Work is stressin' me. Can't seem to get ahead, keep working more hours than I want to. I expect more of this if I intend to continue trying to get out of debt this year.

Which probably means I'll have to start smoking grass on a more regular basis again. And going to the gym. Poor me. Oh well.

Oooohhhh... shiny new intel-powered fastness. I crave to consume one.

They won't ship until March, and really, my current machine does me fine. Also, it's generally good to wait until the second revision before jumping on new hardware. One unanswered question: did fix the piss-poor wifi reception?

Anyway, I'll probably try to get my hands on one later this year.

John Robb, who writes thinky things about Global Guerillas, also has a different site that's more random things he's watching. I've quickly become a fan. Here's a neat little post about how the creation of the EU meta-state is making the old countries sort of obsolete, and intersting things are happening. Particularly interesting given the feudal history of much of Europe as smaller political entities.

Perhaps when we've finished playing house with the Daddy State, we can get rolling on some of this decentralization and neo-regionalism here too. Strong metro/county/state government with a higher level Federal system to do some load-balancing, maintain national infrastructure, etc. It's all about the network. That kind of benevolent Federal system would really want to be hemispheric in its fullness. Not likely in my lifetime, but I think it might be nice.

My pipe-dream blog service is whithering on the vine. New blogs this week:

Wes "Caddyshack" Connley:

Hello. Meet our gang, The Four Horsemen of Clamidia.

And via Wes's blogroll, a taste of the more literati Jeremy "Slarz" Slusarz:

Though the signs may have been there for some time (and, admittedly, they were) this weekend the evidence is simply incotrovertible, and I have had to well up the courage to admit to a serious problem. My building has a hippie.

The problem, I now believe, centers around the apartment directly under mine. A little while ago the quiet, keep-to-herself law student vacated one of the bedrooms (in hindsight, a regrettable loss, though I hardly knew her from Eve). Ever since, little shreds of evidence have been materializing and, in my horror, I think I may have slipped into a state of denial not unlike those that often accompany genocide. ("What? No. I not see. What? Paramilitaries? Groups of Serb soldiers wearing Adidas track pants shoot farmhouses weeth assault rifles? Me? No, I not see. You see, I just seemple farmer.") Denial, however, is no longer an option.

This past week has seen the appearance, in the bedroom window directly beneath mine, of a series of colorful, psychedelic, colorform-like decals, all depicting dancing bears, smiling skulls, psilocybic mushrooms, and the like; the type of nonsense that an 18 year old college freshman from Ohio might festoon the windows of her room in "the Towers" with in order to lend the place a more personalized air for her first year at "State." Later in the year she'll lie back, and, as some Abercrombie-ed human meatball with lingering acne and Natural Light breath paws her with all the grace and sensual dexterity of a sandhog, she'll gaze up at those stickers on the windowpane and think to herself, "My, what a long strange trip it's been..." Ugh.

While I'm excited to continue reading and enjoying both these fantastic efforts, I can't help but feel the same way about all my talented friends starting blogs as I do about any of the half-baked ideas I've spitballed which someone else has turned into a sizable chunk of Venture Captial. I'm simultaniously excited to see the ideas come to life, and yet I feel the need to boastfully claim some non-ownership ownership. I was there when...

But yeah, I bought Jeremy slarz.com back in 2002 as a christmas or birthday present. He'll be a fantastic blogger. My only question is, why you gotta bag on the sandhogs?

My pipe-dream blog service is whithering on the vine. New blogs this week:

Wes "Caddyshack" Connley:

Hello. Meet our gang, The Four Horsemen of Clamidia.

And via Wes's blogroll, a taste of the more literati Jeremy "Slarz" Slusarz:

Though the signs may have been there for some time (and, admittedly, they were) this weekend the evidence is simply incotrovertible, and I have had to well up the courage to admit to a serious problem. My building has a hippie.

The problem, I now believe, centers around the apartment directly under mine. A little while ago the quiet, keep-to-herself law student vacated one of the bedrooms (in hindsight, a regrettable loss, though I hardly knew her from Eve). Ever since, little shreds of evidence have been materializing and, in my horror, I think I may have slipped into a state of denial not unlike those that often accompany genocide. ("What? No. I not see. What? Paramilitaries? Groups of Serb soldiers wearing Adidas track pants shoot farmhouses weeth assault rifles? Me? No, I not see. You see, I just seemple farmer.") Denial, however, is no longer an option.

This past week has seen the appearance, in the bedroom window directly beneath mine, of a series of colorful, psychedelic, colorform-like decals, all depicting dancing bears, smiling skulls, psilocybic mushrooms, and the like; the type of nonsense that an 18 year old college freshman from Ohio might festoon the windows of her room in "the Towers" with in order to lend the place a more personalized air for her first year at "State." Later in the year she'll lie back, and, as some Abercrombie-ed human meatball with lingering acne and Natural Light breath paws her with all the grace and sensual dexterity of a sandhog, she'll gaze up at those stickers on the windowpane and think to herself, "My, what a long strange trip it's been..." Ugh.

While I'm excited to continue reading and enjoying both these fantastic efforts, I can't help but feel the same way about all my talented friends starting blogs as I do about any of the half-baked ideas I've spitballed which someone else has turned into a sizable chunk of Venture Captial. I'm simultaniously excited to see the ideas come to life, and yet I feel the need to boastfully claim some non-ownership ownership. I was there when...

But yeah, I bought Jeremy slarz.com back in 2002 as a christmas or birthday present. He'll be a fantastic blogger. My only question is, why you gotta bag on the sandhogs?

MoveOn needs to get better at messaging. Their ability to raise money and put ads out there makes them relevant, but their actual kung-fu is a little weak.

Here's what I think it boils down to:

• He'll say anything to get a job: this is an important theme for framing the whole hearing process, but currently muddled in MoveOn's ad with the abortion bit. If there's a pivot from abortion it's:
• Privacy. This has the advantage of being the constitutional issue, and having broader general support than "abortion" in particular. It also has strong resonance with the NSA scandal. It's also a decent pivot to:
• Unchecked Presidential power. Why did Scalito get the nomination instead of any of the other fine conservative activists out there? Maybe because what Bush really wants is a justice who will swing the court to authorize his idea that the President is above the law.

Since the major cost here is airtime, not production, in the future it might be smart create a series of ads which share a common theme ("he plays one on TV" is ok, but not a home run) and address two or three points more directly. Not to provide more information, but to repeat the basic message more. People can find the facts online. On TV you want to repeat stuff that sticks, and then repeat it some more.

So if you were to do three ads, it might go:

1. He'll do anything to get a job. Lied on resume. Lied about recusing himself from cases involving Vanguard. Lied about his membership in CAP. He'll say whatever he thinks people want to hear in an interview to get the job.
2. He doesn't believe in a constitutional right to privacy. You can go to the point of saying his legal writing suggests women are the property of their husbands and fathers, but the essential legal point is whether or not a right to privacy exists. If this is what the debate is about, we win.
3. He believes in unchecked Presidential power. Bush is trying to pack the court so he can remain above the law.

Obviously as the hearings go on, the drama will shift and surge, but it's essential that these basic points be repeated by every advocacy group and political organization. Using literally the same language if possible, especially on TV.

I wanted this guy to be President, but nooooooooo. John Kerry was "The Real Deal."

Yeah, sometimes I'm still a little bitter.

I didn't even know Fox owned MySpace. This is all sorts of interesting.

The buzz is about censorship, but this reinforces several ideas/themes I've been feeling. First of all there's the ham-fisted way in which the corp is dealing with "community." Perhaps they don't realize that the technology they purchased has very limited novelty. There are already open source tools that would let you build something as sophisticated as myspace at a delivered cost of under $100k.

You need to spend some money to host 43 million users, yeah, but the code isn't really very valuable. What they bought was a community. No quicker way to drive those people away than to start restricting what they can do and say.

The traditional media is woefully out of touch. The Independent calls MySpace a "filesharing" site. Ha!

Also, this casts MySpace Music in a rather different light, being owned by a global media conglomerate and all. A little less indie, you might say. It now looks more like the imprint wave of the 90s. Can we expect more of this? Maybe. Musicians are a fairly exploitable population.

Finally, I wonder if that means NewsCorp has prepared for the legal contingency families seeking civil damages as a result of statutory rape. When it's a random chat room, or something being run by a couple kids that's one thing, but if Rupert Murdoch owns a service that encourages illegal sexual encounters... well, we live in a litigious society, and Billionaire Tyrants make appealing targets.

(Found via: Atrios)

I seem to be loosing my thirst for political blood lately. I have no one to fight for. Maybe it's just the bum tide of the new year or the lingering flu, but the establishment seems increasingly to be in a downward spiral from which it will not recover, even with a change in congress, and the revolution is flaccid to say the least.

I catch myself wishing that the undercurrent of doom would crest already. So we can get on to the next thing.

What's your Dangerous Idea?

The crisis of meaning is unpleasent for me. Survival has never been all that consuming of a pursuit, and I need stars to reach for. For the past three years or so various political maneuvers (peace, Dean, MFA, the aftermath) have been the locus of my ambition. Not sparking my cylendars anymore. Currently grasping at straws. Bleah.

Well, it's not really all that bad. I'm more or less certain something else will come along.

In lieu of anything else, I stayed up a bit to late watching DVDs and reading books last night. 2046 was the lightlight, The Machinist.

I've never seen a tragic romance done with a male protagonist before, but that's what 2046 is, a story of a writer in Hong Kong in the 60s who's unlucky in love, partly by choice. It was really quite good, maybe especially to me, but the viewer brings their own set of experiences to any cultural product and that's part of the deal. Anyway, if you can dig subtitles, I strongly suggest it.

The Machinist features an Auchwitz-skinny Christian Bale (I realize that's probably offensive, but it's the only thing I could think of whenever I saw his body... I hope he had some doctors with him on that project) in a smart and creepy sort of visual riddle. It was good opaque enough to keep me guessing until the end, which is always nice.

Finally, literature-wise, I finished The Normals, which has a strong middle, but is sort of mushy on either end. Not a good combination for any work of art, but still enjoyable in places. It must be hard to write novels these days, what with all the layers of self-awareness that one has to deal with. It's a problem facing anyone creative. I prefer to go at it stright up, either just make stuff that's unabashedly about me (and hopefully still interesting), or reach out for something that's almost spectacularly fictional. But I can see how other people get caught up in the necessity of addressing the post-post-modernity of the moment. Frankly, in my opinion, the less said about it the better.