Monthly Archives: January 2004


Conspiracy Theories

On Saturday nights ABC replays episodes of Monk, the entertaining USA series. Tonight’s is a repeat but my wife has not seen it so it is on while she falls asleep reading and I browse a few blogs (I should have done some links for you…there is, as usual a lot of good stuff out there).
A key clue that Monk has focused on the right person as the culprit is that the guy sat quietly at his desk (he was proctoring a Saturday morning SAT exam) as all the students jumped up an ran to the windows when a car alarm went off. This was unnatural behavior and would be for you and I in similar circumstances.
At the same time this was playing on Monk I was reading the following?:

…while the 9/11 attacks were occurring, the entire top of the chain of command of the most powerful military in the world sat at various desks, inert.

Well, my reaction each time I have read about this has been incredulity. That is not how I would expect them to behave. Is this proof that they knew in advance about the attacks? No. But, please then, explain their behavior.
Susan at Suburban Guerilla asks whether Michael Hasty’s call to paranoia in the above article is persuasive. He certainly lines up a long series of allegations and evidence and but the lack of citations, while perhaps not appropriate to the medium in which the article appeared, would make his arguments hard to accept by someone not familiar with all the items.
Especially when some of his arguments include things like:

…the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that the murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was “probably” the result of “a conspiracy,”

and then fails to tell us that the committee was referring to a conspiracy involving Oswald and a few others and that:

In terms of its implications for government and society, an assassination as a consequence of a conspiracy composed solely of Oswald and a small number of persons, possibly only one, and possibly a person akin to Oswald in temperament and ideology, would not have been fundamentally different from an assassination by Oswald alone.

So, he doesn’t appear to have everything just right and he would have been much more persuasive if he had ended with a bold Wake Up People before he takes his argument over the edge by rolling out the Bush as Hitler meme.


Airport Abbreviations

What is the origin of those 3 letter airport abbreviations? Some make sense and many seem non-sensical. At least until you understand their origins.
City names, airport names and sometimes the original name of an airport. Get the whole story here.
Via Languagehat.


Atkins Revision

In tomorrows NYT this article (R) will tell you:

…the director of research and education for Atkins Nutritionals, Colette Heimowitz, is telling health professionals in seminars around the country that only 20 percent of a dieter’s calories should come from saturated fat. Atkins Nutritionals was set up by Dr. Robert C. Atkins to sell Atkins products and promote the diet.

But I don’t think Atkins dieters will be too stressed since “…a person who eats 1,500 calories a day could eat a 17-ounce strip steak every day.”
As best I can tell this is a fairly modest revision all things considered. They are still talking 60% of your calories from fat so substitute some chicken and fish if you are eating more then 17 ounces of red meat a day.


Around the Blogroll

Deb is unhappy with whoever stole her food from the refrigerator at work. This is the first I’d heard of Skinny Cows.
Jaquandor contemplates headless chickens, replacements for Britney (a regular series) and ER.
Brian Micklethwait, having nothing better to do then surf the normally unwatched digital end of British TV, found and watched part of an interview with a woman whose secretly filmed undergarments are apparently now circulating on the web. Brian now regrets not watching more of the interview and contemplates what the rules should be regarding this tyupe of filming.
Tim Dunlop recommends this title for David Kay’s new book:Still haven’t found what I’m looking for. Well, these guys all publish a book don’t they.
Josh Marshall notes that Richard Perle confirms that Drudge’s and the WSJ’s ($) latest hack at Clark’s Iraq postion are pure bs.