Internet Aughts

is what Ezra Klein, a pretty good reporter/blogger for the Washington Post, thinks it will all come down to in time.
Time will tell, as they say. See ya in a decade, Ezra.

Our future will have a lot more to do with the internet than with Iraq. At least, so I hope.

Happy New Year Everyone!

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

Help, I'm Trapped In Pepperoni And Can't Get Out

and they make me sing in ronishop quartet.


And 29 other creepiest commercials of the year. Personally, I thought the sushi breath one sounded good, too.

Dave Barry Used To Make Me Laugh

til I cried. This time, not so much. I guess 2009 was worse than even he could imagine.
Good tidbit:

To replace Souter, President Obama nominates Sonia Sotomayor, setting off the traditional Washington performance of Konfirmation Kabuki, in which the Democrats portray the nominee as basically a cross between Abraham Lincoln and the Virgin Mary, and the Republicans portray her more as Ursula the Sea Witch with a law degree. Sotomayor will eventually be confirmed, but only after undergoing the traditional Senate Judiciary Committee hazing ritual, during which she must talk for four straight days without expressing an opinion.

UPDATE: Okay, it grew on me, although I think that leaking from my right eye is an impacted tear duct. The left one, I'm not sure.

In a troubling economic development, the U.S. dollar, for the first time in history, falls below the lentil.

Sullivan's Top Hits

Why didn't Contrarienne think of this? All she had was the vagina prom dress and something else she can't remember. Oh, right, the headline "I Love America." Prom dress got 246 hits thanks to Stumbled Upon.
Anyhoo, "masturbating priests, Matt Stone's potty mouth, Sarah Palin's
gargantuan lies, taking a moment to make sen...se of Sarah Palin's
gargantuan lies, Chris Wallace's fellatial non-journalism, shit-faced
Brits, and stoned parents."

Have A Jib Jab New Year!

Love, julimac

Happy New Year

via Andrew Sullivan, Andrew Sprung gives us some good news. Of course, he also proclaims "my core belief is that the electorate is smarter than all of us." I've heard a lot of politicians say that while holding public office.
Anyhoo, a tantalizing tidbit:

"Whereas real per capita income [worldwide] increased by about one fifth per decade in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, it is expect to increase by about one third in the 2000s...The poverty rate is expected to continue to fall sharply from 57.2 percent in 200 to 49.7 percent in 2010 at a poverty line of one-half of the mean." (Lynge Nielsen, IMF Working Paper, Global Relative Poverty, April 2009

Health: Global life expectancy at birth was 64 in 1990, 66 in 2000, and 68 in 2007. Under-5 mortality rates per 1000 live births were 91 in 1990, 78 in 2000, and 67 in 2007.From 1990 - 2006, the number of people in developing regions using improved sanitation facilities has increased by 1.1 billion; the proportion of the global population with access to improved drinking water sources rose from 76% to 86% in the same period. (World Health Statistics 2009.)

Basketball Man

Reggie Love here standing in for Republican idiots everywhere.

Happy New Year

Cory Doctorow is younger than I am, but just as aware of how dire things are in this world. I am grateful for his optimism.
.

Crappy economies are often the home of wonderful Bohemias. Two recessions ago, I dropped out of school to become a computer programmer. In the last one, I quit the company I'd co-founded and went to work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Now that I'm a parent -- and now that I'm a little older -- I feel the risk a lot more keenly than I did then. But I just keep on remembering that we live in the best time in the history of the world to have a worst time: the time when collective action is cheaper and easier than ever, the time when more information and better access to tools, ideas and communities are at our fingertips than they've ever been.

This is an experiment to see if I can actually continue on a separate page with a post, adding things that do not appear on the main page. Shit, guess not. Still, I shall persist. I think it's possible.