Quickies 3

Keeping the log lite on for you

"The illustrations in this gallery were created by hand using the carbon dust technique, a drawing method which renders images of exquisite visual detail. The accuracy is important to researchers concerned with insect morphology, that is, the study of the physical forms assumed by various species. "

The celestial bird

The Hymns of Orpheus

"The Pentagon's inspector general has launched an investigation. House Appropriations Chairman C.W. Bill Young, R-Largo, said he will ask Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during a hearing Tuesday whether the Pentagon intentionally deceived Congress."

"The Bush Administration's single-minded focus on Iraq has ignored, in large respect, the terrorist threat that produced the attack of September 11, 2001. The leader of that attack on our shores has not been found. Eyes have been trained solely on Iraq, while we remain vulnerable here at home. Many of us on this Committee have tried to better protect the American people from future terrorist attack. But, time after time, the Administration has actively opposed efforts to boost homeland security funds. In this request, however, the Bush Administration seems very willing to back Iraqi homeland security dollars."

Dennis Miller. "Join US!"

"The reason I hate Google. I feel I helped them get where they are. I want them to stay true to what they were when I helped them. I thought their values would remain constant. I wanted to believe they would always just be a great search engine, I never imagined they would compete with me. But now they do. And I feel betrayed. I resent how they used my help against me. I cringe when I see them diluting RSS, I feel betrayed when they blow me off, sometimes very personally. Hate is betrayed love, and that's exactly how I feel about Google. Same, in the past, with Netscape and same with Apple." I still don't get the need for RSS.

NDA myth

What is RFID?

100 Documents that Shaped America.

How bad is it?

" Yes, thank you for gathering all the refutation of the liberal media's crazy propaganda in one easy to digest feel good post so that we can all finally breathe a sigh of relief and just get over this whole Iraq thing."-Sic (hahaha and it gets even worse/better)

" Rupert Murdoch, The Guardian Newspaper Group, magazine group IPC (and others) have formed an unlikely coalition, the British Internet Providers Association, in order to do one thing: decimate the BBC Online website, and protect their own online ventures. They demand that 'BBC Online should be scaled back to being a 'news portal' and...should release its internet source code to commercial organisations.'"

Go CUBS!

"As violence in Afghanistan intensifies, along with plans for expanded U.S. funding and possible military efforts, American newspapers are keeping their staffing in the war-torn country to a minimum, blaming budget cutbacks, a perceived lack of reader interest, and the need for resources in Iraq and other international hot spots."

"Last month, terrorists brought their war to the United Nations itself. The UN headquarters in Baghdad stood for order and compassion, and for that reason, the terrorists decided it must be destroyed." -Did they tell you this Bush? I've not seen these reasons cited anywhere.
"The Taleban was a sponsor and servant of terrorism. When confronted, that regime chose defiance, and that regime is no more." -Down but not entirely out to be exact
"And because there were consequences, because a coalition of nations acted to defend the peace and the credibility of the United Nations, Iraq is free, and today we are joined by representatives of a liberated country. "-US forces defend the credibility of the United Nations! THANK GOD!
" The primary goal of our coalition in Iraq is self-government for the people of Iraq, reached by orderly and democratic process. This process must unfold according to the needs of Iraqis, neither hurried nor delayed by the wishes of other parties." -Save this bit for later.
"The Palestinian cause is betrayed by leaders who cling to power by feeding old hatreds, and destroying the good work of others. The Palestinian people deserve their own state, and they will gain that new state by embracing new leaders committed to reform, to fighting terror, and to building peace." -Too bad Israel doesn't agree.

Condi Rice's excuse about how the uranium bit got in the State of the Union address, "It’s not a matter of getting back in. It’s a matter, Tim, that three-plus months later, people didn’t remember that George Tenet had asked that it be taken out of the Cincinnati speech and then it was cleared by the agency. I didn’t remember. Steve Hadley didn’t remember. We are trying to put now in place methods so you don’t have to be dependent on people’s memories for something like that." They are taking Ronald's old line, "I do not recall."

"Suspected Taliban insurgents set fire to two girls' schools in northern Afghanistan, a local official said Monday, in the second such attack in recent days."

"Violence raged in Iraq Monday with mounting Iraqi civilian and US troop casualties amid growing signs that Washington was ill-prepared to manage the occupation of the country in the wake of its military victory over Saddam Hussein."

"Despite last-minute attempts to force Iraq back on the agenda this morning, the Labour party conference is to be dominated today by manufacturing and health - specifically the government's controversial proposals for foundation hospitals."

"European majors will be encouraged by Iraq's informal overtures, but Musawi, a deputy on Iraq's U.S.-backed Governing Council, has said U.S. firms may be given preference in Iraq's oilfields, home to the world's second-largest reserves."

"In the same vein, Volokh links approvingly to an awful article by Jonathan Rauch. JR's basic message is that if poor people merely worked full-time and got married, they wouldn't be nearly as poor, and the payment of welfare benefits does little to alleviate poverty.

The underlying logic is akin to, if grandma had wheels she'd be a bus. If poor people worked all the time, they would be less poor. Poverty is simply a matter of choice. But the statistics cited by Rauch prove no such thing. They only show association. They just as easily prove that low income and/or external circumstances inhibit the poor from working more regularly. I go back to the Census report. If it's a choice, why the change in 2002? The same argument holds for marriage."

Sunday 28: So hard sometimes...

"Telling people they are H.I.V.-positive is the only thing about my job I don't like. People's reactions vary. A lot of people shut down; they start to space out; they want to bolt. We can't make them stay and talk with us about how they are feeling and what the next steps are, but that is what we try to do. I do H.I.V. testing at H.O.P.E. Inc., a clinic in Tulsa, Okla. In my six years doing this, I've had some people become very upset, because they were pretty certain about who infected them. They said they were going to attack the person. In one case, a client started screaming about how he was going to go kill his partner. But the people who react the most strongly are those who don't consider themselves to be in the ''high risk'' groups. When those people are positive, it's a lot to deal with."

"'Science Fiction' today is a lot like the contemporary Soviet Union; the sprawling possessor of a dream that failed. Science fiction's official dogma, which almost everybody ignores, is based on attitudes toward science and technology which are bankrupt and increasingly divorced from any kind of reality. "Hard- SF," the genre's ideological core, is a joke today; in terms of the social realities of high-tech post- industrialism, it's about as relevant as hard- Leninism."

Serial Killer or programming language inventor?

"a cognitive prosthesis is a computational tool that amplifies or extends a person's thought and perception, much as eyeglasses are prostheses that improve vision. The difference, says Ford, is that a cognitive prosthesis magnifies strengths in human intellect rather than corrects presumed deficiencies in it. Cognitive prostheses, therefore, are more like binoculars than eyeglasses."

"Processing is a context for exploring the emerging conceptual space enabled by electronic media. It is an environment for learning the fundamentals of computer programming within the context of the electronic arts and it is an electronic sketchbook for developing ideas. "

MP3s Are Not the Devil

"Now that most of Korea and a handful of Americans are hooked up on broadband it is time to ask why people don't simply email their favorite songs to each other. The last thing that I would want is to be dumped into Napster or its spiritual descendants. I don't know anything about pop music. What I would want is for my friends who know music and my taste to email me a song every day. If I have 10 music expert friends sending out their favorite song of the day, after a year I've accumulated about 200 hours of music. Prediction: RIAA will get a law passed making it illegal to email sound recordings. To enforce the law the RIAA will have the right to read anyone's email at any time. Encryption of email will need to be outlawed so as to thwart terrorists and music thieves."

Logarithmic Spirals Isabel and M51

Saturday 27: So long Said...

" At the heart of laser action is perfect alignment of the crests and troughs of myriad waves of light. Their location and momentum must be theoretically knowable. But this violates the holiest canon of Copenhagen theory: Heisenberg Uncertainty. Bohr and Von Neumann proved to be true believers in Heisenberg’s rule. Both denied that the laser was possible. When Townes showed them one in operation, they retreated artfully."
and
"But Mead does not bow humbly before all of Einstein’s conceptions. He dismisses the photoelectric effect as an artifact of early twentieth century apparatus. He also believes that General Relativity conceals more than it illuminates about gravitation. “All the important details are smoothed over by Einstein’s curvature of space time.” Gravity remains shrouded in mystery."
And then begins the interview... "So how big is an electron?

It expands to fit the container it’s in. That may be a positive charge that’ s attracting it—a hydrogen atom—or the walls of a conductor. A piece of wire is a container for electrons. They simply fill out the piece of wire. That’s what all waves do. If you try to gather them into a smaller space, the energy level goes up. That’s what these Copenhagen guys call the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. But there’s nothing uncertain about it. It’s just a property of waves. Confine them, and you have more wavelengths in a given space, and that means a higher frequency and higher energy. But a quantum wave also tends to go to the state of lowest energy, so it will expand as long as you let it. You can make an electron that’s ten feet across, there’s no problem with that. It’s its own medium, right? And it gets to be less and less dense as you let it expand. People regularly do experiments with neutrons that are a foot across."

"It's a shell game, with money, companies and corporate brands switching in a blur of buy-outs and bogus fronts. It's a sinkhole, where mobbed-up operators, paid-off public servants, crazed Christian fascists, CIA shadow-jobbers, war-pimping arms dealers - and presidential family members - lie down together in the slime. It's a hacker's dream, with pork-funded, half-finished, secretly-programmed computer systems installed without basic security standards by politically-partisan private firms, and protected by law from public scrutiny.

It's how the United States, the "world's greatest democracy," casts its votes. And it's why George W. Bush will almost certainly be the next president of the United States - no matter what the ***people*** of the United States might want. "

"A preposterous mindset about American beneficence has infiltrated the minutest levels of the media. In writing about a 70-year-old Baghdad widow who ran a cultural center in her home that was wrecked by US raids and who is now beside herself with rage, New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins implicitly chastises her for her 'comfortable life under Saddam Hussein' and piously disapproves of her tirade against the Americans, 'and this from a graduate of London University'."

"In no uncertain terms Delay declared himself opposed to the Bush administration's support for the roadmap, especially the provision in it for a Palestinian state. "It would be a terrorist state," he said emphatically, using the word "terrorist" -- as has become habitual in official American discourse -- without regard for circumstance, definition or concrete characteristics. He went on to add that he came by his ideas concerning Israel by virtue of what he described as his convictions as a "Christian Zionist", a phrase synonymous not only with support for everything Israel does, but also for the Jewish state's theological right to go on doing what it does regardless whether or not a few million "terrorist" Palestinians get hurt in the process.

The sheer number of people in the southwestern United States who think like Delay is an imposing 60-70 million and, it should be noted, included among them is none other than George W Bush who is also an inspired born-again Christian for whom everything in the Bible is meant to be taken literally. Bush is their leader and surely depends on their votes for the 2004 election which, in my opinion, he will not win. And because his presidency is threatened by his ruinous policies at home and abroad he and his campaign strategists are trying to attract more Christian right- wingers from other parts of the country, the mid-West especially. Altogether then, the views of the Christian Right (allied with the ideas and lobbying power of the rabidly pro-Israeli neo-conservative movement) constitute a formidable force in domestic American politics, which is the domain where, alas, the debate about the Middle East takes place in America. One must always remember that in America Palestine and Israel are regarded as local, not foreign policy, matters. "

"During the Democratic convention Nader was interviewed for about three minutes by Maria Shriver, an utterly uninteresting woman who has her job because simply she is JFK's niece; her questions were all of the "don't you realise that you have no chance to win and why are you ruining Gore's chances?" variety, a scandalously partisan position to be taken by a supposedly neutral journalist."

"...one could commence by saying quite simply that if Edward's personality had been the human and moral pattern or example, there would be no "Middle East" problem to begin with."

"They found polite enough things to say about one another. But when they got to Matt it was as if they'd come face-to-face with a child messiah—someone unknowing and awesome. One by one, they struggled to tell Matt how good he was. ("I don't think you have any idea of how you present yourself. It's amazing. We're all blown away by who you are.") Ashleigh dropped entirely out of character (so much so that the show's producers later reprimanded her) and, tongue-tied, struggled for words that were nowhere to be found: "I think that you're a very special person. I think that there's … something special. I don't know what. I mean, I think there's something special.""

Friday 26: Feeling Froggy? Arny and Mikey

"Schwarzenegger misogynist" 856 google hits

"*Create a CodePink “Grope-Free Zone.” Surround your protest with a pink barricade (made of pink ribbon or cloth with Grope-Free-Zone written on it). Or have women wear pink sashes with the same message.
Other message ideas:
No groper for Governor
Flush Arnold, Not Women
No Governor Gangbang
A Hummer is not clean and Arnold is not green
Arnold – keep your hands to yourself!
Sexual harassment is not a family value
Stop the Bush occupation of California"

"Well, the last line in this piece called 'The Groping Governor' born and bred to endure infidelity of a powerful husband, Maria will no doubt take solace in his wealth and prestige and carry on being a classic Kennedy wife all the way to the governor’s mansion. I think that that , you know, I don’t know her that well but I did spend hours with her. This is the impression of her that I got: that she was somehow complicit in this and just kind of going along with the program. I think that is the life that she has known."

"'As we were rehearsing, I saw this toilet bowl,' says Schwarzenegger, an impish smile crossing his face. 'How many times do you get away with this – to take a woman, grab her upside down, and bury her face in a toilet bowl? I wanted to have something floating in there,' he adds. Apparently, he was vetoed. 'They thought it was my typical Schwarzenegger overboard,' he says. 'The thing is, you can do it, because in the end, I didn't do it to a woman – she's a machine! We could get away with it without being crucified by who-knows-what group.'"

"Whatever I thought might hold me back, I avoided. I crossed girls off my list -- except as tools for my sexual needs."

"My attitude about all that has changed radically. I used to feel that women were here for one reason. Sex was simply another kind of exercise, another body function."

"Michael Moore liar" 77,000 google hits

"'It's all about Fear,' he pounds into your head. We're a violent culture because we're a frightened culture. The media/government/corporations want you to be scared so that you will buy, whether it be their ideas, their products, their stock, whatever. We have guns because we're scared because of all the bad news on the TV everyday. Come on, Mike! I call bullshit on you. You're doing exactly what you're criticizing. Your whole damn movie's point is to make soccer moms and movie actresses fear the Redneck Gun Owner and His Crazy Racist Hero, Charlton Heston. Grow up." Way to miss the point!
"He makes it abundantly and painfully clear that Guns. Are. Not. The. Problem." Right. It's those that are nuts and have guns. Why is it that when he points out that racism, fear, ignorance all fuel gun violence it pisses you off?

"What bullshit? It's not my belief, I'm just stating how it is. If one's detractors can prove that one lied, or even successfully allege it, then the mark is there and, at the very least, everything that person says is called into question. Hence my point that Moore has to be more careful and more honest than his detractors when he makes his assertions. Bush should too, for that matter. The press has little to do with it, although I agree with you in that they are far more willing to call someone on the little lies rather than the whoppers, since the little ones are easier to prove and the consequences of failing to prove them are far less. The media make enjoy making claims of crusade, but they are well aware of the risks of taking on those in power without proof, however strong the case."

"Can you imagine the media coverage if a group of anti-abortion protesters had thrown liquid feces on the staff of an abortion clinic? You'd never hear the end of it. This hasn't registered a blip in the major media. Searching Google News for the word "feces" brings up one hit. Pathetic, isn't it? Michael Moore and the rest of the anti-globalization idiots should look at this with pride.

Monkeys and left-wingers. Two lower life forms that throw shit at humans."

Wednesday 24: There is no hump

"Being smart is not always a good thing in the evolutionary race, suggests a new study by Swiss researchers"

"Four parents of Science Academy sophomores are determined to protect their children. From books. The board of directors for the South Texas Independent School District is expected to decide tonight whether to ban two books — Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land — from the high school’s 10th grade English Advanced Placement curriculum. The books, part of the class’ summer reading list, may lead to “inappropriate sexual arousal of young teens,” parent Julie Wilde wrote in her complaint to the district."

Gilberto Gil (cool Musician from South America) with Kofi

RIAA fools

Do your ears hang low?

Problem predicting people

Interesting analysis of power outage

World's oldest Nads

Holy shit!

No shit?

British should have more Sex

This is not a blowjob

Most Phallic Building in the world

No ice for this asshole

Mechanical hand job

"Wanna see the journalistic equivalent of friendly fire? It ain't pretty. But here goes"

Ambassador Joe Wilson interview

Read this post from Ethel the Blog

"Attorney General John Ashcroft has become a threat and a menace to our criminal justice system and to the civil liberties that have been the hallmark of this country for more than 200 years."

"We have executed a private assessment of Afghanistan, available to both civilian and military elements of the USG, and these are our key judgements:..."

Black box voting

Margaret Cho blogs

"A hypertext history of how scientists came to (partly) understand what people are doing to change the Earth's climate."

"To me, violence is a totally aesthetic subject. Saying you don't like violence in movies is like saying you don't like dance scenes... Violence in real life is terrible; violence in the movies can be cool. It's just another colour to work with."

"Action directors are the real film directors! This film [Kill Bill] is difficult; I mean anybody can shoot a scene with two people sitting around a table talking to each other. And I know I can always go back to that, but this is something totally different!"

Tuesday 23: I'm telling

"Can your beliefs about religion make it across our intellectual battleground?

In this activity you’ll be asked a series of 17 questions about God and religion."

" It is no longer possible to have an original opinion on Radiohead."

"It's tragic but true. All New York mourns the last remaining neurons of Thomas Friedman's shrinking brain, apparently lost in a bubbling hot tub of deep self-inflicted fatuity today."

Monday 22: Weak in the week

"Java is the SUV of programming tools."

"duppie (DUP.ee) n. A depressed urban professional; a person who once had a high-status or high-paying job and must now work in a menial or lower paying job."

"We keep hearing about separation of church and state. Well, first of all, we all know that's not written in the Constitution. The Constitution says there shall be no establishment of religion by Congress, but that means that there should be no disestablishment of a religion by Congress, meaning Congress has to remain neutral on the issue.

So, if a man is a Buddhist and wants to have a Buddha in his courtroom, I suppose he could have a Buddha for comfort. If he wants to wear a cross on his neck or she wants to wear a cross for his comfort or her comfort, that's a religious belief. If a Jewish person wants to wear a skull cap in court as a judge, that's his religious right. It's his way of saying God is above me." A) Savage fails at reading comprehension of the Constitution. B) A Judge 'saying' his or her God's law is the authority rather than the law of the land is the problem.

"O'REILLY: Right. Pardon the pun. Because they don't want this movie to be seen by millions of people to regenerate interest in Jesus who had a strict moral code. They don't want any moral judgments. They want legalization of drugs, gay marriage. You go down the list, no moral judgments." You are so full of BS Bill.

"Now once upon a time, I didn't buy into the elite liberal news slant. I was a fool. Some far left newspapers in this country are so dishonest, it makes me ill. They can't win the debate. They can't bring down our ratings. So they have to deceive and defame.

I'm just very lucky I have a forum to get our side out. Others in this country are not so fortunate." Others? You mean the one's being harassed by Ashcroft's Patriot Act intimidation officers?

"SCHWARZENEGGER: I won't raise taxes, because like I said, like I said, I do not want to punish the people for the politicians' mistakes. And it's all the answers they have, the Democrats. It's always the same thing. It's like as soon as they make a mistake, they want to go and raise taxes and punish the people."

"I am a bright. You are (quite probably) a bright. Most of the people I know are brights. The majority of scientists are brights. Presumably there are lots of closet brights in Congress, but they dare not come out. Notice from these examples that the word is a noun, not an adjective. We brights are not claiming to be bright (meaning clever, intelligent), any more than gays claim to be gay (meaning joyful, carefree). Whether there is a statistical tendency for brights (noun) to be bright (adjective) is a matter for research. I would dearly like to see such research undertaken, and I know the result I am betting on, but it is no part of the definition of the noun."

"Emails and internal government documents obtained by The Observer show that officials have sought to edit or remove research warning that the problem is serious. They have enlisted the help of conservative lobby groups funded by the oil industry to attack US government scientists if they produce work seen as accepting too readily that pollution is an issue."

"More than $10bn has been spent on Afghanistan since October 7 2001, most of it by the US. More than 80% of this has paid for bombing the country and paying the warlords, the former mojahedin who called themselves the "Northern Alliance". The Americans gave each warlord tens of thousands of dollars in cash and truckloads of weapons. "We were reaching out to every commander that we could," a CIA official told the Wall Street Journal during the war. In other words, they bribed them to stop fighting each other and fight the Taliban.

These were the same warlords who, vying for control of Kabul after the Russians left in 1989, pulverised the city, killing 50,000 civilians, half of them in one year, 1994, according to Human Rights Watch."

"O'REILLY: "The Founders were not concerned with the minority rights, they were concerned with everybody's rights."

OH REALLY: "All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which would be oppression" (Thomas Jefferson, "First Inaugural Address," March 4, 1801)."

Stay away from Atkins. You just can't rob your body of so many nutrients and not have it mess you up after a while.

A desperate need for attention. Case in point: "43. Blogging about your sex life. People who do this are under two delusions: a) that everyone wants to fuck them, and b) that their writing is interesting. Which is worse: sexual megalomania or an inability to edit? It's a dead heat. The online equivalent of that excruciatingly monotonous blowjob scene in every porn movie ever made."

"I have a foreign policy; I'm working on it. I just don't happen to think it's wise to always stand up and put in quotation marks in front of the world what your foreign policy is."

"You've got your requisite body painting and drum circles and kite flying and giant kickball and rope-bondage class at Camp Arachnid, music at the Church of Wow, penis gourds on parade, yoga and massage and the ragin' Thunderdome bash-fest and the famed Critical Tits all-female all-topless bike procession."

"I thought it was the most obnoxious moment in television history. Madonna will be fine. Madonna is Madonna. She does what she wants. She will get over this. But will Britney get over it? I don't know."

Saturday 13: I'm back

"Accustomed to the vigorous ivy league tradition of calling a stupid argument a stupid argument (and isolated, at home in New Jersey, from the Washington dinner-party circuit frequented by so many other political columnists) he has become pretty much the only voice in the mainstream US media to openly and repeatedly accuse George Bush of lying to the American people: first to sell a calamitous tax cut, and then to sell a war."

"An Islamic court in the northern Nigerian city of Katsina will next week rule on whether to acquit 31-year-old single mother Amina Lawal on charges of adultery, or uphold the sentence of death by stoning."

"...when President George Bush admitted on Wednesday, for the first time, that there was 'no evidence that Hussein was involved with the September 11th' attacks, one would assume that would be big news and an opportunity for the press to make up for past failings.

And according to some newspapers, it was a big story. The Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune (both owned by the Tribune Co.) ran front-page stories on the revelation Thursday. But an analysis of most major American newspapers found the story either buried deep within the paper -- or completely absent."

I give the author these statements, "There is not and never has been any evidence that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attack. None...Also, the weapons of mass destruction story was never true." But this one is bullshit, "No one in the administration expected that such a war would lead to more dangers of terrorism rather than less."

Saturday 13: So Soon now Saturday

William Gibson quits blogging to write

O'REILLY: Every movie is a one-shot deal, all right. This isn't. This is a culture. Eminem's a puppet, and so are the gangsta rappers.

Here's the -- here's the deal. I had two inner-city grammar school teachers in here. They taught fifth grade, all right, and I said to them what influence has all of this rap -- gangsta rap primarily -- had on your children, and they both said to me we now have 10-year-old boys calling 10-year-old girls bitches and hos, OK?

Now is this...

GREEN: Yes. Again, I think, Bill...

O'REILLY: Whoa, whoa. Mr. Green...

GREEN: I think...

O'REILLY: Is this the kind of society...

GREEN: I think that...

O'REILLY: ...that you want to live in?

GREEN: Yes, I think that gets back to what we were talking about earlier, though, with the Madonna-Britney kiss situation, is I think, you know, if you're sitting there with your kid and your kid's listening to this music and starts saying "bitches" and "'hos"...

That's kind of fun, to be able to say "bitches" and "'hos" on the Fox News Channel. Can I -- I can just say that on the Fox News Channel?

O'REILLY: You bet you can.

GREEN: Really? Well, we should be...

O'REILLY: Yes. We've already said it.

GREEN: Well, we should be careful. There could be kids watching.

O'REILLY: Well, listen, this is a news program, and it's in context to what's happening, OK?

GREEN: Yes, I...

O'REILLY: This is happening.

GREEN: I understand.

O'REILLY: And you have...

GREEN: I understand.

O'REILLY: You have millions of unsupervised children, not...

GREEN: No, we're not -- we're not...

natasha on the candidates

The Language of Music and Sound

what's up with Ann Coulter

interview with Paul Krugman

Chong gets 9 months

Neato!

Wednesday 10: WTF?

Crap movie steals from crap book!

Potties of the Future!

FOX News "Democrats Fail to Boost Education Spending"
John's News "Republicans Block education boost that would provide funds to more than 90 % of the nation's schools"
But I thought no Child was to be left behind. Why Senator Bryd, why? "What happened to his commitment to education?" Yes, tell me! "I tell you what happened." OK, do it. "Once the president signed the No Child Left Behind act, and the cameras stopped rolling, and the sound bytes faded away, the president walked away from the job of funding education." BASTARD!

Anti-Globalization Protesters Gone Wild!

"Even by Hogwarts standards, Hillary Potter was no ordinary Senator. Whether or not they'd heard about the Prophecy, new acquaintances couldn't help staring at the red mark on her forehead. It was the indentation left there by a headband she'd once worn, and something only Hillary's best friends knew was that it throbbed when she sensed danger. But why was it pulsing now? "

"I'm a freak in Silicon Valley, I know. This is Tomorrowland, a place where every other brain is focused on what's to come.

Me? I'm still trying to figure out how we got to a place where 135 people can run for governor, where a man called Dr. Phil becomes the arbiter of our nation's mental health and where it's most hip to join a cell-phone-arranged ``flash mob'' for a brief and inexplicable public demonstration. (Is this, by the way, how we got 135 candidates for governor?)"

"Over the course of many thousands of pages, it's also been a detailed political novel, a comedy of the court, a drama of the church, a vision quest, a biography of the last days of Oscar Wilde, several deeply strange attacks on feminism and women in general, and an exegesis of Sim's own bizarre personal take on religion. It fascinates because Sim is an absolutely brilliant maker of pages, a sublime cartoonist with total control of the form... and because, during the progression of the work, you can clearly see his mind crumbling under the pressure of his immense undertaking and twenty-five years of increasing solitude in which he can only express himself to the world through the agency of a talking anteater. It's almost a shame that the big 500-page collections don't include the personal notes that fill out the serial singles in which the work sees initial publication, in which Sim details the entirety of life on Earth as a war against the evil of women and proclaims that "if you learn to leave your penis alone, it will learn to leave you alone." For a while now, people have been taking bets on whether Sim will commit suicide immediately after CEREBUS is complete."

I turned twenty-one in prison
doin' life without parole
no one could steer me right
but Mama tried Mama tried
mama tried to raise me better
but her pleading I denied
and that leaves only me to blame
'cause Mama tried...

mama don't let your babies grow up to be bloggers
don't let 'em hack brackets and code them old tricks
make 'em be doctors and lawyers and pricks
mama don't let your babies grow up to be bloggers
they'll always stay home and they're never alone
even with someone they love

bloggers ain't easy to love and they're harder to scold
and they'd rather leave you a comment than diamonds or gold
javascript rollovers, old failing servers
night magically turns into day...
and if you don't blogroll him
and he don't get clued
he'll probably just post away...

"Music industry hails $2,000 win over child" The RIAA will eat your children!

"How does an industry like this survive for so long? Faced with high monopoly prices, why wouldn't consumers simply turn on the radio or TV, watch DVDs instead of listening to music CDs, or ... (gasp) read books? Actually that may be what is happening. The record industry likes to blame the peer-to-peer file sharing services but these are awfully painful to use. Someone with money to spare could presumably find something more entertaining to do than wait for half-broken files to download. More likely Joe Average looked at a nice collection of 500 CDs being offered for sale at the old prices and said 'Thanks, but I'd rather have a brand new car instead.. and it comes 20 channels of free music on the radio.'"

Eric Rasmusen, an old Homophobe

Matt Harriman, a young Hero

An open letter to the World Trade Organization.

Marilyn Manson gets to the truth of rubbing crotches on guards for entertainment, ''The path to truth is obscured by frivolous lawsuits, but it's lit by the objectivity of a jury that sees the difference between entertainment and assault. I feel completely vindicated and I'd like to thank the jury and judge for their thoughtful verdict." Guards to future Manson concerts will be Crotch-Guard protected.

The headline, "Dixie Chicks Break Promise, Criticize Another Republican" the comment, "He (Schwarzenegger) is a great film star, but I find his idea to run for governor absolutely insane. America should be governed by people who have a clue. I hope he doesn't win." I'll add my 0.02. You are an idiot if you vote for Arnold. Everyone knows Gary Coleman is the best candidate.

Tuesday 09: Wandering Weblogs

"The Internet has made sexual fetishes things to celebrate. It gives people ways to explore their alternative erotic selves, whether kissing mannikins, wearing a ball gag, or cross-dressing as women, men, horses, or badgers. When the fantasies are shared, and the meetings held between that class of individuals known as “consenting adults”—what is the cost of their difference to society at large?"

"Jordan's parliament overwhelmingly rejects ban on "honour killings", claiming that the ban would "encourage vice and destroy social values". Which is almost exactly the same words as used by Christian conservatives in America opposing anti-bullying laws for schools. Funny how religious reactionaries of all stripes will rally in the defense of thuggishness, because, in their world view, the alternative is far worse."

"We should strive. We should work. We should fight against the inevitable.

We should not forget that it is inevitable. We should not disdain our fellows when they stumble. We should not blame them for not being good enough, imply that it was their lack of faith or charity or virtue that led them to suffer. We do not know why. We will most likely never know why. The universe is not ours, it does not answer our wishes, it is not obliged to us. If you prefer a more religious answer, remember God's answer to Job. We were not here when the creation came into being, we do not know what purpose it has, we are not capable of judging it...

I do not seek to take your faith from you. Faith is beautiful. It is a brilliant flame, a defiance, a glory of the human spirit. But as glorious as your faith is, it can only be so if it is properly constructed. You can offer your light to others, you can shine it in answer to their questions, you can attempt to bring it to the world. But if you do so without regard for the light of others, if you refuse to allow them to stumble and fall and find their own answers, you are using it to burn them. Like fire, it must always be controlled. The flickering flames of the candles in the heart of a church is a display of beauty lent in service to God. The roaring fire of the pyre that slays those who believe differently is an abomination, a destruction of all that is shared between us."

"I don't have writer's block. I have something much more insidious and insurmountable: writer's lack of talent and time. I know this has never stopped John Grisham from his assault upon American letters. But he never had to hold a full-time job while raising four kids and trying to trap a raccoon."

"'Joe Schmo' is the happy cross-fertilization of The Truman Show's contrived realism with the snarky, knowing smile of "Joe Millionaire". (In fact, imagine The Truman Show, only with Eurosnob director/creator Ed Harris replaced by Will Ferrell.)

The premise: take one doofus, tell him he's on a reality competition called "The Lap of Luxury", but put him in a house with a bunch of actors playing reality-tv archetypes (The Virgin, The Bitch, The Grizzled Veteran, The Puck Guy, The Polynesian Gay Guy Who's Neither Polynesian Nor Gay In Real Life) rather than real people, and then orchestrate the whole experience to humiliate the crap out of the one guy who thinks it's real and send him for the ride of his life."

"A poster, laid off from Verizon Wireless last year, reports that prospective employers are being asked to pay $10 to $15 before Verizon will verify her former employment. Which they usually won't, of course. She's still unemployed."

"Fact of the matter is, some people refuse to admit to themselves that they are drawn to this stuff like moths to a flame."

"I know, it's piling on, and low hanging fruit, and "black vs white" rhetoric, but I love it none the less."

"Rumsfeld says that the struggle is harder than it should be because domestic critics are making the country's enemies stronger. Kurtz says our hopes for true success are diminished because the electorate has been degenerated by liberalism."

"We came home last week to find a box marked "Gevalia" sitting on the front doorstep. Awesome! Maybe this is party of Gevalia's new program where they send you an entire box full of their expensive-ass coffee, get you addicted, then watch as you come crawling back for more of the product!

What? It works with heroin."

Monday 08: twin links

Fidel Castro points

Kofi Annan points

Patriot Act Google search

Patriot Act Cartoon

"This is one hell of a story in Sunday's Washington Post. The outlines of the tale are ones we've known for a while now: Iraq had little or nothing to do with al Qaida before the war. But the war itself -- the supposed remedy for the tie between Iraq and al Qaida -- ended up making the Iraq/al Qaida mumbo-jumbo into a reality."

"Michael Meacher, a Member of the British Parliament until recently, has written a very provocative article providing his analysis of the events leading up to 9/11, the War or Terror™, the failure of US forces to capture Osama bin Laden and the true goals of the Iraq war. It's a doozy."

"Because of last year’s public tragedy regarding the space shuttle NASA is being forced to deal with the systemic failures in it’s own culture that make such tragedies inevitable. News reporting on the story lately focuses mostly on NASA’s bureaucratic antecedents as the chief cause. I suggest a similar catastrophe may wait in the wings of the U.S. Army’s training infrastructure."

"But even though our standing-duty GI Joes and Janes have more missions than troops and gear to fulfill them, the Pentagon is foolishly gutting the ranks of these valiant part-time soldiers. Legendary Marine leader Gen. 'Chesty' Puller hit the center of the bull’s-eye when he warned, 'When war comes, there will never be enough professionals to do the job.'"

Sunday 07: Struggles & Scandals Sunday

"Once again I've managed to vanish for weeks...nay...months with nary a peep. Shit happens, although it's mostly of the "shit am I ever busy!" variety this time. I'll probably get around to posting some of the details, unless of course I vanish again for whatever arbitrary and capricious reason I might have at the moment. There were a couple of conferences/workshops attended this summer, of the sort I came to avoid for many a year due to the anxiety thingie which has been placated (if not conquered) in the last year or so. "

Guns & Dope Party

"Concentration camps were invented by the British for the Boer War.
If you want to know what kind of coldblooded hardass discipline it takes to run an empire, the Boer War is a good place to start. The Boers, mostly Dutch and French, settled in South Africa way back in the 1600s. The British showed up later and took the prime coastal land from them. The Boers fought and lost a big battle in 1842, then just moved inland to get away from the British. For a while the British left them alone. Then gold was discovered on Boer land and the Limeys suddenly decided they needed to bring the blessings of empire to those poor lonely Boers. So they invaded in 1899. They thought that one was going to be a cakewalk too. The Boers were farmers, not soldiers. But the Boers were marksmen and they knew the ground. Even though they could only field about 50,000 men against 500,000 British troops, they were winning...
What the Brits would be doing about now is arming the Kurds and sending them to police the Sunni Triangle. The Kurds have already asked us to let them do it. They're begging for the chance to get a little payback. They said, 'We guarantee we'll have the place pacified in a week. We can read these people! You can't! We can tell who's a guerrilla and who isn't! All we need is a few fingernail-pulling pliers and a portable generator hooked up to a cattle prod or two!' "

"If it is true that we consistently make costly forecasting errors, what impact could this work have in correcting our aspirations? It is to that interesting question that the article turns at the end, and to the further question of whether institutional or individual judgments would and should be influenced more. For one thing, the influence of this work leans toward liberal thinking that there is little overall benefit to boosting the standard of living of anyone already in middle class comfort. In other words, the misery of the poor is incommensurately more valid than the misery of the well-off unfulfilled by the way they spend their excess resources."

"Dear Credit Card Company: I know I still owe on my balance, but I won't be paying, because I'm moving on. Dear loved one: I know I behaved badly, and I guess I should apologize, but I've moved on. Dear police officer: I realize I exceeded the speed limit considerably, and I know I'm supposed to pay a hefty fine, but I won't be, because I've decided to move on.
I remember when "moving on" signified a more or less free decision to forgive and forget someone else's transgression, as in, "Okay, you let me down, but I'm not going to dwell on it. Let's put this behind us and move on." Thanks to President Bush, we no longer have to wait for others to let us off the hook. Now we can simply move ourselves on. Bush has twisted the phrase around to mean a self-serving self-absolution -- the very antithesis of true generosity of spirit. "

"There are some striking parallels between the two terrorist attacks: both were the result of a car bomb that exploded outside a crowded mosque during Friday prayers and both were part of an assassination attempt against a prominent Shiite cleric that killed scores of worshipers and passers-by.
There is a key difference, however: While no existing government is believed to have been behind the An-Najaf bombing, the Beirut bombing was a classic case of state-sponsored terrorism: a plot organized by the intelligence services of a foreign power.
That foreign power was the United States. "

"'It is embarrassing when there are four power cuts during one hour of discussion with clients,' said Azim Premji, Wipro's head and India's richest man...
Some officials blame infrastructure problems on a rapid population increase that came with the booming job market. Bangalore's population grew 42% between 1981 and 2001."

"Today, Asian central banks hold approximately $1.5 trillion in US dollar-denominated reserve assets. Most of the world's international reserves come into existence as a result of the United States current account deficit. That deficit is now $1 million a minute. Last year, it amounted to $503 billion or roughly 2% of global GDP. The combined international reserves of the countries with a current account surplus increase by more or less the same amount as the US current account deficit each year. So central bankers must worry not only about their existing stockpile of dollar reserves, but also about the flow of new US dollar reserves they will continue to accumulate each year so long as their countries continue to achieve a surplus on their overall balance of payments.
With the depreciation of the dollar rapidly gaining momentum, Asian central bankers are scrambling to find alternative, non-dollar denominated investment vehicles in which to hold their countries' reserves. Consequently, this is a topic that is attracting considerable attention in the press.
There is a related issue of much greater importance being entirely overlooked, however. The surge in international reserves has created unprecedented macroeconomic imbalances that are destabilizing the global economy. The global economic disequilibrium caused by these imbalances is the subject of this article. It is also the subject my recently published book, THE DOLLAR CRISIS: Causes, Consequences, Cures (John Wiley & Sons, 2003).echtel has made $1.3m in political donations over the past four years, 60 per cent to Republicans."

"Halliburton, the American corporation formerly headed by the US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, started out servicing Texas oil wells. It won contracts worth more than $1.7bn in Iraq without ever having to go through a bidding process...
Then there is Bechtel. The former Republican secretary of state from the Reagan era, George Schultz, is a Bechtel board member. As chairman of the so-called Committee to Liberate Iraq, Mr Schultz was one of the biggest campaigners for war. Bechtel was awarded the primary contract - worth as much as $680m...
According to sources in Washington, Bechtel has made $1.3m in political donations over the past four years, 60 per cent to Republicans."

"According to Carlos Gomes, senior economist at Scotiabank, Big Three automakers lost an average of US$180 per vehicle sold in the second quarter of 2003. That's partly a function of intense competition from foreign rivals, with players like Toyota, Hyundai and KIA biting chunks of the "bread-and-butter" compact market segment-and partly the cost of escalating incentives: they now average about $4,000 per vehicle.
Nevertheless, in August, Toyota Canada's sales surged by 21.5%, allowing it to eclipse DaimlerChrysler for the first time with a 10% share of the Canadian market. Not only that, Toyota made the gains with relatively unattractive offers of 1.9% to 3.9% financing on new vehicles."

"I am shutting down PLA. I want to make an effort at writing longer pieces requiring more research and analysis than the pace of daily posting permits. I do not know if, when or where such writings may be published. For me, publishing is not the most important point. I want to explore the depths of several areas of interest in an effort to find understanding. I may start a new blog, I may try to join a group effort (if any will have me) or I may try to publish in a different form."

"A few years ago musician and artist Laurie Anderson sang 'You know, for every dollar a man makes a woman makes 63 cents. Now, fifty years ago that was 62 cents. So, with that kind of luck, it'll be the year 3,888 before we make a buck.' Of course, she was referring to American women and American wages. The good news is that the AFL-CIO reports that women's wages relative to men's for comparable work now stand at 75 cents for every dollar as of 2002. Of course, wages in much of the developing world have further to go to reach parity. See how men's wages in manufacturing stack up against women's around the world."

Sound off on respect

Snopes vs. Michael Moore: Flight of the Saudi's

Snopes vs. Michael Moore part 2

Snopes vs. Michael Moore part 3

Snopes vs. Michael Moore part 4

Saturday 06: Slip a few in Saturday

Vintage Chicago Street Gang Compliment Cards

France inches gloser to Gattica

In flight LASER anti-missile system

Friday 05: Anything Goes today

"James N. Gardner's Selfish Biocosm hypothesis proposes that the remarkable anthropic (life-friendly) qualities that our universe exhibits can be explained as incidental consequences of a cosmic replication cycle in which a cosmologically extended biosphere provides a means for the cosmos to produce one or more baby universes. The cosmos is "selfish" in the same sense that Richard Dawkins proposed that genes are focused on their own replication."

Spagetti in space

"I mean, who do these queers think they are?!? And it's not like these gays are experts either! I know for a FACT one of those fags works at TARGET! I'm telling you, this Queer Eye for the Straight Guy has created a nation of know-it-all buttinsky homos, AND I COULD NOT BE LESS PLEASED."

Santa Monica boulevard bum's sigh, "WHY LIE I WANT A BEER."

Gibbs Technologies invented a car that can drive on water (30mph) or land (100mph) with the push of a button.

Thursday 04: Quotes day. Author in mouse-over title.

"The effects of global warming on glaciers are not just of interest to scientists, as glacial retreat has profound political, economic and social repercussions. I think we can be certain the reason why the Tien Shan glaciers are melting is climate change."

"I am someone who thinks he can influence things. France, as Karl Marx said, is the country of politics, of the revolution and of universalism. It's these factors that maximise the role of the intellectuel and which maybe explain why there is such a large place given to these bizarre personnages, intellectuals, who proclaim 'le vrai, le juste et le bien', and who see a great nobility in political causes. It contrasts with the empiricisim, pragmatism and intellectual modesty of the Anglo-Saxon world, where there's a caution when it comes to the universal. There is no mythology about politics as there is in France. In England, politics is not a noble calling. It's a normal social activity - perhaps it's better like this."

"What happened to the time when film promised to be the definitive cultural medium of the modern world?...This was a time when the world's nations were proud of their contribution to international cinema. Even to have just one world-class director, such as Sweden's Ingmar Bergman, contributed to national self-esteem. Crucially, this was also a time when countries backed their top directors through a mixture of state subsidy and commercial funding from national financial institutions...Just as Mephistopheles sold his soul, so the soul of Hollywood shifted from the creative decision-makers to the accountants, marketing men and distributors."

"Oskar spent his first morning sitting quietly in the back of the classroom. Now he is holding his lunch box. He looks a bit confused.
“Excuse me,” he says slowly. “There are so many more students here than at my old school. Where does our class sit?”
What do you do?"

"...I think what's really revolutionary about Weblogs isn't their content, but the way that Weblog software has enabled technically unsophisticated people to produce aesthetically pleasing, well-organized Web sites. This is how blogs are different from personal home pages, and why blogging software could be to online journalism what PageMaker and Quark were to magazines: It may allow blogs to have the same effect on traditional journalism as zines did. Which is to say, a few big-name blog authors will get hired by major media publications to zing up their lame output. They will then become disillusioned and leave to write extremely mannered, hugely popular memoirs based on the experience of raising their orphaned little brother. (Is Glenn Reynolds destined to become the Dave Eggers of blogging? Discuss.)"

"Fencing and fighting aren't about rival schools and the arcane knowledge they teach. There are a few very simple concepts, and the process of teaching your body to implement those concepts efficiently."

"If everything is studied because of necessity, utility or the pleasure that provides, ‘Destreza’ in weapons joins together those three reasons: it is necessary for the man to defend from the tyranny and so from one single person to armies, ‘Destreza’ in weapons was a necessity; lots of men have practised and written rules about this art, this proves its utility; and a pleasure are the speeches and exhibitions of Masters at arms especially those who show spanish ‘Destreza’ with the sword. It is difficult for ordinary people to under stand or discover hidden things because only the well trained and long time practicioner will profit from these learnings. As Aristole stated, De Natura Universi: ‘Alia quidem certis inditiis signisque a natura discentes, alia etiam oppinatione rationis auxilio id quod probabile est intellectu duccente a sequentes`; some animals learn from signs and traces (animal instinct) and others reason to acquire the knowledge, what is more real?"

"You should have stayed on for [economics] 102, when they teach you about monopolies and anti-competitive behavior. Just because something involves a business fucking some regular people does not make it "classic free market phenomenon" or whatever. I like how a word that stands for competition and plurality has been co-opted by those who would apologize for monolithic and all-powerful corporations which subvert market forces."

"Why bulbulcitate our brabeum, languagehat? Some of us are cacozealous, celeripedan and spiscious in the word department, taking on these traboccant tasks with thysiasteries and gratuitous surgations because it helps us obacerate rather than rambling like a phlarologist? Suffering from dictionary-related pigritude, sir?"

"Some have criticized my stance on triclavianism as being counterproductive, arguing that making a point of doctrinal contention over not making a point of doctrinal contention over adiaphora is itself non-salvific. However, my critics are overlooking the dangers of triclavianistic doctrines: allowing adiaphora to creep into our credenda -- while possibly pushing the theologoumenic envelope and providing exciting new opportunities for supererogative works -- will most often serve to muddy the soteriological foundation of Faith, leading in general to ultramontane excesses and, in extreme cases, ebaptization (which is unacceptable pastoral malpractice, however rare it may be.) Doctrinal integrity, and hence salvific effectiveness, is best served by working to end triclavianism and similar erroneous, or simply adiaphoric, doctrines."

"Channel 4 exceeded the boundaries of acceptability in including photographs showing the mutilation of the babies' bodies, which it considered were contrary to good taste or decency and which showed a lack of respect for human dignity.
"The broadcast of such images raises serious questions, not only about the morality of the artists using dead babies in pursuit of their artistic expression, but of the broadcasters' responsibility not to infringe their dignity."

"I further specifically acknowledge that the duration of any such isolation is uncertain, determined only by my spiritual condition, but that such duration will be completely at the discretion of the Case Supervisor. I also specifically consent to the presence of Church members around the clock for whatever length of time is necessary to perform the Introspection Rundown's processes and to achieve the spiritual results of the Introspection Rundown."

"America is dumb, it's like a dumb puppy that has big teeth that can bite and hurt you, aggressive. My daughter is four, my boy is one. I'd like them to see America as a toy, a broken toy. Investigate it a little, check it out, get this feeling and then get out. "I was ecstatic they re-named 'French Fries' as 'Freedom Fries'. Grown men and women in positions of power in the U.S. government showing themselves as idiots."

Wednesday 03

Dildo Art

Can you tell me how to get to the intersection of Arab and Sesame Street

LeerBurg doesn't sell to France and cites senile Andy Roony-French opposition to the BushWars has as much to do with WWII as dog trainning videos have to do with politics. I correct myself. Andy is a moron too.

"The Moral Sense Test is a Web-based study into the nature of moral intuitions. How do humans, throughout the world, decide what is right and wrong? To answer this question, we have designed a series of moral dilemmas designed to probe the psychological mechanisms underlying our ethical judgments."

" The group uses traditional instruments such as animal horns, stretched jungle creepers, wooden hide drums and pipes made from bamboo and tree trunks.
They sing about the difficulties of day-to-day life in the jungle, but also the pleasures of hunting and fishing and their desire to preserve their ancient way of life."

The skilled worked gap.

Asteroid death. We give it a 1.

"Consider the following scenario: a series of TV ads begin to appear nightly immediately after the Republican convention is over next year. They will be negative ads. They will promote no Democratic candidate. They will therefore not be under the tight restrictions of the Federal Election Commission...."

" The DMCA is too far reaching. What does a third-party search engine have to do with any of this? Control the search engines and you control the net I guess. Its one thing to target the ISP and a whole other thing to target sites that link to it.
Further proof the DMCA just has to go and be replaced by more sensible legslation."-skallas

Ignore the title link and scroll to the great question of what Grimace is:"Grimace is a Giant Taste Bud. Think about that." OR "He's a giant shake monster. He used to be evil and have six arms and steal milkshakes before he joined the forced of good." OR "Durga's deformed brother, mad at being chained in the basement with a television ala Sloth and fed stale chipatis? Good thing he got surgery and behavior meds. He's sweet now."

You can sue crooked Coke Dealers..."An internal Coca-Cola document filed as part of the whistleblower lawsuit said that the company hired an outside consultant to spend up to $10,000 to buy value meals at Burger Kings in Richmond, Va., boosting demand for Frozen Cokes and other slush drinks being promoted in the test market." and " Coca-Cola has denied most of the charges but conceded that some employees improperly influenced the marketing test, which persuaded Burger King to invest $65 million in Frozen Coke."

But crooked VP Cheney gets away..."Congressional investigators say they were unable to determine how much the White House's energy policy was influenced by the oil industry because they were denied documents by Vice President Dick Cheney about his energy task force." and "They met frequently with energy industry representatives and only on a limited basis with scholars and environmentalists, the GAO said. The extent to which any of these meetings or information obtained from the energy industry influenced policy can't be determined, based on limited information made available to the GAO, the report said." and Senator Bob Graham of Florida says, "If the Bush-Cheney team has nothing to hide, then why are they hiding documents? There can be only one answer - they don't want the American people to know just how much influence the big oil companies have over U.S. energy policy."

"It's like the new start of everything. Everyone will say they don't care, but they do. Everyone's trying so hard. Everyone's at the tanning salon. Like seven kids I know got nose jobs just this week."

Tuesday 02

" German tourists on holiday. A German forced the social welfare system to pay for his Miami oceanview flat because living in Germany depressed him."

"It would be an understatement of significant proportions to say that this epic work of celebrity rim-jobbery is the most nausea-inducing collection of text ever to appear in The Magazine; we can handle a little nausea every now and again. No, this article was so objectionable on every level that we more than once cursed the fact that we had ever achieved literacy. We cried out for Our Lord to cast a veil over our sight rather than make us read another word."

"It's official: The fashionable fall meme for unreconstructed Bush administration cheerleaders is the notion that civil-libertarian concerns about the PATRIOT Act have been much ado about nothing: the squawking of so many Chicken Littles."

Vintage Chinese Posters

"Tennant concedes that only a small percentage of drug users become addicted, that the drug laws are not very effective at preventing abuse, and that any increase in addiction that follows the repeal of prohibition is apt to be small. Equally important, he has come to realize after decades of dealing with addiction that the war on drugs imposes tremendous costs in exchange for its dubious benefits."

"Governor, when you say that a gay person is not fit to be a parent, you're talking about me."

"Take the chapter "By Far the Vast Majority of My Tax Cuts." Over the course of 15 pages, Al Franken parses George W. Bush's lie (told many times) that by far the vast majority of his tax cuts would go to folks at the bottom end of the economic spectrum. Fifteen pages. And they're funny even though they're about math."

Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc.(electronic voting machine company) wrote that he is, "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." "To think that Diebold is somehow tainted because they have a couple folks on their board who support the president is just unfair," said Ohio GOP spokesman Jason Mauk. Unfair?

"Lewis, a registered nurse, isn't the average customer. She and Gregg camped out for almost two weeks on the Krispy Kreme Doughnuts parking lot, 2129 Lake Lansing Road, breaking the previous national Krispy Kreme camp-out record by one day." I fear for her child who knows the whole history of Krispy Kreme and plays The Sims: Unleashed—very bad signs.

US says it doesn't know how many detainees in Cuba

"In terms of employment growth, the recovery is the worst since the Great Depression..."

How mental are we?

Einstein's theory of relativity explained through dance

The historical revisionism of Condoleezza Rice

Ann Coulter on Larry King cut up

President Bush ~~speaking~~ lying at the American Legion Convention about Afghanistan

"I’m telling you this for the historical record,’ she said, ‘so that people a hundred years from now will know what I had to go through... That man was crouching over the corpse, no longer chuckling but breathing hard and moving his body rhythmically. At first I thought he must be performing some mysterious symbolic rite he’d learned from Mexicans or Indians as a boy. And then I realized—there is only one way to say this—he was literally fucking my husband in the throat. In the bullet wound in the front of his throat. He reached a climax and dismounted. I froze. The next thing I remember, he was being sworn in as the new president.’"

Edward Tufte really hates powerpoint. Kind of weird for such a smart guy to be on such a stupid subject.

Monday 01

Bill O'Reilly, Please Shut UP!

Strange story about bad informers in Iraq

"Halliburton, , the company formerly headed by Vice President Cheney, has won contracts worth more than $1.7 billion under Operation Iraqi Freedom and stands to make hundreds of millions more dollars under a no-bid contract awarded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, according to newly available documents."

"Judge Roy Moore is clearly, as well as a fool and a publicity-hound, a man who identifies the Mount Sinai orders to Moses with a certain interpretation of Protestantism."

Navy deep sonar ruled harmful to marine life.

"In seven years of research, no one at the Archives has ever been interested in my work. 'Why do you want to know?' I ask. The National Archives keeps all records of documents requests by requestor's name and I've produced a passport and other identification for my pass. 'Am I on a some kind of list?' An eavesdropping researcher at a nearby desk laughs out loud and replies, 'All of us researchers are on some kind of list now, I'm afraid.'"

"It wouldn’t be a stretch to call book reviewing a labor of love, except for the fact that it is so often a vilified profession. Reviewers are accused of having agendas and of cronyism, are called show-offs and career-killers. It’s a lot of heat to take for some free books, a few bucks, and a byline."

Reunion review, "Man goes to 30th college reunion. Remembers girl who got away. Feels sad. The end. You just got five hours of your life back."

DARPA's programs: 'Brain Interface Program', 'Metabolic Dominance and Engineered Tissue', 'Persistence in Combat', 'Continuous Assisted Performance'

Who are the neocon writers?

An open letter to Al Franken from Jim Ostrowski, "On the replay of the famous confrontation with O’Reilly, you said government programs do help people (a straw man argument to be sure), citing the example of socialism security’s aid to widows. By the same logic, bank robbery helps people, no?" socialism security- Oh, how clever! What a dweeb.

"Every writer is, in the long run, on his own"

links related to Alan Moore's unpublished Big Numbers

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