Just did the Political Compass questionnaire… kinda interesting, not too surprising. Apparently I'm at 7.88 of 10 toward the economic left and 8.67 of 10 towards social libertarianism (graph). This means that I would like the government to take a great deal of our money to provide lots of nifty services, and otherwise leave us alone. I believe this political philosophy is known in Europe as "what everyone thinks," and in this country as "damn dirty hippie." Just so you know who you're dealing with.
You (yes, you) need to read Seymour Hersh's latest report on Abu Ghraib in this week's New Yorker. Rumsfeld and the top military leadership knew about the treatment of prisoners at the prison, and they lied about it to Congress. The White House repeatedly failed to provide clear guidance on prisoner treatment and interrogation to military and intelligence personnel, while putting intense pressure on them to extract and deliver information. Gee, I wonder what message that sent.
This administration's callous indifference to human dignity disgusts me.
Ahhh, the Trabi. When my then-girlfriend-now-wife and I were living in Germany, we used to see a lot of these cars, even though we were there nearly ten years after the last one rolled off the assembly line. They're legendary in Germany. I came across this nifty video of their quality control measures.
The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin, contains thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects, including a lock of Byron's curly brown hair. It houses one of the forty-eight complete Gutenberg Bibles; a rare first edition of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," which Lewis Carroll and his illustrator, John Tenniel, thought poorly printed, and which they suppressed; one of Jack Kerouac's spiral-bound journals for "On the Road"; and Ezra Pound's copy of "The Waste Land," in which Eliot scribbled his famous dedication: "For E. P., miglior fabbro, from T. S. E." Putting a price on the collection would be impossible: What is the value of a first edition of "Comus," containing corrections in Milton's own hand? Or the manuscript for "The Green Dwarf," a story that Charlotte Bronte wrote in minuscule lettering, to discourage adult eyes, and then made into a book for her siblings? Or the corrected proofs of "Ulysses," on which James Joyce rewrote parts of the novel? The university insures the center's archival holdings, as a whole, for a billion dollars.
George W. Bush recently visited the only country on Earth that can still stand him - Albania. I believe he was checking out retirement communities or something. Anyhow, while he was working the crowd, someone stole his watch. Check out the video, and keep your eyes on his left wrist.
I believe the word you're looking for is "hapless."
