Over the last several years, the question of the relevancy of past behavior — indeed, even current “private” behavior — for a person’s ability to fulfill the duties of public office has come up many times. Aside from Vietnam service and/or its lack in the current Presidential election, current reporting by The Oregonian about a U.S Representative’s past is probably the the most recent example of a big story concerning the relevancy of an act years in the past. ...
Today is the six-month anniversary of the day I married a woman I didn’t think could exist, at least before I met her: My soulmate. (As corny as it sounds, it’s true, which still amazes me.) It has been wonder-full. Love you, Lorrie. Looking forward to a lot more anniversaries. :)
Back from one of those vacations I’m always afraid to announce online, since those warnings about robbers somehow finding out where you live and robbing you while you’re away have made me paranoid over losing our Precious, Precious Junk. :) Another lesson in the need for precision on the Web last night. During the John Edwards/Dick Cheney Vice-Presidential Debate, Cheney asked the folks at home to go to FactCheck.com, a nonpartisan UPenn site which he claimed would defend his tenure at Halliburton. Now, there’s one problem. It’s actually FactCheck.org. According to reports, FactCheck.com, during the debate, was apparently owned by one of those domain name resellers that only shows a page asking you to buy the domain name. Not long after the debate, suddenly it was redirecting people to GeorgeSoros.com, a site that is not very friendly to the current Administration. So, the first site many saw when heading to read Cheney’s defense was one encouraging folks to think of the dangers of re-electing Bush. ...
Well, the same hosting company that watched our server get fried — to be fair, they also rebuilt it fast, considering — is now moving it to a more secure facility. I just keep imagining a forklift blade stuck through the server rack, somehow skewering only our production server. :)
Amazing how much lightning running in on one server can kill your time and desire to blog. :| (Not this server…our production Web server at my work.) Anyway, another interesting Spiked book review, for two reasons: What the author is trying to tell us, and what the article says about the publication. First, as you can read in the article, the book being reviewed argues that the modern concept of inclusion is reducing the value in our institutions. To become accessible to the masses, they simply require less of us, which has the effect of removing our desire to aspire to the heights those institutions once exemplified. ...
A recent Spiked article has some interesting things to say about modern terrorist movements and their globalist, as opposed to nationalist, backgrounds. I don’t agree with the main thesis — that Western humanitarian intervention weakened the concept of state sovereignty so much that terrorist movements no longer have nationalist aims — because I don’t think the weakness of the state is a new thing. Internationalism has eroded state sovereignty for quite a long time, but a large part of the weaknesses of the state system are the same ones that it has had all along. (A reliance on national identity for legitimacy, for instance, makes it very hard to fill the entire world with brand-new states, which was the one of the effects of decolonization. Former colony space simply could not remain “empty” of states when the powers of the world were states themselves. After all, with whom do you set trade rules?) ...
I don’t watch Days of Our Lives most years. Soaps in general tend to be too repetitious for me. (That comment isn’t meant to be seen as a shot at the genre, which I appreciate. I have the same problem with police dramas, no matter how critically acclaimed.) The turmoil and strife among a group of familiar characters — trapped in a isolated setting and in a claustrophobic loop of repeating plotlines — just doesn’t hold my interest for more than a couple of episodes.
Every once in a while in the blog world, some mildly controversial topic will come along and kick up up a mini-storm of opinions. One of the latest is over Wikipedia, a project encouraging open participation in building an encyclopedia-like reference resource.
How contentious does an election have to be to make Garrison Keillor angry? I think we just found out. BTW, a wonderful example here of how Google AdSense can work in sublimely ridiculous ways. On each page of the In These Times site that I visited, there was an ad for “Republican Singles.” :)
Pretty site. Good sense. Browse Happy.