Internal Monologue

I present for you digby's reaction to Obama's proposed budget: The main problem with all this, of course, is that he willingly signed a tax cut extension for the wealthiest people on the planet just two months ago even as they are making money hand over fist as it is, so any talk about "shared sacrifice" rings just a little bit hollow now. If he wants to be honest about this and admit that he's catering to spoiled plutocrats and Wall Street Demi-Gods because he truly believes that he needs to sacrifice ordinary Americans on the alter of their egos, that's one thing. But blowing smoke about how this hurts him just as much as the college kid who has to drop out in a terrible labor market --- but he's willing to make the sacrifice and so should we --- well, it is too cynically cheap for words. It is pretty sick that even the Democratic budget proposals involve requiring so much sacrifice from people who haven't gotten a good deal recently. And

One thing that's always bothered me on radio phone-in shows and radio interviews is the difference in audio quality between those in the studio and those talking on the phone. The audio quality on phone connections is really awful. How come Moore's Law doesn't apply here? A quick Google search is unsatisfying: I find a bunch of posts basically say that better quality takes more bandwidth and is therefore more expensive. Duh! But if you look at the bandwidth per dollar I get from my Internet/data connection, and graph it over the last 30 years, you'll see a nice improvement. Not as nice as I feel it ought to be, but probably the right O(n) . Phone service? Flat as far as I can tell. Certainly the fact that my phone is mobile now makes it better than phones I had in 1990, but audio quality seems worse due to the compression algorithms now used. The other day, I was listening to an interview NPR was doing with an Iranian activist who was avoiding phone use to remain anony

(via Anthony on Faceboo k ) Here's great WSJ article on the elaborate lengths protesters had to go not to be stymied by the hated Egyptian internal security forces: They chose 20 protest sites, usually connected to mosques, in densely populated working-class neighborhoods around Cairo. They hoped that such a large number of scattered rallies would strain security forces, draw larger numbers and increase the likelihood that some protesters would be able to break out and link up in Tahrir Square. The group publicly called for protests at those sites for Jan. 25, a national holiday celebrating the country's widely reviled police force. They announced the sites of the demonstrations on the Internet and called for protests to begin at each one after prayers at about 2 p.m. But that wasn't all. "The 21st site, no one knew about," Mr. Kamel said. I didn't know the game was so elaborate, and that the security forces were so good at preventing demonstrations

UPDATE: Mississippi governor and potential Republican presidential candidate Haley Barbour won't denounce this effort . This is not the first time Confederate general and early KKK leader Nathan Bedford Forrest has appeared on Internal Monologue . Now a group wants Mississipi to make available Nathan Bedford Forrest license plates . Dear Sons of Confederate Veterans (the group putting this forward): Please don't do this. Please don't ask to do this. This is a really bad idea. How do your black neighbors feel about this? Why would you want to do that to them? Do you know what the KKK means to people? What kind of hatred and murder and terror it perpetrated? Egad, are you trying to justify all the negative stereotypes people have about The South? Are there not plenty of other ways to honor your heritage and your ancestors? Even if you're just trying to piss off people like me, can you do it in a way that doesn't evoke lynchings and lend a patina of approval to raci

Well, we should mark this day: a nation rose up and (mostly) peacefully threw out its dictator. Or caused such a ruckus that the army forced him out. Or prompted the vice-president to tell the people he resigned (we haven't actually heard Mubarak himself say he's resigning. We got the news from his vice-president). Anyway, everyone agrees he's gone, which effectively means it's true. People in Egypt are ecstatic. Time to celebrate. And time for the US to stop backing his ilk. Let's hope this is the first step to something much much better. But even this step is so important: the idea that if you infuriate the people so much, you can be removed from office. So so so important to have that baseline level of accountability. Even dictators, monarchs, and theocrats who aren't replaced by something better will have to spend some of their energy keeping people happy, if only to preserve their own power. I had no idea that such possibilities were available to Tunisia

...the gods themselves contend in vain. Internal Monologue's Quote of the Day is Adam Gopnik via Daily Dish on the stubbornness of stupidity: In a practical, immediate way, one sees the limits of the so-called “extended mind” clearly in the mob-made Wikipedia, the perfect product of that new vast, supersized cognition: when there’s easy agreement, it’s fine, and when there’s widespread disagreement on values or facts, as with, say, the origins of capitalism, it’s fine, too; you get both sides. The trouble comes when one side is right and the other side is wrong and doesn’t know it. The Shakespeare authorship page and the Shroud of Turin page are scenes of constant conflict and are packed with unreliable information. Creationists crowd cyberspace every bit as effectively as evolutionists, and extend their minds just as fully. Our trouble is not the over-all absence of smartness but the intractable power of pure stupidity, an

Since I can't cut-and-paste text from iTunes App Store reveiws, I'm posting a screenshot. Click to enlarge. Thanks, Scott! I'm so glad you find it useful.