I finally got David Janes’ new feedreader working under Windows XP (the previous 0.4.something release just seemed to hang, but 0.5.01 works fine). It’s a pretty slick tool, although there are a few minor quibbles I’d make:

• It doesn’t seem to discover Atom feeds, which seems odd. (I’m not sure if it supports Atom or not—that may explain why it doesn’t discover Atom feeds.)
• The “Political Righties” blogroll (InstaPundit, Lileks, Marginal Revolution, Samizdata, Volokh) seems, well, not to have any real righties in it, at least when compared with the “Lefties” blogroll (Calpundit, Crooked Timber, Eschaton/Atrios, Matt Welch, TalkLeft, and This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow). Maybe that’s a Canuck thing.
• Signifying Nothing isn’t included in the default blogroll anywhere. (Just kidding on that one.)

Anyway, I probably won’t be using it myself, at least not until the promised Linux port happens (and, even then, I think Straw has it beat in the features department, although Jäger does have some neat built-in heuristics for dealing with blogs that don’t have syndication feeds), but if you live in Windows it’s probably worth taking for a spin.

Will Baude has “mixed feelings” about the illegality of dueling, and asks:

How did the introduction of the pistol change dueling culture? When did "pistols or swords?" first become a choice, and how did this new choice on the part of the challenged man change the game theory of duelling? Did this deter duels (as it logically should, since now the challenger knew that his opponent would get to pick the weapon with which he was relatively stronger)? Did those who regularly felt offended make a point to practice both shooting and stabbing?

I can’t imagine what positive aspects of dueling would prompt Baude to have mixed feelings about the barbaric practice, and I don’t have any particular answers to his questions. But Baude may want to find a copy of the March 2004 issue of Smithsonian magazine, in which there is an article on dueling.

Two interesting tidbits from the article:

Perhaps as a way of relieving ennui, the French weren't averse to pushing the pushing the envelope in matters of form. In 1808, two Frenchman fought in balloons over Paris; one was shot down and killed with his second. Thirty-five years later, two others tried to settle their differences by skulling each other with billiard balls.

Even in dueling's heyday, reluctant warriors were known to express reservations about their involvement by shooting into the air or, after receiving fire, not returning it. Occasionally they chose their weapons -- howitzers, sledgehammers, forkfuls of pig dung -- for their very absurdity, as a way of making a duel seem ridiculous.

Nerf guns at twenty paces!

Sunday’s Clarion-Ledger has three articles on the ongoing Southern Miss saga:

• USM director of resource and risk management Jack Hanbury gives slightly more detail on the background of the investigation of suspended professors Glamser and Stringer; key quote:

  Hanbury said Thames asked him to investigate the professors only after Hanbury received information that indicated “very serious misconduct.”

  The information came from Kentucky and arrived after the issue went public, Thames has said.

• USM’s Angie Dvorak sits down with the Clarion-Ledger to clarify her curriculum vitae.
• Ole Miss journalism professor Joe Atkins has an op-ed on the regional antipathy to unions that ties in Thames’ bogus allegation that the AAUP is a labor union.

In other USM news, the school hired disgraced former Iowa State coach Larry Eustachy as its new basketball coach on Thursday, replacing fired coach James Green.

More updates at Liberty & Power and the Fire Shelby Thames! website.

The Baseball Crank has a pretty good analysis of the Clinton-Bush response to terror prior to 9/11. Key graf:

Bottom line: yes, in hindsight, both the Bush and Clinton Administrations, with more foresight, could have done more on both counts [Iraq and al-Qaeda]. Yes, they should have done more. Yes, I hand Clinton the larger share of the blame, at least as far as the failure to develop a long-range offensive strategy is concerned – whereas it appears that Bush was at least thinking in that direction. On the defensive question (i.e., having the homeland on alert), there’s less to fault Clinton and a bit to question about Bush, but I regard the failings as mostly institutional – the problem was the inability to pursue evidentiary leads and get urgent warnings up the ladder, rather than a failure of leadership.

Elsewhere: The Belgravia Dispatch finds The New Republic in November 2001 saying much different things about Richard Clarke than it is today (scroll down to “Interesting Update” – link via Glenn Reynolds), while Steven Taylor and Dan Drezner, as always, have interesting things to say.

Sean Hackbarth notes that widespread dissatisfaction with the efficiency of the government’s airline screening may lead to over 100 (of 429) commercial airports ditching TSA screeners once the government screening monopoly ends in mid-November.

The bad news first: two more Φ letters today. Neither, however, had the audacity to take the opportunity to tell me how great the person they hired is; for that, I am happy.

The good news: it looks like I’ll be spending about a week in France this summer at the Libre Software Meeting in Bordeaux, working on printing stuff for free software, like the semi-stalled Foomatic-GUI and the Debian Foomatic packages, thanks to the meeting’s sponsors (as I couldn’t afford the trip myself, that elusive tenure-track job still not having shown up at my door). It’s hard to believe I haven’t been to France in 14 years; I probably should brush up on my French, n’est-ce que pas?

Congratulations to Roberto Antonio Ferreira De Almeida on finishing his port of Textile 2 syntax to Python. I’ll be shunting it in “behind the scenes” here at Signifying Nothing shortly.

Eugene Volokh points out a law professor who’s integrating a blog into the classroom experience. I’ve personally wondered whether that would be appropriate for an undergraduate course; presumably, the privacy issue isn’t problematic (or, at least, no more problematic than requiring students to give oral presentations). I guess the main issue is whether a professor can expect students to be technically competent enough to use a blog properly—though I suspect the undergraduate who can’t use a word processor, a harder task than blogging, is few and far between.

Of course, before a practical implementation for LSblog, I’d have to add all the security code I’ve been meaning to add behind the scenes (to make a distinction between users and administrators—at the moment, anyone with a login can hose the blog). Projects, projects…

My more immediate concern, however, is writing a paper for the Midwest conference. I figure if Dan Drezner can spin his blog posts into an article in Foreign Affairs, I can spin this into a conference paper. I’ll post more about it when I actually accomplish something on it…

Over at Freespace, guest blogger Erik Peterson writes:

If you’ve seen Roger and Me, you know its about Moore’s attempts to get an audience with General Motors CEO Roger Smith. This was supposed to show how aloof and uncaring and inaccessible corporate dictators can be.

Moore has met with Smith a couple of times since then, including once on his short-lived show TV Nation, where Smith came down and changed the oil in a truck to demonstrate CEOs can do what their employees do.

I don’t know whether Roger Smith has ever met with Moore or not, but it was not Roger Smith who won the “CEO challenge” on TV Nation. I remember watching that episode, and it was the CEO of Ford.

every schoolchild in America, every one who doesn't make a spectacle of him or herself by conscientiously objecting, is expected every schoolday to

pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America And to the Republic for which it stands One nation under God, indivisivible, with liberty and justice for all

which is, really, an awful lot like an oath of loyalty and citizenship.

Alex Tabarrok, however, goes a bit over the top in opposing the pledge for similar reasons. You've heard of Godwin's Law, haven't you, Prof. Tabarrok?

Tyler Cowen points out new research that indicates no-fault divorce laws have led to lower levels of domestic violence and suicide among women.

Jacob Levy has a very good post on the Pledge of Allegiance and its contemporary meaning. I tend to agree with Levy that “[i]f the words are not serious—and they’re not, anymore—if they’re just mindless blather, then they demean something that shouldn’t be demeaned.” When something is said by rote rather than with conviction—as the Pledge is, daily, in public schools—I think it is inherently devalued.

Not that this has much to do with the constitutionality of including “under God” in the pledge, mind you, as Jacob acknowledges. And I’m not sure what exactly to make of Jacob’s suggestion of “a one-time citizenship oath sworn at age 18” as an alternative to the Pledge. But I do think that people who take God seriously ought to wonder whether His name ought to be included as a footnote of something that our society treats as nothing more than a ritual incantation.

Kelley is shocked to learn that the Georgia legislature is proposing a law that will ban not only the barbaric practice known as “female genital mutilation” or FGM (which I’ll spare you the details of), but also female genital piercings.

I think the general reaction to today’s Richard Clarke testimony can be summed up as something of a redux of the David Kay testimony a few months back: everyone was able to take away something to reinforce their preexisting views, and a few blowhard politicos got to spend a lot of time listening to themselves talk.

What’s pretty obvious is that Clarke is saying significantly different things today than he was in 2002. And, as Steven Taylor and Stephen Green note, Clarke wasn’t exactly winning friends and influencing people up on the Hill during either the Clinton or Bush administrations; the normally mild-mannered Chris Shays had this, in part, to say about Clarke’s help to his subcommittee on national security:

Before September 11, 2001, we held twenty hearings and two formal briefings on terrorism issues. Mr. Clarke was of little help in our oversight. When he briefed the Subcommittee, his answers were both evasive and derisive.

Shays, as Taylor notes, is no Republican firebrand—he was one of the few GOP congressmen to not support Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998, and has been somewhat marginalized in the caucus for that stand.

The substance of Clarke’s criticisms seems to actually be refuted by the evidence (not to mention his own words from 2002 and earlier)—the administration was formulating an aggressive policy to go after Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda even prior to 9/11, administration officials Clarke criticizes (most notably, Condoleeza Rice) were well versed in the threat that al-Qaeda posed to the United States,* and the administration kept Iraq on the “back burner” for over a year after the Taliban were driven from power in Afghanistan.

Monty Python’s Life of Brian is being re-released to theaters.

Perhaps as a double-feature with Passion of the Christ?

Is it just me, or is David Bernstein striving to single-handedly turn the Volokh Conspiracy into Little Green Footballs?

Dowingba has a rather ridiculous viewpoint on the SCO/Linux dispute:

Now, I haven’t been following the SCO vs Linux debate very closely, but the MyDoom DDOS attack automatically made me lose sympathy for the Linux argument. Only children and terrorists act that way when they have run out of arguments. Admit you’re wrong, make a new OS, or shut up.

As I pointed out in his comment section, MyDoom (and its variants) was almost certainly the product of a few immature “script kiddies,” and while a few morons at Slashdot cheered it on, they don’t represent the Linux community at all. I recommend reading the background on the SCO/Linux dispute, rather than casting aspersions based on the behavior of idiots who have little, if anything, to do with Linux.

Update: Dowingba has updated his post, explaining his position a bit better. For my part, I think the statement that Linux advocates should “admit you’re wrong, make a new OS, or shut up” is what really set me off: SCO is clearly in the wrong and is grasping at straws because its own efforts to promote Linux under its former name “Caldera” foundered—so now it’s shaking down everyone and anyone who actually had a decent business plan.

Last week I asked readers to submit Schelling points for Memphis: places that you would go to meet somebody if you had prearranged the meeting time but not the place, and you just had to guess where that person would be (knowing that the other person would be guessing where you would be). I also asked about Schelling points for the U.S. and the world.

I myself would choose the gates of Graceland for Memphis, the steps of the Capitol for the U.S., and the top of the Eiffel Tower for the world.

In Memphis, Scott Hayes and Mike Hollihan would meet me at the gates of Graceland.

Randal Woodland would miss me, because he would be in the lobby of the Peabody, “even though I’m resigned to the fact that the person I’m meeting will probably be at Graceland.” Alexander Ignatiev and Chip Taylor will be there as well.

For the U.S., there will be no successful meeting. Scott Hayes will at least be in the same city as I will, but at the Washington Monument. Alexander Ignatiev will be in New York at Madison Square Garden. Chip Taylor and Scott Hayes will also be in New York, at the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building, respectively.

In the world, Skip Perry will meet me at the Eiffel Tower. Alexander Ignatiev will be at Trafalgar Square, and Scott Hayes will be at the Taj Mahal.

Thanks to everyone who submitted answers!

Brian Doherty, in the American Spectator, writes a eulogy for Dave Sim’s comic book epic Cerebus, which ended this month with the 300th issue.

Digging back through my comic boxes, I see that I stopped reading Cerebus at issue 206, at which point the mysogyny and general pretentiousness became too much for me. Doherty’s article makes me think I didn’t really miss anything in the last 94 issues.

But I highly recommend picking up a copy of High Society.

Hat tip to Hit and Run.

Via John Gorenfeld, I learned that my Congressman, Harold Ford, Jr., was present at last night’s “Crown of Peace” awards dinner, hosted by none other than the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Moon himself received an award for “lifelong public service.”

Harold Ford, Jr., as Chris has noted before is “Congressman-for-life-if-he-wants-it,” and I doubt his Republican opponent for the Senate in 2008 will be able to make much of this, given the closeness of Moon to certain prominent Republicans. But Ford is rumored to have even higher ambitions, and an association with the loathsome Moon would not be something I would want on my resume if I were running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 or 2020.

Hat tip to Wonkette.

Amanda Butler has a first-hand report on the oral argument of Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow (a.k.a. the Pledge of Allegiance case). Like Amanda, I think Newdow has the better argument here; however, I doubt that will be enough to sway 5 justices to strip “under God” from the pledge.

The idea of “Deliberation Day” is back in the press, and Steven Taylor—a former student of James Fishkin at UT-Austin—finds the whole idea rather wanting:

There is also the problem of what will be told to the citizens-for-hire during that 24 hour period. I know for a fact that both Ackerman and Fishkin are both rather focused on the issue of distrbutive justice (read: economic distribution) in the context of the liberal state (and not, specifically a classical liberal state but the liberal-welfare state that emerges as a strain of liberalism in the twentieth century). For example, Ackerman’s Social Justice in the Liberal State (1980) while well-written, highly readable, and fun to discuss in class, is a remarkably impractical (and, to me, utterly unpersuasive) attempt to justify economic egalitarianism (at least at the start of each generation).

As for civic competence in general:

Further, if we want better citizens, how about just providing better and more complete American Government classes in High School? How about having someone other than the basketball coach teach government and history? These seem more auspicious places to start.

You can read Brendan Conway’s critique of Ackerman and Fishkin at OpinionJournal (or, quite possibly, in the actual Wall Street Journal), which contains this rather devastating passage:

To test things out, Messrs. Ackerman and Fishkin conducted experimental “deliberative polls” to simulate DDay. To be sure, the weekend-long events seemed to make participants know more. But they also ended up as more vocal advocates of government activism. Perhaps this wasn’t a coincidence.

Foreign aid, energy-conservation schemes, the United Nations and revenue-sharing all became more popular over the course of the polls. Is this because smarter, more informed citizens arrive at activist, liberal positions? It is impossible to avoid the impression that the authors think so. “Participants entered the Deliberative Poll as citizens of the United States and left, to some measurable degree, as citizens of the world,” they write approvingly. Maybe the briefing materials had something to do with this transformation. They were “typically supervised for balance and accuracy by an advisory board of relevant experts and stakeholders.”

This claim raises an interesting question: Just who decides who it is who decides what is balanced and accurate? Maybe Messrs. Ackerman and Fishkin do, or experts they trust. But isn’t that in itself a problem? Indeed, the whole notion of DDay is, in its essence, nondeliberative. Its rules and forms and structures—not to mention those briefing materials and the advisers who supervise them—are handed down from on high rather than arrived at through democratic, um, deliberation. This is a rich irony of which the authors are seemingly unaware.

I previously took issue with Ackerman and Fishkin’s idea here and here.

Update: Robert Musil has more.

As James Joyner notes, the Invisible Adjunct is leaving the building: both the halls of academe and the world of blogging. As someone who’s seriously considered departing the academy himself (although for financial rather than career-related reasons—though, if I don’t have a job lined up for the fall by the end of next month, it could very well be for both), I wish IA all the best in whatever she finds to do post-academe.

Michael Jennings ponders who pays who to include the trial versions of Norton AntiVirus on laptops. My guess is Norton supplies the software either gratis or at a low, lump-sum price.

I’m most unlikely to pay for an anti-virus subscription on my new laptop, as I have a virus scanner that processes all my mail anyway, and I really don’t download much software for Windows (except essential stuff like Adobe Reader and the like); I do most of my real work in Linux, and have done for going on a decade. If I see a Norton Utilities 2004 bundle (which includes an annual Norton Anti-Virus subscription) especially cheap at Costco, however, I might reconsider.

I was sort-of thinking in the back of my mind that if incoming Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero wanted to prove he was serious about terrorism, he’d reassign those troops he’s talking about removing from Iraq to Afghanistan. As Edward of Obsidian Wings notes, that’s pretty much what he plans to do. Good for him.

Now, if he’d actually been smart enough to announce this proposal at the time he was talking about withdrawing troops from Iraq, he might have been spared the blistering treatment he got from this side of the pond.