Quotulatiousness

October 9, 2012

Paul Wells on “AndrewSullivanammerung”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:47

In Maclean’s, Paul “Inkless” Wells has a look at Andrew Sullivan’s most recent panic attack over Barack Obama’s re-election chances and how his debate performance makes that task seem much harder now:

The extended North American/ Anglosphere Twittersphere is agog these days over the latest spectacle put on by Urblogger Andrew Sullivan, who edited The New Republic in the days when paper was king and who has spent the past decade blogging, in succession, for (a) himself (b) Time magazine (c) The Atlantic Monthly (d) Tina Brown. Since 2007 Sullivan has been perhaps Barack Obama’s leading gay British Republican supporter; he wrote a 2007 Atlantic cover story explaining why Obama was “necessary” to binding up the nation’s wounds and a 2012 Newsweek cover story asserting that Obama was about to become the most significant U.S. president since Reagan. (“The narrative writes itself. He will emerge as an iconic figure…”) About 6,000 times he has ended blog posts on Obama with the sentence-thing “Know Hope.”

But now comes Sully’s crisis of confidence.

He watched the same debate everyone else did last week; noticed, as many did, that the incumbent had a hard time of things, and then read yesterday’s surprising Pew Center poll, which essentially showed Obama’s support collapsing so rapidly he will soon owe Mitt Romney votes. [. . .]

It is, in fact, entirely possible that Obama blew the election with a single 90-minute display of I-didn’t-know-this-would-be-on-the-exam. Certainly if he does lose, all the post-mortem tick-tocks will begin in Denver on the night of Oct. 3.

Wells also linked to Ezra Levant’s most recent article at Sun News:

Now we know why Barack Obama uses a teleprompter everywhere, even taking it once to a photo-op in an elementary school.

Now we know why he hasn’t had a press conference in months, preferring to go on entertainment shows like The View (he told his fawning interviewers he is “eye candy”) and David Letterman’s show (first question: How much do you weigh?).

We know because of the shock of last week’s presidential debate with Mitt Romney. The 60 million Americans who watched that debate had been told a hundred times that Obama was the smartest president since Jefferson, the greatest orator since Churchill. And they had been told that Mitt Romney was a heartless gazillionaire.

What they saw was the opposite, for 90 excruciating minutes. When Obama didn’t have a cue card or a teleprompter, when he couldn’t simply skip questions he didn’t like, or talk out the clock, he was a disaster.

Update: Buzzfeed has eight animated GIFs that show Andrew Sullivan’s meltdown rather cleverly.

Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson interviewed by Premier Guitar

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

Shawn Hammond talks to two-thirds of Rush in the November issue of Premier Guitar magazine:

If there’s one band on the planet that’s made it cool for musicians to be … well, uncool, it’s Rush. Because let’s face it — the intelligent, chops-heavy prog rock that Geddy Lee (vocals/bass/keyboards), Alex Lifeson (guitars), and Neil Peart (drums/lyrics) have become synonymous with over the last 30-plus years will never completely escape the stigma of being considered overwrought, stodgy, and even nerdy.

But with 1980’s “The Spirit of Radio” — a tune that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ranked as one of the top 500 most genre-defining — the dudes raked in fame and glory with brainy, multisyllabic bashing of the very industry and medium that made their careers possible, and they did it over a backdrop of swirling pull-off licks, distorted bass, and tour de force drumming that was somehow still catchy. Their encore? The next year they pilloried modern society at large with “Tom Sawyer” — a chops-laden, darkly futuristic anthem that even hardcore deriders of prog can’t help but dig.

Today, Rush is arguably the longest running, most original, and most influential progressive rock band ever. Their influence can be heard in major bands ranging from Pantera to Smashing Pumpkins, Primus, Death Cab for Cutie, the Mars Volta, Coheed and Cambria, and countless others. And yet, through innumerable musical fads they’ve remained staunchly committed to big ideas, grand arrangements, and stellar, instantly identifiable musicianship — rich, unorthodox chording, odd-meter riffing, and ethereal solos from Lifeson, and a finger-busting mix of Jack Bruce’s beef, Jaco Pastorius’ finesse, and a funk master’s groove from Lee. But they’ve also been flexible and open-minded enough to not come across as stagnant and stubborn. In the process, they’ve managed to get more radio play than just about any of their peers, scoring bona fide hits with songs like “Fly by Night,” “Closer to the Heart,” “Freewill,” “Limelight,” and the aforementioned classics. But even when their collective open-mindedness led to sonic evolutions that didn’t sit well with some longtime fans — specifically, the synth-heavy output from 1982–1989 that seemed to push Lifeson into a more atmospheric and textural approach — the band has remained unapologetically forward-looking.

Politics and economics: election-style

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

At the Hit and Run blog, Tim Cavanaugh bewails economic illiteracy:

It’s “very hard to fine-tune an economy” using any tools. That seemed to be a clear lesson of the twentieth century workers’ paradises, and it is implicit when politicians claim (usually following up with a “but”) that the free market is the least-bad system for creating wealth. Spending and taxes can, however, have very destructive effects, and the best way for government to further an enterprise is by the alacrity with which it gets out of its way. As the Clinton-era example shows, you can have a boom even if you just slightly reduce the rate of spending growth. That’s not fine-tuning, it’s slightly easing the heavy hand of the state. The Post’s rhetorical question leaves out such options as “Did they screw it up?” or “Did they do too much?”

You get to this level of fantasy not by knowing too little economics but by knowing too much, by being persuaded that the same math you use when you shop around for bargains or balance your checkbook does not apply at the level of the macroeconomy. Unfortunately, Keynesian logic is like Videodrome: Once exposed to it you can never get rid of it, no matter how much trouble it causes. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman recently claimed that brisk sales of the iPhone 5 will spur economic growth, thus proving the broken-window theory of economics. In fact, it’s the opposite: People who buy the new phone think it will add value to their lives, not replace an equal amount of value that has been destroyed. As the Apple maps fiasco, the purple glare controversy, and this Jimmy Kimmel video suggest, they may be wrong about that. But that Krugman (who last year called for a hoax invasion by space aliens to spur spending) is down to such a transparently absurd argument suggests the time has never been riper to jettison both the new and old Keynesianism.

Just don’t look for either presidential candidate to do that. Right now the big question is whether Mitt Romney or Barack Obama will use his presidential job-creating powers to create more jobs. Mitt Romney is promising to create 12 million jobs, which strikes me as a strategic error. All Obama has to do is promise to create 13 million jobs and he’ll obviously be the better candidate, because that’s a lot more jobs.

Gewirtz: The Windows 8 user interface

Filed under: Business, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

David Gewirtz is unimpressed with the Windows 8 user interface. To understate the case a wee bit:

… And that’s why, in pure analytical terms, one has to wonder what went through the (fill-in-the-blank) (fill-in-the-blank) misguided brains of Microsoft’s managers, analysts, and strategists when they decided to ditch the Start menu.

I finally decided to load the preview edition of Windows 8 and use it. And, despite the operating itself being a marvel of engineering, ease of use, speed, and underlyng functionality — I’m forced to say that it’s unusable for desktops out of the box. Un-frakin’-usable.

[. . .]

Microsoft, on the other hand, has decided that — rather than make some very minor interface nods to the billion or so users it has — it’s going to force everyone to change how they use their machines.

This is not change in a good way. It’d be as if Ford decided to yank out the typical comfortable interior of a car, and replace it with a motorcycle seat, handlebars, and control interface. One day, grandma would get up to go to work, get in her trusty Ford (which she’s been happily driving for decades) — and not know how to do anything!

Worse, since the motorcycle UI isn’t designed for the inside of a car, using it there would suck. People have tried it, and it’s amusing as an exercise, but it doesn’t really work.

Windows 8’s change to the Start menu is not amusing as an exercise. It’s an insult to all the billions of Windows users the world wide.

Here’s the thing. You get into Windows and it’s Metro. You click the desktop tile because you have real work to do — and you’re stuck. How do you launch apps? There’s no launcher or Start menu. If you don’t know to click in the corner of the screen, you ain’t doin’ nothin’. There’s no hint, no cue, no application, no Start menu. There’s nothing there, there.

The fight to save booze-soaked Britons from themselves

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:45

At sp!ked, Tim Black points out that the inconvenient truth is that Brits drink less than they used to, despite all the tabloid coverage of boozy downtown outings:

Not that painting a miserable portrait of our drinking habits is particularly hard today. There seems to be a consensus across political parties and the media that alcohol consumption is indeed a big, big problem. The only discussion centres upon the best way to address it. Prime minister David Cameron, for instance, can announce, as he did earlier this year, that the ‘scandal’ of drunkenness and alcohol abuse needs to be tackled, and no one bats an eyelid. Booze Britain, complete with puking teens and pissed parents, is a given, a fact that simply doesn’t need to be challenged.

Yet it really should be challenged. At the same time as 4Children was busy readying its assault on parents who — shock, horror — like to drink, the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) released rather sobering figures. Using tax-receipt data from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and survey material from the Office for National Statistics, the BBPA revealed that reality was rather drier than the drink-soaked fantasists would have us believe. In fact, alcohol consumption in Britain has actually fallen to its lowest level for 13 years. Furthermore, according to The Economist, supping rates have veritably plummeted among the young over the past 10 years. That is, the very people deemed to be vomiting and fighting at the coalface of binge-drink Britannia don’t actually seem to be drinking that much. ‘In 2003’, reports The Economist, ‘70 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds told interviewers they had had a drink in the previous week; by 2010, just 48 per cent had. The proportion of 11- to 15-year-olds who had drunk in the previous week halved over the same period. Heavy drinking sessions are down, too.’

And this is why the existence of 4Children’s scaremongering report is revealing. In its contorted argument, its counterfactual assertion that there is a big, big problem, it shows how the largely state-backed anti-booze industry, a morass of report-churning quangos and ever-so-concerned charities, is dead set on creating a problem where there really isn’t one. Or perhaps more accurately, it wants to problematise an aspect of our everyday behaviour. It wants to wrest an accepted part of social life from its mundane context, and present it back to us as something weird, harmful, perhaps even sinister.

Falcon 9 loses an engine, able to partially complete mission

Filed under: Space, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:40

Lewis Page at The Register, with a well-timed reminder that work in space is still not routine or ordinary:

The Falcon 9 rocket from upstart rocket firm SpaceX, which lifted off yesterday with supplies for the International Space Station, will deliver those supplies successfully following loss of an engine during launch. However a commercial satellite which was also aboard the rocket has been placed into a lower orbit than planned as a result of the mishap.

As we previously reported, the nine-engined Falcon first stage suffered an engine failure as it climbed towards space, with launch video giving the impression that one of the Merlin rockets had lost its nozzle. The Falcon is designed to carry out its mission even having lost an engine, and the flight path was duly adjusted. The Dragon capsule with supplies for the International Space Station was successfully sent on its way and is expected to reach the ISS without trouble.

[. . .]

Orbcomm says it is investigating the possibility of getting its satellite into the right place using its own onboard propulsion. Even if this can be achieved, however, it will be unsatisfactory as a satellite’s own fuel must be sparingly eked out over its operational lifespan to maintain it in orbit. Using up a lot of it before even beginning operations is liable to mean a short working life for the Orbcomm bird.

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