— Miranda Devine says female suicide bombers tell the truth about the gentle sex: The ugly truth about women, that was for so long hidden behind a saccharine-sweet facade of Queen Mother-style femininity, is that we have always been aggressive and competitive. It’s just that we used to have subtler outlets. Like each other. Suicide … Continue reading “Lessons of Suicide Bombers”
— Miranda Devine says female suicide bombers tell the truth about the gentle sex:
The ugly truth about women, that was for so long hidden behind a saccharine-sweet facade of Queen Mother-style femininity, is that we have always been aggressive and competitive. It’s just that we used to have subtler outlets. Like each other.
Suicide bomber Ayat al-Akhras’ last words were a cut at the men in the Arab armies who slept while she had to do the dirty work.
— Please read PejmanPundit on President Bush’s statement Thursday on the Middle East peace process: Nonetheless, fellow bloggers and gentle readers, with all due respect and in all seriousness, I tell you this: you all have to calm down just a little bit. It’s a tricky thing to ride the Mid-East pony, but Pejman believes … Continue reading “Cooler heads must prevail”
— Please read PejmanPundit on President Bush’s statement Thursday on the Middle East peace process:
Nonetheless, fellow bloggers and gentle readers, with all due respect and in all seriousness, I tell you this: you all have to calm down just a little bit.
It’s a tricky thing to ride the Mid-East pony, but Pejman believes the President has struck the proper balance.
— Following-up on yesterday’s item on the reparations shakedown, check Kathryn Jean Lopez on Slavery on National Review: “Once the record is fleshed out and made fully available to the American people, I think companies will feel some obligation” to settle, Randall Robinson has told USA Today. So long as the reparations activists can build … Continue reading “Reparations scam II”
— Following-up on yesterday’s item on the reparations shakedown, check Kathryn Jean Lopez on Slavery on National Review:
“Once the record is fleshed out and made fully available to the American people, I think companies will feel some obligation” to settle, Randall Robinson has told USA Today. So long as the reparations activists can build up enough public pressure, we can expect companies to eventually buckle and reach for their wallets.
and Megan McArdle at Live from the WTC:
Bankrupting companies with class action suits, 100 years later, for something that was legal at the time — yessirree, that’s a recipe for economic success.
The emerging consensus is that this is a meritless legal action aimed at embarassing companies into paying Jesse Jackson-style shakedowns to civil rights groups with no legitimate mandate. The disturbing thing is that most blacks favor cash reparations, according to a poll cited by Lopez. Robinson, et. al., are apparently hoping to slide settlements beneath the radar while the nation is focused on the war and the economy is weak.
The stonger case for reparations is for Jim Crow rather than slavery, since Jim Crow victims are still alive. So the slavery salvo is phase one of the scam that the scam artists hope will gain strength in the second, Jim Crow phase.
— The Mercury News reports that schools are getting their feet a little damp in mobile computing: Across the nation, schools are taking the radical step of putting portable technology into the hands of children. After years of debate over the use of computers in schools, educators say the new mobility finally will make technology … Continue reading “Finally catching on”
— The Mercury News reports that schools are getting their feet a little damp in mobile computing:
Across the nation, schools are taking the radical step of putting portable technology into the hands of children. After years of debate over the use of computers in schools, educators say the new mobility finally will make technology a classroom tool as ordinary as textbooks and paper.
Right, dudes, schools were the main application areas we had in mind when we invented the wireless MAC protocol for the Photonics IR LAN back in the early 90s. Not that we were all that brilliant, since we stole the idea from Alan Kay’s dynabook.
— Tom Friedman’s latest peace plan for the Middle East, The Hard Truth, strikes me as sensible enough. He correctly observes that the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank – replete with settlements – is inflammatory, while turning the territories over to a terrorist like Arafat is a recipe for disaster, so a third … Continue reading “Friedman Peace Plan II”
— Tom Friedman’s latest peace plan for the Middle East, The Hard Truth, strikes me as sensible enough. He correctly observes that the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank – replete with settlements – is inflammatory, while turning the territories over to a terrorist like Arafat is a recipe for disaster, so a third party has to take control while the Israelis make an orderly withdrawal:
Either leaders of good will get together and acknowledge that Israel can’t stay in the territories but can’t just pick up and leave, without a U.S.-NATO force helping Palestinians oversee their state, or Osama wins — and the war of civilizations will be coming to a theater near you.
I don’t see what’s not to agree with here. The current Israeli leadership, Sharon, and Arafat have a long history of animosity toward each other going back at least to the Lebanon incursion, and that doesn’t help things.
For another point of view, see VodkaPundit, who argues that the Israeli presence in the Territories is irrelevant to Arab hostility toward Israeli. While that’s technically true, the occupation (and especially the settlements) help stoke the fires of hatred. I never have understood why Israel doesn’t install a puppet government over the territories composed of pro-Israel Arabs; maybe because there aren’t any.
— If you agree that Emmanuelle Richard has the Froggiest Blog, you should go to .:: BLOGGUEUR ::. Qui aura le meilleur blog? Vous?, click on [VOTER] in the first category (Meilleur Blog,) and then select “Naughty Bytes“. Voting is a sacred duty, and she’s Matt Welch’s old lady and the world’s most famous Emmanuelle.
— If you agree that Emmanuelle Richard has the Froggiest Blog, you should go to .:: BLOGGUEUR ::. Qui aura le meilleur blog? Vous?, click on [VOTER] in the first category (Meilleur Blog,) and then select “Naughty Bytes“. Voting is a sacred duty, and she’s Matt Welch’s old lady and the world’s most famous Emmanuelle.
— Fairly honest assessment of journalistic fear and loathing: Borg Journalism – We are the Blogs. Journalism will be Assimilated: Weblogs scoop you at every turn, breaking “your” stories before you have a chance to rush your article to press. And even if you do manage to break a story, weblogs take it over, dissecting … Continue reading “Borg Journalism”
— Fairly honest assessment of journalistic fear and loathing:
Borg Journalism – We are the Blogs. Journalism will be Assimilated:
Weblogs scoop you at every turn, breaking “your” stories before you have a chance to rush your article to press. And even if you do manage to break a story, weblogs take it over, dissecting every point you made and pushing your logic to every inevitable conclusion. Forget that follow-up you had planned – ‘blogs have already anticipated and published every point you might have made.
Welcome to the world of Borg Journalism. Resistance is futile: journalism is being assimilated.
At least this journalist knows what he’s talking about.
— Pope VodkaPundit’s blog is down today: My host pulled the plug without warning, without explaination. I had to contact them — and wait an hour — to learn their puny servers can’t handle Moveable Type’s perl script. Let me recommend Os Tyler’s NothingSpecial.com for your blog-hosting needs. Os keeps his system software up-to-date, it’s … Continue reading “Travails of the VodkaPundit”
— Pope VodkaPundit’s blog is down today:
My host pulled the plug without warning, without explaination. I had to contact them — and wait an hour — to learn their puny servers can’t handle Moveable Type’s perl script.
Let me recommend Os Tyler’s NothingSpecial.com for your blog-hosting needs. Os keeps his system software up-to-date, it’s reliable and affordable, and it runs Movable Type with all features enabled better than the other two ISPs I’ve used. NothingSpecial also hosts most of the better blogs, including Layne, Welch, and Emmanuelle.
Update: The Vodkaman is back on-line – the VLWC can’t keep a good man down.
— Newsday (my pick for the worst newspaper in America) columnist Sheryl McCarthy writes a bizarre column on reparations for slavery. First she ticks off some of the reasons that reparations would be counter-productive, such as backlash and fraud. But she then changes her tune and says reparations would be hunky-dory as long as they’re … Continue reading “Reparations scam”
— Newsday (my pick for the worst newspaper in America) columnist Sheryl McCarthy writes a bizarre column on reparations for slavery. First she ticks off some of the reasons that reparations would be counter-productive, such as backlash and fraud. But she then changes her tune and says reparations would be hunky-dory as long as they’re paid by private companies and not the government. Her reasoning, if you can call it that:
With This New Suit, Reparations Start Making Sense.
A colleague of mine made a convincing argument that these and others companies should be made to pay up. The U.S. economy is like Enron, she said, a structure that in its reliance on slavery first and on the devaluing of black labor later is an economy built on business gimickry, accounting fraud and illusion. And at last the whole scam is being exposed.
There’s an illusion here alright, but its not that we live in an Enron economy, or even that slavery was ever a significant factor in the development of the American economy; the illusion is that most Americans are as addicted to class jealousy as McCarthy and the reparations demagogues (Sharpton, Gates, Jackson, et. al.) Americans are no more eager to be taken to the cleaners by a band of flim-flam artists raiding our 401K’s than our federal treasury, so we aren’t going to suddenly drop critical judgment on the belief that they’ve found the Money Tree. Secondly, there’s no way of helping people who are dead, no matter how hard their lives were. And thirdly, most descendents of African-American slaves are embarrassed by the opportunistic reparations movement and rightly fear the division and backlash that can be its only legacy.
Reparations paid by the taxpayers as a whole make no sense because the victims are dead; reparations paid by stockholders and other retirees fail for the same reason.
— Newsweek highlights a new diligence among the VC’s: Silicon Valley Reboots Post-bubble Silicon Valley tries hard to avoid the harebrained excesses that led to dot-bomb disasters. “We’re still doing deals, but now they’re well thought through,” says Accel’s Breyer. For instance, Accel recently took a month’s worth of technical and marketing analysis before funding … Continue reading “Excellent company?”
— Newsweek highlights a new diligence among the VC’s: Silicon Valley Reboots
Post-bubble Silicon Valley tries hard to avoid the harebrained excesses that led to dot-bomb disasters. “We’re still doing deals, but now they’re well thought through,” says Accel’s Breyer. For instance, Accel recently took a month’s worth of technical and marketing analysis before funding a wireless play called Woodside Networks. “Two years ago we would have done it in a week,” says Breyer.
Gee, Woodside sounds like a great company, as this article in the Wall St. Journal shows:
Still, some investors are braving the risks to get in early at new companies. For example, the past quarter saw several relatively massive infusions for new companies — often called A-round financings — such as Woodside Networks Inc. and Cedar Point Communications Inc., which raised $20 million and $19 million, respectively.
Todd Dagres, a general partner at Battery Ventures in Wellesley, Mass., which put some of the money into Cedar Point, says the deal was the first new one he had done in more than a year. “I stopped [making new investments] a year ago because you had to take care of the portfolio,” he says. “You had to make sure your companies were in a survivable mode.”
And even though both Cedar Point and Woodside were classified as A-round deals, neither fits the traditional profile of an early venture investment. By one venture rule of thumb, companies get about three rounds of financing, an A-round to fund product design and development, a B-round to fund producing and selling a product on a small scale, and a C-round to expand sales and get to profitability.
But Woodside is hardly just a couple of entrepreneurs and a business plan. The Palo Alto, Calif., company, which is making semiconductors that will help computers and other devices connect to wireless data networks, was founded back in January last year. It raised an initial $8 million from the founders and some tiny venture firms and expects to have product ready for commercial delivery later this year.
I’m glad we have high-quality startups taking wireless LANs forward, but Woodside isn’t one of them. Once again, we have VCs touting things they don’t understand, investing in low-quality deals with poor prospects, and bragging about it. This kind of thing doesn’t help investor confidence in the market.
