drat fink

degree of difficulty

"But Stanley Milgram believed he had solved the problem, or at least made substantial empirical progress, through an ingenious experiment. Milgram (1967) asked "starters," supposedly "randomly" chosen people from psychologically distant locations like Kansas or Nebraska, to send a folder through the mail to a target person in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts or Boston. The starters were given information about the target person and written instructions to send the folder through the mail to someone they knew on a first-name basis who would be more likely to know the target. That person was to send the folder on to someone even closer. Returned tracer postcards tracked the progress of each chain."

probably meets possibly

"WASHINGTON — Radioactive fallout from Cold War nuclear weapons tests across the globe probably caused at least 15,000 cancer deaths in U.S. residents born after 1951, according to data from an unreleased federal study. The study, coupled with findings from previous government investigations, suggests that 20,000 non-fatal cancers — and possibly many more — also can be tied to fallout from aboveground weapons tests."

hedging your bets

"Liberals love to shower Soros with respect, ignoring his Wall Street background, because his motives are so obviously honorable, and the money he is spending so clearly is going to "good" causes. But his life raises some troubling questions about the autonomy of capital in the era of globalization. Make enough money, and you don't have to obey anyone's rules."

battle criers

"The good news is that to beat the Republicans, the Democrats don't have to fight like them. They simply need to remember how to fight like Democrats. The first step is to stop worrying about how their words and actions will play in the establishment media. Bad press is frequently the sign that you're doing something right. If they're serious about beating back Bush, Democrats need to start pulling on all the levers of power available to them, and to stop shrinking away from sounding partisan when the cause is just. Standing up for your Senate leader when he has been attacked is a form of partisanship that the average American can admire. Voters can grasp the moral difference between investigating a politician's private life and investigating how an administration managed to lose $4 trillion of surplus. American voters understand that Enron is no Whitewater."

file under...

"According to the editors, the current thrown-together look of the Web site will soon be tweaked as a long-overdue plan to spruce up its layout is now in an advanced stage. In the coming months and years, Debkafile intends to expand into more fields and languages; increase its specialized staff of reporters, editors, and analysts; and further build its customized base of individual and corporate clients who are willing to pay to receive the publication's reporting, in more detail, before anyone else."

pestilence

"DeWitt's organization has filed suit in US federal court on behalf of 10,000 Ecuadorian peasant farmers and Amazonian Indians charging Lombardi's company with torture, infanticide and wrongful death for its role in the aerial spraying of highly toxic pesticides in the Amazonian jungle, along the border of Ecuador and Colombia. DynCorp's chances of squirming out the suit were dealt a crushing blow in January when federal judge Richard Roberts denied the company's motion to dismiss the case on grounds that their work in Colombia involved matters of national security."

international style

"These cold war assumptions, both ideological and power-political, will have to be dispensed with if we are to develop some means of controlling armed conflict. It is also evident that the US has failed, and will inevitably fail, to impose a new world order (of any kind) by unilateral force, however much power relations are skewed in its favour at present, and even if it is backed by an (inevitably shortlived) alliance. The international system will remain multilateral and its regulation will depend on the ability of several major units to agree with one another, even though one of these states enjoys military predominance."

winning smile

i was busy watching stories of the ancient nefertiti while a modern version was reveling in her own golden moment.

say it aint sasha

was the bush-cohen photo-op just a cattle call for the beef industry?

dog tired

"howling at where lay lays his head and wondering where sullivans is"

georgia on my mind

the pentagon in the transcaucusas
next stop: georgia
anti-terrorising georgia
us to assist georgia in anti-terror

break his crown

"[Editor's Note: The following is a speech that Dennis Kucinich, U.S. Congressman from Cleveland, Ohio, gave this past weekend at the University of Southern California. Rep. Kucinich is the leader of the Progressive Caucus and a longtime defender of free speech, civil liberties and international peace. This speech makes him the first member of the United States Congress to openly repudiate President Bush's war rationale.]"

dont cry for me

"It's already hard to be a whistle-blower. This incentive structure makes it even harder. One of the striking things about Enron is that no one came forward and blew the whistle on the company. (Sherron Watkins has been cast in the role, but all she really did is beg her boss to orchestrate an artful cover-up so she could continue to make lots of money.) Why will the people who work at the next Enron behave any differently?"

pettinest

my only problem with this story is that if somehow this effort by the saudis actually makes some progress in the middle east that ny times columnist thomas friedman will be given credit for initiating the talks. can you imagine what would happen to his already outsized ego if he could claim credit for bringing some resolution to the most troublesome spot on the globe?

please tell me this isnt happening

"Amy Fisher and Tonya Harding will box on Fox in a one-hour March 13 special (9 p.m. ET/PT). The three-fight card — When Celebrities Attack, perhaps? — also features a battle of the former network stars, as The Partridge Family's Danny Bonaduce dukes it out with The Brady Bunch's Barry Williams for three two-minute rounds. A yet-to-be-announced bout also is planned."

late news

"So if that WSJ editorial writer who invoked "evil" had been honest, he might have written, "it may well be that Danny Pearl was killed because his murderers held him responsible for positions on the Middle East conflict and on Islam oft expressed in these editorial pages. If so, then he died for principles that we honor and will always uphold", or something of that sort, while simultaneously emphasizing that reporters are not editorial writers and that Pearl bore no responsibility for the editorials."

responsible broadcasting

"Scripps said that under its "Democracy 2002" initiative, its nine network-affiliated TV stations will provide five minutes of free airtime to candidates nightly between 5 p.m. and 11:35 p.m. in the 30 days preceding this year's general elections. The stations also will provide free airtime as needed during the 30 days preceding primary elections."

feeling chipper

"WASHINGTON (AP) - A Florida technology company is poised to ask the government for permission to market a first-ever computer ID chip that could be embedded beneath a person's skin."

crumby drawings

The Religious Experience of Philip K Dick

bioware fair

"But it's not just the research data itself that is at the center of the tug of war between corporations and scientists. When working with data as complex and vast as the human genome, the software tools necessary to manipulate that data are as important as the genetic code itself. A whole new science of "bioinformatics" -- a flowering of software and hardware explicitly designed to analyze genomic information at blisteringly fast speeds -- has arisen, operating at the intersection of computers and biology."

liberty treats

"LibertarianParty runs provocative anti-War on Drugs newspaper ads"

delay game

"The previously undisclosed connection between DeLay and Enron offers a glimpse into how the Texas lawmaker and the corporate giant combined forces behind closed doors to deliver a bare-knuckled political punch aimed at breaking a legislative logjam frustrating efforts to deregulate the $300 billion-a-year electricity market, a top goal of both Enron and DeLay."

the gimme fund

"He had a marvelous, secret command center built for $13 million and 27 stories up at Seven World Trade Center. That center was high enough in the sky to fly when the attack hit. Giuliani staggered around looking for a place to become the boss. He called on fire commissioner Von Essen to leave the firefighters and come walking with him. High over the buildings a police helicopter was calling down that the towers were going to collapse as sure as the smoke coming out of them. Their calls fell on no ears. The firefighters were not equipped with radios for an emergency such as this. In fact, their communications were poor nearly everywhere. The fault was with Giuliani and Von Essen. Three hundred and forty three firefighters died. Most of them died because they didn't get out of the building because they couldn't hear anybody signal them in time."

hmm...you think?

"Is Disinformation Office Really Closing?


Remember the Pentagon's new we-can-hoodwink-the-world propaganda office? It seems to be toast:

"The Pentagon may eliminate a new office intended to influence public opinion and policy makers overseas, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today," the New York Times reports. "Proposals from the new agency, the Office of Strategic Influence, have caused an uproar in Congress and elsewhere in the government.

"Its director, Brig. Gen. Simon P. Worden of the Air Force, has proposed that the office coordinate activities ranging from public press releases to secret 'information warfare' in friendly as well as unfriendly countries, military officials said. In the past, such secret operations included the spreading of inaccurate or misleading information.

"Mr. Rumsfeld . . . said today that the disclosures about the office's potential activities may have doomed its credibility."

Maybe this is the ultimate disinformation plot – to say you're closing the office and then secretly keep it open?" via media notes

savoy shuffle

"The discovery could rank as one of the most important from the sea. If plans proceed for an excavation of the site, archival and field research by the explorers suggests, the remains of the Sussex could yield the richest treasure wreck of modern times and illuminate a lost chapter in world history."

youre so money

william greider interviews sen. jon corzine in nation.

afghan gorillas

"To a greater extent than any other armed conflict on the planet, Afghanistan's unfinished 24-year war has been shaped by rival foreign intelligence agencies: The Soviet Union's KGB, America's CIA, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Department and Iran's multiple clandestine services. They primed various Afghan factions with cash and weapons, secretly trained guerrilla forces, financed propaganda and manipulated political conventions."

smoking gums

"U.S. Tobacco Companies
Accused of Terrorist Ties And Iraqi Sanctions-Busting"

power play

"His story exemplifies a decade of post-ideological drift and spitball politics in Washington: a cynical, highly pragmatic struggle over power more than ideas that opened with the Thomas-Hill confrontation of 1991, reached its climax with the impeachment drive and now seems to have been interred with so much else in the rubble of Sept. 11. It was a time of take-no-prisoners mudslinging, in which the Republican right, with no Communists to unmask, found a new kind of enemy within that it tried to bring down by means of a disingenuously holier-than-thou moral crusade fueled by a gossip machine of which Brock was an early and influential cog. The hottest partisan battles revolved around Long Dong Silver and Paula Jones, not Stalin."

anti-trust me

"Twenty years ago, writing about antitrust crimes in the Michigan Law Review, Easterbrook and Fischel, then both professors at the University of Chicago, wrote that managers not only may, but should, violate the rules when it is profitable to do so. And it is clear that they believedthat this rule should apply beyond just antitrust."

stealing seins

the seinfeld zeitgeist

puffed out

"Combs is a Renaissance man, but only by the standards of a P.T. Barnum world. Rarely has someone become so famous by being so mediocre at so many things—a boy wonder without any wonder. Puffy is a famous rapper who can't rap, and he's becoming a movie actor who can't act. He's a restaurateur who serves ho-hum food; a magazine publisher whose magazine was immediately forgettable (Notorious—see, you've forgotten it already); a music producer whose only talents are stealing old songs and recycling the work of his dead friend the Notorious B.I.G."

group pug

"The McLaughlin Group is about to "celebrate" its twentieth anniversary. We might as well "celebrate" the discovery of anthrax."

thrax tracks

"A biological weapons control expert yesterday refused to back down from her claim that the FBI has a prime suspect in last autumn's deadly anthrax letters episode, despite strenuous denials by the bureau."

working the reeds

"We look forward to working with Enron," he said.

der fury

you know theres trouble when the germans are mocking us for our militancy.

frontline news

"Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl is dead, reliable sources close to investigation tell CNN. Details to come."

firmly in the mainstream

"Ninety percent of young male workers now doing worse than they would have 20 years ago"

iceman

"I thought that if you exchange very light particles such as electrons with protons, it must have some significant consequences," he said. "It seemed that if we could somehow change the electrical properties of ice, we should be able to change its mechanical properties — and vice versa."

slake your moneymaker

t3 meets tx

underfoot

i think the operative word is bankrupt.

rent stabilized

bloomberg delivers Top 10 improvements for new york on letterman. im ready for him to start with #10.

chill out

federal prosecutors trying to jail drug paraphenalia maker on unclear charges or maybe im just stupid. or maybe the journalist was high because i cant figure out what he did wrong, although it looks to deal with the proximity issue beetween ye olde water pipes and magazines whose contents, i assume, are protected under free speech. put those two things in a room, and like nitroglycerin mixing with oxygen, it explodes into criminal behavior. but first, there is a spark, and its that ridiculous prohibition on drug related speech in headshops, its the "dont ask, dont tell" policy for drugs. you may legally purchase the item as long as you dont relate it to illicit usage. isnt there some sort of free speech issue at stake? i wonder if they can bring accessory charges on the store because they are acknowledging the use of the item for illegal behavior.

the lawyer for the defendants claim that his client didnt sell to headshops is equally ridiculous. i understand that he is advocating for his client and manuevering around a series of arcane restrictions but....

if the world domination thing is true though, ill know it all was worth it. i didnt realize that aliens were using drugs to take control of planet earth. its a fiendish plot. good thing those boys in iowa are on the case. better yet, stick to corn and crop circles.

on the lam

too many links to steal from lam today like this bit of culture jamming.

give it up

hollywood producers given troop access to produce wartime propaganda. at home, bushies are quick to release information when it tars clinton but will delay when it suits their agenda.

end run

"Former Employee Says Enron Manipulated California Power Market"

golden tablets

"Other states with high antidepressant use were Maine and Oregon. Utah's rate of antidepressant use was twice the rate of California and nearly three times the rates in New York and New Jersey, the study showed. "

whats the matter

"Antimatter, the most elusive building block of the Universe, has been captured for the first time."

cancel my subscription

be you patriot or multiculturalist, there is something here for almost everyone. i know sam adams is doubly proud to peddle suds and skin.

lance armstrong

what frightens me most about this story is that he has $20 million to blow on a space jaunt.

long view

"Supreme Court to Hear Challenge to Copyright Extension Law"

major amplitude

"The stock market is schizophrenic, tech investors are paralyzed and the publishing business is in its worst shape in years. Sounds like a great time to start a tech magazine, huh?

David Bunnell and Fred Davis think so. The tech publishing veterans have thrown sanity to the winds with the planned launch of Dig-It, which the duo call -- stop me if you've heard this one -- ``the Rolling Stone of tech.''

group effort

"The "magic number" of people needed to create a viable population for multi-generational space travel has been calculated by researchers. It is about the size of a small village - 160. But with some social engineering it might even be possible to halve this to 80."

strategic intelligence

"WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries, military officials said."

new cosmos

“Our readers are seeking emotional stability. We won’t make them feel guilty if they are not having a one-hour orgasm. Readers think women will have fewer partners and be less promiscuous. Cosmo girl is not a ‘ladette’, she is quite vulnerable emotionally and I will produce a ‘softer’ magazine.”

memory booster

"The "next generation" of DVDs, able to hold almost six times as much information as current discs, has been unveiled by major technology companies."

curious george

"Now, this could be, anti-George people (there must be some) might argue, because he doesn’t entirely engage. George, for all his intensity, is also an observer; there’s something positively disassociated about him, it sometimes seems. Or it could be because he engages too much—he’s one of those overcommitted, 24/7, nineties types, who, having burned out (he went into therapy and onto Zoloft when he was working at the White House), has to cut his emotional ties and start all over again."

sachs titles

"NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Financial giant Goldman Sachs & Co. has signaled it has set aside more than $1 billion to start a magazine unit, and it’s approaching top magazine executives in hopes of reeling in one of the industry’s biggest names to run the business."

body double

"Johnson wrote a book during his FCC tenure, How to Talk Back to Your Television Set. This link takes you to the full text version, which Johnson has graciously posted online. It's amazing how relevant the book still is today, including its withering assessment of the government's chief regulatory body overseeing the television business ("It has failed," Johnson writes, "because it has, in effect, been captured by the industry it was established to regulate")."

sailing denial

"CIA Director George Tenet told Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak during their meeting Saturday in Sharm el Sheikh that the United States has already decided to attack Iraq, the Lebanese newspaper Al-Mustaqbal reported Sunday."

radioactive man

"'Earth lost its protection against ultraviolet solar rays and for several hundred years the planet would have been battered by intense radiation. All sorts of mutational damage to animals' DNA would have occurred. New species could have emerged as a result. It is possible Homo sapiens may have been one of these.'"

expert systems

"The agency which Poindexter will run is called the Information Awareness Office. You want to know what that is? Think, Big Brother is Watching You. IAO will supply federal officials with "instant" analysis on what is being written on email and said on phones all over the US. Domestic espionage. You want to test it out? Text-message any American friend, "Bmb OK. Allah gr8"."

al news, al the time

us set to unleash j-lo and propaganda on middle east radio

duly noted

howie's feeling libby today.

marin county hottub party

at berkeley they can go to strip clubs for class credit. i wonder if i was in school now would my vietnam class have taken a fieldtrip to the dmz?

whats on

"Perhaps the most ironic aspect of the struggle for survival is how easily organisms can be harmed by that which they desire. The trout is caught by the fisherman's lure, the mouse by cheese. But at least those creatures have the excuse that bait and cheese look like sustenance. Humans seldom have that consolation. The temptations that can disrupt their lives are often pure indulgences. No one has to drink alcohol, for example. Realizing when a diversion has gotten out of control is one of the great challenges of life."

m.i.teenager

"But the thing that is truly unusual about Demaine is the story of the path he took to get there - and of his father, Martin Demaine, who has devoted much of his adult life to educating Erik in a decidedly unorthodox way. Raised among hippies and jugglers and free thinkers, Erik Demaine has found himself at the center of a field where abstract math somehow intersects with street performance. That he is a prodigy is not even a question, say people who have worked with him; the question is what will amuse him."

chip are down

las vegas ditches faux 'family friendly' image. i guess if theyre going to be americas toxic waste dump, they might as well act like it.

transfer ticket

us changes stance on future hostage crisis
farm subsidies out of hand
hong kong plans digital id
all eyes on washington

refried beens

my invitation to participate must have been lost in the mail.

shine a light

"In conclusion, Douglas, I want to make it clear: You are still my friend. And I do not hate you. Though, frankly, deep down, I find myself pitying you."

the good guys

"The company is a leading private contractor of the American global police state, a beneficiary of the "war on drugs," the "war on terrorism" and corporate globalization itself. Like Enron and other multinational corporations, DynCorp enjoys a special relationship with the US government leadership, doing "unsavory" work in hot spots around the world. The US government has "plausible deniability" when things go wrong (for instance, when people get killed). DynCorp gets big government contracts."

laser sharp accuracy

"The next generation gunship, codenamed AC-X and nicknamed 'Son of Spectre' by US defence officials, will carry all the weaponry already used on the AC-130, including twin 20mm Vulcan cannon (capable of firing 2,500 rounds per minute), 40mm Bofor cannon (100 rounds per minute) and a 105mm Howitzer. Its 21st-century addition, however, will be its biggest punch: a chemical oxygen iodine laser (Coil), capable of carrying out lethal and non-lethal attacks."

little drummer boy

"I pass all of this on as straightforwardly as I can, without hype or unrealistic hopes. What was intriguing to me about the crown prince's remarks was not just his ideas — which, if delivered, would be quite an advance on anything the Arab League has proposed before — but the fact that they came up in the middle of a long, off-the-record conversation. I suggested to the crown Prince that if he felt so strongly about this idea, even in draft form, why not put it on the record — only then would anyone take it seriously. He said he would think about it. The next day his office called, reviewed the crown prince's quotations and said, Go ahead, put them on the record. So here they are."

fixer-up job

"SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- The Canadian figure skating pair was awarded a gold medal Friday in an attempt to resolve a judging controversy that has dominated the Winter Games, two Olympic sources told The Associated Press."

back log

miserable melodies
crooked e
roadfood

kappa tau

"Yet more than Dingell, Tauzin is a perverse kind of consumer advocate—one for whom the theater is much more important than the substance. Tauzin, a former amateur actor, calls his Enron hearings "the show," and that is clearly how he thinks of them. He aims at little more than creating drama and embarrassing the parties he summons before him. As BusinessWeek pointed out recently, Tauzin's consumer investigations have produced almost nothing in the way of legislation or substantive change—a few extra dollars for highway safety, no alteration in TV election coverage, no intervention in the California energy crisis. The embarrassed Red Cross did agree to give more cash to 9/11 victims. You can already predict what Enron- or Andersen-related legislation will emerge from Tauzin's committee: not much."

unilateral pass

"Those who have argued that America's war on terror would fail to defeat terrorism have, it turns out, been barking up the wrong tree. Ever since President Bush announced his $45bn increase in military spending and gave notice to Iraq, Iran and North Korea that they had "better get their house in order" or face what he called the "justice of this nation", it has become ever clearer that the US is not now primarily engaged in a war against terrorism at all."

barnyards

"tv barns new tv documentary page"

pass the hat

"Campaign Inflation Industry pumped in a record 696 million dollars to elect George W. Bush and a GOP Congress. The Mother Jones 400 reveals the nation's top contributors -- and what they expect in return."

essay sheik

"In this first of three reports from Saudi Arabia, Elizabeth Farnsworth explores a country and culture that has remained inaccessible to most foreigners until just recently."

bugging out

"Chinese President Jiang Zemin believes fellow Politburo member Li Peng is behind the planting of electronic listening devices aboard the president's new U.S. jetliner, according to a (not so) classified State Department intelligence report."

hard times

"Prominent Campaign Finance Reform Proposals Would Not Have Reduced Enron's or Andersen's Political Spending "

mission scrub

"On 9-9-01 - just two days before Osama Bin Laden's attack on the US - the NY Times published a lengthy and chilling article about Osama Bin Laden by reporter John Burns. Some time after 9-11, the Times SCRUBBED this article, replacing it with a completely different article that Burns wrote on 9-12."

b-list

""I didn't agonize over it," the vice president breezily tells the Post. Neither, apparently, did Woodward. But Dana Milbank might have. By general consensus, Milbank -- one of the Post's two White House correspondents -- is the administration's least-favorite journalist. And it's not hard to see why. Over the past year or so, Milbank, who previously covered the White House for The New Republic, has broken a number of stories that made life difficult for Bush. Last summer, he exhumed an administration plan to exempt the Salvation Army from state and local antidiscrimination laws -- a major embarrassment to Bush aide Karl Rove, who played a central role in the discussions. Milbank also broke early stories about the vice president's secret energy-task-force meetings (which prompted angry phone calls from Congress) and Bush's decision to abandon school vouchers (which prompted angry calls from conservatives)."

news is not free

"NEW YORK -- Last year, many newspapers were considering shutting off free access to their Web sites -- "closing the floodgates," as at least one publisher put it. But there seems to be less interest in shutting those doors these days."

yellow roses

"George W. Bush is trying to rewrite the history of his and his family’s relationship with Enron Corp.’s disgraced former Chairman Kenneth Lay. So far, Bush has enjoyed fairly good success as the U.S. news media has largely accepted the White House spin."

full of sheet

"Bankers at Citigroup (news/quote), Credit Suisse First Boston and Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown found ways for Enron to remove lagging assets from its balance sheet by selling bonds backed by Enron's stock.

After hatching that idea, some of those bankers took it on the road and sold it to other corporations that wanted to make their financial statements look better, too."

memory challenged

"If campaign finance reform is enacted into law, I believe that you can thank President George W. Bush, because he changed the dynamic of how this phony debate has finally ended in Washington, D.C.," Fleischer said. "What I'm signaling is that the president wants to improve the system. I'm not indicating there's a blank check. I will never indicate before a vote is taken that the president will sign anything that's sent to him."

ugly china pattern

"BEIJING, Feb. 12 -- A religious rights group in the United States has published a set of internal Chinese government documents describing in remarkable detail the suppression of unauthorized religious groups, including efforts to crush underground Catholic churches, use of secret agents to infiltrate illegal Protestant congregations and orders for "forceful measures" against the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement."

maureen corps

"Aren't we supposed to be influencing the Saudis and other Middle Eastern countries in the direction of honesty and transparency? Instead, the vice president emulates his Saudi friends — operating with high-handed secrecy, plotting with cronies to develop a petrostate, and restricting the press — just as he did during Desert Storm."

watch out

"NEW YORK (Reuters) - Washington police are building what will be the nation's biggest network of surveillance cameras to monitor shopping areas, streets, monuments and other public places in the U.S. capital, a move that worries civil liberties groups, The Wall Street Journal said on Wednesday."

pazz dispenser

village voice pazz and jop 2001

ollie ollie oxen free

"Afghan Officials Expect Surrender of Top Taliban"

brownout

i didnt know ted turner was a brownie. smart thinking about that honorary degree. probably be worth $50 million when ted drops some serious cash on them. now that he doesnt have a job, shouldnt he run for office or something, or is that beneath captain outrageous?

thin ice

i was one of the many who thought those canadian skaters were robbed of the gold medal on monday. bob costas just said that the french judge (who was the only "western" judge to vote for the russian pair) traded their vote in exchange for a vote for a french pair of ice dancers later in the olympics.

painted love

apparently its ok to show women topless on the 10 o'clock news if they have two canadian flags painted on their chest and the story is in the context of mardi gras.

cheap thrills

funny commentary about an article about manhattanites on the make in hipster brooklyn from The Morning News.

usability

"Usage Note: Till and until are generally interchangeable in both writing and speech, though as the first word in a sentence until is usually preferred: Until you get that paper written, don't even think about going to the movies. ·Till is actually the older word, with until having been formed by the addition to it of the prefix un-, meaning “up to.” In the 18th century the spelling 'till became fashionable, as if till were a shortened form of until. Although 'till is now nonstandard, 'til is sometimes used in this way and is considered acceptable, though it is etymologically incorrect."

sit and spin

spinsanity spins their salon sellout. what, you want to get paid for your opinions?

kinship

"NEW YORK (Reuters) - Michael Kinsley resigned as the top editor of Microsoft Corp.'s online magazine Slate, which he helped start six years ago, but will stay on as a writer and editor, Slate's publisher said on Monday."

oscar mired

and the winner is....

black and tan

"The worst day in Saudi-American relations was Oct. 20, 1973, when Saudi King Faisal joined an Arab oil embargo against the United States. In a matter of days, the global oil market was thrown into chaos. Americans waited in long lines to buy gasoline. Within weeks, the price of oil more than tripled."

rocket in your pocket

"Typically, it has been left to the French, traditionally suspicious of US global hegemony, to find the best words to describe it. Gigantisme militaire they call it, in a phrase that describes both the scale of America's ambitions and also a pathological condition: an organism grown so large it is sick."

ever so weekly

weakly standard blog parody

merry prankster

"George Bush is a careful custodian of his image. It's fine to snap a photo of him without a tie as he works on his ranch, but photographers have been prevented from snapping him with his tie loosened. So the premiere next month at an Austin film festival of a feature-length movie that depicts Governor Bush merrymaking with journalists aboard his presidential campaign plane in the fall of 2000 may not get a thumbs-up from the Commander in Chief."

pop the question

follow the partnerships...

the importance of being idle

finally, a theory for the rest of us.

digital value disc

"While at odds about that, the studios are even more at loggerheads over pricing. One studio, Warner Bros., is crusading to drive down the prices of all DVDs, preferably so low they’ll become an impulse purchase like magazines. Most of its rival studios are aghast. They had counted on years of charging premium prices for the small video disks, which offer viewers a better picture than videotape plus features such as the ability to skip around without rewinding or fast-forwarding. “It’s like we’re in a race to the bottom” in DVD pricing, complains the president of Universal Studios Home Video, Craig Kornblau."

plane truth

"In 1942 my father, George Rarey, a young cartoonist and commercial artist, was drafted into the Army Air Corps. He flew a P-47 before he drove a car. During his service he kept a cartoon journal of the daily life of the fighter pilots. A few weeks after D-Day he was killed in combat over France."

enduring freedom

"For the first time, the administration is proposing to cross the line from counternarcotics to counterinsurgency," said Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the foreign operations subcommittee. "This is no longer about stopping drugs, it's about fighting the guerrillas."


"It is clear that they're ordinary criminals, unlike the Taliban, who fought for a cause," said Capt. Harold Cabunoc, commander of the Philippine forces at Basilan's Camp Cabunbata, where about a dozen American Special Operations troops will soon be based (most of the American troops will stay on safer ground off Basilan). "These guys just kidnap for money. They're just common criminals."


"Russian sources report that the US is trying to use the Kurds - who are fighting for their independence in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran - as its main allies in removing the current regimes in Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Since the break-up of the USSR, Russia has retained quite a good network of secret services in the areas where Kurds live in these countries. According to sources in Russia's military intelligence services, the US has already recruited leaders of the Kurdish communists, and nearly finished financing projects to restore landing strips in these districts. Weapons produced in the Soviet Union and in Russia, familiar to the Kurds, have now been purchased for them."

point break

im not the only person who cant spell -- a bonanza of hits in my log as a result. its actually 'susteren'.

without a doubt

cant get this stupid no doubt song out of my head this morning.

presence tense

"Imagine being able to learn without dialing a single digit whether another person's phone is in use, or in the case of a cellphone, whether it is even turned on. Now imagine being able to do the same thing with any wired or wireless device of the future — whether it is in the car, in an airplane or at the gym. Not only could you learn whether a person is available for a chat, but you could also deduce what that person might be doing at that exact moment, all without exchanging a word."

peep show

frontline: american porn

fig batty

vintage fruit labels

call screening

ken lays not just claiming he was out of the loop, now hes completely out of sight.

plastic bagged

todays plastic surgery victim former cnn/now fox newspersonality greta van sustern.

interest groupies

"From the advent of the New Deal until the 1980s, no such grand financial-and-political-corruption scandal took place, on either party's watch. That was partly because regulations were adopted, beginning in the 1930s, to prevent such corruption. The Reagan-Bush-Gingrich counterrevolution severely undermined those protections. A new way of thinking about business morality -- or rather, a very old way -- took over. The Gilded Age, "public be damned," caveat-emptor spirit of Commodore Vanderbilt came back from the dead, reincarnated as a self-evident, all-American truth. Indeed, the Enron saga exemplifies "the genius of capitalism," Bush II Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill recently proclaimed."

spy me to the moon

why does this spy museum suddenly seem less kitschykool?

blimey

c-spans enron coverage. noticed a hitchens-sullivan washington journal roundtable among the many links.

reserve power

"Last week, 52 Israeli army reservists placed an open letter in the weekend papers stating their refusal to serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The reservists believe the Israel Defense Force's "mission of occupation and repression" doesn't serve the defense of the state of Israel, and they consider the IDF's actions there to be designed to "expel, starve, and humiliate an entire people." By Monday, the Jerusalem Post reported that the number of refuseniks had grown to 150."

notes from the underfrowned

weirdest superbowl moment: paul mccartney and terry bradshaw hamming it up at halftime when singing 'hard days night." mccartney may soon rival guiliani for most tv headshots at major sporting events. (bring back george!)

from the department of mixed messages: fox wrapped the superbowl in the flag with live staged remotes from kandahar and other patriotic nonsense. meanwhile, U2 assembled their heart shaped stage and wore butterflies on t-shirts but certainly were not hired as a protest band. at least they werent accompanied by 'up with america' style pagentry just mtv-like consumerism. (dont forget your glow sticks!)

oh yeah. didnt bet on new england but i didnt think st louis would cover the 14 point spread. now if i only had put down a bet, i would have more money to lose elsewhere.

dreamworking

Darth Vader's theme signals the scene change to Burns' office.

Burns: I don't know what's happening. It seems our profits have dropped 37%.

Smithers: I'm afraid we have a bad image, Sir. Market research shows people see you as something of an ogre.

Burns: I ought to club them and eat their bones!

Smithers: Heh heh, well, maybe this film festival could help us. A film biography might let them get to know the real you: virtuous, heroic, nubile...

Burns: [menacing] You left out pleasant! [clubs Smithers with a newspaper] But I like that film biography idea: a slick Hollywood picture to gloss over my evil rise to power like "Bugsy" or "Working Girl". -- Melanie Griffith: newly notorious?, "A Star is Burns"

Burns: Get me Steven Spielberg!

Smithers: He's unavailable.

Burns: Then get me his non-union Mexican equivalent!

[later] Listen, Senor Spielbergo, I want you to do for me what Spielberg did for Oskar Schindler.

Spielbergo: Er, Schindler es bueno, Senor Burns es el diablo.

Burns: Listen, Spielbergo, Schindler and I are like peas in a pod: we're both factory owners, we both made shells for the Nazis, but mine worked, dammit! Now go out there and win me that festival!

-- Burns puts his foot down, "A Star is Burns"

deficit spending

"$2.3 trillion — that's $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America. To understand how the Pentagon can lose track of trillions, consider the case of one military accountant who tried to find out what happened to a mere $300 million."

frienemies

"But one complaint not mentioned by the administration may be evidence suggesting that Tehran may have helped senior Taliban and al Qaeda members escape from Afghanistan. An adviser to Heart warlord Ismail Khan told TIME that shortly before the U.S. bombing campaign began in October, a high-ranking Iranian official connected to the hard-line supreme leader Ayatollah Khameini had been dispatched to Kabul to offer secret sanctuary to Taliban and al Qaeda fugitives. The Iranian official was apparently trapped in Kabul during the bombing, and remained there until the Northern Alliance took control of the city. Although the Iranians despised the Taliban for their persecution of Shiite Muslims in Afghanistan, their hatred for the U.S. may have run deeper."

influence lost

ken set to lay some major eggs on congress.

kerry is so very...

"Roll Call's annual list of the 50 richest Members of Congress"

deans list

"Vice President Dick Cheney has thrown down the gauntlet. He has refused to give the General Accounting Office the very limited information they have requested about the work of his energy task force. (GAO, created in 1921 during the Harding Administration, has from its inception been an independent and nonpartisan agency of the Congress, charged with studying the programs and expenditures of the federal government.)"

hows 'bout now?

"Not only is the Friday-night "Now" far less ambitious than Mitchell first envisioned but the chaotic process by which it got on the air has alienated some public affairs producers and public TV stations--including Washington's WETA, New York's WNET and Boston's WGBH--whose leaders believe their ideas were shoved aside."

rocket from the...

cryptome
copvcia

my kingdom for a source

"Just off the path stands a massive stone gate that once marked the entrance to the city. A sign placed in front of it by Israeli tourist authorities reads "Solomonic gate, 970-930 B.C." Ussishkin looks at it and laughs. "This is nonsense, utter nonsense," he tells a visitor. "The gate is from 200 years later. Solomon must be turning in his grave." For the past several years, Ussishkin, along with fellow Tel Aviv University archaeologist Israel Finkelstein and Near Eastern historian Baruch Halpern of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, has been co-directing an extensive dig at Megiddo. And some of the findings have set off a battle among archaeologists working in Israel. At issue is whether the biblical picture of a major Israelite state in Palestine, founded by King David and greatly expanded by Solomon, reflects the historical reality of Israelite settlement in this region."

he aint heavy

talking points photo flack at flak.

close shave

"Live chickens slaughtered during opera"

hard drives

"i love it when you reformat my discs."

professional athletes always wanting more

"Although at least eight players from both teams said they didn't know about the $100,000 Super Bowl fine, they were happy to find out that they hadn't violated the rule. All but St. Louis Rams wide receiver Az-Zahir Hakim said the cost of the fine should deter any player from wearing an unlicensed hat in the future."

"I'll wear some company's hat as long as they pay my fine," Hakim said. "Plus a little bit more, of course."

pentangle

the connection radio show talks up shifting focus at the pentagon (and lots of cash) for new expensive toys.

selling short

harvard university (and its $20 billion endowment) may have benefited from insider knowledge involving enron.

roll out the lawsuit

'lets roll' now a matter of litigation. makes you feel good.

inuition

atanarjuat

kurzweilding

ray kurzweil -- accelerating intelligence

frankie bones

"The Chairman of the Carlyle Group, Frank Carlucci, was not only a former Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration, but a Deputy Director of the CIA during the Carter Administration. In fact, Carlucci's career in Washington provides some insight into the intersection between foreign and domestic policy in the Cold War years. Moreover, Carlucci's particular trajectory through the government and into private industry reveals much about the meaning and influence of the military-industrial complex in the past and continuing policies of the United States at home and abroad."

more and moore

"Today silicon is king. But if computers are going to keep up with Moore's law, they'll need something better."

developing news

sci dev net

get your war on

"Geraldo had to go all the way to Afghanistan to get lost in the "fog of war," and look how much that little episode cost all of us. If the self-hating self-promoter had really wanted to learn about confusion, at a more reasonable cost, he could have just stayed home and read the war blogs."

on wax

download this -- bootylicious v. smells like teenspirit

disruption

"What can all companies take away from your study of the newspaper industry and its response to the Internet challenge?

Again, disruption creates net total growth. As I work with so many companies responding to disruptive technology, their overwhelming response is to focus on the potential losses created by disruption. In fact, the time from when a disruptive technology initially emerges to the time it eventually attacks an established market can be quite substantial. In the mainframe computer example, minicomputers were launched in 1967, and even though unit sales quickly passed mainframe unit sales, dollar sales did not eclipse mainframe sales until the late 1980s. Mainframe dollar sales did not have double year declines until the early 1990s. Thus, both markets continued to grow for some time after the initial emergence of the disruptive technology."

zooted

"Carcass feeding, like other forms of enrichment, represents a change of philosophy for zoos, requiring keepers to give up some control so their animals can have more. Some Folsom City Zoo animals refuse to go inside at night while feeding on a carcass. Cats sometimes scuffle over meat, so far without injury. After gorging, animals shun their zoo diet for a few days."

shine on

sparklehorse live from kcrw

sorosport

"The billionaire financier George Soros was host of a party with Klaus Schwab, the Swiss business professor who created and rules over the World Economic Forum, on Wednesday in honor of "social entrepreneurs" — that's philanthropists, not climbers. When told of the Elton John extravaganza — seated dinner and a serenade by Sir Elton — his eyes widened in disbelief.

"I wasn't invited," Mr. Soros said. "Then again, the traffic is so bad I don't want to go anywhere."

spy games

"WASHINGTON -- Salt Lake City, which will host the Olympics next week, was the target of "meticulous" surveillance by Osama bin Laden's spies, according to a top U.S. intelligence official."

layed out

"As the General Accounting Office prepares to go to court to force Vice President Cheney to turn over to Congress an account of his secret meetings with energy industry executives, an interview with FRONTLINE last May shows Lay acknowledging that he told Cheney about Enron's advice regarding the government's new energy program. In the interview by journalist Lowell Bergman to be broadcast on NOW WITH BILL MOYERS tonight at 9:00 on PBS, Lay claims that he was unaware that he was the only CEO of a major electric energy company to confer privately with the Vice President as he formulated his national energy strategy."

newsdumb

Big Names, Little News--This Is CNN?

waxing and waning

"BUZZFLASH: As a congressman, what do you think are the most important goals of the various Congressional investigations into Enron and the energy panel?

CONGRESSMAN WAXMAN: Our focus on the Enron issue has to be to evaluate how a small group of insiders, many of whom were well-connected politically, were able to loot the Enron Corporation and walk away with over a billion dollars, while at the same time, leaving employees and investors robbed of their financial security. I think Congress needs to know how it happened and why it happened, and who helped allow it to happen. And I don't think an investigation of the Enron debacle should only be on some narrow aspects of the Enron issue. I think it ought to be on the accounting practices at Enron, and their political ties. And nothing ought to be taken off the table. We ought to have a thorough and systematic examination of every aspect of this Enron scandal. I do believe it is a scandal because I believe that those who were the insiders in the Enron Corporation schemed to loot the company of over a billion dollars. And they hurt a lot of people in the process. I think that if you look at what happened at Enron, you have those who already had a lot, wanting a lot more. And they just took it at the expense of people who really didn't have much going for them. It's no different than somebody robbing thousands of houses and stealing people's life savings, when you look at what some of these people did in Enron, where they looted the corporation and stole the financial security out from under employees and investors."

a moore in houston

"I hardly ever talk to the guy, you said. You were like Peter outside the walls of Herod after they grabbed J.C. from the Garden of Gethsemane. Three times he denied he knew Jesus, and three times the cock crowed. But Peter, unlike you, felt shame and wept, and then ran away."

security complex

"Federal aviation authorities and technology companies will soon begin testing a vast air security screening system designed to instantly pull together every passenger's travel history and living arrangements, plus a wealth of other personal and demographic information."

the day after

tom tomorrow blogs

killing me softly

killing the buddha

noho star

"Now, Cafeteria, which has a restaurant on Seventh Avenue, plans to open an 11,000- square-foot, 24-hour restaurant that will stretch along Lafayette from Great Jones to Bond Street, engulfing the Jones Diner site.

Community Board 2 on Thursday denied Cafeteria's request for the variance it needs to build its three-story, $4 million restaurant, unless the Jones Diner can be incorporated into the design. The Board of Standards and Appeals will consider the request."

gaza stripped

"scenes from the palestinian uprising"

puddup

pud

somatime

"huxleyville station"

rainbow connection

"Marijuana Advocates Tom Crosslin and Rollie Rohm Sensed the Government Was Out To Get Them. And Then They Were Dead. Was Rainbow Farm Another Waco?"

pro tournament

"Blogger has revolutionised personal websites. Now, its only member of staff tells Neil McIntosh it's time to take blogging to the next stage"