Month: December 2012

A reader writes:

Thank you for covering the new Russian law. There's been a huge outcry in the Russian blogosphere around this. Many people previously loyal to Putin have been speaking out against this. The law has been dubbed "The Herod's Law", referring to the Biblical king Herod, it is symbolic that Putin signed it on the day of the Massacre of the Innocents, December 28th.

Another asks: 

I am sure many will be horrified by this sentiment, but why do we Americans want these adoptions anyway? Are there not enough children in our country who need homes?

Claude Brodesser-Akner notes that most of this year's romantic comedies have bombed:

"It is the hardest time of my 30 years in the business of doing them," said Lynda Obst, the producer of romantic comedies like Sleepless in Seattle, One Fine Day, and How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days. 

One theory why:

Perhaps most at odds with the universal theme of the romantic comedy is this nugget from Pew’s 2010 study: When asked if there is one true love for every person, only 28 percent of women agreed; that was 3 percent lower than men. Some studio execs extrapolate from this data that romance and the idea of "happily ever after" is less of an all-consuming fantasy, and so the traditional tropes of the romantic comedy are too quaint, even obsolete.

Scott Adams anticipates their success:

My prediction that robots will dominate management before they dominate blue collar jobs is based on The Dilbert Principle which observes that the least skilled employees are promoted to management. You need your most skilled people doing interface design, engineering, and the hard stuff. Management is mostly about optimizing resource allocation, and that is something a robot can learn relatively easily, at least compared to most skilled jobs.

Another advantage: the robot manager "can be a hard-ass jerk as often as that is called for":

A robot might need to single out weak performers and let the rest of the team know who the problem is so peer pressure does its thing. A human couldn't get away with being so confrontational, but a robot has no feelings. It simply identifies inefficient parts of a system and highlights them.  No one would bother wasting an hour of the robot's day crying in its office or complaining about fairness.

So it looks as if the idea of a chained CPI for social security, which Obama was once open to as part of a Grand Bargain, is now off the table in the possible mini bargain to avert the taxation wall greeting us all in the new year if nothing happens in the Congress. What I'm unclear about is whether the sequester would be suspended if a smaller bargain around taxes takes shape. I don't think it should be.

The great advantage of the sequester is that it treats military spending as it does domestic spending, and imposes equivalent cuts on each. Without that kind of pressure, the full weight of the military-industrial complex would push Washington – Democrats and Republicans alike – into leaving the Pentagon alone, and making all the savings in entitlements or (much worse) in discretionary spending already pared to the bone. Now I think entitlements need to be pared back; but I agree with the principle that domestic and military spending should be cut by the same amount. If you throw out the sequester, you throw out that rare moment when the neo-imperial spending binge might be brought under control. I remind you: the Pentagon is today spending twice what it was a decade ago. And I remind you of the following chart which is currently the favorite to win the Dish's Chart of the Year contest:

Should the Pentagon really be exempted from sacrifice, when the sick and the poor and the elderly are all being forced to pay more or get less?

"Street" by George Oppen:

Ah these are the poor,
These are the poor—

Bergen street.

Humiliation,
Hardship…

Nor are they very good  to each other;
It is not that. I want

An end to poverty
As much as anyone

For the sake of intelligence,
‘The conquest of existence’—

It has been said, and is true—

And this is real pain,
Moreover. It is terrible to see the children,

The righteous little girls;
So good, they expect to be so good…

Please consider supporting the Poetry Society of America here.

(From Collected Poems © 1975 by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Photo by Flickr user andrewmalone)

Emily Temple collects break-up letters written by famous authors. Below is a particularly cutting selection from Anaïs Nin to C. L. (Lanny) Baldwin, circa 1945:

The day I discovered your deadness—long ago—my illusion about you died and I knew you could never enter my world, which you wanted so much. Because my world is based on passion, and because you know that it is only with passion that one creates, and you know that my world which you now deride because you couldn’t enter it, made Henry [Miller] a great writer, because you know the other young men you are so jealous of enter a whole world by love and are writing books, producing movies, poems, paintings, composing music.

I am in no need of "insisting" upon being loved. I’m immersed and flooded in this. That is why I am happy and full of power and find friendship pale by comparison. But in the middle of this fiery and marvellous give and take, going out with you was like going out with a priest. The contrast in temperature was too great. So I waited for my first chance to break—not wanting to leave you alone.

Matt Rubinstein traces the fight over copyright all the way back to the 6th century:

The most precious manuscript held by the Royal Irish Academy is RIA MS 12 R 33, a sixth-century book of psalms known as an Cathach (‘The Battler’), or the Psalter of St Columba. It is believed to be the oldest extant Irish psalter, the earliest example of Irish writing – and the world’s oldest pirate copy. According to tradition, St Columba secretly transcribed the manuscript from a psalter belonging to his teacher, St Finian.

Finian discovered the subterfuge, demanded the copy, and brought the dispute before Diarmait, the last pagan king of Ireland. The king decreed that ‘to every cow belongs her calf’, and so the copy of a book belonged to the owner of the original. Columba appealed the decision on the battlefield, and defeated Finian in a bloody clash at Cúl Dreimhne. No trace remains of Finian’s original manuscript, if it ever existed. Only ‘The Battler’ survives.

(Image: A sample of text from the Cathach of St. Columba from Wikimedia)