Shots in the Dark

Young Bristol gave an interview to Fox Scientologist reporter Greta Van Susteren, who has in recent months become the Palins’ BFF. It’s great stuff!

Read, as Van Susteren, without actually lettting herself use the word “abortion”—not once in the interview is the a-word spoken—tries to ask Bristol if she considered having an abortion.

VAN SUSTEREN: And in terms of your mother making you have the baby, I mean, the whole issue of, I guess, the right — the right to life and choice and things like that.

[Blogger: Say what?]

BRISTOL: Yes. Yes.

VAN SUSTEREN: But this is your issue. This is your decision.

BRISTOL: Yes. And would have — doesn’t matter what my mom’s views are on it. It was my decision, and I wish people would realize that, too.

Of course, this is nonsense. Bristol doesn’t say how her mom would have felt/done if she wanted to get an abortion, but since Sarah Palin supports making it illegal for a minor to have an abortion without parental consent, we can image the reaction would have been less than supportive.

(Greta, oh Greta, where was the follow-up? Here, let me suggest one: Bristol, how do you feel about the Alaskan law passed last year that requires girls 17 and younger to have parental permission to get an abortion?)

Here’s another good part.

VAN SUSTEREN: [Do you] have any idea how to raise a child?

BRISTOL: Yes, because I’ve been baby-sitting my whole life….

That’ll do it, then!

Like her mother, Bristol appears to stretch the truth. For example:

VAN SUSTEREN: Your parents know you’re doing this interview. You’re 18, so you make your own decisions, but do they know?

BRISTOL: I told my mom yesterday, so…

We are to believe that Bristol told her mother of the interview the day before it happened? Even, a minute or so later, when Sarah Palin joins the interview?

In fact, there’s something a little skeevy about this whole interview.

VAN SUSTEREN: I don’t want to pry to personally, but I mean, actually, contraception is an issue here. Is that something that you were just lazy about or not interested, or do you have a philosophical or religious opposition to it or...

[Blogger: A philosophical opposition to it?]

BRISTOL: No. I don’t want to get into detail about that. But I think abstinence is, like — like, the — I don’t know how to put it — like, the main — everyone should be abstinent or whatever, but it’s not realistic at all.

Sometimes, teenagers can be quite honest, too: Everyone should be abstinent or whatever.

That “whatever” shows just how seriously Bristol Palin takes abstinence—it’s a throwaway line, spoken with absolutely no conviction (whatever!), because Bristol clearly doesn’t believe it, but feels that it’s one of those lines that has to be spoken, to be gotten out of the way, before moving on to the truth.

Please, won’t the Palins go away?

Remember Sarah Palin?

(Gosh, that seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it?)

Well, back home in Alaska, she’s finding it tough sledding.

Palin looked around the room and paused, according to several senators present. “I feel like you guys are always trying to put me on the spot,” she said finally, as the room became silent….

And yet, she’s started a political action commiittee, SarahPAC, you betcha, to raise money for…something.

A quick aside: Most political action committees have some mildly self-important name, like Americans for Better Widgets, that suggests at least that they believe in something. Not Palin’s group—it’s SarahPAC! Because it’s all about…Sarah!

Another aside: Are there any male politicians whom we are supposed to call only by their first names? (BarackPAC?)

Here’s a cool example of the value of posting Yale lectures on YouTube: Yale chief investment officer David Swensen addressing Robert Shiller‘s Financial Markets (Econ 252) class.

Even as the site asserts its right to own and sell whatever you put there, a new Facebook full-disclosure “game” has arisen: “Memories of us.”

One of my friends posted this:

Here’s the deal…

Leave one memory that you and I had together. It doesn’t matter if you knew me a little or a lot, anything you remember!

Don’t send a message, leave a comment on here. Next, repost this in your notes and see how many people leave a memory about you. It’s actually pretty cool (and funny) to see the responses .

Between this, 25 Things You Didn’t Know about Me, and all the other stuff that people put on Facebook, the site is gradually acquiring the ability to develop pretty sophisticated psychological profiles of individual users. I’m not smart enough to know how all this information could be merged and analyzed, or to what ends it could be put…but nonetheless, it creeps me out.

I keep wondering: Who creates these little games which convince users to voluntarily post intimate information about themselves online? Somehow they just suddenly appear ; there’s no source information at all. We’re supposed to think that they just appear organically, and are user-generated. Highly unlikely. Look at the language above: “It’s actually pretty cool (and funny)…” This is trying too hard; it’s corporate-speak in the guise of casual candor.

Is Facebook writing games to prompt users to upload more personal data about themselves? And if so, why?

Why on earth would you want to bring a gun into a national park?

It’s not like you need one: Since 2002, there have been some 1.3 billion visits to national parks, and two people were killed by wild animals. The odds are in your favor.

So why would the Obama administration support a policy that lets you do that, especially one pushed heavily by the NRA and implemented late in the day by the Bush administration?

Thanks to the poster who pointed out Stephen Walt’s very fine blog for Foreign Policy. (Check out his very clever post on the connections between international relations theory and Valentine’s Day.)

This brings the number of Harvard profs who blog to, oh, three—Greg Mankiw, Harry Lewis, and Walt. (Harry Lewis, by the way, gives Mark Zuckerberg too much credit in this post about Facebook’s ownership of your data.) Tim McCarthy was going strong for a while, but alas, his blog has petered out.

Okay, I’m probably missing a couple of bloggers. But still—six or seven hundred professors, and the handful who blog can be counted on the fingers of one, maybe two hands?

I know I’ll get hammered for this, but I suspect this paucity of blogging has something to do with the culture of pedagogy at Harvard—or lack thereof. And maybe the strength of the hierarchical relationship between professor and student at Harvard, which blogs blur by making the professor’s work more accessible and, in a curious way, more intimate.

Yale, by the way, just announced that it will be putting some of its lectures on YouTube.

David Ortiz weighs in on steroid use in baseball.

Asked if he would consent to blood tests, which are currently the only reliable way to test for human growth hormone, Ortiz said, “I don’t care. Whatever. I just want to go out there and make sure that people aren’t looking at you like, ‘Oh look at this guy, he’s big now. What is going on?’”

Here’s one difference between the Boston and the New York media: The Boston reporters don’t actually ask Ortiz if he ever used steroids…..

My point is this: I don’t really care whether Ortiz did or not. The witch hunt needs to end. And I happen to think that Ortiz is a good guy and a fine representative for the game. But I do care about the Yankees being targeted for selective disclosure of six-year-old drug tests….

Frank Rich agrees with me: By opposing the stimulus bill, Republicans are just trying to further marginalize their increasingly disenfranchised political party.

Because Republicans are isolated in [Washington’s] parallel universe and believe all the noise in its echo chamber, they are now as out of touch with reality as the “inevitable” Clinton campaign was before it got clobbered in Iowa. The G.O.P. doesn’t recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle even worse off than when it started. That obliviousness gives the president the opening to win more ambitious policy victories than last week’s. Having checked the box on attempted bipartisanship, Obama can now move in for the kill….

In this blog, he appears to argue that academics who are tardy and/or ill-prepared for meetings are doing so in the name of free speech, and that they are therefore abusing free speech.

It would be hard to imagine another field of endeavor in which employees believe that being attentive to their employer’s goals and wishes is tantamount to a moral crime But this is what many (not all) academics believe, and if pressed they will support their belief by invoking a form of academic exceptionalism, the idea that while colleges and universities may bear some of the marks of places of employment — work-days, promotions, salaries, vacations, meetings, etc. — they are really places in which something much more rarified than a mere job goes on.

However one feels about the question, it would be nice if Fish provided a single example of an academic who feels that failing to fulfill professional responsibilities is an academic right….