Pants on (Sa)fire: Pedantic warmonger William Safire, guest-blogging for Oxford University Press, claims to have made up the verb "consense":

As a language columnist, I feel free to coin a neologism now and then; “consense” is a verb that can replace “form a consensus”. Not the opposite of “nonsense”.

Anyone who has spent even a little time around left-wing politics and activism has heard "consense" used in exactly this way a hundred times. Wiktionary has several citations, including one from 1970 -- a speech by pioneering gay activist Harry Hay. Looks like the queers beat you to that one, Bill!

Yes, I can see how that would work: "By distributing fliers — '10 Reasons to Wait' — outside of a freshman safe-sex seminar, he instantly gained 'a public image' for abstinence, he said, which has helped him to remain chaste ever since." [NYT Mag]

Earnest? Really? "Much the way Hollywood people have shuttled between Los Angeles and Manhattan for decades, or academics commute on the Acela between Morningside Heights and Cambridge, Mass., there is a young, earnest population that is beating a path between artsy, gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn and their counterparts in the Bay Area." [NYT]

Times staffers (up to and including Bill Keller) answer readers' questions about the McCain story.

Young people are deserting newspapers in droves. What better way to win them back than this?

Amazing NYT front-pager yesterday: For 20 years, the World Bank and the western countries that give aid to Africa have been demanding that recipient countries not provide subsidies to farmers. Instead, the western donors have advocated a "free-market" paradigm in which poor countries grow cash crops instead of food, then buy food from rich countries (which massively subsidize their own farmers). Without subsidies, African farmers can't afford to buy fertilizer, which means they can't afford to grow food.

Two years ago, after a poor harvest led to a devastating famine, Malawi's president, as the Times puts it, "decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached," and reinstated fertilizer subsidies. Now Malawi is selling surplus corn to Zimbabwe, and UNICEF is sending the powdered milk it has stockpiled in Malawi to Uganda instead.

It's an incredible indictment of western aid policy and the failures of free-market dogma. Those who read to the end will be rewarded with a scene in which a village chief performs "a silly pantomime."

The song remains the same

David Brooks has addressed himself to the subject of rock music, and as you'd expect it's a total Rothgasm.

Brooks's problem is that rock is no longer a monolithic entity centered on megastars like the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, or Bruce Springsteen, because "there are now dozens of niche musical genres where there used to be this thing called rock." In making his case, Brooks pulls off a pretty incredible rhetorical trick. Watch as he explains the fragmentation of the pop-music audience:

Music industry executives can use market research to divide consumers into narrower and narrower slices... And there’s the rise of the mass educated class. People who have built up cultural capital and pride themselves on their superior discernment are naturally going to cultivate ever more obscure musical tastes. I’m not sure they enjoy music more than the throngs who sat around listening to Led Zeppelin, but they can certainly feel more individualistic and special.

In other words, the fact that people are listening to a variety of different musicians and genres indicates that they are both (a) sheep who have been brainwashed by "music industry executives," and (b) posers eager to show off their specialness. Whereas back when everyone was grooving on Led Zep together, they were all free-choosing individuals, immune to marketing and peer pressure. Yes, that makes sense.

Brooks trots out Steven Van Zandt to bolster his credibility, but Van Zandt doesn't seem very interested in Brooks's fragmentation narrative. He makes a different argument: the familiar "today's music sucks in comparison to the music that was popular during the years when I was fourteen through twenty-two, which happened to be the greatest music ever made" argument.

Van Zandt "argues that if the Rolling Stones came along now, they wouldn't be able to get mass airtime because there is no broadcast vehicle for all-purpose rock." This is a bit like saying that if World War II were fought today it would be over in five minutes because the Germans would be on the same side as the British and the Americans. If the Rolling Stones came along now, they wouldn't be able to get mass airtime because everyone would think they were ripping off the Rolling Stones.

Hilariously, Van Zandt has

drawn up a high school music curriculum that tells American history through music. It would introduce students to Muddy Waters, the Mississippi Sheiks, Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers. He’s trying to use music to motivate and engage students, but most of all, he is trying to establish a canon, a common tradition that reminds students that they are inheritors of a long conversation.

Good idea, Miami Steve -- let's sit the kids down in the classroom together, the ones who listen to Justin Timberlake and the ones who listen to Radiohead, the ones who like Lil Wayne and the ones who like the Get-Up Kids, the one who's into Ornette Coleman and the one who's into Deicide and the one who just borrowed her parents' Dylan tapes, and let's explain to them that they should all start listening to the Allman Brothers, because they are the inheritors of a long conversation that culminates with bearded white men making their guitars go hoodly-hoodly-hooooo! I bet that'll work real well.

Maureen Dowd has been punting a lot lately. Today she turns her column over to Saturday Night Live head writer Seth Meyers to do gags about the TV writers' strike. But there's something off about this bit:

As a comedy writer, I am more than willing to admit that I need a world with producers, but do they need us? The answer is yes, for two reasons. First, without writers whom will the studios blame for their failures? Second, seriously, whom?

Does anyone else detect the heavy hand of the Times copy desk here? Or did Meyers really land the joke on whom rather than who?

You heard it here first: RoBros, 11/1/07; NYT, 11/11/07.

Least comforting assertion of the day: From David Brooks's NYT column:

The Bush administration is not about to bomb Iran (trust me).

If you skipped Anthony Lewis's NYT Book Review essay on two recent Bush books, good call -- Lewis is clearly one of those old guys who can no longer identify what counts as common knowledge. (Random cliché sampling: "The one clear winner from the invasion and the consequent civil strife has been neighboring Iran ... Bush seems to lack the intellectual curiosity that makes for an interesting mind ... there is another, less attractive part of the Bush persona: the mean-minded frat boy ... what I think will be seen, along with the Iraq war, as the most important legacy of Bush’s presidency: his effort to enlarge the unilateral power of the president.")

Lewis wraps up this bloviation with a conclusion that's off-base on two counts. He writes:

There is a profound oddity in the position of the presidentialists like Yoo, Cheney and Addington. Legal conservatives like to say that the Constitution should be read according to its original intent. But if there is anything clear about the intentions of the framers, it is that they did not intend to create an executive with more prerogative power than George III had.

I'm not sure this "oddity" really exists. First of all, the statement "legal conservatives like to say that the Constitution should be read according to its original intent" is almost exactly wrong. The poster boy for originalism, Antonin Scalia, in his "Theory of Constitutional Interpretation" speech, said this:

You will never hear me refer to original intent, because as I say I am first of all a textualist, and secondly an originalist. If you are a textualist, you don't care about the intent, and I don't care if the framers of the Constitution had some secret meaning in mind when they adopted its words.

But even if Lewis had accurately represented the views of conservative originalists, that wouldn't mean that executive-branch-supremacists like Dick Cheney and David Addington were hypocrites. As far as I know, neither is specifically associated with constitutional originalism. (John Yoo is a slightly more complex case.) Some conservatives believe in being faithful to the constitution. Some believe in letting the president do whatever the hell he wants at all times. This is not a "profound oddity"; it's an easily observable fact.

Am I wrong about this? People who actually know something about the law, please let me know.

An unusual moment of confusion from the NYT's estimable Jon Pareles: "Even at 160 kilobits per second (Kbps), In Rainbows is a sonic notch above the standard 128 Kbps iTunes download, and on a portable MP3 player through good earphones, it has plenty of detail."

But when it comes to measuring the fidelity of compressed digital audio, bit rate is not the only relevant criterion. Other things being equal, files compressed at 160 Kbps definitely sound superior to those compressed at 128 Kbps. But other things are not equal. The In Rainbows tracks are in MP3 format, whereas iTunes tracks are compressed using the superior AAC codec. To my ears (and I'm not alone), AACs at 128 Kbps are sonically equivalent to MP3s at around 192 Kbps. I am surprised that Pareles doesn't understand this, given how smart he is.

Am I wrong, or is GM's new agreement with the UAW a potentially lethal blow to the cause of universal health care? The Detroit automakers, staggering under the weight of employee health insurance costs, were expected to be big players in the lobbying for a universal coverage bill in a Democratic administration. If they've paid off 80 years of health costs upfront, as GM's new contract has it doing (Ford and Chrysler are expected to enter similar arrangements), they no longer have a stake in the government picking up those costs.

Maybe there's some provision in the agreement about what happens if government-subsidized health care expands. If anyone actually knows anything about this, please educate me in the comments.

Micheline Maynard's detailed story on the contracts doesn't mention the health care policy angle. It does, however, contain this bizarrely wrongheaded paragraph:

Likewise, U.A.W. members, assured of health care benefits that were the envy of the labor movement, had little incentive to take better care of their health, since their generous coverage would pay for most any ailment.

This is what's known as the moral hazard theory. It holds that, when people are insulated from a particular risk, they become less concerned about that risk: if I can buy flood insurance, I'm more likely to build a house on a flood plain. Moral hazard concerns were in the news recently when the Federal Reserve was considering whether to bail out investors hit by the subprime mortgage collapse. Every time the central bank protects investors from losses on risky bets, it's encouraging more risky bets in the future.

Maynard is applying the moral hazard argument to well-insured union autoworkers: their coverage is so good that they have "little incentive to take better care of their health." But this is ludicrous on its face. Health insurance can absorb the financial costs of ill health, but those are far from the only costs. If you're in constant pain, it's no great consolation that someone else pays for your treatments. If you're bedridden you want to get up and go outside, even if your insurance company pays for in-home care. If you learn you're going to die young you still mind, even if you know your family will receive a generous pension. Health care is unlike other economic goods, and treating it like them is one reason this country's health care system is so fucked up. It's surprising to see the Times, in a news story, get this confused.

We're back! And stealing things straight from Gawker! Check the photo on this NYT story, and then look at the caption, and then scroll down to the very bottom and read the correction.

It turns out that Fake Steve Jobs is a senior editor at Forbes named Daniel Lyons. Surprisingly, this was broken by the NYT rather than some obsessive tech blogger. Maybe we do need old media after all.

Update: FSJ himself says the same thing. Also, on the NYT's tech blog, Brad Stone (who broke the story) asks "Are you happy that the mystery has been solved? Or did we just ruin the fun for everyone?" In the comments, 21 out of 23 commenters pick the latter. "Ruined it completely. Sux big time!" writes MS. Obviously, this is a biased sample set but these folks are, not to put too fine a point on it, total morons. Dennis O'Connor takes the prize for perverse logic with:

Regardless of your infantile need to expose FSJ, we will continue to enjoy his comments if he chooses to continue. He should quit and let the scorn of thousands be heaped around your ears for ruining a good thing.

But he has some stiff competition from Matthew J, who says:

with all of the real news that needs to be slethed by a talented reporter such as yourself, isn’t it more than a little sophmoric to cover this at your paper AND, at the same time, ruin a perfectly good bit of sport?

(Um, how is this ruining a bit of sport rather than participating in it and winning?)

I sympathize with these morons on one point: it was kind of neat when FSJ was anonymous, because you could pretend he was a real person, like e.g. the Earth-Two version of Steve Jobs or something. And now we know he's a fictional construct, created by a guy who happens to have a vendetta against the open-source movement. That's kind of a shame, because the pleasure of FSJ is the plausibility of its insights into Steve Jobs's head. I had thought, Yeah, I bet Steve Jobs really does think that the Free Software people are losers. And I still think he probably does, but the fun of speculation is dampened by the fact that this is obviously the author's POV too.

Still, that same observation reveals something interesting: it makes sense that a guy who engages in a long-term ventriloquism project like this one, who spends more than a year thinking "What might Steve Jobs have to say today?", will wind up writing about the topics that interest him, even if he does so through the point of view of his subject. Like if I decided to write a blog in the voice of Fake Steve Martin or Fake Stevie Wonder or Fake Stephen Hawking, I'd end up writing about that fake person's perspective on comic books and Apple. Something like this happens in most fiction, I suspect, although I have so far kept references to comics and Apple to a minimum in my own novel-in-progress.

Plus more: Daniel Lyons's personal blog, the one in his own voice that mostly covers open-source shenanigans, is a funny and interesting window into a world about which I know very little. Most of it is straight reporting/opinionizing, but here's a satirical entry that could have appeared word for word on FSJ.

It's particularly funny watching David Brooks flail around trying to make sense of Darwinism while Robert Wright, who wrote the book on it, is a guest columnist. Today he nails the kind of piece Brooks was trying to write on Thursday. (Wright is kind of my hero, and his The Moral Animal and, especially, Nonzero are crucial pieces of my mental furniture.)

Brooks no disagreement

What's fun about reading David Brooks is getting to see an ordinary man of no particular intelligence grappling with the really big questions facing humanity. On Monday he made kind of a good point:

While we postmoderns say we detest all-explaining narratives, in fact a newish grand narrative has crept upon us willy-nilly and is now all around. Once the Bible shaped all conversation, then Marx, then Freud, but today Darwin is everywhere.... We’re not a postmodern society anymore. We have a grand narrative that explains behavior and gives shape to history. We have a central cosmology to embrace, argue with or unconsciously submit to.

Today, though, he gets himself into a bit of a mess.

Brooks anticipates what neuropsychology and social science might have to say about Cho Seung-Hui, the teenager who killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus on Monday:

Some will point to the pruning of the brain synapses that may be related to adolescent schizophrenia. Others may point to the possibility that an inability to process serotonin could have led to depression and hyperaggression. Or we could learn that he had been born with a brain injury that made him psychopathic. Or [maybe] he grew up with some form of behavioral illness that would have made it hard for him to interact with and respond appropriately to other people.

From there, Brooks rehearses the standard humanist qualms about scientific models of behavior: Whither the soul? Whither morality?

It’s important knowledge, but it’s had the effect of reducing the scope of the human self.... The scope for individual choice has been reduced, and with it so has the scope for morality. Once, Cho Seung-Hui would have been simply condemned as evil, but now the language of morality is often replaced with the language of determinism.

Brooks would like us to think that this deterministic worldview is a new post-postmodern phenomenon, because it makes for a better column. "The killings at Virginia Tech happen at a moment when we are renegotiating what you might call the Morality Line, the spot where background forces stop and individual choice — and individual responsibility — begins," he writes.

This is, of course, horseshit. Before anyone understood the neurological roots of schizophrenia, insanity was accepted as a defense in criminal trials. (According to Wikipedia, the concept of an insanity defense has been around since the Greeks, and "the first complete transcript of an insanity trial dates to 1724.") Campus shootings like the one at Virginia Tech fit squarely into the classic insanity model, in that the perpetrator gets no material benefit from his violent actions. So when Brooks writes "Once, Cho Seung-Hui would have been simply condemned as evil," we can assume that he's referring to some time before the ancient Greeks.

The real fatheadedness, though, comes at the end. Brooks has been careful to avoid picking a fight with the deterministic explanations for Cho Seung-Hui's actions:

We’re not going to put our knowledge of brain chemistry or evolutionary psychology back in the bottle. It would be madness to think Cho Seung-Hui could have been saved from his demons with better sermons.

But then, in the next paragraph, he turns around and demands a moralistic explanation:

But it should be possible to acknowledge the scientists’ insights without allowing them to become monopolists. It should be possible to reconstruct some self-confident explanation for what happened at Virginia Tech that puts individual choice and moral responsibility closer to the center.

Check out what Brooks uses as evidence for this:

After all, according to research by David Buss, 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women have had a vivid homicidal fantasy. But they didn’t act upon it. They don’t turn other people into objects for their own fulfillment. There still seems to be such things as selves, which are capable of making decisions and controlling destiny. It’s just that these selves can’t be seen on a brain-mapping diagram, and we no longer have any agreement about what they are.

OK -- what?! After paying lip-service to scientific explanations for behavior for ten paragraphs, Brooks runs into an interesting fact about the mind -- everyone fantasizes about killing other people, but very few of us actually do it -- and asserts, without giving any reason, that this difference can only be attributed to some mysterious decision-making destiny-controlling self. What, David Brooks, is so special about that particular fact that it alone couldn't possibly have roots in brain chemistry?

Like 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women, I have had vivid homicidal fantasies. But I also have fantasies that are not homicidal, and one of them is to get David Brooks in a room in front of lots of genuinely smart people and go through a few weeks worth of columns and ask the obvious questions and watch everyone laugh at him.

Great NYT story about the Bush administration's total failure to uncover the massive voter-fraud conspiracy Republicans are always going on about -- and the (mostly poor, mostly nonwhite) people whose lives have been torn apart for nothing more than a minor paperwork error. Josh Marshall has commentary.

A riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a tortilla

There's something I don't get about Frank Rich's column today (here, but behind the stupid subscription wall). The last paragraph begins with this sentence:

Call it a coincidence — though there are no coincidences — but it’s only fitting that the Libby trial began as news arrived of the death of E. Howard Hunt, the former C.I.A. agent whose bungling of the Watergate break-in sent him to jail and led to the unraveling of the Nixon presidency two years later.

What does Rich mean by that interjection "though there are no coincidences"? He can't mean it literally: obviously there are some coincidences, and obviously the proximity of Libby's trial to Hunt's death is one. People who say "there are no coincidences" usually mean to imply the existence of some dark conspiracy, and indeed the column is about a White House conspiracy to defame Joseph Wilson, but surely Rich doesn't mean to suggest a material connection (as opposed to a thematic or associative connection) between that conspiracy and Howard Hunt's death from pneumonia at 88.

I'm sure I'm being too literal here, but I honestly can't figure out what Rich thinks he means. My best guess is that the phrase "there are no coincidences" has somehow lodged in his head (it's not an uncommon phrase), and when he types the word coincidence in a context of skullduggery it muscles its way into the sentence. Does anyone have a better explanation? Post it in the comments.

It is widely known that Byron Calame, the New York Times public editor, is the most boring person in the world. But today is a new low. In a column reporting that readers are, yes, posting comments on the Times's website, Calame offers this example of red-hot give-and-take between readership and staff:

“Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to all of us,” a Los Angeles reader wrote to Mr. LaForge in the afternoon. “It’s much appreciated.”