A sampling of noteworthy memes in the year 2004, loosely ordered for effect. Enjoy.

The most important -- and interesting -- questions are structural.

"Fuck yourself," said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency. "We don't play games at The Washington Post and use dashes." "I felt better after I had done it."

Teenagers nowadays are both more connected to the world at large than ever, and more cut off.

cellphone-based alibi clubs

More research anywhere creates more possibilities for innovation everywhere.

Do you understand the difference between "Is it worth buying?" and "Can it be sold?"

The era of cheap oil is over.

The Internet peering model is fundamentally broken.

"The thing is, this is a lousy business."

Let's talk about the consequences of the aging baby boomers.

Relationships can be hard work, but they are worth it.

When was the last time a talk show changed a mind?

Intelligence is moving to the edges and the edges are found on the Asian mainland.

In China, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America, Britney Spears is Britney Spears.

All entertainment concepts must be run through the Vulgarizer.

"I need to be managing a sexier project."

Values Voters Are Prone To Sinful Behavior.

Its sole function is to sell the naughty lifestyle.

Why the granny panties?

The Middle East must be Born Again!

War may be hell, but infowar is making a bid for heaven.

Personality is destiny.

"There's a certain tone in politics that I aspire to, that allows me to disagree with people without being disagreeable."

"chicken hawks"

Saudi Arabia is the golden egg.

Powell: "Very embarrassing. I am not a happy camper over this. We were wrong." Bush: "I wasn't happy when we found out there wasn't weapons, and we've got an intelligence group together to figure out why."

"It takes half a second for a baby to throw up all over your sweater. It takes hours to get it clean."

typical postwar "untidiness"

Bush: "I've made some mistakes in appointing people, but I'm not going to name them. I don't want to hurt their feelings on national TV."

"No. No. I'm not going to be your monkey."

America, partnering with the best-armed insurgents, allying with the weaker against the stronger.

"You can't talk sense to them," Bush said, referring to terrorists. "Nooooo!" the audience roared.

Moore unfurled what is perhaps the central insight of his oeuvre, that Americans are kind of crappy.

"Bush might be unpopular in Italy, the Iraqi war is not popular in Italy, but Italians know damn well that in 1944, they were liberated by America from the Nazis."

Fight the cult of process.

"You can't fight here! This is the war room!"

It is definitely interesting getting shot at for the first time.

"If you go ahead, we will do everything possible to discredit you... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Decius wrote:
] Is it moral to use tax payer dollars to fund things that a
] large group of people in a society feel are totally immoral or
] unethical? Stated another way, is it ok to force people to pay
] for something they think is immoral, or should we have a broad
] moral consensus on something before we spend public money on
] it.

In an authoritarian society, this question might have some practical utility. In the United States, it seems rather academic.

A candidate for office is ethically obligated to present his/her views to the voting public. The people should be as inquisitive as possible, and no public or foreign policy question should be out of bounds.

Come election time, the people vote. You vote for the candidate of your choosing, with full awareness of the views and intentions of all the candidates. The winner carries out his/her stated policies.

Some candidates choose to separate their personal views from their public policy recommendations. Others do not. How any given candidate stands in this regard should be evident to the voters.

As a politician, one way to achieve such a separation is to make it your policy to defer to the public on certain matters. Call for a referendum and let the people decide for themselves regarding the outcome of a sensitive or highly charged issue.

Congress controls how money is spent, and it is supposed to represent the people in our society. If everyone in Congress had made known their views on stem cell research prior to being elected, then the collective outcome of a vote on a funding bill should be accepted by the public. If not, then the voters apparently didn't care enough to ask (and insist on an answer), because the topic has been part of the conversation for a while now.

Some of your examples are dubious. I don't think a majority of people "on the left" find the Iraq war immoral. The Congress voted in support of it, and they voted to continue funding it during the period of the occupation, even after we knew there were probably no WMDs. The morality of the action has nothing to do with the fact that the French opted not to help us pay for it.

I don't know your threshold for judging when we've reached "broad moral consensus" on an issue, but the whole idea strikes me as rather libertarian in the sense that it implicitly advocates for a smaller government.

Let's say the threshold is eighty percent. So then you go out and get one hundred voters who form a perfect cross section of the American public. You split them up, put each one alone in a room, and sit them down with a copy of the federal budget and a box of red pens. They are instructed to review the budget and redline anything they deem to be "immoral".

Once all of them are done, you compile the results, one line item at a time. If the item was redlined by more than twenty people, then it gets deleted from the budget. "No funding for you! Next!"

RE: Question of the day

Finally! A map of everyone's favorite fictional berg, Springfield!

map of springfield

Every afternoon about 2:45 the city settles into a temporary coma. You can feel the biological lights dimming. As for those poor people trapped in PowerPoint presentations -- well, for them there is no help.

The City Life: The Snooze

In short, the Bungle Affair dares me to explain it to you without resort to dime-store mysticisms, and I fear I may have shape-shifted by the digital moonlight one too many times to be quite up to the task. But I will do what I can, and can do no better than to lead with the facts. For if nothing else about Mr. Bungle's case is unambiguous, the facts at least are crystal clear.

A Rape in Cyberspace

Nine out of 10 eligible Afghans have signed up for landmark October elections, the United Nations said Sunday, a resounding endorsement of a democratic experiment supposed to help Afghanistan turn its back on years of debilitating war.

... except when the Afghan news media report that candidates are "sniping" at each other, they aren't referring to verbal attacks.

WSJ ran a good week-in-review-style article last week entitled something like "Good news from Afghanistan" in which the reporters highlighted a litany of positive developments in the country.

90 Percent of Afghans Registered to Vote

Did you know that Robert Steele is a Top 100 reviewer at Amazon?

#56, actually.

Amazon.com: About Robert D. Steele: At a Glance