Archive | December, 2004

A smart-sounding and persuasive political item from Mickey Kaus (paragraph breaks added): I’ve obsessively sniped at ABC’s The Note for its declaration on August 11 that it was “Kerry’s contest to lose.” This might not seem fair–maybe it was Kerry’s contest to lose and he lost it? Didn’t The Note just guess wrong in a […]

The Republican candidate for governor of Washington State, Dino Rossi, lost a close recount to the Democratic candidate, Christine Gregoire. Now Rossi is calling for a new election (tip to Kos). This is not the way to conduct elections. It didn’t work for Al Gore in 2000, whose image was tarnished for a run in […]

Not only do they jump out of perfectly good airplanes — they name parachutes and skydiving schools after Icarus. I’m staying on the ground, thank you very much; and not driving around in any Volkswagen Phaeton, either. For more, including Amelia Earhart luggage and Magellan Travel, see my Trojan Doctrine article.

Larry Lessig has announced that he will try to update his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace using a Wiki. He writes: I’m extremely eager for the book to gain from the collective wisdom of at least part of the Net. No one can know whether this will work. But if if does, it […]

I was revising an old draft, and came across this sentence: The problems of yesterday will not recur in exactly the same way tomorrow, but they may recur in related ways. Blecch; all those prepositional phrases, the needless abstraction and complexity of the “way”‘s, and even the slight fustiness of “recur” leach the life out […]

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune‘s Nick Coleman has a pretty poor attack on the PowerLine blog (which had apparently criticized him in the past on many occasions). Consider a few snippets: These guys pretend to be family watchdogs but they are Rottweilers in sheep’s clothing. They attack the Mainstream Media for not being fair while pursuing a […]

A while back, a coworker of mine who had been stationed in Guam while in the Air Force told me a surprising fact — the name of the island Guam is not, as one would expect, a Chamorro word. (Chamorro is an indigenous language of Guam.) Rather, it turns out, that it’s an acronym, for […]

Spent a day on Guam during my honeymoon, wish it was more. Guam is an absolutely beautiful island, and within a few-hour flight of Tokyo and other Japanese cities (from where it gets most of its tourists), Cairns, and Manila. It’s much nicer, though much further away, than Oahu. If I were a real estate […]

Getting settled back in after a whirlwhind two-week honeymoon to Hawaii, Guam, Australia (Great Barrier Reef area) and Tokyo. Watched many movies on the long plane ride, most of them bad. The worst of the lot, and one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, was Collateral, starring Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx. While I’m […]

I’ve often heard the U.S. faulted for contributing less to Third World countries than other developed countries do. Of course, the U.S. is larger and richer, so it contributes more total dollars, but the charge is that we don’t contribute as much as a percentage of our GNP. One standard response is that we do […]

In a book review in the latest issue of The New Republic, Cass Sunstein renews his claims that “[t]here is increasing talk [among conservatives] of what is being called the Constitution in Exile — the Constitution of 1932, Herbert Hoover’s Constitution before Roosevelt’s New Deal.” Sunstein has suggested this a number of times before (see, […]

I just got back in town after a week-long vacation in St. Lucia in the Caribbean. I received Tom Wolfe’s new book as a Christmas present to take with me on vacation. For those who still have some down time to do some reading over the holidays, let me strongly recommend this book to you. […]

MAN ADMITS HATE CRIME ATTACK WAS FALSE  INDEPENDENCE, Mo. — Police said a 22-year-old man was charged with filing a false report about a hate crime.  Floyd Elliott, of Independence, told police that on Dec. 14, two subjects attacked him in the parking lot of his apartment complex. He said the attackers cut him in the stomach, […]

An excerpt:   It appears that Bin Laden is so weak now that he is forced to play to his own base, of Saudi and Salafi jihadists, some of whom are volunteer guerrillas in Iraq. They are the only ones in Iraq who would be happy to see this particular videotape.   . . . The narrow, […]

Estimates of the number of dead from the enormous earthquake in Asia have reached 44,000 this afternoon, and continue to climb. The scope of the tragedy is simply unbelievable. You can donate money to help relief efforts here.   Meanwhile, the New York Times finds a connection to the blogosphere (part of a trend I noted […]