In Another “Good Blogging” Rule, Daily Dose of Optimism sez:

In my ongoing attempt to clarify “the rules” about what makes a good blog – one that is readable, insightful, and thought provoking – I’m adding a new one:

The Problem: Posts that only offer links to news articles, or simply re-paste an article with 1-2 sentence “parrot observations.” I find these posts are really feeble attempts at creating “value-added content” for a blog’s readers.

The Solution: before you post, ask if your post contains a brief, clear and self-contained idea; if not, keep the post in draft mode until it does.

This is true if the only legitimate function of a blog is to create content; but just like magazine and newspaper editors filter and select content, bloggers can also serve an editorial function. Instapundit comes to mind, for instance, as a source that many readers monitor for the interesting other links that he posts.

In reading others’ original writings, we are leveraging their thinking, in seeing the (hopefully) clearly presented results of research or thinking, issues presented, defended, attacked, and suggested.

However, by viewing “editorial” blogs (as opposed to original-content blogs), we are leveraging the thinking and the reading of the blogger. You and I can’t personally monitor the 15 gazillion blogs in existence; we can’t even glance at them all. And while over time we can find reliable writers who present great material with wit and erudition, there’s simply too much stuff out there to go through and find the good stuff.

Fortunately, there are lots of other people going through that same stuff, and very different subsets and samples of that stuff than we do. And so we will also run across people whose sensibilities are similar enough to our own that what they find interesting and relevant, we find interesting and relevant. And so we also monitor blogs which regularly cull out articles and blog posts that we wouldn’t have found on our own.

Even search sites (Technorati, Ice Rocket etc.) only help if you already know what you’re looking for; what editorial-type blogs do is to alert us to what there is out there to look for, and recommend what to read and why, which is a different thing altogether.

According to this Auctionbytes article, Yahoo! has elimated ALL fees on their auctions – both listing fees and commissions.

Rob Solomon, Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo Shopping, said on Monday that Yahoo monetizes the auction platform with its core graphical media (banner advertising) and search-based services.

When asked about concerns whether free listings would actually decrease the quality of the listings since anyone could list an unlimited amount of items, Solomon said Yahoo Auctions is utilizing anti-spam technologies developed for all Yahoo properties, including Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Groups, and technologies that detect fraud.

I predict Google will show up in this space sooner or later, and with this exact model (since it is, after all, the model they apparently use for all their services).

I’m guessing the Iraqi terrorist weasels aren’t too familiar with Buffalos; especially 24-ton wheeled ones with a V-shaped hull. From this WaPo article (via The Corner:

… what has been referred to as a “Humvee on steroids,” the Buffalo is a 24-ton mine-protective, countermine/IED vehicle with a long grappling arm that faces down bombs, removes them and withstands terrific blasts without harm to its passengers.

“It’s done so perhaps thousands of times,” said Mike Aldrich, vice president of sales and marketing for Ladson, S.C.-based Force Protection Inc., which manufactures the big Buffalo and its little brother, the 13- to 19-ton (depending on its individual configuration) Cougar. “We’ve only had one broken wrist in two years.”

Force Protection is under a $91 million contract to build its mine-protected vehicles for the Defense Department. About 100 Buffalos and Cougars are already overseas. That number is slated to double by February 2006.

You really should see this beast, and its little brother the Cougar. They’re beauts.

It will be interesting to see what the insurgents’ mad bombers will do once these arrive to keep the roadsides clear. Insurgents have moved to the very braaave “blow things up by remote and then run away” method because they keep getting their posteriors handed to them whenever they raise their heads above worm level in Iraq. But everybody on this side of the Idiot Left knows that the whole point of blowing up roadside bombs is not to gain tactical advantage on the ground; it’s to try to get on the news and gain propaganda victory. Once again, western technology and wealth is going to toss these cowardly pigs for another loop.

Oh give me a zone, where the Buffalos roam…

Update: Here’s a on-the-ground account of dealing with the roadside bombings perpretated by these terrorist cowards.

Dr. Rusty’s Pet Jawa notes that the Italian Red Cross has decided to get into the business of hostage negotiation as well as aiding and abetting terrorist insurgents in Iraq. As he observes, “after you treat the wounded terrorist you’re supposed to turn them in”.

Indeed you are, unless, for instance, you don’t think they’re terrorists at all. Maurizio Scelli, the outgoing Italian Red Cross chief, explained that, after brilliantly negotiating with the kidnappers of aid workers Simona Pari and Simona Torretta:

“The mediators asked us to save the lives of four alleged terrorists wanted by the Americans who were wounded in combat,” Scelli was quoted as saying. “We hid them and brought them to Red Cross doctors, who operated on them.”

So how are they “alleged” terrorists? If they were wounded in combat, who were they fighting against? The U.S. military, which is allied with Iraqi security forces. Were the wounds “alleged”? Perhaps the Red Cross doctors performed “alleged” operations on the “alleged” wounds received while in “alleged” combat against “alleged” U.S. forces and/or Iraqi security forces? I think the term for the evidence that these slime were hostiles here is prima facie.

But perhaps they’re “freedom fighters”? Someone explain to me, then, what exactly we need the Italian Red Cross in the country for, if they’re going to pull stunt like this? Put them on the first flight home (or better yet, let them walk through “freedom fighter” territory).

Update: As usual, Cox and Forkum are brilliant on this.

Stuart at the delightfully obscure Random Useless Info has an interesting chart of gas prices:

The following plot shows how much I paid for each gallon of gas I bought over the past 26 years or so. [...] The plot contains data from 996 fill-ups.

Turns out that we’re just now getting back to the equivalent price we were paying for gasoline back in 1983 (the first year I could drive, so I well remember it, btw). Big whoopty whoop. So why are people continuing to just get stupid about the cost of oil?

UPDATE: Instapundit points me to the brilliant Larry Kudlow, who says on the subject:

Permit me to take a contrarian view on the oil price shock. I say three cheers for higher energy prices. Why? Because I believe in markets. When the price of something goes up, demand falls off (call it conservation) and supply increases (call it new production). We’re seeing a tectonic shift.

And

The moral of this story: markets work if you let them.

Amen and amen.

I’m thinking about changing the name of this blog to “What he/she said” and just making it consist entirely of quotes. But then, perhaps that wouldn’t be much different than what I do now. It’s just that sometimes someone says it so well that it leaves little room for further comment from the likes of me. So, fresh from the RoveHive this morning, my bit of royal jelly tells me that you should read this delightful screed from Lileks.

Please get this straight: there are no marching orders. There is no RoveHive to which everyone buzzes in the morning for a scrap of Royal Jelly we carry off to our blogs. If there sometimes appears to be a unaniminity of subject matter, that’s because certain ideas appear, flower, bloom, take root, and spread. Like kudzu. But kudzu is not taking orders from some dark shrouded mastermind made entirely of cellulose and chlorophyll. If you honestly think that everyone to the right of Noam Chomsky is part of some dark soulless cabal dedicated to extirpating all photons and replacing them with negative matter that strips the flesh from the bones of the poor, I envy you; the world must make perfect sense.

And that’s not even the best part (just the most quotable, short of the copying the entire thing).

Diana West wrote a thoughtful op-ed piece on Friday, “Bush basics” (h/t Ed Driscoll). She says, in part:

It’s time to get back to basics. And by basics, I mean getting back to First Term W., back to when the president’s strategy to defend and protect the United States was to take military action against terrorists and the nations that sponsor them. By unfortunate contrast, the security strategy of Second Term W. is best described as bringing universal suffrage to these same terrorists and the nations that sponsor them. Getting back to Bush basics requires a re-reckoning of what and why we fight — and, just as important, for what and why we don’t fight.

Do we fight to spread democracy? Or do we fight to stop jihad? Far better to fight to stop jihad. Second Term W. believes democratic principles will neutralize jihad — a.k.a. “extremism” in the strangled parlance of political correctness. It may not be polite to notice, but the nasty reality is that jihad is neutralizing democratic principles. The fact the administration must reckon with is that the concept of human rights — the ideals of liberty and justice for all — isn’t a natural by-product of majority rule.

It’s fairly unsettling to think that, after all the blood spilled, money spent, and political shriekage we’ve suffered through, U.S. negotiators might be giving in to militant Islamists by enshrining sharia law in the new Iraqi constitution. It’s especially sad that it’s 99.9% due to domestic political pressure to get the constitution “done” by a deadline that they’re feeling any pressure at all.

Perhaps it’s not quite as simple as throwing women’s rights down the toilet. This Telegraph piece points out:

Though still not going as far as fundamentalist Islamic groups had demanded – they wanted Islam to be the “sole” source for legislation – the wording marks a fundamental concession by the US as it ends the possibility of a separation of religion and state. It paves the way for far more conservative social legislation, for example diminishing the divorce rights of women, as it could allow Islamic clerics to serve on the high court, which will be responsible for interpreting the constitution.

Still, were I an Iraqi minority of ANY kind – especially a woman – I’d be considering whether it was time to leave while the leaving as at least theoretically possible (never mind ‘good’).

I’m still on the bus, but I have moved a couple of rows closer to the front. There’s much more on this here, here, here, and at The Corner.

Back to Diana West, who asks:

Can Iraq ever be stabilized without defanging Iran? Shouldn’t there be, for starters, a big bull’s-eye on these Iranian training camps?

That would be “no”, and “yes”, respectively. To those who prattle on about “endless targets”, keep this in mind: Two down: Afghanistan (Taliban), Iraq (Saddam’s massive cash-and-training network); two to go: Iran (money, ideology, facilities, safety, training) and Syria (ibid). The third, Saudi Arabia, I suspect would wisen up by the time Iran and Syria were brought back into civilization (kicking and screaming if they choose), and stop exporting Wahhabism, but if they didn’t, then fine, 3 to go.

The number of active, influential, capable states exporting terrorism through and from the Middle East is not endless; it’s not even that long. And without a global power (China, Russia) to sponsor and protect their activities, what do we lack?

Perhaps we lack the will; perhaps we lack the belief in the goal, or that it’s achievable in the first place. It’s certainly within our grasp militarily to defeat and replace governments which appear hell-bent on undermining and destroying western democracy (ours included). But if we can’t even keep fundamentalism Islam out of the Iraqi constitution, then it raises the question, doesn’t it, of whether we can do the rest of what’s needed to clear out the cesspool?

Wow, hadn’t really thought about it like that. My sympathies, little d00ds.

Andrew McCarthy’s terrific new article, “Unreasonable Searches” (National Review, Aug. 29, 2005, available online for NROnline subscribers) makes a great case for applying some common sense to security measures which purport to catch terrorists before they terrorize. It’s sad that the points must be made at all, but he does a great job making them.

There is a pattern here – but the U.S. government seems to be incapable of detecting it. We have met the enemy, and it is militant Islam. Yet we refuse to acknowledge that fact, pretending that the enemy is “terror? — a method of attack — rather than the terrorists who employ that method.

[...]

Terrorists — particularly those who are likely to attack — have a profile. They are Muslim males, overwhelmingly young adults of Middle Eastern and North African descent. That doesn’t mean everyone who falls into that profile is a terrorist. Nor does it mean that every terrorist will fit the profile. … But so what? A profile is not a judgment of guilt. It is not even an accusation of guilt. It is an investigative tool. It enables law enforcement to organize suspicions and husband resources rationally, in a manner related to a known threat.(emphasis mine – rew)

There’s nothing hard to understand here. It’s so obvious that one has to be wilfully blind not to immediately grasp and use the technique. And yet, we’re almost daily told that we should be wilfully blind, that we mustn’t “succumb to stereotypes” and so on. But that’s ridiculous on its face; by going out of our way to avoid targeting young adult Muslim males of Middle Eastern or North African descent, we are doing precisely that: recognizing the stereotype, the pattern, the obvious profile, and then wilfully avoiding doing anything about it. Thus, we have all the “guilt” of “profiling” (which, in my view, is none, but for some people is apparently debilitating), and none of the benefits (more security, less dead people, much lower cost of providing that security, etc.).

[The point of profiling] is not to cast aspersions to but improve the odds of thwarting an attack the fallout of which could be catastrophic.

Criminal conspiracies, like much concerted activity (including much that is socially beneficial), tend to be ethnic and cultural.

Nothing new or surprising here. McCarthy points out the inestimable value of profiling of this sort in attacks on the mob(s), drug cartels, Nigerian scammers (one of my favorites), etc. This is even more true in societies or environments where tribal and family links are stronger than nationalist, linguistic, or philosophical ones. People who share a philosophy don’t necessarily look alike; but people who share parents, uncles, and cousins almost always do.

He notes that when Homeland security chief Michael Chertoff defended the feds’ focus on aviation,

His comments drew sharp criticism, mainly from Senate Democrats representing metropolitan areas with mass-transit systems.

That is, the hit dog hollered loudest. No surprise there. But when you “follow the money” (which, sadly, we are forced to do here without the inestimable services of Michael Moore), you can tell pretty quickly how much of that criticism reduces to “dollars for my voters” and how much reduces to “real concern for the safety and survivability of the USA and her way of life” (the answers, btw are “most” and “not a whole lot”, respectively).

Of course, this problem – the rational allocation of resources to actually address the addressable parts of a large and amorphous problem – is always met by the same criticism. Any redistributionist system, no matter its intent or benefit, will have to operate over the friction caused by those who seek to redirect the maximum redistribution their way. And, by definition, the people most intent on it are the people who are the least hampered by larger practical, legal, or ethical concerns for anyone else. Keep that in mind when hearing Chuck Schumer huffing and spitting and caterwauling about this or that “outrageous” idea.

Our homeland-security strategy [...] should assign the responsibility for addressing a particular threat to the entity most able to reduce it, and most likely to benefit from its reduction.

Right. It’s stupid for the rest of the country to spend disproportionately large sums of money on addressing a threat which is by its very nature, permanently limited and localized (you can’t hijack a New York subway car, fly it over and into the Sears tower in Chicago; nor can you fly an L train from Chi-town into the Pentagon). You can’t smuggle nukes into the country via the Atlanta Marta. You can smuggle them across the largely un-monitored borders we share with Mexico and Canada, and you can fly an airliner into a large and thickly-populated building.

That’s not to say that we don’t care whether there’s a mass-transit bombing. We do care; every death, any death, is appalling. But those on the left believe that “care” must and can only equal “federal tax dollars in my pocket”, whereas some of us believe that no single concern lives or has demands apart from the million other ones competing for the same scarce time, attention, and money available.

But the poor, poor states? Whence the money? Oh, the horror. Agonize, agonize…

It’s noteworthy that state and local authorities dedicate little of the billions of dollars in federal grants they receive to mass-transit security. If they really think protecting mass transit should be a higher priority, they can begin by allocating more funding to that goal.

Exactly. It’s too bad that we’ve become so inured to begging and whining that no one apparently thinks to stop and be embarrassed to be asking for more FedBux without stopping and spending any of the unimaginably large sums they’re already getting from Uncle Sam on the problem. I’m reminded, not for the first time, of the celebrity wife suing the celebrity husband, insisting that lil’ celebrity Junior cannot possibly be cared for on a mere $40,000/mo.

McCarthy goes on to point out that making effective mass-transit bomb-proof is probably infeasible anyway (it has to do with the “mass-” part of “mass-transit”).

In any case, throwing money at transit security is unlikely to help much. The London subway system is considered one of the best-protected in the world, required as it was to endure the threat of bombings by Irish Republican Army terrorists. Yet it was attacked twice in recent weeks, and the second attempt — foiled only by a malfunction of the bombs’ detonators — took place while the subway system was in maximum-alert mode. (emphasis mine)

He concludes:

Until money is allocated on the basis of sound cost-benefit analysis, we will become poorer, but no safer.

And what’s more, the constant demand for “action” will continue to lead lawmakers into eroding more and more of those daaaaangerous civil liberties. And the same people shrieking loudest about any attempt to rationally profile likely attackers are the ones who are also shrieking about the “loss of freedom” and the “fascist Bush administration”.

I just saw the news that Pixar’s Joe Ranft has died in a car wreck. One of the early Pixar guys, and one of the indescribably brilliant writers behind Toy Story, which is still my favorite Pixar film (though The Incredibles is close). Before joining Pixar, he worked in the story department at Disney (back when Disney movies HAD stories), including writing on Beauty and the Beast (my favorite modern Disney movie).

Just an immense talent, and a great loss for Pixar (and for us). RIP, Joe.

More here and here.

I’ve always been something of an anti-Apple bigot. It started in the early days, when as a TRS-80 CoCo owner, I had a healthy dislike for Commodore-64s and the odious Apple II. When the first Mac came out, I remember thinking, “How can anyone do anything without a command line to type in?” Yeah, one of those. Over the years, I lost some of the hard edge to my dislike of Apple, partly because I always thought Steve Jobs had a lot of style, and partly because they gradually eased over the line marginally onto “my” side in my eternal, bottomless pit of white-hot loathing for the Evil Beast of Redmond, Micro$oft. But I still wouldn’t have considered actually owning an Apple thingy. Heavens, no.

This has all changed somehow. Early this year, I finally bought an iMac for my wife: she liked the cool, translucent white, the near-total lack of cords, the nice keyboard, etc. I chuckled, being the geek that I am, and how someone might get attached to all those silly aesthetic things about what is, after all, a computer, not a decoration.

By the time I had hers out of the box, installed and running, I wanted one for me. I wanted two, actually. We now have 3 (an iBook and a Mac Mini). The Mini is mine; the others she claims are hers, and can I please move so she can use them.

I’ve been in computing a long time. CoCo, Amiga, PCs, now Linux: I’ve run them all. I’ve never seen a user environment so amazingly well-done as Mac OSX. It’s astonishing. I’m not saying anything new, I know. And the fact that I once hated Macs and now love them is an old refrain, and probably (I said probably) says more about me than it does about the Mac.

But the main reason for this post is really that I’m trying out the new WordPress dashboard widget I found, and I’m staring at a screen so full of eye-candy that I’m seriously contemplating buying a bigger monitor.

Zealot, indeed.