zidouta.com

“I short-sold more stock of the companies that brought us the housing and credit crises.” Jeff, 28, Scientist. Seattle, Washington

How I Spend my Stimulus:

“In January, Congress approved $152 billion in economic stimulus checks for millions of American households, intended to boost the economy and avert a recession. Just how this money will be spent remains to be seen. We hope this website helps shed some light on where the stimulus money is going.”

Via Cynical-C Blog. Zie ook Freakonomics, Likely Effects of the Tax Rebate Checks en What’s the Smartest Way to Spend Your Rebate?

Bessemer Venture Partners, AntiPortfolio:

“Bessemer Venture Partners is perhaps the nation’s oldest venture capital firm, carrying on an unbroken practice of venture capital investing that stretches back to 1911. This long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.

Over the course of our history, we did invest in a wig company, a french-fry company, and the Lahaina, Ka’anapali & Pacific Railroad. However, we chose to decline these investments, each of which we had the opportunity to invest in, and each of which later blossomed into a tremendously successful company. “

Apple, Intel, FedEx, Ebay, Google… Via Freakonomics, Misadventures in Venture Capitalism.

Sam Harris, What Barack Obama Could Not (and Should Not) Say:

“Barack Obama delivered a truly brilliant and inspiring speech this week. There were a few things, however, that he did not and could not (and, indeed, should not) say:

He did not say that the mess he is in has as much to do with religion as with racism–and, indeed, religion is the reason why our political discourse in this country is so scandalously stupid. As Christopher Hitchens observed in Slate months ago, one glance at the website of the Trinity United Church of Christ should have convinced anyone that Obama’s connection to Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. would be a problem at some point in this campaign. Why couldn’t Obama just cut his ties to his church and move on?

Well, among other inexpediencies, this might have put his faith in Jesus in question. After all, Reverend Wright was the man who brought him to the “foot of the cross.” Might the Senator from Illinois be unsure whether the Creator of the universe brought forth his only Son from the womb of a Galilean virgin, taught him the carpenter’s trade, and then had him crucified for our benefit? Few suspicions could be more damaging in American politics today.”

“Killthecliche.com tracks journalistic clichés found in major newspapers and calls out the worst offenders.”

Via FP Passport. Zie ook DMWH’s Media Mammon.

Lauren Berlant in The Nation, Against Sexual Scandal:

“Instead, what stories like this really do is to damage the reputation of sex. Whenever there’s a sex scandal, I feel sorry for sex. I felt sorry for sex during the Larry Craig brouhaha last summer. What if he liked being married and procreating and giving anonymous head? What if that was his sexual preference? What if he really was not gay, as he claims, but had sexual desires that seemed incoherent? Some of the response to Craig was like the response to moralists like Jim Bakker, Ted Haggard and now Spitzer–moralists deserve to suffer the same force of negative judgment they wielded on others. Shame on us? Shame on you, ha ha! But lots of the response was sheer homophobia. And all of it was sheer erotophobia.”

Adam Gopnik to Hendrik Hertzberg:

“Interesting thing, to me at least. If you Google Obama’s wonderful line “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” it’s credited right and left, and going back to the nineties, as a bit of Hopi Indian wisdom. I haven’t (a) read this anywhere or (b) seen anything made of the silent borrowing from the Eldest Peoples, etc. Also, frankly, I doubt that it can be a true Hopi aphorism, unless in some very different form, since I suspect the grammar works only in English. (You couldn’t say it in French, for instance, so far as I can figure.) I wonder who really did invent it, and where B.O. (ah! a difference! You can’t initialize him à la a Kennedy!) found it?”

Peggy Noonan, Can Mrs. Clinton Lose?

“If Hillary Clinton loses, does she know how to lose? What will that be, if she loses? Will she just say, “I concede” and go on vacation at a friend’s house on an island, and then go back to the Senate and wait?

Is it possible she could be so normal? Politicians lose battles, it’s part of what they do, win and lose. But she does not know how to lose. Can she lose with grace? But she does grace the way George W. Bush does nuance.

She often talks about how tough she is. She has fought “the Republican attack machine” that has tried to “stop” her, “end” her, and she knows “how to fight them.” She is preoccupied to an unusual degree with toughness. A man so preoccupied would seem weak. But a woman obsessed with how tough she is just may be lethal.”

“This ain’t Aruba, bitch.” - Bunk (The Wire: Unconfirmed Reports.)

Entertainment Weekly, ”The Wire”: Bright Lies, Big City:

“Last night’s epigraph - ”This ain’t Aruba, bitch” - was delivered by a slurring Bunk at the bar. All those black bodies found in the rowhouses aren’t enough to warrant a continued investigation, and Bunk, McNulty, and Lester tried to drink away their disgust. Perhaps if those bodies had been white; better yet, if just one of those bodies had belonged to a white teenage cheerleader who had gone missing on an island spring break. Now that would warrant front-page news despite being a cold case for months now.”

(Zie ook: Missing white woman syndrome.)

The New Yorker, The Choice. The Clinton-Obama battle reveals two very different ideas of the Presidency:

“These rival conceptions of the Presidency—Clinton as executive, Obama as visionary—reflect a deeper difference in how the two candidates analyze what ails the country. Obama’s diagnosis is more fundamental: for him, the illness precedes the Bush years and the partisan deadlock in Washington, originating in a basic failure of politicians to bring Americans together. A strong hand on the wheel won’t make a difference if your car is stuck in the mud; a good leader has to persuade enough people to get out and push. Whereas Clinton echoes Churchill, who proclaimed, “Give us the tools and we will finish the job,” Obama invokes Lincoln, who said, “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.””

‘Shipwreck timber littering coast’ (BBC). Photo: pip aka flipflop :) (idem)

Eric G. Wilson, In Praise of Melancholy. American culture’s overemphasis on happiness misses an essential part of a full life:

“I for one am afraid that American culture’s overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society’s efforts to expunge melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?

My fears grow out of my suspicion that the predominant form of American happiness breeds blandness. This kind of happiness appears to disregard the value of sadness. This brand of supposed joy, moreover, seems to foster an ignorance of life’s enduring and vital polarity between agony and ecstasy, dejection and ebullience. Trying to forget sadness and its integral place in the great rhythm of the cosmos, this sort of happiness insinuates that the blues are an aberrant state that should be cursed as weakness of will or removed with the help of a little pink pill.”

‘A 19th-century image shows federal troops employing several forms of torture. One man stood on a barrel for several hours; another carried a large log, his leg weighted with a ball and chain; a third was bound to a tree with his arms raised above his head; a fourth sat on the ground, tied.’

Boston Globe Ideas, Torture, American style. The surprising force behind torture: democracies:

“We think torture is mainly the province of dictators and juntas - the kind of thing that happens behind the iron doors of repressive regimes. In a democracy, with open courts and a free press, torture should be a relic. In the words of an American World War II poster, torture is “the method of the enemy.”

But a closer look at the modern history of torture suggests that exactly the opposite is true. Torture isn’t an alien force invading our democracy from the benighted realms of dictatorships. In fact, it is the democracies that have been the real innovators in 20th-century torture. Britain, France, and the United States were perfecting new forms of torture long before the CIA even existed. It might make Americans uncomfortable, but the modern repertoire of torture is mainly a democratic innovation.

In one instance after another, democracies developed new torture techniques, refined them, and then exported them to more authoritarian regimes. Americans didn’t just develop electric power; they invented the first electrotorture devices and used them in police stations from Arkansas to Seattle. Magneto torture, a technique favored by the Nazis involving a portable generator, was actually developed and spread by the French. Waterboarding and forced standing owe their wide use to the Americans and British.”

Ben Wallace-Wells, How America Lost the War on Drugs:

“The drug war, in the end, has been undone in no small part by the sweeping and inflexible nature of its own metaphor. At the beginning, in the days of Escobar, the campaign was a war as seen from the situation room, a complicated assault that spanned multiple fronts, but one which had identifiable enemies and a goal. Today, the government’s anti-drug effort resembles a war as seen from the trenches, an eternal slog, where victory seems not only unattainable but somehow beside the point. For the drug agents and veterans who busted Escobar, the last decade and a half have been a slow, agonizing history of defeat after defeat, the enemy shifting but never retreating. “You get frustrated,” Joe Toft, a former DEA country attache in Colombia, tells me. “We’ve never had a true effort where the U.S. as a whole says, ‘We’re never going to crack this problem without a real demand-reduction program.’ That’s something that’s just never happened.”"

Zie ook: Smartest Drug Story of the Year

“Timers from washing machines and dryers, like these for sale at a parts store in Baghdad’s Rasheed Street district, are used by insurgents to detonate improvised explosive devices.”

Noah Shachtman, How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social — Not Electronic:

“(…) The Defense Department wasn’t blind to the power of networks, of course — the Internet began as a military project, after all, and each branch of the armed services had ongoing “digitization” programs. But no one had ever crystallized what the information age might offer the Pentagon quite like Cebrowski and Garstka did. In an article for the January 1998 issue of the naval journal Proceedings, “Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future,” they not only named the philosophy but laid out a new direction for how the US would think about war.

Their model was Wal-Mart. Here was a sprawling, bureaucratic monster of an organization — sound familiar? — that still managed to automatically order a new lightbulb every time it sold one. Warehouses were networked, but so were individual cash registers. So were the guys who sold Wal-Mart the bulbs. If that company could wire everyone together and become more efficient, then US forces could, too. “Nations make war the same way they make wealth,” Cebrowski and Garstka wrote. Computer networks and the efficient flow of information would turn America’s chain saw of a war machine into a scalpel.”

Fox News Porn:

“Warning. All clips used in this video were taken from Fox News broadcasts.”

Update: Zie ook Larry Lessig, The weird world of “indecency”.

“Belzoni, Miss., in the Delta area. Oct. 1939. Negro man entering movie theater by ‘Colored’ entrance.” Photo and caption by Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration.”

Shorpy Vintage Photos | The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog

NY Times, A Spy’s Path: Iowa to A-Bomb to Kremlin Honor:

“On Nov. 2, the Kremlin startled Western scholars by announcing that President Vladimir V. Putin had posthumously given the highest Russian award to a Soviet agent who penetrated the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb.”

Zie ook: Putin.

“You all brought me here to be executed, not to make a speech. That’s it.”

Charlie Livingston, November 21, 1997.
Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Executed Offenders.

Bruce Schneier, The War on the Unexpected:

“We’ve opened up a new front on the war on terror. It’s an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it’s a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested — even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.”