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?” ...

Some further thoughts on assumptions; I continue to blame Mike. And of course Trent Lott, who has provoked a furor of discussion which could be useful but will no doubt turn to partisan bickering — oh wait, it already has. Trent Lott is, in my eyes, most likely a racist. While his most recent statement could be construed as flattery to an old man and nothing more, we have other evidence. We have similar statements he’s made in the past, one of them off the record (if it’s confirmed) and thus unlikely to have been scripted to win over the crowd. We have his appearance at rallies to raise funds for all-white private schools. We have his voting record. We have a preponderance of evidence. ...

So, yeah. Communication. This arises from some comments Mike made on my previous entry, which I very much appreciated. Most relevant: “… it just seems sometimes that both sides are longer even speaking the same language anymore. And that’s not a good thing.” I think that’s a really good summary of the problem. You can’t point fingers and say it’s the fault of any particular group of partisans. I can easily find left-wing blogs who are as shrill as anyone on the right. I can find blogs at any end of the political spectrum that are rational, calm, and very sensible even though I may disagree with some of the things they say. Wanted to get that out of the way first, although one suspects it’s no insulation against irate screeds. ...

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 (original), “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?” ...

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. ...

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.

The January 2003 issue of Esquire contains an interesting article about Bush’s White House (original). 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 (original) from John DiIulio, detailing his concerns about the current administration. ...

In a fit of something or other, I picked up Hero Designer (original) the other day. My longest running Hero character is Emoticon. Here he is by way of Hero Designer (original). For comparison, here’s the old version (original). 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.

Once again by way of Instapundit, we bring you James Lileks on politics. This time he’s talking about the inevitable decline and fall of Europe. I don’t really have a lot of debunking to do here; I just wanted to point out the vast irony inherent in this sentence: “Like a religion unhinged (original), it is desperately intense (original), gripped with eschatological certainties and devoted to an unswerving belief in a caricature that bears little resemblance to the actual nature of its enemy.” ...

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.” ...