Not shocked - only appalled.

North Korea fired a missile into the sea today -- you can read about that here. I heard about this first on NPR, and they also mentioned Rumsfeld's reaction to this little incident. I don't remember the exact quote, and would have to download a Windows player to hear the news story, which I'm not going to do, so here's a rough paraphrase: "Oh, those wacky North Koreans! You just never know what they're gonna do!" In other words, he did not seem to be taking this as seriously as perhaps he should.

Can they do that?

Man, I don't know why anyone would study world politics when 20 minutes on a grade school playground would introduce you to all the concepts necessary to understanding human relationships. The Bush administration was all but clucking and flapping their arms around last week when they came out with the argument that France and Germany didn't want war because they were too scared. Now ol' US is around the corner of the building, threatening to steal Chile's lunch money (read: international aid).

I'm sorry, but isn't this some form of extortion? Blackmail? Wouldn't this be illegal in the United States? How the fuck is this happening?

Oooohhh baby

you know what I like...

I just fixed the "Fush" link. Not a search engine. Jason. There's a difference. Now it's right.

Word of Blog

I guess that in advising people not to get attached to things in their hometown, I wasn't thinking big enough. Revision: don't get attached to anything anywhere, ever. People, tv shows, independent pharmacies or any independent businesses, come to think of it, and especially not quality online news sources. But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself here in swearing off worldly things; we can still save Salon.

For a long time I read Salon without subscribing, so if you've been doing that, please consider subscribing. I did a couple months ago, and it's totally worth it. They get interesting interviews, write features that you might not see in mainstream news sources, and always have up-to-date stories off the AP wire on their homepage. NPR has cited Salon's influence in cases such as the Trent Lott thing -- Salon pays attention to stories that would often otherwise be swept under the proverbial rug.

And, if you're a conservative who hates Salon.com, you should subscribe anyway to support the political diversity that democracy needs. :) What the hell, it's worth a shot.

After years of striving,

I have learned how to wiggle my ears. And oddly enough, it was exactly like learning how to gleek or talk like Donald Duck. It just sort of happened accidentally a couple times, and I started to notice how how it worked and was able to reproduce the muscle contraction and voila! Wiggling ears!

The best part about this, of course, is that I wear glasses and when I wiggle my ears, they kind of move up and down.

Okay, okay, I know that talk about puppies and ear-wiggling and bobo skee wottin tottin isn't the political invective that I've been pouring out recently. So, for your political invective fix, I'd like to just say that it's frustrating that Saddam is missing the nuances of the worldwide peace movement and assuming that millions of people protesting war are doing so because they support him and his heinously cruel regime. Saddam, if you're reading this, please note that we protest war because we believe that you can be forced to cooperate with UN inspections. Do you really think that anyone anywhere actually wants you to have weapons of mass destruction?

Also frustrating is the tendency of the American government to respond to mass American protests with "isn't it great how in America you're allowed to protest? In Iraq, you wouldn't be allowed to protest. We're all about freedom and peace. That's why we have to go to war." I think it's about goddamn time for them to stop shielding themselves behind the Bill of Rights because the Bill of Rights isn't called the "Bill of Priveleges George W. Bush has decided to let the American People Have." It's the Bill of RIGHTS. Those rights don't mean a goddamn thing if all of our great free speech falls upon deaf, ignorant ears.

Speaking of ears, I can wiggle mine.

Some puppies eat shoes. Carpet. Furniture. My puppy likes all of these things, but to her, there is (apparently) nothing quite like a nice electronic. Yesterday I came home to the carcass of a snakelight. Last week it was the remote control to the stereo.

Mmmm, batteries.

I get higher and lower

It's a toss up. I can't figure out whether it's more appaling that Rate My Professors.com has a rating for "sexiness" of each professor, or if they take "easiness of the class" into account for deciding how good the professor is - and no, harder classes *don't* make better professors. I guess, then, the ideal professor should be a skinny, big-boobed perfect-haired model, or a hunky six-pack-having stud, who teaches easy-A classes. Are students actually this shallow and lazy? I hope Rate My Professors.com is misrepresenting them.

First, Bush says

that if you're not with us, then you're against us.

Then he says, if you're against us, then you're with all the other people who are against us.

Do I have this straight?

In other news, blah.

Does anyone remember

Bo bo skee wottin tottin

ah-ah, ah-ah

boom boom boom

Bo bo skee wottin tottin

ah-ah, ah-ah

boom boom boom

itty-bitty wotten tottin

bo bo skee wotten tottin

freeze! freeze! American cheese!

(hit partner in the stomach)

Those were the DAYS, man.

I'm grateful to Salon, but

I wish they wouldn't hit me where it hurts.

Ow.

At the end of the Salon article linked below, Conason points out that oddly enough no major American newspapers seem to have noticed the little plagiarism problem. Indeed, USA Today, at least, doesn't feature the story in their "News" section. Perhaps more rigorous searching would turn it up - I don't know. But it's really hard for Amercians to go searching for a news story when they don't know it exists, and being as how newspapers are one of the primary vehicles for telling people the news, we seem to have ourselves a little catch 22.

Anyhow, while I was reading the USA Today "News" section, the "This Week's Debates" caught my eye. Having grown up in a pretty conservative household, I was taught that the media has a liberal bias. I'm relieved to have found a popular newspaper that goes against that theory; USA Today doesn't even pretend that they can keep their opinions hidden. They actually list such articles as "Powell Lays Out Convincing Evidence of Iraq's Defiance" and "Deficits Definitely Matter" under "Our View," and the responses to these articles under "Opposing View." Upon about 10 seconds of reflection, I could come up with two or three other ways of naming these sets of opposing views that don't indicate the USA Today's stance on them. Of course newspapers have editorial sections, and of course newspaper writers and owners have political opinions. And I suppose one could argue that the writing in the other articles, the ones not in the opinion (or "debates") section are perfectly unbiased. But the key point here is that it's not bias in the writing that's the most important thing anymore. It's the bias in the decision of what to mention to the public and what to ignore. Because USA Today's conservative readers have the right to ignore the piece on plagiarism for themselves.

Salon.com is certainly liberally biased. I don't even know if the word "biased" is strong enough to communicate how liberal Salon is. Unfortunately for us, this liberally biased news source is the only source I've come across that reports stories that major news networks seem to ignore completely. Stories that seem - to me - rather important. Meanwhile, the TV "news" shows are reporting on Jason Priestly's terrible race car accident and Michael Jackson.

By the way, did anyone catch "Dateline"'s hard-hitting expose on PETA last night?

"The revelation that great chunks of this dossier were simply lifted from a Californian's post graduate thesis won't do much to build up confidence in the government at a time when it desperately needs to build up trust." (From Channel 4 British News)

Yup, I'd have to agree that my confidence level isn't exactly soaring. The dossier in question is the Downing Street dossier that apparently copied word-for-word from three other sources without acknowledging them. It was cited by Colin Powell's address to the United Nations Security Council. For more information, see Salon's Joe Conason's Journal.

"Tell me, answer me, are the inspectors to search the house of every government official, every Baath Party member and every scientist in the country to find the truth, to get the information they need, to satisfy the demands of our council?" --Colin Powell, today before the UN Security Council

Yes. I do in fact believe that searching the house of every government official, every Baath Party member, and every scientist in Iraq in order to be secure in the knowledge that Iraq does not have capabilities for various types of destruction is preferable to spending a single American soldier's life to attain the same thing. Because - for now - that's really what this decision is about - time, effort, and money, or our brothers' and sisters' lives.

The evidence Powell brought forth today is pretty convincing. But I'm going to have to be *really* *convinced* before I can believe that sending Americans in to fight and to die is the right thing to do. There are so many factors (e.g. the military-industrial complex seething and drooling like a dragon-beast at the prospect of war, the dragon-beast with its hand in the pocket of the president and its voice in his ear, the astounding ability of the administration to completely ignore that whole pesky little North Korea thing, to name a few) that make me lean toward distrust of the administration.

Regardless of how you feel about Adbusters,

you've got to admire them for being out there and doing what they do. (If you're inclined to think that corporatization is a bad thing, and not an opportunity for you to make lots of money, that is.)

(link courtesy of james and anne page)

only at walgreens? I don't get it, but I like it.

here is a good site for letters and 10-minute activism: Act for Change

It's a free country, I guess...

But somehow it just doesn't seem right that American news organizations are paying Iraq shitloads of money to set up camp there. Alarmed? Check out Iraq Journal, "A collection of regular reports from Iraq, coordinated by independent journalist Jeremy Scahill." It could indeed be untrue, but then again, if it is, the fact that we wouldn't have heard about this from our normal news sources might not be terribly surprising.

(link courtesy of Take Back the Media dot com)

a note to the young and optimistic

If you think you've found some cool things in your town - things that make your town different from other towns - don't get too attached to them, because the city council fuckers along with private citizen capitalists will find a way to get rid of them in the name of efficiency and huge sums of cash. If you happen to be the type of person who has to get attached to something, make it a mass-production personalityless chain coffee house, or a strip of industrial-looking traffic-clogged highway. These things don't seem to be going anywhere.