April 2008

"Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat."

there are some strange defects for such a high-profile, widely used system, though plugins fix some of them - "remove self-links", "sort categories by title" - but not "remove /category/ from URLs" (WP has intrinsically broken URI handling)

"Just keeping high troop levels on the ground and hoping for the best, paying heavy costs for little influence, is the height of strategic naivite."

but what about the tens of thousands of Iraqis imprisoned for years without trial, who don't have an international press agency keeping them in the spotlight?

"Asked to name countries that posed the 'biggest threat', 95% and 88% named Israel and the US... up from 85% and 72% in late 2006"

"with a GDP of only £8.5 billion, most self-respecting hedge funds could eat it for breakfast, and that is pretty much what they have decided to do"

or so claims the NSW state government, trying to protect its coal power stations - and even this is barely $1000 per person, spread over twenty years!

"The state should not get involved in any sort of national filtering unless it 'concerns specific and clearly identifiable content' that has been declared illegal by a 'competent national authority'"

"it is urban life, almost exclusively, that is culturally associated with excitement, freedom, and diverse daily life"