President Bush has two new endorsements for his campaign: From Russia and Iran.
No word yet from North Korea.
Faith and madness
Robert Suskind has an article in the past week’s New York Times Magazine about the role of faith in Bush’s presidency. It’s not quite what you would expect, and I recommend reading this – not so much for the information as for the piecing together of things and for the rather fascinating quotes from various administration and party officials.
For some reason, this article has disturbed me more than almost anything I’ve seen in the news in the past several months. The conjecture and the analysis ring too true, and the possible consequences are far more alarming than most possibilities of war.
Allow me to be a cynical bastard…
The New York Times has an article about how European countries are working to train Europeanized imams for their mosques.
Two better solutions
From a film review:
Of “Team America: World Police,” from the New York Times:
“Team America: World Police” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has graphic violence, explicit sex and shocking language. And puppets!
Well, you clearly can’t beat a combination like that.
No debate for me…
I missed the debate tonight. Blame it on work, blame it on already having seen the first two (as well as the veep debate) and noticing that they were already repeating themselves pretty thoroughly by the second.
It makes sense; Kerry knew damned well that he won the first, so he kept doing what he was doing. Bush knew that he lost the first, so he corrected and tried to do as well as possible in the second, and in fact improved.
But one week of study can’t really make up for being, as they say in Yiddish (forgive my horrible attempt at transliteration) nicht ein grosse chuchen, nicht ein kleiner narr — neither a great sage nor a small fool. So the second debate was pretty much as expected. From what I’ve heard, the third debate was much of the same.
Oh well. If it wasn’t clear from this post, my mind is pretty much made up, and it has been for a couple of years.
Alright, worth a try…
Nicked from various of my friends. I admit, I’m curious. 🙂
1. Think of a word you would use to describe me.
2. Go to Google Image Search and search for that word.
3. Select the picture you see as most fitting, and post it as a reply.
4. Post this meme in your journal
The situation in Israel
The NY Times has an interesting summary of the fighting in Israel after four years. Interesting for the statistics it provides, including the sidebar with a partial breakdown of casualties and the numbers on suicide bombings.
It’s bloody depressing. What’s more depressing is that there’s no obvious way out of this.
Fscking excellent dinner.
Bread, Parrano cheese, a variety of good olives, and a damned fine Trappist ale. All eaten while listening to good musing and rereading Doug Hofstadter’s explanation of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, which I have to say is remarkably well-written.
Said Trappist ale is also rather strong, which just makes this all the better. This has been a very relaxing evening.
Experimental roulade, tests #1 and 2
Experimental cake attempt today. This is a roulade, so it’s going to be 24h of refrigeration before I know how it turned out, but I suspect that the production version is somewhat better.
Grr. The problem with this cake is having to wait to find out what happened. But one bite tomorrow should tell me what I need to know to make the next version really damned good.
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 