Month: February 2013

Josh Barro identifies the main problem with Rubio’s speech:

The Republican Party’s problem isn’t the messenger; it’s the broad economic message. To fix the message, Republicans need to be for smart government. They need to signal that they have a serious policy agenda that considers programs and regulations on a case-by-case basis, rather than just demagoguing the government. They need a real agenda on health care and jobs rather than just opportunistic opposition to anything the president does.

Michael Grunwald had the same thought:

If Republicans believe that they lost in 2012 because Romney was a boring rich white guy who alienated Hispanics, they got to see a charismatic Cuban-American with humble roots but otherwise indistinguishable positions on every issue except for immigration.

McArdle, on the other hand, calls Rubio’s speech “the most effective SOTU response I’ve ever seen”:

I’m not grading the policy content of the speech, mind you–though as an aside, let’s just say that I’m not a fan of false claims that the GOP can get the economy up to 4% growth by unleashing the awesome power of the free market.  But Rubio mounted the most effective response I’ve seen to the President’s attacks on Republicans as uncaring obstructionists, and he delivered it well.

Tomasky felt that Rubio lacked gravitas:

His voice doesn’t have enough depth to it. He looks sort of young, as many have observed, but he sounds younger, and that’s the issue. He comes across like the proverbial substitute teacher. You know you can throw spitballs in his class, and he’s not going to have the authority to make you stop.

Ed Morrissey liked the speech:

[A]t least rhetorically, Marco Rubio took the correct path in responding to the usual SOTU laundry-list speech.  In his rebuttal, Rubio stayed away from offering the Republican legislative agenda, and instead stuck to the Republican and conservative philosophies of governing and economics.

And Friedersdorf heard nothing new from Rubio:

What Rubio does best is movement conservative boilerplate, so that’s mostly what he does, but he doesn’t make any effort to freshen up the ideas, or even to freshen up the rhetoric he uses to express the ideas. When he starts talking, it’s like when the Dave Matthews Band song comes on, the one you liked the very first time you heard it 15 years ago, but then the guy across the hall played it on repeat for all of sophomore year, and now when the lyrics play you can’t even conceive of them as words with a meaning.

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A reader writes:

As an orthodox, born-again Christian, I find Inhofe’s statement breathtakingly crazy. All those years when Israel was in exile in Babylon, those centuries between Rome and the establishment of the modern political state of Israel – the word of God wasn’t true then? Does he realize that he has just said that humans possess the power to negate the word and promises of God? I believe that might be heresy; if not, it is at least heterodoxy.

It might also be fun to point out to Inhofe that the Palestinians are also descendants of Abram, via Ishmael, so regardless of which ethnic group is in power, the land remains in Abrahamic hands.

Another writes:

I think Inhofe is being incredibly duplicitous when he cites the book of Genesis as reason for supporting Israel and argues that we should support Israel because God decreed Israel belongs to the Jews. The real reason fundamentalist Christians support Israel is not in the first book of the Bible but the last book – Revelations. Revelations (supposedly) prophecies that the Second Coming of Christ will be preceded by the return of Israel to the Jews and by war in the Middle East. Fundamentalists support Israel today, as well as military action against Iran, Iraq, and the Palestinians, because they believe the Second Coming is imminent. See, for example, this piece in the conservative City Journal.

Scientists in Vancouver have engineered a computer that can “reconstruct lost languages using the sounds uttered by those who speak their modern successors”:

Reconstructing ancient languages can reveal details of our ancient history. Looking at when the word for “wheel” diverges in the family tree of European languages helps us date the human settlement of different parts of the continent, for instance.

Evan Fleischer considers the porous lines of the world’s languages. From his extensive list of words:

[I]f we want to … use a word that means the same in both Polish and Czech, we get “Wyrok,” as in, “sentence, verdict”; and if we’re looking for a word that exists simultaneously in Czech and Hawaiian—Czech being the mother tongue of Kundera and the stunning Josef Koudelka—we get “pukowi,” as in, “birch tree”; and if we want a word that simultaneously exists in Hawaiian and Spanish, we use “paniolo,” as in, “cowboy.”

Armin Rosen visits Rawabi, the “West Bank’s first Palestinian-designed planned city”, which has the potential to spawn jobs and development in the West Bank:

Rawabi represents something totally new — a visionary Palestinian-directed private sector project, with support from both Israeli businesses and a major Arab government. It has the potential to shift the conversation on the region’s future on both sides of the Green Line. It could convince Palestinians — and the rest of the world — that the future of the West Bank shouldn’t be shackled to Ramallah or Jerusalem’s vacillating willingness to hash out fundamental issues. It could prove that there’s an appetite, both among Palestinian consumers and foreign donors, for the creation of a social and economic existence in the West Bank that’s de-coupled, insomuch as currently possible, from the Middle East’s tense and labyrinthine politics.

Here’s hoping. I don’t think the Good Friday Accords that finally ended the worst of the conflict in Ireland would have happened without the astonishing economic growth of the Republic back in the days of post-Euro euphoria. Prosperity always helps compromise along.

(Photo by Armin Rosen)

Bernstein thinks “it’s ridiculous to claim that there’s never been a filibuster against a cabinet nomination before; every single nominee that Barack Obama has sent up has been subject to 60 votes”:

Everyone covering the Senate needs to understand that Republican are requiring 60 votes for everything; that they’ve been doing so since January 2009; that prior to 2009, filibusters were frequent (since January 1993) but not universal; that very few Republicans have voted yes on cloture but no on the underlying substance on anything since January 2009; and that the name for requiring 60 votes is “filibuster.”

Felix Gillette covers Snapchat, the app that deletes a photo seconds after the receiver views it:

[Viktor] Mayer-Schönberger [author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age] argues that all information created online should come with customizable expiration dates. Not every piece of data would have to expire after a few seconds as photos on Snapchat do. The key, says Mayer-Schönberger, is to include some form of a self-destruct button in everything created online and to give consumers the power to tinker with the settings from the outset.

Michael Scherer expects to see more tools like this emerge:

Technology has created an enormous burden on all of us. Over time, more companies will move into this space, selling not just a way for us to connect to each other–a technology that long ago left novelty and became a commodity–but a way for us better protect our connections by eliminating their trail. (Facebook already has a Snapchat mimic, called Poke.) There is no good reason that emails you wrote three years ago should be so hard to delete, or still be living on the servers of your friends’ email clients.

Previous Dish on Snapchat here. It sure would have saved me some acute embarrassment a decade and a bit ago.

According to Peter Elbow:

People who care about good language tend to assume that casual spoken language is full of chaos and error. I shared this belief till I did some substantial research into the linguistics of speech. There’s a surprising reason why we — academics and well-educated folk — should hold this belief: we are the greatest culprits. It turns out that our speech is the most incoherent. …

[W]e drift into sentence interruptus: a phrase is left dangling while we silently muse — and we never return to finish it. When we academics were in graduate school, we were trained to write badly (no one put it this way of course) because every time we wrote X, our teacher always commented, “But have you considered Y? Don’t you see that Y completely contradicts what you write here.” “Have you considered” is the favorite knee-jerk response of academics to any idea. As a result, we learn as students to clog up our writing with added clauses and phrases to keep them from being attacked.

Nassim Taleb urges skepticism when assessing the claims of Big Data miners. He warns that big data “may mean more information, but it also means more false information”:

[B]ig data means anyone can find fake statistical relationships, since the spurious rises to the surface. This is because in large data sets, large deviations are vastly more attributable to variance (or noise) than to information (or signal). It’s a property of sampling: In real life there is no cherry-picking, but on the researcher’s computer, there is. Large deviations are likely to be bogus.