Andrew Sullivan's got a great weblog post about the un-conservativism of President Bush. A quote:
He junked decades of American foreign policy in the Middle East, abandoning attempts to manage Arab autocracies for the sake of a steady oil supply, and forged a new policy of radical democratization of the Middle East. He invaded two countries - one in the grip of a theocratic dictatorship, the other brutalized by a Stalinist kleptocracy - and is in the process of trying to convert them into modern democracies. Nothing this radical has been attempted in U.S. foreign policy for a very long time. And nothing so liberal. In the 2000 campaign, Bush mocked the idea of "nation-building" as liberal claptrap. Now it's the centerpiece of his own administration.
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On the most fundamental matter, i.e. the war, I think Bush has been basically right: right to see the danger posed by Saddam and the nexus of weapons of mass destruction and Islamist terror; right to realize that the French would never have acquiesced to ridding the world of Saddam; right to endorse the notion of pre-emption in a world of new and grave dangers. But much of the hard work has now been done. No one seriously believes that Bush will start another war in the next four years. And in some ways, Kerry may be better suited to the difficult task of nation-building than Bush.
Domestically, moreover, Bush has done a huge amount to destroy the coherence of a conservative philosophy of American government; and he has been almost criminally reckless in his hubris in the conduct of the war. He and America will never live down the intelligence debacle of the missing Iraqi WMDs; and he and America will be hard put to regain the moral highground in world affairs after Abu Ghraib. The argument Kerry must make is that he can continue the substance of the war, but without Bush's polarizing recklessness.
This weblog got over 60 spam comments yesterday. I am not amused.
So, I got off my lazy ass and installed MT-Blacklist, which will (hopefully) be much more effective than my hacking of Comments.pm to reject spam URLs. It's trivially easy to install. It also has a nice De-spam feature that will search through your existing comment database and remove the spam.
Now all I need is to add a CAPTCHA plugin and I'll be all set.
I sometimes (ok, everytime) take issue with Paul Graham's Lisp-worship, but his latest essay, Great Hackers, is absolutely brilliant. (Possibly because it doesn't fawningly mention Lisp.) It's a veritable treasure mine of gems:
But the next time I talked to him, he said they'd decided to build their software on Windows NT, and had just hired a very experienced NT developer to be their chief technical officer. When I heard this, I thought, these guys are doomed. One, the CTO couldn't be a first rate hacker, because to become an eminent NT developer he would have had to use NT voluntarily, multiple times, and I couldn't imagine a great hacker doing that; and two, even if he was good, he'd have a hard time hiring anyone good to work for him if the project had to be built on NT.
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It's pretty easy to say what kinds of problems are not interesting: those where instead of solving a few big, clear, problems, you have to solve a lot of nasty little ones. One of the worst kinds of projects is writing an interface to a piece of software that's full of bugs. Another is when you have to customize something for an individual client's complex and ill-defined needs. To hackers these kinds of projects are the death of a thousand cuts.
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I think what a lot of VCs are looking for, at least unconsciously, is the next Microsoft. And of course if Microsoft is your model, you shouldn't be looking for companies that hope to win by writing great software. But VCs are mistaken to look for the next Microsoft, because no startup can be the next Microsoft unless some other company is prepared to bend over at just the right moment and be the next IBM.
My new man to despise: Bill O'Reilly. Actually I guess I've despised him for quite some time now, but here's a candid report of what happens in the "no-spin zone". Excerpt:
Prof. COLE: No, nobody should be surprised. But when he says sanctimoniously says, `We can't have spin; it's dividing the country; you know, the spin has got to stop,' and then he starts accusing another media outlet of engaging in that spin--all I was saying was, `Look, Bill, you're doing the exact same thing.' And as soon as I said that, he literally blew up. He screamed at me; he called me an SOB three times. He said, `We will not put this accusation on air when we show the thing, and you're never, ever going to be on this show again.' And sure enough, when the show aired...
Update: I've cut-and-pasted from the Google cache since the original link (http://www.cablenewser.com/original/cole_transcript_july1.htm) seems to be broken.
Read full entry...CBS's Marketwatch talks about a recent report entitled "I Didn't Do It Alone: Society's Contribution to Individual Wealth and Success."
The report is published by Boston-based United for a Fair Economy, a nonprofit group that researches and raises awareness on issues related to wealth and power. It has signed more than 2,200 multimillionaires and billionaires to a petition to reform and keep the inheritance tax; the "I Didn't Do It Alone" report was gleaned from small sample of those petitioners.
"Pro-business economic policies and tax policies are often centered on the myth of the self-made man," the report says. But the myth of "self-made" wealth "is potentially destructive to the very infrastructure that enables wealth creation."
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The myth of the self-made man is that he has "made it" alone.
Warren Buffett, founder of Berkshire Hathaway and the second-richest man in the world, says: "I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned."
Two tidbits In honor of today's failure to pass a gay-marriage ban. The first is a wikipedia article about the history of same-sex unions throughout mankind. (Not that this really matters to the religous right, as I'm sure they'll just move on to some other shoddy argument against gay marriage.) History of same-sex unions throughout the world
The second bit is a very concisely worded comment on Fark that summarizes my feelings on the matter:
I think that what it ultimately boils down to is that marriage, as far as the American government is (or should be) concerned, is simply a legal contract between two people detailing various completely nonreligous things, such as visitation rights, taxation, property distribution, etc. Denying two people the right to enter into a legal contract based upon their sexes is as ludicrous as saying that a black man can't sell a car to a white man, or Hispanics can only be business partners with other Hispanics, or only Baptists can get loans. Such things, as well as laws against same-sex marriage, are a blatant violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment, and are just about as equally clear a violation of the 1st amendment's clause regarding the establishment of religion, since the only reasons against such a marriage are religious in nature.
Now, if the Catholic church or the Protestant church or whatever church decides that they do not want to allow the religious act of same-sex marriage, that it certainly within their rights to do so. In fact, I would prefer it if they didn't. But for the government, an instituion that is supposed to remain 100% secular and objective, to bar two people from marrying because of their sexes is reprehensible and antithetical to the nature of freedom upon which America was founded.
The Junk Science of the Bush Administration. Infuriating. 'Nuff said.