Internal Monologue

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 week

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 dro

...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 torture

"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