Evert Cilliers on Cheney and other cowards:
There’s a stunning contrast between Cheney and Bush, who said about Obama:”I’m not going to spend my time criticizing him. There are plenty of critics in the arena. He deserves my silence.” And: “I love my country a lot more than I love politics. I think it is essential that he be helped in office.”
Matthew Yglesias:
The Republican strategy of holding out for total surrender is working just fine. They had an interesting theory that if you refuse to cooperate with efforts to make the country better, things won’t get better and the out-of-power party will benefit. The theory appears to be true.
Masse Critique by Kilian Rüthemann & Niklaus Wenger
Out of the White by Michel de Broin
A rare mainstream peek at tensions within the U.S. Hispanic community, from the New Yorker:
During the Administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Latino groups had repeatedly failed to coalesce around a candidate [for the Supreme Court.] This time, they were determined to wield their influence as a block…The Mexican-Americans did not have a superior candidate. The Puerto Ricans did not have the numbers. After hours of debate, Ed Pastor, a Mexican-American congressman from Arizona, made a motion: “The best candidate is Sonia Sotomayor, and we should take a vote right here.” The meeting ended with a unanimous vote for Sotomayor.
A great quote from Charles Taylor in an so-so piece:
The individual pursuit of happiness as defined by consumer culture still absorbs much of our time and energy, or else the threat of being shut out of this pursuit through poverty, unemployment, incapacity galvanises our efforts . . . and yet the sense that there is something more presses in. Great numbers of people feel it: in moments of reflection about their life; in moments of relaxation in nature; in moments of bereavement and loss; and quite wildly and unpredictably.
Robert Reich on bumper stickers and Obama-Biden in 2012:
The most painful political truth for Democrats is the nation won’t possibly be out of this jobs hole by the presidential election of 2012, even if the recovery is vigorous. Do the math. In order to get out of the hole, we’d need an average monthly increase of 400,000 jobs between now and then. But even at the peak of the 1990s jobs boom, the highest we ever got was 280,000 jobs a month. At the peak of the last recovery, in 2005, we got no higher than 212,000 jobs a month. Bottom line: Obama will be going into an election year with a higher total level of unemployment than before the Great Recession. He will have to argue that, were it not for his policies, things would be even worse. Counter-factuals like this do not sit well on bumper stickers.
Teach for America and its lessons for public school reform:
Things that you might think would help a new teacher achieve success in a poor school—like prior experience working in a low-income neighborhood—don’t seem to matter. Other things that may sound trifling—like a teacher’s extracurricular accomplishments in college—tend to predict greatness.
Another casualty of the broken budgeting process in California: the quality of textbooks in other states.
Battles over textbooks are nothing new, especially in Texas, where bitter skirmishes regularly erupt over everything from sex education to phonics and new math. But never before has the board’s right wing wielded so much power over the writing of the state’s standards. And when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas. The reasons for this are economic: Texas is the nation’s second-largest textbook market and one of the few biggies where the state picks what books schools can buy rather than leaving it up to the whims of local districts, which means publishers that get their books approved can count on millions of dollars in sales. As a result, the Lone Star State has outsized influence over the reading material used in classrooms nationwide, since publishers craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers. As one senior industry executive told me, “Publishers will do whatever it takes to get on the Texas list.”
Until recently, Texas’s influence was balanced to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation’s largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that California has put off buying new books until at least 2014. This means that McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come.
The NYT reports on political turmoil in Malaysia where religious identity is being exploited for partisan gain.
I found this detail interesting: at least 180,000 Facebook users have joined a group protesting the use of the word Allah in a non-Muslim context in Malaysia.
One of the ways Facebook has managed its growth is by encouraging that its users create walls. Most likely, I can see your page only if we’re already friends. Good walls make good neighbors, etc.
But what of the group that is overtly political on a site that is not entirely governed by Malay law. If any of its members are one click away from a “neighbor” with different beliefs, shouldn’t they ask for a generalized ban?
The pseudonymous mad hedge fund trader on the new world order:
Cyber warfare is a huge new battlefront. Some 100 countries now have this capability, and they have stolen over $50 billion worth of intellectual property from the US in the past year. As much as I tried to pin [CIA Director Leon] Panetta down on who the culprits were, he wouldn’t name names, but indirectly hinted that the main hacker-in-chief was China. This comes on the heels of General Wesley Clark’s admission that the Chinese cleaned out the web connected mainframes at both the Pentagon and the State Department in 2007. The Bush administration kept the greatest security breach in US history secret to duck a hit in the opinion polls.
Margaret Atwood on why we should not assume any bird species will survive without our help:
One more statistic: according to Al Gore, 97% of charitable giving goes to human causes. Of the remaining 3%, half goes to pets. That leaves 1½% devoted to the rest of nature – including the crisis-ridden oceans, the eroding, drying, or flooding land and the shrinking biosphere on which our lives depend. How crazy are we?
I wonder if pet owners could contribute to such causes via their purchases of certain brands of pet products? If it’s working for Working Assets…
Watching The Girlfriend Experience on Netflix Instant Play: it’s like a movie, but not. It’s also like a reality TV show, but not quite that either. What is clear is that the dialogue is timely and the characters are, I guess, real-like.
Context transforms content. It’s not that people like reading at a computer, though many have more opportunities to do so in the modern workplace. It’s that writing and reading under new conditions transforms that writing. In the case of the web, which is driven as much by pleasure as by technology (as is everything), the new writing may be more pleasurable because it’s more efficient: Michael Kinsley for The Atlantic:
One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long.
I often forward news articles to friends and colleagues. Very seldom do I include the first sentence. More often than not I quote a paragraph halfway through or even the closer. Quite often I quote someone who is in turn being quoted by the author. Kinsley pinpoints the failures in the original prose that prompt me – and doubtless many others – to thus compensate with our edits. (That the above quote is the opening sentence testifies to the author’s clarity on the matter.)
update
my friend KF responds:
I disagree that length itself is the problem, and in the end Kinsely’s argument seems less about length and more about bad journalism. Not too many words but the wrong words. If I am fascinated by a topic I will read a very long article about it–as I just did read The Atlantic’s story about “The Science of Success” –online. And when I email a passage from the middle of a story to others it is because it is that particular passage felt powerful to me, and I think it might to the person I am emailing as well, but others might find different passages hit them over the head. What seems to one person like the most essential point, might not be to someone else…
All very good points. But i wonder just how many possible pull quotes an article has. And the web is like reading one pull quote after another.
Who selects those pull quotes is interesting. It’s only sort of me in that I select other, better readers – or “quote pullers” – to follow. When I do eventually read some longer stories I do so thanks to their very pointed introductions. It’s that kind of introduction that Kinsley brings up as essential for news and too late or too subtle in some stories.
Maybe his wording was not the best: it’s not that they’re too long but that they take too long to get to their premise?
America would be a stronger, more democratic and far wealthier nation if our journalists asked questions as directly as the team of Frank Dohmen and Klaus-Peter Kerbusk do in this interview for Spiegel:
SPIEGEL: Is the crisis over for you?
Kleisterlee: No, it isn’t. But we are getting it under better and better control, as you can see from our costs.
SPIEGEL: No wonder, if you do what Philips does and cut thousands of jobs at short notice.
That’s just the beginning.
SPIEGEL: In the consumer electronics division, you’ve already closed almost all of your factories. Is Philips in danger of facing the same fate as German consumer electronics companies like Grundig or Telefunken, which went bust despite being household names?
And, whoa:
SPIEGEL: If you’ll pardon our saying so, you’re talking exclusively about computer companies. Your direct competitors are companies like Panasonic and Sony — who still do their own manufacturing. Isn’t your retreat more of a declaration of bankruptcy in the face of competition from Southeast Asia?
Just as important, perhaps, is the way the interviewee, Philips CEO Gerard Kleisterlee, is able to parry each question without – as far as I can tell – losing his cool or equivocation. A great read.
postscript
also, it’s quite possible that I’m asking journalists (and CEO’s) to be more German in their interactions.
A different take on last week’s terrorist attack in Afghanistan that killed a team of U.S. intelligence officers and an Al Qaeda double agent. The argument: it proves the terrorist group is not very well organized as they could have extracted more use from a live double agent.
Silver lining to a very dark and toxic cloud, I guess.
Lillia Shevtsova skewers European politicians (and, well, the U.S.) for giving Russia a pass on human rights violations.