As reported in Obama Ends Global Family Planning Restrictions by Julie Rovner (NPR), president Obama issued an executive order “rescinding a policy that since 2001 has barred U.S. financial aid to international family planning groups that “perform or promote” abortion.” That now-rescinded “global gag order” was also broadly used to funnel public funding to organizations whose primary measure in family planning was abstinence, with the expected scintillating results.[1] This is fantastic news, despite pro-life opponents... [More]

The following radio address is the speech given by Martin Luther King at Riverside Church in 1967. The full transcript is available from the UC Berkeley archives. In it, he talks for twenty-three minutes—at times employing exacting historical detail—about the Vietnam War and its effects on the Vietnamese, Americans and the U.S. role from the very beginning. This was back in ‘67, when many Americans were barely aware of the conflict in the first place. Listen to the speech below and hear a... [More]

The article Of the Algorithms, by the Algorithms, for the Algorithms by Chris Wilson (Slate) discusses the U.S. state-of-the-art in redistricting theory. The art/science of districting involves designing electoral districts to optimize representation. On paper, this optimization is supposed to focus on representing the people in a particular district. In practice, instead of being dividing by geography, districts are divided by prevailing ideology in order to stabilize that district—make it “safe”, in the... [More]

David Rees weighs in with possibly one of the last GYWO cartoons ever. He started about eight years ago and has moved on to videos instead. As usual, he manages to capture that which is most important out of the miasma of obfuscation that the mainstream media emits (as Homer Simpson put it: “It’s funny because he says what we’re all thinking.”

get your war on 81 − #6

And the money quote, transcribed for posterity.

“Oh, enough with all the “broad bipartisan” bullshit! Did Republicans not got [sic] their asses totally... [More]”

It seems everyone’s got ideas for the Obama administration. Organizations and causes that have had nothing to do with the office of the president for at least eight years are crawling out of the woodwork and once again offering up their agendas to the president-to-be’s scrutiny.

Those agitating for marijuana legalization seem much more hopeful than the situation warrants. Obama ran on a “law and order” ticket—interested in enforcing the laws the way they are—and, though he’s shown... [More]

The following post was written about a month ago and never published. The context is that of the show-throwing furor that has ebbed somewhat lately.

For a solid week, at least half of the political cartoon output of the world has involved shoes. It is well-known that the media suffers from a severe dearth of imagination but there is no reason to display this deficiency with such pride.

As far as shoes go, this author had two immediate thoughts on seeing the video footage:

1. Bush is pretty... [More]

1. A Widow for One Year (1998) – John Irving (second half)
2. Bleachers (2003) – John Grisham
3. The Glass Castle (2005) – Jeannette Walls
4. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) – C.S. Lewis
5. Tuesdays with Morrie (1997) – Mitch Albom
6. Die Weisse Massai (2000) – Corrine Hofmann (de)
7. The Kite Runner (2003) – Khaled Hosseini
8. A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) – Khaled Hosseini
9. The Book of Saladin (1998) – Tariq Ali
10. The Great Gatsby (1926) – F. Scott Fitzgerald
11. More Tales of the City (1980) –... [More]

The protest footage starts off promising, with the happy chant and music. A few seconds in, the lyrics are translated from the Hebrew as “bomb a ghetto, raise a cheer”. The event was attended by both New York Senator Charles Schumer and New York Governor David Paterson. If Hillary hadn’t been interviewing for her new job[1], she would doubtless have been there, dancing.

Pro-Israel Against Gaza by Max Blumenthal (YouTube)

Choice quotes from the interviewees in the street are:

“Nothing good is going to come of this; they’ve got to keep fighting... [More]”

Most of the news coming from the Obama transition team is about appointments to various positions within the administration. For those who voted for Obama because they thought he was a progressive, the appointments provoke reactions ranging from disappointed to appalled. For those who listened to the words coming out of Obama’s mouth during the campaign—instead of hearing a prettified translation in their own heads—Obama’s mostly center-right choices are unsurprising. Some are more utterly... [More]

Heavy Metal Band Names by Doogie Horner (Comics vs. Audience) (pictured below; click for larger version) offers a well-thought-out taxonomy of many heavy metal band names, with five main categories—Deadly Things, Death, Religion, Animals and Badass Misspellings—branching into over a dozen sub-categories, among them “Pleas for Help”, “Umlauts”, “Medieval” and so on. All in all, not a bad job at all.[1]

Heavy Metal Band Name Taxonomy

As the saying goes, everything can be made better with a liberal application of technology. With Guitar Hero and Rock Band making millions of people feel that they, too, could play music, even though they are, at best, doing an instrumental version of lip-syncing along with a recording, Microsoft Research throws Songsmith on the table in what they clearly feel is the answer to many people’s dreams—the dream of having a keyboard from the 80's back up your atrocious singing.

A visit to the... [More]

Check out the The 25 Most Commonly Misspelled Words quiz (for English, of course). I went in with an obnoxious braggadocio and walked out with a sobering 22 out of 25. Here are the words that I have newly learned how to spell:

• consensus (I chose “con[c]ensus”)
• perseverance (I chose “perse[r]verance”)
• supersede (I chose “super[c]ede”)

The title of the quiz is a bit misleading, as it’s not clear to what the word “commonly” refers. While the words are not extremely rare, they also don’t come... [More]

The latest series of pictures, Scenes from the Gaza Strip (Big Picture), has some pictures of the conflict that have squeezed out of the area, despite the blockade on reporters in the area. Two that stood out in particular for the contrast were these two:

The Hamas rocket lies in the road in which it barely made a dent on impact. The winter ice in upstate New York does more damage to a road than that rocket. Not to make light of a metal tube falling out of the sky,... [More]

The video below is interesting and starts off strong, though the lengths a CNN anchor feels he has to go to in order to report a fact that runs counter to the standard received wisdom are ridiculous. Once the facts have been presented, however, the co-anchor (you’ll forgive me for not having noted the names of what looked like two guys transported from Monday Night Football to the news desk) ignores them and plows forward with more-or-less the standard line. After one more attempt to get an... [More]

The first film is called Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West. It is of interest for one main reason: a DVD containing the film was sent to 28 million households in America in the last month leading up to the 2008 election. The primary sponsor of what is estimated to be a $50 million marketing campaign is completely separate from the pro-Israeli organization that has the same address and three of the same original founders.[1]

The film is almost pure propoganda, shot very nicely, but... [More]

Though many say that the tendency to question authority fades with age, there are several notable exceptions.

One is[1] Harold Pinter, the legendary British playwright, who was outspoken critic of war—the Iraq War in particular—and of the British role in it. His Nobel acceptance speech, called “Art, Truth and Politics” by Harold Pinter (Democracy Now!) (Part 1) and Part 2, is absolutely fantastic and worth listening to all the way through. The links contain video, audio and transcripts.

“The United States supported the... [More]”

826 Valencia is “dedicated to supporting students ages 6–18 with their writing skills, and to helping teachers get their students excited about the literary arts.” They’re in San Francisco and take advantage of the strange work hours and free time of the average freelance writer to provide afternoon tutoring to students who need more one-on-one time. The “store” that they run doesn’t look like a tutoring center; instead, it’s a pirate supply store. There are similar venues in Brooklyn... [More]

It looks like Thomas Friedman really does know where the wind blows, on which side his bread is buttered and so on and so forth. Now that it’s politically safe to do so, he’s going full-bore liberal and no longer arguing how flat the world is or how awesome it is that people around the world can buy a Lexus. Time to Reboot America rips the U.S. government for having gotten into the mess it’s in, one very analogous to that in which General Motors finds itself. His column is kind of short, so he... [More]

Extracted from a PowerPoint show that made the rounds via email a while ago; there were more, but some were clearly photoshopped[1] or just dumb.

Improvisation

Improvised HardhatImprovised JackImprovised Scaffold Leveling

Ladders

Power Tools and Swimming PoolsLadder Extension

Trust

Painting the Last SpotAn Exercise in Trust

This picture from The Year 2008 in Photographs (Big Picture Blog) is absolutely mind-blowing:

“Kerby Brown rides a huge wave in an undisclosed location southwest of Western Australia July 6, 2008, in this picture released November 7, 2008 by the Oakley-Surfing Life Big Wave Awards in Sydney.”

The article, What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting by Randall Stross (NY Times) digs into the pricing and cost structures for text messages (SMS’s[1]) sent via cell phone. It cites astounding numbers of messages sent per year and talks about 10-fold growth in messaging across the spectrum and around the world, but the upshot is: transmitting text messages costs next to nothing so long as an infrastructure for transmitting telephone calls is already in place. That is, the graph of cost to number of messages... [More]

It’s hard to tell which round they’re on, but Israel is winning this one decisively; as of this morning, the score—in human lives, of course—is nearly 400 to 2[1], according to the BBC. Israel would dispute this—of course—because they don’t agree that Palestinians are human. According to Israel, there is no such thing as a Palestinian civilian, since, in the words of one commenter[2], “[t]hey’re all guilty, and paying the price for their recklessly voting into power the murderous zealots of... [More]”

Bill Watterson understood how things worked 15 years ago, which is pretty much how things still work today (click to see a larger version).

Calvin's Premium Lemonade Stand

The date for the cartoon was obtained from this comment, Re: $8.4 BILLION Profit for Oil Giant (This Quarter Only!) and the image originally found on the Truth About Cars blog. Another full transcript of the cartoon is available at Recurring themes in Calvin and Hobbes; Wikipedia, the original source has since been edited and longer contains it. Such... [More]