[Quote:]

In Elektra v. Wilke, the Chicago RIAA case in which defendant Paul Wilke has moved for summary judgment, the RIAA has filed a motion for “expedited discovery”, alleging that it does not have sufficient evidence to withstand Mr. Wilke’s motion.

Allow me to translate that:

Defendant: I’m tired of this bullshit. Show me what you really have so we can get this over and done with.
RIAA: Uhhh… shit. We don’t have a thing. Your honour could we please search everything the defendant owns in order to find something?

[Quote:]

A 100-foot-tall sculpture being unveiled on Monday’s fifth anniversary of 9-11 honors thousands of terrorist attack victims, and then some: Carved into the granite base are the names of more than 40 people who weren’t killed on Sept. 11 after all.

“Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. I condemn the effort to take away the power of rational decision, to drain people of free will and a hell of a lot of money into the bargain.�?

– Gene Roddenberry

I guess he didn’t see this coming…

“Today, open up your Prime Directives to the book of Picard, Season 4, Episode 2. And as the Enterprise was docked in orbit of Earth, Picard did see his family in France. He was offered a job under the ocean. But take it, he did not. Ney, He returned to the Enterprise and boldy go he and his crew did continue.”

[Quote:]

George W Bush has the lowest average IQ of all but one American president since the start of the 20th century, according to the estimates of psychological researchers.

He “is definitely intelligent . . . certainly smart enough to be president of the United States�?, says Dean Keith Simonton, a psychologist at the University of California.

But his intellect falls below all other presidents of the past 110 years except Warren Harding, who was in the White House briefly in the 1920s and regarded as a failed president.

[..]

Bush may be “much smarter�? than the findings imply, says Simonton, but he scores particularly unimpressively for “openness to experience, a cognitive proclivity that encompasses unusual receptiveness to fantasy, aesthetics, actions, ideas and values. In the general population this factor is positively associated with intelligence�?.

Bush’s openness score of zero — compared with 82 for Clinton and John F Kennedy, 95 for Abraham Lincoln and 99.1 for Thomas Jefferson — “placed him at the very bottom of US presidents�?.

This assessment can only be considered tentative because of lack of available evidence on a sitting president, but it is corroborated by a measure of Bush’s “integrative complexity�?. Simonton says: “Low scorers on integrative complexity can only see things from a single perspective — their own.�?

Bush’s score, he says, is comparable to “extremist Islamic fundamentalists in the Taliban and Al-Qaeda leadership — with the notable exception of Osama Bin Laden, who is lower still�?.

[Quote:]

On September 9, 2006, 112 of the world’s most compelling thinkers, artists, writers, scientists, social entrepreneurs, philosophers and humanitarians from around the world will come together in Berlin, Germany, as guests of dropping knowledge.

Seated around the worlds largest table in historic Bebelplatz square, these inspiring individuals, renowned for their lasting creative or social contribution, will engage with 100 questions out of the thousands donated to dropping knowledge by the international public.

Using dropping knowledge’s question-rating system, the public identified 500 questions as those most likely to initate open dialog on a social topic of most relevance to them. This group of questions will yield the final 100 Questions — representing a truly global sampling of cultures, themes and ideas — to be asked at the Table of Free Voices and beyond.

Visit the dropping knowledge website

[Quote:]

The Ohne Scheiss Project is a grass-roots effort focused on arousing solidarity between pedestrians to help them overcome the dog shit left by some Berliner dog owners.
It works by having people take figures out of at sticker poster and then place them around the dog crap to make people aware walking by that there is a danger in the front. There are four shapes: Versaute Scheisse (Dirty Shit), Heisse Scheisse (Hot Shit), Heilige Scheisse (Hollyshit) and Scheisse (Shit).
Order it for €10

Remember the “Bush reading books” story? A pity I didn’t have this quote lying around…

[Quote:]

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you.

~ Mortimer J. Adler

Come to think of it, you never hear about Bush reading books any more. I guess he stopped reading when his lips got tired…

This is probably illegal in most jurisdictions, but fuck, it should be a starting point of what music distribution in the future looks like.

The two sections of the report released by the Senate intelligence committee are: “Postwar Findings about Iraq’s WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How they Compare with Prewar Assessments” and “The Use by the Intelligence Community of Information Provided by the Iraqi National Congress” (both PDFs).

Two reasons why nothing will come from this. One: 375 pages are too much for people to read, so they’ll just get the “talking points” from the “talking heads” on news TV (including fox).

How else do you explain this:
[Quote:]

The fucking investigations are done already, just fucking learn to read, you fucking morons.

And second, but probably most important:

[Quote:]

Still, Democrats were reluctant to say how the administration officials involved should be called to account.