Politics

Oswald Cobblepot For Mayor

While attempting to avoid exposure to the 103º heat index the other day, I was flipping through some channels and stumbled across the campy sequel Batman Ret...

January 18th is Marion Barry Day

January 18th is an inauspicious day for the citizens of the District of Columbia.  It marks the date of the arrest of Mayor Marion S. Barry, Jr. in a drug st...

Why I’ll Be Getting The Swine Flu Vaccine

With the start of the flu season and the advent of a vaccine, swine flu is coming back into the spotlight. Rather than covering the pandemic itself and diss...

Confession of a Credit Card Deadbeat

The roiling economy has uncomfortably squeezed the profits of various huge financial mega-corporations.  As the bottom-of-the-barrel customers are no longer ...

Caesar is Dead

Amid the wailing and gnashing of teeth that has accompanied this financial meltdown, one might easily overlook or dismiss as rote the testimony before Congre...

DTV Transition

Oh no! The transition from analog television to digital television is flawed, and civil rights groups are all mad! Their plan includes:

Four Dollar Gas

The Times is wrong. Not all Americans are hating every minute of it. Heather walked outside a few of days ago, and noted that gas was $3.99 at the BP on 13th...

Finally The End of Overdraft Rape?

I hate debit cards. With a passion. Your money is in your bank account for less time, thus earning less interest. Also, they don’t come with the same level o...

Suicide Rates Among Veterans

Matt over at Machination wrote a little blurb on veteran suicide rates. I was immediately suspicious as to whether the statistic of 6,256 suicides in 2005 wa...

Waterboarding in the Press - 106 Years Ago

The current debate over the use of waterboarding seems new and fresh and relevant. But if working on a digital archive of historical newspapers has taught me...

A Wooden Nickel for the Media

So, I guess there’s something going on about whether or not Clinton’s campaign left a tip after dining at a restaurant in Iowa? Whatever. Who the fuck cares?...

Emperor Daley Continues His Reign

Richard Daley wins again. Not that anybody is surprised, but it is noteworthy that he will have run the city for longer than his father when he completes thi...

I Hope You Voted for What You Wanted

I am seeing a lot of exuberant posts from Democrats, or more often from anti-Republicans, around the blogotubes. After they’ve finished dancing, I hope they ...

Election Results

Election day is over, and so is the recovery. Kevin Zeese lost in Maryland by a substantial margin, garnering roughly 1½% of the vote. It was sad to see so m...

More Than Slight Paranoia

There’s this guy in Bloomington, Indiana. He’s a graduate student and security researcher. He has been poking holes in the security theater our government pr...

U.S. Military Swaps Homosexuals For Laptops

Facing a shortage of arabic translators, the military is purchasing a set of rugged Panasonic Toughbook laptops to be used for computerized English-to-Arabic...

Santa Claus Drowns, Governments Miss Point

Some scientists in the EU made some sattelite imagery available showing that the arctic ice cap had melted so much this past summer that a passageway free of...

Finally, A Useful Color-Coded Warning System

So it’s September 11th. Five years and all that. It was a pretty terrible day, and certainly those responsible should be brought to justice. (By the way, nic...

Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) Is a Luser

This transcript of Ted Stevens is so funny and sad. This man with power actually thinks he has an intelligent opinion on net neutrality, yet his statements b...

Bush Impeachment Panel

Hedda and I went over to Busboys & Poets for a forum discussing the possibility of impeaching President Bush. From the BB&P events page:

Anonymously Quoted in the Washington Post

As I previously blogged, I attended the Bush Impeachment Panel on this past Monday. During the question and answer section, I stood to ask a question of the ...

Pennsylvania School Board Sacked

Lately, they have been few and far between - but sometimes there is a glimmer of hope for this country. The New York Times reports that all eight members of ...

Requiem for a Blog, or Young Bloggenstein

The DCist is mourning the death of Mayor Tony Williams’ blog. You see - and I never knew this - “a blog that goes without an update for 30 days or more is co...

Death of a Hero

The Washington Post is reporting that Rosa Parks has died at the age of 92.

Great Article on Security

Real quick, because Mike and Dawn will be here soon - If you’ve ever gotten into a discussion about politics with me, then you know that I completely agree w...

What the Future Holds

If you know anything about my sociopolitical reasonings, you know that the unsustainability of our current way of life is forefront to how I view the world. ...

Sanitization of the Past

Rory has an interesting post that starts with the sexuality of Lewis Carroll. Basically, he’s amazed at how sanitized much of our history and culture is.

Environment Changes & Human Rights

Is living your chosen way of life a basic human right? It seems obvious enough, especially if your way of life is older than most. It seems that the Inuit ar...

Keep The Hot Side Hot

By official proclamation of the Royal Institute of the Ardvaark: Today is no longer Columbus Day.

Props to The Daily Show

I read this article on the DNC news coverage from the New York Times. I was shocked to find two paragraphs devoted entirely to highlighting The Daily Show’s ...

Inalienable, Alienable Rights

Late last week, I had a voice mail from my theater director, friend, and mentor Marty Grubbs. He was visiting a friend only a few miles away from my new home...

Alan Turing Was Gay

Courtesy of some comments on a Slashdot post, I have just learned that Alan Turing was homosexual. To which I say, “Good for him.” According to a biography o...

The First Step Towards Perfect Control

I was checking out my logs to see if anybody had downloaded my Explosive Ammo Mutator, and I noticed the user agent: "NPBot (http://www.nameprotect.com/boti...

Political Sports

I just finished watching last night’s Daily Show, where Jon interviewed President Bush’s close friend and advisor Karen Hughes. Karen stated that she had bee...

RIAA:Lawsuits::U.S.A.: ???

Lawrence Lessig has once again hit the nail right on the head. He has a brilliant new piece up on Wired discussing the futility of the United States’ present...

$13.86 Poorer

James Avery has come up with the perfect idea for what to do with your $13.86. Donate it to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

$13.86 Richer

Yesterday I received a letter from Jerry W. Kilgore, the Attorney General for the Commonwealth of Virginia. It contained a check for $13.86, my payment as pa...

Ridiculous French Law

If you read the non-technical aspects of this blog at all, you know that I often rail against the miserable failure that is our President, and that I am very...

The Eagle Is Grounded

Wired has a good op-ed piece on the destination to which our current over-protective intellectual property laws are taking us.

State of Confusion Address

The State of the Union Address by our illustrious President Bush has just ended, and I’m TiVoing the democratic response for later. Here are a few of my most...

Bush In 30 Seconds Winner

The winners are up at bushin30seconds.org. The winning entry, entitled “Child’s Pay,” is extremely powerful and produced very well. I’m not too thrilled abou...

Prisoner of War

Saddam has been officially labled by the US Government as a POW. Last I checked, POW stood for Prisoner of War. But Mr. President, I thought the war was over...

Microsoft Sued by Netsc..er…Real

So, yea, Microsoft is being sued again for unfair competition, and the claims in the suit seem amazingly similar to those brought by Netscape several years e...

Refreshing News from the Front

No, not the war on terror, but the war on civil liberties. It’s nice to see that some people in power still believe in that whole silly “Bill of Rights” thing.

Are We Safe Yet?

So they captured Saddam. He was captured “without a shot fired,” and now he will be imprisoned, tried, and probably executed for his “crimes against humanity...

Robots vs. Monkeys

There’s been a lot of hooplah over the robots.txt file published by the official White House web site. I’ve heard a few different theories from different sou...