The call and response of blogmaking continues --everyone has one and everyone says they're no sweat to have. I figure, why not put my thoughts out there? So here they are. E-mail: justin_slotman at yahoo dot com

 
I NOTE: Via AintNoBadDude Jay Zilber's excerpts from Michelangelo Signorile's attempt to Krugman Andrew Sullivan. I dunno. I can't read the article --nypress.com appears to be down-- but hasn't Signorile had a grudge against Sullivan for a while now?
posted by Justin at 8:35 PM

 
FUN WITH CHOMSKY: Flit after discussing Noam Chomsky's defense of himself in the Salon letters pages links to this Leo Casey piece deconstructing the old Sudan-pharmaceutical-factory-bombing-worse-than-9/11 argument. Casey points out Chomsky's love of the argument by authority. On Znet, of all places.
posted by Justin at 6:08 PM

 
DEEPLY SADDENED WATCH: "Gov. Jeb Bush's daughter was charged with prescription fraud today after she was arrested at a pharmacy drive-thru window while allegedly trying to buy the sedative Xanax. Jeb Bush and his wife, Columba, issued a statement saying they were "deeply saddened" by the incident involving their only daughter, 24-year-old Noelle. "This is a very serious problem," they said. "Unfortunately, substance abuse is an issue confronting many families across our nation."

From here. Did Jeba and his wife just admit their daughter has a drug problem and not even try to defend her? Maybe her prescription just ran out and she didn't feel like making an appointment to get a new one. Or maybe she actually has a drug problem. Oh yeah....

Speaking of drug problems, I'm reading Philip K. Dick's classic stoner novel A Scanner Darkly right now. It's as good as I remembered from back in junior high.
posted by Justin at 5:13 PM

 
FOOTBALL ARMS RACE: Interesting LA Times article about the increasing bulk of NFL linemen. There are about six times as many three-hundred pounders playing today than there were ten years ago. There is danger in getting that big:

In plain terms, if a 270-pound player adds 30 pounds of muscle, he significantly enhances his body's ability to generate heat, especially during practice or a game. But he has barely increased the surface area of his skin, crucial to dissipating that heat. "When you get these people who are 300 pounds and 6-foot-5, those are not good numbers," said Robert Girandola, an associate professor of kinesiology at USC.

Just playing in the NFL is going to cause you neverending grief:

And Scranton estimates that, in coming years, every player retiring from the NFL will suffer from arthritis or other ailments related to substantial joint damage in the neck, lower back and knees. He considers it inevitable with 300-pound men who can run faster and hit harder than ever before.

This Pierre Scranton has written a book on football injuries too.
posted by Justin at 4:59 PM

 
SPEAKING OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY: Rambling around the World Of Dawkins I run into this cool little piece from a while back about Robert Wright stalking Stephen Jay Gould in an intellectual sense. The intra-Darwinist wars are always entertaining.
posted by Justin at 1:13 PM

 
RICHARD DAWKINS POLITICAL LEANINGS UPDATE: I ran across this post on CharlesMurtaugh.Com about the ideological leanings of creationists. Charles is arguing they tend to be neocons, which would render my earlier labelling of Dawkins as a neocon innacurate, because he's a confirmed atheist. Check out this ongoing discussion on the Yahoo evolutionary psychology group for further information. I don't know what you would call Dawkins --he's not a liberal, but that doesn't mean he's a conservative. Anarcho libertarian? Atheist conservative?
posted by Justin at 1:07 PM

 
YOUR CONSPIRACY THEORY OF THE DAY: Airstrip One has the link to this conspiracy theory about the secret U.S. military weather dominator. The author argues it's high time all our little United States went their separate ways. All right, but only if Jersey gets the Statue of Liberty.
posted by Justin at 12:48 PM

 
IT'S A BLOG ABOUT NOTHING, SEE: I am pleased that the Protein Wisdom collective is reading my blog; however, it appears I was speaking out of turn regarding Mickey Kaus, who attended the big Los Angeles blogger party over the weekend --so he can't be accused fairly of ignoring the bloggersphere. Josh Marshall, on the other hand, can't even bring himself to mention Rand Simberg by name when he's commenting on one of Rand's posts, so my comments may still apply to him, for what they're worth. And I don't think Andrew Sullivan ever acknowledged his Bloggie nod.
posted by Justin at 8:40 AM

 
THEY NEED A PAY SITE: Samizdata has gone picture-crazy lately, though the mysterious Samizdata Illuminatus remains unrevealed. I bet he looks like God as portrayed in Monty Python And The Holy Grail.
posted by Justin at 8:27 AM

 
TRAGIC: Bjorn has the Scandinavia local-interest story about a Kurdish immigrant who killed his daughter for dating a Swedish guy. He's got some good commentary there too, weighing the strengths and weaknesses of non-liberal cultures and multiculturalism's respect for them.
posted by Justin at 4:27 PM

 
WHILE WE'RE TALKING SCIENCE FICTION: Here's David Pringle's seminal 100 Best Science Fiction Novels list. The one problem is he did it back in 1984 so it ends with Neuromancer, but it's still a worthy list. Read the book version if you come across it.
posted by Justin at 2:21 PM

 
I'LL BE DANGED: Tom Tomorrow has a blog. Via Boing Boing, purveyors of everything cool in this world.
posted by Justin at 1:13 PM

 
WEALTH DOES NOT NECESSARILY BRING CORRUPTION: The opening sentence from this Nature article: "Solvent socialist economies could be more at risk from corruption than liberal ones, according to a team of physicists, mathematicians and economists." Check it out.
posted by Justin at 1:03 PM

 
MEANINGLESSNESS OF RACE UPDATE: Here's Steven Rose arguing for the concept of race having no biological value. If I remember my science wars correctly Rose is a Gouldian liberal and not a Dawkinsian neocon. Bioculturally, of course, race remains a pretty big deal.
posted by Justin at 12:11 PM

 
MORE FANTASY NOVEL STUFF: Via Reductio Ad Absurdum, here's a literary opinion piece saying Philip Pullman is doing for secular humanism what C.S. Lewis did for Christianity. Good stuff. Pullman's books are on the ever-growing Books I Need To Read list. My favorite philosopher C.S. Peirce said something about there being more books worth reading out there than any one person could read in their lifetime, and that was back in the late 1800s-early 1900s. If ever a mouthful was said, that was it.
posted by Justin at 12:43 AM

 
THE KNICKS: Are actually on national televsion right now. Why does this keep happening? Can't NBC adjust and not televise games involving teams that stink?

UPDATE: Alright, it was a good game though. The Knicks still stink. So there.
posted by Justin at 4:02 PM

 
MCSLOTMAN AND MRS. MCARDLE: Megan has posted and responded to my comments over on her blog. I think I have isolated the essential literary difference between us: she is a self-described Robert Heinlein baby, whereas I am one of the world's bigger Philip K. Dick fans --two science fiction authors who wrote pretty differently, you might say. In life Heinlein and Dick had an interesting relationship: Dick, at least early on, was inspired by Heinlein's books --the man of The Man In The High Castle is supposed to be a Heinlein figure. But later on Dick found Heinlein's militarism unpalatable and he was also probably resentful of Heinlein's success, especially compared to his own obscurity at the time. Yet apparently Heinlein spontaneously floated him a loan no-questions-asked when Dick was out of money in the seventies. Dick probably cared about what Heinlein thought more than Heinlein cared what Dick thought, so it was a one-sided relationship in that respect. But it was there. I can take solace in the fact that Blade Runner was way better than Starship Troopers --which actually wasn't that bad. Hey, Paul Verhoeven did a Heinlein movie and a Dick movie (Total Recall) --I forgot about that. And I haven't seen Puppet Masters so I have no idea if it was better than Screamers, which was acceptable B-movie SF. The rubber match will be the fifty-year old Destination Moon versus Impostor.

Anyway, that there was a tangent. As for Megan's comments: I think you could prove or disprove the idea that Tolkien stunts the growth of his readers if you find some of the people putting him at the top of their lists and asking them, you know, when did they first come across Tolkien, how many books have you read in the last year, what those books were, etc. It would probably have to be the project of a crazed academic with an axe to grind --but it would be doable.

I guess my point is --and now that I think of it, I don't think it's a very big deal-- is that I have no problem with literary people having complicated standards for judging which books they like, as long as those standards are the result of them reading a lot of books and genuinely loving books. And when Megan says "But too, those lists of "The Greatest Books" weren't coming from English professors; they were coming from regular people. And those people didn't set up some complicated standard by which to judge greatness; they ranked their favorite books" --I mean, there's no reason to think regular people don't have their own complicated standards for judging greatness. Tolkien's achievement is that his great personal and heartfelt work happened to mirror the great internal workings of a whole lot of other people; if Andrew O'Hehir (see below) is right, perhaps a lot more people are skittish on our modern existence than we might think. Or I might think.

So here's a review on Salon from a while ago also about Shippey's book. It's by Andrew O'Hehir; he calls LOTR "a distinctive, even definitive, modern work of rebellion against modernity" which he argues is why it was so beloved by the counterculture. And here's the original list in question. Note that it is the hundred greatest books of the century as voted on by the British populace; I don't know if a similar poll of American readers has ever been done. I speculate that Stephen King would top such a poll here if it was done of authors and not books; if it was books he'd probably get his vote pretty split due to his insane output.

She's got me on Freud, though. I was babbling.
posted by Justin at 3:48 PM

 
COLLABABLOG: Blowback introduces me to American Samizdat, a new and nefarious collective with the great EPCOT template used by Dodgeblog (which is also threatening to become collaborative), no doubt formed to counter the equally devious National Review blog The Corner. If the Libertarian Samizdata guys are the Superfriends, their American counterparts are the Legion Of Doom. But in a good way. As if you could be the Legion Of Doom in a bad way.
posted by Justin at 10:16 AM

 
TEXANS: Here's the list of players left exposed for the Texans expansion draft. The Lions left Charlie Batch out there, I thought he was their guy for the future. And the Giants are making Jessie Armstead available. Huh.

Speaking of the Lions, here's a good (but short) post by Dave Hogg on toa explaining why they stunk this year.

UPDATE: Mark Byron has comments on the draft too. AND a post comparing Connie Chung to Steve DeBerg.
posted by Justin at 9:02 PM

 
GOD'S GIFT TO BLOGGERS: Is definitely Yahoo's Most Popular. Where else are you getting closeups of Canadian speed skaters' butts? Or an Indian nuclear missile that looks just what I want from an Indian nuclear missile: nice design, pretty colors, cool lettering. You just knew India was going to have an aesthetically pleasing nuke.
posted by Justin at 8:47 PM

 
KEN LAYNE: Says what we were all thinking about that Enron exec who was found dead: somebody else pulled the trigger.
posted by Justin at 8:20 PM

 
MORE NBA: I know I link to Bill Simmons way too much, but this is such a great idea: HORSE at the NBA All Star weekend. That would rule.
posted by Justin at 1:08 PM

 
CLIPPERS UPDATE: Matt Welch writes:

Yeah, the Clippers actually *do* have a somewhat blue-collar audience. You can actually afford to go see a Clippers game, unlike the purple boys (they had a great mini-season-ticket package this year, where you could buy 10 games at 10 bucks a pop, if memory serves well. Me & some friends were all pumped up to buy in, but they sold out really fast). L.A.'s a *huge* basketball town, there's no way to overestimate that, and many of the Lakers' best fans simply cannot afford to go, ever (if it wasn't for Chick
Hearn, it's possible some may have started to defect, for Class reasons).

The crowd at Wednesday night's Clippers-Lakers game seemed, for the most part, like actual Clippers fans, though Shaq and Kobe had their fans --as they will anywhere. The whole Staples Center was on their feet for a key Clippers defensive stand down the stretch. Matt's comments also maybe explain something that the nation probably doesn't understand: why a team as historically pathetic as the Clippers continues to exist. Answer: Los Angeles is an amazing basketball town that actually can support two NBA teams, the Lakers first and foremost and the Clippers when the Lakers are out of reach because Jack Nicholson bought all the good seats. But if the Clippers continue to morph from lovable young-up-and-comers to actually good basketball team, maybe they'll start to win over Angelenos too and stop being the NBA version of a AAA baseball team.
posted by Justin at 1:06 PM

 
SUICIDE ON CAMPUS: USA Today runs this story on the parents of an MIT student who killed herself. They're suing MIT for not institutionalizing their daughter and for not telling them how bad off she was. I'm trying to figure out my take on this pundit-wise; the article makes it sound like the parents have a pretty good case, the girl went through months talking up suicide. But the girl herself was loath to bring her parents into her problems. Their lawyer poses these questions:

''What's the extent of the duty of a university to its students?'' asks David DeLuca, the Shins' attorney. ''Are they a community of surrogate parents, or are they a community of adults without any supervision or care?''

As long as the costs of college are so absolutely grotesque ($34,000 a year? Are you shitting me?) that parents pretty much have to pay for them, parents have a right to demand colleges take care of their proto-adult children. (Who probably are still adolescent in a lot of ways.) Whether the Shins have a case here is a different question. I think they do, because their daughter's therapists wanted her admitted as an in-patient but it would take a week to get her in; meanwhile her parents saw her the night before she set herself on fire and they had no clue. Maybe if they took her home it wouldn't have stopped her --but at least it would have been out of MIT's hands at that point. This case is probably also evidence for the need for institutionalizing people if they're obviously in the process of destroying themselves, as this girl pretty much was.
posted by Justin at 12:47 PM

 
TEE HEE: Tim Blair brings us Australia Gets Drunk, Wakes Up In North Atlantic. In my head I added Terry Gilliam-like animation as the continent made its journey east.
posted by Justin at 11:29 AM

 
COSMONAUT IS DEAD, LONG LIVE TAIKONAUT: Hawspipe has the link to a Chicgo Sun-Times piece on the ambitious Chinese space program by a NASA bigwig. China wants to get their "Taikonauts" on the moon by 2010. The writer gets a tad paranoid here:

Just imagine in 10 or so years a Chinese Taikonaut walking over and dislodging the American flag placed on the lunar surface by Neil Armstrong or bringing back to Earth experiments left behind by Apollo moonwalkers. How would we react? More important, how should this nation react today to this new potential competitor?

Ohmigod, just like in Superman II! GENERAL ZOD IS IN LEAGUE WITH RED CHINA! This HAS to be more evidence of Hollywood giving our enemies ideas. Or at least our space policymakers. Anyway, I thought the brave new space race this time around was going to be done via the market; you know, letting nutty billionaires take trips into space, letting private companies launch satellites, etc. The pyschological impact on us if China gets to the moon? Well, we did it first --we'll always have that. I think they're the ones who need to prove themselves space-wise; we're the ones who need to not get all complacent space-wise. Maybe we don't need to go to the moon again, but we do need some incentives to be in space besides national glory --been there, done that. If we need national glory, there's always Mars.

And talk about prophetic science fiction writers, Cordwainer Smith had this down years ago --I just can't remember where. But he did have the Chinese in space.

Stuff like this makes me think Star Trek, with its harmonious multiracial cast, was ultimately a vision of the best Americans we could be, and not the best humans we could be --though it surely aspired to that too. Maybe the best American humans we could be. The future is obviously not ending the various human cultures and turning us into one big culturally homogeneous species, anyway. Which is probably a good thing in a lot of ways.

Hawspipe also has the link to a neat sports blog called Puck Hog.
posted by Justin at 5:41 PM

 
NBA BEAT: Clippers beat Lakers last night. I think one of the many Los Angeles bloggers out there needs to explain where the Clippers reside in the city's consciousness, now that they're actually kind of okay. The guys on TNT were saying that the Clippers got the working class audience, but I don't think any NBA team has a working class audience anymore.
posted by Justin at 1:48 PM

 
MORE HIGHBROW LOWBROW: Ken links to this American Enterprise article about cutting-edge shock art which, from the descriptions offered, does not sound all that different from your average Italian splatter picture. I am forming the following theory in my head in conjunction with this article, the lowbrow one below and the recent Lileks anti-modern art screed, all linked to by Ken: highbrow art is beloved by academics because it is nearly totally theoretical --art is supposed to be subversive, and the simplest way to do that is to put the Pope in compromising positions and things like that. So highbrow art's lack of appeal is a result of the more general retreat of the academies from everyday life. Meanwhile people "want to look at pictures of people doing stuff" so the lowbrow stuff is what really is popular. Highbrow art is art for theorists, lowbrow art is what people want to see. There you go. There's also an interesting debate in The American Enterprise about the status of movies as art. The comments down the bottom by Terry Teachout are the ones I tend to agree with:

Film, like a canvas or a piece of paper, is only as good or bad as what a living, breathing human being puts on it. I saw a lot of perfectly awful movies in 2001, but even while I was squirming in my seat it never occurred to me to conclude that movies aren’t art. The poor ones are just bad art.

It's all art, some of it is just bad. If you think this way, you avoid getting bogged down in any lengthy and probably unanswerable "but is it art?" discussions. Of course you can get bogged down in discussions of good versus bad too, but at least then you aren't delegitimizing anything, or putting anything too far up on a pedestal. Saying "it's a piece of crap" is better than saying "it's not art."
posted by Justin at 11:50 AM

 
SPEAKING OF VIRGINIA: I notice she's perpetuating the me-zine/blog split with her links section. She sets it up like this: me-zines are by professional writers, blogs are by everybody else. I think that's the distinction. It's not an arbitrary division that she's making, but it might be an unnecessary one.

I think a more appropriate split would be blogs that make reference to other blogs versus blogs that make reference to professional writers' blogs, non-web media pundits and figures and Instapundit only (Kaus, Sullivan, Josh Marshall). Virginia herself belongs to the former group. The latter group has the annoying characteristic (reminiscent of 80s-heyday WWF) of pretending that the competition does not exist (would Kaus ever reference Flit like Joanne Jacobs does? Has he, and I missed it?) but they do serve as a kind of nexus between old commentary and new commentary, as in this web-only American Prospect piece taking Sullivan to task for Clinton-bashing. They have their own place in the great media constellations, as do I, is what I'm saying.

But I still think me-zine is a goofy word that should be retired.
posted by Justin at 10:21 AM

 
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS BECOMING LESS STRANGE: Here's the New York Times on the right-left alliance opposing cloning. In Postrelian terminology that alliance would be called statist, I'm guessing. This is what she's talking about, right? Stuff like this:

Daniel Perry, who as executive director of the Alliance for Aging Research, a patient advocacy group, is a strong proponent of research cloning, says the issue requires "looking past simplistic liberal versus conservative labels" to how people view biotechnology.

"If you are optimistic about the daily revelation of new tools and new insights into biology, if you see that as an upward march toward a release of suffering, you will" favor cloning for research, Mr. Perry said. Opponents, he said, "see it as people losing control to scientists and other technocrats."

Statism versus dynamism seems like pessimism versus optimism, but I wonder if this is always true.
posted by Justin at 8:56 AM

 
HIGHBROW LOWBROW: Boing Boing points out this LA Weekly story on lowbrow art, which is way more popular than highbrow art as you might expect. Google leads me to Juxtapoz, which --the article states-- is the premiere lowbrow journal.
posted by Justin at 8:48 AM

 
WEIRD BIRTH WATCH: Drudge has the link to this story about ovaries being removed for use later in life. The primary use will be for women receiving radiation or otherwise at risk for sterility; the speculative consumer application is that it will allow professional women to postpone childbirth for a while.

UPDATE: Here's The New Scientist on the same subject; their take is more technical, as apparently human ovaries are harder to freeze due to their size.
posted by Justin at 8:38 AM

 
NOT BORN BUT GROWN: Or whatever that part in The Matrix is with the vast fields of babies. Anyway, the null device has the link to this Jeremy Rifkin piece in the LA Times about artificial wombs. Rifkin asks:

How would the end of pregnancy affect the way we think about gender and the role of women?

Years ago, the feminist writer Shulamith Firestone wrote enthusiastically about the prospect of an artificial womb: "Pregnancy is the temporary deformation of the body of the individual for the sake of the species. Moreover, childbirth hurts and isn't good for you. At the very least, development of an option should make possible an honest examination of the ancient value of motherhood."

Other feminists view the artificial womb as the final marginalization of women, robbing them of their primary role as progenitor of the species. The artificial womb, they argue, becomes the quintessential expression of male dominance, a mechanical substitute for the female womb honed to engineering standards and quality controls.

Armed with the artificial womb, asexual cloning technology and stem cells to produce all the extra body parts they need, men could free themselves, once and for all, from their dependency on women.

And, of course, freeing women from the obligation of being mothers. It's weird, I know Rifkin's supposed to be a real downer on biotech but he sort of doesn't take a firm stand on whether or not this is bad here. He talks up Brave New World as a literary warning but then references Francis Bacon for literary encouragement.

Null device also links to the Plastic discussion on this piece which speculates that an artificial womb would sort of move us past the abortion debate as we now know it, which opens with this comment:

Not discussed is the fact that this could throw a major monkey wrench into the abortion controversy and forever change its parameters. Some believe that the development of an artificial womb will lead to an entirely new rhetoric on the part of pro-lifers, who will argue that a woman's legal right to terminate a pregnancy does not equate with the right to destroy the fetus. Envision if you will the spectacle of, say, a million and a half unborn a year transferred by law to artificial wombs rather than destroyed -- orphans before they are even born, adding to the vast population of children awaiting adoption. (And just as likely to show up suddenly on the mother's doorstep in 20 years.) The prospect negates the whole concept of abortion, which is to avoid bringing unwanted children into the world in the first place, while nicely supporting pro-lifers' only concern (once the baby breathes its first breath, their job is done) and making even more ignorant and unrealistic their 'adoption, not abortion' mantra.

Discussion proceeds from there; not everybody is as harsh on the pro-life side as the above is. Fascinating stuff. Obviously such a technology would be way too pricey for years to come to have a chance of changing the abortion debate, but I can imagine it offering another option halfway between abortion and adoption. Of course, in the far flung future we'd probably have perfect birth control too.
posted by Justin at 8:22 PM

 
BOB ALTMAN: Both Damian Penny and Jeff Jarvis have picked up on cranky ol' Robert Altman's political comments, especially the part where he says the terrorists got the idea from Hollywood. Damian and Jeff both think that this couldn't be true because they don't have American movies in Afghanistan but I'm pretty sure that they do, or there's no reason to think that they couldn't. Cheap and easy video piracy has ensured American culture's spread worldwide in an underground fashion (like the recent Black Hawk Down screening in Mogadishu) and if they're seeing our movies in Iraq and Iran I see no reason why Afghans couldn't have squirreled some movies away throughout the Taliban rule. Heck, we know that terrorists are not the most self-consistent people themselves --I mean, everybody's seen Rambo. So I see no reason, on the face of it, why terrorists could not have been inspired by Hollywood movies, because they probably had some lying around. Remember Black Sunday? I think there's at least a quasi-connection here; why else did the Army enlist screenwriters to come up with more potential terrorist plots so they could be countered in advance?

And I don't care what all y'all say, The Long Goodbye is a great great movie, with Altman and Eliot Gould at their rambling comic peaks. Everyone loves MASH. McCabe And Mrs. Miller --which I had to watch a million times in college-- is good too. And Popeye is a seriously underrated movie.
posted by Justin at 1:07 PM

 
DOCTORS SANS PRACTICES: The Boston Globe reports on the rise of hospitalists within medicine. Like ER doctors, hospitalists do not have a traditional practice; they only see patients who are in the hospital itself, which eliminates the need for primary care doctors to check in on patients they've sent to hospitals. It actually sounds like an improvent in customer service as far as getting sick goes, since it means there's always a doctor there --no more late-night raising people out of their beds and all that.
posted by Justin at 12:32 PM

 
SCIENCE AND MARKETS: The AP's Tammy Webber says that the "race to find new uses for genetic discoveries is hindering the usual exchange of information among university researchers". Webber's piece offers some different explanations for why this is happening.
posted by Justin at 12:21 PM

 
SAUDI-U.S. SPLIT CONTINUES: No more veil for female U.S. soldiers in Saudi Arabia. But servicewomen still have to have a guy with them when they go off base and still have to ride in the back of the car. Hey, it's like they've got manservants or something --wotta deal!
posted by Justin at 11:46 AM

 
HUH: John Madden and Pat Summerall are breaking up after the Superbowl. I never really liked that team-up --Pat says some weird things sometimes, and I think either you like John Madden or you don't-- but there you go.
posted by Justin at 11:42 AM

 
MORNING READING: Bill Simmons on the Royal Rumble, Richard Jenkyns on Tolkien, Asher Price on the money family members of 9/11 victims aren't getting, and Allen Barra on black quarterbacks versus white quarterbacks. Plus new TMQ.
posted by Justin at 11:34 AM

 
AAAAAND: Holy crap, the Colts hired Tony Dungy. That didn't take long. Meanwhile, Parcells screwed the Bucs. I think we knew that was coming.
posted by Justin at 5:07 PM

 
THE DONKEY: Ken points out the trouble a brewin' between long suffering fans of the Nets and Bullets. I know the Nets lost yesterday --doomed by Jason Kidd going 1 for 17 and Dirk Nowitzki justifying Bill Simmons mentioning him in the same sentence as Larry Bird-- but at least the Knicks got creamed.
posted by Justin at 5:03 PM

 
PROTEIN WISDOM: Has a real nice post arguing against using race to be the essential component of anyone. I was reminded of the ideas of Jon Entine, whose book is one more for my I-need-to-read-this file. Entine isn't as essentialist either, but he does think that biological racial differences are a legitimate subject of inquiry.

UPDATE: Here's Entine summarizing his points.
posted by Justin at 4:39 PM

 
QUARE: Eve also has the link to this TAP piece from Robert Putnam. Putnam reports that levels of trust between the various American ethnicities are up, as is trust in the government and "political consciousness." Putnam thinks this is a good thing and wonders how long it can be sustained, whereas Eve seems to regard it as a natural and good response to a huge disaster that will diminish as the disaster retreats into the past. This has to do with the fundamental individualism of Americans, Eve says:

Americans like to be left alone. We don't want the government, or our neighbors, interfering in our private affairs, and we're pretty willing to leave other people alone in return. But most people fail to notice that lying hidden under that desire for privacy is an impulse to help others when they truly need it.

September 11 proved this surprising fact. New York City, known for its callous rudeness, suddenly became the most charitable, caring, friendly place in America. The rest of the country, too, immediately put aside its shell of isolation as people reached out to one another in the face of tragedy.

I think this is the strength of America. We know when to come together and when to stay apart. An excess of civic feeling leads to a loss of personal freedom, as governments try to "make things better" for everyone. The American attitude is "I'll leave you alone until you need me," and we know exactly when that is.

Good post.
posted by Justin at 3:07 PM

 
GOOD SALON PIECE: About a University of South Florida professor getting harangued out of a job. To me the biggest scandal about this is USF isn't claiming that the professor (Sami Al-Arian) is doing anything wrong, but rather that the death threats Bubba The Love Sponge stirs up against him cause an unsafe environment (or something) at USF, thus Al-Arian has to go. It is the presence of Bubba in this story that allows Salon to bring up one of their favorite targets, Clear Channel.
posted by Justin at 2:54 PM

 
FINALLY: The Economist has the skinny on what Kmart did wrong and what Wal Mart and Target did right:

[Kmart] has traditionally specialised in promotional retailing: using low-cost newspaper supplements and advertising circulars to tout loss-leaders, such as its famous “Blue Light” specials, in order to draw in the crowds. Although this worked well for years, it also put a strain on merchandising and distribution systems, because orders for particular items came in sudden waves. This meant that Kmart's shelves were occasionally empty—being fully stocked only 86% of the time. Wal-mart's shelves, by comparison, are almost always fully stocked. Promotions also forced costs up at Kmart's suppliers, as they could not reliably predict manufacturing runs. This meant that Kmart could never consistently beat Wal-Mart's prices.

The article says that Kmart is going to have to reinvent itself to survive --apparently that's how Target flourishes, by having a distinctly "trendy" identity. The Economist also confirms the Kmart, city mouse and Wal Mart, country mouse dichotomy, but then says Kmart started to flounder once Wal Mart entered urban areas.

UPDATE: Eve Kayden points out that as Kmart goes bankrupt Amazon finally turns a profit.
posted by Justin at 12:52 PM

 
FEEDING ON THE BODY CORPORATE: Here's Megan McArdle arguing against the corporate income tax. I dunno; as long as a corporation enjoys the legal status of a person, shouldn't they get taxed along with the rest of us? My liberal unconsciousness informs me that the enshrinement of corporations is, in fact, the root of all evil; google corroborates with this and this.
posted by Justin at 12:18 PM

 
BAD LAW: The American Prospect reports on Sony shutting down a site offering hacks of the Aibo robot dog. Then I actually visit the site and it's back up. I guess TAP is a little behind the times, but I appreciate the anti-DMCA sentiment.
posted by Justin at 11:05 AM

 
BLACK HAWK DOWN UPDATE: The New York Times reports on the film's debut in Mogadishu.
posted by Justin at 10:39 AM

 
CCM UPDATE: Mark has the list if you want to get started with adult contemporary Christian music. By the way, Mark, I'm not from Ohio --as my Nets love should make plain. I know of Terry Pluto from that ABA history I keep meaning to read.
posted by Justin at 9:33 AM

 
SNOWGAME UPDATE: Bill Simmons has it number nine on his best Boston sports moments list. And somebody actually died at Foxboro during the game.
posted by Justin at 8:56 AM

 
WE CAN BUILD YOU: The reconstruction of Afghanistan will be at the micro-level, says The New Scientist:

Instead of massive national projects, the initial approach will be based on villages organising themselves to install solar panels and small hydroelectricity schemes, to rehabilitate wrecked irrigation canals and rebuild local roads.

Huh.
posted by Justin at 7:10 PM

 
THANK YOU, SCIENCE WATCH: This article has this paragraph second:

The notion of the coy female and ardent male - the woman being fussy over her choice of mate, the man being indiscriminate and promiscuous - is now entrenched in Western thought. As the distinguished Observer writer Katharine Whitehorn summed it up: 'Outside every thin girl, there is a fat man trying to get in.'

Precisely where is this entrenched? Romances tend to play off these stereotypes, not lend credence to them. Then comes this:

But now researchers are questioning the notion. With increasing frequency they are finding examples - among animals and humans - that show females can be sexual predators for whom infidelity has clear evolutionary advantages. As this week's Nature explains in a major study of the field, researchers are finding the world of sex far more complicated than previously thought.

I mean, they had to do research to figure that one out? The Blogistan Institute For Science would like to point out that --after doing years of research-- the majority of scientists are nerds. Awright, I'm being too hard on the article, which is mostly reporting on the tide changing against strict evolutionary psychology conceptions of male-female differences --which traditionally actually are the ones in the first paragraph quoted above. (Or making a tide up; it's from The Guardian, and since I know bupkis about British papers I don't know if it's one of the liberal ones or not. But the hardcore evolutionary psychology views are traditionally associated with conservatism, rightly or wrongly. Probably because Stephen Jay Gould is not hardcore and he's a liberal, thus the hardcore guy he spars with, Richard Dawkins, becomes conservative by elimination. Maybe.) So maybe it's science's view of sexual prowess that's changing. I tend to agree with Charles Harness circa The Rose that art discovers everything first anyway, so I guess figuring out that sex is complicated in 2002 is pretty good evidence of that.

The other goofy science item today is this item saying that men prefer women who smell like their fathers. This is offered up as more evidence for our genes being secretly in control of us. There may be alternate interpretations of the same evidence, though.
posted by Justin at 6:58 PM

 
AFTER DELIBERATION: Shiloh Bucher has come to the conclusion that Andrea Yates is nuts and finds the clinching proof in this great Time article, which was done with the cooperation of Rusty Yates. The impression I get from the Time piece was that both Yates were amazingly bad at --I don't know, critical self-examination? Or something; bad at insight, I guess. Or they both had an incredible inability to be confrontational. That way lies madness, methinks.
posted by Justin at 6:29 PM

 
ARGENTINA UPDATE: The new guy wants to convert all bank accounts that are now in dollars into pesos. That doesn't sound very fair.
posted by Justin at 4:48 PM

 
CIRCLE OF LIFE OF A TRADE CENTER: The scrap metal remains of the World Trade Center will be reused in construction projects in India and China. I guess it's cheaper for them to buy scrap then for Americans to recycle scrap profitably, which is why it's being sent abroad. I mean, maybe it's analagous to the shipbreaking industry, but I'm not sure.
posted by Justin at 4:19 PM

 
BLACK HAWK DOWN: Flit and Kaus have the factual breakdown of what the movie told you and what it didn't. Perry and Jim have some additional insight on the events behind the movie.

As far as the movie itself went, it was good. It was extremely well-done but sort of lacking a point. I guess Ridley Scott was trying to do journalism via moviemaking, and in journalism you just have to get your facts straight --so the above criticisms are entirely appropriate. As far as showing the risks soldiers take just doing their jobs, they did a good job with that. But I can see the point of those and those who can't really understand why this movie exists. I think Stanley Kauffman makes a good point:

Which leads to the fact that, though military pictures have never been in short supply, we are going to have a martial plenty. Bruce Willis is coming in one, and Mel Gibson in another. This surge cannot be a response to September 11; films take more time to make. But war pictures have always been as plentiful as war itself. We used to like to delude ourselves that there were eras of peace, but in any global view that belief was shaky and it is now hideously laughable.

Still, many of those war films have had some point other than the visceral excitements of slaughter. What's particularly depressing about Black Hawk Down, other than the whole subject of Somalia, is that it doesn't even sense the need for a point. Just slosh a lot of realistic carnage on the screen, it seems to say, and people will come. Roll on, Roman games.

Particularly the "many of those war films have had some point other than the visceral excitements of slaughter." This movie reminded me of Assault On Precinct 13 or Escape From New York, two movies where protagonists are trapped in situations of escalating violence involving armed bands. Both are by John Carpenter, who was a real genre pro and I think what he did in those two was restage a urban warfare movie as a horror movie, as the escalating violence is a staple of that genre, or has been since Night Of The Living Dead. I'm sure other people did that too, but Carpenter is the one who comes to mind for me. My point is: Black Hawk Down only makes sense as a horror movie, where the zombies have been replaced by Somalians. Or it only makes genre movie sense as a horror movie; if you want to argue it as a movie-as-journalism, I think you have evidence for that too. But I'm seeing a limited number of protagonists completely outnumbered by a more-or-less indistinct mob in a situation where survival becomes the only option. This is a good horror picture set in a military milieu.

And I know the story Scott told is essentially the one that happened, that the Rangers were overwhelmed but far better armed and that there were a thousand deaths on the Somali side because of that. But it's still a movie, and since this movie has no other reason to exist besides to portray people forced to physically fight against nameless forces that keep coming and coming and have no reason to exist on the screen besides to kill you, it has to be a horror picture in its heart of hearts.
posted by Justin at 1:48 PM

 
FOOTBALL WRAPUP: Jim comments on the "instant classic" feel of Saturdays Pats-Raiders game, the only game this weekend that was actually good. It just looked like a classic with all that snow --football games become intrinsically more important when played under lousy conditions-- and there was the added bonus of the last-chance field goal and the controversial drive-saving fumble-reversal. I only watched the last quarter and the overtime as I was roped into playing an idiot drinking game with my siblings but what I saw was Good.
posted by Justin at 11:47 AM

 
MORE NETS LOVE: Can be found on ESPN. I will tolerate no petty jealousy in regards to the beloved New Jersey Nets.
posted by Justin at 11:30 AM

 
CHRISTIAN MUSIC UPDATE: Mark Byron has another history of contemporary Christian music right here. He talks about the breadth of the CCM scene, whereas the Bagge piece was probably more interested in it as a sociological phenomenon.
posted by Justin at 11:11 AM

 
SHOUT OUT: To Dodgeblog and the Midwest Conservative Journal for linking to me. Dodgeblog's got the cool picture of the EPCOT giant golf ball in the background, so Uncle Walt's version of our futurity appears to be almost generating Andrew's thoughts. Cool, like I said. And the Midwest Conservative Journal --a secretive Opus Dei-like organization based in Branson, Missouri-- well you don't want to cheese HIM off. The Editor has his ways, donchaknow.
posted by Justin at 3:06 PM

 
AMERICAN PASSIVITY FOLLOWUP: Lake Effect Dan writes in response to this post:

Actually, I'm pretty sure the don't-fight-back mentality began in the late 60s-early 70s when there were a lot of violent bank robberies. Banks figured out they couldn't insist on minimum-wage tellers laying down their lives for a few hundred bucks of the bank's money (or really, the bank's insuror's money), especially if it had a side-effect of putting customers in danger. Cynically one could say that the lawsuit exposure (customers, tellers, whomever) might be many, many times what the robber might get!

So banks developed this non-violent approach and replaced enforcement with technology -- video cameras, dye-bursters, etc.

There was a similar trend toward the skyjacking spate in the early 70s. Again, the reasoning that a skyjacker usually looking for a few
thousand dollars and easily caught afterward wasn't worth risking the lives of passengers over.

So the just-do-what-they-say mentality does have its origins outside of the hostage crises of my youth.
posted by Justin at 2:47 PM

 
GUERILLA-STYLE DEBATING: Here's where I pick up the fight I started with Megan McArdle like weeks ago now that the bone of contention --this Peter Bagge cartoon-- is finally online. I, again, do not detect an anti-redneck bias, just the usual Bagge bemused hatred for his subjects. Actually, I think I brought this up just so I could point people to checking out Bagge's stuff; he's like the greatest comics mind of his generation. Or something. Megan didn't find it funny, but I, like Cal Ulmann, thought it was funny, if just because it was true. But I think Bagge was just doing straight reporting on a funny subject (though I think the way he draws is inherently amusing); I'm glad I know there's a Christian pop culture parallel universe, so if I ever wander into it --well, at least I'll know where I am.
posted by Justin at 5:43 PM

 
RECIPROCAL LINKAGE: While me and The Donkey were going crazy Broadway-style about the Nets' big win, he pointed out Joe Netsfan. It's a website about a professional basketball team that didn't exist, but should have. Oh wait....
posted by Justin at 11:20 PM

 
VIRGIN SHARK BIRTH FOLLOW-UP: Robert Crawford writes me with a third explanation for the King Of The Jaws: one of the sharks switched gender. Or sex --I can never remember the difference. Anyway, here's Robert:

Something to think about in the shark story. While sharks aren't closely related to them, clownfish -- the ones that live in anemones -- change sex naturally. The largest in a community is female, the second largest male, and the others are immature or indeterminant. If the largest dies, the second largest takes it place -- switching from male to female -- and another takes the place of the male.

He brings links to this clownfish page and this discussion about another cross-gendered fish.
posted by Justin at 11:02 PM

 
SUCCESS OR FAILURE IN AMERICA COIN-FLIP-ESQUE: Check this out:

"America can be characterized as a 50/50 society, where the chance of experiencing one economic extreme versus the other is roughly 50/50," said Mark R. Rank, Ph.D., first author of the study and professor at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis.

Americans tend to think of poverty and affluence as "something that happens to someone else," but the study's analysis drives home the fact these events are mainstream issues.

51.1 percent of Americans are exposed to at least one year of poverty during adulthood, 51 percent will experience one year of affluence, while four out of five Americans will encounter one or the other of these economic events.

"The opportunity for extreme economic failure and success appears to be a very real component of American society," said Rank, who co-authored the study with Thomas A. Hirschl, professor at Cornell University.

The numbers fall apart for black people, with nine out of ten experiencing experiencing poverty in the lifetimes while only one of eight having a year of affluence. Then Rank says:

"The U.S. has been characterized as a nation of abundant economic opportunities where affluence is within the grasp of many of its citizens, but America has also been depicted as a free-market society that provides little protection from the ravages of poverty," Rank said. "Our analysis reveals that both views of America appear accurate, with race and education being the fault lines that divide Americans into one group or another."

Contrary to popular belief, gender exerts relatively little affect on the probability of experiencing poverty or affluence, with American men and women remaining near equal odds of experiencing poverty or affluence throughout their adult lifetimes.

Gosh, a study that answers questions about racial and gender gaps. Via the evolutionary psychology Yahoo group.
posted by Justin at 8:03 PM

 
NEW SPORTS GUY: I guess I'm on the NBA beat today. Here's Bill Simmons' latest, a rundown of the season so far. The NBA by his own admission is his favorite sport and I think his take is particularly knowledgable and distinct, like when he argues that Kobe Bryant would be tons more interesting if he didn't have Shaq to clean up for him, or that Dirk Nowitzki is the second coming of Larry Bird. He's usually pretty funny too. And --contrary to common wisdom-- he argues that the NBA is in its greatest period talent-wise since the Bird-Magic-MJ era. I think he'd take issue with Gregg Easterbrook's recent NBA-NFL comparisons. I love Easterbrook in his Tuesday Morning Quarterback persona, but his comments sounded like the comments of someone who hadn't watched an NBA game in a while.
posted by Justin at 7:07 PM

 
LAKE EFFECT LINKAGE: Go read Lake Effect today, Dan's got an excellent demolition of an Alex Cox attempt to criticize Black Hawk Down. Plus he's got the links to some Todd Gitlin, a wicked piece of anti-Americanism (not by Gitlin) and some other great links.

By the way, that's Alex Cox of Repo Man, a great, surreal 80s movie.
posted by Justin at 2:32 PM

 
LIBS GET THE LADIES: Via the null device, here's an article from the National Post about which political stances get the chicks. Apparently hot artsy-fartsy girls go out with sensitive liberals, and hot artsy-fartsy girls seems to be the only female type the author, Andy Lamey, is concerned with. Maybe those are the only girls who live in Toronto? I mean, there's gotta be somebody going for the conservative guys, maybe an Ann Coulter type.

He also lumps libertarians in with the right while he's getting indoctrinated into libertarian thought at a seminar; here's a quote to cheese you off:

Every political movement has a crazed relative hidden away in the attic, dementedly pounding away on a piano while muttering strange remarks only they understand; the aunt or uncle so embarrassing they need to be kept away from outsiders. On the left, this role has been filled at different times by hard-core Maoists, weird art-school radicals, and a really irritating German guy named Theodor Adorno. On the right, it will always be Ayn Rand.

Tee hee. This article is also my first introduction to Critical Review, a libertarian scholarly journal whose contents do not appear to be on-line. Kind of like Vanity Fair.
posted by Justin at 11:42 AM

 
CITIZEN CUBAN: The Dallas Morning News has the straight poop on his Dairy Queen stint. ESPN has two opinion pieces on him, one saying the refs aren't that bad and one saying that Cuban isn't as comical as you think. Both say Ed Rush isn't a bad guy.
posted by Justin at 10:45 AM

 
HAHAHA: Yes, Michael Jordan had the worst defeat of his life tonight. And yes, it was at the hands of the beloved New Jersey Nets. Please don't make any jokes about this being the first sell-out of the season or about any other facet of the pathetic attendance in East Rutherford. Please.
posted by Justin at 12:03 AM

 
HMMM: Most of the big media outlets are bitching about Israel not renewing the press credentials of their Palestinian employees. I'm not sure how defensible Israel's actions are on this; the AP article speculates: "Some Israeli officials have complained that the foreign media have relied too heavily on Palestinians for coverage in the West Bank and Gaza." Those Palestinian reporters should all start blogs.
posted by Justin at 11:58 PM

 
ANTI-BLOGGER RESPONSE WATCH: Okay, here's my rundown on the responses to the Raimondo screed:

As noted below, Glenn Reynolds can now report that Pravda holds his site in fine regard.

Ken Layne just tells him to chill out for a minute. I thought Ken would really rip him, since Raimondo devoted quite a few lines to him, but he pretty much deflated him, which is absolutely a better response.

Bjorn Staerk gives him a few paragraphs and basically concludes with next time he won't be trolled into responding so easily.

Sgt. Stryker gives a point-by-point rebuttal.

Fredrik Norman appears to take him in stride while defending Ayn Rand from charges of racism.

Joanne Jacobs basically has this sentence in response: "Justin Raimondo tries to outblog the warbloggers in an Antiwar.com column, but lacks the analytical skills and wit to pull it off."

And Andrew Sullivan hasn't responded yet. I doubt he will, he isn't really a proponent of the blogging phenomenon --I mean, I don't think he wants everybody to start a weblog like Ken Layne does. But maybe he'll have a little something.

There you go.

UPDATE: I forgot these, because they weren't mentioned in Justin Raimondo's original article:

Rand Simberg points to the drive-by shooting that was perpetrated upon his blog.

Natalie Solent got some fan mail from Justin.

And The Midwest Conservative Journal (a secretive conglomerate based in Ames, Iowa) is cheesed off because the Editor ripped Raimondo twice and didn't even get mentioned in the anti-blogger thing, while bloggers who never had a problem with him got all of his ire. Wotta gyp.

There you go. Again.

UPDATE UPDATE: The Cobra Commander-like Samizdata Team direct me to their responses: by David, by Perry, and by Natalija --hers is kind of wistful and in passing. There's no word from them on what kind of girls dig libertarians, but I'm sure they'll get to it.

Charles wrote in to tell me that he's ignoring Raimondo. Cool. And I would like to thank Charles, belatedly, for linking to my blog.

Incidentally, I only meant this piece to be a sort of tracker for all the people Raimondo called out in his piece, but if you've got a particularly good counter-screed by all means let me know and I'll add it here.
posted by Justin at 9:09 PM

 
DOG-EATING UPDATE: William Saletan on Slate has devoted an article to it and it's the best defense of dog-eating I've ever seen and exposed the cultural prejudices of those who are against it. A sample:

Strip out Bardot's silly arrogance and her Korean colleagues' sentimentality, and their philosophy boils down to this: The value of an animal depends on how you treat it. If you befriend it, it's a friend. If you raise it for food, it's food. This relativism is more dangerous than the absolutism of vegetarians or even of thoughtful carnivores. You can abstain from meat because you believe that the mental capacity of animals is too close to that of humans. You can eat meat because you believe that it isn't. Either way, you're using a fixed standard. But if you refuse to eat only the meat of "companion" animals—chewing bacon, for example, while telling Koreans that they can't stew Dalmatians—you're saying that the morality of killing depends on habit or even whim.

I'm guessing pure vegetararianism is the only anti-dog eating argument that's actually consistent.

UPDATE: Ginger, of course, has a much longer and better post on the above article.
posted by Justin at 8:18 PM

 
PERSONAL HELICOPTER UPDATE: The New Scientist has picked up on the test flight.
posted by Justin at 7:38 PM

 
NEW DVDVR: Issue 133 is finally here. It's the greatest wrestling review on the planet. Enjoy.
posted by Justin at 7:31 PM

 
PRESCIENT POST: Andrew Olmsted points out that nobody in an official capacity has asked who screwed up where in relation to the 9/11 attacks, unlike in Pearl Harbor when people actually got in trouble. I guess officialdom can say, "hey, we're responding --cripes, we're fighting a war." But Andrew's right, there's been no acknowledgement from the CIA or anybody that they goofed.
posted by Justin at 7:19 PM

 
AND HE SAYS HE'S CLUELESS: I should just use my blog as running commentary on Steven den Beste's great posts, or something; here's another one on the latest going postal incident today, except that this time the gunman was tackled before the police got there. Steven asks: "Has the ghost of Kitty Genovese finally been laid to rest?" I think most people thought the don't-fight-back mentality was rooted in eighties hostage crises where you were supposed to negotiate with the terrorists who wouldn't kill you if they got what they wanted --Leon Klinghoffer notwithstanding. But Steven is putting the origin of a passive American attitude in response to people trying to kill us way back in 1964, which is pretty plausible, in my opinion. Not that I'm one of those blame the sixties for the erosion of American moral fiber types, but that era did begin a long period of the national psyche judging itself pretty harshly. Anyway, my answer to Steven's no-doubt-rhetorical question would be: well, yeah, by the passengers of Flight 93. Fighting back is in vogue. It's a better response than that "she said yes" thing that probably didn't even happen. I mean, would everybody have been hiding in the library at Columbine if it happened now? Maybe, but maybe they would've thrown books at the gunmen.

COMICS SIDENOTE: I first heard of Kitty Genovese in Watchmen, it was part of Rorschach's origin.
OPERA SIDENOTE: I first heard of Leon Klinghoffer from reading descriptions like this about The Death Of Klinghoffer which I've never checked out.
posted by Justin at 6:41 PM

 
LAUGH OUT LOUD: The funniest result of that Raimondo anti-blogger screed is that Glenn Reynolds changed his site description because of it. Check the top left corner when you go there. I'm amused.
posted by Justin at 5:03 PM

 
COOL PHOTO: Of Io from the Galileo probe. Yahoo uses the word spacecraft, which I refuse to do, it's a probe, probing like probes will. And it's heading for Uranus. HAHAHAHAHA
posted by Justin at 2:03 PM

 
BIG BUD SELIG ARTICLE: The Washington Post brings a history of Bud Selig. There's this comment about the way baseball is run:

More than anything, the controversy over contraction has exposed the conflicts -- real and perceived -- embodied in a commissioner whose own franchise is affected by most every decision he makes. Under headings such as "Conflict of Interest" and "Independence," the bylaws of the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League prohibit commissioners from holding a financial stake in any teams. There are no such rules in Major League Baseball.
posted by Justin at 1:26 PM

 
WHAT I READ THIS MORNING: Instapundit's new column on Enron, the latest on fake drugs in Dallas via Postrel, awright --new Anne Applebaum, Allen Iverson scores 58 the night after Kobe Bryant scores 56, and a review on Salon of a book explaining why Japan is not as squeaky-clean safe as people want to believe it is. Salon also has an interview with Chomsky today; I wonder if anybody out there will buy a subscription just to rip the Noamster a new one.
posted by Justin at 1:11 PM

 
NEW HITCH, SORT OF: In The Nation's letter page. A quote:

I, however, will continue to presume that it is obvious that those murdered in America on that day were not "collateral damage." Their murders were the direct object of the "operation." By contrast, we have had repeated and confirmed reports of frustration on the part of American targeters in Afghanistan, frequently denied permission to open fire because of legal constraints imposed by the Pentagon. This is actually a tribute to the work of the antiwar movement over the years; it seems paltry in more than one way to be sneering at it.

Via the Christopher Hitchens Web, as usual.
posted by Justin at 1:01 PM

 
FAKE WEBSITE WATCH: As The Donkey already pointed out, Boing Boing brought the link to a obsessive-fan website about a fake Muppet Babies-like show featuring the prominent members of the Clinton White House as kids at White House Elementary. It's great. There's even a Cafe Press store to buy items from a show that never existed but probably should have.

Meanwhile, Coming Attractions has the link to what's apparently a promo site for the Tron sequel, Tron 2.0. If you click on it, prepare for it to take over your screen for about ten seconds.
posted by Justin at 12:58 PM

 
COOLNESS: Steven (I'm not linking to him, as he says he's changing IPs today) points out a company that's developing a wearable helicopter. Time even covered it, revealing that the Pentagon is one of the investors. Neato. There's a picture there of a personal aircraft prototype; it looks like a Skyhawk.

Steven's other post about the universe being stranger than we can imagine recalls Roy Batty's soliloquy from Blade Runner for me, I'm not sure why:

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Time to die.

It doesn't look like much, I admit, if you've never seen Blade Runner, but where it comes in the movie and how Rutger Hauer says it sort of branded it in my brain.
posted by Justin at 12:48 PM

 
CHOMSKY THE SCIENTIST WATCH: Here's an article about a book by a guy, Mark Baker, "whose dissertation was supervised by Dr. Chomsky." Who claims to have found evidence for Chomsky's universal grammer rules. There are of course dissenters:

Dr. Baker's work is by no means universally accepted. Dr. Robert Van Valin, a professor of linguistics at the State University of New York at Buffalo, says the findings rest on a questionable assumption: that there is a universal grammar.

"What they're doing in that whole program is taking English-like structures and putting the words or parts of words of other languages in those structures and then discovering that they're just like English," he said.

Dr. Karin E. Michelson, an associate professor of linguistics at SUNY Buffalo, who also disagrees with the Chomskyan approach, said after reviewing Dr. Baker's Mohawk work that some of the sentences he selected seemed artificial.

Dr. Baker acknowledged that some of the longer words in his study were "carefully engineered," but he said the parameter still held up using more common examples of Mohawk. He said using only examples from real discourse restricted the kind of analysis that linguists could do.

I know very little about linguistics, but I think that was always the word on the scientist street: that Chomsky's linguistics had a hideous English-language bias, which is what I think the guy from the SUNY Buffalo quoted above is referring to.
posted by Justin at 7:15 AM

 
GOOD ARTICLE: From USA Today summarizing the Oracle & Sun vs. Microsoft rivalry, something I wasn't aware of, not being part of the tech audience the article refers to. There's also highlights of other great corporate fights.
posted by Justin at 6:31 AM

 
THE BBC: Has picked up on Cornel West and Harvard grade inflation.

Also, a story on the rise of Korean pop culture within Asia.
posted by Justin at 6:10 AM

 
AND: I can't post a Mark Cuban item without posting a Shaq item. Also from ESPN.com, it's a little opinion piece about how NBA rules weren't designed for Shaq and how he's probably committing an offensive foul on every possession.
posted by Justin at 6:05 AM

 
MARK CUBAN WATCH: He's managing a Dairy Queen now. Yes he is.
posted by Justin at 6:01 AM

 
NEW LILEKS: James Lileks has been linked all over blogdom lately; here's his latest Screed, on modern art. I love this bit:

Previous artistic squabbles always had to do with a shocking new style that confronted the status quo, and it usually led to something good.
Eventually, however, the status quo consists solely of confrontation, and you end up with a group of artists all pointing accusing fingers at a status quo that no longer exists. The bourgeoise is no longer shocked; they don’t care, and they’re not paying much attention until you splatter pachyderm patties at religious icons. Even then they don’t care too much, because they’ve written off High Art as an incomprehensible realm of gobblegook theory, carved sheep, sculpture that has the beauty of a rusty nail in your foot, and masturbatory self-absorbtion that cannot inform, cannot enlighten, cannot inspire, and cannot possibly have anything to do with life as we live it. When High Art is no longer interested in beauty, people looking for beauty will find it elsewhere. And they’ll find it.

Yeah, the bourgeoise is pretty much unshockable, isn't it? It's only when you troll religious people that you get somebody outside of the art world looking at your stuff. Or, rather, that's the only time current-day high art rises to national prominence. It's only an obvious point, but perhaps some artists are bummed out at their diminished cultural cache. (Do classical musicians get bummed out like this?) And they resort to shitgineering to make the headlines.
posted by Justin at 3:02 PM

 
WEIRD NEWS FRONT: A shark has given birth without any obvious signs of fertilization. The two explanations are sperm that lived for three years (unlikely) or asexual reproduction (even less likely.)
posted by Justin at 2:09 PM

 
VALUE OF FEMINISM QUOTE OF THE DAY: ''In America, I think it is possible to live without a man,'' said Rahima in halting English. ''But here, even in Pakistan, you need a father, a husband, or a brother. We don't have any man. ... It makes our life so difficult.'' Quoted in this Boston Globe article about Afghan women whose final employment option has become working as hookers. I note that two of the women in the article only turned to prostitution after they lost their manufacturing jobs; is that worse than going back to the farm?
posted by Justin at 2:03 PM

 
RED SOX SALE UPDATE: They're sticking with the John Henry group despite Charles Dolan offering $40 million more. There's the usual accusations down the bottom of the article of Bud Selig just doing what Bud Selig wants to do.
posted by Justin at 1:53 PM

 
ANTI-PORN MISSIONARIES: Interesting LA times story about these guys (they have a sense of humor: it's "the number 1 christian porn site") at the AVN show. They take a laid-back approach to "porn addiction," a concept I am not sure exists in reality. I mean, it would have to be a near-total psychological addiction, and I can imagine (note I said imagine) some men getting into some kind of Skinnerian positive-response closed-and-admitting-no-one-else feedback loop. In which case these guys are here to help, but only if you want help:

"We're not here to judge anyone or to picket the show. What good would that do?" Gross says. "We decided the best thing to do was to actually be in the show and try to talk to the people in the industry in a professional and respectful manner and not be confrontational. The congregation [at Crossroads] [their home chuch --me] told us they'd be praying for us."

I'm sure they help some people. The article ends with the odd anecdote that Teri Weigel prays before she goes on stage and says three rosaries a day. To each her own, I guess.
posted by Justin at 1:46 PM

 
MEDIA CONSPIRACY THEORY: New York Times article hinting at secret Apple-Time magazine agreement to promote the iMac. Gawd, I bought the old iMac and it sucked; I never had a computer inexplicably lock up on me more than that thing. Never again. Anyway, a while back Andrea See wrote me about why The Economist never tells you who's writing the articles there: to protect journalistic integrity, so people aren't influenced by advertisers or whoever. Now I have no problem with Time throwing a puff piece to an advertiser, I just wish they'd admit they were doing it out of non-journalistic motivations. I mean, does objectivity really sell magazines? Foxnews doesn't claim to be objective and they do fine. But maybe Time admitting their we're-just-trying-to-sell-copies bias is a little different than Foxnews admitting their conservative bias.
posted by Justin at 1:20 PM

 
SCHOTTENHEIMER FIRED: Martyball was not working out, apparently. Maybe hiring your whole family as the coaching staff had something to do with that. And now the Redskins want to hire Steve Spurrier, who may have a rough go of it in the pros.
posted by Justin at 1:00 PM

 
OLD IDEA NEEDING CONSUMERS: Drudge links to this tiny little Reuters story about a South Korean brewery making plans to market a gelatin-liquor. Like a Jello shot? I dunno; maybe it'll be more like those weird Chinese candies that were spotted at the Costco by my brother recently; they taste like peaches and sort of have the consistency of an apple or a underripe peach, except, of course, they're completely uniform and lacking the internal structure of an actual piece of fruit. Weird but good. If you see a plastic bucket with Chinese lettering filled with individually-wrapped gumdrop-shaped things about the size and color of egg yolks, you'll know what I'm talking about. Anyhow, I think the knock against Jello shots is that they get you too drunk too fast --which is why they are so beloved by drunken and trying-to-get-you-drunk fratboys, and also why I think nobody's tried something like this before. Unless they have, in which case I am just some guy with a weblog. But I guess this brewery's business strategy will be a. marketing to fratboys or b. cutting back on the liquor content so non-alcoholics embrace them.
posted by Justin at 12:54 PM

 
ARGENTINA UPDATE: An editorial from The New Republic, actually, on why Paul O'Neill is vastly unsuited for his job. A sample:

This past summer Argentina--facing unemployment climbing toward 20 percent and unable to repay the money it had borrowed to back up its currency, which in 1991 the country's currency board pegged to the dollar--asked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for debt relief. O'Neill was unsympathetic. "They've been off and on in trouble for 70 years or more," he told The Economist (in an interview the investment bank UBS Warburg later called "amazing, astonishing, appalling"). "Nobody forced them to be what they are." O'Neill's comments weren't merely callous; they actually made Argentina's condition worse: By suggesting that the United States would not approve an IMF loan, he helped cause interest rates on private loans to Argentina to rise even more.
posted by Justin at 12:17 PM

 
THE TRUE NATIONAL SPORT: Unqualified Offerings has a great defense of NFL football. He also points out the goofy love of people like George Will for baseball:

It's odd that baseball gets the intellectual cachet, since football is a far more intellectually-challenging game. Offensive and defensive playbooks are famously complicated, and their intricacy and depth goes beyond the sheer volume of material to be memorized. Behind an offensive system is a set of principles given concrete expression in a precise vocabulary, combined and recombined into individual plays and entire game plans.

He also makes the point that a source of football's greatness is its rest period (which soccer and hockey and other "fast moving game" partisans love to point out, but derisively.) It adds suspense, Jim argues. And he makes this unique point:

One also hears scoffs at the idea that many football players should even be considered athletes. Aren't a lot of them fat, not to say steroid-soaked, lummoxes? Leaving aside the steroid question, a lot of football players are big, fat and tall. They're called linemen. As it happens, offensive linemen are likely to be the smartest players on the field. Other football players are much thinner and much faster. There is a mild advantage to being shortish if you are a running back and a substantial advantage to being tall if you are a receiver or a defender. Some quarterbacks are very slow and some are very fast. So let me turn the complaint around and throw in a totem word for good measure: Football makes productive use of a greater diversity of somatic types than any other sport. You can be a 340# lineman, a 240# linebacker or a 180# cornerback. What has baseball to offer the 300-pounder? Should they all just sit around feeling sorry for themselves?

NFL football is America's sport, in popularity and in society-wide importance. What other sport's championship is a national holiday?
posted by Justin at 12:06 PM

 
WOOHOO: New Postrel. Virginia is not a daily blogger but she makes up for it by putting up completely quality posts. She brings the level-headedness to blog hysteria, just like you knew she would:

Bloggers have been getting pretty meta lately, writing a lot about the virtues and evolution of this medium. On her site, Joanne Jacobs offers some history, with reader assistance ("Creation of Blogworld"), and links to some blog-related items elsewhere ("Orwell's Bloggers"), with a wistful consideration of the possibility of micropayments-per-read. (It's not going to happen, although here's an alternative model that might work.) Joanne writes more as a reporter than as an advocate.

More typical are the blog promoters. Andrew Sulivan, for instance, brags "Tina Brown's Talk magazine has around the same number of subscribers per month that we have as [sic] visits." Glenn Reynolds goes him one better. His TechCentral Station column proclaims that "what is really going on is something much more profound: it's the end of the power of Big Media." It's the Reformation, says Glenn, citing Jim Bennett of UPI. Glenn is great, but this is ridiculous.

Read the whole post, of course. The Scene page is like two-thirds new stuff today. I note that she notes that somebody in A Beautiful Mind had their institution changed from Rutgers (where the guy actually went to) to Harvard (where Hollywood wants you to think he went to). What a load of crap.
posted by Justin at 11:45 AM

 
I WOULD LIKE TO BE THE FIRST TO WELCOME OUR SIMIAN OVERLORDS: Boing Boing links to this piece which predicts the next step over humanity in terms of having perfect memories and super math skills will take the form of half-artificial intelligence, half simian cyborg-things. I guess we better stop eating gorillas.
posted by Justin at 11:35 PM

 
SWEATSHOPS: Tim Blair comically links to this article about the downturn in the Bangladeshi economy since the attacks, which says a hundred thousand people have lost their sweatshop jobs in the past two months. The garment workers, mostly women, have the choice of factory work or going back to the farm. I like the sentiment of Tim's post.
posted by Justin at 11:27 PM

 
J-E-T-S S-T-I-N-K: The Jets just died with a whimper, with time running out and going for a touchdown that wouldn't even tie the game, a play that went incomplete. The coaching was pretty suspect in what I saw. Bummer. Michelle Kwan won, though, if you were wondering.
posted by Justin at 11:05 PM

 
HAPPINESS EXPLAINED: Catallaxy Files points out this article on happiness research within economics.
posted by Justin at 10:53 PM

 
PRESIDENT MUSHARRAF: Gave the latest speech-of-his-life today --the previous one was when he announced he was allying with the United States. He makes good sense, and seems to be taking a firm stand towards peace with India. He positively channels LBJ at this point:

The second thing I want to talk about is the concept of Jehad in its totality. I want to dilate upon it because it is a contentious issue, requiring complete comprehension and understanding. In Islam, Jehad is not confined to armed struggles only. Have we ever thought of waging Jehad against illiteracy, poverty, backwardness and hunger? This is the larger Jehad.

Pakistan, in my opinion, needs to wage Jehad against these evils. After the battle of Khyber, the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him) stated that Jehad-e-Asghar (Smaller Jehad) is over but Jehad-e-Akbar (Greater Jehad) has begun. This meant that armed Jehad i.e. the smaller Jehad was now over and the greater Jehad against backwardness and illiteracy had started.

Pakistan needs Jehad-e-Akbar at this juncture.

I'm not sure about this part, though:

Do we want Pakistan to become a theocratic state? Do we believe that religious education alone is enough for governance or do we want Pakistan to emerge as a progressive and dynamic Islamic welfare state?

What, those are the only two choices? I think welfare states have generally been proven bad. But this is a dynamic welfare state though. I don't know what that would look like.
posted by Justin at 10:33 PM

 
MICHELLE KWAN: Just kicked a ton of ass on the tv. She looked exuberantly happy as she finished after hitting all her jumps and everything and not falling down (that's the only thing I know about figure skating, falling down=bad news.) I love the fact that she fired her coach and is doing the Olympics on her own.

Did you know she's dating a hockey player? Just like The Cutting Edge.
posted by Justin at 10:20 PM

 
STATUE UPDATE: Here's a picture of it. Never mind the race-changing, they took out the guy on the right's pot belly. This is obviously a sell-out to the exercise-promotes-health-and-beauty crowd.
posted by Justin at 10:15 PM

 
EEP: Charles links to this story about rampant man-boy love in Kandahar, which I thought was the more conservative part of Afghanistan. Apparently this was a prominent part of pre-Taliban life there that is now reemerging in the post-Taliban era. Say what you will about the Taliban, but at least they repressed everybody equally. Now you only get repressed if you're a woman.

Hey, weren't the ancient Greeks like that? Not like the Taliban, I mean what's reemerging after the Taliban which seems to possess a sort of general disdain for women. Not that the Afghans are going to be the cultural titans the Greeks were; more probably it indicates the all-around primitiveness of the culture there. I think.
posted by Justin at 9:45 PM

 
NICE POST: From the USS Clueless on the racial transmogrification of New York firefighters from white guys into ethnically diverse guys in the statue version of that famous Iwo Jima-like flag-raising photo taken at the Trade Center site. Steven doesn't like it, but he posts a dissenting opinion too.
posted by Justin at 1:11 PM

 
EQUITY WATCH: Here's something on the swing toward research exploring the biological differences between men and women.
posted by Justin at 4:25 PM

 
BLOG TOOL: Here's the Google New Headlines page. It calls up different versions of the same story from different sources. Found via Boing Boing.
posted by Justin at 3:25 PM

 
HUH? FILES: New Goldberg File: "Among the better and better-known blogger sites in our cozy little world are AndrewSullivan.com and KausFiles.com. The most promising up-and-comer is Glenn Reynolds's Instapundit." In what sense is Instapundit an up-and-comer?
posted by Justin at 2:52 PM

 
NEW REPUBLIC PICKS UP ENRON: Yes they do. They have a similar take as The Economist's:

....Democrats want to use Enron as a vehicle for a broader indictment of the White House. They hope to link people's perceptions of the company--a secretive, arrogant, anti-worker institution that hid its cooked budget numbers with good p.r.--to their perceptions of the Bush administration. And in that way, Democrats hope to cast the White House as beholden to corporate fat cats once again--a perception they think was catching on before September 11.

This Enron thing seems to be more about perception than anything else. They also revive older stories about Enron's Kenneth Lay trying to influence White House energy policy.

Also on tnr.com: The new TRB, with Peter Beinart on South Africa's cretinous AIDS policy.
posted by Justin at 2:46 PM

 
ECONOMIST PICKS UP ENRON: Their point is regardless of whether or not there's been any wrongdoing, appearances alone may hurt the Bush administration:

Whether the Bush administration can ride out the controversy will depend to some degree, of course, on whether there was any wrongdoing on the part of Mr Bush or other officials. But even in the absence of proven wrongdoing, the affair could still turn out to be uncomfortable, and prolonged. It contains elements of a classic political scandal. A huge company based in Mr Bush’s home state of Texas and led by his biggest campaign contributor files the biggest bankruptcy in American history. A small group of top executives sell shares before it collapses. At the same time thousands of employees are barred from selling, and lose not only their jobs but their life savings and pensions as well. Meanwhile there are revelations of frequent contacts between the company and top administration officials.


The problem for Mr Bush is that even if all these contacts turn out to be completely proper, the Enron case still embodies many of the doubts that Americans have about him: that he is too close to Big Business (and the energy industry in particular); and that his concerns are not the concerns of normal Americans. This is the president whom last summer Democrats were skewering for his desire to open up Alaska's oil fields supposedly “for his friends in Houston” and for allegedly letting industrialists put arsenic into drinking water.
posted by Justin at 12:11 PM

 
DOG-EATING UPDATE: They're really pushing dog cuisine in Korea:

Next Monday's seminar in Koyang city on canine cuisine would feature ``Doctor Dogmeat,'' Chungchong University professor Ahn Yong-keun, who boasts 350 canine recipes, Yonhap news agency said.

Ahn would present a development strategy for the Korean dogmeat industry, suggesting Web sites on opening dogmeat restaurant franchises and developing new recipes, it said.

Also on the weird food front, Ten Turner is opening bisonburger franchises. Of course the first one's in Columbus. I expect the new Doctor Dogmeat's to open next door.
posted by Justin at 6:39 PM

 
SLATE DIARY THIS WEEK: It's the travails of an immigration lawyer and it's real good. This comment stands out, I have no idea why:

Later in the day, I learn what makes America great: lefties. At the end of my meeting with client H., I write the date of his next appointment in my day planner. H.'s eyes light up: "You're writing with your left hand!" I acknowledge that I am, in fact, left-handed. In H.'s native Congo, apparently children are still strictly forbidden to write with their left hands. "There are so many left-handed people in America!" H. marvels. "Never in my life had I seen so many left-handed people until I came to America!"

I had no idea they were still forcing people to write with the non-sinister hand.

UPDATE: Yes, this is the third time I've said I had no idea in this post. Lousy stupid push-button posting for the people.....
posted by Justin at 6:31 PM

 
ENRON: Ginger Stampley has what you need to know here and here. Crap, Oliver Willis has a whole page devoted to Enron.
posted by Justin at 6:07 PM

 
PHILIPPINES UPDATE: We're sending troops there to train their anti-Abu Sayyaf troops. The article explains that Manila does not want foreign troops actually fighting on Philippine territory. There you go.
posted by Justin at 5:51 PM

 
WHY I LIKE THE INTERNET: I can get pointers on where to get started in following Christian music. Or I could get hipped to obscure Fritz Lang movies. Or I can go on Amazon and read reviews that lead to more reviews of books I should be reading. (Amazon is like a miniature Internet, actually.) Maybe it is all run on love.
posted by Justin at 5:42 PM

 
CHINA SLAMS GATES: China is awarding a big government contract to indigenous Linux-based software companies and excluding Microsoft, says this story from The Straits Times. Though apparently it's just for Beijing; Microsoft has a contract with Shanghai, according to the article. Via dangerousmeta.
posted by Justin at 4:05 PM

 
ONLY OBVIOUS DEPARTMENT: Here's an op-ed from the Tacoma Tribune on why college football players should be paid. I can't think of a reason not to, except that if you pay one kind of athlete, why shouldn't all athletes get paid (like swimmers or gymnasts, sports that aren't cash cows like football and basketball.) But that's what revenue-sharing is all about, and the argument for paying college athletes is revenue-sharing, as you have these teams bringing in tons of money for their universities and seeing none of it themselves, legally, anyway. So why not share the wealth?
posted by Justin at 3:50 PM

 
MODERN ISLAM: Tom on Samizdata brings the link to a Victor Davis Hanson article on what the Arab world does not get about us. Good read. Here's the quote Tom used to get your attention:

If Israel did not exist, the Arab world, in its current fit of denial, would have to invent something like it to vent its frustrations. That is not to say there may not be legitimate concerns in the struggle over Palestine, but merely that for millions of Muslims the fight over such small real estate stems from a deep psychological wound. It isn’t about lebensraum or some actual physical threat. Israel is a constant reminder that it is a nation’s culture—not its geography or size or magnitude of its oil reserves—that determines its wealth or freedom. For the Middle East to make peace with Israel would be to declare war on itself, to admit that that its own fundamental way of doing business—not the Jews—makes it poor, sick, and weak.

The first part of which reminds me of one of my favorite comic book covers, it was one of the Superman titles and was by Gil Kane, I can't find it on-line but it was one of those "imaginary stories" DC used to run, with the title: "If Superman didn't exist, someone would have to invent him." And it had these little Siegel and Schuster dopplegangers creating Superman in a sketchbook while hiding from the reptiloid alien overlords who had taken over the imaginary Earth Without Superman. Hanson's point is of course the reverse, that the Arab world needs something to hate and not something to find inspiring. If you find Superman inspiring, that is.

Hanson --though he doesn't come out and say this-- seems to have a beef with Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, an attempt to explain Western superiority in terms of European geography, a book I have not read yet but it's on the list. Hanson wants ideas and culture to be the main thing that made the West different --which doesn't explain where that culture came from, and that's where Diamond's book comes in, I guess. I need to read more.
posted by Justin at 1:55 PM

 
RISE AND FALL OF PEANUTS: Jim at Unqualified Offerings points out this Peanuts appreciation and analysis by Christopher Caldwell. Caldwell's theory is that Snoopy's takeover of Peanuts is what made it in its later years a run-of-the-mill strip. Snoopy, in the beginning, was a secondary character (like Frieda or Schroeder) and the farther Schulz embraced him and goofy dogs-are-cute humor the weaker his comics became --what Caldwell calls a "a calamitous artistic misjudgment." He also identifies the core of the good Peanuts years as Charlie Brown, Linus, and Lucy. I love this take on Charlie Brown's character:

Charlie Brown is caught in a bind, because his sense of his own worthlessness is also the source of most of his virtues. Of his worthlessness he’s fully convinced. ("They say that opposites attract...," he says of the Little Red-Headed Girl whom he can never work up the courage to meet. "She’s really something and I’m really nothing... How opposite can you get?") But Charlie Brown’s low estimation of himself means a high estimation of others. The tremendous 1959 strip in which he learns on the phone that his baby sister Sally has been born ("A BABY SISTER? I’M A FATHER! I MEAN MY DAD’S A FATHER! I’M A BROTHER! I HAVE A BABY SISTER!! I’M A BROTHER!") shows that Charlie Brown worships his family and his friends. He’s so empathetic that his favorite big-league ballplayer is not Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle but the bench-warmer Joe Shlabotnik. When Linus gives him a gripping recap of a football game in which a team facing a six-point deficit scored a spectacular touchdown with three seconds left, Charlie Brown asks only, "How did the other team feel?" He is a deeply good person.

I don't know how novel any of this is, as I don't think they're teaching Peanuts at the academy yet. (The textbook would have to be big enough to fit fifteen years of strips, which is the 1955-1970 period Caldwell calls the Golden Age.) But it's a great read if you're a Peanuts fan, or just want to read some good criticism of an important American comic strip.
posted by Justin at 1:35 PM

 
ANALYSIS: From The American Prospect on why Japan isn't coming out of recession anytime soon. Here's a troubling excerpt:

As depicted in Richard Katz's book Japan: The System That Soured, Japan is composed of two economies: an extraordinarily advanced one that can compete against any other, and a backward one, sustained by government subsidies and political interests, that resembles Indonesia at its worst. In the late 1980s, the sheer superiority of top Japanese firms, along with the bubble created by bank lending, sustained the whole. But in the 1990s, as Japan's bubble burst and its most powerful firms moved offshore and acquired strong competitors, the inefficient, insolvent economy increasingly overshadowed the high-tech advanced economy.

The article is not so hot on the Bush administration's approach to Japan, or to Argentina for that matter.

There's also a review in this month's Prospect of James P. Gray's book, who was one of the "battlefield conversions" in the Reason drug issue.
posted by Justin at 1:23 AM

 
GOOD POINT: On the death of WebVan from Photodude. It was a good idea but expanded too fast during the dot.com boom, he says.
posted by Justin at 11:03 PM

 
HEY: Cornel West was on Bill O'Reilly tonight and they got along famously. I was disappointed. O'Reilly mentioned something about Larry Summers refusing to appear on his program before, so maybe he was nursing an old grudge by not getting on West's case, or maybe he just enjoyed talking to West.
posted by Justin at 10:27 PM

 
EVEN IF YOU AVOID THE GIANT ROCK: The supernova gets you. Though the article says the supernova only wiped out molluscs when it hit Earth two million years ago.
posted by Justin at 6:19 PM

 
INSOLVENT REPUBLIC OF PUNDITISTAN --HAS A RING TO IT, METHINKS: Both The Illuminated Donkey and Through The Looking Glass point out that a certain word has run its course perhaps.

Donkey's Ken Goldstein also has a good post on why Ringling Brothers versus PETA is not a case of good versus evil. I always knew clowns were scary.
posted by Justin at 6:06 PM

 
GOOD ECONOMICS POST: From Megan McArdle, on why the Keynesians were/are wrong.
posted by Justin at 6:03 PM

 
ANDREA SEE: Like me got a Claire Berlinski e-mail but she does a little research and googles her up. I love how dawson.com is the third site Google found.
posted by Justin at 5:59 PM

 
CASTLES IN THE SAND: Saudi Arabia has knocked down an old Ottoman castle on its territory. The Turks are, of course, appalled. The castle will be replaced by a giant white cube with one door. And no satellite dishes.
posted by Justin at 5:00 PM

 
GOLDEN TRIANGLE BACK IN BUSINESS: Burma I mean Myanmar is back on top of world opium production. How nice.
posted by Justin at 4:56 PM

 
BY THE WAY: Here's the complete list of Mark Cuban's fines. I wanted to find a complete Rasheed Wallace technical foul list too but I can't seem to google it up. He is in the lead this season, though.
posted by Justin at 4:31 PM

 
LOUSY SITUATION: American parents are lining up to adopt Afghan children, reports the Boston Globe, but it's not happening, for two big reasons:

Islam does not recognize adoption, and cultural tradition prohibits it. Orphans in Afghanistan tend to live with extended family - a cousin, aunt, or even a more distant relative. Orphans are not only defined by the loss of two parents; many Afghanistan orphanages take in children who have one parent missing, usually a father, to help relatives with the cost of another mouth to feed in a country where women routinely have six or seven children.

Even if Islam permitted the practice, logistics and US law would prevent any child from leaving the country. The US government doesn't allow adoption in devastated nations so soon after a war; the chance is too great that children designated as orphaned may have merely been separated from their parents.

Which is pretty crappy, as the article estimates there's 1 million Afghan orphans. They also mention this:

Just like during every world disaster, American families started calling adoption agencies as soon as the bombing of Afghanistan began, wondering how to give a home to the hundreds of poverty-stricken children they saw in media reports.

Is this the Jeffersonian wing of the American populace again --to use Meadian terminology? Or what? I mean, I'm glad people do that; it means as a nation we're not limited to giving money to Sally Struthers and UNICEF boxes.
posted by Justin at 4:12 PM

 
TORICELLI WATCH: Here's Bret Schundler's campaign manager on the GOP's chances of winning Toricelli's Senate seat. How come Schundler isn't running? His name's out there, and he can pull a reverse-Christie Whitman and win a Senate seat after losing the governor's race. It's a good run down, though I don't know why he thinks Jon Corzine was better known than Bob Franks.
posted by Justin at 3:52 PM

 
BUD SELIG STINKS: He's friends with the Twins' owner, who thinks he can get a better price from MLB if they contract his team than if he outright sells it. From the Times, again. Here's a piece from George Vecsey on the same thing.
posted by Justin at 2:02 PM

 
PUTIN WATCH: The war in Chechnya is starting up again, says The Washington Post. What a sleazy war, there's abductions for ransom by Russian forces when there aren't abductions to kill people. Wouldn't it be neat if the U.N. or somebody adopted some kind of international rules for secession? Not that anybody listens to U.N. but at least then we'd have something to argue about. How did the Czechs and Slovaks do it?
posted by Justin at 12:49 PM

 
"THE DAWN CAME UP LIKE THUNDER ACROSS THE COSMOS": The first appearance of starlight happened all at once and it was visually spectacular, says this New York Times article. But there's the usual disclaimer that nothing's been proven yet. Also, the guy who is making this claim says that "Perhaps 90 percent of the light from the early universe is missing." I'm no astrophysicist, but isn't 90 percent of the universe supposed to be dark matter too? Not that I have any clue what the correlation would be between those two statements.

By the way, is that "dawn came up" thing Kipling? The author references Kipling in the first paragraph and then drops that line, so it seems like it could be. I think Kipling is back in vogue these days.
posted by Justin at 12:39 PM

 
BURQA-A-GO-GO: Vivienne Walt of USA Today becomes the latest person to go underburqa in Afghanistan. She reports on the differences between Kabul and Kandahar:

In dozens of interviews here throughout December, no man said women should stop wearing burqas, even though the Taliban had been routed from Kandahar, its spiritual birthplace. Their unwillingness to endorse a change didn't stem merely from the widespread support here for the Taliban. The burqa's place in Afghan society is more complicated and deeply rooted than that.

''It is from 250 years ago,'' says Haji Faqir Mohammad, 52, who repairs cars in Kandahar's central market. ''Only in King (Mohammad) Zahir Shah's time did some girls go to school without burqas,'' he adds, referring to the monarch who ruled from 1933 to 1973.

Kandahari men roundly reject a return to that freedom. ''We don't want women to be like they are in the West,'' says Juma Khan, 32, a spare-parts dealer in the city's crumbling auto-repair bazaar. ''We hope that this new government will bring a little freedom for women, but it has to agree with both Islam and Pashtun tribalism.''

She also reports that the sky-blue Afghan burqas are called chaderis, but then goes back to calling them burqas in the article. I guess I can keep calling them burqas too.
posted by Justin at 12:24 PM

 
DEPRESSION: The Washington Post reports on the rise of drug therapy and the fall of talk theraphy within psychiatry as far as treating depression goes. Here, see:

As managed-care companies demanded a shift from open-ended Freudian models of treatment and lengthy periods of psychoanalysis, the antidepressants were heralded as quick and effective. An important reason they were embraced early on is that they were believed to have fewer side effects than earlier medicines.

In the period of the study and the five years since, the medicines have come to supplant psychotherapy in many settings, even though some forms of psychotherapy have been found to be as effective, and even though the combination of medicines and psychotherapy has often been found to be the most effective of all.

As far as I can tell, the entire field of clinical psychology is in a completely weird state, with people with medical degrees being mainly drug-dispensers and people without them being counselors. The article claims this is a result of insurance companies splitting behavioral care from medical care, which ensures "that the behavioral plans have no incentive to improve primary care and primary care doctors have no incentive to provide long-term behavioral care." Psych ailments are weird in general because there's probably still a stigma to them --like you're doing something wrong by being depressed-- and they're conditions, not diseases, meaning they can't be cured as of yet, only dealt with, like diabetes or something. They mention in the article that the most effective treatment is a combination of talk and drug therapy, so I don't know if that means we need better drugs or better talks.

Then the article has this sentence: "Part of a class of medicines that boosts the levels of a neurotransmitter called serotonin, Prozac and its sisters quickly came to be prescribed for a vast array of conditions and disorders." What, drugs are feminine now?
posted by Justin at 11:57 AM

 
BLOG HISTORY: Oliver Willis points out this brief history of the weblog. It's particularly instructive for me; I've been only aware of the warblogs since I started this thing, which for me means mostly the recommended sites on Instapundit and Samizdata. You know, this whole blog explosion since the attacks, which isn't mentioned in Rebecca Blood's history above --which I guess is a second coming of the form. I feel like such a rube, or like Marco Polo "discovering" China, which might be the same thing. I like this paragraph (written over a year ago):

So why doesn't every bookmark list contain five weblogs? In the beginning of 1999 it really seemed that by now every bookmark list would. There was a bit of media attention and new weblogs were being created every day. It was a small, quick-growing community and it seemed to be on the edge of a wider awareness. Perhaps the tsunami of new weblogs created in the wake of Pitas and Blogger crushed the movement before it could reach critical mass; the sudden exponential growth of the community rendered it unnavigable. Weblogs, once filters of the web, suddenly became so numerous they were as confusing as the web itself. A few more articles appeared touting weblogs as the next big thing. But the average reader, hopefully clicking through to the Eatonweb portal, found herself faced with an alphabetical list of a thousand weblogs. Not knowing where to begin, she quickly retreated back to ABCnews.com.

This is kind of what I feel like seeing all the links on Oliver's page, and all the links those links lead to. Charles Johnson seems to be preserving a historical difference between warblogs and blogs by lumping the warblogs into his non-idiotarian heading and keeping the others under "bloggage." A big difference between warblogs (post 9-11 blogs) and the blogs that were there in the years before might be that warblogs are, in general, non-left leaning. Another difference could be that the warbloggers as a group might know a lot less about computers than the older bloggers but saw Glenn Reynolds posting without any kind of fancy site design, checked out blogger, found out it was easy and just started posting. That's how I started, anyhow. It would explain why most of the non-idiotarians use blogger. But both these differences are pretty speculative.
posted by Justin at 9:08 PM

 
GREAT ARTICLE: From Wired on all the kids in Silicon Valley who have Aspergers syndrome. Computer programming appeals to the Aspergers mind; Aspergers minds get together in Silicon Valley, and since there's a genetic reason for Aspergers you get a whole bunch of kids with it. And here's an interview with an autism researcher from the same issue. Fascinating stuff.
posted by Justin at 4:44 PM

 
MARK CUBAN WATCH: Now he's been fined $500,000 for comments after the Mavs lost to the Spurs on Saturday. Original comments here. The ESPN article points out that this is not the largest fine in sports history; that, for $1 million, belongs to former 49ers co-owner Eddie DeBartolo for something involving gambling --the article doesn't give specifics. But this has to be the largest fee in sports history for just talking out of one's ass. Don't get me wrong, though: I love Mark Cuban, but more because I hate NBA refs.
posted by Justin at 2:20 PM

 
DWARF FINDS SOL: Also on the astroscience front, a brown dwarf was found orbiting a sun much like our own by Michael Liu of the University of Hawaii. It was right where the planet-forming area is supposed to be. Its discovery raises some interesting conjecture:

Finding the brown dwarf so close to the star suggests that solar systems formed around sun-like stars could come in many different shapes and planetary distributions. Liu said it is possible that there are planets similar to Earth circling the star inside the orbit of the brown dwarf. For instance, it would be possible for a planet to orbit the star at 93 million miles, the distance from Earth to the sun.

Whatever way our own solar system evolved, it's not the only way for one to evolve, is what this discovery suggests. I wonder if this'll end up being more evidence for the rare Earth hypothesis.
posted by Justin at 2:04 PM

 
DARK NATTER: This article makes the interesting point that the theory of dark matter is a lesser-of-two-evils theory, as the greater-evil theory would involve changes to the laws of gravity, something nobody is ready to do. Here's a big quote to elaborate:

Perhaps scientists don’t entirely understand the way gravity works; perhaps Isaac Newton’s famous law of gravitation needs some revising. But that idea, says the University of Arizona’s Chris Impey, is not very popular.

"Definitely most astronomers are extremely unwilling to give up Newton’s law," he says. "So it’s essentially a choice of two evils: You either hypothesize that Newton’s law is wrong, and that our knowledge of the gravity theory is incomplete. Or, you hypothesize a fundamental microscopic particle that has never been detected in any physics lab, whose properties are only constrained by these astronomical observations. Which is a pretty uncomfortable position for physicists to be in."

The article even mentions the luminous ether in the same paragraph as dark matter, the ether being the proposed substance that electromagnetic waves were propagated by and which was discarded as unneccessary later. Huh.
posted by Justin at 1:51 PM

 
LETTER OF THE LAW: The BBC runs this story on Chinese "hostess bars" avoiding vice prosecution by replacing female hostesses with transvestite hostesses. This is anecdotal evidence for legalizing prostitution, I imagine. Or not.

And Boing Boing has the link to this story about prostitutes in Tokyo Disneyland. And there's a ton of weird stories on that story's sidebar, too.
posted by Justin at 11:54 AM

 
DAVE THOMAS: Died today, says Fox News. Apparently he's been on dialysis for a while and I know that's never good in the long-term. The short article has good details on his life --I had no idea he was inspired by Colonel Sanders himself.
posted by Justin at 10:30 AM

 
IT CAN WORK, I SWEAR: Jim at Unqualified Offerings dissects my proposed CFL-NFL merger:

But UO sees some problems. First, it foresees new entitlements, with the Lower 48 required to provide the Northern Acquisitions with defenses and running games. Second, and sadly, since UO actually likes Canadian-rules football, we have no room for them here. A CFL field is 30 yards longer than a US-rules "pitch," and about a dozen yards wider too. But the trend in US football stadia has been towards ever-increasing intimacy, with the stands built closer and closer to the field. There is no chance whatsoever, for instance, of fitting a CFL gridiron into the Redskins' Fedex Field.

See, what we do is preserve the CFL franchises as they are now with the CFL rules and everything, make them play by NFL rules on NFL fields and make NFL teams play by CFL rules on CFL fields. This won't happen so often, as the CFL will become the Canadian Football Conference and submit its champion to the NFL playoffs or we'll split it down the middle into AFC Canada and NFC Canada. NFL coaches will probably bitch about having to do things different when they go to CFL cities, but they'll get used to it. I mean, it's all football, right?

Besides, if one merged the CFL with the NFL, it practically requires an end-of-season championship between the leagues. Since NFL teams can play CFL style ball if they have to (viz. Saint Louis) and CFL teams couldn't stop an NFL-grade rushing offense with a wall of zambonis, it would be pretty brutal.

Well, if we have a Canadian Football Conference we can give the Grey Cup to whoever wins that. Or we can give the eventual NFL champions the Grey Cup, a far older and nicer-looking trophy than the old football-on-a-stick. Throughout all this, I am assuming that the old quotas on American players on CFL teams will be lifted on a fully merged NFL-CFL, so there won't be a huge level-of-play difference. My plan is FOOLPROOF. I think.

Then Jim wrote: "WARNING: The preceding item contains a snare for pedants! Spot it if you can..." I....I....I don't know what a pedant is.....
posted by Justin at 9:11 AM

 
WATCH ME GET SUED OR SOMETHING: The Rallying Point links to this list of Celebrity Critics of Scientology and I can't help but notice that like half of them are science fiction authors. There has to be some professional jealousy here of L. Ron Hubbard, right? They're thinking to themselves, "I coulda come up with a WAY better religion than THAT." For whatever reasons, science fiction is a kind of culty genre and it's practitioners have to walk a fine line sometimes between being artists and prophets speaking to converts and would-be converts and old L. Ron definitely embraced the prophet deal whole-hog. There are others who went half-way there into guruhood, like Kurt Vonnegut, and others who wanted to but pulled back at the last minute, like Philip K. Dick, as I think Thomas Disch mentioned in The Dreams Our Stuff Are Made Of.

By the way, here's a geek heirarchy I found via the null device (a completely great name for a blog, by the way). Science fiction authors are at the top; people who write erotic Star Trek fan fiction featuring themselves as funny animals are at the bottom.
posted by Justin at 8:40 PM

 
NEW ANNE APPLEBAUM: On why you don't have to worry about the Euro ushering in a European super-state --it's already here. And it's not necessarily a bad thing, she seems to be saying, as it means Europe is not in a crisis. When and if crisis comes, then's when Europe will go back to the internal squabbling we all know and love.
posted by Justin at 8:17 PM

 
JUST LET HIM GO: I thought this thing was blowing over, but now Cornel West is on Larry Summers' case again. While his back is turned, even. Link via Instapundit. My own favorite take on all this is Refugee From The Real World Summers is causing hurt feelings by not being shmoochie enough with Pampered Academic West.
posted by Justin at 8:02 PM

 
CRISIS ON INFINITE BLOGS: So Charles has the link to The Illuminated Donkey --who has excellent taste in templates, I must say, and he's from the Garden State like me. And Donkey has the links to Blather and Boing Boing, and at that point I see links and links to blogs upon blogs, not just on those sites but on the sites they link to. And the majority of these blogs seem to be updated regularly. The Bloggerverse is way bigger than I thought. I mean, I know this is old news and everything. But there's a ton out there.
posted by Justin at 4:53 PM

 
WHATEVER: This Opinionjournal dealie wants to present Ringling Brothers as the brave little circus standing up to PETA --as if Ringling Brothers wasn't run by nuts-- or so the evidence suggests.

Also on the PETA front is this article from the LA Times about dog-eating in Korea. Apparently during the Seoul Olympics the government tried to repress dog-eating, but now for the World Cup they're practically encouraging it. I mean, more power to them; I'm sure my cow- and pig-eating disgusts a lot of people too. Except the Koreans. I mean, is there any animal not on the average Korean restaurant menu?
posted by Justin at 3:45 PM

 
I TAKE ISSUE: With Megan McArdle's comments on the new Reason. She sees an anti-redneck tone in Peter Bagge's great cartoon on Christian rock, which I thought was just exposing the internal contradictions of Christian rock, while finishing with the fact that they weren't all that different from the internal contradictions of unChristian rock. It's not online yet, but it'll probably appear here when it does. You should, of course, read as many of Peter Bagge's comics as you can find.
posted by Justin at 1:00 PM

 
FLIT: Bruce points out that the Canadian troops in Afghanistan represent "the first-ever combat deployment of Canadian ground troops under American command outside the continent" --meaning by continent North America. It's all part of the slow, inexorable march towards statehood for Canada, I reckon. Which I think should only be agreed to if the CFL gets to merge with the NFL while keeping all the CFL rules (12 men on the field, goal posts in the inzone, etc.) alive in CFL stadiums, a la the American League-National League split in baseball. This is obviously the most important point to be made about any potential US-Canada merger.
posted by Justin at 12:28 PM

 
EQUITY UPDATE: USA Today reports that the traffic accident rate for 16-year old girls is rising, while the rate for 16-year old boys is dropping. The percent difference for their insurance rates is shrinking too, though the number the article gives, 41%, still seems pretty big.
posted by Justin at 12:09 PM

 
BY THE WAY: Instapundit has responded to kausfiles on alleged double standards regarding Glenn's treatment of Stephen Ambrose versus his treatment of Cornel West. I think Glenn got the better of kf, and always will, as long as Mickey updates his site in tiny little snippets (and saves his best stuff for the stuff he's getting paid for) while the professor goes into giant paragraphs, commentary being a hobby for him.
posted by Justin at 12:46 AM

 
EXTINCTION WATCH: This time the giant rock is only 370,000 miles away. Great.
posted by Justin at 12:39 AM

 
KAUSFILES: Makes the neat point that the amount of people sleeping in homeless shelters in Minneapolis has been going up regardless of whatever else was happening in the economy or with welfare reform. He then gives a warning against the rush to judgement:

Just looking at this chart, it's hard to blame any particular national policy change for the rise in homelessness. The chart does fit with the leftish explanation that blames rising urban rents (since they go up in good times even faster than in bad times). On the other hand, it also fits with the right wing explanation that Say's Law is at work here: as more beds and services are offered to the homeless -- and as their provision becomes routinized and destigmatized -- more people consciously or unconsciously wind up claiming them. ...When you next read about near-middle-class working mothers who drive to suburban food pantries to grab a free load of groceries, remember that without a whole lot more detail about these families, it's impossible to tell whether their emergence supports the first explanation (people are needier) or the second (people are less shamed).

Good stuff.

posted by Justin at 12:19 AM

 
LATEST EURO STORY: One of the Euro coins may land on heads more often than tails. I expect the next Euro story to involve a water-squirting Euro coin that really no-fooling impresses the ladies at parties.
posted by Justin at 11:52 PM

 
A BRIEF HISTORY OF KMART: If you ever wanted one, here it is, from Reuters. I would like a little more analysis, though, on why Kmart is losing so bad to Wal-Mart. I don't know if this is true everywhere, but at least where I live (Philly metro), the Wal-Marts are in the sticks, the Kmarts in the more urbanized areas.
posted by Justin at 11:43 PM

 
FROM THE THANK YOU, SCIENCE DEPARTMENT: Science has tabbed the limit on the amount of time you can be really physically amorous with any one person: 30 months. From one of those British papers. Plus more on the differences between the genders on their approaches to S-E-X.
posted by Justin at 11:35 PM

 
TAAAAALIBAN: Charles directs us to this little movie-thing about the guy answering the Taliban's phone. Like many a Saturday Night Live sketch, it has a good idea but repeats it excessively. I know Monty Python did that a lot too, but they always seemed aware of it, like they were winking at the audience: "Yes, this joke is terrible. Yes, we did it five times already. Yes, we're doing it again."
posted by Justin at 11:05 PM

 
A NEW LOW IN SINO-GRAECO RELATIONS: Salon introduces Love Collision, about an astrology that combines the Greek and Chinese zodiacs. I love trying to do people one better when they ask me what my sign is by asking them what they are on the Chinese calendar --I think they should probably look into it, particularly people who are really horoscope-obsessed, the kind who are like "oh that's such a Virgo thing" and on and on. This Salon thing is offering a bigger astrology. Neat. Astrology, in my opinion, provides roundabout insight, which works for a lot of people.
posted by Justin at 10:53 PM

 
WEST-SUMMERS WRAPUP: Ken Layne has a big post on the subject, where he compares Cornel West to George Hamilton. I think Hamilton knows he's a goof, though. I am reminded of older comments by Virginia Postrel on a similar subject; I include a large portion of her paragraph to provide context:

Writing in The Daily Princetonian, a former editor of the conservative Princeton Tory explains why David Horowitz would have gotten little p.r. from his anti-reparations ads there: "We're not apathetic. We simply believe in reasoned debate. When the Tory ran an article a few years ago on ex-gays, the LGBA took out an ad in the 'Prince' countering it. End of story. No burned papers, no problems." Some things don't change, and Princeton's civil, somewhat dull, political life is one of them. (This culture is one reason Peter Singer, whose academic freedom I staunchly defend, was a stupid hire. He's a glib, Harvard-style headline getter, not a Princeton-style serious scholar; not surprisingly, the philosophy department, which some rank best in the world, wouldn't have him.)

Cornel West sounds like the ultimate "Harvard-style headline getter." Why would Princeton want him?
posted by Justin at 10:34 PM

 
DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA BAT BOY: Transterrestrial Musings brings the link to this story of the future from Weekly World News, where Bat Boy is president. I may have to start following WWN, as apparently Bat Boy is a fixture there. This should also be a lesson to all of you out there that not all tabloids are the same, as the National Enquirer, which I do follow, only covers celebrities and it's COMPLETELY objective. I think.
posted by Justin at 10:17 PM

 
PAT BUCHANAN --WRONG! Here's Brian Doherty picking apart Grampy Pat's new book. Doherty even lands the low blow, in the parentheses here: "To Buchanan (himself childless, though that may not be by choice), it is vital that the right people reproduce widely to prevent formerly European and American land and culture from being taken over by people of the wrong ethnic background." And I caught the end of Pat on the Bill O'Reilly show, and Bill was hardly yelling at him. I expected more from those two.
posted by Justin at 10:01 PM

 
HOORAH: Duke finally lost. Now they just have to lose in March and my NCAA season is set.
posted by Justin at 9:55 PM

 
OSAMA MAKEOVER: ABC News has a little tiny picture of the Westernized Osama picture. I think he wants to sell you something.

UPDATE: Rc3.org gives the link to the bigger leaflet picture.
posted by Justin at 8:36 PM

 
SHARPENING THE CINEMATIC STEAK KNIVES: When I heard the soundtrack to I Am Sam was all Beatles covers, and that it was about a handicapped guy who was obsessed with the Beatles (or something), I knew we were in trouble. Now Charles Taylor in Salon has the proof:

I don't know the last time I've seen so disgraceful a display from a talented actor. It used to be that actors playing the mentally retarded suffered from a discretion that was its own kind of bad taste. They tended to downplay mannerisms and distortions of speech, and the unintentional message was that retarded people are unpleasant to watch. Penn delves into mannerisms and vocal distortions with an appalling eagerness. He makes the classic mistake of playing the handicap instead of the person. Sam....as played by Penn, he's no more than a device for an actor's display of technique, lumbering gait, distracted affect, galumphing, open-mouthed laugh and the nasal utterances of whatever strays into his brain. An actor affecting this demeanor to make fun of a retarded man would be pilloried. Penn's portrayal strikes me as equally insensitive. It's the nightmare performance of 2001.

To paraphrase that Cracker song, the worlds needs another famous actor playing a mentally handicapped person like I need a hole in the head.

Speaking of Beatles covers (and Salon), David Talbot made the point yesterday about Neil Young doing a cover of "Imagine" at that celebrity telethon and then releasing "Let's Roll." Which is a pretty bizarre contrast, but my own angle is that on the Neil Young version I can hear the lyrics a lot better than on the John Lennon original, where all you hear clearly is "Imagine there's no heaven" and then mumble mumble mumble. So I finally understand, now, that John Lennon was saying a world without religion would be the ideal one. Which as a part-time Jungian I have to sneer at, man being the religious animal and all.
posted by Justin at 6:24 PM

 
WHY I READ DRUDGE: He has the weird stories, like this one about a rash of cattle mutilations in Montana. These cows are found dead with their reproductive organs removed with surgical precision. And predators won't eat the carcasses. Freaky.
posted by Justin at 6:00 PM

 
I MAKE FUN OF ARGENTINA: Never minding that the home state will have four governors in one week. Due a split legislature and a week-long interregnum there will be co-governors for a week. They're even going to crash in the governor's mansion for a few days. They even get to pardon people. Link from Best of the Web.
posted by Justin at 3:51 PM

 
HEEEYYY: New Hitch. Here's a quote: "Given a choice between protecting American civilians and protecting the client regimes that sponsor and coddle those who murder them, the Bush Administration has taken the second option every time." He's on about how Prince Bandar got all the bin Ladens out of the U.S. without question and with FBI blessing, apparently.
posted by Justin at 3:28 PM

 
AP SAYS: "Facts Altered in Anti-Terror Effort" but it doesn't look like that big a deal. Apparently there's a doctored photo of Osama bin Laden on the surrender-Dorothy leaflets we've been dropping in Afghanistan. Hey, it's propaganda, do you expect total accuracy?
posted by Justin at 2:02 PM

 
GOOD POST: From Ginger Stampley on the on-going cross-blog guns debate. She's got a take on why Ulster is a bad example of a successful armed insurgency.
posted by Justin at 1:33 PM

 
D'OH DOLLY: Apparently Dolly the cloned sheep has developed arthritis and far sooner than one would expect for a sheep, which may mean a genetic defect caused by the cloning process. (The last part of that sentence is going to be in Attack Of The Clones somewhere, I betcha, read by Justin Timberlake in a monotone just before he gets slaughtered. This "'NSYNC in Star Wars II" thing is another plank in the George Lucas: Non-Genius school of Star Wars Studies.) Well, they've been telling us all along that this cloning this is far from perfected. I wonder if her forelegs will just sort of fall off next, like Simon's arm in Airplane II.
posted by Justin at 12:46 PM

 
REYNOLDS BRINGS PETERS: Glenn has the link to new Ralph Peters in Opinionjournal. Ralph says, in regards to the Bush administration:

This is an oilman's administration, and long affiliation with energy affairs appears to have blinded an otherwise-superb strategic team to the abundant, well-documented evidence. Far from examining Saudi Arabia's deep and extensive complicity in supporting terror and undermining secular regimes throughout the Muslim world and beyond, the administration reflexively defends the Saudis. I do not believe the administration is intentionally dishonest--only that ties to the oil business and a half-century's assumptions prevent it from facing up to Saudi Arabia's support for, and funding of, the cruelest, most benighted and hate-filled version of one of the world's great religions.

He goes on to call Saudi Arabia the worst of both words as far as his arguments on stability versus instability go, and lists the various countries they're mucking around in (and he gives Indonesia a slight chance for continued existence as a nation, unlike his Parameters piece, where he gave it none.) Read, enjoy.
posted by Justin at 12:25 PM

 
SPEAKING OF SWEET SPORT: Will Vehrs points out Kevin Holtsberry's take on the latest BCS fiasco. Gawd Nebraska got creamed, which ordinarily I'm fine with, unless when it's Miami who's doing the creaming. Shoulda been Oregon.

UPDATE: I meant, shoulda been Oregon in the title game. And why did the graphics last night have Nebraska as number two? That's the Ducks' spot.
posted by Justin at 11:54 AM

 
WEST/SUMMERS UPDATE: Instapundit has a ton of stuff, of course. And Andrew Sullivan links to this ripping of West by Leon Wieseltier from 1995. I remember reading another anti-West piece more recently, I thought it was the Weekly Standard but you can't read anything old there now without paying for it. I like the Summers-West fight but am disappointed that Summers appears to be backing down; if this was wrestling they'd be kissing and making up while the audience boos. Summers-West is on the undercard of my intellectual pay-per-view, along with the Paglia-Foucault Fans Death Match, the Ted Rall-Ken Layne comedy match and the main event of Hitchens-Chomsky. Ah, sweet sport.
posted by Justin at 11:50 AM

 
THE ANDREWSULLIVAN.COM REDESIGN: Man, I think this'll take some getting used to. Look at it. The text box is on the right now, and I, being an English speaker and thus wanting to read left to right, want my text box on the left. Now, obviously, my own page has the links on the left and the text on the right as well, but I don't have the split-screen style that Andrew and kausfiles have. And if you're going to go that route, I think having the text on the left ensures that you read the good stuff first and then surf the links after. It's the way I want to read things, anyhow. Maybe it's sort of an ideological web design choice on Andrew's part, putting the text box firmly on the right.

Speaking of kausfiles, he provides the link to this Jimmy Breslin column with this line: "We know how we acted in New York and doubt if it could happen anyplace else." Followed by this line: "A woman from the University of Richmond, a psychologist of the South, said, "If this was a NASCAR crowd, there would be panic." So even in moments of national tragedy the citizens of New York are still better than the rest of us. As kausfiles says, "There is some kind of clinical condition here. Even contemplating one of New York's proudest moments, Breslin can only achieve civic self-esteem by claiming superiority over those dumb rednecks." All this reminds me of this amazing anti-NYC rant from Boomer on the ConMack site which, I warn you, is not for the faint of heart.
posted by Justin at 10:55 AM

 
DAVID TALBOT HAS BEEN DOING SOME THINKING: And he gives us this piece in the free area of Salon about doves turning to hawks. It's good; somebody hipped him to Walter Russell Mead and he really runs with that football --this is a review of Mead's Special Providence, in fact.
posted by Justin at 7:39 PM

 
GOD MARYLAND GOT SLAUGHTERED: What a bummer. And I hate Florida. No wonder Jim Henley still hasn't posted since. Hey Jim, come back, there's always basketball.
posted by Justin at 2:29 PM

 
MORE FROM THE NEW REPUBLIC: Peter Beinart has the new TRB on Muslims in South Africa, and why Islamism has its origins on the right, not the left. (As far as you can speak about such divisions these days.) Says he:

There's a lesson here for both the American left and the American right. For the left, it's that viewing militant Islam as a successor to the Third World "liberation" movements of the twentieth century (and therefore worthy of sympathy) is nutty. The Taliban surely showed that Islamism represents the opposite of gender and sexual liberation. And PAGAD and Qibla--which have allied themselves against the ANC's notions of "black" unity and empowerment--show that it often represents the opposite of racial liberation as well.

The lesson for the right is strangely similar. It's that militant Islam isn't a phenomenon of the left--powered by the anarchic poor and the intellectuals who harness them to create futuristic utopias. It's often a phenomenon driven by the American right's favorite class, the petit bourgeois: the people who tend small shops and tiny houses, who believe in family, faith, property, and order. And who see those values threatened by rising lawlessness, and by governments too corrupt and too ill-equipped to keep them safe. Such people turn to fundamentalism because it offers security, structure, and the perverse pride that comes from "standing up" to the West.

The "lesson" is based on the fact that the ANC wants to bring Muslims in, and thus can't really obviously jump in with the War On Terrorism.
posted by Justin at 2:25 PM

 
IRAN AGAIN: Here's Franklin Foer in The New Republic about the role of the son of the Shah in promoting democracy. He also makes the point that current president Khatami is looking more like Gorbachev than anyone else: "a reformer, not a revolutionary." Then:

Khatami was, after all, trained in the conservative seminaries of Qum. As Fred Halliday noted in these pages ("Mohammed and Mill," October 5, 1998), his writings on Western philosophy followed praise of John Locke with passages about the hollowness of secularism. Then there's the fact that he has close allies with long histories of abetting Lebanese Hezbollah, and he has made no bones about "defend[ing] the values of the revolution"--a revolution that many Iranians now view the way Russians viewed the Bolshevik revolution in 1991.
posted by Justin at 1:46 PM

 
THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS: Saw it last night, it was pretty good. It wasn't as neat and clean as Rushmore, which has its advantages and drawbacks --the drawbacks being the final wrap-up was a little forced and Owen Wilson's character was kind of grafted on when he wasn't being comic relief. The advantages were that Wilson and Wes Anderson could tell the story of a group of geniuses, instead of the one boy-genius of Rushmore, and get a little complexity and depth in there, though these guys obviously want to stay pretty far away from depth, which is --again-- a good thing.

And I guess a whole lot of famous people saw Rushmore and wanted to be in the next one, as this one has "known" actors in all the major roles. Bill Murray is kind of just there. I was all set to hate Gwyneth Paltrow but she grew on me as the movie went on. But did we really need Alec Baldwin narrating this thing? For you Rushmore fans, Max's teacher from his daydream and Max's father are both there in minor roles. And Gene Hackman was great.
posted by Justin at 1:34 PM

 
PUBLISHED POSTREL: Here's Virginia's newest article from the New York Times. It's about the true elasticity of book prices, which is something real book-lovers don't often understand. Good read.
posted by Justin at 1:05 PM

 
IRAN UPDATE: Yet another article (this one from USA Today) about huddled masses yearning to breathe free in Iran. Hey, they're making Coke there now. The article also makes the point that all those years of "Death to America" chants are making America more popular, not less. And --why-- it's the first appearance of the Iranian Street:

''The Iranian street is much more pro-American than the Arab street,'' says Afshin Molavi, an Iranian-American and author of a forthcoming book called Persian Pilgrimages. ''The government professes to care about the Palestinians but the people don't.''

The first appearance of the Iranian Street I've noticed, anyhow. I don't think it's talking to our old buddy, the Arab Street.

AND: There's a tiny little accompanying piece in there about the new Victoria's Secret in Tehran and other things.
posted by Justin at 12:52 PM

 
IN THE NILE: Nice story about the importance of the Nile to Egypt from WorldNetDaily.
posted by Justin at 12:39 PM

 
MORE ARGENTINE STUFF: Fredrik Norman has a good post on the subject.
posted by Justin at 8:23 PM

 
PAT BUCHANAN BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH: Drudge brings the details on Pat Buchanan's latest volume, The Death Of The West. Immigrants and welfare states cause Europe's demise --which, I mean, he's probably right about the stifling effects of welfare states. Is it me, or is Pat Buchanan the version of Bill O'Reilly who takes himself seriously? No wonder Foxnews is winning. Anyway, the books seems to be about the non-proliferation of white people in the world. And other things; Drudge says that Pat says that "Islam has already surpassed Catholicism as the largest religion on earth." Which, of course, ignores spilts within Islam and makes Catholicism a separate entity from Christianity. But then Drudge makes Catholicism part of Christianity in the next paragraph, so this could just be Drudge being inaccurate. My own little peeve is, and I doubt I'll change anyone's mind about this, is that I hate American being lumped in with "the West." "The West" means California to me. Americans are Westerners (West Europeans) the way Romans were Greeks --to pick a no-doubt Swiss-cheese holey historical parallel. America owes a lot to the West but dang if it isn't Something Else. Well, I think so.
posted by Justin at 6:12 PM

 
END OF INFINITY: Here's a New York Times article on why a universe whose expansion is accelerating will eventually be incapable of having a complete thought. Hey, wow, I'm already there, man. Since having thoughts dissipates energy you'll eventually run out of thoughts since you'll run out of energy, unless you can grow yourself at the same speed that the universe is growing --that is my condensation of the above article. You should probably read it for yourself.
posted by Justin at 4:55 PM

 
OREGON SMACKED COLORADO: Now all we need is a Nebraska vistory to hasten the crumbling of the BCS edifice. Not that I want either them or Miami national champions. But playoffs will make me, for one, watch college football.
posted by Justin at 3:48 PM

 
ENCOURAGING TREND: The Dreaded Purple Master blog reports on the use of nude and almost-nekkid calendars to raise funds. And I just noticed the Australian Ballet. Thank you, Yahoo Most Popular.
posted by Justin at 3:36 PM

 
ON AND PERON: Yes, Argentina has its fifth president in two weeks. The new guy wants to ditch the free market. Well, okay. Doesn't a situation like this call for something drastic? I have no idea what a good short-term solution would be; the new guy is prmising a ton of public works projects. Andrew Hofer has a ton of analysis on his blog.

Andrew also tells of his impending move from Blogger. Now I am an HTML simp; without Blogger I have no blog. But --as Ev himself pointed out on the main page-- Blogger was named one of the "seven wonders of the web" by the Guardian. So maybe I don't have to worry; maybe Blogger means enough to Ev that he'll keep it up and everything, despite the nefarious Christmas attack on it. Maybe he'll find a good business model. I know for me Blogger means not having to know/deal with HTML, and there's probably a lot of other people out there like that. Blogger means convenience, and if you can provide convenience, you've got something. I ramble; my point is, I can't see Blogger going down anytime soon, as it's definitely filling a need.
posted by Justin at 3:11 PM

 
WELL BOY HOWDY: Fatherhood is bad for sex life and makes men fat, says an Australian research team. Thank you, science.
posted by Justin at 2:24 PM

 
BIN LADEN STILL LIVING: WorldNetDaily points out this ABC News story about the hunt for Mullah Omar and bin Laden, which has this little item:

Meanwhile, an intercepted phone call from Iran suggests that bin Laden is still alive — if not in the best of health.

A senior military official told ABCNEWS the communications, intercepted over the past few days, used a code word for the accused terrorist mastermind, and suggested "you should keep [bin Laden] off of the television. He looks bad, he looks sick and it is demoralizing to his people."

That's to be expected --I think he needs dialysis to live. But why is Iran talking up bin Laden? I thought they hated the Taliban, and the puritanical Wahabbi stuff. Maybe it was just sort of a friendly suggestion, and they went into makeup tips next.
posted by Justin at 2:16 PM

 
THE FUNNIES: Glenn Reynolds links to this Tom Tomorrow strip about how 2001 the year did not live up to 2001 the movie. Typical Hollywood. I would like to add that, in 2001, there were no Giant Babies, no Pan Am flights to speak of, and no monoliths droning angsty choruses. (My brother pointed out to me that the cover of Who's Next has the four of them right after they pissed on a monolith, which must have been really obvious when it was record-sized but which I never noticed on the tiny CD cover.)
posted by Justin at 1:33 PM

 
AVOID THE NOAM: Little Green Footballs points out this review from the Philadelphia Inquirer of Noam Chomsky's latest, 9-11. It is not a rave review. And Chomsky fans can't complain he's being covered up here, unless panning his book is like censoring him. Or something.
posted by Justin at 12:37 PM

 
HAPPY NEW YEAR: Yeah, happy new year, if I don't get a chance to post before then. Have a better year, stick to your resolutions, drink a little champagne.
posted by Justin at 3:25 PM

 
KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES: Jupiter will be really bright tonight, says the BBC and the AP. And at right about midnight, too.
posted by Justin at 3:21 PM

 
INSTAPUNDIT POST OF THE DAY: On the failure of U.S. policy in regards to Argentina. It's right here. And Glenn's got more stuff on Cornel West. I flipped past him "rapping" on tv this weekend, it looked more like a spoken word king of thing.
posted by Justin at 3:13 PM

 
NEWS: One story and then the follow-up about mass civilian casualties over the weekend in Afghanistan. I don't know how reliable this all is, but the story is out there.
posted by Justin at 3:12 PM

 
IN BLOG SPACE NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM: Brian Linse points out this story by James C. Bennett of UPI about blogging. He draws a historical parallel that I couldn't possibly comment on between the current professional media and academic types and the Church in Europe right before the Reformation. He isn't all bubbly on blogs but he gives them their due, and he talks about the Anglosphere at length --a neat term I can't remember hearing before for the English-speaking nations of the world. This paragraph stuck out:

One of the most interesting and generally unreported aspects of the Weblog phenomenon is its unconscious Anglosphereness. Blog space is pretty much Anglosphere space, in that the network of bloggers, and especially the post-911 "warblogs," publish all over the Anglosphere, and quote freely from media sources across the Anglosphere, but rather sparsely from outside it. (Several redoubtable Norwegians, blogging in English, are the primary exception). For every link to, say, the English edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, there are hundreds to the London Evening Telegraph or the Times.

Which reminds that Bjoern Staerk has covered the latest India-Pakistan brouhaha from the perspective of Indian and Pakistani papers and you should go over there and check it out. Bennett also says that, as a blogger, I am an "early adopter." That's not true, I didn't own a laserdisc player until it was far, far too late.
posted by Justin at 2:50 PM

 
DOONESBURY EXPLAINED: Dan of Lake Effect points out my Doonesbury-ignorance, saying that "there's SORT of a message [in this Sunday strip] about loopy-liberal Zonker making up with reactionary-right BD over the wreckage. But it's not pushy."
posted by Justin at 2:07 PM

 
NEW NUCLEAR MATH: This story (found via Drudge) says that India is confident it can win a nuclear war with Pakistan, which reminds me of ex-Iranian president Rafsanjani's recent comments on why the Islamic world could survive a nuclear war with Israel: there's more of us than there are of them, and they can hurt us but it's okay because we can really wipe them out. In the old days we had that Mutually Assured Destruction thing that made sure nuclear holocaust was coming for everybody, so World War III remained the Cold War mostly, and a whole lot of post-apocalyptic science fiction got written. But now here in World War IV we can have a localized apocalypse, or at least speak of one. It's still a lot of posturing but it looks like the math has changed.
posted by Justin at 2:01 PM

 
HEY: Matthew Edgar's putting all his FDA stuff on one blog.
posted by Justin at 1:06 PM

 
WHEN YOU FALL OFF BLOGGING FOR A FEW DAYS: And you haven't been online for those days, you don't know where to begin when you get back. I'll just do my own personal what-I'm-catching-up-on watch:

Glenn Reynolds brings the United Nations Bosnian brothels story and the science fiction authors poll on Slashdot. God, none of those guys were prophetic.

Tim Blair has the first 2002 Blog Watch. And a little bit of Fisking.

Joanne Jacobs brings Hitchens' latest from the Atlantic.

Shouting Cross The Potomac has Tony's temp diary.

Brian Linse and Samizdata continue their discussion on guns.

ESPN sent Bill Simmons to a meaningless bowl game in Houston. In that article Simmons also points out that they're not knocking down the Astrodome, merely building the new stadium right next door. Cool. I mean, shouldn't the Astrodome be a national historical site or something? All the other giant ashtray-esque stadiums of that era are gone or going to be gone (like the Vet in Philly).

Moira Breen has a takedown of a goofy article and brings this story about al Jazeera.
posted by Justin at 12:35 PM