Evil

No doubt you are already familiar with the famous Evil Overlord List.

When I've captured my adversary and he says, ''Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?'' I'll say, ''No.'' and shoot him. No, on second thought I'll shoot him then say ''No.''
...
No matter how attractive certain members of the rebellion are, there is probably someone just as attractive who is not desperate to kill me. Therefore, I will think twice before ordering a prisoner sent to my bedchamber.
...
When I capture the hero, I will make sure I also get his dog, monkey, ferret, or whatever sickeningly cute little animal capable of untying ropes and filching keys happens to follow him around.

For those of you well-versed in the important guidelines it contains, I can now offer a complete evil plan generator, courtesy of the diabolical, really cool Diane Riley-Cole.

Systemic problems with the Washington press corps

One of the reasons you should be reading Brad DeLong regularly is his ongoing discussion of the failures of our press corps. He has an interesting post on the subject today.

I have received a number of emails from various journalism insiders defending or excusing Jonathan Weisman, which make some interesting points that I would like to share:
...
Jonathan Weisman responded to my critique that one of his news articles from the Washington Post read like a rewritten White House press release by writing:

F*** Brad DeLong. The first piece put on the web is slapped together as quickly as possible, and the guy for some reason doesn't like me. Here's my analysis

...
All--well most of--these points seem to me to be good ones. But they suggest that what we have here is a much deeper, profound, structural problem. It's much more than a lack of editorial quality control.

My favorite legal theorist

Lawrence Lessig is a great American. A constitutional lawyer, with experience helping formerly communist countries create new legal systems, Lessig has been working on the deep questions of law in the era of software and digital media for the past several years. His book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace is one of the best books on any subject I've ever read. It's a lucid and readable work that is a good introduction for anyone unfamiliar with the fundamentals of legal thinking, open source software, or the intersection between the two.

Lessig gets it. Most importantly, he sees that our intellectual property law has become irrational, inconsistent, and counterproductive, and lays out what we can do to fix it. His energies have been devoted lately to Creative Commons, an organization creating the legal infrastructure for alternatives to copyright. You can now apply a range of creative commons liscenses to works that allow you to protect it in various different ways: allowing free use so long as you are attributed as the author, or so long as the use is non-commercial, or so long as it remains unmodified, and so on.

Whether you already know about Lessig or not, you should take a few minutes to check out this talk of his, which sums up a lot of the issues around how we handle copyright. The site provides a very cleverly done animation to go with the talk.

Today's quote

The ‘wardrobe incident’ during half time was the scene stealer of the Super Bowl. In fact, the half time show during the Super Bowl is now running a close second to the commercials as the most compelling content for viewers. The actual contest on the field continues to be the secondary event during the Super Bowl.

Marty Yudkovitz, President of TiVo

From a mind-boggling press release on the TiVo website, by way of Clive Thomson.

Miles Drentell

I'm sad to learn that Miles Drentell has died of cancer. He's only a fictional character, I know. But unlike Spock, he isn't coming back.

Miles was the evil ad agency boss on thirtysomething, and then emerged later from that weird TV character limbo.

I think of him every time I hear the word “covenant,” because of what Miles said to his employee Michael on the next-to-last episode of thirtysomething. In the episode, Michael had a freakout in front of their client about how unethical it was for that client to fire their celebrity spokesman for participating in an antiwar protest.

I'm curious to know, Michael, just what you think this company does? On a very basic level, you seem ignorant of what you and I do for a living. Have you been sleepwalking all this time? In a trance? I don't know how else to explain you coming in here with that “I'd like to buy the world a Dursten” concept.

The thing that most apalls me is your hypocrisy. Do you actually imagine there's some difference between this campaign and everything else that we do?

[Michael protests that there has to be]

Or what?

You know what I love about this country? Its amazingly short memory. We're a nation of amnesiacs. We forget everything. Where we came from. What we did to get here. History is last week's People magazine, Michael. So don't pretend to cry for Randy Towers. No one really cares.

Michael: All he did was express an opinion.

He expressed an unpopular opinion. No one wants to be unpopular. That's why we're here. That's the dance of advertising. We help people become popular. Through popularity comes acceptance. Acceptance leads to assimilation. Assimilation leads to bliss.

We calm and reassure. We embrace people with the message that we're all in it together. That our leaders are infallible and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, wrong. That is what we do. It's what we've always done, and under your gifted sterwardship, what we will continue to do, onward toward the millennium.

In return for our humanitarian service, we are made rich.

I'm sorry if you misunderstood the nature of this covenant, but you've done so well up 'till now. I thought you knew.

Whaddya know? Crooks and Liars has the clip!

What happened at Camp David in 2000?

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so first:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

The August 2001 New York Review Of Books article Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors by Robert Malley & Hussein Agha not only offers a nuanced and clarifying explanation of why the talks in Camp David sponsored by Clinton broke down, it also kicks off the discussion with everyone’s favorite rhetorical device, the Holy Roman Empire essay question.

In accounts of what happened at the July 2000 Camp David summit and the following months of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, we often hear about Ehud Barak’s unprecedented offer and Yasser Arafat’s uncompromising no. Israel is said to have made a historic, generous proposal, which the Palestinians, once again seizing the opportunity to miss an opportunity, turned down. In short, the failure to reach a final agreement is attributed, without notable dissent, to Yasser Arafat.

As orthodoxies go, this is a dangerous one. For it has larger ripple effects. Broader conclusions take hold. That there is no peace partner is one. That there is no possible end to the conflict with Arafat is another.

For a process of such complexity, the diagnosis is remarkably shallow. It ignores history, the dynamics of the negotiations, and the relationships among the three parties. In so doing, it fails to capture why what so many viewed as a generous Israeli offer, the Palestinians viewed as neither generous, nor Israeli, nor, indeed, as an offer. Worse, it acts as a harmful constraint on American policy by offering up a single, convenient culprit — Arafat — rather than a more nuanced and realistic analysis.

2024 update

I am expanding this post because the article has been immensely valuable to me not just in explaining that moment but as a clarifying exemplar of the the tragic dynamics characteristic of the conflict for decades both before and after. So I want to emphasize how the article is long and well worth your time.

And for the impatient, I have discovered a pair of letters about the article by Gidi Grinstein & Ambassador Dennis Ross, published by NYRB. It includes a long reply by the authors of the article which nicely summarizes its key observations and adds some telling particulars:

Our article does not assign blame or catalog each side’s respective mistakes. Rather, it shows how the historical context and conduct of the negotiations shaped the parties’ attitudes and effectively undermined the possibility of a deal. Dennis wishes to treat Arafat’s behavior at Camp David in a vacuum — divorced from what had occurred during the seven years since Oslo and the twelve months since Barak had become prime minister; and divorced, too, from political dynamics on the Palestinian side. But it is no more possible to do this than it is to divorce Barak’s behavior from Israel’s parallel experience or from its own political realities.

Years of accumulated mistrust and loss of faith in the peace process, political circumstances in Israel and among the Palestinians, the history of prior agreements, perceptions of the United States’ role, the relationship (or lack thereof) between Barak and Arafat, the mechanics of the negotiations — all these contributed to a situation in which each side’s actions were interpreted by the other in the most damaging way. For instance, Barak’s decisions not to implement some of the interim commitments made at Oslo and afterward, and not to turn over three Jerusalem-area neighborhoods to the Palestinians, were consistent with his desire to seek a comprehensive deal and therefore entirely logical from his point of view; but those decisions were seen by the Palestinians merely as further examples of Israel’s ignoring its obligations and seeking to maximize the pressure it was bringing to bear on them.

To say that these steps undermined the prospects for a deal is not to engage in a post hoc attempt to absolve Arafat. Indeed, as Dennis well knows, the US administration’s concern at the time about their potential negative impact was such (given the frailty of the process and the already highly suspicious mood on the Palestinian side) that US negotiators repeatedly sought to persuade Barak to modify his approach. Nothing in what Dennis writes demonstrates that Arafat’s alleged inability to reach a deal, rather than the overall context and the clash of opposing mindsets, was responsible for the failure to achieve an agreement.

Dennis fears that our article will reinforce the Palestinians’ belief that it is “never their fault.” But it surely is symptomatic of the skewed nature of today’s debate that our article, which describes how the Palestinians’ actions — and inaction — contributed to the breakdown in the negotiations, can be characterized as absolving the Palestinians of blame. There also is considerable irony in worrying that the Palestinians will avoid responsibility when, to date, they are the only ones to have been held accountable for the failure to reach a deal. In reality, the predominant view that Arafat alone is to blame has spared both Israel and the United States from the necessity of self-critical analysis.

Of course, the Palestinians made serious mistakes. As Gidi Grinstein observes in his letter, we mention quite a few of them; and Dennis adds others. (In particular, Dennis points to their claim that the Jewish Temple was not in Jerusalem — an offensive position that cannot be excused.) But the question is not whether Arafat made mistakes, or whether these were justified. The question is whether his behavior can be explained by factors other than his presumed inability to put an an end to the conflict. A close scrutiny of events, we believe, shows that it can.

One of the more unsettling consequences of the notion that the failure of the negotiations was caused by Arafat’s incapacity to reach a deal is that it obscures the significant substantive progress that was made. Dennis notes that Barak was prepared to “do what was necessary” to reach an agreement and we, too, noted that he broke many taboos. But Dennis refers only in passing to the Palestinians’ “concessions,” attributing them to “negotiators” as if they had nothing to do with Arafat.

The fact is that Camp David and the talks that followed demonstrated that, at their core, Israeli and Palestinian interests are compatible. For Israel those interests include its continued existence as a Jewish state; genuine security; Jewish Jerusalem as its recognized capital; respect and acknowledgment of its connection to holy Jewish sites. For the Palestinians they include a viable, contiguous Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital and sovereignty over its Muslim and Christian holy sites; meaningful sovereignty; and a just settlement of the refugee issue. In short, both sides share a fundamental interest in realizing their national right of self-determination within internationally recognized borders on the basis of the two-state solution.

This may not suggest that a deal was readily at hand. But can we, on this record, maintain that it was out of reach? And that, on the basis of a hurried, unsuccessful six-month effort, we are better off giving up on the current Palestinian leadership and placing our hopes on a gamble that as yet unknown but presumably more flexible leaders will somehow emerge?

To solve a one-hundred-year conflict in a matter of months is a daunting task even under the best of circumstances — without the miscalculations, missteps, and mismatched timetables that occurred before and during Camp David. In this sense, paradoxically, this tragedy of errors contains a message of hope. For it points to the possibility that things can turn out differently if they are done differently.

I added this long quote shortly after the 1-year anniversary of Hamas’ 7 Oct 2023 attack and the dawn of Israel’s genocidal attack in response, a moment when it is hard not to despair over the horrors in front of us and the cycle of both bad faith and honest mistakes which brought us here.

But. That last note of hope — “at their core, Israeli and Palestinian interests are compatible” and “things can turn out differently if they are done differently” — does still stand, in the long run which is all too far off.

Told you so

Remember I told you to read Republic Dogs, a takeoff on Plato's Republic in the style of a Quentin Tarantino script?

Go read it again. Then check out the teaser trailer for Wolfgang Petersen's upcoming film Troy.

In praise of our Boop-a-Doop girl

So a couple of years ago I was reading about Betty Boop and I learn that she's based on a real person, Helen Kane, a very popular jazz singer of the 1920s who had a squeaky voice. Her signature song was “He's So Unusual”.

And I laugh, because I'm getting a joke almost 20 years late.

Cyndi Lauper's first album, the one that has all of those pop songs you remember from the ’80s, was entitled She's So Unusual, which I thought was clever at the time given her wacky style. But now I really got it. By the time I was sixteen or so I had already grown snide about contemporary pop and had turned to the Beatles and Velvet Underground and was getting turned on to punk, but I couldn't resist Cyndi Lauper: that album was everything pop should be and so rarely is, including smart.

So the other day I go to see a show where this singer does a heartbreaking version of “You Really Got A Hold On Me”. Well, all versions of it are heartbreaking for me thanks to an unhappy romance many years ago. Still, it was a terrific rendition, and it occurs to me that this would be a good excuse to check out the iTunes function for buying songs individually.

I was looking for Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, but about a million people have done cover versions of the song. Including Cyndi Lauper. So I'm curious, and I listen to the sample, and wow -- a minute later I'm downloading her entire new album of her singing Motown and standards, At Last.

Spare arrangements, distinctive renditions, and the girl's got pipes. Check it out.

Why “Miniver Cheevy”?

“Miniver Cheevy” is the title of a semi-autobiographical poem by Edward Arlington Robinson.

I first read the poem, and took a liking to it, in high school. The image of the suffering romantic poet spoke to my adolescent sensibilities. Around the same time, I joined a BBS: direct dialup to a computer in someone's basement. (Oh yeah, I'm online old skool: I remember when FidoNet was cutting edge.)

So I needed a login ID. The ideal login ID is short, unique, distinctive, easy to remember, hard to misspell, and says something about your temperament, which makes “miniver” pretty much ideal. I've used it for dozens of systems since then, though not so much lately.

When I finally broke down and decided to write a blog, I realized that it fits in perfectly with the prevailing style of distinctive names in blogistan, so I brought it out of retirement.

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Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn
    Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
    And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old
   When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
   Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not,
   And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
   And Priam's neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown
   That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
   And Art, a vagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici,
   Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
   Could he have been one.

Miniver cursed the commonplace
   And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
   Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
   But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
   And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
   Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
   And kept on drinking.

---

By Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935), from The Town Down the River, 1910

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The Modern American Poetry site provides a collection of analysis of the poem.

Trompe d'oleil

Astonishing sidewalk chalk illustrations

Look at that first one carefully.

Chaos

A friend of mine is stranded out in America for a while. People like me, with weird interests, are pretty thin on the ground out there, which is why I try to stay here in San Francisco as much as possible.

But the internet solves all problems, and Tribe.net reports that there is, of course, a bit of a goth community in this part of America, and that many of them are chaos magickians. And it occurs to me that there must be throngs of other people reading this who also want my guidance about hanging with chaos magickians.

Here's the deal. Chaos magick can be described as the controlled art of going usefully crazy. Don't knock it on that basis: joining the United States Marine Corps, getting an advanced degree in physics, and becoming a method actor also involve going usefully crazy. But as with other craziness-inducing pursuits, things can go wrong, so some folks describing themselves as chaos magickians are crazy in an entirely tiresome and useless way.

I strongly recommend bringing as many chaos magickians into your social circle as you can manage, but you do want to do some triage. When you meet a chaos magickian, presume that they are crazy, and keep an eye out for what kind of crazy they are.

Plus, it's good to know what they're talking about. If you've read some Robert Anton Wilson (you know who you are, out there) you've got a leg up. Do not expect them to be impressed that you've read the Illuminatus trilogy, folks; I'm talking about the weird stuff published by New Falcon. But to be truly cool, and perhaps become a chaos magickian yourself, read Phil Hine's little monograph Oven-Ready Chaos, which contains everything you need to know. Indeed, it contains Everything You Need to Know. And it's only 68 pages! Including a mapping of characters from The Rocky Horror Picture Show to the qabalistic tree-of-life diagram!

Want more? Here's an index of key resources.

In case you're interested

There's a terrific little entry on strange matter in the Wikipedia, pointed out to me by a friend who shares my opinion that the evidence that the universe will end in heat death is a major bummer.

Strange matter is composed of strange quarks bound to each other directly, in a similar manner to how neutronium is composed of neutrons; a strange star is essentially a single gigantic nucleon .... Some theories suggest that strange matter, unlike neutronium, may be stable outside of the intense pressure that produced it; if this is so, then small substellar pieces of strange stars (sometimes called "strangelets") may exist in space in a wide range of sizes ....

Well, heat death may be a bummer but strange matter is cool. Obviously, this is the solution to the problem of what the Ringworld's floor material is made of.

The material the Ringworld is made of, scrith, is fictional. The stresses such an artifact would undergo are so strong that the tensile strength of scrith approaches that of the strong nuclear force, which holds atoms together.

alt.wesley.die.die.die

It turns out that Wil Wheaton, the actor who played geeky kid Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, actually is a geeky kid. Well, he's about 30 now, so perhaps not really a ''kid'' any more, but yet another geeky young man with an intermittantly charming weblog.

Hey, you in the back row, don't give me that. I am not nearly so geeky as Mr. Wheaton, my weblog is much more interesting, and I get about a billionth as much traffic to my site here. Cool and exclusive, that's me.

My point is, the man actually has a good sense of humor about being a famous actor in a way that entirely fails to impress girls, in a way that indeed connects him to a character vigorously hated by other guys just like him. So I very much enjoyed his bittersweet post about the quiet death of Wesley Crusher.

I'd heard the rumors online. Of course, I tend to not put a whole lot of stock in what I read online ... if I did I'd be overwhelmed with the sheer amount of hot teen bitches who want to get naked for me right now, and I'd be rolling in Nigerian money.

But it made sense, and I couldn't fight what I knew in my heart to be true.

A response to libertarians and anarchists

Today Brad DeLong has a provocative post in which he repeats the ''tale of the slave'' in Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Then he finds he cannot resist following up with another post offering a counter-argument in the form of the ''tale of the serf:''

Here are two situations:

In the first, you are a free and independent peasant living in a village. Your field is your own. Your crops are you own. After working, you huddle before the fire in your peasant hut until you fall asleep. A smallpox epidemic comes. You, your spouse and your children all die.

In the second, you are a peasant living in a village. Once a year a thug with a spear -- Sir Pierre de Bois-Guilbert, say -- comes and takes 10% of your crop. He uses his takings to live well in the castle up on the hill. He also employs a troubadour who comes and entertains the peasants nightly in the village square, singing, juggling, and telling stories. He also employs chirurgeons who undertake research into the balance of the four humours. One day, the chirurgeons come with their knives: they cut the arms of you and your family, and insert some cowpox-infested tissue. When the smallpox epidemic comes, you and your family (and the other families in the village) survive.

In which situation are you ''freer''? Do you really care whether you are ''freer''?

America's finest news source

You may recall this little item in The Onion:

Bush: 'Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over'

WASHINGTON, DC—Mere days from assuming the presidency ....

Bush swore to do ''everything in [his] power'' to undo the damage wrought by Clinton's two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.

During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.

The Onion 18 January 2001

Look at that date! Tom Lehrer once said that he retired from political satire because when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize he realized that he would never be able to keep up with reality. But The Onion has what it takes to satirize by anticipating reality.

This week The Onion takes news satire to a mind-boggling level of deadpan irony.

Bush 2004 campaign pledges to restore honor and dignity to the White House

BOSTON—Addressing guests at a $2,000-a-plate fundraiser, George W. Bush pledged Monday that, if re-elected in November, he and running mate Dick Cheney will ''restore honor and dignity to the White House.''

''After years of false statements and empty promises, it's time for big changes in Washington,'' Bush said. ''We need a president who will finally stand up and fight against the lies and corruption. It's time to renew the faith the people once had in the White House. If elected, I pledge to usher in a new era of integrity inside the Oval Office.''

The Onion 28 January 2004

Go read the whole thing. It may be the most coldly funny thing I've ever seen.

A better example of lefty propaganda

Busy Busy Busy gets it right with its execution of the ''shorter'' concept: snide one- and two- sentence summaries of conservative pundits' columns.

Dig this fine sample from their archives:

Shorter Donald L. Luskin
A Letter From Jeffrey J. Upton

I will personally track, hunt down and pursue my political opponent to the ends of the earth, while my lawyers flush out and assail anyone who dares call this stalking.

Shorter Max Boot
Dog Bites Man in Baghdad

Things are going swimmingly in Iraq, all appearances to the contrary being due to an exaggerated media focus on the body count, which isn't even all that high when compared to any larger number.

Shorter Gregg Easterbrook
One unseen divinity? Ridiculous! Billions of unseen universes? Sure, why not

Theoretical physicists stubbornly prefer science to magical thinking, even though science is complicated while magic easily explains lots of stuff.

The ''shorter'' concept was invented at D-Squared digest but has gone on to glory in lefty weblogs all over the place. Busy Busy Busy not only provides the richest source of them but also links to other good examples.

It's a terrific way of doing criticism. It's pithy, witty, and funny when done well. And yet it's not rhetorically irresponsible: rather, it's the opposite, surfacing core ideas that are often buried under the devices of rhetoric.

Flash propaganda

There's another well-done bit of anti-Bush propaganda from Bushflash.com that's been making the rounds, entitled Thanks for the Memories. It's a good introduction to Eric Blumrich's work: clever and beautifully executed animation, making digestible the complex story of how Saddam Hussein's rise in Iraq in fact involved significant American complicity and even aid. Check it out.

On the other hand, it also demonstrates some of Blumrich's weaknesses as a vigorous lefty propagandist, as in a few places the piece overreaches in attributing American responsibility for events in the last decade and a half. Certainly I believe in some American culpability for supporting the Ba'ath party for a long time, but the first US-Iraq war under Bush the Elder (and its aftermath) represented misjudgement, events spinning out of control, and opportunism on both sides, not clever manipulation by the CIA as Blumrich implies.

Of the almost two dozen animations on his website, all of them demonstrate impressive formal mastery -- artful use of text, photographs, and music to tell a story with impact -- but too many of them are too smug and angry. Quite few are just name-calling exercises. In other places, Blumrich juxtaposes vague triumphalist rhetoric by Bush and his administration with vague triumphalist rhetoric by Hitler and other Nazis -- it's an irresponsible propagandist's cheat that could make Gandhi look like a fascist.

Even at his best he often poisons the well, as in Mission Accomplished. In that animation, he juxtaposes the Bush administration's hestiancy to honor fallen American service men and women in Iraq with a litany of statistics about the bloodiness of the Iraq conflict, punctuated by the names of our war dead flashing quickly over the screen. It's very powerful -- until he accuses the Bush administration of shedding this blood for the benefit of corporations like Haliburton. Sure, a lefty like me finds it gratifying to say that, but the piece doesn't make a case for the connection at all, which means that it will only alienate anyone who is not already convinced. To an ordinary American, that animation looks like a cheap attempt to capitalize on heroic soliders' sacrifice to push anti-corporate conspiracy theories.

When he's explicitly raising questions about a conspiracy, Blumrich is often actually better. Top Gun? juxtaposes Bush's flight suit photo op with his failure to serve even his undemanding duty in the National Guard. Grand Theft America tells the story of Katherine Harris' purging of voter rolls to disenfranchise black voters in Florida. Even Buddy Buddy, which hazily accuses the government of complicity in the 9/11 attack, a very strong accusation which is not supported by correspondingly strong evidence, makes enough of a case that it's not easily dismissed.

It is frustrating to me that so many of our most talented lefty propagandists like Blumrich and Michael Moore are so often rhetorically irresponsible. Yeah, I know, it doesn't compare to the stuff you hear from their counterparts on the right, but that still doesn't make it okay.

People in red states won't believe you if you tell them

It's possible to group the 50 states into two categories: Givers and Takers. Giver states get back less than a dollar in spending for every dollar they contribute to federal coffers. Taker states pocket more than a dollar for every tax dollar they send to Washington.
....
The Democrats' electability predicament comes into focus when you compare the map of Giver and Taker states with the well-worn electoral map of red (Republican) and blue (Democrat) states. You might expect that in the 2000 presidential election, Republicans, the party of low taxes and limited government, would have carried the Giver states — while Democrats, the party of wild spending and wooly bureaucracy, would have appealed to the Taker states. But it was the reverse. George W. Bush was the candidate of the Taker states. Al Gore was the candidate of the Giver states.

From the New York Times by way of Atrios.

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The Daily Howler has more.

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Details from the Tax Foundation.

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A sequel on this blog about who pays taxes.

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A finer-grained map of where the money comes from and goes to.

Remember what I was saying about crossover satire?

I have more for you from the Department of Crossing the Memes. Thanks to Dionysus Devotee, I can tell you about this little gem:

Jack Chick tracts + Goth = Darque Dungeon

Don't know what a goth is, or a Chick tract? Then you won't laugh until your nose bleeds like I did.

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Update: God Hates The Scene is another variation on the theme, and The Trancecracker! gives us a very witty variant of Jack Chick + rave culture.

Plus the original Chick tract Dark Dungeons has been has been adapted to film by a Kickstarter-funded effort which give the work the reverence it deserves.

Today's quote

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

Ben Hecht

Brought to you by way of Brad DeLong, by way of Bonobo Land.

Two stories almost about me

Such is the nature of my generational / social class / cultural / tempermental position that few novels I have read really express the the tenor of my own life experience. But there are a couple of stories on the web which really get it.

One is by the dazzling web cartoonist Patrick Farley, whose Electric Sheep is a showcase of inventiveness and skillful comics storytelling often, but not always, laced with humor. In a later post, I introduce all of my favorite stories of his, but for today I just want to bring The Guy I Almost Was to your attention. (Update: a single page archive of that story, if you need it.)

It's a long story for a web comic: give yourself 20 or 30 minutes to read it. Along the way it evokes the magic of a slightly geeky childhood, the economic desperation Generation X experienced in the early ’90s, the appeal and the absurdity of Mondo 2000 back in the days of “cyber-culture,” and the deep strange seductive power of the Beat era for intense young men. A tiny novel, in web comic form. It works for me. Maybe it will work for you.

My other offering in the tales of smart, weird, intense young men is The Serial Killer Jailbait Airline Lotto by the astonishing Igloowhite. Again, I'll be coming back to some of my favorite things of his in a later blog post. But for now, let me just introduce this one story about sharing a flight with a pretty young girl who, it turns out, is fascinated by serial killers.

At first, I thought this might be a conversational gambit, a feigned interest. But no — she was true to her word, tirelessly questioning me on everything I knew about the perpetrators of serial violence. She wanted to know why I knew so much, and I admitted that I was also obsessed with serial killers — to the extent that I (sheepishly) consider myself something of an armchair profiler.

So I spoke with her like I speak with all teenagers, like an adult. To say that she was amped was something of an understatement.

This odd encounter turns into a moment of clarity in which Igloo realizes that being smart, weird, and intense is a nightmare as a teenager, but eventually you grow into it, that it takes you to extraordinary places where ordinary folks cannot go — like a random conversation with a pretty girl about random murder. This is the kind of weird that turns up in my life, and Igloowhite captures it perfectly.

Five geek social fallacies

Those of you interested in geekkultur may want to have a look at this astute article written by and for the smart, social, and socially awkward.

Ostracizers Are Evil
Friends Accept Me As I Am
Friendship Before All
Friendship Is Transitive
Friends Do Everything Together
...
Each fallacy has its own set of unfortunate consequences, but frequently they become worse in interaction. GSF4 often develops into its more extreme form when paired with GSF5; if everyone does everything together, it's much harder to maintain two friends who don't get along. One will usually fall by the wayside.

Similarly, GSF1 and GSF5 can combine regrettably: when a failure to invite someone is equivalent to excluding them, you can't even get away with not inviting Captain Halitosis along on the road trip. GSF3 can combine disastrously with the other ''friendship test'' fallacies; carriers may insist that their friends join them in snubbing someone who fails the test, which occasionally leads to a chain reaction which causes the carrier to eventually reject all of their friends.

There's a word for it

Nock (n.) -- The cleft of an arrow, or of the fundament

John Kersey's New English Dictionary (1772)

Oceania was, in fact, at war with Eurasia

You may have noticed that the Bush administration is now saying that they never claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction which were a threat to the US, which seems a little funny, since I recall them saying exactly that.

As a notable example, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the other day, ''I think some in the media have chosen to use the word 'imminent.' Those were not words we used,'' which is odd, since on 10 February 2003 his exact words were ''this is about imminent threat.''

For your convenience, the nice people at the Center for American Progress have prepared a detailed history of the semantics of the ''imminent threat'' from Iraq plus another page with a big stack of quotes from Bush and administration officials, in case you're wondering if your memories are a hallucination.

Makes my head hurt

Okay. Okay. Someone is maintaining a blog of spam. Really. Check back every few days for new spam on the blog.

It does not appear to be ironic. Well, actually, it does appear to be very ironic. But it does not appear to be intentionally ironic.

Why?

Sometimes I wonder if some internet content, like the bad movies you find on Deep Cable, isn't the result of some spontaneous mimetic genesis that operates without human intervention. I can almost imagine the Harlan Ellison or Philip K. Dick story: ''Jonathan, if you think about it, why would anyone deliberately make that stuff? It's just a natural outgrowth of the infosphere once it reaches a certain critical mass ...''

Can the American right really believe this stuff?

Today there's a good rant over at The Volokh Conspiracy, quoting Paul Craig Roberts, Reagan's pick for Assistant Secretary of the Treasury.

Compare an American taxpayer's situation today with that of a 19th century American slave.
...
[Some slaves] were freer than today's American taxpayer.
...
The ''Civil Rights revolution'' destroyed equality before the law. Today rights are race-and gender-based.

Have I somehow managed to quote Roberts out of context, to twist his meaning? Go check out Eugene Volokh's rant and see that no, I didn't.

I honestly, genuinely do not know if educated guys on the right like Roberts really believe this stuff, or if they're just saying it. I recognize that some of the stuff I believe is puzzling to folks like them, but this sort of nonsense just seems impossible for anyone thoughtful to swallow.

Tightening airport security is useless

It turns out that several of the 9/11 hijackers were screened by the FAA.

The 10-member bipartisan commission revealed that nine of the 19 hijackers had been flagged by the Federal Aviation Administration's computer passenger screening system before boarding their flights. The system alerts airport security screeners to more thoroughly check passengers who buy one-way tickets or pay with cash. FAA procedures at the time called for the luggage of the ''selectees'' to be screened for explosives.

According to the report, three of the five hijackers aboard Flight 11 were designated selectees by the computer system, known as CAPPS, but one hijacker had checked no luggage and screeners scanned the bags of the other two for explosives. All five hijackers aboard American Flight 77 -- which crashed into the Pentagon -- were selectees and their luggage was held before they were confirmed on the aircraft, and no further screening was done.

One hijacker aboard United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, was flagged and his bag was screened for explosives before being loaded onto the plane, the report said.

Washington Post

Yet we act as though bigger helpings of the same security measures will make a difference. At this point, we may as well eliminate all airport security: no one will ever let terrorists take over a jumbo jet again. Passengers foiled the 9/11 jet-as-flying-bomb strategy later that same day.

The same data in two forms

As a way of pressuring my friend John Dunning into becoming a blogger, I'm going to rudely share with y'all an email he sent to me.

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The world's most attractive zipcode entry field

The applet starts by displaying every zipcode in the US as a white dot. As you type each digit in a zipcode, all the codes that begin with what you've typed stay white, while the others fade. So typing 9 lights up the West Coast, typing 4 highlights just the Bay Area, and so on. Simple, but kind of hypnotic.

Zip

The zipcode map is almost dot for dot identical to a nighttime picture of the US from orbit:

Earth

Considering how zipcodes are distributed, that shouldn't be surprising. But it's still remarkable that as soon as humans are concentrated enough to merit their own zipcode, they use enough light to be visible from space.

Two other people's thoughts about blogging

Now that I'm blogging, I'm thinking about blogging. Very meta. I'm not sure that I have anything to say about it yet, other than that these two folks have interesting observations ...

Clive Thomson points out that blogging gets you thinking like a writer.

The thing that most writers and pundits don't realize is that, before the Internet came along, the vast majority of Americans never wrote anything -- ever -- after they left high school or college. There was neither any need (their jobs didn't require it) or any vehicle for doing it in their spare time. What the Internet did was give us all a reason to write -- and write tons. Which is where things get cool, because that helped Americans realize that they are, beneath the surface, a hell of a lot more outre and odd than they're normally allowed to be in polite company. Hence all the flame wars, the brobdignagian emotions, the playful grandstanding that characterizes so much of online life.

Meanwhile, Rands in Repose agrees and takes it a step further to argue that everyone should ''write and meet with courage.'' Seconding Clive Thomson, he says

If you're reading this, you've chosen to use the web as a means of gathering new ideas. It is a non-trivial ability to take that drunken thought you had last Thursday and translate it a compelling argument that folks should talk about. Writing takes time and practice and time and practice.

When you create a space in your life for a weblog, you're saying, ''Writing matters.''

... then he goes on to talk about the power of weblogging for community ...

Once you've ably conquered the whole writing thing and your ideas are floating around the weblog-o-sphere, people are going to find you. These people are going to want to talk about what you wrote and, oddly enough, their voice is going to sound familiar. This is because they've found something familiar in your voice.

Weblogs match people together regardless of geography thus making the world a pleasantly smaller place.

Is the spam industry employing schizophrenics?

When I first read about Bayesian filtering for spam I dared to hope that it would work well enough to frustrate spammers out of existence. But of course I was wrong: it just created Darwinian pressure for craftier spam. Since Bayesian filtering looks for words and word patterns in email that denote spam or non-spam email, spammers are now trying to overwhelm the filters by adding weird random words that drown out the spammishness of such words as !V!I!A!G!R!A!

Lately, the efforts to outfox filters have taken a turn to the poetic. Today I received this little gem:

Jim gave an indignant neigh

Look at me! he cried

You may guess what an improvement is this automatic Record of Events, which is as reliable as Truth itself

Behold a real horse! The wooden animal gave a start, and then examined the other intently Nothing can be altered or falsified, for the vibratory currents convey the actual events to your vision, even as they happen

This seems oddly reminiscent of conversations I've had with folks on Market Street who have missed a few doses of their antipsychotic medications: rambling somewhere in the border territory between sense and nonsense. Perhaps some street people have now moved on to happier, more productive lives writing copy for the spam industry.

Two other things worth noting while I'm on the subject. Clive Thomson at Collision Detection has more on spam poetry, as well as antispam poetry, as part of his ongoing coverage of spam weirdness.

Plus, it's important that you read what British Parliment has to say on the subject of spam, in both senses of the word.

BARONESS STRANGE: My Lords, does the Minister agree that sardine tins and anchovy tins are also very difficult to open with their tin-openers?

LORD SAINSBURY OF TURVILLE: My Lords, I think I will just agree with the noble Baroness on that question.

LORD MITCHELL ASKED HER MAJESTY'S GOVERNMENT: What are their plans to reduce the growth in spam (unsolicited emails).

LORD SAINSBURY OF TURVILLE: My Lords, I hope the noble Lords will appreciate how I move seamlessly from corned beef to spam.