Stop The Spirit of Zossen 2.0

Lame joke deleted. Strange how something can seem so entertaining until one clicks ‘post’.

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Apropos recent comments . . .

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John Richardson’s Esquire piece ‘Newt Gingrich: The Indispensable Republican’ gets it right. We liked Marianne when she was there intimately engaged during Newt’s rise. A sharp, quick mind and personality of her own, she was easily at home with policy thrust and parry dinner conversations. And provided a social grace very much in need.

Esquire’s quotes and details all ring true. Will it make a difference? Esquire hints at but doesn’t delve into the larger question. What of the weird state of Republican positioning Summer 2010? Those who loathe Palin flock to any signs of another Newt tease. Odd, because they mock Palin for being an air headed Neocon sock puppet while applauding Newt’s far more radical and dangerously incoherent ‘Camus’ blather at AEI.

He’s the walking University of Phoenix, sure. But his dilettantism at least comes with a faux degree in seriousity that Joe Klein accepts. In these de-stabilized times, Newt poses a far graver danger as either a pretend or actual presidential candidate than Palin ever could. His revels in expediency, destruction and irresponsibility are gasoline seeking a fire.

He wears the tight smile of a man who has very little room to move. He is known for his rhetorical napalm and is not accustomed to acknowledging that he often deploys it for its own sake, facts and gross exaggeration be damned. You don’t build a movement by playing fair. He didn’t single-handedly topple forty years of Democratic rule in the House by strictly keeping Marquess of Queensberry rules. And so in Newt’s world, putting Barack Obama in the company of Neville Chamberlain to win a news cycle is just the way it’s done. The grimace on his face says, What part of this game don’t you understand? His assistant looks at his watch. “We have three minutes.”

He will not relax, will not let down his guard, not this time around. He did that once when he was younger, spent three days with a reporter who got his staff to complain of his sexual adventurism and saw him yelling at an assistant. Afterward, he mentioned the episode to Robert Novak, who said, “What the fuck were you thinking?” . . .

After that, Gingrich started to deteriorate. There were times, Marianne says, when he wasn’t functioning. He started yelling at people, which he’d never done before, and he’d get weirdly “overfocused” on getting things done — manic, as if he was running out of time. He took to taking meetings while eating, slurping his food, as if he wasn’t aware or didn’t care how strange it looked. The staff responded with gallows humor: “He’s a sociopath, but he’s our sociopath.”

And this:

There’s a large part of me that’s four years old,” he tells you. “I wake up in the morning and I know that somewhere there’s a cookie. I don’t know where it is but I know it’s mine and I have to go find it. That’s how I live my life. My life is amazingly filled with fun . . . It doesn’t matter what I do,” he answered. “People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.”

Worth reading the whole thing.

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Today is largely offline. We set it aside to pay tribute to those no longer with us whose lives resonate so profoundly still. To see one’s memories of extraordinary people in all their richness memorialized with skilled, appreciative care of archivists and specialists proves to be at once re-assuring and dislocating. We expected an emotional reaction; its depth and intensity nonetheless surprising.

Apropos of nothing in particular we also came across this today in another context. Already being in a reflective mindset, many thoughts rushed by unbidden. Some recalling the era, others the panoply of history, and others the sad context of that anniversary and the wreckage.

Still couldn’t repress a smile imagining Percy Alleline as emcee. And then we heard Smiley say:

Peter Guillam: Why was Control always so hostile to Alleline? Percy wasn’t a complete fool.
George Smiley: Percy can flirt, Peter. And Control hadn’t reckoned on the power of the Alleline lobby.
Peter Guillam: Who were they?
George Smiley: Golfers. “Golfers and Conservatives.” That’s what Control said to me.

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We should reject Bob Gates’s pre-emptive effort to lock in future defense budget growth with his PR statement declaring $100 billion in DoD out year budget cuts. Don’t fall for the flare off the back of the jet. He’s throwing Congress and the public a few meaningless sacrifices. His admitted long term goal? It’s not to cut costs per se but justify permanent 1% increases from this year’s already record defense outlays. This stunt is political kabuki intended to head off real defense cuts by offering a Potemkin facade of budget discipline.

Will Americans be deceived by his PR sleight of hand? Probably.

Read more…

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Tony Judt just passed after a two year battle with ALS.

Mr. Judt (pronounced Jutt), who was British by birth and education but who taught at American universities for most of his career, began as a specialist in postwar French intellectual history, and for much of his life he embodied the idea of the French-style engaged intellectual.

An impassioned left-wing Zionist as a teenager, he shed his faith in agrarian socialism and Marxism early on and became, as he put it, a “universalist social democrat” with a deep suspicion of left-wing ideologues, identity politics and the emerging role of the United States as the world’s sole superpower.

His developing interest in Europe as a whole, including the states of the former Eastern Bloc, led him to take an active role in the developing Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia; it culminated in “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945” (2005), a sweeping, richly detailed survey embracing countries from Britain to the Balkans that, in the words of one reviewer, has “the pace of a thriller and the scope of an encyclopedia.”

Mr. Judt was perhaps best known for his essays on politics and current affairs in journals like The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books . . .

“Today I’m regarded outside New York University as a looney tunes leftie self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university I’m regarded as a typical old-fashioned white male liberal elitist,” he told The Guardian of London in January 2010. “I like that. I’m on the edge of both, it makes me feel comfortable.”

He’ll be missed. Here’s a column exploring his last minute race against time to complete his work.

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After playing with a new iPhone 4 for some time here’s our take. It’s a wonderfully designed portable multi-media device that needs a new phone. Phone problems go beyond the well-known antenna flaw.

We got ours just by walking into an Apple Temple and simply asking for it. They handed one over, no wait time, no pre-order. Apple and AT&T still usually quote a 3 weeks wait. We upgraded on the spot because of Apple’s 30 days no questions asked return policy. Like everyone, we’ve seen the antenna stories.

Our earlier iPhones worked well with AT&T in the D.C. area, unlike NYC or SF. This new phone drops calls more often than wide open Redskins receivers. It’s not the ‘kung fu’ grip antenna problem, either. Even when a call is going well with the phone sitting untouched on a table using speakerphone, it drops a call more often than not. Untouched.

At home, earlier iPhone 3 series reception with AT&T was flawless. Now, walking down a hallway 10 feet will drop a call repeatedly. Moving from one end of a room to the other will drop a call. No matter how delicately one holds the jewel-like device. Rocking in a rocking chair (seriously) suddenly dropped a call with the first rocking movement. All while holding the phone awkwardly with just two fingers on the top and bottom to placate radio propagation deities.

It’s one thing to read frustration like this in say Engadget comments. Experiencing it another. A call to AT&T technical support confirms we’re near 4 network towers. The iPhone 3 series worked flawlessly with them. Out of all the phone calls we’ve made on the new device, maybe 5 didn’t drop, requiring a call back with the other party saying ‘that was weird’. Whether to a landline or cell. We’re careful holding the phone to avoid antenna problems.

It’s a shame. The other functions of the device are beautifully executed. Build quality as always is excellent. Web surfing using WiFi is noticeably faster as well. The pixel density provides a truly crisp, readable display. The camera, Face Time, and hi def video capture are easy to use.

AT&T says they can roll back to the earlier 3G phone (but not give back unlimited data, naturally – no surprise). One AT&T customer service rep earlier tried to talk us out of trying an upgrade, urging wait for a new iteration. He was right. Who knew?

Well, Steve Jobs, we tried. We are, after all, a 99% Apple shop across the board. The sole hold out? A second Xbox 360 at home (first one, RIP due to Red Rings of Death). Just didn’t feel the magic or revolution.

What’s your reaction? Have you had similar experiences?

[UPDATE] Apparently our experiences above, like Tugg Speedman in a POW camp, are a ‘rooster illusion’. An August 5th survey tells us all that the new phone means *fewer* dropped calls. Odd given that Jobs himself admits that the new 4 drops more. We just didn’t realize what Jobs’ ‘only 1% more calls dropped’ meant in real life: a functionally unreliable device.

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Art Brodsky is right: the FCC lacks gumption simply to do its job regarding Net neutrality. It could, as he notes, follow the EPA’s model with climate change. Side-step entrenched corporate interests and a captured Congress all seeking deadlock. Just get on with a rulemaking. Even if in the EPA’s case it’s an an imperfect solution (substantively and bureaucratically).

At stake is the seemingly simple question: are data on the Internet to be treated equally? Or can corporate owners of pipes/spectrum licenses/transmitters charge different rates for partners, allies or the wealthy?

The FCC broadband quagmire has been more typical than not. The FCC is, however, moving closer to systemic failure by refusing to use its authority like the EPA did for climate change. Trying to placate all its political economic stakeholders is creating a car wreck.

Read more…

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36%. Says it all.

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A beautiful and finally tolerable day in the Imperial City. Call them ‘surrender monkeys’ all you want, but when Pierre L’Enfant in 1791 began designing Washington, D.C., he’s not the one who decided the capital should be on a swamp. Here’s an open thread.

We’re tuning out for a day or two all the click-baiting, ankle-biting meme chihuahuas (Gore and Portland, this person is or is not a racist, etc.) in favor of a new book. “The Windup Girl” by Paolo Bacigalupi. We recommend it.

People seem to think Bacigalupi is the next William Gibson (after all, it says so in the blurbs). Perhaps he is, but so far we find him closer to Murakami’s excellent Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Also highly recommended.

Reviewers suggesting it’s a new ‘Neuromancer’ aren’t completely off. That book’s now oft quoted “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” doesn’t convey the richness of “Windup.” And Murakami’s textured (and structurally clever) “Hard Boiled Wonderland”, although not as well known to most Amerikuns, while of the same early 1980s era as Gibson went beyond just ‘jacking into the net’ and explored some of the biological themes fully developed in “Windup.” What we get with “Windup” is a more richly created dystopian world.

Is Bacigalupi another Vance as others suggest, a ‘world builder’ without peer? That’s for another post, perhaps. “Windup” is a great read filled with wry observations about a future with mindless American-Davos consumerism/branding triumphant. Dystopian to be sure but always entertaining and at times witty as well.

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