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Archive for 2012
September 11, 2012
“SMART DIPLOMACY:” @Fault: Besieged U.S. Embassy #Fails Its Twitter Defense.
Related: Protesters Scale Embassy Wall, Shout “We Are All Osama!”
Also: “Today must represent the low-water mark in the history of American diplomacy.”
In a Reynolds presidency, all U.S. diplomatic posts will be equipped with flamethrowers in place of Twitter. Hey, I may run in 2016 — I’m as plausible a candidate as, say, Joe Scarborough. Or Joe Biden, for that matter . . . .
Related: Backpedaling: Politico: White House disavows Cairo apology.
NETANYAHU TO OBAMA: Wait for what? Wait until when?
LOWER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Chicago Teachers’ Strike: A News And Opinion Roundup.
THE TWEET THAT GOT OVER 5000 RETWEETS: Comparing Mitt Romney’s first tweet of 9/11 to Barack Obama’s.
UPDATE: Make that over 6000 now.
THIS IS COOL: Neal Stephenson at the UW Law School October 18th, talking about his book Reamde.
IF YOU MISSED IT THIS MORNING, DON’T MISS this 9/11 post by Sarah Hoyt. I wish we had a President who felt this way.
COMPARISON: Tehran (1979) vs. Cairo (2012). Remember when people thought that electing Barack Hussein Obama would make the Arabs love us?
Apparently, U.S. foreign policy is now being run according to Andrew Klavan’s advice on how to behave during an Islamic massacre.
But not everyone has taken the lesson: Krauthammer to Egyptian Protesters: Go To Hell. I’m with Krauthammer. And a president with backbone would be, too. Advice to Obama: To stiffen your spine, imagine these were Tea Partiers instead of Islamic fundamentalists who hate America and all it stands for.
Also: One U.S. official killed as gunmen storm, burn U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
HEH: “Now recognizable in any language.” Clint’s a pretty good meme warrior.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: In response to yesterdays’ post on MBA school applications drying up, reader Kevin O’Brien writes:
I’m a member of an operations consulting partnership.
One of my fellow partners, whom I’ve been working closely with, is a Chicago MBA which is a whole different level of prestige from the small, regionally but not AACSB-accreditted online business school I did (Daniel Webster College). My degree is comparatively worthless in the prestige stakes. (Not quite Yale Law vs. Thomas Cooley, but that’s not impossibly far off). But what I wanted was to know the stuff that MBA’s know for my own good, after losing a bundle in a business failure. Not to meet the people that people meet in B-school (I already knew lots of those people).
It seems like I know the same stuff. He might have had more drilling on quant stuff, I had an intensive capstone project. I paid as I went and accrued zero debt, while working full time and doing National Guard part time (until I retired from that). My Chicago buddy is a bright and hardworking guy and has paid off the debt he accrued, but it was a lot and he had to work for a guy he didn’t respect, for quite a while, to do it.
Now we’re both pretty happy and surviving despite the down economy. Smart guys always land on their feet. There are many paths to debt-free nirvana but you have to have a plan.
One thing every would-be b-school (or anything) student should do, and one thing every student’s parent should do, is read your book. If you knew how often I hear some friend’s son or daughter tell me their vague plans to major in psychology or political science, with a backup plan of going to law school –any law school– if the undergrad degree proves worthless in the job market, you’d yowl. I recommend the living daylights out of your Ed Bubble book, which I read in one sitting.
Thanks! It could save some people some money. And some grief.
REMEMBERING 9/11: American Dunkirk.
JOURNALISM: Michael Lewis’s Vanity Fair story on Obama subject to White House review.
Those “state-run media” jokes are looking less jokey all the time.
Plus this: “The Times reports that White House press secretary Jay Carney, a former journalist, was uncomfortable with having a journalist around the president of the United States.”
SAY, IS MATT DRUDGE TRYING TO SET UP SOME SORT OF HISTORICAL RESONANCE HERE?
LIONFISH UPDATE: Reader Chuck Wingo emails:
Just got back from a 10 day diving trip to the Bahamas, and thought you’d be interested to know that the lion fish population there is down noticeably from a year ago. Last year our group caught about 50 during a one week trip, but this year, on a ten day trip, we barely caught 20. When we questioned the captain of our boat he told us that we weren’t an isolated case: divers all over the Bahamas have been reporting fewer lion fish all year.
No one seems to know why. Popular explanations include divers taking more, and sharks and other predators learning just how tasty they are, but both of these are just speculation. Sharks and groupers at least seem to have developed a taste for them; our group had about 5 taken right off our spears: one by a grouper and the others by gray reef sharks.
It would be nice if the lower population is permanent, but it’s obviously too early to say if this is permanent. On the other hand we all missed having a big lion fish cook out; we barely got enough for some nice lion fish tacos.
One bit of government policy isn’t helping; the Bahamas have marine parks and no take zones, and the ban on hunting in these areas includes the lion fish. We all noticed a larger population in these areas, which may support the theory that hunting is the primary reason the population is down elsewhere, but if an invasive species has a refuge zone we’ll never solve the problem.
Obviously this is an anecdote, not real data, but I’ll be interested if I start hearing similar reports from other areas.
I certainly saw fewer this year than last as well — but more when I went to areas that aren’t dived much. Which supports the theory that lionfish hunting/eating is having an impact. In other words, all is proceeding as I have foreseen.
IF NOT, YOU’RE OBVIOUSLY A BIGOT: Would You Hire a Male Nanny?
SEEN ON TWITTER: If you want to see an epic fail of public diplomacy, follow @USEmbassyCairo. And boy is he right.
AT AMAZON, bestsellers in science fiction.
Also, today only: Epson WorkForce Pro Wireless All-in-One Color Inkjet Printer, $152.99.
JOHN HAWKINS: Five Simple Mind Hacks That Changed My Life.
JAMES LILEKS HAS A NEW NOVEL OUT: It’s called Graveyard Special.
NOT SO MUCH: Are Modern Professors Experts On Good And Evil?
A READER SENDS THIS LINK AS A REMINDER OF WHY WE NEED TO CRACK DOWN ON SHADY “HOLLYWOOD ACCOUNTING.” Also, we should repeal the Hollywood tax cuts!
IS IT DANGEROUS TO BE too clean? “Clearly, if true, the hygiene hypothesis is the single greatest medical story of our time, undercutting a century of putative progress. Is it true? Probably some of it is. But Mr. Velasquez-Manoff’s ambitious compendium of data and supposition — a great dense fruitcake of a book whose 680 endnotes, the author notes apologetically, refer to only a minority of the 10,000 studies he consulted — spins it all out in the most positive possible way with an energy, eloquence and desire to believe that is both breathtaking and a little scary. . . . Enthusiastic patients, however, enabled by the usual cast of shady entrepreneurs, have predictably skipped the long, dull validation process and are busily infecting themselves with a variety of intestinal worms.”
SOME GOOD NEWS: Middle-class Mexicans snap up more products ‘Made in USA.’ “Trade between the United States and Mexico is surging, up 17 percent in 2011 to a record $461 billion, as Mexico vies with China to become America’s second-largest trading partner after Canada. China and the United States did $502 billion in trade last year. The growing middle class that is fast becoming Mexico’s majority is buying more U.S. goods than ever, while turning Mexico into a more democratic, dynamic and prosperous American ally. . . . While news about headless torsos, drug barons and illegal immigration dominates the headlines, and much of the Obama administration agenda south of the border has focused on law enforcement, economists say another story is one of roaring trade.”