Gulfstream

http://www.hamsterkill.com/ … doesn’t exist; VeriSign suggests www.masterkill.com… 15:08

http://slate.msn.com/id/2089017/ Level-headed analysis of the Valerie Plame affair. 13:02

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/28/national/28FUNE.html “The issue can be especially complicated when the deceased has prepurchased a site, but cannot fit in it.” 10:28

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/22/sep03/buchan.htm John Buchan: not just the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps. 14:18

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/sept0304.html#092803543pm “… I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious, of traitors.” (Background.) TPM running hard with this. 13:50

http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,,43612,00.html The “Kaleidoscope I,” one of Nokia’s very strange new imaging products. (The Kaleidoscope stores and displays about 20 270x228 images.) The Medallion I and II are digital photoframes on a necklace.

These products would work so well as works of sci-fi futurism (check out the ad—cool, huh?), but as actual real-world products to sell? 12:31

http://www.slate.com/id/2088944/ Christopher Hitchens’s very nicely worded appreciation of Edward Said. 10:52

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/nyc/15855022.html “I’m tired of all ye Medieval freaks trying to tell me how great the Medieval times are.” 15:46

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/tvaradarajan/?id=110004050 Profile of Bernard Lewis (he’s 87!). This is mostly here for its mention of a compliment Lewis considers “amongst the finest he’s ever received.” It appears in the preface to a fundamentalist Muslim group’s Arabic translation of one of his works, and runs: “I don’t know who this man is. He is either a candid friend or an honest enemy, but in either case, one who refuses to deal in falsehoods.”

(Another nice compliment (of Richard Posner): “If he did not exist, it would be hard to believe that he could.”) 13:28

http://www.newscientist.com/lastword/article.jsp?id=lw34 How to untangle telephone cords! 18:16

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/wackoattacko/ Michael Moore’s response to his “Bowling for Columbine” critics. 13:28

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1044992,
00.html Book review: Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life. Authentic, in this sense, seems to mean stuff you couldn’t possibly be accused of wanting because you saw an ad for it.

An authentic life, then, is a life supposedly free from marketers’ manipulations. But can this be achieved? It seems to me that an “authentic” life is as studied a life as anything else: it requires that you be just as aware of what you wear, eat, drink and listen to as anyone else—probably more so. (If my father buys white Nikes, it’s because that’s what they have at the shop. He didn’t not buy white Nikes because he saw an ad for them during Friends, or because he knows they’re a multi-national organisation.)

(Rob Walker makes a similar point in a related article in Slate.) 13:20

http://www.zug.com/pranks/riaa/ “Hello. I just downloaded some illegal MP3s and my friend told me that the RAII is going to sue everyone who downloads music. What should I do?” (There’s a few pages to this.) 16:00

http://tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=scholar&s=levy091703 Nice philosophical exploration of the WSJ’s argument that the poor should be taxed harder, lest they forget just how naughty taxes are. 15:33

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/issues/2003-09-17/music.html/
1/index.html What fifth-graders think of Radiohead. 14:41

http://www.thefirsttwins.com/friendster.html Jenna and Barbara’s Bush’s Friendster “profiles.” (Unfortunately Barbara’s not within reach of my “Personal Network”…) 11:35

http://slate.msn.com/id/2088301/entry/2088586/ Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler are only 24 (profile). 17:22

http://www.komotv.com/qt/bouncing_bear.mpg What is says on the box. (How can you know the bear’s okay?!) (1.8Mb) 16:38

http://slate.msn.com/id/2088306/ How generals get elected President. “Wesley Clark, as pundits have noted, faces many obstacles if he wants to be president, including the lack of a campaign team and a late start in fund raising. But he has mastered the two historical requirements: He doesn’t act as if he needs the job, and he doesn’t act as if he wants war. For a general, that’s a good start.” 12:24

http://slate.msn.com/id/2088417/ Steven Waldman says: (1) even if Jews weren’t complicit in Jesus’s death, the Bible says they were (so don’t complain about Gibson’s Passion!); and (2) whether they did or didn’t is theologically irrelevant. (Issue is surely very complex; this seems a little too glib a summary.) 12:12

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/hca/transcripts/2002/
C4/1.html High court transcript (involving dividing and multiplying by zero, somehow): “Now, I required to increase the speed of light within a fusion engine so as to fuse the four hydrogen atoms which I claim become susceptible to fusing through the increased speed of light. Now, I have given no credit to—” 15:21

http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2003_09_01_archive.asp Gibson retires from blogging: “I’ve found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I’ve most enjoyed about it is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I’m doing this I’m definitely not writing a novel.” 11:00

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/burningman.html 09:41

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030829.html I’d wondered about this: if nuclear bombs are so bad, why do people still live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? 08:53

http://slate.msn.com/id/2088046/ Dahlia Lithwick suggests that the Supreme Court debate over the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act sets two elements of democracy—equality and freedom—against each other. (Never really considered this conflict.) 13:33

http://www.gaylifeexpo.com/gaylifeexpo/tickets.htm (c.f. www.monash.edu.au.) The perils of stock photography… 11:13

http://www.abs.gov.au/852563C30081B50B/0/0BE7A979498079B0CA256D33000C3672 The ABS has removed historical estimates of the number of Aborigines in Tasmania from their website because “the historical context in which the articles were intended to be viewed was not in all cases made evident to people accessing the site”; this “may have offended some people.”

Professor Bunyip believes this has something to do with Keith Windschuttle’s dispute with various historians over (among other things) the number of Aborigines living in Tasmania at the time of British colonisation—Windschuttle believes that there were about 2,000; others believe the number was between 4,000 and 10,000—and, according to one of Professor Bunyip’s readers, the missing articles support the lower estimate. (Geoffrey Blainey review of Windschuttle’s book.)

Fortunately, Google’s cache holds one of the articles: The Aborigines of Australia, contributed by W. Ramsay Smith. This makes clear what is meant by the “historical context” not being “made evident to people accessing the site”: for some strange reason, the fact that this article appeared in the Year Book Australia of 1910 is not immediately apparent. The only date that appears on the first screen is 2002, and it’s only by looking at the Bibliography that it becomes clear that the article was written a very long time ago. (Unsurprisingly, the article contains quite a few dodgy statements about the physical characteristics and customs, etc. of Aborigines that the ABS is not prepared to stand by in 2002.) Evidence of a conspiracy against Windschuttle? I don’t think so. (Though the ABS certainly could’ve been clearer about why they were withdrawn.)

(I do hope the ABS puts puts the articles back (though hopefully with better presentation): it is important that everything they’ve ever produced is available to the public, for all time—for some purposes, the wronger they were, the better.) 13:39

http://slate.msn.com/id/2087943/ Fred Kaplan says the U.N. U-turn signals a comeback for Colin Powell.

(Kaplan seems to be wrong about as often as he is right (even taking into account the fact that some of the time he’s writing about something he wishes would happen, rather than expecting it to). He was right about Peter J. Schoomaker being named the new Army chief of staff (great article describing Schoomaker’s philosophy when head of special ooperations—he wants “warrior diplomats”), but wrong about James Baker being sent to Baghdad to supervise Iraqi reconstruction.) 11:24

http://slate.msn.com/id/2087939/ “The private dreams of publicly held companies.”

Top private companies in: the US, the world excluding the US, Australia. (The top 50 public companies have revenues exceeding $40bn (see Forbes’s lists); only three private companies do.) 10:37

http://slate.msn.com/id/2085967/ Slate’s “Field Guide” to the 2004 presidential candidates. 17:44

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=9647 Voter registrations in the social science departments of 32 elite American colleges and universities: 1397 registered Democrats, 134 Republicans.

Why is this? Republicans not as keen to enter academia? Discriminated against when it comes to to hiring? Not as smart? (A noteworthy lack of diversity whatever the cause.) 14:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/31/magazine/31ANTISEMITISM.html A history of modern Israel, more or less, and how it has featured in European and American foreign policy. (It describes the circumstances that led Israel to be a “great liberal European cause” before 1967, and the U.S. to be an “ever more reliable friend” since.) 16:22

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-me-ruling30aug30,1,5755648.story?
coll=la-headlines-business-manual U.S. Judge A. Howard Matz issues preliminary injunction prohibiting L.A. real estate mogul Donald Sterling from using the word “Korean” in the names of his apartment buildings: “Use of the word Korean in the names of residential apartment buildings would indicate to the ‘ordinary reader’ that the buildings’ owner is not only receptive to but actually prefers tenants of Korean national origin.”

(I’m wondering if anyone’s gone after the clothing company FUBU (“For Us, By Us”) which—as well as being provocatively named—seems to feature only black models in its advertising.) 16:43