Category: Thoughts

Way back in 2003, (as Brad Delong reminds us often enough), Daniel Drezner asked the following question:

Can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:

1. It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
2. It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
3. It wasn’t in some important way completely fucked up during the execution.

Well, can you?

Powell’s Books presents The Pat Robertson Coloring Book, as drawn by artists from around the world.

See also Law and Order: An Adventure to Color.

From a discussion about copyright and YouTube/Google:

The purpose of fair use was to allow use of works when transactions were impractical. In that spirit we should acknowledge that if you use someone’s song in a basement skit that never leaves your basement, that should be fair use. But if 50 million people see the skit on YouTube and it generates $1 million in advertising revenues, that should not be fair use.

In other words, everyone who posts their version of the Numa Numa dance has to get express written permission from the RIAA on the off chance that it will become their 15 megabytes of fame.

Why not just piss on the my birthday cake while you’re at it?

I needed a new topic since I gave the Yankees page to a real Yankees fan. I thought, what’s a good topic? How about torture? Torture would be wonderful.

So now I run a page on torture, with links to stuff like this video of a dude getting waterboarded:

The best part of this whole Mark Foley scandal is seeing Dennis Hastert look like this:

How about a CIA personality quiz. Yes, that’s on the official US government intelligence agency site.

Aidan reminded me of the existence of carbonated milk. That reminded me of a Salon article titled I come to bury Iamcarbonatedmilk.com, not to praise it. It’s about expired domain names and why people register them.

I seem to remember being around when several absurd names were registered, including assbarn.com and the now-defunct mybuttthemovie.com. The motivation in each case quite simple: it seemed like a good idea at the time because we were very drunk. That also explains a lot of stuff purchased from EBay.

The Economist’s View analyzes the new Fed report: “The key differences from the last Press Release are: 1. They have dropped the word ‘gradual’ from their description of the cooling of the housing market….”

There’s a house for sale in my neighborhood that Zillow values at $533,000. The asking price is $795,000. It’s been on the market for awhile now with no reduction in price.

I’m running the Hillary Clinton site for Top 10 Sources in our new format — very editor-intensive, updated constantly with the best of the web’s content, etc.

That means reading a lot of things about Hillary Clinton, some of which are just plain awful.

It’s not like she’s Paris Hilton (yes, we have a Paris Hilton site done the same way). Paris Hilton’s job is to go out in public and act silly. Hillary’s trying to do something useful and all the public has to say about it is that she looked ugly in her prom picture?

American political discourse makes me want to vomit. Or maybe that’s the leftover barbecue I had for breakfast. Not sure.

Fun with graphs!