meta-roj

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Tuesday, February 24, 2004

bush calls for same-sex-marriage-ban amendment

just a thought… if this flies, it will (i think) only be the second time the united states constitution is amended to restrict the rights of americans.

(that first time was the 18th – prohibition)

posted by roj at 1:04 pm  

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

tsa precision targetting

the dallas observer reports the story of a tsa (transportation security administration) employee that isn’t what the tsa thought he was.

at least they didn’t accuse him of being a fish.

[ via boing boing ]

posted by roj at 6:47 am  

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

free the grey album

grey tuesday

posted by roj at 4:41 am  

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

bush agendas drive science policy too

while i’m picking on the administrations misuse of intelligence to drive an agenda, it just seems appropriate to throw in a brief mention of the union of concerned scientists and their report [pdf] on the bush administration’s misuse of science.

this was news itself a few days ago, but it picks up a little more traction when it becomes apparent that the pentagon is planning based on severe climate change scenarios.

no one can say with any certainty what constitutes a dangerous level of warming, and therefore what level must be avoided.

president george w. bush, bush disses global warming report [cbs]

I read the report put out by the bureaucracy

it seems that some people at the pentagon have some idea what “constitutes a dangerous level.” it seems that the president didn’t read that report from that bureaucracy. (to be fair, maybe it wasn’t ready in 2001…)

climate science is one thing (and it takes some serious crunching to even have a decent hint), but the ucs report outlines concerns in a number of fields. anyway, the white house got a question about this report…

Q Scott, a group of prominent scientists, including some university presidents and Nobel laureates, signed a letter today complaining that the White House has systematically skewed science to fit its policy agendas. In particular, they accuse the administration of stacking federal advisory panels and suppressing EPA studies that don’t agree with policy objectives. Have you seen the letter, and can you respond —

MR. McCLELLAN: No, I haven’t, but I can assure you that this is an administration that makes decisions based on the best available science. And I would point to what we are doing in terms of the President’s Clear Skies initiative as a prime example. We’ve seen the success from the acid rain program of this market-based approach. And the President has put forward a Clear Skies initiative to cut power plant emissions by 70 percent. And that’s an initiative that is based on the best available science. And that’s what we do with all our policies in this realm.

surely the administration wouldn’t lie about that, so maybe it’s not really a political agenda, it’s just that scientific papers simply aren’t available in the white house.

posted by roj at 4:35 am  

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

soldier for the truth

groupthink and political agendas drive the pentagon under the bush administration. it sure seems like it from the outside, and recently, la weekly interviewed a now-retired pentagon officer, giving us a view from the inside.

USAF Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski in la weekly

I remember in one case, I had to rewrite something a number of times before it went through. It was a background paper on Libya, and Libya has been working for years to try and regain the respect of the international community. I had intelligence that told me this, and I quoted from the intelligence, but they made me go back and change it and change it. They’d make me delete the quotes from intelligence so they could present their case on Libya in a way that said it was still a threat to its neighbors and that Libya was still a belligerent, antagonistic force. They edited my reports in that way. In fact, the last report I made, they said, “Just send me the file.” And I don’t know what the report ended up looking like, because I imagine more changes were made.

for more (please remain seated and keep your arms in the car), soldiers for the truth and the insider notes from the pentagon archives.

[metafilter gave me an excuse to get this public]

posted by roj at 4:02 am  

Monday, February 23, 2004

fcc supports lpfm

a few days ago, the fcc told congress that low power fm wasn’t the most evil thing in the universe, despite heavy lobbying from the more established radio industry (hi clearchannel). a good thing.

posted by roj at 10:40 pm  

Friday, February 20, 2004

database cleanup

i recently finished a little cleanup for the database under this beast. let me know if i broke anything.

(then again, if it’s really broken, how are you going to read that?)

update: as usual, something goes wrong. i managed to truncate a few entries and several titles. i think everything’s fixed now.

posted by roj at 1:48 am  

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

us debt tops $7 trillion

just write a check for… oh… $24, 138 or so, and we’ll call it even.

(that’s only 4687 hours at minimum wage)

update: us consumer debt went through $2 trillion back in january.

posted by roj at 5:11 pm  

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

wsj picks up on that attention thing

o surprise, one of our favorite wall-street-journal-reading, market-strategizing, philosophizing, take-it-back-to-new-york freaky money geeks picked up on it and gave me something to link to.

here, we’ve done a whole series of things on the attention market (you can ignore those things about google).

bringing the vast research resources of the journal to bear, they cooked up a nice chart of things that demand our time these days. it’s worth a peek.

where i don’t necessarily agree is here:

This shift from passive to active consumption works against tightly scripted radio playlists. Yet another tastemaker — radio — is in the process of being marginalized.

barry’s a smart guy, but i think there’s some evidence that it’s not an active-vs-passive shift; it’s a stop-annoying-me-because-i-have-options shift.

posted by roj at 9:34 am  

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

Jan Miner

is soaking in it

posted by roj at 12:42 am  
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