Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces — with Alaska reverting to Russian control.

He also predicts that when the US falls apart, the West coast will become the Californian Republic, and will be either part of China or under Chinese influence.

For more of this, read the full article: As if Things Weren’t Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S. – WSJ.com

Unlike many Rube Goldberg machines, the goal wasn’t to turn on the lights or pour a glass of milk. Instead, Jon wanted to get people psyched about IDEO’s engineering capabilities and to broadcast the distributed contraption live for all to see. Of course, getting a hot dog in the Chicago office to dial a cell phone in Palo Alto for the sole purpose of pumping helium into a bucket of soap and water for a three-foot cylinder of bubbles did plenty to get people excited. When the Chicago team added flames to the mix, Jon didn’t flinch.

The Incredible IDEO Global Chain Reaction Experience

You know what I miss? I miss 1960. Not the part about my face turning overnight into the world's most productive zit farm. What I miss is the way the grown-ups acted about the Kennedy-Nixon race. Like the McCain-Obama race, that was a big historic deal that aroused strong feelings in the voters. This included my parents and their friends, who were fairly evenly divided, and very passionate. They'd have these major honking arguments at their cocktail parties. But unlike today, when people wear out their upper lips sneering at those who disagree with them, the 1960s grown-ups of my memory, whoever they voted for, continued to respect each other and remain good friends.

What was their secret? Gin. On any given Saturday night they consumed enough martinis to fuel an assault helicopter. But also they were capable of understanding a concept that we seem to have lost, which is that people who disagree with you politically are not necessarily evil or stupid. My parents and their friends took it for granted that most people were fundamentally decent and wanted the best for the country. So they argued by sincerely (if loudly) trying to persuade each other. They did not argue by calling each other names, which is pointless and childish, and which constitutes I would estimate 97 percent of what passes for political debate today.

What I'm saying is: we, as a nation, need to drink more martinis.

Dave Barry: And the winner is . . . the man with the martini (MiamiHerald.com)

Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn’t work, 2) didn’t do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighbourhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser’s own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: ‘Learn, guys.’

She was a witch, after all. And precisely because she was a witch, and therefore sensible, she put little faith in protective amulets and spells; she saved it all for a foot-long bread knife that she kept in her belt.

Apple 1984 commercial, found sifting through Flashdance videos.

Q: Which one of the Dilbert characters would you most like to see die?

A: One of my regular characters will die soon. You are the first to know.

Last year’s World Cup ad suggested that women abandoned by their football-obsessed husbands should come and spend some time with healthy alpine men. The ad for this year’s winter campaign suggests that Swiss ski instructors are hot enough to warrant a visit.

Sadly, I haven’t spotted any of these hotties on the streets of Zurich. Maybe I should go up to the mountains more often.

Dear Friend;

This message has been sent to you by a friend or a relative who has recently
disappeared along with millions and millions of people around the world.

The reason they chose to send you this letter is because they cared about you
and would like you to know the truth about where they went.

This may come as a shock to you, but the one who sent you this has been taken
up to heaven.

[...]

This quote is the beginning of the letter that raptureletters.com offers to send in your name to a non-believer of your choice, in the event of the Rapture.

If you wish to do something now that will help your unbelieving friends and family after the rapture, you need to add those persons email address to our database. Their names will be stored indefinitely and a letter will be sent out to each of them on the first Friday after the rapture. Then they will receive another letter every friday after that.

This rapture letter service is FREE and will hopefully gain the person you send it to an eternity in heaven.

That’s right: eternal spam. An updated version of eternal damnation that you can enjoy directly from your iPhone, intermingled with your Twitter updates!

(via I blame the patriarchy)

In German, Bavaria is called Bayern. It is the biggest German region. It is like the Texas of Germany.

The Secretplaces.com map:

Compare with a better map (from www.map-of-spain.co.uk):

(found via Abundando)

But if you are looking for something more useful, you can use Google Calculator. Simply enter the calculation you want to compute in the search box. It has lots of useful operators and recognizes most common constants and units, and can do unit conversion, among other things. If you are using Firefox this becomes specially useful, as you can use the Firefox search box as a calculator. For example, input 2004 in hex in the search box, press enter and, voila! 2 004 = 0x7D4. Neat.

There was a Young Lady of Sweden,
Who went by the slow train to Weedon;
When they cried, ‘Weedon Station!’
She made no observation
And ended up back in Sweden

(limerick by Winston Whatmore)

(link)

According to the FAQ, “Email Roulette is the finest form of email entertainment to hit the net since spam. Whether you’re seeking new online friends or have just had a few too many beers, this is the place for you.”

The idea is simple: send an e-mail to a random receiver. Of course, to receive or send a roulette you must sign up first, and spam sending through the Roulette is not tolerated. You don’t have to send any roulettes if you don’t want to, and the traffic is not too high (I get about one e-mail every two weeks, on average).

For me the fun part is receiving ‘surprise’ e-mails from complete strangers. The content of the e-mails ranges from political questions to simple greetings, depending on the user who sent the roulette. You have the real address of the sender, and can choose to reply or not.

Today I got a roulette with a request for a joke. As I could not remember any, I had to do a bit of research, and came up with this:

A: Knock, knock.
B: Who’s there?
A: Recursive.
B: Recursive who?
A: Knock, knock…

(from the blog InsultConsult)

Anyway, it seems that the Roulette population is slowly diminishing, which takes most of the fun out of the game, as the number of e-mails decreases. So, if you like surprises and e-mail games, join the e-mail roulette! It is free, fun, and easy as pie.

In Monday’s tirade, Pyongyang’s diplomatic spokesman called Bush “an idiot, an ignorant, a tyrant and a man-killer.”

“Bush’s assumption of office turned a peaceful world into a pandemonium unprecedented in history, as it is plagued with a vicious circle of terrorism and war,” continued the statement. “The president’s aides and allies are a typical gang of political gangsters.”

The spokesman concluded darkly that the U.S. president was “a bad guy.”

In the mind of Ana Ulin, it’s always Ann Coulter’s fault. Ana Ulin’s duplicity was execrable. It was malignant. It was Jazzercized. But I understate. One of the internecine Islamists, Ana Ulin mischaracterizes Joe Lieberman. “Maybe we could get Iraq straightened out first,” she said. No, no, it is unthinkable to these degenerate Islamists that American force is a force for good.

But maybe it is not accurate to refer to R. Robot as a “he”. R. Robot is a rhetoric simulator written in Perl and feeding the results into a Movable Type blog engine.

So anyone can go to R. Robot’s weblog and push the “Detect liberal media bias” button to automatically produce a new blog entry in real time (all entries have a consistent strong “anti-liberal” bias). You can also input a name, as I did with mine, to make it appear in the entry. There is a warning: “Warning: Entering your friend’s name may lead to unflattering Google results.” I should have know.