Pre-1985, at least. The good years of video games. :) I am a Defender-ship. I am fiercely protective of my friends and loved ones, and unforgiving of any who would hurt them. Speed and foresight are my strengths, at the cost of a little clumsiness. I’m most comfortable with a few friends, but sometimes particularly enjoy spending time in larger groups. ...
Looks like Coingate is turning out to be as much about simple corruption as weird financial schemes using Ohio money. (I really wish it could be more weird financial schemes. I was looking forward to the exposé on the chinchilla farms.) Governor Bob Taft has admitted he didn’t disclose some golf outings with the central figure in the Coingate scandal, Thomas Noe. While the possibility of free golf doesn’t sound like a big deal — even though it is a violation of the law — the bigger issue is that four top Ohio officials have already resigned because of accepting gifts such as free golf outings. ...
Let’s say you’re CIA Director Porter Goss, and you give an interview claiming that you have an “excellent idea” where Osama bin Laden is hiding. However, you then claim that America’s sense of “fair play” concerning state sovereignty is an issue when it comes to actually capturing him. So, how does that work, exactly? Saddam Hussein was such a great threat to the U.S. from 2001 on that we invaded Iraq and are still occupying the country with a sizable portion of our military, but the person who actually ordered the last major attack on our country is safe because of our respect for the nation-state system? ...
From The Onion. :) “This is no way for people to live,” said Kentucky Family Outreach coordinator Martin Weiss, speaking Monday in front of a half-constructed, five-story Habitrail outside Payneville. “While it’s true that poor Americans need a viable alternative to housing projects, placing them in large, confusing warrens of see-through cylinders is not the solution.”
Frank Furedi writes an article on intellectual/political anti-populism: The belief that the public is too simplistic or too gullible has led some Democratic Party activists to blame the defeat of their presidential candidate in two successive elections on the stupidity of the people. One liberal activist, Michael Gronewalter, states that “civility and intelligent dialogue are useful tools among intelligent people” but are inappropriate for engaging with the public. While his point is oversimplified — there is indeed something wrong if a voter can’t be bothered to find out current information about their own core interests — it would be a sad thing if the lesson the Democratic Party took from the last two elections was that voters were too stupid to understand them. ...
Senator Obama gave another one of those speeches that makes you realize what’s missing in politics in our sound-bite world, this time at the commencement at Knox College: “What will be your place in history?” In other eras, across distant lands, this question could be answered with relative ease and certainty. As a servant in Rome, you knew youd spend your life forced to build somebody elses Empire. As a peasant in 11th Century China, you knew that no matter how hard you worked, the local warlord might come and take everything you had—and you also knew that famine might come knocking at the door. As a subject of King George, you knew that your freedom of worship and your freedom to speak and to build your own life would be ultimately limited by the throne. ...
A House Appropriations subcommittee has voted to cut funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting by 25% next year, totally eliminating the budget in two years. They also voted to get rid of another program that supports children’s educational television. While I think it would be a good thing for public broadcasting to be able to shift from federal funds to other sources, simply so they could get out from under government criticism, this amounts to a direct assault on public television. The excuse made by the subcommittee chair, Rep. Ralph Regula (R-Ohio), was that they needed to cut funding somewhere, and they would rather keep college grants and special education funds than the CPB. ...
Yeah, those words don’t seem like they should all go together, but in this case, it’s appropriate. Check the image on the first page of The AMA Compensation Survey of Marketing Professionals. It takes a bit for it to start, so it may look like a normal picture, but it isn’t. It probably says something about my expectations on the Web when I jump when a picture takes several seconds to start moving. :) ...
Yep, Coingate… Read more about it here. Update: Hey, it made the home page of Yahoo!
One fan’s imagining of Jimmy Olsen’s memoirs: “Did I turn into a giant turtle monster? I sure did. Did I drink the elastic serum? You bet. Did I marry a gorilla? And how. Do I regret any of it? NOT ON YOUR LIFE, PAL.” You know, if Jimmy Olsen was really Robert Evans, that would make a great comic book. :)