Someone clued me in to this invaluable web page. If you happen to end up with a nutty deconstructionist professor (an all-too-frequent occurrence at any post-modern university, or even small college), it will allow you to spew semiotic nonsense without having to twist your brain coming up with it yourself. The nice thing about it is that it is randomly generated, so each paper is unique, and can’t be found on the web by profs looking for plagiarists. If you need a longer paper, just run it several times and splice the outputs together via cut’n’paste. Don’t worry–doing so won’t accidentally inject any semantic content–it may even reduce it, if that’s possible. But it will read like an “A” paper in Lacanian analysis.
All posts by Rand Simberg
They’re Still At It
A few weeks ago, I asked the rhetorical question–since 911, are Democrats still calling some members of the opposite party “Taliban Republicans,” as Julian Bond did at the NAACP convention last summer?
Question answered. Apparently, according to US News and World Report:
Democratic lawmakers have adopted the language of the antiterror war to mock Republican conservatives, especially Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, House Majority Leader Dick Armey and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay.
Says a prominent Democrat: “They’re the Republican Taliban.”
I wonder how that prominent Democrat would feel if he (or she) and colleagues were called “the Stalinist wing of the Democratic party”? It would be equally odious, and equally accurate.
They’re Still At It
A few weeks ago, I asked the rhetorical question–since 911, are Democrats still calling some members of the opposite party “Taliban Republicans,” as Julian Bond did at the NAACP convention last summer?
Question answered. Apparently, according to US News and World Report:
Democratic lawmakers have adopted the language of the antiterror war to mock Republican conservatives, especially Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, House Majority Leader Dick Armey and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay.
Says a prominent Democrat: “They’re the Republican Taliban.”
I wonder how that prominent Democrat would feel if he (or she) and colleagues were called “the Stalinist wing of the Democratic party”? It would be equally odious, and equally accurate.
They’re Still At It
A few weeks ago, I asked the rhetorical question–since 911, are Democrats still calling some members of the opposite party “Taliban Republicans,” as Julian Bond did at the NAACP convention last summer?
Question answered. Apparently, according to US News and World Report:
Democratic lawmakers have adopted the language of the antiterror war to mock Republican conservatives, especially Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, House Majority Leader Dick Armey and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay.
Says a prominent Democrat: “They’re the Republican Taliban.”
I wonder how that prominent Democrat would feel if he (or she) and colleagues were called “the Stalinist wing of the Democratic party”? It would be equally odious, and equally accurate.
New NASA Administrator?
The rumor has been going around since late yesterday afternoon, but now Frank Sietzen at UPI has the story–Sean O’Keefe, currently a deputy at OMB, will be replacing Dan Goldin. O’Keefe has been intimately involved in the ISS budget mess, and given NASA’s inability to manage their programs or their budgets, they could probably do a lot worse than someone from the Office of Management and Budget. I just hope that he’ll have Administration support for the housecleaning that the agency direly needs–he unfortunately probably won’t get it from Congress.
An informed Washington source tells me that we should take any press pronouncements concerning new NASA Administrators with a healthy dose of sodium chloride, for the moment. So perhaps it’s not as done a deal as the reporting would indicate.
Well, according to Spaceref, and based on this White House Press Release, it is a done deal (assuming that the words “the President intends to nominate” imply that the nominee has accepted).
Viva la Revolution
Michael Ledeen has an excellent dose of common sense in today’s Opinion Journal, in which he points out that destroying the Islamofascists will require wholesale revolution in the Middle East, and that’s something at which Americans excel, if we can keep the pinstriped nervous nellies in Foggy Bottom from mucking it up in the name of “stability,” as they did at the end of the Gulf War.
…Yes, I know that our diplomats hate “instability,” but most Americans not only are able to cope with it, they go out of their way to create it. Stability is for those older, burnt-out countries, not for the American dynamo. And chaos is vastly preferable to the vicious tyrannical stability that has crushed and impoverished the people of Afghanistan.
Exactly. Stability is vastly overrated. The Soviet Union was stable for decades. Iraq has been a stable haven for terrorism and dictatorship for the past decade, thank you very much, State Department.
We may need to shift a few borders here and there, and topple a few corrupt regimes, but as can be seen in Afghanistan in the past couple of days, we will do it with the aid of the people of the region, and in the end, they will be much better off. To the degree that it is very messy now, that will be the result of how badly we (the West, that is, particularly Britain) botched it the first time during decolonialisation. It’s time to go back and take a “do over,” and do it right this time.
From Jalalabad to Jalalaworse
According to the Telegraph, Osama is hiding out near Jalalabad, and the special forces are tightening the noose on him.
We’ll see in a few hours or days…
Looking More Like Sabotage To Me
Well, let’s see now–the data is accumulating. Both engines are intact (no internal failure), so that eliminates the bird ingestion theory. The aircraft lost both engines and the vertical stabilizer. The latter was reportedly taken off as cleanly as if someone had simply…loosened the fasteners. And the investigators say “they cannot rule out sabotage.”
Well, from what I understand about the situation now, being a glass-half-full-of-sabotage kind of guy, I’d put it differently–we cannot rule out random mechanical failure, but it’s starting to look very unlikely. The chances of a single engine falling off are very low. The chances of both engines just falling off are very low squared. The chances of both engines falling off, and the vertical stabilizer cleanly falling off are infinitesimal, absent active (sub)human intervention.
And the reporting on this is atrocious (as though that would distinguish it from any other subject). I’ve read things like “no intruders’ voices were heard on the cockpit voice recorder, ruling out sabotage.” As though it’s necessary, or even desirable, to be on an airplane that you’re sabotaging. Do these people even know what the word sabotage means?
OK, let’s forget about nail clippers and cleaning crew for the moment. How tight is the security in the maintenance hangars? What kind of background checks do the mechanics get? Have they checked the maintenance records for the plane, and checked to see who worked on it most recently, and who had access to it? It could have been done the night before, by simply loosening a few bolts on the pylons and empennage. Or it could have been done weeks before, planting shaped charges with a radio-controlled detonator, to blow off the engines and tail right after takeoff, almost ensuring a crash in…Queens. I hope that American (and the other airlines) have done an inspection of their entire fleet before flying them again.
At this point, if it turns out to not be sabotage, I’ll be very interested to hear the NTSB explanation for this one. It may be almost as entertaining (and sad) as the video that they cobbled together for TWA 800 to explain how flames falling from an aircraft could somehow magically appear to be a fire trail heading up toward it, to hundreds of eyewitnesses.
It’s Nu-clee-ar, Dammit!
Look, I’m eternally grateful that George Bush won instead of Al Gore, though I didn’t vote for him (of course, I didn’t vote for Gore either…). And I’ve always thought that picking on his elocution by the likes of Jay Leno and Saturday Night Live was silly, counterproductive, and not all that funny (the media apparently misunderestimated his strategery). And even I, as loquacious as I am, occasionally make a verbal misstep.
But can someone, anyone (Mary? Karl? Karen? Condi? Laura?) please teach him that it’s pronounced “noo-klee-ur” and not “noo-ku-lar,” and make him practice for a few minutes a day until he can get it consistently right, particularly when standing next to the President of Russia? It’s driving me right up the wall.
[Update]
A reader correctly points out that “Jimmy Carter couldn’t pronounce it either, and he was a nuclear engineer.”
This is true–I remember that. But maybe he wasn’t–maybe he was a nucular engineer. Is it some kind of southern thang?
Truly, as I said, I’m ecstatic that Bush is President instead of Gore or Clinton, and this is not a slam at his intelligence (he at least graduated from graduate school). I just wish that he could get this one right, since it’s a very common word lately.
It’s Nu-clee-ar, Dammit!
Look, I’m eternally grateful that George Bush won instead of Al Gore, though I didn’t vote for him (of course, I didn’t vote for Gore either…). And I’ve always thought that picking on his elocution by the likes of Jay Leno and Saturday Night Live was silly, counterproductive, and not all that funny (the media apparently misunderestimated his strategery). And even I, as loquacious as I am, occasionally make a verbal misstep.
But can someone, anyone (Mary? Karl? Karen? Condi? Laura?) please teach him that it’s pronounced “noo-klee-ur” and not “noo-ku-lar,” and make him practice for a few minutes a day until he can get it consistently right, particularly when standing next to the President of Russia? It’s driving me right up the wall.
[Update]
A reader correctly points out that “Jimmy Carter couldn’t pronounce it either, and he was a nuclear engineer.”
This is true–I remember that. But maybe he wasn’t–maybe he was a nucular engineer. Is it some kind of southern thang?
Truly, as I said, I’m ecstatic that Bush is President instead of Gore or Clinton, and this is not a slam at his intelligence (he at least graduated from graduate school). I just wish that he could get this one right, since it’s a very common word lately.