April 2008
Jesus Made Me Puke →
“Only after Israel is involved in a final showdown involving a satanic army (in most interpretations, a force of Arabs led by Russians) will Christ reappear. On that happy day, Hagee and his True Believers will be whisked up to Heaven by God, while the rest of us nonbelievers are left behind on Earth to suck eggs and generally suffer various tortures.”
“If we want the world to embrace free software, we have to make it beautiful. I’m...”
– Mark Shuttleworth
Dr. Albert Hofmann, inventor of LSD, is dead at 102.
Shelf Life: The Other War We’re Not Winning →
If you hadn’t heard that more than 10 percent of American households are in danger of running out of food, you’re not the only one. … “The issue is under-covered mainly because right now, the government is not actively engaged in programs trying to address the problem,” says David K. Shipler, author of The Working Poor: Invisible in America.
“What is disturbing here is that things seem to get worse, not better. These high...”
– David Greely, an analyst at Goldman Sachs
“According to normal economic theory, and the history of oil, rising prices have...”
– Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency in Paris
WatchChantelle Oliver tries to spend equal time in 1860 and online. She is writing a thesis on the continuity between folk art and popular culture. Chantelle grew up on a chicken farm in Tara, and has a four-pound dog named Jesus. She does historic stenciling for therapy.
Ten guidelines for dumpster diving. →
“Dumpster diving,” aka urban foraging, skally-wagging, garbage picking, binning, skip-raiding, skip-weaseling or trashing is an eco-excellent way to cut back on today’s excessive landfill waste, pollution and rampant squandering of non-renewable resources.
WatchLet’s honor those who gave their lives for the freedom to renovate our own American homes.
Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet →
Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,
H.R. 5843, The Act to Remove Federal Penalties for... →
Death of the sitcom frees up 2,000 Wikipedias... →
So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. … And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we...
“It begins with freedom of thought, it continues with freedom of speech, and it...”
– Saudi Islamic Cleric Muhammad Al-Munajid
“I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them cats.”
– Eckart Tolle - The Power of Now
WatchIs this a great country or what? (And is Jena saying “whore” or “horror”? Same difference.)
Pretty Polly - Clifton Hicks A contemporary...
WatchLast Gold Dollar - Clifton Hicks
How Many Earth Days Do We Have Left? →
Plan A — the western fossil-fuel-based, auto-centered, throwaway economic model — is not going to work for China, India, or the 3 billion other people in developing countries, and it will not continue to work for the industrial countries either. It’s time for Plan B — an all-out response at wartime speed proportionate to the magnitude of threats facing civilization. The...
Life Expectancy Drops for Some U.S. Women- David... →
For the first time since the Spanish influenza of 1918, life expectancy is falling for a significant number of American women. … The trend appears to be driven by increases in death from diabetes, lung cancer, emphysema and kidney failure.
Clueless in America - Bob Herbert, NYT →
Roughly a third of all American high school students drop out. Another third graduate but are not prepared for the next stage of life — either productive work or some form of post-secondary education. When two-thirds of all teenagers old enough to graduate from high school are incapable of mastering college-level work, the nation is doing something awfully wrong.
Army, Marines give waivers to more felons →
Pentagon statistics show the Army granted 511 felony waivers in 2007, just over twice the 249 it granted the year before. The Army aims to recruit more than 80,000 new soldiers a year. The Marines — which recruits fewer new service members each year than the Army — also reported a rise in waivers for felonies, with 350 granted in 2007, compared with 208 in 2006.
“Today’s young men and women are more overweight, have a greater incidence...”
– John P. Boyce Jr. of US Army Public Affairs explaining why only three in 10 Americans of military age “meet all our stringent medical, moral, aptitude or administrative requirements.”
Green Living Toolbox →
To prepare for Earthday, April 22, this is a list of web sites from Mashable.
Pretty Polly - B.F. Shelton from the Internet...
eternalcow:I’m bored, if you couldn’t tell, and likely more than a little crazy. I like to think it’s part of my charm.
The Interrogator - An interview in Wired (16.05)
David Samuels (in an interview for Wired): But don't you think that we manage to keep up a coherent narrrative of who we are and where we've been?
Errol Morris: No! We remember things selectively. We experience things selectively. We think about things selectively. We live in a kind of incomplete, patchwork-quilt universe - a bric-a-brac, assembled in some higgledy-piggledy way.
The Dying Soldier - Buell Kazee from the Internet...
Why Bother? →
The best single article that I’ve read about taking personal action to reverse the “cheap energy” mindset. Basically the same advice as Voltaire gives in Candide.
“Since 1979, U.S. spending on energy research has shrunk by approximately half,...”
– Nicholas Kristof
“This morning at the Coffee Bean, I spotted a bottle of water in the display case...”
– Heather Havrilesky - I Like to Watch, Salon.com
Google Earth Resurfaced →
The 4.3 beta has improved photo-realistic renderings and includes a new sunlight button to observe how light changes over time and at different times of day.
“A survey conducted in 2005 found that of “115 published studies concerning...”
– Andrew Leonard - How the World Works, Salon.com
Study spotlights bleak effects of poverty →
An African American living in the Oakland flatlands has a life expectancy of 70.5 years on average, compared with 77.4 years for an African American in the Oakland hills. A white person in the Oakland flats has a life expectancy of 76.6 years compared with a white person in the hills, who on average lives to be 82.3 years.