Bush really nailed it in his tax relief speech yesterday:
“And in our society, when somebody demands a good or a service, somebody is going to produce that good or a service…”
Not bad. Now, apply that logic to abortions and drugs.
Month: May 2003
Mr. Sterling, titan of the Friday night prime time landscape, will not be returning next fall. Total cliffhanger: now I’ll never know if he was gonna get reelected! I imagine I will assuage my grief with badly written fanfic…
No, no, I won’t do that.
It is more or less being replaced by this:
Kate Fox (Silverstone) works as an associate in her father’s Los Angeles law office. In addition to being a sharp divorce attorney, Kate has a knack for matchmaking. She considers her gift a hobby until a socialite bride credits Kate and word of her talent spreads. Soon Kate is juggling the conflicting worlds of divorce and true love. Her father Jerry would rather she focused on work — and her reluctant law partner Nick couldn’t agree more. However, Kate is determined to “spread the love.” Plus, a chance meeting with a handsome stranger (David Conrad, Relativity) may help her find true love in the process.
Well, that’s just super. Damn it, where the hell am I going to get my fix of poorly plotted improbable Washingtonian drama now… Oh.
From a pre-war speech by Robin Cook:
Ironically, it is only because Iraq’s military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam’s forces are so weak, so demoralised and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a few days.
We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.
Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term – namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.
It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories.
Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create?
Why is it necessary to resort to war this week, while Saddam’s ambition to complete his weapons programme is blocked by the presence of UN inspectors?
Boy, I thought his reasoning looked good then. It looks incredible now.
The US announced a new arms inspection team to replace the team which is now departing. Condoleeza Rice has explained that this was a planned rotation, which is why they’re only announcing it after we heard that the old team was leaving. She’s also asserted that we never expected to find the WMD easily, which continues to puzzle me, given that we were told that many Republican Guard units were issued chemical weapons.
My never-ending fascination with Google results continues. Right now, I’m number 8 when you Google for "always be closing". Probably not the link people are looking for, there. What’s worse, Google returns my trackback and comment links rather than the actual blog entry. Suboptimal.
I learned about this effect from Phil Ringnalda, who has some extensive thoughts on the topic. I note that I do have single page entry archives with the title of the entry in the <title> tag, and Google still likes my TrackBack and comment pages more than the main entry page, so I don’t think Phil’s quite gotten to the bottom of the topic. Still, he’s mostly on target. Similarly, while Andrew Orlowski is mostly off-base, and is certainly ranting, he does pinpoint an issue Google needs to deal with.
For the detail oriented, the Center for Cooperative Research put together a chronology of Bush’s movements on 9/11. (Via the Dead Parrots.) I can’t get very upset about Bush going in and doing his photo op — I know that on that day it took a while for me to react. It was, after all, incredibly shocking. What does strike me as strange is the reaction of the Secret Service. As is pointed out in the timeline, evacuating Bush should have been as high a priority as evacuating Cheney.
Also, of course, the rewriting of history bears examination. But that’s a partisan issue; everyone rewrites history.
That was kind of an exciting Mother’s Day. My brother, my sister-in-law, and I had a nice trip down to the Cape to visit Mom, dined on fish and chips, and headed back up north. Right before the Sagamore Bridge, some guy in a Dodge Ram rearended us at around 40 MPH. Dodge Ram 2500s are huge — I’m six feet tall and the hood of this thing was up to my chin. My brother’s Volvo is probably totalled; the Ram has a big dent in the bumper and that’s it. Impressive.
We’re all OK, the Dodge Ram guy is OK, and his young daughter didn’t even notice the impact. Did I mention how impressive the Ram was? Bloody tank, I’ll tell you.
But the whole thing left me a little shaken up.
I love my iPod. I’d long ago noticed that its alphabetic sort puts bands with “The” in their appropriate place; i.e., “The Beatles” sort into the Bs. Good. But I didn’t realize until yesterday that it does the same thing with “Los.” Yep, Los Straightjackets are in the Ss.
Iraq update:
I haven’t yet been willing to say that we should give up on finding WMD in Iraq, although I think it’s pretty damned unlikely. Might be about time to take that step. The 75th Exploitation Task Force, which is the group in charge of finding WMD in Iraq, is getting ready to head home. (Via CalPundit.)
Boy. Remember during the war when we were told that Saddam had issued chemical weapons to the Republican Guard? I guess when the Guard was giving up, they remained loyal enough to Saddam to destroy those weapons with methods so complete that we can’t find any traces of them. While they were slipping away into the countryside.
Also, Barbara Bodine has been relieved as US coordinator for central Iraq. That’s good news, since she was the one who made that little mistake about Kuwait and Iraq in the early 90s. Interestingly, the Washington Post reports that Jay Garner will be heading home too.
Yep, Richard Thompson really does cover "Kiss" on the bonus CD included in his latest album. It’s actually not that mindbending; it makes me want to hear him play guitar on Prince albums (Prince being a not that bad guitarist himself) but I don’t think he improved on the fundamental riff in any way. Which, come to think of it, speaks to Prince’s guitar skills.
Psychedelic Republicans scores far higher on the wrongness meter. I kind of want these, but only kind of. My covetous instincts are sufficiently slaked by looking at the pictures on the Internet. I would, however, pay real cash money for a neocon Tarot deck.
So… this is a very cool hack. I admire it. But I have to ask what the social utility of it is. Should we assume that the links with multiple incoming links are more important? Less important?
We tend to assign importance to numbers, regardless of whether any was intended. I’m sure I sound like an idiot idealist, but the tendency to equate popularity to quality disturbs me a little. Google is the most obvious flagbearer for this concept, by the nature of their algorithm; they do a pretty good job of toning down the effect, but you still find this blog way too high in the results when you search on “Population.” It seems to me that Ben Hammersley’s hack encourages people to think of sites with more incoming links as more important, simply because it makes the information so accessible.
Yes, it feels kind of odd to be saying that we shouldn’t be making information more accessible. Hm. Perhaps it’s a UI issue. Complex interfaces that jam too much info in front of your face are bad. You have to think about what the user actually needs. In this case I’m not sure there’s any need for the user to know how many incoming links Technorati has counted; it isn’t ever going to be useful information in the determination of whether or not to click, so why put it there?