Links for 2010-08-23

“It’s Obama’s conviction–you hear this from the most senior White House aides again and again, because it reflects the thinking at the top–that by keeping his head down and doing his job he can also pursue a different strategy, one that doesn’t aim to win the day or the week but that looks toward victory in the long run. “You can do your job well,” as Axelrod puts it. “You can bring the troops home from Iraq, and you can move forward on things that will strengthen the economy, and you can hope that over time people say, ‘He had a vision that made sense, and he didn’t play by the crazy rules of that game.'” In this view it doesn’t matter so much whether polls show the public hated the stimulus plan. What matters is that it saved jobs and helped get the economy going again. It doesn’t matter so much that the public is skeptical about health-care reform. What matters is that people start getting access to better options.”

“”Well sure,” said Brahma. “The claim that Allah and Hubal are the same is feeble in the extreme. But just to be spiteful, let’s turn things around on those pesky Christians.”

“What do you propose?” asked Shiva. He wasn’t so good at thinking up new ideas.

“Whenever a Christian thinks that “Allah” isn’t the same as “God,” we’ll see to it that his own prayers go directly to Poseidon instead.””

“Poliomyelitis–a viral disease that wreaks havoc on motor neurons, often paralyzing sufferers for life–was supposed to be banished from the planet a long time ago. When Jonas Salk unveiled his famed vaccine to the world in 1955, and Albert Sabin introduced an oral version shortly thereafter, inoculations began in earnest in many parts of the world, drastically lowering incidence numbers. Polio was completely eradicated in North and South America by 1994; in Australia and China by 2000; and in Europe by 2002.

Even so, cultural animosities in isolated pockets of the world have conspired to keep global health authorities from stamping out the disease altogether.”

“My inability to actually remember the 70s has always troubled me because there are a lot of nice things that happened I would like to be able to look back upon and take pleasure in remembering. There are good people who have since passed out of my life whose kindnesses and friendship I should never forget.

And it would be helpful, not mention more enjoyable, if I could read books like Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning with both more objectivity and a more personal engagement.

I think I have a plan for dealing with this.

Fight media with media, fiction with fiction.

My idea is that instead of simply resisting the archival sort of images that keep getting in the way of the “real” images of actual memories, I might be able to jog more of those actual memories by reminding myself what the 70s actually looked like as they happened by watching a lot of movies from the period.

But only a certain sort of movie.”