Two nights ago, Bush’s speechwriter was on The Daily Show, the Jon Stewart fake news program that’s funny because it blurts out the truth. The speechwriter explained with glee how he came up with the phrase “Axis of Evil.” He originally wrote “Axis of Hatred,” but his boss (not Bush) took one look at it and said, “No, it’s the ‘Axis of Evil,'” repeating it a few times aloud to see how it sounds.

This constituted the debate over whether these countries actually are evil and the effect classifying them as such would have. A couple of lobes short of The West Wing, eh?

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Our middle child turned 18 last night. And what has she been looking forward to doing now that she’s attained her majority? Getting a tattoo? Buying cigarettes? Checking a pornographic movie out of the video store?

No, she’s been looking forward to buying a subscription to Nickelodeon Magazine for Kids without first getting the permission of her parents.

(If you haven’t figured it out, she’s a delight. Happy birthday, sweetie.)

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From Dana Blankenhorn comes a link to an article about Kellogg’s application to trademark the phrase “chocolate crackle,” a popular recipe in Australia. Kellogg’s was granted a trademark for chocolate crackles recipe in 1953 but since then the term has been widely applied to a mix of chocolate and sugar, with or without what we call Rice Krispies in the US. In fact, here’s a page from the M&M’s site that has a recipe for a Krispie-free chocolate crackle confection.

The Australian patent office is looking into this short-sighted trademark greediness by Kellogg’s.

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Tripod is making blogs available to their millions of members. They’ve announced a deal with Terra Lycos for “Blog Builder” software. Apparently, it’s being provided for free with a Tripod subscription.

So, welcome Tripod members, to the blogiverse.

Best of all, think of the multiple millions of popup ad opportunities this means!

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Kevin recommends (which is, of course, not the same thing as endorsing) an interesting essay by Roger Scruton about how a smart guy thought his way into a classically conservative standpoint. AKMA does an excellent job assessing and undermining it. AKMA’s main point strikes me as brilliantly right: Scruton poses “a binary choice between banal libertinism and sensible, prudent conservatism” as if shallow liberalism were the only variety on the shelves. And yet there’s a further irony here.

The issue for Scruton seems to come down to whether we humans can escape our traditions and culture. If not, says Scruton , then we must embrace who we are instead of thinking — as liberals do — that we can re-invent ourselves. He writes:

Burke brought home to me that our most necessary beliefs may be both unjustified and unjustifiable from our own perspective, and that the attempt to justify them will lead merely to their loss. Replacing them with the abstract rational systems of the philosophers, we may think ourselves more rational and better equipped for life in the modern world. But in fact we are less well equipped, and our new beliefs are far less justified, for the very reason that they are justified by ourselves.

It is certainly the Enlightenment prejudice to believe that “abstract rational systems” should replace older prejudices, but that is not the only liberal alternative. For example: “Moral progress is a matter of wider and wider sympathy,” writes Richard Rorty (in Philosophy and Social Hope); sympathy is not an abstract rational system. Further, the very person Scruton goes out of his way to malign rather nastily — Foucault — is in fact one our subtlest thinkers about the way prejudice (pre-judgment, not racial bias, of course) simultaneously enables judgment and undermines it. Rather than saying we are all open to radical self-reinvention — something no one except Sartre and motivational speakers espouse — Foucault provided exactly the sort of nuanced analysis that would help Scruton move past the simplification of naive liberalism vs. coldly-brilliant conservativism.

But, Scruton begins the article by saying that it was conservativism’s bold statements that attracted him. So we shouldn’t be surprised that his embrace of conservativism is in fact a rejection of nuance. The irony is that Scruton is so smart and subtle in his support of this position.

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Ken Camp, the author of the excellent IP Telephony Demystified, has started a new blog and posts (on my recommendation, I’m happy to say) an email he sent to me about trustworthy computing. Here’s a snippet:

If we extrapolate trustworthy computing to it’s obvious extensions, don’t we move toward an Orwellian society of complete control and observation? Consider “trustworthy transportation” – your automobile, sensing rage at the pressure of your foot on the pedal, shuts off, thereby not allowing you to pass a car and avoid problems. “Trustworthy refrigeration” – Sensing overly high fat content in the inventory within, your net-connected refrigerator notifies your insurance carrier, who then raises your rates based on an unhealthy lifestyle. “Trustworthy photography” could ensure that the bathtub picture of a toddler immediately be reported to those in pursuit of child pornography rings.

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A mailing list I was on was arguing about Iraq, even though that’s way off its subject. Sombebody posted a message that said, in part

…it is not only within the right of our government to prevent regimes who have demonstrated BOTH the capability AND willingness to harm America or her allies … from doing so, it is her responsibility.

I was about to post a reply but the list’s owner cut off the thread. So, I’m giving myself the last word here:

Does this mean that Al Qaeda had not only the right but the responsibility to attack the World Trade Center since it rightly perceives the US as capable and willing to do it harm? Or, if you don’t like Al Qaeda as an example, how about North Korea, Cuba, or Iran?

The world recognizes the right of a country to defend itself against invasion. Allowing countries to preemptively attack others because another country could attack it — and, frankly, I don’t lie awake at night about Iraq attacking us the way I do about Al Qaeda — lowers the bar to war. We have to be able to live in a world with countries that we despise and fear because that’s the minimal condition for peace.

If war isn’t kept as a nearly unthinkable alternative, it will make peace seem like too much work.

[Did I say “the last word”? Somehow I doubt that. See you in the comments section!]

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I’ve been trying to make time to listen to this broadcast of Gore Vidal on the intelligent radio talk show, On Point. So far, I still haven’t heard it. But, what the heck, I’m blogging it anyway in case you’re disposed to listen to a smart man made increasingly radical or possibly just crankier by his advancing years.

Here’s the show’s blurb about the interview:

Gore Vidal (AP) Lucid, insightful and razor-sharp, Gore Vidal has been taking on the American Empire for nearly half a century. As war with Iraq looms, the legendary author and essayist is in high dudgeon. A night with the prolific, ever-engaging, and right now angry, Gore Vidal.

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Michael Rogers in Newsweek Online discusses Links by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi , Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs and my book. About mine he writes:

“Small Pieces Loosely Joined” by David Weinberger is subtitled “A Unified Theory of the Web.” Weinberger isn’t quite serious about his subtitle. Rather, he provides a thoughtful explication of the phenomena that any such theory should unify: from the design of e-commerce sites to why the phrase “All your base are belong to us” swept the Web. Of the three authors he’s the most overtly philosophical, with chapter titles like “Space” and “Time.” And he makes an interesting point: the idea of the Web is in some ways more important than the mechanism of the Web. The truly transforming impact of the Internet will occur when the linking and virtual existence that we experience on the Web starts to alter how we understand and manage society itself.

He liked Links and Smart Mobs, too. So do I.

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(I missed this news the first time around…) On Jan. 23, MonsterHut lost an important case to the NY Attorney General. MonsterHut was sending spam that told recipients that they had “opted in” to the mailing because the company that supplied the list to MonsterHut claimed that it was an opt-in list. The court held MonsterHut liable for the list provider’s lie.

Further, the court said that if, when registering customer names, you present a checkbox that’s already checked, that’s an opt-out list, not opt-in. In other words, when Real Networks says “Do you want us to send you endless ads in the form of a newsletter?” and presents you with a pre-checked checkbox, they’re doing opt-out marketing. And that’s not allowed.

For information on this from the point of view of a “direct mail” advocate, read Ken Magill’s article. And here’s slashdot’s take on it.

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