We haven’t had much to say recently of a partisan nature, because really, it’s just awful out there, and boring too. Here’s a change of pace, however, with some cleverness added into the mix. The little sub-messages are a nice touch. HT: Ace
Columbia University is offering a new course on Occupy Wall Street next semester — sending upperclassmen and grad students into the field for full course credit. The class is taught by Dr. Hannah Appel, who boasts about her nights camped out in Zuccotti Park. As many as 30 students will be expected to get involved in ongoing OWS projects outside the classroom, the syllabus says. The class will be in the anthropology department and called “Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement.” It will be divided between seminars at the Morningside Heights campus and fieldwork.
From the Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University:
Hannah Appel earned her Ph.D. in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. With research interests in the daily life of capitalism and the private sector in Africa, in particular, Hannah’s work draws on critical development studies, economic anthropology, and political economy. Her current project — Futures — is baded on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the transnational oil and gas industry in Equatorial Guinea. The project explores the considerable work required to lubricate the passage of oil to market – not only of labor (whether manual, managerial, or domestic,) but also of material infratstructures, contracting regimes, and forms of governance and regulation. What combinations of technopolitics, labor, infrastructure, contracts and subcontracts, corporate enclaves and corporate social responsibility programs are required to convert Equatorial Guinea’s hydrocarbon from subsea deposit to spot price on the New York Mercantile Exchange? And to what effect?
Is this guy, a Columbia grad student, going to help teach the course?
Alexandra Petri in the WaPo discusses SOPA:
as the Founders knew, it is unwise to give people more powers than you would like them to use. There ought to be a law, I think, that in order to regulate something you have to have some understanding of it. And when people are saying things like, “This is just the rogue foreign Web sites” and “This only targets the bad actors” and “So you want universities to host illegal pirated versions of copyrighted content?,” it’s enough to make you claw out large fistfuls of your hair. No! No! Nobody is hosting anything.
This bill would require service providers to cut off access to entire Web sites where users are deemed to be engaging in copyright infringement, not take down stolen content they posted themselves. That’s already against the law. But no one seemed to be able to express this. When you have a signed letter from the engineers responsible for creating the Internet pointing out that this bill would jeopardize our cybersecurity, balkanize the Internet and create a climate of uncertainty that would stifle innovation, it seems odd to ignore it.
As a general rule, when the people saying that this will have a horrible, chilling impact on something are the ones who created that thing in the first place, and the people who are saying, “Oh, no, it’ll be fine, it only targets the bad actors” are members of the Motion Picture Association of America, it seems obvious whose opinion you should heed.
The bill has now been amended to exclude .com, .net, and .org and only target those darned foreigners, which of course illustrates just how idiotic the bill is. Pirate Bay, anyone? Our question is this: why, after the horrible overreach of government during the past three years, is there a potential majority in Congress to give even more power to the government? Have these people learned nothing at all?
What is it with beds of nails and sledgehammers? First, here’s a short video of some Chinese military training. Then there’s this much longer TV show clip from India featuring the Warriors of Goja — it’s pretty disturbing, even if the bricks are plaster, the nails are blunt, and the sledgehammer heads are rubber. When you consider that 112-121 boys are born in China and India to 100 girls, and that an excess of boys has often meant war, there’s trouble ahead.
Meanwhile, in what used to be the good ol’ USA, the Department of Homeland Security (the third largest cabinet department) has a Thanksgiving warning from a fellow in a hardhat that turkeys must be cooked properly lest they explode. Perhaps hardhats will soon be mandatory in kitchens throughout the land. (BTW, we don’t think this strange and willful decline will go on indefinitely. But the snapback, when it comes, will more than likely be pretty ugly in our view.)
Toby Harnden in the Telegraph:
the media and Cain’s detractors have over-played their hand. By Friday night, Politico, which broke the original story, had published 94 articles on the allegations in under six days. Every other major publication had followed suit. Every time he stepped out of a room, Cain was mobbed by reporters. Yet despite the maelstrom, Cain’s accusers remain anonymous and the details of the allegations oddly vague. With many conservatives believing that sexual harassment lawsuits are an industry and that frivolous cases are often settled to avoid more expensive litigation, there was a growing sense that Cain was being treated unfairly. Cain’s very amateurishness became almost endearing. Rather than mouthing slick talking points, Cain got angry with the journalists (a profession loathed by most Republican activists) and claimed that he was the victim of a “high-tech lynching”…Those who leaked the details of the 1990s sexual harassment cases might have thought that they’d destroy Herman Cain and leave his campaign dangling from a tree. But, as befits this strange and unpredictable election campaign, a funny thing happened on the way to the lynching.
We haven’t commented on this pig-pile, because we’ve had nothing useful to say. However, it seems clear enough that a substantial portion of the electorate has revolted against — what exactly?
On the Thursday before election day in 2000, the Bush DUI’s were leaked to Fox and hit the airwaves. On election day, we seem to recall that some early predictions suppressed turnout in the Florida panhandle. In 2004, CBS and the NYT collaborated on a scandal story a couple of weeks before the election about a vast number of weapons that had dissappeared in Iraq. This was the same CBS that used obvious forgeries of documents from a troubled guy in an attempt to sink the Bush re-election campaign against a guy with some more fact-based problems. And Bush wasn’t very much of a conservative. In 2008 the 12-to-1 media fell all over themselves to praise their candidate, and couldn’t be bothered with his scandals and strange, outlandish rhetoric. The legacy media now seem to be paying the price for this behavior.
It would appear that a substantial portion of the electorate has adopted as a default position that a partisan narrative chosen by the establishment media is a lie until proven otherwise. That’s quite a big change in a short span of years.
Ah yes. So very much like the tea party.
Many in our generation should be very grateful that this technology did not exist in our college days, as this student at Columbia amply demonstrates.
In a preview of coming attractions, the clown from the National Lawyers Guild tried a stunt to claim police brutality in NYC by being run over by a motor scooter. (Have you ever heard of anyone being run over by a Vespa, ever?) It was of course absurd on its face, and even more so in a frame-by-frame viewing. But it’s street theater that’s going to get gaudier and more outrageous, and many in the media apparently are all too happy to play along. And therein lies the problem.
Here’s his latest rant:
Don’t hate the rich, be one of them — Despite the turmoil in financial markets and global economic downtrend, the rich will go on accumulating wealth faster than ever anticipated. According to the private wealth report released some time ago that the number of high net worth individuals is growing by leaps and bounds on a year-on-year basis. The concept of so-called high net worth individuals refers to those with net assets of at least US$1m excluding their main home.
The survey conducted by Merchants Bank and Bain & Company indicates that as many as 320,000 individuals will possess at a minimum US$1.46m each in disposal assets…it is quite desirable to cultivate a wealth culture, which can, for one thing, gradually change people’s thought process and make them believe everybody can escape poverty and get rich through efforts…
a sound atmosphere in which wealth creation is encouraged will also help people retrain their mind, pushing out the old ‘poverty mentality,’ and replacing it with a ‘wealth mentality.’ If more people are devising ways to create wealth, in a long run, it will contribute to building a harmonious and mass affluent society, as more people will have the ability to help the less fortunate.
A society without producing wealthy people is never progressing on the healthy track. Indeed, even the Bible says ‘money is the root of all evils.’ In this light, a highly commercialized society is not a noble one, either. But it is noteworthy that wealth in itself has nothing to do with guilt or innocence, and what matters most is how to manage it. Nevertheless, it will be beneficial to the general good of a society that, instead of bitterly envying the rich, more people are learning to become one of them.
Oops. That was Communist China. This is America.
We didn’t show the first picture from the Return to 1968 Festival in NYC. It kind of sums things up, however. Maybe this does too: “God bless them for their spontaneity,” Pelosi told reporters. “It’s young, it’s spontaneous, it’s focused and it’s going to be effective.” Yeah, good luck with that. How effective? Just watch this scene from Atlanta’s dramatization of Orwell’s Animal Farm:
How creepy is all that chanting in unison? Ginning this up was a terrible idea on the part of those who wanted to create an anti-tea-party. We’d say Go For It! — but there’s something a little scary about the behavior of these mind-numbed robots. HT: Powerline
In 2008, Lawrence O’Donnell wrote a flattering teleplay about a certain Democratic candidate. The candidate was bold, clever, relentless and heroic. How times change. Imagine O’Donnell treating that candidate the way he treated Hermen Cain. Can’t imagine that? We can’t either. But the really interesting change is that some of the GOP field are not cowering before the hostile Democrat media. For decades the legacy media have acted as though their viewpoint is that of a majority of the country, when it’s simply untrue. Is it just us, or is the 30% beginning to sound like the 30% they are? HT: Wretchard
William Galston explains in TNR:
In 2005, Republicans’ and Democrats’ views of their own parties dovetailed with the perceptions of the electorate as a whole. Today, while voters as a whole agree with Republicans’ evaluation of their party as conservative, they disagree with Democrats, who on average see their party as moderate rather than liberal.
So when Independents, who see themselves as modestly right of center, say that Democrats are too liberal, average Democrats can’t imagine what they’re talking about.
Compounding the problem, the American people are gradually polarizing. According to Gallup, twenty years ago, as Bill Clinton began his presidential campaign, self-described moderates formed the plurality of the electorate — 43 percent; conservatives were 36 percent, liberals 17 percent.
By the summer of 2011, the conservative share had risen to 41 percent and liberals to 21 percent, while moderates declined to 36 percent, surrendering their plurality status to conservatives. Because nearly all conservatives now vote for Republicans and liberals for Democrats, the share of the shrinking pool of moderates that Democrats need to build a majority is now larger than ever.
Another Gallup finding that should alert Democrats is the ongoing collapse of public confidence in government. A survey released earlier this week found that Americans now believe that the federal government wastes 51 cents of every dollar it spends, the highest estimate ever recorded. Twenty-five years ago, that figure stood at only 38 cents…
Tellingly, a number of at-risk Democratic senators up for reelection in 2012 have already refused to go along with key elements of the president’s recent proposals.
The beltway media are almost unanimously Democrats. They live in an echo chamber where, as Galston says, “they can’t imagine what independents are talking about” when they say that the Party has become too liberal.
21% of the country may be a small sliver, but it’s still a lot of people and they have a disproportionate influence on politics, even with the ascension of the New Media. Blue voters and donors are highly concentrated in places like New York, LA, DC, Boston, the Bay area, and Chicago, but they have the media megaphone as well as the campaign dollars.
On issue after issue over the last two years, from the GZM to the 2010 election and on and on, we have seen that the opinion shapers of the Beltway media and the NYT have been losing, sometimes by 70-30 margins. They’ve often explained this by saying that the majority is stupid and hateful. That is a bad strategy.
Mr. Galston has performed a valuable service for his party and particularly its opinion shapers. But honestly, does anyone expect the writers at the Times or the Post to change their opinions after so many years? If anything, we expect the shouting to get louder and the accusations more absurd.
We don’t really know that much about what constitutes 95% of the universe. And even the things we think we know may not be true. BBC:
The speed of light is the Universe’s ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics — as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his special theory of relativity — depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it. Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.
But Dr Ereditato and his colleagues have been carrying out an experiment for the last three years that seems to suggest neutrinos have done just that.
Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another. The team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, sending them from Cern to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.
In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up a few billionths of a second sooner than light would over the same distance. The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance
Lots of theories in the comments section here; we blame global warming for the anomaly. Time for the another look at the amusing LHC video again.
Ann Althouse is conducting a poll about a new political ad. Some of the commenters have said that the ad is over the top after the first 20 seconds. They’re missing the point. The first 20 seconds is the ad. The next 40 seconds is fluff and CYA. It’s part of a strategy to get the media infuriated with someone who would dare call their man President Zero. Roger Simon wrote about this.
It’s also part of Governor Perry’s branding strategy for the base. Ponzi scheme, president zero, etc. Quick: name a phrase or quote made famous by Governor Romney. Waiting. Still waiting. We’re not claiming that it’s going to be an ultimately successful strategy. Mr. Perry may not perform well, and there certainly are a lot of influential people who don’t like him. Time will tell.
We’re of the opinion that twitter is mostly a bad idea, but it does have its moments:
From thorninaz: “Hey #attackwatch, I saw 6 ATM’s in an alley, killing a Job. It looked like a hate crime!”
From chuckdevore (Republican state legislator in California): “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean a big majority of us isn’t out to get you…”
From EddieRobbins: “My neighbor removed his Obama bumper sticker. I think he’s a racist.”
From DickMeyers: “Bless me #AttackWatch for I have sinned. I have muttered naughty words about our Dear Leader 9 times & have doubted his divinity a few times”
From joaniekensil: “Ate refried beans & chips for breakfast which is sort of racist foodist – Carbon emissions to follow.”
From PoliticalGravity: “Saw a kid with a lemonade stand and she didn’t have a permit.”
From DrFreeLance: “I saw a werewolf drinkin a pina colada at Trader Vic’s, and his hair was perfect.”
Funny stuff. (More amusing things here and here.) But as the twitter revolution demonstrated, you don’t actually have to be using twitter to make a fool of yourself.
A Tarrance Group poll:
74% of voters throughout the country believe that businesses and consumers are over-regulated. Further, another 67% believe that regulations have increased over the past few years. These percentages include majorities of all partisan affiliations, with 91% of Republicans, 75% of Independents and 58% of Democrats saying businesses/consumers are over-regulated…
70% believe increasing the number of regulations on American businesses will result in more jobs moving overseas. Also, majorities agree that the increasing number of regulations have created uncertainty for large and small businesses (66%), and that agencies who enforce regulations fail to consider how their decisions lead to increased prices for consumers and job losses (69%).
Every voter has seen wasteful and ridiculous regulatory creep in his lifetime. It should be an easy issue to exploit, and a powerful issue too, given the large majorities of D-R-I that agree. But what would be the best way to do so for maximum visual impact?
The kids’ lemonade stands that cops and bureaucrats now shut down? The TSA-ing of America in a video that fast-forwards from 1972, when there was no airport screening at all, to today’s long lines for intrusive body searches? Maybe you have an idea.
Watch the video before it disappears. The punchline is at 1:10. It won’t be any surprise to you who made the statement above. BTW, the video above only cost the taxpayers $550 million to produce. Chump change.
A rabid Doberman Pinscher jumped on stage at a Tea Party rally in Missouri on Labor Day and barked at the crowd for nearly twenty minutes before people realized he was not a candidate. The dog, later identified by its owner as “Mister Buster,” held the crowd spellbound as he barked, growled, and frothed at the mouth, eventually receiving a standing ovation for his exertions. Gwendolene Thomason, 42, a Tea Party supporter from Jefferson City, was one of the hundreds on hand who were convinced that the Doberman was a Tea Party candidate
Maybe this is a tea party candidate too.
As is sometimes said: If you have the facts on your side, argue the facts, If you have the law on your side, argue the law. If you have neither the facts nor the law on your side, pound the table. It’s going to be a very long 15 months.
They’ve really gone nuts. It’s almost inconceivable that this will get far worse before November 2012, yet it will somehow.
“His work as governor is unparalleled in its frontal assault on women,” said Siobhan Bennett, the president of the Women’s Campaign Forum, citing statistics on women living in poverty and without health care in Texas and Perry’s active opposition to abortion. “He has gone farther out on a limb legislatively in his capacity as governor and has been expressly anti-woman in the legislation he has done.”
“He is beyond what we expect from conservative Republicans on the gun issue,” said Dennis Henigan, the acting president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, who cited Perry’s support for gun rights on college campuses and said it was a sharp contrast with Romney’s “moderate” record. Perry’s rise, he said, had already become “a strong mobilizing force” for gun control activists, whose agenda has been largely ignored by the Obama administration. “People are perceiving a very real threat that he could be the Republican nominee,” said Henigan, calling the prospect “quite frightening.”
Barry Lynn, whose Americans United for Separation of Church and State is on the front lines of keeping religion out of public life, also labeled Perry an extreme figure. “He doesn’t just go to religious right gatherings — he creates religious right gatherings, and that’s a big difference,” he said, citing The Response, a 30,000-person event Perry led in Houston in early August.
The response to all this may be found at 1:10 of this video.