Month: January 2013

On Hagel, I wrote that “Goldblog made the calculation, staying politically neutral (which is itself a political decision for him to retain access with both the Obama administration and the American Jewish Establishment).” Goldblog objects:

What calculation did I make? I simply stated yesterday morning that it didn’t seem likely that AIPAC would be making a cause of defeating the Hagel nomination. (Later reporting, by Eli Lake and others, confirmed this.)

What political decision did I make? I had already written in favor of Chuck Hagel’s nomination for secretary of defense — I even wrote that his straight talk could be good for Israel to hear. “Maybe, at this point, what we need are American officials who will speak with disconcerting bluntness to Israel about the choices it is making,” is what I wrote, to the displeasure of some in Andrew’s “American Jewish Establishment.” How is this neutral?

I could quibble about the manner and tone of Goldblog’s writing on Hagel, but he’s basically right on this. I was too hasty and unfair. I apologize.

Mike Bebernes shares what it's like:

I hate my meds. They cost me sleep, give me headaches and stifle my appetite. Ritalin, Adderall, and other ADHD pills are classified alongside opiates, methamphetamines, and cocaine as schedule two drugs. Prescriptions can only be written for a maximum of 30 days with no refills allowed. Every time I move, I’m interrogated by a new shrink. I have to wade through the assumption that I’m just going to sell my pills to some overachieving high schooler who’s scared of the S.A.T.

And I do need the medicine. It’s what I hate most of all. Without my pills I am an amputee without his prosthetic. Tedium becomes torture. Ikea becomes Abu Ghraib.

He worked from 1993 to 1999 for the president with the worst legislative gay rights record in history – if you count Clinton's signature on Don't Ask, Don't Tell, DOMA, and the HIV travel and immigration ban. Yet now he preens in the New Yorker as if he is a longtime gay activist who always spoke truth to power. A comparable figure, Bob Hattoy, quit in disgust as he observed Socarides' serial betrayals of gay rights on the inside.

We also have the following memo from Socarides providing talking points for the Clinton administration's war on gay marriage and gay servicemembers – who were fired at rates far higher under Clinton than before. Here are some choice passages from a September 3, 1996 memo, co-written by Socarides and the other member of the Clinton administration whose job it was to screw over the gays and then ask us for more money, George Stephanopoulos:

The President has long opposed gay marriage based on his belief that the institution of marriage should be reserved for unions between one man and one woman. The President strongly believes that gay and lesbian individuals should not be subject to unfair discrimination, which is why he has endorsed legislation outlawing discrimination against gays and lesbians in the workplace. But he does not believe that the federal government should promote gay marriages.

It was the HRC and Gay Establishment's line at the time: "marriage" is a nightmare issue; let's aim for protecting workplaces instead. Two decades later, we have marriage in several states, a critical court ruling looming, and … no employment non-discrimination act. But the point was purely to protect Clinton and the Democrats.

And the fall of 1996 was when Clinton actually ran radio ads in the South (see here for the text) bragging of his opposition to gay marriage as part of a defense of "American values". Initially, Joe Lockhart insisted that the ads would keep running, only to pull them after major protest from gay activists. If I were the gay liaison to a president running ads attacking gay people, I'd quit, wouldn't you? The memo even explicitly threatened that Clinton would sign a bill banning marriage equality – which became DOMA.

While Socarides was the gay liaison, the Clinton administration also stabbed us marriage activists in the front as we walked into Congressional hearings by announcing that morning that they had no qualms at all about the constitutionality of DOMA. And here's what Socarides wrote about the core civil rights issue of our time:

The president believes that raising this issue now is divisive and unnecessary and is calculated only to score political points at the expense of this community. The president believes it is an attempt to divert the American people from the urgent need to confront our challenges together… the President does not believe that the federal government should recognize gay marriage [and] he does not believe it is appropriate for scarce federal resources to be devoted to providing spousal benefits for partners in gay and lesbian relationships.

Now, look: I'm glad that Richard Socarides has evolved from his channeling this contempt for gay relationships. I would just ask of him what he has asked of Chuck Hagel: a public apology for the damage he helped do to gay people and people with HIV as he defended Democratic party power against the lives of gay people and their spouses.

Morgan's interview with Jones has been making the rounds:

I watched it with some disbelief and recognition. In Jones, you have so much rage you have to wonder where it comes from. The rage is about an abstract issue – the ideology and rationales that have sprung up to defend the availability of assault weapons for "hunting" – but that doesn't make it any the less horrifying. The entire interview is laced with the threat of violence, and the ugliest of nativism. More interesting: Jones has absolutely no control over himself. TNC reflects on the exchange:

I think the fact that Jones responds to a disagreement over government policy by telling his interlocutor "well how 'bout we take this outside" is illustrative. Jones spends much of the interview ranting about the evils of government use of force, without much attention to the kind of individual violence with which he threatened Morgan. More accurately, Jones believes that the only answer to such violence is more — presumably defensive — violence, though his pose makes him a poor advocate for such a position.

That's putting it nicely. After watching the interview, Rod Liddle dubs Morgan the "best interviewer in the world." Really? For just sitting there and allowing this lunatic to mouth off at the top of his lungs about Mao and Hitler? Allow me to agree with Weigel:

Morgan implies that Jones is simply ignorant — "Do you understand the difference between 11,000 and 35?" But the two men are talking past each other. Jones's job is to blow up and shame a buffoonish foreigner. Morgan's job is to make an example of the worst possible advocate for gun rights, and he doesn't even pull that off. And if he thinks this gimmicky crap is going to advance a gun control debate, then it's possible — horrifying, but possible — that we've been overrating his intelligence.

This was a ratings stunt which in no way engaged Jones or even interviewed him. If such a person acts in such a way on a television interview, you end the interview. Allahpundit defends Morgan's approach:

Dave Weigel says the segment was actually proof of how lame an interviewer Morgan is since he failed to really challenge Jones at any point. I dunno. The segment was designed to be a freak show that would hopefully alienate fencesitters from the gun-rights cause. Why interrupt the star attraction during his performance?

Because Morgan is a journalist and an interviewer, not the impresario of a freak show?

Hearing, according to Seth Horowitz, author of the new book, The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind. Molly Webster summarizes it. She notes that individuals "can recognize a sound in 0.05 seconds":

Why this need for auditory speed? It's our evolutionarily-shaped emergency response system. It let our ancestors hear a twig snap in the woods at night, when all was supposed to be quiet and they couldn't see. Yet, for most of us, we're wired to tune out non-essential sound, so the world doesn't feel like a sensory overload.

And noise directly affects human behavior:

Did you know that when you are in a bar, all the noise — the clash of glasses, yell of a bartender, and couple fighting in the corner; the jokes of friends, slam of the door, and music jamming from the jukebox — activates our body's flight or fight system? In response to that, the body wants to do something, anything, to manage the adrenaline that's pumping through its veins. In this case, that means spend money. Eat more. Get another round.

Waldman asks the apologists to provide one:

Can you give a definition of torture that wouldn't include waterboarding, stress positions, and sleep deprivation? I have no idea what such a definition might be, and I have to imagine that if they had any idea they would have offered one. Because here's the definition of torture you'd think everyone could agree on: Torture is the infliction of extreme suffering for the purpose of extracting information or a confession. That's not too hard to understand. The point is to create such agony that the subject will do anything, including give you information he'd prefer not to give you, to make the suffering stop. That's the purpose of waterboarding, that's the purpose of sleep deprivation (which, by the way, has been described by those subjected to it in places like the Soviet gulag to be worse than any physical pain they had ever experienced), and that's the purpose of stress positions. The "enhanced" techniques that were used weren't meant to trick detainees or win them over, they were meant to make them suffer until they begged for mercy.

Exactly. Torture is defined as breaking someone in order to get information. Cheney's torture program bragged of "breaking" people. John Yoo even bragged of crushing a child's testicles if necessary – which would, in his view, be perfectly legal for a president to authorize. The minute you apply mental and physical suffering sufficiently severe to force someone to "break", it's torture. Of course it is. And remember that the Convention Against Torture that Ronald Reagan signed (what a brutal betrayal of Reaganism were Cheney's war crimes!) made it clear that it was not just banning torture as defined, but anything that came even near torture. This was the America Cheney threw away. Because he panicked.

Seth Stevenson reviews Stephen Coles' The Anatomy of Type, which provides a close look at the design and background of 100 different typefaces:

You’ll discover that Times New Roman was released in 1932 (credit for its design remains in dispute!), created for The Times of London newspaper. We learn that its defining features include long, sharp serifs; very wide upper-case letters; and a comparatively small dot above its i. Coles suggests it is a good choice for a "conventional office-document look" but that Le Monde Journal—commissioned for the French newspaper Le Monde in 1997—is a "fresher alternative."

For Stevenson, the book "provides a glorious opportunity to taxonimize another everyday visual encounter." He claims that now, as he peruses "the text of subway ads and pasted-up flyers," that he delights, "in assessing their glyph widths, their stroke weights, their ascender heights."

(Image from James and Karla Murray's  New York Nights, a book Maria Popova calls "a striking, lavish street-level tour of New York City’s typographic neon mesmerism, revealed through the illuminated storefronts of some of the city’s most revered bars, diners, speakeasies, theaters, and other epicenters of public life.")

Kevin Drum has recently examined the consequences of lead exposure. Dave Roberts looks at toxic substances more generally and identifies a pattern:

We start using something before we understand whether it’s safe. We begin to discover it’s not safe. Industry obscures the science and viciously battles off regulation for as long as possible, forecasting economic doom. Lots of people get sick and die while they do so. Finally some regulations are put in place. The costs of complying turn out to be lower than anyone predicted. The benefits turn out to be much greater than anyone predicted. The pollutant turns out to be more harmful than originally thought. Despite all of the above, industry continues battling efforts to further reduce the pollutant, while claiming credit for the benefits of reducing it as much as they were forced to.

Over and over and over, this story plays out. Yet with each new pollution fight, it’s as though we’ve never had all the previous ones. (See: chlorofluorocarbons, mercury, smog, phthalates, etc.)

Drum adds that this is "especially true of compounds like lead, that primarily affect children."

A reader writes:

Regarding the commenter who is upset that the Huffington Post's obituary of Huell Howser didn't mention that he was gay: shouldn't it be the objective of the gay and lesbian community to live in a society where it no longer matters that they are gay and lesbian?  Shouldn't it be the objective of people who believe in equality and the same rights for all that we no longer have these labels? Whether it is African-American, gay or straight, Catholic or Muslim, the never-ending need for labels is what drives us apart rather than together. 

Another writes:

People can say what they will about Huell Hower’s television work, but there is little doubt he was a unique embodiment of California. During the L.A. riots in 1992, I witnessed Howser produce a revolver and personally guard my neighborhood Radio Shack in the Larchmont district. He was just fed up with people wrecking his city and practically dared anyone to try and steal a boombox. That incident cemented my esteem for him. Yeah his show was corny, but he was a guide to everything great and ordinary about the Golden State, and I’m glad I got to take his tour. 

Another sends the above video:

Comedian James Adomian has made his Huell Howser impression famous through Comedy Bang Bang. In the podcast, Adomian's Howser moves consistently with every appearance from hail-fellow-well-met to slaughtering avenging angel. Here's a sample. [Above] is a Funny or Die video of Adomian performing as Howser – just homage, no slaughtering. And here is a NYT profile of Adomian, "Gay Male Comics Await The Spotlight."