Jim Moore writes about the media's involvement in politics from the side of someone involved in a campaign. His recommendations for better coverage are superb.#

What I am more and more experiencing, from the inside of a campaign now, is the extent to which the mass media (1) defines the process of choice for Americans, and (2) trivializes the choices available to folks. The media wants the public to decide what "style" of president they want: folksy, scholarly, patrician, military, rowdy. Now CNN is running a poll on whether or not the media is being "fair" to Dean. Hmmm. I would say this is the Fox running the henhouse--except, of course, this is CNN rather than Fox.

There is almost no discussion in the TV media of other grounds for choice. These might reasonably include (1) the interests that the candidate represents--financial and otherwise, e.g. big oil/oil services and big defense contractors--as expressed in who and how the candidate raises money, (2) the portfolio of issues that the candidate believes are important to work on, (3) the team that the candidate is likely to assemble to address these challenges.

The Black Saint is funnier than you.#

SER: Still, though, would you want to live like that?

Kelso: The show's Tru Calling not Things I'd Want to Happen to Me.

Tony Pierce writes about Captain Kangaroo and having his own children's show.#

being 110 years old has its advantages. for one, i know who captain kangaroo is, and i know what a loss it is for him to have died today.

adios, captain kangaroo. tell mr. greenjeans hi for me.

John at the Movie Blog points to awesome movie reviews of The Butterfly Effect.#

"...nobody associated with making this movie can possibly emerge unscathed."

"In its own ridiculous way, The Butterfly Effect is an entertaining movie..."

Julie Leung on Ted Leung's new book: Professional XML Development with Apache Tools.#

There's something about seeing what he's worked on so long, turned into something tangible on the kitchen countertop, hard copy you can hold in your hands. And such a cute cover too!.

AKMA asks an important question about The Passion.#

One point I haven't seen anyone recognize in the whole brouhaha over whether the Pope blessed Mel Gibson's film with the words, "It is as it was," involves the oddity of Gibson seeking papal approval of anything at all. If I understood correctly, Gibson's father (with support, if not explicit approval from the movie star) holds the position that John Paul II is not the pope at all, is in fact a heretic. If Gibson sympathizes with his dad's theology, doesn't it look more than a little grimly crass to seek an endorsement from a heresiarch, just because that figure would be vastly influential?

David Weinberger writes about Return of the King. It's funny.#

I have a small wager with my son. I say that Gollum will be nominated as Best Supporting Actor. He deserves it. So does Sean Astin, but as Best Actor; nominating him for Supporting Actor would confuse his character (Frodo's support) with his structural role in the movie.

And I will be personally outraged if LongBeard the Ent beats out Viggo Mortensen for the award for Best Acting by an Inanimate Object. IMO, Mortensen was way better, although I realize it's a topic about which reasonable people can disagree.

Brian Weatherson writes a few anecdotes on the quality of public health care systems in Australian and America.#

Third, the distribution of coverage in the Australian plan is just what you'd expect from a public system.

It's pretty good on day-to-day stuff. If you need to see a GP with no appointment, you can see one, usually with not that long a queue, with no co-payment. That was the feature of the system I most liked, and most used, and most miss about my American equivalent. (Note I don't have that even with a reasonably expensive private health plan.)

It's world-class on life-and-death matters. Even people with private health insurance will end up in the public system if they have a heart attack or are in a car accident, because at emergency care our public system is better than the private system at these things, and as far as I can tell, is as good as it gets.

Lisa Williams about the Japanese, versus the Americans, with regards to money.#

Evan's family has a tradition: when you cut a newborn's fingernails for the first time, you are supposed to put a coin or a bill in their little fist as you do it -- because doing so will mean that a lot of money will flow through their hands in their lifetime. We westerners love to touch money! A lot! One has to wonder what people in Japan make of scenes in American movies where bank robbers get out their stolen millions and throw it in the air and roll in it...

Michael Lucas-Smith comments on Knight vs. Samurai: Fight!#

After reading his essay I'd have to say that a knight in full armor with a shield and a long sword would, in my opinion (and my training in Asian martial arts) beat the Samurai. But if you stripped away the shield, the armor, the Samurai would quickly dispatch his enemy.

Why do I say this generalisation? Well, the mentality of the asian fighter has always been to 'be the best you can be', while the european has always been 'augmentation'. Hence the drastically different armor and the advent of the shield. In fact, in Japan, the 'ninja' were outcastes because they employed techniques that augmented their abilities, such as covering their clothing with blood so they appeared to be wounded, putting poison on their arrows and blades, using the classic 'ninja star', etc.

Roberto Pazzi writes about what nationality the next Pope should be.#

Perhaps, as someone who has devoted two novels to the Vatican, I may be allowed to invent a "what if" scenario. "What if," then, the new pope were to be Italian? We would surely have in bioethical and sexual matters a more modern and less conservative attitude, more sympathetic to the sufferings of the multitudes in Africa who are scourged by AIDS. To these victims John Paul has obstinately refused contraception, for reasons of principle that risk becoming complicity in what could truly be a mass extermination. It was this refusal in particular that influenced the Nobel judges in Oslo in denying him the peace prize.

But the pope has revealed the same mindset in condemning common-law and gay couples, under the influence of a family model that is more Polish than Italian, and in which sexuality has a single purpose: procreation. The inflexibility of John Paul II, the Pole who forbade abortions for Catholic nuns raped by Bosnian Muslims, recalls the severe Adrian VI, the Dutchman who wanted to destroy Michelangelo's nudes in the Sistine chapel.

The Binary Circumstance writes about Andrew Sullivan's link to a memorial site for a fallen soldier.#

All these teenage boys, still at the beginning of their lives, are being taught that their lives are worth less than the flags that they are holding in their hands. That's sick. It's child abuse directed at young boys. It's an insult not just to these children but to all the great men who have used their lives to create all the brilliant inventions that we now take for granted. Which of those young boys would be the next Einstein if they weren't all being taught to value their lives less than a rag with stripes on it. Will they ever grow to the age when they can see past the insanity of a culture that values male sacrifice more than living males? Will they live to be old enough to see past the insanity of a culture where the elders train their male children for self-sacrifice, just as God trained Jesus?

And later he adds:

The first thing that popped into my mind was Andrew Sullivan's polite fiction that young men who have been murdered by mystical, sexist Christian cultural values are heros. While a lot of people might say they are heros, most of us know they are just dead. Dead boys can't be heros; they can't be anything. They no longer exist.

Don Quixote praises another human sacrifice:

Why the US Military is the Best in the World

It is not our technology, impressive as our equipment may be. It is not our spending, even if we are willing to spend more in total and per capita than any other free country in the world. It is because of our brave volunteer soldiers who are willing to put their lives in danger for the rest of us.

[...]

May God be with you Sergeant Major. And many thanks to all our brave soldiers for putting their lives on the line to make the world a safer place.

(Note: The world is a safer place because someone just died?)

Michael Feldman points to a new news story about the German Cannibal Case.#

Mr Meiwes's most remarkable fantasies are not sexual or culinary but megalomaniacal.

He tells Joerg that cannibalism should be propagated as a form of development aid: "We could solve the problem of over-population and famine at a stroke."

Despite the evidence, court observers see the case tilting slightly towards Mr Meiwes.

The internet transcripts reveal a man uninterested in killing, only in eating freshly slaughtered people. The prosecution has to prove that the victim, Bernd Brandes, was murdered for sexual motives.

Will R. links to and summarizes Dave Pollard's "Ideas of the Year."#

You need to read the full post, but here are the highlights:

• There are no rules in the "blogosphere"
• It's more important to be first than best
• Focus on a few subjects and address them profoundly and creatively
• Social Networking will allow us to build deep relationships, collaborate on awesome projects, find the next president.
• Blogs could be the platform for a proxy for each of us as individuals, our electronic filing cabinet and electronic identity
• The abandonment of 80-90% of blogs is a positive phenomenon
• Blogging is increasingly a platform for achieving mainstream recognition
• The culture of blogging is evolving faster than the technology (Note: Sound familiar?)
• Blogs, like diaries, are a substitute for intimacy
• RSS is blurring the distinction between blogs and other me

Dan Hon is still annoyed this year at a few things.#

Waiting for public transport, especially when said public transport is advertised as a quick and convenient method for travelling through town using a picture of a businessman looking at his watch. While presumably waiting for his bus to arrive.

The fact that my mortgage consistently fails to be completely paid off for some inexplicable yet unrectifiable reason each morning.

Ryan McGee writes about resolutions and a New You.#

If human nature tells us anything, it's that we as sentient beings can have all the objectively compelling evidence possible and yet will still only act when we convince ourselves a particular course of action is right. Sometimes we concur with the popular evidence, as in, "You know what? I should lose a bit of weight. I should call that old friend I haven't seen in months. I should look for a new job." Or your own personal conclusion flies in the face of all known forms of logic: "I think a large pepperoni pizza per meal will melt these extra pounds away. I should call everyone who's never called me and tell them to f#ck off. I should stay miserable in my dimly lit cubicle until downsized."

In either case, one and one person alone makes these decisions. The reason most resolutions are not adhered to, thusly, is because all too often they initiate from an outside source, which can appropriate itself into what looks like our own opinion, only to be shattered by the cold harsh light of five weeks later, when you're flailing like that fish in the Faith No More video on the treadmill in your new $120 sneakers below your $40 shorts below your $18 t-shirt below your $10 headband wondering how in the blue hell you ever got there. And then you go and have buffalo wings and wash them down with 18 beers and wipe your chin with the headband.

Faré links to a nice Introduction to the Philosophy of Liberty, or Libertarianism.#

Libertarian is based on the theory of self-ownership. You own your own life, to deny this is to assert that someone else has more of a right to your life than yourself.

David Boaz wrote an article, Key Concepts of Libertarianism, for the Cato Institute.#

It may be appropriate to acknowledge at this point the reader's likely suspicion that libertarianism seems to be just the standard framework of modern thought -- individualism, private property, capitalism, equality under the law. Indeed, after centuries of intellectual, political, and sometimes violent struggle, these core libertarian principles have become the basic structure of modern political thought and of modern government, at least in the West and increasingly in other parts of the world.

However, three additional points need to be made: first, libertarianism is not just these broad liberal principles. Libertarianism applies these principles fully and consistently, far more so than most modern thinkers and certainly more so than any modern government. Second, while our society remains generally based on equal rights and capitalism, every day new exceptions to those principles are carved out in Washington and in Albany, Sacramento, and Austin (not to mention London, Bonn, Tokyo, and elsewhere). Each new government directive takes a little bit of our freedom, and we should think carefully before giving up any liberty. Third, liberal society is resilient; it can withstand many burdens and continue to flourish; but it is not infinitely resilient. Those who claim to believe in liberal principles but advocate more and more confiscation of the wealth created by productive people, more and more restrictions on voluntary interaction, more and more exceptions to property rights and the rule of law, more and more transfer of power from society to state, are unwittingly engaged in the ultimately deadly undermining of civilization.

In opening of another book about Libertarianism, David Boaz writes,#

The old ideologies have been tried and found wanting. All around us--from the post-communist world to the military dictatorships of Africa to the faltering, bankrupt welfare states of Europe and North and South America--we see the failed legacy of coercion and statism. At the same time we see moves toward libertarian solutions--toward constitutional government in Eastern Europe and South Africa, privatization in Britain and Latin America, democracy and the rule of law in Korea and Taiwan, demands for tax reduction everywhere. We even see people in many parts of the world--Quebec, Croatia, Bosnia, northern Italy, Scotland, and much of Africa, not to mention the 15 new republics of the old Soviet Union--challenging the large, intrusive, incorrigible nation-states that they find themselves in and demanding devolution of power. Libertarianism offers an alternative to coercive government that should appeal to peaceful, productive people everywhere.

No, a libertarian world isn't a perfect one. There will still be inequality, poverty, crime, corruption, man's inhumanity to man. But, unlike the theocratic visionaries, the pie-in-the-sky socialist utopians, or the starry-eyed Mr. Fixits of the New Deal and Great Society, libertarians don't promise you a rose garden. Karl Popper once said that attempts to create heaven on earth invariably produce hell. Libertarianism holds out, not the goal of a perfect society, but of a better and freer one. It promises a world in which more of the decisions will be made in the right way by the right person: you. The result will be, not an end to crime and poverty and inequality, but less of most of those things most of the time--often much less.

Jarret Wollstein in an article, "In Pursuit of Liberty," writes about voluntary association and coercion.#

We need others for most of what we want out of life: companionship, friendship, family, recreation, and wealth. A hermit living alone on a desert island may be able to survive, but his living standard and lifestyle will be little better than that of an animal. There are only two basic ways of getting what you want from others: voluntarily or coercively. When you deal with others voluntarily, others deal with you because they want to, because they receive some benefit - material or psychological - by dealing with you. The tools of voluntarism are friendship, trade, compassion, and love. In coercive association, you get what you want from others by deception or fear. The tools of coercion are intimidation, threats, fraud, and physical violence. Voluntary association promotes trust and respect, and provides benefits for everyone. Coercive association creates fear and distrust, and victimizes some at the expense of others. A guiding principle of any free society is voluntary association. Individual Rights are Essential for a Free Society.

Sharon Harris writes about the Gentle, Invisible Hand of Liberty versus the Violent, Visible Fist of Government.#

Government theft is more insidious than free-lance theft. Lysander Spooner, one of America's most brilliant political theorists, talked about this in his masterpiece, No Treason. He compared ordinary robbers to tax collectors. The robber, he pointed out, robs you only once — and then goes on his way. The government, on the other hand, robs you year after year after year. Then it has the gall to say it's doing you a service and expects your gratitude.

The visible fist of government.

In a free society, the right to property and privacy would be sacred. It would be, as the great English statesman William Pitt so eloquently stated, " . . . the poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail — it's roof may shake — the wind may blow through it — the storms may enter — but the king of England cannot enter — all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement."

Cirilla writes about Buy Nothing Day.#

Thanksgiving was one of the only holidays that has remained somewhat untouched by obligatory consumer activity. That is until some bright executive felt they could remedy that by holding massive sales, transforming the simple, family-centric holiday into yet another melee of frenetic spending.

Buy Nothing Day is an exercise, and I think of it as a way to resist the call to arms corporations send out. By staying home and NOT spending needlessly, you are proving that you aren't under the thumb of economic programmers who seek to invade your revery and capture your gaze until they've transferred what is YOUR money into THEIR profit, leaving you with goods you didn't need until they convinced you you did.

I am not above spending, but that is why I study it. I want to know why I've been so utterly seduced by something so harmful and I want to know if I can hit the brakes on this massive country-wide brainwashing. It's not a revolutionary act, but it is a start, one I think everyone should try.

Here are my thoughts on Buy Nothing Day and the comments to her original entry by other readers.#

Tim has written that while doing this shows that you are free from the economic programmers, you are not actually making much of a consistent statement. If you did want to you would "boycott holiday spending entirely." Previously I've linked to No-Shopping Christmas, where Agent000 describes such a statement and boycott:

No Shopping Christmas is a simple, yet heavy concept: buy no gifts for Christmas out of obligation, and inform others of your intent so that they do not feel obligated to buy you gifts in return. Don't waste money on lame decorations, and thank you kindly for not killing the trees. Spend time with your family and friends instead of spending money on them. Participate in the traditions of your religion of choice. Or not. Accept Christmas as a time for rest, relaxation, and spending time with people outside of shopping malls.

Implementing this concept, I see a world with much less stress and much more value. A world where children would receive fewer cheap plastic toys, but have their college education paid for. A world where we plant a tree in our backyard, not our living room. A world where time is valued more than money.

This holiday season, go out and don't buy something.

This, I think, shows some of the core of what Buy Nothing Day is about. Like a religious fast, it teaches the practitioners that they can have a happy, full life without giving into temptation and desire. In this context, Buy Nothing Day forces you to realize that you don't need to buy things every day - hopefully giving you the courage to plan what purchases you must make more wisely and lead a less stressful life. That is the case for controlling your buying in general. In the case of holiday shopping, a No-Shopping Christmas takes something negative ("Don't spend money on Christmas.") into something positive: "Show people that you really care about them, whatever the methods."

We have now reached a point where it is interesting to bring in Tim's next comment, that doing this would cause the market to become stagnant and that this would "cause more damage to the system" if everyone hoarded their money. I think inherent in this comment is both a misunderstanding of economics and an assumption about rights that the "market" has that it does not.

The market has no rights. It is not our responsibility, either individually or as a collective (i.e. the government), to guarantee that what was profitable in the past is profitable in the present or the future. The only markets that should flourish are the ones that are beneficial for the people that are involved in them. If you are providing a product or service that I want for a price we can agree on then I will buy it. If there is no one selling any product or service that I am interested in then I am not obligated to put my money into the market. (Note: This scenario would never occur anyways because of the specialization inherent in humans, there is always someone with a Comparative Advantage over me in something I need, so I would be better off trading with her.)

There seems to be a misunderstanding of the greater meaning of Buy Nothing Day. It serves as a symbol of choice against spending your money. It encourages you to think about WHY you are spending your money, and not spending simply because everyone else is or because advertising tells you to. Even Buy Nothing All Year doesn't suggest that you remove yourself from TRADE (the abstract of money,) it only suggest that you be mindful about where you put your money.

 

Adam writes,

furthermore, you aren't going to actually take away from the profits of the companys, because everyone's just going to go and spend their money within the next couple days anyway."

Again, the point is not to destroy the profits of large companies by one day of protest. Or even really to destroy the profits of large companies with continually boycott. The goal of Buy Nothing Day is to open your eyes and free your mind. And the goal of any boycott, I should mention, is to get the boycottee to change their methods and give in to your demands - in the case of many multinationals this is generally to treat their employees and the environment better. It would be malicious to just single out companies are destroy them through boycott for the sake of destroying them. If there is a successful company, that is not a monopoly, then it exists and is successful because it offers the market something of value and to deny your fellow man that value would be unjust. In fact, to deny that company market share would be to exercise monopoly power of your own, as monopoly is defined as the ability to control entry to a market.

As previously noted, I'm a highly opinionated arm-chair intellectual who consistently covers his ass in the final paragraphs of rants and criticisms. But I post this here because I would get grateful for corrections in my method of argument.#

last month i wrote about eddie west, the guy who owns the shop in my town and how he's crazy an funny.#

last thursday i woke up and rode my bike to work, as i have been doing recently. my idea is that if i ride around without my shirt on enough eventually some beautiful women will ask me for my seven digits. anyways, i was planning on going to Dave Winer's thursday meeting that night so when i went home i was kind of upset to see a flat tire on my car.#

because i was raised inside a computer i don't know how to change my tire. this is very hard for me to admit. i know what to do, i could write it down, but i don't have the confidence to do it alone. so i get ed to come down to my house, do that up and then we go down to the shop so i can wait around while they get a new tire and put it on.#

every time a customer came in Ed would explain to them that I was his psychiatrist and that anything that they wanted to ask him they would have to whisper to me first because he was feeling unstable at the moment and needed a buffer. keep in mind that eddie is like 70, nearly. so this really caught me off guard the first time he said it but i felt that i caught only quickly and we had them all confused. he was telling everyone that he found me through Dr. Bill - who as i mentioned in the last episode is this great Doctor of Psychology who works there fixing cars because he likes doing it - apparently i was bill's star pupil in a class he was taking and when i graduated (i was the youngest psychiatrist in massachusetts) he fixed me up with some money for a practice.#

so then ed and i talked about money, public funding, and education. ed is really involved in town politics and right now there's a big deal about how much money is being spent on new schools for the town. the core of our conversation was that we thought public schools did a poor job doing what they do and that we would both prefer obligatory attendance of private schools of your choice with the government spending money on accreditation programs, scholarships, and breadth of knowledge testing. he liked this idea because it relieves some of the tax burden from people without kids in school, creates better schools, and creates a real quality control system similar to that of colleges and universities - without destroying the chances of people without "means" of getting educations. Bill (who's ex-wife is the head school administrator of the towns) and I thought that his idea was pretty valid but of course no one would really stand for it, the only way to implement it would be to start putting kids in private schools by the thousands.#

the conversation then moved to whether or not people are "really" better off with education and ed talked about when he was a kid in our poor poor farm town. ignorance it seemed was bliss.#

it was a nice time, then i went to the meeting and met Dave Winer and some people. very interesting discussions, i plan on going more often. #

this morning after class i needed to get an oil change for my car and have it's check engine light shut off. so i drove over to my local shop and parked my car. as begin to get out the owner of the shop, a family friend, yells at me "Roll down that window! It's going to get too hot in there and leave the keys in the car!" I did as I said and got out, he then told me to "Get in, we're going for a ride" while motioning towards his car. At this point it's important to note that I am unannounced and I hadn't even said a word when i was getting out of my car.#

So we're driving around a bit, he needs to get his mail and drive around town a bit. I should give a little background on Mr. West. Eddie West was a relatively famous racer in his day. For a summary look at this article and this entry in the New England Racing Hall of Fame. A few key points: "He won more New England Super-Modified Racing Association season championships than anybody, six: In 1969, 1970, 1973, 1974, 1975 and '80. He ranks second in all time NESMRA feature wins with 106."#

So he's this really funny old guy who runs my town's shop and he's kind of like a Town hero. He's been pretty good friends with my family forever so when I go get work done on my car I normally sit around and shoot the shit for a bit. So back to the matter at hand, we're driving around in his battered up old car with no license plate and no registration. He tells me that he has no registration because no one is stupid enough to pull him over, he'll just beat them up. Plus he's got a lot of clout.#

While we're driving along this back road there's a VW Minibus behind us. He turns to me and says "Do you like those cars?" "Yea, a bit" "Bah! The Germans made those to get back at us! Let's freak this guy out!" And he starts to slow will the car towards the right side of the road and almost went completely off before slamming back into the road. It was a riot.#

When we got back to the shop, the minibus stopped and Dr. Jennings got out. He's this guy who is a Ph.D of Psychology from Harvard who works at the shop on Fridays for "fun" and helps out needy people everywhere. I actually don't know everything about this guy but he's a cool, smart guy. And in the office we all talked politics and philosophy and stuff.#

It was a good deal, although Dr. Jennings mentioned to me a philosopher I had a never heard of, Karl Popper. Whom you too can read about via his Google Directory. It seems like the main reason he was mentioned was for his ideas about the inability for solid, successful plans to exist in governments. He doesn't believe in a set Utopia that will eventually be discovered to solve all problems and "His anti utopianism in politics matches his fallibilism in epistemology and leads him to ask not how should we rule or manage but how can we best avoid misrule, and mismanagement in order to minimise harm. " (quote link)#

I enjoy philosophy, politics, and talking with my elders and people who are smarter than me. After all, I am just a bear of little brain.#

An article on kuro5hin about what makes a life happy and unhappy, and how individually we can be happier - from a feminist perspective.