Peter’s Blog

Normally I really like Roger Cohen’s columns but today’s, “The EU in an Irish bog,” is atrocious. He buys hook, line and sink into the rediculous argument that because the Irish have benefitted significantly from EU membership their No vote is dumb, crass, ungrateful, etc, etc. He even says their voting was ‘unconscionable’! I hate this attitude towards politics, as it reduces people’s options to the ‘right choice’ or being guilty of false consciousness.

There is something so inspiring reading about and seeing this house. It’s definitely the first modern/contemporary house I’ve seen in a while that I’d really want to live in.

Los Angeles’ carbon footprint is a light one — sort of - Los Angeles Times

“The Mississippi River roughly divides the country into high and low emitters,” it says. “In 2005, all but one of the 10 largest per capita emitters were located east of the Mississippi.”

Proof again of the inherent superiority of the West Coast! =)

- Posted using MobyPicture.com

Bushs veto threat provokes skirmish on housing bill - International Herald Tribune

Bush, in threatening to veto Franks bill, has called on Congress to pass those two measures as stand-alone legislation. As Democrats tried to bring their bill to the floor on Wednesday, House Republicans threw up procedural roadblocks, including a series of votes on motions to adjourn.

The majority leader, Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, gave a floor speech early in the evening accusing the Republicans of an “abuse of process.”

In response, the Republican leader, Representative John Boehner of Ohio, accused the Democrats of cutting Republicans out of the legislative process.

“We dont have many ways to express our grievance on the housing bill because we have no amendment we can offer,” Boehner said. “All we are asking is to be treated fairly.”

What goes around, comes around, and every time it’s stupid.

I’ve switched the RSS feeds over to Feedburner. Please let me know if you have any problems getting updates. The main feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/beachheadonline/fMqv and the comments feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/beachheadonline/BxVX.

One of my IMAP accounts is taking up over 400 mb on the server and is causing problems, such as bounced messages, so I set out to download all the old messages to my computer and then wipe the data from the server. Unfortunately, Mail.app (my primary mail client) doesn’t have any sort of Export or ‘Copy to local machine’ function, so I had to develop a work around.

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What Belgium was to paedophilia in the 1990s, Austria is to female sex slaves in dungeons in the 2000s.
Dungeons & Austrians - International Herald Tribune

Originally uploaded by j.m.r.

My sister got a DSLR a few months ago and has been taking some fantastic pictures. This great photo of a palm frond is from Chicago and she has some great photos from Death Valley.

A.O. Scott likes Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay

But they’re not stupid, and to the extent that the movie is, its idiocy serves the cause of good sense and intelligence. And no, I’m not smoking anything.