Inside outsider

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I just read in the New York Times that William Daley of the famous Chicago political family (and a former Clinton administration official and a JP Morgan executive) is to be named President Obama’s next Chief of Staff.

The opening graph, at the moment, reads that he’ll bring an “outsider’s voice” to the White House. In the same breath the article promotes his decades of business experience.

Since when is a former corporate executive that has previously held an executive branch appointment an outsider? The New York Times doesn’t attribute that specific term describing Daley’s anticipated role to anyone in the administration, so that’s apparently how they summarize an unchallenged view which they are echoing.

Laughable. Disgusting.

The Legacy of Tron

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I saw Tron: Legacy recently and what it was is about what I expected. It was true in a major respect to the original: it was a technology demo. And this one had a better soundtrack.

I enjoyed it for what it was. Under the 3-D glasses that came with my ticket I had gladly already popped-in nostalgia-tinted contacts, imbued by the cult following of the original Tron (after it too flopped in the theaters).

Still, as I watched, I also hoped for it to break out into something internally coherent and specific, and maybe even illustrate a moral that directly related to the technological challenges of our day.

Jeff Bridges seemed to evoke a John Perry Barlow-esque iteration on The Dude, and from there we could have touched on Net Neutrality (maybe even with tangents touching on technologies like Tor and topics echoing WikiLeaks). Or, more obviously, we could’ve been given a morality play on The Singularity, drawing from Hans Moravec and Bill Joy. Legacy nodded at most of these things and then quickly averted its eyes.

Given the low bar set by and the cultish favoritism associated with its predecessor it was still enjoyable for the indoctrinated.

Double-double-double talk

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An AP story on the NYT web site opens with this: Four suspected U.S. missiles slammed into a house in northwestern Pakistan on Sunday, killing six people in an area near the Afghan border teeming with local and foreign militants, intelligence officials said. That sentence is a mess for several reasons.

The following sentence:

The strike, which was carried out by at least one unmanned aircraft, was part of the Obama administration’s rising campaign to use drones to target militants who regularly stage cross-border attacks against foreign troops in Afghanistan.

If that is so certain — and I believe it — why does the author feel compelled to says “suspected U.S. missiles” in the previous statement?