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 … 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.

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 … 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.

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 … 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.

Beavis and Butthead

— If Beavis and Butthead had a media watch column, it would look like this: In the world of Web logs, talk is cheap. How dumb do you have to be to fall for an April Fool’s prank? Dumb enough to suspend Jeff Jacoby for writing a patriotic column; dumb enough to publish Ellen Goodman; … Continue reading “Beavis and Butthead”

— If Beavis and Butthead had a media watch column, it would look like this: In the world of Web logs, talk is cheap. How dumb do you have to be to fall for an April Fool’s prank? Dumb enough to suspend Jeff Jacoby for writing a patriotic column; dumb enough to publish Ellen Goodman; dumb enough to insult James Lileks for writing too much. In other words, dumb as the Boston Globe, and gracelessly insane.

It turns out the little prick doesn’t like letters to the Editor correcting his mistakes, for some strange reason:

We in the glamorous media business have mixed feelings about the men, women and, yes, children who write in to express their views.

Beam’s whole anti-blog screed was a recycled version of this column, in fact.

No more frog-bashing

— Stupid White Men is number one on the non-fiction bestseller list here (ahead of The Female Orgasm) and in France the number one best seller is a bizarre book claiming the US government invented the air attack on the Pentagon A bizarre book claiming that the plane that ploughed into the Pentagon on September … Continue reading “No more frog-bashing”

— Stupid White Men is number one on the non-fiction bestseller list here (ahead of The Female Orgasm) and in France the number one best seller is a bizarre book claiming the US government invented the air attack on the Pentagon

A bizarre book claiming that the plane that ploughed into the Pentagon on September 11 never existed, and that the US establishment itself was at the heart of the New York and Washington attacks, has shot to the top of the French bestseller lists to indignation on both sides of the Atlantic.

No more frog-bashing for me — they do it so much better to themselves.

How to end suicide bombing

— Tom Friedman scratches his head and asks how to end suicide bombing: …the whole world must see this Palestinian suicide strategy defeated. But how? This kind of terrorism can be curbed only by self-restraint and repudiation by the community itself. No foreign army can stop small groups ready to kill themselves. How do we … Continue reading “How to end suicide bombing”

— Tom Friedman scratches his head and asks how to end suicide bombing:

…the whole world must see this Palestinian suicide strategy defeated.

But how? This kind of terrorism can be curbed only by self-restraint and repudiation by the community itself. No foreign army can stop small groups ready to kill themselves. How do we produce that deterrence among Palestinians? First, Israel needs to deliver a military blow that clearly shows terror will not pay. Second, America needs to make clear that suicide bombing is not Israel’s problem alone. To that end, the U.S. should declare that while it respects the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism, it will have no dealings with the Palestinian leadership as long as it tolerates suicide bombings. Further, we should make clear that Arab leaders whose media call suicide bombers “martyrs” aren’t welcome in the U.S.

Etc., etc., and all very naive. Tom, get serious — the only tactics that will defeat this tactic must, of necessity, be just as barbaric as suicide bombing. You’re dealing with people who believe their cause places them above conventional morality. So let’s encourage Israel to take the surviving family members of suicide bombers into custody, to put them on trial, and ultimately put them to death. Or simply shoot them, all of them, summarily. Failing that, the bombings will continue as long as there is one live Jew in the Middle East.

Journalist of the Year award

— CNN.com – CNN And TIME Magazine Announce Top Winners Of Fifth Annual “Journalist Award” “At Time and CNN, we’re delighted to offer this prestigious award to the brightest journalist,” said Adi Ignatius, Editor of Time, of Jerry Pournelle, the #1 winner. ” We have long wanted to honor Jerry Pournelle in this way, as … Continue reading “Journalist of the Year award”

— CNN.com – CNN And TIME Magazine Announce Top Winners Of Fifth Annual “Journalist Award”

“At Time and CNN, we’re delighted to offer this prestigious award to the brightest journalist,” said Adi Ignatius, Editor of Time, of Jerry Pournelle, the #1 winner. ” We have long wanted to honor Jerry Pournelle in this way, as his contribution to the society has been enormous.”

See this web site for details.

The Evil Empire

— More Than Zero says what everybody is thinking: It is time for the government to step in. I call for immediate takeover of Microsoft by the federal government. I believe this could resolve both the impending social security crisis and my XP installation. Amen, brother.

— More Than Zero says what everybody is thinking:

It is time for the government to step in. I call for immediate takeover of Microsoft by the federal government. I believe this could resolve both the impending social security crisis and my XP installation.

Amen, brother.

Countdown to the revolution

— Bjørn Stærk has done gone over to the dark side. See The People’s Blog – Countdown to the Revolution, with Bj?rn St?rk I quit writing on the web when I realized that nobody cares about the ignorant hate speech of a right-wing nut. He’s ahead of the rest of us – by several hours.

— Bjørn Stærk has done gone over to the dark side. See The People’s Blog – Countdown to the Revolution, with Bj?rn St?rk

I quit writing on the web when I realized that nobody cares about the ignorant hate speech of a right-wing nut.

He’s ahead of the rest of us – by several hours.