August 4, 2008
FEEDING THE NARRATIVE:
McCain, the Analog Candidate (MARK LEIBOVICH, 8/04/08, NY Times)
Big surprise: a lot of smarty-pants computer types have been snickering at John McCain lately.The self-described “Neanderthal” of the Grand Old Party (emphasis, old) has been catching flack for admitting that he is no techno-geek. He not only did not invent the Internet, he can barely use it.
“I don’t expect to set up my own blog,” he told the New York Times reporters Adam Nagourney and Michael Cooper. The Times has learned that Mr. McCain does not text, Treo or Twitter, either.
Positioning the other guy as the candidate of "smarty-pants computer types" is deft.
WHEN ROVEBOTS ATTACK:
Barack Obama says John McCain is 'in the pocket' of oil firms (Tim Reid, 8/04/08, Times of London)
Barack Obama today accused John McCain of being "in the pocket" of big oil companies, as he tried to regain the initiative after a week of attacks wiped out his lead in the polls.
Lord knows how he does it, but Karl Rove has convinced Democrats that his method involves turning a candidates strength into a weakness. Thus, they believe that what made John Kerry a formidable candidate was his Vietnam record, but Swiftboating ruined it for him. The reality is that John Kerry was famous for opposing the Vietnam War after he came home so all the GOP had to do was play up the same record he was running on. John Kerry's narrative was the GOP narrative with the two sides just emphasizing different aspects of the same story. Ultimately though, every time John Kerry talked about Vietnam or pictures of him during that era appeared, they served as reminders of the critique against him as well as the case for him.
The genius of John McCain's recent attacks on Barrack Obama is, likewise, that they play off of the latter's own narrative. You can poke fun at the pretenses of Messiahhood precisely because so much of the official and unofficial campaign centers around personality. Every airy ad and speech that casts Senator Obama as a distinctive figure similarly becomes a reminder of the opposition case as well as his own.
What an attack like Mr. Obama's on John McCain does though is try to reverse an ingrained public perception of the man that has been built up, mainly by the media and Democrats, over the last 8 years. Rather than using Senator McCain's own narrative but giving it his own slant, Mr. Obama is attempting to deny it entirely, a bit of heavy lifting for which a political campaign is ill-suited.
The attack that Mr. McCain's campaign lends itself to is, unfortunately for the Democrats, not one that they wish to play up right now. It would be easy to take his "Maverick" persona and his willingness to buck party and constituencies and raise questions about whether someone who has such trouble playing well with others can really lead a nation effectively. When your opponent proudly portrays himself as a bull in a china shop, portray America as the display case, its treasures at risk.
Now, we need hardly spell out all the problems with this line of attack. It suffices to note that Democrats want to drape the national Republican Party around the bull's neck, not help him point out his distance. Moreover, even setting aside the way the stark contrast in their legislative records suggests that Senator McCain is far more adept at working across party lines to achieve things, Mr. Obama is stuck because he has to present himself as something of an independent also, lest he be tied too closely to a Democratic Party and its special interests that American voters long ago decided diverged from their values.
We may be Stupid and they may be Bright, but you have to love the irony that the GOP elites accidentally had the ideal nominee thrust upon them, while the Democrat activists eagerly embraced a nominee whose weaknesses are legion, his strengths virtually nil.
Whatever we're paying Karl Rove, it isn't enough.
WHICH IS WHY WE LET INDIA KEEP ITS NUKES:
There Are More Boys than Girls in China and India: Preference for sons could spell trouble for China and India (Jeremy Hsu, 8/04/08, Scientific American)
There are 119 boys born for every 100 girls in China today, compared with 108.5 boys per 100 girls during the 1980s. Recent national data is less comprehensive for India, but census records show 115 boys born for every 100 girls in 2003. That represents a major leap from 104 boys per 100 girls in 1981. By comparison, the U.S. is closer to average: 105 boys for every 100 girls this year. [...]Modernization typically leads to a drop-off in the number of children per family, but the preference for sons does not fall as quickly, Ebenstein says. That was evident in modernizing Asian countries such as South Korea and Taiwan, which both saw skewing in the ratio of girl and boy births during the 1980s.
Those countries have recently seen a shift back toward a balanced sex ratio, which spells hope for China and India further down the road. For instance, South Korea had a birth sex ratio of just 107.4 boys for every 100 girls in 2006, compared with 116.5 boys for every 100 girls in 1990. The reverse trend draws power from the strengthening social and economic status of women, as well as the parental desire to have a nuclear family consisting of one boy and one girl.
Baby boy bias is not as widespread in countries outside Asia—at least not enough to prompt parents to attempt to control the sex of their newborns. Studies show the birth sex ratio of males to females fell in North America and Europe during the latter half of the 20th century, although it was not significantly skewed to begin with. South American countries do not have widespread prenatal sex selection because of Catholic beliefs, according to political scientist Valerie Hudson of Brigham Young University, and Africans cherish the earning capacity of daughters. Only some other Central and East Asian countries such as Vietnam now see birth sex ratios near that of China or India.
The growing number of "bare branches"—as the Chinese call young men without the opportunity to marry—was deemed "a hidden danger" that will "affect social stability," according to a 2007 statement by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council. Hudson has also suggested that social instability such as rising crime and even rebellion historically follow any large number of "bare branches," although other social scientists such as Ebenstein remain reluctant to extend such parallels to modern China or India.
Because they don't want to think about it.
WHO WOULD DENY THE UNICORN RIDER A GILT SADDLE?:
O-Force One (Allison O'Keefe, 8/03/08, CBS News: From the Road)
Barack Obama’s new campaign plane is nothing short of grand. Well, for the candidate that is. [...]His chair has his name and campaign logo embroidered on the back top -- “Obama ‘08” on one line and “President” underneath. [...]
After looking at a few photos of Obama’s cabin, [Politico’s Mike Allen] quipped, “Air Force One may seem a tad claustrophobic."
Who peels his grapes?
THEY ASSEMBLE STUFF CHEAP. PERIOD.:
China as the Antidote to Oppression and Exploitation?: So envisions a new book, never mind the facts (GREGORY CLARK, 3/14/08, The Chronicle Review)
In Adam Smith in Beijing (Verso, 2007), Giovanni Arrighi, an economic sociologist at the Johns Hopkins University, sees the rise of the East as representing an opportunity to escape an international order based on oppression and exploitation. In the Arrighi cosmology, a ruling class of capitalists, first in Britain, then in the United States, has dominated the world since the Industrial Revolution, having their wicked hegemonic way with the weak. The riches of the West were created by the oppression of the rest.Arrighi, along with Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein, is one of the leaders in world-systems theory. This school has extended Marx's idea of exploitation within societies to international relations. Trade between rich and poor countries is not equal exchange, according to this view, but instead systematic exploitation of the poor. [...]
How plausible is Arrighi's interpretation of the current juncture of West and East?
A crucial failure in Arrighi's thinking is his obsessive misconception that all economic growth in the West since the Industrial Revolution has been provided by the brains and brawn of the dispossessed of the developing world. Yet generations of research by economic historians — David Landes, Deirdre McCloskey, and Joel Mokyr, among others — show that the wealth of the West was homegrown, the result of a stream of Western technological advances since the Industrial Revolution.
Arrighi, for example, reflexively assumes that in the 19th century "Indian workers were forcibly transformed from major competitors of European textile industries into major producers of cheap food and raw materials for Europe." In fact, technological advances in England, not any compulsion by colonial profiteers, drove out the much cheaper Indian workers from the cotton-textile industry. The East India Company, the ruler of much of India until the end of the Industrial Revolution, had every interest in maintaining the export of Indian muslins, one of the most valuable Indian exports in 1760.
Similarly the United States became an industrial colossus in the early-20th century through advances in technology that included an ability to extract from American soil all the raw materials needed for its growth. Only in the late-20th century did imports of raw materials become of any importance.
Arrighi's basic misconception leads him to conclude that growth among the rest must imply decline for the West. But the last 20 years, when significant growth has occurred both in China and in India, have been prosperous ones for the United States as well. Real income per person in America has increased by 50 percent in those years, despite the rise of China and India. That rate of increase is similar to the rise between 1950 and 1987, when China and India stagnated. There is no sign that the rise of the East is clawing back the growth of the West. That is because the overwhelming source of growth in the United States is technological advance within the U.S. economy.
The growth of the Chinese and Indian economies will exert pressure on U.S. incomes through the increased demand in the world economy for commodities — most important, oil. If everyone in the world were to consume as much oil as Americans do now, then world oil output would have to be more than five times greater than at present. As Chinese demand for oil has risen, China has been aggressively seeking supplies of oil in Africa and the Middle East, doing deals with countries hostile to the United States such as Iran and Sudan.
But even in that regard, the Chinese impact on American incomes through higher commodity prices will be modest. Even at current prices of roughly $100 per barrel, annual U.S. imports of oil are still less than 4 percent of national income. A further doubling of oil prices, to $200 per barrel, assuming we used just as much oil per person as at present, would consequently reduce U.S. income by less than 4 percent. But since technological advance is increasing income by more than 2 percent per year, that hit to the American economy would be compensated for by less than two years of normal growth.
And there is plenty of room for economizing if oil becomes permanently much more expensive.
Here's all you need to know: none of the innovations with which we replace oil will come from China.
DID THE NEOCONS PAY ANY ATTENTION TO THE PRIMARIES?:
How to Pick a V.P. (WILLIAM KRISTOL, 8/04/08, NY Times)
[T]here seem to be at least four competing theories in the McCain camp, which, while not entirely mutually exclusive, point in different vice-presidential directions.1. We’re going to defeat Obama straight up.
If McCain is ahead of or close to Obama in the polls, there will be a strong temptation to do no harm with the V.P. choice. The leading noncontroversial selections — broadly acceptable to Republicans, conservative but not too conservative, young but not too young — are Tim Pawlenty, the second-term governor of Minnesota, and Rob Portman, former Ohio congressman, Bush trade representative and budget director.
2. We need to accentuate Obama’s key vulnerability — inexperience.
If McCain’s central theme is going to be that he’s ready and Obama isn’t, he needs a running mate who reinforces that message — someone experienced who’d be seen as ready to govern. This points to former rival Mitt Romney, whom McCain has come to respect, or former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, whom McCain likes. It’s true that Ridge is pro-choice, which might be a problem. Or could the pick of Ridge signal to independents that McCain is broadening the party, while pro-lifers could be reassured that Ridge would defer to President McCain in this area?
3. Don’t fight the public desire for change; co-opt it.
The public wants change but is nervous about Obama. Why not allow people to vote for experience and the next generation of leadership at the same time?
This implies a young and different V.P.: the 37-year-old governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal; 44-year-old Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska; or Eric Cantor, the 45-year-old Virginia congressman. Party pros would have fainting spells about the unseasoned Jindal and Palin in particular — but party pros are often wrong, and if Jindal or Palin performed well as candidates, the upside would be considerable.
Pretty nearly the only way Maverick can lose this election through his own actions is to choose a VP who's unacceptable to Evangelicals, like a Romney, Ridge or Lieberman. He can't have a big enough lead to get cute about abortion again, which killed him in 2000.
MORE (via Kevin Whited):
John McCain considers Jewish running mate (Toby Harnden, 03 Aug 2008, Daily Telegraph)
Eric Cantor, 45, would be a dramatic choice for Mr McCain, who is running almost level with Barack Obama in national polls but whose aides believe he needs to shake-up the White House race if he is to prevail in November's general election. [...]Of the four, Mr Cantor would be by far the most exiting - though potentially risky - choice. A prodigious fundraiser with a young, photogenic family, support from evangelical Christians and strong backing from hard-line conservatives, he would shore up many of Mr McCain's weaknesses.
Neither has the much needed executive experience to bring to the ticket, but Mr. Cantor is younger than Mr. Lieberman and votes religiously Jewish rather than ethnically.
TOM SEAVER WAS ONLY TRADED TO THE REDS ONCE:
10 things that make blokes cry (BBC, 8/04/08)
Real men don't cry? Tell that to Michael Vaughan, Gazza, Jeremy Paxman or Mike "The Streets" Skinner. What makes the male tear duct well up?It is never easy to give up a job you love. But after five years as captain of the England Test cricket team, Michael Vaughan has stepped down after a lack of runs on the pitch.
After a list of thank yous, his voice caught as he paid tribute to his family. Flashbulbs popped as he blinked back tears.
Once a solely private activity, what makes men weep in public?
(1) When George gets Clarence's copy of Tom Sawyer:
(2) When Joshua Chamberlain orders the bayonet charge at Little Round Top:
(3) When Ray and his dad have that catch:
(4) When Tony Curtis stands up and says: I'm Spartacus!
(5) When Shane fights Joe Starrett for the right to sacrifice his life:
(6) When Sam makes up his mind:
(7) The funeral service at the end of Master and Commander:
(8) When Phar Lap dies:
(9) When James Garner realizes he and Donald Pleasance are toast, in The Great Escape:
(10) When The Chief realizes McMurphy has died for his sins:
AIM HIGHER:
Top Syria official 'assassinated' (BBC, 8/04/08)
A senior military official close to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been assassinated, according to Arab media reports.The official, identified as Brig Gen Mohammed Suleiman, was shot dead on Friday night at a beach resort near the port city of Tartus, the reports say. [...]
Another website, run by a member of President Assad's ruling Baath Party, Ayman Abdul Nour, said Mr Suleiman was shot on Friday night at his beach house.
A sniper on a yacht was behind the attack, according to the website of former regime figure and now exiled dissident Abdul Halim Khaddam. [...]
It is the first assassination in Syria since February, when Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh was killed in a car bomb explosion in the capital, Damascus.
Baby not bathwater.
DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO AN INSIGHT:
Obama's Racial Catch-22 (Adam Serwer, August 4, 2008, American Prospect)
You've probably seen it by now: the images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton dissolving into footage of Barack Obama's speech in Berlin, as a voice dripping with sarcasm proclaims "he's the biggest celebrity in the world." The McCain campaign's "Britney" ad lays out a series of objections about Obama, questioning whether he's "ready to lead" and then criticizes his opposition to offshore drilling. [...]The rapturous coverage of the Obama campaign during the primary was less about Obama himself than it was America congratulating itself for being willing to consider a black man for president, with the subtext being that the United States had finally liberated itself from its racist past. It established an unspoken contract: that Obama's success was proof that racism is no longer a serious problem, thus preempting any further discussion on the subject. But even as the mainstream media all but trumpeted Obama's nomination as the end of racism in the United States, he continues to face a series of arbitrary and shifting public tests merely because of he is black. His dilemma remains that the only way to succeed is to pretend that this double standard does not exist. He has to extricate himself from an ongoing racial competition between blacks and whites, where the prosperity of one is seen as detrimental to the other. The paradox is that by succeeding, Obama has raised the white anxiety about his presence to a level at which it can be exploited as resentment.
If you pruned this essay with a chainsaw you'd be down to two truths that the author states in passing: the basis of the Obama candidacy in the Democratic contest was his race; and, the McCain campaign is shredding him by pointing out that he's little more than a media phenomenon. The real Obama paradox is that, because of his lack of any achievements and because his views are too liberal to appeal to American voters, the only defense available to him is accusations of racism. But telling the better than 50% of the country that says it isn't voting for you that they must be racist is a poor campaign strategy.
MORE:
And if you thought calling a comparison to Britney Spears racist smacked of desperation, you ain't seen nothin' yet, Daily Presidential Tracking Poll (Rasmussen Reports, August 04, 2008)
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows the race for the White House is tied with Barack Obama and John McCain each attracting 44% of the vote. However, when "leaners" are included, it’s McCain 47% and Obama 46%.
The Left is ill-prepared to lose yet another presidential.
RAISING THE BAR FOR W:
Witness: Solzhenitsyn vs. evil (Paul Kengor, 8/04/08, National Review)
The Soviets recoiled each time Solzhenitsyn’s words were broadcast in the West. A striking case that enraged them twice over was when his words were (spiritually) employed inside the USSR by the visiting American president. This occurred on May 30, 1988 at the Moscow Summit, when President Ronald Reagan — who had been quoting Solzhenitsyn since the 1970s — met with Soviet religious leaders at the 700-year-old Danilov Monastery. Reagan said:There is a beautiful passage that I’d just like to read, if I may. It’s from one of this country’s great writers and believers, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, about the faith that is as elemental to this land as the dark and fertile soil. He wrote: “When you travel the byroads of central Russia, you begin to understand the secret of the pacifying Russian countryside. It is in the churches. They lift their bell-towers — graceful, shapely, all different — high over mundane timber and thatch. From villages that are cut off and invisible to each other, they soar to the same heaven…. [T]he evening chimes used to ring out, floating over the villages, fields, and woods, reminding men that they must abandon trivial concerns of this world and give time and thought to eternity.”
In our prayers we may keep that image in mind: the thought that the bells may ring again, sounding through Moscow and across the countryside, clamoring for joy in their new-found freedom.
The Soviets hated this. For Reagan to invoke Solzhenitsyn inside the USSR was bad enough, but to do so in behalf of religious liberty was galling. They wasted no time blasting this passage in editorials in their government-controlled newspapers. Reagan had dared cite Solzhenitsyn in the House of Lenin, an unacceptable blasphemy to the Gospel of Marx.
If a man’s achievements can be measured by the vicious un-holiness of his persecutors, then Alexander Solzhenitsyn will now enjoy a lifetime of heavenly rewards. Spared the martyrdom of the dead Russian believers who could not live to blow the whistle, it was left to him to witness to the outside world. It was a job that this faithful servant did better than any other zek. May he rest in peace, free from pain and elevated high above his tormentors.
It's appalling to hear so many of the same craven twerps who feared Reaganism whinge that W shouldn't say anything too critical of the PRC while he's there for the Olympics
FLAT IS THE NEW ROUND:
Do they really think the earth is flat? (Brendan O'Neill, 8/04/08, BBC Magazine)
But are there any genuine flat-earthers left? Surely in our era of space exploration - where satellites take photos of our blue and clearly globular planet from space, and robots send back info about soil and water from Mars - no one can seriously still believe that the Earth is flat?Wrong.
Flat earth theory is still around. On the internet and in small meeting rooms in Britain and the US, flat earth believers get together to challenge the "conspiracy" that the Earth is round.
"People are definitely prejudiced against flat-earthers," says John Davis, a flat earth theorist based in Tennessee, reacting to the new Microsoft commercial.
"Many use the term 'flat-earther' as a term of abuse, and with connotations that imply blind faith, ignorance or even anti-intellectualism."
Mr Davis, a 25-year-old computer scientist originally from Canada, first became interested in flat earth theory after "coming across some literature from the Flat Earth Society a few years ago".
"I came to realise how much we take at face value," he says. "We humans seem to be pleased with just accepting what we are told, no matter how much it goes against our senses."
Mr Davis now believes "the Earth is flat and horizontally infinite - it stretches horizontally forever".
"And it is at least 9,000 kilometres deep", he adds.
James McIntyre, a British-based moderator of a discussion website theflatearthsociety.org, has a slightly different take. "The Earth is, more or less, a disc," he states. "Obviously it isn't perfectly flat thanks to geological phenomena like hills and valleys. It is around 24,900 miles in diameter."
Mr McIntyre, who describes himself as having been "raised a globularist in the British state school system", says the reactions of his friends and family to his new beliefs vary from "sheer incredulity to the conviction that it's all just an elaborate joke".
So how many flat-earthers are around today? Neither Mr Davis nor Mr McIntyre can say.
'Brane-Storm' Challenges Part of Big Bang Theory (Robert Roy Britt, 18 April 2001, Space.com)
The inflationary model of the universe, developed in the 1980's by Alan Guth (MIT), Andre Linde (Stanford), Andreas Albrecht (UC Davis) and Steinhardt, was designed to resolve these very same problems, relying on a period of exponential hyper-expansion, or inflation.Conceptually, the ekpyrotic model is very different. There is no inflation or rapid change happening at all. The approach to collision takes places very slowly over an exceedingly long period of time. It is quite fascinating that rapid change and very slow change can produce nearly the same effects. The difference results in one distinctive observational prediction, though: Inflationary cosmology predicts a spectrum of gravitational waves that may be detectable in the cosmic microwave background. The ekpyrotic model predicts no gravitational wave effects should be observable in the cosmic microwave background.
In the ekpyrotic model, when the two three-dimensional worlds collide and "stick," the kinetic energy in the collision is converted to the quarks, electrons, photons, etc. that are confined to move along three dimensions. The resulting temperature is finite, so the hot Big Bang phase begins without a singularity. The universe is homogeneous because the collision and initiation of the Big Bang phase occurs nearly simultaneously everywhere.
The energetically preferred geometry for the two worlds is flat, so their collision produces a flat Big Bang universe.
GOTTA BACK OFF ON THE SIMILES:
Sonny Rollins's Endless Summer (WILL FRIEDWALD, August 4, 2008, NY Sun)
September and October will see the release of two new DVDs starring the tenor saxophone colossus Sonny Rollins. As with everything else in this mighty musician's career, timing is everything, and these particular releases indicate something of a disconnect from what we've come to expect. Summer is the time you want to see and hear Mr. Rollins, which is why he usually gives his annual concerts in New York in the dog days of August. Thus, even though the two DVDs (both of which feature him playing live in Europe) are arriving in early fall, the best time to experience Mr. Rollins in person is Wednesday, when he plays Central Park's Summer-Stage.Over the last 30 years, Mr. Rollins has fine-tuned his music to the point where it's an essential summer experience. He has perfected an instrumental and ensemble sound that's so explosively joyful and euphoric that putting a roof over it would seem like an unnecessary step designed only to curtail its rapture. Saying that Sonny Rollins plays "outside" music doesn't mean that it's avant-garde (though he has played that, too); it means literally outdoors, honoring a tradition of jazz that goes back to the genre's beginnings. Jazz didn't only come from New Orleans brothels; it was always a highly social music heard at parks and picnic grounds, parades and social functions all over the Crescent City.
At least since the 1970s — the entire time I've been going to hear him perform — Mr. Rollins has presented his music less like a classical virtuoso in a concert hall or a jazz headliner in a nightclub than as a popular music maker. He has said that he'd rather play B.B. King's, the pop music miniarena, than a club associated strictly with jazz. He is almost without question the greatest living jazz improviser, but he's something else on top of that — an entertainer and larger-than-life cultural phenomenon made from the same mold as Harry Houdini or Enrico Caruso.
LENIN HIMSELF:
Solzhenitsyn at Work (JOHN McCAIN, August 4, 2008, NY Sun)
He was a writer with unusual gifts, utterly devoted to his art, brilliant and exacting, producing work that would stun not just literary worlds but the entire Cold War political world, and he was resigned to being unread until "this secret authorship began to wear me down." Following Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Communist Party Conference and the cultural thaw, Khrushchev encouraged at the Twenty-second Congress in 1961, [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn mustered the courage to send One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a fictitious account of one day's suffering in a poor peasant's life in a labor camp, to the literary journal Novy Mir. The magazine's gifted editor, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, recognized it as a work of genius, compared it to Tolstoy, sent it to Khrushchev for the premier's permission, and published it. Tvardovsky said that while reading the manuscript late at night "he was so moved by its power that he got out of bed, put on a suit and tie and sat up the rest of the night reading ... because it would have been an insult to read such an epic in his pajamas."Solzhenitsyn decided to write, in seven parts, a history of the gulags, which were not first conceived, as popular opinion held, in Stalin's malevolent paranoia, but by Lenin himself, who in the earliest days of Bolshevik rule provided the legal justification for strengthening the party's hold on power by establishing slave-labor camps. Stalin, of course, had expanded the system beyond Lenin's vision.
Therein lies the key to why Gorbachev failed to save the USSR. Being a true believer, he mistakenly thought that if you allowed some criticism of the system that the dissidents would rip into Stalin for corrupting the Revolution. Instead, they went after Lenin and showed the Revolution to be evil from its inception, at which point the system was completely delegitimized. Thus the title of David Remnick's great account of the era: Lenin's Tomb.
MAN OF NO MYSTERY:
Obama Sells Out on Offshore Drilling (Melinda Henneberger, 8/02/08, Slate)
There is no mystery about why Obama has now changed his mind, too, although his position seems to be that offshore drilling is still a bad idea, but we should do it anyway: A national poll taken last week showed that 57 percent of voters favor offshore drilling because 56 percent think gas prices would fall as a result. Only they wouldn't, and both candidates know it.In the same interview with the Florida paper - on the day Chevron became just the latest oil company to report a record profit for the quarter -- Obama said: "I think it's important for the American people to understand we're not going to drill our way out of this problem," he said. "It's also important to recognize if you start drilling now you won't see a drop of oil for ten years, which means its not going to have a significant impact on short-term prices. Every expert agrees on that." (They also agree that if we haven't gotten serious about cutting CO2 emissions long before then, then the heartbreak of realizing that Obama has served us a baloney sandwich will be the least of our worries.)
Only, by even sorta orta backing new drilling, he is sending exactly the opposite message to the public, maintaining the fiction that there is no urgency to changing our ways, and that we can go right on consuming energy same as always. How again is this "change you can believe in"? I get that the McCain commercials blaming Obama for high gas prices are hurting him, but especially given how ludicrous this notion is, how about responding with facts? I know it's easier to assure people you'll bring gas prices down than to explain why nobody will, or should, but he's not even going to try?
His excuse might be the worst part: "The Republicans and the oil companies have been really beating the drums on drilling," Obama said in the interview. Which might give voters the impression that anyone who beats the drums loud enough and long enough will get this same "Alright already!'' response out of him. And it might give those young voters he is counting on the idea that he's not only not as different as they thought...but maybe, just not different enough.
The Unicorn stumbles....
WHO WOULD BE FASHIONABLE?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the man who exposed the horrors of Soviet Communism, dies aged 89 (Tamara Cohen, 04th August 2008, Daily Mail)
When summoned for deportation in 1974, he made a damning written statement to the authorities: "Given the widespread and unrestrained lawlessness that has reigned in our country for many years, and an eight-year campaign of slander and persecution against me, I refuse to recognize the legality of your summons."Before asking that citizens obey the law, learn how to observe it yourselves. Free the innocent, and punish those guilty of mass murder."
The West offered him shelter and accolades, but Solzhenitsyn was vocal in his criticism of Western culture for what he considered its weakness and decadence.
Returning to his home country as a hero in 1994, he was lived quietly in Moscow, where his writing has continued to criticise Western materialism and Russian bureaucracy.
But his later works did not generate the same interest from the West. His disdain for capitalism and disgust with the new generation of Russian tycoons was unfashionable....
-OBIT: Chronicler of the gulag (The Australian, August 05, 2008)
The West offered him shelter and accolades, but Solzhenitsyn's refusal to bend despite enormous pressure also gave him the courage to criticise Western culture for what he considered its weakness and decadence.After a triumphant return in 1994 that included a 56-day train trip across Russia to become reacquainted with his native land, Solzhenitsyn expressed disappointment that most Russians hadn't read his books.
During the '90s, his nationalist views, his devout Orthodoxy, his disdain for capitalism and disgust with the tycoons who bought Russian industries and resources on the cheap following the Soviet collapse, were unfashionable and for a while he faded from the public mind. But under Vladimir Putin's 2000-08 presidency, Solzhenitsyn's vision of Russia as a bastion of Orthodox Christianity, as a place with a unique culture and destiny, gained renewed prominence.
Putin now argues, as Solzhenitsyn did in a speech at Harvard University in 1978, that Russia has a separate civilisation from the West, one that can't be reconciled to communism or Western-style liberal democracy but requires a system adapted to its history andtraditions.
"Any ancient, deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth's surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking," Solzhenitsyn said.
"For 1000 years Russia has belonged to such a category."
Brights were so offended by his critique of the West they even trumped up charges that he was anti-Semitic in an attempt to marginalize him.
MORE:
Understanding Solzhenitsyn (William F. Buckley Jr., April 14, 1976, National Review)
To bring on Sovietologist Richard Lowenthal to confute the vision of Solzhenitsyn is on the order of invoking Naziologist Walter Winchell to dispose of a speech by Winston Churchill. It is as obvious that many defeats are caused by internal conditions, as it was obvious to Churchill that Europe had to fear the strength of Hitler only in context of the weakness of France and Great Britain. No doubt the French, adequately prepared, fired bya more galvanizing vision, would have stood up to Hitler, rather than capitulate; indeed, would have stood up to Hitler before it became necessary to capitulate. The disease of the thirties afflicts us yet again, Solzhenitsyn is saying. And all the more strongly because the moment we seek to resist the trend we are made, by such as the editors of Time Magazine, to taste atomic cinders in our mouths.Solzhenitsyn does not believe one should refuse to communicate with the USSR, as it is being suggested. He believes that these communications ought not to encourage the Soviet Unions in its growing obsession to dominate the world, and obliterate dissent.
Time says of Solzhenitsyn that “as a prophet he has a vision so simple, single-minded and absolute that it cannot cope with a real and complex world.’ People who have less simple, less single-minded, less absolute visions have done very poorly in coping with a real and complex world. A generation ago the Soviet Union was a threat only to its own citizens. Now it is master in Angola, and petrifier of the thought and vision of the worldly editors of the most cosmopolitan magazine in the world.
Solzhenitsyn’s vision is as simple as Cato’s; as naïve as Churchill’s. The great effect of his worlds is that, on listening to them, those of the Lowenthal’s blur instantly from memory.
-Solzhenitsyn -- a Rightist? (William F. Buckley Jr., August 1975, National Review)
The gradual rejection of Solzhenitsyn by the American intellectual establishment was predictable. For one thing he is entirely independent, moving through the cosmopolitan scene without tripping over any of the Lilliputian nets that ensnare most of us. Now Newsweek Magazine has come up with the killer designation: “The exile found himself ignored by some influential liberals and embraced — apparently to his discomfort — by the conservative right.” If only they can thus taxonomize him — a member of the conservative right — they can pin him up in a showcase along with the rare and grotesque butterflies, let him go on there with his writhings and — forget about him.
-OBIT: Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies aged 89 (Damien Francis, 8/04/.08, guardian.co.uk)
His wife, Natalya, told Interfax that her husband, who suffered along with millions of Russians in the prison camp system, died as he had hoped to die."He wanted to die in the summer - and he died in the summer," she said. "He wanted to die at home - and he died at home. In general I should say that Alexander Isaevich lived a difficult but happy life."
His monumental work the Gulag Archipelago, written in secrecy in the Soviet Union and published in Paris in three volumes between 1973 and 1978, is the definitive work on Stalin's camps, where tens of millions perished.
Last year he was awarded one of Russia's highest honours, the state prize. In announcing the award Yury Osipov, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, called Solzhenitsyn "the author of works without which the history of the 20th century is unthinkable".
-OBIT: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) (Gregory McNamee, August 4th, 2008, Britannica Blog)
-TRIBUTE: Solzhenitsyn at Work (JOHN McCAIN, August 4, 2008, NY Sun)
-OBIT: Last struggle is over for Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Tony Halpin, 8/04/08, Times of London)
MOVE OVER, HARRY:
Braves announcer Skip Caray dies: Son and fellow broadcaster, Chip, recalls last conversation with dad (TIM TUCKER, 8/03/08, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Skip Caray made the call when the Atlanta Braves won the World Series in 1995: "Yes! Yes! Yes! The Atlanta Braves have given you a championship! Listen to this crowd!"He made the call when Sid Bream scored on Francisco Cabrera's pinch-hit to win the National League Championship Series for the Braves in 1992: "Here comes Bream! Here's the throw to the plate! He iiiiiiiisssssssss ... safe! Braves win! Braves win! Braves win! Braves win! ... Braves win!"
And he made the call in the late innings of a lousy game in the lost season of 1979: "You have our permission to turn off the TV and go to bed now ... as long as you promise to patronize our sponsors."
Harry Christopher "Skip" Caray Jr. moved from St. Louis to Atlanta in the 1960s partly to escape the professional shadow of his father, the iconic and inimitable baseball broadcaster Harry Caray. Over the next four decades, with a style very much his own, Skip Caray became as much the voice of baseball in the Southeast as his father had been in the Midwest. When we first started getting the Superstation the Braves had Bob Horner and were about to convert Dale Murphy from catcher to centerfield (which may cost him the Hall of Fame?). So they had a spurt where they were decent. But TBS was one of the only stations we got when I was in law school and the Braves traded Murphy and brought up Glavine, Pete Smith and Smoltz to learn on the job. That was when Skip Caray was at his best, with a horrifically bad team.
MORE:
Chipper, Cox, other Braves mourn Caray: Broadcast partner Van Wieren says his honesty will be missed (CARROLL ROGERS, 8/03/08, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Cox tapped a napping Van Wieren on the shoulder during the flight to inform him of Caray's death.Fans related so well to Caray, Van Wieren said, because he told it like it was, even if he couched it in humor.
"But behind the humor there was an honesty and a commitment to telling it like he believed it to be that never, ever varied," Van Wieren said. "If he didn't like it that a game was two minutes late getting started, everybody knew about it. If he had an opinion on a player, he said it. And he had a way of saying it that was sometimes humorous. The way he could take a bad ball game, in some of those bad years especially, and turn it into a fun broadcast, whether it was by talking about something in the game or whether it was talking about something that didn't have anything to do with the game, maybe it was a movie that was coming up after the game or maybe it was a restaurant that he'd gone to. It could have been anything. He was just a very entertaining broadcaster and a very good one. The game was still the most important thing, but if game was decided by the fourth or fifth inning, people would still watch the rest of the game just to hear what he had to say about things. That's a very, very unique ability."
THE WESTEN GAME:
I Like to Watch: Is it a crime to dislike crime dramas? TNT's "The Closer" spices up the procedural mix, but USA's "In Plain Sight" and "Burn Notice" give the genre an extreme makeover. (Heather Havrilesky, Aug. 03, 2008, Salon)
But "Burn Notice" (10 p.m. Thursdays on USA) may be my favorite crime-related drama (outside of "The Shield," of course), in no small part because instead of solving crimes, Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan) is often hired to save regular people from criminal entanglements of all stripes. Aided by his ex-girlfriend, Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar), and his best buddy, Sam (Bruce Campbell), ex-spy Mike pulls off outrageous heists, gets clients out of semi-illegal jams, and generally lives the life of the sophisticated, high-end con artist, interrupted occasionally by angry phone calls from his mom, Madeline (Sharon Gless).Michael was once a spy, but he got fired (see also: burned) and it threw his life into turmoil. Now he does odd jobs to support himself while he tries to get to the bottom of why he was blacklisted, who did it and what he can do to clear his name. He came a little closer to solving that mystery at the start of the second season, when he finally met Carla (played by "Battlestar Galactica's" Tricia Helfer), who is somehow involved in Michael's downfall. Lately, Michael has discovered that Carla may have been an operative in Pakistan (which he first determined because she spoke Arabic with a Kurdish accent -- oh, the expertise of this guy!). But forget Carla's identity, I just can't wait until she and gun-toting Fiona meet. What could be better than a tough-lady catfight? On a show that delights in flashy, dynamic stories and general-purpose silliness like this one, it wouldn't be surprising.
Like a smarter, funnier, modern-day version of "The A Team," "Burn Notice" is closer to comedy than drama. Although the stakes are always high, even the heaviest scenes end on a comic note. Take this exchange between Michael and his mother, who was shocked to discover what her son did for a living at the end of last season:
Madeline: What about me, Michael? All these years, and finally I see what you do. You tell me I have to leave town at a minute's notice, I can't talk on the phone, we're being chased by men with guns! How am I supposed to deal with this?
Michael: All these years you wondered why I didn't come home, why I didn't call. This is why, Mom. I never wanted this for you.
Madeline is rendered uncharacteristically speechless.
Michael: I'm sorry.
Madeline: [Pauses] Well, it still doesn't explain why you didn't write!
Later, Madeline and Michael go to counseling together, leading to one of the funniest dramatic scenes I've seen in months. When asked by the counselor to explain her frustration with their lack of communication, Madeline begins by demanding to know why Michael forgot to call her on her birthday eight years ago. Michael answers with a polite but ironic tone: "At the time I was stationed overseas, transporting a colleague to a locked facility. There were some individuals who were trying very hard to prevent me from doing my job. I was injured, and in a field hospital for six weeks. They didn't have a phone, so I could not ... communicate."
Then it's Michael's turn to discuss communication, so he sweetly asks his mother about the time he was forced to steal groceries to feed the family because his ne'er-do-well father had blown his paycheck again. Michael came home with the groceries and a black eye from the grocery store clerk, and his mother took the food but never mentioned the black eye. When Michael's done talking, Madeline looks stricken, and as they're walking out of the office later, she declares that the therapist isn't a good one and that they shouldn't go back.
Like "In Plain Sight," "Burn Notice" rambles far from the typical crime drama plot, and each scene is buoyed by Michael's always casual, always confident demeanor in the most dangerous of circumstances. Jeffrey Donovan brings such charisma and swagger to this role, it's impossible to imagine the show having half its appeal without him.
Best of all are his crime how-to voice-overs: "Check fraud is more about technique than high-tech equipment. Some old checks, a roll of Scotch tape, some nail polish remover, and you're in business!" Or more memorably, "In a fight, you have to be careful not to break the little bones in your hand on someone's face." Or "Blackmail is a little like owning a pit bull. It might protect you, or it might bite your hand off."
THE SAME FOLKS CLAIM WE'RE IN AN EVOLUTIONARY PAUSE TOO:
Climate hysterics v heretics in an age of unreason (Arthur Herman | August 04, 2008, The Australian)
IT has been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in the US. First, NASA had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record in the contiguous US had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global warming was on the march. It was actually 1934. Then it turned out the world's oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003. Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades, after Al Gore warned us that we were about to see the end of winter as we know it.In a May issue of Nature, evidence about falling global temperatures forced German climatologists to conclude that the transformation of our planet into a permanent sauna is taking a decade-long hiatus, at least. Then this month came former greenhouse gas alarmist David Evans's article in The Australian, stating that since 1999 evidence has been accumulating that man-made carbon emissions can't be the cause of global warming. By now that evidence, Evans said, has become pretty conclusive.
Yet believers in man-made global warming demand more and more money to combat climate change and still more drastic changes in our economic output and lifestyle.
The reason is that precisely that they are believers, not scientists.
Which is a false dichotomy.