infinite improbability

Debate comment

Kerry wants the world community involved in Iraq, but he wants bilateral negotiation with North Korea. What's the difference between the two? Seems to me that if you need multi-national negotiations anywhere, it's North Korea--you can't go it alone there, or anywhere else.

Debate blurb

Quick debate note. Kerry is coming off much better on radio than he is on TV.

Fake tans, and other signs that John Kerry is his own worst enemy

By now, everybody with an internet connection or a tv set has heard about John Kerry's rather fake looking tan. With just over a month before the election, Kerry needs to be getting people to focus on the issues that he's the strongest on, not discussing whether on not his new skin tone is real or not, but this is just another example of Kerry managing to do something to get off message. Things like tans or his constant stream of sports-related faux pas are really quite irrelevant to the question of whether the guy should be president or not, but they're the sort of distractions that Kerry doesn't need.

However, those silly distractions are nothing compared with Kerry's real problem, which is the tactical error of focusing on his service in Vietnam, or even on the war, rather than the issue that he could win on--the economy. Kerry can't win on the war issue--when national security is the prime focus, Bush (even with the WMD stuff) is still the stronger candidate. He needs to focus on the economy, because despite the reality that the economy is fundamentally strong, what matters is not reality but the average voter's perception of the economy, and that isn't so good. Clinton won because he turned the economy into the central issue of the campaign, and if Kerry has any hopes of winning, he needs to do the same thing. Instead, his central theme is "Vote for me, I was in Vietnam," and while that angle may have worked for Max "Vote for me, I lost my legs in Vietnam" Clelland in the Georgia senate race, it's not going to work for Kerry.

Further compounding Kerry's problem is that I seriously doubt that he has a chance to win Florida anymore. The whole (phony) claim that black voters were disenfranchised in 2000 is nothing more than a too-little-to-late last ditch effort to counteract the well organized Republican efforts over the last four years to actively reach out to black voters in Florida. Even Miami-Dade, which went solidly for Gore in 2000 isn't a true Democratic stronghold--Jeb Bush won handily there in the 2002 governor's race. To top it off, the hurricanes have given Bush a chance do what he does best--show resolve in the face of disaster, while at the same time, Kerry's attack ads running during commercial breaks in the middle of the hurricane coverage just ended up looking trite and petty.

In short, I think that Kerry peaked at the convention and that his campaign is desperately in need of somebody to get him back on message before he manages to self-destruct completely.

Hurricanes, and Earthquakes, and Volcanos, oh my!

2004 is going to go down in history as the year of the natural disaster. Four hurricanes and counting, there was just a 5.9 earthquake in California (which apparently doesn't have much damage), and Mount St. Helens is threatening to erupt. Seems that the only disaster that's been avoided this year was summer wildfires.

Now, the question is, how long until the Jack Van Impe types start fitting it in with Bible prophecy to scare us all into thinking the end of the world is coming? (my personal favorite in that category is Grant Jeffrey who used to come to my old church and tie every Cold War related event into Revelation)

Oh yeah, we had another hurricane...

...thanks to Hurricane Jeanne, which wasn't even supposed to come close enough to us to do any damage (proof that meterology isn't an exact science--it came much closer than they said it would), we were without power for the last 36 hours.

We didn't have much blown down--it all blew down in Charley and Frances, but in general, this was the worst of the storms for our area--roofs blown off, etc. I'll post more about it tomorrow. Since we just got power back as of a few minutes ago, there's a lot of e-mail to catch up on.

Great commercial

This is probably the most well done Nike ad I've seen in a while. It's pretty depressing if you're a hockey fan though (I think even you'll start wanting hockey back Holton).

Here's the ad: A Dark Day

Watch out Iceland...

...Hurricane Karl is headed right at you. Well, to be accurate, it will just be tropical storm Karl by that point, and since it's 5 days out, it could miss them. I just think it's kind of interesting that the thing will still be a tropical storm all the way up at that lattitude. Better start hunkering, Iceland.

Football Fans for Truth

John Kerry pretends to be a sports fan, but the folks at the newest 527 group, Football Fans for Truth want us to know that he's really just a sports poser who can't even get the name of the Packers' stadium right (it's Lambeau not Lambert, John), and who was singing the praises of the Buckeyes while in Michigan.

Just a bit on the lighter side of politics...

In which Kathryn rants about the NHL lockout

Boo hiss, a pox on Gary Bettman and Bob Goodenow for their inability to get over their egos and come to an agreement to get the NHL season starting on time. The way I see it, the only two good things that have come out of Bettman's tenure were expanding the league so that Tampa got a team (yay Lighting!) and letting each player on the winning team spend 24 hours with the Stanley Cup. Other than that, the rule changes that came in on his watch are lame, he's really a basketball guy and doesn't have appropriate respect for the game, and well, I'd be happy to see him go.

Hey, here's an idea, maybe if everybody starts making daily calls to the commissioners office and the NHLPA asking "is the lockout over yet?" they'll get so sick of getting bombarded with calls that they'll work something out.

Theresa Heinz Kerry: "let them go naked for a while"

In a comment that is about on par with Marie Antoinette's "let them eat cake," good ol' Theresa Heinz Kerry objected to sending clothing to the Caribbean hurricane victims (who lost everything, mind you), setting up sending clothes and sending water as an either/or proposition, and suggested that they should "let them go naked for a while, at least the kids". Yeah right, if all her houses had been blown down by hurricanes when her kids were little and all of her kids' clothing had been destroyed, I'm sure that she would have wanted her children to go naked. And, I don't hear her suggesting that the kids in Florida who had everything destroyed should go naked, but oh, it's fine for those in the Caribbean to have to go naked. Just the sort of thing that a patrician upper class snob would think. Do we really want this woman representing our country to the rest of the world?

Miami wins again

Florida State is cursed, that's all there is to it.

If you're going to forge memos, don't use Word

Sounds like the folks at 60 Minutes were so eager to dish dirt on Bush that they didn't bother with fact checking. As pretty much every news source has pointed out, the memos were pretty obviously forged in MS Word. I don't know how anybody believed that it could possibly be real, because it's clear from even casual observation that those things weren't written on a typewriter. The most obvious sign that they're forged is that it uses a superscript "th" on the date, which Word does automatically, but which typewriters don't do. Plus, there aren't any typos or signs of correction of typos, and that's highly unlikely. That, and the fact that the text is too even--typewritten text has flaws that printed text does not have.

Here are the memos in question(PDF file)

Did Ken Jennings lose?

Rumor has it that in an episode of Jeopardy that was taped Tuesday, Ken Jennings lost in his 75th game. It is of course unnamed sources, but if it's true, the episode will be airing sometime this fall. The story is that he ends up with somewhere around $2.5 million. Yesterday's episode was Jennings' 41st day on the show, and his total is now at $1,380,661.

Update 11-30-04: I'm closing the comments section on this entry because I'm sick of having to go back and delete profanity laden comments. Also, there are more important things in the world than whether or not Jennings is an arrogant whatever, and I suggest that all of you who are arguing read about them. For example, how about if you all go read about the election situation in Ukraine, it's probably the most significant world event right now.

immense stupidity

This guy is an idiot. Ok, I know it's supposed to be all witty and full of irony, but it's that sort of pretentious pretender who writes something deliberately inflammatory and then smugly sits there and claims that anyone who doesn't like it just isn't witty and intelligent enough to get the joke, so everybody laughs and pretends that it's funny because they are all too afraid to call it what it is for fear of sounding unintellectual.

I am so sick of hurricanes and you probably are sick of me blogging about them

I wish the hurricane season would just hurry up and end. I'm sick and tired of storms. I suppose I shouldn't complain too much because I'm sitting here with electricity listening to all of the generators running around the neighborhood, since it appears that my street is the only one in this general vicinity that didn't lose power. This is just too much though. We were on pins and needles for Charley, which was supposed to give a direct hit and turned at the last possible minute, we spent days in limbo waiting for Frances, and now we have Ivan following the exact same track as Charley and heading towards the state. Waiting for one hurricane is exciting, but waiting for two or three gets really old really fast. And, it's hurting me financially because I work on commission and people aren't spending money because seeing what everybody else lost puts their callous consumerism into perspective as what it is, and as a result, it's pretty darn hard to talk them into thinking that they NEED to drop several hundred bucks on luxury sheets when their neighbors to the south and east don't even have dry beds, that is if they even come into the store in the first place, which most of them aren't.

Another reason to hate the Yankees

The evil NY Yankees want Major League Baseball to award them a forfeit over the Devil Rays, who didn't show up in time for the game today because OF THE HURRICANE!!! What a bunch of morons those stinkin' Yankees are. At the time they would have had to leave to get to New York in time, Tampa was still getting hit by Frances, and they weren't able to fly out. When a team is being hit by a hurricane, that sure seems to me like a good reason to allow the game to be postponed, seeing as they were stuck in Tampa and all, but no, a hurricane the size of Texas isn't a good enough excuse for the evil Yankees. If they get away with this, then a pox on the Yankees, Steinbrenner, and MLB and Bud Selig.

Frances, go ahead and leave already

This stupid storm won't leave. The center made it back into the Gulf of Mexico late Sunday evening, and it was only in the early morning hours on Monday that we started getting the worst of the weather, a full 24 hours after it made landfall on the east coast. We're STILL under a tropical storm warning, and the center is up somewhere near the panhandle now. It looks like it's clearing up here, but you never know. It's getting really old. Spent most of yesterday either watching the storm reports or watching movies, watched Kill Bill Vol. 2 and Rushmore, and I'm just sick of TV. I might be going to work this evening, I haven't checked back with the emergency hotline to see whether they decided to open up at 2 PM or not, I'll have to do that soon. We still haven't heard anything from my aunt and uncle in Palm Bay, and I don't know when they'll be able to call out to let anybody know how they're doing.

Oh yeah, and we're already watching hurricane Ivan, which went from a tropical storm to a category 4 hurricane in 18 hours yesterday (unprecedented), and which is now tracked to head right toward Florida. I know that they said that for most of the population expansion for Florida, we were in a lull in the hurricane cycle, and are going into a more intensified next few decades, but man, two hurricanes in less than a month, and another one on the way. We hadn't had two in the same season for more than a century, much less two in the same month.

Frances Update 8:55 PM, Sunday

We finally got heavy rain, once most of the wind had passed. Now that it's got feeder bands out in the Gulf, it's sucking a lot of water up and we're getting quite a bit of rain because of the feeder band rolling right into the county, as the storm is already starting to intensify again.

Update 9:20

Forgot to mention, we're looking at environmental disaster. because a retention reservoir at a phosphate mine has breached sending acidic wastewater into Hillsborough Bay.

Oh yeah, and there's now a hurricane warning from Anna Maria island north to Destin, which I suppose means that there is a possibility that we could be getting hurricane force winds within the next 24 hours. Since I'm at the extreme southern side of the warning, it's doubtful that we're going to get it that bad again, but you never know.

Frances Update 1:20 PM, Sunday--we're gonna get it

Dang, dang, dang. The storm is heading farther south, it looks like we're going to get it pretty bad. Could even be hurricane winds. Oh jolly.

From TBO.com

Frances Update 11:45 AM, Sun.

We're getting gusts that are stronger than last night--best I can tell, it's now gusting somewhere between 40 and 50 mph (they just put up the graphic on TV that says that they're measuring sustained winds of 47 mph at the airport). We still haven't gotten major rain yet, because this side of the storm is mostly wind, but it should start raining sometime soon. Counties to the north and south of us have customers without power, but they haven't reported anybody here without power yet, which basically means that we haven't had any trees or branches fall on power lines yet.

Frances update 1:45 AM

It's 1:45 AM and still only moderate gusts, I'm going to bed. Looking at radar, we might be getting a feeder band soon--Tampa is getting it now. My guess is that when I wake up tomorrow, we'll be getting some pretty nasty weather.

Frances update 12:10 am

Wind is starting to pick up again here, it's not raining yet, but we should be getting another feeder band through soon. It's pretty wacked, the eye hasn't even come ashore except for the leading edge, and we're already getting bad weather on the other side of the state. We haven't heard anything from my relatives in Palm Bay since afternoon, hopefully they're all ok.

I'll post another update as circumstances warrant.

Blogging the hurricane

Well, we're sitting here watching the storm reports, waiting for something to happen. Mainly at the moment we're trying to see the coverage of Palm Bay, because that's where my aunt and uncle live. Stupid Frances is taking forever to do anything, it was supposed to be on shore by now, but it's taken so long to get through the Bahamas that it's not going to even come on shore till something like 2:00 AM. We've gotten some feeder bands moving through, with some gusts, but nothing major yet. It's going to be north of us, but it's so darn huge that we'll get some rather significant wind and rain. I was at work today, the stupid mall won't close even when they're under a tropical storm warning, the one mall in Miami had to be forcibly closed by the police on Thursday because the policy of mall ownership is not to close until 4 hours after a hurricane warning is posted, and even though people were supposed to be evacuating, they wouldn't close.

At the moment, the weather here is just normal bad summer storm level, but it should get worse through out the night.

Here's the radar from TBO.com

Football? already?

Everybody's talking football, but for whatever reason, I just can't seem to get into it and get psyched for the start of football season this year. Maybe when the regular season starts, I'll get into it, but at the moment, I have a feeling of general blahness about the whole deal. Dunno, it could be because there have been so many off season changes for the Bucs that they don't even feel like the same team that I know and love, and that I've just been put through the wringer so many times by that team that I'm having a hard time getting my hopes up and being optimistic. Yeah, my sports teams have had recent success, and people talk about being a title town and all that, but the reality is that our teams have a cycle of getting good enough that we all get our hopes up, and then they dash them. The Bucs win the Superbowl, and then they go back to being the same old sucky Bucs, but now we know what winning feels like and when you go from those heights back down to mediocrity, the mediocrity is even more painful than it was all those years where we'd watch and at the start of every training camp we'd grasp at any little sign and think "maybe this is the year."

I don't know why sports fans do it to themselves. All those years of supporting your team and hoping that your team will win, even though you know that only one team can do it, and that even if your players are good, there can be injuries and missed field goals and then suddenly because of three plays that went the wrong way, instead of being in the division race, you're suddenly rooting for a team that's trying desperately to finish the season over .500 and all your hopes are for naught. But then, I remember that one glorious night in January when everything went right, and the next thing I know, I'm watching Malcolm Glazer being handed the Lombardi trophy and I can hardly believe it because my team, my team that has always had something go wrong, has actually won the Superbowl. And then there was the day in late May when I walked into the St. Pete Times Forum box office and pulled out my credit card to buy tickets to the Lightning's first ever Stanley Cup Finals game, hardly able to believe that I was actually buying a ticket to see my beloved hockey team playing for the Cup, and walking into the building with my sister that night, repeating over and over to myself "I can't believe it, I'm going to see the Lightning play for the Stanley Cup," and then that night almost two weeks later when I was standing in the middle of a crowd of thousands of screaming people, drenched in beer and not caring because I had just watched my team win, and I could hardly believe it was true. When I remember those glorious moments, everything else seems worth it, and after all, it can't possibly be as good if you haven't endured years of agony to get there, can it? Maybe I'm not so blah about football season after all.

Oh lovely, another hurricane

Well, it's looking pretty probable that Florida is going to get hit by two major hurricanes in one season for the first time in more than a century. You probably won't see me posting any 'Holy crap, it's "The Big One"' entries this time around, because unless something changes, Frances is almost certainly going to hit the east coast. Not good for the east coast, but not nearly as worrisome for those of us on the west coast as Charley was. It just so happens though, that my one aunt and uncle live right in the projected path of the storm, so they, my cousin, and their assorted animals will be coming over to another relative on this side of the state to ride out the storm. Depending on the track, we could actually get some pretty nasty weather over here, but it's too soon to tell for certain. In any case, somebody's going to get hit pretty bad. Frances is more than twice the size of Charley, and it's going to be hanging over the state a whole lot longer dumping a whole lot more rain than Charley did, on top of the high winds. Not good.