Month: June 2010

Chinese companies are paying white men to pose as fake businessmen to burnish their global profile.

First a congressman assaults an amateur reporter, now a verbal assault from the NYT's James Risen, who caught flak for his story on Afghanistan's mineral bonanza:

"Bloggers should do their own reporting instead of sitting around in their pajamas," Risen said. "The thing that amazes me is that the blogosphere thinks they can deconstruct other people's stories," Risen told Yahoo! News in an increasingly hostile interview that he called back to apologize for almost immediately after it ended. "Do you even know anything about me? Maybe you were still in school when I broke the NSA story, I don't know. It was back when you were in kindergarten, I think." (Risen and fellow Times reporter Eric Lichtblau shared a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on the Bush Administration's secret wiretapping program; this reporter was 33 years old at the time.)

Yahoo reporter John Cook reveals more about the interview via Twitter:

NYT's Jim Risen just told me bloggers criticizing his Afghan minerals story are "jerking off in their pajamas." Yahoo worried abt language.

Exum lays into Risen for his "phenomenal arrogance":

[I]f you think you don't need to answer to bloggers, some of whom have spent years doing field research or working in Central Asia and now blog as a hobby, the invisible hand of the market is going to find you out. And before you know it, you'll have taken a buy-out from the New York Times and be teaching creative writing in Maryland. And, let's face it, probably blogging on the side.

Both responses are, it seems to me, acknowledgment of the new media's power to rattle authoritah – the authoritah of congressmen and the authoritah of Pulitzer Prize winners (a political bauble if ever there was one). Score one for the web.

Take this with a grain of salt, along with all other information about the Palin famille:

"Bristol and Levi are still very close," a source close to Bristol, 19, tells Us. The eldest daughter to former Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin claimed in the June issue of Harper's Bazaar that ex Johnston, 20, was "a stranger to me." But the source reveals, "Now that Mama Palin is out of the picture and Bristol is on her own in Anchorage, they spend more time together than most people think." Adds the source: "Levi even stays overnight. I even think they are back together."

Palingates follows up on the rumor, first floated by an Alaska gossip blog. Bristol tells Radar that she and Levi are merely "co-parents."  By the way, Mercede now has a blog.

Catherine Rampell finds a chart on the composition of the American population over the next four decades:

By 2030 — shown by the bars in the middle-shade of green — the entire baby boom generation will have moved into the ranks of the elderly.

This has bigger consequences than just a longer line for the early bird special. It means that a smaller portion of the population will be working, and inversely that a larger portion of the population will be depending on government services (and/or family members and meager personal savings) in order to get by.

Tim Kowal ghettoizes reams of foreign policy opinion:

People make flip assessments about domestic policy because, well, it’s domestic policy, and we’re going to have opinions about where we live.  Besides, we’re forced to be somewhat engaged and to develop our ideas because, at least to some extent, we all reap the consequences of those policies.

Not so with what goes one half a globe away, as most of us have no first-hand knowledge about what’s going on.  And the problems are toxic, complex, and decades old.  It’s as if you tried explaining over the phone to your 80 year old blind grandfather how to assemble a neutron bomb.  At best, it’s futile.  At worst, it’s dangerous.  This is generally what I think of eight minute radio segments and 500 word op-eds on the middle east.

E.D. Kain nods. And I take the general point. But this was a post by Jonah Goldberg, for Pete's sake. It describes the attack on the Mavi Marmara as an attack by Turkey against Israel. It describes the blockade of Gaza as one constructed by Hamas, without any assistance from the Israelis. Its core argument – that once any conflict with terrorists is enjoined, it can never be ended for fear of giving terrorists a victory – is so absurdly ahistorical and illogical it can only come from the template of an ideology that requires barely any actual analysis of events or people on the ground whatsoever to make Solomonic judgments.

I guess my point is: not every foreign policy op-ed is at this level of agit-proppery.

Drezner captures it:

There are plenty of sports in the United States that occasionally capture the intermittent attention of the casual sports fan, but won't "break through" the sports zeitgeist until and unless the United States fields a successful national team.  This is how it tends to work with the Olympic team sports, and it's how it will work with the World Cup.  If the United States can advance far in this tournament, Americans will become more interested; if not, they'll switch back to baseball and the NFL draft.  In this approach, the casual sports fan is using a strategy of "rational ignorance" — i.e., not caring until the team is sufficiently successful.

Karl Smith agitates for open borders:

Immigration temporarily dilutes expenditures on Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the national debt. However, temporary counts for a lot. The future is inherently uncertain and so truly pushing off consequences into the future is inherently a net gain. There is a chance of catastrophe, in which case your sacrifices were useless and there is a chance of explosive growth, in which case your sacrifices were unnecessary. These are real possibilities and should not be ignored.

It also gives additional time to prepare for changes in Social Security. One possibility is that the continued shift away from physically intensive jobs will mean that in 50 years a retirement age of 70 is feasible even if in 25 years it is not.

Jim Morrison investigates the sound of the 2010 World Cup:

A study in the South African Medical Journal released earlier this year said fans subjected to the vuvuzela swarm were exposed to a deafening peak of more than 140 decibels, equivalent to standing near a jet engine. The South African Association of Audiologists has warned they can damage hearing. …

After the 2009 Confederations Cup soccer matches in South Africa, FIFA, the governing body for the World Cup, received complaints from multiple European broadcasters and a few coaches and players who wanted the vuvuzela banned. Fans on both sides argued heatedly on soccer blogs and web sites. Facebook pages both to ban the instruments and support them sprang up. One opponent in a South African newspaper suggested opening the World Cup with a vuvuzela bonfire.

The BBC is taking steps to filter out the godawful noise. An industrious German fan got there first.

Free Exchange reanimates the retirement age debate:

Keeping people in the labour force longer may mean rethinking what retirement means. Rather than a discrete and sudden exit retirement may become more gradual. Phasing people out—perhaps by offering the option of part-time work in the years leading up to retirement, may make sense. That may be easier on people who work well into old-age, as it puts them under less physical strain and it eases the mental transition into retirement. More part-time work also allows firms to pay these workers less than their full salary. The concept of retirement is relatively new and constantly evolving. Somehow it became the norm to spend up to a third of your life on holiday. This was never a good idea or particularly realistic. It puts a huge burden on the government, robs the labour force of still-productive and valuable workers, and it may even increase unemployment for younger workers. The time has come to think more creatively about what retirement means and when it will occur.

Robin Hanson compares:

While we may not hold athletes to the high of standards we hold politicians, we clearly hold them to higher standards than musicians…For our distant ancestors, athletic skill was much closer to political power. Small forager bands feared that the few most physically powerful members would attempt to dominate the band by force. Foragers had much less reason to fear domination by the few most musical folks in the band. So it made sense for foragers to hold athletes to higher moral standards than musicians.

So I suspect our tendency to hold athletes to higher standards than musicians is a holdover from our forager days…