…from Chaucer. Figures.
Spoyler alert: If ye haue nat yet sene the performaunce of ‘Serpentes on a Shippe,’ rede nat of the romaunce, for it doth telle of the manye suprises and straunge eventes that happen in the course of the storye, and thus it mayhap shall lessen yower enjoiement of the performaunce yt self.
I just think that it’s great that he finally got a blog after all these centuries.
It doesn’t look like Florida is going to avoid getting hit by Ernesto. Even the southeast coast (where I am) is in the cone, though to the extreme right side of it. I hope we’ll have a better idea of the situation by tomorrow.
[Update at noon]
Looking at the current forecast track, it’s looking an awful lot like Hurricane Charley a couple of years ago, that originally projected to come ashore in Tampa, but unexectedly took a right turn short of the goal, and pounded southwest Florida pretty hard. Batten down the hatches, Kathy.
[Update at 3 PM]
The latest Accuweather track seems way out of bed with everyone else (NHS, Weather Underground, Weather Channel). It has a much faster storm, heading up the Florida peninsula on Tuesday (forget about launching the Shuttle this week–they’ll almost certainly have to roll back to the VAB). And we’re right in the bulls eye (though at least it would be coming up through the swamp, so minimal storm surge).
Everyone else still centers it off the gulf coast, and not hitting until Wednesday. I hope that everyone else is right, but it looks like we’ll probably have to shutter up tomorrow. Anyone know why the disparity?
[Update a couple minutes later]
I just figured it out. They have their days mislabeled. They think that today is Saturday. That’s a relief, but I still don’t like the eastward trend of their track.
[Evening update]
It’s been downgraded to a tropical storm. Jeff Masters thinks there’s a good chance that it won’t be able to recover to hurricane strength in the Florida straights, and could come on shore as a tropical storm or a low-level hurrican at most.
…given Ernesto’s small size and the difficulty he is having with Hispanolia, there is hope that the expected 1-2 day traverse of Cuba will significantly weaken him. It may take Ernesto a day or two to regain hurricane strength once he emerges into the Florida Straits. This bodes well for the Florida Keys, which may dodge another hurricane. I think that only if Ernesto makes landfall north of Tampa will he have time to organize into a major hurricane.
Here’s hoping.
Does anyone know if a Palm Treo 650 can be used as a voice recorder?
Idiotarian playwright Harold Pinter is “written out.” What a non loss to the stage.
I haven’t had much (anything, in fact) to say about the Pluto imbroglio. I do think a lot of the commentary about it is kind of silly, anthropomorphizing an icy rock with talk of “poor Pluto.” Get over it, folks.
Here’s what I would have written, if I’d had the time and more inspiration.
In this post, a commenter says:
…it is apparent that you hardly ever criticise Bush for anything. You are primarily concerned with the nuttier fringe of Bush’s opposition and what they say. The end result is that although you claim that there is a lot to criticise about Bush, you never say what it is, nor spend much time on it.
What you don’t seem to acknowledge on your blog is that significant portions of the anti-Bush population is _not_ the nutcase moonbat fringe, but people who supported the president but changed their minds because of things that they found they did not like. But you seem to clearly divide the country into “us” and “them” and the only “them” that you acknowledge is the nutters.
A lot of people supported Bush up to the middle of last year, when several things happened. For one, it became clear that Iraq was not getting any better and Bush’s pronouncements about it seemed to indicate that he was the only person who did not recognize this. Then there was the Harriet Miers Supreme Court choice, which convinced a lot of conservatives that Bush was more interested in helping friends than in making decisions based upon sound conservative (and intellectual) core values. And then there was hurricane Katrina and the aftermath, where the entire response seemed muddled and confused. For me, I could substitute “terrorist bomb” for Katrina and conclude that this administration would do as bad a job responding to a terrorist attack as it did responding to a predictable hurricane. That caused me to lose all faith in the president. (And the continuing deterioration in Iraq has not helped change my mind.)
Sure, there are a lot of crazies saying crazy things about Bush. But a) they are not the majority of his non-supporters, and b) they are not the ones who hold political power in this country. So why be so concerned about them, when the problems are with the people in charge?
I am concerned with that because the “nuttier fringe” seems to have become the mainstream of the Democrats, and it gets a lot of air time.
I have criticized the administration, and linked to others’ criticisms with approval often–I suspect you just haven’t noticed. I thought that the Harriet Miers nomination was one of the biggest blunders of his presidency, and I’m livid that amid all the out-of-control spending that he’s actually encouraged, the first thing that he could find his veto pen for in five years was stem cells (not that I think that this should necessarily be federally funded). I think that it was a travesty and in fact a dereliction of duty and violation of his oath of office that he signed McCain-Feingold when he said himself that it was unconstitutional.
I remain furious that Bush didn’t can George Tenent when he came into office, that he allowed Norm Mineta to remain in charge of Transportation for so long after he refused to profile, that he allowed the TSA to drag its feet for so long on arming pilots, that he allowed that idiot who insisted on dress codes for air marshals to remain in place for so long, only recently ending that inspired idiocy.
I think that the Department of Homeland Security was a disastrous mistake (and the reorganization that it entailed was one of the reasons that the federal Katrina response was laggard, though I never have high expectations of federal bureaucracies). Will it respond well to a terrorist attack? Probably not, but I don’t blame George Bush for that. As I said, I have low expectations for big government, regardless of who’s president, and losing faith in a president because a bureaucracy acts like a bureaucracy is silly, though people tend to do it anyway (it was one of the reasons that Bush’s father lost to Bill Clinton). I wish that the administration had used 9/11 as a justification to refocus the federal government on the things that it’s really responsible for and good at, and cleared the underbrush of a lot of the nonsensical things that have accumulated over the decades. Instead with the connivance of the Chuck Schumers of the world, it became an excuse to continue nonsensical things like the Drug War, and grow the government.
There are many other things for which I could criticize the administration, if I had time, and if there was a point. I have said these things, many times, over the years. As I said, for some reason people only notice when I bash the mindless Bush critics.
But my problem is that we are war, and much (even most) of the criticism coming from the left is purely partisan and unserious (if it were a Democrat doing many of the things that Bush, along with his “compassionate conservatism,” has done they’d be praising him as a tough president, instead of vilifying him). I shoot down these spurious critiques in order to clear the field for rational criticism, of which he’s quite worthy. I’m not a Democrat (though I was one once), but I’m not a Republican either (and never have been), and I can certainly understand why Orson Scott Card is upset with his party.
New York Times editorial page today has an opinion about stem cells concluding:
Mostly it illustrates the great lengths to which scientists must go these days to shape stem cell research to fit the dictates of religious conservatives who have imposed their own view of morality on the scientific enterprise.
This following a piece on cluster bombs where they “dictate” the terms of weapons sales from the Pentagon to protect Lebanese. They have also “imposed their own view of morality on the” war “enterprise.”
At least both views of morality coincide on the ethics of cluster bomb use in stem cell research.
To paraphrase Golda Meir, so-called human rights organizations will be useful when they learn to love human rights more than they hate the US and Israel. Or to paraphrase someone else–they’re not in favor of human rights, they’re just on the other side.
We need to either reform them (unlikely–it would require a housecleaning so thorough there would be little left) or form some new ones that could be more credible.
Given that some of the nations who have offered troops for the farce that is a ceasefire in Lebanon don’t recognize Israel’s right to exist (e.g., Malaysia and Indonesia), and the UN itself doesn’t seem to have a problem with this, what would they say at Turtle Bay if Iran offered up “peacekeeping troops” in south Lebanon? Since they don’t formally recognize Iran’s role in the war, how would they refuse? For that matter, why wouldn’t they accept an offer from Syria to help “police” its border with Lebanon?
National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield is calling it quits at the end of the season. Certainly the last two years have to have been pretty rough on him. Here’s hoping that he’ll get a lighter season as a send off.