fling93 loves fishies

Comment Spam and MT-Blacklist

Comment spam seems to have gotten even more rampant lately — twice last week I’ve found 20-50 new comments, all spam. And I’m also seeing more and more comment spam on other blogs (plus Brayden King’s been griping about spam recently).

Certainly, it can be a nice boost for a blogger’s self-esteem to read through comments like “Nice site!” and “You are doing a great service to the web!” and “Excellent, that was really well explained and helpful!” But after a while it gets about as old as those generic feedbacks you get from eBay, like “Great transaction, would do business again, A+++++++!!” And there’s just only so many porn links a blog can take before it starts to look a little sleazy.

Well, I hope most of you Movable Type bloggers already know about this plug-in, but in case not (and it seems Dan Drezner only found out about it last month), let me direct your attention to Jay Allen’s indispensable spam-fighting plug-in, MT-Blacklist.

From Beneath You...

Well, like everybody else, I could blog about Reagan, or George Tenet resigning, or maybe about that fantastic seven-game Stanley Cup Finals. But instead, for reasons that will become apparent, I’ll just talk about our weekend at the excellent Claremont Resort & Spa up in Berkeley.

I’d booked us a room and a couple of 80-minute therapeutic massages to celebrate my wife’s birthday and graduation. While the massages were absolutely heavenly, the view from the room was spectacular (deluxe bay view), and yes, it even came with free Internet access (not that I needed it to feed any sort of blog addiction whatsoever), we’ll forever remember something else…

As we were settling in and I was admiring the view, my wife called to me from the bathroom. “Come here! You’ve gotta see this!”

I rushed over to see… two toilets.

“No, silly,” she said, with obvious excitement. “It’s a bidet!”

One for the Gipper

I’m not sure how much I can add to what’s already been said about Reagan, especially since I didn’t really follow politics that much back when he was in office. Plus, I’ve already written a good deal of what I thought of him in my reaction to the whole Reagan dime proposal and in my lengthy discussion of supply-side economics. But as you might expect, this won’t stop me from writing a lot more. In short, I think he was a very good, but not great president. Someone who was a lot more important to the Republican party than he was to the country (and even in that respect, I think Barry Goldwater doesn’t get his fair share of the credit). But Reagan was still clearly much better than any of his successors thus far.

Economic Record

Still, for those partisan Republicans who like to point to how much the economy improved, my reaction would pretty much mirror that of conservative blogger, Jane Galt:

I saw some Republican… saying that Reagan was great because when he took office, unemployment was 10% and interest rates were sky-high, and when he left office everything was boom-a-riffic. This is every bit as fine a bit of data mining as Democrats who make similar claims for Clinton — the economy sucked when he took office, and was booming when he left. When Clinton took office, the economy was already recovering from a recession; when he left, it was sliding into another one. That’s luck, not talent. … Similarly, high unemployment and interest rates under Reagan were not because Democrats Had Been Driving the Economy Into the Ground Until the Grownups Took Over. High inflation was the result of a dozen years of bad fiscal and monetary policy under two Republicans — Nixon and Ford — and two Democrats — Johnson and Carter — that was brought under control only when Paul Volcker, the Carter-appointed head of the Federal Reserve, jammed interest rates up to national-heart-attack levels and left them there until inflationary expectations were well and truly tamed. Reagan had nothing to do with unemployment and interest rates falling; that was the invevitable [sic] result of a drastic monetary tightening finally working its way through the economy.

Review: Saved!

In case it wasn’t obvious, Saved! is a film that makes fun of fundamentalist Christians. Of course, being an agnostic who thought the previews of this film were hilarious, I was very much the target audience of this movie. So I really wanted to like this film, but while it was enjoyable and funny, the film has a lot of serious flaws.

Jena Malone (Donnie Darko) plays Mary, a girl at a very Christian high school who learns that her boyfriend, Dean, is gay. Convinced by a vision that Jesus wants her to save Dean from the fires of hell, Mary reluctantly sacrifices her virginity in a desperate attempt to convert him back to heterosexuality — and gets pregnant for all her efforts.

Hilary Faye (played by pop songstress Mandy Moore) is the school’s lead Heather, the most popular and powerful student who flaunts her devoutness and lectures those who she sees as straying from the path. Of course, her religious devotion is little more than a shell, and it is her blatant hypocrisy that is the source of much of the film’s humor (for example, the scene featured in the previews where she yells, “I am filled with God’s love,” as she hurls a Bible at Mary).

While many of the film’s funniest moments come at Hilary Faye’s expense, it made me somewhat uneasy, as I thought the humor was somewhat mean-spirited. It’s one thing to poke light fun like at a celebrity roast. It’s quite another thing to make someone the target of your derision, portraying them as something to be made fun of and ridiculed. It’s not exactly an effective way to change anybody’s mind, which this film clearly wants to do.

To be sure, the film doesn’t make fun of Christianity itself, as it portrays the pastor in a surprisingly positive light (especially when compared to Hilary Faye). No, he’s no saint, but that’s part of the whole point of the film, which I’ll get to later. But they could have easily demonized the man by, say, making him a child molester (like Donnie Darko did with Patrick Swayze’s character, Jim Cunningham). What it really targets is the holier-than-thou attitude and the hypocrisy of hate and intolerance coming from those who profess to follow in the footsteps of someone who preached love and forgiveness.

The Jobless Recovery

Pretty amusing post from Brad DeLong, complaining about a phone-call from a clueless magazine writer:

“…Were [sic] doing a story on the performance of the economy under the different post-World War II presidents, and…”

[DeLong:] “Now presidents don’t control the economy. They influence it. And their policies influence the economy not just while they are in office but afterwards as well.”

“That’s very true. What we are looking for is…”

“Now there are two kinds of stories you could be writing. The positive one would be to start by saying that presidents influence but do not control the economy—that most of what happens is the economy following its own path. It would go on to say that presidential policies do influence the economy, to lay out how policies influence the economy, and to evaluate presidents’ economic policies. The negative one—the actual subtraction from the American people’s knowledge—would be to throw together some simplistic indicators of presidential economic performance over which presidents have little or no control, and rank presidents by those indicators. Which are you doing?”

“The negative one…”

The sad fact of the matter is that too many people (including most journalists) do assign the President too much blame and credit as far as the economy is concerned. A topic I’ve covered somewhat before in regards to the 2001 recession and in my discussion of supply-side economics. Reagan and Clinton often get too much credit for the economic prosperity during their terms, and likewise, Carter and both Bushes get too much blame for the economic problems during their terms.

This “jobless recovery” is no different. I’m no expert, but let me explain how I understand it.

Lefties in Baseball

A while back, I saw Baseball Tonight comparing the best baseball players of all time, and it ended up being Alex Rodriguez (ARod) over Barry Bonds, which wasn’t surprising. Barry’s recent steroid controversies notwithstanding, ARod can field the hardest position to fill at shortstop, increasing his value.1 Even though the Yankees have him at 3rd base, it’s still harder to play 3rd than left field.

In addition, Barry isn’t a particularly good fielder. There was a time when he was, but he just doesn’t get to the same balls he used to, and his arm is simply terrible. However, Harold Reynolds didn’t cite this as the reason ARod was the better player. Instead, he said Barry was left-handed, which meant he was limited as to which positions he could play, whereas ARod could theoretically play anywhere.

Although I’ve watched baseball for quite a while, this was news to me. Why were lefties limited? My curiosity was piqued, and so I looked it up. And since there’s probably a lot of casual baseball fans out there who aren’t familiar with the whole lefty-righty issue in baseball, I decided to compile everything I found with everything I already knew into one nifty package.