Philip Greenspun proposes a different sort of welfare system based on the principles that people should get help immediately without becoming a different social class and not giving most of the money to bureaucrats.#

I won't say that my system is optimal. I won't say that I'm smarter than any of the people running the government. However, I do say that American citizens shouldn't have to go hungry or sleep in the streets. We should question the need to pay bureaucrats to decide whether or not people need help. We should consider replacing social workers and bureaucrats with computers processing reports from restaurants, hotels, and other companies who are actually delivering services to Americans who need them.

Philip Greenspun writes about the book Travels with Lizbeth by Lars Eighner.#

One of the most interesting things they both talk about is the similarities between the very poor and the very rich. Namely that they both begin to loss their attachment to material. The poor do not have any or the access to it, so they are not attracted to it. And, the rich could have as much as they want and they know there is always something more they could spend money on.

It's a very strange thing to think, and they both seem to identify with a "pity" of the middle.

I got a discount offer from Amazon via Peter Lindberg. Apparently there is this program called Share the Love that offers a 10% discount to your friends when you buy something. If you would like to be listed as my friend on Amazon for use of this service in the future, then please email me. This will be particularly useful in the case that you feel we have similar interests in books.#

George Orwell writes about the problems with nationalism in 1945.#

It is also worth emphasizing once again that nationalist feeling can be purely negative. There are, for example, Trotskyists who have become simply enemies of the USSR without developing a corresponding loyalty to any other unit. When one grasps the implications of this, the nature of what I mean by nationalism becomes a good deal clearer. A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist -- that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating -- but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is on the downgrade. But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also -- since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself -- unshakeably certain of being in the right.

He explains many of the problems and peculiarities of nationalism. One interesting example is how and why so many nationalists are foreigners to the group they support. His theory is that it has to with public support of your own group is not popular for the "intelligentsia".

A great comment on Pacifists:

Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defense of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China.

Sometimes when reading Orwell I can't believe that this was written almost sixty years ago and the same crap is still going around. It really makes you think that not even the Internet and this stuff could cure people of these delusions. See this on self-hatred.

English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain.

At the very end, he writes about what might cause nationalism and what can be done about it. This is a very short section, but the overall message is that nationalism is something that people will always do to shield themselves from others, themselves, and the truth. As a result, it is unlikely to go away and being upset about it is a bad reason to remove oneself from politics. Orwell says that no legitimate intellectual can remove themselves politics really because it will always effect them and thus they will have an interest.

Marc Nozell links to Save Grafton and the associated blog.#

Chromewalker is about technology. No RSS feed?#

Brian Doss on how interns in the government are primarily selected for sexual potential.#

But, a there is a bright side:

"When you look at an Assembly person from the outside, you have a view about them. But after working with them, you see a totally different person from what you thought," she said. "After interning at the New York State Assembly, I've come to realize I don't want to be involved in politics," said [21-year-old SUNY Albany student Jennifer] Harrington, who has just wrapped up a semester working for the lawmakers.

Score one for civil society over political society, albeit the hard way. One less person with illusions about their politicians and politics is A Good Thing™.

Any comment Carly?

Bruce Schneier writes on warrants, security, and privacy.#

Unfortunately, the debate often gets mischaracterized as a question about how much privacy we need to give up in order to be secure. People ask: "Should we use this new surveillance technology to catch terrorists and criminals, or should we favor privacy and ban its use?"

This is the wrong question. We know that new technology gives law enforcement new search techniques, and makes existing techniques cheaper and easier. We know that we are all safer when the police can use them. And the Fourth Amendment already allows even the most intrusive searches: The police can search your home and person.

What we need are corresponding mechanisms to prevent abuse. This is the proper question: "Should we allow law enforcement to use new technology without any judicial oversight, or should we demand that they be overseen and accountable?" And the Fourth Amendment already provides for this in its requirement of a warrant.

Dienekes reports on the Catholic Church's recent provision against Catholic women marrying Muslim men.#

Dienekes also links to a Helen of Troy slideshow of the major actors.

Peterr Lindberg quotes an interesting paragraph from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.#

In every city of the empire every building is different and set in a different order: but as soon as the stranger arrives at the unknown city and his eye penetrates the pine cone of pagodas and garrets and haymows, following the scrawl of canals, gardens, rubbish heaps, he immediately distinguishes which are the princes' palaces, the high priests' temples, the tavern, the prison, the slum. This--some say--confirms the hypothesis that each man bears in his mind a city made only of differences, a city without figures and without form, and the individual cities fill it up.

Mark Pilgrim switched from MovableType to WordPress. Go him.#

Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program, for any purpose. WordPress gives me that freedom; Movable Type does not. It never really did, but it was free enough so we all looked the other way, myself included. But Movable Type 3.0 changes the rules, and prices me right out of the market. I do not have the freedom to run the program for any purpose; I only have the limited set of freedoms that Six Apart chooses to bestow upon me, and every new version seems to bestow fewer and fewer freedoms. With Movable Type 2.6, I was allowed to run 11 sites. In 3.0, that right will cost me $535.

WordPress is Free Software. Its rules will never change. In the event that the WordPress community disbands and development stops, a new community can form around the orphaned code. It's happened once already. In the extremely unlikely event that every single contributor (including every contributor to the original b2) agrees to relicense the code under a more restrictive license, I can still fork the current GPL-licensed code and start a new community around it. There is always a path forward. There are no dead ends.

Movable Type is a dead end. In the long run, the utility of all non-Free software approaches zero. All non-Free software is a dead end.

Creative Commons links to Donald Rumsfeld poetry recitals.#