MetaFilter posts by troutfishing.
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Curious George and the high tension power line : A cartoon story in 9 parts, on how a cute little monkey out of his depth gets turned into a stuffed ashtray holder.
posted on Oct-2-04 at 8:10 AM
"Just for the record, do you believe the Sun goes around the Earth or the Earth goes around the sun?" : Ages before "Intelligent Design", a bold PaleoCreationist pseudoscientific gobbledygook - embodied by Tom Willis, Creationism's man in Kansas and head of the Mid Atlantic Creation Research Society - strode the Earth. The AAAS dissected the mess in "Lions, Tigers and APES, Oh My! ; Creationism vs. Evolution in Kansas" ( Google cache) and one writer concluded : "The War between the creationists and the public schools is over. The creationists appear to have won" : now, in a Kansas that's scientifically proven flatter than a pancake, Mona Lisa is as happy as a clam, and Kissing Frank's ass and appeals to mysterious watchmakers predominate, while on the national stage, God is a real estate developer.
Meanwhile, a new group proposes better zoning bylaws : Scientists and Engineers for Change
posted on Sep-30-04 at 9:32 AM
"Black Like me" : the notion of "Race" is know known to be scientifically meaningless, but now roll back the clock to 1959 : "...John Howard Griffin (1920-1980) was a true Renaissance man. Having fought in the French Resistance and been a solo observer on an island in the South Pacific during World War II, he became a critically-acclaimed novelist and essayist, a remarkable photographer and musicologist, and a dynamic lecturer and teacher. On October 28, 1959, after a decade of blindness and a remarkable and inexplicable recovery, John Howard Griffin dyed himself black and began an odyssey of discovery through the segregated American South. The result was Black Like Me, arguably the single most important documentation of 20th century American racism ever written....Because of Black Like Me, Griffin was personally vilified, hanged in effigy in his hometown, and threatened with death for the rest of his life."
posted on Sep-19-04 at 9:15 PM
The Likudization of the World "....he has cast the United States in the very same role in which Israel casts itself, facing the very same threat. In this narrative, the U.S. is fighting a never ending battle for its very survival against utterly irrational forces that seek nothing less than its total extermination. "
posted on Sep-12-04 at 9:11 PM
Body Burden : The pollution in people "In a study led by Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York...researchers at two major laboratories found an average of 91 industrial compounds, pollutants, and other chemicals in the blood and urine of nine volunteers.... Scientists refer to this contamination as a person’s body burden. Of the 167 chemicals found, 76 cause cancer in humans or animals, 94 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 79 cause birth defects or abnormal development. The dangers of exposure to these chemicals in combination has never been studied."
posted on Sep-8-04 at 1:36 PM
The bias of balance : new study of how media "evenhandness" distorts truth "Two researchers argue, in a paper published this month in the journal Global Environmental Change, that following the norms of American journalism, U.S. media have promulgated a bias in the coverage of climate change essentially by giving too much credence to climate skeptics at the expense of the scientific consensus." - "Reporters and editors at four of the nation's top newspapers [ New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal ] adhered to the journalistic norm of balance at the expense of accurately reporting scientific understanding of the human contributions to global warming" (an earlier work in this vein).
posted on Sep-7-04 at 9:59 AM
Re-emergent American Eugenics Movement looks to unfinished business - The Tennessee primary win of an avowed Eugenicist Republican Congressional candidate underscores the longstanding association of the Republican Party with a resurgent American Eugenics Movement deeply linked to Nazi racial ideology and championed by the Manhattan Institute and the Nazi-associated Pioneer Fund
posted on Aug-7-04 at 10:48 PM
Wade Davis , on "Death and life in the Ethnosphere - The Naked Geography Of Hope" : "In Haiti, a Vodoun priestess responds to the rhythm of drums and, taken by the spirit, handles burning embers with impunity. In the Amazon, a Waorani hunter detects the scent of animal urine at forty paces and identifies the species that deposited it....On an escarpment in the high Arctic, Inuit elders fuse myth with landscape, interpreting the past in the shadow of clouds cast upon ice.....Just to know that such cultures exist is to remember that the human imagination is vast, fluid, infinite in its capacity for social and spiritual invention." The death of the Ethnosphere was Margaret Meade's great concern up to her death, says Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis of Serpent and the Rainbow fame and student of Richard Evans Schultes, founder of Ethnobotany : "The surprising results obtained from treating psychoactive plants allowed their users to communicate more directly with the unseen world which they believed to exist." Davis coined the concept of the "Ethnosphere" and has worked for it's preservation through Cultural Survival
posted on Aug-5-04 at 8:50 PM
Farewell, eels.
posted on Aug-2-04 at 10:19 PM
Florida county loses 2002 E-voting records in computer crash Ooooops. Do your Congresspeople and Senators support verified voting ? - Check the VerifiedVoting.org database (verifiedvoting.org previously mentioned here) to see if your political reps support H.R.2239 and S.1980, the tandem bills before the U.S. House and Senate which would mandate paper-trail voting. "Electronic miscounts of votes are a fact, not a theory...Technologists warn that electronic voting machines are flawed. They say we should "trust but verify." " Others disagree....with Democracy.
posted on Jul-28-04 at 11:00 AM
The Great American 'Garage Mahal' - cars, houses and garages of the American super-sized new affluent class grow ever larger : "three separate two-car garages attached to his $750,000 brick abode: one for his son Brandon, one for his wife, Janice, and one for him. His garages' many amenities include carpeting, cable TV, speakers wired to the home stereo system and a bathroom. "I've always liked garages and I don't think you can have enough of them," " Mr. Bernard said."
posted on Jul-21-04 at 8:54 PM
Fountains of Youth and Health : periodic, therapeutic fasting and caloric restriction. Ben Franklin wrote of this, and most religions advocate periodic fasting. In the "Fasting Worm Study", earthworms became nearly immortal. Recent research underscores the health benefits, which do not require overall caloric restriction (a "fast and gorge" cycle works too) for humans. Fasting shows promise for the treatment of most addictions, Cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's, Gastrointestinal disorders, diabetes, Uterine fibroid tumors, Back and neck problems, high blood pressure, arthritis and joint pain, depression, perhaps Huntington's Disease... Here's a clinic which specializes in medically supervised water only fasts and offers recent studies and writings on the subject (PDF, .doc, and .htm format). Fasting seems to be very good for your brain overall. Meanwhile, inside : the benefits of caloric restriction, which seems to dramatically slow many age-related diseases.
posted on Jul-19-04 at 10:50 AM
Paul Wolfowitz is the greatest Trotskyite of our times. He believes in permanent revolution. ...and in the Middle East, to begin with, needless to say." thus spoke Seymour Hersh, at a seminal conference during which the National Rifle Association and the ACLU searched for common ground - "Kenneth Starr.....will join a panel session with National Rifle Association Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre, Jr., Americans United for the Separation of Church and State Executive Director Barry Lynn and ACLU President Nadine Strossen....". Strange bedfellows, indeed (Metafilter 21918). Whassup? Trotskyite ghosts prowl the the White House amidst a power struggle of historic proportions.
posted on Jul-16-04 at 12:42 AM
The Educator's Bed and Breakfast Network Lodging for US $34 per couple per night, and breakfast too! Required - a house of your own (or maybe a large apartment, I suppose) to host fellow members. Membership costs $35 per year with a one-time $10 initial registration fee. "Educators" is a broad category which includes teachers of all sorts, writers, journalists, researchers, librarians, probably DJ's....many bloggers...
posted on Jul-14-04 at 8:50 AM
German police revive rabbit "....by breathing through a ball point pen after he passed out in a house fire.....officers opened Napoleon's mouth with a pen and breathed down it while giving the pet a cardio massage, a police spokesman said on Saturday....The officers then rushed [ the rabbit ] by police car to a vet."
posted on Jul-13-04 at 6:59 AM
Running of the naked bull-equivalents? (warning - NSFW, maybe - pic of naked female buttocks) Wouldn't this PETA protest, over bullfight cruelty, be more directly analogous to the "Running of the Bulls" if the naked runners were to be chased by a herd of meat eaters, on motor scooters, armed with stun guns?
posted on Jul-8-04 at 7:43 AM
The Newsweek-Fahrenheit wars - Michael Isikoff's "seven errors, distortions and selective omissions of crucial information" detailed by Craig Unger, "House of Bush, House of Saud" author (read excerpts of his book at Salon.com, for members or by a "day pass") Isikoff has heavily cited Unger's book but, it seems, not bothered to read Unger's generously provided source files. "Liberal" PBS is not excluded, as credulous (or ignorant) "On the Media" host Bob Garfield's July 2 interview with Isikoff demonstrates. What shall we call such pervasive, ongoing and seemingly willful patterns of inaccuracy, distortion, and selective omission?
posted on Jul-7-04 at 5:39 AM
In heartland, Cheney touts "conservative values" and therapeutic use of "F-word" After his controversial, widely and inconsistently reported use of the "F-word" - recently declared to be "abhorrent" by FCC head Michael Powell (as uttered by Bono) - Dick Cheney's "no regrets", "felt better after I had done it" justification suggests that the "if it feels good, do it" ethic of the 60's counterculture has now spread to the conservative mainstream. Some see a role reversal, as a confused type of postmodernist, relativistic thinking gnaws into the conservative zeitgeist. Seventy year old Florence Orris, at a Parma, Ohio Cheney/Republican rally, sympathized with Cheney's "F-word" catharsis, and with relativist values : "I'm almost getting to that point with my Democratic friends..." (from main link) "Conservatism, as I understand it, has always had as its end the cultivation of virtue in the individual and the community," writes one conservative who asks - is it reasonable to look towards the state, and to potty mouthed politicians, for the promotion of public values? Laments one observer of the "Culture Wars", "Who is behind the effort to undermine our moral standards and enslave our people?"
posted on Jul-4-04 at 9:19 AM
Iranian woman 'gives birth to frog' (BBC) "While it is unclear how this could have happened, the [Iranian] paper carries quotes from medical experts who say there are human characteristics to the animal....Medical history recounts stories of people who believed they had frogs - or even lizards or snakes - living and growing in their bodies....One of the most famous was the 17th Century case of Catharina Geisslerin, known as "the toad-vomiting woman" of Germany. " Could this be connected to that 20 pound carp's apocalyptic warnings spouted in Hebrew, last year, as a fish cutter tried to club it to death with a rubber hammer to make it into gefilte fish? Or, maybe it was those new tomatoes? Or an Old Testament thing, maybe a prophecy?
posted on Jul-1-04 at 5:32 AM
"Confident Bremer hurries away from Baghdad" "Brave Sir Robin ran away. Bravely ran away, away!" Hey! Where's that $20 billion in Iraqi oil revenue money? I know it was laying around here somewhere (maybe in those pants I threw in the laundry?)
posted on Jun-29-04 at 1:27 PM
"The most intriguing story in Washington these days is a subterranean conflict that reporters cannot cover because some of them are involved. A potent guerrilla insurgency has formed in and around the Bush presidency - a revolt of old pros in government who strike from the shadows with devastating effect. They tell the truth. They explode big lies. They provide documentary evidence..." - William Greider, on what could prove to be one of the defining power struggles of our time. Through a lens darkly, yes. But deniable ? - not plausibly. As gossip, growing louder now, the shadow-war advances. Unstoppably? No.
posted on Jun-27-04 at 10:53 PM
Think tanks attack Open Source "The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute’s attack on Linux is just the latest in a series of attacks on Open Source by think tanks.....
I was able to detect a common theme to all their criticism. They all seem to be funded by Microsoft. "
posted on Jun-25-04 at 7:36 AM
Federal marshmallow-mixup bust.... "a teacher's aide who forgot to put away her marshmallows and hot chocolate at Yellowstone National Park last year was taken from her cruise ship cabin in handcuffs...."
posted on Jun-23-04 at 8:17 PM
"It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling" Jeri Lynn Ryan, "Star Trek: Voyager" actress and former wife of Illinois Republican candidate for US Senate Jack Ryan says Ryan pressured her to have public sex in S&M oriented clubs. Compare and contrast with this example of the advantages of power, Britney Spears' mother runs over Paparazzi : "....As Britney was leaving a pet store where she had just bought two new puppies, mother Lynne...struck photographer Calum Reavley [ note : with an auto ]......Britney was so hysterical that paramedics actually tended to her first, and left Reavley on the ground writhing in pain."
posted on Jun-22-04 at 5:44 PM
Michael Moore witheld Abu Ghraib torture footage - So, when do we get to see it, Michael ? Liberal torture apologia is OK then ?
posted on Jun-17-04 at 10:58 PM
Consciousness Timeline ll : 1970 - Present (summer reading) Here's a wee summer reading list - on human consciousness and more. A few from the list : Stanislav Grof (altered state/transpersonal consciousness), Charles Tart (altered state/consciousness research), Chogyam Trungpa (Buddhism), Jean Houston, James Hillman, Ralph Abraham (Chaos, Gaia, and Eros), Howard Rheingold (being himself), Mihaly Csikszentmihaly (On "flow"), Joanna Macy, John Lilly (Dolphins, LSD, and more!), James Gleick (Chaos Theory), Thomas Berry, Rianne Eisler, Howard Gardner, Stephen Laberge (Lucid dreaming), Sam Keen (on the manufacture of the "enemy"), James Lovelock (Gaia Theory), Eugene Gendlin ("Focusing"), Hazel Henderson (An alternative economics - for human beings), Jeffrey Mishlove ("The Roots of Consciousness"), Michael Harner (leading world authority on Shamanism), Amory Lovins (on alternative energy), Elaine Pagels ("The Gnostic Gospels"), Huston Smith (on World religions), Ilya Prigogine ("dissipative structures")....now, to the beach.
posted on Jun-16-04 at 7:54 AM
Testosterone patch 'boosts women's sex drive' but, warn researchers, "If a couple doesn't like each other then no patch will improve their sex life." (BBC)
posted on Jun-13-04 at 8:38 AM
"No voting rights for YOU......boy!"- Florida's illegal purges of voter rolls to continue for 3rd national election? Election head resigns. While Florida refuses to release the "purge lists" to CNN, "The head of Florida's elections division resigned Monday amid reports he was feeling political heat over a push to purge thousands of suspected felons from the state's voter rolls." (Tallahassee Sun-Sentinel) " there has been little action (and worse, really) on Florida's agreement to reinstate illegally purged voters to Florida voting rolls that resulted from an NAACP lawsuit over the 2000 election ["Many voters said their votes didn't count or they were turned away from polls due to mistakes on voter lists, busy telephone lines at election headquarters, punch-card voting machine foul-ups and other problems...Statewide, the largest numbers of voting problems were found in precincts with high proportions of black and elderly voters." The NYT editorially acknowledged the scandal on February 15, 2004.]
On May 21, 2002, Ashcroft's Justice Department began a suit against Florida counties "for purging Black voters from voter rolls and other violations of civil rights" Now, four years after the 2000 election, illegally "purged" Florida voters will not be notified until it is "too late to have their rights restored for this election - or are turned away on Election Day", reports the Tampa Tribune. "The vast majority of them are black and would be likely to vote Democratic." It's difficult for convicted felons to regain the right to vote in Florida, but many on the "purge" lists were not (in 2000) and still are not felons at all. [ note : Greg Palast - busy of late - must be most credited with blowing this story wide open. See here here, here.....]
posted on Jun-9-04 at 2:02 PM
"End of Oil" rebuts Reagan hagiography ? Amidst the din that is the lengthy US media coverage on Ronald Reagan's demise, the BBC reports on the growing acceptance (with oil industry attendance at a recent ASPO conference in Berlin) of the Hubbert Curve Theory which predicts we are now close to or at the peak of World Oil production. (also see Metafilter,October 2002).
Now, the wayback machine : the year is 1980 and the new President, Ronald Reagan, has ordered a solar hot water system, installed by President Carter, torn off the White House roof. Reagan will preceed to gut federal alternative energy subsidies and federal R&D spending on alternative energy technologies to, instead, spend many billions subsidizing oil, coal, and gas production.... Over the next 23 years, the US lost it's role as the World leader in efficiency and alternative energy technologies.
posted on Jun-8-04 at 6:24 AM
A bushy-tailed morning in the quest for truth : MemeTank and dKosopedia This morning, I wondered - where's the update to (the deceased) Steve Kangas' mighty liberal FAQ ? "Update?", thought I, "Well, this attempt ran out of steam" Then..."Ah, a Wiki !" Then, "well, isn't truth the point ?...shouldn't it be Bipartisan, or multipartisan ?" Daily Kos was just sniffing (May 28th) along that trail, it seemed....partway : "We hope the dKosopedia will become the progressive-political version of the Wikipedia, a political FAQ so to speak" Would the "Dkosopedia" benefit from a less partisan stance ?
But, the MemeTank rocks -with it's bestiary of Liberal/Progressive, Right Wing, and "other" memes and the (MemeTank's) "Meme Development Project....This section is for people who want to invent new memes and try to encourage professional journalists to start using them."
posted on Jun-6-04 at 10:19 AM
Enron traders caught, on tape, "talking energy" "They're f------g taking all the money back from you guys?" complains an Enron employee on the tapes. "All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?" "Yeah, grandma Millie, man" "Yeah, now she wants her f------g money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her a------ for f------g $250 a megawatt hour."
Wacky Enron boys, what will they say next.....
posted on Jun-1-04 at 8:50 PM
Calling the 'cleaner' - like Harvey Keitel, who has both played a 'cleaner' and become one in real life, Zbigniew Brzezinski now moves in to rectify the mess. "The present policy - justified by falsehoods, pursued with unilateral arrogance, blinded by self-delusion, and stained by sadistic excesses - cannot be corrected with a few hasty palliatives."
posted on May-30-04 at 6:06 PM
"They are going to attack" - but "we won't be like Spain"
posted on May-25-04 at 10:38 PM
Trout Stomach Pump : Summer's almost here, so you'd best start looking for clues. " Finally I observe what the fish are actually feeding on. To do this I have to catch a fish. This is frequently the hardest part, but I can usually scam one up somehow. I then pump it's stomach.....while securely holding the fish I gently insert the tube down the fishís throat as far as I can. I take particular care not to injure the fish during this process.....The suction created by the pump extracts the stomach contents. I carefully release the fish unharmed into the water (I have never lost a fish in this process). Then I squeeze the bulb and deposit the fish's stomach contents into my hand. It is then a simple process to match the stomach contents to the contents of my fly box"
posted on May-24-04 at 10:16 AM
Where's Thursday, May 6 ? - Nightline "disappears" show segment - OK, I've waited almost 2 weeks. Now, it's official - Nightline "disappeared" it's own show. On Thursday May 6, 2004, Nightline featured, prominently, a call for a phased US pullout from Iraq by Retired Lieutenant General, William Odom - Ronald Reagan's head of the National Security Agency. Odom recommended turning the whole mess over to the UN. Mention of Odom or the segment is kind of hard to pry out of ABC . You can buy a transcript though, so this isn't really censorship, right?...........
posted on May-20-04 at 8:28 AM
"A hair-raising fear of idols" - Orthodox hair crisis ".....The storm began four weeks ago, when someone told the rabbis that most natural wigs imported from Europe are actually made of Indian hair. Two years ago, rumors had begun circulating that this hair was bought from Indian priests who gathered it up after the women cut it during a Hindu religious ceremony. This would be a serious problem, since Jewish law forbids the use of objects employed in idol worship (which in Judaism means all polytheistic religions). Apparently many wig-sellers concealed the fact that their wigs, though made in Europe, used Indian hair" (Ha'aretz, Friday, May 14 2004)
posted on May-16-04 at 10:32 AM
Yackity yackity, choo CHOO!, Yackity yackity.....BLOGS! Self proclaimed Blogoholic George Packer, at Mother Jones, shits on blogs everywhere, joins bemused chorus - FOX, journalism grad students, and so on - blathering on blogs. What are they? What do they mean? Quoth Packer : "Blog prose is written in headline form to imitate informal speech, with short emphatic sentences and frequent use of boldface and italics. The entries, sometimes updated hourly, are little spasms of assertion, usually too brief......All of this meta-comment by very bright young men who never leave their rooms is the latest, somewhat debased, manifestation of the old art of political pamphleteering.....if blogs are "a new way of doing politics," there is also something peculiarly stale and tired about them — not the form, but the content......So far this year, bloggers have been remarkably unadept at predicting events.... Above all, they didn't grasp the intensity of feeling among Democratic primary voters — the resentments still glowing hot from Florida 2000, the overwhelming interest in economic and domestic issues, the personal antipathy toward Bush, the resurgence of activism, the longing for a win. The blogosphere was often caught surprised by these passions and the electoral turns they caused." Packer even gets paid for this, plus starring appearances on snooty public radio talk shows! [ Kevin Drum makes an appearance ].....I can excrete lightly digested opinions with the best of them. Where do I apply ?
posted on May-13-04 at 12:58 PM
Secrets of the Third Reich...UFO's? "...As Sir Roy Feddon, Chief of the Technical Mission to Germany for the Ministry of Aircraft Production stated in 1945. "…I have seen enough of their designs and production plans to realise that if they (the Germans) had managed to prolong the war some months longer, we would have been confronted with a set of entirely new and deadly developments in air warfare.".....upright, vertical take-off aircraft.....a saucer-shaped craft with enclosed twin rotors.....Cruise missiles....the V-2....[predecessor of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles]....a rocket-powered fighter, the ME 163...These then, were some of the known German advances. However there were also hints of darker technologies not fully understood." Woo woo! So begins the four part "Secrets of the Third Reich" - where does fact merge into fiction? It's such a great read that it almost doesn't matter. A version with pictures lives here (go to menu, "Book 4"). Then, there's The Hunt For Zero Point We have met the aliens, and they are us ?
posted on May-12-04 at 9:38 AM
"Pull out, pull out", she cried, "Before it's too late!" - Sex sells. Amidst the ongoing PR conflagration - as newly released imagery of the psychosexual humiliation, by US guards at Abu Ghraib, of imprisoned Iraqis (a naked Iraqi man on a leash held by a female American soldier, notably) provokes widespread outrage (and the Red Cross says things are much worse than those pictures show), the BBC reports on informed speculation that the perfect storm of a growing insurgency, political reversals, and a PR debacle will lead to a hasty coalition pullout from Iraq. A frustrated and tense "Machine Gun Cheney" achieves release, via his wheelbarrel load of 30 guns (including a Thompson), blasting away at a Secret Service gun range. His aim, they say, is very good. But will Cheney bite the bullet and level with the American public about what it will now take for the US to prevail in Iraq ?
posted on May-6-04 at 9:45 AM
Becoming Evil : Boston WTKK-FM radio's Jay Severin advocates genocide of American-Muslims - this is the advocacy of domestic terrorism. And not the mere targeting of civilians but the murder of over three million men, women, and children. Why shouldn't Jay Severin be arrested and charged, under the Patriot Act, with aiding and abetting US domestic terrorist groups which advocate such violence? [Scroll down towards the bottom of the Globe story for a transcript of the quote in context.]
James Waller has studied the process by which individuals and society come to commit mass atrocities , and says of his theories: "...[the] explanation simply allows us to understand the conditions under which many of us could be transformed into killing machines. When we understand the ordinariness of extraordinary evil, we will be less surprised by evil, less likely to be unwitting contributors to evil, and perhaps better equipped to forestall evil." Hesiod Lists some of WTTK's advertisers : Purina, Hilton Resorts, 99 Restaurant and Pub, A.T. & T. Wireless. Still, Orcinus is my favorite "rise ofextremist terrorist hate speech in America" news source. Germany has laws against such hate speech - which it believes to be so dangerous as to override free speech considerations - But we've got the USA PATRIOT Act, right?
posted on Apr-27-04 at 12:46 PM
90+ Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap buys 100 copies of "Vallee De La Morte", a board game recreation of the battle of Dien Bien Phu There actually are 2 competing board game recreations of the epic 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu which was (by the French):
""....an attempt to interdict the enemy's rear area, to stop the flow of supplies and reinforcements, to establish a redoubt in the enemy's rear and disrupt his lines," says Douglas Johnson, research professor at the U.S. Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute. "The enemy could then be lured into a killing ground."....Hoping to draw Ho Chi Minh's guerrillas into a classic battle, the French began to build up their garrison at Dien Bien Phu..." General Giap - who led the Vietcong forces in that battle, prefers "Vallee De La Morte". Such games are played with large multicolored paper maps broken up into hexagonal grids, with cardboard pieces representing military units. The rules can be quite complex and some wargames ( such as Drang Nach Osten) have thousands of pieces and take thousands of hours to play (sometimes longer than the actual wars they simulate). More on wargaming.
posted on Apr-26-04 at 10:31 AM
Time to pull out the giant salt shaker - Evidence supporting Abrupt Climate Change theory builds (from a new study published in Nature Magazine, April 22 2004) : "Rate of Ocean Circulation Directly Linked to Abrupt Climate Change - A new study strengthens evidence that the oceans and climate are linked in an intricate dance, and that rapid climate change may be related to how vigorously ocean currents transport heat from low to high latitudes....(From the ever superb NASA Earth Observatory)
posted on Apr-24-04 at 7:16 AM
A viilage to reinvent the world : Gaviotas "In 1965 Paulo Lugari was flying over the impoverished Llanos Orientales, the “eastern plains” that border Venezuela. The soil of the Llanos is tough and acidic, some of the worst in Colombia. Lugari mused that if people could live here they could live anywhere.....The following year Lugari and a group of scientists, artists, agronomists and engineers took the 15-hour journey along a tortuous route from Bogota to the Llanos Orientales to settle."
"...they would need to be very resourceful. So they invented wind turbines that convert mild breezes into energy, super-efficient pumps that tap previously inaccessible sources of water [powered by a child's playground seesaw!], and solar kettles that sterilize drinking water using the furious heat of the tropical sun....They even invented a rain forest!" (from "Gaviotas - A village to reinvent the World", by Tim Weisman) Amidst the strife of war torn Columbia, Gaviotas persists and even flourishes. " "When we import solutions from the US or Europe," said Lugari, founder of Gaviotas, "we also import their problems."....Over the years Gaviotas technicians have installed thousands of the windmills across Colombia....Since Gaviotas refuses to patent inventions, preferring to share them freely, the design has been copied from Central America to Chile."
Gaviotas is real, yes, but it is also a state of mind - as if Ben Franklin, Frank Lloyd Wright, Leonardo Da Vinci - all of the great those giants who reinvisioned the possible - were reincarnated : as a small Columbian village on a once-desolate plain. "Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez has called Paolo Lugari the "inventor of the world." "
posted on Apr-16-04 at 7:39 AM
The GashlyCrumb Tinies "A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs", "B is for Basil, assaulted by Bears", "C is for Clara, who wasted away", D is for Desmond, thrown out of a sleigh", "E is for Earnest, who choked on a peach", "F is for Fanny, sucked dry by a leech" - But, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Edward Gorey's GashlyCrumb Tinies, A-Z, in pictures - done in by bears, tacks, gin, awls, mires, fires, mice, ennui......enjoy!
posted on Apr-14-04 at 9:54 PM
Creative, cheap, participatory, the most innovative city in the world......Curitiba !! There may be no single, organic and living font of solutions to many of the world's most pressing problems than Curitiba (previous link from Wikipedia, and a bit more of a wonkish summary here), a Brazilian city of 1.5 million that urban planners from around the globe make pilgrimages to, to learn.
On a budget a tiny fraction of those which American cities have at their disposal, how did Curitiba become the world's leading model for urban sustainability and quality of life ? - with possibly the world's most efficient and effective public transit system, a network of parks and greenery far beyond Olmsted's visionary parks, 70% trash recycling, innovative social welfare systems, trees everywhere, and "Lighthouses of Knowledge" with small libraries and free internet access as well, a low cost open university system.....and flowers! Curitiba's pedestrian-only (no cars) city center is filled with gardens.
posted on Apr-13-04 at 7:41 AM
major ongoing scandals - a list "there have been an amazing number of investigations of Republicans since Bush took office, some of which directly involve the White House." Is this, in fact, an unusually long roster of scandals as compared to the scandal tallies of past presidential administrations?
posted on Mar-23-04 at 10:43 PM
Religious right fights "Dress-up Jesus" refrigerator magnets "...Urban Outfitters is offering a refrigerator magnet set depicting Jesus on the cross. A variety of clothes for "Jesus Dress Up" include a Satan mask and tights, ballerina, and dogcatcher outfit. The sign above the cross reads, "Hang in there baby!"....A variety of clothes for "Jesus Dress Up" include a Satan mask and tights, ballerina, and dogcatcher outfit....and a Dr. Seuss hat." - So reads an Action Alert sent to the several million members of the Reverend Donald Wildmon's American Family Association which urges concerned christians to bombard Urban Outfitters with letters condemning the allegedly blasphemous magnets. But there is no need to even buy them when you can play "Dress up Jesus" online! - "Dress up Jesus by dragging the items to him with your mouse.", reads the offending website. From the AFA's suggested letter text : "While you may think it is "cute," your decision shows a great disrespect toward people of faith everywhere." - To say that I dislike the AFA would be to put it mildly, but are the refrigerator magnets indeed disrespectful ?
posted on Mar-18-04 at 12:48 PM
The poetry of Donald Rumsfeld, set to music
The Unknown
"As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know."
[Department of Defense news briefing Feb. 12, 2002] : Now, imagine it set to music and sung aloud by a classically trained female singer with a beautiful voice. [ Mp3 clips available at main link ] Some conservatives consider it a homage, while I find it beautiful, compelling, and disorienting.
posted on Mar-12-04 at 1:07 PM
Tom Friedman, well meaning NYT columnnist lunkhead, gets job outsourced In a stunning development, Tom Friedman - until recently the famous NYT op-ed columnist who has downplayed the outsourcing of American jobs, finds his job has been outsourced due to an egregious factual error concerning T-shirts. "[ BANGALORE, India ] I am delighted to write to you today as the new foreign-affairs columnist for the New York Times . My name is Tam Veeraraghavan. Ah, you say, you've never heard of Tam Veeraraghavan, but the name sounds vaguely Indian. Well, I am an Indian. I live in Bangalore. And I'm now the pundit you read in this newspaper. Now some of you might think that I'm an example of how outsourcing is hurting American workers. Well let me introduce you to Yamini Narayanan, an Indian-born 35-year-old with a Ph.D. in economics....."
posted on Mar-11-04 at 12:24 PM
American Taliban plans theocracy - soon Theocracy Watch reports on the religious right's takeover of the Republican Party. The Bush Administration's proposed Federal Marriage Amendment is but one ploy of the new American Taliban : "with one amendment the religious right could wipe out access to birth control, abortion, and even non-procreative sex" ["...behind this amendment: Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Gary Bauer, Robert Bork, Rick Santorum" - via Andrew Sullivan]. Maureen Farrell chronicles the power centers of the newly powerful religious right. Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind series, has the President's ear and this concerns more than jamming Creationism into your school's curriculum.
On the agenda - "The civil government of our nation, its laws, institutions, and practices must therefore be conformed to the principles of Biblical law as revealed in the Old and New Testaments." Writes Farrell - "How did this happen? - Voter apathy is the key to the phenomenal ascent of the Religious Right in the U.S. government." Pat Robertson, 1990 : "With the apathy that exists today, a small, well-organized minority can influence the selection of candidates to an astonishing degree."
posted on Mar-10-04 at 7:32 AM
posted on Oct-2-04 at 8:10 AM
"Just for the record, do you believe the Sun goes around the Earth or the Earth goes around the sun?" : Ages before "Intelligent Design", a bold PaleoCreationist pseudoscientific gobbledygook - embodied by Tom Willis, Creationism's man in Kansas and head of the Mid Atlantic Creation Research Society - strode the Earth. The AAAS dissected the mess in "Lions, Tigers and APES, Oh My! ; Creationism vs. Evolution in Kansas" ( Google cache) and one writer concluded : "The War between the creationists and the public schools is over. The creationists appear to have won" : now, in a Kansas that's scientifically proven flatter than a pancake, Mona Lisa is as happy as a clam, and Kissing Frank's ass and appeals to mysterious watchmakers predominate, while on the national stage, God is a real estate developer.
Meanwhile, a new group proposes better zoning bylaws : Scientists and Engineers for Change
posted on Sep-30-04 at 9:32 AM
"Black Like me" : the notion of "Race" is know known to be scientifically meaningless, but now roll back the clock to 1959 : "...John Howard Griffin (1920-1980) was a true Renaissance man. Having fought in the French Resistance and been a solo observer on an island in the South Pacific during World War II, he became a critically-acclaimed novelist and essayist, a remarkable photographer and musicologist, and a dynamic lecturer and teacher. On October 28, 1959, after a decade of blindness and a remarkable and inexplicable recovery, John Howard Griffin dyed himself black and began an odyssey of discovery through the segregated American South. The result was Black Like Me, arguably the single most important documentation of 20th century American racism ever written....Because of Black Like Me, Griffin was personally vilified, hanged in effigy in his hometown, and threatened with death for the rest of his life."
posted on Sep-19-04 at 9:15 PM
The Likudization of the World "....he has cast the United States in the very same role in which Israel casts itself, facing the very same threat. In this narrative, the U.S. is fighting a never ending battle for its very survival against utterly irrational forces that seek nothing less than its total extermination. "
posted on Sep-12-04 at 9:11 PM
Body Burden : The pollution in people "In a study led by Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York...researchers at two major laboratories found an average of 91 industrial compounds, pollutants, and other chemicals in the blood and urine of nine volunteers.... Scientists refer to this contamination as a person’s body burden. Of the 167 chemicals found, 76 cause cancer in humans or animals, 94 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 79 cause birth defects or abnormal development. The dangers of exposure to these chemicals in combination has never been studied."
posted on Sep-8-04 at 1:36 PM
The bias of balance : new study of how media "evenhandness" distorts truth "Two researchers argue, in a paper published this month in the journal Global Environmental Change, that following the norms of American journalism, U.S. media have promulgated a bias in the coverage of climate change essentially by giving too much credence to climate skeptics at the expense of the scientific consensus." - "Reporters and editors at four of the nation's top newspapers [ New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal ] adhered to the journalistic norm of balance at the expense of accurately reporting scientific understanding of the human contributions to global warming" (an earlier work in this vein).
posted on Sep-7-04 at 9:59 AM
Re-emergent American Eugenics Movement looks to unfinished business - The Tennessee primary win of an avowed Eugenicist Republican Congressional candidate underscores the longstanding association of the Republican Party with a resurgent American Eugenics Movement deeply linked to Nazi racial ideology and championed by the Manhattan Institute and the Nazi-associated Pioneer Fund
posted on Aug-7-04 at 10:48 PM
Wade Davis , on "Death and life in the Ethnosphere - The Naked Geography Of Hope" : "In Haiti, a Vodoun priestess responds to the rhythm of drums and, taken by the spirit, handles burning embers with impunity. In the Amazon, a Waorani hunter detects the scent of animal urine at forty paces and identifies the species that deposited it....On an escarpment in the high Arctic, Inuit elders fuse myth with landscape, interpreting the past in the shadow of clouds cast upon ice.....Just to know that such cultures exist is to remember that the human imagination is vast, fluid, infinite in its capacity for social and spiritual invention." The death of the Ethnosphere was Margaret Meade's great concern up to her death, says Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis of Serpent and the Rainbow fame and student of Richard Evans Schultes, founder of Ethnobotany : "The surprising results obtained from treating psychoactive plants allowed their users to communicate more directly with the unseen world which they believed to exist." Davis coined the concept of the "Ethnosphere" and has worked for it's preservation through Cultural Survival
posted on Aug-5-04 at 8:50 PM
Farewell, eels.
posted on Aug-2-04 at 10:19 PM
Florida county loses 2002 E-voting records in computer crash Ooooops. Do your Congresspeople and Senators support verified voting ? - Check the VerifiedVoting.org database (verifiedvoting.org previously mentioned here) to see if your political reps support H.R.2239 and S.1980, the tandem bills before the U.S. House and Senate which would mandate paper-trail voting. "Electronic miscounts of votes are a fact, not a theory...Technologists warn that electronic voting machines are flawed. They say we should "trust but verify." " Others disagree....with Democracy.
posted on Jul-28-04 at 11:00 AM
The Great American 'Garage Mahal' - cars, houses and garages of the American super-sized new affluent class grow ever larger : "three separate two-car garages attached to his $750,000 brick abode: one for his son Brandon, one for his wife, Janice, and one for him. His garages' many amenities include carpeting, cable TV, speakers wired to the home stereo system and a bathroom. "I've always liked garages and I don't think you can have enough of them," " Mr. Bernard said."
posted on Jul-21-04 at 8:54 PM
Fountains of Youth and Health : periodic, therapeutic fasting and caloric restriction. Ben Franklin wrote of this, and most religions advocate periodic fasting. In the "Fasting Worm Study", earthworms became nearly immortal. Recent research underscores the health benefits, which do not require overall caloric restriction (a "fast and gorge" cycle works too) for humans. Fasting shows promise for the treatment of most addictions, Cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's, Gastrointestinal disorders, diabetes, Uterine fibroid tumors, Back and neck problems, high blood pressure, arthritis and joint pain, depression, perhaps Huntington's Disease... Here's a clinic which specializes in medically supervised water only fasts and offers recent studies and writings on the subject (PDF, .doc, and .htm format). Fasting seems to be very good for your brain overall. Meanwhile, inside : the benefits of caloric restriction, which seems to dramatically slow many age-related diseases.
posted on Jul-19-04 at 10:50 AM
Paul Wolfowitz is the greatest Trotskyite of our times. He believes in permanent revolution. ...and in the Middle East, to begin with, needless to say." thus spoke Seymour Hersh, at a seminal conference during which the National Rifle Association and the ACLU searched for common ground - "Kenneth Starr.....will join a panel session with National Rifle Association Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre, Jr., Americans United for the Separation of Church and State Executive Director Barry Lynn and ACLU President Nadine Strossen....". Strange bedfellows, indeed (Metafilter 21918). Whassup? Trotskyite ghosts prowl the the White House amidst a power struggle of historic proportions.
posted on Jul-16-04 at 12:42 AM
The Educator's Bed and Breakfast Network Lodging for US $34 per couple per night, and breakfast too! Required - a house of your own (or maybe a large apartment, I suppose) to host fellow members. Membership costs $35 per year with a one-time $10 initial registration fee. "Educators" is a broad category which includes teachers of all sorts, writers, journalists, researchers, librarians, probably DJ's....many bloggers...
posted on Jul-14-04 at 8:50 AM
German police revive rabbit "....by breathing through a ball point pen after he passed out in a house fire.....officers opened Napoleon's mouth with a pen and breathed down it while giving the pet a cardio massage, a police spokesman said on Saturday....The officers then rushed [ the rabbit ] by police car to a vet."
posted on Jul-13-04 at 6:59 AM
Running of the naked bull-equivalents? (warning - NSFW, maybe - pic of naked female buttocks) Wouldn't this PETA protest, over bullfight cruelty, be more directly analogous to the "Running of the Bulls" if the naked runners were to be chased by a herd of meat eaters, on motor scooters, armed with stun guns?
posted on Jul-8-04 at 7:43 AM
The Newsweek-Fahrenheit wars - Michael Isikoff's "seven errors, distortions and selective omissions of crucial information" detailed by Craig Unger, "House of Bush, House of Saud" author (read excerpts of his book at Salon.com, for members or by a "day pass") Isikoff has heavily cited Unger's book but, it seems, not bothered to read Unger's generously provided source files. "Liberal" PBS is not excluded, as credulous (or ignorant) "On the Media" host Bob Garfield's July 2 interview with Isikoff demonstrates. What shall we call such pervasive, ongoing and seemingly willful patterns of inaccuracy, distortion, and selective omission?
posted on Jul-7-04 at 5:39 AM
In heartland, Cheney touts "conservative values" and therapeutic use of "F-word" After his controversial, widely and inconsistently reported use of the "F-word" - recently declared to be "abhorrent" by FCC head Michael Powell (as uttered by Bono) - Dick Cheney's "no regrets", "felt better after I had done it" justification suggests that the "if it feels good, do it" ethic of the 60's counterculture has now spread to the conservative mainstream. Some see a role reversal, as a confused type of postmodernist, relativistic thinking gnaws into the conservative zeitgeist. Seventy year old Florence Orris, at a Parma, Ohio Cheney/Republican rally, sympathized with Cheney's "F-word" catharsis, and with relativist values : "I'm almost getting to that point with my Democratic friends..." (from main link) "Conservatism, as I understand it, has always had as its end the cultivation of virtue in the individual and the community," writes one conservative who asks - is it reasonable to look towards the state, and to potty mouthed politicians, for the promotion of public values? Laments one observer of the "Culture Wars", "Who is behind the effort to undermine our moral standards and enslave our people?"
posted on Jul-4-04 at 9:19 AM
Iranian woman 'gives birth to frog' (BBC) "While it is unclear how this could have happened, the [Iranian] paper carries quotes from medical experts who say there are human characteristics to the animal....Medical history recounts stories of people who believed they had frogs - or even lizards or snakes - living and growing in their bodies....One of the most famous was the 17th Century case of Catharina Geisslerin, known as "the toad-vomiting woman" of Germany. " Could this be connected to that 20 pound carp's apocalyptic warnings spouted in Hebrew, last year, as a fish cutter tried to club it to death with a rubber hammer to make it into gefilte fish? Or, maybe it was those new tomatoes? Or an Old Testament thing, maybe a prophecy?
posted on Jul-1-04 at 5:32 AM
"Confident Bremer hurries away from Baghdad" "Brave Sir Robin ran away. Bravely ran away, away!" Hey! Where's that $20 billion in Iraqi oil revenue money? I know it was laying around here somewhere (maybe in those pants I threw in the laundry?)
posted on Jun-29-04 at 1:27 PM
"The most intriguing story in Washington these days is a subterranean conflict that reporters cannot cover because some of them are involved. A potent guerrilla insurgency has formed in and around the Bush presidency - a revolt of old pros in government who strike from the shadows with devastating effect. They tell the truth. They explode big lies. They provide documentary evidence..." - William Greider, on what could prove to be one of the defining power struggles of our time. Through a lens darkly, yes. But deniable ? - not plausibly. As gossip, growing louder now, the shadow-war advances. Unstoppably? No.
posted on Jun-27-04 at 10:53 PM
Think tanks attack Open Source "The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute’s attack on Linux is just the latest in a series of attacks on Open Source by think tanks.....
I was able to detect a common theme to all their criticism. They all seem to be funded by Microsoft. "
posted on Jun-25-04 at 7:36 AM
Federal marshmallow-mixup bust.... "a teacher's aide who forgot to put away her marshmallows and hot chocolate at Yellowstone National Park last year was taken from her cruise ship cabin in handcuffs...."
posted on Jun-23-04 at 8:17 PM
"It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling" Jeri Lynn Ryan, "Star Trek: Voyager" actress and former wife of Illinois Republican candidate for US Senate Jack Ryan says Ryan pressured her to have public sex in S&M oriented clubs. Compare and contrast with this example of the advantages of power, Britney Spears' mother runs over Paparazzi : "....As Britney was leaving a pet store where she had just bought two new puppies, mother Lynne...struck photographer Calum Reavley [ note : with an auto ]......Britney was so hysterical that paramedics actually tended to her first, and left Reavley on the ground writhing in pain."
posted on Jun-22-04 at 5:44 PM
Michael Moore witheld Abu Ghraib torture footage - So, when do we get to see it, Michael ? Liberal torture apologia is OK then ?
posted on Jun-17-04 at 10:58 PM
Consciousness Timeline ll : 1970 - Present (summer reading) Here's a wee summer reading list - on human consciousness and more. A few from the list : Stanislav Grof (altered state/transpersonal consciousness), Charles Tart (altered state/consciousness research), Chogyam Trungpa (Buddhism), Jean Houston, James Hillman, Ralph Abraham (Chaos, Gaia, and Eros), Howard Rheingold (being himself), Mihaly Csikszentmihaly (On "flow"), Joanna Macy, John Lilly (Dolphins, LSD, and more!), James Gleick (Chaos Theory), Thomas Berry, Rianne Eisler, Howard Gardner, Stephen Laberge (Lucid dreaming), Sam Keen (on the manufacture of the "enemy"), James Lovelock (Gaia Theory), Eugene Gendlin ("Focusing"), Hazel Henderson (An alternative economics - for human beings), Jeffrey Mishlove ("The Roots of Consciousness"), Michael Harner (leading world authority on Shamanism), Amory Lovins (on alternative energy), Elaine Pagels ("The Gnostic Gospels"), Huston Smith (on World religions), Ilya Prigogine ("dissipative structures")....now, to the beach.
posted on Jun-16-04 at 7:54 AM
Testosterone patch 'boosts women's sex drive' but, warn researchers, "If a couple doesn't like each other then no patch will improve their sex life." (BBC)
posted on Jun-13-04 at 8:38 AM
"No voting rights for YOU......boy!"- Florida's illegal purges of voter rolls to continue for 3rd national election? Election head resigns. While Florida refuses to release the "purge lists" to CNN, "The head of Florida's elections division resigned Monday amid reports he was feeling political heat over a push to purge thousands of suspected felons from the state's voter rolls." (Tallahassee Sun-Sentinel) " there has been little action (and worse, really) on Florida's agreement to reinstate illegally purged voters to Florida voting rolls that resulted from an NAACP lawsuit over the 2000 election ["Many voters said their votes didn't count or they were turned away from polls due to mistakes on voter lists, busy telephone lines at election headquarters, punch-card voting machine foul-ups and other problems...Statewide, the largest numbers of voting problems were found in precincts with high proportions of black and elderly voters." The NYT editorially acknowledged the scandal on February 15, 2004.]
On May 21, 2002, Ashcroft's Justice Department began a suit against Florida counties "for purging Black voters from voter rolls and other violations of civil rights" Now, four years after the 2000 election, illegally "purged" Florida voters will not be notified until it is "too late to have their rights restored for this election - or are turned away on Election Day", reports the Tampa Tribune. "The vast majority of them are black and would be likely to vote Democratic." It's difficult for convicted felons to regain the right to vote in Florida, but many on the "purge" lists were not (in 2000) and still are not felons at all. [ note : Greg Palast - busy of late - must be most credited with blowing this story wide open. See here here, here.....]
posted on Jun-9-04 at 2:02 PM
"End of Oil" rebuts Reagan hagiography ? Amidst the din that is the lengthy US media coverage on Ronald Reagan's demise, the BBC reports on the growing acceptance (with oil industry attendance at a recent ASPO conference in Berlin) of the Hubbert Curve Theory which predicts we are now close to or at the peak of World Oil production. (also see Metafilter,October 2002).
Now, the wayback machine : the year is 1980 and the new President, Ronald Reagan, has ordered a solar hot water system, installed by President Carter, torn off the White House roof. Reagan will preceed to gut federal alternative energy subsidies and federal R&D spending on alternative energy technologies to, instead, spend many billions subsidizing oil, coal, and gas production.... Over the next 23 years, the US lost it's role as the World leader in efficiency and alternative energy technologies.
posted on Jun-8-04 at 6:24 AM
A bushy-tailed morning in the quest for truth : MemeTank and dKosopedia This morning, I wondered - where's the update to (the deceased) Steve Kangas' mighty liberal FAQ ? "Update?", thought I, "Well, this attempt ran out of steam" Then..."Ah, a Wiki !" Then, "well, isn't truth the point ?...shouldn't it be Bipartisan, or multipartisan ?" Daily Kos was just sniffing (May 28th) along that trail, it seemed....partway : "We hope the dKosopedia will become the progressive-political version of the Wikipedia, a political FAQ so to speak" Would the "Dkosopedia" benefit from a less partisan stance ?
But, the MemeTank rocks -with it's bestiary of Liberal/Progressive, Right Wing, and "other" memes and the (MemeTank's) "Meme Development Project....This section is for people who want to invent new memes and try to encourage professional journalists to start using them."
posted on Jun-6-04 at 10:19 AM
Enron traders caught, on tape, "talking energy" "They're f------g taking all the money back from you guys?" complains an Enron employee on the tapes. "All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?" "Yeah, grandma Millie, man" "Yeah, now she wants her f------g money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her a------ for f------g $250 a megawatt hour."
Wacky Enron boys, what will they say next.....
posted on Jun-1-04 at 8:50 PM
Calling the 'cleaner' - like Harvey Keitel, who has both played a 'cleaner' and become one in real life, Zbigniew Brzezinski now moves in to rectify the mess. "The present policy - justified by falsehoods, pursued with unilateral arrogance, blinded by self-delusion, and stained by sadistic excesses - cannot be corrected with a few hasty palliatives."
posted on May-30-04 at 6:06 PM
"They are going to attack" - but "we won't be like Spain"
posted on May-25-04 at 10:38 PM
Trout Stomach Pump : Summer's almost here, so you'd best start looking for clues. " Finally I observe what the fish are actually feeding on. To do this I have to catch a fish. This is frequently the hardest part, but I can usually scam one up somehow. I then pump it's stomach.....while securely holding the fish I gently insert the tube down the fishís throat as far as I can. I take particular care not to injure the fish during this process.....The suction created by the pump extracts the stomach contents. I carefully release the fish unharmed into the water (I have never lost a fish in this process). Then I squeeze the bulb and deposit the fish's stomach contents into my hand. It is then a simple process to match the stomach contents to the contents of my fly box"
posted on May-24-04 at 10:16 AM
Where's Thursday, May 6 ? - Nightline "disappears" show segment - OK, I've waited almost 2 weeks. Now, it's official - Nightline "disappeared" it's own show. On Thursday May 6, 2004, Nightline featured, prominently, a call for a phased US pullout from Iraq by Retired Lieutenant General, William Odom - Ronald Reagan's head of the National Security Agency. Odom recommended turning the whole mess over to the UN. Mention of Odom or the segment is kind of hard to pry out of ABC . You can buy a transcript though, so this isn't really censorship, right?...........
posted on May-20-04 at 8:28 AM
"A hair-raising fear of idols" - Orthodox hair crisis ".....The storm began four weeks ago, when someone told the rabbis that most natural wigs imported from Europe are actually made of Indian hair. Two years ago, rumors had begun circulating that this hair was bought from Indian priests who gathered it up after the women cut it during a Hindu religious ceremony. This would be a serious problem, since Jewish law forbids the use of objects employed in idol worship (which in Judaism means all polytheistic religions). Apparently many wig-sellers concealed the fact that their wigs, though made in Europe, used Indian hair" (Ha'aretz, Friday, May 14 2004)
posted on May-16-04 at 10:32 AM
Yackity yackity, choo CHOO!, Yackity yackity.....BLOGS! Self proclaimed Blogoholic George Packer, at Mother Jones, shits on blogs everywhere, joins bemused chorus - FOX, journalism grad students, and so on - blathering on blogs. What are they? What do they mean? Quoth Packer : "Blog prose is written in headline form to imitate informal speech, with short emphatic sentences and frequent use of boldface and italics. The entries, sometimes updated hourly, are little spasms of assertion, usually too brief......All of this meta-comment by very bright young men who never leave their rooms is the latest, somewhat debased, manifestation of the old art of political pamphleteering.....if blogs are "a new way of doing politics," there is also something peculiarly stale and tired about them — not the form, but the content......So far this year, bloggers have been remarkably unadept at predicting events.... Above all, they didn't grasp the intensity of feeling among Democratic primary voters — the resentments still glowing hot from Florida 2000, the overwhelming interest in economic and domestic issues, the personal antipathy toward Bush, the resurgence of activism, the longing for a win. The blogosphere was often caught surprised by these passions and the electoral turns they caused." Packer even gets paid for this, plus starring appearances on snooty public radio talk shows! [ Kevin Drum makes an appearance ].....I can excrete lightly digested opinions with the best of them. Where do I apply ?
posted on May-13-04 at 12:58 PM
Secrets of the Third Reich...UFO's? "...As Sir Roy Feddon, Chief of the Technical Mission to Germany for the Ministry of Aircraft Production stated in 1945. "…I have seen enough of their designs and production plans to realise that if they (the Germans) had managed to prolong the war some months longer, we would have been confronted with a set of entirely new and deadly developments in air warfare.".....upright, vertical take-off aircraft.....a saucer-shaped craft with enclosed twin rotors.....Cruise missiles....the V-2....[predecessor of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles]....a rocket-powered fighter, the ME 163...These then, were some of the known German advances. However there were also hints of darker technologies not fully understood." Woo woo! So begins the four part "Secrets of the Third Reich" - where does fact merge into fiction? It's such a great read that it almost doesn't matter. A version with pictures lives here (go to menu, "Book 4"). Then, there's The Hunt For Zero Point We have met the aliens, and they are us ?
posted on May-12-04 at 9:38 AM
"Pull out, pull out", she cried, "Before it's too late!" - Sex sells. Amidst the ongoing PR conflagration - as newly released imagery of the psychosexual humiliation, by US guards at Abu Ghraib, of imprisoned Iraqis (a naked Iraqi man on a leash held by a female American soldier, notably) provokes widespread outrage (and the Red Cross says things are much worse than those pictures show), the BBC reports on informed speculation that the perfect storm of a growing insurgency, political reversals, and a PR debacle will lead to a hasty coalition pullout from Iraq. A frustrated and tense "Machine Gun Cheney" achieves release, via his wheelbarrel load of 30 guns (including a Thompson), blasting away at a Secret Service gun range. His aim, they say, is very good. But will Cheney bite the bullet and level with the American public about what it will now take for the US to prevail in Iraq ?
posted on May-6-04 at 9:45 AM
Becoming Evil : Boston WTKK-FM radio's Jay Severin advocates genocide of American-Muslims - this is the advocacy of domestic terrorism. And not the mere targeting of civilians but the murder of over three million men, women, and children. Why shouldn't Jay Severin be arrested and charged, under the Patriot Act, with aiding and abetting US domestic terrorist groups which advocate such violence? [Scroll down towards the bottom of the Globe story for a transcript of the quote in context.]
James Waller has studied the process by which individuals and society come to commit mass atrocities , and says of his theories: "...[the] explanation simply allows us to understand the conditions under which many of us could be transformed into killing machines. When we understand the ordinariness of extraordinary evil, we will be less surprised by evil, less likely to be unwitting contributors to evil, and perhaps better equipped to forestall evil." Hesiod Lists some of WTTK's advertisers : Purina, Hilton Resorts, 99 Restaurant and Pub, A.T. & T. Wireless. Still, Orcinus is my favorite "rise of
posted on Apr-27-04 at 12:46 PM
90+ Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap buys 100 copies of "Vallee De La Morte", a board game recreation of the battle of Dien Bien Phu There actually are 2 competing board game recreations of the epic 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu which was (by the French):
""....an attempt to interdict the enemy's rear area, to stop the flow of supplies and reinforcements, to establish a redoubt in the enemy's rear and disrupt his lines," says Douglas Johnson, research professor at the U.S. Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute. "The enemy could then be lured into a killing ground."....Hoping to draw Ho Chi Minh's guerrillas into a classic battle, the French began to build up their garrison at Dien Bien Phu..." General Giap - who led the Vietcong forces in that battle, prefers "Vallee De La Morte". Such games are played with large multicolored paper maps broken up into hexagonal grids, with cardboard pieces representing military units. The rules can be quite complex and some wargames ( such as Drang Nach Osten) have thousands of pieces and take thousands of hours to play (sometimes longer than the actual wars they simulate). More on wargaming.
posted on Apr-26-04 at 10:31 AM
Time to pull out the giant salt shaker - Evidence supporting Abrupt Climate Change theory builds (from a new study published in Nature Magazine, April 22 2004) : "Rate of Ocean Circulation Directly Linked to Abrupt Climate Change - A new study strengthens evidence that the oceans and climate are linked in an intricate dance, and that rapid climate change may be related to how vigorously ocean currents transport heat from low to high latitudes....(From the ever superb NASA Earth Observatory)
posted on Apr-24-04 at 7:16 AM
A viilage to reinvent the world : Gaviotas "In 1965 Paulo Lugari was flying over the impoverished Llanos Orientales, the “eastern plains” that border Venezuela. The soil of the Llanos is tough and acidic, some of the worst in Colombia. Lugari mused that if people could live here they could live anywhere.....The following year Lugari and a group of scientists, artists, agronomists and engineers took the 15-hour journey along a tortuous route from Bogota to the Llanos Orientales to settle."
"...they would need to be very resourceful. So they invented wind turbines that convert mild breezes into energy, super-efficient pumps that tap previously inaccessible sources of water [powered by a child's playground seesaw!], and solar kettles that sterilize drinking water using the furious heat of the tropical sun....They even invented a rain forest!" (from "Gaviotas - A village to reinvent the World", by Tim Weisman) Amidst the strife of war torn Columbia, Gaviotas persists and even flourishes. " "When we import solutions from the US or Europe," said Lugari, founder of Gaviotas, "we also import their problems."....Over the years Gaviotas technicians have installed thousands of the windmills across Colombia....Since Gaviotas refuses to patent inventions, preferring to share them freely, the design has been copied from Central America to Chile."
Gaviotas is real, yes, but it is also a state of mind - as if Ben Franklin, Frank Lloyd Wright, Leonardo Da Vinci - all of the great those giants who reinvisioned the possible - were reincarnated : as a small Columbian village on a once-desolate plain. "Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez has called Paolo Lugari the "inventor of the world." "
posted on Apr-16-04 at 7:39 AM
The GashlyCrumb Tinies "A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs", "B is for Basil, assaulted by Bears", "C is for Clara, who wasted away", D is for Desmond, thrown out of a sleigh", "E is for Earnest, who choked on a peach", "F is for Fanny, sucked dry by a leech" - But, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Edward Gorey's GashlyCrumb Tinies, A-Z, in pictures - done in by bears, tacks, gin, awls, mires, fires, mice, ennui......enjoy!
posted on Apr-14-04 at 9:54 PM
Creative, cheap, participatory, the most innovative city in the world......Curitiba !! There may be no single, organic and living font of solutions to many of the world's most pressing problems than Curitiba (previous link from Wikipedia, and a bit more of a wonkish summary here), a Brazilian city of 1.5 million that urban planners from around the globe make pilgrimages to, to learn.
On a budget a tiny fraction of those which American cities have at their disposal, how did Curitiba become the world's leading model for urban sustainability and quality of life ? - with possibly the world's most efficient and effective public transit system, a network of parks and greenery far beyond Olmsted's visionary parks, 70% trash recycling, innovative social welfare systems, trees everywhere, and "Lighthouses of Knowledge" with small libraries and free internet access as well, a low cost open university system.....and flowers! Curitiba's pedestrian-only (no cars) city center is filled with gardens.
posted on Apr-13-04 at 7:41 AM
major ongoing scandals - a list "there have been an amazing number of investigations of Republicans since Bush took office, some of which directly involve the White House." Is this, in fact, an unusually long roster of scandals as compared to the scandal tallies of past presidential administrations?
posted on Mar-23-04 at 10:43 PM
Religious right fights "Dress-up Jesus" refrigerator magnets "...Urban Outfitters is offering a refrigerator magnet set depicting Jesus on the cross. A variety of clothes for "Jesus Dress Up" include a Satan mask and tights, ballerina, and dogcatcher outfit. The sign above the cross reads, "Hang in there baby!"....A variety of clothes for "Jesus Dress Up" include a Satan mask and tights, ballerina, and dogcatcher outfit....and a Dr. Seuss hat." - So reads an Action Alert sent to the several million members of the Reverend Donald Wildmon's American Family Association which urges concerned christians to bombard Urban Outfitters with letters condemning the allegedly blasphemous magnets. But there is no need to even buy them when you can play "Dress up Jesus" online! - "Dress up Jesus by dragging the items to him with your mouse.", reads the offending website. From the AFA's suggested letter text : "While you may think it is "cute," your decision shows a great disrespect toward people of faith everywhere." - To say that I dislike the AFA would be to put it mildly, but are the refrigerator magnets indeed disrespectful ?
posted on Mar-18-04 at 12:48 PM
The poetry of Donald Rumsfeld, set to music
The Unknown
"As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know."
[Department of Defense news briefing Feb. 12, 2002] : Now, imagine it set to music and sung aloud by a classically trained female singer with a beautiful voice. [ Mp3 clips available at main link ] Some conservatives consider it a homage, while I find it beautiful, compelling, and disorienting.
posted on Mar-12-04 at 1:07 PM
Tom Friedman, well meaning NYT columnnist lunkhead, gets job outsourced In a stunning development, Tom Friedman - until recently the famous NYT op-ed columnist who has downplayed the outsourcing of American jobs, finds his job has been outsourced due to an egregious factual error concerning T-shirts. "[ BANGALORE, India ] I am delighted to write to you today as the new foreign-affairs columnist for the New York Times . My name is Tam Veeraraghavan. Ah, you say, you've never heard of Tam Veeraraghavan, but the name sounds vaguely Indian. Well, I am an Indian. I live in Bangalore. And I'm now the pundit you read in this newspaper. Now some of you might think that I'm an example of how outsourcing is hurting American workers. Well let me introduce you to Yamini Narayanan, an Indian-born 35-year-old with a Ph.D. in economics....."
posted on Mar-11-04 at 12:24 PM
American Taliban plans theocracy - soon Theocracy Watch reports on the religious right's takeover of the Republican Party. The Bush Administration's proposed Federal Marriage Amendment is but one ploy of the new American Taliban : "with one amendment the religious right could wipe out access to birth control, abortion, and even non-procreative sex" ["...behind this amendment: Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Gary Bauer, Robert Bork, Rick Santorum" - via Andrew Sullivan]. Maureen Farrell chronicles the power centers of the newly powerful religious right. Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind series, has the President's ear and this concerns more than jamming Creationism into your school's curriculum.
On the agenda - "The civil government of our nation, its laws, institutions, and practices must therefore be conformed to the principles of Biblical law as revealed in the Old and New Testaments." Writes Farrell - "How did this happen? - Voter apathy is the key to the phenomenal ascent of the Religious Right in the U.S. government." Pat Robertson, 1990 : "With the apathy that exists today, a small, well-organized minority can influence the selection of candidates to an astonishing degree."
posted on Mar-10-04 at 7:32 AM
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