Technology / Web /
07 May 2008
A Million Monkeys...
One of my favorite Google products is Google Notebook, and one
of my more frequent uses of it is to keep track of particularly
insightful or pithy posts that I read online. Sure, most sites have
their own methods for doing this, but Notebook keeps them all in one
place. Unfortunately, I never really end up doing much with all the
stuff I save.
Earlier today I found myself reading through some of my notes, and
thought I’d share a few. Any one of them could be an entry in itself,
but honestly I think there’s little I can add to most of them, so I’ll
just point you back to the originals and leave it at that.
On Hillary Clinton’s ‘Prayer Breakfasts’, by MetaFilter’s dw:
[…] Hillary attending the prayer meetings is all about triangulation for
her. She knows where the business of the GOP elite gets done, so
she’s just going to walk right in there. If they were into watching
pre-op trans burlesque while drinking paint thinner, Hillary would
show up at the door with a copy of The Crying Game and a gallon of
turpentine. […]
boubelium had an insightful quip about the difference between
politicians and economists:
[…] if a charismatic politician tells you that he has seen the
economic future, he hasn’t. He isn’t smart enough or boring enough
to undertake the
effort.
“Tom Collins” of Tom Collins’ World Wide Web Log – sort of a
‘Fake Steve Jobs’ of the Beltway, with the best understanding of that
milieu on the Internet – sums up everything you need to know:
“Veronica, this is the United States of America. With the exception
of short period of reform that lasted about forty years during the
last century, the entire history of this country has been nothing
more or less than the work of lying, thieving, cheating, amoral,
greedy, inhuman scum bags.”
“Which means?”
“That, given the
chance, you should always go with the lying, thieving, cheating,
amoral, greedy, inhuman scum bags. Do that, and you can’t lose -
it’s the American Way.”
On a slightly less cynical note, Vorfeed has one of the better
comments I’ve read about the gun control ‘debate’ in a while:
[…] A little less than half of US households (and about 25% of
all US adults) own at least one gun, and yet only about 30,000
people are killed by them per year, and more than half of those are
suicides. … Criminalizing 25% of the country in order to save
30,000 lives is a terrible trade-off – if saving lives is really
the issue, we’d do much better if we built a huge public
transportation network and then banned cars. … As far as I can
tell, the “gun control debate” in this country serves merely to
distract from the actual issue – that is to say, the problem is
violence, not guns! Rather than myopically concentrating on the
instrument used, both sides of the gun debate could probably benefit
from some realistic, holistic thinking about ways to mitigate the
root causes of
violence.
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