In support of Sarah Palin because in support of Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin as a youth, hunting Hey, I happen to like Sarah Palin too. For whatever her level of experience, she has the right attitude, and that’s still got to be the most important qualification for a president. And to draw a chess metaphor, her pick as vice presidential running mate is like an even exchange of rooks (or something), since it neutralizes whatever attacks Republicans would have about Barack Obama’s lack of experience, while the attacks of the few Democrats who say her experience is substantially lower then Obama’s is easily discredited.

Here’s what’s interesting at this moment in the election process: As the conservative intellectuals line up against her, and as the latest round of criticisms and refutations of the McCain campaign’s claims in her favor (a few e.g’s: 1. Yes, she was for that “bridge to nowhere,” up until it became obvious the Congress would reject it; 2. No, she has not been to Iraq, and has “been to” Ireland, as claimed, in the sense that a plane she never got off stopped there to refuel; 3. as of latest, she will not be cooperating with the troopergate investigation; 4. maybe, this), Bill Bennett, one of the conservative intellectuals still standing in her support, went on the Today Show.

When presented with the latest series series of embarrassments and refutations of the points of experience the McCain campaign has cooked up for Palin, Bennett’s response was something like (paraphrasing), “sure, the Republican party intellectuals are turning against her, but most people don’t care about this stuff, and her support among average voters is still strong.”

We pause now while I confess to a pet peeve. “Begging the question” is a phrase that has gone beyond being abused in casual conversation, and is not being flagrantly abused by people on stages and on the television who ought to know better. I’m not normally a language pedant, but, um, I do not think that expression means what you think it means. “Begs the question,” has a specific meaning which is worth preserving. Try “raises the question” next time you want to use the former expression, and I think you’ll find yourself much better served. And while you’re at it, look up the meaning if you need to, and you’ll find yourself interestingly educated.

Anyway. To the extent that there’s any sense left in the world, people base their opinions in significant part on information they get from the news. So here’s Bill Bennett being asked to respond to the criticisms against Sarah Palin, and his response is (paraphrasing again), “even with all this criticism, people still like her.” Dude! Your job is to tell people what they should think, and that’s the best you got? Addressing this to a guy who should care, you, sir, are begging the question.

Image: photo of Sarah Palin as a youth, shortly after hunging, with her catch. Talk to me about how she wanted to ban books, but do not tell me she is not cool, America.

A small appreciation for Richard Wright

richard wright It is very stressful, in these troubled times, to try to summon emotions specific to Rick Wright. Waters and Gilmour would be no problem, even Nick Mason I have lots of specific affection for. As the keyboard player, Wright was obviously central to PF’s sound. But I think that he was most interesting in his minimalist approach to the keyboard. I guess it’s hard to appreciate what he was doing because, rare and innovative as they were at the time, his gauzy synth washes sort of became the default mode for keyboards in pop in the 80s and obscured his contribution. Maybe. I believe he composed that song on Dark Side that has a female singer doing a long wordless improv(?), but insofar as that sort of thing represents PF’s most indulgent side, well, I dunno.

I’m young enough that my introduction to PF came through Momentary Lapse of Reason, by which point Mason and Gilmour were listed as the only two official members of the band (although, oddly, Wright plays on the album), which I guess speaks to his friendship with DG and says something about loyalty and his generally being a perfectly lovely British chap.

If the four members of the Beatles were about as close to all being equal as you can imagine, and REM represents some sort of opposite extreme, with one extremely gifted member and three perfectly good but ultimately replaceable musicians, I guess PF fits somewhere in the middle. Two (three if you count Barrett) creative fountainhead dudes with two talented and valuable supporting musicians, of which Rick Wright was one. Not, I suspect, a bad life.

Tucker Carlson on Sarah Palin

I’m completely transfixed by this little mini-interview with Tucker Carlson, filmed on Tuesday. Carlson is a cable TV blowhard who I rarely get to experience. Here he is apparently with his guard relatively down, talking almost casually with Talking Points Memo’s David Kurtz, and oscillating wildly between the eminently reasonable and the absurd. He begins with (obligatory?) praise for new media, then launches into

It seems to me the essence of scientific inquiry is, bring it on. Test me. Ask an endless series of questions. Test every possible hypotheiss. I mean, that’s what science is, right? But in the name of it you have people say, the very fact that you would raise that question not only suggests but in fact proves that you are a moron, incapable of understanding the debate, or you’re evil, you’re being funded by some special interest that wants to pollute the earth. To impune the motives of people who ask questions in the name of science, that’s insane! In fact, it’s like a parody — it’s like a joke.

Without knowing the specific exchange Carlson is referring to here, it should go without saying that he’s sort of missed the point — that scientists entertain an “endless series of questions” from those who understand the issue under discussion. The continued insistence of a certain group of the right wing that global warming does not exist contradicts the 99% of the scientists who study the issue, and who are understandably irate at debating demagogues who obviously can not be persuaded.

But then comes really the meat — Carlson’s criticism of how the GOP convention is being handled, and on the choice of Sarah Palin as vice presidential candidate. His critique of the cancellation of convention events, and his critique, is great. Spot-on, I’d say, but also almost funny in his frankness and openness. “Go zanny!”

Chrome

As I was installing and loading up Chrome, my general thought was, “yeah, sure Google, I’ll switch as soon as you can replicate my favorite dozen Firefox plugins.” Fast forward five minutes, and my reaction is, shall we say, mixed.

  • This thing is fast. Pages seem to load instantly. It’s a little creepy, but in a good way.
  • As much as Firefox 3 brags about it’s smart address bar, Chrome does it one better, auto-searching for actual url’s in real time. Pretty cool.
  • It respects my screen real-estate — at the top there’s only a thin window name bar thingy, and in fullscreen in goes away completely. In Firefox I like my status bar so I know where links point when I hover over them. In Chrome the status bar is absent, but when I hover over links their target pops up at the bottom of the screen.
  • Generally, there’s no impression of a learning curve — I can just sort of do whatever I need to do.
  • Did I mention how friggin FAST it is?

OK, this is a beta, and it’s not all roses — in my first 5 minutes a couple of little bugs have already cropped up. Nothing fatal, though. Maybe there’s even a Flashblock functionality built in here somewhere.

Chrome may not be displacing Firefox as my primary browser yet, but it’s pretty close to displacing Opera as my backup go-to browser.

Dropical Tepression

Labor Day. This is when I love Miami. Just as Fall starts to set in just about everywhere else, with the leaves browning, animals and people stocking up for the winter, here it is the opposite. Bring in the first tentative indications of the subsiding of the sweltering of the Summer. Bring in the first trickles of snowbirds, returning from the four corners of the world (but mainly Canada) to which they’ve retreated from that sweltering. And bring in the peak of the hurricane season, when God fires the low-pressure storms like bowling balls, one right after another. I’m not even remotely close to kidding, either:

Atlantic Ocean, showing tropical activity

To the left we have Gustav, Category 2 Full Blown Hurricane, currently hitting New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana, maximum sustained winds of 110 mph, and as we speak keeping me in terror of turning on the TV. (But seriously, can you imagine? — an entire city built under sea level, so that in times like these, 100% of them there populace has to evacuate, (and despite the much-publicized few holdouts, I believe most of them in fact have), and the city is presumably empty but for (futile?) looting-prevention squads of National Guard, waiting to be hammered like a fat kid at best, or at worst — what? — wiped off the face of the Earth?)

Next up we have Tropical Storm Hanna, maximum sustained winds of 60 mph, currently doing its business to the Bahamas, and strengthening as it moves towards Florida, the cone of danger veering wildly from the north to the south from advisory to advisory (the NHC really should archive its advisories and maps, so we can see just how well their computer models have done over the years), but with an excellent chance of ruining next weekend for me.

The next low-pressure system appears to have split up into two areas of crappy weather. They may continue to move westward, but they’ve forfeited any chance of blooming into cyclones. Not much, but what heavy weather they bring will be seen as a resting point between volleys.

. . . hot on the heels of which is currently Tropical Depression 9, maximum sustained winds 35 mph, and so probably by the time you read this to be proclaimed Tropical Storm Ike. Doesn’t look like much, but by next weekend it’ll have likely covered two thirds of the distance between its present location and Miami. Are you starting to see my point?

And of course we have the seemingly big orange blob, officially “a strong tropical wave,” where the butterflies are currently doing their fluttering between the coast of Africa and the Cape Verde islands. Orange indicating here “medium potential for tropical cyclone formation,” natch. It too is moving towards us, 15 to 20 miles per hour. OK, so I turned on the TV for a bit. Something about a little bit of good news, and but “some of the levies may already have been breached.” Spawning tornadoes.

But wait, I was talking about why I like this time of the year. The danger I guess is part of it. We don’t have those browning leaves down here to remind us, yadda yadda, of the circle of life, the Forces at Work, on this planet. We have these volatile storms that always look like they’re just bearing down on you, and sometimes they do bear. There is a level of danger, but it’s what’s called a tolerable level. There are warnings, and there are possible preparations and evacuations, and the damage is usually the kind that you can put just dollar signs in front of. My heart goes out to the city of New Orleans. Hope you’re safe. But this, as they say, is part of it.

(Sorry about the high-school-newspaperesque fever of my writing here. I’m just getting back into it, ok?)

Oil price speculation

I’m not ready to talk about global warming yet, but in my research I came across a recent session of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce regarding oil prices. As a public service I watched all six and a half hours of this (not always riveting) meeting, and now am here to share with you the results, which as a fairly free-market-oriented fella I for one found rather shocking.

We’ve heard over and over that oil speculators do not have a significant effect on the price of oil — this has been repeated over and over in a “no reasonable person disagrees with this” tone by all the various political and economic talking heads I’ve seen over the past few months.

The premise of these hearings is presented rather early in the video. Roughly stated, it says that speculators, freed by loosening of restrictions on them passed in 2002, have caused the price of oil to rise to almost double of what it would be in a standard supply/demand market. Further, it says that with fairly straightforward regulations, these speculators would be dis-incentivized out of the market, and the price of oil would return to something on the order of $60 per barrel (as I type, it currently sits around $140 per barrel). It further claims that the current dramatic increase is unlikely to lead to increased explorations, because oil producers do not believe that the price reflects the proper value of oil, and believe that exploration based on the current value would turn out to be financially disadvantageous.

Just a quick explanation of the last bit before I launch into how that premise was argued. The other thing is that the earth is not really close to being “out of oil.” The problem on the supply side is that the easily accessible oil is running out. There’s plenty of oil still in the earth, but it’s either in politically inaccessible places (e.g. ANWR, Alaska, e.g. also big chunks of Russia) or in geological formations from which it is more expensive to extract (e.g. the tar sands of Canada). In other words, if oil companies really believed that $140 for a barrel of oil was the stable price, there’s plenty of oil they could find. There’s still much more at $200 per barrel, and so on.

So, my natural skepticism about the ability of regulations on speculators to fix matters melted away as the four panels that testified before the subcommittee in turn made their opening statements and then answered questions from the congresscritters. The first panel consists of four experts — high-level folks that either advise or study the oil industry — including Fadel Gheit, managing director and senior oil analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., and Edward Krapels, director of Energy Security Analysis. To a one they all agreed with the premises outlined above. The next panel consists of a few folks from industries that rely on oil (trucking, airlines, etc.), to provide their obligatory whining; it is skipable.

The third panel consisted of one dude — Walter Lukken, acting chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. This is the Bush-appointed guy in charge of overseeing the markets, speculators and all, and was notable mainly for how thinly his contempt for congress was veiled. This slimy little kid (looked no older then me) did everything short of telling the committee members to fuck themselves as they tried in vein to get useful information out of him. The final panel finally had some reasonable people who spoke in defense of speculation, but both unfortunately worked for agencies that directly benefit from the speculation — the market institutions themselves. The panel also had the day’s only university professor, Michael Greenberger of the U. of Maryland, who also agreed with the aforementioned premises.

There are some complications here — notably, oil speculation takes place not just on US markets but also on the ICE (Intercontinental Exchange) market, which while being housed in Atlanta is technically a British institution, making regulating it more difficult (but not as bad as it sounds). Overall, though, the subcommittee members — Democrat and Republican — seemed impressed that they had at their disposal a method to drastically reduce the price of gasoline. This hearing took place on June 23. Let’s see where they go with these findings.

Weekendly clickables II

  • How to use a French Press. “It’s important to add your coffee quickly after grinding – if you’re smelling aromas, it’s going stale.” CoffeeGeek is so cute.
  • Holy crap people Jeff Bridges’ website!!
  • “Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ll stop using it.”
  • Chuck Klosterman got 96 Germans to write an essay about who their most influential American was to weed out which 20 would get to take a pop culture class he was teaching. “There was a female student who selected Jared Leto. I must admit — I did not see this one coming. He is perceived as a triple threat of acting, music, and environmental awareness (apparently, his tour bus runs on vegetable oil).”
  • Better then the van lets you sign up to let broke ass bands on tour crash at your house. Joy.
  • Songza lets you listen to any song anytime you want. Doesn’t work on my Firefox, but still great.
  • My favorite new twitter feed: Captions from New Yorker cartoons without the cartoons.
  • Some harsh words about Will Smith’s career. “Smith’s rules for how to be a global black superstar, then? 1. Keep it easy and breezy. Heroes must work for the good of the white folks (especially families and romantic pairings) in the movie, often to their own detriment.”
  • Go play in graphic design traffic.
  • “Never tell the hired gun that someone else has a bulletin, letter, memorandum, or document of any kind. You cannot possibly know this to be true, because the other person may have thrown it out since you last saw it. If you never saw it, then you did not know of its existence and cannot testify about your own knowledge. Don’t ever talk about a document unless you have the document in front of your eyes.” Actually, I have no idea what this is.
  • Nobody wants to help me out.
  • !!! (Via Keith Gessen’s blog, which is stuff about literary culture and photos of puppies and pretty great itself. Oh and who this person has a problem with. Too much internet, too little time.)
  • On the internet you can buy yourself something to make you happy, like a picture of a flying car.
  • So, Liz linked to FreeRice.com earlier this week, and the site seems like win-win for everybody, but I always get suspicious about stuff like this, so I poked around and found this. But still, right? Not only is it not completely credible, but even if true… well, I dunno.
  • Six tips for designing your happiness commandments. I can’t believe I’m not grossed out by this.
  • “. . . although it does not have law enforcement powers, TSA has begun issuing navy-blue uniforms and silver, cop-style badges. Not by accident, the badges look exactly like the kind worn by actual police officers. They say “U.S. Officer” at the top, with an eagle emblem in the center and “Transportation Security Administration” across the bottom. Not all law enforcement officials are happy.”
  • Hey you people riding around the beach on squeaky bicycles: Lube that shit.
  • Ted just posted a talk filmed in 2005: Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. collaboration. This is interesting because a lot of the threads that Shirky ties together are pretty old hat at this point (e.g. flickr tags), but whether or not his grand conclusion works out is still a bit up in the air.
  • Still Bored? Want something to unravel? Try this, but don’t expect to be enlightened at the end of it all.

OK, I’m going back to read what Gessen thinks of the word ‘twat.’

The future of words (on the internet)

First, let’s look at some interesting recent, and not so recent, developments:

  1. Google History. Tracks everything you’ve searched for on Google, and which links you followed. Bear with me.
  2. Google Books. Allows you to search the text of most(?) books ever published. Amazon has a similar feature, and both are somewhat crippled while we get our uneasiness about copyright worked out.
  3. Good Reads. A pretty decent website that lets you track what books you’ve read. Has some unexpected advantages over just keeping a list.
  4. Action Stream/Activity Stream. A running tally of everything you’ve done on the internet (more or less), and by extension potentially everything you’ve read; maybe best explained by looking at an example, in the sidebar of Anil Dash’s blog. Here’s my stream, although as of right now it’s busted.
  5. Zoomii. A visual bookstore interface to Amazon. You zoom in/out, and click individual books for information, to order, or to flip through the book. (This is only tangentially related, but cool enough to include.) Looks like this (but you’ve really got to play with it):

zoomii

So where’s this all headed? Well, one place I’d like to get to is a search box that works on everything I’ve ever read: books, magazine articles, and web pages. The web aspect should take no more then a little Firefox plugin that creates an index as you browse the web. The book thing would require some clever mashup of something like the Goodreads feed with the Google Books search. I’ll give you odds there’s already an engineer at the Googleplex working on it. The magazines are a little tougher, since not all the text is online yet. But lots of it is, so what you need is a service to track your magazine subscriptions/purchases along with some tricky database work. Maybe when Google’s done scanning the world’s books they’ll start in on the mags. Or maybe the publications themselves will create a system to allow this to happen.

The magazines are the trickiest aspect, but I hope this happens, because some great information is locked away in magazines (and I for one do not want to have all that paper laying around, since about 99% is still completely useless). I give it a year or two before some embryonic form of this exists, maybe five until the kinks are ironed out.