Warming Glow reads the latest ratings for NBC:
In plain English, that means that no matter how you measure it, Jay Leno is performing worse as the host of “The Tonight Show” than Conan O’Brien did. And Leno doesn’t even have the disadvantage of having Leno as a lead-in. Although I wouldn’t put that idea past NBC.
Meanwhile, Conan the Comedian is enjoying life on the road.
(Image via Laughing Squid)
Fred Kaplan's article on the McChrystal dust-up is worth reading. He encourages Obama to also can both the U.S. ambassador, Gen. Karl Eikenberry, and Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. A taste:
Petraeus…gains enormous leverage, should he decide to use it. A year ago, Obama, at the urging of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, relieved Gen. David McKiernan of command in Afghanistan in order to hire Gen. McChrystal, who seemed more suitable for the new strategy. Obama would find it extremely difficult to fire Petraeus, who is much more of a household name, a year hence, even if he had good reason to do so.
That's Ricks' view too.
A reader writes:
My brother does a fair amount of work in the game industry. For a military style game, they hired a former Delta Force soldier, for technical advice, who sat down with my brother at a bar and showed him private snapshots taken during operations in the field. The idea of looking at the photos was to create the most realistic, current look of our most elite soldiers. My brother noticed the weapons of course, but then looking closer at the photos he saw a good many of them were wearing t-shirts. He asked, “Do those t-shirts say “Team America?”
The Delta Force soldier said nothing. He did, however, wear a shit-eating grin.
Tyler Cowen is skeptical of them:
I'm not sure if these places will still be going in three years' time. Part of the problem is if you're a customer and what you pay is voluntary, you're under pressure to pay a lot of money. You do it once to prove to yourself and others how charitable you are, but how many people go back 17 times? I would find it a burden — my reputation is on the line. What if I only pay $ 27 instead of $ 34? What does my date think? What does my wife think? You end up wanting to feel liberated and just paying a listed cash price. I think there's no way to solve that problem.
Ruy Teixeira continues to warn (pdf) Republicans about looming demographic challenges. Tom Schaller summarizes:
The nature of the GOP's demographic-electoral problem is three-fold. First, the challenge of trying to evolve and adapt is itself limited by demographics because the GOP's older and whiter residual white minority coalition is simply less amenable to the sort of changes it would take to modernize the party. Second, so many of the figures within the party who might be able to lead a center-right revival have been beaten in recent cycles, with the old Ford/Dole/Rockefeller wing decimated by the 2006 and 2008 cycles. (Relatedly, it doesn't help when people like Frum are cast out from their intellectual circles.) Finally, it is simply not in the nature of conservatism to foment change or be out in front of demographic and social changes: Conservatism works best as a reaction to–not necessarily reactionary, but a reaction nonetheless–to oncoming, rapid changes.
Andrew Gelman throws a couple grains of salt at Teixeira's analysis.
Drezner daydreams:
Most approaches predict that the living dead would have an unequal effect on different governments. Powerful states would be more likely to withstand an army of flesh-eating ghouls. The plague of the undead would join the roster of threats that disproportionately affect the poorest and weakest countries.
The different international relations theories also provide a much greater variety of possible outcomes than the Hollywood zombie canon. Traditional zombie narratives in film and fiction are quick to get to the apocalypse. The theoretical approaches presented here, however, suggest that in the real world there would be a vigorous policy response to the menace of the living dead. Realism predicts an eventual live-and-let-live arrangement between the undead and everyone else. Liberals predict an imperfect but nevertheless useful counterzombie regime. Neoconservatives see the defeat of the zombie threat after a long, existential struggle. These scenarios suggest that maybe, just maybe, the zombie canon's dominant narrative of human extinction is overstated.
Apparently he's working on a book along these lines.
Give it a personality:
When we see the device as having a few human attributes, we start treating it like a human, and not like a tool. So here's my advice for designers of mediocre gadgets: Give them voices. Give us an excuse to endow them with agency. Because once we see them as humanesque, and not just as another thing, we're more likely to develop a fondness for their failings.
The Dish 