Category: blows against the empire

Readers weigh in on My Pet Goat.

Lots of “reader reviews” of the only (?) book the president has been known to read in the past 4 years.

Variously from [link] and [link].

Attack Slogans Are the Most Fun (washingtonpost.com):

“Teach the Iraqi people a lesson in democracy. Elect Kerry!” — Retired historical theology university professor Michael D. Ryan of Mitchell, S.D.

More where that came from: I see a CafePress collection coming out of it . . .

An early 60 VW Bug, black with superwide white sidewalls, driven by a girl whose hair was the color of the head on a fresh pint of Guinness. The license tag: G STOUT

The Coming Search Wars:

“Mr. Gates readily acknowledges these days that Microsoft “blew it” in the market for Internet search.”
[. . . ]
Mr. Gates, belatedly waking up to the threat that the Internet posed to his business, aimed Microsoft’s firepower at Netscape and flattened his rival[.]
[ . . . ]
In Davos, Mr. Gates ruefully acknowledged that Google “kicked our butts,” reminding him of what Microsoft itself was like two decades ago.

“Our strategy was to do a good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignore the other stuff,” he said. But “it’s the remaining 20 percent that counts,” he added, “because that’s where the quality perception is.”

Perception is reality. If all you ever go after is the low-hanging fruit, what are you really good at? After all, Netscape likened ‘Microsoft’s flagship Windows operating system to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers.”” What’s changed, other than its ubiquity?

It’s interesting that a company that guesses wrong so consistently is so powerful. Who would have thought that imitation would be so rewarding?

You Say Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi, I Say Hikmat Shakir Ahmad — Let’s Invade Anyway:

So it turns out — and this is kind of hilarious — that whole Iraq/al Qaeda thing? A bit of a mix-up there. When the administration said an al Qaeda operative was also a member of Saddam’s Fedayeen, they may have confused Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi, the official al Qaeda “airport greeter” (so polite, the jihadists), with Lt. Col. Hikmat Shakir Ahmad, the Iraq militia man. An administration official has suggested that this mistake was a bit boneheaded, noting that it seems odd that a lieutenant colonel in one army would collect people’s bags in another organization: “By most reckoning that would be someone else.” But come on now: There’s only, what, six letters and an entire word transposition difference in their names! Anyone could get it wrong.

And it’s not like it’s never happened before: Who can forget the madcap sit-comish hijinks that ensued when the U.S. supported Ira-q rather than Ira-n back in the 80s? Yikes! But you know how they all look alike.

UPDATE: more here:

The connection supposedly was unearthed earlier this year by a poly sci professor moonlighting as a Pentagon intelligence analyst (do you think I could make something like that up?) It consists of a name – Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, or, variously, Hikmat Shakir Ahmad – that the professor, one Christopher Carney, found on a list of officers in the Saddam Fedayeen – the Iraqi dictator’s personal militia, whose members were blown away in vast numbers by the U.S. Army during last year’s invasion.

UPDATE (with minor edits): War and Piece: :

Here’s a handy guide:

* Ahmad Hikmat Shakir, a.k.a. Hikmat Shakir Ahmad == Iraqi Fedayeen Ltn. Col.

* Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi == al Qaeda greeter/fixer in Malaysia

* Ahmad Hikmat Shakir != Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi

Crooked Timber: Crooked Timber’s Greatest Hits :

In the course of the recent great database fiasco, I took a look at the history of traffic to this site. The AWStats program gave me a the number of unique visitors for every day from our launch last July through to June 16th this year. I was interested in which posts had made the biggest splashes.

I have been keeping a running tally of my most popular URLs over time and by day (in the left navbar on the index page of this weblog and at the top level of the site). But I’m curious to see this plotted over time as well: my nightly Webalyzer runs are useful but only in the aggregate. I’ll have to look into whether awstats can run on historical data or if it has to be in the loop all the time.

In the meantime, I took a look at visitors and ran this report. It’s a very fast program, but it’s hard to compare it against webalyzer since it doesn’t do DNS resolution or even make use of the work webalyzer has done (webalyzer has a 41 Mb cache of DNS lookups archived) .

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | We can dream too

There is only one way to escape from an impasse, and that is to turn back to the point where you went wrong, sit down on the ground and have a think about it.

Long extract from the argumentative Germaine Greer: I’ve read a bit about Oz and some mention of it has appeared on these pages, but have never been there — yet.

What she writes squares pretty well with my impressions, so it makes for an interesting scenario. Why just Australia? Why not Canada as well? And what reparations or amends could we make in this country to our own aboriginal peoples?

And the painful but obvious logic of sitting down — the moment you realize you’ve lost your way — and working out how to get back to it resonates all too well in these chaotic times.

So if you don’t buy into all of these, do you have to start thinking for yourself?

1. Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you’re a conservative radio host. Then it’s an illness and you need our prayers for your recovery.

2. The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest national priority is enforcing U.N. resolutions against Iraq.

3. Government should relax regulation of Big Business and Big Money but crack down on individuals who use marijuana to relieve the pain of illness.

4. “Standing Tall for America” means firing your workers and moving their jobs to India.

5. A woman can’t be trusted with decisions about her own body, but multi-national corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind without regulation.

6. Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton.

7. The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches while slashing veterans’ benefits and combat pay.

8. Group sex and drug use are degenerate sins unless you someday run for governor of California as a Republican.

9. If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won’t have sex.

10. A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our long-time allies, then demand their cooperation and money.

11. HMOs and insurance companies have the interest of the public at heart.

12. Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy. Providing health care to all Americans is socialism.

13. Global warming and tobacco’s link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.

14. Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush’s daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a “we can’t find Bin Laden” diversion.

15. A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense. A president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is solid defense policy.

16. Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.

17. The public has a right to know about Hillary’s cattle trades, but George Bush’s military record is none of our business.

18. You support states’ rights, which means Attorney General John Ashcroft can tell states what local voter initiatives they have a right to adopt.

19. What Bill Clinton did in the 1960s is of vital national interest, but what Bush did in the ’80s is irrelevant.

20. Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.