Brando has a good story up on CJSD.
Of course, the economic thinking and mob hysteria he admits is clear evidence of how much he and his thirty friends hate the American Way Of Life. They're probably all already on The Double Extra Secret Watch List, or so we should all hope. Enough people read a dangerous document like this, there's no telling where it could lead.
Just fifty people a day. Can you imagine fifty people a day …?
From Bruce Reed:
These are tough times for the newspaper business, so editors everywhere should be grateful to Slate's parent company, the Washington Post, for an ingenious cost-saving measure--the reusable headline. Saturday's Post carried a story entitled, "Giuliani Tries To Clarify Abortion Stance." No matter how many times Giuliani addresses the subject, it's the only headline any newspaper will ever need.
You should check "The Has*Been" column/blog regularly. Always good. (Or maybe even subscribe to its RSS feed. I think Slate might finally have straightened out their woes in this department. Progress!) Here's a snippet from Reed's previous post:
As he labors to explain his ever-changing heart on choice, Giuliani seems determined to prove that there is no history test, either.
Giuliani is not alone. Mitt Romney doesn't want a religious test or a history test. His about-face on abortion is even less convincing than Giuliani's. Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, and Tom Tancredo, who don't believe in evolution, want to prove there's no science test. All the Republican candidates are supply-siders, hoping to prove there's still no math test.
On an unrelated note, but on the same site, it seems that I'm not the only one annoyed by ABC's seasickness cam. Phew. (You'll have to read down a few paragraphs -- this guy didn't spend all of his time talking about it, unlike some I could name) I also agree with him about some other points; e.g., that Pussycat Dolls "song" thing is giving me lots of exercise -- my mute button is broken, so I lunge for the volume button at every commercial break. But I disagree with the main thrust of the article, that the NBA is lame. Slate's people live in D.C., so it's understandable that they're a little grumpy, but the only thing wrong with the NBA is the guys in charge of producing it on TV.
Last month, I noted that Bush's nominee to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Michael E. Baroody, has for the past decade and a half worked as head lobbyist for NAMBLA NAM, the National Association of Manufacturers. At the time, I said that I hadn't seen much coverage from the MSM on the matter.
The NYT does have a story on the matter today. Here's what William Brock had to say about Baroody:
He has as much intellectual depth and integrity as anyone I've met in government over the decades.
Brock was a labor secretary under Reagan and, like Baroody, a "senior official" of the Republican National Committee, so he should know, right?
I didn't watch the second Republican candidates' debate, either. Somehow, this tells me all I need to know:
The death of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority, prompted a rush of statements from Republican candidates paying tribute to his life …
(source)
You've probably heard the old joke about the two car companies and their responses to new EPA regulations (the phrase new EPA regulations tells you how old the joke must be). The punchline goes, "So Toyota hired a hundred new engineers …"
Looks like there's a new life for that old joke. ITWorld.com is reporting the following [their spelling of "open-souce" corrected by me]:
In an interview with Fortune magazine, Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, and Horacio Gutierrez, the company's vice president of intellectual property and licensing, said open-source software, including Linux, violates 235 Microsoft patents. And Microsoft wants distributors and users of open-source software to start paying royalties for these alleged violations.
The Fortune story gives more details and lots of analysis, if you're interested.
Clearly, no self-respecting Linux hacker would even look at MS code, if for no other reason than the (sometimes overdeveloped) loathing for the kludginess therein. And clearly, Microsoft has invented little itself apart from talking paper clips -- their entire user interface is a clunky implementation of a blatant rip-off of Apple's design work, and the underlying logic of the OS was originally based on heavy lifting done by DEC.
But the worrisome thing is, a company with pockets as deep as MS can afford a lot of smart and amoral lawyers, so I'm not ready to just laugh this off out of hand. The information superhighway is littered with roadkill from past encounters with the Redmond SUV.
Just to be safe, better grab your copy of Ubuntu now.
Slate has posted the video of the recent debate between Al Sharpton and Christopher Hitchens. I watched it last night. It's pretty good.
This is the debate that caused a one-day furor because of an offhand remark that Sharpton made concerning Mitt Romney being defeated by "real Christians" or something like that. Whatever, it's hardly anything to do with the rest of the debate.
I'd not heard Hitchens speak before. He reminded me a lot of Richard Dawkins. He's clever and has thought out his arguments well. Plus, he has a British accent, which immediately gives him extra credibility and makes his insulting statements sound witty. Well, at least among us hopeless Anglophiles.
Sharpton got in a few good digs, some by recalling Hitchens's stance on the Iraq War, and many others simply by being nimble on his feet. Curiously, he made no effort to defend any particular belief or holy book, and conceded that, yes, people have a long history of doing bad things in the name of God. I'm not completely up on my Protestant sects, but as I understand it, part of what led different branches of Christianity to form and to turn away from Rome was their belief in the ability of the individual to experience and understand God. This may explain Sharpton's point of view -- he is a Pentacostal and was apparently ordained as a minister in his early teens. Another guess is that it may have been merely a debating strategy -- Sharpton seemed solely intent on defending God ("him- or herself" he was careful to say, repeatedly). He also clung to a second major point, that there can be no morality without belief in a higher power. Sharpton said that he'd read Hitchens's new book, and that while he disagreed with it, thought it was good and urged the audience to read it.
As you might expect, there was no "winner." Nor was there much convergence of viewpoints between Hitchens and Sharpton. Almost certainly, you'll finish the debate believing the same thing as you did before. But I found it entertaining, and refreshingly free of the interruptions and general rudeness that characterize most made-for-TV smackdowns these days. It was, in a word, civilized.
On a personal note, I was mostly happy to see another witty and articulate spokesman for the extreme anti-religious point of view. Hitchens did soften his stance a bit at the end. He acknowledged, even defended, the right of others to believe what they will. But he, like me, insists that those beliefs be kept private, and not imposed on him or his children. Also like me, he rejects out of hand the notion that morality requires religious faith, and instead argues that the tendency to behave properly toward others, while perhaps imperfectly developed, is innate in human beings. It is, we believe, a product of evolution, and without it, we wouldn't have lasted as a species. He did not explicitly say, but hinted at, the idea that the altruistic beliefs ascribed to religion must have come from humans themselves. This, to me, seems self-evident. Hitchens made the point most clearly by facetiously wondering if the Jews believed that murder was okay before they received the Ten Commandments.
I know that a lot of people, even some other agnostics and atheists, find the extreme anti-religious point of view offensive, and wish that this point of view would itself be kept quiet. I used to be in that camp, myself. Now, in reaction to the political clout of the other side, I believe it is important to present a firm and vocal disagreement. The philosophy of live and let live is my ideal, but I no longer think that living this way, for the time being, will work.
There is a popular theory, which throws a wrinkle into the hypothesis of global warming, that says that rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet would disrupt the flow of warm ocean water that keeps northern Europe temperate. The result: most of Europe would experience a mini-Ice Age, while the rest of the planet warms. Now, according to a story in the NY Times, the consensus of climatologists is that the theory is wrong.
The really interesting part of the story is that it's fairly long, yet feels no compulsion to present sound bites from the "other side."
Which, no doubt, will buttress the hypothesis of the liberal media.
The only sure thing that can be said about the past is that anyone who can remember Santayana's maxim is condemned to repeat it.
(Hat tip: KK.)
[Added] See also.
Have you noticed the camera-on-a-wire that ABC is featuring in the NBA playoffs this year?
I hate it. The only good thing to say about it is that they mostly stop using it after a few minutes into each quarter.
I appreciate the attempt to provide a new look, and sure, everyone likes new toys. I remember this particular toy from the first game of the XFL, which I watched for the first half and then never again. (But I still remember the player whose jersey claimed his name was "He Hate Me.")
Bizarre cameras don't bother me in football. After watching the first round of the basketball playoffs, and now part of the second, I think I've figured out why they bother me so much in basketball. Two words: video games.
This will be irritating to football fans, but for me, football on TV is indistinguishable from the current state of the art in video games. I don't actually play them, but when I see demos, video game football doesn't look appreciably artificial compared to the meat version. Basketball? Computers aren't there yet. Their video game demos still look like cartoons to me. So does the view from camera on the wire.
I remember my attempts to draw action sports figures when I was a kid. Football players were the only ones that came out right. Maybe it's all the equipment, but there's something robotic about football players. There's something fundamentally simple about them, visually. So, if it wasn't impossible for a non-artist to draw them, it makes sense that it's easy for computers to do it, too. Basketball, by contrast, shows the human form almost completely unclothed, and computers rendering this as a bunch of connected polygons doesn't yet cut it.
I don't want the camera moving while I'm watching the ballet -- give me any fixed angle, and my eyes will adjust, and love to watch. If you move the camera, it just looks phony. Even the ball looks weird when it moves, especially away from the camera. It could be, I suppose, partly, the reduced optics that come with making a camera small enough to ride on a wire, and along with that, it's probably that I don't care as much about football that I don't notice the artifacts on the gridiron. Worse, it's a lot harder to follow the flow when the camera is moving, too. It feels like my eyes have to constantly refocus.
Whatever. I hate the camera on a wire for basketball. This is poetry in motion, the most graceful example of human beings ever. Don't phony it up.
Other notes:
Shout out to John Barry, who may be the second person on the planet to rant about flopping. I like to think of myself as the first. I've long irritated KK and others with my arguments that excessive flopping should merit a warning, and then a technical foul. Drawing an offensive foul is a great move, but way too many players try it way too often. I don't blame them. It's the rules. So, change the rules. I'm sick of watching seven-footers sitting on their asses when they should be trying to block shots. The hamming it up away from the ball is just silly. One of the few technical fouls ever called on me in a game was when I advised the ref after a whistle -- on guess who? -- to award my opponent an Emmy. L.A. stories.
Is not Leandro Barbosa the most fun to watch? Speed! When he hunches his shoulders and just blurs to the basket … man.
Okay, Tim Duncan might still be the absolute most. He doesn't make the highlight reels nearly as much as he should. Pity. The rest of the world could learn something about using footwork. And the glass.
And Sean Marion? Despite every shot -- except for his picture-perfect dunks -- looking absolutely wrong to me, I love his game. You don't get to see it as much against the Spurs, because there is no other team that I've ever seen as good at shutting down the high flyers.
Good stuff, when they shut off Seasickness Cam.
Michael Kinsley has a piece in the NYT Book Review, ostensibly on Christopher Hitchens's new book, but more on the author himself. It's quite good.
I grabbed a couple of Kinsley's delightful phrases and pasted them below. They're in a slightly hard-to-read color, because I hesitated to step on his lines -- they're better when you come across them in context. But if you aren't interested in reading the whole thing, just use your mouse to highlight the following couple of centimeters:
… he is a bit too quick to resort to French in search of le mot juste …
… the Hoover Institution or some other nursing home of the mind …
Reminder: you can read excerpts from Hitchens's book on Slate.
If you use an RSS/Atom reader to get notified of updates to this blog, I apologize for the recent burst of pings that pointed you to ancient posts. I was fixing links, for reasons passing understanding for most sane people.
Should be all better now. Until my next attack of OCD, anyway.
I came across a new acronym initialization just now. Anyone know what "DFH" stands for, especially in the blogosphere? I'm guessing, from context, that it means "Democrat From Hell." It's not in any of my usual sources for acronyms and their ilk. Please clue me in if you've heard it. Or entertain us all with your best bluff answer.
BTW, the context mentioned above is quite good: a post describing John Brady Kiesling. I vaguely remember hearing about this guy. Now it sounds like I'll have another book or two on my must-read list.
Ah, crap. I just made my first edit on Wikipedia. I hope I don't get compulsive.
So many typos. So little time.
Would you believe that Paris Hilton has been sentenced to 45 days in jail for DUI?
How about that there's an online petition titled "FREE PARIS HILTON?"
Okay, then, how about this as the first paragraph of the petition?
Paris Whitney Hilton is an American celebrity and socialite. She is an heiress to a share of the Hilton Hotel fortune, as well as to the real estate fortune of her father Richard Hilton. She provides hope for young people all over the U.S. and the world. She provides beauty and excitement to (most of) our otherwise mundane lives.
As of post time, 23,466 people have acknowledged their mundane lives. The other billion people on the Internet are evidently hoping for a bad-girls-in-prison video.
(Hat tip: PC Advisor.)
Not even by a long short.
- -- Ravi, proprietor of "All About Linux"
I just sorted the messages in my Inbox according to the Subject field. It was a small joy to see that what I had hoped would happen did: the replies to a given subject fell neatly in line with the original message. That is, the subject line of "Very interesting article" and all of the messages with the subject line "Re: Very interesting article" appeared next to each other.
Props to the Thunderbird developers.
Here's Achenbach's take on Romney, et al, and their recent debate:
Having one guy without jowls is what the Republican party leadership calls "diversity."
Runner-up, from the same column: Achenbach quotes John Dickerson, who passes along the following.
I e-mailed a Republican veteran of the last two presidential campaigns whose response to the debate was: "Fred Thompson won."
(Fred wasn't there, if you didn't already know.)
You've probably seen these on wingnutmobiles:
Here are the first two bullet points on the page whence this image originates (they're selling them for $4.95, in gold or silver):
I was provoked to Google "truth fish" in reaction to a nice analysis piece in the NYT, which looks a split brewing among conservatives over belief in evolution.
But the argument also exposes tensions within the Republicans’ "big tent," as could be seen Thursday night when the party’s 10 candidates for president were asked during their first debate whether they believed in evolution. Three -- Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas; Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas; and Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado -- indicated they did not.
I don't know how I feel about this. It is of course discouraging that three semi-plausible candidates for presidential nomination don't believe in evolution. On the other hand, given the state of things in the U.S. in general, and the Republican Party in particular, I suppose I should be happy that only three of ten feel this way.
Ultimately, though, it's comforting to see some seams coming apart in the big tent.
And of course, the only emblem worthy of any thinking person's automobile is this:
This just in from the nephew, who is remarkably tolerant of his uncle's well-meaning counsel. I had ended up my last missive by suggesting that he blog about the recent loss of the family dog, and the too-soon arrival (his measure) of a new puppy. How nice a way to say "get off my ass, you old fogey" is this?
Yeah I've been working on getting the creative juices flowing...but now I mostly talk amongst friends about my problems. You're probably picking up what I'm putting down, like your friends are the closest thing to blood that you have when you're a teenager.
The surprise is not that Ronald Reagan's name was repeatedly invoked last night at the Republican candidates' debate. The surprise is that they limited themselves to doing so only twenty times.
(I didn't actually count, or even watch. The count comes from the sidebar to a NYT story summarizing the talking points.)
Here's the lede and some excerpts from a story that probably bears watching:
A federal official whose investigations of waste and corruption in Iraq have repeatedly embarrassed the Bush administration is now being investigated himself by an oversight committee with close links to the White House and by the ranking Republican on the House Government Reform Committee.
The official, Stuart W. Bowen, Jr., runs the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.
[T]he investigations are coming to light just a few months after Mr. Bowen’s office narrowly escaped what amounted to a termination clause tucked away in a large military authorization bill by staff members of another Republican congressman. A bipartisan group of lawmakers later managed to reverse that provision, but the latest action has renewed suspicions that Mr. Bowen -- a Republican himself -- has come to be seen as a serious political liability by his own party.
Want some Orwell-speak from the Administration who holds all records in this department? Oh, we got some! The investigation was begun after several of people who worked for Bowen made complaints to the …
President’s Council on Integrity and Excellence, an organization that was specifically created to investigate allegations of misconduct by inspectors general at federal agencies.
Update
2007-05-12 23:26 EDT
Missing comma and hyphen added. Does my obsession have no lower limit?
Following Brando's lead, I am posting my answers to Jennifer's Questions here, instead of in her comments. (I might want to change an answer.) Jennifer, if you prefer comments to linkbacks, I apologize. Next time.
1) Have you ever owned or worn a dashiki?
Hell, yes! I loved them, back when they were just going out of fashion. They were mostly hand-me-downs, from the same brothers who gave me their worn-out platform shoes. And who are no doubt laughing at me to this day.
I also liked collarless dress shirts and skinny ties (not at the same time.)
In my own defense, I never liked Members Only jackets.
2) What was your favorite outfit and why?
Anything, so long as I could wear my cowboy boots with it. Count this as yet another thing that George W. Bush has ruined forever. I haven't gone pointy-toed since mid-1999.
3) What would people find most surprising about you?
That I'm a registered Republican. (But there's a sinister motivation at work here …)
4) Do you have a tail?
No. Worrying about being followed is for paranoiacs. I am a neurotic.
5) If you were a cowboy/cowgirl, what would you name your horse?
Jeez, don't ask me that. I'm still embarrassed about my choice of cat names. Not to mention the plethora of cloying nicknames.
6) What's the first thing you think about upon waking in the morning?
Coffee. No matter how badly I have to pee.
7) Hot or cold?
Hot, of course! Oh, not coffee? Well, I think you can always get warm if you're cold, but not vice versa. Does that answer your question?
8) Literal or lateral?
"Lateral" bugs me, because it is often used to mean not just to the side, but backwards, as well.
9) Rain or shine?
I lived in L.A. for a decade, and grew to hate the incessant nice days. Rain, for sure.
10) What scares you the most?
Well, right now, I am recovering from pulling down plaster ceilings in my new old house, which meant much mouse scat fell upon me. Despite wearing a face mask, I have to say: Hantavirus.
But, ongoing, I also worry that Homeland Security listens in when I make up new nicknames for my cats.
11) Worst moment that turned into a best?
Driving a car in a heavy snowstorm that broke down in the middle of nowhere, with my uber-frail grandmother in the back seat. She, being Irish, worried that the battery had died because she had asked me to run the heat. After falling over a guardrail and rolling down a hill, I came upon a farmhouse, got to use the phone, and a tow truck appeared shortly thereafter. Grandma sat next to the driver, who was about ten years younger than she, and absolutely enchanted him with stories. She told me after we'd secured a rental car: "I wasn't worried about the cold. I have a bottle of scotch in my purse."
12) What you're still grappling with?
Like all dyslexic agnostic insomniacs: I stay up all night wondering whether there really is a dog.
13) Winter, spring, summer or fall?
Fall. Another reason to have moved back east from L.A.
14) Carol King or James Taylor?
(Don't think I didn't get the reference and am now not mad about having that line cycling through my head.) Carol(e) King. I didn't hear as much King after her moment of heavy rotation, but at least I never heard from her suckage like Follow The People, or whatever that song was. I mean, how do you make an album like "Sweet Baby James" and then smother the world with treacle for your next eighty albums? Answer, and a message to the kids: Don't use heroin. But if you do, don't stop. It'll mess you up for sure.
15) Do you look at your mouth when you are brushing your teeth or just look around the room?
Choice (c): I stare bleakly into my eyes.
Well, maybe just forlornly. Or glazedly.
Wait. I want to change an answer. I am still grappling with why my spellchecker underlines "glazedly."
Luol Deng has been announced as the winner of the NBA's Joe Dumars Trophy, an award given for sportsmanship, according to the AP.
I didn't know this until five minutes ago: this is an award for which only the players vote.
Peer recognition, in a category overlooked in too many walks of life. Somehow, it seems like there should be more fanfare.
Congratulations, Mr. Deng.
Apple has released a security patch for QuickTime, which you can get on a Mac through Software Update, and on a PC through QuickTime's own Help -> Update Existing Software menu entry.
Brian Krebs has details, if you want them, including links for alternate ways of updating the program.
The download is fairly large, as is usual for this program -- twenty-odd MB on the PC and forty-odd on the Mac.
Further annoyance: when you install the patch on a PC, QuickTime adds shortcuts to your desktop and Quick Launch bar, and adds an icon to the System Tray, irrespective of your previous preferences. You can delete the first two (use the right-click menu on the Quick Launch icon) easily. The System Tray icon can be removed by launching QuickTime and doing Edit -> Preferences -> QuickTime Preferences. Click the Advanced tab and uncheck the box labeled "Install QuickTime icon in System Tray." Then click "OK."
I've said it before and I'll say it again. A patch or other update to a program should not result in change of user preferences. QuickTime continues to get this wrong, and its developers should be punished. I'm thinking mandatory viewing of tonight's debate among Republican presidential hopefuls, followed by the inevitable nine hours of spin on Fox News.
I'm in the minority on this. But if I want you to get all the words for heroin that are out there, I want the ones you know. Not the ones you remember from reading Burroughs in college.
- -- Jesse Sheidlower, via Bryan Curtis
The above comes from an article on Slate, about a man who spent thirteen years in prison assembling a slang dictionary. Recommended.
According to Utility Computing:
Stanford University's Folding@home distributed computing project has seen its capacity more than double in the last month thanks to the addition of idle processor cycles from hundreds of thousands of PlayStation 3 consoles.
Distributed computing is a set-up where a massively complex problem is worked on by many computers. People sign up to help, download a program, and when their computers (and now, PlayStations) are idle, the computers grind away on part of the problem and upload the results. In this case, Stanford is working on "protein folding."
The combined capacity of Folding@home is now about 700 Teraflops (700 trillion floating point operations per second, and the article says that 400 Tflops are being contributed by about 250,000 PlayStations.
It's hard to say whether this indicates that we're not so much a nation of slackers, since a quarter-million PlayStations are sitting idle at any one time. Or, maybe we're such slackers that we can't even summon up the energy to play videogames.
And no, I don't know what "protein folding" is. But it's still a fun fact.
Update
2007-05-12 09:14 EDT
Don't know why I didn't post this when I wrote it. Sorry for the confusion.
You can say this much for the Bush Administration: they stick to their principles. Less politely, they stay bought.
In another attempt at something that has been repeatedly rejected:
The Bush administration proposed on Monday leasing out millions of acres along the coasts of Alaska and Virginia to oil and gas drillers, a move that would end a longstanding ban on drilling in those environmentally sensitive areas.
I can hear the spin now: "It's not ANWAR! This is different! It's offshore!"
Of course there are environmental concerns, and of course, there are irritations at what will probably be another sweetheart deal for Big Oil:
If the administration does lease out areas in Alaska, companies may be entitled to a special reprieve from paying royalties to the government.
And, surprise, surprise, there's really not that much to be had. The Interior Department, which you have to figure is being as optimistic as it can get away with, estimates the total reserves as:
… equal to about 16 months of the United States' current oil consumption and about two years of its current consumption of natural gas.
According to the article quoted for this post, Congress has 60 days to object, or else the plan goes into effect. Probably worth making a phone call or two, don't you think?
