Plus ça change, plus ce’st la même chose. *Sigh.*

The following six-minute video is of Marcy Kaptur (Ohio) grilling Timothy Geithner about his activities, interests and intentions during and after the bailout.

Kaptur CHEWS Up Tiny Tim GOLDMAN And Spits Him Out (YouTube)

Kaptur is absolutely right to do this and Geithner’s exasperation comes across as extremly dickish. He is an appointed official, she is an elected official; he answers to her. That his every answer must be “Goldman Sachs” when asked about his cohorts is his fault, not hers. It would be nice if not only he, but many others who, as... [More]

The article, «Westerwave» ist talentiert im Vergleich (Tages Anzeiger) (“Westerwave” is talented compared to this), is about the EU commissar Günther Oettinger, who has deemed English to be the language of the future. He has often said in interviews that everyone will have to know English, from newscasters to construction workers. His own spoken English is abysmal, which earns him ridicule. Why is it, though, that he must himself be a master of English in order to promote it as the language of the future?... [More]

The iPad debuted, as expected, without support for Adobe Flash. Many industry observers spend very little time thinking about possible reasons for Apple’s continued resistance to Flash and instead very quickly come to the conclusion that Apple either “has it in for Adobe” or “likes to screw with its users”.

Since Adobe has been, is and will be one of the prime developers of content on OS X, it is highly unlikely that Apple “has it in for Adobe”. They might be getting a bit frustrated with... [More]

Spirit (XKCD) anthropomorphizes the Mars lander that was meant to operate for 90 days and has now been in operation instead for 2274 Mars days. Because it has been unable to unstick itself from an impediment since May of 2009, it has been deemed a “stationary research station”. The winds and sand will eventually corrode its solar panels to such a degree that it will lose contact with NASA.

The cartoon evokes a feeling of pity for the robot because we are convinced that it thinks and feels—like us.... [More]

The fifth Nicolas Felton Annual Report (2009) is now available for purchase. Each year, Mr. Felton, a graphic designer in New York City collects a ludicrous amount of information about himself and publishes it in an attractive, elegant and eminently readable format on some yuppie paper with yuppie fonts. This year, he enlisted the help of all of the people he encountered:

“Each day in 2009, I asked every person with whom I had a meaningful encounter to submit a record of this meeting through an... [More]”

1. The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) – Michael Pollan
2. Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995) – Gregory Maguire
3. Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (1992) – Jeremy Rifkin
4. The Great War of Civilization (2005) – Robert Fisk (partial)
5. Armed Madhouse (2006) – Greg Palast
6. The Tales of Beedle the Bard (2007) – J.K. Rowling
7. Rough Music (2005) – Tariq Ali
8. Fahrenheit 451 (1953) – Ray Bradbury
9. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004) – John Perkins
10. The Good... [More]

Power politics has always been about fear. Prop up a boogeyman, get people good and scared and riled up about it, accuse your opponents of being the boogeyman, get the media on your side, then watch the fireworks.

And never—ever—let up.

Note that the last clause in the last sentence in the first paragraph was not “then sit back and watch the fireworks”, as one more colloquially hears. Sitting back is for those who no longer want to be in power. Those in power must be relentless in finding... [More]

Port-au-Prince January 17, 2010In the just over four decades since Martin Luther King was murdered, it seems as if, were he to be resurrected, he would—after a brief acclimatization to the technological changes that had occurred—simply be able to pick up right where he’d left off. Because very little has changed. The illegal surveillance under which the FBI kept him throughout his career now extends to all Americans—and has been made legal. It is unlikely that he would draw comfort from the notion that, though America... [More]

Jim Kunstler is never a very uplifting read, but neither do you ever have to worry about him blowing smoke up your ass. There’s one guy who tries not to see rainbows wherever he looks. His latest, Six Months To Live?, is even more downbeat than usual—if that’s even possible—but it’s difficult to argue that he doesn’t have a point. Or that his predictions are complete nonsense. The term “perfect storm” is thrown around entirely too much, but the signs are there:

• Effects of the sub-prime... [More]

In a very well-written piece, The Quiet American (Antiwar.com), by the always thoughtful Israeli journalist, Uri Avnery, the “War on Terror” is taken to task as an expression as well as a concept. Though the Obama administration has officially consigned the phrase to the dustbin, the policy it represents is nearly unchanged from the Bush era. The concept as a shining light leading America through the inky blackness of an ever more dangerous world lives on with a vengeance.

At the press circus after the... [More]

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]