Awww

Warren Ellis:

Small child I scared the crap out of: “That was...a trick! A TRICK! (looks at her friend and giggles with glee) That was our FIRST TRICK!”

Hallowe'en costumes

Noir writer and actual femme fatale Christa Faust has a few choice words for good girls choosing their costumes today.

The reason for the season

Via Indri, special Hallowe'en coverage from the Onion.

Mountains of Madness

Ganked entire from Brad DeLong for Hallowe'en, the correct response to some (real) news about Antarctica that may prevent us from seeing President Obama inaugurated.

Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Cosma Shalizi R'lyeh Wgah'nagl Fhtagn!

Cosma Shalizi writes:

Ghost Peaks, Buried in Ice: [T]his has me terrified:

It is perhaps the last great Antarctic expedition — to find an explanation for why there is a great mountain range buried under the White Continent. The Gamburtsevs match the Alps in scale but no-one has ever seen them because they are covered by up to 4km of ice. Geologists struggle to understand how such a massif could have formed and persisted in the middle of Antarctica. Now, an international team is setting out on a deep-field survey to try to get some answers. The group comprises scientists, engineers, pilots and support staff from the UK, the US, Germany, Australia, China and Japan.

The ambitious nature of the project — working in Antarctica's far interior — has required an exceptional level of co-ordination and co-operation.... “There are two easy ways to make mountains,” explained Dr Robin Bell, from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who is a lead US researcher on the expedition. “One is colliding continents, but after they collide they tend to erode; and the last collision was 500-million-plus years ago. They shouldn't be there. The other way is a hotspot, [with volcanoes punching through the crust] like in Hawaii; but there's no good evidence for underneath the ice sheet being that hot. I like to say it's rather like being an archaeologist and opening up a tomb in a pyramid and finding an astronaut sitting inside. It shouldn't be there.”...

The expedition gets under way in the next few weeks and will take some two-and-a-half months to complete.

Space-travelers. In tombs. In an inaccessible, highly anomalous mountain-range in Antartica. Do the fools know nothing? Or do they know only too much?

I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the Antarctic — with its vast fossil hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice caps. And I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain...

iTunes

On his Twitter feed Wil Wheaton has been recounting his wrestling match with iTunes.

iTunes: "Hey, I know you're having a rough morning. I'm going to go ahead and move from The Dead to Miles Davis, dig?"  Me: "AWESOME."

Gah! I should have told iTunes, "I see what you did there." FAIL

iTunes: Ima keep you on your toes and shuffle albums from Charlie Parker to Skynyrd.  Me: My toes. I am on them.

iTunes: Hey, what's this? Simon and Garfunkle?  Me: HOW DID THAT GET IN THERE?!  iTunes: Gosh. I wonder.  Me: PLAY TOOL! PLAY TOOL! AHHH!1

Brain: ONE WAY OR ANOTHER! I'mgonnagetcha!  Me: Blondie? Stop it.  Brain: Don't blame me. Blame Rock Band 2.  Me: iTunes? Little help here?

iTunes: I'll play Bauhaus, and maybe Joy Division. But don't bitch when I play Hall & Oates.  Me: Dude!  iTunes: Hey, you ripped it, sport.

Me: Dave Matthews Band? WTF?  iTunes: Turns out you've been putting music into me since 1997, Tough Guy.  Me: "Tough Guy?"  iTunes: Sweet Tits?

iTunes: I'm sorry about everything. Here's the theme to Fish.  Me: Aww. Let's never fight again.  iTunes: PSYKE! LISTEN TO WAYNE NEWTON BITCH!

Me: You're playing a lot of Zeppelin today.  iTunes: that's because you didn't set me to shuffle.  Me: Oh, so it's Nobody's Fault but Mine?

iTunes: So. The Smiths.  Me: Shutup. I can be emo once in awhile.  iTunes: Oh, that's just adorable. Have some This Mortal Coil, Captain Emo.

Having been enjoying using my iPhone on headphones a lot the last couple of weeks, and getting some weird surprises, I know just how he feels.

Obama infomercial

In case you missed it on television, YouTube of course has Barack Obama's infomercial. Ray Ghanbari observes:

Obama is demonstrating the Powell doctrine, applied to presidential politics...the katana blade is gleeming brightly in the Florida night

In case Governor Palin is reading this blog, allow me to explain what the Powell Doctrine means here.

The “Powell doctrine” holds that the US should go to war only as a last resort and then only with overwhelming force.

Overwhelming force. Damn straight. I just gave Senator Obama a few more shekels. He's going to win, but the bigger the margin, the better. Senator McCain's blather about how liberal Obama is works to liberals' advantage if Obama wins big.

Rant

I think that it's not the rantiness that has folks forwarding this page — though it is a good example of the form — it's the annotations.

But at least he was right about that surge thing. I mean, he and Bush got almost everything else wrong, but they backed the right horse this one time. Except (and if you've been getting your war news from any channel that spends more on graphics than foreign correspondents, you might want to hang on to something here) the surge isn't the thing that's turned down the American death toll in Iraq to "only mildly horrific."

I know! I was surprised too, until I took ten seconds to look it up for myself. Bush misleads the media and they totally fucking fall for it, and then they feed it to the public who buys it hook, line and sinker. Who'da thunk that'd work? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, fool me twenty seven times and apparently we're plum out of shame and we've moved on to... hey, was that a Friends re-run you just clicked past, dude? Go back! This is the one where a group of mid-twenties New Yorkers live in apartments the size of small aircraft carriers and nobody says a word about it through the entire show. It's fucking hilarious.

Hmmm? Oh yeah, Iraq. Nothing else has been going on there that could have made those insurgents stop shooting at our soldiers, right? Well, nothing besides the fact that we started paying them not to shoot at us. From where I'm sitting this is a major breakthrough in military strategy. Instead of getting shot at now, we've got ourselves on a ceasefire payment plan. And then, if we ever cancel our subscription, they'll have twice as many guns. There's no way that fucking plan could backfire. Unless we run out of money, I guess.

Oh.

Fuck.

Y'know, in 2000 I was prepared to be impressed with Senator McCain's character. By the primary season in 2008 I was not so impressed, having seen him carry water for Bush for so long. In the course of the campaign I've learned more and more that has made me like him less and less. And yet this rant succeeded in lowering my opinion further.

Dollhouse

If you're the sort of person who cares, you probably know that Joss Whedon's newest project is a TV series called Dollhouse, and you may also have heard rumours that the show has been in trouble with the network ... and here it hasn't even been broadcast yet. Was this just fans' paranoia caused by the cancellation of Angel and Firefly?

At last, Mr Whedon himself has told the tale.

Basically, the Network and I had different ideas about what the tone of the show would be. They bought something somewhat different than what I was selling them, which is not that uncommon in this business. Their desires were not surprising: up the stakes, make the episodes more stand-alone, stop talking about relationships and cut to the chase. Oh, and add a chase. That you can cut to.

Um, who did they think they had hired?

You know if you want to read Mr Whedon's ramblings. I will say in advance that they are long and, in the end, reassuring.

Change we can believe in

Me in February:

His candidacy is a bet that the American people are sick of the Republican propaganda machine's nasty, polarizing effect on the political process, and that it's possible to rise above that process, to run as a voice of moderation, and win.

Clinton is the candidate of winning the game, Obama is the candidate of changing the game.

Obama's powerful “bringing America together” rhetoric — and his mushiness on policy — are both characteristic of this approach. What does Obama stand for? It's hard to tell, beyond changing the style of American politics. But right now changing the style of American politics is a worthwhile goal. The question is whether it will work, and I go round and round about that. It may be that Obama is simply naïve, and that the Republicans will find a way to slime him too and make his ploy impossible. But with a deeply unpopular Republican President and weak Republican candidates, this year may be the best opportunity we'll get to change the face of American politics.

Almost nine months later, we have Obama being very clear about policy ... and mostly offering up some impressive thinking. But more importantly, we have this:

These are people who have been driven out of the Republican party, rather than who have been drawn to the Democrats ... but in Obama they see a Democrat they can vote for.

Eric Hirshberg talks about the interviews in that clip.

Agent

John Scalzi has done an interview with a booking agent for superheroes.

Q: Okay. It’s a Gila Lizard large enough to stomp a car, that shoots poison from its tear ducts.
A: Good. That’s a Class Four monster, which is our classification for non-sentient mutated animal species, with the poison-casting sub-classification. Now, if this were a real emergency I would check the ISSB database, but off the top of my head I can tell you that there are three ISSB-affiliated super beings that could respond in under an hour with powers that would be useful for this particular mission: Battling Tiger in Glendale, ElectroBot in Emeryville and Bryan Garcia in San Jose.
Q: Bryan Garcia?
A: Yes. What about him?
Q: It’s just not the usual sort of super being name.
A: He’s new and he thinks the super being masked identities thing is kind of silly. He fights in jeans and t-shirt. Whatever makes him happy.

Not much stranger than my job.

Celebrity endorsements

I doubt there's enough money in the world to get these actors to reprise these roles, but they're doing it to support Barack Obama.

Voting

Via Content Love, I learn of Jill Lepore writing in the New Yorker describes the history of voting proceedures.

In this fall’s Presidential election, every citizen who is eighteen or older—except, in some states, prisoners and felons—will be eligible to vote. Somewhat more than half of us will turn up. We won’t be clobbered, stabbed, or shot. We will not have to bring our own ballots. We will insist that how we vote be secret. The founders didn’t plan for this. No one planned for it. There is no plan. It’s patches all the way down.

Fascinating.

Virtual flash mob

Ganked entire from Nfiniteperplexity:

I logged on to World of Warcraft last night and got EATEN BY ZOMBIES! Apparently there's a special event to promote the new expansion or something. It was pretty funny because normally everything that happens in World of Warcraft is pretty well understood; if you don't understand how the seasonal Brewfest event works you can ask questions in the general chat channel and someone will probably answer you. But last night it was more like:

[3. Local Defense] The Crossroads is under attack!
[3. Local Defense] The Crossroads is under attack!
[1. General] some_dude: wtf is going on?
[3. Local Defense] The Crossroads is under attack!
[1. General] helpless_noob: lol zombies evrywhere!
[3. Local Defense] The Crossroads is under attack!
[3. Local Defense] The Crossroads is under attack!
[1. General] random_person: omg i got killed like four times
[1. General] some_dude: they even killed the flightmaster
[3. Local Defense] The Crossroads is under attack!
[1. General] random_person: what the hell i'm a zombie now
[3. Local Defense] The Crossroads is under attack!
[3. Local Defense] The Crossroads is under attack!
[1. General] helpless_noob: I think you can get cured in Orgrimmar
[3. Local Defense] The Crossroads is under attack!
[1. General] other_guy: uhhhh...zombies?
[1. General] random_person: braaaaaaainnnnsss!

I can't explain why, but this amuses the hell out of me.

Olympians

Via Thomas Roche, a spicy and strangely sweet story from Olympian Matthew Syed in the London Times Online about sex in the Olympic village.

No meal or coffee break was complete without a breathless conversation with a lithe long jumper from Cuba or an Amazonian badminton player from Sweden, the mutual longing so evident it was almost comical. It was an effort of will to keep everything in check until competition had finished. But, once we were eliminated from our respective competitions, we lunged at each other like suicidal fencers.
....
For some reason the International Olympic Committee insists on bunching the swimming events towards the beginning of the Games with the inevitable consequence that the aquatics folk get going earlier — sexually I mean — than everyone else. So much so that, at the outset of the Sydney Olympics, Jonathan Edwards, a Christian and triple jumper extraordinaire, caused a ripple by telling them publicly to keep a lid on it. Edwards was simply concerned about getting woken up by creaking floorboards ....

Mr Syed is a world-class competitor in table tennis.

Journalism

Brad DeLong:

Joe Klein of Time has been banned from the McCain plane, while other Time employees Jay Carney, Michael Scherer, and Mark Halperin are still allowed on it.
....
It seems to me that right now Jay Carney, Michael Scherer, and Mark Halperin have a choice: they can either write stories true enough about the McCain campaign to get themselves banned from the McCain plane, or they stay on the plane through the election and so shred their journalistic reputations for all time.

The problem is that there is a long institutional history here.

I strongly recommend clicking through and reading about that institutional history. It tells a story that sums up our current crisis of politics and journalism as well as any 824 words possibly could.

Safety first

Jim Macdonald at Making Light liveblogs the shlocky horror movie Unearthed and — bonus! — includes helpful safety tips.

The title sequence ends with someone (face has been concealed throughout) racking a shotgun and walking off-screen.

From there — we’re in a diner somewhere in the Southwest. A nice waitress is filling someone’s thermos with coffee, and talking with the guy about his dogs. A thermos of coffee is a good thing. But not much good against dehydration.

6:23 The guy is a truck driver. Big point made of his tee-shirt (that had better be important later). He’s heading out … uh oh! Something scuttled across the road (it’s dark!) and looks like he crashed. But he (like all Making Light readers) was wearing his seat belt. I sure hope he’s okay.

8:55 Uh oh. Looks like the fuel truck (which our guy was driving) has blown up. A Black Dude from Detroit in a Fancy Car has arrived at Russell Means’ gas station with the news. Russell is there with his beautiful young Native American female scientist relative (you can tell she’s a scientist because she has a microscope). No gas available at the gas station.

Making Light readers who know that Half A Tank Is Empty will be okay, because they already refueled.

As usual at Making Light, the comments are actually worth reading.

Polling data

Sam Wang at the Princeton Election Consortium makes an astonishing observation.

It is not in the interest of individual pollsters or media organizations for you to have the most accurate possible picture of the horserace.

Of course!

Follow the link; he digs into it, and it's fascinating.

Veep

Provoked by the Republican candidate for the Vice Presidency, Brad DeLong notices something.

The Vice President of the United States is the President of the Senate. That means he sits up front. He has the gavel. He chooses who gets to speak next. He chooses when to gavel them to sit down. He makes procedural rulings--which can be overruled by a simple majority vote, it is true, but he makes procedural rulings.

It is true that the Vice President has not traditionally exercised his powers to be President of the Senate. If the President were to tell the Veep to exercise them, it would piss the Majority Leader off--and the Minority Leader too to the extent that the Minority Leader hopes to someday become Majority Leader. But we could someday have a Constitutional Moment, couldn't we? The Vice President could show up and take the chair, right? And then call on and recognize whomever he or she chose and only whomever he or she chose for just whatever purposes he or she chose--and the Veeps decisions would stick, to the extent that he or she was sustained in rulings by fifty-one senators.

Bruce Ackerman at The American Prospect explains this weird little aspect of our government.

Under the original U.S. Constitution, members of the Electoral College didn't cast one ballot for president and one for vice president. The Founders distrusted political parties and sought to minimize their influence. They refused to allow electors to designate a party ticket for a two-candidate slate, as they do today. While electors were each given two ballots, they were told to cast both ballots for the men they considered best qualified for the presidency. The candidate with the most ballots became president; the runner-up became vice president. This system virtually guaranteed that the vice president, serving as president of the Senate, would be the president's principal political antagonist.

But party politics quickly proved too powerful for the Founders' ingenious efforts. During the election of 1800, all the Republican electors voted for the party ticket of Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, giving each of them 73 votes in the Electoral College. Although everyone knew that Burr was the party's vice presidential choice, the tie threw the proceedings into the House of Representatives, and the Federalists almost succeeded in making Burr president. When Jefferson finally ascended to the presidency, the Republicans made sure that the problem wouldn't happen again by enacting the Twelfth Amendment, which created the Electoral College voting system we have today.

But the Jeffersonians failed to consider how this constitutional change could transform the Senate presidency into an instrument of presidential power. It inadvertently created a constitutional time bomb that has been ticking for two centuries. It hasn't gone off only because vice presidents have understood that the Senate was its own place and that their constitutional responsibility was to protect the integrity of its procedures.

Ackerman's post is worth reading in full, since it is occasioned by some moves by Vice President Cheney.

Kids today

My soul sister is a high school principal. One day she stumbled into a conversation her kids were having about what radio stations they favour, and they wound up speculating about her musical tastes. Too amused by the guesswork, she refused to tell them. One of the kids finally closed the discussion by suggesting that of course she wouldn't listen to any of the stations they were familiar with, she probably liked rock ’n’ roll.

Yeah. Rock ’n’ roll, the music of old people.

I'm pretty accepting of my geezerhood these days. That music they listen to, it's just noise. And what are they thinking, going out dressed like that?

Oh, my aching back.

Wicked Warren Ellis, a.k.a. “Internet Jesus,” is forty years old and hipper than I will ever be. His blog demonstrates that he keeps up on weird pop music, European art movements, disturbing body modifications, et cetera. The participants in the online fora he hosts appear to be composed of Intense, Well-Read Young Men and Sassy, Exhibitionistic Young Women. I was the first person I knew who had heard of le parkour and I knew it because of a Warren Ellis comic book.

Today he's writing about his thirteen year old daughter.

My daughter is now 13. You can tell this by the way she presents herself for dinner at a restaurant wearing red and black striped fingerless gloves, a black puffball skirt and tights, a t-shirt that’s the dilute 2008 iteration of an idea Vivienne Westwood scrawled on the back of a fag packet in 1976, and a pair of boots that appear to have been fashioned from the hollowed-out legs of a particularly unfortunate black bear.
....
Having accounts on social network services is evidently “sad.” She’s forgotten her email password and messages her friends through game and fashion sites. She uses YouTube to listen to music.

His daughter, of course, does not think he is cool.

Rock!

Peak Wingnut?

John Cole at Balloon Juice suggests that the era of right-wing nonsense may be on its way out, and that we might already have passed Peak Wingnut.

These days, there seem to be more than enough outlets to rebut the bullshit, the media is tired of being treated like morons, and the Democrats seem for once ready and itching for a fight. But most of all, the attempts just seem so feeble.
....
Nothing like two wars, an economic meltdown, and Sarah Palin to bring clarity to the debate.

But he updates his post quickly.

Never mind, via the comments, I see I spoke too soon.
....
wingnut is a renewable resource. Peak Wingnut was the shortest lived “theory” ever.

Indeed, he goes on to guess that the right wing will only get battier in the years to come.

Wingnuttery, online, at home and in paranoid little gatherings, is about to get almost unimaginably worse. Bloggers know better than to say it in so many words, but as a community defending crap like Katrina, Rumsfeld, Harriet Miers and Alberto Gonzales has left the online right depressed, let down and exhausted.
....
The stupid that will come after their party leaves town on a rail will make the last eight years look like a junior UN meeting.

Say Hebbo to Tarvuism

I've just discovered Tarvuism, a whole religion I've never heard of, described in astonishing detail at the Tarvu.com website. I had thought that the Church of the SubGenius and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster were the most exciting new religions happening today, but Tarvuism covers some territory that I hadn't realized I was missing. Plus It's SO easy to join^™!

The belief system seems wholesome enough on the face of it:

• Tarvu is our Lord God
• There are two universes
• The Tarvunty is the Holy Book
• We should all “be nice”
• Men and women are equal (to each other)
• Tarvu's Prayer should be said every day
• Octopuses are holy creatures
• Everyone has an invisible guardian from Universe A.

And I gotta love the names of the books of the Tarvunty: Beginnings, Questions, Narratives, Lucky Numbers, Paradoxes, Ablutions, Recipes, Fools ...

Facts

I turns out that Wil Wheaton is cooler than Chuck Norris. Much cooler.

6. Accurately depicted in GURPS, Wil Wheaton as a character would cost 413 points.
7. Wil Wheaton has access to seventh level disciplines.
8. Wil Wheaton once visited the eighth dimension using his own home-made oscilation overthruster.

Or if not cooler, at least geekier.

Via Wil Wheaton himself!

Moral codes

Brad Hicks, reflecting on why folks vote Republican, makes a more general observation about moral reasoning.

I long ago got my nose rubbed in the fact that there are two competing views in American society of what a code of morality means. For a while, I thought it was a crazy vs. sane thing. When I found out otherwise, I suspected it was a social-class based thing. When I found out I was wrong about that, I concluded that no, it's just a cultural thing, something that runs in families, just as some families are shouters and some are deeply afraid of open displays of anger. Anyway, the divide is this. Some people believe that when you adopt, and state, a code of morality that that code is a sacred promise that you are making to yourself, to your family, to society. They believe that if you fall short of your sworn code of morality, it may be a sin that God can forgive, but it is a sin against yourself that you should never forgive. They (we) believe that you should hold it against yourself for the rest of your life that you knew better, promised better, and did whatever it was anyway. On the other hand, there are people who believe that no matter how high or low you set your moral standards, you're going to break them some of the time. To them, a moral code is not so much a set of promises as a set of aspirations. Which means that to them, it's not really fair to judge someone by how often they fail to live up to their own moral code (or society's). Why not? Because they sincerely believe that everybody breaks their own moral code roughly equally often, that the only thing that conceals this fact is that some people are just lucky enough or sneaky enough to hide it better when they do. Believing this, they judge people, morally, by what they promise to do, by what they say that they're going to do. Why? Because they believe that the people who promise more are the ones who will try harder.

Mortaging your future

James Howard Kunstler observes “Fannie and Freddie ... managed during the past decade to make housing virtually unaffordable for any normal, responsible person unwilling to game the system.” Case in point: Elusis tells the tale of how she got burned with her subprime mortgage.

I thought it might be worthwhile to tell my personal story of being a subprime mortgage-holder, because I really feel like I did as much as I could to do things right, and still got screwed.
....
I got steered into dodgy mortgages when it's possible I might have qualified for better ones (and if I didn't, I might have opted to rent rather than buy!). The terms my mortgages were written for don't square with my memory of what I agreed to, which I only discovered too late in the process to call things off. As a result my payments were always more than I had really comfortably planned for, and yet I managed to make my payments on time every month. In the end, other bad mortgages destroyed the appraisal value of my property, and forced me to pay money to hand over my place to a buyer (who, fortunately, was a friend and someone I could unequivocally say did absolutely nothing but try to make the deal work out in my favor; she even paid all the closing costs when we found out the devastating news about the appraisal.)

I suppose people might find much to criticize in this story. It's always easier to armchair quarterback. I'm not ultra-naive about finance but I'm not super-savvy either. I felt reasonably sure that I understood the terms of my loans and that what I eventually got was not what I agreed to, but would a court of law find that I was misled, or that I misunderstood? I could have been more forceful about wanting to try for a conventional mortgage rather than the no-document, but when you're looking at dozens of hours of work and phone call after phone call for more pieces of paper, with someone saying “it's fine to do it this way,” what choice would you make? When you're sitting across from an expert who's done hundreds of loans, would you second-guess them?

I wasn't trying to over-reach; I knew I couldn't afford a stand-alone house or even a two-bedroom. I bought a well-kept but modest place — no jacuzzi or covered parking or fitness club or new appliances or bathtub with jets. I had been concerned about the market for some time, but the experts I was with told me I needn't worry. And when I found out what the real terms and costs were of the loans I signed, I made every effort to pay them, even over-pay them, to do the financially-responsible thing.

It's a good demonstration of how even people trying hard to be responsible during the housing bubble had an uphill battle.

Torture

Digby assembles the story on McCain folding on torture which I've been too lazy to line up.

McCain was supposed to be the stalwart opponent of torture and he failed. He was the shiny pink lipgloss on the pig called the Military Commissions Act, and it was actually the lowest, most dishonorable betrayal of principle I've ever seen a politician make. To give him credit for being against torture when he sold his reputation as a POW to the Bush administration to help them legalize it is just mind-boggling.

Here is what happened:

After first insisting that federal law clearly and unambiguously outlaw “torture,” McCain suddenly caved to White House pressure on the MCA, allowing the Administration to insert into the law a clause that effectively allows (and, indeed, legally buttresses the efforts of) the executive branch to implement torture as a means of interrogation.

Without McCain’s pander, there would have been no bad law for the Court to strike down last week. Without McCain’s grandiloquent appeal to Democrats and moderates during that lame-duck session, there quite possibly might have been a better law ...

....
McCain then went on to vote against the legislation that would have required the CIA to follow the Army Field manual, which would have explicitly banned the agency's use of torture. And this week, we found out even more about the cover-up of these activities which the administration had already approved. McCain has not stepped up to condemn this as far as I know.

Here's how John Weaver, his former close advisor, described the fearless maverick's “negotiations” with the Bush administration on the Military Commissions Act in a Frontline interview:

....
There's one other practical side of it, though, the much-talked-about CIA loophole. Where does that come from?

When you're trying to pass something, the perfect can be the enemy of the good. And I think at the end of the day, they did the best they could on that issue. And I think that's how he sees it. I mean, he worked very hard with [Sen.] Lindsey Graham [R-S.C.] and with Colin Powell. And I can assure you that if he's president, that will be fixed immediately.

Some honor. That is all utter bullshit. The signing statement wasn't the problem, although it was odious. The MCA itself, the one that McCain allegedly negotiated, said that that detainees had no right to judicial review, thus removing any chance that anyone would ever know if they'd been tortured or if the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit torture, had been violated. Here's Jack Balkin:

Any CIA official who acts in good faith will probably conclude that waterboarding, hypothermia, stress positions, and related techniques violate one or more of these features of American law.

What the new Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA) did, however, was to make these legal norms effectively unenforceable. That is why Rickard's op-ed is a bit misleading. The McCain Amendment does not provide an individual remedy for violations, the MCA states that individuals cannot enforce their rights under the Geneva Conventions in judicial proceedings, including applications for habeas corpus.

The bottom line is simple: The MCA preserves rights against torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, but it severs these rights from any practical remedy.

....
I never liked McCain, obviously. He's a conservative and a jerk. But I did think he had some core principles until he sold his soul on this issue. It's true that you can't let “the perfect be the enemy of the good” but when it comes to torture, it's not about “perfect or good.” It's simply about “right and wrong.” If McCain had stood up against this bill, it wouldn't have passed. The nation would have preserved some semblance of its tattered honor. Instead, he basked in the glow of his president's approval and later went on to enable the CIA to torture even further. He deserves nothing but contempt for that craven and disreputable act.

H+

I'm old that I saw the first issue of Wired on the newsstand and decided not to pick it up. Did I really need another Mondo 2000?

What with the future looking so gloomy, maybe we do. So Chairman Sirius is back, with folks like Charles Stross, Warren Ellis, and Cory Doctrow in his posse, with a magazine they're calling H+.

I kept waiting for McCain to attack the darkness

HILARY: I mean, never mind that I'm the one with 17 Wisdom, but does anyone listen to the girl? Noooooo.

RON PAUL: Also Mitt have stupid name. Who name kid after baseball equipment?

KUCINICH: HAY YOU GUYS CHECK OUT MY HEAD OF VECNA TRICK

HILARY: This never would have happened when Tim Russert was our GM.

If you didn't get it, never mind. If you did, there's more. Via Indri.

Tools

I give you the Perfect Bruce Sterling Essay: Six hundred and sixty words tying together the iPhone, Third World poverty, the Leatherman multi-tool, Eastern European collapse, fabricating prototypers, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Trendspotting

Having received a gift of bacon flavoured jelly beans, a bacon-loving acquaintance reports to me that bacon may have finally jumped the shark.

Mensch

Via Indri, an evidently true tale of gentlemanly behavior. Schmaltzy, but with a socko ending.

I don't really think this is the sort of thing that should affect any important decisions you'll be making in the next few weeks — other considerations are much more important — but it's comforting. And I have to say, not entirely surprising.