The Continental Illinois Bank (now Bank of America) building.
The Continental Illinois Bank building. Surprising that they have left the name up for the last 25 years.
Archive for the ‘News’ Category
Memento Mori
Friday, March 20th, 2009Well, shit.
Monday, February 9th, 2009Glenn Greenwald reports:
Obama fails his first test on civil liberties and accountability — resoundingly and disgracefully
Two weeks ago, I interviewed the ACLU’s Ben Wizner, counsel to 5 individuals suing the subsidiary of Boeing (Jeppesen) which had arranged the Bush administration’s rendition program, under which those 5 plaintiffs had been abducted, sent to other countries and brutally tortured. Today the Obama administration was required to file with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals its position in this case — i.e., whether it would continue the Bush administration’s abusive reliance on the “state secrets” privilege to prevent courts from ruling on such matters, or whether they would adhere to Obama’s previous claims about his beliefs on “state secrets” by withdrawing that position and allowing these victims their day in court.
Yesterday, enthusiastic Obama supporter Andrew Sullivan wrote about this case: ”Tomorrow in a federal court hearing in San Francisco, we’ll find out if the Obama administration intends to keep the evidence as secret as the Bush administration did.” As I wrote after interviewing Wizner two weeks ago: ”This is the first real test of the authenticity of Obama’s commitment to reverse the abuses of executive power over the last eight years.” Today, the Obama administration failed that test – resoundingly and disgracefully
No justice, it seems. Damn it to hell.
Assholes.
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008If you are the type to go around insulting random strangers, it is likely that one of them is going to sock you on the nose. Make no mistake; this would be wrong, and the person who assaulted you should be penalized.
Don’t think, however, that you’ll find a sympathetic ear in me; “he wouldn’t have hit you if you hadn’t been such an asshole” would be my likely response.
I know a guy who is a Mormon, and he tells me stories about protests in California over his church’s role in helping pass Proposition 8. If the stories are to be believed, some of the protestors have crossed the line into tresspass, and even assault. Make no mistake, this behavior is wrong, and the people doing it should be penalized.
I just don’t want to hear any complaints about it. They wouldn’t be doing this if the Mormons hadn’t been such assholes on this issue.
Say hello to Roxy and Jet
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
Roxy is the little gal further from the camera; Jet is the big boy closer.
Google Chrome
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008I’m trying Google Chrome out now. So far, not bad. I’ve had a little odd behavior in text areas, and when I loaded bigscary to write this post, all of my tabs and windows froze until the site loaded. If I understand the “every tab a process” model, this shouldn’t be happening, but it happens with some frequency.
Other than that, I’m just having the usual “where the hell is the button that does this” issues that always occur when moving from one application to a competing one. So far, I am not noticing any stark differences in performance between Chrome and Firefox 3. I’ve used it with GMail and Maps. I’ll take a gander at Google Docs later on.
Because I know you’re wondering…
Thursday, June 19th, 2008The fermentation chiller project is on hiatus until I know whether getting a chest freezer makes sense. Now hop off those tenterhooks.
I didn’t want to believe it…
Saturday, June 7th, 2008The Michelle Obama “Whitey” video:
OpenID enabled
Friday, May 23rd, 2008I’ve just set up OpenID sign-on for commenting. What this means is that if you have an OpenID login (which you already have if you use AOL, AIM, Yahoo, Blogger, Flickr, Livejournal, Wordpress.com, and some others) you can login using that.
AOL/AIM users, for example, would use openid.aol.com/screenname as their logon. You’ll be briefly whisked away to an AOL logon site that will ask for your passowrd, and when you’re done with that, you’ll come back here.
You don’t have to use OpenID, but it’s there if you want to.
Bud Ale — will AB’s brewmasters slip the leash?
Friday, May 9th, 2008Since the early 90s, the major brewers have made feints in the direction of the craft brewing movement — does anybody remember the all-malt Miller Reserve line, including their Velvet Stout? These excursions, while definitely in the right direction, have never really gone far enough, and have usually been short-lived to boot.
Still, they’ve done nothing to disabuse me of my idea that the brewmasters at AB, Miller (okay, SABMiller) and Coors (okay, Molson Coors) are real pros, and if the marketing and accounting let them off the leash, they could make a world class Bud (Coors, Miller) Stout.
Apparently Anheuser-Busch has filed for label approval of Bud Ale, due out in October. The label mentions Cascade hops and that it’s brewed “with barley from America’s Heartland,” although it’s not clear whether this will be an all-malt beer.
I’ll probably pick up a sixer when it rolls around in October, to see how it turns out. I’m not expecting too much, but maybe, just maybe, this time the brewmasters are getting to run a little freer.
Thanks to Seen Through a Glass.
EDIT: Read the last paragraph of this. Like I say, these guys are good — it’s just that making insipid beer is their job.
Lynchings
Saturday, February 9th, 2008I don’t know if this is true, but it is very intriguing:
When one of those collections [of souvenir postcards of lynchings] fell into the hands of a professional historian, it opened up a whole large statistical universe of lynching incidents, each of which came with a location, one or more names, dozens or hundreds of faces that can be identified, and importantly, a date. That made it possible to research not just a few lynchings, but hundreds of them, and to compile statistics on what had happened before and after them. And the terrible, but fascinating, bit of secret history turned out to be the immediate aftermath of over half of those lynchings. Over half of those lynchings turned out to involve black men who owned their own successful farms and/or businesses. And the day after the lynchings, those farms and businesses were sold to white neighbors, in closed auctions, for pennies on the dollar, and the surviving real heirs were run out of town. And in a terrifyingly large number of those cases, they were able to show one or more of the following facts. The buyer was the person who made the initial accusation against the victim. And the buyer was a relative of one or more of the following: the mayor, the chief of police, the local minister and/or the municipal judge.
This is leading up to Brad Hicks’ take on the murders in Kirkwood, MO.