History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Rewriting History

7 Comments

No, WaPo, Richard Nixon was not impeached:

Obama ends his fifth year in office with lower approval ratings than almost all other recent two-term presidents. At this point in 2005, for example, former president George W. Bush was at 47 percent positive, 52 percent negative. All other post-World War II presidents were at or above 50 percent at this point in their second terms, except Richard M. Nixon, whose fifth year ended in 1973 with an approval rating of 29 percent because of the Watergate scandal that later brought impeachment and his resignation.

The resignation was to avoid impeachment (and removal) — he resigned because a group of senators from his own party went to the White House and told him that he’d be convicted if impeached. Because Republicans have the integrity to remove their bad apples, while Democrats circle the wagons around theirs.

Anyway, I’ll bet the reporter who wrote that wasn’t even born at the time.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

China On The Moon

41 Comments

Will it make a claim?

I sort of hope it does. It would bring things to a head with the problematic Outer Space Treaty.

[Update a few minutes later]

I haven’t looked at the pictures myself, but a reader has emailed me wondering if they’re potentially faked, based on inconsistent shadows, and similarity to past images (while not wanting to sound like the “Apollo moon hoax” people). I don’t have an opinion, but I wouldn’t put it past them.

Business, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Printer Hate

Lileks has bought another buck-sucking fail box:

The aforementioned cord situation is miserable – unless i turn it around, so the control panel faces away. But: it has wifi, so I think: put it in the unheated porch which is sorta-kinda my wife’s office, except A) it isn’t, because it’s unheated and bone-cold half the year, and B) she’s a kitchen-table-iPad after-hours worker now. So i could put it there and communicate with it, wirelessly.

Except you know how that goes. You know. You send a document to the printer. You hear nothing. You get up and walk over to the next room and make sure it’s on. Wifi light is blinking red, because the tech has an attention span that makes Dory from “Finding Nemo” look like the fargin’ Sphinx, and it can’t remember networks, or forgets it was connected, or gets all confused because there’s a box for the city’s wifi system down the block and it keeps saying things and making it lose its place!!!! And then you have to enter your password on a printer touchscreen, which ought to be a field-sobriety test, and then you go back and send the document again and wait for the sullen complaining sound of plastic crap feeding a piece of paper into the machine, and the sudden shocked kadunk! as the print heads swing into place, and then silence, because it jammed.

Like wi-fi, this is a really screwed-up technology.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!