2 Hours Down, 52 To Go
ScrappleFace has the scoop on my Gephardt endorsed Kerry.#
According to a prepared text of his endorsement remarks, Mr. Gephardt will say, "John Kerry is the frontrunner for the Democrat nomination, and that's why I'm endorsing him now, rather than before last week's primary in my home state of Missouri. Unlike George W. Bush, he's no miserable failure. I'm encouraging all of my supporters, including the union members who helped me capture fourth place in Iowa, to get behind John Kerry."
A spokesman for Mr. Gephardt said that the Missouri Congressman ran for president recently, although the claim could not be independently confirmed.
Daniel Davies writes about how the framing of questions can change their meaning.#
Question 1: Would you support the Canadian courts if they decided to "ban spanking in most circumstances?
Question 2: Would you support the Candian courts if they decided to tighten the current loophole in the law on common assault which allows some kinds of physical violence against children?
Question 2 is actually the better description of the facts; the question at issue is the definition of "reasonable chastisement" of a minor by its parents, which is a carve-out from the law on assault.
Tony Bowden writes that it doesn't matter how "good" your idea is if you can't follow through "good."#
When I used to be invited to give talks to people thinking of starting up their own business I used to encounter people who wouldn't even tell the course organiser what their idea was for fear of it being stolen. I always told these people that if they expected to succeed purely on the strength of an idea they should just go home, because making a successful business was much more about the strength of the execution than the strength of the idea. For some reason this never seemed to go down well. And now I find that INI are promoting this nonsense in a major radio campaign!
Zimran Ahmed, interestingly, writes about the exact same thing as above, but with a subtle twist.#
It is an open secret that most consulting projects fail -- if by fail you mean do not deliver the performance improvements or cost savings they initially promised. The reasons are legion: 1) the client did not implement, 2) the client implemented, but did it wrong, 3) one part of the organization stymied the other part of the organization from doing the right thing etc. Failure usually happens because of a failure in execution, not because the actual idea as bad.
In the IBM/Sprint deal, IBM has promised Sprint that it can improve its call center operations. The deal has been structured to increase the chance of successful implementation.
Tyler Cowen points to a Chinese Grade Loan Market.#
A school in China is allowing students who don't do well in tests to borrow a few extra marks as long as they pay them back with interest.
Tyler writes:
Why the monopoly provision? If you are going to do this at all, allow students to trade and lend points among themselves, thereby establishing a competitive equilibrium price.
Samizdata writes about possible problems with libertarianism that fall apart upon inspection.#
This can be the basis for populist political crusades against "Big Oil", "Big Pharma", even "Big Food". The faux libertarian conundrum is the notion that we need a strong state as a guarantor of "real competition": to break up monopolies in the interests of consumers. Yet surely such interference in the market is un-libertarian? In reality the conundrum evaporates when one examines how such monopolies arise. Put simply, monopolies wither in the free market and thrive under state regulation. Such monopolies, rightfully abhorrent to any free market capitalist or libertarian, are sustained by the very political system which seeks to regulate them. Just as the enforced "tolerance" of multiculturalism is a form of intolerance, so enforced competition is inimical to true free-market competition.
François-René Rideau wrote a paper on this. I wrote about this here.
Gary Santoro writes about college and life.#
Some love to talk about college and high school as the best times of their life, but not me. I was reminded watching the tape how directionless, ignorant, and apathetic I was during those years. I always tried to find something of interest in the traditional school systems, but never really latched on to anything. Instead I wandered from class to class, made the best grades I was capable of, and did just about whatever I could to squelch the crushing boredom of it all -- even if it meant making a jackass out of myself in front of a camera for an hour or two on a cold Monday night in a 10 foot square concrete block.
Dave Winer writes about Howard Dean and Betsy Devine.#
Here's one little bit. We were talking about the money that Dean raised yesterday, Betsy Devine volunteered that she had given money yesterday. She gave for two reasons. I don't remember the first, but I do remember the second. Dean said either he wins in Wisconsin or he retires from the race. Betsy, an early Dean supporter said it's important that he bow out if he loses. Makes sense to me. One last push, if it works, great, if not, that's the end of the fight.
But this morning Dean is on the radio saying he didn't write the email, and while it was a great tactic to raise money, he's not personally pledged to get out of the race if he loses Wisconsin. While I'm not a lawyer, I think he either has to return the money or honor the pledge. It seems fraudulent not to.
David Janes quotes an article (which I can't link to due to link rot) about libertarians.#
Here's the breakdown: On the negative side, Libertarians are crazy. Most became Libertarians because they have some social quirk that disallows them from participation in normal society — picture excessive drug use, Dungeons and Dragons play or fascination with the word "metrosexual," for instance. They are strange. You can't take them home to your parents, unless, of course, your parents are members of some druid cult. They frighten small children.
On the positive side, they may be weird, but at least they want to leave you alone. Putting most politicians in office is like putting Michael Jackson in charge of a day care facility — they might not do anything wrong, but you feel pretty uncomfortable leaving them alone.
I wonder if this is more than trolling and if the author actually has an proof that all libertarians are crazy.
wKen write about seeing Chuck D speak.#
Chuck D spends a fair amount of his speech using "the 'N' word" as an example of the harmful effects of mass media, or what he calls the "radiation of a radio-TV-movie nation". He isn't happy that a word which was a degrading insult for hundreds of years, and likely yelled "on a slave ship at the crack of a whip", has been sold as harmless slang to the current generation.
In fact, there is plenty that Chuck D is unhappy about. As he said, if he only talked about positive things, he would be finished in "10 minutes". Instead, he spoke for almost two hours and then stayed after to answer questions and sign autographs for the audience.
The gist of his presentation was how important a good education and critical thinking are. Stupidity is what gets attention, rather than logic and reason. In his opinion, too many people believe the distorted view of reality shown on television. They need to recognize that the Media's image is as realistic as "a cartoon", and trying to live our lives based on what we see on TV would be about as successful as "the coyote is chasing the road runner off the edge of a cliff".
Chip Gibbons links to an awesome video of things the Hubble telescope has photographed.#
Simon Willison writes about the dangers of PageRank.#
I know of a couple of entries on my own blog that are attracting this kind of traffic. The most interesting is probably this entry on artifical diamonds, which has attracted comments from both buyers and sellers of artificial gems. My entry on MSN messenger usability problems from 2002 has drawn a steady stream of hilarious comments, no doubt caused in part by its top rating on Google for msn messenger sucks. Amusingly, for a long time Microsoft's own search engine was giving my page a high rank for a wide variety of less negative messenger related terms.
My own experiences of this phenomenon pale in to significance to some of the others I've seen. The most impressive example has to be Jason Kottke's brief review of the Matrix Reloaded, which drew over 900 comments from Google strays, developed its own micro-community and resulted in Jason pondering who owns the conversation on my web site? Jason eventually deciding to close and archive the thread after the page grew to more than a megabyte in size.
Michael Feldman writes about modern aristocracy.#
In an open Democracy like the United States, where merit and hard work are the defining characteristics of the ruling class, it is only chance and national good fortune to have found two such leaders in one family. And if, as is looking increasingly likely, that Brother Jeb is being groomed to take up the mantle in a grand Bush-Clinton confrontation in '08, that will be but further proof that it is ability not paternity that counts in the US. The whole idea of a heredity-based government is so Anti-American as to be unimaginable in an American context.
Hereditary despotic rulers should be hunted down like dogs, or like Udam and Qusay and Saddam Hussein Hopefully, a change of party in the White House will result in a change in foreign policy to withdraw support for clan regimes like Saudi Arabia and Jordan (where King Abdullah took over after the death of his father King Hussein) and refuse to negotiate with North Korea (where KIM Chong-il has ruled since his father and the country's founder, president KIM Il-song, died in 1994).
Erin Judge writes about Universal Post-College Syndrome.#
Most of us take some time off after college to clear our heads, travel, and attempt to understand the vastness of the possibilities that stretch out before us. But bumming around Europe can only afford so much clarity; for some of us, it can actually be a trying and even existentially traumatic time. We begin to fee small, insignificant, lost...The alienation of our talents in an anonymous vaccuum jolts our self-conception as "special." This is, of course, necessary: we are not special, we are merely random collections of cells spinning through space-time. We learn that we are organic, that we exist to eat, sleep, fuck (Prague often teaches us the extent of that third purpose), that the universe does not care about our abilities to create seemless pastiches of Kafka or paint chilling portraits of urban decay armed with only an ancient Canon and a darkroom. For many of us, these revelations are devastating and shock the ambition right out of our lungs. We return home broken but hardened, more in touch with the visceral underbelly of this mortal coil but without a handhold to keep us functional.
Matt Hinrichs writes about People magazine.#
Every few weeks, Christopher's mom brings us a huge pile of the most recent issues of People magazine. I always spend a couple of hours poring through them in an orgy of celeb fluff. It's so trashy, yet so appealing. Glancing through the pages, you could easily conclude that the average People reader is a fat 50 year old woman who obsesses over weddings and pregnancy and food. A typical spread has an ad for some decadent sweet foodstuff on one side, celebrity diet tips on the other. Even scarier is the mag's bloated coverage of reality show participants. Last December, they ran a lavish eight page feature on Trista and Ryan's wedding. Then later on, another four pages on their honeymoon. Then a cover story on what they're doing this week. Somewhere, the dead souls of hundreds of trees are crying.
Winds of Change writes about the different views of Satan in different religions.#
Christianity sees Satan as a sort of opposite but inferior force to G-d, an exiled angel who is the everlasting enemy of G-d and man. In contrast, Judaism sees Satan as Heaven's Lead Prosecutor in a court where entrapment is acceptable. Not a being whose attention one would wish to attract, but just one of G-d's angels doing a necessary job. Islam sees Satan in a different way again... and that vision is closely tied to Rabia's injunctions in our Jan. 24 post. As James Fadiman notes:
"In Islam, Satan is identified as the single angel who, setting himself apart from all other angelic beings, refused God's command to bow down before Adam on the day of his creation. When questioned by the Creator as to why he disobeyed, the Devil answered that he bowed down solely to the Divine, not to any of the created. Unrepentant, he also argued that God's will determines all that thing, so it would not have been possible for him to refuse God's command unless God himself had allowed him to do so.
He asks whether Satan is a good or bad guy. I think that the purpose of Satan is to be a warning against following the literal tradition of God's word to vehemently and being too addicted to God. Satan's demise was that he would not change his view of the universe (God being all important) after it changed (Man was created) and thus this lead him to commit wrongs.
The warning is: Do not expect to understand God completely and do not trust those who claim to.
There can be no Spiritual Authority greater to or equal to God, who is revealed to us personally. I have written about this before.
Lance Arthur writes about Breasts. That's right, Tits. Janet Jackson's to be precise.#
2a. When Janet Jackson flashed her tit on national television, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Michael Powell, called for an immediate investigation into the matter, calling the act a "classless, crass and deplorable stunt," further adding that he was "personally offended by the entire production." Time between the act in question and the launch of a federal investigation: 1 day.
2b. When, repeatedly, the White House was asked to provide proof of the weapons of mass destruction it claimed that the nation of Iraq was stockpiling and which it used as the reason for an invasion currently costing the United States approximately $5.5billion per month with an overall cost projected by the Pentagon to hit $100billion, and it turned out that the claims of WMD in Iraq were fabricated, the President called for an investigation into the matter. Time between the act in question and the launch of a federal investigation: 10 months and counting.
Strange Women Lying in Ponds writes about constitutional law and gay marriage.#
I really do believe that it's the job of the SCOTUS (and the other courts) to protect us from a government that oversteps its constitutional bounds. The Founders of this country understood that people had certain natural rights that the government, even where decreed by "majority rule," must not infringe upon. And among these rights are the rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," as decreed in the Declaration of Independence.
The Founders saw government as a necessary evil for avoiding anarchy. The problem was how to found a government mandate that would allow the government to do no more than was absolutely "necessary and proper" to carry out its constitutional functions. The Constitution therefore was meant to be a strict definition of the scope of government powers; i.e., the Constitution defines the limits of what powers the government has, not what rights the people have. 20th-century constitutional jurisprudence unfortunately got this completely backwards.
Michael links to an awesome Strong Bad email.#
The New York Times writes about homosexuality in the animal kingdom, love that term.#
Still, scientists warn about drawing conclusions about humans. "For some people, what animals do is a yardstick of what is and isn't natural," Mr. Vasey said. "They make a leap from saying if it's natural, it's morally and ethically desirable."
But he added: "Infanticide is widespread in the animal kingdom. To jump from that to say it is desirable makes no sense. We shouldn't be using animals to craft moral and social policies for the kinds of human societies we want to live in. Animals don't take care of the elderly. I don't particularly think that should be a platform for closing down nursing homes."
Mr. Bagemihl is also wary of extrapolating. "In Nazi Germany, one very common interpretation of homosexuality was that it was animalistic behavior, subhuman," he said.
What the animal studies do show, Ms. Zuk observed, is that "sexuality is a lot broader term than people want to think."
"You have this idea that the animal kingdom is strict, old-fashioned Roman Catholic," she said, "that they have sex just to procreate."
In bonobos, she noted, "you see expressions of sex outside the period when females are fertile. Suddenly you are beginning to see that sex is not necessarily about reproduction."
"Sexual expression means more than making babies," Ms. Zuk said. "Why are we surprised? People are animals."
Dave Winer writes that Howard Dean is not a soap bar.#
The man is interesting, like him or not, and that's a rarity in US politics where candidates are as exciting as toothpaste or underarm deodorant, because that's exactly how they want us to view them, as products, not people. Enter Howard Dean, person. Bloggable to the nth degree. But did Howard Dean know what a blog was? No. Does he know what one is today? No! Did he ever have a blog? He didn't. (I don't mean to ask, as some people misunderstand, did he write his own weblog. I mean did his campaign have a weblog.)
He did raise a lot of money on the Internet, and that's interesting, for sure, and he taught us so much, and if he had gone all the way, I believe he would have survived the onslaught of CNN, ABC and NBC, who were his real competitors, not the other candidates for the Democratic nomination. Read that sentence again, please. That's the core premise of this piece, and the point that all the analysis so far has missed. His challenge wasn't to get the most votes, because that would inevitably follow, once he won the battle with the television networks, a battle which he failed to even show up for.
Chip Gibbons writes about the map of books that liberals and conservatives read that I (among others) linked to the other day.#
Like Christians who read the Bible over and over, and Muslims who read the Koran over and over, liberals and conservatives want to reinforce their own mystical views. They are both convinced they are right and neither side has any proof that they are right. Both sides are building arsenals of words and anecdotes to throw at each other in their ongoing war for the minds of others.
They don't want to change their own minds, they want to change other minds, convert them. Both sides need to continually reaffirm their own rightheadedness against the other side's wrongheadedness.
My name is Jay McCarthy, and I approve of this message.
Julie Leung posts pretty and simple pictures of the outdoors.#
Tony Pierce is my hero.#
todays ronald reagans birthday? fuck ronald reagan and his damn birthday. kurt kobain is dead and ronald reagan isnt and we could get depressed about that or we could just realize who jesus wants for his sunbeam which of course rhymes with fuck ronald reagan. and it should.
The Black Saint is sooo funny. I laughed out loud times twenty.#
So, the story about the baby born with two heads has me wondering what the etiquette is if this happens to a friend of mine. Am I still expected to hold the child? I'm wary of doing that with kids who don't make my flesh crawl.
My sympathies are with seven-week-old Rebeca Martinez and her parents; although, they had to have seen this coming, what with their living in a haunted house built on top of an ancient Indian burial ground located across the street from a nuclear power plant. Worse, during her second trimester, her mother rather irresponsibly parked her car -- on a dare, no less -- at ground zero of a gamma bomb test.
Tyler Cowen writes about the strength and importance of Ed Sullivan's blessing on music.#
Sullivan was especially important for his advocacy of African-American music and entertainment. He helped Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Ethel Waters, Nat "King" Cole, Leontine Price, Louis Armstrong, George Kirby, Duke Ellington, Richie Havens, Mahalia Jackson, Louis Armstrong, Diana Ross and the Supremes, and Marvin Gaye, among others. At the time the major networks typically shied away from carrying such performers, primarily for racial reasons. Sullivan consistently fought with his conservative sponsors and insisted on booking these individuals.
Sullivan was a musical visionary more generally. In addition to the Beatles, he promoted The Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley, and Barbra Streisand. In comedy he showcased Woody Allen, Richard Pryor, and Jerry Lewis, among many others. In each case the performers had not yet established their later significance.
Seth Gordon launches a voting experiment.#
To ameliorate this problem, the wonks have proposed a variety of alternative voting schemes that let voters clearly express their preferences while still having an influence on the outcome. Since this year's Democratic primary has four well-known candidates, I thought it might be interesting to see if different methods of counting the vote could lead to different winners. So I have constructed a Web page with three ballots for you to cast: one ballot that allows you to select only one candidate, one ballot that lets you check off every candidate that you approve of, and one ballot that lets you rank the candidates in whatever order you prefer them.
Julia Grey writes about sexual fears. Makes me upset about being a man, ugh.#
Michael Feldman runs across some of his old friends in the newspaper.#
On Tuesday, Ken Rogoff is speaking at the JFK Jr. Forums (we assume at the JFK School of Government) on "The International Debt Crisis: The Next Generation". In our 3,000 student public high school, Ken was the smartest kid in the gang, and a charter member of our "counter-culture clique". At the time he was the US Junior Chess Champion, and the youngest IM in American chess history.
The Dowbrigade will never forget being the 7th Man on the US Student Chess Team at the World Championships in Haifa, Israel in 1970. We were actually working on Kibbutz Ha'mapil at the time, but Ken, who was playing first board on the American Team, invited us to the tourney and somehow got us on the roster as "last board" so that we had a complete set of credentials and passes.
