Archive: November 17, 2004

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

1. AIM Comments (comment on a weblog with IM), via Cal. Neat!

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Chanukah songs suck

Chanukah songs suck. Everyone knows this of course, but seriously, Jews really get the short end of the stick on common holiday songs.

I was just ripping used pages out of a pad so that I'd have a clean pad to work on while studying physics, and one of the used pages had a note to myself from some other year around this time about Christmas vs. Chanukah song lyrics. I guess I'd jotted down some of the lyrics from some concert I was at (don't remember what). The lyrics for the Christmas song were beautiful: "Rejoice in the Lord always!... How beautiful are the feet on Zion's hill". The Chanukah song was along the lines of "Blah blah, we light candles. La la la. [yes, literally] We play with a dreidel". Blech. I'd wager the music in the Christmas song was better as well.

Permalink | 14 Comments | id 6058

04:39 (utc-5)
edited: 04:41 (utc-5)

 

1. Slashdot | Holub on Patterns. A book for me to check out next time I'm at the bookstore.

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2. A story about one of Ashcroft's many successes that have made us all safer, via LGF.

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3. Here's the article at the NY Times about the National Council for Resistance in Iran and their findings on Iran's "secret" nuclear program that I heard about on John Batchelor's radio program this evening. They're planning to announce their findings today.

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4. Claudia Rosett on the Oil for Food program: Come Clean, Kofi:

   With estimates soaring of graft and fraud under the United Nations Oil for Food program in Iraq, we are hearing a lot about the need to "get to the bottom" of this scandal, the biggest ever to hit the U.N. To get to that bottom will need a much harder look at the top--where Secretary-General Kofi Annan himself resides.
   
   That violates all sorts of taboos. But so, one might suppose, does a United Nations that allowed Saddam Hussein to embezzle at least $21.3 billion in oil money during 12 years, with the great bulk of that sum--a staggering $17.3 billion--pilfered between 1997-2003, on Mr. Annan's watch.
   
   These are the record-breaking new estimates released Monday by the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, whose staffers, despite Mr. Annan's refusal to cooperate, have spent the past seven months voyaging deep into the muck of Oil for Food. At a hearing Monday, these investigators surfaced to tell us the theft and fraud under Oil for Food was at least twice as bad as earlier reports had suggested, and that all this is just a preview of yet more appalling disclosures they expect to release early next year. Sen. Norm Coleman, the subcommittee's chairman, underscored the urgency of such investigations, noting not only that the size of the fraud "is staggering," but that some of Saddam's vast illicit stash might right now be funding terrorists and costing American lives.

   (To finish reading.) Also see this from earlier today (yesterday), as well as this about how the Oil for Food money went directly to killing Jews in Israel.

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5. OpinionJournal: The Lessons of Fallujah, "Killing terrorists doesn't make them stronger":

   So coalition forces strike the city of Fallujah, and Iraqi insurgents respond by attacking in Mosul, Baquba, Kirkuk and Suweira. This, we now hear, proves that the more insurgents the U.S. kills, the stronger the insurgency grows. Call it the Obi-Wan Kenobi school of international relations: Strike him down, and he'll only become more powerful.
   
   In real warfare, of course, killing the enemy means there are fewer enemies to kill. And in one week in Fallujah, and at the cost of some 40 American soldiers' lives and several Iraqi ones, about 1,200 insurgents were killed and another 1,000 taken prisoner.

   Also see the rest of the article for "the question of the barrel".

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6. Charts of the Linux boot process, via HtP.

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7. I updated my weblog posting bookmarklet (I'll post an updated version on my site later) so that it opens my weblog posting window in a popup window. This site gave me a handy reference for all the options available to get rid of window features and such. Also, this showed me how to get ahold of the text selection (thanks Aaron).

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