Latest Parries
December 2012
Some Consumer Affairs
I’ve tried to enjoy schlepping water, thinking that it serves to keep us to some human roots.
April 2012
From Nokia N95 to iPhone 4S
Annoyances and upsets with the iPhone 4S have been more than offset by its screen, the silkiness of its surfaces, the camera, and the third-party market for both software and hardware.
February 2012
2001: A Space Odyssey: Dry, Juicy, Linear, Luminous
After they finished watching the Bond movies, I figured the next series John Gruber and Dan Benjamin would discuss on The Talk Show would be Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. But Gruber refused — too personal for podcasting, he said. Disappointed, I rewatched 2001.
January 2012
A Scheme of a Number of Friends
Instead of acknowledging the wisdom of leading from behind, the Right jumped on the Obama administration’s handling of Libya as yet another example of at best incompetence. They lost me there.
October 2011
The Mouse and the Cantilever
Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.
March 2010
Friendship is for Weenies
It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.
Before the Setup
Nobody from usesthis.com has asked me what my setup us, nor is likely to anytime soon. So I’m just going to mouth off here about it. But first, some background.
February 2010
Walter Russell Mead steps gingerly into the Wieseltier/Sullivan imbroglio
On the Leon Wieseltier/Andrew Sullivan spat, Walter Russell Mead seems to want to have his strudel and eat it too.
October 2009
My Hope: Obama’s Change
Defeat in the Olympics bid may focus the mind in the Oval Office where it should be: Afghanistan.
July 2009
At Modi’in Mall
There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. It’s a hot July Wednesday morning. Things are reasonably busy. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown — Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.
I once told Brian when we were reunited as roommates a few years after high school that a moment comes in Richard Strauss’s Till Eilenspiegel when the character is killed and now in his heaven. Brian later castigated me for speaking so definitively in what was merely my fanciful interpretation of music. But it should be clear to what extent things are knowable in the various realms.
A few months back in the Parries known as “Spooked, They’ll Anoint Rudy,” I was quite wrong; Giuliani is long out the presidential race and in retrospect that was perhaps somehow obvious. My argument then was about national security — I thought it outrageous that the authors of the National Intelligence Report executive summary try to shape the political debate by concluding Iran is not a clear and present danger; this report surely signaled to the electorate that the nation’s fibre is under attack even from within and a president strong on national security is still required. As a relatively superficial follower of events however I saw no prominent national security candidate beyond Giuliani. There was of course one, who’d been out on a limb advocating a retooling for victory in Iraq for months if not years before the Surge was finally enacted, and there could have been no stronger national security credential than this.
John McCain seems an American president I’d love even more than the great liberator George W. Bush (most of you just left, I know). Beyond steadfastness and vigor in the prosecution of Islamofascism, he holds a more American position than his party on immigration. As the party of freedom and commerce, Republicans should want to admit anyone wishing to work and become American. If the North American continent is its magnificent body, the Constitution its inspired brain, then immigration is America’s blood. It’s an outrage that immigration’s been halted, that Ellis Island is a museum. America is mostly empty. The United States could double in population — indeed, to compete against India and China, it probably should — and wouldn’t it be good if that population increase was conscious and managed, and thereby diverse, rather than almost completely Hispanic?
Most Republicans don’t seem to want massive and diverse immigration. I accuse them of being country-club Americans, of being fearful protectionists, of hiding behind national security and the building of the border fence with Mexico their desire to keep out the riff-raff and protect their piece of the apple pie. Nonetheless, a few years into a McCain presidency I feel somewhat confident that I’d be able to emigrate to the US.
Contrast that with an Obama presidency, in hock both ideologically and politically to unions, whose basic interest is to protect the privileges of their current members. Generally this leads to wanting to limit the labor supply, and one obvious way to do so is keeping a lid on immigration. Plus, I might wait on the move anyway as I’m not sure if I’d want to move to a country that could be in the grip of the deepest depression since the 1930s and rudderless and helpless in face of an onslaught of intimidation from the Islamofascists.
Just thought I’d lay my cards out here.
Fri 2 Jan ’09 @ 5:30amAdam
Hey, great to get a first comment since the revamp of my web site. And a moderately praising one at that.
Hope you hang around, subscribe to an RSS feed, and we shall all smell the same.
-ASK
Previously
All So Simple
Nextly
Another End of Times
We were runited as roomies seven years after H.S. It lasted for eight months. We were both poor and disillusioned and it generally sucked.
I don’t remember discussing Till Eilenspiegel. But I do remember sitting in my room one evening listening to the album It’s a Shame About Ray, by The Lemonheads, when Adam stopped in to comment on their cover of the Simon & Garfunkel classic Mrs. Robinson. He characterized it as a pointless waste of time.
Years later, I read that The Lemonheads were essentailly forced to record the tune and put it on the album by their record company. They hated it. So Adam deserves credit for knowing at least a certain amount of his shit when it comes to music. He might not have discovered The Georgia Sattelites or received a carton of Mick Jones’s Marlboro Lights, but he’s held his own.
May the Holy Ducks of Strattford shine their love on you all,
BLG