Seriously?
Seriously.
Seen here.
Saturday, September 04, 2010
Yeah, just me being an atheist dick again
Click to engorge.
(Swiped from @SexCigarsBooze. Hat tip @Pistolette -- "I'd love to put that on a billboard in Saudi Arabia" (me: "How about the US?") -- RTed by @RufusPolk)
Sure, everything looks soft, fluffy, and unthreatening from far enough away
Hurricane Earl from a day or two ago. That little brown thing in the upper left corner? Florida.
Given everything that has been declared #obamasfault (even!), I think FoxNews should be required to do an hour-long special thanking the President for saving us from this menace.
(h/t: KK, via LK, via email)
Saturday Morning Schadenfreude: "Megan McArdle Really Hates Sex at Dawn"
Oh, this response to McMegan "Such Is Blogging" McArdle from the authors of a book she reviewed before she'd read is just priceless.
Via TBogg, whose post is also delicious.
You know when you're just goofing around, and think, nah ... but?
omg teh Google people are good. (Or insane on the same plane as I am; same thing. (I wish.))
I salute the programmer on the Calculator team who stood his or her ground and said, "Nope, someday, someone is gonna wanna do this conversion. So shut up."
I still remember with joy a high school physics class where we were assigned a distance-equals-rate-times-time problem, where the speed was given in furlongs per fortnight. [Added2: oh, yeah.]
[Added] And! I remember from last night's surfing that there are more like us.
[Added3] Up next: neo-reactionaries, moaning, "Oh me oh my. This Google trickery is all well and good, but won't someone think of the children? They will grow up not knowing how to use their calculators. And will they even ever learn RPN?"
It must be the money ... turns everything to crap, doesn't it?
I am very glad Josh Fruhlinger is able to find the funny in this story about Republicans and their campaign financing schemes. Because, me, I'm about to crack a bottle of the hard stuff and put Bulworth on infinite replay until I pass out.
But, y'know, thank god we shut down that EVIL ACORN. And tsk tsk on that uppity president for mentioning the Supreme Enablers.
Sen. David Vitter to return campaign contribution from deceased woman
Assuming he's able to dig her up.
Moar diaperz jox plz. kthxbai.
Deep Thought
You know why we put screen doors in houses in the country?
TO KEEP THEM CLOSED.
Yeah. It only took me a few seconds too long to figure it out, too.
Friday, September 03, 2010
But OF COURSE a story like this must run on a Saturday
Still, we are the Internets, and we obey no Beltway calendar or clock. So read this story and pass it on to your friends, please.
Blackwater Won Contracts Through a Web of Companies
WASHINGTON — Blackwater Worldwide created a web of more than 30 shell companies or subsidiaries in part to obtain millions of dollars in American government contracts after the security company came under intense criticism for reckless conduct in Iraq, according to Congressional investigators and former Blackwater officials.
While it is not clear how many of those businesses won contracts, at least three had deals with the United States military or the Central Intelligence Agency, according to former government and company officials. Since 2001, the intelligence agency has awarded up to $600 million in classified contracts to Blackwater and its affiliates, according to a United States government official.
The Senate Armed Services Committee this week released a chart that identified 31 affiliates of Blackwater, now known as Xe Services. The network was disclosed as part of a committee’s investigation into government contracting. The investigation revealed the lengths to which Blackwater went to continue winning contracts after Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in September 2007. That episode and other reports of abuses led to criminal and Congressional investigations, and cost the company its lucrative security contract with the State Department in Iraq.
The network of companies — which includes several businesses located in offshore tax havens — allowed Blackwater to obscure its involvement in government work from contracting officials or the public, and to assure a low profile for any of its classified activities, said former Blackwater officials, who, like the government officials, spoke only on condition of anonymity.
Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that it was worth “looking into why Blackwater would need to create the dozens of other names” and said he had requested that the Justice Department investigate whether Blackwater officers misled the government when using subsidiaries to solicit contracts.
Read the rest.
Also, for the truly hardcore, like emptywheel and Maha, the article's sidebar contains a link to this giant PDF: "Contracting In A Counterinsurgency: An Examination Of The Blackwater-Paravant Contract And The Need For Oversight: Hearing Before The Committee On Armed Services United States Senate."
Reminder, if you need one: image-Google results for Blackwater. Here's an icky one from an earlier post to get you started.
[Added] Thanks for noticing, Blackwater Watch.
Blog Post of the Week
I know of no words strong enough to praise marindenver's exposé of Colorado Republican gubernatorial nominee, Dan Maes. Just … go.
Glad We're Finally Paying Attention to the Koch Brothers, But ...
... never forget about the Mellon family: almost (?) as rich, just as hateful.
(previously: "About the Koch Brothers" | see also )
Liberals FTW
Yeah, so current events have you and me holding our heads in our hands, if not banging them against the wall. But while reading this post by Evan Hurst, in which he notes the sudden lack of reluctance, just since the Bush years, by a number of big-name Republicans and conservatives to be seen being human towards gay people, I thought once again of the Glenn Beck Lawn Chair Rally and Lardfest: say what you will about the ridiculous and unfounded anger of those people, one point that cannot be emphasized enough is how hard they all were trying to appropriate the image of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Superficially, to be sure, and forgetting a lot of the important stuff, no doubt, but the fact remains that two generations ago, this same sort of crowd would have been calling for him to be jailed, if not lynched.
So, we may not make progress as fast as we'd like on our agenda. Our president appears a tad too cautious and catering for our taste. We don't have a political party that likes to represent our interests consistently. We might even have a messy midterm election, in which we allow our irritation to manifest as apathy, and let the worse of two evils win one.
But if you step back a bit and reflect, you see that our way keeps winning out over the long run. We have to work too damn hard at it, we do sometimes feel like it's ninety-eight steps back for every ninety-nine forward, but when all is said and done, we do drag the reluctants along with us, and we do outlive and outlast the reactionaries. Women vote. People of different skin color get married, and soon, people of the same sex will, too. We may bicker about how much in crisis Social Security is, but it is now taken as a given that old and disabled people should be cared for, and not just by hoping private charity will do it. We are stuck in some unpleasant wars, but we now think individual casualties are of real importance. And so on. I'm sure if you put your mind to it, you can come up with another couple dozen big examples.
It is not at all like me to be upbeat, but despite my usual air of cynicism and despair, I always believe the above. And so I thought I would remind you, who pay so much attention to the details that maybe you sometimes forget the big picture, to keep it in mind, too.
We're better than they are, we're smarter than they are, and dammit, people like what we do.
Line of the Day: 2010-09-03
TBogg on the GHEMRotRSTF:
So, to review: inferring through a cut-out that Mike Castle is gay is unacceptable. Calling outgoing Supreme Court Justice David Souter a “goat-fucking child molester” is something that you put on your resume to the delight of CNN.
Wingnut vs. teabagger catfights are the best.
Teabaggers Binging on Purging
When the teabaggers came for the stimulus, I did not say anything, because I am not a huge fan of government spending …
When the teabaggers came for the health care reform, I did not say anything, because I am not a huge fan of government programs …
When the teabaggers came for Obama, I did not say anything, because I am not a huge fan of Obama …
When the teabaggers came for the Democrats, I did not say anything, because I am not a Democrat …
When the teabaggers came for the liberals, I did not say anything, because I am not a liberal …
And by "I" I mean "Brink Lindsey and Will Wilkinson," two names that will be familiar to some of you.
Here is the start of a post by David Frum, someone else who knows a thing or two about being purged by the lunatics grasping for control of Teh Conservative Movement in these United States.
The Purge at Cato
The summer’s biggest inside-Washington story was the abrupt and simultaneous departure of co-authors Brink Lindsey and Will Wilkinson from the Cato Institute.
Lindsey was Cato’s vice president for research; Wilkinson a Cato scholar. They were working together on a book arguing for a new political approach fusing libertarianism and liberalism – a concept that Cato has previously endorsed on issues like drug control, foreign policy, and sexual freedom.
Lindsey and Wilkinson missed the memo announcing that Cato was going all-in with the Tea Party movement. In early July, Lindsey negatively reviewed at the liberal American Prospect website a new book by American Enterprise Institute president, Arthur Brooks. Brooks had provided an intellectual manifesto for the Tea Party, arguing that the United States now faced a culture-dividing battle over the continued existence of the free enterprise system. Lindsey’s view: “The attempt to turn economic policy disputes into a populist cultural crusade rests on deep-seated confusion about the nature of those disputes and how best to effect constructive policy change.”
A few days later, Lindsey – whoosh! – abruptly departed to a new job at the Kauffman Foundation, Wilkinson to a part-time blog at the Economist.
The story bubbled among libertarian bloggers and tweeters. It broke into the larger blog conversation last week, when Dave Weigel asked the obvious question: were Lindsey and Wilkinson purged?
It's a long post and may be eye-rollingly inside-baseball to a lot of you. But you might at least give it a skim -- it pays to be aware of what's going on inside those power centers. As Frum says farther down:
Right-of-center think tanks claim to do objective research that can be trusted by all policy players, regardless of point of view. They boast that they care about ideas, not parties or personalities. They aspire to set a broader agenda for the right, in lieu of the narrow demands of K Street special interests.
These claims look increasingly false. The right-of-center world is poorer for the dessication of the institutions that used to act as the right’s brains.
We are likely soon to have a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, maybe the U.S. Senate too. And what will that majority do? The answer seems to be: They have not a clue.
You can disagree about some of the particulars and predictions. I certainly do. But I agree with the spirit of his argument, and if we grant his premises, the conclusion is beyond dispute. It's a warning worth taking seriously.
Hat tip to @jim_newell, who liked this line: “Somehow I always thought we’d get more done before we became completely corrupt.”
__________
[Added] Here's a nice post by Will on Glenn Beck. He doesn't get a byline,* but if you're interested, you can probably figure out what's his by checking his Twitter feed, @willwilkinson.
Oh, and here is Brink Lindsey's Twitter feed.
__________
* [Added2] Actually, he points out (← good post) that his Economist posts have "W.W. | IOWA CITY."
Not saying it'll cleanse your colon, BUT!
I hear there’s some pretty ugly stuff right now coming out and what we predict, we always see a pattern. We’ve got some victories under the belt. Things are, things are going well, and then, then there is that public slam of us. So, we always expect what’s coming. I don’t read some of it because I know that those that are impotent and limp and gutless, and then they go on, they’re anonymous, their sources that are anonymous, and impotent, limp and gutless reporters take anonymous sources and cite them as being factual references. You know, it just slays me because it’s so absolutely clear what the state of yellow journalism is today that they would take these anonymous sources as fact. So, when a story especially is filled with those and we know it’s bogus and we’re not going to read it.
As to the bolded part, it sounds like she's been taking advice from the "Advice Goddess", doesn't it?
As to the rest, I'm not sure, but I think she is saying that if you haven't already read that great dishy piece in Vanity Fair, you should.
(h/t: @Tarkloon)
Thursday, September 02, 2010
Oh, hey. Even cooler.
Here's a screen shot taken while playing the video in the previous post.
Note the menu, which appeared when I clicked on the CC button. And after clicking the Transcribe Audio option, just like that, subtitles started appearing. (Added on the fly, in real-time? Or computed once and stored in a separate channel of sorts? Gotta be the latter.)
You can see an error right there in the screen grab, as it happens -- "eighty" should have been any. [Added: and actually, the number of errors throughout is not acceptable by any standard.] Still, though, be interesting to see where this goes, and how well it does with time. Speech recognition is a really hard nut to crack, but I'm curious to see what the Google crew will come up with. Maybe instead of coming up with the genius AI algorithm, the problem will succumb (with high-90s accuracy, at least) to a massive statistical approach, who knows? I wonder, also, if they have some plan like reCAPTCHA or Image Labeler to get the online crowd to help?
If anyone needs me, I'll be out buying a soldering iron
OMG this is so cool. "Illuminate Your Keyboard!"
One of the really nice aspects is the pacing. Note to other YouTubers in this genre: remember that we do have pause buttons, y'all. And replay, and all kinds of fancy stuff. [Added: which is how I now can smirk, "Reverse threaded screws?" right at the beginning. Blooper reel! Added2: Nope. Take it back. Just an illusion, I guess.]
I'm afraid (of the time loss) to look right now, but I'll have to remember to have a look at the YouTube channel Kipkay's Hacks, Pranks & How-to.
A Six-Pack of Clickbait Fail
It is painful to contemplate that anyone would want to click on any of these:
Sometimes I think we are all living in one giant, never-ending episode of reality teevee.
(Pic. source was the sidebar, a short while ago, on this page. ← All right, I'll admit: I was on that page because I was trying to find out what #TwitterBeef meant. Sue me for a momentary lapse of hipwazee.)
Internet Advertisers Finally Admit Who Their Target Demographic Is
It is not known whether this man is related to Tim Pawlenty:
Wonder if he still believes you reboot them by shaking them over your head.
Oh, wait. That was that other Haired Boss.
"Here's How The GOP Picks Up Gay Voters"
I retweeted this a while ago, but just in case you missed it, it deserves another mention. That Dan Savage is a pretty smart guy. Short post, packed with insights. Go.
(h/t: Evan Hurst)
Let the "Down Under" Jokes Begin
This just in:
EvanHurst Anti-gay Australian MP Fred Nile has "researched porn" on his office computer 200,000 times! http://bit.ly/9APHXC
Those fundies just keep living up (down) to stereotype, don't they? How many hard -- if you know what I mean -- drives' full do you suppose Brent Bozell and Bryan Fischer have?
Okay, moar Jan Brewer jox plz.
The Jan Brewer Reviews Review
Apparently someone did not exactly wow 'em with her opening statement at last night's Trainwreck in Arizona gubernatorial debate?
• @ExitPass: "Jan Brewer's Emmy Acceptance Speech"
• John Cole: "It’s the Palinization of politics."
• Betty Cracker: "I don’t want to pity Jan Brewer/But holy fuck, she makes Palin sound like Cicero."
• Dan Amira: "Jan Brewer Was Unaware That Debates Often Include Opening Statements."
• Jason Linkins: "... could charitably be called a 'complete and utter disaster' … It's like she forgot her book report was due or something! … Does Jan Brewer, in her opening statement, qualify as a 'headless body?'"
• Davin Gordon: "Arizona Governor Jan Brewer's Opening Statement: Nailed It./Honestly, she should just take off her mic, drop it on the floor and walk off the set. O-V-E-R, bitches."
• @jeffreycaldwell: "AZ gov shows the very real dangers of heat stroke."
• @JarrettGC: "It's very hot today, and experts say the best way to cool off is to stand next to a frozen Jan Brewer"
• @nicvatar: "illegals could have done better"
• @HariDNC: "Jan Brewer does her best Miss Teen South Carolina"
• George Zornick: "Jan Brewer Struggles To Recall Her Accomplishments"
• Hick With A Master's Degree: "She may be out of touch, and she may be a liar, but she's a rising star now."
• @cliffschecter: "Finaly got 2c Jan Brewer clip frm lst nite. Holy Lord-Half expectd her 2 whip out beer bong, trn 2 Goddard & ask him 2 pass the pringles #p2"
• @DMillerDC: "Just watched the Jan Brewer debate video. Makes my public speaking look like freakin' William Jennings Obama King Jr. in comparison."
• @ZerlinaM: "RT @insanityreport: RT @elonjames: In this video clip Gov. Jan Brewer makes Alvin Greene look Presidential..."
• @steveweinstein: "Jan Brewer to sue Obama for her debate debacle. Said: I know we'll lose on sb1070 and Obamacare, but this one truly is his fault."
@siouxeeq: "must be hard to speak when all you can think is #papersplz"
• @leepacchia: "Good morning...but I digress..."
• @markos: "Brewer should've winked."
I might have missed a few.
But! you ask, could it get any worse?
Oh, you must not have heard about the (imaginary) beheadings.
__________
[Added] Now remixed with Keyboard Cat! (via @mbyhoff)
[Added2] @ebertchicago : "HEADLESS BODIES FOUND BY BRAINLESS GOVERNOR." (RT by @jedlewison)
Wednesday, September 01, 2010
Oh, hurrah! At long last, a glimpse of sanity!
News from the National Center for Science Education, via @JohnAllenPaulos:
ICR concedes defeat over its graduate school
The Institute for Creation Research is apparently conceding defeat in its lawsuit over the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board's 2008 decision to deny the ICR's request for a state certificate of authority to offer a master's degree in science education from its graduate school. The United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, finding (PDF, p. 38) that "ICRGS [the Institute for Creation Research Graduate School] has not put forth evidence sufficient to raise a genuine issue of material fact with respect to any claim it brings," granted summary judgment to the defendants in a June 18, 2010, ruling. It was not until the September 2010 issue of the ICR's Acts & Facts, however, that the ICR seems to have publicly commented on the decision, with Henry Morris III, the ICR's chief executive officer, writing, "ICR's legal battle is over."
Information about the graduate school vanished from the ICR's website over the summer of 2010, but writing in Creation Ministries International's Journal of Creation (2010; 24 [3]: 54-55), Chris Ashcraft reported, "On 25 June 2010 the ICR board of directors voted to close the Grad School," citing a June 30, 2010, e-mail from Henry Morris III. Replacing it, apparently, is the ICR's School of Biblical Apologetics, which offers a Master of Christian Education degree; Creation Research is one of four minors. The ICR explains, "Due to the nature of ICR's School of Biblical Apologetics — a predominantly religious education school — it is exempt from licensing by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Likewise, ICR's School of Biblical Apologetics is legally exempt from being required to be accredited by any secular or ecumenical or other type of accrediting association."
I wonder how Zombie is taking this.
Line of the Day: 2010-09-01
It used to take the commercial media at least a day or two to spread a botched news story from coast to coast, but these days, when you add new technology like Twitter to Tea Party paranoia, you can hang a black t-shirt over a web-cam and within ten minutes half of middle America thinks it’s a total eclipse of the sun.
-- Matt Taibbi, in re John Cusack's tweet
Especially the FoxNews watchers. And never mind how they howled that "don't retreat, reload" and a million other exhortations from their heroes this past year DID NOTHING TO INCITE VIOLENCE!!!1!
__________
[Added] An example of what Taibbi is talking about:
Up next from FoxNews:
Is John Cusack a Seekrit Muslin???1?
Buy them both together and save!
Pix by Betty Cracker and Jewels, whose words you should also read.
[Added] Looks like there's a third book.
Sometimes there really is an Ivory Tower problem
Or if not an ivory tower, at least an unawareness -- or unwillingness -- on the part of too many smart people to acknowledge the existence of a gutter, and from time to time, to be willing to wallow in it a bit, to see what's really flowing on down there.
Michael Tomasky blogs about a column by the Financial Times's Martin Wolf, in a post titled "If FDR had been elected in 1930." Wolf, like Paul Krugman and distressingly few others, thinks the real problem with the economy is that the stimulus package put together in early 2009 was not big enough. And of course, Wolf, like distressingly too many others, believes this is entirely #obamasfault.
Here's a nice bit: It's so good I now blockquote at length.
But the column completely ignores the fact that there's this thing called Congress. There was simply no way to get a $1 trillion-plus stimulus bill through Congress.
This is a big problem with a lot of economics writing, and a lot of social scientific writing on politics in general: it takes no account of politics. Paul Krugman, in one of his recent books, explained that he spent years ignoring politics because he figured that the political system was basically sort of corrupt and filled with second-raters, but that when politicians were met with empirical economic evidence that said "do X," they by and large accepted it and went out and did X.
He was very slow to learn, in the age of modern conservatism, that empirical evidence isn't worth a postage stamp. And so he recalibrated his polemics accordingly.
Similarly, there was a big book a couple of years ago by a political scientist named Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy. He showed that growth has been greater under Democratic presidents than Republican ones since World War II. And he did it in an empirical way that (I presume) satisfied the peer-reviewish demands of his trade.
But Bartels too basically acknowledged in his book: I didn't used to think politics was such a big deal. Or he used to think pols were basically rational actors. In other words it took these social scientists a long time to cotton on to something that was obvious to a lot of us who cover politics, which is that while one side may occasionally play fast and loose with numbers to serve its agenda, we had another side that was just making stuff up all time.
So I don't understand how Wolf can write a column like that and not place the blame for the size of the stimulus where it belongs. And maybe he thinks Obama is a failure now, and that's his right. But what kind of failure would Obama have been if he'd tried to pass a $1.3 trillion stimulus and failed, as he almost surely would have, and we'd had nothing, and today faced unemployment of 15%, while Obama would have been tarred just one month into office as "too far left" for even his own party?
Say it again, and this time in boldface, because these truths needs to be shouted:
He was very slow to learn, in the age of modern conservatism, that empirical evidence isn't worth a postage stamp.
In other words it took these social scientists a long time to cotton on to something that was obvious to a lot of us who cover politics, which is that while one side may occasionally play fast and loose with numbers to serve its agenda, we had another side that was just making stuff up all time.
The Latest Racist Dogwhistling from Tom Tancredo
Yeah, you already know he's a scumbag and that he is obsessed with demonizing anyone whose skin is not his lighter shade of pale. And yes, he's looking more like a fringe character in his third-party bid to become Colorado's next governor. Still, it's worth keeping an eye on lying hatemongers like him, because the right-wing media still gives him a platform to push ideas they want pushed, even if they're smart enough to want them pushed by someone other than their matinee idols. So, to that end, you should have a look at "Tancredo: First Lady Wanted To Ban Christmas Artifacts At The White House" over at TPM.
You should also bear in mind that his remarks (and they were not limited to making shit up about the First Lady, not by a long shot) were not surreptitiously grabbed from off-the-record blabbing when he was surrounded by admiring teabaggers or something like that. These came in an interview with TPM.
Somehow ... "Sarah Palin Profile" ... "Vanity Fair" ...?
Actually, it's a pretty devastating piece. Hurrah for Michael Joseph Gross.
I tried to pick out a couple of excerpts, but there's just too much good stuff. So let's just have this last paragraph of the intro:
This spring and summer I traveled to Alaska and followed Palin’s road show through four midwestern states, speaking with whomever I could induce to talk under whatever conditions of anonymity they imposed—political strategists, longtime Palin friends and political associates, hotel staff, shopkeepers and hairstylists, and high-school friends of the Palin children. There’s a long and detailed version of what they had to say, but there’s also a short and simple one: anywhere you peel back the skin of Sarah Palin’s life, a sad and moldering strangeness lies beneath.
(h/t: @EvanHurst | pic. source)
How many ways can you code-talk your butthurt and your racist feelings?
Thirteen minutes of Glenn Beck fans, talking to an interviewer at the Lawn Chair Rally and Lardfest, over at TBogg's place. Force yourself to sit through it as long as you can. These are the people voting against you, come November.
Welcome to RealAmerica™.
[Added] More from the producers of that video, New Left Media, on their YouTube page and web site. Some comments by them on this specific video on their blog.
Why we call @fredthompson Dumbo
Tweeteth the savior of the Republican Party (well, c. early 2008, at least):
Your opposition party, ladies and gentlemen. But please, keep railing about how awful things are with the Democrats in charge.
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