Month: September 2008

Boris Kachka worries about the book publishing industry:

Right now, Amazon is making little or nothing on Kindle books. Lay down your $359 and you can get most books for $9.99. Publishers list that same Kindle version for about $17.99, though, and—as with all retailers—charge Amazon roughly half that price for it. Which means that Amazon keeps only a dollar on each book, while the publishers make $9.

But Amazon may be offering a sweet deal now in order to undercut publishers later. If their low, low prices succeed in making e-books the dominant medium, they can pay publishers whatever they want. “The concern is they want to corner the market,” explains one books executive, and then force publishers to accept a genuine 50 percent discount. “If they took over as little as 10 to 20 percent of the market,” says an agent, “publishers simply would not be able to exist.”

One can only hope. If any industry deserves oblivion, it’s book publishing.

From the Washington Redskins’ blog, a peekaboo sans jammies:

There’s no explanation as to whose penis was shown in the picture. Applying logical thinking, however, one would have to wonder why another pantsless man would be holding Cooley’s playbook. Also, having seen the uncropped version, it’s hard to imagine that someone could have posted the photo without noticing Little Chrissy hanging out. But Whatever.

A reader writes:

Most people cannot grasp that a specific person is a pathological liar until a) it bites them in the ass and b) there isn’t a shadow of another explanation for the bite marks.  If only a) is true, they will come up with endless excuses. If only b) is true, they will rationalize away why the bite wasn’t so harsh or wasn’t even a bite at all given the context.

Those of us who observe that pathological lying is both possible and more common than generally assumed frequently get ourselves into your situation: people can’t handle being faced with this sad fact and blame us for pointing it out.

Like Will Ferrell’s character Mugatu in Zoolander, who was frustrated because no one else realized Blue Steel was the same as all Zoolander’s other expressions, we start to feel like we’re taking crazy pills.

I don’t care one way or another about Sarah Palin as a person, but anyone who "gets" pathological lying can see there’s way, way too much about what she says that’s demonstrably false to be explained any other way.

We know what has happened to the Republican party in foreign policy. Neoconservatism now has undisputed intellectual hegemony. The campaign of John McCain, and the emergence of the blank slate of Sarah Palin (a blank slate currently being filled in by AIPAC) reinforces this view. McCain is much, much more neoconservative than even Bush. What this means is that those of us who still believe in a conservative foreign policy – reality-based, idealistic within clear realist boundaries, cognizant of America’s mounting fiscal collapse, aware of the fact that power politics never ends, chastened by the Iraq fiasco, concerned about reinforcing alliances and maintaining a solid military – have our work cut out.

The very promising new conservative online magazine, Culture 11, is beginning the task of reconstructing a conservative foreign policy in the wake of the Bush-Cheney fiasco and McCain’s belligerence. Here’s a great essay trying to re-think foreign policy from the perspective of America’s founders. Money quote:

There are two Washingtonian principles which I believe should serve as the basis for a long overdue audit of U.S. foreign policy, certainly since the end of the Cold War. The first is Washington’s admonition that “permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded.”

The second (and here perhaps the Address should be updated from merely referring to Europe to every region of the world) is for the United States to reconsider the level of involvement in the affairs of others: “it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.” Are American interests served by involving the United States in a multitude of regional problems that do not touch directly on our affairs? And do we need to continue to divide the world into categories of “friend” or “foe”, into leagues of “democracies” versus “the autocracies?” Such is alien to the Washingtonian ethos.

The first president took as his guide the following: “Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations are recommended by policy, humanity and interest.”

A reader writes:

Let me get this straight. Governor Palin squandered Alaska’s budget surplus in $1,200 checks to each Alaskan at a time when the conservative move would have been to wait and see what the energy market did (it’s tanking) and in the same breath asked for Federal earmarks?  That’s the change we need?

Deference, please.

After Bush, Republicans harping about big government is, well, risible. I laid out the indictment in my book. Bruce Bartlett did the same. There’s a level of denial here that is truly unhinged. No party has done more to destroy America’s fiscal standing than the GOP under Bush. No president has grown government more sharply since LBJ and, by some measures, FDR:

How many slogans has McCain gone through now? There was "Reform, Prosperity, Peace" ; "Country First"; and now "Change Is Coming." I’m probably forgetting a few others. It doesn’t bode well for his campaign.

Hmmm.

I misread this:

You and your reader are confused about that internal email: it was a message from one of the anonymous hackers/pranksters/griefers to another. They refer to themselves and others as ‘fags’ and ‘tards’ as a kind of group identification, (a member from Ohio might call himself an Ohiofag, and they collectively refer to themselves as /b/tards, after the /b/ image group on the site 4chan, http://www.4chan.org).

New Scientist looks at the future of photography:

Although digital image manipulation – Photoshopping – can improve a person’s appearance it takes time and skill. But software being developed at Tel Aviv University in Israel aims to automatically make photographed faces more attractive.

The system uses a set of basic rules about what makes a face attractive, derived by asking volunteers to rate the attractiveness of around 200 photographed faces. Tommer Leyvand’s team built software that alters faces to match the facial proportions and distances between features that were agreed to be attractive.

The effect is subtle enough that a person is still recognisable as themselves, but somehow prettier.

From my single favorite show on cable: