Hulleye Comes By!

The acclaimed critic of U.S. foreign policy, Noam Chomsky, analyzes Bush’s current political troubles, the war on Iraq, and what’s really behind the global ‘war on terror’ in this interview by Geov Parrish at Alternet. If you haven’t heard or read of Chomsky, shame on you.

You’ve been tracking U.S. wars of foreign aggression since Vietnam, and now we’re in Iraq. Do you think there’s any chance in the aftermath, given the fiasco that it’s been, that there will be any fundamental changes in U.S. foreign policy? And if so, how would it come about?

Well, there are significant changes. Compare, for example, the war in Iraq with 40 years ago, the war in Vietnam. There’s quite significant change. Opposition to the war in Iraq is far greater than the much worse war in Vietnam. Iraq is the first war I think in the history of European imperialism, including the U.S., where there was massive protest before the war was officially launched. In Vietnam it took four or five years before there was any visible protest. Protest was so slight that nobody even remembers or knows that Kennedy attacked South Vietnam in 1962. It was a serious attack. It was years later before protest finally developed.

What do you think should be done in Iraq?

Well, the first thing that should be done in Iraq is for us to be serious about what’s going on. There is almost no serious discussion, I’m sorry to say, across the spectrum, of the question of withdrawal.

Keep reading. Trust me it’s worth it.

Digital cinema expert Patrick Von Sychowski says:

This short film, described as ‘[u]ndoubtedly the most obscure and esoteric animated film ever produced by the Disney empire”, recently re-surfaced on several P2P networks. I’m sure that it won’t be getting a two-disc Disney DVD Collector’s Edition treatment anytime soon.

Snip from description:

Walt Disney’s The Story Of Menstruation — Presenting the Story of Menstruation. A Walt Disney Production Through the Courtesy of Kotex Products — was originally delivered to the International Cellu-Cotton Company on October 18, 1946. It runs approximately ten minutes. It has been estimated that the film has been seen by approximately ninety-three million American women. Neither sexuality nor reproduction is mentioned in this influential film, and an emphasis on sanitation makes it, as Disney historian Jim Korkis has suggested: ‘a hygienic crisis rather than a maturational event.’

Schoolgirls in the 1950s were shown ‘educational’ films, such as ‘Figure Forum’ and ‘Facts About Your Figure’ (made by the Warner Brassiere Company) and it helped create ‘needs’ for such things as foundation support, cosmetics, and a variety of ’sanitary’ products in young girls as early as eleven years old.

IMDB Link, and here is a larger jpeg composite of 7 stills from the movie.

via BB

You figure that in today’s day and age with computers and mathematicians, this would have been figured out a lot sooner.

Elevator company Fujitec America has installed a new elevator system in Seattle’s Metropolitan Park West Tower that groups riders together based on their shared destination. According to the company, you may wait a bit longer for the elevator but your overall time spent getting to your desired floor will be reduced. From the Cincinnati Enquirer:

Self-standing and wall-mounted kiosks with touch screens are installed in common areas where elevator passengers wait. Passengers enter their destination floor on the touch screen.

The requests are processed, and a message is displayed informing users to ride a specific car.

“In a conventional system, waiting passengers crowd into the first available elevator, which often results in the car stopping at numerous floors, increasing travel time,” said Joe Rennekamp, vice president of engineering at Fujitec’s corporate offices in Lebanon.

In time, the new Fujitec system becomes even more efficient at grouping passengers by learning elevator-use patterns, said Rennekamp…