Category: 2004 US Election

Osama: important or not?

Amazon.com: Books: Lanark: A Life in 4 Books (Harvest Book)

Have I mentioned how much I think my local library rocks? I was looking for the above-named book and the library didn’t own a copy (gasp! one of the 99 best novels of all time?). So I made a purchase request a couple of weeks ago and was notified this morning that it’s waiting for me.

Guardian Unlimited | Operation Clark County:

In the spirit of the Declaration of Independence’s pledge to show “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind”, we have come up with a unique way for non-Americans to express your views on the policies and candidates in this election to some of the people best placed to decide its outcome. It’s not quite a vote, but it’s a chance to influence how a very important vote will be cast. Or, at the very least, make a new penpal.

The Guardian wants citizens of the world to weigh in with undecided voters in one county in a swing state. I find myself in a different situation than they may have considered: as an EU passport holder and citizen on the UK, my opinions might be informed by different concerns than someone from Yorkshire or Haringey. But I will do my best to let my personal Clark county voter know what’s on my mind and hope we connect.

Now playing:Every Dog Has His Day by Let’s Active from the album “Every Dog Has His Day” | Buy it

40 Gb of music and “almost all” legal . . . .

helmintholog: stuffing an ipod:

How does one fill 40Gb with music? I don’t know, but I have just realised I’ve done it. I’ve discovered that the 40Gb partition set aside for mp3s is full with 45,127 tracks on it; and there are another couple of hundred sprinkled around the network. Almost all of this is completely legal; most of it ripped from CDs I have bought over the years; quite a lot of it from emusic in the days when they offered genuinely unlimited downloads.

I have filled my 10 Gb iPod — 1,646 tracks — and still have a hard time listening to all of it. I have so many LPs to work through and so much more music I’m interested in. But yes, I suspect most iPod users have more legal track than not. . . I guess it all depends on if you’re a music lover or not. I’m guessing Ballmer, for all his billions, is more interested in making money than making music lovers happy.

The NYTimes’ public editor discusses the perception of bias at his newspaper and how it may be the reader’s bias at work[1]. What struck me about this was how measured the tone of the article was: given the example, one can only imagine how much more garbage he and others have endured.

The New York Times > Week in Review > The Public Editor: How Would Jackson Pollock Cover This Campaign?:

[P]assion is a distorting lens that makes it hard to perceive the shape of things.
[…]
Conservatives thought Cheney won the vice-presidential debate; liberals thought Edwards did. I can look at pictures of my children and see that they are flawless; you will see them differently (even though they are, of course, flawless). Write a book, get a lousy review – it’s happened to me several times – and you challenge the reviewer’s judgment, not your own. We see, and we are more vulnerable to, those things that matter most to us.
[…]
When a reporter receives an e-mail message that says, “I hope your kid gets his head blown off in a Republican war,” a limit has been passed.

That’s what a coward named Steve Schwenk, from San Francisco, wrote to national political correspondent Adam Nagourney several days ago because Nagourney wrote something Schwenk considered (if such a person is capable of consideration) pro-Bush. Some women reporters regularly receive sexual insults and threats. As nasty as critics on the right can get (plenty nasty), the left seems to be winning the vileness derby this year. Maybe the bloggers who encourage their readers to send this sort of thing to The Times might want to ask them instead to say it in public. I don’t think they’d dare.

Interestingly, Mr Schwenk has altered a page with his contact information (at a Cub Scout pack’s website) to contain one the website addresses of Mr Okrent, the Times’ public editor, and Adam Nagourney. Google’s cache isn’t quite so malleable.

Now playing:A Wolf At The Door (It Girl. Rag Doll) by Radiohead from the album “Hail To The Thief” | Buy it

fn1. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Matthew 7:3

Leon Wieseltier
“No great deed, private or public, had ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty.” [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

I was just thinking about this today, apropos of some construction projects I have been involved in: at the time, I thought a time-series of photos would be fun to have, especially to sell folks on the next project (hey, if we can reduce a day’s work to a minute of herky-jerky, giggle-inducing stop-motion fun, it might get folks to sign up). As it happens I have an older digital camera collecting dust and I might just do this.

mod a digital camera to automatically take pictures – hack a day – www.hackaday.com:

i’ve been fascinated with the idea of taking photos on a timed basis from a car, a pet, a kite, but all the gear and ways to do it were really expensive, plus i just wanted to take tons of photos, not 10 or 20. so using an old digital camera and a $1.50 part from radioshack, i rewired the camera to take shots over and over — mounted it to a car, a kite — stuff like that.

So it appears that Saddam Hussein bluffed and lost. (But then who won?) He didn’t have anything but intentions to build weapons he could use against his neighbors, and for that, 1000+ US servicemen and women are dead, thousands wounded, with tens of thousands of Iraqis . . . . washingtonpost.com: Report Discounts Iraqi Arms Threat:

[T]he 1,000-page report by Charles A. Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, concluded that Hussein had the desire but not the means to produce unconventional weapons that could threaten his neighbors or the West. President Bush has continued to assert in his campaign stump speech that Iraq had posed “a gathering threat.”

The officials said Duelfer, an experienced former United Nations weapons inspector, found that the state of Hussein’s weapons-development programs and knowledge base was less advanced in 2003, when the war began, than it was in 1998, when international inspectors left Iraq.

“They have not found anything yet,” said one U.S. official who had been briefed on the report.

Are we so sure the world is safer with Saddam in prison instead of in Iraq? I expect we’ll hear more about this in Friday’s debate.

Now playing:Stick Up Kid by Lyfe Jennings from the album “Lyfe 268-192”

Continue reading “dangerous bluff”