Titivil

thank you new london

This the annual "New London, CT is awesome!" post, as we just completed our annual visit, which included, as usual, the best Chinese New Year (Obsv.) Party ever, and the trip to the Book Barn of Niantic, CT, which remains my favorite used bookstore on the Eastern Seaboard, and is impossible to leave without a box of books measured more easily by weight than by number.

And as a bonus I ran into old friend Brendan Tobin, who has been on a roll lately, scoring a gig with Comic Book Resources consisting of weekly witty, engaging recovers and reimagining of comic book characters. Good to see him, and good to see him doing well.

But thank you, New London, for being a very nice (and under-recognized) destination for a long weekend.

indiana, china, indonesia

Oh, lost in the hoopla yesterday concerning Trump/Romney and the slow suicide of the Susan G. Komen foundation, the governor of Indiana on Wednesday signed into law a right-to-work bill, "right to work" being, of course, a euphemism for union busting, as conservatives long ago learned to always name their anti-this or anti-that legislation positively.

Indiana is not the first right-to-work state, not by a long shot: the South is filled with them. But it's important to note, and of course many of the voters who support this sort of law are probably way too busy to think about these things, but the reason that right-to-work states are alleged to be more business friendly is because without union protection it is easier for businesses to screw over employees, thereby saving them money, which they like a whole lot more than they do funding pensions.

So congratulations, Indiana, for joining that vaunted group of right-to-work communities, which include such worker's paradises as China, Taiwan and Indonesia. Soon, Indiana, your very own workers will be threatening to commit suicide over working conditions of an iPad factory. That's Hoosier pride!

Needless to say, do not expect any of my tourism dollars, nor my support of any industry that takes you up on your offer.

hey look, donald trump

I was largely removed from the reading any of the news yesterday, but did pass by a TV set showing Donald Trump endorsing Mitt Romney for president. I didn't give it much of a second thought. Trump has successfully inserted himself into the political process over the past six months, and Romney would accept the endorsement of a cartoon character if it would put another couple points between him and Newt Gingrich.

But seriously, what? Ignore the fact that for Trump the endorsement makes no sense at all, considering what constitutes the stated views of Trump, back when he figured that the easiest press in the world for "The Apprentice" would be to head-fake a presidential run, and considering his flirtation with a third-party run. Ignore that. The fact of the matter is that Trump is a clown, and not secretly, and Romney was embracing Trump like he was the ghost of Ronald Reagan. Even the optics of it are unwise, as Josh Marshall explains:

During season one of "The Apprentice" he even had this custom firing hand gesture. 90 degree angle hand, flat hand, "You're fired." Mitt Romney is going to appear together with him? For pictures? If I were one of the guys at the RNC in charge of getting Mitt elected in November, I really think I'd be shaking my head right now.

Not that it would be out of character for Romney to do/say something that generally a person running for election wouldn't do, but still. Ultimately, it's important to keep in mind, at all times: we live in a world in which people care who Donald Trump endorses.

what is more interesting than the imf?

Brief ambiguous thoughts here:

So if you're following the Eurozone crisis (that's what we call it, right? a crisis?), you will note that Consensus Sez that austerity is needed in Greece, in Italy and pretty much in every European country that is not Germany. And this is the prescription of the chorus of nations, to some extent, but most markedly of the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank.

Now, standard "I'm not expert (at much of anything, really)" disclaimer applies, but two things come to me in reaction to this, and these are things I don't see repeated much elsewhere. First of all, is it worth someone's time to wonder why the ECB and the IMF are considered the white hats on this? One is basically the Federal Reserve of the Eurozone, established by treaty, and the other is the result of an Articles of Agreement signed by member countries in 1945. Neither has much in the way of transparency or accountability, and neither is organized under anything resembling democracy or any of the tangential political systems. Ostensibly. they are the heroes of this story, but I personally am uncomfortable with the fate of nations (and the people contained therein) being determined by bankers.

Second, and maybe this informs the first, but has the IMF ever recommended to a developing country, or imperiled existing country, anything other than austerity? Is this like the Republican Party, for whom the universal cure-all is cutting taxes? (Recession? Cut taxes. Inflation? Cut taxes. Asteroid hurtling towards Earth? Cut taxes.) Is the IMF ideologically locked into a worldview in which governmental spending is never ever good? And if this is the case, should they maybe be asked to leave the cockpit and let someone else fly the plane?

I'm not trying to sound conspiratorial about all this, but the question of who really runs the world is one that's been bouncing around my head since I was a kid, so I find these questions enormously interesting. And I'm sure the response to this goes something like, "Yeah, but so what? Are your arms long enough to box with macroeconomics?" And no, they're not. But I'm still curious.

warren ellis in space

In light of the results of the Florida primary (and in the interest of kicking someone while they're down), for a last word on Newt Gingrich's intent to not only be president of the United States but also the president of the moon, I'm deferring to Warren Ellis, who was interviewed by Vice as not only a lay authority on future space endeavors but also as someone as interesting as Gingrich is nakedly ambitious.

And it's not all mean on Gingrich — it is filled with insight! And even hope!

If we’re talking outside the space launch field, then, hell, America innovates every day, in a myriad of fields. The field of metamaterials, for instance — invisibility cloaks, and hiding events from time itself? That’s just today, as I talk to you, and that’s all American. I realize there’s a narrative that America is all done, and doesn’t make stuff any more, and it’s midnight for the American experiment and all that, but that ignores the basic mathematics of a country with three hundred million people in it. For every bunch of dubiously photogenic fetal-alcohol-syndrome cases from New Jersey who get on the TV for ten minutes, there are ten times as many people at MIT inventing the future.

See what I did? I tricked you in with the prospect of a well-turned Gingrich punchline, and instead hit you in the face with a reason why today is OK.

Because today is OK! For everyone except for Newt Gingrich.

david brooks, motorboat noise

This may come as no surprise to you, but today's David Brooks column is not so much a column but a number of unrelated paragraphs that are tossed up in the air and placed into the column on the basis of where they land. The good news is that almost half of these paragraphs make some kind of internal sense (an average which, applied to a baseball player, guarantees you the Hall of Fame).

Here, check out the first paragraph:

I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart.” I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.

See? It's like he was deciding between the two sentences, and then opted to go with both.

Of course, the source of this Brooksian incoherence is revealed in that paragraph, as the social hygiene ideas propagated by Charles Murray (he of The Bell Curve, and which ideas include qualities like self-discipline and productivity — ideas so Victorian they may as well be wearing whale-bone corsets). It's as if Charles Murray wrote his latest just for David Brooks.

For a much more palatable (and well-spoken) take on the new Murray, read Joan Walsh for Slate, who includes this nugget of revelation:

Unfortunately [Murray's] portrait of this new uber-class draws heavily from David Brooks’s “Bobos in Paradise” for color, making many of its observations about the NPR-supporting, New York Times-reading, helicopter-parenting residents of “latte towns” seem tired.

The latest Brooks column: logrolling in our times.

yes, newt gingrich is a sociopath

Turns out that titling a post "Newt Gingrich is a sociopath" was an inadvertent little bit of search engine optimization (term of art: SHUT UP) on my part, as my dashboard is showing a modest spike in traffic from visitors using some iteration of the search keyphrase, "Is Newt Gingrich a sociopath?"

Welcome! And, yes, of course he is. If Newt Gingrich were running against a thrice-married, philandering, professional lobbyist, he would not hesitate to call his opponent that out loud. But, isn't...? Yes! He is! But Newt Gingrich is a sociopath, and that is what sociopaths do.

Don't need no DSM-5 to know that.

the sands casino in bethlehem, pa

Last night we stopped by the Sands Casino (in Bethlehem, PA) for a literal hour -- cocktail, drop $10 on video poker, get the hell out. It was packed. It was tougher to find an open machine than it was to find a cocktail waitress. It was also depressing as shit. The crowd was tough to pin down it was so varied. There were the kids on the night out, the local couples playing slots next to each other, the clubbers weirdly hanging around the bar areas, the yuppies pulled in after a meal at the only Emeril restaurants this side of New Orleans, the old men who wouldn't look out of place at a dusty slots joint in Winnemucca, and the throngs of Chinese families busing in from other cities. It's a big place (and table games are open!), so I'm guessing an aggregate crowd of upwards of just on the short side of ten thousand. This particular Sands is smack in the middle of the Lehigh Valley, a three city stretch along I-78 in easternmost Pennsylvania with more than 800,000 residents, all no more than a half-hour's drive (and many with a drive of scant minutes) away. Even so, I'd say that a full quarter of the crowd came from farther away. It's a strange room. For one, it's retrofitted into a dead steel mill, so it actually has tall ceilings, which is weird for a gaming floor. Also, it does not have what I remember from every single other casino I've ever been to: the overriding background noise of dings and chimes from the slots. I remember my first visit to a casino, back before there were any casinos other than in Nevada and AC, and the din of the slot machines hit me like humidity on a summer day in Florida. It was indelible. And the Sands does not have it. But mostly what disturbed me, and this is compared to visits to various casinos stretching back two decades, was the number of people there who seemed they shouldn't be pouring their discretionary income into slot machines. Now, these people are always present at casinos; people are people and as such make terrible decisions. But at the Sands in PA, they are legion. That place is a process server's dream. And I wouldn't necessarily call them desperate. Maybe dedicated. Somewhere in those newtworked slot machines was the future that they deserved, and all they had to do to finally get ahead of the bills, maybe finally buy a house, was to be smart enough to be lucky. And in every life-story as told by the liver, the here is never nothing but smart, so it's only a matter of time. I don't know if this is just me being more sensitive to the arrival of the dystopic future, or the actual arrival of the dystopic future. But as more and more states/communities are looking into the possibility of legalized gambling, of casinos plopped down within walking distance of residences, the word that comes to mind is not, "good."

conservatives are dumb and prejudiced, research sez

This is the pullquote, the money, that you saw splashed around the Internet yesterday:

There’s no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.
The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.

Easy to heart, easy to reblog; a perfect storm of validation and Schadenfreude. But, if you have a moment, I recommend clicking through and reading the entire story, as the writer, Stephanie Pappas, does a good job of explaining that it's not as simple as all that.

Studies have found correlations: between low abstract reasoning capabilities and homophobia, between low IQs and social conservativism, between low levels of education and prejudice. But finding correlations is not the same thing as explaining the link. As in, is conservatism appealing to dumb people, or are dumb people predisposed to be conservative? But, and not to give the GOP yet another reason to wage jihad against science, there is data supporting the premise that conservatism, prejudice and dumbness tend to occur all grouped together.

Which is of course plainly evident to the casual observer, and evident in the electoral strategies of the Republican Party for the past twenty years, but is a useful thing to give more thought to than slapping it on a bumper sticker, if you're looking for a way to combat it.

timothy egan knocks it out of the park

In lieu of the regularly scheduled Newt Gingrich post, go to the NYT's Opinionator blog, where writer Timothy Egan writes the best, most honest, truest (and most snazzy) takedown of Newt Gingrich I've read since the last time Newt Gingrich was relevant. It's titled "Deconstructing a Demagogue," and that is a very accurate description of the piece.

Have some:

Gingrich, as he showed in a gasping effort in Thursday night’s debate in Florida, is a demagogue distilled, like a French sauce, to the purest essence of the word’s meaning. He has no shame. He thinks the rules do not apply to him. And he turns questions about his odious personal behavior into mock outrage over the audacity of the questioner.
After inventing, and then perfecting, the modern politics of personal destruction, Gingrich has decided now to bank on the dark fears of the worst element of the Republican base to seize the nomination — using skills refined over four decades.

And of course it is Gingrich's odious lack of character that would enable him to read the whole thing and be entirely unmoved by it — perhaps attack the American-ness of Egan, or change the subject with a well-placed racist dogwhistle But Newt (and those that love him) is certainly Exhibit A in the inquiry over why the rest of the world thinks that Americans are feckless idiots.

the darcys

Every eighteen months or so I stub my toe on a new band that I don't see getting a lot of air from the usual media outlets and they're so good that they set my hair on fire. Now is one of those times, and the Darcys, from Calgary, BC, is that band.

They are trippy and textured and make a slow quiet noise. I will compare them to Destroyer's Kaputt even though Kaputt (pretty much the best album of last year) has a deeper/wider range of influences. Atmospheric yet tuneful, let's say. (My iTunes sez that it's "rock/shoegaze," so I'll include that even though that's a pretty wide net you're casting there, sir.)

The album that you absolutely have to here is Aja.nbsp; And yes, THAT Aja. It's a cover of the entire Steely Dan classic. And you might be skeptical of a shoegaze cover of Steely Dan tunes — in fact, you should be. But it works, and if there is a finer rendition of "Deacon Blues" out there, then I'm a ham sandwich.

It's streaming until Monday on AOL's The Spinner, although the band let me know via tweet that's it's for sale/free download at their site, as well.

to the moon, newt

Another thing that happened yesterday is that Newt Gingrich made news without being pompous, deluded or plain mendacious (for once) when he told some Floridians in the Spaceport area that were he to be president for two terms, we'd have a base on the moon by the end of the second one.

Pandering aside, the proposal is a little out of character for Gingrich, for specific economic reasons (which I suppose Gingrich could sidestep if he were to entirely privatize NASA).

Which gets to the true flaw of his plan: even if, in an effort reminiscent of our effort to put a man on the moon in ten years during the Sixties, could somehow manage to design/test/implement some sort of safe permanent moon-bound base, we don't have a way to get there and back. (I've done a little research on this.) And forget the space shuttle: even if we could magically unretire the remaining space shuttles, they're not designed to go above low-earth orbit (putting them about 380,000 km short of the moon, or, "most of the way"). Even the big guys we use to put satellites in orbit A) are not recyclable and B) are still hundreds of thousands of km shy of lunar orbit. It'd be like having a mission to get from Baltimore to San Francisco while only having a conveyance designed to get you as far as the end of your driveway.

So yes: a lunar base would be awesome (and useless, until we figure out how to get precious metals off the moon back to here), but eight kinds of implausible.

Which is not the kind of thing to dissuade Newt Gingrich, of course, on his crusade to bestow dignity on the human race for the first time.

introducing jan brewer

Where to start with the heaping heap of yesterday's news? How about with Gov. Jan Brewer.

She's the governor of Arizona, and a controversial figure down there—heavy on the GOP firebrandism, very immigrant unfriendly. The president is visiting the state, and yesterday the governor met him on the tarmac and engaged in a finger-pointing dispute with him. There's no love lost between them, she's a bit of an insane person, etc., etc.—there's not a whole lot of there there when it comes to the story. It's a bit of a yawn.

But I feel like I have to bring it up because of my pre-presidential-run fascination with Michele Bachmann: Jan Brewer is playing for national conservative attention and eventual national campaigns for office (or at least lucrative speaking fees on a national basis). For you and me, to badger the president after immediately after he deplanes and in front of TV cameras is a lapse in manners, but to others, it's the equivalent of Bachmann being all over President Bush like ugly on a gorilla five years ago.— It's a strategic introduction to the base of the Republican Party, who view such un-niceties as a positive quality.

Don't bother remembering her name; you'll be seeing plenty of it over the next twelve months, and even more thereafter.

parable!

On one of my social media feeds (could've been any, really), some dude put up a post about how an economics professor has a class that "insisted that Obama’s socialist economic practices worked," so the prof says that the entire class will get the same grade based on the average grade of everyone, and as the semester progresses the average grade keeps falling (because the lazy get lazier and the achievers want a free ride, see) and then eventually everyone fails.

Now, this account is labeled as a "parable," so we'll have to shut up about, "Pictures or it didn't happen!" But the author, in case the reader was unsure as to the purpose of a parable in the first place, ends with five lessons the reader is supposed to learn:

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.
2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.
3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!
5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.
Remember, there IS a test coming up. The 2012 elections.

I'm not linking/IDing this because I'm assuming the dude means well, and this argument is not exactly a novel one, and one that you find without looking very hard.

And I could hammer away at his takeaways (such as, I would call a more favorable tax rate for capital gains as the very definition of "receiving without working for," or, are we counting potable water and sewage disposal as things the government gives? etc.), that the refutations are also out there and easy to find. Actually, the president had a nice little passage relevant to this last night:

We don’t begrudge financial success in this country. We admire it. When Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes, it’s not because they envy the rich. It’s because they understand that when I get a tax break I don’t need and the country can’t afford, it either adds to the deficit, or somebody else has to make up the difference — like a senior on a fixed income, or a student trying to get through school, or a family trying to make ends meet. That’s not right.

But what I do find even more annoying than the thinly veiled greed and disregard for others displayed by those worried about the trammeling of the fundamental rights of the rich to rig the game is speciousness. Believe what you want about about how society should operate, but you don't get to make up your own personal fairy tale and then cite it as proof of your righteousness. No one is entitled to their own axioms. Because, you know what, at my college economics class, a bunch of us were yelling at our fatcat professor about Marxism Now!, so he said he'd give us all the same average grade, and we ended up with a A-, because we were a bunch of fucking college students and therefore pretty smart/privileged to fucking begin with.

Parable!

If you got some data that supports the notion that the social safety net is somehow toxic, or that the trickle-down economy has any trickle to it at all, then please: share. Otherwise, there are plenty of website comments pages (New York Post is one I'd recommend) that need more commenters.

the apocalyptica of warren jeffs

Hey, here's something creepy. Last week, I noticed that jailed polygamist Warren Jeffs, who has declared himself spiritual head of a renegade Mormon sect fashioned as "The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints," took out an ad in newspapers imparting some important information: Namely, while imprisoned in Texas, he's been talking to Jesus. And Jesus has got some things he'd like us to know!

For example, the Eastern Seaboard? It will be tsunamied. Phoenix? Volcanoed. And Cincinnati? Removed from the map. Plus tons more apocalypitca!

Ordinarily I'd hunt down whatever whack-job website they're running, but this time I don't have to, as some kind soul decided to plot all the Jeffs/Jesus disasters on a Google map, which is a true service to we who are about to perish in flames/water/whichever.

Go check for yourself! And maybe send Jeffs a note down in Palestine, Texas where he is incarcerated, and he'll put a good word in with Jesus for you.

(Via Ellis.)