Green Ground Zero

An extremely fitting memorial. These guys get it.

Imagine for a moment that the structures surrounding the memorial at Ground Zero will be sheathed in an invisible skin of electricity-producing solar cells. During the day, while electricity demand is peaking, the buildings will silently, automatically produce energy. No power plants or transmission lines necessary. No risk of blackouts. No green house emissions. No need for oil, coal, natural gas or nuclear energy. Imagine that the computer and phone networks, the elevators, clocks, air conditioners and ATMS, will all run simply, cleanly, like a crop of corn or a grove of trees, on sunlight. The complex will be connected to the grid -- drawing electricity when necessary, at night or on cloudy days, and pumping power back in when it creates a surplus.

[...]

Never before has the concept of sustainable development been so powerful and timely---especially here in New York. Environmental awareness among New Yorkers was sharply elevated when the attack on the twin towers engulfed downtown Manhattan in a noxious cloud of dust and smoke. The regional drought last summer intensified the city’s concerns about water conservation. And as America pursues another war in Iraq and acknowledges the close connection between Middle Eastern oil and the financing of terror, we are increasingly aware of the need to become energy independent.

The buildings surrounding Ground Zero will be perhaps the most visited and visible structures in the world. As such, they must symbolize optimism and progress. They must embody a cutting-edge solution to some of the greatest challenges of our time – not only boosting morale at home, but also demonstrating to the rest of the world that America has a vision for its energy future. A national symbol of hope, these buildings will also contribute to a vibrant, healthy commercial and cultural environment in lower Manhattan, and help create jobs in emerging industries.

It's a design competition. Any architects out there? Here are the competition guidelines.

Here's a petition to George Pataki and Michael Bloomberg stating "We call upon you to ensure that the structures surrounding the World Trade Center memorial adhere to the highest green building standards and incorporate the latest renewable energy and energy efficient technologies."

Maybe they could use these NC guys' Guidelines. The whole package can be downloaded from here.

Corps Voters

Benjamin Wallace-Wells has an interesting article in the latest Washington Monthly about the new volatility in the military vote. The skinny: while the Bush administration is alienating the military a little more every day, the Democrats are facing an uphill battle at translating that alienation into Democratic votes. This may foreshadow more of a shift among factions within the Republican Party - away from the neo-cons and toward the isolationist and multilateralist wings - than a move toward the Democratic Party. Rumsfeld's unpopularity among the military rank and file is legendary, and that doubtlessly has begun to extend to Cheney, Wolfowitz, and the rest of the unilateralist posse.

How that plays out with Bush facing no primary opponents is anybody's guess, but my gut feeling tells me that a Clark candidacy could peel off a significant and perhaps decisive number of votes. I suspect we may yet see Cheney dumped overboard (via a resignation for "health reasons") in favor of Powell or Giuliani for the GOP 2004 ticket. Karl Rove may be hubristic and malevolent, but he's no dummy and is certainly able to read these tea leaves.

Available for kids' birthday parties and weddings.

Garry Turner failed to break his own record for the most number of wooden clothes pins attached to his face, coming up three short of a tie with "only" 150.

Better luck next time, Stretch.

Priorities, Please

Golly, from how many different angles can I approach this?

ATLANTA, Oct. 29 (UPI) -- Scientists developing an electronic drug sniffer made a device that can "smell" just a few trillionths of a gram of cocaine, a scientific journal says.

And why would you want to detect "just a few trillionths of a gram"? If the boy in the bubble ventured out of his plastic this morning for more than 8 seconds while the nurse wasn't looking he'd have had a few trillionths of a gram of cocaine on him.

Our technology provides a hand-held sensing device capable of real-time detection, reducing the time between drug seizure and laboratory analysis," says Desmond Stubbs, a doctoral candidate in chemistry at Georgia Tech.

Great! If this (obviously infallible) gadget can substitute for laboratory analysis in the hands of a cop, let's just let his partner substitute for judge & jury, too. As long as only a few trillionths of a gram sends up red flags, bogging down that bureaucratic court system is a real potential problem; we wouldn't want to do that.

Besides being ultra-sensitive, the device, nicknamed "dog-on-a-chip," can distinguish between various kinds of illegal drugs.

So if I've been within a quarter mile of ANY type of illegal drug use I'm in trouble. Ohh-kaaaay.

(it's)"an elegant fusion of biotechnology and microelectronics," according to William Hunt, a Georgia Tech professor.

I like those buzzwords, Friend; I can see you have a future. Let's talk. Where would you like to see your Department in 10 years? And also, I've got a friend not too far from Atlanta with some economic development plans for some land he owns; I bet Police Departments all over this great Country will need a few of these gizmos. What did you call it again?

The U.S. Customs Service and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy provided funding for this research.

I can see plenty of value in researching electronic sniffers. Forensics, search and rescue, I dunno... airplane bombs, maybe. But minute amounts of drugs that give positive results with which you virtually can not argue and which create situations where the case is, in effect, settled right there with the cop? Why is this stuff getting funded? Where does it lead?

As if I Needed Another Reason

Apostropher has said it before. And I've seen him down more than a bottle or two. But as long as we're piling it on, red wine is good for your lungs, too.

Pwop!

Clean Up Your Room!

Maybe this Solar temper-tantrum is just Papa Sun pitching a fit about us not picking up our toys.

Thousands of nuts, bolts, gloves and other debris from space missions form an orbiting garbage dump around Earth, presenting a hazard to spacecraft. Some of the bits and pieces scream along at 17,500 mph.

Holy Frick! Almost 9000 objects (officially tracked) and over 100,000 pieces of crap bigger than 1 centimeter.

As an example of the hazard, a tiny speck of paint from a satellite once dug a pit in a space shuttle window nearly a quarter-inch wide.

The United States leads the former Soviet Union in the total quantity of orbital junk, but some companies and other organizations contribute significantly to the count.

But let's not just blame the Americans...

More than 200 objects, most of them rubbish bags, were released by the Mir space station during its first 10 years of operation.

Is there anything we don't just make a god-awful mess of? Criminy.

Sol Coughing

Or suffering from a bad case of the farts. Jeebus, somebody give that star some bean-o.

UV picture, updated every 4 hours.

Interview with Ambassador Joseph Wilson

In two parts, by Jeff Gannon of Talon News

Part 1 published October 28, 2003

Part 2 published October 29, 2003

Good on the whole, given some pretty blatant attempts to partisanize the controversy. Talon News is pretty right wing; they even weave in some fodder for the tinfoil-hat crowd by insinuating France may have been trying to supply Saddam Hussein with the yellowcake uranium.

My favorite bits:

Wilson: if we were going to use military force, it ought to be smart military force for the right reasons rather than something dumb, and frankly the invasion, conquest, and occupation of Iraq for the purpose of disarming Saddam struck me as the highest risk, lowest reward option.

[...]

TN: Did your wife suggest you for the mission?

Wilson: No.

[...]

TN: You have mentioned that you are not partisan. Doesn't that appear to be the case considering the candidates you've supported?

Wilson: Including Bush. When Ed Gillespie was running around doing his little schpiel, he knew that I contributed to the Bush campaign but decided he would selectively use information on candidates I have supported to bolster a case that simply cannot be made...I reserve the right to participate in the political process of my country just like any other citizen.

I was named ambassador to Gabon by George Herbert Walker Bush. One of the highlights of my professional career was serving a charges d'affair in Baghdad in the run up to the gulf war. When I came back to Washington and was introduced to the war cabinet, President Bush introduced me as a true American hero, and I take great pride in that.

[...]

Wilson: I think the administration is dominated by two groups in the foreign policy apparatus who have forged an alliance of convenience in the aftermath of 9/11. The one group, I call the whack-a-moles, and that group is championed principally by Vice President Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, and I think they are probably characterized as best I can see by an approach that says we see a threat, we whack it, we bring our boys home, the threat reemerges, we go whack it again. So that group is for aggressive military action without the subsequent devotion to reconstruction or nation-building in the aftermath.

The second group, I call the johnpur and pith helmet crowd, the ill-liberal imperialists and I think their names include people like Mr. Libby, Mr. Abrams, Mr. Wolfowitz, and the other signatories of the 1998 letter to President Clinton calling for the regime change to be translated into the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein. I think their approach is articulated by people like Mac Boot who wants to establish a beachhead in Iraq for the purposes of redrawing the political map of the middle East.

[...]

(Wilson:)...I think the collateral damage and the consequences of that are not in our nation's interest. I think that at the end of the day we will find it has been a tremendous recruiting tool for al Qaeda and other like-minded international terrorist organizations.

The great irony is that at a time when our military prowess is at its peak, our political and moral authority is at its lowest ebb. A year or two years after we had the sympathy of the world, we are looked upon as a real menace in the world by a large percentage of the population, and I don't think that bodes well for our future.

And then the kicker. It drives me nuts to see pea-brains even asking this:

TN: If we subsequently find weapons of mass destruction will that change your mind as to the validity of Operation Iraqi Freedom?

Go read Ambassador Wilson's response in section 2. This whole line of reasoning is insane. The administration even proffers it by talking about the "ongoing search" and sending David Kay back out there to keep looking for justification. They're like that Red Sox fan still sitting outside Fenway Park fully convinced they'll manage to pull it off; this is the year! The search for WMD as a justification for this war is over. Over. Anything found now - 6 months after toppling Saddam - simply confirms that invading Iraq unleashed a worst-case scenario. At this point all we can do is HOPE AND PRAY (if you're so inclined) that the bluff theory is right. If WMD existed in anything close to usable form in Iraq, invading was hands-down the dumbest thing we could do and subjects us or, more likely, a combination of our soldiers and innocent Iraqis, to that which I shudder to imagine.

Inspections were either 100% or 95%-and-improving effective.

Invasion and occupation were 0% effective and destroyed almost any chance of determining about the 5% implied above.

And gave us - and the 25 million Iraqis who just want to live something close to a normal life day to day - this godforsaken mess.

What was that?

Oh, nothing.

More evidence...

...that Microsoft is evil.

Algiers, Belfast, Baghdad . . . uh oh.

UPI's Martin Sieff makes the analogy that nobody in the Bush administration wants made.

There is a grim inevitability to the latest wave of suicide car bombings, assignations and other attacks in Iraq and a dire conclusion can no longer be avoided. The United States now has a Battle of Algiers or Belfast on its hands in Baghdad. [...] A full-scale guerrilla war against U.S. and Western forces in Iraq is now fully underway, and it has already reached formidable proportions.

The attacks are by no means limited to Baghdad or even only to major cities. And U.S. and British military analysts have told United Press International they cannot be all blamed on old Iraqi Baathists or foreign jihadi troublemakers either. On the contrary, these professional military experts are explicit that the overall pattern of violence clearly shows a widespread, popular revolt with a high degree of decentralization and local initiative. The resistance is rapidly evolving and organizing, they say, but it is organizing from the bottom up rather than from the top down.

Read the whole thing to get the full, fleshed-out version, because I can't do it justice in a summary. Suffice it to say that we are facing a much, much larger and better armed adversary with proportionally far fewer occupying troops, little to no indigenous support, and none of the other advantages a colonial history confers.

Uh oh.

Be wary of the very scary cassowary.

The cassowary, a large, flightless bird found in Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Southeast Asia, can grow to five feet tall and 125 pounds. It is considered one of the world's most dangerous birds, due to extremely powerful legs with dagger-like spurs on the massive clawed feet. The cassowary is one of the only bird species known definitively to have killed humans and is easily recognizable due to the strange helmet-like structure on its head, called a casque.

On mainland Australia, the most recent recorded fatality occurred in April 1926 when Phillip McClean received an injury to the throat after running from a cassowary and falling to the ground. Attacking cassowaries charge and kick, sometimes jumping on top of the victim. Unlike emus, which reputedly kick backwards, cassowaries can kick in a forward and downward direction. They may also peck, barge, or head-butt. The commonest injuries they cause in humans are puncture wounds, lacerations and bone fractures. Serious injuries resulting from cassowary attacks are most likely to occur if the person is crouching or is lying or has fallen on the ground.

[...]

Cassowaries will also kick or peck at doors at windows, sometime breaking panes of glass or screen panels. In these cases they are presumably attacking a reflection which they perceive as another cassowary. They will also kick or chase cars, again because they appear to associate the human occupants with food. Cassowaries dislike dogs and will attack them without provocation, presumably because feral dogs and dingos often prey on cassowaries. Between June 1996 and February 1997, six cassowaries were killed by dogs in the Cairns area and, of 35 cassowary attacks recorded by Kofron on dogs, 29 were in self-defence. Attacks on horses and cows have also been recorded and C. casuarius is anecdotally credited with having killed small horses.

Yikes. But the oddities don't stop there. Yesterday, the Wildlife Conservation Society published a study revealing that three species of cassowaries "produce a 'booming' call so low that humans may not be able to detect much of the sound. The researchers draw similarities between the birds' calls and the rumbling elephants make to communicate."

"When close to the bird, these calls can be heard or felt as an unsettling sensation, similar to how observers describe elephant vocalizations," said WCS researcher Dr. Andrew Mack, the lead author of the study. [...] The authors and their collaborators are now pursuing studies that examine the physics of low frequency sound production and reception. They speculate that the cassowaries' casque might serve a function in both, most likely sound reception. "These investigations are exciting because many dinosaur fossils exhibit casques at least superficially similar to those of living cassowaries," said Mack. "No one knows for sure what purpose these served in these dinosaurs, so further study of living cassowaries might provide clues to how dinosaurs communicated."

Crazy, man, crazy. Giant killer birds with subwoofers on their heads. The press release ends with the following sentence: "Coincidentally, the great early 20th Century dinosaur hunter, Barnum Brown, described the Corythosaurus, otherwise known as the Corinthian Helmet Lizard as 'cassowary-like'." Though nothing exists to make it logically so, the term "Corinthian Helmet Lizard" sounds for all the world like a sexual euphemism. Well, to me it does, anyhow.

Sunstorms II

Much like the word "octopi", however etymologically incorrect the Apostropher comments that it may be, I like writing the word "ejecta". It's one of those words that you know what it means graphically the first time you're exposed to it.

Anyway, while we're still getting pummeled, apparently the worst has passed from the big solar flare and subsequent proton storm that smacked us silly today.

This explosion hurled a ‘coronal mass ejection’ (CME) almost directly toward Earth, which could trigger bright aurorae when the material reaches us in about a day. The Earth was immediately affected by intense X-ray radiation, which ionised the upper layers of the atmosphere, causing serious disruption to radio communications.

The high-energy particles that followed (called a 'proton storm') could upset satellites by interfering with their electronics systems and damaging exposed components. During these storms, astronauts are advised to reduce exposure, particularly during spacewalks.

Our atmosphere protects people on the Earth, but passengers and crews on commercial jets at high latitudes could receive exposure equivalent to a normal medical chest X-ray.

Cool telescopic photos of the flare and storm here, here and here.

UPDATE 12/11/03:

30 Great Sunstorm Photographs here. Gotta say I like the first one.

Who's Desperate?

Coordinated bombings rip across the middle of Iraq, killing 35 and injuring 224, and a few hours later President Bush, in his best night-is-day-up-is-down form, inexplicably announces that the attacks show we are winning the war that he said we already won six months ago.

Explaining Monday's car-bombings in Baghdad, President Bush said, "The more progress we make on the ground... the more desperate these killers become." If the president defines desperation as assaults that are more methodical, coordinated and destructive than previous ones, he's right.

Not surprisingly, the international media begs to differ with Bush's interpretation and the few humanitarian NGOs that remain in Iraq are starting to pack up and leave rather than staying on as easy targets. Just in case you might be considering paying Bush's bizarre argument some credence, you should make sure to catch Robert Fisk's last two columns from Iraq here and especially here.

Iraqis who fail to see US military checkpoints, who overtake convoys under attack - or who merely pass the scene of an American raid - are being gunned down with abandon. US official "inquiries" into these killings routinely result in either silence or claims that the soldiers "obeyed their rules of engagement" - rules that the Americans will not disclose to the public. [...] Not a single soldier has been disciplined for shooting civilians - even when the fatality involves an Iraqi working for the occupation authorities.

[...]

The daily attacks on Americans outside Baghdad - up to 50 in a night - go, like the civilian Iraqi dead, unrecorded. Travelling back from Fallujah to Baghdad after dark last month, I saw mortar explosions and tracer fire around 13 American bases - not a word of which was later revealed by the occupation authorities. At Baghdad airport last month, five mortar shells fell near the runway as a Jordanian airliner was boarding passengers for Amman. I saw this attack with my own eyes. That same afternoon, General Ricardo Sanchez, the senior US officer in Iraq, claimed he knew nothing about the attack, which - unless his junior officers are slovenly - he must have been well aware of.

The question is not whether we are winning or losing. We began losing the moment we allowed ourselves to be sucked into this miasmic nightmare by an incompetent, ideologically-blinded leadership. Only two ways exist to win a war: drive an expansionist power back into its borders or annex disputed territory, and neither applies to this situation. The dead Iraqis, the dead UN/NGO workers, and the western soldiers returning home in coffins (which can no longer be shown in the media, per administration fiat) have already lost everything. The soldiers that have been stuck in that toxic wasteland and their families lose a little more every day. The only question that remains: how long will we allow our bare-assed emperor to keep going "double or nothing" at the three-card monte table and charging it to the national credit card?

UPDATE (5:10 pm): Molly Ivins says more or less the same thing.

Despite what I am sure are the invaluable services of the many PR people of our nation, sometimes it is actually smarter to attack the problem itself than the public relations surrounding it. I suspect that's where we are with the situation in Iraq.

Gustav's Jug Band

The Peabody Institute, part of Johns Hopkins University, is comprised of the Peabody Preparatory School and the Peabody Conservatory of Music, and is one of the world's top-flight music academies. But that doesn't necessarily mean they're stuffy.

Workers remodeling a 19th-century rehearsal hall at the Peabody Institute have found 10 dusty jugs of moonshine in an unlocked closet, where they apparently sat for nearly 60 years. Faded labels on the bottles suggest that the hooch was the handiwork of Gustav Strube, the first conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

Strube, who came to Baltimore in 1913 and lived here until his death 40 years later at age 85, was one of Baltimore's most beloved characters. A composer, conductor, violinist and music professor known as "Papa Strube" to his students, he was locally renowned for his succulent goulash and his home-brewed beer, wine and liquor.

Strube was "a fearsome brewmeister," said Peabody archivist Elizabeth Schaaf, who recognized Strube's handwriting on several labeled vintages, such as "Wild Cherry 1934" and "Big Blue Grape 1946." All told, there are about 8 1/2 gallons of colorless liquid sealed in eight one-gallon glass jugs and a pair of quart bottles. The bottles haven't been opened. But Peabody Institute spokeswoman Anne Garside hopes to have a tasting of the Peabody private label. "We must find out if the stuff is drinkable," Garside said.

Hearts and Minds Update

On a tip from Owlmother (she who makes salacious salads), comes this further sign of the morass of amorality we have stepped into in Iraq.

On Sept. 10, American troops in helicopters swooped down on this remote desert sheepherding village and detained nearly all the males, one as young as 13 and at least two in their 80s. More than a month after the raid, apparently aimed at preventing foreign fighters from slipping across the border from Saudi Arabia, only two of the 79 captives have been freed.

[...]

U.S. military officers declined to talk about the operation, but knowledgeable American sources confirmed the basics of the account given to the Associated Press by six villagers, including one detainee who was released. Their description of what happened offers the first details of U.S. military operations in this border area as well as one of the first looks at efforts to fight the influx of foreign insurgents as the scope of guerrilla violence against American troops increases.

Villagers say they heard the whir of helicopters at dawn over Habbariyah, a Bedouin enclave of 500 people clustered in an area about the size of two football fields. The village is in Anbar province, a third of Iraq's territory stretching west, north and south from Baghdad to the borders with Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan. U.S. soldiers come under daily attack in the conservative, mostly Sunni Muslim province, a former stronghold of support for Saddam Hussein.

Over the next 10 hours, villagers say, troops rounded up men including police, the elderly and teenagers. One woman also was seized. All were restrained with plastic handcuffs and taken to one house. From there, troops loaded the captives on to the helicopters and flew them to an air base north of the village.

The woman, the wife of a tribal leader, was released the next day. The men were transported to the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad, where all but two remain. The two who were freed were Sheikh Meta'ab al-Hathal, 88, the tribal chief, and Hawas Sahn Ibrahim, 81.

Jesus' General

Eleanor Clift wonders whether the leaked Rumsfeld memo was a case of the defense secretary lashing out at the White House or somebody lashing out at him. Toward the end, she touches on Rummy's charming underling General Boykin, who believes that God overturns elections, Muslims worship an idol, and that Satan is the real target in the War on Terror.

In a speech that Boykin regularly gives, he tells the story of an aerial photo he took over Mogadishu that, when it was developed, revealed a black smudge over the city. Rather than accept the mark as a thumb print from whomever processed the film, Boykin became convinced that it was a sign of the evil hanging over the Somali city.

Sheesh. Many have risen to the general's defense about his remarks, arguing that he has the right as an American to hold whatever religious beliefs he wants. And that's true as far as that goes. He is similarly free to believe that a giant tin-foil helmet will block the Mothership's transmissions from activating the dilithium chip implanted in his neck. Either way, you don't want him babysitting your kids, much less being deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

Robert Marus, writing for the Associated Baptist Press, has more:

Speaking in June 2002 at First Baptist Church of Broken Arrow, Okla., he described an aerial photo he had taken over the city of Mogadishu during the 1993 conflict in Somalia. Noting strange black marks in the sky, the general claimed they were evidence of a demonic presence over the city.

"Ladies and gentleman, this is your enemy," he said. "It is the principalities of darkness. It is a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy."

Boykin has said that radical Islamists hate the United States "because we're a Christian nation;" has described the U.S. Army as "a Christian army;" and has said that President Bush was appointed by God "for such a time as this."

Call me a bigot if you like, but methinks General Boykin needs a psychiatric evaluation.

Timmy, don't play with your food.

Ladies and gentlemen, The Meat Gallery - A Garden of Surrealist Sculpture.

Or if you prefer your meat sculptures a little less morbid, the good folks at Nippon Ham even include instructions for these. Um, if you read Japanese, that is.

(tips: CSOD & boingboing)

There's a crack in the pavement.

What on earth would possess somebody to name a street Butt Hole Road? And predictably, American tourists keep stealing the street sign.

Ain't No Mountain High Enough

At Drug Policy Digest, Paul Fishbein links to several articles examining the huge jump in internet-based sales of commonly-abused prescription pharmaceuticals, a trend that is unfortunately well-corroborated by the endless torrent of e-mails I receive daily offering Vicodin, Valium, and Viagra in exchange for my Mastercard number. He reprints a map from a Washington Post article, showing the regional sales of prescriptiononline.com, a giant provider that the government shut down in January. Hit the link and peek at the map; the center of activity is a five-state belt of small towns in Louisana, Alabama, and especially the Appalachian areas of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. In other words, the region that historically has been moonshine territory.

There's an odd quirk to the map, though. While there are sales in the Carolinas, as in every other state in the country, the heaviest activity runs right up to the western borders of the Carolinas, and wraps around them but doesn't enter. I'm not sure why this is - stricter law enforcement perhaps, or a better local provider? Whatever the reason, it sure does stand out, especially since western North Carolina moonshine running was so prevalent that it gave birth to NASCAR.

There's gems in them thar craters!

The Mars Global Surveyor has detected a 30,000 square kilometer area rich with surface olivine outcroppings in the Nili Fossae region of Mars. Olivine is widely used in jewelry and on Earth mostly takes the form of peridot, the birthstone for August and Leo.

Peridot (pronounced pair-a-doe), or precious olivine, is a volcanic gemstone that was once treasured by native Hawaiians as the tears of the Goddess-of-Fire, Pele. [...] In ancient Egypt, peridot was mined on an island called Zeberget. Mining was done at night because legend said that peridot could not be easily seen during the day, but its pale iridescent green was easily illuminated by lamplight at night. It was for this characteristic that the Romans called peridot the "evening emerald." Peridot later was also often used to decorate medieval churches, and was probably carried back to Europe by the Crusaders. Large peridots, more than 200 carats in size, adorn the shrine of the Three Magi at the Cologne Cathedral.

Because it breaks down quickly when exposed to wet weather, the amount of unweathered olivine on the surface of Mars could provide clues as to how long Mars has been a dry planet, though scientists would need to determine whether it was thrust to the surface relatively recently or during the impact that created the crater about 3.6 billion years ago. Perhaps more importantly, this discovery means that the Martians can pay for the reconstruction of their planet after we liberate them.

"More brains!"

What the hell? A gang of flesh-eating, Croatian babies attack one of their own.

A one-year-old boy has been bitten 30 times by a group of more than a dozen other babies at a nursery in Croatia. Frane Simic was covered in a series of deep bite wounds all over his body, including his face. He was attacked after the class nanny stepped out of the room to change another baby's nappy.

Dr. Sime Vuckov, head of the hospital in Rijeka which treated the boy, said: "Biting between young children is not uncommon. But I have never seen anything like this." Police have launched an inquiry into the biting frenzy but admit they are clueless as to the babies' reasons for attacking.

Yeah, and no amount of interrogation will get a one-year-old zombie gangster to break the omerta. They're tough, I tell you. Tough. Seriously, though, this is one of the weirdest stories I have read all month. Note to self: stop smearing babies with bacon grease.

Show Me The Money

Crikey. Bad day ahead for Bremer.

The U.S.-run body governing Iraq has failed to account for billions of dollars allocated for rebuilding the country, a prominent British aid group said today.

Christian Aid said in its report that the Coalition Provisional Authority had only explained publicly how it had spent $1 billion (U.S.) of the $5 billion in Iraqi funds it has been given for the country's redevelopment.

[...]

The funds in question are administered by the Development Fund for Iraq, set up to allow Iraq's new administrators to acquire frozen Iraqi assets and oil revenue for the reconstruction of the country and approved by a United Nations resolution in May. The fund receives 95 per cent of the proceeds from the sale of Iraqi oil.

But the group said the money taken in so far had not been properly accounted for. The report said the board overseeing the fund had not, as required, published funding plans in Arabic, while an international monitoring board called for by the UN resolution has yet to be set up.

Um, the monitoring board hasn't been set up yet and the purchase orders aren't even being written in the native tongue? Wait... didn't we win this war 6 months ago?

Go download (PDF) the Christian Aid Report here. It does not mince words.

As an end note to this post, however, may I direct your attention to endnote #1 of the report.

The Seas and Science

We know only a little bit less about outer space than we do about the depths of the oceans. OK, Maybe that's a little hyperbolic, and I'm all in favor of continuing the quest for answers to cosmic riddles, but I'm really excited about a coordinated global scientific effort to conduct a Census of the Seas.

Three hundred scientists from 53 countries are working on the decade-long census to learn the number of different species, the species' populations and where they live. So far, the Census of Marine Life includes 15,304 different species of fish and 194,696 to 214,696 -- there's disagreement among the experts -- species of animals and plants.

So far, the research is coming up with about 150 to 200 previously unknown species of fish and 1,700 new species of other aquatic animals and plants each year.

The scientists said they believe the oceans that extend across 70 percent of Earth's surface hold about 20,000 species of fish and up to 1.98 million species of animals and plants. Many of those could be basic and small life forms, such as worms and jellyfish.

Knowledge is power, baby. Here's the Census of Marine Life site. The front page is a little too visually distracting for my taste, but it's well organized and fascinating beyond that.

Perusing it got me thinking about Bruce Babbit's National Biological Survey from several years ago. I knew the absolutist property rights folks were freaked out by it and its kickoff coincided with Gingrich's revolution in 1994. I imagined the Republican Congress killed or at least castrated it. Guess I was right. Timely information seems rather scarce on the web. Is this their reincarnation? Any readers know anything more current?

Anyway, while stumbling about I found this article from last month's Washington Monthly about the history of the Culture Wars ™, manifested dangerously in our current Science-hostile administration. Good read; here's a tease:

Not long ago, President Bush asked a federal agency for evidence to support a course of action that many believe he had already chosen to take on a matter of grave national importance that had divided the country. When the government experts didn't provide the information the president was looking for, the White House sent them back to hunt for more. The agency returned with additional raw and highly qualified information, which the president ran with, announcing his historic decision on national television. Yet the evidence soon turned out to be illusory, and the entire policy was called into question. Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, you say? Actually, the above scenario describes Bush's decision-making process on the issue of stem cell research.

[...]

The administration's stem-cell stand is just one of many examples, from climate change to abstinence-only sex-education programs, in which the White House has made policies that defy widely accepted scientific opinion. Why this administration feels unbound by the consensus of academic scientists can be gleaned, in part, from a telling anecdote in Nicholas Lemann's recent New Yorker profile of Karl Rove. When asked by Lemann to define a Democrat, Bush's chief political strategist replied, "Somebody with a doctorate." Lemann noted, "This he said with perhaps the suggestion of a smirk." Fundamentally, much of today's GOP, like Rove, seems to smirkingly equate academics, including scientists, with liberals.

Given the hardcore realism that you'd think would be so central to hypercapitalist ideology, the bankrollers of Republicanism resisting scientific opinion so rabidly just doesn't make sense to me. Ralph Reed's and Pat Robertson's objection I can fit into the puzzle; that makes sense. But the alliance with big biz just seems so unsustainable. I guess I just don't understand.

UPDATE: Oooh! Go here and cruise around, including the various image libraries. Specifically check out "Ceph Base" - it's all about octopi and I just love writing the word octopi.

It's the "Ocean Biographic Information System" and it's the public repository of all the data and photographs the guys at the Census of Marine Life collect, plus a lot more.

Really Pricey Zoom!

But "Zoom!" nonetheless.

AC Propulsion's tzero roadster is a reason to not give up on the electric vehicle. The tzero does 0 to 60 mph in 3.6 seconds, according to the company, and it does it on only 200 horsepower because of its light weight and torque.

The San Dimas, Calif.-based company says the tzero (pronounced "tee-zero," not "chair-o") has compared favorably in acceleration tests to Corvettes, Porsche 911s--and even a Ferrari F355, which it claims to have "out-accelerated...by eight car lengths" in one-eighth-mile drag races. If for nothing else, the tzero's $220,000 sticker price puts it in exotic-car territory.

Zero to 60 in 3.6 seconds? Sheesh. Not your average golf cart.

Earth As Art

My previous post about sunspots, specifically the up close photo of one, reminded me of a really, really cool site my Dad turned me onto...

Or rather, onto which my Dad turned me; sorry, Pop. You get credit for contributing my Grammar Nazi gene.

If you want to simultaneously grasp the micro, macro, and meta in your mind and let your imagination freefloat there for a while, visit this US Geologic Survey site and download some of the pictures. They're huge, so if your computer is on the weak side you'll have to wait or just take my word for it.

But if you can, go peruse all the Continents and enlarge the satellite images.

Sunstorms

This universe is so cool.

A strong dose of space weather is forecast to hit Earth Friday, potentially disrupting satellite communications and posing a threat to power grids on Earth. The event also presents a nice opportunity for anyone to view sunspots, though safe viewing techniques must be employed to prevent eye damage.

The storm of charged particles was unleashed by a dark region on the solar surface called Sunspot 484. The huge spot, about the size of Jupiter's surface, has been growing for several days and rotating into a position that now points squarely at Earth. Another giant sunspot is brewing and more storms could be generated.

More about sunspots here and here.

And they look really cool up close.

UPDATE OCT 29:
Go see Sunstorms II for really cool photos.

and Sol Coughing for a continuously updated UV one.

And then take a leisurely stroll around Apostropher. There's nothing quite like it on the web. We're pleased to make your acquaintance.

I had the good fortune to visit the MacDonald Observatory in southwest Texas a few years back and actually saw the surface of the sun through a special telescope. It was a lucky day because there was a huge Solar Prominence (like a Solar Flare but connected to the surface and both ends so it looks like an arch) active. The prominence was so big the Earth could have passed under it. Way cool.

A big free burning nuclear fusion furnace is available 12 hours a day, on average.
Why, again, are we trying to duplicate this process here on the planet's surface?

Give Me a Sign, Lord!

Whaddaya want - a candygram?

The actor who plays Jesus in Mel Gibson's film The Passion of Christ has escaped injury after being struck by lightning during filming. [...] "I'm about a hundred feet away from them," producer Steve McEveety said, "when I glance over and see lightning coming out of Caviezel's ears."

Both Caviezel and his assistant director Michelini were struck. The main bolt hit Caviezel and one of its forks hit Michelini's umbrella. Neither of the men sustained injuries in the incident. Michelini has been nicknamed Lightning Boy after being struck twice by lightning during the filming in Italy. He had already suffered light burns on the tips of his fingers in an earlier incident during filming on a hilltop in the town of Matera.

Y'know guys, the whole Electric Christ thing was already done back in 1972. And it's not likely you're really going to top madchickentown's stab at it. I'll give 'em points for authenticity, though.

String Burkini

Well now, there's a picture you certainly wouldn't have seen a few years ago.

Miss Afghanistan Vida Samadzai leads other Miss Earth candidates during a press preview in Manila October 23, 2003. Samadzai is among contestants from 60 countries vying for the Miss Earth title in the final next month.

Looks like Afghanistan still needs food aid.

Last Night

I surprisingly saw a lone firefly this evening.

The forecast for tonight is a low of 35 degrees.

To every thing there is a season...

Pitbull Turns on his Master

After every two or three paragraphs of this article in the ultra-right-wing WorldNetDaily I had to scroll to the top to make sure I wasn't still reading a predictably anti-war blog. I read so many every day and the lies of the administration have been so... well... numerous, I kept thinking I had just lost track. But no:

Bush saw the warning, yet completely ignored it and barreled ahead with the war plans he'd approved a month earlier...

By telling Americans that Saddam could "on any given day" slip unconventional weapons to al-Qaida if America didn't disarm him, the president misrepresented the conclusions of his own secret intelligence report...

If that's not lying, I don't know what is...

Over the following months, in speech after speech, Bush went right on lying with impunity about the Iraq-al-Qaida threat...

Even after the war, Bush continued the lie. "We have removed an ally of al-Qaida,"...

It was the height of irresponsibility to have done so in the middle of a war on al-Qaida, the real and proven threat to America. Bush diverted those troops and other resources – including intelligence assets, Arabic translators and hundreds of billions of tax dollars – from the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders along the Afghan-Pakistani border. And now they've regrouped and are as threatening as ever.

That's inexcusable, and Bush supporters with any intellectual honesty and concern for their own families' safety should be mad as hell about it – and that's coming from someone who voted for Bush.

The Apostropher has remarked to me before about Americans' love of building up heroes to super-human heights before ruthlessly clawing them to shreds. Is this poised to happen again? I dunno. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy, though.

More tips to Lynn at Lunaville.

The Wind In His Sails

Go, Dean, Go!

Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean used a northern Iowa wind farm Tuesday as a backdrop for announcing a national renewable energy plan calling for greater reliance on wind energy and ethanol.

Dean said America's dependence on imported oil is indirectly supporting terrorism because some of the oil revenue going to Saudi Arabia is being spent on religious schools that foster hatred of Americans, Christians and Jews.

"We're essentially funding the next generation of terrorists because we're not willing to do something about renewable energy at home,"

Ya damn skippy, we are.

Here's Dean's plan.

Update: To be fair, though, Kerry, Gephardt, and Lieberman have very good energy independence plans as well.

Bled White

On my drive to work this morning, I was listening to Heatmiser, Elliot Smith's first band. If you're not familiar with Elliott Smith, he put out some of the most hauntingly beautiful, melancholy albums of the '90's - a sort of GenX Nick Drake. Then I get to work, still humming, and pay a quick visit to t-melt, only to find out that the Nick Drake analogy just became even more apt. Smith was found dead yesterday in Los Angeles, of a single knife wound. The coroner has preliminarily listed the cause as suicide. Smith was my age - 34.

...So here he comes with the blank expression
Especially for me 'cos he knows I feel the same
'Cos happy and sad come in quick succession
I'm never going to become what you became...
-Elliot Smith, "Bled White"

Whoa, Whoa, Whoa...

Wait a minute.

Conservative Republican lawmakers in Congress worry that the Muslim-dominated country will shed its secular history and officially turn into an Islamic state, complete with a constitution that says Islam is its national religion.

To try to steer Baghdad's constitutional process away from establishing an official Islamic state, two lawmakers, Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., tucked freedom-of-religion provisions into the Senate and House and versions of legislation that would send almost $87 billion to Iraq.

The provisions would instruct the Coalition Provisional Authority to work with Iraq to make sure the new constitution contains specific language to protect religious freedom. While each chamber's version differs slightly, the compromise language is expected to pass Congress next week along with the overall $87 billion spending bill.

"You need to have that separation of church and state, of mosque and state," said Brownback, sponsor of the Senate version.

Let me repeat that for you...

"You need to have that separation of church and state, of mosque and state," said Brownback, sponsor of the Senate version.

The idea of yet another country ruled by religious authorities bothers me more than just about anyone. But if freedom of religion was such a big issue to you, Senator Brownback, what did you think would happen when we bombed the country into chaos, dismantled secular civil society, and then bounced the factions around like letters inside a Boggle dome?

I hate it when people say I told you so, but...

I TOLD YOU SO!

But it's not just stupidity, it's hypocrisy.

Brownback:
"We've gone too far from the issue of separation of church and state to the issue of removal of church from state"

And who subsidizes your living expenses secretly, Senator?

As for Wolf, remember, the guy was instrumental in turning loose Tom DeLay on his crusade to "transform our culture"

Rep. DeLay began to follow Christ seriously in 1985, during his freshman term in Congress. After viewing a Christian videotape about fatherhood, given to him by Rep. Frank Wolf, he realized that his life did not reflect the principles of Christianity. Rep. DeLay wept over his sins and rededicated his life to Christ. Shortly after his recommitment, he began attending a regular Bible study for members of Congress.

Now, Majority Whip DeLay is focusing his political and personal efforts on seeing our culture transformed. On Capitol Hill, DeLay is determined to use his position as the third-ranking Republican member to restore the “Judeo-Christian ethic” that he says has been undermined in recent years.

I'm sorry, dipwads. Proselytizing to me and telling me my way is wrong and yours is right and I'm in trouble if I don't believe like you do is religious persecution; the case that trying to keep your family's Jesus Shock Troops from harassing non-Christians is religious persecution is much weaker.

So said me.

Everything You Know Is Wrong

Over at Lunaville, Lynn has put up a long, exquisitely detailed, meticulously sourced post running through the lies (and the post makes clear that these are indeed lies, not misperceptions) surrounding US policy toward Iraq going back over a decade. You should not only read it, but bookmark it for future reference. Some of these have been repeated so many times that even opponents of the war have accepted them as truths.

Aggregating all of this was truly yeoman's work, and so much information is there that I can't even begin to summarize it. However, one of the links therein is to Peter Turnley's photo essay from the First Gulf War. I have linked previously to this unpleasant collection, with the caveat that it was not for the squeamish. That caveat remains in effect. All the same, the next time you hear a defender of this administration yanking out the "mass graves" argument, do them a favor and send them a link to this picture of American soldiers burying incinerated Iraqi soldiers in a mass grave. Any country that has spent as much time at war as Iraq has (and one of the other debunkings is that he attacked his neighbors unprovoked) is going to be littered with mass graves - what else do you do with hundreds or thousands of dead bodies? Oceans of blood have been spilt in Iraq, and not just by Saddam.

Make no mistake: none of this excuses a single one of the atrocities carried out by Hussein's regime, which were certainly plentiful. Still, if the nation had done a careful sifting through of the facts - including those determined by the American government and military - rather than the cartoonish, reductionist "Saddam is pure evil bent on destroying America" crap that spewed forth from Bush and his warmongering cabinet, the folly of this misadventure would have been apparent to all but the most fervent neo-cons.

It is an unpleasant experience to realize that your government has lied to you blatantly and pervasively. Even more unpleasant is the realization that you swallowed it. This is an administration whose entire governing strategy is based upon deceiving the public. Given that, it is every citizen's duty to arm himself or herself with the facts. Bush's re-election campaign is preparing to shift into high gear; a new mendacity monsoon will begin shortly. Get your TruthBucket™ ready - there is going to be a lot of bailing to do over the coming year.

We're Innocent; It Wasn't Us

It was our LAST incarnation and we can't be held responsible.

ChevronTexaco "is not the successor to Texaco. Therefore it cannot be held responsible for anything," said ChevronTexaco lawyer Adolfo Callejas.

So I can't be held accountable for anything I did before I got married, either? Shit, I want that whole issue with the fire truck and the camel erased from my permanent record. And I want my underwear back, too!

Zoom!

Imagine cruising the Strip at Myrtle Beach in one of these Babies!

The Dutch solar car Nuna II, using ESA space technology, finished first in the World Solar Challenge, a 3010 km race right across Australia for cars powered by solar energy.

The average speed of Nuna II, nicknamed the ‘Flying Dutchman’ by the Australian press, was 97 kilometres per hour, also an improvement on the previous record of 91.8 kilometres per hour by Nuna. Despite two quickly changed flat tires Nuna II travelled 830 km on the third racing day - never before has such a distance been accomplished within one day. On the fourth and final day Nuna again pushed the limits by driving at a top speed of 110 km per hour, finally setting a new world record.

Now if they'd only make a model with tailfins and whitewall tires!

Nascar here we come.

Shutting Off The Tap

The most frequently mentioned reason for the IGC's balking at the prospect of Turkish troops coming into Iraq to shoulder some of the security burden is Turkish - Kurdish tension. No mystery there. Second seems to be the long memory still holding nearly 500 years of Ottoman rule in sharp focus. But damn, seems the Turks cut off the water of the Euphrates to irrigate their southeastern provinces not too long ago. Damming their river will tend to make desert-dwellers a little suspicious of your agenda, all right. Last thing you'd want to do is let them have a stronger hand in the development your oil resources.

Rivers couldn't care less about international boundaries. Neither do infectious diseases, toxic wastes, migratory animals, greenhouse gasses, or - increasingly - fundamentalist zealots.

So how do you figure this stuff out? Apparently 75% of the water in the Euphrates comes from Turkey (rainier, more springs.) Does that mean that the Turks can dam the river and use 75% of the water for economic development in their highlands regardless of the fact that for the 6000+ years of civilization the vast majority of the water flowed into the (hence) fertile lowlands of the Tigris & Euphrates valley (ie Iraq) where agriculture friggin' started? Well, no, that doesn't sound right.

I hate to keep harping on this, but our most pressing issues as a species right now are environmental conservation, public health, violent fanaticism, and festering ethnic conflict. To all of these problems international boundaries are either irrelevant or an exacerbation. And not one of them will be more than feebly dealt with unless done so with strong international efforts via strong international institutions.

So there.

The Tusk at Hand

God, but I love Paul Ford's Ftrain.

...She worked for a long time as an event planner, but she quit when the doctors told her there was no hope. And I want to say: it's just how it is. Some people have tusks. I have not touched it. It apparently swivels in a sort of spongy base. It comes out right below her nose, and curves sharply upwards, which makes it a tusk and not an antler. She's going cross-eyed from looking at it, but I don't say anything.

Her apartment is lit only by the light of the screensaver of her computer. She writes poetry, and then erases it. I don't know why I keep going over there, myself. She did after all dump me, back in her pre-tusk days, for a far more handsome man, a landscape architect...

Mother Suffer

People don't like to hear it said, and it would be nice if the main voice saying it wasn't so flawed a vessel as Christopher Hitchens, but the fact remains and deserves repeating. In fast-tracking the beatification of Mother Teresa, as with all things related to her, the Catholic Church is making a mockery of itself and does indeed signal "the abject surrender, on the part of the church, to the forces of showbiz, superstition, and populism."

MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?

The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for "the poorest of the poor." People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the "Missionaries of Charity," but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell's admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.

One of the curses of India, as of other poor countries, is the quack medicine man, who fleeces the sufferer by promises of miraculous healing. Sunday was a great day for these parasites, who saw their crummy methods endorsed by his holiness and given a more or less free ride in the international press. Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. More than that, we witnessed the elevation and consecration of extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith, and the cult of a mediocre human personality. Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.

First time you've heard any of this? Try starting here. I'm not hostile to Catholicism in any greater degree than I am toward the rest of the menu of religions - less so, really, because of the huge amount of scholarship it represents - but the adulation and adoration of Mother Teresa just sticks in my craw. She was a crook, a hypocrite, a fundamentalist zealot, and an apologist for dictators, and for this she gets to hop to the front of the sainthood line? Ick.

How's the Salary Up There?

Dammit. Six feet tall with my shoes off and I'm still not rich.

An American study has found tall people garner more respect, status and even money than their more vertically challenged counter-parts, with each inch (2.5cm) adding $US783 ($1135) a year to a person's income.

"Height matters for career success," said Professor Timothy Professor Judge [sic], whose research found the taller the person the fatter their wallet. Researchers at the University of Florida and the University of North Carolina, followed thousands of participants from childhood to adulthood in the United States and Britain, examining various aspects of their work and personal lives.

The study found that when it came to determining income height mattered more than gender. Tall people also did better on job evaluations and on seemingly objective measures, like sales performance.

No wonder all those NBA players wear such nice suits.

The Iraqi Monkey Trap and Bush's Bumper

I'm always on the lookout for any opportunity to work monkeys into a post here, but this one would stand on its own even if it didn't mention monkeys. Read William Raspberry's latest Washington Post op-ed, where he recounts Rev. Earl Neil's analogy of the Bush administration's rock-and-a-hard-place Iraqi policy and an African monkey trap that uses a monkey's greed to snare it.

But pretty soon the president himself will have to do something about that coconut. Does he want the rice -- control of Iraq's oil and lucrative rebuilding contracts for his political friends at Bechtel, Halliburton and elsewhere -- more than he wants the possibility of extracting himself from a mess he was warned about but still blustered into? Will he end up just another trapped monkey?

No matter how much Bush tries to spin Iraq, only the blindly loyal or the deeply disingenuous could deny that he has a first-class disaster on his hands, with no good options for dealing with it. Time and again I read the sentiment that "now that we are there, we have to stay and do it correctly." As high-minded as that sounds, the notion is for naught if doing it "correctly" is beyond our abilities. All that will happen is our entanglement in the inevitable civil war.

Does pulling out create the risk of a new Afghanistan (that is, a wild-west haven for terrorists)? Absolutely. Will staying in prevent it? Maybe, maybe not, but it is decidedly closer to that state now than before we were there. Were millions of us screaming prior to the war that this ass-backwards invasion would actually strengthen the terrorists? You're goddamn right we were. So forgive my eye-rolling at the "we have to do it right" or "we broke it, we bought it" arguments. I don't trust this administration's motives or abilities one bit anyhow. As far as I can tell, every day they have American troops on the ground there is just one more day they have to screw up the situation even worse than it already is.

We are flailing about in the dark in regards to Iraq. Nobody has the first idea what to do now that we have marched into Baghdad. We are less like the monkey with his fist caught in a coconut than a car-chasing dog who managed to sink his teeth into the rubber bumper and now is being dragged down the freeway. The biggest difference is that Bush keeps complaining through his mouthful of bumper that the media isn't giving him credit for catching the car, and unfairly focusing on the fact that his hindquarters have mostly been ground away.

Redeployment

Another dead American soldier makes seven in three days. With the sophistication, efficacy, and frequency of attacks on US troops rising steadily, how optimistic is the Pentagon's plan to reduce troop levels to below 100,000 next year and to 50,000 by 2005? Incredibly optimistic, especially when Turkey is having second thoughts about offering peacekeeping troops and Japan will only pony up a few hundred non-combat troops. Unless they don't. However, the Defense Department simply does not have the troops to maintain the current level past next spring, so they have to do something. The US is planning to withdraw about 12,000 troops from South Korea (from a total of 37,000), despite increasing belligerence from the North and an actual, legitimate threat. Wonder where they are headed?

The Unbearable Lightness of Blogging

Posts have been relatively scarce here recently - both Froz and I have been swamped with work and parenting responsibilities and I've recently been feeling a bit blogged out besides. The light schedule will likely persist for another couple or three days here while I get various loose ends tied up. For now, have a chuckle at Mollie Wilson's list of Rejected Titles for Hymns.

God, You Can Be Such a Jerk Sometimes
Even Cripples Praise Your Name
Faith of My In-Laws
Cleanse My Scalp of Dandruff, Lord
Another Rainy Day. Great. Thanks a Lot.
"Holy" like a Doughnut, "Holy" like Swiss Cheese
Just One More Hour, and Then We Go Home
O Saints Who Died in Gruesome Ways
Jesus is More Than Alright with Me
You Have to Admit, This Sounds Pretty Farfetched
I Thank Thee, God, for Buttocks Firm
O Lord, We Really Prefer Not to Know
Alleluia, Schmalleluia

Quote of the Day

From Juan Cole: "Markets, like pet tigers, can be wonderful dynamic things, but they are stupid and amoral, and need to be regulated if they are to be tamed." Among the other news over the weekend at Professor Cole's site, six American soldiers were killed in two days in Iraq, Turkey is getting cold feet over putting troops into Iraq, and the US is finding it difficult to remain unentangled in the mounting internecine Shi'ite hostilities.

Of course, the Bush administration is in high dander insisting that the media is portraying the situation in Iraq as much worse than it really is. Kevin Drum rightly notes that none of us sitting in our living rooms can claim to understand what the situation truly is, but a wealth of hints certainly exist from which some basic inferences could be drawn, and none of them paint a pretty picture:

• Before the war they expected to draw down troop levels to around 30,000 by now. This hasn't happened, so obviously events on the ground have turned out to be a lot worse than they originally expected.

• In fact, as I mentioned last month, we've seen the following actions recently: (a) keeping the 3rd ID in country after scheduling them to return, (b) rotating officers and senior NCOs out of their units, (c) extending the tours of regular troops, and (d) extending the tours of reservists. Now apparently leaves are being shortened. These are risky moves, and the Army wouldn't be making them unless the reality on the ground continued to be grim.

• The White House has shuffled responsibility for Iraqi reconstruction three times, first to Jay Garner, then to Jerry Bremer, and finally giving Condoleezza Rice a bigger role, the last move provoking a furious response from Donald Rumsfeld, who apparently learned about it via memo and media reports.

• Last month Bush shocked everyone by requesting an additional $87 billion for Iraqi reconstruction. He wouldn't have requested a sum this large if he could have gotten by with less.

• Finally, there's the UN. Regardless of what his apologists say now, it's pretty obvious that Bush didn't want to fight for another UN resolution. He wouldn't have done this unless he'd been convinced that he had no other choice.
  

Kevin adds, "But the Sunni triangle still seems to be a war zone, ambushes are taking place at an alarming rate, oil production is not ramping up very quickly, NGOs (and the UN) have pulled out because conditions are so unsafe, unemployment is over 50%, and Saddam is still loose." Putting aside the scoring of political points for a moment, it appears from my vantage point that the most useful outcome of this war will be in providing an example for future administrations of exactly how not to wage a foreign war. While doubtlessly some good things are being accomplished, the cost/benefit analysis on this one is looking worse by the day.

We Are Not Amused

I'll turn 35 at the end of the next month, which means I can actually remember the world before video games. I recall being stunned speechless the first time I saw an Asteroids arcade game, and soon thereafter thinking my friends with then-fancy Atari and Intellivision sets were clearly blessed by a higher power that had deemed my family unworthy of such delights. I played arcade games like every other kid my age, but once they moved beyond left, right, and fire, they just became frustrating and I returned to pinball machines (which, as far as I know, are no longer being made anywhere) and never did become much of a gamer.

So I found this article in Electronic Gaming Monthly amusing - they assembled a group of 10-to-13-year-old kids to have them play and evaluate the very games that my generation found so mesmerizing. The young panel was predictably underwhelmed, but their comments were quite entertaining. The article began with the following note:

Everything written here was actually said by these kids. Really. The only change we made was to remove the more gratuitous usages of the word "gay."

The winning comment from each of the games reviewed:

Pong (1975) - "This is a lot like that game. Um, whatchamacallit—air hockey. Except worse."

DonkeyKong (1981) - "And Donkey Kong's mouth is made of pluses. Look: Plus, plus, plus, minus. They're trying to teach you math by brainwashing you."

Mattel Handheld Football (1977) - "I don't see how this has anything remotely to do with football." God, how I coveted one of these things as a fifth-grader.

Tetris (1988) - "Which button do I press to make the blocks explode?" Four kids comment about Tetris, and all of them express wonderment about a game where nothing blows up.

Super Mario Brothers (1986) - "We're not going to play any mature games, are we?"

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1983 and voted worst game of all time by EGM) - "Yeah, let's watch the [lava] lamp. It's more fun and less predictable."

Space Invaders (1978) - "I'm sure everyone who made this game is dead by now."

No Title Needed

From the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday:

Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he "didn't want to see any stories" quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used.

Um. Yeah.

Recognition of Faith

Showed up in my inbox this morning:

1) Jews do not recognize Jesus Christ as the Messiah.

2) Protestants do not recognize the Pope as the leader of the Christian faith.

3) Baptists do not recognize each other at Hooters.

Heh heh. Indeed. Disclosure: I was raised in Southern Baptist churches, albeit mostly in staunchly liberal ones. That breed mostly doesn't exist any longer here in North Carolina, having either left the SBC or been kicked out for not being sufficiently unpleasant toward homosexuals.

In other faith-based news, the legality of including religious schools in Florida's voucher program is currently being debated in appeals court there. By nature, I'm pretty suspicious about giving tax dollars to religious schools - and I think religious schools should be just as suspicious of it - but I'm pretty agnostic on the voucher question as long as it's happening in other states. It's a bad policy approach , but you can't stop other people from trying out bad ideas. They will eventually figure out on their own that it didn't help and try something else. But best of luck fighting those churches when you try to stop the vouchers.

However, for completely unrelated reasons, I was struck by this paragraph:

Two-thirds of all private schools are religious, but about three-quarters of all schools using vouchers in Florida are religious. The Palm Beach Post said Sunday that 869 of the 1,158 private schools taking vouchers are religious schools. They represent 48 different denominations, 97 percent of which are some denomination of Christianity, including 160 Catholic schools and 138 Baptist ones. Thirteen of the state's 38 Jewish schools, nine of the 11 Muslim schools and both of Florida's Hare Krishna schools get vouchers.

I had forgotten about Krishna schools. Reading that, I remembered that there had been a big lawsuit by former students alleging sexual abuse a few years back. Wondering what had happened to it, I found out that a judge in Texas dismissed the $400M lawsuit back in August, on the basis that individuals should be charged criminally, rather than targeting the church under RICO, the anti-racketeering statute. The Krishnas had the support of the National Council of Churches, the United States Catholic Conference (yeah, I'll bet), the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, and the American Jewish Congress.

Y'know, I'll bet music class at the Krishna schools gets a little old. "This semester, we'll be exploring finger cymbals! [pause] Same song, though. One, two, Hare Hare..."

Oh, and that study that showed patients healed faster when people prayed for them? Folks here in town haven't had much luck reproducing those results.

We're number one!

Here's a brief history of the middle finger starting back around 2500 years ago. Its meaning hasn't much changed during those two-and-a-half millenia. Bonus points were awarded for the photograph of "Galileo's meticulously preserved middle finger," still on display in an Italian museum.

Curses!

Yes, I know it's morally reprehensible, but the sadist in me just cackles at the prospect of a Yankees-Marlins World Series. All the more so because I honestly don't give a damn about baseball. The Red Sox will have to take two games in Yankee Stadium to advance, and the Cubs just blew a 3-0 lead, giving up eight runs in the eighth inning, practically ensuring a Game 7.

Heh heh. I'm sorry, I know it's wrong. I do. But it's just so damned funny. The television executives must be suicidal by now.

Guns don't dress people; people dress people.

Smith & Wesson: It's not just for killing and maiming anymore.

The 151-year-old gunmaking giant is branching out in "an effort by the Company to reach a wider consumer market with products that reflect the American lifestyle." From the press release:

Crossings by Smith & Wesson is a stand-alone catalog and Internet commerce business unit that capitalizes on the strength of the Smith & Wesson brand name by offering consumers a new spirited collection of merchandise for home decor, apparel and gifts. The catalog taps into the resurgence of American patriotism with a desire to return to a simpler, home-focused lifestyle, and love of the American West. [...] Every item in the catalog was carefully chosen for its reflection of a lifestyle born of freedom and independence. [...] Also included are two of Smith & Wesson's newest licensed products just released to the market: the Smith & Wesson Kid Safe Kit and First Response(TM) safety knife, a must have for automobile owners.

The online catalog is here, though it's mostly mall-ready, middle of the road, nouveau-retro-urbancowboy in earthtones, and not one image of a gun in sight. However, I'm not sure what to make of Cowgirls Ride the Trail of Truth. Better be one fancy ride for thirty-five bucks.

Aside: about the title, I agree that guns don't kill people. I do notice, however, that people who kill people sure do seem to like guns.

Balkan Experiments, Global Implications

At least they're talking.

Serbian and Kosovo Albanian leaders launched their first direct talks since a 1999 war on Tuesday, under Western pressure to reconcile by tackling practical problems like power supply and missing persons.

But the two sides remain bitterly divided, with Serbia insisting Kosovo remains part of its territory while Albanians demand independence from Belgrade.

The Serb Prime Minister threatened a boycott but didn't follow through with it. The Kosovar Prime Minister did not attend, but the (less powerful) President did.

The focus of these talks is on smaller, practical matters, avoiding more contentious political issues regarding sovereignty. That's probably a good idea for now but ultimately these two sides, who are in as intractable a situation as any in the world, will have to settle the bigger disputes and the UN has assumed responsibility for seeing that that is accomplished. Maybe later, but time is not impartial in this conflict and both parties understand that. The UN's "relevance" is being put far more to the test in Kosovo than anywhere else - albeit largely because the problem is so much geographically closer to the "western world" than far bloodier ethnic conflicts such as those that have erupted in Africa.

The importance of developments in the Balkans can't be understated. For one (rather americentric) thing, if Wes Clark gets the Democratic nomination to take on Bush he will juxtapose the imposition of American military power there (UN sanctioned, NATO coordinated) against Bush's unilateral approach in Iraq; a stable situation in Kosovo in mid-to-late 2004 is very important to America's future. But regardless of whether Clark gets the nod, the debate needs to go forward; it's just that a Clark-Bush race frames it very well.

On a broader level, however, Kosovo represents the learning process of our international organizations. The economy is globalizing (or, more accurately, the globalization of the economy is entrenching), our democratic institutions have to follow suit, if not take the lead. International action in Kosovo took shape under the shadow of what had just happened failed in Bosnia. It is imperative that the framework of solving these pervasive ethnic bloodlettings, steeped in mutual historic senses of victimhood and National right, be built by the UN and that involved parties persevere. Kosovo is that imperative, as was Timor.

Inherent to this strategy is the conflict between the sovereignty of States and the authority of the UN to take over the responsibilities of sovereignty, by force if necessary. While the translation alternatively makes me cringe and scratch my head baffled, Patrick Sabatier, writing in Liberation, exposes the irony of the term "protectorate" for these experiments by the institution formed to represent the global human family since the same term was so often the pleasant and noble tag applied to colonial usurpations of the rights of (usually brown) peoples a hundred years ago.

Note: Online English translations of individual articles in Liberation can't be linked directly. Go here for Google's translation, scroll down to "The supervision of UNO to the test in Kosovo", and click "Interference". Some of the other pieces there are worth reading as well.

This system, which entrusts to a foreign power the government of a country to draw it from anarchy, or to make possible to it (re)construction of it, had been used as folding screen with the colonial empires of XIXe and XXe centuries, of Kampuchea and Morocco. Admittedly, one does not speak any more, in Kosovo today not more than yesterday in Timor, of the imposition of a foreign capacity.

The fear of abuses makes me a little squeamish. The sense of patriotism makes me a little paranoid. The fear of bureaucratic ineffectiveness makes me a little hopeless (BTW - if you have not seen Danis Tanovic's film No Man's Land go rent it tonight). But we as a species don't have any choice but to try to solve these problems multilaterally. If we fail in one conflict, we get back up and try again.

Planet of the Telepathic, Lesbian, Kung-Fu-Robot-Controlling Apes

Yesterday, I opined that humans will one day regret training monkeys to telepathically control robots. That day may arrive sooner than I suspected. This morning, the RussWhoIsNotMe™ (operating under non-official cover as my boss) alerted me to this New Scientist article about the new breed of Japanese ass-kicking robots.

Visitors to CEATEC 2003 (Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies) met Morph3, a human-like robot about 30-centimetres tall developed by researchers at the Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan. It can perform back flips and karate moves thanks to 138 pressure sensors, 30 different onboard motors and 14 computer processors. Another miniature humanoid robot on display was Fujitsu's HOAP-2. This droid has been programmed to perform moves from the Chinese martial art taijiquan, as well as Japanese Sumo wrestling stances. (links added)

How this relates to the widely researched lesbian Japanese monkeys is anybody's guess, but I smell a conspiracy all the same. Just not the same conspiracy this guy is anticipating: "Nevertheless, I guarantee that within our lifetime the Politically Correct will move to allow red-bearded howler monkeys a seat on the U.N. Security Council."

Somebody get Charlton Heston on the phone. He'll know what to do.

Small Victories

At least doctors can talk to patients about the therapeutic use of Cannabis.

The U.S. Supreme Court let stand on Tuesday a ruling that the government cannot revoke the federal prescription licenses of doctors who recommend medical marijuana to sick patients.

Without any comment, the justices rejected a Bush administration appeal of the ruling that bars the government from punishing and from even investigating a doctor's conduct because of a recommendation that a patient use marijuana.

Whether you're pro-legalization or not (I wholeheartedly am), if you value freedom of speech (the real issue in this case) this is a good thing.

Lobster Pot and the Little Swimmers

Sometimes the line between performance artist and annoying homeless guy in a costume can be so thin.

Even in a town where costumed folk easily outnumber the Brooks Brothers set, Lobster Man stands out in a crowd. Virtually everyone in Provincetown knows him. And virtually everyone - merchants, the town licensing agent and local police - have an opinion about him. In the case of police, Ceria recently got into some hot water over a marijuana possession charge, which he plans to fight in Orleans District Court at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday - dressed in the lobster get-up.

Marijuana is a substance near and dear to Ceria's heart. A staunch advocate of "out and out legalization of pot," as he put it yesterday, Ceria said he will not only dress like a lobster in court, but he will ask the judge to return the ounce of marijuana police confiscated when they arrested him last month on a warrant. "That was lobster pot. That was medicine, and I want it back," said Ceria, a self-described sculptor, actor and street performer.

[...]

Ceria, who's staying at a $20-a-day hostel in Provincetown until he finds permanent digs, said the marijuana charge is no big deal. Besides his legal troubles, Ceria's lobster antics have annoyed and angered other town officials. [...] Ceria also hands out free pamphlets distributed by the chamber, she said, even though he was not asked - or authorized - to do so.

[...]

"He's a nuisance. We've received numerous calls on him," Meyer said. "He's a street guy, that's all; he doesn't work for anyone." Ceria's "panhandling" is against the law, Meyer said. But Ceria, who lived in Wendell, north of Quabbin Reservoir, prior to washing ashore on the Cape, said he's a misunderstood artist. "I help people with directions, the time, the weather. I'm the town crier," he said while working Lopes Square yesterday, dressed in full lobster regalia and wearing rose-tinted sunglasses.

Okay, so that's a silly story. But this one isn't: the U.S. Supreme Court "cleared the way Tuesday for state laws allowing ill patients to smoke marijuana if a doctor recommends it. Justices turned down the Bush administration's request to consider whether the federal government can punish doctors for recommending or perhaps just talking about the benefits of the drug to sick patients."

It's a small victory, but a victory all the same. Marijuana use is still considered illegal for any use by the federal government, but this case came down to the issue of doctors' free speech rights, and amazingly, the Supreme Court did the right thing. File this under "even a stopped clock is right twice a day."

Nine states have laws legalizing medical marijuana (with the exception of Maine, all in the Western US) and 35 states have passed legislation recognizing the herb's medicinal value. Then there's Canada, which can't decide what it believes about marijuana. Slowly but surely, the tide will turn on this. There's just entirely too much money involved for the government not to eventually get in on the action. Of course, one can't ignore the recent findings that marijuana users can show impaired sperm counts and motility. On the other hand, according to this article, I'm balancing that out with my massive coffee intake.

A Lie Told Enough Times

Becomes the truth.

A majority of Americans have held at least one of three mistaken impressions about the U.S.-led war in Iraq, according to a new study released Thursday, and those misperceptions contributed to much of the popular support for the war.

The three common mistaken impressions are that:

1. U.S. forces found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

2. There's clear evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein worked closely with the Sept. 11 terrorists.

3. People in foreign countries generally either backed the U.S.-led war or were evenly split between supporting and opposing it.

Are these people living under a rock?

Here's the questionnaire used by Program on International Policy Attitudes for the survey. It's in PDF.

Maddeningly, though, a gallup poll says Americans still think the media is "too liberal." Oy.

Look ma, no hands!

Right here in Durham, NC, researchers have "have built a brain implant that lets monkeys control a robotic arm with their thoughts, marking the first time that mental intentions have been harnessed to move a mechanical object." Their next step is to make the system wireless, which should be a relatively minor upgrade. The article is fascinating, the researchers were astounded, and this carries huge promise for paralysis victims. Nonetheless, part of me (mostly the insomniac part that watches bad movies on cable at 3 am) can't help but think that as a species, we will one day sorely regret having trained monkeys to telepathically control robots. So begins the Matrix...

On the other hand, the revolutionary nature of this is being overplayed by the researchers. Hell, I can make a 3-ton city bus move away at high speed just by approaching the bus stop.

One Hundred "Greatest" Novels

The Observer has posted its list of the 100 greatest novels. Now, I realize that such lists ultimately come down to the personal preferences of the members of the selection committee and are generally more exercises in provocation than illumination. Still, any list that places Frankenstein in the top ten of all novels ever (and a full 59 spots in front of Nabokov's Lolita), or ranks Charlotte's Web ten spaces in front of To Kill a Mockingbird, Catch-22, Herzog, and One Hundred Years of Solitude raises the distinct possibility that the novels were ordered by pulling slips of paper out of a hat.

Don Quixote takes the honor as the greatest novel, and while that wouldn't have been my choice, it is at least defendable. I'll also award points for putting Joyce's Ulysses down at #45, which demonstrates an awareness that, landmark novel though it may be, inscrutability does not necessarily equal erudition. But all in all, this list was most surprising to me first for its stuffiness (I mean, honestly, Pilgrim's Progress at number 2?), and second for omitting Crime and Punishment, in itself a crime that merits punishment.

Sounds familiar...

So, six months later, how we doin' on that "hearts and minds" campaign over there?

Ooh. Not so well.

US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops. [...] Sheikh Hussein Ali Saleh al-Jabouri, a member of a delegation that went to the nearby US base to ask for compensation for the loss of the fruit trees, said American officers described what had happened as "a punishment of local people because 'you know who is in the resistance and do not tell us'." What the Israelis had done by way of collective punishment of Palestinians was now happening in Iraq, Sheikh Hussein added.

[...]

Farmers say that 50 families lost their livelihoods, but a petition addressed to the coalition forces in Dhuluaya pleading in erratic English for compensation, lists only 32 people. The petition says: "Tens of poor families depend completely on earning their life on these orchards and now they became very poor and have nothing and waiting for hunger and death.

The children of one woman who owned some fruit trees lay down in front of a bulldozer but were dragged away, according to eyewitnesses who did not want to give their names. They said that one American soldier broke down and cried during the operation. When a reporter from the newspaper Iraq Today attempted to take a photograph of the bulldozers at work a soldier grabbed his camera and tried to smash it. The same paper quotes Lt Col Springman, a US commander in the region, as saying: "We asked the farmers several times to stop the attacks, or to tell us who was responsible, but the farmers didn't tell us."

Informing US troops about the identity of their attackers would be extremely dangerous in Iraqi villages, where most people are related and everyone knows each other. The farmers who lost their fruit trees all belong to the Khazraji tribe and are unlikely to give information about fellow tribesmen if they are, in fact, attacking US troops.

Asked how much his lost orchard was worth, Nusayef Jassim said in a distraught voice: "It is as if someone cut off my hands and you asked me how much my hands were worth."

Do you think there is a single person in the Middle East who didn't just draw this parallel? Those farmers whose groves were just uprooted now have no means of income and nothing to do, and got taunted in the process. Now, let's say you're recruiting members for a guerrilla resistance movement. Where would you start?

I Like Magnae Clunes and I Cannot Lie...

Sir Mix-a-Lot in the original Latin.

(tip: TrickL-D)

And night is day.

Instapundit links approvingly to the single silliest argument yet made about the California recall: that the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger indicates that voters realize "joke time is over."

No, I'm not kidding. That's really what it says.

Speaking of unauthorized leaks...

The FDA is considering allowing silicon-gel breast implants back on the market for elective purposes. They have been banned in the US since 1992, except for patients with breast cancer or in controlled research studies of other conditions. Nothing lasts forever, and leaking silicon will make you just sicker than hell, but apparently the silicon implants are far more realistic than the saline-filled ones. In countries where both are sold, about 90% of patients choose the former.

Can't say I have much of an opinion about this; I suppose I view it in the same light as drugs. Adults should have the right to put potentially unhealthy things into their bodies if that's what they really want to do. All the same, I have to think that some day in the not very distant future, people will look back at electively shoving foreign objects under your skin to change the shape of your body (as opposed to following breast cancer surgery) as one of the most bizarre and inexplicable practices of our time, on a par with these sorts of things.

GOOOOOOOOOAL!!!

It might just be that the universe is shaped like a soccer ball.

We could be living in a small Universe where space is curved in on itself, rather like a football, say researchers in this week's Nature journal. More precisely, we may inhabit a dodecahedral cosmos. It is, according to the scientists, the best way to account for the latest satellite observations.

[...]

Data from the US space agency's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which maps the [Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation, the "echo" of the Big Bang], suggests that at the very largest scales its temperature fluctuations seen across the sky are smaller than would be produced by an infinite Universe.

It seems the WMAP data shows the Universe is too small for large fluctuations to be seen in the microwave background radiation. Astronomers from the US and France suggest that space itself is not big enough to support such waves. A small, cosmologically speaking, finite Universe, however, made of curved pentagons joined together into a sphere, would fit the observations.

Believe it or not, we are actually going to find out soon. When the Planck satellite launches in 2007, the data it sends back will allow astronomers pin it down definitively. On a related note, there are photographs of some extremely cool dodecahedral and other-hedral sculptures by SUNY-Stony Brook computer science professor George Hart at this page. Check 'em out. Coincidentally, I drive by an eight foot sculpture by Hart in Chapel Hill at least twice a week.

The jokes write themselves.

From today's Guardian, about post-war Iraq:

Almost all of the bureaucrats at the information ministry have done very nicely for themselves since the war. The government minders who spent their days reporting to the intelligence services on foreign reporters or doing their best to obstruct their work have gone on to well-paid jobs - for the same foreign news organisations they once hounded.

The second-in-command at the information ministry, who spent his days reading the reports the minders wrote about visiting foreign journalists, has been employed by Fox News.

Bottoms Up!

The nine remaining Democratic candidates for president (not counting the tireless but insane Lyndon LaRouche, who is justifiably frozen out of such affairs) will debate tonight in Phoenix. It will be broadcast on CNN at 8:00 EST, but if you suffered through the last one, you know that this many candidates make for an utterly incoherent debate. I figure, though, maybe if I reach the same level of incoherence, it might suddenly all make sense.

Accordingly, I give you Slate's Democratic Debate Drinking Game.

Now that's chutzpah.

Back at the beginning of July, Jonathon Russell walked into his workplace near Jefferson City, Missouri with a Glock semi-automatic, killed three co-workers, injured five more, then turned the gun on himself. I can't speak to the frequency of such meltdowns around the globe, but in the States, they are depressingly common. But here's a new twist: the shooter's mother has filed a claim under the workers' compensation system for her son's death because it occurred on the job.

The company quickly approved the claims filed by the families of Russell's victims, but Modine has no intention of compensating the gunman's family, [company spokesman Mick] Lucareli said. "This is probably an odd situation. It certainly caught us by surprise."

Probably?

Governor Schwarzenegger

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." - H.L. Mencken

"A nation driven half-mad with desperation and grief."

In the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland hits the nail on the head in "The Impotence of Power," the fairest and most perceptive piece I have read about Israel's strange attack on Syria and its place in the larger Middle East conflict. It is difficult not to draw the parallels to America's latest unwinnable war.

Special Ed Military Planning

One Really, Really Bad Idea

The United States has accepted an offer by Serbia and Montenegro to send up to 1,000 combat troops and police to Afghanistan to participate with American forces there, senior Serb officials and foreign diplomats said on Friday.

Probably due to the long history of good relations between Serbs and Muslims, hmm? How desperate is the administration to take Serbian soldiers to help patrol a Muslim country? A few doors down, the Iraqi Governing Council has already rejected the introduction of the Turkish troops, for whom the US essentially bribed Turkey with an $8.5 billion loan. Their fears are easily understandable, what with Turkey having ruled Iraq for 400 years leading up to WWI.

Man, where are the Mongols when you need them? I guess the Persians are still around, but there are a few, um, issues with getting their troops in there to help us. Then again, even if the Hittites and Kassites were still around to lend their experience in "controlling" Mesopotamia, it likely wouldn't be enough.

Read this Billmon post (I mean it - read it) about the rapidly deteriorating situation in Iraq before you swallow one grain of the right wing's argument that the media is making things out to be worse than they are. If anything, they are underplaying the impending disaster.

It's Official: Size Matters

Adding to his voluminous body of scientific discoveries, which includes determining what bread is best suited for soaking up gravy and his IgNobel Prize-winning research on the best method for dunking biscuits in tea, Dr. Len Fisher has determined the algorithms for the perfect cheese sandwiches.

Dr Fisher, of the University of Bristol, revealed that to ensure optimum 'cheesiness', Cheddar should be 2.8 millimetres thick, while Caerphilly should measure 4.5 millimetres, and Blue Stilton three millimetres. Sandwiches should be made with a light spreading of butter or margarine, which enhance the aroma of the cheese.

Fear the Cheese Borg!

The study was commissioned by the British Cheese Council. For a little more rigorous examination of the science behind curdled milk, try this article in the American Chemical Society's journal Chemical & Engineering News. Among other slices of almost useful information, you will finally discover the differences between pasteurized process cheese food, pasteurized process cheese spread, pasteurized process cheese product, and imitation cheese.

What is the sound of no hand typing?

The blog world has a well-deserved reputation for windy verbosity. But then there are the exceptions that prove the rule.

• The Single Bitter Announcement Weblog
• MuteBlog

I found the first via Fables of the Reconstruction and the second I came across so long ago that I no longer recall who brought it to my attention.

Caption Me!

"Don't mind me. I'm just trying to stop another leak."

It's the precedent, stupid.

This is why you don't allow people to put the Ten Commandments on public property.

Anti-gay preacher Fred Phelps has announced intentions to erect a monument to Matthew Shepard, the gay college student brutally murdered five years ago near Laramie. But, the monument will be no memorial. Phelps says the monument would be 5 to 6 feet tall and made of marble or granite. It would bear a bronze plaque bearing the image of Shepard and have an inscription reading "MATTHEW SHEPARD, Entered Hell October 12, 1998, in Defiance of God's Warning: 'Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination.' Leviticus 18:22." The monument would be erected in downtown Casper, Shepard's home town.

Now, one would think that the Casper city council could put a stop to this, right? Wrong.

Phelps has sent details of the monument to the city of Casper city council and there may be nothing the city can do to prevent it. Phelps said he intends to put up the monument in City Park, already the location of a controversial statue of the Ten Commandments [...] donated to the city by the Fraternal Order of the Eagles in 1965. After a court battle over a similar monument in the city of Ogden, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that any city that displays a Ten Commandments monument on public property must also allow monuments espousing the views of other religions or political groups on that same property.

This is why the Jeffersonian wall of separation between church and state is so important and why it must be absolute. If you fudge it for one case - no matter how inoffensive or watered-down - you open the door to every hate-filled fringe group out there, because they are guaranteed the same rights as the rest of us. In the end, the crux of the matter is that every time religion and government get tangled up with one another, they both emerge decidedly worse for the experience.

If you want your religion to inform government policy, that goes both ways: let's have government come in and regulate your religion. That's right - full taxation and audits, EEOC hiring regulations, the whole nine yards. Don't like it? Then keep your religion on private property. Otherwise, the Fred Phelps of the world (or the Church of Satan or the Moonies or the Scientologists or the Christian Identity wackos or al-Qaeda or what have you) will be completely within their rights to crawl out from under their rocks and demand equal airtime.

We are a country of laws. Precedents matter.

Making a Cass of Himself

Rep. Cass Ballenger (R), from Hickory, North Carolina has had another bigotry explosion. You may remember Rep. Ballenger from the beginning of the year when he admitted to having "segregationist feelings" when he had to be around Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) because she was "such a bitch." You don't figure he really could outdo himself on that one, but you'd be figuring wrong.

U.S. Rep. Cass Ballenger blames the breakup of his 50-year marriage partly on the stress of living near a leading American Muslim advocacy group. He told The Charlotte Observer that he and his wife worried that the group was so close to the U.S. Capitol that "they could blow the place up." Another stress on their marriage was the 1995 decision by "holier-than-thou Republicans" in the House to ban gifts from lobbyists, said Ballenger, a Hickory Republican . He said the meals and theater tickets from lobbyists once meant "a social life for [congressional] wives."

[...]

Ballenger said that in the post 9/11 environment in Washington, his wife was anxious about all the activity at the group, including people unloading boxes late at night and women "wearing hoods," or headscarves, going in and out of the office building . "That's 2 1/2 blocks from the Capitol," he said, "and they could blow it up."

Where does one even begin with something like that? The saddest thing is that, given the district he represents, these sorts of remarks probably only help him.

More Tigers in the News

With the Detroit Tigers missing the record for most losses in a season by just one game, they clearly aren't going to be making any headlines during the playoffs. Accordingly, it's up to actual tigers to keep the species in the headlines. They seem to be getting good advice from their agents. First they try to turn Siegfried and Roy into a solo act, and now this.

To the sounds of enormous jungle roars, a police sniper rappelled down the side of a Harlem apartment building yesterday and fired tranquilizer darts through an open fifth-floor window to subdue — seat belts, please — a 350-pound Bengal tiger.

The daring, and creative, bit of sharpshooting helped end an episode in which the New York Police Department, unaccustomed to bagging big game, nonetheless managed to sedate the beast. Officials planned to send the tiger, temporarily being held at the Center for Animal Care and Control on 110th Street, to a conservancy in Ohio. What the tiger, along with a four- to five-foot reptile called a caiman, was doing inside a cluttered apartment in the Drew Hamilton Houses at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and 141st Street remained a mystery yesterday.

In a news conference at the scene, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the police became involved in the case on Wednesday when the apartment's resident, Antoine Yates, called to say he had been bitten by a pit bull. When the police went to investigate, Mr. Kelly said, Mr. Yates met them in the lobby. He went to Harlem Hospital with bites on an arm and a leg.

[...]

As hundreds of onlookers gathered on the street, some began to wonder if this urban big cat would get along so well in the less cosmpolitan reaches of Ohio. "My concern is that the city cat won't make it in the country," said Lynnette Braxton, 49. "He's going to have no jazz, no hip-hop. He's going to miss the Harlem Renaissance."

(Tip: t-melt)

Paper Trails

Also via MWOWWWW (and you can spelunk the link tunnel there if you'd like), comes this interesting news about the recent Ontario elections, where the Liberals handed the Tories their asses in a landslide:

The election used paper ballots which were counted by hand at each polling station, with the results telephoned in to the Returning Officers, who communicated the results to the media. Ontario is a huge place, with over 11 million people on 415,000 square miles or over one million square kilometers (at the longest points, 1,000 miles high and 1,000 miles wide), and yet this old-fashioned system produced election results in about an hour, with the winner giving his victory speech less than two hours after the polls closed. Since paper ballots were used, and absolutely no computers were involved in the balloting process, the ballots can be recounted at any time should there be any dispute, and the ballots themselves serve as decisive evidence of the validity of the results

Add this example to the many serious problems with computerized voting, and the case gets even more obvious. In my district, we use op-scan machines, where you connect the arrow with a felt-tip pin. Seems to me that this is the porridge that Goldilocks chose - not too labor-intensive, not too prone to fraud.

Uh oh.

Israel bombs Syria, attacking an alleged Islamic Jihad training base in "the first Israeli attack deep inside Syrian territory in more than two decades." No matter what you believe about the various Middle East conflicts, this is bad news.

(tip: MWOWatchWatchWatchWatch)

Speakerboxxx/The Love Below

By the way, if you haven't heard Outkast's new double-CD, then run, don't walk, and plunk down your ducats. Holy moly. For my money, this is the first truly landmark album of the '00s. Stylistically all over the map, unrelentingly complex, and your shiny tiny hiney will shimmy and shake all the livelong day. The albums are twin solo projects for Big Boi and Andre3000, and while they are completely dissimilar, they manage somehow to stand together as a coherent whole. Truly staggering. This glowing allmusic.com review doesn't even do it justice. Highest recommendation. I can't stop listening to it.

Their website is pretty fancy, too. Turn your sound on.

The Sperminator

No, this isn't about Arnold.

Researchers in Australia announced successful results in a year-long trial of an injectable hormonal contraceptive for men, using a subdermal testosterone implant replaced every four months and injections of the female hormone progestin given every three months. The study followed 55 couples that used no other forms of birth control for a year. No pregnancies occurred while on the trial and, more importantly, the side effects were low and the contraceptive effect quickly reversible.

Police officer Chris Hains, from south-west Sydney, joined the trial in 2000 after his wife Nicole was having problems with taking Depo-Provera, a contraceptive injection given every three months. Every three to four months, doctors implanted testosterone under Mr Hains's abdominal skin under local anaesthetic. Apart from the discomfort of the incision, Mr Hains said the only side-effect was increased libido: "From my point of view it had a positive side-effect," he said. About seven months after leaving the trial, Mrs Hains fell pregnant with now four-month-old son, Connor.

David Handelsman, the lead researcher, says a male contraceptive pill is still a long ways off, but this is a good step down the road toward it. He also announced promising research into a male "morning after" emergency contraception pill that changes men's blood types. [wink]

Nature vs. Nurture

And nature just raced into the lead.

British researchers have found the first solid neurological indication that sexual orientation is hard-wired in the brain by measuring differences in startle reflexes between heterosexuals and homosexuals.

"The startle response is pre-conscious and cannot be learnt," he said. "It is mediated by an ancient region of the brain called the limbic system, which also controls sexual behaviour. This is very strong evidence that female sexual orientation at least may be 'hardwired' in this region."

[...]

The subjects were unexpectedly startled with a loud noise and the speed and strength of their response measured. Heterosexual men had an average score of 40 per cent, compared with 32 per cent for gay men. Among women, lesbians scored an average of 33 per cent, compared with 13 per cent for other women.

Hmm. Well, I suppose somebody really ought to let this guy know, though it's going to ruin his whole schtick. Scroll down to the third album cover on this page, and tell me if you're convinced. From the pose, it looks like Jesus is his pet name for his johnson. Especially when he talks about his "incredible witnessing tool to homosexual family members and friends." Oh my.

No kitty! That's a bad kitty!

Tiger mauls Roy (of Siegfried and Roy) on stage.

Not Much Bang for the Buck

The Iraq Survey Group has spent three months and half a billion dollars scouring Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, and and all David Kay has to show for it is one vial of botox? Does the administration realize how much of that stuff is wandering around the streets of Los Angeles? Completely unsecured, for Christ's sake? Call in the National Guard!

And now Bush wants to spend another $600 million to keep looking. I can't imagine how those oil companies of his failed. "No, you just keep right on drilling there; this Cheney fella promised me there's oil up under there."

One vial of botox. How embarrassing. You know, now that I think about it, Saddam's face was suspiciously wrinkle-free for a man of his age...

Anderson Cooper Apologizes

From the close of tonight's Anderson Cooper 360° on CNN:

Regardless of your feelings about Rush Limbaugh or Arnold Schwarzenegger, you probably noticed that this week's apologies for various behavior fell somewhere between outright contrition and outright defiance. A lot of people weren't satisfied.

Well, I don't want that happening to me if I get caught up in a future scandal. So I've created an all-purpose apology. All you have to do is edit it down to choose whatever response is best suited to whatever I have to apologize for. Are you ready? All right, here we go.

I'd like to make a statement regarding my unfortunate remarks. My regrettable behavior. My recent crime spree.

Yes, I have behaved badly. Broken the law. Failed to clean up my room. Violated international treaties.

My actions have upset my staff and crew. Women and Mormons. The great state of Wyoming. I feel I have no choice but to resign. Turn myself in. Return the monkeys as soon as I can find them.

Now that I've been caught, it's time for me to apologize to the woman. Six women. Twelve women, the midget and Michael Jackson's aardvark.

I hope now I can move on. Resume the people's business. Promote my memoirs.

Thank you.

"The plumbers are back."

Don't miss Michelle Goldberg's interview with Daniel Ellsberg, who published the Pentagon Papers, on the Plame affair. He, too, thinks the Nixon administration can't hold a candle to this one in pure nastiness. The Watergate meme has become inescapable now.

IgNobels

The 2003 IgNobel Awards Ceremony was held was held last night at Harvard University. The IgNobel Award is given to people whose research or achievements "cannot or should not be reproduced." All of the awards are pretty funny, but these are my favorites from this year.

PHYSICS
Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowley, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart, and Robyn Williams of Australia, for their irresistible report "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces."
[PUBLISHED IN: Applied Ergonomics, vol. 33, no. 6, November 2002, pp. 523-31.]

BIOLOGY
C.W. Moeliker, of Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.
[REFERENCE: "The First Case of Homosexual Necrophilia in the Mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves: Anatidae)" C.W. Moeliker, Deinsea, vol. 8, 2001, pp. 243-7. Photographs can be viewed at http://www.nmr.nl/deins815.htm]

However, the must-read story of the bunch belongs to these guys:

ENGINEERING
The late John Paul Stapp, the late Edward A. Murphy, Jr., and George Nichols, for jointly giving birth in 1949 to Murphy's Law, the basic engineering principle that "If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, someone will do it (or, in other words: "If anything can go wrong, it will")."
REFERENCE: "The Fastest Man on Earth," Nick T. Spark, Annals of Improbable Research, vol. 9, no. 5, Sept/Oct 2003.]

The Nodding Disease

This is as strange as it is sad.

Ten-year-old Susannah Jackson is dying of what may be the world's newest and oddest disease - an illness so rare and mysterious that science has not yet come up with an official name for it. Sitting outside her family's mud hut, near the small town of Lui, Susannah is gripped by a series of brain seizures which force her neck to arch forwards, down, and then up again. No wonder people in this isolated corner of southern Sudan call it "nodding disease."

"We have no clue as what is causing this. It's like a detective novel and a murder mystery, because it's fatal," says Dr Mickey Richer, a tropical disease specialist from Unicef. So far, almost 300 children are known to have caught the disease - all in one small region of the country.

Bizarrely, the seizures normally occur when the sufferers start to eat, or when it is particularly cold. When Dr Richer asks for a bowl of sorghum to be placed in front of Susannah, the "nodding" begins almost immediately, and stop when she has finished eating. Curiously, Susannah does not react if she eats unfamiliar food - a chocolate bar for instance.

[...]

Amadi is now considered to be the epicentre of the disease - 12% of children here are affected. Last year, experts from the World Health Organisation did neurological scans on some of the children, enabling them to confirm that this is a specific and unique condition.

On the subject of suffering African children, this 4-part series is a couple of years old but if you aren't familiar with the story of the Lost Boys of Sudan, it's a completely fascinating story that actually has some happy endings.

Open Source Goodness

The blog-on-steroids experiment at Open Source Politics is something to behold, folks. Unfortunately, the rate at which articles are appearing there means that if you don't check in regularly, you'll miss big chunks of stellar commentary that disappear into the archival ether. Providing links to any of them means glossing over ten more just as deserving, so this isn't a list of the best ones there, just the ones I read most recently. So hie thee thither and wander beyond these worthy entries. They are fighting the good fight.

Kenneth Quinnell recounts the various explosions of bad news for the Right that have rained down like quarters from a schadenfreude slot machine. Kinda does feel like Christmas morning, doesn't it?

Milwaukee public school teacher Jay Bullock has Parts One and Two of a three-part series on the real-life ill effects of the No Child Left Behind Act. Part Three will be up next week, but in the meantime, there is also Earl Dunovant's rundown of how badly Congress has underfunded the NCLB.

Major Barbara believes that the Plame case has moved forward because CIA Director George Tenet has justifiably declared war on Bush. Finally, a war I can support wholeheartedly.

Mike Golby starts with a T.S. Eliot quote (the surest way to grab my attention aside from cheesecake pics) before plowing into one of the link-heaviest posts this side of the digital Mississippi, wherein he argues that overreach, arrogance, and deceit have taken both the Israeli and American Right over the edge of sustainable policy.

Fred Henning wonders whether the recent OPEC clampdown on oil production - which will restrict supply right when seasonal American demand jumps - might not be a brushback pitch intended to warn Bush to back off the plate. Maybe, though I honestly don't know what to make of the Bush family-Saudi relationship at this point.

I Want My Freedom!

Atrios notes another winning quote from our president that is running on CNN: "Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction."

Let's see, the United States, Great Britain, Israel, India, France, and Russia just joined China, Pakistan, and North Korea on the liberation list. Maybe he meant that nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction for free.

A commenter on that post pointed out that just before that, Bush also stated that "Free nations don't attack other nations." That's quite odd, given that his entire policy of pre-emptive war is predicated on the notion that we are free to attack other nations. Is it just parts of speech that he's having trouble with or is he trying to send us a message?

The Tao of Ouch

The Phuket Vegetarian Festival in Thailand, a sort of Taoist Lent, is just wrapping up.

Devout Buddhists have been showing their faith at one of Thailand's most unusual festivals. Devotees, who call themselves the soldiers of God, perform incredible feats during the Phuket Vegetarian Festival. Among the most eye-catching is a street procession in which mediums, in a state of trance, have their cheeks pierced and bodies spiked with hooks, skewers and other sharp objects.

There's more information at the Phuket Tourism Board's website and lots more wince-inducing photographs here. I could string together a procession of equally wince-inducing puns about this story, but Phuket.

John Dean Notes the Parallels

It's well worth having to watch the little movie (or whatever they make you do) to get to the lead story on today's Salon.

I thought I had seen political dirty tricks as foul as they could get, but I was wrong. In blowing the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame to take political revenge on her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for telling the truth, Bush's people have out-Nixoned Nixon's people. And my former colleagues were not amateurs by any means. [...] But neither Colson nor Ehrlichman nor anyone else I knew while working at the Nixon White House had the necessary viciousness, or depravity, to attack the wife of a perceived enemy by employing potentially life-threatening tactics.

He goes on to point out that what really blew Watergate wide open was the Democratic National Committee filing a civil lawsuit against the Nixon campaign. He then recommends that Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame do the same.

If the Bush White House is anything like the Nixon White House -- and there is increasing evidence of the similarities -- it will respond to such a lawsuit like a stuck pig. Leaking the name of a CIA official can under no circumstances be considered a part of any potential defendants' official duties, so they will not be given representation by the Department of Justice. But how about Wilson and Plame: Should they have to bear the expense of a lawsuit to deal with the harm they have suffered and get to the bottom of what happened? I don't think so, and after talking with several lawyers in Washington, I find I am not alone. I have good reason to believe that one or more law professors in the area might handle the case pro bono, or one or more of the public interest groups might underwrite the lawsuit. Needless to say, that will only cause more squealing by those who want this to go away. They will cry that it's all politics. This is an empty contention -- it was the attack on the Wilsons that was pure politics. But the Bush folks appear to have messed with the wrong man (and woman).

Time after time, Nixon tried to stem Watergate by declaring it was pure politics. But what were his people doing in the Democratic headquarters? Was that not merely dirty politics? To fight the investigations of Watergate, the White House and the Republican National Committee, the Nixon reelection committee kept their surrogates working full time. Democrats who criticized Nixon for not getting to the bottom of who was involved in the DNC break-in were endlessly accused of playing politics with nothing but "a third-rate attempted burglary." This sort of defense, of course, has already commenced from the Bush White House, with the president's surrogates similarly downplaying this vile act of political revenge against the Wilsons. Apparently, they don't realize how Nixonian this behavior is, and Nixon and his aides did not exactly set the gold standard for conduct for any presidency.

I think he's on to something here. We know full well that the leaks came from the White House, and DC's worst-kept secret is that Count Cheney's bug-eating Renfield, Scooter Libby, was one of the leakers. With Rove's former employer John Ashcroft in charge of the investigation, it suddenly has been expanded to include the State and Defense Departments, in an obvious attempt to bog the investigation down in a sea of documents. If the administration continues to refuse to appoint a special counsel to run the investigation, Wilson and Plame should follow John Dean's advice and sue for damages. They have a far better and more relevant case than Paula Jones ever did.

Let's not be willfully blind to the freaking obvious: Bush knows who leaked this information. Even if he had no knowledge of it while it happened, there is no way he couldn't by now. The entire press corps is winking as hard as they can while they say, "We don't yet know who did this (coughLibbycough)." I have to wonder if the strange, coordinated backing away from Cheney that happened last month wasn't the first move to pitch him and his sidekick overboard before the 2004 campaign ramps up.

UPDATE (5:02 pm): My old buddy Erik makes the catch: The Wilsons have retained a lawyer and he's talking lawsuit. This is going to be fun.

The Ford Pinto of web browsers.

It's like a broken record.

A Trojan that exploits an Internet Explorer vulnerability is capable of allowing attackers to hijack browser behaviour, anti-virus firms warn. The QHosts (Delude) Trojan can't spread by itself. Users only become infected if they visited a maliciously constructed website containing code which allows the malware to run. This code used a critical object data vulnerability in Internet Explorer to execute. [...] As usual Mac, Linux, OS/2 and Unix users are immune from infection.

Plus, this site looks worse in IE than in any other browser I have seen display it.

Why is anybody still using Internet Explorer as a browser? Aside from the fact that it inexplicably still lacks tabbed browsing, the most basic and useful browser feature to appear in the last several years, it is a magnet for viruses. No matter what platform you run it on (disclosure: I'm a lifelong Apple user and use Safari on my PowerBook), it's a substandard browser. Really, do yourself a favor and download something else. I use Firebird on my Windows machine at work, which whips the stuffing out of IE, despite not even having made it to a 1.0 release yet.

UPDATE (11:45 am): A class action lawsuit has been filed against Microsoft "for its failure to better secure its software against computer viruses, worms and other cyberattacks" on behalf of a Los Angeles computer user whose identity was stolen. Although the seldom-read licensing agreements for software generally indemnify software companies against such claims, you have to wonder how they can do that while other faulty products (say, Ford Pintos or Firestone tires) cannot. Still, the headline reads "Suit Holds Microsoft Responsible for Worm Holes," which begs the question: when did Microsoft patent intergalactic travel?

Smelly Moon

In a little over a year, the European Space Agency's Huygens space probe is scheduled to land on the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. But in examining the data received by using the gigantic Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico to bounce microwaves off the moon, astronomers now suspect that as much as three quarters of Titan's surface is covered with methane lakes. Fortunately, the probe is designed to float and keep from capsizing. "Other observations have shown methane clouds growing and shrinking in Titan's atmosphere, suggesting a 'methane cycle' that includes methane rain and then evaporation back into the clouds."

Mr. Methane was unavailable for comment. Thankfully.

My alma mater...

...does the right thing.

In what is believed to be a first for a public college, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced on Wednesday that it would cover the full costs of an education for students from families of the working poor without forcing the students to take on loans. The announcement comes as public universities, hit by historic shortfalls in state revenue, have raised tuition by 10 percent this year, outpacing private colleges and universities.

[...]

Under the university's new approach, which will take effect with next year's entering class, the university is pledging to provide aid to cover the full cost of an education for students whose parents earn less than 150 percent of the poverty level, or $28,000 for a family of four. The students must agree to work on campus in state and federal work-study programs 10 to 12 hours a week, a level that is widely considered manageable. [...] Several years ago, Princeton became the first Ivy League university to offer full financial aid to needy students without recourse to student loans.

Makes me proud. Did you know that UNC was the first public university in the United States? Go 'Heels.

Truth in Advertising

Rapper C-Murder is convicted of . . . murder. Who could have seen that one coming?

Bush's Lawyer Comes Back

Steve Soto connects some speculative dots and it is . . . interesting.

Our ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Robert W. Jordan, "submitted his resignation about two months ago for personal reasons" and "has been making farewell calls on Saudi officials this month." Two months ago was pretty soon after Novak published his outing of Plame. What do those two things have to do with one another?

Well, Mr. Jordan isn't a career diplomat. In fact, this was his very first gig in the foreign service. Not a bad start, huh? Before that, he was a lawyer in Dallas. George W. Bush's lawyer, as a matter of fact, including defending him in the probe of insider trading allegations involving the funny business with his Harken stock.

Remember the Harken mess? Bush had a failed energy company called Arbusto, which got bailed out by an oil company called Spectrum which then went under itself in a couple of years and got bailed out by Harken Energy. In acknowledgement of his demonstrated expertise in successfully managing energy companies, Harken gave Bush a metric crapload of stock to come sit on their board of directors, stock which he turned around and sold for better than 800 large. And very conveniently for a member of the firm's audit committee, just before the stock plunged. Yet somehow, the sitting president's son (or more accurately, his lawyer, Robert Jordan) got the SEC to close the case even while they said it did not exonerate him. Go figure.

Jordan also was a founding partner of the law firm Baker Botts LLP (yes, as in James Baker), which helped run the Bush effort during the Florida recount and is defending the Saudi royal family against the 9/11 survivors' lawsuit. So, a couple of weeks after the Novak column appears, Jordan submits his resignation (and nobody's been nominated to replace him) and gets ready to return to the United States. I can think of one reason Bush might want his lawyer back stateside.

Head for the Mountains

No. No Bush joke here. Sorry to disappoint.

I'm going here for a long weekend. Probably 5-10 days or so ahead of peak color, but I look forward to three days of not concerning myself with Karl Rove, Tony Blair, Ahmed Chalabi, Ariel Sharon, Paul Bremer, Osama bin Laden, Tom McClintock, Saddam Hussein, Ann Coulter, Rick Perry, Sean Hannity, Dick Cheney, Mike Tyson, Sylvio Berlusconi, Yassir Arafat, Robert Mugabe, Rush Limbaugh's maid, Richard Grasso's accountant, Arnold Schwarzenegger's groupies gropees, Roy's holy boulder, Hillary's secret plan, Robert's sneaky leakers, Tiger's mighty driver, Dubya's bumbling, Bubba's stumping, the melting polar icecaps nor that jerk down the hall who refuses to brew a fresh pot of java when he drinks the last cup.

Bye. See y'all Monday.

That Oxycontin Rush

Unlike the rest of his get-tough-on-crime rhetoric, Rush Limbaugh has been pretty consistently opposed to the War on Drugs. I give him points for the stand, just about the only one where he and I share common ground. Well, except that Donovan McNabb is overrated (at least thus far in the season), though not for reasons of race. I drafted him in the 2nd round of my fantasy football league and he's languished on the bench all season with miserable stats. Thank goodness for Steve McNair and Marc Bulger, who have led The Mustard Truck to a rumblin' 4-0-0 start in his stead.

Anyhow, the big news is that Rush's resignation from ESPN, nominally for his ill-considered remarks about McNabb, may have been more about the swirling allegations that his housekeeper has been supplying him with thousands of painkillers for years. Now, the real reason he should have resigned is that, having watched him all season, I can state with full confidence that the man knows far less about football than politics. His "challenges," as they were called on the show, were so utterly wrong time and again that you could hear eyes rolling every time he threw out his little red flag.

But to the matter at hand: the story was broken by the National Enquirer, which has some credibility issues (to say the least), but then was picked up by the New York Daily News and the investigation has been confirmed by CNN. According to this Atlanta Journal-Constitution article:

Cline told the Enquirer she went to prosecutors with information about Limbaugh and others after four years of drug deals that included clandestine handoffs in a Denny's parking lot. She said she wore a wire during her last two deliveries and gave the tapes to authorities. She also gave the Enquirer a ledger documenting how many pills she claimed to have bought for him -- 4,350 in one 47-day period -- and e-mails she claimed Limbaugh sent her.

In one e-mail, Limbaugh urged Cline to get more "little blues," the street name for the powerful narcotic OxyContin, she said. "You know how this stuff works ... the more you get used to, the more it takes," the May 2002 e-mail read. "But I will try and cut down to help out."

Over 4,000 pills in a month and a half? Jeebus. That's a whopping huge number of painkillers. Huge. As rightwingnews.com points out, "if Rush was buying more than a few ounces of OxyContin or hydrocodone -- we could be talking 15-20 pills here -- he could be facing a conspiracy to traffic in a controlled substance charge. [...] That would mean Rush could be facing a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years."

Oh my. Let me state for the record, that is a completely stupid law and mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses are one of the worst ideas to roll out of any legislature in years. What Mr. Limbaugh needs is rehab (which, his housekeeper alleges, he has been through twice already), just like anybody with a drug addiction. All the same, I have to admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude, after listening to his pompous barrage of slander and distortions over the years. I have no desire to see him in jail, but I sure would like him to sweat about it for a while. Life grants few spectacles more pleasing than self-righteous moralists hoisted upon their own petards.

Now, could somebody please find video of Sean Hannity and Joe Scarborough partying with R. Kelly? Because in all honesty, this one is starting to lose its luster. (Despite initial appearances, that link is safe for work.)

UPDATE (5:37 pm): Over at Fantastic Planet, Jeremy Puma deserves kudos for pulling on the hip waders and trudging through the Free Republic sewer. Why would any sane person do such a thing? Why, to bring us the hilarious moral contortions the Dittoheads are putting themselves through over this, of course. Oh, they are avatars of compassion and fairness now, aren't they?

UPDATE (6:04 pm): As Kynn notes in the comments, and Atrios demonstrates across several posts, while Rush may have opposed the War on Drugs, he has displayed precious little sympathy or compassion for the people caught up in it. So yes, I definitely want to see him sweat, sweat, sweat on this one.

I'm just a biscuit-eatin' cracker.

Qasim Saleem, a PhD student from Loughborough University in the UK, believes he has found the crux of the biscuit through use of "a sophisticated laser technique, called digital speckle pattern interferometry." Not so fast, Qasim. We've got a linguistic problem here. Looks like what the Brits call a biscuit, we Americans call a cracker. This is a biscuit, my 'cross-the-pond brethren - soft, flaky, grease-soaked goodness. Still, it's newsworthy enough that the BBC is carrying the story.

The research showed that, during cooling, a biscuit picks up moisture around the rim which causes it to expand. But at the same time, it loses moisture at the centre, which causes it to contract. This results in the build-up of forces which are ultimately released in the formation of cracks or in the break-up of the biscuit. Mr Saleem said: "We now have a greater understanding of why biscuits develop cracks shortly after being baked."

Yeah, that's why we call them crackers, dude.

He said the findings applied to a wide range of what are known as "semi-sweet" biscuits, particularly low-fat biscuits. Unfortunately those used in the research were not fit for eating afterwards, "on hygiene grounds," he added.

I have no idea what to make of that last quote, but the very idea of a "low-fat biscuit" would send two thirds of the American South screaming in terror. The dogged search for the crux of the biscuit continues. Onward, crackers!

Paging Al Franken...

Looks like there's a new chapter needed in the next edition of Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.

The quote that began it all was "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report." Expanding on that eight days later while talking to Newsday, Bob Novak said, "I didn't dig [the Plame tip] out, it was given to me. They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."

Then in his furiously backpedalling column this Wednesday, Novak wrote, "I did not receive a planned leak [...] It was an offhand revelation from this official." Hmm, I could have sworn I read that they thought it was significant. Oh right, I did.

Ouch. How to explain the discrepancy? Well, that very night he explained away his Newsday quote to Wolf Blitzer thusly: "I never said that. I said I didn't dig it out in the sense I went through the files of the CIA." Well, Bob, I don't think anybody suspected for a minute that you were going through CIA files. I know you're an important journalist and all, but give us a break. I'm quite certain the Newsday reporters didn't think you had access to the CIA's classified personnel files either.

Where are all the people who derisively mocked what the (admittedly mock-worthy) definition of "is" is? Damn, but it's quiet in here...

Will you marry me...

...despite this sucking chest wound?

Back in September and August, I wrote about a spate of violent, drunken melees taking place at weddings, deciding that they had become downright trendy and expressing a little disappointment that none of them were taking place in the south. I was worried we might be losing our edge in the national Self-Parody Sweepstakes. Well, the south has risen again, Hoss, and we ain't even waiting for the wedding. Take it away, Memphis, Tennessee:

According to police reports, Martin, 42, stabbed Henry in the right side of the chest [with an eight-inch butcher knife] because she thought he was looking up the skirt of another woman. Martin told police that during the argument Henry bit her right pinky finger. Martin was initially charged with felony aggravated assault, but was allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge because Henry told investigators he did not want to press the matter.

"They've worked out their differences," said state prosecutor Tiffani Taylor, "and they plan to get married next month."

I guess the way to a man's heart actually is through his ribcage. I have a sneaking suspicion even if their wedding doesn't end up in the police blotter, we haven't heard the last of this charming couple...

Waxing Mushroomish

I like Richard Cohen. Well, actually I don't know him, but I like his writing.

Anyone who can follow combining "souk", "exotic", "redolent", and "hypocrisy" in the same sentence with images of Condi Rice having "waxed mushroomish" on national TV gets 3 bonus points in the funniest columnist of the day contest. I had to clean the coffee that came out of my nostrils off my keyboard.

The Post still so owns this story.

But he brings the hammer down hard at closing:

The leaking of Plame's name, Nixonian in its malevolence, ought to cost Novak his University of Maryland basketball tickets and a self-flagellating column about what he would have written had a liberal columnist done something similar. Other conservative columnists, particularly those who knotted the noose after every Clinton administration boo-boo, ought to write similar columns of penance. I look forward to such delicious reading -- and their calls for a special prosecutor. (I suggest Bill Clinton.)

The president's umbrage at leaks may be sincere, but then how would he know? He merely scans the papers -- sports, presumably. As for others in his administration, their hypocrisy would threaten their immortal soul, if they had one. The fog of cant and sanctimony is so thick I fear that this time a leaker might be caught. Rest assured, it will not be the button man who put a hit on Wilson and his wife but the one who blew the whistle. White House security is at fault.

Somehow, someone got in with a conscience.

Scary inference. There's someone in the White House making unauthorized leaks of the sort Cheney, Libby, Rove, and Bush do not like at all. Rove is well known for a drive to utterly destroy anyone who crosses him. Somebody's head is going to be on a stick; but probably not who it needs to be.

General Election

A couple of interesting Clark links:

C-SPAN has the entire hour-long town hall meeting that Wesley Clark held in New Hampshire the other day. Click on the "2004 Vote" link. It's a very friendly crowd, but still quite an impressive performance. He is entirely more natural than he looked during the debate; it's a format that suits him well. Watch it and try to imagine Bush taking questions like this. Funny, isn't it?

Clark also has written an examination of what went wrong in Iraq at the New York Review of Books. Nothing much new there, but nice to have it all compiled in one place.

Observe the Silence

LA Times: Women Say Schwarzenegger Groped, Humiliated Them

Well, here we go. Not a pretty set of stories, and some of them quite recent history. So, would the outraged moral arbiters from the '90's please step forward and either begin the salivating, top-of-your-lungs denunciations or get the "hypocrite" tattoo on your forehead?

Mr. Gingrich? Mr. Bennett? Mr. Barr? No, I didn't think so.

It's the cover-up.

There have been a lot of allusions to Watergate recently when discussing l'affaire Plame. The allegations here are far more serious, but the real relevance of Watergate was not the "third-rate burglary," but the cover-up that ensued. Novak published his column on July 14th. That makes two and a half months that the White House has known that a serious felony had been committed that had national security implications without acting on it.

So after we find out who did the leaking - and I doubt that will remain a secret for much longer - the next question needs to be: what did Bush and Cheney know and when did they know it? Because covering this up is misprision of a felony, which as you may or may not recall was part of the Republicans' indictment in the Clinton impeachment. Paging Henry Hyde...

UPDATE (4:20 pm): The New York Times is coming to the same conclusion.

If someone at the White House, perhaps acting with institutional sanction, revealed the name of a C.I.A. operative to undermine the credibility of Mr. Wilson and thus stifle dissent over Iraq policy, that in itself would be a serious assault on free speech and an egregious abuse of power. In such a case, the blanket denial that Mr. Bush issued this week would put him dangerously close to the territory in which the cover-up eclipses the offense.

The Professor and Maryann

I randomly stumbled across the work of Isabel Samaras, who is doing the kitsch pop culture thing to pretty good comical effect and, I suspect, decent sales.

The Birth of Ginger


Besame Mucho

Anybody know if she's related to Lucas Samaras?

Well Equipped

With a keen grasp of the obvious, they are.

"Deep political ties between top White House aides and Attorney General John Ashcroft have put him into a delicate position as the Justice Department begins a full investigation into whether administration officials illegally disclosed the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer."

Good read; but talk about understatement.

On a related note, here's an interview with James Moore (coauthor of Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential) by Democracy Now's Amy Goodman. A touch of light thrown on Ashcroft-Rove conflicts of interest political connections. Then he gives his opinion, in no uncertain terms, that nothing like this would happen in Karl Rove's White House without more than just his knowledge and passive approval.

Frog March, anyone?

No, I Guess he Doesn't

From Mary Matalin, apparently a former senior aide to Cheney who still provides the vice president with advice, in this WaPo article: "he doesn't base his opinion on one piece of data".

Tips to Eric Umansky.

Campaign Theme Songs

I winced mightily when the Clinton campaign chose "Don't Stop" as its theme song, just because I've always considered Fleetwood Mac to be one of the most banal, bland, cottage cheese rock acts ever to get rich and famous and that particular song came when they were at their flabbiest and most vanilla period. I'm sure it seemed innocuous enough to the rest of the country but I just have this odd, allergic reaction toward it. I have similar reactions to Heart and Bob Seger. I suspect those aversions arise from being bludgeoned with them by FM radio as a kid. But I digress.

According to this article from the Daily News of Newburyport (MA), many consider the Fleetwood Mac song "the most memorable campaign theme in modern politics." God help us all. By comparison, Ross Perot's selection of Patsy Cline's "Crazy" was clever and classy, providing a nice contrast to the rest of his run. "I'm a Dole Man," a take-off on Sam and Dave's "I'm a Soul Man," was, um, well, I guess it was fun enough to sing along with at rallies.

According to CNN, the new theme song for Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign is Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It." Probably the less said about that, the better.

Campaigns should be careful to actually read the lyrics of the songs they choose; Reagan using Springsteen's "Born in the USA" couldn't have been more ironic, though I'd much rather hear that than treacly, flag-wrapped crap like Lee Greenwood. From the Newburyport article:

But today's songs are a far cry from the old days of campaign jingles like "Get On The Raft With Taft," a song created nearly 100 years ago to push William Howard Taft, the 27th president of the United States, into the oval office. Though he won the election, many mocked the song since Taft weighed 300-plus pounds and was unlikely to share a raft with anyone.

Oops. The article also talks about some of the current Democratic campaign songs. Going the safe and predictable route, Edwards does okay (but just okay - no points scored) with John Mellencamp's "Small Town," and John Kerry the same with Springsteen's "No Surrender" and Tom Petty's "Won't Back Down." Dean has some LeeAnn Rimes song I've never heard, but I'm scared all the same. In keeping with the rest of his career, Gephardt negates whatever cool he got from The Call by pairing it with Tina Turner. Lieberman has Sister Sledge's "We Are Family" and Sinatra's "My Way" (bleah and eh). The song isn't listed, but Sharpton wins hands down with Bob Marley. Get with the program, honkeys. I'll donate fat cash to the first candidate who makes his funk the P-Funk.

Then moving way north to the Progressive Conservative Party of Nova Scotia, John Hamm's campaign chose "Still the One" by Steely Dan. Safe, but not bad. They have disappeared from his site but, of course, Google has that whole voodoo reanimation thing going on, so here are Hamm's Top Ten Rejected Campaign Songs. #8 kills me.

UPDATE (10:42 pm): Can you imagine trying to write a campaign theme song that incorporates this fellow's name? I'll bet he had a tough go of it growing up.

UPDATE (1:20 am): Dirk notes in the comments that "Still the One" is by Orleans, not Steely Dan. I thought that sounded wrong, but seeing it in print trumped that nagging not-rightness. No wonder they're down to 18% in the House of Commons. They're not even clear who sings their theme song...

Not What It Sounds Like

The Adhesives and Leather Symposium

Rrrowr.

Say it ain't so, Maggie!

Eric Alterman notes that prominent liberal-commie, Saddam-loving, tree-hugging, Birkenstock-clad appeaser Margaret Thatcher thinks the war in Iraq was a "mistake."

Baroness Thatcher has warned that British troops could be tied up in a mission without end for years. "Britain should never have been involved and it will be very difficult to get our troops out in anything like the near future," she told Tory peers at a private meeting last week. She also believes a judicial inquiry should be set up into the Iraq conflict rather than the "tightly defined" Hutton inquiry.

I guess she just hates freedom.

Marshall's Chat with Clark

Josh Marshall interviews Wesley Clark. For those who keep screaming that he's not a real Democrat, he reveals that he voted for Gore in 2000 and at least once for Clinton. It appears one of Clark's main strategies is to present himself as non-ideological, because he returns again and again to the notion that the Bush administration produces bad policy because it is blinded by ideology. My favorite part:

For example, take the idea of competition in schools. OK now, what is competition in schools? What does it really mean? Well, competition in business means you have somebody who's in a business that has a profit motive in it. It's measured every quarter. If the business doesn't keep up, the business is going to lose revenue, therefore it has an incentive to restructure, reorganize, re-plan, re-compete and stay in business.

Schools aren't businesses. Schools are institutions of public service. Their job--their product--is not measured in terms of revenues gained. It's measured in terms of young lives whose potential can be realized. And you don't measure that either in terms of popularity of the school, or in terms of the standardized test scores in the school. You measure it child-by-child, in the interaction of the child with the teacher, the parent with the teacher, and the child in a larger environment later on in life.

So when people say that competition is-this is sort of sloganeering, "Hey, you know, schools need this competition." No. I've challenged people: Tell me why it is that competition would improve a school. Most of them can't explain it. It's just like, "Well, competition improves everything so therefore it must improve schools."

If you want to improve schools, you've got to go inside the processes that make a school great. You've got to look at the teachers, their qualifications, their motivation, what it is that gives a teacher satisfaction, what it is a teacher wants to do in a classroom. We've got to empower teachers. Give them an opportunity to lead in the classroom. Teachers are the most important leaders in America. All that is lost in the sloganeering of this party. And the American people know it's lost. So you asked me to give you one thing about this party that's in power -- it's the sort of doctrinaire ideology that doesn't really understand the country that we're living in.

Vague, yes, but on the money nonetheless. The last 2/3 of the interview deals with foreign policy - Korea and the Middle East mostly - and he displays more understanding of those situations in a few paragraphs than our current foreign policy apparatchiks have in three years. The read is well worth your time. A rough summarization: "This isn't a game of Risk, you halfwits."

Clark is going to give Bush fits should he end up the nominee. If he isn't possessed of the Clinton ability to smooth talk, he is certainly possessed of the Clinton smarts. I also get the feeling he is going to have more than a bit of the Reagan teflon coating. I'm not ready to endorse anybody just yet, but the more I read of Clark, the harder it becomes for anybody else to overtake him in the Apostropher primary.

That's the Ticket

Yeah. Billmon has an excellent idea.

(Former CIA agent Larry Johnson:) "... if I hear another Republican operative suggesting that well, this was just an analyst fine, let them go undercover. Let's put them overseas and let's out them and then see how they like it. They won't be able to stand the heat.

Essay question: What country should we send Karl Rove to, and what should his assignment be?

The transcript of the rest of Johnson's interview with PBS' Newshour can be found here. But my favorite part comes thusly:

TERENCE SMITH: We should point out for the record that we invited Bob Novak to join this discussion. He told me this afternoon that he had said all he had to say on this. Your reaction, Larry?

LARRY JOHNSON: I say this as a registered Republican. I'm on record giving contributions to the George Bush campaign. This is not about partisan politics. This is about a betrayal, a political smear of an individual with no relevance to the story. Publishing her name in that story added nothing to it. His entire intent was correctly as Ambassador Wilson noted: to intimidate, to suggest that there was some impropriety that somehow his wife was in a decision making position to influence his ability to go over and savage a stupid policy, an erroneous policy and frankly, what was a false policy of suggesting that there were nuclear material in Iraq that required this war. This was about a political attack. To pretend that it's something else and to get into this parsing of words, I tell you, it sickens me to be a Republican to see this.

Emphasis mine. As an American, it sickens me, too.

Slicing and Dicing

Here's Novak in his own words this morning:

...To protect my own integrity and credibility, I would like to stress three points. First, I did not receive a planned leak. Second, the CIA never warned me that the disclosure of Wilson's wife working at the agency would endanger her or anybody else. Third, it was not much of a secret.

Go read the whole column. But...

On the First point - Even if it wasn't, does an illegal revelation of classified information have to be to the nebulous legal standard "planned" to be a crime? No.

Second - No, but they asked him not to use her name; They said it would cause "difficulties" overseas. Anyway, it's not their job to warn Novak of what specific ramification could be. And endangerment isn't the only problem that can grow from this - It jeapordizes WMD intelligence work in the area of the world at the nexus of Islamic fundamentalism and the formerly heavily armed former Soviet Union. Damnit, Pay Attention You Idiots!

Third - Yes it was. Her covert identity was not allowed to be discussed publicly.

This is getting pretty pathetic. Novak is concerned with his reputation only at this point. The rest of the article is almost as much fun to slice-n-dice.

While some bloggers are talking about Cheney falling and Bush not running for reelection, I think they need to get out more. Good breath of fresh air would do some good. I have little doubt there are adequate firewalls within this White House to keep the headplatter graced with smaller fry. Political damage will be long lasting, however, and the Plame affair will be an issue next November.

By the way - does anybody remember Howard Dean's "16 Questions?" Check out number 4.

But let's remember, doing political damage to this Administration - while I jump at any opportunity; consider me a neither fair nor balanced partisan - isn't the main goal here. The point is to root out a cancer in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue who exposed a WMD-specializing covert agent for political points. If that cancer is a careless underling, their removal is just as important as if it was Cheney, Rice, Rove, or the Dork-in-Chief himself.

The higher up it goes, however, the more I will giggle.