On top of Mt. Breeze,
the wind whipped my face,
at the bottom,
the devils whipped my back.

En lo alto de Monte Brisa,
el viento azotó mi cara,
en el fondo,
los diablos azotaron mi espalda

Chip Gibbons writes about why the Democrats should leave off Nader and focus on themselves.#

I'm already tired of the Democrats whining about how much damage Nader could do to their efforts to defeat Bush. The Democrats blame Bush for the defeat and blame Nader for being a spoiler in the 2000 election. They never blame themselves for being losers. They are too impervious to reality to admit that their message no longer resonates with voters.

If they think that Nader is going to be a spoiler in the upcoming election, they obviously think it's going to be a very close election. They need to focus on what it will take for it not to be a close election. Talking about Bush's whoring to special interests won't do it because the Democrats are equally slutty when it comes to special interests.

Alexander Payne: Hottie.#

Jay Rosen writes about the changing of times for political journalism.#

It isn't. And that is why this belief system is in serious trouble. It answers a political question with an evacuation of politics, toward which professional correctness in journalism allows only neutrality and its endless equivalents-- one of which is equal opportunity aggression in the watchdog role. Gopnik saw this attitude not as undesirable, but strangely non-descript.

For it fails to say anything meaningful about the journalist's role in the American political system as it stands. It is also relentlessly ahistorical, defeating thought about changes in public life that might present new problems or require new ideas. As the press scholar Michael Schudson once wrote, "The news media necessarily incorporate into their work a certain view of politics, and they will either do so intelligently and critically or unconsciously and routinely."

Dr. Paul Roberts writes about the abysmal performance of "criminal justice" in America.#

The purpose of "criminal justice" is to protect the government, not the innocent public.

In the meantime, smile no matter what the provocation as you undergo airport security screening. You can now be arrested for "having an attitude." A snide remark can get you placed on a "no fly" list for life.

Be very careful what you have in your luggage as fines have been instituted for "inappropriate items." That decision is a subjective one at the screeners discretion. According to USA today, a bride recently drew a $150 fine for having a wedding gift in her baggage — a silver cake server. Expect no consistency. Just because you clear one airport with an item, don't expect the next screener to have the same view.

Rick Heller gets through to CNN.#

Jason complains about Ralph Nader.#

To be blunt, the man is a delusional fool and a narcissist in the worst way. Despite any noble policy ideas he may have, many of which I agree with, there is no doubt that had he not run in 2000, Bush would not have been put in office. One percent of Nader votes in Florida going to Gore would have made it a non-issue. No recount, no stopping of the recount, no Republican Supreme court beknighting Bush, no bumbling, cynical, secretive, destructive Presidency. Thousands of dead people would be decidedly not dead had this egomaniac pulled out once he realized how close it was going to be.

People can shout all they want about Gore's miserable, uninspiring campaign, but the truth is, it's Ralph's fault that Bush is in the White House. It was a nice idea to vote Nader in a non-swing state four years ago, but the world is a much different place now.

He links to this clever site.

Alex Tabarrok writes about the "price of eternal vigilance" and Independence Hall.#

Independence Hall is remarkable but I could not enjoy it fully because I was disconcerted by the circumstances of my arrival. I flew into Philadelphia and of course was scanned, wanded, and de-shoed before boarding the plane - this I was prepared for - but it was depressing to walk from the Liberty Bell to Independence Hall and be subjected again and again to gates, armed guards, scanning, searching and surveillance. What is next? Will we be asked to show ID before entering the birthplace of liberty? The experience was upsetting.

Matthew Thomas writes about why Aaron Swartz's proposal of "WikiCourt" is flawed.#

The WikiCourt model is superficially similar to jury trials. But jury trials work because they are supported by money and by physical force. Judges, court security officers, and (to a lesser extent) jurors are paid to be disinterested participants. And if you lie or misbehave, or if you try to reject a trial's verdict, you may be fined or imprisoned. But in WikiCourt, you could lie, cheat, or just reject the outcome, and the greatest inconvenience you'd suffer would be having to get a new pseudonym and e-mail address for yourself before rejoining the fray.

What bewilders me most about Aaron's proposal is his reference to Wikipedia as an example of how collaborative editing by ideological opponents can work. Aaron has contributed substantially to Wikipedia, but so have I, and I've seen quite the opposite.

Mitch Ratcliffe writes about Ralph Nader, and why he would be a bad president.#

Maybe we need to have the opportunity to vote for someone other than one of the two nominees of the two parties, as Ralph Nader says, but that requires us to ask if Nader would be worth a vote. Here is an accomplished activist, certainly, but has Nader ever demonstrated the ability to build coalitions and to compromise with foes to forge a middle ground on which everyone can live? Pardon me, but Ralph is not good at compromise, as his position on why he should run demonstrates: Simply having another choice doesn't increase the quality or quantity of democracy in a society. It can lead, through fragmentation of potential coalitions along arbitrary differences, to extremism by a minority government... exactly as it did in 2000 whence last Ralph ran.

The Black Saint writes about Martha Stewart, awesome.#

I was reading the latest about Martha Stewart's trial and quite frankly, it looks like it's to prison she's a goin'. The whole case demonstrates how seriously the federal government takes white collar crime. If she'd just shot an unarmed black teenager, she'd be home by now.

Shimon Rura asks about some perl code.#

I'll take the following template as my goal. I'd like to have working Perl that looks like this:

my $title = "Late Night With Conan  O'Brien";
$dbh->db_foreach 'get_matches' q{
    select description, tvchannel, when_start, when_stop
    from xmltv_programmes
    where title = :title
} {
    do_something_with($title, $description, $tvchannel);
    do_something_else_with($when_start, $when_stop);
}
  

Shimon, I would do something like this:

my $db_foreach = sub {
 my ( $query, $query_args, $sub ) = @_;
 my $sth = $model->dbh->prepare( $query );
 $sth->execute( @{ $query_args } );
 while ( my $row = $sth->fetchrow_arrayref ) {
  $sub->( @{ $row } );
 }
};

$db_foreach->(
 $query,
 [ $title ],
 sub {
  my ( $description, $tvchannel, $when_start, $when_stop ) = @_;
  # Your code
 }
);
 

Other strategies if you want closer to what you have written would be to find the substrings of $query that start with ':' and see if they are active variables by poking the symbol table, but that is disgusting.

Charley Reese wonders about how to get out of this mess.#

I confess, I don't know how to undo what we've done. How do we persuade the federal government to divest itself of some of its power? How do we persuade state governments to leave most of the decisions to local governments? How do we persuade people to pry themselves loose from their TV sets and computers and actually participate in government?

Probably the process will just continue as it is until it implodes. That is what happened in the Soviet Union. Bureaucracy and party decrees got so far removed from reality that everything collapsed. If that happens to us, at least our children or grandchildren will get a chance to start over.

AKMA links to a slew of articles against The da Vinci Code.#

have one or two da Vinci Code gigs coming up, and have turned down others — so I have to admit that Dan Brown is putting some money in my pockets. But liberty in the extremism of [intellectual] vice is no defense; Brown profits from the confusion he engenders between hoax and history, between bogus "symbology" and critical history-of-religions research, but (for all the pious rhetoric of "encouraging free inquiry") he short-circuits the quest for truth by capitalizing on his readers' credulity.

Laura Miller in the New York Times:

At regular intervals, the book brings its pell-mell plot to a screeching halt and emits a pellet of information concerning a centuries-old conspiracy that purports to have preserved a tremendous secret about the roots of Christianity itself. This ''nonfiction'' material gives ''The Da Vinci Code'' its frisson of authenticity, and it's lifted from ''Holy Blood, Holy Grail,'' one of the all-time great works of pop pseudohistory. But what seems increasingly clear (to cop a favorite phrase from the authors of ''Grail'') is that ''The Da Vinci Code,'' like ''Holy Blood, Holy Grail,'' is based on a notorious hoax.

Margaret M. Mitchell:

"Paganism" is treated throughout The Da Vinci Code as though it were a unified phenomenon, which it was not ("pagan" just being the Christian term for "non-Christian"). The religions of the Mediterranean world were multiple and diverse, and cannot all be boiled down to "sun-worshippers" (232). Nor did all "pagans" frequently, eagerly, and with mystical intent participate in the hieros gamos (ritual sex acts). "The Church" is also used throughout the book as though it had a clear, uniform and unitary referent. For early Christian history this is precisely what we do not have, but a much more complex, varied and localized phenomenon. Brown presumes "the Church" is "the Holy Roman Catholic Church" which he thinks had tremendous power always and everywhere, but ecclesiastical history is a lot messier.

Kieran Healy comments on Simon Schama's longing for a different style of history.#

Once asked what he specialized in, the sociologist Daniel Bell replied, "Generalizations." It's a line worth stealing for job interviews, but it tells an important truth. Being a generalist these days is itself a kind of specialization. Like any other role in an advanced division of labor, it depends on thousands of others, most notably all those monographic specialists dug into the archives. Timothy Burke would like to see historians be trained "to write well, to seek audiences outside the academy, to stretch their powers of persuasion." Those are worthwhile goals, but whereas the mills of academic specialization can grind exceeding small, we can't all have our own BBC miniseries. Besides, I don't think Schama simply wants historians to write better prose. Rather, he himself yearns to play the same role today that Macaulay or Gibbon did in their time. He covets the way they could grasp their subject whole and entire and bring it to almost the whole of the reading public. Which of us scribblers wouldn't want to do the same?

Richard writes about Eric's four problems and advice giving.#

He's asking for advice, which is also known as asking to be told what to do. It's odd for people in their twenties to want to be told what to do, having recently been teenagers and hating it when their parents did it. Also, people in their twenties—yes, there are exceptions—have bosses who tell them what to do too. Granted, they're (hopefully) being paid to do what the boss says, so there's at least a trade off. But why do it for free?