Newt Gingrich, on making a Second Life appearance:

Second Life is a more sophisticated extranet... It is so compelling that people actually spend real money to buy real estate in this online reality.

I don't care if it makes me sound more conservative, in a way, than Newt. What exactly makes this "compelling"? People's bizarre willingness to pay for virtual property is what gives us great things like Chinese gold farming and single companies that essentially own a person's entire (virtual) reality.

See here, though, for an interesting article on the way some disabled people have been using it lately, which is actually pretty touching and probably balances out all the unicorn porn.

(via TechPresident)

-Ben | Comments | Topic: Tech junk

And probably the best one so far:

-Ben | Comments | Topics: Humor, US politics

Senate votes to condemn MoveOn

Nice to know they're making good use of their time...

-Ben | Comments | Topics: Iraq, US politics

"Poll results" from Michelle Malkin's site, demonstrating incontrovertibly that almost all Republicans are opposed to the Bush/Kennedy/McCain Immigration Bill.

Nice to know she's making good use of her Oberlin degree.

-Ben | Comments | Topic: Right-wing wankery

"Do you really want to vote for a guy who doesn't have a publicly accessible myspace profile?"

Assuming you are old enough to vote and a supporter of Giuliani, then I would hope so. But it would be nice if the feller would open his Myspace up, if only so I could add his friends count to my super-geeky Web 2.0 Presidential Primary Indicators table.

-Ben | Comments | Topics: US politics, Presidential Primary 2008 Indicators

As much as I love the internet and what it brings to politics, can we please have a moratorium on using the names of websites or Web 2.0 services as verbs except in cases where a significant number of Americans are at least somewhat familiar with the site in question? Twitter is no Google, and, while I haven't yet brought it to a focus group, I'm pretty sure the word 'Twittering' makes most people want to vomit.

-Ben | Comments

This is the sort of thing Rick Santorum's been warning us about.

-Ben | Comments

And if I die--God forbid--I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, "Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?"

-Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

-Ben | Comments | Topic: Books

Shorter Michelle Malkin:

It is Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson's responsibility to protest offensive lyrics in rap music. Because, well, I think you know why...

You might find this argument stupid on its face, perhaps noting that even a rap artist as brilliant as Mims (Malkin's rather selective citation leaves out the best rhyme in the whole song, by the way: "I'm hot cause I'm fly, you ain't cause you not") doesn't have a regular platform on a major cable news network (yet). But then you'd be ignoring the affirmative obligation of Sharpton and Jackson to condemn Mims, who has the same skin color.

-Ben | Comments | Topic: Right-wing wankery

Michael Ledeen, on legislators' recent trips to Syria:

Heaven forfend anyone in Congress should hate a dictator.

Heaven forfend, indeed. The trick is to hate the dictator, but sell arms to him anyway.

At least he did criticize both Pelosi and the Republican contingent for their visits, unlike Bill Kristol.

-Ben | Comments | Topic: Right-wing wankery

For some reason I've recently embarked on the project of aggregating a bunch of data on the popularity of presidential primary candidates on social networking and futures trading sites. You can check it out here; the question of whether or not this is completely useless is an exercise left to the reader. Personally I think that the exact vote counts will be proportional to each candidates' number of Myspace friends.

Obama is winning the YouTube and Myspace wars; Giuliani watches too much To Catch a Predator and is the only candidate stodgy enough to make his Myspace friends-only.

If I have the time, I'll add more data sources and candidates, set things up so the data updates automatically, and show trends from day-to-day. For now, current data should be updated once or twice a day.

Slate is also keeping track of futures data, and with pretty graphs.

-Ben | Comments | Topics: US politics, Tech junk, Presidential Primary 2008 Indicators

Via Hit & Run, a graphic that is simply astounding:

(graph by Kieran Healy, using 2005 data, which seems to still be the latest available)

-Ben | Comments | Topic: US politics

Jonah Goldberg was actually pretty quick about correcting his post on this "decline in US troop casualties" story when he realized that it was totally and completely bogus. But why did he and half the right-wing blogosphere trust a Kuwaiti state-run news agency's reporting in the first place, anyway?

If the fact that it was transparently dubious reporting from a state-run news agency were not enough, KUNA said its information came via the Multi-National Force -Iraq Combined Press Information Centre, and you'd think Jonah might be a bit more skeptical given that he's well aware of, and has applauded, deliberate military misinformation tactics in the past. So how'd this story get so big?

Oh, that's right: Drudge.

-Ben | Comments | Topics: Iraq, Right-wing wankery

Are you the kind of person who listens to Harry and the Potters for the first time and thinks "man... I need something exactly like this -- only in METAL? Say hello to He-Who-Must-Not- Be-Named.

And if that's not enough for you: The Wizard Rock EP of the Month Club, with net proceeds going to the First Book charity.

-Ben | Comments | Topic: Music

William Kristol, responding to a statement that David Geffen apparently made recently:

Hillary Clinton was cruising along, raising big money, triangulating on Iraq, rounding up supporters who felt they had little choice but to sign on. And then Geffen spoke up. Suddenly Democrats all over the country may be thinking to themselves, "Well, what about that? Why exactly do we have to be for Hillary anyway? Shouldn't we consider some alternatives?"

Is Kristol making a blind stab at satire here, or just very, very high? Even J-Pod seems to have trouble with this whacked-out butterfly theory, which seems to assume that there are Dems out there who are simultaneously stupid enough to not yet know the names Obama or Edwards and care what David Geffen has to say.

-Ben | Comments | Topic: Right-wing wankery