the art of writing is discovering what you believe
32 mentions of the Saudis promising to fine tune oil prices in favor of a Bush re-election campaign vs 1,480 mentions of Jessica Simpson being featured as a VH1 Diva.
By all accounts, the US has been compromised, sold out, by the Bush dynasty and it’s allegiance to the House of Saud.
And it gets less — a lot less — press attention than a C-list starlet hosting a cable TV show.
Doug’s Dynamic Drivel: Sunday funnies:
funny, funny stuff. Makes me glad I don’t fly anymore. Do not attempt to drink while reading these.
Doug’s Dynamic Drivel: page 23 sentence 5 meme:
* Grab the nearest book
* Open the book to page 23
* Find the fifth sentence
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions
The difficulty is that many of them are awfully dark.
A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
dmoz has birthed a search engine. Bootstrapped by the open directory project, the mozdex project offers a search engine that exposes its results.
The Troops Are Dissembling (Harpers.org):
From the Media Reference Guide, a laminated card listing approved responses to journalists’ questions, issued by the Pentagon to American soldiers in Afghanistan. Originally from Harper’s Magazine, December 2002.
LiberalOasis: Archives For The Week of April 11, 2004
But wouldn’t it be interesting to find out if there’s any evidence that someone in the White House tried to cover-up how aggressively Clinton treated the terrorist threat?
Commissioners were vague on details, citing secrecy rules, but indicated that the document rebutted assertions by Ashcroft and others that no clear kill order existed.
So Clinton may have left a standing order to take out Bin Laden that no one saw fit to follow through on?
Gary thinks harder and better before coffee than I do all day . . . .
A wide-ranging and comprehensive post on the state of whatever it is, how the interweb is becoming an aggregation of walled gardens of publishing systems and feed formats that don’t add as much value as they think they do, nor as much as they think.
I took a much shallower poke at this a couple of days ago.
I keep re-scanning Gary’s post: it flies in the face of so much I’ve read lately, and rightly so. I recall a couple of threads lately where some gurus claimed that XHTML and CSS were as readable as plain text prose. And here we have someone saying “HTML-knowledge as a popular skill must die.” Hallelujah.
A great read. And an even better requirements overview/road map.
Harvard Institute of Politics: IOP Political Personality Test:
You are a Traditional Liberal. Traditional liberals like you tend to be:
* Against pre-emptive strikes as a policy.
* Strongly supportive of gay rights.
* Of the belief that immigration has been good for this country.
* Supportive of affirmative-action.
* Oppose tax cuts as an economic policy.
* Of the belief that basic health insurance is a right.
and I thought Civil War re-enactments were bizarre.
Music Industry Should Stop Whining
…..and critically look at themselves and their aging business models, instead of criminalising their customers.
In the Netherlands international record companies broke up contracts with Dutch artists, claiming declining profits due to filesharing as primary reason. The artists believed the story. Harvard Business School sure doesn’t:
A long standing economic question is the appropiate level for protection of intellectual property. The internet has drastically lowered the costs of copying information goods and provides a natural crucible to assess the implication of reduced protection. We consider the specific case of file sharing and its effect on the legal sales of music. A dataset containing 0.01% of the world’s downloads is matched to U.S. sales data for a large number of albums. To establish causality, downloads are instrumented using technical features related to file sharing, such as network congestion or song length, as well as international school holidays. Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. Moreover these estimates are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales. (via Martin Dugage at Mopsos)
Now let’s see if this filters through to main stream press, who have been accepting the music industries explanation without critical examination.
This further backs up the story from Australia where the music industry just had their best year ever, and tried to cover it up, to not undermine their crusade against file sharing.
Oh and if you want to contribute to ending the scam, and getting artists their earned income: Gary’s out to slay the RIAA dragon. (see his list of related entries)