Interesting psyop:
An advertisement on the US government’s Federal Business Opportunities website is inviting applications for someone to develop an “original comic book series”.
“In order to achieve long-term peace and stability in the Middle East, the youth need to be reached,” the ad says.
Praise “Bob”, slack off, lose custody of your child. A Texas woman has lost custody of her son, not even being allowed to write to him, because she was involved in activities of the Church of the Subgenius. Although her son never attended any of the events, which involved fun, nudity, and good old-fashioned blasphemy, a New York judge, James P. Punch, allegedly a “strict catholic”, has denied custody of the child Kohl out of anger after seeing videos of the church’s devivals and X-days.
MetaFilter: Praise “Bob”, slack off, lose custody of your child
(via Post Atomic)
The buzz around the fringeblogosphere today:
A unanimous Supreme Court ruled today that the adherents of a small religious group can continue, for now at least, to import and use an illegal drug in their worship services. The court, in a decision written by new Chief Justice John Roberts, held that the federal government had not adequately demonstrated that it had a compelling interest in banning what even federal prosecutors admit is a “sincere religious practice.”
Pew Forum: Supreme Court Rules that Religious Group Can Use Illegal Drug in their Worship Services
Bill Graves a great front page story comparing Washington and Oregon in last Sunday’s Oregonian. The good news for Oregon:
Drawn by Portland’s strong neighborhoods, openness, affordability and proximity to wilderness, more than 40,000 young adults, many with college degrees, have poured into the city in the past 15 years.
The influx promises to boost Portland’s economy by fostering innovation and giving businesses an edge in the coming scramble for skilled workers as baby boomers retire, says Portland economist Joe Cortright.
[…]
Oregon’s sportswear, wine and semiconductor industries show promising growth. The state is making its mark in nanotechnology research and open-source software, ranks among the top 15 states in per-capita exports and ranks in the top 10 states for new patents per capita.
Oregon Live: Two states, two directions.
There was a good piece on Portland’s economy a while back in Willamette Week.
WTF?
After more than an hour of solemn ceremony naming Rep. Marco Rubio, R-West Miami, as the 2007-08 House speaker, Gov. Jeb Bush stepped to the podium in the House chamber last week and told a short story about “unleashing Chang,” his “mystical warrior” friend.
Here are Bush’s words, spoken before hundreds of lawmakers and politicians:
“Chang is a mystical warrior. Chang is somebody who believes in conservative principles, believes in entrepreneurial capitalism, believes in moral values that underpin a free society.
“I rely on Chang with great regularity in my public life. He has been by my side and sometimes I let him down. But Chang, this mystical warrior, has never let me down.”
It seems that not enough people know the truth about the Suicide Girls and still think it’s some sort of hip, progressive, women owned and operated porn company.
Suicide Girls is owned by Sean Suhl. “Missy” is just a figurehead, and Playboy has or had some sort of partnership with Suicide Girls, but they do not own it. Suhl’s listed as the only authorized representative for the company. If Missy ever owned a stake in it, she doesn’t now.
Suhl’s a neoconservative white male. The site’s blog used to be filled with right wing rants. Mostly foreign policy stuff like pro-war and violent anti-Palestinian stuff. But perhaps they’ve realized they were alienating a lot of their readers and models and have now made the blog open for anyone to post, and it now appears to lean towards the left. There’s no easy way to browse the archives that I can see, but here’s a post by Suhl from April 2004.
Update: the above post has been deleted, it can still be found on archive.org here. Here are two other examples of Sean’s political posts on SG: Shooting Children in the Back and A Loving Tribute to Some Truly Wonderful People.
The first place I came across him being described as a neoconservative was this Willamette Weekly story quite a while back. I can’t find any specific examples of him calling himself neoconservative, but various blog and forum posters indicate that he has described himself as such.
And most importantly: the models get treated badly. Here’s a Live Journal community dedicated to SG discussions and here’s a thread there about alternatives.
Many of the above links are from the comments on this blog. And here’s a good rant about them on Slashdot.
I know a lot of models probably get ripped off by porn sites, and a lot of porn owners probably have politics I don’t agree with. But Suhl made the mistake of pissing off a lot of Internet savvy women, and using his business’s site as a political soap box for views that probably don’t mesh with his customers’.
This post originally appeared at American Samizdat
I just relocated 2 copies each of 1984 and Brave New World at the Hastings here in Laramie, Wyoming.
Hmmm…
The scheme was initiated by Rideout (Creative Arts for Rehabiliation), a company that promotes the arts within the prison system. Co-director Chris Johnston says its aim is “to influence the decisions that are made about prison architecture and design, which almost always relegate education provision to a low priority and the role of the arts even lower.”
Full Story: The Guardian: Prisoners to design own jail
Apprently it’s “purely conceptual” with the prisoners only building models of otheir projects at the end… but the idea of engaging prisoners in a different way is facinating. This will no doubt raise questions about prisoners being treated too well, etc. But if it helps keep these people from coming back to prison, why not?
(via Cool Hunting)
Outstanding post by Josh Ellis comparing small towns to inner cities. I have a similar geographic background as Ellis (we both grew up in small towns in Texas and Wyoming), and mostly agree with what he’s written here. Reminds me of the first chapter of Jim Goad’s Redneck Manifesto (which I loaned out after reading the first chapter, but never got back. Heard it goes down hill after the first chapter anyway).
Update: Josh has written a newer piece called Common People on the same subject. In the newer place, he acknowledges the role of white privilege but still emphasizes class and geography.
See also: Palin’s Small-Town Snobbery: Why it’s time to bury the myth of rural virtue
It seems that post election “buy blue” sites have been gaining popularity. Basically they list where companies’ Political Action Committee money goes.The three I’ve seen:
Cobb 24’s “the list”. The most complete list, and also includes a list of companies who contributed no money to either party (it’d be great if someone could make a Palm app out of this info! And write a WAP interface for it).
Buy Blue short list, but has a blog with discussions and updates.
Choose the Blue. Uses a different system than the other two, somehow they factor in employee individual contributions.
One of the major surprises on these lists is that 60% of Amazon’s money went to Republicans (though when Choose Blue factored in employee contribution, 60% to Dems). Amazon’s trying to spin this by saying their contributions were to Republicans based on anti-spam bills. But a poster on buy Blue points out the candidates they supported included:
* Joe Barton, who promoted “safeguards” regulating TV news content
* Paul Gillmor, Bob Goodlatte, Dennis Hastert, Ron Lewis, James Sensenbrenner, and many others who opposed the “freedom to read” amendment, allowing federal funds to be used to demand patron records from bookstores and libraries
* Marsha Blackburn and Fred Upton, who not only opposed the “freedom to read” amendment, but also promoted a bill that would allow the government to withdraw funding from universities ‘deemed to be harboring academic critics of Israel’
* Lamar Smith, who opposed “freedom to read” and also sponsored a bill to legalize “censorship software” for stripping “offensive content” out of films.
But the process of figuring out what companies to support isn’t so simple. Another poster writes:
Targeting amazon simply doesn’t make sense. Read on.
I completely agree that it’s a great strategy to ask blue-voting consumers to patronize blue-contributing companies, but the tactics encouraged here are so flawed that you are encouraging ineffective behavior, both by us blue-voting consumers and by corporate america.
First, it’s ineffective, at best, to target retailers, especially online retailers, which comprise such a tiny portion of corporate contributions. Check it out: Intel gave 77% of its over $200k of contributions to Rs, but is that stopping us from buying pcs? The same percentage (77) of the beer PAC’s whopping $2.2 million in contributions went red, but are we going to stop drinking beer? And, for nice symmetry, note also that 77% of general mills’ PAC’s contributions went red. So, after we’ve pitched our wintel computers, given up brew, and quit crying in our cheerios, maybe it makes sense to look at retailers. And, heaven help up if you smoke, use gasoline, or make a phone call! The tobacco, energy, and telephone industries’ red contributions absolutely dwarf retail.
Here’s the point: if we’re going to do this buyblue thing right, we need to focus far more on *what brands* we buy than on *from which retailers* we buy it.
Second, among retailers we’re beating up amazon. But does that really make sense? If you really look at it (as someone on this blog already said), amazon gave a lot more to critically important D senate leadership (daschle, reid, dorgan, murray) than b&n, which doesn’t even have a PAC or give soft money (like that other blogger said, it’s flat wrong to include barnes & noble as a blue company).
And look at amazon’s contribs more closely: they didn’t give to bush (as is floating around the web) and, knock out the $4k to mccain (did anyone think he was going to lose? he was reelected with 76% of the vote!) then add in the amazon exec’s individual contribs to sen murray who, when they gave, was in a very tough race, not only does amazon’s overall R/D ratio suddenly go from 61/39 to something like 55/45, they actually end up blue in the senate, regardless of whether you count the mccain contribs. Think about it: unlike the house, the senate was in play this election and amazon’s pac plus execs gave blue to the senate! Yet they’re getting hammered by us?
So here’s the second point: we need to be really careful about how we look at the company contribs. Amazon is far more blue than b&n and yet you’re asking us to boycott amazon and you’re showing b&n as blue?
Lastly, it’s crystal clear that the big box retailers are red, red, red. So, while we’re switching to macs, and stopping smoking, drinking, making phone calls, driving cars, and eating cheerios, then we should, get this: start shopping *more* at amazon, which is the only serious long term competitor to the wal-marts and targets of the world and is far more blue.
Bottom line, what you’re asking blue-voting consumers to do is great strategically, but is ineffective or maybe even backwards tactically.
Along those lines, it looks like it’s really damn hard to spend money without some of it going to the Republicans. Especially out here in rural Wyoming with fewer alternatives, and where “buying local” usually also means supporting Republicans.
Environmental sustainability and worker’s rights are bigger concerns, and Buy Blue claims to be working on a new version of their site that will include more info along those lines. It’s a complex issue and simply looking at who contributed money where won’t tell us much. But it interesting and sort of fun. Here are some of the more interesting and surprising results:
Starbucks: 100% to Democrats
Apple Computer: 73% to Republicans (Chooseblue puts it at 81% to Democrats)
Microsoft: 53% to Republicans (Chooseblue puts it at 60% to Democrats)
Gap/Old Navy: 66% to Democrats
Nordstrom: 100% to Democrats
Macy’s (Federated Department Stores): 100% to Republicans
And check out this old post by Abe about consumer support for candidates, which takes it all a step further…
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