Still Holding Out For A Brokered Convention?

Ed Morrissey dismisses the Republican dream: 

[L]et’s say for the sake of argument that no one candidate has a majority of the delegates, and none manages to wangle a majority on the first ballot at the convention.  How does this benefit conservatives, who have fought the "establishment" that has pushed Romney for the nomination?  The nominating process will then fall into the hands of the Republican National Committee, comprised of state party chairs and other power brokers, where the Tea Party has little or no influence. The fantasy in this case will be that the assembled party bosses and delegates, many of whom are part of state-party establishments, will crown a completely new candidate. ... [C]onsider the hole from which this nominee would start. Ten weeks from the election, the party would have a nominee for which no one had cast a ballot in a primary, who has raised no money, who has built no organization, and who has articulated no platform before getting drafted at the convention.  

Matt Lewis has more. Earlier Dish speculation here.

(Image via politicalbetting.com)

Romney's Envy "Rosebud"

Noam Scheiber contrasts Mitt with his father George:

“I was kicked out of Mexico when I was five years old, because the Mexicans were envious of the fact that my people, who, when they went down there, were just as poor as the Mexicans, ... became prosperous,”[George Romney]  said in a speech in 1961. “The Mexicans thought, if they could just take it away from the Mormon settlers, it would be paradise. It just didn’t work that way, of course.” ...

[T]he elder Romney’s response to this slightly stunted analysis was admirably progressive. It was one of the reasons he favored foreign aid, an end to discrimination, and subsidized preschool and summer school. He was the model of a ’60s-era, liberal Republican. Romney fils, on the other hand, has responded to the same analysis in a strikingly different way. Like his father, Mitt Romney worries about those who would demonize wealth and success. But, whereas George sought to ease their plight, Mitt seeks to demonize the demonizers. It’s as though Mitt inherited all of his father’s noblesse, but none of the oblige.

Reihan makes an important distinction:

The political tendency Romney is criticizing is not a “politics of envy” driven by “the frustrations of the down-and-out.” Rather, he is, I suspect, criticizing a “politics of envy” driven by relatively privileged people who tend to be more concerned about the competition for positional goods in dense metropolitan areas than about chronic unemployment and underemployment in marginalized communities.

Florida Looks Done. Sigh.

Newt's mystifyingly bad debate performance seems to have sealed his fate in the state. But he is still in the lead nationally, and Shelly looks set to keep financing him. Nate Silver has a good guide to what will then be a long month without binding primaries. It's striking that Romney's leads in heavily Mormon Arizona and his home state of Michigan are rather shallow.

Here's the weird thing. I find myself rooting for Gingrich now, one of the most repulsive, nasty and delusional men in American public life. This primary season - when it hasn't eaten deep into my soul - has driven me to all sorts of strange emotions. There were a few nanoseconds when I even wanted Santorum to rally after Iowa. That's a horse race for you, I guess.

"The Moral Scandal Of American Life"

That's Adam Gopnick's view of mass incarceration in the US:

Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.)

Read On »

Dogs Against Romney

I guess it was inevitable.

Appraising Your Values

New research illuminates how the brain grapples with sacred beliefs and indecent proposals:

The brain imaging data showed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural systems associated with evaluating rights and wrongs (the left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems associated with reward. "Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives," [lead author Gregory] Berns says. "Our findings indicate that it's unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people's behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives."

Put another way:

In short, when people didn’t sell out their principles, it wasn’t because the price wasn’t right. It just seemed wrong. “There’s one bucket of things that are utilitarian, and another bucket of categorical things,” [neuroscientist Greg Berns] said. “If it’s a sacred value to you, then you can’t even conceive of it in a cost-benefit framework.”

Faces Of The Day

Wendy Campbell explains Takahiro Kimura's "Broken Face" collages:

Since 1991, Kimura has been creating own unique style of collages (with a focus on faces) that depicts the complicated nature of the human spirit through peculiar physical distortions.

Lomography has more:

Read On »

The Power Of Introverts

Susan Cain praises introverts in her new book:

It’s never a good idea to organize society in a way that depletes the energy of half the population. We discovered this with women decades ago, and now it’s time to realize it with introverts.

This also leads to a lot of wrongheaded notions that affect introverts and extroverts alike. Here’s just one example: Most schools and workplaces now organize workers and students into groups, believing that creativity and productivity comes from a gregarious place. This is nonsense, of course. From Darwin to Picasso to Dr. Seuss, our greatest thinkers have often worked in solitude, and in my book I examine lots of research on the pitfalls of groupwork. 

Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?

I'll own that headline for this one. The total invention of Barack X as opposed to Barack Obama is getting worse, not better, as Bill Maher explains in this instant classic:

First off, the head of the RNC, Reince Priebus, just said this about the bitter GOP death-match now in full flood:

In a few months, this is all going to be ancient history and we're going to talk about our own little Captain Schettino, which is President Obama who's abandoning the ship here in the United States and is more interested in campaigning than doing his job as president.

So the man handed an economy contracting by an annualized rate of 9 percent, and two failed wars, is now the man who is abandoning ship. Next up:

Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal is under fire after asking Republican House members to pray for President Barack Obama’s death. O’Neal made the request via an email he forwarded to GOP colleagues in the House. In an email sent in December, O’Neal asked his fellow Republicans to pray Psalm 109, which contains the following lines:

Let his days be few; and let another take his office.
Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.

The Secret Service needs to give that man a call. Then he should resign. No public official anywhere should be calling for the death of the first black president.

Do You Have A True Self?

Julian Baggini thinks not. But he doesn't believe that the self is an illusion:

Sam McNerney pushes back:

He invites the audience to consider the metaphor of a waterfall. In many ways a waterfall is like the illusion of the self: is it not permanent, it is always changing and it is different at every single instance. But this doesn’t mean that a waterfall is an illusion or that it is not real. What it means is that we have to understand it as a history, as having certain things that are the same and as a process.

Baggini is trying to save the self from neuroscience, which is admirable considering that neuroscience continues to show how convoluted our brains are. I am not sure if he is successful – argument by metaphor can only go so far, empirical data wins at the end of the day – but I like the idea that personal and neurological change and inconsistency does imply an illusion of identity. In this age of cognitive science it’s easy to subscribe to Whitman’s doctrine – that we are constituted by multitudes; it takes a brave intellect, on the other hand, to hang on to what Freud called our “naïve self-love.”

What's An Apology Worth?

A recent study put the question to German eBay customers who had offered a neutral or negative evaluation of a transaction:

One-third of the unhappy customers received a message that included the sentence: “I would like to apologize and ask whether you might withdraw your evaluation.” The others were offered, in place of expression of regret, either 2.5 or 5 euros “as a goodwill gesture.” Writing in the journal Economics Letters, the researchers report nearly 45 percent of those given the apology withdrew their evaluation, compared to only 21 percent of those offered cash. A direct apology: priceless.

Mental Health Break

Yosemite at its most beautiful:

The War On Vitamins

Dr. David Agus wages it in his new book The End of Illness. Brian Bethune summarizes:

Vitamin supplements would be bad enough if they were merely useless, he says. The money Americans spend yearly on vitamins—some $25 billion—is sorely needed elsewhere in the medical system. They aren’t getting much for their money now. Consider claims that vitamin D significantly cuts cancer risks and that three-quarters of the U.S. population had insufficient levels of it. For Agus, these results are found in not very high-grade studies; for one thing, he’s at a loss to understand how anyone can claim to have established the correct dose for appropriate D levels. The bone disease rickets is long gone and age-related fractures are not on the rise, meaning that by the only indications we have, the population has quite enough vitamin D. 

Gregory Ferenstein details Agus' other prescriptions:

[W]e combat weight loss by driving to the gym to walk on a treadmill--and then return to hunch over laptops for hours on end. "Sitting at your desk is akin to smoking a cigarette," he says. Prolonged sitting, independent of physical exercise, he writes, "has been shown to have significant metabolic consequences," influencing everything from cholesterol levels to blood sugar.

A Poem For Sunday

From "The Four Quartets" by T.S. Eliot:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

The poem continues. Amit Majmudar analyzes the work of T.S. and Kay Ryan as the two major philosophical poets.

(Image by Markus Reugels)

Eating In Israel

Annalise Koltun shares his experiences with kosher and non-kosher Israeli cuisine. An aside on Israeli agriculture:

For most of its history, Israel’s produce was watered, weeded, and picked by Palestinian workers who crossed over each day from the West Bank or Gaza. Since the start of the Second Intifada in 2000, however, Israeli has closed its borders to most of these workers. And since few or no Israelis are willing to work in the hot sun for minimum wage, Israel now imports workers from Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines. There are hundreds of thousands of these foreigners in Israel; in 2010, the first victim of a Hamas rocket attack after the previous year’s Gaza War was a man named Manee Singueanphon, not Moshe Cohen.

Why Would Robots Be Evil?

Alyssa Rosenberg applauds the above short film for debunking the fears of the privileged class:

The shopkeeper is angry at a robot who is physically smaller than he is, who is annoying rather than intimidating. He commits an act of terrible violence against that much more vulnerable actor. And then he discovers that things he’s conditioned to want to protect and find adorable—kittens—are emotionally dependent on the robot, who has been stealing milk to feed them. It’s a narrative that questions the shopkeeper’s prejudices and assumptions, rather than suggesting he’s right to be angry and afraid of a new element in his environment.

E.D. Kain nods:

One reasons Blade Runner was so interesting and complex was the very reason Alyssa enjoyed the above short: it turned the fear of the powerful robot Other on its head, and granted them their humanity and their frailty, and ours.

(Video: No Robots from YungHan Chang)

Why Discourage Bilingualism?

Julie Sedivy reiterates the cognitive benefits of knowing two languages:

[A]n intriguing Israeli study led by Esther Adi-Japha found that the drawings of bilingual kindergarten-age kids were different from their monolingual peers. When asked to draw a picture of a flower that does not exist, monolingual children were fairly unadventurous, drawing perhaps a flower that was missing its leaves, or a flower with only one petal. Bilingual children, on the other hand, incorporated elements from completely different objects—producing for instance, a flower with a tail, or a flower with teeth. This kind of cross-category mixing in children’s drawings tends not to occur until kids are about eight years old, putting the bilingual kids on an accelerated timeline for this particular skill.

Heaven For The 1%

Mormons believe in three heavens and one hell. The celestial kingdom is the most desirable:

There are also different sub-degrees of glory within the celestial kingdom, and the highest degree can be reached only by couples who are married together in the temple, and in which the husband has joined what Mormons call the “Melchizedek priesthood." (Pretty much every devout male Mormon joins the priesthood by the time he’s married.) Those who attain the highest degree become gods in the afterlife, meaning that they can bear new children in heaven, and may even have their own planets.

(Artist Rendering of Eternal Progression via the Utah Lighthouse Ministry)

When We Can't Forgive

When Greg Bottoms' older brother was 25, he tried to burn down his family's house when his family was inside. After fifteen years in a prison psychiatric treatment facility, the brother tried to contact the family:

I told the social worker I could not speak to him, nor could my mother, who is in her 60s now, living a peaceful life after many years of a damn difficult one. Call me cold, but our problem—his problem, but ours by extension—is intractable. I wish I could offer some kind of easy prescription here—something to do with politics and policy, with therapeutic philosophies or biochemical treatment protocols. But the mystery of mental anguish, of the mind on the outs with itself, of a version of hell made manifest in a suburban living room, is the one thing in my life that has brought me to the point where my only option seemed to be to pray. To reengage my brother would be suicidal. What choice do I have? The past comes flooding back. I cut him loose to survive.

The View From Your Window

Vatican City, 8 am

The Theology Of Star Wars

Liel Leibovitz critiques it:

We revere Star Wars because to our minds—modern machines that equate religion with superstition and are willing to disregard imperfections in science but never in dogma—the movies represent transcendentalist humanism at its best, a perfect manifestation of that noxious label, “spiritual,” that people use to describe themselves when they’re too dull to believe in religion and too dim to understand science. This is why the Force has become the organizing metaphor of our time; there’s no better one for those who believe that if we only open our hearts and understand people are all the same and all good we’d be enlightened enough to lift rocks with a tilt of our heads.

Should Atheists Build Their Own Temple?

Alain de Botton believes so:

You can build a temple to anything that's positive and good. That could mean: a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective. Why should religious people have the most beautiful buildings in the land? It's time atheists had their own versions of the great churches and cathedrals. A beautiful building is an indispensable part of getting your message across. Books alone won't do it.

His design:

Read On »

How Did The Inquisition Happen?

Cullen Murphy traces how intolerance and persecution took on an institutional life:

The inquisitors shared an outlook of moral certainty. In a world of moral certainty, the unthinkable becomes permissible. The sanctity of private conscience is no longer 
deemed inviolate. ... It all sounds very medieval. But it’s not merely medieval. Scholars may debate whether there truly is such a thing as a “totalitarian” state, and what its characteristics are, but the desire to control the thoughts and behaviour of others – joined to a belief that God or history will render an approving judgement – underlies much of the sad narrative of the past hundred years: the police states, the dirty wars, the ethnic cleansing, the internments, the renditions, the Red Scares, the fatwas, the special prosecutors, the electronic surveillance, the encroachments accomplished in name of national security.

More on the Inquisition as predecessor to today's acceptance of torture here.

"Jesus > Religion"

Over the past few weeks, this pro-Jesus anti-religion video by Jefferson Bethke has racked up more than 17 million views:

Lisa Fullam captions:

I post this here because I suspect he represents a very widely held set of notions among Millennials. These are the young folks who not only don’t darken the doors of churches, but don’t see any reason for doing so. As they see it, the Christian churches’ concerns simply don’t mesh with their concerns. 

CBS interviewed Bethke earlier this week. Another young Christian created a response video defending the Catholic Church:

Read On »

Philosophy For The Masses?

Carlos Fraenkel analyzes the consequences of Brazil's decision to mandate that all high schools teach philosophy:

[C]an philosophy really become part of ordinary life? Wasn’t Socrates executed for trying? Athenians didn’t thank him for guiding them to the examined life, but instead accused him of spreading moral corruption and atheism. Plato concurs: Socrates failed because most citizens just aren’t philosophers in his view.

Read On »

A Visit To Buchenwald

Ari Kohen reflects on touring "the most terrible place I have ever been in my life:"

Having been to Buchenwald, it all seems so much harder to believe than it was when I was listening to survivors’ stories, learning about it in school, or going to a museum. But it becomes almost unthinkable to travel here, a few miles from the Goethe and Schiller houses, and to try to imagine how people could build a place like this one, let alone how they could live in its shadow. They went to the neighborhood bakeries, they read great literature, they played with their children, they walked in the local parks. It is unimaginable to me, especially when I think that these were regular people and not devils. We want them to be monsters because only monsters should be capable of this; but that is one of the principle lessons, I suppose: regular people perpetrated these monstrous crimes and so it is regular people — us, all of us — about whom we must think. 

(Photo by flickr user Vincent Desjardins.)

Goodnight Captcha

A bedtime story composed from the nonsense words used to register for websites. A little long but really clever:

Rising From The Ashes Of Infidelity

Tracy Clark-Flory seeks out couples who have not only survived an affair but became stronger as a result:

Sarah, co-founder of the online support group Survive Infidelity, says that she rarely sees couples recover from an affair unless there’s "virtually full disclosure within two to three conversations" — no fibs to protect the other’s feelings, or one’s own image. But Perel emphasizes that "trust isn’t knowing all the details." Sometimes, in fact, it means "living with what you’ll never know." She says, "It’s the people who are able to switch from a detective mode to an investigative mode who are successful. It’s not, ‘What did you do, where did you go, what bed did you sleep in, how often did you fuck him and what position?’ but more, ‘What did it mean for you? What did you find there? Why did you think you were able to experience that there and not here?" ...

Read On »

Faces Of The Day

Photographer Hal made the above portrait of Sawaco & Ryo for the series “Flesh Love".  Couples were vacuum-packed together and then photographed:

One day I found the perfect place where love could reach its peak. In the vacuum sealed package.

The First Artificial Sweetener

It accidentally gave the Romans lead poisoning:

Roman winemakers found that boiling of unfermented grape juice created a sweeter liquid known as defrutum or sapa. Defrutum is created by boiling off half the volume of wine, while sapa is the result of a reduction to one-third the original volume of wine. ... The boiling process involved long hours and high temperatures, causing lead to seep out of the container, inadvertently artificially sweetening the sapa. ... A modern attempt to re-create the sapa using lead vessels resulted in a liquid with a lead content of 2,900 parts per billion — one thousand times the acceptable dose in most countries.

A Greedy Temptress

Somali Roy reports from the 20th World Orchid Conference:

Orchids are seducers. They trick animals into pollinating them and usually give nothing in exchange. Some orchid species mimic nectar-producing flowers to lure bees; others emit the fetid smell of rotting meat to attract carrion flies. In China, Dendrobium sinense orchids release a chemical normally broadcast by bees in distress; the scent attracts bee-eating hornets expecting an easy meal. The scent of Cymbidium serratum entices a wild mountain mouse, which spreads pollen from flower to flower with its snout. And around the world, orchid species have evolved to look or smell like female insects; males try to mate with the flowers but gather and deposit pollen, which they carry on their flight from deception to deception.

Why We Get The Spins

And other interesting info from inside your head:

Getting The Story Through Grief

Paul Hiebert grabs a great interview with Kerry Burke, a New York Daily News crime reporter featured in the short-lived reality show "Tabloid Wars":

Have you ever had to break the news of a crime to the victim's friends or family?

I have lost count of the times I've done that. I know a lot of reporters who won't do it, and I understand and respect that call. But one, someone's got to tell them, and two, I do it with as much grace and empathy as I can summon. Frankly, I need their story. I do my damnedest to do justice to the family and to their lost one.

Do you ever receive angry calls or emails after a story's been published?

Oh yeah. Death threats and all that.

Read On »

A Poem For Saturday

“The Blue Bird" by Charles Bukowski:

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.

Continued here.

(Animation by Monika Umba)

The Birth Of The Beer Can

It happened 77 years ago this week:

It wasn’t until 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the 73rd Congress  passed a series of laws repealing the Volstead Act, that American Can again took up the cause of canned beer. Working at a rapid pace, its engineers solved the exploding-can problem that September, producing the world’s first beer can. In addition to traditional tin, they reinforced the can with steel, which proved able to hold up to beer’s pressure. Drinkers opened the can with a "church-key" opener, a slice of metal with a sharp bill to punch a hole in the can’s flat top. But with this innovation arose more problems. Designers had to find a way to combat the fact that beer packaged in metal began to taste metallic or tinny. To counteract this, American Can inventors slathered the inside of the cans with brewer’s pitch, made from pine tar. The pitch insulated the can walls from the beer just like the inside of a keg; thus, their cans came to be known as "keglined."

(Photo: Andre the Giant holding a 12 oz beer can)

Mental Health Break

A famous scene gets a bit more oomph:

ooh aah from ant1mat3rie on Vimeo.

Poseur Alert

"My creative process is like making a wild ferment. It starts with the process of making the conditions correct. The next moment is some kind of magic thing, not unlike how ideas form or creative impulses arrive. The Invisible Allies, or microscopic "insects," come and enliven the condition. At this point, the work enters a different stage and it becomes more about making the idea happen and doing the steps to follow the creative idea-notion.  It becomes much more concrete, but still with room for not knowing and playing, and things find their place," - Sartoria, a featured Etsy seller.

(Hat tip: Helen Killer of Regretsy)

History Of The Remix

Mike Barthel traces the beginnings to Jamaica in the 1960s:

The island's extremely strong local music culture enabled a tight interplay between the people who made records and the people who listened and danced to them. As DJ/producers like Lee "Scratch" Perry saw that crowds were interested in longer musical experiences than they could provide with the single format (the 7" vinyl disc on which singles came was generally only able to hold four minutes' worth of music without suffering a drop in sound quality), they produced new versions which they referred to as "versions." ... Since Jamaican producers tended to be owner-operators, both recording and distributing their own music, they had access to the multi-track masters at a time when American musicians didn't. In the United States (and other industrialized countries), the master recordings were owned by the record company, making it much more difficult for artists to get their hands on their own recordings, let alone legally release remixes.

(Video: a remix of Yelle’s "Comme un Enfant," starring Nathan Barnatt)

The View From Your Window

Jaisalmer, India, 12 pm

Attention Doctor Who Superfans

A supercut of every adventure, from 1963's "An Unearthly Child" to last month's "The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe" Christmas special:

Read On »

A Quote Too Good To Check

And it says everything about both Dole and Newt:

"Why do people take such an instant dislike to me?" asked a perplexed Gingrich, to whom Dole bluntly explained: "Because it saves them time."

The Return Of Queen Esther

On the one side, ladies and gentlemen, Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, and Elliott Abrams. On the other, Sarah Palin, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh. And Abrams' Drudge-hyped claim that Newt was once a Reagan-basher seems to have been the final straw. After all, what is this GOP election in 2011 all about if not replaying the fantasy of 1980 - without Reagan and without high inflation and without Carter? Putting Romney before Gingrich as the Reagan heir was just a mite too much for the Newties.

Palin's Facebook screed is a classic of the backlash genre. For her, all mainstream media is the same - which means Brian Ross and National Review are now in cahoots. And she is trying to reframe the race as one between the Tea Party base and the Republican Establishment. Somehow, a former Speaker who called the Ryan plan "right-wing social engineering" and pioneered the individual healthcare mandate is now the Tea Party insurgent. But this was never about issues; it was about identity and class. And that's what makes it so dangerous for the GOP. Money quote:

Now, I respect Governor Romney and his success. But there are serious concerns about his record and whether as a politician he consistently applied conservative principles and how this impacts the agenda moving forward. The questions need answers now. That is why this primary should not be rushed to an end. We need to vet this.

Pundits in the Beltway are gleefully proclaiming that this primary race is over after Florida, despite 46 states still not having chimed in. Well, perhaps it’s possible that it will come to a speedy end in just four days; but with these questions left unanswered, it will not have come to a satisfactory conclusion. Without this necessary vetting process, the unanswered question of Governor Romney’s conservative bona fides and the unanswered and false attacks on Newt Gingrich will hang in the air to demoralize many in the electorate. The Tea Party grassroots will certainly feel disenfranchised and disenchanted with the perceived orchestrated outcome from self-proclaimed movers and shakers trying to sew this all up.

That suggests to me that this is going to get even nastier, as long as Shelly can keep up the funding and Palin can keep up the attention. And here's Palin's definition of what's going on right now:

This whole thing isn’t really about Newt Gingrich vs. Mitt Romney. It is about the GOP establishment vs. the Tea Party grassroots and independent Americans who are sick of the politics of personal destruction used now by both parties’ operatives with a complicit media egging it on. In fact, the establishment has been just as dismissive of Ron Paul and Rick Santorum.

Newt is an imperfect vessel for Tea Party support, but in South Carolina the Tea Party chose to get behind him instead of the old guard’s choice. In response, the GOP establishment voices denounced South Carolinian voters with the same vitriol we usually see from the left when they spew hatred at everyday Americans “bitterly clinging” to their faith and their Second Amendment rights. The Tea Party was once again told to sit down and shut up and listen to the “wisdom” of their betters. We were reminded of the litany of Tea Party endorsed candidates in 2010 who didn’t win. Well, here’s a little newsflash to the establishment: without the Tea Party there would have been no historic 2010 victory at all.

Heres another wingnut:

From RNC head, to primaries, now the primary, the GOP establishment consistently uses all its power to stomp down any conservative. Conservatives are fast approaching a breaking point. The GOP believes it will be fine because it will be all Obama come November. They are wrong. Mitt Romney has gone from unlikeable, to detestable and some of us are not going to forget it simply because the GOP thinks it can blow dog whistles around Obama.

And here's Erickson:

The fix is in for Romney, which just means when he is crushed by Barack Obama a lot of Republicans will have a lot of explaining to do. Newt may not be able to win. But Romney sure as hell can’t beat Obama either if Newt can’t win. The problem remains — Gingrich supporters intrinsically know this to be so and are happy to die fighting. Romney’s supporters are still deluding themselves.

This is a level of rhetorical bile that didn't even occur in the Obama-Clinton dust-up. I don't know if it will give Newt a final wind beneath his wings. But it's possible. A new large sample auto-telephone poll this morning shows a dead heat - while most polls show a comfy Romney margin. But the establishment might have over-panicked a little and given the Newt-Palin forces a way back into the fight. That may weigh especially in the Florida panhandle. Who knows?

What we do know, I think, is that Newt will not bow out if he loses Florida and may go on a scorched earth Palinite crusade to stop Mitt on Super Tuesday. And what we also know is that Palin is fanning the flames. If Newt were to do better than expected in Florida, her clout as a king-maker soars. And the chance that she would lead a Tea Party revolt at the Convention grows.

I mean what if Newt and Romney are so damaged by the end of this that neither has a chance. Could Queen Esther return?

(Photo: Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin speaks during the Republican Party of Florida's fundraising event at Disney's Grand Floridian Resort on November 3, 2011 in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. About 800 people attended the fundraiser to listen to Palin speak, along with Governor Rick Scott and the Attorney General Pam Bondi. By Roberto Gonzalez/Getty Images.)

Should Twitter Self-Censor?

The social networking giant recently revealed its ability to censor certain tweets in countries with speech-restricting laws, provoking a coordinated boycott of the site. Jillian C. York wants everyone to calm down:

Let’s be clear: This is censorship. There’s no way around that. But alas, Twitter is not above the law. Just about every company hosting user-generated content has, at one point or another, gotten an order or government request to take down content.  Google lays out its orders in its Transparency Report.  Other companies are less forthright.  In any case, Twitter has two options in the event of a request: Fail to comply, and risk being blocked by the government in question, or comply (read: censor).  And if they have "boots on the ground", so to speak, in the country in question?  No choice.

But the censorship is incredibly easy to circumvent, which makes Zeynep Tufekci think the policy is Twitter's way of getting around speech laws. Mathew Ingram steps back:

[Twitter, Google, and Facebook] are businesses with corporate interests, not triumphant defenders of free speech — and they each provide the bulk of their services for free, and make money by selling their users’ attention to advertisers.

Read On »

The View From Your Window Contest

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts.  Be sure to email entries to VFYWcontest@gmail.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book. Have at it.

How Wall Street Knowingly Created The Crisis

The always-interesting Francis Fukuyama has a great interview on the financial crisis. Money quote:

What I thought was most interesting about Michael Lewis's book, "The Big Short," was that there is, to this day, a view about the whole pathology of collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) – these highly complex, packaged mortgage securities – as well as the credit default swaps – the insurance contracts written on those securities – that Wall Street created them and they simply got out of hand. They didn’t anticipate it would be hard to value them, how they would be misused, and so forth. What Michael Lewis points out very forcefully is that they were deliberately created by Wall Street banks in order to produce non-transparent securities that could not be adequately evaluated by the rating agencies, which then could be sold to less sophisticated investors, who would buy the idea that this junk debt actually had triple A ratings. So what this book does quite brilliantly is show that there was actually a high degree of intentionality in creating the crisis.

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Are Fairy Tales Worth Saving For Teen Girls?

In the wake of a controversial radio appearance, the blogosphere has not looked kindly on Caitlin Flanagan's new book, Girl Land, which aims to shield adolescent girls from a sexualized mass culture. Irin Carmon, who debated Flanagan in the segment, recaps her experience:

Specifically, she tried to use me as an example of the perils of having the Internet in your room as an adolescent, because I didn’t happen to meet a great guy to date in high school. The remedy? More princess movies.

Meghan O'Rourke thinks Flanagan is naive:

One waits in vain for Flanagan to get to the most interesting fact about the sex lives of teenage girls: that sexual vulnerability goes hand in hand with their own burgeoning desire—and the means to act on it. Instead, she informs us that "obviously" most adolescent girls would never type the word "porn" into a search engine (has she actually ever met a teenage girl?) and suggests that one reason girls can be so voluble is that they’re afraid of male attention. But is there any reason to think that girls don’t feel the same electric sexual charges—the same careless, intoxicated desire—boys do?

What’s most disheartening about all this alarmist rhetoric about girls is also what’s most predictable: It continues to define them as the objects of their erotic experience rather than as the agents of it.

Heather Havrilesky offers a qualified defense of the lightning rod:

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How Do Sword Swallowers Do It?

By not swallowing:

The term is a bit of a misnomer, since swallowing is actually the last thing you want to do with a sharp blade, since it involves contraction of numerous muscles; instead, the idea is to completely relax the throat and turn it into one long "living scabbard."

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John Hancock Should Die Already

David Wheeler shows how antiquated the written signature is:

While signatures remain America's chosen method of authorization, PIN-code transactions are much less susceptible to fraud. "Fraud rates on credit or debit cards that are signature-based are much higher than on cards with PIN protection," notes Chris Hawkins in his book A History of Signatures: From Cave Paintings to Robo-Signings. In 2005, a consulting firm found that signature-based debit card fraud rates were 15 times higher than PIN-based fraud rates.

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A Dish Best Served Sparingly

Cathy Erway ponders meat:

[E]ating meat in small doses — around once a week — gives me a deep sense of appreciation for it, too. I doubt this would be the case if my palate were weakened by its constant presence in my meals. Absence makes the taste buds grow fonder.  Studies have been showing that Americans are eating less and less meat today, and while there are differing takes on why this might be, there is a growing indifference about the necessity of meat on every plate. This is surely good news for the environment. But what about the average household? Maybe they’re also rediscovering a simple rule: We appreciate meat more when we can’t have it all the time.

(Image by Maira Kalman)

Fixating On Fear

A new study presented liberals and conservatives with a variety of positive and negative images (i.e. kittens, car wrecks):

Our evolution as human beings has programmed all of us to pay heightened attention to threatening or frightening stimuli. But conservatives were drawn to the negative images almost twice as fast as the liberals were. And they fixated there longer, too. This suggests that there exists not only a physiological difference, but also a cognitive one in how political partisans react to such pictures. ...

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