Friday Figaro

There are finer actors than Gundula Janowitz, and there are greater artists--although it may be, in part, that Janowitz's relatively small voice precluded her from really embodying many of the great dramatic roles--but you'll listen for a long time before you find a more purely lovely instrument. If she doesn't quite find the pathos of the Countess Almaviva, she still creates a beautiful "Porgi amor." She does prove herself to be more dramatically capable in "Ach ich fühl's," from Magic Flute, in a pretty early recording. (On the other hand, Pamina isn't in quite the same dramaturgic category as the Countess.) In the last piece, she's in her fifties, I believe, looking like she's having a ball singing a very pretty Mozart song.

Economics Is Not Real, Part One Gadjllion

The fact that the economics profession can offer so little in the way of consensus guidance about dramatic, crucially important events like the panic of 2007-2008 is a huge problem and a very legitimate knock on the enterprise, but it doesn’t actually undermine the overall epistemic status of the discipline.

-Woody

Now you have to ask yourself: if the complete and total failure of a discipline to produce anything resembling a believable and empirically verifiable description of the very things the discipline purports to study does not "actually undermine the overall epistimic status of the discipline," then what would? This shit really is a religion; it literally cannot be disproven; it transcends all mortal truth categories and exists in ethereal unity with the whole cosmos; it is the worldspirit moving over the dark waters; yea, verily, it is the ein sof, the unutterable other beyond even the crowning keter of the tree of life, the attributeless everythingness without form or substance, the unspeakable, infinite actuality of the name of god.

In fact, the "overall epistimic status" of economics is that it's bunk and bullshit to begin with, so actually, when I think about it, I find myself in rare agreement with Yglesias. The fact that this crackpot pseudoscience once again fails doesn't alter its fake and fraudulent nature one motherfucking bit.

Never Fills You Up, Never Lets You Down

This is a moment in which both those who serve in the administration and those who support it need to ask whether the Obama administration is keeping sight of its values now that it holds power.

-Ezra Klein

So. Values are the literally inconsequential statements made during a publicity campaign rather than the consequential actions that flow from power. Fucking tastes great, and less filling? Sign me up, baby.

Obama's "values" are killing people with flying robots, giving money to evil, criminal banks, torturing prisoners, lying, prevaricating, and golfing; not necessarily in that order. How is it that every time this fucking horror-show monster cranks up the apocalypse engine, there is some weaselly little careerist ready to pop up in full squirrel to squeak about how unseemly it is to unseal the necromonican and call down the flesh-eating elder gods when you campaigned on a promise to increase Pell grants. Oh, Mister President, would you mind tossing some money to PA to fund Adult Basic before you crack open the bones of the earth and start throwing virgins into the pit? That'd be great, mkay, thanx! ;) Hashtag retarded.

Annals of Have You Actually Read the Bible?

This isn't serious theology. It's hijacking God's name in the service of commentary. In the process, Beck belittles the very beliefs he says he is vindicating, speculates about God engaging in arbitrary, cruel killing and shamelessly shifts the guilt for the disaster onto its victims.

-Stephen Stromberg in the WaPO

Oh, lawd. Because if there is one thing that the God of Islam, Christianity, and Judiasm refuses to engage in, it is arbitrary, cruel killing and victim blaming.

All Butt

Because of the Times' hilarious stable opinion columnists, I sometimes forget to read their even nuttier editorials, you know, the one's that you find drifting down the leftmost column in the print edition, dotted with the royal first-person plural. Well "we

still believe that the United States has a strong strategic interest in Afghanistan. We also know that Americans’ patience with this war has all but run out."

In addition to the Times' insistent misuse of the word strategic, there is that all-but used as a synonym for nearly, even though just above it is reported that two thirds of yinz and mine fellow countrymen "say the war is no longer worth fighting." Sounds like something's plain and simple run out to me. Not that it matters. Two thirds of the peeps no more affect the martial calculation than the New York Times' glorious We.

A Thousand Words

On One Hand Pots, on the Other, Kettles

But the initial invasion was supported by Democrats as well as Republicans, liberal internationalists as well as neoconservatives — Hillary Clinton as well as John McCain, The New Republic as well as The Weekly Standard.

-Douthat

This article by Ross Douthat is pretty good as far as such things go, but I wanted to share the chuckle of this gang of dance partners presented as a list of opponents in rare agreement. Liberal internationalists and neocons! Will wonders never cease?

Little Chicken

Japan, after all, just got hit with a series of very real negative shocks. Buildings have fallen down. Buildings that are still standing have been damaged by water. Cars, trucks, and other pieces of useful equipment have been ruined. Roads, docks, and other pieces of transportation infrastructure have been blocked by debris. Several nuclear power reactors aren’t generating electrical power. Tens of thousands of human beings are dead or injured.

-Matty Woodchuck

Now most likely your flabbergasted eyes literally exploded into weeping pools of pus after reading the incredibly, callously infelicitous use of the Economists' solecism "very real negative shocks" to describe a country that fell victim to a fucking huge fucking earthquake. But it's worth reading the list to see all the things that must be counted before the human toll. And it's worth reading the opening of the next paragraph:

These are not problems that can be solved on the demand side. If Japan is producing less two weeks after the earthquake than it was producing two weeks before the earthquake, that will be because the quake and associated traumas have in fact degraded the country’s ability to produce goods and services.

Is it even necessary to note that this is just a sickening and inhuman way of looking at catastrophe. "These are not problems that can be solved on the demand side." Wuuuutttt? Fuck you, Yglesias. May the sky fall on your head.

Hey Ho

If, when I say that my comments section attracts some big fucking idiots, your first thought is not, "Yeah, that's true," but rather, "Does he mean me?" then the answer is yes. Caveat loquens: this is partly by design. Obviously the forum is unmoderated, and obviously I don't want to turn this into an exercise in recriminative victimhood à la our good friends at Shakeseville &c. But I think I'd be remiss if I didn't mention a little contretemps following a recent post. In that post, I said that Barack Obama was an asshole. I said so subsequent to talking about the torture of Bradley Manning. A commenter named Karen later said:

I knew who Obama was when he called a woman reporter "Sweetie" and when called upon it defended himself by saying he often calls women Sweetie.

Now within the context, this is a perfectly reasonable statement. It does reveal Barack Obama to be an asshole, and I can't see the slightest evidence that this person was, beyond that, trying to make our dickhead president's offhandedly revealing comment commensurate with torture. Fortunately, such restraint eludes some folks; who rushed into the breach, preaching: how can you suggest that this is the same as torture, you fucking woman, you!? Well, hold onto your balls, ladies, and by ladies I mean gentlemen, because I am about to do exactly that.

It's true, of course, that offhanded misogyny and torture aren't equivalent as singular acts. If the universe were a ninth-grade physics textbook, in which difficult and inconvenient forces and interactions could simply be discarded, then the two couldn't be more different, but we don't live in a simplified text, and it turns out that the rope has weight and the pulley doesn't turn frictionlessly on its axle. (Thanks, btw, to the commenter I stole this from.) For instance, Barack Obama is not actually torturing Bradley Manning. It's doubtful he's specifically ordered it. The DoD is working him over; Obama is being assured that it's cool. Proper procedures followed. His offense in this sense is willful obliviousness; heartlessness; thoughtlessness. The sin isn't commission, but allowance; not causation but complicity. You know, but by the same logic, condescending to a grown woman, though in and of itself a rather dully and insignificantly offensive act, is participation in a history of violence and subjugation long predating the imperative of American state secrets, long predating the modern state. Women are an inferior class; they exist in a state of enforced subservience; they are lesser beings in the hierarchy, and the fact that Obama thoughtlessly and automatically treats them as such is indicative of the almost insurmountable totality of their position. The fact that a woman (presumably) can make mild note of this fact and be immediately attacked under the false claim that she proposed a false equivalence is indicative of exactly the same. Let me just put it to you straight, you'll pardon the expression: the torture of political prisoners, categorically, while awful, pales to insignificance next to the subjugation of women and girls, both historically and in the present day.

Human Resources

Barack Obama. What a dick.