As an apocalyptic bat disease threatens to spread across the United States, the stage is set for a showdown between the federal government and environmentalists who feel enough isn’t being done to stop it.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released the second draft version on Oct. 27 of its national response plan for White Nose Syndrome, which has killed more than a million cave-dwelling bats since emerging four years ago.
On the same day, the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity issued a press release excoriating the plan, calling it a “slow-motion response” to a disease that’s already destroyed a major part of the animal kingdom in the eastern U.S., and shows no sign of slowing.
The Center for Biological Diversity has a plan: close as many caves as possible as quickly as possible. There don’t appear to be too many other conservative options given that scientists are just now starting to test treatments.
Yesterday, I was reading through a blog post that claims Nicki Minaj has undergone surgery to change her appearance and was previously a lesbian. The claim was made to deliver a moral judgement: Minaj is fake when she should be keeping it real.
Wonderfully, almost all the reader comments that followed protested the argument rather than its details, calling it boring and meaningless if true. To her credit, Nicki Minaj has written the following fantastic line for the song Monster by Kanye West: “and if I’m fake I ain’t notice cause my money ain’t.”
This is not unlike the debate that drove so many online exchanges last year: is Lady Gaga a hermaphrodite? To that artist’s credit she released the absolutely fantastic video for the otherwise mediocre song “Telephone” in which two prison guards (both female, natch) strip Lady Gaga nude as if to humiliate her, prompting one guard to then comment: “I told you she didn’t have a dick.”
It takes a moment to unwind the genius of that move. Responding to the “normative violence” of the crowd, Gaga creates a nine minute music video in which she is imprisoned by guards but uses the opportunity to call out the desire implicit in claims about her intersexuality, casting the guards as butch lesbians who in turn corroborate that she does not have a penis. (Following the signifier in this exchange is like tracking the ball in an Olympics-level table tennis match.)
Like the fans defending Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga asserts that claims about her real identity are boring and meaningless if true. That both of these artists are in their 20s and have amassed fame (or, in Gaga’s case, become so famous as to redefine the meaning and value of fame) is testament to the high quality of our art.
We may not yet be prepared to marry our politics with our art but if and when we do the conversation will be far more nuanced than the current trends in political discourse might suggest.
Given how many Americans consume illegal drugs, you’d think there’d be more television shows featuring the banality of illegal drug use. (I’m not up on premium cable shows so this may already be a staple of television.)
Such openness in our media could, perhaps, lead to less drug use.
“Such programmes rely on sensationalised, exaggerated statements about cocaine which misinform about patterns of use, stigmatise users, and destroy the educator’s credibility.”
One would think that adverts (whether inserted into dramas or stand-alone) in which patterns of drug use are realistic – based on data – and users are not stigmatized would allow a more credible educator to lay out simple but important guidelines that could reduce drug use; e.g., if you experience side-effects, see a doctor.
Ana liked it.* I thought it was bordering on the absurd. A wish fulfillment scenario made for viewers with a very different set of concerns can feel like a fugue state. Interesting but alien. I got the same feeling of otherness from watching a Neon Genesis Evangelion movie and suspect the experience is not uncommon.
However, fairy tales can be made meaningful across life stages. Not just by inserting parallel storylines and/or peppering the dialogue with allusions but rather through a protagonist who is unsure, insecure, challenged, in flux. (Think Spirited Away along with every other Bildungsroman, no matter the gender, racial or class barriers to be overcome.)
In Twilight, the movie, Bella is a closed set of possibilities. Even her needs and anxieties are seamless: she desires to be desired and nothing else. If anything, she is the monster. (And I hoped at some point it would be revealed she was the true vampire.)
Rather than portraying a coming of age and thus challenging its viewers, Twilight presents an early adolescent’s fantasy of adulthood, allowing its viewers to postpone the most difficult question of all: who am I? what am I?
(A counterfactual: what if Twilight had been an X-Men spin-off? Instead of the awful Wolverine, we might have spent some time with a young woman who tames the supernatural. Instead of “Will I meet Mr. Right?” the hero could have wondered: “If I’m the superior being, why don’t they like me?”)
As for the wish being fulfilled: Ana points out, “Who doesn’t want to marry up?” Cool family, cool house, cool cars. But where Sense and Sensibility exploits class mobility to lay bare the cruelty of Victorian-era patriarchy, Twilight happily submits its hero to gendered norms as the price for her fulfillment.
In a scene where Bella runs away from home, her boyfriend, a considerably older gentleman, helpfully suggests: “Let me drive.” It would be a fitting alternate title.
*Ana likes it because it inverts the traditional vampire narrative, making the bad guys into the good guys. I think other recent vampire stories like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Let The Right One In do that inversion much better without coddling their teen audiences.
Ana retorts that it’s not coddling but a necessary sexual education tool to teach young girls that rape is not the only possible outcome of heterosexual congress. I think we’re in check on that one.
Josh Marshall is right to view California’s failed effort to legalize marijuana in U.S.-centric terms and find it wanting.
But when viewed from the perspective of regional politics (and all politics is local), it was a bold step forward. The American consumer’s demand for drugs has thrust the neighboring state of Mexico into a bloody war. The black or gray market that Prop. 19 tried to regulate is international.
If you live in California, the fate of Mexico is not as abstract as the fate of the Afghans. It’s worth pointing out that the pro-business and quite conservative former president of Mexico issued a public statement only a week before the election praying to God (a conservative Catholic’s God), that the legalization measure pass in California.
Prop 19 may have been doomed as domestic politics but it was potentially productive as international policy. (Conversely, detaining people who happen to be driving while brown is not a very effective way to regulate an international labor supply.)
The tragedy of this movement is that it has not enlisted the vote of Mexican Americans who are interested in restoring order to their ancestral homeland and/or Christians who wish to see the bonds of slavery dissolved via compassionate treatment rather than incarceration (hate the sin, not the sinner).
The reality is that religious leaders mostly heed signs from the here and now: their constituencies, competitors, potential allies and detractors, etc.
The problem with political parties that offer their followers an identity is that identities are inherently conservative.
If a certain attitude – say, animosity – is what defines your identity, you will be reluctant to change your attitude even when the situation around you calls for a different response.
Most of the time, people don’t want to stop being who they are. Yet most of the time, the world is changing. This constant of change is especially true of populous, multicultural liberal democracies as well as in international relations.
The change-averse nature of identity also means individuals will create feedback loops with the people around them so as to remain “in character”. If a person’s political identity is defined by, say, alienation, they will pursue discord so as to validate their worldview and thus preserve their identity.
President Obama does have a re-calibration he needs to do with a big cross section of the electorate. Reality matters for policy; but perceptions matter for elections. They’re what elections are all about.
All year long the new Speaker of the House John Boehner has been promising “common sense reforms” to the spiraling costs of health care and the myriad ramifications (almost all negative) for the national economy.
Common sense is an appeal to what we already know. But, to paraphrase the former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, there are things we know we do not know. When what we lack is information, we cannot appeal to common sense.
Last December, Atul Gawande documented how our 21st century health care system is plagued by the same problems that once crippled the U.S. agricultural sector: “fragmented and disorganized, and ignor[ing] evidence showing how things could be done better.”
Gawande explains how the health care reforms championed by President Obama would, first and foremost, give us the insights we need to tackle the very complex problem of a for-profit health care market place.
What Representative Boehner doesn’t realize – or, perhaps, want to admit – is that ObamaCare is making common sense.
One of my favorite things about music is how clearly it adheres to the dialectical mode of thesis (let’s use more synthesizers!), antithesis (no, let’s use more guitars!) and synthesis (LCD Soundsystem). For that reason, some of the most exciting mixtapes or playlists are those that make connections across time and space, revealing how musical artists quote one another, whether consciously or not, approvingly or as a critique.
I’ve been impressed with the Apple iTunes Genius playlist generator lately which I assume uses software sound analysis along with social or human filtering to generate associations between recordings. But it fails utterly at creating playlists that span across time. It’s a failing that once revealed all but completely undermines the “genius” moniker.
Kathleen Morse, a homemaker from Epping, N.H., described herself as a centrist-leaning independent, but this time she voted for anyone with an R next to his or her name. “I just went with it,” Ms. Morse said. “I mean, it can’t be any worse.”
Oh, my fellow Americans, if only you’d travel more often even if only by reading.
When choosing models for high-end catwalks, campaigns, and fashion magazines, I found that clients’ choices of models tended to be isomorphic. That is, they choose looks that they expect everyone else to choose too. They widely perceive that white-washed ultra-skinny models are most likely to be types chosen by their peers, and to deviate from this tried-and-tested formula would be to risk professional status by being “out of fashion.”
I’ve read a few comments today from liberals all too happy to piss on the Colbert Stewart Parade because it’s not political enough or not the right kind of politics.
Bullshit. The show matters. It matters a great deal. Whether it’s the Miracle on Ice at the 1980 Winter Olympics or the Fireside Chats of the Great Depression, the medium is part of the message – the way we talk to each other and about each other has everything to do with what we are able to accomplish with one another.
The penny ante falangists and frustrated Maoists of the American Right and their far fewer counterparts in the American Left may have everything to gain from keeping comedy out of the conversation but the American public does not.
Comedy is how culture corrects itself. It is not a substitute for politics but neither is it the enemy of politics. Consider just this one example of hundreds from Western Civilization: “After 1835, when the government banned political caricature, Le Charivari began publishing satires of everyday life.”
Here’s the bumper sticker for those who need to boil politics – i.e., human nature – into a catch-phrase: we need phone banks and telecasts, door drops and stand up’s, inspiring speeches and withering satire.
If tactical, goal-oriented political groups didn’t descend on D.C. this past weekend to enlist new members from an audience of 250,000 voters, shame on those tacticians, not the event organizers – and certainly not those who schlepped all the way to the nation’s capital to convene as rational Americans.
Tom Junod has written a lengthy essay for Esquire teasing out the central role that retired and well-to-do Baby Boomers are playing in the Tea Party movement:
The Sore Winners are easy to find. They are most visible at their flagship, Fox News, which dominates both cable news and the political conversaton and yet is always embattled, defending itself against the heathen. They are loudest not only on secular talk radio, but also in Christian broadcasting, which tells its listeners that a nation that remains a nation of Christians rather than a Christian nation is a nation that has turned against them. This is not to say, however, that the Sore Winners are strictly a political phenomenon, manipulated, as some would have it, by their masters in the media or by the money men from Wall Street. No, what makes the Sore Winners such a force in American politics is that their anger is so personal.
…Worrying about what someone who doesn’t think about you thinks about you: this is the essence of Sore Winnerdom, and it is no accident that it also the essence of the Republican animus. The Republican party was small and hidebound — the party of country-club corporatists, and the range-war West — until, with the Reagan Revolution, it began grafting unto itself the legions of the disaffected: the Christianists, the Southerners, the blue-collar workers displaced by the collapse of America’s industrial base and estranged from the unions that failed them. The Tea Party, in this sense, is not a new development so much as it is part of an ongoing migration of the perpetually petulant, a political phenomenon grounded in a demographic one: the creation of a class of baby-boom retirees who have been deprived of meaningful work but given personal computers as Christmas presents. The skin on the Republican Party’s “Big Tent” is by definition thin, and under it gathers a volatile throng of people with nothing in common but the fear that outside its environs someone is laughing at them — or simply having a better time.
Emphasis mine. When politics gets personal it’s no longer about politics – the good of the many – but rather about the needs of the individual.
David Frum rips Charles Murray a new one but also points out that where there’s smoke (obfuscation) there’s a smoldering fire:
Murray is of course right that there exists an American elite. Murray may be right that this elite has pulled further away from ordinary people than the American elite of say 1960. Murray does not prove the case, he does not even try. But intuitively, Murray’s case makes sense for a reason that Murray omits to mention: the American upper class of 2010 is so very much, much richer than the American upper class of 1960.
But here’s another difference between the elites of 2010 and the elites of 1960: The current range of elites have done a much, much worse job of governing the country than did their predecessors.
For a decade, almost all the news from the nation’s political and economic leaders has been news of failure and mistake. From 9/11 through the stimulus, we have careened from one mistake to another. The one success of the entire period from my point of view was the TARP – and even that success was only necessary because financial and political elites had steered us toward the worst financial collapse since 1931. Kudos to those who averted the worst catastrophe, but their work should never have been necessary in the first place. And even TARP leaves a very bitter taste in the mouth, because the price of rescuing the US (and world) financial system was another round of outsize financial rewards to those who had created the mess in the first place.
Yet for all of its general unhappiness, the electorate does not seem to be offering any clear guidance for Mr. Obama and the incoming Congress — whoever controls it — on the big issues.
While almost 9 in 10 respondents said they considered government spending to be an important issue, and more than half said they favored smaller government offering fewer services, there was no consensus on what programs should be cut.
They’ve been lied to so often they think they can have their cake and eat it, too.
I had forgotten that Blade Runner is a movie about illegal aliens being hunted to death by a cop turned bounty hunter in a Los Angeles abandoned by anyone with means*, where Los Mimilocos Mazacote y Orquesta are the headliners at the Bradbury theater and noodle stands are the norm; a SoCal where the weather is inside out and the fugitives are runaway slaves, destined to die young.
I had also forgotten just how economical the movie is in its story telling, both dialogue and plot. Not a great deal happens and what does happen has been done a dozen times before: a police interrogation, a cabaret, a foot chase, broken fingers, gun shots, a rooftop chase and the hero dangling over a tall ledge.
Yet the disciplined chiaroscuro, the impeccable wardrobe, the tension crammed into almost every scene makes it grind forward towards The End: the inevitability of death that only romantic love makes tolerable.
*As Ana puts it, when the plot begins with Leroy’s interrogation, he’s in Secondary Inspection.
Josh Marshall notes that Sony is retiring the Walkman and what a revolution that product represents. I couldn’t agree more.
Just now I was listening to Everything She Wants by Wham! (1984) and for the first time picked up on its use of psychoaccoustic trickery.
In the chorus that begins at 5m24s, you’ll hear a few angry exhortations to “Work!” mixed behind a synthetic hand clap in the left channel. It’s so subtle most people may not notice it even though they may be hearing – and thus, feeling – it.
It’s a clever technique and one that has become commonplace in contemporary music as pop producers mix for headphones. Thanks, in part, to the success of the Walkman.
