Republican attempts to depict her as some sort of radical got downright silly. Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa hit hard on this crucial topic: Why didn’t she require constitutional law for first-year law students, when she did require international law? Doesn’t that mean she cares more about foreign law than the very foundation of American law?
Well, no. Students are better equipped to tackle that essential subject with greater depth and understanding in their second or third year, she said.
Harvard’s Kagan Glides Past ‘Gotcha’ Republicans: Ann Woolner - Bloomberg
My brother sent me this link, along with some pretty nice commentary:
“Independent of how you feel about the Kagan nomination, is this really how you question a candidate at a hearing? An uninformed criticism of Harvard Law’s curriculum from a University of Northern Iowa-educated non-lawyer? This guy is like the kid in a freshman seminar who didn’t do the reading but really wants to contribute a “provocative” question to make sure the professor notices that he bothered to come to class.”
Pope decries abortion, same-sex marriage
I would say that Pope Benedict XVI’s indictment of abortion, divorce, and same-sex marriage as “dangerous threats to the common good” is sort of like a pot calling a kettle black, but that would be in the running for understatement of the year.
It would be more accurate to say something along the lines of “That’s like the leader of an organization embroiled in a worldwide scandal involving not only the widespread sexual molestation of children, but also systematic attempts to conceal and cover-up the abuse calling a loving, faithful couple ‘insidious’ simply because they happen to be the same gender.”
I’m not suggesting that just because a few handful of priests are guilty of some pretty horrific crimes, the Catholic church abandon all of its tenets - outdated and intolerant as some of them may be - and start embracing the very institutions that were supposedly prohibited by the dudes who wrote The Bible.
It’s just hard to hear a guy who had direct knowledge of the molestation of 200 deaf children and chose to do nothing about it refer to anything other than taking no action after hearing about the molestation of over 200 deaf children as “insidious.” So while the Pope is certainly welcome to his opinions, he could use a little work on his timing.
Clive Thompson in Praise of Online Obscurity
The author of this very thoughtful article makes a lot of valid points when it comes to the dynamics of social media groups as they fluctuate in size, but he loses me at the end when he insinuates that there is a “right” or “wrong” way to use new media channels such as Twitter.
The uninitiated will often explain their lack of participation in social media away by claiming that they simply “don’t get it,” which I always counter with my belief that there really is nothing to “get.” This is not to say that Twitter is without value. Far from it. What I am trying to say is that the non-existent barrier of entry that comes from an ecosystem with little or no hard-and-fast rules of engagement is what makes social media so versatile. And it is this versatility that makes it so valuable.
Over the last year or so, almost every magazine or blog has released some sort of “Guide to Twitter” that advises users of the service to follow a certain set of rules when choosing who to follow, how often to post, or what is appropriate to share with your audience. Even though I tend to agree with the more reasonable suggestions these pieces make, I ultimately think they should all be thrown in a backyard tire fire and replaced with one simple creedo: Do whatever you want.
Talk about current events. Talk about your bowel movements. Build your brand. Workshop dick jokes. Participate in trending topics. Refuse to even acknowledge the existence of hashtags.
Keep tabs on people whose output you enjoy whether or not they reciprocate the gesture. Engage in conversational replies only when your interest is peaked. Allow the size of your audience to have as much or as little effect on your activity as you wish.
The ability to follow, unfollow, or block other users with a single click is the only institutional intervention necessary to ensure a user get the exact experience he or she desires. And I would argue that this is the point of all this stuff, anyway.
Legacies only matter to poor people
Mark McGwire admitted to using steroids today. I am not going to act like I knew it all along, but very shortly after the epic home run race of 1998 it became very clear that there was something fishy going on with almost all Major League baseball players that were enjoying even a modicum of success during what will be remembered as one of the dirtiest eras of any sport.
I’ve already come to grips with the fact that my childhood heroes were are all cheaters; partly because decisions I have made in my life prevent me from claiming the moral high ground in almost any situation, and partly because I honestly enjoyed the end result of all this unsportsmanlike behavior. At the end of the day, the effects performance enhancing drugs had on the game of baseball were almost all positive. The only unfortunate fallout was the wholesale rape of the record books.
And I’ve got news for the people who are upset about this: you’re going to have to get over it. McGwire and Sosa and Bonds - and everyone else who has been immortalized in a sports almanac as the direct or indirect result of steroid use - have already won. While the truth behind their superhuman performances have made them infamous, the performances themselves have made them rich. And now that they are rich and mostly retired, there is nothing that anyone can do to teach these guys a lesson.
Leave them out of the Hall of Fame if you insist. Annotate the back of their baseball cards with whatever punctuation symbols you choose. While that will certainly tarnish their legacies, I have reason to believe “legacies” mean more to people who do not make millions of dollars a year (sports writers, guys who played before free agency, John Q. Public) than to people who do (McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, A-Rod, etc).
They’ve already won. Time to move on.
A few thoughts on the BCS system
Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: The primary purpose of the BCS is to eliminate the economic inefficiencies that existed in the previous NCAA system in order to make Bowl Season as profitable as possible. During many of the years its been around, it has indeed brought together the two best college football teams in a game to crown an undisputed national champion, but this should be looked at as nothing more than a very pleasant side effect of a system designed primarily to sell advertising.
Those complex computer formulas and polls are all prologue, serving no other purpose than attempting to legitimize a sometimes illegitimate result by creating a complex mathematical device to take the fall when shit hits the fan.
If the NCAA was serious about crowning an undisputed national champion every year, there would be a playoff system. Period. But the only thing they are serious about is selling the broadcast rights for the BCS bowl games at the highest premium. And in turn, the networks that purchase the rights to the games are only concerned with their ability to charge a lot of money for ads during the events.
With this being said, the BCS system is a complete success. Remember that before it existed, bowl selection committees invited teams to compete based largely on maintaining traditional, historic conference pairings.
But how on earth are you supposed to stack the economic decks when there is no guarantee that a game pitting the team with a “1” and the team with a “2” next to their name will take place every year? And how will John Q. Public know what to watch unless there is a game that is referred to - nay, officially named - the “National Championship” game?
And while a playoff may be more “fair”, it would not have nearly the same predictable (and sellable-in-a-pitch-meeting) result as the Frankenfruit that is the BCS selection system. I mean, heaven forbid a mid-major makes it into the field and upsets a university that may travel better or is in closer proximity to a major media market. How can you promise advertisers 15 or more ratings points in that scenario?
And to be honest with you, I am ultimately okay with this system. As someone whose alma-mater has a long way to go before even having the chance to get royally screwed by the BCS, I do not share the outrage of an increasingly large group of college football fans. But don’t get me wrong: I hate the BCS and pray for a doomsday scenario every single year if only to stoke these fires of widespread disdain. But the only real criteria by which you can judge the BCS is how it compares to the system it replaced.
Is it better than the former decentralized, disorganized and somewhat clandestine Bowl system of days past? I think so. We may not always get the two “best” teams playing the final game of the season, but I doubt anyone can deny that two of the top three or four teams are usually involved. And yeah, there is controversy, but was there any less when teams that may not have even faced each other in years were fighting at the ballot box to be elected the National Champion?
No one is going to argue that a playoff is the most fair way of determining the champion of anything. This is likely why “playoffs” have been adopted in every single other team competition known to man. But until the NCAA decides to go that route with football, we could all do a lot worse than watching some of the excellent games we are treated to every bowl season… even if they are the result of a system that is equal parts greed, entitlement and ghost-in-the-machine voodoo.
A theory on why the original Beatles CDs sound so bad
Right around the time the Moog solo in “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” almost knocked me unconscious, I began to realize just how much better the newly remastered versions of the Beatles albums are than any other available digital rendition of the band’s collected works - even the amazing and noble effort put forth by Purple Chick. But at the same time, I also started wondering why the original CDs sound so awful.
The simple answer is this: They sound awful because they were released in 1987, when every CD sounded awful. The general public had just finished abandoning the fidelity of vinyl for the convenience of magnetic tape, which made a strong case that most people no longer gave a shit how bad an album sounded as long as they could listen to it in their Crown Victoria while cruising around town.
Check out any CD produced that year - Appetite For Destruction, Joshua Tree, In The Dark (hell, even George Harrison’s Cloud Nine) - and tell me it sounds light years ahead of the format it replaced. You can’t because it doesn’t. But no one noticed this before the Beatles CDs because no one had spent the last 20 years listening to first edition Guns ‘N Roses LPs, only to be horrifically underwhelmed when the digital version fell flat. People had been listening to most popular music on cassette tapes and were probably just happy to be able to skip from track to track.
Even though the digital music revolution was nearing critical mass, the only people who really seemed to care where an elite class of audiophiles and Patrick Bateman. Music consumers already showed that they would put up with a poor signal-to-noise ratio and embarrassing low-end frequency reproduction, so why the hell would the music producers waste time and money putting out a superior product (even if they now had the technology to do so)?
It was just the nature of the beast back then, so blaming anyone in specific for the thin, bright sound of the first Beatles CDs would be like blaming REO Speedwagon for the fact that 8-Track players had no rewind function. Maybe we should even be thanking whoever was ultimately responsible for shitting the bed in such epic fashion, because they also shifted the conversation back to sound quality for the first time is at least a decade.
