Year: 2013

It took a while but even Charles Krauthammer now agrees with my 2007 assessment of Obama and asks where I’ve been these past four years. The column is full of hyperbole and Manichean crudity … and no conservative understanding of how political ideology has to adapt to the times. But it’s good to see him finally realize that this suit was never empty. And that Obama has a chance to do to the GOP what Reagan did to the Democrats: drag them back to the saner center.

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Jennifer Rubin has been surprised that “Rubio has gotten favorable to glowing reviews from previously hard-line opponents of comprehensive immigration reform.” Larison wonders if it will last:

[T]here are a lot of movement conservatives that like Rubio and they are trying to protect him and his future political prospects from a damaging backlash. Instead of vilifying him as they would McCain, these movement conservative fans present him as a “problem-solver,” which is a term that they might normally ridicule when it involves supporting policies that they otherwise reject. Things may change once there is legislation to be debated and voted on. The noteworthy thing about the movement conservative response to Rubio’s immigration proposal is that his status as a conservative folk hero has so far shielded him from the hostility and criticism that he would normally be facing.

A former half-term governor will no longer be appearing on Fox News. Her usefulness for the propaganda machine had apparently passed its expiration date.

A female Marine writes:

Maybe I’m in the wrong here, but I don’t think the big challenge will be getting women physically ready; it will be getting grunts to accept us. The Lioness and FET programs were great, but (speaking from second-hand knowledge here) any patrol that expected contact left its girls behind the wire. I cannot be the only female Marine who has walked into a shop of men and gotten an eye roll. Or spoken to like I had a mental disability. Or, occasionally, called honey or baby.I have also worked with grunts. And they for one do not think we can do it, and don’t want us there. I’m just a lowly enlisted lady jarhead and maybe things are different on the officer side (I suspect they are). But, if enlisted men don’t want women among them, they certainly will not be led by one. Maybe if male and female recruits were taught from day to respect each other at boot camp this mentality could change.

Continue reading Females At The Front, Ctd

Nate Cohn thinks Virginia’s electoral vote changes, which might not pass, could easily backfire:

Splitting Virginia’s electoral votes could actually force Republicans to win additional “blue” states. If Republicans win all of Virginia’s 13 electoral votes under the current system (together with Florida and Ohio), they’re just one state, like Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado, or Pennsylvania, away. Under the congressional district proposal, Republicans would probably only win 9 of Virginia’s 13 electoral votes if they won the state. As a result of losing those 4 electoral votes, Republicans might need to win two of Nevada, Iowa, and New Hampshire instead of just one, at least if the GOP also lost Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Wisconsin.

But, if other states join Virginia, the calculus would change:

On its own, the Virginia plan won’t do much to reshape the electoral map. But the combination of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin could be the ticket for Mr. Rubio or Mr. Bush to win the presidency while losing Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and every battleground state other than Florida and North Carolina.

Meanwhile, Molly Ball interviews Jordan Gehrke, the political strategist plotting with Ken Blackwell “to raise money for an effort to propose similar electoral reforms in states across the country.” Earlier Dish on the GOP’s shenanigans hereand here.

Researchers recently used DNA to perfectly encode, transmit and reconstruct all of Shakespeare’s sonnets and a portion of MLK’s”I Have A Dream” speech, among other things. Ed Yong runs down the advantages this method has over your average thumb drive:

For a start, it takes up far less space. Goldman’s files came to 757 kilobytes and he could barely see them. For a more dramatic comparison, CERN, Europe’s big particle physics laboratory, currently stores around 90 petabytes of data (a petabyte is a million gigabytes) on around 100 tape drives. Goldman’s method could fit that into 41 grams of DNA. That’s a cupful. …

Continue reading The Ultimate Data Compression

Alyssa is disappointed that J.J. Abrams will direct the next Star Wars. She notes that major movie franchises “are opportunities for writers and directors to exert enormous cultural influence”:

There should be debates about what it means to have extraordinarily powerful people emerge in our society, which is why I’m glad that Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel apparently is going to explore a much more ambivalent reaction to the rise of superheroes than either The Avengers or Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies ever contemplated. There should be arguments about what our future is going to look like, which is one of the reasons Abrams’ Star Trek, which was a dramatic retreat from the socially engaged tradition of the franchise, was a disappointment even as it was highly entertaining.

And while Star Wars is a space opera, it’s also always been about totalitarianism, religious extremism, torture, and the moral value of political engagement, too. The source and meaning of mystery isn’t the only issue worth considering. And white, male geek gods aren’t the only people with profound investment in these franchises, and the way they express these questions.