I want to go to a movie at the theater described here.

(via Tenser, said the Tensor)

Driving back from Tulsa to Dallas yesterday evening, I heard a report on NPR's the World about the massive project in China attempting to divert water from the South of the country up to the North and Beijing. The total budget for the project reaches upwards of $14 Billion and will consist of:

three south-to-north canals, each running about 1,300 kilometres across the eastern, middle and western parts of the country.

The three lines are designed to divert water from the upper, middle and lower reaches of the water-rich Yangtze River into the country's drought-prone north.

Over the past two decades, hundreds of cities in North and Northwest China have been plunged into an ever-growing regional potential crisis of water resources.

The project is expected to be completed by 2007, just barely in time for the Summer Olympics of '08. One commentator on the NPR program said that it was akin to try to divert water from the Mississippi River to Washington DC. Just kind of made me go "whoa".

You know how at state fairs (and the larger county fairs) they'll have a pavilion or two where you can watch live versions of infomercials, wherein salespeople pitch things like therapeutic massage chairs and space-age cookware? Here's a nifty profile of one member of this special breed of traveling salespeople.

I find sales to be one of the most mystifying of vocations. I spent a year and half doing it (badly), and I can never fathom the kinds of people who can pretty much launch right into an effective pitch within half an hour of seeing the product they're selling for the first time.

Anyone else ever try sales?

Wow, we're posting here again. Hmmmmm....

Well, I might as well bring up a little dust-up in Blogistan regarding the Russian school massacre and the terrorist problem the Russians have in Chechnya. Yesterday, Matthew Yglesias posted as follows:

Worse, even, than the reality of the crime is the knowledge that things will get worse. The situation, clearly, can only be resolved by Russian concessions on the underlying political issue in Chechnya. At the same time, in the wake of this sort of outrage there will not only be no mood for concessions, but an amply justified fear that such concessions would only encourage further attacks and a further escalation of demands. I don't see any way out for Russian policymakers nor any particularly good options for US policymakers. Partisanship and complaints about Bush's handling of counterterrorism aside, this business is a reminder not only of the horrors out there, but also that terrorism is a genuinely difficult problem -- I think we've been doing many of the wrong things lately, but no one should claim it's obvious what the right way to proceed is.

This seems to me to be suggesting that Russia's old policy of scorched-earth, "Kill them all" military incursions into Chechnya hasn't worked worth a damn, so one might conclude that they might try making concessions -- except that this would only encourage further terrorist activity, obviously, since the terrorists would see it as evidence that they can influence policy by killing and violence. Russia, therefore, is caught in a dilemma where one alternative doesn't work and the other simply isn't possible for other reasons. This seems pretty clear to me.

But then along comes Glenn Reynolds, who seizes on Matthew's second sentence quoted above, and only that sentence, in a "Look at the dumb liberal" moment that pretty much completely misreads Matthew's point. (Read the ensuing comment thread as the Instalanche begins.) And then, after Matthew takes strongly-worded offense to this, Glenn retreats into his usual fall-back position of "Gee, I just can't understand why you'd be so mad at me", coupled with "I don't understand your position" (which somehow I was able to grasp in about the forty seconds it took me to read Matthew's entire post) and tut-tut-ing over Matthew's use of profanity. (The horror of it all! Good thing Glenn Reynolds is so gosh-darned consistent about his disapproval of profanity in political discourse.)

Matthew then goes on to clarify his original position here (as if it actually needed clarifying). I found this whole exercise rather illuminating, in light of the "Nuance? We don't need no steenking nuance here!" attitude of today's political commentary.

And here's something that's been bugging me for a long time now: what's the right thing to do if a case can actually be made that what the terrorists want actually is the right thing to do?

Following along with Jason's theme, I'll post this article about the current state of poverty in the US from the Economist. Some excerpts:

Whatever crude logic it possessed at the time, the Orshansky poverty line is by now quite arbitrary. Its originator calculated the cost of meeting a family’s nutritional needs and then multiplied this figure by three, because families in that era spent about a third of their income on food. The Census Bureau does not repeat this exercise to determine today’s poverty line; it does not recalculate the cost of an adequate diet or remeasure the share of income spent on food. It simply adjusts Ms Orshansky’s figures for inflation. Thus today’s dollar thresholds do not tell us how much a family or individual needs to get by in today’s America; they simply restate the cost of feeding a family in the 1960s in today’s prices, and multiply it by three.

As the Census Bureau is the first to concede, the poverty line is not a “complete description of what people and families need to live”. A more complete description would show that poor families now spend a far bigger share of their budget on housing (nearly 33%, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics) than on food (just 13.2%). Child care, done for free by the mothers and grandmothers of the 1950s and 1960s, is now a big expense. Deducting this expense from the measured income of families would add 1.9m to the official poverty figure, according to estimates by Isabel Sawhill and Adam Thomas of the Brookings Institution.

But a better measure of poverty would also assess the various weapons the government deploys against it. The current measure ignores non-monetary benefits, such as food stamps. Nor does it count the earned income-tax credit, a benefit paid via the tax code to the working poor, which has become every policy wonk’s favourite way to redistribute money. The Census Bureau has already experimented with such measures, and is probably itching to finally retire the Orshansky line. But its political masters in the Office of Management and Budget may be nervous of any innovation that would raise the official poverty number. To the bureau, the poverty line may be a mere “statistical yardstick”, but to the administration, it is a political stick its opponents might use to beat it with.

But if the level of poverty is fairly arbitrary, changes in the level are quite telling. Poverty fell throughout the long economic expansion of the Clinton years, from 15.1% in 1993 to 11.3% in 2000. Particularly striking was the fall in poverty among single mothers and their families, from 35.6% (4.4m) in 1993 to 25.4% (3.3m) in 2000.

Just some food for thought.

Make with the chit-chat, eh?

So here's an open thread. What'cha been reading? Listening to? Any good movies? Random thoughts?

Devoter

Devoter is a new political community weblog set up by a MeFier as an alternative to the ceaseless politic posts on the old blue. You can read more about it in this MetaTalk thread. I'm just kind of posting this as an FYI just in case anyone around here is interested. You can still get an uber-l33t two-digit user number, and this also means (hopefully) that MeFi will kind of go back to normal. Well, I can hope, anyways.

Hey Look! A Post!

Hey, how ya doin'?

So there's this SelectSmart guide to ethical philosophy, and I'd be interested to see how you all score and your thoughts, you know, assuming you see this and take it and whatnot. Here are my results:

1. Aquinas (100%)
2. St. Augustine (86%)
3. Spinoza (80%)
4. Ockham (64%)
5. Aristotle (62%)
6. Stoics (53%)
7. Jean-Paul Sartre (49%)
8. Kant (49%)
9. Cynics (41%)
10. Ayn Rand (39%)
11. John Stuart Mill (39%)
12. Nietzsche (39%)
13. Plato (39%)
14. Jeremy Bentham (34%)
15. Nel Noddings (33%)
16. David Hume (30%)
17. Prescriptivism (28%)
18. Epicureans (22%)
19. Thomas Hobbes (8%)

Hope everyone's doing well.

Test, One Two...

Nothing too deep, but I saw something that reminded me of Collaboratory, though it was before my time here*. Even taking the "easy" route they had troubles with their encounter with Dostoevsky.

*Come to think of it, most everything was before my time here. Not that I've helped in that regard.

Ugly Zoo


ugly, ugly, ugly zoo...

Andrew Carlssin luvs Lynndie England.

To quote a certain fellow " hello . . . lo . . . lo . . . lo . . . "

Oh well... I'm going to blog here regardless of all that mutinous chatter going on in the comments section (actually its not quite enough to call it chatter exactly).

So one question I have for you. What is so darned good about the Caps Lock key that merits giving it a button larger than than the tab key on most keyboards? Personally I've had ENOUGH OF SUDDENLY GOING IN TO CAPS MODE SIMPLY BECAUSE BY A STUPID SLip of the fingers while looking for the shift key.

So after hunting around for an answer (on Google for about five and half seconds) I stumbled over this little sucker.

No need to thank me.

Somehow I managed to blow away Chris' post (don't ask me how I did it, I have no idea), so anyway I'm reposting it from a copy I found in Google's cache. Apologies, Chris.

Christopher Alvarado writes:
In a Washington Post Writers Group op-ed, Neal Peirce explores the topic of regionalism by reporting on the trend towards City-County mergers and other alternative forms of governance.

Comments

Cruel & Unusual

"That really, really is the worst atrocity. It affects the honour and pride of Muslim people. It is better to kill them than sexually abuse them."

--- Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of Al Quds Al Arabi

I really wonder whether, with the emergence of these photos, the game isn't over for the Americans in Iraq. Is it realistic, after the bloody siege of Fallujah and the Shiite uprising of early April, and in the wake of these revelations, to think that the US can still win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi Arab public?

--- Juan Cole

I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open. I thought I should just get out of there. I didn’t think it was right . . . I saw SSG Frederick walking towards me, and he said, “Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.” I heard PFC England shout out, “He’s getting hard.”

--- Specialist Matthew Wisdom

Specialist Charles A. Graner and Private Lynndie England give the thumbs up to the Abu Ghraib facility.

[warning: more hideousness here]

Doing the rounds at the moment

http://karmann.goonsquad.net/img/boudreauxs.jpg

Or is it a hoax? No... but these are.

http://www.imagedump.com/pics/59682.jpg
http://home.comcast.net/~shrapnill/BoudreauxBetter.jpg
http://www.sgtstryker.com/pictures/gluesniff.php
http://www.sgtstryker.com/pictures/clay.php
http://www.glennbeck.com/picoftheday/04-15-04-pod-3.jpg
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/images/soldier3.jpg
http://photopile.com/photos/dead/auctions/112062.jpg

Morning Edition without Bob Edwards?!

This is....well, it sucks, really -- especially with Edwards saying that it was a case of "management wanting to move in a new direction", which is basically management-speak for, "Hey, here's something we haven't done before, let's do it!"

Ugh.

I always get mad when I hear people cite some scientific study somewhere that has received a chunk of government funding, and then follow it up with something like "Who on Earth needs to know that?!" The reason I get mad is that you never know what bit of scientific knowledge from one field is going to prove useful in another, such as this: findings from astronomy and particle physics could help archaeologists learn if there are secret burial chambers in the Mexican pyramids at Teotihuacan.

Interesting survey of Iraqi attitudes one year on about the occupation and the future. PDF, really worth a read.

Janet Dilbeck clearly remembers the moment the music started. Two years ago she was lying in bed on the California ranch where she and her husband were caretakers. A mild earthquake woke her up. To Californians, a mild earthquake is about as unusual as a hailstorm, so Dilbeck tried to go back to sleep once it ended. But just then she heard a melody playing on an organ, "very loud, but not deafening," as she recalls. Dilbeck recognized the tune, a sad old song called When You and I Were Young, Maggie.

Maggie was her mother's name, and when Dilbeck (now 70) was a girl her father would jokingly play the song on their home organ. Dilbeck is no believer in ghosts, but as she sat up in bed listening to the song, she couldn't help but ask, "Is that you, Daddy?"

She got no answer, but the song went on, clear and loud. It began again from the beginning, and continued to repeat itself for hours. "I thought, this is too strange," Dilbeck says. She tried to get back to sleep, but thanks to the music she could only doze off and on. When she got up at dawn, the song continued. In the months to come, Dilbeck would hear other songs. She heard merry-go-round calliopes and Silent Night. For a few weeks, it was The Star-Spangled Banner.

--- Can't get it out of my head: Brain disorder causes mysterious music hallucinations

The new Iraqi constitution is an exquisitely crafted piece of work and a total balls up.