Considerettes

The UPI web site finally caught up with UPI stories, and now the blogging article is finally available. You can’t look it up on the Sci/Tech desk since it insta-scrolled off that page.

But my thanks anyway to Mr. Huffman for including me in that.

Well, my guess was correct. Just did a search on Google News for “blog” and found where the Washington Times has picked up the story.

My 15 minutes of fame begins now. 🙂

UPI update: I’m guessing that, even if the aforementioned blogging article isn’t up on the UPI site yet, it has been picked up by some newspapers via other distribution channels that UPI has. The reason I suspect this is that some folks are finding this site by doing a Google search on the word “Considerettes”. That’s not a typical search phrase 🙂 so I’m betting they (or you, if you happen to be one of them) are picking that up from a local paper carrying the story.

So let me welcome you who are visiting me for the first time to my humble blog. I hope you find it useful and worthy of some consideration.

Well as of right now, the UPI site does not have the blogging article on it’s site. Ah well, it’s a bit of a consolation that there’s only been one story from any section posted today, and that was sometime after 4am, while there are many on there from yesterday. So perhaps they’ve been having trouble updating their web site today. (That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

Thomas Jipping has a good piece on the stark inconsistancy in supporting abortion but opposing the death penalty, especially as it relates to the mass commutation of sentences done by former Illinois Gov. George Ryan for all death row inmates. Best paragraph:

And the jarring contrast between this blanket reprieve for guilty killers and next week’s anniversary of the Supreme Court’s blanket revocation of the right to life is stomach-churning. Ryan said all murderers must avoid their rightful punishment because one innocent person might be killed. Yet we know, to a moral certainty, down to an individual person, that every single child killed by abortion was innocent.

Starting from that fact, you just can’t reconcile the two positions.

Mark Steyn of Canada’s National Post has a devastating response the Boston Globe’s (and others’) treatment of the Mary Jo Kopechne incident vis-a-vis Senator Ted Kennedy; minimizing the former to canonize the latter. He notes (with examples) how the left will excuse anything as long as your (liberal) ideology is pure.

My favorite paragraph explain that not only are the left’s actions out of line with their words, but that it’s only the words that really matter at all to them.

If we right-wing madmen do indeed spend every waking minute dreaming up ways to kill as many children as possible, we’re not very good at it. By contrast, the left does a wonderful job of sacrificing the little people in the name of its own corporate interests. In America, generations of black children have drowned in the swamp of inner-city public schools because the Democratic Party subordinates their interests to those of the teachers’ unions. Overseas, the hypothetical body-count of an Anglo-American war with Iraq exercises Bill Blaikie far more than the actual slaughter Saddam has already visited on his people. But then one of the curious qualities of the ideological left is its increasing imperviousness to reality. The uselessness of Canada’s billion-dollar gun registry is not the point: Just having one, no matter how expensive, no matter how irrelevant, “sends the right message.”

Scathing, and full of examples. It’s nothing we don’t already know, frankly, but it’s all in the presentation.

UN Weapons Inspections: Day 49: The media pounced upon Hans Blix’s pronouncement that after 6 weeks they hadn’t found a smoking gun. Today we hear the rest of the story: Hans thinks Iraq is still playing cat-and-mouse, citing cases of illegal weapons smuggling and incomplete disclosure in Iraq’s weapons declaration. I do hope this gets as much press as before.

(Speaking of a “smoking gun”, it appears that Tony Blair is convinced there is one.)

Hussein is considering exile, which would be an OK solution except that it means (according to terms he’d agree to) he’d live out his live in luxury in an Arab capital free of any repurcussions from his actions. I don’t see that as a reasonable solution.

I spent about half an hour on the phone last night with Mark Huffman, a UPI writer, who will be doing a story on blogs. It’ll be posted on the UPI Science and Technology desk this Saturday the 18th, in time for papers to pick it up for their Sunday editions if they wish. The web site address may (or may not) appear, so I’m bracing for possibly my biggest traffic day ever sometime this weekend, or perhaps on Monday. 🙂

Mr. Huffman found my blog by going to Blogger.com and noticing on the 10 most recently posted-to blogs. Given that Blogger just registered its 1 millionth user, that list is constantly changing. Having him looking for a blog on that panel at the same moment I posted is akin to…well, let’s just say I’m keeping an eye out for Ed McMahon and the Prize Patrol.

Well, there’s my 15 minutes of fame. Now serving 2,147,483,648!

Sometimes I add entries to Considerettes so that I can find the link again later if I need it. If you find them helpful as well, then bully for you. 🙂

Ann Coulter’s commentary “The Axis of Stupidity” is a great history lesson on the life and times of the North Korean weapons program, who said what in terms of actually believing that Clinton & Carter had pulled a foreign policy win, and why they were wrong. (Main reason: They believed what a dictator said.)

UN Weapons Inspections: Day 44: Hans Blix says that after being in Iraq for some 2 months (well, not quite Hans) they haven’t found a smoking gun. Yup, Saddam had 8 or 9 years to hide the stuff, and Hans is pleased that nothing’s been found in a little over 6 weeks. Golly, they must have covered the whole country by now, eh?

No, not nearly. Frankly I’m quite confident there are things going on in Iraq that violate the UN resolutions, but we may have a real tough time finding them, giving Hussein’s headstart. He kicked out weapons inspectors in violation of the terms of his surrender. Why? Because he had nothing to hide? Doubt it. Seriously. And in the interim neither the UN nor Bill Clinton had the guts to call him on it. And now Bush is having to clean up the mess they left, while the man responsible for the mess has had plenty of time to find out-of-the-way carpets to sweep that mess under.

And somehow Bush is to blame in all of this? Not hardly.