Going anywhere, doing anything, we leave a trail of 'our unique bacteria'.  And yes, law enforcement has discovered we leave a 'germ print' as useful as our fingerprints.

This is the first de facto USA flag, red with a white canton.

The 1636 Massachusetts colony agreed they had the right to any flag they wanted.

Without exception, they voted to remove the cross.

The 1780 Seal of the State of Massachusetts carried the inscription:

Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem
By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty

From the 'if folks truly understood' department, the first flag of Canada is also the first flag of North America. Neither use heraldry nor religion.

How long did it take to build?
It took me three days. I built it on an old computer I had in my bedroom.

Then what happened?
I showed it to my friends and they criticized it; they asked why anyone would want to use it. So I went onto a few forums and asked people to try the site, and I got 20 people to try it.

How many users do you have now?
Well, after the initial 20 users the site doubled and it continued to double every day since then. Last month I saw 30 million unique visitors come to the Web site and one million new people visit each day. It continues to multiply and I just couldn’t stop it from growing.

What were you thinking while this was happening?
I woke up one morning and checked my computer and saw all of these news articles about Chatroulette. I yelled to Mom to come and look at my computer. At first she was very nervous, but she doesn’t really understand it very well and asked me why I’m not going to school.

"Trading anonymity for accountability has led to radically improved conversations. … A lot less antagonism and a lot more thoughtfulness and general politeness."

Integrate identification.

NakedCapitalism:

Why aren’t our government “leaders” talking about slashing the military-industrial complex, which is ruining our economy with unnecessary imperial adventures?

And why aren’t any of our leaders talking about stopping the permanent bailouts for the financial giants who got us into this mess? And see this.

And why aren’t they taking away the power to create credit from the private banking giants – which is costing our economy trillions of dollars (and is leading to a decrease in loans to the little guy) – and give it back to the states?

If we did these things, we wouldn’t have to raise taxes or cut core services to the American people.

The Bush years and Republican outsourcing.

What about these contractors?

About 7.6 million people earned their paycheck through federal government contracts in 2005, a 50 percent increase since 2002.

In 2000, federal spending on all government contracts was $208 billion rising to $457 billion by 2007.

And their lobbyists?

The Washington Post reports that the number of registered lobbyists in Washington doubled between 2000 and 2005, to nearly 35,000.

Six of ten richest counties and twelve of the top 25 richest counties are around Washington DC. In one county alone, there are:

1. 183,900 worth between $2 million and $10 million;
2. 24,887 worth between ten and fifty million;
3. 7,200 'really rich' between a 100 and 500 million;
4. 500 tycoons, lobbyists, lawyers, owners worth about a billion.

New York City has rolled 350 carts loaded with fresh, local vegetables into its food deserts.

I was talking to myself while reading this that if you were Howard Hughes you would want to hire a writer exactly like the writer that knew his job the way this writer knows and if you were Howard Hughes somebody should tell you there's a writer you want:

"But. I cannot figure out from the release or from press coverage very much of how the process, identified as potentially useful for batteries with an energy density far higher than anything we have now, works and what’s left after it works or how one would throttle such a thing.

"Science writers, in addition to the nose for nonsense, hype, and scam that any reporter needs if he or she is worth a paycheck, need to work particularly hard at sheer explanation. That’s our added value – ability to boil the technical jargon and concepts of biology or physics or chemistry that terrify most reporters and reduce it to reasonably simple English. Throw in some narrative on the discovery process and its context you have a story.

"If a phenomenon is new to science or merely to the layman, this means taking the reader inside the genomes or stellar cores or combustion chambers or atoms and molecules and widgetry to provide a sense, however shielded in metaphor and simile, of what in tarnation is supposedly going on.

"Sometimes it’s almost impossible. But in this case it seems doable, even on deadline. This did not, it appears, get much pickup in mass media. Where it did, there is heat but little light.

Yo. The story might or might not be important. But p-p-please notice the writer, Charlie Petit, offers no shuck.

True Slant:

Congressmen spend between 5 and 7 hours a day on the phone begging for money.

And by the way, when you’re a freshmen, you have to fill out sheets of everybody you call, and how much money per hour, and they have coaches that teach you how to get more money from each one of your phone calls, and who to call, and what data points to have on them to tickle them to make them more apt to give you money.

It is out of control.

And it’s legalized.

AP's Science Writer says, "Not more quakes, just more people in quake zones".

"Tectonically, the Earth is up to no particular mischief", says MIT's Charlie Petit.