Google co-founder Sergey Brin has now taken that comment further, saying that Facebook is becoming a threat to the Internet, along with Apple, and of course the various governments trying to censor their citizens.

Right. The Chinese Internet Firewall is just like Facebook and Apple.

This is why I absolutely can’t stand Google executives. (I like plenty of their products, thank  you very much—I use Google search, gmail, and google apps every day and Chrome when I use Windows.) It’s not just that they’re hypocritical about their whole “don’t be evil” motto, it’s that they really think they aren’t and everyone else is. They really think their shit doesn’t stink.

I understand people who are turned off by the hipster douche image of Apple (but can’t understand why they would cut off their noses to spite their face if Apple makes good products). But Google constantly gets graded on a curve for Android, for Google+, for the ridiculousness of their “open” rhetoric, GoogleTV, Knol, Buzz, etc. and yet survey show that people really do believe that these guys are not evil.

Comparing Apple and Facebook to repressive governments may be an apt comparison on some levels, but only if you include Google in the group too. There’s nothing the others do that they haven’t done too. Facebook hasn’t made the same mistakes they were making in a long time. Apple bought everyone a case for the iPhone antenna and then sent observers into their factories in China. And they did these things in response to pressure people rightfully brought.

Shut up, Sergei. Make good products and cut out the Narcissistic bullshit.

(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

(10b) Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.

(10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date […]

(10d) Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.

(10e) If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.

(10f) Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.

(10g) Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.

(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

(10i) If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.

(11) The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.”

(12) There is a magnifying effect here, too, caused by affirmative action. In a pure meritocracy there would be very low proportions of blacks in cognitively demanding jobs. Because of affirmative action, the proportions are higher. In government work, they are very high. Thus, in those encounters with strangers that involve cognitive engagement, ceteris paribus the black stranger will be less intelligent than the white. In such encounters, therefore—for example, at a government office—you will, on average, be dealt with more competently by a white than by a black. If that hostility-based magnifying effect (paragraph 8 ) is also in play, you will be dealt with more politely, too. “The DMV lady“ is a statistical truth, not a myth.

Derbyshire is a columnist for the National Review Online. I know, you’re shocked. But here’s what stuns me. If you had to respond quickly in as few words as possible what conservatives stand for today, it would be “small government,” right?

Yet Derbyshire seems to want to use the vigilante lynching of Trayvon Martin, and its failure to cause any government activity, as an excuse to make a petulant and vile counterexample. I would challenge Derbyshire to list each and every example of a black-run police department’s failure to properly investigate the predatory murder of a while child by a black male and, in any close case, for there to be a failure to even arrest someone.

If you’re a “small government” conservative, and you can’t see the difference between the government’s actions in relation to security and equality and the acts of private individuals, you have no intellectual substance to your position. None.

I know that somewhere there are people who legitimately think small government is best. But wherever those people are, their message is constantly getting coopted by people who use it as an excuse for “fuck you, I got mine” on the one hand and as coded language to avoid any kind of perceived racial transfer payments enabling mythological “welfare queens.”

The test of whether the legitimate holders of the small government position are legitimate or merely fellow-travellers of the greed and race cult will be by the company they keep. I predict Derbyshire will still be sniffing the jocks of mathematicians around the National Review many years from now.

I like Rachel Maddow a lot. People who draw a false equivalency between her and her purported counterparts on the right are far too facile in their comparisons. Maddow is quirky, intelligent, unorthodox, and, above all, she is not angry. And those who have refused her admittance to the ranks of the Very Serious, like The New Republic, are only showing their own rust.

Drift discusses a topic that should be of great concern to any subject of our great empire: that of the increasing militarization of politics. Maddow is obviously not aiming this book at the Chomskian air of academia. In fact, it is what she says it is: a small-’c’ conservative review of the drift of which she speaks. It is an argument premised on the beliefs of our Founding Fathers, not merely on the current expediencies of empire.

The one fatal problem with it: it only tells the post-Vietnam part of this issue in that it is premised on the change from wars fought by your neighbors and paid for in your taxes, to wars fought by other people without costing you an immediate penny.

This is certainly a key transition, but it is only the resolution to the set up of the plot that began with the Manhattan Project during World War II and the messianic sense of America’s role in the world that that war established. Without these elements, Vietnam would not have been Vietnam. And without the dread of the bomb and the vortex of secrecy that surrounded it and the power to use it from the beginning, there never would have been the same hook for secrecy to sink into to government and metastasize. Maddow is a little bit older than I am, so she is certain to remember the ever-present but subtle terror that the world could simply end in half an hour. This surely informed not only the government’s urge to keep its military doings secret, but also fed the public’s demand for a sense of security.

The drift began with Truman and the bomb, not with Reagan and his Hollywood gestures about Panama, Grenada, and the salute of the commander-in-chief. At that point, it just became regularized.

If the national command authority, which is the group that controls the use of nuclear weapons (and may or may not be identical with the Constitutional chain of succession) can launch doomsday, it seems, a fortiori, they can send a few troops here or there. Plus, if not for their ability to launch a deadly retaliation, the whole framework of Cold War brinksmanship would break down. Keeping America’s nuclear secrets secret, and our ability to spy on Soviet nuclear capabilities secret, created the security state.

To that extent, Gary Wills’s Bomb Power is a more incisive telling of this story.

Maddow has a section on the eerie decay of our nuclear forces which are foreshadowed by her comment that they are unusable. But this entire chapter does not seem to support or undermine her thesis, which is entirely separate from considerations of nuclear weapons. Her thesis, that the President can too easily launch wars detached from any cost to the citizenry (and which arrangment is antithetical to our Founders’ vision). She makes no argument as to whether conventional wars are more or less likely in absence or presence of a strong and ready nuclear deterrent, and, despite explaining the current condition of our nuclear forces, never really connects the dots between the nuclear arms race in the Cold War and the massive centralization of military authority.

As I mentioned, Gary Wills explains this is great detail. But a simple example familiar to most should suffice. FDR tried and tried to get the US into World War II. Congress just would not do it. Not until Pearl Harbor. There was a formal declaration of war. The next war, Korea, was launched by the President without a declaration of war. We never really stood down from World War II. And there is where the drift began.

Leaving aside the nuclear issue, in the immediate post World War II era and its following years, the President ordered, without declaration of war, involved us in the overthrow of governments in Guatemala and Iran (the latter Maddow mentions), sovereignty-violating overflights of the Soviet Union, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and many other military adventures before we went to Vietnam. Even if you only consider those events that incurred massive mobilization, there is always Korea.

These defects undermine an otherwise informative and fun read and places it right in the center of the firing range conservatives are likely to attack Maddow on whether or not it’s what she wrote: another liberal book blaming our problems on Reagan and Vietnam. In this case, this is not only a correct criticism, it’s also one that should undermine the book even for liberals.

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If I see another headline reporting a “rumor” that the iPhone “5″ will have LTE—wouldn’t the bigger news be if it wasn’t?

We’re pretty sure the next iPhone will have LTE, a faster processor, etc.

The only rumors I’ve read that interest me are a new connector. And connector-less charging would be great.

May I suggest as a working hypothesis that the amount of bullshit in any writing is directly proportion to the number of scare quotes in that writing. You have to be sure they are scare quotes, though, and not quotes.

Here is nice heavy helping of bullshit.

I’m also not sure why they would produce a TV that sells as a TV. Perhaps a 48″ or even 60″ Cinema display version of their monitor for Macintosh computers, but why would they want to compete in the low-margin commodity TV world? (I guess the same could be said of phones and computers and they do pretty well.) I suppose this isn’t ruled out in the future, but the rumors were once agains shown to be baseless. The new Apple TV was a very incremental upgrade.

The more natural evolution is a version of iOS for AppleTV that shares more of the exciting features of iOS as well as DVR capabilities. “Siri, record Hawaii Five-O for me and play back last week’s episode of The Office.” All this would need is a HDMI connector and it could work on any TV set. I see no reason to limit this to an Apple-branded TV. The New Apple TV’s lack of Siri seems either to foreshadow another model or mean that Steve Jobs was trolling Isaacson.

Maybe the AppleTV box would even have a CableCard tuner in it. Cable boxes are terrible. I don’t love my DirecTV tuner at all. It’s slow, unresponsive, and ugly. The interface is too complicated and could use some love from Apple. But I have no idea if an AppleTV would work with DirecTV or FiOS or Uverse or anything other than regular cable.

It’s only a matter of time before someone figures out a way to provide the on-demand TV service we all want. something like iTunes, with the feature of letting you add your own recordings from services you subscribe to, be they Netflix, Hulu, or a cable company.

Who better to do it than the world’s largest company?

As for the iPad 3—sometimes I think they name things 3GS and 4S etc. just to mess up the rumor mill—or iPad 2+ or whatever it will be. I knew it wouldn’t be the “iPad 3.” The screens people have seen aren’t the same “retina” resolution as the iPhones. Is it because it’s held different’y? Odd, because I usually hold my iPhone closer. Maybe it won’t be a “retina” display, just an “HD”—is this the iPad 2HD? The iPad //e (lol) still won’t have an SD card slot, I’m guessing. “Retina” is defined, as I surmised, by how you hold it. 

It has to have Siri. There is probably only two models, world-cell and Wi-Fi only. I expect it to otherwise be incremental. Wrong on both counts here, but right about it being otherwise incremental. The A5X processor is mostly noteworthy for handling the extra graphics and power consumption with aplomb.

And today’s winner for stupidest Apple rumor: iPad Mini. Sure, I’ll pick one of those up with my iPhone Nano. Na. Ga. Hap. Pen. These same Zombie rumors occur every product cycle. Someone is just going for stopped-clock is right twice a day “cred” if there is such a thing. They can’t show their work. And just as before, it turned out to be the prior model remaining on sale for cheaper instead of a half-assed new version.

…and one more thing. A new Mac Pro? It’s either time to fish or cut bait with this line. Most people are of the opinion that the iMac i7 is currently the fastest Mac. Although I would much prefer a low-end Lexus, a 32-core Mac Pro with 64G of RAM and 2 TB of flash storage and five 30″ Cinema displays each with whatever the latest silly expensive video card is would be something I would salivate over. Maybe in time for Mountain Lion?

Were they funding ritual circumcisions to begin with? I doubt it.

Religious freedom is just that. It does not include subsidy.

All of this goes to the heart of the issue with Microsoft: are they only relevant to the extent they have de facto monopolies and which one is more important, Windows or Office?

For a long time, both were. It was hard to get any competition to Windows going while it had the only version of Office that was any good, and for longer still while Exchange was the leading e-mail and calendar platform.

But Word stopped adding features that most people use a long time ago and Exchange is not the factor it once was. An interesting phenomenon that occurred around the same time as the launch of the iPhone was the launch of the .docx and other *x file formats in Office 2007. People obviously were not upgrading to 2007. People were getting tired of shelling out for a new version every few years that added features they didn’t use. Does anyone remember the whole scandal over the docx format and whether it was open enough, and allegations of corruption in standards agencies?

It ended up not mattering much, because the .doc file format is fairly universal, but people usually share finished work in PDF, which is an open standard. And the more the web becomes the main medium of publication, the less the storage format of the work in progress matters at all.

Office 2010 seems to have been adopted by force to the extent people use it. At least this time, it correlated with the upgrade of Windows to a very nice OS in Windows 7, the best Windows ever both in absolute and relative terms.

But as universal interchange formats become the norm, having a certain program comes back to user preference. A program is less likely to be imposed by an IT department or demanded by users. As a result, people have more latitude to choose which software they want to use to author documents.

This means unless Microsoft Office is everyone’s choice for reasons other than compatibility it won’t matter. And Microsoft hasn’t made me believe they can do that, and I have no reason to think they can on the iPad either. Therefore, my answer is: it won’t matter if they make an iPad version or not, it won’t matter.

Unfortunately, the rabbis that have put a ban on his book have only done him a favor, casting him in every La-Z-Boy Intellectual Jew’s favorite role: the Orthodox Rebel. And of course, a Chabadnik talking about Jesus is probably the last thing Chabad wants right now, because it is just reflexively going to draw unfortunate comparisons.

But those rabbis and anyone else who engages with this guy are simply swallowing the bait, myself included (though I doubt very much I’m of much help either way). Shmuley knows the Orthodox world very well, of course. His quip that “we are people of the book, we aren’t the people who ban books,” must be deliberately disingenuous because as anyone familiar even in passing with the Orthodox world in general, and the Da’at Torah world of the Haredim in particular, bans on books (including the entire Israeli National Library), media, and even lox on bagels are par for the course.

I’m not posting those examples to make fun of them. I don’t agree with them; but the point is, Shmuley is aware of them and his feigned outrage is proof of his total lack of good faith here.

But what really bothers me is that Jesus is simply not “kosher.”  And nothing I’ve read addresses this squarely.

It doesn’t matter if he observed every last rule that Mea Shearim could ever produce regarding shabbat or his diet. If I really have to explain why this is the case, then you’re probably not my intended audience. But if you’re not following me, I’ll say this. It’s a sign of our times that “kosher” has generated a sense of meaning that means basically, “someone who doesn’t eat pork and who doesn’t drive on shabbat.” It doesn’t mean, “someone who cancels loans in the seventh year and who would never eat a grafted fruit.” In other words, it has come to mean a certain kind of member of a certain kind of Orthodox Jew, not someone who observes all of halakha, but, rather someone who does so in a very certain way.

Here’s a great example. A group wants to start a new certification for food produced ethically (but which must be certified by Orthodox kosher certification first) and in accord with Jewish law regarding the environment, workers, and animal treatment. They are shelled by the Haredi establishment:

A new seal for kosher products and establishments being promoted by the Conservative movement is reportedly about to appear alongside those of Orthodox kashrus agencies. The “Magen Tzedek” certification is intended to signify adherence to certain standards regarding labor, treatment of animals, safety, environmental concerns and corporate integrity.

Such issues are worthy ones but they are well covered by governmental regulations and other areas of halacha, as determined by recognized Torah authorities. They have nothing to do with kashrut.

The same government agencies that aren’t good enough to supervise whether milk really comes from cows is good enough to take care of all of those things?

So, under this kind of definition of “kosher,” Jesus gets called kosher. Rhetorically, of course, this is largely meant to distinguish Jesus from his followers, like Paul of Tarsus, who basically repealed Torah law. The theory is that if we can show the gentiles just how observant Jesus himself was, they’ll think differently about Judaism.

Ha. This shows that what’s needed as much about Christian education about Judaism is Jewish education about Christians. This type of reasoning is no more likely to penetrate their considerations as are the reductiones ad absurdum in this post are likely to talk anyone out of their “strict” Jewish observances.

So, just to make it clear: under Jewish law, Jesus was a false prophet, a false messiah, and, as such violated prohibitions in the Torah. If we accept the stories in the New Testmanent, he was also a sorcerer or a magician, also in violation of prohibitions in the Torah. And those are prohibitions I can list without breaking a sweat.

But, even under the sociological definition of Shmuley’s community, Jesus probably violated shabbat (unless you assume the kind of leniency regarding healing that it is very doubtful the Haredim would). And of course all of this is an exercise in limiting the scope of the discussion to favor one side of the argument. Even if the Jesus of the Gospels were in fact “kosher” no Christian who can be called such believes in only the Gospels without the rest of the New Testament.

This isn’t to suggest that we shouldn’t be more tolerant in our religious discourse or that we should talk negatively about a figure venerated by two billion people. But I simply disagree that we do any good in that vein by making up false compromises that don’t exist. The point is whether or Jesus was “kosher” by any particular person’s definition is irrelevant to Christians in respect to their own beliefs and an affirmative answer more or less spits on 2000 years of Jewish history and suffering.

UPDATE: Check out this review of the book on The Forward containing, inter alia, this quote:

Boteach has the noble goal of improving the relationship between Christians and Jews, yet his approach here is problematic, as well. By severing the good Jewish Jesus from bad Christian teachings about him, he casts all Christian beliefs — about, for example, Jesus’ uniqueness and significance — as groundless and fantastic. Far from building a bridge between Jews and Christians, his portrait of Jesus will be rejected by most Christians as irrelevant and even insulting.

And usually about this time every year, when the football season is winding down, I start getting very interested in trade rumors, playoff positioning, and stats.

Maybe it’s because the teams I like the most are hopelessly mired in mediocrity with little chance of recovering their past glory. Maybe. But I used to just enjoy games. I would watch   two last place teams play in the past. Maybe I don’t have the time to be so obsessed with stats–but I certainly have more time now than I have in many other years.

I’m not sure why. But I have a theory.

Something changed during the lockout. No, I’m not mad at “greedy” players and/or owners. But everyone seems to think that the two major things “accomplished” by the lockout were great for the game. First, allegedly, some kind of competitive balance was restored by a salary cap. Second, the rules were changed to–again allegedly–put the focus back on the skilled players.

I think both of these are crap and I don’t care much for the “New NHL.”

Number one: it is true that higher spending teams tended to do better on average and make more playoff berths and win more Cups even though there were a few glaring exceptions. But the salary cap hasn’t made certain destinations like Edmonton more attractive to every free agent, hasn’t prevented general managers from making stupid trades, squandering draft picks, or making stupid signings. I don’t think there was every any real way to measure whether the teams that spent more were doing so to keep their teams together or just to horde mercenaries. I know it was both, but I’m wondering if the latter predominated so much that it’s worth the result?

And the result is, winning teams that are under the cap can’t stay together. Look at the 2010 Chicago Blackhawks. They hadn’t even finished drinking champagne from the Cup and half the players were on other teams. Part of rooting for or against teams, of being a fan, is, yes, liking the team as more than the sum of its parts. But part of it is also liking the parts and the identity those parts bring. Shouldn’t a team take less of a cap hit to keep players it drafted at least? If not at least to retain any player it has under a team that is under the cap?

The 2010 ‘Hawks are just the starkest example. Almost every team has had to break up when even a medium-quality player or two has a new contract need. They never seem to develop an identity apart from the few core players locked in long term–and these are the guys getting 20 year deals and eating up a bunch of space in the cap so that the kind of guys who contribute to the identity get paid less and just rotate around the league.

The second issue is also crap. Yes, the new rules seem to emphasize what some call “skill.” To me, it’s just one kind of skill. They have basically done everything they can to neutralize the skill of goalies. We used to hear how athletic goalies were. How they lost so many pounds of water per game, etc. Now even Cup winning goalies don’t seem to be capable of stardom. They have been boxed into their little goalie ghetto to keep them from exhibiting any creative skills.

Other players have been given free reign to skate, I guess. But either that newly permitted speed is killing them or there’s some other mysterious cause behind all of the concussions taking stars out of the game. Paul Kariya was the fastest player in the 90s and concussions ruined his career.

So, now, basically almost any kind of check can be called a penalty and a power play is granted.

Hockey used to be about balance and well-rounded players will a diversity of skill. But they also had determination, strength, power, and guts. Goalies were allowed to be skilled. Defenders were allowed to be skilled, too.

Something about this isolation of a single type of “skilled” player and the constant movement of any player that earns a raise has also hurt stardom too. Fewer players seem to be consistently at the top of the league every year, especially non-forwards. Perhaps this is because players achieve greatness in combination with other players and when their mix is changed, so does their apparent greatness.

Again, I think somehow teams should be permitted to be kept together.

But the constant rule changes in search of a mythical “good old days” where Wayne Gretzky was converting the gentiles to hockey is probably the thing that makes me the most annoyed. I can’t even keep track. What’s a goal? What’s not a goal? What’s holding? What’s interference? What is a delay of game for shooting the puck out?

In just about every major sport, the Golden Ages that everyone talks about are eras when few teams dominated and had dynasties. In baseball, it was the Yankees. In basketball, the Celtics, Lakers, and Bulls presided over the Golden Ages. In football, the Steelers, Cowboys, Packers, and 49ers–just 4 teams–have appeared in the majority of Super Bowls and won almost half. And in the last decade or so, no one has been better than the Patriots. If you add them to the NFL super-dynasties, then the majority of wins in the Super Bowl in a 32 team league belong to just 5 teams.

And in hockey, the era the fans allegedly pine for is when the Edmonton Oilers won the Cup 5 times–or, for some, when the Montreal Canadiens won it every year.

Even if it’s not your team, there’s something about a dynastic team and its combination of great players as individuals and as teammates that makes them great.

In hockey, we enjoyed this as fans and anti-fans as recently as the last Detroit Red Wings Cup team, but they are perhaps the exception to the rule with the last pillars of their greatness being replaced by ever weaker reinforcements. The “Dead Puck Era” Dynasties–the Penguins, the Red Wings, the Devils, the Avalanche–and the teams that tried to join them in those exalted ranks, the Flyers, the Rangers, the Sabres, the Stars–were all involved in a great drama played out over several years. I thought this oft-derided era produced some of the best teams, players, games, and playoff series of all times.

And the cap hasn’t saved teams in what are euphemistically called “non-traditional hockey markets.” Even places with Cup winners like Carolina, Dallas, and Tampa aren’t buzzworthy and some places like Phoenix, Nashville, and Atlanta are failures no matter what anyone tells me. How could they be so stupid to think that expanding the league, diluting the talent pool in the process, putting teams where people won’t even be watercooler chatting over them if they are in the Cup finals–and will forget a Cup win in just a little while–was a better idea than keeping teams in small markets where just about everyone talks hockey all the time?

How could they move a team from somewhere like Winninpeg or Quebec in the first place where people pay money to go to watch teenagers play, its on the news, and in the papers?! (And in doing so make half the teams virtually the minor leagues, and the 4th line of every team the minor leagues?)

And to cover the tracks for this stunt (Wayne Gretzky is a great ambassador! We’ll get the talent from Europe!) they put in a salary cap that breaks teams up every time they do any good and redistribute the above-average players (if not the very cream) to be anonymous “stars” in NASCAR towns where they appear in furniture store ads and no one recognizes them? And they blame it on the interference penalties and the goalies!

All of these follies would be excusable if the games were better, the teams were really more competitive, and the game was popular nationally. But they aren’t and it isn’t.

Maybe I’ll snap out of it come playoff time.