Month: August 2008

Rob Inglis has a smarter way to stop overfishing:

Commercial fishing boats that are forced to use smaller nets will generally just stay out longer, burning more fuel and taking up more crew time but coming back with the same amount of fish. A shortened fishing season just motivates fishermen to fish more intensely while they can—buying bigger, more powerful boats so they can get to the fishing grounds more quickly and catch more fish once they get there. This arms race—which often results in further reductions to the fishing season that, in turn, leave the powerful new boats sitting in port—benefits nobody.

The better strategy is to limit each fisherman to a certain amount of fish per year and not worry about how or when he goes about catching it.

"This is disappointing, not just because it’s apparently untrue that Cindy McCain spoke to Mother Theresa, but because it makes you scratch your head. The McCains adopted a little girl from overseas. That’s an amazing, incredibly compassionate thing to do. Why embellish a story like that?

Granted, "fish stories" aren’t necessarily unusual. People will add a little detail here or there to make a story better, but it doesn’t look good when a politician does it — and since John McCain has repeated the story, it looks like Mr. "Straight Talk" is going to end up having to explain on the campaign trail why he and his wife fudged a story about something as intimate as the circumstances under which they came to adopt their own daughter. They should know better than that." – John Hawkins, Right Wing News.

Good one:

McCain decides to leave the absolute ban on all abortion for any reason in the Republican platform. McCain supported changing the language in 2000 and reiterated this as late as 2007.

Andrew Gelman explains why the state of the economy matters.

Matt Welch, McCain biographer, wades into the debate over McCain’s embellishments. Matt puts most of it down to the usual effect of telling stories and anecdotes over and over again – we all fudge and embellish and misremember our pasts, even to ourselves. But not all of us are running for president, with that level of scrutiny:

McCain’s history has never really been scrutinized before. This may sound hard to believe for 26-year veteran of Capitol Hill, but no less true. Like [Richard] Riordan, McCain got used to being able to make a too-salty joke, or too-perfect anecdote, because the press was mostly amused and/or actively wanted to protect the guy from himself. This leads to bad habits, especially in the age of YouTube, and is one of many reasons why the Straight Talk Express is no longer a rolling press conference. But more than just malaprops, there are chunks of the McCain biography, including and especially the Vietnam chapter, that are just flat inconsistent and have never been fully examined journalistically.

And it’s not just the non-"pivotal" stuff like the cross-in-the-dirt story, but fundamental experiences like McCain’s prison suicide attempt, which has a variety of different tellings and timelines in different settings.

5) Seriously, are we gonna argue over the timeline of a guy’s suicide attempt after having been tortured to the point of confession in a Vietnamese prison? This one’s pretty self-explanatory.

6) Anyone running for president automatically loses the benefit of the doubt. This one should be too.

Slow-motion skateboarding:

skate – shot on red – 120 fps from opus magnum prod. on Vimeo.

Don’t you just hate happiness?:

I for one am afraid that American culture’s overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society’s efforts to expunge melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?

Joe Klein is worried:

One of the great strengths of the Obama candidacy has been the sense that this is a guy whose blood doesn’t boil, who carefully considers the options before he reacts—and that his reaction is always measured and rational. But that’s also a weakness: sometimes the most rational response is to rip your opponent’s lungs out.

Yglesias sees a slight improvement in Bush’s polling.