Time to Open Up an Ice Cold Can of Thread
Forvmites, this Thread's for you.
--
Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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References -
Hey Barack--Bill wants you to tell him how his @$$ tastes.
As with the Shaq/Kobe feud, it might be time for the Big Guy to take a long vacation to cool off a bit.
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). . .Michael Moore Award For Achievement in Cheerleading for Terrorists is. . .
Rep. William Delahunt (D-Mass), for this exchange with David Addington, VP Cheney's chief of staff:
Addington told Delahunt he couldn't discuss specific techniques being used, or even discussed for use, by CIA agents because terrorists may be watching his appearance and would gain insight into what U.S. intelligence agents are up to.
"You kind of communicate with Al Qaeda if you do. I can't talk to you because Al Qaeda may watch C-SPAN," Addington said.
Delahunt responded: "I'm sure they are watching. I'm glad they finally have a chance to see you, Mr. Addington, given your penchant for being unobtrusive."
Well played, Representative Delahunt! Your "Mikey" is on the way.
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)given for snide, contemptuous, evasive, argumentative, unhelpful & vaguely threatening testimony to Congress; for semantic games that insult the intelligence of everyone involved; for mastering the art of running out the clock; and generally revealing yourself as an insufferably arrogant jerk with a juvenile emotional disorder who should be nowhere near the controls of national policy.
And yes, Scott, Bill might be up for one.
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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| parent )Rep. Delahunt deserves SO much obloquy for "revealing" the identity of that so obscure figure of the reclusive David Addington - a US government figure who, of course, no has ever heard of , and is so hard to find info on
Jeez, if I, (Jay "scarcely knows computers to save his life" C.) can google up info on this clown in about 10 seconds: why the big fear over what the Big Scary Boogeymen Terrorists might find out - from watching C-SPAN?
(and, as usual, you neatly elide the substance of Addington's testimony before Congress - basically an extended middle finger - in favor of recycled snark. And about Michael Moore?? Who's he??
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| parent )a category 1 tempest in a Barbie-sized teapot.
Redstate had one of their scary flashing red police light graphics up with a call to action for this Delahunt 'controversy', by the way. Is there a point when the gruel gets so thin it ceases being gruel? Looks like we may find out soon.
Scott: it was a lame joke. A throwaway aside. You really have your feathers up about it? Cheerleading for the terrorists? Really?
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| parent ). . .if it was a joke, he felt the need to lie about what he said (claiming to have said that *he* was glad to see Addington--clearly contradicted by the YouTube video). Like many politicians these days, he forgot that even in a friendly committee room run by his fellow nutroots groupies, his actual words were recorded for all to view.
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| parent )do you really think he was being a cheerleader for terrorists?
Are you really miffed about this? Really?
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| parent )Less lying and excuses and more "I was completely out of line--I'm sorry" would be a good start on it. Of course, that would mean ticking off the nutroots who make up his core support, so that won't happen.
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| parent ). . .was a nonmember of the committee who was granted time to harass Addington, a middle finger was all he had coming--and the inane questions that were forthcoming from the actual committee members merited pretty much the same responses from Addington and Yoo.
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| parent )AQ might want to consider honoring Addington for the bang up job he did in helping to expand the AQ franchise to Iraq. Michael Moore, not so much.
--GW Bush, leading contender for worst President ever.
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| parent )T. Boone Pickens weasels out again.
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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)Diablo III announced by Blizzard.
Of course, given the delays in the release of Diablo II, we might be discussing the election of 2012 before III is released.
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)Duke Nukem Forever, which is pretty much a running joke in the gaming world, is rumored to be released this year - just like every other year since 1997. Is it a game, a hoax, or an elaborate piece of performance art?
--I blame it all on the Internet
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| parent )One or two.
I was one of the WoW playerbase a couple years ago. I only played maybe 1-8 hours/week, so I never got obsessed. Thought it was lots of fun, and just a quality, nicely realized game. Eventually got bored, and life got busier, so I quit. My only MMORPG.
Honestly, from what I hear of Diablo 1 and 2, it seems to me like it's a mindless grind-fest of hack and slash. But I'd love to be proved wrong. Always on the lookout for a good game, and WoW was great while it lasted.
Are/were you a fan of the Diablo games? Any insights or opinions?
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| parent ). . .that I've enjoyed more--most notably City of Heroes, which I am still subscribed to three years and four months after signing up--and the Fallout games were certainly better. There was a lot of grind involved, but learning to beat the game using different characters was always fun, and the escalation of difficulty of the boss monsters kept you on your toes. I'm guessing that III will have more role-playing elements than the first two. If you're interested, I'd suggest waiting for a while after it comes out--these days there is no shortage of early reviews of gameplay that will let you know if you'll like it--and it'll give them a chance to work out the bugs that always accompany a new release.
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| parent )Last week a number of news agencies and Drudge passed along a study claiming that global warming caused more violent earthquakes. The study was published in the Natural University Journal of Discovery. If you click on the website for the Journal and the website for the University they have a strikingly similar structure. Even more interesting than that is when you poke around the Journal’s website you’ll see that all the articles are authored by a Tom Chalko, PhD (Laser Holography). A further internet search of Dr. Chalko reveals he’s quite the internet entrepreneur. He is the professional contact for Scientific Engineering Research, which trademarks the Bioresonant line of products (for which Dr. Chalko serves as a model). The study can be found in PDF form here and some refutations to the study can be found here and here.
Apart from the fact that the media organizations which ran the study were not concerned that the author (near as I can tell) founded his own university and acts as the sole author for the university’s journal, the most intriguing aspect of this whole thing is a book of answers sold on one of Dr. Chalko’s sites. The Thiaoouba Prophecy by Michael Desmarquet is the author's account of space aliens called Thiaooubans who abducted him and taught him the “true purpose of life in general and our life on Earth in particular”. Among the nuggets of wisdom Mr. Desmarquet is kind enough to pass along are-
“the true identity of Jesus Christ, and the true origin and background of Biblical events, as well as, shockingly, elucidate and even correct certain important points in the Bible”
and insights on
“the Higher Self / Overself, auras, telepathy, superluminal travel, extrasolar planets, extra-terrestrial lifeforms, the Great Pyramid, ancient and lost civilizations, Atlantis, Easter Island, Mu, lost knowledge and sciences on Earth (including technology such as antigravity), health, well-being, true happiness, true love, spiritual affinity, sexuality”
Maybe it's just me, but I doubt a rapture fearing evangelical Christian who founded his own university and journal would be able to pass along a study doubting evolution in a similar fashion. But Dr. Chalko did give them a way to try if they ever wanted to.
--"That Sam-I-am! That Sam-I-am! I do not like that Sam-I-am!"- Dr. Seuss
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).
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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| parent )"That Sam-I-am! That Sam-I-am! I do not like that Sam-I-am!"- Dr. Seuss
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| parent )this is a truly earthshaking study, although I sense a yawning chasm of credibility.
--I blame it all on the Internet
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| parent )crack me up.
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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| parent )Me: We! -- Ali
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| parent )...CBS News falsely claimed that it was an AP story, even though it obviously did not appear on the standard wire services for publishing these things.
I mean, sure -- MSNBC and Yahoo! Business; these are folks who aren't in the business of informing people, Keith Olbermann to the contrary. But CBS News had kind of a revealing moment there, didn't it?
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent )He says:
Funny, I tend to agree with Liberals on the orientation and Conservatives, more or less, on the behavior side.
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). . .and PETA is not amused. I wonder if PETA can get any interns to dress up in pigeon suits to serve as cover?
Woody Allen had it right in Stardust Memories: pigeons are rats with wings. Keep shooting them, Wimbledon--there will always be more.*
*--my favorite pigeon shooting story: Fenway Park used to have a problem with excess pigeons, and Ted Williams--who along with his legendary two terms as a military pilot was a sharpshooter--was given permission to take out some of the feathery nuisances while the park was empty. Standing at home plate and shooting at pigeons 100-200 yards away with a hunting rifle, Ted quickly ran out of targets and got bored. He then noticed the red lights on the left-field scoreboard.
The scoreboard operator became rather frustrated during the next game trying to display the balls and strikes count, and he was too preoccupied to notice the grinning Red Sox leftfielder standing nearby. ]:-)
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)has a good...if not coy...take on the matter.
One concept I learned from "Free to Choose" by Friedman is the challenge that prosperity brings. Increased awareness, higher expectations and selfless self-indulgence need to be dealt with as a result of progress. Some times, it's the pigeons, but other times, it can be an attack on the very institutions that bring about the prosperity followed by inclination to criticize things that actually helped alleviate conditions that were once so wide spread as to be unnoticed.
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| parent )but wouldn't the notion apply to the very concept of Wimbledon? Pigeons be damned...you've gotta be considerably
to want to pay attention to tennis, period.
Paying attention to the weird trappings and the goings-on surrounding the game is just more of the same.
--Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. - W. Somerset Maugham
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| parent )Or--as I put it a couple of years back in Eiland's Theory of Compensatory Misery:
As human society gradually solves the problems of basic survival and reduces the amount of other miseries rooted in the reality of the human condition, the fringe elements of that society feel an increasingly strong compulsion to become obsessively angry about ever more trivial causes to recapture the sense that life is a painful struggle.
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| parent )
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent )very, very good quote.
I once used the analogy of a broom/mop and a dirty floor with one of my employees to illustrate this same concept:
When the entire floor is dirty and dusty and with a grayish hue to it, nobody really notices just how dirty the floor is. Sweep an area and that part looks better. Sweep most of it and the dirty parts look even dirtier. Next take a mop to it and the brilliant white comes through and the rest of the floor suddenly looks unbelievably filthy. Mop more and the parts that are even poorly mopped start to look like eye sores. An increased relative awareness has made the residual dirtiness almost unbearable.
And what do we blame? The mop and the broom for not doing enough (yet).
Problem in life is that improvements and progress go almost unnoticed until we take a broader perspective....something most people don't have patience or broad-mindedness to do.
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| parent )hat tip to Mises.
McCain:
Sorry, McCain, I don't know which "economists" you're referring to but I and a lot other people were reading about these events well before they hit mainstream airwaves.
Why must he pander? He sounds like such a boob when tries to reach out to the whining drunk at the end of the bar.
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)is that there's a magazine actually called "The Economist" that was warning about bubbles in housing and dot-coms years before the problems appeared. I guess it's not on McCains reading list, which isn't much of a surprise.
--I blame it all on the Internet
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| parent )...is that The Economist's solution was more deregulation in both cases, so it was useless. Really, the paper and ink used to cover the US economy and political system would be far better used to distribute ASCII porn on newsprint.
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent )that I disagree with most of their recommendations, but I think you have to admit that they at least got the diagnosis correct.
I ended my subscription a few years ago when the US section became completely divorced from reality.
--I blame it all on the Internet
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| parent )I ended mine over the coverage of the run up to the iraq war. I figured they were either stupid or thought I was.
I still buy them when I fly, but that's it.
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| parent )You know very, very well that terms like "regulation" and "deregulation" are like "bacteria" and "cholesterol". They mean nothing without context.
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| parent )The other problem is that The Economist is worse than most at the Economist's Failure -- the profession has predicted 7 of the last 3 recessions, but The Economist has predicted 148 of of them in that time.
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent )But what I'm getting at over the regulation/deregulation thing is that context often tells us what the conceptualization of the problem.
I find that how economists approach an issue (1st best vs. 2nd best...for example) determines the opinion over such matters.
Generally, all observed conditions have context and did not happen in a vacuum. These conditions are entirely the products of that context. Now how you view that context can change the perceived solution.
It gets kind of messy to describe but if there is a regulation in place, it's there for a reason. Whether it's a good reason or not or whether it was the right regulation or not often means looking behind that regulation at the context that prompted regulation.
As one example, deregulation can be prescribed in a moral hazard situation...IOW, get rid of a poorly conceived restraint that actually changed behaviors of market agents and caused a new problem....as opposed to finding yet another regulation to restrain the new behavior.
On a lighter note, I often think in traffic light analogies to visualize these problems. I find it helpful. :)
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| parent )Which takes some doing.
--To think is not enough; you must think of something -- Jules Renard
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| parent )who aren't in even most outer boundaries of "the know". Economists have been stewing over this crap for years and giving warnings over the discords.
The problem is that the media, in general, don't harp on these prognostications until they come to pass. Then, everyone has the temerity to wonder where it all came from. Also, there are different kinds of "economists"...many different kinds. An astrophysicist and a geologist are both "scientists" but their expertise is quite different depending on the complex subject matter.
I am not sure how to explain why, but some self-described "economists" who work in social planning and urban development and number crunching in federal agencies don't really strike me as economists in the mold of theorists and even some professors who spend their time simply trying to understand daily events and trends and conceptualizing their place in the scheme of things against basic and complex principles.
I've been reading about economists warning over the dangerously excessive over-investment in housing on the strength of interest rates that didn't reflect market conditions for years.
Sure, nobody could say when it come to pass but it was clear that it was going to happen and before too long. Honestly, if housing hadn't plummeted in the last year or two, I would have been shocked and questioned the basic assumptions of economists. But that didn't happen.
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| parent )Which is kind of a sign.
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent )That's what I was inferring. ;)
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| parent ).
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent )it's also what you get when economists are vested in the institutions they are rationalizing. For example, an economist at the Fed is going to have a hard time fitting in, being happy and getting along if his analytical premises undermine the very core jobs that Fed does.
Public sector and Fed economists are "yes men". Basic fundamentals that interfere are rationalized or disregarded as too basic.
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| parent )hat tip to liberty papers.
Videos speak a thousand words.
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)Actors pretending to be union members complaining about unions in commercials financed by people who financially benefit when there are no unions.
Hilarious. Even better? Every one of those actors is a union member. Gladly.
--To think is not enough; you must think of something -- Jules Renard
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| parent )(Reference here, for those uncultured souls who don't follow tennis.)
--Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio.
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)... reads the ESPN headline; Novak Djokovic is sent out in the second round by Marat Safin in straight sets: 6-4, 7-6 (7-3), 6-2. So much for the potential roadblock to Federer's slot in the finals!
--Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio.
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| parent )In Windows, when I open a file in Excel, for example, and I go to the Documents folder I can only see the files that Excel can open. Also, as I begin typing the name of a file the list gets smaller so that if the first letter is an M then it will only show Excel files that start with that letter.
From what I can see this is one area where Macs lag behind. If I open a file from within an application it will gray out the files that can't be opened but it will not hide them, thus cluttering the view.
Is there something I am missing? Any workaround for this?
--This place is my vacation.
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)An application developer may make files selectable or not, but there's no mechanism for hiding them:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/ApplicationKit/...
well, unless the application developer displays folders as Spotlight queries, but that might become painful to clean up.
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| parent )sorry, but after years of hearing "Buy a Mac" I couldn't resist.
--I blame it all on the Internet
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| parent )who is resistant to Macs just because of their smarmy commercials.
That actor was in the latest Die Hard movie and he was the sidekick but I kept hoping Bruce Willis would kick his a$$.
--Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
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| parent )Kenny Roy is a mentor at Animation Mentor, where Mrs. Jordan learned how to spline her nurbs. Kenny Roy is also quite animated in his own right.
--http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwfCe4AJLqw&eurl=http://www.kennyroy.com/
Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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)