Jay Rosen writes about the Nine Stories of The New Campaign.#

The Dean campaign, most agree, is the most different, taking the biggest departures from the standard model. This is primarily visible in the influence of the Internet on his entire candidacy, but the influence of the Net is not confined to the Net anymore. That's a big story, most of which has not been filled in.

Here are nine threads in a revised public narrative. Anyone can follow them to find vital stories that show us there is something happening in presidential politics, but not in the pattern we had grown to expect. And I do mean anyone willing to do such reporting, whether the title is citizen, student, weblogger, journalist, writer, linker, amateur, pro...

Each of his nine stories seems to take a new aspect of the campaigns and show how that aspect is different than the old system and leads to new requirements on the people that must populate a campaign - or that a campaign must grow from.

The moral here is that when the floodgates are let open it may be a bit difficult at first to get things done because it is so different, but then it becomes clear that when you have (and need) many more people doing something it means a higher quality politics. Because, being that politics is about people - the more people who are involved in something the more honest and true to democracy it CAN be.

(Insert disclaimer about what happens when people seek to get together and form a nice new echo chamber where they can plot against others and form new, more grotesque lies about the opposite side.)

The line on the story is - people out there are being part of the new system not because the system is necessarily getting larger, but because it is getting more open and willing to accept those who desire a voice.

Look at the Berkman Thursday's Wiki page before tonight.#

Alex Tabarrok wonders if professors are obsolete.#

We economics professors like to point out - or at least I do - that downsizing is a good thing. Aren't you glad that blacksmiths were downsized because of the automobile? But we don't like it when this argument is turned on us. Steve Pearlstein writes:

Every year... there are thousands of college professors who twice or three times a week offer what is largely the same basic lecture course in a subject like molecular biology or Shakespeare comedies. A few of these professors offer the kind of brilliant lectures that fill auditoriums and provide the kind of educational experience that students remember all their lives. Many of the rest offer something that ranges from mediocre to awful....why don't we identify these extraordinary lecturers, put their lectures on CDs, and sell them to universities that could supplement them with faculty-led tutorials or discussions?

Pearlstein points out that Mark Taylor, a Williams College philosophy professor, and Herb Allen, a Wall Street financier, tried to do just this at Williams College but not surprisingly the faculty resisted and vehemently voted the idea down.

Real Live Preacher posts part six.#

John Palfrey announces a new discussion.#

Are citizens really re-engaged in the political process? And if so, what would a president elected by a citizen-powered groundswell do once elected to govern in a manner consistent with how s/he was elected? Participate in a discussion ongoing here; it's free and experimental and it's only going to work if lots of us dig in. You'll just have to sign up with a simple form, join the project called "Internet and Society" and reply to the question posted by Jim Moore and Kelly Nuxoll. (We at the Berkman Center don't support any candidate, but we do support citizen engagement in the political process using Internet technologies.)

Jim Moore writes about it as well...

The question speaks for itself (I hope--Kelly Nuxoll and I wrote it), but here is something to mull over:

Perhaps Howard Dean is not running for the same presidency as George Bush. That is, perhaps in an era of online communication, combined with grassroots community organizing, we need a new form of presidency that itself encourages more peer-to-peer problem solving across our society. Perhaps we need a movement to reverse the consolidation of presidential and legislative and judicial power at the center, because this consolidation of power makes it harder for the society to solve its most critical problems.

Amy Skurt posts some amazing pictures.#

Ms. Lauren tells a funny story from middle school.#

In my seventh grade biology class, my lab partner was a boy who was rumored to like me. The rumor was that he was going to ask me to be his girlfriend at the next Friday night football game. He was the basketball and football team captain and very, very cute in my adolescent eyes.

I had a bad cold one day, on the day that we were playing a biology Jeapordy game before a test. Being the competitive whore that I am, I was raising my hand for every question even if I didn't know the answer.

[...Don't you wish you knew...]

Mortifying moments won't ruin you for life, and become funny stories when you're old and want to make fun of yourself on other people's blogs.

Adam Yoshida links to Peggy Noonan who reports that the Pope backs up "The Passion."#

Here's some happy news this Christmas season, an unexpected gift for those who have seen and admired Mel Gibson's controversial movie, "The Passion," and wish to support it. The film has a new admirer, and he is a person of some influence. He is in fact the head of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.

Pope John Paul II saw the movie the weekend before last, in the Vatican, apparently in his private rooms, on a television, with a DVD, and accompanied by his closest friend, Msgr. Stanislaw Dziwisz. Afterwards and with an eloquent economy John Paul shared with Msgr. Dziwisz his verdict. Dziwisz, the following Monday, shared John Paul's five-word response with the co-producer of The Passion, Steve McEveety.

This is what the pope said: "It is as it was."

Adam Yoshida has some nice rumour milling about illegal donations to the Dean campaign.#

There's an interesting question which needs to be answered. What percentage of the money which has come to the Presidential campaign of Howard Dean via the internet illegally comes from overseas? I have no idea of what the answer to that question is, but an examination of the safeguards put in place by the Dean campaign, combined with the massive interest in the campaign overseas and evidence of open solicitation of information overseas points towards a single answer: a lot. Probably tens of thousands of dollars. Perhaps hundreds of thousands. Maybe even millions. I don't know: but we need to know.

Now, I realize that the Dean campaign will insist that there are 'safeguards' in place against foreign donations, and so there are. Before you can donate you must check off several boxes agreeing that you are a US Citizen or Permanent Resident, that you are over the age of eighteen, and several other things. But: they're just boxes, and I don't imagine that people in foreign nations committing offences under election laws who are resident in foreign nations are very likely to ever be criminally charged. [...]

Some people might scoff and say, "$200? What does that matter?" Well, as Dr. Dean himself has reminded us, if one million people give $200 each, that's two hundred million dollars: enough to run an entire campaign. Forgetting that: if just 10,000 people were to give $200, that's $2 million. Is there anyone here who believes that there aren't more than 10,000 committed European leftists willing to put up $200 to help defeat President Bush?

A new conversation between Bush and Kim Jong the Illmatic.#

Hope quotes Philosoraptor on the capture of Saddam.#

I look at the pictures of Saddam, and, despite intense and long-standing hatred for the man, I am not joyful. What I think about is how easily we were railroaded into a war, and how easy it was to synthesize a made-for-teevee War Chief and to call forth groundless adulation from the populace. I think about how easy it was to lie about even the most important and obvious facts. I think about the hard right, frothing at the mouth and marching in lockstep behind their front man, waving the flag, howling about freedom and justice, half-joking about laying some violence down on those who are insufficiently frothy. I think about the house in my town that was burned down because it had an anti-war sign on it. I think about how the rest of the right puts up with this in silence, and perhaps even with some approval. I think about the fact that in the past, those of us who so much as suggested withdrawing American support from Saddam were met with equally frothy denunciations. [...]

So no, I'm actually not in ecstasy about Saddam's capture. It's not that I don't despise the guy, and it's not that I don't recognize how wonderful it is that he's history. It's just that America lost so much in getting here that it's hard to take excessive joy in it. And one real tragedy here is that we didn't even give up a lot to get Saddam—we simply lost things, apparently without any real consciousness that we were losing them. We didn't nobly decide to make sacrifices in order to do what is right and bring down the tyrant. Rather, we were tricked into doing it for craven reasons. Because we were stupid and uninformed, and because we were easily frightened and overly deferential to authority, we allowed ourselves to be talked into going to war.

Brad Edmonds writes about how to abolish government.#

Libertarian commentators often discuss the reasons government doesn't function as advertised. There are so many things wrong with government, and so many examples to point to, that documenting peccadilloes is easy. We take some heat, then, for failing to suggest solutions. Much of that heat is a little misguided, as we mention the final solution frequently: Privatize everything, from education to roads. Additionally, we writers often make the mistake of assuming readers know what we're thinking; it is often the case that identifying a problem identifies the solution, but not everyone is on the same page — most folks (us writers included) don't always realize how many solutions are already available. For that reason, in recent articles I've linked some resources that have good bibliographies, and that refer to concrete, current instances of private successes.

Going another step, I gather that the real problem is how to get from here to there: How to implement the solutions we suggest in the face of government opposition; how to reach the eventual (peaceful!) abolition of government.

Llewwllyn Rockwell on the Vatican's comments on Saddam.#

Compassion for Saddam? Imagine that, an actual human emotion applied to US foreign policy, which is supposed to be about the cold, hard reality that the US state is good and anyone who opposes it evil. It seems that Martino has a different view. Oh how the bloggers loved this one. Instapundit blasted away, National Review attributes such crazy thoughts to the disease of anti-Americanism, and the Dynamist said she could never "respect the authority of such idiots." Clearly, we are required to believe that because the US says so, Saddam deserves nothing but derision and death, the sooner the better. If you might think that Martino has a point, you will be treated to the same level of derision, pending some more extreme solution.

The pundit class during a war is never more insufferable. Lacking guns and uniforms and a foreign foe to kill, they target the people they really hate — civilian war dissidents — as a means of advancing their pet political agenda. It is unseemly to see intellectuals using their talents toward such anti-intellectual ends as national chauvinism. But we've seen that many times in history, as the career ofHeidegger shows. Never believe that intellectuals are above it all; when the right circumstances present themselves, they are ready not only to goosestep with the best of them, but also to write the manuals and administer the prison camps for those who refuse.

Shriram Krishnamurthi releases a programming languages book.#

Kaye Trammell gets some links to all the celebrities' opinions of the Saddam Capture.#

Margaret Cho's was great...

Comedian Margaret Cho described the "spider hole" ashell on earth because it was "without high speed internet access, no ranch dressing, knowing he is missing all the great holiday parties." Even so, she takes some issue with the media portrayal of the capture & feels "it builds up Bush like Indiana DUMBF@#K Jones, and he is not."

The Marmot has some history of Our Lady of the Mongols.#

In case you were curious, St. Mary was a Byzantine princess, the illegitimate daughter of Emperor Michael VIII. At a young age, she was promised in marriage to Hulegu, a grandson of Genghis Khan who, as khan of Persia, sacked Baghdad in 1258. Anyway, she apparently took her time getting to Persia, because when she finally turned up in Tabriz, Hulegu had passed on to the great grassland in the sky. Before dying, however, Hulegu was sure to include in his will that Maria be inherited by his son Abaqa. The two were wed, and she spent 15 years as Queen of the Persian Il-Khanate until one of Abaqa's brothers assassinated her hubby in 1281. The assassin, however, very much viewed Maria is part of his rightful inheritance, so she fled back to Constantinople where her father, apparently wishing to spare his capital the fate that befell Baghdad (and Kiev, Samarkand, Herat...), tried to marry her off AGAIN to another Mongol khan. This was too much for Maria, who instead became a nun and founded The Church of Panagia Mouchliotissa in or around 1285.

I can't wait to hear what Roland Tanglao thinks about the Divine Comedy.#

Wow! What a cowinky-dink! I picked up Part 2 and 3 of the Divine Comedy (Ciardi's translation, I loved Part 1) way back in July and haven't started yet. Reading this great blog entry by Jay McCarthy is absolutely inspirational. Definitely going to try to make a serious dent in Volume 2 over the holidays.

(I'm biased towards Dorothy though, cause I love Penguin.) If I read it again, which I probably will, I will most likely try to read the native Italian seeing as I'm taking Italian classes.

The Black Saint reports on Jenny from the Block's flu.#

J. Lo with the flu is Gigli without vomit bags, an extended director's cut ofMaid in Manhattan -- only worse. For the flu forces Lopez to spend far more time with arm candy Affleck than even her most virulent detractors would wish upon her. The "actor" had canceled his scheduled tour of the nation's top strip clubs and casinos in order to cluelessly tend to Lopez in her weakened state. The stress affects not only her own psyche but also seems to cause a kind of "negative aura" within dozens of people who work for her, drink with her, love her, depend on her for their own welfare and stability because they can't find real jobs. A Lopez with the flu can, in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond as surely as a President of the United States, if he were as popular, can shake the national economy.

Right now I'm listening to De La Soul and decided to look at a review.#

"Description" is a one minute description of all the De La crew, including the cue card women, producer, and some other random people. It leads into "Me Myself And I," their most succesful single from the album (yes, the first rap single to go to #1 [I think on the R&B charts, but I'm not sure] according to the countdown guy). It's very, very good, although a bit faster than their normal style. It does have the interesting effect of making one want to bounce from side to side like they do on their videos. I really like this one, too.

"This is a Recording 4 Living In A Fulltime Era" is another dope laden track. What can I say? More dopitude. "D.A.I.S.Y. Age," my favorite track on the CD, is preceeded by the forty second "I Can Do Anything."

"Paragraph. President. President preachin about the on-tech,
Known for the new step--stop and take a bow.
Amityville. Resident. Resident supported by the speaker,
If you want to feel it in your shoe, let me show you how.
Platform. Witnesses. Witness show you to my showlab,
Hit you with my vocab--hope you have a spoon."

I don't JUST listen to Mandy.

Jason Lefkowitz posts about Dick Morris' interview with Christopher Lydon.#

I listened to Chris Lydon's interview with Dick Morris a couple of days ago. If you haven't gotten into Lydon yet, you should; he's a great interviewer, and he has talked to a wide range of the most interesting people in the netroots/social software world. However, his chat with Morris is less a window into the mind of a visionary than it is a view into the mind of a dinosaur -- trapped in a tar pit and too dumb to even know he's sinking.

[...]

Dean's people have used the Net to tie those half million people together into a connected force that is unlike any other that we've seen in American politics. (Listen to Lydon's interview with Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi to see how.) That's a very different thing than just pushing "We're great, vote for us" messages down the pipe at people. Half a million truly engaged people are far more valuable than twenty million people who grudgingly consent to listen to you yammer on in an endless one-way spiel about how fantastic your guy is.

This, then, is the tar pit that Morris is stuck in. He makes the by-now-beyond-cliche Dean/McGovern comparison, but fails to recognize the key distinction that this time is different because the terrain has shifted. McGovern had to fight his campaign in a world where everybody got the news from one of three channels and where Walter Cronkite could end his newscast by saying, without irony, "And that's the way it was." Could you imagine Tom Brokaw posing today as such an omniscient arbiter of Truth? Aaron Brown? Bill O'Reilly?

Christian Vidmar wonders how many channels the blogosphere aggregates.#

Added Dave Shea's wonderful "Mezzoblue" to my subscriptions list, and this makes 100 RSS channels in my aggregator. This seems my number, enough to always have something to read and not too many when I can't read for a whole day or two, though I know I won't be able to aggregate more. So even if it sounds unfair I'll have to start cutting from the list when I found other must-reads like Dave's. I'm curious: how many channels do *you* aggregate?

964. Word.

Michael Williams says that we shouldn't worry about the obesity "epidemic".#

For thousands of years the prime struggle of humanity was to kill enough food to feed your family. Thanks to technology, we're past that, and the genes that once served us so well are starting to fall into disrepute. Our bodies don't need to use calories so efficiently, and storing fat for later no longer yields a useful survival advantage -- in fact, it may make you less able to survive. The solution isn't to force people to eat better and exercise more if they don't want to, the solution is to wait.

Within a few generations the fattest genes will be weeded out of the population as fat people die earlier and have fewer children. The problem -- with respect to the human population as a whole -- is self-correcting. Those of us born with less efficient metabolisms will have more kids and pass our genes on, and in a few hundred years humans may all require the 4000 calories a day we Americans love to shovel down our gullets.

Virginia Postrel on Christianity and morals.#

Here's the latest example of moral leadership from the Catholic hierarchy. My sympathies to those who feel bound by faith to respect the authority of such idiots.

To make sure I offend both major branches of Christianity, I'd suggest that Protestants consider the implications of their doctrines of moral equivalence--"we're all sinners," equally in need of salvation, equally offensive to God, equally incapable of righteousness--in the face of evil like Saddam's.

Strange Women Lying in Ponds quotes David Brooks on the difference between Bush and Dean's politics.#

At first, the Bush worldview seems far more airy-fairy and idealistic. The man talks about God, and good versus evil. But in reality, Dean is the more idealistic and naïve one. Bush at least recognizes the existence of intellectual and cultural conflict. He acknowledges that different value systems are incompatible.

Strange Women Lying in Ponds discusses Zeyad thoughts about seeing Saddam in the hands of Americans.#

The images were shocking. I couldn't make myself believe this was the same Saddam that slaughtered hundreds of thousands and plundered my country's wealth for decades. The humiliation I experienced was not out of nationalistic pride or Islamic notions of superiority or anything like that as some readers suggested. It was out of a feeling of impotence and helplessness. This was just one old disturbed man yet the whole country couldn't dispose of him. We needed a superpower from the other side of the ocean to come here and 'get him' for us.

I think that what Zeyad is describing, and perhaps what other Iraqis in the article are feeling, is that here was a man who had terrorized them for decades, who had set himself up as being practically a god over their lives. And yet here he was now, being examined by a foreign doctor, having been captured by a foreign army, and looking like a normal man, albeit one who needed a bath and a shave. The shame is probably rooted in a feeling of having been deceived all those years -- If this is all there was to him, why did we let him do this to us?

Drew writes about a Windows experience.#

I'll be the first person to admit that Linux is a nightmare to install. It's fiddly and unintuitive and easy to make mistakes that you can't back out of. The distros with easy installers are typically aimed at those running workstations rather than servers. The server distros assume you pretty much know what you're doing, which is understandable but unhelpful if you're generally clued up but inexperienced. But once it's installed it justs runs and runs and runs. Windows is easy to install and configure. Windows is also hateful, and will waste you more hours than you'd care to count. Windows is a bitch — and then it dies.

Ben Adida writes about the French and the echo chamber.#

Saddam has been captured.

From this, writers like Glenn Reynolds quote and infer that "Jacques Chirac is probably worried sick over what Saddam will say if he decides to talk." Is Donald Rumsfeld worried sick, too, given that he visited and supported Hussein in the early 1980s in the Iran/Iraq war? And after beating up the French for not supporting the US, barely a peep out of Instapundit concerning the fact that France just forgave 2/3 of the Iraqi debt, and that's after being barred from competing to rebuild Iraq. Oh yes, my bad, a peep, but one that implies that the French are finally complying now that the US has showns its strength. And not a peep about the pro-Saddam demonstrations and violence in Iraq today.

[...]

In a world of millions of blogs and instant access to all sorts of viewpoints, you'd think people would have more trouble remaining sheltered and confined to their skewed view of the world. Is the Internet really improving information flow on a general basis, or merely increasing flow between already like-minded folks, thereby creating even more extreme viewpoints?

Metafilter links to a PETA protest plan.#

The fliers include a color drawing of a woman plunging a large bloody knife into the belly of a terrified rabbit. The fliers urge kids to ``ask your mommy how many dead animals she killed to make her fur clothes.

``And the sooner she stops wearing fur, the sooner the animals will be safe. Until then, keep your doggie or kitty friends away from mommy - she's an animal killer.''

Brookline child psychologist Dr. Carolyn Newberger called the tactics ``terribly dangerous to children.''

``It's using children in the worst possible way,'' she said. ``If (the activists) want to legitimately work to protect animals from destruction for fashion, they have every right to. But to do so by targeting children and making them feel their mothers are murderers is absolutely unconscionable.''

The bolded line really bugs me. It is not a matter of "feeling" that their mothers are murders. They ARE murderers. There are no two ways about it. What is being done is making sure they know that they are murders and encouraging them to actually think about it.

Metafilter links to What A Crappy Present.#

"I got that on the computer like two months ago."

Kids today are so good at downloading music from the internet that most of them already have all the music they like on their computer, or if they don't have it yet they can get it in 10 minutes. And remember: if your family turns off "sharing" downloading songs is 100% safe..

Carlos Perez links to "The 8 Laws of Software Evolution."#

1. Continuing Change - A system must be continually adapted else they become progressively less satisfactory in use.

2. Increasing Complexity - As a system is evolved its complexity increases unless work is done to maintain or reduce it.

Lawrence Lessig writes about John Edwards' book, Four Trials.#

Contributors are not the sort who need to read this book. Skeptics are. And if you're going to find a way into the hearts of the skeptics, you need to find a different path than all the traditional ways. Dean found that with the strength of a message ramified through the passion of the web. Edwards needs to find that for his story too.

Cory Doctorow found a way to get his book bought -- by making it easy for people to try it, by making it free for them to download. His aim was to sell more books, not to run for president, and he succeeded in selling more books. So you'd think those running for president might find his lesson interesting. Yet this careful campaign can't even try this tiny innovation. And hence the story and the character of this candidate remains obscure.

Politics is rightly governed by the inverse of the Smuckers principle ("With a name like Smuckers, it's just got to be good!"): The inverse principle goes something like this: "Anyone as smooth and good looking as he has just got to be fake." But the key with both is to get people to taste. And this campaign has got to find a way to get more to taste — at least if this candidate is going to reach this summit this time.

RPGamer has Final Fantasy XII information.#

New Screenshots and Magazine scans.

Famitsu gives some details of the game,

In addition, the development team, led by Yasumi Matsuno, was advised by the teams that worked on Final Fantasy X andFinal Fantasy XI. Therefore, many of the same development techniques used in those games will be applied to the making ofFinal Fantasy XII as well. As seen in Final Fantasy XI, the equipped weapon of each character will be visible on the character's figure on the world map. One idea currently under consideration is using different kinds of letters to create different languages for the various races.

The battle system of Final Fantasy XII will be similar to the one in Final Fantasy X-2 but with some enhancements. Characters and enemies will face each other in two lines, and the screen will feature three slots, which can be filled with blue gems. The purpose of these gems was not explained.

Adina Levin is one of the few who are not pleased with Joel Spolsky's Biculturalism.#

"Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers." Uh, Joel, what about Amazon.com and Google? Linux core, custom applications. Possibly the most useful and broadly usable computer programs out there.

Joel Spolsky is usually insightful, smart, and lucid. His most recent essay, critiquing a book by Eric Raymond on The Art of Unix Programming, is dead wrong and confused.

Real Live Preacher should have been in charge of the Wright brothers project.#

Let me see if I have this straight. It cost 1.2 million dollars to build a replica of the original Wright brothers' airplane, and it didn't work?

1.2 million to copy a plane that two bicycle mechanics built in their backyard? And it doesn't fly?

[...]

Wilbur and Orville Wright, self-taught engineers, built this damn thing themselves with no corporate funding. And no one had ever built an airplane before. 1.2 million dollars and 100 years of aviation experience, and the engineering team can't make one that will fly fifty yards?

Antipixel posts a great picture of a bale of rice wrapped in its own straw.#

I wonder if rice produces just enough straw per bushel to carry itself, or whether more straw is needed or there's straw left over … perhaps enough for a pair or two of next spring's sandals?

Thomas Krannawitter writes about Liberalism and Religion.#

Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Vatican's Justice and Peace Department, said of Hussein, "I felt pity to see this man destroyed, the military looking at his teeth as if he were a cow. They could have spared us these pictures." It boggles my mind to think that educated people of faith seem more concerned with images that show Hussein looking like a rat, than the decades Hussein spent brutalizing innocent human beings.

Cardinal Martino also remarked, "Seeing [Hussein] like this, a man in his tragedy, despite all the heavy blame he bears, I had a sense of compassion for him." The inability of Cardinal Martino to see evil when confronted directly with it, is almost unbelievable. But in a world dominated by modern liberalism, the unbelievable becomes believable. I have heard that the Cardinal has a track record of being a pacifist, very pro-United Nations, and very anti-American -- in sum, very liberal.

Part of the deal is to have compassion and hope for everyone Thomas. No one IS evil, but evil can attach like a parasite to the good that is inside them.

Jim O'Connell writes about trying out yoga.#

I think I have a hard time getting into the whole idea of yoga or meditation because of the whole New-Agey-ness of it all. After all, I'm not very spiritual and I can't see myself joining an Ashram somewhere just yet. The books will tell you that they're not religious, yet they still talk about "Energy Circles" and refer a lot to their gurus. All I was looking for is a way to relax a bit, not a way to achieve "Inner Grooviness"...

It's also a very female-dominated activity. When I looked for a book at the store, they always seemed to be for pregnant women and just being over in that area of the bookshop gave me the willies. Plus, there's that whole leotard thing. ("I ain't wearin no 'tard, man...")

Jane links to a story on the BBC about Pakistani rock star investigating an Islamic ban on his music.#

The Other Guy comments:

The fundamental problem that many religions have is they lack a first principles approach to asserting the appropriateness of their followers' behaviour. This is, of course, by design. The lay people turn to the religious authorities for guidance in these matters. These authorities then turn to some form of holy scripture that is so abstract as to prove entirely useless as a reference source.

I would say that a religious text is very useful as a reference source if you can use it to prove anything, that way it's useful in every way you possibly imagine.

TOG continues...

Interpretive debate begins with a controversial decision to follow. Of course, to implement a first principles approach would remove the necessity for these authorities, because the method would prove to be far more important than the people who participate in it. So it's no wonder these clerics are doing what they are doing. To reveal their reasons for forbidding music would have several consequences, one being that the laypeople would have that much more insight into how to determine the appropriateness of their own behaviour without being instructed by authorities. This whole situation has more to do with the preservation of power than anything remotely religious. There is likely just as murky a method of choosing who these clerics are who hold a rather large amount of power over the laypeople - and I suspect these clerics would like to keep it that way.

Hmm, people in power wanting to stay in power? Who would have thought that? And why do people listen to others who want to coerce them into doing things they don't want? Isn't God and the personal conscience the only judge we have?

Yet, I suspect all of this is so ingrained in the cultural mentality that it will take a rather radical awakening of the laypeople for them to realize that religion is merely a conduit by which these clerics promote themselves to a higher caste in their society. If this does happen though, and it will, just as it did in the United States in the 1960s, expect quite a spectacle.

I like the conclusion.

John Porcaro writes that yes, scarcity is the core of business - but technology is constantly changing the rules about what is scarce.#

Of course this topic is covered in business school, since it's the basis of the "demand curve" and the foundation of Macroeconomics. But what it doesn't take into account is technology.

Land is the classic example of scarcity: once it's gone, it's gone. But what if houses could be built five to an acre because of better water and sewer systems? Of what if farms can yield three times the crops due to better pesticides and lower fertilizer costs? What if land that was once useless could be used due to better water management, better irrigation?

Technology will always progress, allowing us to do more with less--breaking the laws of scarcity. And with the rapid adoption of technology, it's happening even faster.

Jessica talks about libraries and bookstores.#

I want it on the record that I supported the librarian stereotype of someone who buys books by going out tonight and buying myself They Might Be Giants' Bed Bed Bed. I'm also honoring v's children's book theme by blogging about it. For you people who are upset that I bought books because bookstores compete with libraries for customers, don't worry: I borrowed books from two separate libraries today, too. (And in one of them, someone asked me for assistance out of several people in the corridor. I guess I really do look like a librarian, even in my snow boots and winter coat.) It is usually my practice to borrow books from libraries rather than purchasing them. Buying books has become a rare thing for me.

This is something that concerns me... I often wonder how well authors/publishers are compensated for library borrows as compared to book sales. And then there's always the problem of going to the library (in a small town) and them not having the book you want... not that your local Barnes and Nobles will have everything but Amazon certainly does. Although I think that a library is far more likely to have an out of print book, seeing as it would have already been bought.

One reason I buy most of my books is so I can give them to my kids and read them a thousand times in my old age.

Michael Feldman on the good parts of losing his job later this year.#

5. We won't have to swagger up and down the aisles once every semester as a hired goon for the Education Testing Service during administration of the Institutional TOEFL exam.

4. We won't have to touch the Mac Performa computer in our office ever again

3. No more endless and senseless meetings of the ultra-boring Faculty Committee where all we did was institute meaningless change in a deteriorating environment

2. My mother keeps telling me its time to grow up and get a real job

Jorrit Wiersma talks about his adorable daughter.#

The day before yesterday was also very cute. Silke and I were in the local mall and she saw another kid of about the same age. This is usually followed by a lot of standing still and staring. The mother of the other kid decided that it was enough and took the other kid by the hand to go to the grocer's. Silke then came to stand beside me, stared in the distance for a second and then put up her hand to me in a sort of "OK, let's see what the deal is with this hands holding business" fashion. You've got to understand that she normally doesn't want to hold hands. So we walked to the supermarket like that and then she decided that it wasn't for her after all and took back her hand.

Ted Leung talks about having kids.#

In the end, you have to want to have children, you need to recognize that to have children that you enjoy will require a very large investment of time and energy, most importantly when they are young, and you have to want to put in the time for it to be worthwhile. It's like being married. If you want to have a good, enjoyable relationship with your spouse, you have to be willing to invest the time and energy. It's the same with kids.

The Yeti links to Allah's photoshopping.#

Richard links to Barabara Kay on "Kidults," adults who refuse to grow up.#

Kidults are stalled between what used to be well-defined, continuous stages of growth. You grew up, went to school, got a job, got married. Marriage was exciting; it signified taking on an adult's responsibility and was the one sure measure of your independence and maturity. Writer Joseph Epstein recalls: "Everything in the culture of the 1950s provoked one to grow up. The ideal, in the movies and in life, was adulthood."

Even in the '70s Mary Tyler Moore, the breakthrough singleton icon ("you're going to make it after all") knew "making it" included finding Mr. Right, for whom she would happily have demoted her friendships. She yearned for marriage, realizing she was in a socially untenable stasis. She wouldn't fret today. Many brides and grooms are what used to be the young middle-aged. It's called "cross-aging," a historical first.

Richard links to Zimran Ahmed on the transformative not-power of the Internet.#

While it is certainly true that the Internet allows more special interest groups to coordinate, it is not clear how this is a good thing. Special interest groups expend resources vying for government favors that benefit them but harm society as a whole. Having more of them may mean that each group is individually weaker (which may be good) or that there are simply more pigs at the trough (which is probably bad) but special interest groups are not going to Save America, and anyone who thinks that they are has not been paying close attention to the corrosive effect that lobbying has on good governance, which is to say has not looked at the functioning of normal government at all.

The core idiocy in the entire article is the belief that somehow The People are just not being listened to, and if they were listened to then everything would be All Better, and the Internet will force people to Listen To The People. Here on planet earth, the two party system is a result of extremely careful arithmetic, which results in third party candidates hurting the party they are affiliated with by dividing their vote, and politicians respond to the demand of their local constituents who happen to be in swing districts and so need to be listened to, and the Internet will not to anything to change that.

Richard links to Bella English on the Death of Dating.#

Dr. Drew Pinsky, host of the national teen call-in show "Loveline," speaks to college students across the country on the subject of dating. He worries aloud to his audience about binge drinking followed by casual sex. Both young men and women tell him they use alcohol for "liquid courage" -- and, for the woman, to later excuse her behavior.

"I ask the women what they'd want if they could create a fantasy world that suited their needs. They immediately say, `I wish a guy would just sit down and talk to me.' The guys are like, `What, talk?' Men at that age are under the influence of an extremely powerful biology. It doesn't mean they're bad guys. They just need to understand what girls need." Hooking up, says Pinsky, is "awful for the girls, though it's politically incorrect to say that."

[...]

"There needs to be a process of evaluation," says Pinsky. "Call it dating, call it courtship. [A friend] with benefits is someone you walk over to at the end of the night. It's not a relationship. Both sexes get hurt. Someone develops feelings for the other one, usually the woman."

Linux 2.6.0 is released.#

Tim Bray talks about Insecurity by Obscurity.#

There's this big company out there whose name everyone knows. I'll just call them "Example Corp" because this is a good example of how things can go wrong. What happened was, this morning I glanced at my server logs and saw hits from http://legal.example.com/blog; puzzled, I checked it out and was challenged for my email before it would let me in. They were fine with my ordinary address, and I found myself in their legal department's internal blog, full of discussions of people suing them, reports to management, real juicy stuff. Nice Moveable Type group-blog setup; and they'd pointed to my recent bulleted-list rant, leaving a trail of crumbs back to their unprotected unmentionables. I saw that a few of the posts were by a jbloggs and Google, via a search for jbloggs@example.com, revealed that this particular Joe was their Senior Vice President and General Counsel.

Dan Wood posts a link to his Bush in 30 Seconds commercial.#

I've created something that is a little different from my "day job" of writing software. I made a "commercial" that is now available online, that I wanted to share with readers here. It's an entry in the "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest, in which people create a 30 second commercial that tries to point out the ... um ... flaws in our current Presidential Administration. I'm hoping that mine will stand out from the others out there, because the goal of my ad is not to "bash" Bush from a partisan standpoint, but instead, to give credit where credit is due to Republicans ... but point out that Bush's legacy will be far different than those of Republicans like Lincoln, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Reagan. I call it Republican Legacies. The purpose is to point out to fence-sitters, Republicans, and everybody else that this this particular President, who happens to be a Republican, is doing terrible things to our country.

Lance Arthur lists 13 Reasons You Are Not His Boyfriend.#

9. You Stink

Being a Neat Freak is one thing—preferring the stench of your own unwashed body over the clean, fresh scent of a just-showered man is quite something else. Now, I'll admit that I enjoy the occasional sweaty musk of a guy when we're... exercising together. He's all sweaty, I'm all sweaty, the salty tang, the heady perfume, it's all very nice. But when you take that up a notch like some sexual Emeril who thinks if a little is good, a whole hell of a lot of it must be a whole hell of a lot better, you're getting into filthy territory. I am not a filthy man. I do not enjoy filth. That's just me. I am sure there are other filthy guys out there for you, in fact I should think, based on your stench, that finding another one should be relatively easy in any enclosed space. Me, I like soap, shampoo and the occasional schpritz of Acqua di Parma.

Brad DeLong says "Impeach George Bush now."#

The Agonist: Senators were told Iraqi weapons could hit U.S.: .S. Sen. Bill Nelson said Monday the Bush administration last year told him and other senators that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction, but they had the means to deliver them to East Coast cities... about 75 senators got that news during a classified briefing before last October's congressional vote authorizing the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein from power...