It seems that in 1989, Nintendo Power held a contest for artists, which was to design up their own "Nintendo" games. My brother and I should have entered that contest. I rememeber spending day upon day "making" Mega Man 5, and my brother did the same with a Mario 5. I think we got rid of both of them by now, truely a great shame.

The winner of this contest was Jeffrey Scott Campbell, of Aurora Colorado. His game, Lockarm, had a storyline such as what follows...

People applying to live in the Netherlands will have to take an examination to prove that they understand the language and culture, the government has proposed.

The test will require 350 hours of study and cost £250.

U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair plans to allow only people who speak English and have skills that are in demand to settle in Britain, after polls showed the public considers immigration rules to be too weak.

. . .

[The plan] sets out a four- tier system of points for those applying to work in Britain from outside the European Union. People who speak English and have skills in demand will be able to settle in the U.K., while unskilled workers and students won't be allowed to stay permanently.

For Bill Moyers, Grist, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune to allege that James Watt, as Secretary of the Interior, argued that "protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ" is an outrageous libel.

It's revealing, too, to trace the course of the libel over time. The Star Tribune relied on Bill Moyers, and printed a charge by him that, had the editors thought about the matter, they should have realized was ridiculous on its face. Moyers relied on his "favorite online environmental journal," Grist, which in turn relied on (and apparently embellished) a book by Austin Miles, a former circus ringmaster who became disillusioned with Christianity after an encounter with James Bakker. At no stage did any of these worthies think it necessary to do some fact-checking before besmirching the reputation of a former cabinet officer.

. . .

It would be possible, I suppose, for Bill Moyers to distort the truth and mischaracterize the words of others more baldly than he did in his Star Tribune op-ed, but it wouldn't be easy. One can only wonder what made Moyers think he could get away with such blatant misrepresentations. No, wait. It isn't hard to figure out after all. Moyers is just a year or two behind the times; he doesn't know about the blogosphere. Throughout Moyers' career, he was free to slander conservatives with impunity, knowing that there was no forum in thich their responses would ever be heard.

'No!' said Merry. 'It's no good "getting under cover". That is just what people have been doing, and just what these ruffians like. They will simply come down in force, corner us, and then drive us out, or burn us in. No, we have got to do something at once.'

'Do what?' said Pippin.

'Raise the Shire!' said Merry. 'Now! Wake all our people! They hate all this, you can see.... They just want a match, though, and they'll go up in fire.'

Bravo Iraq! For history, Jan. 30, 2005, is one magnificent day for Iraq and the Arab nation. Regardless of who won and who lost, the day should be a permanent fixture on the Arab calendar forever. I don’t want to talk politics; I simply want to celebrate history.

In spite of everything, the Iraqis voted. They did so with a passion and a seriousness that gives the lie to the cliché that Arabs are not ready for democracy. One myth down, a thousand to go.

Everyone says that this is the first free elections in Iraq for fifty years. That is another lie. There has never been one single free election in the long history of the Arabs ever. This is the first one.

It took the Americans to conduct it and force it down the throats of dictators, terrorists, exploding deranged humans, and odds as big as the distance between the USA and the Middle East.

British guns and soldiers were in the area for so long yet did not care to look at the people.

They waltzed with people Gerty and Lawrence (their colonial spies) baptized and were happy to see the nations slip into slavery.

Likewise, the French could not bring themselves to see that the Arabs were good enough to cast a vote. And even when it happened in Algeria, the French orchestrated a putsch to annul it.

On Sunday America vindicated itself to all doubters, including me. They delivered on the promise of an election, so I am sure they will deliver on the promise of withdrawal.

. . .

Perhaps in the coming weeks we will take issue with America again. But for today, I am celebrating by having a McDonald’s. I hate fast food, but for this day I will make an exception.

To the growing frustration and annoyance of Microsoft's management, Apple Computer's iPod is wildly popular among Microsoft's workers.

"About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music player have an iPod," said one source, a high-level manager who asked to remain anonymous. "It's pretty staggering."

The source estimated 80 percent of Microsoft employees have a music player -- that translates to 16,000 iPod users among the 25,000 who work at or near Microsoft's corporate campus. "This irks the management team no end," said the source.

So popular is the iPod, executives are increasingly sending out memos frowning on its use.

. . .

"These guys are really quite scared," said the source of Microsoft's management. "It shows how their backs are against the wall.... Even though it's Microsoft, no one is interested in what we have to offer, even our own employees."

By now, you might have even voted against George Bush -- a second time -- to register your disapproval.

But after watching Sunday's election in Iraq and seeing the first clear sign that freedom really may mean something to the Iraqi people, you have to be asking yourself: What if it turns out Bush was right, and we were wrong?

It's hard to swallow, isn't it?

. . .

Obviously, I'm still curious to see if Bush is willing to allow the Iraqis to install a government that is free to kick us out or to oppose our other foreign policy efforts in the region.

So is the rest of the world.

For now, though, I think we have to cut the president some slack about a timetable for his exit strategy.

If it turns out Bush was right all along, this is going to require some serious penance.

Maybe I'd have to vote Republican in 2008.

Jon Stewart, late in the Daily Show last night to Newsweek pundit Fareed Zakaria: "I’ve watched this thing unfold from the start and here’s the great fear that I have: What if Bush, the president, ours, has been right about this all along? I feel like my world view will not sustain itself and I may, and again I don’t know if I can physically do this, implode. (Hat tip: David Frum).

UPDATE: Tim Blair has more sightings of people starting to exit the "reality-based community" and re-enter actual reality.

2003; the year of freedom.
Before you I was mute, and here goes my tongue praying for the best,
Before you I was hand-cuffed, and here are my hands free to write,
Before you my mind was tied to one thought and here I find wide horizons and greater thoughts,
Before you I was isolated, and here I join the wide universe.
I will never forget you; you broke the chains for my people, and rid us from the big jail.

"Yes, we still face explosions, kidnapping and killing. But already the new Iraq is better even when we don’t have bread.

"We don’t have water, but we are happy. Electricity - no. But we’re better off because under Saddam no one respected us - and today they do. That’s more important than bread or water or electricity."

All the media keeps talking about is how happy the Iraqis are, how high turnout was, and how "freedom" has spread to Iraq. I had to turn off CNN because they kept focusing on the so-called "voters" and barely mentioned the resistance movements at all. Where are the freedom fighters today? Are their voices silenced because some American puppets cast a few ballots?

I can't believe the Iraqis are buying into this "democracy" bullshit...

UPDATE: Tim Blair's coverage makes for reassuring reading. Except if you're one of the Leftern naysayers, though. I keep thinking that if they had any sense or honor they'd be wallowing in introspection and shame today, but... I guess we all know better than that.

I'm of the opinion that the modern Left loves to reverently invoke WW2
because its a safe way to claim they're not complete weaklings when it comes
to national defense and related issues. See, they can say, we were all for
fighting Hitler!

It also doesn't hurt that the Nazis were/are the perfect foes for the Left,
whose hivemind is notoriously emotion-ruled. Hitler and the gang were
downright demonic - right out of Central Casting - and made to order.

Also, hating the Nazis and celebrating their destruction in the post-1945
period was the safest thing one could do. In the past 200 years, no regime
has ever been so as destroyed, scattered, vilified and comprehensively
liquidated as that of the Third Reich. Hell, even the most recent
Euro-conqueror before Hitler - Napoleon - escaped with his life and one of
Nappy's "Feldmarschalls" founded a royal dynasty in Sweden! The
Swastikettes, on the other hand, were hung, shot, driven to suicide or
chased to the ends of the Earth.

GOOD, says I. But the point is that dancing on the grave of Nazism and
idolizing the war that dug that grave was a pretty risk-free political
endeavor after WW2. Very little chance that Otto Skorzeny was going to show
up at your door with a Luger.

Being comprehensively opposed to tyranny - you know, like a true classical
liberal - was another kettle of fish entirely. As we both know, a regime
just as bad as Hitler's survived the war and its bloodsoaked leaders mostly
died in bed (unless killed by each other or by Stalin, the worst snake in
the nest). Add to this the decades-long, collective blowjob administered by
"progressives" to the Soviet State and the right-thinking Liberal has a real
dilemma.

Solution? More WW2 nostalgia, please. Big Red was an ally, the eee-vil Nazis
were the foe, and everything was ideologically comfortable.

Also note the prevalence of the European theater over the Pacific - even
though we fought the Japanese for longer than the Germans. There's also that
messy Atom Bomb thing. And the far less snappy uniforms of the Japs. :)

In the course of history, Manichaeism was ruthlessly eradicated as an heretical, ungodly doctrine. When looking at demographic statistics, however, one might think that the populations in developed countries have converted en masse to Manichaeism and decided to become extinct. The birth rate in most western countries has fallen bellow replacement level.

In the so-called "New Europe", the situation is even gloomier. According to UN projections, Latvia will lose 44 percent of its population by 2050 as a result of demographic trends. In Estonia, the population is expected to shrink by 52 percent, in Bulgaria 36 percent, in Ukraine 35 percent, and in Russia 30 percent. In comparison with these figures, the projected population decline in Italy (22 percent), the Czech Republic (17 percent), Poland (15 percent) or Slovakia (8 percent) looks like a small decrease. France and Germany will lose relatively little population, and the population of the United Kingdom will even see a slight growth -- thanks to immigrants.

. . .

Today, children no longer represent investments; instead, they have become pets - objects of luxury consumption. However, the pet market segment is very competitive. It is characteristic that the birth rate decline in the 1980s, and especially in the 1990s, was accompanied by soaring numbers of dog-owners in cities. While in the past dog-owners were predominantly retirees, today there are many young couples that have consciously decided to have a dog instead of a baby. These are mainly young professionals who have come to a conclusion (whether right or wrong) that they lack either time or money to have a child. Thus, they invest their emotional surpluses into animals.

Still, both day-to-day experience and the media frequently suggest that the quality of life enjoyed in the United States and Europe is under threat by population growth. Sprawling suburban development is making traffic worse, driving taxes up, and reducing opportunities to enjoy nature. Televised images of developing-world famine, war, and environmental degradation prompt some to wonder, "Why do these people have so many kids?" Immigrants and other people's children wind up competing for jobs, access to health care, parking spaces, favorite fishing holes, hiking paths, and spots at the beach. No wonder that, when asked how long it will take for world population to double, nearly half of all Americans say 20 years or less.

Yet a closer look at demographic trends shows that the rate of world population growth has fallen by more than 40 percent since the late 1960s. And forecasts by the UN and other organizations show that, even in the absence of major wars or pandemics, the number of human beings on the planet could well start to decline within the lifetime of today's children. Demographers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis predict that human population will peak (at 9 billion) by 2070 and then start to contract. Long before then, many nations will shrink in absolute size, and the average age of the world's citizens will shoot up dramatically. Moreover, the populations that will age fastest are in the Middle East and other underdeveloped regions. During the remainder of this century, even sub-Saharan Africa will likely grow older than Europe is today.

. . .

Some biologists now speculate that modern humans have created an environment in which the "fittest," or most successful, individuals are those who have few, if any, children. As more and more people find themselves living under urban conditions in which children no longer provide economic benefit to their parents, but rather are costly impediments to material success, people who are well adapted to this new environment will tend not to reproduce themselves. And many others who are not so successful will imitate them.

So where will the children of the future come from? The answer may be from people who are at odds with the modern environment -- either those who don't understand the new rules of the game, which make large families an economic and social liability, or those who, out of religious or chauvinistic conviction, reject the game altogether.

And the real issue isn't homelessness. It's insanity. The laws in this country make it impossible to commit and help even the obviously and often the dangerously insane.

I say that One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is as much at fault as any politician, for it made the institution frightening and the people who run it bad guys.

Johnny Carson died.

We used to watch him when we were little.

It was hard staying up that late, but when we did, we were happy.

Even though we didn't know why.

And though we didn't know it at the time,

He shaped our lives.

Thank you & Goodnight.

Johnny Carson
[1925-2005]

We're sure "The Tonight Show" will air plenty of
Johnny Carson clips this evening.

But "The Tonight Show" hasn't been "The Tonight Show" since
Johnny retired.

The REAL "Tonight Show" is "The Late Show".

Hosted by a fellow named David Letterman.

The ideas and opinions expressed in this bump complely reflect those
of [adult swim]... and you, the viewers.

What I’m staring at on the lawn is the outcome of this process of innovation: a Segway with four wheels. Seems like a pretty natural product-line extension. Field is the first to acknowledge that the Centaur has a tremendous amount of HT DNA—the entire base, stuffed with tilt sensors and gyroscopes that allow it to balance, is an HT. But, he adds, it was hardly as simple as adding two more wheels. The steering, for example, is part mechanical, part drive-by-wire. Two sensors in the steering column calculate speed (from the throttle) and angle of turn (from the handlebar) and send the data to computers in the base. Integrating that information with readings from the tilt sensors and gyros, control boards adjust the speed of the independent rear wheel motors 100 times a second to keep the machine upright.

UPDATE: I'm informed by a British friend that this ad was produced under contract for VW, but was rejected (gasp!) and never broadcast.

Too bad. (I wonder if it was the same agency that did the SportKa spots.) I was all set to be forever in awe of the British advertising agency as one of those cultural treasures that must at all costs be preserved for posterity.

The European Union has warned the food industry it has a year to stop advertising junk food to children and improve its product labeling, or it may face legislation, the Financial Times reported in its online edition.

Markos Kyprianou, EU health and consumer affairs commissioner, told the newspaper that urgent action was needed to tackle a growing obesity problem in Europe, particularly among the young.

Kyprianou said self-regulation in the food industry was preferred, but he warned that the European commission would legislate if progress proved disappointing.

"The signs from the industry are very encouraging, very positive," Kyprianou said.

"But if this doesn't produce satisfactory results, we will proceed to legislation."

A single case can be illuminating, especially when it is statistically banal—in other words, not at all exceptional. Yesterday, for example, a 21-year-old woman consulted me, claiming to be depressed. She had swallowed an overdose of her antidepressants and then called an ambulance.

There is something to be said here about the word "depression," which has almost entirely eliminated the word and even the concept of unhappiness from modern life. Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one's state of mind, or one's mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one's life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct.

A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is willfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place. I have therefore come to see that one of the most important tasks of the doctor today is the disavowal of his own power and responsibility. The patient's notion that he is ill stands in the way of his understanding of the situation, without which moral change cannot take place. The doctor who pretends to treat is an obstacle to this change, blinding rather than enlightening.

UPDATE: On the other hand, this fisking by Tim Blair of a D.C. columnist wandering in bewilderment through Red-State America and hearing the impossibly sensible warm tales of life in the land of responsibility—and concluding, of course, that such a thing can only exist in association with intense racism and bigotry—is worth reading too. I sure hope that this reassurance that the journalist musingly gives himself makes his city life seem less, well, unhappy.

THE billionaire co-founder of the computer giant Apple is offering one of his homes for free to anyone who can afford to dismantle the 35-room mansion and remove it from his San Francisco estate.

When Steve Jobs bought the sprawling house two decades ago, he planned to tear down the building he describes as "an abomination" and to redevelop the land, but he had not reckoned on the strength of feeling among conservationists, who lobbied to save the 17,000sq ft red tile and stucco mansion, arguing it should be protected as a listed building.

The computer mogul finally struck a deal with planning officials, who ruled he could demolish the building, but only if he first tried to entice someone to relocate it.

. . .

Of the house’s original owner, Mr Jobs said: "He was a very wealthy man. Unfortunately, he didn’t have very good taste."

More on "The UNcredibles": WFP (World Food Program) has "arrived" in the capital with an "assessment and coordination team." The following is no joke; no Diplomad attempt to be funny or clever: The team has spent the day and will likely spend a few more setting up their "coordination and opcenter" at a local five-star hotel. And their number one concern, even before phones, fax and copy machines? Arranging for the hotel to provide 24hr catering service. USAID folks already are cracking jokes about "The UN Sheraton." Meanwhile, our military and civilians, working with the super Aussies, continue to keep the C-130 air bridge of supplies flowing and the choppers flying, and keep on saving lives -- and without 24hr catering services from any five-star hotel . . . . The contrast grows more stark every minute.

I provided this to some USAID colleagues working in Indonesia and their heads nearly exploded. The first paragraph is quite simply a lie. The UN is taking credit for things that hard-working, street savvy USAID folks have done. It was USAID working with their amazing network of local contacts who scrounged up trucks, drivers, and fuel; organized the convoy and sent it off to deliver critical supplies. A UN “air-freight handling centre” in Aceh? Bull! It's the Aussies and the Yanks who are running the air ops into Aceh. We have people working and sleeping on the tarmac in Aceh, surrounded by bugs, mud, stench and death, who every day bring in the US and Aussie C-130s and the US choppers; unload, load, send them off. We have no fancy aid workers' retreat -- notice the priorities of the UN? People are dying and what's the first thing the UN wants to do? Set up "a camp for relief workers" one that would be "fully self-contained, with kitchen, food, lodging, everything."

The UN is a sham.

After those, and many other, experiences, we finally comprehended how little we had in common with these “peace activists” who constantly decried American crimes, and hated to listen to us talk about the terrible long nightmare that ended with the collapse of the regime.  We came to understand how these “humanitarians” experienced a sort of pleasure when terrorists or former remnants of the regime created destruction in Iraq—just so they could feel that they were right, and the Americans wrong! 

Worse, we realized it was hopeless to make them grasp our feelings.  We believed—and still believe--that America’s removal of the regime opened a new way for democracy.  At the same time, we have no illusions that the U.S. came to Iraq on a white horse to save our people.  We understand this war is all about national interests, and that America’s interests are mainly about defeating terrorism.  At this moment, though, U.S. interests are doing more to bring about democracy and freedom in Iraq than, say, the policies of France and Russia—countries which also care little for the Iraqi people and, worse, did their best to save Saddam from destruction until the last moment. 

It’s worth noting, as well, that the general attitude of peace activists I met was tension and anger.  They were impossible to reason with.  This was because, on one hand, the sometimes considerable risks they took to oppose the war made them unable to accept the fact that their cause was not as noble as they believed.  Then, too, their dogmatic anti-American attitudes naturally drew them to guides, translators, drivers and Iraqi acquaintances who were themselves supporters of the regime. These Iraqis, in turn, affected the peace activists until they came to share almost the same judgments and opinions as the terrorists and defenders of Saddam.

The EcoBot II uses human sewage as bait to catch the insects. It then digests the flies, before their exoskeletons are turned into electricity, which enables the robot to function.

Bacteria in the sewage eats the flies' soft tissues, which releases enzymes that break down the hardened shell.

Sugar molecules released from the broken-down shell are then absorbed and used as energy by the bacteria.

"The robot then has the energy to carry out some example tasks which in this case include moving towards light, measuring temperature. It has a temperature sensor. It could be anything, but we have chosen temperature," Melhuish said.

"Then it transmits that temperature information over a radio link to a base station a couple of meters away and it does that all using the energy from insect or plant material."

UPDATE: Oh, and incidentally, the Evil Corporations have all just joined the party. KCBS just rattled off a list of names including Pfizer, the Citi Group, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Meyers-Squibb, and about ten others, each of whom was donating $3 to $10 million. That just about leaves any government's pledge in the dust, and makes even the Amazon.com thing seem like small change.

For what it's worth.

UPDATE: Here's the list. And Tim Blair has a roundup of contributions and fundraising efforts from all over the world, including the latest news and anecdotal stories of heroism.

UPDATE: It's become quite an illustrative phenomenon too. Seriously—I don't wanna hear anyone argue, in the face of this phenomenon, that a country that tries to keep taxes low promotes greed and stinginess among its citizens.

Bobby: This is like Pong. Everybody thought it was amazing and good, but now we're just thinking, "Oh, it's only a good loading screen for Test Drive."

Dillon: And to think 20 years from now, people are going to think, "Oh, you're playing [GameCube Zelda game] Wind Waker? That's boring."

EGM: What will you say when your kids say Wind Waker looks boring?

Parker: Get out of my house. You're out of my will.

But what makes me angry was Kerry and his gang's inability to take advantage of the situation. I may regret saying this later, but fuck it -- they should be lined up and shot. There's no reason they should've lost to this joker.

UPDATE: Dean Esmay unloads in a similar vein.

UPDATE: I guess I should also note that my erstwhile Correspondent, dialogue with whom I've chronicled here from time to time (the "massacring people" link above), mentioned as proof of the Hitlerian evil of the Bush administration that at one time he and his friends were questioned by the Secret Service after a Web forum discussion in which they voiced their hope that Bush should get a fatal disease and die. (He was sketchy on details; the fact that he's alternately described them as the "Secret Service" and the "CIA" at different times makes me wonder exactly what happend and how much he's simply hoping to make hay from a relatively painless ordeal.)

I had to point out to him that the Secret Service doesn't have a sense of humor about things like that and never has. Back when I was working at my local ISP in 1996, stories circulated about (for example) a 12-year-old kid who sent a prank e-mail to president@whitehouse.gov, only to end up with the Secret Service shadowing his family's house for the next two weeks. As I said to him, You made threats against the President in a public forum, and you're surprised that the Secret Service got on your case?

Some people just don't think twice about whether their actions might have consequences... and when given a reminder that they live in the real world, where there are rules about civil discourse, suddenly it's a Gestapo sighting.

That's why I have a hard time getting into these discussions anymore unless I've established to my satisfaction that the person is willing to be mature and thoughtful about expressing their side, not merely bleating about Halliburton and Karl Rove, or reciting Michael Moore factoids and mangled Ann Coulter quotes and then standing their smirking with their arms folded, firm in their conviction of rightness.

UPDATE: The Armchair Philosopher wrote along these lines a couple of weeks ago:

The idea that I’ve been playing with is that many of my Left-leaning/pacifist/social-justice friends see most social interactions primarily in terms of power, coercion, and exploitation. The basis for this idea is that these folks often use coercion metaphors to describe individual and collective social situations that many other perspectives regard as quite benign. What got me thinking was a friend’s comment that this blog’s lack of a comment feature “forced” her to do something she didn’t really want to do: respond to one of my posts on her blog (which is not argument-oriented) rather than in a comment. Now, I’m sure that my friend was joking — but even so, the metaphor stood out to me. It would never occur to me to even joke about my comments policy “forcing” anyone to do anything — I think about my feedback policy primarily in economic metaphors, not power metaphors.

Excellent observations here, including illustrations of the labor-theory versus the free-market philosophies, in terms that are hard to argue. (Mountain Dew should figure in all theorems.)

Undiscussed is the side of the coin that describes actual violent events—the two sides in the illustration continue to use different vocabularies to describe war. We talk about Iraq as being about "liberation", the "removal" of Saddam, the march of "freedom" and "democracy"—idealistic and sanitized words that can obscure the very real horrors of the battlefield. But the Left, in protesting it, goes beyond the obvious war vocabulary into metaphors such as "rape" and "stealing [oil]" and "Crusades"—religious, criminological, and sexual metaphors intended to make war out even worse than it is, by ascribing it the same kinds of anthromorphized malevolence as Steinbeck did in describing the overcultivation of the parched land in The Grapes of Wrath.

If there's a unifying theme here, it might be that whereas the one side sees the world as a collection of systems—self-sustaining, self-healing, occasionally klunky or kludgey but usually elegant systems—the other side thrives on personifying all acts as macrocosms of human behavior, with all the faults of the individual human projected onto our institutions and humanity as a whole.

I guess both views are necessary. Otherwise we might, I don't know, kick over our country's pillars and rape the foundations on our way to the troughs of the corporate luncheon where we feast upon the carcasses of the workers of the world and plot the kidnapping of innocent youths to send as fresh blood to lubricate our war machine.

UPDATE: Hmm. Do you suppose there's something to this idea, that conservatives see the world as being comprised of "systems" that are beyond human construction—either by divine design, or by natural law—and that liberals, i.e. "humanists", see the world as being comprised of human constructs, and thus is subject at a macroscopic level to all the weaknesses of the human mind?

Twalk amongst yourselves!

This thin-skinned grievance-collecting gives birth to all sorts of urban legends and rumors about big institutions being hostile to Christ's birthday, such as the one that swirled on WOR radio last week about how Macy's employees had been instructed not to say "Merry Christmas!" to shoppers. A fiction that was put to rest when the host hit Macy's website and saw its "Merry Christmas" greeting, and Macy's employees chimed in over the phones to say there was no such policy.

UPDATE: Lileks says this:

In a sense, blogging is so 2004. The next big thing will be videoblogs. You can fit a rudimentary TV studio in a suitcase -- a laptop, a camcorder, a few cables, and a nearby Starbucks with Wi-Fi you can leech onto to upload your reports. This too will be good. One hundred thousand pairs of eyes looking high and low, versus CBS' staring monocular orb. We'll all turn to the nets to see what they think we should think. And then we'll hit the blogs for the rest of the story.

Hmm. I keep hearing the big guys confidently predicting the rise of the videoblog; but I'm not so sure, frankly. Looking at it from a user-interface standpoint, what's the benefit of video over text? You get pictures and sound and a much richer view of what you're looking at. But what are the intractable downsides? You have to direct and edit video, for one—a badly edited video is way harder to watch than a clunky, confused essay like mine above. Text is just naturally much easier to digest, too, than even the best-edited video. If your mind wanders and you miss a sentence of what someone says in video, it's a pain to go grab the scroll knob and roll it back an indeterminate few seconds to listen to it again, and that's not counting rebuffering and video codecs and all that rot. In text, all you have to do is flick your eye back to the previous line.

And more importantly, when it's text, you can visit a blog and within two seconds know whether there are new posts or not, and within five seconds know whether the new posts are worth reading. You can skim a headline instantly. What's the equivalent ease you get with video? Um, none. You have to watch the thing in order to see what it's about, how long it will take to see it, whether it contains any information you'll find useful, and so on. How many TV news reports have you watched where you got to the end and the reporter said, "Back to you, Diane," without covering anything you were actually hoping to see? You've wasted five minutes. If it were a text blog, it would have taken you a sip and a half of Diet Coke and a stroke of the scrollwheel to process the same information. Not to mention that it probably took the author 1/1000th of the time and effort to produce it. Whence the vaunted immediacy of blog debate once it's all video? How long would it have taken a bunch of videobloggers to break the Rathergate story? A long bloody time, and much fewer people would have had the patience to pay attention to it, let alone do the actual work. Video can't achieve critical mass the way text can and has, in everything from the explosion of e-mail and the Web on forward. Text is the low-tech, low-barrier-to-entry equivalent of papyrus in the CD-ROM age: unsexy, but it'll always work, even after the power grid fails and we're all eating each other in the desert.

Besides, how are you supposed to quote a videoblog? Let's see anyone deny that quoting and cross-linking and fisking is the very heart and soul of blogging. How is that even possible with video? Think how many fiskings there would be of Fahrenheit 9/11 if it'd been text; the only big one we have is the result of one man's obsessive job at deconstructing and transcribing the points of the video into a much more malleable medium, text. Maybe I'm stubbornly refusing to be visionary enough to imagine the stream-of-consciousness, effortlessly editable VR World of Tomorrow, but video and text haven't materially changed in decades, as far as their consumption goes; I can't see that changing anytime soon. Meanwhile, text remains far more flexible and can be molded to the whims of anyone, reader or writer, hence the equalizing nature of the blog where there's essentially no disconnect between the blogger and the discourse in his comments. Once the blogger becomes a director, his readers and fellow bloggers can't respond in kind anymore. And the whole essence of blogging's collaborative nature is lost.

And let's not even get into trying to do a Google search on something someone said in a videoblog. I'll leave that as an exercise for the, um, reader.

I'm skeptical, in short, of the claims so commonly issued by Glenn and the like that videoblogging will inevitably take the place of text blogging, that it will open up huge new realms of discourse and so on. I'm sorry, but looking at it from the standpoint of an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the medium itself, I just don't see it. It's like how I can't quite see an iTunes for movies; the medium isn't as much of a slam-dunk. It takes a lot more shoehorning to make it fit. The discrete pieces of media aren't in such perfect, bite-sized chunks, and lack the natural, built-in organizing criteria we've come to know and love. There are benefits, but they only qualify it as an adjunct to the real steamroller of a medium that we already have, not as a new medium in itself.

We'll undoubtedly see more people posting videos, often very good ones, to support their existing text columns and blogs. But can you seriously, honestly, picture going to a blog on a daily basis whose only content was a QuickTime/WMV window that you had to click Play on to see what it had to show you today?

UPDATE: But then, "A Very Venture Christmas" seems to have been inspired by the same muse—and yet it's funny...

Marxism foresees that era coming as a natural consequence of capital accumulation and the fore-ordained group behavior of mass classes. Classical libertarians -- harking to the resentful Look-Back view -- prescribe removing government shackles that currently prevent the natural flowering of markets. Simply toppling the sin of government excess will begin the era of explicit contracts and true individual liberty.
 
Ah, but then there's Cheerful Libertarianism. (Or perhaps it should be called Maturationalism. Under this Look-Forward zeitgeist, the future era of freedom will come about for one simple reason.
 
Because if we make a future world in which all children grow up healthy and well educated and free-minded, they will naturally, and of their own free will, choose a society free of coercion. Because that is what any person in his or her own right mind would want!
 
Mature, knowledgeable and satiable people will tend to approach the near-ideal society of our fairy tale from nearly any starting point, since almost any unafraid adult will deem it the only decent way to live. Absence of fear is key, persuading individuals to forsake ruthless predation in favor of fair competition.

UPDATE: Um, well, and there's also the business about propaganda in the form of popular movies that extol conformity and destiny and fitting in, and how few of them there are. Brin explicitly points out one counterexample, and uses it as a major part of his thesis: The Lord of the Rings. But I got The Best anonymous e-mail:

I suppose if there was such a movie, and it turned out to be one we all
really liked but which had never really considered in this context, it would
be a little embarassing.

And if the counterexample was the single most important movie in someone's
life, like "The Lion King," that would be really bad.

Okay, yeah, wise guy. Come over here and say that...

The sudden appearance of Zakaria Zubeidi, the 29-year-old militant leader, and at least 20 of his armed men embarrassed the head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the body that administers Palestinian refugee camps.

Weapons are banned in the camps, but during four years of violence, armed gangs have taken control, building their reputations through deadly attacks on Israelis. The unarmed Palestinian police have been shunted aside.

Zubeidi, West Bank head of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a violent group linked to the ruling Fatah party, strode to the gate of the compound housing U.N. agency offices, passing signs on a fence showing the silhouette of a gun with a red line through it.

After a brief argument with a guard, he checked in his M-16 assault rifle with telescopic sight and walked in — a pistol clearly visible on his hip.

“Of course I don’t condone it, but it’s a fact of life,” UNRWA head Peter Hansen told The Associated Press, referring to the violation of the no-arms rule. “Look around the camp. We can’t stop it — we don’t have guns.”

What american beauty illustrates, with extraordinary clarity, is that rebelling against mass society is not the same thing as rebelling against consumer society. Through his rebellion, Lester goes from being right-angle square to dead cool. This is reflected in his consumption choices. Apart from the new car, he develops a taste for very expensive marijuana—$2,000 an ounce, we are told, and very good. “This is all I ever smoke,” his teenaged dealer assures him. Welcome to the club, where admission is restricted to clients with the most discriminating taste. How is this any different from Frasier and Niles at their wine club?

What we need to see is that consumption is not about conformity, it’s about distinction. People consume in order to set themselves apart from others. To show that they are cooler (Nike shoes), better connected (the latest nightclub), better informed (single-malt Scotch), morally superior (Guatemalan handcrafts), or just plain richer (bmws).

The problem is that all of these comparative preferences generate competitive consumption. “Keeping up with the Joneses,” in today’s world, does not always mean buying a tract home in the suburbs. It means buying a loft downtown, eating at the right restaurants, listening to obscure bands, having a pile of Mountain Equipment Co-op gear and vacationing in Thailand. It doesn’t matter how much people spend on these things, what matters is the competitive structure of the consumption. Once too many people get on the bandwagon, it forces the early adopters to get off, in order to preserve their distinction. This is what generates the cycles of obsolescence and waste that we condemn as “consumerism.”

UPDATE: CapLion takes firm exception to the article's attitude toward SUVs and other luxury items. It's clear that the author is no great fan of conspicuous consumption, but I'm not convinced he's agitating for an end to bourgeois commercial culture. His explanation of the capitalist model is without antagonism. It's more a sort of weary indulgence, coupled with an energetic defense against a common misunderstanding of what capitalism requires. True, I'm not sure what to make of that business at the end about legislating away advertising-spawned brand fetishes. But I still think the article fires home some fine points about those who think themselves superior to the "masses" for having bought into the prepackaged and branded rejection of branding.

Just because you're an academic without a consistent point doesn't make you a commie; neither does being a ne'er-do-well intoxicated world-traveling artiste mean you're incapable of gleaning a culture for yourself from the branded mainstream. See this awesome interview with Tony Millionaire of Maakies fame for an illustration of what I mean: a hippie who doesn't get why his interviewer thinks he should be contrite for weeping over Family Circus or having had a hand in Reagan bombing Libya.

(Seriously. Go read it. And read the strip, too, if you like crude scatological comic strips straight out of the 30s featuring absolutely exquisite pen-and-ink background art of pirate ships and flower gardens. I don't understand it at all, but I know what I hate... and I don't hate this.)

Escaping the stress of clogged roads, street violence and loss of faith in Holland's once celebrated way of life, the Dutch middle classes are leaving the country in droves for the first time in living memory.

The new wave of educated migrants are quietly voting with their feet against a multicultural experiment long touted as a model for the world, but increasingly a warning of how good intentions can go wrong.

Australia, Canada and New Zealand are the pin-up countries for those craving the great outdoors and old-fashioned civility.

. . .

More people left the Netherlands in 2003 than arrived, ending a half-century cycle of surging immigration that has turned a tight-knit Nordic tribe into a multi-ethnic mosaic with three million people of foreign roots out of 16 million. Almost one million are Muslims, mostly Turks and Moroccan-Berbers. In Rotterdam, 47 per cent of the city's population is of foreign origin. While asylum claims have plunged, the exodus is accelerating, reaching 13,313 net outflow in the first half of 2004. Many retiring workers are moving to the south of France, but a growing bloc leaving the country appears to be educated, working families.

. . .

Ellen, 43, a lawyer and banker who votes for the free-market Liberals, said the code of behaviour regulating daily life in the Netherlands was breaking down.

"People no longer know what to expect from each other. There are so many rules, but nobody sticks to them. They just do as they want. They just execute people on the streets, it's shocking when you see this for the first time," she said. "We've become so tolerant that everybody thinks they can fight their own wars here. Van Gogh is killed, and then people throw bombs at mosques and churches. It's escalating because the police and the state aren't doing anything about it.

"There's a feeling of injustice that if you do things right, if you work hard and pay your taxes, you're punished, and those who don't are rewarded. People can come and live here illegally and get payments. How is that possible?

"We didn't think about how we should integrate people, to make sure that we actually talk to each other and know each other, instead of living in ghettoes with different rules.

"It's not why we are leaving: the reason is that Australia feels different, it feels like a place where we would like to grow old," she said.

As I write, I am looking at a Christmas brochure for Channel 4. It contains an interview with Paul Abbott, author of the "current hit show, Shameless". Clever Paul swears a lot, and proudly tells a story about how, when his brothers held him upside down to help him steal a Christmas tree from his Yugoslav next door neighbour, he was so frightened that he started urinating. Ha ha.

There follows a two-page pictorial spread of Paul's characters, the Gallaghers, having their Christmas lunch. The tableau is presented (sub-Buñuel) as a parody of the Last Supper. (Do Paul Abbott and Channel 4 believe, perhaps, that this took place at Christmas?) The first page shows a line of yobs - mimicking the Apostles - beginning their meal in reasonably good order. The second depicts them towards its end, violent and drunk. The "Jesus" figure is lurching forward, halo awry, beer can in one hand and cigarette in the other.

The natural inclination of Christians in the face of such affronts is anger. But would it really be a better society in which silly, urinating Mr Abbott could go to prison for such a thing, and perhaps the bosses of Channel 4 with him? Before lots of respectable readers shriek "Yes!", think what it means.

Why is it that so many people resent religion and turn against it? Surely it is because of its coercive force, its tendency to mistake the worldly power of its priests and mullahs for justified zeal for the truth. It is not God who turns people away, but what people do in the name of God. If a law against religious hatred is passed, even when blessed by St David Blunkett, the natural consequence will be a rise in the hatred of religion.

Particularly hatred of Islam. The BNP website describes Islam in the hands of some of its adherents as "less a religion and more a magnet for psychopaths and a machine for conquest". If a law says they can't say that, the BNP will, in the minds of many, be proved right. On Tuesday, Mr Blunkett said that it would be illegal to claim that "Muslims are a threat to Britain". People already censor themselves through fear of Muslim reaction to mockery - I don't suppose even brave, incontinent, foul-mouthed Paul Abbott would write a comedy for the start of Ramadan showing Mohammed downloading dubious images from the internet. If the law criminalises such activity, the scope for resentment is huge.

UPDATE: I suppose it should go without saying that I'm getting mighty sick of that "Christmahanukwanzakah" ad by Virgin Mobilantic Wirelessgalactic or whatever. It's trying to be funny, I know, but it just ends up being just as patronizing as the stuff it's trying to parody.

UPDATE: Don't miss this article on Chanukah and why it's obtuse and a little bit demeaning to defer to it in the way we do with our All Cultures Have Their Own Christmas season.

UPDATE: Heh. Now this is more like it. (Thanks to Keith H.)

“But aren't the Marines terribly Southern?” asked one perplexed mother while standing next to me at the brunch following graduation. “What a waste, he was such a good student,” said another parent. One parent (a professor at a nearby and rather famous university) spoke up at a school meeting and suggested that the school should “carefully evaluate what went wrong.”

UPDATE: Naturally, Tim Blair's commenters have gone to town on the subject of precious childhood memories...

Unfortunately, as the Chicago Sun-Times reports, Gardner seems to have paid a heavy price for contradicting the official line on Kerry's Vietnam service. According to Gardner, shortly after he told his story to local radio stations and a local paper, he received a call from John Hurley, the veterans organizer for Kerry's campaign (and probably the least effective person ever to advocate a position on cable news). Gardner says that Hurley threatened him, stating "you better watch your step; we can look into your finances." Next Gardner heard from Douglas Brinkley author of Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War (arguably the most counter-productive campaign biography ever published). According to Gardner, Brinkley claimed he was "fact-checking" his book, which already was in print. In fact, Brinkley used the call to create an article critical of Gardner. Gardner says that Brinkley called him again, warning him to expect some calls.

Twenty-four hours later, Gardner's employer, Millennium Information Services, informed him via email that his posiiton with the company was being eliminated and that his services were no longer required. Gardner says that he has since seen the company advertising for his old position.

Gardner, the father of three, now is broke and unemployed. Nonetheless, he says he'd speak against Kerry all over again because "I couldn't ever see [Kerry] as commander in chief -- not after what I saw in Vietnam, not after the lies I heard him tell about what he says he did and what he says others did."

"When was the last time I have seen a president on a billboard? What is going on? Didn't Saddam Hussein have his picture up everywhere? What next, a statue?"

UPDATE: My friend Gerrit writes:

As a German, this produces associations I don't quite like
as 'Our Leader' translates to 'Unser Führer' in German.
Now, I know that those associations are not justified,
but a lot of people around the world who had a certain
kind of 'leader' in their past (or still have one) will
look at this and start to wonder what's going on.

The fact that this billboard was not put up by the
Government but by private citizens or corporations
(The one in Orlando seems to have been done by
'Clear Channel Outdoor') will not really change the
impression they are getting. Even if they are told
this is not Government sponsored.

While the intentions behind this might have been
good, I think the people who paid for this didn't
quite think it through.

Well, granted. I'm sure they realized they were just asking for whatever willful misinterpretations people would have; I don't doubt that the whole purpose of putting that message on a billboard over a freeway where all kinds of people have to look at it is intended primarily as a way to rub salt in the wounds of the ones who lost. Certainly I can understand their reactions; I think the thing's rather unseemly, myself.

But I also suspect that the asymmetrical warfare of propaganda goes both ways; all the letter-writer and Michael Moore have to do is tell people that what they saw on the freeway is no different from what was common in Saddam's Baghdad, and the gullible or thoughtless ones will believe it. An ingenious counterstroke? An unfair cheap-shot? Depends on how you look at it, I guess.

Assalamu Alaikaum

The video footage of US Marines killing unarmed civilian in a mosque in Falluja.

http://www.ogrish.com/attachments/2004/11/16/ogrish-dot-com-marine_shoots_wounded_pow_video.wmv

Wasalam
Your brother
Haffeez

This effort wasn't visible to Democrats because it was taking place on an entirely new terrain, in counties that Democrats had some vague notion of, but which they never expected could generate so many votes. The 10 Ohio counties with the highest turnout percentages, many of them small and growing, all went for Bush, and none of them had a turnout rate of less than 75 percent.

For Democrats, this new phenomenon on Election Day felt like some kind of horror movie, with conservative voters rising up out of the hills and condo communities in numbers the Kerry forces never knew existed. ''They just came in droves,'' Jennifer Palmieri told me two days after the election. ''We didn't know they had that room to grow. It's like, 'Crunch all you want -- we'll make more.' They just make more Republicans.''

Amid hundreds of new cars, prototypes and sparkling antiques, the Hummer SUV was the center of attention Sunday for a group of zero-emission supporters at the 47th Annual San Francisco International Auto Show.

Carrying signs that read "Dumm and Hummer" and singing songs like "Drive a Hummer, What a Bummer," about 60 demonstrators gathered outside of show at Moscone Center to demonstrate against American dependency on oil.

"I'm doing this because I have a 15-year-old son who I don't want to send off to war just so that someone can drive a Hummer," said Kirsten Moller of San Francisco.

Called the Fish Empathy Project, the campaign reflects a strategy shift by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals as it challenges a diet component widely viewed as nutritious and uncontroversial.

"No one would ever put a hook through a dog's or cat's mouth," said Bruce Friedrich, PETA's director of vegan outreach. "Once people start to understand that fish, although they come in different packaging, are just as intelligent, they'll stop eating them."

So. The Washington Post finally dropped Ted Rall. This time for a cartoon displaying America as a profoundly retarded, drooling freak.

To which I can only say: so repeatedly drawing cartoons comparing America to Nazi Germany, accusing the late Pat Tillman of being a bloodthirsty racist, 9/11 widows as being money-grubbing opportunists--this was not enough?

Why do I suspect that the only reason the Washington Post really acted finally was not because Rall is vile and hateful, but because he made fun of the mentally handicapped?

Q. In your Ebert & Roeper review of Michael Wilson's "Michael Moore Hates America," you [Ebert] blurted out an erroneous opinion, expressing your doubts about the film's claim that the Canadian crime rate is double the U.S. rate.

I checked with www.statcan.ca, listed as "the official source for Canadian social and economic statistics and products," and with the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics. The bottom line: These sites agree with Wilson's assertion that crime in Canada is much worse than in the USA.

James Elias, Highland Ranch, Colo.

A. Astonishing. For the year 2003, per 100,000 population, Canada had 8,530 crimes, and the U.S. 4,267. For crimes of violence, 958 vs. 523. For property crimes, 4,275 vs. 3,744. Michael Wilson, director of the film, tells me: "There was originally a comedic segment in the film that attributed this to the proliferation of Tim Horton's doughnut franchises, but I could not make it work."