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Friday, June 21, 2002 |
US Takes Aim at Brazil
So who's next on the Bush team's hit parade? Besides Iraq, of course. It's abundantly clear that the Chickenhawk-in-Chief and his corporatic cronies will be slapping hot iron all over Saddam Hussein just as soon as the poll numbers are right. The whole saucy crew have been on a sustained propaganda offensive for weeks, methodically preparing the public to accept the wholly un-American notion of aggressive war. Those droopy invertebrates known as Congressional Democrats are already on board, so it's body bags for Baghdad any day now. Collateral damage, here we come!
But we all know that the Righteous Runner-Up has a broader vision for the world. A world in which no banker has to go to bed hungry--or even slightly peckish--in any of the homes he owns. A world in which no multimillionaire corporate trough-feeder--like, say, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Army, the National Security Advisor, the White House Chief of Staff, the President and Vice President of the United States, etc.--has to sacrifice even one single penny of unearned profit to clean up the land and air he has despoiled with his noxious evacuations. A world where bribery, tax evasion, capital flight, money laundering, false accounting and fraud are protected by law and rewarded by government. A world where the manufacture and use of even the deadliest weapons have been loosed from the profit-choking constraints of international treaties and sworn agreements. A world where even the poorest women--or rather, only the poorest women--are free to die in a pool of their own blood, liberated from an enervating dependence on basic health care in childbirth, all to serve the maniacal misogyny of religious extremists allied with unelected rulers. A world in which every government has the power and duty to strip away the outmoded and unproductive regulations that once protected its natural resources, its national economy, its working people, its poor and elderly, its schools and hospitals, its way of life, even the very air that it breathes and the water that it drinks from unfettered exploitation by small bands of predatory elites.
10:34:14 PM Permalink
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FreeStyle Connect Data Management System
For the last year and a half, I've used the FreeStyle glucose meter for monitoring my blood sugar levels. It's a terrific little unit. Recently I purchased the Data Management System which downloads data from the meter, and graphs the results. Here's a review of the system.
9:44:25 PM Permalink
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The New Suicide Bombers
This is a horrifying story of a young Palestinian woman who set out on a suicide bombing mission in Israel last month, but changed her mind.
She did not go through months, or even weeks, of indoctrination before setting out last month on a suicide bombing mission. She had no connection to the militantly Islamic groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad that once orchestrated most such attacks. She received little more preparation than a demonstration of how to push a button.
...It used to take months of training to prepare a Palestinian terrorist from the West Bank or Gaza Strip to commit suicide in the course of killing Israelis. The attackers were strictly from the fundamentalist Hamas and Islamic Jihad, envisioning a covey of virgins and automatic passes to paradise for loved ones left behind.
But the who, why and how of Palestinian suicide bombing have changed, and the changes alarm not only Israelis but also Palestinians concerned for the impact on their own society. Palestinian militants and Israeli experts warn that the changes could reverberate overseas, should the target list in this metastasizing conflict continue to grow.
Glenn Reynolds says that Palestinian culture is becoming a psychotic death cult. Reading this piece, it's hard to argue.
5:09:59 PM Permalink
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Cold Fusion MX on the Mac
ColdFusion MX on Mac OS X, Part 1. ColdFusion is a system for rapidly deploying Web sites, particularly those that interact with databases. Until recently, Mac developers weren't able to run CF directly on their Apple hardware. But with Mac OS X's Java implementation, CF on a Mac is now possible. In this first part of a multipart series Dick Applebaum begins with an introduction to ColdFusion itself. [O'Reilly Network Articles]
Nice piece. I've written quite a bit of Cold Fusion. Its IDE is very nice, and it will be interesting to see how easy it is to get it running on a Mac. I have't seen the MX version of CF yet, but it sounds pretty exciting from this.
4:53:30 PM Permalink
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All Ye Need to Know
I wasn't fair to John Keats yesterday; quoting only part of that wonderful poem and then printing that Flann O'Brien story about him. I'm sure his reputation will survive, though. At any rate, to make things up to my reader(s), here's "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer:"
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
It just doesn't get any better than this. I've always loved that "look'd at each other with a wild surmise," it paints such a wonderful picture of them standing on the mountain gazing at the vast Pacific, the first Europeans to see it. Of course, it wasn't Cortez, but Balboa who discovered the Pacific. And as one who has spent a fair amount time peering througha telescope, that new planet swimming into his ken is very evocative.
There's an annotation at http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/keats2.html, though there's not much that needs annotation.
9:18:37 AM Permalink
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Spice & Herb Encyclopedia
Here's an interesting but disappointing encyclopedia of spices and herbs. Disappointing because it doesn't include two little plants I put in this year: Stevia and Marshmallow. The leaves of Stevia are incredibly sweet yet have no sugar in them. A natural product, the stevia.net site has some interesting recipes I haven't tried yet. Marshmallow is not as tasty (despite the name) nor as interesting. Another good herb site is http://www.botanical.com/.
8:44:26 AM Permalink
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Asteroid Impact Site
Here's more info from NASA about the danger of asteroid and cometary impacts. All lin all, NASA has some of the best sites on the web.
8:38:16 AM Permalink
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Bright Galaxy M81
Yesterday's Astronomy Picture of the Day is a gorgeous photo of M81, a spiral galaxy in Ursa Major. This is a galaxy that I've seen with my telescope from my backyard. Though a faint fuzzy in the lights around here, it's still something to see, and at low power can even fit in the eyepiece with M82.
8:24:57 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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