Author Archive

Could it be?

By now, and we’re only on number two, I’m sure people are sick of videos of my daughter.  On the other hand, enjoy them anyway.

So, the CEO of Whole Foods got in a little trouble today - to say the least.

Whole Foods’ CEO John Mackey acknowledged today that for seven years he used a pseudonym to bash rival Wild Oats on Yahoo’s popular stock-market forum. Mackey’s alias of “Rahodeb” came to light as part of the Federal Trade Commission’s attempt to block Whole Foods’ proposed $671 million purchase of Boulder-based Wild Oats. The commission cited one of his postings in a filing made public late Tuesday, noting in a footnote that Mackey “often posted to Internet sites pseudonymously, often using the name Rahodeb.” Among the postings, which lasted from a period of 1999 to 2006, Rahodeb wrote that Wild Oats management “clearly doesn’t know what it’s doing” and “OATS has no value and no future.”

So, watch what you say.

Say what you will about Moore, he’s a great interview.  My personal favorite line comes right at the end.  He also brings up a good point: how right was Fahrenheit 9-11.  I wonder?  Maybe I’ll do a little analysis.

Glenn et. al. are exactly right.  Columbia makes cocaine because there is a market and they don’t have the ability to trade anything else.  Country’s won’t stop (and neither will people) doing something on moral grounds until there’s a viable opportunity for them to do something else.  There’s a reason poor people go into the drug trade and not rich ones.

This sort of moral posturing reminds me of the ideas behind sweat shops.  Sure, sweat shops are bad, but they’re not as bad as the alternative - no job at all.  Sweat shops are instead a good first sign that a country is creating the business infrastructure necessary in the global economy.  Remember when sweat shops were all in Malaysia.  What about China?  I’d say Africa could use a few sweatshops.

Quick example: playing golf in morning, want to know what time chic-fil-a opens: open iphone, click maps, type “chic fila” into browser, asks “did you mean chic-fil-a,” click yes, shows map with seven chic-fil-a’s in denver, click one I pass on way to golf course, gives phone number and address, click phone number, it calls, guy answers, ask what time they open - total time? seventeen seconds. Didn’t get map, but could have - complete with live traffic report. And, yes, the photo was taken with the camera on the phone.
Only thing I didn’t do was post from browser on phone - it’s pretty slow if you’re not connected to wireless. And, while I’d like it to be faster, it ain’t like my Nokia worked that great online, either.

Bloomberg has a great take on terrorism, and by great, I mean on I really did.

“On Monday, Bloomberg finally weighed in, but his response was not what some would have expected.“There are lots of threats to you in the world. There’s the threat of a heart attack for genetic reasons. You can’t sit there and worry about everything. Get a life,” he said.

That “What, me worry?” attitude pretty much sums up Bloomberg’s advice to New Yorkers on the terror plot. As far as he was concerned, the professionals were on it, so New Yorkers shouldn’t let it tax their brains.

“You have a much greater danger of being hit by lightning than being struck by a terrorist,” he added.”

Here’s a pretty interesting observation about the events at Virginia Tech.  It’s not an argument for or against anything, just a note, and, as such, should generate zero comments.

Among the 32 people killed were natives of Peru, India, Egypt, Vietnam, and Indonesia. And, of course, the murderer himself was a citizen of South Korea.

The events of Sept. 11 produced a similarly international list of victims, but that was no surprise: One would expect that the World Trade Center, given what it was and where it was, would be full of people from all corners of the globe. One would not expect the same of a random lecture hall in Blacksburg, Va. Yet now it turns out that Blacksburg is not merely a member of some metaphoric “global village” like everywhere else, but that Blacksburg is rather a literal global village, with concrete links of kinship and citizenship all over the world. Whatever American community you touch nowadays, for good or for ill, there are international repercussions.

This new level of internationalism is something to consider in our national debates about immigration, education, or even foreign policy—not as an argument for or against anything, but simply as an existing fact that not all of us have properly internalized. It’s also something to consider when we ponder America’s oddly lopsided relationship with the rest of the world. As you read this article, America’s gun-control laws are being debated around the world, America’s mental-health system is being analyzed in a dozen languages. America’s local news is now the world’s local news. But somehow, I don’t think that our knowledge of the rest of the world is growing at a similarly rapid pace.

The nice people at the McDonald’s really care about the environment, as this sign clearly states.

Can’t you just imagine the mother bird feeding her little chicks french fries she found on the ground underneath the second drive through window? What a perfect habitat for little birds.

Why bother?

I’ve almost been unable to watch the reports on the violence at Virginia Tech.  Unbelievable how bad it is, really.  In a way, the thing that has most bummed me out is the realization that the people in Bagdhad go through this experience almost every day.  It happened again today.  Bagdhad is full of Cho Seung-Huis.

Here’s a shot: “See, this man is a smart man; clearly I’m one crazy asshole.”

This is just funny.

Please check me out at my new favorite site.

UPDATE:  Some of you may have seen it, some of you didn’t, but the title of this post was a derogatory term for black people.  I saw it a second a go and couldn’t take it; so I changed it.

There, I said it. Is it okay? No, it’s not. And, yet, people seem to think it’s okay to use derogatory terms to describe homosexuals. I don’t understand people like Anne Coulter (or the audience from the American Conservatives Union) who think it is.

Just this past weekend, Matt and I were talking about Ned Stewart’s band, Grand Champeen.  Matt had noted he was going to go see them at South by Southwest and I said, you know, they’re still going strong.  I said something to the effect of, “They’re the next ‘Yo La Tengo’,” by which I meant they’d toiled for a long time now and they were due to break out.  Matt, full music snobbery in effect, actually agreed that might be a possibility.

And, then, I get an e-mail from Dave just this morning, linking to an article about the band on MSNBC.  Pretty damn cool, actually.  Go Ned!  And download the album at iTunes or buy it at Virgin or get from the dude who made illegal copies and works outside your building (okay, maybe not that last option).

It’s a Times Select article, but Dowd has a quote from David Geffen in her column today that I think is spot on, with perhaps the esteemed producer of Dream Girls’ assertion that whoever is the nominee from the Republican Party will win or his assertion that the Clintons are evil.  I think, though, that he’s captured the sentiment of the zeitgeist.

Whoever is the nominee is going to win, so the stakes are very high. Not since the Vietnam War has there been this level of disappointment in the behavior of America throughout the world, and I don’t think that another incredibly polarizing figure, no matter how smart she is and no matter how ambitious she is — and God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton? — can bring the country together.  Obama is inspirational, and he’s not from the Bush royal family or the Clinton royal family. Americans are dying every day in Iraq. And I’m tired of hearing James Carville on television.

For what it’s worth, Obama and Hillary are having a real fight over Geffen.  Fineman’s got a good take.

In the other party, and continuing my reliance on the uber-liberal Newsweek, this portrayal of Mitt left a bad, bad taste in my mouth.  Read it here.

A good example of what I’m talking about:

Romney’s campaign aides like to stress that he is a “turnaround” artist. They are referring to Romney’s great success at salvaging failing companies as a venture capitalist in the 1980s and ’90s and his near-miraculous rescue of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City from scandal and debt. The label carries the promise that Romney could reverse the fortunes of the GOP and the nation after the Bush years. But Romney’s turnaround on the burning social issues of gay rights, stem-cell research and abortion has raised questions about the candidate’s sincerity—a dangerous doubt at a time when voters seem to crave authenticity. In Massachusetts, as an unsuccessful Senate candidate in 1994 and in his winning race to become governor in 2002, Romney cast himself as liberal-to-moderate on social issues. But as Romney aims for the conservative Republican votes he will need to secure the presidential nomination, he has emerged as staunchly pro-life and anti-gay marriage. Was he, his critics ask, pretending then? Or is he pretending now?

Is Romney our new Kerry?   I think he might be.  Read this exchange from the Newsweek article.  It feels like Kerry’s “Cheney’s daughter is a lesbian” moment to me: disingenuous and opportunistic.

As a candidate, he can appear slightly overproduced, a little too smooth for the hurly-burly of the hustings. Lately, Romney has been courting the evangelical vote, key to winning Republican primaries. He knows that some evangelicals regard his religion, Mormonism, as heresy (according to the National Journal, more than a quarter of self-identified evangelicals tell pollsters that they won’t vote for a Mormon). So last week, at a lackluster rally in the Bible belt of South Carolina where maybe 300 people half-filled an auditorium, Romney was trying, a bit unctuously, to show his down-home piety. As the crowd trickled out, Romney, his voice still at full decibel from his stump speech, grabbed the hand of state Rep. Bob Leach, a Baptist. “This man,” proclaimed Romney, “his prayers bring down the power of the Lord!”

Since when does a senior partner at a turnaround firm (Bain, for chrissakes) and the governor of Massachussettes, no less, proclaim anything.  I don’t think he does, unless he’s faking.  I’m not saying Romney’s not religious, but he’s not an evangelical Christian, either.

For years I’ve had this idea - the “group think.” The group think is a great thing. It’s what happens when a Georgia return man breaks through the last line of protection on a punt return, when REM plays the first note from “It’s The End of The World As We Know It,” when Steve Jobs reveals the first image of his phone, e-mail, internet communicator device. And, today, Seth Godin described it, albeit with another name. He calls it micro-hysteria and saw the effect first hand at a talent show (why was he at a talent show) and someone started channeling Fergie.

I, personally, think nothing describes the effect of group think better than this: walk stumble into Doc Holiday’s on Avenue A in New York City sometime around 1:23 am on a Saturday morning right around the time the following comes on:

Well, I was drunk the day my Mom got out of prison,
And I went to pick her up in the rain,
But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck,
She got run over by a damned old train.

Everyone sings along, and by everyone I mean everyone from the drunk homeless people to the drunk yuppies to the drunk hipsters to the drunk tourists to the drunk bartenders.

I’ve never seen anything like this.

This link leads to an article referenced by me in the global warming debate. It’s worth reading if you care about my comment that hybrids might actually cost less than non-hybrids over the life of the car (not including any tax breaks you’d receive for buying the hybrid). This directly contradicts Shores’ experience in looking at buying a hybrid in the past few months. I’m only posting here because I can’t figure out how to post a link in the comments section.

Here’s the quote:

Looking at both the Escape and Civic models you can see that even without the benefit of the tax credit, the hybrids have lower Total Ownership Costs over five years.

Just a silly photo.

Wonkette is right, this is perhaps the best lede in the history of the modern newspaper:

A NASA astronaut was arrested in Florida early Monday and accused of attacking a woman she considered her rival for the love of another astronaut, Orlando police said.

Evidently, Lisa Marie Nowak, who has been to space, drove 1,000 miles, in diapers no less (didn’t want to stop), to kidnap the girlfriend of her ex-boyfriend. Dressed in a wig and trench coat, she followed the woman, another astronaut, to the long-term parking lot at the Orlando International Airport. Once in the lot, she pursuaded the woman to roll down the window of her car and sprayed pepper spray at her.

But she missed.

Can you imagine this? You drive 1,000 miles, leaving behind your three children, peeing yourself the whole way, in order to kidnap your ex’s girlfriend, only to miss fire a thing of pepper spray. And, you leave, in your car, all the accoutrements of a kidnapping, including, but not limited to, rubber pipes, a bb gun, a knife, love letters and some garbage bags.

All of which leads to a cover story feature in the LA Times and, almost certainly, a number of bad jokes on Jay Leno. There’s a Master Card joke in there somewhere.

Biden “messed up out of the gate”?  That’s what a lot of people are saying.

This is the quote:

. . . Biden described Obama as “the first mainstream African American [presidential candidate] who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

What’s wrong with that?  Is it because Obama’s black? Cause, I could describe Bush almost the same way, except for the black part or the articulate part or the bright part, but he’s clean and nice-looking.

Obama’s response, by the way, was equally “political” and said something, I think, about how he plans to deal with racial issues:

“I didn’t take Senator Biden’s comments personally,” he said, “but obviously they were historically inaccurate. African-American presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one would call them inarticulate.”

And, to be clear, Jesse Jackson is the only person on this list who may have been a legitimate candidate or “mainstream.”

For what it’s worth, Hillary’s going to win anyway.

This is Miss Margaret Elise Frampton.

The linked website has a pretty interesting premise - what if there were only 100 people in the world but the demographic ratios were the same as the actual population? For example, how many would have a secondary education? Seven. How many would be malnourished? Thirteen. How many people go without basic sanitation? Forty-three. How many can’t read? Fourteen.

The site is a little sanctimoniuos (or a lot), but it’s kind of a fun time waster and relevant. One note: turn your sound off. There’s horrible impending doom music/slow train noise that underlies the whole thing.

This is the scene outside Littlejohn Stadium in Clemson trying to get tickets to the North Carolina game this Wednesday. Pretty cool. Hopefully, the team will come through. (And, for what it’s worth, I’ve got a lot of faith.)

If you don’t know Seth Godin, you don’t know my marketing hero. He’s big time. (For example, if you search for “Seth” on Google, his blog comes up.)

Anyway, I e-mail with him pretty regularly - gotta love the internet - and now he’s published one of my e-mails. Very cool!

UPDATE:  You’ll notice, maybe, that I think I figured out how to trackback.

I am always fascinated by the idea that a country can just “nationalize” an industry or a company. It happens all the time, particularly in second world countries. What interests me more is the complete non-reaction by the international community. As important as global trade and capitalism have proven to be for the improvement of the entire world in the last fifty years, it’s even more fascinating.

There’s very little international law and no international court system to allow a company to sue a federal government for proper repayment for taken assets. That’s bad.

The latest example is Hugo Chavez’s nationalization of communications companies. You know, this guy is a bad guy. It’s weird people don’t get that. The country will own the method of free speach.

Former (bad) Colorado Governor Bill Owens announced today that he is joining Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign advisory team.  You’ll notice, in relation to a previous post by me, that the second paragraph reads as follows:

Romney, 59, has not announced his candidacy officially, but submitted paperwork this week to form a presidential advisory committee, the first step in a race for the White House. If elected, he would be the first Mormon president.

Those italics are mine. Interestingly, there are not nearly as many second (or first) paragraphs that mention Obama being the first black president or Hillary being the first woman president.

As for Owens, well, that was a bad choice.  There have always been persistent rumors about an illegitimate child and, reading from the same page, he’s not that popular with the Free Republic types.

Shores, sometimes you’re right.  The view from here is that in the last six months the country’s environment for environmentalism has changed.  Here are a couple of significant examples: Walmart’s campaign to get everyone to change lightbulbs and the ever growing trend in homebuilding to get “off the grid.” Pretty cool.

What strikes me about these article is that the rich and the poor and the middle class, of all political stripes, are fingding ways to be more energy efficient and the market is meeting those needs.

I’ll Take Manhattan, Too.

Park Slope is notorious for its stroller traffic jams, as well as its slightly manic parents, but whenever I see all those young children on the sidewalk, I think of how many parents have opted to buck the trends of the past 50 years and raise their families in urban neighborhoods.

They know they could buy a McMansion in the suburbs for what they’re paying for a floor-through here, and they know they could have a real backyard. And yet they’ve decided to stay all the same, for the camaraderie and energy and diversity of city neighborhoods. These are virtues we were close to giving up on 30 years ago. That they are ascendant again is good news for all of us.

Note: the links in the quote are mine.  That way you can know a little bit about where Mattalie should live versus where they do live.

There are so many things about this that are funny, I just don’t know what to do with myself.

Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That’s why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today’s rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products. (Most babies are bottle-fed during some part of their infancy, and one-fourth of them are getting soy milk!) Homosexuals often argue that their homosexuality is inborn because “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t homosexual.” No, homosexuality is always deviant. But now many of them can truthfully say that they can’t remember a time when excess estrogen wasn’t influencing them.

Via: Babble, for the new urban parent.

Slate Magazine, which I clearly read a lot, has a pretty good take on why Florida was the right selection for the BCS. Knowing that no one really wants to click through, I’ve excerpted the important parts for you:

Unlike TV commentators and sports columnists, the college-football voters understand, at least implicitly, that the season-long playoff that is the college football season should determine the single best team, not the best two teams. That’s why the voters in the Harris poll and coaches’ poll have consistently voted against a Michigan-Ohio State rematch. The voters cast their ballots for “not-Michigan” when they voted for USC, and they’ve cast their ballots for “not-Michigan” by voting for Florida.

Do we know if Florida is the second-best team in the country? Of course not. Here’s what we do know: Michigan is not the best. How do we know that? By the traditional criterion: They scored fewer points in a football game than Ohio State did. The only team that has the “right” to play in the BCS championship game is the best team, Ohio State. And the only teams that should be scratched without question are teams that have already been determined to be “not the best,” like Michigan.

On Sunday, Michigan coach Lloyd Carr had the gall to declare, “I hope that, in the future, we can have a system where all of the answers are decided on the field” and, “We need to get away from anything that’s not decided by the players themselves.” I’m fairly certain that Carr’s players were involved in Michigan’s 42-39 defeat at the hands of Ohio State and that it was played on a field.

Frank doesn’t post anymore, for obvious reasons. But, if I had some time with him, I’d love to talk about Romney’s mormonism. Slate has a great article almost begging the presidential candidate to make his “I’m a mormon and proud of it” speech.

Mitt Romney has said that if his Mormon faith becomes an issue in his race for the presidency, he will address it at length in a speech. Does he have space on his calendar tomorrow?

The press is writing about his religion. Pollsters are asking about it, and GOP voters inevitably bring it up in any discussion of the 2008 candidates. Will his faith affect how he governs? Will it hurt his chances at winning the nomination? A debate in the blogosphere rages over Andrew Sullivan’s posting of a picture of the undergarment worn by some Mormons, an act that some of the faithful have found offensive.

When they’re talking about your bloomers, it’s time to clear a few things up.

It’s an interesting question and a telling one, I think. Will the evangelical wing of the Republican party vote for a person who has all of their values: no abortion, no gay marriage, no publicly-funded stem-cell research, etc., but whose values are based on a theology heretical to their own?

(I know, I know, it is possible to frame the evangelicals’ values in a way that doesn’t rely on the negative . . .)

Mormonism can be a little crazy. (Or, a lot.) But so can Christianity and Judaism and Islam and science and atheism, which is why I’m thinking about going Buddhist, which always makes sense. On the other hand, it’s a very unfamiliar religion, particularly considering how popular it is.

Anyway, interesting . . . and that underwear looks very uncomfortable.

Slate Magazine has a review of the new (or soon to be new) Tesla Motors roadster, a picture of which you see here in this post. It’s an electric car and, evidently, a blast to drive. I don’t really understand how a car works, but evidently electric engines have a real advantage over internal combustion engines when you’re trying to go fast. There’s a technical-sounding description in the article and it has something to do with torque curves, but, the essence of the whole thing is this: while a professional driver can make a car go zero to 60 in five seconds if he knows exactly when to change gears, most people cannot do that. In an electric car, that kind of skill is unnecessary. All you have to do is floor it. Pretty sweet. Even sweeter? The company is coming out with a sedan soon, too.

A group of homeowners in Pagosa Springs, Colorado are fining a woman $25 a day for hanging a peace shaped Christmas wreath on the side of her house. Evidently, some families have children in Iraq and assume that the peace sign is a portest against the war. The president of the homeowner association says that if they let this go, people could put up posters saying bomb people. Under Colorado law, only one form of speech is protected in an HOA controlled development - the hanging of the American flag. Interestingly, this is a bigger and bigger issue across the country. I don’t think it’s ever been tested at the Supreme Court level; what exactly can an HOA control? This one seems pretty silly to me, particularly considering that some people living in the development thought the peace sign was actually a sign of the devil.

I had the pleasure this season of watching in person as the Tigers lost two games that were eerily similar.  In each case, against Boston College and South Carolina, Clemson was outplayed and yet, because of the sheer amount of talent on our team, still had a chance to win at the end only to see Jad Dean kick it away. I’m frustrated by this seasons.
Here’s a pretty good take on the season from College Football News:

Despite winning eight games in Clemson, Tommy Bowden has to take some heat for a very poor body of work. Why? It became quite clear at points in the 2006 season that the Tigers had more horsepower than any other ACC team. With James Davis and C.J. Spiller in the backfield, Clemson had the clear ability to thunder past opponents with lightning-bolt home-run plays. The Tigers did in fact win at Florida State while crushing ACC Coastal champion Georgia Tech and defeating ACC Atlantic titleist Wake Forest. Clemson proved on multiple occasions how talented it was. Yet, the Tigers lost games they had no business losing (Maryland) while playing somnambulent football on some occasions (Virginia Tech). As is the case with Tom O’Brien at Boston College, Tommy Bowden had the horses to win a division title this season, but didn’t. In the bigger scheme of things, that represents a failure which should minimize the value of an eight- or nine-win year.

It’s a great analysis.  Bowden’s been at Clemson eight years now.  He’s convinced the university to build him new facilities, and that effort is underway in the spectacular new West End Zone.  He’s created incredible recruiting networks throughout the south (see Byrnes high school), and he’s got a group of assistants that would be the envy of almost any team not in the top 20.  Yet, he still can’t convert.

I’ve never put Bowden on the hot seat.  He always has had a shorthanded deck - bad facilities, a broken recruiting network, legacy issues at running back and on defense, or huge injuries.  This year, on the injuries front, we lost two first round linebackers in the first two weeks.  That’s too bad.  And it hurt us specifically against teams that could pass.  Both BC and USuC were able to run in ways that they were not previously able to simply because our inexperienced linebacker core had a tough time defending the run when the safeties spent all their time defending the deep ball.

Next year, though, he gets no excuses.  He’s stacked at running back, wide receiver, linebacker, the d-line, the secondary, and tight end.  He’s got what some consider the second best quarterback recruit in the country starting classes in January, and his o-line, while not experienced as starters, averages over 300 pounds and had plenty of playing time this year. Barring any horrible injuries, he really should win. If he doesn’t, I would imagine he’ll be squarely on the hot seat.

Clemson fans and the school have made enormous committments to the program.  They’ll expect to go to Jacksonville in December and play bowl games in January.  We’ve got the talent, we’ve got the facilities, we’ve got the recruiting, we’ve got the experience.  Do we have the coach?

I know, I know, Fox and the right aren’t the same thing. But, if you’ve got this sort of person carrying your water, well . . .

A spokesman for News Corp., owner of Fox Broadcasting and publisher HarperCollins, confirmed that the company had conversations with representatives of Nicole Brown Simpson’s and Ron Goldman’s families over the past week and that the families were offered all profits from the planned Simpson book and”There were no strings attached,” News Corp. spokesman Andrew Butcher said.

In other words, this guy thought it would make it okay if the victims’ families got paid. Sure, every television executive is like this, except, well, they aren’t. On the other hand, you could have this guy carrying the water.

I feel liberated, and I’m going to tell you as plainly as I can why. I no longer am going to have to carry the water for people who I don’t think deserve having their water carried. Now, you might say, “Well, why have you been doing it?” Because the stakes are high. Even though the Republican Party let us down, to me they represent a far better future for my beliefs and therefore the country’s than the Democrat Party and liberalism does.

We’ve not had a bad apostrophe or quotation post lately.

East West Partners and Continuum Partners were chosen to “enter exclusive negotiations” to be the mast redeveloper of Denver’s Union Station. Big deal! Here’s a rendering of our plan (that you guys are seeing first, by the way). Pretty damn cool.

Though, I’m not sure what else I expected.

And, right now, South Carolina is up by six on Florida with just a few minutes to go. Boy, the SEC is tough.

I don’t really read this site, and I tried to find another source, but Atrios out that Tradesports got it wrong on Senate control.

Cheney just can’t fuckin’ believe it.

Should this have happened yesterday?

Things are tight, and the democrats are already nervous. As the blog post notes, it won’t matter by the end of the day, but, if you’re reading this on Tuesday, don’t you wonder how the democrats frame a victory that doesn’t result in such? When is a victory really a loss? I’d suggest that if the democrats don’t at least gain control of the House, it’s a loss. And, I’d suggest even more that this election is already proof of why Hillary Clinton is the wrong presidential candidate.

As Matt has pointed out, and Obama has constantly tried to prove, the current debates - racism, taxes, immigration, abortion, church vs. state, size of our military - are tired and done. The country leans right on most of these issues (except racism). They’re settled. On top of that, many of these things no longer matter; they are fringe issues. There are real issues with social security (there’s been no viable proposal), national defense (there is no simple enemy), health care (no one likes the way it works now), education (we’re constantly falling behind). These are the issues that a truly progressive democratic party would be addressing. Simply being “not Bush” is no form of platform. The democrats can’t win many of the old arguments; they should change the argument.

See if this gives you some sense.

And so, evidently, is Ellen.

Charlotte had her first Halloween experience this weekend. A couple of suggestions: don’t walk through the inflatable haunted house. Only one reaction can be expected. Shockingly enough, it’s a very similar reaction to the fly-over that announces the start of the Broncos’ games: a complete and total lock down. Bury head in nearest relative’s chest for about 20 minutes. (And, yes, Charlie watched the Peyton Manning dismantling of the Broncos’ defense live and in person this past weekend.) Secondly, realize that if your kid really doesn’t eat candy, it’ll take a minute for her to get into it, but once she gets the idea down - walk up to door, hold pumpkin in front of you, get thing - she’ll get into it.

One note: the candy haul is AWESOME!

Yvette Pita Frampton ‘94, visited Davidson for this past fall’s reunion, her class’s 10th. While their, she had a chance to speak with Eleanor Hatcher ‘94, who asked her to serve as class secretary. Yvette, not knowing exactly what Eleanor meant, quickly and energetically agreed. You can see what Eleanor meant here.

I’m not sure what the hell Jesus is talking about, but this is a simple one for me.

The President today announced that he and the administration were reviewing new options for solving the quagmire (yeah, I said it) that is Iraq. Here’s the money quote so far:

I know many Americans are not satisfied with the situation in Iraq. I’m not satisfied either. And that is why we’re taking new steps to help secure Baghdad and constantly adjusting our tactics across the country to meet the changing threat.

One thing that has driven me crazy throughout this entire ordeal has been the lack of new ideas and new tactics from the administration (and, equally, its critics). To paraphrase President Musharraf of Pakistan when he appeared on the Daily Show, we can point fingers after the crisis is over, for now we’ve just got to solve it.

At first blush, I’d add, placing a strong Iraq government at the center of any strategy seems wise to me. Clearly, no one over there like us too much, and ending their reliance on our military seems a worthy goal. Even a weak Iraqi government would be better at negotiating peace than a strong U.S. military. Easier said than done, but a good goal nonetheless.

UPDATE:  Turns out the Iraqi government doesn’t agree with me, too much.

GooTube Harold Ford, and you’ll get some other dandies.  GooTubing  Bob Corker’s got some pretty good ones, too.

Via: Wonkette.

And, before you go giving me a big whopping “boring,” read this quote from collegefootballnews.com:

Throughout this year, we’ve heard over and over again about how strong the SEC is and that a one loss team from that conference is better than an undefeated team in, say, the Big East. One other thing that we’ve heard all season long is how poor the ACC is this season. Well, before you go denigrating the ACC one more time this season, take a long, hard look at Clemson. The Tigers put on a show against Georgia Tech and with the running game that they have, they’re not going to be taken down easily. There aren’t many BCS teams who could handle Clemson right now. Think Auburn is the best one loss team in the country? Wonder if they could handle James Davis and CJ Spiller right now – they didn’t stop Arkansas. Texas? If they couldn’t stop Nebraska RB Brandon Jackson, how are they going to stop Lightning and Thunder? Florida? Is Florida’s defense stout enough in the middle to stop the Tigers or could Chris Leak and Tim Tebow handle defensive end Gaines Adams and a fast, physical defense? Notre Dame? Please. It’s fun to project how these teams will fare against one another, but conference strength opinions often cloud our judgment as to what teams ‘deserve’ to be in position to play in a BCS game. Unfortunately, the reputation of the ACC is that it’s having a down year, just like last year was for the Big East. And, tell me what happened when the Big East champ took the field against the big, bad SEC in the Sugar Bowl last year? I’m just saying, be careful not to let conference pride cloud the reality of the situation – the reality is that Clemson is for real this year, just as West Virginia was last year.

I’m amazed by the complete lack of self-awareness.  Let me see if I can get this right: “We’re going to kill you because you said we’re violent, which clearly we aren’t?”

Over the past three and a half years, Christians have been subjected to a steady stream of church bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and threatening letters slipped under their doors.

Coming to Clemson, he and his cronies are.

A couple of days ago, Matt linked to his version of Taranto gold. Peter King quoted him in a Sports Illustrated article. Here’s part of King’s quote of Matt’s e-mail:

“So you asked Mets fans how do we like Pedro’s $51 million contract now? We still love it. Pedro has brought legitimacy to a team that desperately needed it, respect to a franchise that looked beaten from top to bottom. Remember Cliff Floyd’s quote at the end of the 2004 season, that it was hard to see any light at the end of the tunnel? Pedro not only brought wins and excitement, he made the Mets a legitimate destination for elite free agents, helping attract Carlos Beltran, Carlos Delgado, Paul Lo Duca and Billy Wagner.”

Matt wrote that. Here’s Ian O’Connor in a USA Today column he wrote a couple of days ago:

Minaya stepped in and ended all that dog-ate-my-budget bunk. The $53 million he spent on Pedro Martinez amounted to a wise investment, even though Pedro’s mummified remains find no place on the NLCS roster. Martinez gave the Mets something they had forever lacked: credibility. It only allowed them to land Carlos Beltran, Carlos Delgado, Billy Wagner and the rest.

That’s not plagiarism, but I think I know where he got the idea.

Take the time (lots of it at 12 pages) to read this story about elephants. It’s from the Times Magazine and it’s as good an editorial reporting piece as I have read in some time. Amazing story really. Two quotes worth quoting:

When an elephant dies, its family members engage in intense mourning and burial rituals, conducting weeklong vigils over the body, carefully covering it with earth and brush, revisiting the bones for years afterward, caressing the bones with their trunks, often taking turns rubbing their trunks along the teeth of a skull’s lower jaw, the way living elephants do in greeting. If harm comes to a member of an elephant group, all the other elephants are aware of it. This sense of cohesion is further enforced by the elaborate communication system that elephants use. In close proximity they employ a range of vocalizations, from low-frequency rumbles to higher-pitched screams and trumpets, along with a variety of visual signals, from the waving of their trunks to subtle anglings of the head, body, feet and tail. When communicating over long distances — in order to pass along, for example, news about imminent threats, a sudden change of plans or, of the utmost importance to elephants, the death of a community member — they use patterns of subsonic vibrations that are felt as far as several miles away by exquisitely tuned sensors in the padding of their feet.

Compared to this.

These were not isolated incidents. All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem. In the Indian state of Jharkhand near the western border of Bangladesh, 300 people were killed by elephants between 2000 and 2004. In the past 12 years, elephants have killed 605 people in Assam, a state in northeastern India, 239 of them since 2001; 265 elephants have died in that same period, the majority of them as a result of retaliation by angry villagers, who have used everything from poison-tipped arrows to laced food to exact their revenge. In Africa, reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from Zambia to Tanzania, from Uganda to Sierra Leone, where 300 villagers evacuated their homes last year because of unprovoked elephant attacks.

The things the author has to say about elephants themselves, the parallels in their society to our society, and our relationship to them, are pretty amazing without being overly sentimental or unreasonable.

This guy has a great meme about how newspapers should live online. A couple of quotes:

As Tim Rutten reports (and I pointed to yesterday), the LA Times has a monetary value of $2.5 billion and “a balance-sheet-engorging 20% margin”. So why does Wall Street hate it? Simple: Because newspapers are a rusty industry. They have tail fins. They print lists of readers every day on the obituary page. Worse, as a class they are resolutely clueless about how to adapt to a world that is increasingly networked and self-informing. And Wall Street knows that

[. . .]

I can’t find a single newspaper that doesn’t have a slow-loading, hard-to-navigate, crapped-up home page. These things are aversive, confusing and often useless beyond endurance. Simplify the damn things. Quit trying to “drive traffic” into a maze where every link leads to another route through of the same mess. You have readers trying to learn something, not cars looking for places to park.

The Denver Post drives me crazy. Unlike better.shorter, their articles don’t have permalinked pages when they are on the front page - new content. So, when an article comes out Monday and you look for it on Tuesday on google, it’s listed, but the link is dead. Until the crawlers can figure out where it’s actually located, you can’t find the story.

Furthermore, their search is dead broken. Here’s a link to a search for “Union Station.” Notice the top article. I don’t know how they are figuring this out, but the “F for Funding Article” is months old. Notice I can’t filter this AT ALL. What if I want it by date? Here’s a google news search for the same thing [adding the word Denver to make it smarter]. Notice I can sort by date AND relevance.

Notice another thing on that google link - the ads. Oh, wait, there aren’t any. That’s an amazing thing about google - they don’t always run ads. But think more about the Denver Post ads. They are always trying to sell us advertising in their paper. We only do in extrememly rare circumstances. Not because I don’t like the paper, but because advertising in that old format doesn’t work for us. But, I’d like to advertise online. The problem is, they run their online advertising just like their offline - they cram it all together. In the paper, real estate ads are all bundled together. It’s impossible to stand out. But, I’d gladly pay for contextual ads on the site (or in the paper!): our company name appears in an article? Run our ad. Downtown condos are discussed? Run our ad. A review of a restaurant in our neighborhood? Run our ad. Instead, I’ve got to advertise on this site. Animated GIFs? When was this site programmed, 1995? No way. Never. (Well, once, but I still feel dirty about it.)

And then, finally, there’s this: I wrote this post because Seth sent me to Eric who sent me to Doc. That’s four places it shows up. Newspapers can’t do that because they first have to know my fake e-mail address. For some reason, newspapers are still trying to get my e-mail address so they can sell it to some other idiot. Stop flippin’ registering me. It’s worthless information and it gets in the way.

Anyway, the modern online newspaper is dumb and sucks. Someone’s going to change it and that someone is going to make GooTube money

The Times had an article Sunday about the ongoing risk of in-flight collissions between aircraft. Ironically, they suggested that the more accurate in-flight positioning equipment becomes, the more risk. I started thinking about it, and I’ve got a simple question: why not just install cameras that can see in every direction out of the plane? Seriously, add the detection equipment, add the positioning equipment, and add the cameras, and you’ve got some pretty good safety.

Read this line, though, and know the Times‘ article is a little bit of a mountain out of a molehill:

The Brazilian crash was a milestone, Mr. Cox and other safety experts said. After tens of millions of flights, it was only the second midair crash involving two aircraft equipped with anti-collision systems.

On the other hand, I admire the aviation industry’s obsession with safety. Their goals seems to be perfection. If only others felt the same way.

This is a short post that was going to be a long post. I’m disobeying the rules in hopes that people will still read the link to this Time Magazine cover story. I had been working for a week collecting a whole series of links talking about how out of touch and bad the Republican leadership has become - the White House, Congress, the Party’s own leadership. But, I don’t need to post it now; you can read all about it in Time.

This will be the most important presidential election in decades for this reason: neither party has a direction. By the time the presidential season begins in earnest, each candidate will, for the first time in a long time, be setting the agenda for their party. That’s a good thing, because both parties currently have only one goal in mind: votes in Congress. The problem is neither knows what they’d vote for.

Hey, everyone. When you post, it seems better to me if you use the option to open a new page when linking out. I know I personally prefer as much.

ADDED: Also, please include a title for posts even if they are going into the shorter category. Those titles are used elsewhere.

ADDED AGAIN: Please remember on shorter posts that they should be further categorized. For example, Matt’s post on Georgia’s acceptance policies for football players is both “shorter” and “football.”

It’s time. The Vols visit Sanford this weekend for a battle of top 15 teams. Clemson’s got a huge one against . . . wait for it . . . an undefeated Wake Forest. South Carolina is going to play football, if you can call a game between the Gamecocks and Kentucky football.

A couple of quick football notes: the ACC isn’t as bad as everyone said. Five teams in the Top 25 and an undefeated team that’s not. No, we’re not the SEC, but we’re better than the WAC.

Also, the new clock rules suck - badly.

The Times has a great article about tailgating at Ole Miss. As usual, there’s a little bit of that “look at how cute the Southerners are” tone that the Grey Lady so often imports when writing about anything not northern. But, it’s also got a money line:

“We may not win every game,” she said. “But we’ve never lost a party.”

The New York Times has a fairly scary (if you’re running Congress or a voter) story about voter approval of Congress - it’s 25%. Turns out, there are probably three things that freak us out: The whole lot is too tied to special interests; nobody in Congress is doing anything, and there are not transformative issues moving through Congress.

The article has this to say, first:

The disdain for Congress is as intense as it has been since 1994, when Republicans captured 52 seats to end 40 years of Democratic control of the House and retook the Senate as well. It underlines the challenge the Republican Party faces in trying to hold on to power in the face of a surge in anti-incumbent sentiment.

But it also points out, importantly, that voters are not nearly as likely as they were in 1994 to sweep the Democrats into power as a result of the dissappointment. It doesn’t say much about that party. It also doesn’t say much about our prospects. It’s as if pollees are saying, we don’t like you, but we don’t like you either.

It’s ridiculous to me that, when combining these statistics, which clearly point to disappointment with the Republican Congressional leadership, and the President’s very low approval ratings, that the Democrats can’t get control.

Why can’t they? It’s number one above. To borrow a phrase from the departed Mr. Clinton: it’s the special interest groups, stupid. And, I really believe it is. Special interest groups, from all sides, seem to lead the conversation on everything. Each issue is handled individually rather than underneath a broad set of guidelines that lead either party. I’ve been trying to think of a term for these sets of guidelines and I believe I’ve come up with one: a platform.

Both parties used to have one: now neither does. In modern terms, we call platforms mission statements. Mission statements set a framework for all decisions. The Democrats have no framework; they’re merely not Republicans and a little freaky. The Republicans have a platform - control spending and lower taxes and secure us without engaging in endless war - two parts of which have been almost entirely abandoned under this leadership and this administration.

Can we get another option?

I’ve noticed a new phenomena on the news websites I read most: the most blogged/most read/most e-mailed list. The most read list means almost nothing to me. After all, the longer the CNN.com editors leave the story about Muslims burning the Pope’s likeness, the more people read it. Plus, the better the photo, the more likely I am to read a story.

On the other hand, it’s fascinating to watch the most-blogged list when compared to the most-e-mailed list. At the New York Times, they almost never include the same stories. I’ve even posted an image of the site, snapped right before I started writing this. There’s not one crossover story.  (And, I’m making this easy for you to see if you take the time to click on the preceding the link.)
I think it’s fair to think this way: the things people take the time to e-mail to their friends are the things that matter to them. The things people take the time to blog are the things that matter to them. Using the transitive property, I come to the conclusion that bloggers and the rest of the world don’t care about the same things.

Here are the five diggbait reasons I believe this to be the case:

1. Bloggers are political wonks; the rest of the world isn’t.
2. Bloggers spend too much time complaining about the same thing; the real world is ready to move on already.
3. Bloggers really like talking about the things their friends are talking about; the real world is tired of those cocktail parties.
4. Bloggers really to talk about controversies; the real world wants to talk about things that actually effect them.
5. Bloggers already already got into Princeton; the real world has sex and thus has to worry about getting their kids into Princeton.

Rory Stewart likes to walk. He’s got a background in foreign service. He’s a writer. Those three facts have led to two books: The Places in Between and The Prince of the Marshes. You can read an excerpt of the latter on Slate. I read the former.

Two weeks after the United States had successfully overthrown, Rory Stewart decided to walk across Afghanistan. He was, in essence, completing a walk across the entirety of the ancient world; he’d already walked across Iran and India and Pakistan and other places he clearly thinks are “cool”. And I suppose he’s right.

But, let’s be clear, walking is a slow, long process and doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a wonderful narrative arc. I’ll give credit to Stewart for this: he doesn’t impose false epiphanies on his book. There are very few emotional asides. There are few stretched metaphors between the reality he saw as he walked and the circumstances of the modern-day Afghanistan - with one exception.

The book does a wonderful job of creating a sense of place:

Herat that morning looked like an Iranian shantytown. Everything had been constructed hurriedly and recently. On the flat roofs of the half-finished shopping arcades, bare girders clustered like dead insect legs, and the walls were the same color as the sand drifts by the curb. This was the architecture of political Islam, representing its combination of Marxism and puritan theology with drab Soviet brick. Most of the men were dressed like provincial Iranians, in dirt-speckled black or faded brown. I did not like the city.

What’s most striking, and Stewart clearly intends to make this point, is just how different the world of Afghanis is from our own. In essence, Afghanistan is a brutal place. There is almost no electrical power throughout the country’s interior. The men are clearly and only in charge. Animals are abused. Gunplay is a part of every day life. The weather drives all of daily life. Everyone - everyone - lives in extreme poverty.

The one belabored metaphor in the book is between Stewart’s own walk and former ruler of Afghanistan, a guy named Bafur. Bafur took the same path sometime in the 14th Century. And he faced the same things. The point: nothing has changed.

It’s clear as Stewart walks that he’s not having much fun. In fact, whereas his walks across other parts of Mesopotamia were clearly highlighted by the hospitality of his hosts, here he just wants to finish. The book reads the same way; the last half of the book is merely about getting to the end.

I guess I know more about Afghanistan now, but I certainly didn’t read The Places in Between in one sitting. On the other hand, it was a book about a long walk; I’m not sure what I was expecting. Read it? Sure. I doubt you can find a better first person account of everyday Afghanistan.

Here’s another good test.  I want to see how a blockquote works.  So, here goes:

The durability of a cease-fire in Uganda’s Acholi war may depend on whether a rebel commander and his top deputies are given amnesty. Above, two children who were born in a refugee camp.

And then, I’m taking a look at the idea behind use the “code” tag:

We’ll see what we see.

So it continues from here.

In essence, does a photo show up? We’ll see, no?

This is the first post in the new life of b.s. We had a great run at blogger, but, to be completely honest, your author is tired of waiting on them to catch up. With the new launch of blogger, which requires that you host at blog.spot if you want any of the new functionality and has really lame templates (not to mention still doesn’t have categories), I thought we’d switch. So, I’m working on two things:

1. Porting b.s over to Wordpress (not really knowing what “porting” means).
2. Creating a nice, new, pretty design. Fun, no?

So, watch this space, as they say, cause it’s going to change a lot over the next few days. (That sounded like more than five people may even read this page.)

David Brooks, author of one of my favorite books, Bobos in Paradise, had an article in this past Sunday’s NY Times’ Magazine about how to rework the Republican Party considering a number of facts, the first of which is the title of the article: The Era of Small Government is Over.

If what is laid out here were indeed the basic tenets of any party, that party would be my party.

1. We need to strengthen nation-states. The great menace of the 20th century was overbearing and tyrannical governments. The great menace of the 21st century will be failed governments, because those are the places where our enemies will be able to harbor and thrive, where violence can nurture and grow, where life is nasty, brutish and short.

2. At home, the most obvious and daunting problem is runaway entitlement spending. Right now, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security consume 8 percent of U.S. G.D.P. By 2040 these programs will consume 17 percent….The solution is clear: push back the retirement age, reduce benefits for upper-income people, redesign the welfare state so that individuals have control over their own benefits packages.

3. America remains a remarkably mobile society, but at the bottom ends of the education and income scales, we’re seeing an ever-larger group of people unable to rise and succeed….Progressive conservatives understand that while culture matters most, government can alter culture. It has done it in bad ways, and it can do it in good ways.

4. People in the strong-government tradition do not believe in active government for the sake of active government, but for the sake of competition….Everybody understands that our budget and tax systems have become dishonorable, favoring the well connected, neglecting everybody else, breeding cynicism and sapping national morale. These systems will never be pure and pork-free. But every few years somebody has to come in and clean out the encrustations that inevitably develop.

5. Our current energy supplies are economically unsustainable and politically dangerous. For conservatives, the first task is to move the debate beyond its politically ruinous confines.

6. American society is now rife with forces that encourage people to think about their own success, to cultivate their own gardens, to segment themselves off into their own cultural cliques. There should be at least one moment in life when people are encouraged to serve a cause larger than self-interest, fuse their own efforts with those from other regions and other walks of life and cultivate a spirit of citizenship.