Month: December 2007

The Readers Digest history of the past 7 years:

INTRODUCTION: George Bush, the Connecticut cowboy, the good old boy from Yale is a man of mediocre intelligence, little imagination, and great stubbornness and vindictiveness. He may be the Decider but his handlers have long known how to manipulate him. The key is to hook him with short, simple sells. Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice know that once he has consulted his gut and perhaps his higher father his decision is forever. So whoever gets to him first is likely to carry the day because he doesn’t like to be challenged and is, quite simply, too lazy to change his mind. The Bubble is a natural consequence of this decision making process where logic, reason, and facts have little or no role.

Bush’s Presidency began in the shadow of a contested and likely stolen election and promised to be unsuccessful in a largely forgettable and unremarkable way. 911 changed all that and transformed a plodding, and essentially AWOL one termer into an accidental hero. Enormous power flowed to his office but Bush had no idea how to use it. He liked to campaign, not govern. In those around him, he prized loyalty over competence and honesty. A believer in the notion of “to the victor go the spoils,” he was the perfect mark for every conniver, bumbler, bungler, hack, hanger on, and would be crony that Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and their friends could find. In the normal course of things, this would have spelled failure. Post-911, it was catastrophic.

At this critical juncture in our history we needed an adult but got an adolescent. Instead of responsibility, we got a truant. In place of flexibility we got obduracy. In the face of great and complex challenges, we got strawmen, a black and white universe, my way or the highway, regurgitated stump speeches, and a steadfast refusal to compromise not just with opponents but with reality.

What all this comes down to is that George Bush should never have become our President. He is not just a bad President but the worst one we could have had, the worst our country has ever seen. This is a judgment that many Americans have come to but which our political establishment and media, even after 6 years, have yet to acknowledge, accept, and act on. This is the tragedy and crime of our times. [From Hugh’s List of Bush Scandals]

The rest of the page details 292 individual scandals/events/possible crimes committed by the Bush cabal. Reading the second graf, I start to gain a grudging admiration of Osama bin Forgotten. Could he have picked a more useful foil in his campaign to create a jihadi army and sully the reputation of the country he blames for much of what he hates in the world?

In 2002, blogging evangelist Dave Winer made a long bet with New York Times executive Martin Nisenholtz: “In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site.”

Today, Associated Press editors and news directors chose the top 10 news stories of the year, which makes it possible to determine who won the bet.

[…]

In the five years since the bet was made, a clear winner did emerge, but it was neither blogs nor the Times.

Wikipedia, which was only one year old in 2002, ranks higher today on four of the five news stories: 12th for Chinese exports, fifth for oil prices, first for the Iraq war, fourth for the mortgage crisis and first for the Virginia Tech killings.

Winer predicted a news environment “changed so thoroughly that informed people will look to amateurs they trust for the information they want.” Nisenholtz expected the professional media to remain the authoritative source for “unbiased, accurate, and coherent” information.

Instead, our most trusted source on the biggest news stories of 2007 is a horde of nameless, faceless amateurs who are not required to prove expertise in the subjects they cover.

[From Long Bet Winner: Weblogs vs. The New York Times]

• Single-use plastic bottles? Check.
• Petroleum-fueled distribution? Check.
• Drawing down a marginal metro watershed? Check..

Don’t Live In Atlanta? You Can Still Help Make Our Drought Worse! — Dasani bottled water is drawn directly from Lake Alatoona and the Chattahoochee River (yes, Dasani is glorified Atlanta tap water), 8.4 million gallons of it in November, and Gatorade comes from the Chattahoochie[sic] as well (the Pepsi Gatorade plant is the city’s largest water user), to the tune of over 70 million gallons per month. So, buy a case of Dasani water or Gatorade, and you can deprive an Atlantan of a future shower!

[From Don’t Live In Atlanta? You Can Still Help Make Our Drought Worse!]

So the two leading purveyors of brown sugar water are poster children for externalizing costs and privatizing gains.

And Atlanta’s tap water has always been iffy. If I was the mayor, I’d want Dasani’s bottlers to pay back a little more than just their water bill.

The 2007 Holiday playlist. The full playlist is below the fold.

I think 9 of the tracks are available from iTunes, less than half.

Some of these appear every year for no better reason than that I can’t imagine a holiday playlist without them. This one, for example, is available now, but I already had a copy 😉 And I think this is actually Roy Wood, not Toy Wood.

When I get the URI for the iMix, I’ll post it.

Continue reading “Holiday music”

I’ve said it before: the film you can buy today, even in a single-use camera, is the best there has ever been. I’m not saying these pictures were taken by film instead of people. But the quality of the film helped make it possible for these untrained photographers to capture scenes from their lives. Rather than worry about if the picture would come out — assuming they knew that much about what they were doing — they just composed what they felt to be worth sharing.

Go look at some more of these: this picture isn’t even close to being the best of the lot.

Pim writes:

I sent a number of disposable cameras to a few people – children and farmers – at a small village in Lesotho, Southern Africa and asked them to take pictures of their life. What returned are some truly amazing pictures, un-mediated by the professional photographer’s eye.

I posted a number of them here, you might find them interesting. They are really amazing, especially considering they were taken by a throw-away Kodak, by folks who mostly had never even touched a camera before.

We are doing this as part of our Menu for Hope, the fourth annual fundraising raffle run by me and a whole bunch of food blogging friends to raise funds for the UN World Food Program – last year’s campaign did over $60K in two weeks. This year’s plan is to support the school lunch program in Lesotho, where the WFP not only feed the kids but is pushing a new initiative to buy from local farmers to support the program. We help feed the kids, which keeps them in school, and also support their parents and community farming.

I remain ga-ga over the quality of pictures taken by those with no training. Keep these in mind the next time you try to convince yourself you need that $2,000 DSLR.

Faces from Lesotho [ChezPim.com]

[From What Disposable Cameras Can Do]

• Secret Amazon Discount Finder
  very cool idea. And just in time for holiday shopping.
  (tags: Shopping money markets amazon internet bargains)
• The education of David Frum
  “we are too soon old and too late smart” Einstein is reputed to have said. What we’re seeing now is the result of politics over policy, of winning over governing.
  (tags: 2008 worstpresidentever gop politics electioneering values)

“Rejoice not at thine enemy’s fall – but don’t rush to pick him up either.”
[From Jewish Proverb]