Limbaugh Rooting for Planet to Explode

Could Help GOP, Radio Host Claims

In remarks that seemed guaranteed to create controversy, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh said today that he was "rooting for the planet Earth to explode" because it would help the GOP retake the White House.

Mr. Limbaugh elaborated on his planet explosion theory, explaining that if the world blows up in the next four years "it will happen on Barack Obama's watch."

"Let's face it, the world exploding would be great for the GOP and Barack Obama knows it," he said.  "That's why he is doing everything in his power to keep the planet from blowing up."

While asserting that he had his fingers crossed that the planet would detonate sometime in the next four years, he said that there were other scenarios he found equally appealing.

"If the population of the U.S. was suddenly afflicted with plagues, locusts and open sores, that would be fantastic for the Republican Party," he said.  "I'm rooting for all of those things to happen."

http://www.borowitzreport.com/

Retirement

Fun With Amazon

These books, which I found on Amazon, are still for sale. A collage like this (but better) ought to be a museum piece somewhere. Or a funny poster. Or a magazine cover. Or all of the above.

This site operates under a Creative Commons license, but I'm waiving the "no commercial use" and the "no derivative works" for this post — so if you're an artist or a designer or an art director, and you feel inspired, have at it. Just please shoot me a copy of whatever you create. Thanks.

http://www.bakelblog.com/nobodys_business/2009/03/fun-with-amazon.html

Docs seek gag orders to stop patients' reviews

CHICAGO - The anonymous comment on the Web site RateMDs.com was unsparing: "Very unhelpful, arrogant," it said of a doctor. "Did not listen and cut me off, seemed much too happy to have power (and abuse it!) over suffering people."

Such reviews are becoming more common as consumer ratings services like Zagat's and Angie's List expand beyond restaurants and plumbers to medical care, and some doctors are fighting back.

They're asking patients to agree to what amounts to a gag order that bars them from posting negative comments online.

"Consumers and patients are hungry for good information" about doctors, but Internet reviews provide just the opposite, contends Dr. Jeffrey Segal, a North Carolina neurosurgeon who has made a business of helping doctors monitor and prevent online criticism.

Some sites "are little more than tabloid journalism without much interest in constructively improving practices," and their sniping comments can unfairly ruin a doctor's reputation, Segal said.

Segal said such postings say nothing about what should really matter to patients — a doctor's medical skills — and privacy laws and medical ethics prevent leave doctors powerless to do anything it.

His company, Medical Justice, is based in Greensboro, N.C. For a fee, it provides doctors with a standardized waiver agreement. Patients who sign agree not to post online comments about the doctor, "his expertise and/or treatment."

"Published comments on Web pages, blogs and/or mass correspondence, however well intended, could severely damage physician's practice," according to suggested wording the company provides.

Segal's company advises doctors to have all patients sign the agreements. If a new patient refuses, the doctor might suggest finding another doctor. Segal said he knows of no cases where longtime patients have been turned away for not signing the waivers.

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090304/ap_on_hi_te/med_gagging_patients

"The Hebrew Mamita" Vanessa Hidary (Def Poetry)

A volatile truce for troubled Swat valley

Pakistan | The government's pact with Taliban militants in the Swat valley has not stopped the killing. And along with the violence, the door has swung open to the Taliban's imposition of harsh religious rule over the valley.

By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH

Pakistani student Tariq Khan walks past a painting in a classroom of a school allegedly blown up by Islamic militants in Mingora, capital of the troubled Swat valley. Taliban militants in the valley have extended a cease-fire, strengthening a peace process that Western governments say risks granting a safe haven to extremists close to the Afghan border.

 

PESHAWAR, Pakistan —

The Taliban and the Pakistani army signed a truce in February in Swat, the once-popular tourist area an hour north of the capital. But far from establishing peace, the pact seems to have allowed the Taliban free rein to expand their harsh religious rule.

Just days after the truce was signed, a member of a prominent anti-Taliban family returned to his mountain village, having received government assurances it was safe. He was promptly kidnapped by the Taliban, tortured and murdered.

The rebels then erected roadblocks to search cars for any relatives who dared travel there for his funeral. None did.

This week, two Pakistani soldiers who were part of a convoy escorting a water tanker were shot and killed because they failed to inform the Taliban in advance of their movements.

Wednesday, the provincial government signed an accord with the local Taliban leader that imposes Islamic law, or Shariah, in the area, and institutes a host of new regulations, including a ban on music, a requirement that shops close during calls to prayer and the installation of complaint boxes for reports of anti-Islamic behavior.

Local residents are skeptical that girls' schools will be allowed to reopen.

Supporters of Maulana Sufi Muhammad, Pakistan's pro-Taliban cleric and leader of a religious movement, attend his headquarters mosque in Mingora. Muhammad gave a deadline of March 15 to impose Islamic laws in the area.

 

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008819867_pakistan06.html

Books: The Biggest News In Publishing Since The Kindle

by Michael Giltz

In the smartest move in years by the troubled book industry, the Thomas Nelson imprint announced a series of new titles it is releasing this year in the "NelsonFree" format. Buy a title at the regular hardcover price and you'll get a free audiobook AND free electronic book version included.

Imagine if you bought a DVD and had to decide at the store whether you wanted to watch it on your TV or your laptop. If you wanted to do both, why you'd have to buy it twice. Imagine if you bought a CD that could only be played on your home stereo. If you wanted to play it in your car, you'd have to buy another copy. And if you wanted to play it on your iPod, why you'd have to buy yet another copy. So instead of paying $15 for an album, you'd have to pay $45. Crazy, right?

But that's exactly how most publishers treat bookbuyers, even though the internet has made the distribution of ebooks and audiobooks wildly inexpensive for them. Do you like John Grisham? If you want a hardcover of The Associate to put on your shelf and share with your spouse, that's gonna cost you $27.95. Want to listen to it on your iPod or in your car? Well, the audio version will cost you $44.95. Is your mother living with you but has poor eyesight? You can buy a large print version also for $27.95. Oh, but you just bought the Kindle. I bet you'd love an electronic version. That would cost $10 for the Kindle version...but it's not available in that format yet. Me, I prefer reading Grisham in the mass market paperback format (the small, easily portable version sold at airports). That will be probably $8 or more -- when it comes out in a year or two. So just to read the new John Grisham any way you want, you would pay about $120. Of course, no one is going to do that, but being forced to choose what way you want to read a book is crazy.

The book world has idiotically followed the disastrous lead of the music industry, which killed the single -- the cheap inexpensive way to start collecting music that turned teenagers into lifelong music consumers. The result? Collapsing album sales softened somewhat by the return of singles via iTunes (which record companies fought every step of the way). Similarly, the book industry has decided you HATE to buy cheap paperbacks at $7 and would MUCH RATHER buy $14 paperbacks in the bulkier trade paperback format, which is a lot heavier and harder to carry around. You also have to wait a year or more to do so, even though in other parts of the world the paperback is released the same time as the hardcover.

The book world has sadly imitated the movie industry by haplessly trying to emulate the DVD. They thought that meant including an author interview at the end of a paperback as an "exciting" extra.

In truth, Nelson is the first publisher to recognize the lesson of DVDs. DVDs succeeded because they offered far superior quality than VHS, provided extras like commentary tracks that were previously impossible and -- this is important -- were the same or cheaper than videotape. Now, taking advantage of the internet and cheap distribution methods, Nelson has dragged the book world into the 21st century. Buy the right to read a book and they'll give it to you in every format possible -- a print edition, an audio edition and an electronic edition so you can read it when and where you want. And they did it without raising the price. If Random House and Ballantine and Simon & Schuster and the rest have a brain in their heads, they'll follow suit immediately.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-giltz/books-the-biggest-news-in_b_171482.html

Give me more money

When Green Is Another Word for Cheap

Hotels' linen-reuse programs get me fuming. Which eco-marketing gimmicks do you find most annoying?

By Jill Hunter Pellettieri

 

When my sisters and I were girls, we loved exploring the hotels my family stayed at on vacation. On arriving, we would race off to ride up and down in the elevator, thumb through the tacky bric-a-brac at the gift shop, and check out the pool, inhaling the sticky, chlorinated air. In the room, we'd fight over free postcards in the desk drawer, play with the phone in the bathroom, and salivate at the prospect of ordering room service and getting those miniature bottles of jam delivered to our door. This was a world that suspended the realities of life at home, and we reveled in every aspect of it.

My taste for luxury has evolved somewhat—I'm not nearly as taken with the M&Ms in the mini bar—but on entering a hotel room, I still immediately review the room-service menu, bask in the prospect of fresh, silky sheets, and inspect the bathroom to ensure I have fluffy, clean towels for every possible need. Then I spy one of those little placards, nestled among the tiny soaps or hanging from the towel rack, asking me to reuse my linens: "Save Our Planet … Every day millions of gallons of water are used to wash towels that have only been used once … Please decide for yourself." And, like that, my hotel buzz fizzles.

I'll admit that I sometimes choose not to participate in this program and request fresh towels and sheets every day. Before you write in scolding me for being a wasteful person, let me qualify that by saying it's not the program, in theory, I'm against. I'm all for saving the environment. But I don't want to be guilt-tripped into going green. It's the two-facedness of it that gets me—save our planet! Conserve our resources! It's up to you, hotel guest. Forsake that washcloth (or two!), or those crisp sheets that are your right when you pay for the room, and to what end—so the hotel can save money on laundry? How many natural resources are wasted printing all of these little signs? Here's an idea: Instead of printing out a placard for every room in the hotel, wash my towel.

http://www.slate.com/id/2212794/

Side show takes main stage

by Gene Lyons

If the economic situation weren't so scary, it'd be amusing watching so many Republicans go crazier than a peach orchard boar, as country folks say.

To the connoisseur of political folly, last week's Conservative Political Action Committee in Washington offered a rich spectacle. Except it wasn't the usual sideshow barkers who provided the most bizarre entertainment; it was the headline speakers, notably Rush Limbaugh and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Between them, they made Louisiana's Gov. Bobby Jindal sound statesmanlike.

Jindal, after all, was merely pitching sweet feed to the cattle. But was it wise to argue that government doesn't work by citing the Bush administration's feckless response to Hurricane Katrina? To mock as wasteful the U.S. Geological Survey's monitoring of volcanoes? The same agency funds river gauges and tidal monitors, of interest to the Bayou State. Heck, why not throw in the do-nothing National Weather Service? Why watch the weather if you can't change it?

Just once I'd like to see one of these Confederate Republicans acknowledge how much more their states receive from the Treasury than they pay in taxes. (For Louisiana, it's $1.45 for every dollar paid; for Mississippi, $1.77, etc.) But then what's a little hypocrisy among free lunch conservatives? Jindal also mocked an (imaginary) $8 billion earmark for a high-speed railway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Then he turned right around and solicited funding for a Baton Rouge-New Orleans line.

Back before free-lunch hypocrisy became gospel, Louisiana had a social structure like Guatemala's-low taxes on the wealthy, a beaten-down middle class and sprawling poverty. Economically, GOP doctrine consists of ignoring the obvious. Show me a low-tax, "pro-business" paradise like the Deep South before World War II, and I'll show you poverty, disease, illiteracy and stagnant opportunity.

Alternatively, try finding a wealthy country anywhere on earth with the economic policies the Jindals, Limbaughs and Huckabees recommend. They simply don't exist. Hence, the current nearhysteria on the right. We haven't seen its like since the 1960s, when many white Southerners panicked over the prospect of racial integration, the John Birch Society flourished, and billboards depicting "Martin Luther King at a Communist training school" lined rural highways.

Historian Richard Hofstadter described it in a seminal 1964 essay: "The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms-he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days."

http://moose-and-squirrel.com/gene/gene.html

Night of the Living Limbaugh Listeners

How Close the Bush Bullet

 

By Robert Parry

Earlier this decade when some of us warned that George W. Bush was behaving more like an incipient dictator than the leader of a constitutional republic, we were dismissed as alarmists, left-wingers, traitors and a host of less printable epithets.

But it is now increasingly clear that President Bush and his top advisers viewed the 9/11 attacks as an opportunity to implement a series of right-wing legal theories that secretly granted Bush unlimited power to act lawlessly and outside the traditional parameters of the U.S. Constitution.

These theories held that at a time of war – even one as vaguely defined as the "war on terror" – Bush's powers as Commander in Chief were "plenary," or total. And since the conflict against terrorism had no boundaries in time or space, his unfettered powers would exist everywhere and essentially forever.

According to his administration's secret legal memos released Monday, Bush could waive all meaningful constitutional rights of citizens, including the First Amendment's protections on free speech and a free press.

John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department's powerful Office of Legal Counsel – which advises a President on the limits of his constitutional powers – declared that Bush could void the First Amendment if he deemed it necessary to fight terrorism.

"First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully," Yoo wrote in an Oct. 23, 2001, memo entitled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States."

Yoo then added ominously, "The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically."

What was particularly stunning about Yoo's reference to waiving the First Amendment – a pillar of American democracy – was his cavalier attitude. He tossed the paragraph into a memo focused on stripping Americans of their Fourth Amendment "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."

While saying that Bush could order spying on and military attacks against U.S. domestic targets at his own discretion as Commander in Chief, Yoo added, almost in passing, that the President also could abrogate the rights of free speech and a free press.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/030409.html

Former Countrywide executives cash in on federal housing bailout

by Jeremy Gantz

After overseeing a company at the very center of the still-imploding U.S. mortgage market, a dozen former executives are now poised to make millions from the housing crisis.

Stanford L. Kurland, the former president of Countrywide Financial the bank that has become most synonymous with the bad mortgage lending practices that eventually caused the housing market to burst, setting into motion the current financial crisis and colleagues from the defunct firm now run PennyMac.

The company, headquartered in the same Los Angeles suburb where Countrywide was managed before it was sold to Bank of America last summer, specializes in buying up bad home mortgages that the U.S. government took over from other failed banks, the New York Times reported Tuesday.

PennnyMac has been buying up some of those mortgages for just a fraction of their value, and they keep a portion of whatever money they collect from the mortgage holder.

PennyMac's business has been "off-the-charts good, said John Lawrence, the companys head of loan servicing, the Times reported.

Although the company is reportedly helping many financially troubled homeowners by slashing interest rates for some strapped homeowners, many are angry that businessmen who oversaw a company that ultimately failed in part due to its subprime lending practices can turn around and profit off the housing crisis.

Countrywide was investigated early last year by the FBI, SEC and the Justice Department for accounting fraud, insider trading and possibly misleading security filings.

"It is sort of like the arsonist who sets fire to the house and then buys up the charred remains and resells it," said Margot Saunders, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center. The organization has for years sought to limit the sort of abusive lending practices that were employed by Countrywide and other financial companies.

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Former_Countrywide_executives_cash_in_on_0303.html

Not for long

Harvey in hell

Kiss My 83 Year Old Ass

The election is over.  Barack Obama is now President Obama and  Bush has slithered back to Texas where I am sure he will drink himself into obscurity.  Palin seems to have been successfully de-clawed for now.  I have sworn off Rush Limbaugh and The View, and Fox News was never really an option for me.  So… now what do I do?  I think I might read a few of  that big-footed Ann Coulter's books and then point my "guns" at her scrawny ass.   She bugs me almost as much as Palin so this could be fun.

But until then, I would like to comment on that Ass Hat who has been posting as Anonymous:

"And where were YOU the past 8 years? Only ready to go because a Democrat is POTUS? Reading through this blog, the "verbal vomiting" that is used towards anyone that has dared to disagree is astonishing. The attacks on Republican politicians, pundits, or anyone that dares think differently are shameful. How hypocritical."

The better question is where were you?  Let me tell you where I was.  I was in shock that we had a President saying "I am the decider"  like some toddler upset that his parents told him no more candy. We were turning a blind eye to torture. The President's answer to everything was war.  We celebrated lower taxes while ignoring the massive debt that was building.  It was as if common sense had disappeared entirely from the White House.   For God's sakes at one point Cheney claimed the Vice President wasn't a part of the executive branch nor was it part of the legislative or judicial branches.  Bush's entire Presidency was an utter failure and at times the nation held him in lower esteem than it did Nixon during his resignation.

So Anonymous, if we didn't have anything good to say these last eight years it is because there was nothing good to say during these last 8 years.  Nothing.

And if you don't like what I have to say then you can kiss my 83 year old ass because on this blog I am the decider. I mean it. Really.

http://margaretandhelen.wordpress.com/2009/01/23/kiss-my-83-year-old-ass/

Just say no

Beware: The spawn of 'Harry and Louise' wish to eat your brain

They -- those insidious, shape-shifting, ubiquitous "they" -- are back, rested up, freshly boodled, and rearin' to go.

One would think they'd be too embarrassed; that some communal, perhaps even atavistic strain of human decency would, by now, have bubbled up from within and throttled their antisocial urges. But shame, and shamelessness, seem immune to their peculiar form of genetic drift.

Who else could I mean but America's shallowest couple, Harry and Louise -- or in today's case, their extended family, already appearing on radios and televisions dangerously proximate to their fellow citizenry.

This time around the heath-care anti-universalists have hatched themselves as "Conservatives for Patients Rights." That may be an admirable improvement over "Harry and Louise" in self-identification, but, at the rate conservatism's image is nose-diving, they may need to wage an emergency follow-up campaign entitled, "Patience for Conservatives' Rights."

America has just about had its fill of these yahoos, although the latter do get points for perseverance. And yesterday that perseverance began anew, with CPR (cute, huh?) launching a three-week, $20 million propaganda blitzkrieg aimed at agitating the terminally bamboozleable "in opposition to" -- here it comes -- "government-run coverage," as the Politico reports.

Ah, if only all health care in America indeed worked as a plodding, socialistic monster, such as Medicare, which operates at a mere 10 percent of the administrative cost of private insurers. But, says the palpitating CPR family, let's do remain mired instead in that fictitious model of efficiency, the private system, where winners earn regular bodily maintenance if not resuscitation and Rick Santelli's "losers" are just S.O.L.

Richard Scott -- CPR's Big Daddy, obscenely wealthy investor, GOP bankroller and disgraced former "head of what became known as Columbia/HCA after fraud charges against the massive healthcare company in 1997" (oops, there's some of that private efficiency, to the tune of an $880 million settlement with Justice) -- intones that "If we have more government involvement we're going to have dramatically worse health care."

For about 50 million Americans, even dramatically worse health care would of course be a dramatic improvement over no health care. But let's go beyond the too-familiar mumbo-jumbo scare tactics and take a peek at how Mr. Scott proposes to improve what, as a fluent system of private care, should not, according to any Hoyle of an Adam Smithian bent, require any improvement:

"[He] is pushing for four principles to any health care reform package: individual choice, competition between carriers, giving patients' ownership over their own coverage and rewarding those who make healthy lifestyle choices."

Do I hear a yawn -- a massive, nationwide yawn of, Same old, same old? Of, What about the nearly 50 million uninsured? Of, What about the (Hobson's) choice and (laughably ineffective) competition and (increasingly unaffordable) ownership that already exist? Of, Healthy lifestyles my butt, for people who can no longer afford even a brief health consultation? And what -- no tax credits? You know, for maybe the unemployed, who live for nothing but clever accounting advantages?

Sorry, Mr. Scott, your proposal is making me sick -- and I can't afford to get sick, because I'm one of the 50 million.

http://buzzflash.com/articles/carpenter/327

Christian salt, a wingnut alternative to Kosher salt

Posted by Cory Doctorow

 

Doran sez, "A retired barber named Joe Godlewski wasn't happy with all that 'Kosher salt' TV chefs use, so he's selling sea salt, blessed by an Episcopalian priest and marketing it as 'Christian Salt'. Of course, most chefs use Kosher salt because of its properties, and not because of any blessing which may have been given by a rabbi."

Oh, sure, but what if you're not an Episcopalian? What about Mormons, Baptists, Catholics and Scientologists? Where's their salt?

Christian salt seller hopes to shake up market

"Apologize to Rush

http://www.dccc.org/content/sorry

 

Who You Calling Socialist?

 

"We are all socialists now," proclaims Newsweek. We are creating "socialist republics" in the United States, says Mike Huckabee, adding, on reflection, that "Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff." We are witnessing the Obama-era phenomenon of "European socialism transplanted to Washington," says Newt Gingrich.

Well! Even as we all turn red, I've still encountered just two avowed democratic socialists in my daily rounds through the nation's capital: Vermont's Sen. Bernie Sanders . . . and the guy I see in the mirror when I shave. Bernie is quite capable of speaking for himself, so what follows is a report on the state of actual existing socialism from the other half of the D.C. Senators and Columnists Soviet.

First, as we survey the political landscape, what's striking is the absence of advocates of socialism, at least as the term was understood by those who carried that banner during the capitalist crisis of the 1930s. Then, socialists and communists both spoke of nationalizing all major industries and abolishing private markets and the wage system. Today, it's impossible to find a left-leaning party anywhere that has such demands or entertains such fantasies. (Not even Hugo Chávez -- more an authoritarian populist than any kind of socialist -- says such things.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/03/AR2009030303207.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

"Swinging for the Fences": The Major League Moment In American Politics

By David Sirota

If there's one thing you can say with absolute certainty about Barack Obama as a politician, it is that he learns - and then improvises, adapts and overcomes, as Clint Eastwood rasps in Heartbreak Ridge. There is no better example of his agility than his first budget.

In pushing the stimulus legislation, Obama initially opted to prioritize his campaign promises of "bipartisanship" over some of his promises of progressive policy. The end result was Republican stonewalling and a bill whose substance and public approval was (while still solid) unnecessarily weakened.

The budget is exactly the opposite. Having learned that Republicans aren't interested in bipartisanship, and - more importantly - having grasped that he must start any legislative negotiation from a position of strength, he sent Congress a budget that is unabashedly progressive - and packaged in overtly populist, "I work for Americans not lobbyists" rhetoric.

The substance is far bolder than most imagined - among other things, it includes more than half a trillion dollars for universal health care and it frontally assaults Reaganomics with proposals to increase taxes on the super-rich, hedge fund managers and polluters.

These are radical proposals, not in the sense that they are outside the mainstream of American public opinion (they aren't), but in how different they are from the last 30 years of conservative and conservative leaning government. And such welcome radicalism most likely emerged not because Obama had a secret pony plan to be this bold all along, but because economic turbulence mandates more far-reaching steps; progressive pressure is more vigorous than it has been in years; and Republican obstructionism taught the president the necessity of laying down clear markers from the beginning of any legislative debate (ie. you don't start a negotiation by asking for what you ultimately expect to get, you start a negotiation by asking for far more than you expect to get, knowing that you may be forced to bargain down).

Yes, the budget has some bad "business as usual" ideas in it, including more increases in defense spending, and what amounts to a second $700 billion bank bailout. But on the whole, Republican Sen. John Thune (SD) is (gasp!) actually right: the administration is "really swinging for the fences" on progressive policy.

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009031002/swinging-fences-major-league-moment-american-politics

Best Anti-Pot ad ever

Everybody must get stoned

A new plan to legalize marijuana in California would create a $1 billion tokin' tax and thousands of green jobs. Now that's a stimulus plan!

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Can Californians help dig themselves out of their historic fiscal crisis by getting high? Tom Ammiano thinks so, and he isn't smoking a thing.

On Feb. 23, the California State Assembly member introduced legislation that would regulate the cultivation and sale of marijuana, and then tax it. By legalizing pot, the San Francisco lawmaker argues, the state could reap huge new revenues. Currently pot is California's biggest cash crop, with annual sales reaching $14 billion. Vegetables, the state's second hottest agricultural product, take in a mere $5.7 billion. And California's famous grapes? A piddling $2.6 billion.

If passed, the Marijuana Control, Regulation and Education Act would give California control of pot in a manner similar to alcohol, while prohibiting its purchase to citizens under age 21. The state's tax collectors estimate the measure would bring in about $1.3 billion in new revenues a year.

Ammiano, a former schoolteacher and stand-up comedian, has been one of the most famous activists and politicians in San Francisco for decades. In the late '70s, he jump-started the movement against the Briggs Initiative, which would have banned gay teachers in California (he appeared as himself in the film "Milk"), served on the San Francisco Board of Education, and later was president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Salon recently spoke to him about why he thinks making pot legit would have California smiling.

Why legalize marijuana in California now?

There's gold in them thar hills! We have one of the worst budget situations we've ever had, and it's a $14 billion industry that's not going away. Everybody knows this and nobody has wanted to go after it. I, frankly, think the time has come.

Even if California did regulate and tax selling marijuana, wouldn't it still be illegal at the federal level?

Federal law preempts a lot of things we've done in California, anyway -- domestic partners, gay marriage, the medical use of marijuana. Certainly the Obama administration has been telegraphing they'd like to revisit the failed war on drugs. New Attorney General Eric Holder just issued an edict: No more raids on medical marijuana dispensers. And, man, if that doesn't reinforce what I have been saying, I don't know what does. Of course, everyone likes to be in the position of saying, "See, I told you I was right."

In many ways, it's common sense. You have drug cartels growing marijuana in our national parks. It's no more the hippie-dippy guy or woman in Humboldt. This is organized crime with no morality and no value of human life. Look at the money you would save in law enforcement by regulating marijuana, decriminalizing it and putting those resources into serious crimes. The black market and the street sales would decline. Pumping $1 billion into our economy is going to provide a lot of green jobs. No pun intended. Obama seems to be a bright-enough guy to realize that.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/03/03/legalize_marijuana/

Hazelwood offers 'heartfelt apology' for oil spill

20TH ANNIVERSARY: Captain of Exxon Valdez included in book.

By WESLEY LOY

Joe Hazelwood, captain of the doomed oil tanker Exxon Valdez, is offering "a very heartfelt apology" to Alaskans for the disastrous 1989 oil spill in Prince William Sound.

The apology comes at the end of a new, 288-page book commemorating the 20th anniversary of the spill.

The book features 62 "personal stories" from people involved with the spill, from people aboard the tanker to Alaska politicians to cleanup workers to U.S. Coast Guard officers to reporters who covered one of the state's biggest stories.

The piece de resistance is an interview with Hazelwood, a largely reclusive figure since the shipwreck that sank his career as a tanker captain.

Sharon Bushell, a Homer writer known for collecting oral histories, traveled to New York City in February 2008 to record the Hazelwood interview after he agreed to take part in the book project, said Stan Jones, spokesman for the Valdez-based oil industry watchdog group that commissioned the book.

In "The Spill: Personal Stories from the Exxon Valdez Disaster," Hazelwood says he now works as an investigator and technical consultant with a maritime law firm in New York.

He doesn't say much about the actual grounding, which occurred just after midnight on March 24, 1989.

The day before, he begins, he and the chief engineer left the docked ship and went into the town of Valdez on some business. On Hazelwood's list was ordering some Easter flowers for his daughter.

"After lunch, we had a couple of drinks," Hazelwood says.

Following the wreck on Bligh Reef, several miles outside the port of Valdez, Hazelwood tells of how he refused to speak with National Transportation Safety Board investigators.

And how, after returning home to New York, he found his house mobbed with reporters.

And how, after a long court fight, he beat all but one criminal charge -- negligent discharge of oil. He would be sentenced to community service in Anchorage.

http://www.adn.com/front/story/711385.html

The T-Mobile Dance

 

The Making of...

The Next Time a Right Winger Tells You How Great They Are, Show Them This...

by Milt Shook

How in the HELL did so many incredibly stupid people get to be in such a position of power in this country? I'd really like to know.

More importantly, why do so many people not only VOTE against their own personal interests, and the interests of their neighbors, but also advocate for positions that apparently run counter to their stated belief system. And why are people whose lives are obviously more messed up than those whom they are lecturing, constantly hawk their self-righteous bullshit to the rest of us with regard to ethics and morals? I've always believed you clean out your own barn, before you start talking about someone else's barn stinking.

And here's the ultimate question; why do they always seem to get a forum that is equal to everyone else, and why doesn't anyone call them on their rhetoric?

Now, if you listen to a right winger, wherever they live is a goddamn paradise, where everyone lives a chaste, moral, Biblical life, and everyone who lives in a "liberal" state might as well be living in a jungle. Right wingers, of course, are all moral, peaceful and God-fearing, while we liberals are all heathenous retches who kill babies and coddle terrorists.

Of course, we know they're delusional. And yet, no matter how delusional they are, the press will give them a soapbox, where they will get to say whatever they want, and no one will call them on it at all.

 

http://pleasecutthecrap.typepad.com/main/2009/03/why-should-we-even-listen-to-right-wing-pols-.html

Bill Kristol’s 1993 Memo Calling For GOP To Block Health Care Reform

by John Aravosis

 

Greg Sargeant over at The Plum Line has gotten his hands on a memo Bill Kristol wrote to his party in 1993, urging them to oppose Bill Clinton's health care plan because - well - it might work. And then all the newly healthy people might like government and see that it could actually do something good for them. Ben Smith summarizes the long memo:

The memo warns that a successful Clinton plan could badly damage the GOP by improving Americans' relationship with government, and makes the case for total, uncompromising opposition based on what would become the "Harry and Louise" campaign, focused on the damage the changes could do to citizens' relationships with their doctors.

The only way that the plan would improve America's relationship with government would be if it worked. Think about that. The GOP ultimately opposed major legislation that would have benefited every American because the legislation might have actually worked. You don't just see parallels to today's Republican party, they're doing exactly the same thing. The GOP is terrified that Obama agenda, from the stimulus plan to health care reform, might actually work. Then Americans would see that - surprise - government can work for the people. And where would we be then, if our government actually started making a positive difference in our lives? Better to vote Republican and ensure that never happens.

 

http://www.americablog.com/2009/03/bill-kristols-1993-memo-calling-for-gop.html

Tongue on fire

Nope

Rachel Maddow, reluctant sex symbol

 

by Judy Berman

Why do we -- men and women, gay and straight -- find Rachel Maddow sexy? Daphne Merkin's "Butch Fatale" about the newly minted MSNBC icon, hidden among the overpriced handbag porn and fluffy profiles of last weekend's New York Times T style magazine, is more complicated than it appears.

As Merkin writes, it isn't often that mainstream culture celebrates the attractiveness of butch lesbians. Sure, we admire femmes like Portia de Rossi and Lindsay Lohan. But for the most part, lesbians who wear suits, cut their hair short or otherwise don't conform to traditional standards of beauty -- the Ellen DeGenereses and Rosie O'Donnells of the world -- have to remain culturally neutered in order to participate in public life. Though we find classic representations of gay male beauty in the films of Luchino Visconti and the writings of Oscar Wilde and Thomas Mann, says Merkin, "It's much harder to envision a lesbian icon without coming up against Fran Lebowitz, looking surly and bored."

The problem with lesbian archetypes, according to Merkin, is that "both categories -- butch and femme -- borrow from gender-influenced dichotomies of beauty." And this is where Rachel Maddow, supposedly, is a revelation. "She may not be one of Hefner's Girls Next Door, exactly, but she is no bare-faced, unstylish dyke either, however she chooses to characterize herself," says Merkin, going on to coo over the way Maddow combines a light dusting of makeup with "Poindexter glasses, Jil Sander pantsuits and Converse sneakers" and concludes that "she's willing to prettify her image sufficiently to endear her to male viewers."

Here's where I disagree with Merkin: I don't think Maddow's TV appearance is particularly calculated to attract male viewers. The makeover doesn't seem like a ploy to sex up Maddow; rather, it's a concession to appearing on television, where everyone has to wear makeup and dress like a professional. According to a New York magazine profile, Maddow's partner, Susan Mikula, is responsible for her wearing makeup: "Without it, 'she looked like a dead person,'" Mikula said. And as for the designer suits, it's not as if MSNBC was going to let Maddow -- or Keith Olbermann or Chris Matthews, for that matter -- go on the air in a ratty button-down and carpenter jeans. Meanwhile, Maddow makes no effort to hide her casual, butch off-screen appearance, either. In this pre-New Year's video, also for New York magazine, a bare-faced, hoodie-clad Maddow gives a lesson in mixology.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2009/02/24/maddow_sex_symbol/index.html?source=rss

See the hilarious debate here.

Spurious arrest of the week

With United States on its knees, why are we still at war?

By BOB HERBERT

The singer Edwin Starr, who died in 2003, had a big hit in 1970 called "War" in which he asked again and again: "War, what is it good for?"

The U.S. economy is in free fall, the banking system is in a state of complete collapse and Americans all across the country are downsizing their standards of living. The nation as we've known it is fading before our very eyes, but we're still pouring billions of dollars into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with missions we are still unable to define.

Even as the U.S. begins plans to reduce troop commitments in Iraq, it is sending thousands of additional troops into Afghanistan. The strategic purpose of this escalation, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged, is not at all clear.

In response to a question on "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Gates said:

"We're talking to the Europeans, to our allies; we're bringing in an awful lot of people to get different points of view as we go through this review of what our strategy ought to be. And I often get asked, 'Well, how long will those 17,000 [additional troops] be there? Will more go in?' All that depends on the outcome of this strategy review that I hope will be done in a few weeks."

We invaded Afghanistan more than seven years ago. We have not broken the back of al-Qaida or the Taliban. We have not captured or killed Osama bin Laden. We don't even have an escalation strategy, much less an exit strategy. An honest assessment of the situation, taking into account the woefully corrupt and ineffective Afghan government led by the hapless Hamid Karzai, would lead inexorably to such terms as fiasco and quagmire.

Instead of cutting our losses, we appear to be doubling down.

As for Iraq, President Barack Obama announced last week that substantial troop withdrawals will take place over the next year and a half and that U.S. combat operations would cease by the end of August 2010. But, he said, a large contingent of American troops, perhaps as many as 50,000, would still remain in Iraq for a "period of transition."

That's a large number of troops, and the cost of keeping them there will be huge. Moreover, I was struck by the following comment from the president: "There will surely be difficult periods and tactical adjustments, but our enemies should be left with no doubt. This plan gives our military the forces and flexibility they need to support our Iraqi partners and to succeed."

In short, we're committed to these two conflicts for a good while yet, and there is nothing like an etched-in-stone plan for concluding them. I can easily imagine a scenario in which Afghanistan and Iraq both heat up and the U.S., caught in an extended economic disaster at home, undermines its fragile recovery efforts in the same way that societies have undermined themselves since the dawn of time -- with endless warfare.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/402069_herbert04.html

Obama Wasn’t Kidding About Health Care

In his big non–State of the Union address on Tuesday, Obama pledged that health-care reform couldn't wait another year. And based on the budget he's submitting to Congress today, it's clear he wasn't joking around — it includes $634 billion over ten years as a down payment toward creating a universal-health-care system. The details of the new system will be worked out with Congress later on, but Obama does spell out how he'll pay for this vast reserve fund: Half will come from savings on government spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and other health-care costs, and the other half from tax increases on those making $250,000 or over a year. That provision, not surprisingly, will be unpopular with a lot of people, but you can't make a health-care omelette without breaking some eggs.

• Igor Volsky says that the "fund is a good start, but it's certainly not enough to reach universal coverage." Even so, it's promising that, unlike the Clintons, who "didn't include any money for health reform in the budget, and left Congress to digest a 700+ page health plan, Obama and Congress will fill in the details of reform." [Wonk Room/Think Progress]

• Jonathan Cohn notes that the investment is "pretty big — more, I believe, than any president has proposed setting aside for coverage expansions to the non-elderly since Clinton tried for universal health insurance in the 1990s." But that still "will not be enough to finance full universal coverage," and it's unclear "how much more would it cost to get everybody (or nearly everybody) covered by decent insurance." [Treatment/New Republic]

• Ezra Klein is excited that "the language in today's budget is something entirely different: Not an idea, but a directive. Not a document to win a campaign, but a document to kick start the congressional process." [American Prospect]

• Jennifer Rubin thinks that with all this new taxing and spending, we'll "see just how huge a debt we can run up and just how anemic an economic recovery we can have, I suppose. Taxing people in a recession? Sounds rather anti-stimulative." [Contentions/Commentary]

• Paul Krugman writes that "[i]t's beginning to look as if Obama's really going to go through with this — and if he gets us to universality, his legacy will be secure." [Conscience of a Liberal/NYT]

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2009/02/obama_wasnt_kidding_about_heal.html

Banks of the living dead

Clinton pledges to press for Palestinian state

By Sue Pleming

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged on Tuesday to press hard for Palestinian statehood, putting Washington on a possible collision course with Israeli Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu.

"We happen to believe that moving toward a two-state solution is in Israel's best interests," Clinton told a news conference with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

Netanyahu, whom Clinton met later, has spoken of Palestinian self-government but has shied away from saying he backed a U.S. and Palestinian vision of statehood that has been at the heart of Middle East peace talks.

Clinton, on her first visit to the region as secretary of state, said Washington believed "the inevitability of working toward a two-state solution is inescapable." She promised the United States "will be vigorously engaged" in its pursuit.

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN0232747620090303

Iran asks Interpol to arrest top Israeli officials

 

TEHRAN - Iran has asked Interpol to arrest 34 top Israeli political officials and 114 military commanders on charges of war crimes in the Gaza Strip, Fars news agency reported Sunday.

The list, compiled by the Iranian prosecutor general's office, includes outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livni and Defence Minister Ehud Barak.

The latest initiative by Iran, which supports Gaza's ruling Islamist militant group Hamas, was taken on the eve of a Palestinian Conference to be opened on Tuesday in Tehran, aimed at once again condemning the three-week Israeli military operation in December and January in Gaza.

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/darticlen.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/2009/March/middleeast_March23.xml&section=middleeast&col=

I wrote that article

In Praise of the Sales Force

by Cory Doctorow

Hardly a day goes by that I don't get an e-mail from someone who's ready to reinvent publishing using the Internet, and the ideas are often good ones, but they lack a key element: a sales force. That is, a small army of motivated, personable, committed salespeople who are on a first-name basis with every single bookstore owner/buyer in the country, people who lay down a lot of shoe-leather as they slog from one shop to the next, clutching a case filled with advance reader copies, cover-flats, and catalogs. When I worked in bookstores, we had exceptional local reps, like Eric, the Bantam guy who knew that I was exactly the right clerk to give an advance copy of Snow Crash to if he wanted to ensure a big order and lots of hand-selling when the book came in (He also made sure that I got ARCs of every Kathe Koja and Ian McDonald novel — Eric, if you're reading this, thanks!).

This matters. This is the kind of longitudinal, deep, expensive expertise that gets books onto shelves, into the minds of the clerks, onto the recommended tables at the front of the store. It's labor-intensive and highly specialized, and without it, your book's sales only come from people who've already heard of it (through word of mouth, advertising, a review, etc.) and who are either motivated enough to order it direct, or lucky enough to chance on a copy on a shelf at a store that ordered it based on reputation or sales literature alone, without any hand-holding or cajoling.

The best definition I've heard of "publishing" comes from my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who says, "publishing is making a work public." That is, identifying a work and an audience, and taking whatever steps are necessary to get the two together (you'll note that by this definition, Google is a fantastic publisher). Publishing is not printing, or marketing, or editorial, or copy-editing, or typesetting. It may comprise some or all of these things, but you could have the world's best-edited, most beautiful, well-bound book in the world, and without a strategy for getting it into the hands of readers, all it's good for is insulating the attic. (This is the unfortunate discovery made by many customers of vanity publishers.)

http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2009/03/cory-doctorow-in-praise-of-sales-force.html

The SSD Project

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created this Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it.

Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) exists to answer two main questions: What can the government legally do to spy on your computer data and communications? And what can you legally do to protect yourself against such spying?

After an introductory discussion of how you should think about making security decisions — it's all about risk management — we'll be answering those two questions for three types of data:

First, we're going to talk about the threat to the data stored on your computer posed by searches and seizures by law enforcement, as well as subpoenas demanding your records.

Second, we're going to talk about the threat to your data on the wire — that is, your data as it's being transmitted — posed by wiretapping and other real-time surveillance of your telephone and Internet communications by law enforcement.

Third, we're going to describe the information about you that is stored by third parties like your phone company and your Internet service provider, and how law enforcement officials can get it.

In each of these three sections, we're going to give you practical advice about how to protect your private data against law enforcement agents.

In a fourth section, we'll also provide some basic information about the U.S. government's expanded legal authority when it comes to foreign intelligence and terrorism investigations.

Finally, we've collected several articles about specific defensive technologies that you can use to protect your privacy, which are linked to from the other sections or can be accessed individually. So, for example, if you're only looking for information about how to securely delete your files, or how to use encryption to protect the privacy of your emails or instant messages, you can just directly visit that article.

https://ssd.eff.org/

Repair Manifesto

 

http://www.good.is/?p=15984

Foreign troops can't defeat Afghanistan's insurgency: Harper

Prime Minister Stephen Harper told CNN television host Fareed Zakaria that Afghanistan cannot be governed or controlled by any foreign power indefinitely.

The insurgency in Afghanistan will never be defeated only by maintaining an international troop presence in the country, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in a U.S. television interview Sunday.

"We're not going to ever defeat the insurgency. My reading of Afghanistan in history is that it's probably had an insurgency forever of some kind," Harper told Fareed Zakaria of CNN.

Harper wouldn't say absolutely whether Canada would agree to an extension of its combat mission, set to end in late 2011, but he did say emphatically that Afghanistan cannot be governed or controlled by any foreign power indefinitely.

"Ultimately the source of authority in Afghanistan has to be perceived as being indigenous," he said. "If it's perceived as being foreign — and I still think we're welcome there — but if it's perceived as being foreign, it will always have a significant degree of opposition."

Harper said he welcomes plans to boost the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, but was cautious about entertaining any request for Canada to alter its commitments. On Feb. 17, U.S. President Barack Obama said he'll send an additional 17,000 American soldiers to Afghanistan this spring and summer, a 50 per cent increase to the 36,000 soldiers who are there already.

Harper said if Obama were to ask Canada for a larger contingent or a continuation of the existing contingent of about 2,500 Canadian soldiers, he would ask the president what his plans are for leaving Afghanistan and allowing Afghans full control over security.

"If we think that we are going to govern Afghanistan for Afghans, or over the long-term be responsible for day-to-day security in Afghanistan and see that country improve, we are mistaken," Harper said.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/03/01/cnn-harper.html

More must be done to protect Afghan civilians

KABUL, March 2 (Reuters) - All sides in the war in Afghanistan must do much more to protect civilians who will face the brunt of any increase in violence with the arrival of thousands of new troops, a top Red Cross official said on Monday.

Ordinary Afghans were now more at risk from the fighting than at any other time since the start of the war in 2001, said Pierre Kraehenbuehl, director of operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Kraehenbuehl told a news conference unless much more was done by the different parties to the conflict to respect their obligations under international humanitarian law "the ICRC seriously fears that the Afghan population will bear the brunt of the announced and potential escalation".

Violence in Afghanistan surged last year with some 5,000 people killed, including more than 2,100 civilians, a 40 percent increase on the previous year, the United Nations says.

President Barack Obama has ordered 17,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan to bolster some 70,000 foreign troops, including 38,000 U.S. soldiers already in the country fighting a resurgent Taliban.

Although more reluctant than the United States, NATO countries are also expected to send some more troops this year to help provide security for the presidential election.

But more troops will likely lead to more violent clashes between international and Afghan forces and the militants causing even more difficulties for civilians, Kraehenbuehl said.

 

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/ISL441910.htm

Repugs in the ring

Lots to eat

Seriously, You Don’t Scare Us Anymore

Redstate joins the chorus on the right assuming that liberal attacks on Bobby Jindal are due to us being scared of him.

Bobby Jindal doesn't scare anyone. Nor for that matter do Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter or the rest of the mental midgets that form the core of the conservative/Republican axis.

It's not as if we've never been scared of the right. For 8 years we feared what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would do to America, and sadly the damage done was even worse than most of us (including myself) feared.

But now? I have no doubt that the right will one day again be on top, there will likely be more than a few Republican presidents within my lifetime. But right now you've got idiots like Sarah Palin and cartoons like Bobby Jindal being touted as serious national candidates. I'm too young to remember it firsthand, but I've got to feel that liberals today feel like LBJ did in 1964 or Ronald Reagan felt in 1984: You can't be serious.

So we mock, not the way we mocked Bush out of fear of what he would and did do, but out of that most natural of reasons: Conservatives and republicans, right now in 2009 are the most mockable of public figures. We've just been through the first election in what could turn out to be a fundamental shift in voting attitudes in America. Conservatives, outside of the mainstream media who pretends as if they're still at the 60%+ strength of 2003-4, are on the outs looking in, tilting at a president with a 60-70% approval rating. And in light of that scenario, they have appointed a gaggle of circus clowns as their standard-bearers.

http://www.oliverwillis.com/2009/03/02/seriously-you-dont-scare-us-anymore/

New Ad: Americans won’t take NO for an answer

Computing The Cost

 

 

Nicholas Carr On How The Internet Is Rewiring Our Brains

 

by Arnie Cooper

 

Anyone who has spent a few hours on the Internet understands how reading a single paragraph can lead to a multimedia journey so far-reaching you forget what you originally went online to look up. Nicholas Carr — author of last July's Atlantic cover story, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" — believes the distracted nature of Web surfing is reducing our capacity for deep contemplation and reflection. He began developing his theory when he realized that, after years of online information gathering, he had trouble reading a book or a magazine. As he puts it, "I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. . . . I'm not thinking the way I used to think."

Growing up in a small town in central Connecticut in the seventies, Carr couldn't have imagined he'd someday make a career of critiquing computer technology. He read a great deal as a boy and entered Dartmouth College with hopes of becoming a writer. He graduated in 1981 with a degree in English literature and spent a year working as an editor and playing in a punk-rock band before he entered a graduate program in English literature at Harvard University. The theoretical focus of his courses failed to captivate him, however, and Carr soon realized that he didn't want to become a professor. He got his master's degree and left.

Carr and his new wife had a baby on the way, so he took an editorial position at a management-consulting firm. He ended up staying twelve years and getting an education in business, economics, and the blossoming field of information technology, or it. In 1997 he became senior editor of the Harvard Business Review. It was the height of the dot-com boom, and Carr spent nearly six years editing articles about business strategy and it. Then in 2003 he wrote an article for the Review titled "IT Doesn't Matter," arguing that as computers have become almost universal, they no longer provide a competitive advantage to companies. The piece aroused much interest — and contempt; Microsoft ceo Steve Ballmer called it "hogwash." Harvard Business School Press offered Carr a book contract, and Does IT Matter? was published in 2004. That success led to a second book, The Big Switch (W.W. Norton & Co.), about "cloud computing" — providing computing software over the Internet, like electric power sent out over a grid. While writing The Big Switch, Carr became interested in the social and cultural implications of the Internet, which led to his Atlantic cover story and the book he's currently working on, tentatively titled The Shallows: Mind, Memory, and Media in an Age of Instant Information.

As for all those years studying literature, forty-nine-year-old Carr has no regrets. In fact, he believes learning to deconstruct poems and stories trained him to think analytically and led him to where he is today. Carr's methodical mind — the "Google effect" notwithstanding — has given him an impressive ability to dissect the ever-expanding cyberworld. He blogs at www.roughtype.com and recently moved from New England to the Colorado Rockies to spend more time outdoors, hiking, fly-fishing, and skiing — and deepening his ability to be contemplative.

Cooper: You've quoted Richard Foreman, author of the play The Gods Are Pounding My Head, who says we are turning into "pancake people."

Carr: We used to have an intellectual ideal that we could contain within ourselves the whole of civilization. It was very much an ideal — none of us actually fulfilled it — but there was this sense that, through wide reading and study, you could have a depth of knowledge and could make unique intellectual connections among the pieces of information stored within your memory. Foreman suggests that we might be replacing that model — for both intelligence and culture — with a much more superficial relationship to information in which the connections are made outside of our own minds through search engines and hyperlinks. We'll become "pancake people," with wide access to information but no intellectual depth, because there's little need to contain information within our heads when it's so easy to find with a mouse click or two.

Cooper: In your Atlantic article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" you suggest that using the Internet has actually lessened your ability to concentrate while reading. What led you to this conclusion?

Carr: I was having trouble sitting down and immersing myself in a book, something that used to be totally natural to me. When I read, my mind wanted to behave the way it behaves when I'm online: jumping from one piece of information to another, clicking on links, checking e-mail, and generally being distracted. I had a growing feeling that the Internet was programming me to do these things and pushing on me a certain mode of thinking: on the one hand, distracted; on the other hand, efficient and able to move quickly from one piece of information to another. In the article, I focused on Google because it's the dominant presence on the Net — at least, when it comes to gathering information. It provides a window into how the Internet is imposing its own intellectual ethic on its users at both a technological and an economic level.

http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/399/computing_the_cost

Donate to the Timothy Leary Digitization Project

 

Posted by David Pescovitz

 

Timothy Leary was an inspiration and friend of bOING bOING from our earliest days. (Photo left of Tim with bOING bOING founders Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair in 1995; and right with me in 1990.) Mark previously posted about the first glimpses of the Timothy Leary Archives available online, in the form of some fantastic videos. That's part of a much larger project to digitize all of Tim's archives and bring him to life in Cyberspace, one of his greatest wishes before he died in 1996. Now, the Timothy Leary Archives are seeking donations to help keep the momentum going. From Denis Berry, trustee of Tim's estate:

Timothy Leary was a visionary. Realizing the importance of the events of the day, he tenaciously saved records of each phase of his life, capturing not only the budding psychedelic movement and its history, but years later, trumpeting the coming of the digital age of personal computers when this concept was still foreign to most.

His archival collection contains over 500,000 documents, including hundreds of letters from luminaries of all kinds (Allan Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Jack Kerouac, Abbie Hoffman, Robert Anton Wilson), documents from his Harvard research, Millbrook journals, IFIF documents, hundreds of hours of audio and video and thousands of photographs. This collection records not only his life, but the history of the entire psychedelic movement, and more.

Last week, at a huge reunion event in San Francisco, his estate announced their plans to digitize this collection and place it online as one of the first projects of its kind. Hosted by Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive, the site will eventually house the entire collection, and it will be completely searchable and indexed. Dr. Leary had this dream before most people even knew what the internet was, or how important it would become.

We invite you to visit to help support the digitization, by donating to help move the project forward.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/25/donate-to-the-timoth.html

Do these mysterious stones mark the site of the Garden of Eden?

By Tom Cox

The site has been described as 'extraordinary' and 'the most important' site in the world.

For the old Kurdish shepherd, it was just another burning hot day in the rolling plains of eastern Turkey. Following his flock over the arid hillsides, he passed the single mulberry tree, which the locals regarded as 'sacred'. The bells on his sheep tinkled in the stillness. Then he spotted something. Crouching down, he brushed away the dust, and exposed a strange, large, oblong stone.

The man looked left and right: there were similar stone rectangles, peeping from the sands. Calling his dog to heel, the shepherd resolved to inform someone of his finds when he got back to the village. Maybe the stones were important.

They certainly were important. The solitary Kurdish man, on that summer's day in 1994, had made the greatest archaeological discovery in 50 years. Others would say he'd made the greatest archaeological discovery ever: a site that has revolutionised the way we look at human history, the origin of religion - and perhaps even the truth behind the Garden of Eden.

A few weeks after his discovery, news of the shepherd's find reached museum curators in the ancient city of Sanliurfa, ten miles south-west of the stones.

They got in touch with the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul. And so, in late 1994, archaeologist Klaus Schmidt came to the site of Gobekli Tepe (pronounced Go-beckly Tepp-ay) to begin his excavations.

As he puts it: 'As soon as I got there and saw the stones, I knew that if I didn't walk away immediately I would be here for the rest of my life.'

Schmidt stayed. And what he has uncovered is astonishing. Archaeologists worldwide are in rare agreement on the site's importance. 'Gobekli Tepe changes everything,' says Ian Hodder, at Stanford University.

David Lewis-Williams, professor of archaeology at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, says: 'Gobekli Tepe is the most important archaeological site in the world.'

Some go even further and say the site and its implications are incredible. As Reading University professor Steve Mithen says: 'Gobekli Tepe is too extraordinary for my mind to understand.'

So what is it that has energised and astounded the sober world of academia?

The site of Gobekli Tepe is simple enough to describe. The oblong stones, unearthed by the shepherd, turned out to be the flat tops of awesome, T-shaped megaliths. Imagine carved and slender versions of the stones of Avebury or Stonehenge.

Most of these standing stones are inscribed with bizarre and delicate images - mainly of boars and ducks, of hunting and game. Sinuous serpents are another common motif. Some of the megaliths show crayfish or lions.

The stones seem to represent human forms - some have stylised 'arms', which angle down the sides. Functionally, the site appears to be a temple, or ritual site, like the stone circles of Western Europe.

To date, 45 of these stones have been dug out - they are arranged in circles from five to ten yards across - but there are indications that much more is to come. Geomagnetic surveys imply that there are hundreds more standing stones, just waiting to be excavated.

So far, so remarkable. If Gobekli Tepe was simply this, it would already be a dazzling site - a Turkish Stonehenge. But several unique factors lift Gobekli Tepe into the archaeological stratosphere - and the realms of the fantastical.

The Garden of Eden come to life: Is Gobekli Tepe where the story began?

The first is its staggering age. Carbon-dating shows that the complex is at least 12,000 years old, maybe even 13,000 years old.

That means it was built around 10,000BC. By comparison, Stonehenge was built in 3,000 BC and the pyramids of Giza in 2,500 BC.

The shepherd who discovered Gobekli Tepe has 'changed everything', said one academic

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1157784/Do-mysterious-stones-mark-site-Garden-Eden.html