After taking nearly the whole summer off (due to medical reasons, greeting the Venomous Hubby returned from overseas duty, and, I suspect, ennui), Venomous Kate returns with a post, Blogger reporting for duty.
What, Kate, no salute?
No teasing now, Kate. I hope you’re back for a while.
Hat tip: Wizbang who questions the timing of this return.
I discovered Jeff Medcalf’s blog, Caerdroia, not long ago and immediately put it into my favorites list. His politics are farther right than mine and he appears to be somewhat more bellicose than I am but I find his analyses clever and interesting. The blog name, by the way, is from a Dr. Who episode.
In a recent post, Coalitions, Jeff analyzes the prospects for future coalitions:
The prospect of future “coalitions of the willing” in any meaningful sense are almost nil. The only powers in the world that can deploy significant forces anywhere in the world and support them indefinitely are the United States and the United Kingdom. Russia has enough troops and logistics assets, but no cash to sustain them in combat. China has a large body of troops, but insufficient logistics assets to support them outside except in SE Asia. France’s capabilities are pretty much limited to the French Foreign Legion and maybe a couple of battallions if stretched, and then they have serious logistics issues. Germany has insufficient forces and insufficient logistics. Japan has constitutional restrictions that prevent sending force abroad. No one else has significant military forces in the first place.
Read the whole thing.
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Riddle me this: when is a carpetbagger not a carpetbagger? When he’s the son of the incumbent, of course! From the Chicago Tribune:
Lipinski makes retirement official
U.S. Rep. William Lipinski, a conservative Democrat from Chicago’s Southwest Side, said today he is retiring at the end of his term in January after 22 years in Congress and will be supporting his son to take his spot on the November ballot.
Lipinski, 66, said he would submit his letter of withdrawal later today with the Illinois State Board of Elections.
“I want to come back to Chicago and spend more time with my wife,” Lipinski said. “When you live three days in one city and four days in another, it takes you away. I want to slow down the march of time.”
Lipinski said he is leaving, in part, because he is confident a massive transportation bill he has labored on for more than a year will be passed by Congress before he leaves office. The bill will pump hundreds of millions of dollars over six years into projects in the Chicago region
Democratic Party bosses are expected to select the congressman’s replacement at a meeting Tuesday. Lipinski’s son, Daniel, who until recently was a political science professor at the University of Tennessee, is the favorite to take his father’s place.
Daniel Lipinski has worked for a number of congressmen over the years, including Gov. Rod Blagojevich when he served on Capitol Hill, and received his doctorate in political science from Duke University.
“He has a terrific academic background in terms of Congress and he can come in and know all about it on the first day,” William Lipinski said. “He’s also very much in touch with the 3rd Congressional District, having grown up here, gone to grade school and high school in the district.”
Julia Child died today. I never met her, never went to a book-signing. But she’s been a part of my daily life every day for nearly thirty years.
Thirty years ago I’d been cooking for quite a while but was a rather haphazard cook. I knew old family recipes. I’d picked up cookbooks along the way and made some recipes from the Joy of Cooking and James Beard’s Casserole Cookbook and The Galloping Gourmet Cookbook and maybe a few others. I’d worked as a short-order cook.
But I wasn’t satisfied. I wanted to do better, know more. So I concocted a plan that on retrospect was quite mad. You will remember that this was the heyday of Julia Child’s TV program, The French Chef (at least in re-runs on public television). So I bought a copy of Julia, Louisette Betholle, and Simone Beck’s cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And I made every recipe. Every recipe. My roommate had carbonnade à la flamande, fonds d’artichauts au gratin, and poulet poele a l’estragon. Dates were treated to duck a l’orange, quenelles du poisson, or lobster a l’americaine. Friends were feasted on coq au vin or gigot en chevreuil (leg of lamb marinated in red wine).
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I’ve been fascinated with writing systems since I was a kid. One day I was paging through Webster’s Dictionary and I stumbled upon the table illustrating alphabets of the world: Roman (ours), the old German Gothic, Greek, Cyrillic (Russian), Hebrew, and Arabic. I would pore over them for hours looking at the differences and similarities. That’s what motivated me to learn Russian long, long ago, and other, more exotic languages as well. All of the world’s alphabets (with the exception of Korean hangul which was designed from scratch by scholars in the 15th century) are descendants of a single ancestor: the Phoenician alphabet. But where did the Phoenician alphabet come from? Within the last few years we’ve gotten some hints.
For almost a thousand years from 2200 BC to 1200 BC Egyptians mined turquoise at Serabit el-Khadem in the Sinai (left). The mineworkers, soldiers, and other people living there left inscriptions carved in the stone. William Flinders Petrie discovered some 30 inscriptions there in 1905. They were interesting but he didn’t know what to make of them. They resembled Egyptian hieroglyphics but they weren’t identical to hieroglyphics.
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Tyler Cowen has a fascinating and, in my opinion, largely correct set of suggestions for the economic agenda of a second Bush term. Without going into detail on his suggestions I have a series of questions for Professor Cowen:
I am in complete agreement with Mr. Cowen’s larger point. Neither candidate appears to have much of a vision for the future direction of the country. I guess it doesn’t fit into a ten or twenty second TV spot.
Stephen Green contemplates the absurdity of trying to plan for the peace before the war has been won and the even greater absurdity of complaining about the inadequacy of such plans in his most recent post on Vodkapundit (via Instapundit):
Now that we know that we don’t know how we’ll win, that leaves the question (and the oxymoron): How do we win?
Ending the rule of the Taliban didn’t end the war. Ending the rule of Saddam didn’t end the war. We could depose the dictators in every dictatorship, and still not be done with this mess. Our enemy isn’t a nation. It isn’t a leader. It isn’t, despite the misnomer “War on Terror,” a war on terror.
What we’re fighting is an ideology.
In comments I made to a recent post on Obsidian Wings, I noted that although I have a number of problems with our health care system, my most significant problem is that it is immoral. This observation was met with a certain amount of puzzlement and even derision so I thought I’d flesh out my observations with a special focus on medical braindrain in Zambia.
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My favorite new blogger My War—Fear and Loathing in Iraq has learned the price of fame:
I never even knew what a Blog was until I read about them in an article in Time Magazine, about two months ago. I read the article and it mentioned how a lot of the soldiers down in Baghdad were writing about their experiences here in Iraq. After reading the article, I went down to the Internet caf‚, and checked them out, and a majority of them were just pure garbage. In fact nauseating. Its like they were written by armed forces recruiters, “Oh I love the Army, I’m soo glad to be here, oh, the Iraqi’s love us, I feel like were doing the right thing” That kinda crap. Nobody was telling it like it is. So I said fuck it, I’m going to do one. I was at the point in my deployment where the letters from friends and family were getting fewer and far between, and I needed something to combat the extra time and loneliness that being on deployment hits you with when you’ve been here for awhile. So I though doing a blog might be a fun thing to do, help kill some time. And it worked, time started flying by once I stated this thing.
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So today I’m walking back from chow, and my Plt Sgt is outside my door waiting for me and he said, The Col. wants to see you, hurry up and go shave, I’ll be back in 15 to take you down there. My heart sank. Shit. I know exactly what this one is about. Its like that feeling you get in high school when you’d fuck up, and they’d call your name over the loud speaker and tell you your presence was needed in the principles office, and you know the police are there in the principle’s office waiting for you.
As the man says, read the whole thing.
I hope his CO’s go easy on him and let him be what he is—a fresh, honest voice.
I read a post earlier today in which the blogger noted that he had written programs in a dozen different programming languages over the years. So I sat down and began to think about it. Here’s the list of programming languages in which I’ve written at least 1,000 lines of code:
