Thanks to the magic of Netflix On Demand, @squorch and I took an evening to sync up our computers and watch Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. I will attempt to summarize the film's message:

Darwinists hate Intelligent Design because they hate Christians. This means that Christians make the best scientists, but science makes people atheists, so scientists are atheists, which is why Christians hide the fact that they're not atheists when doing science, except for the liberal Christians, who are Hitler and hate Jewish babies. This is how we know Intelligent Design has nothing to do with religion.

Ronald Reagan loved Freedom.

ABC News brings us tragic tales of life in the financial sector:

“A lot of those people will have to sell their homes, they’re going to cut back on the private jets and the vacations. They may even have to take their kids out of private school,” said Frank. “It’s a total reworking of their lifestyle.”

He added that it’s going to be no easy task.

“It’s going to be very hard psychologically for these people,” Frank said. “I talked to one guy who had to give up his private jet recently. And he said of all the trials in his life, giving that up was the hardest thing he’s ever done.”

I'm not a financial expert by any stretch of the imagination. The way I understand it, lots of financial institutions spent years loaning out money in really risky (but lucrative) ways. To prevent their investors from freaking out, they figured out creative ways to hide the riskiness. Everyone knew this was going on, but it meant more profits so no one was willing to look too close. After years of this, it was institutionalized: if the house of cards fell, it wouldn't be just one institution but loads of them all taking the fall.

Again, as I understand it, that's what we're experiencing now. Unless I'm totally mistaken, the problem is the systemic nature of the failure: all of the financial institutions were doing it, even the huge ones that have been thought of as 'rock solid' for decades, and if they collapse the whole economic structure goes topsy-turvy panic-mode.

Can someone knowledgeable about these things clue me in, or is the government essentially planning a $700,000,000 $700,000,000,000 bailout of people who got rich by making too-risky investments with other peoples' money?

...It's time for a change. I propose that Microsoft resurrect their old OS/2 spirit and this time, use BSD as its base. Thanks to the flexible BSD licensing, Microsoft could build itself a base free of blue screens and recapture power users who have moved on from Windows completely.

vs...

It broke my heart twice over to see Paris Hilton forced to return to jail for driving drunk and jeopardizing the lives of others. She had so much promise and talent at being a celebrity, and she won't get to use any of it in jail. That's not fair to either her or her fans. Can she just be really sorry and promise not to do it again instead?

I dare you to tell which one is real without clicking through.

A few weeks ago I was visiting New York for work, and I was stuck on the runway while JetBlue played musical chairs with its queued up planes. I flipped on the little in-flight TV and started channel surfing, only to discover Bill O'Reilly solemnly announcing that his Crime Expert had some Starting And Disturbing News to announce. I'll just let the transcript speak for itself:

"Well, you know, there is this national underground network, if you will, Bill, of women that's lesbians and also some men groups that's actually recruiting kids as young as 10 years old in a lot of the schools in the communities all across the country, and they actually carry a number of weapons. And they commit a number of crimes.

"...We've actually counted, just in the Washington D.C. area alone, that's Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, well over 150 of these crews.... And they -- like I said, they recruit these kids to be members of these gangs. As a matter of fact, some of the kids have actually reported that they were forced into, you know, performing sex acts and doing sex acts with some of these people.

"It's all over the country. I mean, you go from New York to California to wherever you want to name, you can see these organizations. Now, the other thing, too, that our viewers are going to find very, very interesting, is the fact that they actually carry -— some of these groups carry pink pistols. They call themselves the pink-pistol-packing group. And these are lesbians that actually carry pistols. That's 9-millimeter Glocks. They use these. They commit crimes, and they cause a lot of hurt to a lot of people."

Quick show of hands, here -- does anyone think that passes the smell test? If nothing else, the idea that a hardcore lesbian gang is going to name itself "The Pink Pistol Packing Group" is hilarious. Maybe they publish a comic called Dykes For Which One Should Be Alert.

Rob Wheeler, the Crime Expert who offered up these pearls of wisdom, has posted a convenient retraction on his web site:

During the O’Reilly Factor segment on June 21st, while engaged in a discussion on Lesbian gangs, I inadvertently stated that gang members carry pistols that are painted pink and call themselves the "Pink Pistol Packing Group." I was not referring to the gay rights group "Pink Pistols" who advocates for the lawful rights of gays to carry weapons for protection.

Further, I mentioned that there are "over 150 of these gangs" in the greater Washington DC area. What I actually meant is that there are over 150 gangs in the Washington DC area, some of which are in fact lesbian gangs.

Lastly, I mentioned in the segment that there is this "national epidemic" of lesbian gangs. A better choice of words would have been to say that there is a growing concern nationally, and especially in major urban areas, of increased gang activity, which includes some lesbian gang activity.

In other words, I completely BS'd my way through a gay-menace segment on national TV. But statistically, there HAVE to be SOME lesbian gangs out there, right? Right?

Next up? Middle-class white guys who eat their neighbors: A growing trend!

This just in: our representatives are hard at work!

Every American taxpayer would get a $100 rebate check to offset the pain of higher pump prices for gasoline,under an amendment Senate Republicans hope to bring to a vote Thursday.

Way to address the root problems, guys.

UPDATE: No corroborating articles have come around to back up KR's original piece on this subject, quoted at the bottom of this post. PulpSpy posts a link back to the original press conference for more context on the 'only an example' comment, and notes that it's not quite the backpedal that it appeared to be from the article. Here's hoping that someone in the Administration is serious about energy independence. I'm skeptical as all hell, but hope springs eternal.

After last night's State of the Union, I was startled to find that the President pledged to dramatically cut our fossil fuel usage over the next two decades. It's the sort of bold leap that i've been saying we need to take to maintain our nation's current rayte of growth and standard of living -- weaning our nation off petrolium would be no less important than the space race was in the 1960s.

Of course, I was rather skeptical. The Bush administration has spent the last six years or so seeking out promising energy initiatives and strangling them in their cribs, so I was a little perplexed. Today, he went out stumping and gave some details.

On Wednesday President Bush set off on a tour of the United States to bring the messages in his State of the Union speech to all corners of the nation.

He told the Nashville audience that the US was close to a breakthrough in making ethanol from materials like grasses or woods.

"All of a sudden, you know, we may be in the energy business by being able to grow grass on the ranch! And have it harvested and converted into energy. That's what's close to happening," he said.

I've ranted about Ethanol before; it's pork, pure and simple. The same problems we face with oil will be faced with Ethanol: even converting the entire midwest into a giant expanse of corn, dedicated to nothing but biomass production, wouldn't give us enough raw material to offset our fossil fuel usage.

Don't worry, though -- the President didn't really mean it.

One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.
...
Bush vowed to fund research into better batteries for hybrid vehicles and more production of the alternative fuel ethanol, setting a lofty goal of replacing "more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025."

He pledged to "move beyond a petroleum-based economy and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past."

Not exactly, though, it turns out.

"This was purely an example," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.
...
Asked why the president used the words "the Middle East" when he didn't really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that "every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands."

Uh-huh. Well, at least we've reduced the turnaround time on the backpedaling to twenty-four hours now. According to last year's State of the Union, we should still be gunning for a manned mission to Mars right about now. Maybe next year we'll get ponies for everyone.

CBS News correspondent Gloria Borger reports that Michael Brown, who recently resigned as the head of the FEMA, has been rehired by the agency as a consultant to evaluate it's response following Hurricane Katrina.

I don't think anything else need be said. Is it Dilbert? Is it The Daily Show? Is it The Onion? I just can't decide.

EDIT: More articles have been popping up. Apparently he's on board, with full pay, until sometime in October. Until then, he'll be helping Congress evaluate the Katrina failures. Apparently, he's said he "should have asked the military for help sooner." Seems to me that a more serious problem was old-fashioned ignorance of the magnitude of the disaster while it was happening.

Is 'If only the military had been there sooner' going to be the new talking point to hammer from every angle? We'll see.

Upgrading to Photoshop CS a couple of years ago was easily one of the best possible uses for my student ID card. The feature set is great, and the ability to directly convert RAW format images from my Canon 10D is a huge boost ot productivity.

The problem is, somewhere along the line I seem to have made a tweak to the colorspace settings that kicked off a year-long journey into madness. On my desktop machine at home -- my main box for photo tinkering -- images look rich and saturated and all sorts of cool. Once I export them to JPEG, or in fact open them in any program other than Photoshop, they fade into washed-out yuckiness. I've tried converting to and from various colorspaces before exporting, carefully examined histograms before and after export, all for naught. Eventually I gave up and just started color-correcting for what I thought images would probably look like once exported.

Today, some on-a-whim Googling yielded a webboard conversation with someone having the very same problem. The root of the problem? Photoshop offers 'live color correction' for people working on CMYK print imagesIt dynamically adjusts on-screen display to reflect how images would appear when printed -- darker, richer, more saturated. Somehow -- probably when working on a print calendar last Christmas -- I'd turned this feature on and forgotten about it. A quick trip to the View menu,the Proof Setup submenu, and voila! I was still set to 'CMYK proofing.' I changed it to 'Monitor' and everything snapped into place. JPEGs now save just as I see them in Photoshop, and I no longer have to sweat bullets correcting blindly.

Three cheers for Google! And thank you, Richard Sintchak, whoever you are, for posting the solution to a problem that's dogged me for a year.

I walked into the living room and found Catherine watching E!, a cable channel whose exclaimation mark identifies it as the most enthusiastic of all content providers. She was watching some sort of 'Girls Next Door' show about Hugh Heffner's girlfriends -- all four of them. Why? To figure out, she said, why a woman would do that

There's a priceless shot of three of them arguing about which Jim Carrey movie to watch while Hugh, nearly 80, watches with a detached and baffled expression. Poor, poor Hugh. You've surrounded yourself with identical blonde sorority girls, and now you must live with the consequences. After watching with her for half an hour, and carefully observing the behavior of the four, I believe there is a simple answer to Catherine's question: these women would not survive in the wild. The aggregate IQ of the Playboy Mansion is hovering somewhere around 250, I think, and that's including Hugh. I'm convinced that there must be full time security people making sure no one jams a spoon into the toaster at 3am.

There are many arguments regarding the pros, the cons, and the meaning of pornography in our culture. I don't want to imply that all women involved in the pornography industry are stupid. I just want to point out, based on E!'s inside look, that Every Time Someone Buys Playboy, They're Interfering With Natural Selection.