I hate it - hate it - when the craziest of left-wing crazies turn out to be right. They would hold up signs at anti-war rallies with a list:
Afghanistan
Iraq
Iran
Syria
And I would think to myself, “No. That would be crazy!” Right?
A group of hot-shot Washington journalists and editors have taken this whole “internet” thing kind of seriously and started their own Web site. It’s called The Politico, and they’re taking internet journalism to the next level. I wish them luck, because God knows they’ll need it if I’m ever gonna get a job after all the newspapers close down. My only question is, why did they design their site to look exactly like The Onion?
Someone named David Rieff gives us his analysis this morning in the New York Times Magazine of what Hugo Chavez means for the world. It’s a piece that leaves one dry-heaving, wading lost and half blind in a bog of post-Cold War, red-diaper-baby horseshit.
In the piece, Rieff riffs on the possibility of Chavez unifying the forces of anti-Americanism in the world and becoming the “next Castro,” as if that were unlikely yet quirkily attractive. “Quixotic,” he calls it.
His shit-eating, navel-gazing analysis, however, completely ignores what it means for people when Chavez and Castro and their ilk decide to dream the impossible dream: It means families get split up, and people have to leave their homelands when their economies are swamped by bad policy and oppression.
He and other arm-chair analysts get paid to opine while stroking their chins, but they repeat the same garbage about Latin America’s “left-wing surge” that “continues unabated.” I’m sorry, but that’s so 2005. The supposedly unabated left-wing surge has certainly abated, in the sense that its two biggest members - Lula’s Brazil and Kirchner’s Argentina - have decided they don’t want any part in the authoritarian isolationism that the wack-os like Chavez are touting.
Today, Brazil is one of the world’s hottest markets for foreign investment. Brazil makes cars. It sells agriculture products. It has its own fucking aerospace industry. Meanwhile, in Venezuela, the local currency is inflating in double digits - the highest rate in the region - and government regulation restricts dollar purchases. Middle class Venezuelans are finding themselves on the horns of a nasty dilemma: Get out now and get screwed, or get out later and get screwed.
The question someone who cares about people should be asking is, how long until Chavez’s overheated and unsustainable model of government collapses? And when it does, how many peoples’ lives is it going to ruin?
It’s a new year, and here comes a new version of Windows, with new features that may be great selling points, but are a guaranteed pain in the ass for anyone who actually wants to use the computer. For example:
The Premium edition’s Aero interface (also in the Business and Ultimate packages) goes even further. Aero uses your PC’s graphics card, which is designed for the hard-core visual processing required by video games, to deliver an eye-popping desktop makeover. What were once boxy menus and window borders now have glasslike, semitransparent edges. (A tip to the horse-race followers: The new iPhone prototype has transparent menus, too.) The transparencies make it easy to read through windows to see what’s behind them, and makes the operating system vanish into the background so you can focus your eyes on pictures, movies, or editing. To get an idea of what I’m talking about, check out this sexy red-themed screen shot.
Bells and whistles like Aero are great marketing tools. Steve Jobs bases a large part of his business model on design tweaks like these that have nothing to do with functionality. This, I believe, is why, for the last 15 years, it has been bloody fucking impossible to get a computer that does things: 1) Quickly; 2) Rapidly; and 3) Without hanging up and crashing all the fucking time.
I am hell-a sick of Vista-style sparkly object software that cost hundreds of dollars, maxes out my system requirements, and, in the end, takes a whole minute to open a PDF, or gives me Web browsing and word processing speed equivalent to that of a 486DX/90 from the late 20th century.
When is someone going to come up with a product without all the shit? The Honda Accord of operating systems? Because I don’t want more motherfucking cupholders, or a talking GPS unit, or leather goddamn seats. I want a machine that will get me to work every day and go for 200,000 miles if I change the oil every three months.
Seriously. It’s 2007. Is this too much to ask?
The Devil Wears Prada fits in two genre niches: Fashion porn and Manhattan media scene gossip. If you’re not interested in either, there is little reason to watch it, which means I would not recommend the movie to the readership of this blog. Although I have to say, the acting of Meryl Streep as the wicked stepmother boss was so delicious, that it alone makes the movie worth watching. As a rental.
In a nut-shell, The Devil Wears Prada is a cautionary tale about how one shouldn’t let the New York fashion world destroy one’s soul with its shallowness, in-fighting, arrogance, ruthlessness, and arbitrariness. Instead, one should find peace in New York’s restaurant, art, and newspaper professions, which have none of those negative qualities (rim-shot please).
But seriously. I enjoyed it quite a bit now that I live and work in the aforementioned media scene. I got all the provincial references to New York City things, recognized the streets, subways, taxis, stereotypes, etc. The fashion montages were many, yet unnoticed by me at the time. Looking back, however, I can sort of imagine the pitter-patter of the female heart watching the heroine don $500 shoes and select a wardrobe from the “samples” room.
The male equivalent is that scene in action movies where the heretofore helpless and beleaguered good guy discovers his superpowers, or finds the back room with all the guns hanging on pegboard and the ammo piled up in kegs along the wall. Dude. Sweet.
But there were larger social issues. Oh yes. Social issues. For example: the failure of feminism. I know what you think I’m going to say, and I’m not going to say it. I don’t particularly give a shit about the 21st century feminist dilemma of family versus career.
What’s interesting to me is what “career” tends to mean in the life of a woman today. Consider the main character, Andy Sachs. Not only is she perfectly willing to be abused and vilely shat upon as a lowly assistant - she’s willing to be an assistant.
Look around the professional world and you find this type everywhere. The cute (but not hot) PR girl, the event planner, the editorial assistant, the personal assistant, all young, smiley, bright, educated women whose nurture instincts are turned on full blast.
These women in the professional world aren’t setting the agenda. They’re planning, organizing, and scheduling for their bosses, who are often men. They are screening calls for their bosses, who are often men. They are running errands for their bosses, who are often men. They are doing a job which you rarely find men doing, and which in former times had a much more pedestrian title: secretary.
Draw whatever conclusions you want about that. I’m just making an observation. Without positing a cause for the phenomenon (Nature or nurture? You decide.), let me just say it will be hard for women to close the gender gap while their best and brightest are content to play a supporting role.
Boutique bottled water got the marketing gurus of the world thinking: What’s another perfectly common chemical substance that people would be stupid enough to pay a lot for if we put it in a pretty package and made wild claims about the purity of its origin?
How about table salt?
And they’re off and running. This first came to my attention when I saw a salt shaker that wasn’t actually a shaker but a mill, in the fashion of a black pepper mill. Now, I know that black pepper and other seeds - like coffee beans - contain flavorful oils, and so when
you grind them fresh, they taste better. Sodium chloride, as far as I know, has no such properties.
Still, this chunky, grindable ocean salt is the hot new thing. Buy it in bulk and it costs $3.75 a pound. And for that much money you can get whimsical names for your sodium chloride like Bolivian Rose and Sonoma Gourmet. If you want to really impress your vegan/reflexologist/magnet-therapist/acupuncture/rieki friends, you can serve them Himalayan Crystal Salt, which, in defiance of the laws of chemistry, is organic.
Of course that organic sodium chloride is super-special, so it’s going to cost you about $14 a pound. But it’s so good for your health! It replenishes electrolytes! It balances the body’s pH! Wow! Or, wait, you could eat a bag of Doritos and it does the same thing!
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: This is why the terrorists hate us. Because we’re not only rich and decadent, we are really, really stupid, and as we can all attest from our experiences in high school, the one thing that really makes you want to blow yourself up in frustration at the injustice of the world is the rich stupid kid who keeps rolling the new Mustang Convertibles his parents give him on the first of every month.
Sodium chloride is a chemical. You can’t do anything to it to make it more or less chemical. It will always be made of one sodium ion and one chlorine ion, whether it comes from the ocean, or a mine, or a factory, or A-Rod’s sweaty batting glove. You can add other chemicals to sodium chloride - like iodine for example - but most sea salts make a big deal about not containing iodine.
Sea salt, then, actual has fewer health benefits than my 89-cent barrel of Morton Iodized Salt.
But I give up. No one will ever listen. They didn’t listen about water, and they won’t listen about table salt. And for that matter, they won’t listen about diamonds, which can now be grown in labs and have the exact same chemical structure as diamonds dug from the ground.
In our successful capitalist society that turns luxury items into commodities, the reversal of that process is the new trend. Western society eats its own head. The Chinese were right, history is a circle, and soon we’ll all be getting paid in pounds of salt.
Organic, grass-fed, free-range, shade-grown, fair-trade, beach-harvested salt.
There is a theory out there about what newspapers will look like once they finish with the beating the internet is giving them. Well, there are a lot of theories. But there is one in particular that has me intrigued, and it is why I blog.
It’s a theory I read in The Atlantic, I think, in an article written by some guy whose name I can’t remember. He said that what the New York Times et al. should do to retain a viable business model is start branding their star reporters.
Not like with a red-hot iron (I think they do that already) but by giving them their own Web sites where they can riff on their area of expertise and hold various and sundry chatrooms/discussions/Web 2.0 thingies. This way, the New York Times would haul in a whole pile of Web advertising revenue, plus generate more traffic to nytimes.com. More reporting, more money, what’s not to like?
Newspapers, however, are stubborn. They are still run by editors determined to make sure terms like “column inches,” “above the fold,” and “lede” (spell thusly so as not to be confused with the “lead” used to make the type) will mean something for the remainder of their careers.
Since I am only 25 I cannot indulge in this luxury of stubbornness, nor can I wait around for that of others. Fortunately, there are signs that I won’t have to: independent journalists are taking matters into their own hands and forging freelance careers with their own Web sites serving as a sort of home base.
The latest of these is David Axe, a freelance military journalist who posts frequently on the excellent DefenseTech.org. He’s just come out with his own site, WarIsBoring.com. Another defense industry reporter, Sharon Weinberger, is collaborating with Axe on another site, called Ares. Both journalists publish frequently, in the mainstream as well as on their Web sites.
Frankly, this is why I blog. It’s not only fun, it can be a good career move.
As pejorative as the word “blog” is at the moment, there are already a lot of “blogs” out there run by extremely sharp professionals who are regularly way out ahead of newspapers. (Despite the aforementioned editors’ best efforts, the word “scoop” has already ceased to have meaning.) The day is coming soon when journalists will have to keep a Web site to be taken seriously.
As far as I’m concerned, this is the beginning of the end for 20th century journalism and its quaint standard of objectivity. In the future, the news industry will split into two basic branches. The first - general-interest broadsheets with in-depth reporting like the New York Times - will change to a weekly magazine format, and put its daily journalism online. Writers for these outlets won’t have to meet a standard of objectivity, but they will have to be fair, they will have to be professional, and they will have to come down from their ivory towers and show some personality. More like magazine writers.
Meanwhile, there will be another variety of journalism which will get stronger: the wire services. AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, etc. will all get stronger and bigger and provide robust reporting on what happens around the world. These wire services will serve as professional training grounds for hungry young reporters who, if they want to, can then develop an area of expertise and write about it on the internet either in association with the Times-like outlets, or on their own, as freelancers whose opinion you can trust.
This, I believe, is the future of journalism. Those of us working in the trade at the moment are facing the same choice as the professionals who were working in radio when television came about, or theater when Hollywood was just cranking up.
That is, newspapers will always be around. But do we really want to dedicate our careers to an eccentric niche product?
1. It was something repeated often at Hillsdale, a proud mantra: This country is based on the foundation of Judeo-Christian values. That’s not correct. The Founding Fathers were, if anything, deists. Also, the Bill of Rights is found in neither the Torah nor the Bible. You might more accurately say that we arrived at our present form of representative democracy - with its guarantees of free speech, free association, suffrage, etc. - in spite of our Judeo-Christian values. (Oh, but the other half of the mantra was “Greco-Roman,” which does seem fair.)
2. The city editor for the New York Sun once said, “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.” The “Man Bites Dog” theory of journalism has since become enshrined in the public consciousness. Except, it’s misleading. Think about it. If you’ve lived in New York your whole life, you know that when a man bites a dog here, something is wrong. It’s news. On the other hand, if you’ve lived in New York your whole life and the only time you read about India is when a man there bites a dog, you’re going to think to yourself, “Wow. Those Indians are a culture of dog-biters,” which, as far as I know, is not true. This is why, if you depend on newspapers to tell you what to think about the world, you will always get the wrong impression.
I love it when this ridiculous, Type-A city tries to confront its riduculous Type A-ness. The cure always seems like an extension of the disease. This week, New York magazine devotes a whole issue to giving inner peace a chance. But after fifteen pages of advice on how to fight your addictions, what to do to relax, where to go to unwind, what groups to join in your neighborhood, what new meditation fads to take up, and how to get in touch with God (advice offered from “five spiritual experts”!), I’m not sure whether to laugh or just tell this city to please, for God’s sake, take your basket-case, hyperactive, work-a-holic narcisim and shove it deeply up your tight ass, which, if my imagination had anything to say about it, would be located somewhere around Park Avenue and 52nd Street.
In the latest lynching… er… hanging carried out by our democratically elected allies in the Iraqi government, one of the criminals had his head yanked clean off. Reuters reports that some “Arabs” are crying foul, while the spokesman for our democratically elected allies in the Iraqi government claims it was “the will of God.”
Actually, as Slate.com’s Explainer explained back in November, they probably just botched their weight-of-prisoner : length-of-rope ratio:
The trick to a successful hanging is to have the victim drop an appropriate distance through a trapdoor before the rope goes taut against his neck. If he drops too far, he’ll have picked up so much speed that the noose might decapitate him. If he doesn’t drop far enough, he could remain conscious as he slowly strangles to death. But if you get the “drop” just right, the knot of the noose will snap against his neck—and either kill him or knock him unconscious.
The last major innovation in hanging occurred toward the end of the 19th century, when executioners first developed a systematic way to calculate the drop. Once these “drop tables” were published, a hangman knew that he’d need 7 feet for a slight, 120-pound criminal, but only about 4 feet for a 200-pounder.
See? The West is an advanced culture. We figured out a mathematical way to kill a man without popping his head off. Those savages in Iraq could learn something.