Internal Monologue

I really hope Starz and Netflix work out their differences and come to an agreement. For their sake, more than mine. If people can't get their video legitimately, that will just bolster the illegal methods. Really, BitTorrent clients are not that hard to use (or so I've heard), and the more people figure that out, the worse it will be for people who produce and distribute video content and hope to charge money for doing so. Have they learned nothing from the music industry?

Internal Monologue has long been an advocate of this : A national movement aimed at sidelining the Electoral College in presidential elections got a big boost Monday when Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation adding California to the list of states supporting the drive. Brown's signature makes California the ninth state to sign on to the effort, which would hand the electoral votes of all participating states to the presidential candidate who wins the most votes nationwide. Currently, California's 55 electoral votes go to the person who wins the most votes in the state. Note that this law only kicks in if states with a majority of the electoral college votes have a similar law. The Electoral College is a national embarrassment and needs to be sidelined. It is a vestige of anti-democratic forces that have no legitimate place in today's polity. This is a great way to get around the EC without amending the Constitution. The latter would be very difficult to do, becau...

...when Google pays $12.5 billion dollars for Motorola , primarily to use its portfolio of patents in lawsuit wars. This is a lame-ass state of affairs and doesn't benefit anyone except lawyers and patent trolls.

The basic point of this TED talk is that at-risk children are woefully under-capitalized in our society. Early childhood intervention provides the public a fantastic rate of return that any venture capitalist would jump on immediately. This is exactly the sort of thing that will help our society be strong, and unfortunately it's exactly the sort of thing that gets cut, because the constituents lack political power.

Here's a chart that shows what dollar value various government agencies assign to a human life when doing their cost-benefit analyses. Via Yglesias . Some commenters reacted negatively to the very idea of cost-benefit analysis and human life. I guess my reaction to that is: "Grow up." Yes, it seems heartless and cold-blooded to place a dollar value on human life. But any safety decision we make (requiring seat belts, helmet laws, disease prevention, etc.) implicitly places a dollar value on human life. Indeed, many government policy decisions (health care, war, whether it is more important to fight unemployment or inflation) make an implicit statement about the value of human life. I think making those implicit statements explicit can help us make more just decisions.

The Oatmeal . A sample:

The main fault line in American politics these days is not between liberal and conservative. It's between conservative and bat-shit crazy. Conservatives have been raising the debt ceiling for years. Now suddenly right-wingers want to take the world economy hostage by threatening not to raise it. This is crazy, and weakens America. Thank you conservatives, for speaking out against this nonsense : Sane conservative economists recognize that not raising the debt ceiling on August 2nd would be a disaster. Sane conservatives understand that the ratings agencies will lower our credit rating if we won’t raise the ceiling, and that we have almost $500 billion in maturing treasuries that we need to roll over in August alone which, as UBS argues , is a problem [...]

If members of Congress think like partisans who want to capture the White House, then the smart strategy for them is to refuse to do whatever it is the president wants. The content of the president’s desire is irrelevant. But the more ambitious his desire is, the more important it is to turn him down. After all, if the President wants a big bipartisan deal on the deficit, then a big bipartisan deal on the deficit is “a win for President Obama,” which means a loss for the anti-Obama side. When Obama didn’t want to embrace Bowles-Simpson, then failure to embrace Bowles-Simpson was a valid critique of him. But had Obama embraced Bowles-Simpson, then it would have been necessary for his opponents to reject it. That’s why now that Obama has a position well to the right of Bowles-Simpson, his opponents are still against Bowles-Simpson. - Yglesias

[I]f you’re interested in labor and working conditions, you’ve got to be interested in full employment. Full employment gives workers meaningful leverage. Mass unemployment gives it all to the bosses. In strict dollars and cents terms, I think everyone is better off with prosperity than with sluggish growth. But in terms of power , mass unemployment is a boon to bosses. - Matthew Yglesias Amen. If the market value of a human being's labor is shitty, people will be treated like shit by their employers. If someone can say, "Take this job and shove it!", that's real power for the worker. If an employer can say, "I've got 30 people lined up ready to replace you.", that's real power for the employer. Everything else is fiddling at the margins. I'd take 4% unemployment and free agency over 10% unemployment and labor union backing me up any day of the week. The Federal Reserve's job is to keep both unemployment and inflation low. Low unemploymen...

This is a good thing: For sheer cynicism it’s hard to top McConnell’s latest bright idea , which is essentially to pass legislation that will give the Obama administration the power to raise the debt ceiling, subject to a 2/3rds over-ride by Congress. The practical effect would be to raise the debt ceiling while allowing Republicans to vote “against” doing so with impunity. Yes, it's a cynical ploy to make Obama look like a bad guy for raising the debt ceiling (to pay for a budget that Congress passes, of course). But it's a total cave on all the policy concessions they were trying to extort from Democrats by holding the economy hostage and threatening to let the US go into default. I'm glad to finally see some movement on this.

The song doesn't start right away, but it's pretty hilarious.

Tom Tomorrow pretty much sums it up.

I forgot where I took this from; I apologize.

xkcd does Hofstadter . A favorite topic of Internal Monologue .

Remember when I said OpenFeint was hiring ? Well, we're hiring even more now . We were recently acquired by GREE, a large and profitable Japanese social networking company. And they want us to grow. Fast. And they have given us a lot of money to do so. Exactly how much is confidential, but it's a lot. If you ever wanted to get into the mobile gaming/social networking universe, now would be a good time. Even if you don't match a job description exactly, I'd encourage you to apply if your overall skills are good. The job I got hired for is actually very different than the one I applied for.

My evil plan is to seduce a seduce a woman and lure her back to my house. Once it is clear she is coming home with me, I'd jokingly toss out the classic "Perhaps you'd like to see my etchings?" line. When she is at my house, I'd actually show her some etchings. And all the etchings would be of Rick Astley. MOOOHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

Here's some geekitude for yall: There's also...Portal Kombat!

It's not a lot of beef, but the process does use some animal products. Here's the link .

...then maybe I'd do this: http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/money_making_scheme/

This place is trying to hire like crazy . Here's a list of openings: Current Openings Business Development Senior Business Development / Developer Relations Manager Engineering Android Engineers (multiple positions) Big Data Software Engineer Build and Release Manager Javascript Engineer (multiple positions) Lead Platform Engineer MySQL Guru Product Manager - Analytics QA Manager QA Mobile Engineer QA Server Engineer Ruby on Rails Engineers (multiple positions) Senior Product Manager Software Engineering Manager - Mobile Software Engineering Manager - Server Sr. IT Systems Administrator Web Developer Back-End Marketing Graphic/Web Designer Sales and Marketing Intern Visual/UI Designer Web Developer Operations Sales Engineer Lots of good things: friendly people, free food and drink, mobile gaming social networking and e-commerce. And a big kickback to me if you tell them you heard about it through me!

Celebrating five years of shouting into the ether. Thanks to all my readers an commenters!

I don't suppose the folks at the Pentagon remember that Homer's "The Odyssey" takes place over a period of ten years as the hero struggles to get back home after participating in a decade-long war.

Things in Libya are moving so fast, the Pentagon doesn't even have time to deploy its PR hacks : There wasn’t any press briefing Friday at the Pentagon, even though a third simultaneous war is about to commence. That’s a pretty strong indication that the military doesn’t know what the goal is, either. So, what are our objectives again? Protect civilians from Qaddafi, I guess. For how long? At what cost? What happens if Libyan civilians start needing protection from the rebels? How come the leaders of Yemen get to kill their civilians? And Bahrain can import Saudi troops to crack down on their own dissidents? The lesson seems to be that as long as you curry favor with the US, you can oppress your citizens all you want. It seems as though we're attacking Qaddafi because we can, not because he is more evil than other dictators in the world. A little honesty about our actual motives would be refreshing.

According to this post , we've started firing cruise missiles at Libyan air defense sites. This is an act of war, and since Congress has not declared war, it is clearly unconstitutional and an abuse of executive power. The UN cannot declare war on behalf of the United States. I hate to say it, but there are now clear grounds for impeaching Obama. Would it have been so hard to get authorization from Congress first?

The war has started for the French : L’aviation française a ouvert le feu à 17h45 sur un véhicule militaire libyen et l’a neutralisé, indique le ministère de la défense français. Un demi-heure plus tard, ce sont trois véhicules supplémentaires qui ont neutralisés dans la région de Benghazi, indique le ministère de la défense. My translation: The French air force opened fire at 5:45 pm on a Libyan military vehicle and neutralized it, said the French Defense Minister. Half an hour later, three more vehicles had been neutralized in the Benghazi region, said the Defense Minister. The French headline uses the word "blindé" to describe the vehicles, which I think means "tank," but I'm not well-versed in French military terminology. The important thing to notice here is that attacking tanks means there's a lot more going on than just a "no-fly zone." This is direct ground support.

My friend Josh, who is well to the right of me on the US political spectrum but whose opinion on military matters I respect, offers these thoughts: If you're asking if imposing a no-fly zone is technically feasible, I think that a review of official and unofficial statements will demonstrate that the answer is yes. Technologically we have the capability, and in terms of force commitments if you look at how the forces in Afghanistan and Iraq are broken down, you will see the Air Force and Navy have a far lower fraction of their combat power committed to those theaters than the Army and Marine Corps. So if you look at the cautionary statements from people close to the department of defense, I think you will observe that they either state or at least fail to deny that enforcing a no-fly zone is feasible. The concerns that have been raised from that quarter appear to mostly focus on 1) realizing that enforcing a no-fly zone necessarily involves extensive suppression of ai...

No mention of asking Congress for a declaration of war, which absolutely should be done if we're getting involved. Shooting down planes, invading airspace, attacking radar installations, etc. is certainly an act of war. I'm tired of our executive branch declaring wars for us. It's blatantly unconstitutional. Obama Said no ground forces will be used, which is reassuring. But what if air power isn't enough? Are we willing to lose to Qaddafi if air power can't defeat him? How many innocent Libyans are going to be killed by our bombs? Sullivan's second round-up of Libya reactions here. MSNBC was reporting that loyalist forces were continuing to attack despite the unilateral cease-fire order. I think that cease-fire was a sham.

Thomas E. Ricks : Finally, what do we do when Qaddafi puts anti-aircraft batteries in mosques, orphanages and chemical weapons depots? Yeah. This war thing is not so simple.

(Additional Libya news resource: NPR's Libya live blog ) Josh Rogin on the Foreign Policy website: Several senators emerged from the briefing convinced that the administration was intent on beginning military action against the forces of Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi within the next few days and that such action would include both a no-fly zone as well as a "no-drive zone" to prevent Qaddafi from crushing the rebel forces, especially those now concentrated in Benghazi. "It looks like we have Arab countries ready to participate in a no-fly and no-drive endeavor," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told reporters after the briefing. Asked what he learned from the briefing, Graham said, "I learned that it's not too late, that the opposition forces are under siege but they are holding, and that with a timely intervention, a no-fly zone and no-drive zone, we can turn this thing around." Sounds like war to me. Greenwald points out that it's totally unco...

These are the days of miracle and wonder, these are the days when we live in a ridiculous science fiction world: Last year I wrote about how Craig Venter and his colleagues had inscribed a passage from James Joyce into the genome of a synthetic microbe. The line, “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life,” was certainly apropos, but it was also ironic, since it is now being defaced as Venter’s microbes multiply and mutate. Turns out there’s an even weirder twist on this story. Reporting from SXSW, David Ewalt writes about a talk Venter just gave. Venter recounted how, after the news of the synthetic microbe hit, he got a cease-and-desist letter from the Joyce estate. Apparently, the estate claimed he should have asked permission before copying the language. Venter claimed fair use . Man, do I wish this would go to court! Imagine the legal arguments. I wonder what would happen if the court found in the Joyce estate’s favor. Would Venter have to pay...

It seems to me that there are two questions that are getting mushed together here: Should outside countries intervene in the Libyan civil war, protect the rebels, and help them topple Qaddafi? Should the United States be one of those countries? It seems to me that there's a better case for European and Arab states to intervene than for the United States to intervene. This is in their sphere of influence, isn't it? If the United States is justifying intervention on humanitarian grounds, then why aren't we in Ivory Coast, Congo, Burma, and other such places?

I'm trying to figure out what is going on with Libya and American intervention there. Here's what I've figured out so far: Here's a nice zoomable map of Libya so you can figure out where these places are. The UN has authorized war on Qaddafi . The rebels are currently not doing well and forces loyal to Qaddafi are pushing towards the rebel stronghold of Benghazi. There was a lot of fighting in the past 24 hours or so around the town of Adjabiya, which is about 90 miles to the south. Loyalist forces have moved onto the road from Adjabiya to Benghazi . A lot of the bloggers I've read think that it is not in the US interest to get into a war in Libya, and that we aren't thinking about the intermediate and long term consequences of military intervention there. These include Abu Muqawama from Center for a New American Security , Information Dissemination , Marc Lynch , and Andrew Sullivan , who has been particularly vehement in his opposition. Thomas E. Ricks blogg...

Is the United States going to war in Libya, or are other people? Sullivan thinks we are , but commenters at this Balloon Juice post think the authorization is so that other countries like France, Italy, and Arab League countries can do this. As much as I don't like Qaddafi, I don't know who the rebels are or what kind of government they would install. I hope for the best, but I do not think US military intervention would be a good idea. Given our current global military footprint, I think we should be getting out of places, not getting into places.

Talking Points Memo : "What do I say to the idea that this [the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act] is a wedge issue? I say 'Hallelujah,'" Frank told reporters. "The fact that we've now evolved to the point where the Republicans are complaining about the fact that we introduced this bill because it causes them political problems is a great sign of progress. It used to be the other way around." I think when we look back on this era, we'll be amazed at how quickly opinions changed on this. Now let's get started on ending drug prohibition... Bonus Quote on this topic from DougJ on Balloon Juice : A lot of talk about how marriage equality is now an issue that works in Democrats’ favor. You know what that means. It means Republicans give up on the issue and start looking for some new shiny “cultural issue” to distract people with. The theocons who profess to care deeply about the “sanctity of marriage” will go gentle under that go...

Best 2012 roundup I've seen is here , just updated. Still pretty wide open, and lots of potential nominees haven't even declared yet. I still think that threading the "right-wing enough to get the nomination, but centrist enough to win the election" is going to be a hard needle to thread for the Republicans. Of course, all that could change depending on the economy and world events.

Ben Smith and others have remarked on the fact the Republican presidential hopeful Haley Barbour is considering reducing American presence in Afghanistan and finding some budget savings in defense. While details are sketchy, he appears to be scouting out a position to Obama's left on these issues. I'd love to have some allies on the right wing for re-evaluating our presence in Afghanistan and casting a skeptical eye on defense spending. And maybe this will prompt Obama to get out faster. More on the GOP and Afghanistan here .

Apparently, Al Qaeda doesn't like Qaddafi either . They seem a bit Johnny-come-lately about it, though. I think the recent popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere have really stolen Al Qaeda's thunder. These uprisings have led to throwing out the rulers of Egypt and Tunisia, seriously threatened the regime in Iran, started a civil war in Libya, and sparked protests throughout the region. What have the suicide bombers done recently? I hope dissatisfied people of the world come to find that cultivating contacts with Al Jazeera TV and learning how to harness social networking is far more effective than bomb-making and suicide-glorifying. Now that I think of it, our own foreign policy establishment might consider the limits of the use of violence. On the other hand, it looks like violence will determine whether Qaddafi stays in power or not. This might be Al Qaeda's route back to relevance.

Don't be an penny-wise, pound-foolish environmentalist: support urban density . If you block the development of additional housing in your urban neighborhood, it is unlikely that any amount of carpooling or energy efficient appliances will offset the negative impact of your encouraging more people to live in suburbs. Now if I can just get OpenFeint to see the virtues of telecommuting once a week, I can have a positive impact on my time use and mitigate somewhat the environmental damage of my long commute.

"It's perfectly reasonable to argue that the problem here isn't that nukes are genuinely more dangerous or more expensive than other forms of power generation, it's that other forms of power generation aren't forced to pay for their own externalities. Charge them properly for the carbon they emit and the mercury they spew and the particulates they make us breathe and they'd be just as expensive and just as dangerous as nuclear power. I think there's a pretty good case to be made for that. Nonetheless, until we do start charging properly for all those externalities, nukes just aren't going to be cost effective and nothing is going to change that. The answer, then, is to force coal and oil and gas power plants to pay for their externalities properly. However, our most recent attempt to make even modest progress toward that goal went down in flames and the Republican Party has made it crystal clear that they'll fight to the death to keep...

The State Department spokesperson who criticized the conditions under which Bradly Manning (the person suspected of leaking to WikiLeaks) is being detained without charges was forced to resign. Greenwald : On Friday, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley denounced the conditions of Bradley Manning's detention as "ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid," forcing President Obama to address those comments in a Press Conference and defend the treatment of Manning. Today, CNN reports , Crowley has "abruptly resigned" under "pressure from White House officials because of controversial comments he made last week about the Bradley Manning case." In other words, he was forced to "resign" -- i.e. , fired. So, in Barack Obama's administration, it's perfectly acceptable to abuse an American citizen in detention who has been convicted of nothing by consigning him to 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement, barring him from ...

Dude, this is awesome : Four new species of brain-manipulating fungi that turn ants into "zombies" have been discovered in the Brazilian rain forest. These fungi control ant behavior with mind-altering chemicals, then kill them. They're part of a large family of fungi that create chemicals that mess with animal nervous systems. [...] Of the four new species, two grow long, arrow-like spores which eject like missiles from the fungus, seeking to land on a passing ant. The other fungi propel shorter spores, which change shape in mid-air to become like boomerangs and land nearby. If these fail to land on an ant, the spores sprout stalks that can snag ants walking over them. Upon infecting the new ant, the cycle starts again. What could be cooler?

"In the short-term, you can 'save' a lot of money by ignoring national infrastructure (just imagine how much money Haiti 'saved' before their earthquake!), but when that infrastructure crumbles, you're screwed. It's a foolish strategy, doomed to failure." - Jed Lewison on Daily Kos

This large image is making the rounds. I wish I had a large, poster-sized printout of it. I wish it included role-playing games and computer games, but hey, it can't include everything.

This post (HT: Favalora on FB ) matches much of my early experience with the Apple ][e: As it happens, this computer came with the BASIC programming language pre-installed. You didn’t even need to boot a disk operating system. You could turn on the computer and press Ctrl-Reset and you’d get a prompt. And at this prompt, you could type in an entire program , and then type RUN , and it would motherfucking run. I can understand why Apple wants to make their products into something of a "walled garden" where the user is shielded from all that technical stuff. But it is sad that to program these days you generally have to jump through more hoops than you did thirty years ago. On the other hand, Apple has been great about helping new developers like me market their software. It might be harder to get started programming, but it's much easier now to go from programming to selling Apps.

John Ellis at Business Insider does better what I did here .

I haven't done much original political commentary recently. But here's a thought I'd like to share: Every single potential 2012 Republican presidential nominee seems to have some fatal flaw that would prevent them from securing the nomination. But the Republicans do have to nominate somebody , so at least one of these fatal flaws is not, in fact, fatal. Let's go through some of the potential candidates: Mitt Romney: Right now, Romney's fatal flaw is that his signature achievement as governor of Massachusetts is the passage of a health care bill that is quite similar in structure to the Affordable Health Care Act that has been demonized by the American Right. He's tried to talk about how his bill was different, and how what works for one state won't work for others, how it's constitutional for a state to impose an individual mandate but unconstitutional for the federal government to do so, etc. But I don't think Republican primary voters are buying it...

I'm looking forward to this: The Game Begins I think an HBO series is a better way to adapt many novels than a movie. Movies have to leave so much out of a nove. And the next book coming out in July .

Old-school gaming blog Grognardia commemorated the 3rd anniversary of the passing of Gary Gygax by inviting readers to submit samples of "Gygaxian" prose. Here's a classic one commenter submitted from D3: Vault of the Drow : The small "star" nodes glow in radiant hues of mauve, lake, violet, puce, lilac, and deep blue. The large "moon" of tumkeoite casts beams of shimmering amethyst which touch the crystalline formations with colors unknown to any other visual experience. The lichens seem to glow in rose madder and pale damson, the fungi growths in golden and red ochres, vermillions, russets, citron, and aquamarine shades. (Elsewhere the river and other water courses sheen a deep velvety purple with reflected highlights from the radiant gleams overhead vying with streaks and whorls of old silver where the liquid laps the stony banks or surges against the ebon piles of the jetties and bridge of the elfin city for the viewers' attention.)...

Chris Hayes via Kevin Drum : There are two numbers that go a long way toward explaining it. The first is 4.2. That’s the percentage of Americans with a four-year college degree who are unemployed....So while the overall economy continues to suffer through the worst labor market since the Great Depression, the elite centers of power have recovered. For those of us fortunate enough to have graduated from college—and to have escaped foreclosure or an underwater mortgage—normalcy has returned. The other number is 5.7 percent. That’s the unemployment rate for the Washington/Arlington/Alexandria metro area and just so happens to be lowest among large metropolitan areas in the entire country. ....What these two numbers add up to is a governing elite that is profoundly alienated from the lived experiences of the millions of Americans who are barely surviving the ravages of the Great Recession. As much as the pernicious influence of big money and the plutocrats’ pseudo-obsession w...

What a useful concept! Gorbachev and de Klerk should start running seminars on how to be overthrown without destroying your country. And Gaddafi should sign up. Not that the former Soviet Union and South Africa are in great shape, but at least they didn't bathe their nations in a sea of blood trying to hold on to power. And that should count for something. Democracy, for all its faults, creates a mechanism by which government can be influenced even when it doesn't want to be influenced. Which is of course when it most needs it. You need the bottom-up feedback. This goes for all kinds of organizations, from nations to living organisms. Listen to your body (politic). Or it may use Facebook to plot your downfall.

via Michelle Gamboa on Facebook :

"I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." - Jay Gould , 19th century railroad baron, via Balloon Juice .

Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, goes to a star-studded pre-Oscar party with his wife: Nobody knew us, and nobody would ever remember us the next day. So we could go whole retard quite openly, and brazenly just ask people "You look really familiar, who are you?". Which we did. With some discreet google image searches when we could guess, and just wanted to verify it ("John Cusack or Paul Rudd?"). Everybody seemed to take it in good cheer. We interrupted David Spade chatting up Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis (that's what Tove says, I was oblivious - it's those famous geek social graces again. I told her I'm sure I'd have noticed Natalie Portman and that she can't possibly have been there, but whatever), and Tove pissed off Warren Beatty by asking his name not just once, but twice . Awesome. I wish he wouldn't use the word "retard" in that pejorative way, but that's a minor quibble.

Here's a great writeup of an annual Turing Test competition from the perspective of one of the human confederates: In two hours, I will sit down at a computer and have a series of five-minute instant-message chats with several strangers. At the other end of these chats will be a psychologist, a linguist, a computer scientist, and the host of a popular British technology show. Together they form a judging panel, evaluating my ability to do one of the strangest things I’ve ever been asked to do. I must convince them that I’m human. Fortunately, I am human; unfortunately, it’s not clear how much that will help.

Politico 44 via Sullivan : SHIFT ON GAY MARRIAGE: President Obama has decided that he won’t “defend the constitutionality” of a part of the Defense of Marriage Act that seeks to bar gays from marrying, the Justice Department announced. The change in the White House’s position means that the administration will no longer argue for that part of the law in two lawsuits filed in the Second Circuit challenging it. Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement Wednesday that Obama “has concluded that given a number of factors, including a documented history of discrimination, classifications based on sexual orientation should be subject to a more heightened standard of scrutiny.” “The President has also concluded that Section 3 of DOMA, as applied to legally married same-sex couples, fails to meet that standard and is therefore unconstitutional,” Holder said. “Given that conclusion, the President has instructed the Department not to defend the statute in such cases.”.

Here's the story from his own website : My most recent accident was becoming a well-known humanist. Somewhere along the line a nice group of people, the Secular Coalition for America, sent a form requesting information from those of us who support separation of church and state. In response to a question about belief you could check one of three boxes. I checked the one that said I didn’t believe in a supreme being. Then there was a blank to answer the question, “What religion do you associate with?” I wrote, “Unitarian” and sent it back to them. (What I didn’t know is that there was a reward offered to find high-ranking nontheist politicians and that some guy out in Hayward, California, was hustling to make $1,000 by turning me in. I met him later at one of my town hall meetings, and he wouldn’t share the money with me. I told him, “That’s not fair!”) I love his story about how he became involved with the Starr-King Unitarian Seminary: Returning to accidents, I then became an acci...

"Being in a good relationship is a risk factor for becoming a parent." -Thomas Bradbury, a father of two and professor of psychology at UCLA From this article: http://nymag.com/news/features/67024/index3.html

This is pretty sick: A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of "justifiable homicide" to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus—a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. The Republican-backed legislation, House Bill 1171 , has passed out of committee on a nine-to-three party-line vote , and is expected to face a floor vote in the state's GOP-dominated House of Representatives soon. The gulf is wide. I don't know how to bridge it.

In our employer-based health care system, we give bosses the power to take away the health care of their worker's children. That's hardly conducive to an equitable power relationship between workers and employers. It's positively Dickensian. I hope future generations shudder in horror at the barbarity and inequity of our practices.

According to this brief article, two astrophysicists think they found evidence of a gas giant in our solar system much bigger than Jupiter: The name of the planet is Tyche. The scientists are John Matese and Daniel Whitmire, from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. According to them, this colossus is hiding in the Oort Cloud—the asteroid beehive that forms the outer shell of our home system, one light-year in radius. They claim that data already captured by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer proves its existence. It only needs to be analyzed... over the next two years.

I present for you digby's reaction to Obama's proposed budget: The main problem with all this, of course, is that he willingly signed a tax cut extension for the wealthiest people on the planet just two months ago even as they are making money hand over fist as it is, so any talk about "shared sacrifice" rings just a little bit hollow now. If he wants to be honest about this and admit that he's catering to spoiled plutocrats and Wall Street Demi-Gods because he truly believes that he needs to sacrifice ordinary Americans on the alter of their egos, that's one thing. But blowing smoke about how this hurts him just as much as the college kid who has to drop out in a terrible labor market --- but he's willing to make the sacrifice and so should we --- well, it is too cynically cheap for words. It is pretty sick that even the Democratic budget proposals involve requiring so much sacrifice from people who haven't gotten a good deal recently. And ...

One thing that's always bothered me on radio phone-in shows and radio interviews is the difference in audio quality between those in the studio and those talking on the phone. The audio quality on phone connections is really awful. How come Moore's Law doesn't apply here? A quick Google search is unsatisfying: I find a bunch of posts basically say that better quality takes more bandwidth and is therefore more expensive. Duh! But if you look at the bandwidth per dollar I get from my Internet/data connection, and graph it over the last 30 years, you'll see a nice improvement. Not as nice as I feel it ought to be, but probably the right O(n) . Phone service? Flat as far as I can tell. Certainly the fact that my phone is mobile now makes it better than phones I had in 1990, but audio quality seems worse due to the compression algorithms now used. The other day, I was listening to an interview NPR was doing with an Iranian activist who was avoiding phone use to remain anonym...

(via Anthony on Faceboo k ) Here's great WSJ article on the elaborate lengths protesters had to go not to be stymied by the hated Egyptian internal security forces: They chose 20 protest sites, usually connected to mosques, in densely populated working-class neighborhoods around Cairo. They hoped that such a large number of scattered rallies would strain security forces, draw larger numbers and increase the likelihood that some protesters would be able to break out and link up in Tahrir Square. The group publicly called for protests at those sites for Jan. 25, a national holiday celebrating the country's widely reviled police force. They announced the sites of the demonstrations on the Internet and called for protests to begin at each one after prayers at about 2 p.m. But that wasn't all. "The 21st site, no one knew about," Mr. Kamel said. I didn't know the game was so elaborate, and that the security forces were so good at preventing demonstrations...

UPDATE: Mississippi governor and potential Republican presidential candidate Haley Barbour won't denounce this effort . This is not the first time Confederate general and early KKK leader Nathan Bedford Forrest has appeared on Internal Monologue . Now a group wants Mississipi to make available Nathan Bedford Forrest license plates . Dear Sons of Confederate Veterans (the group putting this forward): Please don't do this. Please don't ask to do this. This is a really bad idea. How do your black neighbors feel about this? Why would you want to do that to them? Do you know what the KKK means to people? What kind of hatred and murder and terror it perpetrated? Egad, are you trying to justify all the negative stereotypes people have about The South? Are there not plenty of other ways to honor your heritage and your ancestors? Even if you're just trying to piss off people like me, can you do it in a way that doesn't evoke lynchings and lend a patina of approval to racist...

Well, we should mark this day: a nation rose up and (mostly) peacefully threw out its dictator. Or caused such a ruckus that the army forced him out. Or prompted the vice-president to tell the people he resigned (we haven't actually heard Mubarak himself say he's resigning. We got the news from his vice-president). Anyway, everyone agrees he's gone, which effectively means it's true. People in Egypt are ecstatic. Time to celebrate. And time for the US to stop backing his ilk. Let's hope this is the first step to something much much better. But even this step is so important: the idea that if you infuriate the people so much, you can be removed from office. So so so important to have that baseline level of accountability. Even dictators, monarchs, and theocrats who aren't replaced by something better will have to spend some of their energy keeping people happy, if only to preserve their own power. I had no idea that such possibilities were available to Tunisia an...

...the gods themselves contend in vain. Internal Monologue's Quote of the Day is Adam Gopnik via Daily Dish on the stubbornness of stupidity: In a practical, immediate way, one sees the limits of the so-called “extended mind” clearly in the mob-made Wikipedia, the perfect product of that new vast, supersized cognition: when there’s easy agreement, it’s fine, and when there’s widespread disagreement on values or facts, as with, say, the origins of capitalism, it’s fine, too; you get both sides. The trouble comes when one side is right and the other side is wrong and doesn’t know it. The Shakespeare authorship page and the Shroud of Turin page are scenes of constant conflict and are packed with unreliable information. Creationists crowd cyberspace every bit as effectively as evolutionists, and extend their minds just as fully. Our trouble is not the over-all absence of smartness but the intractable power of pure stupidity, an...

Since I can't cut-and-paste text from iTunes App Store reveiws, I'm posting a screenshot. Click to enlarge. Thanks, Scott! I'm so glad you find it useful.

Note to US cable companies: Could you please carry Al Jazeera English? All the blogs I'm reading say it's got very good coverage of Egypt. I probably still won't buy your product, but there's a lot of demand for it at the moment. You shouldn't have let the Bush administration's vilification of it prevent you from carrying it.

Here's an article on teen pregnancy in an urban school in Connecticut that made me react from a position of social conservatism (something which I am prone to do on occasion): Urban teachers face an intractable problem, one that we cannot spend or even teach our way out of: teen pregnancy. This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch. I hasten to add that American teen pregnancy rates are actually down in recent years (though higher than those of our peer nations), according to this post and other statistics I remember hearing. So let's keep that in mind before getting into a moral panic around young women's sexuality. But I'm going to do so anyway. I guess it's the normality of it that is shocking to me. There are cultures, right next door to my privileged l...

I just finished reading The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates. He's one of my favorite bloggers , and inspired my recent interest in the American Civil War. It's a great memoir of a spacey black kid growing up in West Baltimore with a complicated family. His dad is a former black panther librarian and publisher hell-bent on keeping his many children from being swallowed by the perils of the street. The memoir is saturated with hip-hop references, which I mostly completely miss, and classic Dungeons & Dragons references, which of course I get completely. He's a great writer and blends street and geek as well as anyone I've read. I highly recommend it.

I think for most people, the preview of this movie will be enough. But it's on Netflix streaming. Just saw it. A bit long, but often riveting. And hilarious. However nerdy you are, there are probably people nerdier than you. And this movie is about those people: live-action fantasy role-players with real armor and foam swords. With mass battles and an entire political system. They make this D&D player feel downright conventional. But I share all their impulses. Game on, dudes.

Any sufficiently advanced advertising is indistinguishable from content. -me, riffing on Arthur C. Clarke Alas, Shawn came up with it first .

Ed Glaeser via Friedersdorf : The sad fact from an environmental point of view is that building in the San Francisco Bay is a great thing to do. There's an incredibly temperate climate, which means that the carbon emissions for households there are among the lowest in the country. It's got plenty of access to great public transportation. This is the area that should be building a great deal of housing. But when you make it difficult to build there, you make sure that there's housing being built instead in the suburbs of Houston, where you'd need a lot of energy to create a pleasant manmade environment, and there's a lot of driving. I don't see what's "sad" about this fact. And I suspect zoning laws and people's desire to keep their neighborhood as close to a suburban ideal as possible are more responsible than environmental regulations for lack of density. But I'm not familiar with the development landscape here in the Bay Area. I d...

I think Obama has been right to be circumspect about commenting on the demonstrations in Egypt until now. Forceful statements by the US could be used by Mubarak to paint the opposition as agents of a foreign power. Sometimes the best move is just to shut up and let things take their course. We should remember that we can't control events everywhere all the time anyway. But since the violence against the protesters has increased , I think the time has come for the US to publicly throw Mubarak under the bus, or at least let him know publicly that we are willing to do so. Now that it appears as though gangs of pro-government thugs are being unleashed on demonstrators, our reticence is looking less like deference to Egypt's internal political processes and more like looking the other way while "our guy" oppresses his people to stay in power. Obama should also let the Egyptian military know that if it values its cozy relationship with the United States (and all that milita...

Conor Friedersdorf : There is no way to win the War on Drugs. There never has been. There never will be, short of becoming an authoritarian state. We can face up to that fact, or continue ceding liberties and conveniences one by one, for nothing. Down with authoritarianism. Liberation is not just for Egyptians. When it comes to controlling substances, our state's willingness to use violence in support of puritanism is galling. Regulate it. Tax it. Punitively tax it, if necessary. Discourage its use. Offer treatment programs. But let's stop funding drug lords and the prison industrial complex, please. Especially since none of this violence and intrusion seems to put a dent in addiction rates, or even lower the prices all that much. Decriminalization won't be perfect. It may even suck. But I bet it will suck less than the status quo.

Ta-Nehisi Coates : Well-meaning neophytes often suggest that if people of different "races" screwed each other, we'd all look the same, and our problems would disappear. Unfortunately, such magical thinking underestimates the abiding complexity of human thought.In fact people of different "races," have been screwing for over two millenia. Our response--over the past 500 years--has been to invent more races.

I missed this when it came out two years ago:

I actually got this right. Maybe that's a clue!

If you're a US soldier in Afghanistan, and you limit yourself to 3-4 hours a day : The soldiers’ coping behaviors included a range of activities, like reading, listening to music, using Facebook and working out. But what proved to be the single most protective activity — the habit that best bolstered the soldiers’ mental resilience — was spending three to four hours a day playing videogames. A regular daily gaming habit corresponded with the overall lowest levels of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, suicide attempts or domestic violence. And yet — and here’s where we see too much of a good thing — for soldiers playing more than 28 hours a week, there was a steep decrease in the protective benefits of gaming. Indeed, 40 hours a week or more was predictive of significant psychological distress. This is some good news, after hearing about this depressing finding : Recreational sitting, as reflected by television/screen viewing time, is related to raised m...

The red-on-black look of the old interface was generating a lot of negative feedback, so I switched it to something more conventional.

photo by Christopher Irion Announcing a performance of Dust Storm : Art and Survival in a Time of Paranoia by Rick Foster with images by Chiura Obata. Performed by Zachary Drake by special arrangement with AEA. Tuesday evening April 12th 8pm Sonoma State University Warren Auditorium. Free and open to the public. There will only be about 50 additional seats available (the others will be taken by students). I'll post more information as I find out more.

Ezra Klein on Republican efforts to undermine the credibility of the CBO: But beneath it is something more insidious: an effort to discredit the last truly neutral, truly respected scorekeeper in Washington. The facts don't support the particular case the Republicans want to make, so they're trying to take down the people who supply the facts. But once that's done, it can't easily be undone. And the true loser will be the very thing Republicans claim to care most about: the deficit. If getting the CBO's seal of approval ceases to matter, then political parties will cease to try. That's when the "smoke and mirrors" will really begin: when bills just have to sound good rather than pencil out. When there are no skeptical budget experts sending legislation back to the authors with a note that says, "Sorry, not there yet." When policy debates are decided by who can yell the loudest rather than who can write the best bill. I am deeply ...