Steal This Image
Steal this image!
Mathematics
“It is highly likely that the US launch attacks which start the war with Iraq within the next 75 days, and probably between August 15 and October 5.
It is not necessary to be a military strategist to figure this out. It wonât be based on a preparatory build up of US and allied troops, nor initiated because of any particular actions by the Iraqis which require a military response. There may a fabricated âstoryâ the Bush administration uses to try to âsellâ the war. But itâs pretty obvious what the real reason is.
The time range described above is optimal for influencing the November US Congressional elections. With Bushâs popularity plummeting as millions of Americans discover that their life savings and retirement funds have shriveled to a fraction of what they were, the Bush administration has but one trump card left to try to turn the tide– start the war with Iraq.”
[more…]
It is not necessary to be a military strategist to figure this out. It wonât be based on a preparatory build up of US and allied troops, nor initiated because of any particular actions by the Iraqis which require a military response. There may a fabricated âstoryâ the Bush administration uses to try to âsellâ the war. But itâs pretty obvious what the real reason is.
The time range described above is optimal for influencing the November US Congressional elections. With Bushâs popularity plummeting as millions of Americans discover that their life savings and retirement funds have shriveled to a fraction of what they were, the Bush administration has but one trump card left to try to turn the tide– start the war with Iraq.”
[more…]
Suit Up!
This strikes me as what text-entry will be like when we get those headgear-and-gauntlet cyberspace rigs that movies keep telling us we’re gonna have any time now.
Very freaking cool. And you can download it!
[via sylloge]
Edit : It took my like a minute to ‘type’ ‘Holy Bugsh-t’, but man I had fun doing it, and I can see how practice would bring your speed way up. Once again – freaking cool.
I Invented Weblogging!
In case you came in somehow other than the front door, Weblog : The Movie. A wonderchicken joint. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds good.
Taking a whizz
I thought I’d seen it all, here in my reeking little trash-heap slum of a neighbourhood.
I was, as people who employ such phrases usually are, wrong. Walking back from the subway station this afternoon along the main street, I saw a young mother squatting with her girl-child (who was perhaps 3 or 4 years old, and thus past the age where using her as a meat animal is a viable option† any more) in the middle of the sidewalk.
The little girl’s panties were around her ankles, and she was pissing. Like a little pink-clad racehorse.
Now, Koreans tend to be less prissy and self-conscious about the functions of elimination than us western folk (which is perhaps odd in light of all the other faux-christian pruderies they’ve saddled themselves with), and their earthiness is always refreshing to me, but it’s a little beyond the f–king pale to encourage your children to drop their drawers and let fly all over the goddamned sidewalk, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it?
† No, I’m not suggesting they cook and eat infants here — once in a while I just like to see if you’re paying attention out there…
Hails of derisive laughter, Bruce!
Ahhh-hahahahha!
*breathes, wipes a tear*
Ooooh-hoooo. That was good.
By the way, I invented the weblog.
How do you like them apples?
Yeah, so? Yer still C-List!
The double whammy of my loose talk of attention-whoring below and my avowal over at Oliver’s that I am not nor have I ever been a hit-slut has got me to thinking, as I am wont to do after too much coffee.
For someone who swears not to care whether he’s the Hit King Of Bumfuzz Nebraska or not, I do check my referrers and webstats a fair bit, and am always tickled to see one of those spikes that indicates I’ve mortally annoyed yet another group of harmless citizens. Again. Other than comments, which I seek most assiduously, because I believe in this two-way sh-t with a passion (unless of course you want to criticize me, in which case go stick your head in a pig), it’s about the only way I can tell how the heck I’m doing at this non-zero-sum game.
But I wish someone would explain to me how this hits and visits and pageviews sh-t works. I still keep those two little icons ticking over at the bottom of the page because I’ve had ’em since I started on Blogger way back when, and I’m nothing if not a slave to continuity. We also got a webstats package set up on the server a few months ago, and that never ceases to confuse the hell out of me.
For example, here’s my numbers (gimme the numbers, Harry!) for Friday of this week, a pretty much average day for this month.
Sitemeter says : 260 visits/460 pageviews
Nedstat says : 340 pageviews
Webstats says : 10669 hits/484 visits/1135 pages
What the hell do these numbers actually mean? Why are they so wildly different? Am I a f–king superstar yet? Will I become rich and famous, to go along with fabulously handsome and extraordinarily well-hung? Will I start making $6K a month, like whatsisface?
Not bloody likely.
The only stats thing I ever pay attention to is the neat little monthly graph from the Sitemeter gizmo, anyway. But I am genuinely curious as to how on earth these different numbers can be reconciled, what they actually mean, and if they reflect in any way at all the actual number of people who visit this site and shake their heads in bemusement at my latest textual antics.
I sure as heck don’t know. Vanity is the cheese in the submarine sandwich of social intercourse. But if you understand this stuff, I’d sure love a quick tutorial…
Pure Genius
Somebody get this man some first-round venture funding!
Oh yeah, they don’t do that much anymore, do they? Nonetheless, this idea r0x0rs (that’d be hackeranian for ‘amuses and impresses me greatly, in no small part because of its counterculture philosophical underpinnings, my good man’. (Why start speaking 133t now, you ask? Because I have recently shaved off most of my beard, and now have a lone skateboarder-esque tuft on my chin. It’s shot through with grey, of course, but that’s just makes it r0x0r all the more, says I!))
[via the dogdoorofdeath, whose animated gif of the spread of code red also r0x0rs my b0x0rs]
We've Got Blog
I got my comp copy of ‘We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture’ in the mail today, and have had a quick look through it. It’s the first actual book I’ve ever held in my hands that talks about web sh-t, other than HTML textbooks and such.
It terrifies me, the physical presence of the damn thing. And seeing my comments at Metafilter in a serif font, in black on a white background? Disorienting to say the least.
The last thing in the book is a reprint of this conversation, initiated by dogmatic (who memorably described the thread as a ‘stumbling, chortling abortion of a discussion’), in which I played a fairly pivotal part, in tried-and-true wonderchicken style : seriously addressing the question posed, while simultaneously setting up a straight man to aid the inevitable descent into silliness and self-referential tomfoolery.
My take on the conversation is a little more philosophical, perhaps. As I mentioned in dogmatic’s comments : ‘it really did encapsulate in a single thread so many things that MeFi is, or was at that point : self-absorbed MetaTalking, self-referentiality, high-seriousness, utter silliness, a sense of community, an appearance from the admin (Matt), some cross-cultural banter courtesy of Miguel… and more. Taken as an artifact of sorts, removed from its context, I think it’s a fascinating little document.’
rodii, who has since departed from the MetaPlayground, perhaps forever, ably played my straight man. He was also one of the people who did not give permission for their comments in that thread to be used in the book. These people have now annoyed the piss out of me (well, a little), as the publishers decided to include the thread anyway, with the parts of the conversation contributed by those who opted not to play along simply excised.
The result of this is that I come off looking a bit goofy, I think, and even though that’s nothing new, I prefer when I look dumb to do it deliberately. But I’m enough of an attention-whore (and that’s in large part what this blogging thing often is, if we are to be honest — attention-whoring) not to care too much, pleased as I am to see my Meta-Antics captured in print.
The tenor and taste of the words change so completely, for me at least, when they are between hard covers, though.
I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read of the book so far – I plan to dip into it in small measures. It is, however, spurring some thoughts of rebuilding and refocussing this wee site here into something different. What, I’m not quite sure. Certainly another monument to my towering ego (or salve for my deep feelings of inadequacy – Fork! Spoon!), of course (see also : whoring, attention-). That goes without saying.
It strikes me as amusing (and predictable, if you know me at all) that the first book I’ve read praising and proselytizing the weblog has led almost immediately to thoughts of getting the hell out of weblogging.
Why?
Because my well-nigh limitless ego and excess of free time compels me to be the first to think up stupid sh-t, that’s why. And because I love you all so darn much.
Read
In my wanderings today, I noticed some things that were said recently and that I found interesting, and may well be worth your time, from Jeff :
This delineation of introspection as constitutive of feeling and more significantly, that the feelings which come from memory are the most powerful ones of all, has colored Western societyâ feeling is taken as a private rather than public, reflective rather than reactive, individual rather than collectively consitituted response. This is deeply at odds with human appetites. Humanity is far more social than that. Coleridge, no matter how much he agreed with Wordsworth in theory, subverted it in practice. He was loquacious, providing a great deal of his introspection in public. Thinking of the contradictions of publicly generated privacy gave me a headache, and I really needed to soak my head.
[more…]
[more…]
and from Steve :
Blogging, then, is like my mental scratch pad made visible: it’s much more stream-of-conscious, though still composed and relatively controlled. I think about what I’m going to post for a few minutes or a few hours, then pretty much just write it as I type. Along the way, ideas I hadn’t expected pop up and make themselves known, screaming for attention, and often they turn into other ideas, other posts, or even other projects. I actually, ideally, become more productive in my offline writing because of bloggingâin effect, the impermanent work, the scratch pad, feeds what is intended as ‘finished’, lasting work.
[more… (and more from Jeff on this too.)]
[more… (and more from Jeff on this too.)]
Just thought I’d point, and nod.
Trackbackage
Matt has added Trackback functionality to Metafilter. I just tested it out with my previous post, pinging this thread (see the bottom of the thread). When Ben and Mena released the latest version of Moveable Type, with this new trackback functionality built in, there was a great deal of interest and enthusiasm, but that seems to have waned a bit recently, as these things do. I don’t think enough people have been using it, that I’ve been able to see at least. (Edit : I note that Phil Ringnalda has been getting relatively massive numbers of trackbacks, though, so clearly some people are using it! (Edit of the Edit : Clearly it’s time to cut back on the drugs. I was sure I saw (TrackBack(18)) and (TrackBack(30)) there a minute ago!)) It hasn’t quite reached the critical mass needed to sustain the idea and start it metastasizing, but this may just push it over the top, and not coincidentally make Metafilter even more of a Central Bar and Grill for various weblog ad-hoc networks and communities.
I’m hoping Matt’s decision to incorporate Trackbacks into Metafilter threads as an experiment provides that push over the top that the technology needs, because the interconnectedness enabled by tools like trackback, backlinks, and recent referrers fascinates me. Should be interesting – as Matt says here : “Trackback’s the first attempt to string a wire through all the random blogs out there.” I’m curious to see what happens.
Link Dump
Item The First : the tribulations of being a porn-vid store clerk. “Apparently in the old days it was different – no security cameras and longer dead spells. My manager used to clerk then, and she said that having to clean come out of the corners and off the walls was pretty routine.”
[Edit : MeFi discussion here.]
Item The Next : Would it be a bad thing for me to secretly hope that this guy actually is Christ Returned?
Some Other Items : Itâs like they arenât even trying to pretend anymore.
“Bush’s job approval rating stands at 72 percent, virtually unchanged from a month ago. An equally large proportion of people still view the president as honest and trustworthy…”
“And this, basically, is the story of the spectacular unfairness with which moneymaking opportunities are lavished on the politically connected. It is the story of a man who has been rewarded for repeated failures by having money shot at him through a fire hose. It is the story of a man who talks with a straight face about having “earned” a fortune of tens of millions of dollars, without having ever done an honest dayâs work in his life. ”
And now for something completely different : Listen to the ‘bottle (or any other web page). No, seriously. I was hoping I’d sound a bit more like, you know, Motorhead or something, but this is pretty cool anyway.
Fear
This is from a US government website. This is not a parody. Time to get the hell out of there, folks. Things are beginning to get weird scary.
[via boingboing]
Bitch Moan Whine
The university where I teach hands out student evaluations at the end of each semester. They are anonymous, and we don’t get to see them. In fact, the administration (who collectively have their head so far up their fundament that they can tell if they’re getting cavities or not) doesn’t even deign to tell us the results, normally.
I, however, have my sources.
For the last two semesters in a row (that is, since I began this job), according to the student evals, I have been the number one professor at my university (hooray for me!). Both semesters I had eight of the ten top-rated classes in the entire school (double hooray for me, with a f–king cherry on top!).
This is why I was so annoyed and disheartened when the new contract I was presented with this summer didn’t offer me a raise of any kind. In fact, thanks to some of the clever accounting at which Koreans can be so ept, I think I might end up grossing less this year than last. I genuinely love teaching, but damn it, I expect to be rewarded when I so completely exceed what is required and expected of me.
This annoyance percolated into rage today as I watched them erect a 30-foot, chrome-and-neon crucifix on top of the goddamn auditorium. They can spend what must be upwards of twenty grand on Xtian decorations, but they can’t throw me a bone.
f–kers.
[Edit : I forgot to say ‘Angry? Damn right I am!’]
Thought Food
via Metafilter, some marvellously ironic TIPS-related info :
Some food for thought about civilians as informers, about a large number of informers… From the book “Republic of Fear, The Politics of Modern Iraq” by Kanan Makiya (originally published under the name Samir al-Khalil, a pseudonym):
“Nothing fragments group solidarity and self-confidence like the gnawing suspicion of having an informer in your midst. Therefore, to the extent that the public polices itself – a function of the number of informers – it inevitably disintegrates as an entity in its own right, separated from those who rule over it. Informer networks invade privacy and choke off all willingness to act in public or reflect upon politics, replacing these urges with a now deeply instilled caution. In so doing they destroy the reality of the public domain, relegating what little remains to a dark and shadowy existence. In such a world the more well-known violence of state institutions – executions, “disappearances”, murders, reprisals, torture – take on a new societal meaning. Nothing is as it seems, and nothing can be taken for granted. (Page 63 – edition 1989.)”
“The Ba’thist [the party in power in Iraq – IB] postulate that society depends for its very existence on having an unbreachable basic moral norm entails as a necessary consequence that all deviance is immediately and directly an act of treason. The new Arab order must be a seamless moral web. This is the fundamental source of the party’s coherence, and its license to violence. (Page 206.)”
“Once political identity is accepted as belief in an absolute moral imperative, and once morality itself is seen as a striving for perfection towards an unrealizable ideal, then no aspect of conduct is in principle outside the purview of the political organization of the state. Moreover, there is no way to avoid the implication that such all-embracing interference is justified. Justice as the problem of arbitrating between claims on society (rights) never arises, and is not expected to rise. (Page 208.)”
“Nothing fragments group solidarity and self-confidence like the gnawing suspicion of having an informer in your midst. Therefore, to the extent that the public polices itself – a function of the number of informers – it inevitably disintegrates as an entity in its own right, separated from those who rule over it. Informer networks invade privacy and choke off all willingness to act in public or reflect upon politics, replacing these urges with a now deeply instilled caution. In so doing they destroy the reality of the public domain, relegating what little remains to a dark and shadowy existence. In such a world the more well-known violence of state institutions – executions, “disappearances”, murders, reprisals, torture – take on a new societal meaning. Nothing is as it seems, and nothing can be taken for granted. (Page 63 – edition 1989.)”
“The Ba’thist [the party in power in Iraq – IB] postulate that society depends for its very existence on having an unbreachable basic moral norm entails as a necessary consequence that all deviance is immediately and directly an act of treason. The new Arab order must be a seamless moral web. This is the fundamental source of the party’s coherence, and its license to violence. (Page 206.)”
“Once political identity is accepted as belief in an absolute moral imperative, and once morality itself is seen as a striving for perfection towards an unrealizable ideal, then no aspect of conduct is in principle outside the purview of the political organization of the state. Moreover, there is no way to avoid the implication that such all-embracing interference is justified. Justice as the problem of arbitrating between claims on society (rights) never arises, and is not expected to rise. (Page 208.)”
Video
I watch a lot of video on my PC living here in KoreaLand, in large part because I have a grand total of two television channels in English : the (US) Armed Forces Korea Network (see my previous post for a hint of why I don’t tend to spend a lot time watching that) and BBC World, which is groovy, but the same news at 30 minute intervals can get a little tired after a while.
I could spend more time watching the Korean-language channel whose programming consists almost entirely of televised Starcraft matches (no, I’m not kidding – dear god I wish I were), but there’s a fairly good chance that if I did that, I would end up snorting drain cleaner. Last time I did that, I regretted it.
I’m always on the search for new and better-than-WiMP video players. WinAmp 3 has looked promising, but it’s got way too few options for tweaking playback at this stage, anyway.
I found this today, and it is hands-down the best video player I’ve ever found, particularly if, like me, you’ve got a 4 year old PC that chokes when it tries to load up WiMP. An incredible array of both video and audio tweaking options, and it’s lightweight too. Highly recommended. And it’s written by a Korean guy, which is kinda cool.
fcuk Off, Redux
John Pilger argues that ‘war on terror’ is a smokescreen created by the ultimate terrorist … America itself.
…Perhaps the most important taboo is the longevity of the United States as both a terrorist state and a haven for terrorists. That the US is the only state on record to have been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism (in Nicaragua) and has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling on governments to observe international law, is unmentionable.
‘In the war against terrorism,’ said Bush from his bunker following 11 September, ‘we’re going to hunt down these evil-doers wherever they are, no matter how long it takes.’
Strictly speaking, it should not take long, as more terrorists are given training and sanctuary in the United States than anywhere on earth. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals. This is virtually unknown to the American public, thanks to the freest media on earth.
…
General Jose Guillermo Garcia has lived comfortably in Florida since the 1990s. He was head of El Salvador’s military during the 1980s when death squads with ties to the army murdered thousands of people. General Prosper Avril, the Haitian dictator, liked to display the bloodied victims of his torture on television. When he was overthrown, he was flown to Florida by the US Government. Thiounn Prasith, Pol Pot’s henchman and apologist at the United Nations, lives in New York. General Mansour Moharari, who ran the Shah of Iran’s notorious prisons, is wanted in Iran, but untroubled in the United States.
Al-Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan were kindergartens compared with the world’s leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia. Known until recently as the School of the Americas, it trained tyrants and some 60,000 Latin American special forces, paramilitaries and intelligence agents in the black arts of terrorism.
In 1993, the UN Truth Commission on El Salvador named the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war; two-thirds of them had been trained at Fort Benning. In Chile, the school’s graduates ran Pinochet’s secret police and three principal concentration camps. In 1996, the US government was forced to release copies of the school’s training manuals, which recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses’ relatives.
[more…]
‘In the war against terrorism,’ said Bush from his bunker following 11 September, ‘we’re going to hunt down these evil-doers wherever they are, no matter how long it takes.’
Strictly speaking, it should not take long, as more terrorists are given training and sanctuary in the United States than anywhere on earth. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals. This is virtually unknown to the American public, thanks to the freest media on earth.
…
General Jose Guillermo Garcia has lived comfortably in Florida since the 1990s. He was head of El Salvador’s military during the 1980s when death squads with ties to the army murdered thousands of people. General Prosper Avril, the Haitian dictator, liked to display the bloodied victims of his torture on television. When he was overthrown, he was flown to Florida by the US Government. Thiounn Prasith, Pol Pot’s henchman and apologist at the United Nations, lives in New York. General Mansour Moharari, who ran the Shah of Iran’s notorious prisons, is wanted in Iran, but untroubled in the United States.
Al-Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan were kindergartens compared with the world’s leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia. Known until recently as the School of the Americas, it trained tyrants and some 60,000 Latin American special forces, paramilitaries and intelligence agents in the black arts of terrorism.
In 1993, the UN Truth Commission on El Salvador named the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war; two-thirds of them had been trained at Fort Benning. In Chile, the school’s graduates ran Pinochet’s secret police and three principal concentration camps. In 1996, the US government was forced to release copies of the school’s training manuals, which recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses’ relatives.
[more…]
[via wood_s_lot]
fcuk Off
Hey, my American friends, why not take the sage advice of my friend here…
…and tell the bastards to go f–k themselves!
[Edit : Thanks to the random google-surfing psychos who crapped here, but I’ve closed the thread and deleted the bile, pathetically amusing as it was. Sue me.]