U-Haul Hell

I wrote the following last night and saved it as a draft. It's a little messy but se la vie.

I'm drinking a beer and contemplating my infuriating day on hold. I was only calling to confirm my reservation because Mark and Kelley got surprized once by the bastards, and after hearing that kind of thing I wanna be prepared. I wasn't prepared enough apparently.

I wrote this to Mark somewhere in there...

-----Original Message-----
From: Benjamin Hartman [mailto:hartmbe@earlham.edu] Sent: Friday, June 30, 2006 12:15 PM
To: Whitaker, Mark
Subject: ohmygod

Hey Dude,
I'm currently on hold with fuckin uhaul. I called to confirm what I thought was my reservation and lo and behold, what I thought was my reservation time was not what they had. I bitched at the guy for 10 minutes and then I tried calling his superior. I was nicer to his super. This guy calmly said that I should call the "Traffic" dept of uhaul, noting that they will be rather busy today. I tried calling for 10 minutes and then got connected. I told the nice lady, "Sure" when she asked if I could go on hold, and there I rot. Going on 20 minutes now.

Fuck.

When I called the Brookline U-Haul place, they said my reservation was for 7:30 am to 3 pm. Definitely not enough time, nor the right time to wrangle helpers.

Sooo, here are what I think are our options, ranked in order of preferance.

1. I can get the same truck for a more amenable time tomorrow.
2. I can get a slightly smaller truck for a more amenable time tomorrow.
3. I can get either the same or smaller truck for Sunday, all day.
4. I cancel my reservation, and try to find something for tomorrow.
5. I run away and join the army, learn how to kill then track down evil with the barrel of a gun. Saving my last bullet for the chump who denied me my truck.
6. Take a bath in some toxic substance, obtain super strength/speed and move everything in an instant.

Actually, I like 6 more than 5, so I'd like to switch those.

There you have it.

And I'm still on hold.

Fuck.

I'll be giving you a call later on to see how you're doing.

Later,
B

Mark wrote back...

Whitaker, Mark wrote:

> That fucking sucks. Do you have any emails or other proof of the
> original time that you scheduled?

and I sent this at 2:25

-----Original Message-----
From: Benjamin Hartman [mailto:hartmbe@earlham.edu] Sent: Friday, June 30, 2006 2:25 PM
To: Whitaker, Mark
Subject: Re:ohmygodfckuhaul

I'm on hold again.

I just got done being on hold for 1/2 an hour, talked to someone for 2 minutes, made another call, and am on hold again. This shit is driving me crazy.

Long and short. The person I talked to before cancelled my reservation for the 26 foot truck, unbeknownst to me, and put in a request for a 17 footer at another location for Sunday. I thought I had to do this work and was not expecting her to do it for me. Since we had effectively changed our minds, we're again stuck with something we weren't expecting and now don't want. Did I say I hate uhaul recently? I hate uhaul.

I'm still on hold. I know they're busy, but so am I. I've spent the past 4 hours with a phone attached to my head when I was supposed to be productive.

grrrrrrrrrrr.
B

There you have it.

The Real Officer Barbrady

New post please

Dear Blog,
I'm sorry that I have neglected you. My attention span has degenerated to that of a coked up hummingbird, and you have suffered. I flutter to myriad excuses but none will do. All I can offer is penance. I, ... I can't finish this sentence. Not for grief, but for my affliction. And so I will leave you with something different.

I'm sorry Andrew, but if I see that "Is 'Peak Oil' Bunk?" headline one more time my eyes will explode from my head, and steam will shoot from my ears. I don't doubt that on some level, peak oil is indeed bunk (as hype equals bulshit, more often than not), but I can't bring myself to care after this long month. Its presence at the top of the page mocks me and my idleness and so it must be banished.

So blog, I will try to give you something, anything, to fill the space and let you know you are wanted, if still somewhat unloved.

This is a shout out to Mark, whose fame has spread through the wildfire that is YouTube. His banjo magnificence has been recognized by some 3,000 eyes, give or take the odd cyclops or three-eyed mutant. Come, watch him again. And when you're done, register to YouTube so that you may vote upon his greatness with the coveted 5-Star rating. His banjo-ing should be noted for what it is, as the greatest that site has to offer.



and when you're done you should watch these cats.

Is “Peak Oil” Bunk?

NPR continues beating one of their favorite chicken-little memes to death this week: Peak Oil is upon us. Like other things they expect their audience to just accept, such as being in the midst of a global warming crisis and more diversity is always better, they breathlessly report that the world may soon “grind to a halt” due to rapidly declining oil reserves with little pretense that there is a possibility that things…might…just…actually…be…okay.

Now all the breathless talk about crisis is good for book sales and affirming the egos of hybrid driving NPR contributors but I think one will find that actually following the money gives the most accurate picture of the situation. Big shocker: Public Radio’s perspective has little bearing on actual market behavior.

"My guess is virtually 90% of the oil industry is assuming that $70 oil is not going to last more than a few years," according to Adam Sieminski, the chief energy economist at Deutsche Bank (nyse: DB - news - people ). He guesses that most oil companies are projecting crude will fetch $40 a barrel plus inflation over the long-term.

On that score, the oil companies appear to be virtually alone. Wall Street continues churning out predictions of $100 oil. Hedge fund managers are pouring millions into oil futures. And peak oil theorists, who argue that humans have produced nearly half the oil that there is to produce, and that therefore prices will shoot up enough to bring economic growth to a halt, are enjoying their heyday.

"The people most alarmed about future supply are not the people running oil companies," says John Felmy, the chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute, an industry trade group in Washington.

In the past, only 10% of oil discovered worldwide ever made it to market, says Jerry Taylor, the director of natural resource studies at the Cato Institute in Washington. But thanks to the march of technology, that portion has climbed to 35%; a move to 40% would create a big increase in new supply. Peak oil theorists have ignored the impact of these technological advances when they have predicted for years that world oil production was nearing its peak. And that is the reason they keep getting it wrong.

Now I think it’s entirely possible that a couple of oil companies could just be behaving stupidly by not investing in greater supply but since the potential reward is so huge if oil prices stay fixed at current levels or greater it seems unlikely to me that all of them would just sit pat unless they had solid reasons for doing so. Either way a lot of people are going to look very stupid in the next few years.

Colbert Roundup

I had forgotten that Steven Colbert was going to do the White House correspondents Dinner, so was pleasantly awaiting it's appearance on You Tube. But, in case you'd rather read about it, Editor and Publisher has a pretty good review of the performance. Oh, and here are some responses to the review, in the forms of letters to the editor (of Editor and Publisher). Funny shit all.

Update: I missed this one (below) which is actually the begining of Colbert's roast-y type talk. This clip gets a little uncomfortable toward the end when the C-Span folks hold a shot on the President for what seems like a minute, and you see nothing remotely like a smile on his digitized face. Watch out Steve.

Excelsior!!!

THIS IS THE DUMBEST, MOST ECONOMICALY UNSOUND POLICY I THINK I’VE EVER SEEN SINCE CARTER.

What happens when you reduce the cost of a commodity? Demand goes up. What happens when demand goes up? Prices rise. This $100 will achieve absolutely nothing for consumers and will achieve nothing other than cause a brief blip in oil company's revenues. For once can these idiots just stop meddling and let the market do it's job?

Lateness

I fucking hate lateness. More specifically, I hate the mindset that causes lateness (as opposed to lateness caused by unforeseen external forces, which I excuse). I hate it when concerts start an hour and a half later than advertised. I hate that everyone knows that concerts don’t start on time and act accordingly. I hate it when people decide not to go to a party at the time it’s supposed to begin specifically because they don’t want to be there before everyone else arrives. I hate it when people ask me to meet them somewhere, I show up at the agreed upon time and they are consistently never there, but always “about to leave” or “on their way”. I hate that honoring time commitments has often made people consider me to be obsessive, as if merely trying to keep one’s word is somehow an extreme overachievement. Arrgggh!

global warming stuff

Hey, I just finished my global warming debate. Andrew, I used some of your old arguments about bias in academia to show how a consensus among scientists doesn't neccesarily mean they're right, so thanks for the help!

My conclusion after the whole thing...human-induced global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions is probably part of the reason that temperatures are increasing, but not all or even most of it. The consequences are really hard to predict, but will probably be some degree of rise in sea levels, obviously increased temperatures, and generally increased rainfall. If people can continue to develop better technologies, we very well may be able to adapt to the worst of it. Some species of plants and animals will suffer a lot, and some will migrate to better climates, and some we might be able to help with the aforementioned technologies.

Because the system is so complex and hard to predict, though, it may be much, much worse. So, the question is, which scenario should we use for policy decisions. The worst case, the best case, or something in-between? I think it may be wiser to make policy based on the worst case scenario, especially if this involves investments in alternative energy, which would have lots of other benefits too.

Good Movie. Bad Movie?

So last night we saw Thank you for Smoking. It made fun of cigarette companies and nanny state liberals at the same time. Yes, cigarettes are bad and by extension so are the companies that make them, but if you are an adult with a fully functioning brain, by now you should know that. It was great and I strongly recommend it.




But before the movie the trailer for an Inconvenient Truth was shown. Its ninety-four minutes of supercilious, Al Gore hyperbole about Ga-lobe-al Wharm-ang. Oh lord does it look bad. But of course I must not love the earth or children and enjoy betraying it with my 21mpg car. I agree that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions aren’t helpful to the environment but this is really as far as the scientific consensus goes. Anything else is just reckless, and arguably agenda driven speculation. Is Mount Kilimanjaro losing it’s snowcap a sign of the apocalypse we deserve? Nope and Nope. This was discredited over 2 years ago as caused by regional deforestation causing the air to be more dry, but it does make a pretty picture. Is Antarctic melting a new phenomenon? Nope it’s been melting at roughly the same rate for over 7,500 years, but I’m sure Al enjoyed the imagery of drowning all the Floridians who didn’t vote for him in 2000. Was global warming responsible for what happened in New Orleans? Hardly. Don’t get me wrong, I think the fewer carbon emissions the better, but I’m not willing go chicken-little over what appears to be an admittedly undesirable but highly manageable trend. The real tragedy is the exaggerated claims that are made in this movie do nothing to move the debate any more to the mainstream where it belongs. Joe six-pack isn’t going to trade in his Yukon for a Prius because of some sad, sad polar bears or the rantings of some self-righteous activist scientists who were never too good at math. Climatologists should stick to their day jobs and focus on getting the actual science right and leave assessing the true consequences of what they find to people with some actual perspective; economists.

UPDATE: The Beeb of all places questions the "overselling" of climate change.

FLASHBACK: This puts the movie into context: "Arlie Schardt, who was Mr. Gore's communications director during the 1988 presidential campaign, to warn the candidate in a memo, 'your main pitfall is exaggeration.'"

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg sums up my previous points better than I.

Sigh.

My feelings toward our President have tempered over the years to the point where I don't actively dislike the man (however much I disagree with his decisions), and sometimes when I'm feeling charitable, I empathize with him. But every now and again I come across something (usually video) that makes me irate for no real identifiable reason. I found this video via Sullivan who got it from Wonkette who found it on YouTube, and there's plenty wrong with what I see here. He dodges the question, while remarking about dodging the question. He gives that pat "I delegate" remark, which is itself a dodge. He can't take a serious question seriously. He sounds like a moron when he giggles like that, and I'm sure, much more.

Mark said it reminded him of Rickey Gervais's David Brent from "The Office". I agree with that, but there's something else here that bothers me... I'm just at a loss to describe/pinpoint it. What do you think?

worst commercial ever

Okay, maybe it’s not the worst ever, but since we’re in the process of buying a house it seems like it. If I was getting ganged up on like that guy in the commercial I would rip that phone off the wall and shout “peddle your wares somewhere else real estate harpy!” whether the phone was still plugged in or not. As it stands now I still want to scream “what are you doing you pussy? All the specialness in the world doesn’t pay your property taxes!” to that poor simpering bastard of a husband.

guilty funny

So apparently the kid in the video had his life ruined when he decided to film himself pretending to be Darth Maul with his school’s camcorder and just left the tape on a bookshelf for anyone to discover. Shockingly some of his classmates put the video on the internet and he spent the remainder of his time in high school being ridiculed as the “star wars kid”. Stories like these tend to put me into a moral quandary. What this kid has gone through is clearly horrible and you gotta feel for him. Shut up conscience! He made sound effects and is chubby.

UPDATE: Holy crap. I had no idea this was such a pop culture phenomenon.

Gift from above

So I was pooped on by a bird this morning--a first for me. It must have happened while I was walking into work and slipped by unnoticed. It wasn't until I took my coat off, put my backpack away and finally sat down that I noticed a nickel-sized blob of that unmistakeable white/brown/green colored goo on my thigh. Thankfully, it didn't smell and came out pretty easily. In fact, the more I think about it, we're pretty lucky that bird shit doesn't stink. Imagine if dogs could fly.

Daddy, I want a job and I want it now!

Veruca, Daddy can’t give you a job whenever you want them anymore, there are no jobs left.

You'll give me a job now!!!

Sweetheart, nearly 30% of people your age also want a job and the other
70% are so incredibly lazy because they never can be fired that companies cannot hire anymore.

Daddy if you don’t give me a job I’m going to SCREAM!!!

Darling the only way companies would be willing to hire more people
your age is if they were allowed some recourse if you decided to smoke, smell bad
and listen to your incredibly gay French club music instead working.
Oh Veruca, how this pains me. I’m going to have to give them 2 years after
you graduate from college to fire you if things are not working out.

Daddy you make me so MAD! It doesn’t matter how hard I work or how smart I am I’m entitled to the same way of life you had. I hate you! I hate you! I don’t care if people in China are willing to work 80 hours a week at $1 an hour with no vacation time. I want 100% job security, a generous salary, generous, free benefits, 3 months of vacation and a 35 hour work week and I’m not going to let your cowboy capitalist ideas turn people my age into the Kleenex generation. I went to COLLEGE daddy. My reward is a lifetime vacation from reality and it starts NOW!

Alright, Alright Veruca honey here’s what I’ll do, I’ll only give companies 1 year to fire you IF they have an approved reason.

Not good enough Daddy!!! Now I want a pony!!!

UPDATE: A very funny take on the subject of france openly embracing sloth.

UPDATE: One of NPR’s favorite guest authors and progressive activist, Barbara Ehrenreich writes in this month’s Progressive Magazine:

Was it only three years ago that some of our puffed up patriots were denouncing
the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” too fattened on Camembert to
stub out their Gaulois and get down with the war on Iraq? Well, take another
look at the folks who invented the word liberté. Throughout the month of March
and beyond, they were demonstrating, rioting, and burning up cars to preserve a
right Americans can only dream of: the right not to be fired at an employer’s
whim.

And…

You may recognize in the French government’s reasoning the same arguments
Americans hear whenever we raise a timid plea for a higher minimum wage or a
halt to the steady erosion of pensions and health benefits: “What?” scream the
economists who flack for the employing class. “If you do anything, anything at
all, to offend or discomfit the employers, they will respond by churlishly
failing to employ you! Unemployment will rise, and you—lacking, of course, the
health care and other benefits provided by the French welfare state—will quickly
spiral down into starvation.”

Ah yes progressives may have briefly publicly flirted with the Scandinavian social model (which is now rapidly crumbling) but their hearts will always belong to France. No system more fully embraces the progressive credo: “Don’t like economic reality? Protest it!”.

UPDATE: France surrenders to itself.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan declares France dead:

If the French cannot accept even the teensiest attemp to bring market discipline and free labor markets to their over-regulated economy, then they need no longer be considered a nation with a future. They are a nation committing an extremely slow suicide by suffocation. The suffocation is caused by an overdose of insecurity. Its only cure is nerve. But nerve was never a very common French trait, was it?

Are you annoying or boring?

If you're not sure, then perhaps you need one of these:

A device that can pick up on people's emotions is being developed to help people with autism relate to those around them. It will alert its autistic user if the person they are talking to starts showing signs of getting bored or annoyed.

One of the problems facing people with autism is an inability to pick up on social cues. Failure to notice that they are boring or confusing their listeners can be particularly damaging, says Rana El Kaliouby of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's sad because people then avoid having conversations with them.

Hmmm, I'm sure we can all think of some folks who would benefit from this who aren't autistic. But wait, they thought of that too!

People with autism are not the only ones who stand to benefit. Timothy Bickmore of Northeastern University in Boston, who studies ways in which computers can be made to engage with people's emotions, says the device would be a great teaching aid. "I would love it if you could have a computer looking at each student in the room to tell me when 20 per cent of them were bored or confused.

NR likes ‘The Blade’

Since my only source for State news is the unfortunate 10+ hours of WFYI I listen to every week (my commute) I’ve apparently been under the apparently false impression that Governor Mitch “The Blade” Daniels sucks and everyone hates him. Even with my trust of Public Radio news reporting at a historic low I too believed that the “Major Moves” program and the Telcom deregulation bill would consign our children to a future of slavery to jackbooted Australians and be forced to watch 130 channels of HSN. As surprising as it may be, National Review and WFYI have different assessments of My Man Mitch.

There’s about to be a building boom in Indiana, which is desperate good news
for a state that has been severely challenged by the global manufacturing shift
and years of ambivalent leadership.

The chief architect of the boom
is the state’s decisive Governor Mitch Daniels, President Bush’s former budget
director. In Washington, Daniels drew scorn from congressional big spenders,
acquiring the nickname “the blade” for his cost-cutting and privatizing ways.
(The moniker could just as easily apply to his sharp wit and intellect.) The
spenders in Washington, however, won those battles — big time — swallowing the
blade and earning today’s enmity from the Republican base. But now Daniels is
back home and in charge, and he is engineering a turnaround of an entire state
with sophistication.

In the state’s short legislative session, just
completed, Daniels achieved two sweeping victories. The first is the nation’s
most aggressive telecommunications deregulation, which will spur hundreds of
millions of dollars of investment in invisible infrastructure — the “fibers and
frequencies” of the digital age, as Daniels describes it. The second is a $4
billion privatization lease of the Indiana Toll Road and the new I-69
interstate. This will fund the largest-ever upgrade of Indiana’s visible
infrastructure: its antique roads and bridges.

Ironically, Daniels’
“Major Moves” plan to lease the Indiana Toll Road, the seemingly more tame and
obvious measure, turned out to be far more controversial. It passed by a single
vote with just 15 minutes remaining in this year’s legislative session. Weeks
before anyone had heard of Dubai Ports World, the bid by Australian-Spanish
consortium Macquarie-Cintra to manage Indiana’s 157-mile stretch of I-80/90 had
already ignited a xenophobic melee in the heartland. But unlike the DP World
roll-out, Daniels had actually sought bidders for the Toll Road. His proposition
was simple: The winning contractor will pay Indiana $4 billion for an asset that
has never been profitable in government hands; the state gets to keep that
asset; the contractor upgrades the asset with new technology and an additional
$4 billion in improvements; and the state gets to fund a decade’s worth of other
major infrastructure projects, some of which have been on the drawing board for
twenty years. (Just last year Chicago leased its “Skyway” to Macquarie-Cintra
for $1.8 billion. The Skyway connects Indiana’s Toll Road to Chicago, thus
yielding a seamlessly managed road from Ohio to the Windy City.)

Total lack of options

I’m very sympathetic to Andrew Sullivan’s criticisms of the current spendthrift incarnation of “conservatism” in Washington. There hardly seems to be anyone in Washington that seems interested in spending cuts anymore. Where I have a problem with such critics is their apparent belief that having Democrats assume control of the purse strings would somehow improve the situation. Sullivan would be crapping in his pajamas if the following was the consensus of Republicans in Washington (NYTimes):

Democrats say that while their policies lack detail in some respects, they
were able at least to put together a package of proposals to which all
members of the party could subscribe, calling for more money to be spent
on a broad array of items…

Has there ever been a Democratic pet cause that demanded something other than more funding?

Shellfish or No Shellfish? St. Paul and Muhammed Cartoons

I posted this on my other site too.

Ok, so I've been thinking of an interesting issue in community dynamics. In some interactions, some people seem to be the limiting agents, and their preferences seem to take priority over others. Here's a couple of examples. St. Paul (A.K.A., Paul of Tarsus, a.k.a., Saul of Tarsus, a.k.a. Jimmy the Rat), wrote to one of his start-up cults about some problems they were having. It appears that the gentile-oriented Christians wanted to eat meat and have sex all the time like the rest of the hellenistic culture. They took a more liberal attitude toward the old Law, interpreting Christ's death and resurrection as an abolition of the dietary and cultural proscriptions. Many of the Jewish Christians, on the other hand, wanted to still keep Kosher and all that good stuff. So, Paul basically told the Gentile Christians, "You know, between you and me, that dietary stuff is all bologne (bad pun intended). But, it's not going to kill you to refrain from pork and shellfish, so if it bugs the other folks so much, just give it a rest." (this is the literal interpretation of the Greek). Here the people with the qualms, with the compunctions, with the misgivings (read the sissies) won the day. There was no compromise. Here's a modern day version. I'm hanging out with my buddies. One of them is a vegetarian, and four of them are not. We all love steak, and want to go to Little Zagrebs. But, we like our veggie buddy, and don't want him to starve or to be forced to eat a potato with relish or something lame. So, instead, we go to Moonbeam's Golden Tofu and Tobouli Shack, where I eat a pretty good Falafel and bean sprout sandwich. It's ok, but I really want a big, perfectly seasoned steak. Again, here the person with the most limits sets the rules for the community. You can think of some other examples. Roomates who are extremely sensitive to noise or messiness, group outings where people refuse to go to McDonald's, people with allergies to peanuts...I don't know, you get the picture. I find this phenomenon interesting because minority opinions seem to be able to win out over majority opinions, usually without much compromising. It is this lack of compromise that intrigues me. It seems like communities are overly willing to grant some inalienable right to groups or individuals who arbitrarily draw some line in the sand over which they declare they will not cross. Why do communities let these strong opinions dictate where the line is drawn, rather than insisting on a democratic process of negotiation? Of course, as in the case of the person with the allergy, they really do have a strict line. I think this recent cartoon hubub is an example of this issue. The sacredness of Sharia Law to Muslims does not give them an absolute right to draw the line of decency for the rest of the world. Ok, I should stop now, before I get too political. The short version is, I think this is an interesting community dynamic.

Blog change

Hey guys (and random visitors).

You may recall my blog whoredom. I'm changing my other blog from a Friendster blog to blogspot. Here's the new address. www.billygoatsgruff.blogspot.com. Ben, I'm linking my blog to this one. Feel free to link to me too.

It's odd...my interest in politics has waned rapidly over the past couple of months. I think I just got weary of thinking about things on that scale. I may be headed for the non-profit world. It may be a little more suitable for my fragile psyche. But who knows...Bush is coming to Indiana on Friday to stump for Rep. Sodrel, who's trying to fend off Baron Hill, whose seat he took int the last election. It looks like there's gonna be a lot of national heat on this election, and I might end up working on Hill's campaign, so maybe I'll get sucked back in.

Fantastic conversation on Neoconservatism

Check out Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon for some usually interesting, internet-friendly radio shows. Last night's show, in particular, was an interesting critique of ends and means of Neoconservatism with regards to Iraq.

The following description is from the show's (rather good) blog:

We will let two of the grander thinkers of our time take the measure of the Neo-Conservative fall in Iraq.

The global theorist Francis Fukuyama and the Scots historian Niall Ferguson will be measuring, not least, the collapse of their own hopes, dreams and ideas.

Fukuyama is in full repentant, revisionist flight from the broad Neo-Con adventure. Though he never endorsed the US war on Saddam Hussein, he had impeccable Neo-Con credentials, as a student of Allan Bloom, a grad school classmate and friend of William Kristol, and twice a member of Paul Wolfowitz’s staff. In his new book, America at the Crossroads Fukuyama abandons the Neo-Con taste for pre-emption, unilateralism, regime-change and US “benevolent hegemony,” because they seem now a bad mix of doctrines, not just because the Bush team drove them in to the sand in Iraq. His book extends a sulfurous argument that began two years ago with his old pal Charles Krauthammer, who never stopped celebrating the mission to Baghdad.

Said Fukuyama: “Reading Krauthammer, one gets the impression that the Iraq War – the archetypical application of American unipolarity – had been an unqualified success, with all of the assumptions and expectations on which the war had been based fully vindicated.” The Krauthammer logic, still apparently the Cheney logic in Iraq, seems to Fukuyama “utterly unrealistic in its overestimation of U.S. power and our ability to control events around the world… Of all of the different views that have now come to be associated with neoconservatives, the strangest one to me was the confidence that the United States could transform Iraq into a Western–style democracy, and to go on from there to democratize the broader Middle East.”

Niall Ferguson is a different version, maybe a different story. His colorfully illustrated celebration of empire three years ago, on the eve of the war on Iraq, had a simple directive from the spirit of Queen Victoria: it’s your turn, America. You’re an empire in fact — come out of the closet. Take up the white man’s burden (literally) and do the job!

Enjoy

I just like this picture

Ohh, those wacky German Scientists! What will they think of next?

A reason to dislike the French government

As if we needed one. Ha!

I don't normally think of the French in such terms because I don't normally think of the French. But their Ministry of Culture/Legislature's decision to create a law requiring Apple to open up it's proprietary system so that other companies may benefit from iTunes is retarded if only because it will prompt Apple to get out of the digital download biz in France.

However, while I was initially inclined to gripe about the French attempt to become culturally relevant via MP3 players, now I'm slightly curious. CNet says:

Under a draft law expected to be voted on in parliament on Thursday, consumers would be able to legally use software that converts digital content into any format.

It would no longer be illegal to crack digital rights management--the codes that protect music, films and other content--if it is to enable the conversion from one format to another, said Christian Vanneste, Rapporteur, a senior parliamentarian who helps guide law in France.

"It will force some proprietary systems to be opened up...You have to be able to download content and play it on any device," Vanneste told Reuters in a telephone interview Monday.

It will be interesting to see what becomes of this legal loophole for hacking DRM, will France become another haven for digital pirates?

(Sorry if any of this sounds forced, I'm tired of not posting stuff and this was the first thing that came to mind.)

Upright Bass

I'm sitting in a sound booth listening to a boring lecture on health services for adolescents, so I figured I'd pass the time by sharing a recent music development that has me very excited.

I just started playing upright bass in a new trio with a mandolinist and guitarist. Both of the other players are way better than me, which is both intimidating and inspiring. Luckily they are patient with my limited technical abilities and think I have good feel and timing, which they value more than fancy tricks. Geoff, the mandolinist, is the leader and primary composer and writes really cool music. It's right up my alley, i.e. heavily influenced by Edgar Meyer, Bela Fleck and Chris Thile. But best of all, they're both super cool people, especially Geoff.

We get along very well personally and have very similar thoughts and tastes for music. And I guess after being somewhat musically dormant for a year or so (in terms of playing with other people), it's really refreshing/exciting to meet someone who is not only fun to play with, but also isn't a dick.

Coolest video ever.

Oh my god.

I ♥ Milwaukee

Step 1: Lure an internationally renowned architect to build a career defining work

Step 2: Convince some of the oldest, wealthiest families in Wisconsin to pony up $300 million dollars

Step 3: Acquire an art collection worth tens of millions of dollars.

Step 4: Have a bunch of local radio stations promote “Martinifest” an all-you-can-drink-martini party at the art museum for $30 and have people vomit and climb on priceless works of art.

It’s almost as if the collective unconscious of the city is in Homer falsetto “Ooh look at me, I like looking at French paintings! Blahhhhh!”

Balance

In an effort to restore balance to the world by virtue of our youtube video selection, I feel compelled to follow Sully's lead link to this one. It'll make you feel great in a "Rudy" kind of way...

Chew toy

Karla and I were spending a lazy Saturday morning on youtube.com. Enjoy this treasure.

Offensive Cartoons + Flags = Profit!!!!

Am I the only one seeing this? Surely the creative minds of Hollywood could crank out a limitless amount of offensive fare and our once thriving textile industry could hum again in the production of Danish, Israeli and US flags. We could even have them made out of environmentally friendly hemp. Are we going to shortly find out a Bush crony is a flag magnate?

All Herzog, all the time

One day after news broke of his pulling Joaquin Phoenix from a wrecked car, Werner Herzog was shot in the belly during an interview with a journalist from the BBC. All was well, as it was an air rifle that got him, but his reaction is priceless:

HOLLYWOOD - German director Werner Herzog was shot by a crazed fan during a recent interview with the BBC.

The 63-year-old was chatting with movie journalist Mark Kermode about his documentary Grizzly Man, when a sniper opened fire with an air rifle.

Kermode explains, "I thought a firecracker had gone off.

"Herzog, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, said, 'Oh, someone is shooting at us. We must go.'

"He had a bruise the size of a snooker ball, with a hole in. [sic] He just carried on with the interview while bleeding quietly in his boxer shorts."

An unrepentant Herzog insisted, "It was not a significant bullet. I am not afraid."

Two notes: I'm not sure what Werner should be repentant for, and does anyone know what a snooker ball is?

Greatest Headline Ever

Half-naked bricklayer on a bender lunged at police with 4ft didgeridoo

Best quote: Afterwards Jones said: "The police took the didgeridoo away. I had only just learned how to play it."

Harry Whittman: Republican Martyr

So it’s occurred to some that the rather absurd amount of attention the Cheney shooting incident is getting is actually working out quite well for the Bush administration. Last week they had warrantless “spying”, an insanely huge budget, the ex-head of FEMA turning on Bush’s dept. of homeland security, Libby, and Joshua Micah Marshall’s fave, Abramoff, to deal with. Now all they have is an unfortunate accident to respond to….or is it?

What if Rove phoned Pappy Bush knowing that one of the aforementioned scandals will actually stick for a change and Pappy phoned in a favor? “Whitt, we were in the dubya-two together and I gotta ask you a favor. Will you take one for the team?” So Harry Whittington takes the shotgun blast, potentially dies, Cheney’s too distraught to continue in office (potentially dies?) and he becomes the scapegoat for the outcome any relevant scandals. Bush is free to select his desired successor and the GOP is free and clear for 2008. Is there anything Rove can’t do?

Or more likely, liberals in Washington and the media are just to dumb and undisciplined to not stop grasping at whatever new thing pops up. I seriously think Bush could get away with declaring martial law with a simple moon from the presidential Limo with these morons.

UPDATE: The media's giving the Bush administration another great week!?! Media Matters where are you? If this continues you're going to find yourself on a shipping container on the way to one of bossman Soro's eastern european smelting plants.

The sound of hard drives failing...

... is suprizingly soothing, at least when processed through a sampling program. Here's all 100 such tracks if you're so inclined.

Some background: This was a project wherein folks were encouraged to create a song using samples of drives in various stages of crapping out that were posted on the Hitachi website as part of a troubleshooting guide.

Shovelin' snow

While on one hand, I'd like to talk about how much the U.S. response to this whole "Cartoon War" pisses me off. I'm not gonna. I'm tired after shoveling a ridiculous amount of snow out of our driveway only to see another 5 inches accumulate on my newly cleared patch. Damn nor'easter.

In the end, I must say I learned a valuable lesson. That a cup and a half of vino is the perfect cap to 2 hours of shoveling.

OOH Burn!

Sullivan puts a lick on NYTimes:

This whole affair is a contrived, manufactured attempt by extremist Muslims to move the goal-posts on Western freedom. They're saying: we determine what you can and cannot print; and there's a difference between what Muslims can print and what infidels can print. And, so far, much of the West has gone along. In this, well-meaning American editors have been played for fools and cowards. Maybe if they'd covered the murders of von Gogh and Fortuyn more aggressively they'd have a better idea of what's going on; and stared down this intimidation. The whole business reminds me of the NYT's coverage of the Nazis in the 1930s. They didn't get the threat then. They don't get it now.

The same could be said about Europe:

"The press will give the Muslim world the message: We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression," EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini said. "We can and we are ready to self-regulate that right."

Werner's to the rescue

I had passively learned that Joaquin Phoenix was in a car accident a few days ago, but it turns out that he was pulled from the wreckage by Werner Herzog. This quote makes a simple overturned car way more interesting:

"I remember this knocking on the passenger window," Phoenix said. "there was this German voice saying, 'Just relax.' There's the air bag, I can't see, and I'm saying, 'I'm fine. I am relaxed.'"

"Finally, I rolled down the window and this head pops inside. And he said, 'No, you're not.' And suddenly I said to myself, 'That's Werner Herzog!' "There's something so calming and beautiful about Werner Herzog's voice. I felt completely fine and safe. I climbed out."

But this blurb from a little piece in the Guardian made it even better:

But like all do-gooding superheroes, Herzog refused to stick around and take the glory. "I got out of the car and I said thank you," Phoenix said. "And he was gone."

I wish I could fully describe the delight this news has brought me, I'll just say that coffee spurted from my nose and leave it at that.

When the word fellatio becomes an adjective...

This is kind of a weird thing to be first post in a while, but... I couldn't resist. Plus, I needed something to get me doing this again.

So some background: Andrew Sullivan, a blogger/columnist sort that Andrew (from this blog) and I dig, described a biography on Bush by a conservative pundit named Fred Barnes as, "Fred Barnes' fellatial biography of Bush."

Let's ruminate on that one for a second, "Fred Barnes' fellatial biography of Bush"...

Wow. Leaving aside the accuracy of that brief description, that is a pretty kick ass one-word takedown. I'll leave the full analysis to one Arnold Zwicky at Language Log, from a post called "The vocabulary of toadying". Needless to say, it's an extremely comprehensive and thoughtful post on the use and meaning of the word fellatial. Which, I'm sure, has something to do with why I laughed so damn hard while reading it.

Superbowl fun fact

Detroit native Jerome Bettis was recently given the key to the city this week. Only three others have ever received this honor: James Earl Jones. Detroit neurosurgeon, Dr. Benjamin Carson, of Johns Hopkins University and Saddam Hussein.

Sullivan gets his points back

Man when he delivers he delivers.

Perestroika?

I still read the Earlham Word occasionally not so much as a source of shadenfreunde as I did in the past but because Earlham remains a fascinatingly weird place for me. (I’m also utterly fascinated by North Korea BTW. The DPRK has a “heart” too, but it has a 60 foot statue in the middle that you’re strongly encouraged to give flowers to.). In the most recent Word, Doug Bennett, I believe, made the most candid admission yet that all is not well in Earlham’s intellectual ecosystem.

Bennett also warned against two particular threats to the search for truth. The first threat, he said, is the threat posed by fundamentalist religions. There are elements of fundamentalist religions that believe simple readings of their holy texts can reveal all truth and tolerate no compromise. For these elements, Bennett said, "reason leads to dangerous conclusions." Bennett insisted that free inquiry is essential to a genuine search for truth. Echoing Cardinal Newman, Bennett declared, "Our truth seeking should be fearless and unfettered."

According to Bennett, the second danger to the free exercise of reason comes from reason itself. In searching for truth, we may end up seeing only what we want to see. Our search may be distorted by relationships of power and diverted by our passions and interests. "Our commitment to truth seeking must be thoroughgoing, even if it leads to unpleasant conclusions."

Unless you consider “Fair Trade” a fundamentalist religion, I think the possibility of being influenced by the former at Earlham is remote. The latter posited by Bennett is clearly the greater threat to Earlham’s (and academia in general) intellectual integrity (knee jerk pseudo-intellectual criticism from predictable sources adds credence).

While my Kremlinology may be a little a little excitable in this case, in the past year or so from the many EC mailings I somehow still receive I’ve detected increasing notes of perestroika from Bennett; more or less acknowledging that the long campaign to unencumber the academic establishment from tradition may have gone too far; that instead of intellectual discovery being hindered by ridged social and religious tradition, it is now being compromised by those unwilling to let their newest thought experiment be constrained, much less respect the inherent value of convention/tradition. This environment helped bring about the civil rights movements, but also gave us new math and crippling political correctness. In short I think Doug was very reasonably trying to say that in order for institutions of higher learning to regain their once lofty place in the marketplace of ideas (outside of stuff you can patent) balance needs to be restored between absolute and relativistic perspectives.

I'm a blog whore

I haven't been very communicative lately. I guess it's time to fess up...I started my own blog. I'm a whore-slut-hussy. It's a little more journal-esque, describing my life, including my recent career crisis/mental breakdown. It was awesome! Here it is if you want to see it

My one political observation of the day: maybe W. is starting to realize...democracy can be a bitch! Be careful what you ask for, George.

"Don't Be Evil"

tiananmen - Google Image Search.

tiananmen - Google Image Search in China.

Even billionare idealists have a price.

New York Times == Village Voice part 2

With today’s editorial begging Democratic senators to filibuster the vote to elevate Alito to the Supreme Court the NYTimes has now completely undone it’s legacy of being the “paper of record” and has nearly become the equivalent of one of those metro-rags chocked full articles that earnestly ponder whether Bush is retarded, evil or both. There is nothing wrong with these papers it’s just that it’s unlikely that their writings would ever seriously be held up in the Senate as justification for criticism a given policy as the Times was most recently with NSA eavesdropping (Though Teddy surprises me more every year). In a more reasonable, credible era, such a plea for filibuster from the paper of record would have served as justification itself. Now in a few days we’ll likely see that the utterings of the NYTimes have no more import than the latest street corner screed on Chimpy HalliBushitler.

Disillusioning

Knight Rider used to be my favorite TV show when I was a kid and I thought Michael Knight was a badass. This has sent many a happy childhood memory into disarray.

Banjo goodness

This is me playing "Spanish Point" by Bela Fleck. Check it out--it's a pretty cool song. I filmed it just to have as a memory, then later thought that it'd be fun to share on the blog. The audio isn't great but you can get the gist of it. (It's a 5 minute song so it may take a bit to load).

The Decline of Sullivan

Until recently, Andrew Sullivan’s blog used to be one of the 3 or 4 blogs I checked every day. He seemed to “tell it as it is” and had few if any sacred cows. This is no longer the case. This is not a matter of disagreeing with any of his positions as I’ve always disagreed with some but instead his transformation into a shrill ideological hack; a rigid believer rather than the questioner he was before. Kevin Holtsberry does a pretty good job summarizing this recent rhetorical decline:

It seems to me, that he rarely argues in good faith and his animus and personal obsessions color almost everything he writes.

Sullivan is a skilled polemicist. He is obviously smart and can be, or at least has been in the past, an effective advocate for a particular type of conservatism. It is not, nor has it been, the dominant form in this country, but it is a legitimate form worthy of debate and discussion.

But I am afraid I can no longer take his arguments seriously on a host of issues when he blatantly over-generalizes and argues from bad faith based on emotion and sloppy rhetoric rather than logic and first principles. As I noted above, Sullivan would not tolerate this type of argument from others regarding homosexuality or any of the issues important to him. His double standard is a mile wide: trust those who support your ideas and distrust everything the other side does.

Urban Artifact

We did the “Pleasant Run” bike trail yesterday (the last two weekends have been unseasonably warm here) which happens to go through many scenic inner-city neighborhoods. It was among some spectacular urban decay that I found this picture on the trail which appears to be a family photo snapped during a prison visitation. Which begs the question: Of all the backgrounds a prison could have, why a Star Trek theme? And I suppose more importantly, if the prison is going through the trouble of allowing family photos with a spectacular star trek background, why not let the guy put on some regular clothes? I mean, what kid is going to want a collection of photos where daddy’s in prison jumpsuits?

“What’s does you your* daddy do?”

“5 to 10.”

* Jeez-o-pete I hope people didn't think I was trying to write in dialect. I already discovered black people don't like white people attempting this in my required (diversity credit) Afro-Lit class.

Democratic Katrina policies at work

Remember all the energy price control hullabaloo from the Democratic party after Katrina to “help the poor”? Fortunately this didn’t happen because the democratic party currently has about as much influence on policy as a double scotch does on Ted Kennedy. But assuming they did, through the miracle of crappy socialist dictatorships, we can see into a likely democratic future in Venezuela if below we substitute “coffee” for “oil”:

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Coffee is vanishing from Venezuelan stores as producers protest price controls they say are strangling profits -- no laughing matter in a country where drinking the bitter brew is not simply a habit but a culture.

Troops and inspectors have begun raiding inventories held by private companies in an effort to ease the scarcity, authorities said on Wednesday.

The dispute over the bitter beans can be traced back to early 2003, when coffee fell under price controls for staple foods imposed by President Hugo Chavez's government as a way to counter inflation and protect the poor. But prices set in early December outraged coffee producers, prompting protests in downtown Caracas and paralyzing deliveries.

National Guard troops have so far seized about 330 tons of coffee stored by wholesalers in Yaguara and Guacara, near the capital of Caracas, and more raids were planned, said Gen. Marcos Rojas Figueroa of the National Guard.

"That coffee is going to be sold ... at the established price," he said.

NYTimes in self-parody

For a paper so squeamish about attaching the label “terrorist” to individuals who blow innocents up in Iraq to create “terror” they seem awfully at ease at applying labels to the individuals and actions of those involved in the various leak cases in which they’ve become enmeshed. While each leak case involved the potentially illegal public disclosure of sensitive information by current and former executive officials, the NYTimes explains their reasoning for why one leak is bad and the others are good; leakers that provide information that validates the papers editorial views – that the Iraq war and the Bush administration are bad – are “whistleblowers” and leakers that challenge these views are engaged in an illegal campaign to “silence and discredit” said brave whistle blowers. It’s a wonder that they haven’t simply done away with the pretense that conservatives are capable of ethical behavior and simply refer to liberals and conservatives as “good folks” and “evil doers” respectively.

I never knew how entertaining a Judicial ruling could be...

I just read page 137 of the Pennsylvania ID ruling. I'll admit it. I started at the end. I never do that with stuff I read, but this time I'm hooked and have to start at the begining. It's just great.

Here's what caught me:

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the
Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals,
who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would
time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID
Policy.

With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID
have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor
do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As
stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an
alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an
activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court.
Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction
on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a
constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an
imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the
Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which
has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers
of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal
maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

Oddly enough I found it courtesy of Neil Gaiman's blog, where he described it thusly:"The 139 page decision in the Pennsylvania "Intelligent Design" case is facinating reading -- remarkably lucid and interesting." I repeat, great.

Same ole' song and dance. Sort of.

I just came across this post from Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and co-owner of 2929 Entertainment (who own the Landmark theater chain and produced the movie "Good Night and Good Luck", among others). It details a recent experience he had as the subject of a New York Times piece. It's pretty amazing to see all of the communication that passes between Cuban and Randall Stross, the author of the piece, and then the end result.

It's pretty blatant that Stross had a good idea of what kind of article he wanted to write, how he wanted to portray Cuban's position in the movie/distribution industry, and what value he placed on the Cuban's perspective. To some degree, the tone of the article (which, if you don't feel like reading it, is bitchy) is to be expected, but when compared to the dialogue that preceded it, seems extreme.

Cuban followed up his post with this:

the more time i spent on my last blog entry, the more it became apparent i wanted to ask this question and see the comments to this blog, and inevitable commentary around the blogosphere and in traditional digital and analog media..

even a year ago, this would have seemed like a preposterous question.

Given the admitted rush job by Randall Stross for the Sunday NY Times Business column that I discussed in my last blog entry, along with my previous experiences with that paper, i dont think it is preposterous any longer.

Who has higher editorial and reporting standards. Your typical fulltime blogger, or the NY Times ?

Who puts more effort into researching their articles ?

Who conveys more depth ?

The NY Times is obviously feeling some financial pain and cutting back. Costs impact the amount of space they can provide for any article, or for all content as a whole. Bloggers do not have that limitation. I can write as many pages as i like.

The NY Times is limited by deadlines. They have to get to print and get the product out the door. Bloggers do not.

Costs and deadlines limit the amount of resources that can be applied to any given article for both bloggers and the NY Times. Who is more constrained as a result ?

This has nothing to do with bias, per se, but it does have to do with the preconcieved notions of journalists. You may as well extrapolate from here... but I can't help but think of how many pieces of good news I've heard from Iraq via the NYT. Hmmm, I think I know the answer to Cuban's question...

Reason for Iraq pessimism?

This may be a pretty big reason people have such a pessimistic view of the situation Iraq despite steady progress for the last year. Even news that is almost unqualifiedly good gets spun as negatively as possible. Seriously, if gold coins began to rain from the sky and all the Sunni's, Kurds and Shiites all spontainiously joined hands and started singing "I want to buy the world a coke" the headline would still probably be "US Corporations Claim another victim: Commercialism Runs Rampant in Iraq." and "Numerous eye injuries from projectiles."

Does intel have an axe to grind?

Since the Plame controversy, and all the subsequent articles that have been sourced to “unnamed intelligence sources” about renditions of suspected terrorists and domestic NSA spying, many have commented that it appears that there is a rift between the Bush administration and the intelligence gathering establishment. While occasional leaks are normal, the flood of leaked info that – on its face – casts the current administration in a negative light doesn’t seem to be coincidence. Pundits on the left have interpreted these leaks as coming from people of conscience sick of bullying by the white house while those from the right view the intelligence leakers as ineffective bureaucrats retaliating for post 9/11 shakeups. What if it’s something more simple than that?
In my field one of the biggest career risks is to acquire skills based on technologies that die. For example before 2003, numerically most people who developed windows applications used Visual Basic and then very rapidly – companies switched to .Net. In most cases VB developers with many years of experience went from being highly valued to requiring assistance from recent college grads for even the most basic programming tasks. Those who couldn’t adapt were demoted or let go. Is it possible that something similar is happening with the intelligence organizations? Imagine if you busted your ass for learning Russian and all the ins and outs of the Soviet regime only to see the cold war end and Democratic Russia turn out mostly okay? How would it feel instead of being an agent in Moscow to be a desk jockey (like Plame) with all the best assignments going to people less experienced but with the right skill sets? After years of high risk and crap pay only to be thanked by getting warehoused in an office somewhere there may be some intelligence folks that are understandably resentful and want to be in the limelight again(Plame). This doesn’t excuse them for potentially violating national security laws but it seems to be more likely than some of the more extreme scenarios being discussed in the media.

Done and done.

I just finished my last final for the semester! YAY!!!! And I'm almost positive I passed everything. Yay!!!!

The anti-Churchill party

Now I know Dean is a nutcase, but he is the head of the DNC. His guaranteeing US defeat is a little unseemly is it not?

Saying the "idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong," Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean predicted today that the Democratic Party will come together on a proposal to withdraw National Guard and Reserve troops immediately, and all US forces within two years.

Dean made his comments in an interview on WOAI Radio in San Antonio.

"I've seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, 'just another year, just stay the course, we'll have a victory.' Well, we didn't have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening."

While I think Ann Coulter is a nutcase as well, doesn’t this make her charges that anti-war liberals are tip-toeing on the borders of sedition slightly more credible? (And believe me, I'm glad no one like Ann is the head of the RNC)

UPDATE: Kerry intimating that US soldiers in Iraq are behaving unprofessionally – almost as if they were terrorists (If plumbers plumb; terrorists ________)
-- probably doesn’t weaken Ms. Coulter’s argument either.

Kerry: “there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the--of--the historical customs, religious customs. ...Iraqis should be doing that.”

Ok so I now think that 2012 is probably the soonest I won’t be pants pissingly terrified of Democrats being in charge of national security. Anyone who views occasional lapses in cultural etiquette as reason enough to turn over a country with incalculable oil wealth to the next new-and-improved Taliban cannot be taken seriously.

UPDATE: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi claims over half of house Democrats favor "speedy withdrawl" (much to the consternation of the other half).

UPDATE: Dean changes his mind (again)
"We can and have to win the War on Terror." "We can only win the war -- which we have to win -- if we change our strategy dramatically. ... if we want to win the war on terror we cannot pursue the failed strategy we've pursued..."

UPDATE: This can be filed under Murtha’s “Democrats not sure what they believe at any given moment” category. Delaware Sen. Tom Carper seemingly criticized much publicized pro-withdrawal comments by Howard Dean and other Democrats after returning from a tour from Iraq which I first thought was a rare display of candor.

"I wish more of my colleagues, and folks like Howard Dean, would try going to Iraq to see the situation there for themselves"

Great! So he’s implying that what they said was poorly informed and incorrect. Err no.

“Anyone who has visited Iraq and talked to the people there, he said, is not going to come back thinking this thing is going to be won militarily. It's not."

Huh? Isn’t that exactly what Howard Dean said? (see above)

Has Rove figured out a secret weakness in the liberal mind that causes pandering engines to engage simultaneously in forward and reverse inevitably causing a full logic meltdown? Will we see Dean interrupted in a future speech on the necessity of the Iraq war by a rebellious left hand attempting to make a peace sign?

UPDATE: So while conservatives are actively trying to allow democracy to take hold in Iraq liberals are exporting well worn tactics to discredit democratic elections through claims of disenfranchisement.

Juan Cole: ”The only way the vote will happen at all is that the US military has forbidden all vehicular traffic, so everyone has to walk for the next few days. This tactic prevents car bombings from disrupting the elections, but it is a desperate measure and not a sign of an election that could be certified as free and fair.”

Goodness that’s sounds almost as bad as Ohio. Everyone knows inconvenience = Jim Crow unless you happen to be in country with a tin-pot socialist dictator and then it isn’t inconvenience but a valid cultural preference we’d be arrogant and ignorant to judge. Just ask Jimmah.

UPDATE: Holy cow. I was totally joking about the Iraq/Ohio comparison and Eric Alterman is actually making the comparison....seriously.

Animation projects

I did these animations a few months ago for an After Effects class and have been pretty tardy in putting them anywhere they might be seen. I have no reason for the delay, besides laziness, but I'd be quite interested in any type of feedback you have to offer. They've been fairly compressed to speed up the download, so check them out and I hope you enjoy.

Yay! Gervais!!!

I haven't seen "Extras" yet, but the original "The Office" is the greatest TV show ever. I've been thanking my lucky stars ever since I read this blurb from the Guardian Unlimited (hat tip: the Geek-tastic site Ain't it Cool).

Ricky Gervais says: "I want to do a radio show where I can say what I want, when I want for as long as I want and that's free for anybody who can be bothered to listen anywhere in the world. We didn't want it to just be the best bits of a radio programme you'd missed so this is a show that is straight-to-Pod-cast. I suppose we're trying to create an exclusive club. We'd prefer this to be a few people's favourite show than a huge samey ineffectual broadcast"

Ricky is going to be unleashing 12 podcasts, one every week begining Dec. 5. Just bookmark the link to the Guardian Unlimited, check the site next monday, and subscribe to the podcast. It will be lovely.

The left and economics

If you haven’t already guessed from my previous ramblings, the biggest reason I’m not a democrat is their fundamental rejection (misunderstanding?) of basic economic principles. They insist on making policy using an alchemy composed of an odd mixture of feelings and Marxism. Anything resembling the sort of intro-econ stuff you learn as a freshman they look on to with suspicion. Fire baaadddd! This is revealed by Mickey Kaus’ summary of a NYTimes analysis on the latest GDP numbers.

Gregg Easterbrook's rule that All Economic News is Bad was effectively illustrated by yesterday's NYT front-pager, "Upbeat Signs Hold Cautions for the Future." The article notes several positive economic trends, including lower gas prices, but then warns darkly that

... as always with the United States economy, it is not quite that simple.

For every encouraging sign, there is an explanation. ...[snip] Gasoline prices - the national average is now $2.15, according to the Energy Information Administration - have fallen because higher prices held down demand and Gulf Coast supplies have been slowly restored. [Emph. added.]

It's indeed deeply disturbing to learn that higher gas prices have held down demand, causing those prices to fall back to a level at which demand begins to rise again! It's almost as if some insidious law was at work--as prices rise, demand declines! As supply increases, prices fall! You can't win! ... P.S.: The price drop might be alarming if the decline in demand for gas reflected a general economic downturn. But that doesn't seem to be the case. What the NYT's Vikak Bajaj ominously describes is the market working exactly as it's supposed to, coupled with successful rebuilding efforts on the Gulf Coast. It appears to be "quite that simple." ... P.P.S.: Nor can I spot any "cautions for the future." .... P.P.P.S.: Bijaj further reported that

the Federal Reserve and businesses will have a big part in setting the economy's pace next year - the Fed through interest rates and companies by their hiring decisions. [Emph. added]

Yikes. Who knew? That's the sort of alarming macroeconomic information investors can use to make millions--and yet this wasn't even a TimesSelect article. They charge for Bob Herbert but they're giving away Bijaj's explosive contrarian insights for free! The hapless Pinch Sulzberger misses yet another revenue stream. ...

Update: Only a paranoid right-wing blogger would suggest that the NYT's editors are so eager to explain away any positive economic news because the healthy economy is the one remaining prop holding up Bush's presidency, and they can't believe his policies haven't produced another recession yet. Easterbrook's Bad News rule indicates that they'd have written exactly the same piece if a Democrat were in the White House. ... 1:20 A.M.

hmmm....

Topic for discussion: OIL.

Demand is growing very fast (50% in the last decade according to a BP exec I saw on C-SPAN). Production levels are not growing as fast. If we run out of oil, things won't go, people won't make money, economies will stagnate, unless we find something else to make things go. Oil will get more and more expensive as supply decreases, making it more expensive to make stuff go, making economic growth slow down.

Talk amongst yourselves.

Legal Torture

I'm surprised this didn't turn out to be the longest jury deliberation ever.

Georgie gets lost

This is hilarious. Watch as GW tries to wrap up a press conference and finds the door locked.

Also funny

Chicom college students give this song the treatment it deserves.

Awesome Prank

Wow...shocked at first, but slowly overcome by the hilarious genius of it.

Protecting the wrong people

After listening to an insane amount of self righteous demagoguery involving the McCain amendment (Cheney as Torquemada) I’ve found myself supporting the amendment less and less. Primarily I think this is because the arguments employed all generally involve a certain degree of bait-and-switch. When sound moral arguments are employed to question the wisdom of disallowing all “torture”, proponents of the McCain bill shift to a legalistic argument invoking the third Geneva convention as if it’s Mosaic law. And when this is questioned the argument seamlessly shifts to anyone who is against the McCain amendment is implicitly pro-torture. There are many strong arguments against torture I agree with and would cause me to support regulation to limit torture as much as possible but none are convincing enough to persuade me that the human rights of an evil person trump those of their present and future victims. While torture may be ineffective in 99 out of 100 situations, should a situation arise where depriving someone of sleep might help keep 50 people from being blown up; well then let the Christina Aguilera blast away.

But wouldn’t this be a war crime? Article 4 or the Third Geneva convention clearly states that treaty protections only extend to:

o "Members of the armed forces"

o "militias...including those of organized resistance movements...having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance...conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war"

o "Persons who accompany the armed forces"

o "Members of crews...of the merchant marine and the crews of civil aircraft"

o Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.

I don’t see where anyone detained by the US in Afganistan or Iraq meet any of the criteria. The McCain ammendment goes far beyond the Geneva conventions though. If passed it would extend protections of the Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Torture is a horrible thing but I think it’s too easy to lose track of who the real victims in this conflict are. I believe it would be far worse to instill a greater fear of legal consequence within those that are working to protect the innocent. This is a bad law backed up by bad arguments.

One other thing: I do want to briefly acknowledge just how f'd I think the Republican party is at present. While I think too much was made over NJ and Virginia continuing to have democratic Governors, all of Ahnuld's amendments being defeated and the House's inability to pass the most recent budget doesn't bode well for 2006. God I miss Newt...