Matins

¶ Maureen Dowd has made up her mind about Gen McChrystal. (NYT)

So the commander in chief can be bad-mouthed as weak by the military but then he can’t punish the military because that would make him weak? It’s the same sort of pass-the-Advil vicious circle reasoning the military always uses.

At Snarkmarket, Tim Carmody suggests that the general had made up his mind. (Snarkmarket)

There’s been a lot of noise about Gen. Stan­ley McChrystal’s Obama-badmouthing can­dor with Rolling Stone, but besides per­haps Col­son White­head (“I didn’t know they had truf­fle fries in Afghanistan”), Andrew Fitzger­ald at Cur­rent has dis­tilled it to its essence bet­ter than any­one on the net: first sub­stance (“Focus­ing on the few con­tro­ver­sial remarks misses the point of this RS McChrys­tal piece. Really tough look at Afg.”), then snark (“Let’s say McChrys­tal is fired… How long before he shows up as a com­men­ta­tor on FNC? Is it months? Weeks? Hours?”).

While We’re Away

¶ How to make people dependent on you, against their own interest: creating a sick system. (Issendai’s Journal; via  kottke.org)

Keep the crises rolling. Incompetence is a great way to do this: If the office system routinely works badly or the controlling partner routinely makes major mistakes, you’re guaranteed ongoing crises. Poor money management works well, too. So does being in an industry where the clients are guaranteed to be volatile and flaky, or preferring friends who are themselves in perpetual crisis. You can also institutionalize regular crises: Workers in the Sea Org, the elite wing of Scientology, must exceed the previous week’s production every single week or face serious penalties. Because this is impossible, it guarantees regular crises as the deadline approaches.

Regular crises perform two functions: They keep people too busy to think, and they provide intermittent reinforcement. After all, sometimes you win—and when you’ve mostly lost, a taste of success is addictive.

But why wouldn’t people eventually realize that the crises are a permanent state of affairs? Because you’ve explained them away with an explanation that gives them hope.

Now that we have the blueprint, let’s take it to work and share!

¶ Nige visits The Book Shop in Wirksworth, Derbyshire — not to for the first time.

On my last visit, I once again saw half a dozen and more books that were hard to resist, but I restricted myself to two titles – George Thomas’s biography of Edward Thomas for myself, and William Maxwell’s Time Will Darken It for my Derbyshire cousin. She, bless her, returned the compliment by buying me two others that had caught my eye – Richard Mabey’s Gilbert White, and R.S. Thomas’s No Truce with the Furies. This collection – the last published in his lifetime – contains his heartfelt, insightful, long-matured Homage to Wallace Stevens, which I pass on…

I turn now
not to the Bible
but to Wallace Stevens.
Insured against
everything but the muse,
what has the word-wizard
to say?

This is the quiet richness of the lucky reader’s life.

¶ A brief history of American payments systems, from cash to PayPal. The entry is actually part of an interblog argument about “interchange regulation,” so skim past the opening blockquote. (Felix Salmon)

Every so often, non-bank players like Diner’s Club or American Express would come up with a bright idea in the payments space, and some of them made good money for their owners. More recently, PayPal took advantage of the fact that, unlike Europe, the U.S. has a very antiquated and expensive system for moving money directly from one bank account to another. (In Europe, it’s as easy as a phone call, or hopping online; there’s no fee.) So PayPal set up shop in the U.S. to facilitate payments directly between individuals, taking a small cut for itself along the way. But PayPal wasn’t an improvement on the simple European system: it was merely an “innovation,” if you want to call it that, born of sclerosis and greed in the U.S. wire-transfer system.

While we agree that AT&T oughtn’t to be in the payments business, the telcos have more experience with micropayments than any other group, and they’d have much to teach a bank that wanted to mine this territory. First, we need a bank to offer PayPal’s services. (TD, anyone?)

¶ At Discover, Ed Yong takes up the riveting linguistic case of Nicaraguan Sign Language, which is not (among other things) a dialect of Spanish.

The grand idea behind all of these singular observations is that as human language evolved, our mental abilities became increasingly entwined with linguistic devices. Those devices are part and parcel of modern language, and thus modern thought. NSL, being a new language, is the exception that proves the rule – as it developed, so did the abilities of those who learned it, from their skills at visualising objects in space to their capacity for understanding the minds of their peers.

Have a Look

¶ God Almighty Action Figure — complete with AK-47! (FAIL)

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 at 10:02 am.