Ben Brown, Internet Rockstar Feverish Velocity

Where The Conservative Things Live

There seems to be a feeling of disappointment amongst leftist bloviators that their conservative cohorts did not disappear in a puff of logic the moment Obama was elected. Perhaps they have forgotten the years of mind numbing, dittohead rallying propoganda during the Clinton years that culminated in, lest we forget, a successful attempt to impeach the president and successfully sully the image of that office so much so that nobody cared enough to stop Bush from being elected.

Arianna Huffington says,

It’s time to drive the final nail into the coffin of laissez-faire capitalism by treating it like the discredited ideology it inarguably is. If not, the Dr. Frankensteins of the right will surely try to revive the monster and send it marauding through our economy once again.

Paul Krugman says,

Why does such stuff flourish? Probably because there is no punishment for it — as long as you’re on the right, and I mean right, side. Let Michael Moore point out, entirely correctly, the close ties between the Saudis and the Bush family, and he’s blasted as a crazy conspiracy theorist. On the other hand, let Donald Luskin suggest, in 2004, that George Soros is planning to engineer a financial crisis to defeat Bush, and he gets to publish front-page articles in the Washington Post Outlook section declaring that there isn’t a recession.

Huffington and Krugman act like the beliefs of the right have anything to do with facts, reality, or rational thought. Obama’s election and the massive and sudden failure of American-style capitalism are certainly illustrative of the underlying problems, but in no way indicate an end to or a victory of progressive thinking over the feudalistic tendancies of our heartlands. I think this will become especially clear after the rosy colored fog of election bliss passes and people wake up to realize that they don’t have a job, don’t have a retirement, and aren’t a contestant on American Idol. Bush will be safe in his ranch by then, and the only person left to blame will be the formerly plucky junior senator from Illinois.

Why does the right get away with it? They pander to the greed and intellectual laziness in all of us. While the left asks us to make sacrifices for the good of others, the right tells us we should be keeping every penny we earn (so they can take it from us through the slot machine of our unregulated financial system.)

So sorry, Paul, sorry Arianna, you don’t get to sit back and have an easy ride for the next few years where everyone believes you because you’ve been proven finally and ultimately correct. We’ve been trained over the last few decades to sit back and let those in power run roughshod over us, and we now need more than ever those voices of reason, those purveyors of fact and history to guide us through the murky times ahead. The left must not become infatuated with itself, complacent in its tenuous victory, because the moment we lose site of the fierce pragmatism that brought us here, we’ve given up the game.

Who better to keep us laser focused on what is real and what is happening than lying idiots like Limbaugh and Kristol and Luskin and their ilk? I say, renew them all for 8 more seasons.

A Lot of Hot Air

I think a lot about the transition in common language from using future tense to using present tense. For example, Dakota and I had a running wager on when people would start saying “we are in a recession” instead of saying “a recession may be coming,” long after it was pretty clear that a recession was already here.

Well, this article does a pretty good job of switching us to the present tense when talking about drastic climate change. The ice caps ARE melting, the permafrost IS melting, the sea levels ARE rising, and we must DO SOMETHING NOW.

Al Gore set the example with his call for a 10-year conversion to noncarbon electricity. It’s at the outer edge of doable, and the outer edge is where we need to be. We’ll have plug-in hybrid electric vehicles on sale by 2010. The question is, can we have nothing else on sale by 2020? We built more than half of the interstate highway system in a decade. Would rebuilding our rail networks to a European standard be all that much harder? Can we get the price of energy up quickly enough to get markets on the task of finding a low-carbon way of life that works? And by works, I mean reverses the flow of carbon into the atmosphere. Because physics and chemistry won’t reward good intentions. Methane is seriously uninterested in compromise. Permafrost, notoriously, refuses to bargain. Even the absolute political power represented by King Canute couldn’t hold back the rising seas. Those forces will only pay attention if we can scramble back below 350.

Consider this my vote for $15/gallon gasoline.

Build a Garden!

We built a planter box and planted a garden in our yard over the Thanksgiving holiday. It was very easy to do, and we had a lot of fun working on it together. I highly recommend it! If you learn how to grow your own food, you will not die immediately when the apocalypse comes!

Katie got the plans for the planter box from Sunset Magazine. I am basically a retard when it comes to using screws, but even I was able to figure out how to tack a few boards together and dig a few holes.

We planted chard and carrots and broccoli and beets and bok choy and peas and onions and shallots and 2 kinds of lettuce and brussel sprout in an 8×4 box. If we harvest half of what we planted, we will be filled with delicious for weeks.

Here is a view from inside our new garden, photo by Katie:

I can’t help but think about the broccoli and greens we will NOT be buying from California, about the trucks that will NOT be driving the highways to ship them across the country, about the money we will NOT be spending at the grocery store. And all I have to do is dig around in the dirt?

Sold.

Thirty Episodes

Instant Gratification

Thanks to integration with the Netflix API, we have a new feature on HoorayMovies! We are now not only tracking which movies are available to rent on Netflix, but also which movies you can watch instantly using Netflix’s new “Watch Instantly” system. It works very smoothly, and they have a surprisingly large and exciting catalog of movies already available.

If you’ve already got a HoorayMovies account, you can see which movies from your collection are available to watch right this second, and we’ll keep you posted about new releases as they become available. And if you don’t already have an account, what the hell is wrong with you? You know I’m going to keep pestering you until you join.

See our official announcement here…

This is just about the coolest thing the 12-year old kid who lives inside my brain has ever seen: You can now design your own muppet! And for $90, which seems pretty reasonable to me, FAO Schwarz will deliver your custom designed muppet in a few weeks. SOLD.

Now I just need to figure out what to name him.

Red Oceans vs Blue Islands

When we lived in San Francisco, we were frequently confronted by pretty rabid anti-Texas attitudes. We’d have conversations like this:

BEN: Yeah, we’re actually from Texas.

SF: EW! Oh man, that is terrible.

BEN: It’s actually really nice there and most people are very frie…

SF: Yeah, nice for cows and Republicans!

BEN: Well, actually…

SF: Oh, but you live in Austin, so it is ok… A tiny ocean of blue in a giant sea of red!

BEN: Sigh.

Well, take this, you pretentious jerks! Not only is Austin blue, but so is Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, El Paso and Corpus Christi - that’s every single large city in Texas! And look at the gulf coast! Democras are up almost 6% since 2004. Sure, we didn’t turn Texas blue, but you had better believe there are a lot of rational, progressive-minded folks here in Texas who want the same thing for our country as the glitterati in San Francisco do.

Graphic from the New York Times

For comparison, here’s California:

Next time I talk to someone in California, I’m going to say, “Oh, it must be so hard living on that little peninsula of blue in that big sea of red!” For the full context and to see just how surrounded by red that little slice of California blue is, you should really take a look at the county maps of Nevada and Oregon.

PS. No state income tax in Texas either!

Dead Architects

Bryan Boyer just launched this charmingly morbid site about death and architecture. This is the second project to launch on Bryan’s new Of This We Are Sure site.

I am extremely excited that Bryan, the web’s original wunderkind who lived for a while in a make-believe apartment located on my couch, is making HTML again.

More on Generations Shifting, Eras Ending

The long-running, internecine baby boomer cultural feud just isn’t that relevant to Americans who came of age after the civil rights, gay rights and feminist revolutions. Even many younger evangelicals are broadening their agendas beyond abortion, stem cells, school prayer and gay marriage. And just as younger Protestants found JFK less threatening than their parents had found Al Smith, younger whites — even in bright-red states — don’t view the prospect of a black president with great alarm.

Peter Beinart in the Washington Post via The Daily Beast’s Cheat Sheet

Transfer of Power

The politics of your generation is giving way to the politics of mine. The WORLD of your generation is giving way to mine, and the one my children will live in.

Courtney Skott from a letter she wrote her parents to convince them to go Obama.