I’ve got to be honest: I’m still not entirely sure what’s going to be in today’s Sift. I spent this week in the Midwest managing the affairs of my 90-year-old father and considered canceling the Sift entirely until next week, but on my way home on Saturday I decided there were a few things worth posting. (BTW, those of you who follow my religious writings may feel like you know my Dad. He showed up as a major character here and here. Oh, and also in a political post here.)
This week everybody was mostly talking about same stuff as last week: the Olympics and Mitt Romney’s taxes. And then we got another major shooting, which might be a hate crime. We can’t be sure yet, because the shooter is dead and officials are reluctant to assign a motive prematurely.
The combination of a major automatic-trading malfunction Wednesday and a filibuster of the cybersecurity bill Thursday inspired me to write “The Looming Software Catastrophe”. When there’s a trend that only a major disaster can stop, you can pretty well predict that there will be a major disaster.
The Sift will be back at full strength next Monday.
Today’s weekly summary is going to be called “What Free Market?”, and its quote comes from Barry Lynn’s book Cornered about the effect of hidden monopolies on the economy. It may look like the stores contain a dazzling variety of goods, but often all the brands in a sector are made by one or two companies, and even apparent rivals are likely to have overlapping supply chains. It’s much easier for an enterprising individual to build a better mousetrap than to get it onto the local WalMart’s shelves without selling the idea to some megacorp first.
What’s everybody been talking about this week? The Olympics, obviously, but I can’t improve on the nonstop TV coverage. However, I couldn’t resist joining the cacophony about Chick-fil-A and Romney’s trip to London.
This week’s other article centers on what I’m learning from Lynn’s book. One issue I keep coming back to in the Sift is rising inequality. But all along, I’ve felt like I’ve been missing a piece of the puzzle. The usual explanations — globalization, lobbyists, bailouts, tax cuts for the rich, etc. — all play a part, but I don’t think they fully explain the explosive accumulation of wealth at the very top. Maybe monopoly is that missing puzzle-piece, especially the monopolies and near-monopolies that get between consumers and the people who make or invent the products we buy.
Everybody’s talking about the Dark Knight shooting. That’s getting plenty of coverage without me, so I’ll focus on three reactions: the gun control discussion it re-ignites (somewhat to President Obama’s consternation), the bizarre fantasy that an armed crowd could have taken the shooter down with less loss of life, and the religious-right view that blames such disasters on separation of church and state. (Seriously. And BTW, the victims are in Hell if they weren’t Christians.)
Until the shooting, everybody was still talking about Mitt Romney’s taxes, Republicans manufactured a gaffe by selectively quoting something sensible President Obama said, and Ann Romney may or may not have called us peons “you people”.
But the main articles this week will be about longer-term issues. In spite of things I’ve encouraged you to believe in the past, it looks like Peak Oil isn’t really happening, at least not anytime soon. And I take advantage of the Catholic Church’s Natural Family Planning Awareness Week to look back on the papal encyclical that is causing all the problems.
I’m moving slowly this morning, so the first article (on the papal encyclical) probably won’t show up until about 11 eastern time.
This week’s Sift has three articles, so there won’t be as many short notes as usual. I had planned two:
- a discussion of Carne Ross’ new book The Leaderless Revolution, which pairs nicely with what I talked about last week, Chris Hayes’ Twilight of the Elites. Both books are looking at the broad failure of our institutions and finding its roots in the dark side of something we believe in deeply. Hayes targets meritocracy, and Ross attacks the whole notion of representative government. Ross uses his experiences as a British diplomat to argue that the world has become too complicated to turn our responsibilities as citizens over to leaders. He argues instead for a more anarchic, more directly participatory way of addressing our problems. (Yes, Ross is an Occupy Wall Street guy.)
- a lighter piece that I think makes an important point: What Shaving Taught Me About Capitalism. Discussions about the free market always end up focused on computers, where the market has stimulated better performance for less money. For some reason they never focus on shaving, where a series of phony “revolutions” in technology have justified higher prices for no improvement in performance. In the course of my research, I end up reclaiming the inexpensive tool of my ancestors, the double-edged safety razor. (And since I know someone is going to notice: The bearded picture above is how I look in the winter. In the summer I’m clean-shaven.)
But this week’s news-network buzz about Mitt Romney’s finances and business career was such a perfect illustration of what I was talking about last April (in The Narratives of November) that I just had to comment. So there’s a third article: Believe in America, Mitt.
The shaving article should go up in an hour or so, and I expect the complete Sift to be up roughly noonish on the East Coast.
The big article this week started out as a review of Chris Hayes’ The Twilight of the Elites, but turned into a more general piece on institutional failure that I’m calling “In Search of a Universal F***-Up Theory”. Every place where our institutions are failing or disappointing us — in the government, the economy, or even seemingly unconnected areas like religion or sports — you can find a specific explanation that sort of makes sense. But what explains why they’re all failing at once? Hayes’ book is such an across-the-board explanation, but whether you agree with his theory or not, we need a UFT.
It’s still iffy what else I’ll have room for, but I’m working on two other things, one of which will run this week and probably the other next week: a defense of food stamps against the charge that they must be unnecessary because so many of the poor are fat, and the chapter of Leviticus I wish the fundamentalists would quote: Leviticus 25, which establishes the Jubilee Year, cancels debts, and implies a very non-capitalist definition of property. What if people were taking that as seriously as the Leviticus verse that denounces homosexuality?
What was everybody talking about this week? The heat, the Higgs boson, and the political fallout from the ObamaCare decision. And just because you need some cuteness in your life, I’ll link to a video of pandas playing on a slide.
The Supreme Court is kind of like a college student: It procrastinates, and then in the last few days of the term it comes out with an amazing barrage of papers.
This year, they even allowed themselves a temporary incomplete. The term was supposed to end last Monday, but they extended it to Thursday. Sure enough, that’s when they announced their most important decision, the one saying that ObamaCare is constitutional.
Usually, I focus the Sift on issues that I don’t think are getting enough attention, figuring that you already hear more than enough about whatever the media has fixated on. But sometimes the media over-coverage of the Issue of the Day is so confusing and full of spin that I feel like I need to straighten it out. So this week, two of the three articles are about the Court: one about the ObamaCare decision and one about the Arizona immigration decision.
The third article is my own story of accidentally traveling without ID: “I Was Undocumented in Arizona”. (Yes, you can get through TSA without a driver’s license or passport.) That will be the first story that shows up.
I’m also trying something different this week: I’m combining the weekly summary with the Nuggets or Short Notes. I still haven’t decided whether I like the idea or not, but we’ll see how it goes.
OK, it’s Monday. I’m awake. The week’s articles should start appearing in 2 or 3 hours.
What was everybody was talking about this week? Greece, the Senate Banking Committee’s love-fest with bankster Jamie Dimon, the reporter who heckled the president in the Rose Garden, and the female representative who got punished for assaulting the virgin ears of the Michigan legislature by saying “vagina”. But I bookmarked a lot of other interesting stuff for this week’s Nuggets and I still haven’t decided how much of it I have space for.
In addition to the Nuggets, this week’s Sift will have two longer articles:
- If not ObamaCare, what? Even if the Affordable Care Act survives its upcoming death match with the Supreme Court, Mitt Romney has pledged to repeal it. But his plans for replacing it are surprisingly thin. The vague principles he does endorse sound great — especially if you’re an insurance company.
- What Senate candidates should you support? This comes from a Sift-reader’s question: Everybody’s talking about Obama vs. Romney, but the Senate is also up for grabs in November. If you have money to contribute or time to volunteer (and you don’t just want to focus on your local race), where should it go? I answer this question with two other questions: Did you know that the most liberal member of the House is running to become the first openly lesbian senator? And that her race is rated a toss-up?
And by the way: No Sift next Monday, because this week I’ll be at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Phoenix. They tell me that our plans for protesting the Arizona anti-immigrant law do not include getting arrested, but I haven’t seen Sheriff Arpaio’s plans. And while I understand that some great writing has been done in jail, I’ll bet the wifi signal is terrible, so I’m not going to stress over getting a blog out. The Sift will return July 1.
I’ve noticed that traffic on the Weekly Sift home page increases on Monday mornings, as people wonder when the week’s articles will come out. Some weeks take me longer than others, and I can never guess when some last-minute detail or glitch will hang me up for an hour or so. So I’ve decided to add a new feature for the early arrivers: “The Monday Morning Teaser”, which will go up first thing in the morning and tell you what articles to expect later in the day. (I intend for the Teaser to be brief. This Teaser is unusually long because I’m explaining what it is.)
This week’s Sift will have some other changes, which I’ll explain in the summary post: The usual Short Notes post is renamed “This Week’s Nuggets” and will come out last rather than first, so that when the day’s postings are complete it will sit right under the summary, rather than coming out first and sitting at the opposite end from the summary.
Rather than beginning with its own lead article, I plan for each week’s Nuggets to start with a “What Everybody Was Talking About” segment that will quickly link to the best articles I’ve found about stories you’ve undoubtedly already seen a headline about. (If the story was over-hyped, the best article about it might be a satire or a cartoon.) What was everybody talking about this week? Wisconsin, the death of Ray Bradbury, and the transit of Venus.
In addition to the Nuggets, this week’s Sift will have two longer articles:
- What Happened in Wisconsin? will examine the various spins people are putting on Scott Walker’s victory in Tuesday’s recall election. What does this result say about the strengths and weaknesses of the liberal grass-roots movement that was the prototype for Occupy? What does it mean for the Obama/Romney race in November?
- Demonizing the Girl Scouts. I want to throw a little light on a corner of the culture wars that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: In May the Catholic bishops started an investigation of the Girl Scouts, for the purpose of determining whether Catholic parishes should continue to sponsor troops or otherwise cooperate. The bishops may be joining Protestant right-wingers, who for years have been demonizing the Girl Scouts as a radical-feminist, anti-traditional-values organization.
I still haven’t named the weekly summary or chosen a quote for it.
The Weekly Sift 