Huge bonuses were paid to
Huge bonuses were paid to Enron insiders two days before the bankruptcy filing. Also, a great response to Bill Lockyer’s tasteless comment about Ken Lay.
originally posted by xowie
Huge bonuses were paid to Enron insiders two days before the bankruptcy filing. Also, a great response to Bill Lockyer’s tasteless comment about Ken Lay.
originally posted by xowie
IHT.com: Villagers Dying Under U.S. Bombs, Anti-Taliban Forces Say
From Ethel:
What really caused the prisoners to revolt, and what really killed them? Also: It takes money, unimaginable power, and greed unchecked by moral or ethical considerations to make money, as the saying goes. (Featuring your favorite group and mine, the Carlyle Group.)
Font of the Week? Font of a lifetime! Learn about Albertus, create your own sample, and download a truetype version for Windows.
Sen. Thurmond Celebrates 99th Birthday (yahoo/news) looking healthier than ever!
Q: Given the trend just after the attacks to revise popular culture and pull images of the World Trade Center or terrorism out of any entertainment, were you concerned about the content?Frank Miller interview.FM: [Laughs.] Well, it's on the press.
originally posted by xowie
“A joint initiative of six organizations with exceptional expertise in computer and Internet training in the [global] South,” itrain online is a multi-lingual directory of training materials and tutorials on all aspects of computer, network, and internet technologies.
Danza (jish, boingboing, 0sil8) hasn’t hit Daypop yet. This ought to be interesting.
From Follow Me Here:
From this weblog community vantage point, the outrage about the Dictatorship’s mad, ongoing powergrab under Ashcroft’s influence seems so palpable, but where’s the organized opposition behind the spleen? It may turn out to be one of the greatest, most enduring humiliations in American history – certainly on a par with McCarthyism, if that phrase still makes anyone blush – that reasonable Americans are allowing this to happen with no more than ineffectual spluttering like this. Is it time to write your Congressional representatives? Ha! Time to march on Washington? blockade the Justice Dept? Do the words mass protest, or nonviolent civil disobedience, resonate with anyone anymore?Eliot believes that those who oppose Ashcroft must get organized.
The Weblog Review has given us a once-over and compared us favorably to MetaFilter, which is pretty cool, though not as cool as it would have been back when… Nevermind. I’m a little surprised that a weblogger reviewing weblogs isn’t familiar with the convention of hooking a perma-link to each post’s date/time info, but I have chosen to suppress the link color and hide the underline, so the point is taken that I will miss out on some direct links as a result. I suppose I could also put a link to the archives higher up, with those nav links at the top of the sidebar. In any case our official rating is a 4 and our reader rating is a 2.75, so you know what to do (scratch your butt, close this window, and go get something to eat)!
Monkeyfist.com unveils a new look (I was going to make some joke involving gloves but what’s the use) which does a great job showcasing some of the very best original content on the Web. My favorite recent piece goes a little like this:
I am homophobic.
I am homophobic (literally, “afraid of non-heterosexuals”) to the extent that I accept the exclusive validity of “traditional” notions of gender, of masculinity or femininity. I assume, as most people do, that everyone around me is heterosexual, unless they make it clear that they aren’t. By making this assumption, I expect a uniform range of behaviors from everyone I encounter. This expectation has everything to do with why life is extremely difficult for those who are homosexual and for those who’s sexual identity lies somewhere in between. Because it takes a considerable amount of work to break out of these expectations, only a very small number of people who feel overwhelmingly that they are homosexual, and simply cannot live normally otherwise, actually “come out of the closet.” The same closet that’s built and maintained by me and by everyone else who assumes and expects heterosexuality of everyone.
Most people of color (and therefore most of the world) are lactose intolerant. White poison from Colorlines and The Food Pyramid Scheme are two interesting articles about racism and the dairy industry. Additionally, NoMilk and NotMilk are informative sites about the untold horrors of milk consumption. It’s time to go vegan again!
originally posted by beXn
“How Gyroscopes Work” from Howstuffworks.com, courtesy The Segway Blog (see flux).
Diary of the first Segway owner. (c/o boing boing)
originally posted by xowie
originally posted by xowie
Know your rights. (via Emil Guillermo.)
originally posted by xowie
Q: I feel an overwhelming need to kill this man in the cave, but the location of the cave is unknown to me, and so it's impossible to find him. He's been allowed to stay in the cave, however, by the fanatical rulers of the country where the cave is, Afghanistan, so I feel an overwhelming need to kill those rulers. As they've moved from place to place, though, I haven't found them, but I've succeeded in finding and killing many young soldiers who guarded them and shepherds who lived near them. Nonetheless, I do not feel any of the expected "closure," and in fact I'm becoming increasingly depressed and am obsessed with nameless fears. Can you help me?
A: Your real problem is simply the way that millions and millions of people around the world feel about you. Who are these people? They share the world with you -- one single world, which works as a unified mechanism. These people are the ones for whom the mechanism's current way of working -- call it the status quo -- offers a life of anguish and servitude. They're well aware that this status quo, which for them is a prison, is for you (or for the privileged among you), on the contrary, so close to a paradise that you will never allow their life to change. These millions of people are in many cases uneducated--to you they seem unsophisticated--and yet they still somehow know that you have played an enormous role in keeping this status quo in place.Wallace Shawn, The Foreign Policy Therapist.
Times Cries Eke! Buries Al Gore by Gore Vidal.
originally posted by xowie
Ten Do’s and Don’ts to Raising Healthy Multiracial/Multiethnic Children:
Children are concrete learners - they learn about themselves and the world through real experiences, not words and lectures. In a society so polarized by race and ethnicity, our children must have lots of direct contact with both sides of their family. The easiest way for this to occur is through experiences with both parents.
When two adults cross the racial divide to have a child, they can never go back. Your child represents an in-your-face challenge to racism and the belief of every racial, ethnic and national group that ingroup marriage is somehow normal and better. (…)
It’s difficult for a child to develop prejudicial beliefs or inaccurate information about one side of their heritage if they have positive contacts with both sides all the time. Its easy to develop prejudices when the child is around people from only one of his/her backgrounds. (…)
When you hold and talk to your infant, talk about her pretty skin, beautiful eyes, and curly hair. Tell her how much she looks like her father and mother. Sing songs about a beautiful, brown, curly headed baby. Read books about multiracial children, families of the world, and all aspects of her heritage. Give her mirrors to see herself; when you talk to others affirm her positive multiracial identity. (…)
Don’t teach children that color does not matter. It does! - in this country, and most countries in the world. And color matters not only in the greater society, but within every single racial and ethnic group (Blacks, Hispanics, Natives Americans and Asians). People’s initial reactions to other people are based on physical characteristics - what that person looks like (skin color, hair color and texture, facial features).
Children respond to people who care about them - regardless of their background. It certainly helps if these adults know about multiracial children and how to support their healthy identity development.
Do not entrust your child to adults who do not respect their need for a full identity. And, do not assume minority adults support multiracial identity; many do not.
I constantly hear from young biracial and multiracial adults who do not feel good about themselves, because their parents did not support their mixed identity. The rest of the world does not ignore it!
Children need classmates, neighbors, playmates, etc, who represent both racial groups (or more). If this does not occur, children develop an unrealistic - and overly romantic - view of the part of their heritage that is missing, and then want to discover ‘being black’, ‘being Native American’, ‘being Hispanic’, etc. The problem is they truly don’t know what it means to be one of these minorities, so they become attracted to the stereotypes of the group - music, behaviors, clothes, language, etc. Do not raise a child in a single-race environment - especially if its white.
Our children are minorities, have direct personal connections with the dominant group, and are something new - what many are calling third culture children.
Ninety five percent of our children’s experiences - good and bad - have nothing to do with race and ethnicity. Our children progress through the same developmental stages, learn the same school-related tasks, and have all the same challenges as single-race children.
They just have one more experience: being multiracial or multiethnic.
Mr. Kamen plans to demonstrate today a two-wheeled battery-powered device designed for a single standing rider. Its chief novelty lies in the uncanny effect, produced by a finely tuned gyroscopic balancing mechanism, of intuiting where its rider wants to go -- and going there.George calls it a "'Gwe lo rider" and I think they should team with Apple for a special iPod edition. What is it? A.k.a. "Ginger," now known as Dean Kamen's Segway, it's IT.
“It is Bobby Fischer without a shadow of a doubt.”
originally posted by xowie
CD buyers beware – record companies are distributing discs which are broken in a number of ways: they won’t play on many CD players including most computers and DVD players and they won’t allow songs to be converted to mp3 format. As usual, if you buy one from a store, you’re stuck with it (exchanges only, no returns). So bookmark Fat Chuck’s corrupt CDs list and print it out before you go shopping. Considering that the only music worth listening to since 1991’s Nevermind has come out first on vinyl, this shouldn’t really be a problem.
"In India, there are three to four people sharing beds in hospitals, and two or three more on the floor, waiting for their shift. This is not an old epidemic. It is just starting. In 20 years, we could be talking about a billion cases of AIDS.''AIDS at 20: The Epidemic is Just Starting.
originally posted by xowie
David Furnish, Johnny Bergius and Janet Street-Porter are planning to summit Kilimanjaro today to benefit The Elton John AIDS Foundation.
originally posted by xowie
MetaFilter will be a definitive spot today. If you miss what it was or wonder what it could be, stop by. Which other weblogs are doing a good job with today’s Link and Think observance of World AIDS Day? Yours?