Napalm in the Morning....

it's far too late to gloat, if indeed she was fired, as seems the case. The Atlantic is long dead, and while Fallows and TNC remain, what happens to its corpse is really only worth noting with morbid curiosity.
But Megan McArdle no longer works for The Atlantic, and her star seems to have been slowed some in its rising.
This is a good thing.

And Also

this wide ranging piece in The Baffler on what's become of The Atlantic and David Bradley's background is highly worth a read if you haven't already been pointed to it.

Military intelligence professionals, the mind-cure faith, and a changeling, domineering father—it was the sort of upbringing that suffused [David] Bradley’s young life with a sort of spooky dullness. After watching Richard Nixon’s resignation catch so many family friends financially unawares—and experiencing no small amount of personal disillusionment as a gung-ho intern in the Nixon White House—he decided to work on his war chest before going into politics, his first love. (Bradley’s latter-day interest in politics, by the way, should not be taken to mean he harbors any definite political convictions; on the contrary, one of the professed sources of his admiration for writerly “talent” is his own inability to form an opinion on most political issues: “I define the middle,” he has said.) Upon completing Swarthmore, Harvard Business School, and a Fulbright scholarship in the Philippines (devoted to researching the mindset of the colonial Marxist guerillas), David returned to Washington to enroll in law school and to help Gene found a think tank called the International Management and Development Institute. When it came time for David to found his own business in 1979, he visualized a firm with all the affectations of a Washington think tank—down to the drab name, Research Council of Washington— but structured to turn a profit. He later renamed it the Advisory Board Company, which spun off the Corporate Executive Board, and those two generated a multitude of generic-sounding subsidiary Councils, Boards, and Forums. One of Research Council’s first hires assumed from the classified ad that Bradley was operating a “front for a right-wing organization.” It’s still hard to say, at this late date, whether the joke was on that fledgling knowledge worker.

His father, btw, was, among other things, a CIA agent who worked in anti-Marxist counter-propaganda techniques. There's also an inside account of one of The Atlantic's Ideas Forums. Read it.

In the meantime

there's this;

Cleaning Up

since it seems there's a few of you still watching this corpse, now and then, and I'm getting tempted to do the occasional post, I'm going to clean this place up a bit over the next few weeks. Mostly via basic organizing with tags, so feel free to suggest some to be added. The obvious tags are by author and to mark our unrelated posts, something to do with McMegan's lack of math skills (I was thinking "girls aren't bad at math, but McMegan is"), gift guides, bad opinions, fake journalism, memorable McMeganisms, nutpicking. Just enough to make the archives here more navigable.

And plz forgive the following navel-gazing; I'm going to refer to her as McMegan from now on instead of Megan. As anyone reading this would probably know, that's the handle she's chosen to comment with in the threads at her place. I called her Megan because I read so goddamn many words by her and because to call her McArdle would have been too formal and borderline academic for the dismissive way we viewed her work here. But calling her by her first name when I've never met her or, aside from one very brief spurt of emails, interacted directly with her could be read as overly familiar and dismissive in gendered ways which I have no interest in including with the ways in which I'm dismissive of her work. So, McMegan. Way more than 'nuff said.

And now, a little bit of Radiohead from last month for the fuck of it;

Megan Explained

we're still dead here, but this had to be shared. Presenting The Wrongulator;

No one really likes to be told how much the bill is, how far under target, or by how much you have overspent! So if your job has a lot to do with maths, then we hate to be the ones that break it to you, but you’re probably not the favourite person in the office. Unfortunately for you it gets much worse! Now you need to ask yourself who gave you your calculator and does it look like the one in the picture above!?

The Wrongulator is no ordinary calculator, its actually the world’s worst calculator as it never gives the right answer, ever! If your calculator has been exchanged for this one then every single calculation you’ve entered in it has been wrong. It is perhaps the cruelest practical joke you could inflict on your office colleague and the chances are, without being told, they’ll probably never guess….well not before it’s too late anyway! Mwhahahaha!

Note that it's a British company whut makes it, which probably helps to explain how some cruel soul managed to slip it by Megan's ever-so-discerning eye. Now she has an excuse, and a potential endorsement opportunity.

(via Boing Boing)

Last Gasp, Maybe

This thing still on? We thought we should share, just in case.

As lifted from mediabistro.com's FISHBOWLLA.

Ames also wrote this blistering piece calling out The Atlantic‘s Megan McArdle, among other journalists, who trashed Ames and Levine’s reporting while failing to disclose the full extent of their personal and financial connections to the Koch brothers. Worth the read.

Heh indeed.

Retirement

with nutella deciding to move on and M. having been called up to triple A by Thers, this place is gonna be quiet. Megan sucks, and smarter, more capable people like Susan, TBogg, and half of Balloon Juice are on it. If I played any role in her getting recognized as a hack by the liberal blogosphere, awesome, but it was known before I started, and it's time to move on. I'm not going to delete anything here, but there probably won't be too many new posts to come, if any.
I'd been thinking of starting a more serious blog, but then I'd have to be more serious, and I don't want to be. However I have made a new place to rant and be random, not that I've made much use of it yet. It's here, maybe it'll turn into something, maybe not. In any case, thanks for reading. That anyone did was a surprise in the beginning, and our commenters were the best part of all this along the way. Come on by the new place if you for some reason like where I'm coming from, I'd be glad for the encouragement.

Random Twitter Fact

if you take out the vowels in Reince Priebus, you get RNC PR BS. Uncanny, innit.

N yeah, I noticed too. Oh well.

Let's Get Back To Being Human

this is always a good start at that.

Since the world began, we have gone about our work quietly, resisting the urge to generalize, valuing the individual over the group, the actual over the conceptual, the inherent sweetness of the present moment over the theoretically peaceful future to be obtained via murder. Many of us have trouble sleeping and lie awake at night, worrying about something catastrophic befalling someone we love. We rise in the morning with no plans to convert anyone via beating, humiliation, or invasion. To tell the truth, we are tired. We work. We would just like some peace and quiet. When wrong, we think about it awhile, then apologize. We stand under awnings during urban thunderstorms, moved to thoughtfulness by the troubled, umbrella-tinged faces rushing by. In moments of crisis, we pat one another awkwardly on the back, mumbling shy truisms. Rushing to an appointment, remembering a friend who has passed away, our eyes well with tears and we think: Well, my God, he could be a pain, but still I'm lucky to have known him.

This is PRKA. To those who would oppose us, I would simply say: We are many. We are worldwide. We, in fact, outnumber you. Though you are louder, though you create a momentary ripple on the water of life, we will endure, and prevail.

Join us.

Just For The Record

since Nutella seems pissed I thought I'd dot some i's and cross some t's.
Insofar as extreme right wing politics and the accompanying rhetoric were, at most, a secondary factor in Loughner's motives, well behind being fucking crazy, sure, I overreacted a little. The idea that I had partisan gain in mind behind pointing to Palin's use of violent rhetoric against the future victim of violence is itself an overreaction, but to whatever degree I was blaming Palin in an attempt to make sense of a difficult event to process I was wrong. This probably wasn't eliminationist violence, at least not in any coherent sense.
That doesn't mean the ability of Palin, along with Beck and Limbaugh and many other lesser lights, to shape the tone and topics of national discourse isn't toxic and worth combating or that gun violence such as we saw can't be made less likely with some attempt to rationally approach how to decide who to entrust with the ability to murder others simply by squeezing a finger. And it doesn't mean the sheer coincidence of the nature of the poster naming Giffords and the events that occurred shouldn't give Sarah Palin reason to pause and consider the consequences of how she's playing the game. But maybe it does mean I don't have to jump in on it right away.

*Update*

Oh, wait. Blood libel, and her critics "purport" to condemn this violence. Geh. I take it back. She wants people who disagree with her to die. Regardless of whether Loughner was directly influenced by her, this blood is on her hands.