Rock on.
Saturday, May 10, 2014
Saturday Crass Commercialism
Along those lines, Hannibal is pretty good. It is about, you know, a serial killer cannibal, so perhaps not for everyone.
A Thousand Barefoot Children Outside Dancing On My Lawn
I think my favorite ur-old fogie comment that I see in various versions on the internet is something along the lines of "I haven't watched TV in 30 years - there's nothing good on." There's no obligation to watch or enjoy TV, or movies, or music, or video games, or contemporary novels, or anything else. We all have our likes and dislikes, we all have ways we spend our "free" time. I'm certainly not aware of all internet and TV and movie and music and video and fiction traditions and don't claim to be. But, you know, unless you dip your toe in the water you don't actually know if it's cold, hot, or warm.
Where The Poors Are
The big problem with suburban and exurban poverty is that an automobile is a necessary expense, and there are fewer available nearby social services. Not that the urban hellhole provides some super awesome secret welfare program, but density does mean there are more reachable options.
Friday, May 09, 2014
Cancel This Show
Apparently Rob Ford has been banished to the Black Lodge.
Ford has two ways of communicating as he drives — his cellular phone and his Onstar device, a General Motors product that acts as a cellphone. During one call as he drives that night, Ford is recorded as saying the following about Jews, blacks and Italians:
“Nobody sticks up for people like I do, every f---ing k--e, n----r, f---ing w-p, d-go, whatever the race. Nobody does. I’m the most racist guy around. I’m the mayor of Toronto.”
Not Getting It
There's nothing wrong with journalism grounded in a particular ideological perspective. The plight of billionaires dealing with shoddy gold-plated-tub installers can be a genuine news story. The problem with conservative "journalism" is that it's generally 100% hackish.
Bigger Swinging Dick, Mr. President
Fareed Zakaria is so serious.
I'm old enough to remember that world, and, you know, it never existed. But if only Obama would be more enthusiastic about blowing shit up, it would again!
In his speech to European leaders on Ukraine, Obama struck most of the right notes but also offered caveats about not acting militarily. It is difficult to stir the world into action, and into following the United States, if the president is telling you what he would not do rather than what he would do.
But the broader problem is that critics want the moral and political satisfaction of a great global struggle. We all accuse Vladimir Putin of Cold War nostalgia, but Washington’s elites — politicians and intellectuals — miss the old days as well. They wish for the world in which the United States was utterly dominant over its friends, its foes were to be shunned entirely and the challenges were stark, moral and vital.
I'm old enough to remember that world, and, you know, it never existed. But if only Obama would be more enthusiastic about blowing shit up, it would again!
Thursday, May 08, 2014
Narrow, Deep, And Tall
Sure people live in apartments and condos and various floorplans associated with "urban living," but much of the housing stock in Philadelphia is made up of 3 story rowhouses (and, in more western parts of the city, giant Victorians), which, except for the tiny "trinities" that are basically stacked one room floors, are usually pretty big. And all but the tiniest trinities are more than enough room for a couple, if not a family. Since they're narrow - 16 feet wide is typical - people unused to seeing that configuration assume there isn't a lot of space inside. They're narrow, but they're sometimes deep, and 3 stories is pretty tall (there are lots of two story blocks, too, and they're a bit smaller obviously).
Anyway, the more general point is that people associate urban living with shoebox 1 bedroom apartments, but you can have big living spaces and quite a bit of population density (and associated neighborhood supported retail) even without that. Setbacks and massive amounts of off-street parking are what prevent the density necessary for pedestrian-friendly urban living. You can still have houses with a lot of living space.
Anyway, the more general point is that people associate urban living with shoebox 1 bedroom apartments, but you can have big living spaces and quite a bit of population density (and associated neighborhood supported retail) even without that. Setbacks and massive amounts of off-street parking are what prevent the density necessary for pedestrian-friendly urban living. You can still have houses with a lot of living space.
Not Gonna Fall Down
Is it too much to ask that in the richest country in the universe, the majority of the population should be able to go to school, get a job, find a place to live, have kids if they want, send those kids to school, and retire without having to worry that one or two bad events (health, employment) will ruin it all?
We Know How To Stop Inflation
One not often addressed issue with our inflation fear crowd is that we know how to stop inflation. Even if inflation does start ticking up to some unimaginable horror like 3.5% per year, the Fed can quickly take away the punchbowl. To keep beating the inflation drum, you have to believe both that despite being wrong for the past 5 years, it really is around the corner this time, and that the Fed wouldn't react to kill it if it appeared. And that last part is truly nuts. Of course they would (even if they shouldn't).
Hypotheticals
I'm not saying I think it would or could happen (no idea!), but just for the sake of discussion, what if fracking caused some catastrophic city-leveling earthquake. I guess I'm wondering what level of disaster would cause any change in the status quo. Would they just keep on fracking? Suck it, rubble covered people!
A Horrible Person
Someone in a position to know once told me something along the lines that Geithner is as horrible as, or even worse than, you think.
The maddening thing is that it didn't have to be either/or. You could have easily committed to helping homeowners and the banks, but that didn't fit the morality story they wanted to tell. The banks weren't at fault, it was all the people who took out bad loans who were. They had to be punished.
The maddening thing is that it didn't have to be either/or. You could have easily committed to helping homeowners and the banks, but that didn't fit the morality story they wanted to tell. The banks weren't at fault, it was all the people who took out bad loans who were. They had to be punished.
Wednesday, May 07, 2014
Kudos
I was at the Hillman Foundation awards last night. Some fine work was recognized, including Digby's.
Freak
The online front page headline for this story is "Penn student dies in freak overpass fall."
Tragic, but I'm not sure what makes it freakish.
Tragic, but I'm not sure what makes it freakish.
A 27-year-old Wharton student died from injuries suffered Tuesday when he fell 38 feet from an elevated section of Walnut Street after he was hit by a car involved in a two-vehicle crash, police said Wednesday.
There's Something I Need To Say
And I suppose I should just come right out with it. You people need to talk about more important things than you usually do. The fate of the world depends on it.
Less Obvious Than You'd Think
One would think that the security gate at the White House would be rather obviously a security gate, but I remember thinking that I could see how a driver would accidentally head through it given the right circumstances. A lot of people come in and out of that place every day, so it can't quite be a fortress even if there are snipers on the roof.
The man arrested Tuesday afternoon when he followed the Obama daughters’ motorcade made a mistake and was simply confused about D.C. roads, the U.S. Secret Service confirmed Wednesday.
An Internal Revenue Service computer worker, the man does not come to downtown Washington often and did not realize he was trailing a Secret Service motorcade.
All About The Benjamins
I still have no idea what Benghazi is about (something something talking points something email something talking points 4 Americans dead something something terrorism something), but the money people do. It's a code word for "give us your money."
Own Goal
Why on Earth would Dem candidates in MD let themselves participate in a debate moderated by Dancing Dave?
"Are you all wearing your flag pins?"
"If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?"
"Some have some kind of perception of something, how will you change that?"
"Are you all wearing your flag pins?"
"If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?"
"Some have some kind of perception of something, how will you change that?"
Tuesday, May 06, 2014
Tuesday Night
Busy in my official capacity of "guy who opens front door and sends party guests up to the roof deck."
The Great Grift
Some corruption tax in government is inevitable. But here in Philadelphia the grifters are on their way to killing the golden goose.
The state took over the school district and the city has little power over it, except deciding how much additional money give it.
Without $216 million in additional funding, Moody's analyst Dan Seymour wrote in a report to clients, the district threatens to increase the average class size to 41 students and lay off more than 1,000 staff. " This is credit negative because a further deterioration in education services will likely result in additional student flight to charter schools and other alternatives," further reducing district revenues, Seymour added. 3 in 10 Philadelphia students already go to charter schools.
"Rising charter school enrollments have been a drag on the district’s finances, as state law mandates that public school districts pay the costs of sending students to charter schools. Driven largely by charter school tuition costs, the district’s costs per pupil have increased 70% since 2004. Further enrollment declines would exacerbate the district’s financial pressure as charter schools capture a larger share of the district’s expenditures," Moody's adds.
The state took over the school district and the city has little power over it, except deciding how much additional money give it.
Back To The 90s
I'm sure the inevitable Maureen Dowd columns will follow. From The Human Stain:
The summer that Coleman took me into his confidence about Faunia Farley and their secret was the summer, fittingly enough, that Bill Clinton's secret emerged in every last mortifying detail—every last lifelike detail, the livingness, like the mortification, exuded by the pungency of the specific data. We hadn't had a season like it since somebody stumbled upon the new Miss America nude in an old issue of Penthouse, pictures of her elegantly posed on her knees and on her back that forced the shamed young woman to relinquish her crown and go on to become a huge pop star. Ninety-eight in New England was a summer of exquisite warmth and sunshine, in baseball a summer of mythical battle between a home-run god who was white and a home-run god who was brown, and in America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism—which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country's security—was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten twenty-one-year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America's oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony. In the Congress, in the press, and on the networks, the righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore, and punish, were everywhere out moralizing to beat the band: all of them in a calculated frenzy with what Hawthorne (who, in the 1860s, lived not many miles from my door) identified in the incipient country of long ago as "the persecuting spirit"; all of them eager to enact the astringent rituals of purification that would excise the erection from the executive branch, thereby making things cozy and safe enough for Senator Lieberman's ten-year-old daughter to watch TV with her embarrassed daddy again. No, if you haven't lived through 1998, you don't know what sanctimony is. The syndicated conservative newspaper columnist William F. Buckley wrote, "When Abelard did it, it was possible to prevent its happening again," insinuating that the president's malfeasance—what Buckley elsewhere called Clinton's "incontinent carnality"—might best be remedied with nothing so bloodless as impeachment but, rather, by the twelfth-century punishment meted out to Canon Abelard by the knife-wielding associates of Abelard's ecclesiastical colleague, Canon Fulbert, for Abelard's secret seduction of and marriage to Fulbert's niece, the virgin Heloise. Unlike Khomeini's fatwa condemning to death Salman Rushdie, Buckley's wistful longing for the corrective retribution of castration carried with it no financial incentive for any prospective perpetrator. It was prompted by a spirit no less exacting than the ayatollah's, however, and in behalf of no less exalted ideals.
It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn't stop, when the speculation and the theorizing and the hyperbole didn't stop, when the moral obligation to explain to one's children about adult life was abrogated in favor of maintaining in them every illusion about adult life, when the smallness of people was simply crushing, when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides, people wondered "Why are we so crazy?," when men and women alike, upon awakening in the morning, discovered that during the night, in a state of sleep that transported them beyond envy or loathing, they had dreamed of the brazenness of Bill Clinton. I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner, draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE. It was the summer when—for the billionth time—the jumble, the mayhem, the mess proved itself more subtle than this one's ideology and that one's morality. It was the summer when a president's penis was on everyone's mind, and life, in all its shameless impurity, once again confounded America.
Department Of Bad Ideas
I don't think there's any way to do this without freaking out the people who might actually watch it.
MOOOOARRR SOCIAL SECURITY
It really is the only option. We can debate what our overall retirement program should be like for now-25 year olds if we want (and, yes, given tax treatment and other issues 401(k)s are as much a government retirement program as Social Security, just a shitty one), but the near-retirees are pretty fucked.
Nobody Has Any Money For Retirement
Something's gotta change.
The median size of a 401(k) is $24,400 as of March 31, with people older than 55 having $65,300, according to Fidelity Investments. Those funds can disappear quickly in retirement, and the early withdrawals indicate that the coming retirement crisis could be even more acute than expected.
Meetup
Confirming that we do have a meetup in NYC today starting at 830 pm at Rudy’s, 9th Ave between 44th and 45th. the original home of Drinking Liberally. Digby will stop by after 10, following Hillman festivities.
We’ll be in the outdoor space in back, unless it gets too cold.
Questions? Post in comments or tweet me.
We’ll be in the outdoor space in back, unless it gets too cold.
Questions? Post in comments or tweet me.
Monday, May 05, 2014
Monstered
Was hunting for something else and came across this randomly. We don't really have a word or concept for the press monstering someone, because I think we like to imagine our press doesn't do that sort of thing. But sometimes it does, so when it does let's give it a name.
Freedum
It takes an atheist, or perhaps even a Protestant, to get why this stuff matters.
There are no Protestant supremos. In my experience even hard core US Protestants tend to have a greater understanding that even Christianity, let alone religion generally, isn't all the same thing.
There are no Protestant supremos. In my experience even hard core US Protestants tend to have a greater understanding that even Christianity, let alone religion generally, isn't all the same thing.
An Election About Nothing
I suppose the basic 2010 story is that of a wave of angry tea partiers and Dem voters just stayed home and there was nothing anybody could do. But in 2010 I couldn't have told anybody why they should vote for Democrats. I mean, sure, I could explain at length why team D is usually better than team R, etc. etc., but there was no message being put out there. It was like they didn't try.
Except for 2006, when they, you know, won, this is always the Dem approach to midterm elections. Don't make it a national campaign. Don't be too specific about policy. Make your election about biography and character. Don't spend any money until after Labor Day, then spend it all on teevee. Then they lose and it's all, well, our voters suck because they stayed home sucky voters, probably because of those negative Daily Kos diaries.
We'll see this year...
Except for 2006, when they, you know, won, this is always the Dem approach to midterm elections. Don't make it a national campaign. Don't be too specific about policy. Make your election about biography and character. Don't spend any money until after Labor Day, then spend it all on teevee. Then they lose and it's all, well, our voters suck because they stayed home sucky voters, probably because of those negative Daily Kos diaries.
We'll see this year...
Nothing Says Libertarian Like Free Use Of The Commons
Libertarians is weird.
In most places, yes. But not here in charming Keene, where parking officers figure in a philosophical tug of war between a small band of activists who live by the motto “Free Keene,” and the great majority of residents who were unaware that their city was in bondage.
Keene’s two parking officers, both women, are often videotaped by young adults known as “Robin Hooders.” They track the whereabouts of the officers by two-way radio, feed expired meters before $5 tickets can be written, and leave a business card saying that “we saved you from the king’s tariff.”
Well That's Alarming
If the Hudson River tunnels cease to function...um, let's just say no more "Jersey Strong."
The Great Grift
But, yes, let's worry about what people are spending $130/month of food stamps on.
In doing so, International Relief and Development increased its annual revenue from $1.2 million to $706 million, most of it from one corner of the federal government — the U.S. Agency for International Development. IRD has received more grants and cooperative agreements from USAID in recent years than any other nonprofit relief and development organization in the nation — $1.9 billion.
Along the way, the nonprofit rewarded its employees with generous salaries and millions in bonuses. Among the beneficiaries: the minister, Arthur B. Keys, and his wife, Jasna Basaric-Keys, who together earned $4.4 million in salary and bonuses between 2008 and 2012.
Spreading Good Around The World
I'm sure there's no connection between this:
and this:
The World Health Organization on Monday declared the spread of polio a public health emergency of international concern.
Alarmed by the spread of polio from conflict zones in three continents, the agency issued the health alert to try to stop the further spread of the disease, a paralyzing virus once thought to be nearly eradicated.
An emergency committee convened by the organization announced in Geneva that three countries — Pakistan, Syria and Cameroon — had allowed the spread of the virus and should take extraordinary measures to stop it.
and this:
In its zeal to identify bin Laden or his family, the CIA used a sham hepatitis B vaccination project to collect DNA in the neighborhood where he was hiding. The effort apparently failed, but the violation of trust threatens to set back global public health efforts by decades.
It is hard enough to distribute, for example, polio vaccines to children in desperately poor, politically unstable regions that are rife with 10-year-old rumors that the medicine is a Western plot to sterilize girls—false assertions that have long since been repudiated by the Nigerian religious leaders who first promoted them. Now along come numerous credible reports of a vaccination campaign that is part of a CIA plot—one the U.S. has not denied.
Sunday, May 04, 2014
Sunday Evening
Walk. Farmers market. Made ill by too sour bloody mary. Epic nap. Not so bad, I guess.
Sprung
Spring usually isn't the best season here, as it generally goes from winter to summer in about 2 weeks, but after a cold cold winter a bit of warmth is welcome. Maybe I'll go outside.
Autumn is usually pretty good.
Autumn is usually pretty good.
More Morning, Less Controversy
My boys. NYC next weekend, Valparaiso, IN at the end of the month, Space in Evanston, IL in July.
--Molly Ivors
--Molly Ivors
Phone Theft
I don't know if it's a good idea to chase after your stolen phone, but here in the urban hellhole the cops won't touch it if you call them, so...
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