Those goddamn CNN headline writers!

Last week, they one-upped their previous Best Headline Ever with the kickass, “U.N. Smackdown on N. Korea.” Yes, that’s right, smackdown.

Then, they out do all previous contenders for the Zanny Headline award with this gem:

Dog Saves Owner from Fire, Dies Trying to Rescue Cat

Just let that sink in…

Baaaaaa-hahahahahahahahahahaah. Are you kidding me? Seriously, are you kidding me with that?! Oh my God… That headline taps into so many levels of awesomeness that I can hardly fathom its greatness. I’ve become fully convinced that CNN has two stoned college boys coming up with headlines for their website, constantly trying to one-up each other.

That headline looks like it was ripped from an episode of the Simpsons (not a main newspaper story, but think of one of the shots where they cut to a newspaper headline, and if you pause your Tivo or DVD and read the smaller headlines around the main plot-point headline, they’re freakin’ hilarious), or at least from The Onion.

Delving into CNN’s story of this heroic pooch is even funnier:

After a disabled woman’s cat started a house fire, her specially trained dog came to the rescue, then died trying unsuccessfully to rescue the cat.

Oh, that’s right! The damn cat started the fire!

Jamie Hanson said her 13-year-old dog Jesse brought her artificial leg and a phone she used to call 911.

That is just incredible.

“She got me outside and then she heard the cat upstairs and she went up there to get the cat, and she wouldn’t come back to me,” Hanson, 49, said at a news conference Monday at Aurora Sheboygan Memorial Medical Center, where she was being treated for her injuries.

The dog heard that cat upstairs and went to get it?! This happens in real life?! Jesus Christ, half the time I’m too lazy to get up and grab a drink from the fridge, and this dog rescues his owner from a fire, gets outside to safety, and then the damn cat that started the fire is whining upstairs?! Hahahahhaha. Can’t you just see the dog rolling his eyes before trudging back into his certain death?

Here’s to you, Sparky…

In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, you can’t drive on the roads unless you have auto insurance. The Libertarian in me bristles at this notion. After all, who is the State to dictate how I should pay off the costs of a car accident I am involved in? Maybe I’m a safe driver and independently wealthy, and, being able to afford to pay for any unlikely accident/injury to myself or other parties, don’t want to waste hundreds of dollars per month insuring my 1960’s vintage Cadillac; if I crash, I’ll pay the price, but I don’t want to pay money every month just in case I crash. Who is the state to demand I pay that money to a private, for-profit business?

While the Libertarian fraction of this spaceman’s psyche doesn’t like the idea of the state demanding I insure myself while driving, the pragmatist in me recognizes that I don’t, in fact, have the money for a 1960’s vintage Cadillac, and neither do 95% of the knuckleheads on the road with me. If I cause a car crash and do some serious damage to another person, they simply won’t be able to extract the funds from poor-ol’ me to put their life back together, and thus auto insurance is a necessary state imposition.

It isn’t quite a straight line to mandatory health insurance, however. The best argument for a law insisting on auto insurance is that, on the road, you could hurt someone else. When you neglect your health by not buying health insurance, you’re really only hurting yourself. And, hurting one’s self is a right of a United States citizen. Or is it?

When a poor person hurts himself, goes to the ER, is treated, but cannot pay the bill, who pays for the services rendered? Other tax payers. This situation is at the crux of Massachusetts’ new bill that basically requires all Mass. citizens to obtain health insurance. The way the Mass. legislators see it, tax payers already pay the bill when someone below the poverty line visits the ER. Countless studies over the past few decades have proven that preventing someone from getting sick (regular checkups, available prescriptions, etc. all go a long way towards preventing someone from becoming ill) is exponentially cheaper than treating someone who gets sick. Thus, it only makes fiscal sense to require everyone have health insurance, and for the state to pay the insurance charges for those who can’t afford it. Everyone will be healthier, and, added bonus, it will probably be cheaper in the long run.

On Monday the first stage of Massachusetts’ Health Care For All plan went into effect. I support the plan, and I commend Republican Governor Mitt Romney for getting behind it. From now until Spring 2007, the plan will only effect Mass. citizens under the state’s defined poverty line of $9,800 a year. Anyone who makes less than this amount now has health insurance through one of four private insurance companies working with the state. The impoverished citizens pay no deductible, and their visits to the doctor cost as little as $3. But, in reality, these people already were getting a sort of free healthcare, as, since they couldn’t pay their medical bills, the tax payers were paying for their hospital visits anyway. The plan’s biggest effects will bee seen this Spring when the plan starts to work for the State’s lower middle class, those making between $10,000 and $40,000 a year, who make too much money to simply ignore medical bills like the poorest citizens do, but perhaps not enough money to justify the considerable expense of monthly medical insurance bills. These people often go without health insurance and pay out-of-pocket for their visits to the doctor’s when they get sick. Since these visits are so expensive, they often put off going in for medical treatment until they’re in really bad shape, which obviously lowers their quality of life the much of the time. The lower-middle class will now be forced to obtain health insurance, or else pay tax penalties. The good news is the new health insurance plans offered to them in conjunction with the state will be significantly lower than they used to be.

One las thing. I was never really a supporter of the idea of universal health care until I began to think about America’s entrepreneurs, arguably our greatest resource. Most middle class Americans get their health care through their employers. I see the lack of universal health care as a real impediment to entrepreneurship, because it keeps people with good ideas and skills from leaving their day jobs to start their own business. You may have a billion dollar idea with an 80% chance of success in the marketplace, but if you’re married with 3 kids, can you justify quitting your job and starting your own company, knowing you won’t be able to afford paying out of pocket for your family’s health insurance? Very likely you’ll simply stay with your job for the benefits, and thus your million-dollar idea fades away. I don’t think a system like that makes economic sense for our country.

Well, after only a day of using Google Docs, I realized it won’t, in fact, take me a month to fully evaluate it: it sucks. The deal breaker for me is the fact that it doesn’t have any margins. That means that as wide as you stretch the window, the text will stretch right along with it. As skinny as you squash the window, the text will contract. And if you export it to a Word document, it’s a mis-aligned mess. Screw that.

I am kind of charmed by these available-anywhere online word processors, though, and I’ve heard good things about Zoho ThinkFree. I’m going to move my test over to that service.

And now, uh, back to the real news…

Two Google stories in a row?! Has the world gone topsy-turvy?

No, it hasn’t, little kid. But, in all likely hood in response to my post yesterday, Google has followed up their uninspiring purchase of YouTube with the full Beta release of “Google Docs & Spreadsheets ” (I’m going to assume this will later be renamed simply “Google Office,” or perhaps the simpler “Google Docs”).

The new Google section now simply consists of two web services/programs: Google Docs & Google Spreadsheets; put simply, Google is creating Microsoft Office inside your browser. Eventually, one envisions all your favorite Office programs usable right inside your browser of choice, and all for free.

So, who would want this? Well, I would, for one. The biggest benefit of having your word processor online is that all of your files are automatically stored online, re: accessible anywhere. You can set up Google to save revisions of your docs. You can search through your docs, just like you do your Gmail. You and others can all colaberate edit, revise the same document online, and the updated copy will always be available to everyone (no emailing new versions of a doc around the office). This IS the future of bare-bones, Microsoft Office-like products. I guarantee it.

There are still some problems. Google Docs, for instance, doesn’t offer anywhere near the functionality of Microsoft Word; and it is a bit annoying to have your “program” running inside your browser, which you use to do so many other things. But, like everything else from Google, these web services are still in Beta, and they’ll certainly get better as Google studies how people use them.

Anyway, I’m hereby making a pledge. For the next month, I will use Google Docs, and only Google Docs, at the office. At the end of the month I’ll blog up the experience, let you all know how the web-Word really works. Google Docs let you save your web documents as .doc files, so I’ll be able to send my pages to co-workers using Word if need be. Let the testing begin!

UDPATE: So, I finish writing this Blog Post in Google Docs (I always write my posts in a word processor, so as to spell check them) and I notice a nifty little “Publish” button. Pressing this button, Google lets you either publish your doc to a website (think google.com/joes_doc) or publish it to your blog! So, by using Google docs, I’ve just elimiated the step of copy and pasting my posts from Word into my Cosmonaut News blog. Not bad!

Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion.

Yawn.  This was a thoroughly un-Google move for the innovative company, snatching up a service that offers virtually the same technology as their Google Video: user-uploaded Flash Video.  Google wasn’t buying up some new idea; they weren’t buying up a bunch of genius programmers.  No, they were, plain and simple, buying a user base.  Again, yawn…

Google, the ethos, isn’t supposed buy users.  Dammit, Google takes users.  Google builds web services that are better than the competition and, like magic, users doth follow.  Rewind back a couple of years, if you will: Google decides it wants to offer a mapping service.  At the time, the king of the hill was MapQuest, with Yahoo Maps and a smattering of others offering similar mapping programs.  MapQuest was, remember, truly something new under the sun:  you type in your address, type in where you want to go, and MapQuest spits out directions, turn by turn.  It was amazing; love that Interweb!  Sure, the site was slow, and the interface was clunky (want to scroll right on the map?  Click the map’s right arrow, the entire page (slowly) reloads, and you’ve “scrolled” Westward.  Want to scroll over more?  Reload that sucker again…), but hey, we all thought, it’s just a website; its shoddy interface is a limitation of HTML.  We accepted MapQuest, because we were so enthralled with the service.  We didn’t know something better was possible.

So the search hotshot Google decides it wants to offer up a mapping service of its own.  MapQuest must have had something like 80% of web mapping traffic at the time.  Imagine if Google did then what Google is doing now, and simply bought MapQuest?  Well, why not?  They’d be buying all those millions of MapQuest users, and they’d have MapQuest’s “great” mapping technology.  Except…  Oh yeah, MapQuest sucked, and we didn’t even know it!

It wasn’t until Google went and built a better mousetrap (mapping site) that we realized how much better web mapping (and web services in general) could be.  And then, boy, did we ever flock to Google Maps.  Again, that’s the way of doing business that has made Google the powerhouse it is today: they don’t buy customers, they woo them with superior offerings.  It’s worked well for them thus far: their search engine, Google Maps, Gmail.  Google video, in fact, is one of the few “big” services offered by Google that hasn’t caught on in a big way.  I had thought that meant Google must have had a team of crack programmers and designers working furiously on coming up with a better, more innovative web video product.  But no, instead, Google simply went and bought a website virtually identical to their own Google Video, simply because they had a larger user base.

As was the case with MapQuest, YouTube is an incredibly sloppy web offering, one that could be vastly improved upon.  Google has said its engineers will be working with YouTube’s designers to come up with new features.  But without the flame under Google’s ass (i.e., “YouTube has millions more users than us!  We need to come up with something GREAT to lure them over to our side”) I’m doubtful the new features will be all that innovative, or will arrive as quickly as they would have if Google was still in competition with YouTube.  Instead, Google is taking a page from ol’ Microsoft’s playbook and creating a kind of mini-web-video-monopoly.  There’s only one certainty when it comes to monopolies: consumers lose.

Well, that all happened pretty fast, didn’t it?  Seems like just a few days ago we first heard that North Korea planned to test a nuclear bomb.  In a world accustomed to endless U.N. debate, threats of sanctions, back and forth diplomatic bargaining, etc., waking up on a gloomy Monday morning and seeing “N. Korea Claims Successful Nuclear Test” splattered across the front page of your local newspaper is pretty shocking.  And now, basically, we’re fucked.

In the days leading up to this test, it was a happy surprise to see China, of all countries, step up and demand that N. Korea not conduct the provocative test.  But China’s threats weren’t enough, and today CNN reports, “China, a close ally of North Korea, denounced the claimed test as “brazen…””  Well, it’s nice to see China using its influence for good, but it’s too little, too late, Beijing.

From here on out, an Asian arms race seems all but inevitable.  The U.S. is expected to encourage the pacifist Japanese military to go nuclear, and South Korea has hinted they’re going to start work on their own nukes; you can pretty much bank on 24-hour, Manhattan Project-like nuclear program ramping up in S. Korea, well, about 6-hours ago.  You can bet it won’t be long until they’re conducting their own underground controlled nuclear explosions.

So, should the Western world just leave it to the Asians?  Given the current state of N. Korea’s dysfunctional long-range missile program, it’s unlikely their nukes will be able to reach mainland U.S. for at least a couple of years.  With the U.S. military spread so incredibly thin right now, it’s temping to say, “China, S. Korea, Japan: this is your backyard, you’re the ones in immediate danger; get proactive, take care of it.”  But is that really a “solution?”  How can any plan in which more states go nuclear be considered logical?  That means more nukes which terrorists may get their hands on, more scientists who know how to produce nukes, more countries who, in the next 50, 100 years may no longer be allies of ours. No, every country that goes nuclear has to be seen as a direct threat to U.S. long-term goals (and the goal of world peace in general).

So then, should we, as a Democrat suggested at the time, have blasted North Korea’s long-range missiles off their launching pad when we had the chance, accomplishing the dual-goal of hindering their long-range missile capabilities and letting them know we would not tolerate their arms build-up?  I still can’t say if that act of aggression would have been wise, but God damn, it certainly would have been easier to fire a warning shot before the N. Koreans went nuclear.

It will be fascinating to see how the world handles this diplomatic fiasco.  And, oh yeah, the U.N. just nominated a S. Korean as their new secretary-general…  Things are a getting’ interesting.

I jumped into Woodward’s thus far excellent new tome, State of Denial, the third book in his Bush at War series, this morning. These books by Woodward are invaluable. I think they should be read in every classroom, though I know, because of perceived political bent, that could never happen (the first two books were decidedly pro-Bush and, though I’m not far enough in to make an informed judgment myself, the media consensus is that ol’ Woodward’s done a complete 180 in his newest volume, writing a book quite critical of both the President’s administration and of the man himself). The fascinating thing about these books is not the so-called revelations (if you caught Press Secretary Tony Snow’s take on the book, he fell upon his standard/overused line of, “We’ve heard it all before. This administration isn’t living in the past, yada, yada, yada,” as though he finds it laughable that anyone would bother judging an administration in a state of war on past mistakes) but rather the connections Woodward illuminates between political players.

I think I’m representative of most Americans when I say I generally have no idea how, say, a Presidential cabinet is formed in the days before and shortly following an election. Woodward’s book makes you realize that it really is just one man (the newly elected President) picking names and resumes, often of people he’s never met before the obligatory sit-down when he offers them the job. In the case of W, if Woodward’s book is to be believed, he mainly picked people who had served in the White House before (Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense during the Ford Admin, for instance), bringing back the many of his father’s old guard. You always recognize, in the abstract, that nepotism plays a bigger role in politics than in nearly any other field, but, when you’re seeing the connections right there on the page in black and white, it’s quite unsettling: Person A serves in the White House in the 70’s, becomes acquainted with Person B. Person B serves under the first President Bush, Bush takes a liking to Person B’s friend, Person A. First Bush recommends Person A to serve on Bush 2’s cabinet as such and such. Bush 2 accepts the recommendation because, well, it’s his dad… There’s no adequacy test one must take in politics, no way to prove one’s competency.

So far into the book, Woodward has painted the picture of a President overwhelmed by the options in front of him, blindly accepting the recommendations of people around he trusts not for intellectual reasons, but for their friendliness with his Dad or himself. As it turns out, he may have put together the most wholly incompetent cabinet we’ve seen in a while. I always kind of figured, “Well, these are the guys Bush picked; I’m sure he had good reasons for picking each one.” And yet, the various reasons for their appointments in the book, reasons concluded from the hundreds of interviews Woodward conducted, always seem to be suspect. W picked his Chief of Staff, Andy Card, because his father told him he’d never come across someone as loyal Card. Well, great. A dog is loyal. But now Card’s in a position to make national policy decisions, decisions that affect my life everyday, because Card always sided with Bush 1 a decade ago (takes a lot of guts to side with a sitting President, by the way)? It’s a bit disturbing to think about…