Dave Winer announces the new Share Your OPML page.#

The purpose of this site is to gather a community of subscription lists, in OPML format, and aggregate them in interesting ways. Once we have enough data we will produce a Top-100 list of the most-subscribed-to feeds. But that's just the beginning, we hope.

Sappho writes about feminism and divorce, with emphasis on why there are so many divorces. (Via Ms. Lauren.)#

So I'm not entirely without sympathy for feminists' desire to preserve "no fault" divorce. But arguments by feminists, such as this one at the NOW web site, strike me as sometimes too ready to accept the divorce level that we have now. I suspect that NOW sees a potential slippery slope on the matter of waiting periods and mandatory counselling in no fault divorce. And they have some reason for their fear. But I'm not convinced that these things are inherently to be opposed. People can easily lose hope in a crisis. If a waiting period and counselling can actually save marriages, and if appropriate financial arrangements can be made that address NOW's concerns about the financial vulnerability of women, then this change might be a good thing. At any rate, even if we approach actual changes to divorce law cautiously (and I'm way of faddish and hasty moving back and forth, flawed though the current situation may be), I think that greater cultural support for preserving marriage would be a good thing, and that acknowledging that the current divorce rate may not be inevitable, and that some things (better preparation before marriage? better support for couples in at risk situations?) might be done to actually save marriages that are failing now, would be also good.

Jesse Taylor writes about competing for votes in the South.#

Competitiveness in the South is pretty much off the table for the Democratic Party in 2004, at least when it comes to the presidency. Republicans aren't maligning the inability of Bush to win Democratic treasure troves (although they're probably a bit pissed about him throwing PA to Democrats, thanks to the waffling on the steel tariffs). The key is to find someone who can make inroads into the South, and provide a platform for the national party to be competitive in 2008 for their second term, as well as in 2006 for the midterms.

Is Dean that guy? I don't know. But if we're scared of nominating someone because it means that Bush might win most of the South, then we should just fold up the tent and go home.

Ezra Klein on Mark Krikorian and list madness.#

Mark Krikorian [puts] forth this gem of comparative analysis:

Did anyone notice that while Time magazine's "Person of the Year" was "The American Soldier," the "Newsmakers of the Year" in the Canadian edition of Time were Michael Leshner and Michael Stark, the first homosexual couple to legally marry in Canada? I'm not a Canada-basher, but this does tell us something about the different paths our countries are taking, however similar they appear on the surface.

Yes Mark, I did notice that those Time honored as "People of the Year" were different than those Canada's time decided were "Newsmakers of the Year". I also noticed that the two awards were judgingdifferent things. And what does it tell us Mark? That our country is defined by war and violence while Canada is trying to extend equal rights to all their citizens? I'm not an America-hater but I know which one I'd pick.

Fabio Rojas writes about statistics and baseball, and how "Moneyball" wouldn't work for football.#

The key point is that it's easy to isolate to isolate the relationship between certain behaviors in baseball and scoring points. In football, it's a lot harder - people's actions on the football field are all interrelated, making analysis difficult. Thus, a dependable statistical analysis of football has yet to emerge.

This might be an interesting curiosity about the difference between baseball and other sports, but I think there's a broader point about competition and knowledge. The success of statistics in baseball created the opportunity for entreprenuerial behavior by some baseball managers. The introduction of statistics into baseball allowed a few team owners to impose high costs on those who refused to believe that statistics was valuable in sports. This was made possible by baseball's rules - everything centers around a few events (at bats, outs, runs) and it's easy to attribute individual performance to these events.

Jim Henley links to Kelly Torrence on "food fascists" and the American Public Health Association.#

APHA members used to worry primarily about preventing AIDS and slowing the spread of contagious diseases. Now their big concern is what you and your family eat. Politically charged talk about the so-called "epidemic" of obesity has, itself, reached epidemic proportions. Elected officials, presidential candidates, mid-level bureaucrats, and left-wing activist leaders are playing a high-profile game of leapfrog to see who can come up with the most outrageous proposals.

Busybodies are looking to control one of the most basic of human functions—eating. Presidential candidate Joe Liebermanwants the Federal Trade Commission to investigate snack-food and soft-drink marketing. New York state assemblyman Felix Ortiz promotes a draconian "Twinkie tax." At least one person who's had the Bush Administration's ear has bought into the idea that Americans are not accountable for their own weights. "Many people believe that dealing with overweight and obesity is a personal responsibility," former Surgeon General David Satcher recently said. "To some degree they are right, but it is also a community responsibility." It takes a Samoan village.

Courtney on her New Year's resolutions.#

Oh, and I hate being nagged. I should be Catholic as good as I am at guilting myself, so I'm just going to be happy if I succeed in one or two resolutions

The Black Saint reports a conversation about Jesus and Lazarus.#

Kelso: But he'd never done it before.

SER: There's that. It could have backfired horribly. You know, all Dawn of the Dead, eyes rotting in their sockets, ears falling off, "must destroy mankind!" nastiness.

Kelso: So, Lazarus was the first zombie.

SER: Technically, yes. Interestingly enough, there are some early AP photos of Lazarus after his resurrection. He has his arm around Jesus and he's giving the "thumb's up" sign. What few people know, though, is that Lazarus never died again. He's still wandering around, very annoyed. I think I bought coffee from him this morning at Astor Place.

Ed Cone writes about the Crusaders vs. Muslims subtext of The Lord of the Rings.#

Understanding fallen Arnor and beseiged Gondor as the Western and Eastern Roman Empires requires no great leap of imagination, with Minas Tirith doing a fine impersonation of Constantinople -- a white-walled citadel against the scimitar-wielding hordes to the east, who have overrun many of the old empire's provinces.

Tolkien does indulge in racial stereotypes that reinforce this clash of civilizations motif -- evil human characters tend to be darker than the good guys, and often have eyes that slant. Middle Earth's only clearly identifiable black people fight on the side of the Dark Lord, both in the books and the movie. On the other side of the battlefield, the Rohirrim are noticably Germanic, the hobbits English. Tolkien's Jews are on the side of the West.

Also, the elephants riders and archers are clearly influenced by Middle Eastern garb... at least in the movies.

Early Ed wrote about how the Dwarves are the Jews of Middle Earth.

The Dwarves of Middle Earth are bearded exiles from a beloved homeland to which they desperately wish to return. That alone makes them passable analogs for the Jews of pre-1948 European imagination, but it is just the start. The name of their lost homeland is Moria. Moriah is a hill in Jerusalem that would almost certainly have been known to a scholar of Tolkien's stature.

The Dwarves, said to be overfond of gold (in keeping with the European stereotype of Jews), mingle with the other free peoples but are always outsiders among them. They maintain their own ancient religion and their own language, which Tolkien the philologist has filled with a "kh" sound that is found also in Hebrew; I could swear I heard the Dwarvish war cry, "Baruk Khazad-dum, Khazad ai-menu" at Seder last year.

Ogged links to the words of the Apostropher who writes about "Cheapskate Republicans".#

For about a year in the late eighties, I delivered pizzas to keep my college student self properly armed with beer, cigarettes, and what have you. I've never been a poster child for clean living. Anyhow, the lamest, most insulting tips ("$19.75...Here's a twenty; keep the change.") consistently came from McMansions with Bush/Quayle-stickered BMWs in the driveway. Without fail. Every time. And so little has changed.

According to the survey of 630 drivers, [...] people with "Dean for President" bumper stickers on cars in their driveways tipped 22 percent higher than people with "Bush for President" bumper stickers.

No surprise here. Cheapskate Republicans, should there be any reading this, should heed my words and heed them well. We always remembered those addresses.

Real Live Preacher writes about his book.#

I'd like to let my blog be a journal during this month. I'll drop in every few days and tell you what's happening or just blow off steam and chat a bit. I guess I'm asking you to hang with me for the next month and listen. I know that's a lot to ask, but you do not seem like strangers to me. The online journal is a classic style of blogging. I'll just do that for a month. I think it will fun, and I think it will be helpful to me.

When the manuscript is done - HOPEFULLY by February - I'll take a deep breath and get back to posting essays here. I remain VERY committed to Real Live Preacher, the blog. I love writing in this forum. Your feedback and wonderful encouragement have helped me to believe in myself. Here, at the end of a long year of writing, I can actually say the words I've never been able to say before, though I still want to run and hide when I say them.

USA Today reports the Conservatives want Reagan to replace FDR on U.S. dimes.#

WASHINGTON (AP) — Conservative Republicans angry over an unflattering television movie about Ronald Reagan want to put his image on the dime in place of Democratic icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Democrats are just as determined to keep FDR's profile in coin purses.

"If they want to find another way to honor Ronald Reagan, I'm happy to join with them, but leave the dime alone," said Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass.

Yes... they are certainly "conserving" the old ways.

New Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research is out.#

The Onion reports that Dolphins Have Evolved Opposable Thumbs!#

HONOLULU—In an announcement with grave implications for the primacy of the species of man, marine biologists at the Hawaii Oceanographic Institute reported Monday that dolphins, or family Delphinidae, have evolved opposable thumbs on their pectoral fins.

Above: One of the evolved dolphins, whose opposable thumbs have struck fear in the hearts of humankind.

"I believe I speak for the entire human race when I say, 'Holy fuck,'" said Oceanographic Institute director Dr. James Aoki, noting that the dolphin has a cranial capacity 40 percent greater than that of humans. "That's it for us monkeys."

And this is genius...

Candidate Delighted To Be In Chair Factory

LAUREL, DE—During a campaign stop Monday, Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Gov. Howard Dean expressed great pleasure to be at a chair factory. "I can't tell you how thrilled I am to be with the fine men and women of the Laurel Chair Works on this beautiful day," Dean told the crowd of 200 employees, donning a Laurel Chair Works baseball hat given to him by factory owner Darrell Widcock. "Just as you have done for so many satisfied customers throughout Delaware, it is my hope that you can provide me with a 'seat' in the White House." Earlier in the day, Stenberg was overjoyed to be at an elementary school, a mall, a senior-citizen community center, and an Episcopalian Church.

Ben Hyde writes about sunk costs and if we should stay in Iraq.#

So one part of the challenge in thinking about the cost of finishing the project in Iraq is figuring out what the upside is. Those that lead the charge into theis enterprise hoped it would create the hub around which the entire gulf and the middle east could be reframed. That's a delightful, if hegemonic, goal. But does anyone believe that anymore? Few I think.

Lacking that clear benefit we seem reduced to more prosaic benefits. An unthreating, reasonably peaceful, and prosperous Iraq that provides a good example for others in the region - for example.

The problem with bridge building, standards creation, and other organized public goods is that it's extremely hard. Many voices have to be convinced to sing the same song. That can only happen if you have reasonably strong leadership that people respect and follow and you can demonstrate clear benefits to all parties so they expend the effort to get there.

We seem to lack all these. In particular we pissed off whatever chance we had of grabing the reins of leadership going into the project thru our arrogant behavior. Of course if you can demonstrate sufficent cost/benefit people will follow even arrogant leaders. The tough nut is that nobody in this debate is currently providing a credible story that generates substantail cost/benefit. Mostly all we get are benefits that require far too much faith coupled with a general undercurrent of denial about the costs.

Brent Simmons on the future of RSS aggregators.#

2. Synching. The idea is to synchronize not only your subscription lists but also the read/unread status of individual headlines—and to make it so it works between different apps, even apps running on different operating systems.

3. Easier subscribing. One of the problems for new users is the problem of subscribing to feeds. The "feed" URL scheme is a step forward here, because it makes it so you can subscribe to feeds directly from your browser. It also means instead of lots of ways to do this, which is inherently confusing, aggregator developers and users can collapse it down to one way. (I suspect there will be other good ideas too—especially in the realm of finding feeds.) Making all this easy for new users is a high priority.

Max Boot writes about John Shattuck and Human Rights as a Victim of Politics.#

Most memoirs of government service are written by senior cabinet members or White House aides, and their theme, implicit or explicit, is: Look how powerful I was. The Clinton administration has produced a slew of books along those lines, by the likes of George Stephanopoulos, Sidney Blumenthal, Madeleine Albright and Robert Rubin. John Shattuck, who served from 1993 to 1998 as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, has produced a different sort of memoir. Its theme is: Look how powerless I was.

Mr. Shattuck, a former American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, vice chairman of Amnesty International and vice president of Harvard, joined the State Department determined to elevate human rights to the top of the foreign policy agenda. He had every reason to expect that he would be successful, for as a candidate in 1992, Bill Clinton criticized the first Bush administration's policies from Bosnia to China as amoral. But Mr. Shattuck was disillusioned when he realized that there was no consensus within the new administration over the priority to be given to combating repression.

RPGamer has new Final Fantasy XII Screen Shots.#

Razib writes about how Islam is the new Communism.#

Today, everyone notes that Islamist parties rarely have majority support in any Islamic country (though plural majorities can be found in places like Turkey, and by evolutionary, notrevolutionary, Islamists). If you look at the history of Communism, you see that like Islam, Communist parties rarely had broad-based popular support. Rather, a hard core (the "vanguard") transformed whole societies by mobilizing from above. This explains the paradox that the success of Communist take-overs occurred in societies like China, Russia or Vietnam, rather than advanced capitalist nations as Marx had predicted, because these societies had relatively quiescent majorities.

International Communism became a great threat after it found a bastion in the Soviet Union, where Democratic-Centralism (Marxist-Leninism) harnessed Communist ideology to nationalism. The same process can be seen in China, Vietnam or North Korea. It is nationalism that acts as the true driver of Communism, not international utopianism. In nations where Communists have not taken over the society, but still have a presence, like India (and democratic success!), the movement is riven by schism.

Dave Winer wonders if you are your stories.#

My uncle, who died a few months ago, was a big story-teller. We used to joke when he'd start to tell a story that we'd heard dozens of times -- oh that's story number 278,291. In his stories, as with all our stories, he's the hero, he overcomes great odds to prevail, in a funny, lesson-learning way. Today my uncle is dead and guess what, there's nothing more to him now than his stories, and our stories about him. Do any of them have anything to do with who the true man was? See, that's really hard to say.

We seem to think there's more to a person, that you can sort of lift up the floorboard, and underneath the stories, find the soul, the essence of the person. But I'm beginning to wonder. Could it be that our purpose is to tell a story, and that the better lived a life is, the better the story that survives after you're gone?

Ryan Overbey posts new pictures. Amazing Mountain-scape. Wild Marijuana.#

Ryan Overbey writes about religious pluralism.#

Like I said, pluralism has always puzzled me. From my very unsophisticated understanding of it, there are two kinds. A weak pluralism doesn't deny normative differences- it just asks everyone to do everyone else the favor of not slaughtering their fellow men over religious differences. This seems perfectly acceptable to me- as long as we keep in mind that it requires us to all adhere to a host of normative claims. It gets very sticky when you start to establish a pluralist community- would you allow missionaries into your ideal pluralist world? Female genital mutilation? How about sex with small children? Multiple wives? From this vantage point, it looks like building a pluralist society becomes little different from building a Unitarian society. And everyone knows the old joke: "What do you get when you mix a Unitarian and a Jehovah's Witness? Someone who knocks on doors every Saturday for no particular reason."

Then there's strong pluralism, which as far as I can discern comes closer to what Nate wrote. This is the "Whether you know it or not, you're all doing the same thing" sort of pluralism. This is the kind of pluralism that uses the word "God" when discussing religions which have no discernible connection with any such concept.

He links to Kevin Kim on the same issue.

Some people are of the conviction that dialogue should be about happy blokes sitting around the table and agreeing with each other. I personally think that, if dialogue is motivated by an ethical impulse, a will to peace, then of course it's important to find and/or build bridges between traditions, cultures, worldviews. This is why I consider myself a religious pluralist-- a position arrived at through external and internal dialogue. But at the same time, dialogue can't merely be this rootless, fuzzy, New Age-y attempt at papering over differences, sacrificing what makes traditions unique because we've declared, by professorial fiat, that only the Grand Themes matter, and all else is mere detail. "Seek simplicity, then mistrust it."

Richard on The Costs of Blogging.#

This is too good: Tom Mangan says don't believe the blogging hype:

Blogging is not free. It has a cost, paid out in time spent on things that don't get done because the blogger is busy typing and linking. Every minute doing this is a minute not doing something else, whether it's tending to their kids or devising strategies for world peace.

Absolutely. Everything costs something. If what you are doing is "free", it's costing you the time that you could use to do something that will make you money. If you have a laundry business, and it takes up all your waking hours, it prevents you from having a web design business as well. By blogging, you're spending time you could be spending betting on ponies at the track, or whatever else it is you should be doing if it weren't sitting at the computer annotating links (like stopping the whining and just get a girlfriend for crying out loud).

I learn because I love it. Blogging is a way to learn and share my learning.