“We suck enough to make anyone a contender”
2
Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article on Michele Bachmann is brilliant. And scary. And for those of us totally puzzled by the success of people like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, an explanation that makes some sense (to me):
“All of those people out there aren’t voting for Michele Bachmann. They’re voting against us. And to them, it turns out, we suck enough to make anyone a contender.”
Here are few more excerpts from the article:
“In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you’ve always got a puncher’s chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she’s living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she’s built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.”
“Bachmann lies because she can’t help it, because it’s a built-in component of both her genetics and her ideology. She is at once the most entertaining and the most dangerous kind of liar, a turbocharged cross between a born bullshit artist and a religious fanatic, for whom lying to the infidel is a kind of holy duty.”
“Imagine Joe McCarthy dragging Cabinet members into hearings and demanding that they publicly disavow the works of Groucho Marx, and you get a rough idea of the general style of Bachmannian politics.”
“There are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can’t tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously.”
“Pawlenty reportedly views Bachmann’s decision to jump in and spoil his long-planned assault on the presidency as the equivalent to her having crouched over and peed in his Cheerios.”
“Consumers don’t want tablets, they want iPads”
“Fifty percent of respondents preferred Apple over all other brands. There is a remarkable degree of unanimity in consumer’s preferences for the iPad over competing products. … In the US, we find that Apple has more than double the brand appeal of BlackBerry, HTC, Motorola, Nokia and Samsung combined. These manufacturers have a very high level of brand equity and visibility in adjacent categories. It is striking that they hold so little appeal for consumers in tablets.”
WSJ’s All Things Digital
My favorite line from this post: “Apple is succeeding in the category because it reinvented it.”
Are you living “a meaningful well-lived life?”
Eudaimonia is a term the Greeks used to describe “a meaningfully well-lived life.” In this essay, Umair Haque wonders if the economy we have is providing this:
“Instead of an “energy industry,” I see a resource addiction that saps money and preserves self-destructive expectations. I see, instead of food and education “industries,” an obesity epidemic and a debt-driven education crisis. Instead of a pharmaceutical industry, I see a new set of mental and physical discontents, like rates of suspiciously normally “abnormal” mental illnesses and drugs whose lists of “side effects” are longer than the Magna Carta. Instead of a “media industry,” I see news that actually misinforms instead of enlightening — rusting the beams of democracy — and entertainment that merely titillates.”
But Mr. Haque thinks things are changing (and I hope he’s right):
“I believe the quantum leap from opulence to eudaimonia is going to be the biggest, most significant economic shift of the next decade, and perhaps beyond: of our lifetimes. We’re not just on the cusp of, but smack in the middle of nothing less than a series of revolutions, aimed squarely at the trembling status quo (financial, political, social): new values, mindsets, and behaviors, fundamentally redesigned political, social, economic, and financial institutions; nothing less than reweaving the warp and weft of not just the way we live—but why we live, work, and play.”
Scott Adams: Technology Caves
“In the past, the square footage of a home was probably the single biggest factor in determining its level of comfort and livability. Today, technology and a growing trend toward informality make the size of the home less important. You can get to the same level of livability at lower cost by putting your money into room design, sound proofing, and technology. My best guess is that a technology cave could achieve the same level of livability as a McMansion, at a quarter of the price.
I predict that someday you’ll see a technology company such as Apple or Google get into the residential technology cave business. The traditional residential construction industry will never embrace smaller homes with better technology. The change will have to come from another industry.”
Why I love Gmail #326
The screenshot above is from a reply to an email earlier today. Note the “Consider including” option. The first two suggestions are on the money (not so “Bill Scott”). Gmail has had this feature for a while but I just haven’t been noticing it. It just gets smarter and smarter. I also like the option of editing the subject line but perhaps most email clients do this.
Rejecting evolution
Jonathan Dudley is the author of Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics
“…creationism has failed to provide an alternative explanation for the vast majority of evidence explained by evolution.
It has failed to explain why birds still carry genes to make teeth, whales to make legs, and humans to make tails.
It has failed to explain why the fossil record proposed by modern scientists can be used to make precise and accurate predictions about the location of transition fossils.
It has failed to explain why the fossil record demonstrates a precise order, with simple organisms in the deepest rocks and more complex ones toward the surface.
It has failed to explain why today’s animals live in the same geographical area as fossils of similar species.
It has failed to explain why, if carnivorous dinosaurs lived at the same time as modern animals, we don’t find the fossils of modern animals in the stomachs of fossilized dinosaurs.
It has failed to explain the broken genes that litter the DNA of humans and apes but are functional in lower vertebrates.
It has failed to explain how the genetic diversity we observe among humans could have arisen in a few thousand years from two biological ancestors.
“…the belief that scientists can discover truth, and that, once sufficiently debated, challenged and modified, it should be accepted even if it creates tensions for familiar belief systems, has an obvious impact on decisions that are made everyday. And it is that belief Christians reject when they reject evolution.
In doing so, they’ve not only led America astray on questions ranging from the value of stem cell research to the etiology of homosexuality to the causes of global warming. They’ve also abandoned a central commitment of orthodox Christianity.”
Every time I peek at Instagram, I find remarkable new images. This one by someone calling themselves purposofenvy. You can see more of his/her photos here.
Not sure why I find instagram so appealing. I think it’s that the photo is the extent of the communication. You can intuit (?) a lot about someone without a bunch of words. The photo is the story.
Apple to disable iPhone camera at live events?
From the Economic Times: Apple is developing a software that will restrict iPhone users from recording a live concert or sporting event. The software will ensure that an iPhone, while trying to record an event, triggers the infra-red sensors installed at the venue. These sensors would then automatically instruct the iPhone to shut down its camera function, preventing any footage from being recorded, reports the Daily Mail. However, while only the phone’s camera would be temporarily disabled, other features, such as texting and making calls, would still work.
Is this to protect the rights of the concert promoters, artists and media companies… or just a way to deal with the morons holding up their cameras for 2 hours?
“Bottom-Up Revolution”
From an opinion piece on Al-Jazeera, by Paul Rosenberg
Obama, however, is just one political figure, reflecting the more general state of US politics – particularly elite opinion and major economic interests. His ambivalence is, in this sense, an expression of America’s fading power. Obama’s belated attempts to play catch-up with the Arab Spring are but one facet of a more general loss of previous dominance.
And this from Wadah Khanfar, on the obsolecense aging Arab regimes:
This outstanding change, this historic moment, was totally lost on ageing governments that thought they were dealing with a bunch of kids who only needed to vent and then go home to their aimless lives. But they were wrong: because their ideas were old, their opinions were old, their minds were old, and their spirit was old. Ignorance can sometimes be a tool of destiny.
I’m finding Al-Jazeera a very credible and refreshing source for world news.
And then there’s this from a recent NYT story:
The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.
The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”
Reminds me of all those Stinger missles we gave the Taliban fighters to use against the Russkies.