RelentlesslyOptimistic

Positive Proof of Global Warming.

From Neatorama: Positive Proof of Global Warming

Japanese company promotion campaign spotted in Osaka

   
   

I think it's the orange jumpsuits that really make the look. Via MIT Advertising Lab

A false sense of security

Via Nothing To Do With Arbroath

Because his lips are moving: Bush on domestic spying

George W. Bush, Saturday:

The privacy of all Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities. The government does not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval.

Except when they do.

 

So they are tracking a few phone numbers. So what?

From The American Prospect:

Turns out the NSA...is monitoring all of our calls -- not to listen in to what's being said, but simply to gather data about the calls and draw inferences from that...one thing the Bush administration says it can do with this meta-data is to start tapping your calls and listening in, without getting a warrant from anyone. Having listened in on your calls, the administration asserts that if it doesn't like what it hears, it has the authority to detain you indefinitely without trial or charges, torture you until you confess or implicate others, extradite you to a Third World country to be tortured, ship you to a secret prison facility in Eastern Europe, or all of the above. If, having kidnapped and tortured you, the administration determines you were innocent after all, you'll be dumped without papers somewhere in Albania left to fend for yourself.

Via jwz

An Easy Call: Lying

Eugene Robertson, in a Washington Post Op-Ed about the latest domestic spying by the NSA:

At least now we know that the Bush administration's name for spying on Americans without first seeking court approval -- the "terrorist surveillance program" -- isn't an exercise in Orwellian doublespeak after all. It's just a bald-faced lie.

Bush and his people have tried to turn flouting the law into a virtue if it's a law they find inconvenient...We already knew the NSA was somehow monitoring phone calls, so what's the big deal?

Bush has tried to convince us that the overwhelming majority of Americans are not affected by domestic surveillance, but now we know that the opposite is true: The overwhelming majority of us are.

The president's claim, in his brief statement on the report, that the government isn't "trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans" is as disingenuous as Bill Clinton's claim that he "didn't inhale."

Are we safer yet?

If we were still racists we'd be winning in Iraq

"Possibly white guilt's worst effect is that it does not permit whites--and nonwhites--to appreciate something extraordinary: the fact that whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation...There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today"

The Absurd category here started as a place to put the most outrageous wingnuttery, but for a while it seemed like everything that the media reported from or about the Administration qualified, and I started using Disgraceful instead. But ever since Bush's approval ratings have reached a level only two or three times what they should be, the most ridiculous instances of wild-ass-craziness in "respectable" media outlets seem to have become less common.

Until this: Whiskey Bar: Losing Ugly discusses Tuesday's Wall Street Journal op-ed from Shelby Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of the newly-released book: "White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era." In his White Guilt and the Western Past editorial Steele argues that we're losing in Iraq because we feel so guilty over our past racism that we can't go to war "with enough ferocity to win."

"The collapse of white supremacy--and the resulting white guilt--introduced a new mechanism of power into the world: stigmatization with the evil of the Western past."

"America's act of going to war can have legitimacy only if it seems to be an act of social work--something that uplifts and transforms the poor brown nation"

Whiskey Bar's Billmon makes a case for this as "a fairly desperate attempt to think up an excuse for the Iraq fiasco -- one that doesn't involve admitting the invasion was a really stupid idea, stupidly executed." But I wonder if Steele is laying a foundation to attack those who will be horrified by our upcoming use of WMD's nuclear weapons in Iran. It's the "don't let your white guilt prevent you from seeing the need for nuclear genocide" defense.

Minnesota wristwatches and hidden pube embers: Bad News Hughes – the best penis writing on the internet!

What women often don’t understand is how much fun it is to have a penis and scrotum, even aside from the sex part. Patrick Hughes' terrific storytelling at Bad News Hughes provides a glimpse into the joy of having a built-in play set.

"Anatol hasn’t always made such wise choices when deciding how to use his penis"

"I wanted nothing more than to use this fellow to test my theory that punching someone really, really hard on the balls can potentially flip their breaker switch, ideally resetting their personality to something more manageable"

"The victim...will have had a good dose of weiner molecules fly right into their eye by the time they figure it out"

"A second or two after removing his hands, the inrush of oxygen reignites a hidden pube ember"

Like all great artists, Patrick inspires others to stretch and grow – don’t miss the comments. If explaining why you're laughing will violate one or more of your company's policies, wait until you get home to visit this one.

Bush Clinton Playground

You knew there had to be one, right?

Mike of Satan's Laundromat, one of my favorite photoblogs, is back. Click the photo to see the rest of today's entry from Red Hook.

The ultimate in "pimp-my-ride"

What's the first thing most people do when they buy a new car? Sit and smell the new car smell? Drive around and show it off to friends? If you're Ron Patrick and you're building a Street-Legal Jet Powered VW Beetle, "The first thing I did when I got the car was to cut the hole in the back for the engine."

Ron claims the car is street legal in California, and says he built it "because I wanted the wildest street-legal ride possible" and "to use some stuff I learned while getting my fancy engineering degree (I have a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University)."

His next project is to add twin jet engines to his wife's Honda Metropolitan scooter.

Via Neatorama