the proverbial ice cube's chance

in what's left of our democracy.

no fucking comment

"But the State of Israel remains curiously (and among Western-style democracies, uniquely) immature. The social transformations of the country - and its many economic achievements - have not brought the political wisdom that usually accompanies age. Seen from the outside, Israel still comports itself like an adolescent: consumed by a brittle confidence in its own uniqueness; certain that no one "understands" it and everyone is "against" it; full of wounded self-esteem, quick to take offense and quick to give it. Like many adolescents Israel is convinced - and makes a point of aggressively and repeatedly asserting - that it can do as it wishes, that its actions carry no consequences and that it is immortal."

He shoulda looked left and...

he shoulda looked right.

Just like many people who have been drinking, the cell phone users did not believe themselves to be affected, the researchers found.

Yeah, yeah, I know, this is old news. But my local police don't enforce the NYS law re:this but assiduously enforce the Rockyfeller drug laws which do zero to protect my well-being.

Pas sanguine?

Losing that starry-eyed fatalist facade?

Twist a billionaire's knickers

tighter.

More relevant with every passing...

KA-CHING!!

Say it loud

a veritable horse's ass as a subject for historians to ponder.

'ow wouldn't it be loverly part deux

"One example of the collateral damage caused by today's approach is the utter lack of simple wireless connectivity. Another is that we have redundant capital intensive bit paths whose only purpose is to contain bits within billing paths," Frankston explains. "In practice, the telcos are about nothing at all other than creating billable events. Isn't it strange that as the costs of connectivity were going down your phone bill was increasing -- at least until VoIP forced the issue."

"We have an alternative model in the road system: The roads themselves are funded as infrastructure because the value is from having the road system as a whole, not the roads in isolation. You don't put a meter on each driveway. Tolls, fuel taxes, fees on trucks, etc. are ways of generating money but they are indirect. Local builders add capacity; communities add capacity and large entities create interstate roads. They don't create artificial scarcity just to increase toll revenues -- at least not so blatantly."

"I refer to today's carrier networks as trollways because the model is inverted -- the purpose of the road is to pass as many trollbooths as possible. We keep the backbone unlit to assure artificial scarcity. Worse, by trying to force us within their service model we lose the opportunity to create new value and can only choose among the services that fill their coffers -- it's hard to come up with a more effective way to minimize the value of the networks."

Weapon of mass deja vu

Are you "a low use segment of the population?"

Who would have thought...

it would break down this way?

More lovely images

at Bibliodyssey.

Late night comics

banned in Boston.

The People Formerly Known as ...

the Audience
A princely tale, indeed.

What with all the hand-wringing

There's boots on the ground.

More hilarity

whistling up a pipe.

The EPA and the US Department of Justice, which is representing the EPA in the case, could not be reached for comment because severe flooding in Washington DC forced their offices to close on Monday.

Taking the fifth

with your data.

With friends like these

who needs a plan?

Follow the money

following
the outrage.

Tasty

"For example," he wrote, "there is no written protocol which describes which drugs will be administered, in what amounts."

The judge also said he was "gravely concerned" because the lone doctor in charge of mixing the lethal drugs in Missouri is dyslexic. Someone else administers the drugs.

The doctor's dyslexia, the judge wrote, "causes him confusion with regard to numbers."

I'm not blind, I just can't....

sea.

Silence kills

In so doing, he demonstrates that one does not relinquish the freedom to choose what is right, even in the military, and that the freedom to choose what is right transcends the allegiance to man and institutions.

Adroitly skewered

in a situation where the skewers only need to be blunt.

Inertia

of rest, or motion?

Images du jour

Ghosts in the petro machine.

If any of my 3 readers...

don't read digby, do so now.

Unmixed Doubles

Doesn't everyone know they are running for high office?

Quote du jour

The minimum wage bill currently being pushed by Senator Kennedy would raise the minimum wage to $7.25 by 2009. By comparison, the minimum wage was almost $8.00 an hour (in 2006 dollars) in the late sixties. This means that if Kennedy's bill were approved, the real value of the minimum wage in 2009 would still be more than 10 percent lower than it was in the late sixties, even though productivity will have increased by more than 120 percent over this period.

R.I.P.

Enough is enough.

Unintended Consequences

A rather grim bit of blowback


Via

The tune can change

in spite of Washington's bludgeons and bluster.

A mere 120,000 subscribers

can be wrong.
Couldn't happen to a greyer lady.

Take it or leave it

Doing it or not.

'ow wouldn't it be loverly

or some such.

Sidebar goodies

of a calligraphic bent.

Noted

sadly

Give Me Bandwidth . . .

or what? It's not what we have now and w/o action, stasis will prevail. Of course, the action needs to be ours, not theirs.

We'll never get 10 megabits to our homes, let alone the multiples of that speed that are possible and affordable today if these telco Goliaths keep covering up their crown jewels. As Dean Wormer might put it: Fat, drunk (on profits), and stupid is no way to go through life, son.

As little TV as I see

I've always got time for the game.

Panda Slugger

With friends like these, who needs..
And for those of you who remember BCCI, a blast from the past.

Chomsky at West Point

On what, you might ask. Worth listening to.

IN DEBT WE TRUST:

America Before the Bubble Bursts.

Permanent War?

The Bush administration's strategy in Iraq today, as in the invasion of 2003, is: Use military force to destroy the political infrastructure of the Iraqi state; shatter the old Iraqi armed forces; eliminate Iraq as a determined foe of U.S. hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf; build on the wreckage of the old Iraq a new state beholden to the U.S.; create a new political class willing to be subservient to our interests in the region; and use that new Iraq as a base for further expansion.

Taking the Google maps API

to new heights.

Spiralling out of...

..what Martian retreat or Lunar Club Med do these madmen see themselves retreating when they have finished...

Quote du jour

"All of them are trying to copy FOX News now to be honest. Many of them are doing tabloid, more big lipped blonde's and all this kind of stuff. There's only so much of that trailer trash pie to go around."

Optimism, founded or

unfounded, on Net Neutrality

In an idle moment

Wait a bit for more parts so that you can make it more elaborate.

'im agin!

Doing his best.
Everywhere he goes.

Infallibility

Another 'it can't happen here' moment debunked.

Ten Commandments

Thou shalt not forget.

Seems a lot of folks have saved this image

and use the term- 'your tax dollars at work.'

Ask not for whom the Scales

toll.

More of your tax dollars...

hardly working.

The boys of summer

or Tony & Dan visit Baghdad.

Roll On , Columbia

and the winner is.

w/o comment

And he's a bookseller to boot.

Another game of

Beat the Reaper.