Change
26 November 2008| United States Department of Defense | |
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| Robert Michael Gates Secretary of Defense 18 Dec 2006 – 20 Jan 2008 | Robert Michael Gates Secretary of Defense 20 Jan 2008 – ? |
I wonder just how long it's going to take the typical Obama supporter to move on from Denial to Anger…
…or if, indeed, they ever will. Much of politics has a sort of tribalism to it, under which people care far less about policies than they do about whether the coälition with whom they have identified themselves is in power. My friend Ronald once noted that, in some political factions, a willingness to turn on a dime when it comes to doctrine is often seen as the true test of merit.
Tags: Barack Obama, Obama
I don't know that I'm a typical Obama supporter, but given that the secretary is supposed to implement the policies of the president, I'd rather Obama pick someone he believes is knowledgeable and competent but possibly of the opposition party rather than a spoils-system political hack (Michael Brown comes to mind.)
So you're still in the denial stage, eh?
This reäppointment isn't analogous to when President Clinton reached across party lines for his Secretary of Defense. Before the financial crisis refocussed the minds of the voters, Obama's campaign was based upon a condemnation of United States war policy, very much including the policies designed and effected by Gates.
"Before the financial crisis refocussed the minds of the voters"
Is that the the New York Times Canned-phrase of the Day?
Paul Krugman is smiling, and winking at you.
Somehow, the notion that there's a giant amoeba-like brain mass of voters that are somehow maniacally focused on one thing, that then swings around to focus on one (other) thing, in serial fashion, seems a bit of a stretch; even for the mooks at the Daily Kos.
BTW, what's up with the 'a' character with the umlauts? In German, it's a 'y'/'i' like sound. So for "coälition", it might make one think it's pronounced, "coylition", which just sounds Canadian, eh.
When are you going to learn to thread your comments so that I don't have to hack the dB to repair things?
No one here is proposing that the voters are an amœbic mass. One simply recognizes that a some things receive wide-spread, common attention, and some do not. There is even a body of theory and evidence on how people cope with the complexity of decision by simply ignoring various relevant things wholesale, rather than giving every ideally relevant concern at least some little bit of weight (as would a rational individual if such calculations were costless).
Since long before the Germans turned a superscript into a pair of dots, there has been the diæresis, which symbol indicates when vowels have their own sounds. In English it is placed over the second of two immediately adjacent vowels to indicated that it does not form a diphthong with the first. (Hence .) And it may be used over a terminal vowel much as the French would use a grave accent, to indicate that a letter is not silent, without indicating that it is stressed. (Hence .) In Portuguese, the diæresis is given the additional ability to indicate that a diphthong is formed, by appearing over the first of two immediately adjacent vowels.
It would be nice if the people who'd formulated the standards and quasi-standards underlying browsers had from the out-set better recognized the distinction between characters and glyphs, but they didn't, and to ensure that a character with a diæresis isn't rendered as junk, one uses the same escape sequence as for the
umlaut.(Some folk, while aware and respectful of the distinction between characters and glyphs, simply regard the Umlaut as the same character as the diæresis. However, the history of these marks argues against that. Further, one a system that cannot render the glyph of the two dots, a German Umlaut really ought to be converted to an ( → ), while this would not be appropriate to the diæresis ( → ); which argues that these are not the same character. And requiring that a
langattribute be present and that rendering software be responsible for the recognizing that a double-dot gets one conversion for one set of languages, and another for other languages seems a bit much, especially as new values of thelangattribute would have to be introduced to support strings that were meant to be drawn from sets of languages.)As to the value of the Umlaut, it is not /ɪ/, nor does it somehow erase he value of the vowel over which it appears. The German Umlaut effects the following values:
Hence, were the diæresis in taken for einen Umlaut, the value of the would not properly be the diphthong of nor even the more separated sounds of .
When are you going to learn to thread your comments so that I don't have to hack the dB to repair things?
Hey man, I've got special needs. Please respect my minority rights, or the Obamites shall smite thee.
When I eat too many tacöes, the diæresis is indeed soon to follow, which indicates when non-human sounds emanate from das Badezimmer.
Lo, when the œrth was cööling, and the dipthongs were forming, the voice spake unto them, "Yeah, there shall be a Daniel, and though he be put to compare the visage of the official unto the official, naught shall be made of comparison of his own facial scrub, of the fashion most Isaiacally Asimovian, side burnished in flattery's thrall, to his be-whiskered heröes."
Inept threading may put you in the general majority, but I form my demands based upon your being a 'puter professional.
I consider Asmiov to be your boy by transitivity, in-so-far as he buddied with Newt Gingrich. In any case, it's well established in multiple fora that he's not one of my heroes. As to his sideburns, he kept them longer that I keep mine, and trimmed much more of the area around his mouth.
I form my demands based upon your being a 'puter professional.
I ain't no professional. Leon's a professional. Professional's have dignity. I do stuff that nobody else wants to do, or nobody else wants to be seen doing. You know the joke about fat chicks and scooters? Well, it turns out that there is an analog in the realm of computational machinery.
Inept threading may put you in the general majority
The next time I've got the hardware folks on the horn, I'll demand them explain to me their silicon support for their new inept-threading model; insisting their marketing people gave glowing hand-waving stimulus to its virtues; and that our customers were throwing themselves upon our gates, demanding it in deployed systems pronto.
Speaking of dime-turning intercontinental triballistic missives, it turns out that the nom de bain-public of your dearest Jahangir, Lord of the Belly-Dance, has it's historic roots in the title of a 17th century "Mugal" lush, who went by the name Nuruddin Salim Jahangir, or Al-Sultan al-'Azam wal Khaqan al-Mukarram, Khushru-i-Giti Panah, Abu'l-Fath Nur ud-din Muhammad Jahangir Padshah Ghazi, to his bath buddies.
Furthermore, according to the Aencyclopedia Moronica: "In this state, Jahangir was also open to the influence of his wives, a weakness exploited by many. Because of this constant inebriated state, Nur Jehan, the favourite wife of Jahangir, became the actual power behind the throne."
The Yeti of La Jolla
My opponent and I, we were sitting down at a Starchunks, embroiled over a solemn board of draughts, lattes clutched as bayonets in hand, when the ears of my opponent would perk up, his head not yet raising from it's appraisal of the board, and he exclaimed with excited authority, "Hark! The Yeti of La Jolla! One knows him by the tap-tap-tapping of his little shoes!"
Maintaining calm, thinking this a clever ad-hoc stratagem, concocted crudely by my competitor to curdle my concentration, I simply paused, looking upwards to where my eyes should have met my opponents. Yet there! In the peripheral view, a looming figure, not quite twice the height of two men, striding in the cooling pavement of his overcasting shadow, arms swaying like pendulous oars, slapping past the stagnant summer heat, gaining the entrance to the cafe, he loomed before us.
Sensing it, falling from perch and fleeing the scene, the birds outside gave our eyes, but not ears, ample warning. The nasally high pitched wail let forth: "Are you guys plaaaying cheeeckers?! "
"No Ron, we're doing our taxes, using little men to represent all the nice people for whom our dollars toil, without the needs of our own guiding amateur hands, marketly invisible as they may be."
"Oh, I see. By the way, have you seen Daniel? I was hoping he might loan me his book on the mating preferences of transexual sea otters and their classical liberal approach to genetic self-expression in the context of anthropogenic global coddling."
"Yes Ron, he's over there, in the corner, underneath that crush-able hat, attempting to calculate the inner product space of IKEA crossed with his living room, embedded in the complex manifold of VISA cardinality."
His position betrayed again by the local literary slug-a-bed, Gandervile the Chipper, the be-hatted one froze; like a deer, but not paralyzed; ready to break for freedom; in the wild parking lot he knew there would be cover; so he ran. The sounds of the wild Yeti plaintively chasing him in the breeze, "Daniiiiieeel, you forgot your otter boooook!" The tap-tap-tapping faintly diminishing in the twilight.
End part 1.
Say what you will about the Office of the Secretary of Defense, but at least they don't delete my blog posts.
I had thought there were some real Libertarians here. Perhaps a refresher might be in order:
"The central values of civilization are in danger. Over large stretches of the earth’s surface the essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have already disappeared. In others they are under constant menace from the development of current tendencies of policy. The position of the individual and the voluntary group are progressively undermined by extensions of arbitrary power. Even that most precious possession of Western Man, freedom of thought and expression, is threatened by the spread of creeds which, claiming the privilege of tolerance when in the position of a minority, seek only to establish a position of power in which they can suppress and obliterate all views but their own."
Oops, did they use the oppressive, insensitive, and offensive term "Western Man"!
Grounds for deletion! Go Daniel go! Beat it with the policy stick like a red headed step-child!
Up to this point, your comments haven't been deleted. But they have been pushed into a kind of limbo, exactly because they've been OT pirouetting; I figured that I'd take them back out off limbo when the entries themselves had rolled-down, and the issue of being on-topic were less significant.
Unfortunately, you don't seem to have a fucking clue about the nature of freedom of expression. Any and every right, including freedom of expression, amounts to a property right, and a legitimate right to freedom of expression is exactly and only a right to use one's own property for acts of expression. Libertarians believe that, where a property right otherwise exists, it is not limited by the nature of what the holder attempts to communicate by a use of the property.
Your presumed right to come into my 'blog to say what you want is no more legitimate than a presumed right to come into my home and say what you want. I get to control the door here, and who is allowed to abide. I certainly won't allow you to libel me further in my 'blog.