About a week ago, the Obamians released a black and white video (YouTube) supporting their candidate. It features an acoustic guitar as accompaniment to snippets of Obama’s most inspiring words[1] as spoken by him and sung or intoned by various other famous persons. It was pretty schmaltzy, but not horrible. Since McCain didn’t come up with a video response of his own, the crew of Election08 threw one together for him, using a very similar style. This one’s a lot shorter and a lot funnier; it starts going... [More]

There are a lot of online surveys to help voting Americans figure on which of the candidates in the quickly dwindling field they should pin their hopes. Though USA Today has taken it on the chin over the years for their vastly over-simplified graphics—usually prominently featured on their front page—their Candidate Match Game (USA Today) is tour-de-force of design. It compresses a huge amount of information into a very understandable form. It also has only 11 questions, which vastly increases the... [More]

So you’d like to watch TV shows whenever you like, but you’re too lazy to Tivo them yourself? Or maybe you live in a foreign country and would like to stay up-to-date on American culture? Let the magic of newsfeeds maintained by Tivo-using obsessives and the Miro Player do your work for you. It works like this:

Get Miro

Download and install the Miro Player. This player can check video newsfeeds, showing what’s available and letting you download a show from one or more sources. Once you’ve... [More]

The article Two-Party Threaded Chat by Peter Arrenbrecht addresses the problem of multiple threads of discussion within a single conversation. Without face-to-face contact, the threshold for interruption is much lower and answers will not always neatly line up under their questions. A conversation may have many of these “threads”, though individual ones are usually quite short-lived. Chat clients are currently limited by their purely serial approach to inserting text into a conversation.

The solution proposed in... [More]

First the Tom Cruise video and now this one: Yes We Can − Barack Obama Music Video (YouTube). OMFG! Famous people *heart* Obama! Game, set and match to you sir. There is also a Letter from an Obama supporter by Jesse Last (3QuarksDaily) making the rounds and people who should know better are guzzling the kool-aid at a majestic pace and are completely gaga about this gentleman, philosopher, poet and bridger of cultures.

Here are some excerpts with snide commentary.

“I cheered with hundreds of people from all backgrounds and thought... [More]”

Citation found in the article Weber and Legitimate Violence (Crooked Timber).

The State of the Union 2008 wasn’t all boring. In addition to essentially declaring war on Iran, Bush demanded that Congress pass the new FISA legislation tout d’suite[1]. He naturally couched the demand in a way that failure on Congress’s part to do so would play directly into the hands of the terrorists and make America unsafe. Congress, for their part, has agreed to the legislation, but dared to take exception to the provision for retroactive immunity for telecoms companies that aided in... [More]

So this weekend, one mildly out-of-touch ex-pat discovered that:

1. Jimmy Kimmel, who used to host The Man Show with Adam Carolla, now has his own late-night TV show.
2. That Jimmy Kimmel has been dating Sarah Silverman for over five years.
3. That Matt Damon totally doesn’t take himself too seriously.

To celebrate their anniversary (and his show’s), Silverman showed Kimmel a video she made for him, called Sarah Silverman “I’m F*cking Matt Damon” on Jimmy Kimmel (YouTube). It’s hilarious. Silverman is fully... [More]

Jonah Goldberg has been doing the “book circuit”, attempting to pump up interest for his latest and greatest “Liberal Fascism”. His interview on (a) Daily Show with Jon Stewart didn’t go well for him at all—well, because Jon Stewart is not stupid enough to believe his premise and is both well-read and quick-witted enough to refute him in real-time. Goldberg was intellectually defrocked within minutes (but at least managed to chuckle good-naturedly—albeit nervously—instead of getting... [More]

Here’s a great diagram of the Fibre-optic Submarine Cable Systems (The Guardian) encircling the globe. In addition to an map of the cable systems throughout the world, it provides some statistics about the recent shipping accident that severed four of those cable lines, killing the internet and business traffic for almost 80 million users. The government of Egypt was exhorting its citizens to lay off downloading movies and songs for a day or two so that “more important” business could use the bandwidth. If... [More]

Free Rice ScoreInstead of chasing down video references in YouTube, you can expand your vocabulary for a good cause using FreeRice, all while remaining glued to the internet. The initial levels aren’t bad, but the game nicely adjusts to your level of vocabulary and, after a while, you’ll find yourself using educated guesses almost exclusively as they shovel words at you that you’ve never, ever seen before. The word list is maintained and expanded by a “team of professional lexicographers from the firm of Lexiteria... [More]”

Now replace the word “economics” with any other discipline and you have yourself a pretty good rule-of-thumb.

The candidates, their issues, their campaigns and the media coverage thereof is a carefully-managed show. Unless you actually show up at a campaign stop, you do not see anything that a candidate’s handlers don’t want you to see—and they make sure that the wishes of their biggest donaters are honored. In a rare moment of honesty, the video below shows this process at work; it stars Mitt Romney fending off accusations that his campaign is “run by lobbyists” from a reporter who had deluded himself... [More]

A year ago, it was silly to be concerned about the elections in 2008. With the primaries finally underway and the election actually within three seasons’ reach, it’s time to get engaged again. That means shaking off the cobwebs instilled by the ubiquitous brainwashing of the mainstream media (the cloaca of ideas) and actually figuring out what you need to know for the elections, which include:

• Figuring out what your problems are
• Figuring out where your interests lie
• Thinking long term, even... [More]

In Braking Kristol: ‘NYT’ Public Editor Hits Hiring of Columnist (Editor & Publisher) has a typo; they wrote that:

“Clark Hoyt, has called the controversial hiring of William Kristol as an op-ed columnist a “mistake.” … He also wrote, in his column today, that of nearly 700 messages he has received about the selection, only one praised the pick (empasis added)”

It’s a sad day when even Editor and Publisher can’t proofread well enough to detect that they mis-spelled “prick”.

Apple recently announced a new laptop that weighs only 3 pounds and is less than an inch thick at its thickest and only a quarter of an inch thick at its slender foward edge.[1] It’s a nice step forward, combining a large, excellent screen with a full-size, back-lit keyboard to provide a very comfortable mobile experience. It’s got an iSight camera, plenty of RAM and all the wireless goodies you’d expect. The drive is a bit small (only 80GB) and might also be a bit slow, there aren’t many ports... [More]

1. Cell (2007) − Stephen King
2. The Essential Ghandi (second half) (1962) − Mahatma Ghandi (edited by Louis Fischer)
3. Zwischen Krieg und Terror (2006) − Ulrich Tilgner (de)
4. A Man without a Country (2005) − Kurt Vonnegut
5. Wild Fire (2006) − Nelson DeMille
6. Das Parfum (1994) − Patrick Suskind (de)
7. Cobweb (2005) − Neal Stephenson & J. Frederick George
8. The New Rulers of the World (2002) − John Pilger
9. Thud! (2005) − Terry Pratchett
10. Count Zero (1987) − William Gibson
11. Infinite Jest (1996) − David Foster... [More]

News about Iraq has recently dropped off, and the military has filled the void with intimations that the surge is working. The explanation is clearly due to US military efforts, which are capable of fixing everything. That we are still within the six-month ceasefire window opened by Moqtada Al Sadr in August is a minor detail. The BBC is happily burbiling away right now with interviews of people from the American Enterprise Institute (a favorite source for the BBC) telling us that weak... [More]

Subduing Protesters in New Orleans

As reported today in New Orleans to Demolish Thousands of ‘Poor’ Homes by Leonard Doyle (Common Dreams) and New Orleans Police Taser, Pepper Spray Residents Seeking to Block Public Housing Demolition (Democracy Now!), a meeting of the City Council of New Orleans to decide whether to raze 4500 units of low-income housing and replace them with mixed-income housing was disrupted by police wading into crowds of chanting protesters with pepper spray and tasers. The clips on Democracy Now! sound like an... [More]