Hipster PDA

You may have heard of the Hipster PDA: a stack of 3x5 cards held together with a binder clip. This thing is, seriously, pretty much a movement. I myself am a Fussy Hipster PDA user, in the form of spiffy sideways 3x5 cards in a little leather pocket portfolio from Levenger.

I bring it up because a major office supply manufacturer now sells it as a product.

Geography is destiny

Remember this from 2004?

Now this year:

I offer links back to reflections from 2004 by me and by Digby.

Beating the bushes

In case I haven't already mentioned this to any interested readers, the place where I work, Pure Digital Technologies (makers of the spiffy, spiffy Flip video camera) is looking for a product manager, an interaction designer, and visual designer. We're downtown in San Francisco and a mostly civilized working environment. Drop me a line if you have a lead — or are one.

Runaway

For most of 1985, my favourite song was Del Shannon's 1961 hit “Runaway”. So for over twenty years I've been puzzling over the question what the hell is that instrument from the break in the middle of the song?

It sounds like a synth, but that can't be right; this was 1961.

It turns out that yeah, it is a synthesizer, homemade by keyboardist Max Crook, which he calls the “musitron”.

Max developed the Musitron out of a variety of musical instruments and other electronic and electric devices. The initial keyboard is a clavioline, a french organ developed by Constant Martin in 1947. The clavioline is very similar in sound to that of the ondioline, developed by Georges Jenny, also of France. Crook created the Musitron by incorporating the majority of the clavioline, but being an electronics genius, Max was able to further enhance the clavioline by expanding the octave range to infinity (beyond human hearing). He inserted extra resistors, pots, and capacitors. The clavioline also lacked reverb. It was a dry sounding monophonic organ. Crook developed a spring echo reverberation unit custom-built from garden gate springs and other mechanical parts to create an echo chamber which, though crude, produced an amazing and natural echo sound resembing the acoustics of a tile-plated bathroom.

Even without the mystery, I still love the song.

BSDs vs quants

Brad Hicks on the institutional / social / psychological dynamics in financial institutions that led to the mortgage crisis ... and other past breakdowns.

When Michael Lewis was first hired, right out of college, as a salesman at Solomon Brothers, his instinctive belief that things have an actual value was something that got relentlessly mocked by his coworkers. In his early days on Wall Street, they explained to him that there is a pecking order in the financial services industry. For a variety of cultural and regulatory reasons, investment firms are required to have people working for them who are experts at calculating the actual value of an investment based on current mathematical models and best available data. Their department is called “Quantitative Analysis,” and the people who work there are derisively called “quants.” Quants have the lowest prestige jobs in the entire industry, draw remarkably low salaries considering the level of education you have to have to get those jobs and the long hours and the awful working conditions, and Lewis says that they are routinely and cruelly and ruthlessly snubbed by the other half of the business. Those are the people whose specialty is sales. And at the absolute top of the pecking order, Lewis taught us, are the people who were called the Big Swinging Dicks, people who demonstrated the superiority of their manhood by being able to sell anything, however worthless the quants said it was, for however much the company needed it to sell for.

How does a BSD make his money? First, he starts by asking, “what do I have available to me to sell?” How much of it is there? Now divide that into his assigned sales goal. Add in the cost to sell it. That tells him what the thing he has to sell has to be worth; for it not to be worth that is flatly unacceptable. Which leads to the next, and last, and hardest part: what lies does he have to tell to himself to convince himself that it really is worth what he needs to sell it for, and how does he fool himself into believing his own lies? That's the only use that any BSD has for a quant: once in a very, very rare while a quant says something to him that, if he ignores the caveats and footnotes and fine details, he can twist into a justification. The quant doesn't have to have been right. Even if the quant was right, the salesman doesn't even have to accurately remember, let alone accurately pass on to others, what the quant said. He just needs to be able to believe that he is honestly representing what the quant told him when he quotes some bit of (what is to him) quant bullcrap about what the investment is “really worth” when he's on the phone to the client. And he really, really has to believe it, himself, even if he used to know that he was lying, even if he used to know that he was making this stuff up out of whole cloth. Humans kid themselves that they're good at detecting it when people tell them things that aren't true. They aren't. But to the limited extent that they are, they're really only good at detecting one thing: whether or not the other person believes what they're saying. So the ultimate BSD is the guy with the greatest talent for figuring out what he needs to believe in order to get you to give him money, and then making himself believe that, and believe it really hard.
....
I guarantee you that in every firm involved in this market, somewhere in some windowless cubicle in the basement, there was at least one quantitative analyst screaming his head off in emails about this, about how the mathematical modeling that underlaid the calculations that determined pricing on collateralized debt obligations was based on statistical analysis of customers who were buying their primary home, not as an investment vehicle but to live in, and pricing those homes based on reasonable expectations of what someone in their social class could afford to live in and paying no more for them than three times their income. And no BSD in the entire industry wanted to hear that caveat. He didn't dare. He almost certainly paid people to intercept those emails and keep them from him. Because if he let himself get drawn into what must have seemed to him like an arcane and wrong-headed argument about what something is “actually worth,” when there really is no such thing, when everybody knows that the only accurate way to value something is to put it in the hands of a talented salesman and see what he can sell it for? He wouldn't have made his numbers.

Lots of examples of the principle, in tales well told, if you click through.

I leave the parallel to another conflict between people who have been successful by virtue of believing their own BS and the “reality-based community” as an exercise for the reader.

Left

In a Salon interview, Bernard-Henri Lévy defines “the left.”

I think it is the same definition: to have freedom and equality, the two dreams of freedom and equality walking at the same pace. To refuse to choose between the two. This is written in the motto of the French Republic, as you know, “Liberté, égalité, fraternité.” And it is also written in the DNA of the best of America. The real dream of equality, which fed the battle, for example, for the civil rights, Martin Luther King and so on, and the battle for individual freedom. Those who ask to choose between the two — if you have freedom you do not have equality, if you have equality, you do not have freedom — for me, they are not leftist. This is a good definition of the left.

Emphasis mine.

To refuse to choose between freedom and equality. I can go for that.

The power of apathy

In the course of a rumination on Missouri's voting in the presidential election, Brad Hicks talks about St Louis' unique, disengaged political culture.

Aside from the economic differences brilliantly documented by political geographer Joel Garreau in his old best-seller The Nine Nations of North America, St. Louis has one huge important cultural difference with the southwestern corner of the state: a bizarre kind of apathy about what other people are doing that borders on tolerance. There really is no such thing as an extremist for any political cause here in St. Louis. The local descendants of the Ku Klux Klan, the Mystic Knights of the Veiled Prophet, are a charitable organization. The local chapter of ACT-UP changed the national group's motto to, “We're here, we're queer ... and we'd like to get to know you better.” The local chapter of Earth First!'s biggest act of defiance was hanging banners over the highway.

I'd love to hear from local Obama organizers, and even more from Obama organizers who were parachuted into the state with Axelrod & Plouffe's brilliant book on political organizing to check one of my guesses: my bet is that they got roughly 1/3rd the turnout of other organizers anywhere else in the country using the same system, and got roughly half the volunteer hours out of the people they did get that volunteers gave in every other city that used the same system. What makes me say that? Because that's what every volunteer organization that comes to St. Louis reports. Even when a volunteer-run movement starts in St. Louis, like Neopagan Wicca did, the locals put in a third of the numbers and half the volunteer hours per person of anywhere else in the country. It's just how we are. Do you know about the biggest “battle” anywhere near St. Louis during the American Civil War? Pro-slavery and anti-slavery militias both stormed the US Army arsenal in St. Louis, on a rumor that the other side was about to seize it. The side that got there first waited for the other side to show up. Other than a few warning shots and some shoving, they then settled down on opposite sides of the nearest street and just waited patiently, maintaining watch for several days; it was enough for them to make sure that the other side wasn't going to grab all those weapons and do something with them. For just about as long as there's been a St. Louis, our natural defense against violent political extremists has been apathy, usually polite apathy with a hint of disdain, but occasionally shading into enforced apathy.

He goes on to talk about how that the rest of Missouri has a very different attitude ...

Small government

Pericles observes that McCain's reflexive Republican “small government conservatism” was a perfect example of this non-philosophy.

The paradox of McCain is pretty simple: He projects a strong general message that government spending is out of control, and that Congress needs a president strong enough to say NO to its wasteful ways, so that we can continue to cut taxes and yet return to fiscal responsibility. But when the audience asks him about any particular thing the government does, he promises to continue it or even do more of it: He wants to stay in Iraq as long as it takes, keep Social Security and Medicare strong, do something about global warming, take care of veterans, make health care and college educations affordable, start a land-a-man-on-the-Moon-like program to make the United States independent of foreign oil, defend our borders against illegal immigration, and on and on and on. He rails against procedural stuff like Congressional earmarks, but never once does he say, “Here's an expensive government service that the American people are going to have to get along without.”

Pericles goes on to describe the habits of mind which make this reasoning possible.

Soap opera

Stuart Moore sings the tale of X-Men in the ’80s and early ’90s.

Chris Claremont pumped the series full of mysteries and character conflicts, some of which hung, unresolved, for years — especially since the book was bi-monthly at the start. Once John Byrne came on board, he contributed more of his own characters to the stew, most notably the Canadian super-team Alpha Flight.

In those days, X-Men was unique because the artwork was fresh and, more importantly, it was an extension and reïnvigoration of the Stan Lee soap-opera comics formula. Claremont built on Stan’s serial-comics template, weaving a huge number of threads through the book’s uber-story. Many of them were family-oriented: Cyclops’ brother Havok had mysteriously turned against him, Banshee’s cousin Black Tom teamed up with Xavier’s stepbrother The Juggernaut against the team, Moira MacTaggart shared a mysterious romantic past with Xavier.

The early Claremont X-Men never alienated its audience because, while you might be wondering what the hell was going on with Phoenix, there were eight other immediate plot threads moving forward to keep your interest. Once the series went monthly, you’d have expected the dangling threads to be resolved more quickly — but the opposite happened. Xavier, Phoenix, and the Beast spent the better part of a year believing the others were dead, and vice-versa. The mystery of Cyclops’s father, Corsair of the StarJammers, stretched on even longer.

And the book grew even more popular. Its audience loved the spaghetti-strand plots, the personal stories that exploded into galactic-war epics, the hyper-Marvel-style of soap opera piled upon soap opera stacked on top of giant robots, surreal mind-wars, and globe-traveling adventure.

Eventually I realized that Claremont was cheating with his soap opera structure. It seemed like he had a grand master narrative at work, but after reading for long enough you realize that he just is leaving loose ends scattered all over the place, so that was possible for him to pick them up at his convenience and pretend like it was All Part of His Plan.

But the thing about keeping people from falling off the bus makes me think of my man Joss Whedon. He has often talked about how the character of X-Men character Kitty Pryde was a major inspiration to him. It's not hard to draw a line between the teenage superheroine Kitty — smart and fretful, but strong at the core — and Buffy.

But I hadn't made the connection before about the soap opera structure.

One of the interesting innovations of Buffy is the way it weaves a season-long story arc into individual episodes that still stand or their own. TV had been working its way toward that before: Hill Street Blues started it (and invented the brilliant “previously on ... ” device at the beginning of episodes), other dramas had committed to it more and more, and Babylon 5 had attempted the crazy trick of presenting a vast, single narrative disguised as episodic television. But Buffy managed a new level of craftiness in fusing the long and short narratives. Only now does it occur to me that he must have learned some of this trick from reading X-Men.

Joker

Chris of Chris' Invincible Super-Blog has been thinking about the Joker. Here's a taste:

From the start, he’s an amazing visual, and it’s a complete inversion of the classic hero and villain formula. Batman was inspired as much by Count Dracula and the Shadow as he was heroes like Zorro, with a costume designed to frighten, but he’s still the good guy. The one in the bright colors with the big smile who does magic tricks… that’s the one you need to watch out for.

It's the sort of thing you'll like if you like that sort of thing.

Teutonic majesty

I know what you want. You want Nina Hagen covering a Rammstein song, right?

8

For a lot of folks like me, the fly in the ointment of Election Night was that California's Proposition 8 looks likely to pass by a narrow margin, reversing the California Supreme Court's decision that the California constitution's equal protection language meant that the state had to respect both heterosexual and homosexual marriages.

Not so fast, says the ACLU.

The California Constitution itself sets out two ways to alter the document that sets the most basic rules about how state government works. Through the initiative process, voters can make relatively small changes to the constitution. But any measure that would change the underlying principles of the constitution must first be approved by the legislature before being submitted to the voters. That didn't happen with Proposition 8, and that's why it's invalid.

“If the voters approved an initiative that took the right to free speech away from women, but not from men, everyone would agree that such a measure conflicts with the basic ideals of equality enshrined in our constitution. Proposition 8 suffers from the same flaw — it removes a protected constitutional right — here, the right to marry — not from all Californians, but just from one group of us,” said Jenny Pizer, a staff attorney with Lambda Legal.

They're going to court. Yet another reason to be glad that I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU.

Navigation

Apparently, for a few hours the day before yesterday I did not live at the corner of Leavenworth and Bush streets.

Last night in friends' tweets

From me, sent from my phone as we drove home:

Dancing in the streets in the Castro

Ray Ghanbari:

100 years from now, historians will point to watching 2 young African American girls running around the rose garden for 4 years as the pivot

Thomas Roche:

Broadway in Oakland: Car horns honked in the "Yes We Can" pattern, people waving, jumping up and down, college girls in tears

Annalee Newitz:

Wow the mood in San Francisco tonight is amazing. People honking, cheering randomly at strangers.

Returns indexed by polling projections

A handy election results page from the New York Times.

How it feels

I have measured out my life in polling booths.

1988: I'm excited because it's my first time. But I'm not too excited, because I know that the uninspiring Democratic candidate is going to lose.

1992: I'm guardedly hopeful. The campaign has been so weird that anything could happen. I'm voting for the Democratic candidate I had been fascinated and repulsed by during the primaries, voting for a Democrat in the White House rather than the candidate himself.

1996: I'm happy. The President has exceeded my low expectations of him: the past four years have been the only time in my political consciousness when I've regularly seen headlines containing good news. And he's going to win.

2000: I'm literally nauseous. I've voted for the smart, corporate-friendly Democratic centrist against the numbskull, corporate-friendly Republican faux centrist. I feel like my vote has ratified a corrupt process.

2004: I'm anxious. Over the past six months I've given my voice and my money to another bland centrist Democrat because I'm so horrified by the incumbent Republican war criminal. I'm simultaneous hopeful that he'll win — God, please, anybody, just stop the bleeding — but I'm mortified that it's even close.

2008:

I've voted for a man who is less than I'd wish for, but more than I thought I could hope for: liberal ... and pragmatic ... and the most talented politician I expect I'll ever see ... and smart about policy ... and symbolic of a movement to shatter the poisonous political alignments that Nixon created and Reagan cemented ... and who is going to win.

I want to dance.

Just in case

The ACLU has voting rights resources in case there's BS at the polls where you are.

Yes we can

OK, let's hand him a mandate. Let's give him a landslide.

California ballot initiatives

Many of my readers know that I'm opposed to the California ballot initiative process. Once enacted, ballot initiatives are nearly impossible to change, so that when it turns out that they are badly designed legislation the legislature cannot fix them. And they very often badly designed: often innocently, as good legislation is tricky to create, and occasionally maliciously, as the interests behind an initiative cook up legislation with effects that an ordinary voter won't understand. In particular, the state budget drama we go through every year is largely because the maze of set-asides, tax limitations, and other budget rules built up from years of initiatives have made it very difficult for the legislature to create a budget even under the best of conditions.

So my default setting for ballot initiatives is to vote No. But every year, there are a few initiatives where against my better judgment, I end up voting Yes. This year is no exception.

1A: Yes

This is a bond issue to fund a bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles. My friends and regular readers will be unsurprised to hear how I think that more rail is more good, and with Peak Oil and global warming making commuter air travel a very bad idea, it's long past time we got serious about this obviously good place to start. I don't much like doing this as a bond issue; I'd rather see a political order in which heavy investment in rail is part of the normal budget. But there's good reason to hope that this project will get the ball rolling for a strong network of rail in California — this project is one element in a greater proposal that runs San Diego to Sacramento.

2: Yes

This law improving the treatment of farm animals is exactly the kind of thing that should be part of a coherent legislative effort, rather than a ballot initiative ... but a friend of mine told me an interesting story. She was approached by a canvasser with the original petition to create the initiative, and said exactly that: I like the sound of the legislation, but I don't like initiatives. The canvasser said she agreed, but that a legislative solution had stalled out completely, and the backers of the legislation had turned reluctantly to the initiative process. As I was saying just recently, America's screwy food production is the product of perverse incentives, and this legislation is an effort to straighten that out. So I'm voting Yes.

3: No

I was originally inclined to vote Yes on this bond issue for children's hospitals, but the SF Bay Guardian argues that the rules on how the money is apportioned are screwy. When in doubt, vote No, so that's what I'm doing. I'm voting No.

4: No!

Against the distant possibility that I have readers who don't already understand this: parental notification requirements for minors getting abortions are a very bad idea for a number of reasons, not least because not all parents are responsible parents.

5: Yes

This bundle of reforms in drug policy toward dramatically reduced penalties for possession of marijuana, and better access to treatment, is flawed policy but a whole lot better than what we have now. It's become evident that legislatures cannot provide any sanity in this area, so voting for this proposition is the lesser evil.

6: No

A bundle of “law and order” stuff: budget set asides for cops, stiffer legal penalties, prison spending, et cetera. Further screwing up legislatures' ability to set budgets, and putting more people in jail for longer is only good for the prison-industrial complex.

7: No

It's renewable energy, which is tempting, but there are a lot of policy details lurking in there. Looking at supporters and opponents, I find responsible groups on both sides. When in doubt, I vote no.

8: No!

I spoke with some folks who have been phone banking who say that folks are confused on this one, so let me remind folks: Prop 8 eliminates the right to same-sex marriage established by California courts. Say No to hate; vote No on 8.

9: No

Like Prop 6, this revision to parole rules means more people in jail longer. It also means that without the carrot of parole to offer to prisoners, prisons become more hellish, less rehabilitative, and harder to manage.

10: No

As with Prop 7, this renewable energy measure is tempting ... but again there are too many mixed signals out there with endorsements and anti-endorsements. It will evidently be a big windfall for the natural gas people, which isn't really the point. So I'm voting No.

11: No

Yeah, we need redistricting reform, but it's tricky to define good policy for this. Most of the sources I trust are against this, so I'm thinking better safe than sorry and voting No.

12: Yes

This bond to help out veterans with housing money is exactly what you want from a bond measure: it gives loans to veterans, paying for itself as the vets pay the loans back, taking advantage of the state's ability to create a bigger risk pool to make better loans available to more people.

Market forces and food

In an old blog post on market fundamentalism I said:

I believe in using heavy taxation to push market incentives in the right directions. Americans are getting obese because, in part, sugar is cheap and readily available while fresh vegetables are harder to obtain. (Anyone who doubts the latter has been spending too much time in foodie places like my hometown; in much of America you can't find anything greener than iceberg lettuce for love or money.) We should tax sugar back into being a luxury, and subsidize the salad industry.

Recently I noticed Ezra Klein asking why is bad food cheap?

Put aside the externalities. The weight gain and the chronic diseases and the carbon pumped into the atmosphere. Bracket it, as my college political science professors used to say. There's a tendency to believe bad food is simply cheap. We make it like that because it saves us money. Sometimes, that's true. More often, it's not. Bad food is subsidized. Take high-fructose corn syrup. These days, the average American consumes almost 60 pounds of the stuff each year. Forty years ago, they consumed a pound or two of corn-based sweeteners. What happened?
....
Sugar is pricey because the government, on the one hand, pays corn producers to sell high fructose corn syrup for below market cost, and because it won't allow the importation of cheap sugar from other countries.
....
taxpayers are handing billions over to the meat and grain industries in order to convince livestock producers to sell their product at below market rates. We are funding this system.

Code

Anil Dash looks closely at what Sarah Palin is saying.

Put simply, if Palin says “Barack Obama consorts with terrorists”, she is making the assertion that he supports acts of violence against American citizens and the media will refute this obviously false assertion. If, instead, Palin says he “pals around with terrorists”, she's used code-switching to mask the seriousness of the charge, obfuscating her meaning enough to get away with making an assertion that inevitably calls for the imprisonment or even assassination of a political opponent.

This clever use of language only hides Palin's meaning from members of the press. Because writers for traditional media are usually highly educated and pride themselves on their mastery of Standard American English, they can often look down on dialects like AAVE and North Central English. Instead these forms of language being seen as legitimate and interpreted in the social context where they've formed, they're dismissed as being the words of “people who don't even speak proper English!” In the cases where the ideas aren't outright dismissed, there is still rampant misinterpretation of meaning: Reporters wrongly see a term like “palling” as imprecise, when compared to a word like “consorting”.

But these words are not imprecise to their intended audience. They are, in fact, clearer than using legalistic terms like “consorting”. They amplify the urgency of the statements, and increase the sense for Palin's audience that they're on the same page with her, speaking a language too “plain”, too full of “straight talk”, for the press to understand. And they're right.

Awww

Warren Ellis:

Small child I scared the crap out of: “That was...a trick! A TRICK! (looks at her friend and giggles with glee) That was our FIRST TRICK!”

Hallowe'en costumes

Noir writer and actual femme fatale Christa Faust has a few choice words for good girls choosing their costumes today.

The reason for the season

Via Indri, special Hallowe'en coverage from the Onion.

Mountains of Madness

Ganked entire from Brad DeLong for Hallowe'en, the correct response to some (real) news about Antarctica that may prevent us from seeing President Obama inaugurated.

Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Cosma Shalizi R'lyeh Wgah'nagl Fhtagn!

Cosma Shalizi writes:

Ghost Peaks, Buried in Ice: [T]his has me terrified:

It is perhaps the last great Antarctic expedition — to find an explanation for why there is a great mountain range buried under the White Continent. The Gamburtsevs match the Alps in scale but no-one has ever seen them because they are covered by up to 4km of ice. Geologists struggle to understand how such a massif could have formed and persisted in the middle of Antarctica. Now, an international team is setting out on a deep-field survey to try to get some answers. The group comprises scientists, engineers, pilots and support staff from the UK, the US, Germany, Australia, China and Japan.

The ambitious nature of the project — working in Antarctica's far interior — has required an exceptional level of co-ordination and co-operation.... “There are two easy ways to make mountains,” explained Dr Robin Bell, from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who is a lead US researcher on the expedition. “One is colliding continents, but after they collide they tend to erode; and the last collision was 500-million-plus years ago. They shouldn't be there. The other way is a hotspot, [with volcanoes punching through the crust] like in Hawaii; but there's no good evidence for underneath the ice sheet being that hot. I like to say it's rather like being an archaeologist and opening up a tomb in a pyramid and finding an astronaut sitting inside. It shouldn't be there.”...

The expedition gets under way in the next few weeks and will take some two-and-a-half months to complete.

Space-travelers. In tombs. In an inaccessible, highly anomalous mountain-range in Antartica. Do the fools know nothing? Or do they know only too much?

I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the Antarctic — with its vast fossil hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice caps. And I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain...

iTunes

On his Twitter feed Wil Wheaton has been recounting his wrestling match with iTunes.

iTunes: "Hey, I know you're having a rough morning. I'm going to go ahead and move from The Dead to Miles Davis, dig?"  Me: "AWESOME."

Gah! I should have told iTunes, "I see what you did there." FAIL

iTunes: Ima keep you on your toes and shuffle albums from Charlie Parker to Skynyrd.  Me: My toes. I am on them.

iTunes: Hey, what's this? Simon and Garfunkle?  Me: HOW DID THAT GET IN THERE?!  iTunes: Gosh. I wonder.  Me: PLAY TOOL! PLAY TOOL! AHHH!1

Brain: ONE WAY OR ANOTHER! I'mgonnagetcha!  Me: Blondie? Stop it.  Brain: Don't blame me. Blame Rock Band 2.  Me: iTunes? Little help here?

iTunes: I'll play Bauhaus, and maybe Joy Division. But don't bitch when I play Hall & Oates.  Me: Dude!  iTunes: Hey, you ripped it, sport.

Me: Dave Matthews Band? WTF?  iTunes: Turns out you've been putting music into me since 1997, Tough Guy.  Me: "Tough Guy?"  iTunes: Sweet Tits?

iTunes: I'm sorry about everything. Here's the theme to Fish.  Me: Aww. Let's never fight again.  iTunes: PSYKE! LISTEN TO WAYNE NEWTON BITCH!

Me: You're playing a lot of Zeppelin today.  iTunes: that's because you didn't set me to shuffle.  Me: Oh, so it's Nobody's Fault but Mine?

iTunes: So. The Smiths.  Me: Shutup. I can be emo once in awhile.  iTunes: Oh, that's just adorable. Have some This Mortal Coil, Captain Emo.

Having been enjoying using my iPhone on headphones a lot the last couple of weeks, and getting some weird surprises, I know just how he feels.

Obama infomercial

In case you missed it on television, YouTube of course has Barack Obama's infomercial. Ray Ghanbari observes:

Obama is demonstrating the Powell doctrine, applied to presidential politics...the katana blade is gleeming brightly in the Florida night

In case Governor Palin is reading this blog, allow me to explain what the Powell Doctrine means here.

The “Powell doctrine” holds that the US should go to war only as a last resort and then only with overwhelming force.

Overwhelming force. Damn straight. I just gave Senator Obama a few more shekels. He's going to win, but the bigger the margin, the better. Senator McCain's blather about how liberal Obama is works to liberals' advantage if Obama wins big.

Rant

I think that it's not the rantiness that has folks forwarding this page — though it is a good example of the form — it's the annotations.

But at least he was right about that surge thing. I mean, he and Bush got almost everything else wrong, but they backed the right horse this one time. Except (and if you've been getting your war news from any channel that spends more on graphics than foreign correspondents, you might want to hang on to something here) the surge isn't the thing that's turned down the American death toll in Iraq to "only mildly horrific."

I know! I was surprised too, until I took ten seconds to look it up for myself. Bush misleads the media and they totally fucking fall for it, and then they feed it to the public who buys it hook, line and sinker. Who'da thunk that'd work? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, fool me twenty seven times and apparently we're plum out of shame and we've moved on to... hey, was that a Friends re-run you just clicked past, dude? Go back! This is the one where a group of mid-twenties New Yorkers live in apartments the size of small aircraft carriers and nobody says a word about it through the entire show. It's fucking hilarious.

Hmmm? Oh yeah, Iraq. Nothing else has been going on there that could have made those insurgents stop shooting at our soldiers, right? Well, nothing besides the fact that we started paying them not to shoot at us. From where I'm sitting this is a major breakthrough in military strategy. Instead of getting shot at now, we've got ourselves on a ceasefire payment plan. And then, if we ever cancel our subscription, they'll have twice as many guns. There's no way that fucking plan could backfire. Unless we run out of money, I guess.

Oh.

Fuck.

Y'know, in 2000 I was prepared to be impressed with Senator McCain's character. By the primary season in 2008 I was not so impressed, having seen him carry water for Bush for so long. In the course of the campaign I've learned more and more that has made me like him less and less. And yet this rant succeeded in lowering my opinion further.

Dollhouse

If you're the sort of person who cares, you probably know that Joss Whedon's newest project is a TV series called Dollhouse, and you may also have heard rumours that the show has been in trouble with the network ... and here it hasn't even been broadcast yet. Was this just fans' paranoia caused by the cancellation of Angel and Firefly?

At last, Mr Whedon himself has told the tale.

Basically, the Network and I had different ideas about what the tone of the show would be. They bought something somewhat different than what I was selling them, which is not that uncommon in this business. Their desires were not surprising: up the stakes, make the episodes more stand-alone, stop talking about relationships and cut to the chase. Oh, and add a chase. That you can cut to.

Um, who did they think they had hired?

You know if you want to read Mr Whedon's ramblings. I will say in advance that they are long and, in the end, reassuring.

Change we can believe in

Me in February:

His candidacy is a bet that the American people are sick of the Republican propaganda machine's nasty, polarizing effect on the political process, and that it's possible to rise above that process, to run as a voice of moderation, and win.

Clinton is the candidate of winning the game, Obama is the candidate of changing the game.

Obama's powerful “bringing America together” rhetoric — and his mushiness on policy — are both characteristic of this approach. What does Obama stand for? It's hard to tell, beyond changing the style of American politics. But right now changing the style of American politics is a worthwhile goal. The question is whether it will work, and I go round and round about that. It may be that Obama is simply naïve, and that the Republicans will find a way to slime him too and make his ploy impossible. But with a deeply unpopular Republican President and weak Republican candidates, this year may be the best opportunity we'll get to change the face of American politics.

Almost nine months later, we have Obama being very clear about policy ... and mostly offering up some impressive thinking. But more importantly, we have this:

These are people who have been driven out of the Republican party, rather than who have been drawn to the Democrats ... but in Obama they see a Democrat they can vote for.

Eric Hirshberg talks about the interviews in that clip.