Who is This?

Answer at the bottom

 

Shockwave of the Week

In Mark Fiore's The Simple Life, Lady Liberty gets to live in Gitmo.

I Feel So Much Safer Now

Feds arrested white supremacists in Texas with a sodium cyanide bomb, other bombs and chemicals, illegal weapons, hate literature, fake I.D., gas masks, bomb-making books, and coded plans for "meetings" in 10 US cities. Hundreds of subpoenas have been issued around the country but they weren't Muslims, so only the Texas media reported it.

Bush is concerned about the fairness of Russian elections. Mwaa-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Gallery of the Week

Robert Fulton, The Fulton Airphibian, 1946. 
Announcing that "the airphibious age is upon us," 
this promotional brochure promised a vehicle 
that was easy to convert from plane to car or vice-versa. 
It was so easy that a woman could do it by herself in 
only five minutes!

Isn't it nice that someone got the future wrong (unlike George Orwell)? Have fun at Yesterday's Tomorrows.

Calling All Chinese

BuyAmerican.com, a site with 27,600 American-made products from 600 vendors, is for sale.

This Would Have Never Happened if Joan Crawford were President

By now you probably know that if you type "miserable failure" into Google and click on I FEEL LUCKY, up comes Dubya's official biography at the White House site. How did that happen? It's a trick and here's how it's done.

Gee, I Wonder if Scientists Will Ever Discover a Way to Enlarge It?

And how, may I ask, can we avoid the discovery of the world's oldest penis?
 

December 9 Clayton Wentworth - The Voice Of The World 
December 10 Meria With the News 
December 11 Albert Pastore - Stranger Than Fiction, True Culprits of 9/11 
December 16 Robert Greenwald - Uncovered: The Truth About The War in Iraq 
December 23 John Dear - Peace Activist - Troops in front of his home in New Mexico shouting "Kill, Kill, Kill" 
December 24 Catherine Austin Fitts - Where's the Money? 

Why It's Cool to Look Up Your Own Name in Google Once in a While

Cannabis Factory Fails To Find Any Customers 
The North Devon Journal - 18 Nov, 03

A retired Devon farmer created a £55,000 cannabis factory and then found he had no one to sell the drug to, a court heard. Grandfather-of-five Michael Dare, 53, described in court as a respected member of the East Devon community, started planting the drug as a hobby - but it grew into a commercial enterprise. When he decided to try to sell it, he had no idea how to, because of his lack of knowledge of the drugs fraternity.

Cannabis user Dare, said to be of previous good character, was given a 21-month jail sentence, suspended for two years.

Michael, call me, babe, we'll do lunch.

Don't Take My Word For It

"Do not follow advice which you do not understand. Make detailed inquiries with your eyes, ears and mind."
- Qur'an, Al-Isra, Surah 17:34b-38 -

"The most damaging phrase in the language is: 'It's always been done that way.'"
- Grace Murray Hopper -

    "When Italy invaded the Sudan, it had nothing to do with jealousy of the Sudanese polity. They simply wanted a share of colonial Africa, like the other Europeans had taken before them.
    "When Germany invaded France, it was not because it hated the freedoms that the French enjoyed, but because it was anxious for the domination of Europe.
   "Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, not because they resented American democracy, which they in fact despised as being weak and inferior, but because they were bent upon military conquest.
   "As the above examples indicate, there seems to be no historical precedence to show that a nation was attacked because its attacker was envious of its form of government, except, of course, on September 11."
- Raff Ellis: Do our enemies covet our way of life? -

"Everything that's done by the government is done in your name. You are responsible whether you like it or not."
- Helen Thomas -

"When George W. Bush was inaugurated on the Capitol steps in January 2001, the coal industry, which had contributed more than $250,000 to his presidential campaign, was battling a series of regulatory efforts that, taken together, threatened to make the dirtiest fossil fuel, and those who mined and burned it, economically unviable. Less than three years later, coal is once again king. Bush, an oil man whose biggest campaign contributor was natural gas giant Enron Corp., has done more to advance the interests of coal than for any other sector of the energy industry."
- How did coal become the Bush administration's fuel of choice? -

"The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."
- Nelson Mandela -

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
- WOPR: computer in the movie WarGames after refusing the blow up the planet while playing a game of Thermonuclear War -

"Dramatic revisions are coming up from the fever swamps of the anthropologists, who are saying: Why not just forget the institution of marriage? After all, 26 percent of Americans live alone, and about half of those who marry proceed to get divorced. So why not a market solution to the whole business? Let the parties who decide to cohabit for more merely than a night, or even a month, devise an agreement of sorts having to do with how property should be distributed if they break up. Oh yes, if there were children, how would custody be arranged? All the business about paying the bills and visiting rights -- couldn't a thoughtful arrangement be made here, suited to the different personalities of the participants?"
- William F. Buckley -

"The choice is not between scientific medicine that doesn't work and alternative medicine that might work. Instead there is only scientific medicine that has been tested and everything else ('alternative' or 'complementary' medicine) that has not been tested. A few reliable authorities test and review the evidence for some of the claims-- notably Stephen Barrett's Quackwatch (www.quackwatch.org), William Jarvis's National Council against Health Fraud (www.ncahf.org), and Wallace Sampson's journal The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine."
- Michael Shermer: What's the Harm? - Alternative medicine is not everything to gain and nothing to lose -

"Happiness cannot come from hatred or anger. Nobody can say, 'Today I am happy because this morning I was very angry.' On the contrary, people feel uneasy and sad and say, 'Today I am not happy because I lost my temper this morning.' Through kindness, whether at our own level or at the national and international level, through mutual understanding and through mutual respect, we will get peace, we will get happiness, and we will get genuine satisfaction."
- His Holiness the Dalai Lama -

"We may pass violets looking for roses. We may pass contentment looking for victory."
- Bern Williams -

"Perhaps, though, it is a case of the Bush administration confusing the present with the 1960s, an era whose rebellious legacy it seems obsessed with obliterating. To Ashcroft and other Puritan Republicans, Tommy Chong's prosecution is merely another skirmish in their implacable war against the 20th century. In this climate it becomes almost pointless to talk about the drug-war hypocrisy of a White House whose mortgage is owned by pharmaceutical monopolies. Or of the reverential treatment given the Oxy-popping Rush Limbaugh by neo-McCarthyites like Bill O'Reilly, who lyingly told a Jay Leno audience that Tommy Chong had been arrested 18 times."
- Steve Mikulan: Chong Family Values -

"It's not that I disagree with Bush's economic policies or his foreign policies, all right? It's that I believe he's the child of Satan here to destroy the planet earth."
- Bill Hicks 15 years ago on Bush the Elder -  

    "To the truly committed, truly Christian conservative, George W. Bush is a traitor, a completely phony Christian, and just another politician who placed his left hand on the Bible, raised his right hand to God, and swore to uphold and defend a Constitution he had every intention of violating if the situation warranted it.
    "If there is one thing that true conservatives share, it is their solid and unwavering conviction to do what is both lawful and right, both under the law, and in the eyes of our God. In that light, our current president is woefully unfaithful, and in fact, treasonous to our Constitution."
- Carl F. Worden: President Howard Dean -

"From Lincoln to Nixon, our leaders have always paid respects to the dead heroes and consoled the living... George W. Bush, our president who wants everyone to know he is the commander in chief, has yet to attend a single funeral for any of the soldiers he sent off to die for our country... I can hear the Bush re-election machine chirping, 'As long as the president doesn't attend any funerals -- as long as he isn't pictured next to a soldier's casket or consoling a grieving widow -- then it's America's war, not his.' That's it in a nutshell; Bush doesn't go to service members' funerals because it's not good for his re-election campaign."
- Philip S. Manson -

"A study by Northern Kentucky University finds teen sex abstinence pledges don't work. Their survey of 600 teens who took such a pledge found that 61 percent had broken them within the first year -- and half of the rest we found to have redefined what 'sex' means to get around their pledge, arguing 'they can maintain their pledge and still have oral sex,' said NKU researcher Angela Lipsitz. (Lexington Herald- Leader) ...And thus Bill Clinton learns his true legacy." 
- This is True -

   "Dear This is True,
   "Billions of people get blow jobs every day and nobody reports it to the schoolchildren of America. John F. Kennedy got blow jobs and nobody reported it to the schoolchildren of America. Lyndon Johnson got blow jobs and nobody reported it to the schoolchildren of America. Richard Nixon got blow jobs and nobody reported it to the schoolchildren of America. Gerald Ford got blow jobs and nobody reported it to the schoolchildren of America. Ronald Reagan got blow jobs and nobody reported it to the schoolchildren of America. George Bush got blow jobs and nobody reported it to the schoolchildren of America.
   "Then Bill Clinton got blow jobs and Matt Drudge and the Republicans reported it to the schoolchildren of America. Bill Clinton never had any intention of ANYBODY finding out about his private sex life. This is one case where you CAN blame the messenger.
   "Schoolchildren knowing about blow jobs is Matt Drudge and the Republican's legacy, not Bill Clinton's."
- Xarvon, Alien Investigator -

Everything Else

Mandatory reading: No matter who's side you're on, even if you think The Federalist, the conservative e-journal of record, is a compendium of fascist idiocy, you've got to be boggled by their list of 2004 Pork Lotto Winners. It's your money.

If you've got any form of "Gator" spyware on your computer (and there's a good chance you do whether you know it or not), you have got to check this out. Gator has sued them so you KNOW it's good.

Michael Jackson has some good advice for Paris Hilton at Dear Michael Jackson: love advice for celebrities (from the King of Pop Psychology).