This one made me laugh: “It’s hard to take Obama seriously when he employs exaggerations of algorian proportions.” I had already heard of algore, but I hadn’t heard that form of the word before. Time to update the dictionaries. (The quote is from James Taranto’s “Best of the Web Today.”)
Does Barak Obama sound a little bitter over the reaction to his bigotted remarks about guns and religion in small-town America?
Lately there has been a little typical sort of political flare-up because I said something that everybody knows is true,” Mr. Obama said, “which is that there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my hometown in Illinois, who are bitter. (URL)
The Reticulator took the blog verbosity test, and here is the result:
Created by OnePlusYou
It says my posts are 81 percent shorter than the average blogger. But how short is the average blogger? Wikipedia says the average male in the U.S. is 5’9.3″ short, and the average female is 5’3.8″ short. But what about bloggers? How do they compare to the rest of the population?
Or did it mean to say, “My posts are 81 percent shorter than those of the average blogger?” I suppose not, because that would be 20 percent more verbose.
The usually reliable Wall Street Journal editorial page seems to be carrying water for Comcast in the net neutrality issue. I could agree that there are problems with some versions of the net neutrality rhetoric, but that’s not what the WSJ discusses. Instead it defends Comcast’s behavior wrt its throttling of BitTorrent, saying it comes under the terms of “reasonable network management techniques.” But if what Comcast was doing was reasonable management, why did it lie about about what it was doing and what it was selling to its customers? (I’m still irritated about the way it lied to me and to others of its customers about what it was doing wrt blocking port 25.)
In addition to defending Comcast, the WSJ attacks Google. But if the WSJ wants to attack Google on net neutrality, maybe it would do better to point out that Google itself has been far from neutral in carrying traffic. It blocks traffic on behalf of the Chinese government, and at home it refuses to sell pro-life ads that have a religious connection. Just as Comcast did, it tells lies about what it’s doing, saying it doesn’t sell ads that mix “abortion and religion-related content.” But the Christian Institute, which is suing Google, points out that that’s not true at all. It sells pro-abortion ads that have religion-related content. It’s only the so-called “pro-life” side that it censors.
Net neutrality, indeed.
I’ve added a new blog to my list: “Speed Gibson: of the International Secret Police“. I noticed him over at SCSU Scholars when he made a remark about responsibility, pointing out that it’s not a standalone word. It means one has to be responsible to someone.
Well, that’s the way I’ve been saying it for the last 30 years. Here is the way Speed Gibson said it:
Reworking Thomas Sowell’s thought on “social justice,” what forms of “Responsibility” are there that are not social? Can someone be said to be irresponsible if alone on a desert island?
I had to check out somebody who would point this out, so went to his blog and found some delightful writings about the workings of his local Minnesota school districts, into which he’s worked characters from Sinclair Lewis’s books. Maybe that description doesn’t make any sense, but there are some interesting insights inside all the fun he seems to be having. I’m going to pay attention to this one, at least for a while.
I’ve been wondering for some time what I was going to do when I finished the Pimsleur Russian course. I like using the Pimsleur language courses because they’re something I can do on my bicycle commute to work, or when I drive, or sometimes when I’m working out in the garage.
But Pimsleur can take one only so far. It doesn’t do much in the way of vocabulary building, and doesn’t do much to help one with the written language. I worked my way through the last of the 90 lessons a couple of months ago. I can review them some more, but even when I know them perfectly, it won’t be nearly enough.
I’ve done more than just follow the Pimsleur course — I’ve learned enough of the Cyrillic that I can more or less pronounce words I see, even if I don’t understand them. I’ve studied some of the grammar in Russian for Dummies and the Lonely Planet guide. And I watch a bit of Russian movies almost every day — sometimes with subtitles and sometimes without. I’ve learned a few things that way, but at the rate I’m going it’s not enough.
I thought of getting a Russian New Testament on audio from the Faith Comes by Hearing people. I have their limited-vocabulary French version on audio, a lightly dramatized one that seems to come from West Africa, and I thought it was very well done. I can more or less follow the Gospels when I listen to them while riding. (The Epistles and other parts without dialog are not so easy to follow, so maybe I don’t know as much of that language as I think I do.) But I don’t think there is a Russian equivalent. I could swear that at one time the Faith Comes by Hearing people had a more modern translation in addition to the Holy Synod one, but I don’t see any sign of it now. I’m afraid the Holy Synod version might be a bit much for me at this point, though it might be worth a try just the same.
But a few days ago I finally found what I need: Lingq. I signed up for the free version for now, but during some months when I have enough time, I’ll sign up for the for-pay version, maybe even for the one that gets me some real-time help from a tutor.
Lingq is orieinted towards learning words. Learning words is not the same as learning grammar and meaning, of course. But I think it will be just fine for me, having just learned some of the grammar and structure from Pimsleur. I do NOT think it would be a good way to start learning a language, and there may be a point when it’s no longer the best way for me to continue, but it seems just right for this point in my learning. I get to select dialogs to read and listen to. I mark the words I don’t understand, and they go into a flash-card system by which I can learn them. I’ll put some of the dialogs on my MP3 player so I can listen to them over and over while I’m riding.
We’ll see, anyway, if this helps me make some real progress.
I’ve been arguing for some time that the hubris that took George Bush to war in Iraq is similar to the hubris by which the left thinks it can come up with a nationalized health care plan that will work. In both cases, the proponents are without a clear plan for what to do once the conquest is complete. They just tell us that surely there has got to be some way to do it.
The people I’ve mentioned this to act like they don’t know what I’m talking about. But Joel Klein gets it. He understands the similarities. He thinks his version is better than the Bush version, but he gets it:
I didn’t question the patriotism of conservatives: I simply argued that it is more patriotic to be optimistic about the chance that our collective will–that is, the best work of government–will succeed, rather than that it will fail or impinge on freedom.
So, the same people who oppose warrantless wiretaps want Big Brother to set up surveillance cameras to monitor airport screeners to make sure there is no profiling.
With nearly 50,000 screeners nationwide, the civil rights and minority groups say “it is unrealistic to believe that a policy created in Washington is being implemented flawlessly on the ground.”
The groups also said, “Broad individual discretion allotted to screeners also allows them to bring individual biases to the screening process.”
“This places our communities and all Americans at risk because individual [screener] biases may distract from actual security threats at the airport,” the groups said.
But I guess it’s OK to profile airport screeners and subject them to additional screening to make sure they’re all working like mindless robots, even though it’s unrealistic to expect them to do so.
HT to American Thinker for the “Irony Alert.” The article is from the Washington Times.
(I reserve the right to be opposed to warantless wiretaps myself, even if it associates me with these unsavory characters.)
So much for the idea that I’ll buy my wife a John Deere B tractor for her birthday someday. Well-heeled collectors are now driving up the prices, according to the WSJ. (“Old Tractors, Maserati Prices“) Not that it would be of much use on our little acreage.
I’ve not even used a tiller to work up our garden the last few years. Instead, I spade it by hand. I like the quiet of it — it’s quality time for thinking — and I’ve long liked doing spade work. Maybe I should have been a professional grave digger, back in the days before backhoes. My parents are visiting now, and when Dad (who is 89 years old) saw how I get the garden ready these days, he decided to do some spading himself. So the garden is getting spaded up much faster than usual, thanks to his help. And last year I probably made the garden much bigger than it needed to be. There was more corn than we knew what to do with. (I plant the corn; Myra does everything else.) It will be hard to keep from enlarging it a little more this year. I also like the idea that I’ll still be able to do this work if I get to 89 myself.
Myra was the Iowa farm girl. I was not raised on a farm myself, nor was I raised in Iowa. But I think the word “tractor” evokes the same image for both of us — a Johnny Popper — one of the later versions of the Model B, like the one towards the bottom of this page. I presume it was one of those that she drove into a center support post on her father’s new garage when she was maybe 7 years old. (I’ll have to check the details with her sometime.)
Though I don’t know how someone that young could have managed the clutch on one of those. So maybe it was something else. I remember an old Alice Chalmers with a hand clutch, which worked so smoothly a kid could handle it.
Some of my fellow conservatives used to think I was over the top when I talked about how abortion is becoming the Holy Sacrament of the secular left. I predicted that soon no nominee would get past the Senate Judiciary Committee without personally performing the sacrament in front of the assembled senators.
Well, look at this. Google will put up with a lot in the name of free speech, subject to Chinese government veto, of course. But one thing it will not tolerate is abortion ads if they also include religion. That is blasphemy and cannot be allowed.
But to be fair, it isn’t quite as bad as their stated policy makes it sound. Google will relent and accept PRO-abortion ads for sites that ATTACK religion.