There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
The rise and rise of brand McSweeney’s
Topic: Arts
6:51 am EST, Feb 11, 2008
In less than a decade, McSweeney's has gone from an idiosyncratic literary magazine to a new-look publishing empire. Now, it's the American literary scene’s most astute soothsayer.
What really sets Eggers’s empire apart, though, is that it possesses that most elusive and valued of modern attributes: a brand.
The ideal McSweeney’s reader (or writer) lives in Brooklyn, wearsinterestingT-shirts, has a blog he works on in coffee shops, and knows it’s cool to oppose globalisation but uncool to go on too much about it.
McSweeney’s also strives to be socially relevant. It wants to make the world a better place – or at least more like the cooler parts of Brooklyn.
Second Lieutenant Dave Hagner was tall and smooth-faced, and like many other marines he carried himself in a way that brought his toughness into uncomfortable contrast with his youth. He was twenty-seven, older than the men in the platoon he commanded. During the day he worked out and joked around and daydreamed of the boat he would buy when he left the Marine Corps. It was long and sleek, and probably it would be white. It would whisk him light and free above Hawaiian reefs, chasing marlin, sailfish, sharks. He intended, in retirement, to be an old man by the sea.
At night he put the boat aside, slipped into his body armor, checked his rifle and his radio, his ammo clips and night-vision goggles and safety glasses. He pulled on gloves, pushed in earplugs. If he felt lucky, or unlucky, he would ask aloud how the mission would go and toss into the air an angular stone painted with various prophecies, like the Magic 8-Balls you can buy at toyshops. Fortune found, Hagner led his platoon into the ruined, stinking maze of Ramadi. Quietly they slipped by packs of feral dogs, lagoons of sewage. They stepped around the unexploded mortars and crept under open windows, the soft sounds of whispered Arabic falling over them, the speakers unaware of, or unconcerned about, the passage of armed men. When they reached a certain neighborhood, Hagner’s marines would burst into houses and bring the male occupants to him as they blinked off sleep.
Dyson's review is now freely available through Powell's. An excerpt:
In my opinion, the moral imperative at the end of every war is reconciliation. Without reconciliation there can be no real peace. Reconciliation means amnesty. It is allowable to execute the worst war criminals, with or without a legal trial, provided that this is done quickly, while the passions of war are still raging. After the executions are done, there should be no more hunting for criminals and collaborators. In order to make a lasting peace, we must learn to live with our enemies and forgive their crimes. Amnesty means that we are all equal before the law. Amnesty is not easy and not fair, but it is a moral necessity, because the alternative is an unending cycle of hatred and revenge. South Africa has set us a good example, showing how it can be done.
In the end, I admire von Braun for using his God-given talents to achieve his visions, even when this required him to make a pact with the devil. He bent Hitler and Himmler to his purposes more than they bent him to theirs. And I admire the United States Army for giving him a second chance to pursue his dreams. In the end, the amnesty given to him by the United States did far more than a strict accounting of his misdeeds could have done to redeem his soul and to fulfill his destiny.
This is a little bit inside baseball, but of interest to those who've followedtheOLCsaga.
Of the core group of hearty Neocons, one remains on the job. He is Don Rumsfeld’s lawyer, William J. Haynes II, the DOD’s general counsel. Haynes had his escape plan carefully charted. The president nominated him to be a judge on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. He expected to have his nomination confirmed, and depart for the bench.
However, something got in the way of his plans.
Viewed in perspective, Haynes’s long campaign can be divided into a significant number of skirmishes. He’s lost all of them, and he just keeps getting more bitter. Just looking back over the last year, there have been four high-profile skirmishes, not counting the innumerable battles behind the scenes in the bureaucratic folds of the Pentagon.
... This would be comical if it weren’t also tragic. But it tells us a lot about the current political dynamic surrounding the Neocons in the Bush Administration and how they band together to fight their rear-guard battles.
... The Neocons have burrowed into a handful of powerful redoubts and they maintain close contact with and support one another. Their bastion was once the Defense Department, but they have been pushed to the margins by Secretary Gates. But OLC and Dick Cheney’s office remain their last strongholds. Interesting how they work in tight connection to fend off attacks and mete out retribution against the enemy. And interesting that they consider competent, totally apolitical professional soldiers who refuse to be intimidated and cajoled as the “enemy.”
First, the re-branding. Up next: the business process re-engineering.
The CLCs -- Concerned Local Citizens -- are no longer. Just a week ago ... everything revolved around the CLCs. But now, ... with the amazing speed of an acronym-happy military, I've found out that the new, hot-off-the-presses Iraqi-approved term is "Sons of Iraq." SOI (*) for short. Seems that "Concerned Local Citizen" didn't translate into Arabic so well, and the Iraqis didn't like it.
(*) At the risk of crossing the streams, I recall the following exchange, from Bart on the Road:
Father: Martin, here's $10 to invest in the futures market.
Martin: "Soy! Soy! Soy! Soy! Soy!" Father: "Martin, you're up $1 million." Martin: "Yes!" Father: "And now you've lost all but $600." Father: "You got greedy, Martin."
Another explanation:
The Iraqi government has decided to call members of the Awakening who join Iraqi security forces "Sons of Iraq."
The Awakening Council are members of the Sunni tribes that have declared war on Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
A government source said that the name change came in recognition of the national role of the Awakening members.
The Iraqi Interior Minister announced that it will continue to recruit Sunni tribe members to the police force, subject to the usual checks and examinations prior to joining, until their number reaches 12,000.
If you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, then you have Hollywood's hottest catchphrase.
Every year, we seem to get at least one. "I see dead people." "I wish I knew how to quit you." Anything from Napoleon Dynamite.
This year's latest cinematic must-say comes from There Will Be Blood, the oil drama in which Daniel Day-Lewis delivers a crushing insult to a nemesis with the punch line "I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!"
Any technology that is going to have significant impact over the next 10 years is already at least 10 years old.
Innovation is not about alchemy. In fact, innovation is not about invention. An idea may well start with an invention, but the bulk of the work and creativity is in that idea's augmentation and refinement.
The heart of the innovation process has to do with prospecting, mining, refining, and goldsmithing. Knowing how and where to look and recognizing gold when you find it is just the start. The path from staking a claim to piling up gold bars is a long and arduous one. It is one few are equipped to follow, especially if they actually believe they have struck it rich when the claim is staked. Yet the true value is not realized until after the skilled goldsmith has crafted those bars into something worth much more than its weight in gold.
Friedman wrote that it was a visit to a Toyota Lexus factory in Japan that got him thinking about the importance of weaning the undeveloped world from arguing "over who owns which olive tree" (which is how he characterized matters in the Middle East), and onto a path that might one day allow them to produce luxury cars. He concluded that these countries will need to fit themselves into the "Golden Straitjacket," a regimen of privatization, free trade and low government spending otherwise known as the "Washington Consensus." The path is "not always pretty or gentle or comfortable. But it's here and it's the only model on the rack this historical season."
The irony, the South Korean-born economist Chang notes, is that "the Japanese government kicked out General Motors and Ford in 1939," subsequently bailed out Toyota with public money, and even then, the company failed badly with its first U.S. export attempts in 1958. Yet Japan persevered in its support of the industry, with the result that "today, Japanese cars are considered as 'natural' as Scottish salmon or French wine," but "[h]ad the country donned Friedman's Golden Straitjacket early on, Japan would have remained the third-rate industrial power that it was in the 1960s, with its income on a par with Chile, Argentina and South Africa. ... In other words ... the Japanese would now not be exporting the Lexus but still be fighting over who owns which mulberry tree."
As Chang describes the way it really was, you realize how amazing it is that free market ideologues have been able to shoehorn Great Britain into a free-trade version of world history, given that it rose to economic dominance while building a world empire.
