Happy Tuesday.

Speaker Boehner on the Norquist pledge and the fiscal cliff: he "opposes tax rate hikes because they hurt our economy and cost jobs."

NYTimes reporter David Carr either doesn't know that "Al Aqsa TV" is a designated terrorist organization or doesn't want NYTimes readers to know. Either is journalistic malpractice. Carr penned a piece in yesterday's paper claiming that Israel was targeting journalists simply because Al Aqsa terrorists had spray painted "TV" on their car.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:47 AM | Comments (213)
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What Have You Learned as a Police Officer About Life and Society That Most People Don't Know or Underestimate?

Taken from a Quora thread (may require signing up or bugmenot to see it all). And also an invitation for all active or retired Morons in blue to de-lurk and share.

One of the things my upbringing did not prepare me for was the complete lack of civility that some people have. I didn't think of myself as having been sheltered from evil as a child, but I did not learn that some people have absolutely no regard for the welfare of anyone but themselves, and lash out at anyone who tries to make them aware they are not the only people on the planet

Everyone has a "hot button." Calm and even-tempered as you might be, there is some topic that will set you off, especially if it's referenced to you personally. It might be your height, your weight, your sexuality, your education, how much money you have, your mom, whatever. Rational people can become maniacs if someone pushes their buttons.

High-speed chases look like fun because they are.

Take away alcohol and stupid, and the world would require about 90% fewer cops

The number of homicides where neither the victim nor the perp knew two minutes out that it was about to happen is astounding.  (See "alcohol and stupid" above.)

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:20 PM | Comments (594)
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I stumbled across this guy on a routine Internet drunken stumble (not really drunk but aimless and time-wasting). He was a Hungarian named Gyula Halász who came to Paris in the 30s to be a journalist. He wound up discovering his pictures of foggy, haunted nighttime Paris were more interesting than his articles and so tried his hand at that. (He also seems to have been a painter and sculptor but gave those up in favor of night photography.) He changed his name to "Brassai" because it had more letters in common with "Batman." Not really, but you'll see why I made that tiny joke.

I saw two interesting details about him. He liked taking long-depth pictures but didn't like that photography rendered distant objects out of focus, so he shot on foggy nights to disguise that. (Wouldn't that make it worse? I don't know, just telling you what I Saw On The Internet.) The other interesting thing was that night photography, in deep focus, requires long exposure times, but that's not the interesting part.

The interesting part is that he had a timing system worked out, depending on the type of shot, where he'd time the exposure by cigarette. A long exposure would get an American cigarette, while a short one would get a French Gauloise:

"Une gauloise pour une certaine lumiere, une boyard s'il faisait plus sombre" (a Boyard is thicker than a Gauloise, thus takes longer to burn) therefore "[t]he cigarette is not a cigarette but a clock."

That's pretty much all I know about him except for the fact that his photographs are pretty arresting.
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Posted by: Ace at 04:27 PM | Comments (197)
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Hmm. Eagles and Panthers.

Here's a Panther cheerleader. She's kinda, I don't know how to put my finger on it exactly, different.

Not bad. Different

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:01 PM | Comments (115)
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Joe Klein offers a series of propositions, each more risible than the last, culminating with the claim that Chris Stevens didn't want any more security in Benghazi at all, he wanted to be "with the people in the streets."

Whether he wanted the people to invite themselves over from the streets inside the compound, and then to the safehouse, bringing house-warming presents of mortars and sodomy is unknown.

The security team's requests for additional security were repeatedly denied by the US State Department -- not Chris Stevens. Chris Stevens was copied on one such email. If he wanted to object, and say "No I want to be 'in the streets with the people," he could have said so there and spared poor Hillary Clinton the embarrassment.

Do you have stock in Kool-Aid? If you do, you're about to double your money, because Joe Klein is buying it all up.

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Posted by: Ace at 03:20 PM | Comments (196)
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"Interdisciplinary." You know, I took some "interdisciplinary" courses. They were sort of interesting, but they were without much rigor -- sort of interesting bullshit sessions with a reading list. When you're pulling little bits and pieces from five different areas of scholarship you're going to be pretty glib and facile about each of them.

Anyway, I was going to knock such things but then I realized, part of the way along, "Hey, those were kind of interesting."

Oh right I was talking about something else. A major in pot.

A public university located in one of California's prime pot-growing regions has formed an academic institute devoted to marijuana.

The Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research at Humboldt State University plans to sponsor scholarly lectures and coordinate research among 11 faculty members from fields such as economics, geography, politics, psychology and sociology.

Not mentioned: horticulture. I wonder if they'll actually teach pot-growing. But then, it's one of those things you don't have to teach, eh? Work as play. People do it on their own.

This is something really driving me crazy about "scholarship," this tendency to take people's hobbies and interests and craft some kind of faux discipline around them.

Aren't people just supposed to tend to their hobbies and interests on their own? Do they need an allegedly academic wrapper around Porn Studies or the like?

Not only does that tendency cheapen (down to nothing) the idea of scholarship, but it also indirectly pushes an insidious line of reasoning: that one can only learn or become more interesting (or interested) via a formal academic process with class credits and lecture halls and so on. Didn't we used to have reading clubs and other special-interest clubs for this sort of thing, this quasi-scholarly socializing/hobbyist interest thing? Isn't the "academicization" of stuff that's really Just Interesting Things kind of reducing instead of expanding the pursuit of Interesting Things? I'm starting to think that the academy is too important to be left to academics.

Anyway:

"If anyone is going to have a marijuana institute, it really should be Humboldt State," economist Erick Eschker, the institute's co-chair, told the newspaper. .

Wink.

Posted by: Ace at 02:31 PM | Comments (159)
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I don't know how useful these thoughts are. It's a slow news day and these three things have occurred to me, but I haven't thought about them so much to know if they're good ideas.

1. The key to winning in politics is not to appeal to people's best selves and present to them an idealistic, selfless vision; the key is to appeal to their selfish interests but invent a narrative by which the selfish is depicted as selfless, and the low is depicted as the noble.

This is a cynical idea but I have no doubt that this is the central theme of Obama's politics, and the key to why he won two elections. All of his "poetry" is about aspiring to a heaven on earth in which every man is an angel of virtue, but the actual "prose" of his governance is a series of transactional payoffs to one constituency and then another. Rather than calling these things "payoffs" and "small transactions to interested parties seeking money or government favor," he calls it "winning the future" or "safeguarding the dream of America" or whatever.

One problem I had with Romney is that he seemed to too much the rationalist. He is swayed by data; he thinks other people are too. They're not, not in the main. (Present company excepted, as always.)

I don't think reason really sways people. I think if you want to "lead" people you appeal to what they want to do anyway and you invent an emotional, Purpose-Larger-Than-Self narrative around that and sell them self-interest in the packaging of Idealism. I don't think Romney did that, and furthermore, I don't think he was even capable of doing that because he wasn't grounded in any ideology.

Ideology usually provides a logical (if debatable) connection between proposed policy and desired personal outcomes.

When you listened to Paul Ryan speak, he often connected conservative policy with the people's aspirations for a better life. Romney didn't do that himself often enough. As many people said before of him (and more since) he seemed to speak conservatism as a second language, to the extent he spoke it all. Mostly he spoke Managerese.

2. If you want to achieve something, you will achieve it faster and easier if it is more like fun and play and less like work.

I think this is something the Obama team understood -- they made politicking and activism a game, offering lots of stupid little FaceBook things and such. They also strongly promoted "organic" activism -- people getting together in a precinct leader's house for social activities, in advance of actual hit-the-street activism.

Democrats have, I think, a natural advantage in this sort of thing because a younger constituency is more interested in this sort of thing. Young people's lives tend to be socially unsettled -- they're not married yet (mostly), still looking for love, more actively open to new friendships than older people.

I also think they're frankly a little bit dumber which makes throwing a sheep at other Obama supporters more of a draw than it would be for people who aren't as, you know, dumb.

That said, while Democrats may have an advantage at this mode of politics, it's merely an advantage, and either way the "work as play" rule -- you work on the clock, but you play whenever you have free time -- should and probably must be leveraged for our own purposes.

Given that many more conservatives have kids, and would probably enjoy a chance to do something as adults without the kids, I wonder if our own efforts in this direction wouldn't involve a few volunteers agreeing to stay behind with all the kids of the other volunteers. That is, a few volunteer to be day-care personnel, freeing up the rest for social activities/activism.

I noticed in some pictures of Obama's activists they tended to be quite young (no kids yet) or much older (kids all grown up). That would tend not to be the situation among Republicans.

3. I was thinking aboutthis Geraghty piece considering this Goldstein piece on the most politic manner conservatives can comport themselves.

I don't have many firm ideas on this, except to say that contempt is never persuasive. Contempt has its purposes inside a group -- it is natural that any self-selecting group should, among themselves, express contempt externally at those not enlightened enough to join. Contempt to those outside implicitly compliments those on the inside, and thus boosts in-group morale.

Many political embarrassments, however, occur when in-group messaging -- such as naked contempt for those in the out-group -- is vented publicly. As happened with Romney's "47%" remarks, and Obama's "bitter clingers" ruminations.

I'm not sure what to make of this, however. One can hardly fashion a strict rule about such things. Any time I am writing on this blog I am communicating publicly. Sort of, I mean. It's public but without much actual publicity -- to some extent, this is public, but it's sort of private because who, apart from us, reads this drivel? And you don't even read this drivel (you're already in the comments, and have been in the comments since point one), which means, effectively, I'm the only guy reading what I'm writing right now, and I'm barely paying attention to myself at that.

So when Rush Limbaugh makes a statement which is really supposed to be "between us," entre nous, of course it won't be. But what do we say then? That Rush should never engage in the perfectly useful and perfectly common practice of in-group messaging against the out-group? That's frequently what is said when one of these little statements blows up in the liberal media: "He shouldn't have said that. He's hurt the movement."

But is it really realistic to expect someone to act as the most cautious diplomat in every one of his public statements? Diplomats are many things, but interesting they are not.

As I said, I have no idea what to say here, because while I agree we should all be (and I should be) the very most presentable and charming Public Diplomat for the Cause of Conservatism Possible in every single public utterance -- and even every private utterance! -- this is simply an impossibility and so massively stupid a recommendation it collapses under its own weight. No one could live like this, and no one would want to.

And then when do we get to make dick jokes? Never, I guess.

On the other hand, I suppose it wouldn't hurt to keep it in mind that contempt is part of in-group messaging, not intended for wide dissemination outside the group; so when a contemptuous remark gets out in the open, we all shouldn't run around insisting our politicians double-down on it and "prove to the world it's right."

Posted by: Ace at 12:45 PM | Comments (358)
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It's not science fiction. It's America 2012.

Why yes, I am having trouble finding things to post. But anyway:

You know the story: While the provinces starve, the Capital City lives it up, its wheeler-dealer bigshots growing fat on the tribute extracted from the rest of the country.

We don't live in The Hunger Games yet, but I'm not the first to notice that Washington, D.C., is doing a lot better than the rest of the country. Even in upscale parts of L.A. or New York, you see boarded up storefronts and other signs that the economy isn't what it used to be. But not so much in the Washington area, where housing prices are going up, fancy restaurants advertise $92 Wagyu steaks, and the Tyson's Corner mall outshines -- as I can attest from firsthand experience -- even Beverly Hills' famed Rodeo Drive.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, the contrast is even starker. As Adam Davidson recently wrote in The New York Times, riding the Amtrak between New York and D.C. exposes stark contrasts between the "haves" of the capital and the have-nots outside the Beltway. And he correctly assigns this to the importance of power.

Washington is rich not because it makes valuable things, but because it is powerful. With virtually everything subject to regulation, it pays to spend money influencing the regulators. As P.J. O'Rourke famously observed: "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." But it's not just bags-of-cash style corruption. Most of the D.C. boom is from lobbyists and PR people, and others who are retained to influence what the government does. It's a cold calculation: You're likely to get a much better return from an investment of $1 million on lobbying than on a similar investment in, say, a new factory or better worker training.

If we were living in The Hunger Games, we would need... longbows.

Open Thread, too.

Posted by: Ace at 11:57 AM | Comments (271)
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I can't believe this f'n' guy got reelected. So, the deification continues.

Not even "Saint Barack." No, no such minor posting for Him.

Appearing on Sunday night's Soul Train awards in Las Vegas, Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx called Barack Obama "our lord and savior."

"It's like church over here. It's like church in here. First of all, give an honor to God and our lord and savior Barack Obama. Barack Obama," he said.

Remember, wingnuts, you're the anti-science, anti-reason, Magical Thinking ones.

Vengeance Is Mine, Sayeth The Lord : Before the election, Obama rushed a bunch of directives and standards for his possible successor's use of drones to kill terrorists.

Note he put these standards together for a successor. He Himself didn't need standards. God does not err.

Posted by: Ace at 10:41 AM | Comments (409)
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Originally the Fourth Circuit had punted on the suit (which objects to ObamaCare on religious liberty and equal protection grounds, over the mandate), citing the Anti-Injunction Act, which we've seen considered before in the big ObamaCare case. The Anti-Injunction Act says, approximately, you can't sue about a tax until the tax actually takes effect. You can't sue prospectively, to stop a coming tax.

However, the Supreme Court already disposed of that issue in regard to ObamaCare, finding that it didn't apply, and that suits can go forward and be considered on the merits, irrespective of that Act.

The Fourth Circuit is now directed to stop punting the case and consider the actual constitutional arguments about the birth control mandate.

So, that's something. But then, Judge Roberts might once again contrive some nonsensical reason to uphold Obama's directives.

Posted by: Ace at 09:58 AM | Comments (169)
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