Frank Paynter wonders what alcohol makes good goto bad to worse to evil.#
Evil's a heavy word. Maybe "bad" will suffice; but not "good" bad, rather good old fashioned "bad" bad. yelling at people is not good. I think it is easier to raise my voice and assert my (dubious) rectitude when I'm loaded. Yelling is violent, and I think the boundaries of peaceful behavior blur, and the container dissolves in the solvent of alcohol. Many people, certainly myself included, find it easier when we drink to let go of our sense of what is good and right and slide off into behaviors that in the cold light of day we will remember as bad and wrong.
How bad does bad get before it's just plain evil?
Jon Lebkowsky on "Emergent Sobriety."#
Since I quit drinking I have more energy, more focus, and I'm confident that I can get stuff done. Am I an alcoholic? I think my drinking was out of control, though I pretended otherwise - like waiting until the end of the work day to start drinking. Obviously that's a good idea, but it's relatively meaningless if you don't control the amount you drink after 6pm, and I didn't.
Mark Schmitt writes about the role of political magazines and blogs.#
Kos's whole line of argument is actually somewhat offensive to me. The point of a magazine is not to be "on our side." I don't read a magazine to have my views reinforced (that's what I've got blogs for). I read political magazines to learn something I don't know, to hear a viewpoint well articulated that expands or challenges my own, or, above all, to read good analytical journalism, with real reporting. I have to admit, I often skim The Nation and The American Prospect, and put them aside bored because every story is, "here's another reason Bush sucks," without any significant reporting -- not that I don't think Bush sucks, but I don't need to read another rehash of it. By the same measure, The Weekly Standard can often be worth reading, while The American Spectator andNational Review are not, because they are simply cheering on the presumptions of their readers. (The American Prospect has improved recently.)
[...]
I think part of the problem here is the presumed superiority of blogs to "old media." Most blogs have a stance, and some are specifically intended to be on someone's side, particularly the zillions of Dean blogs. Blogs are great, obviously, and if one reads a lot of them, one can get a very well-rounded view of a lot of topics. [...] But there is still a place for a real political magazine, one that brings together real reporters and analytical opinion writers who cover a fairly wide range of views, with good editors and an intention to provoke and surprise. The New Republic is doing that as well as any magazine in the U.S. right now, and whether it helps or hurts Howard Dean should be the last thing the magazine or its readers think about.
Mark Schmitt describes how to read a Budget Proposal.#
All I've read so far is this story, so I don't have many specifics to go on (neither does anyone else). But as this month of strategic leaks begins, it's time for a reminder that presidential budgets are political documents -- they are not actually guides to what the government will really spend in the next fiscal year. And to understand this one as a political document, here is a brief guide to four of the basic budget gimmicks that will be in play.
[...]
Second, there will be proposed cuts that will simply never happen and everyone knows it. No one even gets that worked up when the president proposes them. This category usually comprises the largest portion of the cuts in any president's budget. Here the secret is to go after strong clients, clients so strong that no one will ever touch them. It's not clear from this first article which of the cuts fall into this category, but they will not be hard to spot in the actual budget. For example, most years presidents propose to cut Impact Aid, an education fund for school districts that have lots of federal employees or federal land exempt from local taxes. It's a wasteful program, but there are tens of thousands of Impact Aid school districts, their lobby is well-organized and relentless, and cutting it just isn't going to happen. But if you're OMB, and you need your numbers to add up today, there's no reason not to put it in. It saves a few hundred million on paper, and your job is done. Proposing to cut a defense project whose prime sponsor chairs the defense appropriations subcommittee is another good way to get some savings on paper. And the affected congressman probably doesn't even mind. It gives him a way to announce that he "saved" the project. The proposed cuts to veterans benefits mentioned in the Times probably fall in this category.
Carly, you like Howie Day right?#
Archive.org just put up a live recording from December 16th, 2003 and September 10th, 2001. (weird!)
Michael Jennings in London writes about customer service and capitalism.#
The Royal Mail has a monopoly on mail in the UK for which postage is less than £1.00. Other companies such as Federal Express can carry any packages or letters anywhere they like, but they may not charge less than that minimum amount. This is designed to protect the Royal Mail's monopoly, because it is feared (by Guardianistas at least) that without the monopoly they will not be able to maintain their universal (crappy) service throughout the UK. And of course, the Royal Mail has not been privatised (although the Major government did flirt with the idea for a while) and resistance to privatisation is high. Somehow the same Guardianistas believe that this would corrupt the Royal Mail, and it would only be concerned with profits, and that this would prevent it from providing a proper service to poor people.
Or something.
Compare this with the customer service I received from another organisation a few days earlier - in this case a private company that is only concerned with profit.
Monopolies, granted by the government, have no competition (by definition) so they do not need to worry about pleasing customers who want a product because those customers have no other choice. They just have to do the bare minimum.
Dowingba writes about the etiquette of the Internet and Blogosphere.#
Quoting: The Internet has blurred the line between referencing and plagiarizing to a ridiculous degree. It is usually considered quite a huge faux pas to quote a weblog entry in its entirety. It's a much better practice to quote a line or two or a paragraph or two, enough to get the message across so that you can commence your brilliantly witty commentary. If the referenced entry is only one or two lines anyway, the author probably won't mind if you quote the whole thing. If they are that attached to their two line essay, that's their problem. It would probably be prudent to search their page for a Creative Commons License before doing anything with their work, just to be safe. (I haven't bothered to put a License on my weblog. Do what you will, I won't sue you.)
Amanda Butler on an interesting way of organizing and dealing with Student-Faculty relationships.#
At one point not too long ago, there were eleven people (grad students and faculty) involved in relationships with each other. It may not have been a great status quo, but it worked until one night when some member of the department sent out a drunken email to all grad students and profs listing those eleven names, but not naming the pairings. The situation demanded an official response (why, I don't know). Now, if a grad student and a professor in that department wish to sleep with each other, they have to tell the chair of their intent to do so.
Paul Thurrott grades Apple's performance this year.#
Marketshare. Apple's marketshare in 2003 fell to 1.98 percent, according to IDC sales forecasts for 2003 and Apple's public statements about Mac sales. In short, Apple's marketshare has fallen, year-after-year, each year since Steve Jobs took the reins. And last year's Switch campaign? Useless. Grade: D
Mindshare. Quick: Name another company that so thoroughly dominates an industry in which it is such a minor player. Don't hurt yourself, there is no such company. Apple's marketing mistake (Switch, ahem) notwithstanding, no company gets better press than Apple. Grade: A
Tim Jarrett has the best headline for the Mars Rover Landing: "Mars: US 4, Europe 0."#
Dave Shea comments:
From an iBook on my lap, wirelessly connected to a router plugged into a cable modem connected to my service provider, wired into the internet backbone with countless hops between here and Nasa's web servers, which dish up live video feeds from inside their terminal, panning shots of live data feeds [time-shifted, of course] direct from Mars, and the only thing I could think to myself was "boy is this low quality."
One can only dream of the things we'll take for granted tomorrow.
Mark Bernstein writes about whether weblogs improve writing or not.#
Frequent writing improves writing. We've been teaching this lesson since time began: writers write. The streets of the city are full of people who wanted to write, but never could manage to do it; instilling the habit of frequent writing is the indispensable first step. Weblogs require regular updates; weblogs improve writing.
[...]
Lots of kids don't care. That's not news, or evidence. They never did, they never will. Not everyone wants to be a writer. Especially not when they're 15. Teaching is a tough racket.
Kevin Aylward links to Britney's marriage.#
The bride wore jeans and baseball cap, according to People.com, and had a hotel bellman walk her down the aisle.
People.com reported that Spears and Alexander journeyed to the Little White Wedding Chapel after a stop at the Ghostbar, a club in the Palms Casino Hotel. It reported that the chapel staff told the couple that they couldn't get married without a license, so they were reportedly taken by the limo to the Clark County Marriage Bureau office in the downtown Las Vegas courthouse. They applied for and were granted the marriage license, then driven back to the chapel, where they were married.
The Marriage License.
AKMA writes about different styles of speech making and public speaking.#
This discovery engenders some frustration, though, as I live in a non-oratorical culture; perhaps it's even ananti-oratorical culture. The friendly casualness of conversation so dominates the field of public expression that I see hardly any evidence of oratorical consciousness around me — and I live in a public-discourse-saturated setting. What has banished oratory from the agora?
Perhaps (and I'm talking through my historical hat, here, so the true rhetorical scholars should weigh in to correct me) the weight of oratory grew so burdensome that a thorough-going conversationalism served as a forceful corrective to portentous, stupefying speechifying. Perhaps a cultural shift toward celebrating vernacular expression, democratizing public expression, undermined the notion that one might ever aspire to a different pitch. Perhaps the admirable examples of conversational public speaking combined with the regrettable examples of burdensome oratory to give the impression that conversation was ipso facto preferable, and oratory oppressively artificial.
Tom McDonald links to Castro's Anniversary Party and comments.#
As the event began, television viewers were shown black-and-white film clips of the early days of the revolution, when Castro was a triumphant 32-year-old rebel commander leading his men into the eastern city of Santiago on Jan. 1, 1959.
Just hours before, then-President Fulgencio Batista fled the island for the Dominican Republic.
Castro today is the world's longest-ruling head of government — the only socialist system in the Western Hemisphere. His leadership over this Caribbean nation of 11.2 million people remains unchallenged.
Castro has ruled during the administrations of 10 different American presidents, successfully defying their attempts to force him to change his socialist system.
And Tom's comments:
Fidel Castro is celebrating his 45th year as the friendly leader of Cuba. I wonder what the record is for the longest lasting leader of a country? I know it's morbid but you have to give the guy a little credit for surviving as long as he has.
Adam Gessaman quotes Hannah Arendt in Origins of Totalitarianism:#
The trouble is that our period has so strangely intertwined the good with the bad that without the imperialists' "expansion for expansion's sake," the world might never have become one; without the bourgeoisie's political device of "power for power's sake," the extent of human strength might never have been discovered; without the fictitious world of totalitarian movements, in which with unparalleled clarity the essential uncertainties of our time have been spelled out, we might have been driven to our doom without ever becoming aware of what has been happening.
And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil.
Metafilter links to Sam Smith in Harpers.#
A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies
Posted on Saturday, September 20, 2003. All text is verbatim from senior Bush Administration officials and advisers. In places, tenses have been changed for clarity. Originally from Harper's Magazine, September, 2003. By Sam Smith.
[...]
It was entirely possible that in Iraq you had the most pro-American population that could be found anywhere in the Arab world. If you were looking for a historical analogy, it was probably closer to post-liberation France. We had the overwhelming support of the Iraqi people. Once we won, we got great support from everywhere.
The people of Iraq knew that every effort was made to spare innocent life, and to help Iraq recover from three decades of totalitarian rule. And plans were in place to provide Iraqis with massive amounts of food, as well as medicine and other essential supplies. The U.S. devoted unprecedented attention to humanitarian relief and the prevention of excessive damage to infrastructure and to unnecessary casualties.
Rory Blyth, chess genius.#
At first, I got my ass kicked. This was a little humbling, especially considering that my introduction to the game that year involved me walking up to two guys I didn't know, observing their game in progress, and taking advantage of the fact that they didn't know anything about me. I looked down at their board and deadpanned, "I just finished that game twelve different ways in my head. It's white's game in sixteen moves."
One player looked up at me, his eyes wrinkling in the corners as he squinted, attempting to bring into focus the figure of pure genius looming over him.
"Really?" he asked, his voice full of reverence and awe.
"Oh, yeah," I said. "You're f***ed."
I had lied, of course. I didn't know what I was talking about. It just seemed like a pompous chess genius sort of thing to say.
Derek Balling's Law of Conservation of Cluons is fantastic.#
Jeremy was lamenting the stupidity of some people, when I was forced to remind him of the Law Of Conservation of Cluons. Cluons, like energy, cannot be created or destroyed.
There are only so many cluons in the world. This figure is a constant (until we start interplanetary travel, anyway). The population of the world, however, keeps growing. What does this mean? There are fewer cluons per person.
What makes it worse is that cluons are mutually attractive. People who possess many cluons will not seek out "balance" in the form of finding someone with a low quantity of cluons. People with high quantities cluons generally only find attractive other people with similar quantities of cluons. They then tend to cluster, in areas such as Silicon Valley, or similar areas.
RPGamer links to The Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Trailer.#
Ryan Overbey posts new pictures. My Favourite. (Notice the prettiness of his new look.)#
Richard links to Victor Davis Hanson in the National Review.#
I could go on, but you get the picture of this current madness. There is something terribly wrong, something terribly amoral with the Western intelligentsia, most prominently in academia, the media, and politics. We don't need Osama bin Laden's preschool jabbering about "the weak horse" to be worried about the causes of this Western disease: thousands of the richest, most leisured people in the history of civilization have become self-absorbed, ungracious, and completely divorced from the natural world — the age-old horrific realities of dearth, plague, hunger, rapine, or conquest.
Indeed, it is even worse than that: a Paul Krugman or French barrister neither knows anything of how life is lived beyond his artificial cocoon nor of the rather different men and women whose unacknowledged work in the shadows ensures his own bounty in such a pampered landscape — toil that allows our anointed to rage at those purportedly culpable for allowing the world to function differently from an Ivy League lounge or the newsroom of the New York Times. Neither knows what it is like to be in a village gassed by Saddam Hussein or how hard it is to go across the world to Tikrit and chain such a monster.
Ryan Overbey comments:
The simple fact is that running a civilization has always required the use of brutality and violence. The American civilization has done a pretty good job of not only limiting the amount of violence its citizens are exposed to, but adding to the aggregate wealth and scientific advancement of other nations. Even after acts of horrifying egg-breaking, we have managed to make some pretty good omelettes.
How do we end our decadence? Universal military service, of the sort implemented in Korea or Israel, would be an admirable start. For those unwilling to pick up a gun, require a stint in the Peace Corps- mandatory service in a developing nation. In any case, exposing decadent Americans to the massive effort required to run this civilization, to the heartbreaking suffering experienced everyday in the Third World, would give everyone a bit of perspective, be they left, right, or center.
I suspect Michael Feldman is a terrorist because he sees what the plan is.#
"You must think me an idiot! Flying's too dangerous these days. No, look here. These are all of the flight numbers of the flights from London and Paris to Los Angeles on Christmas Eve. So I copy and paste them into a list. Then I make up a simple code. 223 kumquats. 2445 kilos of dates. 661 camel blankets. Now I wrap it up in a semi-sensical email and all we have to do is make sure it gets to the right recipients."
"And how do you intend to do that?"
"Easy! The infidels are tapping so many phones and emails they barely have time to do anything else. Why do you think they are finally trying to do something about Spam? We just create a one-time email account on a Tanzanian server and send this message to a few people we suspect are being watched. Like Amira, whose husband blew himself up in Baghdad last month, or the Hamarubi Brothers who run that Hawala in Hawaii, or Sheik Zabouti, who we KNOW is talking to the Chemical Brothers. Then we just sit back and watch the fun!"
Total cost of this terrorist operation - $2.95 in connection time.
Tim Shey links to Motoko Rich in the The New York Times on the portrayal of Japan in American movies. (Note how often bloggers are mentioned in the story.)#
But what seems to grate at Japanese viewers a bit more is [The Last Samurai]'s storybook approach to the samurai, who are depicted as unfailingly noble, and as pure as warriors can possibly be. In fact, the samurai myth is now a fairly tarnished one in Japan, in a way that the movie's glory-filled depiction doesn't reflect. And since that myth was originally created by Japanese literature and film, it's odd to see those outdated images return in new American packaging. "Our image of samurai are that they were more corrupt," said Mr. Katsuta. As for the character of Katsumoto, the philosophical samurai leader played by Ken Watanabe, Mr. Katsuta said, in a phone interview, "It set my teeth on edge."
Mr. Zwick acknowledged that the movie inevitably simplified Japanese history, in order to make it accessible to a current — and Western — audience. "The only thing one can do is hope that with a kind of immersion and some respectful understanding, that what you come up with is a distillation, rather than a cliché," he said. However, he also admitted that the movie is heavily driven by myth and nostalgia. "Movies, finally, can't help but dwell in a kind of iconography," Mr. Zwick said. "The samurai myth is partly a myth. It is central in the way that our own lone frontiersman is a myth and I think they find their expression in all sorts of different ways. In this country, we sell cigarettes with the myth and elect presidents with it. In that country it finds its applications in all kinds of different ways and I'm finding my own use for it in this story as well."
Richard on what happens when a relationship goes sour and web hosting is involved.#
My experience related to Adam's is my duet weblog with a friend, that, in hindsight, was a recipe for disaster. It had a clever title, and the concept was even interesting: a guy from the West Coast of Canada and a girl from the East Coast of the United States just yucking it up. Turned out we started it at a point where our relationship—always platonic—became strained (for reasons both related and unrelated to the weblog itself) and ultimately we stopped the weblog at about the 4 month point. I had certain expectations of what she could and couldn't do and I couldn't keep up with the quantity of her entries. Part of the strain occured when I told her she couldn't post lengthy quotes of copyrighted matieral on the site, and that if she did, she would have to clearly differentiate it from her content. The kicker—and she doesn't know I felt this way—she had the temerity to ask for advice about how to deal with me on the weblog—on web space I pay for. That's the way I interpreted what she wrote, anyway.
Joi Ito points to the Wisdom of Ev.#
Come to think of it, this is a corollary to one of my favorite truisms: We judge ourselves by our intensions and others by their actions.
Tony Pierce is a man's man.#
there are three vital parts to Any relationship. sexual or otherwise. trust, honest communication, and the desire for the relationship to exist.
first, the desire. if one of you isnt really 100% into it, theres going to be major problems. people forget how important it is to start at the begining. but this is the beginning "do i want this?" if you dont its over. if youre unsure, its over.
[...]
with that said, some general standbys are: long distance relationships are for people afraid of real commitment, definately dump your high school sweetheart when you go off to college, dating sisters and twins is only for experts, use a condom every single time, theres something to be said of astrology and of a girl who will go down on you when youre watching the lakers.
Kaye Trammell links Hillary Duff's Blog. Oh man, that's great. No RSS feed though!#
Halley Suitt and I agree. Let's just get on with the love making.#
Jay has written something very interesting over at Makeout City as well as the comment he posted to We Quit Drinking So we're all drinking and smoking to get laid and make superior offspring. Thanks for the clarification -- but can't we just skip the smoking and drinking part and get down to the business at hand? Check ths out.
