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One of My Favorite Reads. L a u g h i n g ~ K n e e s is one of my favorite places to go read clear, and poignant insights. Today's gem - For a four-year presidency, doesn't it seem a little counterproductive... [Digital Common Sense]

[Obvious] Always low prices, always low salaries. Georgia's program for uninsured children packed with kids of Wal-Mart employees. [AJC] [Fark]

If you're copy-editing, you're correcting for HITLER!.

What can you say about a story like this?

(“This way to the libertarian recruitment center” comes to mind, actually.)

[Crooked Timber]

Five things I learned from watching Under the Tuscan Sun without sound on the in-flight movie. + Unattractive people are colorful and goodhearted + Almost everyone in Tuscany is an aging character actor with a funny hat + Italian men like watching women dance in fountains + Tuscan birthing rooms have unscreened windows with extraordinary views + The local police will give you rides on their little scooter bikes provided that you're Diane Lane in a skirt [5ives]

BUSH'S JOBLESS RECOVERY AND LUDICROUS EMPLOYMENT FORECAST.

Almost immediately after Bush's Council of Economic Advisors glowingly predicted they would create 2.6 million net new jobs this year, the Republican spin doctors and backtrackers have been working overtime to deny that's what they meant. Of course, as CBS Moneywatch has reported, that's precisely what they meant -- they were just insane to believe it was achievable, and to believe that the press and public would be too stupid to pick up on it. The semi-literate and uneducated Presnit, of course, hummed and hawed and refused to say anything when asked about it after he had trotted it out as 'evidence' the economy was doing just fine. Which of course it is not. The red line in the chart above shows Bush's pathetic job creation record, and shows once and for all that his criminal tax cuts for the ultra-rich were simply a give-away for friends, and did not help the economy for the other 99% of Americans one bit. I am endlessly amazed that anyone with an annual income less than seven figures could even contemplate voting to re-elect this fraud. Again, as CBS reports, there are two ways to interpret Bush's 'forecast'. The more conservative one is that the economy will generate 2.6 million net new jobs in 2004, about 220 thousand per year, moving total employment up almost to where it was before he seized office (the lower blue line above). This compares to growth of 112 thousand in January, so despite the ebullience that surrounded that number announcement, even that number is only half the monthly rate needed to achieve even this target. But when asked for clarification, the Council Chairman said that the forecast is for average 2004 employment to be 2.6 million higher than average 2003 employment of 130 million. To achieve that feat, employment will have to jump by 460 thousand per month and reach about 135 million by December (the higher blue line on the chart above). In the interest of public service, I'm going to hold Bush and the Council to their word. Each month I'll repost the above chart showing progress towards the 2.6 million net new job target. And to be more than fair, I'll settle for achievement of the lower forecast on the chart above. After all, I appreciate that Mr. Bush has a lot of trouble with numbers. This is not an unreasonable expectation of a president who used this ludicrous announcement for blatant political purposes. This is the number one issue in the campaign and he needs to be measured on his performance. After all, if he had run an administration that merely kept job growth up with new entrants in the labour force (growing at 150 thousand a month), employment would currently be above 139 million, and the jobless recovery would not be an issue. The number that Bush uses to talk about jobs, of course, is the fraudulent unemployment rate, which excludes the millions who have simply given up looking for work in the horrendous Bush economy, and also fails to include the millions who are struggling with part-time jobs because Bush is encouraging his big business buddies to outsource and offshore all the full-time jobs. I've already written about the fact that the actual unemployment rate is over 8%. Data is taken from the US Department of Labor statistics.

[How to Save the World]

Can you have too many choices?  Excellent review and discussion in the current New Yorker.

Don't Be A Terror Victim. I'm not entirely sure if it's a parody, or just Fox blowing the fear and terror horn, but for what it's worth, here are 26 things you can do to reduce your chances of being a terror victim."Familiarize yourself with typical airline hijackings." (Try to arrange to be in three or four, just to see how it goes down.) "Do not live or work in a highly urban area that most likely would be a terrorist's target, such as New York City, Washington, D.C., or San Francisco." (Damn, there go the property values.) [mefi] [comments] [Futurismic]

Mindreading isn’t the same as empathy, the sensation of feeling another’s pain. It is a matter of catching subtle cues... [Arts & Letters Daily]

He wishes for the cloths of Heaven.

There wasn’t much light pollution when I was growing up in Ireland, but it was cloudy way too often. It wasn’t until I moved to Arizona and got out into the desert at night that I fully appreciated the Milky Way as a celestial object you could look up and see. I remain appallingly ignorant about the constellations, but via Escadabelle comes a superb photograph of the Arizona night sky (see also a larger version). If you’re ever in Tucson, make time to get out to the Kitt Peak National Observatory which runs a terrific Nightly Observing Program. Here in Australia the night sky is also very clear, outside the cities, but I am even more clueless about its composition.

[Crooked Timber]

"When life hands you lemons, make coffee... and then you'll have the desire to make lemonade."

Jon Friedman, 2004

coffee and cigarettes. Confessions of a New Coffee Drinker  [via sidesh0w.com: sideblog] [jenett.radio]

Greenspan, Bush and Social Security: Robin Hoods in reverse
Alan Greenspan made everyone sit up and take notice yesterday by declaring that, since he thinks raising taxes is a bad idea, the only way to deal with the ballooning deficits the nation faces as the baby boomers retire is to cut Social Security benefits.

So there you have it, more starkly laid out than ever before, by the one voice in the national economy that everyone listens to. First we lowered taxes with a plan ridiculously weighted towards rewarding the extreme high end of wealthy citizens, while tossing a handful of crumbs to the middle class; now we're told that we have to make up the difference by cutting retirement benefits for the mass of Americans.

Let's be clear on a few things: I don't feel that Social Security is a sacred cow that should never be reviewed, revisited or revised. Let's talk about means tests, fixing the inflation indexing, whatever. There's lots of room, and need, for good reform ideas. (The Bush privatization idea is not, however, one of them; putting aside the argument over whether it would offer good results, Bush has never explained how he intends to pay for it. Since the cash to pay for current retirees' benefits comes from current wage-earners' tax payments, if you put the current wage-earners' payments into private accounts, you can't pay the current retirees -- and we're right back to Greenspan's talk of cutting benefits.)

But let's not allow the most basic fact of this national debate to be obscured, either. Bush and Greenspan together are practicing a sick kind of reverse-Robin-Hoodism (or should it be hoodwinkery?). What we are witnessing is a gigantic transfer of cash from the pockets of the many to the pockets of the few. This isn't just morally bankrupt -- it's pragmatically stupid, since in the long run it hobbles the economy.

Our memory span is so short that none of the media coverage of Greenspan's speech that I saw bothered to review the basic history here: The U.S. had already had a plan in place to deal with the baby boom retirement! What do you think those surpluses we began to run up in the late 1990s were all about? That was the money that a bipartisan coalition of responsible Democrats and Republicans had -- at considerable political cost to themselves -- begun to sock away so that we could approach this demographic tidal wave with some degree of confidence.

Fast forward to the 2000 election: Remember George Bush's absurd -- but politically effective -- argument about the surplus? He told us it was "our" money, not the government's, and he wanted to give "us" some of it back. These are Bush's words from that election: "Half the surplus is gonna go for Social Security reform and to pay down debt. One quarter is gonna go for new programs that are needed. But I think it's fair, and I think it's right, that one quarter go back to the hard working Americans who pay the bills."

In hindsight, the distortions and outright lies rolled into that campaign statement are too tightly packed to pry apart: As it turned out, none of the surplus went toward Social Security reform or to pay down debt. Bush pushed through a series of tax cuts that reduced the tax burden on the wealthy while barely changing the tax situations of most "hard working Americans who pay the bills." We encountered recession and war, and instead of facing up to tough fiscal choices, Bush kept telling us, "Just wait, the tax cuts will do their trick -- the economy will grow, Americans will get back to work and the recovery will shave down the deficit." None of that has happened, despite multiple waves of tax cuts. Instead, the deficits keep getting worse.

So now the other shoe drops: Whoops, says Alan Greenspan to middle America, George Bush wrecked your economy, the Republican Congress squandered the national piggy bank -- now we'll have to cut your retirement benefit! After all, isn't it more important to protect billion-dollar estates from the "death tax" than to keep offering working retirees a reasonable pension?

There is one thing Greenspan has done here that the Bush administration will not forgive him for: He was supposed to wait till after the election to start talking about cutting Social Security. Before the election, this dose of truth-telling is a little too dangerous. People might actually start paying attention. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

Rover Captures Dusty Sunset in Blue Martian Sky.

Rover Captures Dusty Sunset in Blue Martian Sky; Picture Gives Information on Mars Atmosphere

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - The Opportunity rover turned its panoramic gaze on the horizon and captured a dusty blue sunset.

( That's just cool! ed. )

[The Agonist]

[Interesting] New SAT format unveiled, testing criteria applied to great writers. Shakespeare, Emerson fail. Unabomber blows away competition. (Atlantic) [Fark]

Tragic, hilarious Marioland 8-bit Flash movies. The tragedy of Marioland: a three-part Flash animation using pixel-cool graphics from 8-bit Mario games as characters in a screamingly funny movie about the tragic invasion of Marioland. The use of Marioland mood music is a masterstroke. Part 1 Link, Part 2 Link, Part 3 (via MeFi)
[Boing Boing Blog]

Great Alibi. [quote:] "If I was the suicide bomber, I wouldn't be doing this interview with you right now," Khadr told CBC News on Wednesday.... [The Daily Irrelevant]

Bush Goes Too Far Andrew Sullivan has just posted a statement I agree with whole-heartedly. Bush has dragged the Constitution into the culture wars for his own political advantage. I consider this a morally criminal act. Lying isn't enough for this guy, he has to try to drag us all into the right-wing swamp of hate and fear. On this issue, one commenter at Sullivan's blog says "the overwhelming majority of the country will be in the President's army, as you'll soon find out," as chilling , threatening, and overtly fascist remark as I have ever seen an American citizen utter in public without shame. Sullivan's statement:

WAR IS DECLARED: The president launched a war today against the civil rights of gay citizens and their families. And just as importantly, he launched a war to defile the most sacred document in the land. Rather than allow the contentious and difficult issue of equal marriage rights to be fought over in the states, rather than let politics and the law take their course, rather than keep the Constitution out of the culture wars, this president wants to drag the very founding document into his re-election campaign. He is proposing to remove civil rights from one group of American citizens - and do so in the Constitution itself. The message could not be plainer: these citizens do not fully belong in America. Their relationships must be stigmatized in the very Constitution itself. The document that should be uniting the country will now be used to divide it, to single out a group of people for discrimination itself, and to do so for narrow electoral purposes. Not since the horrifying legacy of Constitutional racial discrimination in this country has such a goal been even thought of, let alone pursued. Those of us who supported this president in 2000, who have backed him whole-heartedly during the war, who have endured scorn from our peers as a result, who trusted that this president was indeed a uniter rather than a divider, now know the truth. NO MORE PROFOUND AN ATTACK: This president wants our families denied civil protection and civil acknowledgment. He wants us stigmatized not just by a law, not just by his inability even to call us by name, not by his minions on the religious right. He wants us stigmatized in the very founding document of America. There can be no more profound attack on a minority in the United States - or on the promise of freedom that America represents. That very tactic is so shocking in its prejudice, so clear in its intent, so extreme in its implications that it leaves people of good will little lee-way. This president has now made the Republican party an emblem of exclusion and division and intolerance. Gay people will now regard it as their enemy for generations - and rightly so. I knew this was coming, but the way in which it has been delivered and the actual fact of its occurrence is so deeply depressing it is still hard to absorb. But the result is clear, at least for those who care about the Constitution and care about civil rights. We must oppose this extremism with everything we can muster. We must appeal to the fair-minded center of the country that balks at the hatred and fear that much of the religious right feeds on. We must prevent this graffiti from being written on a document every person in this country should be able to regard as their own. This struggle is hard but it is also easy. The president has made it easy. He's a simple man and he divides the world into friends and foes. He has now made a whole group of Americans - and their families and their friends - his enemy. We have no alternative but to defend ourselves and our families from this attack. And we will.

[FarrFeed]

Elmore Leonard's ten rules. If there’s a better set of rules for writers, I don’t know it. Read this, it’s good for you.... [Making Light]

Pentagon warns Bush of apocalyptic climate change by 2020. The Pentagon issued a secret report to Bush warning him that catastrophic climate changes in the next 15 years are a bigger threat than terrorism, and will lead to massive riots and nuclear war.

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

Link (Thanks, Tony!) [Boing Boing Blog]

Tom Peters posts 16 points on outsourcing/offshoring.  Points 6 and 7 are interesting.

6. Americans' "unearned wage advantage" could be erased permanently. ("There is no job which is America's God-given right anymore." -- Carly Fiorina, Hewlett-Packard)

7. The wholesale, upscale entry of 2.5 billion people (China, India) into the global economy at an accelerating rate is almost unfathomable.

His conclusion:  we need to train many, many more creative, risk-taking entrepreneurs.  That will require a massive shift in how we educate our youth.  The only reliable indicator of whether you will be an entrepreneur:  you are the son or daughter of an entrepreneur. 

BTW, I am working with my wife on a new business she wants to start.  One of the first things I did was look into outsourced/offshored production. [John Robb's Weblog]

Economics of Mozart and Happiness.

Tyler Cowen writes

Read Michael’s recent treatment of The Economics of Mozart. The bottom line? Mozart was a successful commercial entrepreneur. His economic problems stemmed from a war with Turkey, not the failures of the marketplace.

He should definitely have known better than to start a war with Turkey. That whole abduction from the seraglio business was a complete farce. Meanwhile — sorry, I’m not even going to pretend to link these comments — Matt Yglesias makes the following observation about Greg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox:

The real progress paradox isn’t “why doesn’t all our stuff make us happy” but rather, given that all our stuff pretty clearly doesn’t make us happy, how do we come to have all this stuff.

Which seems about right. An unwillingness to distinguish these two questions — or rather, the decision, for technical purposes, to treat them as if they were the same question — is a hallmark of modern economics. Robert E. Lane has a book that argues this point. Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer have a solid rejoinder from the economist’s point of view, arguing that money can indeed go a long way towards making you happy — but not as far, surprisingly, as democratic institutions and local political autonomy can.

[Crooked Timber]

Star Gets Ripped, Achieves Fame.
Black Hole Devours Star, Spews Explosive Remnants Seven hundred million years ago, the black hole at the core of Galaxy RX J1242-11 ate a star the size of our sun. "Stars can survive being stretched a small amount," said study leader Stefanie Komossa of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany. "But this star was stretched beyond its breaking point." And no, they don't mean Michael Jackson. [Beyond the Beyond]

Fog of War.

A bunch of us went to see the movie "Fog of War" on Friday night.  This is a very interesting documentary by a local director consisting almost entirely of an interview with Robert S. McNamara who was Secretary of Defense during the first half of the U.S. war in Vietnam and subsequently president of the World Bank.  The film concentrates on McNamara's efforts in bombing Japan and Germany during World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War.

The first depressing take-away from the movie is that our intelligence efforts are almost worthless.  The CIA assured JFK that the Russians did not have nuclear warheads in Cuba at the time of the crisis.  The missiles were in place and the warheads on their way.  In fact it seems that the warheads were already in Cuba at the time of the dispute.  Not only that but Fidel Castro met McNamara face-to-face in the 1990s and said that he'd recommended to the Russians that they use them even though he knew that Cuba would be destroyed and all of its citizens killed.  (N.B.: Personal ownership of a third-world country is a beautiful thing!)

The second conclusion from watching the film is that the U.S. has never won the hearts and minds of foreigners or even succeeded in changing foreigners' minds.  We won WWII by using our industrial power to destroy the capacity of the Japanese and Germans to carry out their objectives, not by convincing the Japanese or the Germans of anything or changing their minds or objectives.

[Philip Greenspun Weblog]

Dayglo Future. Some folks have started a futurist/singularity/cosmic sort of blog. I'm not much of a believer in the thought-is-software idea and have only achieved enlightment a couple of times in my life and then it came in the form of a pill, but the site is lively in the Bucky way and is full of colorful illustrations.... [Joho the Blog]

Mark Fiore: Breast Friends. Bringing You the Bare Essentials of Leadership [The Village Voice Most Popular]

A hidden fist. "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist -- McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell-Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called... [The Daily Irrelevant]

"America’s growing fear of litigation...". Top 5 Ridiculous Lawsuits of 2003

A critical part of the role of judges is deciding who can sue for what, but these days anyone can sue for just about anything.

[via Overlawyered < The Legal Reader] [jenett.radio]

Friday Atrocity Roundup Just two, actually. They're all I can stand. First this gem from the New York Times. The helpful Bush administration is looking to reclassify fast-food jobs as manufacturing jobs in order to make the stats look better. I am not making this up:

Is cooking a hamburger patty and inserting the meat, lettuce and ketchup inside a bun a manufacturing job, like assembling automobiles? That question is posed in the new Economic Report of the President, a thick annual compendium of observations and statistics on the health of the United States economy. The latest edition, sent to Congress last week, questions whether fast-food restaurants should continue to be counted as part of the service sector or should be reclassified as manufacturers. No answers were offered. In a speech to Washington economists Tuesday, N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, said that properly classifying such workers was "an important consideration" in setting economic policy.

Moving right along, you simply must read this Billmon post:

In its effort to relieve overstretched U.S. troops in Iraq, the Bush administration has hired a private security company staffed with former henchmen of South Africa's apartheid regime.

What's more and even worse (it could be worse than this?), this is actually part of a scheme to hand Iraq over to Ahmed Chalabi by creating a US-funded private army of the worst hoodlums and goons imaginable. Civil war in Iraq is not only inevitable under the circumstances, it will be financed in large part by our tax dollars. The estimated 10,000 Iraqi civilian dead so far is only the beginning, never mind (?) the much larger numbers of Iraqi children and elderly thought to have died as a result of sanctions since the first Gulf war. And God pity the U.S. troops caught in the middle. Ought to do wonders for recruiting, too. [FarrFeed]

When Will They All Be Killed.
With pr0n in relative abeyance, sexual performance enhancers now rule the spam market. Sex drugs in cans of spam Today I got spammed by these guys who build post-apocalypse disaster shelters. There's a new twist to the marketplace. Maybe I can take my porn and Viagra in there with me and securely lock the door! Even these extreme measures are unlikely to protect me from spam. We're still supposed to fret about Moslem terrorists when global capitalism has insanely succumbed to satyriasis. Just imagine being a devout Moslem, and thinking that Western society is greedy, lustful, decadent and unnaturally drenched in sex, and then you get an Internet email account and, whoa, here it comes. A veritable tidal wave of Cialis and pr0n. That would be kind of proof-positive, huh? You'd cross your arms in your djellaba and know you were right all along! You'd feel great! Until you tried to escape from the contamination, that is. Man, even a blastproof Taliban cave in Kandahar couldn't save you. [Beyond the Beyond]

Humans are hardwired to feel others' pain [New Scientist]

Science and Politics. [quote:] The Bush administration is guilty of misrepresenting scientific knowledge and misleading the public, a group of America's most senior scientists claimed yesterday. They said the government had manipulated information to fit its policies on everything from climate change to... [The Daily Irrelevant]

Czech Proverb. "The big thieves hang the little ones." [Quotes of the Day]

Marvin Minksy. "Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good. It would be the end of everything we know." [Quotes of the Day]

William Gibson interview. Here's a great interview with William Gibson, who is on the road promoting the paperback of his brilliant novel of apophenia run wild, Pattern Recognition (see my review, too).

"When you write a science-fiction novel set in some sort of recognizable future, as soon as you finish it you have the dubious pleasure of watching it acquire a patina of quaint technological obsolescence. For instance, there are no cell phones in Neuromancer. I couldn't have foreseen them. It would have seemed corny, like Dick Tracy wrist radios."

And he never set out to predict how we might be living a few decades hence. "I always assumed that social-science fiction - anything set on Earth in a not-too-distant future - is just a mutant version of the present. But the easiest hook to hang on me was that I was a futurist. I had always maintained that I was squinting at the present in a certain way."

Link (via Futurismic) [Boing Boing Blog]

Red state, blue win [Salon.com]

Take This Job and Be Thankful (for $6.80 an Hour). David K. Shipler's book, based on interviews with low-wage workers, seeks to alert a complacent nation about the deprivation in its midst. By Michael Massing. [New York Times: Books]

Screen pool.

Here: Play with some balls.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Shows that mention witchcraft no longer eligible for closed-captioning. The five-secret-person Department of Education panel that allocates funding for closed-captioning will no longer provide assitive tracks for the deaf to shows that mention witchcraft, including Scooby Doo, Bewitched, and Justice League.

[T]he result of this mysterious panel's deliberations was that the US Department of Education was to declare over 200 TV programs (almost no cartoons, except for things like Prince of Egypt. No more sports. Precious little drama...) were now inappropriate for closed-caption funding...

28 million Americans are now being protected from Sabrina...

Witches of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your vertical blanking interval! Link (Thanks, Sam!) [Boing Boing Blog]

Famous quotes from nowhere.

Sometimes quotes take on a life of their own. They become famous and get attributed to someone without anyone citing a traceable origin. I ran into such a problem about five years ago when I wanted to use a quote by Herbert Simon in an article. The quote was this:

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

I remember doing all sorts of searches online to figure out the exact source of that quote. But others using those lines either cited no source or pointed to a piece by Hal Varian in Scientific American as the source of the quote. I checked out that article, but there was no citation. What to do? I ended up contacting Hal Varian directly for the source and he very kindly provided a pointer to it (p.40.).

[Crooked Timber]

The 213 Things Skippy is No Longer Allowed to Do in the U.S. Army [del.icio.us/] [Outwardly Normal 2]

Mathematics of M&M packing. According to a paper in the new issue of Science, researchers were surprised to discover that M&Ms randomly dumped into a bowl pack together much more desnely than spheres. Why? Assymetric ellipsoids touch eleven neighbors while spheres only saddle up to six. Understanding how particles pack together can help scientists develop new and denser materials, like ceramics for heat shields. Link [Boing Boing Blog]

India Woos Medical Tourists. It’s not only quality hardware and software that can be done in India for a fraction of the cost. BBC reports that India has a generation of world class doctors capable of doing joint replacement, heart, neuro and cancer surgery at their state-of-the-art facilities. [AlterSlash]

Play as if Your Life Depended on It. Play as if Your Life Depended on It is the first fitness book I've ever read, ever, to make having fun as integral to exercise as muscle growth. It's clearly written, but it's so dense with new insights into the very nature of physical being that you kind [Funlog]

Cheney + Halliburton = (contracts - bids) X $$$

It's a reductive formula, and belaboring it makes it too easy for see-no-evil types to brush off the whole issue. So it's good to have a thorough article on the subject by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker.

[EdCone.com]

quote. The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment. -- Dorothy Nevill... [The Daily Irrelevant]

The Large Now.

Been hanging around the Long Now site, and thinking about Deep Time. A risk of getting older, I guess. Certainly a good way to put politics into perspective.

My perusals this morning led me to the very cool Earth Impact Database, and its collection of images. The 600-million year old Beaverhead crater in Montana, is 60km wide and visible only on gravity maps. The biggest one on Earth is the Vredefort crater in South Africa. It's 300km wide, 2023 million years old and visible in a variety of ways. The coolest is Manicouagan, which appears to be a circular river in Quebec. It's 100km across and 214 million years old.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

O'Reilly: I was wrong.

O'Reilly: "I was wrong."

Some of George W. Bush's conservative political supporters are increasingly restive and anxious about the president's economic policies as well as his attempts to justify the war against Iraq.

Popular conservative television news anchor Bill O'Reilly, usually an outspoken Bush loyalist, said on Tuesday he was now skeptical about the Bush administration and apologized to viewers for supporting prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

"I was wrong. I am not pleased about it at all and I think all Americans should be concerned about this," O'Reilly said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America."

If I may resort to tween-speak for a moment: OMG W00T OMFG

[The Agonist]

No Harm, No Foul in Heavy Net Use. Breathe easy, addicts. A new study says there’s no harm in extended Internet use, contrary to earlier research indicating otherwise. [AlterSlash]

No comment.

In the middle of a generally reasonable Newsweek article about the failure to find WMDs, I came across the following para

But if Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction, why didn't he come clean? After all, he could have given U.N. inspectors free rein; he could have allowed them to interview all of his scientists in private—even outside the country—and let them rummage through his palaces. Faced with war, wasn't that the sensible option?

But, but ...(lapses into stunned silence)

[Crooked Timber]

Living with hunger.

I’ve just finished watching Sorious Samura’s documentary Living with Hunger on the UK’s Channel 4 . It seems to be screening worldwide over the next few days including on CBC in Canada and repeatedly on Discovery/Times in the US. It is an extremely vivid portrait of how some of the world’s poorest people live, how hard they work, and their dignity in conditions tougher than most of us will ever face. Highly recommended.

[Crooked Timber]

CANDID CAMERA

Here’s a “scientific test” to determine your ability to differentiate between so-called Fake and Real smiles. These are not professional models, so be prepared for smiles that could easily come from Crazed Serial Killers. I got 13 out of 20 right.

Suggested added dialogue:

“That was great. No, really.”
“Of course I want to go out/sleep/live with you.”
“I’ll wait right here.”
“No, you’re not too old to wear/do/say that.”
“I’m really, really happy for you.”
“Your new boyfriend/mother/therapist seems very nice.”
“I’m not in a hurry. Take