Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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Update: Also, Athenae's response to Roger Cohen's execrable mistakes-were-made apologia is spot on:
I really think I hate this about our pundit class more than anything:
To some degree, words failed us all in the aftermath of 9/11, a time of fear and disorientation. Journalists did not meet the challenge of holding the executive branch accountable, politically and morally, in the run-up to the Iraq war. Such failures, it is true, were not gross manipulations of the law in the service of inhumanity, but they were failures nonetheless. And they carried a human price.
So I'm wary of the clamor for retribution. Congress failed. The press failed. The judiciary failed. With almost 3,000 dead, America's checks and balances got skewed, from the Capitol to Wall Street. Scrutiny gave way to acquiescence. Words were spun in feckless patterns.
Well hey, so long as everybody screwed up, it's all fine! So long as there wasn't a single voice raised in opposition to what was done, so long as we didn't shout down anybody who had a different idea of things, so long as nobody who spoke up against this bullshit was punished, drummed of public life, called a traitor on national television or demonized for daring to opine that instituting a regime of torture was pretty fucking stupid, so long as we are all equally complicit in this there's no need to punish anybody. Because if it's all of us, then it's none of us really, and isn't it funny how that always works out so beautifully?
Right. I'm sorry if it makes Roger Cohen and so much of the rest of the country uncomfortable to be told that they were and continue to be nothing more than good Germans, but they need to hear it and hear it loudly. All the way up to Pennsylvania Avenue.
Boo fucking hoo. I'm particularly fond of this:
"You can't live in New York and have kids and send them to school on $75,000," he continues. "And you have the Obama administration suggesting that. That was a very populist thing that Obama said. He's being disingenuous. He knows that you can't live in New York on $75,000."
Median household income in New York City: $38,293. These assholes should be grateful they aren't being hunted for sport.
Via.
A (photo) Graphic Novel depicting the life and times of lime man.
Be sure to click through the set and read the captions.
Remember this guy from the yay-yay-bomb-Iraq-liberals-suck demonstrations?
Sure you do. And yesterday's ridiculous teabagging parties drove home the point yet again that this country desperately needs to increase education spending.
Photo Synthesis is a new blog dedicated to science photography that will feature a different blogger-photographer each month. The first is Alex Wild, an entomologist whose insect galleries at his main website are really spectacular as well, and whose full-time blog is Myrmecos.
Female phorid flies are attracted to fire ants swarming over a disturbed mound or foraging along a trail to food. They hover over ants looking for a preferred individual. (Each phorid species has a particular size range of fire ant workers which it prefers.) When the hapless victim is chosen, the phorid darts in, injects an egg into the ant's body, and explodes away at warp speed. The attack takes a fraction of a second and leaves the ant partly paralyzed and disoriented for a minute or so before she staggers off to join her sisters!
The injected egg develops in the ant's thorax until after about ten days the ant dies as the larva moves into the ant's head. The head falls off and the larva eventually pupates in the safety of the hard chitin shell that once housed the ant's jaw muscles and brain. Ant pieces are tossed on ant trash piles or middens and adult flies emerge from pupae about 45 days after the original attack. That's the direct effect of mortality that these decapitating flies impose on ants.
Plenty more fascinating stuff at all of the links.
Great picture from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
"This particular picture shows a region in the southern mid-latitudes of Mars, just west of the Hellas Basin, a vast impact depression 2700 km across. On the left are two large mesas, flat-topped hills. As the wind whips around them, it blows sand into those long, linear dunes called seifs. The seifs themselves can break up and form the horseshoe-shaped dunes called barchans. I imagine that given time, and a hefty budget, this is what Salvador Dali's beachhouse property would look like."
Detail close-ups are at the link. Also, this post from The Planetary Society about the recently selected Europa Jupiter System Mission (NASA page) is worth a read.
Wall Street Salary Caps Drive Away Assholes
Experts Warn of 'Douchebag Drain'
The National Review's editorial on the looming menace of gay marriage really should be read in full to appreciate the sheer magnitude of dumbassery on display in one brief column, but I'd like to just focus on the intro.
One of the great coups of the movement for same-sex marriage has been to plant the premise that it represents the inevitable future. This sense has inhibited even some who know perfectly well that marriage is by nature the union of a man and a woman. They fear that throwing themselves into the cause of opposing it is futile — worse, that it will call down the judgment of history that they were bigots.
Of course, it is futile and history will judge those who opposed it as bigots. But this latter concern is particularly striking from the editors of a magazine that, not so long ago, published op-eds like this:
The central question that emerges--and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal--is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes--the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.
Well, at least they've stayed philosophically consistent over the years.
TAR HEELS! Guess we gotta clear some space for another banner. And the icing on the cake? They let up enough in the second half to ensure that the 1990 Duke squad kept the record for the biggest blowout loss in a title game.
How's it feel to look
A motherfucker dead in the grill
And tell him "I told you"?
The soap opera Guiding Light will run its final episode on September 18th. This means nothing to me since I've never watched it, but I was surprised at just how long the show has been airing.
CBS has announced that after 72 years and more than 15,700 episodes, Guiding Light, the longest-running soap opera on TV, will air its last show on Sept. 18. A press release issued by the network doesn't give an explanation for the cancellation, but many believe that the show's low ratings (hovering at 2.17 million) are to blame. The release also doesn't specify what program might take the place of Guiding Light, which started as a radio serial in 1937, but a talk-show would be a logical replacement.
Seriously? Seventy-two years? Wow.
