sysrick.com

Frograbbitmonkey leaves a scorching comment about the Secret Service investigation of a blogger who "prayed" for bad things to happen to the President: "All of you who think that this girl deserves Secret Service investigation are nuts. It's not even a real prayer. She doesn't believe in God. So she's asking someone she doesn't believe in to give GWB an aneurism through telekenesis. And you people honestly think this is a threat worthy of investigation? If I said, 'Dear Santa, please strike Karl Rove by lightening when your sleigh flies over Washington DC' would you think I deserved to be personally investigated?"

That frm is going to be one scary lawyer, but scary on the side of goodness and justice, of course.

Longtime actor/comedian/writer Harry Shearer's done a great job of collecting some classic outsider video/outtakes footage and putting it up on his website, under the heading Found Objects. I've always been a fan of this kind of stuff, so it's great to see someone's digitized it. You know Shearer as the voice of Mr. Burns, Flanders, and Principal Skinner or from Spinal Tap.

One of the first outtakes clip sites I'd seen on the web was Tom Garneau's Demos from Hell on Bitstream Underground. In addition to being a web geek, Garneau used to be an engineer at Paisley Park.

I'm back from Vancouver, thoroughly exhausted, and unable right now to pull together my notes and thoughts from OOPSLA, which I hope to get to, soon. In the meantime, some random postings:

## This report (from the Program on International Policy Attitudes of the the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland) on the relative perceptions of Bush and Kerry supporters (courtesy Metafilter) is, I suppose, not surprising, but still unbelievable:

Even after the final report of Charles Duelfer to Congress saying that Iraq did not have a significant WMD program, 72% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for developing them (25%). Fifty-six percent assume that most experts believe Iraq had actual WMD and 57% also assume, incorrectly, that Duelfer concluded Iraq had at least a major WMD program. Kerry supporters hold opposite beliefs on all these points. Similarly, 75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55% assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission. Here again, large majorities of Kerry supporters have exactly opposite perceptions.

The report delicately refers to this overall phenomenon as a "tendency of Bush supporters to ignore dissonant information." I'd say that's a very polite way of putting it. A blunter description would be, "heads in the sand."

## Meanwhile, over in Slate Chris Suellentrop has a report on the "Bush Pledge" that takes these final days of the election beyond the surreal and into the proto-fascist:

"I want you to stand, raise your right hands," and recite "the Bush Pledge," said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft, and repeated after Pruitt: "I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States."

They're also pledging, I bet, to continue to "ignore dissonant information."

Ooops: He's alive. And he's condemning Bush. Which of course means that he wants Kerry to win. Unless he really wants Bush to win and is just by default endorsing Kerry in order to get people to vote for Bush...

Listen. Lest there be any doubt. I support John F. Kerry for President of the United States.

There. I've said it.

He still irritates me, but that seems like a personal problem. I still feel like he's a bit of an invertebrate, but with all the stem cell research he'll sponsor, they might find ways to regenerate his spine. The Presidency itself is sometimes good for that though. I wish I saw more difference between his and the president's stated positions on a range of matters, but I think a lot of what he's saying is driven by perceptions of a voting "market" that may look very different after November 2.

But, hey, Hunter S. Thompson endorses him. "I endorsed John Kerry a long time ago," he said, "and I will do everything in my power, short of roaming the streets with a meat hammer, to help him be the next President of the United States." said the good Doctor. He means it. The meat hammer's not out of the question. He also says, " Of course I will vote for John Kerry. I have known him for thirty years as a good man with a brave heart -- which is more than even the president's friends will tell you about George W. Bush, who is also an old acquaintance from the white-knuckle days of yesteryear..." I commend to you his full rant.

Kerry is also personally close to a couple of other friends whose judgement I respect, Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul, and Mary.) He is, in fact, the godfather of Peter's marvelous daughter Bethany. Peter is a very good person and doesn't spend a lot of his attention on people who aren't.

And, speaking of daughters, his provide evidence that he was one hell of a father. They seem a world more awake and aware than the giggling Bushettes. And I do, self-servingly, judge a man somewhat by the alertness of his daughters.

And whatever the current state of his spine, there was an important time when he showed incredible courage. I remember it well. His "Winter Soldier" testimony before Congress back in '71 was truly brave. At a time when most Americans supported our doomed efforts in Viet Nam, Kerry looked America in the eye and told what most of us now know to have been the truth. Viet Nam *was* a tragic mistake.

Tens of thousands more Americans died in vain after John Kerry inquired of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Unbelievably, in light of subsequent events, they essentially died defending Richard Nixon's pride and honor. Kerry had the balls to say so. Whatever he did or didn't do on the Mekong, he was a hero that day.

And let's face it, folks, whatever he may be or have been, he is not now and never has been George W. Bush. He's not a brittle dry drunk with 7000 *real* weapons of mass destruction at his disposal. He doesn't come in a package deal with Karl "Machievelli" Rove, Dick "HAL 9000" Cheney, or Don "Abu Ghraib" Rumsfeld. He isn't likely to turn the Supreme Court into a religious tribunal of Wa'habbi Christianity for the next couple of generations. (My favorite oxymoron, Justice Rhenquist, has been making his culture my law throughout my entire adult life. You know that Bush's 4 appointees will be young, robust, and committed to imposing Leviticus on America as long as we all shall live.)

Then there's the exquisitely named Al Qaqaa - or Deep Qaqaa, as I prefer to call it. Sure and we live in the Golden Age of Irony, but this is too perfect. We invade Iraq to keep terrible weapons out of the hands of terrorists. In the course of our removing Saddam, we also remove his security forces which were keeping 380 tons of the most powerful non-nuclear explosives out the hands of terrorists. Guess who has them now. And George Bush is still proposing that he will be more competent at keeping us safe. And millions of us go on believing him.

Or, as Maureen Dowd put it with customary succinctness, "The officials charged with protecting us set off so many false alarms that they ignored all the real ones."

Look. We simply cannot allow America to look as simultaneously laughable and terrifying as it will if we keep these lunatics in power. If you have a scrap of Patriotism. you can't permit that. But, given that 49 percent of the population is hallucinating like a 300 pound Samoan attorney on bad acid, what can we do about it in the next few days? Time is very short.

I have several suggestions.

Cory Doctorow: Steven Johnson, author of the wonderful books Emergence and Mind Wide Open, has just blogged soem info about his next book, "Everything Bad Is Good For You."

It's just me trying to marshal all the evidence I can to persuade the reader of a single long-term trend: that popular culture on average has been steadily growing more complex and cognitively challenging over the past thirty years. The dumbing-down, instant gratification society assumption has it completely wrong. Popular entertainment is making us smarter and more engaged, not catering to our base instincts.

I call this long-term trend the Sleeper Effect, after that famous Woody Allen joke from his mock sci-fi film where a team of scientists from 2029 are astounded that 20th-century society failed to grasp the nutritional merits of cream pies and hot fudge. (In conversation, I sometimes describe this book as the Atkins diet for pop culture.) Over the course of the book, I look at everything from Grand Theft Auto to "24," from Finding Nemo to "Dallas," from "Hill Street Blues" to "The Sopranos," from "Oprah" to "The Apprentice." There's some material about the internet, too, though less than you might suspect.

Link (Thanks, Steven!)

Yesterday I found myself listening, on my car radio, to someone from Nader's campaign. This person was attempting to refute the various criticisms we've all heard so many times. It made me feel as though someone was trying to work their well-chewed gum ever deeper into my ears, and reminded me all too thoroughly of why I think of myself as centrist.

The idea that Kerry and Bush are merely two sides of the same bad coin is both ludicrous and all too potentially tragic.

At the risk of making him permanently self-conscious, I'm going to quote Bravus again, because he put this, yesterday, so much more tidily than I've yet been able to put it:

"I think I've said before that usually I have a fair bit of sympathy for the 'they're all as bad as each other, there's no real difference' argument. I really, honestly think that's crap, this time around. Bush is heading for an undemocratic combination theocracy/oligarchy in unprecedented ways. The Republican party has been hijacked by extremists. Mainstream Republicans and mainstream Democrats might not have a lot of characteristics that are different, but these guys (Bush/Cheney/Rove) differ from both groups in their radicalism. A vote for them - or even a vote that's not against them - is qualitatively different, I would argue, than any vote cast in the US in recent memory."

This isn't the election in which to make the quixotic but satisfying point that you'd really rather vote Green, or the quixotic but satisfying point that you'd really rather not have to vote for any more white men in tight blue suits at all.

This is an election in which to vote for *the greater likelihood of there being more elections in the future*.

Watch a chess playing computer work through what moves to make. I like the waves of influence.

Welcome aboard!

The London Economist endorses John Kerry. Bill Emmott said: "It was a difficult call, given that we endorsed George Bush in 2000 and supported the war in Iraq. But in the end we felt he has been too incompetent to deserve re-election."

...we think American readers should vote for John Kerry on November 2nd.

You might have thought that, three years after a devastating terrorist attack on American soil... the campaign for the presidency would be an especially elevated and notable affair. If so, you would be wrong. This year's battle has been between two deeply flawed men: George Bush, who has been a radical, transforming president but who has never seemed truly up to the job, let alone his own ambitions for it; and John Kerry, who often seems to have made up his mind conclusively about something only once, and that was 30 years ago. But on November 2nd, Americans must make their choice, as must The Economist. It is far from an easy call, especially against the backdrop of a turbulent, dangerous world. But, on balance, our instinct is towards change rather than continuity: Mr Kerry, not Mr Bush....

Mr Bush's record during the past three years has been both inspiring and disturbing. Mr Bush was inspiring in the way he reacted to the new world in which he, and America, found itself. He grasped the magnitude of the challenge well. His military response in Afghanistan was not the sort of poorly directed lashing out that Bill Clinton had used in 1998 after al-Qaeda destroyed two American embassies in east Africa: it was a resolute, measured effort, which was reassuringly sober about the likely length of the campaign against Osama bin Laden and the elusiveness of anything worth the name of victory. Mistakes were made, notably when at Tora Bora Mr bin Laden and other leaders probably escaped, and when following the war both America and its allies devoted insufficient military and financial resources to helping Afghanistan rebuild itself.... The biggest mistake, though, was one that will haunt America for years to come. It lay in dealing with prisoners-of-war by sending hundreds of them to the American base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, putting them in a legal limbo, outside the Geneva conventions and outside America's own legal system....

Invading Iraq was not a mistake.... But changing the regime so incompetently was a huge mistake. By having far too few soldiers to provide security and by failing to pay Saddam's remnant army, a task that was always going to be long and hard has been made much, much harder. Such incompetence is no mere detail: thousands of Iraqis have died as a result and hundreds of American soldiers. The eventual success of the mission, while still possible, has been put in unnecessary jeopardy. So has America's reputation in the Islamic world, both for effectiveness and for moral stature.

If Mr Bush had meanwhile been making progress elsewhere in the Middle East, such mistakes might have been neutralised. But he hasn't.... To succeed... America needs a president capable of admitting to mistakes and of learning from them. Mr Bush has steadfastly refused to admit to anything: even after Abu Ghraib, when he had a perfect opportunity to dismiss Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, and declare a new start, he chose not to....

If the test is a domestic one, especially an economic crisis, Mr Kerry looks acceptable, however. His record and instincts are as a fiscal conservative, suggesting that he would rightly see future federal budget deficits as a threat. His circle of advisers includes the admirable Robert Rubin, formerly Mr Clinton's treasury secretary. His only big spending plan, on health care, would probably be killed by a Republican Congress.... [O]n social policy, Mr Kerry has a clear advantage: unlike Mr Bush he is not in hock to the Christian right. That will make him a more tolerant, less divisive figure on issues such as abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research.

The biggest questions, though, must be about foreign policy, especially in the Middle East.... [Kerry] has failed to offer any set of overall objectives for American foreign policy, though perhaps he could hardly oppose Mr Bush's targets of democracy, human rights and liberty. But instead he has merely offered a different process: deeper thought, more consultation with allies.

So what is Mr Kerry's character?... His oscillations this year imply that he is more of a ruthless opportunist. His military record suggests he can certainly be decisive when he has to be and his post-Vietnam campaign showed determination. His reputation for political comebacks and as a strong finisher in elections also indicates a degree of willpower that his flip-flopping otherwise belies....

Many reader... will conclude that the safest option is to leave [Bush] in office.... But our confidence in him has been shattered.... [Kerry's] plan for the next phase in Iraq is identical to Mr Bush's, which speaks well of his judgment. He has been forthright about the need to win in Iraq, rather than simply to get out, and will stand a chance of making a fresh start in the Israel-Palestine conflict and (though with even greater difficulty) with Iran.... [T]here is a need in life for accountability. [Bush] has refused to impose it himself, and so voters should, in our view, impose it on him.... John Kerry, for all the doubts about him, would be in a better position to carry on with America's great tasks.

###

The Dude abides with photos.

A handy guide to using Google: Cheat Sheet.

You can print it out, and thumbtack it to your monitor.

From The Nation: 100 Facts and 1 Opinion.

The Non-Arguable Case Against the Bush Administration.

It has 100 facts, and each has a link that purports to back it up.

Today's Wall Street Journal "Corrections & Amplifications" include one that says, "Fox News was incorrectly described in a page-one article Monday as being sympathetic to the Bush cause." They should run a correction of the correction.

Bill Buckley: "What needs to be said about oil is that it IS worth fighting for."

Alert reader Scipio sent along the clip, with a note saying Buckley is clearly under my influence.

(This is also my column today in the San Jose Mercury News.) If you believe that political and social liberty go hand in hand with economic freedom -- and that they form an underpinning of a vibrant free market -- you should be worried about another four years like the four we've just had. More...

[via MetaFilter] Thomas Schaller's essay on Bush, Believe: Why I Believe in Our President, is considerably sharper than the essay from which it borrows its form, Michael Kelly's I Believe (written about Clinton). Schaller has an unfair advantage, though -- he's got better material to work with.

Just yesterday I said that "I'm generally steering clear of the US elections" and hear I am talking about them again. Only adjunctly, though to cite this wonderful hour-long interview with Jon Stewart on C-SPAN. Not only is it tremendously funny, but it's also very insightful. It's a talk show format in front of an audience of New York media, and he takes every opportuntity he can to take them to task on their lousy, partisan reporting. It was engaging enough for me to listen to the whole thing, and I'm pretty ambivalent about things south of the 49th parallel.

David Pescovitz: I'm eagerly awaiting the release next month of JG Ballard Quotes: Does The Future Have A Future?--a pocket-sized book of profound and mind-bending JG Ballard-isms. My all-time favorite fiction writer, Ballard is the prophetic British novelist behind such dark, twisted, noir masterpieces as Crash, Concrete Island, and Cocaine Nights. The new book of quotations, published by our counterculture chronicling friends at RE/Search, is illustrated with photographs by Ana Barrado, Charles Gateweood, and others.

"The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology." --JG Ballard

Your best bet is to order the book directly from RE/Search! Link

They're calling "Mosh" Emimem's October Surprise, and though it does fall short of pulling Osama bin Laden out of his pants, it will probably effect the election as much as, say, John Kerry pulling a goose out his. Don't get...

From the U.S. Geological Survey's What to Do if a Volcano Erupts page:

During an Eruption -

Move Away From A Volcano - Not Toward It

Picked up a copy of The Onion on the street corner in Manhattan and enjoyed this entry, headline "Tibetan Teen Getting into Western Philosophy":

LHASA, TIBET—Deng Hsu, 14, said Monday that he is "totally getting into Western philosophy." "I've been reading a lot of Kant, Descartes, and Hegel, and it's blowing my mind," Hsu said. "It's so exotic and exciting, not like all that Buddhist 'being is desire and desire is suffering' shit my parents have been cramming down my throat all my life. Most of the kids in my school have never even heard of Hume's views on objectivity or Locke's tabula rasa." Hsu said he hopes to one day make an exodus to north London to visit the birthplace of John Stuart Mill.

Of those wishy-washy people who could not choose between Kerry and Bush and thus were in danger of an eternity in Limbo:

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog: Limbo: And after [the banner] there came so long a train
  Of people: I never would have thought
  That Death had ever undone so many...

Then I understood, and I knew,
  That this was the place of the cowardly wretches
  Hateful to both God and to his enemies...

Daniel Drezner has escaped:

danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner :: I've made up my mind: So I'm voting for Kerry.... [M]y anger at Bush for the number of Mongolian cluster-f**ks this administration was discovered to have made in the planning process in the run-up to Iraq was compounded by the even greater number of cluster-f**ks the administration made in the six months after the invasion, topped off by George W. Bush's decision not to fire the clusterf**ks in the civilian DoD leadershop that insisted over the past two years that not a lot of troops were needed in the Iraqi theater of operations.... Reading the New York Times recap of the postwar planning by Michael Gordon just brought all of this back to the surface. The failure by Rumsfeld and his subordinates to comprehend that occupation and statebuilding requires different resources, strategies and tactics than warfighting boggles my mind:

Military aides on the National Security Council prepared a confidential briefing... that examined what previous nation-building efforts had required.... But it underscored a basic principle well known to military planners: However many forces might be required to defeat the foe, maintaining security afterward was determined by an entirely different set of calculations, including the population, the scope of the terrain and the necessary tasks. If the United States and its allies wanted to maintain the same ratio of peacekeepers to population as it had in Kosovo, the briefing said, they would have to station 480,000 troops in Iraq.... More forces generally are required to control countries with large urban populations. The briefing pointed out that three-quarters of Iraq's population lived in urban areas. In Bosnia and Kosovo, city dwellers made up half of the population. In Afghanistan, it was only 18 percent....

Maybe, maybe someone could give administration officials a pass in making that assumption. But once they realized that the Afghanistan analogy wasn't working, they never questioned their assumptions.... One other thing -- reading the Gordon article, what's stunning is that the administration never solved this dilemma: "Rumsfeld, and the rest of the Bush administration's foreign policy team, face a clear choice. It can outsource peacekeeping functions to the United Nations or close allies, at the cost of some constraints on foreign policy implementation. It can minimize the U.N. role and develop/train its own peacekeeping force. Or it can do neither and run into trouble down the road...."

But Jonathan Rauch is still in peril. Advising his readers whether to choose Bush or Kerry, he writes:

Social Studies (10/22/2004): Most disturbing of all is that, with only days to go before the election, I still don't feel I have a handle on what [Kerry] is really all about.... Bush is a dynamic leader, but he lacks what a president most needs: guardrails. Kerry has guardrails, but where is the road? A dispiriting choice. What's a Swimmer to do? It helps to remember that the presidency matters a lot, but not quite as much as most people think. And that muddling through usually works out passably well. And that it is always darkest before the dawn, and you'll never walk alone, and tomorrow is another day. Think on that. And have a Prozac.

That Jonathan Rauch, sitting in the middle of Washington, D.C. at the National Journal, has not seen enough of Kerry in action over the twenty years that he has been senator--and cannot find enough people he trusts who know Kerry--to "have a handle on what [Kerry] is all about" is a devastating indictment of how our elite press corps spends its time. Kerry's ability to work with open-minded Republicans like McCain, Lugar, and Hagel; Kerry's record as a deficit hawk working hard to strengthen the safety net; Kerry's issue advisors--Rubin, Altman, Tyson, and Blinder on Treasury issues, Bianchi and Thorpe on HHS issues, Beers and Holbrooke on security issues--are picked from those who have proved themselves highly competent and effective; Kerry's successes as a boss of prosecuting lawyers, as an investigator of BCCI and POWs, as a member of the Democratic senate caucus--these tell us who Kerry is: a Massachusetts liberal believing in fiscal prudence and an active government, understanding both soft and hard power, and personally brave--both in Vietnam and after, in his courage to say what he believed needed to be said about our war in Vietnam. He's one of the thousand or so people in America best-qualified to be president.

And Bush? As Carlyle Group Managing Director David Rubenstein puts it, "...if you said to me, name 25 million people who would maybe be President of the United States, he wouldn't have been in that category." As Daniel Davies asked--and never received any answer--back at the start of 2003:

D-squared Digest: Can anyone... give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics: (1) It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration. (2) It was significant enough in scale that I'd have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it). (3)It wasn't in some important way completely f***** up during the execution?

The choice between a normal, highly-competent Democrat and George W. Bush--a man and administration of total reality-defying incompetence whose electoral strategy consists of trying to gay-bash his way to a narrow electoral-vote victory--should be an easy one.

Several members of the original team that built the Whitehouse website 10 years ago are reporting that the Bush administration is systematically changing and/or removing content from the archives. The original policy was that no content was ever to be removed or altered. A versioning system was put in place to ensure no breakage or alteration of history would occur.

Let's get these assholes out of our whitehouse.

David Pescovitz: Nobody says it like Hunter S. Thompson.

Armageddon came early for George Bush this year, and he was not ready for it. His long-awaited showdowns with my man John Kerry turned into a series of horrible embarrassments that cracked his nerve and demoralized his closest campaign advisers. They knew he would never recover, no matter how many votes they could steal for him in Florida, where the presidential debates were closely watched and widely celebrated by millions of Kerry supporters who suddenly had reason to feel like winners. Kerry came into October as a five-point underdog with almost no chance of winning three out of three rigged confrontations with a treacherous little freak like George Bush. But the debates are over now, and the victor was clearly John Kerry every time. He steamrollered Bush and left him for roadkill.

Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. . . . I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President," and then I felt ashamed.

Link

Enjoy the draft!

Spring Break, Fallujah 2005. The Bush twins do look nice in camo.

This is like watching a mere mortal hero tear Grendel's arm off and smack his Mom with it. http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/20/1518217 Neal Stephenson Slashdot Interview

Why isn’t there an ad for the Democratic candidate for President that runs something like,

President Bush looks at Iraq and says, “Freedom is on the march.” How would you feel about electing a man who thinks this — [video segments of explosions, newspaper headlines announcing kidnapping, figures of U.S. and Iraqi fatalities] — is freedom?

John Kerry can tell the difference between freedom and chaos.

Just asking. . . .

washingtonpost.com: "Wal-Mart canceled an order for a best-selling book by Jon Stewart and the writers of "The Daily Show" after executives learned that it contained a photo of nine naked, aged bodies, each with the superimposed head of a Supreme Court justice."

A conversation between Kurt Vonnegut and Kilgore Trout (link via the must-read Greensboro blog Backwards City).

Meta review site

What do those letters mean? Find out at the Acronym Finder. It's a bit heavy on the ads, but it found all of the acronyms I fed it.

Let's start the week with one of the few, the proud, the elite: a science fiction writer who can genuinely outdo the aberrant weirdness in contemporary headlines. http://www.strangehorizons.com/2004/20041018/uqbaristan-f.shtml "Prisoners of Uqbaristan" "Colonel Ariadne Levy-Quan was the head of our outfit, a former tankbusting A-10 pilot who went on to Thunderbird MBA and a lucrative tour on Madison Avenue selling ballistic missiles and Botox. Following a well-published tenure as the Riefenstahl Professor of Communications Studies at Pepperdine in Malibu, teaching free market propaganda techniques to Randian young surfers, she was recruited back into public service to help architect the administration's global media program—resulting in the creation of our unit, Task Force Loki, the government's interdisciplinary SWAT team in the global culture war. Domestic psyops was Colonel Quan's particular specialty. She had freaks like us to handle the offshore jobs."

"This election is increasingly about not letting Medievalism conquer the Enlightenment," writes Steve Clemons, after reading Ron Suskind's "reality-based community" piece "It's a head-to-head contest between rationality and dogma."

"Medievalism", I think, flatters what we are up against today, lending it far too long a pedigree. Jeff Sharlet, in The Revealer , offers a more precise analysis. Bush's religion, Sharlet argues, is not Christian but New Age.

"In grappling with Bush’s presidency," he writes, "[the press] has expanded its range, developed a more nuanced understanding of traditional Christian fundamentalism, recognized liberal evangelicalism, and acknowledged the limitations of Enlightenment thinking. But it still can’t account for the kind of magic that says, If you believe you can do something -- become president despite losing the popular vote, launch a war without evidence, and maybe, if you REALLY believe, get re-elected anyway -- you can."

Sharlet's article does account for that sort of thinking, and I urge you to read it.

(Jack Womack, having read it, reminds me of Robert Mitchum as Reverend Harry Powell in "Night of the Hunter: "I practice the religion the Almighty and me worked out betwixt us.")
 

The Ugly American is an enduring stereotype in Europe: tone deaf to other cultures, loud in dress and manner, gulping icewater at restaurants ("American champagne" I once heard a French waiter insult as a table of eleven Americans waived cocktail orders and asked for ice water all around). With anti-American sentiment increasing around the world, and with cultural information more available on the Internet, many Americans are doing their travel homework in order to become more culturally savvy ("Leave the Ugly at Home" article). Books are out that can help you understand the subtleties of another culture and enable you to avoid being an unwitting jackass abroad. As The New York Times travel writer David Kirby explains: "Traditional travel guidebooks usually offer a perfunctory page or two, at best, on how to comport yourself in a particular country before delving into where to go and what to see. They tell you where to eat, but not how to eat. Little, if anything, is said about body language or the historical, political and religious roots of local etiquette. Less still is said about how your hosts will interpret you."

The "Culture Smart!" series goes country by country dispensing cultural coaching for travelers (books typically about $9.95). Since 1985 Roger E. Axtell has been printing updated editions of "Do's and Taboos" (John Wiley & Sons, Inc. $16.95). What kind of tips are in these publications? How to tell time in India, for example. Indians, it is reported, spend more time building relationships. They may expect to invest a week in getting to know you, and will be disappointed when you tell them you can spare only a couple of days. In Bolivia your guests will expect you to eat everything on your plate or they may be insulted, so be careful at the food buffet. Remove your shoes before entering a home in Thailand. This is easy enough, but did you know that you should also avoid stepping on the doorsills where Thai tradition says a spirit resides? Never drop litter in the street in Russia, even a gum wrapper or old theater ticket, because it is not only illegal, it is offensive. In Japan do not blow your nose in public. You should also be prepared for effusive thanks for small courtesies we might take for granted. That being the culture, you should be ready with a hair trigger to thank your Japanese guests on a frequent basis.

Mark Frauenfelder: Great Wired News article about TV B-Gone, a keychain fob that you can use to turn off bothersome TVs in bars, airports, etc.

The device, which looks like an automobile remote, has just one button. When activated, it spends over a minute flashing out 209 different codes to turn off televisions, the most popular brands first.

Link