Incoherence of Republicans: Feature, not bug.

Don't try and appease the American people. Don't try and pander to their policy preferences. Don't try and guess at what direction they really want America to take deep in their hearts...because they, themselves do not know.

Jacob Weisburg of Slate makes the point rather harshly, but well.

Anybody who says you can't have it both ways clearly hasn't been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There's nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but opinion polls over the last year reflect something altogether more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems. Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we're suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place.

At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them. Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn't want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There's another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending.

With all this in the background, Weisburg warns ominously that the politicians who will thrive are those who can best "call for the impossible with a straight face." Like Scott Brown, the newly-minted senator of Massachusetts, someone who wants to call himself a deficit hawk while pushing tax cuts.

Your animated news...now in English

Are there any other Action News items on our page you'd like to see translated into English? I'd probably do it because, you know, it's my job.

Apple Action News: Jan 18th Taliban attacks Kabul

Latest from Apple -- the January 18th Kabul attack.


Based on this story from the WSJ

KABUL—The Taliban launched a coordinated attack on the Afghan capital Monday, paralyzing the city for most of the day as militants set off explosions, took over buildings and attempted to disrupt the swearing-in of new cabinet ministers.

At least 12 people were killed, including seven militants, and 71 people were injured—mostly by hand-grenade fragments—by the time the attacks were over, said Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak. Seven insurgents were shot dead in the fighting and an unknown number of other militants died in suicide blasts, he said.

Rapping up the economy

This is too good not to post.

The economist who participated in the project is Russ Roberts of George Mason University. No prizes for guessing where his loyalties lie when it comes to the battle between Keynes and Hayek. Having said that, the video was just amazingly informative and funny and even-handed. Well done to all involved. Except I think Keynes would have liked some male hotties in his entourage as well.

The Technostructure vs. the Techonomy

I just finished reading the New Industrial State by John Kenneth Galbraith. It's a book that manages to be dated and prescient at the same time. Unusually for an economist, Galbraith attempts to describe the world in a relatively unreduced fashion. t is inevitable that the economic landscape has changed much since Galbraith wrote The New Industrial State. But it's to his credit that he does not retreat into the comforting simplicity of widgetland. In fact, he is hilariously scathing in his attacks on the economists who choose to study the parts of reality that are amenable to being fitted to theoretical models while leaving out parts that might actually be rather important.

Classical economic theory holds that individual profit maximization results in optimal societal welfare as long as the state stands back and let the market do its thang. An interlocking wheel of assumptions is required to prove this happy state of affairs. Galbraith is very good at pointing out the places where the cogs of the wheels just don't fit.

Galbraith's description of what he calls "the technostructure" could not be more relevant in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 08/09. We need a reminder that in our capitalist system, it is not actually the capital that is holding the reins of our corporations. Galbraith patiently explains with wit and verve what, really, any fool with eyes could see. It is the managers who are in charge of the companies and the boards of directors are their tools. Stockholder power is immensely dilute. The individual interests of the managers are frequently not aligned with the the well-being of the company in the long run. Given the power, they will maximize profit for themselves, not the company. Food for thought when considering executive compensation. He's also very good at describing the insidious phenomenon of government and big business aiding and abetting each other. He does this with a fairly value-neutral shrug of the shoulder.

But looking around in 2010, it's also clear that the technostructure is not the whole story. For instance, General Motors, which Galbraith repeatedly uses as the example of an industrial titan destined to expand ever onwards outwards like a benign tumor, would almost certainly have faced corporate death last year without a bailout from the taxpayer. While technology is a bigger story than ever, a important part of the story is coming not from the established titans with monolithic research and development departments, but upstarts like Google who are aggressively poaching on the turf of bigger players. Who knows how things may shake out in the future, but for the time being, it seems there is a decent amount of game-changing afoot. The other staggering change since Galbraith's day, of course, is the increasingly agressive globalization in goods and services. The technostructure still rules a good part of our lives. But nobody is completely immune to competitive forces.

David Kirkpatrick et. al. coined the term "techonomy" to describe the part of the economy that is continually driven by technical innovations and entrepreneurial zeal. They cast the techonomy (including companies/entities as diverse as Google and the Federal Reserve!) as part of the answer to humanity's problems. I'm not quite sure about that, but it does seem to be a good addition to the vocabulary. GlaxoSmithKlein, GM and NBC seems to me very much part of the technostructure -- gliding along on corporate powess for better or for worse. Google, Zappos and the now defunct pets.com, on the other hand, belongs to the techonomy.

The Battlepanda on Conan! Sort of!

Yes, that is my voice you hear in Chinese over the animation. For the record, Conan, that animation is made in Taiwan, not Hong Kong! And the guys in the suits are Letterman and Kimmel.

Kimmel doesn't really look like Kimmel, 'tis true. I gave the animation department a face shot of him that doesn't really show his full figure so they didn't make him fat enough. As for Conan's hair, it's really not tall and orange enough even though I told the guys and gals in animation that's Conan's trademark. Apart from that, they did a great job on a turn-around time that is just astounding.

The animations themselves are getting great hits on youtube. The Chinese version, which is far more popular, just passed 100,000 hits. The English version is at a respectable 16,000 or so. Boing Boing linked to it, as did HuffPo, Gawker TV, DeadSpin and Defamer.

And now, I have a burning question for the blogisphere: Who/what would you like Apple Daily to animate next?

And sometimes the Apple eats you

Life is a strange and wonderful journey, my friends. Who would have thought that I would get my new job thanks (probably) in part to Tiger Woods' peccadilloes? Remember the Taiwanese animated re-creation of the Tiger crash that got a ton of amused coverage in the states? Well, I am typing this in the office of Apple Daily as we speak! Since the Tiger slam video, Next Media Animation has hired me, trained me and started siccing me on some stories. What follows is my first baby -- a two-minute animated recap of the Conan O'Brien/Jay Leno flap. I've worked on other videos, but this is the first one I fully wrote and project-managed.

Our animation team is just...amazing. I cannot describe how sharp and creative and scarily FAST they are. And yes, I am biased. But I really think it's hilarious.

I am also biased in another way: GO TEAM COCO!

Gene and Angelica commands you to have a Merry Christmas

...or else.