my 20th's in 2 years. time to study...

Drezner's iron laws of high school reunions:

3) That person you had a crush on in tenth grade? They're still going to look good.

4) Someone will be out of the closet -- with a 50% chance that that person was in your homecoming court (note to Generation Y: this will be reversed for all y'all -- someone who came out in high school will be in a heterosexual marriage, with two kids and a house in Schenectady).

when cultures combine, the clash is deafening...

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: Israeli Country Music:

Saw this list the other day and it cracked me up. It's the Billboard charts for country music in Israel:

1. "I Was One of the Chosen People ('Til She Chose Somebody Else)"
2. "Honkey Tonk Nights on the Golan Heights"
3. "I've Got My Foot On The Glass, Where Are You? "
4. "My Rowdy Friend Elijah's Comin' Over Tonight"
5. "New Bottle of Whiskey, Same Old Testament"
6. "Stand by Your Mensch"
7. "Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Latkes"
8. "I Balanced Your Books, but You're Breaking My Heart"
9. "My Darlin's a Schmendrick and I'm All Verklempt"
10. "That Shiksa Done Made off with My Heart Like a Goniff"
11. "The Second Time She Said 'Shalom', I Knew She Meant 'Goodbye'"
12. "You're the Lox My Bagel's Been Missin'"
13. "You've Been Talkin' Hebrew in Your Sleep Since that Rabbi Came to Town"
14. "Why Don't We Get Drunk - We're Jews!"
15. "Mamas Don't Let Your Ungrateful Sons Grow Up to Be Cowboys (When They Could Very Easily Have Just Taken Over the Family Hardware Business that My Own Grandfather Broke His Back to Start and My Father Sweated Over for Years Which Apparently Doesn't Mean Anything Now That You're Turning Your Back on Such a Gift)"

local DC radio station intentionally highlights the bigotry of its listeners

In U.S., fear and distrust of Muslims runs deep - Yahoo! News:

When radio host Jerry Klein suggested that all Muslims in the United States should be identified with a crescent-shape tattoo or a distinctive arm band, the phone lines jammed instantly.

The first caller to the station in Washington said that Klein must be "off his rocker." The second congratulated him and added: "Not only do you tattoo them in the middle of their forehead but you ship them out of this country ... they are here to kill us."

Another said that tattoos, armbands and other identifying markers such as crescent marks on driver's licenses, passports and birth certificates did not go far enough. "What good is identifying them?" he asked. "You have to set up encampments like during World War Two with the Japanese and Germans."

At the end of the one-hour show, rich with arguments on why visual identification of "the threat in our midst" would alleviate the public's fears, Klein revealed that he had staged a hoax. It drew out reactions that are not uncommon in post-9/11 America.

"I can't believe any of you are sick enough to have agreed for one second with anything I said," he told his audience on the AM station 630 WMAL (http://www.wmal.com/), which covers Washington, Northern Virginia and Maryland

"For me to suggest to tattoo marks on people's bodies, have them wear armbands, put a crescent moon on their driver's license on their passport or birth certificate is disgusting. It's beyond disgusting.

"Because basically what you just did was show me how the German people allowed what happened to the Jews to happen ... We need to separate them, we need to tattoo their arms, we need to make them wear the yellow Star of David, we need to put them in concentration camps, we basically just need to kill them all because they are dangerous."

The show aired on November 26, the Sunday after the Thanksgiving holiday, and Klein said in an interview afterwards he had been surprised by the response.

"The switchboard went from empty to totally jammed within minutes," said Klein. "There were plenty of callers angry with me, but there were plenty who agreed."

I love that.  Finally, people are REALLY being active about showing the parallels between 1933 and today, how so many wrong ideas and wrong actions can take place under what people think (or really feel, because they're not thinking) are the right reasons.  It's about time that this finally started happening on a larger scale than just the libertarian blogosphere and the NYTimes editorial pages...

would you rather vote based on "false positives"?

Masha Lipman - Russia's Hidden Power Struggle - washingtonpost.com:

One of the innovations of the new [Russian] election bill is a ban on creating a "negative image" of political opponents. This is one way of depriving a campaign of any meaning whatsoever, as just challenging the policies of the incumbent authorities can now be interpreted as a violation of the law.

So while there is always a constituency that dutifully turns out on Election Day to vote "as the bosses say," a great many others will choose to stay home, since they assume their vote will make no difference.

Negative ads and negative campaigns may suck, but the alternative, the "all positive" world, sucks worse. I would rather at least be allowed to SAY a negative truth, even as others can and will say negative lies, than to not be permitted to tell any truth when only positive things are allowed.

Aside: when I entered the editor's note '[Russian]' in the blockquote, I found myself instead wanting to enter '[Soviet]'.  To me, any action in Russia that effectively restores 1-party rule is really a Soviet thing, because even without communism or socialism as the popularist excuse for such abuses, the political mindset that permitted the Soviet civil-rights abuses for so long continues unabated.  Really, it's the same system that existed under the Czars for centuries before, people so used to oppression that they simply can't do anything but lived oppressed even when given the choice not to.

The truly successful democratic revolutions in England, Holland, and America all required an unwavering adherance to Englightenment philosophy to work.  The democratic reforms in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and other western & northern European nations all required one simple thing: a fear of war so strong that they would embrace political uncertainty to avoid that death ever returning.

For Russia, unlike the west, the death didn't end when the war did, so the people never could unite for democracy under the fear of that alternative - you can't unite to avoid death in the future if you still have to live with it (in the form of Stalin's madness) in your present.  Decades later, the light-weight reforms of Gorbachev, mostly cultural rather than civil, that led to the revolution of 1992 may have done more harm than good, because now there is an entire generation that simply don't know how bad it was in the 40s and 60s and as such are dooming themselves to recreate it.