America Sells Itself Out for Stability on the New York Newsday is a fantastic piece by Ralph Peters, “a retired Army officer and the author of two books on strategy”. He very succintly and calmly points out that quite a lot of the U.S. problems in the world today stem directly from a foreign policy that supports ideals exactly opposite to those the U.S. espouses.

While the premise is not new, his approach is much more factual and far less hyperbolic. He arrives at the modern-day reality that the... [More]

John Pilger published an article on March 7, 2002 in the New Statesman about President Chavez of Venezuela. It seems that Venezuela is having trouble learning the lessons of its neighbors in the 20th Century. The story is the same as that told many times before. Democratically-elected left-leaning government nationalizes private oil industry and implements land reforms (which involves giving unused lands away to those that might make use of it) in order to address crippling poverty in over 80%... [More]

osOpinion has an interview with Jef Raskin, …Jef Raskin Talks Skins…, one of the original UI designers for the Macintosh.

Skinning is all the rage with many applications these days (like earthli.com’s themes). A lot of the time, it seems that the designer is more interested in the fun had making the skin or the look of it than the actual usability of it. Apple recently drew criticism for keeping its UI, “Aqua”, closed to skinning in order to provide a more consistent interface for users.
... [More]

Sometimes it’s so hard to keep track of U.S. foreign policy. Especially when trying to figure out where tax money is being spent on making war. There are so many levels of funding available:

1. Foreign aid to oppresive regimes to “stabilize” the local government (think Saudi Arabia)
2. Overt military aid in the form of actual hardware (think Israel)
3. U.S. military “advisors” in the field (think CIA and who knows where they all are)
4. U.S. Troop deployment (bases in over 100 countries, but recently,... [More]

Examples abound of things that are happening (or have happened, fait accompli) that are morally and ethically offensive, but that’s that and move right along. Nat Hentoff wrote Big John Wants Your Reading List for the Village Voice revealing that Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act (oh yeah, it passed, remember?) “…would grant FBI agents across the country breathtaking authority to obtain an order from the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court . . . requiring any person or business... [More]”

Having watched the music recording industry go through digital growing pains, the movie industry is taking a decidedly more legislative angle on piracy. The recording industry may have the DMCA, but that only prevents people from cracking encryption standards that copy-protect music. Hollywood has its sights set on hardware, not software. While the DMCA protects even horrible encryption standards from being cracked legally…by Americans anyway, the SSSCA is an industry plan to enforce... [More]

I remember that immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center, it was generally agreed upon in the mainstream press that irony was dead. I also remember thinking that that was ridiculous. Irony is alive and well. Recent events have borne that out, with increasingly dangerous and heavily ironic things happening all of the time.

Now, in recent days, I’ve seen something that leads me to think that the “irony is dead” mantra was simply a case of mistaken identity. It’s irony’s close... [More]

The New York Newsday published Democrats Raise Questions On War a little while ago. It seems that some have in Congress (especially that troublemaker Daschle) have had the temerity to ask about long-term goals of the administration. This drew the baleful eye of the guardians of a patriotic America in which we all act as one and do not ask questions because it interrupted their slavering, gleeful capering over their new shiny hoards of weapons and money.

It seems the relatively straightforward... [More]

The latest Adbusters issue has Intimidation discussing the Orwellian clampdown that is taking shape in Western society today.

“The supposedly immovable object called citizens’ rights met an irresistible force called “preventative justice.” And it got crushed. … The program isn’t to break bones, but to set limits − what we can say, endorse, speak up against”

More and more we hear the story of the man who was detained for hours or days because he made another person “nervous”. That nervous... [More]

Which side of the road do they drive on? explains exactly that. It covers, in fascinating detail, which countries of the world drive on which side of the road. The map to the left is from the site and shows right-driving countries in yellow and left-driving countries in red. Don’t be fooled by the appearance of surface area, though:

“Having often encountered the implicit assumption that everyone but England and some of her colonies drive on the right side of the road, I compiled … a quick... [More]”

So, how’s the environment been doing lately? With which side of the war on the environment has the U.S. decided to cast its lot? Well, the new Hummer is out. It’s got a 6.0 V8 engine. What kind of fuel economy does it get? Well, that’s a good question. Here’s the answer found on the official Hummer site (emphasis added).

“Because it is a class 3 truck, a type of vehicle that is often classified as a work truck, the EPA does not rate the mileage.. Typically, work trucks site and idle while... [More]”

Lifted from Network (IMDB).

“You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here, you’re beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do. Why, whatever the tube tells you: you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs. In God’s name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion.”

“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are... [More]”

earthli’s themes have been separated into sets and the theme selector has been updated to make it easier to choose the best theme for you.

The earthli Forums are officially closed. Their content has been moved into earthli News, which is built with the same technology as the Albums and the Recipes, yielding a single shared earthli user for all sites. There is also better searching, print previews, a draft/published mode for contributors and a better date-oriented layout for easier browsing.

This is an actual letter sent to a Bank in the US. The Bank thought it
amusing enough to publish in the New York times.

Dear Sir,

I am writing to thank you for bouncing the cheque with which I endeavored
to pay my plumber last month. By my calculations some three nanoseconds
must have elapsed between his presenting the cheque, and the arrival in
my account of the funds needed to honor it. I refer, of course, to the
automatic monthly deposit of my entire salary, an arrangement which, I
admit,... [More]

…as our menu has changed. Try this phone number:

510-809-4466

for a fun look at Enron’s current phone menu. Somehow, it just seems funnier on the phone.

The March 2002 issue of Windows Developer Journal has a tech tip that anyone who uses the STL with Visual C++ has been waiting for. If you’ve tried this, then you’ve likely gotten warning #4786, which tells you that the fully-qualified name of the class you are using is too long to fit into the debug information and will be truncated to 255 characters.

The reason behind this error is pretty stupid. You see, a while ago, I had a cross-platform project that compiled in Visual C++ 6.0 on Windows... [More]

In a glorious case of turnabout-is-fair-play, the Libertarian Party has launched its own ad campaign, similar in style to the one launched by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) that equates buying drugs with supporting terrorism. One of the ads (PDF document), featuring the haggard visage of the U.S. drug czar (who is highly in favor of punitive controls of drugs − i.e. continuing the drug war) with the caption:

<q>This week, I had lunch with the President, testified before... [More]

The Smithsonian Magazine ran Crackdown! (abstract only, sorry) in their February 2002 issue, talking about the red scares in 1919 and 1920. Though they don’t make an explicit connection to today’s situation, the timing of the article makes the implication clear: if we don’t learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. (I know, sooo melodramatic).

<q> Invoking the wartime Espionage Act of 1917 and the 1918 Sedition Act, Palmer sought to flush out “Reds” and socialist supporters remotely... [More]

The Hologram Revolution in the February 2002 Discover Magazine (halfway down the page) reports on a new technique pioneered by a Frenchman, Yves Gentet, that produces the most stunning, realistic, high-resolution holograms you’ve ever seen.

It’s a pity they included only the small picture, because the larger one in the magazine is impressive. In the smaller one here, you can, to some degree, see the depth that is represented in the hologram, and you can kind of see that the frame is no... [More]

Media Mergers

Mega Media Merger Mania on AlterNet covers a February 19th federal court ruling that deregulates the media industry even further. Two rules were struck down:

<q>The first is a 60-year old Federal Communications Commission rule that limits the number of broadcast TV stations a single company can own. The cap is currently set so that a single company cannot reach more than 35 percent of the national TV audience. The second FCC rule prevented a company from owning both a cable... [More]

Zoloft

So, now that we’ve all learned how to become Olympic champions (eat at McDonald’s, drink Budweiser and chug Zoloft, which, by the way, shouldn’t be a surprising sponsor of the Olympics, since Study Finds Utah Leads Nation in Antidepressant Use). Mark Morford reports in Numerous Mormons On Prozac that Utah has twice the national average in anti-depressant usage.

<q>Other states with high antidepressant use were Maine and Oregon. Utah’s rate of antidepressant use was twice the rate of... [More]

Here are two pieces of news from The Register that dovetail nicely. Three new MS security holes − two nasty describes 3 new bugs in Microsoft’s products.

The first bug affects all recent versions of SQL Server 2000, Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 and could give access to the local hard drive to an attacker. The attacker would have to know the name of the file and would receive only read privileges. This is a relatively mild attack, but since most people install to default folders, it... [More]

Ars Technica is running a great article called Microsoft .Net aims to demystify .NET and clear up some of the misunderstandings and deliberate obfuscations surrounding it.

“In a remarkable feat of journalistic sleight-of-hand, thousands of column inches in many “reputable” on-line publications have talked at length about .NET whilst remaining largely ignorant of its nature, purpose, and implementation. Ask what .NET is, and you’ll receive a wide range of answers, few of them accurate, all of... [More]”

Alternet has a quick interview with Noam Chomsky called Noam Chomsky on the Drug-Terror Link. Several questions are asked about the U.S. government’s latest attempts to link drugs with terror. He reminds us that, in fact, the connection is there, but mostly that the U.S. has been a huge proponent of drug operations throughout the world since World War II.

<q>Terrorism is now being used and has been used pretty much the same way communism was used. If you want to press some agenda, you play the... [More]

The “Axis of Evil” described by George Bush in his first State of the Union has been received differently throughout the world. Those nations that were included in it were surprised to be singled out, considering several countries the U.S. is allied with are far worse proponents of terror than they are. Just not the good kind of terror. The kind the U.S. is willing to support. Are you listening, Iran? Also, if you might have ICBM capabilities, then your evil existence justifies (no it doesn’t)... [More]

In a little-reported press conference before the Olympics, SatireWire reports that Bush Asks Non-U.S. Olympians to Unite…

<q> … We have a problem because the enemies of justice, the enemies of liberty and prosperity, would like nothing more than to see America’s weaknesses exploited. They would like nothing more than to celebrate our humiliation on the international stage that is the Olympics. You must not let this happen. You must help us strike another blow against the forces of tyranny... [More]

So I’m sitting there reading the morning paper the other day, flipping through the sports section. Suddenly, right after the page listing the lovely adult stars that are coming to a club near me, I see a half-page ad letting me know that if I use drugs, I’m funding terrorism. I quickly checked to make sure which drugs they’re talking about and, luckily, the pack of cigarettes and bottle of scotch I’d been steadily working my way through weren’t on the list.

What was on the list, you ask? I... [More]

The U.S. Justice Department settled their case with Microsoft, in which they found that while Microsoft is a monopoly and has been for over a decade, the U.S. unfortunately has too much growth and economy riding on their stock (recall that the announcement of the finding of fact against Microsoft in 2000 precipitated the bursting of the dot-com bubble), so they decided to let them keep doing what they’re doing, with nary a nod to the thousands of companies either gobbled up, run out of business... [More]

SatireWire announces that the FBI to Issue 5-Day Terror Forecasts…, which should add some level of organization to dealing with terror. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft stated:

<q>We in law enforcement are duty-bound to report inherent danger, so we will continue to alert the public to serious threats,“ said Ashcroft. “But we also understand how frustrating it is to organize a family picnic or corporate event, only to have it washed out by the late-breaking specter of impending doom. So... [More]