The site to
end all
online auction sites.
[via /usr/bin/girl]
Please bookmark this page as http://www.redbird.org/yawl.html.
The site to
end all
online auction sites.
[via /usr/bin/girl]
The unpayable debt of poor nations to First World banks is
mostly an
artifact
of an accounting system designed to create and perpetuate tha
debt. If the books were calculated a little differently,
Europe could be said to owe Latin America 185,000 kilograms of
gold and 16 million kilos of silver, plus compound interest since
1660. There isn't that much gold and silver in the world, of
course: but it's at least as plausible as the debt that bankers
claim Latin American and African nations owe them.
By firing a beam of neutrons through the
Earth's crust, Japanese scientists have found strong
evidence
for neutrino oscillation. This result has important
implications for theories about the Sun: solar neutrino
oscillation has been suspected for a long time, but the
neutrino deficit could have had another cause. In the new
experiment, the researchers know how many neutrinos
they started with.
The perfect gift for that hard-drinking biker who insists on
strong,
black tea.
The Queens Lesbian and Gay Pride Committee is
asking the Board of Education to
stop
letting the Boy Scouts meet in the public schools, arguing that
the Scouts may have a right, as a private organization, to
discriminate, but that they do not have a right to
use public resources to do so.
The
There are lots of reasons to study American history:
tNat
Hentoff's is
that it provides tools for activism.
The Onion is back from a brief vacation,
to inform us that a
Malignant
Tumor Sees Every Day as Gift from God.
After tragically losing most of its mass in a June 28 operation, the tumor is now in the midst of 12 grueling weeks of chemotherapy, a procedure doctors say it has a less than 20 percent chance of surviving.
Eight gorgeous lines of parody
verse,
combining Tolkien, Joyce, and particle physics.
Avram Grumer
is probably too modest to include a link to this in his own Web log,
so his friends will have to spread it around.
Chocolate may be
good
for your heart, as well as your mood. I don't need much pushing
to eat 15-20 gm of dark chocolate a day--the trick is stopping there,
with the chocolate sitting in front of me--but it's worth
noting that the
study reported here was funded by M&M Mars.
Jon Carroll has taken the time to think
about last week's failed
anti-missile
test:
"Things have gotten unacceptably decadent when a citizen of a
nation roots against his own army."
Carroll argues that the real problem isn't one test, or even this
anti-missile system as a whole: it's in the way the US government
decides on military funding.
Richard Goldstein analyzes
celebrity
bigotry, and why it's acceptable to attack certain groups but
not others. It's easy for people like Eminem and Don Imus to claim
that they're only joking, but feminists, at least,
have heard that excuse before: only the standard targets
are accused of having "no sense of humor" when they object to bigotry,
The clash of ideas in American mass media is not a cacophony but a hierarchy of voices. The ugly truth is that some forms of bigotry are more permissible than others, and some are not acceptable at all....We don't live in a world where words like "whiteboy" and "breeder" are the coin of the realm. Indeed, the nature of being dominant is that there aren't many epithets to describe you. When a gay shrink can become a national figure by calling heterosexuals an abomination, when a black shock jock makes a fortune mocking whites, when a female rapper can go platinum by boasting of slashing up men, then we can talk about a level playing field.
Goldstein urges us to protest, to point out what's going on, and to boycott the peddlers of hate:
Self-interest has replaced the old ideal of common cause. Even worse, libertarians are chastising those who care enough to protest.The First Amendment does not require silence in the face of outrage. On the contrary, freedom demands a constant assertion of values.
Quote of the day:
We are so primitive a species that we have difficulty distributing anything among ourselves without using the market as an intermediary.
Never stare directly at the Sun: get a
robot
to do it for you, with color filters.
[via More
Like This]
If you care about things like top-level domains and how
trademark affects the ownership of domain names, sign up as an
at-large
member of ICANN. You have to be over 16 and willing
to provide both an email and a postal address. That's it.
At-large representatives will be elected soon, so sign up
now if you want to vote.
If you have an email account in the United States, or correspond
with anyone who does, the
FBI may be
looking
at your email.
The Carnivore system--how's that for a name?--scans all
incoming and outgoing emails at the ISP of anyone the agency is
investigating.
According to a letter from the
American Civil Liberties Union,
``Carnivore is roughly equivalent to a wiretap capable of accessing the contents of the conversations of all of the phone company's customers, with the 'assurance' that the FBI will record only conversations of the specified target.... This 'trust us, we are the government' approach is the antithesis of the procedures required under our wiretapping laws.''
Unsurprisingly, New Labour's controversial net snooping bill would entitle it to do the same.
Fifteen ways to
make
yourself miserable.
More political news:
yogic
flyers meet
Perotistas, cheered on
by the one and only Lenora Fulani, who is backing Hagelin
although, or because, he is also the presidential candidate of
the
Natural Law Party.
Yes, I wanted a second party [tm Jim Hightower],
but I don't think this is it.
[This entry revised and extended 14 July, by request.]
The mosses
and liverworts that were probably the
earliest
land plants may have grown in forests
of giant fungi. (The flowers and trees we think of when we
hear the word "plant" evolved much later.)
We apologize for the inconvenience: the previous version of
this file somehow got overwritten by a directory listing,
just after major problems at my ISP. I think I've reconstructed
everything from Friday, but I can't be sure.
Do we have
too
many leaders? Donna M. Bley suggests that it may be time to teach
a different attitude.
[warning: this link is probably good only through 16 July]
I don't want to be anywhere near a performance by this
pipe organ.
It's never
too soon to join the
Christmas resistance.
Guardian readers offer a variety of
answers to
Is
it possible to be both a Tory and a good Christian?
An impressive ad campaign is running to launch
lipstick
for men, in colors like bright purple. The
only
thing missing is the product.
Copyright 1999, 2000 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@interport.net.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.