Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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Isn't it odd how the very same people who cheered on Bush's illegal surveillance at every step of the way are now outraged that somebody hacked into Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account?
"Two people have been charged in a fight that broke out between neighbors attending a baby shower Sunday, during which a woman knocked another unconscious with a shovel and a man allegedly threatened a crowd with a shotgun."
NASCAR Cancels Remainder Of Season Following David Foster Wallace's Death
Go ahead and cash out your 401(k). The world will end in five years.
I could survive 41 seconds chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor.
"At long last, this freaky thing way out in the Kuiper Belt, formerly just known as 2003EL61, officially has a name, as do its two moons, now known as Hi'iaka and Namaka."
"Hundreds of new marine creatures, including as many as 150 soft corals, have been discovered in three Australian reefs, scientists report." Video and photos at the link.
"A drunk man was caught having sex with an SUV that was parked on a main road. The man, who has not been named, was seen with his pants down and getting it on with the front end of the Toyota 4X4. [...] Videos of the incident have been circulated on the web."
"A senior civil servant is facing the sack after pornographic images flashed up as he delivered a Powerpoint presentation to government officials in the Solomon Islands. Fred Ganate, a permanent secretary in the Ministry of Provincial Government, continued to address delegates, unaware of the explicit material that was flashing up behind him."
Just 'cause, y'know, humans are really predictable.
This technology will succeed in replacing fossil fuels, particularly petroleum, as the preeminent fuel source for transportation and avert the more catastrophic effects of global warming. But the currently unfathomable problem of genetic pollution on a global scale, resulting from the widespread propagation of the genetically modified algae necessary to produce this “green crude,” will threaten civilization’s ability to survive and feed itself a century or two from now with disruption the likes of which will make global warming look like an unseasonably warm day at the beach. The timeframe it takes for all this to happen will be just long enough for global warming to drift into the mists of history and lore. Those who first sound the alarm about genetic pollution will be – of course - regarded as kooks.
* Your mileage may vary.
You're gonna get yours!
Eric Boehlert is completely right. As depressingly content-free and jaw-droppingly dishonest as McCain's sick joke of a campaign has been, the national news media gets the lion's share of the blame for creating the environment in which it could be run. Over the past two decades, huge parts of it have completely abdicated their vital role in a democratic society in favor of the political equivalent of professional wrestling. Except without the sophistication, realism, dignity, and erudite analysis that pro wrestling brings to the table.
If there's one area I can find agreement with the right wing, it's that the mainstream media is abysmal and, in defiance of the very laws of physics, still somehow managing to get worse. But they sure as hell aren't on our side.
The financial world is in turmoil, the US government has taken over Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and AIG, and everybody's worried their portfolios could be wiped out at a moment's notice. Where should you put your money to ride out the storm? Animal carcasses in formaldehyde, it seems.
This is your nation on white privilege. Don't miss it.
Via Ta-Nehisi Coates, who adds, "The basic point here, I think, is that racism allows white people to be mediocre."
You know what the best thing to come out of the Republican National Convention was? This.
Via.
In 1994, someone started blogging for the first time. It was probably either Justin Hall or David Winer, depending on whom you ask. Regardless, in the time since, the weblog medium has changed the news cycle — for better or for worse (we think better) — forever.
For this list, we combed the internets for the fifty buzziest blog posts since that time. Some of our selections will no doubt ring a bell — they're posts that achieved instant worldwide notoriety and bested the media at its own game. They brought down politicians, exposed celebrity shenanigans and caused widespread consternation and controversy. And then there are other posts that never became famous, but nonetheless sparked their own wildfires of feedback, both of the go-to-hell and amen! variety. We've included some of those here too, because you probably haven't seen them, and we think you should.
Okay, I'll bite. Hey, what's that I see at #17? I'M FAMOUS, BITCHES!
This throwaway post on an obscure blog
Well, maybe famous isn't the right word.
was published in the summer of 2004, shortly after Obama's now-famous speech at the Democratic National Convention. It asked a simple, somewhat comical question in its headline: "Is Barack Obama the Anti-Christ?" Since then, nearly 2,000 people have weighed in on this notion in the feedback section — most of them to say, indeed he is.
Many of the commenters quote scripture at length, detailing the Bible's description of what the Anti-Christ's attributes will be when he appears on earth: "uncanny skill," "ability to deceive," a "victorious advance," and "he will brook no rivalry in the mad pursuit of increasing authority, prestige and power." Sure sounds like Barack! A stunning example of how blogs have given fringe views a chance for real momentum — today, a Google search of "barack obama" and "anti-christ" yields 584,000 hits.
I like to think I've done my little part in bringing the coveted Satanist demographic back home to the Democratic Party where it belongs. And with it, the election! Surely that's worth a diplomatic assignment in Transnistria. Call me, Barackzebub!
Pressed about what insights into recent Russian actions she gained by living in Alaska, Palin answered: "They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska."
Our very own Krista, in the comments, responds:
And when I look out my window I can see the moon. Doesn't make me a fucking astronaut now, does it?
Heh.
I'm home sick today and so won't be online much, but I want to say this before I drag my sorry self back to bed.
With this ad, John McCain has shown himself to be utterly without honor or scruples and a base, unprincipled liar and smear artist. That ad isn't shading the truth; it's 180-degree, up-is-down lying, and he knows it. "I'm John McCain and I approved this message." I'm sure you did, Senator. I'm sure you did.
Whatever well of respect John McCain earned through his military service, already dwindling from the past four years, has been completely exhausted. He is a disgrace to himself, his family, his party, his uniform, and his country. He's shown himself to be a pathetic, tiny man with no moral compass who not only does not put country first, he doesn't even put basic human decency first. David Brooks, who for eight years hasn't met a Bush applause line he wouldn't stand up and masturbate furiously to, recently wrote that "Republicans are intellectually unfit to govern right now," but that's hardly news. Brooks is just now having to admit what has long been obvious. The real lesson of this campaign is that McCain is not morally fit to serve as president. He is a whore who will degrade himself in any imaginable way in order to get his sweaty palms on the presidency.
Update: See Andrew Sullivan.
I've posted about tardigrades before, and they are absolutely fascinating creatures. But now they have a new feather in their tiny water-bear caps.
It's one small step for water bears, one giant leap for animal-kind. Tiny animals called tardigrades — better known as water-bears — have become the first animals to survive the cruel vacuum, intense cold and radiation of space without a spacesuit.
Water bears were already known to be among the toughest critters alive. When not flying in a low Earth orbit, they prefer to spend their days in water, perhaps on a beach or a dewy patch of moss. But when the water dries up, the millimetre-long 'bears' can contract into a dried-out state and survive like that for years. They are also one of the few animals that survive year-round on continental Antarctica, and are among the most radiation-resistant animals known.
So if any animal on Earth could survive the rigours of space, Ingemar Jönsson, of Kristianstad University in Sweden, and her colleagues figured it would be the water bears. They loaded two species of tardigrade — Richtersius coronifer and Milnesium tardigradum, both already in their desiccated form — onto the European Space Agency's Biopan-6 experimental platform. The experiment was launched into orbit during the unmanned Russian Foton-M3 mission in September 2007.
For ten days, the tardigrades were exposed to the radiation, vacuum and low temperature of space. R. coronifer did not fare terribly well — none survived when exposed to the full spectrum of ultraviolet radiation, which can be extremely damaging to DNA. But three specimens of M. tardigradum did.
And when some wavelengths of ultraviolet light were filtered out (those shorter than 280 nanometres or longer than 400 nanometres), eggs laid by space-faring Milnesium tardigradum hatched just as well as controls that had not been exposed to space vacuum or ultraviolet radiation.
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present Fresno's wurst criminal.
Police in Fresno, California have arrested a suspect after a home was robbed of cash and ransacked in the middle of the night Saturday. That's not that unusual. But this is.
Cops say before the man left, he went into the kitchen of his unsuspecting hosts - two local farm workers - and removed a number of spices and a sausage from the fridge. For reasons that still aren't clear (and frankly, you may not want to know) the accused allegedly began to rub the spices over the body of one of the sleeping and oblivious victims, before hitting the other man with the eight inch kielbasa.
Needless, to say, both woke up as their weird assailant fled the house. Cops later found the man not far away in a nearby field, wearing only a T-shirt, socks and his boxer shorts. They say he wasn't much of a thief - he accidentally left his wallet behind, which contained all his I.D.
A 22-year-old man is being held on a number of charges, although it's not clear if assault with a deadly sausage is a legal statute that will stand up in court. Cops recovered the allegedly stolen money but will have to go before a judge without the meaty weapon. It turns out the men's dog got to it before police could and ate the evidence.
Just another Saturday night...
From the moment on May 1, 2003, when the President declared "major combat operations have ended" on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, such exuberant administration statements have repeatedly been deflated by events on the ground. Left unsaid through all the twists and turns in Iraq has been this: Whatever their disappointments, administration officials never actually gave up on their grandiose ambitions. Through thick and thin, Washington has sought to install a regime "aligned with U.S. interests" - a government ready to cooperate in establishing the United States as the predominant power in the Middle East.
Recently, with significantly lower levels of violence in Iraq extending into a second year, Washington insiders have begun crediting themselves with - finally - a winning strategy (a claim neatly punctured by Juan Cole, among other Middle East experts). In this context, actual Bush policy aims have, once again, emerged more clearly, but so has the administration's striking and continual failure to implement them - thanks to the Iraqis.
In the past few weeks, the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has made it all too clear that, in the long run, it has little inclination to remain "aligned with U.S. interests" in the region. In fact, we may be witnessing a classic "tipping point," a moment when Washington's efforts to dominate the Middle East are definitively deep-sixed.
The client state that the Bush administration has spent so many years and hundreds of billions of dollars creating, nurturing, and defending has shown increasing disloyalty and lack of gratitude, as well as an ever stronger urge to go its own way. Under the pressure of Iraqi politics, Maliki has moved strongly in the direction of a nationalist position on two key issues: the continuing American occupation of the country and the future of Iraqi oil. In the process, he has sought to distance his government from the Bush administration and to establish congenial relationships, if not an outright alliance, with Washington's international adversaries, including the Bush administration's mortal enemy, Iran.
The past eight years really have been one long demonstration of the intersection of malevolence and incompetence. Heckuva job, guys, and it only cost a few trillion dollars and a million dead bodies. Meanwhile, the typically low-info American public has begun warming up to John McCain's promise to continue down this exact path, because the James Dobson-approved Phyllis Schlafly clone he picked for VP is sassy. Which is about par for the course.
"Imagine waking up on the Socotra Island and taking a good look around you (let's say your buddies pulled a prank on you and delivered you there, and lets also assume that you don't have any hangover from abuse of any substances). After a yelp of disbelief, you'd be inclined to think you were transported to another planet - or traveled to another era of Earth's history. The second would be closer to the truth for this island, which is part of a group of 4 islands, has been geographically isolated from mainland Africa for the last 6 or 7 million years. Like the Galapagos Islands, this island is teeming with 700 extremely rare species of flora and fauna, a full 1/3 of which are endemic, i.e. found nowhere else on Earth."
Dark Roasted Blend has a bunch more photos of the weird Socotran landscape.
What do you get when you cross your church youth group and Devo?
Via.
Would it be inappropriate to give this guy the traditional "break a leg" good luck wish before a performance?
(via)
Um, wow. That I could never hope to dance as well as a one-legged man is bad enough. But then there's Dave Toole.
Take notice, America. John McCain and Sarah Palin think your church is lame, and Jay is right: they are either profoundly ignorant or despicable liars. I know which one I think they are.
McCain was sometimes maudlin, sometimes rambling, but always, inevitably, boring. it's unfortunate, really. Set speeches are just not his thing. His strengths lie elsewhere, mostly in an artificial image of a maverick, which really means everyone who's an establishment Republican in DC now despises him even more than they used to after this convention.
Why should that be? Because McCain is openly running against them. Does that mean he's really not Bush II? Of course not. With the pick of Sarah Palin, McCain's told the world he's more conservative than anyone feared, and if he wins, he'll do everything he can to appoint Supreme Court justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas, overturn Roe v Wade and restart the culture wars and re-fight the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and by the sound of the speech last night any other war he can get his hands on. He wants a base election not because he believes in it, but because he will do anything, anything, to win, including sell his soul on live television to the religious right. This is a man that puts ambition over country and over family, and it was as plain as the humorless and mean-spirited speeches throughout the convention.
But he didn't have the guts to choose Joe Lieberman, the guy he wanted, so he took the Governor of Alaska, who's made a splash, but has done nothing to prove her qualifications to stand next in line to a 72 year old who doesn't radiate health. In doing so, he's appeased the social conservatives and exposed his naked ambition. People know that. The voters understand it. The party of Lincoln can't fool all of the people all of the time.
So this man who has been a creature in and of Washington for decades, who voted with Bush 95% of the time, who supported him on Iraq and on the economy, now wants to convince the country that the problem is Republicans (yes, we know that, Senator), and so therefore the solution is - wait for it - Republicans. Riiight.
It's hard to overstate just how awful McCain's delivery was last night. He looked older and more tired than ever, and his laundry lists of the same old Republican same old were hardly the stuff of inspiration or even passable competence. He said again and again that he'd change Washington, but Washington is exactly what he and his party have made it, so he never says exactly *how* he's going to change it, aside from charter schools and more oil drilling. And the fact that "more offshore drilling" was the biggest applause line of the night just goes to show how divorced from reality the entire Republican Party is now. They're a joke—a sick, unfunny joke—but nobody on that side of the aisle seems to be in on it.
So, after signing on enthusiastically to every policy of the worst administration in American history and having that not quite pan out, McCain has now hitched his wagon to the fundamentalist Christian right's rising star, hoping that will pull his pathetic, worn-out ass across the finish line. As most of you know, stopping the wack-job religious right from getting anywhere near the levers of power is really my single issue when it comes voting time, and John McCain just demonstrated as plainly as possible that his "maverick" image is pure marketing bullshit. He's a pathetic, little man who will say anything and suck up to anybody in order to become president. He has no principles he isn't willing to toss overboard. This has always been my opinion of John McCain, and yet part of me is still a little sad to see it so brazenly on display. He knows he's up there peddling nonsense and destroying what little of his image and integrity remains, and the discomfort is plain on his face.
He couldn't have made himself look any smaller last if he had tried. It has been a long journey transforming himself from war hero into a clown, but that journey is finally complete. All he's missing now is the big shoes and a squirting flower.
