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6. november 2004
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Strong rumour: Arafat has Aids
It was actually the first thought entering my mind when I heard that Arafat has a mystery blood illness that destroys his immune system. Obviously I am not alone: Yasser Arafat may be dying from Aids.
Yes, it's a rumour with only circumstantial evidence in its favour (available to the public anyway), but it is certainly feasible and explains a hell of a lot about the near-total media blackout, doesn't it? Arafat's wife Suha, who he incidentally hasn't bothered to meet for years, is controlling what gets out, and that is essentially nothing.
It was a wise move to take him to France. The French will lie through their teeth to hide this. If it is confirmed, it will destroy Arafat's reputation in the Arab world. If Arafat is a confirmed homosexual who died from Aids, it could even can take down Arafat's successors in the Fatah/PLO movement. Who do you think will fill that vacuum?
If this had been some western celebrity dying from a mystery blood disease, MSM would be filled with speculation about Aids by now. With their old hero Arafat, Europe's mainstream media will keep silent.
PS: Arafat and Aids media watch. A few false alerts in Arab media that sometimes spell "aides" somewhat differently.
PS 2: This old story by Sgt Stryker is not only funny, it tells us a lot about the hypocritical attitude to homosexual sex in the Arab world.
They [Saudis] don't go around saying, "Women are for marriage, men are for pleasure" for nothing, Timmy. Yet being presented with a living representation of a Greek vase portrait had the effect of stupefying me, until I quickly recovered and got the driver's attention.
The comparison to the ancient Greeks is hardly accidental.
PS 3: Those who know me will be aware that I have nothing against gays. I have a lot against hypocritical mass murderers like Arafat, though.
10:20:18 PM 
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I cut and I cut, and it's still too short!
Here's the guy democrats should listen to:
"I think the party of Roosevelt became the party of Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11," said Panetta, the former chief of staff to President Clinton and head of the Panetta Institute. "There will be a real push to move the party more to the left and that would be a serious mistake because that's not where the country is.
"We've learned in the past if we are going to compete nationally, if we are going to appeal to Americans across the country, we've got to speak to issues that affect the middle class and not just speak to issues on the left," Panetta continued. "That’s the battle that is going to take place."
Kos, on the other hand, along with Michael Moore represents the voices the democrats should never listen to and even less take "marching orders" from. His winning strategy is to lie:
And thus, the biggest silver lining of this election is how the GOP's victory is thus far being claimed, framed and explained. To that I say, "Let us join that chorus." And we should do so now, because there is immediacy in the post-election window of opportunity.
Marching order #1, therefore, is this: No matter whom you talk to outside our circles, begin to perpetuate the (false, exaggerated) notion that George Bush's victory was built not merely on values issues, but gay marriage specifically. If you feel a need to broaden it slightly, try depicting the GOP as a majority party synonymous with gay-haters, warmongers and country-clubbers. Because I, for one, am tired of hearing whiny complaints from conservatives that, not only do I not have values, but that I fail to properly respect the values of people who are all too happy to buy into, no less perpetuate, inaccurate caricatures of the 54+ million Americans who voted Tuesday for John Kerry.
Criticizing the GOP ain't gonna build us a new national majority. But the process is brick by brick, or perhaps, brickbat by brickbat. We didn't decide the rules of engagement, but that's what they are and so we may as well start firing away.
Shouldn't that be wingnut by wingnut?
In democratic states, when the people doesn't like its leader, the people elect another. When wannabe-leaders have the problem that they don't actually like the people they want to lead, then it's time for them to find another people. Maybe the Swedes will welcome them, and the US Democratic Party will be much stronger in their absense.
Hat tip to Glenn for Kos' nut-rant. He has more.
PS: The headline refers to a well-known German joke about the man who complains that the table leg is still too short, no matter how much he cuts from it.
9:12:29 PM
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The Martians are cleaning the rovers' solar panels
The two Mars rovers Opportunity and Spirit are mysteriously producing more energy than they should, making the vehilces work way beyond their projected retirement age. Somehow, the solar panels are being mysteriously wiped. JPL's Jim Erickson is not too sad about having a pleasant mystery to solve:
"Now we're assuming they're cleaning, but all we can really say is that overnight the solar panels produced between 2 and 5 percent additional power immediately," he said. "We're surmising that for some reason dust is being removed from the solar panel and that's increasing the efficiency of the sunlight being converted to electricity."
The rover team has been bandying about theories, but hasn't figured out the cause.
"One favorite is that a dust devil happened to pick the vehicle to go through and go over the surface of it and clean it off a little bit," Erickson said.
It will only last until the cleaners realise they are not getting tipped for the job.
6:46:29 PM
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"I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot"
The Newsweek post-election coverage continues, now with an inside look at the Kerry campaign between Kerry becoming the de facto candidate until the conventions. This is probably where Kerry lost the election.
Then came the biggest disaster in the Bush presidency, the Abu Ghraib scandal. If Bush had lost the election, that could well have been the primary cause.
3:23:12 PM
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It's the security, stupid
Paul Freedman argues convincingly, to me anyway, that it was not opposition to gay marriage that put Bush back in the White House, but concerns about terrorism and security.
Why did states with gay-marriage ballot measures vote so heavily for Bush? Because such measures don't appear on state ballots randomly. Opponents of gay marriage concentrate their efforts in states that are most hospitable to a ban and are most likely to vote for Bush even without such a ballot measure. A state's history of voting for Bush is more likely to lead to an anti-gay-marriage measure on that state's ballot than the other way around.
Remember Oregon. The voters passed an anti gay marriage bill, and also voted for Kerry.
PS: David Brooks makes the same point in The Values-Vote Myth.
Every election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it has to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them. [...]
The reality is that this was a broad victory for the president. Bush did better this year than he did in 2000 in 45 out of the 50 states. He did better in New York, Connecticut and, amazingly, Massachusetts. That's hardly the Bible Belt. Bush, on the other hand, did not gain significantly in the 11 states with gay marriage referendums.
He won because 53 percent of voters approved of his performance as president. Fifty-eight percent of them trust Bush to fight terrorism. They had roughly equal confidence in Bush and Kerry to handle the economy. Most approved of the decision to go to war in Iraq. Most see it as part of the war on terror.
It's about time the talking heads admit that.
The GOP will be handing the dems a massive gift if they believe right-wing policies are a winner in the future. If there should really be an attack on abortion rights, for example, in a non-war election year the republicans will lose the moderate voters and thus become the minority party.
1:03:39 PM
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Letters to America helped Bush win Ohio
The Guardian's Operation Clark County, a campaign where Brits sent condescending letters to voters in Ohio's very closely divided Clark County, backfired.
The campaign allowed more than 14,000 Guardian readers to send letters to voters in Clark County (population 145,000) who had not declared their party affiliation when they registered. It was canceled less than 24 hours after the first letters arrived in Ohio.
And on Election Day, Clark was the only one of Ohio's 88 counties — and among only 5% of all 3,113 U.S. counties and independent townships — to turn from Democratic blue in 2000 to Republican red this year.
Anyone with sense could have told them that this is the way people react to such a campaign.
12:46:02 PM
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How to kill web ads on the cheap
All right, ads on web pages pay for the content we love to read, but sometimes they are too large, too many and too annoying. That is particularly true about Norwegian online newspapers. Text ads like those provided by google adsense are fine; huge flash or animated gifs are not.
There are available plugins and addins and features in some browsers that help you block image files from specific servers, but here's a way to do it el cheapo with any browser.
Most (alas, not all) advertisements are image files stored on sites like doubleclick.net. Your machine relies on remote servers called DNS to find out which IP addresses (e.g. 207.25.71.245 for one server at cnn.com) it should use to access the actual machine hosting the web content on the internet based on a domain name like blogs.salon.com (this server!). But you can override the entry in the DNS server locally, in a file called hosts which on a typical windows system is located in the directory (folder) C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc.
You must open this file in a text editor like notepad (better not a word processor like Word). It should contain some explanations in the header, in lines prefixed by a #, and below you will find a real entry:
127.0.0.1 localhost
The IP address 127.0.0.1 is a reserved address that always refers to your own computer, the one you are currently working on. The line makes the domain address localhost refer to yourself (also called loopback).
Here comes the trick. If you tell your operating system that a certain domain name is really 127.0.0.1 it will start looking on your machine. It will instantly fail to find it, and your web browser will display the dreaded red x (or something similar) in its place. If you do this to the most popular advertisement servers, your PC will save itself the effort of downloading and displaying large ad images and display an ugly small x instead. Here is a part of my hosts file after I've added some popular ad servers:
127.0.0.1 adtech.m7z.net
127.0.0.1 ads.api.no
127.0.0.1 adlcache.aftenposten.no
127.0.0.1 ad.tv2.no
127.0.0.1 cdn.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 z1.adserver.com
127.0.0.1 spe.atdmt.com
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
It's not entirely satisfactory with the red x, and some sites store its ads locally in which case all content may disappear if you try this trick. But I've found this a good improvement in an overloaded browser window.
If someone knows a good way to block flash animations only on certain servers or sites, let me know. If someone knows how to disable sound for specific sites, let me know about that, too.
12:18:30 AM
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© Copyright 2004 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.12.2004; 07:25:11.
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