Archive for April, 2011

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The Week is Over

By
Tom OHare
– April 29, 2011

It’s suddenly Spring. The trees all look like big white flowery snow cones. If you go to the park to throw the frisbee around with your friends, there are other people at the park doing the exact same thing. Attractive women rock short shorts and get cute little sunburns. (You fall in love with all of them, even the ones who aren’t your type, because short shorts!) There are tulips and crocuses. There is the window that stays open all day and all night. There is light for fourteen hours a day. April showers bring Mayflowers, or whatever.

Take this, for example:

Got it? Good.

Here is some Cat Power, because she is my future girlfriend.

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Ambition or Entitlement: B&S’s Pulitzer-Des-iring/erving Coverage of the Canadian Election Continues

By
Ben Nolan
– April 29, 2011

Jeremy Keehn, an old colleague (and I hope I can say friend) from the Walrus (a Harper’s-ish Canadian general interest magazine at which I was an editorial assistant for the summer back in ’06 while Jeremy was managing editor), has a piece up at Slate about Michael Ignatieff’s faltering campaign to retake the Canadian government from the Conservatives. He’s a fan of the man:

In the 36 years since [Iggy]‘d left Toronto, he had become one of the world’s leading public intellectuals: reporting extensively on human rights issues for the BBC and the New York Times; writing more than a dozen books, one of which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; and teaching at Harvard, where he’d helped codify the case for humanitarian intervention that President Obama invoked to justify bombing Libya.

Jeremy’s thesis on the question of why Ignatieff has faltered is stated most concisely here:

In Canada, you can be disqualified from leadership for wanting it too much.

I think that’s too easy an explanation. It dismisses the possibility that it might have anything substantially to do with him as a candidate, political leader or campaigner. Jeremy thinks Ignatieff has been doing “well” in that role “as a rookie”; that he’s “gregarious on the hustings, a passable debater, and a stellar off-the-cuff stump speaker.” In absolute terms, maybe. I can certainly think of worse rookie performances. But if we’re talking in terms of what’s relevant — his relative gregariousness, acuity as a debater, and off-the-cuff-ness as a stump speaker compared to his competitors — I disagree. To me he’s consistently come off as the most laboured-sounding (least natural) of the candidates, and I get the distinct impression that he’s confused the need to make his criticisms and vision concise with a need to dumb them down. (This has had the result of their ending up sounding both lamer and dumber than they are.) 

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McDonald’s’ Mass Non-Hiring, Update

By
Ben Nolan
– April 29, 2011

Last week I wrote about McDonald’s’ “National Hiring Day.”

Investors.com likened the lineups for interviews to Depression-era breadlines. The obvious difference is that these poor (and therefore lazy, obvs) people aren’t lining up for handouts, but to work — which isn’t to say they’re not lazy. As we all know, since everyone who’s not rich is lazy, the only non-lazy people among that 50 thousand (and the hundreds of thousands more who swallowed the indignity of lining up for hours to beg for a minimum wage, shitty job that makes you fat, diabetic, and gives you acne) will be maybe the one or two that win a lottery on a ticket bought in thinly disguised despair or that maybe lose a limb in a workplace fryer injury or something.

More than hundreds of thousands, it was actually over a million that lined up to beg McDonald’s for a minimum-wage, shitty job. 62,000 were hired. That’s a maximum 6.2% acceptance rate (assuming 1,000,000 applicants exactly). Yale’s regular admissions acceptance rate this year, by comparison, was 6.4%.

When McDonald’s is the Yale of low wage jobs, I don’t even want to know what the state school is, let alone the community college.

Update: A MILLION! There’s only three hundred or so of those in ALL OF AMERICA!

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Healthcare < Guns

By
Trevor Macomber
– April 29, 2011

Earlier this week, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart once again played the role of our collective conscience by calling out Congressman Cliff Stearns’ proposal (and the rest of congress’s discussion-free acceptance of said) to vet 9/11 first responders against the terrorist watch list before providing them with the health care assistance due to them under the only recently enacted Zadroga bill — which took a mere 10 years to pass in the first place. (death + taxes has a characteristically sensible review of the episode and subject matter.)

Now fast forward to today and the AP’s sadly unshocking report that “More than 200 people suspected of ties to terrorism bought guns in the U.S. last year legally, FBI figures show.”

And how is that possible? Well, obviously because “It is not illegal for people listed on the government’s terror watch list to buy weapons.”

So to recap: 9/11 first responders who rushed into burning, collapsing skyscrapers and/or spent months and years of their life at ground zero inhaling poisons and other biologically destructive elements in an effort to find bodies and remove rubble are still dying or bankrupting themselves without a scintilla of assistance from the federal government, but if they want to go out and buy a handgun to, say, hold up a liquor store to pay for their chemo or simply to blow their brains out before their life comes to a slow, painful end? Well, have at it sirs and madams! And by the way: you’re welcome.

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Privacy

By
Booth Willson
– April 29, 2011

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American Id–NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

By
Trevor Macomber
– April 29, 2011

Welp, my Idol bracket’s busted.

I shouldn’t be too surprised, I suppose, since Casey had already been voted off once earlier in the season, only to be rescued by the judges save. And his unprecedented uniqueness (as far as American Idol goes, anyway — upright bass much?) pretty much guaranteed from the get-go that, sooner or later, mainstream voters would weary of his quirky style and jazzy sensibilities, but just watch his final performance and tell me that Casey Abrams isn’t the charmin’est Idol contestant you ever done laid eyes on.

 
le sigh…

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Borders As Rugs Under Which To Sweep Things Like Emissions

By
Ben Nolan
– April 28, 2011
The Economist has a report up on a study trying to measure a country’s emission’s based not only on what’s directly emitted within its borders, but based on what was emitted to create all those goods that are imported for cheap consumption:

A paper just published in PNAS by Glen Peters and colleagues looks at how the world’s carbon emissions get reapportioned when the carbon used to make traded goods and services is charged against the account of the ultimate consumer, not the initial producer. So while Europe may pride itself on emitting less carbon from its own territory than it did in 1990, from a consumption point of view the carbon embodied in imports from China alone all but cancels out the gain. In general the study finds that net embodied carbon imports into developed countries grew from 400m tonnes in 1990 to 1.6 billion tonnes in 2008—a growth rate faster than that of the world economy or global carbon emissions.

Sully’s comment: “Europe isn’t as green as it appears,” which is a reasonable thing to say, but which I’m going to quibble with anyway (why not, right?), because I think it puts the emphasis on the wrong thing, and sounds kind of grossly schadenfreude-y.

I think that what “appears” to us as green about Europe is, overwhelmingly, its contrast to North America, and even factoring in the import emissions (which, yes, more than cancels out Europe’s gains since ’90), doing the same for America barely narrows the canyon-wide (lack of) progress gap. I’m gonna copy over the visualization that accompanied the Economist’s article:

It is very depressing that no progress has been made in Europe and the problem has been so exacerbated in the U.S. in the last ten years.

I wonder what country is driving the contrastingly awesome progress of the “other developed countries”? My bet is Japan. It’s def not Canada.

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What if God Told You to Burn the Constitution?

By
Brian Trent
– April 28, 2011

Quick question: What would your reaction be if a presidential candidate stepped before an audience of millions and decreed that Americans needed to be forced at gunpoint to embrace Islam? And then, in the awkward silence that followed, he added that if elected, he would change the Constitution to align it with good ole Islamic values?

I’m not asking if you’d vote for the guy. I’m asking if you think he’d be lynched by breakfast, or if he might survive until afternoon tea.

The question isn’t hypothetical, either. Like a weed that just won’t quit, Mike Huckabee is once again up in the polls, especially among the so-called Tea Party, but also with Republicans in general. Remember his first run at the White House, when he made his position on the U.S. Constitution resoundingly clear not once, not twice, but on no less than four public occasions?

“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.”

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The New York Times Would Like You to Practice Cursive

By
Tom OHare
– April 28, 2011

Katie Zezima makes the case for teaching The Children cursive handwriting:

1) Might people who write only by printing — in block letters, or perhaps with a sloppy, squiggly signature — be more at risk for forgery? 2) Is the development of a fine motor skill thwarted by an aversion to cursive handwriting? 3) And what happens when young people who are not familiar with cursive have to read historical documents like the Constitution? [numbers mine--ed]

So, there are three objections. Let’s deal with them one at a time.

1) I have never had my signature on a bill compared to the signature on my credit card. Ever. I have been asked for a photo ID that matches the name on the card, however, and this seems to me a better means of ensuring that I am who I say I am than comparing two signatures (especially since the signatures on all my cards are pretty much illegible due to, you know, sitting on my wallet all the time). Furthermore, more and more fraud (and identity theft) is happening online where, it goes without saying, signatures aren’t really the mark of your identity that they are when you sign the canvasser’s petition on your doorstep. Anecdotal though it may be, I have actually met people who’ve had their identity poached via the Internet. I have never met someone whose signature was co-opted to commit fraud.

2) Who cares? There are many examples of fine motor skills we’ve abandoned as technology has evolved to make our day-to-day lives more efficient. I would imagine that there are far fewer people, for example, who know how to ride a horse (as a percentage of the population) than there were in the beginning of the 20th century. Should high schools maintain a stable of stallions so that we don’t forget this valuable skill, or should they just accept that the times are changing?

3) Teaching people how to read a script is not the same as teaching them how to re-create it. Again, it’s anecdotal, but I can barely remember how to make a “Q” in cursive; I can nevertheless read the shit out of the Constitution. So teach kids to read cursive, by all means, sure, I don’t have a problem with that — it is indeed a useful skill. Teaching them to write it when it is clearly on its last legs? Luddism of the worst kind.

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FEED ME

By
Celeste Broderick
– April 28, 2011

Nutsy the Squirrel kicks his peanut habit,

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