Peter Krupa

When I was younger and more tender, the idea of “relativism” - such as it is - filled me with indignation. Because, you know, if truth is relative, that means everyone could be right at the same time, a reality which would both defy common sense and smell like hippies.

I never considered the other side of the relativism coin, which is that perhaps, since truth is relative, everyone is simultaneously wrong.

As I grow older, this possibility strikes me as more plausible.

Now that New York Times columnists have rejoined the land of the living, I once again will have to stop periodically and ask myself the question: What in God’s Holy Name is the point of Maureen Dowd?

Political jawboning aside, what do investors - i.e. people who can make and lose money based on reality - think about Bush’s surge? Not much: “As for the investors, the data shows that the chance the Iraqi government will default on its debt has increased by 40 percent since the surge,” says Portfolio.com’s Odd Numbers blog. “That’s hardly a vote of confidence.”

The basic idea is that the price of Iraq bonds - debt issued by the government - has gone up since the surge, indicating that investors think the bonds are now riskier.

Hard to spin that one.

I could have just updated the post below, but this is too good:

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night, reflecting a growing view in the industry that subscription fees cannot outweigh the potential ad revenue from increased traffic on a free site.

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYtimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to gain access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

Never before has one of my half-assed attempts at analysis  been so swiftly and completely affirmed. The Wall Street Journal is the only remaining content-hogger. We’re waiting, Mr. Murdoch. 

The pilots of an alien spacecraft, peering down upon our curious little world, would probably find it remarkable that every time there is an earthquake or a tsunami or a plague or a famine or a hurricane on one side of the planet, on the other side people throw an enormous party and call it “fundraising.”

Anyway, on that topic and for the edification of the reader I thought I’d post the lyrics to Do They Know It’s Christmas?, a “Band-Aid II” song from 1984 that is probably earnest but also somewhat offensive and hilariously ethnocentric (I never thought I would use that word, but there you have it):

It’s Christmastime
There’s no need to be afraid
At Christmastime, we let in light and we banish shade
And in our world of plenty we can spread a smile of joy
Throw your arms around the world at Christmastime

Feed the world
Let them know it’s Christmastime again 

No. Seriously. People actually sang this song, and recorded it. Like, professional people.

1984 was a different time.

My mind has just been blown. A New York Times article on nytimes.com has a YouTube video posted in the middle of the text. It is not a blog entry. It is a Week in Review article about an African Grey parrot that could apparently think. Anyway, it seems like the New York Times has figured out how to think as well, on the Internet.

So I’ll go ahead and say it. From their perfect little mini-documentaries to the word double-clicks that yield a pop-up dictionary definition, to, finally, posting video material to supplement text: I think the New York Times finally gets the Internet.

I’m excited to see what happens next.

This morning, I watched a knee replacement surgery. They bent the patient’s leg, made a vertical incision, and pulled aside the skin and the knee cap, revealing the glistening curves of the bottom end of a femur. The surgeon sawed those curves off and replaced them with titanium. I will never think of knees quite the same again.

This afternoon, I talked with a financial analyst with the Costa Rican stock market who explained to me his plan for making the market available to small and medium businesses that need to raise capital. He was British. We talked about how bad traffic is getting in San Jose, and then he had to go.

This just in: James Frey has sold a novel titled Bright Shiny Morning to HarperCollins for - rumor has it - one million dollars. Depending on who you ask, it might actually be a book of short stories.

Anyway, if you’ll excuse me I have to go write my memoirs about those harrowing years I spent in the wilds of Vietnam.

“A Designer Gives Lessons on What’s Sexy,” says a New York Times headline. It really made me wonder - what does the homosexual Marc Jacobs think makes a woman look sexy? According to the pictures: painfully skinny, with no hips and no breasts.

They look sort of like… well… adolescent men?

The hot issue at the moment for Democratic presidential candidates is, for some bizarre reason, U.S. relations with Cuba. To rehash for the kids at home, U.S. citizens are forbidden from doing business with Cuba under the Trading with the Enemy Act.

That ban has been expanded over the years to include retail transactions that you would do while traveling. Hence, an ad hoc travel ban.

The exceptions to the embargo are food and medicine, which can only be sold to Cuba for cash. The purpose of the embargo is to keep hard currency out of the hands of dictators, with the hope that they will eventually bankrupt themselves and be overthrown.

People say the embargo has been around for almost half a century and look! It hasn’t changed anything. This is true, and I don’t believe lifting the travel embargo would be such a big deal if the Miami Cubans didn’t go around flaming whoever suggests it.

But the thing to keep in mind - and the reason I support the rest of the embargo until there are some changes on that island - is that the Castro brothers aren’t just fucking the shit out of their own people. In fact, over the last half century, Cuba has made a respectable go at fucking the shit out of the rest of the world as well.

Cuban troops fought for the Soviet Union in Ethiopia and Angola. Cuban money and logistics have supported left-wing Colombia guerrillas in a civil war which continues today. Cuban money and arms ended up in Nicaragua during the Sandinista disaster. And Cuban military and security forces are intimately involved in the clusterfuck currently being perpetrated in Venezuela.

These days, absent the hard currency to carry out military interventions or re-arm radical guerrillas, Cuba has taken to sending doctors around the region to do simple cataract surgery. Although it’s a great public relations coup, given Cuba’s track record I sort of doubt it is based in altruism.

All that to say, the Castro brothers aren’t solely focused on their island. They very, very much would like to export the disaster they’ve created at home, and have tried to do that many times.

Lifting the U.S. embargo, therefore would put a lot of hard cash in the hands of people who only want to stir up trouble. That’s why I’m all for lifting the ban.

But only after the Castro brothers’ exit, stage left.