Merkwuerdige Liebe, Herr Doktor

September 7, 2003

This via the ever-excellent Wood’s Lot, who got it from Harper’s Index: Amount the Defense Department has lost track of, according to a 2000 report by its inspector general : $1,100,000,000,000 Ratio of this amount to the rest of the world’s military budgets combined : 2:1 Approximate number of accounting systems in use at the […]

Read the full article →

My dog is a terrier, that comes from terroir, earth, and sounds like terror

September 6, 2003

Today the ocean looked like the beast revealed, dark inky gray, but transparent enough to suggest the threat of suffocating depth, with a skin of oily black surfaces promising tactile superiority. What it offered, so much was clear, stood in excess of anything you could sacrifice in return. This afternoon, we saw rain fall for […]

Read the full article →

Perpetual Julie

September 5, 2003

If you live in B.C. or the Pacific Northwest, or just are interested in what’s going on ecologically around here (you know, along the lines of “global warming, local warning”), check out this post by Julie of Perpetualkarma. You know, “just” a blogger, having a little conversation, an address to the reader. No bullshit, but […]

Read the full article →

Technopeasant strikes again, Look at the Fool

September 5, 2003

Thanks to some reader alerts, I learned that pictures on my blog weren’t showing up on Internet Exploder in Windows. They looked fine in Mac, though, and they looked fine in Windows using Opera. But not IE. Why? Because I left out the width definition, using only height instead. I did this deliberately because it […]

Read the full article →

What I did on my summer vacation is not the first assignment

September 4, 2003

Homeschooling: Went to S.I.D.E.S. today to meet one of the secondary advisors. Very interesting meeting, and the kids left with new courses. They already have TLE Math (The Learning Equation) in hand, Emma with 7, Adam with 8. For additional courses we took home two Science 8’s; two English 10’s; two German 10’s (to meet […]

Read the full article →

Take back the night, bring back Enlightenment

September 3, 2003

I still can’t get to dissecting some matters at hand (re. the prior to previous post), but here’s another article that gets to the heart of things: Culture of Shame by Matthew Leeming, a review of Asne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul. Leeming attacks (in my view rightly) cultural relativism that would assign to primitive, […]

Read the full article →

Duped by dreams

September 3, 2003

Interesting post by Philip Greenspun today. The Republicans can continue to win their way into power for the same reason that stupid people continue to buy lottery tickets.

Read the full article →

It’s all in a day’s work for confuse-a-cat

September 2, 2003

Julie, what a pointer, trop riche for sure. What I really want to post about, but won’t today because it’s already late & I’m fagged out, is this and this. Among the Adbuster article’s points is that “American advanced capitalism has ruthlessly exploited our comparison instinct. More than that, it encourages grossly pathological ways of […]

Read the full article →

Laws of men

August 31, 2003

The case of Amina Lawal drags on, again, with the case now adjourned until September 25. Perhaps her lawyers will manage to argue a loophole that allows the men of the Shariah court to “save face” and acquit her. Instead of saving their faces, they should be rubbing the medieval scales from their eyes to […]

Read the full article →

Wanted: allies in love

August 31, 2003

Thank god for the Raging Grannies, thank god for the old crones who won’t shut the hell up. There’s Doris “Granny D.” Haddock, who spoke in Hood River, Oregon, on August 16, 2003, A Small Group of Dedicated People Might Actually Do Something, to name the two politics possible in today’s world: the politics of […]

Read the full article →