Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing — have become a Chinese phenomenon: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It’s crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results.
FloatingSheep, a fun geography blog, looks at the beer belly of America. One maps shows total number of bars, but the interesting map is the one above. Red dots represent locations where there are more bars than grocery stores, based on results from the Google Maps API. The Midwest takes their drinking seriously.
Obviously we don't know what might have been in Iraq. Maybe Saddam and his brutal minions would have killed an equal number of Iraqis before they gave way to a new government – which may have been even worse. Maybe the country would have come apart after Saddam's death and led to an equal number killed. Maybe all possible roads that diverged from America's decision to invade involved considerably more dead Iraqis than the one we took. All of that is very plausible. But you can't ignore the fact that the road we took resulted in the death of tens of thousands of Iraqis. If Goldberg and other war supporters want to make the omelet/egg argument about their lives and the creation of a new democracy, fine. But I think it's difficult to try to take credit for the emergence of a democratic government in Iraq without simultaneously taking "credit" (or rather, responsibility) for the tens of thousands of Iraqis killed to get there.
Or the trillions of dollars. Or the thousands of American fatalities and tens of thousands of crippling life-long injuries. Or the massive damage to American credibility. Or the wreckage to the European alliance. Or the boon to the Revolutionary Guards in Iran. Or the likelihood that well over 50,000 US troops will be there for the duration. Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, the play was quite fabulous.
(Almost) every one of Alfred Hitchcock’s 40+ own-movie walk-ons. (Missing: Easy Virtue, Blackmail, Foreign Correspondent, Suspicion, The Paradine Case, Under Capricorn.) Full list of appearances here.
It's mostly women's work, and it's not a job from which you can retire comfortably (unless you are lucky and skilled enough to make it into the top echelon where publishers are interested to hear the new discoveries you made about a 400-year-old classic). When you do turn in a year's worth of work in exchange for what must end up being $.75 an hour — more likely to be a multigenerational soap opera than a work of art — you get the added bonus of the news that if you're an academic, translating can actually hurt your chances for getting hired or making tenure, or you get some jerk showing up at your reading to harangue you for translating the German "reise" as "holiday" instead of "trip," because obviously the author intended "trip" and by choosing "holiday" you have changed the meaning of the entire work. Or maybe you have some yahoo declaring that translation is an impossible act and philosophically suspect. After a 35-year career of this, I would probably be a little angry.
The Monster Engine, a book and art exhibit created by Dave Devries, adds a professional touch to children's drawings. [Ed Note: The Monster Engine website first received attention in 2005, and Devries' art has had a fairly storied life on the Internet since then. Here's a selection of some of the coolest pieces.]
They are a vast improvement on the kind of kids art collected by Maddox.
Clay Risen rejects the idea of an American a parliamentary system:
[W]hile the two parties don’t guarantee complete coherence, they play a vital role in corralling various levels of opinion and forcing Congress toward consensus. Just imagine if the United States had a parliamentary system like Germany’s. We’d probably have a center-left and center-right party, greens, libertarians, and progressives, too; but we’d also have a Texas party, a farm-labor party, a right-wing-fundamentalist party, an America First party–in a large heterogeneous society, the possibilities are endless. We’d be Italy, or India. There’s no end to the shortcoming of the Republican-Democrat duopoly, but it’s more effective than the alternative.
The critical failure in all this was the failure to win public support. Cohn sort of acknowledges this. (“Public support would obviously help–a lot.” Yes, it would.) But that failure is not mainly the Republicans’ fault. I don’t think their criticisms carry much weight: Republicans are no more trusted by the public than Democrats. It is Obama’s fault, first for putting Congress in charge, and then for standing aside for more than a year.
Obama fault Number One: “putting Congress in charge” of legislation. Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t the point of Congress to pass legislation. What is the legislative branch for if it isn’t to, er, legislate? In such a huge undertaking, will it be long and messy? Of course. So what? Is this plan super-liberal? It has no public option, it cuts Medicare, to trims the deficit and it bends over so far to please the drug and insurance companies it could get a job in the Cirque du Soleil.
I can imagine Clive writing back in the Clinton years the exact same conventional wisdom that the Clintons should not have tried to come up with an executive branch scheme and foisted it on the Congress. Same centrist world-weariness.
Now for this nonsense that Obama “stood aside for more than a year”.
Was Clive alive last September? See David Brooks here on one of the best pieces of presidential oratory – turning around public opinion on the subject. Atul Gawande here. Andrew Sprung here. Half the blogosphere here. The other half here. Even Mickey Kaus – who originally didn’t want Obama to give a big risk-taking health reform speech – here. Dish live-blogging here. My conclusion?
A masterful speech, somehow a blend of governance and also campaigning. He has Clinton’s mastery of policy detail with Bush’s under-rated ability to give a great speech. But above all, it is a reprise of the core reason for his candidacy and presidency: to get past the abstractions of ideology and the easy scorn of the cable circus and the cynicism that has thereby infected this country’s ability to tackle pressing problems. This was why he was elected, and we should not be swayed by the old Washington and the old ideologies and the old politics. He stands at the center urging a small shift to more government because the times demand it.
And he makes sense. And this was not a cautious speech; it was a reasoned but courageous speech. He has put his presidency on the line for this. And that is a hard thing to do.
But according to Clive, Obama “stood aside for more than a year”. WTF?
The Dish 