DECLINE OF THE WEST. Cornel West, that is. “This is not the intellectual autobiography West promised a decade ago. In essence it is a fawning celebrity profile — one in which reporter and superstar have somehow fused into a single first-person voice. And in fact that turns out to be quite literally true. In the final pages, West pays tribute to David Ritz, his collaborator, who has undertaken similar projects with Marvin Gaye and Grandmaster Flash, among others.”
Archive for 2009
December 3, 2009
A FIRST LOOK AT THE Prius plug-in hybrid. I would buy one this year if they’d let me, but it sounds as if they won’t.
JUSTICE IN ITALY: People often act like there’s something peculiarly American about a crappy criminal-justice system. There isn’t.
HMM: Placating Publishers by Limiting Links: A Google 5-Click FAQ. People need to make money somehow, and I’m okay with that. But I’m not so sure this will work as planned.
A LOOK AT THE AUDI R8 SPYDER. Looks okay, and it’s a great car by all accounts, but for that much money it seems a bit short on zing.
TOWARD A MORE PERFECT UNION: “I started wondering why I wasn’t applying myself to the project of being a spouse. My marriage was good, utterly central to my existence, yet in no other important aspect of my life was I so laissez-faire. Like most of my peers, I applied myself to school, friendship, work, health and, ad nauseam, raising my children. But in this critical area, marriage, we had all turned away. I wanted to understand why. I wanted not to accept this.” Don’t pick at your life. And what does the accompanying photo tell us?
IN THE MAIL: Timothy Zahn’s The Cobra Trilogy.
AT THE NATIONAL JOURNAL, Neil Munro interviews climatologist Judith Curry about ClimateGate and the IPCC. Excerpt: “We need climate glasnost: openness, transparency, and freedom of information. Scientists who engage in advocacy activities generate lack of confidence in their science, both from within the scientific community and from the public. The public should expect accountability from our major institutions, particularly the IPCC. . . . We need to hear from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academies what they think of this. These are the two institutions that should be the watchdog on all this. This is a black eye on our whole field. We have to defend our field, and show the broader scientific field — the biologists, physicists and chemists — that this is real science, not political science. What a lot of them are thinking… [is that] this is a politically tainted field.”
NONPARTISANSHIP FOR THEE, but not for me.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Dem job proposals may add $300B of spending. “The cost of a new jobs bill Democrats hope to move early next year runs to nearly $300 billion when major proposals under serious consideration are added up.”
TIGER WOODS, IMAGE, AND INFIDELITY. Is infidelity an external force, something that “takes down” a man? And Tiger may be only human, “but wasn’t Tiger Woods perceived as a special god-like man? And isn’t that key to the most lucrative aspect of his career, endorsements?”
UPDATE: Reader Michael Newton writes: “Tiger was respected and admired not just for winning golf tournaments, but for his discipline and concentration. So many of his ads play up the ‘mental’ part of his golf game. Now we find out he lacks discipline away from the golf course and he looks like a charlatan selling us a bill of goods.” Everybody’s human, and nobody’s without flaws. But those who let themselves be built up into something more than human tend to find that people are disappointed when they turn out to be human after all.
TAR, FEATHERS: Peddler charged with taping cops during his own arrest. “A Rogers Park neighborhood man was charged with felony eavesdropping after allegedly taping conversations — including the voices of officers who arrested him — without permission while selling art for a $1 Wednesday afternoon in the Loop.”
Nothing beat cops say to you in the performance of their duties is private. If they don’t want it taped, they’ve got something to hide.
COPENHAGEN: India Will Not Sign Binding Emissions Cuts — Minister.
UPDATE: Background from Shikha Dalmia.
FOR SCIENCE, a credibility bubble? “Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and ‘messy’ as, say, gender studies.” When trust is abused, you get less of it. And people really don’t like feeling like suckers.
UPDATE: Censorship In Copenhagen?
POLITICO: Frustrated Congressional Black Caucus plays hardball with White House. Hey, you guys used to be the most senior black political officials in America. Now, in the age of Obama, you’re just a bunch of congressmen.
MORE ON THOSE DEMOCRATIC RETIREMENTS, from Michael Barone.
ROGER SIMON: ClimateGate — It Ain’t Just About The Weather.
It’s about science and its relationship to politics and profit, the academy, the state and, perhaps most importantly, information control. . . . That is why Barbara Boxer is in shrill blaming-the-messenger mode, insisting that any Congressional investigation of Climategate would target the nefarious “hacker.” She realizes a great unraveling could come from this. So do to the global bureaucrats at the UN and the EU as they prepare for the Copenhagen conference. It is also why the mainstream media was so slow to report the East Anglia CRU emails and documents. They know that if you begin to report these things, you have to report on a lot of other things they have so scrupulously chosen to avoid. . . . No wonder Ms. Boxer is squawking. All the members of our own nomenklatura should be alarmed. Something very dangerous could happen from this – true democracy.
Read the whole thing.
NICK KRISTOF’S OBAMACARE SOB-STORY COLUMN: Busted. “Brodniak is a patient at OHSU — and has been a patient there for the past three weeks. In other words, at the time Kristof’s article was published this past Sunday, Brodniak was already being treated and cared for by some of the best neurologists in the country! . . . Kristof’s readers have been raising money to pay for the Brodniaks to get him treated. But Brodniak is covered. He doesn’t have to pay a dime.”
One presumes that Kristof came up with the saddest, scariest healthcare story he could find. That it turned out to involve a man who was already getting treated for free suggests that the healthcare “crisis” is something less than Kristof makes it out to be.
UPDATE: Reader Bob Therieau writes: “..but rather than rely on the false assumption that there is no healthcare crisis in this country, it seems a much safer bet to me to presume that Kristof is a hack.”
They’re not mutually exclusive. Health care policy is suboptimal, but there is no “crisis.” Talk of a “crisis” is just a PR effort to get us to accept a different set of suboptimal policies that are more to the liking of certain interest groups.
RESEARCHER: NASA Hiding Climate Data. “Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s.”
LIST: 10 Best Books of 2009. Wouldn’t have been my picks, but hey . . . .
BIG GOVERNMENT: Anatomy of a Beat-Down Part 3: Why Kenneth Gladney Was Beaten And by Whom. “But, make no mistake; this is happening on McCulloch’s watch. He has the authority to handle this case and to ensure that proper charges are filed, but he has chosen not to. It begs the question: If he jumped through the ‘Truth Squad’ hoops when Buffy Wicks asked him to during the campaign, is it possible he has turned his back on this case for similar reasons?”
OUCH: ‘Shadow Pentagon’ Chief Questions New Afghan Strategy.
UPDATE: A reader thinks this is better than it’s being spun: “Possibly the most complimentary thing I have heard about Obama from a ‘responsible adult.’ . . . Noah Shachtman is usually more careful than this- Nagl’s criticisms amount to ‘inside baseball’ to most civilians.”
FEINSTEIN AND DURBIN punish citizen journalists. Well, both have a lot to hide, I’d guess . . . .