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Two great anti-Bush op-eds...

The Orwellian Olsens

The Top 19 Dumbest Statements of the Past Week

The first one is an attack on Bush for meeting with the 9/11 commission with Cheeney not separately.

The second is an attack by a libertarian. While I don't see eye to eye with the libertarians, its kind of scary to see eye to eye with them.

Selective Service

brainthink- You've Got A Brain. Use It.

A senior Republican lawmaker said that deteriorating security in Iraq may force the United States to reintroduce the military draft.


"There's not an American ... that doesn't understand what we are engaged in today and what the prospects are for the future," Senator Chuck Hagel told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on post-occupation Iraq.


"Why shouldn't we ask all of our citizens to bear some responsibility and pay some price?" Hagel said, arguing that restoring compulsory military service would force "our citizens to understand the intensity and depth of challenges we face."

Just what we need... bring back the draft... All you young men did remember to sign up for selective service when you turned 18 right?

Uncanny Valley example

- source: The Raw Feed (via gizmodo)
- More on the Uncanny Valley

Bush's press disaster last night

CSPAN coverage
Orkut's anyone but Bush forum this conference has been dissected and discussed. Ken has some interesting quotes from the shrub.

Another voice from the Hellmouth

As a followup to the Academy of Art College expelling a student for writing a violent story, Michael Chabon has written an op-ed piece for the NYTimes that would be a great addition to Slashdot's Voices from the Hellmouth series.

We justly celebrate the ideals enshrined in the Bill of Rights, but it is also a profoundly disillusioned document, in the best sense of that adjective. It stipulates all the worst impulses of humanity: toward repression, brutality, intolerance and fear. It couples an unbridled faith in the individual human being, redeemed time and again by his or her singular capacity for tenderness, pity and all the rest, with a profound disenchantment about groups of human beings acting as governments, court systems, armies, state religions and bureaucracies, unchecked by the sting of individual conscience and only belatedly if ever capable of anything resembling redemption.
...
The imagination of teenagers is often - I'm tempted to say always - the only sure capital they possess apart from the love of their parents, which is a force far beyond their capacity to comprehend or control. During my own adolescence, my imagination, the kingdom inside my own skull, was my sole source of refuge, my fortress of solitude, at times my prison. But a fortress requires a constant line of supply; those who take refuge in attics and cellars require the unceasing aid of confederates; prisoners need advocates, escape plans, or simply a window that gives onto the sky.

Commentary rips on Jon Stewart

Lee Siegel (a television critic for The New Republic) had some rather "interesting" things to say about Jon Stewart. His rant is sort of towards all comedians that have are attacking politicians while standing from a specific view point. Lee contends that comedians should just rip apart public figures but express no political views themselfs. To quote him: The marriage of comedy and politics is even more unhealthy than the marriage of church and state.

He goes on to say: Laughter is the essence of individuality. Sobs sound alike, so do moans of pleasure and pain, so do terrified screams; but each person has his or her own laugh. A horror of individuation is why Stalin asked a group of Polish communists how Comrade Z was, and when they stared at the ground in silence, he burst into laughter because he and they knew that he had had Comrade Z killed a few days before; it is why the Uruguayan junta called the prison where it tortured and killed suspected leftists Libertad--those were instances of politics pursuing and catching laughter, and then having the Last--the eschatologically last--Laugh. Politics hates the naked unbridled ego that laughter sets free; it hates it with the intensity with which laughter heaps its furies on the naked unbridled ego that hides behind the highflown sentiments of politics. When American presidential candidates make the by-now obligatory pilgrimage to the late-night comedy shows, and grovel, and pander, and even humiliate themselves, it's not just because they want to reassure some anxious voters that, in this particular case, they shouldn't worry about feeling diminished by a leader who is dignified, intelligent, and true to his or her individual self. It's also because they've sensed that the comedians have put laughter in the service of highflown sentiments and gotten it under control. I'm not really sure what he is saying here, but it is clear that he wants up to equate Jon Stewart with Stalin.

London underground

Ken normally posts abandoned city web pages. But I figured I would beat him to the punch with a post of the History of the London Underground. It covers mostly closed stations and closed platforms.

via boingboing

Photomosaic of American's who died in Iraq

Depressing Spam statistic

There are 600,426,974,379,824,381,952 ways to spell Viagra

Academy of Art Sucks

No offense to the students who attend there, but your administration sounds like a bunch of former high middle school principals. I can't believe this happened in SF:
A work of art or a harbinger of violence? / Grisly short story gets student expelled from S.F. academy -- and costs teacher her job

Super Mario Guitar

This guitar performance of the Super Mario Brothers theme is too unreal not to pass along. It's not the theme itself that's amazing -- it's the sound effects that he manages to mimic with the guitar.

Flash that attacks Bush's effectiveness on 9/11 by Take Back the Media

Flash Presentation

Take back the media is a left leaning site dedicated to freeing up the media in this country. To do this, they are pushing for accountability, less consolidation, more investigation, and less revisionism.

***The flash uses graphic video that may make some people uncomfortable.

Alternative reviews

Someone is running a blog of bad/amusing Amazon reviews. He has reviews collated from Grapes of Wrath, Madame Bovary, works of Shakespeare, and other books you might have read yourself. For example, here's a review for Animal Farm:

the book 'animal farm' was not very good. we read it in english, and the book is so boring i almost fell asleep reading it. george orwell must be old. i do not recommend this book to anyone.. try watching tv instead. but dont watch the movie, its worse than the book.

and here's one for Ulysses:

Let me just begin by stating how much I loathe Ulysses. I hate Stephen Dedalus. I hate Leopold Bloom. I hate Molly Bloom. I even hate their cat. They're all fatuous and arrogant and dull and dishonest and insecure and insincere and superficial and greedy, and they all take part in a story that's a boring, tedious, frustrating, incoherent, big fat waste of my time and energy. Anyone who claims otherwise is either a massive liar or a sick masochist who deserves to have a bag slipped over their head and be taken away from society. As such it remains one of the most astoundingly honest and ambitious works in modern literature. There is not a book currently existing which is simultaneously as repelling and compelling. Is there a more divisive stirrer of passionate debate in the field of art? Normally a very relaxed, some may say apathetic and pacifistic, individual, I once heard my English teacher saying that Ulysses was nothing but complete garbage. I calmly stood up and punched him in the throat, and I received polite applause as I was escorted from the classroom. Later on, when I reread a section of Ulysses near the middle, I discovered that he was completely right. But you know what? That's life. And that sense of living pours off Joyce's pages and through his eccentric mouldings of the English language like a waterfall. It's almost too much to bear at times. We eat, we drink, we urinate, we defecate, we sneeze, we fart, we stink and we have sex, and after a few decades we die. No hidden wisdom. No great awakening. No grand nobility. No spiritual nirvana. That's LIFE. And the sooner you come to terms with that, the more depressed you'll be. Wonderfully, wonderfully depressed.

Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart will be the anchor of the daily show until 2008... "A lot of people like to get out when their show's still going well," Stewart said in a statement. "This gives me the opportunity to beat this thing into the ground."

Oh, he and his wife are also having a baby.

Unemployment up...

As much a Bush would like it to not be true, unemployment is up....