I am occasionally still in the "user support" game. When a user is
experiencing a
problem, it helps to get details. Specifically, instead of "it doesn't
work", an accurate transcription of an error message is nearly always
more helpful in figuring out the problem.
You will probably not be too surprised to learn that such detail can be
tough to get.
I was a little put out when, instead of just typing in the error
message, people started sending me screenshots. What, you can't just
type in what it says, perhaps 50 characters or so?
Instead you have to send me a hundreds-of-kilobytes graphics
file?
But I learned to deal with it. At least it avoids transcription errors.
But today I got a three megabyte file; instead of using
screenshot software, our user took a picture of his screen. Sigh.
I suppose the day is coming when users start mailing me narrated videos
of their woes. Can't wait!
Yet another shakeup in our phony lineup this week. Joe Biden took
himself out of the running, and this allowed Chris Christie and Mike
Huckabee to sneak above our arbitrary 2% probability threshold, according
to
PredictWise.
This is Huckabee's first appearance since August 9.
Not shocking news. (Jonah: "Of course, this wasn’t actually a revelation
any more than testimony from the Secretary of the Interior that, after
extensive study, he can confirm that bears do, in fact s*** in the
woods.")
Also non-shocking (but depressing): the mainstream media's unwillingness
to make Hillary's serial mendacity clear to their readers/viewers.
Jonah's summary: "Protect the Hive Queen!". He links
to
Noah
Rothman's summary
of media coverage at Commentary. His conclusion:
The Benghazi Committee is owed a public debt if only because it has
exposed the decay in Washington’s culture of wagon-circling. Pundits who
forever lament America’s sense of alienation from the political class
and their growing cynicism towards elected elites appear not to notice
when they are exacerbating that condition. While news media and
Democrats are praising Clinton’s performance, Americans are waking up to
the notion that they might have been deliberately misled about the
deaths of their fellow citizens in a terror attack and likely for petty
political gain. There is something rotten here.
Indeed.
Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker mulls on Jeb's campaign woes:
Jeb has presented himself as the most electable Republican candidate:
willing to break with Republican orthodoxy on domestic issues such as
immigration and education, and committed to breaking, if vaguely, with
his brother’s legacy on foreign policy and to being, as he has said, his
“own man.” Before Bush officially entered the 2016 campaign, he remarked
to a group of C.E.O.s at a conference in Washington, D.C., that a
successful candidate had to be willing to “lose the primary to win the
general,” and should campaign “without violating your principles.” He
meant that one must avoid the perennial trap of party primaries, in
which “base voters,” the hard-core conservatives, force politicians to
take extreme positions that will prove unpopular in a general election
and, when later disavowed, expose the candidate as a phony. “It’s not an
easy task, to be honest with you,” he noted. (Hillary Clinton faces a
similar problem in her race for the Democratic nomination.)
Interesting strategy, Jeb: don't be exposed as a phony. How's that
working out for you?
Politico's Seung Min Kim
notes
the tightrope walk by Marco Rubio on immigration: he once favored the
infamous "Gang of Eight" immigration approach, now not so much.
“He’s saying to donors and to Latinos that I’m still for a path to
citizenship, I’m still for immigration reform. But I’ve learned the hard
way” regarding a comprehensive bill, Sharry said. “It’s very clever. It
sounds reasonable. But for people who actually know what it takes to
pass legislation, especially immigration reform legislation, it’s so
hollow. It has all the substance of Cheetos.”
Snarky comment: those people "who actually know what it takes to
pass legislation" didn't actually pass legislation.
Once you discount the article's obvious bias, it appears that Rubio has
actually shifted his position, but doesn't want to pay the price with
pro-"comprehensive" reformers. And the hunk of the electorate
that might agree with his current enforcement-first-then-we'll-talk
stance don't really view his conversion as genuine. It's tough out there
for a phony.
I came a little late to Carl Hiaasen fandom, but since then I've been a
loyal reader. I just no longer buy the hardcovers on publication day.
In fact, I picked this up from our local Barnes&Noble remainder
display and saved a couple bucks over both paperback and Kindle
editions.
Things kick off when a tourist on a fishing expedition off the Florida coast
reels in a grisly discovery: a human arm, middle finger outstretched.
Local law enforcement treats it like a hot potato: nobody wants to
deal with this obvious unfortunate accident.
Disgraced ex-cop Andrew Yates is tasked with passing off the arm
to someone, anyone, who'll take it off his hands.
Andrew is your typical flawed Hiaasen hero: honest, but quick-tempered
with poor impulse control. He's been demoted to restaurant-inspection
duty because—see if you can follow this—the husband of the
woman Andrew had been involved insulted her honor, and
Andrew sodomized him with a vacuum cleaner in front of a few hundred
witnesses.
Anyway, Andrew sees the arm as a possible tool to get his job back.
(Restaurant inspection is a dreadful, disgusting job as paragraphs
of Hiaasenian prose make clear.) Identifying the person to which the arm
used to be attached is pretty easy. The widow, however, is suspiciously
non-grieving. Then people start dying.
Of course, not all is as it seems.
Oh yeah: there's a monkey. And he's not well-behaved. It turns out that
show-biz (Pirates of the Caribbean, specifically) can burn out
animals the same way it does humans.
Not a bad read, but I found myself bemused at the pacing. There's a big
climactic showdown/rescue/revelation … and then the book goes on for eighty more
pages.
Our leader board gets shaken up a bit this week. Both Carly Fiorina and
Chris Christie have dropped below our 2%
PredictWise
inclusion threshold, and Ted Cruz has moved his five-foot-eight frame
in to take their place. This is the first time Ted has broken 2%
since we've been paying attention. So:
Let's welcome Ted by pointing out that—whoa—a lot of web-writers
out there really, really, really despise him. Just click his link
up there and peruse the first few Googled results. For example,
Lynn Stuart Parramore of Alternet writing (a couple of years ago):
"Ted
Cruz Is a Big Phony and A Giant Narcissist".
And a huge poopyhead too, amirite Lynn?
Ted Cruz, the Tea Party darling, fake-filibustered his way into
headlines recently with a 21-hour anti-Obamacare verbal rampage that
simultaneously made his party look stupid and accomplished nothing. It
did, however, spread images of his smarmy mug across televisions and
newspapers around the country, which is the outcome Cruz most ardently
hoped for.
Lots of people think Ted Cruz is a phony. Others are just as sure that
he's among the most genuine politicians in America. He's not all that
different from President Obama that way.
Lewis argues that Cruz sees himself as (in Obama's words)
"fundamentally transforming the
United States of America." Except in a good way.
Personally, I would prefer a candidate who would make the
same pledge as
Rick
Perry made
four years back: "I’ll work every day to try to make Washington, DC, as
inconsequential in your life as I can."
For virtually his entire career, Biden has been a joke and a punchline,
known not simply for dada-esque gaffes but also for cheating while in
law school and, inexplicably, plagiarizing biographical details from a
British politician during a disastrous White House run in 1988. Then
there's the weird stuff during swearing-in ceremonies.
But would Joe be be worse than Hillary? That's a tough call, right?
Hillary tried hard this week
to disguise the motives for her recent flip-flop
on the TPP trade deal as somehow something different than
sheer political expediency. This involved her claiming
she
had perused the current state of the deal when she almost certainly
had not. Fallout:
an
amusing
exchange
with White House Pressdroid, Josh Earnest:
Q Josh, thanks. I want to ask you about Secretary Clinton and TPP.
It’s interesting to me, because I remember back when we were talking
earlier this year about GOP lawmakers who hadn’t seen the Iran deal, for
example, and you were understandably very critical of them for being
against something before they’d actually even seen it, they hadn’t even
read it. And now we have Secretary Clinton who presumably also has not
seen the final draft of the TPP and yet she’s against it, too. And I’m
just curious if you feel like criticism is warranted because she is
essentially doing what a lot of GOP lawmakers were doing earlier this
year. You haven’t seen it, you haven’t read it, and you’re coming out
against it. Seems phony, doesn’t it?
MR. EARNEST: Well, I don’t think that I’ve minced any words in noting
that we have a disagreement on this issue. But for the reasons that she
has arrived at this position, I’d refer you to her campaign.
In other words (actually in one other word): "Yes".
Actor Frank Ridley has a gig with
https://represent.us/, one of
the seemingly endless groups looking to "end corruption".
Ridley plays the role of "Honest Gil Fulbright", a straightforward
pol who will tell you to your face that he's looking to screw
ordinary people over to cater to "special interests."
Honest Gil showed up at the Republican Liberty Caucus meeting
in Nashua NH last weekend; here's his speech:
Did you stay through the whole thing? Yeah, I didn't either. A bit
obvious and heavy-handed.
But here's the funny thing: phony candidate Honest Gil
beat
actual candidate Jeb Bush in the RLC straw poll, getting 1.5% to Jeb's
1.2%.
[Update, September 2022: Amazon link now goes to a renamed edition. Don't know
what's going on there.]
I noticed that the Dimond Library at the University Near Here owned this
slim volume from Glenn Harlan Reynolds, aka
Instapundit. I very much
enjoyed his book
An
Army of Davids
way back in 2006. It's not often you get a chance to read Glenn in
a format longer than his typical blog post.
The book, short as it is, adapts two previous works: one on the
higher education crisis, the other on K-12 problems. In both cases,
there
is a theme of unsustainability, and not the mushy kind that
environmentalists prattle about. Glenn's favorite saying is
(Herbert)
Stein's Law:
"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
There are any number of trends in the US education "system" that can't
go on forever. At the college level, costs keep increasing, along with
the debts incurred by victims students. Yet the
outcomes remain mediocre, with graduates moving on to unemployment and
underemployment. (The problem is especially bad in law schools,
apparently: they produce far more graduates than the market can bear.)
At the K-12 level, things are similar: ever-increasing costs,
never-improving actual education. The stranglehold of government
on schooling at this level is greater, and (hence) the problems
are less tractable. Still: Stein's Law. It's hard to see how
things can continue this way.
So, what's predicted for the "new" school? Glenn's outlook is kind of hazy.
It would be nice if we got away from the Procrustean ideal: one size
fits all, all students moving through the same curriculum in the same
time in the same way. To a certain extent, technology offers a (partial)
way out: cheap courses that can be taken on your own schedule. If one
course (say) in Python programming doesn't fit your learning style,
you can move on to a different one.
Glenn is an engaging writer, but the book doesn't offer much in the way
of new observations. At least for insights about the
future of college education,
I'd recommend
Kevin Carey's
The
End of College instead.
Pun Salad took a small hiatus to check out Nashville, Tennessee last
week, but we're back again, and plenty of phoniness has gone on
in the interim.
There are no changes to our
PredictWise-based
lineup. Carly Fiorina proved to be a one-week wonder at the top of the
phony charts; Jeb resumes his usual position in first, with Hillary
nipping
at his heels:
Note: today's image is just one of the many results
gettyimages
returns when searching for "distrust". Something about it
appealed to me… but I can't put my finger on it.
Phoniness is a perennial pundit topic; when you can't think of anything
to write about, and a deadline approacheth, you can always write
about authenticity at least once every campaign season.
NYT writer (and Dartmouth prof)
Brendan Nyhan grabbed that life preserver
a few days ago:
"Hillary
Clinton’s Authenticity Problem, and Ours" Is Hillary really all that
phony?
In reality, all
politicians are strategic
about the image and behaviors they present to voters. Some just hide
the artifice better than others.
Prof Nyhan's article contains no points we haven't seen (and linked to)
before, but it's link-filled as befits his even-handed academic take.
He glosses over the particular manifestation of Hillary's phoniness: she
does a very poor job of masking her lust for political power.
Another professor, Greg Mankiw of Harvard, illustrates our thesis
with a concrete example: Hillary's recent flipflop on the TPP trade
deal: for it before she was against it. Prof Mankiw notes that
most economists favor freer trade, and a lot of them have come out
in favor of TPP. But a lot of economists (especally in academia) are
also Democrats. The obvious question:
So, will those economists who like Clinton start to turn against her? I
doubt it. My guess is that most of them don't believe what she is now
saying. They expect that once she moves back into the White House, she
will return to the moderate view of trade deals that her husband
championed. In other words, they are counting on her being
untrustworthy. If they had reason to doubt her mendacity, then they
would start to worry.
Possible new slogan for the paraphernalia on sale
Hillary store: "Trust
her, she's lying."
Jonah Goldberg's column is similar in theme and tactfully
headlined:
"Flip-Flops
Show Hillary’s Long on Ambition, Short on Principles". I would have
gone with the first-paragraph zinger: "little more than political
ambition wrapped in a pantsuit." Jonah reminds us that TPP is just the
latest:
In fact, finding evidence that Clinton operates this way is like looking
for evidence that fire is hot. In 2008, when it was in her interest,
Clinton was against federal “blanket rules” on guns; now she’s making
extra-constitutional gun-grabbing the centerpiece of her campaign (at
least this week, while a recent mass murder is still fresh in our
memories). She long opposed same-sex marriage on principle, until the
times required a new position. She initially thought the undercover
videos of Planned Parenthood were “disturbing.” But within 48 hours, she
was a stalwart defender of Planned Parenthood. As more — and more
disturbing — videos emerged, she grew more adamant that the outrage
wasn’t the fetal organ harvesting, but the videos exposing them.
… and that's just the start.
Fox news personality Greta Van Susteren offers:
"Free
debate advice for Secretary Hillary Clinton: don’t be a phony".
Strikes us as advising water not to be wet, (as Jonah notes) fire not
to be so hot, or uranium nuclei to
try to get along with fewer protons. But:
“Tell us your views without careful hairsplitting to avoid taking on
President Obama where you disagree or where you might disagree with
certain segments of your party. In other words, blunt, straight talk –
whatever it may be.”
Can you imagine what that would sound like?
If she were restricted to "blunt, straight talk" revealing her inner
thoughts and core values, ungilded, unframed? Here's my take:
"I want to be president."
I think that's about all she could say. Over and over, until her time
was up.
Thomas Sowell has—count 'em—a
one,
two,
three
part set of columns written around the theme of "Charlatans and Sheep".
Although none of our current candidates are mentioned, this is worth
keeping in mind anyway:
One of the secrets of successful magicians on stage is directing the
audience's attention to something that is attractive or distracting, but
irrelevant to what is actually being done. That is also the secret of
successful political charlatans.
Consider the message directed at business owners by Senator Elizabeth
Warren and President Barack Obama -- "You didn't build that!"
Assuming for the sake of argument that a man who owns a business simply
inherited it from his father, what follows? That politicians can use the
inherited resources better than the heir? Such a sweeping assumption has
neither logic nor evidence behind it -- but rhetoric doesn't have to
have logic or evidence to be politically effective.
OK, those are the charlatans. The sheep? Those who are gullible enough
to buy the spiel. I.e., way too many of today's voters.
I was in Nashville, Mrs. Salad was off to her meeting, and I was
unenthusiastic about going to yet another money-sucking tourist trap.
Nashville, bless its pecuniary heart, doesn't seem to have a lot of free stuff
to do. Even its
replica
of the Parthenon will set you back $6.
So I went to the movies. Only slightly more expensive than the Parthenon,
even when you splurge, as I did, on 3-D.
The plot is simplicity itself: a Martian exploratory mission finds its
survival threatened by a surprise sandstorm which threatens to tip over
the rocket they plan to use to get off the planet. So they need to leave
in a hurry. But the storm rips off their communication antenna, which
careens into hapless botanist Mark Watney (Matt Damon),
carrying them both off into parts unknown. The remaining crew decide
that Watney is certainly dead, and take off.
Why did they take a botanist to Mars anyway? The book's in my
TBR pile, so maybe that's explained there.
But (guess what?) Watney's not dead. But it appears he might as
well be: his supplies will run out long before there's any hope
of a rescue mission from Earth. His only hope,
as
he puts it: "I'm gonna have to science the shit out of this."
What follows is a tour de force of scientific resourcefulness,
sacrifice, and bravery. Adding to Watney's efforts, the
bureaucratic/scientific maneuverings at NASA/JPL and the returning
crew's ship are portrayed, far more interestingly than I would have
thought possible. (And it's genuinely funny in a number of spots.)
All in all, thoroughly enjoyable.
Matt Damon probably couldn't even cook a potato in real life, but he
(sorry) acts the shit out of this role. (Everybody else is fine too, but
no question: this is Damon's movie.)
The movie is also amazingly realistic:
I know (slightly) better, but I
can see how some people thought it was (a) based on a true story
and/or (b) shot on location.
Another Kindlized Michael Connelly book read during the
ordeal that is modern air travel. (It was $2.99 when I got it
at Amazon a few years back, a deal that is no longer available.)
Defense lawyer Mickey Haller has fallen on tough times. Prosecutors
have become much more successful at avoiding expensive criminal
trials, his usual bread and butter. So he has altered his professional
course,
shifting into defending underwater homeowners against foreclosure
on their homes.
It's the Little Guy™ against greedy, sleazy banks! Never mind that
Haller bills almost as much money from his clients than they owe their
creditors!
But one of Haller's clients, Lisa Trammel, is accused of the
grisly murder of a executive of the bank holding her mortgage.
Mickey immediately shifts back to criminal defense mode; in addition,
he gets Lisa to assign him representational
rights to whatever eventual TV movies
or best selling books are produced by this lurid
ripped-from-the-headlines case. (Mickey is all about getting paid,
and he's very unsentimental about it.)
Lisa is dreadful: self-promotional, self-regarding, self-dramatic
and generally whiny.
But did she do the deed? Mickey keeps telling himself
and his co-workers that it doesn't matter: he just
has to find a credible alternate hypothesis of the crime
to instill a reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors.
It's another fine page-turner (or Kindle button-pusher)
from Mr. Connelly. The outcome of the case
causes Mickey to make a life-changing decision
at the end. Will it work out? I guess we'll see in the next book!
I picked up the Kindle version of this book a couple years back
for the sweet price of $2.99, but it languished in my cybernetic
to-be-read pile. It turned out to be ideal reading on my recent
trip to Nashville. (The Kindle is a godsend to easily-bored
travellers.)
A heinous murder committed a quarter-century ago put Jason Jessup
in the slammer. But modern technology allows DNA analysis of
evidence from back then, and—oops!—it tends to exonerate Jessup.
Instead of letting Jessup go free, the
state decides to go for a new trial.
And they manage to wangle defense lawyer Mickey Haller over to
their side to lead the prosecution.
In a welcome development, Mickey demands the state provide
an investigator of his choice: half-brother Harry Bosch. (This is
nearly a 50/50 Bosch/Haller book, a gimmick that worked for me.
FBI profiler Rachel Walling also makes a significant appearance.)
The case has plenty of dramatic twists and mysteries. But
there is never any doubt that the Bosch/Haller combination
will eventually reveal the actual murderer.
Apparently the antepenultimate entry in Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone
series. Assuming I'm not forgetting how the alphabet works and haven't
missed some announcement from Ms. Grafton about her post-Z plans.
And the title is, simply, X, not X is for Xenophobia
or X is for Xanthan Gum. That would have been silly. But "X" does
crop up in a couple places here.
Kinsey is multitasking: (a) an (apparently) wealthy woman hires her to
track down a son given up for adoption long ago, who turned to a life
of safecracking and bank jobs, and has been recently released from
prison; (b) the widow of a shady private eye (bumped off in the
previous book) has asked Kinsey to search his leftover files to help
with an IRS audit, but Kinsey discovers some mysterious memorabilia and
an encrypted document; (c) Kinsey's landlord, Henry, gets concerned with
water conservation during a California drought, and new neighbors move
in next door—Henry's his usual friendly self to them, but something
about them raises Kinsey's suspicions.
After 23 entries in the series, I am by now used to Ms. Grafton's
quirks. Most notable is the extreme prose-padding; Kinsey's first-person
narration is full of irrelevant detail. (Example: she reports feeding a Wilshire
Boulevard parking meter four quarters, two dimes, and a nickel for 15
minutes of time.) I suspect—I've probably said this before—that Ms.
Grafton's publishing contract called for at least a 400-page manuscript,
and she just adds stuff here and there until it meets requirements.
Not that this is a big deal, I love Kinsey despite her wordiness.
Can't wait to see what happens in Y and Z.
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