Political humour? Oh yes, we’ve got political humour. Somebody put a little love and care into this carefully constructed Bush/Blair ballad.

Came across this article from the January 2001 edition of The Onion, Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’, Reporting on Bush’s inaugural address, The Onion qouted him as making the following claims:

– ‘selling off the national parks to developers’ (yes, more or less)
– ‘going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies’ (oh my yes)
– ‘the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years’ (yepper)
– ‘a 250 percent boost in military spending’ (not sure what the exact number is, but, well, yes)
– ‘bring back economic stagnation by implementing substantial tax cuts’ (yes) ‘…. which would lead to a drop in consumer spending’ (been reading the finance section lately?)
– He assured citizens that he will follow through on his campaign promise to open the 1.5 million acre refuge’s coastal plain to oil drilling (still working on it)

They missed a prediction here:

‘Bush had equally high praise for Attorney General nominee John Ashcroft, whom he praised as “a tireless champion in the battle to protect a woman’s right to give birth’

Ashcroft started with abortion bullying, but he’s opened up on a lot of fronts since.

Of course, back then they had no idea that 911 would happen. I have heard it argued that the bulk of the US administration’s post-attack policies have been oppurtunistic attempts to push through old goals. Apparently those goals were previously obvious at least to the prophets at America’s Finest News Source.

Treeplanters generally have pretty limited scope of conversation. Mostly they talk about numbers of trees they have planted in various days or seasons or provinces. Here is one of the most interesting (ok, the only interesting) discussions of tree numbers I’ve seen on the planter bulletin boards:

http://www.plant-a-tree.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=5&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

Notice the old timer who figures himself at above 2 million (!) trees over his many seasons, and be sure to read Ken Chaplin’s post regarding his recent record setting 15,000 tree day. “Setting the record is never an impossibility, or a pipe dream; just an issue of the right place, right time, and right circumstances.”

Interestingly, that may not settle that debate, there is a follow up post about a claimed 16k day by some baller from down under.

For the record, I reckon about a quarter million seedlings have been midwifed by my left hand here. Amazing I can still type. Or think. Well, okay, type.

Yikes, I’m talking about planting again.

At last nights’ white house press breifing, spokesman Ari Fleischer waxed indignant when a journalist asked him about reports that the US has been attempting to buy international support for it’s war resolution before the UN. In response, the room full of seasoned journalists broke up laughing. The breifing ended.

If you watch through to the break up of the breifing in this c-span coverage, (fast forward to about minute 28 to see Ari’s stand up bit), you can distinctly hear one of the media members joking that Ari was “laughed off the stage”.

In related news, can somebody please reverse engineer the Real Video protocol and release a hacked viewer that isn’t essentially one big bloated peice of spyware?

Grand. If this article in an Israeli paper is true, Ebay is really excited about giving government investigators of all flavours access to all the details of their users behaviour that they are privy to. The source is claimed to be a talk Ebay law enforcement liason cheif Joseph Sullivan gave at the “Cyber Crime 2003” conference. If he really did say what they are reporting, they are practically pushing all of the information in their user databases at law enforcement, and they aren’t too concerned with due process. At all. And it’s probably suprising just how many details they can patch together about a user’s behaviour. Ever bought something on Ebay?

“We don’t make you show a subpoena, except in exceptional cases,” Sullivan told his listeners. “When someone uses our site and clicks on the `I Agree’ button, it is as if he agrees to let us submit all of his data to the legal authorities. Which means that if you are a law-enforcement officer, all you have to do is send us a fax with a request for information, and ask about the person behind the seller’s identity number, and we will provide you with his name, address, sales history and other details – all without having to produce a court order. We want law enforcement people to spend time on our site,” he adds. He says he receives about 200 such requests a month, most of them unofficial requests in the form of an email or fax.

The meaning is clear. One fax to eBay from a lawman – police investigator, NSA, FBI or CIA employee, National Park ranger – and eBay sends back the user’s full name, email address, home address, mailing address, home telephone number, name of company where seller is employed and user nickname. What’s more, eBay will send the history of items he has browsed, feedbacks received, bids he has made, prices he has paid, and even messages sent in the site’s various discussion groups.”

Because maybe then I’d have experiences like this:

“….I am stealing satalite email time so I gotta go. Last week was
fantastic! Looked into the eyes of a lynx from a few feet away – eye
of the tiger indeed. Later that week helped out with an anaethetized
lynx, gave his fur a good rub and held one of his massive paws in my
hand. I can not explain to you how magnificent these cats are. Yup,
I’ve seen pictures and stuff too – but gawd damn huge – if you had
seen those eyes and the astonishingly large face that surrounds them.
Thinking about him on the way home that day the hair stood up on the
back of my neck….”

Damn.

I’m gonna have to dig around in my filing tub and see if I can find that biology degree. I’m sure I had one.

Or I’d be wasting time trying to remember how to compile code into executables so I could play with some of these witty little utilities a freind brought to my attention:

“This is UNIX… I know this…”

3D File System Navigator for IRIX 4.0.1+ As seen in “Jurassic Park”!
http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.html

It was real. Wtf.

Also of interest:
http://fsv.sourceforge.net/

And why not use Doom to file your file system:
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/

-Chi

I’ve been using Disk Piecharter for years on my PC. Looks a little tired now.

posted this off to various Delta Airlines people just now:

To: [email protected],[email protected],[email protected],
[email protected],[email protected],[email protected],
[email protected],[email protected],[email protected]
Subject: the CAPPS program
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2003 16:51:05 -0500 (EST)

Reply Reply All Forward Delete > Message List

“Dear Delta,

I am relieved that there are as many options in air travel as there
currently are. Although I have flown with Delta on several occasions
in the past, it will be easy and affordable for me to fly with
another carrier should Delta choose to implement the CAPPS program.

Please understand that in our society at this time, my privacy,
including the details of my background, are a potential source of
both inconvenience to me should it be released to marketers, and
power over me should it be gathered by others. Once this information
is gathered, it often cannot be retracted, but instead may be
collated by other potential large databasing initiatives, and used in
ways that I will not neccesarily know about or have control over.
That information is mine and not yours, and I will not surrender it
to you in order to be able to fly with you.

I am a normal white middle-class male with nothing to hide that is of
significance to an airline. But I cannot in good conscience
participate in a program that erodes personal rights and freedoms.

Thank you for your time,

Hugh”

Ouch, there was a really long sentence in the middle there that I didn’t notice.

CAPPS 2 is a “a mini-TIA that will data-mine every air passenger’s travel history, living arrangements, and other personal and demographic information. ” (from bOINGbOING). If the airline industry is half as vulnerable as they claim they are everytime they go begging for some more corporate welfare, Delta must be mighty sensitive to a little boycott action. Saddle up.

Go watch Waking Life.

Don’t read this interview with the writer/director (you know who he is, but it’s not important) or let anybody tell you what the film is about before you see it.

Oh my God, these people make professional pinhole cameras.