Internal Monologue

Here are some photos from Bell Labs in the 1960's : HT: Gregg Favalora on Facebook .

Looks like it might happen . If you want to gum up the Senate, you shouldn't be able to just phone it in. You should have to show up. And lets get rid of things like anonymous individual holds on nominations, too.

Yes, that Pat Robertson . Let sanity prevail. End the drug war. It won't be perfect. But it will be so much better than the status quo.

from xkcd , of course. Stockings are LIFO .

"Starting in the early 1980s, up through well into 2009, the individual mandate was an eminently respectable Republican position , embraced by conservative policy wonks and leading Republicans. Since then, virtually the whole of the conservative movement has coalesced around the position that the individual mandate is not merely misguided but actually unconstitutional, a fact conservatives somehow overlooked during the previous three decades. [...] Conservatism's sudden lurch from supporting (or tolerating) the individual mandate to opposing it as a dagger in the heart of freedom is a phenomenon that merits not intellectual analysis but psychoanalysis." - Jonathan Chait

Heard a story on NPR this morning about a domestic tourism lobby group that is seeking to increase the number of foreign visitors to the United States. My thought was, "Thank God there's a moneyed interest with a financial incentive to push back on all the intrusive security measures we're undergoing." I hope it helps. It cannot be said enough: There will never be perfect security. We will be attacked. Sometimes attackers will succeed. There are tradeoffs between security, appearance of security, convenience, civil rights, and fostering a welcoming atmosphere. I think we are spending way too many resources on the first two.

from Sand in the Gears via Sullivan

Not that Karzai's desires should necessarily guide US foreign policy, but when you get quotes like this (via Yglesias ): As he [Karzai] spoke, he grew agitated, then enraged. He told them that he now has three "main enemies" - the Taliban, the United States and the international community. "If I had to choose sides today, I'd choose the Taliban," he fumed. you have to wonder what the heck we are doing there. The context of this discussion was Karzai's very understandable desire to go ahead with a ban on private security firms: what head of state wants armed mercenaries controlled by foreigners roaming around their country? I certainly wouldn't. I just don't see what vital American interest is served by our propping this guy up. Yes, the Taliban would be worse. But would they be worse enough to justify what we're sacrificing and the evils we're inevitably committing in order to prevent them from overthrowing Karzai's government?...

"if you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold". - blue_beetle on MetaFilter

photo from floydwall.com On Wednesday December 8 I saw Roger Waters and his band perform The Wall at HP Pavillion in San Jose. Here is a "review," which will consist of a number of disjoint thoughts and points in no particular order: Overall the show was excellent. It's the sort of concert that is more than just the album played louder. It is a "show". I'm glad I got to see it. I felt I got my money's worth for the pyrotechnics in the opening number "In the Flesh?" My wife jerked in her seat when the bombastic opening blasted out. Strangely, there were no more fireworks after that. But really you get an entire concert's worth in the first three minutes. The physical Wall itself was used very effectively as a projection screen: at times, it appeared as though the wall was opening, crumbling, transforming, etc. It was huge, dwarfing the performers. They really do build it during the first half of the show. Seeing the crew do it did have a bi...

" In Washington, thinking is constrained by the routine experience of being unable to achieve the clearly possible. In Silicon Valley, it's unconstrained by the routine experience of being able to achieve the seemingly impossible." - Ezra Klein

Image from kottke.org Here's a wonderful occasion for nerdly argument: The blog mightygodking.com is posting D&D alignment charts for various TV shows, with each box filled with a character from the show (using the AD&D through 3.5 alignment system, of course). There's The Wire , Mad Men , Thirty Rock , and others. I think the desire to fill each alignment box produces an artificial constraint, but otherwise the project is wholly admirable (HT: Miguel via Facebook). To kick off debate, I assert that within the moral universe of The Wire , Omar clearly falls on the "good" portion of the good-evil axis. He has a code of honor, he cares for others, and he's the only person who doesn't swear. He even takes his grandma to church. Yes, he robs people, but "It's all in the game": he preys only upon drug dealers. And yes, I agree that the current Betty is chaotic evil, but that's just because it seems like the writers hate her at the moment....

Jan 23 2013: Wow, after two years I finally fix the crash caused by the sound. New version 1.3 should show up in iTunes store any day now. UPDATE: It's available now! And I made it free! Feb 2 2011: Five-star review: Thanks, Scott! Glad it's working for you. Jan 28 2011: Version 1.2 live in App Store. Jan 26 2011: Version 1.2 submitted with new interface, mute button. Jan 25 2011: Coming for version 1.2: New interface look , mute button. Jan 6 2011: Version 1.1 is available in the App Store! Thanks for the quick turnaround, Apple. Jan 5 2011: Version 1.1 submitted to App Store. UPDATE Jan 4 2011: The dual sliders are done and dice pools can now go from 0 (though you hardly need an app to roll zero dice!) through 99. I'm just going to do some testing for stability and then I'll submit the update. UPDATE Dec 20 2010: Thanks to everyone who has purchased SDR ! I'm glad there's interest. I've implemented "rule of 10" functionality wher...

While driving around this early morning with my son, I heard a segment on NPR that made me scratch my head. It was about couples in their twenties who decide to raise a child together, but who do not get married because they feel marriage is too big a commitment at this stage in their lives: Andrew Felices, 26, and Mellissa Giles, 27, are this new face of the American family. They've been living together since before their son, A.J., was born. He's 2 1/2 now, and he shrieks gleefully as he sprawls on the basement floor with dad, building a train track. The couple bought a cozy condo in Frederick, Md., last summer. A home, a child — but neither is in any rush to tie the knot. "We're still young," Mellissa says. We're enjoying the time as it is." I was rather puzzled by this. The implication is that having and raising a child together is less of a commitment than getting married. This is shocking to me. In my moral universe, the s...

This is pretty cool: a doorknob that gives you a preview of what's in the room beyond. Of course, sometimes the point of a door is to prevent people from knowing what is going on on the other side. So I'm not sure how popular this thing is going to be. (Why does my brain insist on parsing "doorknob" as "doork-nob"?)

This ( http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2009/10/20nissan.html ) is the funniest thing I've read in quite some time. An excerpt: The next thing I'm going to do is carve one of the longer gourds into a perfect replica of the Mayflower as a shout-out to our Pilgrim forefathers. Then I'm going to do lines of blow off its hull with a hooker. Why? Because it's not summer, it's not winter, and it's not spring. Grab a calendar and pull your fucking heads out of your asses; it's fall, fuckers. HT: Mark Oppenheimer ( http://markoppenheimer.com/front-page/its-decorative-gourd-season-motherfuckers.html )  Pardon the lack of hyperlinking: I'm emailing this from my iPhone and the default email client doesn't support embedding hyperlinks. 

...I'd try to blow up a plane by smuggling explosives up my butt. Then the TSA would insist on sticking their fingers up everyone's butts. With one single act, I would ensure the anal molestation of ever single person who wanted to fly in American airspace. For America-hating terrorists, what could possibly be better than millions of infidels being forcibly sodomized by their own domestic security forces? Osama bin Laden would have me assassinated out of pure envy. Of course I'd deliberately fail to blow up the plane. Because if I blew up the plane, then the TSA might not figure out that the explosives were up my butt. And that's the whole point of the "attack." [UPDATED] I'm not the only one thinking about bombs up the butt : Colleagues of an Islamist terrorist named Abdullah Asiri detonated a bomb inserted up his rectum last year by cell phone in an unsuccessful attempt to kill a top Saudi counter-terrorism official. Three experts I spoke to this weeke...

I'm going to take the introduction of full body scanners (and subsequent backlash ) to re-iterate my contempt for the orgy of airport security theater our in which our government is currently indulging. I am so tired of surrendering my privacy, dignity, tax dollars, and (most precious of all) my time to the enactment of meaningless rituals of humiliation that do nothing to make me safer and keep people in a state of fear and paranoia. Even if these things work like they're supposed to, people wanting to blow up planes will just figure out how to smuggle things in their bags, and all the cost and humiliation will be useless. And even if these things do make us safer, is it worth it? I'm going to come right out and say it: Let the terrorists blow up a plane or two a year. It's not a big deal. It's only a big deal because people get hysterical about it. People should be concerned about heart disease, stroke, and cancer. And maybe automobile accidents, suicide, and drow...

...which is illustrated nicely in this chart from the Washington Post via digby . It shows the difference between the Democratic plan to extend the tax cuts (only for those families making less than $250,000) and the Republican plan. The Democrats do not fight for the interests of the not-super rich nearly as hard as I want them to. But there is a difference between the two parties.

It is hard to write about the nonchalant acceptance of our torture program because it seems Washington does not have a conscience capable of being shocked. Having created an institutionalized, bureaucratized, formalized program of cruelty is just blandly accepted, as though it is some force of nature that we were powerless to prevent or even mitigate. - danps at Open Left I think the slide to acceptance of torture is one of the great moral failings of our time. Others are the continuation of the drug war, the wage stagnation of the past couple decades, and paralysis in the face of climate change. At least with the latter three, there do seem to be political forces working to mitigate those problems, even if they aren't winning. On the torture issue, it seems it's just Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald shouting impotently. Torture is a war crime. Our government authorized torture. Nothing is happening, because people can't think of their fellow Americans as torturers....

"Right now you can be pro-gay and married to a prominent Republican politician. But you can't be pro-gay and a prominent Republican politician." - Dan Savage

Kevin Drum on the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction representations: To put this more succinctly: any serious long-term deficit plan will spend about 1% of its time on the discretionary budget, 1% on Social Security, and 98% on healthcare. Any proposal that doesn't maintain approximately that ratio shouldn't be considered serious. The Simpson-Bowles plan, conversely, goes into loving detail about cuts to the discretionary budget and Social Security but turns suddenly vague and cramped when it gets to Medicare. That's not serious. http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/11/deficit-commission-serious [I sent this from my iPhone, so please excuse any excessive brevity or typo graphical errors.] --Zachary Drake

Yes, you can actually play the game .

I think that qualifies for Internal Monologue's headline of the day : You could call it the surprise du jour: A popular food on Vietnamese menus has turned out to be a lizard previously unknown to science, scientists say. What's more, the newfound Leiolepis ngovantrii is no run-of-the-mill reptile —the all-female species reproduces via cloning, without the need for male lizards. Single-gender lizards aren't that much of an oddity: About one percent of lizards can reproduce by parthenogenesis, meaning the females spontaneously ovulate and clone themselves to produce offspring with the same genetic blueprint. Maybe species hunters should pay more attention to restaurants. I suppose a cloned species would have culinary advantages: you could develop very specific cooking procedures and not have to worry too much about individual variation.

Nicaragua accidentally invades Costa Rica and blames Google Maps for the error. Someone at Microsoft is smiling: Perhaps the most embarrassing thing for Google, though, is that competitor Microsoft has the border definition right on its maps. If Nicaraguan commander Pastora had used Bing Maps , the entire red-faced incident might never have happened. You know that disclaimer those maps often print ("to be used for planning purposes only, make sure the road is still there, etc.")? Maybe they need to include some legal boilerplate about "this map not to be used for invasion planning purposes."

Fascinating article about 4-year old craniopagus twins : They are the rarest of the rarest of the rare. Tatiana and Krista are not just conjoined, but they are craniopagus, sharing a skull and also a bridge between each girl’s thalamus, a part of the brain that processes and relays sensory information to other parts of the brain. Or perhaps in this case, to both brains. There is evidence that they can see through each other’s eyes and perhaps share each other’s unspoken thoughts. And if that proves true, it will be the rarest thing of all. They will be unique in the world. They have been drawing international attention, both public and scientific, since before their birth. Dr. Douglas Cochrane, a neurosurgeon at Children’s Hospital, is part of the team that has been watching over them since they were in the womb. Last year he conducted tests in which one twin looked at an object while he measured the brain activity in the other. “Their brains are recording signals from th...

The methodology is a bit crude (a simple search for the string "we broke up because") but the results are fascinating. Peak breakup times : post Valentine's Day and pre-Christmas.

You really don't need much more election analysis than this.

Vote. I did. Please don't vote Republican. I voted for California Proposition 19. I understand there are problems with it, but ending the drug war is probably one of the best things this country can do for itself domestically. I am so ready for the prohibition era to be over. Vote no on California Propositions 23 and 26. They are not good. Back to searching for a job...

"There are just a lot of people who don’t care that you’re nuts, as long as you hate the same people they do." - Amanda Marcotte

  Greenwald : The United States of America in one short scene, from Politico : MILITARY OFFICERS TOUR JPMORGAN -- JPMorgan Chase yesterday hosted about 30 active duty military officers (across all branches and agencies) from the Marine Corps War College in Quantico, Va.  The officers met with senior executives, toured the trading floor and participated in a trading simulation.  They discussed recruitment, operations management, strategic communications and the economy.  Aside from employees thanking them for their service as they passed by, they also received a standing ovation on the trading floor.  Said one officer after a senior JPM exec thanked him for his service: "We promise to keep you safe if you keep this country strong." You can sleep tight knowing that JPMorgan Chase is keeping your nation strong, and that military officers view JPMorgan Chase as guardians of the nation's strength.

Oh great, now we've tortured a badly wounded child soldier into confessing to an attack on American soldiers. Sullivan : I don't know how anyone who cares about the integrity and moral standing of the United States can absorb the full details of this case and not be profoundly ashamed. To prosecute a child soldier, already nearly killed in battle, tortured and abused in custody, and to imprison him for this length of time and even now, convict him of charges for which there is next to no proof but his own coerced confessions ... well, words fail. The thing that no one seems to be discussing is: how is attacking an American soldier on a battlefield while you are being bombed and shot at by Americans a crime? We didn't prosecute individual soldiers in World War II just for battling and killing Americans. We treated them as prisoners of war. Now Omar Khadr was not part of any regular army. But is what he did different? If Al Qaeda captured an American operative and trea...

IF YOU CAN READ THIS, THEN NOT ENOUGH TIME HAS ELAPSED SINCE MY DEATH TO ELEVATE WHAT YOU ARE DOING FROM VANDALISM TO ARCHEOLOGY.

...but some of my friends are. Here it is: The Map of Non-Monogamy .

Ta-Nehisi Coates : The streets are like any other world--we all assume an armor, a garment to suit that world. And indeed, in every world, some people wear the armor better than others, and thus reap considerable social reward. In the main, it's been easy for me to discard the armor of West Baltimore, because I wore it so poorly. I was never, as they say, truly built for the streets. And still, even I struggled to take it off. But I know others who were masters. (My own brother, for instance.) Inducing them, and those in between, to change class, to trade their plate for robes, to trade the broad-sword for a spell-book, is the real work. The whole piece is really good. Nothing harder than changing habits. Especially habits that worked , that indeed were essential to your survival. I'd love to be able to re-optimize myself, spend my character points differently. But most of those points are already spent, and many of them were spent before you even realize that you ...

xkcd captures it perfectly:

The real Mark Zuckerberg on what The Social Network got wrong: ...It's such a big disconnect [...] the way that people make movies think about what we do in Silicon Valley - building stuff - [...] they just can't wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things . I think this is true: I think ambitious nerds are ambitious nerds because they are nerdy and ambitious, not because they got dumped. We all like a love story, but some stories aren't love stories. Like Lord of the Rings . That ain't a love story. And I found it annoying when a love story was shoe-horned in there. Apparently, the founding of Facebook wasn't a love story either: Zuckerberg has had the same girlfriend since before Facebook's founding. But I actually liked the (failed) love story in The Social Network . I thought it worked. I thought it provided a nice contrast to the Sean Parker character, who no longer thought about the crush that (...

Someone has created an index of all of Ta-Nehisi Coates' American Civil War writing . If you want to see what got me on my recent Civil War kick, here it is.

Attach an HD camera to a weather balloon, use an iPhone to track it via GPS, add some hand warmers to keep the camera batteries from freezing, and a parachute to cushion the landing, and off you go! So many geek points. Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo .

This sentence, from Daniel Indiviglio's article on the Fed's plans to combat unemployment, jumped out at me and punched me in the face: [Bernanke] also mentions the possibility of the Fed providing additional communication on its plans to influence expectations. OK, let me get this straight: The Fed Chair mentions that it is possible the Fed might provide some communication on what it is planning to do to influence events? No, that would be too direct! The plan that it is possible they might provide some communication about would only be to influence people's expectations about events. How many steps removed from actually doing anything is this? Look, I understand that the Fed must be somewhat ambiguous in its statements because so much hangs on their decisions. But this is getting ridiculous.

A Sullivan reader : The recession isn't over; it's killing us. What's worse is that it appears to me that the American Dream isn't just, as punk rocker Ben Weasel put it, "an ugly fucking lie." The American Dream is nonexistent. When I see those who contribute nothing to society getting further and further ahead while my parents, whom I have seen work their asses off my whole life, drift further and further behind, I find that belief in the American Dream is like a belief in Santa Claus – a story told to kids to keep them in line. But as Margaret says at the end of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , we can make that lie come true. Indeed, one could define progressivism as a political effort to reduce the bullshit to truth ratio of the American Dream. I would say the story of America is the story of a nation struggling to live up to its own noble rhetoric. Right now, I'd say our political class is failing us in trying to make this vision of broad and increasin...

From the " cool but very creepy and potentially dystopian " file: Since Dec. 4, 2009, Google has been personalized for everyone. So when I had two friends this spring Google "BP," one of them got a set of links that was about investment opportunities in BP. The other one got information about the oil spill. Presumably that was based on the kinds of searches that they had done in the past. If you have Google doing that, and you have Yahoo doing that, and you have Facebook doing that, and you have all of the top sites on the Web customizing themselves to you, then your information environment starts to look very different from anyone else's. And that's what I'm calling the "filter bubble": that personal ecosystem of information that's been catered by these algorithms to who they think you are. 

Classical music as the audio version of a gated community : As a classical music lover, I’d like to believe that my favourite music has some kind of magical effect on people – that it soothes the savage breast in some unique way. I’d like to think that classical music somehow inspires nobler aspirations in the mind of the purse-snatcher, causing him to abandon his line of work for something more upstanding and socially beneficial. But I know better. The hard, cold truth is that classical music in public places is often deliberately intended to make certain kinds of people feel unwelcome. Its use has been described as “musical bug spray,” and as the “weaponization” of classical music. Am I a very bad person for being fine with this? After all, numerous bars and trendy stores directed at young people play music that's designed to keep old fogies like me out. Whenever I walk by an Abercrombie & Fitch, I feel like the music is basically telling me: "Fuck off...

HT: Paul Hogarth

Yglesias : Whenever I read reports about US government officials being frustrated by Pakistan’s cooperation in fighting militant groups, I always wonder what it is policymakers are expecting will happen. Our current policy, after all, is to give the Pakistani military a lot of aid that’s predicated on the existence of an Islamist militant threat. If the threat went away, the aid would probably dry up and even if it didn’t dry up it would be redirected away from military matters—we wouldn’t be interested in explicitly funding an arms race with India. When the Pakistanis give us a desultory effort it seems to me that we’re just getting what we paid for.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was a formidable Confederate cavalry officer during the American Civil War. After the war, he was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Such a figure ought to be reviled: this was someone who committed treason and rebellion in defense of the vile institution of slavery, and then went on to lead a domestic terrorist organization once that rebellion failed. Surely such a person would be considered a horrible villain! Surely people would be deeply ashamed that their ancestors were ever associated with him or his causes. Nope. Due to the weird mythologizing of Confederate figures that has taken place in the American imagination (and not just in the former Confederacy), there's actually a high school in Florida named after this guy. And black students go to this school (37% of the students are black, according the alumni site). I find it hard to imagine anything more sick and humiliating to do to one's African American students (or any American stude...

Tim Fernholz : According to the Federal Reserve Board's self-published guide to the Federal Reserve, the first duty of the central bank is "conducting the nation’s monetary policy by influencing the monetary and credit conditions in the economy in pursuit of maximum employment , stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates." This morning, I was watching a panel at the America's Fiscal Choices conference that included economists Paul Krugman and Martin Feldstein . Krugman proposed some kind of new Fed action to bolster the job market, and Feldstein replied that the idea would never fly, explaining that "within the Fed, they'd say that 'we don't do unemployment, we do price stability.'" It's not that Feldstein is wrong in assessing the response of Fed officials to demands for a more aggressive monetary policy -- that's the answer we've been hearing from the Fed for the past six months. The problem is that right...

Republican Senatorial candidate for Delaware Christine O'Donnell claims she is not a witch: How long before the Monty Python Holy Grail mashup hits the intertubes? Someone please do it... UPDATE: Here's the Monty Python sketch in question:

This will be so cool: In a long-anticipated ruling last week, the FCC adopted a regulation ( PDF ) that could dramatically improve our wireless devices. The rule offered a brand new and much-improved slice of the radio space for unlicensed use. The new frequencies are known as " white spaces "—the waves that were freed up when TV channels switched from analog to digital transmission last year—and unlike the garbage band, they're considered prime real estate. Radio waves on white-space frequencies can travel for miles, they're much better at penetrating walls and buildings, and they're capable of carrying lots of data. Tech observers say the new rules will lead to a new class of wireless devices known as "Super Wi-Fi." These new routers will be able to broadcast over very large areas—you could use a single device to bring Internet connections to an entire university campus, apartment building, or hospital. Anyone who's ever fiddled wit...

[click here for image] This is just awesome (except for the, you know, pain and injuries): Guests at a new hotel in Las Vegas have complained of receiving severe burns from a 'death ray' of sunlight caused by the unique design of the building. Due to the concave shape of the Vdara hotel, the strong Nevada sun reflects off its all-glass front and directly onto sections of the swimming pool area below. The result has left some guests with burns from the powerful rays and even plastic bags have been recorded as melting in the heat.

xkcd is fucking awesome:

This is our government, inflicting Orwellian nightmare shit on our prisoners: Even the physical design of the Guantánamo courtroom is shaped by the desire to conceal our own abuses. A soundproof glass wall separates the onlookers from the trial participants, so that the only way an observer can hear what is going on is through headphones with a forty-second delay. The reason, according to Denny LeBoeuf, an ACLU lawyer advising on the defense of several detainees, is “the Rule: detainees are forbidden from speaking about their torture.” Remarkably, the US government has declared “classified” anything that the detainees say about their torture, and has required the lawyers, as a condition of access to their clients, to keep secret all details of their clients’ treatment at the hands of their interrogators. But of course, the US cannot compel the detainees themselves not to speak of the unspeakable. The only way it can keep them from telling their stories is...

Apparently, the UN has appointed someone to be humanity's contact person for any alien intelligences encountered: The United Nations was set today to appoint an obscure Malaysian astrophysicist to act as Earth’s first contact for any aliens that may come visiting. Mazlan Othman, the head of the UN's little-known Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa), is to describe her potential new role next week at a scientific conference at the Royal Society’s Kavli conference centre in Buckinghamshire. (HT: Marion ) I'd totally love that job, but the risk of me betraying my species would be too great.

The "Stuxnet" malware is thought to be the latest in cyber warfare. Here's the Christian Science Monitor : Cyber security experts say they have identified the world's first known cyber super weapon designed specifically to destroy a real-world target – a factory, a refinery, or just maybe a nuclear power plant.  The cyber worm, called Stuxnet, has been the object of intense study since its detection in June. As more has become known about it, alarm about its capabilities and purpose have grown. Some top cyber security experts now say Stuxnet's arrival heralds something blindingly new: a cyber weapon created to cross from the digital realm to the physical world – to destroy something. Obsidian Wings has a good roundup of reactions and analysis. Note that this malware has probably already tried to do whatever it was going to do (best guess is that it was targeting some Iranian weapons plant), so it's not a big danger to you right now. But its implicat...

An interesting article on the use of color in popular logos on the web: The web landscape is dominated by a large number of blue brands... but Red occupies a large amount of space as well. What's driving this? You might want to say that carefully organized branding research and market tests were done to choose the perfect colors to make you spend your money, but a lot of the brands that have grown to be global web powerhouses, started as small web startups... and while large corporate giants with branding departments spend quite a lot on market research, user testing, branding, etc. Lots of the sites listed above got started with brands created by the founders themselves with little to no research into the impact their color choice would have. I once asked Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook why he chose blue for his site design... "I'm color blind, it's the only color I can see." ...and now 500 Million people around the world stare at a mostly b...

I agree wholeheartedly:

"The Washington ruling class is embodied by millionaire TV personality Andrea Mitchell, wife of Alan Greenspan, going on GE-owned MSNBC and announcing that it's time for ordinary Americans to "sacrifice" by giving up Social Security benefits (that she, of course, doesn't need)." - Glenn Greenwald

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2010/09/14/dude-wheres-my-quran/ I'm glad folks from my religious denomination, the Unitarian Universalists, were there to protest the burning. [I sent this from my iPhone, so please excuse any excessive brevity or typographical errors.] --Zachary Drake

The Onion nails it again: WASHINGTON—Members of the brilliant, highly trained, and dedicated team of elite professionals who work tirelessly behind the scenes to protect our nation and keep its citizens out of harm's way announced Tuesday that they do not exist. What gives me comfort is that there aren't any super villains either: All those terrorists plotting against us have to recruit from the same sea of mediocrity and self-interest that is the bulk of humanity. We're all just fallible humans muddling through. Fallible humans with a penchant for mythologization.

Folks, this is a much bigger event than the earthquake in Haiti or the Asian tsunami, but it isn't getting the attention of those disasters. Lend a hand if you can. I did this $10 donation by text to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. I'm not sure if that's the best way to give $10, and $10 is hardly an adequate response to such a huge catastrophe, but we should do something .

No, I'm not talking about Afghanistan or Somalia. I'm talking about Mexico , which seems to be losing its ability to keep the Drug Wars underground. I'm a lot more afraid of violent drug cartels operating just to our south than I am of insurgents and terrorists, most of whose objectives concern places half way around the world. We can (and in most cases should) withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, et. al. I don't particularly want to withdraw from our southern border, because I happen to live not all that far from it. With a more sensible drug policy, we could reduce a lot of this violence. Let's get one, please. I'm rather impatient with our politics, these days.

I haven't posted here for a while, but I do have to perk up and say that the current spate of Republican anti-Muslim rhetoric is really awful and frankly downright un-American (if by "American" we can mean a place that does not discriminate against people because of their religion.) Latest example from Tim Pawlenty (via Sullivan ): "I'm strongly opposed to the idea of putting a mosque anywhere near Ground Zero-I think it's inappropriate," he said. "I believe that 3,000 of our fellow innocent citizens were killed in that area, and some ways from a patriotic standpoint, it's hallowed ground, it's sacred ground, and we should respect that. We shouldn't have images or activities that degrade or disrespect that in any way." This just makes me sick. The presence of a mosque degrades or disrespects those who were killed in the World Trade Center? Really? Does it degrade the Muslims who were killed there? Does it degrade the community...

via Ezra Klein .

I just finished listening to the last of David Blight's lectures on the build-up to, fighting of, and aftermath of the American Civil War. I think it would be fair to say that this series of lectures transformed my understanding of American history, race relations, and politics. So much of what seemed baffling to me about my country now seems explicable, indeed even inevitable , given what happened in this country from 1861 to 1865, and then from 1866 through the rest of the 19th century. I did not realize how absolutely devastating the war was, particularly to the South. And then, after all that, for the nation to come together again within a few short years is both miraculous and hideous. Such a cataclysmic schism and subsequent rapid reconciliation could not possibly happen without a thousand myths, delusions, distortions, projections, and obsessions taking hold. And certainly not without a massive backlash and a lot of people being thrown under the bus (or to the back of it). ...

According to this chart , only 23% of people on OK Cupid who identify as bisexual actually send messages to both genders. OK Cupid identifies more interesting lies here , about height, income, and age of photos.

Here's a good writeup that captures some of what is frustrating about the recent Grant verdict.

Rock Fans Outraged As Bob Dylan Goes Electronica Given the number of genre and identity transformations he's undergone, I wouldn't be all that surprised.

From here .

If you're not one of the over 3 million people who has already seen this:

Republican Chair Michael Steele attacks the war in Afghanistan ! Bill Kristol is not happy about this. Sullivan hopes this starts a genuine debate within the American right about the war in Afghanistan. It's interesting how the partisan politics plays into this: Republicans have recently been the advocates of the more militarist approach to fighting terrorism, so one would expect the Chair of the Republican Party to support the Afghan war, as they did under Bush. But Republicans have been almost reflexively against anything Obama pushes forward, even things that Republicans recently advocated (e.g. Massachusetts-style health care reform, cap-and-trade CO2 reduction). Since Obama has identified himself more and more with the Afghanistan occupation (foolishly and immorally, in my opinion), it makes sense that Republicans would attack it. I might find myself with a strange set of political allies on this issue! My guess is that Michael Steele was following the second script (attack ...

I think this is a good expansion of the thinking about the financial crisis. Nobody in our current political discourse is asking questions like, "What is the current power relationship between capital and labor? What do we want that relationship to be? How would policies we are currently considering affect that relationship?" I'd like to see more of those discussions happening. (HT: Shailja Patel on Facebook )

This is the best slacktivist post in some time. I really think our political discourse regarding the economy is completely broken. The US can borrow money at extremely easy rates. Or just print more of it: inflation is extremely low to non-existent. We have a lot of unemployed people (myself included). We have a lot of things we need to do. Let's get to work, America. But due to the desire of the Republican party to punish people who are already suffering, and the over-representation our political institutions give them, we cannot do the obvious thing. This seems like Hooverism all over again. I am very angry, and very disappointed at the nonchalance with which the suffering of so many people is treated by our political class. And these aren't even people on the other side of the world. These our us . 9.3% unemployment is a crisis. And unlike the BP oil leak, we can do something about it.

Cuba embargo to take (welcome) hit today Good news . A congressional panel is poised to take the first step toward ending a decades-old U.S. ban on travel to Cuba and removing other hurdles to food sales to the Caribbean island, a senior lawmaker said on Tuesday. [I sent this from my iPhone, so please excuse any excessive brevity or typo graphical errors.] --Zachary Drake

Planet Earth is ruled by a species of chimpanzee in possession of both nuclear weapons and Abrahamic religion. We're doomed.

"Growing up, I was told of several key moments in British history: Trafalgar, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, and the 1966 World Cup final [vs. Germany]. The tone got extra reverent when it came to 1966." --Andrew Sullivan ( England just lost to Germany 4-1 )

This is a pretty cool but gross video of a giant spider crab crawling out of its shell: