This is new

I've ranted here plenty about inflation, and by now I'm pretty much numb to the concept of the ever-depreciating dollar. But I've never seen this before (menu insert courtesy of Farmington Country Club):

Those are some pretty scary increases over a 90-day period, and they can't be explained away simply by referring to "unrest in the Middle East".

Yes, bad weather has played a role, as the insert makes clear, and the "manmade disasters" they refer to are I assume the continued after-effects of the Gulf oil spill, which has particularly impacted seafood prices. But a doubling in the price of iceberg lettuce? WTF? Yeah, I'm gonna throw that one in the "unstable politics" category of explanation.

I'm no math major, but an increase from $8 to $9.25 is 16%, in 3 months. Using compounding, that's an annual inflation rate of over 80%. Um... transitory?

Quote of the Week

On occasion, I'll cheat a little bit on Quote of the Week, using it as a weak excuse to post what is in fact a clip rather than just a quote. This is one of those times.

But what can I say--this clip is too good to save until Thursday, and it seems especially pertinent given the events of the past weekend. Many of you have probably watched Seth Meyers' amusing remarks at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. I enjoyed his standup, but I found the first few minutes of President Obama's remarks to be absolutely hysterical.

I fully recognize that many people are incapable of letting down their political guard to enjoy the humor of a situation--I am not one of them, but if you are, I apologize in advance. You won't find this funny. But it is. Without further ado...

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"As some of you heard, the state of Hawaii released my official long-form birth certificate. Hopefully, this puts all doubts to rest. But just in case there are any lingering questions, tonight I'm prepared to go a step further. Tonight, for the first time, I am releasing my official birth video."
                              - President Barack Obama

I highly recommend that you watch up until the 4:15 mark in this video. I haven't laughed so hard in a long time. 

Martin Luther King + Bin Laden + Internet = Confusion

I've written (and marveled) here before at the amazing rate at which information--even and especially bad information--can fly around the internet, being posted and re-posted and picked apart in a bizarre but rapid game of telephone that makes "light speed" seem like the slow boat to China.

This dynamic is particularly noticeable and relevant when major news items are breaking, so it should come as little surprise that it reared its ugly head in the aftermath of Osama bin Laden's death. In short, a line that wasn't spoken by Martin Luther King, Jr. became attributed to the civil rights hero, and all hell broke loose in trying to determine what had happened.

Megan McArdle of The Atlantic has the full details, and she should know them--she was intimately involved in the initial chaos.

Yesterday, I saw a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. fly across my twitter feed:  "I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy." - Martin Luther King, Jr".  I was about to retweet it, but I hesitated.  It didn't sound right.  After some googling, I determined that it was probably fake, which I blogged about last night...

It turns out I was far too uncharitable in my search for a motive behind the fake quote.  I assumed that someone had made it up on purpose.  Honi soit qui mal y pense.

Had I seen the quote on Facebook, rather than Twitter, I might have guessed at the truth. On the other hand, had I seen it on Facebook, I might not have realized it was fake, because it was appended to a long string of genuine speech from MLK Jr.  Here's the quote as most people on Facebook saw it:

I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

Everything except the first sentence is found in King's book, Strength to Love, and seems to have been said originally in a 1957 sermon he gave on loving your enemies.  Unlike the first quotation, it does sound like King, and it was easy to assume that the whole thing came from him.

So how did they get mixed together?

Thanks to Jessica Dovey, a Facebook user, that's how.  And contrary to my initial assumption, it wasn't malicious.  Ms. Dovey, a 24-year old Penn State graduate who now teaches English to middle schoolers in Kobe, Japan, posted a very timely and moving thought on her Facebook status, and then followed it up with the Martin Luther King Jr. quote.  

I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. "Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that." MLK Jr.

At some point, someone cut and pasted the quote, and--for reasons that I, appropriately chastened, will not speculate on--stripped out the quotation marks.  The rest was internet history.  24 hours later, the quote brought back over 9,000 hits on Google.

Eventually, it made its way onto Twitter, and since the 140-character limit precluded quoting the whole thing, people stripped it down to the most timely and appropriate part: the fake quote. That's where I saw it.

The speed of dissemination is breathtaking: mangled to meme in less than two days.  Also remarkable is how defensive people got about the quote. The thread for my post now has over 600 comments, and by my rough estimate, at least a third of them are people posting that I need to print a retraction, because of the non-fake part of the quotation.  But I didn't quote that part; I was only interested in the too-timely bit I'd seen twittered.

Crazy. McArdle goes on to discuss just how heated the "yes, he said it", "no, he didn't" rhetoric got, with some people even going so far as to explain (obviously, incorrectly) exactly what he was speaking about and why.

It's strange (though increasingly common) to see a misunderstanding like this develop a life of its own via Facebook, Twitter, and various internet message boards. But I think there's interesting stuff here beyond just the usual "isn't the internet crazy?" musings.

Namely, why should the speaker of a phrase matter so much in our response to that phrase? Shouldn't the sentiment and meaning of words be the same, regardless of who in fact spoke them? Should we disregard statements or feelings regarding non-violence just because they weren't uttered by King or Gandhi? Would they be any less meaningful had they been written by an anonymous blogger, or more ironically, a vicious dictator?

The answer, of course, depends on who you ask. We all have a certain number of pre-determined biases with which we approach situations like these--just as we Americans are bound to respond differently to the Osama news than Pakistanis or Saudis, so too are different Americans from varying backgrounds likely to have different responses.

The power of a quotation like this, reputedly from Dr. King, is that it begs us all to drop our "us vs. them" biases and to begin thinking about things in more universal terms. The emotions of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden are very fresh in all of our minds, and that fact has a tendency to skew the way we think about things, and how we interpret outcomes. The civil rights movement, on the other hand, is more distant and historical. Enough time has passed that we can think about things with clear minds, and consider both sides of the situation more capably than if we were still in the midst of it.

Who spoke a phrase, then, is less important in terms of the meaning of the words, and more important in terms of how we frame them. When we see "MLK" attached to a quotation, we read it much differently--much more divorced from our inherent biases--than if we saw "Barack Obama" or "Sarah Palin" or even "Matt Damon" in MLK's place.

It's difficult for us to read any words, or hear any statements, without first passing them through a filter of our experiences--in fact, it's basic human nature to do exactly that. By attaching a different name onto the end then, all we are doing is placing a different lens or a different filter on the camera.

Words should carry the same meaning regardless of who spoke them, but our experiences and biases won't allow it to be so. That's what allows a controversy like this to take root in the first place. It may be difficult if not impossible for us to hear the bin Laden news without remembering the emotions of 9/11, but I think it's important for all of us to try.

[The Atlantic]

Why I didn't pop champagne last night

Last night was, by any measure, a remarkable night to be an American. Shortly before we were all set to turn in for the weekend (at least, those of us who weren't watching Celebrity Apprentice were), we all received the news that we had been awaiting for nearly a decade--Osama bin Laden, the architect of one of the most terrifying days in American history, had been killed.

Immediately, across the country, the celebrations began, and with good reason. Bin Laden was the head of one of the world's most dangerous and ruthless organizations, one which has claimed "credit" for countless instances of unfathomable death and destruction around the world. Regardless of your thoughts on American foreign policy pre- or post-9/11, there has never been and will never be any justification for the wanton murder of innocent civilians, no matter their national, political, or religious affiliation. The events of September 11, 2001 were then and remain today some of the most cowardly and despicable acts ever committed in human history--I will never forget the unspeakable terror, anger, and overall emotional confusion that I felt that day and in the subsequent weeks, nor do I want to. That day, for better or for worse, will in large part define the lives of multiple generations of American citizens.

Bin Laden was the bogeyman to end all bogeymen, and finally he has been removed from the earth. His death is a loud international reaffirmation of American strength (seriously, the guys who ultimately took him out are absolute badasses, and deserve whatever recognition we can bestow upon them), and it also represents the long-overdue resolution of what had been a significant source of American embarrassment. With all our intelligence-gathering resources and military might, for years we had been tragically, almost comically unable to find the one man we were actually looking for--that ended last night, to our enemies' dismay. In a nation that is increasingly desperate for good news, this certainly qualifies.

Why, then, did I find myself struggling to share in the excitement that seemingly every other American seemed to be oozing from every orifice?

For one, I must confess that I don't exactly feel any safer today than I did yesterday. While Osama was clearly the figurehead and primary inspiration for al Qaeda, and that organization is nowhere near as strong or as organized as it was a decade ago, I by no means think that the death of bin Laden represents the death of al Qaeda. On the contrary, the world is littered with loyalists who are sympathetic to the bin Laden cause (much as it was in 2001, when 19 of them proved just how far they were willing to go to support his vision), and I do worry at least somewhat of the possibility of a symbolic "counter-punch" in support of al Qaeda's now-martyred former leader. The US State Department acknowledged as much when it immediately issued a blanket travel alert for citizens heading overseas.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, I don't think last night was the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning. To treat bin Laden's death as though it in any way represents an end to terrorism or to the United States' complex relationship with al Qaeda is foolhardy at best, extremely dangerous at worst. Any celebration, then, must first recognize that last night's victory is one mostly of symbolic importance, not necessarily strategic importance. The semi-jingoistic cries of "justice" and "revenge" after Osama's bloodshed left me wondering whether this was in fact a consideration for many of last night's revelers.

But beyond that dynamic, I am most troubled by my nagging wonder/worry as to whether or not the ends (if last night was, in fact, an end) of the American response to 9/11 justified the means. America and its government rolled out an aggressive, multi-faceted response to the economic, diplomatic, and psychological shock of 9/11, and the decisions made in the attacks' aftermath (both immediate and distant) are still being felt today, for better or for worse. To summarize...

• In order to restore confidence in the economy and in financial markets, we eased our monetary policy to an unprecedented degree, holding interest rates artificially low for an extended period, and (perhaps inadvertently) in the process stoking a housing bubble that would eventually burst with devastating consequences.

• At the same time, we passed tax cut after tax cut under the guise of economic stimulus, which, when combined with our decision to pour hundreds of billions into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, created a ballooning national debt and perpetual budget deficits that are now nearing nightmare proportions.

• By unilaterally attacking Afghanistan (and later Iraq) under the Bush Doctrine, we put significant strain on key diplomatic relationships, and black eyes like the Abu Ghraib incident and the waterboarding controversy tarnished our nation's image to a degree that we still may not fully appreciate. It may take decades or generations for our nation to recapture the moral and diplomatic high ground that we ceded in the aftermath of 9/11.

• Finally, we created a new department--Homeland Security--whose operatives at the TSA may indeed have made our airways safer, but who have done so at no trivial expense to our privacy and dignity when we fly. This invasion of privacy does not seem to be limited to air travel, as we have all learned that the recently-renewed Patriot Act is in fact incredibly expansive in scope.

Ultimately, as I sit here and assess the overall outcomes of the past 10 years, I can't help but wonder whether America is stronger or weaker than it was on September 10, 2001. Our unemployment is high, as is our national debt and budget deficit, the level of our political rhetoric has plunged to what seems like historic lows, we've lost thousands of young soldiers in pursuit of terrorists like bin Laden, and we've consistently sacrificed our personal freedoms, all in the name of preventing another day like September 11th. At which point, I can only sit back and ask myself--even in death, is it at least possible that bin Laden has the last laugh? In catching Osama, did the United States lose a bit of its soul, compromising many of the values and principles that made it great to begin with?

As a proud American, I certainly hope not.

In masterminding the 9/11 attacks, a key part of bin Laden's thesis was that the United States had become a paper tiger, a big, tough-talking, but complacent bully that couldn't take a punch. By capturing and killing bin Laden, our nation finally landed a significant counter-punch, albeit a decade delayed. But it is by no means a knockout, or even a knockdown--our nation still has much work left to do here at home. The best possible counter to the events of 9/11 is a real return to the traditional American unity and prosperity that has clearly eluded us in recent years; at the risk of sounding trite in these heady times, the best revenge against al Qaeda lies not in capturing its leader, but in living well.

It's time for all of us to step up and, one way or another, ensure that the costs we've endured and continue to endure in our pursuit of bin Laden do indeed prove to be "worth it". Last night was, as I've said, merely the end of the beginning. Today marks the beginning of the rest of the story. What can I do, what can you do, what can we all do to ensure that it's a happy ending for America? The real work starts now.

This is absolutely insane

This clip came across my desk a day too late to be Clip of the Week, but it still warrants a post of its own. This post describes the 37-year (!) project of San Francisco artist Scott Weaver, who built an interactive model of his home city entirely out of toothpicks--nearly 100,000 of them. I don't really know what else to say, this kind of (insane) project just sort of speaks for itself.


Scott Weaver's Rolling through the Bay from Learning Studio on Vimeo.

God's Gift heads to New York

I can only assume that Steve Lavin committed some sort of recruiting violation here...

St. John's coach Steve Lavin has to hope his newest recruit is as impressive on the basketball court as his name.

God's Gift Achiuwa -- a 6-foot-8 power forward and first-team juco All-American from Erie (N.Y.) Community College -- is the ninth player to commit to the Red Storm for next season. St. John's has the No. 3-ranked recruiting class, according to ESPN Insider's top 25.

The Nigerian native, whose father is a minister, chose St. John's over Washington and Cincinnati.

Amazing. Lavin himself refers to the man only as "Gift", and I can't wait to see Dick Vitale screeching about this kid during a meaningless early-season game. And given that God's Gift will be playing in a league (the Big East) that boasts a whopping total of eight Catholic schools (DePaul, Georgetown, Marquette, Notre Dame, Providence, St. John's, Seton Hall, Villanova), the possibilities for creative headlines are really endless. I can't wait.

[ESPN]

Clip of the Week

Well, this wasn't really the greatest week for video clips. Maybe that's just because I spent half the week in Jamaica, not watching videos. Who's to say?

At any rate, you can still check out this one, this one, or this one--each of which is impressive in its own right--but today I'm celebrating a big Game 7 win over an old rival, so Clip of the Week goes to my main man Nathan Horton, for his slap shot through the Canadiens' hearts.



Next up, a little revenge against the Flyers. (Oh, and bring it, LeBron).