DanKohn.com

This story, China Races to Replace U.S. as Economic Power in Asia, includes some of the worst economics ever written in the NYT:

Some see China’s economic thrust, more apparent now under its newly minted membership in the World Trade Organization, as the beginning of an inescapable process of China replacing the United States as the dominant power in Asia.

There are many things about China to worry about, such as their increasingly aggressive military posturing and their almost complete lack of respect for human rights. However, if you want China to become prosperous and democratic, support their economic engagement in the world, don’t use meaningless scare phrases such as “hungry importer”, “siphon of other nations’ foreign investment”, and a “surging exporter” that is “forcing its Asian neighbors to adjust.” One of the most basic lessons of the last 500 years of economic development is that economics is not a zero-sum game.

Eric Raymond quotes Michelle Efird’s declaration, a classic example of ha-ha-only-serious:

In a post 9-11 world, I feel it’s my duty as a woman to wear clingier clothing, flirt more outrageously, have more orgasms, and get on top more often. In short, anything that’s taboo to the islamofascists.

Michelle Efird now has her own blog, shellshocking.

The spam map shows the interrelationship of many spam emailers in graphic form.

Al Queda has almost achieved the cracking skills of a 14-year-old script kiddy.

I hereby appoint Rick Swedloff, an attorney currently living in Philadelphia, PA, to represent me in any habeas corpus hearings if I am detained without counsel for being an enemy combatant. Hopefully, this blog entry will prevent the US government from arguing, as they have against Yaser Hamdi, that the public defender has no right to petition to provide counsel to Hamdi because the attorney has not had a chance to confer with the client he is petitioning to represent. Joseph Heller is laughing in his grave. The 4th circuit ruled today “that a public defender could not represent him because they did not know each other.”

To recite the pledge of allegiance, said a federal circuit court today, “is to swear allegiance to the values for which the flag stands: unity, indivisibility, liberty, justice, and — since 1954 — monotheism.” Needless to say, I wholeheartedly support this position. The next step is to get “In God We Trust” off of money. The court’s opinion: “A profession that we are a nation ‘under God’ is identical, for Establishment Clause purposes, to a profession that we are a nation ‘under Jesus,’ a nation ‘under Vishnu,’ a nation ‘under Zeus,’ or a nation ‘under no god,’ because none of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion.”

Great NYT overview by Jennifer Lee on the state of the spam problem today: ISPs say that “50 percent of incoming e-mail traffic is spam.”

Anne Mitchell (an actual lawyer) explained that nolo contendere means “I didn’t do it, and I’ll never do it again”.

Even better is the scene in Minority Report where a techno-wonk, encountering a “pre-cog” who can see the future, drops to his knees and says, “I’m sorry for what I’m going to do, and I swear I didn’t do any of it.”

The chief judge of the very conservative fourth circuit in Virginia appeared “incredulous today at Mr. Hamdi’s lawyer’s assertion that his client — captured during battle and designated an enemy combatant — had any constitutional rights.” It is a sad day for our country when a federal circuit judge is willing to sacrifice an American citizen’s 6th amendment right to counsel for the “government’s intelligence-gathering operation”. Pathetic.

What always stuck with me about Shylock’s soliloquy in Merchant of Venice is how he opens with some of the grandest language ever written on the commonality of all humankind, and then seamlessly descends into the basest hatreds (which are also, unfortunately, just as universal):

To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else,
it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and
hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my
bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine
enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath
not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will
resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,
what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian
wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by
Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you
teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.

David Remnick writes a (predictably) brilliant piece titled “The Moralist” on the Lewis-Tyson fight in this week’s New Yorker. With a group of invited reporters, the boxer was conducting “a vintage Tyson performance, full of contempt at his visitors and fury at the world”:

I’m just a dark guy from the den of iniquity. You guys would rather be with someone else who’s equal to your status in life. Tiger Woods, or somebody. I come across as crass, a Neanderthal, a babbling idiot sometimes. I like to show you that person. He makes you want to come and listen to me.

You guys have written so much bad stuff about me I can’t remember the last time I fucked a decent woman. I have to go with strippers and ho’s and bitches because you put that image on me…. I wish that you guys had children, so I could kick them in the fucking head or stomp on their testicles so you could feel my pain.

If only loathing, self-loathing, and rage were not quite so intrinsic to the human experience, the world might be a much nicer place.