Month: December 2011

Mark Garrison reports on the growing sophistication of the beer market:

One of the joys of good beer is that it’s far more accessible than the sometimes elitist and 
expensive wine world. Before I explored the new movement in beer service, I was a bit worried that it might be taking the beverage in the direction of wine’s worst excesses. But I don’t worry about that any longer. The people who are working on upgrading service knowledge do want beer to be as respected as fine wine and spirits are. But they are also deeply committed to preserving the affordability and unpretentiousness that set beer apart and to celebrating the breathtaking range of flavors and styles that make it special.

Enjoy:

Cheri Lucas compares Facebook's new Timeline feature to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind:

Last night, I sifted through my entire Facebook history and deleted comments, hid status updates, and untagged or removed unflattering photos I’d forgotten about. … I combed my Facebook wall like I was meticulously proofreading a job at work. Why? Not because any of the content was inappropriate, or meant to be a secret, but because I micromanage myself. Because I’m a perfectionist. And because sometimes I just want to erase: to forget in the same way I had wanted to forget everything associated with a past relationship and a hard, confusing breakup.

Libby Copeland considers her documentation of her daughter's life:

[My daughter] is more of a person now; her future face is developing; her personality is emerging, and one day she will look at my Timeline—no doubt, still permanently archived on the Web—and recognize herself. And I don’t want her to feel I’ve told too much of her story, or the wrong parts. I don’t want to impose this superficial version of her childhood over her own memories. The details are for her to tell, or not tell. She deserves to choose her own omissions.

A Christian pilgrim walks through the Church of the Nativity on December 22, 2011 in Bethlehem, West Bank. Every year pilgrims travel to the church at Christmastime where a gold star embedded in the floor, marking the spot where Jesus was believed to be born. By Uriel Sinai/Getty Images.

Ian Johnson reacts to a series of protests taking hold in villages across China: 

[O]bservers say that the vast majority of these disturbances are handled peacefully—the government sends in an inspection team, money is tossed around (to pay back wages or unpaid pensions, for example) and local officials often arrested. The protests usually end quickly and often without violence once the specific issues are solved. … Academics have a term for this: “adaptive authoritarianism.”  As Peter L. Lorentzen of the University of California, Berkeley, has written, officials view protests as way to gauge popular discontent. Small-scale protests function as a feedback mechanism for the government of a country without an active civil society or elections. Far from being a harbinger of regime change, Lorentzen argues that, in China at least, they can stabilize the regime.

Perry Link highlights the ways in which the legacy of the Mao endures in modern China. Christina Larson reports on discontent among urban elites. 

A new PAC ad says it's because of Paul's fidelity to the constitution: 

Timothy Egan's thinks the troops are simply tired of war:

[I]f the overwhelming service support for Ron Paul is any indication, the grunts of American foreign policy are gun-shy about further engagement in “useless wars,” to use Dr. Paul’s term.

“It’s not a good sign when the people doing the fighting are saying, ‘Why are we here?’” said Glen Massie, a Marine Corps veteran who lives in Des Moines, Iowa, and is supporting Paul for president. “They realize they’re being utilized for other purposes — nation building and being world’s policeman — and it’s not what they signed up for.”

I doubt they're backing him because he's a foul racist.

Spencer Ackerman, reading a new report on the killing of 28 Pakistani troops by U.S. forces, blames "the Pakistani military’s persistent habit of coordinating with insurgents more closely than with U.S. forces." C. Christine Fair thinks we should apologize anyway:

[N]either the United States nor Pakistan will benefit from a continued and escalating standoff. America needs Pakistan to conclude its Afghanistan misadventure. This requires Pakistan both to stop encouraging its militant proxies' violent endeavors and to productively assert its influence to achieve a negotiated settlement that is palatable to most in the country. Washington also wants to keep an eye on Islamabad's quickly expanding nuclear arsenal and terrorist assets such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba — the group that carried out the Mumbai attacks — and other international menaces. Finally, the United States wants Pakistan somehow to be at peace with itself and its neighbors.

The Economist's Clausewitz believes that another one of these incidents is inevitable without a significant shift in the US-Pakistan relationship. Asra Q. Nomani takes a hard look at what a controversy over a naked photograph reveals about the fissures in Pakistani politics.

Signs point to yes:

Although there are accounts of birth-of-Christ hymns being sung in second-century Rome—by order of Christian authorities, not public preference—it was not until the fourth century, when Christmas was formalized as a feast and fixed to Dec. 25, that a songbook started to take form. Some of the first contributions were existing, non-Christian carols adapted to the new celebration. The early church did not appreciate these pagan-Christian conversions and answered with hymns of its own. … Evidence suggests that people sort of hated these songs. The church-approved carols were in Latin and, in some cases, amounted to arcane doctrinal quibbles set to music. 

His investments – surprise! – are weighted heavily towards gold:

There are many possible doomsday scenarios for the U.S. economy and financial markets, explains [William Bernstein, an investment manager at Efficient Portfolio Advisors ], and Rep. Paul’s portfolio protects against only one of them: unexpected inflation accompanied by a collapse in the value of the dollar. If deflation (to name one other possibility) occurs instead, “this portfolio is at great risk” because of its lack of bonds and high exposure to gold.

Bainbridge asks whether Paul's investments have paid off:

I wonder what the annual return on his portfolio's been. If memory serves, stocks have outperformed gold over the last 80 or so years, but gold's at least matched stocks over the last ten years (depending on whether one includes dividend yield as well as stock price appreciation). So he might have done okay, especially because his buy and hold strategy would have avoided a lot of transaction fees that erode the return of more frequent traders.

What Christmas was like before it was "domesticated by the Victorians": 

Christmas was for many centuries a very politically charged season, defined by inversions of the normal social order. Clement Clarke Moore’s famous 1822 Christmas poem “The night before Christmas” includes the line “out on the lawn there arose such a clatter/I sprang from bed to see what was the matter.” At the time the poem was written, disturbance on the lawn on Christmas Eve would have been not magical, but threatening, likely caused by drunken youths roaming the neighborhood, demanding gifts from respectable householders. This was an echo of older traditions, also subversive, which saw tenants and serfs demanding gifts and being given law-like powers in this “season of misrule.”

I've long been amused by the whole idea that real Christians should be defending "Christmas" in its traditional form. The Puritans banned it – even in England, where the climate and darkness all but demand you get shitfaced around December 21. The embrace of Christmas materialism by the Christian right is about as theologically persuasive as their embrace of the Prosperity Gospel and the torture of terror suspects.