Ben Stein May Harm Your Computer
Gordo put up an excellent post about Ben Stein’s foolish War on Science. I was curious to see if any of Ben Stein’s mawkish, lugubrious American Spectator columns were available on the Internet. I haven’t read that magazine since the late 1990s, but I remember Ben Stein used to have a pathetic column in which he would whine about how hard it was to be a wealthy man in Southern California, how difficult it was to have his own TV show, etc.
Well, it seems you shouldn’t be visiting the American Spectator website, readers:
It seems the American Spectator site has been infected with malware.
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January 4th, 2008 @ 00:09
I don’t know if “infected” is the right word to use. I’d be willing to bet the malware was put there by the publishers of the Spectator, and that they get paid by spammers to put spyware and adware on readers’ computers.
It fits right in with the right wing’s “greed is good” philosophy. I’ve also noticed that right wing bloggers like to create links in their essays that don’t lead to places to get more information, but to advertisers who pay on a “per click” basis.
January 4th, 2008 @ 11:45
The sad thing, Gordo, is I bet you’re right.
Look at Crazy Pammy, who’s busy hawking crap merchandise with her picture on it (“Look Mad Hot in Atlas Threads”) when she’s not producing febrile, analphabetic, vodka-and-Percocet-fueled rants about “Islamanazis” and “the Demoncrats.”
January 4th, 2008 @ 14:28
Why ‘kharma’ in Stein’s article? He wrote it several times, so it can’t be a mistake. The Devanagari characters for that word clearly do not aspirate the ‘k’.
In any case, the combination of Seamonkey + Vector Linux == protection against the ancient spirits from long before by the dark forces from beyond the cauldrons of the cryptic winter-night == no worries about malware from greedy webmasters, ever.
Browse safe. :)
January 4th, 2008 @ 14:46
It reminds me of the wingnut propensity to substitute <ch> for <h> in words of Arabic origin (e.g. “Achmed” for “Ahmed,” “Achmedinejad” for “Ahmedinejad”). These phenomena are almost certainly related.
January 4th, 2008 @ 17:43
Yes, dumpendebat, but there is some merit in that convention for the Semitic (or in Persian’s case, Semitic-influenced) languages, right? I mean, there’s a fricative sound there (?) A-chhhhh (white noise)-med, chhhhallah, Chhhhanukah or how?
No kh in kharma anyway.
January 4th, 2008 @ 18:47
In the case of “Ahmed,” the sound represented by <h> is an unvoiced pharyngeal fricative /ħ/, not an unvoiced velar fricative /x/. The sound in “Ahmed” is not the same sound as Hebrew “Chanukah,” German “Bach,” Scottish “loch.”
In Arabic, these three letters of the alphabet represent three distinct phonemes:
ه unvoiced glottal fricative /h/
ح unvoiced pharyngeal fricative /ħ/ — this is the letter “h” in “Ahmed” أﺤﻣﺩ
خ unvoiced velar fricative /x/
In Persian, the first two of those letters both represent the unvoiced glottal fricative /h/ (the velar fricative /x/ is the same as in Arabic, though, and should be transliterated <kh>).
You can at least see where the confusion on this point comes from, anyways; “Kharma” is just 100% wrong, of course.
January 4th, 2008 @ 18:52
“Achmedinejad” is particularly jarring, because the sound we anglophones represent as <ch> (as in “church”) also exists in Persian (it does not exist in Arabic, at least not in Classical/Modern Standard Arabic). So, while you could represent the velar fricative /x/ in Arabic transliteration as <ch>, you can’t do so in Persian transliteration unless you want to be ambiguous and confusing.
January 4th, 2008 @ 20:18
Got it. :)
January 4th, 2008 @ 20:57
Wow, very interesting. Nice work guys.