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Slate’s Bill Saletan has a brilliant exegesis (is that like saying “milieu” in regular conversation?) of why I believe Dean’s candidacy is doomed in Son of a Milieu Worker:

8. Religion and the South. Having grown up in east Texas, I cringe for Dean every time he fumbles for a friendly word about the South. Here’s what he said Sunday: “I have a lot of friends from the South. In the South, people do integrate religion openly, easily into their lives, both black Southerners and white Southerners. I understand that if I’m going to campaign for the presidency of the United States, I have to be comfortable in the milieu that other Americans are comfortable. … I plan to learn how to do that.”

I hardly know where to begin laughing at this comment. Maybe it’s the part where Dean says some of his best friends are Southerners. Or maybe it’s the way he speaks of them as foreigners. Or maybe, as my colleague Chris Suellentrop suggests, it’s the way Dean talks about Southern habits in the third person, like an adult speaking to another adult about children who are in the room. Or maybe it’s the way Dean blurts out that this is all political, just as Bush’s dad used to say things like “Message: I care,” and “When Barbara holds an AIDS baby, she’s showing a certain compassion for family.” Or maybe it’s the very Bush-41 way Dean inserts and impeccably pronounces the word “milieu.” Perhaps Dean intends to run as the son of a milieu work.

I believe if nominated that Dean will lose the general election worse than Mondale (who at least won Minnesota). Fortunately, there is still a small glimmer of hope, in that a new poll shows Clark within the margin of error of Dean’s support.

NYT has a devastating article on adventure traveling in the wrong place at the wrong time: United by a Zest for Travel, Separated by an Earthquake.

This is so much better than the last 2 Matrix movies.

NYT includes this gem of a quote:

On the right and left, many politicians believe that Mr. Sharon’s hints may be political and diplomatic posturing, to satisfy the Bush administration, to restore his sagging popularity, or perhaps to distract attention from a widening corruption investigation. Shimon Peres, the Labor Party leader, who met with Mr. Sharon this week, said he was skeptical. “You know, hints are not a policy,” Mr. Peres said in a telephone interview on Friday. “It’s like all the time in Israel they say we have hints of oil. The difference between hints of oil, and oil, is quite a major one.”

There’s a joke about how God led Moses through the desert for 40 years, yet still managed to plant the Israelis in the one part of the Middle East without oil.

These two pictures from an article in today’s NY Times are as compelling a wordless narrative as you’re likely to see.

The Traveler’s Century Club is for people who have visited at least 100 countries, where they (somewhat arbitrarily) define countries as places that are politically, ethnologically, or geographically distinct. They define 317 such countries, but I’ve so far only visited 50. Here’s my list.

Here’s a New York Times article on the TCC and one from Travel & Leisure.

Obviously, one gets a huge bang for your buck out of Carribean-style cruises, versus the sort of traveling I’ve done recently where I spend two weeks in the Galapagos, or Uganda, or Croatia, or Ghana. Still, slowly but surely….

Update 2005-04-17: Please also check out using IMAP for learning and the wiki entries on ProcmailToForwardMail, (which contains a slightly updated script) and the very detailed directions at SingleUserUnixInstall.

SpamAssassin is currently the most effective spam filter. For me, it correctly marks several hundred messages a day as spam, with nearly no false positives, and only a couple false negatives. Those false negatives — spam that gets through — should be avoidable by training the Bayes algorithm that SpamAssassin uses. Unfortunately, using Outlook working with Exchange server as my mailer makes this incredibly hard to do.

Note that Bayes does not need to be hand trained in order to work well. The magic of SpamAssassin is that the Bayes bootstraps its learning off of the several hundred non-Bayes rules, including the use of DNS blocklists. So, spammy messages that hit certain rules train the Bayes to find similar spam in the future even that doesn’t hit those rules. Thus, the purpose of this procmail rule is simply to enable mistake-based training, which catches the small percentage of false negatives that might otherwise slip through.

Like many SpamAssassin users, I forward my mail through a Unix account, where I’ve configured procmail to filter the message through SpamAssassin and then forward it to my private address on another machine.

The trick for Bayes training is to add some extra procmail rules to specify special processing for training messages. The following is based on having a catchall address for all mail sent to example.com, so I can trigger the bayes training by sending mail to spam@example.com and ham@example.com. It is left as an exercise for the reader to create an alternative script that triggers based on a passphrase added to the subject, and uses formail to remove that passphrase before passing the message to sa-learn.

Note that this setup still only works passably with Outlook and Exchange, because even resending the message causes a new Message-ID header to be created and the old Received headers to be lost. Other headers are still carried over. To trigger Bayes learning from Outlook on false negatives, choose Action: Resend this Message (you have to remove any From and CC headings and change the To field to spam@example.com). Note that nearly every other mailer (except for AOL) supports real redirects; see the bottom of this site.

Here’s the .procmailrc:
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I must be a little strange if this story only increases my appreciation of NYC:

To the sounds of enormous jungle roars, a police sniper rappelled down the side of a Harlem apartment building yesterday and fired tranquilizer darts through an open fifth-floor window to subdue — seat belts, please — a 350-pound Bengal tiger.

The daring, and creative, bit of sharpshooting helped end an episode in which the New York Police Department, unaccustomed to bagging big game, nonetheless managed to sedate the beast. Officials planned to send the tiger, temporarily being held at the Center for Animal Care and Control on 110th Street, to a conservancy in Ohio….

It was shortly before 4:30 p.m. when the police sniper, Officer Martin Duffy, armed with a dart gun and a rifle with live ammunition, began to rappel down toward the window. He fired one dart a few minutes later, which drew a knee-shaking roar from inside the apartment….

As hundreds of onlookers gathered on the street, some began to wonder if this urban big cat would get along so well in the less cosmpolitan reaches of Ohio. “My concern is that the city cat won’t make it in the country,” said Lynnette Braxton, 49. “He’s going to have no jazz, no hip-hop. He’s going to miss the Harlem Renaissance.”

No explanation of how the cat got there (along with a 4-5 ft. alligator-like reptile called a caiman). Presumably, the owner (now in custody) brought them in when they were much smaller. Compare the size of hand and paw:

NYT writes on Mongolians Return to Baghdad, This Time as Peacekeepers:

In 1258, the Mongol general Hulegu, a grandson of Genghis Khan, sacked Baghdad, killing 800,000 people and ending its primacy as the largest city in the Arab world.
This month, the Mongolians returned to Iraq. Ferried into the country on American military transports, 180 Mongolian Army soldiers — all male, all volunteers — are guarding pipelines and working on construction projects under a Polish command.

Keep an eye out for those resourceful Mongols.

The NYT reports:

There is a pointed joke making the rounds of Palestinian politicians here. Mr. Arafat is riding in a car with Mr. Abbas, when he spots an obstacle. “Abu Mazen, there’s a tree in the road!” Mr. Arafat cries, using Mr. Abbas’s nickname. But the car continues on its way. Mr. Arafat’s warnings grow more frantic.
Finally, the car hits the tree, and as the two Palestinian leaders stumble from the wreckage, battered and bruised, Mr. Arafat turns to Mr. Abbas and says, “Abu Mazen, I told you there was a tree.”

Mr. Abbas replies, miserably, “But you were driving.”

It has suited the vision of the White House and Israel for the last four months to seek peace as though Mr. Abbas, not Mr. Arafat, was driving.
Unfortunately for the policy, it also suited the interests of Mr. Arafat, according to some Palestinian politicians and analysts. Doing so deflected the blame for Palestinian misery, as well as any failures of the peace effort, to Mr. Abbas.

Unfortunately, democracies (and psuedo ones such as the Palestinian Authority) get the leadership they deserve. Until some alternative Palestinian leader takes power who realizes that the most basic element of a modern state is a monopoly on the use of force (meaning that he has the courage to arrest the gunmen who want to destroy Israel), it is the Palestinian people who will continue to suffer the worst.