Wheeee!!!! Good times!!!


Some homes worth less than their copper pipes | Reuters

Real estate brokers and local authorities say once-proud homes coast-to-coast are being stripped for copper, aluminum, and brass by thieves. Much of it ends up with scrap metal traders who say nearly all copper gets shipped overseas, much of it to China and India. In areas hit hardest by foreclosures, such as the Slavic Village neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, copper and other metals used in plumbing, heating systems and telephone lines are now more valuable than some homes.

No 4th Amendment?


Administration Asserts No Fourth Amendment for Domestic Military Operations "While the newly released memo focuses on "asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators," it contains a footnote referencing another Administration memo that caught our eye:

... our Office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations. See Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, and William J. Haynes, II, General Counsel, Department of Defense, from John C. Yoo..."

Good lord, it just get crazier. This country truly has gone to shit thanks to bush co.

April Fool's funny


World of Warcraft: The Molten Core

Blizzard's World of Warcraft: The Molten Core Collector's Edition, also announced today, will include tinted cellophane TV overlays, further increasing the array of colors available to players. Additional Collector's Edition features, as well as details on the upcoming World of Warcraft: The Molten Core beta test, will be revealed closer to release. World of Warcraft: The Molten Core will initially be available for the Atari 2600 platform, with plans for additional console systems to be announced in the near future.

All Religions are Fairy Tales.


Business Owners, Customers Upset Over Controversial Billboard - News Story - WFTV Orlando

It looked harmless enough, but the words on a billboard un-nerved so many people that a popular restaurant nearby actually lost business. The billboard was on Colonial Drive near the Old Cheney Highway. Although the popular Straub's Seafood restaurant often advertises on it, this wasn't their billboard. The sign was taken down after Channel 9 started asking questions.

The billboard came down around 4:00 Friday afternoon and nearby business owners are relieved. Straub's restaurant can replace the sign with the night's specials.

At first glance the sign looked like a children's cartoon, but the message next to the fairy princess stirred emotions.

"When you condemn all religions and say they are a fairytale that is wrong," said Rich Stormes, a nearby business owner.

The billboard went up a week before Easter and business at the restaurant went down.

I voted for awesome on this one.

Bush's War


FRONTLINE: bush's war: introduction | PBS

From the horror of 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq; the truth about WMD to the rise of an insurgency; the scandal of Abu Ghraib to the strategy of the surge -- for seven years, FRONTLINE has revealed the defining stories of the war on terror in meticulous detail, and the political dramas that played out at the highest levels of power and influence.

Good post on Boing Boing


Good comment thread: What's happened to the U.S. economy? - Boing Boing

I know people love their anecdotal evidence, especially in an economic discussion. But the concern here is pretty straightforward. From about 2001 - current the United States has funded a comprehensive restructuring of domestic government agencies (i.e. Homeland Security) with new and far-reaching "anti-terrorism" programs (e.g. Federal subsidy of enlarged state and local police, USVISIT, etc.), funded an invasion and ongoing active occupation of Iraq (at a cost of about $1 billion per month), while at the same time cutting taxes, and in September 2007 Congress raised the debt ceiling $9.815 trillion. The U.S. Government went from an ostensibly balanced budget in 1999, to a mind-boggling increase in spending, while at the same time collecting less revenue (i.e. taxes). How do they afford it? They increase the supply of money and credit through the Federal Reserve. This is a stealth tax. By debasing the fiat currency of the dollar, they spend the new dollars on the military-industrial complex to "keep us safe"*, which dilutes the value of the dollars we save in our bank accounts (or that we negotiated with our employers to earn in our paychecks), but all of the other goods and services are still just as scarce, so more dollars are needed for the same value to exchange for them, which is inflation. (*Recently "keep us safe" has been extended to including bailing out financiers such as Bear Stearns and soon Lehman Brothers.)

The "Three Trillion Dollar War" or whatever you want to call it was all paid with inflation, which explains why the price of gold went over $1000/oz, why oil and food prices are up, but people are still generally acting as if dollars are worth what they used to be worth before the new money was created. (Arguably his is also why the Federal Reserve ceased publishing M3 data in March of 2006, and why the Department of Labor and Statistics has redefined the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to exclude energy (i.e. oil) and agriculture from its "basket of goods" estimation of dollar purchasing power.)

The economic crisis the United States can no longer ignore is the unwinding of this inflation. However, economists who speak on television or for politicians will tie themselves in knots and circular logic to avoid ever saying the word "inflation" -- it's like a taboo. So first they pitched this problem as a "sub-prime mortgage crisis", until now the problem is obviously not contained to just that market sector. Recently I've heard people start saying "contagion" like when the Asian Tigers melted down from their inflationary bubble in the 1990s.

But the crisis is simply that the Bush-Cheney administration has spent more money than God by borrowing and printing it (i.e. creating inflation), which in the central banking system of fractional reserve multiplies several times over into even more inflation. This creates an enormous market bubble -- that so-called "economic recovery" Bush has claimed in his speeches of yore. So this bubble didn't even feel like a bubble so much because the "improvement" was marginal over the pre-existing recession from the previous dot-com bubble and housing "foam" created by Alan Greenspan. But soon all of that inflation is about to collapse.

Think of inflation like those Warner Bros. cartoons where Wile E. Coyte runs off the edge of a cliff, and he can keep running and running on the air as long as he doesn't look down and realize that there's no more dirt beneath him. But eventually he looks down and plummets until he hits real dirt. That's what a correction for inflation is like.

And we've had this inflation/recession building up for approximately a decade now. It could take at least that long to get back out of it. So I would not chalk this up to "fear mongering". Fear mongering of the phantom menace called "terrorism" is what got us into this hole.

Dang.....

Fairey has developed a successful career through expropriating and recontextualizing the artworks of others, which in and of itself does not make for bad art. Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein based his paintings on the world of American comic strips and advertising imagery, but one was always aware that Lichtenstein was taking his images from comic books; that was after all the point, to examine the blasé and artificial in modern American commercial culture. When Lichtenstein painted Look Mickey, a 1961 oil on canvas portrait of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, everyone was cognizant of the artist’s source material - they were in on the joke. By contrast, Fairey simply filches artworks and hopes that no one notices - the joke is on you.

http://ww23.rr.com/index.php?origURL=http:


Google to Yahoo Hijack

No thanks. I was with RoadRunner here in Austin back when they firstrolled out service, and for a couple years after that. I know just how flaky and lame their email, DNS, and web services are. They made headlines multiple times here when their POS email server ate thousands of customer emails, and their DNS was a joke (they have redundant DNS servers, but if one malfunctions, the others malfunction as well - meaning dear mom one day gets bounce back messages when she tries to email you, for instance). I found out Time Warner uses Microsoft servers exclusively, due to a limiting funding contract they signed with M$. And I'm quite sure they suck just as much, if not more, today than ever.

I've since switched to Earthlink as my ISP. Time Warner still provides the hardware (the cable line to my house, and the modem), but Earthlink provides the services (DNS, email, web). It's been smooth sailing ever since! I switched my DNS to OpenDNS only to avoid Earthlink's invasive ad-laden search pages on failed DNS lookups. Now with the addition of AdBlock Plus, my web browsing is pain-free!

Yeah, awesome. This just started happening to me this week. Time Warner has a monopoly so there is no-one I can switch too. Also, talking to a tech I could not even get them to admit these pages exist even though I have screen shots and the url. Just a FYI people.....

Scribefire notes

Been using Scribefire for the past few weeks here on the blog and I have to say it makes the whole process a breeze. Sometimes it seems to have a mind of it's own, but I like it. And I know blogging is old fashioned now with twitter and pownce, but I guess old habits die hard. Plus, twitter annoys the christ out of me.

And git off mah lawn!

Damn kids.

Ten Myths You’ve Probably Heard in Bars


Jeffrey Morgenthaler » Ten Myths You’ve Probably Heard in Bars

When I got my first job bartending at a tender young age, I had visions of Tom Cruise in the movie Cocktail: hotel room keys sliding across the bar as I coolly sipped a spiked coffee, standing with one foot on the brass rail and gazing across the emptying room at the end of a long night while I decided which young vixen to go home with. The real truth hits me every other Friday night, as I lie on my stomach in an inch of standing water, trying to fish a whole lime out of my floor drain with a steak knife in a vain attempt to keep the entire bar from flooding. The truth of the matter is, bartending is a job like any other, but with eight more hours of standing and a wild pack of drunks to tend to every night. At the end of that night, there’s an hour’s worth of cleanup to do, and the sad truth is that by the time most of us are done, most people are sound asleep.

Been there, done that


Let’s go vampire slaying
Let’s go vampire slaying

Cold, undead relics from a past age haunt the corporate world, spreading fear and carnage wherever they go. These monsters can look good, seductive even, but if you let them, they’ll suck the life force out of you and leave you dead. Or worse: One of them. I call them vampire ideas and all they deserve is a stake through the heart. Vampire ideas can be found in stock management philosophy, tired old leadership theories or business advice from an earlier era. Wherever they come from, they’re bad for you and they’re bad for business.

Hoo boy, this sums up my corporate days perfectly.

wowzors


Daily Kos: State of the Nation

That speech today? The one that has pundits--from the liberal David Corn at The Nation ("This is as sophisticated a discussion of race as any American politician has sought to present to the public") to the conservative Charles Murray, of National Review Online ("it is just plain flat out brilliant—rhetorically, but also in capturing a lot of nuance about race in America. It is so far above the standard we're used to from our pols."), and those inbetween--noting the brilliance, sophistication, sincerity and candor of the words spoken by Obama? That speech? He wrote it himself.

Once more, with feeling:

He wrote it. Himself.

Barack Obama did. He wrote it.

A good breakdown on the credit crunch


Can’t Grasp Credit Crisis? Join the Club - New York Times

Raise your hand if you don’t quite understand this whole financial crisis. It has been going on for seven months now, and many people probably feel as if they should understand it. But they don’t, not really. The part about the housing crash seems simple enough. With banks whispering sweet encouragement, people bought homes they couldn’t afford, and now they are falling behind on their mortgages.

But the overwhelming majority of homeowners are doing just fine. So how is it that a mess concentrated in one part of the mortgage business — subprime loans — has frozen the credit markets, sent stock markets gyrating, caused the collapse of Bear Stearns, left the economy on the brink of the worst recession in a generation and forced the Federal Reserve to take its boldest action since the Depression?

I’m here to urge you not to feel sheepish. This may not be entirely comforting, but your confusion is shared by many people who are in the middle of the crisis.