President Bush has been on television a few times in the last few weeks, first giving his State of the Union address, then in a more recent interview on ‘Meet the Press’.

After the State of the Union (2004 edition), it was apparent that Bush was honing his laser-like focus on a new batch of enemies for this election year: gays, teenage-sex and steroids. It used to be unions, the poor, terrorists, communists, but, having vanquished all forms of evil abroad, he’s ready to fight domestic... [More]

Coming up tomorrow night is a State of the Union address by the Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America. Considering some of the humdingers thrown around last year, the state of the country this year and the fact that it’s an election year, this year’s should be the best ever!

To get ready, you can go the serious route or the hell-in-a-handbasket route.

The serious route is a single sheet of paper, a State of the Union Scorecard (TomPaine.com), in which the major issues facing our nation our... [More]

Installment 28 (MNFTIU) made me laugh, but in a sad way.

Installment 30 (MNFTIU) just made me laugh. Quoting that is waaaayyyy easier than poking holes in Bush’s space plans myself. I’m reproducing choice quotes below just to have them, but I’d browse to the link so you can see the little office dude in a space helmet delivering the lines.

“
Wait a minute … how are we gonna get to Mars?

“Check it out — we’re going to build a base on the moon! Then we’ll literally FLY TO MARS!!! In space!

“And we all have to... [More]”

Rewrites Considered Harmful? by Neil Gunton thinks developers, especially Open-source ones, make a mistake when moving to a completely new code-base. You see, the old code-base had a lot of testing time in it and was, if not more stable, at least had known bugs.

This is a good argument and one that most project managers are aware of. However, stability is relative to the given feature set. A product is well tested with feature set A. Within 3 years, the product will have feature set B. What must a project... [More]

We’ve become used to seeing contraceptive solutions for women — there are no widely-used ingested male contraceptives. Though condoms are largely seen as a ‘male’ contraceptive, I think most reasonable people can see that they are equally as inconvenient for women. ’Are You Using Anything?’ (AlterNet) talks about a new “Reversible Inhibition of Sperm Under Guidance”, an injectable contraceptive for men “developed by professor Sujoy K. Guha, an Indian researcher of biomedical engineering at the Indian... [More]”

The most amazing practical joke was perpetrated over New Year’s. Friends foil Olympia man’s home (The Olympian) shows pictures of an apartment completely, and I mean completely, covered in aluminum foil.

The pranksters covered doors, door framers, the toilet, everything … they even:

• “unrolled the toilet paper in the bathroom, enveloped the bath tissue in aluminum foil and rolled it back up again”
• “used foil to encircle Kirk’s spare change — each individual quarter he had left atop a living room bookshelf”
• “overed... [More]”

Here’s a question I found about George Bush’s penchant for vacations (Ask Yahoo!):

“How many vacation days has George W. Bush taken to date as president? …”

A fair question for a present sitting on top of the worst economy since the Great Depression, fighting wars in two countries (Afghanistan and Iraq, for those with shorter memories) and performing radical surgery on many of America’s most important laws and institutions (forming the largest government agency to oversee the ‘Homeland’ being one of the... [More]

Moveon.org campaign videos

Move On.Org is sponsoring an ad contest that has just wrapped up the first phase. They got over 1500 entries for a contest called Bush in 30 seconds, which solicits ads describing Bush’s achievements over the last 3 years. (Yeah, it’s only been 3 years; feels longer, doesn’t it?)

Voting for the main event is over, but you can still vote for the funniest, best youth ad (“Al Keyda” should be in the ‘funniest’ list, but “Bring it on” is the winner here, I thought) and best... [More]

Kids are like a hangover; they’re the punishment you get for having fun.

The Daily Show brings us another great, totally straight-faced interview by Rob Corddry called Red Menace*. In this one, Rob interviews a dude who is completely earnest about boycotting movies with “communist” and “unpatriotic” Hollywood stars. There must be a tear in the eye of every rabid, right-wing radio or TV idealogue right when they see this guy (which they won’t because it’s on the horribly unpatriotic Daily Show).

He’s from an organization called PABAAH, which is a really cool acronym... [More]

Is this seriously a screenshot?

Wow. Coming in April. Time to upgrade.

No Joke! 37 Years After Death Lenny Bruce Receives Pardon (NY Times) highlights two completely inadvertent examples of high comedy. Apparently, George Pataki has pardoned Lenny Bruce of his obscenity charge 37 years after his death. Unfortunately, that’s a little late to prevent the US government from having hounded a man to his death for having an unsanctioned sense of humor.

For those bits of high comedy, you have to read his announcement:

“Freedom of speech is one of the greatest American liberties,... [More]”

The article Guilty of Being a Palestinian in Iraq by Kathy Kelly (Counterpunch) documents the plight of two Palestinians in Iraqi internment camps run by the US in the flowering democracy of Iraq.

1. Is there corroboration for this?
2. Where would it come from? CNN? Not likely.
3. How spun is this against the US?
4. What percentage true is it?
5. Is it any wonder Germany got so far as it did in WWII?
6. Why do we always ask “how could the German people not know?”
7. Japanese internment camps
8. If these were Iraqi soldiers doing this to... [More]

Threat level orange. Merry Christmas

U.S. Raises Threat Level to Orange (Newsday) announces that all may not be “Mission Accomplisheder” with the capture of Saddam (as the White House put it).

“The government on Sunday raised the national threat level to orange, the second-highest, saying attacks were possible during the holidays and that threat indicators are “perhaps greater now than at any point” since Sept. 11, 2001.”

I’m sure all of America’s fear- and world-weary travellers really appreciate the... [More]

Drinking Responsibly During the Holidays (The Onion) is a list of rules for kids of all ages:

• If you are a woman, remember: Women are more sensitive to the effects of alcohol. If you are a man, remember: Women are more sensitive to the effects of alcohol.
• Always drink from the bottle labeled “XXX.” The bottle with the skull-and-crossbones on the front is poison.
• Drinking alone is a telltale sign that you know better than to put up with anybody’s bullshit.
• Drinking more than seven nights a week is not... [More]

Warmups

1. 25 squat jumps
2. 25 regular pushups
3. 25 wide pushups
4. 25 diamond pushups
5. 35 crunches (legs up)
6. 35 bicycles
7. 25 leg raises
8. hold legs 6 inches off ground for 45 seconds
9. Stretch up

Drills

1. Mirror drill − 3 minutes
2. Front hand education − straight lead/backfist, straight lead/hook, hook/backfist, low straight to high straight
3. Knife drill − standing in place, practice 5 angles of attack
4. Knife drill − with a partner, parry (meet) 5 angles of attack with the same angle, going back and forth... [More]

Warmups

1. Shadow boxing
2. 75 jumping jacks
3. 25 pushups
4. cat stretch
5. 25 wide pushups
6. cat stretch
7. 10 reverse negative pushups (start low, not on the ground, push up to halfway on the count, back down when say ‘down’)
8. cat stretch
9. 25 bicycles
10. 15 crunches with legs pulling in as well (like jacknives, but collapsed)
11. stretch up (3)
12. 20 Squat jumps
13. Tiny break
14. 10 squat thrusts

Live Round

Go for about 3 minutes apiece:

1. Straight Lead
2. Straight Lead/Backfist
3. Straight Lead/Uppercut
4. Straight Lead/Hook (high)

... [More]

Both earthli Projects and the earthli WebCore are still in development, but here’s a screenshot showing the new look for the job page.

Beware of those who believe in altruism. It’s a quick step from believing it may exist, to seeing it everywhere, to believing yourself capable of it. If you think you are being altruistic, you have more than likely failed to examine your own motives properly.

earthli was down for a few hours recently because the server has moved to a new home, a move of only a few km. earthli’s generous hosting company, Opus AG has moved into fresh new quarters, which means earthli shouldn’t move again in the near future. Current bandwidth is 1MB upload capacity.

Myth and Denial in the War Against Terrorism by William Blum (ZNet) write about the real causes of terrorism instead of the blithe “And the more you love freedom, the more likely it is you’ll be attacked. … they hate our democracy, our freedom, our wealth, our secular government … [people who] reject basic human values and hate the United States and everything for which it stands … ” claptrap issued forth from our estimable administration. One can dispute how ‘secular’ the US government is, but one can’t argue... [More]

WebCore boxThere is a brand new release of the earthli WebCore, along with upgrades for all four modules. The modules are now available for download in easier-to-install packages and include much better installation instructions.

As you can see, the WebCore has also acquired a shiny new logo.

Earthli, less than a year after it’s last logo change, has once again updated its logo. This one really feels like the one that will stick, as it’s unique and looks nice. It also lends itself much better to a smaller, more recognizable page icon (if you’re using a browser other than IE, you should see the icon in your page tabs or bookmarks). It also doesn’t remind people of IE (like the last one, with the ‘e’ in it) and doesn’t steal the look of Mac OS X with the ‘aqua’ rendering.

The logo... [More]

KB toys has transcended any cynic’s wet dreams by offering a George Bush action figure. It’s not Bush in the oval office or gazing with steely resolve into the distance; it’s Bush dressed up as a fighter pilot and designated as an “Elite Force Aviator”.

Go to the link and read the text; it’s not a joke. A more fitting symbol of the deep illness of America society would be hard to find. A wonderful sign of the hope for American society would be if people boycotted KB toys because of this. I hope... [More]

Finally a browser detector you can depend on. Let’s face it, with all of the browsers on the market today, you need a slightly more sophisticated tool than just searching for ‘MSIE’ in the user agent, right? The earthli Browser Detector does just that, using a relatively sophisticated algorithm to suss out what kind of a browser is really hitting your server.

earthli Browser Detector

Earthli has a new default style — based on OS X backgrounds and colors. Also, for all you IE users stuck in the dark ages, there is now automatic support for using GIFs instead of PNGs so you’ll get to see all the icons correctly.

Earthli has been upgraded to the latest version of the WebCore. All applications have been upgraded, but only Projects really has new functionality. The entire site benefits from upgraded styles and theme handling.

Common Dreams is reporting in Wolfowitz: Iraq War Was About Oil that “at an Asian security summit in Singapore”, Paul Wolfowitz said:

“Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.”

This is the same guy who was also quoted earlier this week as saying that, in the recent Iraq war, “for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one... [More]”

“What possible justification could we have for going to war with Syria? Oh, I’m just kidding—go right ahead, I don’t care.”

Bombs Away, And Poor Pay by Jimmy Breslin, found on ZNet got me thinking about ways of convincing people without morals that the Bush administration is out of control. It’s quite obvious that a good percentage of the US population is willing to plunk down their hard-earned tax dollars without considering moral issues,... [More]

Congress has finally found something to do; US lawmakers lose patience over spam on the Register reports that:

“US lawmakers finally appear to be losing their patience over spam, with unsolicited e-mail now costing American business billions of dollars every year.”

Isn’t it great that as long as spam was just annoying everyone in the country and hampering our collective ability to make use of the Internet, it was fine to leave legislation out of it and accept spam as an unfortunate side-effect?... [More]

I’m reading The Clash of Fundamentalisms, by Tariq Ali, which includes some great references. One of them is by USMC General Smedley Butler, who served for 33 years in the Marine Corps and received 2 congressional medals of honor. His first book was called War as a Racket, which appears to be reproduced in its entirety at LexRex and HackVan. In a speech in 1933, he explains his position (the text is obtained from Smedley Butler on Interventionism:

“War is just a racket. A racket is best... [More]”