My belief at this point is that, for the good of the Republic, Specter should be—like a political version of Schrödinger’s cat—permanently suspended in a condition of being on the verge of being primaried from the Left. If we can just keep it up a little longer, I expect Specter to come out in favor of not only single-payer and card-check, but also a $10/gallon gasoline tax, mandatory gay marriage, and the nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy by a syndic of workers’ soviets.—Making Light

One in six patients are cared for in 624 Catholic hospitals scattered throughout the U.S. in 2006, ... All told, $84.6 billion was spent on Catholic church-affiliated care.

[...]

Catholic institutions are uniquely bound by religious directives on care, effectively eliminating key reproductive health and end-of-life treatment that other institutions will provide to patients and bill to their insurance carriers.

Add those restrictions and compound it with two simple facts: 73 percent of the now uninsured are of reproductive age and the leading cause of death among people aged 15-44 is accidents.

In essence, the people most likely to benefit from the proposed public option and insurance exchange will undoubtedly be seeking the type of care Catholic hospitals refuse to provide as a matter of religious principle. ...

Analyzing the bishops' lobbying efforts from a cold, calculating green eyeshade perspective adds a very different dimension to their motives that may help spur secular business interests to protect both a woman's right to choose and their own bottom line.

This Beltrami County voter cast their ballot for Al Franken, but also put "Lizard People" as a write-in candidate, not only in the U.S. Senate race, but for several others. The county auditor/treasurer ruled that the vote should not be counted because it's considered an overvote. Representatives for Franken challenged that decision. (MPR Photo/Tom Robertson) —Minnesota Public Radio

In the mythology, Clinton's decision to raise taxes and cut spending led to an investment boom. This boom led to a surge in productivity growth. Soaring productivity growth led to the low unemployment of the late 1990s and wage gains for workers at all points along the wage distribution.

At the end of the administration, there was a huge surplus .... The moral of the myth is that all good things came from deficit reduction.

The reality was quite different. There was nothing resembling an investment boom until the dot-com bubble ... a surge in productivity growth beginning in 1995, but this preceded any substantial upturn in investment ... [the surge was] the long-predicted dividend from the information technology revolution.

Rather than investment driving growth during the Clinton boom, the main source of demand growth was consumption. ...

The dollar was pushed upward by a combination of Treasury cheerleading, worldwide financial instability ... and the irrational exuberance propelling the stock bubble ... In the short-run, the over-valued dollar led to cheap imports and lower inflation. It incidentally all also led to the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs ...

Rather than handing George Bush a booming economy, Clinton handed over an economy that was propelled by an unsustainable stock bubble and distorted by a hugely over-valued dollar. ... Because President Bush refused to abandon the high dollar policy, the only tool available to boost the economy was the housing bubble. ...

While the Bush administration must take responsibility for the current crisis ... the stage was set during the Clinton years. ... For this reason, it was very discouraging to see top Clinton administration officials standing centre stage at Obama's meeting on the economy.

—Dean Baker

PMI is the Project Management Institute, the biggest and oldest institution in my profession. I'm voting for the Board of Directors. There are nine candidates, three women and six men, and I can vote for up to five. Here are some quotes from candidate statements:

My vision of PMI is to be globally recognized as the de facto advocate for project management, and the key transformation agent through its innovative products, services, programs and partnerships.

PMI's position as the global thought leader in project, program and portfolio management and the authoritative source for all aspects of project management knowledge has been reinforced to me as I have worked with project managers from around the globe.

Second, remain the "Thought Leader" in project management by continuing to be the "go-to" organization for practitioners and corporations looking for project management information.

Finally, PMI must remain a forum for thought leadership in the project management profession

PMI has made significant progress to establish increased membership and presence in various regions, but a stronger focus on a large part of the African region is strategically needed.

As a Board member, I would advocate for PMI's thought leadership in bringing together diverse stakeholders (e.g., academia, corporations, vendors) and professional associations (e.g., engineering, IT, other project management associations) to promote compelling messaging around the value of the profession, and common approaches to its practice.

Slim pickings, you can see, although one of those quotes is markedly different from the rest. Most of the statements are fairly pure bullshit, of both the ב₀ and ב₁ varieties. None of these people seem likely to address what I think is the fundamental weakness of the profession and the institute: the pressures to stop dealing with reality and start dealing with an artificial world instead, a world in which "thought leadership" is a meaningful phrase.

A mind-bogglingly detailed and long post about all of the electronic data flows that can happen on a street:

In an adjacent newsagent’s, the stock control system updates as a newspaper is purchased, with data about consumption emerging from the EFTPOS system used to purchase the paper, triggering transactions in the customer’s bank account records.

Data emerges from the seven simultaneous phone conversations (with one call via Skype and six cellular phones) amongst the group of people waiting at the pedestrian crossing nearest the newsagent.

...

A police car whistles by, the policewoman in the passenger seat tapping into a feed of patterns of suspicious activity around the back of the newsagent on a proprietary police system accessed via her secured BlackBerry. A kid takes a picture of the police car blurring past with his digital camera, which automatically uses a satellite to stamp the image with location data via the GPS-enabled peripheral plugged into the camera’s hot-shoe connection.

...

In the shoe-shop next door, a similar hand-held scanner, unknowingly damaged in a minor act of tomfoolery a day earlier, fails to register the barcode on a box of sneakers, resulting in a lost sale as the assistant is unable to process the transaction without said barcode. The would-be customer walks out in disgust, texting his wife in order to vent his furious frustration on someone. She sends a placating if deliberately patronising message back within a few seconds, which causes him to smile and respond with an ‘x’ two seconds after that. In doing so, his allocation of SMSs for the month tips over to the next tier in his payment plan, triggering a flag in an database somewhere in Slough.

Adnan Khashoggi is connected to every shocking event that has occurred since 1960, usually by no more than one or two degrees. A partial list would include Iran-Contra, Wedtech, BCCI, the Marcos Philippine kleptocracy, the Synfuels fiasco, and the discovery of buried mustard gas in the pricy Spring Valley neighborhood of Washington, D.C. To these we must now add the tragic events of Sept. 11.

As always, Chatterbox emphasizes that Khashoggi's proximity to these events does not demonstrate criminality on his part. But it does illustrate Khashoggi's "Where's Waldo?"-like ubiquity in the noir environment where shocking events tend to take place. Khashoggi is what the journalist Malcolm Gladwell has termed a "connector," that is, a person who stands at the intersection of many social networks. —Slate, 14 Nov 2001

The latest:

In a recent sitdown, celeb interviewer Daphne Barak asks Adnan Khashoggi point-blank, "Was Heather Mills paid for sex -- or wasn't she?" Khashoggi answers "Who cares?" and reaches out to Barak for a high-five. He later says, "How does she know names, places, if she wasn't one of the girls?" referring to the fact Mills has admitted meeting him at one of his events. —NY Post by way of Salon

From Wired Magazine:

We'll be brief: Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn.") and is said to have called it his best work. So we asked sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers from the realms of books, TV, movies, and games to take a shot themselves.

Joel's favorites:

Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket.
- William Shatner

Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
- Alan Moore

The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly.
- Orson Scott Card

Nevertheless, he tried a third time.
- James P. Blaylock

Dinosaurs return. Want their oil back.
- David Brin

Dorothy: "Fuck it, I'll stay here."
- Steven Meretzky

Leia: "Baby's yours." Luke: "Bad news…"
- Steven Meretzky


"I'm really excited about Dungeon Siege, the Uwe Boll movie you're in."

Bruce Schneier on the new airport rules:

And a long-term prohibition against liquid carry-ons won't make us safer, either. It's not just that there are ways around the rules, it's that focusing on tactics is a losing proposition.

It's easy to defend against what the terrorists planned last time, but it's shortsighted. If we spend billions fielding liquid-analysis machines in airports and the terrorists use solid explosives, we've wasted our money. If they target shopping malls, we've wasted our money. Focusing on tactics simply forces the terrorists to make a minor modification in their plans. There are too many targets -- stadiums, schools, theaters, churches, the long line of densely packed people before airport security -- and too many ways to kill people.

Security measures that require us to guess correctly don't work, because invariably we will guess wrong. It's not security, it's security theater: measures designed to make us feel safer but not actually safer.

Airport security is the last line of defense, and not a very good one at that. Sure, it'll catch the sloppy and the stupid -- and that's a good enough reason not to do away with it entirely -- but it won't catch a well-planned plot. We can't keep weapons out of prisons; we can't possibly keep them off airplanes. —Schneier

And a cartoon

Woody Harrelson had to say today about the birth of his third daughter: "In this crazy patriarchal world we live in, we are doing our part to balance the energy. We are proud to announce the completion of our goddess trilogy with the birth of our third daughter, Makani Ravello."

Shine on, you crazy diamond.

Orcinus nails/informs my view on the hot topic of the day:

You know, it's possible to make a case that immigration is an important problem that needs addressing without resorting to racist rhetoric and scapegoating -- though, Lord knows the nativist right hasn't figured that out yet.

But I think you can also make the case that, in reality, it isn't that big a problem, especially placed in the perspective of the life-and-death issues at stake in the fight against terrorism, or the looming threat of global warming, which strikes at our very survival as a species.

What strikes me in any event as far more significant than immigration is the way the nativists piling onto the issue have resurrected the racist right in America. —Orcinus

A great article on ESPN.com about Barry Bonds, baseball, and what it means historically and culturally:

... the past five years have been an especially depressing stretch to be an American ... it's the Era of Predictable Disillusionment: a half-decade in which many long-standing fears about how America works (and what America has come to represent) were gradually—and then suddenly—hammered into the collective consciousness of just about everyone, including all the people who hadn't been paying attention to begin with.

This will not be lost on future historians. In 50 or 100 years, they will search for events within the popular culture that supposedly embodied the zeitgeist of the time. Some of these people will use sports, not unlike the way contemporary historians might use Muhammad Ali as a means to define the 1960s. As these future historians try to explain what was wrong with the world in the early 21st century, I suspect they will use Barry Bonds.

[...]

A mound of evidence suggests that Bonds has been less than honest about steroids. But it seems like he's been honest about a lot of other things. "The last time I played baseball was in college," he said in his grand jury testimony during the BALCO case. He said almost the exact same thing to The New York Times Magazine in 2002: "The last game I played was in college. Ever since then, it's been a business. This is a business."

[...]

Early in "Game of Shadows," authors Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams try to illustrate what motivated Bonds to inject chemicals into his rump, and they suggest that his actions were driven by jealousy and, to a lesser extent, race. "They're just letting him do it because he's a white boy," Bonds supposedly said of McGwire's steroid-fueled run at the single-season home run mark. This statement makes Bonds seem as paranoid as Richard Nixon. How, one wonders, could unseen puppet masters be pulling the strings behind the home run race? It all seems crazy.

But, then again, nobody ever wrote a takedown book on Mark McGwire. I'm not sure anyone even considered it.

Nixon wasn't always wrong.

[...]

For all practical—and statistical—purposes, Ruth wasn't a real person. In 1927 he hit 60 home runs, exactly twice as many as NL co-champs Hack Wilson and Cy Williams hit; when Ruth retired in 1935, he had hit 714 homers, more than twice as many as Lou Gehrig, the man in second place. In 1925, he got a tummy ache, and it was one of the biggest stories of the year. He revolutionized the game, captivated radio audiences, built houses, inspired candy bars and was used as an epithet by Japanese soldiers during the war. Ruth has been dead for 57 years, and he is still substantially more famous than Barry Bonds.

But Bonds is going to pass him, and no one knows how to feel. Ruth was a troubling person, but he's a wonderful idea; Bonds is a troubling person who's an empty idea.

Americans are about to get bounced from an international tournament in their own sport -- and worse, at home -- and I haven't heard one word about the team's moral shortcomings. The basketball team's losses were proof of a breakdown in society. In baseball, hey, anything can happen in a short series.

There is that. And what other striking difference is there in the makeup of the USA's 2004 basketball team and 2006 baseball team? Does anything jump out at you when you look at the team photos? —King Kaufman

The lengths to which reviewers from all over the country, representing publications of various ideological shadings, have gone in order to diminish the specifically gay element is striking ...

It seems clear by now that Brokeback has received the attention it's been getting, from critics and audiences alike, partly because it seems on its surface to make normal what many people think of as gay experience— bringing it into the familiar "heart of America." ... The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really homosexual—that they're more like the heart of America than like "gay people"—you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed.

—Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Review of Books

The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush's tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes. The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do "whatever it takes" to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. WHO ARE YOU AFRAID OF? I listen to people like Rahm Emanuel superciliously explaining elementary politics to us clueless naifs outside the Beltway ("First, you have to win elections"). Can't you even read the damn polls? —Molly Ivins

Some perspective on the brewing war on Iran:

Speaking as a Canadian who is fond of judicious language, I feel that this situation deserves careful and measured thought. So let me just open with:

Is your entire f*cking country on crack??? Are all you Americans out of your cotton picking minds??? Are you completely freaking delusional? Homicidal? Psychotic? Have you lost any shred of a moral compass? WHAT IN THE NAME OF JESUS H. CHRIST ON A CRUTCH IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!!!!!

... Have you all forgotten that the evidence on Iraq was spectacularly wrong? Have you all ignored the fact that it was fabricated? Why then are we going down the exact same road of stage managed, fabricated pseudo-evidence and wild-ass hysteria? What is wrong with you people?

Can't you see that this entire crisis has been manufactured, and has been years in the manufacturing[?]—Den Valdron

Lothar Matthaus has denied an Italian television report that he manipulated balls during Friday's World Cup draw. ... The television channel claimed prepared hot and cold balls allowed Matthaus to know who he was picking.

Applying for a promotion in the Reagan administration 20 years ago, Samuel A. Alito Jr. described himself as a thoroughgoing conservative "particularly proud" of contributing to cases arguing "that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion. —New York Times

[Alito] tried to play down the importance of the 1985 job application as he met with senators, including two prominent Democrats on the Judiciary Committee.

"He said first of all it was different then," said one of the two, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California. "He said, 'I was an advocate seeking a job, it was a political job and that was 1985. I'm now a judge. I've been on the circuit court for 15 years, and it's very different. I'm not an advocate; I don't give heed to my personal views. What I do is interpret the law.' "

...

"And so I asked him, 'Why shouldn't we consider the answers that you're giving today an application for another job?' " Mr. Kennedy said.
—New York Times

In case you missed the diplomatic incident between fictional Kazakhstan reported Borat and the real government of Kazakhstan, and you missed the MTV Europe music awards that ignited the feud, here are some of Borat's comments:

At the press conference
"My 13-year-old son is travelling here by foot, with his two wives and his three childrens." "If he survives the journey I have promised him that he can make penetration with Colombian prostitute Shakira."

In interview with the BBC
"Unfortunately my wife was unable to leave Kazakhstan as she is a woman... this is a good news, she is a boring. High Five!!!"

To finish the show
"To the world, I love you! Apart from Uzbekistan. Assholes."

In an internal memorandum, Microsoft employees were told not to use the term Dzongkha in any Microsoft software, language lists or promotional materials since "Doing so implies affiliation with the Dalai Lama, which is not acceptable to the government of China. In this instance, replace "Dzongkha" with 'Tibetan - Bhutan'."—Tibet News

This came as a surprise to Bhutanese officials who expected an official “Dzongkha” support when a UK-based company called the Orient Foundation took up the task in 1998. ... [Orient Foundation president] Mr. Coleman proposed to the then Dzongkha Development Commission that the Orient Foundation would develop the Unicode system for Dzongkha and help incorporate the Unicode into the Windows Vista. ... The government paid US$ 250,000 and, with the Orient Foundation reportedly unable to pay its share, the Swiss Development Corporation contributed US$ 175,000. The Orient Foundation eventually contributed US$ 14,000.

All the funds were paid to the Orient Foundation.

The final cost of the project was billed at about US$ 523,000. Many observers believe that the project was greatly overpriced.

—Kuensel online

So your goverment pays (through a larcenous, mercenary middleman) Microsoft to add support to your language, which will enable you to, well, to pay Microsoft for their product, and then Microsoft disrespects your culture in order to stay on China's good side. This is exactly the kind of thing that keeps me so committed to working in and with free software.

A lawyer for the defense is cross-examining witness Barbara Forrest, who has testified about the history of intelligent design.

Q. You're also a member of the Americans United for Separation of Church and State, are you not?

A. I am.

[...]

Q. And how long have you been a dues paying member?

A. [...] I can't remember. I've been on the National Advisory Council for several years, although, maybe since 2001.

Q. You've been on the National Advisory Council since 2001?

A. That's about right.

Q. What does the National Advisory Council do?

A. As far as I've been on it, we haven't done anything.

Q. Good.

We are ... engaged in a vast, shambling and tragic occupation of Iraq, the nominal aim of which is to create a secular, rule-of-law-based democracy which would end the cycle of repression, fanaticism and violence which spilled onto America's shores four years ago.

At the same time, President Bush argues for Miers' confirmation neither on the basis of her 'judicial temperament' nor her judicial philosophy or ideology but because she is a staunch evangelical Christian.

The fact that many of the president's more theocratic supporters don't seem to believe him just adds a level of irony or entertainment for those of us still holding out for the Enlightenment tradition. —Josh Marshall

In this transcript from the Dover evolution trial, the plaintiffs' witness is a scientist testifying about the definition and meaning of intelligent design. Mr. Walczak is an attorney for the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs are the parents suing to block the addition of intelligent design to the school curriculum. "THE COURT" refers to the judge.

[Witness]: Now the prediction that is made by Dr. Behe in his book is extremely straight forward, which is, since this was an irreducibly complex machine, and we've taken away most of its parts, what's left behind should be non-functional because, you remember, he wrote, any pre-cursor to an irreducibly complex machine that is missing a part is, by definition, non-functional. This [diagram of a flagellum] is missing 30 parts.

Next slide. Well, it turns out that what is actually left behind when we take those parts away is a little structure with those 10 parts, which is known to microbiologists as the type III secretory system. And I can see, Mr. Walczak, you're saying, why, of course, it's the type III secretory system.

THE COURT: That certainly was on my mind.

—Sep 26 afternoon session, p. 18 of the transcript

Sir Richard Mottram ... is to take on the key job of the prime minister's top security and intelligence adviser. ...

He was permanent secretary at the Department of Transport when, on September 11 2001, Jo Moore, an aide to Stephen Byers, then secretary of state, told officials in an email that it would be "a very good day" to "get out anything we want to bury" ...

Mr Byers, who did later resign, gave a confusing account in the Commons about what had gone on. Sir Richard put it more succinctly. He is said to have told a colleague: "We're all fucked. I'm fucked. You're fucked. The whole department's fucked. It's been the biggest cock-up ever and we're all completely fucked."

—The Guardian

But what I really want to know is: Why is it always three strikes and you're out? Why isn't it ever two or four? Does it really make sense to base a whole law-enforcement philosophy on the rules of an athletic contest?

In 1887 baseball experimented with requiring four strikes for a strikeout. What if that had stuck? First of all, that song would be harder to sing -- "for it's one, two-three, four strikes you're out ..."

But more important, would law-and-order types be a third more lenient toward repeat offenders? Would our national sense of the proper blend of punishment and second chances be governed by the saying "four strikes and you're out"?

What if track were the national pastime? Would states be passing "two false starts and you're disqualified" laws that locked up second offenders for life? Or if football had developed earlier and become the American game a century before it did, would legislatures have debated "four downs and you're punted" bills?—King Kaufman, Salon

This is the blog post about John Roberts' confirmation hearing, and because it is the blog post about John Roberts' confirmation hearing, it will be devoid of content, it will not have any links to anything concrete, it will be circular in logic because it is the blog post about John Roberts' confirmation hearing ...
—--The Rude Pundit

August 18th, 2005 - a milestone in the history of the State of Israel.

This was the day on which the settlement enterprise in this country went into reverse for the first time.

...

At the beginning of the settlement activity, during one of my clashes with Golda Meir in the Knesset, I told her: "Every settlement is a land-mine on the road to peace. In due course you will have to remove these mines. And let me tell you, Ma'am, as a former soldier, that the removal of mines is a very unpleasant job indeed."

If I am angry, profoundly sad and frustrated today, it is because of the price we all have paid for this monstrous "enterprise". The thousands killed because of it, Israelis and Palestinians. The hundreds of billions of Shekels poured down the drain. The moral decline of our state, the creeping brutalization, the postponement of peace for dozens of years. Anger with the demagogues of all stripes that started and continued this March of Folly, out of stupidity, blindness, greed, intoxication with power or sheer cynicism. Anger over the suffering and destruction wrought on the Palestinians, whose land and water were stolen, whose houses were destroyed and whose trees were uprooted - all for the "security" of these settlements.

... the settlers had lost the crucial battle for public opinion when their real purpose was revealed: to impose by force a faith-based, messianic, racist, violent, xenophobic regime, with its back to the world at large.

But most importantly, this was the day when a new chance was born for achieving peace in this tortured land.

A great opportunity. Because the Israeli democracy has won a resounding victory. Because it has been proven that settlements can be dismantled without the sky falling. Because the Palestinians have a leadership that wants peace. Because it has been proven that even the radical Palestinian organizations hold their fire when Palestinian public opinion demands it. —Uri Avnery

According to the computers at Baseball Prospectus, the Dodgers have only a 4.3% chance of making it to the postseason. The Cardinals have a 99.9% chance. How do they come up with these numbers?

... the post-season odds report was compiled by running a Monte Carlo simulation of the rest of the season one million times ... Expected winning percentages (EWP) for each team starts with their W3 and L3 from the Adjusted Standings. A regression is applied to derive the EWP for the rest of the season, which is going to be between the current winning percentage and .500. To allow for uncertainty in the EWP, a normal distribution centered on the EWP is randomly sampled, and that value is used for the remainder of the season in that iteration. To simulate the normal 4% home-field advantage, the home team gets a .020 point bonus, while the visitors take a 0.020 penalty. The likelihood of winning each game is determined by the log5 method.

One of the sites I read every morning is The Daily WTF, which highlights very bad code reported to be in use in production systems. Just as FuckedCompany reveals some of the rot and deception behind the shiny lies, The Daily WTF is more informative and useful for a working programmer (or technical manager) than many sites about how to do it the right way. I mention this because today's post was a bit special. Here's an excerpt. Note that the lines beginning with apostrophes are comments allegedly made by the original programmer himself.

' This code will calculate order total, mask it, and send it to
' the ThankYou.asp page, where it will then be unmasked to reveal
' its true beauty, just like the poor Phantom of the Opera.
Randomize
amount = oTotal
maskerLeft = Int((999999 - 100000 + 1) * Rnd + 100000)
maskerRight = Int((999999 - 100000 + 1) * Rnd + 100000)

A large part of the value of the Daily WTF is the commentary on the awful code by other people. This excerpt and comment is choice:

' takes order total and jumbles it mathematically
maskerAmount = ((((oTotal + 22) * 7 )) - 12) * 620

The power of mathematics compels you!
The power of mathematics compels you!

*** projectile vomit pea soup ***

The discussion about What's the Matter With Kansas? interested me because it brought up a new wrinkle. Executive summary:

Premisses:  Red-state voters are concerned about family values.
            Budgets express values by funding or defunding programs.
            Bush Administration budgets cut funding for many programs
              valuable to red-state voters.

Hypothesis: Red-state voters will not support the Bush administration 
            on the basis of values.

Evidence:   Red-state voters do support the Bush administration on the
            basis of values.

Conclusion: Does not compute!

The new wrinkle (to me) is this proposed explanation: By family values, red-state voters mean, primarily, a sexual code of conduct. "People are frantic about homosexuality, abortion/easy sex, kinky Teletubbies, and the whole nine yards. The lack of interest in money makes sense in this context. People tend to be willing to sacrifice and die for what they believe in, and, let's face it, what they believe is that sex can destroy everything they care about. ... There is no point talking money to people who fear losing their way of life. We need to address the issues they care about."

George Bush ... addressed his visitor as "President Abbas", and not accidentally. The use of this appellation was a deliberate choice.

...

During the negotiations which led to the 1993 Oslo agreement, there was much controversy about the title appropriate for Yasser Arafat. The Palestinians demanded that he be called "President", the Israelis agreed only to refer to him as "Chairman".

Why? Well, "president" sounds like a head of state. States have presidents. Ordinary institutions normally have chairpersons. The Israeli negotiators did not agree at all that the Palestinian Authority, which was set up by the agreement, should have the attributes of a state.

... Arabic ... uses the same word for president and chairman. Both are called Ra'is (from Ras, head). Therefore the agreement says, in all its three versions (English, Hebrew and Arabic) that the chief of the Palestinian Authority will bear the title of "Ra'is".

Since then, all the Israeli media, as well as all Israeli politicians and diplomats, insisted on calling Arafat "Chairman of the Palestinian Authority". Nowadays, they stick this label on Abu-Mazen.

Therefore, when Bush calls his guest "President Abbas", it is a slap in the face for Israeli diplomacy and an intentional boost for the prestige of the Palestinian leader.—Uri Avnery

In his latest column, Avnery explains some of the linguistic and technical subtleties in Israel/Palestine struggle. Points accrue to Bush for doing something constructive.

So they've gone and killed "Star Trek." And it's about time.

They tried it before, remember. ...

So out of the ashes the series rose again. Here's the question: Why?

The original "Star Trek," created by Gene Roddenberry, was, with a few exceptions, bad in every way that a science fiction television show could be bad.

...

As science fiction, the series was trapped in the 1930s — a throwback to spaceship adventure stories with little regard for science or deeper ideas. ...

The later spinoffs were much better performed, but the content continued to be stuck in Roddenberry's rut. So why did the Trekkies throw themselves into this poorly imagined, weakly written, badly acted television series with such commitment and dedication? Why did it last so long?

Here's what I think: Most people weren't reading all that brilliant science fiction. Most people weren't reading at all. So when they saw "Star Trek," primitive as it was, it was their first glimpse of science fiction. It was grade school for those who had let the whole science fiction revolution pass them by. Now we finally have first-rate science fiction film and television that are every bit as good as anything going on in print. "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." ... "Lost," the finest television science fiction series of all time … so far. ... series like Joss Whedon's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and Alfred Gough's and Miles Millar's "Smallville" have raised our expectations of what episodic sci-fi and fantasy ought to be. Whedon's "Firefly" showed us that even 1930s sci-fi can be well acted and tell a compelling long-term story.

Screen sci-fi has finally caught up with written science fiction. We're in college now. High school is over. There's just no need for "Star Trek" anymore.

—Orson Scott Card

The strategy of the Chinese government is to change the subject.
When complaints are lodged about the imprisoning of dissidents, the Chinese do not forthrightly proclaim “Indeed, we do put them in prison. We are justified in doing so. They are a threat to our security.” Instead they change the subject to “No country should interfere in the internal affairs of another country.” When America attacks China’s human rights record, the Chinese do not say “You are mistaken about our human rights problem, and here’s why.” Rather, they change the subject: “What about your human rights problem?”

All governments—all human beings—are guilty of this move, which in American parlance is called “spin”. But in China the technique has been reflexively applied for so long, it is now simply the default official approach to any awkward information whatsoever.—Ann Condi

How much longer until this is the norm in the United States? Or have we already passed that threshold? How do we measure? I think that even though the Administration is either there or headed there, that's not a direct comparison. I believe the change the subject syndrome applies to all levels and branches of the Chinese government, whereas I would still expect to get straightforward (or at least not deliberately misleading or obfuscating) answers from, say local governments or branches of federal agencies or judges or a district attorney. Not from politicians, but from bureaucrats. If this changes in the US, will "terrorism" be the excuse?

... the scientists wanted me to do my bit to help fix the terrible little statistic they keep hearing about, the one indicating that many more Americans believe in angels, devils, and poltergeists than in evolution. According to recent polls, about 82 percent are convinced of the reality of heaven (and 63 percent think they're headed there after death); 51 percent believe in ghosts; but only 28 percent are swayed by the theory of evolution.

Scientists think this is terrible—the public's bizarre underappreciation of one of science's great and unshakable discoveries, how we and all we see came to be—and they're right. Yet I can't help feeling tetchy about the limits most of them put on their complaints. You see, they want to augment this particular figure—the number of people who believe in evolution—without bothering to confront a few other salient statistics that pollsters have revealed about America's religious cosmogony. Few scientists, for example, worry about the 77 percent of Americans who insist that Jesus was born to a virgin, an act of parthenogenesis that defies everything we know about mammalian genetics and reproduction. Nor do the researchers wring their hands over the 80 percent who believe in the resurrection of Jesus, the laws of thermodynamics be damned.

No, most scientists are not interested in taking on any of the mighty cornerstones of Christianity. They complain about irrational thinking, they despise creationist "science," they roll their eyes over America's infatuation with astrology, telekinesis, spoon bending, reincarnation, and UFOs, but toward the bulk of the magic acts that have won the imprimatur of inclusion in the Bible, they are tolerant, respectful, big of tent.

...

According to a 1998 survey published in Nature, only 7 percent of members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences professed a belief in a "personal God." ... Yet only a flaskful of the faithless have put their nonbelief on record or publicly criticized religion, the notable and voluble exceptions being Richard Dawkins of Oxford University and Daniel Dennett of Tufts University. Nor have Dawkins and Dennett earned much good will among their colleagues for their anticlerical views; one astronomer I spoke with said of Dawkins, "He's a really fine parish preacher of the fire-and-brimstone school, isn't he?"

So, what keeps most scientists quiet about religion? It's probably something close to that trusty old limbic reflex called "an instinct for self-preservation."

—Natalie Angier, Free Inquiry Magazine

"Over the last 20 years, inflation of recommendations has paralleled the inflation of grades," says Stuart Rojstaczer, an associate professor of hydrology at Duke University. "Someone to whom you might have given a good recommendation 20 years ago, you now say is very good. Very good is excellent, and excellent is outstanding. And if someone truly is outstanding," he says, his voice trailing off, "well, I don't know what you say."

He once made the mistake of pumping up the volume in a letter sent to a university in Britain, where hyperbole is not the norm. The student was excellent; he called her "outstanding." The next thing he knew, he was the one getting called -- by the search committee. They wanted to know if the letter had been forged. "It was so hyperbolic in their eyes that they couldn't believe it," Mr. Rojstaczer says.

Mr. Leiter, the Texas philosopher, explains: "An English philosopher might write, 'So-and-so has done very fine work.' If that were coming out of Harvard, it would mean this person barely has a three-digit I.Q. Coming out of Oxford, it could well mean this person is one of the top three people coming out of the U.K."

— ALISON SCHNEIDER, The Chronicle of Higher Education

... informal guides to what the French or the English really mean, when they are speaking their mother tongues, have been drawn up by other nationalities.

The guide also points out helpfully that when a Briton says “by the way/incidentally”, he is usually understood by foreigners as meaning “this is not very important”, whereas in fact he means, “The primary purpose of our discussion is...” On the other hand, the phrase “I'll bear it in mind” means “I'll do nothing about it”; while “Correct me if I'm wrong” means “I'm right, please don't contradict me.”

...

No less obvious is the fact that ideas about plain speaking do not travel easily across the Channel. As the Brits see things, a Frenchman who says “je serai clair”(which literally means “I will be clear”) should be understood as meaning: “I will be rude”. Also evident is the Anglo-Saxons' contempt for spectacular gestures à la française. The phrase “Il faut la visibilité Européenne”(“We need European visibility”) is rendered as: “The EU must indulge in some pointless, annoying and, with luck, damaging international grand-standing.” The British also suggest that the sentence “Il faut trouver une solution pragmatique” (literal translation: “We must find a pragmatic solution”) should be understood as meaning: “Warning: I am about to propose a highly complex, theoretical, legalistic and unworkable way forward.”

—Economist

...In America you can have either a flimsy box banged together out of two by fours and drywall, or a McMansion-- a flimsy box banged together out of two by fours and drywall, but larger, more dramatic-looking, and full of expensive fittings. Rich people don't get better design or craftsmanship; they just get a larger, more conspicuous version of the standard house.

...

Where the just-do-it model fails most dramatically is in our cities-- or rather, exurbs. If real estate developers operated on a large enough scale, if they built whole towns, market forces would compel them to build towns that didn't suck. But they only build a couple office buildings or suburban streets at a time, and the result is so depressing that the inhabitants consider it a great treat to fly to Europe and spend a couple weeks living what is, for people there, just everyday life.—Paul Graham

The following flyer, laid at the front door of my and every other apartment in the building, is the latest and most extreme in a series:

Attention Residents!

Shopping Carts

The Imperial Tower Apartments owns a total of 14 shopping carts for all residents to share and use. NO one should be storing these carts in their units for their own personal use.

If we do not see a chance in our current situation, we will be giving notice to ALL residents for an inspection of units for shopping carts.

We will be giving a 3 Day Notice of Conevant or Breech to those that are found with a shopping cart in their unit. This may result in your lease being terminated.

Please return the shopping carts immediately!

Thank you! Imperial Towers Management

In the four months I've lived here, I've never seen more than 5 shopping carts at once at their garage-level corral by the back elevator. The most intriguing question, to me, is whether we have many different cart hoarders, or a single fiend.

... The Social Security Administration doesn't release its official figures until Spring '05. So what are hundreds of media outlets reporting on?

A Babycenter.com press release.

Give credit to the clever folks at Babycenter.com, a parenting web site owned by Johnson & Johnson. They looked at their many users, ready to answer polls and post birth announcements, and created an annual "BabyCenter Baby Names List." Then they sent out a press release announcing their top names.

... The problem is the press, large and small, happily reported these lists as "the most popular baby names in America in 2004." Despite the clear-cut, in-your-face evidence that Babycenter's lists are not a snapshot of America's babies. Listen up, reporters:

There are no Spanish names on the list.

In 2003, America's real top 100 boys' names included:
Alejandro, Antonio, Carlos, Diego, Jesus, José, Juan, Luis, and Miguel.
Not a one made Babycenter's list, in 2003 or 2004.

Whatever Babycenter is reporting on, it isn't America's babies.

—Laura, Baby Name Wizard

[Comedian David Cross] even seemed to have a better handle on the mindset of Osama bin Laden than the Bush administration: "If the terrorists hated freedom, then the Netherlands would be fucking dust." Just a few months later, bin Laden released one of his tapes (not on Sub Pop), saying, "Bush has told you that we do not like freedom. Then why didn't we hit Sweden?" Whoa.

— Josh Modell, Onion AV Club

"Let me, amplifying a hint from Dr Moulton, ask you to imagine a volume including the great books of our own literature all bound together in some such order as this: Paradise Lost, Darwin’s Descent of Man, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Walter Map, Mill On Liberty, Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, The Annual Register, Froissart, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Domesday Book, Le Morte d’Arthur, Campbell’s Lives of the Lord Chancellors, Boswell’s Johnson, Barbour’s The Bruce, Hakluyt’s Voyages, Clarendon, Macaulay, the plays of Shakespeare, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, The Faerie Queene, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, Bacon’s Essays, Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyàm, Wordsworth, Browning, Sartor Resartus, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Burke’s Letters on a Regicide Peace, Ossian, Piers Plowman, Burke’s Thoughts on the Present Discontents, Quarles, Newman’s Apologia, Donne’s Sermons, Ruskin, Blake, The Deserted Village, Manfred, Blair’s Grave, The Complaint of Deor, Bailey’s Festus, Thompson’s Hound of Heaven.

Will you next imagine that in this volume most of the author’s names are lost; that, of the few that survive, a number have found their way into wrong places; that Ruskin for example is credited with Sartor Resartus; that Laus Veneris and Dolores are ascribed to Queen Elizabeth, The Anatomy of Melancholy to Charles II; and that, as for the titles, these were never invented by the authors, but by a Committee?

Will you still go on to imagine that all the poetry is printed as prose; while all the long paragraphs of prose are broken up into short verses, so that they resemble the little passages set out for parsing or analysis in an examination paper?

[...]

Have we done? By no means. Having effected all this, let us pepper the result over with italics and numerals, print it in double columns, with a marginal gutter on either side, each gutter pouring down an inky flow of references and cross references. Then, and not till then, is the outward disguise complete—so far as you are concerned. It remains only then to appoint it to be read in Churches, and oblige the child to get selected portions of it by heart on Sundays. But you are yet to imagine that the authors themselves have taken a hand in the game: that the later ones suppose all the earlier ones to have been predicting all the time in a nebulous fashion what they themselves have to tell, and indeed to have written mainly with that object: so that Macaulay and Adam Smith, for example constantly interrupt the thread of their discourse to affirm that what they tell us must be right because Walter Map or the author of Piers Plowman foretold it ages before.—Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944), On Reading the Bible (II), Wednesday, April 24, 1918

Here's an interesting argument I hadn't heard before for why it's important to defend the theory of evolution (in addition to the part about it being true):

There happens to be a great deal of disagreement over lines of descent, the development of cellular mechanisms, whether or not protists (which include seaweed and diatoms) should all be grouped into one big family or categorized in anywhere from four to a dozen separate groups, and it just goes on, and on, and on. Yet about the basic idea that life as we know it is all descended from common ancestors over billions of years through the mechanism of natural selection, there is no scientific disagreement. Which is to say that while a few individual scientists may hold alternate beliefs based on their personal ideology, the verifiable scientific evidence points to evolution, and that body of evidence is growing all the time.

If they can portray the scientific community as hopelessly confused on such fundamental issues, it isn't a stretch to assert that 'nobody knows' whether or not global warming is happening or even whether stem cell research could be useful. By creating a story line where any secular investigation of the facts is portrayed as being inconclusive by definition, and the material truth unknowable, the listener might as well pick that version of the story which suits them best at the moment. This has implications beyond whether or not people believe that we're distantly related to other primates.

Explain Away evaluates the different explanations for why Kerry lost. My own take is that Kerry lost because Bush got several more percent of the vote nationwide, and that there's certainly no single reason what that happened. But this article debunks some of the more simple theories.

Healing the heartland offers a very well-informed and heartfelt analysis of Democrats' rural issues.

It has to be understood that rural America is hurting, and has been for a couple of decades now. Visit any rural community now and it's palpable: The schools are run down, the roads are falling apart, the former downtowns have been gutted by the destruction of the local economies and their displacement by the new Wal-Mart economy.

People living in rural areas increasingly feel that they have become mere colonies of urban society, treated dismissively and ignored at best, the victims of an evil plot by wealthy liberal elites at worst.

Liberals, largely due to their increasing urban-centric approach to politics, have mostly ignored the problem. And conservatives have been busy exploiting it.

It's important to understand that they have been doing so not by offering any actual solutions. Indeed, Republican "solutions" like the 1995 "Freedom to Farm Act" have actually turned out to be real disasters for the nation's family farmers; the only people who have benefited from it have been in the boardrooms of corporate agribusiness, which of course bellied up first to the big federal trough offered by the law. Even conservatives admit it has been a disaster.

No, conservatives have instead employed a strategy of scapegoating. It isn't bad policy or the conservative captivity to agribusiness interests that has made life miserable in rural America -- it's liberals. Their lack of morals (especially embodied by Bill Clinton), their contempt for real, hard-working Americans, their selfish arrogance -- those are the reasons things are so bad.

These audiences are feeding on a steady diet of hate. And as with all such feedings, they never are sated, but only have their appetites whetted for more. So each day, people come back to get a fresh fill-up of hate.

...

While liberals' chief claim to moral superiority mainly rests on championing the rights and needs of the disenfranchised and downtrodden, one of the most significantly and consistently disenfranchised segments of the American economy of the past 20 years has been the rural sector. If rural dwellers who see their way of life under assault wonder why liberals do not seem to consider their cause a worthy one, they probably cannot be blamed for concluding that they simply live in the wrong place, lead the wrong kind of lifestyle, and are not the right color. It may not be the whole truth, but there is some truth to it.

More to the point, urban liberals should be concerned about what's happening to rural America, because it directly affects their lives as well. The corporatization of agriculture and the accompanying gutting of local rural economies first of all affects urban dwellers' food sources; even as genetically modified foods are being pushed into the food chain, the actual supply of traditional hybrid strains of crops and the genetic diversity they represented has been decreasing dramatically, since many of these resided within the purview of smaller family farms.

Moreover, corporate farms are rapidly becoming a major source of pollution, a problem that affects every locality. Unsurprisingly, the current administration relies on "voluntary compliance" when it comes to regulating this pollution.

...

Cecil Andrus, the longtime Idaho governor, former Interior Secretary and godfather of the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve, tried to warn party leaders against pursuing this course in the 1990s. In 1994, he and a group of Western governors met with President Clinton and his advisers to discuss the party's approach to rural issues, particularly those in the West. Andrus bluntly warned Clinton that, if his administration didn't take rural people's concerns seriously, and continued to send signals of being out of touch with Western issues, they risked becoming a permanent minority party in the West. Democrats' insistence on representing an urban perspective was a real problem, he warned.

At the end of the meeting, Al Gore reportedly took Andrus aside and gave him a chewing-out, telling him: "We think you're the problem."

...

It's hard to overstate the powerful effect a campaign appearance by John Kerry would have had in a place like Idaho -- where he owns a vacation home, but hardly seems to actually visit or have any contact with the residents. It says everything you need to know about the DLC approach to the 2004 campaign that, during one of Kerry's springtime visits to Sun Valley, the Blaine County Democratic Party held a major Kerry fundraiser in Ketchum, raising several hundred thousand dollars -- and Kerry couldn't be bothered to drop in and make even a brief appearance.

...

The larger point, of course, is to shift the focus from supposed cultural differences back to the vast common ground. Rural people, just like urban and suburban folk, value good schools, good jobs, sound infrastructure, social amenities, a vibrant and healthy culture. When we talk to rural Americans, those are kinds of things we should be talking about -- because, for many of them, these are things they have been losing, while the rest of the country seems to be gaining.

There will be inevitable differences. We won't always see eye to eye on some subjects, especially when they are products of differences in religious beliefs: abortion, gay rights, evolution. What has to change is how we react to these differences. Instead of dismissing people as hopeless ignoramuses for disagreeing on these matters, liberals need to operate from a basis of mutual respect for differing but sincerely held beliefs.

Of course, this respect will not always be reciprocated. This will be especially the case for the hard-core right wing that has an entrenched presence in rural America. Those are not the people whose minds can be changed. And in these kinds of cases, liberals should feel no compulsion to be "sensitive." Indeed, failing to stand up to them with appropriate strength is a recipe for getting bulldozed, as liberals have for the past decade.

More apologies. (If you are not American, please do your part to reach out to and support your American friends by buying them a T-shirt.)

An hour by hour guide to the most tense election in my lifetime. Example:

CRUNCH TIME: 9PM

431 Electoral Votes in play

Polls close in Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, New Mexico, New York, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

ANALYSIS: At this point, the election could be over--but only if George W. Bush has won contested states (Arkansas, Florida and Ohio) earlier in the evening. (In theory, Kerry could also wrap up the election at 9PM, but he would need to have won North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia to do it--far less likely.)

A few minutes after 9PM, though, in all likelihood, the result will still be up for grabs. All eyes will then turn to Michigan. If Kerry wins there (as polls suggest he should) attention will shift to Minnesota and New Mexico.

You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle.

The second time was a few years later [...]

—Neal Stephenson

Political reporters--outside of partisan outlets like the Murdoch media--do not intend any partisan bias in their character judgments. Historically, the process has been brutally unfair but essentially random, and therefore nonpartisan. Reporters and pundits seize upon isolated and generally meaningless incidents. In 1972, Democratic hopeful Ed Muskie appeared to shed a tear as he defended his wife. In 1992, Dan Quayle read the word "potatoe" from a misspelled cue card. In a 1992 debate, George H.W. Bush checked his watch for his response time. These incidents became proof that Muskie was too weak, Quayle too stupid, and Bush too aloof to be president. The character traits "revealed" by these anecdotes, once rendered and self-fulfillingly repeated, proved impossible to dislodge.

In recent years, however, Republicans have figured out that this process doesn't have to be random. [...]

—Jonathan Chait, New Republic

The core of Derrida's thinking is that every text contains multiple meanings. To read is neither to know nor to understand, but to begin a process of exploration that is essential to comprehend oneself and society. This is, however, the sort of pretentious bullshit language a minister for Europe can only use when speaking French. — Denis MacShane, minister for Europe

(I didn't read any Derrida; I waited for the movie.)

The Language Log analyzes pauses in the first presidential debate:

Jim Lehrer: Do you believe you could do a better job than President Bush in preventing another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States?

John Kerry: [pause 0.278] Yes, I do. [pause 1.268] But before I answer further, let me thank you for moderating. [pause 0.588] I want to thank the University of Miami [pause 0.564] for hosting us. And I know the president will join me [pause 0.831] in ...

[sound file]

Jim Lehrer: Mr. President, you have a ninety-second rebuttal.

George W. Bush: [pause 0.055] uh uh I- [pause 0.165] I, too, thank the University of Miami, and [pause 0.454] and uh [pause 2.116] and say our prayers are with [speeds up] the good people of this state, who've suffered a lot. [pause 1.304] um [pause 1.507] September the eleventh {sigh} [pause 1.212] changed how America must look at the world. ...

[sound file]

When I listen to the two clips Bush sounds better, and Kerry sounds worse, then the text transcription suggests.

In the last few years, California's laws, Native American tribes, gamblers, and new governer all collided, and there are two gambling propositions on the ballot in the fall. (Non-American readers should know that gambling was, with the exception of Nevada and a city in New Jersey, basically illegal in the United states for many decades. The Native American claims to historical land have been consolidated in small, economically worthless "reservations" often quite distant from ancestral lands; Native tribes are technically foreign nations within the United States but their legal rights have been honored more in the breech. However, in the last few decades many Native tribes have taken advantage of an otherwise worthless sovereignty to host casinos on their foreign soil. This is rather brilliant; picture a circle of tribal elders: "We don't have oil, arable land, minerals, or other natural resources." "Our young ones leave the reservation for the cities and abandon their heritage. Our language and culture are going extinct because we have no future to offer our children." "Wait! We do have the right to erect buildings on our reservations, and the white men will come from hundreds of miles away to put their money down in our buildings and then go away." "And what will they get in return?" "Nothing!")

This LA Weekly article explains everything quite lucidly, though I don't have any other data points with which to assign a trust level. The reporter's take:

• There are Good Tribes and Bad Tribes in California. ("Just before the turnoff for Palm Springs, a 23-story skyscraper towers over the desert floor. ... The only building more than a half-dozen or so floors high in the entire Coachella Valley, the hotel tower is the crown jewel ... now being completed by the Morongo Band of Indians. As one enraged Palm Springs community activist pointedly put it: 'So much for the notion that some people are genetically predisposed to be better stewards.'")
• Proposition 68, despite being backed by Larry Flynt, is bad. Vote no.
• Proposition 70, drafted by the Bad Tribes, is much worse. Vote no.
• Arnold has negotiated a pretty fair deal between the tribes and the state.

  The agreement that he struck with the five tribes was an artful compromise that had something for everyone — including labor. The new compacts approved that night by the Legislature would indeed preserve the tribes’ monopoly on casino gambling but would also require them to make a $1 billion up-front payment to the state as well as annual payments of about $175 million. It fell short of the 25 percent levy Schwarzenegger had promised during his campaign by about one-half, but it was, nevertheless, a sea change.

  Signatory tribes could now expand beyond the previous state-imposed limit of 2,000 slot machines each, but would have to pay increasingly more to do so. The tribes also agreed to submit to numerous state environmental, safety and building constraints, thereby waiving some long-held rights of sovereignty (each of the state’s 107 tribes is, at least theoretically, a foreign power exempt from most state and federal regulation). And to the surprise and delight of many, Schwarzenegger held firm in demanding that the tribes agreeing to the new compacts permitting expansion would have to remain neutral in any labor-organizing attempt, effectively kicking the doors open to unionization.

  It wasn't clear to me if this deal is fait accompli, still requires approval, or depends on both of the related Propositions failing. By the way, in case you think my recent spate of pro-Arnold entries suggests I approve of his gubernacy, note that the LA Times reports that "Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's commitment to boost business generally overruled his desire to help the environment and consumers this year." So call this a credit-where-credit-is-due-so-long-as-you-take-the-la-weekly-at-face-value-which-isn't-necessarily-a-smart-thing kind of posting.

Q: You’ve been compared with Trump. Are you a clone?

A: You won’t catch me in a suit, you won’t catch him out of one. His businesses are built on other people’s money and doing deals. My businesses are built on sweat equity and building businesses. He dismisses his casino partners’ problems as not his; I can’t sleep at night if my partners aren’t successful. I play basketball, he plays golf. I go to sports bars, he goes to black-tie dinners.

— Mark Cuban

• Quality Assurance and Bathing; Why Nobody Loves You
• Politics in QA Management 2; Gas Warfare and Advisory Panels
• Breaking New Ground; 1.0 Projects and Iranian Mineclearing Techniques

At least three or four times since Reagan's death, most recently tonight during radio reporting of the part of the Republican convention in which a commemorative video was shown, I have heard reporters and commentators giving misty-eyed reminiscences about hearing President Reagan say, "Mr Gorbachev, tear this wall down." He said no such thing, not ever. People sometimes say linguists fuss over trivia, but I can't believe anyone could see this point as trivial.

It's so strange that people should misremember, for two reasons. First, the correct original version still phonetically rings in my ears, unforgettably, and I would have thought that would be true for anyone who heard it (which would include even a 30-year-old junior reporter: the speech was in 1987); and second, the way he put it — synonymous, but with with very slightly different syntax — is so much more compelling. The rhythm is better; the parallel with the preceding sentence ("Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate!") is better; and (let me get technical for just a second) the crucial direct object is positioned as last constituent in the verb phrase, not followed by the anticlimax of a particle that belongs with the verb, so the nuclear stress coincides perfectly with the final monosyllable which delivers the pragmatic punch, the key piece of new information conveyed by the final noun. Syntax, prosody and pragmatics in perfect harmony. What President Reagan said, very deliberately — and they say it was audible over on the other side in East Berlin — was: "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
— Geoffrey K. Pullum

That tells you something about the insanity that has gripped the American media. Imagine if the leader of a Canadian political party decided, in the middle of an election campaign, to ignore Peter Mansbridge, Lloyd Robertson and Kevin Newman, and only do an appearance on This Hour Has 22 Minutes.

—John Doyle, Globe and Mail

The vast majority of large global companies consume software rather than produce it. ... If the cost of software is driven down by competition from open source, and thus a major cost of doing business is reduced for global industry, will it be a net gain or net loss to the economy?

... Economics is not a zero-sum game. Money can be spent in ways in which its positive impact on the economy is greater or lesser. If a firm spends $25 million developing a software product that never achieves widespread use and never makes much of an impact (and a huge proportion of commercial software projects fall into this category), the only positive impact on the economy will be the transfer of funds from company coffers to general circulation (and taxes) via the salaries of the employees involved.

On the other hand, if a useful piece of software becomes available at little or no cost to many companies, especially to companies that otherwise would not have been able to afford such software, it can give a major boost to that company's productivity. In that case, even if no money was spent, all those companies increased their efficiency and revenues.

— David Adams, Free Can Mean Big Money: The Open Source Economy

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.

I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting details of someone's curriculum vitae into a complex modifiers on proper names and definite descriptions is what you do in a journalistic story about a death; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative. So this might be reasonable text for the opening of a newspaper report the next day:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière died last night in the Louvre at the age of 76.

But Brown packs such details into the first two words of an action sequence — details of not only his protagonist's profession but also his prestige in the field. It doesn't work here. It has the ring of utter ineptitude. The details have no relevance, of course, to what is being narrated (Saunière is fleeing an attacker and pulls down the painting to trigger the alarm system and the security gates). We could have deduced that he would be fairly well known in the museum trade from the fact that he was curating at the Louvre.

...

A voice spoke, chillingly close. "Do not move."
On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.
Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.

Just count the infelicities here. A voice doesn't speak —a person speaks; a voice is what a person speaks with. "Chillingly close" would be right in your ear, whereas this voice is fifteen feet away behind the thundering gate. The curator (do we really need to be told his profession a third time?) cannot slowly turn his head if he has frozen; freezing (as a voluntary human action) means temporarily ceasing all muscular movements. And crucially, a silhouette does not stare! A silhouette is a shadow. If Saunière can see the man's pale skin, thinning hair, iris color, and red pupils (all at fifteen feet), the man cannot possibly be in silhouette.

Brown's writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it never gets much better.

—Geoffrey K. Pullum

It was really tough to make the Japanese public perceive me as a serious actor or director. As an actor, one of the first films I worked on was Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence by Nagisa Oshima, back in the early '80s. When it was released in Japan, I sneaked into the theater to see how the audience would react. I thought the film was great and my acting was not bad at all. I anticipated that the audience would be impressed by my performance, which was completely different from my comedy persona on TV shows. However, at the moment I appeared on the screen, every single person in the theater burst out laughing. I was devastated and humiliated by the experience, because the character I played in the film was not the kind of person to be laughed at. I swore then and there that I would stick to the serious and dark characters in any films or TV dramas thereafter, and I did. And it took years of playing dark characters, serial killers, and cult gurus for Beat Takeshi to be perceived as a serious actor.

On the nascent cable industry, in 1974
“[Cable will become] a huge parasite in the marketplace, feeding and fattening itself off of local television stations and copyright owners of copyrighted material. We do not like it because we think it wrong and unfair.”

On the VCR, 1983

"[Some say] that the VCR is the greatest friend that the American film producer ever had. I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

On the public domain, 1995

"A public domain work is an orphan. No one is responsible for its life. But everyone exploits its use, until that time certain when it becomes soiled and haggard, barren of its previous virtues. How does the consumer benefit from the steady decline of a film's quality?"

— Jack Valenti

Remember when you were in high school, and you really wanted to go to the prom with a gorgeous girl, but you couldn't ask her because she was really popular and already had served two terms as president of the United States, so you wound up asking John Kerry? That's the situation the Democrats are in now. — Dave Barry

The former head a Republican consulting group pleaded guilty yesterday to jamming Democratic telephone lines in several New Hampshire cities during the 2002 general election. ... Raymond plotted with unidentified co-conspirators to jam Democratic Party telephone lines established so voters could call for rides to the polls in Manchester, Nashua, Rochester and Claremont. Manchester firefighters’ union phone lines also were affected.

Josh Marshall adds:

We did our own bit of sleuthing and found out that Raymond was also the Executive Director of the Republican Leadership Council -- an outfit run by a long list of Republican worthies -- and that his company had done phone banking for them on election day too. And Steve Kornacki of PoliticsNJ.com found out that Raymond also seemed to be behind another phone banking scandal in New Jersey.

Out of all of the words in the Oxford English Dictionary, however, no less than ninety-nine percent were taken from other languages. The relative few that trace back to Old English itself are also sixty-two percent of the words most used. Therefore authentically English roots, such as and, but, father, love, fight, to, will, should, not, and from, are central to speaking English. Yet the vast majority of our vocabulary originated in foreign languages, including not merely the obvious "Latinate" items like adjacent and expedite, but common, mundane forms not processed by us as "continental" in the slightest.

For example, every single word in that last sentence longer than three letters originated outside of English itself ... In fact, it's pretty easy to "cook up" that kind of sentence. What would be harder is to come up with one made up only of words that come from Old English. In fact, that last sentence was one ...

English lost most of its original vocabulary through three main lexical "earthquakes."

Vikings invaded and settled in the northern half of Brittany starting in 787; they spoke Old Norse (ancestor of today's Scandinavian languages) and scattered about a thousand words into English. They were not merely "cultural" terms but staples like both, same, again, get, give, are, skirt, sky, and skin. If I tell you that on a foggy Thursday, a sly, dirty-necked, scowling outlaw skulked into the bank with a knife, ransacked it, and crawled out the window seeming happy, every word came from those Vikings except a, into, the, with, it, and out.

Then, in 1066, French speakers took over England for roughly the next two hundred years. Actually, these "French" people were Vikings again, having taken over northwestern France and switched to French over the generations; their ancestry was why these French were called the Normans—that is, Norsemen. They introduced no fewer than about seventy-five hundred words ... how "French" do words such as air, coast, debt, face, flower, joy, people, river, sign, blue ... or fry feel to us today?

The "Latinate" layer most perceptible to us as a word class apart came after the withdrawal of the French, with the increasing use of English as a language of learning—hence client, legal, scene, intellect, recipe, pulpit, exclude, necessary, tolerance, interest, et alia (including et alia, of course).

The Power of Babel, John McWhorter, pp 95-96.

A truly free, open society would be one in which the following propositions offered by John McMurtry would be widely debated. McMurtry teaches philosophy at the University of Guelph in Canada.
...

3. General Motors, Dupont, IT&T, Standard Oil and Ford Corporations all produced military supplies for the Nazi armed forces during World War II while the United States was at war with Germany.
...
6. The free market means that those without money to buy what they need do not have the right to live.
7. The major player in the international drug trade since the Second World War, using drug enforcement laws to maintain its monopoly, has been the United States government to finance internationally illegal foreign interventions.
...
19. Our major social problems are caused by the profit imperative overriding all other values.
20. The belief that God sanctions our social order or our state at war is a superstition.
...
25. Unions have historically led the struggle for improvements in health care, working conditions and social security for the population as a whole.
...
28. The President and his leading advisors are provable war criminals.
29. Christianity calls for the redistribution of wealth.
30. The mass media are essentially a joint-stock company of profit and advertising for major private corporations.

Originally published in Informal Logic, X,3 Fall 1988.

The two got to only first base (kissing), which is about the only base that anyone can agree on anymore. ''I don't understand the base system at all,'' Jesse said, lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling. ''If making out is first base, what's second base?''

''We need to establish an international base system,'' Brian said. ''Because right now, frankly, no one knows what's up with the bases. And that's a problem.''

Jesse nodded in agreement. ''First base is obviously kissing,'' Brian said.

''Obviously,'' Jesse said.

''But here's the twist,'' Brian said. ''Historically, second base was breasts. But I don't think second base is breasts anymore. I think that's just a given part of first base. I mean, how can you make out without copping a feel?''

''True,'' Jesse said. ''And if third base is oral, what's second base?''

''How does this work for girls?'' asked Ashley, the 17-year-old junior. ''I mean, are the bases what's been done to you, or what you've done?''

''If it's what base you've gone to with a girl, you go by whoever had more done,'' Jesse told her.

''But we're girls,'' Ashley said. ''So we've got on bases with guys?''

''Right, but it doesn't matter,'' Jesse said. ''It's not what base you've had done to you, it's what bases you get to.''

Kate shook her head. ''I'm totally lost.''

''See how complicated this is?'' Brian said. ''Now if someone asks you, 'So, how far did you get with her?' you have to say, 'Well, how do your bases go?' ''

What is the world coming to, when the base system loses definition? Is it going to take an ISO standard to clear things up?

Lakoff: Also, within traditional liberalism you have a history of rational thought that was born out of the Enlightenment: all meanings should be literal, and everything should follow logically. So if you just tell people the facts, that should be enough — the truth shall set you free. All people are fully rational, so if you tell them the truth, they should reach the right conclusions. That, of course, has been a disaster.

Q: Meaning, for example, that if you tell people that the tax cuts are overwhelmingly benefiting the richest 1 percent of Americans at the expense of a balanced budget, liberals think people will naturally revolt against the measure.

Lakoff: Exactly. It never works. And liberals don't know why. They don't understand that there's another frame involved. Here's another example: I've been working with a lot of nongovernmental organizations and advocacy groups of various kinds, including an environmental health group researching what they called the "body burden."

Q: The what?

Lakoff: The body burden — you have to hear it twice, right? It refers to the amount of toxic chemicals you have in your body. This group did a study with the Centers for Disease Control and found that there are vast numbers of toxic chemicals in our bodies, and in the bodies of newborn babies, in mothers' milk, and so on. I asked them how they were going to frame this. They said, "What do you mean? We're just going to put out a report with all the statistics, and they'll be so shocking that everything will change." So they did: a few papers ran it on page 17, some papers ran it a little but more. The next day it was done.

Q: But is that a failure of framing, or a failure of infrastructure, as in no public relations team, no properly prepared talk-show guests on staff?

Lakoff: It's a failure of the whole thing: not taking communication seriously and not taking conceptualization seriously. Anyway, they came back to me a couple of months later and asked how they should run a campaign on it. I said, "It's very simple. You call your campaign Be Poison-Free."

Why use the word "poison"? Because the framing of poison has a poisoner. It makes you look at who is doing the poisoning. Everyone knows what poison is — it kills you. Everybody knows that. Now of course you then have to run a serious campaign and have the money to do that and have the public relations support, which is harder, but the first step is understanding how to frame it.

Bruce Schneier: So I am very much in favor of those sorts of things: hiring linguists at the FBI, getting investigative teams in place, tracking terrorist funding, interdicting communications, that stuff also works.

And then I also advocate stuff at the back end, emergency response, first response, whether it is police, fire, medical, spending money there helps us, again, regardless of what the terrorist plans are.

We can never anticipate the terrorist plans. Inasmuch as we do, they will change them, so by definition you can’t anticipate them. We can’t all say, “My God! They’re are going to attack the rail system! Let’s secure the rail system,” because then they’ll decide to attack something else.

Doug Kaye: So what are some of the examples of the expenditures that the United States is now making that you think aren’t well justified?

Bruce Schneier: You know, generally all of the big budget IT systems. CAPS II, the airline profiling system, is a complete waste of money. I think fingerprinting foreigners at the border, if you actually sit down and think about it, makes absolutely zero sense.

But my primary objection isn't the totalitarian potential of national IDs, nor the likelihood that they'll create a whole immense new class of social and economic dislocations. Nor is it the opportunities they will create for colossal boondoggles by government contractors. My objection to the national ID card, at least for the purposes of this essay, is much simpler.

It won't work. It won't make us more secure.

In fact, everything I've learned about security over the last 20 years tells me that once it is put in place, a national ID card program will actually make us less secure.

(many potential problems described)

Proponents of national ID cards want us to assume all these problems, and the tens of billions of dollars such a system would cost -- for what? For the promise of being able to identify someone?

What good would it have been to know the names of Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, or the DC snipers before they were arrested? Palestinian suicide bombers generally have no history of terrorism. The goal is here is to know someone's intentions, and their identity has very little to do with that.

Finally some good holistic advice on how to actually go about the process of writing:

When you wake up, come back to the computer. Sit and stare at the screen. Do the "sitting up at the computer" posture: Sit straight in your chair and place your hands on the keyboard. Make sure the computer is turned on. Make the "opening a word-processing program" motion with your hands. Then stare at the screen. Make sure your back is straight and your hands are on the keyboard. If you start typing, don't worry. It's just your fingers moving over the keyboard. Pay attention to the screen. Did some words appear there? Good. That means you are writing. Don't worry what the words mean. Just keep making them appear on the screen. If you find yourself slumping over, tense your abdominal muscles to keep yourself sitting up straight. If your legs become uncomfortable, place one ankle under the opposite thigh on the chair. Alternate ankles. Breathe. Let the tension go out of your shoulders. Keep moving your fingers over the keyboard, making words appear on the screen.

The LA Weekly has a delightful set of articles and interviews with some grand master studio musicians.

[Drummer Hal Blaine] recalls the amazement in a music supervisor’s voice when the Wrecking Crew — as Blaine dubbed the top session players — ripped through the cues for a Love Bug session at Disney, having patiently endured a patronizing lecture on the fundamentals of film scoring.

"He says, 'We're going to slowly play a click track. Now, a click track is just something that keeps you - ' like we didn't know. And as soon as we heard eight clicks - boppadoppadoppadoppadang! - we played the whole thing, 10 or 12 bars, something like that. And he says, 'My god, I wish we'd have taken that! That was perfect. How did you guys do that?' And Tommy Tedesco, may he rest in peace, one of the most famous lines in Hollywood, he said, 'Well, sir, we practice a lot during the day.'"

Zinn: I'm much more suspicious of Frodo than you are. I've always viewed him as one of the most malevolent actors in this drama, precisely because of how he abets people like Gandalf. He uses a fake name, Mr. Underhill, just as Gandalf goes by several names: Mithrandir, the Grey Pilgrim, the White Rider. Strider is also Aragorn, is also Estel, is also Elessar, is also Dunadan. He has all these identities.

Chomsky: We call those aliases today.

Zinn: But is Sauron ever anything but Sauron? Is Saruman ever anything but Saruman?

Chomsky: And now, with Frodo in the midst of a hallucinogenic, paranoid state, we meet Strider.

Zinn: Note that the first thing he starts talking about is the ring. "That is no trinket you carry." A very telling irony, that. It is the kind of irony that Shakespeare would use. It is something Iago might say. And did you hear that? "Sauron the Deceiver." That is what Strider, the ranger with multiple names, calls Sauron. A ranger. I believe today we call them serial killers.

Chomsky: Or drug smugglers.

It's too bad it's just a parody. The real thing might look a bit like David Brin's article J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress, where he argues

Now ponder something that comes through even the party-line demonization of a crushed enemy -- this clear-cut and undeniable fact: Sauron's army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colors of humanity, and all the lower classes.

Hmm. Did they all leave their homes and march to war thinking, "Oh, goody, let's go serve an evil Dark Lord"?

Or might they instead have thought they were the "good guys," with a justifiable grievance worth fighting for, rebelling against an ancient, rigid, pyramid-shaped, feudal hierarchy topped by invader-alien elfs and their Numenorean-colonialist human lackeys?

Picture, for a moment, Sauron the Eternal Rebel, relentlessly maligned by the victors of the War of the Ring -- the royalists who control the bards and scribes (and moviemakers). Sauron, champion of the common Middle Earthling! Vanquished but still revered by the innumerable poor and oppressed who sit in their squalid huts, wary of the royal secret police with their magical spy-eyes, yet continuing to whisper stories, secretly dreaming and hoping that someday he will return ... bringing more rings.

"Then would you read a Sustaining Book that would help comfort a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness?"

Pooh, quoted in "Abridged Too Far," a Salon article about the evils of poorly abridged children's books.

Even after being imprisoned for stealing motorcars, even after having escaped prison, and even after having spent a bitterly cold night in a hollow tree, incorrigible Toad is capable of the most delicious grandiosity. Now, the adapted version simply says, "Shaking the dry leaves out of his hair, [Toad] crept out of the hollow and marched off, confident and hopeful, though a little hungry."

Grahame, on the other hand, treats us to Toad's view of his situation:

"He was warm from end to end as he thought of the jolly world outside, waiting eagerly for him to make his triumphal entrance, ready to serve him and play up to him, anxious to help him and to keep him company, as it always had been in the days of old before misfortune fell upon him ... the green fields that succeeded the trees were his own to do as he liked with; the road itself, when he reached it ... seemed, like a stray dog, to be looking anxiously for company.

"The year before, I was walking on the street, nobody recognized me at all. Nobody. I was Mr. Nothing," [Pavarotti] said. "But the day after the performance on the television, everybody stopped me and everybody applauded me. And then I understand the power of television, and I realized what means television, and I began to make love to television, to have television on my side, to devote myself to television."

... One major problem appears to be that the government wrote this EUR 156M/month anticipated revenue into its budget already. That is why those road-building projects are on hold and those 70,000 jobs are "endangered". Yes, that's right. Someone let a contract for a complex, highly-distributed system, of a sort which did not exist anywhere before, with a non-trusted, indeed partially non-trustworthy, user group numbering in the millions, that would cost of the order of a billion euros and ~450 technical-person-years to develop, which was to be in full revenue service inside a calendar year from development start date. And then apparently allowed the whole [German] road-construction industry to become dependent on that anticipated revenue, as well as part of the railways.

What Congress did in 1954, in an attempt to stimulate investment in manufacturing, was to “accelerate” the depreciation process for new construction. ... In the first few years after a shopping center was built, the depreciation deductions were so large that the mall was almost certainly losing money, at least on paper—which brought with it enormous tax benefits ....

Suddenly it was possible to make much more money investing in things like shopping centers than buying stocks, so money poured into real-estate investment companies.

My advice is simple. Death to Flash. If a consultant recommends that you use Flash in a website, run for the door. If you can trample him or her on the way out, consider that a bonus.

... Plus, the specific Dutch institution that oversaw Manhattan was not religious but mercantile—insofar as the East India Company noticed New Amsterdam at all (the place was by far its shabbiest outpost), it didn’t care what people there thought about God. It cared about beavers. It cared very, very passionately about beavers. If you didn’t get in the way of the beaver-pelt trade with Europe, you were an honorary New Netherlander.

"'Gabe Heaven' consists of a barren world, devoid of life, populated by yourself and an army of robots whose behavior you control. Is that about right?"

The second surprise was that the brain areas active in love are different from the areas activated in other emotional states, such as fear and anger. Parts of the brain that are love-bitten include the one responsible for gut feelings, and the ones which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine. So the brains of people deeply in love do not look like those of people experiencing strong emotions, but instead like those of people snorting coke. Love, in other words, uses the neural mechanisms that are activated during the process of addiction. “We are literally addicted to love,” Dr Young observes. Like the prairie voles.

One must hope that American soldiers leave behind a functioning democracy in Iraq--rather than the dysfunctional autocracies and kleptocracies that were the legacy of US military occupations in the Philippines, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Mexico.

In the United States, we spend more than $250 billion each year on IT application development of approximately 175,000 projects. The average cost of a development project for a large company is $2,322,000; for a medium company, it is $1,331,000; and for a small company, it is $434,000. A great many of these projects will fail. Software development projects are in chaos, and we can no longer imitate the three monkeys -- hear no failures, see no failures, speak no failures.

The Standish Group research shows a staggering 31.1% of projects will be canceled before they ever get completed.

Here's Standish Group's table on the build vs buy decision. Build seems to be the winner.

Developed from scratch using traditional languages and methods	33%
Purchased application & modified	15
Developed from scratch using an object model	13
Developed some components & purchased others	13
Purchased application & modified extensively	12
Purchased components & assembled the application	9
Purchased application & performed no modifications	5

But it was only the fifth most important factor in project success rates.

Each factor has been weighted according to its
influence on a project's success. The more points, the lower the project risk.

Executive Support	18
User Involvement	16
Experienced Project Manager	14
Clear Business Objectives	12
Minimized Scope	10
Standard Software Infrastructure	8
Firm Basic Requirements	6
Formal Methodology	6
Reliable Estimates	5
Other	5

The active participation of the bosses, the users, and the manager are much more important than anything else to making a software project succeed. The reason, I'm guessing, is that with those parties involved, any other problem can be overcome, but the inverse is not true.

Dawkins has spent much of his career defending a particular view of Darwinism. This so-called selfish gene view grew out of work in the 1960s by George Williams and William Hamilton. While Darwin argued that evolution involves a kind of survival of the fittest, Hamilton, Williams, and their heirs argued that it's the fittest gene that matters, not the fittest organism. To see what this means, consider an example. When a small bird spots a hawk overhead it will often issue an alarm call, warning its flock-mates of the predator's presence. The odd thing is that this behavior—which we'll assume is instinctive, that is, genetically based—is "altruistic." By sounding the alarm, a bird may well save its flock-mates but it simultaneously calls attention to itself, increasing the odds that it will be attacked by the hawk. How could such a behavior evolve?

If you think of Darwinism in traditional terms—as competition among different organisms—the answer isn't obvious. A bird who sounds a call (and so perhaps gets eaten) is unlikely to have more offspring than a bird who keeps quiet (and so probably avoids getting eaten). And having more offspring is what Darwinism was supposed to be all about. But if you think of Darwinism in selfish gene terms— as competition among different genes —the answer is clearer. A gene that makes a bird emit an alarm may decrease the odds that the calling bird survives but it can increase the odds that the gene for alarm-calling survives. The reason is that the flock-mates who are saved by the alarm are, like all flock-mates, likely to be related to the caller; and relatives, by definition, tend to carry the same genes, including the gene for sounding the alarm. In effect, then, the alarm-call gene is warning—and saving— copies of itself. Those copies just happen to reside in other organisms. The counterintuitive conclusion is that a gene that sometimes causes an organism to sacrifice itself can increase its frequency by natural selection. The alternative kind of gene—one for not emitting an alarm call—can decrease in frequency, since such genes are on average less likely to be passed on to the next generation.[1]

To Dawkins and other advocates of the selfish gene view, such examples reveal something deep about Darwinism: natural selection acts at the level of competing genes, not competing organisms

But, when the first flood of orders started coming in for the Expedition, the factory was entirely given over to S.U.V.s. ... By the late nineteen-nineties, it had become the most profitable factory of any industry in the world. In 1998, the Michigan Truck Plant grossed eleven billion dollars, almost as much as McDonald's made that year. Profits were $3.7 billion.

... Bradsher brilliantly captures the mixture of bafflement and contempt that many auto executives feel toward the customers who buy their S.U.V.s. ... internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.

... In a thirty-five-m.p.h. crash test, for instance, the driver of a Cadillac Escalade--the G.M. counterpart to the Lincoln Navigator--has a sixteen-per-cent chance of a life-threatening head injury, a twenty-per-cent chance of a life-threatening chest injury, and a thirty-five-per-cent chance of a leg injury. The same numbers in a Ford Windstar minivan--a vehicle engineered from the ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto a pickup-truck frame--are, respectively, two per cent, four per cent, and one per cent.

... "Then there's this notion that you need to be up high. That's a contradiction, because the people who buy these S.U.V.s know at the cortex level that if you are high there is more chance of a rollover. But at the reptilian level they think that if I am bigger and taller I'm safer. You feel secure because you are higher and dominate and look down. That you can look down is psychologically a very powerful notion. And what was the key element of safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid. That's why cupholders are absolutely crucial for safety. If there is a car that has no cupholder, it is not safe. If I can put my coffee there, if I can have my food, if everything is round, if it's soft, and if I'm high, then I feel safe. It's amazing that intelligent, educated women will look at a car and the first thing they will look at is how many cupholders it has." During the design of Chrysler's PT Cruiser, one of the things Rapaille learned was that car buyers felt unsafe when they thought that an outsider could easily see inside their vehicles. So Chrysler made the back window of the PT Cruiser smaller. Of course, making windows smaller--and thereby reducing visibility--makes driving more dangerous, not less so. But that's the puzzle of what has happened to the automobile world: feeling safe has become more important than actually being safe.

Not sure if this makes any sense as I am currently drunk in Xiamen China..

I draw in a sharp breath - I'm about to counter-attack. I'm about to rage, 'Gah! Do you want to stand here and make me promise not to sleep with *every* attractive actress and singer and novelist in the world one-by-one?!' Fortunately, a sudden, swooping gust of prescience brings me Margret's certain reply to this rhetorical question. I keep my idiot mouth shut. That's it then - it's checkmate in two; may as well knock the king over now and salvage a little dignity.

'OK,' I say. Quietly. My gaze weighted down feetwards.

'What?'

'OK.'

'Say it all.'

I look up into her eyes, hoping to see a tiny spark of mercy. There's nothing.

'OK. I promise I will not sleep with Alyson Hannigan.'

The words come out, and, somewhere deep inside me, a light is turned off, forever.

(From Mil Millington)

Mr Kahneman's work points to three types of over-confidence. First, people tend to exaggerate their own skill and prowess; in polls, far fewer than half the respondents admit to having below-average skills in, say, love-making or driving. Second, they overestimate the amount of control they have over the future, forgetting about luck and chalking up success solely to skill. And third, in competitive pursuits such as betting on shares, they forget that they have to judge their skills against those of the competition.

Kentis: That was key to the movie to me. Everything today is done in CG [animation], and personally, I don't get the same sense of danger that I do with movies from the '70s and '80s, when you saw stuntmen doing things, and you'd say, "Oh my god, someone was in that car when it wrecked!" So, it was important to work with real sharks, the way their tails flop around like big rats in the water…

Ryan: Yeah, we've all seen sharks cruising by on "Shark Week" but you don't realize how erratic and jerky they can be in the water.

Travis: In movies, there's one shark in the water, that's the one that's going to attack you, as opposed to a group that just hangs out and circles in and waits.

I'm sad to report that my Danish learning process has taken a turn for the worse. After holiday travel caused me to miss a few classes of my Level 1 Danish class, I was rescheduled into a phonetics class, with the idea that, if I can pass it, I can proceed to level 2. However, there are several changes from my prior class that are making me realize how good the earlier class was. First, the original instructor, Steen, was the headmaster of the school. He has decades of experience, is quite unflappable, and seems to be the author of the special technique for teaching pronunciation that makes K.I.S.S. the top DSL (Danish as a Second Language - I think I just made that up) school in Copenhagen. The new guy is very nice, very enthusiastic, a trained linguist, and reminds me a lot of me as a teacher. In other words, he's one big long rookie mistake. Please allow me to enumerate the deficiencies in the new class:

• We meet from 5:15 pm to 9 pm Tuesday and Thursday, compared to 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm M/W/F. This is just too long.
• The old class had a strictly graded test at the end of each day. The new teacher explained his theory that the stress of preparing for the test was using up cognitive resources that could be better spent. Well, speaking for myself, a primary reason for going to a class instead of just sitting at home with a Danish workbook is that I need the external structure and pressure. With the old class, the pressure was to memorize written Danish sentences, certainly a good step in learning a language.
• The teacher subconsciously cheats his pronunciation when he is trying to emphasize points. Some students thought that the difference between the [e] and [i] vowels, which are my personal bugaboo because they are nearly identical, was that the [e] is long and the [i] is short. They thought this because the teacher pronounced them that way for three hours. He wasn't intending to, and he didn't realize he was doing it; he thought he was just speaking clearly for us.
• The old class had a set routine. This is critical in making the time pass quickly. The new teacher has no firm plan and so we spend all of those freed up cognitive resources wondering what we're going to do next.
• The class is too large. The instructor said he wanted only 9, but we have between ten and twelve. The last class had about 13 and felt smaller. I heard that of 18 students in the last T/Th level 1 class, only three passed. So maybe if I stick it out class will shrink.
• Many of the students are sullen. They have completed two or three full three-week courses and then been told they need to take a phonetics class, perceived as remedial. They speak enough Danish that much of the classroom instruction is in Danish. This makes me feel stupid for not knowing enough Danish, which is silly because I've had two weeks of class and some of them have had nine weeks.
• With the M/W/F format and constant preparation for tests, learning Danish becomes a constant part of your life. You're stressed, but it's a productive stress. With T/Th classes and no clear homework or testing, I have four-day weekends from learning; all of Monday, and Tuesday morning and afternoon, are filled with Sunday-night-style "end of the weekend" dread.
• The new class is four and a half weeks long, instead of 3 weeks. So I have three and a half more weeks of this to look forward to. That which does not kill you, makes you resent Danmark.

More things you wouldn't guess about spoken Danish by reading it: os, meaning us, and også, meaning also, are pronouced identically in fast spoken Danish. They share a vowel with the o in kop (cup) and the er in cykler (a bicycle).

Gulvet is pronouced something like ghoul and means, a floor. Køkkenet means kitchen, not coconut, and is pronounced kook-nuh. Hundrede does mean 100, but only half of the letters (hun and either of the es, take your pick) are even implied by the pronunciation.

executive director of the National Fenestration Rating Council

It takes people between eight and ten seconds to process and produce a lasting emotional response to a scene. Camera movement or different camera angles of the same scene can engage people through their orienting responses while providing enough time for them to process the scene.

Tejada seems the most likely to get the biggest deal, what with his May 25, 1976 birth date courtesy of the Dominican Republic, where, as I'm sure you're all aware, means there's a significant chance that not only is Tejada not actually 27 today, but there is a fair chance that he doesn't even bat right-handed ...

Early prediction: park-adjusted, Matsui [Kazuo] will be the fifth-most-valuable shortstop next year or thereabouts, all facets of his game considered, and will spark another silly round of discussion on why, exactly, first-year players shouldn't count as first-year players if they're Japanese (incidentally, if it's racist to consider Japanese players rookies despite their being rookies, I'd like to know how it was racist for former Negro Leaguers to win Rookie of the Year awards, and how, exactly, we should regard the RoY being named for one of these players--is it really the greatest racist insult baseball's perpetrated in 50 years?).

President Bush is scheduled this Saturday to make his second trip in seven weeks to Mississippi. New York City's former mayor Rudolph Giuliani is scheduled to come to the state this week. The former Senate majority leader, Bob Dole; Senator Elizabeth Dole; the former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer; Florida's Governor Jeb Bush; Education Secretary Rod Paige; and former Oklahoma congressman J.C. Watts have all been there.

[Republican candidate for governor Haley] Barbour has blatantly appealed to the most racist elements in Mississippi by defiantly refusing to ask the Council of Conservative Citizens to remove his photograph from its website home page. The photo shows Barbour at a CCC-sponsored barbecue with five other men, including CCC field director Bill Lord.

... When he ran for the Senate in 1982, a New York Times report said:

"The racial sensitivity at Barbour headquarters was suggested by an exchange between the candidate and an aide who complained that there would be `coons' at a campaign stop at the state fair. Embarrassed that a reporter heard this, Mr. Barbour warned that if the aide persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks."

Orcinus writes:

Indeed, Bush is touring there today, and his remarks were interesting:

"I'm proud to stand with this man ... He's proud of this state, and that's the kind of governor you need — somebody who relates to people from all walks of life."

This frankly seems like a coded reference to Barbour's wink-and-nudge refusal to take have his picture removed from the CofCC's Web site.

...

"Identity politics," though it was not called that then, was an invention of 19th-century white supremacists who, along with their acolytes, continued to employ such divisions with abandon through most of the first half of the last century. Their heirs continue to do so, but in less nakedly racial terms.

Now we have attacks on affirmative action, the "welfare state," hate-crimes legislation, and various aspects of civil-rights law, all under the umbrella of combating "identity politics." And consistently, there has been one primary source for this resurgence of white supremacy camouflaged as "normal" politics: the conservative movement generally, and the Republican Party specifically.

Black leaders often criticize the Democratic Party for its abysmal lack of leadership at times like these, pointing to such failures as indicative of the party's tendency to take black voters for granted. Certainly, there's little doubt that Democratic silence on these issues not only empowers the bigots, it also saps the energy from the party's base.

Democrats really need to ask themselves whether they want to be courting the votes of people inspired by the Confederate flag, or the same minorities for whom that flag is a symbol of oppression and intimidation. And if the latter, it is well past time for them to speak up about what is happening in Mississippi.

Washington Post commentary on the ongoing war on Iraq:

... a fundamental truth that seems too often to have eluded American political leaders since World War II: It's not the winner who typically decides when victory in a war has been achieved. It's the loser.

... Very few wars have ended in the loser's annihilation. Most end instead with his acceptance of defeat, aware that no amount of courage, stamina or self-sacrifice can reverse the outcome. The challenge is to bring that condition about as quickly and inexpensively as possible.

But history repeatedly has demonstrated that fighting a war quickly and cheaply doesn't guarantee winning it quickly and cheaply. ...

-- Richard Hart Sinnreich, Winning Badly, Washington Post Monday, October 27, 2003

and a Slashdot discussion on the PATRIOT act, winding over to 2nd Amendment rehash:

Now before everyone begins to quote Ben Franklin, please consider that he lived in a very different era where the ability of a very few to cause significant harm was simply not available. He was saying, don't let the gov't take my gun because I may need it to protect myself from intruders or even the gov't.

However, such an argument fails precisely because a gun couldn't have stopped two airplanes from flying into the WTC. All the privately held guns in the US couldn't stop a military attack by the federal government, if the government really were so inclined to attack its own citizens.

-- Deconstructing the Patriot Act PR Campaign, My take, Dancin_Santa (Score:2, Insightful)

and

"The ACLU takes this odd position on the 2nd Amendment for two primary reasons, along with a fall back stance. First, they have decided that the term "the people" that is contained in the 2nd Amendment does not apply to "the people" as it does in all of the other rights contained in the Bill of Rights. Instead, they take the position that this is a collective right and can only be assigned to a militia group, such as the National Guard, which means that Congress can limit or remove gun ownership as they see fit. Secondly, they cite the 1939 Supreme Court case of US. vs. Miller, as proof that the Supreme Court agrees with their beliefs. And finally, they take the fall back position that even if their first two reasons do not hold water, the 2nd is now outdated because the founding fathers could not have envisioned the type of arms that are currently available and the dangers of a few using firearms in criminal activity outweigh the value of this right to society.." The Hypocrisy of the ACLU, Jeremy D. Blanks

and

All the privately held guns in the US couldn't stop a military attack by the federal government, if the government really were so inclined to attack its own citizens.

Shrug. The privately-held guns in Iraq seem to be doing a reasonable job.

--Deconstructing the Patriot Act, Re:My take, Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)

Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he "didn't want to see any stories" quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used.

The situation is made worse since there's so little effective mentoring in the industry from old-salts who are good at making a religion of the K.I.S.S. principle and making fun of the wealth of bloated, crappy, yet slow-to-fail stall-ware projects that dominate so much of the landscape. If you ask me, explosive growth during the dot-com bubble really blunted the technology edges of the free software movement and our industry generally. It left us collectively struggling to do things the hard way, svn being just one small example.

The first thing I had to sell was a service from US West. See, they had sold us thousands of unlisted numbers, and they wanted to sell these people a service that kept telemarketers from getting their number. The customers were often incoherent with rage ....

PHYSICS: Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowley, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart, and Robyn Williams of Australia, for their irresistible report "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces."

PEACE: Lal Bihari, of Uttar Pradesh, India, for "his campaign to prove he is alive" (BBC wording)

BIOLOGY C.W. Moeliker, of Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.

At Atheist Air, prior to boarding, passengers would be required to spout blasphemous remarks at a display of artifacts from all the major religions. This effectively weeds out anyone who has a secret plan to meet the Creator in the next few hours. Blasphemers would be allowed to carry-on pickaxes, blowtorches, chainsaws, nun chucks, whatever, under the theory that atheists generally try to avoid hurting other people in any situation where there isn't a clear escape route. --Scott Adams, Dilbert Newsletter 49.0

The history of US foreign interventions in the last century is filled with stories in which the US first tried to build liberal institutions in this or that country, saw it was going to be either really tough or unsustainable, and then settled for dictators or autocrats who were thought could secure our interests for the time being.
-- Josh Marshall

(Cynical as this is, it still doesn't address the argument that even the liberal interventions were still motivated by private financial interests.)

A little, toyish purple game console with a lunch pail handle on back, with cartoonish games about a cartoon Peter Pan-esque Link who saves a cartoon princess and a cartoon plumber who collects little bits of smiley-face sunshine to save the sad, sad smiley-face sunshineless town, might be a lot of fun. Only those of us who are very secure in our manhood will ever know.

Moreover, the global capital markets have begun to recognize the unprecedented size of this emerging fiscal catastrophe. In truth, the current Executive Branch of the U.S. Government is radically different from any since the McKinley Administration 100 years ago.

The 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, George Akerlof, went even further last week in Germany when he told Der Spiegel, "This is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history...This is not normal government policy." In describing the impact of the Bush policies on America's future, Akerloff added, "What we have here is a form of looting."

...

In each case, the President seems to have been pursuing policies chosen in advance of the facts -- policies designed to benefit friends and supporters -- and has used tactics that deprived the American people of any opportunity to effectively subject his arguments to the kind of informed scrutiny that is essential in our system of checks and balances.

The administration has developed a highly effective propaganda machine to imbed in the public mind mythologies that grow out of the one central doctrine that all of the special interests agree on, which -- in its purest form -- is that government is very bad and should be done away with as much as possible -- except the parts of it that redirect money through big contracts to industries that have won their way into the inner circle.

...

Maybe one reason that false impressions have a played a bigger role than they should is that both Congress and the news media have been less vigilant and exacting than they should have been in the way they have tried to hold the Administration accountable.

...

And speaking of the Patriot Act, the president ought to reign in John Ashcroft and stop the gross abuses of civil rights that twice have been documented by his own Inspector General. And while he's at it, he needs to reign in Donald Rumsfeld and get rid of that DoD "Total Information Awareness" program that's right out of George Orwell's 1984.

The administration hastened from the beginning to persuade us that defending America against terror cannot be done without seriously abridging the protections of the Constitution for American citizens, up to and including an asserted right to place them in a form of limbo totally beyond the authority of our courts. And that view is both wrong and fundamentally un-American.

...

If the 21st century is to be well started, we need a national agenda that is worked out in concert with the people, a healing agenda that is built on a true national consensus. Millions of Americans got the impression that George W. Bush wanted to be a "healer, not a divider", a president devoted first and foremost to "honor and integrity." Yet far from uniting the people, the president's ideologically narrow agenda has seriously divided America. His most partisan supporters have launched a kind of 'civil cold war' against those with whom they disagree.

And as for honor and integrity, let me say this: we know what that was all about, but hear me well, not as a candidate for any office, but as an American citizen who loves my country:

For eight years, the Clinton-Gore Administration gave this nation honest budget numbers; an economic plan with integrity that rescued the nation from debt and stagnation; honest advocacy for the environment; real compassion for the poor; a strengthening of our military -- as recently proven -- and a foreign policy whose purposes were elevated, candidly presented and courageously pursued, in the face of scorched-earth tactics by the opposition. That is also a form of honor and integrity, and not every administration in recent memory has displayed it.

So I would say to those who have found the issue of honor and integrity so useful as a political tool, that the people are also looking for these virtues in the execution of public policy on their behalf, and will judge whether they are present or absent.

--Al Gore

So that raises the question: What is usury? Usury is something that's analogous to overcharging of any kind. I cite some Hadiths in which it's clear the Prophet was against any form of overcharging. For example, he talked about if a broker dealing with somebody from out of town were to misrepresent the buy and sell prices of the products he's dealing with, then that would be riba. Clearly, that kind of overcharging is not interest, but it is prohibited. So my argument is that overcharging of any kind is prohibited to Muslims. A Muslim has to engage in honest business practices.
--Imad A. Ahmad

Dockers recently came out with a new brand of pants, the Go Khakis, which promise to keep your legs stain-free using revolutionary nanotechnology.

We couldn't help thinking that Dockers might be using the word "nanotechnology" more for marketing muscle than for true scientific purposes, so we called its customer service line to ask a few pointed questions. Here's a slice of the conversation.

Dockers: How can I help you today?

Popular Science: I just bought a pair of the Go Khakis, and I noticed it says they use something called nanotechnology for stain resistance. Can you please explain how that works?

D: Umm, it's, uh, DuPont Teflon coating, and basically what we're asking you to do is not to use powdered detergent and press them after every fifth wash, and dry cleaning is an option also. And do not use fabric softener, because it can interfere with that stain-defending property.

PS: Great, but can you explain what makes this nanotechnology rather than just a coating? What is nanotechnology?

D: One moment please. Did you get the pleated or flat-front?

PS: Flat-front.

D: OK, one moment please. Because the one that says nanotechnology is the versatile pant that wicks moisture away from you.

PS: It says nanotechnology repels stains.

D: OK, one moment please. Can you give me a style number off that?

PS: Sorry, I don't have it with me. But it was a "stain defender," and I believe it said "Go Khaki."

D: And that was the flat-front one.

PS: I believe so.

D: OK, I believe it does say nanotechnology because it's the 60-cotton, 40-micropoly blend.

PS: So that's where the nanotechnology comes in?

D: Uh-huh.

PS: I still don't understand. Are there microscopic machines repelling the stain? How does it work?

D: Umm . . . I guess it's the type of fabric that makes it the nano.

PS: So the "nano" has more to do with the size of the fibers? And water is small enough to get through for washing, but other liquids are not—they bead up and roll off?

D: You know, I'm really not sure, but I do know they'll come clean. My kid has a pair of these. Messy kid. So I got the shirt and pants, and he's doing great with them. You just need to remember to press after every fifth wash.

PS: But would you say the stain defender was the Teflon coating or the size of the fibers?

D: It's a Teflon finish on the pants.

PS: So is nanotechnology affecting the stain resistance?

D: I would say not. I need to help other customers, ma'am. Can I ask how you got the number to call us today?

PS: 1-800-DOCKERS? Lucky guess.

As soon as she walked through my door I knew her type:
she was an argument waiting to happen. I wondered if the 
argument was required... or merely optional? Guess I'd know 
the parameters soon enough.

"I'm Star At Data," she offered.

She made it sound like a pass. But was the pass by name? 
Or by position?

"I think someone's trying to execute me. Some caller."

"Okay, I'll see what I can find out. Meanwhile, we're 
gonna have to limit the scope of your accessibility."

"I'd prefer not to be bound like that," she replied.

"I see you know my methods," I shot back.

She just stared at me, like I was a block. Suddenly I 
wasn't surprised someone wanted to dispatch her.

"I'll return later," she purred. "Meanwhile, I'm counting 
on you to give me some closure."

It was gonna be another routine investigation.

— Dashiell Hammett, "The Maltese Camel"

The kind of Christianity that pervades the religious right in this country divides the world between the saved and the damned, between God's people and Satan's people, between good and evil. We have all seen how this is played out in our politics. I used to think that President Bush was using this language as a political ploy. I still think he is, but I also think—to my disappointment—that he also believes it. His conviction that he is God's chosen one to "rid the world of evildoers" blinds him to the evil that he—and we, as Americans—are capable of doing. The conviction that we are on the side of good—of God—is, however, an ancient one—enormously powerful.

--Elaine Pagels

There's also a problem with conceiving broadcast service--especially the commercial variety--as a "marketplace." Its customers and consumers are different populations. The customers of commercial broadcasting are advertisers, not viewers and listeners. In fact, commercial broadcasting mostly is an advertising business. The "content" it distributes is merely bait; the goods sold are the ears and eyeballs of "consumers". That means commercial broadcasting's real marketplace is Madison Avenue, not radio and TV dials. As a consumer of commercial broadcast programming, your direct influence is zero because that's exactly what you pay. (Paying for cable or satellite service doesn't count, because that payment is for access, not for the content itself.)

The notable exceptions are "premium" channels like HBO and public broadcasting. The reason why programming on both is relatively higher in quality is a simple one: there's little or no split in their markets between customers and consumers. As a viewer or listener, you get what you pay for.

All of which is why this talk about the "media marketplace" is highly screwed up. Relaxing broadcast property ownership rules, in the absence of making larger chunks of available spectrum for everybody, is hardly deregulation. It is a highly selective change in existing regulation that opens opportunities only to the most successful players in a completely closed marketplace.

This is all fine if you don't care about television and radio. But what if you care about the Net and Linux? What does broadcast deregulation have to do with those?

There's a certain ritual to press conferences. With professional obfuscator Ari Fleischer gone, it looks like the new guy is going to need some breaking in. Excerpts from Scott McClellan's first press conference:

QUESTION: I'm not talking about anybody else's comments. I'm asking the question, is responsibility for what was in the President's own State of the Union ultimately with the President, or with somebody else?
Scott McClellan: This has been discussed.
QUESTION: So you won't say that the President is responsible for his own State of the Union speech?
Scott McClellan: It's been addressed.
...
QUESTION: Isn't the President responsible for the words that come out of his own mouth?
Scott McClellan: We've already acknowledged, Terry, that it should not have been included in there. I think that the American people appreciate that recognition.
This goes on for thirteen more questions and "answers," until finally another reporter asks:
QUESTION: Scott, on Keith's question, why can't we just expect, basically what would be a non-answer, which is, of course the President is responsible for everything that comes out of his mouth. I mean, that's a non-answer. Why can't you just say that?
Scott McClellan: This issue has been addressed over the last several days.
QUESTION: Why won't you say that, though, that's, like, so innocuous and benign.
Scott McClellan: The issue has been addressed.

...from the latest issue of Radar magazine, p.26: "But before long, people came to suspect that the danger of SARS had been exaggerated by the media. Or, as Dr. Donald Low, a member of Canada's so-called SARS containment team, put it, It's a bunch of bullshit." (Dr. Low is actually chief microbiologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.)

"Fixing an agency management problem doesn't make headlines or produce voter support. So if you're looking at things from a political perspective, it's easier to go to war."

"It's a total release of the id," he said one Thursday last month as he sat in a Japanese restaurant in Madison ... "I think people are generally false. Even sitting here with you, we are putting on a front. But in [Anarchy Online] you can really let your true character out. If I want to be a pervert, I am able to do that in A. O. and be a pervert right off the bat."

Ms. Werner-Stenlund, who seems alternately befuddled and amused by her husband's other life, put in, "You are a pervert."

Tablet: Any chance of Kaiju Big Battel coming to Seattle?

TKC: Yes, Seattle would be a fine city to protect from giant city crushing monsters.

JUERGEN: I was surprised when I heard you were in Spy Games. How did that come about?

CHARLOTTE: I did that film just so I could kiss Robert Redford. He's a very kissable man, and I thought, "Maybe I'll never get another chance."

IMAGINE a business organised as follows. The number of firms is fixed. New entrants are banned. The head of the business can threaten to close down a couple of enterprises to restrict supplies. This is possible because the activity is exempt from anti-trust law (the largest markets, such as New York and Los Angeles, have just two suppliers; most have local monopolies). Certain classes of employees are indentured servants. Rich firms pay a marginal tax of 34% of revenues to poor ones. And the government helps build the lavish corporate headquarters.

True, there is something chilling about the way she rips the gills out of softshell crabs while they're still alive, as she did on a recent show, murmuring instructions in that calm, deep voice of hers. "Take a pair of kitchen shears like this, and first thing you do is cut off this part of the crab." Um, you mean its face, Martha?

William Harley created the thumping staccato in 1907 when he opted to graft a second cylinder onto his one-cylinder engine design rather than whip up a true two-cylinder engine. Harley used a connecting rod to join two pistons to a single crankshaft. This, combined with Harley's V-shaped engine design, resulted in a rough rumble caused by pistons that don't fire at even intervals. And so the sound was born.

Spine-rattling vibrations that stress the bike's structure and components were a byproduct of that design choice. Due to all that shaking, rattling and rolling, classic Harleys tend to age rapidly ...

I recruited the first group we took to Ghana the way I would have recruited geeks for Tripod. I looked for type-A workaholic supergeeks, and I discovered that type-A workaholic supergeeks have a really hard time with the developing world. After figuring this out, we started recruiting for flexibility and a sense of humor. We looked for people who we felt were a lot more likely to roll with the punches and were less gung-ho but more flexible ...

"New rumors that Saddam Hussein is planning to flee to a castle in Libya with 10 billion dollars. Now President Bush doesn't know whether to nuke him or give him a tax cut." — Craig Kilborn

"President Bush has said that he does not need approval from the UN to wage war, and I'm thinking, well, hell, he didn't need the approval of the American voters to become president, either." —David Letterman

I found a lawyer who works for another landlord. He spends most of his days in court trying to evict tenants. I thought he would be perfect to protect me from the likes of — him. And he was. As he was reading through a lease, he said to me, "OK, this paragraph, I really like this clause, I think I'm going to steal it and use it in my own contracts." Pause. He reaches for a red pen and crosses out the paragraph. "But you're not signing it."

This war isn't really about Iraq or deposing Saddam or even eliminating his WMD, though each of those are important benefits along the way. Nor is it something so mundane as a 'war for oil.' The leading architects of this war in and out of the administration see this war, and have pursued it, as an opening blow in a far broader war against political Islam. They see it as the first in a series of wars and near-wars which will lead eventually to the overthrow of most of the current governments in the Middle East, the establishment of western-oriented democracies throughout the Arab world, and the destruction of nothing less than the political world of Islamic fundamentalism.

That, as you might say, is a rather tall order. And it would have been very hard for the administration to sell the American people on such a struggle. So it didn't try. It pushed rather to get us into Iraq, knowing that if it went about the process in the right way it would make a further series of wars against Iran, Syria and perhaps lower-level hostilities against Saudi Arabia and Egypt all but inevitable.

Not to mention that he´s REALLY FUCKING WEIRD LOOKING, even when he´s dressed in a tuxedo. He waddles all funny and his face is crooked and he sneers and he never shaves or combs his hair, and his eyes look in like six different directions at once. ... And ... he made all these disturbed POINTING JABBING GESTURES at the audience, like he was on drugs ....

And Chris Cooper, who won the Oscar for best supporting actor in "Adaptation", and Pedro Aldomodovodomar, who won the Oscar for best original screenplay in "That Softcore Spanish One with Subtitles", they both got up and gussied around and prayed for peace and shit. Fuck that. OUTRAGE is the APPROPRIATE RESPONSE, you GUTTERING LOONS. Not RESTRAINED MUSHMOUTHEDNESS. Anger and shouting. DISTURBING JABBY GESTURES are the call of the day, and I just hope that more folks like Michael Moore start getting on TV to make them.

Of course, not all civil liberties received such cavalier treatment. Although the PATRIOT Act allows the FBI to obtain records showing what books you purchased at the local bookstore or checked out from the library -- a suspect's reading habits might suggest an unsettling interest in the architecture of tall buildings -- Ashcroft has insisted that the FBI cannot review the records of gun-purchase background checks in the course of a terror investigation.

In situations like these, the actual facts play only a modest role in shaping public opinion, especially when the "facts" are nebulous, subjective, and largely unquantifiable. ... And one surprisingly effective tactic is to assert the point under debate by calmly behaving as if there were no debate and moving on to the next step. ... This places those arguing the opposite side ... in the awkward position of constantly having to re-establish that the debate is still open, without boring, tiring, or otherwise turning off the only semi-interested public.

"The Constitution just sets minimums," Scalia said at John Carroll University. "Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires." ... He said that in wartime, one can expect "the protections will be ratcheted right down to the constitutional minimum. I won't let it go beyond the constitutional minimum."

"If he comes [today] and I face him, I'll hit him... I won't try to hit him in the head, but I'll hit him. And if he charges me, I'll kill him." --Jose Mesa, Phillies pitcher, on Indians shortstop and former teammate Omar Vizquel (ESPN.com)

"I really like Jose... No matter what happened on the field, I still think he's a good guy." --Omar Vizquel, Indians shortstop, on Mesa

"If he comes to apologize, I will punch him right in the face... And then I'll kill him." --Mesa

Heeding appeals from techno-types, in 2000 Bill Clinton ended the deliberate degrading of the free GPS signal. Now your car not only knows exactly how many feet you are from the Pennsylvania Turnpike exit, it knows which lane of the highway you're in.

Making the free signal as precise as the military signal also meant any GPS receiver purchased by Iraq or any other nation is now just as accurate as U.S. military receivers. There's a backup plan, of course. The Pentagon can order the free GPS signal temporarily degraded on a regional basis. This will happen in the Persian Gulf area some time soon. When the GPS-equipped Land Rovers of the Saudi dynastic elite suddenly stop knowing which mansion's circular drive to turn up, the assault on Iraq will be imminent.

Lest any confusion remain, this is not a suggestion or a request that Padilla be permitted to consult with counsel, and it is certainly not an invitation to conduct a further 'dialogue' about whether he will be permitted to do so. It is a ruling -- a determination -- that he will be permitted to do so. -- U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey

"I had a guy in a Dodge pickup pull up behind me 6 feet off my bumper, flashing his high beams," said Ramsey, as we tooled south. "He ran up next to me and gave me the one-finger wave, then pulled in front and slammed on the brakes."

Trooper Ramsey smiled. His white teeth gleamed.

"Of course," he said, "this was all on video."

There are three things that govern a network. Fear is the first thing. It drives almost every decision they make. The only thing that trumps fear is greed. ... And the thing that can triumph over greed is stupidity, and stupidity usually wins the day. - Larry Wilmore, producer of Bernie Mac. Entertainment Weekly. March 14, 2003, p 34.

For me, the most interesting thing about video games is taking the controller and using it to move something around on the screen. - [legendary Nintendo designer] Shigeru Miyamoto

(I tried seven or eight Xbox games and every single one failed this measure.)

There are two ways of opposing a war with Iraq. The first way is simple and wrong; the second way is right but difficult....

The right way to oppose the war is to argue that the present system of containment and control is working and can be made to work better. This means that we should acknowledge the awfulness of the Iraqi regime and the dangers it poses, and then aim to deal with those dangers through coercive measures short of war. But this isn't a policy easy to defend, for we know exactly what coercive measures are necessary, and we also know how costly they are.

"We have five decades of research on all kinds of disasters -- earthquakes, tornadoes, airplane crashes, etc. -- and people rarely lose control," Clarke said. "Policy-makers have yet to accept this. People are quite capable of following plans, even in the face of extreme calamities, but such plans must be there." - Lee Clarke

Clarke says that part of the panic myth is that people misinterpret their own, and others’, behavior as panic. "What they are usually reporting, though, are feelings of fear and not panic-stricken behavior." He explains that the myth provides authorities (i.e., decision-makers, politicians, and administrators) with an easy explanation for complex events. Even when panic does happen—say at soccer matches—focusing on it usually detracts attention from more important factors such as official misconduct or police over-reaction. In addition, by using pacifying speech (e.g., "Everything is under control...") to allay public fear and hiding information from the public, spokespersons cultivate distrust at a time when nothing could be more important to public safety than trust of the information that authorities disseminate.

Citing three disasters in which panicky behavior would be expected, Clarke shows that in dangerous situations (e.g., in a plane crash, a fire in a crowded hotel), people don’t usually turn against their neighbors or forget moral commitments. People rarely lose control. The same message rises from the rubble of the World Trade Center.In Disasters, Panic Is Rare; Altruism Dominates, ASA News

What, then, explains the administration's Iraq policy? I offer here my own account ... It's not an explanation that will satisfy anyone looking for a single cause such as "blood for oil." ...

Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were not concerned about enriching American oil companies, but they were worried that if Iraq acquired nuclear weapons, Hussein could achieve dominance over a region vital to world economic stability. ...

The second consideration was more psychological. The September 11 attacks, combined with the subsequent anthrax episodes, created a national trauma -- a feeling of powerlessness in the face of the unknown. ... Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld believed that by knocking out Hussein they would reduce America's vulnerability to attack.

It's my great pleasure to invite all of you to celebrate our 'Back to Profitability Luau' on Wednesday, March 5, starting at 4:00 pm.

...

P.S. Please do NOT speak to anyone in the media or customers about our "Pro Forma" vs. "GAAP" profitability. Less is more, in this case. Please also refer any questions about the resignation of our most recent CEO to investor relations.

Matthew Meselson ... had the good luck to be a neighbor and friend of Henry Kissinger in 1968 when Nixon became president. Kissinger became national security adviser to President Nixon. Meselson seized the opportunity to convince Kissinger, and Kissinger convinced Nixon, that the American biological weapons program was far more dangerous to the United States than to any possible enemy. On the one hand, it was difficult to imagine any circumstances in which the United States would wish to use these weapons, and on the other hand, it was easy to imagine circumstances in which some of the weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists.

So Nixon in 1969 boldly declared that the United States was dismantling the entire program and destroying the stockpile of weapons. This was a unilateral move, not requiring any international agreement or ratification by the American Senate. The development of weapons was duly stopped and the weapons were destroyed. Britain quickly followed suit. In 1972, as a result of Nixon's initiative, an international convention was signed by the US, the UK, and the USSR, imposing a permanent prohibition of biological weapons on all three countries. Many other countries subsequently signed the convention.