Damn squirrels!

I went to school with a girl who swore up and down that squirrels were vile, sneaky, and dangerous little monsters that had been known to attack people.

This must be one of the ones she was talking about.

God save the Queen!

YES!! 25 years after their first *ahem* release, The Sex Pistols are telling the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to wank off. That sound you hear is definitely not Sid spinning in his grave.

"We're not your monkeys. We're not coming."

While the codger in me enjoyed Bruce Springsteen's surprisingly eloquent induction speech for U2, the rest of me appreciates this a bit more. I wouldn't pay an admission fee to go look at the sweaty pants of some old corpse (in Cleveland of all places! Cleveland's responsible for Drew Carey, what the hell do they know about rock?), so why should some guys who actually played rock and roll, albeit really poorly, want to go there? Long live Punk, Pistols style.

delirium

Just got back from seeing Cirque's latest - a departure from their standard spin on the human circus, Delirium is their spin on the concert, with more and varied live music booming through a huge system, a two sided stage, and projections on screens and sheer curtains to augment the sometimes frenetic activity.

If you haven't, you should see a Cirque du Soleil event. Cirque things are so French, with longing gazes, sweeping romantic epic, and emoting just this side of jazz hands, that you'd have to guffaw if not for the truly astonishing feats the perfomers pull off (don't they ever slip?). Their level of performances, like the occasional Olympic athlete, remind me how incredible human beings can be.

Tonight's was the music of globablization filtered through shabby French twists on taste - quirky, dramatically serious, thematically tongue in cheek, almost. I was reminded of a night in Sardinia, when my friend Eric and I found ourselves in a wide, well-lit alley, pressed between an old brick warehouse and a low, wide building updated with glass walls and turned into a line of glowing restaurants and bars that spilled tables out onto the brick. Long story short, a group of a half dozen or so street performers were tottering on stilts, clowning, juggling, and flipping their slow way down the alley. They were studiously ragged, colorful, and excellent performers, pulling genuine laughter and surprise from the crowd. The Cirque shows try to recapture that same aesthetic - there was less of it tonight, but they still included the odd and quirky and almost unsettling amongst the stylish projected images pulled from a tame but very well-funded rave. Sitting there with the light, color, sound, and movement bending in unimagined ways in front of me tonight, I felt the same comfortable happiness I did that night in Sardinia while also glimpsing the new, thoroughly modern direction of global spectacle.

For policy geeks only,

... rabid partisans with blinders move on.

If you armchair quarterback policy, not just politics, GovTrack.com will be your own little button-down porn. You can monitor what your representatives are introducing, how they're voting, and what they're saying on the floor. If you don't know who they are, it's easy to find out. You can even monitor legislative actions by issue, and get your monitor info by email, etc. One suggested improvement: the ability to summarize at least the most popular bills so users don't have to wade through lawyerspeak. Thankfully, Citizen Joe helps, and is linked to from GovTrack issue by issue.

If you're both a technical AND policy geek, here's how GovTrack's creator, Joshua Tauberer explains what it does:

The more knowledge citizens have about government the better. So how can we use XML and the Semantic Web to make it easier to get that knowledge, and to foster civic participation? This is a question I've spent a lot of time on over the last few years while putting together www.GovTrack.us, a site that gathers existing information on the web about the U.S. Congress and puts it all together in new ways, using RSS feeds and Google Maps, for instance. The site is possible because the government has been posting the relevant information online for a while, but in scattered locations. For instance, legislation is posted in one place and votes on the very same legislation in another. Gathering the information in one place and in a common format gives rise to new ways of mixing the information together. Each day GovTrack screen-scrapes these sites to gather the new information. The information gets normalized and goes into XML files so that when GovTrack wants to display the status of a bill to a user, it can just run an XSLT stylesheet on the XML bill file.

article for the above quote

Incentive to invent a Star Trek-like transporter

Here's a map to see probable routes of nuclear waste in your neighborhood, should Yucca Mountain actually be used. I've broken ranks with many of the environmental orgs I normally support in that I like the prospect of nuclear power ('Like' is a strong word. Let's say I prefer nuclear electricity to the seas rising, black lung, or the Middle East). I don't think that concentrating the waste in one or two spots in the country, and transporting it across a thousand miles of freeways is smart, though. Thankfully, there are many states that wouldn't be affected: Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota (and probably Hawaii and Alaska, which aren't included in the map). If you live in one of those other 45 states, I suggest you start telecommuting.

Additionally, if you're a landlord in Kansas City, Missouri, and you get a potential renter who will only pay cash month to month, wants a basement without windows, and drives a panel truck, I hope some red flags go up.

One man's travesty, part II

A good article from the Christian Science Monitor about the upside of insurgencies. It reminded me of Zorg's (played by the outstanding Gary Oldman in The Fifth Element) description of how, by cutting a wide swath through order and decency, he was actually 'creating life.'

How many glass or window repair shops are you aware of in your neighborhood? The author claims that on just two blocks in a wealthy Baghdadi neighborhood there are about a dozen shops. That's a lot of windows to fix.

One man's travesty

...is another man's opportunity.

My friend Chad, upon reading an article in USA Today, questioned (in his usually calm way) why there is evidently no organization that tracks pedophilia and other sexual threats on the internet. He was fairly pissed that no one seems to be doing much to wake kids up to online dangers. While this definitely sounds like something that should be done (and maybe is, I haven't yet confirmed USA Today's claim), I see an opening in a research market swollen with filled niches.

The article claims "Whether crimes against children connected with the Internet are actually increasing is unknown, because no organization or agency keeps comprehensive statistics." Why not start tracking that kind of stuff? Start out with a collection of tracking info, like the google map application someone put together that maps convicted sex offenders' addresses, add in tallies and lists (with due respect to privacy) of reported offenses, interview or poll kids online, visit community sites like MySpace and Yahoo! Groups and see what kind of policies or safety announcements they have, and start publishing stats, with press releases and summaries for free, and detailed reports for sale. Give the whole thing a catchy name like whistleblower.org or chastitybelt.org, sell t-shirts and bumper stickers with the logo, schedule some speaking events, and make a million dollars. Then move to Mexico and marry 8 or 9 child brides you meet on the internet.

I sometimes wonder at this voracious shift in my view from 'this sucks, and it needs to be fixed!' to 'this sucks, and I bet I can make a lot of money fixing it.'

So far, the best headline of the year

While I look forward to the torrent, the absolute tsunami, of jokes coming about the Vice President shooting someone, my favorite line in the article is this:

"Fortunately, the vice president has got a lot of medical people around him and so they were right there and probably more cautious than we would have been," she said. "The vice president has got an ambulance on call, so the ambulance came."

A) Should the replacement for the leader of the free world travel (even hunt) with a posse of EMTs?

B) "...probably more cautious than we would have been." ??!!

AARRGGGHHH!! I missed CPAC 2006!!

This would have been a LOT of fun. Thankfully, CPAC 2007 registration is now open.

Screw 'Up with People!' - 'Up with the Economy!'

An interesting analysis from the Economic Policy Institute on the numbers behind the jobless recovery (which actually sounds kind of nice if it means I don't need a job to maintain my standard of living):

Economy Up, People Down

A snapshot of the same analysis

Basically the stats all boil down to the conclusion that it's better to be wealthy, and not just standard American upper middle class set for life as long as I keep my job version, but 'f**k you' wealthy, the kind of wealth that makes you really pissed off about the estate tax, without having to be told to be by pundits. Because if you're that wealthy, you're staying there. And if you're not, you'd better start climbing.

Disclaimer: I know the US is technically no longer in its jobless recovery phase, so don't waste your time pointing this out, the President already has:

"President Bush has noted that 2 million jobs were created over the course of 2005 and that we have added 4.6 million jobs since the decline in jobs ended in May 2003. But does that mean the labor market is getting back to normal?

Unfortunately, no. Recent job gains lag far behind historical norms. Last year's 2 million new jobs represented a gain of 1.5%, a sluggish growth rate by historical standards (see chart below). In fact, it is less than half of the average growth rate of 3.5% for the same stage of previous business cycles that lasted as long. At that pace, we would have created 4.6 million jobs last year. If jobs had grown last year at the pace of even the slowest of the prior cycles—2.1% in the 1980s—we would have added 2.8 million jobs. Over the last half century, the only 12-month spans with job growth as low as 1.5% were those that actually included recession months, occurred just before a recession, or were during the "jobless recovery" of 1992 and early 1993."

- www.jobwatch.org

Regarding Re: Fw: FW: BB mountain

The huge amount of bandwidth being taken up in my office by the sharing of editorial cartoons and forwarded emails about Brokeback Mountain has me wondering... Is the fact that everyone else is talking about a given social group (or organization, or whatever) when that social group spends very little time discussing everyone else a fairly good indicator that the social group is innocuous, if not benign? I'm going to go ahead and bet that it is.

Plantation?

This from The New Republic (posted 1.23.06) expresses my annoyed befuddlement about Sen. Clinton's plantation remark much better than I was able to.

THE MASTER'S HOUSE

On Martin Luther King Day, Senator Hillary Clinton, flanked by the Reverend Al Sharpton, told parishioners at the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem that the House of Representatives "has been run like a plantation, and you know what I'm talking about."

Unfortunately, the church's parishioners, who have presumably never worked on a plantation, didn't quite know what she was talking about (the New York Daily News reports that the comment "got muted response"). Apparently, the Simon Legrees in Congress were a bit confused, too. "I've never run a plantation before," House Speaker Dennis Hastert protested, in a surreal moment during a news conference on lobbying reform the next day. (Republicans have been known to deploy tortured plantation references from time to time themselves: "Since [the Democrats] think it is their job to run the plantation, it shocks them that I'm actually willing to lead the slave rebellion," Newt Gingrich said in 1994.)

But Clinton is sticking to her guns. When the Daily News asked on Tuesday night if she regretted the comment, she said, "Absolutely not. As I have said many times before, Congress is run in a top-down way." The last time we checked, an overly hierarchic corporate management style was not the biggest abomination of slave plantations, but perhaps congressmen have been separated from their families, chained together, forced to work for tobacco farmers, and publicly bought and sold during those mysterious closed-door sessions. And Clinton has been fond of the plantation metaphor for a while now: In a November 2004 interview on CNN, she said, "[T]hey're running the House of Representatives like a fiefdom, with Tom DeLay ... in charge of the plantation." Plantation, fiefdom: We see a rhetorical style developing here. Why doesn't she reach out to Jews, who've sometimes been wary of her, by comparing GOP K Street's intimidation tactics to pogroms in the Pale? And, come to think of it, why haven't any intrepid Democratic candidates seized the opportunity to describe Jack Abramoff's hustling of Indian gaming tribes as a "Trail of Tears"? Oh--because most of them have better taste, that's why.

earmark increase

I tend to believe that both sides of the legislative aisle tend to be about equally corrupt (which is probably less so than often thought), depending on which party is in control. This statement from The Christian Science Monitor seems to exceed my expectations, though:

"Since Republicans took back control of the House, the number of earmarks on spending bills has soared from 1,439 to nearly 14,000, according to Citizens Against Government Waste. Over the same period, the number of lobbyists has jumped from 10,798 to 30,402, many of whom now specialize in obtaining earmarks in spending bills for their clients."

Nice. I'd like some reporter to throw that info back in a GOP politician's face when he invokes the demons of special interests, liberal spending, or pork. I'd also like one to keep this stat handy for when the Dems do get back in power, and compare it to their performance. Then again, maybe we'll be lucky enough to have some honest legislation in place to curb this kind of slimy crap. *sound of strong inhale and holding of breath*

I'm guessing this breathtaking increase is due to a confluence of factors, the most important of which is the majority stranglehold that the Republicans are currently enjoying (others being items like a reckless administration, a glut of spending on 'security' issues, and the timely culmination of an incredibly successful and farsighted political machine that has lifted the likes of Tom Delay from the muck). Yet another indicator that the best government is one split down the middle, so neither side can get too much done. So next time you vote, try to hold your nose and spread the love around a little, will ya?

This is the entire article, which is actually about the GOP's recent struggle to find a new House leader.

Is it April first?

Evidently Muslims around the globe are really torqued off at Denmark, tearing up the Danish flag, even burning boxes of Danish cheese. Now THAT'S a statement that tells me they're through dicking around - the plane into building thing, yeah, that was bad, but burning cheese? "Okay, okay, you have my undivided attention, just please dear christ stop burning the cheese!"

This article reads like the tragicomedy that is so much of what we've come to view as relations between the West and the Middle East. It's ridiculous that they're so pissed, but then again, they are really pissed, but then again, they seem a bit over sensitive, but then again, they're furious with Denmark, a country so nice, it's positively nerdy, and on, and on, and on.