Posts

Speaking of the Red Sox, Curt Schilling’s answering questions (original) over on the Sons of Sam Horn. You gotta be a member to post, and you aren’t gonna get to be a member, but the answers are still fascinating. Speaking of Curt Schilling, the Boston Dirt Dogs are running a quote about pitching under pressure from the afore-mentioned thread on the current front page. To illustrate the point, they have a scan of the cover of Grace Under Pressure, a Call of Cthulhu adventure from Pagan Publishing. Strange world.

There is something deeply pleasing about the Cubs hiring Grady Little. Yeah, he’ll help you guys cope with all manner of superstitions. I see he’s not actually going to be coaching much, though.

“Dog! Swine! Come back here with my ray weapon!” (original) From here, via BoingBoing.

Do not mess with Boston political workers during campaigns. See also John Sasso (original), who may well have lost Dukakis the 1988 election when he was forced to leave the campaign; but either way, the first link in this post is good reading.

Inquisitive minds may want to know what NASA’s budget looks like now, since Bush proposes redirecting 11 billion dollars of the budget to a moon mission (original). I’m way into the moon mission; I just wanna know where the money is coming from. I found 2004 budget information here (original). This is not an exhaustive examination of the budget, it’s just a summary based on their request. That said, onward. Hm, this is long — follow the link for the bulk of the discussion and information.

About the belief that we invaded Iraq for the sake of civil rights: Iraq’s Interim Governing Council is in fact regressing on civil rights. Protests ensued (original). Note that this would not be a regression if marriage was a purely religious institution, with civil unions functioning as the political equivalent. However, since the spiritual institution of marriage has legal force, it’s pretty harsh.

Note on the below — “NetNewsWire”: already produces OPML that tags feeds as type “rss”. Reverse compatibility nearly requires others to follow suit; I’m sure NetNewsWire is not the only application that does this. However, the more I think about it, the more I think it’s a good idea to distinguish between multiple feed types. I would like to know if a feed is Atom or RSS before I grab it. Saves time, saves CPU on both ends of the transaction, saves network, and so forth. ...

According to the usual anonymous sources… Bush administration officials say regime change in Iraq had been U.S. policy since 1998, when President Clinton was in office, and insist removing Saddam by force was a last resort. This will come as a surprise to John Bolton, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz — some of whom, I believe, have a role in the Bush administration. They may even be Bush administration officials. If they are to be trusted, Clinton “failed to provide sound leadership” and was “unwilling either to adopt policies that would remove Saddam or sustain the credibility of its own policy of containment.” In fact, he “placed us on a path that will inevitably free Saddam Hussein from all effective constraints.”

Obscure technical quibble of the day follows. Warning: technogeeking ahead. Dave Winer’s OPML sharing guidelines (original) are a little wonky. Point 1 says: If an element is pointing to a feed, set its type to “rss”. Do this even if it’s not an RSS feed. Nope. Set the type to “rss” if it’s an RSS feed. Set it to “atom” if it’s an Atom feed. If you want a generic type name for a feed, I’d suggest “feed”.

The killer combo is the War College report on the foolhardiness of war on Iraq plus the unsurprising revelation that Bush wanted to go to war with Iraq from day one. The first story confirms that Iraq is a distraction from the dangers of Al Qaeda. The second story explains why Bush would allow himself to be distracted. It’s time to give up on the claim that Bush knows things we don’t about Iraq’s danger to the United States. ...