In the late 1990s era of no-logo vogue, cultural commentators fretted that the once-democratic medium of the T-shirt had been co-opted by corporations, and that T-shirt buyers were concerned only with raising the planet's Hilfiger consciousness and saving the FUBUs. "The slogans on contemporary T-shirts are increasingly meaningless," the novelist and columnist Russell Smith observed in The Globe and Mail in 2000. "Most of them are simply the brand name of the T-shirt itself."
Now that our T-shirts are so blithely outspoken — and deliberately offensive — on every issue from Medicare to Britney Spears, it sometimes seems as if we’d like to ban our way back to a more sartorially decorous era. Ultimately, however, the T-shirt skirmishes that continuously erupt are oddly reassuring. Can the public schools be as out of control as they're often alleged to be if all it takes to get suspended from one is an "I ♥ My Wiener" shirt? Has our public sphere grown as hopelessly coarse as our loudest cultural scrub maids insist if a shirt featuring a faux fishing theme and the phrase "Master Baiter" is enough to make Southwest Airlines ground you?
Shouldn't we take comfort in the fact that so many high school students are ready to fight for their right to champion the unborn, maternal hotties, and whatever else they can think of to test the limits of Tinker v. Des Moines? T-shirts may intrude upon our lives in the public sphere, but they're also our most vivid reminder that free speech is woven into the fabric of our culture.
Greg Beato, "I'm With Stupid: The perennially embattled free speech zone over our chests", Reason, 2008-04
I guess it had to happen . . . the LOLCat Bible Translation Project:
1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.
2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.
3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.
4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.
5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1
H/T to Elizabeth Holden.
So, we were out and about yesterday, just getting away from the usual, when we happened across STALAG LUFT MMVIII:
We happened upon the well-preserved remains of RCAF Camp Picton, in Prince Edward County. This site provides some background, including the origin of the unlikely looking guard towers.
For most Canadians, most of the time, the kind of in-your-face, flag-waving displays of patriotism common to American patriotic events are seen as being rather uncouth. That is why these patriotic displays are so much more meaningful.
From the air base in Trenton, Ontario, the funeral cortege passes along motorways lined with scores of people holding Canadian flags, some with a hand on their heart, carrying banners emblazoned with the words "we support our troops."
All 50 of the motorway bridges on the journey into Toronto were said to have been packed with the general public.
As the cortege passes fire engines and police cars, officers and emergency workers solemnly salute as children wave flags.
But the solemn gesture is a far cry from Britain, where Our Boys are turned away from public places and told not to wear their uniforms following sickening insults.
I don't pass near the GO Transit rail line along the lakeshore very often, so seeing a new locomotive on the end of a train was a mild surprise to me. What I originally thought when I saw it was that GO had somehow decided to rebuild the old Ontario Northland TEE trainsets:
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The newly delivered locomotive on delivery in June 2007. Built by MotivePower Industries, formerly known as Morrison-Knudson. | The former TEE trainset used by Ontario Northland for their Northlander service. |
Ronald Bailey posted a link to a Techno Tolerance test. "Among the questions asked are would you upload your consciousness or take treatments that would completely stop aging? The test is modelled on the World's Smallest Political Quiz." Here's my result:
You Score as a Transhumanist-Biotech Transhumanists believe that humanity can and should strive to attain higher levels of physical, mental, and social achievement through the use of technology. They seek to extend human capabilities and improve the human condition through technology- supporting the quest for immortality, the conquering of death and disease, the amplification of human intelligence, and the capabilities of the human body. Transhumanists recognize that over time and with technological advancements, man will realize new possibilities for society and human nature and achieve a posthuman condition (becoming more than human). Societal change is an important consequence of technological progress. Because of this passionate trust in technological advancement, transhumanists generally see all technologies, as long as they don't jeopardize the non-corporeal consciousness of a person, as being beneficial both to society and to the happiness and advancement of the person. Transhumanists see benefit not only in technologies that address medical necessities, but also aesthetic or recreational demands. They support advances in cybernetics, genetic engineering in clinical settings, embryo design, and other technologies that allow individuals to take control of their biology, and the human species to take control of evolution. Transhumanists can be either hard-technology oriented--more inclined to add microchips and machines to their lifestyle--or bio-technology oriented--preferring the softer, more natural advancements and modifications that are made available. |
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Take the test here.
To be sure, by every conventional measure Paul’s presidential bid has been an abject failure — not a single primary win and only 14 delegates as of press time. Yet Paul managed to raise more than $20 million, virtually all of it online, and inspire an army of hyper-devoted and mostly youthful followers using a pitch — and a style — that will have much more to do with 21st century politics than whatever models of Buick and Oldsmobile the Democrats and Republicans eventually crank out this year. That’s how Paul pulled together over 67,000 people at the social networking site MeetUp (a total that was more than 20 times the number who signed up for the next most popular candidate, Barack Obama). That’s why he won raves from quarters as disparate as conservative commentator George Will (who called Paul "my man" on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos"), punk icon Johnny Rotten (who gave Congress' "Dr. No" a celebratory shout-out during a "Tonight Show with Jay Leno" episode), plus a self-explanatory group called "Strippers for Paul."
What explained the ability of this odd politician, with his inept campaign management team, to attract gobs of money, if not actual votes? Because it was only Ron Paul who said something truly distinct this campaign about the very nature of power. Namely, that government should have less of it on all levels and in every instance. "I don't want to run your life," Paul says. "I don't want to run the economy. ... I don't want to run the world." Such sentiment is simultaneously radical and fully in the Jeffersonian tradition of governing best while governing least. The right to be left alone, as Justice Louis Brandeis once put it, is at the very center of the American experiment because it allows individuals and the communities they form to pursue happiness in competing, peaceful ways. This is especially true in Long Tail America, where people are not only increasingly tolerant of alternative lifestyles but are constantly on the hunt for ways to individualize and personalize their own lives.
Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, "Tuned Out (PDF download)", Politics, March 2008
I'm kinda on vacation this week, so posts may or may not appear as I happen to be near a computer and have anything worth posting. If you're desperate for new stuff, there's a whole bunch of worthwhile blogs over there on the left side of the window: click at will.
More often than not, guys interpret even friendly cues, such as a subtle smile from a gal, as a sexual come-on, and a new study discovers why: Guys are clueless.
More precisely, they are somewhat oblivious to the emotional subtleties of non-verbal cues, according to a new study of college students.
"Young men just find it difficult to tell the difference between women who are being friendly and women who are interested in something more," said lead researcher Coreen Farris of Indiana University's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
This "lost in translation" phenomenon plays out in the real world, with about 70 percent of college women reporting an experience in which a guy mistook her friendliness for a sexual come-on, Farris said.
Some might think the results come down to "boys being boys," and so even the slightest female interest sparks sexual fantasy. But the study, to be detailed in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, also found that it goes both ways for guys — they mistake females' sexual signals as friendly ones. The researchers suggest guys have trouble noticing and interpreting the subtleties of non-verbal cues, in either direction.
Jeanna Bryner, "Clueless guys can't read women, study confirms: Why women's friendly cues get interpreted as sexual come-ons", MSNBC, 2008-03-20
I bought an external FreeAgent USB drive last month to use as a backup disk for our various computers here at home. The setup was easy . . . the instruction booklet said "This won't take long." on the front cover, and it was right. It worked very well . . . until Thursday.
The previous night, I noticed a pop-up error message saying that Windows couldn't write to the F:\ drive. I didn't think it was serious . . . probably just a transient issue that'd go away after a reboot. I rebooted the machine, and the FreeAgent drive was accessible again. Our backup schedule has each machine dumping files to the FreeAgent drive in the middle of the night, so as long as the drive was online, there'd be no problem.
So, after rebooting, the errors started up again about 12 hours later. Drat.
Off to the Seagate tech support website. Unlike a lot of tech support sites I've had to visit (I'm looking at you, Symantec), this one actually had good information and pretty easy navigation. Kudos to Seagate's web team and customer support folks. That's the good part. The bad part? The errors I was seeing could be the sign of a dying drive.
The options included reformatting the drive (therefore losing all our backup files), installing their Seagate Disk Tool utility and running diagnostics, or getting an RMA number and shipping the drive off for repairs. Of the three, the downloading tools option seemed the easiest, so I did. After running the disk tests which applied to a USB drive, the FreeAgent reported itself to be functioning properly.
I looked through the various cases on the website for any further clues . . . and realized I'd missed the obvious one: my FreeAgent drive was attached to the machine via an external USB hub. They recommended attaching it directly to the machine (which, in hindsight, is a pretty good idea anyway). Quick dismount (Windows couldn't successfully dismount . . . I might lose data . . . but I was already expecting to lose the entire drive's worth of data anyway). Plug the drive into a spare USB port . . . and everything seems to be working normally.
Last night's backup runs all appear to have completed successfully, and the backup ZIP files open cleanly. I now entertain some hopes that the problem has been resolved.
It must be a slow news week, because there's no other explanation I can think of for this article to be published:
"Nappy-headed hos," the phrase that cost radio shock jock Don Imus his job and triggered a debate on how far free speech can go, was named on Thursday as the most egregious politically incorrect turn of phrase in 2007.
Trailing behind that phrase in the annual survey by Global Language Monitor (www.LanguageMonitor.com), a word usage group, were "Ho-Ho-Ho" and "Carbon Footprint Stomping," said the group's president Paul JJ Payack.
"Ho-Ho-Ho" made the list after a staffing company in Sydney, Australia suggested to prospective Santas they drop their traditional greeting in favor of "Ha-Ha-Ha" so as not to invoke images of the derogatory slang term for women.
"Carbon Footprint Stomping" is a phrase used to describe flaunting environmentally "green" activities by doing things like driving gas-guzzling Hummers and flying private jets, which in these energy-conscious times might be considered the height of political incorrectness.
Okay, Imus was a twit — not that that was in any doubt before he uttered his prize-winning remark — but the other two examples are just dumb. Dumber than that, however, are the folks at Lindsey Gardiner's publishers who "asked [her] to eliminate a fire-breathing dragon from her new book because publishers feared they could be sued under health and safety regulations."
How far detached from reality do you have to be to think that mentioning a mythical creature (already very well established in fairy tales) would somehow expose the publisher to being sued? More disturbingly . . . what if their fear was not only well-founded, but mathematically likely? The article doesn't say where the publisher is located, but in some jurisdictions it might be a consideration (the publisher is in Britain, which explains everything).
Their list of choices is rather unconvincing, as evidenced by the term "race card" somehow making it as a contender in 2007 . . . when it was in common use well before the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995 (and in Britain in the 1960s).
So, how seriously should we take this list? Not very. This is how the announcing organization describes their methodology:
The Global Language Monitor uses a proprietary algorithm, the Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI) to track the frequency of words and phrases in the global print and electronic media, on the Internet, throughout the Blogosphere, as well as accessing proprietary databases. The PQI is a weighted Index, factoring in: long-term trends, short-term changes, momentum, and velocity.
In other words, they pull it out of their collective asses. Nice work, Reuters. Here's a quarter . . . call us when you find some real news to report.
H/T to "Da Wife", who sent the link saying, "There is no way I can comment about this without risking that I will be on the list next year."
In a story that might topple governments from coast to coast, it is being alleged that Tim Hortons coffee cup rims may have been tampered with:
Some Nova Scotians believe Tim Hortons employees are rolling up the rim to rip them off.
But the company is apologizing for a manufacturing error that makes it appear someone has tampered with the rims of some of its disposable coffee cups in Atlantic Canada.
"When I take off my top, I’ve been noticing the rim has already been rolled up, and a lot of people have been noticing that," said Richard O’Brien, a construction worker from Halifax.
Cars, powerboats, global positioning systems, gift cards, coffees and doughnuts are among the prizes up for grabs.
He figures employees from the ubiquitous coffee chain are checking under the rims to try to win prizes for themselves or their friends.
"I’d say it would be the back shifts that are doing it," Mr. O’Brien said.
"As soon as you take the top of the cup off, you can see two little crimps in the sides where they just flipped it up to see if it was a winner."
He won a few free coffees and doughnuts after the annual contest started Feb. 25, but lately the free crullers have been few and far between.
"I work on a construction site and nobody has been winning," Mr. O’Brien said.
Anecdotally, I have overheard several coffee addicts moaning that they think the Timmy coffee cup contest is less generous this year than in previous years . . . they uniformly say they've rarely won anything at all, where in other contests they'd at least had a few free coffee or donut prizes.
Fark wins the prize for reporting, though:
Katherine Mangu-Ward looks at Florida's unhappy relationship with that whole "elections" thing:
If Florida had a Homeric epithet (think Hector, tamer of horses) it would be "Florida, wrecker of elections." To Hades with "the Sunshine State."
This winter, the Florida Democratic party moved their primary up to a week before Super Tuesday, eager for the nation to watch its pilgrimage to the voting booth with bated breath once again. The national party warned that there would be consequences for states that jumped the line, and lo and behold: The Florida Democrats were stripped of their convention delegates.
And now, with Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) scratching each others' eyes out all the way to the finish line, Florida, wrecker of elections—along with Michigan, builder of iron horses—could well be the decider.
[. . .] Florida and Michigan are battlegrounds, not for principle, but for pride and victory. Politicians will be politicians, but Florida's voters have graciously bowed out, turning down the chance to indulge in the sacred rite of voting twice in the same contest. For that, one can almost forgive them the havoc they've caused.
In an LA Times article, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch introduce the largest potential source of "new" votes for candidates willing to listen to what the voters want:
Since the 1970s, the Democrats and Republicans have been leaking market share like a Chevy Nova leaking oil. In 1970, the Harris Poll asked: "Regardless of how you may vote, what do you usually consider yourself — a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or some other party?" Fully 49% of respondents chose Democrat, and 31% called themselves Republicans. In 2006, the latest year for which data are available, those figures were 36% for Democrats and 27% for Republicans. With that gap closing, it's not surprising that presidential elections have become battles over voters who identify with neither party.
Libertarians, for instance. As David Boaz of the Cato Institute and David Kirby of America's Future Foundation note in a study of public opinion polls, roughly 15% of the electorate can be considered libertarian. Such folks are fiscally conservative and socially liberal. They like gays and guns, low taxes and free speech. They are pro-globalization and antiwar. They are at the center of American politics. Win them over and you'll win every national election for the next several decades. Here are some smart — and popular — policies that will appeal not only to libertarians but to other centrist voters fed up with budget-busting compassionate conservatives and nanny-state buttinsky liberals.
. . . by gouging the even less fortunate:
It seems that due to the deep and touching international friendship in the name of Socialism between Hugo Chavez and Ken Livingstone, Venezuela is providing oil at below market prices so that the welfare recipients of London can have half price bus travel. I do not know how your average man on the street in Caracas feels about this, but personally I am wondering just how fast it is possible to see the back of either of these amoral and wretched men. At least we in London have a mayoral election in May so that we can hopefully get rid of Mr Livingstone. The people of Venezuela are probably less lucky.
Radley Balko points to a very amusing site:
" . . . everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what's the harm?"
On the opening page of High Society, which aims to explain "how substance abuse ravages America," Joseph Califano declares that "chemistry is chasing Christianity as the nation's largest religion." Although it is not always easy to decipher Califano's meaning in this overwrought, carelessly written, weakly documented, self-contradictory, and deeply misleading anti-drug screed, here he seems to be saying that opiates are the religion of the masses. Americans, he implies, are seeking from psychoactive substances the solace they used to obtain from faith in God, and better living through chemistry is nearly as popular as better living through Christ.
That claim, like many Califano makes, is unverifiable, and it does not seem very plausible. Americans may be less religious than they used to be, but large majorities still say they believe in God and identify with specific faiths, making the U.S. much more religious than other Western countries, which tend to have substantially lower drug use rates. Although Americans have a bewildering array of psychiatric medications to choose from nowadays (with permission from a doctor), they smoke a lot less than they did in the 1960s and drink less than they did a century ago, when they also could freely purchase patent medicines containing opium, cocaine, and cannabis. If the devout are less inclined than the doubters to use mood-altering drugs, how is it that mostly Mormon Utah leads the country in antidepressant prescriptions? And if chemistry and Christianity are locked in competition, what are we to make of Jesus' water-into-wine miracle, or of the Native American Church, Uniao do Vegetal, and other groups that combine Christianity with psychedelic sacraments?
Already I have put more thought into the alleged connection between faithlessness and drug use than Califano did. And so it is with the rest of the book. A proper debunking would require more than the 186 pages of text that Califano, a domestic policy adviser to Lyndon Johnson and secretary of health, education, and welfare in the Carter administration, squeezes out of conversations with politicians and old reports from the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA), the prohibitionist propaganda mill he founded and heads.
Jacob Sullum, "No Bad Drugs: The arbitrary distinctions at the root of prohibition", Reason, 2008-03-20
I'd wondered about this . . . getting rid of broken compact fluorescent bulbs:
As long as the mercury is contained in the bulb, CFLs are perfectly safe. But eventually, any bulbs — even CFLs — break or burn out, and most consumers simply throw them out in the trash, said Ellen Silbergeld, a professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins University and editor of the journal Environmental Research.
“This is an enormous amount of mercury that’s going to enter the waste stream at present with no preparation for it,” she said.
Manufacturers and the EPA say broken CFLs should be handled carefully and recycled to limit dangerous vapors and the spread of mercury dust. But guidelines for how to do that can be difficult to find, as Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, discovered.
"It was just a wiggly bulb that I reached up to change," Bridges said. "When the bulb hit the floor, it shattered."
When Bridges began calling around to local government agencies to find out what to do, "I was shocked to see how uninformed literally everyone I spoke to was," she said. "Even our own poison control operator didn’t know what to tell me."
The sidebar to the article includes an 11-step process to clean up a broken CFL bulb.
H/T to Jon, my virtual landlord, for the link.
In a partial BBC transcript, Terry Pratchett says goodbye to Arthur C. Clarke, who died yesterday:
Most notably he was the first British science fiction writer to break out of the genre ghetto. I mean, everyone had heard of Arthur C Clarke — The Goodies made jokes about him, Terry Wogan made jokes about him. He became a national treasure like Patrick Moore.
Before 2001 [the film based he created with Stanley Kubrick], you could see the string, you could see what was holding the rocket ships up. It seems almost a historical thing to relate it now, but just the first time you saw it you thought, "here's something totally new".
The amount of work and effort and research that went into that movie was just astonishing.
What I particularly recall was Arthur complaining the reason the apes never won the Oscar for best make-up was they were so good the judges thought they really were apes.
Over the last quarter century, we've seen an astonishing rise in paramilitary police tactics by police departments across America. Peter Kraksa, professor of criminology at the University of Eastern Kentucky, ran a 20-year survey of SWAT team deployments and determined that they have increased 1,500 percent since the early 1980s — mostly to serve nonviolent drug warrants.
This is dangerous, senseless overkill. The margin of error is too thin, and the potential for tragedy too high to use these tactics unless they are in response to an already violent situation (think bank robberies, school shootings or hostage-takings). Breaking down doors to bust drug offenders creates violent situations; it doesn't defuse them.
Radley Balko, "Senseless Overkill", Fox News, 2008-03-12
I go to law school parties with my wife sometimes, and inevitably one of the laywers-in-training will ask me what I do. I tell them I'm a PhD candidate in medieval studies, to which they usually respond with a baffled, "Wow, that's so cool. So, you, like read old books?"
If only they knew. Yesterday I spent an hour and a half at talk hosted by the English department that was nigh unto indistinguishable from an episode of Beavis and Butthead. It involved senior faculty snickering while looking at dirty medieval art and grad students trying to pretend that they were above such things.
Ostensibly, the subject of the talk was "Chaucer and the Relics of Vernacular Religion," but the handouts were mostly dirty pictures like this one, which I took from an online auction house's listing, because Prof. Minnis's photocopies wouldn't scan well:
Carl Pyrdum, "What it's Like to be a Medievalist", Got Medieval, 2006-01-26
Radley Balko has some thoughts on the current state of play in the war on (some) drugs:
As for Dunphy's strange appeal to a junkie's authority, there are several problems with the "if you legalize drugs, everyone will become an addict" argument. Among them:
1) It assumes that prohibition is actually preventing access to illegal drugs in any meaningful way today. It isn't. I could have a bag of marijuana in my hands in about five minutes. As fast or faster than I could get a sandwich. It would probably take me 20 minutes to a half hour hunt down a small bag of heroin, but it wouldn't be difficult. And I could get either without any real fear of arrest. And I'm not a drug user. If I had actual connections, it'd be even easier. Some survey data shows high school kids can get marijuana as easily or easier than they can get alcohol.
2) It wrongly assumes that the all of the problems we associate with drugs — the bloody turf wars, the presence of particularly potent drugs like meth, the lengths to which dealers will go to get their premium, etc. — are the product of the drugs themselves, and not the product of them being prohibited. This chart helps slay that argument.
3) It assumes that the laws against using and distributing drugs are the only thing preventing a huge portion of the population from trying them, and becoming addicted to them. Legalization may indeed increase the use of currently banned drugs. But I have my doubts about a massive increase in addicts. The social stigma would still be there, as it is with alcoholism. Perhaps more people would experiment. But it isn't clear that that's a bad thing. Use is not abuse, no matter what ONDCP says in its press releases. And the vast majority of drug users — even "hard" drug users — don't turn into addicts.
I've often argued for easing the restrictions on various drugs, not because I particularly want to use them myself, but because the costs of keeping them illegal far outweigh the benefits. It's not something Canada could do in isolation from the United States, as we are too vulnerable to trade sanctions which the current government would rush to put in place if we were seen to "weaken" in the war on drugs.
Drug prohibition is working just about as well as alcohol prohibition did in the 20th century. Believe it or not, that's seen as a positive comment in drug warrior circles.
GREEN BAY, WI—The Green Bay Packers addressed questions concerning the current status, future plans, and whereabouts of recently retired quarterback Brett Favre by announcing Monday that they had sent him to the country to live on a beautiful farm with a very nice family.
"We know you loved Brett Favre, but he wasn't happy here. He couldn't stay here," Packers general manager Ted Thompson told hundreds of quiet but tear-streaked Packer fans assembled at the televised Lambeau Field press conference. "And he loved you, too — he loved you very much indeed — but he needed to go someplace where he could run and jump and throw his favorite football around. And he couldn't do that here anymore."
"So we took Brett out behind the Don Hutson practice facility last night, and we . . . Coach McCarthy and I, we . . . We gave him one last hug, and we said goodbye to him, and Brett went away forever," Thompson said, his voice breaking several times. "Those loud banging noises you heard were probably the truck backfiring. He went to the farm in a truck, you know."
In Tel Aviv, not a single bar or nightclub seems to obey the rules; all are thick with smoke. It is, roughly, a mix of 20 percent hash and 80 percent tobacco. According to a prominent investigative journalist here, it isn't just Israelis who indulge in drugging. The reporter, who works for a major Tel Aviv daily, is a fluent Arabic speaker who spends the majority of his time pounding the pavement in the Palestinian Territories.
He relates a bizarre story: Last year, while interviewing a house full of Hamas members, he entered into a rather ordinary conversation on the banalities of soldiering (the journalist, like most Israelis, is an Israel Defense Forces veteran). "So how do you pull these long shifts?" he wondered. "Well, we take pills smuggled in from Tel Aviv," said the Hamas apparatchik. "What pills?" He didn't know, but graciously placed a call to a Hamas comrade, who, apparently, doubles as his pharmacist. "He says they are called the EK-STAZY." The raver-jihadists explained that these mystery pills induce a mild euphoria, and allow them to shoot at members of the Israel Defense Forces for long, happy stretches.
The Hamas-embedded journalist relates another woe-is-me-story of life as a terrorist. "I'm the Oprah of the Palestinians. They are always telling me things about their private lives." One leader of Islamic Jihad recently confessed that his manifold sexual problems were driving him to depression. It is tough, he moaned, to find a good woman, a woman willing to spend time with you, when you marked for death by Israeli intelligence. Amongst the extremists, they even manage to blame not getting laid on Zionism.
Michael C. Moynihan , "Diary of an Israel Junketeer, Part Two: Tel Aviv, the Oprah of terrorists, and raver-jihadists", Reason Online, 2008-03-17
The automotive chaps at The Times take a Prius out for a real-world driving test against a BMW sedan. The results weren't as clear-cut as you'd imagine:
The next day it became clear my Prius did not like motorways, at least not at 75mph into a headwind. My trip meter informed me I was now averaging about 45mpg; the Prius was not going to make it to Geneva on just one tank.
I took the precaution of buying a 10-litre can and filling it with petrol. Sure enough, the dashboard soon informed me the fuel tank was empty, the petrol engine stopped and for two surreal miles I coasted along on battery power. Only when I approached a long steep uphill stretch did I finally drift to a halt. As I filled the tank I consoled myself with my last chocolate bar.
Coasting down the mountain into Geneva my Prius averaged 99.9mpg for a full 10 minutes. It was the highlight of my journey and improved my overall average fuel economy by a full 2mpg. But it was not enough. For all my defensive driving, slippery bodywork and hybrid technology, my average fuel consumption was 48.1mpg. I’d lost to a Beemer and I was disappointed; I had never driven so slowly or carefully for so long in my life. I’m considering buying a V8 Range Rover and opening my own oil well in protest.
Lest it be said that the Prius is not intended to be used for long-distance travel, the writers arranged for a portion of the trip to be conducted in urban areas — where the Prius should shine on the fuel economy front — so that the test was more like a real-world trip than something concocted by advocates either for or against the Prius.
H/T to Mark Allums.
I kept thinking this was an out-take from SCTV . . . H/T to Craig Zeni.
An article in the Daily Mail, which (I hope overstating the case) bids farewell to the traditional English public house:
The same gang of old boys gathers for darts tournaments every week, to throw some "arrows", smoke too much and cackle at private jokes. The walls are hung with badly stuffed fish. There are armchairs and an open fire.
But not any more. This time we got there to find all that gone, stuffed fish, open fire, regulars as well. New tenants had come in and chucked out everything, including the darts board and the bar billiards table.
Now, bar billiards is a weird and wonderful old pub game that's found in a few southern English counties. It's the essence of local distinctiveness.
They've replaced it with a pool table, the kind you'd see in a roadhouse in America or a bar in Bangkok.
And I am suddenly weary. Before my eyes, another tiny bit of the real England I love has been killed off.
But at least the pub is still there, which is more than can be said about far too many of them.
A stunning 56 close every month — usually demolished or converted into housing.
Country pubs are disappearing the fastest. More than half the villages of England are now "dry" for the first time since the Norman Conquest.
At that rate, they'll need to start preserving the pubs in the same way they preserve castles and stately homes!
I don't know about you, but I found this particularly creepy:
Behind placid suburban facades, in seemingly normal neighborhoods, restless housewives are dismembering and enucleating babies, baking them in ovens in pursuit of that gently throttled look, then selling them to strangers. And, no, it's not Satan who's making them do it — it's eBay.
Thanks to a recent British documentary, My Fake Baby, the world at large now knows about the "reborning" community, a mostly female subculture of artisans and collectors organized around vinyl infants who begin life as inexpensive, plain-looking dolls and, through the meticulous craft of maternal Dr. Frankensteins, metamorphize into super-realistic creatures that look and feel just like genuine lifeless babies. The rarest specimens fuel high-stakes eBay bidding wars that can reach upwards of $5000.
Steve Chapman casts a jaundiced eye over the last three presidential candidates still standing:
For some time now, the three presidential candidates have been striving to outdo each other on what Hillary Clinton calls "the commander-in-chief" test. She says that she and John McCain have passed it. McCain's response has been on the order of, "What do you mean, 'we'?" Recently, Barack Obama assembled a passel of retired generals and admirals to publicly salute him.
It's good to know they are preparing themselves for that 3 a.m. phone call. But I'm not convinced any of them is ready for the 8 a.m. call from the budget director reporting that the deficit is raging out of control. When it comes to combating the fiscal menaces we face, these three are all absent without leave.
The budget situation is already dire. In the last six years, the federal government has spent some $1.8 trillion more than it has taken in. This year, the deficit will hit an estimated $410 billion. If the economy falls into a recession, the gap will grow.
Believe it or not, these are the good old days. In the next few years, the budget will begin to show the effects of a mammoth event that has long been dreaded: the retirement of the baby boomers. Social Security and Medicare already account for one-third of federal spending, and over the next 30 years, they are expected to nearly double in cost as a share of the total economy.
Morris dancers, for those of you who don't know, are cute people who dress up in little white suits with green sashes and pork-pie hats with feathers. They tie sleighbells to their feet and they strap long white hankies to their wrists. In any event, there's nothing really alarming about Morris dancers; they're actually quite harmless.
Except that from time to time they will arm themselves with some kind of cudgel or bludgeon or some kind of blunt instrument. And they will gather in a knot or a mob known as a clot, or a team. And they'll gather in kind of a mystic circle and, to the accompaniment of accordion and violin, they will rhythmically and ritualistically hit each other again and again and again, with these sticks.
This is supposed to be some form of British fertility ritual, or some form of entertainment, or something. Anyway, this next song has the sort of knuckle dragging Neanderthal beat that Morris dancers really love to dance to.
Stan Rogers, introducing the song "The Idiot" on the album Home in Halifax.
Wired has a brief introduction to ways to improve your YouTube experience:
Run a well-encoded video through YouTube's backend compression engine and it's going to turn out looking worse for the wear. It's a well-known critique of the site among videophiles, and to its credit, the video-sharing site has been promising it would start encoding videos at higher resolutions. Thankfully, YouTube is finally making good on that promise.
Select videos on the site are already available in 480x360 resolution — it's not HD, but it is a step up from the old 320x240 format. For the most part, this change only affects newer videos and YouTube is rolling it out in a somewhat haphazard manner. Some the videos are identified on the site with a little link offering to take you to a higher res version, but if you want to see the high quality version by default here are a few ways to pull that off.
American history is littered with examples of puritanism deranging the law, from the Salem witch trials onwards. Anthony Comstock, a 19th-century anti-porn campaigner, used his position as a postal inspector to seize 50 tons of books and 4m pictures. He boasted that he was responsible for 4,000 arrests during his career and 15 suicides. Under Prohibition people could be imprisoned for life for consuming alcohol.
Puritanism continues to stalk the country in new guises. The most dramatic example is America's new version of Prohibition — a "war on drugs" that helps explain why one in 100 American adults are in prison. But there are plenty of humbler examples. Schools impose zero-tolerance rules that result in expulsion for minor offences. The citizens of Texas may not buy dildos. Americans are banned from drinking until they are 21.
The combination of legalism and puritanism invariably produces the same dismal results. It creates expensive government bureaucracies that seize on any excuse — rules relating to inter-state commerce are a particular favourite — to extend their powers to boss people about or spy on them. It throws up swivel-eyed zealots who pursue their manias with little sense of proportion or decency (remember Kenneth Starr). And it ends by devouring its children. Mr Spitzer is only the latest in an endless line of self-righteous crusaders impaled on their own swords.
He certainly had no choice but to resign (as he did on March 12th) if, as it seems, he broke the law. But that still leaves the bigger question of whether the law is an ass. George Bernard Shaw once defined "Comstockery" as "the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States"; but it is hardly a joke for the people who are caught in its tentacles. There are enough real problems for America's law-enforcement officials to worry about.
"The hypocrites' club: Now with a new diamond-level member", The Economist, 2008-03-13
It's hard to credit, but the Finnish government is so determined to punish racists that it will even try to block your internet access when you quote government statistics on race issues:
Quotes from official crime statistics published by the Ministry of Justice undoubtedly "help maintain an anti-immigrationist political climate" because they prove that e.g. the Somalis commit more than 100 times more (over one hundred times more, as in, over 10,000% more) robberies per capita than the Finns do.
Yup, he quoted official crime statistics. Given that Finland has one of the highest rates of internet usage in the world, I hope this provokes a powerful backlash against the control freaks who run the country.
And, in this sort of thing, where Finland leads, Canada (and other wannabe Scandinavian countries) will follow.
I've been against red light cameras on the basis that they don't do anything to improve the safety of drivers or pedestrians. I didn't think they were a good idea, but I clearly had the wrong end of the argument: they're very good at doing one thing . . . revenue generation:
[. . .] in a study published this month in the Florida Public Health Review, University of South Florida researchers did find that red light cameras are little more than revenue generators, and actually make intersections less safe than doing nothing at all.
"The rigorous studies clearly show red-light cameras don’t work," said lead author Barbara Langland-Orban, professor and chair of health policy and management at the USF College of Public Health.
"Instead, they increase crashes and injuries as drivers attempt to abruptly stop at camera intersections. If used in Florida, cameras could potentially create even worse outcomes due to the state’s high percent of elderly who are more likely to be injured or killed when a crash occurs."
Okay, so they're bad for drivers . . . where does the revenue angle come in? Here:
Some studies that conclude cameras reduced crashes or injuries contained major “research design flaws,” such as incomplete data or inadequate analyses, and were conducted by researchers with links to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The IIHS, funded by automobile insurance companies, is the leading advocate for red-light cameras. Insurers can profit from red-light cameras, since their revenues will increase when higher premiums are charged due to the crash and citation increase, the researchers say.
That'd be bad enough on its own, except that in many jurisdictions where they've introduced red light cameras, they've also shortened the amber light . . . because that pretty much guarantees an increase in revenue.
Okay, so it also absolutely guarantees an increase in accidents, but you know what they say about omelettes and eggs, right?
[. . .] chilling red [wine] isn't a crime, it's the way its always been . . . it's just the world around us that has changed; let me explain. Today, room temperature is ~70 degrees (21 Celsius) — but in the days when room temperature for reds was first adopted, room temperature wasn't controlled by central air or ambient heat; it was a drafty old French chateau. Here you were lucky if rooms got into mid-50's, and walking around with shorts and a t-shirt on indoors was more likely to give you hypothermia than any kind of comfort. So when you went down to the basement and pulled a bottle off the wine cellar shelf to serve with dinner, it was already "chilled". The idea that red wine, to be served properly, had to be stored next to the oven, was perpetuated by restaurants — and somehow that's just become [accepted as] the norm.
Wine should not be the same temperature as your soup . . . too warm and you kill off all those great subtle flavours. Same can be said about too cold, but if it's too cold, it can always warm up to produce those flavours — too warm, and you're being even more uncouth by dropping a few ice cubes in to chill it down, diluting the taste with water in the process. The only thing worse is stirring in a packet or two of sugar (I've seen and heard about both courses of action)
Michael "Grape Guy" Pinkus, "Raise your Spirits: A Chilly Response", Ontario Wine Review, 2008-03-12
Michael "Grape Guy" Pinkus has some thoughts on what should be done about Vincor's chain of own-label wine stores, now that the company is foreign-owned:
Since Vincor was sold, April 3rd 2006, there has been no consideration or mention of what to do with those Wine Rack stores (you know the little kiosks you find in grocery stores, malls and on street corners that sell Vincor wines exclusively — and one of the few "competitors" to the LCBO’s centralized liquor dominance). The moment Vincor was sold there should have been, and should have continued to be, an uproar about these stores — not stopping until the problem was fixed. Originally the special license to open up additional locations was given to Vincor to promote and sell Ontario wine, but now — not so much. Although Jackson-Triggs, Inniskillin etc. remain Canadian wineries, their profits go south of the border. Have you been in one of these stores (and I don't even have o say lately, because this has always been the case)? Not all the wines on the shelves are VQA, it's that "cellared in Ontario" crap that makes us the laughing stock of the wine world [. . .] Those stores should have been seized from Vincor soon after the sale was made to Constellation and they should have been turned into VQA Wine Stores promoting 100% Ontario wine. Currently, according to the Wine Rack's website, there are 164 in the province of Ontario. If we were to divide those up evenly and geographically among the wineries of Ontario (for argument's sake let's say those that belong to the wine council — 73 in 2007), each winery would have their wines in an additional 2.24 stores. Now say we allow these wineries to have joint control over these locations — buddy-up so to speak with four other wineries (5 in total), these five would have their wines in 11 locations across the province . . . Imagine how many more hands good quality VQA wine would find itself into. These stores would not be allowed to sell "cellared-in-Ontario" wines — only 100% VQA-Ontario product. These stores would serve to educate the public as to what VQA actually is and stands for, because confusion still exists, especially with all those reports about short-crops and lowered percentages. Think about it, the exposure would be amazing and the profits would remain in the hands of our own Ontario-based wineries. Of course the government would get their share, we'd need some kind of governing body over these stores, this is Ontario after all — but let's leave the LCBO out of this one, and create an independent body not beholden to the current monopoly.
Interesting idea, although I'm not normally friendly to proposals to force private companies to disgorge assets at the behest of regulators. In this case, as the stores only exist due to a special dispensation from the regulators, that may not apply with the same force.
Jon, my virtual landlord, is starting to do an upgrade to the underlying blog software that Quotulatiousness runs on (MovableType). In the short term, this may mean a bit of disruption if there are incompatibilities between the very old version I'm using now (2.6) and the current version (4.2).
Just a reminder . . . if something is odd here, check the backup blog for updates.
As amusing as it has been to watch a high-flying hypocrite brought down to earth for indulging his hypocrisy, there are actually some useful ideas being aired:
I understand why Spitzer's alleged hiring of a call girl was stupid, selfish, reckless, immoral and a betrayal of his family. What I don't understand is why it was illegal.
It's not as though sex is otherwise divorced from money. If it were, hot young women would be found on the arms of poor older men as often as they are seen with rich ones. Had the New York governor wanted to buy a $4,300 bauble to seduce someone of Kristen's age and pulchritude, only his wife and his financial adviser would have objected.
It was Spitzer's effort to hide this pastime that attracted law enforcement attention. Prosecutors investigated him not because he had lipstick on his collar, but because he took steps to conceal his patronage of Emperor's Club VIP. By transferring cash to accounts controlled by fake companies, he roused suspicions of political corruption. By now, he probably wishes he had only taken a gratuity to grease a contract.
It's hard to feel excessive sympathy when a colossal hypocrite is exposed. Recently, Spitzer signed a measure increasing penalties for men caught paying for sex, who can now go to jail for as long as a year. But schadenfreude is a weak justification for laws that intrude into the bedroom.
More here.
Update, 14 March: A bit more on this same topic at Samizdata:
Recent large stories in Britain and the US keep the issue of whether prostitution should be legalised in the public eye. I think it should. The resignation this week of Eliot Spitzer, a US politician and former state prosecutor who quit after allegations about his use of prostitutes' services — despite his prosecuting them in his day job — and the recent conviction of the British murderer of five Ipswich prostitutes, convince me we should legalise it. The benefits are many:
People like Eliot Spitzer and other vicious, corrupt state officials would have fewer ways of annoying the rest of us, which is unquestionably a public good. Pimps who control prostitutes, or who attempt to do so, would have fewer opportunities to prey on such women. The spread of sexually transmitted disease would be reduced, if not eliminated because a client could shop around to find brothels that enforce hygiene checks and advertised themselves accordingly. If he caught a STD, the client could sue the brothel, just like a client can now sue a pizza joint if he or she gets food poisoning. And finally, because if an adult woman or man wants to sell sexual favours, that is their business, and no-one else's, period.
I've pretty much given up rapier fencing in the last couple of years, more from lack of time than from any diminished interest. According to USA Today, the sport has continued to grow:
The golf cases propped up against the walls are full of swords, daggers and the occasional bit of chain mail. The halls of the community center ring with the clash of steel, the thud of shields and the quick snip-snip of rapiers. The books quoted are as often as not in medieval German or Latin.
Welcome to a Western martial arts conference. Not a cowboy or lariat in sight. Western in this case is Western European, as opposed to the better-known Asian variety.
These are the arts of warfare and self-defense of medieval and renaissance Europe. Also called historical martial arts, they employ bare hands, pikes, a variety of swords, daggers and rapiers in the way that practitioners of Eastern martial arts might use bo staves, Katana swords and Tanto knives.
Unlike in the East, these fighting traditions died out in Europe in the 1600s with the introduction of gunpowder-fueled weapons.
But now they're making a comeback.
If you watch the video, you'll see a variety of sword styles, but that only begins to scratch the surface of all the interesting ways to simulate the fine arte of skewering, hacking, slashing, and bashing your opponent. All good, clean fun!
Update: The inevitable Fark thread:
birdmanesq:
Thanks for the heads up. Now I have a totally new group of weirdos to avoid.NuttierThanEver:
Translation: These are a bunch of cosplayers who have graduated from foam swords to the real thing and are making up shiat as they go along. Say what you will about karate and wushu practioners but when you can trace the lineage of instruction back 400 some odd years it means more than learning from some guy named Jerry who's WOW handle is Lord Dark Nightshade.The Stealth Hippopotamus:
So it's the SCA without the drinking, drumming, and dancing. So basically its the SCA without the fun.DeadGeek:
"Want to see cool, watch saber competitions. Blindingly fast and savage strikes. Shame the western media coverage of the Olympics does 98% basketball and diving, 2% track and field."
Saber bouts are fun to watch, but I swear they award the point to whomever screams the loudest.
/Been fencing for 13 years
//Epee fencer
///Will NEVER Saber fence again
Ah, Fark: the good, the bad, the plainly demented. The id, unmedicated.
I’m fascinated by the Spitzer-inspired discussion of prostitution on blogs that identify as feminist, most of which seem to be conflicted but marginally pro-decriminalization. It's a surprisingly utilitarian back-and-forth; few posters or commenters are arguing from self-autonomy (OK, none), and most are weighing the obvious harm of denying sex workers access to law enforcement (in the case of criminalization) against the desire not to reinforce patriarchy and/or heteronormativity (in the case of legalization). Everyone seems to assume that legalizing sex work will reinforce all sorts of ugly cultural phenomena women struggle against all the time. Writes one commenter at Feministing, "I'm politically liberal, openly feminist, and opposed to sex work precisely" because of "patriarchy" and "heterosexuality issues."
I find this incoherent precisely because I share all the poster's intuitions about problematic cultural norms. Of course sexism restricts autonomy in all sorts of ways that deserve consideration when discussing the prevalence of prostitution or the choice to enter sex work. Of course it's deplorable that sexually adventurous young women are constantly told they are "degrading themselves" by seeking out various experiences, that every bit of enjoyment eats away at some secret store of purity. This whole tradition — the idea that women need be preserved in glass so as not to "ruin" themselves, lest they diminish their sexual value by "giving it away" — restricts the lived autonomy of women in ways I can't even begin to articulate. None of the slut-shaming makes sense unless you assume women live to give themselves to men in their purest possible form.
Kerry Howley, "Thoughts on Thoughts on Spitzer", Hit and Run, 2008-03-11
I've never watched an episode of The Wire (the "best show on television"), nor did I ever see an episode of The Sopranos (which I gather from recent articles was the previous claimant to the "best show" accolade); I generally watch little-to-no broadcast television. I'm sure that's most of the reason I'm getting heartily sick of all the fin-de-siecle sturm-und-drang about the end of The Wire that seems to be clogging up every blog these days.
Even Reason, one of my favourite sources of information (both in print and online), has been posting their fair share of pissing and moaning about the demise of the "best thing on television".
I don't actually have anything to say about the show, but I had to register my petty annoyance somewhere. Guys, if television is that important to you all . . . you need to get out more!
Samizdata Illuminatus takes a good deep breath:
If I was a believer, I would be pouring a thankful libation right about now. Eliot Spitzer, one of the most nasty power crazed politicos in US politics today, perhaps second only to Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson in authoritarian thuggishness, has just shown that he who lives by the judicial sword, can oh so easily die by the judicial sword. To see a man who thought nothing of using the power of the state to intimidate those who dared cross him get caught in a Federal wiretap is . . . well . . . sweet. I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning.
Brian Reid sent me this link with the following comment: "Fascinating diatribe, interesting viewpoint, pretty funny diagram... What more could you want from the NY Times?".
Yes, I played a little. In junior high and even later. Lawful good paladin. Had a flaming sword. It did not make me popular with the ladies, or indeed with anyone. Neither did my affinity for geometry, nor my ability to recite all of "Star Wars" from memory.
Yet on the strength of those skills and others like them, I now find myself on top of the world. Not wealthy or in charge or even particularly popular, but in instead of out. The stuff I know, the geeky stuff, is the stuff you and everyone else has to know now, too.
We live in Gary Gygax's world. The most popular books on earth are fantasy novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in the real world. And you, the viewer, can play only if you've sufficiently mastered your home-entertainment command center so that it can download a snippet of audio to your iPhone, process it backward with beluga whale harmonic sequences and then podcast the results to the members of your Yahoo group.
Even in the heyday of Dungeons & Dragons, when his company was selling millions of copies and parents feared that the game was somehow related to Satan worship, Mr. Gygax's creation seemed like a niche product. Kids played it in basements instead of socializing. (To be fair, you needed at least three people to play — two adventurers and one Dungeon Master to guide the game — so Dungeons & Dragons was social. Demented and sad, but social.) Nevertheless, the game taught the right lessons to the right people.
A very cool image indeed: Earth at night:
Click the image to see the whole thing.
I believe in Gore, the Prophet All-Knowing, the Creator of the Internet, and in Global Warming, his brain-child:
Which was conceived from Global Cooling, born of his lust for power, after he suffered a stolen election and was considered dead politically.
He descended into Obesity.
The third year He rose again from the obscure, He ascended into media prominence, and sits at the right hand of Bono the Annoying, from whence he shall come to sell carbon credits to the suckers with guilty consciences.
I believe in the Mother Gaia, the holy Ecological Church, the communion of Hollywood stars, the forgiveness of consumerism, the recycling of all things, and life so miserable it seems everlasting.
Amen.
Chris Claypoole, "The Global Warming Creed", Libertarian Enterprise, 2008-03-09
Susan Callaway seems to be offended when I spoke ill of the Boomers. Well get over it. Yours is the generation that has whined and begged for every free lunch that they could get from the government. Saying you weren't one of the whiners or beggars is like saying "Don't blame me, I voted for Kerry". So what. Even if you don't cash your Social Security checks every politician will still be doing all they can to win your aging votes and figuring out ways to dump the bill onto the next few generations. So what if you are voting against your generations desires, the rest of them aren't and that's the problem.
Ron Paul resonates with the young for a good reason. They are the ones who will get screwed the worst by all that Boomer pandering. They are the ones who are going to have to pick up the tab for the party and they don't like it. Unfortunately they are greatly outnumbered by their Boomer parents who instead of having kids decided to have extended childhoods of their own. Unfortunately we Gen X and Gen Y types don't get to have the same extended childhoods your Boomers got, we have to grow up and pay the bills your generation racked up.
Scott Graves, Letter to the editor, Libertarian Enterprise, 2008-03-09
What does the observant Muslimma chav wear? The Burkhaberry:
And, from the Fark thread, a useful little talk on the whole "wearing a Burkha in a free society" issue.
Declan McCullagh interviews Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers:
Why the antipathy toward McCain?
There's an article in Reason magazine about McCain. He's anti-free speech. He's a war guy. Those are about as bad as you can get from a libertarian perspective.
I got turned off by him in a personal meeting. I made a presentation to him that the government is wasting hundreds of millions of dollars in (technology-related) pork barrel spending. I showed that the pork barrel spending is not only fundamentally bad, but also harmful to the people getting the money, the semiconductor industry. When I got done with the presentation, he labeled the pork barrel spending "peanuts." He poked his finger in my chest and said that he's "going to get rid of your big fat stock options."
He's in favor of stifling free speech. He's in favor of the war. He doesn't truly care about lean government. You'd have difficulty picking between him and George W. Bush.
[. . .]
You're making libertarian points. Why aren't there more libertarians, or at least out-of-the-closet libertarians, in Silicon Valley?
First of all, I think Silicon Valley people, if you gave them the world's smallest quiz, my belief is you'd find that people in Silicon Valley are highly libertarian but they don't even know what that phrase means. It's not part of their vernacular. Silicon Valley people are highly apolitical. They're worried about their businesses, they're worried about growth, they're worried about technology. Sometimes they get involved in politics. They get involved on both sides of the fence...
If you would look at the people in Silicon Valley who identify themselves as Republicans, you'll find that they're free-market Republicans. What I think you'd find is that Silicon Valley Democrats have an economic free market base to them, and therefore look a lot like libertarians. Silicon Valley Republicans... aren't restrictive on social issues. You're not going to find any anti-gay, redneck Republicans in Silicon Valley.
Because they don't care that much about politics, they don't get beyond the nuances. But if you took the next layer of detail, you'll find that regardless of how they identified themselves, both sides are libertarian-ish in their leanings.
More of the same sort of reviews here. H/T to Victor for the NSFW link.
You know the current campaign against plastic bags, urging people to avoid using them because they contribute to the deaths of millions of birds and sea mammals? Not so fast:
Campaigners say that plastic bags pollute coastlines and waterways, killing or injuring birds and livestock on land and, in the oceans, destroying vast numbers of seabirds, seals, turtles and whales. However, The Times has established that there is no scientific evidence to show that the bags pose any direct threat to marine mammals.
They "don't figure" in the majority of cases where animals die from marine debris, said David Laist, the author of a seminal 1997 study on the subject. Most deaths were caused when creatures became caught up in waste produce. "Plastic bags don't figure in entanglement," he said. "The main culprits are fishing gear, ropes, lines and strapping bands. Most mammals are too big to get caught up in a plastic bag."
He added: "The impact of bags on whales, dolphins, porpoises and seals ranges from nil for most species to very minor for perhaps a few species. For birds, plastic bags are not a problem either."
The central claim of campaigners is that the bags kill more than 100,000 marine mammals and one million seabirds every year. However, this figure is based on a misinterpretation of a 1987 Canadian study in Newfoundland, which found that, between 1981 and 1984, more than 100,000 marine mammals, including birds, were killed by discarded nets. The Canadian study did not mention plastic bags.
Fifteen years later in 2002, when the Australian Government commissioned a report into the effects of plastic bags, its authors misquoted the Newfoundland study, mistakenly attributing the deaths to "plastic bags".
The figure was latched on to by conservationists as proof that the bags were killers. For four years the "typo" remained uncorrected. It was only in 2006 that the authors altered the report, replacing "plastic bags" with "plastic debris". But they admitted: "The actual numbers of animals killed annually by plastic bag litter is nearly impossible to determine."
But don't worry . . . I'm sure that there'll be another scare along really soon to replace the "plastic bags are evil" meme.
You may have heard that Playmobil, the toy company, recently introduced a toy to help train children to become jackbooted thugs TSA workers. The reviews on Amazon.com are very interesting reading:
You can also read the Fark thread for more frothing-at-the-mouth goodness.
As we contemplate another 30cm of snow starting later today, I had to agree with Den Lippert, who sent this highly appropriate winter greeting (NSFW):
An odd link submitted by "Da Wife", with the comment My mom heard the music and immediately recognized it. She heard it way too many times in the old country.
While Britain is fast catching up to America—and leading Europe—in illiteracy, obesity, and violent crime (despite ubiquitous surveillance cameras and an ineffective ban on handguns), the Wittgenstein references in Monty Python still shape our assumptions of British cultural supremacy. But as the English social critic Theodore Dalyrymple observed in 2004, to profess an interest in high culture in today’s Britain is to be met with accusations of homosexuality.
So before President Ron Paul restores the gold standard, it should be acknowledged that the sagging dollar is providing one useful service: a long-overdue corrective to our self-image as lesser Brits. Europeans, who ranked the English as the “world’s worst tourists” in a recent Expedia poll, have long ago disabused themselves of such stereotypes. Take a look around New York, Boston, or Los Angeles, and spot the omnipresent gaggle of chavs, waddling through the Adidas shop, shouting drunken insults in local Irish pubs, converting the currency on every product within reach. England is just America writ small.
Michael C. Moynihan, "Take Them Back to Dear Old Blighty: The ugliest byproduct of the sagging dollar", Reason Online, 2008-03-06
There are some very amusing (and effective) re-touched WW1/WW2 propaganda posters at this Cafe Press page:
H/T to Katherine Mangu-Ward.
If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.
Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger [link not in original article], who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional.
Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, and David Simon (writing team for The Wire), "The Wire's War on the Drug War", Time, 2008-03-05
Jesse Walker notes the passing of Gary Gygax, the seminal figure in the fantasy roleplaying phenomena of the 1970's and 80's:
Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax has died. It was Gygax, more than anyone else, who turned Tolkien fandom from a premodern pose into a postmodern, participatory phenomenon: Rather than merely reading about hobbits and elves, fantasy fans could enter Middle Earth themselves and create their own adventures. Granted, most of those adventures tended to sound the same. (If you've ever endured a D&Der's detailed account of how he spent his weekend, you'll understand what I mean.) But we knew that from the title, right? On one level it's a liberatory vision, one where anyone can create a world for everyone else to play in. But Gygax gave it a Foucauldian twist: In the end, each of those worlds is still a dungeon.
The comment thread starts off rather well, too:
Episiarch | March 4, 2008, 3:44pm | #
Uh, did you ever play, Jesse? Dungeon crawls were usually the way people got introduced to the game but a campaign could take place absolutely anywhere.But if you are trying to say that D&D players' minds/imaginations are like filthy damp dungeons, that would be funny.
Kerry Howley finds interesting things in A.K. Sandoval-Strausz's Hotel: An American History:
Hotels, he argues, were "a significant episode in the modern idea of a pluralistic, cosmopolitan society," and conservatives invested in the status quo were right to fear them. Transportation advances granted people a new mobility, and traveling Americans suddenly required social mores not predicated on years of shared community bonds.
[. . .]
Hotels were a new institutional form that upset expectations about the arrangement of daily life and alarmed defenders of domesticity. They were full of beds and liquor, associated with sex, theft, and violence. Guests interacted with no patriarch — only a relatively egalitarian ecosystem of managers, porters, and bellboys. As people began to take longer and longer hotel stays in the mid-18th century, sometimes even living in them, "an entire genre of screeds against hotel living" was born, mourning the decline of traditional gender roles in a world where cooks and maids left women hopelessly idle.
None of this did much to dampen Americans' collective zeal for travel and the institutions that would house them along the way. By the end of the 19th century, the American stranger had a new role in the social order: He was a guest.
If people choose not to have children, that's their decision. Obviously. You could make the argument that the future needs kids, and plenty of them, especially if you believe there should be an intermediary government entity transferring part of their income to you when you're old. You could make the argument that childless people are doing their part to save the earth, and the earth will be so grateful it will show up at your funeral and sit in the front row sniffling into a handkerchief. The other guests will nudge and point — is that the Earth? I didn't know they were close. I tend to believe we have reached an unusual point in human history when we have to debate the merits of reproducing, but there you go.
I'm not talking about the people who don't want their own kids but love kids anyway, and prefer the Cool Aunt or Cool Uncle role: bless you. I'm not even talking about the people who are indifferent to kids. I'm talking about the people who find some sort of personal identification in a militantly anti-kid stance. ( I suspect a lot of anti-kid people would be offended if you told them they wouldn't be a particularly good parent, because it requires skills they lack; the strenuously anti-kid types often believe that these skills are simply beneath them, and could be mustered if — God forbid — the occasion arose.) Granted, some people aren't parent material, and it's best they not do something they don't want to do.
[. . .]
So I don't judge people who don't want kids, but I can't stand "breeder" and "clones" and "crotchfruit" and all the other terms of derision. It's the worst form of misanthropy, and a curious protestation of ignorance: these people literally do not know what they're talking about, since there's nothing about parenthood you can observe from a distance that compares to the thing itself. Being irritated with poorly-socialized children in a restaurant does not set one up in a moral high chair. Believe me, parents are just as irritated with those people as you are.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2008-03-05
I was very late in to work this morning, partly because I had an appointment with my dentist, and partly because it was amateur hour for snow plow operators on highway 401 today. We had a moderate snowfall last night and into this morning, somewhere in the 10-15cm range, which wouldn't be too much trouble on its own. What was a problem today was the ineptitude or maliciousness of one or more snow plow operators on the stretch of the 401 from the 404/DVP interchange to at least Yonge Street.
The driver in question had managed to create nigh-on impenetrable ice-walls across the on- and off-ramps for Leslie Street and Bayview Avenue. It was so bad that drivers were up on top of these temporary ramparts trying to shovel their way through using snow brushes and ice scrapers!
Email is the granddaddy of seemingly frivolous Internet applications. "It was an afterthought on the original internet. It was not part of what they sold to ARPA," says [Internet guru Clay] Shirky, an adjunct professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and an Internet consultant for Nokia, BBC, Lego, and the U.S. Navy. Email was just a simplified file-sharing program. But within 3 months, email was 70 percent of traffic on the fledgling Internet.
It wasn't because email was a fast way to send a message to someone, or even that it was a fast way to send a message to a lot of people-there were already ways to do both those things pretty efficiently. What really made email take off, says Shirky, was the Reply All button.
Of course, everyone professes to hate the Reply All button and periodically swears bloody vengeance on its abusers. But the Reply All button offer us the power to turn a communication into a conversation (and sometimes even a community) with virtually no effort at all. No coordinating meetings or teleconferences, no need for synchronicity (anyone can read their email at any time and still be a part of the group), and no duplication.
"For the first time in human history," says Shirky, "our communications tools support group conversation and group action." Governments, enormous, ancient institutions like the Catholic Church, and massive corporations used to thorough dominate the landscape because only they could afford the high costs of coordination or large numbers of people. But now, for the first time, coordination (like talk) is cheap.
Katherine Mangu-Ward, "From Ridiculous to Revolutionary: Will girly blogs, flashmobs, Twitter, and other trivial annoyances save us all?", Reason Online, 2008-03-04
ChuckerCanuck performs a service in identifying the characteristics of Canadian Rednecks:
Often, as we travel the United States, we pass folks who stick their patriotism on their bumpers — the stars and stripes pasted on their cars to advertise their unthinking love of America. For many Canadians, this overt patriotism is decidely foreign. And yet, in my corner of the world, where Liberals win ridings by margins that would make Bashir Assad blush, there is a growing prevelance of people slapping Canadian flag license plates on the front of their vehicles. Canada has rednecks. And to help you identify a Canadian redneck, I have put together a short checklist for your benefit.
H/T to Mark C. at Daimnation for the link.
When stories like this one make the international media:
Freeloading hippie Mark Boyles, 28, decided to demonstrate his contempt for the modern world, materialism, and a bunch of other really terrific things by walking to Gandhi's birthplace in Porbander, India. Boyles is an acolyte of the "Freeconomy" movement, a method of living that, according to the group, "allows people to make the transition from a money based communityless (sic) society to more of a community based moneyless society." In other words, he's a middle class beggar. On the first day of his trip, according to this BBC report, he scored two free meals in the English town of Glastonbury. Hardly surprising; the town is, after all, listed as one of England's "hippie havens."
Boyles and two friends then managed, in a grubby version of Operation Overlord, to land in Pas-de-Calais, France, where the mission encountered into its first snag. According to the BBC, the wandering Freeconomist was quickly mistaken for an indigent "because he could not speak French [and] people thought he was free-loading or an asylum seeker."
In any case, [new versions of the drug naloxone] certainly seem like a good idea for private groups and non-profits. It's a cost-effective way of saving lives.
But not everyone is happy. Dr. Bertha Madras, deputy director of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy, recently told National Public Radio she opposes the distribution programs because — and hold on to your hat for this one — she believes life-threatening overdoses are an important deterrent to drug use.
"Sometimes having an overdose, being in an emergency room, having that contact with a health care professional is enough to make a person snap into the reality of the situation and snap into having someone give them services," Madras said.
Madras' reaction offers a telling glimpse into the mind of a drug warrior.
We're told that certain drugs have to be prohibited because they're too dangerous. But we should also resist efforts to make them less dangerous because doing so might encourage drug use.
It's a bizarre argument until you consider the real motivation behind it: In truth, it's not so much about the harm some drugs do; it's about an absolute moral opposition to the use of some drugs.
Even if they were completely harmless, some people simply don't like the idea that we can ingest chemicals that make us feel good.
Radley Balko, "Better Dead than High", Reason Online, 2008-03-03
Roger Henry follows the links from the last posting to find that it could, indeed, get worse. I hope this is just really, really deep parody, because it's much more disturbing to think that it might be totally serious:
But I've been wrong before . . .
I now remember why the words "Science Fair" filled me with loathing, back in my high school days. They haven't changed much.
H/T to Craig Zeni.
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