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.

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.