A reader writes:
"Come to America"? This couple risked everything by performing an engagement ceremony, so maybe they should seek asylum in a county that doesn’t still consider same-sex marriage an unnatural act. No point continuing to be considered a second class citizen. I would suggest Canada, where their incredible courage can be recognized!
Nate Silver's reading:
Mostly I simply think that the disaster is reinforcing people's frustration — an emotion that has become very widespread within the country, and which crosses most demographic and political boundaries. If that remains the prevailing mood of the country in November, the risks to the incumbent President and his incumbent party are mostly to the downside.
Covering the same ground, Steve Lombardo lays out reasons why the spill isn't comparable to Katrina:
Team Obama has something that Bush never had with Katrina: a villain. A large international oil company. What better villain could you ask for? Team Obama will maximize this to its political advantage over the coming weeks. With Katrina, Bush was the villain.
Greg Scoblete asks what happens if those categories are mutually exclusive:
As I said earlier, it's very difficult to be an honest proponent of Middle East democracy and an advocate for perpetual American hegemony in the region. The emergence of true democracies is likely to reorient the geopolitics of the region in a manner that the staunchest hegemonists would sharply disapprove of. I wonder which aspiration they'll jettison first.
Larison greatly expands upon that thought.
Nick Carr started a mini-kerfuffle by making the case against hyperlinks. Carr links to his critics in a follow up. Felix Salmon nips the argument in the bud:
A blog entry with links at the bottom has aspirations to being self-contained, like say a newspaper column: the links are optional extras. I never have such aspirations and anybody looking to make full use of the power of the internet is doing themselves a huge disservice if they start thinking that way. In these days of tabbed browsing, there’s a difference between clicking and clicking away: most of us, I’m sure, control-click many times per day while reading something interesting, letting tabs accumulate in the background as we find interesting citations we want to read later.
Someone writing online should no more put their links at the end of their essay than a university professor should first give the lecture and then run through the slides. It makes no logical sense, and it does no good for the consumer of the information.
And it looks as if he barely notices:
Steve Coll reflects on the blog he is now giving up in favor of more long-form work. He's onto something here:
By far the most fun I had with this format came when I was on the road. Last summer I was in Africa and Indonesia. Taking half-assed digital pictures for Think Tank and writing diary entries redoubled the already uplifting experience of reporting from those places. If the new journalism arising from digital formats can compensate a person adequately for wandering the world in a taxi with an iPhone, I will happily surrender my nostalgia for newspapers, magazines, and books. I’m not suggesting that the writer’s satisfaction arises from the same work as the reader’s, but even so…
Travel-blogging really needs some support. In my view, foreign correspondents should be encouraged to blog – or better still ex-pats in distant lands should become free-lance bloggers, telling us about the worlds they know, and finding aggregation outlets to disseminate their insights.
Thomas P.M. Barnett posits that Turkey had planned for the confrontation with Israel as a way to jockey for its own nukes:
So now Ankara has its bloody shirt, which will be used — once Tehran inevitably announces the weaponization of its nukes — to justify Turkey's rapid reach for the same. Just like Tehran cannot openly rationalize its bid for regional supremacy vis-à-vis arch-rival Saudi Arabia, Turkey requires an appropriate villain for its nuclear morality play. Anybody watching the deterioration of Turkish-Israeli relations over the past year knew that some cause célèbre was in the works. Suddenly, if perhaps on purpose, Turkey can claim that — despite its efforts to broker a non-nuclear peace in the region (including a recent enrichment deal engineered with Brazil) — it needs its own deterrent against Israel's nuclear arsenal, too.
This Hungarian lady tells one helluva story:
(Hat tip: BF)
A reader writes:
I thought I'd give an American ex-pat's perception from the other side of the pond. I've been in Europe about 20 years and England for 10. I had a decent-paying IT job in Yorkshire until I was laid off a year ago last April. ("Made redundant" is the quaint way they phrase it here.) I keep coming close to getting re-hired, but I'm never *exactly* what they want, or they find someone else slightly more qualified. Or younger. I know this is true from one company that flat out told me they were giving the job to the younger candidate as he would be more tolerant of the low salary they were offering.
Like your previous correspondent, I also type 50 words a minute and have decades of experience. None of which seems to matter.
I know I type 50 wpm because I applied for a 911 operator position (999 here). After passing an assessment phase, I failed the interview. One of my sins was not making sufficient eye contact with the interviewers … obviously a key skill for one who will be answering telephones. I think they were really wondering why someone would be willing to take a 50% cut in pay from their previous job. Which is one of the things you learn; you can't apply for lower paying jobs because you won't be taken seriously (i.e. you're over-qualified).
The only positions I've been able to get are minimum wage – sorting mail over Christmas and delivering leaflets door to door. And they were only part time. And I definitely have to laugh at the perceived socialism safety net the American right spouts so much against. Here, if your partner works, you get $2500 total dribbled out over six months, and then it is cut off – permanently. True, you don't pay for health insurance, but US unemployment benefits are much better than the insult you get here.
Several things I've learned: You can't apply for jobs well under what your previous job was; you won't be taken seriously and will be considered over-qualifed. You must fall completely to the bottom and get the occasional minimum wage, temporary job. No one will commit to any training for a new position. If you've done exactly the job advertised before, you'll be considered. But you'll be considered incapable of learning anything new. General experience will not be considered. Stuff learned on your own will be denigrated or discounted. University degree qualification doesn't matter. Age discrimination is alive and well.
To honor the biggest sporting event of the year, ESPN and New York ad agency Wieden + Kennedy made 32 original posters, one for each participating country at World Cup 2010 hosted in South Africa. Here are some of the best.
A BF reader finds another one, seen above:
Slovenia’s is just badass. Don’t frak with the Slovenians.
The Dish 