I’ll get to some posting on the family soon. The Boy started school today and I’ve got a good story about The La. I’ve been slacking on pictures lately, but now I have an excuse. Our digital camera is having issues that began sometime after the 4th of July. I’m not too happy since I’m fairly certain that it’s now out of warranty. I’ve also got some geek stuff that I want to throw at ya.
Orwell and Bradbury, here we come. I’m not sure if this is one of the intended consequences of terrorism, but it definitely could be considered a fringe benefit by someone wishing the breakdown of a (once) free society. The misapplication of security policies by troglodytes is resulting in the kind of climate that Orwell and Bradbury wrote about in their respective masterpieces, 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. Am I being a little alarmist? Yes, but I don’t like the direction this is heading. I sincerely hope that every high school in America has both of these books on their reading lists this year.
We’ll see if this gets much play from the television media. If the Bush campaign is going to allow stuff like the swift boat ads, then we might as well pull up some old college rugby shots. What an asshole.
It may be somewhat petty and people do change, but if people are willing to disregard a lot of the good things that Clinton did because of the Lewinsky affair, I don’t see why we can’t disregard Bush because he punches people in the face during a rugby game.
EDIT: I left out the original LA Times article that dredged this up in the first place.
Shrub on Thursday’s $417.5B Defense Appropriations Bill:
Third, this bill meets or commitment to America’s armed forces by preparing them to meet the threats of tomorrow. Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.
Norman Mailer on Shrub’s English:
But in my mind, Bush is the immediate obstacle. He is a collection of disasters for America. What he does to the English language is a species of catastrophe all by itself. Bush learned a long time ago that certain key words, “evil, patriotism, stand-firm, flag, our-fight-against-terrorism,” will get half the people in America stirred up. That’s all he works with. Kerry will be better in many ways, no question.
I found this story today from online comic strip artist, Scott Kurtz. He recounts his dealings with the comic syndicates responsible for the comics that you see every day in newspapers. I didn’t realize it was such a racket. I’ve seen cartoonists make jokes about the syndicates hovering over them and the criticism that Jim Davis gets for completely and utterly selling out with Garfield, but I didn’t realize what a racket they have going. It’s worse than musicians and record labels. It’ll be interesting to see if Scott’s ideas come to pass. Everybody’s aware of the battle between P2P and the record industry. Cory Doctorow is a big proponent of distribution of books over the Internet.
Some of the things that Kurtz says reminded me of some of what I said last month about large media conglomerates. Also, I thought I had linked Ted Turner’s article on the same topic, but I can’t seem to find it in the archives.
This posting is a community experiment started by Minding the Planet to see how a meme represented by a blog posting spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet; results and commentary will appear there in the future.
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I posted a few weeks back about a report saying that the Pakistanis were under enormous pressure to come up with a major Al Qaeda operative either during the Democratic National Convention or before the election (credit to Josh Marshall for originally pointing it out).
Lo and behold, today only a few hours before John Kerry is to accept the nomination as presidential candidate for his party, there’s a report of a "top Al Qaeda figure" from all of the major news sites. It’s not Bin Laden, but Ahmed Ghailani, a suspect in the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa. Note that he was captured on Sunday, but they conveniently waited until now to announce it.
Wow.
I read about this somewhere earlier today, but I can’t remember where and I just got the e-mail from Alamo to confirm it.
There’s a screening of Fahrenheit 9/11 in Crawford tomorrow night with Michael Moore in attendance and he’s invited G.W. who’ll be in town. You can get all of the details here. If I were single and had some time on my hands, I’d be so there. There’s got to be an Austin blogger with the time and inclination to participate. C’mon. Let me live vicariously through you. Please?
I’m somewhat of a beer geek and an especially rabid beer geek when it comes to very hoppy beers. Stone IPA and Ruination IPA, which, sadly, you can’t get here, are some of my all-time favorites. You can imagine my delight when I learned that an award-winning IPA from Dogfish Head is coming to Austin. Let me be the first to officially welcome Dogfish to Texas. I hope your brews are worthy of their reputation.
Incidentally, Bitter End is a good place to get a locally brewed IPA with some formidable hoppiness, the aptly named Austin Pale Ale. Anybody know of any other local brews for a certified hop-head?
In the wake of seeing Outfoxed earlier this week, it was interesting to find this post on the Tour De France today. Not surprisingly, Germany also seems to have a problem with biased networks who cut people off when they don’t agree with them. Even more ironically, and I’ve been thinking about this for a while, Al Jazeera was founded mainly to combat the many government run news agencies in the Middle East, but they seem to get nothing but bad press over here. I’d really like to see Control Room.
I finally watched Fahrenheit 9/11 last night. I may post more on that later, but I want to re-read some of the criticisms and counter-criticisms. My initial impression is that it isn’t nearly as radical as some have made it out to be. It’ll be a documentary hat trick this week if I get around to watching Fog of War which I borrowed from Casino.