Saturday, August 02, 2003
Son of "The Environmental President" strikes again
Bush plan to put gas pipeline in rainforest; scheme would enrich his backers (via The Hamster, who also points out that funding has been delayed for now)
p.s. Environmentalists who supported Nader, and thought that Gore and Bush were interchangeable, should once again be reminded of the lost opportunity that the 2000 election represented. Note the dateline on Saperstein's article.
But how will yogi pay the rent?
Labels: intellectual-property
Friday, August 01, 2003
Those wacky leftists, and their conspira---oh, wait a second.
Laurie Mylroie thinks that the State Department and the CIA are deliberately undermining the War on Terror in order to protect their good buddy Saddam. (via Atrios)
Apparently, Mylroie's a friend of Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, and her book has laudatory back-cover blurbs from prominent neoconservatives including Richard Perle and James Woolsey.
And right-wingers have the gall to accuse the left of making up conspiracy theories? Right, it's delusional partisan sophistry to claim that the Bush administration distorted evidence about Iraq's nuclear weapons program, but saying that the CIA framed bin Laden to protect Saddam is just jolly good investigative reporting!
Dimly related: PBS interview with Mylroie.
Avoid Masked and Anonymous at all costs...
Saw Dylan's new movie tonight with TM and AM. It was really awful. Trust me, you do not want to see this movie. I like all different kinds of film, including surrealist film and plotless character studies and quirky indie films and even action movies or thrillers. I can appreciate them all on their own level. But this movie doesn't work on any level; it consists entirely of one-dimensional characters staggering from scene to scene spouting stilted, pseudo-profound aphorisms at each other while Bob Dylan squints at them. It was tragic to see so many truly fine actors struggling valiantly to inject some life into this movie. Even TM, who is a big Dylan fan, thought the movie sucked.
As amazing as this sounds, the nearly-9-minute BMW commercial that ran before the movie (in lieu of trailers) was better than the movie itself. The commercial wasn't very good, either.
Thursday, July 31, 2003
Swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon...
Women prefer more "masculine" men during fertile portion of menstrual cycle (via MeFi comments)
While I'm at it, why not clean these out of the old bookmarks:
- Contraceptive changes women's taste in men
- Pheromones in Male Perspiration Reduce Women's Tension, Alter Hormone Response that Regulates Menstrual Cycle (for references to the papers, visit the Monell Chemical Senses Center's pages for C. J. Wysocki or G. Preti and click on the "My Monell Publications" link at the bottom.).
See also: Discover Magazine profile of Preti, and Google Search which turns up many other hits on this work.
UPDATE: Hmm, the original papers link for the contraceptive study appears to have evaporated, and I can only track down Tony Little's publication list, which only provides cites, not PDFs. Clueless pyschologists; why can't they put their papers on the web, and keep them there, like computer scientists do? Don't they understand that their work will be mangled beyond recognition by journalists and PR people?
Labels: dating, sexual-preferences
Billions for defense, not one cent for security
The same day we hear of a renewed threat of 9/11-style hijackings, we also find out that our new air marshal program is being scaled back because of tight budgets at the Department of Homeland Security.
EDIT: while I'm reading TPM, holy shit, now Republicans are thinking about sending bounty hunters after Democratic legislators.
EDIT: fixed TPM links
The Phrase Finder
Wednesday, July 30, 2003
M. Yglesias on Dem Pres candidates' foreign trade stances
another Princeton economist named Kru.* who writes for the Times
squirrels, trash, UW
Microeconomic costs of email
Labels: economics, social-software
MIT panel recommends nuclear power
Long MIT report on nuclear power issues; oddly enough this doesn't mention heat pollution, which is somewhat worse with nuclear power than other sources. This may pale before the dangers of weapons proliferation and meltdowns, but is a significant local environmental impact nonetheless. Maybe nuclear plant technology has improved in thermal efficiency in recent years?
Related: pros and cons of nuclear energy; not-quite-satisfying review of alternative energy sources; CAESAR project.
(First link via ScienceNOW (subscriber-only))
Tuesday, July 29, 2003
A minor corrective to libertarian obfuscation
Monday, July 28, 2003
Snapshots of the moment
More enviro-junk, dug from my old bookmarks
Spy on your neighbors' political contributions...
...with this handy form! Why does this seem slightly alarming, however necessary it may be?
(via TAPPED)
D. Neiwert collects PNAC links
Why did Bush go to war? Illumination is available.
Big batch o' links
(yes, still cleaning out the bookmarks...)
Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen
pretentious ways of saying "Whoa"
(cleaning out the bookmarks...)
Sunday, July 27, 2003
Last Word on The Hulk...
(SL dragged me out to see it, a while back.)
Labels: film, film-reviews
