candidate

last night we saw the remake of the manchurian candidate. i really liked it, although by making the bad guys a big corporation instead of communist chinese, the title was a little more contrived. (i don't think a single manchurian appeared on the screen) as serious as the film takes itself, there is an implicit joke running around in the background. or at least i think there is. how else am i supposed to take a movie where the vice presidential candidate is secretly mind-controlled by a multinational company that is awarded a bunch of no-bid military contracts?

but at the same time, the film-makers were clearly trying to avoid making this film into too much of a blatent a partisan attack. early in the film there's a discussion of the electoral map which suggests that the bad guy politicians are democrats. (although when it reaches the actual date of the election, the returns map seems to have no resemblance to the earlier discussion--or real-life politics) and i am certain that all self-respective right-wingers would see hillary clinton in meryl streep's character.

somehow, it made me want to see jacob's ladder again. and the original too, of course.

busy but bombs

too much happening this week. i am very busy and tired right now. i was in a hearing in atlantic city this morning. as i parked the car and started to move my finger to the radio button to turn it off, i heard that bombs went off in tashkent this morning. although i had to go, i sat in the car for a few moments and waited to see if any more details were coming. they weren't and i had a hearing to do, so i shoved uzbekistan out of my head and ran into the courtroom.

on the way back i got little more info that what i got this morning. the u.s. and israeli embassies were targeted, as well as the office of the state prosecutor. the best coverage, as always when it comes to uzbekistan news, the argus is the place to go.

wierd

i haven't done much posting lately (at least in terms of substance) and yet my hits keep creeping up. the less i write, the more people come to look. i guess if i ever wanted to hit the big time i should just shut up entirely

outrios

so atrios has been outed. atrios himself has even come clean, the bottom of his blog now reads "a weblog by duncan black." duncan black, it turns out, was recently a visiting professor at bryn mawr college.

i knew he was local, but i never thought he was this local.

convention

i'm probably not going to say much about the democratic national convention this week. i went to one night of the democratic national convention in 1996 when i lived in chicago. the whole thing just felt like i was inside one big vapid commercial. i find them to be completely uninteresting.

so while (i must admit) i am a little proud of the fact that some bloggers were given creditentials to attend and blog the convention out of an inexplicable feeling of blogger-solidarity, i've found i've lost interest in many of the bloggers who are actually writing from the convention. and many of those who are are normally among my daily reads. among my favorite bloggers, kirk seems to be one of the few who is going beyond fanboy-type posts. for most of the others, it would be more interesting to read them if they just stayed home. i guess it will be harder to procrastinate at work this week. not necessarily a bad thing when you get down to it.

on the other hand, i will be attending a watch kerry's speech party on thursday, so i guess even i am taking part in some of the convention madness this year.

catsup

i was away last weekend. mrs. noz and i went to central pennsylvania to visit various family members. we were only there a short time, but it was a nice getaway. i was all but out of touch with the news when i was there. once again i came home wondering what i had missed only to find it wasn't much.

the new edition of the lonely planet guidebook to central asia is out. it's long overdue, actually. when i went last year i was disappointed by how out of date the 2000 edition was. some of the errors were so serious they probably were never right in the first place. but on one of my first mornings in tashkent i met michael kohn, the author of the uzbekistan chapters in the new edition. when i met him he was still writing it and basically doing a longer version of my vacation as his job. i was a little jealous, to be honest.

anyway, i kept in email contact with him throughout my trip, pointing out the errors i found and generally updating him on how much things cost, etc. i'm listed as one of the "fellow travelers" that kohn thanks at the end of the new edition, but i was hardpressed to find any information in the book that i could honestly attribute my emails to kohn last september as i flipped through it today. if nothing else, it is fun to read through and remember my trip. so i bought a travel book i will probably never use, simply because it had my name in it. am i a sucker or what?

a question

so now that i have this new mac, i've gotten some perverse pleasure from finally having an entirely microsoft-free computer. however, today i discovered that my current online fixation, the kingdom of loathing requires IE to use the chat function. i can play just fine on opera or safari, it just won't let me gab with other players. i'm not sure what to do. i could just play KoL from my desktop, but this wireless network still has the shine of a new toy and it's hard to resist using the internet from gratuitously random places around the apartment, just because i can. on the other hand, i could bite the bullet and download IE for mac. or, i guess, i could just play the gabless game i have so far. maybe i'm not even missing much.

any suggestions?

the next level?

yesterday, i plugged trish wilson's post about selective abortion. the post was responding to an essay in last sunday's new york times magazine. the essay made a strong impression on my wife too. not realizing i indirectly linked to it on my blog, she brought it up last night before we went to sleep. and then this morning on the train, i read barbara ehrenreich's piece owning up to abortion.

abortion, it seems, is in the air again. what's striking, however, is that these discussions are not the same tired argument this country experienced over the past few decades. they are not really about whether abortion should be legal. instead they all take as a given that abortion is legal but rather explore the ethical issues in various circumstances where someone is faced with a choice of whether or not to abort.

could it be that we've finally turned a corner on this issue? for the past several years its become increasingly obvious that the pro-choice side won the abortion debate. sure, there are plenty of pro-lifers out there, and there are still all kinds of efforts to attack or restrict abortion rights in this country. but the cloud of doom that i remember hanging over the heads of the pro-choice movement in the late 1980s seems to have disappated. plenty of people are fighting to preserve abortion rights, but there seems to be an underlying confidence that, at least for now, this country is unlikely to overturn roe v. wade.

it's only when you're no longer afraid of slippery slopes that you can begin an honest discussion about whether a particular abortion decision was justified or not (even if everyone agrees it should be a legal right). i don't know whether we've reached this next level of discourse about the issue yet. to be fair both the sunday article that spawned trish's discussion and the ehrenreich op-ed appeared in the new york times, so that hardly can be used as an indication of any change in the overall tone discussion of abortion. but it would be nice if we were on the verge of a whole new way to discuss abortion, without fear that it will inadvertently lead to any rights being taken away

assorted thingies

ben & jerry's ice cream is touring around with an effigy of president bush with flames shooting out of his trousers in what they are calling the PantsOnFire-Mobile (via the agonist)

as the links i included in prior posts for the kingdom of loathing and homestar runner are drifting into the archives before i'm done playing with them, i'm adding them both to the links. i've also added clareified to my links. something i have been meaning to do for a while, but was reminded when dawn commented here yesterday. us lawyers gotta stick up for one another, y'know

as for the the kingdom of loathing, i am happy to report that my accordion thief is now third level and thus i am officially kicking tripp's ass.

selective abortion

i'm not that good at plugging other people's blogs, even though i often read good stuff elsewhere. but don't miss trish wilson's post about selective abortion, and the discussions that follow.

damn legal ethics

spent the day in a south jersey hearing. i'm tired but once again cannot write about what happened today. what's the use of a blog if you can't bitch about frustrating things at work?

the kingdom of loathing

via defective yeti i discovered the kingdom of loathing, probably the greatest stick figure online role playing game i have ever seen.

i'm still a first level accordian thief, but i've been collecting a lot of meat, i only need a bit more moxie to get to level two. keep an eye on your polka bands, i'm on the move!

outfoxed

me and hydro went to see outfoxed last night at a local moveon.org party. "outfoxed" is a documentary about the fox news channel and argues that the channel is nothing more than a propaganda organ for the republican party.

it's not a hard argument to make. much of the film is just letting the fox tapes roll: the daily countdowns until bush is re-elected, the use of the terms "some people say" by their reporters to insert unsourced right wing opinion into news reports, and bill o'reilly's on-air ever-evolving versions of the truth and his abuse of guests to his show.

but it's more than just fox clips. they interview several former fox reporters and producers who speak of orders from the fox main office to shape their coverage. they also consult with with non-fox reporters (like walter cronkite) and media experts to get their opinion of how fox's tactics compare with mainstream journalism. they bring up the PIPA study from last fall illustrating that fox viewers are least able to answer factual questions correctly about current events in the middle east when compared with people who primarily get their news from other news sources. the film makers also presented statistics about the party affiliation of the guests on the channel, republicans are interviewed 5 times as often as democrats and the democrats tend to be moderate to conservative dems.

but most damning was the internal memos from the fox headquarters effectively ordering their newscasters to ignore or downplay negative news about the bush administration, to attack the administration's enemies, emphasize positive aspects of bush's policies, and generally manipulate the content of the news for partisan reasons. what is surprising is not that fox distorts (for that was fairly obvious to me the first time i tuned them in sometime in the 1990s), but rather that the distortion is so calculated. i guess i unconsciously gave them the benefit of the doubt--assuming that like most media bias, it was more an unintentional symptom of having human beings decide what goes on the air and what doesn't. but the memos illustrate daily orders to consciously create a right-wing view of the world, notwithstanding any embarrassing facts that might get in the way.

as i said, the argument that fox news is a right wing shill is not hard to make, but the film is put together as a fairly well-argued brief against the channel. it wasn't as polished or technically interesting as some of the other documentaries i have seen recently (but this has been a good year or two for documentaries). and the last part of the film didn't do that much for me, when they had a "what can you do about it" segment. i guess the corporation had a similar ending. but unlike "outfoxed", the corporation's ending didn't seem tacked on. maybe the makers of "outfoxed" didn't want to end on a low note. or maybe once i classified it as a brief-type argument in my head, the change of tone didn't seem appropriate anymore.

i'm beginning to wonder if documentaries are becoming the media for the left, kind of like talk radio has become for the right. after all this summer several overtly political documentaries have come out. F911 is the obvious example. but there's also , the hunting of the president (which i have not seen), "the corporation," and now "outfoxed."

meanwhile, when i went to outfoxed last night i wore my simpsons t-shirt without thinking about it (it's what i was wearing all day). it was only when i got home that mrs. noz pointed out that the shirt had a fox logo on each of the sleeves. d'oh!

stalling

rainy sunday, my favorite kind. actually, i like all rainy days. at least in the summer. in the winter i always feel like i'm being ripped off. the rain should be snow.

i'm actually kinda stalling here. (can you tell?) i have some time to spare and don't feel like doing arabic flashcards yet. mostly i'm waiting for this american life to start. i always put off all my sunday chores until after this american life. it just seems like a good excuse even though, upon reflection, it really isn't. and actually, upon even further reflection, i don't do this every week either. just this week, cause i can. so there

grrr

i've been fighting with blogger over the below post since i wrote it this morning. the new blogger interface is doing all kinds of weird things to my post, letters have disappeared, spaces appeared, etc. each time i notice, i edit in the correction, only to find that a new problem has popped up.

oddly, the new interface doesn't appear at all when i use opera or safari on my new mac. it's there on my windows machine, at least on IE and netscape, but not with opera. i haven't tried modzilla yet. i'm beginning to wonder if my fiddling is making it worse. but it's hard to resist tinkering

the corporation

last night we saw the corporation, an excellent documentary about the role of corporations in society. the film was really impressive on several different levels. if nothing else, the sheer volume of material, images, sounds, etc. they assembled together in one long carefully built case against the dominance of the corporate form in modern society. the film methodically describes what exactly a corporation is, a bit of its history, how it more recently came to become the dominant institution in our modern world (where multinational leaders regularly attend international gatherings that used to be the exclusive provence of government ministers) and then catalogues some of the harms caused by corporations.

the film starts out by lampooning some of the metaphors that were used to describe corporations when the enron and other corporate scandals broke, and then seeks to find its own, more accurate, metaphor for what a corporation is. because corporations are, legally speaking, "persons" under the law and because corporations are legally required to maximize profit for their shareholders and are prohibited from taking any course of action that is not intended to increase profit, the film consults with the DSM-IV and ultimately diagnoses the modern corporation as "psychotic."

this sounds inflammatory, but a similar idea occurred to me when i took my corporations class law school. as a guy who grew up mostly reading science fiction, i was comfortable with the notion of an artificial person. but artificial people in science fiction were treated very differently the artificial people i learned about in corporations class. most science fiction writers adopted, in one form or another, the three laws of robotics invented by isaac asimov:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

looking back, it's somewhat surprising just how ubiquitous "asimov's laws" were. indeed, some stories i read you just refer to them as "asimov's laws" without further explanation, a shorthand that geeks like me had no trouble understanding. their popularity stemmed from the general consensus that before we trust robots to enter our homes, we need some reassurance that these artificial people will not go frankenstein on us. (as it happens, asimov's robot stories, or at least a very loose approximation of them just entered the theaters this weekend as the film i, robot)

the three laws, or at least the first two, are designed to guarantee that artificial people never interfere with the interests of real human beings. so when i was in corporations class, the absence of anything resembling that kind of guarantee when it came to the artificial people that are corporations was really remarkable. if i wrote a science fiction story in which a robot was created only to maximize the financial gains of a select group of people, the entire premise would seem ridiculous. who would create such a thing? you'd obviously be creating some kind of monster. but that, it seemed, was what a corporation was. the point was further hit home when we read cases about corporations that tried to do things that were not motivated by increasing profits, like divesting in south africa during the apartheid era. corporations can be sued by their shareholders if they get too much of a moral compass. in some sense, having too much of a conscience is actually illegal for a corporation. (at least in the sense that it could subject the company to civil liability)

so i decided not to go into corporate law.

but over the years there is this nagging sense that corporations, as an institution, go largely unquestioned in our society. they unquestionably create a lot of wealth, but no one seems to wonder about the side effects. which is why i think the film "the corporation" is so important to be seen. it's a well-reasoned argument against corporations, or at least a society in which corporations are allowed to dominate to the extent they do today. even if the film is not entirely right, it at least airs a position that rarely has a voice in our society.

one problem with the film is its length. by the end of the more than 2 and a half hours, you feel pretty worn out. perhaps it should have been edited down a bit, but its hard to say what should have been left out. i think the filmmakers had so much to say, they couldn't get themselves to pare it down anymore.

there have been a lot of good documentaries hitting the theater lately. i think the control room is still my favorite. but "the corporation" is probably second of the ones that have hit the theater this year. it's better than fahrenheit 911 even though it will never get 1/10th of F911's audience. when F911 came out some (including myself) said that the movies importance was airing arguments that had not appeared in the mainstream media. but the arguments in F911 have at least had some coverage prior to the film. "the corporation" really speaks the unspeakable in our culture. it marshals an attack straight into the heart of the largest most powerful least questioned institution of our age.

what ran through my head as i read the below article

today president bush accused castro of encouraging sex tourism in cuba:

Addressing a conference on human trafficking, Bush quoted Castro as saying that prostitutes in Havana were the cleanest and best educated in the world.

Bush said that comment was evidence that Havana was encouraging sex tourism. Castro praised Cuban prostitutes for having a college education in a documentary interview by the U.S. filmmaker Oliver Stone.

bush added, "My administration takes a hardline against sex tourism here in the United States.  Under my administration, we have kept our prostitutes dirty and uneducated.  We've particularly cracked down on prostitutes with advanced degrees.  Only through such decisive action can you cut down on the illicit sex trade."

books and arabic (though not arabic books)

no arabic tonight. normally thursdays are the night i meet with my tutor, but he's away for a few weeks. unfortunately, he gets back just before i leave for my vacation. but we will be able to cram in one meeting between when he returns and when i leave and that, at least, should be enough to keep me working while he's gone.

its disconcerting, but recently i've felt like i'm losing vocabulary. as we trudge ahead together, i find it harder and harder to remember words i thought i had gotten down pat 3 or 4 lessons ago. i'm hoping to use the time without the tutor to review these earlier words. i'm hoping it will all come back without much work.

so while my tutoring is on hiatus, i'm trying hard to make sure my studies are not. on the other hand, without a tutor to answer to each week, i have been doing less each day. but that has also meant that i have been reading more. for whatever reason, arabic and reading for fun seem to occupy the same block of time in my life. when i get busy with arabic, my reading basically stops. and even just going to classes or tutoring regularly slows my normal quick reading speed to a crawl. suddenly, this week i'm moving nicely through family matters. i seem to like books set in india. it's not a conscious thing (or maybe it will be now that i've remarked on the fact), just a pattern. i'm not done yet, so i won't comment much about the book at this point.

and maybe i never will. i'm done making promises about blogging. whenever i write "i will write more about ______ later" i never do. so you won't see me do that again. i promise.

uzbekistan decertified

the big uzbek news this week is that the bush administration has penalized uzbekistan for its dismal human right record. congress requires the president to certify that uzbekistan has made progress in human rights before disbursing aid. if the president cannot certify that there has been progress, the country's aid package is cut back as a penalty. over the past few weeks, the state department has been holding hearings to decide whether to uzbekistan qualifies for certification. this week, they decided that the country did not making sufficient progress and cut its aid package by $18 million. to put that in perspective, last year the u.s. gave uzbekistan $86 million, so there is a real question whether this cut is enough to actually influence the government's behavior.

as always with uzbek news, nathan is all over this story, with excellent links and commentary here and here and here and here. chris is also promising further commentary.

as for my own views, i generally support using aid to try to influence democratic reform--both by funding projects that will tend to encourage reforms, and by cutting off other kinds of aid (military aid is the stuff that usually gets a dictator's attention, in my opinion) when they do not act as they want them to. so while i generally support the i idea of using aid as a carrot and a stick, there is also the question of whether the cut-off will be enough to encourage change in the country.

it appears that the aid targeted here is "nonweapons-related military spending, as well as various economic projects." other kinds of aid, like aid to democracy groups, health care funding, and money to secure nuclear-related sites are not affected. so there clearly is an attempt to keep the cut targeted. but is the loss of a small fraction of the overall aid enough to get karimov working to be re-certified? i have no idea.

toss some change at kirk

you may have heard that the democratic national convention is handing out press credentials to a few lucky bloggers. well, kirk is one, but he's trying to raise money to get to boston. he's only asking for a small donation, only $5 or so. so if you can afford it, go send him some dough by going here and clicking the "donate button" in the upper right.

musings of a weary mind

i'm pretty worn out. i had a hearing this morning. it wasn't as far away as most of the ones i do, but it meant i had to wake up a little earlier today. at least i finished fairly quickly, i got back to the office before lunch. the problem was, once i arrived, i had a hard time staying focused. this often happens after i do a hearing (or even just show up at a hearing that ends up settling)--i am wide awake and very focused when i'm around the client, opposing side, judge/arbitrator/whatever, but that all goes out the window when the hearing is over and i go back to my office

its funny. i have this idea for a post. it's one i've been planning to write at some point since i first tried out this thing. but i've never written a word. while other ideas i barf into blogger even when they're still half-baked, for some reason this one doesn't want to come out until its done.

i almost actually tried to write it just now. but i don't feel like it anymore. i wonder if i ever will. and if i do (and don't mention that its the long-percolating one) will think it looks different from the other [posts?

don't miss out

on the latest fashion craze.

why this is a good day

i'm sitting on my porch blogging wirelessly for the first time. i love new toys. the router was pathetically easy to set up and format. and then i turned on my laptop, it found the network right away. i'm still waiting for the laptop-carrying backpack, but the most important 2/3 of the packages i've been whining about have arrived so i'm pretty content

actually today was an all around good day. even aside from the router's arrival, today i discovered that a friend from law school is getting married to another friend from law school. unexpected, yet long overdue, news. i wish them well, but hope that their honeymoon is somewhere that baji has already been before. i'm getting sick of being left in the dust.

on top of that it has been raining pretty much constantly today. i love rainy summer days.

and last but not least (okay, maybe least, but it's still pretty damn good): josh corey pointed me to homestarrunner.com. you must go and play there. it's all endlessly captivating, but you must make sure to see this one and some of these. and maybe this one too. there's probably more good stuff in there, i just haven't found it yet. there's so much!!!

UPDATE: okay, so make sure to watch senor mortgage too.

just answer the freaking question

from this morning's times:

Both Mr. Edwards and Mr. Kerry voted for the resolution authorizing Mr. Bush to go to war. In the interview, they declined to say whether they agreed with other pro-war Democratic senators who said on Friday that they would have voted against the resolution had they known then what was contained in the Senate Intelligence Committee report.

"I'm not going to go back and answer hypothetical questions about what I would have done had I known this," Mr. Edwards said.

Mr. Kerry said: "The vote is not today and that's it. I completely agree with John Edwards."

kerry and edwards' dodge here is disgraceful. first, if they want the public to elect them into office, its legitimate for the public to ask under what circumstances they would decide to go to war. this is one of (if not the) most important power of the presidency and probably the biggest reason that i cannot support bush is because of his decision to invade iraq. it's important for me to know whether kerry-edwards would be any better

second, this only confirms that kerry and edwards plan to largely ignore the left in their campaign. for whatever reason, the republicans always try to campaign to their base (pandering to the religious right, for example), the democrats always try to campaign to the center. it's pretty clear to me that the republican strategy is more effective in the long term. by rallying their base, they get more of them to the polls and, in the long term, because the debate in each election is about issues that interest the right, the political center in this country moves rightward. when democrats campaign only to the centrists, on the other hand, the liberal base reluctantly goes along, their turnout is lower or they are wooed away by the greens and/or nader. and in the long run because democrats are the one talking about centrist positions (e.g. nafta with toothless labor and environmental side agreements), those centrist positions get characterized as "liberal." this further facilitates a move of the political center to the right.

when i read the above passage, it makes me more sympathetic to what nader is trying to do. only when the democrats realize that they cannot take the left for granted will they abandon their current strategy. i'm still not going to vote for nader, mind you. but i see more value in his project when the dems act like this.

the truly stupid thing is that kerry and edwards blew a perfect opportunity to clarify their position on the war in iraq and to explain their votes to authorize the war last fall. sharing the front page with the article that quotes the democratic candidates was this article summarizing the conclusions of the senate panel on pre-war intelligence. the panel found that american intelligence: (1) discounted evidence that iraq had suspended its weapons programs and exaggerated the value of dubious evidence supporting the continuation of the programs, (2) concluded that ties to al qaeda were "tenuous", and (3) since 1999 the iraqi military was so weakened and demoralized, it was unlikely to be much of a threat to its neighbors. in other words, this report gives kerry and edwards plenty of ammunition to say that, given what we know now, they would not have supported the war. virtually every reason cited by the bush administration to justify the war has been cast into doubt by the report.

why is this too much to hope for from the democratic candidates?

bush implicitly confirms pre-war weapons inspections were a sham

as i read this article in the new york times this morning, something occurred to me. the story reported that despite the senate intelligence committee's report on the failure of u.s. intelligence to report accurately on iraq's weapon's programs (or lack thereof), bush stands by his decision to invade iraq.

But Mr. Bush defended his decision to invade Iraq, referring to his repeated suggestions that Saddam Hussein possessed banned weapons that posed a threat to the United States and other nations. "Listen, we thought there was going to be stockpiles of weapons," he said at an appearance in Kutztown, Pa. "I thought so. The Congress thought so. The U.N. thought so. I'll tell you what we do know. Saddam Hussein had the capacity to make weapons."

Later, in York, Pa., Mr. Bush said, "Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons, I believe we were right to go into Iraq. America is safer today because we did. We removed a declared enemy of America, who had the capability of producing weapons of mass destruction, and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take."

bush's statement is nothing really new. he's being saying stuff like that over the past few months as the promised stockpiles of weapons have not turned up.

but this is what occurred to me: remember back before the u.s. invaded iraq, when the u.n. inspectors went in to find the stockpiles of weapons? at the time the anti-war types were saying that bush was just using u.n. inspections as an excuse to invade iraq--that he was planning to invade regardless of what the inspectors found there.

bush's recent statements standing by the decision to go to war despite the lack of any weapons stockpiles shows that the critics were right. bush confirmed their long-held suspicions. stockpiles of weapons did not matter, only the capacity to build those weapons (i.e. the underlying scientific knowledge necessary to build them--for no one has found the raw materials, like weapon-grade uranium, either). so why exactly did bush send the inspectors in back in early 2002? the weapons inspectors were not looking for scientific knowledge. and besides, scientific knowledge is such a low bar. i wouldn't be surprised if most countries have that the necessary knowledge to produce nuclear, biological or chemical weapons (the theoretical basis for nuclear weapons has been around for about 70 years. for chemical weapons its been over a century. such knowledge is not exactly cutting edge)

the funny thing is, arguing that bush was just "going through the motions" with the weapons inspection process was once considered to be practically treasonous. but now that bush has rewritten history about why we invaded, how many people will notice the change?

nader-dean

i just listened to the nader-dean debate on n.p.r.

as i think i've written before, i am not anti-nader like a lot of my friends on the left. i am not against him being on the ballot (i have a hard time advocating narrowing people's political choices in an election) and i don't hold any grudges against his supporters, either in 2000 or this year. if the democratic candidate want the votes of the nader supporters, its his job to win them over. to the extent gore failed to get more of the nader vote in 2000, that's gore's fault, not nader's. (and not the nader voter either).

now personally, i would not vote for nader under any circumstances this year. but that's my choice. this year i've decided to vote more strategically than ideologically. i probably agree with nader more than kerry, but kerry has my vote because he has a chance of winning. nader does not. there is a time and a place for voting on pure ideology and this year is not it. at least in my opinion

others may disagree. though i may argue with the practical ramifications of their choice, at some level i realize that they have a point. it's always honorable to vote your conscience, even if practically speaking, it probably won't amount to much.

at least that's what i would have argued this morning, before i heard nader and dean debate. nader's stock has fallen a bit with me today. i'm no longer sure that he would be the ideological choice for me.

the interesting thing is that nader seemed to be arguing that his his campaign was not about ideology either. at least not in the short term. nader all but admitted that he is not planning to win this presidential election. instead, he explained that he was running more to support his long-term goals of fostering a third party movement in this country. in other words, nader's pitch, when you get down to it, was also more strategic than ideological. while ideology is important to nader in the long run, in this particular election nader presented as a mere step in a larger goal. "every oak tree begins with only an acorn" he said at one point.

but if nader's campaign is based on the claim that this election is a step in a larger strategy, then it's only fair to evaluate how his run for the presidency furthers that long-term goal of building a leftist third-party movement. i think by running this year, nader is hindering, not furthering his goal. from where i'm sitting, it seems that by running nader is doing little more than pissing off the very people who would be inclined to support that long term goal. i.e. people like me. nader talks about building a grass-root third party movement, but you can't build a grass roots movement when the grass does not support you anymore. by running nader is eroding his support among liberals and thus it is not building support for a third-party movement. his strategy is simply flawed. i came away from the debate more convinced than ever that nader does not deserve my vote.

it also didn't hurt that dean totally kicked ass. he is a far more articulate advocate for kerry than kerry is.

tracking

this week i've been spending a lot of my time tracking things i ordered last weekend. this is why i do not order stuff over the internet very often. many people use the internet to shop to save time. it doesn't work that way for me. the order may not take long, but as soon as i get the confirmation email with the tracking number, i can't help but repeatedly check to see where my package is.

this week was especially exciting because i ordered three things last weekend. i don't know if i've ever had three packages to track at one time. it's so exciting! well, not that exciting. when you track roughly every hour, most of the time you don't see any movement. as the adage says: "a tracked package doesn't move" or something like that. nothing is more disappointing than to see that my package is still in palatine, illinois, just as it was 45 minutes ago when i last looked.

well, i guess some things are more disappointing.

anyway, last weekend i ordered a laptop, a wireless router and a backpack (that was supposed to come with the laptop, but instead shipped separately). the laptop didn't ship until wednesday. or at least that's when my tracking first picked it up. its first scan was actually in the waning hours of tuesday. when i first tracked it wednesday morning, i puzzeled over the location "C.K.S. Airp" it said. for the state it listed "TW." then it came to me: chang kai shek airport in taipei, taiwan. this was not good news. i assumed it was shipping from california or something. especially troubling was the fact that i had opted for "ground" shipping. how exactly was it supposed to get to me from taiwan by ground? damn my cheapness!!! the last log entry remained "C.K.S. Airp" all day wednesday. i imagined the truck circling the island, looking in vain for a bridge to pennsylvania. when i bought a whole new laptop, why didn't i throw in the extra $18 to have it shipped by air?

but the next morning i got a pleasant surprise. between the time i left work wednesday and when i checked in thursday morning my package went from taiwan to ankorage to indianapolis to philadelphia. it was waiting for me when i got back from arabic last night. now i'm glad i didn't pay the 18 bucks.

so now i have a new toy, but it's not complete until i get the router. the router shipped before the laptop, but it seemed to sit in illinois forever. as the router hung out with the corn the laptop raced passed it and managed to reach me before the router left the state. today, at least, it finally reached philadelphia. but not until the afternoon, so i don't think it will reach me until monday. i guess that's the shipping i should have splurged on. so much for my dreams of setting up the wireless network this weekend...

edwards' experience

for the past 30 or so hours, starting almost immediately after i learned that edwards was going to be kerry's veep, the right has been parroting the white house's standard criticisms of edwards. one of the main ones is that edwards does not have the experience to be VP.

when i first encountered the argument (i believe it was over at chez echidne), i was surprised that the bush administration would make such a charge. after all, W spent even less time as governor prior to becoming president than edwards has in the senate. given the circumstances, i thought the administration would let that one quietly drop.

that will teach me to assume this administration is capable of recognizing the weaknesses of its own argument. sure enough, president bush himself said today that he does not think edwards has enough experience to be VP.

bush, like all modern presidents, has a series of handlers and political advisors that help him to prepare virtually every public remark he utters each day. so bush himself probably did not write the statement about edwards' inexperience. someone else probably did, bush just delivered it. but as bush rehearsed his line in front of the bathroom mirror this morning, one can only wonder if his criticism sounded a bit familiar. maybe it reminded him of e.j. dionne has pointed out a statement orrin hatch made during the 2000 republican primary debates:

"You've been a great governor," Hatch declared of his rival for the Republican presidential nomination. "My only problem with you, governor, is that you've only had four and going into your fifth year of governorship. . . . Frankly, I really believe that you need more experience before you become president of the United States. That's why I'm thinking of you as a vice presidential candidate."

now that was hatch, this is bush. bush himself never endorsed the idea that inexperienced politicians belong in the vice presidency. but it will be interesting to watch to see if hatch himself ever picks up the edwards is inexperienced line.

meanwhile rude pundit has a good historical run-down of the experience (or lack thereof) of past presidents and vice-presidents.

it strikes me that a single term in the senate is all you need to be vice president. under the constitution, vice presidents have only two things to do: (1) preside over the senate, and (2) wait for the death or incapacity of the president. his single term in the senate will certainly be enough to help him with #1, and anyone can do #2.

in addition to the constitutionally mandated roles the vice president has two other job duties: (3) doing whatever jobs the president assigns to him, and (4) campaigning for the president and otherwise selling the administration's policies to the public. regarding #3, kerry will probably find stuff for edwards to do that are within edwards' abilities. that's how its been done in the past, after all. clinton put gore in charge of the reinventing government program, a role he apparently fulfilled fairly well as government generally shrank during the clinton administration. bush put cheney in charge of the entire country. he hasn't done a good job at that, but it probably was better than the alternative of letting bush make decisions by himself. the point is, history is fairly clear: what presidents choose to assign their vice presidents seems to have more to do with what the vice president (and president) is capable of doing than anything else. there is nothing about edwards' experience in the senate that would suggest kerry couldn't find something to keep him busy.

as for #4, campaigning seems to be edwards real gift. not even edwards' critics say he can't be an effective campaigner.

on balance, therefore, it seems pretty clear that edwards' limited experience should not disqualify him from the job of vice president. and to the extend it raises questions about his ability to serve as president... well, that's a question bush himself should be answering first.

(some of the above links via holden at eschaton)

happening two

hydro doesn't approve of my lame-o post about the weekend. his point in the comments is that a lot happened over the weekend that i didn't mention. that's true. but that's always true. sometimes its hard to blog when nothing happened. but it's even harder to blog when a lot happened and you simply don't feel like telling a long and rather pointless tale. but, just so no one can ever say that we are rubber hose are not thinking of our dear readers, here is a brief incoherent summary of my weekend activities (blame hydro if you don't like it):

there was: drama, pathos, lost keys (NMP), stranded dogs, a complicated move, 2 films, air conditioning, lack of air conditioning, meals with neighbors, friends, a few sisters and a rabbi. there was also baseball, lots of fireworks (in 2 different states), little arabic studying, too many donuts, illicit alcohol, dancing celery, stubborn fires, dying tomatoes, canceled innertubes, and non-canceled innertubes. more lightning than we wanted, but in the end, less than we expected. and last weekend i realized for the very first time that betty boop's real name is elizabeth.

all-in-all a good weekend. i just didn't think about politics much. which was all i was trying to say below.

musings about edwards

i don't have all that much of an opinion of edwards other than he seems to have a real talent to public speaking and talks a more populist talk than most politicians do these days. for a brief period in the primaries i was secretly rooting for him to win the democratic nomination, just to see him run circles around bush in the presidential debates. but other than his speaking ability i never really got that good of a sense of him.

as for what substantive policy priorities he will bring to a kerry administration? who cares. chances are he will be in favor of whatever kerry proposes for the next 4-8 years. vice presidents always have to toe the line for the president. bush senior was pro-choice when he challenged reagan in the republican primaries and coined the phrase "voodoo economics" for reagan's economic plan. he did a 180 on both issues from the moment he accepted his nomination for vice president. if there were any policy differences between kerry and edwards before today, they are probably irrelevant now.

all that vice presidents have to offer is adding to the nominees electibility. cheney was intended to reassure us that the boy-king will be under adult supervision, thus diminishing the public's unease with bush's lack of experience and apparent inability to handle the job. when gore was chosen it was partly to deflect from the draft-dodging charges that had already surfaced about clinton (it may be hard to believe now, but in the early 1990s, senator gore was considered to be a hawk).

what edwards brings to kerry is personality and the south. personality, i can believe. i don't think he's really bringing the south. (i think the south is the most pandered-to region in the entire country. and worse, ineffectively pandered to, because the south doesn't seem to notice the pander) common wisdom holds that it is impossible for a presidential ticket to win without at least one member at least pretending to be from the former confederacy. thus bush senior buried his connecticut roots and pretended to be from texas (claiming a vacant lot he owned in austin to be his home address). texas is a good one to fake too--since it's both south and west. perhaps that's why gephardt stayed on kerry's short list for so long--missouri is both south and mid-west.

but kerry's pick is from the carolinas. both carolinas, it turns out (born in south, now from north), but still strictly an east coast ticket. will this presidential election turn into east vs. west instead of north vs. south?

in any case, i am suspicious of the value of geographical diversity on a presidential ticket. how many people really change their vote based on where someone is from? i can't imagine voting for george bush, even if he were from pennsylvania. or chicago, my favorite place i have ever lived. if W talked like mayor daley, i still wouldn't vote for him. having a familiar zip code is simply no excuse for the war in iraq. i find it hard to believe where a candidate lives would matter enough to anyone to overcome any other reason to love or hate the candidate.

which brings me back to personality. unlike geography, i can believe that actually matters to get election. edwards has it, kerry seems to need it. so edwards is a good thing for the ticket.

happening

i had a fun, yet busy, weekend. not really much blogging though. or following politics much, for that matter. when i step away from politics for a few days i am always amazed when i peek back into the political sites how little i missed. when i'm reading them, it feels like things happen all the time. i suppose they do, but when you leave the swirl of constant posting and updates, you realize that all these baby steps don't always add up to much

i guess this is nothing new, i had a similar revelation last year when i was traveling.

buy! buy! buy!

mrs. noz and i bought several expensive toys today, and it's not even 1:30 yet. i ordered an ibook this morning. this marks my turn back to the mac universe. i used to be a hardcore mac person, but then the games lured me away to p.c. i really like my current desktop, which runs on xp, but i miss the mac operating system. so now i've found the perfect compromise: i will keep this windows-based desktop, but get a mac laptop (and set up a wireless network in our apt, of course). i have been looking for new ways to waste time on the internet. perhaps this is the solution.

meanwhile, we also got a bunch of pieces of furniture. we were going to get three pieces, but while we were in the store one woman literal bought this chair we wanted right out from underneath me. i was sitting on the chair, telling mrs. noz that we should get it when i woman showed up saying "get out of my chair!" the salesman in tow explained that she just bought it and that they didn't have any more in stock. he also added that the manufacturer has stopped making this particular chair and will never ever make anything like it again as the designer has fled to bolivia to avoid the feds. okay, he didn't say that last bit, but it was still bubble bursting to see this random lady cart off what by all rights was our chair

but despite these setbacks, we still managed to dump a wad of money this morning. it's rather frightening how quick and easy it is charge everything. usually we're much more careful and conservative with money. i just hope my wireless network is up and running before the bill comes.

mood swings

i have only been in a blogging mood lately when i happen to be nowhere near a computer.

today i am a little groggy. once a year i stop having caffeine to prove that i'm not addicted. in fact it proves the opposite and today is a perfect example. the coffee was decaf this morning. and so now i have this mild headache and i've been groggy all morning. today is the first day of this year's decafination and the first day is always the worst. by tomorrow i should feel pretty normal again, provided i don't backslide. the next hurdle is next week when i cut out literally everything with even a little caffeine. even chocolate.

why do i do this to myself? i just started writing a long explanation, but then i realized i've done this before. now that i've been posting for more than a year it was pretty much inevitable that i would start repeating myself