Month: October 2011

Spurred on by ABC's Pan Am, Glen Whitman explains why female flight attendants have gotten less attractive over the years:

When deregulation came along … it became apparent that as much as male customers might have enjoyed the eye candy, they weren’t willing to pay for it. Higher quality might seem like a good thing, but it’s really only good if the benefits exceeds the cost. More attractive staff can command higher wages. The airlines could have continued to pay them, if the higher quality had attracted more customers. But as it turns out, most people just wanted to get where they were going, fast and cheap.



TNR's editorial says yes: "we are hearing calls for the upending of capitalism entirely." Nicole Gelinas differs:

Contrast the capitalist world in which Jobs lived with "capitalism," as the U.S. government has applied it to the big banks against which the Zuccotti Park crowd is—imperfectly—protesting. If you’re a bank or an insurance firm, and you create a product that your investors and your regulators can’t understand in a crisis, you aren’t punished, as Apple was when it released products too complex for its customers. Instead, you get rewarded with bailout money. It’s hard to argue with the Zuccotti protesters’ manifesto on this point: "They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity."

(Image from The Cynical Economist)

D.R. Tucker pinpoints the source of the candidate's unpopularity:

Conservatives and Tea Partiers were supposed to put an end to people like Romney. They had convinced themselves that the era of the Bush 41-style Republican was over and done with, and that the GOP would now and forever be controlled by the purebred conservatives, the ideological offspring of Reagan and Goldwater, the true believers who would finally cut Washington down to size and starve the statist beast until you could see its ribcage. If Romney becomes the GOP nominee, it will prove that the Tea Party project was an abject failure, and that the momentum of 2010 was only temporary.

Today on the Dish, Andrew celebrated the life of Frank Kameny, and readers eulogized the great pioneer of gay equality. We corralled more Bloomberg debate reax: Gingrich really belongs on Dancing With The Stars, Huntsman may belong in the State Department, and Perry, the candidate without a plan, doesn't belong in the debates. A reader decried Cain's civil rights cowardice, and the other "Rich Lowry" happens to be a Wells Fargo branch employee who designed the 9-9-9 plan in his spare time.

We assessed new developments in the alleged Iranian assassination plot here, here, and here. The Middle East is splitting along sectarian lines, Scott Charney skewered Bono's hollow approach to philanthropy in Africa, torture reigned in Afghan detention facilities, and we peeked at Qaddafi porn.  

Elizabeth Warren won Burke's support (fun parody of her announcement video here), rank-and-file Republican voters endorsed Obama-style "class warfare," Juan Willians berated congressional Republicans, and Douthat made excuses for them. Occupy Wall Street is not Burning Man, it actually has more in common with the Tea Party than either movement would like to admit, and we did the OWS math here and here. Obama took up the fight against medical marijuana as psilocybin came to the aid of the dying, and Tyler Cowen took issue with Steven Pinker's methodology on violence.

The English language can claim global dominance, a straight guy built a cruiser app with insights he extracted from gays, and heterosexual boys forged physical and emotional bonds in the U.K. Drunk driving is sobering up, development drives urban efficiency, and the fantasy genre could be falling out of favor. In our video feature, Andrew reminisced about the scarf-clad Doctor Who. 

Cool ad watch here, email of the day here, MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here. 

— M.A. 

(Photo: "A march by the Washington Mattachine Society in 1970, with Frank holding his trademarked sign.")

A reader writes:

It's truly serendipitous that Kameny died on "National Coming Out Day." Search 'coming out day' on YouTube and watch the world changing for the better before your eyes. I hope all these kids (and late-but-greaters as well) will someday know the name Frank Kameny and understand that they stand on the shoulders of this giant.

Another writes:

I am woefully ignorant of the history of the gay rights movement and am sorry to say that I knew precious little about Frank Kameny. What strikes me in just a quick glance at information available is that he is one of the people who could be a hero to anyone, rather like a Martin Luther King, Jr. – someone who fights from a position of the positive and the possible and who commands respect because he respects himself.

A quick YouTube search showed him standing at the shoulder of President Obama as he signed the bill giving equal benefits for gay federal employees. Since Kameny in 1958 was fired  from his job as a government employed astronomer for the "crime" of being gay, it was so appropriate that he was there for the signing.

Another:

I'm a public radio host/producer in California. Inspired by your "Before Stonewall" series last year, I called up Frank Kameny and interviewed him for my July 4, 2010 show. We had a wonderful conversation about his life and activism. Frank seems to have been largely overlooked by the national media – surprising, given how accessible he was, right there in Washington, DC. Anyway, our interview offers a vivid sense of who he was and what made him so remarkable. I've posted a link to it here, if you're interested.

My tribute here.

Some pushback against a common suggestion:

I’d suggest that Occupy Wall Street is focused on saying “No” – no to fat cats, no to plutocrats, no to the banking industry, no to business without accountability.  “No” may be the only thing the people involved can agree on.  Burning Man, by contrast, is focused on affirmation:  bring something, build something, create something that everyone can participate in!  Burning Man’s anarchic spirit, though very real, is usually sublimated to a variety of very specific goals – wouldn’t it be cool if we built this and offered it up to the community?

Conn Carroll has a modest proposal:

Perry has performed poorly in all four of the GOP debates in which he has participated. Even the candidate himself seems to acknowledge that debates can only hurt his campaign. So why show up? The Perry campaign is telling every reporter who will listen that debates don’t matter. OK. If they really believe that, then why have Perry show up at all? Why not just work crowds, raise money, and run TV and web ads? We know Perry can’t debate, so let the headlines be about what he CAN do.

Alana Goodman thinks, regardless of what Perry decides, we ought not to count him out:

Aren’t the debates starting to lose their significance at this point, anyway? Romney looks inevitable. The only reason so many of the other candidates are still showing up is probably because its free. Bachmann’s almost out of money. Newt clearly lost interest a long time ago, and is now just doing it for the entertainment value. Huntsman’s at zero percent in the polls, and Santorum’s campaign is heading there. But Perry has none of these problems. He’s still in the top three in most polls. And he has $17 million to burn. No matter how many times he bombs out at a debate, he can still run a top-tier campaign in every other area.

I think he's toast. Just not ready for primetime.

Scott Charney sees the U2 frontman's latest cause as evidence of a broader pattern of attention-seeking:

While Bono's own writings and the website of the ONE Campaign do mention violence and political instability afflicting the region, and even refer to the famine as "man-made," the actual causes of this disruption are completely ignored. …

Bono may be well aware of this, but his pattern of activism since the mid-1980s makes it clear that he seeks to curry favor with politicians of various ideological stances around the world, in order to better ameliorate the results of the actions of these same politicians. To use the terminology of Bono's own industry, his own philanthropy could use a remastering, if not a complete remix. The present, longstanding path of his activism is not only possibly self-defeating, but ominously could be leading to apathy and "donor fatigue" as the same story repeats again and again.  

(Celebrity ad via Copyranter, who initially guesses "Face-lift!")

"[Congressional Republicans] are so obsessed with discrediting the president that they are condemning the entire solar industry and making themselves into villains. At a time when unemployment is stubbornly above 9 percent and Congress cannot pass a jobs bill that will get people back to work, the GOP is attacking an industry that employs more than 100,000 Americans. That number has doubled since 2009. And most green energy companies qualify as small businesses. And with many industries still struggling to recover from the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. solar energy industry grew 69 percent in 2010. Compare that to overall GDP growth, which was just 3 percent last year. … President Obama has low approval ratings these days, but the Solyndra story is an illustration of why approval ratings for congressional Republicans are much lower," - Juan Williams, Fox News. 

Christopher Jobson is gripped with schadenfreude:

The Nightmares Fear Factory in Niagara Falls, Canada struck viral advertising gold with their online photo gallery of people at the peak of absolute terror. There are literally hundreds of photos like this, family and friends tackling their loved ones, desperate screams, unbridled fear the moment they encounter some unspeakable ghoul in the depths of this haunted house. It’s the most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen.

So many to choose from.