Sometimes it's hard to restrain yourself when a person behaves badly. Sometimes it's worth pointing it out; some people can be helped, and help is sometimes worth the effort. But some people are so stupid and self-destructive, nothing will allow them to see themselves as fallible. Or self-destructive. Or stupid. Think about it: the stupid, self-destructive person has a problem seeing herself objectively. By definition. Just a thought.
Posts
5ives is my new favorite thing. A very simple comedic concept -- the list -- done well in a short space. Plus the writer's biographical glimpses make me recall my own (past drug use, suburban music fixations, crushes). This one was my favorite:
Five places that make me nervous
1. Hooters
2. 'Just stopping by this one guy's house for a minute'
3. Bars where women sell shots in test tubes
4. Rooms containing teenagers
5. Anyplace people are praying
I am afraid the sight of people with personal stereos plugged into their head depresses me terribly. They strike me as individuals who are not sufficiently mentally dextrous to pass occasional silent moments in the contemplation of higher things. -- a Prof. Gideon Garter, quoted in iPod is the new sonic boom in The Guardian
I love these sorts of details:
Personal care products sat atop a mini-refrigerator: a cake of Palmolive Naturals soap, a bottle of Dove moisturizing shampoo, a pot of moisturizing cream and a stick of Lacoste deodorant 'pour homme.' Hussein wasn't starving. The kitchen held a bounty of food: brown eggs, cucumbers, carrots, apples, kiwis and flatbread, plus orange marmalade, canned meat, a jar of honey and Lipton tea.
-- from Small, Cluttered Refuge Was a Far Cry From Luxury (washingtonpost.com)
The paradox of the celebrity age is that the more you see of movie stars, the less you learn about them. The modern gantlet of tabloid shows, talk shows, game shows, reality shows, awards shows, TV biographies and 24-hour entertainment cable stations has trained performers to package themselves airtightly around whatever project they are promoting. Only something as dramatic as an arrest or an emergency hospital visit can poke a hole through the gauzy barriers erected by armies of publicists, stylists and cosmetic surgeons. -- from the Times ' 'The Simple Life': With a Rich Girl Here and a Rich Girl There
I love the show a lot too, but do devote an entire weblog to Arrested Development, a show that is never gonna make it on Fox... seems a little weird. TV devotion of that kind always seems a little overkill-ish.
Update: It looks to be "the official weblog," so some flack from Fox is probably doing it.
I was thinking about the Massachusetts Supreme Court's decision this last week, and what I thought about it all. In some ways I think the "pro-marriage" arguments are a little retrograde. Were things better in the day when divorce was more difficult? We can recall that America was once a world (one not unlike modern Saudi Arabia?) where divorce is nigh on impossible if you were a woman. Spousal abuse, stalking, marital rape: none of these terms existed when my parents got married (they aren't married anymore).
There's a good piece in Slate about it, marriage I mean:
...despite all the horrors of Section 4, above, human beings want and deserve a soul mate; someone to grow old with, someone who thinks our dopey entry in the New Yorker cartoon competition is hilarious, and someone to help carry the shopping bags. Gay couples have asked the state to explain why such privileges should be denied them and have yet to receive an answer that is credible.
The dec
You read these harsh reviews of the new Sunny Day Real Estate cd , and it's hard. There's nothing really aggressive and good out there. (Besides the Distillers , I mean.) In some way, I want to support a lot of the new "punk" bands. The current hipness of punk is kind of what kids like us would have welcomed in the late 80s. But the popularity of it annoys me because of the sameness bands like Blink 182, Saves the Day, Thrice, and All-American Rejects offer. Whiny vocals about sexual frustration and variations on that theme... again, nothing wrong with that, per se (it's rock and roll), but genuine diversity of subject matter and delivery would be welcome. You sort of yearn for the weirdness of The Minutemen. Of course, the Minutemen were never as popular as Hall and Oates, and I guess that was the point of that, too.
Rumsfeld has a memory lapse. Again.
"Before the war in Iraq, you stated the case very eloquently and you said . . . they would welcome us with open arms," Sinclair Broadcasting anchor Morris Jones said to Rumsfeld as the prelude to a question.
The defense chief quickly cut him off.
"Never said that," he said. "Never did. You may remember it well, but you're thinking of somebody else. You can't find, anywhere, me saying anything like either of those two things you just said I said."
-- Rumsfeld Retreats (via blogdex )
Listening to this morning's press conference , I was struck by the miserable failure 's lack of articulate rhetoric, but also by the fact that no one calls him on the fact that he pretty much repeats the same things over and over. "Iraq is a dangerous place." Oh, ok. Is that the argument?
I guess what frustrates me is that, by the standards levelled against the Palestinian authority (that they do nothing to combat terrorism ), the "coalition" is also doing nothing to combat terrorism. Am I taking crazy pills, or is suicide bombers' success in murdering innocent people a weird sort of rationale for doing nothing to help re-start Israeli-Palestinian peace talks? Bush repeated it again during the press conference, that it's all Arafat's fault. I hate Arafat, too. But is that our answer?
Had a strange dream last night, where I was counseling a woman on how she could be successful in music, based what I imagined was my sound knowledge of music history. She listened very patiently, and then said, "ok, your ideas are good... if I led a guitar-oriented band with its roots in the Beatles and the Stones." She pointed out that she was an R&B artist who was mainly influenced by hip-hop, so my advice was pretty much useless to her.
Strange thing is that I woke up feeling embarrassed about her criticsm. My understanding of hip-hop is quite rudimentary. A lot of it I don't really get, the videos look offensive and juvenile to me, and I'm hard pressed to see the artistry in something like Bubba Sparxx, no matter how appealing the beat is.
But I wasn't bugged by the fact that, in my own dream, I took the rather pathetic role of Brian Epstein to her John Lennon. (And by that analogy, you can see that she was right.)
Asked once by New Musical Express what his idea of heaven was, [Elliott] Smith replied, "George Jones would be singing all the time. It would be like New York in reverse. People would be nice to each other for no reason at all. And it would smell good." Today, it seems like the least we could wish for him. -- from Slate's obit for Elliott
My post-election-day rant:
Kottke points to this interview , where GWB admits, yeah, he doesn't read anything. At all:
Bush said he insulates himself from the "opinions" that seep into news coverage by getting his news from his own aides. He said he scans headlines, but rarely reads news stories.
Yesterday's election results, combined with the entire Bush presidency, has reinforced my cynicism to a degree that, until today, I wasn't comfortable admitting. It's just so... messed up. People really don't mind that the president is nincompoop. It's ok. We like him. He doesn't put on airs. He eats corn dogs. He prays. Perhaps he really doesn't understand what's going on, but, it's confusing and stuff. His aides understand, he's got smart people working for him. That's what matters.
No serious challenge to Arnold 's platform, whatever that platform was. Actually, he ran without one. He wouldn't talk to newspap
"Arnold Schwarzenegger should not be judged on past improper advances towards women but as the devoted husband he is today." (Gee, why didn't Clinton think of this brilliant "devoted husband I am today" defense?) Moreover, Hatch already feels strongly enough that Schwarzenegger is of United States presidential caliber that he cites him as an argument for amending the Constitution, so that foreign-born American citizens can run for the Oval Office. -- from the Nation's Daily Outrage
Bill was quoting this Salon thing about Jack Black, how
[a]n MTV interviewer asked him if there are any rock stars today and he said "Yeah, of course -- you've got your White Stripes, your Strokes. You got your, uh [pauses] -- OK, that's it."
I was thinking about this just yesterday. I think Oasis was the last band to be rock stars in an unapologetic, un-ironic way. They abused drugs, sneered, behaved poorly, bla bla, but more importantly, they actually didn't care what people thought of them, because they were rock stars. Now, that doesn't mean they managed their career well, they didn't, but that's sort of the point. I mean, think about that: pretty simple, that kind of hubris. Any shmo can have it. But to have it w/o irony... and to be willing to command attention, it never happens today. Only Eminem has that kind of chutzpah, and his "moment" is sort of over. For all her fame, someone multiplatinum like J-Lo isn't really about
Listening to the new Strokes cd . Yeah, I got it from... somewhere. At any rate, it's good, if not exactly a huge step in some new, amazing direction. It sounds like the Strokes. Some of it is quite funny. However, it evokes a world of parties and 40-ouncers and young people trying to find their way, something I'm pretty removed from (as in the lyric "We could go and get 40s/Fuck the Winterland party/Oh really your folks are away now?/Alright let's go, you convinced me").
This is becoming a bit of a story.
At CIA Director George J. Tenet's request, the Justice Department is looking into an allegation that administration officials leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer to a journalist, government sources said yesterday.
At first I didn't give it much currency; it seemed like a minor thing to me. But apparently someone senior -- very senior -- in the Bush administration wanted revenge. How Nixonian. Could Bush be another popular president, fighting an unpopular war, who has become his own worst enemy?
We missed the county fair this year. Then again, I really stopped enjoying it after the early nineties. Taking kids to the fair is not as much fun as enjoying the freakishness with other adults. Last time I spent a lot of time encouraging my daughter to not be afraid of all the weirdness. Like mulleted, Raiders-jerseyed adults hooting while playing first-person-shooter video games. Or the fact that 4H auctions were invented for the purpose of sending that cute pig to slaughter. Or the sadder truth that the plastic-bear honey container, filled with strata of varicolored sand, is a ripoff at any price, not just the $9.99 they are asking. Even when the bear wears a pink felt cowboy hat.
Bill Moyers made a clearheaded editorial on NOW , about the American and French soldiers who died together at Marne. Read it and realize that idiots like Tom Friedman should not be listened to.
The more history I learn, the more convinced I am that the conservative lame-os currently occupying the White House are wrong, and they don't even know they are wrong because they are ignorant.
The Unsexy List has a couple of good entries:
32. Tongue Rings. You having a tongue ring in 2003 is like us prancing around in eight-ball jackets. After four drinks you'll slur that it makes oral sex feel amazing. It doesn't!
33. Lower-back tattooes. Lately, it seems that if there's no faux-Celtic design between your low-rise jeans and your baby tee, something's missing. Recently, we've been seeing girls with their names in thug font in that place. Must save a lot of awkwardness.
You mean Cheney lied? He never does that! Well, yeah, I guess he does. Here's the Washington Post on just a piece of the all-spin zone called BushCo:
An FBI investigation concluded that Atta was apparently in Florida at the time of the alleged meeting [with Iraqi intelligence five months before 9/11], and the CIA has always doubted it took place. Czech authorities, who first mentioned the alleged meeting in October 2001 to U.S. officials, have since said they no longer are certain the individual in the video of the supposed meeting was Atta. Meanwhile, in July, the U.S. military captured the Iraqi intelligence officer who was supposed to have met Atta and has not obtained confirmation from him.
- Bush Team Stands Firm on Iraq Policy (washingtonpost.com)
And on and on and on!
As evidence that Hussein had "reconstituted" his nuclear weapons program, as Cheney had said before the war, the vice president cited Hussein's prewar possession of "500 tons
Strategists in both parties agree that the memory of the attacks has served a powerful purpose for Bush, but the political landscape may be shifting. A spate of recent polls has shown voters becoming more concerned about the economy than about terrorism. Bush's earlier popularity for his handling of the attacks' aftermath never translated to approval for his domestic policies, and now his overall approval rating is receding.
-- Bush Cites 9/11 On All Manner Of Questions . [titled as if WaPo were suprised; via Kottke ]
In the latest Paul Krugman , the Krug gets all medieval on Dubya's ass:
If Mr. Bush had admitted from the start that the postwar occupation might cost this much, he would never have gotten that last tax cut. Now he says, 'We will do what is necessary, we will spend what is necessary. . . .' What does he mean, 'we'? Is he prepared to roll back some of those tax cuts, now that the costs of war loom so large? Is he even willing to stop urging Congress to make the 2001 tax cut permanent? Of course not.
Mission Creep - Bush's perversion of the "war on terror," a biting piece of work from Saletan in Slate:
To justify this burden, Bush tells us it's still about 9/11. He tells us terrorists are trying to 'inflict harm on Americans' to make us 'run from a challenge' in Iraq. He tells us we must be 'resolute in our own defense.' He tells us we must 'spend what is necessary to achieve this essential victory in the war on terror.' He conflates enemies. He spins circular logic. He appeals to our pride. He continues to misrepresent the terrorist connections on the basis of which he justified the Iraq invasion, and he expands the definition of the 'war on terror' so that Iraq can be crammed into it anyway, along with dozens of other countries. Two years after 9/11, he has so thoroughly twisted the meaning of what happened that day that, in effect, he has forgotten what it was.
Sen. Clinton to Block Bush EPA Nominee Good on ya Hillary.
So I'm reading the new Al Franken book and though it's a little thin in the middle, damned if I'm not laughing on every page. And I was also embarrased to say that I bought all the GOP bullshit about the Wellstone memorial last year. So shame on me. Thanks, Al. I really wish I could have been there when you pissed Wolfowitz off.
This is good: TicketSatan will now auction concert tickets to highest bidders . "[T]here would be no limit on how high prices could go - it would be simply a matter of how much people were willing to pay." Sort of a program to help disadvantaged Eddie-Bauer-clad 50-year olds buy their Eagles tickets.
It happened today: I got a Howard Dean email from a friend:
This next month is critical to our campaign. During the next 29 days, we are
going to prove the staying power of the grassroots- prove that you have the
power to change the way politics is done in our country-- and we are going
to create the September to Remember.
Who writes that stuff? The September to Remember?
The gawker folks mention the The New Sincerity: Kidults thing in the NYT this last weekend . (I love that NYT sociological tone-of-gravity thing: "Most have busy lives with adult responsibilities, respectable jobs and children of their own. They are not stunted adolescents. They are something else: grown-ups who cultivate juvenile tastes in products and entertainment. Call them rejuveniles.")
I know people who collect kidstuff, but they've been collecting for a while, not all of a sudden. Recall the lunchbox girls with Bettie Page bangs, who collected Pee Wee Herman stuff? Or the housemate in college who had the Scoobie Doo crap in his room? (If anything sharpened the consumer desire for kidstuff, it was ebay, right?) I think it's funny how marketing creeps into smaller and smaller subcultures. Soon there won't be subcultures, just markets. Or is it the other way around? Is a subculture nothing but an immature market?
Skateboarding thus brings together a concern to live out an idealised present, trying to live outside of society while being simultaneously within its very heart. But for skateboarders to produce themselves in this way, their activity must take place in the streets of the city. -- from A Performative Critique of the American City: the Urban Practice of Skateboarding, 1958-1998
Is that true? Is it really a subculture? (Or subbaculcha ?) As it moves closer and closer to becoming a mainstreamed sport, it becomes a pretty fragmented one. At one point another "extreme sport" will surface in the pop culture pool, and another subculture will have the same conversation. In related news, the Livermore Safeway stopped carrying Thrasher .
Forrester Research, a high-technology consulting group, estimates that the number of service sector jobs newly located overseas, many of them tied to the information technology industry, will climb to 3.3 million in 2015 from about 400,000 this year. This shift of 3 million jobs represents about 2 percent of all American jobs.
"It's a very important, fundamental transition in the I.T. service industry that's taking place today," said Debashish Sinha, principal analyst for information technology services and sourcing at Gartner Inc., a consulting firm. "It is a megatrend in the I.T. services industry." -- from that NYT piece about IT jobs moving overseas that everyone's talking about
Fascinating piece in the Post about George Mason grad student Sean Gorman, whose geography dissertation maps North America's critical information infrastructure, that is, the fiber optic interdependence of American businesses in total. He got all of the information on the web, none of it is classified, still the Dept of Homeland Security wants it shut down or classified. Or, as the case will most likely be, funded by the DHS so that everyone signs NDAs and we never hear about it again. ( "The government uses research funding as a carrot to induce people to refrain from speech they would otherwise engage in," said Kathleen Sullivan, dean of Stanford Law School. "If it were a command, it would be unconstitutional." )
Thanks for using the SelectSmart.com 2004 Presidential Candidate Selector .... Your responses determined the order of the list below. The results are scored on a curve. The highest score, 100%, represents the closest match to your responses. This does not mean that this or any candidate shares all your views. However, the candidate at the top of your list shares more of your selected views than do any others.
Your Results:
1. Kucinich, Cong. Dennis, OH - Democrat (100%)
2. Edwards, Senator John, NC - Democrat (91%)
3. Kerry, Senator John, MA - Democrat (85%)
4. Gephardt, Cong. Dick, MO - Democrat (81%)
5. Dean, Gov. Howard, VT - Democrat (81%)
6. Graham, Senator Bob, FL - Democrat (76%)
7. Lieberman Senator Joe CT - Democrat (74%)
8. Sharpton, Reverend Al - Democrat (72%)
9. Moseley-Braun, Former Senator Carol IL - Democrat (68%)
10. Libertarian Candidate (27%)
11. Bush, George W. - US President (2%)
12. Phillips, Howard - Co
"Bellwether. This is the leading sheep of a flock, on whose neck a bell is hung. It is nothing to do with climate, prevailing winds or the like." I always wondered what bellwether meant, and now I know . As a writer, I like style guides and usage guides, Kottke 's remainders list points to one I haven't seen, from the Economist . There are others, right? Like Strunk , the American Heritage , Oxford , Yale And remember the MLA ? Perhaps the true measure of a undergrad's willingness to go to grad school, and study even more liberal ats, could best be measured by his willingness to ingest lots of MLA. But I hated it; hence, I only got a B.A.
I have mixed feelings about Nader going after the White House again . On the one hand, I think anything that gets actual issues onto the tv and into the faces of people eating their TV dinners... good. But did Ralph hurt Gore? And if he did, should we blame Ralph for war, bad government, right-wing judgeships? Now that I said it, it seems too simple. I mean, when I voted for Gore, I wasn't voting for Gore, but against Bush.
Buddy Hackett, who broke into comedy as a young waiter-performer in New York's Catskill Mountains and went on to achieve iconic status as a raunchy nightclub performer and rubber-faced clown in movies including "The Music Man" and "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," died Monday at his home in Malibu. He was 78.
Is it strange that I'm touched by the death of Buddy Hackett ?
So what is the conservatives' next move? The main argument -- that gay marriage puts marriage "under attack" -- is such utter and total bullshit. Yet it persists. The amusing thing is that these same GOPers have no problem with the horrible problems like homeless families , unaffordable childcare , or underfunded k-12 schools , things that really and truly hurt kids and families, but rant on and on about how straight people getting married more will solve everything. I guess they will also fear-monger, the "slippery slope" that Rick Santorum brought forth: if you say that the hallmark is privacy and consent, this allows incest, prostitution, and perhaps touch-dancing. Whatever.
Of course, not every conservative is crying in her beer. The worst are already putting terrific pressure on Bush to nominate folks slightly to the right of Heinrich Himmler to replace the eventually-retiring William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Connor. As Phyllis Schalfly said today
If Ellison pulls off his PeopleSoft bid, it could allow SAP to focus on just one major competitor. "It might even be better for us," says [SAP CEO Henning] Kagermann, "because the difference between Oracle and SAP is clearer than between SAP and PeopleSoft in the culture of the companies." - from "The Man Who Mooned Larry Ellison" [found on Ditherati ]
Because mySQL is now under the GPL, PHP5 will no be bundled with mySQL . This isn't unexpected, since SAP acquired mySQL you figure this sort of thing would be happening. But it's a little weird, all these OSS apps that seemed hippy-dippy and free are becoming commodities. Is this the missing future that people are talking about?
"Placeholder for Mindy's Editorial." Take a look at Slate's sneak of BushCo. web site , coming soon to a browser near you. I love all the faux headlines: "President Signs Amber Alert Law," "President Acts to Lower Rx Bills." Would some unsuspecting soul actually venture to the BushCheney04.com site to have a taste of phony news? Why are sites like that even necessary? The web is weird.
For several years... [public policy professor Richard] Florida queried audiences, asking which career they'd choose: machinist with higher pay and job security, or hairstylist with lower pay and no job security. "Time and again, most people chose the hair salon, and always for the same reasons" - flexibility, freedom from supervision, stimulation, creativity, and the immediate satisfaction of their customers. The aesthetic imperative has spread new economy values beyond just knowledge workers. -- from Virginia Postrel's "The Aesthetic Imperative"
I have to say, I bought all of that "end of work" stuff, I was totally into it. I used to stare at those Business 2.0 print ads by Guru.com . I thought, "in my generation..." And I am still thinking that my days in my (relatively) creative job are quite numbered. I have more or less the job I dreamed of five years ago. I do web design, database design, flowcharting, technical writing, and
Here's Andy about the left's moral abdication vis-a-vis Iran . OK, guys, the American left should extend the love to Iran's dissidents. But conservatives have bad history with dealing with democratic countries, in the sense that it likes to intervene with non-aligned democratic govts., and is loath to intervene w/ allied govts. So Pakistan... there's a slim definition of "democratic nation," but the administration won't rock the boat there. There are much more repressive folks in the region, like, the Saudis, upon whom Bush has applied little or no pressure. And they haven't said much about Burma and Aung San Suu Kyi. Actually, the State Department is talking about that . And Iran, well, the US didn't really do a good job the last time .
I just think it's the Rumsfeldian selectivity (sounds like a psychological disorder) that irritates me. The fact that everything that the Administration doesn't want to talk about (read: WMD) is just dis
I used to have an affection for lists and list-centered writing, especially The Book of Lists . I loved that book in the fifth grade because (a) it contained a ton of sex information and (b) it bestowed volumes of worthless trivia, a boon to pretentious fifth-graders everywhere. But list books are now the bane of gift stores, with hundreds of "1000 things that will make you smile" type-books polluting the book industry . And lists in magazines are now so prevalent that they warrant their own hit piece . So: death to lists.
BR asked me:
Do you think the Republicans are just tax cut happy because they really believe it will help (somehow) or that they are also using it to try to choke off the ability of the government to do anything effectively, and therefore, pumping up their argument that anything done by the government, aside from the military, is better done by the private sector? I mean, that is probably what people like Tom DeLay want, but is that widespread?
I think the whole issue of taxation is of a piece with Iraq. It's ideology. The current administration, unlike Bush I, is not timid in the face of pure right ideology. It's very Reaganesque in that way, in the sense that the Bush neocons, the real Straussians , see liberal leadership as America's Weimar leadership : weak, timid, unwilling to use the power of office to do anything other than please its array of liberal PACs and lawyers. Conservatives feel that (a) power is a good thing and (b) power should be used, and used s
The Douglas Adams link that's making the rounds made me think of Doctor Who. I was a huge fan of the show back in the early 80s. I was such a total geek. About a year ago I had Doctor Who nostalgia and watched a couple of storlines on VHS. It had to admit it bored me. The scripts seemed dumb, the special effects sucked, and I was suddenly older.
The government is holding children at Camp X-Ray :
The US military has admitted that children aged 16 years and younger are among the detainees being interrogated at its prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, a US military spokesman, yesterday said all the teenagers being held were "captured as active combatants against US forces", and described them as "enemy combatants".
The children, some of whom have been held at Guantanamo for over a year, are imprisoned in separate cells from the adult detainees, Lt Col Johnson said. He would say only that the teenagers are "very few, a very small number" and would not say how old the youngest prisoner is.
* * *
"That the US sees nothing wrong with holding children at Guantanamo and interrogating them is a shocking indicator of how cavalier the Bush administration has become about respecting human rights," said an Amnesty International spokesman, Alistair Hodget
Hey, sugar, welcome to the weblog page devoted to you and your birthday . If you're reading this, I figure you've already delved into this goofy green box of cards. But if this is your first card, rest assured that some are better than others.
I composed this page to amuse, distract, and/or entertain you. So here goes.
Now, of course I could have done the usual thing, and directed you to a page devoted to teapots , or a page devoted to cool tennis shoes (like the Adidas Tobacco ), or a page that shows you how to get David Spade's autograph . But that would have been too obvious. Here are some other obvious ideas I scrapped:
- the Ultimate Columbo Site
- pages devoted to Office Space... like this one and this one and this one and this one (with a stapler-centered point of view)
- funny pictures from A Mighty Wind, like this , and this . Oh, and this too . And behind-the-scenes on Waiting for Guffman
- Benicio Del Toro's official website (why does he
Tim Robbins talks baseball:
Our ability to disagree, and our inherent right to question our leaders and criticize their actions define who we are. To allow those rights to be taken away out of fear, to punish people for their beliefs, to limit access in the news media to differing opinions is to acknowledge our democracy's defeat.
Did he write that? Or did Gore Vidal ? Either way, damn straight, Tim.
Thinking and trying to make sense of the passage of time. It all goes so wrong. How can you grow old and not fight the eternality of change? I hate everything I do and yet I continue to use my hands and eat and pray. I pray, even when I am struggling against it. The grammar of feeling. Richer nights without the praise of your peers, draining me of everything I called my own. I�m down with that. I can�t pick her up until I�m able to leave. I don�t use the list of priorities anymore. You can�t say enough nice things about Mitchell Froom , so many critics hate him. I�m lost again, I am continually lost, staring into my hands, wishing I could spend my way out of strangeness. People wanting to cry but being unable, people ready to wonder if there�s something greater than the god they pray to. The clown on the freeway sounding an alarm. Storefronts crowded with plastic flowers. You can�t face the people you love. Everything is all right.
I was depressed for a while, but now I'm bette
To further confuse things, you have to read this great piece in Salon which asks the question "why isn't the left in favor of removing Saddam?"
The piece refers to Slobodan, and I confess that in the early 90s I wrote a letter to Pres. Clinton, urging him to engage the military to stop ethnic cleansing. Back then, I sincerely thought another holocaust was coming, and was enraged that the Democrats were uninterested in comitting troops. Weird, huh? If Clinton had bombed Milosevic's HQ I would have had no problem with that. (Of course, I always cut Bill C. a lot of slack. A lot.)
I guess my only problem with the Salon piece is the notion that while Vietnam was "tens of thousands of deaths justified by a systematic lie," the bombing of Iraq reflects an administration whose lies are somehow less dangerous, that we should look to the, uh, upside of bombing Iraq into obedient democracy. I think, in the case of Vietnam, America was rightly afraid of commun
And you thought you were scared... here's an excerpt from Raed's to-do list :
- Finished taping all the windows in the house, actually a very relaxing exercise if you forget why you are doing it in the first place.
- installed a manual pump on the well we have dug because up till now we had an electrical pump on it.
- bought 60 liters of gasoline to run the small electricity generator we have, bought two nifty kerosene cookers and stocked loads of kerosene and dug holes in the garden to bury the stuff so that the house doesn�t turn into a bomb....
You should really read him ... while you still can.
The war is about to start , and I find myself wondering how far reporters will be allowed to report. And I wonder how much more war-geek reporting I can take from the major news outlets (this from the Time article cited at the start of this paragraph):
Unlike the first Gulf War, in which fewer than 10% of the bombs were smart, this time close to 80% would be. And unlike the laser-guided bombs of 12 years ago, these satellite-guided weapons, known as joint direct-attack munitions (JDAMs), should be able to find their targets automatically, unimpeded by smoke or bad weather. The top targets of those JDAMs would be the military sites�command posts and critical garrisons belonging to the Republican Guard�that keep Saddam in power and the symbolic sites, like his presidential palaces, that reflect that power. "It will be highly kinetic," an Air Force planner says with grim understatement.
No mention of the fact dring GulfWar v1.0, smart bombs were reported as "surgica
If so, the fault mainly lies with President Bush. His articulation of political aims and postwar plans has been sketchy to the point of empty cliche. He has never discussed the human costs of war, nor its price. The Yale economist William D. Nordhaus estimates the military expenditure between $50 billion and $140 billion; far more daunting, his study finds, the postwar costs to the United States of occupying and rebuilding Iraq, along with the impact on oil markets and the economy, could run as high as $2 trillion. This is a calculation that no one in the administration has dared to make, at least publicly. Privately, some officials suggest that Iraqi oil will pay for it.
More than anything, the president hasn't readied Americans psychologically to commit themselves to a project of such magnitude, nor has he made them understand why they should. He has maintained his spirit of hostility to nation-building while reversing his policy against it. Bush is a man who has never shown
The Dems are laying low on Iraq, and I have been wondering if that was good idea. This bloke from USAToday thinks so (from Altercation ). I guess if Dems forge a "silent dissent" from the President's policies, the Dems have nothing to lose. This is the reason why the White House hawks have little interest in currying support for this irrational war. Think of it from the White House's point of view: if things go well, everyone (including the UN) will take credit anyway. If things go badly, everyone will carp anyway. From the hawks' perspective, the US is alone anyway — existentially? — so to spend effort getting people to get with you is effort wasted.
This is no way to run an empire.
If a doctor handed you a strong medication--saying you had no choice but to swallow it--but didn't talk to you about the host of new ailments and problems that might be caused by the medication, that would be damn irresponsible. Well, meet George W. Bush, M.D. He has been claiming the United States must take the most extreme measure--war--to keep itself safe and healthy. Yet he has refused to address the knotty matters (post-op complications?) that will follow in the wake of war.
- David Corn, Bush's Presidential Malpractice
In reading the Blogger/Google thread on blogroots , I saw mathowie linking to the KM section in their blogger book and it was like, "whoa, I need to read this." Funny how the big big news brings you to the smaller, more interesting stuff. Once again, the web.
People at work talk about weird stuff. Ginko biloba . The South Korean arsonist . Mock-ups. The space program. That idiotic myth about "three generations of Americans on welfare."
Ah, yes, code chartreuse, or whatever level we're at , could it really be the reaction of our confused and frightened imagination?
A key piece of the information leading to recent terror alerts was fabricated, according to two senior law enforcement officials in Washington and New York.... Despite the fabricated report, there are no plans to change the threat level. Officials said other intelligence has been validated and that the high level of precautions is fully warranted
Neil Finn was great last night. And so was Rhett Miller , although I still distrust the David Cassidy hairdo.
Everything I know about programming actually occupies little space. I'm facing that now while I prepare to work on something more complex than the stuff I've done before.I guess that happens when you learn: rather than things becoming easier, things that were difficult become mastered, and then newer difficulties open up. It's what Robert Fripp talks about when he talks about craft .
"There is nothing political about American literature," Laura Bush has said. But it would be hard to find writers more subversive than the three she chose for her event. Whitman's epic of radical democracy, Leaves of Grass, was so scandalous it got him fired from his government job; Hughes, a Communist sympathizer hounded by McCarthy, wrote constantly and indelibly about racism, injustice, power; Dickinson might seem the least political, but in some ways she was the most lastingly so--every line she wrote is an attack on complacency and conformity of manners, mores, religion, language, gender, thought. - Katha Politt, Poetry Makes Nothing Happen?
Add this to your list of completely under-reported stories: Israel is silently giving the go-ahead to assassinations on U.S. soil. Oh, ok, sure.
The Israeli statements were confirmed by more than a half dozen former and currently serving U.S. foreign policy and intelligence officials in interviews with United Press International.
Why are we supporting the Sharon government? Can someone please let me know?
Well, the Lott moment may be over, but I am hoping that people will make a big deal about this move by the Bushies into affirmative action territory. How can the GOP say it is reaching out to black voters when it constantly interferes with college admission policy ? Why do "best government is least government" people jump so quickly to, uh, govern, when it suits their ideology?
As I said, I'm hopeful, but not foolish. The White House is using the "let's compensate for this by mentioning historically black colleges a million times" strategy. And that sort of thing does work (cf. Reagan White House). Case in point: a GoogleNews search on "Bush historically black colleges" garners 56 hits alone.
This makes me sick: "Bush Declares Sanctity of Human Life Day." How many layers of hypocrisy can you count? He won't even use the A-word (i.e. "abortion") because he can't afford to politically, and he has a pretty dismal record as far as "human life" goes. Another sick photo-op to stroke the John Ashcrofts of the world. [from TBOGG ]
I haven't heard jack about these polling numbers . Why isn't this all over the news?
CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll. Jan. 10-12, 2003. N=1,002 adults nationwide. (Results below are among registered voters.)... "If George W. Bush runs for reelection in 2004, would you say you will definitely vote for him, might vote for or against him, or will you definitely vote against him?"
Definitely For Bush 36 %
Might Vote For or Against 31 %
Definitely Against Bush 32 %
No Opinion 1 %
A glance at myself over the holidays. Explained to Springtime that I am thinking I don't do much that is creative, and I wish I did. She said "I think you're having a mid-life crisis," and suspects that I'm just being too hard on myself. "You're writing code, and that's writing." She's right, and I have the time to do creative things. But I keep thinking I've got more to do in life than this:
Function GetNumberOfFoldersRecursive(index,sParentFolder)
'PRECONDITION: depends on a global var iNumFolders
Dim FSO, oFolder, oChildFolder, oFile
Set FSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set oFolder = FSO.GetFolder(sParentFolder)
For Each oChildFolder in oFolder.SubFolders
iNumFolders = iNumFolders + 1
MsgBox "oChildFolder.Name = " & oChildFolder.Name & " [" & iNumFolders & "]"
ShowError("GetNumberOfFoldersRecursive&q