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The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 05:22:00 -0700

The Daily Cannibal

Posted: 14 Sep 2020 08:32 AM PDT

Gavin Newsom on California’s wildfires:

"California, folks, is America fast forward. What we are experiencing right here is coming to all across the United States of America unless we get our act together on climate change — unless we disabuse ourselves of all the BS that's being spewed by a very small group of people that have an ideological reason to advance the cause of a 19th century framework and solution. “

Sorry, guv, but what you have there is not global warming, but local insanity. Your state is burning because you mismanaged your forests, largely for budget reasons. Clearing away brush was just too expensive for a state that needed the money for…more important things.

Now, surrounded by choking fumes and a nightmare sky, you angrily insist that this is all coming to the rest of America, because the future happens first in the no-longer-quite-so-golden state,

You further assert that climate change is settled because we’ve taken a vote, and “only a very small group of people” deny it. This is

a. untrue.

b. so funny that it’s hard to believe you could say it with a straight face.

History is replete with angry Cassandras prophesying, in the words of PG Wodehouse, “some kind of hell which would ultimately stagger civilization and turn the moon to blood. ” But the prairies will not become a living Hell of natural vengeance, nor will the New England forests erupt into evergreen calderas, nor the blue hiils of Virginia, the Ozarks, the Appalachians, nor any other sanely–managed greenery of the rest of our verdant paradise.

I sympathise with your rage. People whose streets are festooned with shit are seized with an understandable compulsion to fling it at those who mock them. I do not envy your situation, but neither does it impel me to share your despair. You made your future; the rest of the nation will make its own way.

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 04:40:00 -0700

The Daily Cannibal

Suffer, You Bastard

Posted: 10 Sep 2020 08:09 AM PDT

Bad news from the Wall Street Journal:

“Men Urged to Limit Alcohol to One Drink a Day Amid New Concerns”

What “new concerns?” Is somebody worried that we don’t feel bad enough already?

Our federal medicos note that the pandemic has occasioned an increase in national alcohol consumption, and this comes as news to no one. When you can’t walk outside without covering your face like an ISIS jihadist or you’ re washing your hands more often than a deranged Lady Macbeth, alcohol seems like a sensible option.

The virtuous ask: “Do you really need a drink?” The answer might be found in a passage from Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers:

"The last moral objection that Converse experienced in the traditional manner had been his reaction to the great Elephant Zap of the previous year. That winter, the Military Advisory Command, Vietnam, had decided that elephants were enemy agents because the NVA used them to carry things, and there had ensued a scene worthy of the Ramayana. Many-armed, hundred-headed MACV had sent forth steel-bodied flying insects to destroy his enemies, the elephants. All over the country, whooping sweating gunners descended from the cloud cover to stampede the herds and mow them down with 7.62-millimeter machine guns…The Great Elephant Zap had been too much and had disgusted everyone. Even the chopper crews who remember the day as one of insane exhilaration had been somewhat appalled. There was a feeling that there were limits…And as for dope, Converse thought, and addicts—if the world is going to contain elephants pursued by flying men, people are just naturally going to want to get high."

Look at what is happening all around you, as earnest talking heads and politicians assure you that looting is redress, arson is protest and violence is valid. What else is left, to make sense of this, but a few belts of attitude adjuster?

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Wed, 9 Sep 2020 04:42:00 -0700

The Daily Cannibal

California Dreamin’

Posted: 08 Sep 2020 09:08 AM PDT

California governor Gavin Newsom announced new guidelines today for state residents to help combat poor air quality resulting from climate-driven wildfires.

“The emissions generated by large-scale forest fires have significantly reduced the state’s air quality, resulting in correspondingly lower oxygen levels,” the governor stated.

“We therefore request all residents to reduce respiration levels by 5% in order to conserve our air quality.”

Noting that lower atmospheric oxygen levels “impact the elderly and sick disproportionately,” Newsom suggested that younger healthy residents might consider “holding their breath for one minute out of every ten,” in order to “provide for those less fortunate.”

The respiration reductions are “recommended, but not mandatory,” the governor stated, but cautioned that continued wildfire activity “might require compulsory restrictions on wasteful consumption of our limited oxygen resources, which I am confident the legislature will pass, if necessary to preserve public health.”

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 04:10:00 -0800

The Daily Cannibal

Dear America

Posted: 17 Feb 2019 09:21 AM PST

From our friend nemo, posted earlier today on Bill Quick’s Daily Pundit:

To my fellow citizens/residents:

Recently I was involved in a widely-reported incident that has been badly distorted by the media, and misunderstood by most of the public.

Despite the negative publicity these misperceptions have brought me, I am grateful for the spotlight the media has thrown onto the story, because my own comfort is nothing compared to the need to heighten America's focus on the clear and demonstrable racism epidemic in our country.

In brief, I staged a real-time bit of theater, in which I reported that I had been assaulted in Chicago by two white males who attempted to lynch me.

I regret that the media failed to understand that this was a symbolic act on my part, designed to call attention to the thousands of similar episodes that actually take place in our nation each day. As a professional actor with some measure of success in my craft, I used the skills at my command to make what I believe to be a valued and thought-provoking contribution to our national racial dialogue.

I sincerely regret the misunderstanding my symbolic act has generated, but still firmly believe that I have acted in the best interests of those still threatened, oppressed and even killed by the scourge of racism that has stained our national honor and disfigured our historical legacy for three centuries. If this has resulted in highly unpleasant repercussions to me personally, I gladly accept the burden, how ever unjust, if it benefits even one person who struggles for dignity and equality in the toxic environment of American injustice.

With head held high, and a grateful salute to those who have also sacrificed their own safety and self-interest in the cause of freedom,

Jussie Smollett

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 03:31:00 -0800

The Daily Cannibal

Like life doesn’t already suck enough

Posted: 16 Feb 2016 12:13 PM PST

Kofi Annan, former UN General Secretary, wants you to quit eating meat, because global warming.

"And of course there are alternative sources of protein. For example, raising insects as an animal protein source," Annan said. "Insects have a very good conversion rate from feed to meat. They make up part of the diet of two billion people and are commonly eaten in many parts of the world."

You always knew that, if he could, this dude would make you eat bugs. Because you deserve to suffer, you bastard.

I think I get it….

Posted: 16 Feb 2016 11:46 AM PST

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 03:29:00 -0800

The Daily Cannibal

There’s just something about this….

Posted: 11 Jan 2016 03:42 PM PST

I’m running this in its entirety from Bill Quick’s Daily Pundit. Because it’s so good. I didn’t even ask if I could. He won’t mind. Neither will razorbacker.

No Purchase Required

He stepped out of the soup kitchen, packed as always on bitterly cold nights with the soup watered to the point of absolute clarity, and the wind hit him like a knife blade.

His mother had been right; he never listened. His coach had been right; he never gave his all. His high school guidance councilor had been right; so much potential, so little effort. His ex mother-in-law had been right; he'd never amount to anything. At last able to see himself for what he was, a loser, he turned upwind to head for the mission bed for the night.

The howling wind blew debris into his face, including a small slip of paper. He reached up and dully examined it. A lottery ticket. For tonight's drawing. He slipped it into his pocket…maybe this time. Maybe this time.

If this were the opening to a novel or short story, would you keep reading? I know I would.

Not bad, razorbacker. Not bad at all.

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Tue, 8 Dec 2015 04:59:00 -0800

The Daily Cannibal

Merry Christmas

Posted: 07 Dec 2015 01:35 PM PST

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Thu, 3 Sep 2015 03:31:00 -0700

The Daily Cannibal

The End of Days?

Posted: 02 Sep 2015 12:36 PM PDT

Ever since I was a tyke, my ears have rung with prophesies of doom issued by wrathful soothsayers, ranging from elder relatives despairing this or that sad state of affairs and clergy at various school chapels hurling promises of hellfire, to handwringing ink-peddlers in the media and stern politicians decrying in the most urgent tones the sure cataclysm that awaits us if we neglect to submit to their will.

Lately, however, it seems the pace of this activity has picked up, and rather sharply at that. Whether this owes more to an actual increase in our risk of damnation or to outside factors, such as the proliferation of pulpits offered by the internet and the tidal effect of an impending presidential campaign season, is a topic for further dispute, but the fact remains that optimism about the future is at a low ebb, while the number of potential ruins we face multiplies with the speed of a climate-change computer algorithm.

Are we indeed nearing the end of days? Sure seems like it. Note:

Yesterday, traveling to Alaska to celebrate the restoration of Denali, our president launched into a Jeremiad on climate change guaranteed to instill quaking knees and simultaneous fever and chills into even the boldest skeptic, promising us that nations would drown while others baked in endless drought, that crops would wither and die as billions perished in global famine, that the permafrost would perma-melt, releasing trillions of tons of CO2, which would in turn further ramp up the flames of the inferno until eyebrows scorched, foot-soles blistered and every scalp became a flaming crown of retribution.

He did, however, allow that this can still be prevented, but, as always, was somewhat murky on the details, as the wheels of this particular juggernaut have been turning for quite some time, and even his recent carefully-phrased treaty with China seems to offer little reprieve for the next ten years or so from the emissions of that energetic and still-expanding industrial center. And India? Brazil? Well, certainly there is work to be done, but we must not, as we are frequently reminded, let the perfect be the enemy of good. But what if the alternative to “the perfect” is in fact not “the good,” but “that masquerade of rotten ideas?”

To requote an old friend, CfE,:

Few things are true. Wisdoms which inhabit a future that never arrives are many.

On another front, we have the emerging appreciation that the US is not alone in having an immigrant problem. In fact, it seems as if almost overnight the entire globe has been convulsed into one pandemic spasm of expulsion as large chunks of our more beleaguered nations flee in terror from their native lands seeking asylum in places that must seem exotically weird to them.

We haven’t witnessed this level of refugee flight since World War II, or possibly even the Great Flood, leading us to question what may have changed so radically and so powerfully, to produce such movement on so massive a scale.

Well, we don’t have to look far. The fact is, conditions endured in their homeland by most of these folks are so starkly horrific that even the prospect of death by drowning, or suffocation, or from slow-roasting in the packed-to-the-hatches holds of barely-floating derelict steamers, does little to deter them. They reason, quite properly, that whatever hell may await them in their transit, or however miserable the conditions they will encounter as and if they actually find whatever foreign shore they seek, these can be no worse than those they flee.

This cannot, however, inform their new host nations what actions they may take to absorb them. The result has been abysmal: tens of thousands dying en route, hundreds of thousands camped in filthy shantytowns, angry altruists demanding justice for the refugees and angrier citizens demanding an end to the torrent of strange people speaking strange languages and insisting on their right to asylum.

Here, no words of solace issue from our leaders — only a growing perplexity about how to address both the compassionate and the frightened sectors of their electorate. Which leads us to the final indicator that the apocalypse is indeed upon us.

We have pestilence and famine, we have war and certainly we have death. All that is now required is the emergence of the Antichrist — someone who, like P. G. Wodehouse’s Lord Ickenam, “would be up to some kind of hell that would ultimately stagger civilization and turn the moon to blood.”

Enter Donald Trump. Has any figure in memory risen so swiftly and so far in the eyes of the enlightened from harmless notoriety to a height of infamy rivaling Lucifer himself? Certainly the progressive element of society loathes him with almost breathless vigor, falling over itself in a concerted attempt to snuff out what started as a brushfire and has now erupted into a full-fledged inferno. Where his actual remarks themselves seem insufficiently outrageous, the righteous are pleased to infer or openly invent interpretations more scurrilous still.

But the facts are that Trump is saying what many people have in their hearts, but either fear to say or have not found a way to say it. Is Trump a racist, and by inference his followers too? Or is Trump refusing to let the threat of the “racist” brand silence reasonable and considered objections to lawless migration and the damage it may inflict? Is Trump a narcissistic con man with dictatorial tendencies and no regard for the harm that careless pandering to his base might cause? Or is that the other guy/gal — or even the incumbent?

Nor is it the left alone that may feel threatened by an ideological nightmare. Just yesterday, Kanye West announced at the VMA Awards that he was running for President — but in 2020. Which raises an interesting question: does Kanye mean to imply that the Democrats will lose in 2016? Because if they do not, the incumbent is unlikely to welcome a West candidacy four years later. “Well,” you may say, “West doesn’t expect anyone to take him seriously.” Did Trump?

All the portents seem to agree, therefore, that the seeds of our destruction, now long since sown, have sprouted and are beginning to flourish. Even the stock market, that sensitive and generally impartial soul, has been trying to tell us that the good times are over, and Pharaoh’s lean kine now stalk us. What can we do?

Here we have some words of counsel, again not our own, but from CfE. Don’t believe everything you are told.

Newspapers suggest what might be, and the reader elects the speculation to office. Does the poor consumer of dancing ink remember how often these plungers have been wrong? No. He can't wait to sail out again on the next rubber boat inflated with the gas of possibility. Truths that are sold and consumed before they are true are not very valuable because they are not very true.

Our problems are real, and complex. But the solutions proposed are simple, and therefore fantastic. Things are not simple, and fixing them will take more than “the gas of possibility.” In the interim, the best choice may be the advice offered some time ago by Douglas Adams:

“Don’t Panic.”

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Sun, 16 Aug 2015 03:29:00 -0700

The Daily Cannibal

Check Ex-Mate

Posted: 15 Aug 2015 12:34 PM PDT

History repeats itself, we have been told, and recent events in the world of online journalism seem to bear this out. A few weeks ago, Gawker.com, an internet playpen for the lower-information millennial set, saw the departure of its three top editors, accompanied by a solemn promise from the publisher that the site would now become “20% nicer.” The impetus for all this arose from an article that claimed the CFO of a competitor online media company had solicited paid sex from a male prostitute, and the article was based solely on the claims of the prostitute, with no corroborating evidence — or attempt to obtain any. Further, in order to “protect” the accuser, Gawker named only the CFO in the article.

Alas, it obtained that the “accuser” was an extortionist, albeit a somewhat unbalanced one, who successfully duped Gawker into acting as an accomplice in his plot to blackmail the CFO. This was a little much, even for Gawker’s readers, who turned on the publication with the fury of an enraged Macbeth, blasting the site for more than a week with an endless stream of taunts and vitriol in its comments section.

Sound familiar? Perhaps only to those who followed the exotically bizarre Village Voice series on Bruce McMahan and his ex-wife Elena. The two narratives are eerily identical: a deranged and ruthless extortionist contacts a publication so eager for pageviews that it finds a way to print nonsense of the flimsiest and abjectly absurd tenor, despite obvious red flags and bone-jarring contradictions in the blackmailers’ narratives. Elena enlisted the Village Voice as her dupe, which ran two articles claiming that McMahan had a lengthy affair with his own daughter.

This naturally created more than a little consternation in the McMahan family, which watched helplessly as the Voice printed a rich tapestry of absurdities supported by impossibilities, including the assertion that McMahan had married the daughter in a ceremony at Westminster Abbey. This story fell apart very quickly under the briefest scrutiny, but the Voice never offered a retraction or apology. The damage to McMahan was done; his only recourse was to sue, but such a suit could only draw more attention to the story, and the Voice was facing bankruptcy for other reasons, including an outstanding judgement of roughly $15 million against it for unfair business practices in California. Subsequently, it was revealed that Village Voice Media was essentially a front for an online child prostitution website, Backpage.com, which provided by far the majority of the company’s revenues. In short, a pretty squalid little bunch of gangsters and pimps had walked into McMahan’s living room and sprayed it with bullshit, leaving him and his children to clean up the mess as best they could.

Gawker is still reeling from its outing fiasco, with major advertisers dropping the site in revulsion, and the Village Voice now limps along under new ownership, as the former owners sold it off for almost nothing. They did, however, maintain ownership of the kiddy-hooker website, which remains under attack by various parties, including a few dozen state attorneys-general.

In Gawker’s case, the extortion plot was quickly unmasked. In McMahan’s case, it took many years finally be decided in any satisfactory way.

Now, a decade later, the final chapter has been writ, this time by a circuit court in Florida. McMahan’s ex-wife, frustrated by her failure to gain control of McMahan’s sizable fortune through outright blackmail, has spent the past ten years in a prolonged attempt to regain leverage on him through custody of their two children, which was awarded to McMahan some time ago after evidence of his ex-wife’s bizarre and inappropriate behavior was reviewed by court after court.

Now a Florida court has ruled that Elena no longer may claim any parental rights to the children whatever, awarding sole and permanent custody to Bruce McMahan. Moreover, it does so by describing her behavior towards the children in unambiguous terms of clinical precision.

Elena McMahan told a story to the Village Voice, seeking to extort virtually all McMahan’s money from him. She wished to do McMahan harm, certainly, but that opens the question of what she thought she was doing to her own children. “Your daddy is a monster” is hardly good news for a child to hear, even if true; in McMahan’s case, it was as malevolent and shameful a lie that she could possibly tell. Now the court has told its own story, in language of soul-shriveling harshness, using words and phrases no mother could ever bear to hear.

This is small comfort, I assume, for Bruce McMahan, but Gawker — beware. Sometimes justice, which may “grind exceeding slow but exceeding fine,” does triumph, even in the courts. Having done a great wrong to an innocent man, with no objective other than boosting readership and revenues, you put yourself in the Village Voice’s unenviable position of village dupe. And although karma may be a bitch, she’s not a whore. That’s reserved for folks like you.

McMahan, we understand, put Elena behind him some time ago; the court’s recent decision, however, essentially provides the whole sorry saga with a full stop instead of a nagging ellipsis suggesting more might yet come. As for Elena, the game is now over. No check, no mate.

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 03:27:00 -0700

The Daily Cannibal

You Are The Dead

Posted: 26 Mar 2015 03:15 PM PDT

Let’s play a guessing game. I’m going to list ten adjectives or phrases, and you tell me which potential presidential candidate comes to mind. Not who I am describing, mind you — just who pops into your head:

— polarizing
— calculating
— disingenuous
— insincere
— ambitious
— inevitable
— entitled
— over-confident
— secretive
— will do anything to win
— represents the past
— out of touch.

Well, whoever you guessed, I hope it wasn’t Hillary Clinton (but it was, wasn’t it?), because according to a group called “Super Volunteers For Clinton,” you’re not allowed to use any of those words or phrases to describe her. Why? Because sexism, that’s why.

According to the WaPo:

Hillary Clinton has been in the public eye for a very long time, which means much has been written about her — including quite a few adjectives. But some of these adjectives are now off-limits.

That’s according to the Clinton “Super Volunteers,” who have promised to track the media’s use of words they believe to be sexist code words.

So these words are now off the table: “polarizing,” “calculating,” “disingenuous,” “insincere,” “ambitious,” “inevitable,” “entitled,” “over-confident,” “secretive,” “will do anything to win,” “represents the past,” and “out of touch.”

Chilling, isn’t it? An interesting amuse bouche for those who want a taste of the menu a Clinton administration might propose for our consumption. Of course, this asinine attempt to muffle the opposition won’t discourage many critics, partly because they will hoot with derision at the presumption, and partly because many of these adjectives are remarkably apt descriptors of the person in question, but as funny as the title “Clinton Super Volunteers” may seem to you (“double-secret probation?”) we find little to laugh about. We can’t help hearing a disembodied voice say from behind a mirror: “You are the dead.”

This star chamber of hyperventilating hysterics sees no danger in attempting to dictate which adjectives we may use. Their cause is just. Right-minded thinkers must prevail. Dissent must be ruthlessly suppressed, and individual rights are always secondary to the greater good for the many.

Jazz hands, everyone. Jazz hands.

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 03:34:00 -0800

The Daily Cannibal

Snowpocalypse Not

Posted: 27 Jan 2015 03:29 PM PST

It was fun watching the weather channel gremlins disport themselves, gesture at the marauding snowflakes and make the most of their moment. Their warnings were ominous. “Three feet of snow.” “Hurricane winds.” “Historic Winter Storm!”

It was just as much fun watching Cuomo and de Blasio huffing and puffing, running about pointing fingers and issuing orders with a gruff “we’re in charge here” glee. At times, they appeared to be trying to outdo each other, harsher and sterner with each passing hour. As long as the cameras were rolling, so were they.

Understandably, the folks in New York City became peevish when the promised avalanche failed to materialize. The mayor and the governor were accused of overreacting in closing public transit and banning all vehicular traffic. The mayor and the governor in turn became peevish, sternly reminding us that it is far better to err on the side of caution than “risk lives.”

And they are right about that, at least. The forecasts were actually remarkably accurate, and failed only in the sense that New York City remained safely outside the really heavy band of snowfall — by only a few miles at most — that blanketed Long Island, Connecticut and points north with anywhere from a foot and a half to two feet of snow.

What our leaders don’t seem to understand, surprisingly, is the nature of their game. When you promise people a winter carnival, you’d better deliver. They predicted a “blizzard.” And that’s what we expected.

Blizzard! Who is not thrilled? The prospect of winds howling and mountains of snow drifting across deserted streets exerts a strange attraction to those assured of spending the interval safe and cozy inside their warm homes, perhaps by a crackling fire, sipping warm beverages and gazing out triple-thermopane windows at nature’s might. Or better still, slipping under the covers for the night, maybe with an extra blanket or two, drifting off to sleep while outside, the dunes of snow pile up until they could smother a wolf, and no early-morning wake-up to spoil the luxury of safe harbor in the storm.

In the city, power lines do not go down, and watermains don’t freeze. The risk of any real discomfort is small, and then, a winter fantasy — sparkling white streets, fluffy sidewalks and beautiful frosty arabesques swirling around brownstone stairways — awaits. Dogs leap. Children cavort. All, for a brief time, is strangely clean, quiet and very, very pretty.

But we didn’t get it. In spite of our dutiful trips to the stores to stock up on staples, waiting in line, cancelling dinner plans, postponing errands and hunkering down for the blow, the blow never came. Sure, we got some respectable snow. But it was no blizzard.

I don’t blame the citizens for their petulance, and I admit to enjoying the discomfiture of the politicos. Perhaps our leaders should learn to issue their ukases without such battlefield stridency, with less arm-waving — and when they decide to put on a show, understand better how badly their public reacts to a such dismal flop.

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 03:46:00 -0800

The Daily Cannibal

Doctors For Sale

Posted: 17 Nov 2014 02:26 PM PST

According to an editorial in today’s New York Times, Cuba earns $8.2 billion a year by “exporting” roughly 50,000 Cuban doctors and nurses to work in various countries in Latin America and Africa. That comes out to about $200,000 per doctor. The doctors are paid approximately $60 a month, although some assigned to Ebola treatment centers get as much as $240 from the WHO.

Strangely, many of these doctors object to this. So did Emilio González (whom the Times describes as “a hard-line Cuban exile”), who was head of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services under George Bush. Mr. González described the labor of Cuban doctors abroad as "state-sponsored human trafficking."

The Times isn’t so sure, citing the State Department’s “latest report on human trafficking that reported coercion of Cuban medical personnel does ‘not appear to reflect a uniform government policy.’" Hmmmm. “Doesn’t ‘appear?'” “Uniform?” You mean it’s “selective” human trafficking?

In any event, Mr. Gonzales engineered some legislation that enabled any Cuban doctor abroad to apply for fast-track immigration to the US simply by applying at any US embassy.

Sounds good so far. We need doctors, and doctors who are essentially sent abroad as slaves, whose earnings are confiscated by a totalitarian regime, and who voluntarily apply to asylum should probably be welcomed with open arms by a nation that is purportedly opposed to that sort of thing and open to all who are legitimately oppressed.

But the Times not only demurs, it vehemently disagrees. These damn doctors should stay put, argues the Times. After all, we are advised:

American immigration policy should give priority to the world's neediest refugees and persecuted people.

Interesting. That’s a pretty big sample, including most of Africa, much of Latin America, a large part of the Middle East, all of Haiti and arguably most of Cuba. If buy buy that astonishing (and self-minted) definition of what official US immigration policy should be, better get set for a whopping hike in your tax bill and a lot of tents in your parks and parking lots. Moreover:

Secretary of State John Kerry and the American ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, have praised the work of Cuban doctors dispatched to treat Ebola patients in West Africa….
It is incongruous for the United States to value the contributions of Cuban doctors who are sent by their government to assist in international crises like the 2010 Haiti earthquake while working to subvert that government by making defection so easy.

Well, we wouldn’t want to embarrass Mr. Kerry, who does that to himself perfectly well without our assistance. But — it’s “incongruous” to value the labor of slaves — and then help them to escape their slavemasters? How? In what alternative universe?

It’s probably wearisome to my readers to read further examples of the curious thinking that infects the Times editorial board, whose logical twists derive from the most advanced ethical topologies, but this one requires such an extreme warping of hidden dimensions that we start wondering if anybody there reads this stuff before they send it off to the printer.

In the meantime, it’s perfectly fine, in the world of the Times, to deny asylum to highly-qualified, highly-desirable legal applicants for immigration, while at the same time welcoming waves of “undocumented” aliens to swarm our borders.

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Sat, 15 Nov 2014 03:26:00 -0800

The Daily Cannibal

General Goodwrench, Meet Agent Cellphone

Posted: 14 Nov 2014 03:04 PM PST

After a spate of recent articles in the press detailing serious problems in the nation’s missile command structure — ranging from rampant cheating on qualifying exams, large-scale chronic disrepair in the infrastructure, poor morale, high turnover and a host of other problems — a review board formed by DoD Secretary Hagel released its findings, and the results were pretty depressing. Says Yahoo News:

To illustrate the degree of decay in the ICBM force, the review found that maintenance crews had access to only one tool set required to tighten bolts on the warhead end of the Minuteman 3 missile, and that this single tool set was being used by crews at all three ICBM bases. The crews now have one at each of the three bases.

We have a disclosed defense budget of $550 billion, and only one set of tools to attach warheads to hundreds of missiles at three different ICBM bases. This, apparently, did not sit well with new Defense chief Chuck Hagel.

He said, “‘What is going on here?'” one of the senior defense officials recalled.

Actually, the best part of all this is:

They had to share [the tool set] via Federal Express delivery, the defense officials said.

Really? Fed Ex?

Scene i: Minot AFB, North Dakota

“Hey, did we get the warhead wrench yet?”

“Nah.”

“Anybody have the tracking number?”

Scene ii, Pentagon, Washington, DC

“Mr. Secretary, there’s someone calling on an unsecured landline claiming he’s the President of Venezuela, and he keeps saying “I have your missile wrench.”

On an apparently unrelated note, the Department of Homeland Security released its report on the recent White House intruder, and the story just gets worse.

The agent in charge of the attack doggies didn’t get the alert because, according to the New York Times,

…the officer did not realize that an intruder had made it over the fence because he was sitting in his van talking on his personal cellphone. The officer did not have his radio earpiece in, and had left the second radio he was supposed to have in his locker.

Tip-top folks we have on guard in the White House, right? Really on the ball.

Then there’s this (also New York Times):

As the officer stationed there tried to lock the doors, Mr. Gonzalez "barged through them and knocked her backward." She told him to stop but he continued on to the East Room.

"After attempting twice to physically take Gonzalez down but failing to do so because of the size disparity between the two, the officer then attempted to draw her baton but accidentally grabbed her flashlight instead," the report said.

“The size disparity between the two….” I like that. Another way of saying this would be “because, being a guy, he was a lot bigger than she was.” I’m all for gender equality, but what gibbering baboon thought that the best way to defend the President from intruders was to ask a female agent to tackle someone twice her size?

All of which is to explain why I said “apparently unrelated.” Both stories involve stunning incompetence and inexcusable negligence across a wide spectrum of reputedly-elite personnel in precisely those two areas we have always been led to believe are at the top of our priorities: our nuclear arsenal and the protection of our chief executive. For these jobs, only the finest, most dedicated people qualify.

Now there’s a scary thought. In the world of government and military service, these folks are supposed to be the best we have.

What if they are?

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 03:11:00 -0800

The Daily Cannibal

What a Bunch of Fucking Idiots

Posted: 12 Nov 2014 04:07 PM PST

Actually, there is no article.

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 03:52:00 -0800

The Daily Cannibal

Who Really Won? (Not You.)

Posted: 10 Nov 2014 12:05 PM PST

Unsurprisingly, we have been misinformed. One of the election themes emerging from the media was that the Tuesday midterms were a hidden but serious “win” for Hillary. According to Yahoo News:

Take a closer look at demography, geography and the road ahead for the parties, and it's clear that the long-term winner of the 2014 midterms wasn't the GOP at all. The long-term winner, in fact, wasn't even on the ballot this year.

Her name is Hillary Clinton.

Okay. Whoever wrote this was probably drunk at the time, and who could blame them? Nothing could be more punishing for someone of this stripe than watching election after election fall to the Forces of Darkness, and sooner or later the yearning to hit the bottle hard and often must have become irresistible. But even these tortured constructs and desperate fantasies were not to be spared; alas, somebody actually asked the voters.

An NBC exit poll reveals that 40% of actual voters said they would vote for a Republican candidate over Clinton, with 34% saying they would elect Clinton. To be fair, no single Republican outpolled Clinton head-to-head, and we won’t bother listing the reasons this might be so. Still, it hardly adds up to a ringing endorsement of the Arkansas dynast.

Frankly, we think no one won this election, because it wasn’t an election. It was a shrug. Obama was correct to point out that two-thirds of voters didn’t even bother to show up, saying “I hear you, too.” He should. Normally, the midterm turnout averages about 45%, versus around 60% for presidential years. This year it was only about 35%, which would be a decline in the actual number of people voting of about 22%. That’s a big difference.

All this in spite of all the drum-beating to get out the vote? The millions of dollars, the impassioned pleas, the clarion call to “mobilize the base?” (One of the more curious aspects of this effort was the language used by both Barack and Michelle Obama to couch their urgings: it was almost invariably “We need you to…” or “I want you to….” Did they think all this was just about what they need and they want?)

While much has been said and written about voter disgust with Washington, and their anger at both parties’ confrontational tactics, something has been missed here. The voters aren’t just angry; they’re unimpressed. After six years of hearing the trumpet blasts promising plenty, or the deep bass chimes forecasting doom, they just don’t believe much of what they hear any more, and worse, they have begun to think that there’s little that Washington can do to affect them. It’s no longer Republican versus Democrat. Instead, it’s just a bunch of faceless people in blue suits with flag pins in their lapels, all murmuring the same “We know what’s best for you” chant, even as the long slide into desuetude continues, in spite of rosy statistics and bold assertions of success.

There’s a weird new coalition of the disenchanted out there: blacks and Hispanics on the left, who wonder what, if anything, this strange Messiah can deliver, and another, perhaps more interesting faction in between.

The “minorities” can’t find anything in Obama’s programs that will actually change or improve their lives. On the left, they see through the gaudy chrome of the rhetoric and find themselves looking at a rickety chassis of nothing-new-here gobbledegook of union pandering, absurd claims of “improvement,” and barely-disguised carnival barker shills, with nothing to show for it.

On the right — and this is very damn important — are the “salt of the earth.” The blue-collar and white-collar Americans who always thought that if they worked hard, put in their time, and minded their own business, they would be rewarded with a safe, happy and secure retirement in a country they could called America.

This America has gone away. It seems to them that they just don’t count. They they have has been replaced by a bizarre nether-world where strangers are welcome, without sanction or law, to take from those who have worked their whole lives for the savings they have so carefully husbanded, because their leader’s largesse — if not their pockets — is limitless. They are told that their America is no longer. That is has been “transformed.”

I don’t think they liked it. A strange coalition, the haves and the have-nots, may have found a common ground against the “you-have/I-got” disseminators of the nation’s wealth. We’ll see. As the pundits said, electoral gains are short-term.

In short — those people who didn’t vote made a much louder statement than any of those who did. They comprise an impressive majority. Strange bedfellows indeed.

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Sat, 8 Nov 2014 03:34:00 -0800

The Daily Cannibal

It Wasn’t Just The Old White Men

Posted: 07 Nov 2014 07:32 PM PST

Nothing brings out the creative among opinion pundits like an election. This one has been no exception, yet this time, the progressive faction's tea-leaf musings about the meaning of it all have ricocheted past resentment and recrimination straight towards the outlandish. Witness this concluding line of yesterday's lead editorial in the enlightenment's flagship publication, the New York Times:

"Voters said they wanted the two parties to stop bickering and work harder, not erase the progress made in the last six years."

"Not erase the progress of the last six years." If you wonder where in this election, amongst the toppled towers, broken battlements and smoking ruins of the once-transcendent Democratic congress, the Times can find an endorsement of their "progress," you will remain bewildered. "Erase" seems to be precisely what the voters had in mind when they hit the rewind switch on the incumbents.

The Times, and Slate, Salon, and a ragtag army of like-minded folk, having been slapped across the face by the masses (those assholes!) with a stinking mackerel of rejection, have no choice but to insist that the reality they project is the one that rules. Salon and Slate variously assert that the real winner of the election was Hillary (!), that the House and Senate seats won by Republicans are just a temporary setback before the electorate recovers from its pique and returns Democrats in 2016, that illiterate rednecks have doomed the polar bears and that women – women! – betrayed poor Wendy what's-her-name who lost in Texas.

Of course, our thought leaders tell us, "What can you expect? The mob, you know. Low-information voters, greedy bigots, nekulturny slaves to our crass consumer cult." (This was the same mob that gave Obama a majority in the House and Senate in 2008, and reelected him and a House majority in 2012, but back then, they were smarter somehow, more open to "new stuff" and less apt to question the wisdom of the nomenklatura.)

And so the long, wearisome process of persuading the people that the beatdown they just witnessed was either insignificant, never really happened, or was badly misunderstood, unfolds. For some insight as to how this gets done, I refer you to our colleague CfE, who recently advised us:

Newspapers suggest what might be, and the reader elects the speculation to office. Does the poor consumer of dancing ink remember how often these plungers have been wrong? No. He can’t wait to sail out again on the next rubber boat inflated with the gas of possibility. Truths that are sold and consumed before they are true are not very valuable because they are not very true. Few things are true. Wisdoms which inhabit a future that never arrives are many.

But are people that easily misled? Can people read "stuff" like this and be unaware of their manipulation and distortion, or that they are ingesting fables, not narratives? CfE again:

Stuff happens but it has no relevance to humans until reported. Once reported, events have a human value. And once they are reported they have gone through a human ego and no longer have an objective reality. So there might be an objective reality out there somewhere, but we have no way to communicate it.

Thus, with a simple phrase, the Times attempts to convert a wish – that this election was not a repudiation – into an "objective reality." But it is so transparently – and embarrassingly — pathetic for them to do so. Why would they attempt it? Why would their readers wish to accept this construction, so bizarre and out of touch with real events?

Some would say it was ego. Some would cite their smugness, and their contempt for "unenlightened" thinking. These things may play some role, but the primary motivation is much more primitive and powerful: it is fear.

These people spend a lot of time informing themselves. They "read up on the issues." They ingest tomes of data, and feed like a pod of dolphins on the latest interpretations of social constructs and economic structures, and attend lectures and symposiums, and generally make a sustained athletic effort to be as well-informed and as keenly alert as possible. Nothing wrong with that.

The rewards for this kind of industry are many and often highly satisfying, but there is a kind of mildew that creeps into the carpet of information and comprehension they so busily weave. They begin to think that they are smarter, better-educated, better-informed and generally better qualified to make judgments about what should be and what should not be. And this is often true – up to a point.

The question is, how much better? Is it even significant? Samuel Johnson once famously said "There is no point in settling the precedence between a louse and a flea."

Human systems and interactions – including, and especially, large scale interactions, like politics and societies – are complex. Back to CfE:

The last time things were simple was when the first animal cell came into being. Then it started eating things and dividing into different beings and things got complicated. But men seem to remember all the way back to the origin of the genetic train when things were simple, and lust for the same clarity that first animal enjoyed before he branched into the many complicated things he is now, each with its own point of view and no referee in sight to announce who is right in what they do.

So the editorial board sachems are smarter than almost all the people marching dutifully to the polls on Tuesdays, and when those voters reject the wisdom of the New York Times, something strikes a very deep chord among the sachems. An intolerable thought intrudes, if only for a fleeting moment, before it is banished back to the Hell from which it sprung:

"What if we're wrong?"

It is this fear that drives the media to madness – that after all the fact-finding, the polling, the statistical drudgery, the briefings, the inside sources, and deep channels of information available only to those connected to the seats of power, they may be completely, unutterably and irrevocably wrong.

And so this election was more than just an election. For some years now, the "progressive" element has ridden a surge, in which it became more and more assured that it had become unstoppable — that they had persuaded the electorate that the skepticism and caution of those who found more style than substance in the Obama agenda were actually the forces of ignorance and darkness, and that all right-minded folk would now cleave to their banner in an unstoppable wave of noble ideas. (If the legislation they had so sloppily written, and the systems they had so ineptly crafted, had been in any way commensurate with their professed ideals — in other words, if they did anything that actually worked — that might have been the case.)

But the whole thing unraveled into a cascade of botched schemes (“Fast and Furious”), disastrous rollouts (Obamacare), criminal neglect (VA hospitals), dismal events internationally (Benghazi, Bergdahl. Syria, ISIS, the Ukraine), inept and apparently endless bungling of everything from Ebola to immigration.

And what were the successes? Well – there were none. Not one. The wave crested, and everyone watched to see if it would roll back out to sea, to fade away into the great ocean of previous lofty but failed ambitions, to mix and mingle, and never be seen again.

This gave the pundits pause, and when the results came in on Tuesday night, great was their dismay. This election was no longer just an election. It was an unmistakable rejection of an agenda, its glorious rhetoric, its hidden hostilities and, most of all, its thuggish presumption. All that had been so recently won now teetered and wobbled – and it became time for the defenders of the faith to rally, and, like the Crusaders of old, cry "God wills it" as they rode into battle with the heathen. This was no longer a difference of opinion. This became a war for "progressive" survival. Hence the other-worldly weirdness of "the progress of the last six years."

In Moby Dick, Melville stops, not briefly, in his narrative and takes a sudden, unexpected and almost unwelcome swerve into exploring what drove Ahab's thus-far unexplained animus towards the white whale, and, more puzzling still, the enthusiasm his crew assumed for hunting it down, even to the detriment of their own profits and self-interest. Yet what Melville dwells upon is not the terrifying size of the beast, or its ferocity, or its malevolence. He runs on for page after page in a tour-de-force of Gothic horror about its color, and the sinister significances that white has in cultures and societies around the world. He finally concludes:

"And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?"

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Thu, 6 Nov 2014 03:43:00 -0800

The Daily Cannibal

Still Doesn’t Get It. Never Will.

Posted: 05 Nov 2014 02:40 PM PST

We just spent more time than we needed to listening to President Obama’s response to last night’s midterm election results. He said “The Republicans had a good night.”

Wrong. They didn’t have a good night, Mr. President. You had a very bad one.

Politicians sometimes make the mistake of believing their own rhetoric. The president makes a habit of it.

“More people are working than ever before.” Wrong. More Americans are out of work than ever before. You can jiggle the math all you want, consigning millions of workers to a weird kind of limbo so that they no longer “count” in unemployment figures, but after a while, people stop nodding and start looking around.

“Health care is more affordable, and more people are insured.” Wrong. Health care costs have skyrocketed for millions of Americans, in the form of dramatic premium increases and insufferable deductibles. Recent data shows that there has actually been a net decline in the number of insured when cancellations, including corporate plans, are fully considered.

ISIS? “The junior varsity.” Ebola? “We have it completely with foolproof protocols.” Illegal immigration? “They will all be swiftly deported.” And so half-truths, deliberate deceptions and outright falsehoods followed inept and outright coverups and evasions spew like a stream of toxic waste from a Balkan foundry — because he doesn’t get it, and never will.

Why not? Because it’s all about optics. Obama has lost any hope of real solutions, if he ever had any. Now he’s engaged in a desperate struggle to make it all look good. But that’s not all his fault — because, for a long time, we bought that. We accepted the optics because we wanted to believe that there actually was substance behind the shadows; we inhaled the ether, and slept through the pain.

But the problem with ether is that it wears off. Sooner or later, voters begin to get restless. They start to notice that people really don’t seem to be any better off, or are doing worse. They respond to fumbled foreign policy with emotional, personal reactions: “Putin is laughing at us.”

The result is a wonderful kind of cyclicality in American politics. We elect the visionaries, who need to find money for implementing their agenda. They slowly siphon spending from boring but necessary sectors, which fall into disrepair, into bold new programs that are wonderful in ambition but not often practical in design. When the bridges start to decay, and someone says “Maybe we need to buy some paint,” they respond with “let the next guy deal with that. We have nobler prospects to pursue.”

But sooner or later the voters notice that the schools are dirty, the roads are bad, and the crime rate is going up. People that arrived here uninvited yesterday are demanding benefits that people who have paid taxes for decades don’t have themselves. Programs that are sold as “protection” either invade their privacy, take away their constitutional rights or increase their costs. They start to say “Hmmmmmm….”

And what then does the President tell the voters? That’s when he gets to talk about what he has actually accomplished. So he takes credit for the economy, which fails on two levels:

1. There is no one in America so naive as to believe that Obama has had any positive effect on GDP or stock market performance, any more than they believed that Jimmy Carter was the driving force behind the 1980 US Olympic hockey team’s gold medal.

2. More people are out of work than when he took office.

Occasionally, he makes reference to American energy independence, but in a somewhat bashful, Bambi-like tone, because he knows how hilarious it is for most of us to hear this, from him, of all people. “In my administration, energy costs will necessarily skyrocket.”

Health care? Again, a perfect example of the “sounds great, doesn’t work” leitmotif running through all of Obama’s grand ideas.

Education? Don’t make us laugh.

Foreign policy?

Anything?

What can you actually point to, Mr. President, and say “Here I have done something well?”

Voters don’t study. They don’t call friends and say “Hey, let’s all get together for dinner on Tuesday, read what Paul Krugman says about deficit spending and decide whether or not we need more stimulus.” They don’t bone up on the latest U.N. or IPCC statistical climate goulash. They look at the guy on TV and say, “You know, I think you may be full of shit.” Not that the other guy isn’t — but maybe it’s time to give the other guy a shot. Six years of this hasn’t done much, and worse still, the guy currently in charge seems to be saying “it’s all good — no need to change the way we think.”

He’s still saying it today. He’s saying that he looks forward to hearing the Republican agenda. Why? He knows what it is, and has for years. For all we hear about Republican obstructionism, it’s been Obama that won’t negotiate. Today he said “If they propose legislation I can sign, I’ll sign it.” Translation: “I’m not budging an inch.”

Nothing has changed. Except that it has. Now both the House and the Senate are firmly in the hands of the Republicans. What now? Obama clearly stated today that he would move to implement immigration “reform” and other programs through executive orders.

But without funding, these orders are just unicorn farts in the wind. And this Congress is not about to fund anything Obama attempts to accomplish through executive fiat.

We can look forward to a lot more “optics.” And the soundtrack should be highly entertaining as well.

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Tue, 28 Oct 2014 03:05:00 -0700

The Daily Cannibal

Ebola Czar?
But Look At How Shiny It Is
The Times, It Is A-Changin’
Talk Cheap, Lives Dear
Let’s March!
Hot Water
Raw Deal
Dog Days
Le savant? C’est moi!
Big Men
Noir Lucinda at the Portland Zoo
The Physics of Learning
Reached Bottom, Auguring In
QED
Borderline Inanity

Ebola Czar?

Posted: 17 Oct 2014 08:22 AM PDT

Now that the president has been compelled to cancel two fundraising trips to deal with this pesky ebola stuff, he's starting to take the situation seriously. He has solemnly assured us that the possibility of a "serious outbreak" in the US is "very, very small," but this comes on the heels of his earlier assurance that any outbreak at all was highly unlikely.

For people as yet unmarked by the president's previous forays into health care, his confidence may be palliative, but for others – those who buy their own health insurance, and military veterans, for example – a sense of unease may be creeping in. And uncharitable skeptics who question his skills at crisis management during fast-moving events are getting skittish as well, because nothing – even "the economy, stupid" — stimulates panic as fast as an exponentially-rising mortality rate.

But now we are advised that the president is thinking of appointing an "ebola czar." In the world of titles, this one is probably not the one we would covet. Nor have Obama's past efforts at czar-making proven particularly useful – the last (maybe only) czar we can recall was the "jobs czar," and we all know how that turned out. (Hint: more Americans are unemployed today than in any other time in the nation's history.)

Presumably, this official will be given plenipotentiary powers to direct and coordinate national human and material resources in defense against an epidemic, which seems appropriate under current circumstances. So far, official responses to the ebola threat have been only loosely knit, with various agencies and officials (including some lunatic "judge" in Dallas) all playing different roles with conflicting criteria, unclear objectives and not a little bit of Keystone Kops fumbling about.

But the ebola czar has another function, we suspect – one that is far more important to the president and all the other folks in DC who understand just how annoyed the people are likely to get if there is "a serious outbreak." In situations like this one, you need more than a capable administrator, a decisive manager, a quick thinker and a firm hand at the wheel.

You need a fall guy.

Look out, "czar." These guys you will be working for have more than a little of the Bolshevik in them, and you know how they felt about czars.

But Look At How Shiny It Is

Posted: 04 Oct 2014 05:09 PM PDT

Some time ago on this site we suggested that things had gotten pretty scary in the world. We should have known when we were well off.

Since then, we’ve had an explosion in ebola, the rise of ISIS, Putin’s rearmament, and a series of events in the federal mechanism that suggest we may have crossed some indefinable line between bureaucratic ineptitude and outright incompetence. The Secret Service needs “to be more like Disney?” Who did she think she was guarding? Mickey?

We are starting to feel like Yogi Berra with the first-year Mets: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

The ebola problem raises so many questions we don’t even know where to start. The inspector general of the CDC recently declared that the agency was completely unprepared for any kind of pandemic, citing everything from expired and insufficient stocks of available medications to the general lassitude of the entire organization. I am sure, however, that it is on target for meeting objectives for diversity.

The protocols for defending against diseases like ebola rely heavily on the hilarious concept that people fleeing a killer virus will be open and forthcoming about their situations. And — even when they are — hospitals seem ill-advised on red flags. Yes, you might be angry that the Texas patient did not say outright “Hey! A week or so ago I carried a woman who subsequently died of ebola in my arms, and I might be wearing the same clothes.” But please: didn’t anyone say “You know, this guy has a funny accent?”

When you run a farm, you know certain things have to be done, or everything goes to hell. If you focus on washing down the tractors so they are all bright and shiny, maybe the fields don’t get plowed on time.

This administration has been too focused on chrome and not at all on grit. It worries obsessively about how it looks, as opposed to how it works. It confuses noble intentions with effective programs. It’s been that way for almost six years now.

No wonder things are coming apart at the seams. Time to get back to basics. Maybe it takes a pandemic to get that thought across. When millions die because someone thinks form is more important than function, people wise up quickly.

The Times, It Is A-Changin’

Posted: 01 Oct 2014 05:11 PM PDT

The New York Times is laying off about 7.5% of its newsroom staff in another round of cuts, but what interests us about this latest trim job is this:

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the newspaper's publisher, and Mark Thompson, its chief executive, said that in addition to the job cuts, NYT Opinion, a new mobile app dedicated to opinion content, was shutting down because it was not attracting enough subscribers.

The Times continues to cut muscle, but the fat seems to remain. Krugman, Gail Collins, Maureen Dowd, Frank Bruni et. al., who have long since lost any connection they may have had to anyone not on their Kool-Aid diet, remain, while the real strength of the paper, which actually can and does provide solid reporting on topics removed from the editorial agenda, ebbs away on a steady current of deletion.

Meanwhile, the paper that some time ago decided that the best counteroffensive to the internet’s speed was to abandon reporting in favor of “thought leadership” suddenly learns that no one really gives a shit about its “opinions.”

There is no more sports page in any real sense. Most of the content is either agenda-driven, focused on topics such as head injuries, football team names, naughty athletes and a bizarre addiction to the WNBA — or puff pieces of the sort that Sports Illustrated used to run in the 60s. The business page is fine, but no real news is broken there — that’s for Bloomberg, Reuters and other web-driven folks — and I’m sure the dining/home/arts etc. sections have their fans, but who buys a paper for that?

The Times had some illusion that people would read their paper because they wanted to know what to think. It has run out new offensives on this premise, like “The Upshot,” a remarkably dull-witted and flimsy feature, and the just-cited web page.

Someone must have thought this was a gamesaver for a failing paper in a paper-failing era. The Times assumed — and often clumsily and condescendingly stated outright — that today’s issues are far too complex for most folks, who would gladly and greedily welcome being spoon-fed their opinions by the wiser sachems of the Times.

Doesn’t look like it from here.

Talk Cheap, Lives Dear

Posted: 30 Sep 2014 03:44 PM PDT

The first confirmed case of ebola in the US has been identified in Dallas today, which should trouble us more than a little bit, because that’s all it takes — one case.

A very articulate CDC doctor with textbook diction has assured us in a press conference that the situation is under complete control — that the CDC has over a hundred (!) professionals already at work in Africa, and that the Defense Department has “boots on the ground” there.

That magic phrase! Nothing to worry about; the neoprene soles of high-tech footwear are already at work, stomping out the dreaded virus in its lair (but it’s already here). And we are told that the “President is leaning forward on this,” whatever in this fresh hell that might mean; that the CDC is “acting proactively” (as opposed to “channeling an ostrich,” a prior strategy that clearly has now been abandoned).

The CDC doctor spoke in wonderfully enunciated tones, with carefully measured stresses on all significant words. Each phrase was honed by expert copywriters to project just the right mixture of wariness and confidence necessary to prevent the entire nation from shitting its pants, which, all things considered, would not be an inappropriate reaction. Because it only takes one case.

What we have not been told is how long this person has been here, how many other people here he has been in contact with, what steps have been taken or can be taken to quarantine them, and other data that surely will be relevant to any further discussion.

Of course it’s easy to second guess, and say that things should have been done — but — no kidding — how much would it have cost to have a better plan for this than we seem to have now? Was it just too much trouble? In just the past few months, the number of projected victims has risen from a few thousand or so to a million or more.

Terrorism is scary, immigration reform very noble, and ending “income inequality” endears our leader to his base, but plague trumps all of that. It kills — literally. And the last time we had one of this potential magnitude, it killed millions.

At this point people may be wondering if it’s time to ask some obvious questions:

1, Did the president really think that he could leave the containment of this disease to African states and leaders whose managerial expertise, responsibility, reliability and general competence has not thus far been especially noteworthy?

2. Did he think that, like ISIS, this crisis would best be dealt with by ignoring it in hopes it would just fade away?

People do get weary of controversy, and complex issues that just get more confusing the more they are discussed. They forget about the listless attitudes and the apathetic responses, the chaotic non-logic and the lengthy procrastinations — but they don’t forget the sight of someone puking their guts out as blood spurts from their eyes and ears minutes before they die. This is real, it’s here, and — Mr. President — this is one you can’t just talk your way out of.

This situation may require some very hard decisions, but we know you can make those. It will also require some very good ones. Do you have any of them? Because, if you do, this would be a good time to put them on display. We await with some interest to find out.

_______________________________________

Addenda:

There are now at least two Ebola victims in Dallas.
When the first victim went to the hospital with “flu-like” symptoms, he identified himself as having just come from Liberia. They sent him home.
He has been in contact with at least five schoolchildren. Neither they nor anyone else he has been in contact with have been quarantined. They are being “monitored.”

Does anyone think we have a good grip on this situation?

Let’s March!

Posted: 22 Sep 2014 12:48 PM PDT

Yesterday we had a Big March here in New York City, where Al Gore and Ban ki-Moon and Bill de Blasio joined many thousands of people in demanding that We Just Have To Do Something about climate change, which used to be called global warming until it stopped getting warmer.

According to the New York Times, “Organizers…estimated that 311,000 people marched the route.” The organizers arrived at this figure “using data provided by 35 crowd spotters and analyzed by a mathematician from Carnegie Mellon University.” In the arena of climate science, this level of statistical rigor approaches the superlative, especially when vouchsafed by no less an eminence than a mathematician from a local college.

Math is important to climate scientists, as long as they are free to jiggle the numbers as and when it suits their purpose, or to make them up altogether, as NASA was recently caught doing when it lowered the temperature for an entire year (1934) in order to make 2010 “the hottest year on record” (it isn’t). And even that figure — average global temperature — is highly suspect: as one statistician once noted, the concept of a global average temperature, often cited by climate change advocates as evidence of something or another, except when it isn’t, is about as meaningful as “adding up all the phone numbers in a telephone directory, dividing by the number of listings and claiming to have computed an ‘average telephone number.'”

Then there’s the “raw data” itself. It’s perhaps a little more cooked than raw. Says website Hansen’s Climate Con:

The parts of the world which GISS shows to be heating up the most are so short of weather stations that only 25 per cent of the figures are based on actual temperature readings'

And the other 75%? These figures are “extrapolated,” which is derived from the Latin verb meaning “to make up.”

The celebrity marchers had various messages, some more alarming than others. Gore waxed familiarly about the dire future that awaits the unbelievers (moderate yawns), Ban Ki-moon reiterated his demand that wealthy nations contribute $20 billion or so each to a UN fund that would help poorer nations adjust to the costs of the inevitable cataclysm (yes, that’s right — he said “Pay me.”), but de Blasio raised the fear levels of all right-minded people when, as the Times reports, he pledged that “he was committing the city to an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2050.”

Yikes. For those of us who were hoping we would have to tolerate this buffoon for four years at best, and a maximum of eight at worst, the notion that he would still be directing city policy in 2050 in any way whatever kicks in a gag reflex sufficient to propel a cantaloupe the length of Madison Avenue.

Still, the marchers were undisturbed by the notion that climate change may have more to do with agendas than evidence. Their zeal was palpable. They carried banners and signs, some of them relating to the matter at hand; others were more far-ranging, touching on subjects as varied as income inequality and police brutality. But at one point all united, as the Times reports:

The climax of the march came in the early afternoon. All along the route, crowds had been quieted for a moment of silence. On Avenue of the Americas at 57th Street, there was an eerie silence as marchers raised their arms and looked down.

Then at exactly 1 p.m., a whistle pierced the silence, setting off a minute-long cacophony intended as a collective alarm on climate change. There were the beats of the drums and the blaring of horns, but mostly it was whoops and cries of the marchers.

The whoops and cries of the marchers. It is not accidental that, at the end of the day, that’s what it all came down to. We were taught as schoolchildren that in ancient China, the peasants were told by the wise men that during an eclipse, the dragon that was eating the sun (or moon) should be frightened off by banging on drums, blaring on horns, setting off firecrackers and generally making as much of a din as they could possible muster. How we laughed. This is what passed for science in those primitive times.

See how far we have come since then! Of course, the ancient Chinese did have one unarguable fact they could point to: the dragon inevitably capitulated. For the marchers, as evidence continues to mount that climate change is far more complex, far less clear-cut and very likely completely unpredictable in terms of outcomes — in short, that the wise men may be and very likely are all wet — the result may be less certain.

Hot Water

Posted: 05 Sep 2014 04:26 PM PDT

Twice a week, a gentleman named Paul Krugman writes a column for the New York Times Op-Ed page. This column almost invariably asserts that Europe must stimulate growth by printing vast amounts of money, and that the US should stimulate growth by printing vaster amounts of money than it already has. In fact, if Mr. Krugman has another topic, it is lost on me, but since I tired of reading the same column twice a week year-in and year-out, I may have missed one or two in dissimilar veins.

I do, however, check in on Mr. Krugman from time to time, in much the same way that one might examine a long-dead tree for signs of new growth, and today I was happy to find that he remains steadfast in his course.

Is Mr. Krugman correct? It had been generally acknowledged by economists that increasing the money supply to this degree would inevitably lead to inflation at a high level. But Mr. Krugman points out that we have been pumping money into the US economy at unprecedented levels historically, and that no inflation has occurred. Yet. Therefore the “inflation hawks” are wrong, and the Fed should immediately begin spewing dollars like an Icelandic volcano, which will create millions of new jobs, send domestic consumption soaring and usher in a new age of prosperity for all.

Because no inflation.

Yet: some years ago some learned folks produced computer models that warned us that the air was getting hotter, and that this was a Very Bad Thing. The models projected that by now the air would be much hotter, that Great Storms would occur with much greater frequency and of much greater ferocity, that Arctic sea ice would vanish completely, and that surging sea levels would threaten entire island nations.

But, in fact, the air hasn’t gotten any hotter for nineteen years now, “extreme weather events” have been more infrequent and less extreme, the ice in the Arctic is growing at a rapid rate, and at last notice, and England and Vanuatu remained uninundated. In fact, virtually all of the model predictions have failed to materialize, and yet many, many people — including Professor Krugman — insist that climate change is Settled Science, and that the day of reckoning, if somehow inexplicably postponed, will certainly come.

Actually, there have been some half-hearted attempts to explain the disappointing lack of heat, which generally involve the assertion that the missing heat has gone down deep in the ocean, and is hiding there.

Maybe that’s what has happened to all those dollars the Fed has been printing. Because for all the hooting and hollering about our economic “recovery,” more Americans are out of work than at any other time in the nation’s history, real income growth is negative and poverty rates are rising.

Mr. Krugman, do you see any problem with thinking that “no inflation yet” means it won’t happen, while “no warming for a long time now” means nothing? Might these positions be inconsistent? Finally, do you think those dollars, like our missing heat, are stashed someplace that is all wet? We ask you with the greatest respect for your authority on these topics, for when it comes to “hot air” and “all wet,” we readily concede that you have no peer.

Raw Deal

Posted: 04 Sep 2014 12:01 PM PDT

Yikes!

A 23-year-old middle school teacher in Cambridge, Maryland was placed on administrative leave and "taken in for an emergency medical evaluation" after the Dorchester County Board of Education and Sheriff's Office discovered he had written a novel about a school shooting — that is set 900 years in the future.

WBOC reports that English and Language Arts teacher Patrick McLaw wrote a novel called The Insurrectionist under the pseudonym "Dr. K.S. Voltaer." According to its official description, novel begins "on 18 March 2902, [the day] a massacre transpired on the campus of Ocean Park High School, claiming the lives of nine hundred forty-seven individuals — the largest school massacre in the nation's history."

McLaw was suspended by the Dorchester County Board of Education pending an investigation and is no longer in the area. He is currently at a location known to law enforcement and does not currently have the ability to travel anywhere."

A schoolteacher is whisked away by the authorities and held incommunicado because he has written a sci-fi novel about a mass school shooting? His home is searched for weapons and bombs; he is “placed on leave” by the school board, and the police will not disclose his whereabouts, he is “not able to travel anywhere,” although he is not under arrest?

Yikes again! What is the country coming to? Jack-booted thugs swooping down on a poor novelist and middle school teacher based on some book he wrote when he was 19? Yep! Sounds like a clear case of hysterical overreaction, and a gross violation of the teacher’s civil rights — to wit, freedom of speech, unreasonable search and seizure, habeas corpus and possibly, since he is black, there is more than a hint of racism.

At least, so we are advised by “Raw Story,” a general news blog covering everything from trendy diets to the latest outrages of the NYPD, whence came the quoted section above.
Well, maybe not.

According to the LA Times:

Over the weekend, various reports stated that a middle school teacher in Dorchester County, Maryland, was placed on leave because he wrote two science fiction novels about mass school shootings. But according to information received by the L.A. Times, Patrick McLaw was placed on leave because of mental health issues.

"It didn't start with the books and it didn't end with the books," State's Attorney for Wicomico County Matt Maciarello told The Times. "It's not even a factor in what law enforcement is doing now."

Concerns about McLaw were raised after he sent a four-page letter to officials in Dorchester County. Those concerns brought together authorities from multiple jurisdictions, including health authorities.

McLaw’s attorney, David Moore, tells The Times that his client was taken in for a mental health evaluation. “He is receiving treatment,” Moore said.

Because of federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act regulations mandating privacy around healthcare issues, he was unable to say whether McLaw has been released.

McLaw’s letter was of primary concern to healthcare officials, Maciarello says. It, combined with complaints of alleged harassment and an alleged possible crime from various jurisdictions led to his suspension. Maciarello cautions that these allegations are still being investigated; authorities, he says, “proceeded with great restraint.”

We shoulda known better. It now appears that Mr. McLaw has sadly encountered some difficulties that are at this point his own business, that he is receiving medical care, and that the police are behaving properly in respecting his right to privacy.

Of course, these days, given almost daily reports in the media about law enforcement overreach and overreaction, not to mention the scant regard sometimes shown for the rights of citizens (and non-citizens), it’s easy to assume the worst. In this case, however, we had some suspicion at the outset that all was not as Raw Story claimed. Raw Story, after all, is now edited by one Tony Ortega, whose history is studded like a diamond tiara with nuggets like this one.

In the past, Tony’s inventions have ranged from fake stories to fake people, from outre claims to impossibilities, and this load of buffalo chips is only the latest in his long and inglorious trail of #heylookatme journalism. He didn’t write the article himself; he generally doesn’t, preferring to hang a subordinate reporter with the blowback when the facts come out and these contrivances inevitably boomerang. But he gets what he wants — lots of clicks on the web, and hang the consequences.

Tony specialized in this kind of effluvia as editor of the Village Voice, where he admirably and eloquently defended his employers’ online child prostitution website backpage.com by remarking that “the kids don’t have to hand out on the streets or in back alleys.” After getting the elbow at VV when he had outlived his usefulness, he landed at Raw Story, where he has now left his indelible imprint.

His tenure at Raw Story thus far has hardly been distinguished. There Ortega specializes in clickbait headlines about non-stories, most recently about two women in Florida who were caught red-handed trying to steal someone’s beach tent:

What next, Tony? We have a suggestion: “Secret cabal boils animal embryos alive, paints them bright colors and secrets them in the gardens of a national monument every spring!” Get on it. (Hint: It’s called the White House Easter Egg Roll.)

Dog Days

Posted: 25 Aug 2014 04:03 PM PDT

Summer recedes, and with it, so does our President. Crisis these days has as many heads as the Hydra. We thought we had our hands full with Ukrainian civil war, ISIS, Ebola, Central American nations sending battalions of “children” like shock troops to our southern borders and demanding ransoms to stop the insanity (and these only the most recent calamities — we still have Syria, Obamacare, IRS skullduggery, Iraq in tatters, Afghanistan tottering, a fraudulent “recovery,” and so on.) Now we have Ferguson, which, whatever else is said, cannot have a good outcome, because it won’t matter what the facts are: when people start comparing the looting in Missouri with the Boston Tea Party (“We deserve this stuff!”), then you can pretty much assume that hysteria has driven reason from the building.

Add to this a swelling (and strangely sudden) discontent in the media with our disengaged President, and a tinge of despair sets in. People mention the waning days of the Carter administration, but Carter never seemed to exhibit a withdrawal like Obama’s. He has wearied of the tumult of state, and retreated into the company of his friends and close confidants, in settings of restaurants and vacation homes, with a weird clashing of opulence. Like Melville’s reluctant scrivener (“Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness”), he would now “prefer not to” do much at all. The Versailles-like cocoon he has woven about himself carries with it a wearied petulance. The message: “I tried to help, but you all wouldn’t listen.”

Ah, yes — the Republicans: so intransigent. Why will they not allow the president to lead? Is it not their task, as loyal citizens, to follow? They clearly think their duty lies elsewhere. Perhaps the pundits of enlightenment are correct, and this truculence owes itself to an innate inhumanity, a cruel insensitivity to suffering, and a pigheaded resolve to frustrate Obama at every turn.

Maybe so. But we suspect it is also driven by an endless series of tawdry tricks (remember the budget bargain with Boehner, when Obama yanked the rug out from under him after telling him he had a deal?), and Obama’s my-way-or-the-highway approach to leadership. But Obama, if nothing else, is skilled at trumpeting lofty ambitions — and then following up by what the Economist tersely referred to as “lazy legislation.” Witness Obamacare, whose fundamental principle of affordable universal healthcare is theoretically as admirable as its implementation was lamentable. Good intentions, meet the road to Hell.

But this leaves us all a little bit despondent. What the heck has happened to us?

Are all these problems just unsolvable? Is there no action we can take to right the ship of state? Is Cornel West right — that the US is now a decaying society in its justly-deserved death throes? When the president of the United States refers to Al Sharpton as “someone we can do business with,” but can’t seem to get along with Angela Merkel, something is certainly awry, but can it really be all this bad?

No. Obama’s time will end, and someone else will seize the reins of government. Wary of the old country and western nostrum about how it always looks darkest right before it turns black, we concede that the abyss yawns, and may indeed engulf us. I’m betting against it. People are showing some signs of waking from the narcotic daze they have stumbled through for the last six years of this feckless administration. Even Bill DeBlasio has paid more lip service than rent to his “politics of aspiration;” when New York City Democrats start showing signs of reason, all is not yet lost.

Of course, my hope may be dashed, my faith in the fundamental strength of the nation may be foolish, and my instinct to proceed on the assumption that not everything is in vain may be Pollyannish. But to quote a past master of despondency, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Le savant? C’est moi!

Posted: 18 Aug 2014 01:56 PM PDT

Aspiring elitist alert: forget about the one percent. If you think you qualify, or hope someday to qualify, or think that membership in this crowd certifies you as part of the elect, you are wrong.

Now it’s the 0.5%.

Tom Steyer, a billionaire hedge fund manager, is concerned with spreading awareness here in the homeland about critical issues like climate change. Freed from penury and the mundane obligations that enchamper most of humanity, Mr. Steyer broods on the weightiest matters, and spends much of time now funding political candidates who embrace his vision. And he is mightily chuffed by the level of enlightenment amongst the Olympians he encounters:

"I think if you were to go around to most of the — what I would think of as super-sophisticated people who think about politics and policy more than five minutes a month — we are doing really well."

But he worries about the rest of us — people who just don’t have the time, vision or brainpower to embrace the big picture. He seeks to engage the common folk — or, as he puts it:

“the 99.5 percent of the people whose lives are very busy and complicated and pressing and they don't have a lot of time to think about the things that don't immediately impact themselves and their family.”

Mr. Steyer, take heart. As bizarre this notion may seem, even among the 99.5% of the sub-super-sophisticated, there are many who can still steal a moment or two from their daily drudgery and self-centered musings to contemplate what Wordsworth called “elevated thought.” Yes, we may fret about college tuitions and vehicle maintenance, but these concerns do not distract us to the extent you seem to fear.

And it may amuse some of these folks more than you would care to know how you define “super-sophisticated,” as your concept would seem to embrace contributors to Gawker, talk radio addicts and a very large number of college sophomores.

Many years ago, Henry Ford threw a lavish banquet, to which he had invited those he considered the titans of the current day: bankers, industrialists, Edison, and so on. He presented each of these worthies with a laurel wreath (!), which he insisted they don as they feasted, and advised them that they were the pinnacle of intellectual achievement in the land. But the guests felt foolish, and the event was not a success.

Mr. Steyer, your wreath is ready.

Big Men

Posted: 18 Aug 2014 12:11 PM PDT

A friend of ours who spent some time several years ago as a guest of the federal government (read: inmate at a minimum security prison “camp”) emerged from the experience with a lot of entertaining stories and some useful observations about human behavior and development. One of them was:

“Big men tend to be stupid.”

This was a bit of an overgeneralized conclusion, as the “big men” he referred to also “tended” to be twenty-something high school dropouts and career felons, but his reasoning was interesting:

“You see this big dude swaggering around with a “get the f**k out of my way” attitude. People are afraid of him, because his reaction to any type of opposition is physical, or the threat of getting physical. Usually the threat is enough, but if it isn’t….

“So he never learns anything. No one can tell him he’s wrong, or that what he’s doing may be a bad idea, because everyone is afraid to say “Uh, hey….”

So now we are told about a young man who “was on his way to college,” who happened to be walking down the middle of the street when a cop told him to get to the sidewalk. What happened next is unclear still, but now the young man is dead, shot by the selfsame cop.

It emerges that a few hours earlier, this young man walked into a bodega, grabbed a handful of cigars and started to walk out with them without paying. Confronted by the shopkeeper, he shoved him out of the way, knocking him down, and left. The scuffle seemed almost comical, as the young man was 6’4″ and weighed 290 pounds, and the shopkeeper looked to be about half that size. But the big man took what he wanted, because he could.

No, that’s no reason to shoot him, but it’s the reason why he’s dead.

He’s not dead because white cops hate black people (and some do).

He’s not dead because America is still a racist society (and it is).

He’s not dead because there are only three black cops on a police force of 50 (and there are).

He’s not dead because there’s no justice (any lawyer can tell you there isn’t).

He’s not dead because he was black (and he was).

He’s dead because he was stupid.

Noir Lucinda at the Portland Zoo

Posted: 16 Aug 2014 12:00 AM PDT

It’s sunset and elephants are strolling around a pen by the stage. The
falling sun lights up an aspen tree. A wind blows its leaves
into a twirl so the aspen looks like a fish jumping through the last
golden beams of light. Will Lucinda be our beautiful tree fish
tonight?

Big fat Lucinda, old and used, comes out, smiles at nobody, picks up
the guitar in a hurry, and sings. The noise she makes is so
beautiful nobody knows anything about her looks any more. Big fat old
Lucinda sings like a searchlight and takes your thoughts away
because she is singing with this big beautiful voice and there isn’t
room for anything else inside your head.

It’s a while before you notice the sideman on the guitar may have
touched that thing before. It needs some minutes to get him because
big fat Lucinda with her scruffy half-silver hair is still taking all
you’ve got. You might wonder how many stage hands were needed to buckle up
those black leather pants which restrain her big fat ass if you
weren’t so busy figuring out a plan to get a job as her cook.

What does she sound like when she talks in the kitchen? Does she ever
bust out with her boyfriend hating “Are You Down” when she’s eating her
scrambled eggs?

You’ll take the chef job as long as she keeps the guy with the guitar
out of the kitchen. Let’s not talk about marriage. You couldn’t screw
her. You just want to cook for her.

When she says “Thank you,” after “Drunken Angel” she means “I don’t
give a shit.”

She has only 3 guys on stage with her. The bassist has spiked hair,
the drummer thinks he’s a cowboy, and the skinny guitar guy hasn’t
eaten in a week because hungry isn’t something which comes to him
often.

Suddenly she’s on “Are You Down”, her rejection hymn to one of
her asshole boyfriends. The guitar guy who has been playing nearly in
the Duane Allman class instantly gets mud on his finghers. Is he the
boyfriend she’s ripping?

“Nothing will make me take you back,” the voicelight beams. “Are you
down, babe, down with that?”

Get out of the kitchen mother-fucker. I’m coming through with
scrambled eggs just like they make them at the Turnberry Hotel in
Scotland.

“Take care of each other,” she says at the end of the concert. What?
Now she likes the audience?

Fuck that. I just want her to eat my Turnberry eggs.

The Physics of Learning

Posted: 12 Aug 2014 12:23 PM PDT

Truth resides in the majority. It is not a scientific thing at the bottom of a well where only the knowing can come to drink. Down there, where the aqua vitae reposes, there are still politics.

Take any science you like and start reading to find its truth. You will soon get to where you can’t follow it anymore because there are too many concepts to relate to each other. Definitions will pile up like Carlisle Indians on top of a Michigan fumble.

When you realize you are not within 1,000 sentences of getting your science’s truth, you are ready to take someone’s word for it in a summary.

But whose word? Which one of the experts knows the truth? Your science has prepared for this question. They have held conventions and elected concepts to verity. You can read in the newspaper who knows your science. You won’t have to spend years getting a Phd to verify these precious drops of truth yourself.

Here is where a couple of things go wrong. Who at the newspaper is choosing between the factions within the science to represent the truth? Nobody with a Ph.d. No, it is somebody who interviewed one of the experts years ago and liked the gray flecks in his black hair.

But suppose the ridiculous happened and there was an intelligent news reporter who had a Ph.d. All he’s done is choose a favorite among people smarter than he. Oftimes the thinker with to best thoughts isn’t even on his list.

So when the newspaper chooses an authority and relays his vision of the science, it is a hopelessly political act. Where is truth when such politics rule its arbitration?

It’s out there somewhere, I guess. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe it is as inscrutable as politics itself. Now when we see truth so purified by politics, what value do we assign it?

You will recall that the major business of politics is to show that one person knows better than another. How knowable is that?

It is nearly equivalent to whether electrons are best described by matrix multiplication or wave mechanics, except more difficult. The beams and waves of human actions take every bit as many lifetimes to study and fail to understand.

Reached Bottom, Auguring In

Posted: 06 Aug 2014 03:56 PM PDT

We looked in recently on Tony Ortega, late editor of the Village Voice, at his new assignment as “Executive Editor” at Raw Story, and couldn’t find much. Far from the sensationalist claptrap that typified his Voice rantings, his articles, which are few and far between, focus almost exclusively on Scientology and “gun violence.” In other words, Tony has chosen his villains well this time: one is an identifiable fraud, and the other appeals to a wide enough cut of hysterical monomaniacs as to guarantee him an enthusiastic audience, however mawkish and shrill his “I feel your pain” arpeggios may get.

The site itself is a kind of Gawker for grownups — but only in the sense that there is little in the way of commentary on the undergarments of teen idols, or the indiscretions of rap stars. Otherwise, it’s almost identical in terms of depth of content versus wattage of emotional “look at me, aren’t I wonderful” paeans to right-thinking and vengeful dismissals of “not us/ergo not cool” wrong-thinking.

Still, it’s an improvement over Ortega’s last gig, which was noted chiefly for his willing stooge role for kiddie pimps Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey of backpage.com infamy, and his enthusiasm for running stories of the “Billionaire Marries His Own Daughter In Westminster Abbey” mode, with a wonderful indifference to fact or probability. But then, by the time Ortega left the Voice, there wasn’t much to leave. Most recently the rag announced further layoffs, and narrowly averted a strike by employees fed up with salary cuts and terrible coffee. There wasn’t really anywhere left to go but up.

But Raw Story doesn’t exactly stun the reader with its insights or opinions. If there is a hell for serious journalists, Gawker is probably it, but Raw Story isn’t far behind, and some could make a convincing case that Gawker occasionally runs lengthy pieces of admirable thoroughness and admirable investigatory complexity. No trace of this evidences itself at Raw Story.

As for Ortega, he continues to write his book about Scientology, now in the works for quite some time, and whose eventual release will be sure to dazzle those as yet unacquainted with the cult’s demonic avarice. Who these folks might be I cannot say, but Tony, they’re out there. They may be living in caves, clueless as wombats, but they’re your audience, and you deserve each other.

QED

Posted: 06 Aug 2014 11:05 AM PDT

At a televised news conference connected to the recent US-Africa confab in DC, Michelle Obama offered some thoughts on being First Lady:

"We can't waste this spotlight, it is temporary and life is short and change is needed and women are smarter than men."

There’s a lot of meat on this bone, but I’m just going to nibble on that last bit. And in the spirit of economy, I’ll refute the notion that women are smarter than men with just one quote, also recent:

"What would we do if Moses had not been accepted by the pharaoh’s family? We wouldn't have the Ten Commandments for starters."

That was Nancy Pelosi a few days ago. ‘Nuff said.

(Hint: They don’t call that dude “omnipotent” for nothing.)

Borderline Inanity

Posted: 04 Aug 2014 03:01 PM PDT

The President of Honduras dropped in on Washington a week or so ago to share his thoughts with US lawmakers on the recent tsunami of teens arriving at our southern border from his country. His remarks were enlightening, and eerily familiar.

First, he allowed as to how our “ambiguous” immigration policies, and some carelessness on the part of our President in his comments regarding “undocumented” visitors, were largely seen by his citizens as an open invitation to walk right in and and sit themselves down. We have heard this before from many, many observers, and were unsurprised that he made mention of it.

Second, and equally expected, he noted that drug and gang violence had turned most of the non-rural regions of Honduras into a hellish landscape, providing citizens with a strong incentive to relocate, preferably to a place where there were good hospitals, free housing and some modicum of civil peace.

Third, and by now almost inevitably, he sadly pointed out that the people at fault for this development were not indigenous druglords or gangbangers, but rather the American consumer, whose otherworldly lust for illegal intoxicants had clearly fostered this environment. (He exempted by omission European consumption of meth, coke and left-handed cigarettes, presumably because Spain shares no common borders with Mexico.)

We had heard all these things before, actually, some months ago when President Obama attended a symposium on drug crime in Venezuela. The most noteworthy outcome of this colloquium was a scandal involving US Secret Service agents passing out in hotel hallways and stiffing the local hookers after — well — stiffing the local hookers. In fact, so familiar is this catechism that we knew precisely what conclusion the President of Honduras would arrive at long before he actually divulged his solution.

Because, as Chris Rock once pointed out, “that train is never late!”

Said the President:

“Pay me.”

Yes. The President suggested that the investment of a mere $2 billion, distributed among Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador might still the waves of youngsters currently waltzing across our borders. Interestingly, this was precisely the amount mentioned by a plenum of Latin American leaders after the Venezuelan caucus, where we were assured by these worthies, many of them with straight faces, that these funds would be spent on drug interdiction, education and the building of hospitals.

Were we a more cynical nation, we might detect a more cynical dynamic behind these migrations. Some may even wonder how tens of thousands of kids could make it through the 1100 mile journey from Honduras to the Mexico/Texas border by themselves — with no quiet assistance and support from governments eager to persuade their northern neighbor to come up with the boodle. It certainly does make one wonder how this exodus gathered such momentum so quickly, and its curious confluence with the slashing of US aid to these countries.

We say, “No.” That couldn’t be. No government could be so callous and so cruel as to use its children as pawns in a blackmail scheme. And shame on anyone who thinks so.

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Sat, 18 May 2013 03:20:00 -0700

The Daily Cannibal

IRS: We Misunderstood….

Posted: 18 May 2013 02:49 AM PDT

We can breathe easier now. That chilly wind we mistook for political persecution turns out to be a big misunderstanding. In today’s lead editorial, the New York Times assures us that

The Internal Revenue Service, according to an inspector general’s report, was not reacting to political pressure or ideology when it singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny in evaluating requests for tax exemptions. It acted inappropriately because employees couldn’t understand inadequate guidelines.

Thank goodness for inspector generals. And I’m glad this is now all cleared up. But for those of you that might still have some reservations about this matter, maybe a look at some excerpts from the inspector general’s interview with the two agents – oops, now four agents (and a deputy director, several other high-ranking IRS officers and, various members of Congress and, for all we know, Butch Cassidy and the Hole-In-The-Wall Gang) involved in this tempest in a teapot :

IG: What exactly did you find confusing in your guidelines? Can you be specific?

Agent 1: Well, sure. Our supervisor told us that the head honchos wanted us to identify, investigate and deny tax-exempt status for Tea Parties involved in political fundraising.

IG: Well, we have a copy of the guidelines she read to you, and it actually says “”the parties involved,” not “Tea Parties.”

Agent 2: Whoops.

IG: Then there was a second briefing, in which she clarified specifically that you were not to focus on conservative organizations. Yet you added new names, almost all of which were conservative politically. How did that happen?

Agent 1: She did?

IG: Yes — the new guidelines gave you said — let me read the exact language — “it is essential that in any such investigation, the highest priority shall be to stick to the right thing.”

Agent 1: Oops.

Agent 2: We thought she said “the right wing.”

IG: Okay. But then there was yet a third redefinition of the guidelines that — frankly — I don’t think left any room for ambiguity here, where she specifically said: ”Let me make this clear. A single-minded focus on conservative social welfare organizations is intolerable and you have to include more liberal applicants even if you endorse their objectives.”

Agent 1: Well, I thought she said “We need to hound these cracker enemies of the administration, their children, their neighbors and their pets until they scream for mercy and sign a pledge to vote Democratic for the rest of their lives.”

Agent 2: That’s what I heard.

IG: Gentlemen, I am having a very big problem here.

Agent 1: Actually, sir that’s a small problem.

IG: It is?

Agent 2: Yes sir. A big problem would be that your father has been deducting $13,000 a year from his gross income for a “home office” when he’s been retired for the last seven years, and lives off his pension and Social Security.

Agent 1: And an even bigger one is your sister’s failure to declare $120,000 a year in rental income from her villa in Acapulco.

IG: I’m sure it’s just a case of their confusion about tax laws….

Agent 1: Yes sir.

Agent 2: You see how easily this can happen.

IG: Well, gentlemen, I think this concludes my investigation. I see this as a simple case of ‘inadequate guidelines’.

Agent 1: I’m glad you see it that way, sir.

IG: Let’s hope the New York Times doesn’t get hold of this story. There’ll be hell to pay.

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Sun, 12 May 2013 03:03:00 -0700

The Daily Cannibal

Dead Man Walking

Posted: 12 May 2013 12:32 AM PDT

“This employee, who hit rock bottom some time ago, is now proceeding to auger in,” read an oft-quoted performance review from a bewildered supervisor. It’s also a pretty good description of the ”new” Village Voice, whose zombie inexplicably continues to stagger and stumble across the media landscape.

The latest blow — and, with any luck, a fatal one – came a few days ago. According to Keith Kelly, media analyst for the New York Post:

Turmoil has gripped the Village Voice once again after its top two editors walked off the job.

Editor-in-Chief William Bourne, who took the helm in November, quit yesterday along with Deputy Editor Jessica Lustig rather than make more staff cuts demanded by the new owners.

As Kelly points out, this is just the latest in a series of top-of-the-masthead missteps for the Voice. The previous editor, Tony Ortega, was pushed out after lurching into an endless series of rambling screeds against Scientology, apparently as a penance for his tawdry editorial attempts to justify the Voice’s ownership of the nation’s largest online ad vehicle for child prostitution.

Unlike the most recently-departed editor-in-chief, however, Ortega came to the Voice carrying considerable baggage already. Kelly notes:

[Ortega] caught the eye of the previous owners with a highly charged piece that claimed hedge-fund millionaire Bruce McMahan had seduced and married his long-lost biological daughter in a secret ceremony at Westminster Abbey.

More recently, questions about the veracity of that story have surfaced, including the fact that only the royals and members of the immediate parish around Westminster Abbey can be married there.

The Westminster Abbey silliness was in fact the least of this story’s missteps, which included misidentified photographs, forged documents and an interview with McMahan’s ex-wife which she denied under oath ever took place. Ortega’s subsequent efforts at the Voice included a feud with Cablevision’s James Dolan which generated considerable sympathy and support for Dolan, a development hitherto thought highly unlikely, if not completely impossible, in New York City. Ortega’s tenure saw the departure of almost all the remaining notable bylines at the Voice, including Pultizer Prize winner Jules Fieffer, long considered the dean of the nation’s political cartoonists. While most of these names resigned, Fieffer was ignominiously and abruptly fired by Ortega as a “cost-saving measure.” Fieffer’s salary at the time was $75,000 per year.

Now the two top editors have resigned, this time in protest of further cost-saving personnel cuts. A new interim editor has been appointed, while management conducts a search for a permanent replacement. Permanent, here, is loosely defined, and begs the question of who will succumb first — the latest editor, or, finally and mercifully, the Voice itself? Many of those who choose to remember the Voice as it once was — a leading light in American alt journalism — wait to echo Hamlet’s last words to his father’s ghost: ”Rest, perturbed spirit.”

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 04:02:00 -0700

The Daily Cannibal

New Times, Old Tricks

Posted: 10 Apr 2013 08:32 PM PDT

Back in January, the Miami New Times Ran a series of sensational articles alleging that Alex Rodriguez had frequented a local clinic and purchased performance-enhancing drugs there. But these articles were long on speculation and short on evidence. In fact, the only real evidence offered were photos of an alleged “journal” kept by the clinic’s proprietor, who had vanished.

We were skeptical. We have seen the New Times run this kind of scam before, most notably with their series of articles alleging that Bruce McMahan, a prominent hedge fund manager, had married his own daughter. The McMahan articles, however, were pure fantasy, and the Rodriguez stories at least start out with some measure of credibility, as A-Rod has admitted to PED use in the past.

Still, more than two months have passed, and the New Times has yet to produce the alleged “journals.” Both Major League Baseball and the FBI have indicated a strong interest, to say the least, in viewing them, as both are actively investigating the story, but The New Times steradfastly refuses to give them access. Their reasons for withholding them are curious, to say the least. According to a recent editorial in the New Times itself:

Sorry, MLB Commissioner Bud Selig. We won’t hand over records that detail the inner workings of Biogenesis, the controversial Coral Gables anti-aging clinic that allegedly supplied prohibited drugs to six professional baseball players, including Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez.

The reasons are manifold. History plays a role in our decision. So do journalistic ethics and the fact that we have already posted dozens of records on our website. Finally, there is a hitherto-unreported Florida Department of Health criminal probe into clinic director Anthony Bosch.

When the New Times starts citing “journalistic ethics,” reach for your raincoat, because you are about to get drenched in phlegm. This isn’t a case of protecting a source; they have already identified the author of the journals — the aforementioned owner — and no one cares who stole them and gave them to the New Times.

And “history?” Here they refer to their unhappiness with Jeffery Luria, owner of the Dolphins, and Bud Selig’s role in assisting Luria to obtain tax dollars for a new stadium. If you catch a whiff of the barnyard in this, you’re not alone — normally you’d have to witness a Rosanne Barr bungee jump to beat a stretch like this.

The facts: the New Times publishes snapshots of pages from a journal. It then refuses to allow anyone at all to inspect the journals. Take our word for it, they say.

Forgive us for suspecting that you’ve been taken in like rubes at a roundup, New Times. And, as we have noted, this isn’t your first rodeo. Put up or shut up. Sooner or later, it will all come out. If you have any curiosity about how this will end, you might try googling “Tony Ortega.”

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Mon, 8 Apr 2013 03:10:00 -0700

The Daily Cannibal

Call Off The Hunt

Posted: 08 Apr 2013 01:33 AM PDT

A former restaurant critic turned social analyst named Frank Bruni has taken on hunting in today’s New York Times. Mr. Bruni doesn’t think much of it, or of hunters, or of guns. Mr. Bruni went to a “bird preserve,” where they raise game fowl as though they were chickens, and then release them by the hundreds for well-heeled customers. Mr. Bruni notes that, although is is a “lousy shot,” he bagged a partridge. ”I killed,” he writes.

And while Mr. Bruni avers several times that he has no bone to pick with hunters or hunting, he describes hunting in tones of such distaste that one wonders what sort of vitriol he can muster for things he actually dislikes.

Mr. Bruni describes his foray into the wild thus:

…many of the birds weren't so quick to use their wings. We would be within inches of one of them before it fluttered skyward, and it would be maybe 20 feet away when one of us took our shot.

Mr. Bruni, you did not go hunting. You may as well slip on some ice on the sidewalk and say you went skiing. The hunters I know regard such establishments with comical contempt at best, and would not be caught dead there. How would you react if someone told you they knew all about haut cuisine because they once ate at a restaurant that “had tablecloths and everything?”

Mr. Bruni also has little use for fine firearms.

I had never used a firearm before, not even on a shooting range, and understood the allure instantly. My 12-gauge semi was black, sleek, elegant and Italian-made, as much an accessory as an instrument of death. The Vinci, it's named, as in Leonardo da, the "Renaissance inventor, artist and thinker who shattered the technological boundaries of his world," according to the Web site of the manufacturer, Benelli. This is how thoroughly a weapon can be romanticized and fetishized, as if it were a Rolex. As if it were a shoe.

In the strange world that Mr. Bruni inhabits, a well-made shotgun, demonstrably superior to mass-produced items in terms of balance, precision, accuracy, and yes, beauty, is somehow comparable to a $2500 mechanical watch that does not tell time as well as a twenty dollar chip-driven Timex. As for the shoe comparison, perhaps Mr. Bruni is under the impression that hunters nuzzle their weapons lovingly in secret and apart, stroking them and cooing in tender tones. Or perhaps Mr. Bruni just really likes shoes. In any event, he seems to find the entire concept of a beautifully-crafted firearm somehow a form of perversion, ludicrous and as absurd as a diamond necklace on a gekko.

Yet Mr. Bruni, prior to his elevation from hashhouse commentary to the editorial page, chiefly noted for paeans to concoctions of eggs and air called souffles, prose poems about the mystical complexities of spoiled fruit juices and detailed descriptions of food emporia charging upwards of $100 or $200 per head without even throwing in the booze. Perhaps some people found this silly, disproportionate and more than a little redolent of Marie Antoinette. If they did, Mr. Bruni regarded them as Philistines, and quite rightly so. There is a place in this world for fine food and drink, and it would be a poorer life without them.

But hunting? Well, Mr. Bruni’s real objection is its place in the current national debate about guns:

Hunting is always coming up when the country is debating new restrictions on firearms, as we are now. Opponents of such basic gun-control measures as universal background checks and an assault-weapons ban talk of slippery slopes and raise the specter of parents' being unable to lend shotguns to their children for a wholesome duck or deer hunt. They assert the importance to hunters of certain semiautomatics that might be prohibited.

Hunting enthusiasts recently went as far as advocating a boycott of Colorado because the state had passed some entirely reasonable new gun restrictions. There's this assiduously orchestrated outcry that a primal, virile, broadly beloved American pastime is under dire siege from disconnected lawmakers.

And it’s hooey.

This is classic misdirection. Mr. Bruni attempts to narrow this whole discussion to the hunting aspect, and insist that since hunting is in no immediate danger from proposed legislation about background checks and national registries, why then, obviously we should have universal background checks and national registries. This is what happens when you take food critics and turn them towards more complex issues. And as for hooey, what do you call the assertion that “this assiduously orchestrated outcry” doesn’t better describe the fibs, distortions, outright lies (“a fully-automatic weapon…”) and Pollyanna nonsense we are getting from the likes of Obama, Feinstein, Pelosi, Bloomberg et. al?

In any event, Mr. Bruni argues, there are fewer and fewer hunters every year — so why listen to them?

The popularity of hunting has generally declined over the last four decades. According to a survey by the Fish and Wildlife Service, only 13.7 million Americans 16 or older hunted in 2011, the most recent year for which figures are available. That's in a country of more than 313 million people.

I dunno. Thirteen million people seem like a lot to me — it’s more than the population of Florida, Illinois, or Pennsylvania, and a lot more than the populations of Greece, Sweden or Switzerland, but I don’t hear Mr. Bruni saying that we should throw Pennsylvania’s delegates out of the Congress or refuse to recognize Swiss passports. And if declining interest is the measure of a pastime’s worth, what shall we say about opera? Ballet? Theater? These have been hard hit over the years by changes in popular tastes, and, with the exception of a handful of well-capitalized organizations, struggle for funding. Yet we do not deny their value to our society, or drown them with Visigoth contempt.

Mr. Bruni ends his article with a puzzling attempt at a coup de grace. Referring to his chef friend who took him to the outdoor slaughterhouse where he shot his bird, he notes:

It was impossible for me not to be nervous around guns, even with Seamus patiently teaching me and repeatedly urging vigilance.

He's 38 and has hunted on and off since his teens. I asked him if more stringent gun control would cramp his and other hunters' style.

"A totally bogus argument," he said without hesitation or elaboration,

There you have it. Seamus says so, and I guess that’s that. Mr. Bruni has given us the equivalent of a rube walking into a museum and cackling at the Picassos, and the marvelous thing is, he is unaware of how foolish he sounds — a not uncommon fault of op-ed folks at the Times, to be sure, but irritating still.

The “bogus argument” is the one pretending to reduce a highly complicated issue to a one-dimensional straw man. It’s not about hunting, Mr. Bruni. It’s about being hunted.

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Sun, 7 Apr 2013 03:28:00 -0700

The Daily Cannibal

Public Princes

Posted: 06 Apr 2013 09:22 PM PDT

Political corruption in New York state and New York City are nothing new, but it seems to be undergoing a phase shift. Lately, we barely get wind of one mare’s nest of venality before a new outrage splashes across the front pages. Two days ago brought us a Democratic senator and his NY city council henchman bribing folks far and near to get the senator on the — huh? — Republican ticket for mayor of NYC, and right on the heels of this story, another state senator is accused of accepting $22,000 in bribes to allow someone to open a daycare center in his district, while preventing anyone else from opening another center for three more years.

These scandals are hardly noteworthy, given the kubuki theater that is New York politics, where senators and councilmen and other public servants file in and out of the courts and prisons with admirable regularity, yet the sudden increase in frequency seems to demand an answer to the question of the hour: when do even New York voters finally say they’ve had enough? When do we start to think that these are not isolated incidents in a largely honest and reliable government? At what point do we begin to suspect that the few cockroaches we catch are but a tiny fraction of the thousands hiding behind the wall?

First of all, voters would probably be more upset if they had some notion of what state senators and city council people do. Whatever it is, it is not obvious. Presumably the senators, who are “part-time”, are responsible for passing legislation relating to taxation, budgets and other weighty matters, but little of this filters out to the electorate, perhaps because political reporters are too busy covering trials and investigations to pay much attention to mundane matters like these, or perhaps because a series of strong governors have had their own way for so long where actual governing is concerned that the legislators would start in surprise if actually consulted by the executive branch. In any event, it seems clear they are far too deeply engaged in looting the public purse to pay much attention to actual public business. Ditto the city council, whose roster of mountebanks and charlatans is unrivaled domestically or internationally, save possibly Italy, which has been at it far longer, or Chicago, where all the dead are registered Democrats.

Or maybe we know what we’re doing, we voters. God help us if those who hold public office actually tried to govern us, we think. We see what mischief they get up to already; maybe we silently beg them to go about their petty thievery and back-alley hustling, squabbling over pitifully small bags of boodle (compared to the really big-time swindles their private-sector paymasters operate). “Never mind us,” we implore them, lest we wind up with even more law than we already have, which, to many minds, is already far too abundant.

It should gall us that those who hold the public trust and profess responsibility should be so very dishonest and without conscience. We may be inured to this behavior from commercial chieftains, who make no pretense to community responsibility, but shouldn’t we expect better from those who have promised us to be trustworthy stewards of the state? Think carefully. Look what happens when incorruptible politicians gain power. All manner of nanny-state mayhem begins to break out, and no soda is safe.

We have ample lessons from recent history and antiquity of the results of reform. Suddenly newly-formed legislatures fill with earnest people demanding a bewildering array of civic revisions, throwing things into a turmoil that will not settle until the zealotry and energy of the right-minded are finally and inevitably dulled by the lust for power that dooms all revolutions to failure, and corruption creeps back into the res publica both in fiscal and despotic deformities.

Frankly, the only thing more odious than what we already have in New York is what we could get if we’re not careful. The progress of organized crime in New York City might serve as a good example. Each time the police managed to cripple whatever group controlled the underworld economy — starting with the Italian mafia — they left a vacuum which quickly filled with an even more savage and brutal bunch of thugs, finally arriving at today’s mix, whose enthusiasm for murder and flair for colorful vengeance beggars anything contemplated by those comparatively meek and civilized Dons. If we clear all the current crop of scoundrels out of the cloakrooms of the Senate and the City Council, we might well find a new scourge of civil servants that make their predecessors look like guardian angels — or worse still, we might really get a group of guardian angels, whose unflinching self-righteousness and devotion to improving the populace threatens us with an even more invasive and dismaying thuggery, albeit of a different tenor.

Isn’t there a compromise? Can’t we expect, at the very least, to have a reasonable number of honest, hard-working people in our city and state government? In fact, we may already have this, in a strange way, in that there may be many folks on the take who also devote a fair amount of their time to the public welfare, in the time-honored tradition of Tammany Hall, Huey Long, Jim Curley and many other noted American institutions, who knew that a healthy host was in the best interests of the parasitical classes. Charlie Rangel, who gamed the system as well as anyone, probably did as much for his constituents as he could, given the world he lived in, and is still held in high enough regard to keep his seat in Washington.

Besides, even when the reformers think they’ve got it right, it all seems to end in tears. Eliot Spitzer, crusading state attorney general, is elected governor, but Sir Galahad is revealed as “Client Number Six” of a $5000-a-night hooker. Anthony Wiener, fire-breathing champion of the oppressed, turns out to be less obsessed with the plight of the underdog than sexting photos of his own underwear. ”Put not thy trust in princes,” counseled Machiavelli. Wise words then; wiser still now.

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Sat, 6 Apr 2013 03:35:00 -0700

The Daily Cannibal

WIMPS? WIMPS!

Posted: 05 Apr 2013 09:29 PM PDT

Here at the Cannibal we’re worried about wimps today. Up until now, we had been dimly aware of them, but did not view them as particularly troublesome, even though there are an awful lot of them everywhere. Mostly, they seemed to be pretty innocuous, preferring to go their way with as little interaction with anything as as they could manage, remaining invisible and virtually undetectable except for those few who might actively be looking for them.

At this point we should probably explain that we are not talking about spineless milquetoasts who always wear galoshes when it’s wet out. We are talking about WIMPS, which is an acronym for Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles, and perhaps now you can better understand our concern. Whatever a “massive particle” is — and we’re still not too sure (nor, for that matter, is anyone else) — it doesn’t sound like anything we want to get mixed up in. But we can’t avoid it, because there are a near-infinite number of them. We can’t see them, we can’t feel them, and we can only deduce their existence from certain anomalies in the gravitational field of the universe.

Why worry, then?

Because, up until relatively recently, we didn’t know they were there at all. WIMPS are suspected of comprising so-called “dark matter.” This is important because, according to Wikipedia, “based on the standard model of cosmology, the total mass–energy of the universe contains 4.9% ordinary matter, 26.8% dark matter and 68.3% dark energy. Thus, dark matter is estimated to constitute 84.5% of the total matter in the universe.“

Get that? These scientists we hear from every day, pontificating on everything from calories to carbon dioxide with such suave certainty, had no farging clue until a comparatively short time ago what 84.5% on the stuff in the universe was up to, or where it was, or even that it existed at all. Does this concern you? Because it bothers the hell out of me. I mean, 84.5 %?

Now I’m told that quadrillions of so-called”massive” particles are sleeting through me at near light speed every second, but I shouldn’t worry about it because they are “weakly-interacting.” Why should I believe them? How big is a “massive” particle? The size of a house? A BB? How do they know?

Which brings us to our point. Science is a work in progress, which we all too frequently forget. Just as we think we’ve figured it all out, along comes something to upset the applecart, and previously-cherished notions about how everything works end up in history’s ashcan. Now it seems quaint that learned experts actually believed that planets occasionally but predictably moved backwards in their orbits. That fire was made of tiny particles called “phlogistons.” That “atoms” were indivisible. That stress caused ulcers.

Today, much of what he hear about science seems to have the word “climate” attached to it. And lately, previously-cherished notions about what is or isn’t happening to the climate have come under sharper scrutiny. It seems troublesome that there has been no increase in the global mean temperature for 12 years, which contradicts the iconic “models” so highly prized by those who have no doubts whatever about this topic. One scientist with a hard-to-beat resume, Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, pretty much summed up the main problem. Dyson believes that the planet is warming, and believes that human activity probably has something to do with it. He is not so sure about how much it is warming, or how large a role human activity has played.

What he is sure of is how useful climatologists computer models are. He notes that, having played around with computer models for decades now in the world of quantum physics, it seems very very unlikely that something as complex and as little-understood as the atmosphere can be modeled on a computer with any better predictability than that offered by a Ouija board. He his not, therefore, a climate skeptic, but a model skeptic. And Freeman Dyson, in the world of models, may not be a bad one to emulate.

A money manager I interviewed once drew three concentric circles on a whiteboard. The first, quite small, he said was “what we know about markets.” The second, much larger circle represented “what we don’t know about markets.” I asked him, after a brief silence, what the third circle, by far the largest, represented. He smiled. ”That is what we don’t know we don’t know.”

The next time you see some guy in a lab coat on TV gravely explaining with charts and laser pointers how you need to replace all the light bulbs in your house with flickering diodes filled with poisonous vapors in order to “save” the planet, remember: he not only may not have any idea what he’s talking about, he may also have no idea that he doesn’t have any idea. Thems is the most dangerous kind.

The Daily Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Subha Sundar Das) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 03:57:00 -0800

The Daily Cannibal

Snow Job

Posted: 22 Feb 2013 12:58 AM PST

It snowed in Arizona yesterday, cancelling a round of a PGA Tour event. I would have paid money to see the faces of the pros when the flakes started coming down. But not all the flakes were falling from the sky.

Predictably, whenever there is weird weather, you get someone ascribing it to human folly. This time it was a PGA rules official, Mark Russell, who opined “It’s just climate change, you know — what can you say?”

Well, for one thing, you could say something that didn’t make you look like a thorough moron gibbering about something you know absolutely nothing about.

In 1954, when I was six, I awoke one morning in southern California to find about a foot of snow on the ground. My friends and I were ecstatic. Classes were cancelled; we ran around throwing snowballs, building snowmen, sliding and jumping. We had never seen snow. Among the adults no one could remember any snow there before. They referred to it as a “freak storm.” We started looking for the freaks.

No scientist from the PGA Tour was there to tell us that this miracle from the sky was a portent of doom, or a proof that we were destroying our planet. What is the difference between that snowfall and yesterday’s event in Arizona? None, I suspect, except for the tendency of self-appointed climatologists to claim it as yet another proof that their religion is the word of The One True God.