My New Year's Resolution


I will try really hard not to make fun of Republicans and other ideologues who believe that all of man's problems can be solved by the free market, and that the best government is one that stays out of our way.


D'oh!

From today's NY Times:
"When Iceland was first settled by the Norse around 870, its light volcanic soils presented colonists with unfamiliar challenges. They proceeded to cut down trees and stock sheep as if they were still in Norway, with its robust soils. Significant erosion ensued, carrying half of Iceland's topsoil into the ocean within a century or two. Icelanders became the poorest people in Europe. But they gradually learned from their mistakes, over time instituting stocking limits on sheep and other strict controls, and establishing an entire government department charged with landscape management. Today, Iceland boasts the sixth-highest per-capita income in the world.
There's always next year.
1.1.05 19:32


Any port in a storm


Juan Cole on last weekend's tsunami:
"It is very odd that nations cooperate to help each other in the face of natural disasters. But when they become angry over some minor dispute, they are perfectly happy to inflict far more damage on each other than mother nature ever did. Pakistan and India were seriously contemplating using nukes on each other as recently as 2002. Now Islamabad is sending rupees to Delhi, and Delhi is expressing gratitude.

"Now that nukes are becoming so common, humanity has to find a way to move into permanent cooperative and helping mode. War is gradually becoming unthinkable. The massive tsunami's toll has now risen to 150,000, but an Indo-Pak nuclear exchange would have killed 10 million."
Stranger still that the former governor of Texas responded so lamely to this disaster. It doesn't take a seasoned diplomat to recognized a prime opportunity like this to show the gentler, more progressive side of America.


Now I have that damn theme song playing in my head

What's on Law & Order tonight.

Hat tip to Menace.
2.1.05 01:06


Follow the leader


The indispensable Digby is wondering about the same thing as I am:
"The problem isn't that the left is pacifist in the war on terror. It's that it's pacifist in the war on liberalism and that's coming from both within and without.

"The old saw about 'the terrorists have won' is a cliché to be sure. But that doesn't mean it's not true. Bin Laden doesn't have to invade with an army or even terrorize us further with bombings and terrorist attacks. His job is done. We are now fully engaged in destroying ourselves."
Indeed, Democrats will continue to get their butts kicked at the polls until they can at least muster a genuine sneer when talking about terrorism. But we're just too damn introspective to pass judgement, even on a misogynistic, homophopic, liberal-bashing, mass murdering trust-fund baby like Osama bin Laden. If ever there was a poster child for something liberals can get pissed about, it's this guy. There's a time for academic conferences and break-out sessions, and there's a time for trumpets. Liberals have risen to the challenge of fighting wars in decades past. What's the problem now?


Tsunami videos

Here.

This is what 150,000 looks like on a computer screen.

This is what it looks like in southeast Asia (Warning: Extremely graphic image).


And speaking of washed up

David Brooks is adrift in a tsunami of inane ramblings intoday's NY Times:
"Human beings have always told stories to explain deluges such as this. Most cultures have deep at their core a flood myth in which the great bulk of humanity is destroyed and a few are left to repopulate and repurify the human race. In most of these stories, God is meting out retribution, punishing those who have strayed from his path. The flood starts a new history, which will be on a higher plane than the old.

Nowadays we find these kinds of explanations repugnant. It is repugnant to imply that the people who suffer from natural disasters somehow deserve their fate. And yet for all the callousness of those tales, they did at least put human beings at the center of history.
Then he goes on to dis Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, The Lion King, and anyone else whose heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils.
The naturalists hold up nature as the spiritual tonic to our vulgar modern world. They urge us to break down the barriers that alienate us from nature. Live simply and imbibe nature's wisdom. "Probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves against her heats and colds, but find her our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds," Thoreau wrote.

Nature doesn't seem much like a nurse or friend this week, and when Thoreau goes on to celebrate the savage wildness of nature, he sounds, this week, like a boy who has seen a war movie and thinks he has experienced the glory of combat.
Yes, David, and when you write crap like this you sound a political hack who has had breakfast with Jerry Falwell and now thinks God will return his phone calls. Brooks ends his screed by mourning Asia's dead, and "for those of us who have no explanation" for God's wrath. Presumably this doesn't include David Brooks himself, who is pretty sure it's the liberals' fault.


More red state values



In keeping with today's theme of death, Heraldblog directs you to Reason online, and this curious little piece on the great Oklahoma casket conspiracy. Oklahoma is one of a handful of states that only permits licensed morticians to sell caskets.
"Qualifying as a funeral director in Oklahoma requires two years of college courses, graduation from a mortuary science program, a one-year apprenticeship that includes the embalming of at least 25 bodies, and two exams. After all that, the applicant is deemed qualified to sell boxes."
This greatly benefits deceased Oklahoma businessmen who want to rest assured that their home state's economy is at least breathing, and of course Oklahoma funeral homes who can charge twice for a casket what it would cost most anywhere else.

Enter Kim Powers and Dennis Bridges, two outside-the-box thinkers and founders of Memorial Concepts, which sells caskets on-line. Powers and Bridges asked the courts to overturn Oklahoma's casket cartel, but so far have been turned down. The case appears headed for the US Supreme Court, which will be on a high state of irony alert if Chief Justice Rehnquist gets to hear the case.
3.1.05 03:01


Pew blog research


Some interesting numbers on the blogging phenomenon (via Douglas Fisher):

• 7 percent of U.S. Internet users say they have created blogs -- 8 million Americans. (It's gone up about 2 percentage points in each of the three surveys Pew has done since June 2002.)

• But then again, 62 percent do not know what a blog is

• 27 percent said they have read blogs, up from 17 percent in a February survey. That's 32 million Americans reading blogs. Much of the growth was the result of political blogs and the election.

• Those who read blogs tend to be male, young and well-educated). But there also has been greater-than-average growth among women, minorities, those 30-49, and those of us with dial-up connections at home.

Previous Pew surveys show that most people who post to blogs update them once a week or less. But most of us can quite anytime. No, really. I've got in under control.


Top ten media innovations for 2004

New York University's Prof. Jay Rosen, author and media critic, has a lengthy, must-read piece on emerging challenges to the way Americans produce and consume news. They are:.

1. The Legacy Media.
2. He said, she said, we said.
3. What the printing press did to the Catholic Church the blogging press does to the media church.
4. Open Source Journalism, or: "My readers know more than I do."
5. News turns from a lecture to a conversation.
6. "Content will be more important than its container."
7. "What once was good--or good enough--no longer is."
8. "The victory of affinity over geography."
9. The Pajamahadeen.
10. The Reality-Based Community
4.1.05 16:29


Election results confirmed


So the Dems made a good showing of themselves today, even as they certified the college of electors' votes. Hunter at Daily Kos watched the proceedings (presumably via C-Span, since the networks had more important soaps to do) and reports:
"I was impressed by how prepared the Democratic speakers were, in both houses, and how very unprepared the Republican speakers were. While Democrats were citing example after example of actual vote suppression efforts, partisan electioneering on the part of state officials, etc., etc., Republicans who got up to speak mainly read from newspaper clippings or otherwise strutted and blustered about. It seems fairly clear that the Republicans weren't actually expecting a contest, and were unprepared for it.

"The issue was framed very well. This isn't a contest of the outcome, but of the process, and the partisan corruption therein. Republicans will spin it as they will, but they will have very little ammunition, from Democrats, to work with. The talking point needs to be, at this point: Democrats are standing up for the right to vote of all citizens. Why aren't the Republicans?"
Why not the Republicans? The FOX-GOP-Rove axis of evil will tell us that the Republican Party is forward looking, and trusts the judgement of the American people, while the Democrats put their faith in courts and trial lawyers. To counter this, Democrats need to press the need for reform without looking like sore losers.
6.1.05 23:20


Wingnut roundup


According to the San Fransisco Chronicle, Senator John Kerry was greeted warmly by US troops as he visited them in Baghdad Thursday.
U.S. soldiers approached Kerry inside the restaurant of the Rashid Hotel, asking him to pose for photographs and sign T-shirts. The star-struck restaurant manager insisted on serving Kerry the restaurant's specialty, a plate of grilled chicken and lamb.

Later in the day, Kerry met with about 20 soldiers based in his home state, including reservists from the 356th Engineer Detachment and 126th Aviation Company of the Massachusetts Army National Guard at Camp Victory, where soldiers are bivouacked in luxury villas once inhabited by Saddam Hussein and his loyalists.
Wingnuts, posting on Lucianne.com, reacted with a mixture of tired clichés, ad hominem attacks, and misinformed comment:

OMG, hanoi heinz kerry will undo in 10 minutes, what our Military, Pentagon has striven to do for 1 /2 years. Just like he did when he went to Paris and collaborated with the VC leaders, to collaborate against the USA, causing more pain to our POWs' and more killing of our Military. This POS is a traitor, and should be tried for treason, which he committed when he went to Paris. Why isn't he being tried, instead of being free to roam around the World, turning the World against the USA, just like slick willie and his worst half does. - Sunflower
That's a pretty volatile situation you're describing there, Sunflower: one visit by a US Senator, and all of Bush's good work comes tumbling down. Imagine what a determined insurgency could do.

He probably picked up his 4th Purple Heart - WhiteSubaru
Ha ha ha ha. That's really funny. Rich guy goes to Vietnam instead of the Air National Guard, gets shot up, and that's not good enough. You slay me, WhiteSubaru.

Wait ten minutes, Kerry will praise Bush. Did he take Teraaaazah with him?
No. Have you finished HiiigghhSccchhooll yet?

What else did we expect from this moron? Maybe the next "roadside" incident will have the proper timing.
Yeah, and maybe the cheering troops that accompany Kerry will be blown to bits, too. Moron.
7.1.05 02:19


Media whores



Conservative commentator and part-time White House lawn jockey Armstrong Williams has has admitted to taking $240,000 to promote Bush's educational policy on his television show. This has created a great deal of hand wringing in journalistic circles, and predictable navel gazing about what it means to be a journalist these days. The White House denies responsibility, natch, saying it was a Department of Education decision to promote the No Child Left Behind Policy. The Tribune Company has dropped Williams as a commentator.

The Bushies have been producing phony news segments for years, and distributing them to unsuspecting or friendly news outlets. That's fine, as long as the pieces are identified as political infomercials. But they're not.

This story stinks on so many levels I'm not sure where to begin, or who deserves the most outrage. The Bush administration has shown contempt for so many American institutions that it should come as no surprise that now it's laying waste to what's left of journalistic credibility to advance its own agenda. But it's not like the American media needs any help debasing themselves. What is called journalism these days is more like the public affairs divisions of entertainment focused corporations.
9.1.05 20:15


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