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Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Top Stories from the last 24 hours
Romney and Bibi: Middle East Policy By Two Best Buds Walkie-Talkiing After Bedtime
April 18th, 2012Top StoryRomney and Bibi: Middle East Policy By Two Best Buds Walkie-Talkiing After BedtimeBy Mobutu Sese Seko
It was the sort of Times article that readers consume in growing frustration. It screams at greater speeds toward a hard, on-the-ground reality; then someone pulls the Objective Journalism ripcord, and it floats harmlessly back upward. The story is that Romney's Middle Eastern policy would probably be indivisible from Israel's. But the big, important implication is that Netanyahu has every incentive to campaign indirectly for Romney, too. Meanwhile, the B-17 all this truth dropped out of, The Well, Duh, flies harmlessly away, with a painting of a hot, exasperated lady on its side. It's not clear whether any of this matters. Consider: back before the American empire piloted a Rascal bearing its own bloat off into a terminal sunset, we believed that politics ceased at our shores, that whatever domestic gamesmanship we might pursue, our foreign policy interests would not be prey to them. Laborers could still afford to go to baseball games, and Ayn Rand books were only shelved in the fiction section. The modern story that dispelled that nonpartisan wishful thinking is somewhat predictably Vietnam, though not in the way you think. In 1968, with the expectation of a plum position in the Nixon administration, Henry Kissinger persuaded the south Vietnamese to spike the Paris peace talks with unreasonable demands, promising a better deal under a GOP administration. About a half decade and 20,000 dead Americans later, Kissinger brokered an accord like the one he'd scuppered illegally. But it had already served its purpose: Kissinger destroyed Hubert Humphrey's peace strategy and a huge 1968 campaign plank. Lyndon Johnson refused to publicly condemn Nixon and Kissinger for doing something incredibly fucking illegal (under the Logan Act), lest he be seen to use the office of the president to aggressively campaign for a successor or divulge the shady means with which his evidence had been gathered. And if that example feels too quaintly historical or insufficiently Middle Easty, there are always the more recent depredations against truth and policy, like announcing Mission Accomplished 40 days after a war's commencement and eight-and-half years before its end—but only one year before an election. We have an established tradition of poisoning overseas affairs to distort DC shadow-puppet theater, so it's hardly unreasonable to read something like this—
—and conclude that Mitt Romney isn't the slightest bit hesitant to subcontract American Middle Eastern affairs to a foreign leader, just to grab some votes. And why should he be? For one thing, the Republican party has been desperate to break the hammerlock the Democrats maintain on Jewish voters. For another, he can only shore up support among those evangelicals who believe a whole Israel is necessary to complete the dispensationalist fantasia of rapture, murder and Churchill Downs raining from the skies. But most importantly, it's not certain whether those two conditions matter, because Romney couldn't even one-up Eric Cantor. In November, 2010, Cantor, the House GOP Whip, spoke to Netanyahu before his meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He pledged that the GOP-controlled U.S. House of Representatives could be relied upon to serve as a check against the Obama presidency. Cantor told Bibi that congress would protect the interests of a foreign power and act as a block against the branch of government actually intended to handle diplomacy. In Eric Cantor's high school civics class, evidently government was divided into executive, judicial, and Israel. And even then, God knows if that matters, since Bibi has basically been campaigning against Obama since 2009 anyway. In April, 2009, former intifada prison MP and current Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg sock-puppeted Bibi's pronouncement that either the U.S. or Israel would eliminate Iran's nuclear development. It was a clear ultimatum that admitted neither discussion of Iran's ambitions vis-a-vis nuclear energy nor the means of response. Three years later, nothing has changed. This story never changes. In case you're feeling any more exercised by the above, ask, too, if it matters. Because one of the strongest thrusts of Netanyahu's three-year public relations campaign against the Obama administration has been against the latter's predictably polite, impotent tutting about illegal Israeli settlements. (For all the whining about Democrats, the last American president to tell Israel to go stuff it was George H.W. Bush. Bill Clinton's Middle East envoy, Dennis Ross, was a former AIPAC official, and the negotiating group he led was celebrated by Israeli newspaper Maariv as "The Mission of Four Jews.") Let's play a historical game. Here's a quote with the identifying details removed. You guess when it's from and who it's referring to:
The period in question was 1978-9, and the president was Jimmy Carter. (For more, see Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation, page 426.) This has been the great asshole move on Obama's part: reiterating a complaint as old as the 35-year Romney-Netanyahu circlejerk by appealing to international agreements to which Israel has been voluntary signatory. None of this would much matter if Israel were merely the hobby horse of a bunch of intolerant Christian bozos or the sentimental/defensive/religious/ethnic cause of former immigrants and their families rightfully nurturing their dread of racial intolerance. But, even according to the extremely pro-Israeli Bush Department of Defense, our uncritical support of that nation is the primary radicalizing factor among Muslims, outside of our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. (General David Petraeus testified to this and was criticized for his troubles.) Far from the GOP rhetoric of its being our first line of defense against the fires of Muslim terrorism, it is, by GOP admission, our gasoline. So maybe the above litany doesn't matter, but try reading it through in reverse. A man who routinely demonizes the Obama administration for suggesting that his nation be bound to international agreements over 35 years old also has a nearly 35-year-old relationship with the GOP presidential candidate—who publicly defers to his judgment—and has enjoyed a pledge of fealty from the GOP's top House ideologue. He's also issued an ultimatum to the United States and a Middle East nation about preemptive war. Maybe those things are important; maybe outsourcing American foreign policy or wedding it to private or legislative interests directly at odds to America's elected diplomatic branch yields poor results. Just don't expect that from a New York Times article. This is not a story about international politics and policy. This is a story about rich people being buddies, about chummy-chum-chums. You wouldn't want to bury that lede in a bunch of geopolitics. When rhetorical brinksmanship can lead us all to an apocalyptic race war, you should partner up with someone. It's like going to the museum on a field trip in elementary school. When you might start killing millions of brown people, for God's sake: remember the buddy system. Image by Jim Cooke. "Mobutu Sese Seko" is founder of the blog Et tu, Mr. Destructo?  | From Our SponsorTop Stories
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Use Springpad as Your New Personal Assistant: Get Organized, Save Money, and Have Fun Being Productive
April 18th, 2012Top StoryUse Springpad as Your New Personal Assistant: Get Organized, Save Money, and Have Fun Being ProductiveBy Alan Henry
Getting Started with SpringpadThe new Springpad is a little like Pinterest—if Pinterest were insanely useful! Here's how it works: Sign up for a free Springpad account, and the service starts you off with a few notebooks. Notebooks are like categories; you can create notebooks for specific projects or for broad sweeping ideas. Your notebooks are where you'll store lists, notes, bookmarks, or anything else you want to keep for future reference. To add something to Springpad, just click the plus sign at the top of the page in your Springpad account. You can paste a URL of something you want to come back to, search for an item in the Springpad database, use the Springpad bookmarklet to "spring" an item or bookmark into your notebooks when you're elsewhere on the web, or use one of the Quick-add tools in the drop-down menu to let Springpad do the thinking for you. We'll go into more detail on adding and organizing items a little later, but the point is that adding items is so easy you won't need a lengthy tutorial or a bunch of third-party add-ons to help you get started. Springpad is most often compared to poular snipping and capture tool Evernote, and while that's fair, the one that's best—or at least best for your use case—will depend heavily on how you like to keep track of your ideas and projects. Choosing one over the other is ultimately a matter of taste. Evernote's fine if you're really into it, but Springpad is, in this writer's opinion, a much better tool, and a slick way to visually organize your thoughts, projects, and shopping lists. Plus, Springpad's smart sorting and social features put it over the top. Don't Think Organizer; Think "Personal Assistant"Collecting data is easy; any service can do that. Springpad's secret sauce lies in how it organizes your data once you save it to your account. Springpad's smart sorting means you don't have to manually create notebooks for movies, music, recipes, bookmarks, or anything else you would normally want automatically organized (although you can!). Springpad tags it all for you, and lets you filter based on those tags across multiple notebooks, or drop the same item in more than one place. For example, say you have a gadget you want to research or buy. Click the plus-sign to quick-add that item to your Springpad account. You can paste a URL, or just start typing the name of the product, and Springpad will auto-complete the entry for you. Then it'll add links to buy the product at Amazon, check other prices elsewhere, and even look up reviews and other information on the product so you can make an educated decision, all without you spending time looking it up yourself. If you decide to sleep on it, Springpad will even send you an alert if the price on your item drops to warn you that now might be a good time to buy. The same applies for music, movies, and books—Springpad automatically organizes them for you and pulls in relevant information so you don't have to. We noted this a while ago, but perhaps the biggest joy of using Springpad is that you don't have to have a half-dozen tools and utilities that do similar-but-just-slightly-different things (web clipping, public sharing, private collaboration, to-do and task management, etc) when Springpad does them all well enough that you can spend more time doing instead of planning and organizing. Organize Your Life with SpringpadEach notebook in your account can represent a category that you want to organize items into, like "Recipes to Try" or "Parts for My Next Computer Build," or a whole project where you can to collect ideas and to-dos instead of projects, like "Basement Renovation" or "Garden Planning." Once created, you can start filling up your notebooks with snippets from the web, to-dos, products, and more. Here's how:
Your notebooks can be public, private, or only available to a select group of people. If you and your significant other are planning to redecorate the living room, for example, the two of you can share a notebook where you both post design or furniture ideas for the other to see. You can connect your Springpad account with your Google account to pull in events from Google Calendar. If you have a friend who's into music, you can create a notebook for new albums, and invite them to comment on your tastes and suggest new bands without exposing the world to your music tastes. If you prefer being public, you can just as easily share your notebook with all of your friends on Twitter or Facebook so they know what you're into. It's flexible, and the way you use the notebooks is entirely up to you. Springpad is primarily a webapp, but you can also manage your notebooks on your iOS or Android device thanks to the Springpad mobile apps. There are also tablet-specific variants for the iPad and for Android tablets, and while we love the webapp, the mobile apps are just as useful, especially for retrieving information on the go, like a shopping list or itinerary. Don't be fooled though—the mobile apps are designed for data entry as well, and you can get some real work done using the Springpad mobile apps, especially on a tablet. Be More Productive with SpringpadUp to this point, we've been discussing Springpad as something of a more elegant and visually attractive way of organizing your life than Evernote, and a more useful way of organizing the things you find on the web than Pinterest. Now let's talk about how you can use Springpad to get some real work done. The latest springpad update lends itself to topical notebooks with checklists or specific to-dos and events inside each one, all linked to your Google or Yahoo account, and to your mobile devices. This setup is perfect for productivity systems like GTD or Personal Kanban. If you prefer GTD, you can take the simple approach with a few notebooks like Marcel Chaudron outlines in his walkthrough, or you can go all out and build a rich and deep productivity system like Bobby Travis explains over at 40Tech. Regardless of your approach, here are the basics:
That's all there is to it, in the simple case. 40Tech explains how to amp this up a bit and take it to a more granular level. If you're reading this and still thinking about how this all compares to Evernote, Daniel E. Gold explains how Springpad stacks up to Evernote from a productivity standpoint for him. He argues—and we agree—that it's Springpad's flexibility that stands out, even if Evernote has it beat in some other areas. If Personal Kanban is more your style, and you're familiar with tools like previously mentioned Pegby, your initial setup is easier. You'll follow the same steps above, but instead of the GTD-themed notebooks and tags, you'll only create three: "Pending," "In Process," and "Done." Have More Fun with SpringpadAll of these tips are designed to keep you organized and help you be more productive, and while you can do them all in public (especially some of the more goal oriented ones—you know how we feel about working towards your goals in public) most of them may be more suited to private notebooks that you only share with the people you're working with, or your family and friends. That said, Springpad's flexibility means that you don't have to just use it as a stodgy productivity tool. Create some public notebooks for your interests, whether it's movies, music, books, hardware, electronics, anything, and start sharing. You can use Springpad partially as a service to keep those items so you can return to them and enjoy them later, whether they're articles you meant to read or the upgrades you want to buy for your home theater, and you can share them with the world and the Springpad community. Follow other users, like their bookmarks and notebook entries, and invite your friends to join you. Yes, we know this all sounds a little Pinterest-y, and if you're already having a blast with friends at Pinterest, this use case may not resonate with you, but the fact that you can use Springpad for work and for play illustrates its flexibility and saves you the hassle of joining another network if you don't want to. One of the most compelling things about Springpad is that it's growing and changing faster than most other services like it. That cuts both ways, but I've found that the changes are largely positive, and the features added with each new revision improve its functionality without compromising its core features. Others can (and will) disagree, but Springpad is a service that's gotten better with age and change. It's still under heavy development, and the team behind Springpad are keenly aware to the needs and feedback of its userbase, which is another huge point in its favor.
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