Month: December 2011

If you have some time to kill, there are some incredible videos among this year's Mental Health Break finalists. The "Returning Soldiers' Dogs" video is dominating the competition but there are several videos worthy of your vote. Click each link to watch the videos and pick your favorite:

For readers who want an extra dose of mental health, here is a list of videos that narrowly missed the top ten: Basketball Juggle, Old School Toys, Fiddler On The Roof Gets Served, Year-Long Timelapse, Dancing Skeleton Guy, MOVE, Pogo's Pufnstuf, Colored Pencil Stop-Motion, Food Porn, Dubstep Masterpiece, SFW Porn, and Roller Skates.

The Dish Award Glossary

Click here to vote for the 2011 Malkin Award!

Click here to vote for the 2011 Hathos Alert!

Click here to vote for the 2011 Moore Award!

Click here to vote for the 2011 Von Hoffmann Award!

Click here to vote for the 2011 Yglesias Award!

Click here to vote for the 2011 Face Of The Year!

Click here to vote for the 2011 Chart Of The Year!

Nate Silver points out that the latest CNN poll, which shows Paul trailing Romney by 3 points, only surveyed registered Republicans:

What’s wrong with using a list of Republican voters for a Republican caucus poll? The answer is that it’s extremely easy for independent and Democratic voters to register or re-register as Republicans at the caucus site. Historically, a fair number of independent voters do this.

And as we've seen, Paul draws a wide advantage among independents and Democrats, so the CNN poll is "quite simply missing these voters and therefore will probably underestimate Mr. Paul’s support, perhaps by several percentage points." But by that same standard, things are looking worse for Paul in New Hampshire:

There is some unambiguously good news for Mr. Romney in New Hampshire, however, where the CNN poll did include independents and shows him with a very healthy-looking 27-point lead over Mr. Paul. Although the New Hampshire numbers still have the potential to change significantly both before and after the Iowa, that is a pretty healthy cushion, and Mr. Romney’s rivals appear to be losing ground at the very moment when they need to gain it. Our forecasting model now gives Mr. Romney a 90 percent chance of winning New Hampshire, up from about 75 percent previously.

EJ Dionne looks for cracks in the "Romney fortress" in New Hampshire. Building off Silver, Blumenthal parses the PPP and CNN polls:

One important potential shortcoming for both surveys: Neither samples mobile phones. As the Washington Post reports, the most recent estimates [pdf] find that 29 percent of Iowa adults had a cell phone but no landline in their household. The Washington Post/ABC survey conducted in early December found that Paul did better than Romney on interviews conducted over cell phones, while Romney did better than Paul on landline interviews.

Another argument from Pinker on why war is in decline:

For one thing, it no longer pays. For centuries, wars reallocated huge territories, as empires were agglomerated or dismantled and states wiped off the map. But since shortly after World War II, virtually no borders have changed by force, and no member of the United Nations has disappeared through conquest. The Korean War caused a million deaths, but the border ended up where it started. The Iran-Iraq War killed 650,000 with the same result. Iraq's annexation of Kuwait in 1990 backfired. Israel seized land in 1967, but since then most has been returned and the rest remains contested. 

Timothy Snyder critiques Pinker's book at length. Previous Dish discussion here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Peter Dolton and Oscar Marcenaro-Gutierrez summarize their research on the topic:

[I]mproving teachers’ pay improves their standing in a country’s income distribution and hence the national status of teaching as a profession.  As a result of this higher status, more young people will want to become teachers. This in turn makes teaching a more selective profession and hence facilitates the recruitment of more able individuals. Higher status and higher pay are invariably linked but the two can provide separate driving forces to engineer better recruits to the profession. The key hypothesis is that better pay for teachers will attract higher quality graduates into the profession and that this will improve pupil performance.

Ruy Teixeira believes Obama's re-election will hinge on them:

On the state level, in contrast to 2008 where the youth vote put Obama over the top in only two states, North Carolina and Indiana, there could be many instances where the youth vote makes the difference in 2012. Consider Ohio. Obama carried 18 to 29-year-olds with 61 percent against John McCain’s 26 percent in 2008, while losing seniors 44-55. Both groups were 17 percent of Ohio voters. Thus, if Obama splits 30 to 64-year-old voters roughly evenly in 2012—significantly worse than he did in 2008—he will likely still win the state if youth voters continue to be more pro-Obama than seniors are anti-Obama.

A reader updates us:

Louis C.K.'s experiment has netted over $1M in twelve days thus far. He's quartering the money, using a quarter to pay for production costs, a quarter for large bonuses for his staff, a quarter for charity and he's keeping a quarter. To me this has been the most interesting online experiment since Radiohead's "In Rainbows".

Another responds to Alan Jacobs' take on CK's project:

What Louis has found is a new model, but only for those who have been able to leverage "mass media" to first find "mass success."

The interesting thing about the Internet is that it allows properties and personalities who were once wed to a network for a business model to eventually decouple from a network and still find success. Take Seinfeld, Friends, or The Sopranos … for a season or two the network held the cards. But once those properties became hits, who had the power? The talent. And the Internet provides a viable alternative for those who feel their contract with a network or distribution partner is unfair to go out on their own.

I am still waiting for an artist like Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber to cut ties with a record company and create a subscription model whereby rabid fans pay $5 a month for videos, concerts, and songs as they are recorded rather than waiting for a new album. How many Bieber fans would ask for a one-year subscription at $60 a year from their parents? Even only 100,000 probably surpasses his record contract. Get to a million and it is a no brainer.

Another shifts gears:

Louis CK is not the only one taking a risk in the way he is selling his product online. Small game developers, who can't afford the price of distributing and marketing their games the same way as Activision or EA, have begun joining together to sell their games as part of a pack, called the Humble Indie Bundle. The games are free of DRM or any other means of theft prevention. They don't even have a set price. Customers choose how much they want to pay for the games and how that money will be distributed.

And it works. The Humble Indie Bundles have brought in substantial sales and profit for the small developers. By going out on a limb and trusting their customers to not steal their work, the developers have been rewarded with more than enough funds to continue doing what they love.

And did I mention you can get the games for free by making a donation to the American Red Cross or Child's Play charities through their website? Because you can.

Today on the Dish, Andrew got angry at Netanyahu's refusal to consult with the US on Iran strikes, called Gingrich out for hyperbolic attacks on Ron Paul, chuckled at Santorum's unfortunate choice of words, and marveled at the blogosophere's inability to make the newsletters hurt Paul in Iowa. Bernstein wasn't as convinced on that last point, a reader kept up the debate on Paul and racism, Steve Kornacki credited a media blackout with Ron's rise, and the paleolibertarian continued to poll well in the Hawkeye state. Pundits grumbled about Iowa's outsized influence, Santorum (gag) surged, and Perry kept up his patented pattern of saying stupid things. Douthat tried to find the good in the GOP field while a 9-year-old grilled the candidates on the most important political issue of our time: superheroes.

Arab League monitors ineffectually surveyed the devastation in Syria, 38 North speculated about a world after Kim Jong-Il's bizarre funeral, and we worried that both India and China might both be heading towards serious economic problems. Chris Christie narrowly led the Yglesias Award voting, readers continued to discuss limiting work hours, and McCardle gave tips on saving money. We counted down the year in ridiculous comments from both Republicans and Democrats while Alyssa Rosenberg thought the Game Change movie should have been about the Edwards campaign. Wikipedia went global, touch was socially important everywhere, and broken Christmas lights got sent to China.

Tweet of the Day here, Moore Award here, Faces of the Day here, MHB here, and VYFW here.

– Z.B.

Douthat takes a "moment to praise each remaining contender for something – big, small, or somewhere in between – that they got right during the campaign and that deserves to find its way into the eventual nominee’s agenda." An example:

Newt Gingrich has taken a lot of heat from his rivals for his various forays into techno-utopianism. But Gingrich’s current scientific obsession, brain research, is more practical than fantastic. Federal support for basic scientific research tends to generate a higher return on investment than Solyndra-style attempts at playing venture capitalist, and in an era of skyrocketing old-age health care costs, brain science is a particularly reasonable place to commit public funds. As National Review’s Reihan Salam points out, modestly postponing the onset of diseases like Alzheimer’s could save taxpayers a fortune in Medicare spending over the next few decades.