Losing the Narrative By Glenn Loury – March 31, 2008
To my mind, commentary about Obama’s ‘race’ speech in the press has been superficial and overtly, unreflectively partisan. (It was a fine speech, to be sure; don’t get me wrong. This guy is not only a brilliant politician, he’s a genuine intellectual. He has integrity. And, he’s brave, to boot.) Yet, as editorial writers rush to call it “the greatest speech on race since King’s 1963 oration…,” I can’t help but notice how they blithely overlook LBJ’s 1965 commencement speech at Howard University which, to my mind and by any serious historical standard, was easily a more important and historic statement. Johnson’s speech was, after all, a statement which had and still has consequences, in terms of major institutional reforms embodied in our nation’s laws and practices, affecting the lives of many millions of people over the span of two generations. (But, then, the Obama enthusiasts have successfully implanted the idea that it is somehow ‘racially insensitive to recall that LBJ’s skills, vision, courage and compassion were absolutely indispensable in bringing about the progress we all take for granted today…)
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The 200-mph supercar, basically a Porsche Motorsport version of the 911 Turbo, is all the scarier for its effortless ways.
RUMBLE SEAT
2008 Porsche GT2: Brute almighty By Dan Neil, April 2, 2008
You may recall from your psychology classes the name Harry Harlow, a controversial researcher known for his wire monkey-surrogate mother experiments. One group of baby rhesus monkeys was taken away from its mothers and given a maternal figure made of terry cloth; another group was given a figure made of just bare wire. These experiments demonstrated the famous Harry-Harlow-was-a-toolbag principle.
In Porsche’s laboratory, the relatively luxe 911 Turbo (what with its padded seats and all) is the terry-cloth monkey and the new GT2 — stripped utterly to its essentials, inhospitable, a harsh mockery of the comforts of the automobile — is the wire monkey. To love the GT2 is to embrace its malign indifference to your well-being. To cuddle one is to feel the cold bite of steel against your cheek. Mommy, why won’t you hold me?
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LJ, that would be my wife, says Bill Clinton is trying, at least subconsciously, to sabotage Hillary. I believe the opposite, that he just really, really wants her to win so he could burnish his legacy.
He’s never forgiven Al Gore for throwing away a gold-plated opportunity (if you don’t count the fact that Gore won and the Supremes took the presidency from him) to become president.
But incidents like this, of which there have been too many this primary and caucus season, lend credence to LJ’s position.
The Democratic National Committee do an about-face and ratify the fraudulent Florida primary, in which case, Michigan’s even more fraudulent primary results would also be accepted. Need I remember anyone that Sen. Clinton, (D-NY), won both those states.
Howard Dean and Florida’s elected officials are trying to figure out a way to do this now.
And the next presidential primary and caucus seasons will be even more chaotic. I mean, Michigan were supposed to follow party rules. They thumbed their collective noses at those rules and there’s no consequence.
Analysts: iPhone shortage is 3G precursor by Stevie Smith – Apr 3 2008
Prior indicators would suggest the network enhanced 3G iPhone is on track for a retail arrival some time during the coming summer, but a growing shortage of the original, slower EDGE model have led to a rush of speculation regarding that scheduled release.
More pointedly, the ongoing depletion of iPhone stocks across the United States has prompted a wave of rumour suggesting that the enhanced 3G model could take retail stores by storm as early as next week.
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Stop watches? Are they kidding? I didn’t even know they have a journal like this.
Sex Therapists: a Few Minutes Is Best By MEGAN K. SCOTT
NEW YORK (AP) — Maybe men had it right all along: It doesn’t take long to satisfy a woman in bed. A survey of sex therapists concluded the optimal amount of time for sexual intercourse was 3 to 13 minutes. The findings, to be published in the May issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine, strike at the notion that endurance is the key to a great sex life.
If that sounds like good news to you, don’t cheer too loudly. The time does not count foreplay, and the therapists did rate sexual intercourse that lasts from 1 to 2 minutes as “too short.”
Researcher Eric Corty said he hoped to ease the minds of those who believe that “more of something good is better, and if you really want to satisfy your partner, you should last forever.”
I mean, honestly. After all these years of drinking water because they tell me it’s good for me. Never mind, they say now:
Research debunks health value of guzzling water By Will Dunham, Wed Apr 2, 2008
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The notion that guzzling glasses of water to flood yourself with good health is all wet, researchers said on Wednesday.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb and Dr. Dan Negoianu of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia reviewed the scientific literature on the health effects of drinking lots of water.
People in hot, dry climates and athletes have an increased need for water, and people with certain diseases do better with increased fluid intake, they found. But for average healthy people, more water does not seem to mean better health, they said.
Their scientific review, published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, is the latest to undercut the recommendations advanced by some experts to drink eight glasses of 8 ounces (225 ml) of water a day.
Jim Sleeper got me. We’d had our debates all those years ago but I was always fond of him. So, when we had our disagreements, it was a disagreement. I figured he believed what he believed and that was that.
But when we had lunch recently, after having been out of touch for several years, he intimated to me that he’d changed his mind about some of his old positions. He was not explicit and I did not challenge him. That would have been rude.
Mr. Sleeper has a piece at TPM Cafe now that absolutely blows me away. This is the thing. He was always a thinker, seriously assessing problems that afflict our society, especially when it comes to race, and the mind-bending ways that we go about not solving them.
Constraining us all to define our citizenship and even our personhood more and more by race and ethnicity in classrooms, workrooms, courtrooms, newsrooms, and boardrooms, today’s liberalism no longer curbs discrimination; it invites it. It does not expose racism; it recapitulates and, sometimes, reinvents it. Its tortured racial etiquette begets racial epithets, as surely as hypocrisy begets hostility. And it dishonors’ liberals’ own heroic past efforts to focus America’s race lens in the 1950s and ’60s, when conservative pieties about color blindness concealed monstrous injustices.
— Introduction to Liberal Racism, Jim Sleeper, 1997
In his TPM Cafe piece, he was taking a measure of Shelby Steele, a man I have no respect for but for whom, Mr. Sleeper, once upon a time, had high regards. Steele came out with a book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, right before the presidential primaries and caucuses began.
His dismantling of Steele is so deeply thought out, so complex, yet methodical that it would not do justice to try and quote any passage without taking it out of context. It is a great read.
Some of Mr. Sleeper’s books, The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream, are available at Amazon.com. He wrote so well (and still does) about these issues that we really ought to go back and re-read what he said and reassess some of his observations about our society, our culture.
A good place to start, at least until you receive your books from Amazon, is Mr. Sleeper’s website at jimsleeper.com.