Saturday, January 17, 2009

17 Jan 2009 08:18 pm

We Should Have Paid More Attention

Eight years ago, Will Ferrell performed Bush's future first State Of The Union. It could stand for his farewell address as well:

17 Jan 2009 06:47 pm

The Tao Of Guitar Hero II

Carr responds to Rob Horning:

Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable. To buy a guitar is to open possibilities. To buy Guitar Hero is to close them. A commenter on Horning's article writes, "To me, the radical move that Guitar Hero makes is to turn music into an objectively measurable activity that is more amenable to our Protestant work ethic. It brings the corporation’s focus on quantitative performance indicators to the domain of music, displacing the usual mode of subjective enjoyment."

17 Jan 2009 06:29 pm

Pulping The Squirrels

Appleyard posits:

Let me say it again, the only newspapers around in the future will be very upmarket, all the downmarket stuff being more readily available on the internet or in magazines made of  pulped squirrels that will be handed out free to the unemployable and the insane. Until that day of gentlemen print journalists dawns - more properly redawns - various schemes and scams will splutter and die... But patience, wood pulp, pigment and high intelligence will endure.

17 Jan 2009 05:30 pm

How Obama Really Won

It was the urban vote says Nate Silver:

...the future of America is an urban one — among the twenty largest metropolitan areas in 2000, nineteen had added population by 2007, a trend likely to sustain itself as rising gas prices place more pressure on exurban commuters. Republicans trail Democrats among essentially every fast-growing demographic except the elderly — the youth vote, the Latino vote; they never had the black vote. It is long past time that they hone their pitch to urban voters, and find their shining city upon a hill.

17 Jan 2009 04:55 pm

From Typewriter To Bookstore

An inside expose of the publishing industry with all its gory secrets:

(Hat tip: Doctorow)

17 Jan 2009 03:51 pm

The Tao Of Guitar Hero

Rob Horning searches for the meaning of the video game:

If you want a more interactive way to enjoy music, why not dance, or play air guitar? Or better yet, if holding a guitar appeals to you, why not try actually learning how to play? For the cost of an Xbox and the Guitar Hero game, you can get yourself a pretty good guitar. I can’t help but feel that Guitar Hero (much like Twitter) would have been utterly incomprehensible to earlier generations, that it is a symptom of some larger social refusal to embrace difficulty.

17 Jan 2009 03:00 pm

Face Of The Day

A policeman walks past Shepard Fairey's portrait of US President-elect Barack Obama after it was installed at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington on January 17, 2009. The portrait that came to symbolize Obama's historic campaign made its permanent home at the National Portrait Gallery. Obama warned of 'difficult days' ahead before heralding his new era of change, by rolling back the years on a pre-inaugural slow train to Washington. By Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty.

17 Jan 2009 02:57 pm

Poseur Alert

"Once the words begin to settle into their circumstance in a sentence and decide to make the most of their predicament, they look around and take notice of their neighbors. They seek out affinities, they adapt to each other, they begin to make adjustments in their appearance to try to blend in with each other better and enhance any resemblance. Pretty soon in the writer’s eyes the words in the sentence are all vibrating and destabilizing themselves: no longer solid and immutable, they start to flutter this way and that in playful receptivity, taking into themselves parts of neighboring words, or shedding parts of themselves into the gutter of the page or screen; and in this process of intimate mutation and transformation, the words swap alphabetary vitals and viscera, tiny bits and dabs of their languagey inner and outer natures; the words intermingle and blend and smear and recompose themselves. They begin to take on a similar typographical physique. The phrasing now feels literally all of a piece. The lonely space of the sentence feels colonized. There’s a sumptuousness, a roundedness, a dimensionality to what has emerged. The sentence feels filled in from end to end; there are no vacant segments along its length, no pockets of unperforming or underperforming verbal matter. The words of the sentence have in fact formed a united community," - novelist Gary Lutz.

17 Jan 2009 02:25 pm

The View From Your Window

17 Jan 2009 01:53 pm

Cheetos, Not Journos?

Yglesias puts his finger on one variety of professional insecurity:

Convention dictates that if I sit at a desk and read a transcript of what the press secretary said and then write about the transcript, I’m a lowly cheeto-eater. But if I sit in the White House press room and transcribe what the press secretary said, and then write about the transcript then that’s journalism. Similarly, if I travel around with the president and then read the pool reports that my colleagues write and then write about that: Journalism. But if I read the newspaper account of where the president went and then write about that: Cheetos.

One reason, however, that I blog rather than do cable is that I think I can get at more nuanced, detailed and factual truths online than on TV. I'm as parasitic as they are, but less geared toward pure entertainment - with more links and access to immediate information.

17 Jan 2009 01:15 pm

Racial Constructions

Matt Feeney thinks Hau Hsu is missing something:

I would argue that, over the last twenty years especially, blackness (and also nonwhiteness, of course, both more generally and in its other specific forms) as an identity, an idea, a cultural marker, has been an object of furious constructive labor not just by self-conscious hip hop jesters and personality-artists, but by advertisers and other corporate sales experts, record execs and producers and promoters, lawyers and politicians, policy entrepreneurs and impresarios in the world of therapy and cultural counseling, educators and human resource professionals. The narrative of liberated multicultural blackness is, I would argue, as much a construct as the old definition of blackness as the hobbled other of whiteness. It has been so furiously taken up for purposes of commerce and politics – people have made so much money off of it – you’d think all those suspicious hermeneuts would approach our new celebratory multiculturalism with the same suspicious wince that they bring to the old tables of racial order.

17 Jan 2009 12:57 pm

And The Beat Goes On

Mark Frauenfelder calls this Obama citizenship video "unintentionally funny." The Dish concurs. The salient Snopes page is here:

17 Jan 2009 12:55 pm

Taibbi On A Roll

Whatever you think of his critique, it's hard not to be impressed by the bravado prose:

To review quickly, the “Long Bomb” Iraq war plan [Tom] Friedman supported as a means of transforming the Middle East blew up in his and everyone else’s face; the “Electronic Herd” of highly volatile international capital markets he once touted as an economic cure-all not only didn’t pan out, but led the world into a terrifying chasm of seemingly irreversible economic catastrophe; his beloved “Golden Straitjacket” of American-style global development (forced on the world by the “hidden fist” of American military power) turned out to be the vehicle for the very energy/ecological crisis Friedman himself warns about in his new book; and, most humorously, the “Flat World” consumer economics Friedman marveled at so voluminously turned out to be grounded in such total unreality that even his wife’s once-mighty shopping mall empire, General Growth Properties, has lost 99 percent of its value in this year alone.   So, yes, Friedman is suddenly an environmentalist of sorts.

What the fuck else is he going to be?

That's one of the nicer paragraphs.

17 Jan 2009 12:32 pm

Contra Ben Stein

The top ten signs of evolution in modern man.

17 Jan 2009 12:13 pm

Facebook vs. Google

Michael Agger talks with David Glazer at Google:

Glazer believes that everything on the Web is better if it's social. Checking out a stock? It would be nice to read chatter from other potential investors. Baking a cake? Look at advice from those who have already tried the recipe. Tempted by a new restaurant? See if your foodie friends have eaten there already. The reason we don't do these things now is that the "barriers to social are too high." It's still too annoying to fill out all of those registration forms, and there's no universal way to manage your online identity and networks of friends. Google and its partners want to collapse the barriers to social and give each and every one of us an entourage.

There's just one hiccup in this plan: Facebook, the place where many of us already have our entourage.

17 Jan 2009 11:05 am

The First Human Ever Photographed

And he's getting his shoes cleaned in Paris - sitting still for ten minutes while the Daguerrotype captured him. More photographic firsts here.

17 Jan 2009 10:52 am

The Top 20

Nate Silver rounds up leading economists' views on the stimulus.

17 Jan 2009 10:45 am

Republicans In Tennessee

One of their own just cast the deciding vote to make himself Speaker of the state House - backed by all the Democrats. A real ruckus ensued. But I was most struck by how a leading Tennessee Republican framed his opposition:

"Action will begin immediately to address the actions of Rep. Kent Williams," said Smith. "His commitment today was not to Republican principles, but to the blind and shameless pursuit of personal power. He cast his vote for a pro-tax, pro-gay, pro-abortion, anti-gun liberal Democrat to preside in leadership against all 49 of his Republican colleagues."

Notice that the Southern GOP is now getting more honest. It has a problem with anyone who can be called "pro-gay."

17 Jan 2009 09:43 am

Not Being There

I couldn't bring myself to watch Bush on Thursday night. But Ross did:

Watching Bush's farewell address last night, what struck me above all was how long it's been since he felt like the President. Bush never had the gift of persuasion, the ability to give a State of the Union address or a press conference that left his enemies disarmed, but there was a time when he at least seemed like a leader - like someone consequential, active, and important, whatever one thought of his actions and their consequences. But that air of authority and leadership dissipated somewhere between the failure of Social Security reform and the 2006 midterms, and for the last two years Bush has projected the air of a bystander to history, as though events, and his presidency, were largely out of his hands.

17 Jan 2009 08:33 am

Sweatshops Are Good?

Nicholas Kristof argued that sweatshops are better than the alternative – namely, earning a living by sorting though trash. The video is hard to watch. He adds a few more thoughts on his blog:

My point is that bad as sweatshops are, the alternatives are worse. They are more dangerous, lower-paying and more degrading. And when I struggle to think how we can really make a big difference in the development of the poorest countries, the key always seems to be manufacturing. If Africa, for example, can only develop an apparel industry, it will boom.

Yglesias adds his own two cents.

17 Jan 2009 08:08 am

Defense Stimulus

Seriously? I guess if Goldfarb cannot help wage a new war, this is his second best option.

Friday, January 16, 2009

16 Jan 2009 09:19 pm

The Centrist

Tyler Cowen on Obama saying he will deal with medicare and social security:

The deeper reality is that Obama understands that this country was set up to be governed from the center and he'd rather start there than move there after two years of failed attempts to do something else.  Don't be taken in by those funny maps they show about how the Democratic legislators are further left than before; the more power you have, the harder it is not to govern from the center.

But the more prosaic truth is that given that the possibility of a second great depression requires massive borrowing for a year or two, entitlement reform may be unavoidable. How do you persuade the global markets to lend the US more money in the short term if you do not show some small chance of getting back to fiscal sanity in the long term?

If Obama manages to leverage this crisis toward entitlement reform, he would become an historic president. It really would be Buchanan-Lincoln. I've spent too long in DC to believe it, but I can still hope can't I? And the key thing this time around is whether we can build a grass-roots movement to support Obama in this, just as we did in the campaign. Raise the retirement age, means-test social security, raise Medicare premiums for the affluent. After what has amounted to a generational war on the under-40s under Bush, re-balancing is actually a moral cause.

You up for it? I am if you are.

16 Jan 2009 07:54 pm

Face Of The Day

A semi-conscious Kite looks out after an operation at the Forest Department's Van Chetna Kendra rehabilitation centre in Ahmedabad, India, on 16 January, 2009. The center, with the help of volunteers of several non-governmental organisations, rescued some 200 birds after thousands of birds received injuries and hundreds died owing to being cut by sharp, glass-coated 'manja' - kite-strings -across the Gujarat state during the festival of Makar Sankranti. By Sam Panthaky/AFP/Getty.

16 Jan 2009 07:30 pm

Chavez Caves II

Blodget says the socialist leader has learned the primary insight of conservatism:

What's interesting is that the idea of re-inviting Western firms was actually floated prior to the collapse in oil prices, upon the realization that local producers weren't up to the task.

Expect this to play out around the world. State-run firms badly underperform their private peers, and governments desperate for revenue won't have the luxury of squandering their resources when they're this cheap.

16 Jan 2009 07:29 pm

A 13 Percent Approval Rating!

Americans say goodbye to Dick Cheney. And they are being much too kind.

16 Jan 2009 07:25 pm

How Pure A Partisan Shill Is Hewitt?

This pure:

[T]he massive spending splurge unveiled by House Democrats is just a joke, an expression of eight years of pent-up liberal frustrations at fiscal discipline --the teenagers given a fifth and the car keys, out on a destructive joyride.

Every time you think: nah, they can't say this with a straight face, they can't actually pretend - in January 2009 - that the Bush Republicans were adept at fiscal discipline for the past eight years, can they? ... not after doubling the national debt, not after raising spending more swiftly than LBJ or FDR, not after a surplus became deficits of trillions of dollars as far as the eye can see, they can't say that, can they? ... you realize - yes they can!

16 Jan 2009 05:36 pm

What Will You Miss?

Seth Godin asks what "When newspapers are gone, what will you miss?" His answer: "investigative reporting." But Godin is optimistic:

...if we really care about the investigation and the analysis, we'll pay for it one way or another. Maybe it's a public good, a non profit function. Maybe a philanthropist puts up money for prizes. Maybe the Woodward and Bernstein of 2017 make so much money from breaking a story that it leads to a whole new generation of journalists.

The reality is that this sort of journalism is relatively cheap (compared to everything else the newspaper had to do in order to bring it to us.)

(Hat tip: Doctorow)

16 Jan 2009 05:11 pm

Why Do The Geese Hate Us?

Eddie Izzard explains that they don't:

16 Jan 2009 05:02 pm

Good Riddance

The Economist unloads on Bush. His was a presidency rooted in three core beliefs: "partisanship, politicisation and incompetence."

16 Jan 2009 04:58 pm

The Fact Of War Crimes

Matt Yglesias:

If John Yoo walked down Pennsylvania Avenue and shot a guy in the head, we wouldn’t say “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” even though it would be as true as ever that it’s important to look forward. And more than one person has died as a result of Bush-era torture policies.

16 Jan 2009 04:54 pm

Dissent Of The Day III

A reader writes:

In your post "The Biggest Spin" you mention that we may be in "a lull before another hot phase of a civil war [between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq] that goes back centuries". While the current divide between Sunni and Shia Arabs in Iraq is real, I think that stating that this conflict "goes back centuries" is misleading much in the way as Bill Clinton's characterising the 1990's conflicts in the Caucasus and Balkans as caused by "ancient hatreds".

 

Yes, Sunni and Shia factions have quarreled for centuries, especially in Iraq. The Shia Imam Husayn was himself killed at the Battle of Karbala in 680. And yes, southern Iraq has been an important center of Shiism since that time. However, many Iraqi Arabs are much more recent converts to Shiism, dating from the late Ottoman Period. Sunni and Shia traditions among Iraq's Arabs have much more to do with Iranian and Ottoman power politics and cultural influence than any deep-seated ancient hatreds. Shias have often identified firstly as Iraqi Arabs (even if Sunnis are slightly skeptical of their credentials), and have expressed their identity as such through a myriad of tribal loyalites and political ideologies, from Ba'athism to Communism to the parties that we see today. Furthermore, there is as much violent competition among Shia groups (such as the Badr brigades, Dawa, and the former SCIRI party) as between the Shia and Sunni. Imagining that the violence in Iraq centers on a society split primarily between Sunnis and Shia, locked in eternal combat, is just plain wrong. Worse, it's the kind of vision of Iraq that al-Qaeda espouses.

 

Iraq is a much more complicated place than that. Failing to realise this is precisely what got us into this mess in the first place.

16 Jan 2009 04:20 pm

Mental Health Break

Still life, with bullet:

(Hat tip: Robbie Cooper)

16 Jan 2009 04:13 pm

Tripping With Coffee, Ctd.

Buzz kill.

16 Jan 2009 03:51 pm

The Birds

Drezner weighs in on the miraculous Hudson river landing:

While most birds probably wish to peacefully coexist with humans, it is becoming increasingly clear that a small group of radicalized avians are hell-bent on destroying our way of life.  This can not stand.

I, for one, look forward to President Bush's declaration of a War on Birds.  Unfortunately, this will last only four days, after which President Obama will no doubt appoint this guy as special envoy to the avian community.

I, for one, blame Canada.

16 Jan 2009 03:37 pm

"Snarge"

A noun for the bloody goo that remains of birds after making their way through a jet engine.

16 Jan 2009 03:31 pm

Shallow Thought

Why do the geese hate us?

16 Jan 2009 03:22 pm

Wyeth, RIP

I immediately thought of Mike Kinsley's old column, "What The Helga?", but TNR doesn't have it online. But searching for it did produce this little 1987 gem from Bob Hughes. Money quote:

The time is past when one could dismiss Wyeth as nothing more that a sentimental illustrator, as critics irked by his popular appeal regularly did a decade or more ago. True, his work is grounded in illustration and often fails to transcend it. Not a few of the images of Helga lying naked on a bed or tramping resolutely through the snow in her Loden coat have the banal neatness of things done for a women's magazine. Some of them, like the technically impressive watercolor In the Orchard, 1974, are as deadly in their "sensitiveness" as greeting cards. But there are some fine drawings here, moments of vision caught with attentiveness and precision, that have a lot more visual oomph than the more laboriously finished works. And two or three of the paintings are marvels of iconic condensation. Like a good second-rate novelist who can rise to first-rate episodes, Wyeth can surprise you.

(Photo: Long Limb, by Wyeth.)

16 Jan 2009 03:16 pm

Quote For The Day III

"No U.S. president can justify a policy that fails to achieve its intended results by pointing to the purity and rectitude of his intentions," - Paul Wolfowitz, "Statesmanship in the New Century," in Kagan, R. and Kristol, W, eds. Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy, San Francisco, 2000, p. 335.

16 Jan 2009 02:47 pm

Give Those Pilots A Medal II

Fallows, who knows how to fly a plane, helps you see that this was indeed a remarkable feat. And he makes nervous flyers like myself a little spooked about ... birds:

Coastal airports are often near water; most airports are surrounded by a lot of grass; the combination means that flocks of birds often assemble where they can do themselves and the airplanes real harm. At an airport in Maryland I once aborted a takeoff in a small propeller plane -- the only time I've had to do so -- because, out of nowhere, dozens of Canada geese suddenly appeared in front of me. It's all too common, when approaching airports near water, to have to concentrate on flocks of seagulls (or crows, even away from water) in hopes that they will, by the very last instant, get out of the way and allow you to land.

And ditching in water? This is something that very few amateur or professional pilots have ever practiced for real.

16 Jan 2009 02:12 pm

Will History Redeem Bush?

Nate Silver looks at other presidents and crunches the numbers:

Although there is some correlation between the final Gallup numbers and the historians' views of each president, it is not very strong -- in fact, it is not at all statistically significant. The most obvious discrepancy is that of Harry S. Truman, who was extremely unpopular at the time he left office in a cloud of foreign entanglements and minor domestic scandals. Truman, however, is regarded very favorably by historians. The next-most striking disconnect is that of Gerald Ford, who was actually fairly popular for most of his presidency -- perhaps Americans were happy to have any alternative to Richard Nixon after Watergate -- but is not very well regarded by history. Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson have also worn a little better historically as compared with perceptions about them at the end of their terms.

We cannot know what we will think in a decade's time. But what we can say is what we see now. For the record, and fuly acknowledging that I once supported him, I think Bush is at this point in time, the worst president in American history, with Buchanan a close second. With each passing day, the evidence of the astonishing damage he did accumulates. I feel ashamed I ever hoped for the best, and only marginally comforted by the fact that I realized my error before a lot of others.

(Photo: Paul J Richards/Getty.)

16 Jan 2009 01:50 pm

"Our Sincere Thanks"

Ruffini starts the revisionism:

On taxes, Bush did everything right. Being a shrewd politician, he tackled the easy part first, but never followed up on the hard part (spending). Lest we be too hard on the man in this case, he is not exactly unlike most politicians in that way, and most of the responsibility for the spending atrocities rests with Congress. Were it not for the war, this would have been an era of tax cuts and fiscal responsibility -- and certainly so in comparison to Obama.

The fiscal negligence began long before 9/11 and was made infinitely worse by the Medicare expansion and social security failure.

16 Jan 2009 01:28 pm

A Ceasefire By Tuesday?

Daniel Levy speculates:

If a ceasefire is becoming imminent, then it is fair to assume that while the dynamics of the conflict (Israeli recoil from fully re-occupying Gaza), and the diplomatic effort have played a role, the key element to timing here is the approaching Obama presidency.

Increasingly, I think this entire operation is about Obama. The Israelis are showing that they know the incoming president is a grown-up and will likely force them to come to some difficult but vital decisions about their future. So they're increasing their leverage as best they can - largely by launching an operation that is both legitimately designed to weaken Hamas as much as possible and illegitimately designed to punish Palestinian civilians for voting for the wrong leaders. Levy continues:

Continue reading "A Ceasefire By Tuesday?" »

16 Jan 2009 01:19 pm

Ending Blackmail

By repealing DADT.

16 Jan 2009 12:53 pm

"wtf else r we gna do?"

The Frums celebrate Obama's Inaugural.

16 Jan 2009 12:41 pm

Will Tory Do?

A reader writes:

I don't think you can be "a Tory" because it just doesn't exist in the American tradition. Since it is American political culture, which, you're principally engaged in I think defining yourself with a foreign meme diminishes your potential impact. Also just because the Tories are adopting more moderate social positions in England, up in Canada they're not the socially progressive responsible conservatives that the Tories in England have become and that you identify with.

Further! Don't give up on the word conservative. It's true that it has been perverted by Christianists and the militarists on the radical wing of the Republican party but that's why it's so important that you don't give up on it. Re-define them not yourself! Words are important and Conservative is NOT a dirty word. If someone as dedicated to pushing back against the germanization of the english language (enhanced interrogation techniques + homeland security being not coincidentally the most high-profile examples) and as high profile as yourself gives up then we're lost.

16 Jan 2009 12:04 pm

No More Money

Chris Hayes guesses at the GOP's plan:

Here's my sense of their long-term strategy. This isn't based on anything other than observation and chatting around the Capitol. I think they'll let the stimulus pass and, indeed will be quite fine with it being very big. Much bigger than it is now: a trillion dollars or more. Because once the stimulus passes, Republicans are going to say: OK. We're done. Meaning: no more money. They'll point to the $700 billion for the TARP, plus the $1 trillion for the stimulus, and they'll say: we've spent all the money there is to be spent. There's no money for healthcare. There's no money for anything, really except the Pentagon. They'll run against deficits, waste and bailout nation.

16 Jan 2009 11:23 am

Hitler, Lenin and Mao

Rick Warren speaks of his mentors in trying to take over the world for Jesus. He also decries the notion of moderation in religion or politics. Those who believe that Warren is interested in truth rather than power need to get to know his writing and speaking and record more thoroughly.

16 Jan 2009 11:08 am

Cool Ad Watch

Really, really safe sex:

But the genius part is the blooper reel:

One more after the jump:

Continue reading "Cool Ad Watch" »

16 Jan 2009 11:05 am

The Biggest Spin

It is so big it needs to be rebutted tout court:

Obama opposed the war. But the war is all but over. What remains is an Iraq turned from aggressive, hostile power in the heart of the Middle East to an emerging democracy openly allied with the United States. No president would want to be responsible for undoing that success.

The following is not really in dispute by anyone. There are still well over 130,000 American troops occupying Iraq. We have no secure idea what will happen when they leave. We have as yet no reliable integration of Sunnis into the largely Shiite Iraqi military. We have not seen what will transpire after the looming regional elections. Terror attacks continue in ways that remain routine for Iraq but that are unimaginable in any other country. Critical issues like Kirkuk remain unmanaged. The very close alliance between Baghdad and Tehran goes unmentioned by Krauthammer but remains a serious question for the future.

The possibility, in short, that Iraq has lurched, via hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of American dollars, from an unstable, fractious tyranny hostile to Iran to an unstable, fractious, failed state friendly to Iran is a real one. The possibility that we are in a lull before another hot phase of a civil war that goes back centuries is an equally real one. To pretend that all is peachy, that the war is "all but over", and that the practical impossibility of Obama being able to extract himself and us from the catastrophe of the Iraq occupation is proof of vindication for Bush is so cynical it's jaw-dropping.

It's an attempt to set up the president-elect so that the disaster Bush created can soon be blamed on the man who thought it was a bad idea in the first place. It's of a piece with the looming Republican plan to assail Obama for massive spending after the GOP increased government spending for eight years at a pace not seen since the 1930s.

If these people had any shame, they might hold their peace. But we know at this point that the more shame is merited the less these people feel.

16 Jan 2009 10:36 am

The Logic Of Gaza

Shimon Peres gets candid:

Israel's aim, he said, was to provide a strong blow to the people of Gaza so that they would lose their appetite for shooting at Israel.