| Sunday, May 29, 2005 |
23:53 - First they came for the knives
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4581871.stm
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You know, it used to be that you could make a pretty good case against the arbitrary regulation of privately owned firearms by explaining that if the purpose of gun control is to prevent violent crime, criminals denied guns (legally acquired ones, anyway) could just commit their murders with knives instead. (Make knives illegal, and they'll hit you with cars or pour Drano on you instead. And so it goes.)
It was almost a joke, in fact; rattle off the logic, and even a defender of gun control would usually have to concede the point (as it were) and take up a different tactic. Who, after all, would make knives illegal? Guns may have limited applicability to everyday life, but people need knives. How else are you supposed to cut up your turkeys and roasts?
Well, it seems the British may have to come up with an answer to that absurd rhetorical question:
A&E doctors are calling for a ban on long pointed kitchen knives to reduce deaths from stabbing.
A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase - and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.
They argued many assaults are committed impulsively, prompted by alcohol and drugs, and a kitchen knife often makes an all too available weapon.
The research is published in the British Medical Journal.
The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all.
They consulted 10 top chefs from around the UK, and found such knives have little practical value in the kitchen.
None of the chefs felt such knives were essential, since the point of a short blade was just as useful when a sharp end was needed.
And a short blade is just as useful for killing someone, if you're determined to do it. So's a hammer. So's bleach. What'll be next on the hit parade?
By all means, don't be finding ways to stop people wanting to kill each other; instead, just pointlessly reduce obvious methods for them to kill each other. Don't punish the bully on the playground, just cancel recess.
And by all means: consult chefs to determine whether people have a need to be allowed to own such things as kitchen knives. Come on, now: what else should the infant wards of the state that you call "citizens" be protected from being allowed to own?
Will everyday people in England actually put up with this ruling being made upon their lives, or will they take a stand? Can this finally be the place where people stop thinking of "freedom" only in the context of "allowing people to be gay and do drugs", and start thinking of it in terms of liberty from an oppressive police state dictating the terms by which citizens can live?
I'm told by a friend who grew up in Florida (and in the company of people who told these stories from first-hand experience) that in Castro's Cuba, every kitchen has a long carving knife—chained to the counter. It's regularly inspected by the secret police to make sure you haven't tampered with this deadly weapon in "your" house. If you work in the cane fields, you're issued your machete when you arrive to work, and must turn it back in at the end of the day. In this way murders are kept at bay, for the small price of having stormtroopers burst in every few weeks to frisk you for illicit implements of destruction. (But of course you have free health care and 100% literacy.)
Is that where you want England to go, West Middlesex University Hospital?
Via CapLion, who's planning a lucrative career as a mugger in Britain, where his victims will be defenseless and he'll be protected by law from being assaulted by them in the course of his work.
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| Thursday, May 26, 2005 |
22:40 - Every emotion you have ever had, to the Dark Side leads
http://www.livejournal.com/users/mistful/68456.html
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Via John. Best Star Wars: Episode III review evar.
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12:24 - Guy must have flunked Civics
http://www.conyersblog.us/archives/00000103.htm
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I wonder what "Congrefs shall make no law refpecting an establishment of Religion" means to Rep. Conyers.
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| Wednesday, May 25, 2005 |
00:38 - Wait, he can't do that
http://www.acf.org/white_house.htm
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Having been dolefully lectured on the subject by everyone from park rangers to Bill Bryson, it's hard not to be excited to see this:
The tree planted Friday came from a research farm in Virginia, where blight resistance was bred into the native chestnut with the help of the Chinese chestnut.
The American chestnut, prized for its timber and its crop of glossy dark nuts, once dominated Eastern forests from Maine to Georgia. The graceful trees were virtually wiped out by blight starting at the turn of the 20th century.
That loss, Case said, "was the greatest environmental disaster in the Western Hemisphere since the Ice Age."
Now, after years of breeding, cloning and crossbreeding, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is ready to reintroduce disease-resistant chestnuts to Eastern forests next year.
Case says the chestnut is also poised for a comeback that could reclaim the scarred face of closed coal mines. It can also absorb carbons released into the air by fuel-fired plants in the Midwest, he said.
"This is a major accomplishment," Case said. "(The president) is to be given a round of applause — that this is a help to the environment. There's no question about it."
Be sure to check out the rest of the site for further background information. I hadn't realized these efforts even existed—I'd been led to believe that the tree was extinct, and with it bucolic daguerrotypes of mustachioed men and spring-bustled women spreading a picnic under gigantic arching chestnut branches in parks, pennyfarthing bicycles leaned against the massive trunks. But who knew—there's hope after all.
Maybe the Greens will take to the streets to protest this obvious abuse of the power of genetic engineering or something, or perhaps they'll just cut down the White House sapling. Anything would be better than for this to succeed.
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23:13 - Babykillers On Parade
http://unoriginal.co.uk/footage39_1.html
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George Galloway ought to be ashamed that if he'd had his way, this video would not exist.
Via JMH.
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22:38 - Reductio ad Kansas
http://www.reason.com/rb/rb052505.shtml
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I've noticed that the bar for arguing against intelligent-design-in-schools types is pretty low. People (especially those snide enough to call their magazine Reason) don't seem to feel there's really much argument to be made. People reading their articles, naturally, don't demand much rigor in reinforcing what they already believe, so why should the authors bother? Understandable.
Yet still, this (via InstaPundit) bugs me:
The anti-evolutionists affect not to know who or what the "intelligent designer" of their theory might be. He, she, it, or they could be little green men or purple space squid or a race of intelligent supercomputers—or maybe, just maybe, an omnipotent God. Who knows? We're all just innocently asking "scientific" questions here.
But away from the glare of media attention, this pose of scientific objectivity cracks. "ID has theological implications. ID is not strictly Christian, but it is theistic," admitted board member Martin. The intelligent design proponents in Kansas ask: Why not let children in public schools hear arguments for intelligent design in biology classes? Schools could "teach the controversy."
Biologists retort by asking, "So it's OK then for high schools to teach astrology, phrenology, mesmerism, tarot card reading, crystal healing, astral projection and water witching, too?"
It bugs me because there's a pretty obvious counter-retort to be made. It goes: Yes, sure, but only to the extent that they're relevant to a basic science course in elementary school—which is to say, not at all. No more than you'd teach oncology, metallurgy, human sexuality, DNA analysis, or juggling to sixth-grade science students.
In other words, there's a different test to be applied here. You only teach the stuff that's relevant to basic science—and basic science includes, fundamentally, discussion of the origins of life on Earth. Ancillary disciplines—whether quackery or established practice—just aren't on the radar of kids at grade-school age, nor should they be.
And then, when the time comes to study whether phrenology or crystal healing have any scientific merit, you can establish in an afternoon's work that they don't. And the students might be better educated by the exercise, mightn't they?
When I was a high school freshman, my World Cultures & History (once known as "Geography") teacher, an altogether phenomenal figure with whom I later visited Russia as part of a student tour group, dispensed to his class the wisdom that there are not two, not three, but five human sexes. Male, female, homosexual, transgendered, and neuter. (I think—it's been a while.) He required us all to transcribe this "theory" into our notes and recite the details on demand in the week's topical quizzes. This caused something of a stir, and parents wrote a few confused—not to say alarmed—letters to the local paper about it, wondering what else their kids were being taught by this guy or the rest of the faculty at this fine upstanding school. It's peachy, you see, for the public high school to teach evolutionary theory without a breath expended to explain the limitations on said theory or even the fact that it merely is a theory (albeit one that seems to mostly work); but one might think that if a teacher is going to fill his students' ears with pet hypotheses about human sexuality, it might help if he went with one that anybody else on the planet agreed with. But, y'know, hey, that's just a suggestion.
But there's an argument to be had, isn't there? Teachers get to say whatever they like, as long as it doesn't involve "theism" or the dreaded "God". If they can get fired for that sort of thing, why not for explaining that the Earth's gravity is caused by centrifugal force (as this guy also laughably maintained)? And if the goal is to get kids to think in new ways about things they might already think they understand, well, why be so threatened by the idea that whatever religious dogma it obliquely validates, scientific reasoning cannot disprove or even fully describe a system in which logic is not a fundamental design constraint?
The author gets this bit right:
What they don't understand, however, is that religious belief and evolution are compatible.
In 1996 no less a religious authority than Pope John Paul II declared, "New knowledge has led to the recognition in the theory of evolution of more than a hypothesis."
He could have gone on to point out some of the little-known details of the Galileo story, which are much in the same vein. (Not that you'd ever hear a teacher with any self-preservation instinct say so.) But he doesn't.
He also doesn't seem too concerned with explaining how it's hypocritical or indicative of imminent theocratic takeover for someone to say in public that intelligent-design theory is totally agnostic as to the specific nature of said design, but to admit in private that "ID has theological implications. ID is not strictly Christian, but it is theistic". WooOOOoo. Spooky. At least for Reason readers it is, apparently. This guy seems a bit too pleased with himself for discovering that intelligent-design advocates in America tend to be Christians. Shocka! Gee, I thought they were all pure-hearted solipsistic atheists who wanted kids to start from I think therefore I am and deduce the existence of rice pudding and income tax by twelfth-grade graduation.
What he's so horrified by is simple acceptance of reality. When you've got someone fighting for the right to teach that science by its very nature cannot disprove that which it cannot observe, and therefore science cannot disprove the existence of supernatural elements in the Universe, the fact of the matter is that in Kansas, the way that will manifest is with "theistic" vocabulary—even, horror of horrors, Christian vocabulary. If it were in a different state, such as Buddhasota or Jedifornia, perhaps that would be different.
Federalists ought to enjoy seeing this happening, it seems to me. But however each state handles it, its upshot would be that kids wouldn't have to go to school and be told by their teachers that their parents are fools, and then go home and be told by their parents that their teachers are lying to them. And that seems like a rather positive thing for the minds of kids looking for trustable authority figures—more so that ensuring that any hair-splitting whisper of the "theistic" is blockaded from a reluctantly adopted acknowledgement of the place an intelligent-design hypothesis might play in an understanding of how the Universe works.
Who knows? Kids might even learn the proper scientific definition of the word "theory", and be properly equipped to identify one when they see it later in life—instead of the current popular definition, which is "Scripture that you learn in school instead of church".
UPDATE: Standard disclaimer: I am not now, nor have I ever been, a creationist. Just so's we're clear.
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| Monday, May 23, 2005 |
15:01 - Whisper numbers
http://www.chicagoboyz.net/archives/003157.html#more
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There's an old, old Dilbert strip—from the days before the Pointy-Haired Boss, even—where Scott Adams illustrates how numbers in business can be manufactured from thin air. It goes like this:
RANDOM STOCKBOY: I have no idea; it could be anything from one to a million.
MIDDLE MANAGER: They say it could be a million.
EXECUTIVE: Experts say one million.
That's what it's felt like in recent months watching the number of Iraqi dead climb and climb in the media—first latching onto the "100,000" Lancet figure and gnawing on it to this day in prime time, over and over, long after it was debunked; then upping it higher and higher to 250,000 or even 300,000, with seemingly no criteria for verification beyond "It's bigger than the last number, so it must be right."
So here's Shannon Love (via JMH) on the idea of the "number gut", something the people repeating these numbers don't appear to possess:
Why couldn't 250,000 be dead from violence? Well, the first clue is that the total population of Iraq is around 25 million, so 250,000 dead represents 1% of the entire population. That means if LIMS is accurate then 1 in every 100 Iraqis were killed in the war up to Sept 2004. So what? After all, it's a war and lots of people die in wars right? Well, not as many as most people think.
For example, during WWII the Japanese mainland suffered the most extensive aerial bombardment in history. Every major urban area save one (Kyoto) was burned to the ground. On march 10th, 1945 the great Tokyo fire raid burned down a third of the city and killed 100,000 people. Two major cities were nuked. Japan at the time had a population of 78 million, so 1% of the population would have been around 780,000. Now, what is your guess as to the number of Japanese killed on the Japanese mainland?
Did you guess around 500,000? Under 1%? Well, that is in fact the number (note: that's only dead, not dead-and-wounded).
So, with the Falluja cluster included, LIMS asks us to believe that Iraq has suffered a worse proportional aerial bombardment than did Japan during WWII. Common sense compels us to ask: does Iraq look like it suffered such a fate? Where are the mass graves? Where are the leveled cities? Where are the hundreds of thousands of walking wounded? Where are the millions of refugees that such intense fighting must have inevitably produced?
I get the feeling that there's nothing more to these numbers people are tossing around than to the "whisper numbers" that ruled the stock markets during the dot-com boom; we lived in terror that someone named ShadowKnight718 would post a message on some discussion forum somewhere that said "17 cents per share profit" or "2 cents per share loss"—from an anonymous IP and with no supporting research or anything—and traders would immediately set expectations accordingly. Suppose a company was about to announce a 15-cent-per-share profit, a number that in a vacuum would indicate fabulous breakout results? Well, someone on some chat board said 17 cents, so get ready to tank. Tough beans.
All you have to do is make up some number that one-ups the last one they said on the news, whether it's true or not, and it instantly attains the mantle of truth. It's almost as though they have an agenda to promote.
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11:50 - Thanks but no thanks
http://mediamatters.org/items/200505180008
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You know, this is just something we don't need:
From the May 17 broadcast of The Glenn Beck Program:
BECK: Hang on, let me just tell you what I'm thinking. I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out -- is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus -- band -- Do, and I've lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, "Yeah, I'd kill Michael Moore," and then I'd see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I'd realize, "Oh, you wouldn't kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn't choke him to death." And you know, well, I'm not sure.
I don't listen to talk radio, so I have no idea how civil or uncivil it routinely is... but this kind of thing is just ridiculous. It plays into every negative stereotype people have about "right-wing talk radio" and it exonerates Michael Moore in people's minds, turning him back into a legitimate victim instead of a swamp-draining, mansion-building Sad Clown in a hobo costume who did more damage to the Democratic Party's credibility than he ever did to Bush.
You're not helping, Glenn Beck.
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09:26 - Be still my heart
http://www.actionforum.com/forum/index.html?forum_id=266
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MoveOn.org has a new discussion forum, with a rating system so people can vote on ideas that are intended to shape the group's agenda.
Best of all, if you're a "citizen of the world", as some of the particiapants at home and abroad label themselves, you can post happy ideas about aiding the Iraqi insurgency that get vehement agreement.
Now that's "democracy in action".
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| Thursday, May 19, 2005 |
22:14 - Okay, I talked me into it
http://www.deadmonkeycomics.com/gallery/album10/email_final
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I wasn't going to link to this, but I really would be remiss if I didn't. So: The Email Cartoon, which is probably Not Safe For Work, but it's worth it just like this was.
Shun.
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| Wednesday, May 18, 2005 |
18:19 - IT'S A TRAP
http://darthside.blogspot.com/
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Darth Vader has posted for the last time, it seems. Is that well-timed or what?
I tell ya, if it weren't for the Darth Side, I'd have no angle whatsoever to find the characters in the prequels interesting enough to care about. This does the job nicely, and it ends marvelously. Dude knows what he's doing.
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13:26 - From the ashes a fire shall be woken
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Lileks got me Googling, and I found this site which seems to be a snarky and satiric—though full of excellent real information—blog on architecture in New York.
And it's covering today's Donald Trump unveiling of his new WTC proposal, which Curbed had described (sight unseen) as "tall, leggy, and voluptuous".
If I'm not terribly mistaken, isn't that the Gardner/Belton design? You know, the one that not only proposes a practical use of the site, features a gorgeous set of supporting buildings and some amazingly appropriate memorials, restores the original skyline in a confident and unapologetic manner, and actually looks good?
If so, hot diggity damn. If it's got Trump behind it now, it stands a real chance.
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11:04 - Behold the crushing of dissent
http://vodkapundit.com/archives/007835.php
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Stephen Green quoting Scott McClellan being grilled by the press over the Newsweek scandal. (That's right, the press has the sente in this game. Still.)
Q With respect, who made you the editor of Newsweek? Do you think it's appropriate for you, at that podium, speaking with the authority of the President of the United States, to tell an American magazine what they should print?
MR. McCLELLAN: I'm not telling them. I'm saying that we would encourage them to help --
Q You're pressuring them.
MR. McCLELLAN: No, I'm saying that we would encourage them --
Q It's not pressure?
MR. McCLELLAN: Look, this report caused serious damage to the image of the United States abroad. And Newsweek has said that they got it wrong. I think Newsweek recognizes the responsibility they have. We appreciate the step that they took by retracting the story. Now we would encourage them to move forward and do all that they can to help repair the damage that has been done by this report. And that's all I'm saying. But, no, you're absolutely right, it's not my position to get into telling people what they can and cannot report....
Q Are you asking them to write a story about how great the American military is; is that what you're saying here?
Noooooooo, I'm just asking them not to LIE about how BAD it is.
Why can't we have a press secretary as snide and sharp-tongued and arrogant and downright rude as the people he has to deal with every day?
For crying out loud, even when the scandal is against the administration's opponents, the administration ends up being the one against the wall.
And people call this a Nazi state.
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| Sunday, May 15, 2005 |
23:49 - Blood on the pages
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1116217489.shtml
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Dean is right: Newsweek is squarely to blame for all the deaths and injuries and intimidations that have resulted and have yet to result from their eager repeating of an anonymous report of Guantanamo Bay guards flushing the Koran down the toilet.
The only thing Dan Rather hurt in his fake-news scandal was George Bush's reputation, which is about like saying he's responsible for harming the popularity of 8-track players. But Newsweek has gotten people killed.
Something they would have known if they'd spent more time reading LGF instead of thinking up new ways to belittle religious people or misinterpret technology news is that a whole lot of the Islamic world already believes that Americans are responsible for nonstop crimes against Muslims that are just getting hushed up by the Zionist media; this is simply a long-awaited and long-expected "documented" case of it. For Newsweek to tell the real story now—that the Koran-flushing incident in question was a prank by an inmate trying to clog up the toilet with the only flushable thing in his cell—would be an exercise in futility and more fuel on the fire, whereas if they'd told it that way originally it would only have gone unnoticed. (And they'd have sold less copies, probably, so there you go.) And just as the Egyptian experts examining that EgyptAir crash a few years back where the black box showed the pilot muttering prayers just before sending the plane into a deliberate dive into the ocean insisted that the pilot would never commit suicide because Muslims just don't do that, there will be nothing Newsweek can say or do to make the people who believe their original story was accurate change their minds. They know the truth; any attempt to deny it now would just be a cover-up, and further proof of the Americans' nefarious complicity. Especially if they had the audacity to try to say that Muslims—Muslims—were the ones desecrating the Koran. It'd just make them madder.
If Newsweek had any sense of the stakes involved in the global PR campaign that is the War on Terror, they'd be steering clear of these matters where they're clearly not qualified to treat sensitive news with the delicacy it deserves and requires, and spending their writers' precious time instead on more lavish cover stories about how Y chromosomes and bottled water cause cancer.
I sure am glad I let my subscription lapse a few months ago.
UPDATE: Well, yes, perhaps the bigger problem—globally speaking—is that we have to be this careful about stuff like this.
It's the 21st century, and we did away with anti-flag-burning laws. Your turn.
UPDATE: So according to Glenn and one of Austin Bay's on-the-scene correspondents, Newsweek has managed to turn what has been by all accounts a spectacular political success in Afghanistan over the past three years into "a total disaster"?
I'm starting to want to see some hangings for treason here. I wonder if we can get Newsweek to foot the bill for the Afghanistan campaign to date, since they don't seem to have cared about pissing it all away in the name of scoring some cheap points in yet another flagrant abuse of the freedom we give the press in time of war these days.
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| Friday, May 13, 2005 |
15:49 - Daily profundity
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You know, I don't think there are many better-conceived words in the English language than "waive".
Regardless of its unrelated etymology, one just can't help picturing a guy waving his hand dismissively at some piece of paper full of fine print and going "Ehhh".
...Okay, you make more sense. I'm tired.
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| Thursday, May 12, 2005 |
01:17 - Homer sleep now
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Just finished uploading the last chapter of the new book. The one I got the green light for about three weeks ago.
And a whole weekend ahead of schedule, too.
I think I'll go to bed early tonight. (According to UPS, there might be a lens waiting for me when I wake up...)
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| Wednesday, May 11, 2005 |
18:25 - "We should look for all manner of diversity"
http://www.nytco.com/pdf/siegal-report050205.pdf
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What's this? The New York Times is out-and-out admitting that there really is a liberal media, and they're it?
Have Jon Stewart and Ian Maxtone-Graham seen this?
Via Cold Fury.
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| Tuesday, May 10, 2005 |
14:07 - It's officially mainstream when it encompasses the esoteric
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPlayListsPage?fcId=62768434&pa
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Jeezum crow! Look at this latest exclusive at iTunes: all the Final Fantasy soundtracks. All the way back to the 8-bit ones.
Nice presentation, too.
(Ooo! New Gorillaz album too. Oh, and videos that require iTunes 4.8. Wonder what that has?)
UPDATE: Aha: they finally rolled Contacts and Calendars syncing directly into iTunes, instead of making you configure it through iSync. Tiger-only feature; now that they've decoupled .Mac syncing from iSync, they can also move the iPod out and into iTunes. No more having two different things launch whenever you plug in the iPod.
Funny how I just finished writing the chapter on syncing contacts and calendars LAST NIGHT and submitted it this morning...
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| Monday, May 9, 2005 |
11:32 - Good thing all scientists are apolitical
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Well now, hold on here—perhaps this new documentary (via LGF), in which thousands of scientists from all over the world denounce the scientific basis of the global warming theory, actually is "not of broadcast quality", as the Canadian broadcasters' screening board determined. Maybe it's really disingenuous and full of obvious untruths, or maybe it's just shoddily done.
...Hmm. Okay, well, looks fine to me.
Maybe they can get it shown here, in between publicly sponsored showings of The Day After Tomorrow and Fahrenheit 9/11.
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| Friday, May 6, 2005 |
14:32 - This guy might need an intervention
http://mfdh.ca/writing/scoop_diary_archive/04-1111.html
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Via BrianD comes this story/adaptation that's just a little bit too well executed for its own good.
Nadim Zero leaned back in the booth and boasted that he had made the Red Sea Run "in less than twelve miles." Reading Salim's blank look he continued: "I've outrun British customs boats. She's fast enough for you, old man. What's the cargo?"
"Only passengers," replied Salim smoothly. "Myself, the boy, two clerks, and no questions."
Nadim Zero chuckled. "What is it? Some kind of local trouble?"
"Let's just say we'd like to avoid any...American entanglements."
It wasn't until I reached the end that I realized that this was done by Matthew Frederick Davis Hemming, the guy behind the Darth Vader blog. I should have seen it earlier—the Canadian diction should have been a giveaway. After all, no one country is big enough for two people this terminally geeky...
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| Thursday, May 5, 2005 |
17:14 - Do they give a Nobel Prize for "attempted chemistry"?
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Just a thought, here.
On 9/11/01, two of the four hijacked planes successfully hit the two towers of the World Trade Center. The other two planes and their targets, however, have sort of become a footnote to history, understandably—if only by sheer dint of numbers of casualties and lasting damage to the national psyche.
However: we know that Flight 93, the one that went down in Pennsylvania when the passengers rebelled, had been targeted at the Capitol building; and Flight 77, the one that hit the Pentagon, had a flight path with deviations that suggest that it was originally steering for the White House, but couldn't find it and went instead for its secondary target.
In the years since 9/11, the predictable response has been twofold: from one side of the nation has been the implacable call not just for justice against the actual perpetrators of the act, but for a thorough worldwide cleansing of the ideology that would give rise to people inclined to follow in their footsteps... and from the other, a sense of reservation and reluctance, born of the fact that the buildings that toppled were the World Trade Center buildings, symbols of commerce and American financial dominance and—to some—hives of "little Eichmanns", the people really pulling the levers that directed American actions that they found abhorrent (globalization, investment banking, free trade, capitalism, et cetera). The strike on the Pentagon just sealed the deal (repeat after me: military-industrial complex). In other words, the way 9/11 went down, it's become irresistibly branded as a big blow against America's economic might and hubris—not its political clout or identity as a nation.
The success of the terrorists' mission has to be scored at about 65%—they hit half their primary targets and missed two, but hit a secondary target. The targets they hit differ significantly in symbolic impact from the targets they missed (or hit as second choices). However, this result could have gone any number of different ways, largely dependent on nothing more than accidents of timing, luck, and serendipity.
What, then, if things had happened a little differently?
What if the timing had worked out another way, so that different targets had been hit first, and passengers on different planes had started hearing the news on their cellphones and begun making plans to rebel and overthrow the hijackers? What if the weather or pilot error had forced other planes to make new decisions as to where to aim, rather than the ones that did?
What if it had been the Capitol and the White House that had been hit, and the World Trade Center had been missed entirely?
How would that have affected America's response to 9/11? How would we have reacted if, instead of it being a symbol of our financial global dominance and a privately owned office building full of thousands of civilian employees of regular companies and tourists that had been destroyed, it were the symbols of America's political power that bore the attack's full brunt? What if, in the months following 9/11, nobody thought—for there would have been no outward reason to suspect it—that the "little Eichmanns", whose buildings were still standing intact there in Lower Manhattan, had anything to do with the terrorists' motives? What if, instead, on the evening news each night we found ourselves staring at two shattered national monuments in Washington D.C., the graves of hundreds of Senators and Representatives and possibly the President?
Would we have reacted differently? Would we be asking ourselves "Why do they hate us?" Would our youths be protesting in the street against military response? Assuming he survived, would they be calling Bush Hitler? Would they be talking about appeasement and understanding and compromise?
And if not... why the hell not?
Better yet: since we live in a world where these things didn't happen... why the hell do they?
People discussing issues like hate-crime laws make lots of airy claims that "intent shouldn't be a factor" when determining how to punish someone—an act of murder is an act of murder, regardless of the motivation, right? Only the commission of an act should be punishable—not the attempted or intended commission of that act. If someone's convicted of attempted murder, it's pretty typically a lesser sentence than for successful murder. Seems to make sense, but... not if you think about it too hard.
Because if we treat 9/11 only on the basis of what the terrorists successfully accomplished, we run the risk of missing the whole point of the act, and reacting in a manner that attempts to solve all the wrong problems.
We have to measure our response according to the symbolic and concrete impact that 9/11 would have had if the terrorists had succeeded in hitting all their primary targets. Because that's what they would have done if only they'd been able to. They didn't choose to hit only the buildings full of "little Eichmanns" and our military headquarters, and leave our representative government and its symbols intact. If Allah had been on their side, they'd have taken out both towers of the WTC, the Capitol Building, and the White House. And we'd be reacting today based on the aftermath of that kind of horrific spectacle that would have been all the more dreadful than 9/11 already was in the real world.
Some people are able to cloud their moral judgment by justifying 9/11, to some degree, as a righteous attack upon America's economic hubris, rather than upon us as a people. Yet I don't think they'd be able to do that if it were our national symbols and monuments, the historic and irreplaceable buildings that Americans of all political stripes revere as the home of politicians among whom just about anyone can find representation in past or present history, that had been turned into rubble-filled craters. There'd be no denying who it was that was the attack's targets. And there would be no confusion or equivocation as to the appropriateness of the response.
  
Imagine that none of the buildings pictured here, or the people inhabiting them, existed anymore. Not just half of them, or well-armored substitutions for some of them that are easily rebuilt—none of them. Imagine all of them going up in the same plumes of smoke that covered Manhattan for that week in September.
Go on: imagine it.
That's the world in which those people live who back the War on Terror. Not the world where nature and humanity conspired to turn the attack into something subtly different in symbolic character, and considerably less horrific, than what it was intended to be.
Hell, if all the planes had missed, even if miraculously nobody had died, even if the plot had been foiled at the ticket counters—we should still be reacting the same way, with the same far-reaching plan to reshape the Arab world and snuff out Islamic fundamentalist terrorism by spreading secular democracy. Yet imagine how intense the domestic and international resistance would have been then.
Just a thought, but—why should there be any difference?
UPDATE: Yeah, I know the "hate crimes" thing is a bit glib. Go too far into the "punish intent rather than deed" direction and you're in Big Brother territory; yet too far in the other direction and you end up adjudicating things solely on the basis of body-count, and the judicial system becomes some sort of non-sentient organism responding to stimuli in a coldly linear manner, which just isn't a sensible way to deal with humans and all their irrationality. Then there's the "intent should matter when deciding punishment, not when deciding guilt" argument put forth by South Park, which seems to make sense, but takes some mental gear-grinding. The point is, we don't have to do any psychological tricks in this case to find out what the terrorists' dream outcome was, and we'd be deluding ourselves to proceed on any other basis.
UPDATE: I also realize Bush was in Florida on 9/11; but that, too, was dumb luck. It's not like the terrorists could really have planned around that.
UPDATE: Greetings, Rantburg patrons—and thanks for the kind words!
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| Friday, April 29, 2005 |
14:17 - Mood: melancholy
http://darthside.blogspot.com/2005_04_01_darthside_archive.html
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Via Damien: Darth Vader's blog.
...You try to be an effective manager, you weed out the bad apples like the late Admiral Ozzel -- only to find that an insidious culture of incompetence has somehow transformed your deadly pan-galactic armada into a fleet of spaceballs.
It's alternately very silly and very good. Certainly a lot more entertaining than the last couple of movies have been, but maybe that's just because it actually pays attention to extant plot and makes some attempt to tie it all meaningfully together. There's even some perverse wisdom in it.
This'll be one to watch.
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| Wednesday, April 27, 2005 |
16:29 - They do stuff™
http://www.huhcorp.com/index.htm
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I'm totally buying stock in these guys. As soon as they IPO.
Via Cold Fury.
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| Tuesday, April 26, 2005 |
11:57 - NEW POPE IS NAZI LOL WTF!!1!1
http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2822
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It's always refreshing when one of the lone voices of sanity on the Internet comes from Something Awful.
I’m going to build a time machine. What I’m going to do is take old Bill here back in time to 1941 Germany. We’re going to sit there and wait for the Nazis to find him and say, “Join us or die.” Bill Berkowitz (Uhm, we’ll have to change that last name for this to work) is going say, “Sorry folks, but I humbly oppose the Nazi regime and I don’t wish to join your organization.” and we’ll see what happens.
George Washington owned slaves during his lifetime. He didn’t want to and in his heart he knew it was wrong but he did anyway. It was the cool thing to do at the time. Slavery was just another fad like pogs or Pokemon. But in 1976 he was posthumously appointed the grade of General of the Armies of the United States, the highest ranking military position the U.S. has to offer. The fact that he owned slaves didn’t seem to bother anyone. The fact that Joseph Ratzinger involuntarily joined the Hitler Youth shouldn’t bother anyone either.
But it will, as long as some people can use it to fuel the storybook image they have of the world in which WWII was that far-off time when good and evil existed, people who committed atrocities were otherworldly beings in man-suits (certainly, anything but human), and the human race was absolved of having to base their decisions in this gray modern world on any sort of moral clarity as long as you say enough things like "How many Nazi salutes did he give? How many times did "Sieg Heil" come out of his mouth?" when you think the right people are listening.
UPDATE: Brummbar has more.
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| Monday, April 25, 2005 |
15:44 - But that's not fair
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CapLion has a few things to say on the subject of socialized medicine. Money quote:
To address this properly, I really need to start off with a fairly macroscopic view of the issue. It's one that many, many Americans understand, and just about all Canadians, Europeans, and Liberals in general do not: It is not okay to be poor.
Perhaps harsh, but as Cap says, read the rest of it before you start smashing things. And I've gotta say, it comes at a pretty opportune time for me to read it. See, here I am pulling in no fewer than four incomes from two full-time jobs and change (as well as a lot of completely self-driven work over the past several years that's now trickling dividends my way), in which number I count this current breakneck writing project on which I'm working harder and faster than I ever have before in my life (including college), with visions of hazard pay and an impeccable Guy Who Gets Things Done aura shining around me when they think of who'll be able to take on future emergency projects. Sleep? Who needs it? Alaska beckons. Or, failing that, the mortgage payment, which plus expenses adds up to within hundreds of my after-taxes take-home pay.
...And then, as I did a few weekends ago, I go to visit some acquaintances on a bright Saturday in San Francisco. Four of them, living in an absolute pit of an apartment in the middle of the city. Oh, it's a beautiful apartment complex—perched on a high hill, full of gorgeous landscaping—but their unit itself was packed from floor to ceiling with books, used food, knickknacks, and piles of cat crap. Of the four renters, not one had a job. One apparently did some kind of contract work once in a great while, but that hadn't happened in a long time; and so one of them, who told me this with great pride, was the "main breadwinner" by virtue of his skulking down to the bus station to pick up garbage every few days, which he smugly said qualified as enough "community service" to make him eligible for General Assistance, which he was able to convince his worried mother was a "job". Meaning one of my incomes—I don't know, pick one—was being diverted to pay his and his friends' rent.
Boy, what a sucker I am, huh? You work harder than the average, you make more money—but you get taxed harder, like the evil rich person you obviously are. Don't wanna work, and don't mind living in a litterbox? We'll find some bozo with an extra income or so he doesn't need and make him sponsor you.
Oh yeah, and then the guy asked me to "lend" him money, or else they'd get kicked out of the apartment. Like I'd done once before, never to see the money again, needless to say. I tell you, it was all I could do to get to my car before I started yelling and hitting things.
And get a load of this little gem from my Correspondent that I read this morning:
There are also circular problems. Let's say I'm having trouble getting work because of my weight (companies don't want to co-pay my high insurance costs). Losing weight is best with the right foods, which cost too much, which I can't afford, because I don't have the job. Or I need the medical assistance to lose this much weight, and I don't have the health insurance because I don't have the job (and the Republicans have made this one of only two industrial countries which has no national health plan). Or, because I don't have a job, I try to survive on government assistance, but I don't qualify because my car is worth too much money, unless I try to sell it in which case I get only a fraction of its value, and then the government doesn't pay enough to live on, and I can't get work because I don't have a car to get there (and I live in a big city whose public transportation system is both too expensive and unreliable), so I get stuck on government assistance, not being able to eat, so I find a local part-time job that I can walk to, and then they cut back the government assistance, and the combination is even less than what I was making before, so...
Where to begin? Perhaps with the thing about how losing weight requires expensive food. Huh? Funny, everyone I've always talked to seemed to be convinced that losing weight involved buying less food. Or jogging around the block once in a while, which is free. Jared became a matinee idol on six-inch Subways, right? "Results not typical", I know, but give me a break. If only there were magical weight-loss pills slipped into every mailbox by the USPS, like in Canada or Cuba, eh? But of course it's the Republicans' fault that this guy is too fat to work. Do I have that right? God, I'm stupid.
I know, I know—part of being one of those people who takes on way too many projects at once and always seems to come through in a way that makes people applaud and throw money my way is also being the kind of person to never complain or even make any public spectacle of how much work it all involves. You can't be an uncomplaining martyr if you complain. I know I don't have any real problems, and being successful insulates me from even being able to empathize properly with people who do. But you know, sometimes you just read or experience too many things in a day that make you so mad you want to wrench your own head off.
And sometimes you're tempted, because you live in a country where the evil capitalist hospitals would probably be able to sew the damn thing back on for you.
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10:57 - A cup of Gatorade
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Four chapters in five days. Whoo.
At this pace, though, I'll come in well under the deadline. I just hope they don't want me to do this again anytime soon.
Anyway, last night as I was taking out the garbage, I heard the whine of what sounded like struggling jet engines directly above; very loud, enough to make normal speech difficult, and changing in pitch suggesting that the pilot was making some pretty significant power adjustments. The next-door neighbor came running out to see what it was, just as the plane passed overhead; there was a choppy cloud cover at about 1000 feet, and the plane was barely above it, or so it seemed. Judging by the way the lights were arranged it looked to have long swept-back wings-- a C-5 or something, aimed in the direction of Moffett.
But there's no way it should have been that low. The neighbor and I stood there watching and listening for a long time[md]we could hear those engines whining after it had been gone over the horizon five minutes. We never did hear a big "boom", but it wouldn't have surprised us at all. Pretty unnerving.
Anyway, that's enough of the outside world.
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| Wednesday, April 20, 2005 |
16:26 - Quoth the editor
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Just now:
How quickly do you think you can write this book?
We have an opportunity to have this on promo this summer at B&N but the book
needs to be ready to ship to the customer on July 7th. To do that we will
need to maintain a very aggressive schedule and would need to have 100% from
you by May 16th.
Uhhhh.... huh. So if there's any doubt as to why blogging shall be light for the coming three weeks...
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| Monday, April 18, 2005 |
15:07 - Sentience is a deadly weapon that must be registered
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J Greely has a good take on the rapidly-becoming-infamous Rattlesnake Anti-Defamation League signs that are just so very symbolic of urban Californian mentality as a whole.
I'd think it all has something to do with a vague little voice in the back of everyone's minds that says, "We're the privileged ones, therefore evil; so whatever happens to us, good. We deserve it."
I should mention, however, that the signs in my San Jose neighborhood warning of mountain lions and coyotes are nothing like this kind of theme-park daffiness. Maybe something about having our cul-de-sacs infiltrated and our cats devoured by such creatures gives us less of a sense of humor about such things.
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| Tuesday, April 12, 2005 |
18:11 - There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio...
http://www.zompist.com/predic.htm
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Elections cause people to do a lot of thinking and writing. They certainly seemed to have had an effect on Mark Rosenfelder back in 2000, who penned this long and crunchy essay (via James A.) on the American political landscape while Gore and Bush and McCain were still duking it out on the campaign trail.
It's worth a read. Not because it's totally right—there's a lot of it that's willfully blinkered, I think, or that betrays the author's personal proclivities in a way that would put the lie to any claim he might make to being "unbiased". The whole thing, in fact, is a treatise in defense and promotion of "liberalism" as he defines it. He spends a satisfying amount of time explaining the very rational roots of the philosophy and distancing himself from the "progressives" (whom he holds in as much disdain as he does unreconstructed communists). But it's been five years and a huge tectonic shift in world politics since when this thing was posted, and the most fascinating thing I've seen all week is how well this piece works as a time-capsule as contrasted with today's political landscape—and that's only after five years. Things move fast these days.
Rosenfelder tries gamely to explain the existence of the conservatives in American politics, but he can't resist oversimplifying them or referring to them with dismissive nicknames ("consies" and "fundies"); to read this piece, one gets the impression that anyone to the author's right harbors at least the latent desire to roll back abortion rights and abolish the IRS. As he puts it late in the piece:
[A given political party long in power] also stops explaining itself with any eloquence or passion. Many noisy consies, such as Salon's David Horowitz, were once liberals; their descriptions of what liberalism is are usually unrecognizable, and their reasons for leaving it are adolescent. (E.g. one recent apostate decided that conservativism was more 'sensible'; his example was that the homeless weren't disadvantaged people, but street lunatics. So, it was just 'sensible' to keep blacks from voting or holding good jobs? And the 'sensible' way to treat lunatics is to keep them as filthy, drunken vagrants?)
Riiiight. That's what Middle America wants post-9/11 (or, I suspect, wanted beforehand). Latent racism and authoritarianism.
Most of the big unaddressed political class that Rosenfelder seems to ignore (because I really doubt they were statistically insignificant in 2000) is what we now know as the South Park Republicans. Not a racist bone in their bodies, determinedly secular, anti-authority, libertarian, middle-class, anti-tycoon, entrepreneurial, fiercely defensive of privacy, sexually liberated, and all for equality of all rights that it is sensible for the law to affirm—yet tempered by a knowledge that there are some restrictions on social behaviors we've inherited from our benighted ancestors that actually have some place in building strong communities. These are people who take a moment now and then to wonder whether there might in fact have been some downsides to the empowerment of women or the mainstreaming of homosexuality—not with the intention of rolling them back, notably, but of confronting such faults without the fear imposed on us by an establishment that won't tolerate the questioning of such ideals as multiculturalism or the absolute parity in all objective measures of all races and sexes and religions and lifestyles. This isn't about "discrimination"—it's about understanding how humans work, and finding out whether we're being willfully blind about certain things that might be costing our society in efficiency and elegance.
These days, the people attracted to various segments of the political landscape don't much reflect the way they sifted themselves out in Rosenfelder's long-bygone era, it would seem. This bit stuck out at me as particularly laughable:
A more typical libertarian, I suspect, is one of my recent correspondents, who earnestly explained that prosperity was not based on "brute labor", but on "clever thinking". That's pure Randism; but the guy makes $14,000 a year. What's the story here? Randism seems to be built for billionaires. It's a transparent reponse to socialism: When people are calling for your blood as exploiters, it's mighty comforting to be told that your place at the top of the heap is heroic and even moral.
I suspect Randian rhetoric appeals most to folks like my $14K/year correspondent-- basically, smart whites who have a grudge against the system. They're not doing as well as they'd like, but they're not in enough difficulty that liberals pay them any heed. Rand crystalizes for them their suspicion of socialism and the welfare state, and assures them that their ambition and hard work are the marks of future Nietzschean overlords. There's also a particular pleasure in being contrarian, in not merely opposing but scornfully rejecting the liberal idea that one should resist misery and injustice. It's a miserable and unjust world, baby! We are winners, and damn the losers! Only they're not exactly winning yet. Something must be holding them back. Ah, the government!
"Smart whites who have a grudge against the system"? "$14K/year"? Yeah, that describes a whole lot of libertarians I know. No, this is 2005, and the people who fit this mold today are the hard-core Progressive radicals: the ones who hold such a grudge against the established systems of humanity that they're willing to march in the streets to overthrow them so the world can be more like it is in cyberspace, where everyone has as much sex and alternate reality and hallucinatory escapism as they want and nobody hates anyone ever (except Republicans). The college-age floundering urbanite in this day and age, as I've known him, isn't a Randian; he's a hazy idealist, insulated from the need to work like an assembly-line drone of yesteryear by myriad opportunities and luxuries unthinkable to the poor of earlier ages, and adhering reflexively to any convenient group with a built-in grudge and sad tale of repression to tell. Society at large is at fault for not providing enough welfare to deserving folks like them; much better to define themselves as part of a romantically downtrodden community or subgroup than as a part of the white-bread nation that shuns them. Rosenfelder himself says: "The country is too rich for progressive causes to be understood, much less championed." He's right-on there. Less so when he describes the ACLU as being a champion of the individual and the conservatives as secretly yearning for aristocracy—if there is any group with delusions of elite superiority these days, it's the cranky youths in every suburb who think that knowing how to configure sendmail or run a port scanner makes them Middle America's natural born leaders.
The author of the piece makes several mentions of his above-average familiarity with the role of religion in these proceedings; and while he is quick and thorough in his dismissal of the "fundies", he does say this:
Similarly, many people abandon the Christianity of their childhood without ever achieving an adult understanding of their religion. They think they've left the religion for rational reasons, when all they've defeated is the Sunday-school simplification of it.
Bravo. If there's one thing of which I've grown intensely weary in recent years, it's those people who smugly sniff about having risen above the ridiculous superstitions of religion and embraced a philosophy based on "rationality" and "logic" and "reason". Bull.
A friend recently brought over a DVD of Penn & Teller's Bullshit! series that aired on Showtime; among all its episodes, which debunk and expose the silliness of all manner of conceits of modern society (such as magnet therapy, penile enlargement, alternative medicine, animal liberation, Feng Shui, and so on), the crowning jewel was its hour-long segment on creationism. And while Penn and Teller were quite happy to videotape people lobbying in Atlanta to have creation taught as a theory (alongside evolution) in Georgia public schools, they did an amazing job of failing to acknowledge the very salient points with regard to legal precedent, scientific inquiry, the nature of a theory, legitimate criticisms of evolution, and fear of competing ideas that these people made, instead preferring to point and laugh at the stupid hicks with their stupid hick accents. They (well, Penn) even egregiously misrepresented the First Amendment, as everyone does, when explaining about the "separation of church and state". I had to move upstairs and shut my door about halfway into it, it was so maddeningly intellectually dishonest and unjustifiably condescending.
Any high-school kid can pick up a science textbook and read the explanations of why evolution is the answer to everything; but it takes someone willing to take a leap into unsupported realms of thought—indeed, a leap of faith—to understand that logic cannot sufficiently describe a system in which logic is not a constraint. In fact, logic itself would dictate that one couldn't use logic alone in such a circumstance. Specifically, we are limited enough in our faculties as humans that we cannot distinguish between the world as we know our scientific laws would predict it to appear, and the world as fashioned by some omnipotent force to appear the way our laws would predict it would appear. This might seem too counterintuitive or far-fetched for a mere high-school intellectual (as I once was) to grasp; but the years intervening since I was shocked to discover that there actually existed people on modern planet Earth who believed in God have been chastening, to say the least.
I went to Caltech, perhaps the most hard-science-oriented university on the planet. I specifically went there so that I, as a sure-footed atheist of the kind that nobody with even a shred of spirituality would ever invite to lunch, could be sure of never having to deal with such irrationality ever again. But what should I discover, upon completing the Blacker Hovse roompick in the fall of 1994, but that I had landed in a double... and the occupant of the other side of the room was a guy I'd come to call, behind his back, the Apostle Matt. Deeply, deeply religious. And, I would later find, one of the most agile minds I'd ever met.
We clashed numerous times over the course of that frosh year, with our creationism-vs-evolution diatribes occupying long sheets of paper that we taped up all over the inside of our room's walls, so that we could read each other's rebuttals and write them in silence, never once giving actual voice in conversation to them. Seriously: as furious as we grew on paper, we never once broached the subject in actual speech, and our conversations were never anything but pleasant and happy. But these sheets of densely-written paper covered the walls from floor to ceiling, turned the corner, and spilled out and down the hallway for passersby to read and observe our philosophical fisticuffs. And the most galling thing of all was that at the outset, I assumed—assumed—that just because he was some fundie whose presence on campus was inexplicable (dang, he must have had a lot of extracurricular activities), I'd be able to run rings around him logically. I figured I could even quote the Bible at him and beat him at his own game. Sure, I'd never read it myself, but hey—it's a big book. Surely he can't know it that well. How should he know whether some outrageous verse I made up is actually in there or not?
Suffice it to say that he wiped the floor with me. Not necessarily in the specific wall-covering discussion, but in the long run. See, it turns out that creationist or not, he became a planetary science major, did numerous research projects and theses on the nature of the universe—all while at the same time leading the Campus Christian Fellowship and excelling in everything else he did, which was a lot—and graduated with flying colors, going on to grad school where I believe he's already in charge of some prestigious theoretical research group. Whereas I floundered my way through a mechanical engineering curriculum and graduated only by the skin of my teeth, which is why my teeth bear ugly stretch marks to this day. Had I backed a slow horse? Had I managed to shut myself off to a whole mode of thinking that would have allowed me to excel? I may have had the edge in knowledge of parody materials and smirky pop culture, but intellectually—I know now—he was so far beyond me that I wasn't really a worthy opponent.
After the rigor of academia was behind me, and (shortly afterwards) once 9/11 occurred, I was able to look back on the experience with something of a renewed perspective. It turns out, shockingly, that some huge percentage of Caltech's undergraduate population—larger, even, than the national average among universities, if I remember correctly—were highly religious. If I'd known this as a high-school senior, it'd have turned my world upside down. But I've seen it in action. Religion is no detriment to intelligence or reason. Quite the contrary: it's an enhancement, an augmentation to a mind that might find it all too tempting to limit itself to feeding on logic alone. I've seen too many breathtaking churches and cathedrals and synagogues and mosques, witnessed too many small-town Ladies' Auxiliaries presiding over community funerals, heard too much astonishingly good music created by people my own age, all inspired by that stupid, retrograde thing, religion, to ever again be seduced into the grim austerity of life so limited. I'm still an atheist in practice, mostly just out of habit, but I have to apologize to myself and others for it rather than holding it up as some kind of banner proving my elite superiority over the seething masses as I once did.
(Incidentally, a wise sophomore during that frosh year in Blacker opined that by definition, the only thing a scientist can be is agnostic. This idea is less and more attractive to me depending on the cycle of the moon.)
Religion is one of the only areas in which I think South Park misses the mark in its social commentary. That aside, it as a collected work stands as a pretty good rebuttal (or corollary) to Rosenfelder's treatise. It's possible, in a nutshell, to be friendly to most of what he describes as core "liberal" values (civil rights, feminism, environmentalism, campaign finance reform, freedom of expression, gay rights), and yet not to be so fixated upon them that we mutate into establishment-destroying radicals once the bulk of those issues have been addressed. There's a wide gulf between "You don't have to like gays and lesbians, but that's no reason to jail them, fire them, beat them up, or deny their civil rights" and "Let's all legalize gay marriage". In that gulf rests a huge demographic that Rosenfelder seems to have overlooked, or that has only found its voice in the intervening five years.
The funniest part is the ending, where Rosenfelder issues some predictions for the future:
• The Republicans will find that they like governing; as a result their anti-government rhetoric will fade away, to be revived only on ceremonial occasions (in much the same way that you only hear "these United States" at political conventions).
• Religion is here to stay; but the fundies, frustrated with their inability to impose theocracy, will lose interest for a generation. The next time they pop up, they'll be as likely to ally with the left as with the right (especially because abortion will, I suspect, be largely eliminated by improved methods of contraception).
• Liberalism will disappear-- at least in its incarnations as described above; the new movements and causes that replace it may keep the name. The political fights of 2100 will center largely around ideas that are considered impossibly idealistic or perverse today.
• Conservativism will remain, of course; though it will end up implicitly accepting everything that 20C liberalism stood for.
That was supposed to be a prediction for the next hundred years. Sounds like it's only taken a twentieth of the time.
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| Monday, April 11, 2005 |
20:27 - Stop Stealing My Money, You Thieving Government*
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What wonder should I behold upon opening my online bank statement today but that my federal tax return check, written in the amount of $489 and spelled out in longhand as well and proper, had been cashed by the IRS in the amount of $989.
This coming on top of having to pay no less than $3400 combined federal and state estimated payments on the advance for the current book (from which nothing was withheld, and all of which I received in the first quarter, and they don't allow you to spread it out over the whole year) made for an ugly-looking number in my checking account, with a little horizontal line in front of it. Not pleasing to me was any of this.
Oh, I called up the bank and had them put things right. I acknowledge that my 4's sort of look like 9's. But you'd think the IRS would check the longhand version of numbers like this, to avoid "understandable" errors that somehow always fall in their favor...?
...Oh. Right. What was I thinking?
* Apologies to Frank J.
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14:37 - Can't fight City Hall
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As much as it might be fun to dream about this, much uglier and stupider stories like this make it clear how futile such hopes probably are.
Dang, that's a nice proposal, though, as I've said before.
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11:42 - Still got it
http://www.caltechvsmit.com/
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Wow. Looks like "That Other" Institute of Technology still has that ol' fighting spirit.
We decided that the Academic fair would have the largest concentration of prefrosh, so at 1pm we unloaded 800 shirts reading “MIT” on the front and “…because not everyone can go to Caltech” on the back, and casually walked in through the open loading dock in the back of the building with nine boxes of shirts. Within the first twenty minutes we handed out nearly 400 shirts. No one noticed anything because the shirts were individually wrapped in plastic bags. However, It was only a matter of time before one of the prefrosh opened the bag and decided to put on the shirt. When one of our shirt distributors noticed this happening we picked up the boxes and were gone in a minute. Looking behind us we saw the room filled with campus police all looking for us. A couple of us went to the Athletics fair through the front entrance, nodding to the door monitor who knew us as prefrosh, with a few boxes of shirts. We were able to pass out shirts for ten minutes before the door monitor stormed up to us and asked “Who told you to hand out those T-shirts?” to which we replied, “I think he is somewhere over there,” then picked up the boxes and bolted.
I'm proud of the little whippersnappers.
(I was always pleased that Caltech, by the way, was about one of the most apolitical campuses one could ever hope to find... the way things are going these days, it really is going to be a bastion of sanity in more ways than one.)
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| Saturday, April 9, 2005 |
18:31 - Not Well Thought Out
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This seems like a poorly designed tree.
The seed pods that appear in spring are so heavy and clustered so thickly that the wood of the branches can't support them, and the tree falls over unless it's tied up.
I'm imagining a forest of these in the wild, each one crawling along the ground like some kind of thick and woody creeper vine, or an astronaut on a planet where the gravity is about five times too high...
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| Friday, April 8, 2005 |
00:46 - Discovery of the hour
http://spamusement.com/
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What happens if you take explodingdog, have it be drawn by someone with a lot more artistic skill than he lets on (and a penchant for drawing characters that look like Strong Sad), and have the titles be written by the random software that generates subject lines for spam e-mails?
Spamusement, that's what.
I swear, my throat hurts after going through all these. It starts out silly, then gets promising, then one by one builds itself into an edifice of pure genius. Every one of these is gold. Seriously. Best thing I've seen since the Flame Warriors.
"I sure wish you weren't so silly". Ouch. I hurt.
Via Chris.
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18:41 - I must only use this power to annoy
http://www.mail-archive.com/poclad@efn.org/msg00002.html
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Hey, remember "kything"? That telepathy stuff from the Madeleine L'Engle books?
Now I wish I didn't.
(Did everyone read those books as part of the standard curriculum? Or was that just my school district?)
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13:12 - First disarm the populace
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_national_review-wrong.htm
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I wonder how long it will be before people start jumping up in the middle of these courtroom proceedings and shouting, This is OUR country, we have our OWN customs, and you are GUESTS?
Probably never. You'd get thrown in jail for it these days.
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10:40 - Highway Beautification Project
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You ever notice that when you see a car on the road whose back end is totally, gaudily covered with bumper stickers, you don't even need to get close anymore to know what they're all about?
I even saw a brand-new Porsche 911 Carrera a couple of months ago with a big NO BLOOD FOR OIL sticker on it. Totally aside from the irony of the statement itself, imagine the mindset of someone who would put any bumper sticker on that kind of car. Some people, apparently, feel so strongly about these matters that it overrides all taste.
Which brings up another interesting thing I noticed: In the run-up to the election, we all saw plenty of pro-Kerry and pro-Bush bumper stickers. But while there were also (and continue to be) anti-Bush stickers up the wazoo... did anyone ever see any anti-Kerry stickers? Because, oddly enough, I sure didn't...
If this signifies anything, I'm sure it escapes me.
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| Monday, April 4, 2005 |
11:33 - A holiday we can all enjoy
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April 1st always involves some good clean fun from our favorite companies and content creators. Some of the best ones:
Google Gulp. These guys are way too silly for us to be able to buy their stock.
Steve Jobs Joins IKEA. It was only a matter of time...
Homestar Runner's new Pay Plus Service. With free Seven Second Trial!
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09:15 - DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/004225.php
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(Under Penalty of Canadian Law)
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| Friday, April 1, 2005 |
11:09 - Doctor Evil
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My long-time Correspondent—the one who wants to suicide-bomb Republicans—threw me an interesting curveball yesterday:
I was recently sent a news story stating that the state house of Michigan has passed a bill which says that no doctor, nurse, or other caregiver can be held responsibile for any consequences of withholding medical treatment for religious, ethical, or moral reasons. This has to go to the state senate, and then to the governor of course, but since being gay is an offense against God, I don't intend to get myself injured in the state of Michigan... just in case.
I believe the story to which he's referring is this one: Don't Give Doctors a Moral Veto Right.
Under the House legislation, providers can't refuse to provide services based on a person's membership in groups protected under the Elliot-Larsen civil rights act.
That leaves them free to refuse to care for gays, lesbians, the obese, the unwashed, the homeless, prostitutes, intravenous drug abusers or any of the host of other people who are frequently the object of hatred or derision, which is almost always rationalized by a moralizing smokescreen.
I admittedly don't know the details of the Elliot-Larsen Act, nor do I know whether there are other Michigan civil-rights laws that the Michigan legislature could have invoked instead that would have mentioned gays as being among the groups guaranteed medical treatment. However, the "outrage" here that has so many people incensed is apparently that the law invokes that Act out of convenience rather than explicitly listing all possible reasons for which a person can't be refused medical service.
Know what this looks like to me? A bunch of journalists and lawmakers have latched onto an undebated technicality in the law and used it to write a bunch of lurid headlines and paint a picture of a state willing to become the nation's pariah for no immediately obvious reason. Michigan Preparing To Let Doctors Refuse To Treat Gays! Please. I mean, seriously—can you imagine the outcry if it became understood that Michigan had actually become a state where gays shouldn't expect to get medical treatment? It's unprecedented and way outside the bounds of what's considered basic medical professionalism (to say nothing of decent human behavior) across the country.
At about the same time as the Michigan law's passage, according to this analysis, Mississippi—Mississippi—passed a similar law that explicitly protected gay and lesbian patients, though it happened not to mention "marital status" in its list of characteristics worthy of exemption. Is my correspondent suggesting that Mississippi doctors are about to start refusing to treat single people? Is he saying he'd feel more confident as a gay man trying to get medical treatment in Jackson than in Detroit?
Understanding the original nature of the "refusal rights" laws is crucial to knowing what's going on here. As I understand things, they were originally designed to give individual doctors an "out" if they didn't want to get fired for refusing to perform an abortion; and (critically) the whole idea was so that said doctor could put another doctor in his place, and shuffle the duty shifts around accordingly, without having to worry about getting sued by the patient. There's nothing in there saying that the patient wouldn't get treated by somebody; it's an escape hatch for individual caregivers with personal objections. There will always be doctors and nurses in any hospital—probably a wide majority—with no objection to performing abortions, let alone to treating gays or unwed mothers or whatever; and once the patient is in the hospital's care, the hospital is responsible for his well-being.
I mean, come on—these are doctors we're talking about here. The Hippocratic Oath still holds. And to suggest that this Michigan law is actually intended to give doctors the slim excuses they crave to avoid treating people is to assume that all the state's hospitals and clinics are staffed by slavering evil beasts with no human compassion and a hankering to toss gay guys out into the dumpster behind the radiology wing. Just because it's a Midwestern state is not a good enough reason to believe that's true.
I've long been hesitant to apply the old Rorschach's test of "Are human beings fundamentally good, or fundamentally evil?" to the task of categorizing whether a person falls on the Left or Right side of a given argument. There are just too many contradicting positions one has to believe in. Limited government and capitalism, for example, depend on believing that humans are fundamentally evil (or at least inevitably corrupt); whereas gun freedom and and a lean welfare state and democracy depend on believing that humans are fundamentally good (or at least competent). Allowing oneself to be guided solely by whether one believes humanity is "good" or "evil" at heart leads to a really weird hybrid sort of political platform, so I really can't do it.
And yet the more I read, if this correspondent of mine is any indication, the more I feel that the far Left is driven by an irrational fear and morbid loathing of humanity itself so profound that I have to wonder if people like him have ever met any human beings. Everything they believe in seems to be centered around the enlightened few keeping the troglodytes in line; and for them to support things like communism (which requires complete and voluntary public cooperation and competence to work) suggests that either they haven't thought it out very carefully, or they secretly relish the thought of exiling "troublemakers" to gulags or putting them up against the wall.
Now, I understand that it's foolhardy to deny that a lot of people out there are venal, greedy, corrupt, stupid, incompetent, or (indeed) evil. Everything's not all right in the world, clearly, and human failings (particularly on the part of world leaders and those in positions of power) are usually to blame.
But as I said to the guy: an interesting thought experiment is to list all the people with whom you've come into contact over the course of the day. Can you seriously and fairly describe more than half of them as evil?
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| Tuesday, March 29, 2005 |
16:21 - The fog of blog
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Anything happening out there?
Seriously... it seems things have gotten pretty quiet lately. And perhaps that's only because I got new glasses yesterday, which I'm still getting used to (they're huge amounts sharper than my old ones, but if I look in any direction other than straight ahead, the image both goes out of focus and exhibits extreme chromatic aberration, like looking through a prism), so I'm still getting headaches whenever I try to read anything.
Ah well. Here's something from Sunday.
My camera has better lenses than my glasses.
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| Monday, March 28, 2005 |
09:26 - Why don't cats ever need chiropractors?
http://www.themoggy.com/olympics.htm
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The Silly Sleeping Pose Olympics.
Via Marcus.
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| Tuesday, March 22, 2005 |
19:09 - I do not think it means what you think it means
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=15158_Demand_Google_News_Transparency&
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This is very enlightening, and very sad. In this example, starker than any I've yet seen, we get to see how the definitions of concepts like "racism" and "Naziism" and "hate" have changed in our modern discourse—and not, I fear, for the better.
Charles Johnson of LGF, in another installment in what's become an ongoing issue with the headline aggregation policies of Google News, has pointed out that while his own site had been repeatedly denied the voluntary listing by that service, the neo-Nazi site National Vanguard has been granted it. Now, while I can frankly see how this is consistent with Google's stated policy—namely, that any "news site" that sources original material is fair game for listing, and LGF really doesn't produce enough new material to qualify—the storm that has swirled up around the matter has brought a few very ugly things to light.
Read through the comments on Jeff Jarvis' relevant thread to see the two sides of the argument at work: one, positing that Charles is a "racist" and a "Nazi" because his site (which prior to 9/11 was the home of an easygoing but occasionally grumpy long-haired art dude who liked to bicycle around Orange County and poke mild fun at George W. Bush) nowadays has the primary goal of pointing out real, documented instances of outrageous expressions of the virulent ideology that drives the enemies that attacked us three and a half years ago, and that the commenters on his so-called "hate" site (the smirkingly self-described "Lizardoid Minions") are little removed from the "digital brownshirts" that Al Gore spoke of with such fervor. And the other, defending Charles against such claims, challenging the first side to come up with actual evidence for making them.
It's funny, really—or would be, if it weren't so sad. The best that Side A can come up with for Charles himself is to say, essentially, "Well, it's not so much what he says, as how he says it—well, okay, it's not how he says it either;" and for the commenters, to pick out examples of people making injudicious statements that are easy to take out of the context of a real, demonstrated outrage to which they're responding, or to point at a person daring to express that he thinks homosexuality is wrong (for example) because it says so in the Bible, and declare the place a "right-wing" cesspool of "racists" and "bigots" and "Nazis".
Racist/Prejudicial Hatred and Stereotyping of Islam at LGF:
Religion of Savagery
Religion of Market Bombs
Religion of Misogyny
Religion of High Explosives
Religion of Suicide Car Bombs
Religion of Beheadings
Religion of Slaughter
Religion of Car Bombs
Plenty more examples of right wing hatred can be found here
And a response from shortly later:
John:
Plenty more examples of right wing hatred
How is pointing out (well-documented, factual) instances of Islamist savagery an example of right-wing hatred?
Btw, thank you for that post. I don't think I could've made a more effective argument for the importance, validity, and value of LGF if I'd tried.
It's come to this, then: compiling documentation of real, actual outrages, with photos and direct quotes from quite mainstream sources, and pointing at them with a glowering expression—why, that's racism! And never mind the things he's actually pointing at; those are just "the way things are", or "our fault", or (as one self-described gay person explains why he doesn't care that Charles is, from the Islamists' perspective, on his side):
Regarding Islam. I'm an American who does not plan to travel overseas to flaunt my sexuality, so I could give two shits what Islamic countries are doing. I do know, however, that there is an American Taliban that wishes it could do the same to gays here. I'll fight my battles at home first.
Here, in a quite compact space, we've got the purest distillation of the grotesque contortions that concepts like "racism" and "bigotry" and "human rights" have undergone in recent years. Charles, who—though a casual familiarity with his history and motivations makes obvious that it's not even remotely necessary—is careful to never even accidentally make any public statement that could be construed as "racist" (much as these guys try to demonstrate that his sarcasm toward dissembling Islamists amounts to such), and who runs perhaps the only site dedicated to applying the most rigorous standards of volunteer journalism to the cause of staring with a cold and unblinking eye at the threat that made itself plain to us on 9/11/01, is the Left's pariah. He's no better than the neo-Nazi site that Google News has voluntarily listed, in their eyes. Never mind the incalculable service he's done these past years, shining a light on matters that the evening news prefers to keep hushed-up; his daring to do it in the first place makes him the target of death threats, slander, and—perhaps most galling of all in the world of blogdom, where reputation is one's most prized asset—a name one can hardly even speak in mixed company.
And opposed to him is a guy who thinks the boundaries of human rights and civil society should coincide with those of our own country, and outside them—well, it's just the rest of the world. Screw it.
There is simply something wrong with this. I'm not asking that Charles Johnson be made the subject of statuary or hoisted on a cheering throng's shoulders. I'm not denying that the things he points out can easily be construed as bearing exceedingly ill will toward a certain class of people (though that class is hardly, when the discussion comes down to brass tacks, one that I'd be willing to defend, as they're the ones wholeheartedly following the ideology that is LGF's explicit nemesis). All I'm doing is pointing out that if terms like "racist" or "Nazi" or even "right-wing" have come to be construed so broadly that Johnson falls into their orbit, then they've lost all meaning.
It's easy to see, once you've sifted through this whole avalanche of irrational hatred, how the logical progression works: Republicans (for some reason) are associated with racism. LGF points out repeated examples of atrocities committed by a group that looks like a race. Charles Johnson defends Bush and his policies in the War on Terror. Ergo, Johnson is a racist and LGF is a hate site. QED. (Oh, and Bush is Hitler.)
But starting from the thesis that most of the denizens of LGF—if you honestly follow their discussions, as few on the opposite side seem willing to do—are in fact former Lefties themselves, comprising every facet of society from white to black to male to female to gay to Jewish to Chinese to Cuban to even Arab, who have chosen to recognize the Islamofascist threat to all of them for what it is, and refuse to back down from pointing it out wherever it rears up just because it's not politically correct to do so... well, "race" itself becomes the reddest herring that I've ever pushed to the side of the plate. Race is completely irrelevant to me and (I submit) to the vast majority of LGFers. Ask 'em and they'll tell you, in style as much as in substance; you simply won't hear anyone rail on the way the people at Vanguard do, because they're the real deal. And LGF is about as different in spirit and in practice as it can be.
That's the tragedy that's unfolding here. People who frequent LGF aren't just not racists, they hate racists. It's one of the few things they do hate. And if that makes LGF a "hate" site, well... sign me up too, because the term is meaningless anyway.
UPDATE: Hey, welcome, lizardoid minions. Heh—"eloquent"? This is about as embarrassingly leaden as my prose has ever gotten. But still, thanks, and my pleasure.
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13:20 - Everybody knows that
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524904.300
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This New Scientist article (via Brian D) makes the following claim:
THE rich are getting richer while the poor remain poor. If you doubt it, ponder these numbers from the US, a country widely considered meritocratic, where talent and hard work are thought to be enough to propel anyone through the ranks of the rich. In 1979, the top 1 per cent of the US population earned, on average, 33.1 times as much as the lowest 20 per cent. In 2000, this multiplier had grown to 88.5. If inequality is growing in the US, what does this mean for other countries?
Almost certainly more of the same, if you believe physicists who are using new models based on simple physical laws to understand the distribution of wealth. Their studies indicate that inequality in market economies may be very hard to get rid of...
And from there it springboards off into funky applications of gaseous particle physics to determine how the wealthiest gas particles keep the poor gas particles crushed under their jack-booted neutrons. But I have to wonder where the underlying assumption comes from, or how right it is.
As Dean Esmay quizzed a few weeks ago:
1) In the last ten years, has the rate of violent crime gone up or down in the United States?
2) How about the rate of auto fatalities over the last ten years?
3) How about teen pregnancy and STD rates?
4) How about drug and alcohol use and abuse rates?
5) As a percentage of the average American's annual income, or net wealth, has the national debt gone up or down over the last 50 years?
6) Are casualties in Iraq higher than Vietnam, lower than Vietnam, or about the same as Vietnam?
7) Has the air been growing more polluted or less polluted over the last 10 years? How about over the last 50 years? Or the last 100?
8) How about the quality of water in rivers and lakes over the last 10 years, or the last 30 years?
9) Have standards of living for the poor gone up or down over the last 10 years? The last 30 years? The last 50 years? The last 100 years?
10) Compared to, say, 40 years ago, do more people have health insurance today, or less people?
Go see the original post for the answers, but you can probably guess from the tone, huh?
Seems to me that someone, on some side or other, is cherry-picking data to look as heinous (or as rosy) as possible. Which one do you suppose it might be? Which one is it more likely to be?
Of course, whenever something makes the news and is presented to the public as an extant problem, the gut reaction that's all but engineered into the very presentation is "There oughtta be a law". Whether intentional or not, that's surely at the heart of so much perceived media bias, right?
After all, they're just watching out for our best interests.
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| Monday, March 14, 2005 |
15:35 - If you say so
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/349tpijp.asp?pg=1
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Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard:
"Pursue your happiness. We were the first country to do it. And we live for that, the fact that people have personal rights. Go where you want. Do what you want. The fact that I chose Canada is almost a bigger embodiment of the American dream. . . . I still love America."
"So you're saying being unpatriotic is an act of patriotism?" I counter, though my heart is no longer in it.
"I've had too many cocktails for that one," Wright says.
It stops looking like Canada-bashing after the first few paragraphs, I promise. After that it becomes good.
Seriously, for any who care: if I ever come across as being derisive or dismissive of Canada, that's almost certainly not my intent. There are things about the country's politics and social impulses that I don't agree with, and that I find interesting as illustrative measures in understanding how our own government works—a rather important thing, one would think, as we watch a whole part of the world on the brink of inventing new governments of its own after the models it sees in us and other modern democracies. But that doesn't mean I don't find the place fascinating, the people friendly (America-bashing aside), and the country itself a place I'm looking forward to visiting again this summer. Just because I'll be glad to get back home—unlike those profiled in this article—doesn't mean I never wanted to come in the first place.
Via Paul Denton.
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12:13 - Yesteryear
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I always enjoy Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons' updates on SomethingAwful.com; he's more serious and even-handed than the rest of the site's writers, he's a great storyteller, and he's well-read and incisive and deeply, deeply interested in his subject matter to boot. As an obsessive student of World War II, he shows a loving familiarity with the silliest and most awesome technology to come out of Nazi Germany, and with respectable apolitical figures like Rommel; but he never lets that cloud his vision of the larger issues, as with his republishing last week of Julius Streicher's Never Trust a Fox in His Green Meadow and Never Trust the Oath of a Jew—which may in fact be illegal to read if you live in some European countries. (I'm sure we all remember when France tried to sue Yahoo for allowing French citizens to stumble onto auctions where Nazi paraphernalia was being sold.)
Which is a shame, because nothing—nothing—is more important than making sure people are familiar with this sort of thing and what it looks like.
If it's kept under lock and key, we stop being able to recognize things like it—and more alarmingly, we start mistaking everything for it. I'd challenge any of our professional alarmists, the ones who insist that America is a racist state sowing fear and hatred against minorities in our midst and insinuations that every Muslim hides a bomb under his coat, to take a good look at what Parsons is shoving in our faces and forcing us to confront, and then to explain where in modern American society anything like this is allowed to exist. Seriously.
Ours is a world where our "Hitler" figure, rather than commissioning books like this from our "Streichers", gives speeches fawning over our "Jews". And yet, to many, the situations are indistinguishable.
On a related note, I've been re-reading the Chronicles of Narnia, just because it's been so long—and I am finding myself endlessly amused by all the subtext that C.S. Lewis apparently couldn't resist throwing in, increasingly as the books went on. I'm not just talking about the "Aslan is Jesus" stuff; we all know about that (glorifications of Bacchanalian orgies notwithstanding). I'm talking about Lewis' unapologetic disdain for democracy and romanticization of divine monarchy. Everywhere you turn there's more evidence of it. Nothing's ever as it should be except when a Human is king. Nothing made Caspian an inherently better ruler than Miraz except that he was the "rightful" king by birth. Miraz is scornfully referred to as having originally seized power under the title of "Lord Protector", a reference that must have been alarming to Lewis' original British readers—and all the more so today—in its derision obliquely directed toward Cromwell's republican revolution in British government. The tenor rises along these lines throughout Lewis' writing and reaches a head in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, in which Lewis gives himself thoroughly over to the conceit—embodying everything he loathed about modern utilitarian British society in Eustace, as well as in the bureaucratic Governor Gumpas, whom Caspian overthrows and replaces with a Duke ("I think we've had enough of Governors") seemingly for the crime of doggedly administering his province according to the people's expressed needs, though the overt reason (outlawing slavery) is honorable enough. In that same book, Lewis muses that the kids' earlier return to Narnia had been like King Arthur returning to Britain, "as some say he will. And I say the sooner the better."
But all this is just amusement. What I wonder is this: what chance would the Narnia books have of being published today, given Lewis' unflattering and unmistakable portrayal of Calormen, the all-but-undisguised stand-in for the Islamic world—which in its imperialism and militancy and social equivocation is responsible ultimately for the destruction of Aslan's whole universe? None, that's what chance.
And yet compared to Streicher's work, it's nothing.
Some days I think we have to invent these cartoons of old, defeated problems simply to avoid having to face the real problems we legitimately face in the modern world. At least we know we can defeat Naziism, so we'd rather spend our time running the last vestiges of racism and sexism and homophobia and lack of diversity to ground than turn and deal with Islamofascism. We haven't converted that particular storybook into a museum piece yet.
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| Thursday, March 10, 2005 |
11:58 - Something that deserves attention
http://akcomics.com/
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AK Comics: "Middle East Heroes". A comic book company based in Egypt with an aim toward being "educational and a force for moderation". And you know—their site could use an editor, but the art is damn good, as are the stories they appear to be presenting. Quite a breath of fresh air indeed.
Via Dean, who was similarly pleasantly surprised.
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11:30 - Scylla and Charybdis
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=15019_IKEA_Dhimmitude_Watch&only=yes
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Poor IKEA. I wouldn't want to be in their shoes.
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| Wednesday, March 9, 2005 |
17:06 - Oh, Napster. Will you ever learn?
http://marv.kordix.com/archives/000416.html
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Remember how quickly people figured out how to break Napster? Constrained only by the speed of real-time playback and re-encoding from a WinAmp output plugin, any Napster subscriber—or free trial user—could simply download as many songs as he wanted and convert them into DRM-less MP3s, and there was nothing Napster could do to stop him or even to determine that he was doing it.
Well, now even that one saving grace (the real-time playback step) is gone: a program called Virtuosa 5.0 allows users to convert DRM'd WMA files with nary a care as to their purported copy-protection. And now you can simply download all Napster's music for free.
What're ya waiting for?
(Via Bob, whose friend is now 15,000 free songs richer after his 2-week free Napster trial.)
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15:29 - Shooting the messenger
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Either incompetent or lying. This kind of vocabulary sucks to have to use; but it's the only one that works.
I don't see any other way to attempt to explain the people who are trying to minimize or change the terms of discussion regarding the Rathergate memos. Like Tim Goodman of the estimable SF Chronicle, via Tim Blair:
The fetid amusement of killing Dan Rather ends tonight. And what a tired affair it was.
There’s no pride in watching the deconstruction of a man. You can take all your conservative pundits who rode down the warpaths of perceived biased and mute them forever now. You can take your navel-gazing journalists who believe Rather made A Big Mistake He Must Pay For and put them in a room, where their own self importance will choke them all to death. And you can take your CBS backstabbers who found in Rather’s last hours of weakness a chance to rise up and join the chorus of haters—becoming smaller themselves as the time of his career suicide drew near—and give them all a great big prize for bravery.
And yes, that includes Walter Cronkite.
Take them all away. Anybody who found joy in this deserves to rot in their own mean-spiritedness. Bravo, you threw stones at a 74-year-old careerist. You whispered sad stories about a weird man to a press corps all too willing to take him out. Dan Rather, who was by most accounts ambitious, polarizing, determined, a self-promoter, a tireless worker, a man who believed in his own ideals, a square peg in the proverbial round hole, the replacement for a myth, a flawed arbiter of history, a man less smooth than his peers and, lastly, a man complicit in a story that may have been inaccurate but not entirely wrong, is no longer the Dan Rather we knew …
And now his time is over—not merely part of an era ended, as when Brokaw retired, but a tortured anti-hero paying the price for indiscretions few can even remember.
It's times like this that all you can do is stare quizzically at the person spewing words like these, squint a little, see if they're joking... and if it's clear that they're not, flail your arms as wildly as you can and yell, at the top of your lungs, THEY WERE FREAKING FAKE!
Auto-centered address at the top. Times New Roman. Crumpled and smoothed out to look old. Etc, etc, etc.
This is what Dan Rather presented, uncritically and with great fanfare, to a credulous public that trusted him. That's a failure of basic journalism that would disgrace a freshman stringer. And yet Rather, senior anchorman, spiritual heir to the legacy of Cronkite and Murrow, whether because of intent to deceive or inability to detect obvious fraud went ahead and presented it anyway. And we're supposed to feel sorry for him? We're supposed to give him a break?
See LGF for all the rest of the damning analysis including lots of visual aids every bit as good as the one above. Incorrect abbreviations, date discrepancies, unauthentic military usage and style, badly forged signatures, testimonials from the people who knew Killian (including the secretary who would have typed the memos if they'd been real), and on and on.
But really, none of it should be necessary at all; because the docs are bloody WORD PRINTOUTS. They just are. Who seriously cannot tell that? Anyone who has used a computer at all in the last ten years knows a Word document when he or she sees it—there are just certain subtle but obvious elements to the way Word creates default documents, including the font, the margins, the tab stops, the word wrap, and the autocorrected features like the infamous superscript "th" that people are still trying to tell the public was a common feature on 1972-era desk typewriters in general use in Texas Air National Guard offices and used by colonels who hated typing.
You don't need to know the arcane details of typography to see these things for what they are. All you have to do is use Word on occasion. And considering that these are all reporters advancing these defensive stories, how likely is it that none of them have ever used Word? Of those who have, how many have even seen the memos in question and done any thinking on their own about what they rather seem to look like—let alone looked at the LGF/Power Line/INDC Journal images to see the evidence of their own eyes? Any of them?
Either they're ignoring material evidence or they're unable to interpret it in a professional manner. Does that make them incompetent, or outright liars? It's got to be one of the two.
They're trying to shift the discussion onto being some kind of "witch-hunt" where sinister conservative bloggers are given "marching orders" (I love how often that term comes up) by some "Buckhead" guy at The Free Republic (Karl Rove in disguise, perhaps?) to go forth and whip up a media frenzy over pointless little inanities of fonts and kerning and such, gnawing on it tenaciously until we have the precious, precious blood of our lifelong foe Dan Rather.
To me, though, and to LGF's readers and most of the sane sector of the blogosphere, it looks instead like there's a big ugly FACT sitting right here on our front lawn like the biggest dog turd you've ever seen, and Dan Rather's standing there smirking with his huge slobbery Great Dane at his side, and he's pointing innocently at himself and going, "What? Me? You think I did something wrong here?"
Seriously, it does not get much more cut-and-dried than this here. And yet it's apparently a sign of the times that even that isn't enough to generate a case any more conclusive than the O.J. trial. Now we have Rather retiring among accolades and retrospectives and sniffly defense editorials, rather than with the disgraced discretion anyone of his credentials should have the decency to assume after being so closely associated with such a scandal. Either Rather is incompetent or lying—or he's totally surrounded by assistants and deputies who are incompetent or lying, which is hardly any better.
That's what I don't get about this, and why I feel compelled to weigh in for what I hope is one last time (it's okay, Tim Goodman): this should be an open-and-shut case, where not just the evidence itself but plain common sense tells us a more unequivocal story than just about any since Watergate or Monicagate. And yet not only is there no real contrition among the affected parties for what happened, there's not even any consensus. It's like we've got a team of philosopher-poets all crouching around that big steaming pile on the lawn, all rubbing their chins and trying to come up with as many possible explanations as they can, some plausible and some not, for what else but what it looks like it might possibly be.
I'd love to put it behind us. It's a disgrace to all of us for it to have happened in our news media at all. But we can't do so if the way this incident goes into the history books is as a mean-spirited, blown-out-of-proportion smear job by a bunch of paid partisan hacks against an honorable and honest newsman at the end of his career. That's a grave insult to the very concepts of civil rational discourse, honest and well-researched news reporting, and careful scientific analysis, the very things we're supposed to be trying to have more of in this country. ...Right?
UPDATE: And now that Dan's history, it's on to more fertile territory, in which a new and potentially embarrassing account of Saddam's capture is debunked in detail by the technically savvy and first-handedly familiar before the news media even have time to put together their front-page treatments of it. SomethingAwful is mentioned.
UPDATE: Oh yes—and as Steve W. mentions, couldn't Rather have saved himself hundreds of thousands of dollars by simply firing up Word on his own computer (assuming he has such a device) and trying to reproduce the Killian documents on his own? If he has any conversance whatsoever with the basic modern tools of journalism, that little experiment ought to tell him all he ever needed to know.
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| Tuesday, March 8, 2005 |
16:34 - Frabjous Day
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It should be noted that Google Maps works with Safari now.
And there was much rejoicing. (Are we still allowed to say that, like 1990's college freshmen?)
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14:21 - With great power comes great responsibility
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1110304808.shtml
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So, it seems, goes the thinking that underlies actions like the "several dozen European victims of Asia's tsunami disaster" who have decided to sue the Thai government, the French hotel chain Sofitel, and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for criminal negligence in not being all-powerful—for not, in effect, preventing the tsunami.
It's not just that "there's money on the table", as with the case of these lawsuits against the iPod and iTunes Music Store for using technologies widely in use across a whole spectrum of devices and services—technically everyone from Microsoft to Creative to Napster should be targets too, but it's just that Apple is the big fish, and so they're the ones getting sued. No, in this case it appears to be something subtly more insidious: it's the belief that now that the U.S. is the world's most conspicuous superpower, it ought to be expected to behave as though it had superpowers. It's like, "Okay, you Americans: you want to act like you own the place? Fine, then—you get to take the blame for anything that goes wrong, even things that aren't remotely your fault. Even things that you do more to remedy after the fact than anyone else on the planet. Because, you see, anything that goes wrong, no matter how well you clean it up afterwards, still went wrong—and thus is your responsibility. You wanted this role, you get everything that comes with it. Including the most unreasonable demands ever made in an acolyte's desperate prayer. You're God now, so you'd better act the part."
To some, I'm sure, it must seem like the height of hubris for a country in the position of the U.S. to have sole superpower status—in other words, to refuse to voluntarily give up power until it's coequal with everyone else, whatever sense that would make—and yet to decline to be held responsible for Acts of God. (After all, we should be in the position to prevent Acts of God, shouldn't we?) If we're the world's policeman, we have to be the world's caretaker too, goes the logic. Seasoned as it is with sour grapes.
I'm reminded of a Star Trek: TNG episode, a particularly tedious one (though probably through no fault of its own) in which Clarke's hoary old "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" witticism is played to the hilt: "The Picard" is charged with the unenviable task of explaining to a preindustrial, hut-dwelling race that his starships and transporters are merely the historical expansion of bows and arrows, not superhuman magic. Of course, he can't get through to them that he doesn't possess the power to defeat death and is not there to pass moral judgment on them; they end up placing both the plaudits due a god, and the demands for favorable weather and restoration of loved ones' lives expected from one, at his feet.
Of course the episode ends with wisdom having been dispensed and understanding sown—but the Prime Directive has to hold sway, and The Picard refuses to be held responsible for bringing either supernatural good or supernatural evil to the planet; the price is that the Federation will keep its distance and not be seen. A god can't be seen, or else he's bound to be held responsible for anything that happens, regardless of how much in his power it is to affect it one way or the other.
So we're being tested, here on post-Cold-War Earth. Can America play a realistic role on the world stage—where we keep order and provide plenty and comfort where it's in our power to do so, and yet where it's acknowledged where our powers and responsibilities end? Or do we have to accept the mantle of omnipotence, with all that implies, through the very decision of refusing to withdraw from world affairs altogether?
As Michael Demmons, who comments on this story, says:
I'm a Canadian who has lived here for nearly 5.5 years. I really don't know how Americans put up with constantly being blamed for, well, everything.
I guess it comes with the territory.
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| Friday, March 4, 2005 |
21:30 - Redundancy of the day
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Seen in the checkout line:
"Gambling for Dummies"
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| Wednesday, March 2, 2005 |
11:54 - Keep the dream alive
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110006362
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Via Instapundit and transcribed by James Taranto, a fly-on-the-wall moment where the horror of the realization that maybe there might be some good in the world coming of the Bush Doctrine creeps out, manifested through Jon Stewart's ever-increasing cognitive dissonance at seeing everything he's fought so hard against having such positive consequences for the world.
Soderberg: The truth always helps in these things, I have to say. But I think that there is also going on in the Middle East peace process--they may well have a chance to do a historic deal with the Palestinians and the Israelis. These guys could really pull off a whole--
Stewart: This could be unbelievable!
Soderberg:---series of Nobel Peace Prizes here, which--it may well work. I think that, um, it's--
Stewart: [buries head in hands] Oh my God! [audience laughter] He's got, you know, here's--
Soderberg: It's scary for Democrats, I have to say.
Stewart: He's gonna be a great--pretty soon, Republicans are gonna be like, "Reagan was nothing compared to this guy." Like, my kid's gonna go to a high school named after him, I just know it.
Soderberg: Well, there's still Iran and North Korea, don't forget. There's hope for the rest of us.
Stewart: [crossing fingers] Iran and North Korea, that's true, that is true [audience laughter]. No, it's--it is--I absolutely agree with you, this is--this is the most difficult thing for me to--because, I think, I don't care for the tactics, I don't care for this, the weird arrogance, the setting up. But I gotta say, I haven't seen results like this ever in that region.
Soderberg: Well wait. It hasn't actually gotten very far. I mean, we've had--
Stewart: Oh, I'm shallow! I'm very shallow!
Soderberg: There's always hope that this might not work. No, but I think, um, it's--you know, you have changes going on in Egypt; Saudi Arabia finally had a few votes, although women couldn't participate. What's going on here in--you know, Syria's been living in the 1960s since the 1960s--it's, part of this is--
Stewart: You mean free love and that kind of stuff? [audience laughter] Like, free love, drugs?
Soderberg: If you're a terrorist, yeah.
Stewart: They are Baathists, are they--it looks like, I gotta say, it's almost like we're not going to have to invade Iran and Syria. They're gonna invade themselves at a certain point, no? Or is that completely naive?
Soderberg: I think it's moving in the right direction. I'll have to give them credit for that. We'll see.
But there's "always hope that this might not work". Just as some have held that a KFC outlet in Baghdad would be a far worse fate for Iraqis than a lifetime under Saddam, for some people—even aides to President Clinton, such as this Nancy Soderberg—find it far more important to ensure that Bush and the Republicans don't get credit for any positive change in the world than for that change to happen in the first place. Better the Middle East status quo should endure for another eight years than have Iraqis and Lebanese SMS'ing each other "Thank You George W. Bush" messages.
As Soderberg also says: "As a Democrat, you don't want anything nice to happen to the Republicans, and you don't want them to have progress. But as an American, you hope good things would happen." It speaks volumes right there that these two goals, these two identities, should be at odds, doesn't it?
Right now the big thing that MoveOn.org is gearing itself up for is the defense against Bush's Social Security renovation. They're soliciting Flash ads bolstered by talent from John Cusack, Aaron McGruder, and other luminaries, with the goal of preventing Bush's plans for partial Social Security privatization from becoming reality. This is an issue I have no strong opinions on; I stand to be convinced either way. I don't know a whole lot of facts on the subject. But I do know a few bits of trivia that seem to be getting covered up and kept out of the public discourse on the matter:
FDR never intended Social Security to be a mandatory federal program for perpetuity; he explicitly stated that he intended it to be privatized over a gradual process (or maybe he didn't—but there's plenty of debate over what he meant Social Security to be);
Bush's plan is entirely voluntary—you can continue to put your money into Social Security if you'd rather trust it than the stock and bond markets;
Politicians on both sides of the aisle have been direly warning us of the imminent doom of Social Security for decades now; I spent my high school years listening to earnest adults telling me solemnly to make sure to save money in private accounts—just stick $1000 in a savings account at age 18, they said, and let the compound interest accrue—because there would be no money to pay for my retirement if all we relied on was Social Security; and as far as I know, nothing has changed to make that less true in recent years;
"Safe until 2038" is not a very reassuring thing for the Democrats to be saying. I don't consider 30 years to be sufficiently long-term for any program that has an effect on my life—it's barely sufficient to hope that UNIX timestamps will be retrofitted by that time.
So given these pieces of information, what exactly is the genesis of this reluctance to make a few changes in the interest of greater flexibility and freedom with our money? The college kids rallying behind Michael Moore must understand that they'll be retiring at just about the date that Social Security is being projected—by their own statistics—to run out its guarantee of solvency. Can't they see that it's in their interests to do something? It must go against their very nature, too: what college-campus mob ever rallied around banners saying EVERYTHING'S OKAY and KEEP THE STATUS QUO? It's ridiculous. It's like a bumper sticker Principal Skinner would have on his car.
What it comes down to, apparently, is simply that it's something Bush is in favor of, so automatically it's something that must be opposed. The worst outcome ever, of course, would be if Bush were to fix Social Security—and then get the credit for it. Better to ride a sinking ship down into the deep than to be rescued by a boat with an elephant printed on the side.
It's all the harder to escape this conclusion when we've got Howard Dean showing his dedication to pluralism by kicking off his stint as head of the DNC saying "I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for." Really, Howard? Everything?
I've seen this kind of reactionaryism in several places before, but nowhere so vividly as in Muslim victims of bombs or earthquakes or tsunamis refusing to be rescued by Israelis.
That isn't what the Democrats have become, is it?
UPDATE: Not if people like this are as capable of putting dedication to the greater good above party purity. Guys, nobody's going to laugh at you if you say you were wrong. Here's a little secret: it'll make people respect you more.
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09:41 - Yahoo turns ten
http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/yahoo_birthday/
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It's the big one-oh for the oldest websites out there these days; and Yahoo is celebrating by buying everyone ice cream cones at Baskin-Robbins.
And look what they used to look like...
And Flash can be used for good, it seems...
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Brian Tiemann
