Category: The Dish

If you like this kind of thing:

… then you’ll love the rest of this site.

By Patrick
Historians really don’t like George Bush:

A Pew Research Center poll of 109 leading historians found that 61 percent of them rank Bush as “worst ever” among U.S. presidents. Bush’s key competition comes from Buchanan, apparently, and a further 2 percent of the sample puts Bush right behind Buchanan as runner-up for “worst ever.” 96 percent of the respondents place the Bush presidency in the bottom tier of American presidencies. And was his presidency (it’s a bit wishful to speak of his presidency in the past tense–after all there are several more months left to go) a success or failure? On that score the numbers are still more resounding: 98 percent label it a “failure.”

This marks a dramatic deterioration for Bush. Previously he wasn’t viewed in the most positive terms, but there was a consensus that he wasn’t the “worst of the worst” either. That was in the spring of 2004. In the meantime, Bush has established himself as the torture president, the basis for his invasion of Iraq has been exposed as a fraud, the Iraq War itself has gone disastrously, the nation’s network of alliances has faded, and the economy has gone into a tailspin–not to mention the bungled handling of relief for victims of hurricane Katrina. In 2004, only 12 percent of historians were ready to place Bush dead last.

By Patrick
Unlike coffee, blogging may be hazardous for your health:

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

(Hat tip: Karl)

By Patrick
Coming soon:

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

Harlem, New York, 2.30 pm.

By Patrick
Julio Gonzalez Altamirano discusses the controversial new Absolut ad (above) showing the west as part of Mexico:

A vodka company created a nationalist advertisement for the Mexican marketplace. The internets allowed an American audience to gaze upon said advertisement. And voila! An opportunity for anxiety, anger and shock to pour out on the different sides of all the issues our neighbor to the South conjures up: the growth of the Latino population, illegal immigration concerns, imperialism, the presence of the Spanish language in public square and so on.

I certainly dread the idiotic conflations that seem to be dominating the side boycotting the vodka company. Conflations such as confusing Latin America with Mexico. Or arguing that American Latinos are essentially an un-meltable mass of recent arrivals somehow magically coordinating to take back the Southwest for the Mexican government (I guess I didn’t get that memo.) And ultimately, I am just not persuaded that a liquor-selling multinational thinks enhanced profitability will result from actually fomenting a war or domestic revolt in the world’s largest economy.[…]

There is something utterly disingenuous about a Swedish vodka brand playing on Mexican nationalism with an ad that features English copy…there is definitely something unappealing about a corporation exploiting the real resentments present in developing country as a way of establishing brand appeal.

By Patrick
Former OLC employee Tim Wu:

[Yoo] did the opposite of probably the most important thing that the OLC is supposed to do: tell the government what it can’t legally do. He, instead, twisted the law to give his client, the White House, the answer they wanted.

The lawyer is always at risk of becoming his client’s lapdog. Legal boot-licking may be a constant temptation in legal practice, and it is something that happens too often, but it’s obvious to any lawyer that it is wrong. And the higher the stakes, the worse the sin. Yoo, when tested, failed completely.

By Patrick
Greenwald looks at media coverage of Yoo in relation to other stories:

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

"Yoo and torture" – 102
"Mukasey and 9/11" — 73
"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" — 16
"Obama and bowling" — 1,043
"Obama and Wright" — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
"Obama and patriotism" – 1,607
"Clinton and Lewinsky" — 1,079

By Patrick
Ernest Weekley’s 1924 article on the role of the lexicographer provides context for this post. An excerpt:

We now know that the duty of the lexicographer is to record and not to criticize, that refined speech and elegant speech are the delusions of a mistaken optimism, and that the only people who now speak English with any approach to historical correctness are the few surviving agricultural laborers who are old enough to have escaped the devastating effects of the Elementary Education Act. Johnson’s Dictionary went far to accomplish, in the eighteenth century, what the Italian and French Academies had unsuccessfully attempted in the seventeenth. It is, of course, as hopeless for the lexicographer to try to stem the flowing tide of new words and expressions as it was for Mrs. Partington to keep out the Atlantic with a mop, but Johnson’s authority was so unparalleled that Boswell’s description of him as ‘the man who had conferred stability on the language of his country’ had, for some time at any rate, an element of truth.

By Patrick
Alexis Madrigal has some highlights from this year’s International Exhibition of Inventions. Denis Thevenin didn’t make the cut.