Should anyone care, our Wii number is 4955 0027 5059 0513.
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10:43:12 PM,
Friday 3 July 2009
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Oh, yes... The St. Louis Zoo is an excellent zoo, full of bizarre animals, such as Okapi and Takin, along with an excellent butterfly house and bird collection. And free!
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06:52:47 PM,
Friday 3 July 2009
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Today I moved an outlet closer to the washer and dryer, and added an outlet under the kitchen sink. Now there is only one extension cord left in the house! No, I lie. 2. 3 if you count the fan that's plugged into a light switch, but still, Progress! And, even better, now I can call the plumber and have the hot water dispenser installed.
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06:50:27 PM,
Friday 3 July 2009
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10:13:32 PM, Friday 26 June 2009
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timesheet
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(1)
02:32:15 PM,
Friday 26 June 2009
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Aha! As a child I really liked Lean on Me. Later on, when internet music happened, I found the original version, and couldn't understand how I could have tolerated it. But now I have the answer! Club Nouveau released a new jack swing cover of it in 1986. I'm not sure if this is more or less embarrassing, but it's much more comprehensible.
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(2)
10:20:16 PM,
Thursday 25 June 2009
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I just got a email from Democrats.org, a website I certainly never subscribed to, and the unsubscribe page required that they send me a confirmation number. Someone doesn't understand about how to avoid aggravating their customer base.
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(1)
04:51:03 PM,
Thursday 25 June 2009
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Kinsley on various groves: He makes two interesting points:
1) "The true answer is that we tolerate discrimination in favor of traditionally oppressed groups more than we tolerate discrimination against them. It's not symmetrical. And, if you believe in affirmative action -- as Sotomayor proudly does, as I do -- it can't be."
2) "The obnoxious form of discrimination practiced by institutions like the Belizean Grove isn't discrimination against men. It's discrimination against ordinary women who aren't successful, or powerful or connected, who haven't risen through the meritocracy. It's not that many of them want to join; most have never even heard of the Belizean Grove. (I'd never heard of it until this week.) It's that the openly expressed purpose of this organization is to create a female elite just like the male elite represented by the Bohemian Grove in all respects except one."
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03:25:04 PM,
Thursday 25 June 2009
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The other reason Iran may be quite capable of surviving as a police state: oil and mercenaries. Oil drilling does not require much in the way of a functioning civil society.
I very much like Friedman's idea of using the televised tyranny in Iran as a narrow end of the oil tax wedge. Though it's worth noting that while I do believe natural resource wealth (not just oil) and tyranny are profoundly linked, I'm not about to cancel my flight plans, which is the largest thing I could do in way of an oil boycott.
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01:37:51 PM,
Wednesday 24 June 2009
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A sniper is someone who is a good enough shot to hunt snipe! This is my new favorite etymology.
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(4)
03:14:01 PM,
Tuesday 23 June 2009
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Or, to put it in terms of Civilization IV, does constructing the Internet make the Police State obsolete? In the actual game, the UN is capable of passing a resolution that abolishes Police States: that doesn't seem likely to work, somehow.
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02:58:56 PM,
Tuesday 23 June 2009
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Various people, okay, Anne Applebaum, but others as well, are talking about how oppression is inherently self-defeating, and no government that murders it's own people can survive long. Unfortunately, there are rather a lot of counter-examples, both historic and modern. Not only that, it's religious foundation gives it a reason-for-being that the eastern european kleptocracies didn't have. I am also reluctant to rely on the humanity of their committees of priest-kings: sincere piety has never been a friend of self-doubt. I take little comfort in the hypothetical arc of history being towards justice. If totalitarian governments didn't work, there would be little need to worry about them. I think it is just as likely that we may be seeing the birth of a much worse Iranian government, as that of a enlightening revolution.
Edit: Dan Drezner saying something similar to what I was trying to get at, with a link to an interesting, optimistic, Hobsbawmian rumination about Tank Man and the man in the tank.
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(1)
02:27:14 PM,
Tuesday 23 June 2009
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site & script courtesy of Moss
