] Claire Buchan, a White House spokeswoman, said the
] administration has already looked into ways to compensate
] for future crunches on resources, pointing to a 2002
] White House appointed commission that advocated phasing
] out Social Security options for younger workers while
] allowing retired and near-retired persons to keep their
] benefits.

Social Security is a wealth redistribution system. Admit it. Thats what it is. When it started it was, on a demographic basis, taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor. The reason its going to fail is that, on a demographic basis, its now stealing money from the poor and giving it to the rich. We ought to accept that its a wealth redistribution system and run it like one. You ought to get it only if you need it, and it ought to suck just enough that most people won't want it. I'm all for raising the amount of money one can put in tax deferred personal savings accounts if we can do that without bankrupting the government. However, the path to fixing social security is to see it for what it is and run it appropriately. In order to do that the people making decisions about it are going to have to agree to cut their own potential income. For the most part, politics doesn't work that way. So if you're between the ages of 20 and 40, prepare to get fucked, because you are the smallest generational demographic, and thus you have the smallest amount of democratic political power. You will witness the very definition of tyranny of the majority in your lifetime.

Good news -- and bad -- for baby boomers, says AARP

] Since the system went into place last September at the
] new elementary school here in Cambodia's remote northeast
] corner, solar panels have been powering three computers.
] Once a day, an Internet "Motoman" rides a cherry red
] Honda motorcycle slowly past the school. On the passenger
] seat is a gray metal box with a short fat antenna. The
] box holds a wireless Wi-Fi chip set that allows the
] exchange of e-mail between the box and computers.
] Briefly, this schoolyard of tree stumps and a
] hand-cranked water well becomes an Internet hot spot.
]
] It is a digital pony express: five Motomen ride their
] routes five days a week, downloading and uploading
] e-mail. The system, developed by a Boston company, First
] Mile Solutions, uses a receiver box powered by the
] motorcycle's battery. The driver need only roll slowly
] past the school to download all the village's outgoing
] e-mail and deliver incoming e-mail. The school's computer
] system and antenna are powered by solar panels. Newly
] collected data is stored for the day in a computer
] strapped to the back of the motorcycle. At dusk, the
] motorcycles converge on the provincial capital, Ban Lung,
] where an advanced school is equipped with a satellite
] dish, allowing a bulk e-mail exchange with the outside
] world.

Rural Cambodia, Though Far Off the Grid, Is Finding Its Way Online

] Artists get a full 50% of the purchase price. And unlike most record labels,
] our artists keep the rights to their music.
]
] Founded by musicians, for musicians.
]
] No major label connections.
]
] We are not evil.

Awesome!!

Magnatune: try before you buy MP3 music.

] But while the U.S. economy ekes forward, then slips back,
] the Korean and Chinese economies are growing some twice
] as fast. While the U.S. pretends to have a stock market
] resurgence--the figment of a commendably reflated
] dollar--Korea and China are undergoing real equity
] expansions

Check out South Korea Index:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=EWY&t=5y&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=

Forbes.com: Korean Broadband Explosion

] Believe it or not, the following projections are made by
] an advisory service whose 2004 target for the Dow Jones
] Industrials Average is 9,400 -- some 1,200 points below
] where it closed on Tuesday.

Value Line's forecast for the Dow in 2004

Instead, it was a lesser-known HBO program, Da Ali G. Show, that infiltrated a black-tie Nashville Opera fund-raiser last week at Loews Vanderbilt Hotel. In the show, British actor Sacha Baron Cohen adopts several different personas to goof on people. To target the opera fund-raiser, Cohen turned into the character of Borat, a naive TV reporter from Kazakhstan.

British actor Sacha Baron Cohen in Nashville

] What is fascinating is that before filing the defence
] brief, the prosecutor, that is the general counsel's
] office at the US Defence Department, approved it. As they
] are employees of the military, the department would have
] had to approve the press conference held on Wednesday by
] Mori and the others.

The DOD is trying to be a nice guy now that it is about a month or two from getting its ass handed to it in the Supreme Court.

A legal black hole in Cuba threatens to suck in some precious rights - www.smh.com.au

Wild lays the smack down:

] Inside the United States, where the war began, we
] must continue to give homeland security and law
] enforcement personnel every tool they need to defend
] us, the president said, noting that key provisions
] of the Patriot Act were set to expire next year.
]
] The terrorist threat will not expire on that
] schedule, he told lawmakers. Our law
] enforcement needs this vital legislation to protect our
] citizens. You need to renew the Patriot Act."

Fuck you Ashcroft. We are not interested in more Patriot Act. We do not live in the middle east. We live in America. We have rights and civil liberties built by our forefathers. You strip those from us and leave us with only what our forefathers would be rolling in their grave to learn about. You are not making me safer from terrorism by reading my bank account statemets without court concent but by dropping bombs on tents where terrorist reside. Also, you are not providing due process to those terrorist that reside in the United States. You only lock them up and throw away the key. Why not show the world our court system and due process and what happens to people/groups that carry out evil deeds.

Let the Patriot Act die is deserved death and bring on the guns and bombs where the real war of terrorism is fought.

MSNBC - Bush makes case for second term

] The United States is overextended, not just militarily
] but economically. We are trying to do too much, borrow
] too much, spend too much, and sooner or later we will
] have to suffer the consequences. We are a country in the
] beginning stages of what can best be described as
] hegemonic decay. Empires take decades if not centuries to
] wither, a process more clearly viewed through a rearview
] mirror; Edward Gibbon's masterful account of the decline
] and fall of the Roman Empire is perhaps the greatest
] example of this truth. But here and now, we're much less
] inclined to Gibbon's viewpoint than we are to Alfred E.
] Newman's. "What, we worry?" is pretty much the national
] motto when it comes to our finance-based economy and its
] future prospects.

Another major investment guru weighs in on the trade deficit.

What, We Worry? Yes. (washingtonpost.com)

] I've done nothing basically because the environment is so
] binary (and all these trades are different expressions of
] the same view) that I feel no compunction to rush into
] anything, especially in the shorting-stocks department.
]
] I would rather be late to that party than early, since
] it's so clear to me that when stocks go down next time,
] they're going to go down for real. I anticipate that we
] will see a huge decline, with the major averages falling
] over 50%.

Yikes!

If 2004 goes bad, it will go really bad