James Fallows

I'll start posting some of the reactions I've gotten to my current cover story that tries to make sense of President Obama's successes and failures in his first three years in office.

Not many people who have written in about the piece have said, "But gee, it was so short!" It's all of 12,000 words long -- but even at that scale, we left lots of stuff out. Among the cutting-room floor material was an attempt to address the issue this reader's message raises: how much of Obama's super-cool demeanor, which can seem so icily effective when it works and so ineffectively passive when it doesn't, is due to the pressures on him as America's first non-white president. If I, as a middle-aged white guy, am aware of the perils awaiting him at the slightest flash of being an Angry Black Man, I can barely imagine how much more profoundly he must have wrestled with this question.

I am therefore glad that Nancy Wallace, whose name I'm using with her permission, has written in about the issue:

I wanted to write to you because I think there's an important element of Obama's emotional responses and the perception of those responses that you didn't mention: race. I grew up in a family that was black middle-class; we actually were kind of the Cosbys. From the time I was in elementary school, I was aware, even though no one ever said it out loud, that was supposed to be "a credit to the race". I had a responsibility to be a role model which meant studying hard and going to church and getting into a good college and going on to professional school and marrying someone of the opposite gender. I was taught to deal with emotions by hiding them, because tears or anger would immediately slot me into a stereotype of Mammy or Jezebel.

In 1995, I had a nervous breakdown in the office where I worked at Harvard. I was on medical leave for two months. When I came back, I couldn't shake the sense that as the only black woman in my office, my failure to handle an unreasonable and excessive workload would reflect poorly on all black women, everywhere. It took a long time and a lot of therapy to realize that I was carrying a burden that wasn't mine, and that by repressing my emotions to avoid being seen as "too angry" or "hysterical,"  I'd just made everything worse.

Unlike me, Barack Obama IS a role model. Everything he does and says is, on some level, viewed through the prism of "First Black President". Knowing that has to constrain his public emotional responses, especially anger. If he raises his voice the slightest bit, then he'll be seen as an Angry Black Man, and Angry Black Man is scary. Jan Brewer claimed that the president was being "threatening" toward her, and I believe she probably did feel threatened because there was a tall black guy in front of her who didn't look all that pleased. At any moment, he could have whipped out a gun, or overwhelmed her with his brute animal strength!

Even the media narrative is quick to slap Obama with the "angry" label. After his speech during debt ceiling crisis where he directly criticized the GOP, his demeanor was described in some headlines as "angry", when in reality, he managed to hold it down to vaguely irritated. Can you imagine what would happen if he'd said, "Look, these clowns in the House? Dumb as a box of hammers. If they want to stop dicking around and get serious, I'm here; otherwise they need to stop acting like a bunch of spoiled whiny brats."

Jackie Robinson agreed that during his first year with the Dodgers, he wouldn't respond to any of the abuse he received from players, officials or fans, because even just yelling back would be seen as proof that "they" can't handle the pressure. I suspect Barack Obama is fairly laid back in general, but we'll never know because he can't be anything else.

Check out Flight Aware's track of the route of the Boeing Commercial Aircraft Group's flight 236 yesterday. This is the route the plane actually took, as logged by Air Traffic Control radar. Look at it for a minute, if you don't get the point immediately. Hint: the aircraft in question was a "Dreamliner," aka Boeing 787. Another hint is in the upper left hand corner of this page.

More »

Much of this past fall I was interviewing political figures to get their judgments on what-we-know, and how-we-know it, about President Obama's successes and failures in office so far.

The results are now online here (but of course it's always best read on paper!) plus a short video q-and-a with Corby Kummer, who was my editor on this piece as he has been for nearly all other Atlantic articles I've done since the early Reagan years.

Will have more to say about the background of this article, implications, cutting-room-floor info (yes, even with a 12,000-word piece, there's a lot left out!), and so on in the days ahead.
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Also, for the record, the Reddit AMA session I did yesterday was interesting, at least to me, and the results are here.

To lift your spirits you might watch this now-famous bit from Jon Stewart four years ago, after Romney dropped out of that year's race against John McCain. The part from time 2:50 to 4:15 is the heart of it. (Via Steve Benen.)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Mitt Drops Out
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

I was indeed feeling sorry for Romney in human terms -- losing every county! - and then I reflected on the kind of person who would find solace, in time of trial, in sentiments like the ones we hear from him.

Never imagined I would end up saying this, but: Go Santorum!

Finale, at least from me. A few incoming items on the "we take your jobs" / "YellowShirtGirl" discussion.

1) From Julia Kim Smith, a further HTML exploration. 

[If you're tempted to write in: No, that's not what the HTML actually shows. <blog class="joke" > ]

2) From Funny-or-Die, a parody that is not exactly Oscar Wilde-like in its rapier subtlety but that has its moments. My favorite is in the first 20 seconds, a joke on the theme of "my excellent math ability!" Plus a Jeremy Lin reference right after that.

3) From a reader who notes our old friend "false equivalence" in an NYT item on the controversy:

While I think this is a relatively minor offense, I just thought it was interesting that the New York Times article you linked to in today's blog made certain to include this:

>Senator Stabenow has done some China-blaming of her own. From her Senate Web site: "China has a clear pattern of flagrantly violating trade rules and it is long past time to stand up to them."  And on Monday, in a conference call with reporters, she said, "We can't continue to sit back and let China's policies cost us jobs.''<

How is this even remotely comparable to the offensive commercial in question?  Why does it deserve inclusion?  It just serves to tar Senator Stabenow, unfairly, with the same brush.

I liked the NYT item but the reader has a point. It's one thing to talk about trade rules, currency valuation, etc and something else to run "me likee!" ads. The "to be sure" reflex really is deep, for all of us in the journalism business.

4) From Chauncey DeVega at Daily Kos, a clip that exactly matches the "visual dog-whistle" that I said the video was evoking, with its use of a smiling but treacherous young Asian beauty, issuing broken-English come-ons to the unsuspecting Yanks. This is a scene not from Apocalypse Now but from Full Metal Jacket -- a movie made 25 years ago about events 20 years before that, but whose imagery left a mark in the public mind. Someone involved with this ad had seen this movie. Really, the scene is a remarkable match to the Hoekstra ad:

For devotees of Reddit IAMA sessions, I will be doing a live question-and-answer session there today starting at noon east coast time. FYI it will be at Reddit.com/r/iama.

Thanks to the Atlantic's Jared Keller, whose long-time entreaties have gotten me off the ball here. See you on line.

Today's installment comes from Mike Lofgren, familiar in these pages for his observations after a career working mainly for Republicans in the Congress. He begins:

For most of my three-decade career handling national security budgets in Congress, Iran was two or three years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The idea of an Islamic bomb exerts a peculiar fascination on American political culture and shines a searchlight on how the gross dysfunctionality of American politics emerges synergistically from the individual dysfunctions of its component parts: the military-industrial complex; oil addiction; the power of foreign-based lobbies; the apocalyptic fixation on the holy land by millions of fundamentalist Americans; US elected officials' neurotic need to show toughness, especially in an election year. The rational calculus of nuclear deterrence, which had guided US policy during the cold war, and which the US government still applies to plainly despotic and bellicose nuclear states like North Korea, has gone out the window with respect to Iran.

You can read the rest here.

Also from Peter Beinart, an argument I don't have the same personal standing to make, about the potential for American Jewry to help spare Israel a rash error:


Yes, Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon would create a lot of dangers and complications. But according to the latest testimony from the most authoritative American intelligence expert, the U.S. is not sure that Iran is even trying to build a bomb. It says nothing good about our current political/strategic climate that there is so much loose talk about "preventive" war at this stage. Eisenhower would not have talked this way, or Rabin, or other strong leaders from those two countries' modern history.

Who says that the people behind Pete Hoektra's "Your economy get very weak" ad are insensitive?

They haven't changed the ad itself, or the "Debbie Spend It Now" site festooned in nonsense Chinese and even more nonsense economics. (Best headline about all this, from the NYT: "Asia Bad. Take Many Jobs. Not Fair." )

But fortunately they have changed the HTML code! Here's what we saw last night, as part of the code referencing the comely and smiling "we take your jobs" Asian woman:



But now:


Who wouldn't call that progress! I know that I feel better. As I bet does the actress who appeared in the spot. I'm looking forward to hearing about it from her side some day.

As anticipated last month, I finally saw the George Lucas adventure movie about the Tuskegee Airmen, Red Tails. Here is how some of the real Tuskegee Airmen looked:



And??? OK, it's not Shakespeare. The dialogue is sometimes laugh-out-loud corny -- I mean really, several times I actually burst out laughing in the theater --  and the characters have a kind of comic-book obviousness. The naturally talented virtuoso who takes one risk too many; the college boy weighed down by parental expectations; the doomed sweethearts; the bigot who sees the error of his ways -- and the ones who don't; etc. Still, I'm glad I saw it, and I hope it registers as a success.

Reason one: It's not supposed to be Shakespeare! If put in its real artistic class -- not just contemporary aerial-Westerns like Top Gun and even Star Wars itself but also World War II standards like 30 Seconds Over Tokyo or Sands of Iwo Jima, all of whose real message is, "See how brave and good our people are! And how they must cope with personal problems, and how they miss their loved ones at home, as they resolutely fight for us"--  it's no cornier or thinner than the others.

Reason two: It's fun to watch. At least if you have any interest in seeing good guys vs. bad guys as they zoom around, engage in derring-do, and blow things up. Or, as a veteran flyer put it when defending the movie against nit-picking critiques of its accuracy:

None of them seem to understand that the film is for an audience of teenage boys--particularly African-American boys--and not 60-year-old rivet-counters.

Thanks to TPM for a tip to what you see if you examine the HTML code* of the Pete Hoekstra / Fred Davis "we take your jobs" video.

The image of the "Chinese" girl in the video, who speaks American-accented English, is labelled as ... well, see for yourself:

Maybe everyone else in politics-land knew this, but I was interested to learn:

- The brains behind the ad belonged to Fred Davis, shown in a picture from his bio at his company's site.

- Davis was also the creator of two other memorable political ads, Christine O'Donnell's "I'm Not a Witch" and Carly Fiorina's "Demon Sheep" ads, clips of both of which can be found on his site ("Witch" here and "Sheep" here). Plus other greatest hits, as listed by the WaPo.

- Last year he did those weirdo pre-announcement ads for Jon Huntsman, and at the time said that Huntsman was "the only GOP candidate who has a prayer of beating Barack Obama."

- His uncle is ... Senator Jim Inhofe!  I'd love to be there at Thanksgiving. It's kind of like the Adams, Taft, or Roosevelt lineages of leadership.

On the merits of the ad, two reader comments. First, about its cinematography:

You have probably already noticed that the opening and the ending are stock footage from SE Asia somewhere.  I am guessing that the meat of it was shot in Kern County somewhere.

Now, about the possibility of an extra dog-whistle, an American reader with a Chinese last name adds:

You mentioned the visual dog-whistle this ad provides, and I would add to that characterization.  In addition to the Vietnam imagery of films like Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, or The Quiet American, it also evoked the specter of Vincent Chin, the Chinese American who was killed 30 years ago by a Detroit-area auto plant superintendent who thought Chin was Japanese.  This was during the period of American paranoia about Japanese domination of business, especially the automobile industry.  The killer allegedly said to Chin, ""It's because of you little m***s that we're out of work!" even though Chin was not Japanese.  Chin was beaten to death and the perpetrators were given very lenient sentences for what is in my view, a hate-based and pre-meditated crime. 

I'm sure I won't be the first or last reader to point this out, but the Hoekstra ad served as another, perhaps unintentional dog-whistle.  As someone whose ancestors came from southern China, just as Vincent Chin's ancestors had done, maybe from a place similar to the setting of this advertisement, this resonated loudly and unequivocally: don't let Asians take your jobs.

And, from a Michigander now living in the South:

As a Son-of-Michigan-In-Exile, I am appalled at Hoekstra's ad.  It's so bad, I won't be able to make fun of South Carolina politics for the rest of the week, and I'm sure there will be something wonderful said by someone down here - they never disappoint.

The ad is flat out racist, and there is no idea behind it except racism.  What, you say?  The ad is supposed to show how China is getting ahead in global competition?  Then why is the word "China" never mentioned in the ad?  This as has only one message: vote for Hoekstra if you hate Asians (although it's probably phrased a little more offensively than that).

Finally, from a veteran of Republican politics:

Liberals are without doubt hyperventilating over the racist implications of Pete Hoekstra's political ad against Debbie Stabenow. But believe me, that's not a very effective way of attacking Hoekstra. Most of his potential voter base (including socially conservative industrial union members in Michigan) simply won't care, and he will in any case spin it that he is being persecuted by the politically-correct thought police.

The more interesting angle is one of hypocrisy. Hoekstra voted for permanent MFN for China in 1999, and China's creditor status vis-à-vis the U.S. simply reflects all those good-paying union jobs Hoekstra shipped there (yes, I know international economics is more complicated than that, but would certainly put Hoekstra on the defensive.)

It is humanity's deepest question. Or at least for the one seven-billionth of humanity represented by me. Today AVweb answers the question in an unexpected way.



For previous installments in the "Where's My Flying Car?" saga, see here and here, including this action shot of the charming Terrafugia (which AVweb says will not turn out to be the Flying Car you're looking for).



Keep hope alive.

As Barack Obama contends for a second term in office, two conflicting narratives of his presidency have emerged. Is he a skillful political player and policy visionary—a chess master who always sees several moves ahead of his opponents (and of the punditocracy)? Or is he politically clumsy and out of his depth—a pawn overwhelmed by events, at the mercy of a second-rate staff and of the Republicans? Here, a longtime analyst of the presidency takes the measure of our 44th president, with a view to history.

1) The weakest case anyone has made in public for going to war, from a celebrity professor. Reflect upon this being published in a leading magazine.

2) Historical analysis worth reflecting on (including the comments), from a less publicly-known professor who makes a more serious contribution. This essay, by James Fearon of Stanford, argues that today's existing nuclear powers have, overall, been less militarily aggressive after acquiring nuclear weapons than they were beforehand. One of his sample charts:

During the 2010 midterm-election campaign, I said that the "Chinese Professor" ad was the bit of political persuasion/propaganda most likely to be remembered long after the campaign. Of course, that was before I knew about "I'm Not a Witch."

I considered the "Chinese professor" ad skillfully done. It was ominous but just short of race-baiting (since the "villains" were not Chinese but Americans collectively, and its triumphalism was incidental, as an ending touch, rather than central); and it was in the long-standing American tradition of using external threat as a vehicle for addressing internal concerns. If you'd like to see how the same approach looks when carried out by people who don't worry for a second about what lines they cross, consider one that lucky viewers in Michigan will see later today.

It's for this year's campaign for the U.S. Senate seat in Michigan, now held by Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat. Her Republican challenger, former Rep. Pete Hoekstra, works a "clever" play on her name to show how she's actually advancing the interests of the wily Chinese.
 


Let's not even get into the logic of the ad -- eg, the fact that China's formula for creating jobs has involved more public spending and more public "guidance" of industry than America's. Let's skip to the bonus points for racial imagery in the ad, apart from the obvious.
 
1) The "Chinese" woman speaks in American-accented English, and I would bet she is actually an Asian-American. But the script has her make pidgin grammar errors, "Me likee!!"-style.

2) The ad's words are about trade, budgets, and jobs, but its images are about -- 'Nam!!  Of course some parts of southern China look the way this ad does, with rice paddies, palm trees, no big buildings, people wearing conical straw hats and bicycling along dike tops. But this is nothing like how the typical big-factory zone looks in China, or the huge cities that would exemplify Chinese wealth and the country's rise -- ie, the subjects of this ad. So why this rural setting? I think it's because it offers a kind of visual dog-whistle, for those Americans who, either through experience or through Apocalypse Now-style imagery, associate smiling-but-deceptive Asians in a rice-paddy setting with previous American sorrow.

This ad is embarrassing for America! Regardless of party, I hope it loses Hoekstra more votes than it wins him. For an earlier illustration of a comparable approach, see this one from Nevada Arizona. [Apologies to Arizonans.]  Update: Politico has more on the ad. (And thanks to YA for the tip.)

What I am about to mention is not "news" and will be familiar to people following the Iran story. But it is important. Precisely because there is so much daily chatter about a possible military strike on Iran, it is worth going back to make sure this part does not vanish from the public record or front-of-mind consciousness.

This past week, the leaders of the U.S. intelligence community said that they were not sure that Iran was even trying to build a nuclear weapon.

Why does this matter? Much of the mounting chatter about Iran takes absolutely for granted that its leaders have a bomb-building program under way. Thus the only questions worth asking are:
  - How close are they?
  - How dangerous would they be?
  - What would it take to stop them?
  - How much time does anyone else have to fend them off, before it's too late?

But here is what happened last week.

1) At a hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last Tuesday, Olympia Snowe of Maine had this exchange with James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence -- who was appearing with David Petraeus of the CIA. Emphasis added:

Senator Snowe: I gather we agree with the fact that Iran has not made the decision to weaponize at this point. Director Clapper, do you agree on that?

General Clapper: Yes, but they are certainly moving on that path, but we don't believe they've actually made the decision to go ahead with a nuclear weapon.

I heard this exchange while I was driving around yesterday (on C-SPAN radio -- yes, now you know my darkest secret). You can see a video of the whole hearing at C-Span's site, and a reference to the exchange on the CFR site.

2) Before that hearing, Clapper released his "Worldwide Threat Assessment," available online in PDF. The relevant Iran portions say:

We assess Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons, in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that better position it to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so.  We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons....

We judge Iran's nuclear decision making is guided by a cost-benefit approach, which offers the international community opportunities to influence Tehran.  Iranian leaders undoubtedly consider Iran's security, prestige, and influence, as well as the international political and security environment, when making decisions about its nuclear program.

Obviously this doesn't resolve the whole issue. US intelligence has been wrong on such matters before, to put it mildly. (Although warnings that Iran is close to having the bomb are decades old.) Just now Jeffrey Goldberg, who emphasizes that he is the anti-bombing camp, posts a reminder of the reasons to be wary of Iran.

Still: the next dozen times you hear about how to cope with Iran's "headlong" or "inevitable" or "destabilizing" progress toward building a bomb, reflect for a minute that in the judgment of the U.S. intelligence community, we are not sure that they even trying. And reflect on the factors the Iranian leadership may be weighing as it makes this choice.

[Please see UPDATES below.] Earlier this week I said that I would soon be presenting a bunch of links and highlights on the emerging debate over a military showdown with Iran. I said that, in contrast to the rush-to-war mood 10 years ago that preceded the invasion of Iraq, this time we were starting to hear more "wait a minute: Is this war a good idea? Is is necessary?" questions from a range of voices before fighting began. For the record, I am in the "It is not necessary, and it is not a good idea" camp.

I haven't gone on to post the promised additional info. The reason is that the "war with Iran?" question is no longer any kind of fringe topic. It has moved to the front pages, the lists of "most clicked" items, and to the center of mainstream news discussion. Apart from Ron Paul, no prominent Republicans seem to be expressing second thoughts; and members of the Obama Administration, from the president on down, are sticking to their "all options are on the table" mantra -- as they should.* But everywhere else a real debate seems to be underway.  So this is a closing-the-loop note for the moment. If you want more back-and-forth on Iran, open up the paper or go to any news site. Right now, mainstream coverage is telling us about a main issue, and with more pushback than I would have expected.

Update: But because I should mention a non-mainstream site worth following, see the range of reports on Nuclear Diner.
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* "As they should?" Yes: even if the president had fully and sanely decided that a preemptive strike would be a ruinous error, he has everything to gain by leaving his intentions ambiguous. Unless in so doing he frightened the Iranians into a panicky preemptive move -- but, without playing out all the scenarios at the moment, this is one case where it makes sense for a president to keep his public statements vague.

UPDATE^UPDATED The Atlantic commenter known as mikey writes:

2 points I think worth making.

First, Iran is VERY different from Iraq in a critical way.  The Iraq invasion and occupation did not have a noticeable impact on the global economy.  Indeed, there were quite a large number of individual corporations that profited from that war, and the rest did much the same as they would have had the US never invaded.  Iran is certainly different.  There is no doubt that Iran will use economic warfare to leverage her position and weaken that of the aggressors, using a number of tactics to take as much oil off the global market as possible.  Oil companies might see a short term spike in profits, but the rest of the US and Europe's economies will immediately fall into deep, stark recessions.  The cost of shipping Asian goods will suddenly change all the manufacturing calculations and China's economy will stall.  To the extent that we have learned since 2007 how utterly financial interests control government policy, they will do what they can - and I submit they can do a great deal - to prevent a war with Iran.  So barring some gross miscalculation, I don't expect one.

Second, on this coy, facile "All options are on the table" mantra.  First, does anybody really think there's any substance to that?  Or perhaps to put it another way, if we stopped saying that tomorrow, would anybody assume that a pre-emptive attack on Iran was no longer on the table?  I think it might make sense to take some of the pressure OFF of Iran.  Of all the parties involved in the disputes with Iran, which one do you suppose feels the most threatened?  Daily pronouncements of belligerent intent, and a calm, dispassionate discussion about bombing Iran's cities and killing thousands of her people?  Do you sometimes expect one of Iran's leaders to stand up and shout "HEY!  I'm right here in the room with you.  I can HEAR you talking!"  If I was the Iranian leadership, I would certainly be moving toward a nuclear deterrent just as fast as I could.  I would already know precisely the date I was going to kick out the inspectors and and go into my finishing sprint. 

I think this might be one of those cases where a little less smirking cowboy and a little more humble global neighbor might change the equation.

Overall, this makes sense.

A citizen of a Western European country, who works in the United States for a fast-growing Internet startup company, writes today:

In many of your TSA related post, a key theme is the illusion of security through ineffective and "invasive" means. Seems like there is more of this going on in the broader "security" world.

-A young British couple was sent back from the US after some ill-advised but innocuous tweets;

-Muslim man gets arrested for using term "blow away the competition" in a text message

It's one thing to have Google and Facebook data mine your life to make money for themselves. It's another thing if innocent communication gets you in trouble with a humorless bureaucracy without adequate recourse.

The fact that as a green card holder I seriously hesitated before hitting "send" on this message means something I think.

The stories my correspondent links to are quietly incredible. About the latter episode, which took place in Quebec, today's news story describes what happened to a telecom salesman named Saad Allami:

On Jan. 21, 2011, Allami sent a text message to colleagues urging them to "blow away" the competition at a trade show in New York City.

According to [a lawsuit for damages he has filed], he was arrested without warning by police three days later and detained for over a day while his house was searched. During his detention, a team of police officers allegedly conducted an "intrusive" four-hour search.

"The whole time, the officers kept repeating to the plaintiff's wife that her husband was a terrorist," the filing reads.

The British couple, shown below in a photo via ABC, got in trouble for a slangy use of the word "destroy" in a Tweet. The ABC account says:

"Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America," one of the tweets read. Bryan told The Sun [in England] that in this context "destroy" just meant party.

"The Homeland Security agents were treating me like some kind of terrorist. I kept saying they had got the wrong meaning from my tweet but they just told me 'You've really f***ed up with that tweet, boy'," Bryan told The Sun.

There are a lot more details in The Sun's account -- and with all allowances made for the imaginative potential of UK tabloids, it is worth a look.

Yes, we need to be "safe." It is worth noting what we are giving up in the name of safety. Think about the last line in the note from my European friend.

From high school I recall some amateur-psychology experiment about the power of sensory incongruities. If you were offered a piece of cheese that was colored black, or a slice of meat that was green, you would think, Yucckkk!, even if its taste was perfectly fine.

I'm not going to get into whether this behavior is learned, innate, evolutionarily sensible, or whatever. I'll just say that I have the same reaction to beer in a can. If it is coming from a metal housing -- like the one at the right, which I saw all too often in my long-lost years in Texas -- then I (snobbishly) assume it is not going to be very good. Or, even worse, the one at the left, popular during an era in American history I don't even tell my children about.

Imagine then my confusion at encountering the beer below in a local store. It's is called Dale's Pale Ale, and it looks like it comes from the same schlock brewing tradition as Texas Pride. I would have instinctively shied even from getting close to it on the rack, let alone buying or drinking it -- were it not for a reader's note saying: Never mind that it's in a can, it's good.

And it is! Here it is, shown on this sunny February afternoon in DC.



Historians of the American craft-brew wars are presumably well familiar, as I was not, with Dale's Pale Ale and the Oskar Blues brewery in Colorado that produces it. The brewer who came up with the formula tells the Creation Story of the beer, and the brewery has an official-description page that tells more about its pedigree, awards, and so on. The brewery also includes this claim to restoring the dignity of canned beers as a whole:

America's first hand-canned craft beer is a voluminously hopped mutha that delivers a hoppy nose, assertive-but-balanced flavors of pale malts and hops from start to finish. First canned in 2002, Dale's Pale Ale is a hearty (6.5% and 65 IBUs), critically acclaimed trailblazer that has changed the way craft beer fiends perceive canned beer.

I'll say: it's a start. Try it for yourself. And if you're tempted to send me a lecture about not judging things on appearance, I'll say: Yeah, yeah, tell me about it when you're eating green meat.

As part of digesting the meaning of the Era of the Facebook IPO, please check out an essay today by Dave Winer, which builds on one yesterday by John Battelle, which itself was a response to one the previous day by Keith Woolcock. All are worth reading, and all concern the way Facebook's rise is changing -- and distorting -- the overall shape of the internet.

In brief they argue:

 - Google's business success depended on a worldwide internet structure as open, untrammeled, and transparent as possible. Therefore most of what Google did for its own corporate interest also advanced those aims -- or at least did not impede them.

- Facebook's business success depends on an internet structure that is increasingly "gated" and segregated into proprietary realms. Therefore most of what Facebook has done is to induce maximum sharing of personal information within its propriety sphere, while erecting barriers to the flow of information from one realm to another.

- The shift of business advantage from the "public" to the "private" model means more than a different subset of people becoming zillionaires. It will also affect the fundamental structure of the Internet and its value to the 99.999% of us who are neither Google nor Facebook IPO-beneficiaries. Already its effects are being seen, as all these pieces argue, with Google's promotion of its "G+" and social-search features. Facebook's ascent leaves Google with no choice but to compete on those terms.

Or as Battelle puts it:

1. The "old" Internet is shrinking, and being replaced by walled gardens over which Google's crawlers can't climb. Sure, Google can crawl Facebook's "public pages," but those represent a tiny fraction of the "pages" on Facebook, and are not informed by the crucial signals of identity and relationship which give those pages meaning. Similarly, Google can crawl the "public pages" of Apple's iTunes store on the web, but all the value creation in the mobile iOS appworld is behind the walls of Fortress Apple. Google can't see that information, can't crawl it, and can't "make it universally available." Same for Amazon with its Kindle universe, Microsoft's Xbox and mobile worlds, and many others.

2. Google's business model depends on the web remaining open, and given #1 above, that model is imperiled.

It's not just a battle between companies. (And, for later discussion, Google's* challenge is managing three struggles-for-survival at the same time: against Facebook on the "social" side, against Amazon on the e-commerce side, and against Apple and others in the mobile market.) It's also a battle with important "externality" effects on the rest of us. For instance: Google's success has depended on people spending as much time within its online ecosystem as possible. Thus it had an incentive to offer, free, services like Google Earth, whose commercial predecessors charged subscribers thousands of dollars per year. Or Google Maps, which is expensive to maintain. Facebook's success mainly depends on having users share more and more of their personal information within the Facebook environment. Its business logic leads to fewer "public goods."

To wax geostrategic for a moment, this argument over the Internet "commons" is very much like debates through the post-World War II era about the conflict between relatively open and relatively closed political and economic systems. Ie, the more a closed or beggar-thy-neighbor regime prospers, the worse behavior it evokes -- for survival reasons -- from all other participants.

More on that later -- and, as soon as I can, more on how I have come to peace-of-mind about Google's new privacy settings. Hint if you want to do research on your own: sign in to Gmail or one of your other Google-related accounts (YouTube, Google docs, Blogger etc). Then, while signed in, go to google.com/dashboard. You will be interested in what you see, and the changes you can make. First, read these three pieces. Update: Andrew Keen today on CNN also worth reading.
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* Routine for-the-record disclosure, which at some point I'll have given so often that I can dispense with it: I have no financial involvement (alas!) with any of these companies. But I have many friends, and now a family member, working at Google.