Ever wonder what $10,000 looks like?



This page on the Memory Hole has images of the largest bills that the US Goverment has ever produced, including the elusive $100,000 bill, which is illegal for an individual to posess.

Naomi Kein: Free Trade Is War

On September 9, seven antiprivatization activists were arrested in Soweto for blocking the installation of prepaid water meters. The meters are a privatized answer to the fact that millions of poor South Africans cannot pay their water bills.

The new gadgets work like pay-as-you-go cell phones, only instead of having a dead phone when you run out of money, you have dead people, sickened by drinking cholera-infested water. On the same day South Africa's "water warriors" were locked up, Argentina's negotiations with the International Monetary Fund bogged down. The sticking point was rate hikes for privatized utility companies. In a country where 50 percent of the population is living in poverty, the IMF is demanding that multinational water and electricity companies be allowed to increase their rates by a staggering 30 percent.

At trade summits, debates about privatization can seem wonkish and abstract. On the ground, they are as clear and urgent as the right to survive.

Because it's a Naomi Klein kind of day...now this is a great female role model.

The Unswoosher: Changing Nike's Image

Phil Knight had a dream. He'd sell shoes. He'd sell dreams.He'd get rich. He'd use sweatshops if he had to.

Then along came a new shoe. plain. simple. cheap. fair. designed for only one thing: kicking Phil's ass.

This is great! I will be ordering a pair in support. Check out their "Kick-Ass Marketing Strategy". ( Via Follow Me Here)

Watching The Watchers

In the fall of 2002, the Bush administration announced Total Information Awareness, a massive effort to build a counterterrorism database that can help track the activities of "people loosely organized in shadowy networks." The name was changed to Terrorism Information Awareness after critics charged that gathering gigabytes of data on private citizens is a threat to individual freedoms. But meanwhile the domestic surveillance program continues. So MIT graduate student Ryan McKinley decided to do something—beat the government at its own game by watching the watchers.

On this July 4, after six months of programming, McKinley went live with a Web site that inverts the idea of Total Information Awareness. It's called Government Information Awareness (www.opengov.us). The premise is a simple but powerful one: If our elected officials use the latest information technologies to follow our every move and detect unusual patterns in our behavior, perhaps we should subject them to the same intense scrutiny. ( Via Emergence Blog )

Word Pirates

They're our words, dammit!

Marketers, politicians and other short-sighted, self-interested, sticky-fingered people have been stealing our words. Not only do they take them for commercial purposes, but they misuse them entirely. They're Word Pirates and we're going to take back what's rightfully ours.

For instance...

For instance, the word "pirate" itself has been taken over by the Big Content companies. They mean "anyone who shares files." Real pirates murdered, raped and stole. They didn't share music, rightly or wrongly.

For instance, "intellectual property" refers to ideas. Ideas aren't property. Not only one person can "own" them. It's a bad metaphor leading to worse laws.

For instance, "hotel guest" pretends that people who pay money to stay in a building are somehow guests.
(via Weblogsky)

This is kind of neat. Type in five topics at random and this site will produce a graphical representation of blogs mentioning these topics in the last 10 weeks.

The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus



ahahah. From Al Franken's book "Fair and Balanced"..

OBJECTIVE: Creation Education: Creation Science Fair 2001:

I totally love when Christians make themselves look ridiculous. Saves me the trouble. :)


"Jonathan Goode (grade 7) applied findings from many fields of science to support his conclusion that God designed women for homemaking: physics shows that women have a lower center of gravity than men, making them more suited to carrying groceries and laundry baskets; biology shows that women were designed to carry un-born babies in their wombs and to feed born babies milk, making them the natural choice for child rearing; social sciences show that the wages for women workers are lower than for normal [ed. AHAHAHAH!!!!] workers, meaning that they are unable to work as well and thus earn equal pay; and exegetics shows that God created Eve as a companion for Adam, not as a co-worker."

John Ashcroft gets a soundtrack.:


"With fists and middle fingers upraised, a booing, hissing and chanting crowd of about 1,200 people awaited United States Attorney General John Ashcroft when he arrived at Faneuil Hall at Boston University Tuesday morning, decrying his support of what some protesters called government policies undermining civil rights.
Ashcroft was bombarded by cries of 'Shame!' and the sound of the 'Imperial Death March' from the movie 'Star Wars' as he entered a meeting with law enforcement officials in Faneuil Hall. "