Random Reaction

New Orleans' Rebuilt Levees "Riddled With Flaws" - National Geographic Not to beat a proverbial dead horse , but is this really news? Is anyone truly surprised by this? Nothing against NGS of course - they are investigating and reporting, but I am just stunned at the level of denial in New Orleans, and indeed around the country about what has to happen on our coastlines. I understand that a traumatic event happened to their hometown, and people want to make it like it used to be, but that is denial of the highest order,and satisfies the pop culture definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Face it: New Orleans either needs to be moved or restricted to higher ground (I understand this is why the French Quarter suffered relatively little damage). I didn't mention it in my last post, but do they think rebuilding New Orleans below sea level is going to become a better idea with global warming leading to sea level rise? No...

Paul Krugman gets close to a concept that I thought of from the very beginning of the sales job leading up to the Iraq War: "I wasn’t really surprised by Republican election victories in 2002 and 2004: nations almost always rally around their leaders in times of war, no matter how bad the leaders and no matter how poorly conceived the war." He doesn't quite go there, but to me, the next logical step to this, cynical as it sounds, is that war can be a useful tool for the party in power to get re-elected. The whole changing one's horse in mid-stream concept. It is a staggering thought that one of the main motivations for going to war in Iraq under false pretenses was to maintain power, but this administration has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that politics and maintaining power trumps everything else. I mean, it has been well-documented that the president was telling everyone he wanted to link Saddam to 9/11, within days of that tragedy, even though everyone knew it...

I think it is quite hypocritical of Apple to have a commercial indicating how all this "crapware" comes pre-loaded on PCs, and doesn't on Macs. I expect that there is more, on average, in a PC than a Mac, but the commercial implies that the Mac has none, which is patently not true . The apologists come out in force in the comments to this blog: http://theappleblog.com/2007/04/16/new-stuffed-commercial/ It's OK when Apple does it, just not the PC world.