Author Archives: OGHD

What’s the difference between Al Gore and the Unabomber? The Unabomber knows he’s not the President.

EARLY WORKING DRAFT

Some of you may remember the “Al Gore / Unabomber Test”, which is no longer available at several sites. Please send a link if you find it. Short of that, I’ll simply sum it up like this: there were six quotes from Al Gore’s book Earth In The Balance, and six from “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski’s Manifesto. The task set before you was to determine from which tract the eco-freak quote was pulled. I failed miserably. So did everybody else. The meaningful statistical difference between average real score and random answers score was nothing.

Why do I bring this up now? Eco-Freak Al Gore has gotten his face back in … Continue reading →

Walter Cronkite says we should have abandoned Iraq when a hurricane knocked out NOLA… He says it would have provided a perfect excuse. I beg to differ. He advocates running away from a commitment.

This would change the nature of all of our international commitments: “The United States hereby commits to come to the aid of any country signatory to this pact against aggression and other forms of tyranny–unless in case of rain, in which case we will only play home games.”

A commitment is something you must do. Capital letter-C “Commitment” is what guarantees you will do it. A commitment is something you can point to on paper, and is something which can be counted, whereas Commitment is found within the hearts of trustworthy people, and cannot … Continue reading →

Boy, am I hungry. I could eat a cow. Good thing, too, as I don’t know any butchers in the area. Lots of ranchers, no butchers. No choice but to go hit up one of my rancher friends, walk a cow home, and eat the whole thing. But before I do, let me tell you about something I saw.

I saw an article at NewsBusters in which New York Times executive editor Bill Keller said, “Most of what you know, you know because of the mainstream media. Bloggers recycle and chew on the news. That’s not bad. But it’s not enough.”

Well, of course his comments did not please me, but the fact is that he is right. I can count actual reporting bloggers I am even … Continue reading →

This FoxNews Poll shows the results for several political figures, when respondents were asked whether the subject was a “Strong and Decisive Leader”, and “Understands the Needs of Average Americans”.

I found it interesting that the subjects are ranked in descending “Decisive Leader” order, and that that closely matches the numbers for “Understands Needs” order. They descend roughly together, until “Understand” takes a jump back up with Clinton, and stays high for Kerry and the Algore.

So I did a little math. I wanted a single composite of both “scores”, so I plotted the results by hand, X=Understanding, Y=Leadership. If you look at the resulting graph, you see the subjects range from unpopular in the lower left (Gore Country) to Popular in the upper right(Giuliani Country). Also, … Continue reading →