Archive for April 2008

Gene Healy is back blogging, and has published his first book. The Cult of the Presidency. They say that when you’re writing a book, you should have a two-sentence answer at the ready in case people ask you what it’s about while you’re on the elevator. For a long time, mine was “it’s about the presidency. I’m against it.” That elevator pitch was enough for me.

Well, she finally got one in her clutches. Those are battle stains, folks. Every morning we walk up this greenbelt to the west of the freeway and back. There are usually a number of squirrels, but also a lot of trees. She is lightening quick and is usually almost on them before they scurry up trees. Well, today one messed up. The springtime grass is tall, so rather than chasing it into the grass she stopped and listened. When it fell off the trunk of the tree she was into the grass in a two foot high, three foot horizontal bound. Right on top of it. It got clear, onto the next tree but by this time must have been too scarred to get a good grip. Fell of that tree, then another, and Nuke was on it again. Then there was some darting back & forth, a little contact here and there, but as soon as it began running across the street in a straight line she was on it in an instant, and out in the clear. She ultimately couldn’t hold it and it got away, so I have no idea the extent of the injury to the…

I began getting a sense of this some time ago. …Blog platforms can be customized beautifully these days with a fraction of the development time and cost because the entire backend of the site is already done. That’s a huge shift for the web design business because traditional shops (and I’ve worked for and with some) would have their own code set for building sites or they would start from scratch. Customers got charged like crazy for sites that would really be no big deal in this day and age. The worst part is not everyone knows this and some web shops are still selling their services like always. This blog, though I could, isn’t even customized directly in the CSS (cascading style sheet) but is rather just a stock template that I’ve customized within a limited range of parameters TypePad provides, such as colors, fonts, link styles, title styles, and so on. Basically, just like creating a fancy Word template that you then use over and over. So I have several different page designs which are saved as templates. The front page is one, the about page another, and then there’s a generic page style for displaying posts past…

I guess California is just better organized and efficient than these cluster fuckers. More here. Saw it first at Billy’s, then Radley’s.

Whatever you may think of it, the simple reality is that China is fast becoming the financial powerhouse of the world and they’re partly responsible for saving our financial ass. Here’s a 60 Minutes segment that gives quite an overview. You can judge for yourself, but I instinctively like the guy. He seems pretty forthright and talks good sense. “It’s our policy not to control anything,” Gao said. “So you’ll put a lot of money in a foreign company, and not even get on the board?” Stahl asked. “You’re right.” “Why?” “Simply because we don’t want to go in and say, ‘OK, I think you should change this person or I think you should change this product line,'” Gao said. “That’s not our business.” Investing is quite a different animal from management. Here’s the standard Churchillian logic for the maintenance of peace between nations. “What if our two governments had a serious dispute?” Stahl asked. “Over Taiwan?” Gao asked. “Yeah. Now could your government come in and say to you, ‘pull your money out now?'” “It could be. But I seriously doubt that will happen. “It would hurt you, too,” Stahl said. “Definitely,” Gao said. “It would hurt me. Hurt…

Then there’s this news, which I happened to just catch splattered all over the TV at the local mini mart moments ago. First off, the legal sense of the word means nothing to me. I couldn’t care less if 400 people of whatever gender get together in whatever combinations suit them and make like rabbits all goddammed day long, for all the world to see. What’s it to me? Now that that’s out of the way, let me just say this: in a rational world, that mess would have been dealt with long, long ago, and definitively so. …By real men concerned more that women and children, who may be rationally presumed not to want to endure rape at the age of 13 or 15 by 50-yr-old men, and who are unable to cry out for help, would have welcomed it. Those who didn’t would have been free to carry on. This is telling. Dressed in home-sewn, ankle-length dresses with their hair pinned up in braids, some 133 women left the Yearning for Zion Ranch of their own volition along with the children. Yea. Fucking perverted, impotent bastards. Afraid of real, independent women with minds of their own. So why…

What can I say about it? After an initial 30-second look, whenever, I kept seeing reference to it, and so I looked more deeply last week, I think. Sat through the demo and everything. I do not get it. Not in the least. Not in the slightest. Now, I can think of a couple of people who aren’t close family members where I might be interested to see what they may be up to at any given moment, presuming they took the time to log it, but it seems to me like a lot of effort to go to for something that’s so fleeting and superficial (“OK, but that was 5 minutes ago; what are you doing now?”). I suppose it’s precisely what makes me so interested in blogs that concurrently makes me so profoundly uninterested in Twitter. If you’re interesting — eclectic and eccentric, even a kook, is better — then I am interested to know what’s going on with you. But I want the highlights. The most interesting stuff. The stuff you put some effort into, or what others put effort into riling you up about. Get it? On the other hand, of my current reading stack, Jump…

Top North Port police officials said that their agency handled the case appropriately, and that they would not have done anything differently had the victim been one of their family members. “As a professional looking at it, yes, I would be satisfied,” said North Port Police Chief Terry Lewis, who was out of town when Lee was kidnapped. He returned two days later. “As a dad or as a husband or as a family member, when your daughter doesn’t come home, you’re never satisfied. “I’m confident in the response.” … He noted that officials captured the man who allegedly kidnapped, raped and murdered Lee. And they found Lee’s body. Do you get it? Billy linked that, and adds: “When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.” Or even hours. While you’re being murdered.

Warren Meyer, with the audacity to try and run a business and produce something for himself, family, employees, customers. None of these guys have the first clue what it takes to run a business day to day, nor how much of a business owner’s time and effort is aimed not at service customers better, and not at being more productive, and not at making employees happier or better trained, but at responding to the latest mass of government regulation, paperwork, licensing, taxes, and other total crap. If you haven’t dealt with it first hand, with all of it coming out of your money, time, profits, you just have no idea. And here’s another thing Warren doesn’t mention, but it’s the truth. Do you know how much of this regulatory crap gets through and gets enforced? Big business and associations of many smaller ones. That’s right. All this stuff equals barriers to entry and friction working against success. Large scale companies can pretty efficiently deal with a lot of crap, so they support it. Just the other week I found out about a change in some building permit requirements that’s going to cost $40,000 more than budgeted on a project and…

That’s really all there is to say about it. That’s Fitna, a 15-minute short film out of the Netherlands. Take a look. On another note, Englishman Pat Condell has lots and lots to say. I can pick at a lot of it, but the general thrust is right on. His last one was about that film and it’s as good a place as any to begin. Here’s a bit about the man.

How anyone could even consider letting this pathological liar, Hillary Rodham Clinton, within a furlong of the White House is completely beyond me. Actually, that’s not true. I think most people love lies and liars. It’s only the nature of what is being lied about where they discriminate. (Balkolink)

Well it was quite a ride. Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments rank, I think, as some of the best work ever laid down on celluloid and I doubt anyone would think that were it not for Heston. If you imagine the biblical character Moses, whose face will you always see?

I was going to blog about this yesterday but just couldn’t fit it in. No matter; Billy Beck has done what needed doing to the miserable prick Chris Benisch, principal of the Harris Park Elementary School in Westminster, Colorado. For now, however, all he knows is that just being himself can land his ass in a sling: at his age, it’s his job to integrate his senses and cognition (who here was never momentarily fascinated with the smell of a Magic Marker at his age?), and that is why he got stomped by this mindless punk commissar, Benisch. Now, I don’t know whether this sort of thing is all entirely new, or if it’s more an effect of the Internet, being able to publicize far, wide, and instantly. I tend to suspect the latter, and if so, then at least there’s that. But if you’ve been paying attention over the past few years, here and elsewhere, have you been finally getting the sense that what you grew up to understand about justice, i.e., that it was about getting the bad guy, isn’t the reality? The reality is that it’s either about the getting, for ego’s sake, self promotion, attention, or…

Mounted a pot rack in the loft. Got it from Crate & Barrel.