Hangzhou Lovin’

This shit is ridiculous. The last thing I want is a market that once valued Pets.com higher then G.E. to be predicting for our national security.

Pentagon Prepares a Futures Market on Terror Attacks
By CARL HULSE

ASHINGTON, July 28 � The Pentagon office that proposed spying electronically on Americans to monitor potential terrorists has a new experiment. It is an online futures trading market, disclosed today by critics, in which anonymous speculators would bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups.

I was up late a couple nights ago, sipping on a little sumthing, talking with my friend. He made a comment about how much of his time he waisted chiasing women. I responded that I probably waiste at least a third of my mental power just thinking about sex. (Hell when I was in middle school it was probably more like 90, up to 95 when I was bored in class.)

This isn’t a startling revalation all men and most women won’t find it a surprising, but the thing that bothers me is what do women think about? I find it very hard to believe that women think about sex as much as men. For men sex is the defualt topic of thought, (”I’m bored… I wonder what she would look like naked… in my bed…”). We men waiste a significant portion everyday thinking about this stuff. If you are a women who thinks they think about sex as much as men, then give me an email I’d like to get to know you…

If women don’t think about sex as much as men what do they think about? Why aren’t they ruling the world. They should have a huge advantage over us. If I could replace all the time I think about sex with something useful like carpentary, I would be able to build the taj mahal by now. So I want to know what do you women think about? shoes? makeup? I am really clueless.

I just finished reading Wealth and Democracy by Kevin Phillips. A little dry but I liked it a lot. I’d say it has two main points:

1. In U.S. history when there is a large amount of wealth inequality it usaully has come from goverment backing and is helped by goverment corruption. These days are no different, and much the wealthies ability to get so much money comes from goverment largess. Look at the telecom giveaway in the 90’s.

What surprised me is how this is not always the way it was. Presidents from Washington to lincoln, (”Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital.”) to even eisenhower.

I’m convinced that much of he current economy is mere speculative bubble that mostly supports the super rich while the rest of the U.S. steadily loses ground. Which brings us to the second point…

2. Comparing the U.S. to other historically dominant powers such as Holland in the 1700’s and Britian in th 1800’s, the U.S. is in the decline stage of it’s cycle. The precious world leaders (Holland and Britian) rises were charecterised by industrialisation increased trade and increased prosperity for all of the people. Their decline stages had economies that were losing jobs in basic manufacturing and being more and more tilted toward finace, as well as having the middle class lose prosperity while the rich got richer.

Here in the U.S. the real wages for middle classes havn’t risen since the 70’s, manufacturing jobs are leaving the country in droves and Finace is becoming the most important sector of the economy.

The only difference is that Unlike the logical chain from Holland to Britian to the U.S. there is no clear succesor to the U.S. once it starts to really decline. China comes to mind, but it has a long way to go to be able to pick up were the U.S. left off, plus it relys on waistful U.S. consumer spending to power it’s economy, so if the U.S. declines it will be hurt as well.

Nevertheless, China is going to keep getting stronger and the U.S. is going to continue to weaken. This makes my decison to go to China look rather brilliant. When (or should I say if…) I get good at chinese, I should be able to live comforably off teaching American Businessmen Chinese as they try to jump on the next bandwagon.

publishing strangeness..

Editorial by NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Based on conversations with people in the intelligence community, this picture is emerging: the White House, eager to spice up the State of the Union address, recklessly resurrected the discredited Niger tidbit. The Central Intelligence Agency objected, and then it and the National Security Council negotiated a new wording, attributing it all to the Brits. It felt less dishonest pinning the falsehood on the cousins.

What troubles me is not that single episode, but the broader pattern of dishonesty and delusion that helped get us into the Iraq mess � and that created the false expectations undermining our occupation today. Some in the administration are trying to make George Tenet the scapegoat for the affair. But Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired spooks, issued an open letter to President Bush yesterday reflecting the view of many in the intel community that the central culprit is Vice President Dick Cheney. The open letter called for Mr. Cheney’s resignation.

This is all well and good, but wasn’t it clear that the bush admnistration was manipulating facts before the war started?

This is not a joke

Fellowship Baptist Creation Science Fair 2001:

1st Place: “My Uncle Is A Man Named Steve (Not A Monkey)”
Cassidy Turnbull (grade 5) presented her uncle, Steve. She also showed photographs of monkeys and invited fairgoers to note the differences between her uncle and the monkeys. She tried to feed her uncle bananas, but he declined to eat them. Cassidy has conclusively shown that her uncle is no monkey.

Maybe it’s not all bad…

2nd Place: “Women Were Designed For Homemaking”
Jonathan Goode (grade 7) applied findings from many fields of science to support his conclusion that God designed women for homemaking: physics shows that women have a lower center of gravity than men, making them more suited to carrying groceries and laundry baskets; biology shows that women were designed to carry un-born babies in their wombs and to feed born babies milk, making them the natural choice for child rearing; social sciences show that the wages for women workers are lower than for normal workers, meaning that they are unable to work as well and thus earn equal pay; and exegetics shows that God created Eve as a companion for Adam, not as a co-worker.

update: Some people think the site is a fake and I am starting to think so myself, but it seems like a lot of work to go through just to put up a hoax christian site.

update 2: ok it is a joke, but a damn good one.

Supporting the troops Bush style…

from the Army times

Nothing but lip service

In recent months, President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress have missed no opportunity to heap richly deserved praise on the military. But talk is cheap � and getting cheaper by the day, judging from the nickel-and-dime treatment the troops are getting lately.

God i hate this new blogger interface….

For awhile I thought no one was reading my blog because for some reason new comments weren’t showing up on my computer. So I felt dejected, but now I am happy again.

allright my take on the democratic race, Howard dean is looking pretty good. I saw him interviewed a couple times and there was a minimum of bullshit. But I think it’s gonna be really hard to beat bush no matter what.

what the dems need to d oin my opinion is
Basically the main place where bush beats the demo’s is in national security issues. So the democrats should do a few things to undermine the publics confidence in bush

1. Talk about the Iraqi occupation as a failure. Pound this point home no matter what happens in Iraq. If the streets in Iraq are being paved in gold the demo’s should say that hte streets should be paved in platinum.

When talking about Iraq the main issue should be our soldiers saftey and how bushg isn’t doing enough to provide for their saftey.

2. Bring afgahnistan back to the th media’s attention. Our reconstruction of A’stan is a failure, and it should be presented as bush not giving enough support for our troops there,

3. When critiscing bush on foriegn policy there should be only three themes that our brought up. 1. That bush cannot be trusted (the dems are doing this pretty good right now) 2. That bush is not giving our troops abroad enough support to keep them safe, 3. that bush’s policies are making the terrorism more likely (in supporting htis point talk about the possibility of Saddam’s WMDs going to terrorists and the reforming of the taliban in A-stan.

4. Whatever you do don’t talk positivley about the french. People here really hate them.

As for non foriegn policy advice i only have one thing to say. Stay negative. The main focus of any dem campaign should be to critisize bush. They should try to focus the debate on Bush. Bush made the campaign in 2000 about Al Gore’s honesty and the demo’s this year should do the same. It’s been shown many times that negative campaign ads work better than positive ones.