Microsoft es malo

Typically I think people being passionate about Microsoft vs. Apple is a pathetic waste of human energy, but maybe it's worth it just for this YouTube comment:

Microsoft=

M ierda
I nfestosa
C abrona
R oedora
O fensiva
S openca
O bsoleta
F alsa y
T onta

Oh rexiphone.

PS: Surprisingly, YouTube comments don't have permalinks--but maybe that's a good thing.

Leslie Gore

I Twittered about this the other day, but it's worth saying a few things about:

I love everything about this video. Gore, looking very staid and pre-sexual revolution, steps up unusually close to the camera, which looks like it has Vasoline smothered all over it (maybe an inept attempt to create a soft focus effect). Usually with these old videos of a live musical performance on TV, the camera shoots things pretty wide and the singer stands there awkwardly in the middle of the stage (probably under strict instructions not to stray from his or her mark) splitting time between singing to the audience and singing to the camera. But this footage comes off as strangely low-fi, amaturish, and so therefore realistic. Gore basically ignores the camera and sings to the audience, even craning her neck way up to connect with the screaming girls in the nosebleed seats--breaking even more with the TV performance conventions and lending to the gritty feel of the footage (and also allowing us some wicked angles of her expressive face--lots of eyebrow action, lots of lopsided smiles...her facial expressions are doing a lot of work in this performance).

The song itself is great, too, sounding like something Nancy Sinatra would sing in a Tarantino movie--I like that the same person who is known for the inanity of "sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows" also belted out "don't tell me what to do / and don't tell me what to say / and please when i go out with you / don't put me on display". The contrast is awesome.

Also, performance-wise, she kills this thing. I like the way she builds in intensity all the way through, and the way she alternates between moody/sultry and I'm-not-taking-this-to-seriously playfulness. I even approve of the minor-y refrain that the song ends on.

Well, anyway. I guess one more thing I will add is that, of all social movements, feminism has to have one of the worst image problems--I mean, when someone mentions "badass feminist" or "cool feminist", it's difficult to say if an iconic image comes to mind besides maybe Rosie the Riveter. But I think feminism really does have a cool aesthetic when it's taking place just before all the actual progress got made in the 60s, when it was 50s housewives in perfect hairdos chain smoking and calling bullshit on society, or, as in this case, some teeny-bopper coming out of left field with a rage-filled anthem for freedom and equality, thinly disguised as a diatribe against an overbearing steady.

To borrow a phrase from Andrew Sullivan...

...Poseur Alert:

Stout is a collector in the best sense of the word. Though he joked that he began acquiring books when he realized he’d never have a 401k, it is probably more accurate to say that Stout is in complete thrall of the smell of ink, the feel of paper, the intellectual and physical heft of the literary object, the near-indiscernible sound of the turning of pages.

Intellectual heft?

Incidentally, there needs to be a ban on a) articles mourning the decline of print media, b) references to how print media smells, and c) smug-ass bragging about what a special appreciation one has for print media.

Google sucks

Ok Google search, you've been resting on your laurels for too long and now you kind of suck. I should be able to search for stuff in blog posts and news articles while specifying a date range. Don't tell me you're not smart enough to identify datelines and blog post timestamps. The information's out there.

Make it happen.

Through the looking glass

David Brooks touches, I think, on a lot of the same things I was getting at in my earlier post about personal responsibility going out the window during a depression:

Our moral and economic system is based on individual responsibility. It’s based on the idea that people have to live with the consequences of their decisions. This makes them more careful deciders. This means that society tends toward justice — people get what they deserve as much as possible.

...

...Individual responsibility doesn’t mean much in an economy like this one. We all know people who have been laid off through no fault of their own. The responsible have been punished along with the profligate.

...It makes sense for government to try to restore some communal order. And the sad reality is that in these circumstances government has to spend money on precisely those sectors that have been swinging most wildly — housing, finance, etc. It has to help stabilize people who have been idiots.

As Krugman would say, we're "through the looking glass"--virtuous behavior on an individual level is sinking the economy, and the only way to bring it back up is to give money to those who behaved the worst.

You shouldn't even have to make this argument

I think this Sullivan post is a must-read. One thing it does well, I think, is do away with the Jack-Bauer-inspired cartoon version of torture that I think most passive supporters of "enhanced interrogation methods" have in mind: thumbscrews, beatings, etc., all taking place in the context of the proverbial "ticking time-bomb" scenario. Indeed, torture can be anything that "sustained long and relentlessly enough, can break a human being". That could mean subjecting a prisoner to freezing temperatures for long periods of time; but it could also mean something as mundane as sleep deprivation for several days in a row. Both are torture; both violate core American ethical commitments; both are illegal.

Also, I like his phrase "the pseudo-world-weary". I might have to steal that.

It begins

We're all welfare queens now

When it's economists blabbing about statistics, it's "scary"; when it's the formerly middle class lining up at food banks, it's scary:

Once a crutch for the most needy, food pantries have responded to the deepening recession by opening their doors to what one pantry organizer described as “the next layer of people,” a rapidly expanding group of child-care workers, nurse’s aides, real estate agents and secretaries who are facing a financial crisis for the first time. Over all, demand at food banks across the country increased by 30 percent in 2008 from the previous year, according to a survey by Feeding America, which distributes more than two billion pounds of food every year.

...

And amid the million-dollar houses of Marin County, Calif., a pantry at the San Geronimo Valley Community Center last month changed its policy to allow people to stop by once a week instead of every other week, since there are so many new faces in line alongside the regulars.

“We’re seeing people who work at banks, for software firms, for marketing firms, and they’re all losing their jobs,” said Dave Cort, the executive director. “Here we are in big, fancy Marin County, but we have people who are standing in line with their eyes wide open, thinking, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m here.’ ”

I think these sorts of stories and images will start to have a noticeable impact on the national dialog--I think you're going to start to see (even more of) a swelling of support for Obama's big government interventions, and maybe even a second stimulus. And I don't mean to be cynical, but I actually think a lot of it will have to do with the fact that the people requiring handouts are white, suburban, middle-class-looking people--and that's just not supposed to happen in America. I'm not accusing Americans at large at being racist or anything, it's just that I think it's human nature to have a more visceral and empathetic reaction to something happening to one's in-group.

A constitutional convention for California?

I don't generally like to post about California politics or the current budget crisis, because I know--and everyone else knows--exactly what the underlying problem is, and there's a limit to how many different ways you can point out that the government has been hijacked by an intransigent Republican minority. The California government is seriously flawed, and the reckoning is upon us.

Of course, the natural steps to take in fixing some serious procedural flaw with the government would be to rewrite the constitution. But as the Sacramento Bee's Dan Walters points out, the same forces that prevent California from passing a budget would also prevent it from agreeing on a new constitution:

Fundamentally, however, a constitutional convention is only a process, not a product. And there isn't even any agreement on the process – how many delegates would be selected, how they would be chosen and how they would go about their work.

The state constitution is silent on those issues, leaving it to an ideologically polarized Legislature to set the ground rules with a two-thirds vote required.

Some legislation calling for a convention or setting forth its procedures has already been introduced, which is a clue to the pitfalls of the process. If the Legislature is incapable of dealing with California's burning political issues, including the budget, how could we expect it to agree on how a constitutional convention would work – especially the partisan or ideological makeup of convention delegates?

Democrats would want a convention likely to embrace removing impediments to raising taxes, for instance, by containing a strong majority of their colleagues, while Republicans wouldn't go along with that – thus mirroring their essential conflict over the budget.

What all this basically means is that California has painted itself into a corner: every possible path to a fundamental change in the way the government works would need the approval of an overpowered and entrenched minority party. I only see two ways out: the first is that the state of affairs is allowed to proceed to utter crisis, causing such a tectonic shift in the political dynamics of the state that obstructionism becomes a liability for the Republicans. The second is that Republicans are somehow unscrupulously removed from their position of power, for instance via some gerrymandering scheme.

Neither of those options is very palatable--or likely. So I'm guessing that this crisis will go like the others: at the 11th hour some concession will be made to get the budget passed, the state will stagger onwards--and we will all find outselves in the same situation next year.

“the most cruel and foul injustice”

That's how Dick Cheney described the indictment of his chief-of-staff Scooter Libby back in 2007.

I think my eye just twitched a little.

Dubai

Via Sullivan some pretty entertaining copy, although I think the author is a bit of a poseur:

Short of opening a Radio Shack in an Amish town, Dubai is the world’s worst business idea, and there isn’t even any oil. Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai - it was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous.

...

Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the worst of both the West and the Middle-East....

...

It looks like Manhattan except that it isn’t the place that made Mingus or Van Allen or Kerouac or Wolfe or Warhol or Reed or Bernstein or any one of the 1001 other cultural icons from Bob Dylan to Dylan Thomas that form the core spirit of what is needed, in the absence of extreme toleration of vice, to infuse such edifices with purpose and create a self-sustaining culture that will prevent them crumbling into the empty desert that surrounds them.

I never thought of Dubai as a New-York-minus-the-freedom-and-authenticity before, but I think that's right.

I'd still like to visit some day.

Stagnant wages, falling home prices

A look into how household spending patterns are contributing to the slump:

One concept that has gotten a lot of attention the last few months is the household balance sheet: the relationship between household assets and liabilities, and what that means for household behavior (consumption versus saving). Though not the precipitating factor in the current crisis, the weakening of household balance sheets (fewer assets, same liabilities, less net worth, more anxiety) has likely had a significant effect in depressing consumption, which has been the single largest factor in our recent decline in GDP.

...

On the headline level, [from 2004 to 2007] median income fell from $47,500 to $47,300 (all figures are in constant 2007 dollars), while median net worth (assets minus liabilities) grew from $102,200 to $120,300. No surprise there: we already knew wages stagnated, while real estate and stocks appreciated. However, since the survey was conducted in 2007, median net worth fell by 17.8% according to the Fed estimate, to $99,300, and that’s just to October 2008. Given that the cumulative returns of the stock market have been about -15% since October 31, and that housing prices have fallen as well (and the Fed used a housing index that has fallen less than the Case-Shiller index*), that net worth is probably between $90,000 and $95,000 - significantly less than in 2004, and back around 1998 levels ($91,300).

One of the reasons why the real estate crash has hurt so much is because rising home prices were driving consumer spending, and consumer spending accounted for something like 70% of GDP. So when home prices fell, households saw their net worth shrink and started to save instead of spend, causing GDP to fall.

George Will smackdown

George Will's latest article contains some specious empirical claims about global warming, and the internet has responded with force.

Liberal Lieberman

Looks like I had it right all those months ago about the much-maligned Joe Lieberman. From Joe Klein:

It seems Lieberman played a crucial role in talking several Republicans off the ledge, thereby vindicating President Obama's refusal to be vindictive toward the Connecticut Senator, who had some nasty things to say about Obama and Democrats in general during the presidential campaign. Lieberman has always been a moderate-progressive on economic issues so his vote should not be a surprise--but his active lobbying for the bill has to be considered directly attributable to the grace with which Obama treated him. Those who wonder about the President's efforts to be nice to Republicans--a singularly ungracious lot, cult-like in their devotion to failed economic policies past--should bear this particular example in mind as we go forward.

Lieberman is as liberal as the next Senator when it comes to the economy, health care, and energy.

Bon mot watch

Bryan Appleyard (via Sullivan), explaining gofugyourself.celebuzz.com:

Don’t think this sartorial eye of Mordor is trained only on Hollywood...

That's pretty good.

Time for nerds to get crunk

Yay!