blog.shrub

Why Farhad Manjoo still watches The West Wing:

The show is a fiction, certainly. There isn’t a politician in the world like Jed Bartlet, an exceedingly smart, (mostly) honest man with principles, who doesn’t govern by politics, who takes counsel from the cooler, calmer heads on his staff, and even from his opponents. Today in politics, you won’t find anyone half as good. And that’s precisely why I watch: Some people might look at “The West Wing” under the Bush administration as a fantasy. I look at it as a blueprint. We should be so lucky to have a real White House like that. And maybe, one day, we will. Until then, it’s nice to have it on TV.

Robert F. Kennedy at the Sierra Club, September 10, 2005 [via Wil]:

I do 40 speeches a year in red states, and there is no difference between how Republican audiences and Democratic audiences react when they hear what this White House and this Congress are doing. There is no difference except that the Republicans come up afterward and say, “Why haven’t we ever heard of this before?” I say to them, “It’s because you’re watching Fox News and listening to Rush.” Eighty percent of Republicans are just Democrats who don’t know what’s going on.
…
If you talk to these people on Capitol Hill who are promoting these kind of changes and ask them, “Why are you doing this?” What they invariably say is, “Well, the time has come in our nation’s history where we have to choose between economic prosperity on the one hand and environmental protection on the other.” And that is a false choice. In 100 percent of the situations, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy.

Al Gore at the Liberty Coalition (2, video) [via bn]:

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution - our system of checks and balances - was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: “The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men.”

I ran into Guy Kawasaki at Macworld on Monday. He has a new blog. It’s got some material from his books mixed with commentary on current tech events. I liked the “10 lies” pieces.

they aren’t mine anyway…

• at conferences, there should be a printer preloaded with perforated card stock for people to print up temporary business cards
• all cell phones should feature noise-cancelling microphones

The Onion AV club interviews Sarah Silverman:

AVC: How long do you think you would have stayed on SNL if you hadn’t been fired?

SS: I don’t know. That’s a stupid question. You are a big dummy.

AVC: What was it like to be fired from that show?

SS: It was great!! You really are a fucking idiot.

How to order wine without looking like an asshole.

For Google: W Lifestyle Salon
721 Queen Street West
Toronto ON M6J 1E6
416-361-9777

(Daniela, formerly of Xtraordinaire, works Saturdays.)

My friend Leigh has a chapter in an anthology of academic works on Harry Potter. Now I’ve stumbled across a collect of student essays from a class called “Games for the Web: Ethnography of Massively Multiplayer On-line Games.”

On NPR’s This I believe: There Is No God:

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.

Richard Dawkins on Good and Bad Reasons for Believing:

The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much cleverer and more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But now I want to move on from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something , and warn you against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called “tradition,” “authority,” and “revelation.”

and the dangers of Gerin oil:

Gerin oil (or Geriniol to give it its scientific name) is a powerful drug which acts directly on the central nervous system to produce a range of characteristic symptoms, often of an antisocial or self- damaging nature. If administered chronically in childhood, Gerin oil can permanently modify the brain to produce adult disorders, including dangerous delusions which have proved very hard to treat. The four doomed flights of 11th September were, in a very real sense, Gerin oil trips: all 19 of the hijackers were high on the drug at the time. Historically, Geriniol intoxication was responsible for atrocities such as the Salem witch hunts and the massacres of native South Americans by conquistadores. Gerin oil fuelled most of the wars of the European middle ages and, in more recent times, the carnage that attended the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent and, on a smaller scale, Ireland.

Sam Harris spoke at the Long Now foundation on “On necessary heresy.” Stewart Brand summarizes:

In the US, Christians use irrational arguments about a soul in the 150 cells of a 3-day old human embryo to block stem cell research that might alleviate the suffering of millions. In Africa, Catholic doctrine uses tortured logic to actively discourage the use of condoms in countries ravaged by AIDS. “This is genocidal stupidity,” Harris said. Faith trumps rational argument. Common-sense ethical intuition is blinded by religious metaphysics.

In the US, 22% of the population are CERTAIN that Jesus is coming back in the next 50 years, and another 22% think that it’s likely. The good news of Christ’s return, though, can only occur following desperately bad news. Mushroom clouds would be welcomed. “End time thinking,” Harris said, “is fundamentally hostile to creating a sustainable future.”