Until recently, chocolate was usually involved in any desserts described as ‘decadent’. Apparently pumpkin pie is now also emblematic of decay.

Someone wrote in to Glenn Reynolds with a point I’d been thinking about yesterday, and planning to write about today. Speaking of the Obama administration, he wrote:

These people are so steeped in Saul Alinsky that they fail to realize that they were written for people trying to topple the system and mau-mau the flakcatchers. But now THEY ARE the flack-catchers and they obviously never really understood the problems of governing.

Reynolds comments:

Yeah, Alinsky’s a set of rules for annoying The Man. Not much help once you are The Man.

I don’t know whether I’d go so far as to say that Obama & Co. ‘never really understood the problems of governing’, but the rest of this rings true. The Left, and the Democrats in the US in particular, have become something like a dog chasing a car. The dog is just acting instinctively and chasing after anything that moves; he doesn’t really have a plan for what’s going to happen should he actually catch the car.

The Democrats, from 2000 to 2008, blamed all of their problems — hell, all problems full stop — on George Bush. Couldn’t get their policies enacted? It was all the fault of George Bush (spit) and those corporations (spit) and talk radio (spit)!!!11 It’s all just lies and fear that are fooling the people into a false sense of complacency!!!1 so that Halliburton (spit) can get richer (spit)!!1

And so on. Before George Bush, it was just corporations and talk radio and the vast right-wing conspiracy etc.

Some lefties actually seem to understand that their real problem is that the majority of the people don’t like their policies. Once in a while, this slips out, as in these examples from just after the election in 2004, but in general you have to keep this kind of contempt for the electorate under wraps if you want to have a snowball’s chance in hell of actually winning elections.

By spitting at the straw-man enemies of George Bush and Fox News, though, the left was able to forget about, or at least to paper over, its differences; this is how you have a ‘coalition’ that include both billionaire capitalist George Soros and the Berkeley Marxist League. What did they stand for? Well, a lot of things, many of them directly contradictory. But more than anything, they stood for opposition to Bush, hatred of Fox News, etc., etc.; many of the Democrats’ troubles now are the direct result of their confusing this emotion-based unity with genuine agreement.

The left now controls the universities, TV, movies, nearly all major newspapers, NPR, PRI, all TV news except for Fox, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House, and yet you have Valerie Jarrett saying

I think that what the administration has said very clearly is that we’re going to speak truth to power.

Their ideology has become so wrapped up in ’struggle’ and ‘organizing’ against some more powerful force that you wind up with a person with an office in the White House who reports directly to the President of the United States talking about how she and her colleagues are going to speak truth to power. It’s like a tic.

1. Why is there any money in porn? I suspect that there isn’t, at least in ordinary non-weird porn. As it’s becoming clear was true of all old media, the real value the companies were adding was distribution — the printing, marketing, shipping, etc. The porn guys were making money from their printing presses, their videotape duplicators, and the networks of pornography stores that sold the stuff. The Internet has replaced all of that, and so now all you need to produce porn is a pair of tits and a camera.

2. I think that this might be why we might be seeing more… unusual porn.

Let’s say that you’re turned on by the naked female body. There are about 3.45 billion human females in the world; half of them are uglier than average, so figure 1.7 billion better-looking-than-average females. Figure that 20% of these are in the prime porn age range, so there are 340 million good-looking young ladies out there. Even if 90% of them would never, ever pose for pornography, that means that there are 34,000,000 potential porn stars out there. Good-looking young ladies willing to pose for porn are just not a scarce good, when you look at the problem globally.

Scarcer are good-looking young ladies willing to pose for porn while being defecated on, or tied up, or while fucking a dog, etc., etc., etc.; this can be sold at a premium, because there is less competition. Fewer people are interested in this kind of thing, but they’re willing to pay quite a bit more for it.

Ergo the real talent in porn — the people who put a lot of effort into it, and who are dedicated to making serious money from porn — are going to make fetish porn.

3. This has led to two things: a devaluation of porn all together, or porn inflation, e.g. things like widespread mainstream-media coverage of celebrities with their bosoms hanging out, and at the same time a diminution of what you might call respectable mainstream soft-core almost-porn, R-rated feature films that were thinly-veiled excuses to show breasts on the screen. Maybe I’m not paying attention, but this sort of thing seems to have disappeared completely — as you’d expect, because you can see the same thing for free now without having to also sit through what were usually excruciatingly bad movies.

4. And it’s led to a third thing: the belief, among members of the public, that society is getting more and more depraved.

It’s not that; the reality is that while the porn of an earlier age needed to appeal to the widest possible variety of potential customers (in order to provide for the capital expense of printing, tape duplication, etc.), while today’s porn needs to appeal strongly to niche markets (in order to provide for the greater margin necessary in a world where so-called ‘vanilla’ porn is essentially free).

All of this has undoubtedly and unambiguously happened to the porn industry, and the same thing appears to be happening to the news industry. Basic news and commentary is now pretty close to free; it doesn’t cost much to observe an event or to have an opinion, and the distribution cost has gone to $0. We see news fragmenting into niche markets (examples include Fox News and MSNBC each attempting the narrow-appeal route, and the increasingly transparent political bias of Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, etc.; though this will likely work better for Fox and other conservative news organizations because ‘vanilla’ news is already pretty far left), and we see criticism from both the right and left that the news coverage is becoming more ‘polarized’, more ‘irresponsible’, more — dare I say it? Depraved. Just like the zoo porn.

I wonder what industry this phenomenon will hit next. TV shows would be the obvious answer, but while the distribution cost of a TV show online has dropped to pretty close to $0, I think the production of even a mediocre show might still be too capital-intensive.

These idiotic ads for home security systems aren’t anything new, but this one happened to air while I was in a position to capture it.

If you are afraid of such a thing:

1. You’re nuts. Such a thing is only slightly more likely than your house being hit by a meteor;
2. You need a gun, not an alarm.

A National Emergency has been declared by the President of the United States!

Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Since this is — apparently — an actual emergency, you will, presumably, be instructed where to tune for news and official information.

Or, perhaps, not. You’d think that a national emergency would be a big deal, but it according to the Washington Post:

President Obama has declared H1N1 swine flu a national emergency, clearing the way for his health chief to give hospitals wider leeway in how they handle a possible surge of new patients, administration officials said Saturday.

The president granted Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius the power to lift some federal regulations for medical providers, including allowing hospitals to set up off-site facilities to increase the number of available beds and protect patients who are not infected.

Obama said in the declaration that the “rapid increase in illness . . . may overburden health-care resources.” White House officials played down the dramatic language, saying the president’s action did not stem from a new assessment of the dangers the flu poses to the public.

White House officials played down the dramatic language.

White House officials. Playing down the dramatic language.

It is hard to be more White House, or more official, than this guy right here:

And it’s his signature at the bottom of the order, presumably, so if the ‘White House’ thinks that the language is too strong, that would seem to raise the question of why they used that language.

My suspicion is that there’s a law somewhere that allows the President to suspend certain regulations in the event that it becomes likely that a “rapid increase in illness . . . may overburden health-care resources”, but not otherwise, and that the order was drafted to comply with the provisions of that law.

Yet White House officials are playing down the dramatic language. This means that at least one of two things must be true:

1. One or another part of the White House apparatus is being less that totally truthful, or
2. The President does not believe that a “rapid increase in illness . . . may overburden health-care resources”, but he signed an order saying that anyway.

I don’t actually mean to fault Barry O here; I’m more interested in how we got into a state of affairs where doublethink is actually the expected and required thing.

Philip Greenspun writes:

Isaac Newton was a member of the Royal Society, but I don’t remember King Charles II taking credit for the Principia.

Nobody can spell tinotopia, it seems. I find myself giving out my e-mail address over the phone from time to time, and while you’d think that tinotopia would be easy to understand, the truth is, apparently, that it isn’t.

To begin with, for some reason most people really, really want to think that it’s tinopia. And then they don’t actually listen when I spell it. I prepare them for it. I tell them that it’s a nine-letter word, beginning with Tino just like my first name, and ending with topia from the Greek topos meaning place, just like in utopia. I then spell the word: T-I-N-O-T-O-P-I-A. They then read back ‘tintopia’ or worse. Usually several times before getting it right. Not infrequently, I have to resort to having them confirm every single letter before I give them the next one.

Aviation people are even worse. They’re just as bad at everyone else at spelling tinotopia, but they want to use the phonetic alphabet.

The purpose of the phonetic alphabet is to introduce redundancy into the communication when you’re spelling something, or specifying individual letters, over a noisy channel like the radio in an airplane. If you’re sitting at a particularly hairy intersection of taxiways labelled ‘B’, ‘C’, D’, and ‘E’, for instance, and the controller tells you to proceed on taxiway ‘Dee’, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re not going to have any idea which taxiway he wants you to use. So he’ll say ‘Delta’ instead, or ‘Bravo’, or ‘Charlie’, or ‘Echo’.

This sometimes is useful on the phone (plenty of people out there think that ‘tinopopia’ — the land where Tino is Pope, presumably — is a likely option), but when you try it with someone who’d not familiar with the phonetic alphabet, it just creates chaos because they’ll write down tangoindianovemberoscartangoscarpapaindiaalpha.com.

In the case of people familiar with the alphabet, it just results in it taking longer for them to write down ‘tinopia’.

I never knew there was a term for this, but Wikipedia has put me right.

Cultural Cringe

Cultural cringe, in cultural studies and social anthropology, is an internalized inferiority complex which causes people in a country to dismiss their own culture as inferior to the cultures of other countries. It is closely related, although not identical, to the concept of colonial mentality, and is often linked with the display of anti-intellectual attitudes towards thinkers, scientists and artists who originate from a colonial or post-colonial nation.

This seems, at least by this name, to be a specifically Australian thing, but wikipedia also mentions Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. The United States is not mentioned in the article at all, despite the fact that most left-wingers in the USA seem to be horribly embarrassed of the country and its culture.

The Talk page mentions the United States, specifically citing the phenomenon I point out above.

I’ve always thought that, among lefties in the United States, at least, this is related to their general though sporadic abhorrence of nationalism in the wake of WWII, and to their belief that one should not judge another man until one has ‘walked a mile in his shoes’.

The result of these is that any judgement that an American makes about Iran (for instance) is in some ways illegitimate, because the American can’t Truly Understand Their Struggle; while any hateful garbage the same American spouts about fellow Americans is not only legitimate (because the Manhattanite believes that he has in some sense walked in the shoes of the Texan) but serves to prove his anti-nationalism.

I have started accumulating Christmas Media for this year. None of it is really appropriate for at least a month yet, but it takes a while to find interesting things that I don’t already have.

I’m particularly on the lookout this year for Christmas-themed Old Time Radio shows — and Thanksgiving-themed OTR, too. This kind of thing is far harder to find (at least in any organized way) online than one would expect. There are a few torrents out there representing themselves as being holiday-themed OTR collections, but they’re unseeded. Pretty much all OTR content is in the public domain now — they didn’t bother to renew the copyright — but the main distribution channel still seems to consist of people selling CDs of the stuff. Very strange.

I’m also looking for older American TV that deals with Christmas. Another strange thing is that American TV older than about 2002 is nearly nonexistent online, except for things ripped from DVD reissues.

There’s some new parking scheme afoot, says the Washington Post:

The changes underway in Arlington also would allow parking prices to fluctuate depending on demand. Meters would be remotely monitored for parking space usage. The goal is 85 percent occupancy, said Wayne Wentz, the county’s chief of transportation engineering and operations. When it rises, the price will increase from 75 cents to $1.

This actually sounds like a good idea. The whole point of parking meters isn’t — or wasn’t, anyway, when the things were introduced — to raise revenue, but to ensure that parking is available for those who need it. Without parking meters, the space is used more inefficiently.

But:

“It’s sending a signal to drivers that if you’re gonna drive, it’s uniformly going to cost you,” said Harriet Tregoning, the District’s planning director. “We don’t want everyone to think it’s great to drive because parking is free and available.”

So by spending money to manage the supply of and demand for parking spaces, they hope to make parking less available? That’s the intention? How’s that supposed to work? I think pretty much everyone would prefer an actually available parking space for $5 to one that’s available, but only theoretically, for $0.75. Unless you work for minimum wage or near to it, it’s cheaper to drive in and pay quite a bit for parking than it is to take the Metro — particularly if you don’t happen to live within walking distance of a Metro station on the other end of your journey, since that just means that you’ll have to pay for parking at the station.

Tregoning says drivers in the District are long overdue for some tough love: Just 63 percent of city households own a car. The national average is somewhere in the 90s, she said.

The city used to require developers to build four parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet of retail space. Now the standard is one space.

“Now we say to developers, look at the car ownership rate in the neighborhood and do something that’s commensurate,” Tregoning said. When a historic building rehabilitation is under review, planners discourage even a single space for each condo or store.

After they get done with this round of planning and meddling, expect more stories about how suburbanites are avoiding DC because they’re all racists.