Via Ex-Gay Watch, I see 20/20 updates a show they did previously by examine how people react to public displays of affection -- by gay people. According to EGW, "The setting is NJ for lesbian wives and Alabama for a gay couple. Guess where the 911 call happens."
That this is happening on the Day of Silence just can't be a coincidence. Appropriate timing.
The mighty Gamera tagged me with this a while ago and I'm just now getting around to it. So here are five facts about myself:
five things:1. I really hate tomatoes. When raw, anyway. It's something about the texture, I think. Cooked, I have no objection. Which is odd, since I have a friend who hates cooked tomatoes in any form, but has no objection to raw ones. I think I'm learning to like olives (except for those nasty things that come on frozen pizza), but tomatoes are more of a challenge.
2. I don't like California. There's nothing actually wrong with it; something about it just grates on me the wrong way. Maybe it's the fact that the weather is always insufferably perfect, or that they don't always number their highway exits. Or maybe it's that there are just so damn many people everywhere. We always joke that Champaign-Urbana is a city surrounded by a sea of corn, but in Southern California, you're always in a suburb surrounded by an sea of more suburbs.
3. I'm terrified to fly. It used to be that I didn't mind it at all, then became gradually worse. And now I can't really get on a plane at all. It's getting affecting where I look for jobs, even. I probably should do something about it, but not dealing with the problem is always easier than doing something about it.
4. When I was a freshman in college, I dislocated my kneecap while playing racquetball. (The really embarrassing part is that I was playing alone.) Two years later, I slipped on some wet concrete, fell down and either dislocated it again or wrenched it badly. I wound up having surgery on it a year later. It's better; I can go up stairs without it sounding like I have a ratchet in my pants, but getting up from a squatting position can be distinctly uncomfortable.
5. There are only four interesting things about me. Yes, I know this is a total cop-out, but I really cant think of anything else.
Since all the bloggers I know have done this already I'm going to tag PZ Myers, Atrios, Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Tobias, and Dr. Fig. People, of which, only one reads this blog. See if you can figure out which. One of these things is not like the other...
This is short notice, but there will be an electronics recycling event tomorrow, Saturday, April 19, from 9:00 am to 3:30 pm. It looks like they're taking all sort of electronics, with a small charge for televisions. Here's the flyer.
We have a new staff member starting at work soon. He is looking for an apartment. Another colleague recently went through a series of apartments looking for one that he found accessible and I suggested he might be able to share some of what he learned. We got into this discussion and it came up that it seemed the farther you get from campus, the better the apartments became. Somehow, paper and a pencil was involved and this sketch happened:
I think the fact that the "optimum distance to campus" is given in metric units just ices the cake.
Alright, people, listen up! When you have finished with a pair of rubber gloves, you take them off and throw them away. What you do not do is leave them lying around on the nearest work surface looking like the shed skin of some dismembered, purple, reptilian hand. I also don't appreciate you leaving them inside out, with your nasty sweat and germs all over the surface I have to touch in order to throw them away.
This has been an announcement from the Eeeewmergency Broadcast System.
The more I pay attention, it seems like the more I notice that media narratives are always forced into a particular frame. Any science story about computers involves artificial intelligence or how many times the Library of Congress would fit in a new storage device. People that go missing are almost always female, white, young, and attractive. Really, when was the last time a media cycle fixated on a missing African-American woman?
Politics is especially bad. Lately we've heard tons about Obama's un-American preacher and Hillary's Bosnian misremberances. Really, could you tell me how John Edwards's health care policy would differ from anyone else's. I bet, however, you could tell me how much he paid for the famous haircut.
And it's still happening. Glenn Greenwald points out:
One other point to note about all of this is that these fixations are as skewed as they are vapid. Barack Obama is an exotic elitist freak because he went to Harvard Law School and made $1 million from his book. Hillary Clinton can't possibly have any connection to the Regular Folk because her husband, who grew up dirt poor, became quite wealthy after being President. John Kerry was completely removed from the concerns of the Regular People because his second wife was rich.
By contrast, George W. Bush was a down-home, salt-of-the-earth Man of the People despite being the grandson of a U.S. Senator, the son of a President (who greatly magnified his riches in his post-presidency), and the by-product of an extremely wealthy, coddled life. Ronald Reagan was pure Americana despite spending most of his adult life as a very wealthy Hollywood actor (and converting his post-presidency into far greater riches still). And John McCain is as Regular a Guy as it gets, even though he dumped his first wife (the mother of his three children) after she was disfigured and disabled by a near-fatal car accident so that he could marry his much younger, much prettier, and extremely wealthy heiress-mistress, whose family riches then launched his political career and sustained a life of luxury for almost three decades (that's how McCain's rustic "Sedona cabin" -- i.e., his sprawling compound -- came to be).
It would be bad enough if our political press were obsessed with such trivialities. The fact that they do so in such a Republican-leader-worshiping manner makes it only that much worse, particularly given that it's this dynamic, more than anything else, that determines the outcome of our elections.
I imagine nothing is going to change about this any time soon. The Republican candidate will always be a cowboy "man of the people" while the Democrat will be a latte-drinking, elitist Frenchman.
Because moon-grrl asked so nicely, here's an update on my foray into the world of baking with Artisan Bread In Five Minutes A Day:
It really is every bit as easy as the book suggests. It's a matter of 10-15 minutes to mix the ingredients and you're touching the dough to shape it for 5 minutes, max. I'll photoblog better next time I do this and believe me, there will be a next time.
This whole thing started from a The Splendid Table podcast episode. You can listen to that episode here.
(Weird fact. When you do a Technorati search for "Artisan Bread In Five Minutes A Day," one of the blogs that pops up on the first page of searches is "My Penile Enlargement Reviews." Seriously.)
The "liberal" media is largely ignoring this recent story about McCain saying Iran is training Al Qaeda terrorists. He's wrong, of course, since Iran is largely Shia and Al Qaeda is basically a Sunni movement.
The McCain campaign is trying to pass this off as a "slip of the tongue" sort of thing. Saying "Shia" when you mean "Shiite" now and then is understandable, I suppose. This clearly wasn't just a simple mistake. McCain has said this exact same thing on at least four different occasions. His campaign has even been using this point in its literature.
I just want to point out how, not wrong, but stunningly wrong he is here. Even I knew the moment I heard that, that something wasn't right. That's sort of analogous to getting the Chinese and the Japanese mixed up during WWII, or maybe the Germans and the Russians.
OK, I get that the difference between "Sunni" and "Shiite" is confusing, but the guy is running to be head of the military during a war! It you cant tell Pakistan from the Taliban, it seems to me you lack one of the basic qualifications for the job.
The so-called liberal media is all but ignoring this. There was a smattering of coverage, then the spin began. It seems the party line is that he "misspoke." This wasn't a slip of the tongue. This wasn't him just meaning one word and saying another. As Glenn Greenwald points out, McCain has been making this same error, consistently, for days. The only reasonable explanations to me are that he genuinely doesn't understand that the Iraqi insurgents are not mainly Al Qaeda, or that he is attempting to perpetuate the myth that the Iraq war has something to do with 9/11 by conflating Al Qaeda with native-Iraq hostiles.
Whether it is honest incompetence or genuine malfeasance, it does not bode well for a McCain presidency.
(Update to get my own Shia/Sunni labels correct. Good thing I'm not running for President.)
... well, rising, anway.
When I was driving down to visit family over Christmas, I took a few podcasts of The Splendid Table with me to listen to in the car. One of the episodes features a new book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, which is all about a new technique for making bread at home. In short, you mix up a lot of a very high-moisture dough and let it sit in the fridge, using it as you need it. That's really the whole of the idea. The book has been getting quite a bit of press, so I thought I'd give it a try. I got the book from the library and mixed up a batch of dough this afternoon. I didn't get a chance to actually cook any up today, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity for this post title on Easter. I'll let you know how it turns out.
And wouldn't you know it, you can see the technique for yourself here, posted on YouTube by one of the authors of the book:
There's an interesting post over at Balkinization. Eliot Spitzer's pecadillos were discovered when his bank reported suspicious transactions to the government, as they are required by law to do.
These events offer a window into a much larger phenomenon, the National Surveillance State, in which the state increasingly identifies and solves problems of governance through the collection, collation and analysis of information. Governments have always used information, but today's techniques are made more powerful and more prevalent by lower costs of computing and data storage.
If computing power increases enough, there is no reason why governments might not lower the threshold for reporting of suspicious transactions, or, indeed, require that every transaction over 100 dollars be reported. All this information could later be sifted through by data mining programs, in order to spot patterns of suspicious activity. The only limit is the technology and the manpower that law enforcement is willing to devote to analysis of financial transactions...
On the other hand, these developments carry all of the potential risks of a powerful National Surveillance State: Governments can make mistakes in assessing levels of criminality and dangerousness; and their data mining models may characterize innocent activity as suspicious. Without sufficient oversight and checking functions, government actors may misuse the additional knowledge they gain, for example, by instigating abusive prosecutions, or creating discriminatory systems for access to public and private services (like banks, airports, government entitlements and so on). And the more powerful government becomes in knowing what its citizens are doing, the easier it becomes for government to control people's behavior.
Remember, computing power isn't just increasing, it's increasing exponentially. Yet the government still manages to put our own Senators on terrorist watch lists.
Via Ryan, I find another of those Cosmo Internet quiz things:
Powered By Pleasure Store
I guess that just makes me a cheap slut.
I had some cheese in the fridge that had been there a bit too long. The other day, I took it out and found it had become a bit moldy. But it was blue cheese. So does the mold make it better or worse?
Every once in a while, I poke my head in to the News-Gazette blogs. I'm not sure why; they're usually just about sports and weather and are only intermittently updated. (These people aren't actually paid to blog, are they?) One of the more disappointing ones is Rhonda Robinson's. Her history of promoting creationism, anti-vaccination, anti-contraception, and oh-my-god-the-Muslims-are-coming paranoia never fails to make me shake my head and fear for the future of the children she homeschools.
A couple of weeks ago, she came out with a blog entry about how recent school shootings are caused by the use of antidepressants. She has no actual information, but supports her conclusion through innuendo, insinuation, conspiracy-theories, and an appeal to alternative (i.e. ineffective) medicine.
Here is the sum total of her argument:
No doubt there will be calls for more gun control, tighter security, but what I want to know most is will they look in [NIU shooter Steven Kazmierczak's] medicine cabinet.
The overwhelming majority of adolescent and young adult shooters have all been on, or withdrawing from psychotropic medications.
That's the totality of her argument. These shooters were taking psychiatric medications, therefore the medications are at fault for the shootings. The fact that these men were taking antidepressants for a reason doesn't seem to register with her. The fact that they were actually mentally ill is, apparently, irrelevant.
Her appeal to authority is rich, too. She cites Julian Whitaker when he says:
...guns and movies don't cause these tragically frequent episodes of inexplicable violence. The real reason is written out on a prescription pad by psychiatrists and doctors all over the country-these monstrous acts were done not by criminals, but ordinary people high on prescription drugs.
What she doesn't mention is that Whitaker is an alternative medicine quack, who treats people by means of diet and exercise changes, nutritional supplements, and chelation therapies. He actually believes there is a conspiracy among drug companies to over-proscribe psychiatric medications to children.
I'm not suggesting that psychiatric medications can't have serious side effects, or that they're not over-proscribed. I'm just saying that jumping to the conclusion that these shootings were caused by these medications based on no other evidence that the shooters were taking these medications, and ignoring the fact that they had underlying mental illnesses, is an example of poor critical thinking. Using that kind of logic to propose these medications be outlawed, as Whitaker does, is reckless and irresponsible.
Robinson doesn't mention that the two deadliest mass shootings in US history, the 1966 University of Texas Clock Tower shooting and the 1968 California State, Fullerton massacre, were both perpetrated by men who were seriously mentally ill, before the age of antidepressants. One was committed by a man who was depressed and had a brain tumor, the other committed by a paranoid schizophrenic. Undoubtedly, if their cases were discovered today they, too, would be on antidepressants. But that doesn't mean you can blame the violence on Prozac.
UPDATE: Just reacting to some of the stuff that's come up in the comments. I just want to say that we know that starting antidepressants can lead to an increased rate of suicidal behavior, especially in young people. So it's not entirely unreasonable to think that there might be a possibility that we might see an increase in violent behavior as well. Also, I don't think it's unreasonable to hypothesize that abruptly stopping antidepressants could lead to strange changes in behavior. As terrible as mass shootings are, they are fairly rare, so trying to establish a cause is difficult, at best.
My main complaint in this blog post was just to point out that Robinson sees a mentally ill person on antidepressants commit an act of violence and jumps to the conclusion that the antidepressants were to blame. Furthermore, she does so without evidence. She then goes on to quote a alternative medicine quack that thinks these rare events necessitate a complete ban on these drugs in spite of the fact that they have improved the quality of life for millions of people.
I was reading over at IlliniPundit suggestions on how to deal with Unofficial. One commenter suggested that the police deliberately harass bar patrons. Another suggested the bar entry age be raised to 24 or 25. Both are of questionable legality, I suspect. Several other commenters suggested the Mayor use his powers as Minister of Alcohol (or whatever) to force the bars to close for this weekend.
Judging from the smoking ban brouhaha last year, I guess we can conclude:
Did anyone catch Torchwood a few weeks back? You know the episode with the giant space whale in the warehouse? Worst CGI monster since the Sci-Fi Channel's last movie of the week. But there was this little moment I found amusing. It's framed too perfectly in the shot for it to be a coincidence.
The episode was called "Meat" and that's what it was about.
As more timely bloggers than I have pointer out, Supreme Court Justice said the other day:
...it would be absurd to say that you can’t stick something under the fingernails, smack them in the face. It would be absurd to say that you couldn’t do that.
I just want to point out the complete moral turpitude of what Scalia is saying. He's not even bothering to participate in the legal sophistry so popular among Republicans these days that waterboarding isn't torture. He's flat-out saying that the US can torture detainees. He's talking about putting splinters under people's fingernails, for crying out loud.
That's where this issue has brought us. It used to be that the United States could claim to be a moral authority in the world. Now a member of the highest court in the land is claiming the US has the legal authority to torture captives and it barely even makes the news.
For those not local, it turns out that this week's shooting at Northern Illinois University was done by a UIUC graduate student. I just found out that he lived in the same apartment complex from me, just on the other side of the parking lot. Whoa. Freaky.
I don't really have anything to say on this, but can we wait just a little while before blaming this on Illinois's lack of concealed carry laws, media violence, removing God from the public schools, video games, or the homosexual agenda? Just 72 hours before it starts getting used as ammunition for your choice of political argument. Is that so much to ask?
While I was visiting the parental units over Christmas, we watched Love Comes Softly. It was an odd choice and no one could remember why it had been in the Netflix queue. It probably was one of those "Since you liked X, you'll like Y" things.
It wound up being pretty predictable, made even more so by the fact that the opening credits let us know that the movie was distributed by Faith & Values Media. Oh, boy. Katherine Heigl plays a pioneer woman moving West with her husband, who dies five minutes into the movie, the day they arrive at their homestead. A couple of days later, at the funeral, Dale Midkiff proposes marriage, ostensibly since the preacher is leaving the very next day. Not "real" marriage, mind you, but she needs a place to live and he needs someone to care for his small children. He even says he'll sleep in the lean-to outside the house. The rest of the movie is fairly predictable at that point: she learns to be a good homemaker, bonds with his tomboy daughter, convinces her to wear a dress, discovers she's pregnant by her late husband, is witnessed to by her new husband, and at the movie's climax, discovers she's in love with the new guy. The movie's title comes from a conversation Heigl has with her only female friend, who also, it turns out, entered into a marriage of convenience only to discover she loved her new husband. Love in a marriage, you see, is an optional thing that sometimes "comes softly," rather than being something you start with.
Marriage is therefore sometimes a thing you do because it is useful or practical and not out of sentiment. That's a pretty radical idea for this day and age.
Remember that this is a movie made by a "family values" business and broadcast on the freakin' Hallmark Channel. Normally, I don't believe that making a movie is an endorsement of what happens in a movie -- you can tell a story without advocating its events -- but remember that this production company has made "good values" the very differentiating factor in its business model. I can only conclude they are, on some level, holding up this example as something to be emulated.
It's the sort of thing that makes me want to point out to all the "protect traditional marriage" types that this is what a traditional marriage is. Before about the mid-1700s, you got married for economic, political, and practical reasons, not for love. It was expected that some degree of fondness would develop, but it was never central to the institution. Not only was the kind of soulmate-finding, all-consuming love we idolize in our popular media not expected in a marriage, but it was actually considered improper for much of Western history. This Christian attitude towards marriage reminds me of the creepiest thing I've ever seen on the Web.
Other than this sort of creepy aspect, I didn't hate the movie. I didn't love it, but it wasn't awful, either. Some one else must have agreed, because they didn't just make a sequel, they made five.
There's a thread over at IlliniPundit about McCain winning Florida. In it, the Pundit himself complains about the unwillingness of Democrats to be bipartisan and compromise with Congressional Republicans:
...many Democrats want to see the end of partisanship by having Republicans adopt Democratic positions. I have not seen any Democrats who lament partisanship urge Democrats to adopt Republican positions, nor have I seen anyone urge Democrats to compromise to move closer to Republican positions.
I almost laughed out loud at the idea that the lack of bipartisanship in Washington is due to the intransigence of Democrats. Glenn Greenwald pointed out this week what "bipartisanship" means in Washington. Here's a few examples:
To support the new Bush-supported FISA law:
GOP - 48-0
Dems - 12-36To compel redeployment of troops from Iraq:
GOP - 0-49
Dems - 24-21Declaring English to be the Government's official language:
GOP - 48-1
Dems - 16-33The Military Commissions Act:
GOP - 53-0
Dems - 12-34To renew the Patriot Act:
GOP - 54-0
Dems - 34-10Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq:
GOP - 48-1
Dems - 29-22
The moderate position is not the midpoint between the two extremes, as TheSquire pointed out a couple of weeks ago with reference to the Overton Window.
Greenwald concludes with:
On virtually every major controversial issue -- particularly, though not only, ones involving national security and terrorism -- the Republicans (including their vaunted mythical moderates and mavericks) vote in almost complete lockstep in favor of the President, the Democratic caucus splits, and the Republicans then get their way on every issue thanks to "bipartisan" support. That's what "bipartisanship" in Washington means.
