My apnea has rather suddenly become too severe to ignore. At Google, the first paid link under ‘apnea’ advertises a widget that clips to the nasal septum. For $18, it would be pleasant to believe that it’s not mere quackery!

Confessions Of An Isolationist Wannabe: John Hawkins writes on Right Wing News:

Rarely a day passes on the internet without another article being written that claims America is a “hegemon”, that we’re like “like Rome,” or that we want to “create an empire.” Take it from a Conservative, ultra-nationalistic, America-first hawk; Americans on the whole would rather drive bamboo shoots under their fingernails than “rule the world.”

So what? Here’s a little secret that the world would do well to remember: Foreign policy is not made by Americans-in-general.

So how the hell did we end up with our fingers in every bowl of soup from Bahrain to Brazil? It’s because we’re not content to sit around on our behinds while the entire planet collapses without us. . . . We’re the only thing keeping the planet from reverting back to an early 1800’s style plunder, war, and rampage philosophy.

Or so the politicians keep telling themselves.

If they really wanted to help the world’s hellholes, they could consider lowering agricultural tariffs, and cut off subsidies to foreign politicians (if even that word is not too polite for e.g. Mubarak).

Silly puns like this are only a small part of what you’re missing if you don’t read Soap on a Rope. Say not that I warned thee not.

I’ve long been puzzled by some of the 404s that appear in my logs. Does everyone get a steady trickle of requests to POST /cgi-bin/formmail.pl ?

John Weidner (Random Jottings) expresses something I had in mind:

Suppose thousands, nay tens of thousands of Federal employees were replaced whenever the White House changed hands. The continuity of well-established procedures would be broken. But, so would the continuity of entrenched lethargy and indifference. The new people would lack much of the knowlege needed for their jobs, but they would also be willing to try new ideas, and would know how things are done in the private sector. Some of the new people would be incompetent or venal, but . . . well, you know where that one’s going.

Weidner also touches on the former practice of selling commissions in the British army. Sir Iain Moncreiffe (1919-85) made the interesting point that this meant most officers were able to resign in protest without endangering their livelihood. (Indeed in many regiments an officer could not live on his salary.)

See also this memoir by David Hardy. (local copy, just in case)

I’ve seen several comments, on as many sites, saying that automatic runoff elections (as used in Australia, I believe) would eliminate the problem of spoiler candidates. True, but I prefer approval voting, which is simpler, requiring only one procedural change: stop discarding ballots as ‘spoiled’ for marking too many candidates. (I guess it’s not so simple where voting machines are used; at least some such machines physically prevent multi-voting.) An approval count also gives a single number which meaningfully measures the winner’s mandate.

Since I last looked, Richard Bennett has taken down the insulting “I don’t do Netscape 4” page. Good boy.

(I primarily use 4.79 because 6.2.2 is much less graceful in handling mail and bookmarks.)