Pop Sins

Why Is Salon Publishing a 9/11 Truther?

Yuck: 

What concerns me about the repudiation of the Hookers is that the 9/11 Truthers are being tarred with the same “crackpot” brush. Yes, many of the September Eleventh conspiracy theories are implausible, and too often veer, as conspiracy theories unfortunately tend to do, toward the anti-Semitic. But unlike with Sandy Hook, 9/11 conspiracy theories flow from a scientific fact: whatever the 9/11 Commission Report might claim, fire generated by burning jet fuel is not hot enough to melt steel. As with JFK’s “Magic Bullet,” the official version asks us to pretend that the laws of physics do not exist. This opens the door for alternative versions, however ridiculous, that must at least be considered—even if, as was probably the case in the aftermath of the JFK assassination, the cover-up was well-intended, and not the case of an evil shadow government doing evil shadow-government things.

"Maybe when Kennedy has his own personal demons under control he’ll be ready to reclaim his family’s political legacy. Until then, legalizers have to deal with one more high-profile recovering addict who’s working out his personal control issues in public."

— Doug McVay of Common Sense for Drug Policy dings Patrick Kennedy for his anti-pot crusade. 

Remember this password?

After my grandfather died, his children were privately relieved that he had died first. My grandmother managed not just the household, but their finances, to the extent that when my grandfather wanted to buy a new pickup truck in his early 60s, he felt the need to ask my grandmother, as the cost would be more than his weekly allowance. My grandmother in turn did the math and determined they could afford it. OK,  he said. Now what? Now you go to the dealership in Orlando, and pick out a truck you like. You aren’t going to come with me? No, my grandmother said. But she did call ahead to the dealership, where a friend worked, and asked him to take care of my grandfather. 

I recently switched computers and can’t remember all my passwords and now I wish to God that I had someone to call ahead to the Internet dealership and work this all out. 

"Let us set aside the bizarre assertion that marriage has survived until now, as an institution, because it is so fun and that anything that is more fun threatens its very existence."

— Amanda Hess on that scary Atlantic story about how online dating is going to destroy all the marriages. 

When can we have a national conversation about this?

Der Spiegel: 

With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then it was down to three seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each individual pixel on the monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.

Second zero was the moment in which Bryant’s digital world collided with the real one in a village between Baghlan and Mazar-e-Sharif.

Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.

“Did we just kill a kid?” he asked the man sitting next to him.

“Yeah, I guess that was a kid,” the pilot replied.

“Was that a kid?” they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.

Then, someone they didn’t know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. “No. That was a dog,” the person wrote.

They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?

"While many of Obama’s transparency failures concern national security, not all of them do. In October 2011 a panel of science journalists convened at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to discuss the transparency record of federal agencies. After introducing six science journalists, panel moderator Seth Borenstein, a writer for the Associated Press, introduced the representative from the Obama administration. ‘You’ll notice that it is an empty chair,’ Borenstein said."

— I wrote a long, depressing thing about Obama’s transparency record. You should read it.

"Thousands of man-hours went into designing and implementing a program that was useful on one day and one day only, and on that day, it crashed."

— The story of Romney’s incredible GOTV fail in a nutshell.

"For all its intellectual attainments, the Left keeps losing. It simply cannot make common cause with ordinary American people anymore. Maybe this has happened because the Left has come to be dominated by a single profession whose mode of operating is deliberately abstruse, ultrahierarchical, argumentative, and judgmental—handing down As and Fs is its daily chore—and is thus the exact opposite of majoritarian. Maybe it has happened because the Left really is a place of Puritanical contempt for average people, almost all of whom can be shown to have sinned in some imperialist way or other. Maybe it is because the collapse of large-scale manufacturing makes social movements obsolete. We do not know. And none of the accounts under review here get us any closer to an answer."

— Regardless of your politics, Thomas Frank’s essay on the failure of Occupy Wall Street is damn interesting.

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