Politics Is Not a Team Sport
The novelist Andrew Klavan has written a completely insufferable ode to himself for being conservative that's getting a lot of praise.
The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don't have to lie. ... This is leftism's great strength: it's all white lies.
I wrote a response for Watching the Watchers that addresses the need of too many Americans to treat politics like a sport in which your team rox and the other team sux.
Doctor Has a Beef With Health Claims in Food Ads
One of the more interesting blogs I've discovered recently is Weighty Matters, a weight-loss and wellness blog by Yoni Freedhoff, a Canadian doctor who exposes efforts to make unhealthy food sound like it's good for you.Freedhoff began his career as a family physician, but switched gears and started the Bariatric Medical Institute in Ottawa, Canada, because he "quickly became frustrated prescribing medications for conditions that could be controlled with lifestyle changes. ... It's much more fun to stop drugs than to start them."
He recently spotted the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada recommending red meat as a healthy food:
I'm not aware of any study that has demonstrated any significant health benefits with red meat consumption.
On the contrary, I'm aware of many studies that have demonstrated the dangers of red meat consumption -- from breast cancer (in post-menopausal women, intake of just 60 grams per day increased their risk of breast cancer by 57 percent), to colon cancer (people who ate the most red meat were almost 40 percent more likely to develop colon cancer), and diabetes (for every increase in the number of daily servings of red meat there was a 26 percent increase in the risk of developing diabetes).
I Take Abuse According to RFC 2142
I was told Friday that Buzzword.Com has been added to a blacklist at RFC Ignorant because the domain doesn't have an abuse email account. Somebody wanted to report a spam blog on my server, and when he couldn't send mail to an abuse account here, I was turned in for RFC reeducation.
RFC 2142 requires that web sites and other servers take mail at several standard mailboxes, including abuse@domain for complaints, postmaster@domain for issues regarding mail servers and webmaster@domain for web servers. According to RFC Ignorant, all domains that might be abused must have an abuse account that takes mail.
It is ... a widely-held misconception that <abuse@domain> only needs to work for Internet Service Providers. Instead, it should work for any "organization" for which e-mail (or other abusable Internet) service exists, whether that service is provided to one user or one million.
Because an abuse account is likely to get a bunch of spam, I was hoping to put an autoresponder there that tells people to use a web form to file complaints. But that violates the RFC:
... sites are welcome to suggest "better/optimized" methods of communication, but they must acknowledge that the complaint will be acted upon, as submitted to the main abuse@domain address.
RFC Ignorant's approach is obnoxious but the point's valid. You can't run a service like a free weblog host without being attentive to complaints.
After dealing with this and spending most of the day on spam problems on my weblog and e-mail servers, I decided that my plan to run 16 WordPress MU servers was completely insane. I've consolidated all of them down to a single host, Buzzword.Com.
Finding Good Blogs in a Sea of Spam
The 16 free WordPress hosts I began in February have been a gigantic maintenance hassle because of spammer abuse, but they have lauched two cool new sites: The Ad Whisperers, a blog about TV commercials, and Political Fretwork, a liberal blog that mines the press for political news.
Last night, Ad Whisperers linked to a phone commercial that has an unusual selling point -- our company will stick with you through all the changes in your life -- even sexual orientation:
You may have seen the new Fido cellular phone ad touting how flexible the company's plans are. You may also have done a double-take near the end when you realized that the man -- who had first been seen making out with a blonde and then with a brunette and a baby -- was now snuggling up with a guy on the couch.
Forget low roaming charges and free calls to my five. I want a phone service that'll support me on the down low.
Fretwork pulls together stories from various sources as they're breaking, like this contrast between Bush's saber-rattling to pass a war budget without a withdrawal timetable and Mogtada al-Sadr's saber-rattling to end the occupation, noting a disturbing observation from Middle East scholar Juan Cole:
Chillingly, some of the demonstrators appeared to be soldiers in the Iraqi army.
If I could get one killer blog a month on these servers, it would be worth the aggravation of checking the WordPress MU servers daily to delete spammers.
Cluetrain Derails in Blacksburg, Virginia
One of the best-known techbloggers was embarrassed Monday when he sent the following private e-mail and it was published by the recipient:
From what I gather so far (and info is incomplete), most of the cell phones in use by students at Virginia Tech, and the system they used as well (much more feature-rich than phones provided by big carriers, and user-programmable to boot) were provided by a company in New York run by my friend ... . I think what they're doing is critically important: helping the users help themselves and each other. And using this tragedy to create the phone systems we want, rather than what the carriers are willing to give us.
Though he backed away from this sentiment, for reasons that should be obvious, he can't deny thinking that the massacre might be a useful lever to get better phone services.
Not long ago, another prominent techblogger proclaimed that a new computer chip was more important than cancer, using a news story about an actual teen with cancer as his example:
... having cancer is important to that one person. Intel chips change the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
Yesterday, a third techblogger's first take on Cho Seung-Hui's release of a multimedia manifesto was to claim him as a vlogger, a person who publishes video updates of his life as a blog.
The Virginia Tech shooter sent a package of video and pictures to NBC.
In other words, vlogging comes to mass murder, in ways no one anticipated (or no one I know).
It makes perfect sense, in a perfectly senseless way.
I've been a techblogger for a long time, hyping stuff that excites me about web publishing, programming and affiliated forms of geekery. But there ought to be subjects that are larger than their ability to sell cutting-edge technology, and I'm pretty sure that mass murder and childhood cancer are two of them.
I Shall Wear the Bottoms of my Trousers Rolled
Today is my 40th birthday. On this day at a medical clinic near Dallas four decades ago, my grandfather Bill hounded a senior nurse as she weighed and measured me, convinced I would be switched with another newborn through accident or malice. The only other kid in the nursery that morning was a girl, so I'm pretty sure my folks are the ones who produced me in a night of Champale-fueled abandon that probably involved a Chevy Malibu.
My parents married in late September 1966. I was born full-term. Twelve years later I finally did the math and began pestering my mother for an explanation during a car ride to my grandparents' house, fearing that I was a living breathing example of the breakdown of the American family. My aunt Pam halted the line of questioning and put my mind at ease by threatening to beat me.
With this birthday, I am officially entitled to a mid-life crisis.
Although I am a lapsed Catholic, I stuck with the church long enough to master guilt, so horndogging in the tradition of our nation's 42nd president has been ruled out. (Today's news that gonorrhea has developed drug resistance helps reaffirm that decision -- we're getting closer to Eddie Murphy's doomsday scenario where you poke your nether regions in the wrong place and they immediately explode.)
Because I refuse to clean my garage and live in a covenanted community that forbids curbside parking, a sportscar is also out of the question.
Normally in this circumstance, I would settle for some completely unnecessary home theater or computer purchase, NBA or baseball tickets, or perhaps Silver Age comic books in pristine mint condition. I live my life so close to the edge I get dizzy.
But this is one of life's moments that comes with spousal immunity from prosecution, so I'd hate to waste it. I think I'm going to use this opportunity to become one of those people who goes to the beach in a leopard-skin mankini.
The Internet's Chorus of Calumny
Frank Paynter's getting his groove back after the Internet's long tail knocked him around like a stegosaurus. For all of the talk about how bad it is to be the focus of an angry mob, an angry Internet mob gums its prey rather than biting. Once you get used to the slobber it's not so bad.
Now that the horde's moved on to Tim O'Reilly and his stinking badges, Paynter's mocking the outrage brigade by quoting Karl Marx:
All this chorus of calumny, which the party of order never fail, in their orgies of blood, to raise against their victims, only proves that the bourgeois of our days considers himself the legitimate successor to the baron of old, who thought every weapon in his own hand fair against the plebeian, while in the hands of the plebeian a weapon of any kind constituted in itself a crime.
Katharine Newman, a college student in Virginia, works me over a little for defending Paynter, Jeneane Sessum and Chris Locke:
The reaction of some of the Big-Fishes who owned these group blogs became defensive, arguing that they were being unfairly indicted for hate speech, which they weren't particularly accused of authoring. And that was when the story really got under my skin. All these Big-Fishes standing in line to say they wouldn't apologize for what they hadn't said, to decry Sierra's story as a black mark on their careers? Backing these Big-Fish, folks like Nick Denton and Rogers Cadenhead? I really would have hoped not.
I defended them because the mob was 99 and 44/100ths percent wrong. Once people had a compelling story -- mean web publishers drive female blogger into hiding with misogynistic death threats -- they never let go of it, because the facts were more complicated and less entertaining.
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