Just got back from meeting out some of my people including my boy Mawi Asgedom. If you haven't checked out his book you need to. At $9.95 it is a steal. Cop it.

Those who trade in their freedom for protection deserve neither-- Talib Kweli via the Chappell Show.

Beef is not what Jay did to Nas, Beef is Iraq, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, some beef is big, some beef is small but what you all call beef is not beef at all -- Mos Def via the Chappell Show

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Mogambo Guru rambles on about Alan Greenspan and the coming disaster for the US economy in his latest posting.


And since we are talking about debt, let's divide the total amount of official debt outstanding, namely $32 trillion, by the mere 110 million non-government workers that we have in the USA. Furiously pounding the keys on the calculator, we get the hard-to-comprehend figure of $290,000 of debt per private-sector worker. The new debt limit, when borrowed over the course of the next sixteen months, will obviously bring the new total to $299,000, if nobody in the country adds another single dime to their debt loads. To which I guffaw with a blatant undertone of stark sarcasm and disrespectful disgust.

Reason brings us this article on why the Matrix matters.

Movies are another matter; The Matrix Reloaded sometimes seems like the New Testament on steroids. It also suffers from the bind of superhero epics—if Neo is unstoppable, how can there be real constraint, and so suspense?

Beyond the cool violence, vinyl cat suits and dazzling bullet-time effects, the Matrix world points both toward our future and to basic theological mythologies, to spiritual meta-narratives that can appear backlit by modern science.

In this sense science fiction is an ambassador between the two most widely separated tribes of modern thought, the scientific and the religious. Negotiations should prove profitable, but only if they are imaginative.

Lileks on the Matrix Reloaded. I couldn't have said it any better or made it any more hysterical.

Kovanda reads this everyday for a good reason (Jeff sits next to me at the office and is always cracking up at this guy's daily ramblings).

Blog of the week is compliments of the Misses.org website that is a daily read for anyone interested in economics and the Austrain School of Economics. Rockwell and crew update it daily and offer comments and analysis on the latest breaking economic news.

Europe bound for the bro and sis (and Brita)... Who are all off to Slovakia for a couple weeks (4 to be exact), along with some side trips to Prague and other interesting spots. I'm going to try to get them to post and give us some updates. My brother will be working in a hospital, and my sister is doing some marketing work for USX. Also they will be taking a trip to Croatia to visit Nino, the Croatian Sensation. I was going to meet, but due to the unpredicatability of when their travels will take place, I had to pass. All in all they should have a pretty fun summer. Why didn't I get to do stuff like this?

Interesting Business Week piece on girls out performing guys in school. I kind of remember this going on while I was in high school and apparently the trend is only increasing.

On the plus side for us men, minus the taxes part --

Better-educated men are also, on average, a much happier lot. They are more likely to marry, stick by their children, and pay more in taxes.

Score one for the pharmacy companies and take one away from the consumer, at least here in IL, as Rod (the governer) bans the sale of ephedra to save the children. Once again thank you government, because we consumers aren't smart enough to think for ourselves. Just another reason why you don't elect a democrat to office (then again we can go into numerous reasons not to elect a republican too). The ban doesn't do all that much, as most companies were being forced to stop selling ephedra because of the cost of insuring their products, but I guess this makes it official. Let's hope protein powders aren't next on the agenda.


CHICAGO -- Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed the nation's first statewide ban on ephedra Sunday, flanked by the parents of a 16-year-old football player who died of a heart attack after taking the diet supplement.

"It's a good first step but it's not enough,'' Blagojevich said. He and other lawmakers urged other states and the federal government to adopt similar bans.

Cable modem has finally been fixed, so blogging should pick up. It only took two weeks, numerous phone calls and them not showing up to fix it once, after I sat home for four hours on a Saturday waiting for them. Comcast customer services gets a big 2 out of 10. If it wasn't such a hassel, I would switch to DSL and save twenty bucks a month now that Comcast is jacking my cost up to $60 a month (Verizon is $38 for DSL). Due to the fact that I am probably relocated from my current apartment in October, I'll take the hit for the next 4 months and then flip to DSL.