Wednesday's Wonders

1701 Is The Lonliest Number
It looks like the French are backing out of any commitment to put troops on the ground in Lebanon. And you know we're not.  It's clear that Hezbollah and Israel are going to do whatever they damned well please, UN do-gooders and international handwringers be damned. And that ladies and gentlemen, is the way of the fucking world. Clutch your pearls and swoon, but wars will be wars, and now you know the fate of third party, non-carrot, non-stick diplomacy.

Gapminder.org
I don't know how my head has gotten to a place where my knee jerks away from Aid & Development. It's probably because I lament the lost opportunity for the creation and maintenance of a proper empire, and nothing annoys me like do-gooders who can't do enough. Nevertheless, there is some really great visualization software in the hands of the Gapminder folks and Google is paying attention. This also makes me very insecure as a commercial BI consultant. Primarily because nobody at Google has gotten back to me yet.

The Day The Earth Stood Stupid
Even though I'm writing this on Tuesday, I predict that nothing particularly mindblowing will have occured by the time you read this Wednesday. Despite the fact that people closer to the action than me have predicted that Crazy A and his Islamic Jihad flunkies will do something world-historically dangerous, I think we've already foiled that plot. It must really piss them off that we've interrupted their plans. I mean consider it the possibilities. What if Israel was still getting bombed, the London plane plot was carried off and whatever Iran had planned today (like a nuclear test) actually happened? A trifecta of evil. Well it didn't. You can go back to sleep now.

Tiger's Twelfth
I still have my red Nike sweatshirt that I purchased a decade ago when Tiger Woods won his first major at Augusta. He's since averaged more than a major a year. Anything is possible, but I think you have to bet on Tiger. What are the chances he could tank like Greg Norman? Who knows? But I think he deserves a second wave of props. He has really out Jordaned Jordan. He dominates his sport like nobody since Pele.

Dorky Quote of the Week
"It would be difficult to find more dramatic examples of unjustifiable secrecy than these decisions to classify the numbers of U.S. strategic weapons."
-- William Burr