Insolvent Republic Of Blogistan |
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The call and response of blogmaking continues --everyone has one and everyone says they're no sweat to have. I figure, why not put my thoughts out there? So here they are.
E-mail: justin_slotman at yahoo dot com
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Tuesday, January 15, 2002
CHOMSKY THE SCIENTIST WATCH: Here's an article about a book by a guy, Mark Baker, "whose dissertation was supervised by Dr. Chomsky." Who claims to have found evidence for Chomsky's universal grammer rules. There are of course dissenters: Dr. Baker's work is by no means universally accepted. Dr. Robert Van Valin, a professor of linguistics at the State University of New York at Buffalo, says the findings rest on a questionable assumption: that there is a universal grammar. "What they're doing in that whole program is taking English-like structures and putting the words or parts of words of other languages in those structures and then discovering that they're just like English," he said. Dr. Karin E. Michelson, an associate professor of linguistics at SUNY Buffalo, who also disagrees with the Chomskyan approach, said after reviewing Dr. Baker's Mohawk work that some of the sentences he selected seemed artificial. Dr. Baker acknowledged that some of the longer words in his study were "carefully engineered," but he said the parameter still held up using more common examples of Mohawk. He said using only examples from real discourse restricted the kind of analysis that linguists could do. I know very little about linguistics, but I think that was always the word on the scientist street: that Chomsky's linguistics had a hideous English-language bias, which is what I think the guy from the SUNY Buffalo quoted above is referring to. GOOD ARTICLE: From USA Today summarizing the Oracle & Sun vs. Microsoft rivalry, something I wasn't aware of, not being part of the tech audience the article refers to. There's also highlights of other great corporate fights. THE BBC: Has picked up on Cornel West and Harvard grade inflation. Also, a story on the rise of Korean pop culture within Asia. AND: I can't post a Mark Cuban item without posting a Shaq item. Also from ESPN.com, it's a little opinion piece about how NBA rules weren't designed for Shaq and how he's probably committing an offensive foul on every possession. Monday, January 14, 2002
NEW LILEKS: James Lileks has been linked all over blogdom lately; here's his latest Screed, on modern art. I love this bit: Previous artistic squabbles always had to do with a shocking new style that confronted the status quo, and it usually led to something good. Eventually, however, the status quo consists solely of confrontation, and you end up with a group of artists all pointing accusing fingers at a status quo that no longer exists. The bourgeoise is no longer shocked; they don’t care, and they’re not paying much attention until you splatter pachyderm patties at religious icons. Even then they don’t care too much, because they’ve written off High Art as an incomprehensible realm of gobblegook theory, carved sheep, sculpture that has the beauty of a rusty nail in your foot, and masturbatory self-absorbtion that cannot inform, cannot enlighten, cannot inspire, and cannot possibly have anything to do with life as we live it. When High Art is no longer interested in beauty, people looking for beauty will find it elsewhere. And they’ll find it. Yeah, the bourgeoise is pretty much unshockable, isn't it? It's only when you troll religious people that you get somebody outside of the art world looking at your stuff. Or, rather, that's the only time current-day high art rises to national prominence. It's only an obvious point, but perhaps some artists are bummed out at their diminished cultural cache. (Do classical musicians get bummed out like this?) And they resort to shitgineering to make the headlines. WEIRD NEWS FRONT: A shark has given birth without any obvious signs of fertilization. The two explanations are sperm that lived for three years (unlikely) or asexual reproduction (even less likely.) VALUE OF FEMINISM QUOTE OF THE DAY: ''In America, I think it is possible to live without a man,'' said Rahima in halting English. ''But here, even in Pakistan, you need a father, a husband, or a brother. We don't have any man. ... It makes our life so difficult.'' Quoted in this Boston Globe article about Afghan women whose final employment option has become working as hookers. I note that two of the women in the article only turned to prostitution after they lost their manufacturing jobs; is that worse than going back to the farm? RED SOX SALE UPDATE: They're sticking with the John Henry group despite Charles Dolan offering $40 million more. There's the usual accusations down the bottom of the article of Bud Selig just doing what Bud Selig wants to do. ANTI-PORN MISSIONARIES: Interesting LA times story about these guys (they have a sense of humor: it's "the number 1 christian porn site") at the AVN show. They take a laid-back approach to "porn addiction," a concept I am not sure exists in reality. I mean, it would have to be a near-total psychological addiction, and I can imagine (note I said imagine) some men getting into some kind of Skinnerian positive-response closed-and-admitting-no-one-else feedback loop. In which case these guys are here to help, but only if you want help: "We're not here to judge anyone or to picket the show. What good would that do?" Gross says. "We decided the best thing to do was to actually be in the show and try to talk to the people in the industry in a professional and respectful manner and not be confrontational. The congregation [at Crossroads] [their home chuch --me] told us they'd be praying for us." I'm sure they help some people. The article ends with the odd anecdote that Teri Weigel prays before she goes on stage and says three rosaries a day. To each her own, I guess. MEDIA CONSPIRACY THEORY: New York Times article hinting at secret Apple-Time magazine agreement to promote the iMac. Gawd, I bought the old iMac and it sucked; I never had a computer inexplicably lock up on me more than that thing. Never again. Anyway, a while back Andrea See wrote me about why The Economist never tells you who's writing the articles there: to protect journalistic integrity, so people aren't influenced by advertisers or whoever. Now I have no problem with Time throwing a puff piece to an advertiser, I just wish they'd admit they were doing it out of non-journalistic motivations. I mean, does objectivity really sell magazines? Foxnews doesn't claim to be objective and they do fine. But maybe Time admitting their we're-just-trying-to-sell-copies bias is a little different than Foxnews admitting their conservative bias. SCHOTTENHEIMER FIRED: Martyball was not working out, apparently. Maybe hiring your whole family as the coaching staff had something to do with that. And now the Redskins want to hire Steve Spurrier, who may have a rough go of it in the pros. OLD IDEA NEEDING CONSUMERS: Drudge links to this tiny little Reuters story about a South Korean brewery making plans to market a gelatin-liquor. Like a Jello shot? I dunno; maybe it'll be more like those weird Chinese candies that were spotted at the Costco by my brother recently; they taste like peaches and sort of have the consistency of an apple or a underripe peach, except, of course, they're completely uniform and lacking the internal structure of an actual piece of fruit. Weird but good. If you see a plastic bucket with Chinese lettering filled with individually-wrapped gumdrop-shaped things about the size and color of egg yolks, you'll know what I'm talking about. Anyhow, I think the knock against Jello shots is that they get you too drunk too fast --which is why they are so beloved by drunken and trying-to-get-you-drunk fratboys, and also why I think nobody's tried something like this before. Unless they have, in which case I am just some guy with a weblog. But I guess this brewery's business strategy will be a. marketing to fratboys or b. cutting back on the liquor content so non-alcoholics embrace them. ARGENTINA UPDATE: An editorial from The New Republic, actually, on why Paul O'Neill is vastly unsuited for his job. A sample: This past summer Argentina--facing unemployment climbing toward 20 percent and unable to repay the money it had borrowed to back up its currency, which in 1991 the country's currency board pegged to the dollar--asked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for debt relief. O'Neill was unsympathetic. "They've been off and on in trouble for 70 years or more," he told The Economist (in an interview the investment bank UBS Warburg later called "amazing, astonishing, appalling"). "Nobody forced them to be what they are." O'Neill's comments weren't merely callous; they actually made Argentina's condition worse: By suggesting that the United States would not approve an IMF loan, he helped cause interest rates on private loans to Argentina to rise even more. THE TRUE NATIONAL SPORT: Unqualified Offerings has a great defense of NFL football. He also points out the goofy love of people like George Will for baseball: It's odd that baseball gets the intellectual cachet, since football is a far more intellectually-challenging game. Offensive and defensive playbooks are famously complicated, and their intricacy and depth goes beyond the sheer volume of material to be memorized. Behind an offensive system is a set of principles given concrete expression in a precise vocabulary, combined and recombined into individual plays and entire game plans. He also makes the point that a source of football's greatness is its rest period (which soccer and hockey and other "fast moving game" partisans love to point out, but derisively.) It adds suspense, Jim argues. And he makes this unique point: One also hears scoffs at the idea that many football players should even be considered athletes. Aren't a lot of them fat, not to say steroid-soaked, lummoxes? Leaving aside the steroid question, a lot of football players are big, fat and tall. They're called linemen. As it happens, offensive linemen are likely to be the smartest players on the field. Other football players are much thinner and much faster. There is a mild advantage to being shortish if you are a running back and a substantial advantage to being tall if you are a receiver or a defender. Some quarterbacks are very slow and some are very fast. So let me turn the complaint around and throw in a totem word for good measure: Football makes productive use of a greater diversity of somatic types than any other sport. You can be a 340# lineman, a 240# linebacker or a 180# cornerback. What has baseball to offer the 300-pounder? Should they all just sit around feeling sorry for themselves? NFL football is America's sport, in popularity and in society-wide importance. What other sport's championship is a national holiday? WOOHOO: New Postrel. Virginia is not a daily blogger but she makes up for it by putting up completely quality posts. She brings the level-headedness to blog hysteria, just like you knew she would: Bloggers have been getting pretty meta lately, writing a lot about the virtues and evolution of this medium. On her site, Joanne Jacobs offers some history, with reader assistance ("Creation of Blogworld"), and links to some blog-related items elsewhere ("Orwell's Bloggers"), with a wistful consideration of the possibility of micropayments-per-read. (It's not going to happen, although here's an alternative model that might work.) Joanne writes more as a reporter than as an advocate. More typical are the blog promoters. Andrew Sulivan, for instance, brags "Tina Brown's Talk magazine has around the same number of subscribers per month that we have as [sic] visits." Glenn Reynolds goes him one better. His TechCentral Station column proclaims that "what is really going on is something much more profound: it's the end of the power of Big Media." It's the Reformation, says Glenn, citing Jim Bennett of UPI. Glenn is great, but this is ridiculous. Read the whole post, of course. The Scene page is like two-thirds new stuff today. I note that she notes that somebody in A Beautiful Mind had their institution changed from Rutgers (where the guy actually went to) to Harvard (where Hollywood wants you to think he went to). What a load of crap. Saturday, January 12, 2002
I WOULD LIKE TO BE THE FIRST TO WELCOME OUR SIMIAN OVERLORDS: Boing Boing links to this piece which predicts the next step over humanity in terms of having perfect memories and super math skills will take the form of half-artificial intelligence, half simian cyborg-things. I guess we better stop eating gorillas. SWEATSHOPS: Tim Blair comically links to this article about the downturn in the Bangladeshi economy since the attacks, which says a hundred thousand people have lost their sweatshop jobs in the past two months. The garment workers, mostly women, have the choice of factory work or going back to the farm. I like the sentiment of Tim's post. J-E-T-S S-T-I-N-K: The Jets just died with a whimper, with time running out and going for a touchdown that wouldn't even tie the game, a play that went incomplete. The coaching was pretty suspect in what I saw. Bummer. Michelle Kwan won, though, if you were wondering. HAPPINESS EXPLAINED: Catallaxy Files points out this article on happiness research within economics. PRESIDENT MUSHARRAF: Gave the latest speech-of-his-life today --the previous one was when he announced he was allying with the United States. He makes good sense, and seems to be taking a firm stand towards peace with India. He positively channels LBJ at this point: The second thing I want to talk about is the concept of Jehad in its totality. I want to dilate upon it because it is a contentious issue, requiring complete comprehension and understanding. In Islam, Jehad is not confined to armed struggles only. Have we ever thought of waging Jehad against illiteracy, poverty, backwardness and hunger? This is the larger Jehad. Pakistan, in my opinion, needs to wage Jehad against these evils. After the battle of Khyber, the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him) stated that Jehad-e-Asghar (Smaller Jehad) is over but Jehad-e-Akbar (Greater Jehad) has begun. This meant that armed Jehad i.e. the smaller Jehad was now over and the greater Jehad against backwardness and illiteracy had started. Pakistan needs Jehad-e-Akbar at this juncture. I'm not sure about this part, though: Do we want Pakistan to become a theocratic state? Do we believe that religious education alone is enough for governance or do we want Pakistan to emerge as a progressive and dynamic Islamic welfare state? What, those are the only two choices? I think welfare states have generally been proven bad. But this is a dynamic welfare state though. I don't know what that would look like. MICHELLE KWAN: Just kicked a ton of ass on the tv. She looked exuberantly happy as she finished after hitting all her jumps and everything and not falling down (that's the only thing I know about figure skating, falling down=bad news.) I love the fact that she fired her coach and is doing the Olympics on her own. Did you know she's dating a hockey player? Just like The Cutting Edge. STATUE UPDATE: Here's a picture of it. Never mind the race-changing, they took out the guy on the right's pot belly. This is obviously a sell-out to the exercise-promotes-health-and-beauty crowd. EEP: Charles links to this story about rampant man-boy love in Kandahar, which I thought was the more conservative part of Afghanistan. Apparently this was a prominent part of pre-Taliban life there that is now reemerging in the post-Taliban era. Say what you will about the Taliban, but at least they repressed everybody equally. Now you only get repressed if you're a woman. Hey, weren't the ancient Greeks like that? Not like the Taliban, I mean what's reemerging after the Taliban which seems to possess a sort of general disdain for women. Not that the Afghans are going to be the cultural titans the Greeks were; more probably it indicates the all-around primitiveness of the culture there. I think. NICE POST: From the USS Clueless on the racial transmogrification of New York firefighters from white guys into ethnically diverse guys in the statue version of that famous Iwo Jima-like flag-raising photo taken at the Trade Center site. Steven doesn't like it, but he posts a dissenting opinion too. Friday, January 11, 2002
EQUITY WATCH: Here's something on the swing toward research exploring the biological differences between men and women. BLOG TOOL: Here's the Google New Headlines page. It calls up different versions of the same story from different sources. Found via Boing Boing. HUH? FILES: New Goldberg File: "Among the better and better-known blogger sites in our cozy little world are AndrewSullivan.com and KausFiles.com. The most promising up-and-comer is Glenn Reynolds's Instapundit." In what sense is Instapundit an up-and-comer? NEW REPUBLIC PICKS UP ENRON: Yes they do. They have a similar take as The Economist's: ....Democrats want to use Enron as a vehicle for a broader indictment of the White House. They hope to link people's perceptions of the company--a secretive, arrogant, anti-worker institution that hid its cooked budget numbers with good p.r.--to their perceptions of the Bush administration. And in that way, Democrats hope to cast the White House as beholden to corporate fat cats once again--a perception they think was catching on before September 11. This Enron thing seems to be more about perception than anything else. They also revive older stories about Enron's Kenneth Lay trying to influence White House energy policy. Also on tnr.com: The new TRB, with Peter Beinart on South Africa's cretinous AIDS policy. ECONOMIST PICKS UP ENRON: Their point is regardless of whether or not there's been any wrongdoing, appearances alone may hurt the Bush administration: Whether the Bush administration can ride out the controversy will depend to some degree, of course, on whether there was any wrongdoing on the part of Mr Bush or other officials. But even in the absence of proven wrongdoing, the affair could still turn out to be uncomfortable, and prolonged. It contains elements of a classic political scandal. A huge company based in Mr Bush’s home state of Texas and led by his biggest campaign contributor files the biggest bankruptcy in American history. A small group of top executives sell shares before it collapses. At the same time thousands of employees are barred from selling, and lose not only their jobs but their life savings and pensions as well. Meanwhile there are revelations of frequent contacts between the company and top administration officials. The problem for Mr Bush is that even if all these contacts turn out to be completely proper, the Enron case still embodies many of the doubts that Americans have about him: that he is too close to Big Business (and the energy industry in particular); and that his concerns are not the concerns of normal Americans. This is the president whom last summer Democrats were skewering for his desire to open up Alaska's oil fields supposedly “for his friends in Houston” and for allegedly letting industrialists put arsenic into drinking water. Thursday, January 10, 2002
DOG-EATING UPDATE: They're really pushing dog cuisine in Korea: Next Monday's seminar in Koyang city on canine cuisine would feature ``Doctor Dogmeat,'' Chungchong University professor Ahn Yong-keun, who boasts 350 canine recipes, Yonhap news agency said. Ahn would present a development strategy for the Korean dogmeat industry, suggesting Web sites on opening dogmeat restaurant franchises and developing new recipes, it said. Also on the weird food front, Ten Turner is opening bisonburger franchises. Of course the first one's in Columbus. I expect the new Doctor Dogmeat's to open next door. SLATE DIARY THIS WEEK: It's the travails of an immigration lawyer and it's real good. This comment stands out, I have no idea why: Later in the day, I learn what makes America great: lefties. At the end of my meeting with client H., I write the date of his next appointment in my day planner. H.'s eyes light up: "You're writing with your left hand!" I acknowledge that I am, in fact, left-handed. In H.'s native Congo, apparently children are still strictly forbidden to write with their left hands. "There are so many left-handed people in America!" H. marvels. "Never in my life had I seen so many left-handed people until I came to America!" I had no idea they were still forcing people to write with the non-sinister hand. UPDATE: Yes, this is the third time I've said I had no idea in this post. Lousy stupid push-button posting for the people..... ENRON: Ginger Stampley has what you need to know here and here. Crap, Oliver Willis has a whole page devoted to Enron. PHILIPPINES UPDATE: We're sending troops there to train their anti-Abu Sayyaf troops. The article explains that Manila does not want foreign troops actually fighting on Philippine territory. There you go. WHY I LIKE THE INTERNET: I can get pointers on where to get started in following Christian music. Or I could get hipped to obscure Fritz Lang movies. Or I can go on Amazon and read reviews that lead to more reviews of books I should be reading. (Amazon is like a miniature Internet, actually.) Maybe it is all run on love. CHINA SLAMS GATES: China is awarding a big government contract to indigenous Linux-based software companies and excluding Microsoft, says this story from The Straits Times. Though apparently it's just for Beijing; Microsoft has a contract with Shanghai, according to the article. Via dangerousmeta. ONLY OBVIOUS DEPARTMENT: Here's an op-ed from the Tacoma Tribune on why college football players should be paid. I can't think of a reason not to, except that if you pay one kind of athlete, why shouldn't all athletes get paid (like swimmers or gymnasts, sports that aren't cash cows like football and basketball.) But that's what revenue-sharing is all about, and the argument for paying college athletes is revenue-sharing, as you have these teams bringing in tons of money for their universities and seeing none of it themselves, legally, anyway. So why not share the wealth? MODERN ISLAM: Tom on Samizdata brings the link to a Victor Davis Hanson article on what the Arab world does not get about us. Good read. Here's the quote Tom used to get your attention: If Israel did not exist, the Arab world, in its current fit of denial, would have to invent something like it to vent its frustrations. That is not to say there may not be legitimate concerns in the struggle over Palestine, but merely that for millions of Muslims the fight over such small real estate stems from a deep psychological wound. It isn’t about lebensraum or some actual physical threat. Israel is a constant reminder that it is a nation’s culture—not its geography or size or magnitude of its oil reserves—that determines its wealth or freedom. For the Middle East to make peace with Israel would be to declare war on itself, to admit that that its own fundamental way of doing business—not the Jews—makes it poor, sick, and weak. The first part of which reminds me of one of my favorite comic book covers, it was one of the Superman titles and was by Gil Kane, I can't find it on-line but it was one of those "imaginary stories" DC used to run, with the title: "If Superman didn't exist, someone would have to invent him." And it had these little Siegel and Schuster dopplegangers creating Superman in a sketchbook while hiding from the reptiloid alien overlords who had taken over the imaginary Earth Without Superman. Hanson's point is of course the reverse, that the Arab world needs something to hate and not something to find inspiring. If you find Superman inspiring, that is. Hanson --though he doesn't come out and say this-- seems to have a beef with Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, an attempt to explain Western superiority in terms of European geography, a book I have not read yet but it's on the list. Hanson wants ideas and culture to be the main thing that made the West different --which doesn't explain where that culture came from, and that's where Diamond's book comes in, I guess. I need to read more. RISE AND FALL OF PEANUTS: Jim at Unqualified Offerings points out this Peanuts appreciation and analysis by Christopher Caldwell. Caldwell's theory is that Snoopy's takeover of Peanuts is what made it in its later years a run-of-the-mill strip. Snoopy, in the beginning, was a secondary character (like Frieda or Schroeder) and the farther Schulz embraced him and goofy dogs-are-cute humor the weaker his comics became --what Caldwell calls a "a calamitous artistic misjudgment." He also identifies the core of the good Peanuts years as Charlie Brown, Linus, and Lucy. I love this take on Charlie Brown's character: Charlie Brown is caught in a bind, because his sense of his own worthlessness is also the source of most of his virtues. Of his worthlessness he’s fully convinced. ("They say that opposites attract...," he says of the Little Red-Headed Girl whom he can never work up the courage to meet. "She’s really something and I’m really nothing... How opposite can you get?") But Charlie Brown’s low estimation of himself means a high estimation of others. The tremendous 1959 strip in which he learns on the phone that his baby sister Sally has been born ("A BABY SISTER? I’M A FATHER! I MEAN MY DAD’S A FATHER! I’M A BROTHER! I HAVE A BABY SISTER!! I’M A BROTHER!") shows that Charlie Brown worships his family and his friends. He’s so empathetic that his favorite big-league ballplayer is not Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle but the bench-warmer Joe Shlabotnik. When Linus gives him a gripping recap of a football game in which a team facing a six-point deficit scored a spectacular touchdown with three seconds left, Charlie Brown asks only, "How did the other team feel?" He is a deeply good person. I don't know how novel any of this is, as I don't think they're teaching Peanuts at the academy yet. (The textbook would have to be big enough to fit fifteen years of strips, which is the 1955-1970 period Caldwell calls the Golden Age.) But it's a great read if you're a Peanuts fan, or just want to read some good criticism of an important American comic strip. ANALYSIS: From The American Prospect on why Japan isn't coming out of recession anytime soon. Here's a troubling excerpt: As depicted in Richard Katz's book Japan: The System That Soured, Japan is composed of two economies: an extraordinarily advanced one that can compete against any other, and a backward one, sustained by government subsidies and political interests, that resembles Indonesia at its worst. In the late 1980s, the sheer superiority of top Japanese firms, along with the bubble created by bank lending, sustained the whole. But in the 1990s, as Japan's bubble burst and its most powerful firms moved offshore and acquired strong competitors, the inefficient, insolvent economy increasingly overshadowed the high-tech advanced economy. The article is not so hot on the Bush administration's approach to Japan, or to Argentina for that matter. There's also a review in this month's Prospect of James P. Gray's book, who was one of the "battlefield conversions" in the Reason drug issue. Wednesday, January 09, 2002
GOOD POINT: On the death of WebVan from Photodude. It was a good idea but expanded too fast during the dot.com boom, he says. HEY: Cornel West was on Bill O'Reilly tonight and they got along famously. I was disappointed. O'Reilly mentioned something about Larry Summers refusing to appear on his program before, so maybe he was nursing an old grudge by not getting on West's case, or maybe he just enjoyed talking to West. EVEN IF YOU AVOID THE GIANT ROCK: The supernova gets you. Though the article says the supernova only wiped out molluscs when it hit Earth two million years ago. INSOLVENT REPUBLIC OF PUNDITISTAN --HAS A RING TO IT, METHINKS: Both The Illuminated Donkey and Through The Looking Glass point out that a certain word has run its course perhaps. Donkey's Ken Goldstein also has a good post on why Ringling Brothers versus PETA is not a case of good versus evil. I always knew clowns were scary. ANDREA SEE: Like me got a Claire Berlinski e-mail but she does a little research and googles her up. I love how dawson.com is the third site Google found. CASTLES IN THE SAND: Saudi Arabia has knocked down an old Ottoman castle on its territory. The Turks are, of course, appalled. The castle will be replaced by a giant white cube with one door. And no satellite dishes. GOLDEN TRIANGLE BACK IN BUSINESS: Burma I mean Myanmar is back on top of world opium production. How nice. BY THE WAY: Here's the complete list of Mark Cuban's fines. I wanted to find a complete Rasheed Wallace technical foul list too but I can't seem to google it up. He is in the lead this season, though. LOUSY SITUATION: American parents are lining up to adopt Afghan children, reports the Boston Globe, but it's not happening, for two big reasons: Islam does not recognize adoption, and cultural tradition prohibits it. Orphans in Afghanistan tend to live with extended family - a cousin, aunt, or even a more distant relative. Orphans are not only defined by the loss of two parents; many Afghanistan orphanages take in children who have one parent missing, usually a father, to help relatives with the cost of another mouth to feed in a country where women routinely have six or seven children. Even if Islam permitted the practice, logistics and US law would prevent any child from leaving the country. The US government doesn't allow adoption in devastated nations so soon after a war; the chance is too great that children designated as orphaned may have merely been separated from their parents. Which is pretty crappy, as the article estimates there's 1 million Afghan orphans. They also mention this: Just like during every world disaster, American families started calling adoption agencies as soon as the bombing of Afghanistan began, wondering how to give a home to the hundreds of poverty-stricken children they saw in media reports. Is this the Jeffersonian wing of the American populace again --to use Meadian terminology? Or what? I mean, I'm glad people do that; it means as a nation we're not limited to giving money to Sally Struthers and UNICEF boxes. TORICELLI WATCH: Here's Bret Schundler's campaign manager on the GOP's chances of winning Toricelli's Senate seat. How come Schundler isn't running? His name's out there, and he can pull a reverse-Christie Whitman and win a Senate seat after losing the governor's race. It's a good run down, though I don't know why he thinks Jon Corzine was better known than Bob Franks. BUD SELIG STINKS: He's friends with the Twins' owner, who thinks he can get a better price from MLB if they contract his team than if he outright sells it. From the Times, again. Here's a piece from George Vecsey on the same thing. PUTIN WATCH: The war in Chechnya is starting up again, says The Washington Post. What a sleazy war, there's abductions for ransom by Russian forces when there aren't abductions to kill people. Wouldn't it be neat if the U.N. or somebody adopted some kind of international rules for secession? Not that anybody listens to U.N. but at least then we'd have something to argue about. How did the Czechs and Slovaks do it? "THE DAWN CAME UP LIKE THUNDER ACROSS THE COSMOS": The first appearance of starlight happened all at once and it was visually spectacular, says this New York Times article. But there's the usual disclaimer that nothing's been proven yet. Also, the guy who is making this claim says that "Perhaps 90 percent of the light from the early universe is missing." I'm no astrophysicist, but isn't 90 percent of the universe supposed to be dark matter too? Not that I have any clue what the correlation would be between those two statements. By the way, is that "dawn came up" thing Kipling? The author references Kipling in the first paragraph and then drops that line, so it seems like it could be. I think Kipling is back in vogue these days. BURQA-A-GO-GO: Vivienne Walt of USA Today becomes the latest person to go underburqa in Afghanistan. She reports on the differences between Kabul and Kandahar: In dozens of interviews here throughout December, no man said women should stop wearing burqas, even though the Taliban had been routed from Kandahar, its spiritual birthplace. Their unwillingness to endorse a change didn't stem merely from the widespread support here for the Taliban. The burqa's place in Afghan society is more complicated and deeply rooted than that. ''It is from 250 years ago,'' says Haji Faqir Mohammad, 52, who repairs cars in Kandahar's central market. ''Only in King (Mohammad) Zahir Shah's time did some girls go to school without burqas,'' he adds, referring to the monarch who ruled from 1933 to 1973. Kandahari men roundly reject a return to that freedom. ''We don't want women to be like they are in the West,'' says Juma Khan, 32, a spare-parts dealer in the city's crumbling auto-repair bazaar. ''We hope that this new government will bring a little freedom for women, but it has to agree with both Islam and Pashtun tribalism.'' She also reports that the sky-blue Afghan burqas are called chaderis, but then goes back to calling them burqas in the article. I guess I can keep calling them burqas too. DEPRESSION: The Washington Post reports on the rise of drug therapy and the fall of talk theraphy within psychiatry as far as treating depression goes. Here, see: As managed-care companies demanded a shift from open-ended Freudian models of treatment and lengthy periods of psychoanalysis, the antidepressants were heralded as quick and effective. An important reason they were embraced early on is that they were believed to have fewer side effects than earlier medicines. In the period of the study and the five years since, the medicines have come to supplant psychotherapy in many settings, even though some forms of psychotherapy have been found to be as effective, and even though the combination of medicines and psychotherapy has often been found to be the most effective of all. As far as I can tell, the entire field of clinical psychology is in a completely weird state, with people with medical degrees being mainly drug-dispensers and people without them being counselors. The article claims this is a result of insurance companies splitting behavioral care from medical care, which ensures "that the behavioral plans have no incentive to improve primary care and primary care doctors have no incentive to provide long-term behavioral care." Psych ailments are weird in general because there's probably still a stigma to them --like you're doing something wrong by being depressed-- and they're conditions, not diseases, meaning they can't be cured as of yet, only dealt with, like diabetes or something. They mention in the article that the most effective treatment is a combination of talk and drug therapy, so I don't know if that means we need better drugs or better talks. Then the article has this sentence: "Part of a class of medicines that boosts the levels of a neurotransmitter called serotonin, Prozac and its sisters quickly came to be prescribed for a vast array of conditions and disorders." What, drugs are feminine now? Tuesday, January 08, 2002
BLOG HISTORY: Oliver Willis points out this brief history of the weblog. It's particularly instructive for me; I've been only aware of the warblogs since I started this thing, which for me means mostly the recommended sites on Instapundit and Samizdata. You know, this whole blog explosion since the attacks, which isn't mentioned in Rebecca Blood's history above --which I guess is a second coming of the form. I feel like such a rube, or like Marco Polo "discovering" China, which might be the same thing. I like this paragraph (written over a year ago): So why doesn't every bookmark list contain five weblogs? In the beginning of 1999 it really seemed that by now every bookmark list would. There was a bit of media attention and new weblogs were being created every day. It was a small, quick-growing community and it seemed to be on the edge of a wider awareness. Perhaps the tsunami of new weblogs created in the wake of Pitas and Blogger crushed the movement before it could reach critical mass; the sudden exponential growth of the community rendered it unnavigable. Weblogs, once filters of the web, suddenly became so numerous they were as confusing as the web itself. A few more articles appeared touting weblogs as the next big thing. But the average reader, hopefully clicking through to the Eatonweb portal, found herself faced with an alphabetical list of a thousand weblogs. Not knowing where to begin, she quickly retreated back to ABCnews.com. This is kind of what I feel like seeing all the links on Oliver's page, and all the links those links lead to. Charles Johnson seems to be preserving a historical difference between warblogs and blogs by lumping the warblogs into his non-idiotarian heading and keeping the others under "bloggage." A big difference between warblogs (post 9-11 blogs) and the blogs that were there in the years before might be that warblogs are, in general, non-left leaning. Another difference could be that the warbloggers as a group might know a lot less about computers than the older bloggers but saw Glenn Reynolds posting without any kind of fancy site design, checked out blogger, found out it was easy and just started posting. That's how I started, anyhow. It would explain why most of the non-idiotarians use blogger. But both these differences are pretty speculative. GREAT ARTICLE: From Wired on all the kids in Silicon Valley who have Aspergers syndrome. Computer programming appeals to the Aspergers mind; Aspergers minds get together in Silicon Valley, and since there's a genetic reason for Aspergers you get a whole bunch of kids with it. And here's an interview with an autism researcher from the same issue. Fascinating stuff. MARK CUBAN WATCH: Now he's been fined $500,000 for comments after the Mavs lost to the Spurs on Saturday. Original comments here. The ESPN article points out that this is not the largest fine in sports history; that, for $1 million, belongs to former 49ers co-owner Eddie DeBartolo for something involving gambling --the article doesn't give specifics. But this has to be the largest fee in sports history for just talking out of one's ass. Don't get me wrong, though: I love Mark Cuban, but more because I hate NBA refs. DWARF FINDS SOL: Also on the astroscience front, a brown dwarf was found orbiting a sun much like our own by Michael Liu of the University of Hawaii. It was right where the planet-forming area is supposed to be. Its discovery raises some interesting conjecture: Finding the brown dwarf so close to the star suggests that solar systems formed around sun-like stars could come in many different shapes and planetary distributions. Liu said it is possible that there are planets similar to Earth circling the star inside the orbit of the brown dwarf. For instance, it would be possible for a planet to orbit the star at 93 million miles, the distance from Earth to the sun. Whatever way our own solar system evolved, it's not the only way for one to evolve, is what this discovery suggests. I wonder if this'll end up being more evidence for the rare Earth hypothesis. DARK NATTER: This article makes the interesting point that the theory of dark matter is a lesser-of-two-evils theory, as the greater-evil theory would involve changes to the laws of gravity, something nobody is ready to do. Here's a big quote to elaborate: Perhaps scientists don’t entirely understand the way gravity works; perhaps Isaac Newton’s famous law of gravitation needs some revising. But that idea, says the University of Arizona’s Chris Impey, is not very popular. "Definitely most astronomers are extremely unwilling to give up Newton’s law," he says. "So it’s essentially a choice of two evils: You either hypothesize that Newton’s law is wrong, and that our knowledge of the gravity theory is incomplete. Or, you hypothesize a fundamental microscopic particle that has never been detected in any physics lab, whose properties are only constrained by these astronomical observations. Which is a pretty uncomfortable position for physicists to be in." The article even mentions the luminous ether in the same paragraph as dark matter, the ether being the proposed substance that electromagnetic waves were propagated by and which was discarded as unneccessary later. Huh. LETTER OF THE LAW: The BBC runs this story on Chinese "hostess bars" avoiding vice prosecution by replacing female hostesses with transvestite hostesses. This is anecdotal evidence for legalizing prostitution, I imagine. Or not. And Boing Boing has the link to this story about prostitutes in Tokyo Disneyland. And there's a ton of weird stories on that story's sidebar, too. DAVE THOMAS: Died today, says Fox News. Apparently he's been on dialysis for a while and I know that's never good in the long-term. The short article has good details on his life --I had no idea he was inspired by Colonel Sanders himself. IT CAN WORK, I SWEAR: Jim at Unqualified Offerings dissects my proposed CFL-NFL merger: But UO sees some problems. First, it foresees new entitlements, with the Lower 48 required to provide the Northern Acquisitions with defenses and running games. Second, and sadly, since UO actually likes Canadian-rules football, we have no room for them here. A CFL field is 30 yards longer than a US-rules "pitch," and about a dozen yards wider too. But the trend in US football stadia has been towards ever-increasing intimacy, with the stands built closer and closer to the field. There is no chance whatsoever, for instance, of fitting a CFL gridiron into the Redskins' Fedex Field. See, what we do is preserve the CFL franchises as they are now with the CFL rules and everything, make them play by NFL rules on NFL fields and make NFL teams play by CFL rules on CFL fields. This won't happen so often, as the CFL will become the Canadian Football Conference and submit its champion to the NFL playoffs or we'll split it down the middle into AFC Canada and NFC Canada. NFL coaches will probably bitch about having to do things different when they go to CFL cities, but they'll get used to it. I mean, it's all football, right? Besides, if one merged the CFL with the NFL, it practically requires an end-of-season championship between the leagues. Since NFL teams can play CFL style ball if they have to (viz. Saint Louis) and CFL teams couldn't stop an NFL-grade rushing offense with a wall of zambonis, it would be pretty brutal. Well, if we have a Canadian Football Conference we can give the Grey Cup to whoever wins that. Or we can give the eventual NFL champions the Grey Cup, a far older and nicer-looking trophy than the old football-on-a-stick. Throughout all this, I am assuming that the old quotas on American players on CFL teams will be lifted on a fully merged NFL-CFL, so there won't be a huge level-of-play difference. My plan is FOOLPROOF. I think. Then Jim wrote: "WARNING: The preceding item contains a snare for pedants! Spot it if you can..." I....I....I don't know what a pedant is..... Monday, January 07, 2002
WATCH ME GET SUED OR SOMETHING: The Rallying Point links to this list of Celebrity Critics of Scientology and I can't help but notice that like half of them are science fiction authors. There has to be some professional jealousy here of L. Ron Hubbard, right? They're thinking to themselves, "I coulda come up with a WAY better religion than THAT." For whatever reasons, science fiction is a kind of culty genre and it's practitioners have to walk a fine line sometimes between being artists and prophets speaking to converts and would-be converts and old L. Ron definitely embraced the prophet deal whole-hog. There are others who went half-way there into guruhood, like Kurt Vonnegut, and others who wanted to but pulled back at the last minute, like Philip K. Dick, as I think Thomas Disch mentioned in The Dreams Our Stuff Are Made Of. By the way, here's a geek heirarchy I found via the null device (a completely great name for a blog, by the way). Science fiction authors are at the top; people who write erotic Star Trek fan fiction featuring themselves as funny animals are at the bottom. NEW ANNE APPLEBAUM: On why you don't have to worry about the Euro ushering in a European super-state --it's already here. And it's not necessarily a bad thing, she seems to be saying, as it means Europe is not in a crisis. When and if crisis comes, then's when Europe will go back to the internal squabbling we all know and love. JUST LET HIM GO: I thought this thing was blowing over, but now Cornel West is on Larry Summers' case again. While his back is turned, even. Link via Instapundit. My own favorite take on all this is Refugee From The Real World Summers is causing hurt feelings by not being shmoochie enough with Pampered Academic West. CRISIS ON INFINITE BLOGS: So Charles has the link to The Illuminated Donkey --who has excellent taste in templates, I must say, and he's from the Garden State like me. And Donkey has the links to Blather and Boing Boing, and at that point I see links and links to blogs upon blogs, not just on those sites but on the sites they link to. And the majority of these blogs seem to be updated regularly. The Bloggerverse is way bigger than I thought. I mean, I know this is old news and everything. But there's a ton out there. WHATEVER: This Opinionjournal dealie wants to present Ringling Brothers as the brave little circus standing up to PETA --as if Ringling Brothers wasn't run by nuts-- or so the evidence suggests. Also on the PETA front is this article from the LA Times about dog-eating in Korea. Apparently during the Seoul Olympics the government tried to repress dog-eating, but now for the World Cup they're practically encouraging it. I mean, more power to them; I'm sure my cow- and pig-eating disgusts a lot of people too. Except the Koreans. I mean, is there any animal not on the average Korean restaurant menu? I TAKE ISSUE: With Megan McArdle's comments on the new Reason. She sees an anti-redneck tone in Peter Bagge's great cartoon on Christian rock, which I thought was just exposing the internal contradictions of Christian rock, while finishing with the fact that they weren't all that different from the internal contradictions of unChristian rock. It's not online yet, but it'll probably appear here when it does. You should, of course, read as many of Peter Bagge's comics as you can find. FLIT: Bruce points out that the Canadian troops in Afghanistan represent "the first-ever combat deployment of Canadian ground troops under American command outside the continent" --meaning by continent North America. It's all part of the slow, inexorable march towards statehood for Canada, I reckon. Which I think should only be agreed to if the CFL gets to merge with the NFL while keeping all the CFL rules (12 men on the field, goal posts in the inzone, etc.) alive in CFL stadiums, a la the American League-National League split in baseball. This is obviously the most important point to be made about any potential US-Canada merger. EQUITY UPDATE: USA Today reports that the traffic accident rate for 16-year old girls is rising, while the rate for 16-year old boys is dropping. The percent difference for their insurance rates is shrinking too, though the number the article gives, 41%, still seems pretty big. BY THE WAY: Instapundit has responded to kausfiles on alleged double standards regarding Glenn's treatment of Stephen Ambrose versus his treatment of Cornel West. I think Glenn got the better of kf, and always will, as long as Mickey updates his site in tiny little snippets (and saves his best stuff for the stuff he's getting paid for) while the professor goes into giant paragraphs, commentary being a hobby for him. KAUSFILES: Makes the neat point that the amount of people sleeping in homeless shelters in Minneapolis has been going up regardless of whatever else was happening in the economy or with welfare reform. He then gives a warning against the rush to judgement: Just looking at this chart, it's hard to blame any particular national policy change for the rise in homelessness. The chart does fit with the leftish explanation that blames rising urban rents (since they go up in good times even faster than in bad times). On the other hand, it also fits with the right wing explanation that Say's Law is at work here: as more beds and services are offered to the homeless -- and as their provision becomes routinized and destigmatized -- more people consciously or unconsciously wind up claiming them. ...When you next read about near-middle-class working mothers who drive to suburban food pantries to grab a free load of groceries, remember that without a whole lot more detail about these families, it's impossible to tell whether their emergence supports the first explanation (people are needier) or the second (people are less shamed). Good stuff. Sunday, January 06, 2002
LATEST EURO STORY: One of the Euro coins may land on heads more often than tails. I expect the next Euro story to involve a water-squirting Euro coin that really no-fooling impresses the ladies at parties. A BRIEF HISTORY OF KMART: If you ever wanted one, here it is, from Reuters. I would like a little more analysis, though, on why Kmart is losing so bad to Wal-Mart. I don't know if this is true everywhere, but at least where I live (Philly metro), the Wal-Marts are in the sticks, the Kmarts in the more urbanized areas. FROM THE THANK YOU, SCIENCE DEPARTMENT: Science has tabbed the limit on the amount of time you can be really physically amorous with any one person: 30 months. From one of those British papers. Plus more on the differences between the genders on their approaches to S-E-X. TAAAAALIBAN: Charles directs us to this little movie-thing about the guy answering the Taliban's phone. Like many a Saturday Night Live sketch, it has a good idea but repeats it excessively. I know Monty Python did that a lot too, but they always seemed aware of it, like they were winking at the audience: "Yes, this joke is terrible. Yes, we did it five times already. Yes, we're doing it again." A NEW LOW IN SINO-GRAECO RELATIONS: Salon introduces Love Collision, about an astrology that combines the Greek and Chinese zodiacs. I love trying to do people one better when they ask me what my sign is by asking them what they are on the Chinese calendar --I think they should probably look into it, particularly people who are really horoscope-obsessed, the kind who are like "oh that's such a Virgo thing" and on and on. This Salon thing is offering a bigger astrology. Neat. Astrology, in my opinion, provides roundabout insight, which works for a lot of people. WEST-SUMMERS WRAPUP: Ken Layne has a big post on the subject, where he compares Cornel West to George Hamilton. I think Hamilton knows he's a goof, though. I am reminded of older comments by Virginia Postrel on a similar subject; I include a large portion of her paragraph to provide context: Writing in The Daily Princetonian, a former editor of the conservative Princeton Tory explains why David Horowitz would have gotten little p.r. from his anti-reparations ads there: "We're not apathetic. We simply believe in reasoned debate. When the Tory ran an article a few years ago on ex-gays, the LGBA took out an ad in the 'Prince' countering it. End of story. No burned papers, no problems." Some things don't change, and Princeton's civil, somewhat dull, political life is one of them. (This culture is one reason Peter Singer, whose academic freedom I staunchly defend, was a stupid hire. He's a glib, Harvard-style headline getter, not a Princeton-style serious scholar; not surprisingly, the philosophy department, which some rank best in the world, wouldn't have him.) Cornel West sounds like the ultimate "Harvard-style headline getter." Why would Princeton want him? DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA BAT BOY: Transterrestrial Musings brings the link to this story of the future from Weekly World News, where Bat Boy is president. I may have to start following WWN, as apparently Bat Boy is a fixture there. This should also be a lesson to all of you out there that not all tabloids are the same, as the National Enquirer, which I do follow, only covers celebrities and it's COMPLETELY objective. I think. PAT BUCHANAN --WRONG! Here's Brian Doherty picking apart Grampy Pat's new book. Doherty even lands the low blow, in the parentheses here: "To Buchanan (himself childless, though that may not be by choice), it is vital that the right people reproduce widely to prevent formerly European and American land and culture from being taken over by people of the wrong ethnic background." And I caught the end of Pat on the Bill O'Reilly show, and Bill was hardly yelling at him. I expected more from those two. Friday, January 04, 2002
OSAMA MAKEOVER: ABC News has a little tiny picture of the Westernized Osama picture. I think he wants to sell you something. UPDATE: Rc3.org gives the link to the bigger leaflet picture. SHARPENING THE CINEMATIC STEAK KNIVES: When I heard the soundtrack to I Am Sam was all Beatles covers, and that it was about a handicapped guy who was obsessed with the Beatles (or something), I knew we were in trouble. Now Charles Taylor in Salon has the proof: I don't know the last time I've seen so disgraceful a display from a talented actor. It used to be that actors playing the mentally retarded suffered from a discretion that was its own kind of bad taste. They tended to downplay mannerisms and distortions of speech, and the unintentional message was that retarded people are unpleasant to watch. Penn delves into mannerisms and vocal distortions with an appalling eagerness. He makes the classic mistake of playing the handicap instead of the person. Sam....as played by Penn, he's no more than a device for an actor's display of technique, lumbering gait, distracted affect, galumphing, open-mouthed laugh and the nasal utterances of whatever strays into his brain. An actor affecting this demeanor to make fun of a retarded man would be pilloried. Penn's portrayal strikes me as equally insensitive. It's the nightmare performance of 2001. To paraphrase that Cracker song, the worlds needs another famous actor playing a mentally handicapped person like I need a hole in the head. Speaking of Beatles covers (and Salon), David Talbot made the point yesterday about Neil Young doing a cover of "Imagine" at that celebrity telethon and then releasing "Let's Roll." Which is a pretty bizarre contrast, but my own angle is that on the Neil Young version I can hear the lyrics a lot better than on the John Lennon original, where all you hear clearly is "Imagine there's no heaven" and then mumble mumble mumble. So I finally understand, now, that John Lennon was saying a world without religion would be the ideal one. Which as a part-time Jungian I have to sneer at, man being the religious animal and all. WHY I READ DRUDGE: He has the weird stories, like this one about a rash of cattle mutilations in Montana. These cows are found dead with their reproductive organs removed with surgical precision. And predators won't eat the carcasses. Freaky. I MAKE FUN OF ARGENTINA: Never minding that the home state will have four governors in one week. Due a split legislature and a week-long interregnum there will be co-governors for a week. They're even going to crash in the governor's mansion for a few days. They even get to pardon people. Link from Best of the Web. HEEEYYY: New Hitch. Here's a quote: "Given a choice between protecting American civilians and protecting the client regimes that sponsor and coddle those who murder them, the Bush Administration has taken the second option every time." He's on about how Prince Bandar got all the bin Ladens out of the U.S. without question and with FBI blessing, apparently. AP SAYS: "Facts Altered in Anti-Terror Effort" but it doesn't look like that big a deal. Apparently there's a doctored photo of Osama bin Laden on the surrender-Dorothy leaflets we've been dropping in Afghanistan. Hey, it's propaganda, do you expect total accuracy? GOOD POST: From Ginger Stampley on the on-going cross-blog guns debate. She's got a take on why Ulster is a bad example of a successful armed insurgency. D'OH DOLLY: Apparently Dolly the cloned sheep has developed arthritis and far sooner than one would expect for a sheep, which may mean a genetic defect caused by the cloning process. (The last part of that sentence is going to be in Attack Of The Clones somewhere, I betcha, read by Justin Timberlake in a monotone just before he gets slaughtered. This "'NSYNC in Star Wars II" thing is another plank in the George Lucas: Non-Genius school of Star Wars Studies.) Well, they've been telling us all along that this cloning this is far from perfected. I wonder if her forelegs will just sort of fall off next, like Simon's arm in Airplane II. REYNOLDS BRINGS PETERS: Glenn has the link to new Ralph Peters in Opinionjournal. Ralph says, in regards to the Bush administration: This is an oilman's administration, and long affiliation with energy affairs appears to have blinded an otherwise-superb strategic team to the abundant, well-documented evidence. Far from examining Saudi Arabia's deep and extensive complicity in supporting terror and undermining secular regimes throughout the Muslim world and beyond, the administration reflexively defends the Saudis. I do not believe the administration is intentionally dishonest--only that ties to the oil business and a half-century's assumptions prevent it from facing up to Saudi Arabia's support for, and funding of, the cruelest, most benighted and hate-filled version of one of the world's great religions. He goes on to call Saudi Arabia the worst of both words as far as his arguments on stability versus instability go, and lists the various countries they're mucking around in (and he gives Indonesia a slight chance for continued existence as a nation, unlike his Parameters piece, where he gave it none.) Read, enjoy. SPEAKING OF SWEET SPORT: Will Vehrs points out Kevin Holtsberry's take on the latest BCS fiasco. Gawd Nebraska got creamed, which ordinarily I'm fine with, unless when it's Miami who's doing the creaming. Shoulda been Oregon. UPDATE: I meant, shoulda been Oregon in the title game. And why did the graphics last night have Nebraska as number two? That's the Ducks' spot. WEST/SUMMERS UPDATE: Instapundit has a ton of stuff, of course. And Andrew Sullivan links to this ripping of West by Leon Wieseltier from 1995. I remember reading another anti-West piece more recently, I thought it was the Weekly Standard but you can't read anything old there now without paying for it. I like the Summers-West fight but am disappointed that Summers appears to be backing down; if this was wrestling they'd be kissing and making up while the audience boos. Summers-West is on the undercard of my intellectual pay-per-view, along with the Paglia-Foucault Fans Death Match, the Ted Rall-Ken Layne comedy match and the main event of Hitchens-Chomsky. Ah, sweet sport. THE ANDREWSULLIVAN.COM REDESIGN: Man, I think this'll take some getting used to. Look at it. The text box is on the right now, and I, being an English speaker and thus wanting to read left to right, want my text box on the left. Now, obviously, my own page has the links on the left and the text on the right as well, but I don't have the split-screen style that Andrew and kausfiles have. And if you're going to go that route, I think having the text on the left ensures that you read the good stuff first and then surf the links after. It's the way I want to read things, anyhow. Maybe it's sort of an ideological web design choice on Andrew's part, putting the text box firmly on the right. Speaking of kausfiles, he provides the link to this Jimmy Breslin column with this line: "We know how we acted in New York and doubt if it could happen anyplace else." Followed by this line: "A woman from the University of Richmond, a psychologist of the South, said, "If this was a NASCAR crowd, there would be panic." So even in moments of national tragedy the citizens of New York are still better than the rest of us. As kausfiles says, "There is some kind of clinical condition here. Even contemplating one of New York's proudest moments, Breslin can only achieve civic self-esteem by claiming superiority over those dumb rednecks." All this reminds me of this amazing anti-NYC rant from Boomer on the ConMack site which, I warn you, is not for the faint of heart. Thursday, January 03, 2002
DAVID TALBOT HAS BEEN DOING SOME THINKING: And he gives us this piece in the free area of Salon about doves turning to hawks. It's good; somebody hipped him to Walter Russell Mead and he really runs with that football --this is a review of Mead's Special Providence, in fact. GOD MARYLAND GOT SLAUGHTERED: What a bummer. And I hate Florida. No wonder Jim Henley still hasn't posted since. Hey Jim, come back, there's always basketball. MORE FROM THE NEW REPUBLIC: Peter Beinart has the new TRB on Muslims in South Africa, and why Islamism has its origins on the right, not the left. (As far as you can speak about such divisions these days.) Says he: There's a lesson here for both the American left and the American right. For the left, it's that viewing militant Islam as a successor to the Third World "liberation" movements of the twentieth century (and therefore worthy of sympathy) is nutty. The Taliban surely showed that Islamism represents the opposite of gender and sexual liberation. And PAGAD and Qibla--which have allied themselves against the ANC's notions of "black" unity and empowerment--show that it often represents the opposite of racial liberation as well. The lesson for the right is strangely similar. It's that militant Islam isn't a phenomenon of the left--powered by the anarchic poor and the intellectuals who harness them to create futuristic utopias. It's often a phenomenon driven by the American right's favorite class, the petit bourgeois: the people who tend small shops and tiny houses, who believe in family, faith, property, and order. And who see those values threatened by rising lawlessness, and by governments too corrupt and too ill-equipped to keep them safe. Such people turn to fundamentalism because it offers security, structure, and the perverse pride that comes from "standing up" to the West. The "lesson" is based on the fact that the ANC wants to bring Muslims in, and thus can't really obviously jump in with the War On Terrorism. IRAN AGAIN: Here's Franklin Foer in The New Republic about the role of the son of the Shah in promoting democracy. He also makes the point that current president Khatami is looking more like Gorbachev than anyone else: "a reformer, not a revolutionary." Then: Khatami was, after all, trained in the conservative seminaries of Qum. As Fred Halliday noted in these pages ("Mohammed and Mill," October 5, 1998), his writings on Western philosophy followed praise of John Locke with passages about the hollowness of secularism. Then there's the fact that he has close allies with long histories of abetting Lebanese Hezbollah, and he has made no bones about "defend[ing] the values of the revolution"--a revolution that many Iranians now view the way Russians viewed the Bolshevik revolution in 1991. THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS: Saw it last night, it was pretty good. It wasn't as neat and clean as Rushmore, which has its advantages and drawbacks --the drawbacks being the final wrap-up was a little forced and Owen Wilson's character was kind of grafted on when he wasn't being comic relief. The advantages were that Wilson and Wes Anderson could tell the story of a group of geniuses, instead of the one boy-genius of Rushmore, and get a little complexity and depth in there, though these guys obviously want to stay pretty far away from depth, which is --again-- a good thing. And I guess a whole lot of famous people saw Rushmore and wanted to be in the next one, as this one has "known" actors in all the major roles. Bill Murray is kind of just there. I was all set to hate Gwyneth Paltrow but she grew on me as the movie went on. But did we really need Alec Baldwin narrating this thing? For you Rushmore fans, Max's teacher from his daydream and Max's father are both there in minor roles. And Gene Hackman was great. PUBLISHED POSTREL: Here's Virginia's newest article from the New York Times. It's about the true elasticity of book prices, which is something real book-lovers don't often understand. Good read. IRAN UPDATE: Yet another article (this one from USA Today) about huddled masses yearning to breathe free in Iran. Hey, they're making Coke there now. The article also makes the point that all those years of "Death to America" chants are making America more popular, not less. And --why-- it's the first appearance of the Iranian Street: ''The Iranian street is much more pro-American than the Arab street,'' says Afshin Molavi, an Iranian-American and author of a forthcoming book called Persian Pilgrimages. ''The government professes to care about the Palestinians but the people don't.'' The first appearance of the Iranian Street I've noticed, anyhow. I don't think it's talking to our old buddy, the Arab Street. AND: There's a tiny little accompanying piece in there about the new Victoria's Secret in Tehran and other things. Wednesday, January 02, 2002
PAT BUCHANAN BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH: Drudge brings the details on Pat Buchanan's latest volume, The Death Of The West. Immigrants and welfare states cause Europe's demise --which, I mean, he's probably right about the stifling effects of welfare states. Is it me, or is Pat Buchanan the version of Bill O'Reilly who takes himself seriously? No wonder Foxnews is winning. Anyway, the books seems to be about the non-proliferation of white people in the world. And other things; Drudge says that Pat says that "Islam has already surpassed Catholicism as the largest religion on earth." Which, of course, ignores spilts within Islam and makes Catholicism a separate entity from Christianity. But then Drudge makes Catholicism part of Christianity in the next paragraph, so this could just be Drudge being inaccurate. My own little peeve is, and I doubt I'll change anyone's mind about this, is that I hate American being lumped in with "the West." "The West" means California to me. Americans are Westerners (West Europeans) the way Romans were Greeks --to pick a no-doubt Swiss-cheese holey historical parallel. America owes a lot to the West but dang if it isn't Something Else. Well, I think so. END OF INFINITY: Here's a New York Times article on why a universe whose expansion is accelerating will eventually be incapable of having a complete thought. Hey, wow, I'm already there, man. Since having thoughts dissipates energy you'll eventually run out of thoughts since you'll run out of energy, unless you can grow yourself at the same speed that the universe is growing --that is my condensation of the above article. You should probably read it for yourself. OREGON SMACKED COLORADO: Now all we need is a Nebraska vistory to hasten the crumbling of the BCS edifice. Not that I want either them or Miami national champions. But playoffs will make me, for one, watch college football. ENCOURAGING TREND: The Dreaded Purple Master blog reports on the use of nude and almost-nekkid calendars to raise funds. And I just noticed the Australian Ballet. Thank you, Yahoo Most Popular. ON AND PERON: Yes, Argentina has its fifth president in two weeks. The new guy wants to ditch the free market. Well, okay. Doesn't a situation like this call for something drastic? I have no idea what a good short-term solution would be; the new guy is prmising a ton of public works projects. Andrew Hofer has a ton of analysis on his blog. Andrew also tells of his impending move from Blogger. Now I am an HTML simp; without Blogger I have no blog. But --as Ev himself pointed out on the main page-- Blogger was named one of the "seven wonders of the web" by the Guardian. So maybe I don't have to worry; maybe Blogger means enough to Ev that he'll keep it up and everything, despite the nefarious Christmas attack on it. Maybe he'll find a good business model. I know for me Blogger means not having to know/deal with HTML, and there's probably a lot of other people out there like that. Blogger means convenience, and if you can provide convenience, you've got something. I ramble; my point is, I can't see Blogger going down anytime soon, as it's definitely filling a need. WELL BOY HOWDY: Fatherhood is bad for sex life and makes men fat, says an Australian research team. Thank you, science. BIN LADEN STILL LIVING: WorldNetDaily points out this ABC News story about the hunt for Mullah Omar and bin Laden, which has this little item: Meanwhile, an intercepted phone call from Iran suggests that bin Laden is still alive — if not in the best of health. A senior military official told ABCNEWS the communications, intercepted over the past few days, used a code word for the accused terrorist mastermind, and suggested "you should keep [bin Laden] off of the television. He looks bad, he looks sick and it is demoralizing to his people." That's to be expected --I think he needs dialysis to live. But why is Iran talking up bin Laden? I thought they hated the Taliban, and the puritanical Wahabbi stuff. Maybe it was just sort of a friendly suggestion, and they went into makeup tips next. THE FUNNIES: Glenn Reynolds links to this Tom Tomorrow strip about how 2001 the year did not live up to 2001 the movie. Typical Hollywood. I would like to add that, in 2001, there were no Giant Babies, no Pan Am flights to speak of, and no monoliths droning angsty choruses. (My brother pointed out to me that the cover of Who's Next has the four of them right after they pissed on a monolith, which must have been really obvious when it was record-sized but which I never noticed on the tiny CD cover.) AVOID THE NOAM: Little Green Footballs points out this review from the Philadelphia Inquirer of Noam Chomsky's latest, 9-11. It is not a rave review. And Chomsky fans can't complain he's being covered up here, unless panning his book is like censoring him. Or something. Monday, December 31, 2001
HAPPY NEW YEAR: Yeah, happy new year, if I don't get a chance to post before then. Have a better year, stick to your resolutions, drink a little champagne. KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES: Jupiter will be really bright tonight, says the BBC and the AP. And at right about midnight, too. INSTAPUNDIT POST OF THE DAY: On the failure of U.S. policy in regards to Argentina. It's right here. And Glenn's got more stuff on Cornel West. I flipped past him "rapping" on tv this weekend, it looked more like a spoken word king of thing. NEWS: One story and then the follow-up about mass civilian casualties over the weekend in Afghanistan. I don't know how reliable this all is, but the story is out there. IN BLOG SPACE NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM: Brian Linse points out this story by James C. Bennett of UPI about blogging. He draws a historical parallel that I couldn't possibly comment on between the current professional media and academic types and the Church in Europe right before the Reformation. He isn't all bubbly on blogs but he gives them their due, and he talks about the Anglosphere at length --a neat term I can't remember hearing before for the English-speaking nations of the world. This paragraph stuck out: One of the most interesting and generally unreported aspects of the Weblog phenomenon is its unconscious Anglosphereness. Blog space is pretty much Anglosphere space, in that the network of bloggers, and especially the post-911 "warblogs," publish all over the Anglosphere, and quote freely from media sources across the Anglosphere, but rather sparsely from outside it. (Several redoubtable Norwegians, blogging in English, are the primary exception). For every link to, say, the English edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, there are hundreds to the London Evening Telegraph or the Times. Which reminds that Bjoern Staerk has covered the latest India-Pakistan brouhaha from the perspective of Indian and Pakistani papers and you should go over there and check it out. Bennett also says that, as a blogger, I am an "early adopter." That's not true, I didn't own a laserdisc player until it was far, far too late. DOONESBURY EXPLAINED: Dan of Lake Effect points out my Doonesbury-ignorance, saying that "there's SORT of a message [in this Sunday strip] about loopy-liberal Zonker making up with reactionary-right BD over the wreckage. But it's not pushy." NEW NUCLEAR MATH: This story (found via Drudge) says that India is confident it can win a nuclear war with Pakistan, which reminds me of ex-Iranian president Rafsanjani's recent comments on why the Islamic world could survive a nuclear war with Israel: there's more of us than there are of them, and they can hurt us but it's okay because we can really wipe them out. In the old days we had that Mutually Assured Destruction thing that made sure nuclear holocaust was coming for everybody, so World War III remained the Cold War mostly, and a whole lot of post-apocalyptic science fiction got written. But now here in World War IV we can have a localized apocalypse, or at least speak of one. It's still a lot of posturing but it looks like the math has changed. WHEN YOU FALL OFF BLOGGING FOR A FEW DAYS: And you haven't been online for those days, you don't know where to begin when you get back. I'll just do my own personal what-I'm-catching-up-on watch: Glenn Reynolds brings the United Nations Bosnian brothels story and the science fiction authors poll on Slashdot. God, none of those guys were prophetic. Tim Blair has the first 2002 Blog Watch. And a little bit of Fisking. Joanne Jacobs brings Hitchens' latest from the Atlantic. Shouting Cross The Potomac has Tony's temp diary. Brian Linse and Samizdata continue their discussion on guns. ESPN sent Bill Simmons to a meaningless bowl game in Houston. In that article Simmons also points out that they're not knocking down the Astrodome, merely building the new stadium right next door. Cool. I mean, shouldn't the Astrodome be a national historical site or something? All the other giant ashtray-esque stadiums of that era are gone or going to be gone (like the Vet in Philly). Moira Breen has a takedown of a goofy article and brings this story about al Jazeera. Friday, December 28, 2001
FROM THE WAR AGAINST THE WAR AGAINST DRUGS: Jim Henley points this one out. If you can pick up the recent Reason drug issue, do so, it's very good. FAR SIDE WAS NEVER THIS BAFFLING: Here's Sunday's Doonesbury. It's incomprehensible. At least when I didn't get a Far Side, I could think it was because I didn't know what an ichthyologist was or something. This I just don't get. And it's not snowing in New York. SECRET POPEYE AND BLUTO TAPES: USA Today runs this article on the new Popeye and Bluto Minute Maid ad, which has them being rather too friendly with each other. What, they can't just be good friends? Next you'll tell me that wrestling is gay. ARTICLE, MULTI-BLOGGED: This piece by Mark Steyn I read about on Joanne Jacobs' site, who got it from little green footballs. So it's been passed around a bit, but only because it's really good. Here's a disturbing tidbit: President Bush and co. have been so busy enjoining us not to beat up our Islamic neighbours that they’ve failed to notice an actual as opposed to hypothetical spate of ‘hate crimes’: according to Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, more European synagogues have been attacked and burned in the last year than in any year since 1938, the year of Kristallnacht. This doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of press coverage. What the hey? Anyway, Steyn's points are all about the role of cultural preferences in American and European foreign policies. AND that European criticisms of American resemble older European criticisms of Jews. How encouraging. RICHARD C. REID UPDATE: His mom is shocked. Link from Drudge. I'd say the oddest thing about Richard C. Reid so far is that his name is, in fact, Richard C. Reid, and that he is British and therefore not Sri Lankan in the least. I mean, I for one thought that we wouldn't be calling him "Reid" for long. The old cliche about not judging books by covers probably applies here. I can't think of any shoe cliches. WHAT NEXT, "WHERE'S THE BEEF?": Apparently Verizon is introducing an emergencies-only "wireless phone that can identify a person's calling location and phone number to an emergency call center." Is this not --in 2001, almost 2002-- the beloved panic button (I can't remember what it actually was called) of the "I've FALLEN and I CAN'T GET UP" lady of my youth? Which makes me wonder why they think it'll work now. Maybe they're thinking the spread of cell phones and beepers will make a device that bombed fifteen-or-so years ago palatable to consumers now. (I'm assuming it bombed, I don't remember it having any kind of impact besides the annoying-yet-memorable commercial.) Can't you just put 911 on your speed dial? But this new gizmo transmits location too. I dunno, it just sounds like the return of an Eighties Cultural Icon, and John Hughes movies are the best representatives of that particular species. YOUR ANTI-FOUCAULT ITEM OF THE MOMENT: From a book review in The Times Literary Supplement. It's just the first paragraph that's about the goofiness of Foucault. Reading every single Camille Paglia column in Salon has made Foucault-bashing one of my favorite intellectual spectator sports, and if you're a fan as well, you might like this. POST THAT SHOULD BE READ: From Andrew Hofer over at More Than Zero about the effects of schizophrenia on a friend. It's stories like this that make me think Thomas Szasz might be a crank. Wednesday, December 26, 2001
SPREE AND P.J. SHAKE HANDS: Well how nice. I was wondering where P.J. was these days (working for NBC) as I'm a long time Seton Hall fan. Tuesday, December 25, 2001
MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM THE ECONOMIST: Of course the article's title is Is Santa a deadweight loss? Apparently somebody tried to figure out what percent of gifts actually go unused and thus constitute "deadweight." Then the article points out alternate considerations, like the uncalculated sentimental gifts and the gifts that give the recipients preferences they didn't have before: Some of the best gifts, after all, are the unexpected items that you would never have thought of buying, but which turn out to be especially well picked. And preferences can change. So by giving a jazz CD, for example, the giver may be encouraging the recipient to enjoy something that was shunned before. This, and a desire to build skills, is presumably the hope held by the many parents who ignore their children's pleas for video games and buy them books instead. Of course, some people will tell you that video games build hand-eye coordination and problem-solving skills, so I guess it depends on whether the parents want to raise humanities professors or fighter pilots. I guess a combination of both would produce creative scientists. Speaking ideally, of course, as if input X always leads to output Y. By the way, who writes The Economist? There's never any actual names in there if you get the magazine. Never any photo credits either. Is it one guy in his basement? Crazed geneticist who has cloned himself? Crazed physicist who creates alternate-universe versions of himself and then collapses them back into his "one" "true" "self"? I mean, I just don't see how you can build a resume writing for The Economist. RICHARD C. REID, SHOE COBBLER: Here's a better picture of Dick Reid. He looks a lot less zoned this time. STUFF: I got a few jackets, gift certificates and this Merlin Donald book I'd been asking for. It's all over now; time for Nervous Anticipation to meet Stark Reality. KING PONG: The BBC points out Blinkenlights, a giant Pong game on the side of a building in Berlin. Neat. IT'S THE CONSPIRACY, STUPID: Great little post from Unqualified Offerings on who tends to believe in conspiracy theories and who tends to join the military (they're the same people.) IT'S ALL ABOUT THE GIVING, OR SOMETHING: Here's an utterly non-Christmas but completely worthwhile post by Natalija Radic over on Samizdata. It's all about --you know, um, S-E-X. Oh god, I can't even TYPE it. I must be a Western socialist. (Joke that only tends toward being funny after you read the post.) ONION COMET, ONION CUPID, ONION DONNER AND BLITZEN: Here's a little Christmas entry from The Onion: Parent Mad 6-Year-Old Didn't Like Peanuts Special ROSE HILL, VA—Bruce Pillard, 34, was angered Tuesday over his 6-year-old daughter's indifferent reaction to A Charlie Brown Christmas. "That show is a classic and an annual tradition!" an incensed Pillard told daughter Courtney after watching the program on CBS. "It is not 'boring,' and the voices do not sound 'weird.' What the hell is wrong with you?" Courtney was then sent to her room for the remainder of the evening. I love the Peanuts Christmas special myself and look forward to it every year, but I was wondering when I watched it this time how dated it could get. There's two really dated references, to bubble gum cards (is Topps still making that nasty gum?) and to aluminum Christmas trees (that I've never seen at the K-Mart.) Everything else is Beethoven and Bible quotes. MERRY CHRISTMAS: It's 12:30 Christmas morning and it must be a holiday, I'm getting sick again. Have a good Christmas, everyone. Monday, December 24, 2001
HOLY CRAP!: Somebody bought my ad off the top of my page. Is this the big media conspiracy? Rupert Murdoch? Gerald Levin? Ted Turner? To whose opinions do I now have to kowtow --maybe not right away, but subtly, slowly, until I am simply a mouthpiece for the party line? (That's quasi-paraphrasing Philip K. Dick at his paranoid best around the end of Radio Free Albemuth.) I guess this isn't an Insovent Republic anymore. My Mystery Benefactor has my thanks. UPDATE: Mystery Benefactor revealed to be Brian Linse of AintNoBadDude. Thanks, Brian! Now all I need is a Mystery HTML Benefactor to tell me where in my template I can go to change the color above here from blue to something else. Anybody? WHO'S HANDS ARE IN WHAT POCKETS: If you've ever wondered which media conglomerates own which companies, The Nation provides this flash thingie. I love having this kind of information --it makes for great conspiracy theories-- but dang if The Nation didn't use the tiniest font ever in coming up with this thing, I guess so they could flashify it. "People won't read this stuff on their own. They like bells and whistles. Hey --let's use FLASH! Then they'll read it! Then they'll KNOW!" The Mark Crispin Miller article that accompanies it is sure to boil the blood of some, I reckon. My beef with it is that he seems to confuse web services with web content, as if who owned as ISP is the same as who uses an ISP. Actually, he doesn't have much to say about the Internet at all. This paragraph is annoying me: Thus what we have today is not a problem wholly new in kind but rather the disastrous upshot of an evolutionary process whereby that old problem has become considerably larger--and that great quantitative change, with just a few huge players now co-directing all the nation's media, has brought about enormous qualitative changes. For one thing, the cartel's rise has made extremely rare the sort of marvelous exception that has always popped up, unexpectedly, to startle and revivify the culture--the genuine independents among record labels, radio stations, movie theaters, newspapers, book publishers and so on. Those that don't fail nowadays are so remarkable that they inspire not emulation but amazement. Otherwise, the monoculture, endlessly and noisily triumphant, offers, by and large, a lot of nothing, whether packaged as "the news" or "entertainment." This monoculture thing --I'm not seeing it. UPDATE: Here's a better who-owns-what from the Columbia Journalism Review. I spot one factual inaccuracy right away: The New England Sea Wolves are now the Toronto Phantoms, and owned by local Toronto businessmen and not Cablevision. NEW POSTREL: Virginia takes on SUVs, calls attention to advances in diaper design, and writes the latest chapter in Our Friends The Saudis. She introduces me, anyway, to Ginger Stampley's blog and to this post in particular. Read the whole thing; here's an excerpt: I will hate SUVs (and pickups, and vans, and other large light-truck class vehicles) as long as they are big, because their drivers are collectively rude and inconsiderate. Most SUV drivers treat their vehicles like they're little sports cars, and they're not. Their size means they require a greater clearance to be safe to change lanes and follow, and other drivers need consideration from them. Plus they think they can park the stupid things anywhere, as this guy did this weekend at the liquor store (I was looking for the Anchor Steam Chistmas beer) --just left his giant Cadillac whatever-it-is in a non-parking space in front of the store. So I had to figure out why the hell he was stopping and then pull around him, cursing him silently in the cold vacuum of my brother's car (a giant Olds Cutlass.) I am reminded of this old Camille Paglia Salon entry: My quarrel with the SUV is that 75 percent of East Coast owners don't know how the hell to drive it. I go white with fear a dozen times a week as some white, middle-class soccer mom in a trance rockets past in an SUV with one hand on the wheel and the other on a cell phone pressed to her ear: She can neither signal nor safely steer through turns, which the massive, high-held weight of the SUV makes especially tricky. Monica Lewinsky's embarrassing wipeout on a California highway last year shows that the problem is not the SUV; it's ditzy owners of both sexes who need primers on how to handle a quasi-military vehicle. I blame auto companies not for making and selling the SUV but for their failure to educate the public about the difficulties and dangers of driving an armored tank on the open road. I've always dug Paglia, by the way, but she gets additional props from me for introducing me to Reason and Virgina Postrel in the first place, who, in turn, turned me on to Glenn Reynolds and the whole bloggerverse. Links really are the lifelines of the Internet. JAPAN ATTACKED UPDATE: It looks more like it was a North Korean spy ship rather than Chinese smugglers, according to this article. Link from Drudge. Pyongyang must be pissed about being left out of the World Cup. Hey, the same thing happened to South Korea a few years back. TRACKING MY TEARS (AND EVERYTHING ELSE): Glenn Reynolds passes on this article about why national ID cards are not going to work. Such cards are only as good as the documents they're based on, like birth certificates, which can be easily forged and/or messed around with. That's why, ultimately, we're all going to need to have little tiny microchips implanted subcutaneously that can track all our movements and can helpfully be wired to explosives that only detonate when we leave the fifty states. It's our only option. (Sarcasm.) But, I mean, if the argument against national ID cards is that they won't work, how can you argue against national little tiny social-security-number-emitting microchips that probably will work? I can see the use of something like this if you have a latex allergy or something and need medical people to be kept aware of that. I guess the best argument against it is that yes, eventually, a ID microchip could be faked too, so why force it on everyone. And the firm in the article is mainly pushing for medical applications right now, though hopes to develop personal identification applications eventually, and some futurist is quoted talking about the fashion applications of the little chip. So I don't have to worry about living in a "bad science fiction film" (as the article puts it) yet. (Like it couldn't happen in a good science fiction film. That's as big a cliche as the old "Biff! Wam! Zoom! Comics aren't just for kids anymore" in every annual read-comics news story.) Hey, little chips "are already used to track cattle, house pets and salmon." Oh the HORRIBLE FUTURE --when we're no better than a pack of FLOPPING SALMON. And Charlton Heston can come from the past to rescue us: "Get your hands off me, you damn dirty SALMON. The proud human race, reduced to school of god-damned pink fish. MANIACS!" And Obi-Wan (played by Sir Alec Guiness, of course) can be all dismayed: "He's more salmon now than man." META BLOGGING: Dawson wonders (in passing) if there's a better word for "one who blogs" than "blogger." We could go with "blogman" but we'd have to change it to "blogperson" eventually (or "blogfighter" or "blog carrier.") Same with "bloggerman." I dunno, I like blogger, and I contend that the spread of blogging is directly related to the use of the word "blog" over the word "me-zine" --which does not roll off the keyboard. Nor can you make into a verb easily. ("Blog" is like "smurf" in this regard.) And what sounds more intriguing: Someone calls you up and you say "Hey, I'm working on my blog" or you say "Hey, I'm working on my me-zine." Me-zine sounds dorktacular, blog strangely fascinating and --dare I say?-- manly. Of course, once you explain that you're goofing around on the Internet you've immediately moved into the lonely, windswept plains of nerdistan. But at least you can hold it off for what, seven seconds? Maybe. GREAT CHRISTMAS POST: On Jeff Jarvis's Warlog: World War III. Explains the story of the man behind this phrase: "When Hitler attacked the Jews I was not a Jew, therefore I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church — and there was nobody left to be concerned." Information I did not know. Sunday, December 23, 2001
WHAT WOULD JESUS SAY: Joanne Jacobs points out this goofy piece by Stephanie Salter where Jesus talks to W. Joanne takes it apart far better than I could. I love this exchange: SALTER: Dear brother, you are right to want to stop evil. The tricky part for humans has always been, what is the best way to stop it? My four-letter answer is written, over and over, in the Bible, but it has been ignored by potentates, peons and sometimes popes for 2,000 years. Why? Because it contradicts the human instinct for vengeance. JACOBS: I'm good with crossword puzzles, but I had a hard time with the four-letter answer. "Peace" is too long. So is "cheek," as in "turn the other." "Pray" would work. But I think she means "love.'' (Hey, I'm Jewish. "Love'' doesn't appear all that often in our Bible; "smite'' gets more play, though it's five letters.) I'm noticing that Jesus is not claiming to be the son of Allah, called the "One Who Creates All" in the Salter creative-writing thing. I'm glad He clarified that. Anyway, if you read it, read it in the Bill Cosby voice of God ("Noah." "WHAT?") or the Holy Grail voice of God. Or maybe the South Park voice of Jesus. It's funnier that way. CORRECTION: Bruce R. writes in response to Matthew's response to the lead-made-bin Laden do it story below. Bruce says: Yer both wrong. Buddy Ebsen (the original Tin Woodsman) was hospitalized due to an adverse reaction to his high-aluminum content makeup. He didn't die, and it wasn't lead. I should point out that the Osama-wears-lead-paint story is still conjecture at this point; the guy in the article said it looked like he was wearing it. But it's an interesting angle nonetheless. SHOUT OUT 'CROSS THE POTOMAC: Hey, I made Blog Watch II this morning. Thanks. And I've noticed I'm using the same template as Will and Tony, as well as their esteemed Punditwatch. Same as Flit as well. I swear I'm not copying. It's more like back in high school when you'd show up wearing the same shirt as somebody else. I'm so EMBARRASSED. Kidding, kidding. I'd switch to orange and purple or something, and will, as soon as I learn HTML. THE MAN WHOSE SHOES WERE BOMBS: Ken Layne points out this picture, where "Richard Reid" is apparently signalling secret Popeye-brigades to eat spinach en masse and beat up whoever their particular Blutos happen to be. He looks a little better in this picture and this picture, though a little woozy. All the sedation, maybe? MSNBC is saying he's a Sri Lankan. The MSNBC news head (who is not the divine Jeannie Ohm) just said that new security protocols will require anyone who trips an airport metal detector to take their shoes off. Yeah, that'll work. I like Jeff Jarvis's suggestion about flying naked better. LITTLE OPINIONJOURNAL THING: American girls raised into Saudi women. I think this is what Snoopy meant by "poor blighters." This is an older story --I swear I've heard it before-- but it's kind of more important now, what with Saudi princesses running amok. In the "Taste" section, for some reason. A LITTLE CHRISTMAS MUSIC TRIVIA: Another holiday song is Run DMC's "Christmas in Hollis, Queens," and I just heard tonight on the UPenn station the song where the persistent sample in that song comes from, Clarence Carter's "Backdoor Santa." You can listen it to it here. Saturday, December 22, 2001
ANOTHER SHOT OUT: Thanks to dawson.com for mentioning this page. The secret Ann Coulter-David Horowitz love tapes are in the mail. EAST TIMOR UPDATE: Phillips (the gas company) is investing a bundle in a pipeline there. This has to be good news for the two-year old nation. Right? Okay, no more from the Yahoo/BBC Asia section. NEW ZEALAND ACCIDENTALLY ENTERS PROHIBITION: No, really. Due to a typo. Apparently Parliament was rushing through an anti-public drinking law and got an "and" and an "or" confused. The New Zealand Herald has more: The error [in the law] is in the clause defining a public place. It says: "A place is a designated public place if it is ... a) a public place in the district of a territorial authority and for which the territorial authority is responsible, or b) is identified in an order made by a territorial authority ... " The "or" should have read "and". More here. JAPAN ATTACKED, SORT OF: A "mystery ship" entered Japanese waters (down at the southern tip) and fired shots and was fired upon. This report says Korean characters were found on the life jacket of a body retrieved from the water, while this report says Chinese characters were on the boat itself. Curious. THE WAITRESSES: I am always reminded of the Waitresses this time of the year, since "Christmas Wrappings" is my favorite holiday song. Here's one site about them. Here's another. I had no idea they sang "I Know What Boys Like." My other favorites are "Snoopy and the Red Baron" by the Royal Guardsmen and that one by the Kinks --it don't know the title, it's the one that goes "father Christmas, give me some money." I always leave these two, or three, on the radio. THIS NINERS-EAGLES GAME: The refs have thrown flags and subsequently denied, after conferring, there was a penalty three times --picked up the flag, as they say. Either this is a good officiating crew or the NFL is encouraging officials to make sure they're making the right call after that Cleveland debacle. I'm guessing the former is more likely. I BLOG PRETTY SOME DAY: Matthew Edgar responds: Thought you might like a response to your question about the FDA and lead. Simply put, hell no! In more detail (if you want that) the FDA was not the first by any means organization to discover led was bad for you and could poison your brain. The FDA did nothing to restrict the use of lead, doctors and hospitals and makeup organizations have voluntarily gone away from lead use and have encouraged the reduction of use. In fact the Wizard of Oz contributed more to this than anything else because the original tin man died because of lead poisoning. (Crazy, huh?) The FDA hopped on the band wagon late and claimed that it was the champion of this cause. Matthew also counter-blogged a response on his site to the lead-made-Bin-Laden-crazy story below. Preview: The FDA does not get off easy. Hey, the first e-mail response to my blog. And I hardly begged at all. BOMB SCARE: I just saw on MSNBC that a guy on a plane from Paris to Miami was trying to light his shoes on fire (which happened to be made of C-4), bit a flight attendant, got gang-tackled and then strapped in a chair while the plane got diverted to Boston. I guess the new eternal vigilance system (as opposed to the old take-my-wallet-just-don't-hurt-me system) is working out. Meanwhile, the Blogistan Insolvent Press is reporting that Jeannie Ohm is a total fox. OLD PEKAR: Here's an old Harvey Pekar review of Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. His reaction to Pynchon reminds me of mine to Don DeLillo's White Noise, who also throws in a lot of useless trade names in his books (or he did in White Noise, at least. I have a copy of Underworld I haven't started yet.) Here's Pekar: The way Pynchon jams information into his books doesn't have much purpose, other than to attempt to dazzle readers. Joyce, on the other hand, uses his immense knowledge far more subtly in the process of creating symbols. Merely citing a bunch of product names like Stacey Adams shoes and Count Chocula, as Pynchon does, isn't a great feat, nor is his giving cutesy names to people and places like Benny Profane and the Bohdi Dharma Pizza Parlor. Anyone can just sit around for 10 years and read, like Pynchon; his reclusiveness has aided in building his reputation, and then write a novel filled with the factual information picked up. There's a Pekar article collection at the Austin Chronicle too. HOT DIGGETY: The Grizz beat the Lakers and the Spurs have the best record in the NBA. Not that I'm a Spurs fan, but I'm a Laker anti-fan. LATEST WHY THEY HATE US: It's the chemistry, stupid. Lead poisoning is apparently an ingrained part of Middle East culture: "Does lead poisoning explain Osama bin Laden's madness? Dr. Simanonok writes, "When I managed the blood lab at a northern California clinic for the poor, Pakistani children were often found to be contaminated with lead from the black makeup called 'kohl' that their mothers applied around their eyes. Middle Eastern mothers use it on their boys just as much as their girls. "Lead poisoning is especially bad for children because it can reduce their IQs dramatically and cause developmental problems. In both children and adults, problems associated with lead poisoning increase with blood levels, from behavioral and learning disorders to various physical ailments including high blood pressure and kidney problems, even at moderate levels. At very high levels, lead can cause convulsions, paralysis, coma or death. "Besides the fact that many Arab cultures have a history of prolonged lead exposure through kohl (with nothing like our EPA or FDA to limit any of it), lead poisoning should especially be considered a possible factor in recent events because many Arab fighters, including some of the Taliban, traditionally use kohl around their eyes. "Some pictures of Osama bin Laden certainly suggest he might be wearing kohl, and it is known that he suffers from kidney problems. Lead poisoning could explain bin Laden's kidney problems and could only contribute to the madness of suicide bombers under the influence of malignant religious views." I hope the doctor isn't conflating Pakistanis with Arabs, though. (I wonder if Matthew Edgar agrees this is a good reason for the FDA's existence.) Unisci provides this article on the further mental-incapacitation effects of good old Pb. POOP NEARING FAN: India and Pakistan get closer to war. Link from Drudge. The only possible upside is that at least Pakistan can't press for any Taliban in the new Afghan government. The downside --a big freaking war-- is of course huge. WHO'S NEXT: Apparently, the Philippines are. The Abu Sayyaf come off more like a gang here than anything else. EASY TARGETS: The latest sound beatings of Robert Fisk and Ted Rall. It's like watching a hit-the-jerk dunk tank at a carnival. And doesn't the dunkee usually benefit from that? They don't do it for free. Fisk is probably just doing his job as he understands it and serving his audience (while entertaining his detractors.) Rall, on the other hand, is a lot better known now than he was before the attacks and he might be playing up to his new audience, who might be nothing but his detractors, while still entertaining his old audience, Comic Relief and alt-weekly newspaper readers (the comics are in the back by the non-sexual massage ads.) He's at least an unpredictable guy, as that Ken Layne summary above illustrates. I mean, I've always liked his comics. I don't always agree with them but his and Tom Tomorrow's are the alt political strips I check out pretty regularly. And he might be right about Art Spiegelman. Or I could just be a knee-jerk Harvey Pekar fan. But if that original Rall attack on Spiegelman was as out-of-the-blue as some said it was, then there's always been a self-promoting streak there on Rall's part. Friday, December 21, 2001
THE JACKSONIAN TRADITION: Charles over at little green footballs reminds me of this article by Walter Russell Mead I heard about via Virgina Postrel back in April. It's all about competing strains in our foreign policy, named Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian, Jacksonian and Wilsonian. Mead is introducing the Jacksonian tradition in his article, after Andrew Jackson. If you haven't read it yet, please do so, it's really good. UPDATE: Lake Effect Dan points out this talk given by one of Mead's collaborators, Sherle Schwenninger. It seems like Schwenninger and Mead are notable for trying to move past isolationism versus interventionism in describing American foreign policy: Let me begin by introducing some broad notions of American foreign policy, deal with some of the catch notions which you've probably all come across in your study of the United States, but which I think may not be fully adequate in helping you understand the American foreign policy tradition and process and the evolution of American foreign policy, particularly during this period of time. It's often heard that the U.S. struggles between isolationism and internationalism, between withdrawal from the world and a very activist approach. It's also often posed that the United States has to choose between a moralist tradition that emphasizes values and human rights, and a more realist tradition that's concerned about hardcore interests and geopolitics. And often you'll hear, as you do in the current debate, particularly over the concern with the popularity of Pat Buchanan, about the risk of isolationism in American foreign policy today. Well again, I believe this sort of oversimplifies what has gone on historically, and I think it's important to understand that there's a richer tradition of American involvement in the world that sort of defies these two categories. And I would break it up by saying that there's three sort of cultural traditions that the United States draws from and that you see manifested in its foreign policy. One is called the Hamiltonian tradition, which is named after Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who represented sort of the big monied interests of the United States, the central banks, the sort of high politics of finance and geopolitics. This is the American equivalent of realism; it represented the tradition of the Anglo-American elite, the house of Morgan--Morgan was one of the largest Anglo-American banks, it had enormous influence on the early development of the United States; it was later represented by Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt. It's very much in the American great power tradition, that's concerned about the expansion of trade, but also building political alliances that underpin that trade. But that's not the only tradition, or even the dominant one. There's also a very strong what I call Jeffersonian tradition in American foreign policy, and here's perhaps where people draw the relationship to the moralistic streaks of American foreign policy, the concerns about human rights, about international law, the Wilsonian tradition, Wilson is often to some degree associated with [the Jeffersonian tradition], named after Thomas Jefferson, who though he wanted to avoid entangling alliances, was very much concerned that American values inform the larger international order. Now I think the Jeffersonian tradition is best represented by the American missionary spirit. There's a rich history, even during the period when the United States was considered the most "isolationist," you had American missionaries on all the continents, very prominent in China in the 19th century, but also in Africa and Latin America,the tradition of going and spreading the American way of life and also the American religion. Today's equivalents of this missionary spirit are the human rights groups and the sort of transnational civil society that is predominantly, there's a lot of Anglo-French involvement in the NGO's, human rights and humanitarian organizations, but you'll notice that many of them are American. And I think this was perhaps well illustrated in the first days after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of democracy in Central Europe, you had a lot of twenty-something Americans as well as a lot of foundations, both individuals and institutions poured into the region to spread the American ethos of democracy and market economy. The third tradition may be less noble, and I think this is where Pat Buchanan draws much of his resonance, and that is what I call the Jacksonian tradition, named after Andrew Jackson, who was president of the United States in the early 19th century. It's a populist, anti-internationalist, slightly paranoid, inward-looking, somewhat xenophobic, anti-immigrant tradition in the United States that has deep roots. It's often also aligned against the great banks. William Jennings Bryan, in the late 19th century, who ran for president in 1896 on the platform of doing away with the gold standard, which was a conspiracy by the Anglo-American banks to bankrupt American farmers and small businessmen, is part of that tradition. In a strange way, Jessie Jackson borrows some of those attributes, though he also borrows heavily from the Jeffersonian tradition. There was an element of paranoia in this American Jacksonian tradition that is also familiar to people from the Central European region, and I think was reinforced by a lot of refugees from the Second World War who brought a lot of anxieties about having lived in the shadow of German Nazism and Soviet Stalinism and reinforced that tradition, surprisingly. Read it in full. It's good background reading if you were intrigued by what James Woolsey was saying in that Jerusalem Post article. IN THIS HUNDREDTH YEAR OF UNCLE WALT: The Midwest Conservative Journal offers this comment: EUROPE LAND - Forget the European Union. According to this Robert Kagen column in the Washington Post, Europe ought to declare itself a historical theme park, make every European a park employee, charge admission and be done with it. The Euro could be the European Disney Dollar or something. Now I read the article in question and don't see that exact suggestion being made. I am, on the other hand, pretty dense. BUT that doesn't stop it from being a really good idea. At least that would keep them out of trouble and from conquering the world anymore. (See Instapundit's defense of Euro-bashing. But then Glenn shoots Euro-bashing in the foot by putting up pictures of the all-new all-different Swedish Bikini Team.) All we'd have to really watch out for is replacing all the citizens with robot doppelgangers and we'd be all set. Thank Michael Crichton for pointing that out. What else have we learned from Michael Crichton? Let's see-- --Cloning dinosaurs is bad. --Alien artifacts are bad. --Some, but not all, monkeys are bad. --Alien germs are bad. --Never work in an E.R. --Never buy Japanese products. --Sexual harassment cuts both ways like a knife. There you go. BLAME BOTH YOUR PARENTS: This article says a father's love/lack of love is as important to forming a child's personality as a mother's. It's a Reuters story, and doesn't go into what, if any, are the substantial differences between father's love versus mother's love (how the loss of one, for example, tends to affect a child's personality as opposed to the loss of the other) save for this paragraph: The team further found that in certain instances, the love of a father plays an even more important role than that of the mother. Many studies found a father's love to be the sole determining factor when it came to a child's problems with personality, conduct, delinquency or substance abuse. They said future research is needed to explain this observation. I'd love to hear more on this. I mean, we've all seen Psycho and about a zillion other movies, we all know --anecdotally at least-- about people who seemed to listen to one parent more than the other. Stuff like this may give us more of a handle on what's going on when there is a parental affection problem, now that we're all post-Freudians and have to, you know, actually do research on things like this and not mythologize endlessly. SO BEAR THAT IN MIND: When reading this article (link from Joanne Jacobs): NOT THAT IT MATTERS a whit to us here in the cool, gray city of love what Frank Lindh, daddy of the Taliban warrior from Marin, does, did or dreams of doing with other consenting adults, but shouldn't he come clean with us about all the facts in the odd odyssey of his son? Frank Lindh has been quoted time and again as saying it was his son John's reading of the "Autobiography of Malcolm X" when John was 16 in 1997 that turned his son's head and heart towards Islam. But something else then going on in the family's life may be have been just as pertinent. When Frank Lindh left his family in 1997, it was to move in with a male companion. Yep. ... The man with whom Lindh lived has since been described as "a family friend," but other family friends say the men lived as a gay couple. It would take a specialist in family issues to map the constellations of feelings and problems that would describe John Walker's path toward Islam in 1997, but sources close to the family say the father's turn of life from married man to modern gay man startled and flustered the 16-year-old. Given the pummeling that the Walkers and marvy Marin County have taken from the national press over their wayward son, you can't blame the old man for wanting to suppress reporting on his sexuality. ... Joanne finishes with: "Johnny Walker eventually joined the Taliban, which executed homosexuals by crushing under a stone wall or throwing them off a high building." (What was up with his goofy fake foreign accent in that tape, anyway? Weird.) This Johnny Walker thing may or may not be a subject for serious armchair psychoanalysis. Right now, the circumstantial evidence is making it a poser thick with irony, shall we say. Maybe the irony is so obvious I'd want to dismiss this twist a little too quickly, but ever since planes were driven into buildings I'll consider anything. CONFIRMING EVIDENCE: MSNBC is reporting a second translation of the Bin Laden tape confirms the use of the phrase “jalad alhayaa” (meaning, the article says, Saudi "religious police") in reference to the guy who smuggled Khaled Al Harbi into Afghanistan. Logically, the smuggled-by-Saudis was the more likely translation over the Iran-did-it one. What's more, "A member of the team that translated the tape for the Pentagon said the additional translation by ABC was consistent with parts not yet released by U.S. officials." So there you go. MAP OF SPRINGFIELD: Can be found here, courtesy of the DVDVR message board. It seems to be a topographical version of every Springfield location mentioned on The Simpsons and not anything you can really match up with the show, where they've always played fast and loose with where 742 Evergreen Terrace really was. The Simpsons producers have always tried to geek-proof their show by having minimal continuity and by featuring the straw geek of the Comic Shop Guy prominently. But geeks will keep on geekin', as this map shows. WHO SMUGGLED IN KHALID AL HARBI?: A Ken Layne reader points out differences between the Washington Post and ABC News versions of the Bin Laden tape. One says Iranian police smuggled the Saudi dissident Al Harbi (the legless guy, right?) in, the other says the Saudi police did. The former is against the usual wisdom about Iran, that it's a Shiite nation strongly suspicious of the hyper-puritanical Wahhabi Sunni Saudis, so it's just kind of weird. The latter makes more sense; the stories about a gulf between what the Saudis say to us and what they say to themselves are becoming pretty common. This would be one more log on the fire. Ken also suggests attacking Saudi Arabia, which makes more sense than attacking France. Though it's doubtless much less difficult. Ken Layne also has a link to his friend Tony Pierce's blog. This is a good blog. It's not a blog I could do, but it's a very good blog. Current stories: hockey fights; Tony Pierce's life; monkey drinks Coke. MORE ON CHOMSKY HATERS: Chomsky hate is like Duke-men's-basketball hate. It's a hatred tinged with respect for the quality work the object of hate actually has accomplished, which is totally outweighed by the additional hatred for said hate-object's obnoxious friggin' fans. (Certain parties excluded.) This is similar to Denver Broncos hatred (more pleasurable when the Broncos were good, though) and hatred of anybody excessively linked-to on zmag. It's a different animal, by the way, from LA Lakers/Dallas Cowboys hatred, whose fans are too apathetic to really hate. SPEAKING OF ON-LINE FIGHTS: Perry de Havilland noted recently that Christopher Hitchens' attacks on Noam Chomsky were lots worse than the recent Horowitz/Radosh one. Mostly because Hitchens was supposed to be on Chomsky's "team," but Hitch made Noam look like an ass in their on-line debate (Chomsky basically resorted to wishing Hitchens' points away. It was a slaughter.) Not only that, but the fact that this was an intrasquad scuffle sort of made Chomsky look even weaker, which may explain his status as a favorite blog-target. Hitchens really opened the floodgates for Chomsky-haters, I think, just by rendering him, in essence, speechless. Not that there's anything wrong with Chomsky loathing. My favorite bit: Matt Welch's Happy Birthday, Gnome! --if only for the title. GOLDBERG VS. LIBERTARIANS: Here's Nick Gillespie's closing argument to the court of public opinion and final Goldberg-rejoinder. MURDOCH IN CHINA: Apparently James Murdoch's Falun Gong anti-pimping has impressed the cadres sufficiently, since Rupert Murdoch and Star have been granted a license to broadcast to a wealthy portion of China. Do you think they do the same self styled purveryor of honest journalism/actual serving a previously-underserved conservative audience schtick they do here? Cause it seems to me the Chinese version would have to me more liberal than what they have now and not less, or else it's just one more version of what they already have. Right? On Fox News in particular, I guess I'm of the school that they're just finding an audience turned off by Jennings-like nth-degree impartiality. I just hate the fact that a geriatric Australian knows the American tv-watching audience better than the native media barons. Or maybe I'm just bitter about Wendi Deng. These two are married? I type the sound of gritting teeth. RED SOX SOLD: To a group that includes former Marlin-owner John Henry, producer Tom Werner and the New York Times. This was Bill Simmons' nightmare scenario: We're vehemently against [the Werner and John Henry] group, for a variety of reasons: 1. Werner was the principal owner of the San Diego Padres in the early/mid-'90s, nearly driving them into the ground because of the mammoth ownership group he assembled (which didn't have nearly enough working capital to operate a successful baseball team). In 1993, the Pads jettisoned many of their top players, including Fred McGriff and Garry Sheffield, and some season-ticket holders actually sued the team. Even Chris Farley ran his company better during the first hour of "Tommy Boy." 2. John Henry owned the Marlins until about five minutes ago, when Team Selig expedited his sale of the team so he could be involved with Werner's group. That led everyone here to wonder if the proverbial "fix" was in (that Selig and Company were aboard and Team Werner's eventual approval was a done deal). We love coming up with conspiracy theories here in Boston. 3. I mean ... John Henry? Would you want someone co-owning your team named "John Henry"? Is that a stage name? 4. One of the limited partners in this group? The New York Times Co., which owns the Boston Globe. Here's what Beth Healy wrote in a feature about the Henry group for yesterday's Globe: "The Times Co. has stressed that it is primarily interested in the team's controlling stake in the New England Sports Network, which is included in the sale, and has said it would not interfere with coverage of the Red Sox." And if you pull this leg, it plays "Jingle Bells." 5. Duquette is reportedly tight with the Werner group. 'Nuff said. 6. According to some reports, Team Werner plans on renovating Fenway Park, rather than building a new stadium. In all honesty, I can't even discuss this premise rationally; the only way I would attend a baseball game at Renovated Fenway is if they staged "Lob Plastic Bags of Your Own Urine At the New Owners" Night. 7. Werner made his money as a TV producer, so he gives off that "Mr. Hollywood who wants to own the Red Sox to impress his buddies" vibe. Yuk. If that's not bad enough, Werner is engaged to Katie Couric, which could potentially make Katie the First Lady of the Boston Red Sox. I will now light myself on fire. END QUOTE. Check out his latest: the Sports Guy's DVD picks. LARGE SQUID BAFFLES, AMUSES SCIENTISTS: The article somehow lives up to that great headline. Check out the picture. Is the abyss staring back at us? (My favorite James Cameron movie, by the way. "SHE HAS A STRONG HEART! SHE WANTS TO LIVE!") By the way, getting that Abyss link brought up four pop-ups on the IMDB. I guess their business model involves annoying people into joining the pay version. FUNNIEST JOKE FOUND: Actually the funniest joke that these guys found when they studied humor scientifically, according to Nature. The more important point is that the study found one of those male-female division in humor-apprehension: men prefer put-downs (like your momma jokes, I guess), women prefer puns. I thought that was the more important point of the article, anyway, since this is the current funniest joke in the world: Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are going camping. They pitch their tent under the stars and go to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night Holmes wakes Watson up. "Watson, look up at the stars, and tell me what you deduce." Watson says, "I see millions of stars and even if a few of those have planets, it's quite likely there are some planets like Earth, and if there are a few planets like Earth out there, there might also be life." Holmes replied: "Watson, you idiot, somebody stole our tent!" It's pretty good but I don't think this beats the great German pre-war joke. "My dog's got no nose." "How's it smell?" "Awful." HA HA HA HA oh man, it's still effective sixty years later. SHOUT OUT: To Andrea See for putting my big fat newbie URL on her page. Hey, she's a lefty too. AND a non-Mensa member. Good thing I got them disorder-tendencies to compensate for my lack of I.Q. At least I'll be entertained by the persistent cave paintings on the interior of my skull. READ KEN LAYNE'S POSTS: Read them here, actually. Then read them in Crow T. Robot's voice. It's great. And "jackhole" --I have no idea if he invented it or not, but I swear it's the funniest insult ever. THERE'S TWO ACTUALLY: This one's more topical and less technology-oriented. And it's got a link to a conspiracy theory I haven't seen elsewhere about insider trading on United Airlines stock before the attacks. Thursday, December 20, 2001
THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR HAS A BLOG: In the science section, and it's pretty good. If sparsely updated. Top stores: XP has big gaping security flaw; an obituary for adcritic.com; Europeans won't pay to download info on their cell phones. FLIT ON SULLIVAN ON HOROWITZ ON CHOMSKY: Flit's take on David Horowitz's expose of Noam Chomsky --and Andrew Sullivan's one-sentence thumbs-up on it on his site-- is very worthwhile. I started scanning through that article (meaning stopped reading it closely) once it got to the Nicaragua part. Flit scores it at 1-2-2 for Horowitz; in hockey terms that's 4 points --certainly better than two or three, but not the ten points an all-out winning streak would have been. Got the link to Flit off Samizdata, by the way. QUESTIONS OF THE HOUR: From Andrea See's blog: "Questions: do you save? Do you have a savings plan? Does a bank (or something similar) take care of it?" ANSWERS: No, no, and no. I have been plan-free for years and reading this commencement address I stumbled across while researching an economics paper made me think I really need to get one. Ten percent of my income I'm supposed to save? I really need to get cracking. "Not that I'm really expecting answers from anyone (rather personal subject, this), but I was just thinking about it. I was brought up fairly privileged, and am a bit of a spendthrift. Trying to plan my life (for the next six months, anyway) has brought that into sharp focus: I can't faff around, I need savings to live reasonably comfortably." Being a total spendthrift brought up semi-privileged myself I can't help but agree. My current dumb plan is to get a decent income by acquring better job skills and hence greater marketability via further schooling. It'll take a while, but I'm kind of okay in science and I figure it's about time I put my brain to good use. And --wow-- Andrea can plan six months ahead --something I can only dream of. Two weeks is about my limit right now. "This whole 'adult-responsibility' thing is a bit of a nose-wrinkler." TOTAL nose-wrinkler. Maybe self-discipline is the only good answer, even if it's the least fun. I dunno. HERNANDO DE SOTO QUOTE OF THE DAY: "In spite of their obvious poverty, even those who live under the most grossly unequal regimes possess far more than anybody has ever understood. These possessions, however, are not represented in such a way as to produce additional value. When you step out the door of the Nile Hilton, what you are leaving behind is not the high-technology world of fax machines, ice makers, television, and antibiotics. The people of Cairo have access to all those things. What you are really leaving behind is the world of legally enforceable transactions on property rights. In Cairo and similar cities, mortgages and accountable addresses are unavailable even to people who would probably strike you as quite rich." Check out more of his stuff off the publications page of his thinktank, the Institute for Liberty and Democracy. His particular take on 9-11 was a take I think only he could make, especially the stuff about terrorist politicians. I really need to read his book. MY FAVORITE NUTTY NBA OWNER: Known Shaq-baiter and computer billionaire Mark Cuban is apparently subjecting NBA officiating to rigorous statistical analysis. I would love to hear the results of this, as NBA refs are my least favorite species of referee, what with their blatant superstar-favoring that made me really hate Michael Jordan back in the day. It also puts a number on money lost by Cuban to NBA fines last year: a half a million. Crikey. NEW JERSEY NETS LEAVING, MAYBE: Thinking of going back to New York, in fact, where the franchise started back in the ABA. Here I thought that new stadium in Newark was a done deal. Not that you can really blame them, attendance for the Nets has usually been fairly stinky --and for the Devils too, who actually have been good for a while (except this year) so we can't use the Nets-stink argument to explain the fact that nobody shows up. It's just the apathy, I guess, of the citizens of my home state. Or maybe people will pay to see a good Nets team (basketball being more popular than hockey) and a good Nets team is what we now have, thanks to the Jason Kidd trade. We'll just have to sit everybody down and explain to them that --brace yourself-- the Nets are good this year and see what happens. So maybe that's why YankeesNets is pressing the issue, as opposed to when the Nets stunk: now they maybe can blackmail a new building out of the state. But I can't imagine any New Jersey governor standing up for one of our franchises, though I would've loved to see what Schundler would have done. ANOTHER WASHINGTON MONTHLY ARTICLE: This one's about the possible return of baseball to the D.C. area. I wonder if they'll go with Senators again for the nickname (which is fine with me) or maybe that's too offensive these days for the District populace, like the Bullets becoming the Wizards. I mean, holy crap: "Bullets" is bad but "Redskins" is acceptable? Perhaps the new MLB franchise will follow the NBA team into whimsical mysticism and be the Washington Trolls. Or Elves. Or Wraiths. Maybe not. NAVY WEAPONS WORK, OTHER SERVICES' ARE RATHER YUGO-LIKE: The Navy altered it's testing procedures a while back and so their airplanes actually work, according to this piece mentioned on Slate. Navy planes have flown 1500 missions in Afghanistan, while the B-2 (an Air Force plane) has flown six, and there's Ospreys sitting idle here in the States due to their persistent crashing problem. And I didn't know those Predators have been crashing, or that B-2s fall apart in the rain, or --most importantly-- there are no bathrooms in the B-2. It's like that part in "The Right Stuff" where the almost-astronauts have to argue the German scientist to put a window on the capsule. Apparently the Navy's new methods are the same as what private industry's been using for years --which may explain a lot. CHARLOTTE CHURCH: If --like me-- you had heard that Charlotte Church (everyone's favorite teenage classical music star) had said something contra common sense about the attacks, and you weren't quite sure what, here's something about it. I mean, she's fifteen, right? She mostly sounds like it, displaying the lack of empathy and all-around ignorance thought common to the proto-adult. But her Paul McCartney-bashing appeals to my hideous sense of generational envy, and I hope she nurtures it into her adult years. HANDEDNESS: Apparently chimps have a preference for one hand or the other, according to this item from Discover. Actually all primates do, and the proportions vary by species (lemurs are mostly lefties, humans are mostly righties). But here's the kicker: "Among humans, lefties are more likely than righties to suffer from dyslexia, schizophrenia, stuttering, and other disorders." This explains....a little too much for my tastes..... LAST HUNDRED YEARS IN AMERICAN HISTORY EXPLAINED: In this article Ralph Peters tears into the often great distance between American ideals and American foreign policy, and highlights the Spanish-American War as the beginning of a century of decidedly hypocritical actions on the part of the U.S. (propping up thugs, valuing the devil we know way too much, putting business interests that benefit a tiny percentage of the American public first.) From Parameters, the U.S. Army Way College's own magazine. Glenn Reynolds --who has hipped me to so much different stuff in the past three months-- turned me on to this as well. AWRIGHT IT WORKS: Cool. Now I can start blogging. I was reading Jay Zibler's admission that he finally "gets" the ending of 2001 over at Mind Over What Matters. Back in school the theory offered to me was that Kubrick had this real belief in the circularity of history and that the evolution from gorilla to spaceman to giant baby was just him saying that the wheel had come full circle and that the net progress of humankind ended up as zero. That's the first time giant baby made any kind of sense to me, anyway. TEST COOLIDGE: Seeing if my theory about posting-to-save-changes is right. This is probably mentioned really explicitly somewhere, but darned if televsion hasn't ruined my attention span. Okay.... COOLIDGE: Apparently you have to post something to get your template change to show up. Lemme mess around here a minute.... HTML: My ignorance is now coming around to bite me on the ass, because I can't figure out how to add links on the side of the page. That's half the fun of doing this, checking out the stuff other people have come across. Tarnation.... STILL TESTING: Hey, it does work. And I still don't know dink about html. That's cool, though my ignorance isn't doing anything for my resume. And the links open in the same window, which I vastly prefer over the open-in-new-window thing. Neat. |
