Month: January 2011

Skip Oliva lists eight unlikely, but technically possible, constitutional scenarios:

I knew a guy in college named Derek, who was working for some House member at the time. Derek said he always dreamed about being the first non-member of the House to be elected speaker. There’s nothing that would prohibit that. The Constitution simply states, “The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other officers.” It doesn’t say anything about who is qualified to be elected speaker. Of course, the House has always chosen a member as speaker in practice.

A reader writes:

You disappoint me with your praise for Apple's design. If anything, it's design and marketing seek to brainwash. Let's start with the design of the stores which you refer to as a secular church. This is absurd. Churches are designed to bring a sense of warmth and spirituality and mysticism; Apple stores are sterile and smug. They look like a room out of the Death Star more than a church or a place I would want to buy something.

What galls me the most about them is their slogan – Think Different. This is as Orwellian as it gets, considering that customization is the enemy of all things Apple.

They want complete control over all their products at all times. If you need a new part, you can only get it from Apple. Not to mention that their design is pretty exclusively uniform – bright, clean whites, blacks, and the occasional grays. Much like stormtrooper uniforms. I come back to the evil empire again because it truly is what Apple designs most resemble.

What's worse about the slogan is that I've never encountered such groupthink as I do with Apple users. Everything Apple makes is the best, easiest-to-use product. No questions asked. When you suggest there might be some issues such as the iPhone not being able to make calls, you are completely shot down. Criticism is not allowed in the house of Apple (as proven by its recent attempts to censor any and all critics).

Finally, we get to the worst of it: Apple users tend to think that the company cares about them. They think of Apple as their friend, far more than just a company that wants their money.

Another seems to prove that point:

I despise spam offers from companies as much as the next person.  But when I get an unsolicited offer from Apple, I don’t feel the slightest bit angry.  I feel almost honored that they thought of me and considered me worthy of their latest offering.  Ridiculous, of course, but that’s how I feel.

Another writes:

I didn't want to be That Damn Geek, but this issue has been bugging me this week so I guess I'm fated to do it: I don't understand how you can speak your fear of technological destruction in one breath and then praise Apple in the next. I don't mean to imply that Apple will bring about the downfall of tech yadda yadda, but their approach to technology strikes many geeks as being inherently anti-innovation and backwards-looking. Cory Doctorow has an excellent essay that puts it better than I can, but let's give it a shot.

I think that by denying access to native code, by making it ridiculously difficult and possibly illegal to tweak their hardware, by rigidly controlling the apps and OSes that a user can have on an iDevice, Apple retards progress. Closed systems inevitably stagnate. If you can't take something apart and put it back together better than it was before, you can't improve on it. And if you can't improve on something, in a rapidly-evolving world, it's going to fall behind and die.

Sure, not every user is a tinkerer/engineer/programmer/geek. So what? That doesn't make it necessary to remove that capability entirely. I can't program; I only have a rudimentary knowledge of my laptop's innards. But the potential is there; every user is a potential creator. That's the beauty of modding and hacking. Apple does its goddamn best to take that away from us, to pry control out of the hands of the user, to stop the common user from making things BETTER and perhaps sharing that invention with the rest of the world. I don't see how that can be anything but terrible.

Another points to a new Gizmodo post by Kyle VanHemert, who writes:

When the iPhone 4 launched, the dock connector was flanked by standard Philips #00 screws. You probably have something in your house right now that could unscrew 'em just fine. But people who have taken their iPhone 4s into Apple Stores for repair have apparently been noticing something a little bit different when they got it back: The screws were no longer Philips but some bizarre new flower-shaped ones referred to as a "pentalobe security screws." And you almost certainly do not have a screwdriver that will fit them. In fact, no one does, except Apple.

In the comments of a Bill Easterly post, David Ellerman outlines a major problem:

The basic problem, across the whole range of the human helping relationships (like aid) between what might be called the “helper” and the “doer,” is that success lies in achieving more autonomy on the part of the doers, and autonomy is precisely the sort of thing that cannot be externally supplied or provided by the would-be helpers. This is the fundamental conundrum of all human helping relations, and it is the basic reason, not complexity, why engineering approaches and the like don’t work.

(Hat tip: Wilkinson)

Steven A. Cook explains why Tunisian soldiers were so unwilling to stop the uprising:

The Tunisian military — made up of about 36,000 officers and conscripts across the army, navy, and air force — is not the oversized military common throughout the Middle East that is short on war fighting capabilities but long on prestige and maintaining domestic stability. Defense spending in Tunisia under Ben Ali was a relatively low 1.4 percent of GDP, which reflects not only the fact that the country has no external threats, but also part of a Ben Ali strategy to ensure that the armed forces could not threaten his rule.

This was clearly a mistake.

Had Ben Ali followed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who has always taken great care to make sure that the Egyptian armed forces were well-resourced, General Ammar and his fellow officers may have thought twice about tossing their sugar daddy overboard.

Yet there is a more profound difference between the Tunisian military than its counterparts in Algeria, Egypt, and Turkey to name a few. …Tunisia’s military did not found a new Tunisian regime after the country’s independence in 1956. This was largely a civilian affair under the leadership of Habib Bourgiba — a lawyer. As a result, there is no organic link between the military and the political system.

A reader writes:

Not to ignore the fun in the Hobbes and Tyler comparison, but there are big differences between the two. 

In the commentary at the beginning of one of his Calvin and Hobbes collections (I forget the name), Watterson makes a point that people often refer to the "trick" of Hobbes being alive only when no other people are around.  He makes it clear that he thinks people make too big of a deal of this, and that it really is just the different versions of reality experienced by the characters in the strip.  To Calvin's parents, friends, etc, Hobbes is a stuffed animal because that is what they expect him to be.  To Calvin he is an alive Tiger, who has his own thoughts and opinions, because that is what Calvin expects him to be.  While Tyler can only do things that "Jack" can conceive of, even if "Jack" can't do them unless he has taken on the Tyler persona, Hobbes acts independently of Calvin.  Watterson even notes that Hobbes is clearly smarter than Calvin in his description of Hobbes in the same collection, implying that Hobbes isn't controlled or limited by Calvin's imagination, but capable of independent thought that is greater than his companion. Plus, unlike Tyler, Hobbes is the voice of reason.

Yeah, I know, it is just a comic strip, but some of us were raised on it, O.K.?

Today on the Dish, Andrew debated the past and future of marriage with James Poulos, and came down hard on John Paul II for the church's handling of abuse. Bernstein expected more of the same from the GOP on marriage equality in 2012, and Andrew backed Goldberg's outrage at the Smithsonian's betrayal of their curators. Larison and Max Boot assessed the role the US did or didn't play in interferring in Tunisia, and Steven Heydeman compiled a checklist for the Jasmine Revolution. Noah Millman weighed in on the wealth and democracy overlap, and the revolution's pictures are here. We rounded up the debate over a destroyed Afghan village, and the legacy of torture still reverberated around the world.

Andrew served up a nice helping of Palin crack, and Howard Kurtz profiled Palin's id. Josh Marshall defended TPM's Palin coverage, and a word cloud of her labor experience with Trig here. We tracked the fake success of the fake repeal, Frum boiled down the GOP's healthcare dilemma, and the party needed an infusion of new blood. CPAC's conservative freedom featured stopping a mosque, and we trained our eyes on Texas for a debt-minded Tea Party. Libertarianism hit its stride, and Obama's coup could last. Tyler Cowen and Jayme Lemke feared an era of high unemployment, but that didn't mean the US should force its companies to act like China's just for the thrill of it. The antics of Arizona's worst sheriff spotlights the ridiculous politics of the Dupnik recall, and one Supreme Court Chief Justice hid some relevant family ties. Demographers followed the flow of college grads, and aerial spy photos didn't impress Gregg Easterbrook. PZ Myers poked holes in Bering's evolutionary defenses against rape thesis, and Breitbart didn't mind a little PubicCoke, as long as he gets a raise. Fight Club paralleled Calvin & Hobbes, we treasured another classic case of Washington scorn, and air sex is safe but not easy.

VFYW here, Moore award here, Apple accolades here and here, Malkin award here, dissents of the day here, FOTD here, and MHB here.

–Z.P.

Ackerman follows up on this story and gets a comment from a Petraeus spokesman, Col. Erik Gunhus:

Some human-rights researchers are of two minds about the demolitions. “On the one hand, it’s horrifying to see this level of property destruction, but on the other hand, from a civilian protection standpoint, it’s not great to leave these booby-trapped towns in the state that the Taliban left them,” emails Erica Gaston, an Afghanistan-based researcher for the Open Society Institute. “Given the way in which the IEDs and other explosives have been planted (often wired into the walls of houses), defusing them by other means would likely be incredibly risky and not feasible for a very long time. There’s no easy answer.”

Clearing the houses of their explosive riggings without bombing them would likely mean U.S. or allied casualties — prompting the choice that the 1-320th made, Gunhus says. “It comes down to, intellectually, do you level a town where no one’s living that would take you probably days and you’d probably lose some people, or do you level it and then rebuild it? Intellectually, think it makes sense.”

(Photo: A US Marine from 2nd radio battallion stands at Talibjhan base outside Musa Qala on January 19, 2011. A 140,000-strong force of NATO-led international troops stationed in Afghanistan currently fighting Taliban-led insurgency is now entering its tenth year. By Dmitry Kostyukov/AFP/Getty Images)

Gregg Easterbrook is unimpressed by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which takes "detailed aerial pictures of the Earth’s surface — mainly of cities, including America cities" and then overlays those images "with other forms of data". Like several other military agencies it "has a growing budget never subject to public scrutiny and rarely questioned by Congress":

The key point is that Google and Microsoft are able to give away topographic information, or sell it at low cost — for $399, Google Earth Pro offers better resolution — while a defense agency spends billions of dollars to do the same. As free-market entities, Google and Microsoft are concerned with cost-effectiveness. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, exempt from cost controls and public scrutiny, wants to run up the price: its bureaucrats benefit from empire-building.

This is everything that’s wrong with defense spending in a nutshell.