Month: August 2012

1) As more than one commentator has noted: can you imagine the outrage if a Democratic candidate who never served in the military announced a VP pick who never served in the military – from the deck of a battleship?

2) Also as more than one commentator has pointed out: this is the first ticket in American history without a Protestant. LDS and Catholic. In a way, this is a tribute to how things have changed – tribal loyalties have shifted and political team trumps everything else on the right. Because if you’d run a Mormon and a Papist thirty years ago down South, that campaign would have been deader than fuckin’ fried chicken…but in 2012 the Romney/Ryan bill will sweep the Deep South states without a fight.

3) More amazing (and personally gratifying to me) is that even though the Republican platform could not be more intrinsically Southern if you dipped it in buttermilk and fried it in pig drippings, this is the second consecutive election in which neither ticket will feature anyone even tangentially Southern. The last time this happened unambiguously was 1920-24, a time when there was no such thing as a GOP down South and when the national Democrats were still on the run from “rum, Romanism and rebellion”. 1968-72 was ambiguous; Spiro Agnew was from a former slave state that never seceded, Tom Eagleton was from Missouri (even if he only lasted a few days on the ticket), and George Wallace actually won states as a third-party candidate (the last man to do so) so there was still a decisive Southern politician in play for ’68.

I say all that to say this: sixteen years ago, the core of my proposed dissertation in political science was the proposition that Southern politics were being nationalized, especially on the right. And now look at the GOP platform and its commitments: loudly partisan and patriotic, anti-taxation, pro-business, opposed to government expansion, dismissive of public services when not outright taking the “root hog or die” position on things like Medicare and Social Security, fiery in its advocacy for radical individualism, leavened with a lot of sotto voce racism in its treatment of minorities, explicitly religious, and ripe with personal attacks and deliberate opprobrium with a casual regard for truth…this is basically the essence of Southern campaigning for the last century, almost from the moment the Democrats regained the whip hand in the states of the old Confederacy.

And this platform, this mission, this belief system – this is the basis for a campaign by a Mormon from Massachusetts and his Catholic running mate from Wisconsin. Two decades after a couple of guys from Arkansas and Tennessee brought us the New South Presidency, two candidates from the states of Kennedy and LaFollette and out to deliver the Old South version.

I was right. I was dead solid right and I nailed it exactly. The older I get, the better I was. I just hope I’m wrong about the other thing I thought twenty or twenty-five years ago.

Of which, as I say, more later.

4) Last but not least: this is a pick that was met with ecstasy on both sides. For the GOP, Paul Ryan is the 21st century Newt Gingrich: the big thinker whose ideas and genius will tear those filthy Democrats limb from limb. For the Democrats, the prospect of running against somebody who proposes to scuttle Medicare and Social Security, whose deficit-hawk bona fides curiously only appeared once Obama was inaugurated, who is on the record with his admiration for an avowed atheist and wealth-worshipper – the general consensus appears to be “PLEEEEEEEASE DON’T THROW ME IN THAT BRIAR PATCH”.

Romney may yet win this election. But if he doesn’t, there’s a good case to be made that he lost it this morning.

If its really Paul Ryan…well, this means several things:

1) it means Multiple Choice Mitt is in serious fecal arrears with his base, and needs the poster child for the Serious Austerity Right to shore up the faithful.

2) it means a hell of a lot of hue and cry over a budget that apparently enjoys approval ratings similar to herpes…which get worse after people analyze it. It also means that the Ryan Budget will get serious national attention, and they may not be glad it did.

3) it’s a bet – a HUGE bet – that they can buy off baby boomers and get away with shafting everyone under 55. As someone who just broke 40 myself, I’m not exactly thrilled with the idea that I now have to start saving for my own basic health insurance on top of my own retirement – essentially it’s the “ROOT HOG OR DIE” approach to retirement for everyone born after the Eisenhower administration. In other words, a reversion to pre-New Deal ideas of growing old in a world where life expectancy has grown by twenty years or so.

Romney is already in trouble – the Reid-led attacks on his taxes have found the mark and Team Obama is firing for effect. As a rule, when you’re complaining about the fairness of the attacks against you and asking for a truce – of any kind – you’re losing. And with the economy showing signs of life which could improve by November, it’s rapidly beginning to look like this election may turn into a referendum on the future of Social Security and Medicare. And a lot of the country may react negatively to securing the future of the original Me Generation at their own expense.

Besides, Nixon was right: a VP cannot help you, he can only hurt you (and not to be utterly sexist, but She – so far – ruins you). If you’re relying on a VP pick to save your campaign, you’ve lost already. The rest is just scoreboard.

Back to action after a badly needed week off.  The Tahoe portion was just right – some getting away from it all, not just sitting around doing nothing but not pressured to do anything either, and two nights away was just the right amount to leave time to accomplish everything at home – whether that consisted of getting projects done or determining they didn’t need doing at this point.

Not least among the achievements was finally cleaning up the home Mac mini and its iTunes management and backup solution.  The machine was bought in February 2010, but it was the previous model (in an internal Apple new-old-stock clearance) and it’s showing its age, so getting reliable backups set up and a less complicated model for managing iTunes was nice (the wife and I share an iTunes ID but have different content and playlists, and previous attempts to fix and consolidate had left a slew of duplicates and no room on the hard drive to maneuver. Comment if you want details; it’s too boring even for me to recount.)

So hanging out the wash for Monday morning:

* ‘Er indoors is changing jobs.  Which is always exciting and terrifying in similar measure, not least because it means willfully giving up your track record and institutional memory and regenerating, and putting in the necessary time to progress from Rookie of the Year to Most Improved to MVP to The Wolf.  Fortunately, I have absolutely no doubt that she will do it, and faster than I could, because she has a bunch of stupid stuff like “diligence” and “professionalism” and “initiative” and “talent” and bullshit. ;]

 

* The Apple-Samsung saga continues, this time with the extent to which Samsung ripped off iOS wholesale for its own UI – literally its own UI, as Samsung’s Android devices use their own proprietary TouchWiz UI over top of Android’s native interface. Color, graphic elements – it’s absurd. The hits just keep on coming from the media covering the case, too – this article actually does a good job breaking down how even the packaging design abruptly changed after the iPhone hit.  Not that any of this is particularly surprising for those who saw the “Blackjack” and “Blade” launched in the wake of the success of the Blackberry and RAZR.

 

* So another tragic shooting, and this one pretty clearly the work of a white supremacist with more guns than intelligence.  At this point, it’s absurd – James Fallows has the definitive lines, which I will quote in full:

One person who (unsuccessfully) threatened the lives of his fellow airline passengers ten-and-a-half years ago has changed air travel for every single passenger on every U.S. flight in all the time since then. We responded (and over-responded) to that episode with a “this won’t happen again” determination, like other countries’ response to mass shootings. It is hard to know what kind of mass killing with guns would evoke a similar determination in America. The murder of six people including a federal judge and near-killing of a Congresswoman last year obviously didn’t do it. Nor, in all probability, will these latest two multi-death shootings. In their official statements of condolence yesterday, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney replicated their achievement after the Aurora murders: Neither used the word “gun.”

This is where we are at – the media, the elected officials and the very citizenry of this country have been so completely mau-maued by the NRA and its apologists in conservative media that no one will even table the possibility of doing something to impede, however slightly, the ability of one person to obtain military-grade weapons and ammunition and attack without warning.  One hint that somebody might make some sort of secret terrifying Wonka bomb and we’re dumping our drinks out and putting our shoes through the X-ray for years. Two mass killings in a month, enabled by assault weapons, and what are we prepared to do?  Fuckall.

This isn’t difficult. No weapon with a sporting purpose honestly needs more than five rounds between reloads. I’m willing to countenance ten, even.  But I’m having a really hard time understanding why you need thirty shots and instant reload unless you’re deliberately looking for trouble.  And yet, as I say, as long as we remain in thrall to the people who want to need the guns, we’re going to have trouble.  Of which more later.

 

* Mat Honan famously ran into trouble this week when somebody managed to social-engineer a password change out of Apple tech support.  The problem was, since his Google account was sending its backup email to that iCloud mail address, it was a simple matter to get the Google password reset – and from there it was a piece of cake to start wiping his devices.  And because he had his Twitter account linked to Gizmodo’s, once they had a way into his Twitter, they were able to use Gizmodo’s for all sorts of mischief.

The problem with the cloud is the problem of any ecosystem: you need diversity.  You can’t put all your eggs in Apple’s basket, or Google’s, or Yahoo’s or Microsoft’s. A non-trivial chunk of what I do is run on a private system where I married the operator’s sister.  None of my Twitter accounts are linked together (although some do follow each other, what do you want from me).  Large pieces of the system don’t overlap at all – nothing in Google points back to iCloud, nothing in iCloud points to Yahoo, there’s no remote support to fiddle for my private system, etcetera. Diverse ecosystem = robust ecosystem.  If one piece of my operation falters, I have something to fall back on, pretty much across the board.  This is not by accident.

 

* Starting tomorrow, we’ll find out whether “early to bed and early to rise” is going to happen for yer boy.  Fingers crossed.

 

For a long time, I’ve banged the drum for the notion that the only hope for the South will be when everyone for whom segregation is living memory is dead and gone – and quite possibly their kids too (and yes, I know this means me).  The counter-argument has always been that you need that living memory – you need the people who remember what it meant to have separate drinking fountains, the people for whom To Kill A Mockingbird rings dangerously true, the people who can say with authority “no, I know this sounds absurd but it really happened.”

The problem is, having living testimony isn’t worth it anymore. Having people around who want to go back? That’s a much greater impact now.  And it’s spreading, especially now that they’ve discovered an “immigration crisis” to allow them to try to legally crap on brown people and “assaults on freedom of religion” to let them lash back at gay Americans, or even ordinary women who might want preventive care without mortgaging the house to pay for it.  And now that you can show The Other a great big middle finger with the simple expedient of eating the right fast food – has there ever been a more perfectly Teatard demonstration? Ever? – I’m more convinced than ever that the whole alternate reality occupied by the Old Ones is going to be a problem going forward.

And that’s why it’s not worth it.  If nobody who remembers segregation (and wants to go back) is still around, that living memory isn’t going to be all that necessary anyway.  And right now, the Old Ones form far too much of the rank-and-file of the army of delusionals who want things back “the way they used to be” – even if much of it is a figment of the popular imagination.

History and memory are important, but we’ve gotten to the point where the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.