Month: August 2007

It’s not like they don’t know what they’re going to put online: why does it take so long to get new content up?

Itching to see the iMac I can’t afford to buy right now.

Where Is He Now?:

Talk turned to the U.S. presidential campaign. Morse mentioned the pressure that Hillary Rodham Clinton was facing to apologize for her Senate vote authorizing Bush to go to war.

Makiya stared into his glass of red wine. “That’s so Maoist,” he said.

“People shouldn’t feel the need to apologize. What is there to apologize for?”

Accountability is Maoist? Accepting that the reality didn’t match the plans is Maoist?

Continue reading “the new Maoism”

• An ignoble anniversary
  ‘Six years ago today, Bush received one of the most important warnings any president has ever received — and he told the CIA official who handed him the warning, “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”‘
  (tags: worstpresidentever 9/11 war osamabinforgotten)
• Two weeks behind the Zeitgeist
  from far enough away, does’t a plateau look like a peak?
  (tags: oil economics politics energy)
• Vintage Comix – page 2
  I knew he could draw but I didn’t know he wrote as well. Fun stuff and not as dated as he suspects.
  (tags: comix art culture history)
• HOW TO – Sprinkler control with embedded linux
  Oh, goodness, I was just thinking about irrigation stuff. And now I see this?
  (tags: agriculture hacking hardware diy cleverideas)

Venezuela Fact of the Day:

Mark Weisbrot and Luis Sandoval of CEPR argue that the Venezuelan economy is actually doing rather well, and poverty has decreased dramatically under Hugo Chávez. I don’t really have any opinion on this–I just thought that this bit was unexpected:

[Venezuela’s] private sector has grown faster than the public sector over the last 8 years and therefore the private sector is a bigger share of the economy in 2007 than it was before President Chavez took office.

Who knew?

The timid iconoclast notes that The Economist Acknowledges Peak Oil:

“The world is consuming more oil than it is producing.”
— The Economist, July 14-20 print edition.

Pretty simple, but it’s out there now.

To be clear, we’re not producing oil, but discovering/extracting it. Perhaps a matter of semantics, but we can produce lumber by growing trees or steel from raw ingredients or recycling existing steel (ship-breaking comes to mind). Like land, there’s no way to make more oil. Liquefying coal or extracting from the tar sands or oil-shale is too expensive, requiring too much of the energy we hope to harvest.

In the long run, everything is finite, sometimes even in the short run. I think we’ve lost sight of that over the past couple of generations.

Technorati Tags: peak oil

Eight Is Enough:

God forbid anything permanent should happen to the Chief Justice, but keep in mind that there is absolutely nothing written anywhere that says the Supreme Court has to have nine justices. There is ample precedent for the court only having eight and there are many cases that are heard by eight because one of the justices is recused. So there is no way in hell that George W. Bush should ever, EVER get another bite at that apple with Democrats in charge of the congress. Just saying — no more Bush Supreme Court appointees for any reason. None.

Where we are Frum | Campaign for America’s Future:

Is he saying that Mexicans who go through a period of naturalization of nearly a decade (“Currently, the median number of years of U.S. residence between legal immigration and naturalization is around eight years“) [UPDATE: or, as digby points out, who were born here] “lack deep attachment to the American nation”? I invite Frum, with whom I’ve had friendly exchanges in the past, to answer me this question: how is your argument different from that of the 1920s nativists, including the Ku Klux Klan, who argued that my Jewish ancestors who became naturalized citizens–as well as Catholics from Eastern Europe—likewise couldn’t possibly develop a deep attachment to the American nation?

• Mac Tips and Tricks
  having issues with my mini hanging at boot time. this looks like a pretty good compendium of trouble-shooting tips.
  (tags: osx troubleshooting systemadministration)
• Mets 8, Cubs 3: Mets’ Glavine Reaches Milestone After a Week of Anxious Moments
  It seemed likely he would be a 300 game winner. Didn’t realize no other Met had ever done it.
  (tags: sports baseball)

Has anyone done more to poison the well of public discourse that Newt?

Newt Gingrich on ‘this phony war’:

“We used to be a serious country. When we got attacked at Pearl Harbor, we took on Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. We beat all three in less than four years. We’re about to enter the seventh year of this phony war against … [terrorist groups], and we’re losing.”

Newt Gingrich used to make bologna, now he hates it:

“We have got to get beyond this political bologna. I’m not allowed to say anything positive about Hillary Clinton because then I’m not a loyal Republican, and she’s not allowed to say anything positive about me because then she’s not a loyal Democrat. What a stupid way to run a country.”

Amazing. He’s finally realized that making any issue into a partisan talking point, that politicizing anything and everything, even language, is bad for the country. Some history teacher he must have been. What a child.

Continue reading “who’s he trying to kid?”

I put in a little message that appears on individual entry/post pages, suggesting if the entry was useful, a donation would be a fine gesture.

I just got $5 (less some PayPal friction): thanks, Susan.

That’s a month of AdSense revenue, based on the last time I looked at that.

Every little helps. 4600 entries, some of them have to be helpful, right?