This morning, NPR’s Morning Edition featured a report from Mara Liasson about the use of language in Washington. She started off by talking about how ‘toxic assets’ are now being called ‘legacy assets’ and the difference between ‘shared responsibility’ vs ‘individual mandate’ in the discussions over health insurance. Good so far.
But then she went on to discuss Obama’s ban on the use of ‘war on terror’ and his administration’s alternate, “overseas contingent operations.’
This is where her report went off the rails. She interviewed writer Joe Queenan about this usage. First she paraphrased him: “Queenan thinks leeching political language of its most powerful terms–axis of evil, war on terror–fits right in with President Obama’s non-polarizing, inclusive leadership style.” Great. But Ms. Liasson and Mr. Queenan missed the opportunity to point out that terms such as ‘war on terror’ and ‘enhanced interrogation’ were a calculated invention by the political right specifically to frame the debate in their terms. Of course Obama is not going to use them!
Mr. Queenan, in fact, went on to draw an inappropriate (and, I would argue, partisan) conclusion: “He does use those fancy vaporous expressions, and I think that does go well with his personality, and it’s kind of hard to pin this guy down on anything.”
Obama’s choice of vocabulary does indeed reflect his ‘inclusive’ leadership style. But equally important are the terms that he’s not using: unlike the previous administration, his administration is not inventing partisan vocabulary to frame the debate in liberal terms. He’s accurate and neutral, not partisan or vague.
(George Lakoff was the obvious interviewee for this report.)

…does not mean that you should. Case in point: Fancy Fast Food.

Walter the Farting Dog plush toy. (Good book, strange product tie-in).
(And you thought I was talking about myself!)

… does not include downing the last slurp of coffee from your travel mug on the way to work, only to get chunks of something.
I’m just saying, if you were on the road with me this morning and saw me suddenly swerve into the oncoming lane briefly, I was trying to quickly spit my coffee back through the opening in the travel mug without spilling it all over myself.

The City Community Church here in Austin (which looks like it falls under the emergent church umbrella) now invites people to bring their dogs to worship.

The Null Device recently linked to a story about a professor who got a nonsensical, computer-generated article accepted for publication in a supposedly peer-reviewed, producer-pays-to-publish academic journal. It’s an interesting story, but what caught my eye was the professor’s carefully considered conclusions based on his experience:

From this one case, we cannot conclude that Bentham Science journals practice no peer review, only that it is inconsistently applied. . . While one should be careful not to generalize these results to other Open Access journals using similar business models, it does raise the question of whether, at least in some cases, the producer-pays-to-publish model may unduly influence editorial decision-making.

This type of thinking makes me miss the academic world; I think this is also a good example of the type of careful academic nuance that all too often gets lost when academic topics are presented to a wider audience.

In the last couple of days, I’ve heard several commercial television news reports about torture, but they’ve consistently referred to waterboarding as an ‘enhanced interrogation technique.’ Way to buy into the conservatives’ framing of the issue.

If you read my blog regularly, you probably already know that I’ve long been pretty pessimistic about the economy. My over-simplified layman’s take is: since so much of the economic growth of the last couple of decades was based on unsustainable and/or imaginary things (e.g., real estate values; crazy, unregulated investment vehicles,etc.), the new reality–after we stop the decline of the global economy–will be much different. For instance, see this post by Rafe Colburn and my comment about it.
Now, I’ve found an article in The Economist that backs up my pessimism. After going through details of the current and future economic situation, here’s the summary:

The worst is over only in the narrowest sense that the pace of global decline has peaked. Thanks to massive—and unsustainable—fiscal and monetary transfusions, output will eventually stabilise. But in many ways, darker days lie ahead. Despite the scale of the slump, no conventional recovery is in sight. Growth, when it comes, will be too feeble to stop unemployment rising and idle capacity swelling. And for years most of the world’s economies will depend on their governments.
Consider what that means. Much of the rich world will see jobless rates that reach double-digits, and then stay there. Deflation—a devastating disease in debt-laden economies—could set in as record economic slack pushes down prices and wages, particularly since headline inflation has already plunged thanks to sinking fuel costs. Public debt will soar because of weak growth, prolonged stimulus spending and the growing costs of cleaning up the financial mess. The OECD’s member countries began the crisis with debt stocks, on average, at 75% of GDP; by 2010 they will reach 100%. One analysis suggests persistent weakness could push the biggest economies’ debt ratios to 140% by 2014. Continuing joblessness, years of weak investment and higher public-debt burdens, in turn, will dent economies’ underlying potential. Although there is no sign that the world economy will return to its trend rate of growth any time soon, it is already clear that this speed limit will be lower than before the crisis hit.

(Via 3 Quarks Daily)

The next time I encounter someone who thinks that science and religion are mutually exclusive, I will direct them to this sermon delivered at a synagogue by science journalist Robert Krulwich.
By the way, if you’ve never listened to RadioLab, you’re missing something great. You can subscribe to the Radiolab podcast via iTunes.

A few weeks ago, we bought a new Maytag washing machine from our local Home Depot. It was delivered and installed a few days later, on a Tuesday. We did a few loads of wash without incident. On Thursday evening, it stopped in the middle of a wash cycle and we smelled a burning rubber odor. It had died.
The next day, I stopped by the Home Depot and talked to the guys in the appliance department. They said that they had to talk to Maytag in order to see how to proceed. They called me back later in the afternoon to inform me that Maytag would send a repairman out the following Tuesday to assess the situation.
My wife and I found that really unacceptable for two reasons: 1.) we’d be without a working washing machine for at least a few more days, and 2.) Home Depot was passing the buck to Maytag for a product we bought from them.
I talked with the Home Depot guy again and he said that they would like to help us out by just swapping out our dead washer with another from their stock. The manager would could make this happen would be in on Saturday afternoon.
On Saturday afternoon, the manager called and made arrangements to do the swap. I was not home, but my wife said that the guys who brought over the new washer were clearly not trained appliance installers; they had multiple difficulties in getting the one washer out and the new one installed. In the process, they managed to put one large gouge and several cuts in the linoleum floor in the laundry room and to scratch our hardwood floors.
We were happy that Home Depot had tried to circumvent Maytag’s bureaucracy and to provide good customer service, but we were not too pleased with the floor damage.
The Home Depot store filed a claim with their insurance company for the damage. The adjustor came out a couple of days later, and we received a check a few days after that. The amount that they awarded us will pay for the damage and then some.