Writing about or pointing out something amusing you saw in the craigslist personal or classified ads is stupid, and you should stop doing it. And if it’s a typographical error that you think is hilarious, please take a leave of absence and think about what you’ve done.

That is all.

1. Take A Heart The Sorrows

   First you take a heart
   Then you break a heart
   But before you do,
   You make him fall for you

2. Don’t Be Fooled Heavenly

   Have you ever wanted to have a fight for the one you love?
   Want someone to shout at, instead of to shout a, shout a, shout about.
   Have you ever needed somebody to shake you up?
   Have you ever wanted to see, how much he’d bleed,
   If you kicked him in the teeth?

3. Sugar April March
   chickfactor interview

4. I Was Meant For the Stage The Decemberists
   overcompensating episode

5. Oh Yeah Stereo Total

   “Oh Yeah” is a fast instrumental-Rock’a'Billy-airplane-taking-off-jetter. The organ melody of San Reimo made it an absolute classic. Looking at the world through a high pitched tape-delay.

6. Born to be Bad The Runaways

   I called my mother from Hollywood the other day
   And I said “Mom, I just called to tell ya I joined a rock and roll band
   And I won’t be coming home no more”

7. Gossip Folks [f/ Ludacris] Missy Elliott

   Musi ques
   I sews on bews
   I pues a twos on que zat
   Pue zoo
   My kizzer
   Pous zigga ay zee

8. An Endless Supply The Thermals

   every call you never made
   every call you waited for and never came
   every ancient sound that’s passed to your ears
   in an endless supply of ones and zeroes

You could just get together a list of every registered Democrat in the country, then take a statistically valid random sample of 1,000 or so of these people fly them all to a big hotel in Dayton (shades of Balkan diplomacy), and tell them they’re not leaving until some candidate has the support of 600 people. [emphasis added -- tew]

Obviously Matt Yglesias has never been to Dayton.

The article goes on to suggest darkly that Google hasn’t acted against comment spam because of their financial stake in Blogger, but I think this is unlikely — I think it’s just a very hard problem. Staying ahead of a motivated attacker is nearly impossible, as countless computer security experts will attest — close one hole and a motivated attacker will just find another. I looked for a reference to this idea on Bruce Schneier’s site, but I couldn’t find one.

It’s the evil-Universe doppleganger of Open Source software development: not only do we have “given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow,” but also “given enough spammers, all opportunities will be exploited.” It’s the same everywhere — a truly determined attacker, no matter how many holes you plug, will find a new hole.

It’s not enough to blacklist commenters, to bayesian sort your email, to digitally-rights-manage your music, to X-ray every bag at the airport. Motivated parties will find a new way, a new method, a new weakness to exploit. There just isn’t a long-term technical solution, as far as I can see.

I shrugged it off, back in 1994, but maybe spam is going to turn out to be a big problem.

Admittedly, you have to be a howling retard with all the intellectual curiousity God gave a Sea Monkey to think this way, but let me introduce you to your fellow human beings.

Let me put it this way: who would you rather have standing beside you when spear meets shield–Achilles, Hector, or Odysseus? With Hector, the man of honor, you will wage war when you should–but you may well lose. With Achilles, the man of skill, you will win–but you will wage war all the time, whether or not you should.

With Odysseus, the man of strategy, you will wage war only when you can win–but will you always be happy with your victories?

I think I would take my place beside Odysseus. But who should I take my place beside? It is an interesting question…

The question for my readers is this:

Who would you rather have standing beside you when the horde of chitinous bugs comes swarming up out of a cave? Lt. Rasczak, Dizzy Flores, or Carl Jenkins?

(Update: Carl Jenkins. You know — Doogie Howser.)

It’s not a big change, but it was overdue, since I usually can’t go six months without completely replacing whatever I’m using to build this site. So nearly a year — that’s unprecedented.

When the GOP sees a regime that’s hostile to the United States and that it is within America’s capacity to topple militarily, they say: “Go for it.” A hostile state always might become an al-Qaeda sponsor, and Republicans think the possibility of state sponsorship of al-Qaeda is very, very, very bad, so it’s worth going way out of our way to make sure it doesn’t happen. Fundamentally, Republicans are eager to overthrow regimes not because they’re democracy-promoting idealists (though some are democracy-promoting idealists, that’s just not the dominant strain of thought) but because they’re very worried about state sponsorship.

The Democratic foreign policy establishment sees this very differently. Democrats worry about failed states. Democrats think al-Qaeda grows — and grows powerful — where institutions of governance break down. Iraq wasn’t governed pleasantly, but it was governed. Hence, Democrats are loathe to destroy a regime unless they’re prepared to put it back together. This makes Democrats more hesitant to overthrow regimes, not because they’re stability-worshipping realists (though, again, some probably are) but because their collective nightmare is more failed states. Democrats take nation-building seriously — too seriously to want to do it more often than is really necessary.

Is there in the end a fatal contradiction between Israel’s Jewish character and its democratic form of government? Only if you accept the idea–rooted in Rousseau, promulgated for more than a century by Marxists, and embraced by left-leaning intellectuals throughout the Western world–that the aim of democracy is to reflect in its institutional forms peoples’ highest hopes, overcome individual alienation, and make all its citizens whole in heart and soul. But there is a more reasonable understanding of liberal democracy, one more in keeping with its first principles and classical formulations and less bound up with utopian hopes and Communist nightmares.

In this understanding, majorities are given wide latitude to legislate, circumscribed principally by energetic protection of the individual rights that belong to all citizens. In this understanding, states do not have an obligation to affirm equally the grandest aspirations of all citizens, but they do have an obligation to ensure that all are equal before the law and that none falls below minimum or basic requirements for education, health, and material well-being. And in this understanding, there is no reason in principle why a Jewish state–one which is open to Jews throughout the world, and gives expression in its public culture to Jewish history, Jewish hopes, and Jewish ideals–cannot protect the political rights and civil liberties, including religious freedom, of all its citizens, provide them with equal opportunities, and require that they take their fair share of responsibility for maintaining the state. And there is every reason, grounded in both democratic and Jewish imperatives, why Israel ought to do precisely that.

Substitute “heterosexual” or “blonde” or “right-handed” for “Jewish” in the above paragraph, and you’ll understand why things like this make me so sad.