That it was Randinho’s birthday, so let’s all wish him a Happy 75th!
Archives for 2013
Long Read: “A Deadly Mix in Benghazi”
Another excellent multimedia piece from the NYTimes that will be widely discussed, and yet liable to change exactly nobody’s mind:
… The United States waded deeply into post-Qaddafi Libya, hoping to build a beachhead against extremists, especially Al Qaeda. It believed it could draw a bright line between friends and enemies in Libya. But it ultimately lost its ambassador in an attack that involved both avowed opponents of the West and fighters belonging to militias that the Americans had taken for allies.
Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.
A fuller accounting of the attacks suggests lessons for the United States that go well beyond Libya. It shows the risks of expecting American aid in a time of desperation to buy durable loyalty, and the difficulty of discerning friends from allies of convenience in a culture shaped by decades of anti-Western sentiment. Both are challenges now hanging over the American involvement in Syria’s civil conflict….
Complications, Complications
I decided to convene a death panel of one and pull the plug on my ancient LaserJet printer this morning. It had been printing in funny colors for a long time, and today it started leaving poop marks on the page. I’ve cleaned it out and changed cartridges and it’s still doing it, so euthanasia was the answer.
The new HP Color LaserJet I purchased was cheap (since it’s just a ploy to get you to buy cartridges — a full cartridge load costs more than the printer) and full of features. You can print from a smartphone, from anywhere on earth, using Google Cloud Print or HP’s ePrint. You can print over a wired or wireless network, or directly connected to your computer.
It’s a great device, but I have no idea how regular folks configure the damn thing. This is the second HP networked color printer I’ve set up this year (the other was for my brother) and both of them have required a little bit of troubleshooting and basic network configuration. Two different networks, two different PCs (a Mac and a Windows 7 machine) and two problems. The fix involved stuff I’ve done for 20+ years so it wasn’t a big deal, but I know that Joe Average Computer User would have been stuck.
These are the bog-standard, entry-level HP devices. Millions are sold every year. I either hit the jackpot twice, or people are spending many hours on the phone talking to HP support to get these printers working. I wonder how many other devices are like this.
Here’s another open thread to discuss your computer woes, or anything else.
Another Open Thread
I’ve got some sort of stomach bug, so I’m just piled up on the sofa taking it easy. My youngster is cruelly forcing me to watch a Sasquatch hunter marathon on television.
The Sasquatch people have their own special vocabulary: for example, “squatching” means looking for yetis. I’m definitely going to have to wrest back control of the remote prior to football.
My mother-in-law gave me an ancient waffle iron that has cannoli plates. Have you ever heard of such a thing? I was going to attempt homemade cannoli, but I feel too queasy at the moment.
What are y’all up to? Have you ever made cannoli?
Early Morning Open Thread: Sunday Sermon
(John Deering via GoComics.com)
Point and mock. Luke O’Neil, journamalist, whines in Esquire about “The Year We Broke the Internet“:
… The Internet, like the Sphinx, is a ravenous beast that eats alive anyone who can’t answer its hoary riddle. We in the media have been struggling for twenty years to solve that riddle, and this year, the answer arrived: Big Viral, a Lovecraftian nightmare that has tightened its thousand-tentacled grip on our browsing habits with its traffic-at-all-costs mentality—veracity, newsworthiness, and relevance be damned. We solved the riddle, and then we got eaten anyway…
This is not a glitch in the system. It is the system. Readers are gullible, the media is feckless, garbage is circulated around, and everyone goes to bed happy and fed. BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti admitted as much when explaining, that, when he’s hiring, he looks for “people who really understand how information is shared on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and other emerging platforms, because that is in some cases as important as, you know, having traditional reporting talent.” Upworthy editorial director Sara Critchfield seconded the notion. “We reject the idea that the media elite or people who have been trained in a certain way somehow have the monopoly on editorial judgment.”…
This conflation of newsiness with news, share-worthiness with importance, has wreaked havoc on the media’s skepticism immune systems. It didn’t happen out of nowhere, it’s a process that’s been midwifed by the willful blurring of the lines between fact and fiction on the part of a key group of influential sites, that have, unfortunately, established a viable financial model amid the wreckage of traditional media. It’s why companies are so eager to shuffle native ads—content produced to appear as if it were a site’s regular content—into the regular mix. They’re hoping we won’t know the difference. They’re right, we often don’t. That’s part of the reason native advertising revenues are up 77 percent this year, according to a new study by BIA/Kelsey. There are practically no consequences anymore….
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Apart from that, what’s on the agenda today?
Early Morning Open Thread: Sunday SermonPost + Comments (184)
Saturday Night Open Thread
Cleaning out my holiday cache, and waiting for the Blogmaster to post proof-of-life. The NYTimes decided to do a year-end interview with every Purity Patroller’s target-of-the-moment:
… As people have brought these things up to you over the last year, has it changed your personal thinking about race?
No, I never let that change me. My grandma, who is alive, was living in a time where there was no way in hell that she would’ve ever thought there would’ve been a black president. I mean, never. And my grandma’s like, not even 80, so this is in a short period of time that things have changed so much. I really thought about it a lot when Nelson Mandela passed away, because I couldn’t even imagine living this life and seeing how much it’s changed. So, you know, I look forward to when I’m older, my kids being like, “What do you mean people ever even talked about what color your dancers were?”
You obviously know that the primary visual imprint of you from the last six months is either the V.M.A.s or your videos.
I went from people just thinking I was, like, a baby to people thinking I’m this, like, sex freak that really just pops molly and does lines all day. It’s like, “Has anyone ever heard of rock ’n’ roll?” There’s a sex scene in pretty much every single movie, and they go, “Well, that’s a character.” Well, that’s a character. I don’t really dress as a teddy bear and, like, twerk on Robin Thicke, you know?
Last night, I was talking about some Madonna performances, and I said, “At some point, everything becomes irrelevant.” Like, no one even thinks about when she did “Like a Virgin” at the V.M.A.s. That just becomes a standard, where it’s just like, “Oh, that’s her thing.” …
Every generation has its moral panic, and it happens to be you this year, and two years from now, it’ll be someone else.
Exactly. Even when I hear that — that someone, two years from now, is going to be the next kind of provocateur — like, I can’t wait to collab with whoever the hell that is, you know? I’m like, whoever that is, I’m going to ride that wave.
Guess there weren’t even any sporting events that deserved blogging, so… What’s on the agenda for the evening?
Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid…
Dave Weigel, in Democracy:
… The conservative base of the Republican Party takes no responsibility for the party’s 2012 defeat. It takes no responsibility for the 2008 loss, either. In its telling, the base was too slow to pick its champion. Its vote was split, coalescing too late behind one candidate—Huckabee in 2008, Santorum in 2012. So the Republican establishment force-fed it two “electable” candidates named John McCain and Mitt Romney. This is the ur-myth of the modern GOP; it will scare the base into organizing more adeptly than it’s ever done before. Since the rise of party primaries and binding caucuses, only twice—1964 and 1980—has the conservative base overcome the party “establishment.” Ronald Reagan was a two-time loser (he ran briefly in 1968 in addition to 1976) before he won; and when Barry Goldwater triumphed, only 16 states held true primaries. There’s no precedent for a true conservative insurgent taking the nomination in the modern age of drawn-out, expensive ballot contests.
But there are cracks in the dam. Mitt Romney, a runner-up in the 2008 contest, faced an incredibly weak 2012 field. That didn’t stop him from becoming the first Republican to lose the South Carolina primary on the way to nomination, losing “conservative” voters—two-thirds of that state’s electorate—by 21 points. It didn’t stop him from having to fight a month-long mop-up operation against Santorum, who won more states than Romney in the South and nearly won in the Midwest, where he was outspent nearly 5-to-1, even before PAC money was counted. The weakest insurgent candidate in memory actually won 11 state contests, four more than John McCain won in his still-celebrated 2000 run against George W. Bush…
Theda Skocpol, in the Atlantic, “Why the Tea Party Isn’t Going Anywhere”:
… The Tea Party was supposed to be dead and the GOP on the way to moderate repositioning after Obama’s victory and Democratic congressional gains in November 2012. Yet less than a year after post-election GOP soul-searching supposedly occurred, radical forces pulled almost all GOP House and Senate members into at least going along with more than two weeks of extortion tactics to try to force President Obama and Senate Democrats to gut the Affordable Care Act and grant a long laundry list of other GOP priorities suspiciously similar to the platform on which the party had run and lost in 2012. The Tea Party’s hold on the GOP persists beyond each burial ceremony…
Here is the key point: Even though there is no one center of Tea Party authority—indeed, in some ways because there is no one organized center—the entire gaggle of grassroots and elite organizations amounts to a pincer operation that wields money and primary votes to exert powerful pressure on Republican officeholders and candidates. Tea Party influence does not depend on general popularity at all…
… Americans may resent the Tea Party, but they are also losing ever more faith in the federal government—a big win for anti-government saboteurs. Popularity and “responsible governance” are not the goals of Tea Party forces, and such standards should not be used to judge the accomplishments of those who aim to undercut, block, and delay—even as Tea Party funders remain hopeful about holding their own or making further gains in another low-turnout midterm election in November 2014….