November 20, 2004

Give Till It Hurts . . . And It Always Does

Via Pirate's Cove comes this chart, which purports to show how the inhabitants of various states rank when it comes time to give to charity. I didn't get a chance to study the methodology behind it, but I found the idea fascinating, since instead of simply adding up all the money spent and adjusting for population (which would presumably make New York and California look good) it adjusts for the actual incomes of the populations involved, creating a "generosity index" (and placing New York and California squarely in the lackluster middle of the pack).

The site provides ammo for those who maintain that "all stereotypes are true, up to a point." The list begins with two Southern states, Mississippi and Arkansas, and stays Southern and rural for a good 15 entries. The first Western state is Utah, at #8, then Idaho (# 10), Wyoming (11) and Texas (12). The first state from the upper midwest is Indiana, at #25, and the first state from New England is Maine, at #32. The bottom of the barrel (um, chart) is Rhode Island (47), New Jersey (4 , and then two more New England states: blue-blooded Massachusetts (49) and New Hampshire (50).

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Somewhere in Alaska, a Fact-Checker is Starting to Sweat

I ran a quote a few days ago from Greg Hill of the Fairbanks News-Miner in which he maintains blogs can be highly inaccurate. The same writer ranted, as well, about the open sourcing of Wikipedia, and—oddly—referred to blogs that allow comments as "wikis," because of their supposed collaborative nature. (Speaking of which, why aren't you guys writing the entries for me?)

Mr. Hill: "garbage in, garbage out."

Problem is, as reader Chadster noticed, the writer mentions "Dave Berry's" blog by name. That is, Dave B-a-r-r-y. And, as a copy editor and fact-checker myself, I reminded myself that I try to turn that part of my brain off when I'm online, lest I go nuts. (Or . . . more nuts.) But Chad didn't, which is the point. He noticed that someone hyping the superior accuracy of printed/mainstream news sources didn't get the name right for a writer who's been well known and in the public eye since the 80s.

And so, Chadster wrote a note to Dave Barry, who blogged the Fairbanks News-Miner article. And thus I've helped to entertain thousands of people by writing one little old blog entry. You never know what might happen, huh?

Wiki, wiki, wiki.

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Protein Wisdom

has the goods on Democratic racism. You follow the links, and are just shocked that anyone would dare portray Dr. Rice in these awful ways—based on the color of her skin.

Of course, I've never been much of an Aunt Jemima woman myself. Plain old Bisquick does it—with lashings of Mrs. Butterworth syrup, the libertarian choice.

So perhaps that's one less thing to worry about. I guess.

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From Team Esmay

Dean sparked a great discussion on how those of us who lean libertarian ought to look at corporations, and at unionization.

It's a long comments thread, and we mostly kept it civil. The ideas in it are intriguing, so check it out.

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November 19, 2004

Grab Those Cameras!

Michele is having a contest: She's requesting that you document the ugliest, most over-the-top, excessive and inappropriate Christmas decorations on your local buildings and humans and send them on in. And she links some lovely and grotesque examples, so RTWT.

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November 18, 2004

The Spy Who Flirted with Me

Jeff Goldstein, on reforming the CIA:

So let me get this straight: GossÂ’ plan is to replace people like Valerie Plame with actual deep-cover operatives whose mission it will be to infiltrate terror groups? And this is supposed to make us more popular on the UN cocktail party circuit how, exactly?

No. This wonÂ’t do. I beg you, Mr. Goss, think of the shrimp puffs!

Full story and links over at Protein Wisdom.

It continues to amaze me that so much of our "intelligence" capability appears to have been devoted strictly to getting information that was easy to get. And yet we know of at least two Americans who "infiltrated" terrorist organizations. Unfortunately, they were sincere.

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More on the Pajama Brigade

Greg Hill, a reporter for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner is more of a "Cathedral" guy than a "bazaar" fan:

Blogs focus on whatever subjects their creators care to expound upon. While some are academically rigorous, most are merely personal rants. When bloggers feel passionately enough about a subject, often themselves, they create and regularly update blogs expressing their views, usually including hyperlinks to other Web pages that confirm their opinions. All it takes is some inexpensive and user-friendly blogging software, strong opinions and time. Actual knowledge is purely optional.

There are many credible blogs dealing with serious subjects, but most bloggers aren't experts. As the old computer maxim GIGO states, "garbage in, garbage out," and the person believing everything he reads--especially on blogs--is living dangerously indeed.

Some blogs are intentionally unserious, like humorist Dave Berry's blog that features funny inanities of American life sent in by his readers. A recent Berry blog posting, for instance, had a hyperlink to the "Frozen Critters Inventory Price List," where consumers can purchase frozen whole skunks for only $75 apiece, a "Real Rattlesnake Egg with Real Head, Open Mouth, Peeking Out of Egg" for only $18, and, just in time for Thanksgiving, frozen unpainted turkey heads for only $40, with the painted ones running $15 extra.

Blog owners usually don't allow their readers to add their own comments, preferring their monologues to others' dialogues. On the other hand, a "Wiki," which gets its name from the Hawaiian word for "fast," is a type of Web site that encourages active participation. It's the approach taken by Wikipedia, the most pervasive quasi-encyclopedia on the Web. Wikipedia is free and contains millions of articles in scores of languages that pop up early in many Google searches, but the articles' authors are anonymous and can be anyone, so their credibility is dubious.

We must keep the dirty, unwashed masses out of the information business. Otherwise . . . it's chaos!

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Megan McArdle

(writing as Jane Galt, of course) recommends a book on welfare reform, and then tells us:

My own thoughts on welfare reform: it's clear to me from the research I've done to write about poverty, and from reading books like DeParle's, that the poor suffer from three main problems: their own poor impulse control or decision making; a culture that encourages poor decision making; and limited means, which give them no buffer against the results of their poor decision making.

Liberals want to change the third variable, but this is somewhat recursive. As long as our society offers housing to everyone who needs it, the poor will be stuck living with people whose bad behaviour makes them impossible neighbours . . . so that even if the housing stock is physically perfect, crime and various other sorts of antisocial behavior that flourish in a world without evictions make the housing for the poor actually unbearable. Also, if people have very bad problems, such as mental illness or drug addiction, no reasonable amount of cash will improve their lot without adding things like forced institutionalisation. The people with those problems, unsurprisingly, are the overwhelming majority of the truly immiserated poor, who have rotting housing, insufficient caloric intake, and so forth.

Conservatives, by and large, want to change the first two variables, and there's a lot to this. There's simply no question that welfare enables women to make short term choices that are all right in the short term (dropping out of school, having a baby out of wedlock), but disastrous in the long term. Enabling women to make awful short term choices means enabling some proportion of them to ruin their lives.

But it's not enough to say to these women "Get married" or "Ignore your friends and pay attention to school". Some extraordinary people do, of course, but we all tend to overestimate how easy it is to be that extraordinary. Most of us reading this blog, after all, went to college and/or got nice steady jobs because we had enormous social and familial pressure on us to do so. How many of us were strong enough to overcome our environment, drop out of high school, and sell drugs?

I jest, of course, but not totally. The fact that every inner-city kid isn't a Horatio Alger story doesn't mean that inner city kids couldn't be, if their environment were more like the one I grew up in. After all, the girls in my high school didn't fail to have babies at 16 because they were more virtuous than the ones down the road at JFK High; they failed to have babies because they had a very clear idea that something better awaited them. How do we give those kids a more hopeful vision of their futures?

Part of the answer, I hope, is that by ceasing to enable those bad short-term decisions, the culture changes to focus more on the long term. Girls stop having babies at fifteen, and start demanding committment at 25--and they demand, too, that the boys stop selling drugs, because a husband in prison is one who can't provide for his family, and the government won't replace him any more. I doubt that's the whole answer, but I hope it's a big part of it.

There's a lot I agree with in there—and a little I do not.

But she's certainly a smart cookie.

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November 17, 2004

Terror in the Skies

Annie Jacobsen's series on airline security concerns has been renamed "Safety in the Skies" in an apparent attempt to make it more palatable to the readers of Women's Wall Street. The tenth installment focuses on what a joke the "no fly list" used by the airlines is: you can read it here, and discuss it amongst yourselves. Scary stuff. (There is a sidebar next to the story that contains links to all the "Terror/Safety in the Skies" stories.)

We need to place more pressure on Congress and the President to get the Department of Homeland Security to do its job. Bureaucracy can be such an intractable evil . . .

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Light Blogging Tonight

. . . as I'm trying to get my "pages" ready for writers' group tomorrow night, and as usual Ye Olde Fiction Project is giving me trouble.

My husband has his group in the morning, and mine is in the evening. So his pages are done.

Somehow I'd like it to be his fault that I'm still working on mine this close to the deadline, but that taxes my creativity almost as badly as the pages themselves do.

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It's Hurtful, If You Want To Know the Truth

Glenn is boycotting me. It makes me sad that he would throw out our friendship this way. All those long nights, talking almost until dawn till he went upstairs to the Instawife and I walked down the long hall to where Attila the Hub waited, asleep.

And now this utter silence. This refusal to recognize my blog.

Next thing you know he'll be saying he never went to Idyllwild, California for a vacation in a cabin covered with snow. He'll say I never made Moroccan Stew for him, the Instawife and 15 other people.

He's trying to disown me. He's acting like the history we share is somehow embarrassing to him.

Fine. Two can play at that game: I will stop linking him. Beat him at his own game, until he cries "mercy" and acknowledges our true, deep—yet Platonic—connection.

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November 16, 2004

The Other Attila,

Pillage Idiot, discusses the evolution of the Jewish vote, the problems with polling data, and the phenomenon of "closeted Jewish Bush voters" (a phenomenon that presumably moves in concert with that of "closeted liberal Bush voters").

Remember: outside our respective blogs, he comments as "Attila," and I'm "Attila Girl" (or sometimes "Miss Attila"). And he's in Maryland, so we're on opposite sides of the continent (not to mention the gender divide).

Attila writes to Attila Girl, whose head is filled with visions of MoxiePop and MoxieNu, and bad feelings, bad blood, lost jobs, And he suggests:

What's funny is that before I set up my blog, I did a lot of searching for the blog name to make sure I wasn't taking anyone else's name.  I didn't dream of having to search for Attila, too.

Please let me know what you think.  We should stay amicable about it.  We're almost relatives.

My cousin Attila should get along with me just fine.

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Thank You, John Hawkins!

You know, for a sexist pig,* you certainly link me a lot.

In return, and on its own merits, I'd like everyone who hasn't to check out "10 Quick Warnings For The GOP." I'm not the same brand of conservative as John—we differ on a couple of social issues—but I agree with every single point he makes here.


* This is what we call, in the trade, an inside joke. No nasty e-mails—either to Right Wing News, or to me.

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Kill Them All; Let God Sort Them Out

Apparently, it's all over the news today that bad things happen in wars.

Jeff at Protein Wisdom runs a righteous linkfest, and points out that:

First, the filth US Marines have been killing in Fallujah are terrorists, not insurgents; and second, these terrorists routinely hide behind children, fire from inside mosques, feign injury and/or surrender with ambush in mind, and booby-trap dead bodies in hopes of slaughtering American soldiers. They’re not interested in the “rules of war.”

Unless it helps them kill more of us, of course. Americans have died because we've been so assiduous in avoiding any unnecessary civilian casualties; my eyes are dry today. Has everyone forgotten the use of Red Crescent vehicles to carry armed Iraqis in the first phase of the war?

Jeff again:

Kidnapped international aid worker Margaret Hassan has been murdered. On video. No word yet on whether or not she was armed at the time.

Lest anyone misunderstand, I'm glad that we've taken such care to fight a clean war. I'm glad that we go to great efforts to keep civilian casualties to an absolute minimum. But I do not want to see this war drag on and on because our boys and girls have to fight in handcuffs, while the opposition finds ever-more-outrageous ways to flout international law.

The mainstream media is, once again, guilty of an egregious double standard.

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Head on Over

To Michael's blog, The Common Virtue, to wish him a happy first blogversary, and to support his being the very first guy with the guts to advertise on Little Miss Attila. (More will follow, I suspect, but he's blazing the trail.)

His blog is interesting reading in particular because he really does represent the leadership of the future. It's especially illuminating for those of us who have no military background. (And, of course, I am such an ignoramous: all I know about military life I owe to my former Marine husband and to Tom Hanks. If the Attila Hub weren't writing a book about Vietnam, I'd know even less.)

The Common Virtue provides a peephole through which we can see today's military passing on its body of knowledge to the next generation. We infer, from reading Michael's posts, what the Army's priorities are in the here and now. It gives us insight as to what the "brass" is thinking. (One of the things I loved about seeing Band of Brothers for the second/third time is that when you see the guys from the 101st go to take the Germans' machine gun nests on the very day they land, you know you're seeing the actions that became the model for lessons being taught at West Point to this very day: that assault became the way to approach a fixed target.

Naturally, it's just one step beyond to want to know not just the physical rigors Michael and his friends are going through, but to see the reasoning behind the exercises they perform. The war games, especially, fascinate me. (Another Band of Brothers moment: we begin to see that Captain Sobel, though a brilliant—and slightly sadistic—trainer of men is worthless in the field, and it shows up in the war games the guys engage in as "warmups" before they go into battle for real.)


As for Michael, he's not above providing "added value" by running the Carnival of the Recipes. He knows what we like—at 22, at 42, and at every age in between. Forget music: Food is the universal language.

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November 15, 2004

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you

. . . the next President of the United States.


(What? You don't want Condi to be CiC? Then don't nominate another Northeastern liberal—male or female. Give yourselves a fighting chance.)

It would be interesting to have two women jockeying for the White House. And Condi is simply an astonishing woman: switchblade-smart, and (the straightened hair notwithstanding) amazingly beautiful. She turned 50 the other day, and it just doesn't show.

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Smash

has a lovely story about an anti-war protest in San Diego, inspired by our Fallujah offensive.

Initially, he, da Goddess, and others were counter-protesting as usual with the other Protest Warriors.

Then a few Marines from Camp Pendleton wandered by. Seeing the point-counterpoint on the sidewalks of San Diego, they called their friends. Soon they had a righteous counter-demonstration of their own going on.

Go read the whole thing; Smash has pictures!

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The Protocols Cookbook

is being excerpted at Beautiful Atrocities, which certainly lives up to its name this week.

Trust me: this one is sick.

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If You Haven't Read This

. . . you should. It's Iowahawk's take on how the Blue Staters are coping with the "Dollywood" values that ooze into their lives.

"It was one day last spring," says Ellen McCormack. "My life partner Carol and I were in the garage, working on a giant Donald Rumsfeld papier mache head for the Bay Area March Against the War, when Rain walked by. I thought he looked kind of strange, so I stopped him and looked closely into his eyes. Then I realized the truth -- he was wearing a mullet. I was shocked, but he swore to me that it was only ironic."

"After a few months, it was clear Rain had lied to us -- that hideous Kentucky waterfall was completely earnest," she adds, choking back sobs.

Her 18-year old son would soon exhibit other signs of disturbing changes.

"I was driving past a McDonalds one day last summer, and I thought I saw Rain's bike outside. He had told me earlier that he was going to a friend's house to stuff envelopes for the Dennis Kucinich campaign. I pulled a U-turn and headed back," she recalls. "When I confronted him in the parking lot, he started giving me a lame story about how he was only there to protest globalization, but I could smell the french fries on his breath."

McCormack says that Rain's erratic behavior would also come to include excessive politeness and deference.

"Everytime I tried to talk to him it was 'yes Momma,' and 'no Momma,' when he knows damn well my name is Ellen," she says, anger rising in her voice. "It was like I didn't even know him anymore."


Via Mikal, the selective, eclectic bookseller. And several other fine blogs.

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November 14, 2004

Jeff/BA . . .

does it again, with some Good News from America (cf. Good News from Iraq):

• Grace Leung, 73, woke with a clear conscience, knowing that she'd survived 52 years of open warfare without killing her husband. She looked forward to another day of battle.

• Tamara Huerta, 22, a waitress pulling a double shift, suddenly realized she could do just about anything with her life. Dazed, she sat down.

So go read 'em all—in context.

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