Since I posted This is really pissing me off, I have noticed an inordinate number of searches for a single word: pissing.

All but one from European branches of Google, and even that one was reporting in Italian.

Adolph Giuliani figured out how to get Confederate types to vote for a Yankee.

On Rudy Giuliani's new exploratory committee website you can find a bio of the former Mayor and current frontrunner for the GOP Presidential nomination. The bio describes his current marriage as follows: "In May of 2003, Rudy married Judith S. Nathan. Mrs. Giuliani is a registered nurse with an extensive medical and scientific background."

...needless to say, the bio makes no mention of his first marriage to Regina Peruggi, which was annulled after he discovered she was actually his second cousin.)

I just found out The Best of Soul Train comes on Saturdays.

It was inevitable, I suppose. I thik WCBS-FM or AM still does Golden Oldies in New York City...I haven't even turned on a radio in months...which is why The Best of Soul Train was inevitable.

When I was in high school (circa 1970), Golden Oldies were the records that came out in the 50s. I remember someone in a bullshit session wondering what WCBS would do when funk hit 20 years old.

Consensus was they'd be '50s station instead of an Oldies station.

Not for nothin', really. I'm just turning into the guy I used to make fun of.

I'd name it Ouroboros.

I'm listening to Washington Journal this morning...the 1/3 of the country that believed Dubya is the Celestially Ordained Savor of the American People and Through Them, The World (quite coincidentally, the same position to be claimed by the Antichrist) are even more delusional.

I'm considering the Iraq Study Group's 79 suggestions and wonder why they get lauded when they've produced a grab bag much like Rumsfeld's parting shot.

I read some  responses to Heather Mac Donald's anti-Black screed over at City Journal...the National Review bragged on it AFTER linking it on its home page. Responses by police officers on NYPD Rant (a bulletin board for police supporters) were interesting too.

And the Class Wars continue. I linked that beause it's easier than typing shit out.

You've got to keep your eye on Clay Shirky

Social Facts, Expertise, Citizendium, and Carr
Posted by Clay Shirky

I want to offer a less telegraphic account of the relationship between expertise, credentials, and authority than I did in Larry Sanger, Citizendium, and the Problem of Expertise, and then say why I think the cost of coordination in the age of social software favors Wikipedia over Citizendium, and over traditionally authoritative efforts such as Britannica.

Make a pot of coffee; this is going to be long, and boring.

And so it was...but Mr. Shirky hits it with a domain-independent pattern often enough that you gotta read his stuff.

First, let me say that I am a realist, which is to say that I believe in a reality that is not socially constructed. The materials that make up my apartment, wood and stone and so on, actually exist, and are independent of any observer. A real tree that falls in a real forest displaces real air, even if no one is there to interpret that as sound.

I also believe in social facts, things that are true because everyone agrees they are true. My apartment itself is made of real stuff, but its my-ness is built on agreements: my landlady leases it to me, that lease is predicated on her ownership, that ownership is recognized by the city of New York, and so on. Social facts are no less real than non-social facts — my apartment is actually my apartment, my wife is my wife, my job is my job — they are just real for different reasons.

Throughout America, there are countless peace-builders and peace-building projects. Those skilled in ameliorating the effects of violence -- from conflict resolution experts to nonviolent communicators -- have proven their effectiveness at treating root causes of violence. Yet these programs receive only pennies in comparison to the tremendous costs of violence.

A 2004 World Health Report estimated the cost of interpersonal violence in the United States (excluding war-related costs) at $300 billion per year. We currently allocate more than $400 billion per year to the Department of Defense, not including the cost of the war in Iraq. The financial cost alone is enough to motivate many to support this bill, but the human carnage is simply a cost that should never be permitted in a civilized society.

Waging peace
By Marianne Williamson | November 16, 2006

The Art of Thinking
Helping Students Develop their Faculties of Thinking and Observations
Craig Holdrege

Questioning

The ability to question lies at the root of thinking. When we truly think-and don't just mimic what another person tells us-the activity arises out of questions. Questions are the driving force of any thought process; they give direction, focus, and energy. If we're interested in helping students think, then we must help them learn to question themselves and the world.

One problem with our information age is that people "know" very much without ever having asked for this knowledge or, afterwards, questioning it. We know the earth moves around the sun, we know the earth is 4.5 billion years old, we know we breathe oxygen, we know genes determine heredity-we know, we know, we know. But ask ninth graders how they know any of these facts and you get blank stares and responses like, "I don't know, somebody told me that," or "I saw it on the Discovery channel."

Thought I'd get them out of the way in one shot.

I don't use eBay. Ever. Any email I get from "eBay" is a phishing scam. I get the feeling they are VERY successful on the whole, though...they're sending out a full cycle of notifications all the way down to requests for comments on the quality of the transactions. The PayPal scams are even better...they show you a bill for a laptop or something purportedly being charged against your account, with a link to cancel/dispute the charge. Stealing your identity by convincing you someone stole your identity. Such skillful time-binding and conceptual recursion...I'm almost not annoyed.

The study found that the white men were more likely to supplement heroin use with inexpensive fortified wine, while the African American men were more likely to supplement heroin with crack. Most of the white men were expelled from their families when they began engaging in drug-related crime; these men tended to consider themselves as destitute outcasts. African American men had earlier, more negative contact with law enforcement but maintained long-term ties with their extended families; these men tended to consider themselves as professional outlaws.

Study Finds Different Patterns Of Street-Based Drug Use Among White And African American Men
27 Oct 2006

Among men who live on the streets and inject heroin, there are important differences between African American men and white men in their patterns of drug use, risk of health problems, and strategies for survival, according to a unique study published in PLoS Medicine.

I'm linking this article soley to bring this point to your attention.

At least six million American children have difficulties that are diagnosed as serious mental disorders, according to government surveys — a number that has tripled since the early 1990’s. Most are treated with psychiatric medications and therapy. 

I'm actually retraining myself. I used to be pretty good at this, and it was more relaxing than politics.

"Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing . . . after they have exhausted all other possibilities."

-- widely attributed to Winston Churchill

This was lifted from The Progess Report. I thought it was amusing.

TERRORISM -- 9/11 COMMISSION NOT TOLD OF RICE-TENET MEETING WARNING OF AL QAEDA ATTACK: Administration officials did not inform the 9/11 Commission of a July 2001 meeting between CIA Director George Tenet, CIA counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black, and then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, during which, Rice was warned of an imminent attack and urged to take action against al Qaeda. According to reports in Bob Woodward's new book, "State of Denial," Tenet wanted to "shake Rice" into action, but left the July 11 meeting "frustrated because they were not getting through." Black recalls, "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head." Despite the importance of the meeting, the 9/11 Commission never heard about the encounter. 9/11 Commissioner Tim Roemer notes, "None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews, including interviews under oath, nor do we have any paper on this. ... I'm furious." Jamie S. Gorelick, a fellow commission member added, "I can assure you it would have been in our report if we had known to ask about it." Peter Rundlet, counsel to the 9/11 Commission, wrote, "At a minimum, the withholding of information about this meeting is an outrage. Very possibly, someone committed a crime. And worst of all, they failed to stop the plot."

In keeping with this, from Warrior Lessons II

Develop the practice of doing as little as possible when affecting things. It will require you to understand this most important thing as a process, make you understand the importance of change, timing and balance. Keeping the use of your resources as low as possible means you'll have more resources to deal with the inevitable unexpected.

I suggest becoming familiar with reductio ad absurdum arguments.

The advantage of reductio ad absurdum arguments are:

• it forces you out of justification mode and into discovery mode
• contradictions are easy to find if they exist
• you volunteer none of your own ideas to be attacked

Direct Pointing
by Earl Dunovant
Copyright © 1995

"I will speak plainly. If you understand my words, you may stay. If not, you must go.

"To begin with, I am discussing both the planet and the world. The planet is real, vast, and you are but a single element of it. . . a mote, composed of motes, on a mote of a planet circling one of a vast number of starts in one of a vast number of galaxies in what may be one of a vast number of universes. The world, on the other hand, is internal to you. It's the network of laws and expectations that defines the future, intersecting the network of memory and explanation that defines the past, and the perceptions made relative to these networks. Our bodies live on the planet; we are creatures of the world. Do you understand?"

The crowd looked at each other uneasily. They had not expected to be tested until the lesson was complete.

A disturbing number of women have somehow been driven insane in a very specific way: they want children so much they cut open a pregnant woman to steal the foetus. I saw this article late yesterday.

Ill. Police Look for Slain Woman's Kids
Ill. Police Search for Children of Slain Pregnant Woman, Last Seen With a Woman Now in Custody
By JIM SUHR
The Associated Press

EAST ST. LOUIS, Ill. - Authorities returned Saturday to a thickly weeded lot where a woman's body was found two days earlier her fetus missing, cut from her womb perhaps with scissors in hopes of finding her three children they say were last seen with a woman now in custody.

THE TRUTH

Accepting the truth is the only way to be able to change the truth. Accepting the truth is difficult sometimes. We often think things are other than what they are, and that desire makes us search for evidence that something hidden will come to light and prove things were the way we expected them to be all along.

Meanwhile, had we just accepted events as they happened, unpleasant as they may be, we would have been freed immediately to work on changing things.

Choosing which truth to accept and which to reject is just as bad as rejecting all the truth. We accept pleasant truths and deny unpleasant ones. Or we accept unpleasant truths and deny pleasant ones - you know people that do that, don't you? Go on, tell the truth.

How do you know what the truth is, though?

Republished.

Steely resolve

This was going to be a comment elsewhere, but I decided I wanted to say it out loud, in general.

The first requirement is that you pursue what you think is the most important thing in the world. Without purpose there is no resolve. This most important thing can be a person, a principle, whatever. And it doesn't matter why it's the most important thing to you. All that matters is that it's something you enjoy, can see clearly, and see coming about.

Choose carefully…your will in related areas will be as strong as the area's relationship to your focus, and your will in general will get stronger from the exercise but only in this one thing you can be unbreakable.

From: Seeing Reason: Image and Language in Learning to Think
by Keith Stenning
page 73

Logic makes a radical distinction between discovery of a logical or mathematical proof and justification. Logic provides a mechanical criterion of justification. A conclusion is logically justified if it appears in a sequence of steps of derivation all of which follow from the problem statement or earlier derivations from it by one or other of the rules of inference. Each rule application is 'small' enough that it can be checked mechanically. But how we are to find such a chain of rule applications is a matter of discovery. Discovery can be (and historically has been) by dream, hallucination or revelation. Logic does have something to say about discovery, but by far its most intense focus is on the apparatus of justification, and on the very concept of justification itself.

"It's more about protection and control in the way he goes about using his infamy," said Polak, director and chairman of the Intellectual Property Group at Indianapolis law firm Sommer Barnard. 

Obviously some white folks were more deeply scarred by the OJ verdict than 9/11.

If you a relative, I suggest with respect it's past time to let go and move on. I've dealt with several deaths, I know how that works. And if you're not a relative, get a life and shut up.

Men offer twist to Simpson case
Pair's legal maneuver could force ex-football star to pay for slayings
By Erika D. Smith
September 6, 2006

Man, there's a lotta-lotta stuff I want to get to today and I don't know how much I'll get to. I got income inequality stuff, education stuff, Disney propaganda stuff, race and politics stuff...

Not one bit of it has any 9/11 rememberances.

The funniest is that Republicans have taken their "Party of Lincoln" bullshit to its (il)logical extreme: Bush AS Lincoln. Which makes the Party of Lincoln the Party of Bush.

Think about that for a minute.

The meme was officially launched yesterday on the Huffington Post and OpinionJournal/WSJ Op-Ed pages. Steve Gilliard ran across Lincoln Lied and Thousands Died on the Huffington Post and asked the musical question

So, Seth, are you claiming that opposition to the war is racism or treason or both?

I saw ol' Newt Gingrich's Bush and Lincoln piece in OpinionJournal.

I just saw an ad for a Barbie doll that comes with a dog that eats and craps. Also comes with a pooper-scooper.

Note the dogshit is the very biscuits you feed him. How appropriate is that?

When she looked into the Falcons squad, she was pleased to learn many professional women participate. The roster in recent years has included an epidemiologist, a civil engineer, a high school biology teacher and a registered nurse.

Lawyer's other life: Falcons cheerleader
Her sideline is on the sidelines
By DAVID SIMPSON
Published on: 08/22/06

Nicole Marchand's day job is serious business.

As an assistant district attorney in DeKalb County, she specializes in crimes against children.

So her co-workers were surprised to learn that she will spend some fall weekends dancing in the uniform of an Atlanta Falcons cheerleader before huge audiences in the Georgia Dome.

So what. He still sounds like a political whore.

Leftist ideology causes South Korea's regime to cultivate victimhood and resentment of a Japan imagined to have expansionism in its national DNA.

Let's see how many meaningless right wing buzz words we can jam into a single sentence. "Leftist ideology" counts as one.

Mr. Will yammers on randomly as Mr. Brooks did about Peyton Place, both reminding me of a truism on mathematical proofs: the point of maximum eloquence coincides with the point of minimum confidence. Both are interesting to read because the way they construct their articles tells you a lot about their target audience.

Brown will do nicely, thank you very much.

After telling the crowd that Webb was raising money in California with a "bunch of Hollywood movie moguls," Allen again referenced Sidarth, who was born and raised in Fairfax County.

"Lets give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia," said Allen, who then began talking about the "war on terror."

In an interview, Sidarth said he suspects Allen singled him out because he was the only non-white face in the audience, which he estimated included about 100 Republican supporters.

"I think he was doing it because he could and I was the person of color there and it was useful for him in inciting his audience," said Sidarth. "I was annoyed he would use my race in a political context."

Sen. Allen's Remarks Spark Ire
By Tim Craig and Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, August 14, 2006; 3:16 PM

Democrat James Webb's Senate campaign accused Sen. George Allen (R) of making demeaning comments Friday to a 20-year-old Webb volunteer of Indian descent.

I can't think of anyone I know in Sarasota, Fl. Maybe you're reading, maybe you got the address from the DNS records as one gentlemen who thought sending me a fruitcake for Chrismas would unnerve me.

Fact is, it was a great fruitcake, first one I liked in years.

Oh, right, back to what I was saying. I threw your letter away. 

My father has died.

I don't know if I was really prepared or if I'm just numb right now.