Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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Two quick hits I intended to put up here first...
about really old clams and really new gardens, of course.
The formation of the International Climate Action Partnership, designed to facilitate best practices and consistency among carbon marketplaces, sounds good. Every signatory has or clearly intends to establish the caps and measures that are fundamentally necessary for an effective carbon marketplace. Whatever shortcomings there are to Kyoto (and there are many), the treaty is grounded in real numbers.
The main problem with US stonewalling during these last few critical years is not that carbon reduction has been inadequate; the short term dynamics are not nearly as important than the long term. The main problem is the lack of a clear set of rules for this marketplace that everybody can understand and by which everyone can uniformly play. We have gotten off on the wrong foot.
There is a wild-wild-west mentality in the carbon-trading marketplace in the US now: snake-oil-selling charlatans peddling clean conscience and corporate image green washing based on outlandish claims for projects that would have happened anyway.
Carbon emission reductions, contrary to fantasy, will not come so easily. A market-based approach will help them come as inexpensively as possible. However, the sky is not going fall for accounting gimmicks a la Enron. Paul Hawken is still a visionary, but we were all little more idealistic fifteen years ago, weren’t we?
It boils down to this: the measure of an effective, market-based greenhouse gas reduction policy will be whether reducing energy consumption can compete fairly with renewable energy development. Both are necessary, but the latter has much higher costs. Obfuscating those costs to make them seem cheap - and, admittedly, overstating achievements in reduction - are disservices; the numbers have to be real.
But since the going's good, I'll take this opportunity to announce that I intend to idle my car non-stop out in front of my house all night so that it's well warmed up for driving in the morning. For a mere $100 I will start the ignition one hour later.
This summer the House Judiciary Committee launched an effort to collect tips from would-be whistleblowers in the Justice Department. The U.S. attorney firings scandal had shown that much was amiss in the Department, and with the danger of retaliation very real, the committee had set up a form on the committee's website for people to blow the whistle privately about abuses there. Although the panel said it would not accept anonymous tips, it assured those who came forward that their identity would be held in the "strictest confidence."
But in an email sent out today, the committee inadvertently sent the email addresses of all the would-be whistleblowers to everyone who had written in to the tipline. The committee email was sent to tipsters who had used the website form, including presumably whistleblowers themselves, and all of the recipients of the email were accidentally included in the "to:" field -- instead of concealing those addresses with a so-called blind carbon copy or "bcc:".
Only the email addresses were exposed; none of the names or other identifying information of the whistleblowers was revealed. The blunder, however, was noticed by a number of people who had used the website form and received today's email. One disgruntled recipient replied to the entire list of whistleblowers angrily complaining about the snafu; two others forwarded the committee email to TPMmuckraker with similar complaints.
Compounding the mistake, the committee later sent out a second email attempting to recall the original email; it, too, included all recipients in the "to:" field, according to a recipient of the emails. [...] There are more than 150 recipient addresses revealed in the email. Some of the email addresses appear to be transparently fake, but there's also, much more troubling, a vice_president@whitehouse.gov carbon copied on the email, which is the public email address for Vice President Dick Cheney. In other words, an email containing the email addresses of all the whistleblowers who had written in to the committee tipline was sent to public email address of Vice President Cheney.
Christ almighty. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
My uncle tipped me off to a movie clip in which Stephen Wiltshire, an autistic man from London, draws a 16-foot panorama of Rome from memory after a single flyover in a helicopter. You won't believe the level of detail. I've never seen anything like it.
I've linked previously to Theo Jansen's mobile sculpture-organisms, intended to one day roam the beaches in herds. But that was two and a half years ago, and this clip of him giving a talk and showing videos about his "animals" earlier this spring is just so awesomely cool. Don't miss it.
Via Neatorama, who also links to a very swank gorilla made of coat hangers. Following the link there to David Mach's website: highly recommended.
And lastly, nice galleries from outer space and underwater.
Neiman Marcus carries Juicy Couture's line of makeup, perfumes, and accessories for dogs, Juicy Crittoure. The line's website has a Flash interface, so I can't link directly, but if you go to the Collections->Doggy section, you can watch the commercial, if that's your sort of thing. By the way, the perfume? Sixty dollars an ounce. Because there's no excuse for not being classy when you're licking your anus and eating garbage.
Latest installment here: Don't Bogart that Groove.
Who loves you like apostropher loves you, baby?
Bush's head of the Voting Rights section of DOJ believes that measures that disadvantage elderly voters help black voters because "minorities don't become elderly the way white people do; they die first".
Seriously, WTF?
The perfect summary of Bush's very important press conference yesterday, courtesy of Whatever It Is, I'm Against It.
Richard Roberts asks for a leave of absence from Oral Roberts University as scandal erupts. And only last week God personally told him to stay and fight the charges. That God, so fickle. Oh, and Mrs. Roberts has a thing for the teenage boys too, according to the lawsuit, beginning on page 14. Mm-hmm.
I'm not certain what specific information was being sought when somebody arrived at this site a few minutes ago by searching google for ninja fantasy problem psychological penis, but it does seem like the sort of thing you might find here.
If you want to marry a baby, you should hurry and book your tickets for Arkansas before they fix the law. Just be aware that you can't gay marry a baby there, because that would be wrong.
Brian Dettmer's book autopsies are amazing.
Update: M/tch left links to more of Dettmer's work in the comments, and they're worth following.
Brown County GOP Chairman Donald Fleischman has resigned his post, says a spokesperson, after being accused of enticement and fondling of an underage boy, reports the Green Bay Press-Gazette Saturday. [...] The boy was found by police in Fleischman's home on two occasions in late 2006 while being sought as a runaway from Ethan House, a home for at-risk youth. Now 17, he says he stayed with Fleischman at his house and a cabin, where he was provided with alcohol and cannabis, and regularly fondled.
Y'know, I kept getting told throughout my life that we were the party of perversity, but it's simply impossible to win that battle with the GOP. Via.
You might think you've had a bacon burger, but you probably haven't. (via)
And the fact that he wants to publicly deny the inner badass that is so beloved of his real fans bespeaks a wimpiness that links him to his famously spine-free father, who really was the mirror image of his son, a civilized, not wholly unintelligent man who was always embarrassing us by insisting that he was really a pork-rind-eatin' country music listenin' macho wild man son of a bitch.
But you should read it all, then ask which is more pathetic: the transparent phony or the 62 million people taken in by him? Via CT.
...who ruins it for everybody else.
The Dutch government said today that it will ban the sale of hallucinogenic mushrooms, rolling back one element of the country's permissive drug policy after a series of high-profile negative incidents. The decision will go into effect within several months and doesn't need parliamentary approval, Justice Ministry spokesman Wim van der Weegen said. [...]
Calls for a re-evaluation arose after a French 17-year-old, Gaelle Caroff, jumped from a building after eating psychedelic mushrooms while on a school visit to Amsterdam. Caroff's parents blamed her death on hallucinations brought on by the mushrooms, though the teenager had suffered from psychiatric problems in the past. [...] Since Caroff's death, other dramatic stories involving mushrooms have been reported in the Dutch press, though mushroom vendors complained that each of the cases involved tourists who were using other drugs and alcohol at the same time — against their usage instructions for mushrooms.
The users include:
— A British tourist, 22, who ran amok in a hotel, breaking his window and slicing his hand badly.
— An Icelandic tourist, 19, who thought he was being chased and jumped from a balcony, breaking both his legs.
— A Danish tourist, 29, who drove his car wildly through a campground, narrowly missing people sleeping in their tents.
Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen had suggested a 3-day "cooling off" period between ordering them and using them.
That last sentence keeps cracking me up.
Paul Krugman has the definitive word on the (laughably inept) Graeme Frost witch hunt and how the modern conservative movement has now completed its transformation into a brainless septic tank.
In response to Eugene Volokh's incredibly stupid WSJ op-ed about Obama's lack of a flag pin on his lapel, Roy Edroso brings the unvarnished truth:
Wearing a flag pin isn't like telling your spouse that you love him or her. Unless you are a U.S. servicemember, or Captain America, or attending a naturalization ceremony, wearing a flag pin means you are a dick.
From the guy who fired Brad from All-American Burger in Fast Times at Ridgemont High to Fox anchors to the creeps who run for office to American Dad!, the flag pin has proved a reliable symbol of dickitude. Seldom have I seen an otherwise normally-dressed guy wearing a flag pin and thought, oh, isn't that sweet, he's telling America that he loves her! No, long experience has taught me that the pin-wearer wants something from me: either my vote, or an unearned advantage for whatever song-and-dance or sales pitch he's about to spool out. Or he wants the other Republicans in the room to spot him, so they can huddle privately and exchange stories about how they dicked someone over. Or he wants to pass for a dick so the other dicks won't gang up on him. Which makes him a dick.
Like most generalizations, this one is not foolproof, but coupled with common sense it is close enough to get you through most days. What Obama was trying to tell us with his gesture was simply that he is not a dick. It's not probative, but it's a step in the right direction.
Also, Professor Volokh? Total dick.
Update: Bill Maher says it represents a nearby but different body part.
I forgot that these were awarded last week. This year's winners:
MEDICINE: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects."
PHYSICS: L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.
BIOLOGY: Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.
CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin -- vanilla fragrance and flavoring -- from cow dung.
LINGUISTICS: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
LITERATURE: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word "the" -- and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.
PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.
NUTRITION: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup.
ECONOMICS: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.
AVIATION: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.
Further details on each at the link.
I stayed home from work yesterday, since Cassidy woke up with a fever above the level at which the daycare asks you not bring them. Turned out to be a pretty low-grade affair all in all, and if I kept her dosed up with the infant Tylenol, the only sick symptom that remained was a runny nose. Anyhow, about mid-day I realized that this was the first time since she was born in May that I'd gotten to spend a day alone with her. The first time in four and a half months (well, I guess I got two weeks immediately after she was born, but there were two of us there and newborns aren't much interactive). I'm at work during the week, of course, and weekends mean two other kids—one of them a noisy and demanding two-year-old—plus grocery shopping and laundry and visitors and meals and football and everything else, such that any long stretch of undivided attention is more or less impossible.
The day was just wonderful. The very most enjoyable sort of sick child is the one that doesn't actually feel bad. She's not mobile yet so it's all face-to-face interaction, and with such a pretty face, too. But it was also a bit depressing to realize how little time middle-class parenting usually provides. Or is providing me, anyhow. Sigh.
The North Carolina guy who found a human leg in a smoker he bought? The story continues.
Shannon Whisnant has said all along he was willing to go to court for the right to keep John Wood's severed leg. Sure enough, a judge will soon decide who gets custody of the Simpsonville man's amputated limb, which was found stored in a barbeque smoker mistakenly sold during a mini-storage public auction. Judge Mathis, that is. The nationally syndicated "Judge Mathis" court show, which has aired since 1999, features former Michigan Superior Court judge Greg Mathis. [...] Wood and Whisnant -- the Maiden, N.C., man who claims he owns the leg because he bought it and now wants to charge admission to see it -- are headed to Chicago for a Friday taping of the show, both men said. [...]
Will Judge Mathis tell John Wood he doesn't have a leg to stand on? Could this story get any classier? Why, yes it could.
Wood's leg was amputated above the knee after a plane crash in 2004 that killed his father. Instead of disposing of the leg, Wood decided to keep it so that it could be cremated with him when he dies. He stored it in a freezer for a while, then hung it on a fencepost, before stowing it in a barbeque smoker that was among his belongings housed in a Maiden Plaza Mini Storage unit. Wood landed in financial trouble, and two weeks ago his belongings were sold during a public auction. Whisnant bought the smoker among other items. When he got the smoker home, he opened it and found the leg and foot wrapped.
At first, Whisnant said he thought it was a piece of driftwood, until a liquid oozed from the leg onto his hand. He called 911, told the dispatcher he was "grossed out" and surrendered the leg to authorities, who gave the leg to a funeral home to take care of. After ruling out foul play, the funeral home contacted Wood to come pick up his leg, which the funeral [home] embalmed.
However, Whisnant saw the publicity that Wood's story received and decided he wanted the leg back so that he could charge admission for people to see it. He already has charged $3 for adults and $1 for children to view the smoker. Whisnant said he wanted to "write some books and do some movies."
Last week, Maiden police gave the leg back to Wood, over Whisnant's objections. Whisnant said he has a receipt to prove ownership. Whisnant offered to allow Wood joint custody of the leg and said he'd make sure the leg would be cremated with Wood eventually. [all bolds mine -'r]
"Some" books and movies? How many sequels could this story really support?
The Sneeze has two long-running series: the hilarious "Steve, Don't Eat It!" and tracking the annual life cycle of the mysterious Tree Brain. On Monday, the two storylines became one.
Another Republican politician busted for soliciting sex in a public bathroom. At least this one doesn't seem to have been one of the "family values" shriekers. But still, it's really becoming uncanny.
The Smoking Gun has the autopsy report for Montgomery, Alabama Baptist minister, Gary Aldridge, who died during what they are describing as "some autoerotic undertaking". The Evidence of Injury section reads:
The decedent is clothed in a diving wet suit, a face mask which has a single vent for breathing, a rubberized head mask having an opening for the mouth and eyes, a second rubberized suit with suspenders, rubberized male underwear, hands and feet having diving gloves and slippers. There is a leather belt around the midriff. There is a series of ligatures extending from the hands to the feet. The hands are bound behind the back. The feet are tied to the hands. There are nylon ligatures holding these in place with leather straps about the wrists and ankles. There are plastic cords also tied about the hands and feet with a single plastic cord extending up to the head and surrounding the lower neck. There is a dildo in the anus covered with a condom.
Is it just me, or does the bolded bit there really, really argue against autoeroticism? I was never a Boy Scout, so maybe I'm just not thinking this through, but tying your own hands behind your back and to your feet in multiple layers strikes me as a pretty difficult maneuver, especially when dressed in a full diving suit or two with a foreign object inserted in you. According to the Montgomery Advertiser, "police ruled the 51-year-old pastor of Thorington Road Baptist Church was alone at the time of his death and that there was no foul play involved."
Hmmm. That seems unlikely.
If the current frontrunners hold serve, the general election campaign is going to give children everywhere nightmares.
WNYT: "Outside Schenectady City Court, the woman accused of performing oral sex on two men with her young kids in the back seat Monday had nothing to say to reporters. Other inmates inside the van transporting her back to jail encouraged Cook to keep her mouth shut."
But perhaps not for much longer.
With the armed security force Blackwater USA and other private contractors in Iraq facing tighter scrutiny, the House of Representatives on Thursday overwhelmingly approved a bill that would bring all United States government contractors in the Iraq war zone under the jurisdiction of American criminal law. The measure would require the F.B.I. to investigate any allegations of wrongdoing.
The bill was approved 389 to 30, despite strong opposition from the White House. It came as lawmakers and human rights groups are using a Sept. 16 shooting by Blackwater personnel in Baghdad to highlight the many contractors operating in Iraq who have apparently been unaccountable to American military or civilian laws and outside the reach of the Iraqi judicial system. [...]
The House bill, sponsored by Representative David E. Price, Democrat of North Carolina, would expand a law that in 2000 brought defense contractors working with American troops overseas under the jurisdiction of United States criminal law. The 2000 law has rarely been used and might not apply to firms like Blackwater, which was hired to guard diplomats and could argue that its work is not tied directly to war operations. [...]
Mr. Price has been working on the contractor issue for about three years and first introduced his bill in January. A similar measure was submitted in the Senate by Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois. Mr. Obama, a candidate for his party's nomination for president, introduced an updated version on Thursday.
Yay for David Price! As I've said here before, whatever my frustration with Congressional Democrats, I'm very happy with my own Congressman. By the way, the 30 Republicans who think our mercenaries should be able to just kill whomever they want with abandon can be found here.
Stereogum has launched Drive XV, their tribute to R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People, with free mp3s of the covers of each song, as well as liner notes by the bands covering it and Mike Mills. Some real gems there. Best to act quickly before the permanent downloads disappear like they did with the OK Computer tribute, and you're stuck streaming the files.
Negligent homicide charges have been dropped against a former Lake Jackson woman who had been accused of killing her husband with a sherry enema that led to alcohol poisoning. Court records show the charge against Tammy Jean Warner, 45, of Texas City, was dismissed Aug. 31 because of insufficient evidence, the Houston Chronicle reported in its online edition Wednesday. Michael Warner, 58, died May 21, 2004. An autopsy showed he had been given an enema with enough sherry to have a blood alcohol level of 0.47 percent, almost six times the legal limit of .08 percent in Texas. Tammy Warner has told the newspaper that her husband was addicted to enemas and often used alcohol in them to get drunk.
Not the fifteen minutes of fame anybody hopes for, I would think. (h/t: Ogged)
This video would be pretty awesome even without the subtitles, but they put it over the top.
Her boyfriend survived, but had Ms. Wenn been successful you'd have a decent case for justifiable homicide.
Don't fuck with this woman's food. After discovering that her boyfriend of five years had eaten the pork chops she'd prepared for herself, 45-year-old grandmother Tracy Wenn stabbed him with a dinner knife while screaming "Eat my pork, feel my fork!" (Yeah, she was drunk.)
"I'm sorry about what I did to Anthony but you just don't eat my pork chops and expect to get away with it. They're my favourite and I'd made them with peas and carrots with onion gravy. I'd been thinking about that meal all day, it looked lovely when I put it in the fridge and when I got home and saw he'd eaten them I saw red... I like my food, especially chops. He hasn't done it since. That's taught him not to pinch my dinner."
Thanks to Kriston for the tip.
Nothing to add to this comment by nattarGcM ttaM about a class he taught a few years back, but it's a hell of a story.
The course was a sort of intro to IT course. There were a lot of retired or aging academics who attended it. One guy, I still love thinking about. He came with his daughter, who was of pensionable age herself. It took me hours to get him to use Word so he asked if, rather than continue the rest of the course, he could use the time to write something and I could check to see he was managing OK.
He told me he wanted to write his autobiography. The first line began, "I began work as a surgeon, in Sheffield, in 1929".
Turned out it was this guy and he must have been 97 or 98 at the time:
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article347582.ece
Amazing life. Great man.
Also, whopping lots of mix tape goodness in the comments to this post, including Apomerica.
