Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, 'America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country.' We stepped right into bin Laden's propaganda.Duh.Richard Clarke
By way of Michael Bérubé, who mentions this quote in the context of pointing out how Michael Berman doesn't understand this point. Extra credit for checking out Bérubé's terrific review of Berman's Terror and Liberalism, which is the only interesting article I've ever seen from the pages of Tikkun.
Ruben Bolling's comic which runs in Salon, Tom the Dancing Bug, doesn't usually work for me. But I love his “Justice Scalia” series of strips, which feature every lefty's anti-favorite conservative jurist having adventures in the style of a silly TV program, “righting wrongs” using the logic of his court decisions.
For your convenience, I have them for you here: One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight
Only in about 20 metro areas, mostly located in eight states, does the relationship of home price to income defy logic. The bad news is that those areas contain roughly half the housing wealth of the country. In California, the price of a home stands at 8.3 times the annual family income of its occupants; in Massachusetts, the ratio is 5.9:1; in Hawaii, a stunning, 10.1:1. To some extent, there are sound and basic economic reasons for this anomaly: supply and demand. Salaries in these areas have been going up faster than in the nation as a whole. The other is supply: These metro areas are "built out," with zoning ordinances that limit the ability of developers to add new homes. But at some point, incomes simply can't sustain the prices. That point has now been reached. In California, a middle-class family with two earners each making $50,000 a year now owns, on average, an $830,000 home. In the late 80s, the last time these eight states saw price-to-income ratios this high, the real estate market collapsed.
Counting every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable harm.(By way of Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo)US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, writing in dissent
Bush v. Gore, 9 December 2000
Yes, this is real. Someone really posted a job ad offering Exxxtra $$$ for elf-based ''hand-to-hand'' marketing promotions. I really responded with a straightfaced email expressing interest. The person really replied with an invitation to an elf orientation.Google reports that it is the only page on the Web containing the exact phrase ''elf orientation.'' Or did, until I posted this ...
Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application. While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?
Protesters often complain about being marginalized or ignored by the mainstream media and a good look at the choice pics below may explain why. Come on people! Going to a protest is no reason to make yourself look ugly or retarded.
It's a crossed-meme joke. Last November, there was a story about a 7-year-old who was disciplined at school for telling other kids that his mother was a lesbian. Atrios followed the story and posted a disconcerting image of the school's ''student behavior contract,'' which says ''what I should have done: cep my mouf shut.''
Meanwhile, a story was breaking about the famous picture of Bush serving Thanksgiving turkey in Iraq being a bit deceptive: it seems that the turkey in question was a display platter, not something served to GIs.
Add to that Atrios' recurring theme in linking to mainstream news articles, pointing out, like many observers, how the mainstream press, and the White House press corps in particular, have been intimidated by the Bush administration. With Karl Rove at the helm, the administration has used a strategy of weeding out reporters who write things critical of the administration by cutting off their access to information.
So Atrios combined all of those themes into a joke. And now ''turkee'' is Atrios' shorthand for ''the good stuff.''
A Supplication to the Shower Goddess of Iowa City, Iowa, for a Hot Shower Before I Teach My Eight-Thirty AM Class on Friday, February 27th, 2004
Impluvia, hot fingered,
please be there when I open the spigot.
I woke up cold.
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when you close the thermostat circuit,
when you keep the others asleep and
save yourself for me,
it is a miracle of hotness
On the other hand, he has this bizarre optimism that they're not so bad as they seem, they're just evolving into something cool that we cannot yet fully imagine. Bunk. Edge cities suck. They lack public space, corrode community, and are ugly, ugly, ugly. They sap the soul. People live in them because in America they mostly don't have a choice, for economic reasons.
Kevin Drum has a nice summary of the book's explanation of how the logic of cars shapes edge cities.
The basic unit of density in an edge city development is the FAR (pronounced eff-ay-are), or Floor-to-Area Ratio, which Garreau describes this way: ''It is the developer's fundamental calculation of urban density, hence traffic, hence parking, hence human behavior, hence civilization.'' FAR is the ratio of the total floorspace of a building to the area of the land the building is on, and it is constrained by the rule of thumb that each worker in an office building requires 250 square feet and each car requires 400 square feet.
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In other words, there's a gray zone between an FAR of 0.4 and a FAR of about 1.0 where it doesn't make economic sense to build much of anything. And it all hinges on parking.
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Edge cities always develop to the point where they become dense enough to make people crazy with the traffic, but rarely, if ever, do they get dense enough to support the rail alternative to automobile traffic.
Broke my willing suspension of disbelief, you know?
So today, the witty and sophisticated Diane pointed out to me the obvious: Gargamel is just crazy, and hatred of Smurfs is a psychotic symptom. This also explains why he lived in such a crummy hovel --- obviously he can't hold down a steady job if he's nuts.
I feel much better now.
If things are not going swimmingly in Iraq, it is not the fault of domestic critics. It is the fault of the people who sent in too few troops and failed to plan for the aftermath of the war.Or, as I've been saying for two years, it's not that I think having a cruel totalitarian dictator running Iraq is okay, it's that I think invading Iraq is catastrophically stupid policy. That's not too rarefied a distinction, is it?One should not have to have been 'pro-war' to be a critic of what's going on. I'm tired of people prefacing their criticisms with phrases like 'as someone who supported this war...' Well, you were wrong. Why should we listen to you now? There were plenty of reasons to be against the war, but the only one which was necessary was the fact that the people in charge were utterly incompetent - that people opposed to 'nation building' had no real desire to carry it out. Once their incompetence was clear, no other reasons were necessary. Even Tom Friedman recognized this was a risky venture, but he failed to understand that you do not support risky ventures run by inept lunatics.
I live a life in which I meet quite a few people with totem animal names. In fact, I've been in rooms full of people where I feel a bit awkward confessing that my name is simply “Jonathan,” and the temptation to jazz that up as “Jonathan ben Ephraim” doesn't help a bit. So I was tickled by this article about people choosing silly “Raven” and “Wolf” names.
Wolves are no more noble than scorpions. They'll happily rip your face off between munching on fluffy rabbits and sweet little mice. But wolves are furry and gorgeous and they look off into the distance as though they contain some unspoken wisdom. Bitch, please. They were thinking about how nice some noble caribou would taste right about now. But this seems to be the prerequisite for liking an animal enough to name yourself after it — that the animal is adorable or fiercely beautiful, which reflects well on the namee. No one ever names themselves Salamander Mangymoose, or Swift Ostrich, or Starmanatee. Yet these are perfectly lovely animals — they just don't make you look dark and cool, do they? Yeah. I'm onto you.
Now for the record, I know a “Raven” who I figure gets a special pass because she's mostly a scientific rationalist and she chose it in spite of being blonde. And the mighty Joi Wolfwomyn also gets a special pass, in spite of her silly spelling, for going out of her way to observe in her Re/search: Modern Pagans interview that “you don't meet that many Pagans whose names are Aardvark, Piranha, or Snail.” Plus, she has enough personal fortitude and presence that she has a genuine right to name herself whatever she pleases.
But really, if you're gonna go the totem animal route, you ought to do something distinctive and unique, with very personal symbolism. Isn't that the point?
I know a guy who has it right: his name is “Fly.” He grew up as “Maggot,” but then had a transformative experience one day. Now that is cool.
Update: Thorn just introduced me to Shaggy Manatee. Nothing beats the tale of Fly, but still cool.
Under assault by insurgents and unable to rely on U.S. and coalition troops for intelligence or help under duress, private security firms in Iraq have begun to band together in the past 48 hours, organizing what may effectively be the largest private army in the world, with its own rescue teams and pooled, sensitive intelligence.Is it just me, or is this really like the plot of a bad videogame's cut scenes? An alliance of necessity between mercenaries in a war-torn country ...
During my recent bout of illness I watched about forty hours of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD. I ordinarily watch very little TV (I don't own one) so seeing a concentrated chunk from a single series made me super-conscious of some of the recurring patterns in the show. Series television depends upon recurring patterns for practical reasons, but this has serious artistic consequences for the medium.
Efforts to control production costs necessarily create recurring themes in a show's visual style. The most obvious and important example is the tendency to use the same sets repeatedly, either to represent a location frequented by the characters or to create “new” sets by redressing old ones in new ways. Handled artfully, this can be a real strength, creating a vivid world where the characters live. The bridge of the Enterprise is as much a character on Star Trek as Spock or Captain Picard. Or think of the Stedmans' house on thirtysomething, the endlessly re-dressed cemetary on Buffy, or the garage in Taxi. On ER, M*A*S*H, and The West Wing, the setting is the title character! The recurrance of sets, costumes, and props can also put a television show into an almost pure world of characters and dialogue: I don't think we ever left the two-room office on Barney Miller, giving the show a simplicity that contributed to its distinctive rhythm.
Recurring patterns emerge also from the way that the storytelling in a series interacts with the viewer's time: a show has both a very short and a very long chunk of the viewer's attention. On the level of an individual episode, you have 22 or 45 minutes of screen time, which compels a lot of storytelling efficiency. If you can rely on the same rules for vampires, or phasers, or ER proceedure, you don't have to spend time providing this exposition. But then once you've seen several epsiodes, these recurring elements become what you take away from the show, more than any particular story: Buffy kickboxing, Hawkeye with a martini, Columbo saying “there's just one thing that bothers me.”
This is why TV show drinking games are interesting: they remind you of patterns in the show that you recognized on an unconscious level, and it's pleasant to see those things articulated.
In the episode “The Zeppo” Buffy demonstrates the clever effects that this makes possible. The episode has the same basic structure as Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Stoppard follows two minor characters from Hamlet, with Shakespeare's play only occasionally intersecting for brief scenes. Rosencrantz is funny because the audience understands what's happening better than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do — we've already seen Hamlet, and Stoppard can take advantage of that pre-existing knowledge. In “The Zeppo”, Xander is separated from the other characters for most of the episode, occasionally intersecting with the other Buffy characters who are facing an apocalyptic threat.
But dig it: in “The Zeppo,” the Buffy story that our protagonist intersects with is a story we have never seen. Yet we can follow it because what we do see is full of recurring elements we recognize from other episodes: Willow preparing a magic spell, Buffy and Angel declaring their love for one another, the end of the world averted in secret in tunnels beneath Sunnydale. The show itself is winking at us, saying it knows it falls into these patterns, and then using that admission to tell a different kind of story.
Even a small amount of belief in diminishing marginal utility of wealth leads to the conclusion that the government ought to put its thumb on the scale on the side of a more middle-class and a less Second-Gilded-Age economy and income distribution. How the government should do this, however, is an extremely hard problem--a problem that it is even hard to think about because we lack an adequate theory of market failure.
If you were one of the people who were puzzled by Grontar the first time, you will remain puzzled by these new pages as well.
Update: The genius creator of Grontar revealed!
I viewed [Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed] as the second movie on a day that began with a screening of Taking Lives, with Angelina Jolie absorbing vibes from the graves of serial killer victims. The third movie was Bresson's 1966 masterpiece Au Hasard Balthazar, which could have been called “The Passion of the Donkey.” So you see we have to shift gears quickly on the film-crit beat.
Were the United States to withdraw, it would send a clear message that Washington is vulnerable to pain --- even at low levels. This would undermine the ultimate goal of demonstrating undeniably that the Islamist militants --- al Qaeda or not --- have no chance of defeating the United States, and therefore no chance of achieving their broader goal of a renewed Islamic caliphate stretching across the Muslim world.We are now at a point where an object --- immovable by strategic design --- is being faced by a thus-far unyielding force. Washington cannot pull back, or it will suffer defeat on a much broader scale than just Iraq. The jihadists cannot end their offensive, or they will demonstrate their impotence and lose any chance of stirring the Muslim street (whatever that might be) into action. With U.S. elections nearing, the jihadists will intensify both the scale and the scope of attacks. In Iraq, with the handover of power nearing, the secular militants will increase their attacks. With the ongoing rotation of troops, U.S. forces will make a show of their power to deter future attacks or resistance. The combination will be volatile.
''Mirroring'' is a term that system administrators use meaning that they have set up multiple computers that serve up the exact same data. They do this when the data -- like a web page -- will have lots of people asking for it and any one computer would get overwhelmed. If you didn't know that, now you do, and you'll laugh at the pun.
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.Ouch!Schopenhauer
Justice Thomas is a truly uncommon creature, a black political conservative. Now, if you only see black men on cable news talk shows, where all black men are conservatives (Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Alan Keyes, Armstrong Williams) you probably don't think this is unusual. Well trust me, it is. It's really quite difficult to find an African-American who (like Justice Thomas) was alive during Jim Crow, who actually saw the Voting Rights Act end legal discrimination at the polls, and who is the successful beneficiary of Affirmative Action (but now says that he's against it). It was easier to justify my character Icon having those beliefs; he's also a space alien who can fly.Via everyone's favorite comic book superhero, Neil Gaiman.
It's obviously much easier for pilots, controllers, travel agents, frequent flyers, computers and baggage handlers to say and write ORD than the O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, Illinois -- but how did this practice start, and why are some airport codes easy to understand (ABE and ZRH) while others seem to make absolutely no sense (ORD)?
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Some special interest groups successfully lobbied the government to obtain their own special letters. The Navy saved all the new 'N' codes. Naval aviators learn to fly at NPA in Pensacola, Florida and then dream of going to ''Top Gun'' in Miramar, California (NKX). The Federal Communications Committee set aside the 'W' and 'K' codes for radio stations east and west of the Mississippi respectively. 'Q' was designated for international telecommunications. 'Z' was reserved for special uses. The Canadians made off with all the remaining 'Y codes which helps explain YUL for Montreal, YYC for Calgary, etc. One of the special uses for 'Z' is identifying locations in cyberspace. What am I talking about? Well, an example is ZCX the computer address of the FAA's air traffic control headquarters central flow control facility. ZCX is not an airport but a command center just outside Washington D.C., that controls the airline traffic into major terminals.Lacking both 'W' and 'N' Washington National has a code of DCA for District of Columbia Airport. The newer Dulles airport just outside D.C. was DIA (from Dulles International Airport); however, the DIA and DCA were easy to confuse, especially when hastily written in chalk on a baggage cart, scribbled on a tag or a handwritten air traffic control strip, so we are stuck with the backwards IAD. Now one of the rules of the game is ''the first and second letters or second and third letters of an identifier may not be duplicated with less than 200 nautical miles separation.''
''The Final Solution''Did he really say that? Am I just being sneaky, quoting out of context? Atrios reports, you decide.Bill O'Reilly, 31 March 2004
Three days after 9/11, Phil Agre circulated this chilling essay about the consequences for democracy in the US. A few months later, I recall rereading it and finding it scary and prescient. Rereading it again now, “scary and prescient” is an understatement.
Let us say, then, that George W. Bush commences a war against Osama bin Laden, or even against the greater abstraction of “terrorism”. What happens then? A state of war is a serious thing. States of war have routinely been used to justify censorship, the curtailing of civil liberties, and the repression of dissidents. States of war are also understood to require the opposition in the legislature to moderate its otherwise essential functions of criticism. Calls are issued to stand behind the political leadership and to display unity, with the implication that the enemy is watching and that failure to unite is tantamount to treason. These are not healthy conditions for a democracy; indeed, they are the opposite of democracy.
War in the old conception was temporary: the idea was explicitly that the state of war would end, and that the normal rules of democracy would resume once their conditions had been reestablished.
[⋯]
The almost inherent crisis of democracy, and the actual nature of conservatism, become clearest in conditions of war. The conditions of war are almost identical with the social vision of conservatism, and it is no surprise that conservatives are so eloquent when the possibility of war arises. Conservatism has always been profoundly opposed to the popular exercise of reason, supposing it to lead inevitably to tyranny, and wartime is ideally suited for the absolute, polarized, us-and-them forms of thinking that are the opposite of rational thought.