This thing is not like that thing

Both Illinipundit and Glock21 have accused the Obama administration of astroturfing and that they are therefore no better than the right wing mobs currently shutting down town hall meetings across the country. These are excellent examples of the logical fallacy of false equivalence. Basically it goes like this: the right wing is inciting their base to be as disruptive as possible, the Obama administration is encouraging people to contact their local officials: see, they're both astroturfing!

Well, no. This is a great example of the false equivalence. The best definition I can find online is from the link above, as equating "an act by one party as being equally egregious to that of another without taking into account the underlying differences which may make the comparison patently invalid."

I don't like the idea of the Obama administration handing out talking points; I think talking points are the lazy way out and are for people who don't really have an argument. But if you look at the evil, evil document that Illinipundit posted, all it's really encouraging you to do is "have a quick conversation with the local staff, tell your personal story, or even just drop off a customized flyer and say that reform matters to you." And it offers to provide you with "the address, phone number, and open hours for the office, information about how the health care crisis affects your state for you to drop off (with the option of adding your personal story), and a step-by-step guide for your visit."

Really, that doesn't sound like much to me. I've never visited my Congressional office and I can definetly see how that might be a bit intimidating. I don't know the protocol or procedures involved. (Did you know letters to your Congressman are properly addressed to "The Honorable So-and-so?")

When you really get down to it, the Obama campaign is nothing more than asking people to politely contact their own, local representatives and make their wishes known.

The opposition is not.

• In Tampa, Florida, a town hall meeting had to be cut short because of shouting in the meeting, after the mob of 1,000 people was banging on the windows, and after a violent fistfight broke out in the entryway.
• The SEIU is getting death threats by phone and -- believe it or not -- Twitter.
• Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) has said "the time for polite town halls is 'over.'"

I'm all for people talking to their reps and voicing their opinions, even if I disagree with them. But these tactics show that the right-wing is not attempting to participate in the health care discussion, they're attempting to disrupt it.

A married yokel

I swear, these yokels are trying to be the death of me. It's like they get together after the weekly Ku Klux Jesus meeting and plot ways to make my blood pressure go up. And I keep falling for the bait. This week our yokel is Harold Miller of Urbana, who is obsessed with thinking about your penis. But not, you know, in a gay way or anything.

How can any intelligent person, using simple common sense, not realize the stupidity in calling homosexual behavior "marriage"?

Well, as an intelligent person, using simple common sense, I don't think anyone actually is calling homosexual behavior "marriage." Not anymore than anyone is calling heterosexual behavior "marriage." I think what people are saying is that gay people shouldn't be treated any differently from straight people.

In all of recorded history, genuine marriage has always been between a man and a woman, male and female, as was designed and intended.

Well, actually, no. In all of recorded history, genuine marriage has pretty much been between a man and a woman and a woman and a woman. Usually underage and usually with her consent being optional.

Even animals are smarter; did anyone ever see two bulls shacking up?

Really? Really? We're supposed to base human sexual behavior off the behavior of cattle? Perhaps Mr. Miller could give me an example of one bull and one cow "shacking up," because, to the best of my knowledge, ranchers generally keep one bull for quite a few cows. You know, like the Mormons used to do.

It's always ironic when people try to use animal behavior to prove that human homosexual behavior is "unnatural," seeing as there homosexual behavior in animals is widespread and well-documented. There are gay penguins in Manhattan, Germany, and China. The German penguins took in an egg that was abandoned by its Biblically heterosexual parents, hatched and raised it. The Chinese penguins were given were given an egg and became "the best parents in the whole zoo". One of the gay San Francisco penguins recently broke up with his boyfriend and moved in with a female penguin proved once and for all that Mother Nature has a sense of irony.

In vivid contrast, true marriage is natural, normal, beautiful and sacred.

Sure it is. Just ask Brittney Spears.

A patriotic yokel

It's, well, no day in particular, but that means it's time for another in the Local Yokels series! Yes, where we learn all about the woefully ignorant, yet vocal residents of our society. They're like homeschooled yodelers.

This Local Yokel is Paul V. "Pete" Springer from Fisher, IL and the N-G titled his Letter "Country has drifted from biblical teaching". With a title like that, I think you know what you're in for, so let's get started.

In anticipation of experiencing another day commemorating our independence, I looked up the definition of patriotic. I found it as follows: "One who loves his country and jealously guards its welfare."

Yeah, because I know I anticipate the arrival of a holiday by sitting down for a nice session with the dictionary. A real patriot would have sat down with the Bible, not Mirriam-Webster. Obviously this is just another example of our country straying from its biblical roots.

Seriously, what is with people starting off an argument or a speech by giving the dictionary definition of a word? You see it all over the place. Is there some sort of crappy template these people are using?

I love our country and appreciate the many freedoms we enjoy, particularly our freedom to worship, and I am reminded that 52 of the 55 men who signed our Constitution were so claimed orthodox evangelical Christians.

That's an impressive reminder indeed, especially considering that 39 people signed the Constitution. Maybe he's using faith-based math. Obviously, Mr. Springer's love of his country is surpassed only by his ignorance of it.

When I think of how our country has drifted from the many biblical beliefs/teachings that were practiced at that time, I am dismayed.

Really? The many biblical teachings practiced at that time? Slavery, the subjugation of women, the execution of gays and lesbians, the persecution of Native Americans, what's not to love?

The Bible was considered to be God's Word and a guide for living, and was the basis for our laws.

And here we get to the real Christian chauvanism. The Bible has never been the "basis for our laws." The Constitution is the basis for our laws. It is a completely secular, non-religious document. Nowhere does it cite the Bible for support. I would challenge Yokel Springer to find me a bicameral legislature in the Bible. Or any elected body. Trial by jury? Copyright? Religious pluralism? In fact, it specifically states "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."

Today the Bible is made fun of and is no longer taught to our children.

Really? I wasn't aware that churches no longer discussed the Bible in Sunday School in Fisher, IL.

Consequently our morals have deteriorated to such an extent that I think our country is in danger of self-destruction.

Is there something about religous people constantly thinking that the end is nigh? Does it have something to do with their belief that Judgement Day is all but upon us (and has been immanent for about 2000 years now)?

To name a few changes contrary to biblical teaching that we now seem to accept:

1. The taking of God's name in vain

I'll mention that to Zeus next time I see him. I'm sure he'd be happy to strike people with a few thunderbolts.

2. No longer setting aside a day of rest.

Funny, it's Saturday and I'm writing this from my own home. I'm not just having one day of rest, I plan to have another tomorrow, too. Thank you, union agitators, for the weekend!

3. Homosexuality.

4. Same sex marriages

5. Divorce.

Gosh, just what is the point in being a Christian if you can't regulate other people's sex lives? You can't even smack your wife around these days and expect her to stay with you anymore.

6. Abortion,

Exodus 21:22: "If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine." Clearly not the same thing as killing, no matter what the pro-life crowd says.

Honestly, our country is in pretty good shape. We're having some problems at the moment, but they're primarily financial, not moral. People are more likely now to be able to live productive, healthy happy lives than ever before. We even let women own property. Shocking

Unintentional humor

You know all those Facebook applications where you can send things back and forth to each other? A little while ago, I got a warning from Archaeology Weapons that looked like this:

Kinda soft and squishy for a weapon, don't you think? Then again, if the diaper is loaded, it might count as a WMD.

I get email comments

It's always seemed to me that you haven't hit the big leagues as a blogger until you start getting hate mail from kooky, weird people. If you're PZ Myers, you get death threats. While I'm no PZ, I guess I'm moving out of the pee-wee league and into the little leagues. This comment was left by "Mary" on a two and a half year old post I wrote as a reponse to another local blogger's misogynistic column in the Daily Illini. I shall not speak the name of that local blogger lest that summon him, but it rhymes with "Shmambenek." Anyway, here's the comment:

Wow, could you possibly be more of a gutter slut? If I had a billion dollars, I'd bet it all that you'll die of some ghastly STD by the time you're fifty. That's how it is with all you gutter whores.

You are beneath me and anyone else with a shred of morality. You are the bottom of the barrel...complete and utter scum. People like you are just one notch above murderers.

I am all for gender equality, or equity at least. Women are just as capable of doing things as well as a man could, and in many cases better. But we don't need to use our bodies to get ahead. We are smart and can use our BRAINS. Men don't have to use their bodies to get ahead. Why do we persist on using our bodies and not our brains?

I like classical feminism, but this new 'omg I want to have sex with fifteen billion guys and I want everyone to praise me for it' is complete and utter bullshit and I WILL call feminists prostitutes with no integrity because that's exactly what you are. As John Bambenek said, at least they can be honest about themselves and what they do. One couldn't say the same about gutter trash like you.

Wow. People who have sex are "one notch above murderers?" Unhinged, much? I must say, if Mary and Schmambenek are apparently the paragons of virtue, I shall wear the label of "gutter slut" with pride. Now, where are my fifteen billion men?

UPDATE: Speaking of internet trolls, there's a really interesting problem over with Wenalway, a persistent troll, over at IlliniPundit. Check out the July 3 Open Thread. It seems to me the persistence, scope, and narcissism of this one troll makes me wonder if this is less about Internet jerkitude and more about a mental illness of some sort.

Definitions. You haz them wrong.

Tim Fernholz has a good post over at The Prospect about how Republicans and conservatives are calling every action taken by the Obama administration "socialist." It's simply not valid:

it's not fair to say that the Obama administration is socialist per se because socialism is an -ism, a system, a guiding philosophy, and it's clear that putting the government in charge of private production is not the Obama administration's guiding philosophy...

If the Obama administration had come into office without an economic emergency, they wouldn't be involved in these firms -- don't forget that the first big government takeovers came under George W. Bush and that the management and directors of the auto companies asked for government help. The current administration has made clear they don't intend to be in the auto making (or banking) business for very long, and voluntarily laid out various guidelines to keep politics out of business decisions. Obviously, lines will be fudged and there are plenty of opportunities for conflict, but this is clearly not an administration whose every answer is "seize the means of production"

Now, would someone please this to tell the yokels that keep writing into the News-Gazette?

(h/t Ezra Klein)

Why do bicycles have gender?

For some reason even I'm not really clear on, I've been thinking about getting a bike lately. They're kind of intimidatingly expensive, so I've also been keeping an eye out on Craigslist for a used one. It's gradually started to bug me about why bicycles have gender; that is, why are there "men's bikes" and "women's bikes"? (Actually, if you look at the Schwinn website, you'll see there are "bicycles" and "women's bicycles.")

The only difference between them that I can tell, is the location of the crossbar that goes from just under the handlebars to the stem on which the seat sits. On men's bicycles it's high. On women's bikes, it's low. Really, that's all I can find. Pink tassels on the handlebars notwithstanding.

The standard explanation I've always heard (and this is from way back when) is that men and boys are more likely to treat their bike roughly, and so they need a more sturdy frame. So why not just make them all that way? Is it just "Oh, you're a lady and ladies need a more feminine, breakable bike"?

To be fair, I just looked around a bit, and the "sport" type bikes that are likely to be ridden offroad or by professional athletes all appear to have the higher crossbar, I assume because the frame is stronger.

Is there really some reason behind this, or is it just an unnecessary gender difference and marketing scam?

UPDATE: OK, based on the comments here, the comments on Facebook after Bryan posted a link to this, and my mother calling me the other night, the most reasonable explanation is that women's bikes have the crossbar where it is so women can wear dresses without getting them all rumply.

I can't imagine that's particularly important anymore, though. Unless you're a fundamentalist Mormon woman riding a bicycle around the compound (because no fundamentalist Mormon woman would ever need to ride a bicycle off of her husband's compound), the need to accommodate long skirts just doesn't seem all that important anymore. I haven't seen many women riding a bike in a tea-length gown lately, have you?

You decide

From Matthew Yglesias comes this report of conditions under which prisoners are held:

[P]rolonged periods of exposure to the elements; humiliations such as public nakedness; confinement for up to several weeks in small ‘punishment cells’ in which prisoners were unable to stand upright or lie down; being forced to kneel or sit immobilized for long periods; being hung by the wrists; being forced to stand up and sit down to the point of collapse.

Quick. North Korea or American "enhanced interrogations"?

Paging Mr. Hitchcock

My desk sits right next to a window. From the outside, the windows must be reflective, because birds keep coming up and attacking their reflections. Sparrows, cardinals, and one with a little orange head that I can't identify. They can't seem to see us, because they never react to our movements.

This week, we had a new visitor, a hawk. For some reason, this guy didn't attack his reflection. These aren't great pictures (they were taken from a cell phone), but I was literally 12 inches or so from this hawk, which was a pretty amazing experience. It's like our own little hunting blind.

I had to tilt the shades open so we could see him, and I think he could hear that. You can see in some of the pictures, he's fluffing his feathers. When we tried to lift the shades up out of the way, he squawked and flew off.

I think this is a red-tailed hawk. He's been there before, but never this close. I hope we'll see him again.

Shruken Head

Some time back, David gave me this little plastic husband that grows and expands if you put it in water. A little while ago, I put it in some water to see what would actually happen. The cup of water I used, however, wasn't quite big enough and it wound up growing to the point where it pushed up out of the liquid, which meant those parts didn't get to soak up water and grow. This is the result.

So what I want to know is, is this a metaphor or an omen?

Some weekend lightness ... ow!

Welcome our new bee overlords! A hive of bees shut down part of Union Square in New York:

Thousands of bees -- in a hive -- in a building between 4th Avenue and Irving Place -- and it was no joke to the employees here at GameStop. They were trapped inside their store. The sign in the window said, "temporarily closed, due to bee infestation."

"There's a hive...inside the walls...leading upward...they say somebody's on the way, but they're taking a long time to get here," bee watcher Herman Leath said.

In fact, it took two hours to get some help...and that was only after Eyewitness News called the police department...who said, call the fire department...who said, call 9-1-1...who said, call 3-1-1..who said, call the mayor's office.

And finally, at around 4 p.m. the NYPD's bee specialist arrived -- but removing the hive was no easy task...

"I'm probably gonna be relying on scent...the queen bee's scent...it could take a half hour&an hour...two hours...I don't know," NYPD bee expert Tony Planakis said.

And just in case you missed that, "...around 4 p.m. the NYPD's bee specialist arrived..." Who knew?

Hat-tip: The Consumerist, who suggests the bees may have been protesting for better game trade-in value.

Another one bites the dust

IlliniPundit has again banned Regnad Kcin, née ewjohnson, from his site. I completely understand why he did it. Kcin was nothing if not offensive. (Not to mention a total kook: he's a Paultard and a 911 Troofer) But, frankly, he's not all that out of the Republican mainstream; just a bit more vocal about it. I realize that there are a few open minded Republicans out there, but purer-than-thou homophobia really is official Republican policy.

I posted this in response to Kcin's latest odious comment. I rather like it, if I do say so myself and have even gotten one complement on it, from a straight guy, no less. I figure next time there's an anti-gay yokel in the N-G, I'm gonna send something like it in as a Letter.

Since homosexual activity is a sexual hedonism demonstrably harmful to others and destructive to the framework of the society...

I would like to apologize on behalf of the smoking crater that used to be the LGBT community. If only we had known things like gay marriage and the lack government-regulated sexual activity would have led to turning this country into the post-apocalyptic hellhole it has become, we would not have been so strident in our demands. If only we had listened when we were told that Will & Grace was just the first step towards the food riots and race wars now sweeping this once great and entirely heterosexual nation. (Not to mention that everyone is now speaking French.) Obviously you were just begging gay men to marry your sisters and daughters and keep them in loveless, unfilling marriages for the greater good. Why, oh why, would we not listen?

An online community is still a community

I've been meaning to put this up for a while now, but keep not getting around to it. I realize the topic of this post may initially look a bit dorky, just bear with me, it's really not. Yes it involves Warcraft (David, I can already hear your eyes glazing over), but just ignore the game jargon and it's a really great story.

This story was posted in the Warcraft Europe forums a while ago and it's about this guy that comes across a newbie asking for help:

So off i went, with a lvl 34 Human Warrior, and helped this fella out with a few of his red quests.. We chatted a little whilst we played, and it came to my attention that this wasn't a very old player, as he kept on having to go "becuase dad neds 2 chek the emall" he also clearly had no idea how to play, kept on pointing at random objects and saying "coooooooooool!!", and by the state of his outfit, it looked like he hit mach 2 and collided with a Dorthy Perkins store.

A few weeks pass, they stay in touch now and then, but then he sees the kid again, this time getting cyber-bullied in-game.

Anyway, a few hours later, i get a message from this kid "i got kicked from my guild :(" i tried to cheer him up, but it wasn't happening.. And to be honest i couldnt be arsed trying, and i was tired and logged off.

So yesterday ... i see this kid sitting next to the mailbox, no guild tag, people bouncing around him having fun.. And theres him, all alone, no-one paying attention to a "noob".. Now i know human race facial expressions never change, but as far as avatars go, this one looked really depressed.

So i message him asking if hes cool, and he tells me hes thinking about quitting, becuase he gets bullied alot at school, and his ex guild mates all said really horrible things to him, and that he knew some of the kids in reality, becuase they go to his school, and are beggining to bully him in school about how he plays WoW etc. We all remember how it was.. I remember i used to get bullied in school for not having any toys, or having an old version of a toy.. Imagine it now, you get bullied about it at home AND school too.

So he decides to do a really nice thing

So what did i do? I took the kid shopping is what i did... Bought him his epic (ground) mount, a load of nice armour off AH, which i made sure was well colour co-ordinated AND gave him very nice stats for his level. Bought him 2 very nice rare axes (fotgotten the name) and got a guild mate to put +15 agility on each one.

I also bought him a host of accessories, fun stuff, like a mana wyrm, somedeviate delights, an Orb of deception.. yunno.. all the "coooooool" stuff.

OK I realize that may have gotten a little thick for anyone that doesn't play the game. He later says that he spent about 1600 gold on this little shopping trip. Just to put that in perspective, if you added all the gold up on all my characters across all the servers I've played on, you'd have about that much. This was months of work that this guy spent on the kid.

Then (and this is my favorite part), he gets a thank you letter. Not from the kid, but from the kid's father:

I want to thank you for helping my son in this game, he's been so excited for days about the new things you bought him, hes also been having a tough time in school latley, and we agreed we would get him this game as an escape, although latley its turned into nothing more than another source of bullying and abuse.

Thanks to you the little chaps smiling again.

Once again, lots of thanks!"

So yeah, maybe people think playing the game is a bit dorky, but this is the sort of story that restores my faith in the humanity of dorks.

I just realized that it's a very fitting coincidence it's currently Children's Week, when players can take an (in-game) orphan around, show him different parts of the world, and buy him treats and candy.

RIP, Bea

Bea Arthur

(If any of the Pussycat Dolls are reading, I'd just like to point out that it really should be "Don't cha wish your girlfriend were hot like me?" Really, good grammar costs nothing.)

The Last Disappointment, Part 2

This is the second post on this book that I wanted to make, and I'm still not out of the Preface. Feser's entire thesis in this book is that he can make a logical argument for the existence of God. Which is pretty amazing considering the diversity in beliefs, rituals, and claims about the religious supernatural. So here's how he gets around that:

...I should make it clear at the outset that this is not a defense of an amorphous ecumenical something called "religion," but only and specifically of the classical theism and traditional morality of Western civilization, which, I maintain, are superior -- rationally, morally, and socio-politically superior -- to absolutely every alternative on offer."

The amount of sheer arrogance in that statement is mind-boggling. Realize that when Feser is talking about the "classical theism of Western civilization", he's basically talking about conservative Christianity. Also realize that Feser bases his book almost entirely on two things: Platonic ideals and the Arisotelian final cause. The two are entirely unconnected.

Feser's argument is basically that you can logically prove God exists and that he is a being of pure Being. I may or may not deal with the absurdity of that statement in a later post, if I get around to it. But nothing in Feser's claim is exclusive to Jehovah. It applies to YHWH to about the same degree as Vishnu. But Feser disregards all the other possibilities out of hand because they're not Western enough. Ooooh, scary foreign philosophies.

It's also an unfair statement because the God in Feser's logical argument isn't the God of Western Civilization, i.e. Christianity. There really isn't a religion in the world that says God is a being of pure Being and stops there. No, they all carry the baggage of specific supernatural claims with them. God is triune, transubstaniation, demonic possession, an angel that wields a sword of fire that turns every which way. You can't have just a vague, hand-waving claim about God that you say proves how superior "Western civilization" is without also claiming all the supernatural baggage that comes with the dominant religion of Western Civ.

In other words Ed, Quetzalcoatl called while you were out and, man, is he ever pissed.

Be specific!

I don't normally care for Andrew Sullivan, but he makes a good point about today's faux-grassroots teabagging parties:

But the substantive critique must remain the primary one. Protesting government spending is meaningless unless you say what you'd cut.

If you favor no bailouts, then say so. If you want to see the banking system collapse, then say so. If you think the recession demands no fiscal stimulus, then say so. If you favor big cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, social security and defense, then say so. I keep waiting for Reynolds to tell us what these protests are for; and he can only spin what they they are against.

All protests against spending that do not tell us how to reduce it are fatuous pieces of theater, not constructive acts of politics. And until the right is able to make a constructive and specific argument about how they intend to reduce spending and debt and borrowing, they deserve to be dismissed as performance artists in a desperate search for coherence in an age that has left them bewilderingly behind.

The Last Disappointment, Part 1

Every once in a while, I try to read a book that's interesting or important or that will just be a change from the genre fiction I otherwise seem to read. So the other week, when I was in the library, I picked up The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism by Edward Feser. I'm not sure why it interested me; maybe I just thought it would be interesting to see what sort of arguments the other side has for their beliefs. I gotta say, if this is the best refutation anyone can come up with, the New Atheists (which would make a pretty good name for a band) don't have much to worry about.

Some quick background: over the past few years, there have been several books written by prominent atheists. Richard Dawkins wrote The God Delusion, Sam Harris wrote Letter to a Christian Nation, Christopher Hitchens wrote God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I think there have been a few others, as well. There's even a snazzy new logo. In interest of full disclosure, I'll say that I haven't read any of these books. They may be brilliant, they may be silly, I don't know.

One of the reasons I haven't blogged so much lately is that I sit down wanting to write a review of this book, and just think "Ugh." So I'm going to break it into more manageable and less frustrating parts.

The first thing that strikes me about this book is just how shamelessly political it is. There's not a whole lot of philosophy in it, and very little past the Humanities 101 level of things. But Feser is continuously harping on all the hot-button socially political issues of the day. This is the very first paragraph of the book:

At the time of this writing, exactly one week has passed since the Supreme Court of the State of California decreed that homosexuals have a "basic civil right" to marry someone of the same sex... Malcom Muggeridge famously said that "without God we are left with a choice of succumbing to megalomania or erotomania." The court's majority, in declaring by sheer judicial fiat the equal dignity under law of family and sodomy, would appear to have gone Muggeridge one better by succumbing to both at once."

Allow me to point out the subtle characterization of heterosexual sexual relationships as being wholesome and constructive (i.e. his use of "family"), while gay relationships are entirely driven by sinful lusts ("erotomania", "sodomy"). The subliminal implication he's trying to make is that gay people don't of course have real "families"; their children, their relationships, their support of each other is somehow less valid and legitimate than others. But remember that this isn't a book about gay marriage or politics.

Again, let me point out that this is the very first paragraph of the book. But it's not the last time he'll mention it. Gay marriage is something that Feser returns to again and again in his book, referencing it I think at least once in every chapter. He doesn't limit himself to the terrible influence of Teh Gay, either. There's Terry Schaivo, abortion, and lots and lots of sex. Well, just the kind of sex that Feser doesn't approve of.

As I was reading Superstition, I think I gradually came to the conclusion that Feser's book is not the philosophical treatise I was expecting, but more of the philisophical analog of Ann Coulter's writings. You don't come into this book to learn something or to get a well-reasoned argument. You come to a book like this to get your worldview reinforced and to learn exactly how wicked those unlike you, in this case the liberals and the atheists, truly are. Just like Coulter, that's the service that Feser provides.

Now all I need is a belfry

So, the other night, I was lying in bed on my way to the Dreaming. There was a squirrel outside making some noise or another and I was looking up at the ceiling at the moving patterns the blinds made as a car went in or out of the parking lot. The squirrel must be in the tree right outside the window. Then another car drives through the parking lot making that pattern on the ceiling. Then again.

Wait. I didn't hear a car. At that point I'm really looking at the ceiling and see something go right across it. Oh, my God, there's a bird in here! So I jump out of bed and turn on the light and, yup, there's a bird circling around inside my bedroom. So I quickly remembered my glasses were in the bathroom and went to fetch them. I wonder how it got in, is there a window broken somewhere? I came back to the bedroom and stopped.

That's not a bird.

That's a bat.

THERE'S A MOTHERFUCKING BAT FLYING AROUND MY MOTHERFUCKING BEDROOM.*

Quickly, I closed the bedroom door and ran to the closet to get a bedsheet to catch it in. Well, OK, first I screamed like a woman in a 50s science-fiction B-movie, then ran to the closet to get a bedsheet. On my way back to my bat-filled bedroom, I also grabbed the broom. Why? I don't know. I guess bats are like spiders in that sense.

Back at the bedroom. Deep breath. Ready to open the door and throw the sheet over the bat and quickly catch it. Open the door. Cue dramatic music.

Nothing.

What? Where did it go? Walk over to the windows to see if one is broken. Nope. Check behind the blinds to make sure they're bat-free. OK, I'll open one so when I find the bat, I'll just shoo it out. Window's open. Screen's not. Screen won't open. Great, I have a rodent flying around my apartment and I can't even open a window to get rid of it.

Go back to the living room and open the patio door. Fortunately, the weather is warming up, so it's only about sixty outside. I can live with that.

I grab a flashlight and head back to the bedroom. I start looking around, under, inside, and through things. Nothing. No bat. Well, I *know* it's here. There's no other route out of the bedroom and I've kept the door closed every time I left. Keep looking.

I finally found it hiding behind the filing cabinet. Naturally, it had to decide to hide behind the heaviest thing I own. After moving the CD rack and the lamp, I've got enough room to grab the filing cabinet and pull it back. Yup, there it is, on the floor. I poke it with the broom enough to push it out from behind the filing cabinet. Grab a towel and run to the far side, at which point he decides to crawl back behind the cabinet. So I pull the cabinet out another six inches and throw the towel over the chirping thing.

Gently, I scooped it up in the towel and hightailed it outside. Putting the towel down, I shook it apart a bit and the bat chirped a few more times then lopsidely flew away to hide under the eaves of the building not far away.

Yeah, it was kind of icky. It was a bat after all. But you know, under different circumstances, he was enough like a little furry creature that it would have been kind of cute, too. But not flying around my bedroom at the wee hours of the morning.

At this point, it was pushing 1 am, I'd been running around the apartment, and moving furniture. Sleep was not quick in coming. So that explains why I'm a bit sleep deprived this week.

* With apologies to Samuel L. Jackson.

Does this mean I'm famous?

I've been thinking it's awfully strange that people keep coming to the blog after having searched for "plain yogurt" on Google. Then I did the search myself and found that this post is on the first page of results.

I never thought I'd be on the first page of any of Google search results. How strange.

Hollywood, stop messing with my childhood! Part 2

OK, so I promised you a blog post. The last one wound up being about how Hollywood was taking beloved stories from my childhood and turning them into movies that actually were pretty decent. This one delves into the "not so much" territory.

What gave me this whole idea was the adaptation of a book I very fondly, The Dark is Rising. This is the second book from Susan Cooper's five-book sequence (don't call it a series!) of the same name. The books are richly steeped in English and Welsh folkore and Arthurian legend. To sum up the story, 11-year-old Will discovers he's the last of the Old Ones, a group of immortal paladins that serve the Light and fight against the Dark. Will must discover the Six Signs (bronze, wood, iron, fire, water, stone) before it's too late.

That about sums up the similarities between the book and the movie. The movie was retitled only weeks before its release to The Seeker: The Dark is Rising giving it a wholly unnecessary Narnian colon and ruining what I've always thought was one of the most evocative book titles ever. Will is changed from 11 years old to 13 making him less a kid and more of an annoying teenager, but allowing them to add a completely unnecessary girl-related-subplot. The price of which was removing the character of The Watcher entirely. Merriman's foster son, who deserts the Light when Merriman was willing to let him die to protect a power magical artifact, then serves his penance by having to carry one of the Signs for 600 years before giving it to Will. Oh no, that character is booted to the curb so Will can get a funny feeling in his tummy when some girl looks at him sideways.

Need I mention the fact that they fabricated out of whole cloth a long-lost brother for Will (and he's got 5 already), who is kidnapped and captured by The Dark as a baby, which makes his father cold and distant, that Will must find out about and rescue? Or the fact that Will seems to be less of the last of a line of a group of the most powerful magical heros throughout history more the leader of a group of incompetent octagenarians?

Sigh. When I heard there would soon be a film version of TDIR, I checked out the books from the library and gave them a re-read. I did the same with John Carpenter's (no, not that John Carpenter) Tripods series when I heard The White Mountain is due to be released sometime in 2009. In interest of full disclosure, I never did read this trilogy as a kid, but rather saw the BBC miniseries, which only made it through the first two books and left the fans hanging. It's about what you would expect from 1980s British TV fare, but I'm of the opinion that it was pretty good for what it was. It's sort of War of the Worlds meets Mad Max meets The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I still think the intro is a bit eerie:

Information about the movie is scarce at best. The IMDB page is subscription-only, but I notice that it's listed there as being released in 2012 rather than 2009, so perhaps it was pushed back. Supposedly Gregor Jordan is on to direct.

I have a bad feeling about this movie. The first book is the story of three boys' travels through post-alien-invasion Europe as they travel from England to France. (All adult humans are brainwashed and mind-controlled by the aliens at the age of about 15.) I suspect that the setting will be moved out of Europe to the United States to avoid the association with that most Communist of nations, France. I also suspect the boys will be moved up in age from 14 to 17 or so. Lastly, the fact that they appear to be changing the name suggests that they will try to condense all three books into one movie. The BBC had twelve on-screen hours to tell the story of the first two books. Trying to shrink that, plus another book, all into one and a half hours is just a recipe for disaster.

And a longer trailer for season 1 (fan-made, I think):

I'm of two minds of the recent remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The new one is a bit less technocolor than the Gene Wilder version. Depp's performance as Willy Wonka is very fresh; as I think can be expected from Depp, he takes the role and really makes it his own. Wilder's Wonka seemed to like the kiddies in the movie a bit too much, if you know what I mean, while Depp's Wonka seems more likely just to have some in the freezer. But the last act of the movie just goes in a totally strange and unnecessary direction. It doesn't seem out of place to me to have fantastical elements in children's literature that don't really need to be explained. I don't need some Freudian backstory about why Wonka became a chocolatier, he just is. Wholly unnecessary and distracting from the main story.

Lastly, we're starting to see trailers for Race to Witch Mountain, the remake of 1975's Escape to Witch Mountain. I hesitate to include this one because, even though I have fond memories of it from when I was young, I haven't seen it since and suspect it is actually fairly hokey. Still, I liked it and one of the things I remember about it is that there was quite a bit of mystery about it: who are these kids, why can they do these things, what happened to them? And from the previews for the new one, it looks like all that is gone and these two weird kids are just superpowerful beings that hire a former-wrestler-cum-taxi-driver to drive them cross-country to get somewhere to stop the end of the world from arriving. Ugh. I mean, aliens that can smash cars with their minds, but can't figure out how to work a cell phone or take a plane somewhere?

You mean it gets even worse?

Four and a half years ago, I wrote this blog post, about how frustrating it was that no one would be held accountable for what happened at Gitmo other than a few low-level functionaries.

Three and a half years ago, I wrote this blog post, about how much worse what actually happened at Abu Ghraib was than we all had thought.

A former Gitmo guard has now come forward and is talking about what is actually going on there.

Neely [the guard] discusses at some length the notion of IRF (initial reaction force), a technique devised to brutalize or physically beat a detainee under the pretense that he required being physically subdued. The IRF approach was devised to use a perceived legal loophole in the prohibition on torture. Neely’s testimony makes clear that IRF was understood by everyone, including the prison guards who applied it, as a subterfuge for beating and mistreating prisoners—and that it had nothing to do with the need to preserve discipline and order in the prison.

Honestly, that really doesn't shock me. Several prisoners were actually beaten to death at Abu Ghraib. I remember one quote from an Army doctor that examined the dead detainee, and how he described his injuries as resembling those of someone that had been hit by a bus. So finding out that physical abuse is not just regular, but encouraged, seems just par for the course.

But as shocking and saddening it is to hear about beatings like this, that's not the end of it: (emphasis mine)

He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgment that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes.

It's one thing (and implausible) to say that the Abu Ghraib abuse was the work of "a few bad apples." This obviously isn't. White House lawyers were aware of what was going on and actually fought to provide legal cover. You can't tell me that the awareness of these tactics stopped with those lawyers.

In other words, rape is now official government policy.

Hollywood, stop messing with my childhood! Part 1

It seems that Hollywood is determined to ruin many of the fond memories I have of books from my childhood. They keep making movies and remaking things and doing a hatchet job on them.

That's not to say they haven't done a couple of things right lately. I'm actually a fan of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe. It's true to the books, it treats its source material with respect, and it's just a great story. It's a bit of a shame that the Religious Right adopted it in such a priggish manner, but maybe they'd read ahead and were trying to act like Eustace. Prince Caspian wasn't as good, but again, it was faithful to its source material; I just didn't like that book nearly as much. It also looks like they will be making The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, contrary to one rumor I heard. So I'm happy, since it is my favorite of the books.

SPOILER WARNING

I honestly doubt they'll go much past those three. The Silver Chair and A Horse and His Boy barely has the Pevinsies in it and The Magician's Nephew not at all. They have to get the movies made before the actors grow up too much to be believable, unless they do them out of order. The Last Battle seems doubtful to me. Would you really make a children's movie where the protagonists realize they're dead at the end of it? "Hey kids, lets go watch a movie where all the characters you grew up with actually die!"

HERE ENDETH THE SPOILERS

I have to say that I am a fan of the Harry Potter movies as well. Again, they dealt with the source material faithfully, insofar as is reasonable for two-hour adaptations of pretty big books. (David, I can hear you rolling your eyes.)

In dragged on a bit in later acts, but Sci-Fi's recent OZ miniseries wasn't half-bad. I'm not sure if that counts in this list, since I was first introduced to Oz via The Wizard of Oz, as I suspect most of us were, but I did read several of Baum's books. The miniseries really was more of a reimagining, like the recent Battlestar Galactica, rather than a retelling of the original story. It didn't surpass its source material like BSG, but I think it retained the sense of steampunk wackiness and actual danger that I remember from the books.

Wow, after checking Wikipedia, it looks like there have been a lot more books made into movies than I was aware of: How to Eat Fried Worms, A Ring of Endless Light (thought I didn't read the book), A Wrinkle in Time, The Westing Game, and there was even a Neverending Story III. It looks like most of those adaptations sucked.

Which brings me to the point of this blog post, but it's taken me so long to get here, it's going to have to wait for another day.

Wacky things on the radio

When I travel, like I was doing over the past weekend, I listen to the radio a lot. Sometimes, I listen to talk radio, which means listening to conservative and Christian talk radio. This past trip, I had the dubious pleasure of coming across a series of interviews done with people at the Creation Museum. The one that I managed to catch most of was with Jason Lisle, head astrophysicist at the Museum.

Wait a minute. An astrophysicist that thinks the universe is only a few thousand years old? Isn't that like going to the infectious disease department at a hospital to find a doctor that thinks viruses and bacteria can't make you sick?

OMG, Lost!

... but enough of that.

This weekend, I came across a recipe that said, if you didn't have any pimentos, you could substitute maraschino cherries.

I didn't even know my brain had a gag reflex.

Stealing Yglesias

Because it's so good, I'm just going to quote Matthew Yglesias's entire post:

Ed Gillespie’s RealClearPolitics article on “Myths and Facts About the Real Bush Record” is about as stupid and dishonest as you’d expect. But after “debunking” five perfectly accurate alleged myths, Gillespie gets into the whopper that really gets my goat:

And one last fact: Our homeland has not suffered another terrorist attack since September 11, 2001. That, too, is part of the real Bush record.

This is like saying that except for the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover had a good economic record. The vast majority of Americans to have ever been killed by foreign terrorists were killed under George W. Bush’s watch. As Gillespie says, whether or not a president succeeds in preventing foreign terrorists from murdering thousands of American citizens is an important part of that president’s record. And Bush took office on January 20, 2001. Nine or so months later by far the largest terrorist attack on American soil was perpetrated. That’s a fantastically enormous failing. If you only look at Bush’s final seven years, you’ll see that he was as good as every other president at preventing terrorist attacks. And if you include his entire presidency, you’ll see that he was by far the worst.

Not suffered another terrorist attack since 9/11?

One word: Anthrax.

Remember, kids, it's only terrorism if it's done by a Muslim!

And from the comments:

...the conservatives never give Bill Clinton any love for preventing another terrorist attack after the first World Trade Center bombing that took place six weeks after his inauguration. You know, the one whose perpetrators are all in jail. Instead, they sneer at him for trating terrorism as a “law enforcement issue.”

Rick Warren: Bigoted Dumbass

Liberals everywhere are rather pissed off that Obama has chosen the odious Rick Warren to give his inauguration speech. David has a good post on the subject. One of the reasons Warren fought against Prop. 8 is that he claimed it would mean preachers that spoke out against gay marriage would go to jail since that would be hate speech, an out-and-out lie.

W.A. Criswell was a Southern Baptist preacher who Warren once described as "the greatest American pastor of the 20th Century." This is a quote from Criswell:

Don't force me by law, by statute, by Supreme Court decision ... to cross over in those intimate things where I don't want to go. Let me build my life. Let me have my church. Let me have my school. Let me have my friends. Let me have my home. Let me have my family

That sounds like pretty boilerplate text you could expect from any conservative Christian when it comes to the gay marriage issue, no? I really wouldn't bat an eye if I heard Warren or Pat Robertson say something like that. (One of the more ludicrous objections gay rights opponents come up with is that gay marriage would somehow hurt their marriages, though they never say exactly how.

But Criswell wasn't talking about gay marriage. He was supporting segregation.

That arguments for segregation seem so applicable to gay marriage opponents seems telling to me, somehow.

Math. It matters.

From a letter in today's News-Gazette

The reason that the Big 3 cannot compete is executive salaries. The math once again proves how wrong Kruse is for blaming the autoworkers. The top two General Motors executives combined salaries were over $22 million in 2007. Divide that by 3.8 million cars sold by GM in 2007, and you find that these two salaries added over $5,800 to the price of every car GM sold in America last year.

Yes, please. Divide $22 million by 3.8 million. Did you get 5,800?

Yokel gets his magical Mormon panties all in a bunch

Sigh. The yokels just keep writing. The literate ones, anyway. This week's yokel is Robert Dunn, who will be familiar with anyone that spends too much time on IlliniPundit. This particular letter to the editor of the N-G has got to be the biggest, most hysterical overreaction I've seen in ages. Mr. Dunn is all a lather about the uppity homosexuals not letting him persecute them like a good Christian should be able to.

I am appalled at the treatment that my church has received at the hands of radical homosexual groups

Well, that's fair. I'm appalled that your church would decide to poke it's nose into California politics that are really none of its business. Single-handedly hurting thousands of California families so you can feel all self-righteous is pretty appalling. I can only wonder how many hungry people could have been fed with the $20 million Mr. Dunn's church spent on it's campaign of lies and deceit.

Seriouly, Mr. Dunn is "appalled" at protests and demonstrations? The threshold for appall-dom is set pretty low these days. Personally, I'm more appalled at sick people dying alone while their loved ones are not allowed to be at their deathbeds because they're not "real family."

Notice how it's always "radical" homosexuals? The only non-radicals being the good little queers that just quietly bend over and let the Mormon Church give them the shaft, if you'll pardon the metaphor. The only way Dunn could have made that more of a cliche would have been to call them "radical homosexual activists." Now that's scary!

Now that conservatives are back in the wilderness, it is the time for all conservative Christians to unite beyond denominational and theological distinctions to defend our right to speak out on important moral issues.

Conservatives are back in the wilderness? I'm sorry, did FOX News go off the air while I wasn't looking? Did Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Newt Gingrich, World Net Daily, freerepublic.com, and even IlliniPundit suddenly get up and evaporate while I wasn't looking?

With liberal Democrats ... our First Amendment rights are in jeopardy.

Wait, whaaaaat? Liberal Democrats, the most free-speech political group you can think of are a threat to the First Amendment? Which party ran a candidate that wanted to get Harry Potter banned from the library? Which party is trying to ban the Kite Runner in local schools now?

With the possible implementation of the Fairness Doctrine, religious broadcasting is threatened.

Ohhh. Now it makes sense. The Fairness Doctrine is that ridiculous thing that Rush Limbaugh uses to frighten his listeners. It's a dead deal. No one is talking about bringing the Fairness Doctrine back. No one. Except Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, trying to scare their Dittoheads into being all mouth-frothy.

...we are one Supreme Court justice away from having an anti-life, anti-free speech, anti-traditional values majority in the nation's highest court.

Why do I think that, when the next piece of controversial religious art comes along, Dunn's new-found support of the First Amendment will evaporate like Ted Haggard's pants? An anti-life Supreme Court? What, would they suck the life force out of the lawyers arguing before them? I, for one, welcome our new black-robed, vampiric judicial overlords.

This is a call to unity among all of those who believe that our nation was founded as a Christian nation conceived in liberty.

Geez, all this "Christian nation" nonsense just chafes my butt. People like Dunn seem to think that, because their Christian God is the font of all goodness, and because America is by definition good, America must be Christian. That's poppycock and the founding fathers like Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and the like knew it. In fact, they specificially rejected Christianity as the basis for our government.

Now here is the piece de resistance, where Dunn completely jumps the shark:

If we do not stand as one, we could be looking in the future when a letter like this is deemed a "hate crime" and the author is thrown in prison in our new Orwellian moment of "change and unity" under Obama.

Wow. Paranoid delusions much? Name me one public figure that has said that writing a ridiculous letter like Dunn's would be a hate crime. Find me one hate crimes statute that would classify Dunn's bigoted little rant as a hate crime. You can't, because they don't.

But these fundies hate having their bigotry called out as such. And anyone pointing it out is "persecuting them because they're Christians." We live in a country where religous conservatives regularly blame gays for everything from California wildfires to the current economic crisis. They're free to predict Gay Day at Disney would lead to meteor strikes. The Republican Party of Texas still has as part of its platform that gays should be put in prison. So get down off the cross, Mr. Dunn. Soylent Mormon is quite a ways off.

False economy

One of the sillier things about the proposed auto manufacturer bailout is the noise that was made at the last hearing about the fact that the company CEOs took the company jets from Detroit to Washington, DC. In fact, I'm pretty sure I heard more about that fact than about what actually happened at the hearing. (Amusing fact. When Ford's CEO was asked if he would take a pay cut of his $2 million salary to a symbolic $1, his response was "I'm think I'm OK where I am." Uh, duh.)

Because of the bad PR last time, it's been announced that the Ford CEO will actually be driving to Washington, DC later this week. That has got to be the dumbest economic move ever. According to Google Maps, that's about a 9 hour drive. Let's say he's got an iron bladder like Dr. Fig (don't ask), and will make only the minimum of stops. So let's say it's a 10 hour drive, door-to-door.

Ford's CEO make a $2 million salary, but his total compensation package is $22 million. That means he gets paid $11,000 per hour. Nice work if you can get it, but that means just the time it will take to make this drive will cost Ford $110,000.

But there are even more costs to consider. Mulally is making this trip to ask Congress for the money that might mean the difference between staying in business and going under. (And Ford is probably in the best shape of the Big Three.) So if for some reason, he misses all or part of the hearings, the very future of Ford would be jeopardized. Makes the stakes of having a flat tire seem a lot higher, no? For want of a spare tire...

To get to DC, Mulally will have to drive through Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. In December. What are the odds that there might be several inches of snow just like we got in Illinois on Sunday somewhere in that 500 miles? Maybe one percent? And if that snow had a 50/50 chance of stopping the CEO to get to the hearing to beg for his company's future? That's a 1 in 200 chance that we'd lose a company worth $18 billion, even taking into account the recent troubles in the stock market. Alleviating that risk might be worth the price of a private jet.

Flying commercial isn't much better, either. It will take several more hours that flying in a private jet. (I'm guessing, never having flown in a Lear.) Remember that $11,000 an hour? Again, you have all the risk of being delayed because of weather, an oversold plane, mechanical problems, etc.

I'm not saying that the CEO getting to take the company jet on a weekend shopping trip to Rodeo Drive isn't extravagant and unnecessary. I'm just saying that sometimes spending money to save the time of an extremely valuable employee or in an incredibly high-risk situation is sometimes a sensible expense.

What's with salted butter?

Meijer had butter on sale the other day, so I was going to get a pound to stick in the freezer. I don't go in for any of that fancy gourmet butter, so I was just looking for my usual, 1-pound box of unsalted butter quarters. For some reason it seemed to me the section for salted butter was enormous compared to the one for unsalted butter. Why?

People put salt in butter before the days of refrigeration so it wouldn't spoil as fast. These days, it seems everyone has access to both a refrigerator and electricity; some people even have indoor plumbing. So the need to add salt to butter to stop if from spoiling is rather unnecessary. So why is there such a demand for salted butter?

Google just "gets it"

I don't have a home laptop, so when I travel, I'm pretty much either without Internet connectivity unless I can borrow a computer. It's not that I'm a luddite or anything, I'm just a cheap bastard. So, when my sister gave me her hand-me-down PDA to replace my old Palm, I thought it was just neat that it had built in wi-fi. I could check my email anywhere, even in a hotel while traveling. Now that wi-fi is available in the iTouch and probably state-of-the art toasters these days, that doesn't sound like much, but it was new to me.

I originally got a Yahoo email account many years ago because it was difficult for me to check my ISP email while traveling. Their web-based interface was accessible anywhere. Then I got a Gmail account becuase it was the new and shiny thing and I wanted to give it a try. So I check both now and then.

Or at least, I tried to. On the PDA, Google's apps load up very well. There's a mobile version of the search page and of the mail application. At my ISPs webmail interface it doesn't work quite as seamlessly, there's a lot of scrolling up and down and linebreaks are a bit screwy, but hey, it works.

Then I went to Yahoo. Did I get a poorly-laid out, but functional, page? Nope. I got a "Sorry, but you can't use this browser with Yahoo Mail" message and nothing else. It wouldn't even let me in.

This week, I got to sit in on a web and telephone based conference with someone at Google about cloud computing. In it, they talk about all the different ways people are accessing the Internet and what they're doing with it. It's very clear that Google is a company that just "gets it" when it comes to next-generation computing applications.

Honestly, I think that most people don't need the mega-functionality of Microsoft Office. I started using Google Docs when I was job-hunting and needed access to my documents both at home and at work. It's incredibly easy to use and the ability to have immediate access to your documents from anywhere can be invaluable. It would probably be perfect for most home users and even small businesses. Come on, when was the last time you needed to use the Mail Merge function of Word or inserted a Table of Authorities?

You mean you can use a computer for other things?

Or, why I can never buy a Mac.

Computer woes

Well, this is frustrating. My computer has just recently taken to spontaneously shutting down for no apparent reason. No warning or anything, just in the middle of whatever I'm doing ... pfffft. I'm reasonably sure it just needs the power supply replaced, which is about a $100-150 fix.

But it's just over 3 years old and I had been thinking about replacing it this January. Replacing the power supply is a good 10-20% of the cost of a new computer. The idea of being without a computer for a protracted period strikes fear into my heart, so it seems reasonable to replace it early.

I haven't bought a computer in three years, so I've fallen behind in what's good, what's not, and what former players in the market are a shadow of themselves. I'm thinking about either going with a mail-order configurator like Cyberpower, but I've also considered getting a premade system at Circuit City or Best Buy and dropping in a decent graphics card. I'm avoiding Dell. I think their quality has improved over what it once was, but I think they're overpriced. Does anyone have any suggestions as to a vendor or experiences they'd like to share?

And just to stave off the inevitable, no a Mac is not an option.

UPDATE: No boot for me! It looks like the turning-off-unexpectedly problem has turned into a wont-even-boot problem. Nuts. Thank goodness for work laptops you can take home. Posting may be light for the next couple of weeks. Fortunately, I don't think I lost any data. Since this is probably a power supply problem, it should all be intact on the hard drive. When I get a new computer, I'll get an external drive encloser and drop my old hard drive into that. That way I'll have all my old data and a backup drive, too!

Hey, if you do mostly desktop applications, word processing, email and the like, a Mac is probably a good choice. On the other hand, you can get a decent PC suitable for doing all those things for a third of the price. Wow, it looks like you can even get an ultra-portable from Dell for $350. Admittedly that's probably not good for much other than web browsing and email, but damn, you can spend more than that on a PDA.

Get thee to IlliniPundit

I was going to put up a link to Glock21's post about Prop 8, in which he is both more verbose and more eloquent than me when it comes to the issue. But it looks like he cross-posted it to IlliniPundit, where there is a surprisingly long comment thread. Unfortunately, the anti-marriage crowd is fairly vocal and self-righteous. So, I encourage everyone to visit and chime in with their $0.02. Just please be civil.

Why do conservatives hate history?

Via Pharyngula, I found this conservative nitwit complaining that the Left is being discriminatory because ... they're opposed to discrimination:

Do the Left not understand that the majority of Californians want to keep the definition of marriage as it has been since the beginning of time?

From the Only True Bible(TM), 1 Kings 11:

And [Solomon] had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines: and his wives turned away his heart.

"Beginning of time" does not mean what you think it means, dumbass.

My last thoughts on politics for a while

One, it's good for it to be over, finally.

Two, to the GOP: neener, neener, neener.

Peeking behind the curtain of "voter fraud"

Basically, what Ezra said:

All the evidence suggests that the actual threats to the "fabric of our democracy" come from disenfranchisement: Voter purges using programs with crude name-matching algorithms, insufficient voter machines in heavily populated urban centers, partisan challenges of individual voters when they attempt to vote. The literature leaves no doubt that huge numbers of legitimate voters lose the ability to weigh in on election day. By contrast, there's no empirical support for the idea that voter registration fraud is a significant factor in elections ("The only way Mickey Mouse could vote is if he shows up with a federally approved form of ID. And if they wanted to affect the election, they'd have to have multiple addresses and do it an incredible amount of times."). But by making noise about the rare instances of fraud rather than the constant instances of disenfranchisement, Republicans are able to frame the conversation around further restricting the ability to vote. The idea of expanding the franchise -- making it easier to vote and harder to be wrongfully purged -- is far from the conversation. And that's the point.

And again, I'm ashamed to be a Texan

23% of Texans believe that Texans think Obama is a Muslim. For fuck's sake...

Why are so many Republicans delusional?

I was watching Washington Journal on C-SPAN yesterday (sorry, their video server is down, so no link), when one of the callers said he could never vote for Obama because "he's convinced that there's Muslim money behind him." This seems to refer to some vague notion that he's a Manchurian Muslim or in the pocket of a conspiracy run by some sinister, shadowy Jews Muslims. It's similar, of course, to the claim that was being pushed by FOX News and the Republican Party a few months ago that Obama was himself a Muslim. My mother works with a guy that's also convinced Arabs have been plotting to put Obama in office for years.

You'll find conservatives are pushing the line that Obama isn't even African-American, he's really Arab-American. I guess being black isn't Muslim-scary enough. Here we see it at GOPUSA:

[Obama] is the illegitimate son of a Kenyan Arab; not of an American Black (so we don’t owe him apologies for slavery); and stepson of an Indonesian Moslem. Obama was a Moslem studying the Koran in a Madrassa when he was 10 and listed as a Moslem in his Catholic school later on.

Here is The Conservative Voice:

Does Arab ancestry explain Obama's Palestinian sympathy and opposition to deposing Saddam Hussein by force? ...

The Senator's background is: Caucasian from his mother [and] Arab African from his father. Before all the Obamiacs jump on the answer, the Kenyan Obamas are listed in the Kenyan census as Arab African not as Tribal 'Black' African. His father's great great grandmother was a Tribal African.

"Therefore by ethnic lines the Senator is 50% Caucasian, 43.75% Arab, and 6.25% Black African (from where the Senator gets his skin pigmentation).

Here's a picture of Obama with his "non-black" father:

Here's one blogger of some renown again claiming Obama is of Arab descent. Here's a commentator at World Net Daily (color me surprised) insinuating, as recently as September, that Obama really is a Muslim.

These people are clearly delusional. This stuff is so easily debunked, and has been so thoroughly debunked that their claims fall apart under even the most trivial of examination. So why is it so persistent?

But my larger question is why is this sort of lunacy particularly a Republican phenomenon? You don't see influential forces on the Democratic side speculating about whether McCain was turned by the Viet Cong during his capture and that he really is a Manchurian candidate. You don't see people suggesting that Sarah Palin's having spent her life within sight of Russia has made her into a Communist, her socialist redistribution of Alaskan oil monies notwithstanding. Honestly, I don't have an answer, why is it that this kind of foolishness is a purely Republican phenomenon?

How does this crap stay on the air?

Last week I had the pleasure of driving cross-country, which meant a lot of listening to the radio. I came across one radio show, which turned out to be The Glenn Beck Program. As most right-wing news broadcasters do, Beck has a radio show where he spouts off crap with no one to challenge him, usually telling us how smart he is in the process. It's the same with Limbaugh, Hannity, and O'Reilly.

But I was amazed at what he was saying. He was talking about Obama's economic plan, and allowing 401(k) withdrawals:

...he wants to make penalty-free withdrawals from retirement accounts up to $10,000. We should not be doing anything that encourages people to take money out of their 401(k). If you're in an emergency, I get it. If you are going to lose your house, I get it. If your spouse has died and buried them, you have to do it, I get it. But not to pay off your credit card bills. Why would you do that? Quite frankly it's not to help people. It's to enslave people. Because the more you can deplete your 401(k) to pay off things that are not dire emergencies like death or losing your home, you deplete your savings.

The right-wing complains about so-called liberal media bias all the time. At most, you'll find someone like Olbermann accusing Bush of being incompetent. I can't think of a single case, and I challenge someone to find me an example, of a supposedly liberally-biased news person accusing a Republican of actual malice in his policies.

And not just malice, but lily-white Beck saying that Obama, an African-American, wants to "enslave" America? That's just beyond tasteless. It's like accusing Joe Lieberman of wanting to start another Holocaust.

This week it was announced that Beck's show will be leaving CNN Headline News and moving to ... wait for it ... FOX News. Color me surprised.

My thoughts on Palin

Fig asks what I thought of the VP debate. I didn't want to bury my thoughts in the comments on a non-top-post, so I'm putting them here. Both she and David seem to have been traumatized by the debate.

Personally, it was about what I expected. I think by now it's pretty clear that Palin follows in Bush's intellectual footsteps: poorly informed, incurious, and ideological rigid. After the famous Couric interview Palin's main objective for this debate must have been not to embarrass her.

On the other hand, her comment that "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also" pretty much shows that she had nothing but contempt for the debate process. The debate wasn't so she could let the American people know about her track record, that's what the Internet is for. And newspapers. Which she should know, since she reads them all.

Palin's job in this interview was to not do anything embarrassing and repeat the campaign's talking points, which she did ad infinitum. Notice that whenever she was talking she never gave any specifics, just aw shucks, gee whiz, gosh darn, say-it-aint-so-joe soundbites intended to appeal to the so called "low information" voters, and I think that succeeded.

Fortunately, it looks like recent polling data shows she has turned off the voters that look for a bit more in their candidates than whether or not they would be a good person to have a beer with.

UPDATE: This piece by Radley Balko basically sums up what really bothers me about Republicans:

This growing anti-intellectualism on the right is alarming. It isn’t that Palin is dumb. I don’t think she is. It’s that she has no interest in learning, no interest in reading or experiencing anything that might challenge what she already knows she believes. She thinks with her gut, as Steven Colbert might put it. She’s a female W. And they seem to love her for it. The GOP has gone populist. Knowledge, worldliness, and learning are to be shunned, swept aside as East Coast elitism. It’s all about insularity, earthy values, and simpleness. Remember the beating John Kerry took in 2004 for daring to use the word “nuance?” There’s no room for complexity on the right anymore. It’s good and evil. Black and white. Us and them.

Drill, baby, drill

Sarah Palin wants energy independence. She wants more offshore drilling and Alaskan drilling. Here's her version on energy independence:

Energy independence simply isn't possible while we're dependent on petroleum. Alaskan production would be approximately the same size as the yellow areas.

Hat tip: Ezra Klein

Should I watch the debate?

I'm torn. It won't change who I vote for. On the other hand, if the Couric interview and the following, now-infamous SNL skit is anything to judge by, there is some possibility that it will be entertaining.

Why won't the press cover this?

In this election season, we've seen expose after expose on Obama's church, Reverend White's teachings, Sarah Palin's daughter's pregnancy, John Edwards's affair, and so on. But virtually nothing about policy. Ezra Klein has an interesting piece about how John McCain's health care plan will massively raise taxes on everyone, result in 20 million Americans losing their health insurance, and basically end employer-based health insurance.

The individual insurance market is not the same as the employer-based insurance market. It sacrifices the bargaining powers of numbers for the cost-effectiveness of comparison shopping. It is fractured. It has higher administrative costs. Insurers can discriminate on the basis of preexisting conditions, geography, age, gender, and even simple whim. The risk pools are smaller. The deductibles are higher, as are the co-pays, and the spending caps are lower. And the individual insurance market is much more expensive: Buchmueller, Glied, Royalty, and Swartz estimate that "for a typical family that moves from group to individual coverage...the move to nongroup insurance will raise premiums for an identical policy by more than $2,000 per year." That increase alone chews up 40% of the family tax credit, and that's simply so the family does not lose ground. In addition, the tax credit is not indexed to health spending, and will sharply decline in value with each passing year. In sum, individuals will be in a costlier market, where insurers have more power to set prices and conditions, and McCain's tax credit will do less to help them with every passing year.

Yet, mark my words, the media narrative for this election will be that Obama is in favor of higher taxes.

Putting things in perspective, the graphical version

I put together this little chart because I think it shows the impact of this bailout better than yesterday's post.

Crap, that's a lot of money.

Just putting things in perspective

I feel like I should write a blog post about the financial bailout that was announced this week. I find it difficult, however, because I barely understand enough economics to balance my checkbook at the end of the month. I sort of get the impression that it's a Big Deal and, therefore, I should care about it, but I'm not entirely clear on what's going on, how we got here, and what's been proposed to do about it.

So I'm not going to talk about that. I just wanted to try to get an idea of the scale of the $700 billion bailout. Seven hundred billion dollars is a LOT of money. It's a bit enough number that I have difficulty wrapping my brain around it.

• This bailout is the size of the cumulative cost of the Iraq war to date, plus 50%. David has a neat little widget that displays the cost of the Iraq War at any given instant, presumabely to show how fast the number is growing. This bailout is even bigger.
• The bailout is four times larger than the cumulative cost of the War in Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom, source). That's the war that we went into after, you know, a little thing called 9/11.
• This is roughly fifty times larger than the airline bailout after 9/11. That's 5000%, mind you.
• Remember the savings and loan crisis of the late 80s? (I don't, really. I was in high school and wasn't really paying attention.) That was about $125 billion. This is roughly six times larger than that.
• The bailout alone will add an additional 7% to our national debt.

So the cost of this thing is staggering. And it's not limited to American banks, either. It turns out we will be bailing out lots of foreign-owned banks as well, as long as they have "significant operations" in the US. Excuse me, but when was the financial well-being of Swiss banks an American problem? Why isn't the Swiss government doing their part of the bailout?

All the decisions about who will be bailed out and for how much is left up to one, unelected guy. As Glenn Greenwald points out:

"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." Put another way, this authorizes Hank Paulson to transfer $700 billion of taxpayer money to private industry in his sole discretion, and nobody has the right or ability to review or challenge any decision he makes.

So who thinks we should privatize Social Security next?

Something's wrong with these numbers

OK, So I'm kinda confused about something. The hurricane warning I saw for Ike insisted that Galveston residents faced "CERTAIN DEATH."* Somewhere between 20-50% of Galveston residents did not evacuate, or between 10,000 and 30,000 people. Rescuers have searched about 90% of Galveston and evacuated about another 1,500 people. The official death toll varies a bit, but is on the order of a dozen people.

So what happened to the other 8,500 - 28,500 people? Either I'm missing something, or these numbers just don't match up.

[*] Actually, the warning I saw said that residents "MAY FACE CERTAIN DEATH," which leaves open the possibility that they may not, making me wonder about what definition of "certain" was being used. Imminent natural disaster is no excuse for bad grammar.

Things I never thought I'd hear a Senator say

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse at the hearings on the politicization of the Justice Department:

When it comes to politics, this is an administration that has no gag reflex.

(Oops, wrote this a while back but forgot to publish it.)

How the RNC should have ended

This is just great. I really have no other words.

Via Pam's House Blend.

Congratulations to people I've never met!

It appears that moon-grrl and Jonathan have gotten married. I'm assuming to each other. Congratulations!

Remember, shiny side out

IlliniPundit really has descended into tinfoil hat territory. He's now complaining about what is, apparently, a media conspiracy to win Obama the election.

I doubt Palin, or the overblown and transparent media bloviation surrounding her, will seriously impact the dynamics of the race ... But I wonder, as I have for a while, if at some point the public tide will turn on this obvious and over-the-top media worship of Obama ... But I wonder, as I have for a while, if at some point the public tide will turn on this obvious and over-the-top media worship of Obama.

We've had to deal with non-stop allegations that ohmygod Barack Obama is a Muslim, he's not a US citizen, he's a Marxist, he's a socialist, he wasn't born in the United States, his wife hates whitey, his wife hates America, he doesn't say the Pledge, etc. This is apparently "media worship." For Odin's sake, major news outlets are having debates about whether Obama is actually the fucking Anti-christ.

Seriously, what did you expect would happen when McCain nominated, lets face it, a basically-unheard-of state governor for the second most powerful political position in the world, especially considering she's the first woman that Republicans have nominated to this level and that McCain passed over his own preferred candidate for her sake? That everyone would just ignore her?

I'm sorry, but the fact that her unmarried, minor daughter is pregnant is indeed news, particularly in light of her anti-sex-education and anti-teenage-mother policies. The fact that her husband hates America and wants to secede from the United Stats is news. The fact that she abused the power of her office to settle a family vendetta is news. The fact that she has been part of an anti-Semitic church for most of her adult life is news. Does Gordy really expect us to ignore all of these things?

Yeah, I'll grant that she's not a member of Alaska Independence Party and that early reports were mistaken. But her husband was.

That's the great thing about the myth of the "liberal media." It insulates Republicans from any criticism. It allows the faithful, when they are confronted by anything they find unpleasant, to simply avert their eyes and chant "media bias." And the media is so paralyzed with fear of accusations of being "liberal" from the likes of Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity that they bend over backwards to accommodate them.