Bush Calling For Even Bigger Deficit

Reuters has an article out saying Bush will ask for an increase in missile defense spending and to modernize the Army.

…boost spending on missile defense by $1.2 billion next year and nearly double funding to modernize the Army in the $401.7 billion U.S. military budget for 2005…

Even the conservatives believe the Bushies are trying a “choke and die” approach to reduce the government. I think they overreached and we’re in for a world of hurt. Whose missles are we defending against?

Time Cube

My wisdom so antiquates known knowledge, that
a psychiatrist examining my behavior, eccentric
by his academic single corner knowledge, knows
no course other than to judge me schizoprenic. In
today’s society of greed, men of word illusion are
elected to lead and wise men are condemned. You
must establish a Chair of Wisdom to empower
Wise Men over the stupid intelligentsia, or perish.

Time Cube

Health Care Reform

I’ve got a new favorite NPR radio show: On Point with Tom Ashbrook, out of WBUR in Boston.

Yesterday, they had a discussion of health care costs and solutions for the US. The highlight had to be Uncle Miltie, Nobel Prize winning economist explaining why a single-payer system would completely and totally blow health spending out of the stratosphere. (Friedman article archive and thoughts on health care )

His central tenet (and one with which I completely agree) is that the only way that we as a country will ever stop health care costs from skyrocketing is to forget a “single payer” system, and even to step back from the current structure of insurance we use, and to put the actual costs of health care back on the people at large. In the words of Friedman: “nobody spends somebody else’s money as wisely or as frugally as he spends his own”.

And a point I continually keep trying to make (Maybe a Nobel prize will make it carry a little more weight):Enactment of Medicare and Medicaid provided a direct subsidy for medical care. The cost grew much more rapidly than originally estimated - as the cost of all handouts invariably do. Legislation cannot repeal the non-legislated law of demand and supply. The lower the price, the greater the quantity demanded; at a zero price, the quantity demanded becomes infinite. Some method of rationing must be substituted for price and that invariably means administrative rationing.

We have become so accustomed to employer-provided medical care that we regard it as part of the natural order. Yet it is thoroughly illogical. Why single out medical care? Food is more essential to life than medical care. Why not exempt the cost of food from taxes if provided by the employer? Why not return to the much-reviled company store when workers were in effect paid in kind rather than in cash?

Look, I know that no-one ever clicks through to the NRO links - but this guy won a Nobel prize, and has arguably been the most influential economist of the latter half of the 20th century. He’s the great advocate of globalization and the supply side. He’s not some half-cocked kook.

Tivo Stats in USA Today

Can I get a only last Wednesday of the month subscription to USA Today?

On Wednesday January 28 USA TODAY unveils an enhanced package of television ratings coverage in the LIFE section, including a monthly listing of the Top 10 most rated programs based on an analysis of anonymous, aggregate data from 20,000 TiVo households.

Boing

Hey, let’s get the old skating crew back together, except …

The adult model Powerisers give users from 130 lbs to 220 lbs the ability to jump up to 6 feet in the air and take running strides of up to 9 feet in length.

I would like to try these out, but not quite $400 worth.

Phillipe For America

The insanity continues at Achewood as Phillipe starts building the platform for his campaign.

and be sure to download the awesome Phillipe-themed blip-hop single from Freezepop called Here Comes A Special Boy!

Oops! Missed it by THAT much...

A billion here… a billion there - soon you are talking about real money. I’m glad you’re not mature any more, JRO.

Comic Book Guy has been brought in for questioning

Yoda falls victim to theft.

BTW - this is a prime example of why “Just the facts, ma’am” journalism both sucks and blows. The article from the AP lacks any sort of soul at all. Such as noting whether or not Mr. Noble lived with his mother. Or any notice of glasses, pocket protectors, or Jedi Robes being worn by same gentleman.

Sigh. Long live bias.

Starlings, TN

My buddy Mike has run Chicken Ranch Records from various exotic locations including Ruston, LA; Austin, TX; and Athens, GA. He’s always had some interesting bands come through and one of the latest includes some folks I met back in the day at the homestead (Shreveport, LA), so you may have met them, too. Steve Stubblefield was with the Methadone Actors back then. Tim (Timmy) Bryan infamously played with Mike in Habitual Sex Offenders (it’s not what you think, it’s more like this kind of thing, eh) and also played with Steve in Methadone Actors. Together when on tour, and including some other folks when they record, these two are the main components in Starlings, TN . They have enjoyed a lot of critical success (and I’m a big fan of their first album) and the big news is they were featured on NPR this evening.

Check ‘em out. I know you’ll like it.

The Harrowing Road To Hana

The Road To Hana is a favorite journey (it’s not the destination, it’s the journey) for Maui visitors trying to escape the touristy parts of the island. This 50 mile stretch of road has dozens of spots where it suddenly reduces to one lane. Much to the constarnation of locals, us haoles tend to drive the road slowly watching around clifs, waterfalls and watery coves for oncoming speed demons.

We decided to take the road after we finished lunch in Kahului. This was a mistake in hindsight since most people make The Road to Hana into an full day-trip or even over-night it. It took us over two and a half hours to make it to Hana only making a few stops along the way. We’ve been chastised for missing several pools and waterfalls, but we did see some really nice coves along the way.

Here’s what it looks like to come across a one-way section of the road — and this is a pretty good representation of the visibility available.

Brave Becky did the all the driving there and back.

Playing In The Surf

Here are a couple of Action Sampler 3.0 pictures from Mickey and Emily’s wedding day.

Mary Ellen, Bridget Goodwin, Kathy Anderson, and Becky Kapes Osmon posing in the surf.

Marc Glazer playing in the surf.

I’ve decided to put portraiture/personal pictures up here at the BPB, but I’m putting “artsy” pictures at Pedestrian Photography — be sure to go to both sites to see everything.

Seven rolls have been developed — ten more to go!

Ben, Oreos and The Budget

Ben (of Ben and Jerry’s) has gotten into politics with True Majority and has this cute little Flash movie where he decribes the Federal Budget with Oreo© cookies.

Console Game News

• Nintendo announced a new portable system called Nintendo DS that will be demo’d in May at E3 — anyone want to score me a high-end pass? The most exciting rumor to me is the wireless gaming interface. If it was designed conceptually like BlueTooth (but worked better) it could break portable gaming wide open.
• Rumors abound that Microsoft will drop the price on XBox this year, possibly as low as $99 by late summer. Can anyone give me a good reason(game) or two that I should go ahead and purchase one?

Finally

A platform we can all get on.

The ESP Game

Those wacky folks over at CMU have this little game where you and a complete stranger are trying to match up your minds over the internet. I can’t play due to my workplace’s firewall, but I’m looking forward to testing my mental metle from home tonight.

MovieRap.com

I know they are taking themselves seriously, but isn’t MovieRap.com about as pointless as MovieHaiku.com? Check out the site for rap video reviews of Movies. I particularly appreciate the review for Honey .

Taboo Fight

I’ve got some family that used to live in Conway, Arkansas. (Don’t act so surprised.) So, this little story cracked me up.

Three men were arrested on felony charges after a game of Taboo went awry at a Conway home. … A 24-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of felony possession of a controlled substance and felony possession of drug paraphernalia.

I know that Becky and I find it hard to play board games without a little smack to keep us going.

Useful (To me)

Nat’l Weather service out of Taunton, Mass, has Snow Maps for New England. Looks like they err on the side of not reporting, but that’s fine if you’re using them to figure out where to ski.

The Devil and Renee Zellweger

When perusing Salon today, you may be tempted to skip over this article by Molly Norton about Renee Zellweger and you shouldn’t. It’s really cute.

When I found out she had no real acting experience, I relaxed. I mean, she didn’t spend 50K on drama school to learn the Stanislavski emotional-recall technique that allowed one to cry on cue just by remembering how much she had spent on acting school.

Maybe I like it just ‘cause she’s a hometown girl, or maybe it’s kismit because the last thing I read before falling asleep last night was this piece in the Texas Monthly Bum Steer Awards 2004:

ICH BIN EIN EAVESDROPPER A German couple eating breakfast in the same restaurant as Renee Zellweger started gossiping in their native tongue about the Texas-born actress, criticizing her clothes and speculating about her height and marital status, only to be answered curtly in German by Zellweger herself, who said, “No, I’m not [married]. I’m five foot three, and I always dress this way in the morning.”

More interesting stats

More from the Census bureau

25 to 34 year olds - just over a quarter have college or advanced degrees, but almost two thirds have some college experience. In no way, shape, or form do we represent a cross section of the US.

The other interesting observation is that as the population ages, the percentage of folks with a college degree (I’m including advanced degrees here) holds constant, but the percentage of advanced degrees continues to rise pretty sharply. Showing that there is a pretty strong correlation between lifetime learning and getting the first college sheepskin.

War on Poverty

This was so good, I thought it needed its own thread…

Cyn said (scroll down) > (Why don’t we help the poor) by throwing that $1.5 billion into the pot (to raise their incomes).

We’ve tried that. Actually, since LBJ’s famous “War on Poverty” started, we’ve spent between $4.5 trillion and $7 trillion on the “War.” Just as perspecitve, a Trillion dollars is a Million Millions. So if the feds just wanted to hand out large chunks of cash, they could have made between 4.5 and 7 million millionaires in the last 40 years.

My point (and there is one) is that we have tried just throwing money at poverty, and it’s done nothing in the long term to reduce poverty rates. Continuing to suggest “free money” as a panacea is kind of like being the bully punching the wimpy kid with his own hand and repeating “Stop hitting yourself…”

But, even the Census Bureau shows that the poverty rate has been basically unchanged for the last 40 years, even going up significantly under the Carter, Reagan, and Clinton administration. (Although I would be curious to see how the poverty rate is determined).

Taking a rough figure for folks below the poverty line at 40 million Americans, and the lower figure for the “War“‘s cost (about $4 Trillion), we’re looking at about $100,000 PER PERSON over the life of the “War on Poverty.” Granted, that’s only about $2,500/year per head. But that is PER PERSON. Family of 4 living below the poverty line should get an income boost of approx $10 grand, even at the low end. With 2002 figures, the effective poverty line for a family of 4 is $18K, give or take - or one 40 hour/week job with 2 weeks of vacation at $9/hour. Which is pretty close to what McD’s pays around here. That’s with one potential earner staying home the entire time. Add in the $2,500 per head we could give the family if we took all the social programs to straight handouts, they’d be almost to $30K in family income.

Bureaucracies to hand out money are extremely expensive to operate, and generally do a pretty poor job. Granted, it’s not HHS, but when I was using the VA’s GI Bill to pay for grad school, it took me almost a year to get my initial payment. Good thing the GI Bill was gravy and we had the cash to support school.

The other thing to think about - Those 4.5 million millionaires that we wiped out to spend $4.5 trillion on the “War on Poverty” - What’dya wanna guess they would have done with their cash. My guess is not spread it out and roll around naked on it (Though some might have). My guess is that most of them would have gone out and formed some sort of small business.

Using some more figures from the Census Bureau, (I used the figures from 2001, scratch pad is here), we see that 20 percent of the population works for companies of less than 100 employees. A company of 5 to 9 employees has an average payroll of $175K, certainly sustainable for someone with a million bucks to invest. Hey - at an average of 7 employees per firm, those 4 million millionaires that we didn’t create since we were providing handouts instead of letting people keep their taxes would have created 28 million jobs at an average salary of $26K, well above the poverty line, or more jobs than we have people below the poverty line.

My point (and there is one) is that we have tried just throwing money at poverty, and it’s done nothing in the long term to reduce poverty rates. Continuing to suggest “free money” as a panacea is kind of like being the bully punching the wimpy kid with his own hand and repeating “Stop hitting yourself…”

New Hampshire Primaries - Go Figure

Dubbayah finished ninth in the Democratic primary as a write in, ahead of Carol Mosely Braun, and getting a third of the votes that Sharpton did. Interesting, as well, that W got twice as many write-in nods as HRC.

One BTW - 115 votes (What W got) - 0.1% of the registered democrats and independents in New Hampshire. One-one thousandth. So, figure there’s 120K registered Dems and Independents in the Granite State. Assuming about a 50/50 Jackass/Elephant split in the population of the US, the ski resort and park north of Boston represents about 0.1% of the Democrat base in the country. And they got to effectively give Lieberman the heave-ho.

Freaky-Ass Parrot

A parrot in NYC speaks 950 words, shows signs of a sense of humour and has telepathy.

In an experiment, the bird and his owner were put in separate rooms and filmed as the artist opened random envelopes containing picture cards.

Analysis showed the parrot had used appropriate keywords three times more often than would be likely by chance.

This was despite the researchers discounting responses like “What ya doing on the phone?” when N’kisi saw a card of a man with a telephone, and “Can I give you a hug?” with one of a couple embracing.

France and Russia - Hands in Saddam's pockets?

From the London Independent

Claims that dozens of politicians, including some from prominent anti-war countries such as France, had taken bribes to support Saddam Hussein are to be investigated by the Iraqi authorities. The US-backed Iraqi Governing Council decided to check after an independent Baghdad newspaper, al-Mada, published a list which it said was based on oil ministry documents.

The 46 individuals, companies and organisations inside and outside Iraq were given millions of barrels of oil, the documents show.

The French? They deny it. The AJC has a very different take. on the story than the Independent (who looks to be reading the UPI feed).

BTW - I spotted the story in the Wash Times on the UPI wire, but didn’t want to drag up the Moonie connection. That their church in Wash DC really does kind of creep me out…

Dirt, dirt, dirt

I was looking around for more Gramm-isms, and stumbled on Skeleton Closet a site dedicated to tearing down pretty much every candidate for president since 1996. Equal opportunity - no half-founded gaffe goes un-documented.

My favorite: Al Sharpton - …Known associate of Michael Jackson. Reckless demagogue.

Spam Dead in two years.

From he-who-must-not-be-named’s mouth, courtesy of NRO.

Sick of spam? Dumb question, I realize. According to the Chairman, spam will be history — done, beaten, not a problem — in two years.

BTW - Gates rocks, IMO. He’s rich as sin, and still has his head in the game. Plus, he avoided buying the Blazers.

Musharraf seems to be saying that the Islamic world needs freedom — freedom and democracy. He doesn’t put it that way, exactly, but that’s how it comes out. It doesn’t matter, he says, how many leaves you destroy — how many you pluck. It doesn’t even matter if you succeed in lopping off whole branches. What matters is that you seize the thing by the roots. But when he speaks of root causes, he doesn’t seem to be blaming the West. He says, in so many words, that the winds of freedom need to blow through the Islamic world, so that the people may raise themselves up and get with modern life.

Don't Eat It

Write your name

Impenetrable Acronyms

So I’m particularly proud of using LATLLWTT:AFABLATR to refer to Franken’s most recent book. Somehow it looks like a Welsh word…

Any other good examples?

Big Fish

I’m not an emotional guy. It takes a whole lot to move me; Big Fish had me tearing up at the end.

It’s tough to explain, and I actually feel sort of silly now that I’m out of the theater, but hey - deal.

Tim Burton is a Genius. No, Genius may not be the right word. Artist may be closer, but still may not adequately capture what I am looking for. Truthfully, though, he may have just been the right guy in the right place at the right time.

To start, the script is possibly the most compelling thing to grace the silver screen in a long while. Better even, IMO, than LOTR . I say that not lightly - but John August’s adaptation of Daniel Wallace’s novel is extremely well done. Much of the story hinges on narrated voiceover - but it’s the voiceover of a storyteller, a raconteur - a voiceover that’s somehow not out of place, and not a cheap gimmick to save time or production costs.

Burton’s movie turns some of his previous work on its head. Unlike the string of movies from Beetlejuice through Sleepy Hollow (With a potential exception with the fun, fun, fun Mars Attacks ), the “real world” in “Big Fish” is the dark and serious place - in the fantasy world (potentially more real than the “real world” here) of Edward Bloom, everything is sunlight, smiles, and roses.

Dan Wallace admits that calling his protagionist “Bloom” was a nod to James Joyce’s impenetrable Ulyssees . At least he’s humble.

I’ll admit, much of my appreciation of “Big Fish” probably stems from my own usually overly rosy view of the world, and belief in the capacity of people to make their own lives better. I could also identify with Dan Wallace’s character (played by Billy Crudup ) completely and totally confused about what to make of his father. BTW- Crudup’s character is named “Will Bloom” - more potential foreshadowing.

All that aside, it was nice to see a movie that took seriously love, hope, and optimism.

Yuck

Whale explodes in Taiwan street.

Lying on the trailer-truck was the dead whale - underbelly exposed with a large elongated tear where the biological gaseous blowout took place. Besides the shocking red bloody mess, large piles of whale intestines and guts were strewn along the road, leaving an unpleasant and ghastly scene for startled residents.

Freakin' hilarious!

(T)he pranksters told one customer who had just placed an order: “You don’t need a couple of Whoppers. You are too fat. Pull ahead.”

Although it’d be somewhat more impressive if they’d had to actually hardwire a transmitter into the box after hours…

Aw man...

Mad MoJo! First, the wrong coordinator quits (I wish Greg Davis had resigned), and now this. I know the guy (Greg Robinson if you haven’t clicked the link) has a superbowl ring or two from his Denver days… but he’s slid. The last three years, the Chiefs have had bottom-tier defenses even with reasonable talent.

There… even though it was bad news, aren’t you glad you took a break from politics. :-)

Catching E-Criminals

Check out this story about catching internet spammers in the act. My favorite part is in the section on Pump and Dump Stock scams where this warped individual signs her emails “Take care and God bless.” while she’s selling her spam services to inflate interest in a stock so the client can double thier money illegaly.

'Cause I'm big enough, I'm strong enough, and gosh darn it, Dean was talking

Al Franken, tough guy

Wise-cracking funnyman Al Franken yesterday body-slammed a demonstrator to the ground after the man tried to shout down Gov. Howard Dean.

The tussle left Franken’s trademark thick-rim glasses broken, but he said he was not injured.

More On The Sanctity of Marriage

Divorce details on W’s brother are starting to come out.

“It’s a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her,” said the attorney, Marshall Davis Brown.

“It was very unusual,” Bush replied.

…

Sharon Bush also accused Neil of fathering a child with the woman he now plans to marry. The woman’s ex-husband has filed a defamation lawsuit, and DNA testing has been requested.

and this article even mentions the priviledges of being a Bush (as if we didn’t already know you could be handed the presidency for little to no effort)

he stands to make millions from businesses in which he has little expertise — including a computer-chip company managed in part by the son of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin.

…

At the end of his father’s presidency, Neil was among a group of defendants who agreed to pay $49.5 million to settle a negligence lawsuit over the $1 billion collapse of the savings and loan he directed in Colorado.
Bush denied wrongdoing and was not charged in the grand jury investigation, but the U.S. Office of Thrift Supervision found Bush’s conduct “involved significant conflicts of interest and constituted multiple breaches” of his fiduciary duties.

and to be fair, I’ll include this excerpt:

Jimmy Carter’s beer-swilling brother, Billy, wrote a book called “Redneck Power” and accepted money from the government of Libya. Bill Clinton’s half-brother, Roger, was jailed for a year for dealing cocaine. Richard Nixon’s kid brother Donald took $205,000 from Howard Hughes in the hopes of opening a fast-food chain selling Nixonburgers.

213 Things

From The 213 Things Skippy is No Longer Allowed to Do in the U.S. Army

Once upon a time, there was a SPC Schwarz stationed with the Army in the Balkans. SPC Schwarz was either very clever or very bored; but probably both, since he managed to attempt or be warned about 213 things he wasn’t allowed to do. He collected those things into a hillarious list and posted them to the web. The site hadn’t been updated in a couple of years and has since gone away; but the list is classic, so I saved it.

Here are some of my favorites:

• Not allowed to add ‘In accordance with the prophesy’ to the end of answers I give to a question an officer asks me.
• May not wear gimp mask while on duty.
• An order to put polish on my boots means the whole boot.
• The following items do not exist: Keys to the Drop Zone, A box of grid squares, blinker fluid, winter air for tires, canopy lights, or Chem-Light ® batteries.

Rockface Rescue

This is a cool update to Choplifter called Rockface Rescue where you pilot a copter around rescuing people and animals. As you can see, I didn’t do so well on my first try.

Bush WayLay'd Again

Carol Lay (who is always funny) gets another good shot at Bush this week and takes on the RNC with it, too. (Remember this one which got Bush and his P.R. group?) Be sure to click through for the final punch line of this strip.

Attacking The Passion

I was incensed enough about this review at Salon for “The Passion of the Christ” to write a Letter to the Editor. You’ve read my review and know that I liked it. If Cintra Wilson (or her interviewee, Father Stanger) didn’t like the film I wouldn’t be upset, but the open bias and low journalistic integrity of this article stuck in my craw.

Here’s what I wrote to Salon’s editors:

Cintra Wilson’s agenda over Mel Gibson’s movie is biased and will surely cast her in a bad light as more people see the film. I saw an early cut of this film in Austin and spent 90 minutes listening to Gibson’s Q&A. His “agenda” for this film, contrary to Wilson’s paranoia, is the best form of any religous believer: Tell the story as you believe it and let the viewer decide. Mel Gibson doesn’t proselytize with this film and he leaves the viewer plenty of room to decide the level of fiction contained within.

Associating “The Passion of the Christ” with the evangelical Outreach program of an individual church and presenting them as Gibson-sanctioned is simply yellow journalism. I can empathize with Wilson’s hatred for large churches, but extending that hatred to this film is being vitriolic. Wilson identifies a couple of churches who have charasmatically embraced this film while ignoring the secular embrace of one of the most active online movie communties (aintitcool.com). It would take very little research to know that Gibson has screened this film for many audiences regardless of religous cross-sections — and they almost all liked the film.

I don’t know where Father Stanger received his information about the the last days of Jesus, but this film portrays the bible’s version of the events accurately. If they aren’t “factual” they are the closest we will ever come to knowing the facts until time travel is perfected. Father Stanger and Cintra Wilson, also, reveal their agena by pointing out the violence and slow-developing story line. The violence intrinsic to the gospel’s portrayal of these final days is unavoidable. Previous film makers have been hampered by societal values around the subject of violence and Gibson takes full advantage this modern age allows him without taking liberties about the effects a cat-o-nine-tails would evince. Using his own mother’s words, Stanger calls the film “plodding” but by taking the time to follow the brutal physicality of Jesus’s beating with the brutal psychological torment of the road to Golgotha, Gibson communicates the duality of Jesus’s torture. Maybe Wilson and Stanger (and Stanger’s mom) were hoping to catch Lethal Weapon 5.

The strongest (and strangest) inaccuracy in this article comes when Father Stanger is prompted by Wilson to say “The good guys speak English; the bad guys speak these other languages.” Take my word for it: No one in “The Passion of the Christ” speaks English. This phrase will be taken out of context by many readers — and those who can recognize the context will follow Father Stanger’s misinterpretation. Gibson in no way is suggesting that Vikings are evil and that anyone who doesn’t speak English is evil. That is purely Father Stanger’s bias against Mel Gibson showing through in it’s ugliest fashion.

I don’t know why Wilson and Stanger are collaborating to attack this film and Mel Gibson. I am most troubled by Father Stanger’s particularly un-Christian behavior towards fellow human beings. Calling out a group of evangelical Chrstians as “red-neck” and suggesting they are racist is catty and hate-filled. Father Stanger thought the film glanced over “Love your neighbors” while he has forgotten the same sentiment in this interview.

“[Wilson:] So you didn’t feel like it was going to be a tool of great conversion or anything.”

“[Sanger:] No, not at all.”

Good. Gibson is pretty clear that he didn’t want to make a tool of conversion. He would be happy that Father Stanger feels assured he has not.

“[Wilson:] What would be your advice for would-be moviegoers?”

“[Stanger:] I’d say don’t bother.”

Do bother. It is a fine film telling an ancient story. This is a gorgeous work of art and if you are inclined to disagree with Christianity, feel free to approach is as a work of fictional art. Gibson won’t mind and you won’t miss out on great art.

Leaky White House

Eric Boehlert rips into Cheney this morning with an article showing more conflicts between the country’s intelligence community and the veep. I especially love the level of discourse

Cheney, in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News, spontaneously lauded the discredited Weekly Standard article and described it as “the best source of information.” …
“It’s disgusting,” said Vincent Cannistraro, the former CIA chief of counter-terrorism. “It’s bullshit,” said Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who served in the agency’s Near East division.

Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes trumpeted the article on Fox News. “These are hard facts, and I’d like to see [skeptics] refute any one of them,” he said.
But the Department of Defense did just that. On Nov. 15, the next day, the Pentagon issued an extraordinary statement calling the story “inaccurate” and explaining it was based on raw intelligence (or a “classified annex”) that had not been evaluated. “The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions.”

More problems derived from the Bushies destroying a decades-long design of vetting intelligence. Now Cheney and Fox News are getting intelligence from the same source.

Spaced Penguins

This is a nice twist on the shooting targets with gravity game. Cool little spirographs are the goal that eventually land the pernguin (whose name is Kevin) onto his spaceship.

Another Major Bushie Act In Legal Trouble

The Patriot Act is getting shot up in the courts.

The case before the court involved five groups and two U.S. citizens seeking to provide support for lawful, nonviolent activities on behalf of Kurdish refugees in Turkey.

…

The judge’s ruling said the law, as written, does not differentiate between impermissible advice on violence and encouraging the use of peaceful, nonviolent means to achieve goals.

p.s. Is it wrong to simply straight quote from this article ?

Inventing Medical Procedures

I know this is a particularly difficult subject, even here on the backporch, but this is a sad but powerful story from a woman who had an abortion that would fall into the specifics of the overly-broad, ignorantly-non-medical Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.

“I’m pleased that all of you have joined us as the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 becomes the law of the land,” Bush said. After singling out 11 political supporters of the bill — all of them men — the president whipped the 400-strong, antiabortion crowd into a frenzy. … The signing ceremony staged by the White House was part evangelical tent revival, part good ol’ boy pep rally, ending with the audience muttering “Amen.” …

At the heart of the debate is a term that legislators concocted. They created a nonexistent procedure — partial-birth abortion — and then banned it. … But in the bill, there is no mention of fetal viability (the point at which a fetus could live independently of its mother for a sustained period of time).

That's Right: Mature!

Dell’s internet filter service has decided that all things Rollerfeet.com are category: Mature.

No one has ever accused me of being mature before.

Travails Of An Early Adopter

It goes without saying that I am the man to talk to about new products. Usually the food engineers and QA managers of Hershey’s and Nestle do a good job and I have nothing to complain about. That is not true today. Here’s three new products that at best are pointless, at worst just disgusting.

• Swoops - picture Hershey’s big hitter candy bars: plain choclate, Reese’s, and Junior Mint presented in the shape of a Pringles chip and mini-canister. They aren’t bad, but I don’t see the point. None of the products they are duplicating are improved on with the new size/shape. Go ahead and purchase these safely but don’t expect to be overwhelmed.
• Reverse Reese’s Cups - While B.T. and Tina were in town for our annual New Year’s Party and some wedding or something, I forced Tina into a trinket shop around the corner from the house and came across what sounded like a good idea: peanut butter outdside with chocolate center. The mistake in thinking that sounds good is this: how can you make an external peanut butter that actually tastes/feels like peanut butter? You can’t so these suck. I’ve got 20 or so left at my house if anyone wants them.
• Hershey’s S’mores Candy Bar - I picked up one of these at DFW airport on the way back from Hawaii. I love s’mores, so this should have been a slam dunk. It was one of the worst things I’ve put in my mouth relative to my expectations. The real kicker is there is one taste that neither I nor Becky could identify. Maybe it was “new car taste”. I don’t know, but I would reccomend you avoid this at all costs.

Mexicans get the news

Illegal Immigration is up after GWB’s proposal to give legal status to workers already here.

At least he announced the plan in the winter so we don’t have more people frying in the desert while crossing the border.

Yahoo RSS Feed

My!Yahoo is beta testing an RSS feed as part of new content delivery. It’s a little slow in updating, but since I read blogs more than I do My!Yahoo now-a-days, it could convince me to return to their site more often. (Here’s the FAQ on the new feature.)

p.s. For you normal folks, here’s the url for doing BPB sydication into the My!Yahoo RSS feed: http://www.rollerfeet.com/backporchbeer/index.rdf

The Sanctity of Marriage

Joyce McGreevy rips into the president’s SOTU with some clever prose. I especially approve of her attack on the whole “sanctity of marriage” b.s.

This should help the president safeguard the sanctity of marriage from those who, unlike his brother Neil, fail to appreciate that marriage is a union of a man, a woman, and whoever shows up at the man’s hotel room.

This often unnoticed back-story hits both sides of the aisle (although my favorite Democrat who might lose his seat to sneaky GOP redistricting seems as committed to his marriage as I am) but you won’t hear the Democrats hypocritically supporting this idea. I’m betting the Newt Gingrich and upstanding Congressman like Steve LaTourette (R-OH) will stand behind whatever W proposes without the slightest hint of irony. Here’s a quote from Steve’s wife:

He called me on Friday and said he wants a divorce … I think Washington corrupts people … He was a wonderful husband and father, the best I ever saw, until he went there. I told him I was trying to get him out of the dark side, all that power and greed and people kissing up to them all time. Now he’s one of them. All they care about is getting reelected. I hate them all.

So the POTUS reccomendation will include a tax sanction against anyone who gets divorced or gets caught cheating on their spouse.

That’s gonna happen, right?

Republican Hackers

The DNC sent me a thoughful note yesterday. I knew both of the stories below, but I didn’t realize the timing between them. They rubbed me the wrong way when I heard them and hearing them presented in this fashion really sticks in my craw:

President Bush bypassed the Senate confirmation process and appointed Charles Pickering to a lifetime seat on the federal bench just hours after laying a wreath at the grave of Martin Luther King, Jr.

That was just their way of stoking the fire, though. This was the real point of their email:

the Boston Globe reported that Republican staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee repeatedly accessed computer files belonging to Democratic members over the course of the year

Since the example was made of Kevin Mitnick before the “Patriot” Act, I can’t wait to see what the government does to the hacker responsible for this crime. Surely the GOP’s partisan spying — tantamount to an electronic Watergate — will lead to a slew of arrests with the criminals being jaled for several years before charges are officialy drawn up, and then the defendants will have to process their case with paper and ink since allowing them access to computers would further their criminal activites.

That’s gonna happen, right?

Pinhole Cameras

I am considering making my next major purchase a pinhole camera from Lomo. If I were truly adventurous I would make own, but the style of the Zero Pinhole Deluxe is gorgeous. It’s $350 I could spend on something more constructive, but what’s money for anyway?!?

I am curious to know of anyone’s experience with 120 film as per developing, etc.

Cheney, Cheney, Cheney

I guess Cheney has decided the best way to reduce attacks on W is to paint a big target on himself. Taking Supreme Court Justices on hunting trips and to dinner is the kind of bad form they teach against in Managment 101 — “perception is reality”. Even though we all know Scalia is possibly the most extreme of conservative “hang ‘em high” judges and he’ll side with this adminstration when they proclaim the government should have the right to put GPS tracking devices in every citizen’s bunghole, Cheney should know that this kind of activity would look suspicious to the public. Then again, he knows how much he’s got away with so far, maybe he’s seeing if he can get away with more. He’ll probably release a statement declaring these tete-a-tete’s are actually about increasing impartiality not the other way around. It certainly seems unethical, but I’d like to hear from our two L.A. Lawyers.

While he’s laughing at the U.S. public over his whole wool/eyes dance, his former company is paying about $6,300,000 to the pentagon for “overcharges by a subcontractor that is accused of giving kickbacks to supply U.S. soldiers in Iraq”. Business as usual.

Liberal Lies About McDonald's

I should know better than to get all worked up over a NYPost article, but this one hits me in the gut. Morgan Spurlock made a documentary where he decided to eat only McDonald’s food for 30 days. The quote that will be used by the tree-hugging dirt-nibbling hippies:

Within a few days of beginning his drive-through diet, Spurlock, 33, was vomiting out the window of his car, and doctors who examined him were shocked at how rapidly Spurlock’s entire body deteriorated.

reads more to me like a man eating foods that cause an allergic reaction. The host site for “Super Size Me” appears to be overwhelmed so I don’t have the details of his diet, yet, but this reeks of untruth. Sure, it’s a bad idea to eat exclusively McD’s for any long time but it’s not poisonous. The key is probably realted to:

Scores of cheeseburgers, hundreds of fries and dozens of chocolate shakes later…

If my lactose-intolerant digestive system tried to process that list of food I would be hospitalized after a couple days.

Just a note

Couple of items -

First - I’ve been taking liberties with the banner under the title (as I’m sure y’all have noticed). Good/Bad/Indifferent?

Second - I wanted to spread a little love around the porch, as I’m sure the upcoming election will be extremely acrimonious, with the level of discorse hovering somewhere around Willie Horton/charges of racism exchanges from about April through November. Group hug.

Last - I’m a lucky man. Headed to Houston next week for a last little bit of roughhousing with only one kid. Headed to the hills this weekend for a little bit of XC skiing.

Smack the Pingu

What’s better than clubbing baby seals? Smacking penguins like baseballs. Check out this game where penguins dive in front of your club-wielding Yeti and you knock them out-of-the-park.

So far, my record is 593.

Bored Meeting Game

This may be the worst flash game ever. Why would you shoot paper wads into a wastebasket compensating for a near-by fan on your computer screen? Easy: because if you do it for real at your desk it looks like you’re not working.

More useful info...

Phases of the moon from the US Naval Observatory.

Why should we care? Well, first, since the moon’s been doing this phase thing, which is somewhat (but not completely) tied to the tides, ever since the first cells formed back in the primordial ooze, there’s a chance that it has some sway on our CHOICE in life.

Second, the moon throws out a pretty significant amount of light. File under WDYLIA: The two lane that extends pretty much forever west of Austin uses crushed limestone for its base, set in a matrix of tar. Standard construction, ‘cept limestone tends to flouresce in the moonlight. As an experiment, head out on the next full moon find a nice, open stretch of road, and briefly turn off the headlights. THe road will stretch out in front of you like a luminous ribbon, and suddenly, freed from the tunnel vision your lights caused, you’ll see all the critters who come out to feed in the night.

Third - ‘cause it’s there in plain sight, darn it!

Did I Mention We Were In Hawaii?

This is part two of my travel update of our Hawaii trip. If you’re lucky, it will be my last time bringing it up.

Day of Lounging

After several days of lots-of-stuff-to-do (follow that link above, dorkus) Becky insisted that we take a day off. Between swimming at the pool, lunch at CJ’s Comfort Zone (right next to our lodging location), and an afternoon at the “beach club” I was able to finish 60% of the #1 best seller (and let me tell you it’s a good example of why the popular vote may be a bad thing — it’s got a good back-story but it’s basically a dime-store detective novel.) Lounging is definitely a must-see if you go to Maui.

The Luau

For dinner after our day of rest Becky signed us up for the Old Lahaina Luau . We weren’t sure it was a great idea since dinner theater is almost always pure torture. Evidenced by the 3 rolls of film I burned through during our dinner, though, I’d say they’ve got a good thing going. It’s more traditional than a lot of Hawaiian luaus (no fire dancing, for example) with poi-making demonstrations, a digging-up-the-pig show and a great dance show abreviating the history of Hawaii.

Mendes Ranch

We woke up early Tuesday morning and drove to the windward side of Maui to the Mendes Ranch for a morning horse ride. I tried to pass myself off as an “intermediate” rider (since I did “showdeo” for a few years as a kid) which apparently meant I got the difficult horse. When I say difficult, I mean stubborn. My horse, Patch aka “Patches”, should have been nicknamed “Passive”. Maybe he wasn’t too happy to have my 200 lb ass on his back but he completely ignored every kick I gave him, and then he ignored the leather strap one of the cowboys gave me becasue he pitied my inability to communicate my desire for Patch to keep up with the rest of the pack. Every once-in-a-while one of the cowboys would ride up behind me and Patch and he’d get nervous and break into a trot, but when it was just he and I he wasn’t going anywhere fast. Becky’s horse, Samantha, was sweet but had a real dislike for other horses, so she’d snort and kick like a madhorse when others rode near her.

The Road To Hana

If you go to Maui, everyone will insist that you take the road to Hana. I think this is more of an initiation rite than the good advice it is presented to be. The road to Hana is about 50 miles long with 20-30 spots where the road is reduced to a single car width. So after 2 1/2 to 3 hours of driving on a curvy middle-of-nowhere pray-to-God-you-don’t-break-down it’s-a-miracle-its-paved road, you get to a town with one General store that closes early and no restaurants (unless you count the road-side smoothie/cane juice stand.) Maybe I was having a negative experience due to my exposure to the legendary Hawaiian hospitality:

Travel Tips

Here’s a travel tip for you: Get a CostCo membership before you go to Hawaii. Seriously, as expensive as food is in Maui you are better off getting a room with a kitchenette and buying bulk food at CostCo your first day on the island. Even better, the cheapest place to find Hawaiian music, DVDs and books is CostCo.

Go Home

My last full day on Maui started to wear me out. The first bad sign of the day was a hand-made grafitti sign on the road out to Mendes Ranch. It was our first time driving through a truly local neighborhood and we were greeted with the epithet “Hawaii Island, Not Haole Island”. On the road to Hana we saw more in this vien including the oddly-worded “No Hawaiian, No Aloha” and the very simple “Go Home”. Between that and the IZ pro-Hawaii songs we were listening to I started feeling a little caucasian guilt about the occupation of Hawaii. It was definitely time to go home.

Going Home

We took our sweet time getting to the airport, even stopping at a mall to catch Disney’s Teacher’s Pet (which had one scene where a character was holding a magazine titled “GArY Magazine”). Our plane left Maui at 6pm Weds and arrived at DFW at 6am Thurs. I had the bright idea of taking a hyrdocodone to chill me out so I could sleep the whole way. Instead it just made me high as a kite and I finished the other 40% of the #1 best seller (still just a dime-store detective novel), only getting an hour or so of shut-eye before the plane landed in the big D.

p.s. Be on the lookout for many many photos. I dropped 16 rolls in the mail and two more slide-film rolls at Wal-greens yesterday.

Latitude and Longitude

The Degree Confluence Project is an attempt to visit every place in the world where a line of Latitude meets a line of Longitude. Pretty cool, lots of neat pictures taken all over the world. Kind of a fun way to get to know what different areas look like.

A little bit of navigation theory:

Latitude is the measure of how far north or south of the equator a place is. No matter where on earth you are, to go a degree further north or south will be a journey of almost exactly 60 nautical miles, about 70 regular miles, or about 112 kilometers.

Longitude is how many degrees east or west of Greenwich, England a place is. At the equator, a degree of longitude will be almost exactly 60 nautical miles, etc. As one approaches the poles, the distance between the lines of longitude decreases, since all lines of longitude merge at the poles.

What’s the upshot of this, you ask? Why should we care?

I know that lots of us on the porch kind of dig tramping around in the woods. As most scouts or Y-Guides know, you should never hit the woods without the Ten Essentials. Handheld GPSes are great, at least until the batteries die, or the seals leak, or they get sat on, etc. Then, you’re stuck with a map and compass. The compass is pretty handy in figuring out general direction. The latitude scale on the map comes in handy for estimating distance, since one minute of latitude suddenly becomes the scale for one mile of distance. Pretty nifty, right?

Anyhoo, Lat/Long is one of those things that IMO everyone ought to know. It ain’t that hard, comes in handy, and can save your life.

CBS Joins Fox In Being "Fair and Balanced"

The folks over at MoveOn.org are pissed at CBS for refusing to air the winning “Bush in 30 Seconds” ad. They’re doing a mass mailing trying to petetion to CBS to stop being partisan lap dogs.

To watch the ad that CBS won’t air [ if you haven’t already seen it ] and sign our petition to CBS, go to:
http://www.moveon.org/cbs/ad/

(If you want to skip the ad and just sign the petition, click here .)

Here’s the part that sticks in m craw:

CBS will claim that the ad is too controversial to air. But the message of the ad is a simple statement of fact, supported by the President’s own figures. Compared with 2002’s White House ad which claimed that drug users are supporting terrorism, it hardly even registers.

That ad campaign makes me jump off the couch and scream in anger every time I see it. I really want to make a TV ad supporting the idea that organized crime got a leg-up in this country thanks to prohibition in the ’20s just like it’s doing today.

p.s. Is everyone here on MoveOn.org’s mailing list? Am I serving a redundant purpose?

p.p.s. I’m back! (Did I mention I was in Hawaii?)

What was that about Hawaii?

Did anyone mention a recent/ongoing vacation? Seems like someone was going to Hawaii, I’m not sure if I got that right or not…

However, I DO know that Kelly and I spent a wonderful weekend in an exotic locale. That’s right – southwestern Pennsylvania is the next big thing in adventure travel. And by “adventure travel” I mean “upper-middle-class family vacation.”

We spent Saturday through Monday at Nemacolin Woodlands Resort & Spa and it was perfect. Although the last leg of the 3-hour drive was a little nerve-wracking due to snow, once we arrived I have to say the snowy butt-ass cold weather only added to the charm of the place. There’s not much that’s prettier than rolling wooded hills blanketed in fresh snow, especially when viewed through a window while sitting next to a fireplace and drinking a glass of wine. That was our weekend in a nutshell.

The Monica Gellar tactic of loudly declaring that you’re on your honeymoon worked like a charm – we got upgraded to a suite, complete with in-room hot tub and two balconies, and a bottle of champagne delivered to our door. Saturday night dinner at the French restaurant Lautrec was amazing. Although Kelly isn’t as much a fan of French cuisine, I loved every bite of snail, goose liver, duck, lamb and veal that I had. The fact that the chef visited our table and congratulated us on our recent marriage was a nice touch.

I heard about the place from a family friend and it certainly caters to families. The only other people there without kids either had left them at home, or had sent them to college. Had we wanted to socialize with people our own age, it would have required bridging the guest-staff gap. Lucky for us, being two crazy honeymooning kids in love, it was perfect – the restaurants and bars and largely empty after 10, which is when the free babysitting service ends. We made the rounds to the cigar bar and “dance club” (there were 6 people there and a very bored DJ) where I requested Justin Timberlake. Knowing that no one there will ever see you again so you can act the fool, that’s good times.

Then Sunday, oh Sunday. The Lord’s Day. For us, it was The Spa Day. After breakfast in the lodge, we ventured over to the Woodland Spa. I had a short workout, just to say I did. Then we visited the pool, the outdoor hot tub (love hot tubs surrounded by snow), then the sauna and indoor whirlpool. Then a facial that made me fall asleep, while Kelly had a “mud massage.” What I love about these places is that they give everyone a fluffy white terrycloth robe. So you’re walking around and while you KNOW you look like an ass because that woman over there does, the fact of the matter is that you’re all wearing the same thing and probably naked underneath. What a great equalizer.

Lunch was in the spa restaurant, which is apparently “feng shui cuisine” not that I noticed anything especially soothing about the food. I was just worried that my robe was going to fall open or something. Then it was back to the spa for my salt scrub. This is an interesting concept, the salt scrub. Basically it’s having someone give you a scrubby bath while you lie on a table covered with a towel. On one hand, it’s a little embarrassing, but if you’ve had a bikini wax, really no biggie. My verdict – I’m glad I did it, but it’s probably not worth the $crilla.

After a day of spa-induced relaxation, I could have easily settled for staying in the room watching it snow (with cable TV!) and ordering room service. However, we decided not to be total slugs and headed over to the Mystic Mountain ski area for some snow tubing. Although it looked like lots of fun on a nice long track, the 0 wind chill and $15 price tag for 2 hours turned us off. It was back to the Lodge for us, for a good dinner at the Tavern sports bar and then ice cream at PJ’s.

All of this to say, I would certainly go back when I have dollars to drop and am in need of heavy-duty relaxation. It’s true, there’s not much of a cultural component to vacations like this. I didn’t see much that was new or different or expanded my horizons. But the concept of a “getaway” was new to me. The idea that there’s this sort of alternate reality vacation-land, there’s no new city or landscape outside of your hotel to go see, no beach, no family reunion – the hotel IS the destination. That was weird at first, but nice in the end.

318 Represent!

I was just trying out the new iTunes RSS generator and what to my wondering eyes should appear at the top of the “recently added hip-hop” list?

Shreveport’s Throwdest by B-Mac.

The Last American Man

It is a rarity nowadays when I actually read a book cover to cover. My reading time is spent as follows: work-related BS, news outlets, New Yorker. Lately I can’t even count the NY as actual reading, more like an attempt to read and comprehend something while simultaneously falling asleep. Soon I will be illiterate and walk the streets as a mindless drone, voting Bush into a second term.

Sorry … so … it is with great personal pleasure that I can report I read a book cover to cover and am reporting on it!

Elizabeth Gilbert turns in a fine tome about a guy who actually succeeds at his true life wilderness livin’ lifestyle as opposed to the subject of Jon Krakauer’s Into The Wild. The two books are similar in subject matter, but diverge at the point where Gilbert reveals the thesis she’s trying to prove (and effectively does) about the loss of the frontier bringing about the eradication of the American self-made man. Except for this one dude, Eustace Conway.

Conway’s life is almost unbelievable. He left home at 17 to live in the woods and has been there since, acquiring land and trying to spread his message of self sufficiency to others. Gilbert does a great job of getting all angles of this story, but encountered some criticism after the book was published for leaving the narrative kind of open-ended, without much of a conclusion to the book. Those critics miss the obvious point: Eustace Conway is still alive and is still a very conflicted person and Gilbert has enough restraint and style not to predict the future for American readers who want their endings nice and neat. I salute her for that.

You can find Conway’s website here, but it doesn’t look like it’s been updated since 2002. It will at least give you some pictures to accompany your thoughts on what he looks like and where he lives. Good read.

The Rise and Fall of the Creative Class

Here at the AIA, there has been a lot of talk in the past year about Richard Florida’s “The Rise of the Creative Class.” Although I haven’t read it yet, from what I can tell it’s kind of a big WDYLIA - extolling the virtues of cities like Austin that manage to become centers of creativity, etc.

Dr. Florida hasn’t stopped charting the trends of the creative class, and the latest news isn’t so great…(thanks to Maud for the link) Below is the excerpt I found most interesting. Although all of it is stuff I had thought about vaguely, it struck me and I thought others might find it interesting:

“Why would talented foreigners avoid us? In part, because other countries are simply doing a better, more aggressive job of recruiting them. The technology bust also plays a role. There are fewer jobs for computer engineers, and even top foreign scientists who might still have their pick of great cutting-edge research positions are less likely than they were a few years ago to make millions through tech-industry partnerships.

But having talked to hundreds of talented professionals in a half dozen countries over the past year, I’m convinced that the biggest reason has to do with the changed political and policy landscape in Washington. In the 1990s, the federal government focused on expanding America’s human capital and interconnectedness to the world—crafting international trade agreements, investing in cutting edge R&D, subsidizing higher education and public access to the Internet, and encouraging immigration. But in the last three years, the government’s attention and resources have shifted to older sectors of the economy, with tariff protection and subsidies to extractive industries. Meanwhile, Washington has stunned scientists across the world with its disregard for consensus scientific views when those views conflict with the interests of favored sectors (as has been the case with the issue of global climate change). Most of all, in the wake of 9/11, Washington has inspired the fury of the world, especially of its educated classes, with its my-way-or-the-highway foreign policy. In effect, for the first time in our history, we’re saying to highly mobile and very finicky global talent, “You don’t belong here.”

Obviously, this shift has come about with the changing of the political guard in Washington, from the internationalist Bill Clinton to the aggressively unilateralist George W. Bush. But its roots go much deeper, to a tectonic change in the country’s political-economic demographics. As many have noted, America is becoming more geographically polarized, with the culturally more traditionalist, rural, small-town, and exurban “red” parts of the country increasingly voting Republican, and the culturally more progressive urban and suburban “blue” areas going ever more Democratic. Less noted is the degree to which these lines demarcate a growing economic divide, with “blue” patches representing the talent-laden, immigrant-rich creative centers that have largely propelled economic growth, and the “red” parts representing the economically lagging hinterlands. The migrations that feed creative-center economies are also exacerbating the contrasts. As talented individuals, eager for better career opportunities and more adventurous, diverse lifestyles, move to the innovative cities, the hinterlands become even more culturally conservative. Now, the demographic dynamic which propelled America’s creative economy has produced a political dynamic that could choke that economy off. Though none of the candidates for president has quite framed it that way, it’s what’s really at stake in the 2004 elections.”

Hooray for aerogel!

Is there nothing it can’t do?

(I searched for our previous aerogel post, but it seems we’ve reached the point that our archive is big enough to lose things in.)

Hooray for Hydrogen!

Pretty cool, and almost fully cooked. Fuel cells that use existing fuels… Maybe ‘Big Oil’ will let this one slide, since they get to keep raping the earth and making HUGE sums of money and everything.

I miss Johnny… Come home safe, oh flame-baiter! Surely someone will bash the State of the Union speech? ;-)

Another Strike Against Gephardt

As we were eating breakfast this morning on our patio overlooking ocean, beach and palm trees — Did I mention we are in Hawaii? — CNN Headline news featured Chuck Berry playing guitar and singing for the Gephardt campaign. Apparently no one on the Gephardt team has seen the video I saw. (Only continue if you want the truly disgusting details.)

At the uncensored version of The Show With No Name that we saw at the Alamo Drafthouse, Charlie showed the infamous Chuck Berry video. Once you have seen a man pee on his 40 year old girlfriend(?), lean down as if to kiss her and then pull back to say “I’d kiss you but you smell like piss.”…well, you lose a little respect for said man.

Then again, the DNC is trying to set a pattern for private sexual perversion not being important for a politician’s career. I guess I agree with them, but I still wouldn’t vote for Gephardt.

Did I Mention I'm In Hawaii?

Just a brief update before I forget the details. We’re just past the half-way point in our trip with 3 nights and 3 full days of “Aloha Time” inscribed in our gray matter. I’m holding on to 10 exposed canisters of 35mm film mainly from three cameras (Lomo, 3D Loreo and Colorsplash) though one of them may be from the Action Sampler. I’ve got 150 minutes or more of video that is evenly divided between the wedding ceremony and whale watching. All of these will contribute to a slow media explosion over the coming weeks and months — and they will surely be expanded before we even get off the island.

Maui - Where Music Comes To Die

Maui radio (and a few stations we can pick up from the Big Island) fall into three main categories (excepting the one NPR station that plays only a tiny bit of NPR production and fills the rest of their time with instrumental music): Classic Rock, 80’s and 90’s, and Island Music. There is a noticeable dearth of popular music which is refreshing at first. Soon, you come to recognize that like many people, music has decided to make Maui it’s final resting place and is taking it’s sweet time in passing on. Lest you think that Island Music will be your retreat, let me assure that sandwiched between authentic Hawaiian and Reggae music are many indecipherable covers of songs you know and love played with a ukelele.

The Wedding

Mick and Em commited themselves to merging into a single being on a beach just North of Lahaina. Most of the men in audience wore slacks and Hawaiian shirts, while the women wore brightly colored summer dresses. Despite Wednesday’s 70mph winds that tore off roofs, shut down power to much of the island, and put a kibosh on a pre-wedding Luau the weather was absolutely perfect on Friday. I had the honor of video taping the ceremony and brought two newly purchased wireless mic’s for the occasion. One was attached to Mickey (and it did an excellent job of picking up the blessed couple and the minister) the other was attached to a great guitar player/singer, Will, who provided accompainment for the ceremony. (If you have an event in Maui and need a musician, Will substritutes for a whole symphony and is a consummate professional — send me an email and we’ll put you in touch with him.) Video forthcoming if the couple authorizes it.

Post Wedding Whale Watching

One of the celebration events after the ceremony was a whale watching excursion on a 35 foot sailing vessel. This was my first time getting beyond swimming reach of the shoreline and it was beautiful. I would definitely do it again — as long as someone else is in charge of the mechanics and I can just lay back and watch the water. We followed one small whale for about 15 minutes and he gave us one amazing breach before we got distracted by a mother and her calf. We idled within 100 yards or less of the two of them for over 20 minutes watching the calf learning to breach while his mother kept nudging him away from the boat. It was one of the most phenomenal natural events I have witnessed.

DIY Rentals

As people were leaving today I recognized the need for some mode of transportation. I figured I would give the local rental places a chance and found a good price on a Jeep ($46/day) at Rainbow Renters. Becky and I borrowed someone else’s ride before sunrise and drove into Kahului to get our car. Benny gave us the only automatic Jeep on the lot which had over 125K miles on it and looks like you would expect an island Jeep of that age to look. He cautioned me as I was leaving to “take it easy going off the curb”. I figure it’s his lot and his car so I did. I pulled across the road to cut through the mall to reach my highway back to Kaanapali. As I hit my first speed bump the engine died. I tried for five minutes to restart it with no luck. I went back to work something out with Benny and he gave me a standard transmission Jeep that had 136K miles and looked like you would expect, again. As we were driving away, Becky pointed out the strong smell of exhaust and fumes despite the complete lack of a top on our Jeep. I followed her suggestion and returned to Benny’s establishment, got my refund and we headed to Avis. They gave me a Chevy Tracker with 6K miles. For $36/day.

Haleakala Crater

Good thing we had a good car because Brain Walters joined us this afternoon for a drive up to the crater on the top of the world’s tallest dormant volcano. It took about 75 minutes and 30 degrees Farenheit to climb the 29 miles to the top — each mile getting thinner with taller cliffs. We arrived about an hour before sunrise and I started to internally question if we should even stay since you can only take so many pictures of the moon-like surfaces hovering just above a thick cottony cloud cover as the temperature was working it’s way towards freezing. Brian was resolute, though, and as the sun set the clouds cleared away. We were witneess to a world of colors previously unknown, plus a mind-expanding view of the entire east side of Maui and the enveloping Pacific Ocean surrounding it. As darkness fell and the lights of the towns came on it was simply stunning. I just hope my pictures come out.

More To Come

We have two more full days here. Tomorow will be spent mostly lounging in a cabana, reading books. We will try to squeeze in a Luau one night and sushi at the best sushi bar on the island the other night. Tuesday morning we’ll be rising with the geese and heading across the island for a 2-3 hour morning horse ride. We may try a jaunt across the rustic rural part of the island into Hana if our thighs and bums aren’t too sore. This will surely result in even more pictures and maybe a little more video.

I can’t wait to start posting photos. Surely with over 300 photos I will have something worthy. Since I have already started forgetting all of the wonderful things I’ve seen and done, the gaps will have to be filled with photos.

p.s. I am conflicted with my current means of access. I am staying directly above the lobby of our hotel. While arranging an event with the concierge I noticed she was working wirelessly, so I booted up and found the network open. I’ll try to limit my bandwidth…

Too Clever

Apple’s apparently going to re-release their 1984 ad for Macintosh.

‘Cept it’s different. Yep, the stacked woman in sweet hip huggers is wearing an iPod. You can compare it with the original ad here (And use a little Hawkeye bandwidth).

It’s well done. I had watched the ad twice before I had to pause and make sure that I’d seen what I’d though I saw. But isn’t it a little bit of NewSpeak to go back and airbrush in on history?

Hey, Buddy, can you spare a dime?

I wanna buy me a baseball team.

Bud Selig is selling the Brewers. Now, if we can only get him to quit as commissioner …

The Rev. Al agrees with me...

Internet voting is a “high-tech poll tax.” “If someone can vote in the warmth of their living room, but a grandmother has to go down four flights of stairs and into the cold,” he said, “that’s not an even playing field.”

Life Aboard

Fresh Bilge is put out by someone who’s living one of my fantasies - no house, only a boat.

I’m not completely sure that “sailing away” would really appeal to me for longer than a couple of weeks, but it’s kind of refreshing to know that there are people who are actually doing it.

Woo Hoo! Put me in the Kerry Camp!

From 1996 - “I think we can reduce the size of Washington,” Kerry said Jan. 6, 1996. “Get rid of the Energy Department. Get rid of the Agriculture Department, or at least render it three-quarters the size it is today; there are more agriculture bureaucrats than there are farmers in this country.” Courage. Must have helped him while he was serving in Vietnam.

Mmmmm, hot pants

Showing that Brandi Chastain may have been on to something, the head of FIFA said “the women’s game should try to attract fashion and cosmetics companies as sponsors by featuring “more feminine uniforms.”“:http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,108723,00.html Riiight.

BTW- Fox has a pretty low opinion of its audience (Which I think is pretty endemic across news sources, and the source of much percieved media bias.) They explain that in England where soccer is known as football, since obviously, someone reading an article about soccer wouldn’t know that.

Eisner's got to go

It disturbed me, and I know that it’s wrong that it did, but nevertheless -

I was watching the LAL playing the Sacto Kings on ESPN tonight. Halftime rolls up, and one of the ABC/ESPN/NBA “I love this game!” spots comes up. ‘Cept it’s the guys from “The Queer Eye”.

Redemption comes, though, with McD’s running an “I’m loving it” spot featuring folks playing hoops on rollerblades.

My gripe: I don’t associate these guys with much except snide comments and the people they like to sleep with. Someone decided that it would be fashionable to have gay folks on TV, much like Al Jolson decided that it would be fashionable to dress up in blackface and sing “Mammy”. The “Fab Five” are having their sexuality exploited - they’ve got a show because they are gay, and happen to be designers, etc, rather than having a show because they’re good designers who happen to be gay. The show plainly discriminates against straight men, too, implying that we’re all a bunch of out-of-touch slobs. How long would a show where five upper middle class men who gave career advice (including dressing, diction, and grooming) to low-income men last?

Why does political correctness need to creep into sports? For the longest time, sports were a happy oasis, where excellence was rewarded, weakness was analyzed, and there were sill winners and losers. Then ESPN fires Easterbrook and Limbaugh (He was probably a mistake in the first place), and the whole climate in TV sports has changed completely. The BCS fiasco this winter kind of gels the entire fiasco - Oklahoma needed a second chance after choking in the Big 12 championship, they’d played so well until then, and they were really trying hard.

Yeah, but OK still choked to K State. Done and done.

I’m such a dinosaur.

Best Catalog Ever!

They’ve got everything

Salon

Holy hopping horse hockey! The San Francisco Chronicle has an article about Salon’s finances. A couple of interesting tidbits -

- 60 full time staffers
- $2.5 million of losses on $2.1 million revenue for the last year
- 73,000 subscribers

Rolling Stone is throwing $800,000 at the dot mag over the next year - I wonder if it’ll do any good.

I’ll be honest - I’ve pretty much abandoned the site, since it went all liberal all the time. I swung by before posting this rant, and the new bits were mostly similar to this about a self-parody of the “Bush in 30 Seconds” ads.

I checked out the bit on Liberal Oasis. The ad itself is pretty darn funny IMO, it confirms what I’ve thought was the campaign strategy of many on the left. But Spittle can’t avoid both self aggrandization (Like “all your base are belong to us,” the phrase “Don’t be an Asshole, Vote Democratic” is now part of the Internet lexicon. McAuliffe can thank me later.) and condecension (Then hit counts notched up further courtesy of angry conservatives who, through no fault of their own, didn’t understand the context and really thought the DNC had stooped to calling President Bush “a lying sack of horseshit.”).

A relatively balanced article extrapolates the number of “casualties” from the first Gulf War out to about 170,000 based on the number of folks who have filed with the VA, without noting that their figure, about 25% of veterans filing as disabled, is pretty consistient with historical figures on folks getting out of the military in general. Part of that is because the VA will lable a vet as disabled if there is anything physically wrong with them that wasn’t wrong when they went into the military. So some vets go in at 18, in perfect health, spend four or five years humping packs, working on industrial gear, etc, and when they get out at 23 (or later), age begins to catch up with them. The VA, looking out for vets as it’s charged to, will go ahead and give them a medical disability classification for almost any potential problem so that the government is covered in the event that years down the line something develops. A friend had been in to see a Navy doc while on active duty for a sprained knee during a softball game; the VA noted the injury in their physical and made a notation that he was disabled, with a 0% disability currently. So my friend is a DV now, despite being a marathon runner. The 170K casualties story is a blatant attempt to insinuate that the Army is less than honest with recruits, and makes light of both the success of the Coalition during Gulf War 1, and minimizes the sacrifice of previous generations of American warfighters where actual combat lead to losses in the magnitude claimed by Salon. Not exactly a “fair and balanced” story.

Not to get bogged down too hard in nitpicking the misrepresentation of facts or the sheer ego involved in most of the Salon articles I’ve read recently, here are my suggestions for turning Salon around:

1. 60 staffers? Draw straws, people, and fire up the espresso machine in the office instead of sending out Bob - There are staff cuts that need to be made. I’d also ditch some of the big names on the roster - one of the draws about Salon initially was that it showed that there were good, intelligent writers out there who weren’t getting a fair shake in traditional media. But now the Mag (Site? Whatever.) is weighed down with tired, traditional voices like Arianna Huffington and Joe Conason (Who’s gone off the deep end and claimed that Bush’s call to Mars was only so Halliburton could drill for oil there, then half-heartedly explained he was only kidding a couple days later, not to mention praising the CIA for leaking classified information in the same article he blasts the Administration for leaking same…) Plus, staff cuts could be seen as a contribution to the Democrat candidate - more jobs lost thanks to Bush.

2. Tie in to a print mag. It looks like they’re doing this with Rolling Stone; I seem to recall something similar with another traditional publication a while ago.

3. Look hard at costs. Realize you are, after all, a web-site. Reduce the square footage you’ve got in San Francisco, maybe let the peons do a little more telecommuting.

I’d like to say that Salon needs to move back to the center to reach profitibility, but even I don’t buy that. Rush Limbaugh has shown that it’s possible to make money hand over fist with an ideoligically polarized website, and we all know that there’s more rich leftists on the ‘Net than rich right wingers. Even if Salon continues its slide to the left, it should be able to sustain, and probably increase its revenue streams and subscriber base. IMO, they’ll actually probably increasing revenue from continuing to tilt further left. True believers are always willing to throw more money at their causes.

Salon probably has the best business model out there for online pubs. I don’t know how much the ad-driven day pass brings in versus subscribers, but it’s a pretty innovative way to make sure that people put eyes on the advertiser’s products; leaps and bounds over banner ads. And it’s an innovative way to hook eyeballs and encourage subscription without being overlly intrusive (I don’t think you even need to register to get a day pass). Hopefully, they patented the model, and have some of their 60 person staff out stumping the idea to other sites. Here’s a concept - free porn for a day if you look at an ad for herbal viagra… Salon’s day pass could do just that.

Lastly, I’m saddened that Salon has wandered far left of center, but I don’t wish them ill by any means. It happened in Houston with the Pacifica station who went from a primarily local music venue to a primarily alternative politics venue, losing several long-time DJs. But, looking at the financial statements on their sites, revenue is up, and they’re putting cash in the bank for future expenses. And that’s with a pretty significant decline in grant money, meaning that donations have really picked up. They’ve lost me as a listener, but they are obviously better serving their clientele. There’s little reason that Salon should not be breaking even. The market is out there. I just wish that there was more of a market for middle-of-the-roaders like me.

May not be from Niger

But it came through Iraq. There’s yellowcake in Rotterdam in a shipment of scrap metal from down Baghdad way.

If Johnny were here...

He’d post this. And he’d probably say, “I told you so.” :-) I think Jank and I agree with the 90 Republican congressmen. He’s done too much from the ‘big business playbook.’ Interesting that this shows up in USA Today - coordinated warning shot from the Hill?

Man, it's cold

I’m just sayin’. We were -10 at the house this morning. High of 5 expected today. Apparently, that was nothing compared to back in the day. Although there are many, many wonderful quotes in this article, my favorite has to be:

“The Portland Press Herald told of an overnight fire on James Street … it took five hours to fight the blaze in temperatures close to 30 below. A reporter paraphrased Fire Chief Oliver Sanborn as saying ‘water from the hoses froze instantly, and fell on (firefighters) like hail as it bounced off the walls of the building.’”

A little military humor...

For Pot - Best choice is inceneration

“We’re not talking pounds and pounds … (w)e’re talking tons and tons. The easiest thing would be to have it incinerated”

My guess is that the Canuks could find thousands willing to pitch in with the inceneration.

The O'Franken Factor

‘Cause he’s good enough, he’s smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like him. Noon to Three, weekdays. Starting in April. They’ll try to go ‘round-the-clock, starting in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco.

More here.

That Onion

They know how to bottom line it, don’t they?

U.S. To Give Every Iraqi $3,544.91, Let Free-Market Capitalism Do The Rest

iTunes Detector

Why would I want to install and run it in order to view anything on the site?

The most useless vote ever.

In the interest of civic duty I went to the polls yesterday to vote in DC’s Democratic primary. Here’s how little I accomplished:

1. It was a primary — an election meant to choose a candidate for the actual election.

2. It was a non-binding primary — DC statehood activists got the primary set to be the first in nation this year in hopes of shining the blinding beam of media hype on the fact that DC residents have no vote in congress. However, the DNC wants all the hype fully focused on New Hampshire and Iowa, so they pressured the locals to make this primary “nonbinding” — it has no effect whatsoever on DC’s convention delegation.

3. The DNC also encouraged the major candidates to ignore the DC primary. As a result, Dean, Mosely Braun, Kucinich, and Sharpton were the only majors on the ballot. Although I also had the choice of Lyndon Larouche, Harry Braun (jank, check out his site — he might be the candidate for you), and Vermin Supreme, a performance artist whose platform is based on tooth care and who wants to genetically engineer flying monkeys to serve as tooth fairies.

4. The kicker — I’m neither whole-heartedly a Dean man or a Clark man, but I figure I’ll be one of them eventually. So when I got to the polls, it seemed wrong to vote for Dean without Clark on the ballot, and there was no write-in option. So I turned in a blank ballot.

5. Also, my polling place had one electronic voting machine, which I used. So, as we know, The Man can change my vote to whatever he wants anyway.

Democracy in action.

End of a Technology

A Reuters article at MSNBC discusses Kodak’s decision to end 35mm and APS cameras.

But the Rochester-based company will continue to sell one-time use cameras in the West and expand its sales of these and other film-based cameras and supplies in markets such as China, India, and Latin America, where demand is on the rise.

So, my current love of 35mm film is gonna start getting expensive, I think. A while back Kelly turned me onto Lomography.com and I’ve purchased several film-based cameras since then — most from this site like the original Lomo (which is almost always in my pocket), the Colorsplash (featured here last week), the SuperSampler and the ActionSampler (which I now realize I need to upgrade to the ActionSampler Flash ). I did not buy my 3D camera from Lomo but I saw it there first and found the original Korean manufactured version.

Here’s my favorite pictures from each of these cameras (except the Action Sampler which has yet to produce a picture I will admit to taking.)

ColorSplash

SuperSampler

Lomo

I hope to add several hundered more pictures to my collection while I’m in Hawaii this next week. (Did I mention I’m going to Hawaii, yet?)

Another K Strike!

I can’t believe that I’ve never posted one of these before, but it doesn’t come up in a cursory search. I love Keith Knight’s K Chronicles and it often makes Wednesday my favorite day at Salon.com. This week features Keef’s brand of Bush attack which speaks to the silliness of all political speech (including my own).

Happiness will only come in if you let it

Way back when, there was a little group in Austin fronted by a guy named David (it’s Dah-veed ) Garza with clever lyrics, tight arrangements, and the ability to drive drunk Texas co-eds crazy.

Their songs can be found here

Unfortunately, the band broke up over artistic differences, leading to other terrible changes in Austin such as the crash in affordable housing, the closing of marginally safe but time-tested venues such as Liberty Lunch.

Emotional rundown of Me So Twangy

1. Always Give Your Love Away Nothing particularly poignant, but as good of a song to open an album as ever.

2. Nicotine Queen This song is responsible for almost every cigarette I bummed first year at TU

3. Blue Silly as it sounds, this song had much to do with Missy and I sticking together for the first year of the last - no crap - thirteen. Both of us went into the relationship knowing that with it being college and all, and both of us having an average to above-average fondness for music, booze, and general carousing (Me at the above-average to high end), the chances of us lasting more than a few months were slim-to-none. So we wooed with things like “As sure as the sky is blue, I will never understand you”, Patsy Cline, and Red Hot and Blue . Cynical? Sure. But guess what - honesty has paid off. “As deep as the National Debt, I’m sure someday I’ll regret that you can’t see me, you can’t hold me…”

4. Amnesty Another good relationship song - “Still we’re victims of our own complacency…” Quality, clever lyrics, catchy bridge, and “I sleep so well when my dear love, I hold her, I sleep so well when her chin’s on my shoulder.” Works well for horny co-eds.

5. My Wish Typical prototypical protest song, but great work on the snare drum, minimalism from David and the bassist. “The more we irrigate, the less we have to wait for world freedom.” Whatever the hell that means.

6. While My Hair Grows Long I like to think that the bassist and the drummer left over songs like this, but I do have an extremely low tolerance for slow sappy songs. Only song I can think of about a dead hamster.

7. My Emaciated Heart Catchy hook. More three-syllable words.

8. Fishsticks “I’m not going anywhere, at least, at least not yet…” Doesn’t have the same appeal 13 years down the road, but it’s also missing a half a case of beer, and 300 drunk college kids yelling “Fishsticks” while bouncing up and down to the tune.

9. Heaven Sent Another slower song. This one, though, I can tolerate. It takes a lot from old swing, and it gives up none of the craftsmanship in lyrics and melody. “She’s like an old sweet melody, she sings in my head.” I think all of us have had a (gender)friend that springs to mind with this song. The “Whissshhhh” is endearing as well.

10. Quiet Another slow song, but tolerable. Good melody, reminds me a whole lot of Poi Dog Pondering.

11. “It’s No Secret” Twang takes the metaphor one step too far. But it’s clever, and has a shoutable chorus.

12. Bigstick Like Moby Dick , ‘cept with monkey references. He likes peanut butter, and trunky trees. I used to play my suitemate’s bongos while we listened to this. He was much, much more alternative and cooler than I.

That’s it for the trip down memory lane. I like the album much more than I think it comes across. But much of my previous like was likely beer and testosterone fueled. Although, the album holds up much better than others I liked from that same period. Can’t come up with an example right away, but I’m sure y’all can help out with that.

Bright Orange Folder apparently will rotate through different material from time to time. And it’s not love letters.

Drum Machine

Rockstar Games, the people who brought us Grand Theft Auto III, held a design competition called rockstar games upload III which produced some pretty cool stuff. The best IMO is Drum Machine .

Real Space

Get back to old school 2D Shooters with Real Space from java-gaming.com. (That’s right, you geek: it’s a java-based game!) Power-ups, mission scenarios, funky soundtrack — it’s got it all.

Moveon.org picks 'Bush in 30 seconds' winner

Here are the proud winners. Yes, your children are doomed to be underage sweatshop laborers as a result of Bush’s economic policies. Maybe that is why we want to throw out immigration policy out the window - so THEIR kids can be underage sweatshop laborers to pay for GWB’s economic policies… yeah, that’s the ticket!

In a related story, this morning Katie Couric was interviewing Paul O’Neill on the Today Show and she reels this off in a deficit discussion with the esteemed ex-Secretary of the Treasury:
“I’m no expert on economics Mr. O’Neill, but itsn’t there a specific school of thought, Keynsian specifically, that asserts that deficits have no long-term economic impact?” It made me giggle. I don’t know why…. :-)

Word for the day

And principle for life:

tergiversation \tuhr-jiv-uhr-SAY-shuhn\, noun:
1. The act of practicing evasion or of being deliberately ambiguous.

2. The act of abandoning a party or cause.

No doubt if I worked on it, I could evolve some kind of double-talk that would get around the offensive phrase, and make the, to me, face-saving implication; but to hell with that, I have too much respect for the English language, and for your understanding of it, to go in for tergiversation and weasely circumlocution.
—Richard Gillman, “Standing Up to Ezra Pound,” [1]New York Times, August 25, 1991

Dean Defense Double-up

Not one but two articles today at Salon discussing attacks on Dean. I particularly liked this question/answer (even though it sounds like it was prepared.)

Fineman: “Do you have a favorite Bible passage or book or theologian?”

Dean: “I like the Book of Job.”

They also ran an article on Al Sharpton attacking Dean’s race record but I wonder if Salon will mention the Gephardt race issues that are slowly emerging.

New Rocket in Houston

And he doesn’t have much of a jump shot.

Roger Clemens has signed with the ‘Stros for next year. “I had visions of coming down here [to Minute Maid Park] and sitting in my season seats for a change and watching the guys play and enjoying the stadium that way,” Clemens said. “When Andy signed, two days after that, everything started spilling over to my lap.

Bags and Biggs were excited about the signing. In an ironic twist, Bagwell, a Boston native, passed up a chance to close out his career with the BoSox a couple of years ago to sign a big contract with the Astros. All in all, though, these two B’s have got to be pretty pumped about a pitching rotation consisting of Pettitte, Clemens, Oswalt, and Miller - Both Bagwell and Biggio are players who are on that infamous Hall of Fame “bubble”; a World Series Ring would make them shoe-ins.

It’s hokey and all, but the season building in Houston is looking to be a pretty compelling bit of baseball, ‘specially if it pans out. But it’s nice to see the owners in Houston actually shelling out a little bit of cash to keep the new stadium filled. Time to see if Choke City can reclaim the Clutch City title.

(BTW - the other Rockets are 2 games over .500, better than half the teams in the league, and they’re still third from the bottom in the Midwest. No team in the Midwest is below .500. Tough, tough year)

Huh. Guess Censorship is alive in the USA

Harvard invites Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao to speak, then honors him by sending a student protesting China’s occupation of Tibet to an administrative board, where the student is faced with possible expulsion.

“I think, frankly, Harvard should be ashamed that they care more about not ruffling the feathers of China’s premier than about the chance to voice the concerns of six million people,” (Megan) Howard (the protester) said.

Fair and Balanced

Al Franken was on Tough Crowd on Comedy Central today. Funny, funny. He and Quinn played well off each other. My guess is that the folks watching the USO shows were rolling on the floor laughing.

Best bit was Al mentioning that he did a show in Tikrit, and asked to get a picture in the “spiderhole” with two Washington Redskin cheerleaders. He was told no, that it would be insulting to the “Arab Street”. Al then went on to say that the whole Geneva Convention treatment of Hussein was crap, and that Saddam should have his nuts chopped off, stuffed in his mouth, and then he should be paraded down the “Arab Street” so that terrorists could finally get the picture.

I still don’t like his economics, but he’s one of the funniest guys going.

Alternative News Is Good News

An AP article at Yahoo!News has a poll showing more people seeking alternative news sources and abandoning the traditional outlets.

Young adults were leading the shift, with one-fifth of them considering the Internet a top source of campaign news for them, said the poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. About the same number of young adults said they regularly learn about the campaign from comedy shows like “The Daily Show” and “Saturday Night Live.”

That sounds bad at first glance, but I’d rather people get campaign updates from Jon Stewart than Bill O’Reilly.

Nightly network news was named as a regular source of campaign news by 35 percent, down from 45 percent four years ago, and newspapers by 31 percent, down from 40 percent.

Maybe one of the news channels will revert to honest fair and balanced news in an effort to retain viewers. …It could happen!

Please, Keep Your Sex Life In The Garden

What is this beautiful picture depicting?

Two leopard slugs mating in a garden in Australia. Ewwww…

EggRun

It took me way too long just to figure out how to operate this game . (I blame the creators for giving poor directions…or actually no useful directions at all.) Use your mouse to select the egg and drag in the opposite direction of where you want to launch her. It took me 55 launches to get through level 1 the first time.

Run Becky Run - 01/11/2004

I was gonna toss this as a comment here but Becky deserves better.

Becky ran a 30k this weekend — her first official long distance run — and placed 63rd out of 88 in her age group (and 274 out of over 400 overall)!

Here’s the break down:

Age Group Place: 63
Overall Place: 274
Name Age: Becky Kapes 26
1st 10k
  Rnk: 73
  Time: 1:04:24.0
  Pace: 10:23
2nd 10k
  Rnk: 62
  Time: 1:05:35.7
  Pace: 10:35
3rd 10k
  Rnk: 58
  Time: 1:05:41.0
  Pace: 10:36
Total Time: 3:15:40.8

One of you running types can explain the importance of consistency.

WMD's in Syria?

That’s what Nizar Nayyouf “an exiled Syrian journalist now living in Paris” claims.

It has been confirmed that the Iraqi weapons which were smuggled into Syria through the intermediary of Colonel Zu Alhima Shalish are now located in three different places

“The first of these places is a tunnel on the mountain slope near the village of Baida, which is situated two kilometers from Misyaf. This place is under the jurisdiction of Department 489, which deals with coded messages and documents.”

“The second of these places is a factory owned by the air force in the village of Tal Sinan, which is situated between the two cities of Hamma and Salmiyah. The third of these places is the town of Shinshar, which is situated 40 kilometers to the south of Hums and 3 kilometers to the east of the Damascus-Hums highway. There are underground tunnels there, which belong to Brigade 661 of the air force. This is a reconnaissance force. These tunnels are several meters deep.”

Nayyouf’s source contends that the weapons, likely missile parts and chemicals, were transferred in large wooden boxes and barrels, under the supervision of Colonel Zu Alhima Shalish and his nephew Assef, who works for the Albashair Company, which is owned by the Assads and has offices in Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad. The source says that this company was also responsible for the smuggling of Iraqi oil to Syria and providing weapons to Saddam’s regime.

The source also shared one more interesting detail: the weapons were smuggled across the border to these sites in ambulances.

“The persons who were responsible for such actions know of course that American satellites will see the big cars, and maybe they will estimate that something is dangerous,” Nayyouf said. “So they put them in ambulance cars — when I see ambulance cars of course I will think everything is ok, people are being carried to hospital, to other countries, no one will suspect.”

Geraghty does run down many of the potential doubts about this, most importantly “Show me the weapons!”. IMO, this theory fits well with Hussein’s past track record, of finding allies of convinience, being primarily interested in self preservation, and greasing skids with money. But, I’ll believe it when I see crates rolled out of storage.

Etrigan The Society Hob-nobber

Special thanks to BPB-mom-in-the-hood, Linda McCollum, for sending me this “clipping” from the society section of the Shreveport Times.

Note how my name goes last in the list of vistors? It is either because they were listing people in reverse-order of importance, or maybe by time-of-arrival. I don’t understand why the SmiCollums aren’t listed.

I’ll have to update my society pages scrapbook which now has a total of…let’s see…one entry.

WYDLIA - Episode 1

In the interest of “fair and balanced” news, I present this piece I like to call WYDLIA as a counter argument for my articles here, here, here, here, and here :

The four-day allergy forecast for AUSTIN, TX is:

So, I’m starting to get a not-so-funny feeling in my left nostril that often leads to a dose of antibitotics. I’ll be spending the next 3 days overloading on Allegra, Claritin-D — that’s right: antihistimane double-up! — and Flonase. Lucky for me, I am headed to Hawaii on Thursday to videotape the nuptials of some close friends on Lahaina’s beaches. Maybe that’ll help clear my head.

Free Pressed Tells The Truth

I’ll have to start reading FreePressed.com on a regular basis. Their current lead article states that Iowans are sick and tired of running into Democratic candidates.

… Dean wrapped up his speech the way that he always does.

“You have the power, you have the power, you have the power,” Dean said, his face barely visible over the top of the podium. …

“Thought you’re car could use a tune up and oil change,” the boyish Edwards said, as he rolled out from under the car. “By the way, I went ahead and rotated your tires. Did you know that my daddy worked in a mill?” …

Other articles at FreePressed draw my attention, too. Like this Op-Ed that states:

Both sides are being disengenuous in their criticisms of the Democratic frontrunner. But at least the Republicans have a legitimate excuse—they’re Republicans.

and this article about Jeb Bush’s plan for “faith-based prisons” :

Jerry Falwell tapped to bring his special brand of hate-filled evangelism to role of warden.

Apology For My Wedding Toast

I want to apologize to the SmiCollums for royally screwing up my wedding toast when the goblet was passed to me. This is what I was going for.

WWII in Color

PBS ran this tonight. Amazing footage of the “last good war”, all in color. Well done, shows great admiration for the sacrifice, preparation, and execution of the war. It’s really well balanced, too.

On one hand, there were things like “If the people back home knew what we were going through, they wouldn’t be doing things like striking, or complaining about rations.”

Then there were things like this quote from a marine’s mom - “We have traded our son for an engraved certificate saying that he died for liberty. Damn sorry swap.”

There was a letter written from a dad to his kids, to be opened should he not return. Absolutely unbelievably eloquent, along the lines of there is good in the world, and never forget that dad died to keep that good around. I wish I could have found a transcript on the PBS site, but couldn’t.

“The day the world forgets they will truly have died in vain.”

So should I report myself for substance abuse after a 5 miler?

CNN reports that running produces the same chemical changes and cannaboids in the blood that burning a spliff does.

Early Bush Attacks

Here’s a couple weekend stories that are starting the Election Year standing POTUS attack.

Reuters kicked it off with this article featuring summarized information from Former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s report.

He likened Bush at Cabinet meetings to “a blind man in a room full of deaf people,” according to excerpts from a CBS interview to promote a book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, “The Price of Loyalty.”

…

“From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) was a bad person and that he needed to go,” O’Neill said in the “60 Minutes” interview scheduled to air on Sunday. “For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.”

CBS News has this article attacking the publicized record of Bush’s Secretary of Education who performed “The Texas Miracle”.

It was called the “Texas Miracle,” and you may remember it because President Bush wanted everyone to know about it during his presidential campaign.

It was about an approach to education that was showing amazing results, particularly in Houston, where dropout rates plunged and test scores soared.

…

But that’s not what Kimball saw: “I had been at the high school for three years, and I had seen many, many students, several hundred a year, go out the door. And I knew that they were quitting. They told me they were quitting.”

What a great way to start the election year!

The Extinction of the Choco-Diles

I have often harrased my SoCal friends to keep their eyes open for the elusive Choco-dile, since that is the only place I’ve seen them. I am not alone in my quest as this site shows. I will take my finding of this site as a sign from God to harrass all you BPBers.

Please, please, please peruse your local grocery store aisles looking for Choco-diles.

If you do find them I will gladly repay you and go to Central Market and get you whatever your little stomach desires.

VT Town Attempts To Secede

More than a few BPBers and friends have been to Killington, Vermont — some to live, some just for snowboarding. I love this article about the town of Killington expressing dissent about the state they are in.

They say the town’s restaurants, inns and other businesses send $10 million a year to the state capital in sales, room and meal taxes, but the state returns just $1 million in state aid to Killington. …

Secretary of State Deborah Markowitz said Killington has little chance of secession “absent an armed insurrection type of thing. … A town is a construction of the state and exists at the pleasure of the Legislature.” …

“I love having a Vermont address. I’m proud of it. It’s a cool place to live,” said resident Steven Kelly.

Speed

This game has nothing to do with trying to drive a bus above 50mph or else it will blow up. Speed is just a card game where you play against the computer trying to beat her in getting rid of your cards.

Cyber Mice Party

This quick little game gives you a round of cheese, a handful of couch-surfing items and a limited amount of time to save a specified number of mice. It starts pretty simple, but round 3 of Cyber Mice Party has escaped my abilities.

Somewhat moot

Until something turns up, but the Portugese Prime Minister reports that WJC, as recently as October 2003, “told (The Portugese PM) he was absolutely convinced, given his years in the White House and the access to privileged information which he had, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction until the end of the Saddam regime.”

FWIW.

Others are starting to notice

The IMF has taken notice of the shaky footing of our economy (and don’t let us get into the “what is the economy” question. I’m talking about the financial basis of our government spending and the overall plan for the same in the future) - do you think the voters will?

What I want is a proper cup of coffee

But what I got was Trout Fishing In America on Morning Edition Looks like TFA’s up for a Grammy (Insert snide comment from the Simpsons).

And, showing why I’m such a fan of NPR, the lead in to the half hour at 8:30 EST featured the battle between Beef.com which is a PETA site (featuring cows frothing at the mouth) and Beef.org (which features “It’s What’s For Dinner”) over Mad Cow disease. The bit NPR used to describe PETA was along the lines of “PETA, an animal rights group, is against eating cows, mad or happy.”

My personal description of PETA would focus on their anti-free speech activities, and their suit against a pro-meat eating group, People Eating Tasty Animals.

Works as well as Windows Update

I could get Shinto this.

What a bunch of pansies.

Canadians against snowball fights.

I crap you not.

Kaukinen said that to avoid such dangers students are reminded that snow should stay on the ground and not become an instrument of violence.

Though when it stays on the ground, it’s supremely useful for rubbing people like Ms. Kaukinen’s face in. (OK, that last bit was mean.)

Mars

We may have covered this already, but there’s a decent bit over at Slate on the ethics of colonizing Mars. The author seems mostly for it, but has a couple of exceptions in the event we find ANY life on Mars.

To heck with that, I say. Unless we find sentient life on Mars, on the order of, say a stoned comparative lit major at a second rate state school (not looking for much besides the realization of something besides basal instincts), I’m not too concerned about what we as a species do to Mars.

I can understand environmentalism on Earth, to a point, as this planet is pretty well evolutionarily tuned ot our survival, and it’s in our best interest to keep it that way. But isn’t that all out the window once we leave the planet, provided we’re not infringing on another sentient species? What would be our interest in, say, keeping the moon desolate and barren? Or in not draining the methane seas of Io (if that’s the right moon of Jupiter) to provide for interstellar rocket fuel?

Ball Droppings

(Let me know when you’re done with the Beavis and Butthead laughing. I’ll continute then.)

Interactive art is something I’ve been fascinated with ever since I caught an exhibit at the Whitney which allowed you to download a Palm app directly from the exhibit itself. That work let you teach a dancer different dance steps and eventually to put on a dance show. This work is hard to describe (as is most of this stuff) but it has to do with dropping balls and setting up platforms for them to bounce on. Mesmerizing and addictive.

Cannon Fodder

This game is making the rounds. You aim your cannon and fire at an active opponent (computer or true MP) to decide who is Cannon Fodder — anyone brave enough to sign up and play me?

Whatever, Whenever

As I’ve stated before I used to have a secret web crush on Tara from ikeepadiary.com. My crush was entirely derived from her Holly Hobby lingerie and cool new tat, so it’s a visual thing. Actually, I still do have a crush and now that she’s moving to Houston it will be harder to hide our love from my wife (who still gives me dirty looks when I mention Tara’s updates at IKAD.)

I’ve got a new secret web crush, and this is almost entirely based on intellect. Jami runs Whatever, Whenever and regularly updates it with short intelligent essays and cool little themed photography collections. The best part is that she lives in Brooklyn, but doesn’t seem as self-agrandizing about it as Lindsay Robertson (who’s cool and all, but not as cool as Jami.)

The Gimli Glider

I never knew how much math airline pilots were involved in, although after reading this story I have to question how good they are at it. In mid-1983 a manual mis-calculation of available fuel forced Boeing 767 pilots to use their passenger-filled plane as a glider in search of a runway. The pilots and flight controllers scrambled through several more calculations trying to determine how to save the plane.

Scary stuff.

The history of WD-40

Here’s a little home improvement back-story on how WD-40 came to be.

It took them 40 attempts to get the water displacing formula worked out. But they must have been really good, because the original secret formula for WD-40—which stands for Water Displacement perfected on the 40th try—is still in use today.

Why, oh why can't I get someone else to vote for

If the Democrat nominee ends up being someone who’s for staying the course in Iraq and following a similarly activist foreign policy, continuing to be a bully abroad, I may have to vote for them.

This plan to allow illegal immigrants to fill “jobs Americans don’t want” will have been the straw that broke this camel’s back.

Here’s why I don’t like it:

1. It completely ignores the first law of economics, supply and demand. The administration’s assertion “Reform must begin by confronting a basic fact of life and economics — some of the jobs being generated in America’s growing economy are jobs American citizens are not filling” is a load of horse crap (and that’s being light). In this case, the demand is coming from companies with low-paying jobs to fill, and there’s no-one in America willing to fill the positions for the price being offered. The solution? Raise wages for the crappy jobs. In a truly free market, there is a wage at which a qualified American will fill the job.

I’d like to interject here that the idea of raising the minimum wage is just as asinine an idea as allowing illegals to fill the positions. In both cases, the government action distorts the market. There are some jobs that Americans are willing to fill at low wages (High schoolers working at fast food and/or retail springs to mind here), and some items that consumers will do without rather than pay inflated prices for (fast food again springs to mind). With the immigration proposal, this plan panders directly to industries like agribusiness, who will not pay anything close to a living wage, (or invest in equipment to automate, which would generate highly skilled jobs in creating new agricultural techniques or machinery) and construction, which frequently pays extremely low wages. Granted, food prices would go up (But we’re already obese), and more value would be created in existing homes and buildings (potentially becoming an incentive to conserve rather than build on unbuilt land).

2. This, possibly more than anything I’ve heard in my life, smacks of jingoism. “There are jobs that Americans just won’t do.” Yeah, but them Mexicans (and Filipinos, and Asians, etc..), them folks’ll do anything for a buck. I’m far from a believer in political correctness, but this just rubs my belief that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” completely the wrong way. So it’s all right to pay these folks peanuts. Can we also work them 80 hours a week, deny them benefits, and use them as footstools?

3. Hello? Homeland Security? Yeah, I’d like to come over to do a crappy job that an American won’t do for the minimal pay some greedy bastard’s willing to give. Previous experience? Well, I studied under a terrorist mastermind and am planning to kill Americans… No, no, sorry, I was joking. What I meant to say was that I was raised in a muddy shack and have always dreamed of drinking Coke, holding hands with a multi racial crew, and singing in harmony. SURE, I’d LOVE the job working with toxic waste. Does that happen to be near a public water supply?

4. It’s a cheap argument, but I’ve got to pull out the slippery slope. So we bring foreigners over here to do “crappy jobs that Americans won’t”. Sure, that’s great stuff like picking fruit, cleaning buildings (though I’ve noticed up here in the NorthEast, most cleaning is done by Anglos, who seem to be making a decent living, so it can’t be all that bad of a job, and last time I checked there was a ton of money being made up here), picking trash. But what happens when Jake wants to go take a job at the DQ when he hits 16, ‘cept the labor laws have been changed to prevent anyone under 21 from working, and the DQ is staffed with Zambians? Looks like he’s not flipping burgers. Or what happens when someone decides that they want to pay engineers $20K a year, and find the people they need graduating from the University of Chile? Hey, GWB- I can’t find any Americans who want to do this work; guess I need to import me some cheap labor…

5. Possibly the most conservative of my problems: The illegals are already here illegally. Why reward them for having broken the law? That’s like saying “Hey, tax cheats… You beat the IRS. Man, too bad we didn’t catch you. Why don’t you go ahead and keep the people’s money? But don’t do it again, you naughty, naughty cheaters….” Part of the claim is that the program will reduce illegal immigration by letting foreign nationals apply for vacancies. Riiight. Some guy down in Guadalajara needs a job NOW. By this Administration’s estimation, rather than getting on a truck heading straight for the border, he’s going to go to some US job office, fill out an application, wait for the government to process it and match him with a job, and then go through the hassle of getting a passport, etc? Yep. that’ll work like a freakin’ champ.

6. Where do we put all these guest workers? If an American can’t afford to live in the US on the wages being offered, are we going to open tenements, possibly government provided, for the guest workers? If so, that’s another handout to business that won’t pay living wages.

7. Who the hell is left for the Administration to buy votes from? They’ve bought seniors with free drugs, the tax cuts and the rebates were aimed squarely at middle class moms and dads, there hasn’t been a darn thing that’s been even slightly non-pro-big-business, the Patriot Act appealed to (… who, exactly?) this panders to minorities, especially hispanics (Yo quiero cheap labor). Doesn’t anyone care about principles anymore (And I don’t buy that anyone, with the possible exception of Lieberman, Sharpton, and Kucinich in the Democrat primary is standing on principles. OK, I threw Sharpton in there as a joke.)?

Grrah. This has me so steamed I had to get out of bed to put it on the page. My biggest beef is with the economics of it - they’re just bad, bad, bad, and as contrary to free market principles as outright price controls would be.

Hey, Anyone out there got a camera?

As you can see on the recently-updated smicollum.net, there’s a wedding ofoto account. So if you took any pictures, put ‘em up, por favor.

P.S. there’s at least one in which Becky looks smokin’ hott.

Deficit, Schmeficit?

Both the Washington Post and the NY Times have editorials this week blasting the ever-increasing deficit.

Of course, I like Krugman’s best but they both have the same message. The Bush economic plan of cutting taxes while raising spending will eventually send the economy to hell in a handbasket. There is no credible forecast that could possibly say otherwise.

I don’t know how Jank keeps insisting that cutting taxes is what will turn our economy around. How can it be possible that reducing income while increasing spending, thus incurring more debt, is the way to get us back on the upswing? Someone has gotta pay for all of this eventually.

Which is why I’m voting for the “Child’s Pay” ad in the MoveOn.org contest…

DIY Fatality Stats

On another website I’m arguing about whether banning cellphones in cars will really reduce traffic accidents. To prove my point, I went to this website where I was able to design my own queries and pull data from the National Center for Statistics & Analysis’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) Web-Based Encyclopedia.

I show in 2002 the following data:
17 Fatal Crashes due to Emotional Driver Related Factors
165 Fatal Crashes where Cell Phones were present in car
18 Fatal Crashes where Cell Phones were in use
155 Fatal Crashes where Sleepy Driver Related Factors

LIAR!!!

I can see why the LIAR track is so popular with those in the Dean camp - it’s way, way too easy to do.

Take this story for example:

Howard Dean committed Friday to taking taxpayer dollars to finance his presidential campaign … Like Dean, Al Sharpton, former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun and Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich are committed to taking public financing and the spending limits that come with it, aides said. … He promised to make it an issue in the Democratic primaries if any of his rivals decide to skip public financing, as President Bush did en route to winning the Republican nomination in 2000.

Oooops - Guess Dean lied Or did he just change his mind?

Even the other candidates are smelling blood on this one: “Just like President Bush, Howard Dean has effectively undermined campaign finance laws for his own personal, opportunistic political advantage,” said Dick Gephardt’s campaign manager. Isn’t that like the Democrat form of excommunication?

Happy Birthday

To the Doc.

Hope your lovely bride smuggled some real beer back into Oklahoma with which to celebrate..

Pathetic Geek Stories

I can’t remember where I first saw Pathetic Geek Stories…I think it was an obscure ‘zine I bought while on a road trip. They’ve moved online including an extensive archive of their illustrated tragic real-life stories of nerds in bloom. Somehow I always seem to empathize.

Juggling Is Easy

Learning to juggle three balls took a little skill and I figured it out within an hour. Learning to do more than a three-ball juggle has been a lifelong failure for me. In the same manner, Juggler starts off pretty easy and quickly degenerates.

It Was All A Dream

It was a little wierd to wake up this morning and discover that Robert Scheer and I had the exact same thought — Why, for heaven’s sake, would a divine power described in scripture as supremely wise and just employ a self-indulgent, partisan hack with a history of bigotry and greed as his spinmeister? … Robertson missed the point, the voice said. I guess it is time to start my own prayer circle.

Warms the cockles of my heart

Whatever the heck cockles are.

Despair, Inc is selling it’s BitterSweets for VD again. Features sayings such as “Peaked at 17” and “UC my blog?”

Were I in the market for crappy trinkets, Despair.com would get my ducats.

Drunk Jank Scoops the Journal

Way back when, I ranted in favor of Kucinich’s Department of Peace, I endorsed the idea of doing away with the UN in favor of a body comprised of those that meet standards of human rights, democracy being a firm evidence of a commitment to Human Rights (Property rights being as firm of evidence, but this isn’t meant to be a rant). Today’s WSJ features a bit by MAX M. KAMPELMAN taking much the same stance:

Is it any wonder that many Americans hesitate to place our security concerns in the hands of the U.N.? Daniel Patrick Moynihan, as he was leaving his role as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in 1976, called it a “theater of the absurd.” … At a minimum, it is essential that the U.S. take the lead in establishing and strengthening a Caucus of Democratic States committed to advancing the U.N.’s assigned role for world peace, human dignity and democracy. The recently established Community of Democracies (CD) has called for this move, a recommendation jointly supported in a recent report by the Council on Foreign Relations and Freedom House.

The article goes on to highlight the fact that the Community of Democracies was spearheaded by Sec. of State Maddie Albright, and legslation was introduced in the Senate by Democrat Senator Joe Biden requiring that such action be taken.

Johnny (and the rest of you pot-smoking hippies): This is an issue that would have legs with Joe Six-Pack that highlights the Administration’s foreign policy shortcomings while building on some of the Bush Administrations successes (The coalition of the willing featured some vibrant, growing, recently free democracies, such as Poland, who should be highlighted as success stories), and a demonstrable track record of Democrat leadership. An issue like this, coupled with a focus on the out-of-control growth of government and the deficit, and the corporate handouts (careful on this one, be sure to couch it in terms that free-market types can deal with, such as “propping up failing businesses” instead of “handouts to rich cronies”) contains not a whole lot to upset the democrat base, and lots and lots for people who approved of the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan, war on terror, and who like general libertarian types of things to move to the Jackass side of the aisle.

Much as conservative southern Democrats feel sold out by the rest of the party, libertarian Republicans feel sold out by GWB. They’d swing in a heartbeat if given something to vote for besides “Bush Lied” and “Tax cuts for the wealthy”.

Guess this turned into a rant. Sorry.

The last paragraph of the op-ed rocks, too:

A strong case may be made for the need for an international body to which all of the world’s states, democratic and authoritarian, belong. Discussion and constructive exchange may flow from it. But let us not bestow on it the appearance of being a forum of principle or wisdom qualified to judge the dimension of our national welfare and value. The changes necessary in the U.N. will be difficult to achieve, and some may not be achieved at all. But the impetus for such change must be a commitment to human rights and democracy. We should put Kofi Annan’s statement to the test: “When the U.N. can truly call itself a Community of Democracies, the Charter’s noble ideas of protecting human rights … will have been brought much closer.”

Classic Journal - slamming the UN by quoting the Secretary General, and damming Kofi Annan with faint praise. Bartley lives on.

Fox News and RNC Continue Lying

Over the holidays I traveled from Austin to Sherveport and back by car. That’s a 5 hour drive each way if you only stop to pee once. I saw God’s hand at iTunes in the form of Al Franken’s audio-book for Lies and Lying Liars Who Tell Them which clocks in around 10 hours. (Is that sacreligious? Probably doesn’t matter because God’s too busy still trying to locate “compassionate” conservatives.) It’s an excellent book and I highly reccommend it to anyone open minded enough to take Al Franken ripping into Coulter, Hannity, Limbaugh and O’Reilly in his friendly harmless manner. (Oh and he takes a good chunk out of the Bush administration while he’s at it.)

My favorite theme in the book is Franken’s use of clear and simple statistics to prove the lies that the conservative media tells and re-tells. Even better are when Fox outright tells a lie and the rest of the media world picks it up as if it were fact (because you know Fox would never lie.) Fox is at it again — this time attacking MoveOn.org in an effort to head off MoveOn’s upcoming anti-bush ad.

RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie launched the attack on “Fox News Sunday,” and the RNC followed it with press releases and calls to reporters. The charges centered on two ads posted on the Bush in 30 Seconds website which compared President Bush’s tactis with those of Adolf Hitler. Mr. Gillespie repeatedly referred to the ads as ‘the MoveOn ad’ or ‘MoveOn’s ad,’ implying that we had sponsored or perhaps even commissioned the ad. And he also claimed that we might spend $7 million to run it on TV.

This is a lie. MoveOn.org hasn’t sponsored such an ad, and we never would — we regret the appearance of these ads on the Bush In 30 Seconds site. The two ads in question are from more than a thousand posted by members of the public, and they were voted on by MoveOn members through December 31st. Obviously the few hundred of you who viewed these ads agreed that they were not worthy of further broadcast or recognition, because they got low ratings. Yesterday we announced the 15 finalists — all good, hard-hitting and fair appraisals of the Bush record, in the judgment of the members and others who rated them. The two offending ads can only be found one place now — on the RNC website!

in a letter titled “RNC Smear Campaign” from Eli Pariser, MoveOn Voter Fund [moveon-help@list.moveon.org]

p.s. My favorite part of the book is the story of the Clinton adminstration handing the Bushies a plan that strongly resembles Homeland Security along with a breakdown of why terrorism was the biggest threat the U.S. faced. The Bushies promptly ignored it (for about 9 months) deciding instead to invest money and political power on a missle defense system… What ever happened to that?

LSDs Effect On Artistry

This series of web pages chronicles an artist using his dose-giver as a subject throughout his ‘trip’.

World Leader Quiz

Here’s a little quiz that supposedly tests what World Leader you closely match. They’ve added a nice touch that lets you pick how many questions you want to answer — the more question, the more accurate…or so they say.

Liberal SFers Stirring Up More POTUS Trouble

Free speech is alive and well under the current administration — they just don’t know about it.

The police cleared the path of the motorcade of all critical signs, but folks with pro-Bush signs were permitted to line the president’s path. Neel refused to go to the designated area and was arrested for disorderly conduct; the police also confiscated his sign.

…

When Bush stopped by a Boeing plant to talk to workers, Christine Mains and her 5-year-old daughter disobeyed orders to move to a small protest area far from the action. Police arrested Mains and took her and her crying daughter away in separate squad cars.

Abstract Comic Strips

I love Brooke McEldowney. Leveraging his success with 9 Chickweed Lane he convinced the powers that be to let him publish Pibgorn . The latter is a geeks-only fantasy land that takes weeks of reading to begin clue-catching. The former is in it’s description only slightly uncommon, “the story of three generations of now-single women”, but the art work often borders on the abstract and strives to break the physical boundaries of “established” comic strips.

Sometimes, it’s too much for me to get so I ask of you folks: What happened here?

Found

Found Magazine features a section of found letters and notes that are interesting to peruse. By far my favorite is “someone who…” because the author took the time to type it. How often do you find an incorrectly parked car and want to leave an evil message for the driver? and then go somewhere to type up said letter, walk back to the poorly parked vehicle, and leave the folded-up note under the wiper?

I’m guessing the note was either never actually placed under a wiper, or maybe the author went out of his way to track down the car later that day/week.

btw, I came across a double-parked Solara this morning at work so I slipped my RAV4 into the itty bitty space next to it and crawled out the back door. hee-hee.

The Good Doctors

While I did miss out on the festivities in Bryan, I was able to catch up with a couple of good Doctors and friends of the Porch down in New Haven on Sunday. Tara and Aanand are doing well, and little Eishan is cute as a button. Their homepage is here. if you want to see pics of the rugrat.

Nothing exciting to report, but a good time was had by all. When we get moved into Mystic, they’ll be all of a half hour down the road, at least until later this year when they head back down Texas way.

A 40 for Our Fallen Homies

Maybe most of you knew this, but I just found out that my favorite high school teacher, Otto Sellers, passed away last fall.

For those of you who didn’t know Dr. Sellers, he was one of the smartest, funniest, and most caring people I have ever known. Unfortunately, he was also possibly the least-healthy person on the planet, and that ultimately was his downfall.

I will always remember him as the guy who gave me a real understanding of math and physics, convinced me to pursue a science degree in college, and had the good sense to only show up for class about 3 days a week. More importantly, I will remember him as the man who stood in front of the room in all his portly glory, held a golf ball in one hand, started a slow pirouette, and said, “Now imagine I am a planet and this is a satellite.”

I still laugh at that memory. Hopefully you are in a better place, Dr. S.

Three Billion Year Old Spheres

I have got to research this conpiracy-fueling story about a bunch of metal alloy spheroids that were found in South Africa. They have been scientifically dated to be over three billion years old and cannot occur naturally.

Way To Say

The font on the Boondocks is way too small and it can get overly political, but it’s a usually funny comic strip. On the first day of the year they discuss alternatives to pronounce two-thousand-four:

My favorite is “the dub and four pennies”…although I’m not entirely sure I know what it means.

Rehearasing and Wonderful Groomsman Gift

Now that the nuptials are fully commenced and all that remains for the happy couple to wrap up are a long trip back to the nation’s capitol, sorting the many gifts of love and sending Thank You cards: it’s time to start the photo-blogs. For now, I’ll only offer this photo at bpb but with three rolls in the mail I expect to drop more pics later this week.

The rehersal dinner yielded a few tears of joy and the generous pair of soon-to-be-weds handed out a passle of great gifts. Mine was a Lomography brand colorsplash camera which features a color-filtered flashbulb and second or rear curtain sync — photographic examples here. (Be sure to see samples from my first roll over at Pedestrian Photography with more to follow in a few days.)

6+=1

Here’s another interactive animation in the medium of artsy fun like Fly Guy and the vein of that other thing I can never find.

Vote for Dean! It'll only cost you $2,500 a year...

WSJ’s pulling no punches out of the gate. Stephen Moore of the “Right Wing” Club for Growth details how Dean’s stump proposals add up to take over $200 a month out of the pockets of middle class Americans. Great economic plan.

Under current law, a married couple with one child and a $40,000-a-year income pays income taxes of $1,503. Under the Dean tax, that family would pay $2,935—or just about double. For a family with two kids and an income of $80,000 a year, the extra Dean tax costs $1,780 a year. What Mr. Dean has never had to answer to in the Democratic primary, perhaps because the other candidates are too embarrassed to ask, is how a presidential contender whose campaign is dedicated to relieving the economic squeeze on working class families, believes that socking these folks with a $1,400- to $1,800-a-year tax hike will make their financial situation less stressful … His tax plan would be the equivalent of hitting small businessmen, who create about 70% of the jobs, over the head with a two-by-four. The highest tax rate under the Dean plan rises from 35% to 39.6%. Add on top of this perhaps the most insidious feature of the Dean tax. For the first time ever, he would eliminate the cap on payroll taxes. Henceforth, all income of more than $87,000 a year would pay a 15% payroll tax. This means the Dean tax plan raises the small-business tax rate from 38% to 55%. If you are a self-employed worker with an income of $125,000 a year, which in high-cost-of-living states like California and New York is hardly rich, Howard Dean wants to raise your taxes more than $8,000. That will create jobs?

The bit also details how Dean will also start taxing over 2 million families who don’t currently pay any taxes. It ends by quoting JFK, probably the last Democrat who got economics “that higher tax rates “will never produce enough revenues to balance the budget, nor enough jobs” to put Americans back to work.”

Yep, we were the bad guys in Vietnam

Them VietCommies really respect freedom of the press. Yep, great accomplishments by the “Peace” movement during the ’60s.

Despite Vietnam’s constitutional guarantees of a free press, in reality dissidents take considerable risks if they speak out.

And if anyone says that folks “take risks” in the US for speaking out, please provide examples other than the Dixie Chicks or others who have lost market share instead of actually going to prison. I’ll also guarantee that a Vietnamese prison is related to an American prison in about the same way that the Driskill Hotel compares to the place with hourly rates down on South Congress.