Thursday, September 18, 2003

As of about... (September 18th, 2003 -- 6:39 PM EDT). As of about six this evening in Washington, DC we got the first of what I'd call serious gusts. But so far not too... [Talking Points Memo] Josh Marshall interviews Ambassador Joseph Wilson, of Yellowcakegate-outing fame.
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Ow. Ow. Ow. I'm in the throes of a truly nasty eyestrain headache right now - the sad result of trying to stay awake last night while Arwen was over, late, afer she got out of work. It couldn't feel much worse if someone had let rabid gerbils loose on my eyesockets. Ow.
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XML Blogging Language instincts. The dictionary of the Semantic Web may one day be written. But not until we've done a lot of yammering, a lot of listening, and a lot of imitating. We need to find ways to help these behaviors flourish. [O'Reilly Network] The ideas put forward in this article got a big boost this week when Kimbro Staken revealed Syncato, his way-cool new blog software that's based on XML DB and that uses XPath expressions in its URLs. Today Kimbro released the source code which (I can't resist) you could also find using this search: http://www.xmldatabases.org/WK/blog/item//a[contains (@href, '.gz')]. ... [Jon's Radio] Ok, this is nifty, nifty stuff that Kimbro has written - any chance we can get this kind of functionality pulled into Radio? Both the XPath and XSLT aspects are things that I think would really help extend the usefulness and power of Radio...

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Meeting Interesting People Thursday night blogger meeting at Berkman is on. [Scripting News] I'm going to try to make it to this tonight - if nothing else, I'd like to meet Dave Winer. Plus, there's dinner afterwards, and I don't feel like cooking tonight. Or any night, for that matter. But that's another topic. =)
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Presidential Issues - What Matters To You? At a message board I go to, someone asked what the issues were that would determine who we think should be president. This is what I came up with. Just a note - the other participants on the board tend to the loonie "Hillary's gonna run for President! She's so EVIL!" right-wing side of things, so that's the target audience for this... Civil liberties - I feel that we NEED a president who actually values them. Respect for international law - how can we expect our citizens to be treated equitably overseas when we lock up other countries' citizens as "enemy combatants" - a concept which does not exist anywhere in international law? I'm not saying we need to join the International Criminal Court (though I feel that's the right thing to do) but we should stop breaking the conventions we HAVE signed and agreed to. Homeland security - we're not providing near enough funding for (among other things) first responders, port security, etc... We need a president who treats homeland security as something more than just an opportunity to give his dad's buddies new toys to play with (*cough*poindexter*cough*). The deficit - we need to get rid of it ASAP. Obviously, some deficit spending is needed when we're in a recession, but half a trillion bucks? Without hiking taxes to pay for it? That's just dumb. This country needs fiscal responsibility again, like what worked in the '90s. Support for the troops - and no, I'm not talking about bringing them home - I'm talking about paying them enough while they're there AND home, not cutting veterans' services, etc... Our soldiers deserve much better than they've been getting for years. Judicial appointments - as much as I love the 9th Circuit's rulings, they're not actually GOOD rulings quite often. What's more, they just provide more fuel for the right wing stacking of the federal bench with reactionary judicial activists. Souter, O'Connor, Kennedy - these are justices I can respect, agree with them or disagree with them, because they don't feel as if they're motivated by politics, unlike the 9th Circuit or, say, Scalia and Thomas. Privacy rights - speaks for itself, really. Then there's my pipe-dreams - the things I'd love to see in a president but understand that I won't, since I'm waaaaay to the left of the majority of the electorate (and therefore SHOULDN'T be perfectly represented by the president - just as the wacky right shouldn't (but is) be perfectly represented by the president either): Death penalty - I fail to see how it's not unconstitutional. It's also more expensive, not a deterrent, etc...it's just revenge killing, and that's not right. Gay rights - support for same-sex marriage, extension of all anti-discrimination laws to cover discrimination against homosexuals, the elimination of don't ask don't tell, etc... Gun control - ban handguns. Period. While we're at it, I'd like to see some serious reconsideration of the Second Amendment - rewrite it to be, y'know, CLEAR. I could even accept it being rewritten in a way that weakened gun control, just so long as it MAKES SENSE. A return to truly progressive taxation. Not 80% tax rates, but 50%, for sure. Didn't exactly destroy the economy in the '50s, did it? I'm sure I can come up with more, but that's it for now. =)

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The Saudis Want The Bomb. Oh Crap. Saudis consider nuclear bomb. Nuclear arms: Saudi Arabia, in response to the current upheaval in the Middle East, has embarked on a strategic review that includes acquiring nuclear weapons. [Guardian Unlimited] Ok, this is really, really, really bad. I'm more comfortable with Iran having nukes than Saudi Arabia. Can you imagine just how bad this could get?
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BlogPulse automates trendspotting. Yet another memetracking site keyed into the blogosphere is the still-in-beta BlogPulse, which identifies key phrases (usually of two words or more) - as well as topics, people, and links - that are appearing most often in tracked weblogs each day. [Radio Free Blogistan] [A blog doesn't need a clever name] I came across this yesterday - nifty stuff. The various and sundry tools and apps that have grown up around the blogosphere are pretty amazing - TrackBack, Daypop, Blogdex, etc...it gives all these new ways to look at the blogosphere - are any of them applicable outside the land of blogs, though?

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