When You Fail To Plan

This started off as a post about the hiring practices at The New York Times.

But then it took a turn.  

Meh, whatcha gonna do.  

So, next time, hiring practices at The New York Times.  This time you get the tale of a nearly invisible organizational plague that is breaking down civic machinery everywhere.

I serve on a few voluntary boards out here in the middle of Middle America, and I'm active in a number of civic organizations.  Most of them are populated by humans at the far end of the actuarial Bell Curve, and since most of these organizations never bothered to focus on developing a farm system to bring in new blood and teach them the ways of the Force, many of them are currently being kept afloat by the aggregated, specialized institutional knowledge of few key board officers.

Board officers who are leaving.  

FYI, I can tell you from the many years I spent in workforce development, this dynamic, in somewhat different forms, is also happening out there in God alone knows how many private companies, corporations, colleges and so forth.

At these organizations, there are usually barely minimally adequate records for anyone coming on-board who needs to learn, in a hurry and in detail, how things got to be the way they are.  Instead the whole thing depends on Wally remembering that when they had that problem back in '94, Phil knew a guy whose cousin was an electrician or something.  Of course, Phil retired in 2003 and moved to Boca, but they think that maybe his son took over the business?  Or maybe some cousin?  Anyway this extremely complex and technical problem is back -- or something that reminds them of it is back -- so does anybody know what happened with Phil's business, or know enough about this extremely complex and technical problem to know who else to call?

Like that.  

Multiplied by dozens of tasks, all competing for the attention of a few volunteers.  

But are these tasks critical?  Are they we-all-go-to-jail or the-building-will-collapse issues, or are they not?  Who knows?  It there a way to rationally prioritize them?  Not that they know of.  Well, couldn't one, seemingly simple task -- say, reattaching some wooden elements that had been taken down for some reason now lost to history years ago -- be done by anyone with a ratchet wrench and half a dozen lag bolts?  Just to get it off the list?

Heavens no!  This will require some highly specialized carpentry and electrical expertise that only someone like Jim could handle.  

Ok, so .... where's Jim?  

Well wouldn't you know it, Jim also retired.  To Pompano.  And, hey lookit that!  He only lives about 20 minutes from Phil!  Small world.  

However, even though the indispensable men were either retiring to sunnier climes or passing on to that Big Finance Committee Meeting in the sky, the need for warm bodies to fill the mandated, institutional ranks remains, and so raw recruits are, well, recruited with little more vetting than, "Have you ever served on a board before?  Have you ever run a meeting?  Do you know how to type?"  And so, technically, seats are filled and charter-mandated officers elected.  

But facility with Robert's Rules and MS Word cannot make up for the loss of someone with 30 years of experience and contacts as a general contractor, or 20 years as a plumber or master woodworker or a degree in non-profit management or a degree in 501(c)3 accounting.  Those are the skills which, at a minimum, are required to keep the ship from running up on the rocks, and those skills are now, almost entirely, exiting the scene.  

Oh, did I mention that these organizations usually don't have anywhere near the financial resources to hire enough experts to bridge these gaps?  Yeah, it's all volunteers.  And tensions run high.  The remaining old hands are very anxious to hand the bag off to the new people ASAP.  They're tired. They've done their bit for king and country, and have other things to do.  Fair enough.  But once the new people have a chance to really look under the hood, they are equally anxious to not take over the legally-liable leadership of the group.  They're happy to take minutes, and will gladly staff a booth at an event if someone else plans it, or swing a hammer if someone else can tell them where to swing it and why.  

I also forgot to mention that almost all of this shrinking pool of competent volunteers usually serve on a number of different boards and councils.  You know the "80/20 rule", right?   80 percent of the work is done by 20 percent of the people, which is now a lot closer to being a "90/10" rule?  Well, when that 10% starts to leave and no capable replacements are available they're absence has a cascading effect across multiple organizations.    

Like so many problems today, short of building a time machine, going back to the 1980s and 1990s and demanding that responsible people start to make the small adjustments that would avert these crises later, I have no easy solutions.  As younger people prioritize different things, soon that 90/10 rule will become a 95/5 rule.  The pews will get emptier.  The member meetings more sparsely attended.  Some traditional community events will start to fade away.  

It is a hard thing to be of the generation that will not be the first to the Moon, but instead to whom falls the responsibility for boxing once-beloved things up and closing once-vital things down.  Nobody wants to be that guy, because everyone resents that guy, but here we are.  

Because like it or not, as Harry says in The Magnificent Seven, "There comes a time to turn Mother's picture to the wall and get out."  

Tips Jar

The Prude Abides -- UPDATE

File under, "Dave's Not Here."

After months of "book leave" and divorce lawyers, David Brooks sat alone in his vast space for entertainment, riffling through twenty years of columns. Twenty years of championing (and then quietly scuttling away from) crackpot economic schemes, backing (and then backing away from) ruinous military adventures, promoting (and then silently absenting himself from) one Great White Conservative Hope after another. 

So much bullshit. 

So much of it deep fried in Beltway trans-fat "Both Siderism". All of it served up with a side of smug moralizing and whatever pop sociology fad was tickling the wind sock that week.

Twenty years of columns.

Untold thousand of piles.

An empire, really.

And when David Brooks saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more subjects on which to write horribly stupid opinions.

And then...

And then...

And then...Colorado legalized pot!

Huzzah!

Briefly, the premise of Mr. Brooks' column today is that he used to smoke pot, and he enjoyed it, but only because he and his friends smoked exactly the right amount of pot during exactly the right decade.  Also, being white and privileged, his future was never annihilated by getting busted and picking up a criminal conviction that would ruin the rest life, but having only 800 words at his disposal, Mr. Brooks omits that little detail.

In fact, he omits a lot of details -- pretty much everything that happened between the screening of Reefer Madness in 1936 and the minute he rolled out of bed and decide to lecture America on the evils of weed -- preferring instead to focus on this one time, decades ago, when he screwed up an oral report in an English class because of the mary jane.

Decades later, that moment still haunts him so horribly that you shouldn't smoke pot.

Normally I would do my David Brooks thing.  The same David Brooks thing I've been doing for going on nine years now, since back in the day when taking on Mr. Brooks in public was illegal, so I'd stay up half the night drying it, bagging it and cleaning out all the stems and seeds in secret. Then I'd hop in my beater and run it out to a few of my regulars, hoping all the while that I was being careful enough not to get busted.

My typical yield would be a few hundred views, four comments, and that would be that.

I might supplement it with a custom graphic I put together for that batch: a visual complement to my post that would tantalize the eye while my customers got baked on my backyard chronic.

I might tweak my sweet, illicit home-grown with a few asides that only an experienced grower would know about.  Like...

...seeing as how Mr. Brooks spent years rampaging around in a state of ranting, moral stupor from very publicly binge-huffing Iraq War resin out of Dick Cheney's underpants, perhaps lecturing others on the virtues of pursuing "the highest pleasures" (Translation: living la vida Bobo) and eschewing the "lesser pleasures" -- 

I’d say that in healthy societies government wants to subtly tip the scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship. In those societies, government subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.

-- is not a humiliation that any normal person with his public record would want to risk...

...or...

...the revelation that while Mr. Brooks's nappy-time is capable of being haunted by past mistakes, amazingly it is goofing a classroom assignment as a college kid decades ago and not his unremitting and catastrophic failures as a Neocon grownup adult that troubleth his sleep.

But of course, this was all before slapping around David Brooks for being an insufferable dolt was legalized.  Before the big combines moved in with their vast acreage, controlled environments, salaried employees and international distribution networks and took over the entire enterprise.  Small grower like me?  Well, a few of us will still exist for awhile as novelties, but we're not long for this world.  

We were loners, Dottie.  Rebels.

Disreputable alchemists working in the shadows to keep our fellow mutants sane.

But now that the law has changed, everything that law carried with it has also changed.  

Now anyone can walk right up and purchase a public vivisection of Bobo in broad daylight from Vanity Fair or Esquire or BuzzFeed or Mediaite or The Daily Beast or  The Daily Dot or Slate or  Slate (again, this time with an embarrassingly bad PhotoShop) or The Week or The Baltimore Sun or (sort of) The Washington Post or Politico or Business Insider or The Nation or Bloomberg News or the Chicago Reader or the BBC or The Economist.

For fuck's sake, you can score a bag of ditchweed Bobo Takedown at Forbes or International Business Times nowadays; it's so 100% risk-free that even Andrew Sullivan's Pot-'n-Pope-'n-Stuff blog has taken a gentle gibe at his very good friend David Brooks:

I sure hope I’ve treated David’s arguments, such as they are, civilly. Ditto my friend David Frum’s. I know they are well-intentioned, and the idea that there can be no cost to ending Prohibition is silly.

And so what until recently had been the honorable, outlaw and potentially-career-crippling avocation of a few has become another high-end, over-the-counter commodity.  And while I believe the quality and consistency of my sticky icky is as good or better than anyone's, anywhere, I am old enough to know that nothing can beat superior marketing and distribution.

So today just go read Gary Greenberg's post, "I Smoked Pot With David Brooks" -- 

... I never spoke up before because I figured if I threw mud at someone whose whole career rests on being squeaky clean, well, that’s just mean. And it’s mostly irrelevant now. I mean, like he said, we’ve “aged out” and “left marijuana behind.”

Well, all except me. I still get high from time to time. It helps me deal with the kids, makes me more playful and my knees ache less when I get on the floor with them. Dave would probably say I delayed having them until so late because I was too busy getting stoned, and maybe he’s right, although I like to think I was waiting for the right woman and the right time. Anyway, I gather he doesn’t have any problem with my once a week toking, even if it’s “not a particularly uplifting form of pleasure and should be discouraged more than encouraged.” So even if social scientists have proved smoking doesn’t really make me more creative (although I could swear it does, and I’ve heard others say the same, but what do we know?), and even if it makes it impossible for me to “graduate to more satisfying pleasures”–although marriage, kids, reading, music, conversations with friends, I used to think those were pretty satisfying– I guess I’m okay in his book.

Funny thing. I didn’t know before this morning that I was the “full-on stoner” who was one of the four reasons Dave gave up weed. Sorry as I am to hear that our frolics are now his shameful 4 a.m. memories, after all these years of silence, it’s nice to know I mattered to him, that I was a significant part of the moral life of someone so important and with such a strong “sense of satisfaction and accomplishment”—an achievement I guess I made possible by teaching him that “one sort of life you might choose is better than another sort of life.”

And here all along I thought he quit because of that time we got pulled over by the Radnor cops in senior year right after we’d clambaked his Mom’s Vista Cruiser...

-- which is either 100% true, or such a subtle and lovely parody that the truth should be ashamed of itself for not living up to its potential.*

And as always, Matt Taibbi is well worth your time:

Yet here they come, luminaries like MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, publishing mogul Tina Brown, and Yale blowhard-in-residence David Brooks, all hot to build a Wall of Decency around the New American Menace. They are the 21st-century version of the Anti-Saloon League, gathering now to denounce the perils of the legal recreational joint.
...

The Brooks column is particularly infuriating because in just a few hundred words it perfectly captures why marijuana needs to be legalized. Here's this grasping, status-obsessed yuppie who first admits that that he smoked an illegal drug without consequence in his youth, then turns around and tells us, as a graying and bespectacled post-adult, that it would be best if the drug remained illegal for the masses.

UPDATE:

It was a lovely, subtle parody, so reality should consider itself scolded.

Also, based on it's verisimilitude, that one post generated interest from many, big-name publications with which you may be familiar:

...
Gary Greenberg, the psychotherapist who had unintentionally convinced journalists around the country that he had grown up toking up with a New York Times columnist, was having a good day. Greenberg’s essay, a takedown of David Brooks’ anti-pot confessional column written as if Greenberg and Brooks were childhood smoking buddies, had become easily the most popular piece ever published on Greenberg’s personal blog. He had gotten interest from (among others) The Atlantic, The Washington Examiner, and The Huffington Post.

“First of all,” Greenberg said, “almost everyone thinks it’s true.”

Including, for a time, me. Like almost all of the writers I follow on Twitter, I initially read Greenberg’s satire as genuine, a biting reflection from a friend that Brooks said had become so dangerously dependent on marijuana that the Timesman had foresworn the drug forever for fear of ending up like Gary. It was a little piece of internet gold, new media reaching out and very uncomfortably tapping the old on its shoulder.
...

Obviously I must now re-think my entire blog marketing strategy.

Those Darn Conservative Deadbeat Dads

There are the biological ones:

Judge scolds Rep. Joe Walsh in child-support case with ex-wife

A Chicago judge issued a preliminary ruling Wednesday against U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) in his child-support dispute with his ex-wife, ordering the Tea Party favorite to explain why he appears to be $100,000 behind in child-support payments.

Cook County Circuit Judge Raul Vega also wanted to know why Walsh wasn’t in court Wednesday — the McHenry Republican’s ex-wife, Laura Walsh, was there — and initially said he expected him to show up for the next hearing.
...

And there are ideological ones


From here:

Why Do We Call These Radicals Conservatives?

PM Carpenter:

Why, then, do modern commentators persist in referring to modern conservatism as "conservatism"? While Krugman's statement is perversely unimpeachable -- "modern conservatism is actually a deeply radical movement" -- it also contains a colossally unconcealed contradiction, which is way overdue for journalistic retirement.

But that would require MSM journalists and editors exercising their own judgment against the propaganda of one political party. And that we know they will not do. They couldn't even call torture by its proper name, for Pete's sake.

While I freely confess that I find it especially hilarious when one of the Conservative progenitors of our modern political disaster goes all "Henry Fitz-Empress" (beard and all, in this case)

when confronted with the stink of their own ideological DNA reeking from every pore of their bastard race of Rightwads, these vicious little homunculi did not spring from the head of Zeus, Mr. Sullivan.

Nor did they arise spontaneously out of the elemental humors of the universe, nor (so far as I know) were you and those like you roofied by a building full of octogenarian Satanists

so that Lucifer use you in his very special electoral breeding program.

Of course you had lots and lots of help -- after all it takes a Movement to raise a Monster -- but these depraved goony fucks are all yours, Mr. Sullivan.

And however many times you change your political wardrobe,

change your name, change their name, and otherwise deny them, they will still be yours.

All yours.

For the rest of your life.

Monkey Poo Discovered

On Monkey House wall.

Film at 11.

Fresh from the desk of the World's Greatest Blogger:

The Tea Party As A Christianist Force

We've been told again and again that the real motivation of the Tea Party is a multi-partisan movement to bring the debt and government under control. I've never believed this, partly because these people were never to be found under Bush. It was primarily a laundering device to disappear the Bush years, re-brand the GOP as a wholly different entity and thereby avoid the long wilderness that the catastrophes of the first decade of this century might have led them into.

Now we have some large data sets to review the reality. And the reality is that the Tea Party is the Christianist right-wing of the GOP.
...

I agree, although I'd like to know the names of the people Mr. Sullivan believes have been lying to us "again and again" about "the real motivation of the Tea Party".

Names, Mr. Sullivan. Names, and then a sustained call for some substantial consequences to come down on the necks (or at least the wallets) of the people who have been lying to us about such vitally important matters.

Names, Mr. Sullivan, unless of course they are friends of your, in which case we don't name names or call for contrition and atonement do we?

I was also pleased that it came sans Mr. Sullivan's usual, gratuitous shot at the imaginary sins and distant histories of Culture Warrior Liberals, remains the highest form of tribal-identification-invective/Crazy-Lefty-Sauce-lobster-bib among Ivory Tower "Conservatives" who want to make loudly certain that none of their frathouse brethren mistake them for Evil Libruls in the dark as they parrot exactly the same fucking critiques that Liberals have been leveling at the Right (and for which we have been roundly mocked) for decades.



As as I (like many Liberals) wrote many, many times before it was fashionable, the Tea Party -- like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin -- is nothing but the GOP Base who have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created just long enough to burn their uniforms and pretend they were all in Switzerland the whole time.

Nobody knows what “independents” want, because “independent” as a modern political category is a textbook example of what Kurt Vonnegut defined in "Cat's Cradle" as a "granfalloon":

"...a proud and meaningless association of human beings"

Because “independent” can mean any-damn-thing, or nothing at all.

...

Snake-handling queer-hating Leviticans who think the GOP is too gutless because it won’t advocate rounding up Teh Gay and putting them in camps?

Independents.

Bunker-dwelling survivalists?

Independents.

Pimple-faced 30-something John Galt wannabees who masturbate themselves blind to “Atlas Shrugged” because that hot chick in accounting won’t give them a second look, but won’t she be sorry when Objectivists stop the engine of the world and people like her will have to stand in like to offer their vajay-jays to the alpha studs wealth producers!

Independents.

Klansmen who want to smoke a little weed?

Independents.

America's compulsive political middle-children who have been taught so thoroughly to compromise their way out of any conflict that they will travel a 1,000 miles just to find a fence to straddle?

The opinionless little ciphers who just want to make sure they line up with a winner?

The moral cowards wouldn’t pick a side with a gun pressed to their heads, because of the terror of then being committed to actually doing something instead of snarking their way through life declaring "Well, ya know, bote sides are juss a buncha crooks anyway!" about every situation regardless of context and circumstances?

If asked, I guarantee you all virtually of those people would tell you that they think of themselves as “independent”.

And based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?

Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

But they fool no one.

Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.

They have, as always, been aided and abetted in this latest Big Conservative Lie by our idiot media.

the same media that jumped on the Iraq bandwagon. The same media that went right along with the Conservative Lie that Clinton was a depraved monster. The same media that has been on-board with every other Conservative or Fake Centrist Lie before and since.

However, the big, ugly fact that you continue to run away from is that your whole movement has itself been one, long "laundering device". One long exercise in feeding the paranoia and rage of the mad Dog Base with lies and red meat, followed by some horrible failure, followed by pressing the Media Memory Reset Button and pretending it never happened or that Imaginary Libruls were just as bad or worse, followed by rinse-and-repeat-and-up-the-ante.

Like a Virgin.

“...they turned to prayer, beseeching
that the sin which had been committed
might be wholly blotted out.”

-- 2 Maccabees. 12:42

After conspiring to bring about two of the most destructive events in modern American history -- the impeachment of a US President over trivia, and the probable theft of the subsequent Presidential election -- to what God could Republicans possibly pray that their eight years of insanity, venom and violence "might be wholly blotted out?”

On 09/11/01, their dark miracle came winging its way out of a clear, blue sky.

Eight years ago, this is what we all saw.

All of us, all together across all political, cultural and religious spectra watched the worst thing many of us had ever seen.

Together.

But in what now seems like less time than it took to wipe away our tears, the same depraved thugs who sponsored eight years of "Clinton Murdered Vince Foster!" hysteria began hijacking of our pain and patriotism to serve their partisan interests right before our eyes.

The minute the Bush Administration began trying to stretch the war they got into an excuse for the war they wanted, 9/11 stopped being merely a national tragedy and started being the Bush Administration's bottomless political ATM machine.

The minute the Party of Personal Responsibility began using the mantra "9/11 changed everything" as the political equivalent of the Blood of Christ -- as a means to absolve themselves of their personal responsibility for eight years of malice and derangement -- for them September 11, 2001 stopped being a moment of shared, national anguish and started being a suit of cultural body-armor which magically deflected any criticism of their lies and their and hypocrisy.

An impervious sniper's nest from which they could cynically escalate

their war on the Left.


Or don't you remember the day the Right robbed the graves of all those who perished on 9/11 to turn this


into their all-purpose

"Get Out of the 90s Free" card?

And the thing is, it worked.

By selling 9/11 for a mess of wingnut pottage, the Right bought itself an anti-Liberal free-fire zone and two Presidential terms-worth of blank checks. Two terms of an alternately supportive and supine media. Two terms of catastrophe, corruption and treason protected from scrutiny by an ablative shield made out of solid "Why do you hate America?", and a promise that they could go on bareback fucking diseased monsters in the alley all night long, every night, forever and wake up each morning miraculously clean, virginal and still beloved in the eyes of God.
...

There is nothing going on with the Tea Party that was not baked into the Conservative Movement like the bean in a King Cake under Nixon, metastasized under Reagan and predicted by those Damned Dirty Hippies decades ago. And because of that intractable and irrefutable fact, the professional survival of Conservative Public Ineffectuals Intellectuals like Mr. Sullivan depends 100% on "laundering" their own past every bit as much as the Teabaggers "launder" theirs.

And it is perhaps this sheer, ludicrous hypocrisy of the foundation on which they have built their critiques of their former partners in Conservative crimes that is the reason why none of these fearless public intellectuals will publicly debate -- or even acknowledge -- this old and fatal lie at the heart of their brave, new Conservative World.

One Ordinary Day With Piefights

So blogging is dead.

Again.

Well sure that makes me feel blue.

I mean, how am I -- a mere scribbler of transient words in the Wet Sand of Time -- a mere pisser of ephemera on the Urinal Cake of Eternity -- supposed to bear up under this disaster having already been shattered by the death of conversation, the death of the novel, the death of the short story, the death of radio, the death of live theater, the death of the rock and roll, the death of a salesman, the death of irony, the death of Ivan Ilyich, the death of stand-up, the death of the Republican Party, the death of retail,the death of portraiture, the death of Superman, the death of disco, the death of the Democratic Party, the death of the LP, the death of the newspaper, the death of the Western, the death of cities, my death of cold, the death of the essay, the death of Pets.com, the death of the cool, the death of science fiction, the death of the Hired Man, the death of the symphony, the death of traditional marriage, the death of Marat, the death of the metric system, the death of the bar scene, the death of the Ball Turret Gunner, the death of abstract expressionism, the death of outrage,

and of course sad stories of the death of kings;

How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?

Also the death of Eric Cartman.

OK, so where was I?

Oh yeah.

Ahem...

OMFG! The death of blogging! OMFG!

Whatever shall we do!

Blogging Is Legacy Technology: The Proof

by Jonathan Rauch

My doughty, authoritative criticisms (here and here) seem to have just about brought the blogosphere to its knees. Looking over some of the responses, I'd have to say that a lot of people either help make my point or miss it altogether. You can look here, here, here, and here for some of the smarter responses. They fall into a few categories.

"You're Comparing Apples and Oranges." The blogosphere is intended to be ephemeral, so accept it on its own terms.

Good advice, if only bloggers would follow it. As I keep saying, I'd have a better attitude about the blogosphere if it presented itself as a flea market instead of a revolution in human affairs. The MSM, imho, is way less self-congratulatory than the blogosphere.

"So's Your Mother." There's lots of bad stuff in old media, so nyah-nyah.

Right. My claim is not that old media are perfect, it's that blogging is a format that makes producing good stuff difficult, which is why there's much less good stuff in the blogosphere.
...

The app supports the fundamental human desire to engage in a sustained way with narrative and argument, which is why it will displace blogging as a medium of cultural importance. Blogging is a cultural dead end, trapped by its own idiosyncracies...

I watch with growing concern as young journalists get channeled into content mills where they post three, seven, who knows how many blog snippets a day. I spoke with one young guy who told me he puts up seven posts a day and would like to break into longer form by doing only three. One of the most promising young journalists I know couldn't take it and quit for medical school. Another young writer tells me he longs to "get off the hamster wheel."
...

And, yes, I admire David Broder.

You know, I'm gonna wear the seat of my Sunday pants all shiny if I have to keep sitting through this same damn wake over and over again.

Or hey, maybe blogging isn't dead?

Maybe this isn't about blogging at all?

Maybe this is about the main thing that monster sites like the Daily Beast really, really care about: traffic.

Maybe this is about larding up their biggest traffic driver with lots of new staff and interns and guest writers and djinns and curatoculturalists and grommet-oglers who conjure a transparently artificial, eyeball-attracting "controversy" out of thin air by whipping a handful of contrarian eggs around inside a very large glass house

And, yes, I admire David Broder.

and then "reacting" to them a few posts later

Blogging & the Failure of the Legacy Media: College Football Edition

by Alex Massie

Like an over-matched Jack Russell terrier, plucky Jonathan Rauch will neither let go nor go away. I salute the scamp and his rascally determination to snap at any passing ankle!

And, actually, I take his point that new technology such as Kindle singles, apps and whatever comes next will offer writers and readers new and interesting ways to engage with one another. But it's hardly Blogs vs Apps since why can't you have both?
...

in order to induce people to believe that there is some there there.

Maybe I don't give a rat's ass what Mr. Rauch has to say on the subject or, for that matter, anyone else who has read the Last Rites over the blogosphere's from high atop Mt. Insider over the last several years.

Maybe it's just a game they play for their own reasons.

Maybe it's just..."One Ordinary Day With Peanuts".

/Spoiler Alert/ If you haven't read Shirley Jackson's brilliant little monster of a short story originally published in "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction" in January of 1955, first, shame, shame on you (PDF copy here) and second, go no further if you don't want to know how it ends./

The story is 90% about a man named Mr. John Phillip Jonhson, who walks out of his front door on a beautiful day with his pockets stuffed with candy and peanuts and proceeds to be extraordinarily generous and genial and all-around terrific to just about everyone he meets. From a single mother trying supervise the moving of her meager possessions into a truck while also watching her tiny son, to a young man and women that Mr. Johnson plucks out of their individual, harried mornings and sends off to enjoy the beautiful day all expenses paid, to a lost kitten...Mr. Johnson's sincerity and kindness are almost miraculous.

But then, when he gets home, every one of our expectations are upended...

...
Mrs. Johnson came out of the kitchen and kissed him; she was a comfortable woman, and smiling as Mr. Johnson smiled. "Hard day?" she asked.

"Not very," said Mr. Johnson, hanging his coat in the closet. "How about you?"

"So-so," she said. She stood in the kitchen doorway while he settled into his easy chair and took off his good shoes and took out the paper he had bought that morning.

"Here and there," she said.

"I didn't do so badly," Mr. Johnson said. "Couple young people."

"Fine," she said. "I had a little nap this afternoon, took it easy most of the day. Went into a department store this morning and accused the woman next to me of shoplifting, and had the store detective pick her up. Sent three dogs to the
pound—you know, the usual thing. Oh, and listen," she added, remembering.

"What?" asked Mr. Johnson.

"Well," she said, "I got onto a bus and asked the driver for a transfer, and when he helped someone else first I said that he was impertinent, and quarreled with him.

And then I said why wasn't he in the army, and I said it loud enough for everyone to hear, and I took his number and I turned in a complaint. Probably got him fired."

"Fine," said Mr. Johnson. "But you do look tired. Want to change over tomorrow?"

"I would like to," she said. "I could do with a change."

"Right," said Mr. Johnson. "What's for dinner?"

"Veal cutlet."

"Had it for lunch," said Mr. Johnson.

Excuse me now while I outfit my laptop with black crepe and turn all of my pictures of Mark Twain to the wall.

At Play in the Fields of the Sturgeons

I am sincerely delighted any time I find evidence of a new generation discovering the power of posing science-fictiony questions.

When a new crop of cultural speculators are glimpses walking beneath the vast dome of a great, literary cathedral, brushing lightly against the spindizzies, ansibels, mass drivers, sandworms, bussards, galactic emperors and allotropic iron torpedoes left behind by the Elders of a Dying Genre, never realizing that the curve of that firmament and all of its furnishings were not naturally occurring phenomena phenomenon phrenologist :-), but has been carved out of the unforgiving marketplace more than a generation ago at a half-a-penny-a-word by battalions of hungry pulp scriveners whose names are now mostly forgotten (unless, of course, they had the foresight to cook up, say, some insanely profitable cult)...

Is Time Us, Space Them?
By Robin Hanson ·
(This post co-authored by Robin Hanson and Katja Grace.)

In the Battlestar Galactica TV series, religious rituals often repeated the phrase, “All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.” It was apparently comforting to imagine being part of a grand cycle of time. It seems less comforting to say “Similar conflicts happen out there now in distant galaxies.” Why?

Consider two possible civilizations, stretched either across time or space:

Time: A mere hundred thousand people live sustainably for a billion generations before finally going extinct.
Space: A trillion people spread across a thousand planets live for only a hundred generations, then go extinct.
Even though both civilizations support the same total number of lives, most observers probably find the time-stretched civilization more admirable and morally worthy. It is “sustainable,” and in “harmony” with its environment. The space-stretched civilization, in contrast, seems “aggressively” expanding and risks being an obese “repugnant conclusion” scenario. Why?

Finally, consider that people who think they are smart are often jealous to hear a contemporary described as “very smart,” but are much happier to praise the genius of a Newton, Einstein, etc. We are far less jealous of richer descendants than of richer contemporaries. And there is far more sibling rivalry than rivalry with grandparents
or grandkids. Why?
...

... apparently never realizing that 10,000 amazing, maddening, glorious possible answers to their questions can be found moldering silently away between the lurid covers of 10,000 ancient books and magazines scattered here and there in the dusty corners of the dying American Empire.

Some aging Boy or Girl Scout please gently slip a copy of "Time Enough for Love", "The Martian Chronicles", "Universe", the "Foundation" trilogy, "Dune", "The Demolished Man", "Venus Plus X", "The End of Eternity", "Bring the Jubilee", "When the Sleeper Wakes", the "Uplift" series, "Scanners Live in Vain", "Childhood's End", "The Left Hand of Darkness", "City", "The Mote in God's Eye", "The Marching Morons", "With Folded Hands", "To Your Scattered Bodies Go" or one of a dozen dozen other masterpieces into their pockets or onto their Kindles.

Years and years from now, they'll thank you for it.

Blood Money for Billionaires

"And, for an instant she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human"

-- Count Zero (1986)

Blood Money for Billionaires.

This is the hill the Right was willing to die on.

Blood Money for Billionaires.

This was the issue over which the Party of God was willing to screw "...the least of these."

This was the issue over which the Party of Personal Responsibility was willing to hold America's unemployed hostage during the worst economic calamity since the Republican Great Depression.

This was the issue over which the "How fucking dare you question the Commander-in-Chief" Party was willing to endanger American lives and let a nuclear treaty with Russia rot just to make the Commander-in-Chief look weak.

And it worked: they got their Blood Money for Billionaires.

So, are they celebrating? Dancing little goose-stepping jigs?

Of course not.

They're bitching that their patriotic, deficit-warrior, Tea Party sensibilities were cruelly violated because the tax cuts did not go nearly far enough.

They're moaning that the weak-willed GOP was willing to give up one pfennig to subsidize the lazy, mooching lifestyles of unemployed losers.

And they're breathless awaiting Conservative Media Hero Andrew Breitbart's latest cinematic opus about Sinister Negroes, Reparations and Obama's Secret Radical Liberation Theology.

Or ACORN.

Or those evil Unions.

Or something.

Because it's always something,

We cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.

We will become all one thing, or all the other.

A Journey of a Thousand Becks

begins with a single Reagan.

When the insufferably Credulous try wearing the Big Boy Incredulity pants out in public, the results can be hilarious.

Andrew Sullivan's Quote of the Day:

Quote For The Day

21 Oct 2010

"I don't think we came from monkeys. I think that's ridiculous. I haven't seen a half-monkey, half-person yet," - Glenn Beck.

Sigh. They don't just deny the fact of climate change; they deny evolution as well. How can a sane conservative in any way support these nutcases?

Andrew, the journey from Reagan to Beck is like the trip from Joliet, Illinois to Cheyenne Wyoming: a long, straight, wide, well-paved highway direct from here to there.

And along this well-lit, well-marked Conservative Royal Road on which you have been a merry motorist for most of your adult life -- like the endless cornfields of Iowa -- you have been rolling past markers reading "Radical Deregulation", "Liberals are Traitors", "Ignorance is Strength", "Gut The Middle Class", "Plutocracy Ahead", "Strategic Racism", "Embracing the Fundies", "Fair and Balanced Next Right", "Fuck Science" and, most importantly, "History Never Happened" at regular intervals for the last 900 miles.

This pattern -- this distinctly Conservative pattern -- was established long ago: only its amplitude, phase and angular frequency have changed.

So from what deep reserves of ignis fatuus are you still drawing that you can continue feigning surprise and horror that your Movement has finally arrived at exactly where it has been heading all along?

Once again...


Yours in Christ,

driftglass

The Messicans Tempted Us

And we did eat.

When your party is based on cheap labor at any cost AND frantic, flag-waving fake-patriotism, eventually things start to get a little weird.

Friday Flashback

Today we set the I'm feeling lazy and discouraged and David Fucking Brooks has plopped another godawful, "Both Sides are Wrong but Righteous Values Will Save Us" bag 'o dung on the Op Ed page of the NYT that I can't look at today without feeling like throwing up everything I've eaten since 6th grade Wayback Machine to an April 2005 post in which a little-known blogger predicts the rise of the Tea Party...

...in children's parable form.

"...
So she got on the phone with her very good friend Karl Rove and with his help organized carpools to the polls, and get-out-the-vote drives, anti-gay marriage amendments and smear campaigns. For Jesus.

And Little Red State Fundy delivered the margin of victory and was featured in many, many magazines: without Little Red State Fundy, the Republican Party could never, ever, ever win anything.

And now everybody knew it.
...?

The rest here.

A Freak Party Campaign

for the next Mayor of the City of Chicago?

There are going to be 3,000 people in identical blue and slate-gray suits all trying to look ponderous and mayoral, so why not sprint an old-school, bootstrap, hell-for-leather insurgent campaign in the opposite direction?

You want a green city with a balanced budget?

Legalize marijuana, grow it on the roof of city hall

and fill the barren city coffers selling Big Shoulders Gold and Windy City Blue. For a city that thought nothing of illegally destroying an airport just because the its Mayor felt like it, this should not present much of a problem.

Turn abandoned public housing units into vertical pot farms.

Market Picasso-shaped bongs and Soldier Field bowls.

Sell Tribune rolling papers and "Wait 'til next year" brownies at Wrigley Field.

The list of upsides goes on for pages.

Chicago...

Herb Farmer for the World,
Pipe Maker, Stacker of Weed,
Player with Dank and the Nation's Chronic Handler;
Stormy, husky, mellow as hell,
City of the Spliff Holders:

Hell, I've already got

the flag.

By the way, if you are a City worker, contractor, agency employee or funder with a story to tell, please EMAIL ME at driftglass00 AT yahoo DOT com. Discretion assured!

In Other World-Shaking News

My local NPR station just came Dangerously Close to reporting in unequivocal language that:

1. Both sides are not equally wrong or biased.


2. For a disturbingly large number of Americans -- mostly Conservative Americans -- facts just don't fucking matter.


3. Reflexively saying "both side do it" every time a Conservative gets caught in the alley pistol-whipping the truth is, y'know, a bad thing.


4. That big-megaphone members of the "media elite" are by far the ones doing the most damage.
   

In other words, finally, gingerly touching on the Massive Media Fail that Liberals have been screaming about for years.

Man, Da Mare says he's leaving and the whole world comes off its axis.

But then, what can you expect for an organization that is clearly in the pocket of the Kenyan Usurper and his Chicago union goons?

Numbers, Ctd.

Duncan nails it! In that, in a couple of days, there will be actual numbers.

As Summer Winds Itself Down

It seemed like a good time to try out a new aesthetic for awhile.

Americans Remain Anxious/Hopeful

About a variety of issues

Numbers

Because numbers sometimes represent things in the real world.