licentious radio

Thursday, January 23, 2003
[7:05:46 PM]

Does Boy Blunder's stupid-talk affect US national security?

He's pissing off the huge parts of the world. It's especially dramatic because of the tremendous good will the US had after September 11, 2001.

If there *is* a reason to invade Iraq, then Bush's blundering has been a terrible disservice to the world. And who remembers an elected President of the United States *ever* calling a paranoid dictator of a country with nuclear technology "a pygmy"?

See ConsortiumNews.com.

The gaffe in the news today is that Bush'll "persecute" Iraqis as war criminals if they use naughty weapons. Is it scarier to think Bush can't comprehend the difference between "persecute" and "prosecute", or that -- like some Bible-waving buffoon -- he really means "persecute"?

But the important thing is the loss of cooperation with our key allies. Barrage after barrage of disrespect from Bush and Rummy don't seem to be helping the war effort any. It may just be "Old Europe", but NATO is the right way to coordinate efforts with European countries, and so American lives are endangered by this diplomatic disaster.

[3:15:11 PM]
It's like that "Emperor has no clothes" story, isn't it? The people march against a first-resort conquest of Iraq. Then Germany and France come out against it. Today it's Russia, China, and Canada. The US military is increasingly open about its desire to avoid war.

What's the rush? Besides the Bush domestic political needs, what indeed? And *that's* why we're all against the war, and why no amount of gibberish propaganda can get the world to go along with Little George.

[2:54:04 PM]
What is "fascism"? [democraticunderground.com].

[2:08:27 PM]
"This is the worst president ever," [Helen Thomas] said. "He is the worst president in all of American history."

[1:55:35 PM]
Hey, speaking of media whores, the saddest I know of (I don't have a TV) is Debra Saunders at the local Hearst paper. She manages to be a shrill propagandist without verve.

I did learn something from her SUV column the other day, but that's a first.

Today I cracked up laughing with her first line: "Do the French owe the United States for saving its [sic] bacon in World War II?" How long, exactly, is that debt supposed to last? If de Gaulle wouldn't follow Kennedy in 1963, maybe that's a hint that the French think the there's no more debt.

Then again, maybe if enemy tanks were rolling across America, the French *would* come to our aid, like after the September 11 attacks. More to the point, negative feedback is loyal -- when you're on the wrong track. It was right-thinking patriots marching in the streets. France and Germany are doing us a kindness by not feeding the madness.

You would think Hearst could afford a quality propagandist, but I guess times are hard in the Corporate Media business.

[1:43:21 PM]
Bush is still trying desperately to repair the damage from assassinating Lott and replacing him with Frist -- a much lower-profile bigot. Thus you get the choice of Martin Luther King Jr.'s celebration to slap blacks in the face. Thus you get Jerry Thacker picked for the AIDS panel. (Thacker has called AIDS the "gay plague" and equated homosexuality with incest and bestiality.)

This is not "stupidity". This is Karl Rove.

The good news is that -- though evil -- the Boy Blunder is stupid. A quip about a replay of a bad movie is pretty stupid when you're the director.... Another Bush as president, another recession, another war for oil. Careful with your tantrums, Junior.

The SF Chronicle's political cartoon today is "Thirty Seconds Over Baghdad.... DICK CHENEY as Dick Cheney, COLIN POWELL as Colin Powell, TOMMY FRANKS as Stormin' Norman, and SADDAM as himself".

[12:34:58 PM]
CapitolHillBlue.com: "The President considers this nation to be at war," a White House source says," and, as such, considers any opposition to his policies to be no less than an act of treason."

That's our "Commander" for you.... But who the heck is CapitolHillBlue.com?

[11:24:51 AM]
We completely deny the rumor that Poppy Bush is Adolph Hitler's bastard love-child -- conceived in the run-up to the beer-hall putsch while a blacked-out Prescott lay unconscious in the same bed. That's not the way it happened. You can't even prove Prescott was in Munich to deliver the cash for the putsch.

These conspiracy theorists have gone *way* overboard with their allegations. Prescott may have funded Hitler, but that doesn't mean his wife was doing Hitler on the side. Sheesh, give us a break!

[11:11:49 AM]
Guardian: "Yet under questioning by MPs on Tuesday, Blair admitted that no evidence had been found of any links between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein, something his intelligence agencies have repeatedly told him. Yet the Bush administration, encouraged by the Israeli government, continues to promote the lie that such a link exists."

[11:07:41 AM]
The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, told the Boston Globe yesterday: "If there is a conflict with Iraq, the leader ship of the coalition [will] take control of Iraq. The oil of Iraq belongs to the Iraqi people. Whatever form of custodianship there is ... it will be held for and used for the people of Iraq. It will not be exploited for the United States' own purpose."

licentious radio suggests you ask the Native Americans about the US government's custodianship.

We also point out that Halliburton and American oil companies can still make a gazillion dollars that they wouldn't have made otherwise, even if the oil were administered fairly. Saddam was using mostly French and Russian oil companies before. Why do you think Poppy hates him so much?

[10:49:25 AM]
Condi sez the little empty warheads with the 10-20 mile range are scary because if Saddam had a much bigger empty warhead with much longer range, and filled it with VX, he could kill a million people with it.

It's no wonder Stanford stopped her from teaching and shunted her into administration.

Saddam has had evil gases since Rummy's visit in the early 80s. Why hasn't he used them on Tel Aviv? Oh. Deterrence.

How does deterrence work? Little pain for right actions, huge pain for wrong actions. And when we invade Iraq with the explicit purpose of "getting" Saddam, dead or alive? Hmm. Huge pain for right actions (not VXing Tel Aviv), threats of war crimes prosecution for wrong actions??? We're going to bomb Baghdad to rubble, and Iraqis whose friends and family are being blown to bits are supposed to be worried about a trial in The Hague?

[10:29:27 AM]
Poor Hilary Rosen [wired.com].

The article makes it clear she invests her own creativity in the struggle to destroy the music industry. It's as if she never saw any of those movies about stupid old people trying to keep the kids from dancing. The kids are gonna dance.

It's also as if they've never heard of *advertising* at the RIAA. But it *is* true that the disposable-star business model that they've devolved into is doomed. If they can get Congress to prop their business model up -- even if it costs the economy hundreds of billions of dollars in lost value -- why shouldn't they?

"Hey, hey, hey, good-bye!"

[10:07:02 AM]
For page layouts of books, there is a common worship of the Golden Section, which yields tiny inner/back margins. That's lovely and practical with a small number of large pages with a high-quality binding.

But in cheaply bound paperbacks, the Golden Section makes the book harder to read, and practically requires you to stress the binding beyond the limits of most glue.

Consider the example of Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style. The glue is pretty good, but if you don't fold the binding open, the lines of text curve dramatically.

Josef Mueller-Brockman in "Grid Systems/Raster Systeme" devotes some examples and two sentences to the topic:

"In voluminous books the pages become curved when the book is open. The wide back margins are intended to prevent the lines of text becoming difficult to read because of this convexity."

If you want to play Golden Section, why not Golden Section what the *reader* sees when holding the book? That's very different from what you draw on a single flat sheet of paper.

[9:41:16 AM]
There was a lot of fuss when wired.com switched to stylesheets for page layout. The front page I go to is back to tables:

http://www.wired.com/news/nc_index.html

The articles seem to be formatted with tables.

(The lines of text are *too* long! I keep my browser windows *narrow* -- so narrow that a line of text that wraps to the window is reasonably readable. So I can just read the "print" version. I don't understand what they think anybody else is going to do. Maybe you're supposed to buy the magazine....)

The regular front page is still stylesheet layout, though:

http://www.wired.com/