Month: September 2011

An interview not saturated in Maslin-style condescension. And, yes, there is a country where the Trig story can be calmly discussed and explored. It's just not the US.

What do the Wall Street activists even want?

This is a movement in search of a message, a community trying to define itself by listening. There seem to be two broad camps: one believes Occupy Wall St. should adopt a specific demand to address unequal distribution of wealth in America (views vary, of course, about what policy should be advocated to achieve this); while the other camp is focused on creating a spectacle that will create its own momentum, grow larger, and define its goals at some undetermined point in the future.

Greenwald fumes:

Does anyone really not know what the basic message is of this protest: that Wall Street is oozing corruption and criminality and its unrestrained political power — in the form of crony capitalism and ownership of political institutions — is destroying financial security for everyone else?

Yglesias points out that specific demands make protests more effective. John Cassidy thinks the NYPD made their jobs much harder by pepper-spraying protesters:

If the cops had kept their cool, the occupation, which is meant to last several months, might well have declined over time to a hard core of a few dozen. Now the protesters’ numbers are growing, presenting a dilemma for [Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly] and his billionaire boss Mayor Bloomberg. Should they leave the kids alone or present them with another publicity coup by attempting to break up their encampment?

(Photo by Flickr user Paul Stein)

A small fortune:

The cost of congestion to the average commuter, TTI estimates, was about $713 in 2010. That’s up from $301 per commuter in 1982, after adjusting for inflation, and it includes the price of wasted fuel (14 extra gallons per person, on average), the costs of personal delays (34 hours per year), and the increased costs of goods that delayed trucking companies pass on to consumers.

A reader writes:

I recommend that band get while the gettin's good – i.e., about another five minutes. The funny thing about those generic category domain names is that they are all worthless, however much they may have sold for once. All those examples Ostrofsky mentions are garbage, internet detritus. Have you looked at business.com to see what's there? Essentially nothing. Vodka.com has been "under construction" forever. Sex.com isn't in the top 1000 porn sites; neither is poker.com among poker sites. What kind of idiot visits mutualfunds.com instead of Vanguard, Fidelity, etc., or his own brokerage?

In contrast, look at the domain names that ARE valuable: google.com, facebook.com, yahoo.com – even dailybeast.com. These aren't generic categories; they're companies that have put their effort into getting themselves known. There are plenty of active Tea Party websites already, distinguished not by their domain name but by how attractive they are to their readers and commenters. This is no different than the bricks-and-mortar world, where people do not shop for groceries at Grocery Store, or subscribe to Newspaper, or direct-deposit their paychecks into Bank Bank. The people who paid anything at all for these generic domain names are idiots.

A flappy-headed friend of the Dish writes:

Way to bring back traumatic middle-school memories with that post on Canadian alt-rockers The Tea Party. Canadian readers of the Millennial generation will remember the band as the jackasses whose angsty, Soundgarden-meets-Prodigy silliness used to clog up the video countdown on Much Music (Canada's alternative to MTV) with the same obstructionist fury their American counterparts have brought to Congressional politics. You'd be chilling on the couch after a long week of football practice and book learnin', eagerly awaiting the latest video from late-'90s stalwarts like the Foo Fighters or the Wu-Tang Clan, and instead you'd be watching some doofus unload his psychosexual baggage in a flooded, snake-infested warehouse.  The video for their hit single "Temptation" (which, among other sins, stole the title of an infinitely superior New Order track) definitely merits consideration for a retroactive Hathos Alert.

Martin Langeveld predicts that the Kindle Fire's heavy emphasis on shopping and e-commerce will "impact every business engaged in advertising" – especially as tablet adoption approaches its projected market saturation level of 80 percent:

Cheap but robust tablets will have built-in means of delivering advertisements — because that’s the new bargain offered by Amazon. “A service, not a tablet.” Amazon’s giving away the razors in order to sell the blades. Besides books, movies, and music content, Amazon’s service will include ads, including local “Kindle Special Offers,” Bezos said during yesterday’s announcement.

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, meets patient Fabian Bate, 9, during a visit to open the new Oak Centre for Children and Young People at The Royal Marsden Hospital on September 29, 2011 in London, England. By Kirsty Wigglesworth/WPA Pool/Getty Images.

The Christian magazine Relevant takes a hard look at the reality of premarital sex. John Blake recaps: 

80 percent of unmarried evangelical young adults (18 to 29) said that they have had sex – slightly less than 88 percent of unmarried adults…the article also asks a question that rarely comes up in discussions about abstinence movement. Relevant notes that in biblical times, people married earlier. The average age for marriage has been increasing in the U.S for the last 40 years. Today, it’s not unusual to meet a Christian who is single at 30 – or 40 or 50, for that matter. So what do you tell them? Keep waiting?

Relevant interviewed Scot McKnight, a professor of religious studies: 

Sociologically, the one big difference – and it's monstrous – between the biblical teaching and our culture is the arranged marriages of very young people. If you get married when you're 13, you don't have 15 years of temptation.

Fred Clark offers an explanation for the high rate of premarital sex among evangelicals:

What Blake describes as a "challenge" for "abstinence movements" might rather be interpreted as a consequence of those abstinence movements. It may be that "Don’t — and that’s all you need to know" doesn’t work as a substitute for actual sexual ethics.

Daniel Soar worries about Google's potential (rather than Facebook's) to become an all-knowing data repository:

The reason is that Google is learning. The more data it gathers, the more it knows, the better it gets at what it does. Of course, the better it gets at what it does the more money it makes, and the more money it makes the more data it gathers and the better it gets at what it does – an example of the kind of win-win feedback loop Google specialises in – but what’s surprising is that there is no obvious end to the process.

Chait thinks the New Jersey governor would test the GOP:

The deeper question a Christie run would raise is what, exactly, Republicans are looking for. The Congressional Republicans have pursued a strategy of opposing everything Obama proposes, even positions Republicans had endorsed. How much of this represents the Party moving substantively right — actually changing its mind about the individual mandate and payroll tax cuts and so on — and how much represents a simple desire to fight Obama? If Christie runs, he will offer a perfect test. Here is a man signaling he wants to sign the same overarching plan for federal taxes and spending that Obama wanted to sign, but he will just be really mean about it.

In related territory, Douthat and Larison debate the limits of Christie's charisma. Readers proffer more potential reasons why he isn't running:

Being overweight myself, I understand how difficult it is to manage a hectic schedule.  I think Christie understands that he can't meet the grueling physical demands of a presidential run.  Everywhere he goes he is carrying an extra man around in his backpack.  His asthma has already landed him in the hospital this year, and his asthma will not be improved by huffing and puffing his way from one event to another.  This may be even part of what he means by saying he "isn't ready."

Perhaps like most of us, he's an eternal optimist that given enough time, he'll lose the weight.  (A vice-presidential run perhaps? He'd only have to do this dance for a couple of months.) This is not something many people want to go near.  Notice, this is not a question of discriminating against him because he's fat.  This is a question of whether he thinks he can do this because of the burden he carries. 

Once in office, obese presidents throughout history have actually performed above average. Another reader:

Chris Christie cannot get the Republican nod. "My religion says it’s a sin. But for me, I have always believed that people are born with the predisposition to be homosexual," he told Piers Morgan on Tuesday night. "And so I think if someone is born that way it’s very difficult to say then that that’s a sin. I understand that my church says that. But for me personally, I don’t look upon someone who's homosexual as a sinner." Hell, that's worse than being a Mormon.

(Photo: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie speaks at a Reform Agenda Town Hall meeting at the New Jersey Manufacturers Company facility March 29, 2011 in Hammonton, New Jersey. By Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images)

A reader writes:

You've been noticing a lot of coincidences in the VFYW world lately, but here's a strange one that neatly ties together two seemingly unrelated Dish threads from yesterday. Just as your readers were discussing urban vs. suburban traffic planning, All Things Considered did a story about the increasing number of roundabouts in US cities, and reporter Alex Schmidt interviewed an LA traffic engineer named – at least he claimed – Michael Hunt. So maybe that wasn't a prank someone pulled on the LA City Council. Maybe, you know, Mike Hunt was stuck in traffic.