Category Archives: In Our Time

Why does Google’s so-called “All Access” service not want my business?

Pandora accommodates me with an iPad app. Why won’t Google All Access?

The moment I heard that Google was starting a music subscription service, I decided I would do with this one what I had not done with Pandora or Spotify: Pay for it.

Well, not right away. I saw that I could get it free for a month, and then pay at the discounted rate of $8 a month thereafter. If I didn’t like it the first month, I just wouldn’t pay.

But I figured it’s Google, right? So I’ll probably like it. Anyway, it would probably be integrated with my gmail and my YouTube account and everything else, so it would be convenient. Just yesterday, I used Google’s Hangout for the first time, for a three-way conversation that worked pretty seamlessly within my Google+ iPad app. There were glitches, but so far I like it better than Skype.

So I was all set to sign up when I saw this AP review:

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Google Inc.’s new music service offers a lot of eye candy to go with the tunes. The song selection of around 18 million tracks is comparable to popular services such as Spotify and Rhapsody, and a myriad of playlists curated along different genres provides a big playground for music lovers.

The All Access service represents Google’s attempt to grab a bigger piece of the digital music market as more people stream songs over mobile phones. Such services are also meant to further wed smartphone users to Google’s Android operating system, where the search leader makes money from advertising and transactions on its digital content store, Google Play.

For a monthly fee, All Access lets you listen to as much music as you want over an Internet connection. You can also download songs onto mobile devices for smooth playback later when you don’t have cellphone or Wi-Fi access.

It’s worth a try for the discounted monthly rate of $8 if you sign up by the end of June. Those who sign up later will pay $10 a month, the same amount charged by the main competitors, Spotify and Rhapsody. Either way, you get the first month free and can cancel at any time…

Sounds good, right? Then I got to this part…

All Access works on the free Google Play Music app for Android devices and over Web browsers on computers — but not on the iPhone. (Spotify and Rhapsody work on both Android and the iPhone).

And not, as I read elsewhere, on my iPad, either.

I’ve got some news for Google…

According to Google’s own Analytics, more than a fifth — 22.48 percent — of this blog’s readers read it on a smartphone or tablet.

Of those, more than three-fourths — 75.8 percent — are reading this on an Apple device.

So, unless my audience is unrepresentative of the larger world (or unless, ahem, Google Analytics is wrong), right off the bat, Google is saying it only wants the business of less than one-fourth of the mobile/tablet market.

How stupid is that?

Does anyone at Google really think that satisfied iPhone and iPad users — who know, according to Google’s own Analytics, that their platforms are the current standard for which most software will be written — are going to switch to what they consider to be a lesser product just because they can sign up for a music service? When they can already get Spotify and Pandora? And when they know that an iTunes subscription service is in the works?

This speaks to a larger problem in the tech world: I thought the people at Apple were insane when they came out with the iPhone 5 without Google Maps. It really irritated me that they weren’t smart enough, humble enough to realize that Google did maps best, that it was way out ahead of anything Apple could do to imitate it, and if they really wanted their customers to have the best, they would serve them up Google Maps, as they had done with the iPhone 4. YouTube, too.

Fortunately, I was immediately able to download those Google apps for both my phone and my iPad, so no harm done.

And I see in this report from Wired that a third-party iPhone app that will give me Google All Access is in the works, too (although, when I tried to get it from the Apps Store just now, I was told it still doesn’t work for the new service).

But why should I need workarounds? Why can’t Apple recognize that Google does maps better, and Google recognize that Apple does phones and tablets better? Or, at the very least, recognize that three-fourths of the market out there believes it does, and isn’t going to use your product unless it is accommodated?

I just don’t get these people and their proprietary hubris…

Would you like a 3D print of fries with that?

2 Replies

We don’t have flying cars yet, or time travel, but I’m encouraged to see that NASA is at least working on this…

NASA can send robots to Mars, no problem. But if it’s ever going to put humans on the Red Planet, it has to figure out how to feed them over the course of a years-long mission.

So the space agency has funded research for what could be the ultimate nerd solution: a 3-D printer that creates entrees or desserts at the touch of a button.

Yes, it’s another case of life imitating “Star Trek” (remember the food replicator?). In this case, though, the creators hope there is an application beyond deep-space pizza parties. The technology could also be used to feed hungry populations here on Earth.

Texas-based Systems and Materials Research Corp. has been selected for a $125,000 grant from NASA to develop a 3-D printer that will create “nutritious and flavorful” food suitable for astronauts, according to the company’s proposal. Using a “digital recipe,” the printers will combine powders to produce food that has the structure and texture of, well, actual food. Including smell…

Obviously, the food would not be created out of thin air. The “toner” on this copier would have to consist of the chemical building blocks of the actual food items. The story doesn’t really spell out why that’s such an advantage, but I’m guessing it’s because powders containing those compounds are more easily stored.

But still… you would have to have the water that would flesh out the food, and… I don’t know why this would be an improvement over Tang.

But it sounds cool.

Personally, I want a 3D printer that would print diamonds out of coal dust. Or make a really convincing 3D print of Christina Hendricks. Just as a for-instance. I think that would be highly marketable.

But was Obama RIGHT about Kamala Harris?

38 Replies

I’m really not terribly interested in whether President Obama’s compliment about California Attorney General Kamala Harris was “sexist.” After all these years, I’m still trying to figure out an accurate, consistent definition of the term. It seems to shift, depending on context.

I’ll let y’all hash that out. Anyway, here’s what I’m talking about:

Speaking at a fundraiser in a wealthy San Francisco suburb, President Obama praised the looks of California Attorney General Kamala Harris.

“You have to be careful to, first of all, say she is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough, and she is exactly what you’d want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake,” Obama said. “She also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general in the country.”

“It’s true! C’mon,” he added, to laughter from the crowd…

And why did they laugh? Because most of the people in the crowd, male and female, had probably had more or less the same thought.

Coming from Obama, I take the remark as pretty benign. If it had come from Bill Clinton, I might react differently. Poor Obama — he’s seen as so aloof, so one time he tries to be a regular guy, to give an honest human reaction, even be gallant, and he ends up having to apologize for it. With Bill Clinton, the remark would be superfluous because we already knew he was a “regular guy” — and not in a good way.

400px-Kamala_Harris_Official_Attorney_General_Photo

And really, I want to hear from everyone on this. I’m not looking for the male reaction. Women are equally fine judges of pulchritude. I’m not looking for anything salacious or lascivious. I’m thinking more on the level of that episode of “Seinfeld” when George said of Joe DiMaggio, “Now that is a handsome man.”No, for once, I’d rather stay away from the value judgments, and ask a simple question: Was the president’s observation accurate?

When I started writing this post, I meant to link to a site that would show us all of the attorneys general. Unfortunately, the only link I’ve found that looks like it would enable us to do that doesn’t seem to be working. Maybe a lot of other people had the same thought, and overloaded the site — I don’t know.

I can say that, based on the photos I’ve looked at, she’s the best-looking attorney general I’ve ever seen. (Henry McMaster may have been tall and well-coiffed, but come on…) But I may have missed some unusually handsome examples of both genders; I must admit that.

I’m just trying to help the president out here, on the theory that truth is an effective defense…

The amazing thing about newspapers, as interpreted by ‘George Costanza’

2 Replies

Romenesko shared this, which he got from The Harvard Crimson. It’s from an interview with Jason Alexander, best known for his role as George Costanza on “Seinfeld”:

The first time I really thought, “Oh my god, Jerry Seinfeld is brilliant” was when he did a joke about newspapers, and how relieved the editors of a newspaper must be when exactly the right amount of things happen everyday to make the paper come out perfectly, so that at six o’clock at their deadline, you don’t go, “Oh, one more thing happened,” and now you have a blank page with two paragraphs.

I’ve always loved that joke, too. Because while it is meant to be seen as ridiculous, it taps into a sense of wonder I had about newspaper from an early age.

When I was in second or third grade, I read a book of short stories aimed at people my age. It had a theme — each story opened a window on some different aspect of the big wide world, meant to show kids the possibilities for when they grew up. One story, the one I remember best, was about a kid who went to work for a newspaper as a copy boy (which would be my first newspaper job, at the Memphis Commercial Appeal, years later). The reader followed the boy as he learned about everything it took to publish a newspaper each day.

I was struck with awe at the enormity of such a task. I couldn’t believe any group of people, no matter how experienced or talented, could get all of those things done in a day, every day. And yet there was the proof, on my doorstep each morning.

Decades later, after I had mastered every aspect of the process, I used to wonder sometimes at the complaints we’d get from readers. Someone would be griping at me about some small thing that, in his or her opinion, wasn’t quite right in the paper, and I would remember that story and how it impressed me. And I’d think, Hasn’t this person ever thought about what a miracle it is that the paper comes out at all? Obviously not, or they’d have backed off a bit.

I’ve never thought a single actual error in any paper I worked for was excusable. And readers deserved to demand the same high standard from us. But occasionally, when they were going on and on about some tiny thing that had gone wrong (or that they saw as having gone wrong), I’d find myself wishing they’d pause, just a moment, to be impressed by everything that was right, against all odds…

Oh, wait, one other thing… Having spent a lot of years making the news fit the paper, ruthlessly wielding a light-blue felt pen (which humans could read, but the camera that shot the page when it was done could not pick up) in composing rooms, or trimming with marginally greater delicacy on a computer screen, I found myself puzzled that Yahoo paid a high-school kid tens of millions for an app that… well, here’s the description:

Yahoo was attracted to Summly’s core technology for automatically summarizing news articles. The technology, which included an algorithm for deriving the summaries, was created with help from SRI International, a Silicon Valley research-and development firm that has an artificial-intelligence lab and has an ownership stake in the startup….

In 2011, Mr. D’Aloisio founded his company, at the time called Trimit. He redesigned the app to automatically boil news articles down to 400-word summaries and re-launched it as Summly in late 2012 with help from SRI…

I thought, hey, I could have done that for Yahoo for half the money. And I wouldn’t have needed an app for it. It only takes seconds per story. I’ll admit, the slashing I used to do in composing rooms (and on computer screens) wasn’t always a work of art when I was in a hurry (which was most of the time) — but I kind of doubt this app is any more respectful of the writers’ precious words…

This fashion item should be called the ‘Rand Paul’

1 Reply

And why not? After all, that furry vest Sonny Bono wore was called a “Cher.”

Even before Rand Paul’s filibuster made paranoia chic in American politics, designer Adam Harvey was unveiling Stealth Wear, which renders the wearer somewhat less visible to drones’ thermal imaging.

I didn’t know about it, though, until I read about it today in The Guardian. Check it out…

Does anybody out there read ‘terms and conditions,’ ever? If not, it gives me hope…

9 Replies

I almost ignored the essay in the WSJ today about simplicity, because it started out with something about Henry David Thoreau. I’ve never been a fan. I don’t like anything about Walden. Life can indeed be simple if you isolate yourself from society — simple, but not worth living. (I say this as a person who is given to self-absorption, but that’s not a quality I like in myself, which causes me to react viscerally against Thoreau.) Also, it’s hard to avoid snorting in contempt at anyone who thought “modern” life in the first half of the 19th century had too much hustle and bustle in it.

But my interest was engaged a few grafs on, when I got to this bit:

Do you know anyone who stops to read “click-through” agreements on websites in the middle of performing a task? One company, PC Pitstop, deliberately buried a clause in its end-user license agreement in 2004, offering $1,000 to the first person who emailed the company at a certain address. It took five months and 3,000 sales until someone claimed the money. The situation hadn’t improved by 2010 when Gamestation played an April Fools’ Day joke by embedding a clause in their agreement saying that users were selling them their souls…

For a long time, I’ve meant to write a post asking, “Does anybody out there ever read those ‘terms and conditions’ agreements that you have to click ‘Agree’ to in order to proceed?” I tell myself that no one does, but I was a bit leery of posting the question because everyone might respond, “Of course we do,” at which point I would know for sure that what I’ve often suspected in the past was true: I’m on the wrong planet.

If it turned out everyone else was reading them, it was going to make me feel guilty every time I clicked “Agree” without reading all that crapola. It wasn’t going to change my behavior — I’d rather go to Room 101 than read a single one of those monstrosities. But it would make me feel bad. A little.

Those things always come up when I’ve already been substantially inconvenienced, having been forced to go through unanticipated steps in order to get on with whatever I was trying to do when the process started. You know those nightmare traps, in which you’re trying to do A, but realize that you can’t do A until you’ve done B, and then it turns out that B can’t be accomplished without first having completed C, etc. Those 20,000-word masterpieces of unreadability only come up when you’re fuming your way through G or H, and you’ve had it.

Besides, I couldn’t read one if I tried — not if by “reading” it, you mean get anything out of it. The surface of every letter in such documents is polished, then coated with grease, so that my brain can’t grab ‘hold of them. I can only read them on proofreading level. I don’t know if everyone experiences this or only someone who’s spent a lot of years as an editor, but there’s a certain level of reading on which I can catch spelling, punctuation and even grammatical errors, but when I’m finished, I can’t tell you what I just read. That’s as deeply as I can go into those kinds of documents.

The authors of the essay in the WSJ note with justice that much of the unnecessary complexity of life — the sort that’s too much to deal with — is caused by lawyers and technologists. On the one hand, lawyers try to protect their clients by covering every base to an absurd degree. Then there are those people who think everything can be quantified — people like “Clive,” a character created by John le Carre, of whom he wrote, “He believed that facts were the only kind of information and he despised whoever was not ruled by them.”

But you know what? If everyone else — or at least a goodly proportion of the populace — clicks through all those things without reading them, it gives me some hope for the world.

I tend to lump in this sort of complexity with the lack of trust in the world. I wrote a column back in the ’90s that was sort of my Unified Field Theory of public life. I said everything that was wrong with society resulted from the fact that we didn’t trust each other. Overly lawyered, too-complex-to-read contractual agreements are monuments to this problem. As I wrote in 1995, “A lack of basic trust of each other explains why… We have so many laws, and so many lawyers. We trust nothing to common sense…”

One of the great ironies of this is that so many people come to hate government because they get fed up with bureaucracy and overly complex rules. And yet the reason we have all those excessive rules is that someone insisted that we add them because they didn’t trust government just to use good judgment.

But I just realized something about those agreements I click on without reading: They show that I trust the entity that posted the agreement. I know I’m not signing away one of my grandchildren or my house or whatever, because I know that society wouldn’t stand for that. I know that if the agreement for this software that millions of others have downloaded meant that I was selling myself into slavery, I would have heard about it. Society, that thing too many of us distrust, wouldn’t have stood for it. So, even more than the entity that drafted the agreement, I’m trusting society as a whole. I’m trusting the village, or the wisdom of crowds, or whatever you choose to call it.

Which makes me feel better about the world, and about myself. And about everyone else who clicks on “Agree” without reading the agreement, and gets on with life. It makes me feel better about the world I live in.

REALLY? Netflix thinks these are ‘like “Zero Dark Thirty”?’

50 Replies

Some fret that the algorithms that surround us know too much about us. I don’t. Not yet.

Over the last few years, I’ve rated 2,383 movies on Netflix — so I really think I can claim to have given this thing a chance — and the service still doesn’t have a clue what I’m likely to like.

I guess there are just too many variables in what makes a motion picture enjoyable.

I find that Pandora does a somewhat better job of throwing me an occasional song I haven’t heard before, but like upon hearing. Don’t get me wrong — it’s not batting 1.000 or anything. But every once in a while, something I didn’t ask for makes me think yeahhh. It manages this more often than Netflix does. At least it seems that way. I haven’t kept a spreadsheet on it or anything.

Really, I like Netflix very much. It’s a great service, for what it does (both the DVD and instant sides). But what it does not do is understand my preferences. And I hold out little hope of it achieving that feat when it doesn’t have a clue what sorts of movies are “like ‘Zero Dark Thirty’.”

You’ve got to be kidding me. “Universal Soldier?” “Batman Forever?” “Kinky Boots?”

Here are some movies I would say are actually like “Zero Dark Thirty:”

“Black Hawk Down” — A true story featuring U.S. Special Forces troops in action.
“Body of Lies” — Also fictional, but it involves dusty, gritty intelligence work on the ground in the same region. It even has torture scenes, as I recall.
“Green Zone” — Much in the same genre as “Body of Lies.”
“Homeland” — OK, it’s TV and not the big screen, and fictional, but the main female character has a lot in common with the lead in “Zero,” and may actually be based on the same real-life woman.
“The Hurt Locker” — Same director, also set in the region, very similar feel (and a better movie, although “Zero” is good).

See where I’m going with this, Netflix? Probably not. Anyway, I see little reason to worry, based on this at least, that machines are reading my mind…

Lesson (too late) for Romney: Always thank the servers

39 Replies

HuffPost has been talking to the bartender who shot the infamous “47 percent” footage that did so much to undermine Mitt Romney last year.

Here’s what he said about how it happened:

The man, who tended bar for a company that catered to a high-end clientele, had previously worked at a fundraiser at a home where [Bill] Clinton spoke. After Clinton addressed guests, the man recalled, the former president came back to the kitchen and thanked the staff, the waiters, the bartenders, the busboys, and everyone else involved in putting the event together. He shook hands, took photos, signed autographs, and praised the meal—all characteristic of the former president.

When the bartender learned he would be working at Romney’s fundraiser, his first thought was to bring his camera, in case he had a chance to get a photo with the presidential candidate. Romney, of course, did not speak to any of the staff, bussers or waiters. He was late to the event, and rushed out. He told his dinner guests that the event was off the record, but never bothered to repeat the admonition to the people working there.

One of them had brought along a Canon camera. He set it on the bar and hit the record button.

The bartender said he never planned to distribute the video. But after Romney spoke, the man said he felt he had no choice.

“I felt it was a civic duty. I couldn’t sleep after I watched it,” he said. “I felt like I had a duty to expose it.”

As Huffington suggests, Obama owes Clinton on this one…

Macfarlane on the Oscars: Funny, offensive, both, or neither?

15 Replies

Everyone’s buzzing about Seth Macfarlane’s performance hosting the Academy Awards last night. Such words as “sexist” and “racist” have been used.

But what did anyone expect? If anything, his material was significantly toned down from the stuff you can hear, and see depicted in cartoon form, on “The Family Guy” before prime time each evening. To call Macfarlane’s brand of humor sophomoric is to promote it several years past its middle-school level. That is, it’s the kind of humor you’d hear from a middle-schooler who was demonically quick and witty. Admittedly, Macfarlane’s material is the sort that makes people laugh, even if they’re feeling guilty while doing so.

Racism (we are all invited to laugh at Brian, the racist dog), graphic violence involving children, incest, and mockery of religion are pretty much standard fare on “The Family Guy.” (And at this point, I’m feeling pretty embarrassed for knowing all that.) Ditto with “Ted” — it’s funny, but don’t be fooled into letting the kids watch it just because it’s about a Teddy bear.

So explain to us why anyone would be shocked at his “We Saw Your Boobs” bit last night? From him, that’s pretty mild stuff.

At one point, a joke was made about how it would have been better to have engaged the services of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who co-hosted the Golden Globes. Hey, no joke — they would have made people laugh without cringing.

But seriously, if you engage the services of Seth Macfarlane, this is what you get, at the very least. No sense moaning about it afterward.

My favorite spam of the day

3 Replies

Mostly, my spam filter works pretty well, but some days small groups of them sneak through. I got four of them back-to-back this morning.

I get a kick out of the way these bots try so hard to produce comments that sound real, but still fall so short of their goal. Here’s my favorite today:

I’ve been browsing on-line more than three hours lately, yet I never discovered any fascinating article like yours. It is beautiful price enough for me. In my view, if all website owners and bloggers made good content as you probably did, the internet will probably be a lot more useful than ever before.

I love this part: “…if all website owners and bloggers made good content as you probably did….” It doesn’t want to go too far and commit itself…

It is beautiful price enough for me, too.

Todd Kincannon seems to have found his own Heart of Darkness

26 Replies

I’m not sure how else to put it.

I’ve known Todd, slightly, for several years now. Once, I would have said, “I know him to say hello to.” Now, I say, “I know him to exchange Tweets with,” which I have done frequently. I’ve only met him in person a handful of times, and when I have, he’s been a polite, friendly young man who seems to know how to behave himself in public.

But lately, his Tweets — and there are a LOT of them; I don’t personally know anyone who Tweets more constantly — have been trailing off into a strange, dark, extreme place. Following them is like traveling up the Congo (or, in Coppola’s version, the Mekong) in search of Kurtz, who had lost himself in savagery. Increasingly, they are of a sort that I can’t quote here without violating my own standards. Even showing you the ones that this post is about is a departure. But now that Todd has gone on national media to defend these truly indefensible Tweets, and not backed down an inch or admitted in any way that they are beyond the pale, and been identified to the world as a former executive director of the state GOP, well… I’m laying them out before you.

Here’s the one that the above video interview is about:

Here’s another related to it:

I don’t know what has led Todd on this path. I know that when he stepped it up (or rather, down) a few degrees a month or so ago, he found himself gaining a lot more attention, and I’ve seen that do bad things to people’s heads before.

Is it just immaturity? When Rusty DePass posted something on Facebook that deeply offended all who saw it, he immediately took it down (too late; it had been grabbed and preserved) and truly, sincerely apologized to everyone for it. (I think Kathryn, and others here who know Rusty, will back me up as to his sincerity.)

Todd operates in an environment where… well, the maturity level is pretty well established in the language used in this Wonkette piece criticizing him. A place where there are no rules of civility, or at least it seems that there aren’t — until Todd manages to find a way to violate them. (The problem with Wonkette’s reaction, of course, is that it helps Todd believe in his explanation that this is just a left-right thing, and he’s just doing what everybody does to people on the other side.) A place where obscenities that would only sound daring to a 7th-grader are the standard.

How hard is it to simply say that, for instance, Trayvon Martin was just this kid, you know? He was neither an angel nor a devil, he was just a kid who didn’t deserve to die because he had a run-in with this George Zimmerman guy, who wasn’t an angel or a devil either. MIsguided people on the left and right have glommed onto these people as some sorts of symbols, but they were just people. And his shooting was what the prosecutors in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities would have called a “piece a s__t case,” a case that’s just a horrible, tragic mess any way you look at it, with no heroes, no one to admire, no good coming out of it, no redeeming lesson to be drawn.

But one thing is clear: Now that the kid’s dead, he sure as hell doesn’t deserve to have his memory trashed in terms that shouldn’t be used in public under any circumstances, about anybody.

Todd’s performance in the above video is nothing short of appalling. I don’t know what to say but to define it in Conradian terms, and express how sorry I am to see it. He might not be sorry, but I am…

‘What It Feels Like To Be Photographed In A Moment Of Grief’

23 Replies

Here’s something for us all to ponder in these days when journalism is more and more about emotion…

On the night of the shootings in Newtown, Conn., a woman named Aline Marie attended a prayer vigil at St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church, which was packed with local residents and the media. After about 45 minutes, Marie saw the statue of Mary and knelt down to pray.

“I sat there in a moment of devastation with my hands in prayer pose asking for peace and healing in the hearts of men,” she recalls. “I was having such a strong moment and my heart was open, and I started to cry.”

Her mood changed abruptly, she says, when “all of a sudden I hear ‘clickclickclickclickclick’ all over the place. And there are people in the bushes, all around me, and they are photographing me, and now I’m pissed. I felt like a zoo animal.”

What particularly troubles her, she says, is “no one came up to me and said ‘Hi, I’m from this paper and I took your photograph.’ No one introduced themselves. I felt violated. And yes, it was a lovely photograph, but there is a sense of privacy in a moment like that, and they didn’t ask.”…

Here is the picture in question. NPR goes on to pose this question:

What are your thoughts? Should photographers interact with their subjects in moments of grief, or is it more respectful to leave them alone?

Which is a good one.

I’m old school on this. Way old school. Recently, in a comment on another thread, I told this anecdote about an experience that deeply affected the way I look at this sort of thing:

One of my first assignments as a reporter, back in the 70s, was to go interview a family that had lost some children in a fire. It was one of those awful situations of a family that lived in a rural shack heated by a wood-or-coal-burning stove, and some coals got out of the stove and caused the house to burn like kindling.

The photographer and I found the home where the survivors were staying with relatives. It was a house just like the one that had burned, way out in the country. The parents of the dead children were at the funeral home making arrangements. The family that lived in the home let us in, and then left us to wait in the front room while they congregated back in the kitchen. There was no conversation between us.

The photographer — much older and more experienced than I was — and I sat on the edges of our chairs, feeling EXTREMELY awkward, intensely feeling how much we were intruding, and unwelcome. But I guess maybe those poor folks didn’t feel empowered to turn us away.

We glanced at each other uncomfortably every few moments, and stared around the room the rest of the time.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the wood-burning stove in the center of the room. There were burned spots in the battered linoleum floor all around it. Another imminent tragedy, staring me in the face.

We just sat there, waiting to pester those poor bereaved parents, dreading their return, for about an hour.

Finally, one of us — I think it was Bob, the photog — said “Let’s get out of here.” And we did.

Here’s the upshot of the story. Although it became more and more common over the years for news organizations to harass bereaved families in their grief and demand to know how they felt — I even worked with some people who maintained that it gave families a welcome catharsis — I resolved that day that if I were ever an editor, I would never send anyone on such an assignment.

As it turns out, I was an editor a couple of years later, and for the rest of my career. And I never forgot that resolution. Reporters can attest that I sent them on a lot of awkward, unpleasant assignments over the years, but I never sent anyone out on one like that.

Now, having declared myself entirely against this sort of thing, I can offer some defense of the photographer in this case. First, this doesn’t appear to have been the worst sort of intrusion, as there is no indication that the subject of the photo was a bereaved family member. Second, if you are going to take pictures like this — and that is to me debatable — then it’s disingenuous to demand that the subject be asked first. The journalistic version of the Observer Effect kicks in. You can’t get a picture like that — an honest, real one — after you’ve made the subject aware of your presence. And really, do you even want a picture of someone who would say “yes,” and then strike a pose for you? I think not. Such a photo would not only be ethically compromised, it would be downright creepy.

Thoughts? Or feelings, considering the topic?

The utter pettiness of public life in our times

27 Replies

As a young man, Abraham Lincoln fretted that there was no opportunity for his generation to accomplish anything important; gone were the days in which the founders had risen to the great challenge of establishing the nation.

Here’s an early passage from Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, which I finally finished reading a couple of nights ago:

… Lincoln had expressed his concern that his generation had been left a meager yield after the “field of glory” was harvested by the founding fathers. They were a “forest of giant oaks,” he said, who face the “task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land,” and to build “upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights.” Their destinies were inseparably linked” with the experiment of providing the world,” a practical demonstration” of “the capability of a people to govern themselves. It they succeeded, they were to be immortalized; their names were to be transferred to counties and cities, and rivers and mountains; and to be revered and sung, and toasted through all time.”

Because their experiment succeeded, Lincoln observed, thousands “won their deathless names in making it so.” What was left for the men of his generation to accomplish?…

Of course, Lincoln was profoundly mistaken:

In 1854, the wheel of history turned. A train of events that mobilized the antislavery North resulted in the formation of the Republican Party and ultimately provided Lincoln’s generation with a challenge equal to or surpassing that of the founding fathers.

Every day that he was in office, Lincoln and his administration wrestled mightily with questions of ultimate important and great moral weight. Until very late in the war, the great issues — whether the United States would continue to exist, and whether all its people would be free — were in great doubt.

Along the way, he dealt with a great deal of human pettiness — from the criminal uselessness of General McClellan to the scheming, naked ambition of Salmon Chase, from the everyday grubbing of officeseekers to personal disputes that threatened the government’s ability to function — but his focus, and that of most of those around him, was on the towering issues of the day.

And in spite of all, the challenges were met, masterfully. By Lincoln, whom I am more convinced than ever is the most remarkable and able individual ever to hold the office of president, but also by ordinary people who rose to do extraordinary things.

All the time I was reading that book, I kept thinking how unbelievably petty our public life is today. And I’m not just talking about the partisan bickering that I decry here so regularly. It’s the things that we squabble about that are so depressing.

The whole time I was reading that book — and I read it slowly, over a period of months, mostly at the dinner table, a few pages at a time — the great crisis of our time was the “fiscal cliff.” That precipice was created by our utter inability to deal with the most routine concerns, those of financing the government. And of course, we have a series of unresolved conflicts of the same nature that we must deal with this year, since the can has only been kicked, and kicked feebly, down the road.

In her column this weekend, Peggy Noonan wrote the following, in another of her passages finding fault with President Obama:

All the famous criticisms of him are true: He has no talent for or interest in sustained, good-faith negotiations, he has no real sense of alarm about the great issue of the day, America’s debt….

Really? That’s “the great issue of the day”? How mind-numbingly appalling.

And perhaps she’s right. Politicians in Washington, and all those who ape them in the hinterlands, certainly act as though that, and attendant issues, are the great matters of our day.

But here’s the thing: There are no great moral considerations involved here, people. Figuring out what it costs to run the government and how to levy the taxes to pay for it are matters that a middling accountant could work out in a day, and the issue would be behind us. How much to tax, how much to spend are indeed debatable issues. But they are not issues of right and wrong. They are unworthy of anyone’s passion.

No, I don’t long for us to be engaged in a mighty war to settle whether this nation, or any like it, will continue to exist. I don’t want to see more that 600,000 of my fellow citizen die in settling some momentous issue.I don’t lament, as Lancelot did in a time of peace in The Once and Future King, that “We don’t see many arrows thrilling in people’s hearts nowadays.”

I would just like to see us recognize that petty issues are petty issues, and resolve them, and move on. And no, I don’t consider trillions of dollars to be small considerations; I’m just saying that these issues are eminently solvable, with just a modicum of reasonable behavior on the part of all parties. I’m saying that the “drama” of “fiscal cliffs” and debt ceilings is entirely contrived, artificial and unnecessary.

Getting rid of slavery — now that was difficult. It was the great unresolved conflict that had dogged the nation since its founding. The issue could not be resolved without tearing the nation apart and putting it back together again. The solutions accepted as fact in 1865 were unthinkable in 1860. (Yes, they were “thinkable” in that abolitionists advocated them; but it was politically impossible to implement them until the height of the war.)

We shouldn’t need a national existential crisis to solve the problem of balancing the national checkbook. We should just be able to do it, and move on.

Why would SC Dems want to link themselves to Bill Maher?

24 Replies

I was a bit surprised that I received an email announcing that Bill Maher will appear in Columbia from… Amanda Loveday, executive director of the S.C. Democratic Party.

Then I saw why:

The South Carolina Democratic Party will be hosting a fundraiser and pre-show reception in conjunction with show and invite you to join in the company of fellow Democrats, food, drinks and premier seating. Click here to buy tickets to the show and take part in the pre-show reception. Tickets are limited and they will be offered on a first come, first serve basis.

What was missing from the release was anything that might answer the burning question: Why on Earth would Democrats in South Carolina want to link themselves to Bill Maher?

It really kind of floors me. The guy is sort of a modern apostle of incivility. His whole shtick is about being obnoxious.

I’m not alone in thinking this. When I mentioned in a post awhile back that I was sorta kinda almost agreeing with Maher about something, and how rare that was, we had an extended discussion, and only one person didn’t find the guy (at best) off-putting. That was Phillip, which sort of surprised me, Phillip being such a thoughtful guy who deals respectfully with those with whom he disagrees. Unlike Bill Maher.

More typical were the comments from Kathryn Fenner:

Bill Maher has that tone of dripping sarcasm and snide condescension, and he did a lot to hinder the cause of vaccinations with his ridiculous campaign. What a jerk!…

Bill Maher divides people and turns off a lot of people who otherwise might agree with him. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert do a far better job of saying what needs to be said and possibly winning converts to their point of view.

Maher would be far more effective if he’d get over himself: stop trying to establish his superiority and disdain for those beneath him and just stick to his point….

His “humor” is of the tripping somebody or otherwise humiliating somebody kind that most of us out grew in junior high, if we ever found it funny…

So, I ask again: Why would Democrats in this state want to link themselves so directly to someone this unlikable?

The simple answer might be: Dick Harpootlian. But still…

Everything that is wrong with our politics, in state & nation

56 Replies

Haley Palin

OK, so maybe it’s not everything — there’s personal pettiness, and anti-intellectualism, and an appalling willingness on the parts of too many to stoop to the lowest common public impulses for advantage — but it’s something that runs through it all, and ruins everything it touches. And besides, those things are more or less related to this thing.

It was on display in this story today about the campaign “warchest” — oh, let’s not forget that another thing that is wrong with our politics is that we pretend that it is war, with all that attendant “fighting for you” trash — that Nikki Haley has assembled for an as-yet-undeclared re-election campaign.

I’m not talking about Nikki Haley in particular here. I’m talking about something that is all too much a part of modern politics, and she just provides us with a good example, because she’s a particularly avid practitioner of what I’m talking about. The relevant passage:

Haley had six fundraisers last quarter, half of them out of state, in California, New York and Florida.

Donations from S.C.-based businesses and residents accounted for less than 60 percent of the total she raised during the quarter. Florida donations were next at 10 percent, followed by New Yorkers at nearly 6 percent.

Californians’ 51 donations ranked second in number behind the 418 reported from South Carolina, but their combined $21,000 ranked fifth in total amount, at 4 percent.

“It’s a strong showing,” Pearson said. “It shows that people in and outside the state want her to be re-elected gov

Haley had six fundraisers last quarter, half of them out of state, in California, New York and Florida.

Donations from S.C.-based businesses and residents accounted for less than 60 percent of the total she raised during the quarter. Florida donations were next at 10 percent, followed by New Yorkers at nearly 6 percent.

Californians’ 51 donations ranked second in number behind the 418 reported from South Carolina, but their combined $21,000 ranked fifth in total amount, at 4 percent.

“It’s a strong showing,” Pearson said. “It shows that people in and outside the state want her to be re-elected governor if she runs.”

And no, I’m not saying it’s awful that she goes after money where she can get it, or anything like that. The thing that I am saying is a problem is the fact that it is possible for a governor, any governor, to go outside his or her state to raise campaign money. It’s the fact that those outsiders will give, when asked the right way, that is the problem of which I speak.

Reading that story, I tried putting myself in Nikki Haley’s place. I tried imagining that I was running for governor, and I was on a fund-raising trip to New York or Florida or California or wherever, and I was standing in front of a well-heeled group of people with checkbooks in their pockets, and I thought:

What on Earth would I say to those people to get them to give money to me for my campaign for governor of South Carolina?

And I couldn’t think of a thing. I mean, I think about the reasons I would run for governor if I did, and they are many. I refer you to my last column at the paper for just a tiny few of those reasons. But not one of the reasons that could ever conceivably motivate me to run could ever possibly motivate someone who does not live in South Carolina and has no stake in South Carolina to give me money.

I would have nothing to say to them. Nothing that would be relevant to them, in any case.

But Nikki Haley, and other politicians who do what she does, have no problem in that regard. That’s because pretty much everything they say, and think, as political creatures is cookie-cutter stuff, the kind of stuff the national talking heads constantly spew out of the Beltway via 24/7 TV “news.” You can’t tell one from another.

That’s why it’s so easy and comfortable for someone like Sarah Palin to campaign alongside Nikki Haley, which they did with such aplomb and comfort in one another’s company during our governor’s first campaign. That’s because, even though they are from very different states with different issues and different needs, they think the same thoughts and say the same things. Henry Ford’s methods of mass production have been applied to politics, so that parts are interchangeable.

This is made possible by the fact that all these folks talk about is ideology — pure, simple, lowest-common-denominator ideology, unsullied by the specifics of reality, which is understood everywhere because of modern communications.

Their words and their thoughts have nothing to do with the messy, organic, ad hoc, practical, idiosyncratic business of governing — which to an honest person who engages it with an open and critical mind practically never meshes with the neat constructs of ideology.

And that’s what’s wrong. That’s what that story made me think about.

Haley: Blame the hacker, not the government

37 Replies

When I heard Nikki Haley was going to hold a presser this morning to call about most of our tax returns being stolen from the Department of Revenue, my first thought was to wonder whom she would blame for a failure at her agency.

As it happened, she said that no one was to blame except the hacker — whom she portrayed as some sort of unstoppable super-villain.

She could be right as far as my knowledge of such things extends, although perhaps some of y’all may have other thoughts.

Anyway, here are some highlights of what she said:

More than 150,000 people have signed up now for the protection being offered by the state.
We have until the end of January to sign up for the credit protection that the state is offering, and the protection will be retroactive. (I don’t know how that works, but that’s what she said.)
If you don’t have a computer or Internet access, call DOR and someone will do it for you while you’re on the phone. (Someone noted that people were having trouble getting through. Nikki said she and her husband got right through on Saturday, but then, they called during the Gamecocks’ game. She noted that for most people, it’s taking about 12 minutes to get through.)
“We don’t know whose information was compromised.” SLED Chief Mark Keel, to whom the governor deferred repeatedly during the event, said it could be weeks before that is known.
No one knows yet how much it will cost for the state to provide the ID protection it is offering to citizens free of charge. “We are in negotiations with Experian” on that, she said. The cost depends on how many sign up. All she could say was that the state will get a wholesale rate.
How will it be paid for? She said that would be up to the General Assembly; the money will have to be appropriated.
Why not just go ahead and enroll everybody in the protection? she was asked. Because tax records are confidential, and the state is not allowed to sign someone up for something that they might not want, she said.
Most Social Security numbers are not encrypted, she said, either in the private or public sector. “This is not just a DOR problem; it’s an industry problem.” She said it was “the industry standard” that such information would not be encrypted.
How will minors be covered? In the coming weeks, people who signed up for protection will get the opportunity to sign up for family plans to cover the children associated with their accounts.

When asked whether anyone in her administration has been disciplined over this, she said, “The person I hope will be disciplined is this international criminal that came in and hacked.”

“This wasn’t an issue where anyone in the agency could have avoided it. This wasn’t an issue where anyone in state government could have done something to avoid it. This is a situation that a sophisticated, intelligent criminal got into a database, that is unbelievably creative on how he did it, and now we’re having to deal with it,” she said. Earlier, she had said, “You know, it’s amazing, because when you are dealing with international hackers, you are dealing with a new, sophisticated type of intelligence that a lot of us have not dealt with.” She said if the CIA can be hacked into, anyone can.

“It’s the new world in which we live in,” she said.

As for the point on which she is most vulnerable to criticism, she pointedly did deflect responsibility. She insisted that citizens were not notified earlier because she deferred to the judgment of law enforcement professionals, and said that was the appropriate thing to do in such a situation. In fact, emphasizing that she doesn’t accept blame for that, she had Mark Keel start off the press conference.

“I know that much has been made about the timing of making this public,” said Keel. “The timing of notifying the public… was dictated by law enforcement. It was done because we were conducting an investigation. We were trying to … protect this information as much as we possibly could, and by allowing us the time that we had to conduct our investigation, we believe that this information was better protected than it would have been otherwise.”

“It was done because we asked the administration to allow us time…,” he said.

Nikki Haley’s summary on it all? “It’s not the crisis itself; it’s how you handle it.” And she insisted over and over that the protection being offered to citizens after this breach is second-to-none. She said her family’s information was hacked several years ago, and “I wish we’d had what we are offering today.”

I’ve GOT an ‘iPad Mini’ — it’s called an ‘iPhone’

5 Replies

Got to say I was seriously underwhelmed by Apple’s news yesterday:

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Steve Jobs once mocked tablets with small screens, saying they would need to come with sandpaper so people could sand down their fingertips to use them. But that didn’t stop his company from shrinking the iPad.

Apple’s iPad Mini, which it unveiled at a press event here on Tuesday, weighs about two-thirds of a pound and has a screen that measures 7.9 inches diagonally, making its surface area significantly smaller than that of the 9.7-inch iPad. Philip W. Schiller, Apple’s vice president for marketing, said the smaller, lighter tablet would be a good fit for people who want something more portable than the 1.44-pound iPad.

The company is selling the lowest price Mini for $330, about $130 more than similar-size tablets from competitors…

So what burst of innovation will they come out with next — an iPad that’s between the iPhone and the mini in size, or one between the mini and the full-size? Or maybe a 60 inch, for that home-theater effect while you’re sitting in the coffee shop?

And in the WSJ in the same news cycle, Walter Mossberg was highly praising the new Microsoft tablet set to come out at the end of the week. Ouch, Apple.

All of this Apple angst brings to mind this hilarious sendup of the iPhone 5 complaints, from SNL a couple of weeks back…

Brad Warthen

All The News That Gives You Fits