The emperor still has no clothes, but now he has a Nobel Prize to cover up his nakedness.
My reaction is a basically a combination of malkinfreude (H/T Balloon Juice Lexicon), and Jim Henley's:
"Barack Obama, God love him, has continued the American military presence in Iraq, spread the war in Afghanistan to Pakistan, continued to rain remote death down on Somalis who wander too close to people our famously inept intelligence operations flag as enemies and continues to keep “all options†on the famous “table†regarding the country sitting between Iraq and Afghanistan. His administration proposed and will approve a real increase to the world’s most bloated military budget. The Committee might as well give the Biology Prize to the Discovery Institute."
"Renamed Desert Prize" indeed.
...the polder model requires both unsparing bluntness in stating one’s own views, and nearly endless patience in listening to the opinions of others.
Sounds much like the ideal for a Quaker Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business. Especially the "endless patience" part.
Tikkun olam. That's what Balfour is doing. It is not what those who prosecute such parents are doing.
#4: The constellation of meanings around the word "tzedakah" makes me think there's a basically sane worldview built into Hebrew. (My wife is currently studying Hebrew, and just came home with this example last week.)
#3: Reminds me of the I Ching, how I read Tarot, or Sufi word-root change-ringing.
I got the answer to my question posed in #47 above:
"The American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights filed a writ petition before the California Supreme Court today urging the court to invalidate Proposition 8 if it passes. The petition charges that Proposition 8 is invalid because the initiative process was improperly used in an attempt to undo the constitution’s core commitment to equality for everyone by eliminating a fundamental right from just one group – lesbian and gay Californians. Proposition 8 also improperly attempts to prevent the courts from exercising their essential constitutional role of protecting the equal protection rights of minorities. According to the California Constitution, such radical changes to the organizing principles of state government cannot be made by simple majority vote through the initiative process, but instead must, at a minimum, go through the state legislature first.
"The California Constitution itself sets out two ways to alter the document that sets the most basic rules about how state government works. Through the initiative process, voters can make relatively small changes to the constitution. But any measure that would change the underlying principles of the constitution must first be approved by the legislature before being submitted to the voters. That didn’t happen with Proposition 8, and that’s why it’s invalid."
The fight goes on.
Re: California Prop 8...
Is there anyway this can be overturned within the state as being incompatible with other clauses of the state constitution? Or do we now have to go the Federal route (full faith and credence and/or 14th amendment) even though Federal courts historically have refused to apply these to same-sex marriage issues?
Ligustrum (privet) flowers: a heady, almost cloying scent that never fails to conjure up timeless summer days spent chasing butterflies.
Gasoline: I spent the first three years of my life in a small house next to the maintenance garage of Occidental College, where my father was chief engineer. There are no memories associated with the smell, just a diffuse pleasure.
Geranium flowers: my maternal grandmother's garden was full of them. Oddly, the smell also evokes the Doré engravings for the Divine Comedy, as there was an old translation of that work at their house to which I repaired with horrified fascination almost every time I visited there.
"This is not unlike my favorite meeting game, which is to identify which artists created the faces of the people around me."
I remember coming out of the Royal Museum in Brussels in August of 2000 after spending several hours in the 16th century section (The Massacre of the Innocents was a wrenching experience), and seeing the same faces that the Brueghels had painted walking past me on the street.
Zucchini bread is wonderful, but it uses so little zucchini that it's not very helpful in dealing with an overload. Unlocked cars are still a better bet.
Coarsely-grated zucchini sauteed in olive oil with garlic and pepper and then topped with parmesan cheese is a nice change of pace.
The analyst firm Gartner has been talking about this since about 2005. They consider it "the most significant trend affecting IT." (IIRR, they coined the word "consumerization.")
The subject has come up in some of the interviews I've conducted with CIOs and other network professionals for some clients I write for. The general attitude seems to be appreciation for the potential to accelerate innovation (and one did mention the recruiting angle) mixed with a great deal of apprehension about security.
Security has a real bottom-line impact--one analyst firm found the average cost per compromised customer record to companies in 2007 was almost $200. One company lost $118 million due to compromised wireless networks in just two of their 2200 retail stores.
There's also the compliance angle. These days, security is as much about compliance with regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley as it is about keeping the bad guys out--maybe more so. And frankly, considering how the deck is stacked against consumers in their struggles over privacy with corporations, that's probably a good thing.
...you might get to feature in a Reader’s Digest Drama In Real Life (AKA Too Stupid To Live) article.
Many years ago I heard from a ranger in the Sierra that they called situations like that "INS" rescues: Interfering with Natural Selection.
That may have been the time I saw a body bag coming down from Trail Camp on Mt. Whitney in July--someone who thought that a Sears kapok sleeping bag would keep them warm the previous night...at 12,000 feet above sea level. On that same trip I saw someone smoking a cigarette at about 14,000 feet or so.
Rather than "nil nisi..." I'd say instead, with Chesterton, that "charity is a reverent agnosticism towards the complexity of the soul."
There is a new technology being developed that can perform automated tagging, from a company called SearchPhysics. It detects and exploits patterns inherent in any language (and in many natural processes, such as galactic clustering) to extract knowledge about the subject material presented. The neat thing is, it's language-independent, and requires no training.
Standby by for incoming abuse from Moleskine fanatics. That's my choice for a notebook for any activity.
For those who are gluten-intolerant to one degree or another, my GF waffle recipe, the result of about two years of experimentation:
1/2 cup masa harina (without lime)
1/4 cup brown rice flour
1/4 cup tapioca flour
up to 4 tbsp soy flour (optional, adds protein, but more will change the taste, and not for the better)
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar (or honey if you prefer, but waffles will brown more)
1 egg
1/6 cup canola oil
1 cup buttermilk less a smidgen (a full cup will generally make the batter too fluid)
Sift dry ingredients, then mix in wet ones. Turn on the waffle iron after mixing to give the batter time to bubble. Makes about six waffles.
This is our invariable Sunday breakfast. The tapioca helps make them crisp and light, with just the right degree of browning.
A bigger problem with chocolate than adulteration is slave labor: much of the chocolate in products from the big companies like Hersheys comes from the Ivory Coast, where it's created using child slaves.
The nice thing about this latest controversy is that if you buy your chocolate from a company that's careful not to use cocoa beans produced using slave labor, they're likely to be the kind of company that will also insist on making real chocolate.
I note that in his latest response to Patrick's criticism (June 8, 11:15 AM), Mr. Blickstein admits to PUI (posting under the influence). That's really respecting one's audience.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
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