Simple answers to insipid questions

From Howie Kurtz in the WaPo:

Krugman calls for focusing on the candidates' policy proposals instead. I'm all for that. But can we really make judgments about Obama and Edwards, for example, based on the differences in their health care plans?

Umm, yes. This has been the first edition to simple answers to insipid questions, inspired, of course, by Atrios.

Odds and ends

I'm busy getting ready to watch The Sopranos' final episode, but wanted to pass along a link to an article about how lightening up roofing and highway materials is a vastly useful environmental technique, since much less heat is absorbed, especially in cities. All it takes is chalk dust. Apparently, the reason we don't do this is because it's too simple to sound impressive. From Mark Kleiman, via Matt Yglesias:

Of course, if we had political reporters who weren't pig-ignorant about science and technology, this wouldn't be as significant a problem as it is. And if politicians weren't in the habit of offering trivial pseudo-solutions to serious problems, journalists would be less cynical about things that seem too easy. But then if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a trolley car.

This is a case where simply repeating the idea until it no longer seems funny could make a difference. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to explain the idea to five people until they stop laughing.

Stop laughing!

By the way, lest we ever forget this, people are morons. This is a fundamental truth of human existence. It applies to those in the tech world who would impose arcane limits on us, crazy warmongering politicians like Joe Lieberman, the same crazy guy agreeing with Barack Obama that the internet is dangerous, etc....though I'll note that, closing the circle, Obama does know how to deal with pig-ignorant journalists.

The wrong man was convicted

Just a quickie this morning, about last week's Repbulican debate, with actual content outsourced to the always good Paul Krugman (link is behind the NYTimes firewall, but if you have an e-mail from an .edu domain, you can see it):

In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the "gaffe of the night"?

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit....

[I]f there’s one thing I hope we’ve learned from the calamity of the last six and a half years, it’s that it matters who becomes president — and that listening to what candidates say about substantive issues offers a much better way to judge potential presidents than superficial character judgments. Mr. Bush’s tax lies, not his surface amiability, were the true guide to how he would govern.

And I don’t know if this country can survive another four years of Bush-quality leadership.

No Justice, No Peace

Before getting started on this morning's post, I should link to a great editorial in the WaPo from a counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the good guys), arguing that since filesharing is so incredibly easy, the RIAA and universities should just bundle in a music-sharing license in with preexisting fees currently paid by universities to musicians to cover various performances on campus. Anyway, I'll try to post some recent vacation photos tonight, but until then, onto the news of the day.

No Justice: For those not following it, or unable to figure out from the news coverage of the current scandals at the Department of Justice, here is a brief recap. Throughout the Bush administration, but more frequently during the period 2004-present, political posts throughout DoJ were filled with young lawyers lacking any proper experience who happened to be extremely loyal (and thus easily manipulable) conservative Republicans. This list could include Monica Goodling, Kyle Sampson, and yesterday's Congressional hearing embarrassment, Bradley Schlozman (click on links for bios). Said employees seem to have made it their mission to try to politicize the entire justice department by preferentially hiring Republicans, even though this is completely illegal for career positions at DoJ. Why would they do this? Well, the primary offenses revealed so far were at the Civil Rights division, the Voting Rights division, and the US Attorneys themselves, who are responsible for prosecuting crimes involving those two departments. It doesn't take much to infer that the goal was to steer voting rights/voter fraud lawsuits against Democratic groups, and prevent such lawsuits against Republicans. About half of the US Attorneys fired had refused to indict Democrats who weren't guilty of anything, and the other half seem to have been involved in actually prosecuting guilty Republicans, which is an unforgivable offense to the administration. I should make clear of course, that "voter fraud" by minorities, which Republicans like to throw around, is largely a myth designed to suppress the minority vote, since it leans heavily Democratic.

One can further infer who is behind this affair. It can certainly be suggested that the reason so many youngsters were placed in positions of power is because their strings can be pulled by a puppet master, and so far all signs seem to point to Karl Rove. Recall before the 2006 elections, he claimed Republicans would succeed because he was entitled to "THE math" on the elections. Though he never stated such, one could suggest that carefully arranging the balance of who is actually allowed to vote might explain why one might be overconfident. Unfortunately for him, his dreams of a "permanent Republican majority" actually fell victim to the fact his party was perceived as vastly too corrupt to remain in power. Shucks.

No Peace: On the international front, it seems crazy to me that there are forces in the administration pushing for war with Iran, even though Iraq and Afghanistan aren't exactly going well. Who could be doing this, you may ask? Would it shock you that it is the Vice President, Dick Cheney? From Newsweek:

A NEWSWEEK investigation shows that Cheney's national-security team has been actively challenging Rice's Iran strategy in recent months. "We hear a completely different story coming out of Cheney's office, even now, than what we hear from Rice on Iran," says a Western diplomat whose embassy has close dealings with the White House. Officials from the veep's office have been openly dismissive of the nuclear negotiations in think-tank meetings with Middle East analysts in Washington, according to a high-level administration official who asked for anonymity because of his position. Since Tehran has defied two U.N. resolutions calling for a suspension of its uranium-enrichment program, "there's a certain amount of schadenfreude among the hard-liners," says a European diplomat who's involved in the talks but would not comment for the record. And NEWSWEEK has learned that the veep's team seems eager to build a case that Iran is targeting Americans not just in Iraq but along the border of its other neighbor, Afghanistan.

Lest anyone think this is just rumor, It seems to have been confirmed by a bunch of people:

Multiple sources have reported that a senior aide on Vice President Cheney's national security team has been meeting with policy hands of the American Enterprise Institute, one other think tank, and more than one national security consulting house and explicitly stating that Vice President Cheney does not support President Bush's tack towards Condoleezza Rice's diplomatic efforts and fears that the President is taking diplomacy with Iran too seriously.

This White House official has stated to several Washington insiders that Cheney is planning to deploy an "end run strategy" around the President if he and his team lose the policy argument.

What happens, one can ask, when the administration is basically at war with itself, not to mention a bunch of other countries. well, for one thing, you end up with a badly understaffed foreign service. Also, you end up with a bunch of people lying about various matters to all sorts of people. Should the former by Chief of Staff to the Veep, and the latter by a US Attorney, this is not always a good idea, and can end up with said Chief of Staff residing at the Crossbar Hotel for 30 months (can we now call it the Paris Hilton Hilton?).

Imprisonment

A quick summary of the news from this morning:

Imprisoned by the Universe: There is a great article by Dennis Overbye of the NYTimes this morning about dark energy, the stuff that makes the universe accelerate outward, and what this means for the ultimate fate of the galaxy (not planet, which will be long since gone, or humanity, whose future is a mystery trillions of years from now). I'd only add that measurements of dark energy are convincing, but theoretically difficult to explain, and we may yet overhaul our basic cosmological model in the future should a better theoretical grounding come along.

Imprisoned by the Government: Yesterday, a military court basically overturned the whole trial system set up to deal with detainees at Guantanamo, based on the case of a boy who was captured when he was 15. See either a good analysis piece from the NYTimes, or if you really want, a piece that basically just repeats the Bush administration spin from the WaPo.

Imprisoned by outdated moral notions: For all that FoxNews is indecent by design (see below for more on that), the government's treatment of their broadcast network, among others, has certainly been indecent. Thankfully, the courts have thrown out some ridiculously hefty fines imposed on the networks when celebrities used naughty words at live awards ceremonies. There is a boring wrap-up in the WaPo (they just can't win today), and a great one in the NYTimes:

But the judges said vulgar words are just as often used out of frustration or excitement, and not to convey any broader obscene meaning. “In recent times even the top leaders of our government have used variants of these expletives in a manner that no reasonable person would believe referenced sexual or excretory organs or activities.”

Adopting an argument made by lawyers for NBC, the judges then cited examples in which Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had used the same language that would be penalized under the policy. Mr. Bush was caught on videotape last July using a common vulgarity that the commission finds objectionable in a conversation with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. Three years ago, Mr. Cheney was widely reported to have muttered an angry obscene version of “get lost” to Senator Patrick Leahy on the floor of the United States Senate.

Imprisoned by the bonds of racism: If the charges against him are true, the Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) will be going to jail for a long time for corruption and being stupid enough to hide $100K in his freezer!?! If so, honestly, good riddance to him, for being a stain upon our government, and if he takes fellow Dem Allan Mollohan of West Virginia along with him supposing the latter is guilty, all the better. Corrupt Democrats are corrupt officials first, and we are better off without them. Still, only FoxNews could manage to make their own faults the story when describing a 16-count indictment. It seems that FoxNews can't tell black representatives apart, even when one is the current head of the House Judiciary committee and has a moustache, and the other one is not and does not. Idiots.

Imprisoned by our own shortsightedness: What do you do when NASA satellites keep finding evidence of global warming, which is inconvenient for an anti-science administration trying to deny the existence of said phenomenon? Apparently, you cut the funds for the program!

Imprisoned by preconceived notions: Newspapers apparently don't like Google News, because, um, well, I really don't understand. It actually drives their online traffic, and they want to look the gift horse in the mouth, then slaughter it and eat it. See a wise graduate student destroy the arguments of a journalism professor here, and puzzle over the vagaries of the tenure system.

Imprisoned by themselves?: It seems that the Justice Department interprets civil rights and voter rights to mean trying to make sure that minorities don't vote, by any means necessary. Congress is investigating. Perhaps they can sic the DoJ on themselves?

Catching up #3: Technology/Music/Free Concert Clips

As I mentioned back when I was more responsible about daily blogging, I think the whole push by media companies for digital rights management (DRM) software is a load of crap. At best it makes it slightly more inconvenient to copy files illegally, and at worst it means that the CD* copy of Bruce Springsteen's We Shall Overcome album won't play on either my DVD/CD player or my computer, and thus can't be imported onto my iPod (remember, CD* means like a CD, only crappier). In what almost counts as irony, I returned the disc to the store and got it on iTunes instead, and then burned a backup copy to disc, thus freeing it from the DRM software that Apple prefers. For anyone who likes the album, let me recommend that you do this, but rearrange the tracks in alphabetical order. For unknown reasons, this is a vastly better mix than what Springsteen et al. decided to go with. This is true whether you get the additional tracks from iTunes (Bring 'em Home, How Can a Poor Man Stand such times, etc.) or not.

Anyway, Apple recently announced that they are adding non-DRM tracks to their online store, albeit at an additional cost, starting with the non-Fab component of EMI's catalog. More power to them, I say, even if they do charge more for the privilege (which, frankly, is their right). Some people, though, are now up in arms about a hidden bit of the system: apparently, they "watermark" the files by encrypting your account info into the song file. Honestly, I understand that this can be a security threat if your iPod is stolen, but let's not kid ourselves. People are angry because it means that they will have to think carefully about illegally sharing those files. Allow me to play them a dirge on the world's smallest violin....ok, better. Just because DRM is dropped doesn't give people any more right to share the music files than they possessed before, which is absolutely no right whatsoever, unless said album was released under a Creative Commons license, like They're Everywhere, by Jim's Big Ego. For those convinced that they need to share files with their friends, but are afraid of the fuzz, one might suggest the following method is not really so hard.

1. Burn music to CD.
2. Read CD back into computer.

If you aren't willing to put forth that much effort before posting your music to a torrent site, I kinda hope the law does bust you, because you're an idiot.

Speaking of music, I've been listening to a bunch of it, and here are some recommendations:

Via my co-blogger, a Mexican Ska band that just totally will rock your world, Los de Abajo (The Underdogs). Clips from their album LDA vs. the lunatics ca be found here, including the single mix of the title track, which is just awesome. Honestly, given that that link will allow you to play their entire album for free, I don't understand why you are still reading this. You can always come back to my ramblings later, if you think about it.

Speaking of albums being streamed freely over the web, Wilco is doing it again with their latest album, Sky Blue Sky, which just came out recently. Go to this page, and click on "listen" in the lower left. After that, you can buy the album if you'd like, supporting musicians who remember that their fans deserve t be respected, not threatened with lawsuits. As for the album itself, dkon loved it at first listen, but it's taken some time to grow on me, and might need a bit more time still. It's very slow and quiet, much more given to softer pop rock than the atmospherics of their past albums. Jeff Tweedy's voice is in good shape, and the lyrics are a bit more grounded than the past few album's intricate nonsense (that's not an insult, BTW, just the best way I know to describe some of their songs). For what it's worth, I liked the album when I played it outside while chilling on the porch, and it'll do nicely for just about anyone in a "porch music" capacity, to use a term I usually associate with Greg Brown. I can't really rank it above either Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which is just a brilliant, quasi-visionary album, nor Being There, Wilco's second album, a double disc of roots-inflected Rock'n'Roll that just pounds out all that is good about good ol' down home Americana rock. Still, the album is currently playing in the background and my wife has been unable to stop drumming her fingers in time with Sky Blue Sky, so it must be pretty catchy.

Staying on the alt-country vein, I have to also recommend the newest album from Golden Smog, Blood on the Slacks. For those not familiar with them, Golden Smog started off as a side project for Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, a couple members of the Jayhawks, and a bunch of other alt-country artists. Tweedy was apparently too busy with Wilco for this particular release, but the Jayhawks members are more than capable of sustaining the gig. They have a couple of free tracks available on the MySpace page I linked to, but I also have to recommend their rocked out version of David Bowie's Starman.

Delving back slightly further into the history of country rock, I stumbled across a Gram Parsons tribute album while looking for Wilco songs, and it is incredible. Return of the Grievous Angel is a staggeringly good album, and I can't say enough about "$1000 Wedding", covered by Evan Dando and Juliana Hatfield, "Sin City", by Beck and Emmylou Harris, or the title track, as covered by Lucinda Williams and fellow former Byrd David Crosby (Wilco's cover of "One Hundred Years From Now" is also very good, of course).

Finally, we've always known that They Might Be Giants were a bit ahead of the curve, but they are currently trying something that I have to say I can't remember being tried much before. Their new album, The Else, is available on iTunes exclusively, at least until July 10 when they finally ship the CDs. Here is a mashup of my favorite song on the album, Climbing the Walls with highlights from the Lost Season 3 finale (go to 0:47 for the music starting; spoiler warning?), and concert recordings of Take Out the Trash and Shadow Government.

Catching up #2: Movies

Having watched way too many movies in addition to the recent finales of Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, Veronica Mars, Lost, The Office, and Scrubs, and the upcoming ones of The Sopranos and Entourage, here are some reviews.

Far and away the best movie we've seen this year is Hot Fuzz, from the same people who brought you Shaun of the Dead. Lest you think this is some bizarre pick, I'll note that it's currently #109 on the IMBD Top 250, and the only release this year to top it so far is Grindhouse, which we haven't seen. Hot Fuzz is just about the perfect British humor takedown of American action movies that the world has ever seen. Based around a supercop from London sent to the perfectly idyllic countryside for making his colleagues look bad by comparison, the movie somehow manages to provide two different satires of the same genre. In the first half, we have the subtle brilliance of a film edited like an action film, with all the quick cuts, slow-mos, multiple angles, and other familiar tricks, even though nothing in particular is happening other than some brilliant jokes and physical gags. In the second half, when all hell breaks loose, we have shootouts, fistfights, explosions, and cruel but hilarious imitations of the two best cop movies ever (their judgment, not mine), Bad Boys 2 and Point Break (any film that allows its actors to mock Keanu Reeves scores bonus points in my book). Hot Fuzz is probably the first film in years to have multiple "fall out of your chair" moments, and is basically a must see if you possess any kind of sense of humor.

Pirates of the Caribbean 3 is a big, exciting mess, never really making much sense but delivering a decent number of laughs and gorgeously filmed action scenes. It's probably worth seeing on the big screen, since it just won't seem as impressive on a small screen. Shrek 3 is a smaller movie, funny but a bit less consistent than either of its predecessors, and can probably be safely waited upon until it comes out on video.

From the Netflix releases, I have to give some props to "Happiness of the Katakuris", a truly bizarre Japanese movies that plays like a cross between The Sound of Music and The Evil Dead. The claymation (?!?) parts make it even stranger. I'd try to describe it further, but it really doesn't make any sense. We were pretty disappointed by The Weather Man, which didn't really go anywhere at all, and Munich, which did, but took way too long to get there. The Squid and the Whale was understated but very good, personal as only well-told semi-autobiographical works can be, with a good performance from Jeff Bridges, among others. Confetti, starring Martin Freeman (Tim from the British version of The Office), was a good quirky British comedy, and we were surprised how much we liked Now You Know, directed by Jeff Anderson (Randall from Clerks), which basically slots into the subgenre of "quirky comedies about life in New Jersey that feel a deep ambivalence toward the Garden State".

Harry Potter #5 (the movie) comes out on July 11, 10 days before Book 7 appears in print. More on films then.

Catching up #1: Books, Part 1

aka Man's Best Friend Outside of a Dog, #13-16:

The Sherlock Holmes novel(la)s: The Final Solution by Michael Chabon and The Italian Secretary, by Caleb Carr

I don't really know what motivated Michael Chabon to write a Sherlock Holmes-based novella, given that he's not particularly associated with the mystery genre (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a coming-of-age novel, not a detective tale). As such, he managed to write a very different sort of Holmes story than what one is used to: in the wrong era (World War II), Holmes as an anonymous protagonist without a Watson to be found, solving what would seem to be a rather insignificant crime (a boy;s lost parrot). Chabon deserves credit for his technique, in that we essentially know more about the end of the tale as readers than his characters do throughout, a rather difficult feat to pull off. Still, this reads more as an exercise in constrained literature, using pre-existing characters placed in unfamiliar settings, than as a true detective story. Chabon's characters come off as very human, especially the more commonly cold and mechanical Holmes, but the detective story feels like an afterthought. I'm still a bit unsure of the global setting of the piece (a WWII story entitled "The Final Solution" should make the subtext clear), which serves more as a disturbing reality check contrasting the relatively calm and rational image of Holmes' Victorian era with the horrors of the 20th century. Still, not a bad quick read, as is Carr's take as well.

Caleb Carr is an obvious choice for writing a Holmes-based story, as his most familiar works, The Alienist and Angel of Darkness, involve turn of the century detectives, albeit ones that prefer the science of the day to pure deductive logic. Carr clearly has a feel for the characters and the proper flow of a detective story. He may be slightly more technically inclined than Arthur Conan Doyle, and more given to filling in some crucial details for a turn of the 21st century reader that would be more familiar to his forbears, but the conversations and plot developments feel more naturally appropriate to a detective story. Still, for all that the setup is appropriately mysterious, involving a perceived threat to the British crown in the late days of Victoria's reign, the conclusion feels more than a bit muddled. In some ways, Carr's talents lie in stretching out the conclusion of a rather straightforward mystery, the literary equivalent if you'd like of a Law and Order episode, whereas here he has to draw out the conclusion of the mystery for too long, tripping over his loose ends and red herrings a bit. More than anything else, it seems like he just should have had one more go at the draft to clean up the ending, but failed to do so. Again, not a bad book, but rather a quick read of middling quality.

The Author I Love To Hate: Remains of the Day, and Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

I hate to go up against both the Booker Prize committee and some members of my book club, but for Ishiguro, how can I not? In essence, these are the same boring book, in which a feckless narrator drives slowly through the English countryside, reminiscing slowly on how useless and feckless they actually are, slowly letting us in on the details. Frankly, it's a terrible style designed to fool the reader into the appearance of deep literature, but it lacks the cleverness that a well-plotted story should have. Essentially, you take a linear plotline, divide the terrible secret into bite-sized chunks, and then place one in each chapter surrounded by long and boring discussions between flat, emotionless characters. There's never any real twist, nor any real action, just a feeling that something more interesting has to lie eventually around the corner (hint: it doesn't). It's "artistic" pacing by dilly-dallying endlessly, and "literary" in its descriptions because the characters are so robotic that it feels like it should be insightful (I have the same complaint about French New Wave directors and their bizarrely robotic characters). In RotD, the main character is Stevens, the butler played memorably in the movie by Anthony Hopkins, who has to face up to the fact that his employer collaborated with the Nazis during WWII, and Stevens never really did a damn thing in his life other than to make exuses. This might have been slightly more interesting had the reader not realized all of this within the first few pages.

SPOILER WARNING AHEAD, skip to the next paragraph unless you want the plot possibly spolied: In NLMG, the narrator is Kathy H, who fecklessly reminisces about her classmates at an isolated boarding school. The big secret, never really well concealed, is that she and her friends are being raised to be organ donors, a la The Island. Suffice it to say, the science in the book is terrible, Ishiguro made no attempt to understand modern bioethics, and he seems to fundamentally misunderstand the notion of marginalized people in society (hint: we prefer to keep them hidden in the shadows, not in front of us everyday, e.g. migrant laborers, wounded Iraqis, third world child laborers, etc.). The book is so unrealistic that it could only work as an allegory, but he never bothers to actually set one up. One particularly caustic review suggested the characters would be more sympathetic if they were revealed to be cows. I would argue that as they go around their feckless, passionless lives in England, that not only does Ishiguro write about england as if he had no experience with the country, where he has lived since age 5, but he writes like he has no actual experience with actual people either. Seriously, I never thought I'd say this, but just watch The Island instead: at least it realizes that with a premise so ridiculous, the best thing to do is turn it into a dumb action flick rather than an insipid, boring novel.