“In political measures we ought never to recede, never to retrograde, never to admit ourselves to be wrong … even when in error we ought to persist in it, in order to have the appearance of being in the right.”

Danger Island is a reality show in development that pits actual convicted felons against manhunters. We’re one step closer to The Running Man. You can apply to be a contestant, but you can’t have been convicted of murder, rape, or child molestation. The $1,000,000 prize goes to the victim of the winner’s last crime. So I guess if the winner had beaten someone to the point of quadrapalegia and then commited mail fraud, the US Postal Service would get the prize. (thx lee)

There are some reports up at Prisoners of the Census that outline how political clout in Nevada has been unfairly shifted from urban to rural areas. The problem lies in the US Census, which counts people in prison as residents of the town in which the prison is located. This approach results in some quirky statistics. Take Pershing County, for instance (one of the red ones in the northwest). At least 21% of their population, and 95% of their Black population, is incarcerated. What might seem like a diverse community on paper, isn’t at all in the free community. That’s because most of these prisoners come from urban areas such as Las Vegas and Reno, and not from the rural areas surrounding the prisons.

Briefly: I’ve mentioned before that the gossip columnist for the Review-Journal, the largest paper of record in Nevada, is frighteningly high-profile. His name is Norm Clarke and his column is called Norm! Vegas Confidential (punctuation necessary). And yes, that’s the picture the RJ displays above every column.

An attorney in a Las Vegas family court is cited for contempt after bickering with the judge. From the RJ’s transcript: “He then sits down, sighs, and can be heard saying: ‘Oh God.’ ‘What was that?’ the judge said. ‘There, I sat down,’ Houston said. ‘OK, you’re the powerful judge.’”

Gay culture is dying, says Andrew Sullivan in a long New Republic essay. “For many in the gay world, this is both a triumph and a threat. It is a triumph because it is what we always dreamed of: a world in which being gay is a nonissue among our families, friends, and neighbors. But it is a threat in the way that all loss is a threat.” (free registration – use bugmenot to bypass it)

Edward Lazarus chimes in on the Miers nomination in this excellent, excellent article on FindLaw. “If nothing else, the conservative infighting over Miers has revealed that the most conservatives do not believe their own hokum about judicial neutrality, any more than liberals do. In truth, they think that personal values are crucially important to judging, and that liberal and conservative judges alike inject these values into their decision-making.” I think this is a must-read – he really nails the essence of the controversy and dispels several myths most people have about the Supreme Court. Lazarus was a clerk for Justice Blackmun (who penned the Roe v. Wade decision) and wrote Closed Chambers, an enthralling behind-the-scenes look at the US Supreme Court.

Bush’s job approval among African-Americans at less than 1%? Well, the NBC/WSJ poll has the number at 2%, but with a +/-3.4% margin of error. For all we know, Condaleeza Rice is the only African-American who approves of him. (thx doorframe)

Finalists for the 2005 National Book Award have been announced. I was happy to see William T. Vollmann, a favorite of mine, garner his first nomination in the fiction category for Europe Central. (He was nominated in 2003 for the 7-volume nonfiction essay Rising Up and Rising Down, of which I’m almost done with volume 4.)

Coupled with the iPod item below, Apple also released iTunes 6 today (otherwise there’d be no way for the iPod Video to get content). So I upgraded my iTunes and checked out the new version.

DJ Dangermouse (of Grey Album fame) and MF Doom collaborate on Danger Doom , a hop-hop album that frequently samples the characters from the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. Not a musical masterpiece, but it’s fun to hear Brak and the gang from Sealab 2021, among others, in these tracks. Click on the link to hear the album on MySpace before it’s taken down.

Dear Bush: “You are the best governor ever…” Best, Harriet Miers. That’s a real quote – click the link to see more cloying quotes from the New York Times.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo (among others) thinks that Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the White House leak of the CIA identity of Valerie Plame has turned into a conspiracy hunt. Specifically, he posits that the White House Iraq Group, whose job it was to sell the Iraq war and included Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, may be the key to the investigation. If this is true and Fitzgerald goes after them, this could turn into a massive scandal for the Bush administration. I’m not sure why any president would want to serve two terms anymore – it pretty much guarantees disgrace.

Malcolm Gladwell has an essay in the New Yorker about how the admissions process at Ivies such as Harvard have evolved. Turns out they added character and physical evaluation in the 20’s as an Anti-Semitic reaction to the increasing number of Jews enrolling. Also, it bugs me how income is often used as the only metric of success for college graduates in these kind of studies. Maybe I’m biased since I don’t see myself making near six-figures any time soon…

Two game theorists win the Nobel Prize in Economics. Game theory has been a hot topic for a quite awhile now in several fields: economics, computer science, sociology, political science, etc. Despite its welcoming name, the subject matter is rather mathematical and complex. For a fun and non-technical read on some elements of game theory, specifically the Prisoner’s Dilemma, I suggest the last few chapters of Douglas Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas.