The Republican Attorney General of South Carolina has a super-secret list of 950 dead people who supposedly voted there. Six of those names were actually turned over to the elections commission. The score: zero for six. No evidence whatever of any kind of fraud.
I only wish the con artists who have been using “voter fraud” as an excuse for preventing Democrats from voting, and their accomplices and useful idiots in the Red Blogosphere, were capable of shame.
Chris Smith was an unknown would-be director attending film school in Milwaukee when he met a fellow would-be filmmaker named Mark Borchardt, whose career could not have looked very promising. Smith wisely made the decision to make Borchardt the subject of a documentary, and the result is a movie that succeeded artistically and financially more than either of them could have imagined: 1999′s American Movie (sometimes listed as “American Movie: The Making of Northwestern”).
The documentary follows Borchardt’s painfully unsuccessful effort to make “Northwestern”, which he envisions as a cinematic masterpiece. As the shoestring production collapses around him, Borchardt decides instead to resurrect his half-finish horror film “Coven”, the proceeds of which he hopes will finance his dream project. With money from his dotty Uncle and volunteer acting and production by his family and aspiring local actors, Coven fitfully begins to turn into something Borchardt hopes he can be proud of. Meanwhile, the rest of his life is a mess. He is unemployed, lives at home with his parents, drinks too much, and is estranged from his children. The emotional anchor of his life is less so his family than his best friend Mike Schank, a recovering alcoholic with a taste for gambling and a peaceful stoner/Buddhist-esque demeanor.
Never mocking or exploitative, the movie takes its subjects seriously just as they take themselves and their art seriously. As with Hoop Dreams, the families involved gave a remarkable level of access to the documentary makers. The affecting result is a true slice of American life, as lived by white lower middle class people in Milwaukee.
And remember, “Coven” does *not* rhyme with oven. Should’ve kept the umlaut….
By now, most of you who don’t live in caves have probably heard of Google’s new privacy policy. The policy’s professed purpose is to “provide better services to all of [Google's] users.” This means, according to my Corporate-English dictionary, to make gobs of money by placing on our screens ads that closely track our searches, our gmail, our Google Music selections, and so on.
For now, it seems, we can opt out of having Google track our search history by changing the “Web History Controls” on our google accounts. (Hayley Tsukayama of the Washington Post gives a short tutorial as to how, here. It’s purposely a bit fiddly, but doable.) But I don’t trust that opt-out to stay active forever, and in any case using it wouldn’t prevent google from mining information from our email, our music choices, etc.
Quixotic though it may be, I propose a different method: regular purgatives. I propose that those who don’t like the new policy make a habit of every so often typing into their search bars, one by one, a series of terms unrelated to one’s actual interests and to one another. The idea is not to avoid Google’s algorithm but to confuse it.
Doing this will take a couple of minutes, and nobody will do it unless it’s fun. I therefore humbly propose a new art form: the Babel Bomb. The idea is to post on the web a series of terms that are unrelated but have a vague conceptual or verbal continuity about them that’s esthetically pleasing–or else, in an alternative, deconstructivist mode, have a deliberately jarring or contradictory quality that’s funny or stimulating. If Babel Bombs catch on, people can look for them on the web and get some fun out of detonating them. I got the idea from google bombs, of course, but also from Spy magazine’s ”Spy list” of people who had nothing in common except that they were somehow indicative of the Zeitgeist (or not), as well as from my time fact-checking the Harper’s Index.
Below is one example, in a mix of the modernist and deconstructivist modes (tending towards the former). I’m sure others can do better. Feel free, in comments, to try.
Schizophrenia, Ron Paul, Corinthians, Ricardo Montalban, islands, John Donne, Dun & Bradstreet, Jenna Jameson, “Irish whisky,” clover, crimson, vampires, platelets, dishes, weddings, divorces, Kardashian, Nagorno-Karabakh, puppies, Hello Kitty, sticker shock, Baumol, Dettol, Geritol, grandfather clause, Santa Claus, elves, shelves, brackets, crackers, donuts, Homer Simpson, Samson, baggage, strawberry, shortcake, clambakes, beaches, Sneetches.
Update: Apparently this doesn’t work (see the comment by Rachel) and other things work better, at least for search engine privacy (see the comment by Katja), though none of us has a solution for gmail I don’t think. File this under “malign intellectual mutation,” I guess. Still: doesn’t anyone actually like my list? 
I gave Psychiatry Grand Rounds yesterday at the University of Arkansas Medical School in Little Rock. During the tour of the beautiful, modern and environmentally-state of the art Psychiatric Research Institute, I was impressed by something called a “suicide resistant door”.
One of the challenges of inpatient psychiatric services is that while you want to give patients privacy and insulation from noise, putting doors in their rooms carries risk. The problem is that the hard top of good strong door will support the weight of a patient who hangs him or herself (e.g., by stringing twisted bedsheets around the throat).
The ingenious doors at the Psychiatric Research Institute were solid to the touch, but a triangular section of wood at the top right of the door is inset in a slot within the rest of the structure. This triangular section rests on an interior support that can only take 5 pounds of pressure. If you put any more pressure that that on the door top, the triangular piece collapses into the interior, making the top of the door angled, smooth and virtually impossible to hang oneself on.
Brilliant innovation, props to the Institute for adopting it. May many other psychiatric facilities follow suit.
On ill-considered impulse, I decided to subject myself to the CNN Republican debate Thursday night. Pretty appalling, all around. Even the joy of watching Republicans form a good old-fashioned Democratic circular firing squad couldn’t making up for the dreariness of living – even for only two hours – in the dim-witted, ignorant, insular, fact-free, hate-filled universe that all four candidates seem to imagine that their voters’ minds inhabit.
The high point was Romney’s denying any knowledge of an ad accusing Gingrich of calling Spanish “the language of the ghetto.” That turned out to be Romney’s own campaign ad, ending with his voice saying, “Soy Mitt Romney … apruebo este mensaje.”
Amazingly, the moderator called him on it. Romney then turned to Gingrich and asked whether the accusation in the ad was true, and Gingrich replied weakly that the comment attributed to him had been taken out of context.
What a missed opportunity! L’esprit de l’escalier is always 20-20, but what if Gingrich had turned to Romney and said:
“Is it true?” “Is … it … true?” You put up an ad accusing me of insulting tens of millions of Americans, and said you approved of it, and now you’re asking me whether it’s true? You didn’t bother to find out first?
Tell you what, Mitt. I’ll bet you a million dollars I have never used “Spanish” and “language of the ghetto” in the same sentence. Do we have a bet?
Gingrich’s problem was that the Romney ad was only mostly a lie. What Gingrich had in fact said was “We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English, so people learn the common language of the country and so they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.”
That’s not a foolish thing to say. And in the original sense of the term “ghetto” – an ethnic enclave in a city – it’s not even an insult.
It’s only because Kenneth Clark’s use of “dark ghetto” to refer to segregated African-American neighborhoods, and the subsequent deterioration of life in those places, has given “ghetto” the connotation “violent slum,” that Gingrich’s comment, applied to the Spanish language, implied that all those in this country whose primary language is Spanish are slum dwellers, speaking a gutter argot.
But of course Gingrich, speaking to the DAR-ish National Federation of Republican Women, more or less intended the ethnic insult, as he more or less intends all the subtly-racist crap he’s been spewing this year. He just intended it to apply to Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles and Puerto Ricans in New York, rather than Cuban-American Republicans in Miami.
Too bad. If Gingrich had been as calmly unconcerned with the truth as Romney always is, he could have truly rattled Romney, rather than merely rattling his cage.
As the cheese-eating welfare-state surrender monkeys say, L’audace! Toujours l’audace!
Footnote Santorum was the one who nailed Romney, and nailed him good, on “Obamneycare.” But I’m not sure anyone was listening, and Santorum’s attack applied to Gingrich as well. Somehow it seems unfair that Santorum gets no benefit of really believing, or at least having consistently pretended to believe, all of the nonsense (the individual mandate is unconstitutional, global warming is a hoax) they’re all now spouting in unison. If I could only find the World’s Smallest Violin …
I figure that 88% of RBC readers will vote for Newt in November. For the remainder, here is some evidence of the power of his new ideas and out of the box thinking! “Gingrich opened up the possibility of the moon becoming the 51st state, something he believes could happen once a permanent settlement reaches a population of 13,000 Americans. While a 1967 United Nations document says that no one country can claim sovereignty over the moon, the U.S., Russia, and China failed to sign a more recent U.N. treaty to settle the question of who owns the moon. ”
A friend, whose professional interests are in health services delivery and finance, writes:
Over the last several decades, I’ve had four dental crowns. In each case, the dentist put in a temporary, a distant laboratory turned the mold into a metal cap, and I returned for its later installation.
This week, I underwent a CAD-CAM process. A fiber optic probe takes photos of the stump until a 3-D picture of the site stabilizes. The computer designs the prosthesis. A milling machine cuts it out of a block of “resin” (looks like plastic to me), just like a lens grinding machine. The dentist installed this permanent cap before the novocaine wore off.
Looking up the technology afterwards, I read that [1] it leaves more of the tooth for future use than the traditional method and; [2] under excessive pressure, the resin is designed to break instead of the remaining tooth. Both developments lengthen the useful lifespan of the stump, a good thing. However, I’m nervous about the doctor’s recommendations when he has an expensive piece of equipment to pay off. The physicians have struggled with the equipment ownership issue without success.
I missed this while it was happening, but it got some attention in the NYT today. New Hampshire has enacted a law that seems to give parents unilateral power to line-item veto their kids’ curriculum in public schools. The law looks like a can of worms, because the parents’ substitute material has to be “sufficient to enable the child to meet state requirements for education in the particular subject area“. Here’s some text from the state’s science curriculum framework:
Science is not a matter of belief; rather, it is a matter of conclusive evidence that can be subjected to the test of observation, reasoning and peer review….
The science is based on two fundamental assumptions:
- A naturalistic explanation is sufficient to account for the functioning of the universe.
- The universe can be understood using logic and rational thinking.
It’s easy to imagine a parent who finds these offensive, and hard to imagine what could replace them that is both different and the same enough to satisfy them if they are viewed as “state requirements”. Perhaps “state requirements” for science is something content-free, like “X classroom hours of instruction labeled science“. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds in practice.
However it goes forward, the idea is simply stupefying, figuratively (for me) and literally (for the kids). It’s right that parents have a lot of power over their children, but there are rights they don’t have, like physically abusing them and denying them adequate nutrition. Maybe Plato was wrong about the relative importance of what you eat and what you think. The idea that someone educated twenty or thirty years ago knows everything that should be known by someone in school today is a spectacularly reactionary proposition; let’s bring the world to a stop now, and forever. I guess I’m not surprised that there are parents, perhaps after too many long cold winters alone in isolated farmhouses, cruel and vengeful enough to want to make their kids as dumb as they are, or dumber. But this was passed over the governor’s veto, and in a state with a well-regarded public education system that’s cheap, has a very low dropout rate, and good test scores.
This piece of evil does raise questions about what schools can and can’t demand of students (note to self: remember to go over this with students early this semester). Assuming there is a collective public education obligation at all, with grades and some sort of testing, what can we demand of students? There would seem to be a category of facts like mathematical theorems, uninteresting and vacuous to debate, that we can just require students to recall to pass a course. But what about evolution: when we “teach it”, are we demanding that students say “organisms evolve over time through natural selection for fitness” on the exam? If a student doesn’t believe it, who gets the failing grade – her, or the teacher? – or does she have to lie to pass the course? My view is that the school has the right to force students to recount the principles and processes, and the evidence that supports the model, but all they have to believe/know is that “Miss Smith and the textbook say that the theory of evolution says A,B,C, and they offer reasons A,B,C for saying so.” The words in italics are tacit and easy for students to miss, and I think we owe it to them to point out that they are assumed as part of any exam answer and almost any lecture even though we don’t say them every time. After all, we can teach classical Greek theology without worrying about seeming to tell students that Zeus is the source of lightning, or even that there is a literal Zeus.
Of course there are parents who don’t even want their kids to hear what scientists believe about evolution, or what Communists say about economics, just as theocratic states don’t want alternative religions on offer at all. I believe this view comes from a deep insecurity about whether what we believe will actually hold up against an alternative, and a natural desire to avoid starting a process that might end with me discovering I’ve been wrong about something important for a long time, or my child doing some independent thinking (and maybe going to Hell). In my father’s formulation of this childishness, “I’m glad I don’t like lemons, because if I did, I’d eat them, and I hate the things!”
I can feel my policy analysis students tightening up when we start looking at markets and what prices do, and I think their resistance is similar to what’s going in in New Hampshire, and perfectly understandable (note to self: see previous note to self): “This is starting down a path that seems to lead to valuing everything at how much money people will pay for it. I don’t want to be a person who believes that, but the prof has been doing this for a long time and I don’t think I’m quick enough, or know enough, to get off the path by arguing with him if it leads where it seems to be going. [Furthermore, I have no idea how delicate his ego is nor how vengeful he is when students push back.]“ This condition is not the level of arousal and curiosity that leads to learning, it is a state of fear that arrests it. It seems to help to recognize it explicitly in the classroom, but it’s really hard to reassure adults who feel the earth moving under them in many ways, including very scary ways (factory closing? job lost? house foreclosed? priests and coaches abusing children? the president is going to be either a member of a weird cult, or a black guy who talks better than anyone I ever met, or a serial adulterer? my daughter what? …I want the world to be the way it was when I felt like I could deal with it!).
I think I understand the pain of the Granite State citizens who have grasped at this very ill-advised device for reassurance and comfort. It’s a rare political leader who can guide them to a more adaptive response; I hope they get one, because this little cry of anguish may be the source of a world of hurt for a lot of kids who deserve better.
Newt Gingrich says that if he is the nominee, he will challenge President Obama to a series of Lincoln-Douglas debates.
Someone in the Obama campaign should leak a confidential memo revealing how absolutely terrified the President is of this prospect.
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