Wednesday, January 05, 2011
We State The Obvious, Because That's What We Do
This whole "blogging" thing has, perhaps, met its match in the form of Facebook updates. It's like a pithiness release valve, the status update; the pressure necessary to write a blog post just never materializes. And who suffers? Why, you, of course, the pithiness-starved, blog-reading public.
Friday, October 09, 2009
As Pure An Example Of Shark-Jumping As One Could Ever Hope For
Yes, I realize there is a dangling preposition in the title of this post. But there are more important things afoot. Like the fact that the president just won a Nobel Peace Prize. I'm not sure whether that means that he has jumped the shark or that the Nobel committee has jumped the shark, but I'm pretty sure I just saw a shadow flit across a dorsal fin, and so we can deduce that someone or something has, indeed, vaulted over it.
In a world where reasonable political discourse is the norm, this would be c-c-c-craaaazy stuff, but we don't live in such a world. We live in a world where Sarah Palin is considered to be a viable candidate for public office, and where people straight-facedly call the Fox channel "news," and where people who believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that the Congress' current healthcare reform bill contains "death panels" are considered serious analysts whose opinions on the subject of the day, which is often somehow Britney Spears-related (gah!), are to be carefully weighed before coming to any important conclusions about the state of the union.
So, in light of these things and others, I am going to attempt to help you help me get a grasp on the relative weirdness of this morning's central revelation through an intellectual exercise based around the following question:
{ahem}
Is the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama more or less shocking and embarrassing than the fact that his predecessor authorized and carried out a program of torturing civilians in secret CIA prisons in eastern Europe?
In a world where reasonable political discourse is the norm, this would be c-c-c-craaaazy stuff, but we don't live in such a world. We live in a world where Sarah Palin is considered to be a viable candidate for public office, and where people straight-facedly call the Fox channel "news," and where people who believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that the Congress' current healthcare reform bill contains "death panels" are considered serious analysts whose opinions on the subject of the day, which is often somehow Britney Spears-related (gah!), are to be carefully weighed before coming to any important conclusions about the state of the union.
So, in light of these things and others, I am going to attempt to help you help me get a grasp on the relative weirdness of this morning's central revelation through an intellectual exercise based around the following question:
{ahem}
Is the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama more or less shocking and embarrassing than the fact that his predecessor authorized and carried out a program of torturing civilians in secret CIA prisons in eastern Europe?
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
The Scrutiny of Defeat
From fresh-faced young Republican website rebuildtheparty.com:
"2008 made one thing clear: If allowed to go unchecked, the Democrats' structural advantages, including their use of the Internet, their more than 2-to-1 advantage with young voters, their discovery of a better grassroots model -- will be as big a threat to the future of the GOP as the toxic political environment we have faced the last few years [ed.- emphasis mine]."
Is that the best euphemism you've ever heard for "our party's control of the White House, Senate, House of Representatives, and the courts and the full flowering of our ideological agenda" or what? Oh Republicans, your attempts to skirt the issue of your incompetent governance in your explanations of your electoral defeat are priceless. Don't ever change.
"2008 made one thing clear: If allowed to go unchecked, the Democrats' structural advantages, including their use of the Internet, their more than 2-to-1 advantage with young voters, their discovery of a better grassroots model -- will be as big a threat to the future of the GOP as the toxic political environment we have faced the last few years [ed.- emphasis mine]."
Is that the best euphemism you've ever heard for "our party's control of the White House, Senate, House of Representatives, and the courts and the full flowering of our ideological agenda" or what? Oh Republicans, your attempts to skirt the issue of your incompetent governance in your explanations of your electoral defeat are priceless. Don't ever change.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Monday, November 03, 2008
The Credit Crisis Explained (In Terms Of Sandwiches)
Maybe it's a little late, but if you're still confused, I have prepared the following explanation of the credit crisis in a manner near and dear to my own heart.
When you go to a baker to get your bread, the baker organizes all the ingredients, bakes a loaf, and takes your money in exchange for that loaf. You depend on his expertise. Similarly, when you buy a house, you depend on the expertise of the banker to "bake" you a mortgage. It's a unit, a commodity, created through the financial expertise of the banker. If you imagine that the entire pool of mortgages in the United States is 100 loaves of bread, here's what happened over the past several years:
First of all, keep in mind that not all mortgages failed; it was just around 6%. So imagine, if you will, that six out the hundred loaves of bread have gone bad. They're moldy, baked with melamine, full of weevils, whatever. Pick your poison, they've gone bad. It used to be that those six loaves could be readily identified as bad and avoided. Now, however, we have these financial instruments called "derivatives," which are created out of whole commodities like mortgages. The process of turning mortgages into derivatives is sort of like taking all hundred loaves and chopping them up. Some end up as slices for sandwiches, some end up as croutons in salads, some end up as crumbs for baking onto fish or chicken, some end up served with little spreads of cheese and salmon at weddings and piano recitals, some end up mixed into bread puddings, some was mixed with egg and made into French toast.
The important thing is, you can't really tell anymore which loaf the bread came from. There could be a sandwich made with one slice of good bread and one slice of bad bread, there could be good croutons and bad croutons in the same salad, you never know. So word got out that some of this bread was no good, and some people found bad bread in their meals, and then other folks started to wonder if any of this bad bread got into their meals as well. They stopped eating as much, and the value of meals made with bread was thrown into doubt. No one knew if these bread-based meals were worth eating or not, so the people who had them were afraid to eat them, and they certainly couldn't sell them or serve them to their families. So institutions with these derivatives on their books began to wonder about their financial health, but they couldn't unload the derivatives because their value was suspect.
At that point, even though only a small percentage of the bread/mortgages were bad, no bread/mortgage-based products were considered safe, and people stopped dealing with bread. This wreaked havoc on people's diets, and they started looking for alternatives to bread, for bread-free meals, just as investors fled to precious metals and government bonds (think of them as meat and soy-based dishes, the Atkins diet of the financial world; sure it looks fine in the short run, but eventually your kidneys will fall out in your underpants). People whose diets were almost entirely bread-based began to starve to death, like Indymac, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns.
In that environment, no one knew who would get sick next, and how much bad bread had already been eaten, so people with a stake in the health of the populace started to get wary. Health insurers found that too many people were getting sick or were at risk of getting sick for their business model to work. Large insurers, such as AIG, were threatened with failure because not only had they invested in bread, but they had offered insurance policies to people with high-bread diets. Some bread was found in meals that had been exported and sold overseas, and some bread was known to be in frozen TV dinners, socked away in freezers somewhere, ready to rear its ugly head at some undetermined future date, without warning.
Even non-traditional operators had insurance-like stakes in the health of others. The "credit-default swap" market was akin to one person taking on responsibility for the health of ten, twenty, maybe thirty other people. It was like a day-care operation, where one person guaranteed the health of other people's investments for a small fee. But it wasn't just one day-care, it was as if a whole neighborhood had a rotating playgroup arrangement, where everyone's kids would go to a different person's house on different days of the week, at different times of day, so that in some fashion, everybody was responsible for everybody else's kids. And they were all feeding them bread-based snacks, not knowing if some of those snacks contained bad bread. Naturally, people began immediately trying to pull their kids out of day-care, and refusing to offer day-care to other kids, and trying to stow all their bread-based foods in the back of the fridge where no one could see them. This caused the basic machinations of daily life to freeze up, and ruined many good restaurant chains, grocery stores, and bakeries. Some kids couldn't be found, because no one remembered whose house they were supposed to be at and when, some kids showed up at day-care to find the doors locked, it was a mess, because no one had been keeping track of the schedule.
And the reason it's so hard to fix is that you would have to have a health inspector go through every item of bread-based food in every single person's refrigerator to determine if part of the six bad loaves had gotten into the food. And there's just not enough health inspectors, or day-care regulators, because in the mid-nineties the number of health inspectors was cut as part of a program to make more bread (mortgages) available to more people. And starting this century, the rules governing day-care centers (credit-default swaps) were completely thrown out courtesy of a late-night last-minute addendum to an appropriations bill by Sen. Phil Gramm. And even those health inspectors that were on the job were encouraged not to work very hard by the Bush administration, which was never really into health inspections to begin with, and didn't see the value in boosting the Health & Human Services (federal regulators') budget. They believed that kids were perfectly capable of getting to day-care on their own, and the kids that couldn't deserved to be abducted or left to die out in the cold after school, in a sort of market-based natural selection.
So now that the whole system has been thrown into chaos, the feds are working with the bakers and grocery store owners and the neighborhood playgroups to try to identify where the bad bread is, so that they can confidently assure a large amount of people that their specific sandwiches are safe to eat. Legislators are attempting to throw more light onto the day-care schedule and sort out where everyone's kids are and whether or not they're sick from moldy bread consumption. Everyone is probably going to have to throw out some sandwiches, and some good sandwiches are going to get thrown out with the bad ones, just to be safe. Eventually, however, more bread will be baked, and so long as that bread is baked to a high standard, and if the health inspector is there, watching the guy at the deli as he cuts up the bread to make sandwiches, fewer bad loaves will make their way into the market, and the value of any given sandwich or bread pudding will return to its normal level.
Which is important to the health of the nation.
When you go to a baker to get your bread, the baker organizes all the ingredients, bakes a loaf, and takes your money in exchange for that loaf. You depend on his expertise. Similarly, when you buy a house, you depend on the expertise of the banker to "bake" you a mortgage. It's a unit, a commodity, created through the financial expertise of the banker. If you imagine that the entire pool of mortgages in the United States is 100 loaves of bread, here's what happened over the past several years:
First of all, keep in mind that not all mortgages failed; it was just around 6%. So imagine, if you will, that six out the hundred loaves of bread have gone bad. They're moldy, baked with melamine, full of weevils, whatever. Pick your poison, they've gone bad. It used to be that those six loaves could be readily identified as bad and avoided. Now, however, we have these financial instruments called "derivatives," which are created out of whole commodities like mortgages. The process of turning mortgages into derivatives is sort of like taking all hundred loaves and chopping them up. Some end up as slices for sandwiches, some end up as croutons in salads, some end up as crumbs for baking onto fish or chicken, some end up served with little spreads of cheese and salmon at weddings and piano recitals, some end up mixed into bread puddings, some was mixed with egg and made into French toast.
The important thing is, you can't really tell anymore which loaf the bread came from. There could be a sandwich made with one slice of good bread and one slice of bad bread, there could be good croutons and bad croutons in the same salad, you never know. So word got out that some of this bread was no good, and some people found bad bread in their meals, and then other folks started to wonder if any of this bad bread got into their meals as well. They stopped eating as much, and the value of meals made with bread was thrown into doubt. No one knew if these bread-based meals were worth eating or not, so the people who had them were afraid to eat them, and they certainly couldn't sell them or serve them to their families. So institutions with these derivatives on their books began to wonder about their financial health, but they couldn't unload the derivatives because their value was suspect.
At that point, even though only a small percentage of the bread/mortgages were bad, no bread/mortgage-based products were considered safe, and people stopped dealing with bread. This wreaked havoc on people's diets, and they started looking for alternatives to bread, for bread-free meals, just as investors fled to precious metals and government bonds (think of them as meat and soy-based dishes, the Atkins diet of the financial world; sure it looks fine in the short run, but eventually your kidneys will fall out in your underpants). People whose diets were almost entirely bread-based began to starve to death, like Indymac, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns.
In that environment, no one knew who would get sick next, and how much bad bread had already been eaten, so people with a stake in the health of the populace started to get wary. Health insurers found that too many people were getting sick or were at risk of getting sick for their business model to work. Large insurers, such as AIG, were threatened with failure because not only had they invested in bread, but they had offered insurance policies to people with high-bread diets. Some bread was found in meals that had been exported and sold overseas, and some bread was known to be in frozen TV dinners, socked away in freezers somewhere, ready to rear its ugly head at some undetermined future date, without warning.
Even non-traditional operators had insurance-like stakes in the health of others. The "credit-default swap" market was akin to one person taking on responsibility for the health of ten, twenty, maybe thirty other people. It was like a day-care operation, where one person guaranteed the health of other people's investments for a small fee. But it wasn't just one day-care, it was as if a whole neighborhood had a rotating playgroup arrangement, where everyone's kids would go to a different person's house on different days of the week, at different times of day, so that in some fashion, everybody was responsible for everybody else's kids. And they were all feeding them bread-based snacks, not knowing if some of those snacks contained bad bread. Naturally, people began immediately trying to pull their kids out of day-care, and refusing to offer day-care to other kids, and trying to stow all their bread-based foods in the back of the fridge where no one could see them. This caused the basic machinations of daily life to freeze up, and ruined many good restaurant chains, grocery stores, and bakeries. Some kids couldn't be found, because no one remembered whose house they were supposed to be at and when, some kids showed up at day-care to find the doors locked, it was a mess, because no one had been keeping track of the schedule.
And the reason it's so hard to fix is that you would have to have a health inspector go through every item of bread-based food in every single person's refrigerator to determine if part of the six bad loaves had gotten into the food. And there's just not enough health inspectors, or day-care regulators, because in the mid-nineties the number of health inspectors was cut as part of a program to make more bread (mortgages) available to more people. And starting this century, the rules governing day-care centers (credit-default swaps) were completely thrown out courtesy of a late-night last-minute addendum to an appropriations bill by Sen. Phil Gramm. And even those health inspectors that were on the job were encouraged not to work very hard by the Bush administration, which was never really into health inspections to begin with, and didn't see the value in boosting the Health & Human Services (federal regulators') budget. They believed that kids were perfectly capable of getting to day-care on their own, and the kids that couldn't deserved to be abducted or left to die out in the cold after school, in a sort of market-based natural selection.
So now that the whole system has been thrown into chaos, the feds are working with the bakers and grocery store owners and the neighborhood playgroups to try to identify where the bad bread is, so that they can confidently assure a large amount of people that their specific sandwiches are safe to eat. Legislators are attempting to throw more light onto the day-care schedule and sort out where everyone's kids are and whether or not they're sick from moldy bread consumption. Everyone is probably going to have to throw out some sandwiches, and some good sandwiches are going to get thrown out with the bad ones, just to be safe. Eventually, however, more bread will be baked, and so long as that bread is baked to a high standard, and if the health inspector is there, watching the guy at the deli as he cuts up the bread to make sandwiches, fewer bad loaves will make their way into the market, and the value of any given sandwich or bread pudding will return to its normal level.
Which is important to the health of the nation.
Monday, September 29, 2008
You've Gotta Score Points If You Want To Win
Am I the only person who has noticed that Wolf Blitzer talks about politics the way John Madden talks about football? Just repeating the most inane, almost surreally didactic explanations as though the archangel had just whispered in his ear?
Thursday, August 28, 2008
An Inconvenient Truth
Republicans, please. If you're going to insist on referring to Obama as "emperor," you might want to make mention of the fact that the most imperial thing about his potential presidency is the scope of executive power that Bush and Cheney are feverishly amassing for him.
It might not win you points with the dead-enders, but it will go a little ways toward making you sound less ridiculous. Assuming you're into that.
(I'll take my thanks in the form of all-caps blog comments.)
It might not win you points with the dead-enders, but it will go a little ways toward making you sound less ridiculous. Assuming you're into that.
(I'll take my thanks in the form of all-caps blog comments.)
Monday, August 18, 2008
A Message To My White Brothers, Whatever Their Skin Color Or Racial Derivation
Jeff over at Protein Wisdom has written a series of posts under the heading "Provocateurism" that led me to a little thought that is, in some circles, needlessly, in my opinion, characterized as radical. Which is a lot of commas for such a small bit of text. That thought is that those concerned with American racial divisiveness and angst and sturm and drang and cetera need to come to grips with the question "why is it that white people who procreate with other races don't have white children?"
Yeah, from the mouths of babes, right? In other words, why are caucasian attributes considered to be so fragile that they can't survive exposure to non-caucasian attributes in the genetic mixing bowl? Why is white skin considered to be so adulterable, in a way that Asian, African, Latino, Pacific Islander, et al are not (in the U.S., generally, at least)?
Is it a function of the majority-white demographic hereabouts? And if so, when said demographic shifts significantly enough that whites are just one more minority among many, instead of being the overwhelming majority, will that attitude change? Will more "half-white" and "quarter-white" children start checking the "white" box on their census forms and thereby cause some sort of (purely academic) resurgence in American whiteness? And, in an hilarious development, would some of them develop so ferocious a racial identity that the white power movement would experience an heretofore unexpected diversification within its benighted ranks? Leading then to some sort of schism between the hard-line and moderate white supremacists, the latter being perhaps more concerned with dwindling subscription rates, and willing to accept adherents of any skin-tone or maxillofacial configuration so long as their ideology is correct?
Some questions, you see, just lead to more questions.
Yeah, from the mouths of babes, right? In other words, why are caucasian attributes considered to be so fragile that they can't survive exposure to non-caucasian attributes in the genetic mixing bowl? Why is white skin considered to be so adulterable, in a way that Asian, African, Latino, Pacific Islander, et al are not (in the U.S., generally, at least)?
Is it a function of the majority-white demographic hereabouts? And if so, when said demographic shifts significantly enough that whites are just one more minority among many, instead of being the overwhelming majority, will that attitude change? Will more "half-white" and "quarter-white" children start checking the "white" box on their census forms and thereby cause some sort of (purely academic) resurgence in American whiteness? And, in an hilarious development, would some of them develop so ferocious a racial identity that the white power movement would experience an heretofore unexpected diversification within its benighted ranks? Leading then to some sort of schism between the hard-line and moderate white supremacists, the latter being perhaps more concerned with dwindling subscription rates, and willing to accept adherents of any skin-tone or maxillofacial configuration so long as their ideology is correct?
Some questions, you see, just lead to more questions.
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Friday, March 21, 2008
Repent Ye, Syndicated Columnists!
Charles Krauthammer asks a number of questions in his column today about Obama's recent speech on race . We at the Fiery Sword have prepared an uncomfortable answer for him:
Because focusing the conversation on race is easier and more politically acceptable in the current climate than stating the obvious: Christian Preachers Say The Darnedest Things. These guys are dependent on demagogic incitement to keep their jobs, and they base most of their pull on the notion that the people they are talking to are fundamentally flawed and deserving of punishment, and only they possess the power to avert that punishment. The notion that 9/11 was punishment for transgressions (sins, if you will) flows naturally out of the modern Christian theology. Given that those who believe themselves to be special, to be saints in the land of the wicked, are more likely to cling to the church, declaring America to be the aforementioned wicked land is the best choice for a preacher who wants to retain his job for upwards of two decades.
But good luck dropping that little egg on a campaign trail where all the candidates are crassly scrambling for the mantle of "most devout." Pointing out the glaring incompatibility of pretty much ANY Christian sermon with the qualities necessary for competent governance is not the kind of thing that gets one elected to public office, and we can thank who for that? The liberal elites? Not so much, CK.
Because focusing the conversation on race is easier and more politically acceptable in the current climate than stating the obvious: Christian Preachers Say The Darnedest Things. These guys are dependent on demagogic incitement to keep their jobs, and they base most of their pull on the notion that the people they are talking to are fundamentally flawed and deserving of punishment, and only they possess the power to avert that punishment. The notion that 9/11 was punishment for transgressions (sins, if you will) flows naturally out of the modern Christian theology. Given that those who believe themselves to be special, to be saints in the land of the wicked, are more likely to cling to the church, declaring America to be the aforementioned wicked land is the best choice for a preacher who wants to retain his job for upwards of two decades.
But good luck dropping that little egg on a campaign trail where all the candidates are crassly scrambling for the mantle of "most devout." Pointing out the glaring incompatibility of pretty much ANY Christian sermon with the qualities necessary for competent governance is not the kind of thing that gets one elected to public office, and we can thank who for that? The liberal elites? Not so much, CK.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Against The Power of Mordor There Can Be No Victory
There are no coincidences. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
I Have A Huge Head, And Little Tiny Arms!
People depend on us, the blogging community, to synthesize the news stories of the day, to make the connections that they otherwise would not have made, whether for lack of time, lack of motivation, or lack of intellectual wherewithal. Taking that duty as seriously as I do, I present to you today the obvious upshot of these four recent stories:
Fearless Glow-In-The-Dark DINOSAUR ARMY!
You heard it here first, people. Don't act all surprised when you see the ripples in your Mojitos.
Fearless Glow-In-The-Dark DINOSAUR ARMY!
You heard it here first, people. Don't act all surprised when you see the ripples in your Mojitos.
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Hosannas In The Lowest
If I were the type to make sweeping pronouncements about cultural paradigms, I might be tempted to say that that kid in Omaha who carried out that suicide attack on a shopping mall was the final step in the ascendancy of the most truly American of cults, celebrity. The kid said he wanted to go out with a bang, and that he would be famous. Note that he didn't decide to get famous by shooting a celebrity, he decided to become a celebrity by shooting random people and then himself (which, by the way, is no easy feat with an SKS). Apparently that's an accepted method now.
I understand the draw of celebrity, or so I thought. There's money and power and ease of life, and all that. Being a celebrity could be pretty sweet, as a means to an end. But this guy, he has a more radical theology, i.e. that celebrity is the end in and of itself. And he was willing to both kill and die for it. A interesting idea, certainly.
Several folks interviewed expressed sorrow for this guy. I wonder if they express sorrow for suicide bombers who blow themselves up in markets in Israel or Baghdad? I'm not judging the response, I'm just suggesting that drawing a distinction between the two is a bit too picayune. Suicide/murder in hopes of posthumous reward, inability to grok the finality of death, it's the same rationale. If there's any reason why one is deserving of sympathy and the other is not, I don't know what it is.
I understand the draw of celebrity, or so I thought. There's money and power and ease of life, and all that. Being a celebrity could be pretty sweet, as a means to an end. But this guy, he has a more radical theology, i.e. that celebrity is the end in and of itself. And he was willing to both kill and die for it. A interesting idea, certainly.
Several folks interviewed expressed sorrow for this guy. I wonder if they express sorrow for suicide bombers who blow themselves up in markets in Israel or Baghdad? I'm not judging the response, I'm just suggesting that drawing a distinction between the two is a bit too picayune. Suicide/murder in hopes of posthumous reward, inability to grok the finality of death, it's the same rationale. If there's any reason why one is deserving of sympathy and the other is not, I don't know what it is.
Friday, November 02, 2007
The Post Gins Up Some Rummy
Your friend and mine Donald Rumsfeld apparently used to fire off about 40-60 little memos a day, termed "snowflakes" for the way they drifted down upon the heads and outstretched tongues of the Department of Defense. After reading several of them, it would appear that the good Secretary was awfully concerned with how things were being perceived in the press, and felt he was often being depicted unfairly. He would, at times, attempt (with some success) to develop counter-narratives to combat the depictions at which he took umbrage.
Does that sound like a Secretary of Defense? Or does that sound like the type of thing that one would expect from, for instance, a blogger?
Does that sound like a Secretary of Defense? Or does that sound like the type of thing that one would expect from, for instance, a blogger?
What's Past Is Prologue. Also, It's Plausibly Deniable.
FEMA held a press conference whereat there was no press, on account of the thing being called at the last minute, etc. FEMA dealt with this particular emergency by providing its own employees to stand in for the press, and lob softballs at the podium with reckless abandon.
Our lovely new White House Press Secretary, Dana Perino, true to form, could not just say "That's embarrassing, here's how it happened, we apologize." Oh no. Not Dana. She's a professional. She had to overextend and say (wait for it) "It is not a practice that we would employ here at the White House or that we -- we certainly don't condone it."
Ahhhh Dana. Really? The White House wouldn't hold a public event and pack the audience with shills? Really? The White House wouldn't do that? They wouldn't call press conferences with no warning? The White House wouldn't screen attendance to ensure only the underhand pitchers get through?
Are you absolutely sure of that?
Our lovely new White House Press Secretary, Dana Perino, true to form, could not just say "That's embarrassing, here's how it happened, we apologize." Oh no. Not Dana. She's a professional. She had to overextend and say (wait for it) "It is not a practice that we would employ here at the White House or that we -- we certainly don't condone it."
Ahhhh Dana. Really? The White House wouldn't hold a public event and pack the audience with shills? Really? The White House wouldn't do that? They wouldn't call press conferences with no warning? The White House wouldn't screen attendance to ensure only the underhand pitchers get through?
Are you absolutely sure of that?
Apologies.
They have been making me work at work. I know, right? But since the whole reason I started doing this was to have something to do at work, it has put a hitch in my blogging step. There have been ridiculous things going on, and I have not commented upon them. Cardinal sin, for blogs. Two our fathers and two bloody marys for me, for certain.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Oh Come On Dot Org
Apparently, "Petraeus" sounds enough like "betray us" to make some intern at Moveon.org think it would be a great idea to make up a new and disparaging nickname for the good General. Come on people. Who green-lighted this? Are you TRYING to torch your credibility? Let me introduce you to a little bit of important PR calculus: if you're going to engage in character assassination, you have to do so in so clever a manner that even your target can't deny the humor without being pegged as a stuffed shirt. Homophones aren't going to cut the mustard.
So embarrassing.
General Petraeus is a pawn, okay? He is trying to put a good face on things because his job is to win the war in Iraq. Not to decide whether we should be fighting it. Not to declare the policy failed. Just to win. If his boss gave him the latitude to decide those other things, he would be a less sympathetic character, but in the current situation, THAT'S NOT HIS JOB. Do you suppose he got where he is by giving up? This guy is doing his level best to spin gold from hay, and while that may make him a little delusional, it doesn't make him malignant. The president may have been acting like this is all Petraeus' baby, but seriously. This is George Bush we're talking about. Not exactly what we would call a reliable source.
So please, Moveon.org, next time you find yourself in the kind of paroxysm of group-think that led to that headline, remind yourself that that's how teenagers and coke-addled studio executives think, not effective political actors. The rest of the copy in the ad wasn't terrible, but who do you think read past the headline? Anyone who isn't already in the choir? Not so much.
Bush league, folks.
So embarrassing.
General Petraeus is a pawn, okay? He is trying to put a good face on things because his job is to win the war in Iraq. Not to decide whether we should be fighting it. Not to declare the policy failed. Just to win. If his boss gave him the latitude to decide those other things, he would be a less sympathetic character, but in the current situation, THAT'S NOT HIS JOB. Do you suppose he got where he is by giving up? This guy is doing his level best to spin gold from hay, and while that may make him a little delusional, it doesn't make him malignant. The president may have been acting like this is all Petraeus' baby, but seriously. This is George Bush we're talking about. Not exactly what we would call a reliable source.
So please, Moveon.org, next time you find yourself in the kind of paroxysm of group-think that led to that headline, remind yourself that that's how teenagers and coke-addled studio executives think, not effective political actors. The rest of the copy in the ad wasn't terrible, but who do you think read past the headline? Anyone who isn't already in the choir? Not so much.
Bush league, folks.
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
It's Not Foie Gras, It's More Like Veal.
I'm going to draw a parallel here: you are aware of the people who decry games like tag in schools in some kind of misguided rush to avoid conflict during developmental stages when kids should be learning to deal with conflict? You are also aware of the people who decry the university professors who bring their politics to the classroom and make dissenting students feel uncomfortable at a time when said students should be learning how to debate effectively in hostile ideological environments?
Same team.
I fought my alma mater on a number of issues, and you know what? I consider that to be among the more valuable lessons of higher education: taking on an institution that holds all the cards. Because I hate to break it to you if you were unaware, but that's life, kid. When I was in middle school we played a game at recess called "Smear the Queer" wherein one kid had a ball and every other kid in the game (and there was no limit to participation) would try to take that kid out and take the ball from him (this was generally a boy's game, not by design, but by nature). The educational value of that game cannot be overstated. It's just you against an overwhelming force, success is only fleeting, and defeat is assured. When I was in college we played a game called "Divestment" wherein a small group of students with no money would try to get the university to stop investing in wealthy companies that conducted business with oppressive regimes such as those in Burma and Afghanistan. It was just us against an overwhelming force, success was only fleeting, and defeat was assured.
It is these experiences that foster growth, understanding, and character development. It is these scenarios that will recur ad infinitum throughout life, and those who are unprepared for them are weaker for it. So I say to those complainers, you are opposing the very thing that makes you strong. Your success will ensure the failure of those who follow you. Educational environments require these elements, for the same reason that gyms don't prohibit weights over 5 pounds.
Same team.
I fought my alma mater on a number of issues, and you know what? I consider that to be among the more valuable lessons of higher education: taking on an institution that holds all the cards. Because I hate to break it to you if you were unaware, but that's life, kid. When I was in middle school we played a game at recess called "Smear the Queer" wherein one kid had a ball and every other kid in the game (and there was no limit to participation) would try to take that kid out and take the ball from him (this was generally a boy's game, not by design, but by nature). The educational value of that game cannot be overstated. It's just you against an overwhelming force, success is only fleeting, and defeat is assured. When I was in college we played a game called "Divestment" wherein a small group of students with no money would try to get the university to stop investing in wealthy companies that conducted business with oppressive regimes such as those in Burma and Afghanistan. It was just us against an overwhelming force, success was only fleeting, and defeat was assured.
It is these experiences that foster growth, understanding, and character development. It is these scenarios that will recur ad infinitum throughout life, and those who are unprepared for them are weaker for it. So I say to those complainers, you are opposing the very thing that makes you strong. Your success will ensure the failure of those who follow you. Educational environments require these elements, for the same reason that gyms don't prohibit weights over 5 pounds.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Why Adapt When You Can Recontextualize?
Q: How much of an unrepentant narcissist do you have to be to squander the power of one of the mightiest elected offices in the world on the unrelentingly incompetent pursuit of a lofty and admirable but hardly unreachable goal, and then declare yourself a "dissident" when the wages of your blundering come home to roost, as though the unquestionably-universally-yearned-for-and-fought-for idea onto which you latched to give flight to your ambition was some sort of unpopular, counter-intuitive seed that you have been furtively trying to plant in the hard, unyielding soil that is potted in the hearts of men?
A: Duh. We know where to place blame when our ideas don't come to fruition, right? It's the system's fault, or the press's fault, or the opposition party's fault, or just plain rotten luck. We certainly wouldn't ever dream of placing that blame in our own fumbling hands. The time for examining our own efforts and assessing the validity of our methods may one day come, but for heaven's sake not now while we're busy strutting around in an unabashed dilettantic fugue. History Will Vindicate Us. Print it on the currency. Brick by brick our good intentions will pave us a mighty road down which we shall gaily skip, eyes aglow in anticipation of the just desserts that await us at the end.
A: Duh. We know where to place blame when our ideas don't come to fruition, right? It's the system's fault, or the press's fault, or the opposition party's fault, or just plain rotten luck. We certainly wouldn't ever dream of placing that blame in our own fumbling hands. The time for examining our own efforts and assessing the validity of our methods may one day come, but for heaven's sake not now while we're busy strutting around in an unabashed dilettantic fugue. History Will Vindicate Us. Print it on the currency. Brick by brick our good intentions will pave us a mighty road down which we shall gaily skip, eyes aglow in anticipation of the just desserts that await us at the end.
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Candid And Unfettered Advice
I often hear, in reference to the refusal of the White House to allow information about its advisors and its decision-making process to come to light, that "for the President to perform his constitutional duties, it is imperative that he receive candid and unfettered advice," to quote White House Counsel Fred Fielding, and that the prospect of having to testify under oath about that advice could have a chilling effect and make such advisors "reluctant to communicate openly and honestly." This rationale has been repeated so many times that reporters seem to gloss right over it on auto-pilot, like it's just some boilerplate they have to include next to station identification and the weather.
What kind of advice is the president getting that the American people need to remain ignorant of it? If there are people advising the president who are afraid of having their ideas attributed to them, I've got news for you, those people should not be influencing policy. Are there any secret signatures on the Declaration of Independence? Are there any articles of the Constitution whose validity is dependent on their authorship? Why should we, as Americans, be so respectful of the desire for privacy of those who are guiding our ship of state? It's our country, "We the people" isn't just a cute phrase, it's a guiding principle, that this representative democracy, this republic, derives its power from the people, through the people, and for the people.
I know I'm getting carried away here, but this is pretty outrageous stuff. Should we allow ourselves to be ruled by those who lack the courage of their convictions? Given that this nation was created and birthed by men and women who were willing to die, to be tortured, to give up all they had in the world for the ideas of freedom and justice for all, does it not follow that the maintenance and furtherance of the grand ideals that underpin the United States of America should be undertaken by people of similar strength of character? That the governance of this nation should be an enterprise to which one would be proud to have one's name attached?
I recognize that a good decision-maker, especially one responsible for so much, needs to have access to all available options, and sometimes must make difficult and perhaps Machiavellian choices about things. And if we're talking about information that must be kept secret to ensure the security of the country, then telling it on the mountain is not appropriate. But when we're talking about internal politics, about the basic nuts and bolts administration of national policy, such a deference to secrecy is not right, and it's certainly not our way of doing things. We the people believe in open and honest government, and those qualities are not fueled by shadows, smoke, and mirrors. If the Congress is asking the president a question, then the people represented by the Congress (that's us! you and me!) are asking the president a question, and if he is indeed upholding the ideals that he most solemnly swore to uphold, then he cannot but answer truthfully. That is a basic fact of our system of government. To do any less is un-American, and must be dealt with harshly and with all available haste.
What kind of advice is the president getting that the American people need to remain ignorant of it? If there are people advising the president who are afraid of having their ideas attributed to them, I've got news for you, those people should not be influencing policy. Are there any secret signatures on the Declaration of Independence? Are there any articles of the Constitution whose validity is dependent on their authorship? Why should we, as Americans, be so respectful of the desire for privacy of those who are guiding our ship of state? It's our country, "We the people" isn't just a cute phrase, it's a guiding principle, that this representative democracy, this republic, derives its power from the people, through the people, and for the people.
I know I'm getting carried away here, but this is pretty outrageous stuff. Should we allow ourselves to be ruled by those who lack the courage of their convictions? Given that this nation was created and birthed by men and women who were willing to die, to be tortured, to give up all they had in the world for the ideas of freedom and justice for all, does it not follow that the maintenance and furtherance of the grand ideals that underpin the United States of America should be undertaken by people of similar strength of character? That the governance of this nation should be an enterprise to which one would be proud to have one's name attached?
I recognize that a good decision-maker, especially one responsible for so much, needs to have access to all available options, and sometimes must make difficult and perhaps Machiavellian choices about things. And if we're talking about information that must be kept secret to ensure the security of the country, then telling it on the mountain is not appropriate. But when we're talking about internal politics, about the basic nuts and bolts administration of national policy, such a deference to secrecy is not right, and it's certainly not our way of doing things. We the people believe in open and honest government, and those qualities are not fueled by shadows, smoke, and mirrors. If the Congress is asking the president a question, then the people represented by the Congress (that's us! you and me!) are asking the president a question, and if he is indeed upholding the ideals that he most solemnly swore to uphold, then he cannot but answer truthfully. That is a basic fact of our system of government. To do any less is un-American, and must be dealt with harshly and with all available haste.
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