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.” ...

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?:

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. ...

That was another busy movie weekend. Two SF flicks, which had more in common than you might think (above and beyond both being surefire money losers): Equilibrium and Solaris. I was determined to catch Equilibrium, since I missed Below and am still annoyed about it. Equilibrium is only on about 300 screens, too. I’m really glad I did. It’s a sometimes awkward graft of a unique action aesthetic onto a fairly standard totalitarian dystopia, which somehow works very well. The backbone of the movie is the near future dictatorship we’ve seen before: it’s Farenheit 451 via Albert Speer’s Berlin. The director, Kurt Wimmer, gets it right. It’s almost as pretty as anything by Wim Wenders. ...

Why aren’t any US publishers publishing lines like this (original)? Or this (original), from the fantasy perspective. Wow. (No insult meant to Tor, whose reprint line is delightful; mild snide perhaps for Baen, since I’m still mournful about the Telzey edits (original).)

Bartleby.com is the best Web resource I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a solid, fast, all-in-one-place site with quality reference books ranging from the Columbia Encyclopedia through Strunk and White’s Elements of Style past Bulfinch’s Age of Fable to Gray’s Anatomy. Sweet. If that’s not enough, there’s also an extensive collection of verse, an equally extensive collection of fiction, and a big fat bunch of essays. Yeah, it’s all free.

I have just a little more on the Ninth Circuit gun control decision, to start off the morning. How Appealing pretty much sums it up here, here, and here. This is why he’s a practicing lawyer and I’m just an interested party. I was particularly interested in this SF Chronicle article (original), which talks about Judge Reinhardt and his approach to the law. It discusses what I think is admirable about the recent decision; namely, Judge Reinhardt’s tendency to confront cutting edge issues head on.