Via Norm at onegoodmove comes word of this interesting New Yorker: Fact piece by Malcolm Gladwell: Something borrowed. It concerns the question of just what is, and isn’t, plagiarism, and in particular whether it was or wasn’t such when playwright Bryony Lavery lifted key passages from a New Yorker article about serial killers, and put them in the mouths of her characters without attribution.

A nice, thoughtful piece from Jeanne of Body and Soul on the possible justifications for continuing to fight the war in Iraq: Misery.

The issue she’s grappling with seems a bit abstract to me, given that the architects of this war don’t actually give any signs of being motivated by a desire to help the Iraqi people; that’s merely the lame excuse they’ve been left with now that all their other tissue-paper rationales have fallen apart. But it’s an interesting mental exercise, anyway.

Courtesy of Hiro, a link to someone who clearly has way too much time on his hands: RoboDump 1.0.

I’ve posted a few of these, but this is a good one, so I’m posting it, too: An explanation of a vote for Kerry.

Kevin Sites (the embedded reporter/photographer who took the footage of the Marine shooting the wounded Iraqi in the mosque in Fallujah) gives his firsthand account of the circumstances: Open letter to Devil Dogs of the 3.1.

Pretty interesting stuff, at least for those who feel a moral obligation to try to understand what actually happened, as opposed to just spinning themselves with comforting assumptions.

In the tradition of that Human Descent site I’ve linked to previously, here’s a three-beasts-in-one photoshop contest from the users of Worth1000.com: Chimaera 6.

Thanks to Onan for the link.

Nice, clean, and to the point: Bush is Lord and Condi Rice is angry!!

Continuing the topic of human origins (and continuing my recent obsession with Michael Williams), I have to wonder: why do arguments like this bother me? Key human characteristics.

Interesting discussion by Paul Waldman of a recent Gallup survey on Americans’ attitudes re: evolution and Biblical infallibility: Meanwhile, back in the reality-based community.

Some science for your weekend, courtesy of some daring folk who decided to see if running really skanky vodka through a Brita water filter would make it taste better: Oh my god it burns!

(This ran at Slashdot, which I used to make a point never to link to, or to use as the source of lies.com items, since I figured that everybody reads Slashdot already, right? But then I stopped reading it (years ago, actually) so now I’ve decided it’s fair game.)

See also this comment in the associated Slashdot discussion re: trying to do the same thing with human urine: Speaking of filters…

I’ve got a thing for really well-done parody, which sometimes leaves me foolishly admiring something that wasn’t actually meant to be funny, but just seems like it ought to be. I previously provoked quite a few comments for and against the theory of evolution by linking to an essay by Richard Paley, and it turns out Dr. Paley is just one of the fine people doing God’s work as part of Objective: Christian ministries.

Anyway, here’s another fun one for you to chew on. Is it real, or is it parody? Objective: 4 Kidz (with Lambuel).

Hello! My name is Lambuel and I hope that we can be friends. I would like to share with you my love for Jesus. Did you know that Jesus loves each and every one of us? It’s true! In the Bible, He says: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”… Isn’t that COOL?!

From Liza Sabater, whom I just now discovered via her enviable googlerank for the phrase “george bush sally hemmings,” an uplifting story that will resonate with anyone who’s ever been to the emergency room with an allergy-constricted airway: For love and turkey.

Michael Williams doesn’t just shock and depress me. He also offers links to interesting stuff like this: A bombardier’s reflection, in which Korean War veteran James Earl Jones looks back on the making of Dr. Strangelove.

In my memory of my recent posting behavior, I see a huge mass of Bush items in the runup to the election, and then a sudden near-total lack thereafter. So I thought I’d put it in graphic form, to see how accurate that was:

Which actually isn’t as dramatic a fall-off as I’d imagined. At least it doesn’t look quite so much like that, especially given a little red from this item today.

Given that I’m counting this as a category-dubya item, though, I really ought to have some non-self-referential Bush content. So I offer you this: the most appropriate comment I can think of to make on Bush’s post-election activity so far. And yeah, I’m actually just posting the picture, rather than saying anything, because again, I don’t really have the heart, and it kinda speaks for itself anyway:

Onan said of this image something like, “Gee; did he kiss Colin Powell goodbye, too?” And then my wife, separately, said the exact same thing. So I guess a lot of people must have said that. Or maybe Onan and my wife are coordinating their comments behind my back. Which really seems pretty unlikely, if you know them.

I’m not sure what my posting behavior is going to be like going forward. I think it’s going to change, though. In the runup to the election I was pretty hot and heavy with the “I must trumpet the lameness of the Bush administration as an act of civic duty, that I might impel my fellow citizens to deliver a furious hiding unto him at the polls.” And unsurprisingly, I find that my interest in that has pretty much died, at least for the moment.

I guess the only point in my doing this, or at least the most worthwhile point in my doing it, is to continue to try to be as honest as I can about what I’m thinking. At the moment, those thoughts are still fairly thoroughly depressing. Like, for example, there were the thoughts inspired by the aforementioned Onan’s observation to me the other day that hey, I should cheer up: we’re only eight weeks or so away from the presumptive midpoint of the Bush presidency.

Sometimes I don’t like Onan very much.

I haven’t been posting much lately, about Fallujah or much else; I guess I haven’t had the heart for it. But I don’t want you to think I’ve vanished off the face of the Earth.

Here’s the most memorable thing (for me, I mean) that I’ve seen on the war in the last few days: Michael Williams (he of the well-earned victory over my horror-stricken Bush-Cheney sign clutch), on the non-issue of shooting the wounded: Killing on the battlefield.

Still sliding. No bottom in sight.

Jerome Doolittle of Bad Attitudes talks interestingly about the parallels between the current operation in Fallujah, and military spokespeople’s efforts to assure us that only Very Bad People are being killed by our side, and the role he played during a previous conflict, in which he lied in precisely the same way: Collateral damage.

It’s interesting to me how the stuff I read clusters into little obsession topics. Well, it’s obvious, too, that I’m just a serial obsessive, and the media I go to for my information mostly embody the same sort of cover-it-to-death-and-then-drop-it mindset. But anyway, here’s a batch of my latest reading material on the great Blue America/Red America divide:

From Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, doing the big-picture grounded-in-historical-book-learning thing he does best: A few years ago, before the 2000 election… It’s about the differences between blue states and red states, in particular, the differences in murder rates and what they show.

And from Chris Bowers at MyDD: Real conservative values. Makes a good point that political conservatives shouldn’t be allowed to claim to stand for a bunch of principles that they don’t honor in practice.

Timothy Noah writes at Slate on the apparent desire of “evangelical Christians” to avoid being labeled as “the Christian right”: Red-state PC.

Finally, a snarky one for Craig to complain about: Fuck the South. Pretty much self-explanatory.

Promoted from the comments on this item. Who says lies.com doesn’t foster intelligent discussion?

To all you liberal lefty’s out there (and of course the “moderator” who will never let this see the light of any display) trying to dismantle the US of A and show no respect for the office nor the President, I have just 1 word!

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So, yeah; I’m a geek. And when I saw what they were doing at dvdtracks.com I couldn’t rest until I’d tried it myself.

So now I have. I’m not sure that anyone else in the world is actually going to be interested in listening to this, but on the off chance someone will be, here you go: my unauthorized audio commentary track for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Extended Edition):

Low Quality/Small File Size

• Disc One Commentary (12.3 MB mp3 file)
• Disc Two Commentary (10.9 MB mp3 file)

High Quality/Large File Size

• Disc One Commentary (43.6 MB mp3 file)
• Disc Two Commentary (38.0 MB mp3 file)

From some good folks at UMich: Election result maps. More of the ones I’ve posted previously, but with nicer colorization, and a bunch of cartograms.