Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

— H. L. Mencken

$1,000,000 in four months?.  Clever boy.

The NSA gets caught breaking more laws.  Anyone surprised?

Oh, and the White House may be doing the same thing.  This régime truly thinks itself above the law.  How Nixon-esque.

Remember Sony’s use of spyware in their copy protection scheme?  Remember Sony stripping PCs of web security in an attempt to remove their own spyware?  Remember Sony getting sued over the fiasco?  Now, Sony has settled the various lawsuits and has a lot of work to do to clean up the mess they created while also trying to win back consumer confidence and trust.  I think they have a long road to travel on this one.

Take a look at MSNBC’s wackiest animal stories of 2005.  Be certain to check out the photo slide show as well — you won’t be disappointed.

In case you’ve been under a rock for the last few weeks, Texas has been burning due to significant and ongoing drought conditions.  Wildfires have even hit the DFW metroplex directly and are responsible for loss of life and property throughout our area.

How’s this for immersion journalism?  He’s only 16 and snuck to Iraq for his Christmas holiday — without telling anyone, including his parents.  Um, oops.

Give me kittens or give me death!

The precursor elements for DNA and protein have been found in the dust circling a young star.  Anyone want to guess how that got there?  Perhaps a new intelligent design in the works?  Perhaps leftovers from our own creation that somehow were blown across the galaxy?  But wait!  There can be no life outside of our own solar system.  Isn’t that part of most religious dogmas?  If this discovery isn’t some atheistic conspiracy [note sarcasm], it means the formation of life as we know it is as probable anywhere as it is nowhere, a happenstance mix of the right ingredients during any planet’s formation.  And that’s only if we assume all life in the universe has to be fundamentally the same as what is observable here on our own planet.  Anyone know the real definition of the word alien?

What kills souls is quite simple: choice. They choose to die because they despair of themselves. They die of lack of love. Our lives must be rich with compassion both for ourselves and others. This is what enables us to thrive and live in the body of consciousness that is this universe. The body is a brief passage, a place of decision. It is here, in this engine of forgetting, that we can only decide from our essential truth whether we are going to go on or not.

— Whitley Strieber

I must admit that the results of this quiz are frighteningly accurate.  The three movies it shows at the end happen to be favorites of mine.  Very interesting…

The Movie Of Your Life Is A Black Comedy

In your life, things are so twisted that you just have to laugh. You may end up insane, but you’ll have fun on the way to the asylum. Your best movie matches: Being John Malkovich, The Royal Tenenbaums, American Psycho

If Your Life Was a Movie, What Genre Would It Be?