Tuesday, February 25, 2003
The concept of “choice” is complicated, entwined in personal desires, social strictures, and the law. What happens when personal desire reigns supreme? Who’s most worried about this? It’s not philosophers. It’s economists.
Monday, February 24, 2003
If you’d like to know more about how the Kingdom of Hawaii became the Territory of Hawaii, the University of Hawaii has an excellent collection of primary sources. The Dole fruit and sugar fortune had not a little to do with it. A church here in Brooklyn has a saying: “Our missionaries went to Hawaii to do good, and they did very well.”
Saturday, February 22, 2003
The Smoking Gun has some odd documents showing the meeting minutes of the birth of Al Queda. They come out of some case of a charity group that was raising money for Al Queda. It’s chilling to see this petty and bureaucratic beginning to this group. Members had to pledge to be early-rising and obedient and they were only supposed to take members who had good references, good manners and were good listeners.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/bifladen1.html
The Smoking Gun also has Al Queda’s terror manual.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/jihadmanual.html
Saturday, February 22, 2003
Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, was on Meet the Press last week, and had some fascinating ideas about how a war on terrorism and rogue nations should be fought. Will he run on the Democratic ticket? Maybe. I hope so — it would be nice to see some foreign policy backbone on the ticket. Mickey Kaus, of course, hates him. The New Republic, for reasons I don’t fully comprehend, hates him even more. Their biggest beef? He doesn’t want a war to kill a lot of people, and he’s suspiciously like Colin Powell. Conspicuous by its absence: an alternate policy. Sour grapes for TNR.
Saturday, February 22, 2003
I thought I was over my paralyzing high-school crush on you. I am not.
Saturday, February 22, 2003
He wrote The Threatenting Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. Pay attention to his editorials in the New York Times and his interview with Talking Points Memo.
Saturday, February 22, 2003
The EPA is being sued by seven Northeastern states, who are each hoping that the agency will be found negligent in its implementation of the Clean Air Act. There are a number of different actions pending. The states don’t like sneaky procedural changes that don’t treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant and prevent a thorough review of emissions from power plants. The NYT article highlights the poor treatment that the environment gets in this administration. Case in point: the voluntary carbon dioxide control program that the President touted in lieu of the Kyoto Protocol was announced in the cafeteria of the Department of Energy.
Friday, February 21, 2003
England is giving Blair lots of grief for palling around with George Bush. Brits are really squeemish about Bush’s dogmatic Christian rhetoric. That’s especially interesting because this is the country the US broke away from because of its dogmatic Christianity.
The BBC’s Jeremy Paxman asked if he prayed with Bush.
Blair curtly responded:
“No, we don’t pray together. No, Jeremey, No.”
Newsweek was great to point out that in the US, politicians would have jumped at the chance to brag that they prayed with Bush, no matter how much that flew in the face of the establishment clause.
Thursday, February 20, 2003
A long-overdue swipe at David Foster Wallace. Includes bonus parody excerpt!
Thursday, February 20, 2003
Noam Scheiber has a great piece in The New Republic on the undue influence of Washington pollsters on Democratic campaigns. The upshot is that the party message is enforced from the mothership in Washington through the complex set of relationships between well-connected Democratic polling firms, the party election committees, the regionals, and the campaign committees. In 2002, the polling-derived message was almost certainly flawed and snuffed out any local issues where Democratic candidates would have otherwise found traction. Significantly, the Republican infrastructure has no such polling “inner circle” and candidates are therefore more flexible on campaign strategy.
It’s sharp thinking and a worthwhile concern, but blaming the Democratic polling machine for flaccid policy doesn’t make me feel any better.
I'm the Chief Technology Strategist for the Red Hat US Public Sector group, an open source and free culture advocate, a picky drinker, an amateur aesthete, and a dog enthusiast.
more...
What I’m Hearing
