One of my favorite parts of having a web­site sta­tis­tics soft­ware for this site like Mint, is that I get to see all of the weird searches that people do. For instance, I can see that ear­lier today, some­body came to this page on my site by search­ing for “1997 st. pauli girl poster”. Noth­ing weird about that. The funny part though is the that the domain of the person search­ing ends in usdoj.gov. It appears as though the US Depart­ment of Jus­tice is inter­ested in one par­tic­u­lar St. Pauli Girl.

This past week I’ve been fin­ish­ing up read­ing Noam Chom­sky’s latest book, Failed States. I have had to slog through most of the book because it gen­er­ally tends to be an over­whelm­ingly depress­ing read. Such is the nature of read­ing between the lines of US for­eign policy.

The part of the book that really inter­ested me (and kept me read­ing) was the the last chap­ter on “Democracy Pro­mo­tion at Home.” This is def­i­nitely the best sec­tion of the book. I have often in the past resigned myself to being a hope­less rad­i­cal left­ist; a person whose social and polit­i­cal ideals will prob­a­bly never even come to fruition in the United States (or per­haps even into pop­u­lar dis­course). There was how­ever one survey of US pop­u­lar opin­ion cited by Chom­sky that gave me hope. The survey was con­ducted by the Pro­gram on Inter­na­tional Policy Atti­tudes (PIPA) and titled The Fed­eral Budget: the Public’s Pri­or­i­ties.

In the study, con­ducted in March 2005, people were asked an array of ques­tions about how they would change the pro­posed budget allo­ca­tion. There are sev­eral amaz­ing con­clu­sions can be drawn from the survey:

1. There is a very broad agree­ment that the mil­i­tary budget should be cut (on aver­age by 31%)
2. There is a con­sen­sus that much more money should be allo­cated to social programs
3. The actual budget is essen­tially the oppo­site of pop­u­lar opinion.

The full report in PDF format is avail­able on the web­site. Here are some illus­tra­tive charts culled from the report.

Over­all win­ners and losers in the budget changes:

Changes in social spend­ing:

Changes in envi­ron­men­tal spend­ing:

That last one astounded me. Here are the sur­veys find­ing results on that point:

By far the largest increase in per­cent­age terms was for con­serv­ing and devel­op­ing renew­able energy. This amount was increased $24 bil­lion, from $2.2 bil­lion to $26.2 billion—an extra­or­di­nary increase of 1090%. This was also the area increased by the largest majority—70%.

Per­haps there is hope after all.

Yesterday’s New York Times ran a brief pro­file on America’s Next Top Model con­tes­tant Heather Kuzmich, who has Asperger’s Syn­drome. This arti­cle is pretty brief but inter­est­ing. I have watched sev­eral of the episodes this season and really enjoyed watch­ing Heather. Unfor­tu­nately, she was voted off the show last week for [wait for it], her inef­fec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills. It’s kind of like that other season (insert number here) when there was a con­tes­tant in the top three that was a little bit short. The judges highly insight­ful com­ments every week would be some­thing to the effect of “We like you…but you’re short.” Thanks Cap­tain Obvious.

The deliv­ery of this is fantastic.

Via I Am Seb.