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A New York state man who sent out millions of junk e-mails was sentenced to three-and-a-half to seven years in prison, the state attorney general's office said Thursday.Well call me a cynic but I'm deeply unimpressed. Maybe I don't understand the mechanics of spamming in the 21st Century -- maybe it can't be done effectively without stealing identities and forging stuff -- but I'd feel a helluva lot better if he'd actually been charged with spamming.
Howard Carmack, known as the "Buffalo Spammer," received the maximum sentence for 14 counts of identity theft and forgery, a spokesman for New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said.
But if the result doesn't represent the public's opinion, and only reflects who happened to be better organized online to drive up the statistics, then why should a news organization that aspires to accuracy and candor report it? My sense is that the reason this thing draws eyeballs is precisely that some readers, who aren't knowledgeable in statistics, do wrongly ascribe some meaning to it.I don't know but it seems to me the reason why they run these idiotic polls is not to mislead those unknowledgable in the meaning of polls and statistics -- it's to drive eyeballs to CNN.com, pure and simple. From a
From the NY Times, courtesy of Daniel Drezner:
"A few blogs have thousands of readers, but never have so many people written so much to be read by so few."
Amen.
Blogging has been frustrated (thats blogstrated for you Rich Hall fans) due to great weather leading to attempts to blog from the deck with a fractious laptop and indecipherable software.
I took the effort inside only to find the Yankee game in a rain delay, and my pathetic attempt to email the post in progress from the aforesaid laptop to my desktop a grandiose failure, akin only to my inability to a) grow hair on my head or b) get someone other than people I know (and few of them at that) to read this blog.
So I'll leave you with Michele's post asking folks to place their favorite movie quote in her comments. It's up to 135 and counting. My favorite (and I only read half of them):
"Now what kind of an attitude is that, 'these things happen?' They only happen because this whole country is just full of people who, when these things happen, they just say 'these things happen,' and that's why they happen!"
The best thing about the comments is that she suggested they be made without context. It's fun to try and guess the movie, although "Let the Wookie win" is on the side of obvious. I owe a beer to the first to enter a comment here identifying the movie and player who said that line (Google is not permitted).
I?m working on a column about ?Farhenheit 911.? Found this quote from Moore?s own site, from April 14. That?s the infamous entry where he wrote ?The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ?insurgents? or ?terrorists? or ?The Enemy.? They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow ? and they will win.?Noted. He also wrote: ?I oppose the U.N. or anyone else risking the lives of their citizens to extract us from our debacle. I'm sorry, but the majority of Americans supported this war once it began and, sadly, that majority must now sacrifice their children until enough blood has been let that maybe -- just maybe -- God and the Iraqi people will forgive us in the end.
Sacrificing American blood to earn God?s favor? Sound like anyone you know?
Despicable.
What he said.
It wasn't just the caliber of his work, which of course was high. It was that he had the courage to stand up and say, "They're lying. This is the truth," and back it up with so much evidence that he could not be ignored. Doug had a permanent effect on the way baseball's off-field issues are covered. He made it right--no, he made it mandatory--to question the claims of baseball's authorities, and he did it in the face of opposition from some powerful people. When called on the carpet by Bud Selig, Doug calmly presented the facts and refused to be intimidated.You can find the page where Pappas writes on his phone conversation with Bud Selig here. For another insight into his legacy, try the Futility Infielder.
So following the speech I did a quick series of flips between CNN, MSNBC, and Fox. Chris Matthews on MSNBC has Sen. Joe Biden leading off. He's entirely critical of the speech because (again -- this is only from the first few minutes) it didn't respond to specific questions some Senate Committees have about where we go from here and how.
CNN had an analyst who said there's nothing new, the timeline he laid out was all known before, etc. Come to think of it I'd never heard the timeline laid out in detail like that, so I guess I don't watch enough CNN -- except I watch them more than any of the other cable news channels. Go figure. (Where's the friggin' sarcasm tag?)
Fox has another analyst (sorry, no names here) who stepped back and saw the speech for what it was, a speech to the public that said (in my words summarizing his) "We're winning, and we will win, and this is what will happen next."
The Fox guy got it right. Bush was speaking beyond the press and the politicians, talking not to the Senate or to the media, but to us, telling us what was going on, something he's been too short on over the last many months. I'll leave the comments on the liberal media to others.
I don't know what President Bush will say tonight but here are a few points I take with me in to the speech.
First, we are further down the path, and closer to our goal, than the media has reported for the last several months now. The goal is a democratic Iraq, governed by Iraqis. For months we've been told that things are going horribly, but we're never told how the horribleness translates into our inability to complete the job. It doesn't.
Second, we are constantly told we can't "finish the job" without international help, but I don't see it. We tried to build the broadest coalition we could. France and Germany decided to pass and I don't see why or how they will be convinced that now is the time to join in, or what they could bring to the table if they did. And for the life of me, I can't figure out why, at this point, they'd be inclined to join in any event.
Daniel Drezner goes further out on a limb than I will. "One prediction -- it will be impossible for media write-ups not to link the situation in Iraq with the physical aftereffects of Bush's bicycle accident."
The last entry was the first done out on the deck, and it was a pain. I was provided with several HTML editing tools by the resident Mac Geekette and so far I'm unimpressed. To be fair, part of the problem is navigating around Mac software, something I'm not accustomed to doing (the control, option, and Apple keys don't map directly to the PC keyboard equivalents -- or is it that they map indirectly to the PC keyboard non-equivalents?). And where the hell is the delete key? Oh, there's a delete key alright, but it acts like the backspace key. So where's the backspace key that acts like a delete key? Sheez!
But most of the problem relates to the software. Page Spinner didn't spin me much, and BBEdit crapped out because she didn't put the licensed version on the machine. What really pissed me off about that was, I cut my text to the clipboard before it closed on me, but it wiped the clipboard when it closed!
It's GoLive, the next time I try this, but I want to avoid using high end software for such a simple purpose.
A FEW YEARS AGO Michael Moore, who's now promoting an anti-President Bush movie entitled Fahrenheit 9/11, announced he'd gotten the goods on me, indeed hung me out to dry on my own words. It was in his first bestselling book, Stupid White Men. Moore wrote he'd once been "forced" to listen to my comments on a TV chat show, The McLaughlin Group. I had whined "on and on about the sorry state of American education," Moore said, and wound up by bellowing: "These kids don't even know what The Iliad and The Odyssey are!"Tim Blair, from whence the link came, has more And last week I found perhaps my favorite quote on Moore, from Christopher Hitchens:
Moore's interest was piqued, so the next day he said he called me. "Fred," he quoted himself as saying, "tell me what The Iliad and The Odyssey are." I started "hemming and hawing," Moore wrote. And then I said, according to Moore: "Well, they're . . . uh . . . you know . . . uh . . . okay, fine, you got me--I don't know what they're about. Happy now?" He'd smoked me out as a fraud, or maybe worse.
The only problem is none of this is true. It never happened. Moore is a liar. He made it up. It's a fabrication on two levels. One, I've never met Moore or even talked to him on the phone. And, two, I read both The Iliad and The Odyssey in my first year at the University of Virginia. Just for the record, I'd learned what they were about even before college. Like everyone else my age, I got my classical education from the big screen. I saw the Iliad movie called Helen of Troy and while I forget the name of the Odyssey film, I think it starred Kirk Douglas as Odysseus.
But speaking here in my capacity as a polished, sophisticated European as well, it seems to me the laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they?ve taken as their own, as their representative American someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.
For a long time now it has been our practice in the modern Western world to define ourselves primarily by nationality, and to see other identities and allegiances?religious, political, and the like?as subdivisions of the larger and more important whole. The events of September 11 and after have made us aware of another perception?of a religion subdivided into nations rather than a nation subdivided into religions?and this has induced some of us to think of ourselves and of our relations with others in ways that had become unfamiliar. The confrontation with a force that defines itself as Islam has given a new relevance?indeed, urgency?to the theme of the "clash of civilizations."He goes on, though, to compare and explain some differences and similarities between the civilizations, and ends with this:
Today we in the West are engaged in what we see as a war against terrorism, and what the terrorists present as a war against unbelief. Some on both sides see this struggle as one between civilizations or, as others would put it, between religions. If they are right, and there is much to support their view, then the clash between these two religiously defined civilizations results not only from their differences but also from their resemblances?and in these there may even be some hope for better future understanding.It's worth the full read.
Two connected things stick in my mind today. If we're doing better in Iraq than the media tells us, what is going right? And if the media isn't telling us that stuff, what are they telling us instead, and why?
On the first point, Belmont Club has a post that, I think it's fair to say, reports stuff you won't see or hear about tonight on ABCNMSNBCBS. Extra credit question: if things turn out ok in the end in Iraq along the lines of the progress suggested by Belmont Club, use the press's coverage of the quagmire in Afghanistan and the terrible 3 day slog through a quagmire sandstorm on the way to Baghdad to suggest ways Big Media can avoid acknowledging they don't know how to cover a war.
On the second point, Glenn Reynolds says the Nicholas Berg story has been downplayed by Big Media at the expense of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, despite the public's obvious interest.
Some have said Berg's execution should be played on the national news too, especially since the prison photos have received such wide airplay. But I don't think the two can be compared. While I agree that the prison pictures have been overplayed, I don't think the reluctance to show Berg's execution itself is indicative of much. Had there been no prison scandal, the Berg video would still not have been shown. I don't see why, given the saturation coverage with pictures, etc. of the prison scandal, that in itself this makes a difference.
Third, (I know -- I said two points, but Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition!), also from Reynolds, on media bias:
It's wrong to root for your country's defeat. Especially when that defeat would mean the death of innocents. And surely it's worse still when it's merely for domestic political advantage.Isn't it?
As he's fond of saying, read the whole thing.
There's been a great debate going on between Randy Barnett, a constitutional libertarian, and a few other law blogs that are better described as constitutionally conservative. It started out over gay sex, and now it's moved to abortion.
There's some lawspeak involved, but I think Barnett's disembowlment of their arguments is logically clear enough to enjoy.
George Will and David Brooks think the War in Iraq has jumped the shark. I always thought that phrase was odd -- it refers to the Happy Days episode where Fonzie jumped over a shark tank on his motorcycle, thereby indicating that the show was going downhill. I don't know about you but if it's about going downhill, then Happy Days did that when it was first pitched to ABC. But I digress. E.J. Dionne probably though the War jumped the shark when it was pitched by Bush to Rumsfeld, or was it Cheney to Bush, or Wolfowitz to Cheney? Whatever.
As to Dionne, in a response to my emailing friend I wrote this:
Dionne argues that we are fucked over in Iraq, that we can't win any longer, and I think that's a load of crap. In the last 6 or so weeks we've had the Fallujah uprising and Sadr's forces taking control of certain cities. But neither of these "factions" have popular support in Iraq, and the whole country is not imploding. In both cases the situations are under control and getting better daily. We've avoided the bloodshed we obviously could have inflicted in both cases, and have increasingly marginalized each foe. I understand the politics of how things appear to be, especially given the relentlessly negative coverage, and that's certainly a problem for Bush. But the coverage has been relentlessly negative all along. It was relentlessly negative during a 3 day sandstorm during the ride to Baghdad, for crying out loud. Remember the 2-3 week period when we were in a quagmire in Afghanistan? The major media have no clue -- not one -- not half a clue -- they don't even have a fucking clue quark to work with.
I do not believe that everything is peachy keen over in Iraq. It most certainly is not. But that's the point, isn't it? We'll flay ourselves forever over Abu Ghraib while rat bastards (apologies to all the rat bastards out there) like Al Quaeda pulls off murders like this. Meanwhile, we continue to fulfill Bush's promise to create a sovereign Iraq on June 30. We continue to build up Iraq's ability to maintain order, which it must do in order for the new country to survive. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, but for all of the carping you'd think we just had a cave-in. Not.
On the other hand, for the Churchillians out there, try this, via you know who.
Uh, mostly what he said. Except for saying Upper West Side when I think he meant the Upper East Side too.
After quoting several comments on how Bush has screwed things up in Iraq, Jacob Levey concludes:
Ugh. I still believe things to be not-irreparable in Iraq. The stakes are very high, and the U.S. has got to get this right. But I didn't think they would ever go so far wrong.I now suspect that at the end of the day Iraqis will be much better off but the U.S. will be noticeably worse off than if the war had not taken place. Iraq will end up as a more federal, more constitutional, more democratic state than exists in the Arab world so far. But, after the eventual Iraqi state has rearmed sufficiently to put down all the internal threats, it will also be more authoritarian, more militaristic, more theocratic, and more anti-American than it might have been. The U.S., however, will have sacrificed a great deal of its moral capital and credibility in the process-- moral capital and credibility that it needs in order to fight both the military and the social-transformation fronts of the war on terror.
I'm not as pessimistic as Levy, and one of the links he cites, to an MSNBC piece by Fareed Zakaria, it seems to me is coming from someone who was against the war from the start. But he's got Andrew Sullivan, and Kagan and Kristol linked to as well and they aren't of the MoveOn.org variety.
More than one of the links says Bush has mishandled relations with Ayatollah Sistani, the leader of the Shi'ites. I don't know what's being referred to there. It seems to me Sistani has been cooperative in our attempts to rein in Ayatollah Sadr. What else is there to that?
One of the criticisms found in a variety of places is that it was a mistake to disarm the military and kick out the Baathists. Maybe so. But the only criticism that sticks for me to any degree at the moment is that we may have used too few forces, if not during the invasion than at least for the occupation. I haven't seen any analysis that explains to me why the folks who made those decisions were wrong when they were made.
But that's ok. Success breeds success and failure breeds failure, even if the formulas for both were "right" at the outset. Still, by no means do I think all is lost, and the worst effect of the prisoner treatment debacle will be if it distracts us from where we're going and where we need to be. And the worst outcome of the investigations and court martials to come (aside from the growing sense, to me unbelievable, that we can't win) will be throwing the book at the army enlisted personnel on the scene if those directly responsible for their conduct aren't included.
The problem for me as November slowly approaches is that I think the idea of the War was correct and I don't think all is lost by any means. I think it is only lost when we think it is lost. Things could have gone better than they have, and a large lot of the criticism aimed at Bush is political -- but not all of it. Still, John Kerry can't possibly convince me he's the guy to make it work without utterly reversing everything he's said thus far in his campaign. Hold it -- that may still happen. After all, he just backed off his Benedict Arnold CEO bit.
Are we screwed? Or are we screwed?
Yesterday was No Pants Day. Why didn't someone send me the memo?
This is, uh, unique, but please, no golden showers remarks in the comments.
May 7, 2004 -- OAKLAND - Moises Alou has company when it comes to using his urine to toughen up his hands. "I do it during the winter and spring training to keep my hands hard," All-Star catcher Jorge Posada said of the unorthodox skin conditioning program. "You don't want to shake my hand during spring training before practice."Alou, a Cubs outfielder, Posada and Angels outfielder Vladimir Guerrero are the only three hitters in the majors who don't wear batting gloves. While it sounds unorthodox, older players apparently used urine to keep their hands tough and people who do field work in warmer climates use it to keep their hands from developing calluses.
Michele at A Small Victory has this great bit:
In the battle of Michael Moore v. PETA, there are no sides to take. You just grab a big bucket of buttered popcorn, sit back and watch. The way one would watch Hannibal Lecter take on Norma Bates, I assume.
I'm guessing Moore will handle this as deftly as he has this upcoming documentary -- Moore's the subject, not the producer/director.
Moore's in the news this week too because Disney will not allow Miramax to distribute his new documentary video polemic, Fahrenheit 9/11. But the news is that it's not news. Moore has known about it for a year.
Or is less Moore, more.
Less than 24 hours after accusing the Walt Disney Company of pulling the plug on his latest documentary in a blatant attempt at political censorship, the rabble-rousing film-maker Michael Moore has admitted he knew a year ago that Disney had no intention of distributing it.The admission, during an interview with CNN, undermined Moore's claim that Disney was trying to sabotage the US release of Fahrenheit 911 just days before its world premiere at the Cannes film festival.
Instead, it lent credence to a growing suspicion that Moore was manufacturing a controversy to help publicise the film, a full-bore attack on the Bush administration and its handling of national security since the attacks of 11 September 2001.
In an indignant letter to his supporters, Moore said he had learnt only on Monday that Disney had put the kibosh on distributing the film, which has been financed by the semi-independent Disney subsidiary Miramax.
But in the CNN interview he said: "Almost a year ago, after we'd started making the film, the chairman of Disney, Michael Eisner, told my agent he was upset Miramax had made the film and he will not distribute it."
From Lead and Gold comes a link to an article cautioning perspective about Iraq by relating some circumstances during the first 12 months of WWII.
Nor was the administration immune to criticism, particularly for its commitment to defeating Germany first. Given that it had been the Japanese who had attacked Pearl Harbor, Americans found it difficult to understand why in the first months of the war more U.S. troops were being sent to the United Kingdom than to, say, the Philippines, where they might help Gen. Douglas MacArthur to stop the invading Japanese forces. A Gallup poll showed that a substantial majority of the population believed that Japan was the nation?s "chief enemy," and therefore that most of the country?s resources should be committed to the Pacific. In fact, as late as mid-1943 a bipartisan group of senators?all of whom, it should be noted, had a history of opposition to the president?s policies?were accusing the administration of an almost criminal neglect of the war against Japan.
Read the whole thing.
. . . or rather, very very hot.
(Via VodkaPundit.)
Kevin Mitnick, yes, the Kevin Mitnick, helps to catch the bad guy.
Daniel Drezner links to a Chicago Tribune story about the Asian "brown cloud", contaminated air that moves around the world and has scientists theorizing about its effects. Ironically enough, the so-called brown cloud produces white clouds in the atmosphere because water droplets more readily form around the particulates in the cloud.
For me though, this paragraph from the Trib story says it all:
Some researchers, in fact, think the extra-white clouds caused by dirty air are helping to offset the global warming effect. That would offer an explanation for the unsettling fact that "the planet hasn't warmed as much as the models suggest it should," given the amount of greenhouse gas that humans have released into the atmosphere, the researcher said.
Alternate analysis: since so few of these "models" have proven of any predictive value whatsoever over time, maybe the researchers should simply admit that they don't have a clue about how to model the climate and accurately make these predictions.
How much would you pay to embarass yourself? The answer seems to be $5,601.01.
I meant to get to this over the weekend. Then again, if I'd done all that I'd meant to I'd have won the Powerball lottery on Saturday night.
Christopher Dickey writes that the Bush administration's decisions in Iraq have been disastrous and are now irreversible.
Ever since it became clear toward the end of 2001 that the Bush administration was headed for war with Iraq, I?ve been thinking about John O?Hara?s classic 1934 novel ?Appointment in Samarra.? Although the title refers to a town north of Baghdad,* the story is actually about a Cadillac dealer in Pennsylvania. After a few too many drinks one Christmas eve, he makes a fatally stupid gesture, and nothing he can do afterward will retrieve the moment or stop the tragic series of events it sets in motion.
The first thing I note is that 15 or more months before the invasion of Iraq, and before the Congressional resolution authorizing the war, and before the UN Resolution giving Saddam an ultimatum, Dickey was against the war. I suppose this is an "I told you so", then.
This administration is a lot like that Cadillac dealer, I?m afraid. You can see it trying to reverse course, struggling to back away from one rash misjudgment after another in the Middle East. But it can?t even begin to set things straight, and at this point I?m not sure anybody can. Among students of the region?in government and in think tanks, in the United States and around the world?there?s a rapidly accumulating sense of doom, and I use the word advisedly.
I'm not an anti-intellectual. I think the fact that some smart people study places, cultures, and all that, is good. But, there's no reason for me to believe that the "students" he refers to, that is, the students of the Middle East and Iraq, are those whose opinions I might respect. There's a ton of nonsense among academia and think tanks that wax poetically while morally equivalizing over the US and Israel, and the horrible fate of the poor poor Iraqis and Palestinians living under jackboots. There's boatloads of multi-cultural idiots who'll overlook terrorists killing a mother and her four children in order to preserve "diversity". I don't know who Dickey refers to, and you won't find it from reading the whole thing because he doesn't tell you. But already, I don't trust the guy, who was against even thinking about going to Iraq as early as 2001.
He goes on:
It?s obvious that many U.S. officials, and possibly the president himself, now understand how badly we?ve screwed up. But they keep coming up with yesterday?s solutions today, and those won?t work anymore. ?The history of post-Saddam Iraq is one of successive, short-lived attempts by the U.S. to mold a political reality to its liking,? says a just-released report from the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. ?With each false start and failed plan, realistic options for a successful and stable political transition have become narrower and less attractive.?
Let's go to the videotape. The International Crisis Group article to which he refers is found here, and the first sentence of the executive summary (from which Dickey's quote was taken) reads:
The situation in Iraq is more precarious than at any time since the April 2003 ouster of the Baathist regime, largely reflecting the Coalition's inability to establish a legitimate and representative political transition process. [italics added].
Help me out here, friends, but doesn't it percolate through even the CNMSNBABCBS filter that the troubles in Fallujah and Najaf are due to a) Baathists and Al Quaeda fighters who don't give a rats ass about representative political transition processes, and/or b) an upstart Islamo-fascist Mullah who saves his rat's asses for much more worthy causes? I guess the ICG are the "students" of Iraq to which he was referring? Is anyone impressed yet?
He turns his eye toward Israel and the Palestinians later in the piece. I know I'm not up on the intracacies there but his analysis is long on how Bush has just screwed the Palestinians and short on how Palestinians terrorists are the reason why that's happened, if in fact it is what happened.
I've quoted only three paragraphs (out of the first four) and it's pretty clear: proposing the use of force if Saddam Hussein didn't comply with UN resolutions regarding weapons disclosure was in itself a bad idea. If that's so, he's got to make his case. Instead its just a drive-by with an AK-47. He finishes with this:
In the meantime, all over the map you can hear the tick-tock of Al-Qaeda-style terrorism counting down to catastrophe. In Britain an attempt to build a chemical bomb was disrupted, then a plot to stage suicide attacks and provoke mass panic in a soccer stadium was stopped. In Jordan, terrorists plotting to set off an enormous toxic explosion were rounded up. Saudi Arabia stopped several bombings earlier in the month, but missed the terrorists who blew up one of the internal security service?s administrative buildings. In Syria, just last night, running gun battles echoed along the streets of embassy row in Damascus. In Thailand, meanwhile, more than 110 people died in what looked like an abortive uprising by Muslim zealots. ?The air is too hot,? says Justo Lacunza-Balda, who runs the Vatican?s well-informed Pontifical Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies. ?I have this impression that something very big is being cooked.?Yet when President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney testify in tandem before the 9/11 commission tomorrow, the one phrase unlikely to be heard in that closed-door session is ?sorry.? Even when this administration makes a radical U-turn, it never admits it was headed in the wrong direction to begin with, which may be one reason we?re stuck on this road from Bad to Worse.
What are they supposed to apologize for? Islamo-fascist terrorists killing people or trying to? Dickey's an apologist for terrorists. It's our fault that they are so mad. Well at least the first four letter's of his name are apropo.
So the doomsayers are telling us the war is lost or practically so. The problem is, they've been telling us all sorts of doom and gloom stories all along. They told us hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's would be killed, that there would be street to street fighting, that blah blah blah. I'm certain the war has not gone "as planned" but that's because war by definition does not go as planned. And I'm confident those running this one know that.
I'm not able to parse where more troops, or a different approach, might have made things better today than they have. But what I can parse is this: we are much more capable than we are given credit for by the likes of Dickey.
What really strikes me too about the war is that finding soldiers, either over in Iraq or rotated home, who support the war is like shooting at the broad side of a barn. Air American would love to find an Iraq War Kerry Clone, and for all I know they have. But they are a rare species, indeed.
I don't like that progress towards establishing a democratically elected Iraqi government seems uncertain, nor that Fallujah and Najaf, and a few other hot zones have resulted in many casualties these last several weeks. But I have no faith in those who say it was a mistake from the beginning see-I-told-you-so because they'd be saying that now even if it wasn't a mistake from the beginning. To be fair, those who thought it was a good idea from the beginning (yours truly included) will say just because the job isn't done doesn't mean it can't be done. I'm still betting it works though. As Glenn Reynolds says: we're not going to turn Iraq into Connecticut, or even Turkey, overnight.
Fair enough. But President Bush didn't promise that either. And he didn't promise the troops would be home by now. He told us its dangerous and risky. That's been true so far, as I always thought it would be, and the likes of Mr. Dickey doesn't sway me a bit.
This blog sucks because my wide(?) reading habits don't lead much to original entries.
For something original, check out today's offerings from Asymmetrical Information to see what I mean.
In the course of that reading I came upon a hilarious take down. Read it if nothing else.
Continued spring cleaning is my immediate excuse today. Ennui and an overwhelming lack of talent remain at the baseline.
In case you're concerned you won't pass the exam, I recommend the following:
There's nothing like a demonstration to drive the point home.
""The kids screamed and started to cry," said Vivian Farmer, who attended the presentation with her 13-year-old nephew.Everyone was pretty shaken up," Farmer said. "But the point of gun safety hit home. Unfortunately, the agent had to get shot. But after seeing that, my nephew doesn't want to have anything to do with guns."