As here, it still seems as though there may be some possibility to stop this ghastly bill. My senators are utterly hopeless but if yours are not, please call.
TODAY. Soon it'll be too late.
Damn it. And damn the traitors who voted for this, selling our rights out for a bit of political advantage. And damn the feckless media morons who couldn't be bothered to report on what was happening in any accurate way. And damn the administration who pushed for this so they can escape punishment for their crimes.
This is very good. On some level I agree with the comments made by the Tims on this thread, but it's painful.
Push polls in Wyoming, where kooky Republican Barbara Cubin is running for re-election, call Democratic challenger Gary Trauner a "New York liberal."
Gary Trauner is Jewish.
Is this code, or am I paranoid?
I just actually had the thought "What are those kids doing on my lawn?"
(Answer: Retrieving their football, which they are throwing awfully close to my car IMO. Also, they turn out to be college students.)
The title reminds humble old me: "Must We Know What We Say?" is now in print. You can also get it from Duke's Philosophical Review site here. The contents of many other issues are on the site, but I think the April 2005 issue with MWKWWS in it is the most recent in print for now.
And "How Causal Probabilities Might Fit into Our Objectively Indeterministic World," which I wrote with Nuel Belnap, is available here (journal ToC; you need to be able to access Synthese through Ingenta Connect to get the article that way). I'm not sure if it's in paper yet, or if (more likely) it's been in print for a while and the journal forgot to tell me.
But the point is that I had the thought, "What are those kids doing on my lawn?" Though now they're gone.
I love YouTube.
Looking for the Ornette Coleman and Last Exit videos mentioned here, I found this video from Italian TV of Ornette Coleman in 1974, playing "Dancing In Your Head/The Good Life/Theme From a Symphony/whatever he's calling it this week" with a quartet with James Blood Ulmer on guitar, Sirone on bass, Billy Higgins on drums. This is the only documentation I know of of Blood in Ornette's group. woot!
Here's Ornette on Saturday Night Live, introduced by Milton Berle. Here's Last Exit.
Canadians thought that when they told U.S. authorities (on no good evidence, bad for them) that someone was suspected of being linked to Al Qaeda, that they were dealing with "a country with many of the same values as Canada." To the innocent man's harm, they were wrong.
I'm not about to read anything John Yoo writes, but something struck me from this bit Charles Pierce quotes:
The changes of the 1970’s occurred largely because we had no serious national security threats to United States soil [as Pierce says, WTF? but that's not what I want to talk about], but plenty of paranoia in the wake of Richard Nixon’s use of national security agencies to spy on political opponents.
Given that Nixon had used national security agencies to spy on political opponents, isn't the proper term not 'paranoia' but 'justified concern'? We aren't even in "don't mean they're not after you" territory.
I've received a request for more "Hey! Here's a weird sentence" blogging, so to keep something on the front page: Never mind that it's silly to say "This [terrorism] is an enemy more dangerous than any we have faced in the 20th century." Doesn't the use of the present perfect imply that it still is the 20th century?
That wasn't very good sentence-blogging, I apologize.
Also, apparently, error messages from the school mailing list software, and the occasional e-mail from the administration about upcoming development seminars.
Filibuster by amendment? God forbid that someone be able to hold up a bad bill by trying to change it, when there's bipartisan opposition to that bill. (via TPM Muckraker)
[Philosophy-related posts will probably resume sometime or other. When you least expect it!]