The Trouble with Tribbles

But a prolonged period of widespread mass unemployment paired with a collapse in overall spending reflects something else. People haven’t decided they want fewer apples and more pears, they’ve decided they want fewer goods and services and more safe liquid financial instruments.

-Matty Woodchuck

Woody Mattchuck trying to wind his swollen tongue around economists' jargon is like watching a Star Trek episode in which everything has been edited out except the technobabble; it is a script composed entirely of reversing the polarity. He has less than no idea what he is talking about, which is bad enough, but he combines his own mental feedback loop with a psychopathic insouciance in the face of human suffering. Saying that "people" have decided they want "fewer goods and . . . more safe liquid financial instruments" is like saying that European Jewry decided it wanted a smaller and less geographically widespread population. It proposes that the perpetration of a colossal wrong upon innocent people is the result of some invisible collective will.

On the plus side, I believe that it is not possible to write anything dumber than the above quotation. I believe that this is the stupidest thing Matthew Yglesias has ever written, possibly the stupidest thing any human being has ever written, and that not even he is capable of descending below the bottom of this pit.

Centrism

This is my favorite piece of music by Scarlatti, played a little too fast on the harpsichord by Gustav Leonhardt and a little too slowly on an organ by Gerard van Reenen.

Hardest

The real difference is that Year Up takes great care to prepare its students to succeed in a professional culture. “We often talk about hard and soft skills,” says Chertavian. “To me, it’s actually hard and harder skills.” The merely hard skills are things that many training programs cover — for IT, it might be using software applications or installing hardware. The harder skills are more nuanced. They involve questions like: Do you know how to communicate in a team? If you’re running late, do you know to call ahead? If you don’t have enough work, do you know to be proactive and ask for more? Do you know how to write a professional sounding e-mail?

Chertavian points out that the social signals new employees send can make all the difference. “It’s how you make eye contact, it’s how you dress, it’s how you shake hands, it’s how you make small talk at a Christmas Party,” he says. “It’s when we speak, are you nodding your head? Are you leaning in and asking questions? It’s knowing how to introduce yourself. It’s knowing what’s appropriate for conversation. All of those things are learned. If you don’t have that context, boy, it feels real foreign to go through the security gate at Fidelity and exist in that environment.”

-The Times

Do you know how to respond to the woman from another department who calls you on your cell phone to tell you that she just sent you an email letting you know that she'd left a voicemail on your office line, which you can disregard because she got the answer? Do you know what to do with the guy from receivables who calls you eight times a day and precedes every single conversation with the phrase, "Okay. Quick question." Do you understand how managing open-ended projects related to abstract ends like "improving systems transparency" and "increasing operating efficiencies" allows you to play coloring-book with Excel's graphing features while occasionally producing glossy reports that will impress your boss. Have you learned to refer to yourself as a "Six Sigma Ninja" in a high-fiving, boo-yeahing voice? Do you realize that all lunches can be stretched to three hours if you keep your Outlook calendar stocked with out-of-the-office meetings that are sufficiently plausible to be believable but vague enough to remain unverifiable? Has anyone told you that anytime you are confronted with a task that was assigned but unfinished, you should respond that you are still "waiting for bids from a few vendors" and that you will push and/or apply pressure to get them in? Do you always remember to keep your ALT-Tabs in order so that when you are blogging and a colleague walks in, you can immiately jump back to something vaguely financial in appearance? Are you aware that by using exclamation points liberally in your emails you can say nearly anything without it occuring to the recipient(s) that you are calling them fucking morons? Are you able to make constant, vague references to staying late and/or coming in early in order to suggest that your 30 hours a week are actually 60? Can you remember that the asshole who sits constantly nodding as a boss or higher-ranking employee speaks is the second-most hated person in the room, right behind the person who, upon the question, "Any questions?" asks a question. Have you successfully eliminated any residual belief that white-collar management professionals possess or need to possess any special skills or knowledge? Are you comfortable pretending not only that you know what you are talking about, but that everyone else knows what they're talking about? Are you willing blithely to use jargon that is already almost devoid of real meaning in a manner completely orthoganal to its bare sliver of actual significance and to tolerate such usage in others? Can you, without giggling, employ the phrases, "our industry," and, "in this industry"? Yeah? When can you start?

Piece of the Middle East

What I want to know is how does this affect America? What does it mean for America? In what way is it about America? To what extent does it reflect America? In what manner can we say that it was influenced by America? To what degree can we say that America affects it? How will it in turn affect America? What is its import for America? Will it be good for America? What are America's obligations? How deeply ought America be involved? How much support can America offer? America America America America. America America America. America America America America America.

Calsutmoran Calling

Bondi said she wanted to get the stuff off the shelves before spring break in case users high on it think they can fly.

"There are a lot of balconies out there," she said.

-Palm Beach Post

There are a lot of balconies out there! WHO WILL THINK OF THE CHILDREN?

Interesting note. I have had a number of psychadelic experiences that involved the vague sensation that I might be able to fly, and yet in each and every case, this sensation was accompanied by a commensurate conviction that in order to do so, I would require a long runway. Yes, mind-altering chemicals can transport you to the far Mayan reaches of the multiverse, but at the same time, the most cosmic experiences very often comingle with an hilariously intense mundanity, an obsessive conviction that in order to achieve lift-off, you must run a full mile--duh; it's only logical, man. After riding shai-hulud all night long, sometimes you just want a Denny's Grand Slam, you know what I'm saying?

Anyway, a million gay years ago, when I was a kid, I remember that flight and superhuman strength were the invariable accomplices of PCP. Oy, these kids today. Get off my lawn.

Vasectomy Nation

The President just said on the radio that we've gotta win the future. I say to you, America, that this is not enough. The future must not merely be beaten, but defeated utterly, consigned to the dustbin of history in advance. We must destroy the very idea of time itself, eliminate from the universe the very concept of its unidirectional progression. We must eliminate all human life and consciousness, wherein resides such a concept of time, for the good of all human life and consciousness.

The Extrinsic Finality of the Union

Obviously nothing that Barack Obama or the Republican whatsisface who offered the rebuttal or whatever said was interesting in any particular. We are going to build a wind-powered nuclear factory that will cut the deficits of the future today in order that some dead kid not have sacrificed in vain, in America. What I am interested in is the weird teleology, which holds all of us, each and every one, to be slaves of the future. I mean, I am all for some modest sense of stewardship in the name of The Children until the asteroid hits, but if you listen to what these nutcases are really saying, if you consider the framework in which their platitudinous oratory sags like a poorly girded floor, it is effectively that each human life is a prison term; that within the global gulag we must toil relentlessly to dig the ditches for our jailers, who are the succeeding generations. But of course, each succeeding generation is in turn enslaved by the next, and they in turn by that which follows, and so on and so on, until at last some impossibly distant Stapledonian starfucker looks over his diaphonous shoulder, checks us all up and down, bats his dark eyes quickly, and sniffs off in the other direction, like the prettiest boy in the bar.

The Verbs are Tense

I suppose I imagine Eric Alterman as the red-cheeked guest of an ongoing faculty mixer, his fourth cheap scotch sweating a ring on the associate dean's wife's prized Ethan Allen imitation-colonial side table, his glasses slightly fogged from the interplay of warm foyer air and the opening-and-closing front door, through which the younger professors and the hard scientists slip, either to go get real drunk on real drinks at a bar, or to read a few pages and fall gratefully asleep, though perchance as the veil of sleep draws, softly clicking like an act curtain, across their waking eyes, they will hear like a distant echo Doc Alterman's last, semi-bellowed gesticulation, which somehow slipped through the closing door before it latched behind them and blew out into the icy night like a malign spirit, or a laugh track: "Impeached! Over a blow job!" But . . . did they really hear it? They turn, awake again, in their comfortable beds, and ask their wives or boyfriends, "Was that nut really still going on about the whole Clinton thing?" "What nut?" their husband or girlfriend murmurs back. "Alterman," they say: "Eric Alterman."

"Who?"

Alterman eveidently has a new book called Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama, which, as a writer, I can't help but admire, for it accomplishes the extraordinary in combining two tautologies to create a single oxymoron. Dissent Magazine has published an excerpt, called "Obama and the Media," and as you can imagine, it consists principally of complaints that a conservative media cabal prvents Barack Obama from doing something. What exactly he's been foiled in pursuing remains unsaid. Well, maybe it's elsewhere in the book. There, is however, a hint:

Even without the heavy overlay of right-wing propaganda, the American media as they are now constituted would be hard-pressed to provide the kind of information and opportunity for debate required if the president were to undertake fundamental liberal reforms of our various dysfunctional institutions and outdated public policies.

When you begin with a caveat, move into a hypothetical conditional, and conclude in the subjunctive, you may want to reconsider the wider stridency of your prose. While I'm a little unclear what a "fundamental liberal reform" is, and while it seems to me that our various institutions are only "dysfunctional" if you take that possessive pronoun a little over-literally, the real absurdity here, the fundamental problem with the piece as written and on its own terms, is that it has launched a fussilade against the media for not allowing Barack Obama to engage in something that he has shown neither the inclination nor the intention to do.

Hyrda Lacy

As Radley Balko, most prominently but certainly not solely, has now spent years demonstrating, American law enforcement has become increasingly paramilitary, largely on claims that the drug and terror wars require that police abandon their roles as general "officers of the peace" and community servants (beat cops, patrols) and criminal investigators (detectives) in order to become videogame strikeforces, knocking down doors, busting heads and taking names. So when I read about waves of violence striking police officers, I take a fairly dim view. A phrase twice-repeated in that article: serve an arrest warrant. Which sounds innocuous enough, but which now more often than not involves an armed SWAT team acting out a Call-of-Duty fantasy. Why was a SWAT team storming a house instead of just waiting the guy out? It's not like he had hostages.

Yoga Booby

So this Tara Stiles character sounds obnoxious, but yoga "purists" and "traditionalists" are just the worst, and I say this as a person who counts his daily ashtanga practice as one of the most important parts of his life. Modern posture yoga is of very recent vintage and is a thoroughly synecretic practice that owes as much to imported Western gymnastic, body-building, and gymnastics exercises as it does on mysterious, trance-delivered Vedic texts, as Mark Singleton explains in exhausting detail. (And, oh, by the way, doesn't it strike you as interesting that Tirumalai Krishnamacharya's account of his secret revelation recalls a more classically American scam.) Now, there is no reason to see synecretism as somehow damaging or discrediting; quite the opposite, in fact. Whatever style of yoga you prefer, a regular practice that involves mindfulness, good breath, and physical rigor will improve your comportment and enhance your disposition and certainly give you a well-muscled back and core. My practice changed my life, improved me mentally and physically, gave me better balance and posture, made me stronger, gave me more energy, and it is in large part because of this personal experience that I am so tickled by the authenticity patrol. I mean, shit, even David Swenson puts 15-minute routines in the back of his practice guides.

The Law, in Order

Few take issue with King's assertion that homegrown terrorism is rising dramatically.

In the past two years, according to Justice Department statistics, nearly 50 U.S. citizens have been charged with major terrorism counts - all of them allegedly motivated by radical Islamic beliefs.

-WaPo

Charged with major terrorism counts. Now isn't that an interesting way to put it.