Yeah, I know all that about polls, but there seems to be a story in the making if the RasmussenReports' presidential tracking poll is any reliable: Kerry has been surging past and ahead of Bush over the last days. It is now Kerry 48% Bush 42%, but look at the development over the last few days. Now we're actually outside the margin of error:
Date
Bush
Kerry
Apr 7
42
48
Apr 6
44
47
Apr 5
45
47
Apr 4
46
46
Apr 3
46
45
I can't see it any other way than this being the result of the tense situation in Iraq. Kerry has hardly done anything clever campaign-wise lately, and I doubt the 9/11 hearings have much effect at this stage.
This is rather dangerous, because it means that America's enemies believe they can hurt Bush by killing US troops. In reality, I doubt a President Kerry will be better news for terrorists internationally, or the extremists on either side in Iraq, but it is a matter of how the situation is perceived. If the polls are perceived as showing America as "weak" and sensitive to bodybags, that can only be bad news for the coalition in Iraq and the war on terror generally.
I emphasise that I don't really believe Kerry will become a Zapatero if he is elected. But it is not inconceivable that US enemies believe that, and hope for him to win (others enemies may well hope Bush wins, since they think Kerry will be able to get more international support while keeping up the hardline approach abroad).
Mark Steyn is standing Quagmire Watch. War opponents are very, very excited at the current level of unrest in Fallujah and the Shiite areas, but Steyn is not standing down from his conviction that Iraq is, all things considered, still on the right track.
Fewer people are being killed in Iraq right now than in Syria, Iran or Saudi Arabia. The only difference is the western media are in Iraq and not in any of those other dumps, and, as I’ve pointed out before, they’re still using their old Baath Party translators.
It would not surprise me if this is true, but I'd like to see the actual statistics.
Spammers have been very creative in avoiding keyword based spam protection. By susbtituting letters, like a lowercase l with a number 1 or uppercase I, and countless other methods they can write any which word a heck of a lot of ways.
How many ways?
Cockeyed has done the math, and I have no intention of checking it, and found that the word "Viagra" can be written 600,426,974,379,824,381,952 (six hundred quintillion!) different ways.
Keyword-based spam filters are unlikely to be able to keep up with this.
A pregnant woman in Mexico performed a caesarean section on herself with a kitchen knife, and became the first woman in the world to both deliver a healthy baby and survive to tell the tale after doing such a procedure on herself.
"She took three small glasses of hard liquor and, using a kitchen knife, sliced her abdomen in three attempts...and delivered a male infant that breathed immediately and cried," said Dr R.F. Valle, of the Dr Manuel Velasco Suarez Hospital in San Pablo, Mexico.
Valle recounted the event in a report in the International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics.
Before losing consciousness the woman told one of her children to call a local nurse for help. After the nurse stitched the wound with a sewing needle and cotton thread, the mother and baby were transferred and treated by Valle and his colleagues at the nearest hospital.
The boy will hear this for the rest of his life: "I cut you from my womb with a kitchen knife, and yet you are not eating your vegetables?"
This is not a photoshopped image. It is a piece of jewlery on her eyeball. That is apparently the new in thing in Holland.
Totally unrelated news story, except maybe in some cosmic sense:
Andre Thomas, a young man in jail accused of killing and cutting out the hearts of his son, estranged wife and her daughter tore out his own eye from its socket with his hand. When asked why, he quoted the Bible:
Mark 9:47: "And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell."
Either he's working very hard to avoid the death penalty by being declared legally insane or, most likely, he is insane, legally or not. His eye could not be saved, so wherever he is going, he is going there one-eyed.
Btw, Thomas' form of Biblical exegesis is called hyper-literalism, that is, inability to understand that some statements are hyperbole or allegory. It is fairly common, in a selective way, among Christian fundamentalists, but rarely with such extreme consequences.
Been adding sitemeter counters to all articles in my, well, articles section. Didn't know I had that many articles there. Some of them attract a steady stream of traffic. Still most of my traffic is not registered on Sitemeter, but it's better than it was.
Now I just have to find out how to put a counter in my categories. Bah.
Oh, and the Radio Userland people seems to have improved the service notably with the server move last week. Especially the comments feature is now, after a bit of trouble, working properly (hint, hint!).
