Rudy Giuliani is a mean, small, racially-motivated and purely political animal and always has been. Viz:

“We had no domestic attacks under Bush.”

Giuliani started the primary race for the Republican presidential nomination with a bang. That he was, for a while, running neck-and-neck with Hillary can be in no small part attributed to his near-constant reference to “9–11”. In fact, he quickly became known not as a “one-issue candidate” but as a “one-phrase candidate”. His orations were nothing... [More]

There are many admitted fans of The Big Lebowski and many of them are dedicated to the point of obsession. Into that category squarely falls Two Gentlemen of Lebowski by Adam Bertocci, which is the entire script of the film rewritten in the style of William Shakespeare.

This first sample is the first scene in the bowling alley where Smokey steps over the foul line and Walter takes offense.

The first decade of the twenty-first century brought with it much that is bad—global economic crash, increased American colonialism, increasingly harsh climate—but what is less-often mentioned is a feature primarily of American society that was quite aggravated throughout: Anti-intellectualism. Anyone who knows anything or bothers to educate themselves before opening up their big yap is often dismissed as a tool, a nerd, a bore. Instead, ample room was made in many a debate for anyone who... [More]

In search of the world’s hardest language (The Economist) is an interesting read, proposing candidates based on number of sounds, number of genders or genres, number of individual sounds, number of difficult-to-make sounds, number of consonants, consistency of spelling (adherence to consistent phonetic rules) or agglutination (combining of words to express concepts).

So, for example, spelling in French and English are not particularly predictive, so that makes them difficult to write error-free without a... [More]

Documentary buffs, rejoice! There are a lot of very good documentaries coming out of the not-quite-yet-a-police-state of America. The following are all worth a look (or a listen is enough in most cases) if you’re interested in what America’s really doing, where it’s headed and how the hell we got here. As they say, “no matter how far down the wrong road you’ve traveled, turn around (it ain’t gonna get any better until you do).”

The following order is by release date, not by preference or rating.... [More]

The full text of the article can be downloaded in PDF at In memoriam by David Foster Wallace (Harper's Magazine). All of the articles he published for that magazine are available there.

And, from the department of “it’s not just the U.S. doing it” comes this article, Police routinely arresting people to get DNA, inquiry claims by Alan Travis (Guardian), which the recently released results of an inquiry into the national DNA database maintained by the various police forces of the U.K.

Similar to U.S. policy when it comes to deciding on whom to keep an eye, the U.K. is strongly racially biased, with the report “raise[ing] the possibility that the DNA profiles of three-quarters of young black males, aged... [More]”

When it was revealed that the Bush administration was wire-tapping whomever the hell it pleased without a warrant, the country was up-in-arms for a minute or two. Once that barely risen dust had settled—with the Bush administration having changed its policy in no significant way—the American public consoled itself that at least the gross inefficiencies of government would prevent too many of them from being wiretapped.[1] Luckily, tons of tax dollars and the willing cooperation of large... [More]

Cited from the article Breaking the Australian Silence by John Pilger (Antiwar.com)

The first terrorist attempt in eight years means that everyone at the Department of Homeland Security has gotten their knickers in a twist…again. However, they should instead be delighted with the extraordinarily good numbers favoring the good guys. The good guys being those people who don’t want to blow up metal canisters full of innocent people just to prove a point.

The post, The Odds of Airborne Terror by Nate Silver (538.com), crunches the flight statistics for the last decade and comes up with “one terrorist... [More]”

A recent collection of photos called Eid al-Adha and the Hajj, 2009 (Big Picture Blog) included the following photo:

Saudi special forces display some of their skills and equipment during a ceremony as they prepare for the influx people to participate in the Hajj, in Arafat 15 kms outside of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Sunday, Nov. 22, 2009. (AP Photo/Issa Mohammad)

These Saudi soldiers’ uniforms looked awfully familiar. A little work with Google Images and I came up with the following image of actions figures from the mid-80's.

GI Joe Cobra Guards

The Saudi special forces’ uniforms are clearly based on those of the forces of Cobra in the G.I. Joe cartoon universe. I wonder how subconscious this was?

“Cap & Trade” is ostensibly a policy for controlling climate-change. Like many other bright ideas, while it is technically feasible on paper, it is unlikely to satisfy any of its purported ecological goals when actually used. Like communism or capitalism, it’s a system that only works if human beings don’t get involved. It won’t even get out the door before it’s corrupted to serve power and generate wealth for the already wealthy instead of actually controlling carbon output.

This may not be... [More]

We all do it. We all commit certain behaviors to habit so that we don’t have to think about them anymore. We don’t think about how we get to work in the morning or home again in the evening. We just take the right exit, the right stairway or get on the right train without a second thought, our bodies taking us where we need to go without any intervention from the brain.

So we all have these well-worn grooves along which we coast, using the energy we spare for other things—perhaps thinking... [More]

To egregiously paraphrase the Pascal quote cited later:

“A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

There is all too much substantiating evidence for this adage these days, especially if one spends too much time wallowing in what is often designated the MSM or [M]ain[S]tream [M]edia. Learning a little about something and beating everyone over the head with it is nothing new. Nor is the phenomenon wherein those who know the least make the most noise. It is very likely that things have... [More]

10/GUI by R. Clayton Miller documents a design proposal for a way to better incorporate multi-touch technology into everyday computing.

10/GUi by R. Clayton Miller

Executive summary:

• Your arms are too heavy to be able to multi-touch on-screen.
• Your arms and hands are not transparent.
• The mouse has only a single point of contact (not counting mouse-gesturing, which offers more degrees of freedom).
• What about putting the multi-touch surface on the table instead of on the screen?
• Manipulating classically clipped and overlapped windows is... [More]

Cultures that haggle[1] have a rule-of-thumb when making deals that is approximately: “If the customer/shopkeeper is smiling, you got screwed.” On the other hand, if you’re walking away with purchases under your arm and you can just hear the sound of someone cursing you and your ancestors over the sound of your whistling, then you got a good deal.

The title says it all: Healthcare industry stocks explode as bill progresses by Glenn Greenwald (Salon.com).

Wall Street has been doing a frenetic jig, rubbing itself to new heights... [More]

It’s actually not complicated at all, if you’re willing to open your mind to logic just a little bit and suspend your belief that Iran is a double-boiler of barely suppressed rage and killing mayhem. The post, Iran Isn’t The Problem, Stupid by Evert Cilliers (3QuarksDaily) sums it up in three sentences:

“Why might Iran want the bomb? Well, some damn foreigner invaded Afghanistan and Iraq on either side of Iran, killing and maiming people for nine years now. You’d have to be Amish not to look into a deterrent.”

When you put it... [More]

There’s a keyboard viewer stashed away in a very unintuitive place. These instructions assume you are using OS X English, but include steps for both Leopard and Snow Leopard (versions 10.5.x and 10.6.x respectively). Click the footnote links to jump to the screenshots below.

1. Select “System Preferences…” from the Apple in the top-left corner.
2. In Leopard, select the “International” icon in the top row (in Snow Leopard, it’s called “Language & Text”)
3. In Leopard, select the “Input Menu” page.... [More]

So, there’s this show on the Discovery Channel called Dirty Jobs starring a fella named Mike Rowe. He’s got an all-American blue-collar image and he’s popular enough with the geek crowd to have attracted the attention of Reddit, which invited him to answer some questions. The final question in this video involves his obvious appeal for the ladies: “Is there any chance you’ll stop having sex with my wife in her dreams?”

His answer is absolute comedy gold, from the writing to the timing to the... [More]

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace came out years ago and stunk up the place big time. Most of us just agreed that it sucked and that it spent way too much time on the stupid little kid and the even stupider Jar Jar Binks. The movie below builds a 70-minute thesis on the suckiness of SW:TPM with copious examples of how the older movies did everything better and a startlingly insightful analysis of plot devices and movie-making, in general.[1] You almost have to feel sorry for the older Lucas, because... [More]

Seventeen years ago, the nations of the world got together in Kyoto and agreed to a scheme that would bring climate change under control. After a round or ten of glad-handing and slapping one another on the back, they spent the intervening years ignoring all of the targets that they’d set, with some nations even backing out of the treaty entirely (I’m looking at you, GWB). The first world careened onward, pursuing “bigger, better, faster, more” without regard for the effects on the third world... [More]

So, after at least half a year of intense debate, political haggling and a spirited back-and-forth, we have the following ground-breaking legislation to transform the American health care system. In short, our legislators have determined that what we need is almost exactly that which we already have, but that we would like to pay much, much more for it.

1. It will cover more people.
2. It will be illegal to deny coverage for preëxisting conditions.

Negatives

1. It won’t be... [More]

The citation above was linked into a discussion on Reddit about the death penalty. At a guess, 90% of the participants... [More]

The New York Times thinks we’re mentally challenged; from today’s NY Times Front Page podcast:

“The MTA will be eliminating the W and Z lines.”

So far, so good. That’s the informative bit. They followed up with:

“As a result, some commuters will have to wait longer for trains.”

With a bit of editing, they could chop the podcast in half without losing any information at all.
 

The place: Norway; the occasion: the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech from the Master of Rhetoric.

Shorter Obama:

“Until America gets everything it could possibly want—which includes unlimited resources and a continuation unchanged of the lifestyle to which our richest have become accustomed—there’s gonna be war. Until America doesn’t experience pants-shitting terror every time another nation achieves even 1% of our glory, there’s gonna be war. Anyway, thanks for the award and thanks... [More]”

These are just rough notes to accompany the citations; the book was in German, but yours truly does not yet feel comfortable enough with his grasp of that language’s grammar to formulate the accompanying notes and thoughts in it. So, English it is. Apologies to all those who can only read half.

This small book quickly—so quickly—establishes the gulag life as normal that one hardly notices how restricted and miserable the lives of the inmates actually were because Schuchow’s[1] attitude was... [More]