Brains, With Backup.

[elfs]

Flashbake: Automated Version Tracking for Writers

I write, nad when I do I often lose track of what I was working on, when, were, etc., ad nausea. Sometimes I want to back up and go down a different road. I'd love to be able to track what success I was making without having to be religious about regularly calling subversion, and adding metadata myself.

Flashbake uses git and claims to do all that for you, automagically, only adding database entries when changes have been made to your text. I can't wait to try it out and, more importantly, since it's in python, I can modify it to meet my needs and create reporting tools around it that are writer-specific. Very cool!

No, seriously, why should we trust you?

The Plank finds a good one in which Karl Rove and Sean Hannity are suddenly worried by the "White House Power Grab."

Excuse me? Since when have these guys ever worried about White House authority? When they speak, why should we listen? Why should we believe in their honesty? The brutal cynism of news producers-- put them on, don't care if what they say is true or meaningful, just put them on if they get an audience-- is making me nauseous.

What pettiness

Joyce Capron at the "American Thinker," writes that her rebellion against "all things Obama" includes turning around any magazines in the grocery line that have his face on them so she doesn't have to look at them. I love that she admits she has her "talking points" ready. What about her thoughts?

I am disappointed to read that her school can't find a sponser for her children's "Conservative Thinker's Club." Hell, if I was a teacher, I'd sponsor it and shepherd it make those kids dig, goddamn, for underlying principles and meaning in their conservatism, rather than tribal frission stoked with the days "talking points."

I can't help but look at the blog's title picture, of Uncle Sam in the position similar to Rodin's, and have two thoughts: first, Rodin's statue is ironic, in that it could be taken both as a muscled god trying to think, or to challenge the viewer to consider that a muscled god does think. It's deliberately ambiguous that way. The other is from a classic from the long-missed Dysfunctional Family Circus (Google for it if you don't get it; NSFW, but if it's your thing you could spend hours reading it) in which Billy, upon seeing the Rodin statue in person, says, "What a hellacious dump."

"The Microsoft Store."

What's the logo going to be? A pair of heavy glasses with tape in the middle? I can't help but think this is going to be disastrous for them. Unlike Apple, they don't even have that much hardware to stock the store.

The religious right doesn't want to be "the religious right" anymore.

Gary Bauer of "American Values," says that "Religious right" has connotations as offensive as "American Taliban" or "Christian facism," and he wants the press to use a different term. But there's nothing inherent in "religious right" that makes it perjorative.

As Rightwing Watch points out, the pejorative connotation of "religious right" was earned.

Japanese Economists tell Obama: You're making the same mistakes we did. Stop that

Japanese economists are telling the Obama administration that the current bailout package is exactly what they did in 1992, and it didn't work. Either let the system collapse and rebuild on the rubble, or ruthlessly get in there with the disinfectant of sunshine and the scalpels of nationalization, but this middle course dooms America to a decade of pain.

Tony Blankely calls for censorship

Tony Blankely calls for government intervention to prevent enemies of America from having a place in our nation's newspapers. Not only is that wrong-headed, but it contradicts our values as a nation, to let the other party have their say, if only to give us something to mock.

Comments

Very sloppy, Elf

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

As the previous anonymous comment says, Blankely is not with the Cato Institute.

The Matthew Yglesias post you linked to explains the situation correctly. He describes David Rittgers at Cato as "appropriately horrified." about the Blankely position. I can only assume you read the Yglesias piece much too quickly. Were you just eager to believe that the Cato Institute would take such an anti-freedom position?

The Blankely post appears at the Washington Times website, and ironically, it has clearly been censored.

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/12/yes-we-need-censorship/

The paragraph beginning "At the beginning of World War II" has had several publication names crudely removed, leaving blank spaces and sentence fragments behind.

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