Month: February 2013

Neil Freeman takes a novel approach to fixing the Electoral College:

The fundamental problem of the electoral college is that the states of the United States are too disparate in size and influence. The largest state is 66 times as populous as the smallest and has 18 times as many electoral votes. This allows for Electoral College results that don’t match the popular vote. To remedy this issue, the Electoral Reform Map redivides the fifty United States into 50 states of equal population. The 2010 Census records a population of 308,745,538 for the United States, which this map divides into 50 states, each with a population of about 6,175,000.

(via TPM)

Henry Blodget thinks that the drive for companies to be “mobile only” or “mobile first” is misguided. He advocates a “mobile, too” approach:

With the explosive growth of smartphones, tablets, and super-sleek laptops, mobile usage continues to grow as a percentage of overall Internet usage. In some countries, moreover, smartphones have already vaulted past laptops and desktops to become the dominant personal-computing device. In these countries, companies should obviously focus on mobile first.

But in the developed world, which already has a massive installed base of desktops and laptops, bigger screens are still extremely important. And they are likely to remain so, even when everyone who uses them also owns a smartphone and tablet.

Cory Bergman responds:

[N]ews organizations should shift to a mobile-first approach immediately. This doesn’t mean we ignore the desktop, but prioritize mobile over it — make mobile the default everything. When brainstorming a new product, start with a phone or tablet design and work backwards to the desktop. Set performance goals based on mobile performance over desktop.

Philip Jenkins examines the causes of Pope Benedict’s failure to make significant progress toward his goal of re-evangelizing Europe. The most important reason why? Benedict’s strategy of retrenchment and relying on the most fanatical movements within the Church:

[T]rue reconversion, Ratzinger believed, could only be achieved by small, dedicated groups of highly active and committed believers, like the small, super-loyalist movements that emerged during the sixteenth century, chiefly in Spain and Italy. The Jesuits and Opus Dei are the best-known examples, but also influential were the Italian Focolare, the Sant’Egidio Community, and Communion and Liberation, Spain’s Neocatechumenate, and the Mexican-founded Legionaries of Christ. So were charismatic offshoots like Rinnovamento nello Spirito Santo (“Renewal in the Holy Spirit”) and the Emmanuel Community. Like the early Jesuits, such groups demanded extremely high levels of participation and activism, and some were accused of cult-like behavior. Focolare, for example, subjects members to ritualized public confessions and retreats that serve as a kind of total immersion in the group and its doctrines. Still, such movements spread widely, partly because they offered such a high role for lay activists, especially women.

Both Ratzinger and John Paul II saw these movements as the leaven, the yeast, that could energize and restore a Christian Europe that that could once again play its full part in the global Church. By the mid-1980s, John Paul was citing them as a beacon of hope, even the start of a modern-day Pentecost, and this wholehearted support continued when Benedict took office in 2005.

You see now why it was so convenient to overlook some of the abuses that some of these groups engaged in. They seemed to be the only new energy in the Western church. And you see now also a little of the desperation – as Wojtila and Ratzinger tried to rescue the Church from its death-spiral in Europe. Of course, tolerating the abuses of, say, Maciel, was, in the end, utterly self-defeating. You look desperate and you become complicit in rank evil.

This wasn’t a strategy of engagement with the modern world, with its great intellectual advances and deep moral problems; it’s a neurotic desire for purity. It aims at convincing no one. As Jenkins intimates, it replaces dialogue with cult-like obedience. Loyalty replaces love. It is the practical corollary to the lost promise of Joseph Ratzinger and did nothing in the end but speed the demise of an already dying Church.

It reminds me of how the GOP thought the Tea Party would save it. But nothing will save Catholicism but an openness to truth and a love of others. It’s there – throughout the real church, which exists everywhere the people of God come together. It just needs re-connecting with its institutional guardians.

(Photo: the Vatican struck by a lightning bolt the day Benedict announced his resignation. By Getty Images.)

James Serpell wants to expand the gene pool for purebred dogs:

Nowadays, many breeds are highly inbred and express an extraordinary variety of genetic defects as a consequence: defects ranging from anatomical problems, like hip dysplasia, that cause chronic suffering, to impaired immune function and loss of resistance to fatal diseases like cancer. The only sensible way out of this genetic dead-end is through selective out-crossing with dogs from other breeds, but this is considered anathema by most breeders since it would inevitably affect the genetic “purity” of their breeds.

Waldman charts it:

At the beginning of last year, the armed forces had 7,500 drone aircraft, meaning that one out of every three flying machines in the military was a drone (though the majority are the small, hand-launched kind). The Pentagon is considering scaling back on procurement, on the theory that it has about enough drones for the near future. But that doesn’t mean they’re becoming less important; quite the contrary. The military has even created a medal you can win for piloting a drone; it will rank above the Bronze Star, despite the fact that you can earn it without any risk to life or limb.

Watch now on the Mediatwits podcast, along with Ana Marie Cox, Mónica Guzmán and Felix Salmon, moderated by Mark Glaser. We’re chatting about new media models and the SOTU, among other topics.

In the wake of the recent meteor strike, Fisher keeps tabs on Russian conspiracy theories:

When I had coffee this morning with a fellow journalist who was born in Ukraine and had just returned from a reporting trip to Moscow, she told me that the one thing I should keep in mind about public reaction to the meteor that streamed over central Russia today is that superstition runs deep in that country. The predicted Mayan “apocalypse” in December, for example, was widely reported in Russian media as a seriously plausible event, she said.

It turns out that she may have been on to something. The site RussiaSlam, which monitors Russian social media, is gathering Web commentary from within the country. So far, theories include the biblical apocalypse and an alien invasion.

A Russian politician is promoting another, insane conspiracy theory – that the meteor wasn’t a meteor but “Americans testing their new weapons.”

Wired is hosting a symposium analyzing the military strategy of the Battle of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. Adam Elkus cites the failed mission as a classic case of imperial overreach:

The Empire had no local partners on Hoth, and Vader commanded a large personal armada that was nonetheless barely adequate for the daunting task of completely blocking off both Hoth’s surface and orbital expanse. A much larger ground force with air superiority met with similarly subpar results during the Clone War’s Battle of Geonosis. In contrast, all the Rebel Alliance needed to do was evacuate its elites and reconstitute its forces elsewhere. As Graham Jenkins points out in this roundtable, the Rebels deserve credit for their tenacious — and effective — delaying battle.

Ackerman’s analysis is here.

Pareene mocks the tactics of the anti-Hagel media:

So, in case you were wondering, if you want to viciously smear someone, all you have to do is send a stupid lie to a Breitbart guy and he will publish it and then everyone in the conservative movement will repeat it. Just type, “Dear Ben Shapiro I heard Chuck Hagel cashed a check for ten million Soviet rubles from a group called ‘THE ALLIANCE OF EVIL’” into your AOL mail program and I guarantee Sen. Ted Cruz will be demanding answers within a week.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Rubin, who is an employee of the Washington Post, is just lazily tweeting McCarthyite guilt-by-association nonsense about how Hagel once gave a speech to a group that, on a different occasion, defended a person who said a bad thing about Israel. “#extreme,” she adds, in case you were unsure whether or not she thought Chuck Hagel was extreme.

The Greater Israel Lobby never quits.