Ahoy! It's the Crimson Permanent Assurance!
Break out the muskets, me hearties!
"Getting a novel bought is certainly better than having it sitting unsold. It's nowhere near the same as having it published"
It's pretty much the same thing - the author's gotten over the hard part, and has money in hand. From then on, it's pretty much on a conveyor belt to printing, and out of the author's control. If the book ends up not being published, it's probably not due to the quality of the author's writing.
Similarly, you're a father once you've knocked a woman up, even though it'll usually be nine months until you can hold the result in your hands.
The sales numbers aren't really that significant, anyway, because a fine novel can suffer low sales due to poor marketing efforts by the publisher. The author doesn't have that much influence on the process once the publisher has bought the book. What the author does have influence on is the writing, the quality of which is reflected by the sale to a publisher.
If the Nebula jury rules are modified to exclude cretins, you just know this guy will dash into a phone booth, change into Martyr-Man, and go crying to Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity about how he's being persecuted by the traitorous liberal media for his red-blooded true patriotic American beliefs.
He's humble, too.
"Vox Day" is just his own special way of spelling "Vox Dei", which, if I'm not mistaken, would mean "Voice of God" or some such.
He also has violently bad hair.
"I sometimes think that, in two thousand years, at least seven languages will use some variant of "Bush" to mean emperor."
Perhaps.
But it may also come to be synonymous with "Nero".
The genius of Gucknon is that it's a no-lose situation for the White House.
If he was not discovered, he'd have remained available as a propagandist and patsy.
Now that his background has been discovered, the story helps provide cover for the GOP's harmful legislative activities, sucking up airtime for a few news cycles. Meanwhile, tort deform, bankruptcy deform, and other things are being largely ignored by the media. (The tort deform bill was passed by the house today, after being passed by the Senate, and got little coverage in the media or in the blogosphere.)
It's not like there'll be any sort of an investigation, so it'll do no damage to the Bush administration.
I don't know if they intentionally picked a gay prostitute to be their news conference stooge, but it turned out pretty well for them.
I also wonder if the Social Security thing is, this year, mostly a smokescreen and a lightning rod into which the Dems will expend all their resources, while the GOP screws Americans in favor of big business and the rich. Oh, and while they launch more wars.
While you're in Chicago, you might want to check out the Body Worlds exhibit of plastinated & posed cadavers. I believe it's at the Museum of Science & Industry until September.
"President Pupa"?
(Think of a developing beetle swaddled in a protective coat.)
Greg London writes: "George "Voters should be seen and not heard" Bush"
The attitude goes beyond just voters, though. Maybe
"George 'Subjects should be seen and not heard' Bush"
Where clearly 'subjects' includes, well everyone on earth, even if they don't know it yet.
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan wrote: "What's the matter with Kansas? by Tommy Franks."
Tommy Franks is Bush's pet general who ran the Iraq invasion.
I think you mean Thomas Frank.
I'm listening to a song, the title of which seems appropriate:
"If I'm Gonna Sink (I Might As Well Go to the Bottom)"
(Performed by Neko Case, from Touch My Heart - A Tribute to Johnny Paycheck)
I'm not sure if it describes my feelings right now, or the motivation of the electorate yesterday.
neil writes: "It gets worse than that. On Saturday I found an article by the AP's own Nedra Pickler, containing the rather strange assertion that Bush lost New Hampshire in 2000."
Nedra was probably thinking of Bush's loss in the 2000 New Hampshire primary, to John McCain.
rea writes: "I suspect that discriminating against people on the basis of race is, objectively, racist--and it doesn't matter whether, in his heart of hearts, the discriminator really believes in racism or instead is acting for cynical political advantage."
But he's not discriminating on the basis of race, he's discriminating on the basis of their party affiliation.
If the citizens of Detroit were black Republicans, the GOP would be trying to boost black turnout, not suppress it.
If the motivation was racism, the GOP probably wouldn't *want* the votes of black Republicans.
If the citizens of Detroit were identical in demographics, but white, and voted Democratic the GOP would *still* want to limit the turnout.
It's still nasty, and racism might be a factor, but it's not really the crux of the matter. Racism might lead the Mich. GOP to be more willing to use dirty tricks against black voters than against white voters, but the heart of the matter is voter affiliation, not race.
It just *looks* like racism because of the current and long-standing racial makeup of Detroit.
"Brooks seems to be saying that if we can make democracy work, then it works because it didn’t need us to make it work."
Sounds like the concept of marriage that so often leads to divorce.
Robert,
The software lets you associate an application with a protocol.
Thus, when you select a protocol and click "Change", you get an Open Panel with which you can browse around your computer and find the application you wish to associate with the protocol.
What you want to do is select help, click Change, and select a program which is harmless, such as Chess.
Then, if something tries to twiddle a help: URI, instead of opening Help Viewer and wreaking havoc, Chess will open instead and nothing unpleasant will result. And you'll see Chess open up for no apparent reason, and know something tried to twiddle a help: URI.
Note that it's not just a web issue. The LaunchServices API is what is used to open files and URLs, and what figures out what to do with a given protocol, type, or extension.
There's a commandline tool called "open" which you give a filename or a URL, which it causes to be opened in the correct way. http URLs go to your default browser, etc. It uses LaunchServices to find the mapping and open the file.
In addition to typical URLs, the tool also opens the help: and disk: URLs which are a factor in this hole.
If you use MoreInternet to map help: and disk: to harmless applications, the mapping applies in the "open" tool, and should work anywhere that LaunchServices is used.
"Gee, faking a regualar Master's in a non-technical field is even dumber. What's the commitment? 32 credits and maybe a thesis? Not to minimize the work load, but with determination, such a degree could be had, part-time, in less than two years. I'd bet that the military would even have paid for it."
That's why I figure in his case the fake degree was more of a cosmetic issue. He probably is qualified for his job from his time in the Army.
Getting a degree in HRM might not really be useful for him, or make him a *genuinely* better candidate for his job. For his job, 25 years in the Army probably makes him more qualified than a person who wasn't in the military bit has a PhD in Human Resource Management.
So a degree in it would be a waste of time and money for him.
But, there might be a desire in the government for peoples' underlings to have impressive-sounding credentials. So there'd be pressure to get otherwise useless degrees in the easiest way possible.
Larry Brennan writes: "rvman - I wasn't aware that the bogus degree was an MBA."
It's not an MBA, it's a Master's in Human Resource Management. Such degree programs probably don't even address issues peculiar to the military.
Regarding accreditation, I looked into computer science graduate school accreditation, and there didn't seem to be any such thing.
Undergrad programs would be accredited, but there didn't seem to be any accreditation for grad programs, at least none that I could find.
Seems like, in order to really determine the damage, you'd have to look case-by-case.
One guy apparently got a PhD in Computer Information Systems from a mill.
Now, if the guy knows *nothing* about CIS other than how to launch Solitaire, that's real bad.
On the other hand, there *are* people without formal education who could probably be in the ballpark for a PhD in CIS, just from experience. For example, Clifford Stoll, who's an astrophysicist by trade, but wound up as "Systems Manager" in his lab, wound up tracking down a German hacker who was getting into all sorts of government computers, and later was testifying to Congress about computer security.
On the one hand, a bogus CIS degree for Stoll would be a pointless smirch on his reputation. On the other hand, one can certainly imagine a bureaucracy which either fired him or didn't hire him because he didn't have that all-important graduate degree credential providing evidence of his skill and experience.
Abell has a BS that looks legit, in Poli Sci, but his bogus degree is in Human Resource Management. On the other hand, he spent 25 years or so in the Army, in some positions of leadership, so may know more about military Human Resource Management than he would learn in a university. (ie, Domestic Partner Benefits 101 would not apply; HRM courses probably don't get much into how you handle when 100 employees lose limbs and need to be airlifted to Germany).
So I'm not sure his bogus degree represents a *real* deficit in his ability, as opposed to a way to wrap the experience he has in a simple, phrase easily digested by the average Human Resources pod person.
He's not quite like a guy walking into a hospital and scrubbing up for surgery without knowing anything about anatomy other than what he's seen on CSI.
And, as Mark Kleiman points out, it's not like Bush's legitimate degrees from Yale and Harvard did him (or us) any good.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 8 |
| 2004 | 31 |
| 2003 | 57 |
| 2002 | 1 |
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