Hey, Google "+". You know enough about me ...

... that I'd think you could get the goddam pronouns right by now.

[ + ]

Above: my G+ posts page as viewed by "public."

They is me? Sounds like Pogo.

Welp, all I'll say ...

... about this is that, back in the day, I thoroughly enjoyed pissing all over the urinal screens featuring Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No To Drugs" message.

(Ask your grandparents, kids. Oy, how we suffered.)

Well, no, I will say one other thing. What happens when someone gets it in his or her head that the better coupons are always near the inside of the roll?

Please help spread that rumor.

Good night, and good luck

-- or --

Why we so rarely blog about politics anymore, part [manyromannumerals]

Y'know, there's lying to pollsters because Activism. There's tribamalism, there's the decades-long crippling effect of the rightwing noise machine, there's the black-guy-in-the-White-House thing.

&c.

And then there's this set of responses to a survey question ("Who do you think was more responsible for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina: George W. Bush or Barack Obama?"), from within the past week (via):

Twenty-eight percent said they think former President George W. Bush, who was in office at the time, was more responsible for the poor federal response while 29 percent said Obama, who was still a freshman U.S. Senator when the storm battered the Gulf Coast in 2005, was more responsible.

Bonus! "Nearly half of Louisiana Republicans — 44 percent — said they aren't sure who to blame."

I'm walking on sunshine, oo, oo. And don't it feel good.

Yeah, sure. Like we don't already know the answer will be "Derp!!!1!"

(h/t (and pic source via): Rebecca Schoenkopf)

And you were worried about our coming ROBOT overlords

Yeah, because Zimmer didn't freak you out enough with that other thing.

As Humans Change Landscape, Brains of Some Animals Change, Too

Evolutionary biologists have come to recognize humans as a tremendous evolutionary force. In hospitals, we drive the evolution of resistant bacteria by giving patients antibiotics. In the oceans, we drive the evolution of small-bodied fish by catching the big ones.

In a new study, a University of Minnesota biologist, Emilie C. Snell-Rood, offers evidence suggesting we may be driving evolution in a more surprising way. As we alter the places where animals live, we may be fueling the evolution of bigger brains.

PSYCHO SHOWER SCENE SOUND EFFECT.

Just be careful who you call varmint cong from now on, is all I'm saying.

Also, at risk of being thought of as all Hoot-Smalley, I really hope I never meet Dr. Emelie, because I am sure I would end up calling her Prof. Rell-Snood.

(It's a Catholic thing. Just nod and play along. It'll all be over soon.)

(pic. source)

(?)

(??)

Michael Bloomberg: Ultimately, a legacy of utter failure

I haven't been paying much attention to his stint as mayor -- he was marginally less creepy than Rudy Giuliani, wasn't he? -- but there is no walking this back:

(h/t: I blame)

[Added] And don't fail to follow this link from the preceding. Not for the first time do I marvel at Roy Edroso's scalpel and how gracefully he wields it.

Line of the Day: 2013-08-23

Ah, man. I probably shouldn't blockquote this, since it's the closing paragraph of a post of which you should read the whole thing.

But it's that good.

Okay, your choice: do the usual trick, if you really don't want to read the few paragraphs that come first, or go get yourself some context.

When it's important I'm willing to make common cause with some rightwing asshole to push the tide back on civil liberties. But when you line up with Rand Paul you know what you're getting. [Jeff] Jarvis is so full of shit, he's as useless as an ally as he is as an opponent -- maybe even more useless; he discredits any cause by adopting it. I'm beginning to think newspapers would already be utterly dead by now if Jarvis hadn't spent the past ten years predicting it.
    -- Roy Edroso

Txt spk

But don't worry. The tomatoes are laughing WITH you.

[ + ]

Out of pocket

Either I forgot it completely, or somehow never read this one back when I was all about Marlowe, but I just finished Lady in the Lake a couple of nights ago. It was a great read, as is everything in the terribly small Raymond Chandler canon.

Among the delightful archaic terms encountered: our hero reports at one point checking his strap watch.

Are you able to name any other extinct retronyms?

Huh. You mean some other country is even dumber than the US about what it classifies?

Who knew the Communist Party was worried about this?

Besides everybody on the planet, I mean.

Story link? Really? You want one? OK.

Line of the Day: 2013-08-19

I usually just ignore Twitchy, which isn’t really a news site so much as an effort to stoke and direct the apparently bottomless desire of right wingers to harass people online, which they appear to mistake for activism.
    -- Amanda Marcotte

May be the most polite thing anyone (to the left of Limbaugh) has ever said about Malkin.

(h/t: TBogg)

Good piece on Dave Chapelle

Here.

Maybe this'll just confirm your liberal biases ...

... but Rick Perlstein's Baffler piece from a few months ago, "The Long Con: Mail-order conservatism" is an enjoyable read, in a faintly horrifying way.

Lotta money to be made out there, if only you didn't have a conscience.

(h/t: Julian Sanchez)

I'll give that a big Oh, Snap!

We have so many Tea Party readers and followers. To lose all zero of them due to our September cover would be devastating.

— EBONY (@EBONYMag) August 7, 2013

(h/t: Doktor Zoom)

Here's an article on GMO foods that definitely bears your attention

At least in this case, the choice seems to come down to accepting a genetically modified orange or eating a whole lot more pesticide.

Or eating oranges that look like the one on the right.

[Added] Or, as numerous meatspace commenters have pointed out to me, not eating oranges at all.

I myself am not totally against GMO foods. I don't have worries about the "Frankenfood" aspect; i.e., I'd have no problem eating a given sample that had gone through the testing described in the article. I do worry about genetically modified organisms -- plant or animal -- escaping into the wild, as it were, before we completely understand what we're doing, in general.

(h/t: Andrew Revkin)

Ripped from context 2

Apparently, this is a sincere compliment:

Some human language researchers are impressed, too. “My hat’s off to them,” Dr. Oller said of the new study’s authors. “They aren’t even babbling researchers, and they came up with a procedure that eluded all of us. Assuming they are correct, they’ve made a serious contribution to the babbling literature.”

Doghouse's Olios are always good

This one, especially so.

Must be nice

To have that kind of money, I mean.

The military headquarters responsible for computer-network warfare, the United States Cyber Command, will grow by 4,000 personnel with an additional investment of $23 billion, ...

The creation of jerbs! With no hint of scolding from the deficit scolds!

Does it get better? Oh, it gets better:

... General Dempsey said. (Cyber Command and the National Security Agency are led by the same officer, Gen. Keith B. Alexander.)

Uh huh.

“We are doing all of this not to address run-of-the mill cyberintrusions, but to stop attacks of significant consequence — those that threaten life, limb and the country’s core economic functioning,” General Dempsey said.

I for one feel safer already!

So, despite the DH, not really so different after all

Ripped from context ...

Homo sapiens, the species that would eventually form both the American and National Leagues, ...

Deep thought

Cheap is nice, but how long until a 3D printer can make a copy of itself?

Fundamentalist religion, summed up

... an outlet for emotionally disturbed men with intimacy deficits.

If that's not the shorter of the year, I can't imagine what else is.

Yeah, yeah. Fish in a barrel. But when the master is holding the shotgun ...

TBogg on Geraldo Rivera being very sad about not becoming your next U.S. Senator from New Jersey?

I was going to say it could not get any better, but then I happened to hover over the first link in TBogg's post, to the authoritative news source that, according to the Blogger Ethics Panel, must be cited before commencing to snark.

The flagship of the Right Wing Noise Machine, ladies and gentlemen.

It's almost hard to believe that conservative outreach to minority groups still isn't doing any better.

Did you know Carl Zimmer now has a NYT column?

I just discovered this. No author page yet, but you can start here.

I've long known that winning the silver can be painful, but this is news to me

A lede that belongs in the Hall of Infamy:

Seven-time All-Star Grant Hill retired from the NBA on Saturday after 19 seasons, ending a career interrupted by injuries that included an Olympic gold medal.

May?

And come to that, suggested?

Whoever writes the blurbs for the NYT's front page ought to sack up. How about saying what the article really says; e.g., Good writing need not be constrained by dictionary definitions?

The article would be better with some more examples, but it does offer something rare, to you, a decent person with your head on straight: the opportunity to agree with someone who writes for The Weekly Standard.

Fun fact of the day

An excerpt from "The Chutzpah Caucus:"

... Keynesian economics says not just that you should run deficits in bad times, but that you should pay down debt in good times. And it’s silly to imagine that this will happen, right?

Wrong. The key measure you want to look at is the ratio of debt to G.D.P., which measures the government’s fiscal position better than a simple dollar number. And if you look at United States history since World War II, you find that of the 10 presidents who preceded Barack Obama, seven left office with a debt ratio lower than when they came in. Who were the three exceptions? Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes. So debt increases that didn’t arise either from war or from extraordinary financial crisis are entirely associated with hard-line conservative governments.

My mind is a terrible thing

I glanced at this three times before I realized it did not say "Dana Fetish Cubes."

I didn't know Rachel Maddow had a new book out

​What's most amazing to me is that the wingnuts haven't swarmed the Amazon page to give it one star ratings. Particularly given the topic.

(At least as of this moment, it's at 4.5.)

Probably I won't read it. Sounds like something I already agree with on every point, and who needs reinforcement on such a discouraging matter?

Hat tip to Dok Zoom and his latest post in the series "Sundays With The Christianists." This one is on "A Biology Textbook With Dinosaurs On Noah’s Ark." The connection between these two items? A service advisory at the end of the post: next week's SWTC will be preempted by Dok hosting a discussion of Maddow's book.

Now, that's entertainment

And it's not just the headline.

Chinese “spy” caught with NASA laptop full of porn, not secrets

There's also the backstory.

Jiang, a former contractor at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, had recently been let go by his employer because of pressure from Republican congressman Frank Wolf of Virginia. Wolf had claimed Jiang and other Chinese engineers employed by NASA contractors were a security risk. And that day, it seemed so—Jiang had a NASA-owned laptop in his possession, and was on a plane back to China.

But it quickly became apparent that Jiang was at worst guilty of violating NASA policies. There was no evidence of any sensitive material on the laptop, and Jiang didn't have clearance to such projects at Langley as an employee of the National Institute of Aerospace. Instead, investigators found, the laptop was loaded with pornography and pirated movies. Since he had lost his job and his work visa was expiring, Jiang simply was going home—with a little entertainment.

A press release issued by Wolf after the arrest and copy of Jiang's arrest warrant have since disappeared off the congressman's website. In the release (cached by Google here), Wolf had said, "I am particularly concerned that (the) information (on Jiang's laptop) may pertain to the source code for high-tech imaging technology that Jiang has been working on with NASA. This information could have significant military applications for the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army."

Some?

The NYT sure does love that weasel word.

The piece itself is a little more honest, to be fair.