slamboard

That question is just an extension of what people were discussing in 1995 in relation to the picture in this video. I looked into it and it is indeed becoming a trend…

Vanity Fair

Carroll Daily Times Herald

Men’s Fitness

In the interest of ethics, I should point out that I got all those links from a blog that focuses on Ethics in a Digital World.

With fuel costs breaking new records everyday, lots of people are considering curtailing their driving. For some people, this may involve putting a car into storage for months or longer. I was considering it and I realized that there are probably a few things that I should do to the car if I want it to stay in the condition that it is in. Here are a few links with helpful information:

Mothballing your car

AAA has advice that seems to cater to people with really nice cars.

After moving in 2005, we went carless for a whole year. It can be done. I consider my 1990 Skoda to be a time saving device. It is not a necessity and it is not a part of my identity.

I was just checking out one of many online businesses that claim to operate on Christian principles. I am skeptical but respectful of this practice. Basically, I consider it a branding decision and the degree to which it is ethical is entirely dependent on how well they follow through with that promise. Actual churches don’t always measure up, so it is highly probable that many ‘Christian’ businesses register fairly high on the hypocrisy meter.

This particular Christian business seemed okay and what caught my eye was that they felt it was necessary to have a front page disclaimer related to advertising. The most prominent advertising was coming from Google.

Many webmasters and bloggers put contextual ads on their sites and take a buyer beware approach. These ads are so ubiquitous that we tend to feel zero responsibility for their content. Maybe we are wrong.

The headline in the Washington Post says Clinton Sorry. The report says that she apologized for her recent reference to the RFK assassination.

I don’t know if the quote at the end of the piece is complete, but I read it for context and I do not see the word sorry. An apology from Hillary Clinton is a lot like Heidi Diaz coming clean.

I wrote the first part of this entry without watching the video of Hillary’s comment (the one for for which she ‘apologized’). I have to admit that it doesn’t sound as bad as it looks in print.

I was obsessing about politics and I saw some derogatory term that I didn’t understand. I went over to the urban dictionary. None of the ‘definitions’ for my term were remotely plausible, darn kids.

I noticed that scientology is paying to advertise on urban dictionary as well as YouTube.

I am willing to sell this blog to scientology for a reasonable offer.

The above video is best presented without commentary.

I want to make a short post about how I recently found a VISA card that had been left in an ATM. I approached the machine that was outside on a main street. It was beeping frantically and displaying in a language that I cannot read. I pressed a random button and the card came out. I looked at the name and then looked around for possible card owners. I didn’t see any, but I saw a police officer and I showed the card to her. She pointed way up the hill at an old man walking with a cane and told me to run after him. He responded to the name on the card and I gave it to him with a pat on the shoulder. He thanked me.

You will not find too many Presidential candidates vowing to carry on the torch for Bush and Cheney. I think at last count, it stood at Zero. Since the present administration is not in a position to help with any campaigns, they have more time to do what they have been doing all along… hand out favors and alienate the rest of the World.

The general public has enough to worry about with the really big issues, like the war (which Bush and Cheney can take full credit for) and the economy (for which they deserve at least partial credit). The administration has walked behind this giant pile of lemons and opened up a little lemonade stand where they are giving away judicial appointments and other sweet stuff to the little people that have helped make it all possible.

Gustavus Adolphus Puryear IV was on loan to team Cheney to prepare him for debates in 2000 and 2004. He has made millions as the general counsel for CCA the private company that houses many of America’s federal prison inmates. Putting a man who has made obscene profits from imprisonment on the bench as a trial judge seems counterintuitive, but so does installing a man who made obscene profits as an executive for a defense contractor as Vice President.

The seven figure sales at Kimkins.com were due in no small part to the favorable coverage in Woman’s World Magazine. This publication has huge circulation, and the print versions will often sit in waiting rooms and salons enjoying months or years of repeated perusal. People seeking to expose the Kimkins fraud did not get very far in trying to convince Woman’s World to make any kind of reversal or apology. We personally received no answers to our questions last year and instead got a cease and desist order. In response to the letter, I made changes to the cover image that I was using to make it arguably transformative. There was no follow up from the magazine. I didn’t send any further correspondence to them. Many, many interested people did.

After a long wait, the magazine has finally apologized in detail, on their website. A print apology is also forthcoming. I thank them for it.

Comments have been enabled on ‘Papers of Record’ since long before the birth of the Internet. A letter to the editor is in many ways the same exercise as making a comment on the website of a newspaper.

The difference is immediacy. I have never in my life written a letter to the editor. My wife has written at least one that I know of, by email.

One of my best friends was very upset about a journalist referring to the smoke that came out of a local industrial complex as steam. By the time he had handwritten a letter, he had lost his head of steam and he didn’t bother actually mailing it.

These days, the major newspapers are adding comments to their online content, with varying levels of moderation. Some appear to be completely unmoderated. Some are reviewed almost as stringently as letters to the editor. I strongly suspect that some are moderated with bias. When you get hundreds or thousands of comments, the opportunity to bolster your agenda by selective approval and rejection is tremendous.

A story in the LA Times about the Obama and Clinton campaigns has almost ten thousand published comments. I only read one page and it contained several comments that were eviscerating a previous comment that had been one of the many comments arguing that Obama lacks substance. It seemed a bit excessive and redundant. Maybe these are unmoderated comments. The TOS for user contributions are very exhaustive.

I have been critical of scientology in the past on this blog and elsewhere. The organization that sometimes calls itself a religion and sometimes doesn’t is presently under attack by a disorganized group of people who revel in the power of the mob without apology or reflection. The fact that they are focused on a big, bad target at the moment does not make them the good guys. They have been known to wreak havoc on an individual’s online activities and personal privacy for the simple reason that the individual was enjoying what the group perceived as unwarranted celebrity. Another group of people who get attacked are randomly chosen from a list of hacked passwords for MySpace and other social websites.

I am in no way optimistic about their attack on scientology because I know that the group has a very short collective attention span. The only meme that doesn’t get old is complaining about old memes.