Fables of the reconstruction

Witness the Firepower of This Fully Operational Battle Station

What not to say to Darth Vader at the Imperial water cooler.

Also, a few hasty notes jotted while channeling the Force:

20050427

It's Christmas On Hoth    

Big day.  Storming the rebel ice fortress.

Took a nap first so I would be peppy. Leg feels pretty good. 

Admiral Ozzol took the fleet out of hyerspace too close to Hoth, and the Rebel Alliance were -- you guessed it -- alerted to our approach. The cornerstone of Ozzel's arrogance is his insistence that rebel technology is so vastly inferior to Imperial technology that we need broker no caution.

This attitude is typical of a man who could not rephase his own fusion orb if his life depended on it. 

 

Stooping to Their Level

Belle Waring:

Look, my country is better than this. Or this. Just. Stop.

I know I’ve related this before on my own blog, but my grandfather was an OSS spy in WWII. In one of the letters he sent home to my grandmother he describes how he met up with US ground troops who had just taken a French village controlled by a particularly awful German captain. He relates how his first impluse was to beat the shit out of the guy, knowing what he did about what the man had done. But he just gave him a cigarette instead. I don’t remember exactly what he said in the letter, but it was basically that the German was surprised at his mild reception, and my grandfather told him that was what happened when you were taken prisoner by Americans, and that we were better than them, better by a long shot. Anyone who thinks Osama bin Laden is more of a threat to the US than the Axis is welcome to come to East Hampton to get hit on the head with a lead pipe by my grandpa. He’s still pretty spry. Also, just stop.

Just remember, being a fundamentalist and nationalist is not the same thing as being a good person or a patriot. Often, they're opposites.

What Day Is It?

I had quite a weekend, demonstrated by the fact that it's Tuesday and I am just getting around to posting.

Went up to Brooklyn on Friday night and met up with Prof. Bitch, who was in town for the Blog Sheroes thing.  Just a few years ago, I went to Brooklyn all the time, so it was nice to go back.  We went out for good Mexican food in Park Slope with Bitch's sister-in-law.  It's only a couple hour drive, so I got back here around 3-4 a.m.

Saturday, a friend of mine and I decided it had been too long since we had just gone out drinking, and it would be a while before we really got the opportunity again, so we did that.  Unfortunately, it started pelting down rain just as we were about to go out, so we had to wait for it to slow down, and drank a bottle of wine while we waited.  Finishing that, we noticed the rain had stopped, so we proceeded to hit four different bars in about 4 hours, during which time we lost our judgment completely.  I won't go into the details, but we were ... silly ... in public and just out of control by the time we got home.  I had forgotten just how comfy a floor was when you're really drunk.  Very comfy.  Let's just draw a veil of silence over the rest.

Speaking of stupid things, I recently was re-introduced to the limits of my mathematical abilities by the Monte Hall Problem.  Here's the basic statement of the problem:

In the show, a contestant was given a choice of three doors of which one contained a prize.  The other two doors contained gag gifts like a chicken or a donkey.  After the contestant chose an initial door, the host of the show then revealed an empty door among the two unchosen doors, and asks the contestant if he or she would like to switch to the other unchosen door.  The question is should the contestant switch.

So, I was adamant that it made no difference whether the contestant switched doors or not.  I reasoned that after one of the "wrong" doors was opened, then there was one prize door and one gag gift door left.  I thought there was no reason to believe that the door the contestant chose was more or less likely to be the prize door, so the odds were even and therefore there was no reason to switch. 

Of course, the correct answer is that the contestant should always switch doors.  It drove me insane until I had read several explanations.  The one I found most understandable is below the fold.

I'll Make The Obvious Joke

Bigger than the Beatles.

Achewood

It's uneven, occasionally veering into silly, but often throws up gems.

DeLay Career Deathwatch

Poor Bugman:

Retreating under pressure, Republicans on the House ethics committee said Wednesday they were ready to open an investigation into allegations of wrongdoing against Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

Four of the five Republicans on the committee were ready to move ahead, said Rep. Doc Hastings, the panel's Republican chairman. The panel also has five Democratic members.

Losing a Good One

Jim Jeffords is not running for re-election.

Bury That Joke

Guess who is still blogging:

Thursday, April 07, 2005
Update from heaven
This place is awesome. Why didn't you guys let me come here 15 years ago?

You Can't Slander The Dead, But You Can Try

Two bios:

Marla Ruzicka (December 31, 1976 – April 16, 2005) was an American Green activist and aid worker who was killed by a car bomb blast in Baghdad.

Cori Dauber is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies (and of Peace, War, and Defense) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is also a Research Fellow at the Triangle Institute for Security Studies.

Cori Dauber, in addition to being a professor of communications (with peace, war and defense thrown in for good measure)  is also a right-wing blogger.  In a post titled "Let Us Not Speak Ill of the Dead", Dauber ignored her own admonition and noted the death on Saturday of Marla Ruzicka by putting scare quotes around "humanitarian" and "aid worker", and writing:

What, precisely, she did of a practical nature in either Afghanistan or Iraq is left somewhat vague, besides caring an enormous amount, and organizing. Were food, or medical supplies, or school supplies, ever actually found, dispursed [sic], distributed? If so, it isn't mentioned. But, boy, did she care, with tireless energy, and she made sure the civilian victims of war knew she was there caring -- and that "we" were sorry.

But, boy, did she care. The sarcasm drips and burns like acid.  What, precisely, of a practical nature, has Cori Dauber done in regard to civilian victims of war?  Encouraged the creation of a few, perhaps.  Worse than someone who went to Afghanistan and Iraq without the desire to kill people.  But she thinks the MSM hid the late Ms. Ruzicka's light:

Why the reluctance to say she was a leftist in the pieces tonight? She clearly didn't shy away from that in life -- in fact she took pride in her beliefs. Why deny them to her in death?

But, boy, did she care. It's very important to get Ruzicka's political affiliation down, you see.  Why?  To attack Ruzicka with, silly blog reader.  Not directly, of course; Dauber denies any such intention.  But if political affiliation were such an important thing to know, I would expect Prof. Dauber to call for the revelation of the political affiliation of every American killed in the Magnificent War Against Terror and Its Liberal Sympathizers. Strangely, a cursory review of Dauber's archives reveals no such call.  Except in Ruzicka's case. 

But, boy, did she care. Then Dauber used Ruzicka's death to accuse the media of making inflammatory accusations that the U.S. military is lying through its teeth about not keeping records on civilian casualties in Iraq.  Not that the U.S. military has ever lied about such things before.  And then she accused journalists in Iraq of hiding the fact that they knew and liked Ruzicka and her work on behalf of her NGO, which calls into question how unbiased the coverage of her death is.

But, boy, did she care. The net effect, as usual, is that Dauber conjures up a liberal, America-hating media-NGO conspiracy from the death of a woman who lost her life trying to help people.

And that, in short, is the mentality of the right today.

Verizon DSL Goes Does Not Go Naked

On Monday, according to Slashdot, Verizon announced that DSL customers in the old Bell Atlantic/NYNEX area of the Northeast can drop their phone service and just subscribe to DSL, if they wish, called "naked DSL".  This move tacitly acknowledges that cable high-speed internet and VOIP are putting pressure on them, especially, I would bet, Comcast's announced speed increase.  I can't wait for Philly to push Wi-Fi or Wi-Max out to everyone, so we can smack both Verizon and Comcast upside the head.

If you have no idea what I'm babbling about, ignore me. As usual.

Update: I just called them to drop my telephone service.  Hilariously, despite the fact that corporate announced it yesterday and it's all over the news, they had neglected to tell anyone in customer service.  So, you know, the people who have to implement this have no idea how to drop my telephone service without dropping the DSL, too.  But they have stopped billing me for it while they figure it out.  Is this just typical for the management of Verizon , or is the fact that they didn't have a communication plan proof that competitors stampeded them into it?

Update 4/20/2005:  Um, turns out they're not offering naked DSL, according to these guys.  There's nothing on the Verizon website at all, so who knows.  I guess I'll switch to cable modem after all.

Big Brother Is A Delaware LLC

Go ahead.  Enter your name.  See what people can find out about you.

Where Are All The Female Bloggers? Laughing Their Asses Off

Shelley at Burningbird is gobsmacked by a certain university president:

“I’m aware of the behavior, Larry. But what causes it?”

He beamed at me, patted me on my head and chucked me under the chin. “Why honey, it’s because the male brain is wired for linking!”

I’ll have to admit, I was taken aback by Larry’s response. I mean, it didn’t make sense that a guy’s brain could be better able to handle linking, especially since women also use the link.

Her bartender clears it up for her:

She leaned closer to me, even though no one else was in the place.

“You see, guys see links as an extension of themselves. ”

Extensions of themselves? Extensions? Slowly, understanding dawned.

“You mean…”

“You always were a bright girl, mores the pity.” She said, winking at me. “You got it in one. To you and me, a link is just a link. To a guy, however, a link is something special, a part of himself. The most,um, important part of himself.”

Time for plain speaking. “Mags, are you telling me that guys equate links with their dicks?”

You want a link, baby?  You want some linky love?

The whole thing's a good chuckle.

(Via the eminent and ineluctable Dr. Prof. Bitch, who reportedly gets plenty of nasty link love already.)

The Pretty Girl Comes to Philly

And hooks up very close to my place.

Transformative Sex

Ezra Klein likes this column by David Brooks.  Ezra writes:

[Brook's column is] a perfectly sound meditation on the paradoxical relationship between an increasingly sexual culture and a decreasingly sexual youth that doesn't pivot into insane ravings in the last paragraph.

In the column, Brook says:

As the entertainment media have become more sex-saturated, American teenagers have become more sexually abstemious.

Brooks then gives a list of stats which show or purport to show declining sexual activity among teenagers.  I had originally intended to dig into the stats, but then I got to the CDC website, saw the huge PDF documents with hundreds of charts, and decided to junk the serious analysis and just go for the easy snark.  As usual. 

What Brooks is after is support for his "innately conservative" thesis about American society; i.e., Americans are basically all Puritans, no matter what we say.   I have no idea if kids today are sexually less active.  My instinct is that there is at least some education that is getting kids to use condoms more regularly, and also a fair bit of lying to people doing research, due to the onerous propaganda put out by the fundies.  In other words, I bet that on one hand, the data doesn't support Brooks thesis (more kids using condoms is not conservative) and on the other hand, the data is wrong. 

Brooks says:

American pop culture may look trashy, but America's social fabric is in the middle of an amazing moment of improvement and repair.

By improvement, Brooks means less sex is being had.  That's really the bottom line for right-wingers: fewer people enjoying themselves is better.  And in fact fewer people may be having sex today, thanks in part to the anti-sex brigade, but even if so, I don't think what's happening is consistent with Brook's thesis that American youth are becoming more conservative about sex.

Kids that I do know - very intelligent, well-educated, if not all well-off - all seem to have a much more knowledgeable, mature attitude to sex that was not common when I was growing up.  I don't know many teenagers, so my sample is skewed.  If they aren't going out and getting sloshed and having random sex as frequently, perhaps that's because they don't feel compelled to get drunk as an excuse for sex.  They're picking their shots because they don't have a better handle on the difference between sex and love, and they like both, just not necessarily from the same people.  Or at the same time.  I think the new maturity young people display, despite the efforts of the anti-sex crowd's, is largely due to the information and conversation available on the web. If you're middle-class and came of age since 1992, there has been no time you have not been able to flirt, make arrangements for sex, discuss sex or look at porn in complete anonymity.  That ability has had nothing but an unalloyed good effect on the lives of young people, as it gave them the tools to find out and figure out what is what much more quickly.

Brooks says:

[I]t's becoming clear that we are seeing the denouement of one of the longest and increasingly boring plays on Broadway, the culture war.  ... [T]oday's young people appear not to have taken a side in this war; they've just left it behind. For them, the personal is not political. Sex isn't a battleground in a clash of moralities.

Put starkly like that, it is clear to me that Brooks is wrong.  He hopes that young people have absorbed some religiously-based personal conservatism, a new prudery.  I don't think so.  But whether he is right or I am, or we're both wrong, it's impossible for people to separate their attitude towards sex from their political views.  If kids are more prudish today, as Brooks says, then that will have an impact on their views of things like women's reproductive rights and sex ed in the schools.   If they are more enlightened, as I believe, they will want to see the knowledge and self-determination that they enjoyed spread to others.  The personal is not always the political, but when it comes to sex, it is. 

Gonzales: Apparently Not As Bad As Ashcroft

TalkLeft writes that Attorney General Gonzales met with the ACLU's executive director Anthony Romero on Wednesday.

In itself, a meeting is nothing.  But it's better than Ashcroft, who refused to meet with the ACLU throughout his entire tenure.  When the chief law enforcement officer refuses to even talk to the largest and oldest civil liberties organization in the country, you know things are bad.

Paperless

This year for the first time I filed my taxes entirely over the web.  I used TaxAct and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's site, both free.  (The IRS has a list of other free filing sites out there, too.)  That left me with PDF versions of my returns on my computer.

Now, I am going to scan the forms and receipts and destroy the originals.  To make it complete, someday I want them to send me the W-2 and 1099s and such via email.  Even better, the software should be able to pull the information into the return automatically for me.

British Intelligence Has Learned It's As Stupid As Its American Cousin

Bumble, bumble.

I Wonder How This Can Be Blamed on Lawyers?

Sometimes a nice chart of numbers is all the commentary on something you need:

See that? We spend much, much more per person on health care.  Yet our life expectancy is lower and infant mortality rates are higher. 

As Atrios noted earlier this week, our governmental expenditures on health care exceed the spending of all those other countries on the chart, on a per capita basis.  That is, neglect all the health care spending through company health plans and neglect all the health care spending by uninsured individuals, and take just the amount that the federal, state and local governments spend on health care, and divide by the total number of Americans.  That number is still more than the per capita number from each of the "socialized medicine" countries (where the government spending is effectively all of the health care spending).  And yet our whole bloated, fucked-up, for-profit system produces worse results.

The chart above is by Kash at Angry Bear, who is doing a series of posts on health care.  Read two and come back in the morning.

Filter

(Naomi Harris via David Pescovitz at BoingBoing.)

Inefficient Market Hypothesis, or, How to Win Over The Geeks

Sort of as a piece with this, the incisive Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon writes:

Most "libertarians" I know of are straight men who like to fuck without making babies and therefore oppose the wingnut push to legislate the bedroom. But they don't oppose it in any meaningful way, such as supporting politicians who, you know, agree with their beliefs about personal freedom. Instead, they keep supporting wingnuts and relying on liberals to do their fighting for their civil rights for them.

And the worst part is that "libertarians" count on liberals for a good reason--we're not going to quit fighting for their civil rights just so they can learn a valuable lesson about laying down with wingnut dogs and waking up with Jeebus fleas. A part of me is touched by their faith that we liberals, with the help of the courts, can protect their rights. But now the power-hungry wingnuts are in power, and they seem dead set on taking away the protections that we all, libertarians included, enjoy. Not that I expect my warnings to make any difference, but I can enjoy a pre-emptive "I told you so".

I think what Amanda is missing here is that, in addition to fucking without reproducing, straight libertarian males also like people who Blow Shit Up.  Toughness is of a piece with the straight male libertarian ethos, usually because the adherents were beaten up in high school for being huge Star Trek nerds.  Joining the Republican Party and making scads of money in technology industries is their form of revenge, never mind that the Party is run by the same sort of jocky meatheads and alpha bitches who tormented them in their youth. 

As I've said elsewhere, and probably should have copyrighted, "High school never really ends, it just changes location."  Large chunks of human behavior can be explained by the desire for sex and status, and what happened to you in high school, which come to think of it, are all really the same thing.  For geeky white straight libertarian males, which without losing anything of importance can just be abbreviated to read "libertarians", high school was a painful mixture of a reality in which they were the lowest organism in every food chain and a private fantasy world in which they dominated everyone with their fierce, awe-inspiring intellects.  Today, these people blog and, in some high-functioning cases, teach law in Tennessee. 

The libertarian is thirsty for thrills and revenge, both of which were denied them in their adolescence, and only the Republican Party is set up to deliver them.  The GOP is the party of nuclear-tipped space-launched stealthy cruise missiles which can both swim and fly and can kill the intended target without mussing the hair of the people next to him, and only cost $100 billion a copy, never mind that they don't work.   The Democrats are the party of people who want to dismantle said missiles.  Not only that, but the Democrats are also the party of people of color, gay and lesbian people, people who do not speak English, disabled people, and university professors - despised minorities all, which remind the libertarians too much of their younger selves.  They want to live in a fascist Heinleinian state, with lasers and hot chicks, or at least pretend they do, which for them from long habit is the same thing anyway.

What the Democratic Party must do is undercut the GOP's science-fiction-based comparative advantage.  First, it must promote the right candidates.  Ladies and gentlemen, consider Picard/Data '08.  Yes, yes, I know neither are eligible to the Presidency, on account of foreign birth and being fictional, but these are minor details that can be swept aside with a pliant press - after all, they didn't say anything when a man with the intelligence of a small woodland creature was twice elected President and then dragged the nation into war under the barest of flimsy excuses.  Second, we must transform ourselves into the party of Killer Robots That Can Blow Up Other Killer Robots With Lasers.  Our strategy will be to disperse the robot and laser factories in low-income areas of major cities, divert the funding from places like Alabama and some of those other states in the middle of the country - I can never remember their names - and then stream the video of "tests" of competing robot armies over the internet.  No one will be killed, there will be full employment and high-tech job training, and campaign contributions from tech companies will pour into Democratic hands.  The Republicans won't stand a chance.  It'll be a rout.

Dinner For One and a Half

(Via Sarcasmo.)

That's About Right

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Shotgun of Understanding. What's yours?.

NPR's On The Media

NPR's On the Media has been worth listening to recently. 

Today, Brooks Gladstone did a piece [all links that follow are streaming sound files] on the he-said-she-said journalism problem, offered media idiot John Stossel the chance to hang himself with his views on global warming, covered the proliferation of corporate video news releases, and Philadelphia's plan to provide universal wireless high-speed internet access.

It strikes me that these topics have all received extensive play on blogs.  If true, it's good to see topics that bloggers find important making their way back to the broadcast/cable media in a more constructive way than putting Assrocket on CNN.

And He's Watching TV

A real McDonald's ad from Austria:

If that doesn't make you want to scream, cry or break a few windows, you're a perfect Bush voter.

The Personal Is The Political

Maybe it's because I've been spending a lot of time with the cutest one-year-old in the world, but I think Prof. Bitch has written a wonderfully moving post on the woman who was her daycare provider: My other mom.

Usage Note

N.b.:  Using "humble" to describe yourself in a non-ironic way is instantly and completely self-refuting, similar to calling yourself "classy."

Goodnight, Liberal Media

I give you an ad running in the April 11, 2005 New Yorker:

I love the avaricious smile on the kid's face.

Republicans Want Rape Victims to Bear Their Rapist's Child

The First Amendment Center:

Republican Gov. Bill Owens yesterday vetoed a bill that would have forced hospitals to tell rape victims about emergency contraception, saying it would have crossed the line by forcing church-backed institutions to violate their own ethics guidelines.

"This bill would violate fundamental constitutional principles by forcing an institution to say things to patients that it explicitly does not believe to be morally or ethically valid," said Owens, a Roman Catholic who has campaigned on conservative values. ...

Timothy Dore, executive director of the Colorado Catholic Conference, said lawmakers had no business telling church hospitals they had to refer rape victims to clinics that would provide a morning-after pill.

"That was a cooperation with evil we could not tolerate," he said.

State Rep. Terrance Carroll, D-Denver, said Owens misconstrued the intent of the legislation.

"This was not about abortion, it was not about freedom, it was about women who were raped," he said.

Senate Minority Leader Mark Hillman, R-Burlington, said Democrats had tried to use their newly won majorities in the House and Senate to ram through social legislation and they failed. He said the bill would have had more support if it allowed institutions to opt out if they had moral objections.

"That's what they would have done if they cared about rape victims rather than flexing their muscles at the Catholic Church," Hillman said.

State Rep. Keith King, R-Colorado Springs, said any attempts to override the veto would fail. The measure passed 46-19 in the House and 22-13 in the Senate, with a number of Republicans crossing party lines to support it. It did not have enough support for the two-thirds vote needed in each house to override the veto.

"A cooperation with evil we could not tolerate"; I like that.  As if these pedophile-protecting, child-raping motherfuckers don't have vast experience cooperating with evil when it suits their purposes.  It's all about the power of the Catholic Church.  Don't tell them how to deliver medical care!  If they don't want to tell rape victims about EC, they don't have to.  If they don't want to prescribe birth control, you can't make their pharmacists do so.  Life!

Keep an eye on Gov. Owens, too.  That slimy, smarmy bastard - I have met him, I know - wants to be a Senator or President one day.

(Courtesy of His Most Royal Majesty King of Zembla.)

Cuts Both Ways

Let's not get too happy about this:

According to a new NBC/WSJ poll, one-third of the goddam Republicans in this country are counting on you [Democratic members of Congress] to stop Mr. Bush and his GOP colleagues from "going too far in pushing their agenda." Opposition to individual policies (Social Security, filibusters, immigration) tends to run even higher.

Yeah, at first, this seems like a good thing.  "See? Even a big chunk of Republicans support us!"  Except, they don't and they won't, and these numbers are a bad sign, not a good sign.

Americans have a dialectical model of politics.  They know that even if Party A takes position X, then Party B will take position D, and the two sides will fight it out.  Through some combination of merit, skill and power, a result is reached. 

Now, there is a good measure of magical thinking in this model.  Like the similar near-religious belief in the market, the outcome of this legislative process is viewed as inherently optimal, and all other results no more optimal, and possibly inferior.  When a Republican says he expects the Democrats in Congress to push back against his own party's excesses, he's merely expressing belief in this system.  A hope.  Like a sports fan, he wants to see a good game, but in the end, he wants his team to win. 

If the Democrats fail to stop the Congressional Republicans, do you imagine these voters are going to start voting Democrat?  No, they'll rationalize the result: "It's not so bad.  If it were, then the Democrats would have been able to stop it." 

Do you see how this is laziness on the part of the Republican rank-and-file?  Instead of taking the responsibility for checking their own party's ambitions, they leave it up to the other side.  Yes, their desire for the Democrats to do what they won't rises proportionately to their own level of discomfort with insane policies like Social Security deform and the nuclear option.  But discomfort is not opposition, and I see no reason to celebrate the fact that these infantilized bastards expect our side to do the work for them.

Department of Who The Fuck Are You Kidding?

NYTimes.com:

"As passionately as we all feel, especially about issues of life and death, the fact is that constitutional rule of law is a matter for serious and rational discussion," [Representative DeLay] said. "People on all sides of this debate need to approach the issue for what it is: a legitimate debate by people of good will trying to clarify the proper constitutional role of courts."

DeLay has a problem. (Alright, he has lots, but this is the one I want to discuss.) He can't not use the judicial-tyranny tool. He's committed. It's essential to the paranoid right-wing victim complex. But Tom reads the polls. (Tom can read!) He knows he is personally unappealing; his behavior in the Schiavo matter damaged him; the aftereffect lingers on in the coverage of the judge-bashing fest at which his remarks were delivered. So, instead of appearing live, he sends a tape. And he throws in "let's have a nice civil discussion while I rip your throat out."

Don't lose your balance trying to backpedal there, Tom. Oops!

Signifying Nothing

Cog at The Abstract Factory:

The fact is, Goldberg doesn't care in the least whether what he says is true and well-reasoned, and neither do his backers and readers. Goldberg's function is not to say things that are true, nor is his function to present a reasoned argument. Goldberg's function is to spew forth some roughly grammatical stream of words that appear to reinforce conservatarian ideology, so that his readers can listen, nod, and feel vindicated in their beliefs.

And --- this is what's really maddening, all the outrages I've brought up wouldn't matter in the least except for this point --- virtually all right-leaning commentators, running the gamut from David Brooks to Rush Limbaugh to Glenn Reynolds, whether consciously or not, perform roughly the same function, and they're wildly effective. The entire right-wing movement is like a hovercraft floating on the perpetually roaring whirlwind of sub-rational, self-reinforcing nonsense that gusts through the minds of its adherents. It goes on and on and on, and nobody stops the people who feed it; most of the time, nobody with a prominent voice even stands up to them and calls them on their nonsense. For writing this column, and numerous other pieces of garbage like it, for filling people's minds with offal, Jonah Goldberg will never face judgment; he'll die peacefully, with a fat bank account and a kid gloves obituary.

Right.  "The Mighty Wurlitzer" exists to produce sounds pleasing to the conservatarians, and to drown out words and music that might make them think.  Right-wing argument is the epitome of rationalization; they start with the desired result, and never leave there.  It puts me in mind of a toddler with a favorite toy.  No matter what arguments or facts are presented, they want what they want and they should have it because they want it.  It is somewhat admirable in its single-mindedness.  Other than that, it's a complete disaster for our country and for the world generally. 

(Via Julie Saltman.)

Counterfire From The Messenger

Athenae at First Draft unleashes a barrage:

Freedom isn't free, you miserable chickenshits. You cheer the war, you love the war, you love the troops, you support the troops. But to recognize their sacrifices would diminish your pleasure so you send the images away. You jackholes are the ones who are always bitching that the left "blames America first." You're the first to blame "the media," to blame "bias" when things don't look the way you saw them on the outside of the box. Why do you now blame the photographers who bring you images of the dead and wounded, of protest, conflict? Why don't you blame the terrorists? Why don't you go wave a little flag in the face all this carnage because certainly it's exactly the item you put your finger next to on the menu. THIS IS WHAT YOU WANTED. LOOK AT IT. Print out every single one of those photos and paper mama's basement with them, chickenhawks. Here's your war, in all its glory. Max your credit card out, because freedom isn't free.

You cocksuckers, if you didn't want to see the bill, you shouldn't have ordered the food. Quit taking out your anger on the waiter setting the check down in front of you. Schmucks.

I feel ya, as the kids say today. But we're talking about people who can rationalize Abu Grahib. They don't believe in evidence; they don't believe in facts; they don't possess shame. You can't shock them into realizing what they've done. You can only beat them.

War Crimes and Misdemeanors

Jeanne at Body and Soul notes an article listing some eerie parallels between the practices U.S. soldiers have used with impunity on prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan and the practices we locked up enemy soldiers for after World War II:

In the annals of law, the case of Masatomo Kikuchi is all but forgotten.

The former Japanese prison guard was tried by the Allies after World War II for war crimes. In 1947, a U.S. military commission, citing the Geneva Conventions and customary international law, convicted him of compelling prisoners of war to practice saluting and other military exercises for as long as 30 minutes when they were tired. His sentence: 12 years of hard labor.

Jeanne says:

Just try to imagine the warbloggers' reaction if an American were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for forcing Afghan or Iraqi prisoners to salute for 30 minutes when they were tired.

There is more. I guess the U.S. is lucky that the victors write the history.

Free As In You Get What You Pay For

Wired News:

Lately, it seems like almost every time you tune into your favorite Blogger-hosted blog ..., you find that the site is frozen in time. Or, there are multiple posts with identical content. Since Blogger, which is owned and operated by that sleek geek machine, Google, is a lot like a public utility, when it goes down, so do the lights on a large swatch of the blogosphere.

The result: a lot of irate netizens.

Well, yes.  If you've ever heard the word "bloggered", then you don't need to read the article.  Hint to tech execs: If the name of your product ever becomes a slang term for "broken", revisit your business plan.

So, what's the direction of the free blogging software world? 

Recently Yahoo! came out with Yahoo! 360, an invitation-only social-network thing with a blog utility.  Here's my Yahoo! 360 blog: http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-wMFAlLA8crLtKqOG2IQXcSNi.  See that url?  My, that'll be easy to tell my friends about.  See the plain ol' blog design?  You can't change it - all Y!360 blogs look the same.  And it doesn't allow trackbacks.  Okay, it's in beta and it hasn't ever, ever gone down in the whole 2 days I have been using it.  But still. 

I also read at Lifehacker about Blogsome, which is based on the popular software Wordpress.  Sounds like a good service - fully customizable design, easy to remember urls (http://mithras.blogsome.com/), and although no trackbacks yet, I'm sure they'll come.  The problem?  Well, I signed up for it this morning.  They have to email you the password to post to the site you create.  Waited a couple hours.  No email.  I again requested the password be sent to me.  Waited a couple hours.  No email.

Great.

My suggestion?  A basic typepad account is a measly $4.95 a month. 
 

Shaken, Not Purred

Sexy? Want to see more?

See here.

(From here.)

Hey, Orin Kerr, FYI

Washingtonpost.com:

The Justice Department is acknowledging for the first time that the FBI used a secret search warrant to copy and seize material -- including DNA samples -- from the home of Brandon Mayfield, a Portland, Ore., man who was wrongly arrested and jailed last year in connection with the March 2004 train bombings in Madrid.

In statements and testimony this week, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and other Justice officials have also said that some of the special powers used to spy on Mayfield were strengthened by the USA Patriot Act, the anti-terrorism law facing fresh scrutiny from Congress. ...

Mayfield, a convert to Islam, was arrested May 6 after the FBI concluded that his fingerprint was on a bag of detonators connected to the bombings two months earlier in Madrid, which killed nearly 200 people. He was freed two weeks later, after the FBI admitted it had bungled the fingerprint analysis. Mayfield is suing the federal government.

The Justice Department previously declined to confirm Mayfield's contention that his house had been ransacked in a covert search.

But in a March 24 letter to Mayfield, sent as part of the ongoing lawsuit, the department acknowledged that during clandestine searches of his home the FBI made copies of computer drives and documents, and that "ten DNA samples were taken and preserved on cotton swabs and six cigarette butts were seized for DNA analysis." Authorities took approximately 355 digital photographs.

Finally, the letter said, "Mr. Mayfield is also hereby notified that he was the target of electronic surveillance and other physical searches authorized pursuant to FISA" -- the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs such warrants and was expanded under the Patriot law.

This is an unusual case because we know about it. We will never know of most searches under the USA PATRIOT Act, because they're secret in perpetuity. PATRIOT search orders are accompanied by a lifetime global gag order. If you receive a PATRIOT search order you may not tell anyone ever that you have even received it or you go to jail. Such orders do not require a showing of probable cause.

I don't think I need to editorialize on how bad an idea it is to let the government search you and seize your records, your files, and your DNA without showing probable cause and without allowing you the opportunity to protest.

The title of this post refers to Orin Kerr, a regular contributor to The Volokh Conspiracy, who has repeatedly challenged people to come up with one - even one! - instance of PATRIOT being abused. Given the gag orders, of course, Kerr's challenge is extreme hackery. Par for the Volokh course. But now we have at least one case, and I expect Kerr to begin spinning it as fast as possible: "It's only one case! And it's not an abuse of the Constitution! You must love terrorists!"

Yadda yadda.

Professor Canute

Bitch, Ph.D.:

But for the record, the lefty-professors-brainwashing-students meme is really fucking dumb. Hell, we can't even brainwash 'em into doing the reading.

Bwahahahaha.

Google Maps Adds Satellite Imagery

You can now view the satellite image of whatever map you're using in Google Maps. (There is a map/satellite toggle in the upper-right corner of the page.)

I've joked for a while that the logical next step is that when you zoom in on a map, you get real-time satellite video imagery.  You know, it's not that much of a joke anymore. 

As a tech user, what I want to see happen with maps next is:

1. Integration of street-level photographs, like the A9 service.  When I go someplace, I want to be able to print out pictures of landmarks along with my driving directions.
2. Information on traffic and parking.  Yahoo! Maps already has a primitive system of alerting you to traffic problems.  That needs to be made more robust (by letting the driving directions function give different results based on current and predictable future traffic flows.)  Also, there should be at least some way to see where the parking lots are and how much street parking is available.  Ideally, some way to know in real time where a space is available.  Impossible?  Not if the municipalities will cooperate. There are a number of ways I can think of - sensors in the roads, pole-mounted cameras that can "see" when a space is empty - of keeping parking information current. 
3. Real-time overhead video.  Blimps and other unmanned aerial vehicles are getting cheaper and more useful (especially as innovation on wireless high-speed data and voice traffic continues).  Cameras can be hung on aircraft and the imagery can be integrated with mapping software.

As a citizen, I worry about the privacy implications of all this, of course.  But the technology exists already, the applications are obvious, and the revenue-producing potential vast. It's coming (someday), so we better think of how we're going to deal with it.

(Via /.)

The Dick Cheney of Popes

Roy Edroso at alicublog:

John Paul II essentially conducted himself as an American-style conservative. .... [He] had more or less written off the West -- except as an income stream -- but had an eye on other regions. His tireless travel, like our own crusades, was mostly devoted those areas less acquainted with peace and freedom (and capitalism, and individual liberty) than our own, regions where he may have imagined there was hope for renewal.

Though he railed against our "culture of death," JPII never put the Church in direct confrontation with it on our turf. It may be that, when he retrenched Liberation Theology, he was just swatting down Marxism -- or it may be that he was acknowledging that our hemisphere was for the time being lost, and that only a worldwide revival based in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe -- places that are effectively at Year Zero, where Church law could one day become, as it was in the West in centuries past, the law of the land -- could redress the balance.

Whatever his reasoning, Pope John Paul II worked tirelessly in the interests of a Church that I left many years ago. Any resemblance between those interests and the interests of Jesus of Nazareth are, I assure you, purely coincidental.

Yes.  One of my theories about the people running the Republican party today is that they are convinced that America is doomed, and they are just trying to control the timetable and path of its destruction by serving as the instrument of that destruction.  That is, America to certain elite conservatives is like a great big business careering toward bankruptcy - the only question is what you can loot before the whole thing goes bust.  Useless junk - civil liberties, religious tolerance, long-term investments in education and science - are all tossed overboard or shoved aside.  If true, this would explain much, I think. 

Mr. Wojtyła may have just realized something similar about the fate of the irrational Catholic Church in the educated West, too, and decided to take it into more hardline, brutal waters as a measure of necessity.  Between the stateless wealthy and the controlling priest there could be common cause.

Strengthening Families

NYTimes.com:

"It is not a small issue to us," said Ms. Schwartz. "I have a thyroid condition. And a main reason we moved to Michigan was so I would be able to stay at home with the children."

In November, Michigan voters, along with those in 12 other states, approved legislation to define marriage as an institution between a man and a woman. On March 16, Michigan's attorney general, Mike Cox, took that one step further, ruling that passage of the constitutional amendment meant that gay and lesbian state workers should be ineligible for health benefits for their partners in future contracts. ...

Dr. Moltz said she and Ms. Schwartz took their 4-year-old daughter, Aliana Schwartz, to the polls with them in November. "We try to be civic-minded people, and we think it's important for children to actually watch their parents vote," Dr. Moltz said.

When told of how the vote went, Ms. Schwartz said, the little girl asked if it meant the family would be split up.

"We were really in shock for a week after the vote," Ms. Schwartz said. "We would walk down the street and look at people and think, are you one of the ones who think we don't deserve to be a family?"

I really don't have much to say about this substantively. It's just an example of why Republicans are in my book irrational, immoral, primitive, drooling morons. Exhibit A, in fact. You all can go fuck yourselves.

Coprophilia

A pungent example, from a minor master of the medium.