Business Items

“Critics say Stewart benefits from a double-standard: he critiques other news shows from the safe, removed position of his ‘fake news’ desk. Stewart himself agrees…” - Wikipedia entry on Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Sprint has continued to lose long-term service subscribers, despite currently being the exclusive provider of the allegedly sought-after Palm Pre. The Journal refrained from speculation that Palm may have delayed its advertising campaign so as to maximize both the value of pre-release publicity and the proximity of such advertising to the Pre’s universal availability in the coming year. Perhaps that paper considered contentions of arguable duplicity to be more obvious than might warrant note.

What it certainly didn’t touch was the overwhelming dislikability of Palm’s television campaign, which has now begun in full force. The spate of 30-second spots (such as this and this) to which viewers have lately been subjected derives from this original minute-long monstrosity, in which a vaguely androgynous blonde woman reminiscent of an Icelandic fairy is inexplicably surrounded by dancing Shaolin warriors. (I’m not manufacturing the Shaolin bit; see here.) The successive forgo the original’s epic quality and instead settle for monotone intimations intended, one imagines, to impress by way of serenity rather than information.

As sound as the theory behind this advertising may be, it’s implementation leaves much to be desired. Perhaps the commercials’ style places their central actress into the uncanny valley, where potential empathy morphs into revulsion. She’s additionally provided no aid by scripts filled with such faux pith as might trip my reflexive distaste for the middlebrow. Regardless, we can safely assume that Palm has done itself a disservice in creating an ad that is unsettling at low speed and made borderline horrific by a simple addition.

“I had my vasectomy some years ago, and it has not noticeably affected my ability to meet margin calls.” - David Henderson

Yesterday, David Brooks used his column to respond, at length, to an hypothetical situation originally posed on the economics blog Marginal Revolution. The fact that he chose to do so may be taken as indicative that a world short on news is already flooded with commentary on health insurance reform, financial regulation, and Sonia Sotomayor. The content of his response may be taken as indicative of Brooks’ propensity to project his own perspective onto the populace at large.

The subjunctive in question asks how humanity would respond, were some evil solar event to sterilize an entire hemisphere. Despite ignoring the inclusion of animals in the original scenario description, Brooks postulates pandemonium. (As an aside, the bit about animals would very quickly render half a world without livestock, which would, indeed, have catastrophic short- and medium-term implications. How do you feed all of the sterile people without eggs, dairy, or meat?)

His argument appears to hinge on his contentions that “Material conditions do not drive history” and “Anything worth doing is the work of generations.” The former assumption discards the work of Marx and his intellectual progeny out of hand, and the latter assumes both that immigrants could not be culturally naturalized in the course of a lifetime and that a plurality of humans see the improvement of social structures as their raison d’etre.

Really? Maybe this is a reflection of the ethos in which I’ve been educated, but the implications of feudalism, the black plague, historical struggles for European hegemony and naval supremacy, and the Industrial Revolution — to name a few things — would seem to refute the assertion of material conditions’ ineffectiveness in shaping history. We might use them differently if we can’t breed, but we’ll still have nuclear weapons and the internet.

As to the latter point, I don’t know that I can understand it well enough to retort. No matter what the world’s sharecroppers, accountants, and ne’er-do-wells might like to think, shaping the society to come plays a negligible role in their daily lives. Yes, the elimination of the breeding option would be a great disappointment, but it wouldn’t make ice cream, kayaking, or orgasms any less enjoyable. Most of the time, most of the people are just trying to enjoy the day and get a leg up on the next. Sure, we have an interest in improving the human condition. Thanks to the division of labor, the actual endeavor to do so is left to activists, politicians, and pundits.

Thus, the column is left with an implicit stink of WASP-ish condescension.

Speaking of condescension, I’d like to know if anyone has a clue what Bill Kristol was hoping to accomplish in his appearance on The Daily Show. Even in the extended interview, the man reveals little beyond his sneering veneer. He appears to have no particular agenda to promote or product to plug. He delivers and sets up jokes with a body so tense that one doesn’t know whether to laugh at him, with him, or near him. He appears to have been invited with the hope of a productive discussion, yet he neither makes a worthwhile point nor concedes to one.

A person doesn’t know what to think, other than that’s it’s only Wednesday, and it’s already been a good week for people talking past each other.

“Here’s a thought: maybe nerds aren’t social lepers. Maybe we’re just selective in our friendships. Maybe that whole sitting alone in the corner with a book thing is really just us saying, ‘Dude, I don’t like you.’” - The Park Bench

For some reason, I keep thinking about how much sense it makes for health insurance to be administered by the government. Including more people who need only wellness and catastrophe care offsets the cost of chronic conditions. A larger group has more negotiating leverage with providers. Perhaps most importantly, personal wellness becomes a civic virtue rather than a boon to profiteers. There will be plenty of time to kick dead horses, however, during the August recess.

Thus, I take a moment to ponder a matter of radical impertinence. Henceforth, I will proceed under the assumption that no one else watched the five consecutive nights of Torchwood: Children of Earth. Considering that I, myself wouldn’t have known about it if not for the steadfast memory of my DVR, this premise seems reasonable.

Those of you who might actually be disappointed to have missed the truncated third season of Torchwood might find some comfort in watching BBC America broadcast the American premiere of Doctor Who: Planet of the Dead tomorrow night.

Its relative anonymity notwithstanding, Torchwood continues, in all its campy wonder, to raise worthwhile cultural questions. Why is Britain so dramatically lit? Why does the BBC pay for a cast of hundreds but not cogent screen writing? How can anyone be expected think of an organization based under Roald Dahl Plass without a tangential reflection on James and the Giant Peach?

There are more pertinent questions. How did the 456 discover that human children functioned as mood-altering substance for their race? Why would they have contacted the U.K. in 1965, when the U.S. and Soviet Union were clearly the world’s leading powers? How can Britons appear to have so much concern for human life when they were enslaving (I believe the preferred term is “colonizing”.) a notable portion of the Earth’s population as recently as a century ago?

For the first of the second set of questions, there is no answer. The query redirects to the second of the first set of questions.

While the second of the second set of questions could also redirect to the second of the first set of questions, it’s more easily answered with an assumption that fiction is naturally parochial — and at least a bit ethnocentric. Jack Bauer saves the world from terrorists in the U.S., and Torchwood saves the world from aliens in the U.K. As luck would have it, Cardiff is home to a rift in space and time, and the abstract center of transnational loathing would seem to occur somewhere between St. Louis and Wichita. Serendipity is awesome.

As to the last of the second set of questions, a person can’t offer a hard and fast answer. Given the fact that Progressive thought is most prevalent in the more urbanized areas of these United States, one might consider that the U.K. has roughly twice the population of California squeezed onto about three-fifths the real estate. Also, while Britons aren’t exactly impoverished, their per capita GDP is significantly lower than ours. (How do you like your Greenwich Mean Time now?) Thus unable to isolate from each other, one might expect them to manifest a certain amount of concern for their fellow citizens, and such concern is, indeed, manifested by the kind of robust welfare state that was never instituted in the old Empire’s colonies.

…and now we’re back to socialized medicine. Like I said, there will be plenty of time to kick dead horses in the coming weeks.