Is this the 80s?

It's certainly sounding a LOT like the 80s. For those who don't remember, that was a time when certain politicians participated in a class war against the poor and the middle class while funneling money to the most wealthy of the country (trickle down economics). They even had the chutzpah to label those who disagreed with their policies as socialists participating in class warfare. Well, some of us were...

Facing a huge deficit and a looming deadline to concoct a budget agreeable to both chambers of Congress, lawmakers recently made a number of decisions that would adversely affect the poorest and least-influential people in the United States. In the name of cost cutting, several Senate and House committees agreed to or proposed to slash huge amounts of money from several key anti-poverty programs, including Medicaid, Medicare and food stamps last week.

The proposals arise from Congress’s need to reconcile competing Senate and House appropriations packages. The final package is expected within the next few weeks. Both houses are also considering steep tax cuts and possibly expanding a number of exemptions that would directly benefit the nation’s wealthiest.

Studies went on to prove that trickle down economics really didn't work. Bush the first even tried to stem the tide of some of the more Draconian effects of the theory by working with Congressional Democrats to balance the budget. Of course, in order to do so he had to break his "No new taxes" pledge and was promptly punished for that by corporate America (a redundant phrase if ever there was one). In the report above we see 2 staples of trickle down economics: a) tax cuts to the wealthy instead of tax increases to balance the budget (why shouldn't the wealthy be more than happy to contribute more during war time?) and b) no mention of reducing Pentagon expenditures which outnumber most of the other countries in the world combined. For a pro-life party, Republicans sure love to promote weapons of mass destruction and death.

Belt buckle

Quick! Buy one for someone you love!

Sexploitation posters

Definitely NSFW: Posters and lobby cards.

Dickie's Quickies

Please note the new Support the Commons button on the left margin. The Creative Commons needs a lot of small donations from many donors in order to maintain its charitable status with the IRS. Give a little and spread the word.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science and 2 other scientific bodies are using copyright laws to combat so-called "intelligent design" theories in Kansas.

AAAS has long held that students are ill-served by any effort in science classrooms to blur the distinction between science and other ways of knowing, including those concerned with the supernatural.

After carefully reviewing the latest version of the standards, the leadership of the National Academies’ National Research Council and the National Science Teachers Association have decided they cannot grant the Kansas State School Board permission to use substantial sections of text from two standards-related documents: the research council’s National Science Education Standards and Pathways to Science Standards, published by NSTA. The organizations sent letters to Kansas school authorities on Wednesday, Oct. 26 requesting that their copyrighted material not be used.

SweetDaddy Tiki's Mugshot Gallery. Zen for the day.

Zen of another, NSFW, flavor: a blogger shares images scanned from The Erotic Coloring Book. Click on each image for the full view.

This video (fairly large .mov file) for Taiwanese rock band LTK Commune features a catchy, bouncy tune paired with images of a man taking a chainsaw up the butt, an elderly woman grabbing some guy in the crotch, a poorly done version of rope tricks in an S/M way, and a couple (blurred) screwing. It's all done in good fun which, from what I can tell is mocking the tabloid press...I think.

Dyson visits Google

George Dyson paid a visit to Google's headquarters in California and, luckily for us, he wrote a fascinating essay about it.

We can divide the computational universe into three sectors: computable problems; non-computable problems (that can be given a finite, exact description but have no effective procedure to deliver a definite result); and, finally, questions whose answers are, in principle, computable, but that, in practice, we are unable to ask in unambiguous language that computers can understand.

We do most of our computing in the first sector, but we do most of our living (and thinking) in the third. In the real world, most of the time, finding an answer is easier than defining the question. It's easier to draw something that looks like a cat, for instance, than to describe what, exactly, makes something look like a cat. A child scribbles indiscriminately, and eventually something appears that resembles a cat. A solution finds the problem, not the other way around. The world starts making sense, and the meaningless scribbles (and a huge number of neurons) are left behind.

This is why Google works so well. All the answers in the known universe are there, and some very ingenious algorithms are in place to map them to questions that people ask.

Another quiz

You are a Gender Nazi. Your boundary-crossing
lifestyle inspires awe in your friends and
colleagues. Or maybe they're just scared you
will kick their asses for using gender-specific
language. Either way, the wife-beater helps.


What kind of postmodernist are you!?
brought to you by Quizilla

From the mouths of babes...

..."The reason for not misleading the Congress is a very practical one," said Rep. Richard Cheney, R-Wyo. "It's stupid. It's self-defeating ... Eventually you destroy the president's credibility." ...

-- From a July 20, 1987 Associated Press report on the Iran Contra investigation.

And this, Rep. Richard Cheney (R-Wyoming], vice chairman of the House committee, at the conclusion of public hearings on the Iran-Contra affair, as reported by the AP, August 4, 1987:

...Mr. Chairman, I think it's _ a couple of quick points I would like to make in closing. Questions have been raised about why we had these committees established. I think it was preordained that there would be such an investigation once it became clear the administration was trading arms to Iran. Congress clearly has a legitimate role of oversight in reviewing the conduct of foreign policy by the administration, and the president himself supported these activities and encouraged us to form these select committees.

I also think it's important that credit be given to the president. He's given his complete cooperation and support to our investigation throughout. He's provided administration witnesses without ever claiming executive privilege, provided thousands of pages of documents, classified and unclassified, provided access to his own personal diary, and given these committees and the nation an in-depth look at some of the most sensitive and excruciatingly painful events of his administration....

It takes a strong, confident leader to subject himself and his administration to the very thorough nature of this congressional investigation. And we are here today, concluding the public phase of our hearings, on time, in large part because of the president and his administration.

President Reagan has enjoyed many successes during his more than six years in office, clearly, this was not one of them.

As the president himself has said, mistakes were made...

Clearly, there is plenty of work to be done if Congress is going to equip itself to play a constructive role in the conduct of U.S. _ U.S. foreign policy in the years ahead. And I fervently hope that future presidents will take away from these hearings one important lesson, that no foreign policy can be effective for long without the wholehearted support of the Congress and the American people. It is often easier to develop a policy to be pursued overseas than it is to muster the political support here at home to sustain it. Covert action has its place in the kind of world we live in, but it is no substitute for the kind of effective political leadership that brings around a recalcitrant Congress and persuades the American people of the importance of supporting those who share our faith in democracy.

Text copied from Laura Rozen, who goes on to write:

And ask yourself this. When Congress and the relevant committee leadership knows it's being stonewalled, when it doesn't say a word (until the eve of an investigation's anticipated indictments that could embarrass it), when it doesn't use its Constitutional powers and access to the American public to demand compliance, when it pretends that there's nothing even there to investigate, then who really is at fault? The stonewaller? Or the stonewallee? And would you call the problem stonewalling at all? Or collusion?

Three things that will not get you laid

and, if they do, then you should be suspect of whom you're sleeping with:

1) Boob scarves
2) Vagina Panties (scroll down for the penis boxers)
3) Naked People sheets.

Forgot this one!

Definitely, not safe for work. Italian art collection of sexy, erotic, and some pornographic illustrations. The one above is by Julie Bell. There is a ton of variety on this site.

Women in British Advertising in WWII

Some great ads and magazine covers.

Friday art sampling

Two, including a seasonally correct one, by Robh Ruppel. Second link is directly to his site.


Claire Wendling


Kenichi Nakane



The two above are from the French design firm, Agent 002. Lots of terrific art there in a variety of styles.


Sam Cobean


Thorsten Hasenkamm

Shocked!

That's sarcasm, folks. I've longed complained that H-1B visas were primarily a tool for corporations to import foreign workers in an effort to suppress tech job wages locally. It's simply cheaper for a company to import workers here than to build a factory overseas and, if they can get Congress to do their bidding, then all the better. Mind you, I don't have a problem with foreign workers. On the contrary, I wish that labor standards were better world wide and that workers - citizens of the world that elect the governments - were allowed the same fluidity that corporations currently have.

This article in InfoWorld, titled, "The H-1B Swindle" is hardly surprising to me.

Terrorism is spelled B-I-N-G-O

Kentucky officials have gotten a grant to protect Bingo halls from terrorism.

Lovely art

From Mu Pan

Dickie's Quickies

Ugh...the lawn just about did me in yesterday, but after 2 breaks and over 2 hours, it is done.

Sadly, singer Shirley Horn has died. She was truly a jazz great.

New Orleans' residents are wondering if they'll have homes to return to or if they will be displaced again by greedy developers. Will this nation allow this to happen to our neighbors?

Concerned New Orleans homeowners are anxious to return to the city, fearful that developers or government authorities will steal their land. Many are alarmed by reports that the government is planning to bulldoze swaths of low-income communities, including many properties in the heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward.

New Orleans homeowner and ACORN activist Derwin Hill said, "They’re picking homes that really could be, you know, put back together. And they want to just wipe out the whole area."

Hill predicted that those whose homes were completely destroyed, or who lack the financial resources or insurance money to hold onto damaged property, might be preyed upon by real-estate speculators seeking "to buy them out cheaply. They’re not going to get what their property’s worth."

Search engine

Exalead is a pretty cool search engine. It uses RSS, separates returns into a variety of categories, and will also located country and/or continent of the web page location so you can more localize your search.

Pretty quiet today: Long work week and mile high grass that needs to be addressed. Be back ASAP.

Heard back from The Seattle Times

I got an email this afternoon from David Birdwell, National/Foreign News Editor at the Seattle Times regarding my opinions about omissions in stories printed in the Times within a week of each other (on 2 different occassions) that served to mislead readers. As noted, I do not think that this is a conspiracy of any sort, but rather a couple of mistakes that perhaps needed to be pointed out and corrected. From Mr. Birdwell's reply:

Mr. Stringfellow:

Thanks for the note. It's always nice to hear from somebody who is so obviously informed and reasoned.

You make a lot of good points.

Regarding the Sandi Doughton piece concerning George Taylor, I think our wire desk generally does a good job of reading the newspaper. Of course, nobody sees every single thing written by every other department. People go out of town, take vacations, have family emergencies, etc. In a perfect world, our environmental reporters would take a look at all our environmental wire stories, and vice-versa, but only the largest publications have that kind of manpower. Our local reporters have their projects, and our wire editors have only so many hours in the day. I think the Times has an excellent wire operation; we do so much more with our wire report than other newspapers in our circulation class. That said, we can't always spend as much time as we'd like on every story. As in every profession, it's a matter of priorities.

Fair enough. As I said, I just wanted to raise it up a notch. It continues:

Some other things to consider: The Doughton piece and The Washington Post story you cite are apples and oranges. Doughton's package was as comprehensive as anything we do, examining many different factors on both sides of the argument. She literally had months to work on that package. In contrast, The Post article was short in length, and I'm not sure it would have been the best use of space to spend several paragraphs poking holes in Taylor's credentials; it's also not fair to refute the credibility of the only critic in the story.

Here, we disagree a bit. Yes, the stories are apples and oranges to some extent, but not for the reasons cited. Both stories were about Global Warming. The Doughton piece, however, is how the media manipulates public opinion in the debate by allowing skeptics with suspect credentials to post views without mentioning either the credentials or offering rebuttal of the skeptics so that it appears that Global Warming is a hotly debated topic amongst scientists. Ms. Doughton pointed out herself that the vast majority of scientists agree that the planet is warming and that man made causes are part of the problem. She said, however, that the media, by presenting energy-funded skeptics who are sometimes not peer reviewed publishers, gives the public the impression that the debate is 50-50 when it's really 99-1 with the majority believing global warming is an issue. So, yes, the pieces are apples and oranges in that the Washington Post piece published later is actually an example of Ms. Dougton's reporting, complete with using a skeptic who was debunked in her article. Note Mr. Birdwell's comment about fairness. That's exactly the problem: how fair is it to print the skeptic's views without also telling readers that his project was funded by Exxon, et al, and that he has never published in peer review journals? How is that fair to readers? Since when does "fairness" or "balance" give way to veracity of the story; the integrity of the news reported?

The rest of the letter:

As for the flu-vaccine story, yes, I'm sure there are many reasons why we aren't prepared for a potential flu pandemic, and I'm sure the government deserves a good deal of the blame. Yes, the story would have been better with the previous elements that you cite. It's a matter of time and resources. To be honest, the Chicago Tribune story arrived very late in the evening, and we had to react quickly to even put it in the newspaper. This is the case with many stories from papers such as the Tribune, LA Times, Washington Post, etc.

I think your comments are worth noting, and I will pass them along to my staff. They're worthy of consideration. We will continue to try to do better. I ask in return that you give consideration to the things that I have mentioned.

All good points and I accept them at Mr. Birdwell's words. It's good that the Times replied and I think that they generally do a good job. These just happened to be two glaring instances that I wanted to bring to their attention so that they can improve their product.

Silly patent

A cereal bar (who knew?) chain has threatened a lawsuit against against another cereal restaurant based on apparent patent rights to pouring milk into cereal. From FreeCulture.org:

Cereality has patents pending to give them an exclusive right to six business methods, including "displaying and mixing competitively branded food products" and adding "a third portion of liquid." If these patents are approved by the U.S. Patent Office, Cereality would have a complete monopoly on cereal bar business--just for being the first to put together the legalese necessary to describe mixing breakfast cereal.

Dickie's quickies

Tiki-Tim's has some new Halloween postings: albums featuring The Munsters and, separately, Boris Karloff.

U.S. News is reporting that some members of the White House staff are considering what would happen if Dick Cheney is prosecuted and resigns. They do admit it's idle speculation at the moment, but some have floated Kindasleazy Rice as a possibility. There is some opposition to such a notion:

The rumor spread so fast that some Republicans by late morning were already drawing up reasons why Rice couldn't get the job or run for president in 2008.

"Isn't she pro-choice?" asked a key Senate Republican aide. Many White House insiders, however, said the Post story and reports that the investigation was coming to a close had officials instead more focused on who would be dragged into the affair and if top aides would be indicted and forced to resign.

The key Senate Republican aide did not go on to say, "My God, and she's a woman, too. Plus, she's black, which puts her one step behind Libby Dole. And who would take her seriously with that back to front comb over? Did you know she got a melatonin transplant from Michael Jackson? Just a rumor, but I've heard whispers."

The Financial Times is reporting that Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Chief of Staff, confidant, and friend to Colin Powell for 16 years, is the latest former staffer to break his silence on his views on what has gone wrong in this White House. Long quote from the article:

“What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

“Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.”

...

Among his other charges:

■ The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was “a concrete example” of the decision-making problem, with the president and other top officials in effect giving the green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. “You don't have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you've condoned it.”

■ Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser and now secretary of state, was “part of the problem”. Instead of ensuring that Mr Bush received the best possible advice, “she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president”.

■ The military, particularly the army and marine corps, is overstretched and demoralised. Officers, Mr Wilkerson claimed, “start voting with their feet, as they did in Vietnam. . . and all of a sudden your military begins to unravel”.

Mr Wilkerson said former president George H.W. Bush “one of the finest presidents we have ever had” understood how to make foreign policy work. In contrast, he said, his son was “not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either”.

“There's a vast difference between the way George H.W. Bush dealt with major challenges, some of the greatest challenges at the end of the 20th century, and effected positive results in my view, and the way we conduct diplomacy today.”

So, Kindasleazy Rice would side with her husband the president to build her intimacy with her husband the president? Maybe she is in for the VP job?

Walker in UK harassed by police for using cycling path

Sally Cameron was walking on a cycling path to work. Apparently such disregard for rules leads one to be suspected of being a terrorist in the UK. And you thought that the U.S. was the only one who had it bad.

She said: “I’ve been walking to work every morning for months and months to keep fit. One day, I was told by a guard on the gate that I couldn’t use the route any more because it was solely a cycle path and he said, if I was caught doing it again, I’d be arrested.

“The next thing I knew, the harbour master had driven up behind me with a megaphone, saying, ‘You’re trespassing, please turn back’. It was totally ridiculous. I started laughing and kept on walking. Cyclists going past were also laughing.

“But then two police cars roared up beside me and cut me off, like a scene from Starsky and Hutch, and officers told me I was being arrested under the Terrorism Act. The harbour master was waffling on and (saying that), because of September 11, I would be arrested and charged.”

Ms Cameron, who said that at one stage one of the officers asked her to stop laughing, described the incident as “like a scene from the movie Erin Brockovich, with all the dock workers cheering me and telling me to give them hell”. She said: “I was told that the cycle path was for cyclists only, as if walkers and not cyclists were the only ones likely to plant bombs. There are no signs anywhere saying there are to be no pedestrians.

“They took me to the police station and held me for several hours before charging me and releasing me.”

She said that she was particularly galled by the letter from the procurator fiscal’s office, which said that she would not be prosecuted even though “the evidence is sufficient to justify bringing you before the court on this criminal charge”.

Keith Berry, the harbour master at Forth Ports Dundee, said yesterday that Ms Cameron had been seen as a “security risk”. Speaking about the incident, which took place in May, he said: “We contacted the police in regards to this matter because the woman was in a secure area which forbids people walking. It was seen as a security risk. We were following guidelines in requirement with the port security plan set up by the Government.”

A spokesman for Forth Ports said: “We will robustly prosecute anyone who breaches these new security measures because they have been introduced by the Government and we are obliged to enforce them.”