| |
 |
Friday, August 27, 2004 |
F-Bomb-Dropping Attorney Gets Worldwide Notoriety
So much for professional courtesy. A Chicago lawyer's expletive-filled phone message circulating on the Internet is providing fresh evidence to those who say lawyers' standards of behavior are eroding. In the voice mail, Winston & Strawn associate Ankur Gupta... [The Legal Reader]
Maybe he's hoping Cheney will pull a federal judgeship for him!
3:29:35 PM Permalink
|
|
The Tease of Memory
I have the strangest feelign that I've read this article before.
In the summer of 1856, Nathaniel Hawthorne visited a decaying English manor house known as Stanton Harcourt, not far from Oxford. He was struck by the vast kitchen, which occupied the bottom of a 70-foot tower. "Here, no doubt, they were accustomed to roast oxen whole, with as little fuss and ado as a modern cook would roast a fowl," he wrote in an 1863 travelogue, Our Old Home.
Hawthorne wrote that as he stood in that kitchen, he was seized by an uncanny feeling: "I was haunted and perplexed by an idea that somewhere or other I had seen just this strange spectacle before. The height, the blackness, the dismal void, before my eyes, seemed as familiar as the decorous neatness of my grandmother's kitchen." He was certain that he had never actually seen this room or anything like it. And yet for a moment he was caught in what he described as "that odd state of mind wherein we fitfully and teasingly remember some previous scene or incident, of which the one now passing appears to be but the echo and reduplication."
When Hawthorne wrote that passage there was no common term for such an experience. But by the end of the 19th century, after discarding "false recognition," "paramnesia," and "promnesia," scholars had settled on a French candidate: "déjà vu," or "already seen."
But get this paragraph:
[Inquiries into deja vu] nearly ground to a halt in the early-20th century, in part because of the shadow of Freud. A new generation of scholars arose for whom déjà vu was unmistakable evidence of the ego's struggle to defend itself against id and superego. In 1945 the British psychologist Oliver L. Zangwill wrote a 15-page essay explaining that Hawthorne's episode at Stanton Harcourt stemmed from an unresolved erotic yearning for his mother. (This despite Hawthorne's own plausible conclusion that his déjà vu was sparked by a dimly remembered Alexander Pope poem about the building.) As late as 1975 the prominent psychologist Bernard L. Pacella proposed that déjà vu occurs when the ego goes into a regressive panic, "scanning the phases of life in a descent historically to the composite primal-preobject-early libidinal object-representations of mother."
Man, that "unresolved yearning for his mother" stuff sounds about as stupid as anything I've read in a while.
3:21:19 PM Permalink
|
|
How long can America stay scared?
Cory Doctorow:
Bruce Schneier, America's sanest security expert, has just posted a slew of new articles, including this one, called "How Long Can the Country Stay Scared?"
A terrorist alert that instills a vague feeling of dread or panic, without giving people anything to do in response, is ineffective. Even worse, it echoes the very tactics of the terrorists. There are two basic ways to terrorize people. The first is to do something spectacularly horrible, like flying airplanes into skyscrapers and killing thousands of people. The second is to keep people living in fear. Decades ago, that was one of the IRA's major aims. Inadvertently, the DHS is achieving the same thing.
European countries that have been dealing with terrorism for decades, like the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Italy, and Spain, don't have cute color-coded terror alert systems. Even Israel, which has seen more terrorism -- and more suicide bombers -- than anyone else, doesn't issue vague warnings about every possible terrorist threat.
Link
(Thanks, Bruce!) [Boing Boing]
1:59:31 PM Permalink
|
|
Where Is The Shame?
George W. Bush ought to call off his dogs. The one thing we ought to be able to do is rally in a bipartisan way behind those who have been willing to fight our wars. [The New York Times > Most E-mailed Articles]
I wonder. Which people now serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are going to be victims of future Republican smear routines? Will the children of those who are in the Administration now slime those who are fighting now?
1:25:43 PM Permalink
|
|
Gotcha on Climate Change
The latest Timeseditorial certainly fits Roger Pielke's theory that the paper is trying to box the Bush administration in on climate change:
After three years of belittling or suppressing science, the Bush administration appears willing to concede that humans and their industrial activity have been largely responsible for the recent warming of the earth's atmosphere. This tardy acceptance of what mainstream scientists have been saying for years does not mean that the administration is prepared to deal seriously with the problem - by, for instance, supporting mandatory caps on emissions of carbon dioxide. But at least nobody is trying to hide the evidence.
Meanwhile, John Marburger is saying the latest report has "no implications for policy." I know that the Times and enviros are getting psyched up, but I really doubt there's a fundamental shift going on here.
P.S.: On the other hand, if Bush were John Kerry, surely Fox News would have accused him of doing a "flip flop" on climate change by now. [Chris C. Mooney | The Intersection]
12:54:43 PM Permalink
|
|
2004 NL MVP
Barry looks like a lock for a seventh MVP, but as you can see from a few of these, there's always an idiot or two.
Dayn Perry:
“To put a finer point on it, by the end of the regular season, Bonds will have contributed roughly 15 wins over what the Giants could've received from a readily available replacement. No one else can touch that kind of production.”
Eric Neel
“There is one and only one candidate in the NL MVP race: He plays left field for the San Francisco Giants and his name is Barry Bonds.”
Jay Tierney
"I've always felt that OPS is the best stat in baseball, because it combines the key elements to a good offensive player, accounting for driving in runs and simply getting on base. Bonds leads them all by nearly 400 points!"
Paul White
“Bonds continues to be off the charts, more than twice as indispensable as anyone else. His 1408 OPS is 613 points more than San Francisco's team figure. The next best in the majors is Colorado's Todd Helton at 256.
Andrew Baggerly
“With Bonds getting pitched around by most teams, Rolen has the best chance to become the first non-Giants player to win the NL MVP award since Atlanta's Chipper Jones in 1999.”
Rick Hummel
"But this year in the National League there are really no pennant races, and the wild-card team barely will have 90 victories, so this is a year when the MVP must come from a first-place team."
Ray Ratto
"And yes, let's talk numbers. Bonds not only leads baseball in most of your telling statistics (on-base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS and most of your other miscellaneous what-is-that-an-acronym-for numbers), he also has the best and worst stat ever.
Those zany walks."
[Jay's Giants Blog]
12:21:09 PM Permalink
|
|
XP Service Pack 2
I've been running XP Service Pack 2 since about the time it came out; I got it from one of the BitTorent releases that was available. For me, so far, the thing has been pretty flawless. I turned off all the firewall stuff -- I have that through my router systems. I also don't use IE or any Outlook variations that are such sources of virii, so I don't feel I really need it.
There's a lot in the release that isn't related to security. I especially like the new 802.11b tools, which make it easier to connect to a wireless network. Easier, at least, for me. I haven't checked the lists of applications that are problematic, but apparently I'm not using any of them, because I've had absolutely no problems.
So, I'm not really making any recommendations -- don't call me if you get hurt! -- but I am glad I installed the service pack.
10:58:50 AM Permalink
|
|
© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
|
|
|
|
|
