NATIONAL POST

The doctor who first raised the alarm about a mysterious new disease has become one of the most famous casualties of the deadly respiratory illness.



Dr. Carlo Urbani, an Italian communicable-disease expert known for his tireless dedication to his patients, who received a Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work with Doctors Without Borders, died in Thailand this weekend, where he was being treated for the severe acute respiratory syndrome he was the first to diagnose.

Usability Myths Need Reality Checks

Two papers, published by Robert Virzi in 1992 and Jakob Nielsen and Thomas Landauer in 1993, made a pretty good case that five users would uncover 70% of major usability problems and the next three would get most of the rest - for certain types of software. The usability community took the idea and ran with it.

Arguments advanced in the articles justified five to eight users as a significant number. It was also an affordable number. All sides were satisfied. Let the testing begin!

The two papers gave five to eight users a scientific basis for the testing of small software applications. However, extending the "five user theory" to larger software applications and the world-wide web turned a useful rule into a myth with no scientific basis.

Good myths are plausible explanations that serve a purpose. Feel free to chuckle, but at one time more people believed that a big guy in the sky with a hammer caused thunder and lightning than ever believed five users was enough to test anything, even though praying to Thor never did stop the rain. The myth served its purpose, which was not to control the weather, but to keep the Nordic priesthood in power.

Social Software panel at PC Forum 2003

Clay Shirky: Social software is everything from chat to group email to games. Three key things:

It's native to the Internet in ways that other technologies are not. Prior to the Web we had other tools for publication. IM was preceded by phones. Social communication -- how groups gather -- has no analog except the table.

It has an inverse relationship of value to scale. Websites are better with more users. But inviting 10,000,000 to dinner or putting 10,000,000 in your Rolodex sucks. The smaller the pool, the more valuable the relationships. The unit of social software is small groups.

War Desk | canada.com

There is something surreal about an intense gun battle in such intimate circumstances.



As one of the young gunners told me just after the fight, "It was like the best video game I have ever played."

Bibliography and style guides for writing and teaching English

Citing sources from the World Wide Web

Jon Udell: The universal canvas

Yahoo! News - Brody Surprises Berry With Kiss at Oscars

Brody Surprises Berry With Kiss at Oscars

2 hours, 57 minutes ago



LOS ANGELES - Best-actor winner Adrien Brody created an amorous Oscar moment to remember when he grabbed presenter Halle Berry and planted a long kiss on the mouth of last year's best actress.







A stunned Berry was left openmouthed and gasping Sunday, although she appeared amused by Brody's enthusiasm after he won an Oscar for his role in "The Pianist." Looking on from the audience at the Kodak Theatre was Berry's husband, singer Eric Benet.



"Whoa, I bet they didn't tell you that was in the gift bag," Brody cracked.



Backstage, the 26-year-old Brody was asked about the smooch.



"Well, if you ever have an excuse to do something like that, that's it," he said. "I took my shot."



Did Berry kiss him back?



"Oh yeah," Brody said, grinning.

Online Technical Writing: Strategies for Peer-Reviewing and Team-Writing

Online Technical Writing: Power-Revision Techniques

'Sick Feeling' for a Pilot's Family

"I want President Bush to get a good look at this, really good look here," his father, Michael, said, holding up a picture of the dead marine. "This is the only son I had, only son."

The Memory Hole > Thomas Pynchon's Unseen Writings for Boeing May Get Published



Thomas Pynchon was once a technical writer. Wheee!

Word Styles

Al Qaeda Training Manual

Al Qaeda Training Manual

The attached manual was located by the Manchester (England) Metropolitan Police during a search of an Al Qaeda member's home. The manual was found in a computer file described as "the military series" related to the "Declaration of Jihad." The manual was translated into English and was introduced earlier this year at the embassy bombing trial in New York. The Department is only providing the following selected text from the manual because it does not want to aid in educating terrorists or encourage further acts of terrorism.

Jernej Simoncic's homepage - GimpWin installer page



This is actually the best place to download Gimp, a free graphics program for windows.

Tor Lillqvist--GTK and GIMP for Windows

Mr. Bush's War

This war belongs to Richard Perle, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Dick Cheney and all the fellows from the Project for a New American Century. Again, if you have not yet clicked the links above, go ahead. I'll wait.



Welcome to the American Empire. Don't be surprised that your rights and privileges have changed all of a sudden. We used to be a constitutional democracy. That's pretty much done now. You're a citizen of an empire today, one that attacks sovereign nations without cause, with the backing of such international heavyweights as Spain and Eritrea. You're not a citizen. You're a customer. Take a number and get in line.



Above all, and amusingly enough, this war belongs first and foremost to George W. Bush. Mr. Bush ran a number of oil companies straight into the ground before becoming the constitutionally castrated governor of Texas. From thence to our current greatness, it seems. This has been his party since July, but few were truly interested in attending. 160 nations want nothing to do with this attack, and eleven of the fifteen United Nations Security Council vote-counters told him to go pound sand, despite a month-long bribery campaign that would have made John Gotti blush with envy.

Mozilla document

Recommendations

RECOMMENDATIONS

In spite of these positive gains and improvements in training teachers, more still needs to be accomplished. Adams and Fuchs assert,

When you bring a computer into the classroom, things naturally change. Some changes can be anticipated; others cannot. Some changes are desirable; others are not. Of one thing we can be certain, whatever our field of work, we must be aware of the influence of technology or be beached by this sea of change. (5)

I recognize that technology brings with it inequities and injustices of its own, and I am not arguing that technology will solve these problems; nor am I arguing that a teacher's knowledge about technology will necessarily produce better literacy within the students. What I am arguing, however, is that teachers need to be trained to use technology so that they are better prepared to combat, recognize, and fend off the inequalities that will appear in computer- equipped classrooms. Teachers need the knowledge so they can have the agency to make decisions about technology and so they can be contributors to the developing of technology. In sum, we need to train teachers so that they will not just see themselves as people who are having technology shape and define them, but as people who have the power, the authority, and the agency to be developers of technology and to be, in Haas and Neuwirth's words, "shapers" of technology (326). We, as a field, cannot afford to be washed away; we cannot allow the rug to be swept out from under us while we remain content in our teaching . . . or our training.

In the section below, I will address the concerns that a computer-rich environment evokes and give recommendations regarding how we might better prepare teachers to utilize and facilitate

technology in their teaching.

Recommendations

RECOMMENDATIONS
In spite of these positive gains and improvements in training teachers, more still needs to be accomplished. Adams and Fuchs assert,
When you bring a computer into the classroom, things naturally change. Some changes can be anticipated; others cannot. Some changes are desirable; others are not. Of one thing we can be certain, whatever our field of work, we must be aware of the influence of technology or be beached by this sea of change. (5)
I recognize that technology brings with it inequities and injustices of its own, and I am not arguing that technology will solve these problems; nor am I arguing that a teacher's knowledge about technology will necessarily produce better literacy within the students. What I am arguing, however, is that teachers need to be trained to use technology so that they are better prepared to combat, recognize, and fend off the inequalities that will appear in computer- equipped classrooms. Teachers need the knowledge so they can have the agency to make decisions about technology and so they can be contributors to the developing of technology. In sum, we need to train teachers so that they will not just see themselves as people who are having technology shape and define them, but as people who have the power, the authority, and the agency to be developers of technology and to be, in Haas and Neuwirth's words, "shapers" of technology (326). We, as a field, cannot afford to be washed away; we cannot allow the rug to be swept out from under us while we remain content in our teaching . . . or our training.
In the section below, I will address the concerns that a computer-rich environment evokes and give recommendations regarding how we might better prepare teachers to utilize and facilitate
technology in their teaching.

raelity bytes: blosxom: plug-in registry

I, Cringely | The Pulpit

But the trick here is not to do this by passing a law because laws can't generally be enforced over national borders. The only behavior any of us can reliably alter is our own, so WE -- not the spammers -- have to do something different. My proposed solution is a new class of e-mail application that combines many of the attributes we see on eBay, the Internet's one great commercial success. In fact, this solution could well be OFFERED by eBay, and I recently suggested it in an e-mail to Max Levchin of eBay's PayPal subsidiary.



What I am coming down to is essentially an economic argument. I think that passing laws is the wrong way to handle this problem and the right way is by making the spammers pay -- literally pay -- to reach me. I find preferable the idea that spammers pay me directly rather than have them pay the equivalent of postage that doesn't benefit me at all except by reducing the volume of spam. Of course, doing this requires a micropayment system, which made me think of PayPal, which can efficiently handle tiny transactions and already has 17 million customers.

Another factor in this choice is that writing fiction every day seems to be an essential component in my sustaining good mental health. If I get blocked from writing fiction, I rapidly become depressed, and extremely unpleasant to be around. As long as I keep writing it, though, I am fit to be around other people. So all of the incentives point in the direction of devoting all available hours to fiction writing.

raelity bytes

email - sends newly aggreagated stories to the email address of your choosing.



Be sure to set the $mail_cmd configuration variable in the email.pl plugin source to the email command Blagg should use to send email; defaults to "/usr/lib/sendmail -oi -t".



Usage requires additional command-line switches:



* -plugin=email (activates the Email plug-in)

* -email={destination email address}

* -subject={email subject line} [optional; default is "You've got Blagg!"

raelity bytes

blogger - speaks to any Blogger API-enabled application.



Take a gander at Blagg w/ Blogger Blaggplug in action at blagg.blogspot.com .



Usage requires additional command-line switches:



* -plugin=blogger (activates the Blogger API plug-in)

* -username={your blogger username}

* -password={your blogger password}

* -blogid={your blogger blog id}

* -url={URL of the XML-RPC server at the remote end; defaults to Blogger's}

* -app_key={the app_key for a particular Blogger API URL} (optional)

raelity bytes

email - sends newly aggreagated stories to the email address of your choosing.



Be sure to set the $mail_cmd configuration variable in the email.pl plugin source to the email command Blagg should use to send email; defaults to "/usr/lib/sendmail -oi -t".



Usage requires additional command-line switches:



* -plugin=email (activates the Email plug-in)

* -email={destination email address}

* -subject={email subject line} [optional; default is "You've got Blagg!"

KCRW Music: Morning Becomes Eclectic

Flaming lips. Capture this stream.

Yahoo! News - U.N. Orders Inspectors From Iraq

UNITED NATIONS - Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) ordered U.N. employees on Monday to leave Iraq (news - web sites), after the United States, Britain and Spain abandoned efforts to win U.N. backing for military action.

Sounds like we're ready to start killing people.

Poynter Online - Thursday Edition: Kidnapping Facts

Only 100 or so abductions by strangers each year fit into more serious categories -- cases in which the child is held for an extended period of time or is killed, she said. But the longer the abduction lasts, the more bleak the prospects become of finding the child alive.

Poynter Online - Thursday Edition: Kidnapping Facts

In 2001, 840,279 people (adults and children) were reported missing to the FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC). The FBI estimates that 85 to 90 percent of those (roughly 750,000 people or 2,000 per day) reported missing were children. The vast majority of these cases are resolved within hours.



Based on the identity of the perpetrator, there are three distinct types of kidnapping: kidnapping by a relative of the victim or "family kidnapping" (49 percent); kidnapping by an acquaintance of the victim or "acquaintance kidnapping" (27 percent); and kidnapping by a stranger to the victim or "stranger kidnapping" (24 percent).

William Gibson While I'm on the topic of mediated personae, something that came up during that CBC taping, last night (for me, anyway) was the idea that blogging (or even posting to fora) represents the democratization of the mediated persona. Literally anyone can have one, now, or several. I am an exception to this, because I have mine via the printed word, the oldest mass medium on the planet, and this website is maintained by a publishing company that belongs to an even larger corporation owned in turn by shapeshifting reptiles from Beta Reticuli, but the rest of you, today, are free to mass-mediate your own personae. Which was formerly, hugely, not the case. Choose a handle, post: you're mediating a persona.

William Gibson SOMEONE EXPRESSES SURPRISE
At my having remarked yesterday (with an evident sense of discovery) on something (the mediated persona) that I dealt with, extensively, as far back as IDORU.
Keep in mind that anyone who's read a novel of mine has read it much more recently than I have. I can't recall ever having reread anything of my own, in its entirety, after publication.
But, also, now I think about it, IDORU was the last of my full-on I-don't-do-the-Internet freestyle extrapolations. When I wrote IDORU, I was still faxing my daily pages to friends for comment, and probably wasn't at all sure what websites *were*. ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES was the first book I wrote as an email-using, web-searching, spam-accreting human. So I suspect that my unlikely-seeming wonderment at the democratization of mediated personae is about that awareness arriving, for me (as opposed to my Man Behind The Curtain) only just now.

Googlism :

mark crane is trying to get a phd in composition and rhetoric at the university of louisville

mark crane is an assurance and advisory business services partner in the west michigan practice and has been with ernst & young

mark crane is an aquatic toxicologist expert in many ecotoxicological techniques

mark crane is working on a phd

mark crane is our troop leader

mark crane is available to assist with your technology procurement needs

mark crane is maintaining the pages under the direction of dr

mark crane is most probably right

mark crane is a partner in the chicago office of segal mccambridge singer & mahoney

mark crane is a senior editor at medical economics magazine

mark crane is doing a lot with them

Covering the Chaos (Randy Bass)

Covering the Chaos (Randy Bass)

Heath Row's Media Diet

Bubble Money

Bubble Money

Sterling: Let's talk about the business side. That’s Topic No. 2: Where's the bubble money? Where's the economic activity? Where's the business model? So much glass was put in the ground and so much human energy was expended for something that doesn’t have a business model. The death of portals is a problem. The death of ISP's is a problem. If something like Canopy takes off, there go the ISP's. Its interesting to me that the biggest thing going right now is Google. Google isn't a portal. It's all about getting right into the database. Get me right into the database.



Who is this poor guy from Red Herring? I saw him on CNN this morning. He says, "I was googling it. I was bloggering it." I was blog dancing him. He says, "Yeah, the enthusiasts usually start it and then someone like me comes in to finance it." I was, like, "Where's your magazine dude?" How many times do these guys need to be punished? How much money do they need to lose? When will they learn that the Internet is a product of the sciences and the military. Those aren't profit-motive ventures.



CNN doesn't have any money to send anyone to Baghdad this time around. Fox lost heaps of money, enough money to build entire cities from the ground up. There's no money. There's no money in Blogger. There's no money in the corporate media. Money has to come from somewhere. Unless information wants to be worthless. Unless we just want to be worse informed from machines that work worse and worse. That’s the trend I'm looking at, and it's bugging me.

Elizabeth smart has been found alive, in the company of some drifter street prophet who calls himself "Emmanuel." Completely unbelievable. I wonder if she's brainwashed. They found her in Sandy, my hometown. Thank heavens for the random pullover policy. Oddly, I was pulled over for no reason a few days ago in Orem, and I sorta look like the guy. Hmmm...

test.

"Orchid Fever" by Susan Orlean

John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth. He has the posture of al dente spaghetti and the nervous intensity of someone who plays a lot of video games. He is thirty-four years old, and works for the Seminole Tribe of Florida, setting up a plant nursery on the tribal reservation near Miami. The Seminole nicknames for Laroche are Crazy White Man and Troublemaker. My introduction to Laroche took place last summer, in the new Collier County Courthouse, in Naples, Florida. The occasion was a hearing following Laroche's arrest for illegally taking endangered wild orchids, which he is passionate about, from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, which is a place he adores. Laroche did not dress for the occasion. He was wearing wraparound Mylar sunglasses, a cotton-blend shirt printed with some sort of scenic design, and trousers that bagged around his rear. At the hearing, he was called forward and asked to state his name and address and to describe his experience in working with plants. Laroche sauntered to the center of the courtroom. He jutted out his chin. He spoke in a rasping, draggy voice. He stuck his thumbs in his belt loops and said, "I've been a professional horticulturist for approximately twelve years. I've owned a plant nursery of my own. . . . I have extensive experience with orchids, and the asexual micropropagation of orchids under aseptic cultures." Then he grinned and said to the court, "I'm probably the smartest person I know."

"Orchid Fever" by Susan Orlean

John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth. He has the posture of al dente spaghetti and the nervous intensity of someone who plays a lot of video games. He is thirty-four years old, and works for the Seminole Tribe of Florida, setting up a plant nursery on the tribal reservation near Miami. The Seminole nicknames for Laroche are Crazy White Man and Troublemaker. My introduction to Laroche took place last summer, in the new Collier County Courthouse, in Naples, Florida. The occasion was a hearing following Laroche's arrest for illegally taking endangered wild orchids, which he is passionate about, from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, which is a place he adores. Laroche did not dress for the occasion. He was wearing wraparound Mylar sunglasses, a cotton-blend shirt printed with some sort of scenic design, and trousers that bagged around his rear. At the hearing, he was called forward and asked to state his name and address and to describe his experience in working with plants. Laroche sauntered to the center of the courtroom. He jutted out his chin. He spoke in a rasping, draggy voice. He stuck his thumbs in his belt loops and said, "I've been a professional horticulturist for approximately twelve years. I've owned a plant nursery of my own. . . . I have extensive experience with orchids, and the asexual micropropagation of orchids under aseptic cultures." Then he grinned and said to the court, "I'm probably the smartest person I know."

Clique of Instant Messagers Expands Into the Workplace

Clique of Instant Messagers Expands Into the Workplace
By AMY HARMON

Instant messaging, long associated with teenagers staying up late to chat online with friends, is moving into the workplace with an impact that has started to rival e-mail and the cellphone.

Less intrusive than a phone call and more immediate than e-mail, instant messaging is finding users far more quickly than e-mail did when it was first introduced, according to Forrester Research, a technology research firm in Cambridge, Mass. In the last year alone, Forrester said, the number of instant messages has grown by more than 50 percent, so that nearly one-third of American adults are now IM-ing, as it is called, with their children, clients, colleagues and each other.

"It really is instant," said Nancy Elieff, a realtor in South Pasadena, Calif., who recently began using instant messaging to stay in touch with her children in college. "You don't have to wonder if they're going to get your message, when they're going to get your message, if they're going to write you back. It's really now."

The growth is driven in part by the availability of free IM software on the Internet, as companies like Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo use it to lure customers to their other services.

Software Pioneer Quits Board of Groove

Sample chapters

Must have gadgets - QuickTopic bulletin board

I'm also in the military (National Guard, not currently activated), and when the situation calls for bringing anti-boredom items, I will always bring a book. Printouts of classics are also great to always bring along. God bless Project Gutenberg. It doesn't matter if they're ruined, so I can fold them up, put them in my pocket, and take them into the woods or sand without worry. The last thing I read that way was Milton's Areopagitica. Photocopies work too, as well as torn up, 50 cent used books. Similarly, cassette dubs are the best for music in the woods, because it doesn't matter if they're ruined, they're cheaper, more durable (somewhat), and hold more than a CD-R. And you play them on a $5 portable radio.

DECONFERENCE

March 22 - 31, 2003
DECONsciousness: Building as Blog

Ever had cause to wonder what a house or building is thinking? In an age of networked consciousness, that thought is an echo that slips frictionlessly past the soapy surface of time's constraints. Agile, flexible, and invasively curious, the spaces of this exhibition are collaboratively curated and designed by Steve Mann and architectural designer Stewart Morgan.

Joi Ito's Web: An email from Dee Hock about the emergent democracy paper

I wonder if you realize that a dozen or two people like yourself with the right combination of communication, technological and organizational skills could design and implement a global government without the consent of any present form of organization and provide it with the neural network to insure its success. A government that could continually evolve to ensure that no matter affecting the public good or the health of the planet fails to be disclosed, examined and understood. Or that any existing organization could escape being confronted with synthesized opinions and alternatives that would swiftly emerge. Such an organization based on rights of participation and withdrawal and consent of the participants could be something entirely new in this tired world. Now that would be something truly worthy of the best within us and the best among us. And a great deal of fun in the bargain! It would, in the fullest sense, be far from democratic since the Internet remains largely a tool of the privileged and technologically savvy. That, we can hope, will change in time. One must always begin somewhere, remembering that the sages tell us our responsibility is to succeed in the world as we find it if it is ever to become the world we wish it to be.

Joi Ito's Web: An email from Dee Hock about the emergent democracy paper

Joichi:

How nice to hear from you and how kind of you to take time to send your paper on Blogging, a singularly uncharming term, but none the less interesting. I have read it several times with considerable interest, for it deals with a number of subjects in which I am deeply interested, such as democracy, scaling, the failure of the Internet to fulfill its promise, and the ability to perceive and honor differences without losing perspective of the parts as inseparable from one another and from the whole. To distinguish without dividing is a state of mind badly needed in the world today.

As you may know, I have been arguing for a decade that the Internet was fatally flawed and would go the way of the telegraph, telephone, radio and television as far as its promise of elevating ideas and discourse, advancing democracy, enhancing liberty or facilitating economic and political justice. I have lived long enough to remember the claims that were made at the advent of radio and television, and read enough of the history of the telegraph and telephone to realize that the claims made by the messiahs of those forms of communication were not dissimilar from the claims made by aficionados of the Internet. The reason, from my perspective, is not complicated.

Untapped Networks

Watts: Absolutely. Corporations could benefit a great deal by thinking about their problems not just as technology or engineering problems but as network problems.

Look at Microsoft. I find it ironic that Microsoft is fighting so hard to not have its software packages segregated. What the company doesn

O'Reilly Network: Cory Doctorow's Bitchun' World: P2P Gone Wild [Feb. 27, 2003]

Koman: There's a scene in the book, where they ask the Imagineers, "How long to build?" And the guy says, "Five years." And they say, "No, without reviews, and approvals, and sign-offs." And the answer is eight weeks. You've had this experience of pulling together some entrepreneurial programmers but being completely stymied in being able to release your code ...

Google Search: comp.risks

Interesting archive of computer-related risks, per our discussion of the shuttle disaster on Wednesday. Also John Dvorak has a very interesting article on email and the shuttle:

Email and the Shuttle

Kicking back as a career / Life of tester not all fun, but it is all games

Developers is a catch-all word for the programmers, artists, sound technicians, managers and other people who get together to make a single game. A sampling of the brainy topics developers will take on in San Jose this week: "Geometric Modeling for Sound Propagation," "34 Ways to Create Emotions in Games" and "Revenue Models for Massively Multiplayer Games."

Digital FM Transmitter CC-FMT

Finding the right way to connect your radio, MP3 player, or even a computer, to a stereo system can be time consuming and frustrating. This Digital FM Transmitter lets you send a signal from any audio source to any radio easily, and without wires. Use it to send a satellite radio signal, MP3 audio, and more, to nearby radios around your home or workplace, even in your car.



The FM Transmitter is simple to use. Just plug the Transmitter into the headphone jack or line out of any audio device and set the frequency of choice (88-108 MHz). You

Nemesis Follows Hubris, DIY or Not

What was really going on was hubris, and that deathly fear of damage to public image. Was there some reason that the Columbia went to an orbit from which it couldn't reach the ISS as easily as it could de-orbit, its only real hope (and still not a good one) of a rescue? Would an ISS rendezvous orbit have been ... cowardly? Underconfident?

Columbia was too heavy to reach that orbit.

Nemesis Follows Hubris, DIY or Not

Now factor in that it might take four times longer in a space suit. The Columbia didn't have six weeks -- supplies would've run out long before. Then figure in that far more than a single tile was damaged on the Columbia. Multiply by the number of tiles, and they don't finish until mid-summer, long after their climbers' knapsacks are empty.

Do we know conclusively it was a tile problem?

The Press Gaggle

MR. FLEISCHER: Tonight, the President is going to discuss this. I think you will hear the President tonight talk about the threat of Saddam Hussein and how he poses a danger to the American --



Q. In 12 years he hasn't done anything.



MR. FLEISCHER: We will temporarily suspend the Q&A portion of today's briefing to bring you this advocacy minute. (Laughter.)

Wired News: Net Hacker Tool du Jour: Google

"We've done a lot of work at universities and teaching hospitals, and it's the hardest environment to impose security, because they tend to have an open information-sharing model," Langston said. "It makes it very difficult to impose restrictions on data: In a teaching environment, that's how people learn and extend their knowledge.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL I remember a time years ago when I was as convinced that Dick Cheney was obscenely wrong about something I am now. Subsequent events raised the possibility that he might not have been so wrong after all.

[IP] a pirce very worth reading till the end SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL byJo

Veteran Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory accompanied me on one of my futile visits to his office, where she spent better than an hour listening to us argue about ³circular errors probable² and ³MIRV decoys² and the other niceties of nuclear nightmare. When we were leaving, she, who had seen a lot of politicians in her long day, turned to me and said, ³I think your guy Cheney is the most dangerous person I¹ve ever seen up here.² At that point, I agreed with her.

[IP] a pirce very worth reading till the end SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL byJo

Here is the problem I think Dick Cheney is trying to address at the moment: How does one assure global stability in a world where there is only one strong power? This is a question that his opposition, myself included, has not asked out loud. It¹s not an easy question to answer, but neither is it a question to ignore. Historically, there have only been two methods by which nations have prevented the catastrophic conflict which seems to be their deepest habit.

Teemings - Extras - The Horror of Blimps

On this occasion I awoke to the sense that there was a large menacing presence approaching me silently out of the gloom, so I opened my eyes, and there it was! A LARGE SILENT MENACING PRESENCE WAS APPROACHING ME OUT OF THE GLOOM, AND IT COULD FLY!!!



Somewhere in the control room of my mind a fat little dwarf in a security outfit was paging through a Penthouse while smoking a cigar with his feet up on the table, watching the security monitors of my brain with his peripheral vision. Suddenly he saw the LARGE SILENT SINSITER MENACING FLOATING PRESENCE coming at me, and he pulled every panic switch and hit every alarm that my body has. A full decade's allotment of adrenaline was dumped into my bloodstream all at once. My metabolism went from "restful sleep mode" to HOLY SHIT! FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE OR DIE!!!! mode" in a nanosecond. My heart went from twenty something beats per minute to about 240 even faster.