moveon has an amazing video of donald rumsfeld getting caught up in the bush administration's web-of-lies. i think they ought to be running that on all the major networks.
the problem with this sort of playing policeman to catch them in the middle of their lies is that in the time it takes you to catch them, they've been busy spreading a whole new batch of lies and deceptions. dave johnson at see the forest says it pretty well:
Listen, there is something we all need to get through our heads. They just lie.
If the Bush people did a focus group and found out that people would vote against him because he owns a miniature green Chinese monkey with an earring, THEN WE WOULD BE HEARING THAT KERRY HAS A MINIATURE GREEN CHINESE MONKEY WITH AN EARRING! They are making it up, they are lying, they are going to say and do ANYTHING. OK? They just lie. Get used to it.
They just lie. So don't be surprised and don't be shocked. And most of all, don't start responding by trying to disprove their charges and going through all the points and specifics and particulars! YOU ALREADY KNOW THAT THE CHARGES THEY WILL MAKE TOMORROW AND NEXT WEEK ARE FALSE. OK?
i had an idea for an art project but since i'll never do anything with it i've decided to just post it here so i can say "man, i thought of that years ago" if i ever see it done.
there'd just be a bowl of fortune cookies sitting on a column in the middle of the gallery. you'd be encouraged to take a fortune cookie. instead of "fortunes" each piece of paper would have the subject line from a spam received by the artist.
i've got this little asus terminator pc that i got on close out from fry's. it came with some of the noisiest fans i've ever heard. i couldn't leave it on overnight or i'd end up having dreams involving heavy machinery.
last month, right around the time i'd moved, ordered some fans from silenx to replace them. well long story short, the post office lost the fans in the process of forwarding them to my new address and silenx was gracious enough to send me out another order. they arrived yesterday and i'm oh so happy. i turned the computer on and, well, couldn't even tell it was on.
if you're looking to reduce the db your box puts out, i can't recommend silenx highly enough.
this is finals week, i'm really just hoping to limp through the term. instead of studying i've spent the the last few days:
thomas friedman, the nytimes columnist that i once admired, has a new op ed discussing the reasons we don't need to fear outsourcing to india. if you boil it down he seems to be saying that they're uncreative and they live in poverty. aside from the semi-racist overtones, the question i've got is "how long will that last?". in the 1950s the only thing that came out of japan was cheap junk. that's changed.
the real gem is this line:
What would Indian techies give for just one day of America's rule of law; its dependable, regulated financial markets; its efficient, noncorrupt bureaucracy; and its best public schools and universities? They'd give a lot.
people in this country would give a lot for it too.
billmon has yet another excellent piece. this time he lays bare the us's coldwar system of "imperialism by remote control". he argues that we can't forget 9/11 because it is exactly that system, and americans' indifference to it, that caused 9/11.
What's most needed is for the American people to understand that the rules of the game have fundamentally changed.
To be completely blunt about it: The USA simply cannot fuck with rest of the world with impunity any more. There's now a very real, and potentially huge, price to be paid for playing the role of global cop (or global empire) while indulging in an essentially isolationist mindset at home. Little items like America's dependence on foreign oil, or its lockjawed support for the state of Israel, or the arrogance and corruption of the IMF, or the relentless drive to open up foreign markets to international trade and capital (what conservative scholar Andrew Bacevich calls the "ideology of openness") -- these all have consequences that extend way beyond the small coterie of intellectuals and interest groups that have traditionally dominated the U.S. foreign policy debate.
Ever since the end of the Vietnam War -- and even more, since the end of the Soviet Union -- there's been an unstated assumption in the American political sphere that U.S. interests abroad (whether geopolitical or economic or both) could be protected and advanced at relatively minimal cost to, or involvement by, the American people. A small, professional, high-tech military, heavily geared towards special forces and the application of air power, would permit narrowly targeted military interventions in the peripheral world, without the need for a large citizen army. A cadre of diplomats and technocrats would concentrate on opening economic doors -- and making sure they stayed open. Wall Street and the multinationals would provide the financial muscle, and supervise the care and feeding of local elites, while the intelligence agencies watched for any signs of a political backlash against the globalization agenda. Terrorism, if it was conceived as a threat, was seen as a threat from the left, motivated by economic or political grievances.
If all else failed, there were always those special forces.
rss, for the uninitiated, is the an XMLish format that lets websites publish lists of headlines/recent posts. my blog for instance has a feed, as do most. what an rss reader allows you to do is download the rss feed, parse it, and present it in a manner that lets you see the headline and tell if you've already read the current stories/posts.
my problem with most readers is their use of internet explorer as redering engine and i'm too much of a diehard mozilla fan to settle for any thing ie based. i'd tried using news monster, one java/mozilla based reader, but it never seemed stable. besides for the last 6 months i've moved from the mozilla suite to mozilla's next generation firefox/thunderbird browser/mail setup. yesterday, i finally found it, the holy grail: a firefox rss reader extension. it's pretty sweet, all y'all firebox users out there should go pick it up.
i guess ashcroft can cause too much trouble while he's in the hospital but maybe he'll recognize that it's a message from god that he needs to change his sinful ways... nah, i'm sure he'll be back on his feet, stomping on freedom in no time.
i was shocked to read william safffire coming out against gibson's religious snuff flick. i haven't seen it yet, i'm downloading it off the p2p networks. i really don't want to give gibson any money.