Tagged: James Fallows
Editor-in-chief
A photo recently added to the White House photostream on Flickr reveals a startling presidential penchant for meticulous editing:
Ouch! The speechwriter who endured this grueling feedback, Jon Favreau, is the second-youngest in presidential history. The only man every to serve at a more tender age, Atlantic magazine writer and former Jimmy Carter speechwriter James Fallows, offered these comments on the photo:
The volume of Obama’s editing is unusual but not unheard of. The quality of his editing is exceptional for a public figure. Think of just one sentence in the shot above. The original says “This has always been our history.” Obama changes it to, “This has always been the history of our progress.” A different, more interesting, and more original-sounding thought.
Those wishing to track President Obama’s edits in detail can view an enormous version of the photo here.
Visual data: landing an Airbus in the Hudson River
Still on the subject of aircraft, remember US Airways Flight 1549, the Airbus 320 that set down safely in New York’s Hudson River after losing both its engines to a collision with Canada geese? Exosphere3D, a Denver company that “specializes in technical animation and scientific visualization of complex data sets,” has combined the wealth of publicly available radar data, cockpit and air traffic control recordings, and flight recorder information to create a series of startling 3D animations the tell the story in a way that would have been inconceivable a decade ago. I’ve embedded the best of the bunch here, but if you have the bandwidth, check out the full screen view on YouTube.
Hat tip: James Fallows.
What’s needed for Obama’s Afghanistan surge to succeed
James Fallows, the Atlantic writer who is a thoughtful observer of US foreign affairs and an admirer of President Obama, says the president’s newly announced war strategy rests on two “judgment calls.”
1) Whether Al Qaeda/related terrorist groups really do depend so heavily on a specific geographic base in Afghanistan that, if the U.S. can disrupt them there, we won’t have to apply similar efforts later on in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, or anyplace else.
2) Whether a limited increase in U.S. troops, for a limited amount of time, really can make a decisive difference — in the long-term stability of the Afghan regime, in the competence of the police and military, in the resistance to a Taliban or terrorist return, and so on, after allowing for any friction or hostility created by the additional presence of U.S. troops.
Fallows is skeptical:
I am no expert on either point.* But I know these things: for Obama’s strategy to pan out, the answer on both calls had better turn out to be Yes. And my observation of the world over the years makes me assume, fear, and expect that the answer to #2 is going to be No. That is what I meant just after the speech in saying, “I hope he’s right.” The alternatives are grim.
*Fallows is being characteristically modest. He is a former presidential speechwriter, a seasoned observer of foreign policy, and the author, among many other things, of Blind into Baghdad, a devastating account of the US invasion of Iraq. If he is skeptical of Obama’s Afghan strategy, it’s chilling news for Canadian policy-makers.
Read the full post, Afghanistan for Beginners.
Burtynsky’s Tar Sands images hit DC on the eve of Copenhagen
“Oil,” a major exhibition by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, is currently on display at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. in Washington, DC. The exhibit includes horrific photos of the Alberta Tar Sands:
[Click images for larger view - links fixed.]
Burtynsky specializes in sweeping, often eerily beautiful views of landscapes altered by industry: mine tailings, quarries, scrap piles. James Fallows, of the Atlantic, which features another of Burtynsky’s images this month, writes:
The impact of the exhibit as a whole is, well, hard to convey in words…. [V]ery few people have seen the range of oil-industry artifacts that he has captured in his wall-sized and incredibly-detailed photos. Extraction and refinery operations around the world; the industries oil has made possible; the indications of the end of the oil era. Hard to forget.
The exhibit moves next to The Rooms Art Gallery in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where it will be on display from May 7–August 15, 2010. It will continue to travel through 2012.
More photos and a video after the jump.
All we like sheep – training division
Contrarian reader Andrew Bourke flags the droll consumer reviews of the Playmobil Security Checkpoint on the Amazon website (scroll way down). Moneyquote:
I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger’s shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger’s scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said “that’s the worst security ever!”. But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried to hijack it, she was mobbed by a couple of other heroic passengers, who only sustained minor injuries in the scuffle, which were treated at the Playmobil Hospital. The best thing about this product is that it teaches kids about the realities of living in a high-surveillence society.
Andrew also passes along this commentary from xkcd.com:
Contrarian’s friend Adrian, who has skirted more security checkpoints than Contrarian has boarded planes, wonders what improvements I would like to see in airport security.
The generally accepted view is that the El Al method of interviewing (‘profiling’) each passenger is the best, almost the only, sure method. Indeed, there were moves adopt it in the USA after 9/11, but objections from namby-pamby leftist self proclaimed libertarians [like me! - ed.] precluded this.
Finally, James Fallows has consolidated his many posts on this subject here.
All we like sheep – feedback (updated)
A cautious Contrarian reader writes:
A friendly caution about taking pictures inside the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority pre-board screening area: If noticed, likely to attract unwanted security attention.
Noted — but isn’t this just further evidence that the real purpose of security theater is not to keep Canadians safe but to buttress the puffed-up functionaries charged with upholding these useless, colossally wasteful procedures?
Left: Stanfield International Airport 7 a.m., October 15. The security queue extends past the Clearwater Seafoods kiosk to the Air Canada check-in counter. Right: Half and hour later, inside the CATSA security zone.
The overwhelming evidence is that airport searches do not make us safer, but they make us more sheep-like. For more discussion of the witless “security” precautions we have accepted since 9/11, see:
Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic Magazine account of the ease with which smart terrorists could thwart airport screening.
John Mueller’s Foreign Affairs article contending that there reason there have been no attacks since 9/11 is that “that there are no terrorists within the United States, and few have the means or the inclination to strike from abroad.”
A Foreign Affairs panel discussion of Mueller’s thesis: “Are we safe yet?”
James Fallows’s many sensible contributions to the national “security” debate: “Declaring Victory,” “A Nation of Ninnies,” ” The End of 9/11,” and “Civilize Homeland Security.”
Ben Friedman on The War on Hype: “Conventional wisdom says that none of us is safe from terrorism. The truth is that almost all of us are.”
The blog, Crypto-Gram newsletter, and articles of security guru Bruce Schneier, who coined the term, “security theater.”
Nova Scotia could contribute to the reversal of this craziness by easing up on the intrusive “security” fooferah that has infested provincial public buildings.
Update: Contrarian reader Jeffrey Pinhey writes:
In Rome, earlier this year, I was screened very carefully getting into a security area. Once in, I was able to buy a large, heavy glass bottle of olive oil with a nice long handle… I mean neck. I then was allowed to just carry this on to the plane with me as carry on. This was a significant weapon, at least the equal of a box cutter, even without breaking it and having the sharp glass. Yet they took away a tiny hat pin from a little old lady.
Obama’s first bad speech?
James Fallows, author, Atlantic Magazine writer, and erstwhile speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, has cataloged with discernment his admiration for several of President Obama’s landmark speeches over the last 18 months. So it was surprising to read his prediction that the president’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize will flop.
Fallow’s argument is “probabilistic:” Of the hundreds of Nobel prize acceptance speeches delivered over the years, he contends, only one was ever noteworthy: the three-minute oration by novelist William Faulkner, a man notorious for hating to make speeches.
Here is Faulkner’s remarkable address, delivered on December 10, 1950:
The full text is after the jump:
The slippery slope
As the US right hurls ever more fantastic slippery slope arguments at health care reform, the Atlantic’s James Fallows has challenged readers to come up with a single non-specious example of a metaphorical slippery slope. Aside from, “birth leads inevitably to death,” they’ve been pretty much stumped.
But one reader offered this 19th century advice from Thomas de Quincey, author of Confessions of an Opium Eater.
If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time. Principiis obsta — that’s my rule.
For those unschooled in Latin, Fallows translates principiis obsta — resist the first inklings, nip it in the bud — as “the slippery-slope concept with a college degree.”
What bothers Contrarian about slippery slope arguments is that they always seem to be used as an excuse to avoid doing the right thing.
The Atlantic’s James Fallows blogs about GPI Atlantic
Atlantic Magazine writer James Fallows, drawing on this New York Times op-ed piece, bemoaned the lack of headway in replacing the GDP (gross domestic product) with a GPI (genuine progress indicator) in the years since the Atlantic published this seminal 1995 cover story on the concept.
In fact, that Atlantic cover story helped inspire Nova Scotia’s Ron Colman to found GPI Atlantic, which has done important work developing measures of real progress in this region. Colman wrote Fallows to point this out, and today Fallows blogs about GPI Atlantic. [Disclosure: contrarian once worked for GPI Atlantic.]
Notice anything unusual here?
Two questions about this photo from an entry in Atlantic Magazine writer James Fallows’s wonderful blog:
- Do you notice anything unusual about this cityscape?
- Can you name the country in which this photo was taken?
Answers after the break. Read more »
