Ameriquest

If they get rid of filibustering in the Senate, then teachers won't have a good reason to show Mr. Smith Goes To Washington in school anymore. The procedures would be too antiquated to make it instructive for modern students. Bummer.

The average career prison guard will spend about 11 years in prison during his lifetime. (via Unwelcome Guests #250)

DIY Intelligent Design
Here's an essay I wrote, got all excited as if I'd come up with some epiphany instead of just a pun, and was going to submit to some website. Came to my senses and just posted it here. I'll probably add some more essays and try to link them together under this brand idea of DIY Intelligent Design, arguing that atheists and agnostics should actively convert people away from superstition when it obviously harms people and society. How faith/superstition doesn't seem harmless to me anymore.

How to make fire with aluminum can and a chocolate bar.

Eyesore of the Month by James Howard Kunstler is a cool subsite that I found linked on Sprol.com
"With Sprol, now you can see the sprawl. We'll take you to the best of the worst places in the world via satellite imagery. Seeing the impact of people from space gives us an important perspective on many issues facing us today." Bird's eye view of weird masses, like acres of shipping containers, nuke plant on a beach, Vegas suburbs pushing into the desert, toxic chemical plants with bare patches where nothing will grow, fun for the whole family!

No disrespect to JP II (he's getting enough of that from other quarters), but I was really looking forward to a week or so of papist pundits frothing all over each other, trying to find new things to say about Pope Smoke. I must have been six when JP II was pope-ified, and the only thing I can remember is the Pope Smoke, cameras showing clips of the Pope Smoke for days until they finally picked him.

So they pick this new dude within 24 hours and I didn't get the barest whiff of Pope Smoke on CNN on Monday (although it was Lou Dobbs I was stuck watching in the cafeteria at work, and he's much too concerned about the INVASION of ILLEGALS, but still, can't he stop masticating foreigners long enough for a quick clip of Pope Smoke, and then back to his dimpled smirk?). I had to break down and search Google News with a few combinations of search terms before I could find a weak photo of some chimney, could have been a chimney anywhere in Europe. Oh well.

"The fork is the most dangerous weapon in the arsenal of Homo Sapiens."
- Howard Lyman, former cattle rancher and founder of Voice for a Viable Future, a nonprofit group promoting organic farming and vegetarianism.
[I don't know what that's supposed to mean, but apparently the editors of Vegetarian Times thought it worth quoting.]

"They're detached from reality and susceptible to influence."
- The official explanation from the Israeli Defense Force on why it gives a low security clearance to any recruit who admits to playing Dungeons & Dragons, quoted in Details magazine, May 2005.

"People of the United States! We are Unitarian Jihad! We can strike without warning. Pockets of reasonableness and harmony will appear as if from nowhere! Nice people will run the government again! There will be coffee and cookies in the Gandhi Room after the revolution."

Today on Fresh Air, Thomas Friedman explained that the Palestinians should make sure to pump up some economic development in the areas where Israel is pulling out. Then the Israelis will like having prosperous neighbors and they might be encouraged to pull out of other areas. Isn't that nice?

"Most of the people living on [Earth] were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy." - Douglas Noel Adams, page one of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Friedman's suggestion is kind of like that, only in this situation you could say, "it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper under military occupation."

<Conservative rhetoric>
Why should US citizens be forced to pay for poor people out of our tax dollars? Why shouldn't that money come from the sources that have always done well by the poor: private donations from churches and community groups?
<trying to keep a straight face>

Likewise we can do away with federal death benefits to families of fallen soldiers, as long as their cases are exciting enough to attract the attention of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.
</Conservative rhetoric>

For real though:
Family of killed soldier gets home makeover - MSNBC.com: "The family of Spc. Lori Piestewa, the first woman killed in the war in Iraq, is getting a new home courtesy of a reality television show."

"Fuck that fucking motherfucker. That is not peaceful."
-- my wife.

RollingStone.com: The Long Emergency: "The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class."

The Wall Street Journal reports that archives from postwar military tribunals in Japan reveal that the U.S. government considered many of the same practices approved and practiced on detainees at Guantanamo Bay to be war crimes, for which senior officials were held accountable. [via cursor.org]

For anyone who dismisses Chomsky without listening to him, this must be very startling news. If the WSJ is crawling through old Chomsky speeches for their stories, maybe next month they can suddenly "discover" that the Bush Doctrine of Pre-emptive Warfare would have justified Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor.

"EarthCore is the world's first podcast-only novel: you can't find it in stores, you can't download the full audio, and the only way to find out what happens is to subscribe to the podcast. This novel is a cross between episodic modern-action fare like '24' and classic sci-fi movies like Predator and Starship Troopers."

classic = Predator and Starship Troopers ?!?!?!?!?

I've been reading The Buccaneers of America by Alexander O. Exquemelin. It's not as cute and romantic as Captain Blood. Mainly I find that it bogs down in the accounts of Buccaneers raiding towns and torturing people to find out where they buried their money or where the other rich townspeople have gone to hide. Some nice descriptions of the flora and fauna of Hispaniola and Cuba and other islands in the Carribean, if you don't mind dozens of different descriptions of murder and torture, townspeople ransomed, then moving on to the next settlement where they capture the fort and torture more people. Ugh.

Dungeons & Dragons For Dummies!
"D&D is complex to learn, and this friendly guide helps the curious locate a game, understand the rules, choose or create a character, follow proper game etiquette, and even move up in the hierarchy to become a Dungeon Master."
??? Does the author of this promotional blurb misunderstand the concept of "Dungeon Master" or is s/he harnessing people's existing misconceptions? Any idiot can become a Dungeon Master, and usually does.

If that's not your bag, maybe I could interest you in a mailing list of HIGH-DOLLAR RUSH LIMBAUGH UGGS FOOTWEAR BUYERS?