Category: General

General comments.

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Bashing the United States on the Nobel Level

No Nobel prizes for American writers: they’re too parochial | Books | The Guardian

It’s hard to tell if this criticism is a veiled political jab dating to the oppressive Bush era, but given the disappointment with which contemporary American literature is greeted in the United States as well, it’s probably a safe bet that no American will win this year’s literature Nobel Prize.

And, if an American wins it, then it probably was a political jab after all.

Update: Nope. An American did not win it. And, in 2010, a Peruvian won the prize. I’m reading Twain. I hope they award one to him posthumously.  PNM

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As Long as I’m Getting Paid

The Associated Press: Recession delivers a double blow to many charities

The American way of funding charitable work has always been suspect. It was always a means of showing off one’s wealth rather than a means of funding the process of helping the indigent, the underprivileged and the unfortunate. Even at the height of private giving, the US has possessed the most staggering poverty rates in the industrialized world. The hodge podge of charitable organizations never received the funding and the structural strength to remedy the problems they were erected to address. Absent taxation, people never gave enough.

And, now, even though the richest Americans have lost some of their net worth to the financial crisis that they largely created, the latest census data show that the income gap between the richest and the rest of the population continues to grow; in other words, the richest people in the world have not nearly lost as large a percentage of their wealth as have the rest of the world.

Thus, we have definitive proof, in numbers, that the American way of helping the underprivileged, funding the arts and building cultural institutions through charitable giving has been an unqualified failure.

This failure bespeaks a distrust of government–in effect, a distrust of ourselves as a society and as a nation–so profoundly inimical that we prefer failing as individuals to succeeding as a country.

But, hey, as long as I’m getting paid, who cares, right?

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He Died Like a Celebrity

DJ AM died from lethal mix of prescription drugs and cocaine – LA Daily News.

I love house music. Everyone knows this. But I have no idea who DJ AM was. I am shocked, however, that such a lethal combination of recreational and prescription drugs did not kill him sooner.

The toxicology report showed the 36-year-old Adam Goldstein had the following drugs in his system: cocaine, OxyContin, Hydrocodone or Vicodin, antianxiety drugs Xanax and Ativan, Klonopin which also controls anger, Benadryl, and Levamisole, a drug apparently used to cut cocaine.

“Celebrity DJ” is itself a strange title. Perhaps with this final act, Goldstein proves that he ranks up there with Belushi and others.

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No Rest for (the Wife of) the Wicked

Trustee sues Madoff’s wife over ‘life of splendor’ – Yahoo! Finance

I said as much a while back, and it seems as if one of the trustees of Madoff’s victims seems to agree.

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Baghdad North?

Belfast Catholics riot over Protestant parade – Yahoo! News

The constant fighting between Catholics and Protestants in Belfast is far too reminiscent of the Shi’a-Suni battles of Baghdad than of any rivalry in northern Europe. Maybe Belfast should be called Baghdad North.

More links here.

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The Spoils of Crime

Ruth Madoff forfeits asset claims, left with $2.5 million | Reuters

$2.5 million is not a bad take at all for suffering through decades of lavish living at the clients’ expense. One wonders why someone how has absolutely no bargaining power vis a vis the prosecution of a confessed criminal is granted such a healthy settlement when a huge number of the defrauded clients are left with absolutely nothing.

The soup thickens, indeed.

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When Politics Gets Personal

BBC NEWS | Africa | Kenyan sues over sex ban ‘stress’

Perhaps if pro-life women were thus to protest abortion rights, the problem would go away.

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The Freakshow Stops at Wikipedia

Wikipedia excommunicates Church of Scientology | Technically Incorrect – CNET News.

A propos of the previous post about the virtual incorruptibility of the Wikipedia content editorial system comes this golden nugget of a story about how Wikipedia has the balls that no information or news source has. When the “Church” of Scientology logged a few too many attempts to remove embarrassing truths about it, it was banned from editing altogether.

Now, if only the rest of the media were to show enough backbone and refrain from allowing commercial interests to define what “news” is.

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Spray On, Wax Off

BBC NEWS | Health | Spray for ‘six times longer’ sex.

Among the side effects making the list of “serious” side effects of the various erectile disorder medications like Cialis and Viagra is priapism, defined by the Merriam-Webster online dictionary as “an abnormal often painful persistent erection of the penis”.

It should come as very good news, then, that one no longer need to take these ED medication strictly to achieve the side effect. A new spray turns the trick, as it were.

Sure, it’s designed to make guys who last 15 seconds last two minutes, but you can almost here the college sex spray parties getting planned in Florida and Texas for next year’s spring break.

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On News, Knowledge and Information

U.S. Broadband Is Fine, Nothing To See Here – The New York Times methodically fixing all broadband issues.. – dslreports.com

Where do you turn when you need objective assessment of the state of broadband connections in the US? Not the New York Times, apparently. Dslreports.com, by far the greatest resource in the US on evaluating your own broadband connection and determining how much value you are getting from your broadband provider does a much better job of reporting on the state of broadband connections for consumers and the state of affairs in the telecommunications industry in general than the New York Times.

In other words, if you take away the most impressive broadband countries, then dismiss our still mediocre showing as a product of geography (which doesn’t explain our record on poor urban deployment, or the successes of say, Canada), the U.S. looks pretty good. With availability and speed issues solved, that leaves just high US broadband prices left to dismiss, which Hansell apparently can’t. “On prices, unlike speeds, those tantalizing reports from overseas are correct,” he says.

Like in France, where users can get 100Mbps/50Mbps fiber service, VoIP and IPTV for $40 a month — in large part because the country took our now-scrapped attempt at local-loop unbundling and made it work. Fiber carriers who were sharing the access lines of local incumbents are now building their own networks, which resulted in strong facilities-based competition and lower prices thanks to — get ready — regulation. Which brings us back to our first sentence, and a larger point we’d be interested to see Hansell engage.

It would seem, then, that we can count on the New York Times to deliver the same sort of hard hitting journalism it delivered in the buildup to the Iraq war in 2003.

So, yes, the bottom line from the New York Times is be happy that you are paying too much for mediocre broadband service. You’re better off than Mexico, and, sure, you may be worse off than the French, but at least you don’t have to worry about that pesky regulation that guarantees your rights and the sort of regulation that makes corporations compete for your money.

The New York Times commends you for being an American. Your life is better without regulation. Being ripped off by corporations against which you are powerless is the only privilege that you have as an American. You eschew it at your own peril.

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