Should This Blog Stay Or Should It Go — That Is The Question...

Yesterday, this blogger felt as if he was at ground zero of a terrorist street-bombing. Marc Tracy, a staff writer at The New Republic, actually offered a dyslogy for this blogger's favorite pastime. Wow, Tracy was shoveling dirt on the blog and June 24, 2013 will mark the 10^th anniversary of this blog:

Tuesday, June 24, 2003
Hello! Welcome to my world! Rather than send e-mail to my friends (and foes), I decided to enter the 21st century and publish a Web Log (Blog). Visit daily. Youneverknow.

NS
Posted by Neil Sapper at 6/24/2003 03:51:00 PM

1 comment
Anonymous
Amazing that Google has allowed you to waste this much bandwidth.

So, that first post to this blog elicited a flame-comment from "Anonymous." So, since 2003, this blog has been filled with 3791 posts (counting this one) in nearly a decade. "Time flies when you're havin' fun" goes the old bromide. Of course, an alternative aphorism is probably on the minds of the poor wretches inside the wire at Gitmo: "Fun flies when you're doin' time" (probably written on an unknown jail cell wall). As far as this humble blog is concerned, this blogger will bumble on as the curator of the best writing in cyberspace — a Reserve Room in the vast jumble of the cyberspace library (aka the Web) — until Google pulls the plug on Blogger (the software that has formatted and published all of the nearly 3,8000 posts since the summer of 2003). At that time (and nothing lasts forever at Google), the theme song for this blog will be

[x YouTube/LyricMachine Channel]
"Should I Stay Or Should I Go" (1981)
By The Clash

If this is a (fair & balanced) anticipation of this blogger's imitation of Hamlet's soliloquy, so be it.

[x TNR]
Eulogy For The Blog
By Marc Tracy

Tag Cloud of the following article

andrew article beginning ben best blog blogger brands change contains context course decoder discriminating edited enough follow form going highly institutions interested internet leads magazine media news personal politics post post-blog reader reading seems sense smith social something sometimes specific started strong subject sullivan technology times today traffic twitter writer

created at TagCrowd.com

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In November 2011, Politico's most prominent blogger, Ben Smith, declared the advent of the "the post-blog blog." "The dusty old form of the personal political blog has required some updating. Twitter has replaced any individual blog as the place the political conversation plays out," he wrote. "Other successful bloggers—from Andrew Sullivan to Michelle Malkin, Chris Cillizza to Ezra Klein—have been edging in different ways toward institutionalizing what works, staffing up and formalizing their beats to better serve their audiences." Smith was announcing that his own blog, which dated back to Politico's beginnings nearly five years before, would undergo a similar sort of change. About a month later, though, he announced that he would become editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, a website where nearly every article is, in a sense, a blog post, but there are no actual blogs, and whose traffic model depends in no small part on discovery via social media. In other words, a post-blog blog.

This is the context in which the New York Times' decision, revealed this week, to review all of its blogs and shutter at least some of them (including the popular, at least among the sort of media wonks who are still reading this article, Media Decoder), ought to be understood. In a post published today, Media Decoder hinted at the reasons for the decision: Now that it is going away, the reader can "See All Media News In One Place" at the Media & Advertising online section.

It seems likely that business imperatives helped prompt the Times' move. The Grey Lady is coming off its worst quarter of digital subscription growth since its current paywall was introduced two years ago. A redesign is apparently on the way. Smaller brands within brands, be they rubrics like "Media Decoder" or personalities like "Ben Smith," make increasingly little sense in a landscape where writers can cultivate their own, highly discriminating followings via social media like Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter, while readers can curate their own, highly discriminating feeds. In this world, there is no place for the blog, because to do anything other than put "All Media News In One Place" is incredibly inefficient.

How did we get here? The trajectory of any of the bloggers Smith mentions would work, but let's take Andrew Sullivan. In the 1990s, he was fully ensconced in print institutions (among other things, he edited The New Republic). When he started a blog, it was on his own—other than a small handful of strange, Web-only creatures, in 2001, what magazine wanted a blog? By 2005, the answer to that question had changed, allowing Sullivan to ensconce his blog in larger institutions—Time, The Atlantic, and The Daily Beast, in chronological order. This was the golden age of the personal blog: The Internet had empowered a few strong writers to create their own brand (if you were idiosyncratic—say, if you were gay, English, Catholic, and heretically conservative—then all the better) and a few strong big brands to create their own small brands (Media Decoder was launched in 2009, and finds its roots in TV Decoder, a blog that was started when the Times poached writer Brian Stelter, who like Sullivan, Klein, et. al. had built a following on the Internet as a personal brand). Meanwhile, readers interested in reading the best that had been thought and said on the Internet had no choice except to follow along—the best they could do was to use RSS to focus on the feeds they tended to find interesting.

But today, Google Reader is dying, Media Decoder is dead, and Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish is alive in new form. This year, Sullivan decided that he was a big enough brand, commanding enough attention and traffic, to strike out on his own. At the beginning of the last decade, the institutions didn't need him. Today, he feels his best chance for survival is by becoming one of the institutions, complete with a staff and a variety of content. What wasn't going to work was continuing to have, merely, a blog.

We will still have blogs, of course, if only because the word is flexible enough to encompass a very wide range of publishing platforms: Basically, anything that contains a scrollable stream of posts is a "blog." What we are losing is the personal blog and the themed blog. Less and less do readers have the patience for a certain writer or even certain subject matter. Instead, they use social media to efficiently pick exactly what they do and do not click on, rather than reading what a blogger or blog offers them. In part due to his melodramatic intellectual style, Sullivan's blog was almost like a soap opera pegged to the news cycle—which I mean as the highest compliment. Smith's blog, too, had its specific scoops (Jewish politics, labor politics). And Media Decoder frequently brought a Times-type sensibility to media stories not big enough to merit their own staid articles in the ink edition. A necessary byproduct was that even if you were a devotee, you were not interested in about half of their posts. You didn't complain, because you didn't have an alternative. Now, in the form of your Twitter feed, you do, and so these old-style blogs have no place anymore.

There is little sense in shouting against the wind, but the blog—the blog as a thematically or personally coherent space containing an individual's or a subject's specific interests, commitments, attitudes—was a great thing, and its decline is saddening. One never felt one knew talented writers or complicated subjects as well as the ones that maintained excellent blogs. Every day, even every hour, you could predict, argue with, be surprised by, get enraged at, and be persuaded by them. Unlike the pre-blog newspaper or magazine column (which still persists, of course, if anachronistically and often embarrassingly), the blog provided the unmediated space for the writer or theme to wrestle with itself in full view of the reader. And unlike the post-blog and its endless stream of isolated dollops of news, which seems to be the world we're heading towards, the blog offered a crucial context for understanding what it was reporting or opining on in each instance. The blog was the right form for the right time, but it was also just plain right, and remains so. Sometimes the pace of technology leads us to do something that is substantially superior, and sometimes the pace of technology leads us to do something that is substantially inferior. It would be nice if we could step in when the mutation selected is a good one, and identify it as something worth saving. But I'm guessing there isn't as much money in that. Ω

[Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic and previously was a staff writer at Tablet. He co-edited (with Franklin Foer and also contributed to) Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame (2012). Tracy wrote and edited "The Scroll," the blog of Tablet, a daily magazine of Jewish life and culture. "The Scroll" won the 2011 National Magazine Award.]

Copyright © 2013 The New Republic

Since the Google Reader will go dark on July 1, 2013, another site is available tor readers of a lot of blogs (or a single blog). The alternative is Bloglovin'. How does Bloglovin' work? Sign up, add all the blogs you want to follow, and then you’ll be notified every time one of your favorite blogs has a new post. Bloglovin' is available both on the web and on your iPhone or Android phone.


Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves by Neil Sapper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at sapper.blogspot.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.



Copyright © 2013 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Gitmo Fear & Loathing Right Here!

Cutting-edge blog? The cartoonist-in-residence in this blog, Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins), won 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. The prize is awarded annually by The Herb Block Foundation for “distinguished examples of editorial cartooning that exemplify the courageous independent standard set by Herblock.” The winner receives a $15,000 after-tax cash prize and a sterling silver Tiffany trophy. Perkins received the prize April 25th in a ceremony held at the Library of Congress. In today's 'toon, Sparky the Wonder Penguin (wearing his trusty Inuit-like goggles to ward off bull$hit — not snow — blindness) engages in yet another colloquy with Chuckles the Sensible Woodchuck. This latter character is a recent (June 29, 2010) addition to the 'toon as a tribute to the glory of chuckleheadedness. Today, Sparky and Chuckles discuss Gitmo in a tribute to the brilliant analysis of the panelists on Faux News. Gitmo is both a national tragedy and a monument to the stupidity of The Dubster and his merry men. Gitmo is a complete failure: hunger strikes, the failure of the nonsense of military tribunals, and so many of the internees are now stateless because their countries of origin refuse to readmit them. Add the stupidity of Dumbos in Congress who froth at the mouth over the thought of moving the internees out of Gitmo to confinement in some prison in the USA. Chuckleheadness indeed. If this is (far & balanced) national insanity rooted in the war on terror, so be it.

[x This Modern World]
The Guantanamo Problem
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

(Click to embiggen — H/T to Daily Kos — or use the zoom feature of your browser) Ω

Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow". His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly.

Perkins, a long time resident of Brooklyn, New York, currently lives in Connecticut. He received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002.

When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political weblog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001.]

Copyright © 2013 Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

Since the Google Reader will go dark on July 1, 2013, another site is available tor readers of a lot of blogs (or a single blog). The alternative is Bloglovin'. How does Bloglovin' work? Sign up, add all the blogs you want to follow, and then you’ll be notified every time one of your favorite blogs has a new post. Bloglovin' is available both on the web and on your iPhone or Android phone.


Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves by Neil Sapper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at sapper.blogspot.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.



Copyright © 2013 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Today, The Cobra Gives A Final -Kiss- Hiss To The Dubster (AKA POTUS 43)

Maureen (Mo) Dowd of the NY Fishwrap was dubbed The Cobra by The Dubster when he was in his frat-boy mode. The Cobra has appeared infrequently in this blog after she admitted to plagiarism in some forgotten Op-Ed piece. However, today's helping of snark, inspired by the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, was too good to ignore. The Dubster has no shame and he pranced around in his Presidential Center in Dallas with "more guts than a government mule" (as this blogger's maternal grandmother described shameless wretches who tried to bluster their way to respectability). Of course, The Cobra is focused beyond the village idiot (aka POTUS 43) and her gaze falls upon those potential candidates who would be POTUS 45 and beyond. The solution would have been the castration of Poppy Bush (POSTUS 41), The Slickster (POTUS 42), and — as much as this would have hurt — POTUS 44. We need a new amendment to the Constitution: beyond a two-term limit, there should be a sterilization program for any potential presidential candidate. The Cobra lists a partial nightmare of future presidential candidates: George P. [Bush], Chelsea [Clinton], Beau Biden, and Joe Kennedy III. Thank goodness The B(ig) F'ing (word of your choice) Idiot aka The BFI (Limbaugh) is childless. If this is (fair & balanced) political infanticide, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Silver Fox’s Pink Slip
By Maureen Dowd

Tag Cloud of the following article

advice asked assessment barbara bush cheney cherry-pick chief country dad debate decider defended don e-mailed families father feel former fox generation house ignored invading issue jeb led legacy library obama people president presidential priceless qualified really saddam shape silver skin smart son studied thought today wanted war weak weren white

created at TagCrowd.com

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Barbara Bush is a word that rhymes with fright.

She’s right.

Asked on the “Today” show whether she thought her son Jeb should run for president in 2016, as W. has urged, the famously candid and caustic Silver Fox offered the most honest assessment of her oldest son’s legacy.

Aside from the cascading disasters that the country is still struggling to recover from, a key W. legacy is derailing the path of the son Poppy and Barbara Bush dearly wanted to be president: Jeb.

For the first time, the 87-year-old former first lady acknowledged, in essence, that W. had worn out the family’s welcome in the White House. “He’s by far the best qualified man, but no, I really don’t,” she said when asked if her second son should aim to be the third Bush in chief. “I think it’s a great country. There are a lot of great families, and it’s not just four families or whatever. There are other people out there that are very qualified and we’ve had enough Bushes.”

Jenna Bush Hager, a “Today” show correspondent who was a participant in the Thursday interview with her grandmother, mother and sister, blurted “Surpri-i-ise!” and threw up her arms. CNN e-mailed Jeb to find out what he thought of his mother’s “priceless” comment and Jeb e-mailed back: “Priceless indeed!”

But Bar, who was also giving the back of the hand to the Clintons, spit out the truth. It is wearying that America, a country that broke away from aristocratic England in a burst of rugged individualism, has spawned so many of its own royal political families, dynasties that feel entitled to inhabit the White House, generation after generation, letting their family competitions and tensions shape policy and history to an alarming degree.

Why does a George P., Chelsea, Beau Biden, Joe Kennedy III presidential sweepstakes feel so inevitable?

There were plenty of other, less perspicacious assessments of the Bush legacy on the occasion of W.’s presidential library opening in Dallas. Josh Bolten, Bush’s chief of staff in the second term, defended 43’s economic record — two off-the-books, badly managed wars and more of the deregulation that led to toxic derivatives, government bailouts and a near collapse of the whole economy — saying it “really wasn’t so bad.”

Former Bush staffers and some on the right defended 43 in the usual debates: Was he the Decider or the Dupe? Was he smart or simplistic? The latter question is really beside the point in Washington, the capital of smart people doing dumb things.

W.’s presidency will go down in infamy because he ignored Katrina and the Constitution and cherry-picked intelligence with Tony Blair to build up a faux case for invading Iraq. That is why the three Democratic presidents who talked at his library’s dedication had to cherry-pick their topics, focusing mostly on W.’s good work on AIDS in Africa.

Though he presents himself as the Batman of anti-terrorism, W. ignored the warning that Osama was going to strike and didn’t catch him dead or alive. He failed to fix the egregious problems of agencies coordinating watch lists and dropping the ball on information about terrorist suspects, which flared again in the Boston bombings.

W. and other Bush officials continue to say they could not possibly have known that Saddam had no W.M.D. But I’m now told that Saddam sent word through the Saudis to the Bushies over and over that he had no W.M.D. and was only blustering to keep his nemesis in the neighborhood, Iran, at bay.

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld weren’t looking for the truth, and they weren’t hitting the pause button the way President Obama is with Syria right now, sensitive to the quicksand nature of the region. They simply wanted to blast some Arabs and Saddam was a weak target, just as W. was a weak president, easily led wherever Cheney and his co-conspirator Rummy, along with their bellicose band of neocons, wanted to take him.

Obama and others praised 43 last week as “comfortable in his own skin.” That’s absurd. People who are comfortable in their own skin don’t shape their lives and actions so self-consciously, and often self-destructively, on another. W. veered between aping his father and doing the opposite of his father.

Pressed by Charlie Rose on “CBS This Morning,” W. reiterated the unfathomable fact that he went to war with the same dictator that his father did, without ever seeking his dad’s counsel. “He knows,” W. said of his father, “that each presidential decision requires advice from people who have studied an issue.” That’s quite a rationalization. Who, after all, has studied the issue more closely than another president who decided against invading Baghdad?

Sadly, no one in W.’s inner circle studied the issue. As Colin Powell has noted, there was no proper debate or meeting of the National Security Council before the invasion. W. went to war on body language, manipulated by the war-mongering gargoyles who would also bring us torture, domestic spying and secret prisons.

“I can’t remember a specific incident where I called up and said, ‘What do I do?’ ” W. said about getting advice from his level-headed dad.

And that’s the shame of it. Ω

[Maureen Dowd received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, with the Pulitzer committee particularly citing her columns on the impeachment of Bill Clinton after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Dowd joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1983, after writing for Time magazine and the now-defunct Washington Star. At The Times, Dowd was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, then became a columnist for the paper's editorial page in 1995. Dowd's first book was a collection of columns entitled Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004). Her second book followed in 2005: Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide. Dowd earned a bachelor's degree from DC's Catholic University in 1973.]

Copyright © 2013 The New York Times Company

Since the Google Reader will go dark on July 1, 2013, another site is available tor readers of a lot of blogs (or a single blog). The alternative is Bloglovin'. How does Bloglovin' work? Sign up, add all the blogs you want to follow, and then you’ll be notified every time one of your favorite blogs has a new post. Bloglovin' is available both on the web and on your iPhone or Android phone.


Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves by Neil Sapper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at sapper.blogspot.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.



Copyright © 2013 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

In The Aftermath Of Boston, Eags Considers The Law & Disorder In Both Perugia & NYC

Eags' paean to Boston policing overlooks the police fusillade at the boat holding a critically wounded (by his own hand) Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect in the Boston Massacre II, in a Watertown, MA backyard. How that incapacitated suspect survived that field of fire is amazing. However, after 102 hours, Boston law enforcement lost command and control in that moment. Nonetheless, Eags points out that Boston policing was far superior to that in Perugia (Amanda Knox) and The Big Apple (Central Park 5). If this is a (fair & balanced) critique of poor police strategy, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Good Cops, Bad Cops
By Timothy Egan

Tag Cloud of the following article

authorities bad book boston boys burns case central confession convicted cops court crime dna documentary enforcement evidence fact happen innocent italian italy ken kercher knox law life man month motive murder night park people physical police press rape release roommate setting showed signed statement story suspect tabloid trial woman year

created at TagCrowd.com

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The 102-hour sprint from the moment two bombs went off in Boston to the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Watertown, Mass., should be capsulized and sent to every law enforcement academy. Tireless culling of video images, apt use of tips and technology, and quick action by a fleet of cops showed both the risk and the range of good police work.

By contrast, we are reminded this month of the terrible price of bad police work. Amanda Knox’s book about her ordeal as a prisoner of coincidence for a murder in Italy and a documentary about five innocent teenagers framed for the Central Park rape case present a blueprint of official malpractice.

It goes like this: Conduct an all-night interrogation until the suspect is tired, broken and confused, producing a “confession.” Release the narrative to a predatory press, setting the story in stone before an alternative view can take hold. Ignore all physical evidence that doesn’t fit, including the absence of any physical evidence.

In the Knox and Central Park cases, the press was truly toxic. And it was almost as bad after the Boston bombing. An online witch hunt, coupled with the tabloid glare of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, targeted innocent bystanders in Boston. Restraint, admirably, came from the authorities — they were the ones to call for an end to reckless speculation.

Many people, mostly in Europe, still doubt Knox’s innocence in the 2007 murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia, Italy. And many people, despite a confession by the real Central Park rapist and DNA evidence tying him to the crime, still suspect the five boys who served time for the near-fatal assault and rape of a 28-year-old jogger in 1989.

But with the release of Knox’s book, Waiting to Be Heard (2013), and the airing on PBS of the documentary “The Central Park Five,” these ordinary people are finally having their say regarding the extraordinary circumstances that cost them their freedom. What’s remarkable is how similar the missteps were by law enforcement and their abettors — bad cops aided by bad reporters.

The biggest mistake made by Knox, a college student with no criminal record, was volunteering to talk to the police. She had no lawyer, and her Italian was barely serviceable. The police had no credible evidence tying her to the murder of her roommate. But over the course of a long night, Knox was slapped on the head, she says (denied by authorities), and goaded into signing a statement in formal Italian that placed her near the crime and implicated an innocent man.

There was so much blood, and so many fingerprints, in the small bedroom where Kercher was slain by knife attack that even cops of the Keystone type could solve the crime. And in fact, when those prints, that blood and much more physical evidence lined up exactly with a man, Rudy Guede, who had fled to Germany shortly after the murder, the police had their culprit. Guede was later convicted, though he claimed he only had sex with Kercher and wasn’t in on the murder.

But because the authorities in Italy had invested so much pride and publicity in their earlier Knox story, setting off a global tabloid firestorm on her sex life by releasing details of prior intimacies, they still had to go ahead with a trial of Knox and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito.

They put forth a series of absurd motives. This student in her junior year abroad was a leader of a “satanic ritual,” it was said early on. In court, she was called a “she-devil.” When these medieval claims were met with derision, the motive was changed again: it was suggested that Knox killed her roommate because the young woman from Britain was a messy housemate.

In trial, Knox testified that the police called her “a stupid liar,” and repeatedly hit her. She said she signed a statement while “in shock” and was unsure what it meant. And in her book, she blames herself for being naïve and for behaving “like a lost, pathetic child” while under harsh interrogation.

Her conviction, and sentence of 26 years, was overturned in 2011. Knox went home to Seattle and resumed her studies at the University of Washington. The case against Knox, the appeals court found, was “not corroborated by any evidence.” Any evidence.

Sadly, the Italian Supreme Court last month sent the case back for another trial, because of procedural errors, though it’s unlikely Knox will ever be returned to Italy.

These details are fairly well known. But when you line them up with the Central Park case, you see a pattern for how people can be convicted despite the absence of motive or physical evidence. It happens far too often, in cases that rarely get any attention.

The Central Park suspects, five black and Latino teens, were accused of raping a young woman — for a debauched thrill, like Knox. None of them had ever been in trouble with the law before — like Knox. They were questioned all night, without a lawyer, and ultimately told the police what they wanted to hear — like Knox. They signed a confession that had almost no relationship to the actual facts of the crime — like Knox. And once DNA evidence came back, and showed no tie to the boys, the prosecution stuck to their case.

As Knox was a she-devil with a kitchen knife, the kids in New York were a “wolf pack” that went on a “wilding” spree. The police controlled the story from start to finish, feeding a tabloid fantasy to unquestioning reporters, as detailed in the film by Ken Burns, David McMahon and Sarah Burns. (Full disclosure: I was featured in a Ken Burns film on the Dust Bowl last year.)

The convictions were vacated in 2002, after a confession by a serial rapist with a positive DNA match to the crime. But by then, the boys had spent more than a decade of their lives behind bars. Knox was jailed for four years; at times, she says in the new book, she considered taking her own life.

At the core of both cases is hysteria — sexual, in the case of Knox, racial for the Central Park five. Institutional pride, and the inability to admit an error, were the other two big factors.

The police procedural in Boston shows what can happen when the authorities keep an open mind and drag a wide net. They need the press, occasionally for help, but more often to keep them honest. Ω

[Timothy Egan writes "Outposts," a column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan's most recent book is The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America (2009).]

Copyright © 2013 The New York Times Company

Since the Google Reader will go dark on July 1, 2013, another site is available tor readers of a lot of blogs (or a single blog). The alternative is Bloglovin'. How does Bloglovin' work? Sign up, add all the blogs you want to follow, and then you’ll be notified every time one of your favorite blogs has a new post. Bloglovin' is available both on the web and on your iPhone or Android phone.


Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves by Neil Sapper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at sapper.blogspot.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.



Copyright © 2013 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

The Response To The Criticism Of POTUS 44 Re: Gun Control — Speak Softly & Carry A Big Executive Order

The Commentariat from The Deadline Poet (below) to The Cobra in the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed Section have been biting the ankles of the POTUS 44 over the failure of the U.S. Senate to enact the background check gun-bill. However, Quatrain-Breath and The Cobra have it wrong: it wasn't Professor Plum, Miss Scarlet, or The Butler yada yada yada. The culprit was the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid (D-NV). That profile in cowardice has refused to use the nuclear option to vote out all of the impediments used by the Dumbos: filibusters and holds. Reid allows the Dumbos to demand a 60-vote majority (because of the filibuaster-threat) to pass a bill when the Donkeys hold a 54-vote majority in the U.S. Senate. Fixing blame on the POTUS 44 for the defeat of the recent nearly-lame attempt at gun-control is akin to blaming The Butler for the murder in the game of Clue. In addition, those who attempt to attach the tail o'shame to the POTUS ignore his most recent Executive Orders about gun-control. Don't pooh-pooh executive orders. FDR placed Japanese residents and legal Japanese immigrants on the West Coast in a gulag of concentration camps in sparsely-populated areas of the country after Pearl Harbor. How did FDR do it? An executive order. After WWII, HST desegregated the Jim-Crow armed forces of the United States. How did HST do it? An executive order. Stay tuned about executive orders in the area of gun-control. If this is a (fair & balanced) use of executive authority under the Constitution, so be it.

[x The Nation]
Criticism Of Obama's Failure To Get A Background Check Bill Passed In The Senate
By The Deadline Poet (Calvin Trillin)

Tag Cloud of the following article

armed background bill brawls calvin check criticism deadline disdain failure fighting gloves guns kid nitty-gritty obama passed people poet senate shuns trillin

created at TagCrowd.com

(Click to embiggen)

Disdain is what he has for brawls;
The nitty-gritty’s what he shuns.
Kid gloves are what he’s fighting with
Against some people armed with guns. Ω

[Calvin Trillin began his career as a writer for Time magazine. Since July 2, 1990, as a columnist at The Nation, Trillin has written his weekly "Deadline Poet" column: humorous poems about current events. Trillin has written considerably more pieces for The Nation than any other single person. A native of Kansas City, MO, Trillin received his BA from Yale College in 1957. He served in the army, and then joined Time.]

Copyright © 2013 The Nation

Since the Google Reader will go dark on July 1, 2013, another site is available tor readers of a lot of blogs (or a single blog). The alternative is Bloglovin'. How does Bloglovin' work? Sign up, add all the blogs you want to follow, and then you’ll be notified every time one of your favorite blogs has a new post. Bloglovin' is available both on the web and on your iPhone or Android phone.


Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves by Neil Sapper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at sapper.blogspot.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.



Copyright © 2013 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Yo, FBI! Yo, Homeland Security! Here's A Name To Add To Your Terrorist Watch List: Domestic Terrorist Firearms Enabler — Wayne LaPierre!

Michael Kinsley does a masterful job on the NRA's Wayne LaPierre by taking the Chief Gun-Nut to the ends of his insane defense of weapons, any weapons — even pressure-cookers. The folks at Presto probably have written a check to the NRA. The best antidote to evil is laughter and Wayne LaPierre is crazy to the point of absurdity.May he soon have every NRA member's fondest wish: that he will have cold, dead hands. If this is a (fair & balanced) diagnosis of gun-nuttery, so be it.

[x TNR]
Crackpots For Crock Pots!
By Michael Kinsley

Tag Cloud of the following article

amendment atmosphere bit bombs carry cold constitution contribution criminal crock damned-fool deer distinguished drones enough freedom gun head heston history idea jogged lapierre memory militia nightmare op-ed pat people piece pot pressure probably rainy regs required rifle rubber rules saved senator something statement step tearful terror think thought wayne weapons

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Like many of us, Wayne LaPierre had no idea you could build a terror weapon out of a bit of scotch tape, a couple of rubber bands and an old pressure cooker (or was it a toaster oven?). “Well I’ll be damned,” said the head of the National Rifle Association, no doubt correctly.

Wayne’s second thought came just as automatically, if not as quickly. “I wonder,” Wayne thought, “what we at the NRA are doing to protect the right of all citizens under the Second Amendment to own and use double boilers and other terror weapons?”

Wayne became indignant. How many lives would have been saved this week if every runner in the Boston Marathon had been required to carry a small bomb in his or her backpack? When bombs are made criminal, only criminals have bombs, Wayne thought.

What should he do? Wayne asked himself. Well the first step was obvious. He must find yet another Democratic senator with fond memories of playing with bombs as a child. Not as hard as you’d think, Wayne chuckled. It’s amazing how memory can be jogged by a campaign contribution. And Wayne gave himself a well-deserved pat on the back. He was responsible for creating an atmosphere in which any statement about guns, pro or con, must be preceded by a tearful reminiscence of Mom using a rifle to slaughter bears out the kitchen window.

What would be the purpose of this Grandma-Moses-type panorama? To show people that bombs have a distinguished history and a rightful place among other weapons we are so proud of. Wayne thought of drones, America’s most recent contribution to the honor roll of weaponry. The bomb had its day, but now it must step aside. Wayne started to get weepy: Bombs and drones are as American as, as, as…well, Wayne could write the op-ed himself. In fact, he probably would have to write it himself. Old Senator blow-hard, whom he’d been saving for a rainy day, couldn’t write a passable op-ed piece if a gun was pointed at his head.

But this was a rainy day if ever there was one. Just think of the legislative nightmare that lies ahead: registration of bombs, limits on how many bombs one family could possess. Rules and regs, rules and regs. Just because the Constitution talks about a “well-regulated” militia, people have gotten the idea that the Second Amendment has something to do with a militia and that it has to be regulated. What poppycock! Of course, in a way, it’s Scalia’s fault, with all his damned-fool nonsense about strict construction and whatnot. Wayne had half a mind to stop the man’s check.

It’s not about hunting, the manly camaraderie, the beautiful stillness of the forest at dawn or any of that crap, Wayne thought. He wanted to scream: You don’t need a bomb to shoot a deer. You need a bomb to drop on the ATF asshole who comes to take your bomb away. Wayne realized that this was sort of a circular argument. But it was good enough for that old fool Charlton Heston, so it’s good enough for Wayne LaPierre. True, a crock pot is a bit harder to carry than a rifle, and probably easier to pry out of your cold, dead hands. But unless we fight for the freedom of all weapons to be owned by people who will love them, then every weapon is at risk.

Or something like that, Wayne thought. Ω

[Michael Kinsley is an editor-at-large for The New Republic. Previously, he was the editor of the New Republic and a columnist for the Washington Post. He was the founding editor of Slate. He also served as editor of Harper's, as the editorial and opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times, and as the American editor of The Economist. He has written regular columns for Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and the Times of London. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Readers Digest, the Daily Beast, Conde Nast Traveler and other publications. For six years he was co-host of the CNN program "Crossfire," appearing five nights a week opposite Pat Buchanan, John Sununu and Robert Novak. He also was William F. Buckley's regular interlocutor on "Firing Line" and a moderator of the "Firing Line" debates. Kinsley graduated from Harvard, went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and came back to study at Harvard Law. While in his third year of law school, Kinsley began working at The New Republic and finished his Juris Doctor degree in the evening program at The George Washington University Law School.]

Copyright © 2013 The New Republic

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Copyright © 2013 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

The Moral Of Today's Post: If The Foo $hits, Wear It

Today's post about grad school and graduate students brings to mind a recollection of the writer Willie Morris' list of types of mean, nasty people Morris had met prior to his encounter with a slumlord in NYC:

"...The landlord and his sons treated every complaint (by tenants) with a hurried, exasperated crudity. I had known Mississippi red-necks, mother-killers, grandmother-killers, sixth-year graduate students, and spit-ballers who threw at your head; I had never run up against people so lacking in the human graces." (North Toward Home, p. 342.)

Re-reading that list of nasty people brought this blogger to the realization that he had been a "sixth-year graduate student" (a year+ for an MA and a 5-year slog for a PhD) in the days when most classroom stuff was written on cave walls. Small wonder that this blogger was friendless by end of his grad school days. And now that this blogger stands on a virtual street corner in cyberspace gibbering and babbling, it's obvious that this blogger is still friendless. And poor Joshua Rothman is a scrivener by day and dissertation drudge by night. Think a good thought for him in his garret or basement room. If this is a (fair balanced) sigh of relief that there is no more grad school for this blogger, so be it.

[x New Yorker]
The Impossible Decision
By Joshua Rothman

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advice asked bad best career children chronicle cons conversation decision different don english experiences fact feel give grad graduate happen hard herzog humanities idea impossible judged later letters life likely making people perhaps person pros question rational read really sample school sorts students study things thinking turn worthwhile writes years

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Graduate students are always thinking about the pleasures and travails of grad school, and springtime is a period of especially intense reflection. It’s in the spring, often in March and April, that undergraduates receive their acceptance letters. When that happens, they turn to their teachers, many of them graduate students, for advice. They ask the dreaded, complicated, inevitable question: To go, or not to go?

Answering that question is not easy. For graduate students, being consulted about grad school is a little like starring in one of those “Up” documentaries (“28 Up,” ideally; “35 Up,” in some cases). Your students do the work of Michael Apted, the series’s laconic director, asking all sorts of tough, personal questions. They push you to think about the success and failure of your life projects; to decide whether or not you are happy; to guess what the future holds; to consider your life on a decades-long scale. This particular spring, the whole conversation has been enriched by writers from around the Web, who have weighed in on the pros and cons of graduate school, especially in the humanities. In addition to the usual terrifying articles in the advice section of the Chronicle of Higher Education, a pair of pieces in Slate—“Thesis Hatement,” by Rebecca Schuman, and “Thesis Defense” by Katie Roiphe—have sparked many thoughtful responses from bloggers and journalists. It’s as though a virtual symposium has been convened.

I’m a former humanities graduate student myself—I went to grad school in English from 2003 through 2011 before becoming a journalist, and am still working nights on my dissertation—and I’m impressed by the clarity of the opinions these essays express. (Rebecca Schuman: “Don’t do it. Just don’t”; Katie Roiphe: “It gives you a habit of intellectual isolation that is… useful, bracing, that gives you strength and originality.”) I can’t muster up that clarity myself, though. I’m very glad that I went to graduate school—my life would be different, and definitely worse, without it. But when I’m asked to give students advice about what they should do, I’m stumped. Over time, I’ve come to feel that giving good advice about graduate school is impossible. It’s like giving people advice about whether they should have children, or move to New York, or join the Army, or go to seminary.

Maybe I’ve been in school too long; doctoral study has a way of turning your head into a never-ending seminar, and I’m now capable of having complicated, inconclusive thoughts about nearly any subject. But advice helps people when they are making rational decisions, and the decision to go to grad school in English is essentially irrational. In fact, it’s representative of a whole class of decisions that bring you face to face with the basic unknowability and uncertainty of life.

To begin with, the grad-school decision is hard in all sorts of perfectly ordinary ways. One of them is sample bias. If you’re an undergrad, then most of the grad students you know are hopeful about their careers, and all of the professors you know are successful; it’s a biased sample. Read the harrowing collection of letters from current and former grad students published in the Chronicle, and you encounter the same problem: the letters are written by the kinds of people who read the Chronicle, in response to an article about the horrors of grad school. They, too, are writing out of their personal experiences. It’s pretty much impossible to get an impartial opinion.

Last week, one of my college friends, who now manages vast sums at a hedge fund, visited me. He’s the most rational person I know, so I asked him how he would go about deciding whether to go to grad school in a discipline like English or comparative literature. He dealt immediately with the sample bias problem by turning toward statistics. His first step, he said, would be to ignore the stories of individual grad students, both good and bad. Their experiences are too variable and path-dependent, and their stories are too likely to assume an unwarranted weight in our minds. Instead, he said, he would focus on the “base rates”: that is, on the numbers that give you a broad statistical picture of outcomes from graduate school in the humanities. What percentage of graduate students end up with tenure? (About one in four.) How much more unhappy are graduate students than other people? (About fifty-four per cent of graduate students report feeling so depressed they have “a hard time functioning,” as opposed to ten per cent of the general population.) To make a rational decision, he told me, you have to see the big picture, because your experience is likely to be typical, rather than exceptional. “If you take a broader view of the profession,” he told me, “it seems like a terrible idea to go to graduate school.”

Perhaps that’s the rational conclusion, but, if so, it’s beset on all sides by confounding little puzzles; they act like streams that divert and weaken the river of rational thought. Graduate school, for example, is a one-time-only offer. Very few people start doctoral programs later in life. If you pass it up, you pass it up forever. Given that, isn’t walking away actually the rash decision? (This kind of thinking is a subspecies of the habit of mind psychologists call loss aversion: once you have something, it’s very hard to give it up; if you get into grad school, it’s very hard not to go.) And then there’s the fact that graduate school, no matter how bad an idea it might be in the long term, is almost always fulfilling and worthwhile in the short term. As our conversation continued, my friend was struck by this. “How many people get paid to read what they want to read,” he asked, “and study what they want to study?” He paused. ”If I got into a really good program, I would probably go.”

Thinking about grad school this way is confusing, but it’s confusing in a mundane, dependable way; you’re still thinking about pros and cons, about arguments for and against a course of action. Continue to think about grad school, though, and you’ll enter the realm of the simply unknowable. The conflicting reports you’ll hear from different graduate students speak to the difficulty, perhaps even the impossibility, of judging lengthy experiences. What does it mean to say that a decade of your life is good or bad? That it was worthwhile, or a waste of time? Barring some Proustian effort of recollection, a long period of years, with its vast range of experiences and incidents, simply can’t be judged all at once. The best we can do is use what psychologists call “heuristics”: mental shortcuts that help us draw conclusions quickly.

One of the more well-understood heuristics is called the “peak-end rule.” We tend to judge long experiences (vacations, say) by averaging, more or less, the most intense moment and the end. So a grad student’s account of grad school might not be truly representative of what went on; it might merely combine the best (or worst) with how it all turned out. The most wonderful students will be averaged with the grind of the dissertation; that glorious summer spent reading Kant will be balanced against the horrors of the job market. Essentially, peak-end is an algorithm; it grades graduate school in the same way that a software program grades those essays on the S.A.T. Sure, a judgment is produced, but it’s only meaningful in a vague, approximate way. At the same time, it raises an important conceptual question: What makes an experience worthwhile? Is it the quality of the experience as it’s happening, or as it’s remembered? Could the stress and anxiety of grad school fade, leaving only the learning behind? (One hopes that the opposite won’t happen.) Perhaps one might say of graduate school what Aeneas said of his struggles: “A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.” Today’s unhappiness might be forgotten later, or judged enriching in other ways.

This kind of thinking, in turn, makes you wonder about the larger purpose of graduate school in the humanities—about the role it assumes in one’s life. To some degree, going to graduate school is a career decision. But it’s also a life decision. It may be, therefore, that even older graduate students are too young to offer their opinions on graduate school. Ten years is a long time, but it’s still only part of a whole. The value of grad school hinges, to a large extent, on what comes next. The fact that what comes next is, increasingly, unclear—that many graduate students don’t go into academia, but pursue other jobs—might only mean that a greater proportion of the value of graduate school must be revealed with time. Grad school might be best understood as what George Eliot, at the end of Middlemarch, calls a “fragment of a life,” and

the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval.

You never know how things will turn out. Experiences accrued in one currency can be changed into another. Ambition today can fund tranquility tomorrow; fear today can be a comfort later on. Or the reverse.

The breadth of grad school, in other words—the sheer number of years it encompasses—makes it hard to think about. But, finally, it’s challenging because of its depth, too. Grad school is a life-changing commitment: less like taking a new job and more like moving, for the entirety of your twenties, to a new country. (That’s true, I think, even for undergraduates: grad school is different from college.) Grad school will shape your schedule, your interests, your reading, your values, your friends. Ultimately, it will shape your identity. That makes it difficult to know, in advance, whether you’ll thrive, and difficult to say, afterward, what you would have been like without it.

The philosopher L. A. [Laurie Ann] Paul, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, describes these sorts of big life decisions eloquently in a forthcoming paper; she calls them “epistemically transformative” decisions. Sometimes, you can’t know what something is like until you try it. You can’t know what Vegemite tastes like, for example, until you try Vegemite; you can’t know what having children will be like until you have children. You can guess what these things will be like; you can ask people; you can draw up lists of pros and cons; but, at the end of the day, “without having the experience itself” you “cannot even have an approximate idea as to what it is like to have that experience.” That’s because you won’t just be having the experience; the experience will be changing you. On the other side, you will be a different kind of person. Making such a decision, you will always be uninformed.

We don’t, Paul writes, really have a good way to talk about these kinds of life-changing decisions, but we still make them. It’s hard to say how, exactly, we do it. All she can say is that, in order to make them, we have to do something a little crazy; we have to cast aside “the modern upper middle class conception of self-realization [that] involves the notion that one achieves a kind of maximal self-fulfillment through making rational choices about the sort of person one wants to be.” From this point of view, when you contemplate grad school, you’re like Marlow, in Heart of Darkness, when he is travelling up-river to find Kurtz. “Watching a coast as it slips by the ship,” Conrad writes,

is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you—smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, ‘Come and find out.’ "

We make these decisions, I suspect, not because we’re rational, but because we’re curious. We want to know. This seems especially true about graduate school. It’s designed, after all, for curious people—for people who like knowing things. They are exactly the people most likely to be drawn in by that whispered “Come and find out.”

* * *

In a narrow sense, of course, there’s nothing about these skeptical thoughts that should stop me from giving advice about graduate school. And when students ask me, I do have things to say. I point them to data, like the chart published in The Atlantic last week, which shows the declining reliance of universities on tenured faculty. And I tell my own story, which is overwhelmingly positive. I may not have finished (yet), and, like any grad student, I had my moments of panic. But I loved graduate school, and I miss it. In particular, I miss the conversations. Talking with my students, I found and expressed my best self. The office hours I spent in conversation with my professors stand out, even years later, as extraordinary experiences. I wish that everyone I know could have them, too.

But, talking to my students, I’m aware that there are too many unknowns. There are too many ways in which a person can be disappointed or fulfilled. It’s too unclear what happiness is. It’s too uncertain how the study of art, literature, and ideas fits into it all. (I’ve never forgotten the moment, in Saul Bellow’s Herzog, when Herzog thinks, “Much of my life has been spent in the effort to live by more coherent ideas. I even know which ones”; Herzog knows everything except how to live and do good. And yet what he knows is so extraordinary. As a grad student, I led a fascinating and, obviously, somewhat ironic discussion of that quote.) And, finally, life is too variable, and subject to too many influences. A person’s life, Eliot writes, also at the end of Middlemarch, is

the mixed result of young and noble impulses struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.

I’ll give advice about grad school if you ask me to, and I’m happy to share my experiences. But these bigger mysteries make the grad-school decision harder. They take a career conundrum and elevate it into an existential quandary. In the end, I feel just as ignorant as my curious, intelligent, inexperienced students. All I really want to say is, good luck. Ω

[Joshua Rothman is an writer and editor at The New Yorker and — previously — was a columnist for the Boston Fishwrap's Ideas section on Sundays. After graduating from Princeton University (BA in English), Rothman was a graduate student and teaching fellowing in the Department of English at Harvard University. Rothman spent nine (9) years as a Harvard grad student. He was a lecturer in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard for the latter seven (7) of his years at Harvard. Since Rothman is still working on his Harvard dissertation, he is best defined by ABD.]

Copyright © 2013 Condé Nast Digital

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Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves by Neil Sapper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at sapper.blogspot.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.



Copyright © 2013 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves