Uppity

This shit is just racist.

And so, let me tell you, is all the talk about "small-town values" and "Barack Obama thinks he's special" and everything else they said at that odious, repulsive, sickening Republican convention. It's all just coded Southern Strategy garbage. I come from a small town, and I promise you, our "values" are exactly the same as the values of city people, except maybe we care a little more about corn subsidies and -- well -- there don't happen to be any black people out here. That's what "small town values" means. The whole thing amounts to "Barack Obama, stay out of our house."

Not that you'd know it from the networks. I've been at home this week, relying on CNN and MSNBC for most of my news because our internet is not quite state-of-the-art, and all they ever talk about is goddamn Sarah Palin. Here is a woman who signifies nothing new about anything and serves only to waste airtime we could be spending on unemployment. But: Hockey mom! Pregnant daughter! Moose stew! Who gives a shit? She's there to wink at their racist, fundamentalist base, and nothing else. Yet her religious fanaticisim gets the cutesy treatment normally reserved for puff pieces about bible-thumpers who run foster homes (awww! babies!), and the only person I've seen on TV to even broach the race issue was Katrina Vanden Heuvel from the Nation -- at which point Larry King nervously cut her off.

Luckily the Obama campaign has its head on its shoulders and continues to, you know, campaign in swing states while McCain's people are focused on these political Special Olympics. Fact is this isn't a predominantly rural country anymore -- you don't win Colorado by turning out mountain men, you win it in the Denver-Boulder-Colorado Springs metropolitan area, and Democrats know it. I'd be THRILLED to watch the McCain campaign dig its own grave by playing to the racist base, because that's a 50%+1 strategy to begin with, one that Bush barely scraped by on; with that kind of thinking, just a little demographic shift or an opponent who scrambles the turnout model is enough to send the other guys to a big party in Atlanta -- and you wake up one morning to learn you're stuck in Hazzard County. Which is where the entire Republican Party belongs.

BUT it won't stop the Republicans, and their useful idiots on the network news, from lecturing us about "patriotism" and the "heartland" until everyone sane has finally gone crazy and everyone crazy sounds sane. My God.

Well... that felt good to get off my chest. See you all next week.

Oh, my head

Three months ago I got angry at Barack Obama, as I often do, for talking shit about the 1960s. At the time, I wrote:

[D]oes he just mean that Senator Clinton hasn't been forceful enough in denouncing the Port Huron Statement? Is John Edwards too soft on the Weathermen? What the hell is he talking about?

Ha ha! Funny anachronistic references to defunct 1960s radicals, which illustrate the silliness of the issue because they could never ever crop up in a present-day... what the hell?

The Hillary Clinton campaign pushed to reporters today stories about Barack Obama and his ties to former members of a radical domestic terrorist group... "Wonder what the Republicans will do with this issue," mused Clinton spokesman Phil Singer in one e-mail to the media, containing a New York Sun article reporting a $200 contribution from William Ayers, a founding member of the Weather Underground, to Obama in 2001. (Obama's ties to the radical group first surfaced last week in a Bloomberg News article.)

In a separate e-mail, Singer forwarded an article from Politico.com reporting on a 1995 event at a private home that brought Obama together with Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, another former member of the radical group.

[...] "If the Clinton campaign is truly concerned about the exploitation of the Weather Underground issue by the Republican attack machine, perhaps they should focus on the pardon of some of its members in the waning days of the Clinton administration," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said.

"The Weather Underground issue." OH MY GOD JUST FUCKING KILL ME. They know there's a WAR going on right now, don't they? Like, not a culture war, a war war? WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT THIS??!!?!?

...The Clinton campaign is simply beyond repair, if this is the level they're sinking to. (Not that Burton's doing himself any favors by jumping right down into their frame -- "Yeah, well, your guy is also a dirty hippie!") I understand such garbage scores points with the pathological media, who of course are obsessed with the 1960s, but for everybody else... this is rapidly becoming the stupidest primary ever. I need a drink...

Hello UC Race, Goodbye Sanity

Can you hear it? Off in the distance? That faint "tap-tap-tap" sound coming from Mather and Currier Houses? Listen carefully late at night, children, and maybe you'll pick it out: that's the sound of several dozen Harvard students masturbating furiously. Or, as we call it in public, the UC election!

I've been putting off writing this blogpost for a while. As you may remember, last year's UC race turned Dem Apples into a flaming pile of crap for like two weeks on end, and I hesitate to go there again; but something inside me just wants to contribute. (I'm assuming that "something" is my desperate need for attention, which everyone involved in Harvard politics surely understands.) So, with a helpful reminder that the stakes here are so low we can't possibly do any real damage to anything, let's take a look at the candidates:

MATT SUNDQUIST & RANDALL SARAFA. Everything that has been said about these guys has been said. Sundquist is a genuinely nice and caring guy who will work his heart out for the student body, etc etc etc, and Randall Sarafa is... well, he's there. Sundquist and Sarafa also have the whole establishment (including the Dems, and the Crimson as of this morning) as well as a dedicated campaign team behind them, who are working very hard to dispel the notion that Sundquist is OBVIOUSLY GOING TO WIN; this widely-held idea poses a problem for the Sundquist ticket, since voter turnout would suffer considerably if everyone thought they were OBVIOUSLY GOING TO WIN. (I myself am certainly not trying to spread the scurrilous rumor that Sundquist is OBVIOUSLY GOING TO WIN. No sir.) Still, if they can accomplish that task, Sundquist and Whats-His-Name, Li'l Sundquist, will run an effective and intelligent UC with all the quality that we expect from blah blah blah blah blah.

ROY WILLEY & NICK SNOW. Immediately disqualified because they used "Baba O'Riley" by the Who in their campaign video. I'm serious. I cannot vote for these guys for the same reason I do not watch CSI or any of its spinoff programs: because what our media has done to The Who is just inexcusable. They have taken one of the giants of classic rock, a band that deserves to be considered on the same level as Zeppelin and the Stones, and reduced them to a goddamn commercial cliche. Come on! That hair-raising yell at the end of Won't Get Fooled Again -- that's supposed to be a amazing cathartic release after seven minutes of Pete Townshend noodling on the synthesizer, and instead CSI: Miami turned it into a slogan on the same level as the "Oh yeah!" from the execrable Entourage theme. You know what? Let's move on.

FRANCES MARTEL & LEO ZIMMERMANN. Frances has a long history of writing hilariously whacked-out shit about Communists for RedIvy (I wish you guys would post more! We need material!), and both she and her reluctant anti-running-mate Leo have a demonstrable record of being awesome. As evidence I submit these two recent quotes -- Frances, on GOP-Open tonight:

The only thing I'm "reeling in disappointment" about is that humanity has to deal with your existence, and that because you go to this school there's a chance your tripe will be propagated to the masses. Oh, and I've never "casually lobbed" an insult at you that didn't come from the bottom of my heart, Mr. Lacaria.

And Leo in their Crimson profile:

When Zimmermann is asked if he would be excited if he won, his face reveals no emotion.

“In a sense,” he responds, staring down at his plate.

When urged to elaborate, he adds: “I’d be neurologically stimulated in the sense that it would make a response.”

This is clearly the kind of leadership our student body needs. Thus, I wholeheartedly endorse the Martel-Zimmermann ticket, and I urge you not to vote for them -- because these people are way, way too cool to send into the hellhole that is our UC. Frances and Leo must be saved from themselves. (And I'm pretty sure their campaign is just a well-choregraphed joke anyway, though you never know around here.) So friends, I aks you to follow my lead, and DON'T VOTE FOR THE MARTEL-ZIMMERMANN NON-JUGGERNAUT -- if we can win over enough hearts and minds in the next four days, maybe after all these years we'll finally be able to accomplish nothing on this campus!

...So that's where I stand. But to turn to a more serious and analytical perspective: this race is consistent with a number of things I've observed about the Harvard student body and its (often perverse) social structures. These patterns have shown up in both this race and last year's; I was too intelligent new to pay much attention to the 2005 race that gave us Haddock-Riley, but I wouldn't be surprised if that one was much the same. Here's what I think (over the jump):

Read more »

Apple Products: Still Garbage

Let's depart from politics for a second. I'd just like to say the following:

"HA HA HA HA HA."

I have contended from the beginning that Apple, the company responsible for the Mac (which is incorrectly referred to as a "computer"), exists in its own little cultlike fantasy world and rarely corresponds with any form of reality. When it does, such as in potentially useful products like iTunes, it insists on its own Holy File Formats and its Purifying DRM Rituals so it cannot be polluted by outside influences. As a result, like most things produced in isolation by religious zealots, Apple products applied to the real world are weird and shoddy.

Still, I was surprised to see that Safari's inexplicable port onto Windows crashed and burned so quickly -- my God, less than two hours. And look at the stupid-ass way they did it:

Apple's Web site touts, "Apple engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one." As Larholm explained on his blog, that may very well be correct: Its engineers obviously designed Safari to take advantage of security protocols in the OS X operating system, as evidenced by function calls to those protocols Larholm located inside the source code for the Windows version - calls which would obviously go unfulfilled.

Yes. Apple programmers forgot what platform they were writing for. Insert the slow clap here.

It's symbolic of Apple's basic problem: self-indulgence. All their programs -- iTunes and QuickTime particularly come to mind -- are bloated behemoths clogging all your RAM with unnecessary features and graphical swirls, and remarkably prone to crashing. Their products are almost sickeningly slick, elevating design over functionality and jacking up the price in the process. Their technical support (such as it is) fully expects you to replace your product wholesale if you so much as get some dust in it, and they expect you to do it smiling. They are the DMV of computers.

This cannot last. I say the empire of Apple and Macintosh is a house of cards; outside the niche market of graphic & video design (at which Mac products do excel, so long as you can comprehend their terrible OS and deal with those useless one-button mice), their products have no place in the market; they've lasted this far riding good advertising, gullible buyers and a system that locks you in once your files are there. Free-market capitalism may be flawed but it's not that flawed.

So put me down for a prediction that the launch of the iPhone, their latest boondoggle, will be the one where everything finally snaps. Because while people will tolerate Apple's ego, and their products' pathetic attempts at functionality, in luxury items like music players and desktops -- they are "cool", after all, and one must suffer for fashion -- they cannot put up with this in something so key as a phone. If your phone breaks, you're fucked.

And the iPhones WILL break. Oh, will they break. A product this ambitious? My God, think of how fragile your iPod is, now multiply that by five and add in software issues. Damn thing is a recipe for disaster; it'll scratch, it'll crash, it'll wipe out your data, it'll give you 20 minutes of battery life on a good day or heat up in your pocket like charcoal on a grill. And once it breaks you'll have to go through Apple Purgatory while they either ship it to Cupertino or make you buy a new one for full price as you yell at those blank-faced Apple Store androids -- during which time, you will have no phone. Enjoy that.

No, the time has come for Apple's reckoning. Just you watch. Within six months there'll be angry mobs outside Apple stores waving iPhones with those annoying frowny faces on them, screaming "REFUND!" The publicity empire Steve Jobs has crafted will collapse, and their stock prices with it. Apple will lose its credibility among consumers, sell off QuickTime to Macromedia, Amazon.com will usurp the online music sales market, the iBook will go the way of the Dodo, and within five years we'll all go back to using Microsoft Windows the way Jesus wanted us to. The end.

...I promise I'll go back to writing about politics later this week.

TREMENDOUSLY IRONIC UPDATE (6/14): Less than 36 hours after I posted this, my PC's registry got corrupted somehow and I can no longer boot Windows on my home laptop. Tonight I'm planning an intimate evening with the Windows XP Recovery Console, or failing that, Linux installation. A man of less intestinal fortitude might take this as a wake-up call -- but I am no such man...

LESS IRONIC BUT STILL RELEVANT UPDATE (6/18): One reformat later I am up and running with Ubuntu Linux -- and pardon me for being evangelical but I wholeheartedly recommend it for everyone. It's better than Windows and Mac OS on every possible scale; more efficient, more customizable, better design, better security; plus everything -- every program, every upgrade, all of it -- is free. Download it, you can try it on a Live CD without ever touching your hard drive. Goddamn am I happy with this thing.

Double Take

So I was reading RedState, as I often do before bed. (The stupidity is so overwhelming that my brain just quits, and then I can sleep like a baby! Better than Lunesta!) And amid the usual mind-blowing absurdities (apparently a "McCain-Lieberman ticket would bring back the majority support for the war"), my interest was caught by one piece: a post titled "The Democrats' Reality Crisis". Frontpaged. Here's the argument:

Speaker Pelosi has said that she feels “sad” that the President says al-Qaeda is operating in Iraq. Just last week, Steny Hoyer said “The Administration and Congressional Republicans now disingenuously claim that the fight in Iraq is primarily against al-Qaeda,” before back peddling in front of another audience. Senator Harry Reid has said (what hasn’t Harry Reid said?), “We have to change course [away from Iraq] and turn our attention back to the war on al-Qaeda and their allies.” And John Murtha has said, “We cannot win this… al-Qaeda is a small part of this.” The current issue of the New Republic takes a deeper look into their troubling words.

People across America should call their offices and ask whether they actually believe the claims they are making – because if they claim that they do - one of two things must be true. They are either intentionally misleading Americans about the reality in Iraq for political gain or they haven’t a clue about what is actually going on the ground in Iraq.

OK, fair enough, RedState. You contend that Democrats, in arguing that Al Qaeda is not the primary problem in Iraq, are incorrect. I presume that after the jump you'll provide evidence for this interesting claim?

Are they are so far removed from the reality of the world we live in that they think al-Qaeda is an entity that operates in dozens of other nations in the world except in the place that Osama Bin Laden has called “the center of the war” with America?

It is being reported that the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, has been killed today. Do these Democrats think al-Masri wasn’t really operating in Iraq, he was just vacationing there? Their statements beg the question.

We have young men and women paying the ultimate price for freedom in Iraq, fighting a battle against radical Islam for our children the future of our nation. Meanwhile, the Democrat majorities in Congress – knowing that they can’t force the President and Republicans in Congress to surrender in Iraq - are simply trying to score political points with their liberal base by exploiting the most serious threat to freedom loving nations on earth.

Um... well, leaving aside the note that al-Masri may not be dead after all, I feel obligated to point out that Democrats aren't arguing that Al Qaeda is not in Iraq. In fact one of our key arguments against the war is that it exacerbates the terrorist problem in Iraq. Just read the quotes above, for heaven's sake, and you'll note that they describe Al Qaeda as a "small" part of the conflict -- our focus is on the fact that Iraq contains issues greater than and separate from Islamist terrorism (viz: civil war), a fact that goes entirely uncontested in the piece. Which renders the whole thing nonsensical.

Basically, this is a blatant straw-man argument that doesn't even stand up to the immediate scrutiny of a sleep-deprived 19-year-old. Big deal, right? It's just RedState. But then I glanced back at the author of this garbage, and I saw--- no, no, it can't be---

"Congressman Jeb Hensarling."

Yes. This bilge was written by a member of the United States Congress.

(Pause while I attempt not to shoot myself in the face.)

...I'm not sure who exactly should be more insulted here -- Congressman Hensarling, at the fact that his writing doesn't even pass muster on a shitty blog, or the United States of America, at the fact that we pay this man. We pay him money. Good Lord...

I have to wonder, if this is the logic Republicans are really capable of employing when it comes to Iraq, whether there's even any point in engaging them. Certainly Bush's obstinate veto is not a positive sign. They seem, as I've previously argued, impervious to logic; it becomes increasingly clear every day that the Iraq problem cannot be solved as long as Republicans have a hand in it. Period.

But it's not healthy to focus too much on these partisan things. Don't you know there's a War on Terror going on, and we must be serious and civil about it. There is no room for political gamesmanship in these matters, like Joe Lieberman says. Etc, etc, fucking etc.

-----------------------UNRELATED: Be sure to come to the Stand For Security rally today at 2:30 outside Holyoke Center. Additionally, the Dems will be having a solidarity fast on Friday, and an event that day at 1:00 outside University Hall. (I actually can't make it to the Friday thing, ironically enough because I have to be at my job, but everyone who can make it should really come out.)

Seriously, Crimson? Seriously?

Editorial, today:

[T]here is no way to extend dining hall hours without increasing the $4,618 per semester board fee paid by each student... We’re willing to pay a bit more for better service, and we’d hazard to guess that a vast majority of students would agree... We could stick with the current system, and continue to complain about irrational and restrictive mealtimes indefinitely, or we could bite the bullet, pay the cost, and reap the benefits.

Yeah, because you know, we don't pay enough in tuition. Hell, why don't we hike it up to 80 grand and get every student a personal valet? That'd be nice, wouldn't it? Go Harvard!

For Chrissake, we're already shelling out exorbitant amounts of money in order to have waffle-makers with the Harvard logo on them. The Shuttle buses have custom-made upholstery with that crest in a repeating pattern. This place uses $100 bills for goddamn wallpaper, and the editorialists want to increase our tuition so some pampered rich kid can have his Baked Ziti at 8 PM? Meanwhile we can't pay our security guards or biolab workers a decent wage? Get the fuck off my lawn.

I'm all for extending dining-hall hours. But we already have an insanely luxurious cafeteria system compared to every university ever; and unless the Crimson editors want to pay for it themselves from their magical Plympton Street Money Tree, raising costs for an expansion is just absurd. It's things like this that make we wonder just how in-touch our Prestigious Student Newspaper really is; we don't all have trust funds, you know.

Keep your shirts on...

...we're almost there. 24 hours from now, we should already have a fairly good idea how things are shaping up. For the ardent election-watchers, Evans-Novak has a helpful chronological breakdown of when the various House races close (though don't bother with the actual analysis, it's startlingly bad. RI-Sen leans Republican? OK then.)

And of course, you can get the latest returns all night on WHRB, 95.3 FM in greater Boston and streaming live online, where Wes Oliver and I will be anchoring a full slate of programming. We begin at 6:30, break for the hockey game at 7, and resume coverage around 9:15. Watch for the appearance of our own Eric Lesser -- my only hope is that he can stay sober...

--

One word to those people who are panicking about the tiny late swings in the poll numbers, and you know who you are. That word is: chill. This is a natural correction that is to be expected, and exaggerated by the media (which wants nothing more than to cover a horse race). It has nothing to do with "momentum."

Remember, the vast majority of voters do not have the same slavish devotion to poll numbers as we do. Their understanding of the election, more often than not, boils down to this:

And they are not being demoralized or encouraged by whatever odd numbers McClatchy spits out on Saturday. People's decisions are based on the context of the whole election, and on the state of (gasp!) their actual lives. Which can only benefit us.

I'm off to do some last-minute GOTV phonebanking for Patricia Madrid. Tomorrow I vote here in Cambridge, and then do whatever Deval Patrick needs me to. If everyone else pitches in as well, we can -- and will -- take this country back.

See you in the new world.