The movie below is called Imperial History (1.1MB) and documents the occupation of the Middle East, Asia and northern Africa over the last 5000 years.

The following empires ruled over smaller and larger swatches of land throughout recorded history. The dates given are approximate and estimated from the movie. The names and ordering are correct. And, yes, there is overlap: that’s kind of the way it with empires.

• Kingdom of Egypt (3000 BC − 1380 BC)
• Hittite Empire (1400 BC -1050 BC)
• Kingdom... [More]

Howie Hawkins for SenateThe mid-term elections are real; the United States will do its best to keep up the pretense of democracy this fall, if only to satisfy the UN inspectors and to show the world we still know how it’s done. We’re 0-2 (keep messing up the clean landing) in the last two and our much-(self)-vaunted efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq have failed to impress.

The midterms are so called because they come in the middle of a presidential term and offer only senators and congressmen instead of the big... [More]

World leaders recently gathered at the U.N. headquarters in New York City to exchange ideas on how to move forward into the 21st century. The speeches of Bush, Ahmadinejad and Chavez were given the most coverage, though not necessarily for the right reasons. Morales of Bolivia tried to upstage Chavez by smuggling in a coca leaf; this gimmick was drowned in angry replies to Chavez’s correlation of president Bush with a whiff of brimstone. As usual, the media made the most noise about the least... [More]

Our corpulent body of state awoke from an uneasy slumber this week, heaving its bulk upward and exposing long-neglected folds to the harsh glare of sunlight, emitting a noxious stench that caused many a man to quail and many a gorge to rise. This flabby, pale underbelly represents America’s long love affair with ignoring the golden rule and with having its cake and eating it too. We need, in a word, torture. And we need it bad.

George Bush[1] is our undisputed champion, striding confidently... [More]

Keith Olbermann has been given quite a bit of leeway to pound the drum for the overtly liberal media. His most recent work is this 8 minute speech—quite erudite and extremely critical of the president—demanding an apology from George Bush.

’Countdown with Keith Olbermann’ for Sept. 11 by Keith Olbermann (MSNBC) is the full transcript (search about 75% of the way down the page). He lambastes the Bush administration—in particular Bush and Cheney—for daring to deem everyone who doesn’t kowtow before them as “soft... [More]

In the world of club sports, advertising is everywhere. Though the US has thus far resisted the urge to plaster corporate logo all over its players, Europe has long since capitulated to this lucrative source of financing. Ice hockey teams look like a unicorn ate too many jelly beans and threw up rainbows all over the ice—potheads would love it if the guys just wouldn’t move so quickly. Football[1] players look marginally better, their team owners usually restraining themselves to a single logo... [More]

November Prognostication by Ben Tripp (CounterPunch) has an ironclad list of reasons for why the Republicans will not be swept from power this November, as so many in the liberal media are predicting. Hint: they’re the same reasons that they won the last two national elections and enjoy a majority in all three branches of government. Not much has changed, so there’s no need to change tactics—tactics that only have to work on the small minority of Americans that can ever be bothered to vote in a mid-term election anyway.... [More]

Manuel II PaleologusDo not be alarmed. Though the pope has been in headlines lately, he has not been kidnapped, conceived a child with Britney Spears or baptized Suri Cruise (which would be awesome). It must be a slow news week, because the global media monster heaved its noisome bulk in a slightly different direction, using the Pope’s pointy hat to poke at the hornet’s nest of Islamofascism. With news of terror on the wane, it was about time we had our fears squarely refocused on the 21st century’s answer to... [More]

Received via email from several sources (and rewritten to satisfy the excruciatingly high standards here at earthli News):

One day, during a daily briefing, Donald Rumsfeld told president Bush that 3 Brazilian soldiers had been killed in Iraq.

Upon hearing this, the president froze and all the color ran from his face. He slumped forward, head in hands and whimpered softly.

After what seemed like an eternity, he composed himself and asked,

“Just exactly how many is a brazillion?”

It’s the... [More]

This essay is written as a response to the CPU giveaway by Wil Shipley (Call Me Fishmeal).

I double-click the GTA: San Andreas icon and watch, relieved, as the Windows desktop fades to black.

*Churn*

The intro graphic’s looking a little pink.

Drat. The font’s messed up.

*Restart game*

Again with the pink logo, but the font’s ok. Let’s load up a saved game and do some driving. Funky music accompanies the fade from the loading screen to Carl’s back. A quick look around confirms that Carl was taking some serious psychadelics... [More]

“Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”

“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”

“Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to to, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.”

Mahmoud Talkin' TrashIn the article, Iran TV debate challenge to Bush (BBC), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad throws down the gauntlet and challenges Bush to a live televised debate to “let both sides air their views uncensored”. Uncensored in Iran, maybe. But if Americans aren’t allowed to see Janet Jackson’s pierced nipple, you can bet your ass they won’t be seeing George Bush get his ass handed to him by a the president of Iran. No worries there, though, as the US pooh-poohed the suggestion, calling it a “diversion from global... [More]”

In order to enhance the learning process, the lessons learned will come first:

1. Using the “Hibernate” feature will eventually bite you in the ass
2. Hibernating while using an external monitor as the primary display is a bad idea if that display will not be around when Windows re-animates
3. Doing step (2) while attached to a display that is rotated 90 degrees is a sure-fire way to see things in Windows XP you haven’t seen since Windows 3.1.

In order to begin a rip-roaring rollercoaster of an... [More]

This photo montage of Postcards from Ken Lay (Whitehouse.gov) is one way to speculate a happy ending for the thousands of former Enron employees who may not have yet seen their way to forgiving “Kenny Boy” with quite the same fawning sycophantism to wealth mustered by Bush and his cronies.

Kenny and Dick: a Missed Connection?

Imagining the Tenth Dimension is a web-site dedicated to the book of the same name by Rob Bryanton. With a resounding recommendation by none other than Greg Bear, this book explores a universe of ten dimensions, as put forth in string theory. The preamble contains the following disclaimer text:

“The “theory of reality” that I advance on this website and in the book “Imagining the Tenth Dimension” is not the one that is commonly accepted by today’s physicists. Anyone wanting to know more about... [More]”

One Year Performances is a website dedicated the performance art work of Tehching Hsieh, who, during the late 70s and early 80s, did some simple, elegant pieces that tested the limits of human endurance. Each piece has a simple rule, by which he lived for one year.[1]

This Flash video, Oreos by Ben Cohen (TrueMajority), uses dessert to focus your attention on the ridiculous numbers in the US federal budget. The first illustration (below) shows the size of the military budget as compared to the sizes of other portions of the federal budget. On the one hand, he’s conveniently left off Social Security and Medicare (the two biggest non-military programs in the federal budget), but on the other, he’s only included the official Pentagon budget, which does not include Homeland Security’s... [More]

“You dance with the ones that brung ya, I guess.”

Even the most clear-thinking among us—those used to examining every last assumption and idea implicit in their attitudes and opinions—fall occasionally into the trap of widely held prograndistic notions. Crime and Punishment by Billmon (Whiskey Bar) has an excellent article on the recent Supreme Court decision—5–4, of course—which firmly applied the Geneva conventions to all prisoners, including enemy combatants and any other fantastical definions invented by the ruling plutarchy to deceive themselves and... [More]

Steve Yzerman retiresSteve Yzerman has retired from the NHL. He played for the Detroit Redwings all 23 years of his career, leading them to 3 Stanley Cups and 21 playoff appearances. He’s even got an Olympic gold medal, which he won with Canada when they could still play international hockey. ‘Captain’ forever has a place in hearts of Detroiters tells his story.

“There’s not a statistic for heart, but Yzerman would be the unquestioned record-holder. Through the years, he’s had five knee surgeries and lost all his... [More]”

The Bible is Bullshit is a video of an old Penn and Teller show[1] in which they spend some time gleefully debunking some of the more obvious contradictions in the bible. They actually provide a lot of decent historical background from the annals of biblical scholarship, which basically accepts that the bible is a work of man and has made some inroads into discovering exactly which men wrote which parts and when.

The biblical scholar they interview is completely incapable of formulating an... [More]

Biggest. Fireworks. Ever.

The shuttle program is 25 years old now and, ever since the 2003 crash of the Columbia, which was caused by pieces falling off, has had a much more touch-and-go feel to it—which is certainly attractive to NASCAR fans nationwide. As noted in the article, Shuttle fears over foam lost in blast-off (Telegraph.co.uk), the liftoff was not error-free, but the problems were well within expectations:

“‘This isn’t too abnormal,‘ said Bill Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator for spaceflight. ‘We fully expected to... [More]”

“Zuerst hatten wir kein Glück, und dann kam auch noch Pech dazu.”

'Ladder' in the SubwaySome artists in Bayview Subway Station, Toronto got together to create perspective art at a subway. The paintings are deliberatly distended in order to fool the eye into thinking that it is a three dimensional object. The picture of the ladder to the left is a pretty good example. I’m not sure how they make these—whether they really can draw the false persepective from their mind’s eye or whether they work from a sketch or design prepared beforehand. At any rate, these remind me of the... [More]

Map of World ReligionsWadsworth Religion Course Guide Religion Maps offers a colorful look at geographic distribution of world religions and religious sites in both the ancient and modern worlds. Leaving out religion is the Contemporary World Map, which shows all of those countries from the World Cup that no one could find. Note that the inside of Africa’s elbow seems to be especially conducive to football, as the Ivory Coast, Ghana and Togo are all neighbors there. Most interesting is the map shown in thumbnail to... [More]

The International Philosophy World Cup brought to you by Monty Python—Greeks vs. Germans in a knock-down drag-out battle of the philophosers on a football pitch. If the embedded video below doesn’t work, try this link to the video at YouTube. It’s a touch on the long side, but the closing flurry of announcing makes it worth watching the whole thing:

“The Germans are disputing it. Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant via the... [More]”

The last couple of days have been pretty lackluster for football, from the Holland–Portugal disaster, wherein 16 yellow cards and 2 red cards were dished out to the two out-of-control teams, to the Italy–Australia and Switzerland–Ukraine games, which treated us to over 200 minutes of scoreless football. 200 minutes of master class in defense and all of the buzz today is about diving in the penalty box. The day before, Germany took an early two goal lead and sat on it for a further boring 80... [More]

Attack #1Attack #2Attack #3Animator vs. Animation is a Flash animation that shows what happens when creative differences arise between the drawer and the drawee. In this one, an animator quickly becomes hostile to a freshly-minted stick figure drawing, which takes umbrage to the violence, using the environment (Macromedia Flash itself) to retaliate. It’s very cleverly done and very convincingly animated, giving the impression that the figure is actually fighting for its very life, using bow and arrow against an... [More]