Month: October 2007

Kottke’s Alex Wright uncovers a classic piece of prophesy from as early as 1932:

Here, the workspace is no longer cluttered with any books. In their place, a screen and a telephone within reach. Over there, in an immense edifice, are all the books and information. From there, the page to be read, in order to know the answer to the question asked by telephone, is made to appear on the screen. The screen could be divided in half, by four, or even ten if multiple texts and documents had to be consulted simultaneously. There would be a loudspeaker if the image had to be complemented by oral data and this improvement could continue to the automating the call for onscreen data. Cinema, phonographs, radio, television: these instruments, taken as substitutes for the book, will in fact become the new book, the most powerful works for the diffusion of human thought. This will be the radiated library and the televised book.

Wright notes:

Sweet fancy Macintosh, if that’s not what we’re all doing right here on the web all day.

John Aravosis begins to understand what interest group politics are actually about:

What I’m hearing is a message far different from what you hear from NGLTF and some of the louder activist claiming to speak for the enlightened masses. I think that a lot of gay people never truly accepted the transgender revolution that was thrust upon them. They simply sat back and shut up about their questions and concerns and doubts out of a sense of shame that it was somehow impolite to even question what was happening, and fear that if they did ask questions they’d be marked as bigots. And now, that paper-thin transgender revolution is coming home to roost.

There’s a connection:

More than one million Iraqi refugees have fled to Syria, putting an extraordinary burden on a poor country of 20 million people. 2,000 refugees from Iraq arrive at the Syrian border everyday, and Iraqi refugees residing in Syria comprise roughly 8% of that country’s population, a huge drain on the local economy…

The refugee crisis is also likely to lead to more terrorism and Islamic extremism. "Past experience has shown that large concentrations of refugees incubate irredentist violence and nourish jihadism. Coping with these flows will require the coordinated efforts of the UN, wealthy donor countries, and nongovernmental organizations…The presence of large numbers of Iraqi refugees in Jordan provides useful cover for jihadis looking to operate in that country. Moreover, the so called ratlines that bring foreign fighters into Iraq can support the reverse flow of terrorists to other regional cities or onward to western Europe." [Council on Foreign Relations, 9/07]

An escalating dispute over the uber-Catholic Ave Maria law school.

A reader writes:

Chris Matthews was much more rude and over the top than Jon Stewart was by framing the value of his book by talking about how Bill Clinton got laid in college. This was much more offensive than anything that Jon Stewart said to Chris, unless the rule is that you cannot talk to an author about their book unless you fully accept its premise.

The fact that you gave Chris a pass while going after Jon highlights why we get frustrated outside of the Beltway at times. I thought it was admirable that Jon wanted to engage in a serious conversation about the book. Chris just couldn’t keep up.

As for when they made fun of me, I don’t mean personally. The parody of the Chris Matthews show before the interview was what I had in mind.

They can’t help themselves, can they? One of the enduring reasons for cultural polarization in America is that the baby-boomer generation keeps reliving the same, exhausted squabbles they’ve been fighting since Vietnam. Bush vs Gore and Bush vs Kerry were really re-matches of 1968 all over again. If you want one more round of boomer conflict, you couldn’t do better than a Clinton-Giuliani match-up, could you? The nastiest alums of that period reunited to fight each other into the ground, with almost four decades of grudges to settle. Today, Rudy accused Clinton of being like McGovern. Yep: that’s what we need. Another re-hash of that exhausted paradigm. But, hey, the Washington establishment has already decided the primaries: it’s Clinton vs Giuliani. So it’s McGovern and Nixon again. Do I have to remind Democrats who won that battle? And why there’s no one the GOP wants more as the Democratic nominee than Hillary?

Port Judith, Rhode Island, 6.35 pm.

St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke says he’d refuse communion to Giuliani.

A nugget that might emerge at the AG hearings:

A ”dial-a-porn” service and the New York Daily News are among companies Michael Mukasey, President Bush’s choice for attorney general, has listed as former legal clients in documents turned over to senators who will decide whether to confirm him.