Quartz City

Apparently the best way to deal with the budget deficit is to pretend it doesn’t exist.

The Bush administration has shelved a report commissioned by the Treasury that shows the U.S. currently faces a future of chronic federal budget deficits totaling at least $44 trillion in current U.S. dollars.

The study, the most comprehensive assessment of how the U.S. government is at risk of being overwhelmed by the “baby boom” generation’s future healthcare and retirement costs, was commissioned by then-Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill.

But the Bush administration chose to keep the findings out of the annual budget report for fiscal year 2004, published in February, as the White House campaigned for a tax-cut package that critics claim will expand future deficits.

The study asserts that sharp tax increases, massive spending cuts or a painful mix of both are unavoidable if the U.S. is to meet benefit promises to future generations. It estimates that closing the gap would require the equivalent of an immediate and permanent 66 percent across-the-board income tax increase.

Paul Wolfowitz on “selling the war”:

The decision to highlight weapons of mass destruction as the main justification for going to war in Iraq was taken for “bureaucratic reasons”, according to the US deputy defence secretary.

But in an interview with the American magazine Vanity Fair, Paul Wolfowitz said there were many other important factors as well.

The famously hawkish Mr Wolfowitz has been a long-time proponent of military action against Iraq.

Picking weapons of mass destruction was “the one reason everyone could agree on”, he says in the interview.

Sometimes when you’re steeped in personal miasma, there’s nothing like a rude cathartic story to cheer you up.

Rob@cockeyed.com got tired of using false names with grocery store membership cards and swapping them with friends so now he wants an army of clones.

Now I want to try something different. I want to take the credit for all of my shopping, and for your shopping too!

The key to this plan is the UPC on the back of the card. Typically when I use my Safeway card, the cashier swipes the card over his scanner. With a BEEP my card number is recorded, my savings deducted.

In November I registered a new card with my real name and address. Then I carefully photographed my card and printed the UPC onto a sheet of address labels. Send me an email with your address and I’ll send you a label with my membership number and bar code on it. When you get the label in the mail, stick it on the back of your own Safeway Club Card, carefully covering the old zebra stripes.

The next time you shop at Safeway, your card will link your purchases to my club card number! Your old Safeway Club identity will be gone forever, just like in that movie Eraser, with Arnold Schwarzenegger.. unless you swipe your card through the magnetic reader. Anyone who does this will be lumping their shopping data together with mine. Together we might amass a profile of the single greatest shopper in the history of mankind.

In return I promise to post photos of anything we earn related to the Safeway Club:  5% discount coupons, free turkey certificates, jewel-encrusted scepters, etc.

Couple years ago a friend of mine asked me what sort of new music I was listening to and it came to me that it would just be a whole lot easier to hand off a mix tape/CD and just say “listen.” The first mix was a great success and when I ran into my friend again a couple of weeks ago the inevitable “so what are you listening to?” question came up again.

So here’s the 2003 edition of The Pesusich Mix (named after the friend that started this). There’s no real theme to it other than it’s all stuff that’s been released in the past 12 months (more or less), isn’t on a major label, and tends to be on the droney side of things. I was listening to it in the car today and it’s a pretty good little comp.

1. The Lovetones, “The Sound And The Fury”
2. The Solarflares, “State Of Mind”
3. Manitoba, “Kid You’ll Move Mountains”
4. Languis, “Touch A Cloud”
5. Charles Atlas, “The Light They Intended For You”
6. The Land Of Nod, “Half-Light”
7. Surface Of Eceyon, “Over Land, Over Ice”
8. I Am Not The Janitor, “Follow (Introduction)”
9. Kinski, “Waves Of Second Guessing”
10. Scenic, “Year Of The Rat”
11. Paik, “Killing Windmills”

K10 points out the answer to the eternal question that keeps cyberpunk wannabes awake at night… “How do I make that funky green raining code that you see in the Matrix, the Matrix Reloaded and the Matrix Revolutions?”

Lisa Rein puts this way more eloquently than me when she says:

I went to sleep last night and woke up this morning thinking the same thoughts:

Never in a million years would I have ever predicted that I would be living in a world where I feel the need to take photographs inside of a Starbucks store in an attempt to somehow prove that I am still living in a free society.

Anyway, if you do take pictures of Starbucks interiors, be sure to post to Lessig’s comment page.

OK, finally finished the importing from the old Radio Userland site. Now to fix all the picture links.

An amazing photo tour through Uranium City in northwest Saskatchewan. Uranium City was a mining boomtown that once had a population of 5000, but is now a ghost town of abandoned buildings and radioactive tailing piles.