This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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July 2003
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Both Wrong?

Charles Krauthammer goes off on Democrats for supporting intervention in Liberia but having issues with Iraq and comes to the conclusion that maybe Democrats only support military intervention in places where there are no US strategic interests. Whatever. Maybe in some cases. Dunno. But perhaps they are BOTH wrong? We really should only be sending in the military when there is an extreme need and our national interests are in danger. This was not the case in Iraq, and it is not the case in Liberia either. There was no need for us to go into Iraq (although now we have no choice but to make the best of it). There is no need for us to go into Liberia. The main argument at this point to go into Liberia would be to help heal the wounds with the rest of the world incurred by the Iraq adventure. That might be something worth considering this for.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40916-2003Jul10.html

(via MaxSpeak)

Rubber Duck, Come in Rubber Duck, Put the Hammer Down

This is a really fun unintentional experiment. I’d like to see graphs and charts though.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3060579.stm

A consignment of thousands of rubber ducks is expected to wash up any day on the coast of New England – after more than a decade at sea.

Duh!

This whole concept is a shameful travisty of anything even resembling justice or due process. The defendants can’t see all the evidence against them. There is no client-lawyer confideniality. (Not to mention they haven’t been able to see lawyers at all most of the time.) Hopefully there will be enough public pressure on this that either these eventually get transfered to a civilian court (unlikely) or the military keeps “adjusting” the rules as they already have a little to make these a little closer to what one would expect in a fair process.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/13/politics/13TRIB.html?hp

But as the Pentagon prepares for the first such proceedings in more than 50 years, it is encountering a potent criticism: many lawyers and bar groups say the conditions for civilian defense lawyers are so restrictive that they might not agree to participate in the process and thereby lend it legitimacy.

Rebecca’s Candidate

Rebecca is really into this guy. I admit I haven’t really started to pay huge amounts of attention yet to the various candidates. But this guy would certainly be interesting to watch. If he is going to get in, he should go ahead and get in. I get the idea of waiting a bit to jump in at the right moment. But you can’t wait forever.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45989-2003Jul11.html

The good news is that an ideal solution has landed in the Democrats’ laps: Wesley Clark. The bad news is that because so few Democrats recognize the scale of the problem, not many of them grasp the solution.

(via OxBlog)

Enough for Now

OK. I’ve been playing with the new blog thing and adjusting webpages to work with it for over 8 hours now. I have the first “layer” from the home page converted. Lower than that may just have to get done sporadically as I happen to update those pages rather than all at once. Maybe later today I’ll try some actual links to real news stories or blog stories or something. Or not. We’ll see. For now, a little more TV, then sleep. Night all. Hmmm… I wonder if I don’t actually announce the change to the site how long it will be before anybody notices and comments. I bet it will be awhile. I told two (2) people I was working on this blogging thing tonight. Haven’t mentioned to anybody else. Lets call it an experiment.

Of course all this adjusting my website makes me want to hurry up and get an iSight and get a webcam working again.

Oh, and I do have to figure out how to get an automated backup of this blog thing going. I’ll think about that later. Sleep is first.

Possible New Place

Hey, I showed a few people, but hadn’t yet linked to it from the site, so here it is. If all goes well, I am in the process of buying a townhouse/condo in Yardley, PA. At the home inspection my sister took a few pictures. You can see them here.

New AbulHome!

Well, I went ahead and made the new Blog the homepage of abulsme.com. A bunch of things are still rough and need to be adjusted to really work right. But I’ve got some time this weekend. I’ll fix as much as I can, then anything that is left slowly fix over time. My priority will be things linked directly from the front page. The deeper things are, the longer until I clean them up and make them match the new front page.

Also have to put some things in place to start backing up this new stuff since it is all database driven instead of file based. Can’t be losing anything for posterity!

Getting the Hang

I’m starting to get a hang of this thing and am customizing a few things. We’ll see how this goes. I may make it my home page soon.

Scapegoat

Testing grabbing something from a site.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/11/sprj.irq.wmdspeech/index.html
A line in President Bush’s State of the Union address alleging that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Africa should never been included in the speech, CIA Director George Tenet said Friday.

My First Entry

So I tried to set up Movable Type first a few weeks ago, but ran into some issues. So today I tried pMachine, which I’d actually downloaded first. A couple of issues with mysql at first, but all up and running and happy now. Don’t know what I will do with it yet, but it should be fun to play with.