Cindy Sheehan arrested for tshirt at State of Union

Scientists want to bombard Mars to reveal what's under the surface (presuming what's under the surface doesn't mind being bombarded)

Palace Revolt (msnbc)
They were loyal conservatives, and Bush appointees. They fought a quiet battle to rein in the president's power in the war on terror. And they paid a price for it.

The Kinks performing "Autumn Almanac" from Top of the Pops (1967) (mpg vid) via the always brilliant Sonic Pollutions.

How to throw a soccer ball (Nature)

This is what happens when you let 'the market' take care of technology adoption. Infighting, unjustifiable expense, monopolistic corporations, and public use of broadband laws that differ dramatically from city to city have caused the U.S. to plummet to 19th in home broadband penetration.

At its current growth rate of over 90% per year, China will pass the US in total broadband subscribers by late 2006 to become the largest broadband country in the world. The US has fallen to 19th overall in household broadband penetration, and is in danger of being passed by Slovenia in early 2007.

ted is like a virtual, torrent-based, online tivo. Tell it what your favorite shows are, and it'll automatically download them via bitorrent.

Trucker slang and CB 10-Codes

This is your Army on drugs (vid link)
A cold-war era film of the Army (UK?) doing tests the organizational and psychological effects of LSD of troops in the field. Live rocket launchers on the menu.

OnionAV's least essential albums of '05
Witness: The Rose Vol. 2: Music Inspired By Tupac's Poetry, which is probably the hundredth post-mortem album this guy's name has graced. Later this year they're going to exhume his corpse and feature it on a dancing celebrity show.

If you havn't checked in a while, the fixed gear gallery has reorganized somewhat, and added a load of new purist, one-gear, no-brakes rides. The best-of galleries have some beautiful bikes.

An amazing hockey goal (vid)

Kunstbar: The Art History via a corner bar

Some psychedelic audio lectures (mp3) at Future Hi

A 1971 Sears catalog via Bifurcated Rivets

Common Errors in English

A conservative group is offering students money to spy on suspected liberal professors.
Jones had offered to pay UCLA students $100 for recordings and lecture notes of professors caught in "indoctrination, one-sided presentation of ideological controversies and unprofessional classroom behavior." Jones said one student, whom he declined to identify, had taken up the offer thus far.

While saying that he was interested in monitoring professors who inject any sort of inappropriate ideology into courses, Jones has identified mainly instructors with liberal and leftist views as potential monitoring targets.

Also out of the UK, a poll reported on the BBC shows that 'Science is not for normal people'.

Among those who said they would not like to be scientists, reasons included: "Because you would constantly be depressed and tired and not have time for family", and "because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female".

The Jive is back from a short trip. I noticed that I got namechecked in the first couple of minutes of the Episode 7 Ricky Gervais podcast from the Guardian!

Spherical tree houses for sale

Read the text of Al Gore's speech attacking Bush for abuse of executive power here.

Make your own motivational posters with motivator.

The Most Complicated Keyboard in the world. Chinese, of course.

[Stop wasting your spacebar on mere spaces]
Song Tapper is pretty amazing. Tap out a melody on your spacebar, and it IDs the song. For me, it correctly got Blackbird by the Beatles, and Happy Roving Cowboy by The Sons of the Pioneers (!)
Found on metafilter.

Build a sterling engine from aluminum cans (w/ movie of the working engine)

You'd never think that the guy who wrote 'Raindrops keep Falling on my Head' would take a political stance in his songwriting, but in this interview with Mother Jones, singer Burt Bacharach tells about how he put his political frustration with the illegal and immoral actions of the Bush administration to music in his most recent album.

Russell Tice, an NSA intelligence officer, was fired from his job in May of last year for speaking out against the Bush administration's illegal abuses of power in spying on Americans. Read his interview with Alternet here.

Well, as far as an intelligence officer, especially a SIGINT officer at N.S.A., we're taught from very early on in our careers that you just do not do this. This is probably the number one commandment of the SIGINT Ten Commandments -- you will not spy on Americans.

It is drilled into our head over and over and over again in security briefings, at least twice a year, where you ultimately have to sign a paper that says you have gotten the briefing. Everyone at N.S.A. who's a SIGINT officer knows that you do not do this. Ultimately, so do the leaders of N.S.A., and apparently the leaders of N.S.A. have decided that they were just going to go against the tenets of something that's a gospel to a SIGINT officer.

A virtual Space Mountain ride video from Google Video (via things magazine)

Behind the Magic Curtain (Guardian)
A look into the prep that goes in to a Steve Jobs keynote.

The Wizard of Odd hipped the Jive to bluelips.com which sells embalming videos to the non-embalming community. The Jive is pretty freewheeling and all, but aren't there some things that non-professionals just shouldn't do out of deference to the pros? Repairing transformer boxes on utility poles is one. Embalming has gotta be up there.

Ricky Gervais's Guardian podcast Episode 6 is now up and available. These just keep getting better.

Photographs of heavily modified mailboxes. This seems to be a rural fascination, but I'm all for moving it elsewhere. Long load, but where else are you going to see these feats of Jed Clampettism? Why, at Fred's strange mailbox site, that's where.
A couple of similar, smaller Australian sites, here and here.

Postmodern cinema has reached its pinnacle as of this. Where else to go but down?

Hmmm...

Top 50 music videos of 2005, with links to watch each. (WFMU blog)

Also worth reading is "Repealing the Magna Carta" from Mother Jones.

After the latter scandal became public, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (who, in 2002 as White House counsel, penned a memo advising the President on how to circumvent the 1996 War Crimes Act) claimed that George Bush had the right to violate the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (which makes it illegal to spy on U.S. citizens in the United States without prior or retroactive -- within 72 hours-- court approval) due to his "inherent authority as commander in chief under the Constitution." This, despite the fact that in 2004 Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the court, insisted, "A state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens." Bush himself then came out swinging, claiming that he had no need for the courts since he acted as his own agency of oversight, and his acts were legal because he "swore to uphold the laws."

"There is a name for a system of government that wages aggressive war, deceives its citizens, violates their rights, abuses power and breaks the law, rejects judicial and legislative rights on itself, claims power without limit, tortures prisoners, and acts in secret. It is dictatorship."
The Hidden State Steps Forward, from The Nation

Holy Shit. I remember when fundies were just a bunch of uptight, scolding killjoy ninnies. This guy is just dangerous. Please, NSA, keep a tight watch on this insane creep.

"He is a great friend of Israel and a great friend of Prime Minister Sharon himself, so I am very surprised," Ayalon told CNN.

"This is what the word of God says," Watts told the AP. "This is nothing new to the Christian community."

Cartman is consuming more than just cheezy-poofs. The low-fi South Park series just bought an XServe Array. I thought they were just colored paper cutouts...

I finally understand the ferver over soccer in Europe. It's empirically more likely to produce upsets.

It's officially legal to moon in Maryland. Now all we need to do is get a few thousand people lined up on the MD/DC border, and stage a real show of hams as a political action.

The Edge asks, "What do we believe is true, even though we can't prove it?"

Hard Case Crime: re-publishing and reviving crime-noir lit.

Low-Fi Jive: The Fisherprice Pixelvision PXL 2000 was a $99 (worth a bit more now) video camera marketed to kids in the late 80's that uses audiocassettes. From RetroThing, which has all kinds of huge, previously expensive, awkward tech nostalgia.

Happy New Year from the Jive!