Month: May 2010

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

Have you not watched the news this week?  Every station shows a deserted coastline as the oil begins to wash up.  Where are the feds?  In 40 days why have they not dispatched booms and clean-up workers to the beaches?  They have dragged their feet getting the Army Corp of Engineers to help the coastal states set barriers up to protect the beaches and marshes.  On Hardball, Chris Matthews hammered the Coast Guard Admiral on the fact that there is no comprehensive plan to clean-up the spill.
 
When even center-left commentators are joining conservatives in criticism you seem to have forgotten your own moto :

“To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle".

My reader has a point. Not being glued to cable, I wasn't thinking of the clean-up. But I need to look into it further before I concede the point.

Insane In Relation To What?

Friedersdorf wants to give libertarians a fair shake:

If returning to the gold standard is unthinkable, is it not just as extreme that President Obama claims an unchecked power to assassinate, without due process, any American living abroad whom he designates as an enemy combatant? Or that Joe Lieberman wants to strip Americans of their citizenship not when they are convicted of terrorist activities, but upon their being accused and designated as enemy combatants? In domestic politics, policy experts scoff at ethanol subsidies, the home-mortgage-interest tax deduction, and rent control, but the mainstream politicians who advocate those policies are treated as perfectly serious people….

As the most egregious excesses of the war on terror so clearly demonstrate, libertarian ideology doesn’t always lead its adherents to lunacy, and being “in the mainstream” isn’t always a self-evidently desirable characteristic, nor has it ever been in the long history of American politics.

Frum is much less forgiving. I find marginalizing a set of views because they are not "mainstream" as opposed to "being wrong" is, well, classically lazy journalism and classically cheap politics. Conor is right. The insanity we take for granted every day – the Afghanistan war, for example – is a lot crazier than the gold standard.

Two Feel-Greats Before The Weekend

This video of a hearing impaired infant hearing his mother's voice for the first time after a cochlear implant is about as tender a thing as you'll see in a while. If you ever despair of modernity, it's worth remembering that in previous eras, not only would this baby never hear but we would never see him hear. And then there's simply a trapped dog and a great cop – another moment once captured only for one man, and now viewable by millions. Seriously, this is worth watching through to the very end:

The View From Your Recession

A reader writes:

Thank you for the outlet.  I am a 58 year-old male, and my white hair proves it.  I was laid off an executive position in a real estate company in January 2009.  I directed international marketing programs and was responsible for over $200 million in transactions.  But I have been unable to find work, even well below my former position.  I am told that I appear too smart, too qualified.   I have applied for many, many jobs – jobs I could do in my sleep.

Playing by the rules, I post and scour Monster and Career Builder to no avail, not even an interview.  When I see a job that particularly fits my skills, I break the "rules" and contact the employer directly and consistently.  Still, no job.  The State of Florida has a service to help the unemployed.  When I met with my counselor, she was shocked that with my resume I didn't have a job.  As we pursued opportunities, she finally suggested that I dumb down my resume.  That proved a bit difficult.  I was in charge of a large development marketing operation.  My former company was extremely successful (until the financial world changed and mortgages disappeared).

How do I feel?  I cry.  From there it is anger, then depression. As I like to say, I lost my job that January, and lost my pride by June.  I have now lost hope. I eat very little during the day then my (employed) girlfriend comes home and I cook dinner.  She has been terrific.  She is more worried about me than our finances.  As I like to tell her, I guess I used up all my good luck when I met her.

The Legacy Of 24, Ctd

A reader writes:

Having never missed an episode of 24, I agree with the earlier writer that the normalization of more and more extreme acts of violence is part of the show’s legacy.  But what really struck me about the show was an outgrowth of a world, created by the 24 writers, where extreme institutional incompetence was the norm.

When Jack is “forced” to torture, it is because CTU, in spite of technology and extralegal authority beyond the wettest Cheney dream, never has more than one active lead. Add to this that they are staffed in every department with treasonous moles and ass-covering bureaucrats, and supported by field agents and cops who cannot even successfully set a perimeter around a suspect. For instance, the mastermind of Season Four, upon that a colleague had been captured, stalled his pursuers by calling in a lawyer from the snottily-named “Amnesty Global” to advocate for his civil rights.

The writers performed acts of superhuman gymnastics over the years in order to make Jack, week after week, the ONLY man who can be trusted, in the ONLY place where there is hope of stopping the attack, with ONLY minutes to work. The disaster MUST be of unimaginable scale and scheduled for only hours (or minutes) into the future. The villains MUST be so steely and self-assured as to laugh at the possibility of life in prison, or even a painless execution.  Our normal institutions MUST fail.

That cocktail is effectively never replicated in the real world, where investigations unfold over months and years and involve so many puzzle pieces of information. And no one has perfect situational judgment here on Earth, where we have things like ambiguity.  But it was the only fuel the 24 engine could accept once the producers elected to ride its formula as far as it would take them.

The show truly was the dramatization of Cheney’s infamous One-Percent Doctrine.