Tuesday, November 12, 2002

Independent News. Bush's Christmas present for the world, Iraq war Independent News [Blog Left: Critical Interventions] Maybe they're realizing that the war could last longer than a couple weeks, which means they NEED to go in sooner.
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Democratic Presidential Hopeful Lays Out His Plans for Economy. A likely presidential contender, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, is to give a speech calling for sharp spending reductions and rolling back tax cuts. By Adam Nagourney. [New York Times: Politics] Well, the rolling-back-tax-cuts is a good thing, at least if those being targetted fit the needed criteria: they make as much money as I do. In fact, let's not just roll back Bush's tax cut - weren't there tax cuts on the upper percentiles during Clinton's administration? Let's roll some of THEM back to. And then give another tax cut to those who need it. As to spending reductions - if we're talking about cutting some of the, what, 40 billion in farm subsidies, or various other corporate welfare, I'm there. If we're talking about cutting social services, nah. Deficit spending for needed services isn't a bad thing when the economy's not good. Sadly, we're talking about social services here and a moderate (ha!) southern Dem, so they'll be on his to-cut list.

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Blogging goes wireless:. "This is exactly what journalists should be worried about. In a few years, millions of people will have mobile phones with high-quality integrated digital cameras. Whenever something happens anywhere in the world, pictures and eyewitness accounts will be up there on the web for everyone to see in no time." [evhead] I don't need the camera - I'd just be happy if I could get Radio so that I could leave it running on a server at home all the time, and something to send emails with items to post back to the server. The Hiptop seems like the best solution for that so far, and I'll probably start doing that once I a) have a system I can leave here running 24/7 (or killed/restarted every 4 or 6 hours if the memory problem in Win2000 won't go away) b) have a Hiptop But it's something I'd really like to be able to do - more for the coolness of it than any practical application, yeah, but still, it'd be REALLY cool.

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Mutombo and Rogers Have Room to Improve. If Dikembe Mutombo and Rodney Rogers could not solve the inexperienced Bulls, what chance do the Nets have when they play host to the San Antonio Spurs on Wednesday? By Steve Popper. [New York Times: Sports] Not much? Mutombo isn't the force he used to be, and Rogers is absolutely useless if he can't shoot from outside. Duncan is so much better than either one of them that it's not even funny. Things like this (and discussion with Bruce of a blog doesn't need a clever name, and people talking about the future of the Celtics on various mailing lists) makes me think about where basketball in the US is going. Big men in the traditional mold are pretty rare - I don't think they're any more rare than they've ever been. The difference is that there are a lot more teams than there used to be, and the biggest source of additional players (Europe) doesn't have big men that play with their backs to the hoop. A couple teams are adapting to this more international style already. The team that's had the most success doing this is pretty obvious: the Mavs are built around a nasty shooting European big man, after all. They're a long distance shooting team, using their ability to force defenses to open up under the hoop to cover the outside shooters as a way to get to the hoop as well. They're an unbelievable offensive force, but not so hot on defense. The Celtics are the other team that seems to have taken that model and run with it, with a generous helping of defense added. There's been a lot of talk about their ability to completely mess with transition defenses by launching three pointers or other long range jumpers when they (Walker, Delk, Williams, Pierce) see they can't penetrate the defense. Carpet bombing, people have been calling it. Could be the wave of the future...

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