September 2004

I think something completely new is needed - how about an elected assembly, with one representative per 10 million people?

apparently Australia will only preemptively attack neighbouring states after consultation... or something

"It's your intellectual capital and you worked hard to produce it for your citizens... it should be living in a nice, long-lived, non-proprietary data format"

South Africa formally recognises the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic; Morocco recalls its ambassador in protest

"At present, any Iraqi in Samarra who wants to serve in the police force must first ask permission from the rebels"

"WIPO embraced a culture of creating and expanding monopoly privileges, often without regard to consequences"

"strategies considered intrinsically poetic in Persian... are relatively rare in English, not considered intrinsically poetic, and can be seen as unnatural or absurd"

"If you harbor terrorists, you are a terrorist" becomes "One man's terrorist is another mans freedom fighter"

I've been summonsed myself, on October 5th. I'm tempted to turn up carrying a stack of legal texts on the theory of juries...

the only chemical weapons Saddam Hussein had were "small quantities of poisons, most likely for use in assassinations"

"the scale and depth of urban poverty is underestimated because of the way poverty is measured in poor countries"

"things aren't better for Americans now than they were in 2001, and they certainly aren't better for Iraqis"

"Pictures of the koala are as abundant as flies, but it's hard to get your hands on an image of the Queensland lungfish."

"Most other nations experiencing ageing pressures are advanced economies with well-developed social security structures"

"to prevent companies from only reporting positive results, or spinning data to suppress inconclusive or unflattering conclusions about their treatments"

"championing the cause of Muslim women has become as popular a refuge of a scoundrel as patriotism was once said to be"

this has to be an election-driven "act tough" stunt - aerial bombardment of cities is going to achieve SFA (except further alienating Iraqis)

"Baby otter formation has been taking up most of the time that I used to spend reading blogs, writing posts, and generally fulminating"

I was talked into minding some servers for a friend - "you'll just have to apply security patches" - but the main mail/web server crashed on Saturday and one of its xfs filesystems seems to have regressed...

looks like the only choice to me, given the damage caused by massive hydro schemes and the pollution of coal plants

"The biggest implication is that mid-level officials will not be meeting with AIPAC. They don't want to be seen with them."

"Pipes is an unreconstructed bigot and xenophobic fanatic whose academic work fails to meet even the lowest standards of scholarship"