So I have always maintained that Aquafina tasted gross and was totally not worth the money. And Pepsi has now been forced to admit that the product is actually tap water. Hah! So much for the bottled mystique.

Update: So is Dasani. Which I have always thought tasted even worse. :)

I mean, it's not like much really surprises me anymore, and it's not like I wasn't aware of Bush's lack of foreign policy experience. But, um, still. This (from Democracy now 8-7-06) is pathetic if true (and I sort of don't doubt it).

Book: Bush Didn't Know Difference Between Shiites and Sunnis And finally a new book by former U.S. ambassador ( Read more... )

I reallly do go in spurts... but it's not really that I don't have post-able thoughts and refrain or anything... well, maybe sometimes Anyway, this is a quick one. www.goodsearch.com is a yahoo search engine that will donate a penny to a charity of your choice (their list, but they have pretty much anything you'd want) for every search you make ( Read more... )

In Praise of Self-Deprecationby Wistawa Szymborska ( Read more... )

Wow. Another bit of my ignorance that I've thankfully lost. I'd been under the impression (as I'm sure pretty much everyone else in the U.S. was) that all this U.S. law not applying in Guantanamo, blah, blah, blah stuff was thanks to W. (or at least his advisers). Turns out, it actually came from Daddy who did almost the same thing the U.S. is ( Read more... )

So I finally got around to going to see An Inconvenient Truth. I've got to say, it's a damn good film. I mean, the science wasn't really new to me and it wasn't as detailed as what you'll get from Scientific American. But for a movie.... I think I might have to eat my words about movie theaters not being the place for serious political discourse ( Read more... )

So there's a lot of AIDS-related stuff in the media right now, since it's the 25th anniversary of the disease. But what exactly does this mean? Well, here, in an excerpt from And the Band Played On... is a description of exactly what this anniversary is of:

On Friday, June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control Morbidity and Mortality Weekly ( Read more... )

I just finished James Yee's book For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire. Yee was the Muslim champlain at Guantanamo and tells what it was like working at Gitmo and the story of his arrest and time in solitary confinement for basically no reason aside from the fact that he was Muslim. In short, I knew these things had to be going on ( Read more... )

James Howard Junstler on Wal Mart, "In effect, Americans threw away thier communities in order to save a few dollars on hair dryers and plastic food storage tubs, never stopping to reflect on what they were destroying."

From The Long Emergency

The doubled-standard so many in America apply to human life continues to baffle me. Think of the huge response to September 11th, of the outpouring of support. Think of the money the government has spent to prevent another such attack. And my heart goes out to those who lost loved ones in the attacks. But my heart also goes out to those who ( Read more... )