Just read Jacob Sullum's column about CrossBalls , on Comedy Central. I had not heard of this show, but I must watch it at some point.

Reason contributing editor, escapee from Communist oppression, Xena fan-fic author, and Boston Globe columnist Cathy Young comments. Too much good stuff to pick out a quote, so I will abstain.

Jesse Walker pretty much sums up my view... [apologies to HuSi readers who have already seen this...]

The Democrats have nominated a senator who--just sticking to the points listed above--voted for the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, McCain-Feingold, and the TSA; who endorses the assault on "indecency"; who thinks the government should be spending even more than it is now. I didn't have room in my top ten for the terrible No Child Left Behind Act, which further centralized control of the country's public schools--but for the record, Kerry voted for that one too. It's far from clear that he'd be any less protectionist than Bush is, and he's also got problems that Bush doesn't have, like his support for stricter gun controls. True, Kerry doesn't owe anything to the religious right, and you can't blame him for the torture at Abu Ghraib. Other than that, he's not much of an improvement.

Yet I find myself hoping the guy wins. Not because I'm sure he'll be better than the current executive, but because the incumbent so richly deserves to be punished at the polls. Making me root for a... blowhard like Kerry isn't the worst thing Bush has done to the country. But it's the offense that I take most personally.

If you're from one of the following states, odds are that you're an overall contributor to the Greatest Country in the History of Earth (in descending order of chance of being a contributor)

• New Jersey
• Connecticut
• New Hampshire
• Nevada
• Massachusetts
• California
• Illinois
• Minnesota
• Colorado
• Delaware
• New York
• Washington
• Michigan
• Wisconsin
• Texas
• Oregon

Congratulations to all of you!

Indianans aren't contributors, but you aren't leeches on those of us who contribute. Just keep this in mind.

And now it comes to the less fun part of this exercise. Who are the leeches? Who's on welfare? Odds are, if you're from one of the states below, you're a despicable person who's dependent on the largesse of the states above (ranked ascending order of leeching):

• Florida
• Georgia
• Ohio
• Wyoming
• North Carolina
• Rhode Island
• Pennsylvania
• Kansas
• Vermont
• Utah
• Nebraska
• Arizona
• Maryland
• Iowa
• Tennessee
• Idaho
• Maine
• Missouri
• South Carolina
• Louisiana
• Virginia
• Kentucky
• Oklahoma
• Arkansas
• Hawaii
• South Dakota
• Alabama
• Montana
• West Virginia
• Mississippi
• Alaska
• North Dakota
• New Mexico

John Edwards' Bursting Media Bubble
Charles Paul Freund

News stories that describe a candidate's apparent weaknesses can allow that candidate to address such issues in public. It's not as if only reporters could see, for example, that Edwards didn't know what he was talking about during some of the candidates' debates. Many voters could see it, too. With no sustained public dialogue about it, Edwards really had no obvious way to resolve voter doubts, leaving voters to take those doubts with them into the polling booth.

[SNIP]

A stark fact that is sometimes obscured by Edwards' positive coverage is that his best claim is to have exceeded early expectations without being able to build on his early success. Indeed, he won no more primaries than did Howard Dean or Wesley Clark: one. Aside from his native South Carolina, Edwards didn't even do well in the South, running behind in such states as Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia. Despite his efforts to cherry-pick primaries (another relatively unexplored subject of campaign coverage), he couldn't beat Clark in Oklahoma, couldn't sell protectionism in the Rust Belt, and couldn't make any headway at all against Kerry when they were last two serious candidates standing. True, he had outlasted other Democrats with far more experience, but Edwards' candidacy in its closing days was very like his early candidacy, when few people had heard of him. It had failed to develop depth.

A story I submitted got posted to YRO: Yay! Just posting this for the benefit [???] of any fans who ignore YRO.

Note that it was timothy and not michael who posted it...

An interesting piece by Jesse Walker regarding Reagan's willingness to betray the major constituencies that helped to get him elected:

And if Reagan didn't live up to the expectations of his libertarian supporters, the flipside is that he did the same thing to his backers on the Christian right, and among that species of anti-Communist that seemed unconcerned with the specter of nuclear war.

Due to volume of comments (IINM, my most heavily commented JE yet... 'tis always amazing how popular meta-wankery can be from time to time), I suppose I'd address some of the issues brought up in a second JE...

"Emigrate" may have been a poor choice of word, or it's quite clear that clarity is a good thing . I'm not suggesting that we abandon Slashdot, or even the JE's. I think that SolemnDragon got the gist of what I was thinking about: a sort of complement to the JE's. Cross-posting wouldn't/shouldn't be "against the rules".

History. There is a history of sites that broke off from Slashdot and succeeded (at least for a significant period of time). Kuro5hin is, of course, the dominant example. HuSi, which basically was where a significant portion of the "Kool Kid5" of K5 went when things started going downhill is perhaps even more directly applicable to this idea.

On Scoop. Scoop has a counterpart to messaging called the Hotlist. As implemented at HuSi (which started life as little more than a testbed for Hulver's patches to Scoop), every story (including diaries) that you post is added to your hotlist. Every time a reply to one of your comments is posted, an entry is added to your hotlist. Additionally (and this was the extent of the K5 hotlist for non-subscribers), you can hotlist a story that's particularly interesting and thus be alerted when new comments are posted. K5 subscribers (and all HuSi users) also got the ability to hotlist users, so that whenever they posted, a hotlist entry would be displayed. UI conventions on Scoop sites are to place the hotlist on every page. I know of no limits on hotlist sizes, though I haven't really looked at Scoop's code in a loooong time.

A rough vision. This would not really be a competition to Slashdot. It wouldn't be stories that got rejected by Slashdot (not that there's anything wrong with that or such should be verboten). Would there be a general topic? Not really, though I suppose "the most intelligent user community on the web" might be apt (if possibly a bit conceited). K5's "Technology and Culture" may well be the best summation of what I'd like. We're all reasonably cultured and all reasonably knowledgeable on technology and such; we've got the expertise.

Political commentary: yeah

Game reviews: yeah

Music/Movie/TV/Book reviews: yeah

Interesting news: yeah

Interesting sites: yeah

Random shit from our daily lives: yeah

Humor: yeah

Fiction: why the hell not?

Community structure. I think HuSi has the right idea: if you want to join, fine. If you crap all over the lawn, we'll clean it up and ban you. Knock yourself out.

AC posting. One idea I've had brewing for a while is that AC posting should be preserved, but not immediately visible (as it is open to abuse). Logged-in users get the ability to promote/make visible AC posts. If one logged-in user promotes a post (and thereby essentially certifies, under risk of dire consequences that it's not crap), it's visible for all to see and treated just like any other post from a logged-in user. If three vote "It's crap", the post is no longer eligible for promotion.

Marotti.com. Yes, thoughts of Marotti.com have gone through my head. IMHO, Marotti "failed" because it didn't really differentiate itself from Slashdot (by which I mean the front page). As much as we bitch about the editors here, the story selection, the dupes, and so forth, the fact is that it's difficult to imagine a successful competitor to Slashdot in the "News for Nerds" market. Accordingly, Slashdot's FP should not be the model.

Has the time come for the "FK Circle" (to use a possibly somewhat inaccurate term) to emigrate from Slashdot and move to our own territory, where rather than earn ad money for OSDN, we could have control over how the ad money is distributed?

Maybe something along the lines of Scoop... I realize that K5 is junk nowadays, but I don't think there's a community CMS that matches Scoop in the medium-sized community area (cf. HuSi).

There's enough interesting people who post in this circle to assure no end of content. If things get slow, we could always line up another Guy vs. Dayton no-holds-barred cage match :oD. Get Google ads going and generate enough to pay for hosting (or get somebody to donate a server for sponsorship mentions on every page, or some such), with the extra proceeds being used for charity or something.

If you have a comment, please post in this follow-up JE

My prescription:

• Find the sick Iraqi fucks who beheaded the American, plus their home villages.
• Every unit that had a single person involved even peripherally in the Abu Ghraib torture incidents, military or civilian gets rounded up.
• Everybody in the above groups is furnished with a machine gun and more than sufficient ammo.
• Mark off an area of the desert about four miles square.
• Set 'em against each other.
• Last one standing is beheaded for murder.
• Sell pay-per-view TV of the entire spectacle ($15 sounds reasonable)
• Proceeds from the PPV go to funds to build a functional society in Iraq and help the families of fallen servicepeople.

At least then some good might come out of this whole affair.

• Rhythm & Light , by Carrie Nuttall. A photo collection by Neil's wife of the drum master in the studio.
• Traveling Music: Playing Back the Soundtrack to My Life and Times , by Neil Peart. This looks like a sequel to Ghost Rider, detailing Pearts travels between dates on 2002's Vapor Trails Tour. Examining the cover art, I make the following observations:
  
  It looks to be done by Hugh Syme (Rush's long time artist). The ear in the rearview mirror resembles Neil's. The cover art to Ghost Rider can be seen in the mirror. The overall style is very reminiscent of Power Windows.

For the past couple of weeks, I have had a Sirius satellite radio.

It. Kicks. Ass.

That's all I can say on this subject.

The New England Patriots have acquired runningback Corey Dillon from the Bengals for the 56th pick in Saturday's NFL Draft.

You looked at their skin and their hair and wondered how it could be different from our skin and hair.

The Stars' Tennis Balls, Stephen Fry.

Yes, Virginia, it's possible to be opposed to ANWR oil/gas exploitation while in favor of construction of a pipeline to bring natural gas from Alaska. Enviro-nuts can't get this through their skulls; nor can they get it through their skulls that moving as much oil/coal consumption to natural gas is a good thing.

IS THERE A PIPELINE IN THE PIPELINE?
Gregg Easterbrook
The New Republic, 16 April 2004

The United States got through another winter without a natural-gas shortage, though prices continue to be high. Right now, with the weather warming, the wholesale price of natural gas is about a third higher than it was during the winter of 2001, the coldest recent winter. Natural-gas supply is the next energy problem waiting to happen. There appears more chance of bad news on natural gas than on oil, which gets all the political attention.

Don't even get me started on their idiocy with respect to nuclear power....

And on a similar note:

ENVIROS RELIEVED, SOME BAD NEWS FOR A CHANGE
Gregg Easterbrook
The New Republic, 15 April 2004

Thus today's new regulation does not mean "clear skies no more for millions." Okay, headlines must fit the space, but the ability of The New York Times news pages and editorial page to be wrong about the most basic aspects of air-quality science has become quite spectacular. Skies have not ceased to be clear; they are getting clearer all the time, though you would never know this from reading any major American newspaper. In turn, today's stricter rules will put increased pressure on state and local officials to enforce smog controls, open car-pool lanes, encourage mass transit and take other antipollution steps. (Areas in violation of the new regulation risk loss of federal funds and other penalties.) In other words, the new smog rule will be yet another clean-air achievement for the Bush administration. Will anyone get this right? Expect the phony spin to be, "Oh my God, smog violations increasing!"