Best of the Web Today's James Taranto has an item in Thursday's oeuvre about Muammar Gadhafi's poetry, which he then tops with one of his own:
There once was a man named Gadhafi Who wrote poems that were sweeter than toffee And I wrote in my journal That the mind of the colonel Gave as much stimulation as coffee
All my limerick attempts turn out as haiku. And vice versa.
As anyone who has browsed blogdom knows by now, the FBI is taking copious amounts of heat for refusing to characterize last Thursday's LAX ticket counter shooting as an act of terrorism. I suspect the problem may be that, after last September 11, the threshold for "terrorism" has been raised. What we need, therefore, are several different categories below actual terrorism.
Nuisance-ism: Where the perpetrator makes a terrorist-like threat but doesn't carry it out. This would be the terrorist's equivalent of a crank phone call, but higher on the scale than Bart Simpson's calls to Moe's Tavern ("I'd like to speak to Miss Huggenkis, first name Amanda."). Pretty much everything al Qaeda has said it would do since 9/11 would qualify as nuisance-ism.
Tantrum-ism: Where the perpetrator commits an act that would be terrorism if the purpose were political, but because it's just a personal rage episode, it doesn't qualify for the Big T. An alternate term for this would be the now-obsolete "going postal".
Freedom Fighter-ism: Where the group perpetrating violence for extremist political purposes has been deemed "okay" by some authoritative entity, such as Reuters or the U.S. State Department.
Stupidity: Where a group of would-be terrorists are allowed to run around loose in this country because some idiot federal judge decides calling them "terrorists" is unconstitutional.
PC-ism: Where a bunch of left-wingers who agreed with Bill Clinton that Rush Limbaugh was indirectly responsible for OKC, suddenly decide that left-wing violence isn't an issue unless Paul Krugman threatens to kill the SEC chairman.
Tourism: Where perfectly innocent people travel with no plans of doing anything wrong -- but if they're going through an American airport they are presumed guilty of plotting terrorism.
Errorism: Where the nation's foremost law enforcement agency insists that an act of terrorism wasn't.
I think that would have been a better title for The Dodd's item on Ipse Dixit about Michael Jackson's race war. Isn't much there that I can take issue with -- unless I want to be, you know, really snide, snotty, snarky, sneezy, happy, bashful and doc. Jacko blaming a racist conspiracy for his last CD's failure is kind of like Jay Leno blaming the audience if his jokes fall flat.
Over the weekend Michael Jackson held a protest because he says the record industry is racist, the industry isn't fair to blacks. .... Michael was so mad that he had his plastic surgeon put an angry look on his face.
Thanks to Alex Gimarc for the link to Open-the-Steese.org, an organization established to oppose the Democrat Knowles Administration's "Washington Monument strategy" to force the almost totally Republican Legislature to spend more money on unnecessary state government programs.
In response to the Legislature's initial refusal to give Knowles the money he demanded (undoubtedly in hopes of trying to buy votes in this fall's gubernatorial election for Lt. Gov. Fran Ulmer who wants to be Gore to his Clinton), the administration cut snow removal funds for 70 roads in heavily Republican Interior Alaska. The only state highway on the list is the Steese Highway, which is one of only three in Alaska to extend to the Yukon River. Over 100 residents of remote communities will be stranded this winter if the cuts are not restored.
Knowles and his supporters are of course blaming the Republicans in the Legislature, who have no binding say whatsoever on where the administration allocates funds; this is entirely an arbitrary act by the Governor and his administration to make the fiscal situation impact people where it hurts, in hopes they'll vote Democrat in November.
Of particular interest to me is this assertion at Open-the-Steese.org:
Even more unfortunately, this all appears to be part of a larger effort to put pressure on Alaskans to allow state government access to Permanent Fund earnings, or to approve a state sales tax or a state income tax. Lately we've all been hearing much about our so-called "budget shortfall" or "budget deficit," but in fact Alaska currently enjoys a quite healthy potential surplus - almost $8 billion, not including the Permanent Fund.
(Emphasis mine).
If this assessment is valid, then much of my gloominess about Alaska's fiscal future is unwarranted.
The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner has been in favor of abolishing the historical City of Fairbanks (second-largest city in Alaska) and replacing it with a Municipality of Fairbanks that would encompass all of what is now the Fairbanks North Star Borough -- an area the size of New Jersey. This is mainly because of jealousy toward the #1 and #3 cities in Alaska, Anchorage and Juneau, both of which have "unified" with their surrounding boroughs. One supporter of Fairbanks unification/consolidation even went so far as to argue that undergoing this bizarre transformation would eliminate confusion over Fairbanks having two "mayors" -- in Alaska, both cities and boroughs have mayors -- by unifying the job in a single office.
The last attempt to abolish the historical city, founded about 100 years ago in the wake of a gold rush, was defeated overwhelmingly by voters after even the News-Miner expressed skepticism about the idea. One problem with the plan was that the city could be abolished even if city residents had voted unanimously against it -- a majority of all votes cast boroughwide would have been enough to make it happen -- and non-city borough residents outnumber Fairbanks city residents 5 to 3. So a Fairbanks legislator wrote a bill that would fix this by requiring a majority of city residents to approve a consolidation effort.
Governor Tony Knowles, a Democrat and former mayor of the Unified Imperial Municipality of Anchorage, vetoed the bill. And the News-Miner's editorial today approves of the veto.
What is most important for a local issue put to vote is that the outcome recognizes the desires of the local majority. Requiring a majority vote in both the city and borough on the issue of consolidation would be like requiring statewide measures to win a majority of votes in both Anchorage and Fairbanks. Such a system would make it nearly impossible to accomplish anything--or at least, many things.
Apparently the editors forget that we live under a Constitution and a Rule of Law, wherein the tyranny of the majority is recognized to be as great a danger as the tyranny of the minority. We don't have a pure democracy -- which has been well described as two wolves and one lamb voting on the dinner menu -- rather, we protect the rights of minorities by tempering majority rule.
Furthermore, the example the editors cite as an argument for their view, is ridiculous. If the statewide measure in question were the abolition of Anchorage and Fairbanks, you damn well better bet your sweet bippy the voters in those two cities should have something to say about it.
Allowing 50,000 people who live outside the City of Fairbanks to abolish the city despite their having no constitutional stake in the existence of that city, would be a tyranny of the majority. Rep. Jim Whitaker's bill should have become law, and I can only hope that next year then-Gov. Frank Murkowski will have the opportunity to sign it.
UPDATE: I overlooked another way this could be put to rights: the Alaska Legislature, which I believe still harbors a veto-proof Republican majority, could do what it has done so often throughout Knowles' tenure -- and simply override him. But the opportunity for that may be limited.
But I'm not sure I buy the idea this is the first-ever meme war. The American Revolution was a meme war too, as were the Second World War and the Cold War. So were the religion-based civil wars in Britain's tumultuous history, and of course the Crusades, the original jihad of Mohammed, and the Old Testament wars of the Israelites. In fact, any religious or ideological conflict is a meme war -- the one thing that distinguishes the present one is that we've heard of memes and can categorize the conflict accordingly; in the old days we would simply have said "ideology".
So I'm not sure Bear is really onto all that big of a new idea here. But he's done a great job of framing it in language that befits our 21st-century sensibilities.
A wrong conclusion reached quickly is far superior to a right decision reached too late -- but a snap judgment that turns out to be right is too cool for words.
In the extremely unlikely event that a right decision really is more important than a quick one, why bother?
The benefits of being right are overrated. ("No good deed goes unpunished.")
Ditto the consequences of being wrong. ("It's easier to get forgiven than to get permission.")
Living by rules that make no sense makes more sense than trying to talk everybody into living by a whole new set of rules that make perfect sense.
Michael Norman, who in his "semi-retired" spare time enjoys turning discarded computers into functioning tools, often donating them to poor schoolchildren, has happened across the carcass of one eye-opening machine in a Dumpster next to a Dunkin' Donuts in Schaumburg, Ill.
Now if he could only get the FBI to take a look inside.
"Complacency, along with a 'brush it off, let it pass' attitude through ignorant oversight, could most easily reward us with a September 11 repeat," Mr. Norman tells this column.
This particular computer find was "totally cannibalized — all the internal components were gone except for the internal aluminum frame itself," he explains. "Seeing it that way and thinking it to be totally 'stripped,' I started to turn and walk away but caught a glimpse of something attached to the partially hidden carcass as it lay in a pile of debris. Stretching into the Dumpster I picked out the hard drive."
Because it looked new, he took it home and threw it into a desk drawer, making a mental note to "check it later." Later came on Friday night, June 28 — less than two weeks ago.
"Now why in the world would someone throw away a perfectly good, and not cheap, hard drive?" the Illinois man asked himself as he opened the hard drive.
The first thing to pop up on his monitor was Windows 98, and Mr. Norman had to get past the user's name and password. "No problem," he says.
It turns out the first name of the person it was registered to was "Imran" (we have decided to withhold the man's last name). "Now comes the interesting part," Mr. Norman says.
"On the hard drive was the same name that appeared at the password, only now it had 'Major General' before it. There is a file with photographs, one of which shows this person holding an AK-47 rifle. Other pictures show him amidst groups of Arab-type individuals. There are three pictures of him sitting in the pilot's seat in the cockpit of an aircraft. And there are programs on this hard drive relating to airplane and pilot lessons."
What Mr. Norman viewed next was equally disturbing: links to pages called "Air Disaster," "Covert Operations," "Scorched Earth," "Flight Simulator," "Garmin Flight Trainer (400 Series)," and "No. 1 News Resources of Pakistan."
He studied the hard drive until 3:35 a.m. "I could not help thinking that this computer was torn apart with a purpose in mind by someone who suddenly felt the need to protect himself from exposure to any attachment, to any form of terrorism," he says.
Up early that morning, he telephoned the FBI office in Aurora, Ill. Hearing a taped message, he notified the FBI in Chicago, but the woman who took the call seemed uninterested and "hung up," he says.
A few hours later he called the FBI again. This time another woman listened to his story and commented about the number of "crackpots" in the world. She dismissed the call. Apparently there will be no FBI report, and certainly no investigation, Mr. Norman says.
"I realize all this may turn out to be absolutely nothing," he says. "But what aggravates me is that during this most critical moment in your and my America, even the world, our president is telling us, the American people, on an almost weekly basis, that situations could possibly arise which may test the mettle of every American citizen — man, woman, and child.
"Now I feel we should heighten our senses, become aware and alert and immediately responsive to individuals and/or activities that suddenly do not seem to fit the norm. And we should all, each and every one of us act."
I haven't made my blog rounds yet so I don't know if I'm the first with this -- probably not.
A lethal encounter in the desert. With a bullet in his back, Caleb fights for his life against the elements, a determined killer, and his own fading strength.
In this, the first of the exercises mentioned here, the challenge is to write a 600-word story from the first-person point of view, but severely limiting the use of the first-person pronoun. The “I” nevertheless has to be important to the story.
Having recently seen I, Robot, I’ve been inspired to write something based on what I see as a more likely evolution of existing technology—one in which robots as conceived by Asimov don’t quite exist.
An attempt to write about my Clearwater characters closer to the present day than in “Play Rough, Fight Dirty.” Much of Wiley’s backstory from this effort translates into “PRFD,” but some is a little different, and I’m not sure whether I want to finish this story.
Prior to the release of Serenity, the studio-hosted Browncoats website hosted a number of contests, including one calling for fans’ versions of the vows said by Zoë and Wash when they were married. I couldn’t settle for merely writing vows—I had to write the whole scene.
