Thursday, June 12

Meme-Watch: Hypermiling 

A Google Search

6/12/2008 10:57:00 PM   •  

Iraqis Condemn American Demands 

"High-level negotiations over the future role of the U.S. military in Iraq have turned into an increasingly acrimonious public debate, with Iraqi politicians denouncing what they say are U.S. demands to maintain nearly 60 bases in their country indefinitely.

Top Iraqi officials are calling for a radical reduction of the U.S. military's role here after the U.N. mandate authorizing its presence expires at the end of this year. Encouraged by recent Iraqi military successes, government officials have said that the United States should agree to confine American troops to military bases unless the Iraqis ask for their assistance, with some saying Iraq might be better off without them." (Washington Post)

6/12/2008 10:52:00 PM   •  

Justices Rule Terror Suspects Can Appeal in Civilian Courts 

SCOTUS sides with the Constitution, for once. (New York Times) In a 5-4 ruling, with the usual suspects in dissent, the Court ruled that denial of habeas corpus rights to the detainees is unconstitutional, and that they are to be heard in civilian courts. A monumental rebuff to the criminal dysadministration, but they got five years of illegal detention in under tthe belt before the rule of law reasserted itself.

6/12/2008 10:46:00 PM   •  

Apple's new iPhone augurs the inevitable return of the Bell telephone monopoly 

Tim Wu writes in Slate Magazine:

"The wireless industry was once and is still sometimes called a "poster child for competition." That kind of talk needs to end. Today, the industry is more like an old divorced couple; the bickering spouses are AT&T and Verizon, the two halves of the old Bell empire. (To its credit, the Bell company, in internal memos, proposed a wireless phone in 1915 and then spent 70 or so years deciding how to deploy it without hurting its wired-phone business.) While you can't blame this on the iPhone, nearly every non-Bell phone company is, in the long tradition of such firms, dying or being purchased. Sprint Nextel lost an astonishing $29.5 billion in a single quarter last year—a loss of nearly double the annual revenue of Google. Alltel, one of the last independents, is being bought by Verizon. The exception is T-Mobile, which, while healthy, simply doesn't have the spectrum to play with the bigs. By the end of this year, we may find that the wireless world, in industry structure at least, will be pretty close to where it was at the beginning of the 1990s, before 'deregulation.'"

6/12/2008 10:43:00 PM   •  

Wednesday, June 11

Camille Paglia on Obama, Hillary, etc. 

"Hillary's authentic contribution to feminism is to have demonstrated for the first time that a woman can win state primaries -- even if she needed her husband's help as well as racially divisive tactics to do so. This welcome development will surely encourage big donors to support future presidential campaigns by women, who (like Elizabeth Dole) were previously forced to drop out early for lack of funding. Obama's meteoric success will also benefit female candidates, who can hope to break out of the pack as suddenly as he did. Past predictors of electoral success have been exploded, and all bets are off.

...Hillary's sex helped her more than hurt her. What the media repeatedly claimed was her success in debate was predicated on her silencing of her male competitors, who were bullied into excess caution in dealing with a woman. Not one Democratic male dared attack or rebut her with the zest shown by all the Republican candidates jousting with each other. Hillary had to be coddled with elaborate deference -- or the delicate little woman would squawk bloody murder (as she did when she petulantly complained about always being given the first debate question). All of this rubbish was resurrected last week in the thousand mawkish excuses found by the media and her crooning acolytes for "giving her time" to withdraw from the race. No man would have been treated in that overconcerned way -- as a frail vessel of quivering emotion. Yet another blot on feminism, courtesy of Clinton, Inc.

And here’s another whopping female advantage: Hillary could jet around the country with an elaborate, color-keyed wardrobe and a professional hair and makeup crew, who plastered and insta-lifted her with dewy salon uber-ointments and cutting-edge technology before every appearance. No male candidate has ever had that theatrical privilege. (John Edwards, in contrast, was heaped with scorn for his simple yet pricey haircuts.) When the mega-prep for some reason failed -- as on a frigid morning in Iowa -- the resultant photo of Hillary in realistically wrinkled 60-year-old mode caused repercussions around the world. Golda Meir, with her robustly lived-in face and matriarchal jowls, would have given ever-primping Hollywood Hillary a derisive Bronx cheer.

There can be no doubt that Hillary's travails have reignited the feminist wars, which sputtered out in the mid-'90s after the rousing triumph of the insurgent pro-sex wing of feminism to which I belong. Grab your swords and saddle up, ladies! The spectral Steinem is clinging to Hillary like a limpet. Oh, and there's Susan Faludi wispily brooding in Steinem's papoose. Get ready to rumble: Male-bashing feminism is back with a vengeance. (Salon)

Point worth pondering, even though dedicated contrarian Paglia delights in skewering nothing more than feminist ideology. BTW, given how it transformed society in the last three decades, what would be so bad about finally introducing some male-bashing rhetoric to one of the last public bastions of sexism, the Jurassic political scene?

6/11/2008 07:42:00 AM   •  

Dennis Kucinich in the House of Representatives, June 9: 

"Resolved, That President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate..." (.pdf)

6/11/2008 12:52:00 AM   •  

Tuesday, June 10

Satellite Tracking 

"US and Canadian readers, enter your zip code below, hit Go!, and you will find out what is going to fly over your area in the nights ahead. There are hundreds of satellites in Earth orbit; we cut through the confusion by narrowing the list to a half-dozen or so of the most interesting. At the moment we're monitoring Jules Verne, the International Space Station, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Genesis prototype space hotel." (spaceweather.com)

6/10/2008 10:36:00 PM   •  

McCain Googling for VP? 

Choosing a vice president may not be that complicated after all. (Reuters)

6/10/2008 10:22:00 PM   •  

What will Bush be remembered for? 

Salon best of Table Talk:

• "... He's made us all aware that 'it can happen here.'
  
  
• His legacy? The next time you have a chance to vote for a president you would like to have a beer with ... DON'T.
  
  
• He's got some brush cleared. He lowered the bar for the next president. He almost succeeded in uniting the Democratic Party. No one has ever been able to do that.
  
  
• How can you call him a failure when he's achieved all that while taking a record number of vacation days?
  
  
• His nicknames for other people are sometimes borderline creative.
  
  
• He made it highly unlikely Jeb would get his chance.
  
  
• He put Crawford, Texas, on the map.
  
  
• And almost took New Orleans off it.
  
  
• He's shown us that it's okay to redefine words and phrases ('Mission Accomplished'?)."

6/10/2008 07:00:00 PM   •  

The George W Bush Presidential Library 

"Construction is now well underway. You'll want to be one of the first to make a contribution to this great man's legacy...

The library includes:

* The Hurricane Katrina Room (still in the planning stage).
* The Alberto Gonzales Archive, where no-one can find anything.
* The Texas Air National Guard Room. (Attendance optional.)
* The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they don't let you in.
* The Guantanamo Bay Room, where they don't let you out.
* The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room, which no-one has yet been able to locate.
* The Iraq War Room. Here, after you complete your first tour, you are routed onto second, third, fourth, and sometimes fifth tours.
* The Dick Cheney Room -- complete with shooting gallery -- in an undisclosed location.

Also included:

* The K-Street Project Gift Shop, where you can buy (or steal) an election.
* The Airport Men's Room, where you will be able to meet some of your favorite Republican senators.

To highlight President Bush's accomplishments, the museum will be equipped with an electron microscope to help you locate them.

The President has said that he doesn't care that much about the individual exhibits -- just that he wants his museum to be better than his daddy's." (wordwizard.com; thanks to pam)

There are no plans yet for where in the library to put the President's book (the librarians are still waiting for him to finish coloring it).

6/10/2008 06:59:00 PM   •  

Sunday, June 8

Digital Forensics: 

5 Ways to Spot a Fake Photo (Scientific American)

6/08/2008 08:04:00 PM   •  

Put Your Money Where Your Indie Rock Is 

Eliot Van Buskirk: "With CD sales declining and labels whining, it might seem crazy to view recorded music as fertile ground for investment. But for thousands of fans-turned-music-investors on SellaBand and Slicethepie, it makes perfect sense to gamble on a favorite band's future...

By having fans fund albums, these sites hope to channel money toward projects more likely to succeed. It's like holding a fundraiser to usurp the executive producer's traditional moneybags role, while crowdsourcing the A&R (artists and repertoire) guy's job." (Wired Listening Post)

6/08/2008 10:53:00 AM   •  

Who will Obama choose as veep? 

Nope, you're wrong: "The selection of a vice-presidential nominee is potentially the most important un-democratic election in the world, though Vladimir Putin might disagree. There is only one voter in each party -- and he certainly does not answer pesky questions from pollsters. The entire closed-doors decision-making process would be familiar to members of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. And the amazing thing about this traditional exercise of the divine right of presidential nominees is that nobody in America objects... [even in] a year when Democrats have been hyper-vigilant about any perceived deviation from voter sovereignty." (Salon)

6/08/2008 10:49:00 AM   •  

Where the Goblins Live 

"Gnomes are extremely small, human-like creatures who wear pointy red hats, all have beards (the men, not the women) and live in holes beneath the ground. They are benevolent, caring for animals, but also sympathetic to humans. Several subspecies can be distinguished: wood gnomes, garden gnomes, dune gnomes (at the coast), farm gnomes and mill gnomes. Or at least some people believe so; in the olden days, gnomes were an accepted fact of life, as is attested by the widespread knowledge of them, but their ever rarer sightings have confined them to the realm of folklore.

This map shows the extent of the gnome habitat in Europe: vast but fragmented, from Ireland in the west to an eastern boundary deep in Siberia, and from high up in Scandinavia to a southern limit running throught Belgium to Switzerland and down into the northern Balkan. Southern countries like France, Spain, Italy, Albania, most of ex-Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria and Greece are (almost) completely gnome-free. Heavy concentrations of gnomes can be found in the British Isles, Scandinavia, the Alps and Carpathians and areas of Belarus and the Ukraine." (Strange Maps)

6/08/2008 10:28:00 AM   •  

Peace and Justice are Breaking Out 

If you don't beleive it, read today's Google News front page.

6/08/2008 10:27:00 AM   •