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The Republican propaganda mill, a brief history It's bigger than Bush vs. Kerry. It's about billionaire funded thinktanks (AEI, Heritage) paying columnists to sit around and make stuff up or legitimize crackpot theories (blacks are genetically stupid, japanese internment was okay). Furthermore its about radio, internet, blogs, tv news and publishing houses working in concert to pummel memes onto the American public. When this stuff infects your culture and is no longer the domain of the loons but now as mainstream as apple pie and Wal-Mart, what do you do?
comment posted at 4:42 PM on Sep-6-04

The most comprehensive presentation ever mounted on the life, theories, and the social and political involvement of Albert Einstein will be at the Skirball Cultural centerr, Los Angeles, from September 14, organized by the American Museum of Natural History, and revived by Tom Teicholz. Incidentally, Discover magazine dedicates the whole September issue to Einstein (subscription).
comment posted at 7:47 AM on Sep-5-04

Smolin vs. Susskind on the anthropic principle. For those keeping score: Stephen Hawking is for it. Brian Greene is not.
comment posted at 1:13 PM on Sep-4-04

5 Reasons Why Christians Should Not Obtain a State Marriage License
comment posted at 3:41 PM on Sep-3-04

Protests at RNC test appropriate response
An eyewitness account by I Can't Believe Its A Democracy - "I just have to pause here for a moment to make an observation. How many times have I seen an interview with an arrested protester who claimed he or she had done nothing to provoke the police. Almost always my reaction has been, "Yeah, sure." Only now I was seeing this very situation unfold in front of my eyes. These protesters, while certainly noisy, had obeyed police instructions down the entire length of the street. Now they were being treated as if they had gotten wildly out of control, but they hadn't. I know, because I was there."

Another account from Captain Normal (also an eyewitness and even got arrested and held for 24 hours without being charged or being able to contact a lawyer) discusses a family of French tourists caught up in the sweep as well as some of the other residents of "Gitmo on the Hudson".
comment posted at 1:52 PM on Sep-2-04

The inauguration of September heralds the opening of the current opera season within the United States. Predictable mainstays of standard repertoire will return, but a few notable performances will make their debut this season. One of the new performances that has been already generating excitement is Margaret Garner, to be hosted by Detroit’s Michigan Opera Theater in May. With the libretto composed by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, the opera is a musical extrapolation of her 1987 novel Beloved. Margaret Garner is the autobiographical account of a Kentucky slave who journeys to Ohio with her family to live in freedom. However, the Garner family is intercepted during their pilgrimage by slave traders who threaten capture, and rather than have her daughter live in bondage, Margaret murders her. Top mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves stars as the lead, and it will be directed by Kenny Leon, last seen conducting P. Diddy in Broadway's Raisin in the Sun.
comment posted at 9:03 PM on Sep-1-04

Columbus swift boat vet angry about letter Swift boat veteran Bob Anderson of Columbus is ticked. It bothers him that Sen. John Kerry's swift boat history has become such a political hot potato. But he's even more irritated that his name was included - without his permission - on a letter used to discredit Kerry. "I'm pretty nonpolitical," the 56-year-old Anderson said Tuesday. So, when he found out last week that his name was one of about 300 signed on a letter questioning Kerry's service, he was "flabbergasted."
comment posted at 11:15 AM on Sep-1-04
comment posted at 12:32 PM on Sep-1-04

My name is Scott Camile. I was a Sgt. attached to Charley 1/1. I was a forward observer in Vietnam. I went in right after high school and I'm a student now. My testimony involves burning of villages with civilians in them, the cutting off of ears, cutting off of heads, torturing of prisoners, calling in of artillery on villages for games, corpsmen killing wounded prisoners, napalm dropped on villages, women being raped, women and children being massacred, CS gas used on people, animals slaughtered, Chieu Hoi passes rejected and the people holding them shot, bodies shoved out of helicopters, tear-gassing people for fun and running civilian vehicles off the road.   Here is the Swift Boat related back story from The Sixties Project: Winter Soldier Investigation - Testimony given in Detroit, Michigan, on January 31, 1971, February 1 and 2, 1971. Sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. This testimony was published in the Congressional Record, "Extensions and Remarks," April 7, 1971: 2825-2900, 2903-2936. (Much More Inside)
comment posted at 6:33 AM on Aug-31-04

The Colombia you don't know. Sure, we all hear about the drug trade and the violence. Unfortunately this overshadows a lot of the good things about the country. There's a lot of Colombia outsiders don't see. Like the Caño Cristales, the five-colored river. [more inside]
comment posted at 12:25 PM on Aug-30-04

The maven of midwestern gentility weighs in on today's GOP.

How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?
comment posted at 9:54 AM on Aug-30-04
comment posted at 10:59 AM on Aug-30-04

Father Cornelius (Neil) Horan doesn't just spread his end-of-the-world message by running onto the track during Formula One races and accosting hapless Brazilian marathoners (more here, here and here) -- he writes books, too, excerpts of which you can download for your edification and salvation. From what he says, better hurry. (Via Colby Cosh)
comment posted at 9:37 AM on Aug-30-04
comment posted at 1:22 PM on Aug-30-04

A Kind of Innocence We'd Never Seen Before: Thoughts on the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, and Collective Consciousness
comment posted at 9:23 AM on Aug-29-04
comment posted at 5:44 PM on Aug-29-04

I *heart* Bea Arthur:

Bea Arthur sparked a security scare at Logan Airport in Boston this week when she tried to board a Cape Air flight with a pocketknife in her handbag. The "Golden Girls" star, now 81, was flagged by a Transportation Security Administration agent, who discovered the knife - a strict no-no following 9/11. "She started yelling that it wasn't hers and said 'The terrorists put it there,' " a fellow passenger said. "She kept yelling about the 'terrorists, the terrorists, the terrorists.' " After the blade was confiscated, Arthur took a keyring from her bag and told the agent it belonged to the "terrorists," before throwing it at them. As she boarded the plane, she told the TSA employees, "We're all doomed."

Kuro5hin offers a novel proposition: Bea for President!
comment posted at 3:43 PM on Aug-28-04

The Essential Foghat Timeline. Is it any wonder that Foghat is so hard to keep track of? (Found here). There were two versions of Foghat touring from 1990 to 1993. Roger Earl was touring with his version of Foghat (originally called the Kneetremblers) from 1986 to 1993 and Dave toured with Lonesome Dave's Foghat from 1990 to 1993...
comment posted at 3:44 PM on Aug-28-04

Tricks of the Trade . In an article in The Morning News, Defective Yeti asked readers to reveal the secrets of their profession:

Attorney: Do whatever it takes to fit your contracts onto a single page. Even sophisticated negotiators can be charmed by the lack of a staple.

Auto Mechanic: Always put copper grease on the battery terminals after servicing a car. The performance benefit is negligible, but when customers look under the hood they will immediately see that something’s changed and thus feel happy to pay you.

Handyman: If you have to change a light bulb where the glass is broken, you can press a potato into the metal base to unscrew the remains of the bulb from the fixture. Got any secrets to success or even just survival in your racket?
comment posted at 10:08 AM on Aug-24-04
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comment posted at 1:34 PM on Aug-24-04

Change This - We're betting that a significant portion of the population wants to hear thoughtful, rational, constructive arguments about important issues. We're certain that the best of these manifestos will spread, hand to hand, person to person, until these manifestos have reached a critical mass and actually changed the tone and substance of our debate.
comment posted at 8:36 AM on Aug-24-04
comment posted at 1:55 PM on Aug-24-04

Urban Guerilla Warfare. The upcoming protests outside the Republican National Convention are becoming less notable for the expected numbers and more notable for the extremes each side will go to. The GOP has decided to blame everything happening outside on the Democratic Party. Liberal groups are feared to be infiltrating the convention's own volunteer staff. And some right-wingers, feeling "compassionate conservatism" means abandoning people in the middle of New York, have taken to pretending to offer housing to out-of-state protestors. Has anyone else started to dismiss the idea of a terrorist attack simply as "too obvious?"
comment posted at 7:26 PM on Aug-23-04
comment posted at 9:52 AM on Aug-24-04

Sapir/Whorf raises its head again in study of the Piraha tribe. I can't stop thinking about this article which appeared in the Globe and Mail Friday.

A study appearing today in the journal Science reports that the hunter-gatherers seem to be the only group of humans known to have no concept of numbering and counting. Not only that, but adult Piraha apparently can't learn to count or understand the concept of numbers or numerals, even when they asked anthropologists to teach them and have been given basic math lessons for months at a time ... the Piraha are the only people known to have no distinct words for colours.
They have no written language, and no collective memory going back more than two generations. They don't sleep for more than two hours at a time during the night or day. Even when food is available, they frequently starve themselves and their children, Prof. Everett reports.
They communicate almost as much by singing, whistling and humming as by normal speech.
They frequently change their names, because they believe spirits regularly take them over and intrinsically change who they are.
They have no creation myths, tell no fictional stories and have no art.

Can any of our anthropologists or linguists comment? I had thought that narrative was the common link in all human cultures....
comment posted at 6:01 PM on Aug-21-04

Huckapoo! OMG is that the worst band name ever, or what? ...Daniel Radosh extends his healthy obsession with teenage female celebrities with a list of why Huckapoo is now officially his new favorite band. ("Say what you want about Modest Mouse, but do they have a logo like that?")
comment posted at 1:24 PM on Aug-20-04

Introducing: Metal Rubber. "Twist it, stretch it double, fry it to 200°C, douse it with jet fuel—the stuff survives. After the torment, it snaps like rubber back to its original shape, all the while conducting electricity like solid metal." Sounds familiar, no? Here's the son of the Roswell air field's intel officer, describing the debris he says he saw in 1947: "It was possible to flex this stuff back and forth, even to wrinkle it, but you could not put a crease in it that would stay, nor could you dent it at all. I would almost have to describe it as a metal with plastic properties." The UFO freaks are already all over the "back engineering" of Roswell crash debris. Meanwhile, there's something unusual in the sky over Minnesota right now.
comment posted at 6:52 AM on Aug-20-04
comment posted at 8:26 AM on Aug-20-04

The Conscience of Joe Darby
"Because the irony of all this is that the people in Somerset County who turned their backs on Joe, well, those people would probably feel very different if they knew the rest of the story. That it really wasn't about softening prisoners, gathering intelligence, or trying to win the war. That it wasn't even about losing control in the heat of the moment. It was about getting up in the middle of the night and going somewhere you weren't supposed to go, then beating and raping people there. It was premeditated violent crime."
comment posted at 9:05 AM on Aug-17-04

Teach Yourself the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 24 Hours. "our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism." Is a pithy Gibbon a more palatable one?
comment posted at 8:46 AM on Aug-17-04

1,000 Reasons to Vote Against George Bush. Reasons are in alphabetical order, by category. Last updated Friday, August 13, 2004, 5:18 PM
comment posted at 6:32 PM on Aug-13-04
comment posted at 7:19 PM on Aug-13-04
comment posted at 6:00 AM on Aug-14-04

A Libertarian for Kerry. John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the EFF and a former campaign manager for Dick Cheney, is taking his libertarianism into the Democratic camp. "...we need something -- and I think it’s governmental -- to reregulate the market and make it free, because the multinationals have taken it away." (More inside).
comment posted at 6:03 AM on Aug-13-04
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comment posted at 3:36 PM on Aug-13-04

iPod vs. Cassette Tape: a comparitive study in pictures.
comment posted at 11:51 AM on Aug-12-04

Is it the start of a moral life when one really acts as though another life is just as important as one's own, or is that an obsession skirting mental illness?
comment posted at 11:59 AM on Aug-10-04

Re-emergent American Eugenics Movement looks to unfinished business - The Tennessee primary win of an avowed Eugenicist Republican Congressional candidate underscores the longstanding association of the Republican Party with a resurgent American Eugenics Movement deeply linked to Nazi racial ideology and championed by the Manhattan Institute and the Nazi-associated Pioneer Fund
comment posted at 7:46 AM on Aug-8-04

The HIV virus has jumped from primates to people on at least seven separate occasions in recent history, not twice as is commonly thought. And people in Cameroon are showing up with symptoms of HIV, but are testing negative for both the virus and its primate equivalent SIV, the virus from which HIV is thought to have evolved. That suggests that new strains of an HIV-like virus are circulating in wild animals and infecting people who eat them, sparking fears that such strains could fuel an already disastrous global HIV pandemic.
comment posted at 11:48 AM on Aug-6-04
comment posted at 6:55 PM on Aug-6-04

The anti-Kerry book Unfit for Command is #1 on Amazon. Unfortunately, the book, not even released, has entered the downward spiral of diminished credibility of its authors. The "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" have been found to include a man who changed his story right after Kerry entered the race and another who flat-out retracts his accusations. Meanwhile, another SBVfT member has accused Kerry of not really deserving his Bronze Star because the events leading to it never occured... even though the Veteran recieved a Bronze Star for the same day's events he claims now never happened.
comment posted at 12:10 PM on Aug-6-04
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comment posted at 6:51 PM on Aug-6-04

Meet Vernon Blake. Vernon Blake was a Systems Admin for the Alabama Department of Transportation, and it was 'well known' in his office that a certain supervisor spent far more time playing solitare on his computer than he did doing anything else. Inspired by a campaign to stop waste in Alabama government, Vernon installed a screen capture utility which took 717 screenshots (.pdf) over 7 months, documenting a clear pattern of non-work related use of the computer. The results? The supervisor was given a written repremand. Vernon Blake was fired.
comment posted at 12:51 PM on Jul-31-04

The Top 50 Worst Guitar Solos (revisited). On Jimmy Page's solo in Radioactive: He pieces together an angular, steely synth-guitar catastrophe that probably only the eunuchs in Yes could warm up to. And Angus Young's solo on "Ballbreaker": Take away the hyperactive Chuck Berry duckwalking and frantic head- bobbing and you're left with some extremely constipated rockabilly soloing. And what the fuck is these guys' fixation with men's genitalia all about, anyway? [more inside]
comment posted at 1:06 PM on Jul-31-04