Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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There hasn't been much here recently, and I'm getting ready to drive to DC and hang out with my imaginary internet friends, so there definitely won't be anything for at least a couple of days. Then when I return, I have to buckle down on a really big project at work, so let's just call this the beginning of a blogging hiatus.
Happy New Year, everybody.
It looks like Billmon is hanging up his blogging cleats. That would be an immeasurable loss for the left end of blogland, as he has always been one of the smartest and most prescient voices we have.
If this really is last call at the Whiskey Bar, thanks a million and you'll be sorely missed.
Update: And just like that, the site is gone. For the time being, the google cache still holds the second link, "An Iraq Retrospective." Read it before it vanishes, too.
The hardest working man in show business gets a rest.
May 3, 1933 – December 25, 2006
Better go ahead and start the therapy now.
Children watched in horror as a Santa Claus collapsed and died as he handed out presents at a Christmas party on Sunday.
Soldiers trying to seize control of one Mexico's top drug-producing regions found the countryside teeming with a new hybrid marijuana plant that can be cultivated year-round and cannot be killed with herbicides. [...] The plants' roots survive if they are doused with herbicide, said army Gen. Manuel Garcia.
"These plants have been genetically improved," he told a handful of journalists allowed to accompany soldiers on a daylong raid of some 70 marijuana fields. "Before we could cut the plant and destroy it, but this plant will come back to life unless it's taken out by the roots."
The new plants, known as "Colombians," mature in about two months and can be planted at any time of year, meaning authorities will no longer be able to time raids to coincide with twice-yearly harvests. The hybrid first appeared in Mexico two years ago but has become the plant of choice for drug traffickers [in] Michoacan, a remote mountainous region that lends to itself to drug production. Yields are so high that traffickers can now produce as much marijuana on a plot the size of a football field as they used to harvest in 10 to 12 acres.
Technology marches onward. (via The Stinging Nettle)
Julio Cesar Cu has you beat.
Paid just $400 a month to de-clog the miles of sewage tunnels running beneath the Mexican capital, diver Cu comes across the nastiest of flotsam.
"The oddest have been dead animals, animal heads, dead people," he said. "Unfortunately a lot of bodies end up here."
Cu's job is to prevent blockages in tunnels of up to 20-feet (6-meter) wide that could cause sewage to flood onto city streets. "Once, we fished out car parts which I think would have fit together to make a whole car," he said.
It is so dark down amid the cold liquid waste of some 18 million inhabitants that Cu and his three fellow divers cannot see and have to feel their way along the tunnel walls. Dressed in a thick red wetsuit, Cu pulls debris out with his hands or unblocks tunnels with a stick.
The divers receive air through a tube connected to the surface and are attached to a safety harness to stop them being swept away, as happened to one colleague 21 years ago who died in a torrent of filthy water while clearing a blockage. [...]
"I like diving as a sport. As a job I like it even more," he said.
Four hundred dollars a month.
What an amazingly perfect photograph. (via Ogged)
Update: In the Unfogged comments, snarkout adds: "If they just keep going down that road, Cheney's going to get a heart, Bush is going to get a brain, and Rumsfeld is going to get a medal that proves he has courage."
You mean... People actually have sex before they're married?
Almost all Americans have premarital sex, says a report published Tuesday that analyzes federal data over time and suggests programs focusing on sexual abstinence until marriage may be unrealistic[...]
This fall, the federal government clarified its guidelines for millions of dollars in 2007 federal money available to the states for abstinence-only programs. The message that such funds, which previously have focused on preteens and teens, would now also target unmarried adults up to age 29 stirred controversy after Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services, explained that the revision was aimed at making sure states knew money would be available for 19- to 29-year-olds because more unmarried women in that age group are having children[...]
But a fellow in family and culture issues at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., that supports abstinence-only legislation, blasts the report as "an attack on abstinence."
That's right. Finding out what people do is "an attack".
If somebody sells you bad crack, take it up with the dealer. Complaining to the police won't help.
You know how it's said that very drunken drivers sometimes survive car wrecks with less serious injuries because they're so relaxed? It appears to work for five-story plummets as well.
The Nietzsche Family Circus pairs a random Family Circus panel with a random Nietzsche quote, and quite often to lovely effect.
Hat tip to cangrejero.
Twenty-one deaf members of the China Disabled People's Performing Art Troupe perform the Thousand-Hand Bodhisattva. Stunningly beautiful.
(via Ticklebooth)
You had to see this one coming.
A fence-building company in Southern California agrees to pay nearly $5 million in fines for hiring illegal immigrants. Two executives from the company may also serve jail time. The Golden State Fence Company's work includes some of the border fence between San Diego and Mexico.
Jesus H. Christ. I'd have been driving to their call center with a calculator and a Louisville Slugger already.
All of these were mailed to me over the past week or so by various regulars 'round these here parts. Thanks much and I apologize for not writing back; this week has been insane. I promise I'll try to be a better person once the holidays pass.
Algorithm March with the Ninjas.
Flight pattern visualizations.
Gives a new meaning to bringing home the bacon.
René Magritte meets Hieronymus Bosch.
Pure white android blood may become the first FDA-approved treatment for traumatic brain injury.
Ten Bible verses nobody ever preaches about.
A meteorite found in northern Canada is older than the sun.
Freaky mind-control fungus infects insects.
A million thanks to Lenhart for brightening my day at home with a vomity toddler by sending me a link to this article. Read the comments.
Over at Unfogged, Brock Landers linked to this list of America's top 50 most influential evangelical Christians. It's from January, so I suppose Ted Haggard has probably fallen out of the rankings, but I found it interesting how few of these people most non-evangelicals would recognize. I knew 22 of the 50 (Jakes, BGraham, Warren, Crouch, Meyer, Bush, Dobson, Colson, FGraham, Schuller, Stanley, Sekulow, Crouch Jr., Hinn, Hagee, Haggard, Kennedy, Parsley, Hannity, the Pope, Santorum, and Dr. Phil - those last four sound like a punchline), which probably puts me well ahead of most heathen liberals, but then sometimes I watch JesusTV late at night because it's funny. I should have recognized Jim Towey, what with him being in the government and all, but I didn't. I'd also never heard of Anne Graham Lotz, despite her being Billy Graham's daughter and living just down the road in Raleigh.
How'd you score?
And right here in Durham, no less. It "sends a message" to me, sure enough, but probably not the one they intended.
I've developed a solid reputation as a grinch, because every year about this time, I start to feel bludgeoned by the endless, Clockwork Orange-ish repetition of the same twelve Christmas songs. I've discovered that it isn't so much the honest-to-God religious songs that get my goat, as those are mostly pretty and subdued. No, it's the frickin' non-denominational ones (particularly, for some reason, Walking in a Winter Wonderland and Let It Snow) that every single recording artist on Earth feels some sort of obligation to cover. It's bad enough that every public space in North Carolina is filled with some treacly lite-jazz version of Frosty the Snowman, but they pipe that stuff into the bathrooms at work, so that I can't even take a crap without Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer intruding on my quiet time.
Predictably, by this time of the month, I'm reaching the end of my rope and hitting Google Maps to find gun shops and water towers. Ho ho ho BANG ho ho ho BANG. Sleep in heavenly peace BANG BANG BANG! My wife and the rest of my extended family find this completely baffling ("you've had that same Elvis Costello album playing in your car for three weeks, after all"), and I can't quite explain it myself. It just is what it is.
However, Steve at The Sneeze reminded me that if more Christmas music sounded like this song, I could probably quit drinking myself to sleep every night from Thanksgiving to New Years. "What I love about it is just when you think it couldn't possibly get any worse, it does. By a lot. And it does this more than once, building to the most glorious mess I've ever heard. I smile every time I hear it."
Ahhh, I feel so much better. Happy holidays.
You'd hope that Congress changing hands might inject some sanity into the Iraq debate, but unfortunately some of the new power brokers are every bit as clueless as the people they are replacing. This isn't even hard stuff; it's the very most basic background information, and the incoming Chair of the Intelligence Committee (Intelligence, for cryin' out loud - it's like the head of the SPLC guessing that the Klan is predominantly black) clearly hasn't the first idea and is just pulling stuff out of his ass.
God help us, we are so screwed.
Guess what happens when you hire a cougar to entertain the kids at a 7-year-old's birthday party? Yeah, you guessed correctly.
I haven't said anything about Britney Spears exposing her lady business for the paparazzi because I figured there wasn't anything to say about it except here's hoping it's the beginning of a widely adopted trend. However, it turns out there is plenty more to say on the matter, and that plenty more is hilarious.
I started to give a work warning, but there are no untoward pictures at the link and lord knows if you're already reading my site at work, then this one certainly isn't any worse. Just dozens of instances of the last word in the title of this post.
Via Neatorama, a 360° QTVR panorama of the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic.
Everybody and their brother has linked to this already, but in case you somehow missed it, this Mary Poppins remix is pretty awesome.
Following up on the post below this one, let me just cut and paste this from Glenn Greenwald.
Atrios posted an excerpt of Russ Feingold making a vitally important though barely-recognized point last night on MSNBC (C&L has the video here):
The fact is this commission was composed apparently entirely of people who did not have the judgment to oppose this Iraq war in the first place, and did not have the judgment to realize it was not a wise move in the fight against terrorism. So that's who is doing this report.
Then I looked at the list of who testified before them. There is virtually no one who opposed the war in the first place. Virtually no one who has been really calling for a different strategy that goes for a global approach to the war on terrorism [...]
This report does not do the job and it's because it was not composed of a real representative group of Americans who believe what the American people showed in the election, which is that it's time for us to have a timetable to bring the troops out of Iraq.
The reason it is worthwhile -- actually imperative -- to continuously document what war advocates said in the past is because they have proven themselves to be completely bereft of judgment and insight and, in most cases, lacking any sort of moral compass. And yet, these same war advocates -- and only they -- are deemed even today, as Iraq lies in ruins, to be the responsible leaders who have a monopoly on worthwhile wisdom. Conversely, those who exhibited great judgment and foresight are as mocked and stigmatized as much as ever (just a little bit less overtly, but only a little), and are excluded entirely from the process of determining what we should do now.
Read the rest.
He never disappoints. Referring to the Iraq Study Group, which came to the blindingly obvious conclusion that our Iraq policy is a complete disaster, Hugh Hewitt complains:
Of the 43 "former officials and experts" consulted—including Mark Danner of the New York Review of Books, Thomas Friedman, Leslie Gelb, Sandy Berger, Anthony Lake, Ken Pollack, Thomas Ricks, and George Will—the ISG did not find it necessary to talk with, say, Victor Davis Hanson, Lawrence Wright, Robert Kaplan, Mark Steyn, Michael Ledeen, Reuel Marc Gerecht, or Christopher Hitchens.
Yeah, what's up with that? How can you get to the heart of the issue if you don't talk to the people who have been 110% wrong about every. fucking. detail. of our misadventure to date? I just don't get it. And they didn't ask Hugh his opinion either, and he's on the front line!
I came across this completely typical bizarro-world Hewitt nonsense at Sadly, No!, where commenter JK47 adds, "The ISG also did not find it necessary to talk with, say, Soupy Sales, Kevin Federline, Morganna the Kissing Bandit, the Taco Bell chihuahua, Mark 'The Bird' Fidrych or the remaining half of my ham sandwich."
Update: I forgot to note that the "experts" they did consult included Thomas Friedman and Ken Pollack, so it isn't like the got-it-wrong-from-the-get-go crowd wasn't amply represented.
Jennifer Maestre's crazy pencil sculptures.
Her nail works are pretty cool, too.
(via Neatorama)
Wow!
Evidence has been discovered that liquid water is flowing on Mars today, NASA scientists announced today. [...] The surprising find emerged from some 240,000 images taken by the orbiting spacecraft Mars Global Surveyor. Images taken of the same areas over time revealed that liquid water likely flowed through hillside and crater gullies during the past seven years. Telltale deposits of debris suggest that gully sediments were washed downhill by occasional water flows.
"It could be acidic water, it could be briny water, it could carry lots of sediment or be slushy, but [it appears that] water is involved," Edgett said.
The past seven years. Holy cow. Here's the picture that tipped them off.
In an area known as Terra Sirenum, new light-toned deposits coating gullies in April 2005 were not present in December 2001. Similar changes were seen in a crater etched into the Centauri Montes region of Mars, which apparently changed sometime between August 1999 and February 2004.
"I think this is pretty interesting evidence that says yes there's is subsurface water," Christensen said, adding that aquifers, snow packs and ground ice are all plausible sources for liquid martian water. "It remains to see which ones are most plausible."
Malin and his team believe that some form of water, be it briny, acidic or slushy, may be bursting out from underground sources at the gullies and leaving the tell-tale signs. The result, Malin added, could resemble the sort of mudflows seen on Earth after torrential rains or flash floods.
Edgett said early estimates call for somewhere between five and 10 swimming pools' worth of water to have formed the gully changes seen on Mars.
"And if you were there, and this thing was coming down the slope, you'd kind of want to get out of the way," Edgett said, adding that Mars' thin atmosphere would force the water to boil off as it flowed out.
Fiji government overthrown by Bananarama!
From the looks of their website—which still hasn't posted the news of their smashing victory—they seemed to have lost one of the original members, but I'm not convinced the new singer is going to fit in with the group's overall image.
Hey, remember the guy who got killed having sex with a horse? Sure you do. Well, Robinson Devor has gone and made a documentary about it, and it's going to have its world premier at the Sundance Festival.
No, I'm not kidding.
