Tim O'Reilly writes about Dean's failure in the primaries so far.#

Howard Dean's disappointing performance in the first two primaries has come as something of a shock to people who think that blogging is the answer, whatever the question. Jock Gill just sent me a pointer to a nice op-ed that he wrote on the subject that exactly captures my feelings on the subject. The internet is a great tool, but it's only a tool, only one tool of many that we need for any objective, let alone an objective as complex as electing a political candidate. Expertise trumps enthusiasm, and above all, knowing the right people to connect to rather than just connecting to the folks who are already on your side. (What were they thinking, sending kids in orange hats to Iowa? A sure way to say "We're not like you.")

Michael Feldman writes about eating contests and their winners.#

There is obviously some Eastern Mystical Mind Control thing going on here, some neural short-curcuit of the gag reflex, which may come natural to certain rare individuals but which we are convinced can be taught and is passed down from generation to generation in secret eating societies who use their skills to unknown ends. Some of these eating contest winners may be renegade members of the eating cults seeking to capitalize on their occult skills. You decide.

D. Keith Roberts writes about one of my favourite bands: Ozomatli.#

If you're not familiar with them they're kind of a Latin hip-hop samba, funk, salsa, political, rock, pop, party band. Labels aside, they're very, very good and put on one hell of a show.

The name of their current tour is the "Warm Up Your Cold Booty Winter 2004 Tour" and that pretty much sums it up. I saw them Sunday and while it was cold and rainy outside, it was very hot and sexy inside. Every single ass in the place was moving and grooving and the band was on fire.

Halley Suitt's inspiring words on loss and the like.#

Thinking about losing my dad, losing my mom, odd word loss, strange verb to lose, strange phrase, losing people. Thing is ... they seem hardly lost. If anyone is lost, it is us, trying to understand their passing. But I do not find them gone. They are here and don't call me crazy to say so. Maybe they are made into lovely silk ribbons, long rolls of gossamer, slightly champagne color, wavering like smoke, shimmering like candlelight through your lively life and you find they weave themselves in and out of your mornings, your noons, your nights. How tricky they are to find their way into your daily day, glowing slightly, not ghostly, but they smile back in funny ways, they drop a tear here and there throughout the house, and beg one of you at unlikely times.

Richard picks great "guy" movie quotes.#

Office Space: they say it's "It's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care." I haven't seen it in a while, but I'm going to go with "I love kung fu."

Scarface: they say it's "Say hello to my leetle friend." My vote goes to "All I got in my life is my balls and my word, and I don't break them for nobody." But they get the key scene right.

David Weinberger praises Jon Stewart as American's Finest Journalist.#

No other journal so effectively dismantles the self-contained, self-referential world within which American journalism operates. Want to see how journalists, with a stern gaze at the camera, position themselves above their interview subjects? Want to see how to keep asking a question until you get the answer you think is right? Want to see how the question becomes the text?

Plus, Stewart is one of the best serious interviewers around. He's done his homework and he asks the questions that I want asked. He's also damn funny.

Richard covers David Allen White on the importance of language as opposed to TV, movies, and the Internet.#

White bemoans the decreasing importance in having an adequate vocabulary in order for people to express themselves: "Language is deteriorating, vocabularies are shrinking, people are less and less able to express themselves linguistically or have a pool of words to draw on to describe what they think and feel. As a result, in its place, they are often compelled instead to wordless action because they are blocked in their very nature. I suspect it has something to do with why there is an increased level of violence in the world. With words no longer available to us, we act physically because that's what we know and what we've seen." He does not make a very strong case for the inverse relationship between violence and vocabulary: the words "I suspect" are too weak. It's an attempt to soften a claim, making it less absolute by making it a suspicion so that disproving it would be a less of a blow to his ego. White goes on to bemoan the quality and accuracy of information on the Internet (echoes of Harold Bloom, and is White aware of the irony of appearing on the Internet in order to decry it?) and says that the moving image cannot be considered beautiful because it does not present a story in the same way a book does. Alexander Nehamas, in terms of TV, would probably disagree.

If I could get around the Catholic rhetoric and the disdain for a medium I love—the Internet, but White and I are in agreement to a degree about TV and movies—I probably would have enjoyed this article more. He's right that ours is not a culture which prizes beautiful language, but he didn't do a very good job of proving it.

Chip Gibbons writes about his disgust at the media with relation to Dean.#

He is not particularly excited about any Democrat, but that doesn't mean he thinks the media is doing well at all. This is a great comment:

Dean was also on Meet the Press this morning and made the point that he's still the frontrunner in the number of delegates that he has. Halley linked to CNN which documents that fact.

Dean is now playing on the fact that Kerry is as addicted to special interest money as George Bush. But then so is Dean. While Dean talks about average Americans and how they don't count, he fails to point out that it's the process itself that has written them off. Individuals don't count and cannot compete with huge, well-funded mobs of special interests. If you want to matter in all that corruption, you must join with a mob; much like kids in ghettos or in high school must join with a gang to avoid being picked on. We'd all like to believe that it's more dignified than that, but the simple unadulturated truth is that it's not.

Kuro5hin.org links to Ananova on justice in America.#

A US man who was jailed in 1970 for his first and only criminal conviction - stealing a television - says he hopes to be released in December.

Junior Allen, 63, says he has applied again to the North Carolina Parole Commission for release following 25 straight rejections.

"I'm going to smile on the outside, but I'm definitely going to be crying inside. And probably cry inside until I get across the state line," Allen said.

The theft of a television set now carries a probable sentence of probation only.

Meanwhile, the same commission has released Howard Washington on parole in January after 10 years in prison for murder.

Richard quotes Christopher Hitchens.#

Christopher Hitchens, on Saddam Hussein (with the emphasis added): "if he really didn't have any stores of unlawful WMD, it was very dumb of him to act as if he still did or perhaps even to believe that he still did. And it seems perfectly idiotic of anybody to complain that we have now found this out (always assuming that we have, and that there's no more disclosure to come). This highly pertinent and useful discovery could only be made by way of regime change. And the knowledge that Iraq can be finally and fully certified as disarmed, and that it won't be able to rearm under a Caligula regime, is surely a piece of knowledge worth having in its own right and for its own sake."

John Quiggin reflects on the Iraq War and a JM Keynes quote: "When the facts change, I change my mind -- what do you do, sir."#

In November and December 2002, however, the facts changed. First Saddam announced that he would readmit UN inspectors, without restrictions on the sites to be inspected and that he would declare all his weapons. Then he proceeded to do just that, claiming to have no weapons at all. Meanwhile Bush and Blair suddenly started hedging about the nature of the knowledge they had declared. The same pattern proceeded right up to the outbreak of war. Time after time, some condition would be declared crucial by Bush and Blair (overflights, interviews with Iraqi scientists, out-of-country interviews with Iraqi scientists), the Iraqi government would agree after a brief delay and then new condition would be raised. As quite a few observers noted, the behavior was the same as that of the Austro-Hungarian government with respect to Serbia in 1914.

Halley Suitt was recommended to be a nun in college.#

This of course proved HIS point that I should join Orkut -- which was just where I did NOT want to lead the conversation. Then we were kidding around about other jobs I might have had and of course he said something about "nun of the above" and I said, "Wait, aren't all nun's literally of the above?" A discussion of nuns followed. I've always gotten off on nuns wearing wedding rings saying they are married to Jesus. Is there a point where Jesus becomes kind of a deadbeat husband and stops bringing flowers and you can't get him to put down the Wall Street Journal and actually talk to you at breakfast anymore?

The Black Saint on Christmas and other holidays.#

Halloween is the only holiday that does not give me the hives and, as such, is the only one I celebrate. Perhaps it's because October 31st is when all the outsiders of the world unite. Oh, how I empathized with Frankenstein's monster when he lamented, after a particularly disastrous blind date inBride of Frankenstein, that "she hates me… just like others."

However, come November 1, my slow descent into Macy's-sponsored madness begins. If Halloween is when I can relish in my outcast state, Thanksgiving and Christmas serve to remind me that I'm not a "real" person. "Real" people have "Grammies" and family photo albums. They spend the holidays away sipping hot chocolate in a "cabin" or a "cottage" (one is in the woods, the other is near the ocean — I can never remember which). They grew up sharing sodas at the Chok'lit Shoppe with Betty and Veronica while talking about the upcoming sock hop.

Brian Weatherson thinks it would do academia well to have a draft system like the NFL.#

Why not replace all the papers, or at least all the colloquium papers, at the APA Eastern with papers by new candidates? One problem is that this would require making the conference a little bigger - or at least require more papers being on simultaneously. This year there were a little under 100 colloquium papers, but there are more than 100 new PhD students going on the market. Still, with only a small expansion of the colloquium program (and perhaps cutting back on the symposiums) we could give every new candidate a chance to present a paper. Ideally these would be commentator-free. Even more ideally the candidate would present a short summary of a pre-posted paper and the bulk of the hour could be spent responding to questions as at BSPC. This would mean hiring departments would have to send scouts as well as interviewers (if they are interviewing) but I think it could be really useful. For one thing, departments could have different scouts go to different papers and so get a chance to have a look in person at many more candidates than they do now.

Strange Women Lying in Ponds writes about Holocaust deniers and "minimizers."#

I'll say right out that Hitler's attempt to exterminate an entire race is no more evil or condemnable than Stalin's attempt to exterminate an entire social class. Does that make me a Holocaust denier?

It makes you at least a Holocaust minimizer, if not a denier. If one were to propose that Stalin attempted to "exterminate an entire social class", then one would have to accept Stalin's view of events such as the forced famine in the Ukraine and the liquidation of the "kulaks." But what Stalin termed class warfare was really just a vehicle for keeping him in power.

[...]

What distinguishes the Holocaust from Stalin's atrocities is that the Jews were condemned by the Nazis to die because they were born as Jews. They were sent to camps that were specifically designed for extermination. Their extermination was the official policy of the Nazi regime. There was consequently little they could do to save themselves once the extermination machine had begun.

Real Live Preacher writes about "Have a nice Superbowl!"#

I usually keep up with the latest trends and developments. I must of missed a memo or something. I mean, when you drop the definite article, you're talking MAJOR holiday.

[...]

Oh well, at least we won't have to worry about the fanatical Christians bitching and moaning because "they've taken the Christ out of Superbowl. "

Jesus is not the reason for this season.

Brian Carnell links to The Baby Dragon.#

The documents suggest that the Natural History Museum turned the dragon away, possibly because they suspected it was a trick, and sent it to be destroyed. But it appears a porter intercepted the jar and took it home. The papers suggest the porter may have been Frederick Hart - David Hart's grandfather.

Mr Mitchell said: "The dragon is flawless, from the tiny teeth to the umbilical cord. It could be made from indiarubber, because Germany was the world's leading manufacturer of it at the time, or it could be made of wax. It has to be fake. No one has ever proved scientifically that dragons exist. But everyone who sees it immediately asks, 'Is it real?"'

Brian's comment is great:

If that's true, that's really going to piss of Rob Bowman. Despite spending $115 million on his-lame assed movie, he still gets outdone by 19th century Germans who produce a dragon that looks far more realistic than anything that appeared in "Reign of Fire" (and, somehow, the plot and dialogue was several order of magnitude worse than the special effects -- one of the worst big budget movies ever).

Mark Schmitt links to a "generous" view of John Kerry as a Senator.#

"The guy has guts," Jack Blum, who investigated the drug-contra connection for a subcommittee on terrorism that Kerry headed, told me recently. "So many politicians are in the job so people will love them. Kerry is a throwback to senators like Phil Hart, who, even though he came from Michigan, investigated the auto industry. They run for office not so people will love them but to use the powers of office"--in Kerry's case to expose betrayals of the public trust.

In three investigations during his two terms Kerry has charged targets head on. He is a hero of a new biography of the Washington power lawyer and Democratic pooh-bah Clark Clifford. In Friends in High Places: The Rise and Fall of Clark Clifford, Douglas Frantz and David McKean depict Kerry as the only Democratic senator who was willing to investigate the Bank of Credit and Commerce International and Clifford's role in its mega-larcenies. "What are you doing to my old friend Clark Clifford?" an older southern Democrat asked Kerry in a Senate elevator one day. Kerry made no reply, but told an aide accompanying him, "You should hear what they say to me in the cloakroom." Not in public life to be loved, Kerry pressed on. The evidence compiled by his committee helped to close down a huge criminal conspiracy.

Julie Leung wonders how best to introduce her children to politics in a way that does not promote disillusionment.#

What I want to do though is to educate them about the political process. The younger two probably won't remember 2004 but Abigail might. I can still remember watching Ford and Carter on the little black and white TV in our family room while my mom cooked dinner. I remember too how I wanted Ford, not that I knew much about either candidate. I just didn't like change. I didn't want someone new. I wanted things to stay the same. Ah the political preferences of young children...

Abigail and Michaela have already learned a little from our lives. Ted and I have taken them with us when we vote. The kids come home carrying sample paper ballots and wearing "I Voted" stickers like tatoos. In the past couple weeks our daughters have heard Kerry's New Hampshire victory speech and Bush's State of the Union address, played on NPR as I cooked dinner. They danced to Dean. Abigail's beginning to read headlines and I imagine she'll begin to pick up bits and pieces on her own soon.