Month: March 2011

…you just need to be really brazen about your flip-flops. Sure, sites like ThinkProgress or Politifact with catch you, and the first few times that happens maybe you’re a little worried about what’s going to happen. But then it dawns on you: nothing is going to happen. Your base doesn’t read ThinkProgress. The media doesn’t really care and is happy to accept whatever obvious nonsense you offer up in explanation. The morning chat shows will continue to book you. It just doesn’t matter.

Kevin Drum, yesterday, on Newt’s ridiculous flip-floppery re: Libya (last week: bomb ‘em into the stone age!; this week: we can’t just go around bombing countries willy nilly!). I thought Drum was being a bit overwrought with this, but then the sad spectacle this morning of NPR doing exactly this…they presented a smorgasbord of GOP talking points about the GOP House not being “consulted” sufficiently pre-bombing.
Of course, these same GOP House members were screaming “bomb! bomb! bomb!” every day of every week leading up to bombs falling, but their opinions were apparently unheeded. As soon as the first bomb fell, though, those opinions did a 180. Now intervention was out of the question. The whole “Obama dithers too much!!!” meme: down the memory hole forever.
NPR uncritically reported this new GOP position, paying zero heed to the old GOP position (of last fucking week), larding it with a “he fools around too much running about in Latin America” and only then stamping the whole moldering package with a fig leaf in the form of a “some say” from an administration flack.
But yes, NPR is clearly a liberal hellspawn that must be destroyed if we’re ever to have any semblance of balance in reportage.

Strikers and their families: Go Die in the Streets

one section buried deep within [H.R. 1135] adds a startling new requirement. The bill, if passed, would actually cut off all food stamp benefits to any family where one adult member is engaging in a strike against an employer

No need to talk about this kind of stuff at the national level. Shrill. Just let all those troublemakers and their families starve to death already. Christ, it’s their fault we’re in this mess to begin with. GOP to striking workers and their families: Go die in the streets.

Strikers and their families: Go Die in the Streets

…the underlying problem is that anyone with actual expertise and any kind of public profile — in short, anyone who is actually qualified to hold [a position requiring Senate confirmation] — is bound to have said something, somewhere that can be taken out of context to make him or her sound like Pol Pot. [Donald] Berwick has spoken in favor of evaluating medical effectiveness and has had kind words for the British National Health Service, so he wants to kill grandma and Sovietize America.

So what lies down this road? A world in which key positions can only be filled by complete hacks, preferably interns from the Heritage Foundation with no relevant experience but unquestioned loyalty.

In short, we’re on our way to running America the way the Coalition Provisional Authority ran Iraq.

Paul Krugman
I’d only quibble with: on our way.
Source: The New York Times

If you want to pay the New York Times to read the news using both their iPhone and iPad apps, in theory, you should be their ideal customer — you’re willing to pay, and you’re looking forward, technology-wise. But you’ll save money by getting several pounds of paper that you don’t want delivered to your doorstep every week.

John Gruber, crystallizing the fundamental problem with the New York Times’ paywall scheme. Or, as Jay Rosen might put it: the print guys won.
The paywall was supposed to be all about beginning a gradual transition away from the strictures of the printed Times (and everything that implies for the costs of operating under that overall business model). Instead, it seems to be a continuation of that model at any cost, well after said model has proven to be unworkable. Pining for yesterday won’t bring it back any sooner.

We’re Comfortable Together

PZ Myers represents on all things marriage:

If we strip marriage of the asymmetry of power, as we must if we allow men to marry men and women to marry women, then we also strip away the man and wife, dominant and submissive, owner and owned, master and servant relationship that characterizes the conservative view of marriage. This is what [right wingers] want to preserve, and this is what they are talking about when people like Gingrich echo those tired phrases about “Judeo-Christian values” and complain that their “civilization is under attack”. And it is, when we challenge their right to treat one partner, so-called, as chattel.

And once you look at it that way, you see no abuse of their values when Gingrich goes tomcatting around—he’s simply asserting his traditional privilege as the Man.

The whole thing is really indispensable.

We’re Comfortable Together

Dear New York Times, (Four things)

Your paywall is going up on March 28th. Fair enough. I see non-print-subscribers will need to pay somewhere between $15 and $35 per month to access more than a few articles.
We can agree not to bicker over the inherent stupidity of having tiers like “web” vs. “tablet.” That sort of foolishness is left as an exercise for you, the apparent fool. But I will say: charge for the app but then make it the best way anyone can imagine for accessing the single-priced, dumb pipes version of your content.
That said, what I don’t see is that I, the potential online subscriber, will be getting much of anything in return for my hard earned dollars (other than baseline access, of course).

So here’s a short list of what I, the paying subscriber, expect from you:
1) Access to all articles as a single page by default. If I am mentally unstable enough to request articles be broken into several pages by default, then so be it; however, it is therefore sadly unlikely I am able to hold a job and pay for a subscription. But if you’re going to persist in this multipage CPM crap, then I, the subscriber, should get to choose whether or not I have to take part in it now that I’m paying for the privilege.

2) No content-obstructive ads, ever. I realize ads are a fact of life for you, me, and us, and I respect that they have to be there (just like they are in the physical paper, whether or not I subscribe to it). However, the physical paper does not suddenly and irrevocably wrap my head with a mandatory, inescapable, full page ad that then lingers for some length of time each time I pass one while reading the physical Times. Neither should the electronic version of that article. You are a content company, start respecting both your content and the prospective buyer of said content.

3) Mobile ads should furthermore be minimizeable. Pixels are precious on an iPhone or other small screened devices. If you are going to tier out “mobile” versions for special and exrtra cost over “web” versions, then you have to let me minimize the ad. I have seen your ad. Now let me drop it down or scroll it up so I can have a few more lines of text per page. In fact, since you love tiers so much, mobile is the one space where I should be able to purchase an entirely ad-free version for some additional fee. Those pixels are worth that much to me. At least give me the option to pay for them.

4) Finally: a subscriber should have access to full text RSS feeds of everything you publish.

That this is very little to ask is self-evident. That none of it will be granted is similarly self-evident. That none of these key, user favoring absences will be cited when the paywall fails to attract much in the way of a revenue stream is probably also all-too-self-evident. So it goes.

Earthquake 9.0

According to recalibrations of old seismograms by the US Geological Survey (USGS), 11 “megathrust” earthquakes with an 8.5 magnitude or greater occurred worldwide in the twentieth century. Ten of these 11 earthquakes occurred offshore or near a coast, nearly all with tsunami damage. So far in the twenty-first century, five such megathrust earthquakes – with severe tsunami damage in four cases – have occurred offshore.

Proper use of earthquake science advises against an overreaction to the Tohoku disaster, but also spotlights further dangers that policymakers must take into account.

[…]

Aftershock patterns benefitted earthquake forecasting when Ross Stein and his USGS colleagues discovered that the stress increments of past large earthquakes were good predictors of where the next large earthquake would occur. Long after the aftershocks subsided – months, years, or decades after – another earthquake of similar size often broke within the next segment of the fault zone, where stresses had been increased only slightly in relative terms. How time-delayed stress-triggering occurs is a mystery, but it has been documented worldwide.

An irregular series of large, damaging earthquakes shook the North Anatolian Fault in the twentieth century from east toward the west across modern-day Turkey, reaching the Sea of Marmara in 1999 with the Izmit earthquake. Stress increments from Izmit have loaded the fault segment next to Istanbul. The 6.6 magnitude San Fernando earthquake in 1971 loaded the nearby fault that caused the 6.7 Northridge earthquake in 1994. More germane to Japan, the 9.3 Sumatra-Andaman megathrust earthquake in December 2004 loaded the next subduction-zone segment to the south, and this segment generated an 8.6 megathrust event only three months later in March 2005. No prediction can be made today for Japan, but it is safe to forecast a sharply increased probability for a major earthquake on the broad, simple subduction-zone segments both north and south of the Tohoku rupture zone. The segment to the south lies offshore the Tokyo metropolitan area.

Earthquake 9.0

Scale and Magnitude

Some accounting matters:

The 9.0 magnitude quake (the fourth-largest recorded since 1900) was caused when the Pacific tectonic plate dove under the North American plate, which shifted Eastern Japan towards North America by about 13 feet. The quake also shifted the earth’s axis by 6.5 inches, shortened the day by 1.6 microseconds, and sank Japan downward by about two feet.

Scale and Magnitude