Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Night moves

Ross Mayfield: Lo and behold, there were the Northern lights at 30,000 feet somewhere above Sweden. Grabbed my camera and took a picture.

I once stayed up all night on a redeye from San Francisco to Paris, staring at the northern lights out the window, from Montana to Iceland, roughly. And they looked very much like Ross's picture. Green and eerie.

Making Money, cont'd

Leverage is my first follow-up to the Making Money session at Bloggercon. It lists as many other posts as I could find in the wee hours of this morning (a helluva lot, lemme tell ya).

I also put up the series of questions I used to provoke discussion at the session.

More will come in tomorrow's SuitWatch (which will be archived here).

Ouch, cont'd

Chris Nolan's latest post is Required Reading. She nails the Democratic party in so many ways, and so accurately, that the post reads like a crucifiction. (Or a photograph in words of a suicide by crucifiction.) [I know I misspelled that, but at least one reader thinks that also makes a point, so I'll let it stand.] A sample:

The Clintons are corporate Democrats. They place great emphasis on fund-raising, moderately liberal politics and polling to find out what — exactly what — they can get away with as they seek office and craft legislative policies. It's a funny kind of leadership. It's really following loudly. Corporate Democrats give people what they want so they can stay in office all the while telling their core supporters — that'd be the few real Liberals left in America — that compromises need to be made in exchange for staying in office to do the "good" work that needs to be done. It's a cynical hollowing out of a set of principles that has created — in John Kerry who was following their lead — a candidate who stood for almost nothing. This is the party that refused to stand up to George Bush during his first term in office. It's hard to believe they will grow spines and begin to articulate a set of views or ideas. It's simply too late for that.

Her bottom line: the Democratic Party as we know it and have known it for the past 70 years is toast.

Ah, but that's just for the Democrats. Chris is too good a prophet, with too broad a vision, to stop there. Dig:

The far left falls away because it can't get anything done; it's too busy looking back to the 1970s. The far right falls away because its politics aren't viable, it's too busy trying to recreate the 1950s. Both are principled but they don't have the votes they need to get what they want.

This is how the group that I call Progressive Libertarians start to make their political presence know as a group, on the national level. Preaching fiscal responsibility and social tolerance, they'll continue to draw moderates — and this is fundamentally a nation of moderates -- to their way of doing things. They're already a force in the Republican Party: Rudy Guiliani is looking at 2008, Arnold Schwarzenegger has just started laying out his agenda to reform California. Progressive Libertarians "small is beautiful" attitude — the emphasis on the stripped down corporate attitude the entrepreneurial "what works best" approach to solving problems — is well suited to the U.S. return to its federalist roots. It solves, among other things, the gay marriage problem because it would let each state make it own rules. It's a great replacement for the monolithic social services infrastructure that Democrats are having a harder and harder time defending. In essence, it creates a sensible moderate response to arguments made by both Conservative Republicans and Liberal Democrats.

Gives me hope.

Light up

The Auroral show is still on. (As are the solar storms causing them.) Wherever you are in the U.S. right now (in the middle of the night, give or take, as I write this), go out and look North. The Northern Lights are curtains of soft beauty that rise up to a thousand miles into space. This picture shows that the curtain may be down around the Great Lakes right now, and visible as far south as Florida. Even if it's up around Hudson's Bay, it may still be visible south of the Great Lakes. Check it out.

On the continuing end of media as usual

Jeff Jarvis is Ernie Miller's first interviewee in the Future of Digital Media Series at Corante.

Stochastic Attitude Test

Convert my best SAT score to IQ, and I come out at 108. That was five points higher than my tested IQ in the 8th Grade.

Also interesting to see reported, on the same page, that Bush got a higher SAT score than Kerry.