Are you better off...

...than you were 10,000 civilian deaths ago?

One of the constant refrains from those who continue to believe the Iraq adventure is beyond criticism is that the media refuse to talk about how much things are improving over there. Of course, when we rebuild the infrastructure that we destroyed during two wars and a decade of bombing, then yes, that is an objective improvement over not rebuilding it. But patting ourselves on the back for that is a little like expecting gratitude for helping someone to their feet after you suckerpunch them.

Many Americans seem wedded to the notion that Iraqis' lives simply must be better now that they aren't living under a dictatorship. Of course, the folks proclaiming this have usually lived neither under a dictatorship nor a foreign military occupation nor, for that matter, in Iraq or any country remotely resembling it. So perhaps their ranking methodology lacks a little solid grounding in experience.

Aysha, 21, said most of her family remained at constant risk from the terrorist threat while going about their daily life in Baghdad. When she speaks to her relatives, she says she can sense the fear in their voices as attacks on the city escalate day-by-day.

Earlier this month, more than 220 Iraqis died in simultaneous terrorist attacks at Shia religious ceremonies in Kerbala and Baghdad. And on Tuesday, a 1,000lb car bomb killed seven people as it ripped through the Mount Lebanon Hotel in the Iraqi capital. Aysha, a third-year student of Arab and Middle East studies at Exeter University's Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, believes Coalition forces should withdraw from the country.

She said: "The war was supposed to be about freeing the Iraqi people but it has done anything but. People can't step outside of their home because they fear for their lives. It has been a disaster. My family who live out there say that what we are seeing on the TV is exactly what they are living through. People in Iraq are more scared for their lives now than they were during the war because of all the terrorism and uncertainty."

Now, I have no more experience from which to speak than the people I mentioned above, so take this for what it is worth. Living under a dictatorship is perpetually flogged here as the most unacceptable of human conditions and for political dissidents, that is certainly true. But most Iraqis, like most Americans and like most people everywhere, weren't political. The main concerns in their lives were precisely their lives: their relationships, their religion, feeding their families, music, sports, the new fall sitcoms, blah blah blah. They steered clear of the political minefields and led normal lives.

Whatever hardships they faced, those were certainly amplified by having a war waged on their soil, followed by an effective state of violent anarchy teetering toward open civil war. So when I encounter pampered Americans sitting at their $2000 laptops castigating Iraqis for their insufficient gratitude, I'm mostly just embarrassed for them. Even if you believe it, you should know better than to say it out loud.

Yes, we are building soccer fields and schools and repairing water systems, and those are all good things. But accusing the media of overplaying the negatives in Iraq seems odd when the negatives include scenes like this one.

The Falluja violence began when two four-wheel-drive vehicles were attacked by guerrillas on a main road in the town, 32 miles west of Baghdad. A crowd then set the vehicles ablaze and hurled stones into the burning wreckage. Television pictures showed one incinerated body being kicked and stamped on by a member of the jubilant crowd, while others dragged a blackened body down the road by its feet.

The footage showed at least three people lying dead, while some witnesses said that four were killed. It was not clear how many people were in the vehicles. As one body lay burning on the ground, an Iraqi came and doused it with petrol, sending flames soaring. At least two bodies were tied to cars and pulled through the streets, witnesses said. "This is the fate of all Americans who come to Falluja," said Mohammad Nafik, one of the crowd surrounding the bodies.

Some body parts were pulled off and left hanging from a pole, while two incinerated bodies were later strung from a bridge over the road and left dangling there. It was unclear who was traveling in the vehicles, both four-wheel drives of the type used by foreign contractors, journalists, civilian members of the U.S.-led coalition and some military personnel.

"Overplaying" this would be no small feat. The situation in which we currently find ourselves is precisely the reason I opposed this entire madness. We are the dog who caught the car and now can't figure out how to get our teeth out of the bumper while our hindquarters keep slamming into the road. If we leave now, Iraq becomes the New Afghanistan. If we stay, it becomes the new Palestine and the catalyst for radicalizing a generation of young Muslims. Even under the best possible scenario, Iraq (like every state in the region) remains decades away from a functioning democracy, no matter what Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney say.

Regardless of what we do, America is and will continue to be less safe than before. The blame here is not Bush's alone. He had plenty of enabling accomplices, including John Kerry, most of the news media, and a majority of the American public. For all the right wingers shouting that we have to stay in Iraq because al Qaeda has decided that preventing a functioning democracy there is a main objective, I offer a few responses:

1. Judging from history, preventing democracy from taking hold in the Middle East doesn't require any effort.
2. Adopting or rejecting any policy based on how AQ views it is still being manipulated by terrorists. Choose the correct policy, regardless of AQ's views.
   2a. Bin Laden wants us in Iraq. It's the best recruitment tool he could imagine.
   2b. If al Qaeda comes out against cancer, should we start smoking so the terrorists don't win?

You could accuse me of being all criticism and no solution and you'd be exactly right. I don't see a solution and didn't see one a year ago, either. Unfortunately, "can we get out and how" should have been agenda topic number one during every discussion leading up to the invasion.

Update (4:15 pm): Kevin Drum links to some nightmarish pictures (also here) of the Falluja violence, now confirmed to involve four American contractors.

Fire works. Work, fire, work!

Probably not his proudest moment.

A man in Jacksonville was seriously burned when he accidentally set off a commercial firework in his car that he apparently intended to throw at his girlfriend, according to a report. Investigators said the Shannon Kramer, 35, got into an argument with his girlfriend Sunday night on Herschel Street. Police said he later got into his car, and apparently lit the explosive with the intention of throwing it at his girlfriend, but the device dropped between his legs, WJXT-TV reported.

"He light the fuse, which was long -- they believe about 18 inches -- but it was about a half-second burn time," Jacksonville Sheriff's Office Lt. Larry Gayle said. "He [wasn't] prepared for the fuse to burn down that fast. He thought he had time to throw the device."

Neighbors who heard the explosion ran to the car, saw the man on fire and used a fire extinguisher to put out the flames. Kramer suffered burns to his legs and groin.

"And I would have won that Darwin Award if it weren't for those meddling neighbors," thought Kramer, through the barbituate fog. "Hey, wait! Says on the website: 'If the individual does not die, however does render him or herself incapable of reproducing they are still eligible for the honor.' I might still be in the running!"

Note that this was a "commercial firework," which I assume means the kind that explode across the sky after rocketing hundreds of yards upwards. Oh, and before you ask: Jacksonville, Florida. Of course.

I guess that settles it.

God is on the Palestinians' side. Though he sure isn't giving them much to work with. They should start comparison shopping.

Put me up for the night?

Room #12 at the Propellor Island City Lodge in Berlin. Click through the other rooms. I can't say they all look comfortable or welcoming, but they certainly are different. Every single one of them.

(link: boingboing)

The giant shrimp is on!

Their conspiracy uncovered by your relentless apostropher, the Masters of the Dark Realm at Long John Silver's corporate headquarters have relented and agreed to make good on their word. The Martian ocean was discovered and now, my fellow Americans, we will have our free giant shrimp.

"This is the big announcement that Long John Silver's has been waiting for since January - that there is evidence of a past salty sea on Mars," said Mike Baker, Chief Marketing Officer for Long John Silver's, Inc. "We can't wait to celebrate NASA's out-of-this-world success, and there's no better way to recognize their giant accomplishments than with free Giant Shrimp for America."

On Monday, May 10, between the hours of 2 p.m. and 5 p.m., customers can stop by any participating Long John Silver's restaurant and enjoy a free Giant Shrimp (one piece per customer).

Long John Silver's President Steve Davis [pictured below, struggling to keep a giant shrimp away from his jugular -a] sent a personal letter to NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe, congratulating NASA on their discovery.

"We've been following the Mars Exploration project since the beginning," Davis wrote, "and we've been anxiously awaiting word of evidence of an ocean on Mars. The rovers have been extremely busy since they arrived on Mars - they've had 'plenty of things on their plate.' Now, with the discovery of ocean water, America can add one more thing to its plate - free Giant Shrimp."

Davis ended the letter by writing, "This is one small step for man, and one giant leap for Giant Shrimp." He also again expressed interest in Long John Silver's becoming the first seafood restaurant on Mars.

Baker added that the Giant Shrimp giveaway is the perfect way to celebrate NASA's historic discovery, which has taken place at the same time Long John Silver's Giant Shrimp introduction has been one of the most successful product launches in company history.

"NASA is making history on Mars and Long John Silver's is making history here on earth," added Baker. "Our faith in NASA has paid off. Their giant accomplishment calls for Giant Shrimp."

But don't think they aren't pissed about my calling them out. On May 10th, I will be over the Atlantic Ocean (what irony) flying home from Italy and will be unable to collect what is rightfully mine as an American.

Bastards. Giant, succulent, batter-fried, vindictive bastards.

Underwater Turbines

A British company called SMD Hydrovision demonstrated a new system called TidEl for harnessing tidal power to create electricity. Most hydropower techniques used currently involve erecting large barriers across river estuaries, a practice that carries negative effects both environmentally and aesthetically. SMDH's innovation is to put large turbines underwater offshore, secured to the seabed by chains. The underwater turbine idea has been explored (and is being explored) by others, but the posts on which they would be mounted have trouble standing up to rough waters and expenses rise quickly in proportion with water depth. By using the much less expensive chain method, they float with the current and are always facing in the optimal direction for power generation.

The group tested a one-tenth scale model of the generator by submerging the device in a huge water tank at the New and Renewable Energy Centre in Northumberland this January. Results presented at the Oceanology International 2004 meeting in London last week suggest that full-size twin turbines should produce about one megawatt of electricity. The inventors hope to deploy a full-scale unit, with blades 15 metres long, at the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney next year.

I've been looking for a little deeper detail on the generation claims, though without much luck. Translating a megawatt into a hard number of homes powered is an equation with a daunting number of other variables, but estimates range from about 200 to about 1000, implying that one could theoretically power a small town. It packs a tiny environmental impact with no scenic degradation and tidal forces are far more reliable than wind or sun, both of which obviously vary with the weather. Promising stuff.

Chomsky Blogsky

Hey look - Noam Chomsky has a blog! It's called Turning the Tide and it's a whopping four days old.

Life on Mars?

The discovery that a saltwater sea once existed on the surface of Mars - and the continued presence of subsurface water - greatly increased the chances that life may once have existed there, and that's all very exciting. But now comes much more suggestive evidence that life may exist there right now. Multiple groups have independently confirmed the presence of methane in the Martian atmosphere. Due to the thin atmosphere of Mars, any supply of methane would have be constantly replenished or disappear within a couple hundred years.

On Earth, there are organisms called methanogens - microbes that produce methane from hydrogen and carbon dioxide. These organisms do not need oxygen to thrive, and they are thought to be the type of microbes that could possibly live on Mars.

Scientists caution that the methane could be the result of volcanic activity, but none of the many spacecraft orbiting and analyzing Mars have seen any signs of active volcanism. However, active volcanic vents would also produce enough heat to melt some of the vast quantities of sub-surface ice, providing another favorable habitat for microbial life. The rovers, designed for geological work, do not have the proper equipment to test for the presence of microbes, though the failed Beagle project did. Hopefully, this will put a brake on the gathering momentum of the horribly shortsighted notion of terraforming Mars.

The important question, then, is whether life originated on one of the two planets and seeded the other through impacts or if it arose independently on both planets. If it's the latter, that is compelling, though not decisive, evidence that life is common throughout the universe. Next year, the Huygens probe will descend through the thick, methane-rich atmosphere of the Saturnian moon, Titan. Here's a fairly technical exploration of the possible sources for Titanic methane. Titan seems a poor model for harboring life, though I suspect that our current notions of "life" may be a little too focused on forms similar to terrestrial life.

Who knows? Regardless, this has turned out to be a pretty heady time to be an astronomer, hasn't it? For all my abiding interest in the subject, I took only one astronomy class during college - during my first semester at UNC, at 8:00 am MWF. Unfortunately, the intro class consisted largely of the professor turning off the lights to show slides, followed shortly by the thud of my head landing on the desk. I gave up the fight and just showed for the exams, passing the class by the skin of my teeth. Had it been an afternoon class (and had I not been so slavishly dedicated to the path of least resistance), my entire academic career might have been vastly different.

The fasten seatbelts sign has been turned on.

Zoom!

An experimental unmanned jet called the X-43A is being readied for a dash at the edge of space on Saturday that could see it reach a speed of 5,000 miles per hour, seven times the speed of sound, in testing the concept of a scramjet engine. If testing is successful, NASA's 12-foot-long X-43A will become the first nonrocket, air-breathing plane to reach hypersonic speeds, a development engineers hope could lead to sending payloads into space much more cheaply or to aircraft that could whisk people to any point in the world within two hours.

[...]

The flight plan calls for a modified NASA B-52 bomber to drop the 2,700-pound X-43A, attached to a booster rocket, from 40,000 feet above the Navy's Pacific test range off the California coast at 4 p.m. The rocket is to accelerate the craft, made of steel and aluminum alloys, to 100,000 feet and Mach 7 before the vehicles separate. Seconds later, the scramjet is to fire for 7 to 10 seconds and propel the X-43A about 5,000 m.p.h., after which the craft will conduct a series of high-speed maneuvers before crashing into the sea. There are no plans to recover the X-43A because of the expense that would be involved.

Researchers have tested scramjet, or supersonic-combustion ramjet, engines in laboratories for decades, but none have been flown successfully. Conventional turbojets work by concentrating air with fan-like blades in a compressor, combining it with fuel and burning the mixture to produce thrust. Faster speeds can be attained using ramjets, which forgo the compressor and use a specially shaped inlet to concentrate air for burning when moving at high speed.

Airplanes powered by scramjets, engineers believe, could travel at thousands of miles per hour. And space rockets, instead of carrying heavy liquid oxygen to burn with their fuel, could use scramjets to scoop it out of the atmosphere and carry more cargo into orbit.

The NASA factsheet on the program is here.

North American Free Trash Agreement

A lot of the coverage on Michigan's new set of laws regulating trash importations from Canada (primarily) and elsewhere are a little misleading. When you speak of "restricting", "limiting", or if you're just too witty "putting a lid" on trash what's implied is some sort of quantifiable maximum amount of waste allowed across the border; that's not what happened at all.

This set of laws goes into effect Monday. Depending on how vigorously it's enforced, waste can be stopped only if the truck contains tires, bottles & cans, or comes from a community without bans on those materials. It could also, I suppose, be rejected if the driver can't document from where it came.

The waste-equals-money folks in the hauling / landfilling business (usually the same company) are grumbling about legal challenges, of course. And many courts do have a propensity to think of trash as holy commerce. But the nature of the challenge will depend on the manner of enforcement. We'll see.

Big losers? Nobody, really. Pain will be spread around. Although, I can't imagine the State Police getting too excited about their new powers. Big winners? Toronto's recycling coordinator.

If this was a particularly collaborative process between local governments across the border, I can see it working. If not, they will have problems. It's always refreshing to hear of waste being treated differently from commerce. And I'm glad recycling and waste reduction efforts in areas around Michigan are getting some helpful pressure.

But to put it in political context, when was the last time you heard of someone getting reelected by promising to bring more garbage into a community?

It’s Called Sarcasm

Go look it up.

Watching the hacks-in-disarray try to refute Dick Clarke’s account that Bush’s pants were granny-knotted around his ankles regarding al-Qaeda on September 11th is getting hilarious. In the cacophony I would be only mildly surprised to hear a voice rise up “he turned me into a newt!”

But one angle I just can’t believe they take seriously is Clark sizing up Condoleezza Rice’s facial expressions. He may as well have said (and would have if he was one-tenth as sarcastic as me): “As I briefed Rice on al-Qa'ida, her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before thought I had just landed from Mars.”

From what I’ve read of Clarke last night and today (I totally missed events of Tuesday through Thursday this week) he can be pretty sarcastic and quite condescending. I can see this particular combination tends to irritate Dr. Rice. Can’t really blame her for that, but the response by her and the RNC Talking Points Media Machine is similar to what I’ve noticed from a lot of people who get testy and frustrated, with a teaspoon of fright thrown in to make it interesting.

People in panic mode miss contextual information. Language and communication is so much more than words. The qualities of the words' situation allow accurate interpretation: Patterns in the speech, gesture, volume, facial expression, awareness of audience, forum, etc. When folks are flustered, context gets lost and literal interpretation of words is all that makes it through. The envelopes of literary device, thin ones like emphasis or thick ones like metaphor, get missed. All that are left are literal words – nuggets of data that miss the point.

Now, the printed word definitely filters out some context as well and this sub-story has largely played out along “he wrote, she wrote” lines. But this is pretty obvious: Of course Condoleezza Rice knew who al-Qaeda was in 2001, dumbasses, you’re missing the point. The fact is Clark thought Rice wasn’t concerned enough with them and she thought he was too fixated on them. Rice herself, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Carl Limbacher, Jim Geraghty, and others look really idiotic blathering on with this feeble diversion.

Think they’re scared?

Boo!

Heh heh.

BOO!

Heh heh heh!

The Passion of the Python

Heh heh heh.

Monty Python's film The Life of Brian is to return to US cinemas next month following the success of The Passion of the Christ. The Biblical satire will be re-released in Los Angeles, New York and other US cities to mark its 25th anniversary. Adverts will challenge Mel Gibson's blockbuster with the lines "Mel or Monty?" [and] "The Passion or the Python?" [...] Rainbow president Henry Jaglom said: "We decided this is an important time to re-release this film, to provide some counter-programming to The Passion."

In related news, The Passion of the Christ has now killed a second audience member. After the first one keeled over, I was sure she would rise again after three days. Since I'm certain that would have made the front page, I can only assume that it didn't happen (or she died a second time while frantically clawing at the lid of her coffin). Maybe if you die during a zombie movie...

...drip...drip...drip...GUSH!

Why am I only finding one news article that mentions Sibel Edmonds?

A former FBI translator said Wednesday that the bureau had "real, specific" information relating to the Sept. 11 attacks before they happened. Sibel Edmonds worked for the agency working from Sept. 20, 2001 to March 2002. Edmonds said she was hired to retranslate material that was collected prior to Sept. 11 to determine if anything was missed in the translations that related to the plot. In her review, Edmonds said the documents clearly showed that the Sept. 11 hijackers were in the country and plotting to use airplanes as missiles. The documents also included information relating to their financial activities. Edmonds said she could not comment in detail because she has been under a Justice Department gag order since October 2002. Edmonds has testified before the Sept. 11 commission, the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.

The Justice Department gag order might explain why I've never heard of this woman before. But Tom Flocco has spoken with her, and if what she says is true, then it just became abundantly clear why the administration blocked this commission as long as they could and why they have stonewalled it since.

FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds, was offered a substantial raise and a full time job in order to not go public that she had been asked by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to retranslate and adjust the translations of [terrorist] subject intercepts that had been received before September 11, 2001 by the FBI and CIA. Edmonds, a ten year U.S. citizen who has passed a polygraph examination, speaks fluent Farsi and Turkish and had been working part time with the FBI for six months-- commencing in December, 2001.

In a 50 reporter scrum in front of some 12 news cameras, Edmonds said "Attorney General John Ashcroft told me 'he was invoking State Secret Privilege and National Security' when I told the FBI I wanted to go public with what I had translated from the pre 9-11 intercepts. I appeared once on CBS 60 Minutes but I have been silenced by Mr. Ashcroft, the FBI follows me, and I was threatened with jail in 2002 if I went public." Edmonds told tomflocco.com.

[...]

"My translations of the pre 9-11 intercepts included [terrorist] money laundering, detailed and date specific information enough to alert the American people, and other issues dating back to 1999 which I won't go into right now. [...] The senate Judiciary Committee, and the 911 Commission have heard me testify for lengthy periods of time time (3 hours) about very specific plots, dates, airplanes used as weapons, and specific individuals and activities."

Ms. Edmonds says she has retained counsel and decided to go public despite the threats. Again, I don't know the first thing about this woman and so haven't any idea whether she is credible or not. But if what she says is true, then it makes this statement by Condoleezza Rice problematic: "Had this president been aware that terrorists would have used airplanes as missiles and attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he would have acted on it."

Now, perhaps by adding the level of specificity of designating specific buildings gives her a technical out, but it's abundantly clear that using planes as weapons had been considered prior to the attacks. As Bob Somerby has pointed out, we had already foiled multiple plots in the 1990's that planned just that very thing. However, even if they hadn't envisioned using planes as missiles, it wouldn't much matter. The measures you would employ to thwart a regular hijacking are the exact same ones you employ to thwart a suicide hijacking, and it is obvious that intelligence warning of hijackings was abundant.

Note: this does not equal "Bush knew." Not even I will assign that level of malevolence to him. The picture that is starting to emerge, though, is that they realized afterwards that they should have known, particularly since Richard Clarke had been pestering them incessantly about imminent al-Qaeda attacks. They got caught with their pants down and have been trying to stall the investigatory commission ever since in order to avoid having their carefully constructed hagiography of Bush-as-Solomon tarnished.

I didn't get to see Richard Clarke's testimony to the 9/11 commission yesterday because, well, I have a job. I also missed his 60 Minutes appearance. But I did hear him on NPR's Fresh Air last night and it was devastating. The Bush people have to be quaking in their boots about Clarke. Set aside an hour and listen to it if you didn't hear it the first time around. This could well be the guy that brings down the Bush presidency by exposing his essential lack of seriousness about the War on Terror. Once that has been taken away, he's got nothing left but an all-gay-marriage-all-the-time campaign, and I just can't see anybody riding that horse across the finish line.

Think they're sweating?

Scotland is the New South

Prediction: Scotland will soon pull even with the United States in the obesity sprint and extend their lead in the tooth decay relay.

Scotland's latest culinary delicacy - the deep-fried chocolate sandwich, promises to be one of the world's fattiest snacks. The 1,000 calorie sandwich first appeared on the menu at an Edinburgh hotel, selling for £4.95. But it's now available throughout the country. The sandwich consists of two slices of white bread smothered in chocolate sauce, dipped in batter and deep-fried. It's then covered in sugar and more chocolate sauce and served with vanilla ice-cream

Speaking as a guy who has eaten both deep-fried candy bars and deep-fried Twinkies (you gotta love the NC State Fair), I say: mmm, deep-fried chocolate sandwich...

Hey baby, are those real?

Entire generations of adolescent boys (and at least one adolescent-minded blogger) have tittered chuckled at the bird known as the titmouse. No matter how old I get or how many years of serious-minded parenting I've successfully stowed under my belt, my inner Beavis just can't resist a setup that easy. But suddenly, that "joke" just traded in half its allotment of juvenile humor for an equal dose of creepiness.

Nature: Human breasts grown on mice

The key, Weinberg says, is to transplant two types of human breast cells into the mice, one of which has been blasted with radiation. The cells grow into human-like breast tissues, complete with milk ducts. Unlike human breasts, however, the mice's growths sit flush to the chest. Humans are unusual in this respect, says Daniel Medina who studies breast cancer at Baylor College of Medicine at Houston, Texas: "In few other species are breasts pendulous."

In the past, some researchers transplanted only one type of breast cell, called epithelial cells, into mice. These cells line the milk ducts, and are where breast cancers start. But such attempts were "doomed to failure", says Weinberg, because they lacked a second element of human breast tissue - support cells called fibroblasts. So Weinberg's team took fibroblast tissue from women who had undergone breast reduction surgery. They blasted half the fibroblasts with X-rays, injected both healthy and irradiated cells into mouse mammary glands, and grafted human epithelial breast cells alongside.

Next up, the research team will attempt to grow testicles on birds to create the world's first balled eagle.

Dormez Vous?

Can't say why exactly, but this cracks me up.

Poetry in Motion

You would think that the Poet Laureate of England, given three months to produce an ode to the British victory in the Rugby World Cup, ought to be able to whip up some stirring celebratory verse. But you'd be wrong. After three months, Andrew Motion instead comes up with a piece composed of four lame-ass limericks. Why three months? Motion reportedly spent the period fruitlessly searching for a perfect rhyme for Wilkinson. Unsuccessful, he decided instead to use players' first names. You can read his final product here.

Now, I know that "A Song for Jonny" is intended as light verse and not as a follow-up to "The Wasteland." But when you are the frigging Poet Laureate of the nation from which arose the majestic English language, I expect some rhymes to exhibit at least a little creativity. But instead: boot, route, ghosts, posts, salute; leap, keep, ball, maul, weep; feet, beat, score, roar, sweet; and all, tall, Clive, survive, balls. One point awarded for Clive-survive, for a grand total of one point.

If you read it aloud and listen really, really closely, you'll detect a faint thumping noise. That would be William Wordsworth's corpse battering the sides of his casket as he goes all turbine.

(link tunnel: Simon World by way of Road to Surfdom)

Damning Indictment

Watched Leslie Stahl and Richard Clarke on 60 minutes last night (I was fortunate enough to see UAB pull a fast one on Kentucky immediately prior to the show – go Blazers.)

This is the most damning indictment I’ve heard from inside this administration; it’s way beyond Paul O’Neill.

"Frankly," he said, "I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know."

Clarke went on to say, "I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism."

Given that the “War on Terrorism” and the war in Iraq are the only things on which the electorate seems to lean favorably towards Bush, I think Kerry needs to hit hard, fast, and repeatedly on the national security issue. Yes, the domestic issues are increasingly important and play to the Democrats' favor, but war in the news effects the electoral dynamic in volatile and dramatic ways. I say take the fight straight at Bush. It is the only leg he’s standing on, and it’s very weak.

Having the bulk of our armed forces overstretched by needlessly occupying the most secular society in the heart of the Arab world at the squandering of over $100 billion a year and the overwhelming post-9/11 goodwill of the world has disastrously jeopardized this country’s security like no blunder committed by any “war” president we’ve ever had.

The poll results are confusing, I’m sure, to critical thinkers everywhere. But millions of Americans just believe that tough talk, no matter how hollow, means tougher on our enemies. Republicans generally, by way of bluster and willingness to throw huge amounts of money at defense contractors, have an inexplicable edge on making Americans feel safer. It is time to take this issue back.

To do that, it needs to be presented in simple terms and repeated again and again. George Bush misled you and botched the war on terrorism. Americans are horribly less secure now because of it. Boot him out of office before he makes it any worse.

Sorry to end on such a sour note; I'm off to a conference for the rest of the week and doubt I'll be able to post much, if anything. Over to you, Russ...

Ribbit

Children in a British nursery find a three-headed, six-legged frog.

Mike Dilger, from the BBC Natural History Unit, said: "I have never seen anything like this. Frogs are primitive animals - so the occasional extra toe is not that unusual. But this is very unusual." All the creature's eyes and legs appear to function normally, but it is not known whether it eats using all three of its mouths. The amphibian was kept in a container for several hours but hopped away later while nursery staff were showing it to curious parents.

Eek.

Extreme Method Acting

Eh, I thought her performance was a little stiff.

Called Dead: You Will Be, the production calls for a genuine corpse to "lie in state" throughout the performance. The theatre troupe, known as 1157, hope to get the consent of someone such as a terminally ill hospice patient to allow their body to be used for the play, which will run for 24 nights in mid-May.

"The body will not necessarily be touched by the actors at all," Jo Dagless, one of the group's artistic directors, told the newspaper. "But all those details would be worked out in advance with the donor and their family."

"Not necessarily?" Guess that leaves open the option of touching unnecessarily, which you'd think would be the larger concern. Still, it's a far sight more dignified than having your corpse used to test landmines or some such. And, sadly, more dignified than about 2/3 of the "theme funerals" in this list compiled by the National Funeral Directors and Morticians Association ("The visiting family and friends use go-carts. Dress the loved one in a car-racing suit."). Then again, dignity ain't always all it's cracked up to be.

So who knows? The play could be a hit that ends up running on Broadway for years, in which case the producers will definitely want to give these guys a ring. Not that they need the work, really, but they do seem to have the right recipe.

Conceptual Continuity

The Passion of the Christ was displaced from its position as the top-grossing movie after a three-week stay at the top. And what would be appropriate to follow up on the snuff movie version of the end of Jesus' life? Obviously, a movie about resurrection, about triumph over the grave.

So I'm taking it as a sign from above that this week's new king of the cinematic hill is about flesh-eating zombies.

And as they did eat, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them, and said, "Take, eat: this is my body." And there did arise from His apostles a great cry of "More brains!"

Et tu, Richard?

60 Minutes certainly should be interesting tonight.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, President Bush ordered his then top anti-terrorism adviser to look for a link between Iraq and the attacks, despite being told there didn't seem to be one. The charge comes from the advisor, Richard Clarke, in an interview airing Sunday at 7 p.m. ET/PT on 60 Minutes. The administration maintains that it cannot find any evidence that the conversation about an Iraq-9/11 tie-in ever took place.

Clarke also tells CBS News Correspondent Lesley Stahl that White House officials were tepid in their response when he urged them months before Sept. 11 to meet to discuss what he saw as a severe threat from al Qaeda.

"Frankly," he said, "I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know." Clarke went on to say, "I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism."

Oh my. The right wing will predictably begin howling soon that Clarke served in the Clinton administration and therefore should be ignored. That he served as Clinton's "terrorism czar" prior to being Bush's is true, but as long as we're pulling out bios for ideological authentication purposes, let's look at the rest of his government CV.

Richard Clarke is a career member of the Senior Executive Service, having begun his federal service in 1973 in the Office of the Secretary of Defense as an analyst on nuclear weapons and European security issues.  He joined the State Department in 1979 as the senior analyst for the NATO decision to engage in theater nuclear arms control and to deploy nuclear cruise missiles in Europe.  In the Reagan Administration, Mr. Clarke was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence.  In the [first] Bush Administration, he was the Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs.   In 1992, Mr. Clarke joined the National Security Council staff.

Well, he certainly sounds like a Democratic hack to me. As usual, Billmon has the Clarke analysis you should read. Don't miss it. If the überhawks are leaving the reservation - and not quietly - then Bush is in even deeper trouble than I thought. The credibility gap widens...

Coke adds life.

Boy wouldn't you hate to be head of their public relations department about now?

First, Coca-Cola's new brand of "pure" bottled water, Dasani, was revealed earlier this month to be tap water taken from the mains. Then it emerged that what the firm described as its "highly sophisticated purification process", based on Nasa spacecraft technology, was in fact reverse osmosis used in many modest domestic water purification units.

Yesterday, just when executives in charge of a £7m marketing push for the product must have felt it could get no worse, it did precisely that. The entire UK supply of Dasani was pulled off the shelves because it has been contaminated with bromate, a cancer-causing chemical.

Coke. It's the real thing. Get ready for Water Classic™.

Mission Creep

Spaced Out is a project in the UK to build the largest scale model of the solar system to help make the huge distances involved more comprehensible. The Sun would be located at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, and 17 other models for the planets, Halley's comet, and several asteroids will be built in cities across the UK at appropriate distances. A few will be at space-related visitor attractions, but most will be on school grounds.

Having not been to Great Britain, not one of these sites means a thing to me, but so far the placed planets are: Mercury at Chelford, Venus at Alderley Edge, Earth at Macclesfield, Mars at Northwich, Jupiter at Wrexham, Saturn at Lancaster, Uranus at Bath, and Pluto at Fort William. Asteroids will mark the model's boundaries, with Quadar in Penzance and TL66 in the Shetland Isles.

But our shiny, new red planetoid may have thrown the project a curveball.

The discovery of Sedna, described as a possible new planet orbiting the sun at a distance of eight billion miles, has got scientists on the project scratching their heads. It is twice as far away as Pluto, which, until this week, was the farthest known planet from the sun.

Physicist Dr Nigel Marshall, who is among the organisers of Spaced Out, has been forced to search beyond the Scottish isles for a model location. "This discovery has doubled our knowledge of the solar system and turned the whole project upside down," he said.

Sedna's orbit would take it to the north of Scotland, but it may pass close to the Faroe Islands. Otherwise, its location on the Jodrell map will have to be in mainland Europe.

Current Collection

If you have any business or pleasure planned within a holler of Chapel Hill, North Carolina this weekend then you have GOT to go see Choreo Collective perform their annual big show™, "Choreo Collective's Current Collection."

This group is shattering preconceived notions about what dance is, rewriting traditions about what the creative process is, and knocking down the walls that separate different media. Plus they're just good. Damn good. The ten bucks you shell out to attend this show will be well worth it.

Gottta level with you, though, dear readers; I'm somewhat biased. Go back to their website, link to "Current Collection 2004", check out the lower of the two group promo shots and set your eyes on the chiquita in the back. That's Froz' Lady. She's hot. And guess what...

She's 'with child.'

Lucky, lucky me.

Today's Beavis moment...

... is brought to you by Fark.com, who spots the best headline ever.

I'll kill you, you subordinationist son of a bitch!

Once again, do you doubt for a second that this took place in the South? Take it away, Statesboro, Georgia!

A couple who got into a dispute over a theological point after watching "The Passion of the Christ" were arrested after the argument turned violent. The two left the movie theater debating whether God the Father in the Holy Trinity was human or symbolic, and the argument heated up when they got home. [...] According to a police report, Melissa Davidson suffered injuries on her arm and face, while her husband had a scissors stab wound on his hand and his shirt was ripped off. He also allegedly punched a hole in a wall.

How does that profoundly esoteric theological debate escalate to the point that you'd stab your spouse with scissors? I haven't the faintest idea. You have to appreciate the stigmata-like nature of the wound, though. That rocks.

"It was the dumbest thing we've ever done," [Mrs. Davidson] said.

Somehow I doubt that.

The world's tiniest elevator.

Going up?

Nanoscale elevators made of two interlinking organic molecules have been built and operated by US and Italian scientists. They are the most complex molecular machines built yet, consisting of a platform flanked by three rings that thread through three vertical rods. The force of an acid-base reaction is used to power the "elevator". Experts say the force produced by the movement of the platform itself is larger than forces produced by previous 'nanoshuttles' - single rings that moved up and down a rod. The elevators could be used to tightly control chemical reactions, or as drug-delivery systems.

In a loosely related story, British scientists have successfully spun rope-like fibers from nanotubes that might eventually be used to build space elevators, allowing the placement of satellites into orbit without having to blast them out through the atmosphere.

The nanotubes are hollow strands of carbon just about 30 millionths of a millimetre or so wide — around 5,000 times thinner than a human hair. The resulting threads may be tiny but they have the potential to be exceptionally strong. [...] The tiny ropes can be made to any length — an improvement on similar threads that were up to 20 cm long. And because they are produced directly from the furnace in which the nanotubes are made, the process is relatively cheap and avoids the need for noxious organic solvents. [...] The mixture is squirted into a hot furnace in a jet of hydrogen gas. Nanotubes form as a tangled mass, rather like cotton candy, and are then wound onto a spindle to form strands.

So far, they aren't any stronger than normal textile fibers, but the researchers are looking for ways to make the molecules line up more tightly, like in the Kevlar ropes used to anchor oil drilling platforms to the ocean floor.

Nuclear families aren't always the best.

I got into trouble as a youngster. A lot. Got accepted to a prestigious live-in high school for math and science and got expelled just short of a semester later. I had a bad temper, a big mouth, and was pretty dead set on defying authority wherever I could find it. Bright plus bored plus a latchkey kid equals ample mischief opportunities. Luckily, the grades were always good, and folks excuse a lot of the rest as long as that thin patina of good citizenship stays in place.

Alcohol was available but unreliably, so as a teenager I could rattle off an impressive list of over-the-counter ways to get altered. I could also produce an equally impressive list of things you thought might get you high that could definitively be marked off the list, thanks to rigorous clinical testing by yours truly and my usual partner-in-crime, the namesake of The First Principle of Larry. I've known several who carried the name (Lawrence doesn't count, you must be a Larry), and to the man, they have been trouble. A whole lot of fun, plenty of good intentions, but trouble followed them like goslings.

Sorry, I’m digressing. I’m certain I stayed lodged pretty high on my relatives' prayer lists and for all I know that's the thin blue line that stood between my current deceptively acceptable bourgeois lifestyle and pushing my belongings around downtown Durham in a shopping cart. But for all my parents' justifiable consternation and late-night panic, they should just have been I glad that I wasn't particularly ambitious.

Publicly, the men in white promised the residents of Golf Manor that they had nothing to fear, and to this day neither Pease nor any of the dozen or so people I interviewed knows the real reason that the Environmental Protection Agency briefly invaded their neighborhood. When asked, most mumble something about a chemical spill. The truth is far more bizarre: the Golf Manor Superfund cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn, who attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in his mother's potting shed as part of a Boy Scout merit-badge project.

[...]

The archetypal American suburban boy learns how to hit a fadeaway jump shot, change a car's oil, perform some minor carpentry feats. If he's a Boy Scout he masters the art of starting a fire by rubbing two sticks together, and if he's a typical adolescent pyro, he transforms tennis-ball cans into cannons. David Hahn taught himself to build a neutron gun. He figured out a way to dupe officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission into providing him with crucial information he needed in his attempt to build a breeder reactor, and then he obtained and purified radioactive elements such as radium and thorium.

The Harper's article from way back in 1998 is a fascinating read. Suddenly, choking down bottles of Robitussin on the hood of an El Camino seems utterly banal. Yes, I know it already seemed pathetic, but now pathetic and banal. Link via Unfogged.

The Spirit of the Stairway

The Guardian recently printed an excerpt of a new short story by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk with the caveat: "This extract is not for the squeamish, or for children. Some may find it offensive." The passage dealt with kids inserting foreign objects into places they oughtn't be. You get the picture. You have been warned. But in the middle of it was this lovely snippet.

People in France have a phrase: "Spirit of the Stairway". In French: Esprit d'Escalier. It means that moment when you find the answer, but it's too late. Say you're at a party and someone insults you. You have to say something. So under pressure, with everybody watching, you say something lame. But the moment you leave the party?

As you start down the stairway, then - magic. You come up with the perfect thing you should've said. The perfect crippling put-down.

That's the Spirit of the Stairway.

The trouble is, even the French don't have a phrase for the stupid things you actually do say under pressure. Those stupid, desperate things you actually think or do.

Your crane style is very good.

But now you must face Sensei Rumsfeld.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has opened his fortified island headquarters to participants in his second no-holds-barred martial arts tournament, the enigmatic mastermind announced Monday.

"Warriors of the world, hear me," said Rumsfeld, seated on the onyx throne overlooking the fighting arena at the island's central volcano, surrounded by a phalanx of exotic but murderous beauties and his seven-foot-tall guard Omarra. "I declare the Eagle Fist all-styles, hand-to-hand combat world championship open once more. For the next 10 days, the world's mightiest fighters will come together here at Fang Island to compete for a prize of $1 million and the post of Associate Secretary Of Full-Contact Defense!"

Rumsfeld then declared the tournament open by symbolically shattering a block of obsidian with his prosthetic dragon's claw—the powerful weapon grafted onto his right wrist after 2003 champion Li severed his hand with manji butterfly swords.

And fortuitously enough, The Poor Man points to POE News, which has the rundown (with pictures) of Donald "Fistful of Known Unknowns" Rumsfeld's fighting techniques.

Twin Cobra Fist!

Quiver, puny mortals. Where's your messiah now?

Potty Mouth

I try to steer clear of the semiotic and semantic fronts in the gender wars because they always just seem so damn silly. "It's not history, it's herstory! You mean womyn with a y, right? ICBMs are just giant phallic symbols!" Blah blah blah, go finish your master's thesis already. But I gotta admit, this seems a little . . . hostile.

(via World O' Crap)

Was he drunk?

Did anybody else happen to catch Eric Alterman on Dennis Miller's CNBC show last night? I've honestly never seen an interviewer do a worse job. Ever. And though I'm sure it has happened I can't remember anybody ever making a bigger public display of being a complete dickhead than Miller did. It was unbelievable to watch, even if you friggin' hate Eric Alterman.

Alterman updates his site weekdays about 2:00 Eastern. Today's should be interesting.

Update (2:08 pm): Since I am aware that was probably one of several hundred viewers CNBC has at any given moment, I should point to this description of the show by South Knox Bubba. But don't take our word for it - watch it yourself.

It slices. It dices.

It synchronizes.

"The 'Memory USB' army knife includes a flash memory stick, a piece of technology which has become increasingly popular with computer users over the past few months. It means owners can store data such as presentations or database files for easy transport."

Except on airlines.

Don't waste your breath.

NASA already knows what you're going to say anyhow.

NASA has developed a computer program that comes close to reading thoughts not yet spoken, by analyzing nerve commands to the throat. It says the breakthrough holds promise for astronauts and the handicapped. [...] Jorgensen's team found that sensors under the chin and on each side of the Adam's apple pick up the brain's commands to the speech organs, allowing the subauditory, or "silent speech" to be captured. [...] On early trials, the program could recognize with 92 percent accuracy six words and 10 numbers that the team repeated sub-vocally. The first words were "stop," "go," "left," "right," "alpha," and "omega."

Expect this to be the next feature upgrade on Diebold voting machines. "Due to obvious galvanic skin responses, eight hundred clearly erroneous votes were re-assigned to Pat Buchanan."

Don't Ask, Don't Be

But we're not promising anything on the first part. This is infuriating.

A gay employee who is fired or demoted for attending a gay pride rally would receive protection from the Office of Special Counsel. But the same employee would have no recourse at OSC if he was fired or demoted simply for being gay.

This is new Special Counsel Scott Bloch’s initial reading of a 1978 law intended to protect employees and job applicants from adverse personnel actions taken against them for reasons unrelated to their job performance. In his interpretation, Bloch is making a distinction between one’s conduct as a gay or lesbian and one’s status as a gay or lesbian. “People confuse conduct and sexual orientation as the same thing, and I don’t think they are,” Bloch said in a March 10 interview with Federal Times.

I read this article close to ten times. Somebody please correct my interpretation; I hope I've tied myself in a logistical clovehitch and am missing something here. A federal employee can be fired for being gay and have no recourse through the Office of Special Counsel?!

Tip: Atrios.

Duck!

Closest call on record with an approaching asteroid.

An asteroid the size of a small office building will make the closest approach ever recorded to the Earth on Thursday evening. Discovered just two days ago by an automated telescope scanning the sky for near-Earth objects, asteroid 2004 FH will miss the planet by a mere 40,000 kilometres, just over a tenth of the distance to the Moon.

JPL's Near Earth Object Program website is getting overwhelmed, so try it but expect to have to try again later.

It was the breast of times...

...it was the worst of times.

The good news: "Many of today's generation of postmenopausal women have breast tissue more akin to that of younger women."

Yay!

The bad news: "This makes it harder for mammograms to pick up tumours or early signs of breast cancer in some over 50s and may also lead to unnecessary biopsies because of uncertainty in reading the results."

Boo!

Got A Minute?

Or ten. Or thirty. I have three good reads worth sharing before I stagger off to bed.

First is Adel Safty's op-ed piece in Gulf News concerning the Arab "urgent task of renewal." Arab League heads-of-state are gathering later this month in Tunis to discuss, among other things, a pretty massive overhaul of the organization's charter.

Second is a pair of articles in The Weekly Independent from Lahore. One, Between the devil and the deep sea, is encouraging in that it presents the ultra-conservative Islamist parties in Pakistan as engaged in some rather pissy squabbling amongst themselves and I love it when religious fanatics - of any theocratic flavor - get their panties wadded up and start acting all bitchy with each other. This may prove helpful in the search and destroy mission to find bin Laden and Omar, which is the subject of the other article, Zeroing in on Osama. Some interesting angles totally new to me in that piece; check it out.

And finally, a book-review-slash-museum-opening-announcement from that reliable source of insight, Al-Ahram. I'd always kept to the political analysis pages in this Egyptian weekly, but wandered off the beaten path tonight and found a real gem. Cairo's Sakakini Palace has been donated by its wealthy owner to the Ministry of Health to house a museum dedicated to the history of medicine in Egypt. A book by a Physician and medical historian involved with the project is reviewed in detail.

Good night.

Foreign Endorsements

In a videotape purportedly made by "al Qaeda's European military spokesman," he endorses George W. Bush for president of the United States.

The statement said it supported President Bush in his reelection campaign, and would prefer him to win in November rather than the Democratic candidate John Kerry, as it was not possible to find a leader "more foolish than you (Bush), who deals with matters by force rather than with wisdom."

In comments addressed to Bush, the group said: "Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilization. Because of this we desire you (Bush) to be elected."

So much for the "Osama wants Kerry to be president" argument. Who says homicidal religious fanatics don't have a sense of humor?

(via kos)

More Solar Eruptions

Boom!

"On Friday, 12 March 2004, the Sun ejected a spectacular 'eruptive prominence' into the heliosphere. SOHO, the ESA/NASA solar watchdog observatory, faithfully recorded the event.

This 'eruptive prominence' is a mass of relatively cool plasma, or ionised gas. We say 'relatively' cool, because the plasma observed by the Extreme-ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) on board SOHO was only about 80 000 degrees Celsius, compared to the plasma at one or two million degrees Celsius surrounding it in the Sun's tenuous outer atmosphere, or 'corona'..."

The Ultimate Last Laugh

Indian Express: "Osama Bin Laden narrowly escaped capture by French troops in Afghanistan, perhaps several times, the head of France’s armed forces said today. But French soldiers are determined to capture the Al Qaeda chief by the end of the year, Gen Henri Bentegeat said today."

Oh God, please, please, please, let it be the French who capture bin Laden. Just let it happen when I'm near a hospital, because there is a better than even chance that I would die laughing. I just hope the French army is selecting targets more carefully than their artists are.

What's For Dinner?

Via LocusSolus some culinary HocusPocus.

Mr. Drum Goes to Washington

Figuratively, anyhow. The acknowledged ninja master of the center-left blogworld, Kevin "CalPundit" Drum, has made the jump from independent pundit to major media muckety-muck. He is now the in-house blogger for the indispensable Washington Monthly, christening his new digs Political Animal.

Congratulations, Mr. Drum. It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Except me, of course, though I suspect my blogging is better suited to Mad Magazine than the Washington Monthly...

Elliptic Eccentricity Explanations

One of the mysteries of the the newly discovered distant planetoid tentatively named Sedna is its highly elliptical orbit around the Sun. The distance from the Earth to the Sun is one AU (astronomical unit). Sedna's orbit ranges from 76 AU at perihelion, its closest approach to the sun, to 1000 AU at aphelion. By contrast, Pluto, which also follows an elliptical orbit, ranges from about 30 to 50 AU. At 1000 AU, you would think that the gravitational pull between Sedna and the Sun would be close enough to zero for the icy red planetoid to go hurtling out of orbit. So what is causing the bizarre orbit?

Michael Brown, the astronomer at California Institute of Technology who led the discovery of Sedna, said the most likely scenario involves the Sun having been born in a star cluster, and several stars that were then closer to the solar system -- still more than 10,000 AU away -- were responsible for ejecting objects like Sedna. Several astronomers not involved in the discovery support the idea that Sedna was lured outward by a star. But others don't buy that explanation.

"I don't really like that," said Marsden, who heads the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., where newfound solar system bodies are catalogued. Marsden favors an object closer in, a "planetary object," he told SPACE.com, perhaps at between 400 and 1,000 AU.

Marsden's theory involves an as yet undiscovered, distant, earth-sized object affecting Sedna's orbit. The leader of the team that discovered Sedna admits that is a possibility, but his calculations would put it at about 70 AU.

Brown said there is one unexplored region of space left, amounting to about 20 percent of the sky, that hasn't been searched for an Earth-sized object that would be orbiting at 70 AU and presumably in the main plane of the solar system. It is the region toward the bright galactic center, which is harder to search.

[...]

Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute adds another twist to the whole puzzle. Stern thinks there could be Earth-sized planets in the Oort Cloud, the most distant region of the solar system. Brown's team said they thought Sedna should be counted as the first known object of the otherwise theoretical Oort Cloud. The distant reservoir of small icy objects is thought to exist based on the orbits of some comets that zoom through the inner solar system now and then, and then disappear into deep space. Nobody knows what's actually in the Oort Cloud, however.

The more we discover, the more mysteries we uncover. When the Hubble-on-steroids James Webb Space Telescope goes up (currently slated for 2011) and starts revealing so much more than we have ever been able to see previously, we will be reminded just how little we really understand about our universe. I have long believed that life is just the universe's way of looking at itself. It is still seeing through a glass, darkly, but its eyes are getting better in a hurry.

Om shanti, baby.

Syrians, Iranians, and Kurds, Oh My!

A domino effect throughout the middle east indeed, first in Syria...

It's the worst domestic unrest in Syria in two decades. Over the weekend and into Monday, Kurds rioted in several Syrian towns adjacent to Iraq and Turkey, prompting swift intervention by Syrian troops. At least 14 Kurds died in riots which began Friday in Qamishli during a brawl between Kurdish and Arab soccer fans.

then in Iran.

In Iran, Kurds have their own province and are relatively free to participate in the country's political life, traditionally by supporting reformist politicians. But their political impact was dealt a severe setback by last month's elections, when the vast majority of opposition candidates were barred from running.

Ali Reza Nourizadeh is the director of the London-based Center for Arab-Iranian Studies. He says Iranian Kurds in the past week held public gatherings celebrating Iraq's interim constitution and the autonomy of the Iraqi Kurds. Several people were reported injured and dozens arrested when Iranian authorities broke up the gatherings.

News out of both of these societies is very dificult to get, so the scope of the unrest is unclear. Some accounts are rather sensational.

Civil war isn't the only threat; regional war is. Ready for the vortex?

A real threat here is if armed Kurds start seeking refuge in northern Iraq after causing trouble of one kind or another in Syrian, Iranian, or - god forbid - Turkish territory. If any Kurdish village grants them refuge or protects them in any way, then our number one ally in Iraq is providing safe harbor for those whom Iraq's neighbors will characterize as terrorists. The irony is almost discernable through the dreadful magnitude of the situation.

If you're interested in more horrific yet timely irony duplicity, contrast this spectacle with this exhaustive account.

UPDATE 9:45 am WED: Ha'aretz is reporting that a US team landed in Syria to help with negotiations and told Syrian authorities to (1) get the situation under control but (2) don't be too rough about it.

VOA reports that Amnesty International is demanding Syria come clean on the whereabouts of hundreds of Kurds detained over the last few days. One source said 2000 in "mass arrests" as far away as Damascus.

Al Bawaba presents the Syrian authorities as intervening by meeting with leaders on both sides, Arab and Kurdish.

Numerous accounts over the last 3 days have indicated Kurdish expatriates or exiles (what do you call them when they don't have a country?) have demonstrated at Syrian embassies in Brussels (where they actually occupied the compound), Geneva, Ankara, and Nicosia. Also lots of "where is the western press?" comments abound. Do bloggers have to take the lead on getting this story out, too? C'mon, guys; you're the ones with reporters on the ground in these places.

CSM, which leaves Time in its analytical dust on virtually every story, has a good map. I like maps.

Garbage Collector

Ever noticed how Cheerios tend to agglomerate in the bowl when you're almost finished and there's more milk than cereal to be seen? Turns out that garbage does the same thing in the ocean, albeit for somewhat different reasons: less due to surface tension and more due to circulation patterns.

Here's a troubling but fascinating account by a sailor of running across the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a Texas-sized collection of refuse floating about halfway between Oregon and Hawaii and apparently not going anywhere anytime soon. Warning: the article has an unavoidable and rather gruesome picture of the effect this garbage has on local fauna right up top.

It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments. Months later, after I discussed what I had seen with the oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, perhaps the world’s leading expert on flotsam, he began referring to the area as the “eastern garbage patch.” But “patch” doesn’t begin to convey the reality. Ebbesmeyer has estimated that the area, nearly covered with floating plastic debris, is roughly the size of Texas.

He concludes by stating "I now believe plastic debris to be the most common surface feature of the world’s oceans." Crikey. [sarcasm]Maybe that's why the temperature and pressure patterns in the North Pacific are changing[/sarcasm]; see below.

Patterns Within Patterns

I wrote last week about recent research into the atmosphere / ocean dynamic in the North Atlantic. So to ensure balance and keep the world from tipping over, let's give the Pacific a chance to shine in the spotlight.

The North Pacific has been governed by a roughly two-decade-long pattern of surface temperature, current strength and barometric pressure more or less repeated since measurements started being taken 80 years ago.

But the last 5 years have totally fouled up the model. Drat.

"Looking back over the past century, categorizing the climate signals as a pure PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation) pattern would be simple-minded," said Bill Patzert, Oceanographer and Climatologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "This research shows that although there are some characteristics of a PDO, there are some disturbances in the 'PDO force.'"

Odd how Hollywood gives us our metaphors.

Not So Super

The Republicans in the Senate (plus 4 predictable southern Democrats minus 3 predictable northeastern moderates and John McCain) have stuck you and your children with another bill: paying for Superfund cleanups.

There is a complete lack of logic to this aside from proving how deeply beholden to their corporate masters they are. Superfund has cleaned up hundreds of toxic waste sites around the country and it has done so without ballooning federal expenditure. "Polluter pays" policies such as this not only clean up sites at a timetable we, the public, decide based on severity of the contamination but - quite fairly - stick those who caused the pollution with the bill. If the polluter is bankrupt or no longer in existence, an account funded by taxes paid by companies producing or utilizing the chemicals and processes that most commonly cause the contamination is used. It's not perfect, but it's about as fair as it gets. To boot, this is an incentive to move away from the more toxic industrial materials and towards more ecologically suitable technologies.

In 1995 the Superfund tax expired and the newly-Republican congress failed to renew it. President Clinton was supportive of the tax but in a rather compromised political situation, if you'll remember, and he had to be very careful about which battles to advance. This one got jettisoned and many in the conservation movement never forgave him. It was another example feeding the "there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans" mentality that proved so disastrous in 2000, especially in Florida. Nader ran as a Green, remember.

Eight years later, with no replenishing, the well was dry. General funds had to be tapped to continue the cleanups. Bush's solution? Order EPA to slow down the remediations.

This is truly counterproductive on so many levels. Contaminated sites tend to spread toxins via surface and ground water; delays exacerbate the problem and up the cost. Cleanups should be as close to revenue neutral as possible; what happened to that infatuation with user fees Republicans used to have? And finally, remediation technologies are going to be very important in coming years and Superfund sites have been a testing ground for all sorts of strategies. Conservation - defined to include cleanup of previously contaminated environments - can be an excellent economic development tool. These technologies and the services of implementing them hold incredible export potential. It's obvious that the Right wing agenda no longer shies from propping up industries with public funds, they're just exercising lousy judgment choosing which industries.

Reinstating the Superfund tax will be back. If you live in Illinois, Colorado, Alaska, Pennsylvania, or Oklahoma, you're in a good position to do something to give it a better shot in 2005.

Who's appeasing whom?

Max Sawicky on the war party reaction to the Spanish election:

Fear would describe when you roll over for fear of attack and submit to oppression, but failure to support the adventures of G. Bush does not equate to fear of Al Queda. It simply equates to good sense. If anything, mostly-Christian Spain has more reason than the U.S. to be wary of fundamentalist Islam. Imagine if we had to worry about Mexican terrorists. Perhaps proximity engenders more wisdom as well, as far as picking and choosing your fights (emphasis mine -a). Spain has shown no reluctance and I gather little incapacity to crack down on Basque terrorists. Why should they be more afraid of Islamists?

The worst of which you could accuse the Spanish is acting in their own national interest, something nations are wont to do. Such behavior is often inadequate in light of the world interest. For that reason we have an organization called the United Nations which is able to produce decisions that can command respect, if arrived at by open, democratic means. The task of leadership is advancing the world's interest effectively in that body.

That is the most miserable of the Bush Administration's miserable failures. Military strength notwithstanding, it is losing its favorite war out of political ineptitude. Why? Because it is trying to appease Americans who still haven't figured out how the U.S. lost the war in Viet Nam.

The neoconservative Greek chorus hasn't figured it out yet, but Spain just raised its leadership profile within the EU significantly. Incidentally, China and Russia have been very quiet about Iraq recently. I imagine they are getting no small amount of pleasure watching the Bush League twist in the wind.

Translucent Concrete

On a tip from my buddy Rick, I came across this bit of structural innovation (with pictures). Soon, you'll no longer need to hail from the planet Krypton to see through concrete walls.

A wall made of "LitraCon" allegedly has the strength of traditional concrete but thanks to an embedded array of glass fibers can display a view of the outside world, such as the silhouette of a tree, for example.

"Thousands of optical glass fibers form a matrix and run parallel to each other between the two main surfaces of every block," explained its inventor Áron Losonczi. "Shadows on the lighter side will appear with sharp outlines on the darker one. Even the colours remain the same. This special effect creates the general impression that the thickness and weight of a concrete wall will disappear."

[...]

"In theory, a wall structure built out of the light-transmitting concrete can be a couple of meters thick as the fibers work without any loss in light up to 20 m," explained Losonczi. "Load-bearing structures can also be built from the blocks as glass fibers do not have a negative effect on the well-known high compressive strength of concrete."

Wow.

The Other Sedna

While bumbling about looking for what few scraps of information exist about Sedna, I discovered a Sedna a little closer to home, in the form of a sea slug. And what do you know, but five short years ago, Glossodoris Sedna was Nudibranch of the Week.

"This species occurs throughout the length of the tropical eastern Pacific (i.e., Panamic) province, from Puerto Penasco in the northern Gulf of California, to the Islas Galapagos. It may be seasonally and regionally abundant or rare. In the summer at Puerto Penasco, it is one of the most abundant opisthobranchs; however this species is quite rare at Bahia de los Angeles. Glossodoris sedna has also been reported rarely in the Caribbean, from southern Florida and the Bahamas."

Several spectacular (and these things really are spectacular) nudibranch galleries can be found here, here, here, and here.

Off to a promising start.

I don't think the Bush White House is going to be asking the new Spanish government out on any dates.

"The war has been a disaster; the occupation continues to be a disaster," Zapatero said in a radio interview. At a news conference later, he called the Iraq war "an error." He added, "It divided more than it united, there were no reasons for it, time has shown that the arguments for it lacked credibility, and the occupation has been poorly managed."

[...]

"Unless there is a change, in that the United Nations takes control and the occupiers give up political control, the Spanish troops will come back, and the limit to their presence is June 30," he said. Zapatero addressed criticism directly at Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, another steadfast supporter of the United States in Iraq. "Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush must do some reflection and self-criticism. You can't organize a war with lies," he said.

Nevertheless, Zapatero said he wanted to have cordial relations with Washington. "That's the beauty and greatness of democracy," he said. "It allows you to disagree while maintaining good relations."

He doesn't know Bush so well, does he? The right wing will begin mocking Spain as French-style "cowards" in three...two...one...now. Isn't Michael Graham just the cleverest? This shouldn't be difficult to understand. The Spanish public was against joining the invasion by huge percentages, but Aznar went ahead anyhow. Once Hussein was toppled and Spanish troops settled in with only a handful of deaths, people might grumble about the cost, but were willing to give Aznar the benefit of the doubt so long as their lives weren't disrupted too much.

But now it has claimed 200 lives and not the lives of soldiers but of civilians. Iraq isn't Spain's fight. It isn't even our fight. Iraq was never a focal point of Islamic extremism; in fact, it was practically the least hospitable state in the region for such beliefs. If you wanted someone who would whack Islamic fundamentalists, hey, Saddam was your guy. Just ask the Shiites. We have, however, managed to turn it into a terrorism hotbed. Just as we made Afghanistan one in the '80s while settling another grudge. We are building a perpetual motion Middle Eastern war machine and any world leader in his right mind would be looking for a way to hop off this merry-go-round. It's madness.

All the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments seem well out of proportion to what happened: parliamentary elections were held and a new government will be formed. This happens all the time. It's called democracy and it's what we said we were bringing to Iraq (instead of the police state they've gotten). The Spanish government implemented a policy that was broadly unpopular, it had severe negative repercussions, and they were voted out as a result. That's the way it is supposed to work. Either quit whining about it or just admit you'd prefer a one-party state.

The Spanish, who know a thing or two about terrorism having lived through decades of it, knew that the War on Iraq does not equal the War on Terrorism. The ouster of the Popular Party is not a victory for Al-Qaeda, no matter how many times Lucianne's smarmy little doughboy screams it. The Socialists won't be offering Osama a cabinet position. This election was an acknowledgement of what has become impossible to ignore: occupying Iraq hasn't reduced terrorism a whit. Rather, it has increased terrorism. There weren't any car bombs in Baghdad before the invasion. There weren't any giant train bombs in Spain, either.

When you discover you're shoulder-deep in a hole, the first thing you do is stop digging. I suspect this election is the crack in the dam, and you'll see more countries start to opt out of this cage match in short order. Look to Italy, a country that historically has changed governments at the drop of a hat, for the next upheaval.

Update (10:26 am): Some quotes from Spaniards in this SF Chronicle article:

Luis Gonzales, 56, a high school Spanish literature teacher: "Aznar took us into a war that wasn't our war, but only for the benefit of the extreme right and the American companies."

"Americans need to understand that Bush's attitude is causing more hatred and more terrorism," said Marie Isabel Garcia, 31, a foreign language graduate student who visited the Puerta del Sol memorial.

Previous episodes, such as claims that Aznar's government had concealed damaging information about a major oil spill off Spain's Atlantic coast two years ago, fed the perception that the outgoing leader and his party were not trustworthy. "All the negative elements of his political personality were shown at this stage, and the election became a plebiscite against Aznar," said Antonio Lorsa, a University of Madrid political scientist.

Update II (10:47 am): As per usual, Juan Cole says it better than I could.

That's my boy!

I had one of those parenting moments over breakfast this morning where I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the six-year-old junior apostropher is carrying my genes. He was relating a school story from last week between spoonfuls of Cheerios when he remarked, "And I did really good at it!" He paused, frowned, and then corrected himself, "Really well at it."

I came within an inch of packing the car and driving him to Disney World.

Now That That's Settled

I can start sleeping at night again.

"Bubbles are lighter than beer, so they're supposed to rise upward," said Richard N. Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Sciences at Stanford. "But countless drinkers have claimed that the bubbles actually go down the side of the glass. Could they be right, or would that defy the laws of physics?"

Turns out yes, bubbles will travel downward, but the reason doesn't quite relegate Newtonian physics to irrelevancy. Bubbles on the side of the glass experience drag while counterparts in the middle rise quickly, creating low pressure at the bottom which the fluid on the side - and the bubbles suspended therein - drop down to balance.

Next mystery: How long will a bottle of red really keep?

Framing the Debate

My Ro-bot Life has an excellent parsing-by-example of a couple of the latest big movers in the Bush lexicon hit parade: "deeply irresponsible" versus "steady leadership." You should bookmark it for rapid response purposes. Remember: war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. Also, putting mayonnaise on a hamburger bun is manufacturing.

I can't believe it's not partially hydrogenated soybean oil!

Cows fed rapeseed yield naturally spreadable butter.

Rapeseed is rich in unsaturated fats, which pass through the cow's digestive system into its milk. One of these fats, called oleic acid, makes butter produced from the milk spreadable when cold. [...] The butter tastes just like normal.

To be marketed as 'butter', the product must be made entirely from milk fat. If any vegetable oil is present, the substance is relabelled as a 'spread', which is often less attractive to consumers. "We just put the vegetable oil in at an earlier stage," says Fearon. [...] Rapeseed is used to supplement the normal diet of food pellets and grass. "If we feed them raw seeds alone, they come straight out of the other end of the cow," says Fearon.

Cows have always struck me as so weird that they definitely merit a suspicious, watchful eye. Particularly the crafty "wetback cow" that, aside from flaunting our immigration laws (la vaca dice el MOO!), can carry the oddly named Boophilus tick, spreader of the nasty bovine piroplasmosis. Giant hive-mind mammals are not to be trusted, no matter their accent. Lucky for them that they are made entirely out of beef.

Say hello to Sedna.

American astronomers will announce the discovery of a tenth planet/planetoid orbiting the Sun, beyond Pluto. The body, roughly the size of Pluto, orbits in the Kuiper Belt in an elliptical orbit between 6 and 84 billion miles from Earth, and has been named Sedna, after the angry Inuit goddess of the ocean. She was forced to marry a dog by her father, who then drowned the dog after Sedna bore his puppies, and was then tricked into marrying a white raven. When the raven attacked the boat in which she and her father were escaping, her father threw her overboard. As she tried to climb back into the boat, he cut off her fingers, which became the whales and other large sea mammals that accompany her in the frigid Arctic waters.

Sedna was discovered by scientists from the California Institute of Technology's Palomar observatory near San Diego, and was confirmed by sightings from the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. As the most distant object yet discovered in heliocentic orbit, "it never gets above 400 degrees below Fahrenheit. And it's so far away that if you were on Sedna and looking back at the sun, an astronomer says you could block it out with the head of a pin." One orbit around the sun takes 10,500 earth years. As with Pluto, Sedna's status as a full-fledged planet is up for debate.

No Más, No Más.

With the ouster of Spain's conservative and newly unpopular Popular Party this weekend, one leg of Bush's Axis of Badass has been amputated. Incoming Prime Minister Zapatero pledged to withdraw all Spanish troops by June unless the UN was brought in to run the show, saying, "The war has been a disaster [and] the occupation continues to be a disaster. It has only generated violence." Prepare yourself for the House bill requiring the Congressional cafeteria to rename the Spanish omelet to the Security omelet.

Atrios summarizes the right-wing reaction: "The people of Spain voted out the party which failed to protect them from a terrorist attack, and this proves they aren't serious about fighting terrorism." Get used to that argument; you're likely to hear it over and over after November 2nd. But Juan Cole has the most interesting observation so far:

I was struck by the comment of a Spaniard in Charles Sennot's Boston Globe piece on the Spanish elections. He quoted a voter who was disturbed by the way Aznar had manipulated information and public opinion, accusing him of lying about the threat posed by Iraq. He said that these tactics reminded him of the ones the dictator Franco used to use.

It reminded me that most of the publics in countries with fascist pasts--Spain, Germany, Italy--rejected the way the Iraq war was gotten up by Bush and his European partners. They sniffed something wrong with the manipulation that was clearly employed. They had been sensitized to such techniques by their suffering under fascism in the past.

And, it strikes me that the techniques that they minded so much are those of the Neoconservatives. What does that say about the latter? Maybe they don't deserve Leo Strauss as an intellectual ancestor. Maybe their real genealogy is rather more sordid.

Ouch.

Krispy Krap

Let's say you're middling through life in a job that has no relation to your life dreams. You're married and you never have sex. You go to church because the rituals are comforting though you suspect deep down it's probably hollow at its spiritual core. What do you have for breakfast?

I'm thinking the low-sugar doughnut. Just for the sake of thematic consistency.

Exactly how low the sugar content would be was unclear Thursday. Krispy Kreme spokeswoman Amy Hughes said she didn't know because the new doughnut is still in the early stages of development. It is set to debut before the end of the year. But just one of Krispy Kreme's Hot Original Glazed doughnuts has 10 grams of sugar and 200 calories.

See, it's like a doughnut, but with all the pleasure taken out of it.

Par for the course.

President Bush paid homage to International Women's Week by praising the release of . . . a man.

"Earlier today, the Libyan government released Fathi Jahmi. She's a local government official who was imprisoned in 2002 for advocating free speech and democracy," the president said at the White House.

[...]

"Definitely male," said Alistair Hodgett, spokesman for the human rights advocacy group Amnesty International, whose representatives tried to see Jahmi in prison during a recent visit to Libya.

Sigh.

Funniest lab report ever.

If I was this guy's TA, I'd nominate him for student council president. The drudgery of grading undergrad papers must really be brightened by submissions like "Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass."

Results

Check this shit out (Fig. 1). That's bonafide, 100%-real data, my friends. I took it myself over the course of two weeks. And this was not a leisurely two weeks, either; I busted my ass day and night in order to provide you with nothing but the best data possible. Now, let's look a bit more closely at this data, remembering that it is absolutely first-rate. Do you see the exponential dependence? I sure don't. I see a bunch of crap.

Christ, this was such a waste of my time.

Banking on my hopes that whoever grades this will just look at the pictures, I drew an exponential through my noise. I believe the apparent legitimacy is enhanced by the fact that I used a complicated computer program to make the fit. I understand this is the same process by which the top quark was discovered.

The rest of it is just as fabulous. Link via boingboing.

Nuke Subsidies Getting You Down?

Just rewrite the rules on waste disposal to make operations more... um... cost-effective.

If the Bush Administration has its way, radioactive waste will soon be officially no different than ordinary trash--meaning it could be dumped into your nearby town landfill. Long a dream--and goal--of the nuclear industry, the Bush EPA is actively considering a reclassification, or redefinition, of what constitutes radioactive waste. The period for public comment on the controversial proposal expires this Wednesday, March 17.

The nuclear industry has been pushing for such a redefinition of contaminated "low-activity" waste for over a decade. Sending this waste to an ordinary landfill or hazardous waste handler (if radioactive material is mixed with hazardous waste) would be cheaper than disposal at facililities licensed to handle radioactive materials, which is what current EPA regulation requires.

Of all the misguided policy proposals I've watched materialize in the last three years, this ranks right up there with the finest of them. "Low-Activity" waste is the lowest of three radioactivity levels within the much-apologized "Low Level Radioactive Waste." When you hear that this waste comes from medical research you are hearing a half-truth. More like a quarter; over 75% of it comes from nuclear power generating facilities.

Landfills are getting better, but as a long range waste management strategy, they still suck. Or leak, rather. They all will. Period. Let me put it another way: Local governments imperatively need to develop household hazardous waste programs to try to divert the minimal amounts of radioactive waste (smoke alarms, for example) that Subtitle D (regular trash, or 'MSW') landfills receive already, not brace for the impact of a rush of radioactive trash from nuclear power plants.

The "Low-Level" disposal facilities, however suspect, are more secure and the current method of handling LLRW, even the "Low-Activity" portion, protects public health better than the alternative: tossing it into the dumpster. You know, the one at the edge of the parking lot.

May I ask who's calling?

On the one hand, I can see the point of this.

Technology companies should be required to ensure that law enforcement agencies can install wiretaps on Internet traffic and new generations of digital communications, the Justice Department says. The push would effectively expand the scope of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, a 1994 law that requires the telecommunications industry to build into its products tools that U.S. investigators can use to eavesdrop on conversations with a court order.

Well, if it's a court-ordered warrant, but it only covers communication means that suspects aren't using any longer, then yes, I can see the problem there. I want to be safe from crime that threatens me, just like everybody else. Law enforcement needs to be able to compete technologically.

Fearful that federal agents can't install wiretaps against criminals using the latest communications technologies, lawyers for the Justice Department, FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration said their proposals "require immediate attention and resolution" by the Federal Communications Commission.

Aaaand that's where they lose me. I know the argument didn't just change substantively, but whenever I see the FBI, the DEA, the FCC, and the Ashcroft Justice Department huddling up, hairs stand straight up all the way down my neck. I don't have to explain it, I just know on a lizard-brain level that nothing good will come of it. You know it, too. The ink won't be dry off the decision before it will be abused.

Critics said the government's proposal would have far-reaching impact on new communications technologies and could be enormously expensive for companies that need to add wiretap-capabilities to their products, such as push-to-talk cellular telephones and telephone service over Internet lines. The Justice Department urged the FCC to declare that companies must pay for any such improvements themselves, although it said companies should be permitted to pass those expenses on to their customers.

We need the ability to spy on you and you have to pay us for the privilege. Nice. Hey, I have an idea. You guys figure out how to crack it on your own dime, just like we do.

Update (1:30 pm): A little more detail on the case.

NPR = Not Publicly Recognizable

Being the good and dutiful liberal that I am, I listen to enough NPR that I feel like I know all of the on-air voices: MEE-chele Norris, Sylvia Poggio-o-o-oli, Don Gonyea, the whole bunch. But given the nature of the medium, they have always been nothing more than discorporate voices to me. But what do you know, at NPR's directory page, you can match the familiar voice to a wholly unfamiliar portrait for almost all of their posse.

Renée Montagne is pretty hot, but Patt Morrison's got the best hat. Also, while Bailey White looks nothing like she sounds, Baxter Black looks exactly the way he sounds. Once I started clicking through all these once-faceless names, the activity began to take on an edge of manic OCD. I slapped their hit counter silly.

Fluffy

Help the Nebraska State Patrol name its new robot.

The Omaha Channel: "Currently known as the 'Mark V,' the new robot weighs 800 pounds and is designed for multiple uses in carrying out the patrol's mission to serve and protect. People who wish to submit their entry can visit the online contest page here. The Nebraska State Patrol invited everyone to participate, and encourages school children across the state to take part in the contest. The deadline for the contest is April 12, and the Nebraska State Patrol bomb technicians will select the winner."

I'm telling you, they're going to get that roadrunner this time.

Probably not, but...

Is Dogzilla roaming a remote island in Papua New Guinea?

Villagers on the island of New Britain reported seeing a 3m-tall, grey-coloured animal with a head like a dog and a tail like a crocodile. [...] A local councillor told The National newspaper that villagers said the creature had been seen by women on several occasions and had reportedly eaten three dogs.

Do those Martian rocks the rovers are examining contain coral-like fossils? That rotini thing is pretty odd.

Should a guy who spent seven years in jail for trying to poison his wife be able to get a job as a university lecturer on ethics?

Will this custody arrangement still be in place next weekend?

Crider's [11-year-old] son was pulled over by a Texas state trooper outside of the west Texas town of Big Spring in the predawn hours of Saturday after the officer saw the car speeding and weaving through traffic. [...] Crider apparently was taking his son home for the weekend as a part of a custody arrangement with his ex-wife. Crider and a friend stopped off at a bar with the boy, and when the two adults became too drunk to drive, they handed the keys of the rental car over to the boy. The boy was pulled over just as the group started on a trip of some 200 miles to Crider's home.

Clothes make the madman.

I find the metronomic regularity with which these stories appear even more puzzling than the stories themselves. This week's man-removes-own-genitals story comes from British Columbia.

A man who ran naked down the street with blood gushing from his severed penis yesterday mutilated himself, said RCMP in this Okanagan city. Police received a report at about 2 p.m. of a man running down the street, screaming "Repent, repent, fornicators." The 33-year-old Penticton man, who was wearing only a tuque, was later found with his penis and testicles severed near a construction site.

I read more or less this same story about once every couple of weeks, so it gets hard to make your DIY amputation eunuch unique. This one stands out only for the nice visual touch of crowning his neutered birthday suit with a tuque, which does make your average naked, screaming, bloody, religious fanatic come off a little more dopily charming. Maybe he's a Canadiens fan. There's a 2-3 week delivery wait, so if you're planning a self-mutilation, order yours now.

A Different Kind of Growth

Some long-time Apostropher readers may remember a Holiday message I posted here back at Thanksgiving pointing out three vaguely grasped dynamics that lead to a, for lack of a better modifier, ‘structural’ underappreciation. The second of those three, “the services of the bounty”, and in a slightly less accurate manner the first, “the humanity in the role” are perfectly squared by the philosophical underpinnings of this report, The Genuine Progress Indicator Report (2002 edition, updated 2004), by Redefining Progress.

I highly recommend reading the entire thing. I’ll not endorse or take issue with their numbers; to me that’s not the most important aspect. Their analysis that GDP is a helpful, but woefully biased, measure of economic health is slam on target. GDP takes a cropped, filtered, and limited-angle snapshot of the economy. You could split hairs until the cows fly south for the winter about which economic activities should be counted as “enhancing or detracting” from the country’s economic well-being. Ultimately those answers will depend on your perspective.

For example, I’ll agree that additional uniforms for prison guards necessary for incarcerating criminals can be considered a “detracting expense.” But naturally, the guy working the textile machinery (probably in Indonesia) won’t see it that way. And when you take this logic to its farthest extent, navigating a fair number of intellectual contortions along the way, you can remain totally consistent while saying that all clothing is a necessary expense to protect us from wind and weather, thus it should be accounted similarly.

But the nut remains: There has got to be a different measure for economic development other than growth of GDP. And I’m glad someone is trying to calculate it.

What generates value? Extracting natural resources, of course, but that is in reality a loan. It’s borrowed from the stock of natural capital that Earth replenishes – albeit at a slower rate than we usually extract it. Manipulating those resources amplifies value, with some input, but doesn’t really create it out of nothing. Additionally, steel mined and turned into a bullet sold for 50 cents to fire into a house in Falluja may or may not be money well spent, but it’s certainly an expense for which we should try to minimize future encumbrances. Services similarly can go either way.

I think it’s IDEAS. That’s the great limitless font of value out there. And the stimulation of more and better ideas doesn’t come from pinching away at employee benefits packages to make the enterprise more competitive. It doesn’t come from shifting a textile job to Malaysia to increase the margin on each shirt sold. It doesn’t come from unleashing clearcutting on old-growth Firs.

We have a trifecta paradox: There’s an enormous amount of work to be done, not enough people have work, and we’re working each other to death. People don’t have time after slaving away at dead-end jobs to cultivate their minds, develop their personalities, and spend time with their families. That has HUGE costs associated with it not to mention the reprehensible waste of potential. People aren’t croaking from heart disease because malpractice premiums are driving up healthcare costs, they’re croaking because they’re stressed out by hyper speed life. Kids aren’t engaging in self-destructive sexual behavior because of Janet Jackson’s boob, they’re doing stupid things because parents and/or mentors are too worked to spend more time with them than they spend at their job.

Teaching and informing is the ultimate in the creation of ideas. It’s like gardening. A master gardener doesn’t grow good tomatoes he grows good soil. Good soil will make healthy plants and healthy plants will make wonderful fruit. It multiplies and manifests. Teaching is gardening in that it multiplies. A good idea presented to a sharp mind will produce many, many more good ideas from the seed planted there.

Go talk to a kid or buy a book or attend a dance or pick up a hobby. That’s where the ideas are. And here I am giving mine away for free; sheesh.

All the Salt in the Caribbean

Three researchers at Cal Davis have shown a correlation between European and North American glaciations, presumably brought about by temperature decreases in the North Atlantic, and salinity levels in the Caribbean over the last 120,000 years. Not much for me to add in defense or criticism other than to say, as always, we may be looking at a chicken-egg debate. It's a new (to me) angle I figured was worthy of note. Although with the dearth of comments to the scientific posts 'round here sometimes I think we're just talking to ourselves.

The Power of Poo

Hold on a sec while I finish up here... Ok.

In preemptive non-compliance with Michael Powell's crusade to make the world a less foul-mouthed, and thus safer, place by vigorously defending taboos against discussing all things copulatory or excretory. I want to talk to you today about a subject near and dear to my heart: Shit. Fucking comes in a very close second (the talk, not the act; there we have a clear winner).

Currently, we in the first world dam up all our rivers, divert huge portions of the water flowing in them, and channel this planet's circulatory system, chlorinated, through pipes of sequentially decreasing size until we "use" the water in our homes and businesses. In use, the water is generally contaminated with dirt, natural and synthetic chemicals, and shit. Then we go through the reverse process, pipes getting bigger and bigger, until we clean the water up (successful in varying degrees, usually directly related to the general economic health of the community involved) and merge it again with the natural waterways.

In most of the third world the process is, shall we say, less sophisticated. Usually ponds, pits or drains directly linked to the creeks. Often it just runs down the street.

Shit, what to do with all this shit? Well, there's a bunch of shit in the shit-news recently. Apparently, shit isn't so shitty. There's a lot of potential in shit.

For starters, we can get energy from it, a la "Who run Bartertown?" Or if your shit quantities are a little smaller, grow your food and flowers in it. This has some real potential in those parts of the world less capable of financing big sewage treatment / power generating facilities. I'll narrowly avoid a critique here of the types of development investments the IMF and World Bank promote vis-a-vis what the poorest of our human brethren around the world really need.

Or instead of shitting bricks we could brick our shit. Houses of the hole. Build the bathroom first and save a bunch of money.

When all our work is done building our new world based on the power of poo, we can all go skiing.

Let 'Er Rip

I've blathered on before about my disdain for the "leave nature to be herself" puritans in the environmental movement and how conservation should be thought of and practiced as interventionist.

Well, trying to fit this slipper on that foot certainly exercises the ol' rationalization-avoidance muscle.

The (New Zealand) Government has ruled out intervening at Mt Ruapehu's crater lake to prevent a potentially disastrous mudslide from occurring. Conservation Minister Chris Carter yesterday told a public meeting organised by the Ruapehu District Council that engineering options, such as building a trench to drain the lake, had been reviewed and discounted. A mudslide, known as a lahar, is expected to occur early next year when an ash dam surrounding the volcano's crater collapses.

Fascinating stuff. This is happeneing inside Tongariro - Taupo National Park. From the New Zealand Department of Conservation, "Te Papa Atawhai", website, here's a photographic image of Mt. Ruapehu with details and landmarks identified.
Here's the Crater Lake Status Report.
Here's the lauchpad for their collection of Risk Assessment documents, all in PDF but relatively small.

It's less of a "leave nature to be herself" argument and more of a "not a whole hell of a lot we can do" argument. Working near the crater could likely involve more damage, injuries and deaths than the lahar will. Engineering something inside the park, but down river would destroy riparian habitat - although they were kinda skimpy on how the lahar will destroy plenty of riparian habitat itself, set extremely bad precedent, and probably not work anyway.

Decision? Put the best warning system together you can and educate everybody downstream (mostly park visitors) to get the hell out of the way when the bell rings.

Best Headline of the Day

Goes to Andrew Northrup at The Poor Man: John Podhoretz's Precious Gets Smacked And He Whines Like A Little Bitch

John Podhoretz is just aghast at the rude and uncouth things John Kerry is saying about our President. He puts down his parasol and hand fan, gathers up his petticoats, and runs sobbing from the shade of the magnolia tree to the drawing room to pen an editorial for the NY Post about the nasty, nasty man, who can just forget about ever being invited to the spring cotillion.

I have been amazed (well, no I haven't) that the same people who during the Clinton administration gleefully participated in the most gratuitous display of political beanballing in our nation's history now claim to be shocked, just shocked, that the other side might play some chin music of their own. As Andrew puts it, "Boo fucking hoo, you big baby." Oh, and by the way fellas, you'd better get ready to keep hitting the dirt from now until November. A wise man once said something about living by the sword. Go look it up.

Tom Tomorrow has the final say on this.

Bring back flogging!

More like this, please.

Four major Internet service providers today announced a series of federal lawsuits against people and companies alleged to have sent hundreds of millions of unwanted commercial e-mail messages, the first lawsuit of its kind under the recently enacted federal law known as the CAN-SPAM Act. The plaintiffs, Time Warner, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Earthlink filed in federal courts in California, Georgia, Virginia and Washington state and charge the defendants with sending a combined total of hundreds of millions of bulk spam e-mail messages to customers of the four networks.

Sweet. There is no punishment I can imagine at the moment that would be sufficiently painful and degrading, but I'm willing to sit in on the brainstorming sessions. What sort of person makes their living filling your inbox with lame come-ons for prescription medications, cable descramblers, and hot Asian schoolgirls? An unsavory one, of course, like one of the named defendants, Davis Wolfgang Hawke.

Hawke also has a controversial past as a wanna-be neo-Nazi. He was the subject of a front-page February 1999 profile in The Boston Globe, which described in detail the story of how Greenbaum, who was born to Jewish parents, changed his name to Hawke and transformed himself into the self-styled leader of a fledgling Internet-based organization called the "Knights of Freedom" while a student at Wofford College in South Carolina. When the white-supremacist movement didn't take an interest in him, McWilliams says, Hawke turned to spamming full time.

Nice poster boy you got there. Now if I can just find a way to take the reprobates that keep spamming my comments with online pharmacy ads and infect them with Ebola, I will be able to die a happy man.

Behold the power of Cheesus!

Thou shalt not take mine name in vain, nor shalt thou blaspheme in individually wrapped slices. Blessed are the cheesemakers.

(tip: Vision? Nary!)

Update (2:21 pm): Fo' sheezy, my Jeezy.

People in glass houses...

...shouldn't throw pots and kettles.

Remember all the Republicans who were simply aghast during the '90's at Democratic donors spending the night in the Lincoln Bedroom? Come on, I know you do. Maybe this helps: one of them is currently president. Called it bad for the country and everything. Well, I guess we must be past the expiration date on their milk of principle.

President Bush opened the White House and Camp David to dozens of overnight guests last year, including foreign dignitaries, family friends and at least nine of his biggest campaign fund-raisers, documents show. In all, Bush and first lady Laura Bush have invited at least 270 people to stay at the White House and at least the same number to overnight at the Camp David retreat since moving to Washington in January 2001, according to lists the White House provided The Associated Press.

Some guests spent a night in the Lincoln Bedroom, historic quarters that gained new fame in the Clinton administration amid allegations that Democrats rewarded major donors like Hollywood heavyweights Steven Spielberg and Barbra Streisand with accommodations there. That scandal and Bush's criticism of it is one of the reasons the White House identifies guests. In a debate with Vice President Al Gore in October 2000, Bush said: "I believe they've moved that sign, 'The buck stops here,' from the Oval Office desk to 'The buck stops here' on the Lincoln Bedroom. And that's not good for the country."

I anxiously await the impassioned denunciations. But I'm not holding my breath.

(via: It's a Crock and CalPundit)

More from the Treacherous North

Following the rescue of the Russian scientists (and their dogs) stranded in the arctic, now somebody else is in trouble up in them thar icecaps.

"As an adventurer, Dominick Arduin’s goal has been set breathtakingly high: to be the first woman in the world to reach the Geographic North Pole solo. This challenging attempt will begin in spring 2004."

Oops.

Preemptive Strikes

With Jeb Bush still pulling the levers of Florida's state government and Kerry holding a slim lead there, everybody, but everybody, is expecting monkey business down there come November. Kerry can win without Florida, though it would be more difficult, but Bush almost certainly cannot win without it, so you'd better believe the shenanigans will be in full effect. Clearly the Democrats should be stocking up on brooms in accordance with Rule #126. However, it looks like JFK2 has a plan.

John Kerry said Monday he is ready to go to court -- even before the November election -- to ensure that he does not lose Florida's 27 electoral votes because of ballot problems. And he directly accused Republicans of stealing the 2000 election for George W. Bush in a contest that was finally settled by the U.S. Supreme Court, giving the president a 537-vote victory.

"What can you do to prevent them from stealing the election again?" Kerry asked a crowd of hundreds at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center in Hollywood, his first stop in a three-city Florida campaign swing Monday. "We're going to pre-check it, we're going to have the legal team in place. [...] We're going to take injunctions where necessary ahead of time. We'll pre-challenge if necessary."

Good opening move, Senator. Put them squarely on the defensive and don't let up for a second. Make Michael and Fredo actively defend their "integrity" every time a microphone appears. Also, nice bon mot here: "I'm often asked how it feels to run for the highest office in the land. I don't have a clue. I'm not running for secretary of state of Florida."

I promise to wait.

Three... two... one... and they're off! The pants, that is.

Among teenagers who pledged not to have sex before marriage, a majority did not live up to their vows, according to a national study reported here on Tuesday. The teenagers also developed sexually transmitted diseases at about the same rate as adolescents who had not made such pledges.

88% of the Chastity Brigade ended up getting haunched before they got hitched. To which anybody ought to reply, "Well, no shit, they're teenagers." Point one: teenagers experiment with sex. Point two: teenagers change their minds on every line item of their belief system during adolescence, usually multiple times, and aren't so good at keeping promises in any event. Point three: about 88% of those pledges were the parents' idea, and not many teenage girls will reply, "Dad, I just can't sign this without a contingency clause."

The STD rate was roughly the same as non-pledgers because, despite starting sexual activity 18 months later on average, the pledgers were entirely more likely not to use condoms or know they had been infected. The study also indicated that once these kids broke their pledges, they tended to dart out to the front of the Promiscuity Derby in a frantic effort to make up for lost time. And again, nobody should be surprised.

This study is yet another hole punched through the logical veil of just-say-no/abstinence-only programs aimed at teens. Look, it's obvious that abstinence is the best policy for teenagers to protect their healths and futures. Similarly, the best way to reduce handgun violence is for people just not to shoot one another, right? Right. However, back here on earth, jamming ones fingers in ones ears and screaming "la la la la la" at the top of ones lungs does not an effective policy make for much of anything.

Young people have sex. You did. I did. Our kids either have or will (mine's six years old, so unless he's even more advanced than I suspect, I'm pretty sure he's in the latter category). Any policy that ignores this most basic fact of human existence is just pissing into the wind. Not only will you end up soaked, it's probably gonna burn like hell when you pee.

Third Reichoons

Ananova: Nazi Raccoons Conquer Europe

Raccoons released by Hermann Goering in Germany in 1934 to "enrich the Reich's fauna" are threatening to succeed where their Nazi benefactors failed by conquering Europe. They have become so successful that German authorities revealed this week that raccoon numbers are now at record levels - with more than a million in Germany alone.

[...]

The first pair of raccoons were released at Kassel, in the wooded hill country north of Frankfurt, where there are now 100 raccoons per square kilometre - the same density as North America. Residential homes in Kassel resemble fortresses with mesh wire covering all openings and spikes defending drainpipes and gutters. Rubbish bins are secured with bungee cords or padlocks. Kassel has hired an animal control officer whose sole duty is to patrol the streets in search of raccoons and answer residents' appeals for help.

Nothing to add; just thought it was funny, living as I do in the land of raccoons.

God Hates Shrimp

I'm a militant agnostic. As the bumper sticker says, "I don't know and you don't either." I can't clasp atheism to my breast, because the non-existence of a diety is as inherently unprovable as its existence. As such, atheism is as big a leap of faith as theism, and in my eyes, sloppy thinking. And I can't follow headlong into fundamentalism because it promises me an unavoidable eternity of torment and agony. Oh, it's not my unnatural desires (though lord knows I gots plenty of 'em) or my love of drink or any of the rest. Given enough time and whacks to the backs of the knees, I could probably rid myself of those and be just as miserable and pissed off about it as the rest of the flock.

No, it comes down to Leviticus, every family values crusader's favorite Old Testament book of finger-waggling. Not 18:22 and 20:13 - that's just never been much of a temptation, except, y'know, Michael Stipe back when he had hair and I was a teenager. Not that there's anything wrong with that. No, it's that damn 11:9-12. No shrimp? No thanks. I know I'll never have the willpower, and honestly, I'd rather go to Hell than try.

Sure, I know I could play my "Acts says I can eat it" card, but that just seems so wishy-washy and Johnny-the-Baptist-come-lately. Plus, since it says "God has shown me that I should not call any man common or unclean," then I can't call homosexuals abominations either and once you take that away, well, you've gone and taken what little fun there was clean out of fundamentalism. Nothing but Wednesday night fellowship dinners left and there's only so much green bean casserole a man can eat.

No, just as the execrable godhatesfags.com hews to literal scripture, so too does godhatesshrimp.com. And if I must choose between being an abomination or an agnostic, well, the one just sounds so much more neighborly...

(godhatesshrimp via Jack Balkin)

An Incredibly Long Tool

Name.

University of Rochester scientists used a new technology, the Multiple Collector Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer to analyze Australian rocks (lithified on an ancient seabed) for their molybdenum isotope content.

The amount and type of molybdenum isotopes is associated with oxygen content in seawater. High oxygen content is critical for certain developments in evolution. These rocks imply much less oxygen just over a billion years ago.

How much less oxygen is the question. A world full of anoxic oceans could have serious consequences for evolution. Eukaryotes, the kind of cells that make up all organisms except bacteria, appear in the geologic record as early as 2.7 billion years ago. But eukaryotes with many cells-the ancestors of plants and animals- did not appear until a half billion years ago, about the time the oceans became rich in oxygen. With paleontologist Andrew Knoll of Harvard University, (Ariel) Anbar previously advanced the hypothesis that an extended period of anoxic oceans may be the key to why the more complex eukaryotes barely eked out a living while their prolific bacterial cousins thrived. (Gail) Arnold's study is an important step in testing this hypothesis.

Multiple Collector Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer. I wonder how much one of those bad boys costs.

Voter Irregularities

Oy. Why don't we just decide these things by rolling dice. It would probably be just as accurate.

At polling places (in Orange County, CA) where the problem was most apparent because of turnouts exceeding 100%, an estimated 1,500 voters cast the wrong ballots, according to the (LA) Times' analysis of official county election data. Tallies at an additional 55 polling places with turnouts more than double the county average of 37% suggest at least 5,500 voters had their ballots tabulated for the wrong precincts.

And for the gold medal in the 100-meter understatement, Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation: "Certainly this kind of problem that's occurred in Orange County doesn't do anything to contribute to greater confidence in electronic voting systems."

No, it certainly doesn't.

Natural Selection Fails

It has to be Florida.

I wrote the other day about the Miami teacher who bet $20 that a student would get hurt if he jumped out of a second-story window in order to prove some still mysterious (to me) point about evolution. The student took him up on the bet and landed unhurt. Now that's pretty high up on the list of bad decisions for somebody acting in loco parentis. But leave it to the Sunshine State: there's a new bar to be cleared now.

"Can we catch it? Can we catch it?" some of the students yelled, according to Jimmie Scroggins, father of two of the teenagers. Bus driver Sherry Hattaway said no. Then, students said, she changed her mind.

The yellow doors opened. Out ran four boys who climbed the fence, chased the alligator into a mud hole, poked sticks at it to get it to clamp its jaws down, then used their shirts to try to cover the reptile's head. A fifth student tossed a roll of electrical tape out the window, and the boys on the ground wrapped shut the gator's jaws and hoisted it back over the fence.

After 15 minutes, the boys and their catch all tumbled back into the bus. Eleven students. One bus driver. One alligator. Why did they want to catch the gator?

"It was the first thing that came into my head," said 14-year-old Jacob Scroggins. Since that episode Thursday, the 41-year-old driver has been put on paid leave, said district transportation director Mike Park. Hattaway, a Pasco bus driver for five years, declined comment Monday.

I don't even know what to say.

Numbers numbers numbers.

Interesting data abound in the latest ABC News-Washington Post poll. Bush’s overall support was unchanged from February at 50%, equal to the lowest of his presidency. Bear in mind that the day after he was impeached, Clinton was in the high sixties. This is just about an historic low for an incumbent president at this point. 57 percent say they want their next president to steer the country away from the course set by Bush. In a three-way race, the respondents break down Kerry 47, Bush 42, Nader 5, though without a party backing, Nader is unlikely to make the ballot in more than a handful of states, so the two-way numbers of Kerry 53 Bush 42 are probably closer to an accurate snapshot. However, the most interesting numbers lie in the details. The margin of error is +/- 3%.

First, Bush on the issues, from worst to best.
Do you approve or disapprove of the way George Bush is handling:

• Health insurance: Approve 32% D 62%
  
• Federal budget deficit: A 33 D 65
  
• Social Security: A 38 D 55
  
• The economy: A 39 D 59
  
• Prescription drug benefits for the elderly: A 41 D 49
  
• Creating jobs: A 43 D 54
  
• Same-sex marriage: A 44 D 52 (!)
  
• The situation in Iraq: A 46 D 53
  
• Taxes: A 50 D 47
  
• Education: A 50 D 45
  
• Protecting constitutional rights: A 61 D 37
  
• Terrorism: A 63 D 34

Then, Kerry versus Bush on the issues. On the question of who do you trust overall to deal better with the issues facing the nation, the split was Kerry 49 Bush 44.

• Health insurance: Kerry 56% Bush 36%
• Federal budget deficit: K 53 B 38
• Social Security: K 54 B 38
• The economy: K 53 B 41
• Prescription drug benefits for the elderly: K 50 B 41
• Creating jobs: K 51 B 43
• Same-sex marriage: K 43 B 44
• The situation in Iraq: K 48 B 47
• Taxes: K 51 B 43
• Education: K 52 B 40
• Protecting constitutional rights: K 45 B 45
• Terrorism: K 36 B 57

Kerry loses soundly to Bush on the issue of terrorism, but everywhere else, he is either comfortably ahead or tied. Those numbers look bad for Bush, but you have to weight the relative importance of each issue to voters. Asked to rank the single most important issue in the election, the replies were: the economy and jobs 36% (advantage: Kerry); terrorism 17% (Bush); Iraq 10% (tie); education 8% (K); Social Security 7% (K); prescription drugs and Medicare 7% (K); health care 6% (K); and something else 8%.

Respondents were also asked to rank the various issues as one of the single most important issues, a very important issue, a somewhat important issue, or less important than that. Multiplying the percentages for each category by 4, 3, 2, and 1, respectively to get a relative weight, the resulting order was: constitutional rights 295; economy 290; terrorism 289; creating jobs 287; Iraq 276; health insurance 271; taxes 266; federal budget 266; education 265; prescription drug benefits 260; Social Security 257; and way behind the rest of the pack, same sex marriage at 201.

On the issue that contributed so heavily to sinking his father, whether he "understands the problems of people like you," Bush is getting hammered at Yes 41% and No 57%. Kerry, on the same question, has the reverse: Yes 58% No 34%. On the question of whether he is a strong leader, Kerry scores Yes 61, No 29, Don’t Know 10; Bush scores Yes 63, No 36, Don’t know 1.

On whether he stands up to special interests, where Bush has tried to define Kerry, Bush scores Yes 51, No 44, DK 5, and Kerry scores Yes 54, No 30, DK 16. On caring more for big corporations or ordinary people, Bush tallies corporations 67, people 26, and Kerry scores corporations 23, people 60. When asked whether each man was honest and trustworthy, the results for Kerry were Yes 59%, No 30%, DK 11, while Bush was Yes 54, No 45, DK 1.

Winning big in the unintentional irony category was the question of whether Bush has done more to unite or divide the country. That resulted in an even split of 48% for unite and 49% for divide, which pretty much indicates that he has divided the country. Finally, the perennial hot button social issues aren’t proving to be the third rail they normally are perceived to be. Asked whether they could vote for a nominee whose views on the following issues differed from their own, the percentages answering yes were: abortion 60, same-sex marriage 61, gun control 75, and the death penalty 80.

As everybody warns, it is still very early in the campaign season. However, Kerry is starting from a very strong position and Bush is in unusually bad shape for an incumbent. With the media finally starting to turn on Bush and the internet relentlessly driving fact checking in an unprecedented manner, it will be interesting to see whether the vaunted GOP money advantage can provide the same advantages it has in the past. I’m beginning to doubt that it can. 2004 will be a referendum on Bush, not on his challenger, and so far Bush is losing it badly.

Lowering the Voting Age

I see a bit about this periodically and it sounds, on the surface, to be a fine idea. Perhaps there are downsides some insightful reader can point to. But I'm glad to read in this San Francisco Chronicle article that a legislator is proposing the idea. Crazy Frisco; always looking to be inclusive.

The National Youth Rights Association gives their top ten reasons to lower the age to 16 and they sound logical and fair. Although their "Last Civil Rights Movement" schtick rings a little hollow for me.

But given these horribly condescending quotes from California Republican Representative Ray Haynes: "...the nuttiest idea I've ever heard" and "There's a reason why 14-year-olds and 16-year-olds don't vote. They are not adults. They are not mature enough. They are easily deceived by political charlatans." I gotta wonder whether this has potential as a "show your real stripes" issue for Democrats when juxtaposed to the gay marriage flap. Hmmm.

Non-commercial Campaign Commercials

Since it's probably straining Horklog's poor server at this point, I'll mirror it unless bandwidth gets really slammed: Howard Stern's deconstruction of the new Bush ads. It's a 3MB mp3, so right-click or ctrl-click and download it, please, rather than just streaming it.

Also from the Horklog post (at which I arrived, as is so often the case, from Atrios), two ads that ought to get MUCH wider play:

1. The ad the Democrats ought to be running.
2. The ad the Republicans would be running if truth in advertising laws applied to political campaigns.

While we're on the topic, as great as MoveOn's Child's Pay ad is, the new Polygraph ad just seems to lack the power. Still, you know that the Republicans are worried from their attempts to strongarm television stations into pulling the first ad. Kos has a good explanation of how the media playing field has changed since the last election and how unsteady the GOP machine's footing is in this brave new landscape.

And with this post, I probably just set the minor league record for link:text ratio.

Oh, Heavens

These Hubble pictures will grab you in an inspiring yet highly disconcerting manner.

Story about the phenomenon here.

Happy Tuesday.

I Lied To You, But I Lied For You

You oughtta be grateful.

I just don't think that the small group of people who presently still entertain the idea of either voting for Bush OR Kerry are likely to buy this.

RUSH: Well, the answer that the libs want to say, "He didn't find any weapons of mass destruction." Oh, you got two things you can say: "Well, this Pakistani nuclear scientist gave himself up and the Libya got rid of its nukes. And don't think either of these would have happened, had we not gone to Iraq." The story is out there. The story is out there it just needs to be told and Bush is going to have to be the one to tell it.

Nevermind that the "Pakistani scientist" didn't exactly "give himself up" in the traditional sense and that Libya didn't exactly have "nukes" to "get rid of."

So the argument is: It wasn't really Saddam's WMD that we were after, even though we wouldn't shut up about them. It was the ripple effect of disarmament throughout the region we were after (regardless of the fact that determined psychopaths don't NEED rogue states to get nasty, dangerous chemicals, radioactive materials, or infectious agents.) We just couldn't tell you about it because you wouldn't have gone along. Y'know, you're too stupid to be told the truth. Reelect me because you can um... trust.. me to continue to... um... "Leadership!" that's what they call it. Yeah, "Strong leadership in times of change."

No. Where I come from they call it lying.

It's the Neurons, Stupid

Or rather, how densely packed they are in sheeps' hypothalamuses that is associated with their sexual orientation.

OHSU researchers discovered an irregularly shaped, densely packed cluster of nerve cells in the hypothalamus of the sheep brain, which they named the ovine sexually dimorphic nucleus or oSDN because it is a different size in rams than in ewes. The hypothalamus is the part of the brain that regulates sex hormone secretion, blood pressure, body temperature, water balance, and food intake, while it also plays a role in regulating complex behaviors, such as sexual behavior.

The oSDN in rams that preferred females was "significantly" larger and contained more neurons than in male-oriented rams and ewes. In addition, the oSDN of the female-oriented rams expressed higher levels of aromatase, a substance that converts testosterone to estradiol so that the androgen hormone can facilitate typical male sexual behaviors. Aromatase expression was no different between male-oriented rams and ewes.

The study was the first to demonstrate an association between natural variations in sexual partner preferences and brain structure in nonhuman animals.

So straight guys are just a little more dense upstairs? Tell me something I don't know.

Baaaa.

Tarheels in the News

Once again, our best and brightest on display.

A man was arrested at Charlotte/Douglas International Airport Sunday after spitting what officials said appeared to be urine at security screeners. Charlotte-Mecklenburg police were called to the airport about 11 a.m. Witnesses told authorities the man was holding a container, took a sip from it and then spat on Transportation Security Administration employees. Jerry Orr, airport operations director, said the man was immediately wrestled to the ground and never entered any secure parts of the facility.

I assume he had been planning it, since, you know, he's carrying a container of urine through an airport. As you'd expect, the man has been scheduled for a psychiatric evaluation, so attempts at divining the logic behind his actions are probably pointless. Still, you have to wonder.

"Lose my luggage, will you? I'll show you sonsabitches, oh yes I will. Let's see, I could-- no, too expensive. Or maybe-- eh that won't work. He-e-e-y, I know..."

Monday Morning Poetry Minute

John Isbell: "Blessed Are the Coffeemakers"

Anarchy in the Land of Starbucks

Seattle's mayor jumps on board.

Seattle's mayor jumped into the roiling debate over gay marriage, vowing to recognize the marriages of gay city employees who tie the knot elsewhere and pushing for a measure to extend protections for gay married couples throughout the city. Mayor Greg Nickels can't issue marriage licenses in the city — that authority rests with the county — so he has decided to do what he calls "the next best thing."

On Sunday, he told The Associated Press he plans to sign an executive order Monday requiring the city to recognize the marriages of gay employees who get their licenses elsewhere. Nickels also said he'll ask the City Council to protect gay married couples throughout the city from discrimination in employment, housing or the use of parks or other city facilities. If the council approves the ordinance, it also would require contractors doing business with the city to recognize gay marriages among their own employees.

Predictably, the head of the state's Christian Coalition chapter has branded the mayor's decision as "anarchy," the homophobic right wing's new preferred talking point. You may remember Schwarzenegger warning ominously of the same: "[A]ll of a sudden we see riots and we see protests and we see people clashing. The next thing we know is there are injured or there are dead people, and we don't want to have that."

Anarchy? Please. Anarchy doesn't look like this:

It looks like this:

Just a helpful hint: if you'd like your arguments to be taken seriously, you might should start with serious arguments.

Finger Foods

Shhh, or else everybody else will want one.

An Ohio woman was served a salad containing part of a restaurant worker's thumb sliced off while chopping lettuce, a health official said on Friday. The woman "thought it was gristle or something like that" when she tried to chew the unexpected garnish, said William Franks, health commissioner for Stark County, where the incident occurred earlier this week. "Physically I think she's OK, other than hysteria," Franks added. Stark County officials did not release the woman's name.

The restaurant worker accidentally sliced off the tip of his thumb while chopping the ingredients on Monday night at the Red Robin restaurant near Canton, Ohio, he said. Despite a search, it could not be found. "The salad should have been discarded," Franks said.

Uh, yeah. Good rule of thumb.

Meeting the Neighbors

I have a long-standing fascination with owls, with whom I feel a certain odd kinship, mostly due to both of us keeping roughly the same hours (and swallowing field mice whole). Last night after dinner, the whole household was standing on the front porch, watching a lightning storm blustering in the distance as it rolled toward us with 50-to-60-mph winds, when an absolutely massive barred owl swooped through the cone of the porch light in the front yard. Despite a truly intimidating wingspan of about four feet, it didn't make a sound as it flapped. It banked sharply up, then landed on the corner of the roof, just over our heads and stared at us for a good five minutes before getting bored and silently soaring out to a tree in the yard.

Very, very cool. I think I shall call him Hooters.

It's good to laugh.

Via Blog on the Run, I came across this list of handy Aramaic phrases you might need if you go to see The Passion of the Christ. Many winners therein, but my favorites:

Da'ek teleyfoon methta'naanaak, pquud. Guudaapaw!
Please turn off your mobile phone. It is blasphemous.

Ma'hed lee qalleel d-Khayey d-Breeyaan, ellaa dlaa gukhkaa.
It sort of reminds me of Life of Brian, but it's nowhere near as funny.

Ayleyn enuun Oorqey?
Which ones are the Orcs?

Also, at Salon, Bill Maher suggests some compromises for cutting the gay marriage Gordian knot. Since they will make you sit through an animated advertisement to get to a 400-word essay (unless you pony up the annual subscription), I am reprinting it here in the time-honored tradition of blatant copyright violation.

New Rule: Politics is about compromises. Really stupid compromises.

America has a rich history of solving hard moral problems with ridiculous compromises. That's how we got such laws as: Blacks are three-fifths of a person. Slaves are property, unless they make it to Ohio. Interning the Japanese but not the Germans. Killing most Indians, but letting others run the Keno parlors. Porn, but not hardcore porn. Booze, and then no booze, and then booze again. But no pot. Except medical marijuana, which is legal to possess, but illegal to obtain. You can't have stem cells, except the ones we already have.

In this spirit, I would like to offer compromise suggestions for the knotty issue we face today, same-sex marriage. Why not this: It's OK to be gay if you're already gay -- but no new gays. We'll grandfather you in if you're already an organ grinder, but that's it.

Or, how about we let gays marry, but come out against "gay mortgage" -- allowing two men to buy a place and do God-knows-what in it diminishes the sanctity of what goes on in my ranch-style home in Calabasas. 

Or maybe the answer to this is as plain as the nose in my lap. With both sides so set -- one being all for gay marriage, and the other completely against it -- how about we just let the lesbians marry?

Come on, marriage is a chick thing anyway. Human monogamy and the institution of marriage were invented by women and the church as a way to address female insecurity and to stamp out oral sex as we know it.

And don't give me some line about how two women can't reproduce. As long as David Crosby is alive and can swallow Viagra, that's not a problem.

Plus, let's face it, when people talk about homosexuality being "not natural" and "an abomination," they're not talking about the women -- they're talking about the men. Nobody seems to find anything so abominable about Britney Spears tonguing Madonna, or the Coors Light twins grinding against each other.

Isn't it time both sides compromised a little on this issue? The statistics tell us that anywhere from 2 to 10 percent of people in America are gay, although it seems higher at my bathhouse ... so, as an ultimate compromise, why don't we just say anybody in America can get married, and we'll just call it "New Marriage" or "Marriage Classic."

"He Molests the Dead"

Just going by the title of his latest Newsday op-ed, I get the feeling that Jimmy Breslin doesn't really like George W. Bush. Did he just call the president a necrophiliac?

In his first campaign commercial, George Bush reached down and molested the dead. But this only in keeping with both Bushes. George Bush, Sr., had the badge of officer Eddie Byrne, who was gunned down in South Jamaica, and he stood up at Christ the King High School in Middle Village and held it up and said he would have this badge on him forever. Some chance. Bush then led high school girls into insane cheers for the death penalty.

Now, right off, this second George Bush came up with the badge of a Port Authority cop, George Howard, who died. He was from Hicksville. His mother gave Bush the son's badge. When Bush came back to the trade center a year later, he reached into his pocket and whipped out that badge and he had a tear in his eye. What makes it worse is that this George W. Bush acts like he's entitled to treat the remains of a dead man like a souvenir. Now he shows a commercial with dead bodies, or body parts, covered with an American flag being taken through the smoke and flames of the world trade center attack. It caused people who had lost family members in the attack to complain about using the dead or parts thereof being used for a politician's gain.

My goodness.

Exoskeletal Warriors

Our friends at DARPA are developing a human exoskeleton. It's for rescue missions and sharing with fire departments, of course.

Although the device itself weighs a hefty 50 kilograms, the pilot should not notice this because the machine takes its own weight, with the control system ensuring that the centre of gravity is always within the pilot's footprint. In addition to its own weight, it will carry a 32 kilogram payload within the backpack. To the pilot this would feel like they were carrying just 2 kilograms, says [project leader Homayoon] Kazerooni.

"The key element is that the pilot needs no joystick, keyboard or buttons to operate it," says Kazerooni, leaving your hands free for other tasks. This is because the entire control system is designed to ensure it moves in concert with the person wearing the exoskeleton. "You just push your leg and it moves."

Question is: when does it become standard in NFL jerseys?

Attempted Ice-assination

Scary.

Russia has launched a rescue operation to evacuate 12 of its scientists stranded on a research station which partially sank near the North Pole. [...] The break-up on Wednesday of the North Pole-32 base destroyed 90% of its structures in half an hour. "All of a sudden a huge wall of ice appeared that kept growing and growing," Mr Koshelyev told Russian media via telephone. "First they were three metres (10 feet) high, then five, then seven and finally over 10. Such a thing, I would say, has never before been seen on a polar station."

North Pole-32 was set up 10 months ago on floating Arctic ice to study climate change and assess mineral reserves. The drifting station has covered a distance of 2,750km (1,700 miles) since it was set up last April.

A fast-moving thirty-three foot wall of ice. Don't guess you stand much of a chance in that fight. They managed to save two tents and about five days worth of supplies. The Russian helicopter crew will try to find the floating scientists in a featureless environment that provides only a few hours of twilight a day and may or may not present any possibility of landing. If not, the twelve will have to climb dropped ladders to escape from their -30°C (-22°F) liferaft. Barring that, a nuclear-powered icebreaking ship is on the way, expected to arrive in about five days.

Update (3/6, 10:43 am): They got 'em. "We have on board our helicopter all 12 explorers and two dogs."

Politics as war, war as politics.

Like Kevin Drum, I just can't feel indignation about the WTC images in Bush campaign ads. Bush has mentioned 9/11 every single day starting on 9/12, no matter what the topic at hand. His thematic fixation has assumed a Rainman quality ("Qantas Airlines, never been hijacked, definitely Qantas. Nine. Eleven. N-n-n-nine. Eleven. Nineelevennineelevennineeleven..."). I so expected this - and it so pales next to, oh, pretty much everything else he's done since assuming office - that any ethical umbrage I might work up would be passionless. Of course they will exploit it for political gain. They pushed back their convention to put it in September, and in New York City for crying out loud. Last year, the GOP awarded $150 donations with a color photo of Bush on September 11. He's the aircraft carrier dude, remember? The one with the fake ranch?

The heights of shamelessness already scaled on a daily basis by Bush and Pals have just left me a little jaded about this one. Don't get me wrong - I'm glad he's catching hell for it. I can see how folks would be offended and I hope it makes the campaign nervous about using it again. But of course they will, especially after they shot all that aircraft carrier flight suit footage and now when it shows during the campaign, it will be followed by "I'm John Kerry and I approved this ad." Y'know, they gotta use something.

But I don't know that a campaign based on fear of terrorism is really going to carry the day this fall. Horrible as it was, when you put 9/11 and the following 2-1/2 years in proper perspective (and please, do read that link), it gets difficult to argue that this is the single issue that will define the American experience for the next four years. Fear works quite well for a time, but people get tired of it eventually. Support for remaining in Iraq continues eroding. If Bush wants to run as the "war president" he fancies himself to be, he may have an unpleasant surprise coming from the folks who know what it really means.

If I were George W. Bush, I would be terrorized by the eyes of those scruffy-looking veterans, the so-called band of brothers, volunteering for duty with the Kerry campaign. They look like men with scores to settle, with a palpable intolerance toward the types who sent them to war for a lie, then ignored their Agent Orange illness, cut their GI benefits, treated them like losers and still haven't explained what that war was about. They know Jane Fonda is a diversion from a larger battlefield. They are the sort who will keep a cerebral United States senator grounded, who have finally figured out who their real enemies are and who are determined that this generation hear their story anew. They are gearing up for one last battle. Chickenhawks better duck.

So let the battle begin. We have some powerful images on our side as well.

League of Conservation Voters Scorecard

This was released last Friday, but because of a combination of work and other extracurricular activities – none of which, my Attorney informs me, are likely to result in deportation - posting then or even earlier this week would have been sorely lacking in any meaningful analysis and insight. I know my legions of cult followers expect that. Not that waiting until now offers them much, mind you, but at least I’ve read the thing from one end to the other and can probably bluff my through. Hell, that’s the number one skill you learn in College, right? Here goes…

Here’s LCV’s website
Here’s the LCV Press release where you can download the 3.45 MB scorecard in PDF.

LCV is “the political voice of the national environmental movement and the only organization devoted full-time to shaping a pro-environment Congress and White House.” Their BOD is an all-star lineup of some of the heaviest hitters in the world of conservation. They and their Political and Political Advisory Committees members come from organizations such as NRDC, EDF, Sierra Club, NPCA, USPIRG, NWF, and UCS. They are to be taken seriously.

The Scorecard is in two parts: one for the US Senate and one for the US House of Representatives. 18 critical votes cast by a Senator and 19 cast by a Representative were scored, pro- or anti-environment. One pro-environment vote counts (just over 5%) towards a total percentage. No vote cast or an anti-environment vote count nothing. Reflecting the importance of a comprehensive, sustainable energy strategy to National and global security, the House vote on the Energy bill conference report (the 2003 Energy Bill that the House passed but not the Senate) as well as the Senate vote on the cloture motion (the attempt to kill the filibuster that staved off this legislation until… well… this year) were weighted double. Effectively, the scores are percentages representing fractions over 19 (in the case of the Senate) and over 20 (in the case of the House.)

The points that struck me in reviewing the scorecard that I find worthy of note are:

· The Democratic presidential hopefuls scored lower than expected, but almost uniformly because they were absent during votes in which they would not have made a difference. Lieberman and Edwards showed the largest decline in score of any Senator over last year, but that is almost entirely due to absences.
· John McCain rocks, for a Republican.
· For the first time ever, a vote on a judicial nominee – William Pryor – was counted. Pryor apparently has earned quite a reputation among the environmental community for being extremely zealous about restricting the Federal government’s ability to enforce environmental rules. LCV devotes a “special” section to Mr. Pryor in the scorecard’s introduction.
· For the first time that I remember, a single vote was double-weighted. The 2003 Energy bill – you remember, the Congressional reflection of Cheney’s task force – was such anathema to the environmental community that LCV counted a vote for or against it as two. Additionally, four other votes were riders or amendments to the Energy bill and 2 more related to energy policy in general.
· Regionally, New England and the Mid-Atlantic states had the best average scores by far. The Far West and Midwest were in the middle and the South and Mountain West were at the bottom. Anyone other than me notice a partisan trend? The States with Senate OR House averages (for their delegation) of 80% to 100% were all blue. Alternatively, state delegations averaging 0%-20% were red by a 28 to 1 margin. The average Democrat score in either chamber is over FIVE TIMES the score of the average Republican, even with McCain, Collins, Snowe, and Chafee in the Senate and the 13 Republican House members (all from the Northeast and upper Midwest) who scored above 60 really tugging on the Republican average.

So next time you hear an ignorant little Naderite tell you that there’s no difference between the parties, smack ‘em upside their silly little head once for me and show them the following Reader’s Digest version of votes:

The Senate votes:

1. Energy Bill (counted twice): Very bad Bill. House passed it, Senate didn’t and sent less onerous 2002 Bill to conference. Democrats locked out of conference; MTBE producer protection (even in existing lawsuits) and extension of Clean Air Act targets without requiring pollution controls put BACK after they had been removed from House Bill. Senate filibuster worked. For now.
2. Climate Protection. Watershed event. McCain – Lieberman act. Reduce GhG emissions to 2000 levels by 2010. Sens McCain (R-AZ) and Lieberman (D-CT) held up discussion on Energy Bill until Senate met their demand for up-or-down vote on this Act. Demand met but measure failed.
3. CAFÉ Standards. Sen. Durbin (D-IL) proposed amendment to Energy Bill that would have raised CAFÉ standards for cars (to 40 mpg) and trucks and SUVs (to 27.5 mpg). Measure failed.
4. Arctic Drilling. Sen. Boxer (D-CA) offered amendment to strip from budget resolution (Bush included projections of revenue from drilling in Refuge). Amendment approved.
5. “Healthy Forests” (sic). Fire protection pretext for increased logging. Logging and road building far from homes, increased logging of fire-resistant trees, restricts community involvement, stumbling blocks for injunctions. Measure passed, became law.
6. Defense Dept Environmental Exemptions. Endangered Species, Marine Mammal Protection, Resource Conservation & Recovery Acts, and Superfund. Armed Services Committee killed many exemptions. Sens Lautenberg (D-NJ), Akaka (D-HI), Lieberman (D-CT), and Jeffords (I-VT) offered amendment to qualify ESA exemption. Amendment passed. However, Conference Committee re-broadened ESA and reinserted MMPA exemptions. Bush signed.
7. Offshore Drilling. Moratorium since 1990. Energy Bill required inventories, destructive in and of themselves. Sens Graham (D-FL) and Feinstein (D-CA) offered amendment (big issue in CA and FL) to kill inventories. Amendment failed. Ultimately, inventories were NOT included in conference report.
8. Privatizing Parks Service. Sen. Reid (D-NV) offered amendment to Interior Dept funding bill that restricted money to study how best to privatize. Amendment failed, barely. Lesser restrictions on spending for “outsourcing studies” did come out in conference report.
9. NEPA Waiver in Healthy Forests Initiative. NEPA requires analysis of alternatives to Federal projects with environmental impact. HFI waives this and requires only comparing to no action. Sen. Cantwell (D-WA) offered amendment to reinstate “adequate range of alternatives”. Sen. Crapo (R-ID) then offered motion to kill Cantwell’s amendment. Motion passed.
10. Tongass Judicial Review. To Interior Dept appropriations bill Sen. Stevens (R-AK) offered rider to restrict legal challenges to logging. Sen. Boxer (D-CA) offered amendment to kill rider. Sen. Stevens offered motion to kill Boxer amendment, tit-for-tat. Motion passed.
11. Pryor Nomination. Pryor has abysmal environmental record. Senate vote to kill filibuster failed. But we know what happened next.
12. New Source Review. Old power and industrial plants had to install pollution prevention improvements when expanding or upgrading facilities. EPA changed rules, side-skirting NSR in two ways. Sen. Edwards (D-NC) offered amendment to omnibus appropriations bill putting rule changes on hold. Amendment failed. Federal appellate court later issued injunction against rule changes.
13. Renewable Fuel Liability. Energy bill (again) included liability waiver for pollution from developing and manufacturing renewable energy fuels. For the same reason that you don’t want recycling facilities exempt from RCRA and permitting procedures, this is a bad idea and would be an extremely bad precedent. Sen. Boxer (D-CA) offered amendment to ensure corporate liability. Amendment rejected.
14. Superfund Taxpayer Liability. Superfund fees expired in 1995. Superfund balance expired in 2003. Taxpayers now footing 100% of the bill (18% ten years ago). Superfund actions have slowed dramatically over last 3 years. Sen. Lautenberg (D-NJ) offered amendment to omnibus spending bill that restored polluter liability (“polluter pays” fees). Amendment failed.
15. Nuke Subsidies. Sen. Domenici (R-NM) inserted language into Energy bill for loan guarantees for half the construction costs to bring 8400 megawatts of nuclear energy online. CBO estimated default risk (based on previous experience with that incredibly profitable (sic) nuclear power industry) at 50%. Sens Wyden (D-OR) and Sununu (R-NH) offered amendment to strike provision. Amendment failed. Conference report does NOT include Domenici proposal.
16. & 17. Devils Lake and Yazoo Pumps. Two pork barrel Army Corps of Engineers projects in ND and MS that would contaminate water supplies, destroy wetlands (large areas of them), and exacerbate flooding. The Devils Lake project is a direct affront to Canada because it would pump contaminated water from a basin in ND into a watershed that drains north towards Hudson Bay. Canada was “informed”, over their objections, that the project complied with the applicable treaties. Sens Dorgan (D-ND) and Conrad (D-ND) used an unorthodox procedure to attach the rider funding the ND project to the omnibus spending bill. Sens Lott (R-MS) and Cochran (R-MS) attached a rider to an appropriations bill to fund the MS project. Bipartisan (Several Democrats, McCain, and a Republican from a “dumped-on” state) efforts to kill the riders were unsuccessful.
18. International Family Planning. Bush reinstated prohibitions on foreign assistance to organizations if that organization does anything remotely close to talking or thinking about abortion. Sen. Boxer (D-CA) introduced amendment to State Dept authorization bill to overturn prohibitions. Sen. Luger (R-IN) offered motion to kill Boxer amendment. Motion failed. No action on authorization bill by end of session.

The House votes:

1. Energy bill. The worse of the two bills came out of the House successfully on a very close to partisan line vote. Pork, liability exemptions, environmental control exemptions, delays on clean air targets, ANWR drilling, token but unsubstantial efforts at renewables development.
2. Oil conservation. Amendment to Energy bill offered by Reps Markey (D-MA) and Boehlert (R-NY) instructing DOT to reduce oil consumption by cars, but not telling them how. Amendment defeated. Handful of Republican and Democrat defectors.
3. & 4. Arctic drilling. Unacceptable and ineffective amendment to Energy bill to limit oil development as ANWR is drilled defeated. Subsequent amendment to strike ANWR development from House Energy bill also failed. Handful of defectors on both sides; largely party line.
5. & 6. “Healthy Forests”. Rep. McInnis (R-CO) introduced a very Bush bill into the House. Wrought with problems, see above. Reps Miller (D-CA), DeFazio (D-OR), Ranhall (D-WV), and Conyors (D-MI) offered a series of improvements in an amendment. Amendment defeated, bill approved.
7. Roadless Rule. Expanding timbering roads (at taxpayer expense) into areas of National Forests that Clinton had ordered “roadless.” Rep Inslee (D-WA) – of the first “Frog-Marching” comment from Joseph Wilson fame – offered amendment to Interior Dept appropriations bill to stop Bush’s rule changes. Amendment defeated.
8. Forest Management Plans. Elimination of “population viability rule” in National Forest Management decisions. Weakening of NEPA enforcement and restricting citizen input. Rep. Udall (D-NM) offered amendment to Interior Dept appropriations bill to stop Bush’s rule changes. Amendment defeated.
9. Defense Dept Exemptions. See #6 in Senate summary above. Plus some rollbacks the pentagon didn’t even request. Reps Rahall (D-WV) and Dingall (D-MI) tried to offer amendments to Defense authorization bill striking the rollbacks, but rules-for-debate vote stymied them and became de-facto vote on authorization. Authorization passed. After conference, even more goodies expanding exemptions from Reps Warner (R-VA) and Hunter (R-CA).
10. Yellowstone Snowmobiles. Despite EPA and Parks Service recommendations against it, Bush lifted limits on snowmobile use in Yellowstone. Reps Holt (D-NJ), Shays (R-CT), Rayhall (D-WV), Johnson (R-IL) offered amendments to Interior appropriations bill to uphold ban. Amendment failed on a tie. Federal Court has reinstated the ban.
11. Yellowstone Bison. Last free-roaming wild herd in continental US. Nearby cattleranchers are afraid of their herds catching Brucellosis, although it’s never happened. Less than 500 cattle graze where they’d come into contact with Bison. Rep Rahall (D-WV), whose name I seem to be reading a whole lot here, offered an amendment to the Interior appropriations bill that would stop the practice of… yes… sending Bison to slaughterhouses. Now I’m sure there’s a good scientific reason for wanting to cull the herd, so I’ll reserve judgment here until I study the issue some more. But haven’t we pressured this species enough to perhaps look for ways to expand their population and range instead of killing them to protect cattle? Dunno… just a thought.
12. Klamath Basin. Dams, unsustainable irrigation projects, salmon fights, wetlands loss, migratory bird flyways, small farms; classic “wish we’d have settled the west better” story. Anyway, when in a hole the first thing you do is stop digging, so Reps Blumenauer (D-OR), Thompson (D-CA), and Shays (R-CT) offered amendment to Interior appropriations bill to stop NEW agricultural leases unless some environmentally suitable crops were to be grown on the refuge. Amendment killed.
13. Offshore drilling. Energy bill. See #7 in Senate votes above. Rep. Capps (D-CA) offered amendment to instruct conferees to keep moratoriums on inventories. Amendment PASSED! This is why the conference report did not include inventories (if you remember that far back.)
14. Ozone Pollution. Local governments and agencies are charged with improving air quality under the Clean Air Act. Rep Barton (R-TX) inserted language into the conference Energy bill that delayed targets and lessened requirements. Rep Johnson (D-TX) offered amendment to instruct conferees to drop Barton’s language. Amendment failed.
15. Clean Water Act Exemptions. Oil development is largely exempt from CWA requirements. Boy, that’s depressing. Rep Filner (D-CA) offered amendment to the Energy bill that would strip some of these exemptions. Amendment failed.
16. Riders. See the Corps of Engineers projects (#s16 & 17 in Senate section above) and imagine lots of these other, environmentally destructive “riders” on unrelated legislation. Nice way to scoot projects under the radar. They’re on the rise, say LCV (and I’ve read the same theme on other Conservation groups’ websites). Rep Obey (D-WI) offered amendment to the omnibus appropriations bill to instruct conferees to remove a few of these including Tongass judicial review changes. Amendment failed. Damn I’m saying that a lot.
17. Delaware Channel Project. Make 106 mile stretch of the Delaware river 5 feet deeper. Don’t know what I think about this, as this particular channel is likely to be dead already and I don’t see much environmental damage by digging it deeper. Spoils can be a problem, and the State of New Jersey has rescinded a permit to accept them. But I’m just not qualified to make a call on this one. Anyway, Rep Andrews (D-NJ), who certainly knows more about this project than me offered an amendment to an appropriations bill to reduce funding for it. It failed.
18. Greenways. House appropriations Committee eliminated the requirement that states use 10% of Federal surface transportation funds for things like pedestrian and bike trails, historic preservation, scenic and historic highways, and conversion of old rail corridors. Reps Petri (R-WI) and Olver (D-MA) offered amendment to the transportation bill to reinstate the requirement. It passed.
19. International Family Planning. See Senate vote #18 above. Rep. Crowley (D-NY) offered amendment to the State Dept authorization bill contributing $50M to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) over 2 years unless the President certifies that UNFPA “directly supports or participates in coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.” Reps Hyde (R-IL) and Smith (R-NJ) made a motion to kill Crowley’s amendment. The motion passed.

Whew.

Cure for Traffic Jams

Smear the freeways with sugar and wait until people start knocking each other around.

Just as people can get fed up in traffic jams, so, too, can ants, new research suggests. A report published today in the journal Nature indicates that congestion on ant routes prompts the insects to shove one another around, leading some of them [Froz: Those in rice burners, more than likely] to take alternate routes.

Probably fine for highways linking towns, but what about big conurbations?

Chimps R Us

I have fallen dreadfully behind in reading the various print magazines that get delivered to my house each month. Atop the bookcase behind my couch, a couple of lonely, unthumbmarked stacks of periodicals - one of Harper's and another of the Atlantic Monthly - have accumulated like so many layers of sedimentary rock month after month. Oh, the spirit is willing, but between the shiny distractions of digital cable and wireless internet, the flesh has grown weak and those stalwart culturebearers have of late been leading quiet lives of desperation and neglect.

Recently, the lady of the house (she who didst expand my diet beyond cereal and microwave meals) took pity on the poor, glossy orphans and moved several of them into a basket in the downstairs bathroom. As a result, without going into more detail than any of you would care to hear, they have been getting a little more attention recently. The wireless network often results in the computer more accurately reflecting its designation as a laptop, likely adding an icing of humiliation atop the magazines' cupcakes of neglect as they sit in their lowly wicker vacation home. But hey, they're starved for attention and should be grateful to get what they can. At least they haven't gotten recycled unread like most of the other titles.

Hmm, that's a very long introduction just to tell you that this link is to an Atlantic Monthly story from way back in last October's issue. Anyhow, the article is about a once-famous chimpanzee named Oliver who had a whopping lot of people convinced that he was either the missing link or a chimp-human hybrid (don't think about that too long), due to his oddly humanoid behaviors and appearance. If you're unfamiliar with the story, as I was, it's pretty fascinating.

The Ronco Desktop Nuclear Fusion Bubbler

Researchers have apparently produced nuclear fusion in a contraption about twice the size of a coffee mug by shooting soundwaves into acetone containing heavy hydrogen.

The researchers expose the clear canister of liquid to pulses of neutrons every five milliseconds, [...] causing tiny cavities to form. At the same time, the liquid is bombarded with a specific frequency of ultrasound, which causes the cavities to form into bubbles that are about 60 nanometers - or billionths of a meter - in diameter. The bubbles then expand to a much larger size, about 6,000 microns, or millionths of a meter - large enough to be seen with the unaided eye.

"The process is analogous to stretching a slingshot from Earth to the nearest star, our sun, thereby building up a huge amount of energy when released," Taleyarkhan said.

Within nanoseconds these large bubbles contract with tremendous force, returning to roughly their original size, and release flashes of light in a well-known phenomenon known as sonoluminescence. Because the bubbles grow to such a relatively large size before they implode, their contraction causes extreme temperatures and pressures comparable to those found in the interiors of stars. Researches estimate that temperatures inside the imploding bubbles reach 10 million degrees Celsius and pressures comparable to 1,000 million earth atmospheres at sea level. At that point, deuterium atoms fuse together, the same way hydrogen atoms fuse in stars, releasing neutrons and energy in the process.

They note that the process is safe because the temperatures and pressures are contained within such small spaces in the bubbles. The discovery is still a long way from practical applications, and their efforts now will turn to scaling up the process and reaching the "break even" point, where the energy needed to produce the effect is exceeded by the output.

Our sensible neighbors to the north.

From an Associated Press-Ipsos poll of randomly selected adult Canadians:

Do you have a very positive, somewhat positive, somewhat negative or very negative opinion of the role that the president of the United States, George W. Bush, plays in world affairs?

• Very positive, 7%
  
• Somewhat positive, 22%
  
• Somewhat negative, 33%
  
• Very negative, 34%
  
• Not sure, 4%

Has the military action in Iraq: increased the threat of terrorism around the world, decreased the threat of terrorism around the world or had no effect on the threat of terrorism?

• Increased threat of terrorism, 53%
  
• Decreased threat of terrorism, 15%
  
• Had no effect on threat of terrorism, 29%
  
• Not sure, 3%

Every so often, I hear folks mutter that if the United States keeps moving down the path of GWB-style plutocracy, then he or she is going to pack up and move to Canada. Having spent a fair amount of time in the Great White North, I can certainly understand the sentiment; it's a lovely country with donut shops on every damn corner. But obviously, our goal should be getting Canadians to move en masse down here. Hey guys, today's predicted high here in Durham, NC is 81 degrees Fahrenheit...

A Wider Play of Grey

Over at the Prospect ("Britain's Intelligent Conversation"), Nick Crowe is sounding the death knell for hip-hop, labelling it "creatively impoverished." However, his justification for the eulogizing seems to rest on the fact that - gasp - the corporate music world is now involved. Whatever. Thumb through the rock, country, jazz, even classical recordings gracing the upper reaches of Billboard's rankings, and you'll think that music itself as an art form is creatively impoverished. Needless to say, that's like saying that fashion has gone to creativity hell after surveying the offerings from Wal-Mart, Sears, and Montgomery Ward.

Hip-hop is still resting on the cutting edge of popular music and challenging the corporate rulers of culture. Case in point: DJ Danger Mouse's bootleg remix known as the Grey Album.

What do you get when you cross the Beatles' legendary White Album with rapper Jay Z's The Black Album? Why, The Grey Album, of course. Acclaimed mixer Danger Mouse (known to his lawyers as Brian Burton) created this fascinating hybrid of classic rock and cutting-edge hip hop for what he has described - in response to threatening letters from the Beatles' record company in the US - as an innocent "art project".

Otherworldly loops from brief bursts of electric guitar and odd snatches of vocal are underpinned by drum patterns sampled from Ringo's kicks, toms and hi-hats, creating a kind of sonic Beatle jigsaw puzzle beneath Jay Z's high-speed rap masterclass (the latter taken from an a cappella version of the album, released by the rapper to facilitate just such experimental remixes). Every musical sound was lifted from the Beatles' classic, although you would have to be a real buff to spot them all. It even includes a witty homage to Lennon's original sound collage, Revolution #9, with Jay Z rapping backwards.

But what might have been considered a delightful oddity to intrigue musical aficionados has rapidly become an internet cause celebre, the focal point of a battle between file-sharers and copyright holders in an ongoing war of attrition that will ultimately decide the future of the music business.

Music conglomerate EMI is playing Whack-a-Mole, trying to eliminate any trace of the remix, but in the era of digital copying such an effort is akin to putting toothpaste back into a tube. The album is fantastic, by the way. Fire up your preferred filesharing application, hit the music newsgroups, or google furiously until you find it posted somewhere. It's well worth your time and bandwidth.

Update (3/5, 3:15 pm): In the comments, Sterling points to this page at the Electronic Frontier Foundation with a good, brief examination of the legal specifics involved.

Dumbest. Argument. Ever.

And the winner is . . . Dennis Prager!

America is engaged in two wars for the survival of its civilization. The war over same-sex marriage and the war against Islamic totalitarianism are actually two fronts in the same war – a war for the preservation of the unique American creation known as Judeo-Christian civilization.

Judeo-Christian civilization is a "unique American creation?" WTF? And that's only the second stupidest statement in that sentence.

There have been many Christian countries, and they are no longer. They have been replaced by secular countries, and they are weakening. Only American civilization remains strong, and it does so because of its unique amalgam of values rooted in Judeo-Christian morality.

So, just to make sure I understand this, Prager's argument is that the addition of Jewish values to Christian ones has allowed America to remain strong where all those monoculture Christian ones have disappeared? Am I just being nitpicky to point out that Christian values are inherently grounded in Jewish ones? What are we talking here: kosher dietary restrictions and being able to choose either weekend day as the Sabbath? Is that the advantage we maintain over the Holy Roman Empire?

I haven't even touched on his listed reasons why same-sex marriage will destroy the very foundation of Western civilization and render us no better than those frickin' godless Red Chinese. And trust me, those are even more inane than what I quoted above. Go read it and marvel that he's getting paid to pump out these sorts of retarded non sequiturs.

Sigh.

Van Doren's Heavenly Melons

No, I'm not talking about Mamie, though wh--. Er, I'd better just leave that one alone. Following on the heels of the black tomato, here comes the astronomy watermelon.

(90 Day) Van Doren Strain. The early-ripening strain of this legendary variety was rediscovered by Seed Savers Exchange, thanks to seed obtained from Merle Van Doren near Macon, Missouri. The medium to large 25 to 40 pound melons have dark green skin speckled with pea-size bright yellow 'stars' and usually one larger 'moon'. Leaves are also speckled. The bright rose-pink flesh is very sweet with excellent flavor. Seeds are brown. Plants have good drought and disease resistance.

(tip: Spacetramp)

Kerry Attacks!

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is briefly distracted by flashbulbs, seconds before plunging his teeth into Ms. Heinz-Kerry's jugular vein. North Carolina Senator John Edwards, pictured below narrowly avoiding the same fate during Sunday's debate in New York, declined to comment.

Point Blank

I don't get it.

The science class was in the middle of a lecture on evolution on Wednesday when the student -- whose name was not released -- began talking about jumping out the window to prove his point, according to the police report. The teacher, Yrvan Tassy Jr., bet him $20 that he would hurt himself if he jumped, police said. That's when the boy jumped out the window.

He landed on his feet -- in a patch of dirt and grass -- and returned to the classroom, the police report stated. He asked Tassy for the $20, and Tassy said he'd bring it the next day, students told police. School administrators reported the incident to police on Thursday. Tassy has been assigned to another location where he doesn't have contact with students until the investigation is completed.

Granted, it's Florida, so it isn't as though it has to make sense, but what point either for or against evolution would be bolstered by jumping out of a second story window? I'm not asking rhetorically or derisively; I'm genuinely flummoxed. This is going to keep me awake tonight.

Conspiracy!

NASA's press conference announcing conclusive evidence that water once existed plentifully on Mars took place this afternoon, despite the fact that the implications of said evidence were apparent at least as early as last week. Obviously everybody wants to make sure they have all their ducks in a row before making a big announcement, but almost every researcher in the field was already well-convinced that water played a major role in Martian development at some point. So why the delay? Why today? I think I may know.

Consumers can buy the new Giant Shrimp at the chain's more than 1,250 restaurants beginning February 16, 2004. If NASA announces the discovery of conclusive evidence of an ocean on Mars prior to February 29, 2004, America gets free Giant Shrimp at participating Long John Silver's restaurants on Monday, March 15, 2004, from 2 p.m. until 5 p.m.

Two days past the deadline. It is now abundantly clear who really trawls the corridors of power in Washington, DC. And I, for one, welcome our new deep-fried crustacean overlords.

Tell us something we don't know.

Reuters: Chavez calls Bush 'asshole' as foes fight troops

The Venezuelan president now has a new line for his business cards: Connoisseur of the Completely Obvious.

Republicans in Wonderland

"When I use a word, it means exactly what I say it means. Nothing more, nothing less." - Humpty Dumpty, Alice through the Looking Glass

From David Neiwert at Orcinus:

It's starting to become clear that, to the Bush administration -- and their corporate and media cohorts -- the definition of a "terrorist" is "someone we don't like." All in the past week, we were treated to the following spectacles:

-- An administration official -- the education secretary, no less -- declaring the National Education Association a "terrorist organization."

-- The chairman of American International Group referred to lawyers who are opposed to Republican plans for tort reform as "bar terrorists."

-- CNN's Judy Woodruff, in an interview with Jean-Bertrand Aristide, chiding the Haitian leader that the armed thugs rampaging through the island nation were not "terrorists" but rather "political opponents."

But in the meantime, a mail bomber in Arizona can set off an explosion in a government office -- one aimed at promoting racial diversity -- and hardly anyone hears a peep about it. Certainly, no one has begun referring to the attack as terrorism, even though that is quite clearly what it is.

Read the rest, then take a gander at Sy Hersh's (also a terrorist, as you may recall) latest article in the New Yorker about the terrifying sham situation regarding Pakistan's nuclear proliferation and the Bush administration's "no big deal" reaction. Bush will indeed fool many people into voting for him because of his dimwitted WarOnTerror™ (brought to to you by the same creative geniuses behind the WarOnDrugs™ and other fine, family-oriented, screen-tested wars), but from any fair reading of the facts, he has done just about the very worst job of combatting terrorism ever. Except for, of course, Ronald "freedom fighter" Reagan, who never met a right-wing terrorist he didn't like (Jonas Savimbi, anybody? Roberto D'Aubuisson? Oh, I know - how about Osama bin Laden?) .

If you're going to practice double standards, you will be paid with double standards. Don't use it. Don't condone Israeli terror, Pakistani terror, Nicaraguan terror, El Salvadoran terror, on the one hand, and then complain about Afghan terror or Palestinian terror. It doesn't work.

No, it certainly doesn't.

"Soaking Wet"

Mars once was.

"Liquid water once flowed through these rocks. It changed their texture, and it changed their chemistry," said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the science instruments on Opportunity and its twin, Spirit. "We've been able to read the tell-tale clues the water left behind, giving us confidence in that conclusion."

Dr. James Garvin, lead scientist for Mars and lunar exploration at NASA Headquarters, Washington, said, "NASA launched the Mars Exploration Rover mission specifically to check whether at least one part of Mars ever had a persistently wet environment that could possibly have been hospitable to life. Today we have strong evidence for an exciting answer: Yes."

The Smear Machine Blows a Gasket

This is too funny. You remember the photo of John Kerry onstage with Jane Fonda? The one that was an obviously (and poorly) photoshopped fake? Sure you do. The right wingers got their panties all moist about it, then had to retreat muttering that, even though they had been played for total suckers, Kerry was still a very, very bad man. So if the Hanoi Jane ploy doesn't work, what do you try next? Why, Kerry at a fundraiser with the now-deceased founder of the Church of Satan, Anton LaVey, of course. How very subtle.

Predictably, it's a fake, as well. Somebody needs to sit these folks down and explain the concept of jumping the shark.

Update (9:55 am): As Boxman points out in the comments, the original picture from which Kerry was lifted is actually creepier still.

We anxiously await the Kumato Clamato.

Moving one step closer to achieving the dream of tomacco, the powers that be in the world of agricultural innovation present the black tomato.

Following its success last year with the purple carrot, supermarket chain Sainsbury's said on Monday it was trialling a new breed of black tomato, called the Kumato. Six years of research has gone into the super-sweet Kumato, which originates from the Galapagos Islands and was developed to tolerate the dry, salty growing conditions of the Mediterranean.

For some reason, and I am not kidding, Sainsbury's is also claiming that the tomatoes enhance the sex lives of tortoises.

The Passion of the Number of the Beast

Man, you just couldn't make this stuff up.

Tickets at one movie theater screening Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" are being deemed decidedly unholy. The number 666, which many Christians recognize as the "mark of the beast," is appearing on movie tickets for Gibson's film at a Georgia theater, drawing complaints from some moviegoers.

The machine that prints tickets assigned the number 666 as a prefix on all the tickets for the film, said Gary Smith, owner of the Movies at Berry Square in northwest Georgia. The 666 begins a series of numbers that are listed below the name of the movie, the date, time and price.

"It's from our computer and it's absolutely a coincidence," Smith said. "It has nothing to do with the film company or any vendor. It's completely in our computer."

He then added, "And when I say 'our computer,' I mean the international Zionist conspiracy."

Ask the White House

Following NASCAR's Michael Waltrip's Q&A at the Ask the White House webpage (real first question: "Michael -- what do you think the best racing video game is?"), I see they are now back to actual representatives of the White House. Today's contestant is John P. Walters, Director of Office of National Drug Control Policy and they even have a "Submit a question" link! Somehow I don't think mine will get answered, though.

Dear Drug Control Director Walters,
Dude, why can't I find Quaaludes since, like, the 80's? Those were AWESOME!

(tip: a bored statistician)

Update (2:45 pm): Nope, wouldn't answer it. Losers.

Genome Sequencing

Now that they have figured out how to do it, scientists are plotting this year's lineup of creatures whose genetic code will be mapped. Projects currently underway include the genomes of dogs, cows, purple sea urchins, rhesus macaques, six species of yeast, chickens, and flatworms. Scheduled to get started this year are the red flour beetle, three species of roundworms, six species of fruitflies, four species of yeast, and one of my personal favorites, the opossum (first o is optional south of the Mason-Dixon line).

If they can genetically engineer this guy to taste like pork chops and kudzu to taste like mustard greens, these scientists will have statues built in their honor all over the south. Ladies and gentlemen of the ivory tower, I prithee: Onward! Immortality awaits.

Genetically Modified Art

New Scientist has interviews with three artists who are using biotechnology to monkey about with DNA and produce living art oddities. Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr are growing actual wings from pig stem cells; Marta de Menezes is using tiny needles in cocoons to create butterflies with asymmetric wing patterns; and Laura Cinti has produced a transgenic cactus that grows hair. The winning answers from each of the short interviews follow. See if you can spot the artist with postmodern theory classes under her belt.

Catts: "Oh yes! Before Napster collapsed we downloaded lots of pig songs - from Looney Tunes to heavy metal - and played them to the cells while they were seeding in the bioreactor. We did seem to get better distribution of the cells when we played the music."

de Menezes: "Next year I plan to make the stripes of zebrafish vertical instead of horizontal so that they look more like zebras."

Cinti: "Cactuses are not known for their beauty, and they are seen as fleshy, meaty and monolithic. I'm interested in the anti-sexuality that these phallic stems with extruding spines signify. Hair is a sign of reproduction, a sign of our bodies changing, becoming or being sexual. So the cactus with hair becomes a sexual symbol. I think this perversion resonates with the cultural climate surrounding genetic engineering: transgenics is seen as anti-sexual, asexual, because it directly interferes with the natural reproductive process. The Cactus Project brings that perversion into focus and reverses it. The cactus with its hairs coming out is showing all the desires, all the signs of sexuality. It doesn't want to be trapped. It wants to be released. The desire is to enter the world as a species from a mythical landscape. I'm interested in this desire, this wanting to come out."

"Can't win his own state."

Via Stinging Nettle, the latest SurveyUSA poll of registered North Carolina voters shows the differences between Edwards and Kerry in head-to-head matchups against Bush:

Edwards 50 Bush 47
Bush 53 Kerry 42

The margin of error is 3.9%, making the Edwards-Bush matchup a statistical tie, but Kerry is getting swamped. With the Democrats assigning convention delegates proportionally, Kerry could get the nomination just by winning California convincingly and placing a close second in every other contest, so at this point it may well be academic. However, I would like to move that we officially retire the oft-repeated truisms that Edwards couldn't deliver NC were he to head the ticket (disclaimer: I doubt he can do it from the #2 spot) and that he wouldn't have won his Senate seat had he run for it. Especially the latter: he would be coasting with a double-digit lead against Richard Burr right now.

The media seem to believe that Kerry doesn't much care for Edwards and would be loathe to offer him a VP slot. As I stated above, I think Kerry loses NC regardless of who is on the ticket with him (unless it's Dean Smith, Andy Griffith, or Jim Hunt), but if he ignores the potential strength of a Kerry-Edwards ticket nationally, it will be to his disadvantage. Gephardt, despite exciting nobody, would almost certainly deliver Missouri's 11 EC votes, but little else. Many have focused on Bob Graham with an eye to Florida's whopping 27, but after watching Graham's painful stint as a presidential candidate, I have to think: please, no. Max Cleland's name keeps bubbling up, but when I take the time to look at his voting record I say again: please, no. Bill Richardson is always on everybody's short list as the most prominent Latino officeholder on the Democratic roster and is certainly a credible candidate, but New Mexico has gone blue the last three elections and the question is whether he could bring any other southwestern states over. I don't have a guess as to the answer.

A VP candidate rarely adds much to a ticket (see Bentsen, Lloyd and Kemp, Jack), but Edwards' rhetorical skills are in a class by themselves. I think he may just be the exception. I still think an Edwards-Kerry ticket is the best line-up, but barring that...