Happy New Year from the blast zone

It's another New Year's Eve in our nation's capital, and here I am, buying cases of liquor, fueling up my car, and plotting emergency escape routes. You think I'm paranoid, but really, no one ever thinks it's going to happen to them until it actually does. People hear about all sorts of terrible things--military coups, genocides, tsunamis, deadly chemical accidents, suicide bombers--and they think two things. First, "Those poor people." Second, "Thank goodness that could never happen to me." Millions of people have thought this, and millions of people have been wrong.

The last time I truly felt fear for my physical being was as a child in the early 1980s, during the end of the Cold War--undoubtedly because I had seen The Day After (1983) on TV at a tender age. Possibly also because we had "tornado/nuclear attack" drills at my elementary school, in which we learned, I kid you not, to curl up into little balls under our desks. As I grew up in a mountainous area not prone to tornadoes, I saw through that one even at age six. At least they were trying not to freak us out completely.

It is certain that some of the fears I feel now--fears of dirty bombs at the Capitol, of IEDs on my morning Metro ride--are no more rational or merited than my childhood fear of nuclear war was. Fears of a one-party government takeover are another story, history shows. Next time: why the Weimar Germans and post-WWII Czechs didn't see it coming until it was too late. [Continued here.]

From the brain jack files

A new study shows that internet use displaces time that was once spent socializing and watching TV, reports the NYT.

"According to the study, an hour of time spent using the Internet reduces face-to-face contact with friends, co-workers and family by 23.5 minutes, lowers the amount of time spent watching television by 10 minutes and shortens sleep by 8.5 minutes."

8.5 minutes? I knew there was a reason I was so tired all the time.

Smart!

Tiny car to test U.S. tastes (WP) Yes, the 60-mpg Smart car, common on the streets of Europe, is to be marketed in the U.S. In case you haven't seen one of these beauties, here are a couple I encountered in Amsterdam. Note that they are basically cubes, so you can park them either way in a parallel parking spot. Rad.

The coolest thing about Smarts, besides the fact that they get six times the MPG of a Hummer, is that they are designed by Swatch. The people who make the plastic watches we used to wear in the '80s. I wonder if the cars will come with a giant Swatchguard (laugh with me here if you remember these). Anyway, I actually saw a Smart, with Ontario plates, cruising down I-95 the other day. I cheered the cute little Ontarian who was driving it, though I feared for his safety.

Who do you have to screw to get fired around here?

As we discussed Donald Rumsfeld's job performance the other night, my friend Seth wondered to me what it would take to get fired by the Bush administration.

I countered that the surest way not to get fired by Rove/Cheney/Bush is to screw up royally. It fits into their whole philosophy of never, ever admitting that they made a mistake. I guess you could get asked to resign (George Tenet?) but if you're really concerned about holding on to your job, it couldn't hurt to land the country in a multi-billion-dollar military quagmire with no exit strategy and low troop morale.

I'm a Googlin' fool

Searched for: "state of the union" 2005 date

Got: XXX-State of the Union. "Ice Cube replaces Vin Diesel in the lead role of a Gen-X James Bond prototype whose extreme sports skills and criminal record make him an effective and expendable secret agent." Scheduled for release April 29, 2005 in theaters around the country.

How to help tsunami survivors

The death toll from yesterday's disaster is now estimated at 20,000, and aid groups warn that the survivors will face hunger, homelessness, and contamination of the water supply. Why not put some of that big ole Christmas check from your grandma to good use? Here are some effective organizations that can put your donation to work helping these people:

International Red Cross
Oxfam
Save the Children

Christmas joy for you!

The Kevin F. Sherry Sweater Project: This is the hardest I've laughed since I watched Waterworld last night. Kevin models, and the site author comments on, horrible sweaters from the late 1980's. (via Screenhead)

How the First Amendment Stole Christmas

Groups on Right say Christmas Is Under Attack (WP)

Happy Winter Solstice from, as Jerry Falwell might put it, "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America." I personally fit into at least three of those categories, and on this most sacred Eve, I think I speak for all of us when I apologize for so cruelly oppressing America's ultra-right-wing Christians for all these years.

George Will watch: global warming

In his WP column today on the global warming debate, George Will executes a perfect example of what is known as the "straw man fallacy." Using the plot line from a recent Michael Crichton thriller as fodder, he constructs a falsely kooky image of the scientists and environmentalists who are concerned about global warming, then picks up a rhetorical bazooka and blasts that image to the ground. Specifically, Will implies that these folks all predict catastrophic Day-After-Tomorrow-type climate change and that they are busy trying to rationalize the much more incremental ecological changes they observe to fit the catastrophic scenario.

Surely, writes Will, the environmentalists are merely fearmongers, and "various factions have interests -- monetary, political, even emotional -- in cultivating fears. The fears invariably seem to require"--get this--"more government subservience to environmentalists and more government supervision of our lives."

The truth: Many climatologists warn that catastrophic changes, for example the stalling of ocean currents, are a possible, though not definite, consequence of global warming. This is akin to someone warning you that if you drink and drive you risk having a terrible accident. It's no sure thing you'll have an accident, but it's possible, which is a good reason not to drink and drive.

The observed incremental changes that Will pooh-poohs, meanwhile, are actually a pretty big deal. I'll send you over to the Union of Concerned Scientists for a discussion of these.

As always, Will makes one good point--that we should be concerned about "how conventional wisdom is manufactured in a credulous and media-drenched society"--and then uses faulty arguments to make bad conclusions.

The military are not like the rest of us

My little brother, the West Point cadet, just emerged from his room wearing a backpack stuffed with 75 pounds of free weights. Apparently he's going for a little eight-mile run and will be back soon.

The more things change . . .

Excerpts from the Port Huron Statement of 1962. Students: read this.

"We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit. . . When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world. . . many of us began maturing in complacency. As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. . .

[Yet] almost no students value activity as a citizen. Passive in public, they are hardly more idealistic in arranging their private lives. . . Attention is being paid to social status (the quality of shirt collars, meeting people, getting wives or husbands, making solid contacts for later on); much too, is paid to academic status (grades, honors, the med school rat-race). But neglected generally is real intellectual status, the personal cultivation of the mind . . .

Any new left in America must be, in large measure, a left with real intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools. The university permits the political life to be an adjunct to the academic one, and action to be informed by reason . . .

A new left must transform modern complexity into issues that can be understood and felt close-up by every human being. It must give form to the feelings of helplessness and indifference, so that people may see the political, social and economic sources of their private troubles and organize to change society. In a time of supposed prosperity, moral complacency and political manipulation, a new left cannot rely on only aching stomachs to be the engine force of social reform. The case for change, for alternatives that will involve uncomfortable personal efforts, must be argued as never before. The university is a relevant place for all of these activities. "

Fahrenheit 1.0

"Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web."--NYT

One more step toward the dream of a realtime RSS feed of all human knowledge plugged directly into your brain. Or perhaps toward the end of civilization?

What Google is setting up is similar to existing archives like J-Stor and Lexis Nexis in that it digitally reproduces and stores resources like newspaper and journal articles that also exist as hard copy. And that's cool. What freaks me out is movement toward content that only exists digitally. Steps like the one Google is taking grow the culture of online-only research, journalism, and correspondence, and make a future of digital-only information more and more likely.

Why is this a problem? I am primarily concerned about the possible impact of this culture on future historical study. Personal correspondence, newspaper articles, opinion pieces (the Federalist Papers, for example), and other such documents have always been important resources for biographers and historians. Now these documents are increasingly available only on the internet or as computer files like e-mails. And digitally stored documents may be far less accessible to future historians than physical documents are, in that they are easier to destroy and require special equipment to read their contents.

Your grandfather's letters to your grandmother from WWII? Safe in your attic. Your friend's e-mails to his family from Iraq? Tragically erased when Outlook crashed ($%#*ing Microsoft). And while anyone who knows English will probably be able to read your grandfather's letters now, a hundred, or two hundred years from now simply by picking them up, future historians will hardly be able to "run across" your friend's e-mails, trapped as they are as 1's and 0's on a hard drive, and read them without special effort.

Just something to ponder while you go check your e-mail and then read Slate.

Aspen dispatch

I saw Hunter S. Thompson in the flesh! We spotted him at the bar in Aspen's posh Hotel Jerome. My colleague Lucy had the balls to go up and introduce herself. She noticed that our favorite gonzo journalist was wearing a rubber band around his wrist, and wondered why.

Lucy: Why are you wearing that rubber band around your wrist?
Dr. Thompson: For lewd purposes.

Awesome. In other news, latkes are definitely the best hangover food, and Ocean's Twelve is this holiday season's must-see sequel.

We'll resume our usual daily commentary on matters of general public concern as soon as this blogger is back on the East Coast and sober.

Friends don't let friends blog drunk

Wonkette writes:

"Look, we've been getting fucked by Republicans for four years. Might as well take it some place beyond demolishing Social Security demolished and curtailing out civil rights."

"demolishing Social Security demolished"? "out civil rights"? I'm disappointed. Yours truly has certainly been known to blog while drunk--heck, even write entire thesis chapters while mildly tipsy--but that's what the "save as draft" button is for.

On a related note, I hear that Virgin Mobile is going to offer an "anti-drunk-dial" service that will allow you to block certain numbers (your boss, your ex, whatever), for a small fee, when you know you're going to imbibe.

No death knell for the evening news!

I grew up watching the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. Of course, it’s been years since I’ve watched it on a regular basis, but a couple of weeks ago I caught Dan and Co. and was reminded of the virtues of this format.

Chief among those virtues, in my mind, is that evening news programs must make choices. The cable news networks, with their 24 hours of daily air time and wealth of programs on different topics, can run almost any story they want to—and they do. A 30-minute news program, on the other hand, is the broadcast equivalent of the front page of a newspaper. Producers and editors are forced to choose what to include. Moreover, just as there is significance in where on the front page a newspaper article appears, there is often significance in the chronological arrangement of broadcast news stories within the program. I find these choices of inclusion and placement interesting.

Of course, some will say that the 24 hour news networks are fairer to the consumer, giving her access to more information and allowing her to decide for herself which stories are the most important, rather than receiving information at the whim of a news director. I think this argument sells the broadcast media short.

In truth, in every medium, in every format, writers, editors, and producers control which information is presented to us and how it is presented. They have an ethical duty to eschew bias and to make the best choices they can for their audiences. Presenting every single piece of information and abdicating responsibility for synthesizing and analyzing it is not good journalism—it’s laziness and cowardice. We should expect more from the media, who have been given the use of our public airwaves and the strongest constitutional free-speech protections.

Guesstimate this

I hereby and forthwith add the use of the word "guesstimate" to my growing list of style/grammar/word choice errors that should not be tolerated.

We already have estimate, meaning "to calculate approximately" (v.) or "a tentative evaluation or rough calculation" (n.). We also have guess, meaning "to predict (a result or an event) without sufficient information" (v.) or "a conjecture arrived at by guessing" (n.). It's one or the other, people. You're either making an educated estimate, or you're making an uneducated guess.

Yours truly,
The Department of Linguistic Purity and Common Sense

W tells it like it is

"We're a large compa--uh, country, with all kinds of avenues where somebody could inflict harm."--President Bush when asked about the likelihood of terrorists attacking U.S. food supplies, 12/3/04

A large company, indeed. Shareholders, we need a new CEO.

Note: I saw this comment on tape on CNN; the only place I could find the quote in print was in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which elided the President's misstatement.

In-Fuhrer-ating

Sorry about that title. It's 6:30 on a Friday and I'm a little punchy. Anyway--I'm not exactly expecting him to burn down the Reichstag and blame it on the Communists, but you have to admit, this billboard is pretty creepy.



Salon: "[The image] currently graces several billboards in Orlando, Florida, along Interstate 4 . . . The billboards in question are controlled by media juggernaut Clear Channel Communications, and also carry a tag saying that the contents are a 'political public service message brought to you by Clear Channel Outdoor.'"

Tigers--get with it on the pranks

"Harvard fans and alums fall for a prank run by 20 Yale students at The Game Nov. 20. The students convinced them to hold up 1,800 red and white pieces of paper to spell out 'We Suck.'"--Yale Daily News

Look at these guys, orchestrating huge, visually appealing pranks while the Princeton kids are still trying to steal the clapper. More power to them, because we call all agree on one thing: Harvard does suck.

When academia attacks

George Will points out in a recent Washington Post column that academia is rife with--can this be true?--liberals. The result? A kind of liberal academic groupthink, he writes. Or, as Wonkette would undoubtedly term it, "an intellectual circle-jerk." (Extra-apt, since 85% of America's full professors also happen to be men.)

As you might imagine, the intellectual circle-jerkers--probably guys a lot like my hippy pinko professor dad--had a lot to say on the Letters page about this topic today. My favorite:

"If academia is becoming more liberal, perhaps it is the free choice of individuals who feel the country would be better off with policy guided by science and study, rather than by faith and dogma. When conservatives discover the Enlightenment, perhaps more of them will find successful careers in academia."

Snap! And now, analysis. What we are debating here is not really whether academia is "liberal," whatever that means, but whether that is a problem. Mr. Will's beef is that a "filtering process" tends to exclude conservatives, and thus conservative viewpoints, from the Ivory Tower; this leads to aforesaid groupthink and a lack of diversity of thought.

Is it a problem if all academics have the same political leanings? Yes, basically. This argument is a little overdrawn, though; there are many types of liberal, just as there are many types of conservative. If by "liberal" all you mean is "interested in openly exploring a variety of cultures and viewpoints" then I say, that's what higher education is all about. If by "liberal" you mean "secular," then I say, there's a reason that there aren't more biblical literalists teaching biology at colleges and universities. That's because they're wrong, based on the best scientific evidence. Why aren't there more Greenbackers teaching economics at our nation's universities? Exactly. In short, maybe the most educated people in the country are mostly liberal because . . . liberals are right?

Bar tricks

On tonight's episode of The West Wing, Leo did a cool trick involving a toothpick and two forks balanced on a wine glass to illustrate to C.J. her importance as the new White House Chief of Staff. My new weekend goal is to master this trick. I'll let you know how it goes.

This is what theocracy looks like

Theocracy Watch: This is a slightly propagandistic but otherwise very cool project of Cornell's Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy. I especially recommend reading their history of the religious right's takeover of the Republican party.