Month: July 2008

Beating Hillary Clinton.

An art project at Wimbledon:

The artists essentially use grass as a form of photographic paper, projecting a black-and-white negative image onto a patch of grass as it grows in a dark room, and using the natural photosensitive properties of the grass to reproduce photographs.

The best part:

Part of what interests Ackroyd and Harvey about using grass is its ephemeral qualities, with the images they create often melting away soon after the grass is exposed to natural light and begins to grow. In galleries the artists have used light control to prolong the life of a work, but, before you rush to SW19 to see the HSBC piece for yourselves, this work lasted only as long as the Wimbledon crowds, and now that we have settled into the final stages of the competition has already pretty much disappeared.

Alan Jacobs on challenging religious sincerity:

It’s easy to come up with a story explaining why this person or that person is falsely professing religious belief; and, because we don’t have any (human or mechanical) mind-readers at hand, such skepticism can never be either refuted or confirmed. I’ve been around this highly annoying block way too many times. I have politically conservative Christian friends who are certain that Bill and Hillary Clinton have never been Christians but have been faking it all these years for political leverage; I have politically liberal friends who say exactly the same thing about George Bush. Maybe they’re all right; maybe they’re all wrong. How the hell would I know?

In general, people should be allowed to define the content of their own religious experience – not its authenticity.

Chris Anderson has argued that the web is moving us away from mainstream products and towards the "long tail," the vast number of obscure products on the web. A recent study comes to a different conclusion:

In a recent study Anita Elberse, a marketing professor at Harvard’s business school, looked at data for online video rentals and song purchases, and discovered that the patterns by which people shop online are essentially the same as the ones from offline. Not only do hits and blockbusters remain every bit as important online, but the evidence suggests that the Web is actually causing their role to grow, not shrink.

Anderson’s response:

…there is a subtle difference in the way we define the Long Tail, especially in the definitions of "head" and "tail", that leads to very different results.The best example of this is in what she describes as a growing "concentration" of sales around a relatively small number of blockbuster titles. In the Rhapsody data, she finds, the top 10% of titles (out of more than a million in that data sample) accounted for 78% of all plays, and the top 1% account for 32% of all plays. That sounds pretty concentrated around the head, until you reflect, as she notes, that "one percent of a million is still 10,000–[…]equal to the entire music inventory of a typical Wal-Mart store."

Ruffini is worried about McCain:

Message wise, McCain seems to be paralyzed by indecision between multiple different ways to get at Obama — is he a phony? a naif? too liberal? There has been nothing as disciplined as the Kerry flip flopper meme.

The body language I hear from the campaign is that Obama will not be defeated on issues, but on attributes, mostly stuff like the Clark kerfuffle when they can scuff the other side up with their own hypocrisy.

I’m a big fan of attributes and meta-narratives as the centerpiece of campaign strategy, but those attributes must be tied to some semblance of a winning position on the issue landscape. And especially in an election year, a candidate’s advocacy for a specific issue position can change the dynamics of the issue for the better. So, in 2004, Bush’s personal decisiveness contrasted with Kerry’s indecisiveness in a time of war. That message was not introduced in a vacuum.

McCain must decide to engage on the issue landscape and win a key battle on it in some fashion, either by outright winning or by bringing it close enough that McCain’s reputation can seal the deal. If McCain appears out of synch with the issue landscape, none of his leadership attributes will matter.

Akureyri, Iceland, 1.30 pm.

Robert Frank looks at how the rich would fare under Obama and McCain.

Maybe my roots are showing. One striking facet of many European conservatives and British Tories is their relative comfort with an Obama presidency, compared with American Republicans. Check out this little blog post by British Tory Daniel Hannan. Here’s a classic foreign view worth airing:

Consider, more or less at random, some of [Obama]’s policy positions. He wants to cut corporation tax. He plans (disappointingly) to grant immunity to telephone companies that help the federal government to eavesdrop on its citizens. He seems to have dropped any notion of criminalising the private ownership of guns, and made no protest when the Supreme Court struck down the District of Columbia’s ban on pistols last week. Having made some protectionist noises in order to appeal to the know-nothing Pennsylvania Democrats in advance of their primary, he has returned to reaching the virtues of free trade with an enthusiasm matched by few Republicans.

A couple of days ago, he made a lengthy speech about patriotism, his lapel sporting the little flag that has become a permanent fixture. He is even – again, rather to my disappointment – watering down his commitment to remove the garrison from Iraq.

Like many Tories, Hannan regards the Iraq adventure as foolish utopianism – not a criterion for right-wing credentializing. He doesn’t share American conservatism’s culture-specific love of guns and gun culture. So what’s not to like? Here’s the first reader response from an American:

You forget that he has the hallmark of a true leftie: he supports abortion. In fact, he believes an unwanted pregnancy to be a punishment. He also has leanings towards same-sex marriage (though doesn’t fully endorse it), and favours embryonic stem cell research.

But British conservatives don’t regard first trimester abortion rights as a right or left issue; and, as in most other civilized countries, Brits now uncontroversially embrace legal rights for gay couples. Toryism is also agnostic on embryonic stem cell research. So remove the Christianist elements of Republicanism, assume that conservatism has some interest in fiscal responsibility (no longer true of the GOP, alas), and why exactly should a Tory fear Obama?

In a British context, Obama is a one-nation Tory. Not a Thatcherite, to be sure, but well within the historic boundaries of British conservatism. Maybe that’s why I don’t fear him in the slightest. And I don’t think of myself as in any way a lefty either.

In reality, that is:

Jeff Barr and William Wes Wilkinson, two cowboys from Elverta, were the first male couple married in Woodland on Monday. "We met at a Gay Rodeo Association barn dance eight years ago," said Wilkinson, 43. "We’re both officers of the association. … I proposed to him and he immediately proposed to me, and we accepted at the same time while we were driving down the road in our truck."

The couple have 5 acres with three horses, three calves, nine chickens and two dogs. "That seems to be our family," Wilkinson said. But Barr’s parents, Walter and Louise Barr of Moraga, were present to witness the ceremony. "We have to do that," Walter Barr said of supporting their son …

That last moving sentiment is proof that in reality, rather than in the abstract, support for gay marriage is a deeply, deeply pro-family position.