Thawed ~1.5 cups of frozen roasted sweet Corn from Trader Joes, and a similar amount of Foster Farms frozen precooked roasted chicken breast from Costco.

In the meantime I cut coarse slices of 1/4 a yellow onion and sauteed it in olive oil with two minced garlic cloves. Minced and added a couple of tablespoons of fire roasted peppers (also from Trader Joes), and a couple of tablespoons of “Tomato Magic” (tomato puree thickened with tomato paste) from PFI.

Added the thawed corn and chicken to the frying pan and mixed.

Added a pinch of oregano, a pinch of ground cumin, and a hint of ground cayenne. Salted to taste.

Prep time: ~10 minutes.

Consumed. Delicious.

I kind of hate myself for doing this, but here it goes:

Chief Justice William Rhenquist has died. This leaves Bush with two vacancies to fill. So, what happens to Roberts, who some suspected might be positioned to succeed Rhenquist as Chief Justice, and is Bush going to have any chance of shoving two right-wing activists onto the bench at a time when his approval ratings are sinking even lower?

(Ok, so not cold blooded or calculating at all. That was the plan when I was writing the title, but after that, I didn’t have much energy for anything but what you see above).

I’m not Christian, religious, or even very spiritual. It’s not that I disagree with what I think I understand of Christian teaching, I don’t. It’s not that I don’t see that being open to something bigger than ones self can be a source of strength and comfort. It’s just that I’m no quite as forgiving of human frailty as I need to be to accept the hypocrisy that seems to swirl around any congregation.

With this background, I may not have the credibility to say what I’m about to say, but I’m going to say it anyway.

If George Bush were a Christian leader, as he seems to fashion himself, he’d be down on his knees, in front of God and man, begging for forgiveness for himself and his nation for abandoning its poor and sick to the devastation that hit New Orleans.

Instead, he’s up there, smug and proud, trying to act like he’s on top of something that is so much bigger than himself.

I’ve not really been able to think or read too much about what’s happening in New Orleans. What I do read, see, and hear is just too horrible for me right now. We’re making financial contributions to the Red Cross but it seems so insignificant. Whenever I think about it, my chest gets tight.

Bush’s assertion that people couldn’t have foreseen this kind of disaster, is of course, nothing but lame spin, already discredited before the words passed his lips. People have foreseen this sort of disaster since the founding of New Orleans and have been taking escalating measures against it ever since. The levees, the canals, the pumps, all are extreme measures to help the city eek out its precarious existence while at the same time making the costs of the inevitable disaster that much higher.

It was foreseeable, not just on the scale of a hundred years, but on the scale of a few days. Weather forecasters knew it was hurricane season, they new a big one was on the way. The good news is that they evacuated the city, mostly. As bad as things are there, it could have been much much worse.

The bad news is that the evacuation plans failed to take into account the reality for large numbers of the population. Much was made at the beginning of the idea that the people who stayed behind were just stubborn or stupid. Many may have been, but so many had no choice. There are hospitals that still aren’t evacuated. Other’s didn’t have a vehicle, or money for gas. They couldn’t have made it out if they wanted to, and they were essentially abandoned.

It’s like they lived in another country, a horribly corrupt 3rd world country. The thing is, they are citizens of the United Sates of America, just like me. We share the same president, a president who was on vacation while the disaster was unfolding, a president who offers lame spin.

It’s pretty obvious now just how much Bush basked in the glow of Rudy Giuliani after 9-11. I though Bush’s biggest accomplishment at the time was not falling to pieces when faced by a situation that was so far beyond his abilities as both a man and a leader, but others thought he rose to the occasion. No one was discounting Giuliani’s accomplishments at the time, but clearly, they were far too generous towards Bush.

I don’t want to say too much more about his incompetence, but I want to finish a though I started earlier. It was well known that New Orleans could end up horribly flooded, and it was known that a dangerous storm was coming. Now think what would have happened if there hadn’t been any warning. What if terrorists had breached the levees? How many would be dead?

Post-9/11, it was foreseeable that New Orleans could end up flooded with almost no warning, and yet, even with enough warning to evacuate much of the city, things are as bad as they are and seem likely to get worse before they get better.

Given such a colossal failure, I hate to think of the result if there were a biological attack on an American city. Even if the casualties from the attack were relatively minor, I hate to think of the panic it would trigger among a population who has proof that their government is incompetent to deal with the situation at a time where they’ve had 4 years to get their act together.

Now, getting back to New Oreleans. I deplore looting, but I’ve got a real hard time judging people taking food or clothing. Even if their own homes are relatively intact, there is no power, there are no stores operating and emergency provisions are few and far between. If their clothing got wet its probably sour and nasty from the heat by now.

As to the rest of them, the ones taking TVs and other shit they can’t even use right now, sure they are nothing but mean and petty brutes, but who is going to judge them? We live in the richest, fattest country in the world, and yet we were too mean and hard to take care of our poor and sick when things get tough. We ran for safety and left them to die.

With the iTunes music store, Apple and Steve Jobs did for the music industry what they proved incapable of doing on their own, it gave them a future in the world of online digital media.

Now, to show that they’ve learned nothing, portions of the music industry are trying to force Apple to change their simple consumer-freindly pricing model.

Apple, Digital Music’s Angel, Earns Record Industry’s Scorn – New York Times
If he loses, the one-price model that iTunes has adopted – 99 cents to download any song – could be replaced with a more complex structure that prices songs by popularity. A hot new single, for example, could sell for $1.49, while a golden oldie could go for substantially less than 99 cents.

This is ridiculous on many fronts. For one thing, the music industry has long discounted whatever new music they are pushing in order to help build critical mass. Why do they think their “hot new thing” model, which is already showing signs of strain and wear, is going to hold up if they start jacking up the price on the new product they are trying to move?

In addition, jacking up the prices on popular music is just going to feed the free trading in music to which iTunes has provided the first and most successful alternative to.

Finally, this approach could actually hurt their revenue from more obscure items in the back catalog by cutting prices on tracks that might be hard to find on a filesharing service by discounting those tracks. Most of my iTunes purchases have been back-catalog tracks. More importantly, the latest and greatest actually makes up a pretty small proportion of the music people listen to. The top 100 songs on Rhapsody only acount for about 1% of the music its users play. Meanwhile 90% of the 1 million songs in their catalog are listened to at least once a month.

I guess I can content myself with the knowledge that the big record labels aren’t exactly united in their opinions on the matter and the hope that the more shortsighted among them are only hurrying themselves towards irrelevance.

I wrote yesterday about the beta of “new version of Google Desktop Search”:http://www.geekfun.com/2005/08/23/new-google-desktop-search-beta/ which has a clever new approach to RSS subscriptions. Rather than expecting users to explicitly subscribe to the RSS feeds of sites that they visit, the WebClips section on the new GDS sidebar automatically shows feed items for pages you’ve recently or frequently visited that have discoverable feeds. Rather than expecting a user to know about RSS feeds, and rather than trying to explain to them why they’d care, Google is demonstrating their relevance.

I really like this approach, but it didn’t occur to me until just now that this could be the target for abuse by advertisers. They could hide feeds on web pages that would start showing up in your Web Clips. In fact, they might already be laying the groundwork.

I just checked my Web Clips options and I saw that it had detected feeds for “servedby.advertising.com/rss”. Right now, that URL doesn’t return any content, so I don’t know what’s going on. I’m not sure if it’s a bug in Web Clips, or what pages the feeds were detected on, but it’s all very suspicious at this point.