¶ Matins: Andrew Sullivan wonders why the New York Times publishes an Op-Ed piece by a “hard-right neocon” whose views on Iraq were “so terribly wrong.” Mr Sullivan’s colleague at The Atlantic, Joshua Green, wonders pretty much the same thing — vis-à-vis Mr Sullivan himself! (via Brainiac)

¶ Lauds: When I was a kid, shirt cardboard was my all-purpose source of fun; what a drag it was, waiting for my father to wear the shirts when they came back from the laundry. It wouldn’t have made much sense, but if that stiff card stock had been corrugated, I might have grown up to be Chris Gilmour. (via The Best Part)

¶ Prime: The Times has started a new business blog, entitled You’re the Boss. you’re the boss. Because we believe in small businesses at The Daily Blague, we’re going to give it a trial.

¶ Tierce: Laura Italiano overdoes it a bit at the Post, but that’s what they their reporters to do.

¶ Sext: It’s official: dogs are brighter than cats. (Don’t tell our backer that we ran this story, though.)

¶ Nones: Was the United States meddling in the Iranian election dispute when it asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled maintenance shutdown? (And Twitter famously complied.)

¶ Vespers: Now that Penguin is republishing classic thrillers by pioneer Eric Ambler, it’s good that John Self is here to appreciate them ably.

¶ Compline: A thoughtful and interesting piece about abortion? Surely we jest, right? Wrong. Richard Crary surprrises. (But don’t worry, you probably won’t be asked to change your mind.)

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

Oremus…

§ Matins. What both commentators ought to be worrying about is this.

§ Lauds. A grandfather clock: how cool is that? It probably doesn’t work (but it’s set to 10:10, magic time for watch marketers.

Because technical limitations make it inconvenient to run the grandfather clock, here’s Queen Victoria instead.

§ Prime. For the most part, the blog will be written by Times staffers, but perhaps that’s just to get the ball rolling. In a very well-written entry — a much quicker read than I thought it would be — entrepreneurial consultant Jay Goltz explains how the stimulus package will hurt small businessmen. His position is not political, but smart — as in, regulators don’t know what they’re doing a lot of the time.

And now, thanks to the stimulus package, unemployment insurance has been extended as much as an additional 20 weeks. If you’ve had to lay off 10 people, this could easily result in additional taxes of $10,000, $50,000, or even $100,000. It’s a time bomb that won’t go off until after employers get their contribution-rate increase in November, but it will go off.

And therein lies the final irony: Even after the economy improves, I’m going to think long and hard before I hire anyone. Thanks to the stimulus package — the stimulus package — the costs, paperwork, and legal exposure associated with hiring employees is on the rise. I’m not saying the package is all bad, but it does make it less appealing for small businesses to hire more people, or even to offer health insurance, for that matter.

Clearly, that was not the intention of the (mostly) well-intentioned people who passed the stimulus package. What’s scary is that there are lots more changes being discussed. As those conversations continue, I hope more of those legislators somehow manage to learn what George McGovern learned — what small-business people live everyday.

Certainly unemployment insurance needs to be reconceived for small employers. But then there are serious reasons for treating employers of fewer than 150 persons as categorically distinct from employers with greater numbers of workers. (If 150 isn’t the golden number, something below 500 certainly is.)

§ Tierce. Anthony Marshall may have been a regular Snidely Whiplash, threatening to tie his mother (or perhaps her dog) to the tracks if she did not sign the codicils, but the lurid quality of the following is simply groundless — and therefore false.

Anthony Marshall and his sneaky band of lawyers devised a bizarre, “inherit from beyond the grave” arrangement so that his mother, philanthropist Brooke Astor, would never suspect her $60 million in cash and bonds was destined for the pockets of her despised daughter-in-law, Charlene, prosecutors said this morning.

Marshall intentionally kept his wife’s name off the paperwork that the aged, Alzheimer’s-addled Astor was swindled into signing in Jan. 2004, prosecutors said, in arguments outside the jury’s hearing.

§ Sext. I guess Aristotle was right: cats are not rational animals.

She added that the results show that cats do not understand cause-and-effect connections between objects.

The experiments involved attaching fish and biscuit treats to one end of a piece of string, placing them under a plastic screen to make them unreachable.

They were tested in three ways, using a single baited string, two parallel strings where only one was baited, and two crossed strings where only one was baited.

With two crossed strings, one cat always made the wrong choice and others succeeded no more than might be expected by chance.

§ Nones. The answer to that question wont’ be settled anytime soon, if ever. If the Ahmadinejad regime continues in power, then there’s no doubt that the Twitter Tweet will be added to the long list of American interventions in Iranian affairs, the sore that Mr Ahmadinejad knows how to stroke, and that President Obama has been careful not even to try to soothe. (The State Department’s Josh Cohen made the request via e-mail, understandably — given the tweet’s limitation to 140 characters [including spaces] — but diplomatic historians of the future will, we hope, find “Twitter Tweet” to be irresistible. They’ll love explaining what it meant.)

The State Department said its request did not amount to meddling. Mr. Cohen, they noted, did not contact Twitter until three days after the vote was held and well after the protests had begun.

“This is completely consistent with our national policy,” Mr. Crowley said. “We are proponents of freedom of expression. Information should be used as a way to promote freedom of expression.”

The episode demonstrates the extent to which the administration views social networking as a new arrow in its diplomatic quiver. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton talks regularly about the power of e-diplomacy, particularly in places where the mass media are repressed.

Mr. Cohen, a Stanford University graduate who is the youngest member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, has been working with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other services to harness their reach for diplomatic initiatives in Iraq and elsewhere.

§ Vespers. I’ve meant to read Ambler for years, because something about Jean Negulesco’s adaption of Mask of Dimitrios, with Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, suggests that what was great about the book didn’t make it onto the screen. Mr Self may suggest why.

Graham is informed by the local intelligence chief that this was no botched burglary, but an attempt to kill him: he is told that the Germans want him dead so that his company’s work on Turkish army equipment will be delayed. Graham is incredulous (he has “the growing conviction that he was involved in a nightmare and that he would presently wake up to find himself at his dentist’s”) – as is the reader. Is there a threat to Graham’s life or not?

He told himself that he was behaving like a schoolboy. A man had fired three shots at him. What difference did it make whether the man had been a thief or an intending murderer? He had fired three shots, and that was that. But all the same, it did somehow make a difference…

This was my favourite aspect of the book – the acute understanding of how awareness conditions our response to a situation.  (To quote Terry Pratchett, perhaps for the only time on this blog: “One problem is that I’ve got Alzheimer’s.  The other problem is that I know I’ve got Alzheimer’s.”)  Graham, as the archetypal ‘man caught up in’, is inactive and reactive until forced to do otherwise.  Ultimately the effect of the fear is almost as dramatic as any physical threat to him, though the latter does surface more directly in the last third of the book, when the plot and more traditional thriller elements take over.  In some cases what seem to be conventions of the genre were newly-minted when Ambler presented them here.

§ Compline. I lost track of Mr Crary’s blog, The Existence Machine, when Outlook went on the fritz about RSS feeds, late last month. Last night, I found it again, and was very glad to do so, not least because I enjoy his discussions of books that I would and will probably never read. He writes so well about what’s on his mind. I haven’t followed The Existence Machine long enough to know just how exceptional the topic of abortion is, but I expect that it doesn’t come up often, and that it came up this time because it provoked Mr Crary’s thoughtfulness.

I listened to them talk, continuing to feel uncomfortable, when suddenly the conversation made a turn that allowed me to enter into it easily, quietly. The question of the moment was, what should be the legal consequences of abortion? This had always been a question that had troubled me, so I said something. I’ve long sensed that very few people actually want to have women sent to prison for having an abortion. My friend admitted that this was a problem, that it was an issue that too few anti-abortion people thought about. She maintained that being anti-abortion is not about punishment.

…

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Because, of course, there are those who do believe punishment is in order, the punishment of doctors in particular. These are the people who really drive the movement against abortion, the lunatics who blow up clinics, who harass women, who kill abortion providers, such as the asshole who recently killed Dr. George Tiller. These are the true believers; these are the people who can and will be pushed over the edge by irresponsible political rhetoric, the kind we get from the American Right every day.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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