¶ Matins: Congressional Republicans, continuing their fascist makeover by seeking to win votes by stoking fears if they can’t inspire ideals, have launched a spectacularly disinformative infographic about the Democratic health-care reform plan.

¶ Lauds: It’s official: The New York Times is going to raise much-needed cash by selling its flagship classical-music station, WQXR. This may be the most foregone story of 2009. 2008, even. Interestingly, nobody on the Internet seems to care.

¶ Prime: At the Washington Post, Harold Myerson sees a Robert McNamara for our times, and his name is Richard Rubin. And his pupils are Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. We hope that, well before forty years from now, they will not only have repented but recanted. (via Felix Salmon)

¶ Tierce: Oops! No Astor news. Happily, there’s Chris Christie. As in Ruth’s Chris Steak House. No business connection, just the fact that Mr Christie wiggles his head between two positions, sort of like a twitchy, too-rare entrée. (God bless Google Reader!)

¶ Sext: Thanks, Joe, for the tip to You Suck at Craigslist, a site that collects ill-conceived postings at the Want-U-Adds.

¶ Nones: Mexican authorities refuse to negotiate a cease fire with La Familia, a leading drug cartel. Rightly so! But why does this story make us think of Las Vegas?

¶ Vespers: FYI: UK thriller writer Jeffrey Deavers lists ten top novels with computers and/or Internet connections. What’s this? E M Forster is on the list? With a tale from 1909? Now, that’s prescience!

¶ Compline: About The New York Review of Ideas: it’s an NYU J-school class project!

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

Oremus…

§ Matins. It’s a shame that Rube Goldberg isn’t around to help them sex this up.

§ Lauds. It’s hard to prove a negative, of course, and we don’t spend a lot of time at sites devoted to talking about music. (We just listen.) But we’re surprised by what, at first, we took to be a lack of interest in this story, which, after all, spells the end of a 65 year-old institution that —

— that is 65 years old. It has begun to occur to us that few Internauts know about the station, much less listen to it. We stopped listening regularly at about the age of fourteen, when our allegiance switched to the late, lamented WNCN; more recently,we listened to WNYC. (Now we don’t listen to the radio very much.) We could never listen to WXQR now because of the advertisements — that’s what comes of giving up television; advertisements induce shingles.

We haven’t listened to Metropolitan Opera broadcasts (except for the odd aria, usually sung by Sondra Radvanovksy) in over fifteen years, but that nearly 70 year-old institution is much beloved here in New York City, as it is elsewhere, and the first thing that ought to be settled is how and where the broadcasts will be carried from now on.

§ Prime. Remember laughing at the chimera of the “new economy,” the one that didn’t involve “bricks and mortar”? All the while of course, the real new economy — the quants’ economy — was preparing a tectonic rift beneath our very feet.

If there’s an analogous figure to McNamara in this mess, then, it’s probably Rubin — socially liberal, like McNamara; concerned with the world’s poor, like McNamara; architect, like McNamara, of a system perfected by the best minds of his time, a system that should have worked but that failed catastrophically. Rubin’s repentance is a private matter, but the lessons that his protégés Larry Summers and Tim Geithner derive from the failure of deregulated hypercapitalism are of the utmost public concern. Whiz kids themselves, do they still believe in the capacity of their fellow whizzes to concoct financial devices so mathematically sound that strong regulation would be superfluous? Their reluctance to tightly regulate credit-default swaps suggests that they haven’t really been disenthralled of their faith in self-regulating markets. If we’re lucky, the image of Bob McNamara calculating the war on his slide rule, and spending the subsequent decades trying to understand where he went wrong, may bring them to their senses. It certainly should do that for us.

§ Tierce. Well, he’s better than I was, the first time I was on the air, way back at WSND in 1966. But not by a lot.

Which is not to disagree with Alex Balk: the guy may win! I’ve had the impression that Governor Corzine is looking for an important post in the household of the Dalai Lama — it’s the only way to atone for all those Goldman years.

§ Sext. In this recent posting, we see, first, a Mad Libs-type listing in which the blanks have been filled in with the wrong parts of speech and, in one instance, the name of a movie that the app’s search engine couldn’t find.

What follows is ambiguous. The young man who posting the listing, boyofutica, decided to make a video that captures the fill-in-the-blank aspect off the listing app. YSaC thinks that this is proof of the fellow’s cretinism, but we’re not so sure. You tell me: a guy who loves Fried Green Tomatoes but claims not to be “into chick flicks”? Does not compute.

update: Please see the clarifying comment from YSaC‘s administrator below.

§ Nones. We wonder how long it is going to take for a Central or South American government to co-opt trafficking in illegal drugs and the fallout in civil violence by spurning American primness and just de-criminalizing the stuff — at major resorts. After all, that’s how we dealt with organized crime and gambling.

What d’you suppose the availability of first-class weed, with maybe a little blow on the side, would affect tourism — and how long before American hoteliers clambered on the bandwagon?

§ Vespers. Mr Deaver’s writeup of Forster’s The Machine Stops makes us think of John Searles’s Chinese Room.

We haven’t read any of the titles on Mr Deaver’s list, we don’t think. (Did we read Thinks during our Lodge craze? The story sounds familiar.) We did read William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, which we found smart and chic but not satisfying enough to hold on to. Mr Deaver’s own new book, Roadside Crosses, sounds like a good summer read — provided he’s readable. We don’t know about that.

§ Compline. The NYRI was created by students in Robert Boynton’s Journalism of Ideas course. The brilliant thing about this project, the brainchild of future professional journalists, is that it obviates the MSM/Pajamahadeen dichotomy.

But most of us probably chose to take the course because of its focus on ideas-based journalism. It promised to immerse us in a much different type of research and writing than what we’d find in your average news-writing course, or even your average post-grad first job. So I’d venture to say most of us were pretty excited about working on the site—everyone pitched in to write, edit and produce it. This was the kind of work we wanted to do—and if it doesn’t match up to professional opportunities, well… people want to read it, right? So maybe the way journalism really works right now isn’t how it should work.

May it prosper as copiously asThe New York Review of Books .

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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