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Population: One

News update

Cold Fury clarifies his earlier statements, and I believe I thus owe him an apology. I can’t hold being closed-minded against him, either; I think that people on the left are just as likely to be closed-minded in exactly the same sort of a way. You think (say) Atrios believes a word Bush says without some sort of evidence? Nope.

Nor should he, any more than Cold Fury should believe Democratic politicos. Hidden agendas are the nature of the beast. The Republicans accused Max Cleland of being a pacifist! Pointing your finger at the left as the only people who do this is simply silly. “Did you know John McCain has an illegitimate black child?”

Now, I think Trent Lott’s comments were pretty clear, and I remembered his involvement with Bob Jones University, and so forth. Still, I can understand holding off a little. On the other hand, I would hope that people will remember this, and the next time a Democrat says “This guy’s support of Bob Jones makes him suspect,” they’ll listen. It’s not always crying wolf.

Nonetheless: my apologies for the mischaracterization.

Misapplication of information

Conventional wisdom in the blogosphere is that everyone’s up in arms about Trent Lott, with harmonious accord. At the worst, there’s some confusion about which bloggers broke the story first. Well… I gotta kick that one around a little, and shed some light on the warblogger world.

Mischa says, “Listen, folks: If you wanna get rid of Trent, it’s no skin off of my nose, I couldn’t care less. I never liked the guy to begin with. But would you please, please, PLEASE try to come up with a reason that’s even half-way intelligent?”

Cold Fury says, “I don’t really think the man is a raving racist; I think he was merely spouting a little half-baked fluff to pump up Sperm Thurmond at his party, that’s all. But the truth is, he simply has to know that he’s under a media microscope, and as the Republican standard-bearer in Congress, our useful-idiot mainstream journalists are just waiting for him to make any stupid move at all that they can pounce on. If he doesn’t know this, then it necessarily follows that he’s too damned stupid to be allowed to speak in public, much less speak for the Republican Party on anything more pivotal than whether to have the fries or the baked potato with lunch.” I.e., he needs to quit because he makes Republicans look bad. But he’s a nice guy at heart. Sure.

So do a few quotes mean anything about warbloggers as a whole? Nope, not even close. The vast majority of bloggers on all sides of this issue think Lott should resign because he’s an unrepentant racist. However, I’m trusting the rest of the warbloggers will remember that some of their comrades are on the side of the segregationists.

Set them free

The Creative Commons licenses went public today. I’ve been looking forward to this. Essentially, they’ve created a boilerplate method of licensing your creative works into the commons. You retain copyright, and you choose from a menu of possible restrictions on the use of your work, and they provide you with an appropriate and reliable legal document. It makes giving away your creative efforts easy.

Not only does this tickle my interest in donating intellectual effort to the world, it satisfies one of my instincts. It minimizes the effort needed to take a particular action, which in my book is the best way to get people to take that action. You’ve got to cut down on friction if you want people to do things. Creative Commons makes the licensing process gut simple.

I expect to be licensing Population: One under one of their licenses soon, once I’ve mulled it over a little.

Back on the trail

This weekend, on the Brunch Report:

I had a lovely breakfast today; fried eggs with bacon and some nice monterey jack melted on top, between two toasted English muffins. Instead of the traditional cholesterol-laden mayonnaise, there was some tasty artichoke salsa to glue it all together — spicy, but not too spicy, with a hint of roasted garlic.

Where’d I get it? I made it myself. I am bachelor king! My coffee is good, too.

At it again

There are more reports that Bush has sanctioned assassinations. Except they’re not assassinations, because the targets are enemy combatants and thus legitimate targets for lethal force. Well, OK, but I really don’t want to see any complaints about atrocities if Colin Powell or Bush gets assassinated by Al Qaeda. If it’s OK to target leaders on the other side of a war, and we’re in a war, then it’s gotta be OK for both sides.

Saddam’s still not off the hook for his attempt to assassinate Bush Senior, though, since Bush wasn’t an enemy commander at that time. Even from Iraq’s perspective.

Letters from an exhibition

The January 2003 issue of Esquire contains an interesting article about Bush’s White House. I’m not entirely certain what to make of it, but it’s certainly good reading. The meat of the article is a fairly scathing portrayal of a White House where policy is set by Karl Rove, whose main concern is political advantage. As a sidebar, Esquire presents the primary source material: a letter from John DiIulio, detailing his concerns about the current administration.

You’ve got to wonder if this sort of thing is simply a trench war between branches of the Republican Party, in which one branch is using the press to good advantage. Actually, you don’t have to wonder that — it’s fairly obvious. The catch is that it’s not an ideological battle per se. It’s a battle between the concept of politics as a means towards advancing an ideology, and the concept of politics as an end in itself. In other words, are you trying to win so you can make the country better, or are you trying to win because winning is important?

To a certain degree, even that’s an oversimplification. I think that Bush does want to make the country a better place. I just think that he feels ideology is secondary to that effort. He believes in governance of the well-intentioned. This means that he can’t see the necessity for controls; since he would never abuse near-dictatorial powers, he should receive those powers so that he can do a better job.

Side by side, cheek by cheek

In a fit of something or other, I picked up Hero Designer the other day. My longest running Hero character is Emoticon. Here he is by way of Hero Designer. For comparison, here’s the old version. The latter is from Fourth Edition, and Hero Designer is a Fifth Edition product, which explains the differences in pointage. Hero Designer is, all in all, pretty slick. A bit slow because it’s written in Java, but that makes it cross-platform, which means it runs on linux now and I can use it on my Mac when Apple releases Java 1.4. Neat.

Pros of cons

It is not entirely clear to me that this experiment had the desired effect.

“It felt weird,” said Nicole Squires, a student juror. “I felt like I had a life that I could totally ruin or just keep it the same. It was really odd, but it felt really nice to get that feeling and see how I could change a life.”

You know, once they’ve tasted human flesh they never go back to their former prey. She’s tasted the thrill of human game, and she won’t ever be able to forget it.

Forest, trees

Daily Kos recommends that Democrats “back off Lott, and for heaven’s sake, don’t call for his resignation. He’s more valuable to us alive than dead.” I think this is allowing the thrill of the competition to distract one from the destination. Politics are, in ever-glorious and rather deeply flawed theory, a tool for governing the country well. Putting aside the goal of doing good by the country for the sake of political victories is, well, the sort of thinking that reminds me why I’m an anarchist. It’s too damned easy to slip into tactical thought when considering politics: “What would be best for the Republibertariocratic Green Party?:

Passages

My grandmother, Zoe Warner Durrell, passed away this morning. I’m going to talk about it a little, because I want to say some things about her and this is a place where I talk about that which is meaningful to me.

It was very peaceful. She had just moved into the home of my Aunt Zoe and Uncle Jeff, leaving her assisted living home; everyone was very happy about that. My father had spent Thanksgiving with them all. Everyone in the family had spent some time with her in the last year or so. She’d been ill since last winter. When my father called me this morning, it was not shocking.

Grandmama was a matriarch in the classic sense. She had always had a firm vision of what the family should be, and let us know when we slipped. Not in a bad way. There’s something to be said for firm guidance, and I am happy to have inherited my concepts of politesse and nobility from her. We’re preppies, albeit rather lapsed ones in my generation. I don’t say this very often, but I am proud of my heritage.

She lived through amazing changes. I am embarassed to admit that I’m not sure of her exact age, but then, it would be wrong to talk of it in public in any case. She’d seen most of the last century. The world never baffled her. In this past year, she’d gotten an email device, which she was happy to use with assistance. It’s easy to forget how much the aged have seen, but Grandmama was not one to be underestimated.

She and Grandpapa lived well and graciously. He was a publisher, originally in New York and then on a smaller scale in Kennebunkport. I know of fewer more noble occupations. I hope to follow in those footsteps, someday. When she moved to North Carolina, after he passed away, she donated her Kennebunkport house to the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust.

I am told that her memory was slipping, towards the end. It must have been difficult for her. She was exceedingly lucid when I visited her last spring, which is precisely what I would have expected. She was an author, not terribly prolific, but it’s another aspect of her that impressed and influenced me. In any case, she died content and happy that her family was doing well.

I hope that I’ve lived up to her standards. I hope that I continue to do so. I will miss her terribly.