10. september 2004

Genesis data may have survived From utter despair, scientists have now turned around and said it appears that a lot of the data in the Genesis space capsule survived. Great news if it's true. 11:38:51 PM    comment []  trackback []

Guess which sneaky bastard was behind memogate This was simply too good not to steal! Credits to WizBang, and a hat tip to Glenn for the link. I didn't expect this from Clippy, but after his fall from grace when Bill Gates fired him, what should we expect? Maybe he'll replace Dan Rather at the CBS. PS: More blog Word hoax humour! PS 2: They "blamed" the Columbia space shuttle disaster on Powerpoint. Now they "blame" memogate on Word. What is next? Maybe the next election result will be blamed on Microsoft Excel. PS 3: Yes, calling it "memogate" is tongue-in-cheek, at least from my side. Sorry. 10:04:13 PM    comment []  trackback []

In praise of a monster On September 9, 1976, China's communist leader Mao Tse-tung (Zedong) died. The Guardian has just reprinted John Gittings's next-day Mao eulogy on its website. What do you do when one of history's worst mass murderers die? If you write in a leftist newspaper, you sing his praises and express fear for the power vacuum left after his death. Mao's failure to find his "chosen successor" - two (Liu Shao-chi and Lin Plao) fell by the wayside - must mar his enormous achievements. Yet the positive benefit of encouraging large numbers of Chinese to question and challenge bureaucratic authority could eventually transform China. "So many deeds cry out to be done ..." Mao wrote in his most famous poem. "Ten thousand years are too long. Seize the day! Seize the hour !" Much of the strength of the China which Mao has left behind lies in this confident assertion for the future. Indeed, Europe's left continued to venerate Mao well into the 1980s, and on the fringes, until this day. Most of them may have abandoned Mao today, but they hardly have regained any moral clarity. 8:25:33 PM    comment []  trackback []

The Bush Doctrine I have spent the last hour or so reading Norman Podhoretz' hawkish and fascinating article World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win.  A brief excerpt and further comments on Winds of Change. 7:57:11 PM    comment []  trackback []

"60 Minutes" going down in flames over forged Bush memos If you want to forge documents that supposedly were made in 1972, it is not a good idea to write them in Microsoft Word using the font Times New Roman. Remembering to turn off the autocorrect feature that makes "1st" into "1st" is also a clever move. CBS "60 Minutes" journalists may be dumb enough to fall for it, sure, but the people in the blogosphere sure aren't. PowerLine was first, which brought great credit and server-bombing traffic to them. There was old style journalist blood in the water, and boy did the bloggers have a good time. Even leftist bloggers who'd love these AWOL charges against Bush to be true had to concede, sort of. The mainstream media, for once, jumped on to it pretty fast. CBS is stupidly standing by its story, for now. Even the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten writes about this today, linking the LGF (if they understood permalinks, I'd suggest linking here and here, explaining the facsmile above). I have to find a way to set up my computer to wake me up when something really important happens in the blogosphere. Now that would require some clever heuristics. Update: Fixed link. Note a very good overview of the issue at Tech Central Station with the $64K question: The more basic question is how could a rabble of bloggers, in one day, provide hard core proof of forgery when major news organizations took those documents at face value? Most fundamental of all, why did the New York Times, the Boston Globe and CBS allow themselves to be used for such a transparent attempt to slander President Bush? Out in the blogosphere there are a swarm of people rooting for the answers. I think we already know the answer. It's amazing what a combination of bias and incompetence can accomplish. 3:53:42 PM    comment []  trackback []

No good deed will go unpunished Americans are more or less used to seeing various extremists around the world burning their flag. It's probably a bit more unexpected that people halfway around the world, on Sri Lanka to be specific, are burning Norwegian flags to protest against my country. A group of Sinhalese nationalist Buddhist monks are protesting the Norway brokered peace plan with the Tamils, and there have been claims that Norway's peace brokers are biased (from both sides, apparently). Thus they burn Norway's flag on the other side of the planet. (From a Norwegian article in Aftenposten) 7:19:41 AM    comment []  trackback []

© Copyright 2004 Jan Haugland. Last update: 01.10.2004; 07:23:36.