August 23, 2005
- August 24, 2005
- GOOGLE STOCK MYSTERY SOLVED, SIMPLY:: "When companies think their stock is undervalued, they buy it back. The Googlers are in the opposite fix. Their stock is overvalued, so what do they do? Sell more. Quickly. Before sanity returns to the marketplace."
- TARANTO TYPES FOR ME : "So why do I find myself rooting for the 'religious right'? I suppose it is because I am put off by self-righteousness, closed-mindedness, and contempt for democracy and pluralism--all of which characterize the opposition to the religious right."
- AARON HASPEL ON "Tiger Repellent" "Throw in a sacred text that it is blasphemy even to translate, and a standing order to slaughter the infidels, and you've really built something to last."
- POWERLINE PROVIDES SOME CONTEXT: "Sometimes it becomes necessary to state the obvious: being a soldier is a dangerous thing. This is why we honor our service members' courage. For a soldier, sailor or Marine, "courage" isn't an easily-abused abstraction--"it took a lot of courage to vote against the farm bill"--it's a requirement of the job.... Even in peacetime. The media's breathless tabulation of casualties in Iraq--now, over 1,800 deaths--is generally devoid of context. Here's some context: between 1983 and 1996, 18,006 American military personnel died accidentally in the service of their country. That death rate of 1,286 per year exceeds the rate of combat deaths in Iraq by a ratio of nearly two to one."
- WAITING ON THE WEDDING NIGHT: "Sacha Baron Cohen aka Ali G was dunked in the sea by Pamela Anderson's bodyguards -- after rugby-tackling the actress at her dogs' wedding."
- GLOBAL GUERRILLAS -- Rapid Innovation and Infrared IEDs "Our problem is that the cycles of innovation that yield deployable weapons and counter-measures for US and British forces are slow and non-responsive by comparison. This is another aspect of global guerrilla math: our deployed innovation is measured in years and theirs in months."
- "SILENT RUNNING'S" SECRET TOXIC WASTE: "It contains two near-fatal doses of Joan Baez, each of which contain such concentrated hippieness you could soak it in vat of Curtis LeMay's urine and it would never dissolve."
- "To expiate the pain of losing her firstborn son in the Iraq war, Cindy Sheehan decided to cheer herself up by engaging in Stalinist agitprop outside President Bush's Crawford ranch. It's the strangest method of grieving I've seen since Paul Wellstone's funeral. Someone needs to teach these liberals how to mourn. Call me old-fashioned, but a grief-stricken war mother shouldn't have her own full-time PR flack. After your third profile on 'Entertainment Tonight,' you're no longer a grieving mom; you're a C-list celebrity trolling for a book deal or a reality show." —Ann Coulter
- LT. PHILLIP CARTER would have like more training: "We could've used more weapons ranges; more realistic live fire exercises; more practical exercises. Fortunately, we will have a chance to do a lot of that here before we deploy, and in Kuwait before we head up to Iraq."
- GIORNALE NUOVO: The Discovery of a World in the Moone
- INSTAPUNK ON MICK: "He'll probably flash that grin again, the one that has made him the world's oldest bad boy and the only surviving (make that thriving) dinosaur of an age that is long gone and yet still viciously present under the skin of a brand new century."
- GoogleOS? YahooOS? MozillaOS? WebOS?: KOTTKE GIVES YOU "my best guess as to how an 'operating system' based on the Web (which I will refer to as 'WebOS') will work"
- JAMES LILEKS CLEARS THINGS UP: : "There is no RoveHive to which everyone buzzes in the morning for a scrap of Royal Jelly we carry off to our blogs. If there sometimes appears to be a unaniminity of subject matter, that’s because certain ideas appear, flower, bloom, take root, and spread. Like kudzu. But kudzu is not taking orders from some dark shrouded mastermind made entirely of cellulose and chlorophyll. If you honestly think that everyone to the right of Noam Chomsky is part of some dark soulless cabal dedicated to extirpating all photons and replacing them with negative matter that strips the flesh from the bones of the poor, I envy you; the world must make perfect sense."
- FORGET ABOUT WEB 2.O here comes the rollout of HUMVEE 2.0!
- IBOOK BARBARIANS AT THE GATES: "Chaos erupted yesterday morning at Richmond International Raceway as people stampeded through the gates in a rush to buy used iBook laptops for $50 each.Mothers clutched their children for protection, people screamed as they were knocked to the ground, a stroller was demolished, cars inched through the crowd."
- WINDOWS 95 TURNS 10: "As part of the launch, Microsoft paid $12,000,000 for the rights to use the Rolling Stones' song 'Start Me Up' (containing the prophetic line 'You make a grown man cry'). '"
- AND THE OTHER REASON TO FUND AMTRACK IS: "Boeing predicts a major crash a week by 2010. And we already have a pretty good idea what will cause these crashes: Four out of five today are "controlled flights into terrain" -- the crew malfunctions, not the airplane."
- DR. SEUSS DOES WORLD WAR II via Nickie Goomba.
- BILL ROGGIO'S BORDER WARS "The battles against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and al Qaeda and the insurgency in Iraq are increasingly being pushed towards the borders."
- TIM OREN POSITS "The Hierarchy of Unease." SCOTT LOFTESNESS RESPONDS with "Hierarchies - of Life and of Privacy."
- August 22, 2005
- THINK YOU CAN SPOT A FAKE SMILE? Think again.
- DR. SANITY IS rewritting Joan Baez to great effect: As I remember your songs were sad and forlorn Your poetry was lousy I thought Where are you singing now? A small town in Texas Forty years ago I bought your album And bought into a movement that only amounted to Empty Slogans and Dust
- GREEPS, WHO WORKS FOR BIG OIL, HAS A NEWS FLASH FOR YOU: "Major oil companies don’t make money on gas. Repeat that ten times. Read an annual report sometime. There is zero margin on regular and a small margin (a cent would be good) on premium. At the pump, oil companies make money on cigarettes, beer, and lottery tickets. Not gas."
- DR. BOB ASKS: "How do you deliver a death sentence?" Then he tells you.
- SOME EVIL SOUL SENT Kim du Toit an article on "how to be a man." Wisely, they did not give him the home address of the writer.
- IN THE END, WE'LL OWN THE SAUDI OIL FIELDS TOO: "In the long-term I predict an invasion by the U.S. military of Eastern Province to secure the oil fields there. The plans are there, drawn up. The invasion would take a matter of hours; all that is needed is a certain number of forces to occupy all the strategic positions."-- John R. Bradley
- NIKITA DEMOSTHENES IS PREDICTING DISASTER "I predict that alarmist liberal James Annan will meet the same fate in this decade as alarmist liberal Paul Ehrlich met in the 1980's. Any takers? .... These guys are all alarm & little-to-no science. Their reason for sounding alarms are inevitably not about the hard science (which they're wrong on), but rather about their utopian agenda (which you'll find motivates left liberals almost to a man and woman). Both Annan and Ehrlich, if they had their way, would have massive new tax programs, and massive new government spending, and massive new governmental regulation, to avert the false disasters they prophesy. Tellingly, when these chicken-little campus Karnaks are shown to be wrong, they insist that their utopian solutions are still needed anyway!"
- IN OR OUT? FAFNIR PROPOSES LE GRANDE COMPROMISE! "Keep our army in Iraq, but cleverly disguised as idle French tourists vacationing in the cool mesopotamian summertime. Sure some Iraqis might ask some questions, like "Where did all the American troops go" an "Where'd these French guys come from." "Sacre bleu, vive la france," our army would say in its striped shirts an berets, wavin a croissant in the air with disaffected charm."
- JON HASTINGS ISN'T BUYING THE MOVIES ARE GETTING WORSE GAMBIT: "The Movies Have Always Been Bad."
- DEMOSOPHIA ASKS TWO GOOD QUESTIONS: "Does anyone understand how difficult a global war against stateless totalitarianism actually is? And does anyone appreciate the almost-miraculous fact that we're not just holding our own, but beating them at their own game one small victory at a time?"
- SEAL MATT HEIDT'S ALSO CUTTING CINDY NO SLACK: "... his mother's very public effort to steal his honor is one of the most despicable acts that can be perpetrated by a family member of the fallen."
- MICKEY KAUS OPINES "... this isn't World War I, where you need large numbers of young men in uniforms to do damage," but fails to note that you don't need many men at all to do damage to large numbers. All you need is a good reason.
- WHY MICHAEL BLOWHARD LOVES JACKIE COLLINS, and why you should too.
- MEDIENKRITIK gets you up to speed on the German elections and the Schroeder "Vertrauen in Deutschland"* campaign. *"Trust in Germany". Sound familiar?
- MATH IS HARD: Your dumptruck weighs 4 tons. That load of slate in the back weighs 20 tons. The sign next to the bridge you are about to drive across says, "Weight Limit: 15 Tons." What do you do? Right.
- MORGAN STANLEY'S STEPHEN ROACH says we have no cushions to absorb the impact of an energy shock: "Today's "zero" saving rate underscores the total absence of any such cushion. The only backstop available to support the spending excesses of American consumers is the saving that is now embedded in their over-valued homes. Yet with the housing bubble now in the danger zone, that's not exactly a comfort zone." Relax, if you have to sell your house for a tank of gas, you can always live in your SUV.
- ON THE OTHER HAND, WAPO'S Robert J. Samuelson says What? Me Worry? "If your home or stocks increase $10,000, you may feel comfortable borrowing $4,000 to spend. You've still got an extra $6,000 in savings." And if either of those items reverses in value? Oh well, the WaPo scribblers play with words while Morgan Stanley plays with real money. Your call.
- GRAFFITI FOR GROWN-UPS: Ward Jenkins shows you how. (Illustrated too.)
- CHEAPER THAN THERAPY: Can a woman feel lust for a truck?
- THE ANCHORESS reads carefully and finds "This book is filthy dirty!" Then she reads between the lines.
- BILL PESCHEL John Cleese undergoes surgery "The good news for all Franz however, is that the infected bit which has been cut out by the surgeon, will be offered for sale on the website in the next few days."
- BLAMEBUSH! asks "Would You Hit a Grieving War Mom With Glasses?" [We report, you decide.]
- ACHENBLOG: "I can't help but notice that Science asks us to believe in things we can't see. Quarks? Never seen one. Black holes? Ditto. Circulation of the blood? Seems to me it just pulses in place. Earth spins on its axis? Not that I can tell....."
- WIZBANG takes a long, hard look at the new "girly" condoms.
- RADIO DAVID BYRNE is currently running a stream of really great hits from the 60s. Impeccable taste.
- BANTERIST finds Apple guilty of "Homophone neglect, a misdemeanor." But fails to comment on The Penguin Movie. Loss of down.
- CHRIS LYNCH'S A LARGE REGULAR DEFINES -- "stool pigeon."
- BAD SCIENCE; THE BLOG Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column from the Guardian and More…
- ACE OF SPADES allows that Elizabeth Edwards now feels a connection to Cindy Sheehan.
- ROBERT CADENHEAD @ WORKBENCH wants Idris Elba cast as the new James Bond, completely ignoring the fact that I am available and will take the call.
- ADSCAM/THE HORROR: "Hunter went off in style yesterday. His ashes were fired from a cannon on top of a 150 foot tower at his compound in Aspen. Celebrating the occasion, guests included Sean Penn, Lyal Lovett, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Johny Depp, who paid for the cannon." [Ed: I would have tossed a buck in the hat to see that too. Years ago.]
- JARVIS SEZ: "Imagine a local news operation that actually says something." Hard, very hard to do, but Fox may bring it off.
- PORETTO is holding a Sheehan Consolidated Fact Fest over at his place.
- ARMOR GEDDON on Army Pilfering and Canister Shot: "This is just the way things are. Everyone knows it, everyone accepts it. The guys who need it most, get it last or not at all."
Posted by Vanderleun at August 23, 2005 11:51 AM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.