StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-shame-of-college-sports/8643/

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/opinion/the-amateur-ideal.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/clinton-and-obama-learned-nothing-remembered-nothing/2011/03/29/gIQA9zHVoK_blog.html#pagebreak

In her column of September 22,2011 Jennifer Rubin severely scolds President Obama and President Clinton for deviating from the AIPAC and Neo-Conservative line on Israel. Not anything like a surprise from an American Likudnik.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/james-renton/palestines-un-bid-lessons-from-history-of-zionism

But here is James Renton at Open Security offering some very important background information that might just put this polemical outburst into a context; as more readily understood as a holding action, to prevent the collapse of a historically untenable exceptionalism.

Political Observer  

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/opinion/brooks-obama-rejects-obamaism.html?_r=4&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

 

 "I’m a sap, a specific kind of sap. I’m an Obama Sap.”

 It is a rather well worn rhetorical trope to make oneself the butt of one’s criticism of another by indirection. Mr. Brooks like so many others fails to make the critical distinction between the Rhetorical Obama and the Political Obama and how this very canny and adroit pragmatist works both sides of the political street; although he has managed to alienate his base and their hunger for the fulfillment of the promise of the Rhetorical Obama. But Mr. Brooks declares his disillusionment with the reassertion of the Rhetorical Obama, as opposed to the policies of the Political Obama, which remain monuments to a rather dull conservative political/economic ethos. In all this rhetorical chaff, one can see a shining core emerge out of this debris, of the self-proclaimed reasonableness of our writer, brought to this disappointing conclusion by certain facts, like the dishonesty of the President on the matter of taxing the rich. On which Mr. Brooks provides statistical data from the IRS. Mr. Brooks does not touch on the failure of Free Market Economics to deliver on its well advertised promises, he being one of its long time advocates.Nor on the continuing economic ramifications of the collapse of 2008.That might be a kind of honesty demanded by our present crisis but wholly beyond the reach of this political moralist. One final note, a quote from the essay is illustrative of two issues.

“Being a sap, I still believe that the president’s soul would like to do something about the country’s structural problems.”

He speaks first of President Obama’s soul which is a wholly irrelevant matter and perhaps could be  the subject  of a more deeply argued theological discussion, if one believes in a construct called soul. But here it is used pejoratively as pure condemnation of the self-willed forgetting of one of the cornerstones of Mr. Obama’s Christian faith, as interpreted by Mr. Brooks. As for structural problems one could conjecture that that could mean the final dismantling of what is left of the New Deal as unnecessary in the 21^st Century, captained by Enlightened Conservatives like Mr. Brooks and his political fellow travelers.

Political Observer

   

    

Just rereading pages 340 to 343 on the cogito.

‘When someone says I am thinking therefore I am, or exist, he does not deduce existence from thought by means of a syllogism, but  recognizes it as something self-evident by a simple intuitus of the mind.”

I know you've all been waiting for my story on Ms. Huffington, but one must admit that when it comes to insider reporting, dripping with rhetorical treacle and a certain cattiness, Elizabeth Rubin at Vogue has outdone everyone, who has attempted to describe the phenomenon of Arianna H. Let me just quote the opening sentence of this revelatory reportorial miniature:
"Everyone remembers the first time they met Arianna Huffington; everyone has a story."
And it just gets better and better. Ah,and the delicious mouth feel of the 'Arianna Huffington brand' like Poilly Fuisse on the tongue. The narration of Ms. H's rise to the top is rather breathtaking handled in two short paragraphs, designed not to excessively bore that very fastidious Vogue reader. And the word Zeitgeist never got such a working over as it gets in this article,whew! I'm dizzy just from writing it, much less reading it so many times.
Under the leadership of Tim Armstrong, AOL will promote patch.com and Arianna will use unpaid bloggers that were such a hit at the HuffPo, to work for free while giving all a chance to write for a national audience. Poor Arianna, she thinks all is forgiven from her rather nasty parting of ways of those unpaid bloggers on HuffPo, so sad. Gore Vidal did call the USA The United States of Amnesia. But after all Milton Friedman was her great,even beloved mentor. But Arianna is a force of nature or of just plain colossal ambition, to be a mogul, a taste-maker, a trendsetter and in charge of remaking the world and bringing the rest of us with her, even the unpaid ones, whether we want to go or not. Please read and enjoy this really short,chatty little pastiche. It sort of makes you long for those seemingly endless New Yorker articles brimming with authorial self-congratulation and guaranteed to put you in Dreamland.
Sincerely yours,
Myra B.     

 

 

http://www.literaturebitch.com/

http://www.salon.com/life/ask_wayne/index.html?story=/ent/col/2011/09/16/ask_wayne&source=newsletter&utm_source=contactology&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Salon_Daily%2520Newsletter%2520%2528Not%2520Premium%2529_7_30_110

Dearest Wayne,

The vicissitudes that fate visits upon us all is rather breathtaking. A dizzy old queen dispensing advice to an audience of desperate heteros, brings the notion of irony to a rather bleak dead end! But anyone who can write a 304 page book about Jackie has got the fortitude, and just plain guts, to pontificate on problems that he is absolutely existentially ignorant of, this makes your advice column absolute must reading. And whose bight idea was it to put our Wayne in charge of advice giving? : that resident drama queen of Salon, Joan Walsh? That certainly is a tantalizing question, but probably better left for another day. And your first column certainly vindicates the faith in your abilities that the editors at Salon are vested in. Although it lacks the necessary sympathy , indeed commiseration, that would be indicative of concern for the psychological well being of your first inquirer. Or were you going for the shock therapy that Dr. Laura specialized in? Oh, and Dr. Laura is much missed, she was psychologist and moralist rolled into one. Well, best of luck on your new venture, from your old and dear, dear friend.

Sincerely yours,

Myra Breckenridge      

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/opinion/brooks-the-planning-fallacy.html?_r=1&hp

It is easy to imagine that at breakfast tables, lunch rooms , dinner tables and even at swank dinner parties in the suburbs of the capitol, the political homilies of Mr. David Brooks are the subject of many conversations, many disagreements,  many small debates, that provide some mealtime diversion to the participants. They can feel a sense of partaking in the intellectual life of the Republic, of defining by their activity the actuality of citizenship. In his latest column The Planning Fallacy, Mr. Brooks exercises his dissent on the notion and practice of policy making and policy planning: in essence he says that any attempt at policy planning is essentially doomed to failure giving as his example:

“When the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman was a young man, he led a committee to write a new part of the curriculum for Israeli high schools. The committee worked for a year, and Kahneman asked his colleagues how long they thought the rest of the project would take. Their estimates were around two years. Kahneman then asked the most experienced among them how long such work took other curriculum committees. The gentleman pointed out that roughly 40 percent of the committees never finished their work at all.But what about those that did finish? The gentleman reported that he had never seen a committee finish in less than seven years and never in more than 10.This was bad news. They might fail to finish a task that they thought would be done in three years. At best, the project might consume eight or nine years. Yet this information didn’t affect those on the team at all. They carried on, assuming that though others might fail or dally, surely they wouldn’t. As it turned out, their project took eight years to finish. By the time it was done, the Ministry of Education had lost interest, and the curriculum was never used.”

Mr. Brooks only refers to the works of well accredited experts, with impeccable intellectual pedigrees. Mr. Kahneman’s attempt to write a new curriculum was completed after eight years and never used. But what is germane is that this prolonged story of a single failed attempt to write a new curriculum is used as a long and tendentious introduction and rhetorical frame to the political stalemate between Republicans and Democrats, as presented by Mr. Brooks, hardly a disinterested observer or reporter. In essence both parties are mired in their respective narratives of economic recovery and neither can emancipate themselves from those narratives, that is, without the political wisdom of our Solomon like pundit. And his cynical conclusion is that policy can only aspire to fix small things, make small changes, that benefit some. But one could answer with the successes of the New Deal and The Great Society, although Mr. Brooks manages to describe one of these grand policy attempts as a failure.

Let me take a moment to quote some of Mr. Brooks’ irresistibly trenchant bons mots:

“The problem comes when these optimists don’t look at themselves objectively from the outside.”

“Most people overrate their own abilities and exaggerate their capacity to shape the future.”

“Optimistic people rise in this world.”

“The key to wisdom in these circumstances is to make the distinction between discrete good and systemic good.”

Political Cynic