Maybe....

[via Sideshow]

Boggles the mind....

[via Simon World]
If you post details of a breakup anonymously on an e-board, and tens of thousands of people follow up and threaten the wrong people, who gets sued?

It's in China, which makes it all the more interesting: the bulletin board culture there is going to revolutionize something, but we're just not sure what, yet. Breakups, for starters.....

Quotations #045

"Only the modern city offers the mind the grounds upon which it can achieve awareness of itself." -- Georg Wilhelm Hegel

"The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants." -- General Omar Bradley

"Conservativism is the worship of dead revolutions." -- Clinton Rossiter

"A man who is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at sixty has no head." -- Benjamin Disraeli

"The conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it." -- Will and Ariel Durant

One in Four Americans...

In which we are drawn and, ahem, quartered. [via Simon World]

Quotations #044

"It is impossible for an idea to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available." -- Thomas Mann

"All children are essentially criminal." -- Denis Diderot

"People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian faith doubted, and at seeing it practiced." -- Samuel Butler

"The age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system." -- Thomas Paine

"Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles." -- George Santayana

Bush v. America on North Korea Policy

I'm one of the first to argue that policy should not follow popularity (There was a fantastic radio humor short I heard a few years back about an election which was won by the candidate who literally promised every voter a pony, but I haven't been able to locate it since) but when a politician claims a "mandate" as our president has generally that means that their policies are broadly endorsed. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.

I'm particularly struck by this:

Still, 42 percent now say that Mr. Bush would have been better off trying to counter the threat of North Korea before invading Iraq, compared with 45 percent who think Mr. Bush was correct to focus first on Iraq.
...
58 percent of respondents said the White House did not share the foreign affairs priorities of most Americans.
...
On North Korea, 81 percent said that that nation does indeed now have nuclear weapons, and 7 in 10 said it poses a serious threat to the United States. Still, a majority of Americans said they opposed taking pre-emptive action against North Korea if diplomatic efforts failed - a shift from before the war in Iraq, when a majority said they would support military action if diplomatic efforts failed.

It always struck me as odd that the Iraq campaign came first, and that the administration held back on making North Korea a priority when it had a must stronger claim to WMD from the very beginning of the first term. Oil? We'll never get a straight answer out of this administration (or access to their documentation, either).

And they don't gain weight...

Robots that can mimic the movements of models (supermodels, of course) to display clothing in stores. Better, robots that will also use visual recognition technology to monitor shoppers (and non-shoppers) for marketing purposes. [via Simon World]

Obviously it's just a novelty now, but from the description this is intended to be integral technology for marketing (and, I'm guessing, security) departments of major stores. High end stuff, so far, but what's to stop lower end stores from using the visual technology without the mannequin? It could revolutionize corporate anthropology and psychology (yes, they use both disciplines to study shoppers and manipulate our perceptions and behavior).

Quote Garden: History Bumper Crop!

"Pricklefoot" (gotta be a great story there, but the linked blog is missing. Another story?) in comments points to The Quote Garden as another source for pithy wisdom. Their history page, linked above, is quite extensive, and includes quite a few quotations I don't have in my collection. Here's a few highlights, and, as always, emphasis is my own:

• The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from. ~John Still, The Jungle Tide
• All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon. ~Voltaire, Jeannot et Colin
• We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre. ~Dick Gregory
• We are the prisoners of history. Or are we? ~Robert Penn Warren, Segregation
• History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided. ~Konrad Adenauer
• History is a vast early warning system. ~Norman Cousins
• Historian: an unsuccessful novelist. ~H.L. Mencken
• Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice. ~Will and Ariel Durant, Our Oriental Heritage
• If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history. ~Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary

Just because they're celebrating ...

... doesn't mean they pulled the trigger. It just confirms that they are poisonous scum.

Update: David Neiwert wades through more of that scum professionally than anyone should have to. He's been tracking this story though mostly mainstream sources, but his expertise in this area is extraordinary. He should get hazard pay.

WikiQuote: History, of course

A friend who writes at least 100 words a day sent me the above link. I don't "get" Wiki, and I don't use Wiki, but their History Quotation page includes a few I haven't seen before, including:

• "History is not to be searched for practical lessons, the applicability of which will always be doubtful in view of the inexhaustible novelty of circumstances and combinations of causes, but just this, that the mind acquire a sensitiveness an imaginative range."-- Peter Geyl
• "Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas." -- Alfred Whitney Griswold
• "History is not a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches." -- Lord Acton
• "It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people." -- Good Omens (by Gaiman & Pratchett)