The shred has officially been reincarnated HERE.  New functionality and expanded means of sharing ideas and media are available and continuing to be developed.  Please send an email to Phil, Taka or Jason if you would like an invitation to the new playground.  Namaste

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Chickipedia

federal budget


this is a great visual/graphical representation of how the federal budget has been planned for the upcoming fiscal year. this spending plan is the one that the president proposed and is under debate in congress right now. it also includes the percent change from last years budget numbers...

yikes!!
there is a built in deficit of $239 billion

sorry EPA and higher ed, there is a war ya know...

DEATH and TAXES 2008

Friday, January 25, 2008

Hooray!

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/01/25/bluetooth.legs/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

Anonymous War On Scientology

"The Internet-based group "Anonymous" has released statements on YouTube and via a press release, outlining what they call a "War on Scientology". Church of Scientology related websites, such as religiousfreedomwatch.org have been removed due to a suspected distributed denial-of-service-attack (DDoS) by a group calling themselves "Anonymous". On Friday, the same group allegedly brought down Scientology's main website, scientology.org, which was available sporadically throughout the weekend. Several websites relating to the Church of Scientology have been slowed down, brought to a complete halt or seemingly removed from the Internet completely in an attack which seems to be continuous. The scientology.org site was back online briefly on Monday, and is currently loading slowly.

On Monday, the group released a video titled: "Message to Scientology" on YouTube concerning their intentions to attack the Church of Scientology. A robotic voice on the video begins with "Hello leaders of Scientology. We are Anonymous," and continues by explaining their motivations: "Over the years we have been watching you, your campaigns of misinformation, your suppression of dissent and your litigious nature. All of these things have caught our eye. With the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation the extent of your malign influence over those who have come to trust you as leaders has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organisation should be destroyed." The message goes on to state that the group intends to "expel Scientology from the Internet". As of Wednesday, the video had been viewed 370,347 times, favorited 2,473 times, and is currently YouTube's top third video of the day..." -wiki




During the hack of the scientology website some sensitive documents were leaked.....ones that devotees pay thousands of dollars to see. Download them here if you wish. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.....

love love

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Hello friends

This is my first post, hooray! I finally have something worthwhile to add. I hope this works- this is an interview with author Paul Levy. I would try to explain what it's about, but I wouldn't do it justice. Let's just say it's a fascinating mix of Jungian psychology, synchronicity, reality as a collective dream, spiritual awakening and madness, apacolypse, and how George Bush fits into all of this. I strongly suggest giving it a listen. Okay have fun! Yay! :)

http://www.redicecreations.com/radio/2007/01jan/RICR-070125-plevy.mp3

i will live forever as a memory on the internet


800 years of life:
researchers at USC have extended the life of yeast by 10 times. by using a similar gene manipulation, and a diet, they have begun to test a life extension plan on people in Ecuador.

"you know my father was in the tuskegee experiments..."

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

goodbye

the time has finally come for me to venture off to the southern hemisphere...(if you were ever wondering why it's called a hemisphere you should talk to my friend griff)
anyway I'd love to stay in touch with you all while I am gone so if you'd leave me your e-mail address that'd be great
love you
see you in a few months!

I Like Lou Dobbs

Two recent articles that made me feel so...


Our leaders have squandered our wealth

NEW YORK (CNN) -- President Bush's assurances that we'll all be "just fine" if he and Congress can work out an economic stimulus package seem a little hollow this morning.

Much like Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke's assurances last May that the subprime mortgage meltdown would be contained and not affect the broader economy. And it seems Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has spent most of the past year trying to influence Chinese economic policy rather than setting the direction of U.S. economic policy.

There is no question that Bush, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will quickly come up with an economic stimulus package simply because they can no longer ignore our economic and financial crisis. That economic stimulus plan will amount to about 1 percent of our nation's gross domestic product, an estimated $150 billion.

But all of us should recognize that the stimulus package will be inadequate to drive sustainable growth in our $13 trillion economy. An emergency Fed rate cut and an economic stimulus plan are short-term responses to our complex economic problems, nothing more than bandages for a hemorrhaging economy.

Bush, Pelosi, Reid and the presidential candidates of both parties have an opportunity now, and I believe an obligation, to adjust the public policy mistakes of the past quarter-century that have led to this crisis. And only through courageous policy decisions will we be able to steer this nation's economy away from the brink of outright disaster.

We all have to acknowledge that our problems were in part brought on by the failure of our government to regulate the institutions and markets that are now in crisis. The irresponsible fiscal policies of the past decade have led to a national debt that amounts to $9 trillion. The irresponsible so-called free trade policies of Democratic and Republican administrations over the past three decades have produced a trade debt that now amounts to more than $6 trillion, and that debt is rising faster than our national debt. All of which is contributing to the plunge in the value of the U.S. dollar.

At precisely the point in our history in which this nation has become ever more dependent on foreign producers for everything from clothing to computers to technology to energy, our weakened dollar is making the price of an ever-increasing number of imported goods even more expensive.

All Americans will soon have to face a bitter and now obvious truth: Our national, political and economic leaders have squandered this nation's wealth, and the price of this profligacy is enormous, and the bill has just come due for all of us.

Bernanke endorsed the concept of a short-term economic stimulus package, but he cautioned that the money must be spent correctly: "You'd hope that [consumers] would spend it on things that are domestically produced so that the spending power doesn't go elsewhere."

Just what would you have us spend it on? The truth is that consumers spend most of their money on foreign imports, and any stimulus package probably would be stimulating foreign economies rather than our own. Imports, for example, account for 92 percent of our non-athletic footwear, 92 percent of audio video equipment, 89 percent of our luggage and 73 percent of power tools. In fact, between 1997 and 2006, only five of the 114 industries examined in a U.S. Business and Industry Council report gained market share against import competition.

And let's be honest and straightforward, as I hope our president and the candidates for president will be: This stimulus will not prevent a recession. It may ease the pain for millions of Americans, but a recession we will have. The question is how deep, how prolonged and how painful will it be. Unfortunately, we're about to find out how committed and capable our national leaders are at mitigating that pain and producing realistic policy decisions for this nation that now stands at the brink.




Campaign a lot of partisan nonsense

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Remember how excited everybody was just a short while ago that this presidential campaign was the first in 80 years to be wide open, without a president or vice president in the campaign?

Remember how excited we all were that American presidential politics had matured to the point that a woman and a black man were winning primary and caucus votes that allowed both to claim front-runner status?

Now Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are ensnared in petty racial and gender politics and that does neither of them credit.

But at least the ugly spectacle that Clinton and Obama created should serve as a reminder to all of us that group and identity politics have outlived their effectiveness and that pandering to socio-ethnocentric interest groups and special interests, whether as large as corporate America or as small as the construction company in a congressman's district, has no rightful place in 21st century American politics.

The Democratic and Republican candidates for president have done hardly better than President Bush and the Democratic-led Congress on the issue of the war in Iraq. The candidates trip over one another to bring more of our troops home faster than the other candidates, or refusing to withdraw our troops from Iraq until the job is done; policy choices not dissimilar to the simplistic White House's false choices in either staying the course or cutting and running.

But these presidential candidates, both Republican and Democrat, obviously would prefer not to discuss the war in Iraq in their campaigns, nor to state clearly whether they would secure our borders and ports as an absolute first condition before taking up the issue of immigration reform.

Both parties and nearly all of their candidates continue to drive false choices for the illegal immigration debate as well. The centrist and appropriate policy response to this crisis is to secure our borders and ports, and enforce current immigration laws.

Now that the economy has become the number-one issue for primary voters of both parties, we can expect the candidates to come up with new economic programs that will solve every problem in our society. Economic stimulus packages will soon be the order of the day, with more false choices: The Democrats will offer handouts to every man, woman and child and the Republicans will give drastic tax breaks to large corporations and the wealthy as the panacea for what ails us.

These candidates will not have addressed the causes of our economic malaise: The critical issue of the faith-based free trade policies of the past decade that have been devastating to working men and women and their families, policies that have enlarged our trade debt to more than $6 trillion.

And while presidential candidates of both political parties talk about our public education system in terms of globalism and American competitiveness, they fail to recognize the crisis in our public schools and they fail to prescribe urgently needed solutions.

This partisan nonsense and predictable platitudes of this presidential campaign does not augur well for the nation, and I fear none of the candidates of either party is capable of extricating us from the mess their partisan politics have created.

myspace is sooo cool!!

Monday, January 21, 2008

SOMEBODY DOZEME!!!!!

CORN!!!!



Corn is everywhere in the US. it makes up the bulk of our farming, is used in food, as food, as fuel, is animal feed and is always over produced and over-subsidised by our government. why so much corn?

high-fructose corn syrup is bad news and is everywhere....

this is a nice article giving some basics about corn and processed foods


biscuits...