michaelw.net George Bush's resume by Kelly Kramer

"I started wondering ... what would a George W. Bush resume look like exactly? Listed below is what I came up with."

via boingboing

AlterNet: It’s Still the Economy, Stupid

"One of the big fears of the Bush tax cut is its impact on future generations, families and children. Even N. Gregory Mankiw, recently nominated as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, says in his popular textbook 'Principle of Economics,' that when government runs a budget deficit it 'pulls resources away from investment in new capital and thereby depresses the living standards of future generations.'"

BushCo Reams Nation Good / No WMDs after all, no excuse for war, too late for anyone to care anymore. Ha-ha, suckers

"Ah, but screw the liberal whiny peacenik U.N. inspectors, you know? Let's ask the U.S. search teams themselves, ShrubCo's own squadrons of biologists, chemists, arms-treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts and Special Forces troops who've been in Iraq for weeks now, searching frantically.

Surely they've found something, right? Surely we can now prove that Saddam was fully intending to fillet our babies and annihilate Florida and poke the eyes out of really cute kittens on national TV for sadistic pleasure, right? Gimme a hell yeah! "

AlterNet: Socialism Lives!

"In the annals of armed conflict, there has never been an outcome quite like this, where the victors coddle the defeated enemy while visiting misery on their own people. If the rebuilding of Iraq goes as currently planned, the Iraqis will be enjoying their universal health care system just as Medicaid gets savaged at home. They will be counting up their personal oil profits while Americans face deep cuts in programs such as temporary assistance to needy families, the earned income tax credit, food stamps and education at all levels. Iraqis will be free to practice democracy in its untidiest forms, while Americans can be spied on and incarcerated without charges under Patriot Acts I and II."

This chair makes me claustrophobic just looking at it. Future of the workspace? I think not! (via /)

Synthetic gecko hairs promise walking up walls

The prospect of being able to emulate a gecko and walk up a wall and across the ceiling has come a step closer to reality. Scientists in California have begun to work out how to make a material coated with synthetic gecko hairs. If engineers could create a material that matches the nimble lizard's incredible grip, the applications would be endless.

FCC Headlines Posted Today

I decided to do a daily google news search every day until June 2nd, to check and see how much press this upcoming ruling is getting. Evidently, if it were up to the Spokesperson for the FCC, we would stop discussing it altogether and let the giant monopolies like Viacom get on with their agendas. At least that's the feeling I got after watching C-Span yesterday.

As a sidenote, the day this story broke online, I sent out various hyperlinks to articles out on the subject. The next day, when attempting to round up those hyperlinks to post to this blog, I found that *4* of them had changed. Strange, huh?

Neurology, impulse control and free will

"He was a schoolteacher, a husband, a father. Then he became a pedophile preoccupied with sex.
Doctors who treated him at the University of Virginia hospital in 2000 believe that the man's powerful sex addiction was caused by an egg-sized tumor in his brain.
"It turned out he was a guy who had made it into his 40s without having any problem with this," said Dr. Russell Swerdlow, a UVa associate professor of neurology. "He had a brain tumor that was damaging the part of the brain that controls impulse."
Once the tumor was removed, the man's sexual obsession disappeared. Swerdlow believes this is the first known case to link damage of the frontal lobe with pedophilia."

via boingboing

Should the people who create a technology be responsible for what users do with that technology? If the RIAA has a say in it, the answer is yes.

If technology inventors are held liable, it's difficult to imagine where to draw the line. The Google search engine arguably helps pirates find copies of software, and Usenet newsreaders--from Forte FreeAgent to the venerable tin and trn--surely aid and abet file-swapping on the alt.binaries hierarchy. FTP (file transfer protocol) is often used to swap illicit files, the argument might go, and the ready availability of free Perl interpreters and C compilers accelerates the development process.

Right?