Monday August Olio

•I woke up after about 3-1/2 hours of sleep this morning, and a voice in my head said "The modern Republican party is practically identical to the so-called Fathers' Rights so-called movement: a pinpoint of pure white hatred and disgruntlement surrounded by concentric gaseous layers of self-aggrandizement, denial of personal responsibility or accountability for the results of one's actions, and an apodictic certainty that money is the only arbiter of truth."

• It's not the religious angle to the Sacred Republican Skinny-dip that tickles me (aren't we all used to that sort of thing by now?); "Hey, the holy waters where Jesus walked should be just the thing to work off some of that Montrachet and foie gras! Lord knows I could use it." No, what I liked was the instantaneous outbreak of "one year ago". 

Rep. Yoder: “A year ago, my wife, Brooke, and I joined colleagues for dinner at the Sea of Galilee in Israel…."  (Monogamous public nudity. Nice touch.)

Doug Heye: “Twelve months ago, [Eric Cantor] dealt with this immediately and effectively to ensure such activities would not take place in the future.” said Doug Heye, Cantor’s deputy chief of staff.

Heye added: “Last year, a staffer was contacted by the Bureau [FBI]...

Yeah, I think we've all done a lot of growing up since then.

Whatever you think of the outcome, you gotta admire the speed and grace of the veteran pathological liar, doncha? 

•In addition to fighting my natural indolence (okay, so I don't fight very hard), Weltschmerz, saddle rash, and the public career of Ryan Lochte, I've been suffering from the worst bout of Jobs-Induced Apple Colitis in the last five years. Bring back System 7.5! The really interesting thing I've learned in the past three weeks of fighting an utterly recalcitrant and vaguely Fascist operating system is that the vaunted stability of OSX really makes you long, when things really turn to shit, for the days when the damn thing would just crash and get it over with, you'd kiss off a few files that'd be forgotten in a week's time, if that, and get on with things. 

I haven't lost a bit of data in a month of trying, but there's a very real possibility at any moment that I'll lose some to a high-velocity collision between my back up drive and my iMac screen.

What I have done (among other things) is watch a dozen videos on the YouTubes explaining how to solve everything from a Firewire kernel panic to staring at my own stupid name in the corner of the menu bar. Yes, indeed, I upgraded to Mountain Lion a few days ago, something I never would have done without letting others volunteer to be beta testers for the next couple months except for the panic (its, not mine). The first major improvement I noticed from that, I believe the commonly-accepted term is "upgrade", was that now my trackball wheel ran backwards. Apparently so I could feel like a hipster, or a Mom, with an iPhone. And it's working, because nowadays I spend fourteen hours a day staring at a screen, and I mutter to myself in public.

I admit that I brought this on myself by recklessly plugging in a new drive for my iTunes collection. As a result--and, again, this list is far from exhaustive, believe me--I couldn't use Mail without entering my password every five seconds for the better part of an hour (and Mail, once a program with a few restful and reassuring quirks, now has full-blown Tourettes); couldn't flip through iTunes--fuck iTunes, in case I haven't said that recently--in Cover View, or Toxic Flow, or whatever they call it, without a guaranteed freeze; spent a sennight where the Finder would develop iAmnesia after five minutes; stood helpless as the freezing behavior took over every piece of Apple™ brand software (and little else) like a pandemic trend in eyewear or social mediaizing; and now, over the last 48 hours, watched as every reboot (six, for the average half-hour) launched three pieces of software, the same three I'd scrupulously closed each of the other five times. That seems to've stopped. I won't bother recounting the adventures of my new, larger, Time Machine disk, which has been subject to more blackouts, odd conduct, and mysterious disappearances than the entire Barrymore clan.

The most remarkable realization is that there is no abnormal behavior, no matter how idiosyncratic, trivial, labyrinthine, or random-seeming, nothing whatsoever that your Mac can start doing that you can't Google up and find fifty people asking about. Nothing.

I've said it before, but where the all-purpose Chinese insult is "May you live in interesting times", mine is "May something you like become wildly popular."

• The Piscopo Hypothesis states that any successful concept will, sooner rather than later, come under the control of people who didn't get the concept in the first place. Slate. "Double Secret Extra-Tricky Reverse Unexpected Contrarianism" was bound to be reduced to its component parts ("Stupid" and "Shit") long before someone gave David Weigel the money for a seventeen-part History of Rick Wakeman. But this ? (Don't go there.)

I guess we should be grateful that few, if any, trees will die for this, but Campbell Brown is given internet space to defend the idea that she's not Just Mrs. Dan Senor, but actually has her own ideas. And she's given this space because nasty internet commenters blasted some of those ideas, in part by mentioning the fact that she is, in fact Just Mrs. Dan Senor, in addition to being idiotic in several other ways. We'll print you a sample of those ideas in just a moment. 

But first, in her defense Mrs. Senor points to some campaign reporter who married an Obama campaign functionary, as well as Andrea Mitchell, who is either married to Alan Greenspan, or happened to buy the terrarium he's housed in. 

So leave us note, first, that Andrea Mitchell is to Washington what Barbara Walters is to Hollywood, that she's been criticized plenty for it, and no one wants to drag her conjugal bed into it. Whether a campaign stringer who marries an Obama aide goes on to become an evening news emoter, as Mrs. Senor did, remains to be seen. We do not, as a culture, believe that such matters prevent someone from being "an objective reporter", as Mrs. Senor tries to style herself, because most of us understand that the sole purpose of "the news", teevee division, these days is to reassure the upper-middle class that its betters are looking out for its interests. Just as we all believe it was possible for Weigel to be an excellent shill for the "Teabag Party" while sleeping with Ezra Klein.

Mrs. Senor had been given two Op-Ed spaces; in one she revealed her status as the wife of a murderous cutthroat--a theoretical murderous cutthroat--about halfway through the piece, while in the other she omitted it. People who disliked her opinions, and who oppose everything about her husband, including his haberdashery and continued use of oxygen ("Rationalists") brought up the connection. As they are entitled to do. 

Mrs. Senor finds this unfair. Personally I find it unnecessary, since the reality is that she's barely qualified to hold an opinion:

Most recently an op-ed I wrote for the Wall Street Journal was critical of New York teachers unions for supporting a policy that makes it very hard to fire teachers who engage in inappropriate sexual behavior with children. In this case, I failed twice. The teachers union immediately pointed to my Romney tie (apparently in their view only a Romney supporter would oppose sexual predators in school?). They then rightly asserted that  my husband serves on the board of StudentsFirst—New York, an education reform group that advocates for charter schools. He receives no money from the organization, yet the teachers unions blasted me for hiding this connection, and falsely accused me of a financial conflict of interest. Here I failed to disclose because I stupidly did not connect the teachers’ unions’ opposition to charter schools to their support for a system that protects teachers who engage in sexual misconduct. My sincerest apologies to the teachers unions for not fully appreciating how wrong they are on not one but two issues.

It really is unfair to accuse Mrs. Senior of indifference to the slaughter of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children, just because her husband helped orchestrate it. Those are her own opinions.