Month: September 2009

Sarah Palin's upcoming speech, which will detail her own nuanced view of relations with China, will, of course, be closed to reporters. Palin will never allow herself to be exposed to a press conference. It would hurt future money-grubbing.

We stand corrected and ashamed. About that last MHB. A reader writes:

That recording was actually by The Portsmouth Sinfonia, “a real orchestra founded by a group of students at Portsmouth School of Art in Portsmouth, England, in 1970 — however, the Sinfonia had an unusual entrance requirement. Players had to be either non-musicians, or if a musician, play an instrument that was entirely new to them.”

Another writes:

I recognized it immediately because it was on Dead Parrot Society, a compilation album of British comedy dominated by Peter Cook and the boys of Monty Python.

Another:

Brian Eno was a member for a while and played the clarinet.

Could come with the downfall of book stores. Anthony Grafton explains and worries about monopoly control of information:

For years, Google has kept rolling out one new application after another, from Street View to Fast Flip, and rolling over most of the competition as it does so. They’ve just done it again: [Thursday], Google announced that they would allow On Demand Books to produce paperback versions of two million out-of-copyright digitized texts on the Espresso Book Machine, which can print and bind a book in less than five minutes. For the recommended $8 a copy—the price of a paperback romance—readers will be able to buy anything from “Moby Dick” to “Dame Curtsey’s Book of Candy Making,” The Google-On Demand partnership could transform retail bookselling—especially of books for university courses.

Jonah Lehrer pores over the research by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler on social networks and obesity:

It turns out that the old warning of David Hume – causation is a slippery concept and a tricky thing to prove – is even more relevant in the age of excess data, when supercomputers can sift through terabytes of social information and uncover all sorts of fallacious correlations. Christakis and Fowler get around this problem through some clever analytics: they show, for instance, that obesity is much more contagious between close friends than it is between acquaintances, which suggests that social networks are the driving mechanism (and that the new neighborhood McDonald's isn't). Regardless, it will be interesting to watch this new field evolve in the next few years, as the Humean skeptics do battle with the enthusiastic believers…

A unique bit of logic from Michael Schwartz, chief of staff for Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK). His interlocutor is Pat Fagan, of Heritage, who once described using contraception as turning heterosexual sex gay. Just passing it along. These people are central to today's conservatism.

Tony Woodlief goes off on an enjoyable rant:

Just where did we develop the notion that our opinions are so desperately important that we are justified when we hurl them at people the way monkeys sling their poo? Sure, I have plenty of opinions, but you find them here, or wherever someone pays me to speak or write, presumably for audiences who know what they are getting into. You won’t catch me barking my opinions into my cell phone so that everyone in the airport can hear, or shouting down someone’s speech, or shuffling about in front of the White House with one of those signs which, no matter how cleverly the person has worded it, might as well just read: HAVE GONE OFF MEDICATION, PLEASE NOTIFY MY THERAPIST.

I understand that in a constitutional republic, people are afforded certain liberties to speak their minds. But we are also afforded, please let’s remember, the right to zip it. To keep a stiff upper lip. To grin and bear it. Because for the most part, our opinions are usually much more fascinating to us than to everyone else. Take it from a guy whose website address is his own name.

"I think that for those of us who were opposed to this bill, it's game–almost–over.  This isn't exactly surprising; Democrats have a commanding lead in the house and the Senate, and now they have the presidency too.  If public opinion on this thing craters again, I'll reassess.  But for now it looks like it's time to start preparing for an ambitious health care reform, and all the dislocations, and the budget crisis that we now have even less ability to avert," – Megan McArdle. But Megan thinks it will mean the end of a Democratic House in 2010.

Romney now adopts the populist position that we should not have bailed out the banks. That was his latest pander to the Christianist base this morning:

When government is trying to take over health care, buying car companies, bailing out banks, and giving half the White House staff the title of czar – we have every good reason to be alarmed and to speak our mind!

There are several obvious lies in there – there's no "government take-over" of healthcare, and Obama's advisory czars are fewer than Bush's. But Romney will say anything in any particular order in order to pander. There's something quite refreshing about his open refusal to have any principles, or even to worry about the slightest consistency between one statement and the next. (Yes, as Dave Weigel notes, he backed bailing the banks out at the time.) Alas, the only thing less credible than Mitt Romney as a Christianist is Mitt Romney as a populist.

When it comes to respecting international law, Eric Posner says no:

During his presidential campaign, Obama expressed support for the International Criminal Court and humanitarian intervention. In office, he has done nothing for the ICC and has stood by while the killing continues in Sudan. He has promised to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay; the problem, however, was not that the facility itself violated international law but that the detention methods practiced there (arguably) did so. These very same detention practices have continued in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Obama has sought to give immunity to Bush-era interrogators — another possible violation of international law, and certainly in tension with it. Bush's unlawful tariffs on steel are matched by the "buy American" provision in the stimulus bill signed by Obama and the tariffs that he has slapped on Chinese tires. Obama has provided some symbolic support for international law in a few ways, but where it counts — obtaining Senate ratification of the Law of the Sea treaty (which Bush also supported) and numerous international human rights treaties — he has expended no political capital. Don't expect this to change.

The NYT admits that those tire tariffs are legal, but nevertheless slams the decision as "bad economics and bad foreign policy." The difference is that the US is no longer actively in breach of its treaty obligations and domestic law in torturing and abusing prisoners in the war on terror; and the notion that a president has absolute authority to do anything he wants under his war-powers has been abandoned. That's a big deal to me. But apart from that, Posner is not wrong.