Not my promised flying car but nevertheless a certifiable piece from my Jetsons future.

Consequently, I have an irrational desire to own one of these.

Stupified

There was an entire Jeopardy! category devoted to blogs? Did any of you all catch this? Is it real? Wow.

Running the gauntlet

Protesting and civil disobedience in an age of terror alerts and mobile communications.

Pardon my anger....

....but crap like this really makes me angry.

I am a "liberal", and I personally own not one but two Bibles (different translations).

And you know, I haven't exactly seen a whole lot of book-burnings hosted by liberals or liberal-minded organizations. I'm just sayin'.

Ugh.

What a workplace!

Like a car pileup on I-190 in downtown Buffalo, I couldn't look away as a bunch of MeFites pile onto this job ad, which makes this particular place of business sound about as cheery as a graveyard. Not sure what point I'd make, but it's weird to read.

He's a freak.

Is anyone following the adventures of Ken Jennings, the freakish freak who's been ruling the roost on Jeopardy! for months now? Alex Trebek pointed out the other night that because Ken is still playing, he's not eligible for this year's Tournament of Champions, and will wait until next year. But if Ken wins every day until two days before the 2005 Tournament of Champions, he'll be eligible for the Tournament -- which will include just two players.

Anyway, the guy's something to watch. On the one hand, he's a devout Mormon, so he dominates Bible topics. But then, he's apparently done a lot of studying of alcoholic beverages (if not drinking them, since he's a Mormon), because he always does well with "Potent Potables". The other night he ran the table on a Monty Python topic, and he carries a figurine of a Totoro with him as a good luck charm.

He's a freak. But he's fun to watch.

(I hope all the people he beats get T-shirts that read, "I got my ass kicked by Ken Jennings.")

Bait and Switch

Sharon repudiates America's "road map" while copping flack from his own party about the Gaza withdrawal. The whole thing is an exercise in bait and switch, the purpose of which is to consolidate control over the occupied West bank and to accelerate ethnic cleansing there.

Zero-Gravity Flights made Public

At $3,000 it's still a pricey ticket, albeit a bit cheaper than the privatized Space Flights, but if I had the spare cash, I'd happily go on an FAA-Approved Commercial Zero Gravity Flight.

A specially modified Boeing 727-200 aircraft, called G-Force One, will be used during a nationwide tour Sept. 14-24.

"We kick off a two-week tour with Zero-G flights in New York City, Los Angeles, Reno, Dallas, Atlanta, Detroit and Florida," Peter Diamandis, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of the company, told SPACE.com.

The kick-off flights will carry "select consumers and guests," the company announced today. The first flight was slated today to depart from Newark Airport in New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan.

Trips available for everyone else start in October.

Are you all tempted to raise the $3k so I can go on the Dallas stop? I promise to post a wonderful entry about it!

Oh, and, they teamed up with Diet Rite!? Find out more about the company from their official site.

Here's something that I'm trying to wrap my mind around:

What, exactly, is a terrorist?

It seems like a no-brainer type question, but I keep seeing the insurgents we can't seem to stop fighting in Iraq referred to in the news as "terrorists". Are they terrorists, though? Is guerilla-type action a form of terrorism, then? Certainly, using car-bombs against civilian targets is terrorism, but is doing the same against a military target "terrorism", or just guerilla tactics?

I'm asking because I'm increasingly suspecting that in the War On Terror, we not only fighting the wrong people but we don't know who we should be fighting in the first place.

Thoughts? (Sorry about not linking anything, but this is just half-baked think-out-loud type stuff.)

OK, folks, time for a Dichotomous Poll! Is this whole business about whether the newly-released "Bush National Guard" memos are real, with the whole bit about whether the typewriters in 1971 could do superscripts and nonproportional fonts and cut-and-paste and do PowerPoint and all that stuff (a) a crucial piece of the puzzle about whether George W. Bush can be trusted with the National Security Apparatus and the prosecution of the War on Terror, or (b) a stupid and irrelevant bit of red-herring stuff, and a case of "Ooooooo, a bouncing ball, let's follow it because there's certainly nothing more important to be talking about!" on the part of our national media and political discourse?

I vote 'B', myself.

OK, NFL fans: any football predictions or thoughts on the upcoming season? My personal feeling, icky though it may be, is that the Super Bowl is the Stupid Patriots' to lose.

I want to go to a movie at the theater described here.

(via Tenser, said the Tensor)

Driving back from Tulsa to Dallas yesterday evening, I heard a report on NPR's the World about the massive project in China attempting to divert water from the South of the country up to the North and Beijing. The total budget for the project reaches upwards of $14 Billion and will consist of:

three south-to-north canals, each running about 1,300 kilometres across the eastern, middle and western parts of the country.

The three lines are designed to divert water from the upper, middle and lower reaches of the water-rich Yangtze River into the country's drought-prone north.

Over the past two decades, hundreds of cities in North and Northwest China have been plunged into an ever-growing regional potential crisis of water resources.

The project is expected to be completed by 2007, just barely in time for the Summer Olympics of '08. One commentator on the NPR program said that it was akin to try to divert water from the Mississippi River to Washington DC. Just kind of made me go "whoa".

You know how at state fairs (and the larger county fairs) they'll have a pavilion or two where you can watch live versions of infomercials, wherein salespeople pitch things like therapeutic massage chairs and space-age cookware? Here's a nifty profile of one member of this special breed of traveling salespeople.

I find sales to be one of the most mystifying of vocations. I spent a year and half doing it (badly), and I can never fathom the kinds of people who can pretty much launch right into an effective pitch within half an hour of seeing the product they're selling for the first time.

Anyone else ever try sales?

Wow, we're posting here again. Hmmmmm....

Well, I might as well bring up a little dust-up in Blogistan regarding the Russian school massacre and the terrorist problem the Russians have in Chechnya. Yesterday, Matthew Yglesias posted as follows:

Worse, even, than the reality of the crime is the knowledge that things will get worse. The situation, clearly, can only be resolved by Russian concessions on the underlying political issue in Chechnya. At the same time, in the wake of this sort of outrage there will not only be no mood for concessions, but an amply justified fear that such concessions would only encourage further attacks and a further escalation of demands. I don't see any way out for Russian policymakers nor any particularly good options for US policymakers. Partisanship and complaints about Bush's handling of counterterrorism aside, this business is a reminder not only of the horrors out there, but also that terrorism is a genuinely difficult problem -- I think we've been doing many of the wrong things lately, but no one should claim it's obvious what the right way to proceed is.

This seems to me to be suggesting that Russia's old policy of scorched-earth, "Kill them all" military incursions into Chechnya hasn't worked worth a damn, so one might conclude that they might try making concessions -- except that this would only encourage further terrorist activity, obviously, since the terrorists would see it as evidence that they can influence policy by killing and violence. Russia, therefore, is caught in a dilemma where one alternative doesn't work and the other simply isn't possible for other reasons. This seems pretty clear to me.

But then along comes Glenn Reynolds, who seizes on Matthew's second sentence quoted above, and only that sentence, in a "Look at the dumb liberal" moment that pretty much completely misreads Matthew's point. (Read the ensuing comment thread as the Instalanche begins.) And then, after Matthew takes strongly-worded offense to this, Glenn retreats into his usual fall-back position of "Gee, I just can't understand why you'd be so mad at me", coupled with "I don't understand your position" (which somehow I was able to grasp in about the forty seconds it took me to read Matthew's entire post) and tut-tut-ing over Matthew's use of profanity. (The horror of it all! Good thing Glenn Reynolds is so gosh-darned consistent about his disapproval of profanity in political discourse.)

Matthew then goes on to clarify his original position here (as if it actually needed clarifying). I found this whole exercise rather illuminating, in light of the "Nuance? We don't need no steenking nuance here!" attitude of today's political commentary.

And here's something that's been bugging me for a long time now: what's the right thing to do if a case can actually be made that what the terrorists want actually is the right thing to do?

Following along with Jason's theme, I'll post this article about the current state of poverty in the US from the Economist. Some excerpts:

Whatever crude logic it possessed at the time, the Orshansky poverty line is by now quite arbitrary. Its originator calculated the cost of meeting a family’s nutritional needs and then multiplied this figure by three, because families in that era spent about a third of their income on food. The Census Bureau does not repeat this exercise to determine today’s poverty line; it does not recalculate the cost of an adequate diet or remeasure the share of income spent on food. It simply adjusts Ms Orshansky’s figures for inflation. Thus today’s dollar thresholds do not tell us how much a family or individual needs to get by in today’s America; they simply restate the cost of feeding a family in the 1960s in today’s prices, and multiply it by three.

As the Census Bureau is the first to concede, the poverty line is not a “complete description of what people and families need to live”. A more complete description would show that poor families now spend a far bigger share of their budget on housing (nearly 33%, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics) than on food (just 13.2%). Child care, done for free by the mothers and grandmothers of the 1950s and 1960s, is now a big expense. Deducting this expense from the measured income of families would add 1.9m to the official poverty figure, according to estimates by Isabel Sawhill and Adam Thomas of the Brookings Institution.

But a better measure of poverty would also assess the various weapons the government deploys against it. The current measure ignores non-monetary benefits, such as food stamps. Nor does it count the earned income-tax credit, a benefit paid via the tax code to the working poor, which has become every policy wonk’s favourite way to redistribute money. The Census Bureau has already experimented with such measures, and is probably itching to finally retire the Orshansky line. But its political masters in the Office of Management and Budget may be nervous of any innovation that would raise the official poverty number. To the bureau, the poverty line may be a mere “statistical yardstick”, but to the administration, it is a political stick its opponents might use to beat it with.

But if the level of poverty is fairly arbitrary, changes in the level are quite telling. Poverty fell throughout the long economic expansion of the Clinton years, from 15.1% in 1993 to 11.3% in 2000. Particularly striking was the fall in poverty among single mothers and their families, from 35.6% (4.4m) in 1993 to 25.4% (3.3m) in 2000.

Just some food for thought.

Make with the chit-chat, eh?

So here's an open thread. What'cha been reading? Listening to? Any good movies? Random thoughts?

Devoter

Devoter is a new political community weblog set up by a MeFier as an alternative to the ceaseless politic posts on the old blue. You can read more about it in this MetaTalk thread. I'm just kind of posting this as an FYI just in case anyone around here is interested. You can still get an uber-l33t two-digit user number, and this also means (hopefully) that MeFi will kind of go back to normal. Well, I can hope, anyways.

Hey Look! A Post!

Hey, how ya doin'?

So there's this SelectSmart guide to ethical philosophy, and I'd be interested to see how you all score and your thoughts, you know, assuming you see this and take it and whatnot. Here are my results:

1. Aquinas (100%)
2. St. Augustine (86%)
3. Spinoza (80%)
4. Ockham (64%)
5. Aristotle (62%)
6. Stoics (53%)
7. Jean-Paul Sartre (49%)
8. Kant (49%)
9. Cynics (41%)
10. Ayn Rand (39%)
11. John Stuart Mill (39%)
12. Nietzsche (39%)
13. Plato (39%)
14. Jeremy Bentham (34%)
15. Nel Noddings (33%)
16. David Hume (30%)
17. Prescriptivism (28%)
18. Epicureans (22%)
19. Thomas Hobbes (8%)

Hope everyone's doing well.

Test, One Two...

Nothing too deep, but I saw something that reminded me of Collaboratory, though it was before my time here*. Even taking the "easy" route they had troubles with their encounter with Dostoevsky.

*Come to think of it, most everything was before my time here. Not that I've helped in that regard.