Month: August 2007

feeling safer everyday

Russia’s Bomber Force Resumes Long-Range Patrolling:

Russia’s strategic bombers have not ranged far from home since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Vladimir Putin orders the resumption of long-range missions, mostly to give the American flyboys something to think about.

Life above the 47th parallel takes on a little extra thrill with news like that.

Now playing: Lustre from the album “Priest = Aura” by The Church

crayons on the Internet

This opus — Index for the Atkinson theory of civilization — is quite a piece of work, not unlike it’s author I suppose. Keener (and funnier) minds than mine could sift through it for loads o’ funny. But take a look at a subject heading you know something about, and see what you find.

Did you know that AIDS was caused by the use of crack and amyl nitrate? Did you know that Greenpeace is a self-perpetuating scam? The decline of cricket is also detailed. His opinion of 9/11? “This attack was a Barbarian Raid signalling the start of hostilities that will only cease when the citizens of Western Civilization have all been killed or enslaved.”

This is the kind of thing that a. has to be monitored, in case whackos like this gain any mindshare outside their little mobs and b. debunked, less the credulous fall into its loathsome toils.

In sum, this is just another lengthy whinge about the loss of entitlement by an unbalanced and nostalgic nutter with a few topical bits added to give it wider appeal.

[via]

not even the Onion would go this far

Conservative Calls for Bush to Name Himself ‘President for Life’:

On Aug. 3, a writer for Family Security Matters, a national security group associated with a conservative think tank, argued that President Bush should appoint himself “president for life” and “empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans.”

Only if he then goes there to run it.

quote of the day

Business & Technology | Former whiz kid Andreessen isn’t done just yet | Seattle Times Newspaper:

[Marc Andreessen, t]he man who helped commercialize the Web rails at industries, from music labels to newspapers, for whining and wasting time before committing themselves to digital strategies.

“I’m astonished by some industries’ ability to sustain chronic pain to avoid acute pain,” he said. “You have to take drastic action.”

irony, please pick up the white courtesy phone

Talking Points Memo | Annals of Reporting:

[T]his morning I was alerted to an opinion column in the Los Angeles Times by Michael Skube, a journalism professor at Elon University. The sum of the piece is that the blogosphere is as rife with disputation as it is thin on information, or more specifically, reporting, writing that demands “time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance.”
[…]
I followed up noting my surprise that he didn’t seem to remember what he’d written in his own opinion column[…].

To which I got this response: “I said I did not refer to you in the original. Your name was inserted late by an editor who perhaps thought I needed to cite more examples … ”

And this is from someone who teaches journalism?

Perhaps I’m naive. But it surprises me a great deal that a professor of journalism freely admits that he allows to appear under his own name claims about a publication he concedes he’s never read.

Actually, if you look at what he says, it seems Skube’s editor at the Times oped page didn’t think he had enough specific examples in his article decrying our culture of free-wheeling assertion bereft of factual backing. Or perhaps any examples. So the editor came up with a few blogs to mention and Skube signed off. And Skube was happy to sign off on the addition even though he didn’t know anything about them.

I remember this guy when he was at the Atlanta papers: 10 years haven’t improved him. What’s ironic about this is the claim that bloggers don’t have editors to keep them on the reservations, that discipline and true attention to detail can only be learned at a Real Newspaper, preferably after getting a degree from a reputable J school.

So a professor at a J school, who used to work at a big newspaper, allows an editor to insert copy into an OpEd, copy he doesn’t know enough about the subject to object to, and we’re supposed to take him seriously?

Excellent.

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my first eBay unpaid item strike

Just had a jerk seller issue an unpaid item strike against me for an item he refused to ship. On the one hand, is it worth a dollar (the closing price of the item) to avoid this kind of thing? On the other, why reward someone who is obviously a chiseler?

Hope he finds his dream local buyer. That, or learns to write a factual item listing.

[update] And eBay removed it when I explained what had happened. The fact that it was my first in 100+ transactions may have helped.

if you read only one piece on Iraq, this should be it

Uniformed soldiers of 82nd Airborne — the pointy end of the spear — deliver their own assessment of how things are on the ground. Needless to say, it differs from the view inside the Green Zone or from the center of a defensive phalanx of helicopters, HUMVEEs, and soldiers.

The War as We Saw It – New York Times:

The Iraqi government is run by the main coalition partners of the Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance, with Kurds as minority members. The Shiite clerical establishment formed the alliance to make sure its people did not succumb to the same mistake as in 1920: rebelling against the occupying Western force (then the British) and losing what they believed was their inherent right to rule Iraq as the majority. The qualified and reluctant welcome we received from the Shiites since the invasion has to be seen in that historical context. They saw in us something useful for the moment.

Now that moment is passing, as the Shiites have achieved what they believe is rightfully theirs. Their next task is to figure out how best to consolidate the gains, because reconciliation without consolidation risks losing it all. Washington’s insistence that the Iraqis correct the three gravest mistakes we made — de-Baathification, the dismantling of the Iraqi Army and the creation of a loose federalist system of government — places us at cross purposes with the government we have committed to support.

Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict — as we do now — will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.