obfuscated.org

Stephanie pointed this out yesterday, but I can’t resist mentioning the MySpace profile for Corey Porter as well. Fun facts about Corey Porter:

• Corey Porter is from POUGHKEEPSIE, New Yorkl
• Corey Porter has recorded such hit tracks as “Foot Step in the Dark,” “What If” and “Forever Real.”
• Corey Porter is a mammal.
• Corey Porter has a fly Yankees hat. I have got to gets me one of those.

Tony Snow, regarding his new job:

You never lie. You never try to shave the truth. But on the other hand, you’ve got to keep in mind the guy I’m working for is the president.

His time spent at FOX “news” should prove to be wonderful training.

Cuban throws down in his usual style regarding the responsibilities involved in owning stock.

Its time for all shareholders to realize they have a responsibility as owners of stock. That if you dont fulfill that obligation, you are nothing more than a corporate Ho and your share of stock is nothing more than a baseball card, worth what the next Ho will pay for it.

Corporations aren’t going to quit trying to bend the rules whenever possible as long as the shareholders have their fingers in their ears screaming “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA!”

Chris did a good writeup of W’s recent strong words regarding oil.

The problem is one of economics. Hybrids improve the fuel efficiency of cars. In a lot of economic models, when you can use a product more efficiently, this actually increases consumption of the product because suddenly it makes economic sense to use it in ways that didn’t make sense before. For example, when I lived in Saudi Arabia, they used to spray oil on to sand dunes. Why? With the low cost of gas and the high cost of fresh produce, it was a cost effective way to reclaim land from the desert. Same thing happens with more fuel efficient cars: sure, that commute to work stops chewing through so much gas, but now it makes economic sense to drive more. If it cost me $200 a day to drive to work, I’d bike or find a job or home where I didn’t need to make that drive. It’d make economic sense even if it cost me $2000 more a month (either in lost income or increased mortgage payments) to do so. But if I can get a $2/month all-you-can-burn deal on gas, I’m going to start driving to visit a neighbor across the street.

I’m well aware of what happens when fuel gets expensive — heck, I took a different job so (amongst other reasons) I wouldn’t have to commute. The other side of the coin, however, I hadn’t considered. Frankly, I think the price of gas has a long way to go before people consider it cheap again, but it’s an interesting thing to think about either way.

Related: I wonder where the US’s cost for gas is relative to the rest of the world. An exceedingly hasty search shows that in Japan, gas was $3.79/gallon in 2004. I can’t imagine that it’s gone down. honestly, I’m not sure what we’re all complaining about.

Web 2.1 provides for server-side <blink> tags.

Note: if you did not see the blinking text above, it means that your browser is not compliant with the Web 2.1 standards. An easy way of checking whether your browser is standards compliant is to check whether the installation files for your browser were smaller than 50MB, or the run-time memory usage is less than 300MB. If this is the case, you should download a more recent browser to get the full Web 2.1 experience.

Writing for Rolling Stone, Sean Wilentz wonders if George W. Bush is the worst president ever.

Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a “failure.” Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration’s “pursuit of disastrous policies.” In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton — a category in which Bush is the only contestant.

These are amusing, but I think Scalzi already closed the case on W not being the worst president ever.

Some dude runs around and smashes huge ice walls with his fists. That’s about it.

I can’t stop playing.

NetNewsWire author Brent Simmons has a great post on how to best get what you want out of software types.

The secret formula

Now I’ll tell you straight up how to manipulate me: save me time.

Time is so precious, it’s everything.

Carrot beats stick every time.

Carl Bernstein writes a well-considered call for a congressional investigations of the Bush administration.

Perhaps there are facts or mitigating circumstances, given the extraordinary nature of conceiving and fighting a war on terror, that justify some of the more questionable policies and conduct of this presidency, even those that turned a natural disaster in New Orleans into a catastrophe of incompetence and neglect. But the truth is we have no trustworthy official record of what has occurred in almost any aspect of this administration, how decisions were reached, and even what the actual policies promulgated and approved by the president are. Nor will we, until the subpoena powers of the Congress are used (as in Watergate) to find out the facts—not just about the war in Iraq, almost every aspect of it, beginning with the road to war, but other essential elements of Bush’s presidency, particularly the routine disregard for truthfulness in the dissemination of information to the American people and Congress.

I personally think that this sort of thing is bound to fail Hanlon’s Razor, but if there are shady dealings in the Bush whitehouse, we deserve to know about it.

OK, even I’m getting bored of these. It’s not quite outrage fatigue, but it’s similar.

Surprise surprise, Yahoo drops a dime on yet another Chinese dissadent.

News implicating Yahoo in the imprisonment of Jiang Lijun in 2003 surfaced on the eve of a summit between Chinese President Hu Jintao and President Bush in Washington.

It was the third such case involving the U.S. Internet giant.

So, yeah. Boo on you, Yahoo. Way to stand up for the little guy.

I not I’ve not stated it explicitly before, always assuming that it was just understood. In case this was a mistake, I’ll be clear here: while Yahoo — and Google, and whoever else — clearly isn’t the good guy in the whole China situation, they’re not the bad guy, either. China is very clearly the bad guy. They’re the ones who need to clean up their act and stop doing stuff like imprisoning its citizens for questioning the government.