Public service announcement: Do not leave a full can of
soda in the freezer. Especially not on the top shelf. (It's
been that kind of day.)
Public service announcement: Do not leave a full can of
soda in the freezer. Especially not on the top shelf. (It's
been that kind of day.)
Robert Reno points out that American politics needs something
not mentioned in the Constitution:
separation
of sex and state.
It was, after all, Kenneth Starr's unnatural obsession with the president's private behavior that led to the tit-for-tat exposure of several Republican members of Congress who got caught with their pants down. Does Bush lump their sexual indignities with the licentiousness he implies of the Clintons? Curiously, each of them turned out to be among the most sanctimonious of the Clinton-hating scolds.If civility and dignity are to be restored to Washington, it will come when sex is segregated from politics much as we already separate church from state.
China is conducting a
census, using enough census takers
to populate a large city. The government has promised "full secrecy,"
but many families are expected to hide illegal children.
They also have the problem of counting somewhere between
80 million and 120 million migrants.
Ethel the Blog has an excellent
analysis
of the extremely questionable numbers behind the Social Security "crisis":
even the so-called "optimistic" numbers assume that, throughout the
next 30 years, the economy will grow more
slowly than it did during the Great Depression. If you
can find an economist who seriously believes this, ask him or her
whether, and how, the stock market will grow at 1990s rates during
30 years of economic stagnation.
The real question is, why does the Social Security Administration want us to believe that its highly successful program is doomed?
In the Moroccan Sahara, the largest, if not only, business is
trilobites.
They can be dug up by the thousands--and the strange Americans will
pay for them. There's no Moroccan law against
making fake trilobites--selling them as real is illegal, but imagine
trying to enforce anti-counterfeiting rules if having a stack of
fake hundred dollar bills were illegal--and some dealers will paste
on extra whiskers to make their specimens more appealing.
Molly Ivins explains why she's voting for Nader,
and why
you shouldn't:
I'm also voting for him because I live in Texas -- where all 32 electoral votes will go to George W. Bush even if I stand on my head, turn blue and vote for Gus Hall, the late communist...And how do we ever change the whole rotten system at that speed? Brick by brick, child by child, slowly, toward liberty and justice for all....
In Texas, we'll vote for Nader and a perfect world. You swing-state progressives need to make the hard choice -- but you're not making it just for yourselves. Good luck to you all.
How long is it going to take before we see scandalized
newspaper articles about
BabyExchange and
its return policies, even though its only actual product
is a fairly innocuous t-shirt?
A minor planet with the unassuming name
2000 EB173
is the largest trans-Neptunian asteroid so far known, and
probably the second-largest asteroid in the Solar System.
What would you name the largest object between Neptune and Pluto?
I don't know if Larry Flynt's investigators are right this
time, though they have a good record, but CNN silently
dropped
his accusation that Dubya helped a woman get an
illegal abortion from their transcript of a Crossfire
program that included the host telling Flynt
"NEVER let it be said that we CENSOR any of
our guests."
The sin here is hypocrisy: CNN's and possibly Dubya's.
I'm pro-choice. Bush says he's anti. Is he only anti when it's
not his friends?
[via Ethel
the Blog, which also includes a more complete transcript of
Flynt's remarks.]
[Sorry about all the US politics lately; the emphasis will
probably shift back toward science and miscellaneous weirdness
after the election.]
It took me a lot of hunting around, with at least two different
search engines, to find a
plate
tectonic map that shows the boundaries of the North American
plate. (Most available tectonic maps seem to be Mercator projections,
and omit much of the Arctic.)
BountyQuest is a new Web site that will
pay for evidence of
prior art on certain patents. If you can prove
that Amazon's one-click-ordering patent uses something
published in 1987, there's $10,000 waiting for you.
They'll also pay you if you can invalidate their own
business model patent.
[via rc3 daily]
Some Republicans in Congress want to change the law to
require
the Census Bureau to share data with other government agencies.
Linda Monk is unsurprised: she was "one of those
paranoid Americans who chose not to answer all questions on the
long form of the 2000 census."
So far, all the Congressional Budget Office is asking for is monthly survey data, but it would set a dangerous precedent. The Census Bureau opposes the change, because it values its credibility: it promises that nothing you tell the census will be revealed to anyone else. That promise is essential to an accurate count, which is the Census Bureau's whole purpose and one of the few things the constitution actually requires the US government to do.
One last trip to Mir is planned--to bring it
sufficient fuel to control
its
plunge into the ocean. Space tourism sounded good, but the
money isn't there. With Mir's orbit is decaying, the alternative to a
controlled dive into the ocean is an uncontrolled fall, in which pieces
might land on a city.
Greens
for Gore hopes that they're supporting the lesser of two
good men by urging people in states where the election looks
close to vote for Gore rather than
Nader, in order to keep Bush from winning.
We are not authorized by any candidate or any candidate's authorized committee. We aren't officially anything yet except for an idea in formation....
Thank you and stay tuned for more! And remember to hug a tree; it's good for you!
Pay cash for your books, folks: a Denver judge
has ruled that the police can
demand
the bookstore invoice for a how-to book on drug manufacture.
He said that the "public interest" in prosecuting crimes
outweighs the First Amendment in this case: there is no
constitutional protection of the right to prosecute criminals.
Instead, the Constitution strictly limits what government may
do toward that end. The Tattered Cover is appealing the ruling.
(As far as I know, you cannot buy anonymously from any online
retailer.)
Copyright 2000 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.