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This was much harder than it should be, but I now have automatic digests of my new blog entries being delivered to subscribers to my blog@dankohn.com mailing list. (Sign up at the top right on dankohn.com.) You need to be very comfortable with HTML and somewhat familiar with Unix (editing and copying files) or else find someone who is to help you.

Getting this to work requires setting up mailman in digest mode with semi-automatic web-based subscriptions from my blog, changing MT to use full blog descriptions in RSS, using Aaron Schwartz’s great rss2email.py script, setting up a cron job, a lot of testing, and a little luck.
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In the NYT, There’s Nothing So Closed as an Open Competition includes the worst memorial idea ever:

The panel reviewing proposals for a memorial to victims of the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon, for example, vowed to consider every submission. Yet the members acknowledge that some proposals — say, the full-scale, stainless steel model of an airplane mounted so that it would appear to be about to crash right into the Pentagon — were viewed for only the briefest of moments.

How to Talk About Israel says:

What Henry Jackson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu and George W. Bush have in common is that they enabled bookish men to feel tough, beautifully, enviably tough. Too much can be made of the connection between the Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss and officials in the current Pentagon, but one aspect of Strauss appears to have rubbed off on them. Born in Germany, Strauss was a liberal rationalist in his youth. He had hoped, he said, that anti-Semitism would end with Jewish assimilation in a liberal democracy. The Nazis taught him otherwise. By the 1920’s he began to regard liberals as weaklings, powerless to stop the violent mob. If one thing ties neoconservatives, Likudniks, and post-cold-war hawks together, it is the conviction that liberalism is strictly for sissies.

While I’m not quite in the liberals are sissies camp, I do feel that liberalism must be defended from its enemies. Anyone who doesn’t believe that fundamentalist totalitarianism is the enemy of Western liberalism has their head in the sand.

I just want to win the war without in the process giving up all of the cherished rights like habeas corpus that give liberalism meaning.

Brad Delong, responding to a misleading FT article by John Kay, brilliantly points out why it is both illiberal and immoral to prevent superstores like Wal-Mart from saving money for Europeans like they do for Americans:

But there are lots of guys living in western Europe for whom the lack of an opportunity to shop at a WalMart equivalent–and thus to shave 50% off the retail margins they pay while shopping in the picturesque march municipal–is a real loss. True, they would miss out on their “pleasant excursion[s] to pick up some produce in Menton’s march municipal and browse the FT over an espresso in the place Clemenceau.” But if they paid less for produce and staples, they might use the money to pay for a better vacation of their own, or perhaps a dishwasher. They are more than picturesque background figures to entertain John Kay’s eye: they are people with limited incomes, but with lives and plans of their own.

The most fascinating article you’re likely to read about how bee hives are like police states, and how they descend into anarchy if you breed in new characteristics. From Nature.

NYT reports:

One man on lower Broadway complained to a police officer about a vendor immediately hiking the price of bottled water from $1 to $2…. “Y2K finally happened, people” cried a young man walking up Broadway, stutterstepping through the crowd…. On Sixth Avenue, a man, walking down a center traffic lane, said to his friend, “This is like in those movies, man, when a bomb drops or something and you have to live off the land.”