Steven Den Beste has a brilliant essay on who we are fighting and why.
I also can't help but love his take on the mess Schröder finds himself in:
Chancellor Schröder needs someone to give him some brief but very important advice: Don't fuck with Texas.But this is a lesson that, in the past, some have had to learn the difficult way.
Long a supporter of the Palestinians, India has in recent times switched sides for no reason other than pure national interest. Why, just because they now depend on Israel for trade, they no longer take Yasser's phone calls. How simplistic!
This article from the Asian Times is also amusingly at pains to convince that there are no real parallels between Palestine and Kashmir. And that's true so far as this goes-- India has gotten away with far more oppression than Israel has ever attempted.
Here is just the start of a true gem!
Hello Mullah, hello Fatwa
Here I am at Camp al-Qaeda
Camp is very entertaining
But when I'm home I'll have to do some 'splaining
A new Austin restaurant, Demi Epicurious, in the space that used to be Sardine Rouge and before that, Sfuzzi. Great site, and they even have recipes!
John Rosenberg has an interesting new blog called Discriminations. Check out his discussion of the historical scandal you haven't heard about!
Well, I ran the update that came out today and the mail filters seem to work now. They still aren't nearly as useful as the Eudora filter system, but they'll do. The spam filter really does work quite well.
Still not holding my breath for the iPod fix.
The New Scientist is reporting that Epic Records has sent the new Pearl Jam and Tori Amos cds to reviewers in sealed cd players with glued-in headphones. It's too bad super-glue can't hold their failing business model together.
The first thing I heard as I woke up this morning was the nutty Fox guys discussing an attack on Tel Aviv. I'm afraid my incoherent first groggy thought was that Saddam had decided to do some preemption of his own. I was actually relieved a moment later when I realized that it was just another suicide massacre, with only five dead.
I need to learn php soon. Anybody have any suggestions as to where to begin?
Fear not, gentle readers! I've just had to spend the day Jaguaring my Macs. So far OS X.2 seems to work quite nicely, though the mail client is a big disappointment. It does spot spam pretty well, but, at least on my desktop installation, the filters don't function as I'd like them to. Perhaps the new update will improve them. One can hope.
Of course, I'm still waiting for the firmware update that will solve this iPod problem, if indeed a firmware problem it be. I have my doubts. As you might recall, the iPod was advertised as the perfect companion to "the active lifestyle." But if it is moved about while it updates its cache, which happens every 20 minutes or so, it freezes up. Or so one theory goes, at least. No one knows for sure precisely why it freezes. Scratch that-- the folks at Apple surely know, but this problem doesn't officially exist so far as they're concerned. All I know for certain is that my 5-gigger freezes at roughly that interval when I run and it deeply angers me. It's very frustrating, to say the least, especially when I bought it to use while I run and was promised it would work under those conditions. I just noticed that the Apple iPod page no longer makes that claim, but they must have changed it after getting so many complaints. When Den Beste talks about Apple's duplicity, this is what he means. It's one of those classic problems that Apple won't admit exists until it has a solution. Which I pray is soon, because it's breaking my stride.
Still, I can't honestly say that I'm sorry I bought the iPod, even though I was deceived. It is an amazingly elegant, useful, and beautiful machine that has allowed me to enjoy music more than I have in years. I don't really have the time or patience to listen to cds. But on a six mile run last Sunday, I was able to listen to an entire Mahler symphony, the First, and then two PJ Harvey albums.
As you can see, I'm not likely to break any speed records in the near future. Which means that over six miles, the damn lovely device jams up more times than I'd like to admit.
People who bomb children in schools are terrorists-- not militants, not extremists-- they're terrorists. It remains to be seen whether it was Jewish terrorists who put a bomb in a Palestinian school. Hopefully whoever did it will be punished. But it was Israeli police who dismantled a second bomb in the school. Funny, I can't remember the last time Palestinian sappers diffused a bomb meant for Israelis.
Christopher Caldwell grudgingly admits Dubbya makes a pretty fine war-time leader.
Been workin' on the permalink problem.
Update: Hot damn! They work!
No, this isn't one of those web quizzes. I just discovered that the USS Shiloh is a guided missile cruiser and it was commissioned just two days after my 19th birthday! That's almost coincidental.
Is Bush really the best choice of recent American presidents to play this role?
Here's something for the next time someone tries to tell you about how much better French culture is than ours. France, which glorifies "le futbol," thinks little girls are better off doing frou-frou girly stuff, rather than getting dirty playing soccer like the boys. In fact, the 4 percent of girls who do play often have to keep it a secret to avoid being ridiculed as "garçons manqués," that is to say, "failed boys." The sport is also considered to be rather low class, and thus wouldn't be something for --quelle horreur!--nice, middle class, French girls. Well, it's cultural prejudices like these which allow our little girls to kick French ass as often as they get the chance, as this upcoming film is likely to reveal.
CNN claims that their new $15 million street-side studio for Paula Zahn's morning show "won't have any effect on the show's ratings." Yeah, Roger, that. Though I might take a look now and again, just to see if anyone is protesting CNN's biased coverage outside, my early mornings belong to the wacky circus-like atmosphere over at Fox and Friends. Long may their soap-on-a-roap hang freely!
Interesting bit in an otherwise unremarkable puff piece on Texas Democratic Senate candidate, Ron Kirk, in the Washington Post. They note the tens of millions of dollars in personal funds that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez is willing to spend to get elected. And then comes this prediction:
That colossal outlay of money will help get Hispanics and other generally Democratic voters to the polls, a synergy that can only help Kirk.Hmmm. I wonder how spending collossal amounts of money gets traditional Democratic voters to the polls. I'm sure it's all the money available for TV ads!
Last week, while desperately trying to make MT work, I was following the "controversy" over sexism in the blogosphere with quite a bit of interest. I have to say, I think it's mostly been a big hullaballoo over nada. Before I threw it all away to work on the very large paper, I myself was getting decent traffic. It was more traffic, actually, than I could have ever imagined, without even showing everyone my "Janeane Garofalo" ass. (Stiller ain't had none of this!)
That said, I do think the controversy, which revolves around Dawn Olsen, who appears to be upset that she is not on the Instapundit's blogroll and that he is only linking to her more exhibitionist posts and not her "more heady" items, raises some interesting questions. In particular, does revealing sexual information about oneself on ones blog lead others to not take one as seriously, and is there a double standard, in this respect, between male and female bloggers? What about suggestive pictures of oneself? Further, do men and women look at this issue differently?
Regarding the first matter, what I happen to look for on the internet is intelligent thought about my own and other cultures, as well as information about what's currently happening in the world and why. In this regard, I have been quite happy to find all of that in spades on other people's blogs. What I happen to not be personally looking for is intimate information about other bloggers, regardless of their gender. Do I want to hear how things went on VodkaPundit's recent honeymoon? No! Am I happy to have only the most general notions about the origins of The Gnat? Yes! Do I want to know which direction Asparagirl's compass is currently pointing? Not particularly! The same is true for the professional pundits I follow. Am I relieved that The Hammer has yet to devote a Friday column to dispelling common notions about intimacy following a spinal injury? Well, yes! Did I really care to find out that MoDo can't find a date? Actually, no! And it's also true of web magazines I read-- much more Slate than Nerve, I have to admit.
My interest level about such matters is of course a separate issue from that of losing credibility from sexy posts. Can one kiss and blog, yet still be respected in the morning? (Why do I suddenly feel like Carrie Bradshaw here?) I think it depends on how well you do it. And I should also add that I, of course, don't give a fig what anyone else chooses to write on their very own blog. That noted, if someone actually has something interesting to say about sex, I'd like to read it, but it's rather a tricky subject. Those who attempt to address that realm must be aware that it's hard to say something new and fascinating about such heavily traveled yet ineffable territory. And beware! There's really nothing more boring than banal sex talk.
Frankly, I think it is also a matter of attitude. Dawn Olsen seemed to me to be carving out a niche for herself as the Mae West of the blogosphere. Obviously, it was a void that needed to be filled, to judge from the popularity of her site. But yet she complained that InstantMan was only linking to her more salacious posts and in a manner that was disrespectful. Now, if there's nothing wrong with writing about sex, as Mrs. Olsen seems to believe, why be ashamed to be pegged as a sex writer? It's clear from IP's frequent posts to the Berkeley sex columnist, Rachel Klein, that he doesn't see anything wrong with women writing about sex. In fact, in one of the posts that Mrs. Olsen complains about, he suggests that she'd make a good replacement for the lately matriculated Miss Klein. In another post she doesn't mention, he suggests that Mrs. Olsen, among others, would be a better choice of writer for Rolling Stone than any they currently pay. I seriously doubt that there is any malicious reason why she wasn't on his blog roll.
Now, in response to her complaints, several bloggers have suggested that Mrs. Olsen might be taken more seriously if she didn't post so many sexy pictures of herself on her site. I myself don't think that's the reason she's not thought of as a major political blogger, to the extent that she isn't. It's certainly also not because InstaPundit or Andrew Sullivan, or anyone else, looks down on her. It's just that she doesn't write about politics nearly as much as she writes about sex. But plenty of other female bloggers have shown pictures of themselves, or even just major body parts, and had their writings taken quite seriously. If anything it makes them seem more interesting to the predominantly male blogosphere because it proves they have beauty and brains.
I, myself, put a rather fuzzy picture of myself on the old site, but I swear it was only to prevent further confusion about my gender. Despite my allusions to my husband and Jogbras, more than once I had been referred to as male. And I drew the line at the mugshot, even as others shared, well, more; mainly because I didn't want to encourage any unwanted attention or give anyone the wrong idea. It is a crazy internet, after all, full of all kinds of odd sorts, some significant fraction of which, let's just say, don't get out very much. Another important reason for my photographic restraint was dear Mr. Bucher, who upon seeing my small cameo on dropscan rather pointedly joked, as only a spouse can, about whether I was trolling for dates.
Which brings me back to Dawn Olsen, exhibitionist and supposed victim of the Big Blog Boys' sexism. What has struck me most when encountering Mrs. Olsen's discourses on her oral sex technique or the close-ups of her rear was the plain cruelty of taunting the blogosphere with half-knowledge of delights they presumably will never know. Of course, it's clear from her popularity that many people enjoy such taunts. As such, it's none of my business, surely. And perhaps I'm being harsh. One of her complaints, in fact in the aftermath is that female bloggers have been especially judgmental of her. I think it is true that women are, in general, hardest on other women. There may have already been a perception, right or wrong, among some female bloggers that she was getting a lot of traffic, not because she wrote well or had new and interesting ideas, but because she was so salacious. Which was also no big deal, up until the point she attacked the much loved BlogFather for linking to her salty posts, and threatened to "blow up the blogosphere- and the tools who run it", whatever that means. It's only fair to point out that several men also thought her complaints to be without merit. Thus, it can't all be catty female jealousy.