• Hot Off The Presses

    Iraqis Dying To Live In A Democracy

    Bush admits `disquiet’ in nation | Chicago Tribune But the president insisted his Iraq strategy will work: “There’s a deep desire by the Iraqi people to live in a democracy,” he said. And he urged Americans to be patient as his administration looks for ways to help ease the pain at the gas pump. Thanks to us, they’re dying for the chance to live free and to suffer less pain at the source of our gas. Via Huffington Post’s Michael Shaw

  • Hot Off The Presses

    Denial Is Just Another River In Egypt

    Bush Says U.S. Spying Is Not Widespread – New York Times The article, in USA Today, said that the agency did not listen to the calls, but secretly obtained information on numbers dialed by “tens of millions of Americans” and used it for “data mining” — computer analysis of large amounts of information for clues or patterns to terrorist activity. Oh! Right! That’s all right then. This is just like an episode in NUMB3RS, isn’t it? This makes me feel much more trustiful about the NSA’s data-mining millions of American citizen’s phone numbers. So now I suppose the secretive and…

  • Hot Off The Presses

    Tens Of Millions Of Us Are Al Qaeda

    Now it’s coming out: the NSA’s stated goal is to create a database of every single call ever made within the US. They want the data so they can analyze call patterns, they say. But the Pretendent of the United States of America is on record as saying only cross-border calls were to be tracked: In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. “In other words,” Bush explained, “one end of the communication must be outside the United States.” Uh huh. That was a while back ago. This quote is a…

  • Blogs Wot I Read

    The Nuts Would Clog The Nozzle

    Hey, I’m no rocket scientist, but I found the thought of candy-powered model rocketry pretty appealing: Rocket Food – Popular Science But you can liberate the same amount of energy in much less time by mixing the Snickers with a more concentrated source of oxygen—say, the potent oxidizer potassium perchlorate. The result is basically rocket fuel. Ig?nited on an open fireproof table, it burns vigorously, consuming an entire candy bar in a few seconds with a rushing tower of fire. If you could bottle the energy of kids playing and turn it into a Molotov cocktail, this is what it…

  • Random Access Memories

    Willing To Pay The Slacker Tax

    What? Me graduate? Perpetual UW-Whitewater student says no | Chicago Tribune Lechner has had his story told in newspapers and network television shows, not to mention campus publications across the nation that have picked up stories from UW-Whitewater’s student newspaper, The Royal Purple. By this spring he had completed 234 college credits, or about 100 more than needed to graduate, and was taking seven more. That qualified him for the so-called “slacker tax,” instituted this school year by the UW Board of Regents to help cover the state subsidy for students who stay long past the usual four of five…

  • Home Improvement

    WBEZ Goes Talk (YAY!)

    WHAT ABOUT ALL THAT JAZZ? | Chicago Tribune I don’t know, but the schedule looks like there’s still plenty of jazz on it. I can tell you that around here, the moment the jazz starts playing in the evenings and Sunday afternoons, off goes the radio with a snap.

  • Politics, Schmolitics

    Rumsfeld vs. McGovern Edits

    Media Matters collated several different news stories and compared different edits. Some edits amount, in varying degrees, to a lack of truthiness. There’s a video clip with them all run together – it gets pretty repetitive. The interesting thing is the FOX news one – it shows how much more contentious the setting was, with two other protestors visible (one being grabbed by a security guard) and you can hear more heckling from people on both sides. Maybe FOX wanted to show how embattled Rummy was and how idiotic those damn liberrrls were to disrupt the proceedings. Media Matters –…