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“As Steve Gilliard said it so well, if you only support our military efforts in the GWOT if someone else actually does the fighting, you don’t support them at all.
Be honest. Be as honest with us as you are with yourself.”
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amusing and poignant anecdote;Edward Tufte sees the “pressure to achieve end-state over time” powerpoint turd.
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title says it all.
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“Former Bush economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey was ousted from the administration after he suggested the Iraq conflict could cost $200 billion.”
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he’s honest, at least when he says he hasn’t read the books in question.
Category: books
not their fault, no sir
Vanity Fair recently interviewed several of the Iraq war’s neoconservative architects to see if they had any regrets about the last four years. The short answer is, “Yes.”
The boys at S,N! do it so much better than I could but I couldn’t help thinking of those old motheaten lefties clinging to the belief that Marxism was still valid, even after the excesses of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. After all, they had failed to do it properly, nothing to do with Uncle Karl.
Seriously, the old gangster method — a bucket, some cement, and a river — is what these bastards deserve, if they should be so fortunate.
Now playing: Golden Years by David Bowie from the album “Station To Station” | Get it
what will the chickenhawks say about this?
What gives you the right to f*** with our lives: VII:
The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Staff Sgt. Ronald L. Paulsen, 53, of Vancouver, Wash., died on Oct. 17 in Tarmiya, Iraq, from injuries sustained when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle. Paulsen was assigned to the Army Reserve’s 414th Civil Affairs Battalion, Utica, N.Y.
53 years old. This isn’t some kid who couldn’t make up his mind what to do with himself. Not that I think anyone should over there dying to defend the delusions of Dear Leader, but for some kid, drunk on entitlement, to cheer for a war he won’t fight is sad. To be willing to have someone his father’s age die in his place is pathetic.
elective cinema
The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town:
[I]n the cyclorama you’d have to choose which section of the screen to watch. Ross pointed to the parapet of the Belvedere Castle, a couple of hundred yards away, and said, “Imagine if you could go over there and see, say, a murder, or two people falling in love—or have multiple narratives going on at once.”
This is one of the things that attracts me to pinhole photography or any kind of photography with extreme depth of field: the idea of everything in the frame being in focus, edge to edge, top to bottom, allows the viewer to choose what they want to focus their attention on, rather than the photographer choosing it for them. It has its own limitations, of course, but with the right subject it can a great way to communicate.
plague
Would we be ready for a recurrence of the diseases that wiped out the Americas’ native populations 400 years ago?
It’s been a hard day’s night …:
Here’s the deal. In about 1913 a flu virus “jumped” from one species (probably swine) to another (people) and by 1918, more than five million persons [Actually, it was between 20 and 40 million] had died from it. That virus has been recreated in labs for study within the past two years, and one of its nifty effects, technically termed a “cytokine storm“, is to turn your body’s immune system into a self-targeting ninja horde. It was, and is, the deadliest single disease on record since the flea-borne “Black Plague” that decimated Europe in the days of rats, mice, open sewers and “miasmatic transference.”
In the rising tide of theocratic oligarchism sweeping around the globe, it’s worth remembering that science exists and has proven some things.
Preventing communicable diseases isn’t rocket science.
1. Wash your hands.
2. Stay home when you’re sick.
3. Keep your kids home when they’re sick.
4. Cough into your shoulder or elbow, not your hands.
5. Wash your hands. Use warm water and soap, or an antibacterial gel.
never met any of them.
| HowManyOfMe.com | ||
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Though I did get some cranky email from someone who thought I had usurped his preferred gmail.com address. I told him to get over himself.
The only other one I know of is the guy who makes guitars. Never heard of this dude.
links for 2006-09-21
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lomography has been touting a new product for weeks: hopes for a digital LC-A are in vain, as it seems to be a film camera. Yay film!
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In an unprecedented step, the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific academy, has written to the oil giant to demand that the company withdraws support for dozens of groups that have “misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of
The Conservative Soul
In the mail: The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back by Andrew Sullivan. It’s yet another devastating indictment of the Bush administration by a conservative.
From the book jacket: “The contradictions keep mounting. Today’s conservatives support the idea of limited government, but they have increased government’s size, power, and reach to new heights. They believe in balanced budgets, but they have boosted government spending, debt, and pork to record levels. They believe in individual liberty and the rule of law, but they have condoned torture, ignored laws passed by Congress, and been indicted for bribery. They have substituted religion for politics, and damaged both.”
Does anyone think they really believe in any of those things? They may pay lip service to them but it doesn’t follow from the headlines that there’s anything to it.
And let’s leave out how long it took Sullivan to work this out. Why an openly gay man aligns himself with a political party that considers him an abomination escapes me.
Now playing: Little Red Light by Fountains Of Wayne from the album “Welcome Interstate Managers”
books a-go-go
The Friends of Seattle Public Library Book Sale is going on this weekend, and I took my young bibliomanes for an expedition. We did pretty well, even finding something useful in the Better Books area.
The overwhelming bulk of the books are cheap (like $1/hardback, $.50 paperback cheap) but the newer and/or nicer books, art books and the like, are priced a bit higher. I scored a bound set of Escher prints, 29 of them, for $5. The younger set bagged a bunch of Babysitters Club and Hardy Boys, I grabbed 2 Margaret Atwood [1,2]novels for their mom’s book club reading list, and I found Stereolab’s Margerine Eclipse (CDs are a buck as well). So more than a dozen books and a CD for $18. Not bad. The quality seemed much higher than on previous visits, either it wasn’t as picked over or stuff is being rotated out more aggressively.
And the young book lovers were so pleased with my recent foray into bookbinding they’re making their own. I made a small book press yesterday to make this easier, and we went to pick out cover materials for them. Now we have a couple of additional sheets of Naugahyde, one a deep blue, the other a faux rhino skin. And we got some lengths of ribbon to add bookmarks. One is in the press now, all 96 pages of it, we’ll cover it tomorrow, then do the other. My son’s stitching came out better than mine, and he showed a considerable amount of patience/independence on this. At 9, I would have made a bigger mess, even with help, if I even persevered to the end.
Now playing: La Demeure by Stereolab from the album “Margerine Eclipse”
Now playing: La Demeure by Stereolab from the album “Margerine Eclipse”
the final word on HDR
I made a vow to not touch HDR with a ten foot clown pole. It’s the Thomas Kinkade method of photography.
Nailed.
Now, HDR isn’t photography so much as post-processing, but like any other post-processing or image altering method, it can be abused. Better not to start. Or at least keep it to yourself as you find your way.