Okay, if you're not a regular reader of web logs ("blogs" to the cognoscenti), the title above makes very little sense. Mr. Burgess is critiquing an article conflating obesity with income inequality which appeared in the Grauniad.
In the hierarchy of coolness, politics sits at the absolute rock-bottom. I would rather be caught wearing a hooded brown robe and casting a 10th Level Spell of Enchantment against a chaotic good half-elven Ranger, than be standing in a sea of uptight dorks and declaring to the world, "Mr. Chairman, the Great State of Nebraska, home of the Cornhuskers and latent sexual frustration, nominates John Kerry to be the next President of the United States!" And the crowd goes wild! No, no one actually says, "And the crowd goes wild!" because there's no decent color commentary for political conventions. It can't be that hard. If a couple of schmoes from ESPN can make the NFL draft seem exciting, surely hiring the likes of John Madden and Pat Summerall could make any political convention more appealing than a local Shriner's gathering at the airport Hilton.
Here is his website. I must admit I've never heard of him, but I'd only heard a bit about Aaron Russo, the candidate backed by the few Libertarians I'm still in active contact with.
I guess I should be happy that there still is a US Libertarian Party...the Canadian party imploded some years back, and to the best of my knowledge is not active any more.
Update: Thanks to Chris Myrick for the pointer that the Libertarian Party of Canada still exists. Or, more accurately, exists again according to Canadian election officials.
This op-ed piece by Scott Taylor is depressing reading. And it points out nothing that was not already known five years ago. And that is perhaps the most depressing part: he's right that no political party in Canada has any real idea about what to do with the Canadian Armed Forces, and how (or whether) to pull them out of the funding death-spiral they've been in for the last three governments.
Although he doesn't directly address the idea, we may end up following in the path of New Zealand, who recently abolished their air force, rather than pay the cost of replacing their existing fleet of fighter jets. Canada, with more land area than any other country except Russia, can't do that, although the US Air Force probably has the capability to formally take over the defence of Canadian airspace (just in their own interests of self-defence). Or perhaps just let the remnants of the navy sink at their moorings. The US Navy can easily take up the slack.
If (when?) that happens, Canada will no longer be an independant country...or even willing to pretend to be. We'll just be a bigger, colder Puerto Rico, with no votes or influence in Washington.
And some would say that this is already true...
Steven Den Beste writes about heroism, inspired by a DVD of the Battle of Britain he picked up recently.
Real heroes don't seek to impress you. They seek to blend in. They don't constantly talk about what they did, and will usually be reluctant to talk about it even if directly asked.This matches with experiences I've had, where some WWII veterans can't be prodded into talking about their experiences at all, while others carry on as if they single-handedly defeated the Luftwaffe (when in fact, they spent the entire war defending Calgary from the Nazi hordes).
Tim Blair posts a classic howler from Reuters. Do read the comments. . .they're worth the price of admission.
Ana Veciana Suarez writes, in the Miami Herald:
Years and years ago, when other kinds of troops fought for the feminization of the armed forces, they probably never expected something like this. Back then, the public concern was whether our girls would be able to cut it. Too nice, too soft, too civilizing, some said. How would they behave in the trenches?
Well, now we know. As these soldiers have become the poster girls for the Iraqi prisoner scandal, we realize we had it all wrong. Women can be just as cruel as the next guy. All it takes is a war, inadequate training, poor supervision, dehumanizing conditions and the hardening of hearts.
Yet, while acts committed by women are no less — or more — heinous than those by men, our reactions, molded by years of acculturation, tend to differ when we see a woman in the role of tormentor. We're shocked. Appalled as much by the actions as by who has been recorded on film giving a thumbs up signal. How could she? we ask. We want to believe that women, of all people, should know better.
P.J. O'Rourke offers a brilliant suggestion for the candidates in the ongoing presidential election.
. . .we don't have to retreat ignominiously from the war on terrorism and from our other international responsibilities and commitments; we can recuse ourselves — i.e., disqualify ourselves from participation on the grounds of personal bias.Linked from Spotlight on Military News.
We can explain to the court of global public opinion that, because America possesses the largest economy, the widest network of business relationships, and the only effective military force on earth, we have too great a vested interest in world events to render fair and impartial judgment.
On every issue of geopolitical adjudication, from 9/11 to the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, America is a jury of cops and crime victims. A change in venue has already been called for by noisy street protesters, France and suchlike. Let's accede to the pre-emptory challenge and go home.
Thomas Jefferson is reported to have said:
As for what is not true, you will always find abundance in the newspapers.And:
I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month; and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.It's hard not to agree with him after all these years.
This report in the San Francisco Chronicle discusses a new initiative to allow small wineries to ship their product direct to customers outside their home states. In Ontario, you cannot have an out-of-province winery ship directly to you — it has to be handled through the LCBO. Many US states have similarly antiquated laws (although some are even worse, Pennsylvania forbids both in- and out-of-state wineries from shipping to customers). This appeal may open the way to removing those restrictions for American consumers. We may only hope that something similar will happen here in Ontario.
Anna, of Primal Purge writes about a new dieting wonder: a retainer that forces you to take smaller bites of your food. It would apparently cost about $400 and require a fitting from your dentist. But that's just setup. Go read her blog entry.
Warning: The entry is PG-13 or PG-17 rated. Don't go there if this will bother you. . .
I suspect that a social problem is in the process of being manufactured. At every juncture in women's lives today, sociologists and hype-hungry media seem eager to discover a social crisis. We're too thin; we're too fat. We're career obsessed; we're quitting work to become housewives. Now, after decades of urging girls to become Ph.D.s, women are suddenly discovered to be too educated for their own good.
The increase in well-educated women should elicit sustained applause that is tempered only by concern about equal access to education for males. There is no more of a "marriage crisis" now than there was when male students dominated campuses. Moreover, the perceived problem is self-solving. When the Australian newspaper The Age, reported a similar "problem" — "there are an astonishing 47,000 more women than men with degrees in this age group [age 25 to 29]" — it included the solution. Census figures for 2001 showed that 12 percent of women aged 25 to 29 with university degrees married men without them. Marriage is a healthy institution that adapts quickly to circumstance; marriage patterns may be shifting to adjust. There is a "marriage crisis" only for women and in-laws who demand an attorney or doctor for a husband and do not wish to welcome a plumber or mechanic into the family. This is their personal problem, not a social one. Indeed, if marrying down constituted a crisis, society would have collapsed long ago from the tendency of men to wed "below their station." Marrying down is called a social crisis only when women's choices appear to be limited. This reflects both hypocrisy and elitism.
This article just needs to be read. Go read it!
Link, courtesy Reason's Hit and Run blog.
James Lileks, on the glories of folk remedies and ancient recipies:
The soap bottle had another claim. "Blue Lavender Essence Lore: Brides in Italy perfumed their wedding clothes with lavender in order to calm their prenuptial jitters."
Left unspoken: Didn't do jack. You'd think the Brides in Italy would have figured this out in short order, eh? "Here, my child. Soak your dress in lavender. It will calm your nerves." Did it work for you, mama? "No, I spent the morning sobbing and throwing up in rank terror, since I had only met your father the previous night, and he had the breath of cheese far gone with mold. But this is what we do, for we are superstitious peasants whose worldview is derived not from empirical observation of the world, but sage wisdom Grandmama got from her great-grandmama. Now put these grape stems up your nose so your first-born will be a boy."
James Lileks, in today's Bleat:
Big hugs, big smiles; a great little moment, very touching. Or so I think; I was watching it through a viewfinder. (All the parents — I'd say "the other moms" since they were all female, but that does suggest I am in fact a mom) were taking pictures as well. Hail digital photography: now instead of one or two blurry faded photos in a scrapbook, people have 3 dozen shots chronologically stored in a computer's hard drive. Which dies.I find this amusing, because later this evening, I'll be taking lots of digital photos at a PlayMakers! rehearsal. . .
. . . as I'm out of the office and away from the computer for the rest of the day. Try to keep your celebrations down to a dull roar, okay?
. . . by setting up ad agencies to help the provincial government do to Ontario what the federal government did to all Canadians.
Ralph Peters writes about the new need the US armed forces in Iraq have: to conduct operations quickly enough to avoid getting coverage in the media. He points out that the Baathist resistance has not been able to win military victories, but they are doing a dangerously good job of having the media win propaganda victories for them.
Ananova reports that a couple in Germany wanted to try using artificial means to have a child after eight years of childless marriage. Upon questioning by the clinic staff, it turned out that they had never had sex. . .
Update: Snopes suspects a hoax.
Ontario taxpayers got hit again yesterday with an evil, wanton attack on their wallets. The Liberals are right about those bastards in the Conservative party: they rob from the middle class and give to the entrenched interest groups. By eliminating health care coverage for eye exams, physiotherapy, and chiropractic care, they're demonstrating that their filthy capitalist "USA-style", pay-as-you-go vision means higher costs for many Ontarians. By introducing a higher deductable for health costs, they're showing that they don't care about sticking it to low- and middle-income families.
Higher taxes on tobacco and alcohol are pretty much standards in every budget, but the 50% increase in the fee to renew a driver's license is about as non-progressive as you can get.
We shouldn't stand for this! Ernie Eves must go! . . .
What's that? He's already gone? Oh. Well this must be the work of that eeevil born-again evangelist capitalist Stephen Harper, who's the head of the . . . federal . . . Conservatives. Oh.
Who's to blame, then? The Liberals? That can't be — they swore during the election campaign to balance the budget without raising taxes or cutting healthcare. They'd never have lied to us, would they?
Would they?
Steve H. resumes the offensive. One of the comments he received provided him with a full bladder of bile, which he had to empty. The results are, as usual, entertaining. Go read!
I am amazed that anyone would try to defend Private England as a guardian of liberty. Try to think of a soldier who has weakened America more. I'm stumped. John Walker, the pinhead who fought against US troops, doesn't even register on the scale used to measure Lynndie England. Because of Lynndie England and her pals, we have gutted our interrogation procedures, and support for the fight against terror is waning. Our enemies could never have accomplished that. So don't hand me some nonsense about how I'm an armchair commando attacking a brave soldier in the field. I'm an American citizen rightly criticizing a piece of trash who harmed my country very badly.
Judi McLeod writes on the Canadian angle of the UN's Oil for Food program, which has morphed over the years from providing food for starving Iraqi civilians to providing rich bribes to UN officials.
This link appears to be temporary, so I don't know how long this article will be readable.
Update: Permanent URL added.
Jane Galt, over at Asymmetrical Information, quotes Stuart Buck at length, following up with some of her own observations:
Consider that when my grandmother got married, laundry took an entire day, and left her exhausted by the wrenching work of boiling water for washing, wringing the clothes out, and physically hefting wet clothing onto the clothesline. Three hefty meals a day had to be prepared for men doing hard physical labour without any of the modern aids, from food processors to frozen vegetables, that I enjoy, a mound of dishes done after every meal, a house had to be cleaned without the aid of vacuum cleaners, groceries had to be gotten on foot . . . everything was physically more demanding, and more time consuming.And then, the money quote:
My mother stayed home with us. By the time I was ten, she was going bonkers. There simply wasn't enough to do in the house . . . and my mother, mind you, had gone in for gourmet cooking in a rather large way, producing elaborate dinners that took hours to prepare. She was the mainstay of the PTA, the building's co-op board, and so forth. Nonetheless, there simply wasn't enough to keep an active woman occupied after the children were in school.
This has created a problem, of course: women's work used to be compatible with child care, and now it is not. And the business world is still largely designed for men: it is not structured to accomodate professional women who stay home with young children.And that, I think is the key to the whole situation — the needs of the economy are changing faster than the structures that have made the economy work so well for the past fifty years (oil shocks and wars notwithstanding). Jane promises more discussion on this point later . . . I expect to be linking to her site regularly.
A few weeks ago, I was talking to a libertarian who was arguing that the Patriot Act was a one-way ticket to totalitarianism. We were violating fundamental rights that had been enshrined in the constitution for 200 years, and once we'd given them up, it was going to be a short step on the slippery slope to a police state. I share her fear of government intrusiveness. But this a markedly ahistorical view of the constitution and the liberties it allows us to enjoy, which is no more accurate for its extreme prevalence in libertarian circles. There is no primal state of liberty, created by the Constitution, from which we have slowly but inexorably been moving away. Liberties have been granted, and taken away, and granted again throughout the history of our country. [. . .] The shape of liberty has changed over the 200 years of our existence, expanding in some places and contracting in others. There is no libertarian eden, located somewhere in the American past, from which we are now fallen, or falling. [. . .]There's much more, and well worth reading. Read it!
Madeline Albright spoke at my sister's graduation last weekend, and during her speech she said something to the effect that the world situation now was scarier than it had been at any time since World War II. This is a common belief — commoner among liberals, but not exclusive to them. But huh? Think of what the world looked like to George Orwell. Nazism defeated, but at terrible cost — and no one knew, then, that Fascism wouldn't re-emerge. Russia, with Stalin still at its helm, devouring Eastern Europe. The most terrible weapon ever imagined recently used for the first time, and every nation with two scientists to rub together working hard to develop their own, personal holocaust-maker. The Cold War incipient in the battles over Berlin. And, if you're Orwell, a nasty case of tuberculosis, and no nice antibiotics to cure it. Things were bleak.
Yet we made it through, with a modicum of liberty and a splash of human kindness, and now democracy is springing up like mushrooms everywhere you look, poverty is steadily decreasing, though perhaps not as fast as we'd like, and wars are killing fewer and fewer humans each decade. The world is a pretty good place to live, and getting steadily better for almost everyone. As flawed as the human race is, we seem to be a lot better than the doomsayers think at muddling through.
We opened a bottle of Chateau des Charmes' 2002 Riesling yesterday. This is not one of your limp-wristed, weak, or watery Rieslings. It's got a powerful, long-lasting flavour to put some Chardonnays into the shade. An off-dry, rather than a dry wine, but with plenty of acidity to carry the fruit through to the finish. This wine is going on our "restock" list. Highly recommended.
Today's Bleat takes aim at the patron saint of "Gonzo Journalism", Hunter S. Thompson. The result ain't pretty:
Of course in Thompson's world the Big Darkness is always coming. Every day it doesn't come means it'll just be bigger and darker when it finally arrives. He's the anti-rooster, bitching about the dawn: sure, it worked today, but one of these days the sun won't come up, and then where will you be? Sitting on your nest popping out eggs like THEY want you to, completely unprepared for the Big Darkness! Which will be huge! And dark!
It would be funny if it was, well, funny, but it's not even that. It's just rote spew from the other side of the latter sixties. You had your Hopeful Hippies, the face-painters and daisy-strewers, convinced that human nature and human history could be irrevocably changed if we all held hands, listened to "Imagine" and realized that the war is not the answer. Regardless of the question. But the other side was the sort of dank twitchy nihilism Thompson spouts. It has no lessons, no morals, no hope. Imagine, Winston, that the future consists of a boot pressing on a face. Here's the worst part, Winston — inside the boot is NIXON'S FOOT.
Thompson has less hope than the Islamists; at least they have an afterlife to look forward to. All we have is a country so rotten and exhausted it's not worth defending. It never was, of course, but it's even less defensible now than before.
He can say what he wants. Drink what he wants. Drive where he wants. Do what he wants. He's done okay in America. And he hates this country. Hates it. This appeals to high school kids and collegiate-aged students getting that first hot eye-crossing hit from the Screw Dad pipe, but it's rather pathetic in aged moneyed authors. And it would be irrelevant if this same spirit didn't infect on whom Hunter S. had an immense influence. He's the guy who made nihilism hip. He's the guy who taught a generation that the only thing you should believe is this: don't trust anyone who believes anything. He's the patron saint of journalism, whether journalists know it or not.
British journalist expelled from US.
<Nailing my colours to the mast> I'm a libertarian. I've been a libertarian for most of my life. Things like the USA Patriot Act just freeze my blood, and I don't even live in the United States. News items like this just defy parody or ridicule, because it's so ridiculous on the face of it.
Ignorance of the law is not supposed to be a valid defense in court, but clearly it will enjoy a new popularity as cases under the Patriot Act come up for judgement. How can you possibly know that you're obeying the law if the law is secret?
When a federal judge ruled two weeks ago that the American Civil Liberties Union could finally reveal the existence of a lawsuit challenging the USA Patriot Act, the group issued a news release.
But the next day, according to new documents released yesterday, the ACLU was forced to remove two paragraphs from the release posted on its Web site, after the Justice Department complained that the group had violated court secrecy rules.
The irreplaceable Steve H. goes to town (so to speak) on the weakening "they ordered me to do it" defenses of Private Lynndie England.
So maybe we shouldn't think of Private England as a sadist. Maybe, in her own little way, she thought of herself as a humanitarian. While the rest of the military went after the Iraqis' hearts and minds, Private England made a play for their willies.
One thing that unites the men who beheaded the American Nick Berg in Iraq, the soldiers who abused Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the Palestinians who have held on to Israeli body parts in Gaza City and the murderers of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan is that they all enjoyed what they did, and enjoyed it immensely.
There is almost no greater pleasure known to man than to commit great acts of cruelty in the belief that the cause of right and justice is being served. Anyone who has observed rioters will know that they are having a wonderful time: could there be a greater joy than vandalism with a social purpose?
In dangerous times, I think this county has to cover it's a**. Simple fact is, I'm of both persuasions. If two gay guys want to get married, I could care less; if some psycho from another country wants to blow up their wedding, I expect my government to kill him preemptively.
Dennis Miller, at a CNBC press conference for his TV show.
Jim Dunnigan, who was the best known of Simulations Publications Inc. (a wargame company) employees, has a new book out on the best books about the Second World War.
Dunnigan, after leaving SPI, has become a very well respected historian and military analyst. While I haven't yet seen the book, I'd expect it to be well worth adding to your library.
Yesterday's bottle was an Italian Sangiovese Daunia by Farnese. It was adequate, although it definitely needed the half hour of decanting before we had dinner. It was the definition of a cheap bottle of plonk. For $6.95, we got an adequate wine, but we've had better (Cesare's Merlot delle Venezie comes to mind) in the same price range.
I should point out that the majority of visitor comments have been uninterested in the wine reports. Is anyone actually interested in 'em?
Yesterday, I opened a bottle of Stoney Ridge Cellars' 2003 "Bench Cabernet Franc". This is a very young wine, so I didn't have high expectations of it . . . it was an after-work wine. At first, the overwhelming impression was tannins. The second sip didn't matter because the first sip had stomped all over the tastebuds and left little unbruised in its wake. This is a wine that the winery suggests will be drinkable up to 2010. This may be true, but I'm now wishing they'd included a Best After date, too.
Kevin Jaeger posts this look at Arab conspiracy theories on his blog Trudeaupia. If this is the sort of thing that rational, educated members of the Arab public indulge in, there is very little hope of democracy becoming common in that part of the world in the near future.
Andrew Plato is a former technical writer who has unique insight into the quirks and weirdnesses of the profession. This is a posting he made today to Techwr-L, a mailing list for tech writers:
Developing a detailed, barely-used style guide for your company: 100 hours
Obsessing over minor editing nits: 200 hours
Trivializing content so you can play with the latest features in FrameMaker: 50 hours
Flummoxed at why nobody respects you at work: priceless.
For all those times you need it: Font Fondling. It's wherever you are.
PS: Get the hell back to work, you!
Bruce Ralston provides some perspectives on the military nominees on the CBC's Greatest Canadians popularity poll (any bets that Pierre Trudeau won't make the top of the list?). Given how badly Canadian history is taught in most public schools nowadays, it'd be risky to bet on anyone who hasn't appeared in the Toronto Star in the last ten years getting much support...
A real world view of playing with fire, uh, I mean XML. If those three letters mean nothing to you, the article would also be less than illuminating.
This is very amusing. If you don't know Firefly, it won't make much sense. You've been warned.
Dagger Six: *heavy gunfire sounds in the background* Angels, we got some local color happening, a grand entrance would not go amiss!
Static: Dagger six, Angels three-six, roger.
Dragon Lady: How is he able to quote a tv show while being shot at?
Jackal: Shit just gets in your head and stays there.
I've recently started a small wine cellar, and I've also started keeping records of the wines we drink. Being a bit of a geek, I had to put it all into a database (but I'm only somewhat geeky, so it's not available online). So much, I can hear you thinking, for the romance and mystique of oeneology, eh? Yeah, well, I'd like to spend my wine-drinking budget on good stuff that's worth drinking, and avoid buying poor quality vinegar. My memory is not what it should be for this sort of detail, so putting the information into a database made some sense (if only to me).
As I've been typing information into the database, I'm trying to include information from reviews . . . which means I need to de-jargonize the high-falutin' nonsense that wine reviewers publish. I've also discovered that no matter how many awards a particular wine may have won, I'm often left wondering if the judges were drinking the same thing that I was when I get around to trying it. Even reviewers with whom I seem to have a certain compatibility of taste sometimes leave me scratching my head.
Billy Munnelly, for example, is the opposite of a wine snob. He's a determined wine popularizer and evangelist (oengelist? vinvangelist? vinularizer?), who publishes a bi-monthly newsletter (Billy's Best Bottles) and an annual book on good, inexpensive wines available in Canada. I've found his recommendations to be very helpful, although he's much more fond of "fresh" and "lively" wines than I am (see his site, or his book, for his definitions of those terms).
Vines magazine, I've found, isn't particularly useful to me, in that several wines they've lauded to the skies were pedestrian or worse in my glass. No fault of theirs: my tastes are highly idiosyncratic, but it's good to know how similar a particular reviewer's tastes are to yours in order to give proper weighting to any published review.
In keeping track of the wines, I'm also trying to come up with some sort of simple numerical rating system with an idea of using the price and rating to come up with some rough number indicating the "quality:price ratio" of any given pair of wines. If a wine that I'd rate an 8 out of 10 costs $15.95, is it better (for certain metaphysical meanings of the word "better") than a wine rated as a 9 but costing $24.95? In general, the more expensive the wine, the less chance it'll ever be found in my basement, but I do recognize that a typical $15 bottle of wine will taste better than a typical $8 bottle of wine. The increase in quality isn't linear, by any stretch of the imagination, and (worse) varies from year to year.
Steve H. is a Miami lawyer with a blog. Yes, that must already be two-and-a-half strikes against him without even trying. In spite of that, he's one of the funniest commentators in the blogosphere and this entry is both brilliant and amusing.
When confronted with a moral problem, nine out of ten people will look around to see what nine out of ten people are doing, and they will follow suit without further deliberation. It's amazing how powerful the herd instinct is, in creatures as intelligent as human beings.[. . .]
The herd instinct helps frat pledges discard their common sense and self-respect, and it's also what drives frat brothers and prison guards to perform acts of sexual sadism. For that matter, it explains how Hitler got the Germans and Poles and other Europeans to load Jews into cattle cars and send them to the gas chambers.
I have always had problems with the herd instinct. I am not a joiner. I don't like discarding my own judgment when someone less intelligent than I tells me to do something I think is wrong or stupid. To a certain extent, that makes me defective, and in other ways, it's a virtue. On the whole, I'm glad.
The Times reports a concern that a new battlefield centre at Waterloo will further obscure the fact that Napoleon lost that particular battle.
This story has fascinating overtones (and undertones). Lieutenant Chontosh is a brave man. This he has proven. Lieutenant Chontosh is also a fantastically lucky man, which is proven by the fact that he survived his exploit.
I'd be willing to take bets on what most of his men were thinking while he was conducting his highly unconventional flank assault. . .starting with something like "What the F*** is the friggin' LT doing?" and ending somewhere in the general region of "F***. He survived? F***. How'd he manage that?"
Bravery on the field of battle is an amazing thing, but it also draws all sorts of unwelcome attention from certain quarters — usually the ones opposite you looking down their battlesights in your general direction. A genuine hero is wonderful — as long as he's not sharing your particular two-man trench.
Update: link corrected.
In his New York Post opinion piece, Ralph Peters points out that most of the Arab nations critical of the US handling of the Abu Ghraib situation have much worse records of justice.
As an American, I want my country to be held to higher standards — we can live up to them. Proudly. But we don't need any more hypocritical charges from states with no standards at all. [. . .]
All those who opposed the removal of Saddam, from the BBC to Egyptian state television to The New York Times, act as though the events in Abu Ghraib prove that they were right all along.
No. They weren't right. And no amount of disingenuous "reporting" or feigned shock on the part of newsreaders can change the fact that America behaved nobly and bravely in Iraq — or that we continue to struggle to do the right thing, if sometimes ineptly.
I forgot to add this yesterday when I had the article called to my attention: L. Neil Smith, SF author and Libertarian radical, on the practicalities of carrying a concealed weapon. Not something I've ever needed to do, but interesting as a purely theoretical topic.
Reason contributing editor Cathy Young on the ongoing Abu Ghraib scandal.
Dong Resin, who emits quotable material at a fairly high rate, is back online at his blog. Much of his writing is scatologically enhanced, so if this bothers you, don't go there. So to speak.
Sample screediness:
Blogs, cds, laptop computers — I see them all in terms of what it was like before I could do what they let me do — namely, kill large swaths of my life dead without even noticing until I see all the dandruff on my keyboard and inhale deeply enough to be upset by my own stink.
Marginally work-safe, unless you work for someone like EDS...
L. Neil Smith, in an essay on the whole disgusting mess in the Iraq prison: Torturing the Truth.
That truth is simply this: it isn't the Moslems who came to the west to push us around, steal our resources, sneer at our customs and beliefs, depose our leaders and replace them with puppets, reshape our political institutions, or redraw our national borders to suit their own foul purposes. No, that's what we Europeanoids have been doing to them.
Get this through your head right now, because it's not going to go away, no matter how much you may hate being compelled to recognize it. It's a fact that will largely determine the shape of the 21st century. Americans and Europeans are the aggressors in this conflict, and what happened in New York on September 11, 2001, was an act of long-delayed retaliation.
Visitors since 17 August, 2004