Ranting and Roaring

If only I had said something!

Ex-Buffy actor checks into rehab

Former Buffy the Vampire Slayer co-star Nicholas Brendon said Thursday he has voluntarily entered a treatment centre because of an alcohol problem.

I’m not sure if this (endorsed by TMLutas here) makes any sense. Debt in the form of U.S. Treasury bonds is fully fungible both in purpose (one supposed use is as good as another: the US is still getting cash) and market use (beyond the impact of the specific terms and conditions per issue, recently issued bonds are no different that previously issued bonds). If any country wants to get out of the funding US for wars business, then they’re getting out the funding US for anything else business (via Treasury bonds) also.

Or to state it another way, buyers of new debt are not making any bets that holders of old debt are not also.

TMLutas writes:

The sad spectacle of US troops abusing prisoners demonstrates (once again) that democracy and freedom isn’t about having a much better government than any other. It’s about finding the bad apples relatively early, punishing them, and excluding them from further service so the rot doesn’t spread.

In something of a similar fashion, a rot is spreading through the Canadian politic. The corruption that has been uncovered in the last three years at the municipal, provincial and federal level (not to mention in law enforcement) is simply staggering. And I can’t help think the core enabler of this situation is the smug and complacent Southern Ontario voter, with no thought running through its collective head except “everything is super, we’re the best in the world, everyone who doesn’t see things the way I do is a provincial extermist bigot”. For the most part, is not even liked we’re being paid-off, as say Atlantic Canada is: we’re just happy to think we’re kings of the world.

We’re getting the Canada we deserve.

Wretched is reporting that the enemy forces are compacted into a 4km square area in Fallujah (via TM Lutas).

A question for the knowledgable: why doesn’t the US military use “sonic” attacks against enemy positions? Surely it’s fairly easy to create noise on the level of a couple of Who concerts that would absolutely drown this area in sound. This would drive all the civilians out of the area and drive the opposition to absolute distraction (if not suicide) after a day or two.

Since I was complaining earlier about enemy propaganda being reported about news, how about this:

Marines, backed up by jet fighters, attack helicopters and an aerial gunship, fought furious battles yesterday with Fallujah terrorists – who used women and children as shields. For the second day, black smoke and flames billowed into the sky and earth-rattling booms shook the Iraqi city as the fighting erupted on three fronts in the Sunni stronghold.

Let’s see some high quality pictures of the civilian shields. Surely this is an important piece of information for the home front.

This has been bugging me for awhile too. The whole “Jennigrad” incident is also a symptom of the media equating parotting enemy propaganda with information received from their “own” side.

In an industry that feeds on ratings and bad news, a failure in Iraq would be a goldmine. When our so-called “trusted” American media takes a quote from an Iraqi doctor as the gospel truth over that of the men and women that are daily fighting to protect the right to freedom of press, you know something is wrong. That doctor claimed that out of 600 Iraqis, that were casualties of the fighting, the vast majority of them were women, children and the elderly. This is totally absurd. In the history of man, no one has spent more time and effort, often to the detriment of our own mission, to be more discriminate in our targeting of the enemy than the American military. The Marines and Soldiers serving in Iraq have gone through extensive training in order to limit the amount of innocent casualties and collateral damage.

Yet, despite all of this, our media consistently sides with those who openly lie and directly challenge the honor of our brave heroes fighting for liberty and peace. What we have to remember is that peace is not defined as an absence of war. It is the presence of liberty, stability, and prosperity. In the face of the horrendous tyranny of the former Iraqi regime, the only way true peace was able to come to this region was through force. That is what the American Revolution was all about. Have we forgotten? Freedom is not free and “peace” without principle is not peace. The peace that so-called “peace advocates” support can only be brought to Iraq through the military. And we are doing it, if only the world will let us! If the American people believe we are failing, even if we are not, then we will ultimately fail.

From yesterday’s Best of the Web:

Europe vs. International Law

Writing in National Review Online, Joshua Muravchik argues that Europe, by denouncing Israel for defending itself against the terror group Hamas, is not only acting in a morally craven fashion but defying international law:

Each of these European states is a party to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Unlike, say, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the genocide convention is a treaty, with the force of law. It is one of the oldest, and perhaps the most widely subscribed piece of international human-rights legislation, and arguably the one with the soundest legal foundation, codifying what the Nuremberg tribunal and the U.N. General Assembly in its very first session found to be existing customary law.

Article One of the convention obligates every party “to prevent and punish” genocide as “a crime under international law.” The convention goes on to define genocide as, inter alia, “killing” intended “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

Hamas seeks the destruction of the Jewish state, and its charter says it “regards itself the spearhead and the vanguard of the circle of struggle against World Zionism [and] the fight against the warmongering Jews.” As Muravchik writes, this is “as clearly formulated a project of genocide as we have had since Mein Kampf.”

Yes, I know, I haven’t writing much here recently. Sorry.

Recent News:

• Trinity-Anne has been in Newfoundland since Sunday and will probably be there until the 11th of May. Very sad for us, very fun for her.
• Toronto’s new Terminal 1 is a nightmare of bad design and “looks über function”. It is pretty, in a 1987 European Airport sort of way. I’d like to say that this (the most passenger expensive airport in the world) is the straw that broke the camel’s back for me, but that camel’s been flat on the ground for a long time. Highway 407, Terminal 1 … now prepare for another “Public-Private” (we pay, they benefit) ass-raping, tax payers.
• My work laptop is dead.
• You! Go get Jäger now! I command you. It will massively reduce the time you spend blogging. Really.
• It’s supposed to be 24 degrees in Toronto today. Look what I found while getting the weather. Will you be taking the one-”tonne” challange? I thought so. Remember where those silent-but-deadly greenhouse gases come from.

Gareth Simpson quotes an old post of mine, where I wished that aggregators could be more closely integrated into browsers, since most of the time, the aggregator serves as the browser’s burly bouncer, figuring out who gets in and who’s

Royby at a weblog about weblogs writes:

BlogMatrix Jäger is yet another Weblog and News site reader. But the difference between this reader and others is that it uses a single panel instead of the “traditional three panel layout of most other readers. It will cost you US$15 to subscribe, but if you hurry you can pay only US$10. Worth a look at perhaps as they say that this reader will tell you ONLY what has updated.

Next Tuesday’s Carnival of the Canucks will be hosted (again!) by Vicki at Just in from Cowtown.

Next Tuesday’s Carnival of the Canucks will be hosted (again!) by Is up at the Easternblog. Go check it out. Nice job, Eva!

While I was doing some research on Unicode I came across something called Proto-Sinaitic^* which lead me to this neat page “Evolution of Alphabets” that graphically demonstrates how various lettering systems evolved (such as ours).

^* suggestion — sigma: “tits”.

I’m getting a $CDN 0.83 refund! Or maybe not: they probably won’t pay out amounts less than a dollar.

Question of the year:

“Can you describe how you felt when the bodies of children clutching their dolls were unearthed in mass graves?”

BAR driver Jenson Button came second at San Marino today, just behind You-Know-Who. He also led the race from the Pole position until the first pit stop.

Update: Results Here

This is an outline of how Jäger will deal with RSS 2.0 Enclosures. This may be available in version 1.2 or maybe 1.4 if parts prove to difficult to implement.

Here’s an example of an RSS feed that uses enclosures. One could use to (for example) automatically save all these MP3 songs.

1. We can indicate the presense of enclosures in the main list by use of an icon in the main list. Since we plan to be adding icons anyway (to indicate open and closed Categories) this will not take up significantly more screen Real Estate. We’ll have to do some usability tests to make sure this doesn’t look too awful or is confusing.

   Clicking the enclosure icons will pop up a dialog giving the option to save the enclosures. The icon should change after enclosures have been saved.

2. We can automatically save enclosures. This would be an option in the Weblog Settings dialog, which would also allow (demand) the user select a directory for the enclosure to be saved in. Download enclosures will have to be given their own thread and there’s actually a fair bit of clever logic that will have to be added for scheduling and dealing with broken links and what not.
3. We may want to add an option to the Filtering to look for enclosures
4. Atom probably has an equivalent: we’ll have to find out what that is and deal with them in much the same way.
5. We’ll probably call them attachments, to be more consistent with user terminology.

Joey writes:

Team Ms. McNally up with her Canadian dim-bulb counterpart Leah McLaren and put them on some kind of “gosh-they’re-cute-but-dumb” reality show a la The Simple Life or Newlyweds.

Harsh, dude, harsh.

Canadian women win curling championship

Canada’s Colleen Jones won the women’s world curling championship in Sweden beating Norway’s Dordi Nordby in Saturday’s final.

Good job, ladies.

1. Subscribe to weblogs by dragging links onto Jäger. You do not need to find the RSS feed or (usually) even the home page: almost any associated link will do.
2. After you’ve read a few blogs, click on the Recently Updated List button again and everything you’ve seen will disappear. If you’re a power reader, turn on View > Recently Updated List > Skip After Reading and they’ll disappear as soon as you’ve moved on to the next blog!
3. You can interactively unsubscribe to an entire Category of posts by selecting Actions > Unsubscribe….
4. Almost everything you can do in the Actions menu is available directly in the Recently Updated and All Weblogs Lists by a right mouse button click.

Who will rid me of this turbulent Ferrari dominance?

• 2.4 litre V8 engines which must last two races (currently, 3 litre V10 engines to last race weekend)
• A return to manual gearboxes and a ban on traction control and power steering
• No tyre changes during race and one tyre supplier only
• 12 teams on grid (currently 10)
• No spare cars allowed during race weekend

Ex-Pogues singer attacked in London

Shane MacGowan, former singer with Irish folk-rockers The Pogues, suffered facial injuries during a beating in a central London pub, a British newspaper reported Wednesday.

How could they tell?

Nicely put , FOAD:

Earlier this week, a member of the Formula One media attacked FIA president Max Mosley for failing to show up at the funeral of Brazilian great Ayrton Senna. The Briton, instead, flew out to Austria in the days after May 1, 1994. ‘Roland had been forgotten,’ said Mosley, referring to the young Simtek driver with the surname of Ratzenberger who also perished in a F1 crash that weekend.

So I went to his funeral because everyone went to Senna’s. I thought it was important that somebody went to his.’

The real reason Libya came out of the cold: F1.

Dave Pollard’s theory of Everything you need to know about Canada in 10 minutes. Here’s my old take.

The Discount Blogger hangs up his blogging gloves. Michael wants to investigate the theory that there’s more to life than sitting in front of a computer.