harikari.com

Al Gore turned 60 today and kicked off a new campaign to cool the planet.

The Alliance for Climate Protection’s “we” campaign will employ online organizing and television advertisements on shows ranging from “American Idol” to “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” It highlights the extent to which Americans’ growing awareness of global warming has yet to translate into national policy changes, Gore said in an hour-long phone interview last week. He said the campaign, which Gore is helping to fund, was undertaken in large part because of his fear that U.S. lawmakers are unwilling to curb the human-generated emissions linked to climate change.

“This climate crisis is so interwoven with habits and patterns that are so entrenched, the elected officials in both parties are going to be timid about enacting the bold changes that are needed until there is a change in the public’s sense of urgency in addressing this crisis,” Gore said. “I’ve tried everything else I know to try. The way to solve this crisis is to change the way the public thinks about it.”

Full story here.

The Center for Public Integrity has a project which created a database which documents the lies which led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

935 comments from 8 top administration officials including President George W. Bush are documented in the story:

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration’s case for war.

It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose “Duelfer Report” established that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq’s nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to restart it.

From the CNN story :

“In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003,” reads an overview of the examination, conducted by the Center for Public Integrity and its affiliated group, the Fund for Independence in Journalism.

“As the mortgage market has become more segmented and as risk has become more dispersed, market discipline has in some cases broken down and the incentives to follow prudent lending procedures have, at times, eroded.”

– Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, December 18, 2007

SPOKANE, Wash. – A Republican state legislator from southwest Washington had sex with a man he met at an erotic video store and then told police he had been targeted in an extortion attempt, according to police documents released Tuesday.

State Rep. Richard Curtis, R-La Center, who on Monday declared, “I have not had sex with a guy,” told police he was the victim in an extortion attempt by Cody Castagna at the posh Davenport Tower hotel on Oct. 26, search warrant documents said.

…

In his only public comments, Curtis told The Columbian newspaper of Vancouver, Wash., that he did not solicit anyone for sex and was not gay.

“I committed no crime,” Curtis told the newspaper Monday. “I did not solicit sex. I was trying to help somebody out.”

Curtis, a former firefighter, declared, “I am not gay.”

The sordid details of the police report:

Richard had walked into the bathroom and was there for several minutes.  The male in the Home Depot jacket told ______ “He always takes a long time because he’s putting on lingerie.”  A few minutes later _____ saw Richard exit the bathroom wearing long red women’s stockings and a black sequined lingerie top.  Richard went up to the second viewing room, which is upstairs in the boutique.  _____ walked upstairs, walked past the second room and saw a 40-ish year old white male with a cane performing oral sex on Richard.

Later…

Richard asked _____ what was up.  _____ told Richard he had lost $40 at playing cards earlier that evening.  _____ said he used his last $10 to get into the boutique to view the porno movies.

Richard told _____ that he would give _____ some money and help him out.

…

Richard directed _____ to meet him at the Davenport Towers Hotel.

…

_____ asked Richard what he did and Richard told him, “I work to help people out.”  Richard also told _____, “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

…

Richard said his wife knew that he liked being with guys when they got married, but she was not into that, so he only did that when he was out of town.

…

Richard got out a tube of lubricant and _____ was now naked and began masturbating on the bed.  Richard told _____ that he liked to be submissive and role play because he has a job where he’s always in charge.  Richard told _____ that _____ was in control.  _____ stated he got a flavored condom which Richard had on the nightstand next to the bed.  _____ put the condom on and performed anal sex on Richard.

I’ll stop here, but there’s much more if you want to read it.

It ends up as a he said/he said case of did Richards pay for sex with the guy or did the guy try to extort money from Richard?  We’ll have to wait and see on that.

But based on the police report and the hotel videotapes that confirm Richard was with a guy in the hotel, I think we can assume Richard enjoys gay sex.

But he says he’s not gay.  He’s just a guy that likes to dress up in lingerie, go to porn theaters for blow jobs from men, pick up men and take them to his hotel room for anal sex.

Gay?  Who’s gay?  Certainly not this Republican member of the Washington State House of Representatives.

I have been thinking about yesterday’s article in the New York Times about the company responsible for the current demolition project at the Deutsche Bank building in NYC.

First, a little background on the Deutsche Bank building. This building was originally damaged during the events of 9/11/2001 and is currently being deconstructed/demolished. Just a couple of days ago, the Deutsche Bank building was responsible for the deaths of two firefighters who were killed while attempting to put out a fire in the building. While the deaths of these heroes is tragic, this is not my point.
The lead paragraph of yesterday’s NYT story is enough to get the conspiracists going:

The John Galt Corporation of the Bronx, hired last year for the dangerous and complex job of demolishing the former Deutsche Bank building at 130 Liberty Street, where two firefighters died last Saturday, has apparently never done any work like it. Indeed, Galt does not seem to have done much of anything since it was incorporated in 1983.

“So what” you say? Ever read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged? Who is John Galt?
I have already said too much…

In what appears to be the world’s worst case of Beer Goggles, a Serbian man at a beer festival over the weekend apparently thought he was about to get lucky with a couple of ladies. He stripped naked and climbed in to an enclosure thinking it was a “Beer Cage”. He was promptly eaten by bears.

From Reuters via CNN:

A 23-year old Serb was found dead and half-eaten in the bear cage of Belgrade Zoo at the weekend during the annual beer festival.

The man was found naked, with his clothes lying intact inside the cage. Two adult bears, Masha and Misha, had dragged the body to their feeding corner and reacted angrily when keepers tried to recover it.

“There’s a good chance he was drunk or drugged. Only an idiot would jump into the bear cage,” zoo director Vuk Bojovic told Reuters.

Local media reported that police found several mobile phones inside the cage, as well as bricks, stones and beer cans.

As the 6th anniversary of the September 11th attacks approaches, we can prepare ourselves for an onslaught of partisan vitriol and claims of personal victimhood. The Republicans will bend over backwards to remind us that we were attacked by Iraq on that day and that Democrats are tearing the country apart with calls for appeasement and hugs for our enemies. The Republicans are the only ones who suffered that day, the only ones who could see the true threat.

And that’s what they’ve been telling us since September 11th, 2001. But I remember a time when much of the nation saw hope for a new camaraderie among Americans and a renewed solidarity with our global allies. I never personally expected it. With the political climate of the times, I saw only one possibility: the Bush administration was going to milk the goodwill for all its worth and then use it to create a fetid, gaping divide between those who are with them and those who are against them.

Sadly, my pessimism was well founded and played out over the following months to be prophetic. Not only that, it’s been so much worse than anything I imagined possible at the time. And it seems to be getting worse.

Today I read this on Media Matters. John Gibson, a Fox News anchor, mocked and derided Jon Stewart’s post 9/11 return to air as phony and disingenuous. It’s a new low. Not much lower than the previous low, but it does continue the awful trend of treading on social taboos. You don’t mock someone’s heartfelt grief. Or at least you didn’t used to. But now it’s out there and soon it will all be game.

If you have any doubt how genuine Jon was on that episode, watch this clip:

Digg has it

A Tennessee doctor was arrested in Seattle on July 25, 2007 for calling 911 from a pay phone at the Sea-Tac Airport to say “Flight 980 Memphis. There may be a bomb on board”.

After his arrest, Kou Wei Chiu, 31, of Bellevue, Tenn., admitted to calling 911 3 times in an attempt to stop his flight from leaving without him. Apparently, he was not seeing results from his calls so he kept calling 911.

From the AP article on Forbes.com:

“After his first phone call, he looked outside at the plane and saw that his call had had ‘no effect,’” FBI agent Gary France wrote. “He made a second phone call and noticed that this call too had no effect. This led to the third call.

“Chiu stated that he made the calls thinking that the airline ‘would ground the plane for a couple of hours,’ because bomb threats are taken seriously. When asked how he thought other passengers might react when they overheard his calls, he conceded that he thought ‘they would be traumatized,’” the affidavit said.

I have missed several flights do to poor timing, but for some reason the thought of calling in a bomb threat has never crossed my mind.

So, what the hell was this guy thinking?

In China, former State Food and Drug Administration director Zheng Xiaoyu was sentenced to death and executed for corruption and the taking of bribes.

From the Guardian:

During Zheng’s tenure from 1998 to 2005, his agency approved six medicines that turned out to be fake, and the drug-makers used falsified documents to apply for approvals, according to previous state media reports. One antibiotic caused the deaths of at least 10 people.

I hope the US Pharmaceutical makers are paying attention.  Maybe we could get a law like this passed here…

I made a very clear and sensible decision to stay clear of the iPhone hype. I don’t need a phone that does all that. Actually, I have a phone that browses the web, gets my email, wi-fi, bluetooth, mp3, and a gorgeous screen. I use the phone feature only.

Unfortunately, I have friends who are not as budget conscious as I am and were able to stand in line yesterday to get their mitts on an iPhone. We were all out having drinks to celebrate the semi-retirement of a brilliant and lucky buddy in his mid thirties who arrived half an hour late with his brand new iPhone. It was un-activated, so all we could do was marvel at the form factor, which was enough.

It’s smaller than you think it’s going to be. It’s a bit shorter than my T-Mobile SDA and narrower than an iPod. Fits nicely into my pocket with no uncomfortable bulk. Unactivated, it allows you to look at the main screen and slide the slider for an “Emergency Call”. The numeric keypad pops up so you can dial 911, I guess.

Later, Solomon showed up with his brand new, activated iPhone. That was pretty much the end of my social interaction. The world went silent and my vision went tunnel. It works exactly like they say it will. Typing is something you have to get used to, but you will. You’ll want to start out by holding your finger down on the keyboard until you have the letter you want. This allows you to slide a little to the left to get O instead of P, or a little up to get N instead of the space bar. Or, just type as fast as you can and trust that iPhone will correct you correctly when you hit the space bar. It’s pretty slick.

Internet is decently fast, and for the applications I can see myself using, perfectly fast enough. YouTube videos take a while to buffer, but once they start playing they’re solid.

We played around with the contacts list a bit, which was actually fun. Tap the edit button and then the contact picture icon, point at your friend, and grab a picture of them for their profile. Then when you contact them or they contact you, the background is filled with the designated picture, full screen.

The magnifying glass positioning tool is amazing. In fact, the way everything you’re tapping on pops up in a graphic above your finger so that you know what the phone thinks you’re touching is a fantastic innovation. Somebody at Apple must hate styluses as much as I do. This finger as stylus thing is brilliant, and brilliantly executed.

So, yes. Now I want one. Even though I don’t need it. It’s pretty much the greatest phone experience I’ve ever had. Even if it was fleeting.