alexch's almanac

"Change We Can Believe In” wasn’t just about a set of policies; it was more grandiose. Obama promised to transcend forty years of demographic and ideological trends and reshape Washington politics. In the past three years, though, he has learned that the Presidency is an office uniquely ill-suited for enacting sweeping change. Presidents are buffeted and constrained by the currents of political change. They don’t control them.
George C. Edwards III, a political scientist at Texas A. & M., who has sparked a quiet revolution in the ways that academics look at Presidential leadership, argues in “The Strategic President” that there are two ways to think about great leaders. The common view is of a leader whom Edwards calls “the director of change,” someone who reshapes public opinion and the political landscape with his charisma and his powers of persuasion. Obama’s many admirers expected him to be just this.
Instead, Obama has turned out to be what Edwards calls “a facilitator of change.” The facilitator is acutely aware of the constraints of public opinion and Congress. He is not foolish enough to believe that one man, even one invested with the powers of the Presidency, can alter the fundamentals of politics. Instead, “facilitators understand the opportunities for change in their environments and fashion strategies and tactics to exploit them.” Directors are more like revolutionaries. Facilitators are more like tacticians. Directors change the system. Facilitators work the system. Obama’s first three years as President are the story of his realization of the limits of his office, his frustration with those constraints, and, ultimately, his education in how to successfully operate within them."

"Congress is polarized largely because Americans live in communities of like-minded people who elect more ideological representatives. Obama’s rhetoric about a nation of common purpose and values no longer fits this country: there really is a red America and a blue America.
Polarization also has affected the two parties differently. The Republican Party has drifted much farther to the right than the Democratic Party has drifted to the left. Jacob Hacker, a professor at Yale, whose 2006 book, “Off Center,” documented this trend, told me, citing Poole and Rosenthal’s data on congressional voting records, that, since 1975, “Senate Republicans moved roughly twice as far to the right as Senate Democrats moved to the left” and “House Republicans moved roughly six times as far to the right as House Democrats moved to the left.” In other words, the story of the past few decades is asymmetric polarization.
Two well-known Washington political analysts, Thomas Mann, of the bipartisan Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agree. In a forthcoming book about Washington dysfunction, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” they write, “One of our two major parties, the Republicans, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

"When Christ performs the miracle of the loaves and fishes do we condemn him for depriving fishmongers of hypothetical income?"

"Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized."

"By any fair estimate, over $42 million in income over two years isn’t bad for a guy who jokes about being “unemployed.” Indeed, Romney would be in the top 1% based solely on the income he makes in one week."

"Instead, I would talk about strings (not “string objects”), and sometimes I would refer to “objects”, simply meaning “the things in these programs.” The fact that all these things in Ruby are objects made this sort of sneakiness on my part work so well."

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And really, it is because of the popularity of Prozac that the low-serotonin story took hold, even though, Frazer argues, the scientific research has not borne that out.

“I don’t think there’s any convincing body of data that anybody has ever found that depression is associated to a significant extent with a loss of serotonin,” he says.

Delgado also makes this argument. In the 1990s, he carried out a study that showed that if you take a normal person and deplete them of serotonin, they will not become depressed. He says he feels this demonstrates that low serotonin doesn’t cause depression.

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"It turned out that Parkinson’s — a brain disorder — was caused by a deficiency of a chemical in the brain called dopamine. This discovery influenced the way scientists thought about depression. “There is no doubt in my mind that the Parkinson’s story had a strong impact on the way that people were thinking about depression,” Frazer says. “It became easy to speculate that depression was due to a deficiency.” The question, of course, was what was deficient? Which chemical was too low? For decades researchers argued this question, but no one candidate took the lead. And then came Prozac."

"OK, I know you really want to know about those swear words. The one that comes up repeatedly in the phone call is cazzo, which is probably the most common taboo word for “penis”. In its literal meaning, a good English translation is probably prick. But it’s widely used for generalized swearing, to mean something like For God’s sake! or Bloody hell! In one of the most quoted parts of the conversation (you can already buy a T-shirt with this phrase on it), De Falco says Vada a bordo, cazzo! In one of the English translations of the transcript, this is rendered as Go on board, (expletive)! But De Falco is not saying Go on board, you prick!, as that translation might suggest. A much more natural way to render what he says would be Get the fuck on board!"

"One aspect of this that escapes anyone who relies only on the English translation is the fact that De Falco uses the lei (the polite form of “you” and the associated verb forms) throughout the whole conversation. The direct imperatives (Vada a bordo! “Go on board!”) acquire an enhanced sense of authority by being expressed with lei. De Falco is not losing it; he’s remaining correct and military in his manner. At the same time, he frequently addresses Schettino as Schettino, without any title. This is again proper military usage from a superior to a subordinate."

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JW: Making the FX show, do you see yourself as a benevolent dictator?

I’m not a dictator, because I’m not in control of anything, I’m just deciding what to try. To me, it’s not that I control a bunch of people, it’s just that nobody controls me. There’s nothing above me except responsibility to the product. That’s the ultimate responsibility, is if the show sucks, then what was the fucking point of being in charge? I’m right about these things on the show, and when I’m not, it’s interesting to watch me be wrong. I don’t think you have to be perfect, you just have to be compelling in the work you do.

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I think it goes in waves. For a while people really got off on comedy writing, watching the way shows were structured, and that show, Community, I haven’t really seen it very much, but what I hear about it is that people really like the way it deconstructs the form of sitcoms and is playful with it, and that’s really turning people on, and I just don’t know anything about it, I haven seen it and I don’t have the same…everything, especially television, is shaped by what else is on and what’s been on. So that’s what that’s about, people are on a sort of diet right now, and Community gave them a brand new contextually interesting thing to like. I think that’s awesome.

JW: It’s looking like it’s going to be canceled.

Yeah, I know, it’s such a bummer. I think anything that’s not like everything else that over a million people watch, you should leave it on the air, just to keep the ground fertile. Not for some, “Fuck Hollywood, this was better,” but to keep enough variety, I think it’s important for TV to have that.

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Dragon Age II

Even as we marveled at the advancements in the Mass Effect series, longtime BioWare fans loved Dragon Age: Origins for sticking close to the company’s turn-based, epic fantasy past. However, the rushed and misguided sequel felt like a slap to that core audience, with its stripped down, shallow button-mashing combat, small world, repetitive dungeons, and poor storytelling. This was the rare BioWare title that felt rushed and – even worse – halfhearted.

Elder Scrolls Bugs

We love The Elder Scrolls V. It’s our Game of the Year for a reason. You know what we don’t love? Having to keep 100 different save files because we spend our time in Skyrim in constant fear of random, quest-breaking bugs. From skeleton dragons flying backwards to giants sending guards hurtling into orbit, we’ve seen it all when it comes to bugs in this game. While patches have helped, your time in Skyrim may always be a buggy experience, and that’s a shame.

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