Earlier this week I finished reading The Divine Comedy, Part 3: Paradiso by Dante Alighieri (Translated by Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds) and will write my commentary of it as I have done in the past with The Purgatorio and The Inferno.#

Some notes on the form of my notes:#

When I am quoting the commentators, I will indicate the page number where the quotation comes from. But, when I am quoting Dante I will indicate the line the quote starts and will not indicate which Canto unless it is unclear from the context of the quote.

The first thing to note is about the translation. While the other two Cantica where translated and annotated solely by Dorothy Sayers, the Paradiso is joint work. The circumstance of this was Dorothy Sayer's death after translating the first twenty cantos. She had also not yet begun the commentaries yet, but she indicated to Barbara Reynolds that she should continue work.#

In the Introduction, Barbara notes that many people do not read the Paradiso because it is so different and more difficult than the other two Cantica. Indeed, even Dorothy noted that many do not make it to the Purgatorio. And of those scholars who do it read it, many find reason to complain or misunderstand meanings are are left unsatisfied.#

Throughout the Paradiso, as you shall soon read, Dante finds himself incapable of explaining many of the things that he is seeing or things that are going on. Macaulay complains of this:

Macaulay, an ardent enthusiast for the narrative power of the poem as a whole, considered the Paradiso by no means equal to the two preceding parts, except in regard to its style. His reason for considering it "far inferior to the Hell or the Purgatory" stem from a misunderstanding of the very quality in Dante which he so much admired, namely, his narrative skill. "Among the beatified he appears," says Macaulay, "as one who has nothing in common with them -- as one who is incapable of comprehending, not only the degree, but the nature of their enjoyment." [pg. 14]

As Barbara notes, this is a misunderstanding because it ignores that the poem is about Dante on two levels: in the story he is unable to understand much in Heaven, particularly the justice of it and the pleasure, because no mortal can and he can merely look upon a reflection; but in the creation of the Paradiso it was necessary for Dante to understand these things to accurately and skillfully great a vision for the reader.

The Paradiso represents the result of the quest towards understanding and enlightenment that the creator Dante travelled through out his life. It is a road map and travel log of the various topics he wondered and visions his saw. In this travel log there is a man named Dante who cannot grasp the things he sees because he has not yet refined them.

This serves as a constant reminder that the pleasures of Heaven are beyond the imagination of the living and no matter where you are, you are merely at the doorstep of understanding God.

As you may recall, Dante's previous guide, Virgil, left him at the end of the Purgatorio atop the Earthly Paradise (The Garden of Eden) and Dante's love, Beatrice, has replaced him.#

Barbara comments on the choice of Beatrice and what she symbolizes...

When Dante and his poem venture, as best they may, into the world of Reality, his guide is Beatrice, who represents his own personal experience of the immanence of the Creator in the creature. In her he had seen, in those moments of revelation which he describes in the Vita Nuova, the eternal Beauty shining through the created beauty, the reality of Beatrice as God knew her. [pg. 16]

Here Barbara refers to Heaven has the "world of Reality" because in Heaven, as you move closer and closer to God in terms of understanding and Love, you begin to see things the way God sees them. This is the true Reality of the world, because truth only exists in the eye of God.

What Beatrice signifies for Dante is when something is so pure and filled with Beauty that the vision of God is momentarily imparted upon you as you look at it. People often speak of the reason they believe in God or they talk about a scene or circumstance that made them love the world: the brilliant sunrise, a mountaintop, the face of loved one, etc.

These are instances when a glimpse at the immeasurable Love God has for all his creations is shown to us. These images bring us closer to understanding God, and thus increase our ability to appreciate future scenes. To bring in the last topic, Dante the character's confusion, why the Graceful love and honour somethings can be confusing because only they see them as God does.

On the nature of the earthly passions and the passions of those in Paradise is some interesting discourse and notes.#

In Heaven, the emotion of wrath is experience with an utter detachment from all sense of guilt. In this the saints display an attitude that is in keeping with Catholic Christianity, which must always simultaneously affirm and deny the value and importance of the things of this world, being at once concerned with them and wholly detached from them. When loved in themselves and for the sake of the self they are, however intrinsically innocent, pomps and vanities, pitfalls and impediments, "falso piacer", the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes, the Siren who is the false Beatrice, the mere projection of the ego upon the surface of the phenomena. But when they are loved for God's sake, because He makes and loves them, they are vehicles of His glory and sacraments of Himself, the teeth by which love grips the soul, [pg. 28]

This is important to me for two reasons: it represents why symbols and the world we see with our eyes is important; and, it shows why there can be no Spiritual Authority other than God and his echoes in your conscience.

Why the material world is important. As revealed in a smaller form earlier with the reasoning behind Beatrice's symbolism and here expanded in more general form, the material world can serve as a tool to better understand God. All things are a reflection of the Divine Light by an elaborate system of mirrors--as you will learn later in the Paradiso--and as a result of this the image of God is everywhere.

There are windows and mirrors in every glimpse or glance we take at anything. The problem is when rather than looking at the reflection of God--the true means of better mentally grasping God on Earth--you instead focus on the surface of reflection. When you love something for its own sake as separate from God, you love what you have created in your own mind to represent it... you love an image of yourself rather than that of God.

This is the selfishness and corruption of Love that is the core of every Sin.

There can be no Spiritual Authority other than God. The line between these two types of observation and appreciation is so thin and impossible to distinguish from the outside that it means there is no judge other than God. This is something that I will likely return to but it is the heart of my feelings toward the Scriptures and the words of Churches.

The written and spoken words of all members of Church history are signposts on the road to God. They do not define what is Good or Evil, what is Justice, because Justice is God's Will and it cannot be understood completely by a book or a bishop. The other tool at our disposal upon this quest is the moral compass of our conscience... the Knowledge of Good and Evil that was passed down through Adam.

The road is dangerous and fraught with many temptations that lead away from God and one of those temptations is to follow someone's signs rather than your own. There is no map to hold your hand at every crossway.

Burkie on Britney's latest photo shoot.#

Britney Spears has put rumours of a boob job to rest by posing in a revealing bra on the cover of a US magazine. Sources on the daring photoshoot - for Blender - insist that the 22-year-old pop princess is "all woman". Britney has been plagued in recent months by claims that she has had her breasts enhanced in an attempt to further her music career. But under the front page headline "Britney busts out", she wears a plunging, bright green bra and flashes skimpy panties. An insider said the pictures were raunchy "but everyone has come to expect that with Britney. "Wearing a bra like that, wou would be able to tell if she had work done. "She is definitely all woman."

Anne Galloway posts a New Year's revelation.#

The academic life can be strangely isolating. I work too much, and spend too much time online. Both give me a great deal of pleasure, but should be better balanced with being outside and playing and connecting with friends and loved ones. I've spent a lot of time with my sweetie recently and, after being together for six years, I am more convinced than ever that he is the one for me. I talked with one of my oldest and dearest friends the other day, and even though she lives across the country, just hearing her voice made me incredibly happy. She also sent me a William James quote that made me smile and think especially of people I care about but only have regular contact with online: "Wherever you are, its your friends who make your world." I love and need my family and friends - not only do they bring me great joy, but with them I am a greater person.

Crystal Flame is becoming a verifiable stud... and you can too!#

Each time you interact with someone you're attracted to, dedicate a few seconds of thought (not too much) to the interaction. Don't worry about extracting useful conclusions from it, just think back to the interaction, compare it to other interactions, and then get on with whatever you're doing. Occasionally you'll know for sure that someone was attracted to you — and as you think back, you might suddenly realize that an interaction you thought was friendly was actually a flirt.

Most social groups have some forum where discussion about interactions is accepted; stereotypically, girls go the bathroom and guys go the bar. Over time, each person assembles in their mind some subconscious compendium of low-key signs and probable meanings; sharing situations with others allows this to happen much more effectively, as you can air several opinions about any given situation. That's at the core of my current social interaction theory: first, interactions; second, interpretation; third, comparison.

Tim Jarrett writes about Jefferson with regards to liberty and war time.#

Contrasting notes from my reading over the holiday. I found a passage in Peterson's Jefferson that I think is pertinent to the current arguments about restrictions of liberty during wartime. Writing during his vice-presidency in the hostile Adams administration during a British war scare, concerning to the Alien and Sedition acts (which entrenched xenophobia in the law and criminalized criticism of the government), Jefferson feared that the intent of the law's framers was to trick the people into surrendering their power to the government:

The system of alarm and jealousy which has been so powerfully played off in England, has been mimicked here, not entirely without success. The most long-sighted politician could not, seven years ago, have imagined that the people of this wide-extended country could have been enveloped in such delusion, and made so much afraid of themselves and their own power, as to surrender it spontaneously to those who are manœuvring them into a form of government, the principal branches of which may be beyond their control.

Steve MacLaughlin writes about his relationship and dealing with problems.#

From working on our issues individually and together the past couple of months I've found some answers. (Though I still have many unanswered ones as well.) I realize that everyone out there is screwed up, to one degree or another. We all have our quirks, our moments, our strengths and weaknesses, and our pasts following us around. I guess that's what makes us individuals, not carbon copies.

I also know that most people never really change a lot of these behaviors. They give up. They crawl into a space in their head and shut the door. But my entire life I've fought to overcome obstacles set before me, and now that I know what those obstacles are I don't think anything can stop me. That sounds overly optimistic and naive, and I'm sure life will knock me on my ass along the way. But I have come to learn that the view from the top of the mountain isn't worth it if there is no one to share the view with.

I can only hope it's not too late.

I read for Adam Keys.#

The Binary Circumstance warns Michael Jackson not to cry wolf.#

The Santa Barbara Sheriff's Department released both audio and video tapes today that seem to indicate that Jackson was polite and did not complain during the booking proceedure.

If Jackson continues to make statements that are so obviously out of sync with evidence, he will have no credibility at all when facing the child molestation charges. People will only become more convinced that he is delusional and therefore incapable of knowing what the truth is.

Steven LaTulippe writes about the dangerous philosophy underlying the Lord of the Rings.#

America, and much of the Western world, has had a long-running conflict between two irreconcilable views of the purpose of our civilization. One group, most aptly typified by the Jacobins of French Revolutionary fame, believes that society is an idealistic pursuit of utopia. This school of thinking holds that there must be a unifying goal which must be pursued relentlessly in order to justify society's collective existence. From the Crusades to the present Iraq War, the Jacobins believe that only by throwing our bodies (not their bodies, mind you…but ours) into the maw of war for the "higher purpose" that currently enthralls them will we morally justify our existence.

The opposite pole, typified by the America First movement of 1930s fame, holds a position usually described as "conservative." This group believes that the purpose of society is to provide a framework of liberty so that the people can go about living their lives. It holds that the purpose of society is to permit the people to raise their children, work at their chosen career, and worship God with as little interference from distant authority as is possible. It is the belief in a Republic, not an Empire. It requires a military of minutemen, not centurions. It believes in "community building" at home, not "nation building" abroad.

Ogged writes about Glenn Reynolds' suggestion that the United States should not be a "neutral arbiter" between Israel and Palestine, but they should make out "enemy" (Palestine) suffer as much as possible.#

First, note Glenn's approach to foreign policy: we should make our enemies suffer. This is in the interest of...what, exactly? Not peace, certainly. Satisfying as it may be for the world's lone "hyperpower" to inflict suffering on a refugee population, it should be obvious, and not just from our experience with this conflict, but also in Northern Ireland, and the Balkans, and with the Kurds, and etc., that quelling such grievances by force is untenable in the long-run and that even decades of suppressive quiet can quickly give way to renewed violence.

Second, as I've said here before, it's just morally and historically wrong to provoke a reaction and argue that the reaction justifies the provocation. We don't need to rehearse the recriminations of the entire Israeli/Palestinian debate to see that US policy has contributed to Palestinian suffering (and the facile response that the US has also prevented some Palestinian suffering, or that the US has the power to inflict far greater suffering is no response at all). Given our burden of responsibility, acting now as if the primary responsibility rests with the weakest of the three main actors in the conflict would be false and, simply, uncivilized.

George Washington said that states do not have enemies or friends, only interests.

Jessica writes of almanacs and terrorism.#

The buzz on many blogs about librarianship surrounds a recent report by the FBI that terrorists might be using almanacs to get information to plot their next terrorist attack. Therefore, we should all be on the lookout for people with almanacs and report any suspicious activity.

As much as we should take these reports (ahem) seriously, it was difficult for me to read the Associated Press article without laughing. I couldn't help thinking that some government official looked at an almanac for the first time and realized that it contains useful information. What's next: are we supposed to put almanacs in locked cases and only let patrons borrow them with proper IDs or withdraw them from the collection? The editors of two popular almanacs quoted in the article point out that information in their publications is widely available in other sources. Let's hope the government doesn't resort to banning these useful materials out of fear that terrorists will use the information to plan their activities.

Michael Feldman writes reasons for another terrorist attack on America. (While not supporting said attack.)#

The Boy Who Cried Wolf Syndrome - If something doesn't happen soon, people are going to stop paying attention when the government raises the terrorist threat level. Many are already questioning the value of a system that just gets everybody all excited and makes them feel less, rather than more secure. If there was an attack, at least they would have a REASON to feel less secure, and to pay attention to warnings in the future.

9/11 Nostalgia - It was the worst of times, it was the best of times. America came together in those terrible days, and it was a beautiful thing. We felt proud to display the American flag for the first time since our childhood. Neighbors talked to neighbors, there was national focus and consensus, and it was clear what we had to do. Resist. Overcome. Fight back. Then we got bogged down in the details, and the Bush-Hussein family feud. Another attack would bring things back into focus.

The NASCAR Effect - Why do you think car racing is the second most popular spectator sporting event in this country? Its not because they want to see a gang of grease monkeys change a set of tires in less than 30 seconds. Its because they want to see if there is a spectacular crash and burn. Not that they actually WANT any of the drivers to get hurt, heaven forbid, but the possibility of a fiery disaster is a sure way to attract a crowd. The same is true of a terrorist attack. No one but the terrorists actually wants it to happen, but when it does, no one wants to miss it.

Richard writes about China's One Child Policy and the problems it creates.#

The One Child Policy, while fairly successful in curbing population growth both in China and the world (the policy accounts for most of the recent decline in world-wide birth rates), it has introduced significant costs to Chinese society. One is the increased "worth" of females, "worth" in terms of declining supply, and increased demand, which has meant increased kidnapping and forced prostitution. It's also meant a surplus of young men, and where do states employ surpluses of young men? Typically the army. Boys born to families are treated liked royalty (hence the term Little Emperors) because a) boys have historically been prized as babies and b) if they can only have one, that means that boys are increasingly prized.

Granted, the one child policy has meant that a lot of women who already have a child, when they become pregnant, take "vacations" to the countryside for 9 months or so. This means that some babies go accounted for (my mom asked me what happens to these unaccounted-for babies as they grow up, and it's a question I didn't have a good answer to), which means that female babies are actually undercounted in surveys. So the problem as I described above isn't as stark as it could be. My point is that the one child policy is a coercive measure which has introduced costs, such as abortions and unaccounted-for children, as well as, in some respects, the decline in the status of girls.

Population control is something that increasing concerns me. A population cannot grow for ever in a closed environment like the Earth so at some point there will be too many humans (and some think there are too many now.) So the problem is, should survival take care of it or should there be a "fair" policy? The survival solution seems very cold and elitist, because the richer countries will be able to support more children, but the carte blanche policy seems to be very unforgiving and not really fair.

I support the one that guarantees more liberty while also supporting charities that increase the education and survival opportunities offered to those of "lower" socio-economic standing.

Curt Siffert praises electability while Dr. Cline condemns it.#

Our voting system requires us to judge electability as well as issues. I can guarantee that when I compare myself to Dean, I am probably a better fit to many that will end up voting for Dean. But, it's wiser for them to vote for Dean, because he's got more of a shot of winning than I do - and people find that out by reading press articles such as the one that Dr. Cline criticizes.

Focusing on issues only is an ideal, and an honorable one. But we also have to submit to a voting system. And as soon as an idealistic person submits to a system, they have to submit to the pragmatism that that system requires. And until we have a voting system that can accurately interpret the detailed preferences of a voting population, we have to submit to the requirements of our current voting system: making coalitions before we vote. Relevant to the judgments of making effective coalitions are the data about how electable someone is.

These "politically useless" articles are actually quite useful. In this case, I agree with Dr. Cline's ideal, but in practice he is wrong.

A case of Idealists versus Pragmatists here. I happen to be very much an idealist, but I think I understand the pragmatic point of view. Although I must ask, if we recognize that the voting system is not accurate and does not let us vote for who we want--then perhaps we need a new voting system?

Why isn't that a more important issue? Because the politicians know they would not get elected in a fair system and the media knows they could not milk it for money, so neither pushes it.

Christopher Lydon writes of the blogging spirit and a vision for the next year.#

Blogging is a very American thing, as Dave likes to say. It might not seem so strange to our 19th Century champions of expressive democracy, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friend Walt Whitman, for example.

"Whitman's ideal of America," writes the poet Carl Dennis, "is a country held together not by law or custom but by a network of imaginative filaments thrown out by autonomous individuals who want to include as many people as they can in their own acts of self-definition."

Read that again, please. It is precisely the bloggers' vision.

Dennis Kucinich on the new draft of the Iraq War.#

The Army's refusal to release tens of thousands of soldiers who have completed their terms of service amounts to drafting them on the very day they fulfill their obligations. These men and women have already risked their lives. They should not have to risk them a second time through involuntary service, through being forced to stay in Iraq. This is a draft. A draft forces people to serve involuntarily. If this occupation is allowed to continue for years, as the President and other Democratic presidential candidates want, we are bound to see a more formal draft.

The Man in The Yeti Suit will soon take it off...#

The fact is I am at heart a good man with few issues. My girlfriend will vouch that I do indeed hold her up on a pedestal and follow social conventions far more than I ever put forth on the weblog. This morning I woke at 5:00, fired up the espresso maker and made her a cappuccino and an egg white omelette. While she packed, I checked out the weather in Florida and cleaned her apartment before driving her to the airport.

When I think about the future, I think of her. I use the word "together," and "we," and plan for a future where she is involved in every aspect of my life because she compels me to do so. Compel. It's a strange word. If it suggests that she asks these things of me, it is incorrect. If is suggests that I am helpless before the desire to make her life easier than it absolutely the truth. I love her. It's not hard to say.

Richard posts his "Best of 2003" list.#

Best Blogger: if you have a weblog, and you kept it updated throughout 2003, you are the blogger of the year. Seriously. This is still early days for blogging, and even if you started in 2003, you were doing what most people never heard of. It takes a lot of time and effort and, yes, courage, to do it consistently. Even if all you did was link to those stupid online quizzes, at least you put something out there.

Best Weblog: Yours. See above.

The Linux community is ridiculous. Kernel Traffic reports when someone unsubscribes from a mailing list.#

Richard Tallent comments on Teresa Hayden's review of a book about Creationism.#

The Bible is the story of God's relationship with man. Genesis 1-2, therefore, is not the story of the creation of the Universe, but rather the story of the preparation of Earth for man. The early church believed in the Day-Age theory, which holds that the "days" ("YOWM" in the Hebrew) are non-literal and that the heavenly bodies "were made visible" on the fourth day, not "were created" (both compatible with the Hebrew word "HAYAH", and the "ASAH" mentioned afterwards is a look-back). Such theories can be reconciled to a great extent with current scientific theory, and actually are a more plain interpretation of the text when considering the Hebrew context. Literal-day theories, though popular, are right up there with JFK and UFO conspiracies.

MacSlash reports The OmniGroup's OmniWeb 5 Preview is up.#

Most browsers have tabs, but OmniWeb builds on the idea of viewing multiple web pages in a single window by offering thumbnails and powerful drag and drop capabilities.

[...]

Imagine you have a lot of web pages open in your browser that you still have not viewed, but you need to restart your computer. You could bookmark all the pages and then load them all again when you next launched the browser, but that can take a lot of time and clutter up your bookmarks.

[...]

Also new to OmniWeb 5 are special 'News Feed' bookmarks for viewing XML/RSS feeds from many popular web sites right in OmniWeb's bookmarks. Now you can always be on top of the latest website headlines without having to use an external application.

Bookmarks and history are now easier to search, too, with a search field built into the bookmarks interface. You can sort them based on a number of available attributes making it easy to find just what you are looking for.

Tony Pierce writes about his truest girl.#

if i ever do get married i want that feeling from my bride. its a calming effect. its a submissive thing. its a whatever-you-want-is-coolio vibe.

she said pick me up at ten pm i said anywhere. she said LAX i said no one is allowed in. she said you can do it. save me. i saved her. she said take me to taco bell. i said baby i already have your seven layer burrito in the back seat. she said i love you. i said i love you too babydoll.

i told her she looked good. she said have you been drinking i said doesnt matter, i know a hot girl when i see one.

Tony Pierce has the best New Years resolutions.#

8. i will do at least 100 curls a week
9. i will read at least 2 pages from the bible each sunday
10. i will write a dirty novel
16. i wont make out with any more teenagers from the internet

Joi Ito on Alkaholiks Anonymous.#

I was talking on the phone today with someone trained as a professional in treating addiction. It's interesting to note that when AA was started in the 60's, it was difficult to find other people who would be supportive during the process of trying to quit drinking. There was also quite a bit of social stigma associated with recognizing an addiction and trying to deal with it. It is much more common today and with chat, email and blogs, it's easier to find people to talk to about this.

Nothing against AA and I am fascinated by it, but I think that this cross-blog support network we are creating for people who have chosen to quit drinking is really amazing and it will be interesting to see where this leads.

Kevin Drum writes about raising the minimum wage.#

This is one of the most important things we could do to help the working poor, who have seen the minimum wage fall by a third over the past three decades.

And for those who insist that raising the minimum wage would cause massive economic dislocation, I'd like to point out that Congress doubled the minimum wage in 1950 with no ill effects, and raised it to about $8/hour in present-day terms in 1968, again with no ill effects. What's more, with a few exceptions, most minimum wage jobs are in service industries, not manufacturing jobs that are susceptible to being sent overseas. Raising the minimum wage would help a lot of people at a pretty small cost. We should do it.

If you actually believe that minimum wage helps anyone, read about Why Minimum Wage Creates Unemployment, particularly from Russell Nelson:

Let's get this out of the way fast: any minimum wage law is wicked, and should be immediately abolished.

If that alone doesn't convince you, then let's get into details. A minimum wage law says, in effect, that anybody whose labor is not worth the minimum shall not be employed. Nobody would support a minimum wage law if it were written that way. The Department of Labor minimum wage page says "The FLSA requires that most employees in the United States be paid at least a minimum wage and overtime pay at time and one-half the regular rate of pay after 40 hours in a workweek."

Ryan Overbey links to Nate Paxton on authority, democracy, and religion.#

This current conflict is about that, in some small measure. In the American context, we are all Puritans, craving authority, structure, and someone to tell us what to do and how to understand our relationship to God. Even Catholics are Puritans in this respect. As a British RC theologian of my acquaintance said to me recently, it's primarily in America that we see the Roman church tearing itself apart over what the moral teachings of the church should be, as it's primarily in America where people see themselves as bound by the same. In other countries, he asserted, people just don't pay much attention to what any church has to say, which is why you find priests with mistresses or common law wives and nobody makes much fuss about said practice, as long as it isn't flaunted.

Americans, for all their talk about democracy and democratic impulse, don't really want to govern themselves fully, I think. That kind of life requires a lot of work, self-awareness, and self-sacrifice that even the best of us might have trouble with. It's even harder in the spiritual realm than it seems in the political realm. In some sense, it may be that we only have so much to give to our lives, and we are willing to cede control of some or all of what is part of us. In our religious lives, I think may of us are more willing to submit control of our own minds, moral senses, and understandings of God to external sources of authority, with positive and negative results.

(My emphasis above.)

Every time someone talks about how they don't care if their leaders listen to them or something to that effect, I wonder if they really care about their freedom. It doesn't seem to be very important to them if they have it for sale or let it be stolen.

Richard responds to Kaye Trammell and "tip" writers in general.#

If you're in it for the love of the game, and you're paying the hosting fee, then—limited of course by the long reach of copyright, libel/slander and other laws that should be limiting your speech—you get to say what you want. Earlier this year, I wrote a response to some Golden Rules of blogging (the original rules are no longer available). Basically, you can do whatever you want on your site. If you delete or substantially change something that I linked to and responded, then chances are I'll be upset about it, because if it's gone, it would look like I was engaging in a straw man argument. (Goodness knows I've done that enough without people changing what they wrote.) Do it once, and I'll think that you had a good reason to do so. Do it a couple times (you only get two strikes) and you will have lost a reader. But I don't have the right to tell you how to run something you pay for.

I applaud Kaye for her ethics in making substantial changes obvious. But by telling me that I should do with my weblog without saying how it benefits me doesn't sit well with me.

I like Richard's point: This is a marketplace of ideas and if you treat your readers poorly then you will stop having readers. So then, it seems, the best thing for a tip writer to do is to write guidelines for how to recognize a blogger who cares about their reader. And like with any type of persuasion, there should be much focus on why I think these things mean what they do.

I do, however, think that if you choose to read blogging guidelines that are not written in a "Why" style, you can often read in between the lines and use them as a framework to think about what you want blogging to be like.

Dave Winer announces the new Share Your OPML page.#

The purpose of this site is to gather a community of subscription lists, in OPML format, and aggregate them in interesting ways. Once we have enough data we will produce a Top-100 list of the most-subscribed-to feeds. But that's just the beginning, we hope.

Sappho writes about feminism and divorce, with emphasis on why there are so many divorces. (Via Ms. Lauren.)#

So I'm not entirely without sympathy for feminists' desire to preserve "no fault" divorce. But arguments by feminists, such as this one at the NOW web site, strike me as sometimes too ready to accept the divorce level that we have now. I suspect that NOW sees a potential slippery slope on the matter of waiting periods and mandatory counselling in no fault divorce. And they have some reason for their fear. But I'm not convinced that these things are inherently to be opposed. People can easily lose hope in a crisis. If a waiting period and counselling can actually save marriages, and if appropriate financial arrangements can be made that address NOW's concerns about the financial vulnerability of women, then this change might be a good thing. At any rate, even if we approach actual changes to divorce law cautiously (and I'm way of faddish and hasty moving back and forth, flawed though the current situation may be), I think that greater cultural support for preserving marriage would be a good thing, and that acknowledging that the current divorce rate may not be inevitable, and that some things (better preparation before marriage? better support for couples in at risk situations?) might be done to actually save marriages that are failing now, would be also good.

Jesse Taylor writes about competing for votes in the South.#

Competitiveness in the South is pretty much off the table for the Democratic Party in 2004, at least when it comes to the presidency. Republicans aren't maligning the inability of Bush to win Democratic treasure troves (although they're probably a bit pissed about him throwing PA to Democrats, thanks to the waffling on the steel tariffs). The key is to find someone who can make inroads into the South, and provide a platform for the national party to be competitive in 2008 for their second term, as well as in 2006 for the midterms.

Is Dean that guy? I don't know. But if we're scared of nominating someone because it means that Bush might win most of the South, then we should just fold up the tent and go home.

Ezra Klein on Mark Krikorian and list madness.#

Mark Krikorian [puts] forth this gem of comparative analysis:

Did anyone notice that while Time magazine's "Person of the Year" was "The American Soldier," the "Newsmakers of the Year" in the Canadian edition of Time were Michael Leshner and Michael Stark, the first homosexual couple to legally marry in Canada? I'm not a Canada-basher, but this does tell us something about the different paths our countries are taking, however similar they appear on the surface.

Yes Mark, I did notice that those Time honored as "People of the Year" were different than those Canada's time decided were "Newsmakers of the Year". I also noticed that the two awards were judgingdifferent things. And what does it tell us Mark? That our country is defined by war and violence while Canada is trying to extend equal rights to all their citizens? I'm not an America-hater but I know which one I'd pick.

Fabio Rojas writes about statistics and baseball, and how "Moneyball" wouldn't work for football.#

The key point is that it's easy to isolate to isolate the relationship between certain behaviors in baseball and scoring points. In football, it's a lot harder - people's actions on the football field are all interrelated, making analysis difficult. Thus, a dependable statistical analysis of football has yet to emerge.

This might be an interesting curiosity about the difference between baseball and other sports, but I think there's a broader point about competition and knowledge. The success of statistics in baseball created the opportunity for entreprenuerial behavior by some baseball managers. The introduction of statistics into baseball allowed a few team owners to impose high costs on those who refused to believe that statistics was valuable in sports. This was made possible by baseball's rules - everything centers around a few events (at bats, outs, runs) and it's easy to attribute individual performance to these events.

Jim Henley links to Kelly Torrence on "food fascists" and the American Public Health Association.#

APHA members used to worry primarily about preventing AIDS and slowing the spread of contagious diseases. Now their big concern is what you and your family eat. Politically charged talk about the so-called "epidemic" of obesity has, itself, reached epidemic proportions. Elected officials, presidential candidates, mid-level bureaucrats, and left-wing activist leaders are playing a high-profile game of leapfrog to see who can come up with the most outrageous proposals.

Busybodies are looking to control one of the most basic of human functions—eating. Presidential candidate Joe Liebermanwants the Federal Trade Commission to investigate snack-food and soft-drink marketing. New York state assemblyman Felix Ortiz promotes a draconian "Twinkie tax." At least one person who's had the Bush Administration's ear has bought into the idea that Americans are not accountable for their own weights. "Many people believe that dealing with overweight and obesity is a personal responsibility," former Surgeon General David Satcher recently said. "To some degree they are right, but it is also a community responsibility." It takes a Samoan village.

Courtney on her New Year's resolutions.#

Oh, and I hate being nagged. I should be Catholic as good as I am at guilting myself, so I'm just going to be happy if I succeed in one or two resolutions

The Black Saint reports a conversation about Jesus and Lazarus.#

Kelso: But he'd never done it before.

SER: There's that. It could have backfired horribly. You know, all Dawn of the Dead, eyes rotting in their sockets, ears falling off, "must destroy mankind!" nastiness.

Kelso: So, Lazarus was the first zombie.

SER: Technically, yes. Interestingly enough, there are some early AP photos of Lazarus after his resurrection. He has his arm around Jesus and he's giving the "thumb's up" sign. What few people know, though, is that Lazarus never died again. He's still wandering around, very annoyed. I think I bought coffee from him this morning at Astor Place.

Ed Cone writes about the Crusaders vs. Muslims subtext of The Lord of the Rings.#

Understanding fallen Arnor and beseiged Gondor as the Western and Eastern Roman Empires requires no great leap of imagination, with Minas Tirith doing a fine impersonation of Constantinople -- a white-walled citadel against the scimitar-wielding hordes to the east, who have overrun many of the old empire's provinces.

Tolkien does indulge in racial stereotypes that reinforce this clash of civilizations motif -- evil human characters tend to be darker than the good guys, and often have eyes that slant. Middle Earth's only clearly identifiable black people fight on the side of the Dark Lord, both in the books and the movie. On the other side of the battlefield, the Rohirrim are noticably Germanic, the hobbits English. Tolkien's Jews are on the side of the West.

Also, the elephants riders and archers are clearly influenced by Middle Eastern garb... at least in the movies.

Early Ed wrote about how the Dwarves are the Jews of Middle Earth.

The Dwarves of Middle Earth are bearded exiles from a beloved homeland to which they desperately wish to return. That alone makes them passable analogs for the Jews of pre-1948 European imagination, but it is just the start. The name of their lost homeland is Moria. Moriah is a hill in Jerusalem that would almost certainly have been known to a scholar of Tolkien's stature.

The Dwarves, said to be overfond of gold (in keeping with the European stereotype of Jews), mingle with the other free peoples but are always outsiders among them. They maintain their own ancient religion and their own language, which Tolkien the philologist has filled with a "kh" sound that is found also in Hebrew; I could swear I heard the Dwarvish war cry, "Baruk Khazad-dum, Khazad ai-menu" at Seder last year.

Ogged links to the words of the Apostropher who writes about "Cheapskate Republicans".#

For about a year in the late eighties, I delivered pizzas to keep my college student self properly armed with beer, cigarettes, and what have you. I've never been a poster child for clean living. Anyhow, the lamest, most insulting tips ("$19.75...Here's a twenty; keep the change.") consistently came from McMansions with Bush/Quayle-stickered BMWs in the driveway. Without fail. Every time. And so little has changed.

According to the survey of 630 drivers, [...] people with "Dean for President" bumper stickers on cars in their driveways tipped 22 percent higher than people with "Bush for President" bumper stickers.

No surprise here. Cheapskate Republicans, should there be any reading this, should heed my words and heed them well. We always remembered those addresses.

Real Live Preacher writes about his book.#

I'd like to let my blog be a journal during this month. I'll drop in every few days and tell you what's happening or just blow off steam and chat a bit. I guess I'm asking you to hang with me for the next month and listen. I know that's a lot to ask, but you do not seem like strangers to me. The online journal is a classic style of blogging. I'll just do that for a month. I think it will fun, and I think it will be helpful to me.

When the manuscript is done - HOPEFULLY by February - I'll take a deep breath and get back to posting essays here. I remain VERY committed to Real Live Preacher, the blog. I love writing in this forum. Your feedback and wonderful encouragement have helped me to believe in myself. Here, at the end of a long year of writing, I can actually say the words I've never been able to say before, though I still want to run and hide when I say them.

USA Today reports the Conservatives want Reagan to replace FDR on U.S. dimes.#

WASHINGTON (AP) — Conservative Republicans angry over an unflattering television movie about Ronald Reagan want to put his image on the dime in place of Democratic icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Democrats are just as determined to keep FDR's profile in coin purses.

"If they want to find another way to honor Ronald Reagan, I'm happy to join with them, but leave the dime alone," said Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass.

Yes... they are certainly "conserving" the old ways.

New Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research is out.#

The Onion reports that Dolphins Have Evolved Opposable Thumbs!#

HONOLULU—In an announcement with grave implications for the primacy of the species of man, marine biologists at the Hawaii Oceanographic Institute reported Monday that dolphins, or family Delphinidae, have evolved opposable thumbs on their pectoral fins.

Above: One of the evolved dolphins, whose opposable thumbs have struck fear in the hearts of humankind.

"I believe I speak for the entire human race when I say, 'Holy fuck,'" said Oceanographic Institute director Dr. James Aoki, noting that the dolphin has a cranial capacity 40 percent greater than that of humans. "That's it for us monkeys."

And this is genius...

Candidate Delighted To Be In Chair Factory

LAUREL, DE—During a campaign stop Monday, Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Gov. Howard Dean expressed great pleasure to be at a chair factory. "I can't tell you how thrilled I am to be with the fine men and women of the Laurel Chair Works on this beautiful day," Dean told the crowd of 200 employees, donning a Laurel Chair Works baseball hat given to him by factory owner Darrell Widcock. "Just as you have done for so many satisfied customers throughout Delaware, it is my hope that you can provide me with a 'seat' in the White House." Earlier in the day, Stenberg was overjoyed to be at an elementary school, a mall, a senior-citizen community center, and an Episcopalian Church.

Ben Hyde writes about sunk costs and if we should stay in Iraq.#

So one part of the challenge in thinking about the cost of finishing the project in Iraq is figuring out what the upside is. Those that lead the charge into theis enterprise hoped it would create the hub around which the entire gulf and the middle east could be reframed. That's a delightful, if hegemonic, goal. But does anyone believe that anymore? Few I think.

Lacking that clear benefit we seem reduced to more prosaic benefits. An unthreating, reasonably peaceful, and prosperous Iraq that provides a good example for others in the region - for example.

The problem with bridge building, standards creation, and other organized public goods is that it's extremely hard. Many voices have to be convinced to sing the same song. That can only happen if you have reasonably strong leadership that people respect and follow and you can demonstrate clear benefits to all parties so they expend the effort to get there.

We seem to lack all these. In particular we pissed off whatever chance we had of grabing the reins of leadership going into the project thru our arrogant behavior. Of course if you can demonstrate sufficent cost/benefit people will follow even arrogant leaders. The tough nut is that nobody in this debate is currently providing a credible story that generates substantail cost/benefit. Mostly all we get are benefits that require far too much faith coupled with a general undercurrent of denial about the costs.

Brent Simmons on the future of RSS aggregators.#

2. Synching. The idea is to synchronize not only your subscription lists but also the read/unread status of individual headlines—and to make it so it works between different apps, even apps running on different operating systems.

3. Easier subscribing. One of the problems for new users is the problem of subscribing to feeds. The "feed" URL scheme is a step forward here, because it makes it so you can subscribe to feeds directly from your browser. It also means instead of lots of ways to do this, which is inherently confusing, aggregator developers and users can collapse it down to one way. (I suspect there will be other good ideas too—especially in the realm of finding feeds.) Making all this easy for new users is a high priority.

Max Boot writes about John Shattuck and Human Rights as a Victim of Politics.#

Most memoirs of government service are written by senior cabinet members or White House aides, and their theme, implicit or explicit, is: Look how powerful I was. The Clinton administration has produced a slew of books along those lines, by the likes of George Stephanopoulos, Sidney Blumenthal, Madeleine Albright and Robert Rubin. John Shattuck, who served from 1993 to 1998 as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, has produced a different sort of memoir. Its theme is: Look how powerless I was.

Mr. Shattuck, a former American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, vice chairman of Amnesty International and vice president of Harvard, joined the State Department determined to elevate human rights to the top of the foreign policy agenda. He had every reason to expect that he would be successful, for as a candidate in 1992, Bill Clinton criticized the first Bush administration's policies from Bosnia to China as amoral. But Mr. Shattuck was disillusioned when he realized that there was no consensus within the new administration over the priority to be given to combating repression.

RPGamer has new Final Fantasy XII Screen Shots.#

Razib writes about how Islam is the new Communism.#

Today, everyone notes that Islamist parties rarely have majority support in any Islamic country (though plural majorities can be found in places like Turkey, and by evolutionary, notrevolutionary, Islamists). If you look at the history of Communism, you see that like Islam, Communist parties rarely had broad-based popular support. Rather, a hard core (the "vanguard") transformed whole societies by mobilizing from above. This explains the paradox that the success of Communist take-overs occurred in societies like China, Russia or Vietnam, rather than advanced capitalist nations as Marx had predicted, because these societies had relatively quiescent majorities.

International Communism became a great threat after it found a bastion in the Soviet Union, where Democratic-Centralism (Marxist-Leninism) harnessed Communist ideology to nationalism. The same process can be seen in China, Vietnam or North Korea. It is nationalism that acts as the true driver of Communism, not international utopianism. In nations where Communists have not taken over the society, but still have a presence, like India (and democratic success!), the movement is riven by schism.

Dave Winer wonders if you are your stories.#

My uncle, who died a few months ago, was a big story-teller. We used to joke when he'd start to tell a story that we'd heard dozens of times -- oh that's story number 278,291. In his stories, as with all our stories, he's the hero, he overcomes great odds to prevail, in a funny, lesson-learning way. Today my uncle is dead and guess what, there's nothing more to him now than his stories, and our stories about him. Do any of them have anything to do with who the true man was? See, that's really hard to say.

We seem to think there's more to a person, that you can sort of lift up the floorboard, and underneath the stories, find the soul, the essence of the person. But I'm beginning to wonder. Could it be that our purpose is to tell a story, and that the better lived a life is, the better the story that survives after you're gone?

Ryan Overbey posts new pictures. Amazing Mountain-scape. Wild Marijuana.#

Ryan Overbey writes about religious pluralism.#

Like I said, pluralism has always puzzled me. From my very unsophisticated understanding of it, there are two kinds. A weak pluralism doesn't deny normative differences- it just asks everyone to do everyone else the favor of not slaughtering their fellow men over religious differences. This seems perfectly acceptable to me- as long as we keep in mind that it requires us to all adhere to a host of normative claims. It gets very sticky when you start to establish a pluralist community- would you allow missionaries into your ideal pluralist world? Female genital mutilation? How about sex with small children? Multiple wives? From this vantage point, it looks like building a pluralist society becomes little different from building a Unitarian society. And everyone knows the old joke: "What do you get when you mix a Unitarian and a Jehovah's Witness? Someone who knocks on doors every Saturday for no particular reason."

Then there's strong pluralism, which as far as I can discern comes closer to what Nate wrote. This is the "Whether you know it or not, you're all doing the same thing" sort of pluralism. This is the kind of pluralism that uses the word "God" when discussing religions which have no discernible connection with any such concept.

He links to Kevin Kim on the same issue.

Some people are of the conviction that dialogue should be about happy blokes sitting around the table and agreeing with each other. I personally think that, if dialogue is motivated by an ethical impulse, a will to peace, then of course it's important to find and/or build bridges between traditions, cultures, worldviews. This is why I consider myself a religious pluralist-- a position arrived at through external and internal dialogue. But at the same time, dialogue can't merely be this rootless, fuzzy, New Age-y attempt at papering over differences, sacrificing what makes traditions unique because we've declared, by professorial fiat, that only the Grand Themes matter, and all else is mere detail. "Seek simplicity, then mistrust it."

Richard on The Costs of Blogging.#

This is too good: Tom Mangan says don't believe the blogging hype:

Blogging is not free. It has a cost, paid out in time spent on things that don't get done because the blogger is busy typing and linking. Every minute doing this is a minute not doing something else, whether it's tending to their kids or devising strategies for world peace.

Absolutely. Everything costs something. If what you are doing is "free", it's costing you the time that you could use to do something that will make you money. If you have a laundry business, and it takes up all your waking hours, it prevents you from having a web design business as well. By blogging, you're spending time you could be spending betting on ponies at the track, or whatever else it is you should be doing if it weren't sitting at the computer annotating links (like stopping the whining and just get a girlfriend for crying out loud).

I learn because I love it. Blogging is a way to learn and share my learning.