Good morning (barely), and welcome to today's collection of various tidbits!

• Over at National Review Online Jonah Goldberg is documenting liberal response to his criticism and analysis of their current political status. From The Corner [you'll have to scroll down a little bit - their Permanent Links are somewhat finicky - to the Goldberg entry titled "Liberal Roots, Cont'd."]:
  

  I've spent a lot of time thinking about this for my book, and I've concluded that the problem with liberalism isn't lack of money or organization or media access (please God, stop their whining about Fox News and the American Enterprise Institute for pete's sake, they look ridiculous). Their biggest problem is they don't have a philosophy. This causes a lack of organization. This causes a lack of popular ideas. This is why the Democratic Party defines itself in such reactionary terms -- blocking Republicans, creating lockboxes, yelling "stop" and "no" a la Al Gore and so on. Today the only issue that unifies liberals or the Democrats is their hatred of George W. Bush and to a lesser extent "his" war. That's not a program, that's not a philosophy, that's not even liberalism. That's a gripe.

  For more, here's the first Corner entry in that series ("A Liberal Responds"), and you can find Goldberg's original analysis here. Keep reading the Corner, too, as this discussion is ongoing (there were a further three or four posts on the subject as I was typing this up!)


• Thanks to Rev. Donald Sensing, we have a glimpse of the intellectual bankruptcy of even the more mainstream left-wing media. From Bill Hobbs:
  

  Think the Left will change its tune on the war in Iraq if we find proof of the weapons of mass destruction? Think again.
  

  "Even if we were to discover enormous warehouses full of nuclear weapons, the war still wouldn't have been justified." - popular syndicated political cartoonist Ted Rall, who describes himself as typical liberal Democrat.

  I'd link to the page where he wrote it, but I'm pretty sure that there's a special room in Hell for people who send Rall extra traffic.

  Ugh. Ted Rall - who already has a notoriety in the blogosphere for being 'the scum of the earth' - is printed in the Washington Post.


• On other fronts in the blogosphere, Jeff Jarvis notes that Bill Gates has embraced blogs:
  

  Gates' comments on blogging technology were the most extensive thus far from Microsoft's chief software architect, signaling that the world's largest software company is waking up to the potential of blogging as a potential threat and also as a new business opportunity.
  
  ..................
  
  Gates described to his audience, which included Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, Carly Fiorina, Barry Diller and other top business executives, how blogs worked and suggested that they could be used as a tool for businesses to communicate with customers.
  
  "It's getting away from the drawbacks of e-mail and the drawbacks of a Web site,' Gates said, "We're progressively getting better and better at it."
  
  ..................
  
  Microsoft, which has already amassed more than 700 employee bloggers talking up its products and software in development, is embracing blogs and RSS technology because they are yet another potential threat and opportunity, said Joe Wilcox, analyst at Jupiter Research.
  
  Since blogging, and many of the tools needed to post blogs, can work independently of Windows, they could be used to draw away from Windows-based software, similar to the threat posed by Netscape in the early days of the Internet, analysts said.
  
  "If I'm Microsoft and my fundamental goal is to sell more copies of Windows, then I might want to get involved in that," said Wilcox, who also has his own blog called "Microsoft Monitor".

  Jarvis comments:
  

  Gates wasn't talking about blogs as blather. He was talking about blogs as tools for personal and business publishing of any kind of information. And he was talking about RSS as a new means of communication and distribution.
  
  This means that, of course, Microsoft will embrace blogs and RSS in its tools, from Word to IE. It also makes Google look smart for buying Blogger (without a strategy then).
  
  Providing publishing tools and space will be an essential service in the near future -- for businesses, for family shopping lists, for unlimited sorts of publishing -- and the war to win that space is just beginning.

  With the Microsoft move, Blogging may have just hit 'the big time.' Of course, Steven Den Beste has another perspective.


• Did you hear the other day that the US forces in Iraq killed 40 Iraqis at a wedding party? Okay, well did you hear that initial reports were, shall we say, less than transparent? Namely about the fact that the entire story may have been a distortion? No? Well color me shocked. [That was sarcasm. I know, I'm not too good at it, so I have to put in this editorial comment to make sure I've clearly communicated...and it kinda ruins the whole effect. Okay, I'll shut up now. -- Ed.]
  

  Why was a wedding party in full swing at 02:45 am in the middle of the desert? A glance at the map would show the area in which the wedding took place was 250 kilometers from  "Dr. Salah al-Ani, who works at a hospital in Ramadi," and who "put the death toll at 45."  A long way to go for medical treatment or burial when Qusabayah is 50 kilometers away. Under normal circumstances, there are two wounded for every dead. By the normal ratios there should have been at least 90 injured. There was a videotape "showing a truck containing bodies of people who were allegedly killed in the incident. Most of the bodies were wrapped in blankets and other cloths, but the footage showed at least eight uncovered, bloody bodies, several of them children. One of the children was headless." A video of the dead, but where were the wounded?
  
  Nothing to discredit the initial report on the face of it, and Faramarzi was correct in reporting the initial details, but there enough for someone to say 'get in closer for a better look'. Long before we found out about the satcom radios, the weapons and the cash at the "wedding party".
  
  ..................
  
  At this writing, 24 hours after the initial story, some newspapers are still reporting the incident as an attack on a wedding party while others describe it as a strike against a militant group. Two versions and no closure. Except in the case of individual news threads, like Faramarzi's, whose content has evolved, the reportage as a whole resembles a palimpsest, a word used to describe a sheet of parchment which has been overwritten many times by different symbols until finally the newer cannot be distinguished from the older. We are collectively no nearer to definitively finding out the truth about the "wedding party" than we are to discovering anything definite about the Oil for Food scandal, WMD stockpiles in Iraq, the anthrax letters or what the deal was in Fallujah.

  The inherent difficulties faced by journalists of keeping tabs on ongoing events and unfolding stories place those readers who only give the headlines a once-over at a severe 'truth disadvantage.' This is not helped by the current practice of newspapers in which they run corrections inside the bowels of an edition. Important information is missed, incorrect conclusions are drawn (sometimes so incorrect as to be directly the opposite of the truth), and by the time tomorrow rolls around, it's literally 'yesterday's news' - so why correct yourself on the front page? And people wonder why media credibiilty is sinking so low.


• Moving to more personal topics, I took last night off from working out (but not from being out of the house and "briskly walking"). Depending on how my father feels on Saturday (he just gets back from Kazakhstan today), I may be able to convince him to work out with me in Hamilton, and that'll make four workouts this week - a good start!
  
  Elsewhere, in addition to all my classes, I've also started working in earnest on my first set of books. There are several people who know what they're about, so I won't elaborate here - besides, if I talked about the books in any specificity, then I would seriously hamper my chances at finding a publisher when the time comes - but suffice it to say that emerging nanotechnologies play an important role in all three. Which is why I'm so excited to find sites like e-drexler (via InstaPundit). The problem with writing in a technical landscape (even if it's not a technically-focused book - I'm not going hardcore Michael Crichton, but I want my basics to be correct) is that one needs to do quite a bit of research, even to gain a cursory knowledge of the topic. Well, thanks to Instapundit, I now have a compendium of all that information. Progress, here I come!