] We strongly encourage the state of Georgia to incorporate
] the entirety of the AAAS benchmarks. A complete science
] education is essential to scientific literacy and to our
] state's economy.

Please sign! Save Georgia from itself! First the Ten Commandments, now this...what part of "separation of church and state" DOESN'T FREAKING APPLY?!!

Georgia Science Education Petition

LAME! They are only giving free itunes in bottles, not cans, and the place were I usually buy bottles, my office, has at least a month's supply of bottles that aren't part of the promotion. By the time they get Pepsi in that is actually part of the promotion it will be over. Despite the fact that I drink at least two Pepsis a day I'll have to seriously alter how I buy them if I'm going to get any itunes.

Apple - Pepsi

Jeremy wrote:
] The sad fact is that US intelligence was not up to par. There
] are many reasons for that failure, but the most obvious one is
] the absence of an effective human clandestine intelligence
] service.

Hrm... I'm sceptical here. Was this really a failure of the U.S. intelligence community? The UN weapons inspectors were opposed to the idea. There was a lot of push and pull between the administration and the intel community. The politicians floated a document that was an edited version of some grad student's research paper. It was quite clear that there were quarters of the intel community who were saying that there probably weren't WMD, or that we didn't know, and that information was not brought to the forefront because the administration didn't want to hear that. Bush wasn't asking the CIA whats going on in Iraq, Bush was asking the CIA to "prove" conclusions he had already made. It seems to me that to go back and nail the CIA for "getting it wrong" is ridiculous. They were not allowed to "get it right" in the first place. The administration was operating on its own version of reality and we were all aware of that.

This issue gets deeper still. I really strikes at a fundamental problem with our democracy. Presumably, the people control the government. The government cannot go to war without people's approval. The geopolitical strategic reasons for the war were available and discussed here. However, the television watching public doesn't have the attention span to handle complex explanations for complex decisions. So, things end up getting simplified for them. The WMD justification was the simplification they ended up running with. It was a poor choice because they weren't sure it was even true. But people bought it. And now the television watching public is trying to grapple with the fact that this explanation was weak, and Bush is offering other equally simplified explanations in response. It seems like a really futile dialog.

How can people govern if they aren't willing to study? Did Bush lie to the public? Yes! Could he have run an honest explanation for what he was doing? Would we have supported it? Its not clear. Should he have?

These are the important questions, but we're not discussing them. We're busy freaking out because the simplification we got didn't hold. The administration should have seen this coming. They should have known that they might be wrong and they should have had a game plan in place to handle that possibility. Maybe this is it. Its called an independent commission, AKA, pin the tail on the CIA. This isn't the first time during this administraion that the CIA will take a political bullet for them, and as in the past, there will be no consequences. No heads will roll because its all bullshit anyway. The public will be made to feel like everything is ok.

But, everything is really really not ok. This isn't a democracy. This is a highly evolved system of consentual manipulation. And that is not an anti-bushism. Clinton played the same games all the time. And its not clear that we CAN be a democracy. We're not ready.

RE: Restoring Trust in America

] Congress is considering a good bipartisan compromise
] known as the SAFE Act (short for Safety and Freedom
] Ensured) that was introduced last fall by Sens. Richard
] Durbin (D-Ill.) and Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho). The
] measure, S1709, would add judicial oversight to rein in
] the FBI's overly free hand.
]
] The bill also extends the Patriot Act's sunset
] provisions, for example requiring periodic
] reconsideration of circumstances in which agents can read
] someone's e-mail or peruse their credit card purchases.
]
] In a letter last week, Ashcroft preposterously asserted
] that the SAFE Act would "make it more difficult" to stop
] terrorists "than before the Patriot Act," and said he'd
] recommend that Bush veto it. Lawmakers should ignore this
] bluster as they take modest steps to protect civil
] liberties while continuing to fight terror.

Ashcroft appears to be seriously opposed to even a moderate approach to the Patriot Act.

Safer Option for Civil Rights

The brother of Iran's reformist president was among those who resigned. He said, "This is the end of the reform movement."

One-Third of Iranian Parliament Quits in Protest

] Cryptogrphever is an on-line application which lets you
] discover secret messages hidden in webpages published on
] internet. It is possibile to analyze any text with
] criptographever.

Secret messages are everywhere! This tool is proof. It takes any text and figures out if there are English words in a transposition of the text. The "Cultural Class War" article I recently posted here said "hit target."

Cryptographever

Marie and I have recently gotten into watching this show called
"Good Eats" on the Food Network. The host, Alton Brown, offers a
lot of interesting recipes on a geek tip. For example, in one
episode he asks some materials people at GaTech about the
properties of various casserole dishes.

A recent episode called "The Pouch Principle" offered a dish that
is easy to make, takes about 30 minutes total to prepare, and
offers a great deal of potential variety. Anything from asian noodle
dishes to hearty meat and potatoes stuff. It sounds perfect for
preparing food after work when you're tired but you want something
good.

Good Eats Pouches

... an entire generation of lowered expectations ...

This author doesn't understand why we are ignoring the problem. If you look two articles back in my MemeStream to "Creative Class War" you'll get the why to go along with this article's what.

Education Is No Protection

The antiglobalization protesters almost shut Davos down the last two years. This year, they were nowhere.

Elephants Can't Fly

] Thanks to the GOP takeover of Washington, and the harsh
] realities of the Big Sort, economically lagging parts of
] the country now wield ultimate political power, while the
] creative centers--source of most of America's economic
] growth--have virtually none.

This is a very good article that gets off to a slow start. It resonates with a lot of the things we've been discussing here. The author is arguing that the migration of creative people from the midwest into the country's urban centers during the .com boom created the political situation which led to the Bush win in 2000. (The Democrats' political base is now concentrated into smaller geographic areas, cutting their electoral edge on the GOP.) Now the creative class is politically disenfranchised.

You can see this directly in the election. Bush is offering tax cuts to people who are handling multi-million dollar inheritances and who make most of their money from capital gains. Dean and the other Democrats are offering to help families who make less then $50,000 a year. They talk about manufacturing jobs and steel workers. This country's economic future is not going to be built by steel workers. It is also not going to be built by the bored and dull sons of sons of sons who have more money then you can count and no real ambition as a result.

This country's economic future has always been built by people who are both capable of building it and motivated to do so. This author is arguing that we might not see it at all. He is seeing brain drain out of the US to Canada, Europe, and Australia. We wouldn't feel that right now if we had it, as the US isn't using the people they have. What's cutting a little muscle when you aren't running at top speed? The authors suggest a serious risk that the next runner to the front of the pack is likely to be a country that creates opportunities for the creative class, and right now thats not us.

'Creative Class War' by Richard Florida