sc, underlined

"When I was in college a friend of mine who active in Leftish causes expressed her disgust with the..."

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:05:47 -0800

“When I was in college a friend of mine who active in Leftish causes expressed her disgust with the idea of fish genetic material spliced into tomatoes.* This is a cliche and widely quoted example, so she wasn’t being original, but it was clear that she thought that the argument was powerful on prima facie grounds. That is, fish genes shouldn’t be in plants. Why? Because they just shouldn’t. This genre of argument from intuition and plausibility derived from an emotional response is of the same family as Sarah Palin’s Creationism.”

- The other denialisms : Gene Expression

"Palin — and there’s just no way to deny this — is a supremely gifted politician. She has staked out,..."

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:27:37 -0800

“

Palin — and there’s just no way to deny this — is a supremely gifted politician. She has staked out, as her own personal political turf, the entire landscape of incoherent white American resentment.
…
She is building a political career around the little interpersonal wars in the immediate airspace surrounding her sawdust-filled head. And in the process she connects with pissed-off, frightened, put-upon America on a plane that’s far more elemental than the mega-ditto schtick.
…
Most normal people cannot connect on an emotional level with Rush’s meanderings on how Harry Reid is buying off Mary Landrieu with pork in the health care bill. They can, however, connect with stories about how top McCain strategist and Karl Rove acolyte Steve Schmidt told poor Sarah to shut her pie-hole on election day, or how her supposed allies in the McCain campaign stabbed her in the back by leaking gossip about her to reporters, how Schmidt used the word “fuck” in front of her daughter, or even with the strange tales about Schmidt ordering Sarah to consult with a nutritionist to improve her campaign endurance when she herself knew she just needed to get out in the fresh air and run (If there’s one thing Sarah Palin knows, it’s herself!).

Complaining about the assholes we interact with on a daily basis is the #1 eternal pastime of the human race. We all do it, and we get to do it every day, because the world is full of assholes. Me personally, I waste an enormous amount of time seething over people who get onto crowded subway cars with big backpacks on and/or talk in the Amtrak quiet car and/or drive 57 mph in the fast lane or, my personal favorite, walking with glacial slowness in a horizontal row four overweight tourists across on a New York City sidewalk. We all get into furious arguments at work that make us want to explode in self-righteous fury (in my office dramas I always realize I was actually the asshole a day or so later) and when we get home from work, this is usually what our loved ones hear about for at least the first hour or so.

Not health care, not financial regulatory reform, not Iraq or Afghanistan, but — assholes.

Sarah Palin is on an endless crusade against assholes. It’s all she thinks about. She doesn’t really have any political ideas, in the classic sense of the word — in fact the only thing resembling real political convictions in Going Rogue revolve around the Trans-Alaska pipeline and how awesome she thinks it is.
…
She is the country’s first WWE politician — a cartoon combatant who inspires stadiums full of frustrated middle American followers who will cheer for her against whichever villain they trot out, be it Newsweek, Barack Obama, Katie Couric, Steve Schmidt, the Mad Russian, Randy Orton or whoever. Her followers will not know that she is the perfect patsy for our system, designed as it is to channel popular anger in any direction but a useful one, and to keep the public tied up endlessly in pointless media melees over meaningless nonsense (melees of the sort that develop organically around Palin everywhere she goes). Like George W. Bush, even Palin herself doesn’t know this, another reason she’s such a perfect political tool.

”

- Matt Taibbi - Taibblog – Sarah Palin, WWE Star - True/Slant

"In a nutshell, when a simulation of a complex phenomenon (brains, weather systems) reaches a certain..."

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:50:28 -0800

“In a nutshell, when a simulation of a complex phenomenon (brains, weather systems) reaches a certain level of fidelity, it becomes just as difficult to figure out what’s actually going on in the model—how it’s organized, or how it will respond to a set of inputs—as it is to answer the same questions about a live version of the phenomenon that the simulation is modeling. So building a highly accurate simulation of a complex, nondeterministic system doesn’t mean that you’ll immediately understand how that system works—it just means that instead of having one thing you don’t understand (at whatever level of abstraction), you now have two things you don’t understand: the real system, and a simulation of the system that has all of the complexities of the original plus an additional layer of complexity associated with the models implementation in hardware and software.”

- IBM makes supercomputer significantly smarter than cat

Face Of The Day - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:40:49 -0800

Face Of The Day - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

"RSS will form the basis for the open distributed version of Twitter. The loosely-coupled..."

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:15:24 -0800

“

RSS will form the basis for the open distributed version of Twitter.

The loosely-coupled 140-character message network.

RSS already has everything we need, including a protocol for realtime updates.

Further, any vendor of a Twitter client would, imho, be well-advised to spread out to achieve independence from the Twitter company. One way to do that, and they should all do it, is to support Facebook on an equal basis with Twitter. But that isn’t enough. They should all make an investment in the open distributed way of doing what Twitter does. What that means is to offer the user the option to create a backup of their tweet stream in RSS, as a publicly-accessible feed. And once there’s a base of apps doing that, they should add a feature to subscribe to those feeds.

Key point: Once they’re there, they can add core features without waiting for Twitter.

”

- Where is RSS? (Scripting News)

And partly it’s because the prison guards union has spent...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:27:59 -0800

And partly it’s because the prison guards union has spent the last 30 years scaring Californians into fits in order to build up the prison population. The chart on the right shows an almost ghostly parallel: adjusted for inflation, UC tuition has gone up 5x since 1980. During the same period, spending on corrections has also gone up 5x. As we spend ever more on warehousing prisoners, we’re forced to make students pay ever more for their education. The two lines track almost exactly. (via California’s Choice | Mother Jones)

"Posters to various message boards tell stories of seeing bumper stickers with the message “Pray for..."

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:21:54 -0800

“

Posters to various message boards tell stories of seeing bumper stickers with the message “Pray for Obama – Psalm 109:8” on the highway

…

“Let his days be few; and let another take his office.
Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.
Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.
Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labor.
Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favor his fatherless children.
Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.
Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the LORD; and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out.
Let them be before the LORD continually, that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth.”

”

- Psalm 109:8 ‘Let His Days Be Few’ - Schott’s Vocab Blog - NYTimes.com

Angry Crowd Shouts at Sarah Palin Book Signing Tour...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:58:41 -0800

Angry Crowd Shouts at Sarah Palin Book Signing Tour Noblesville, IN

(via )

Fox commentators not getting the whole Constitution thing

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:38:17 -0800

Fox commentators not getting the whole Constitution thing

"She has never, to my knowledge, said anything interesting or intelligent regarding a policy issue...."

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:27:11 -0800

“She has never, to my knowledge, said anything interesting or intelligent regarding a policy issue. Indeed, she makes news most reliably by saying things that are ignorant, untruthful, or grammatically incomprehensible. Up to a point, one can allow that she might be playing dumb as a deliberate strategy, but ultimately Occam’s Razor must slice. Last week on “Meet the Press”, David Brooks called Mrs Palin “a joke”. It is important for the press to remind ourselves periodically that it is possible for people to be powerful, famous, entertaining, and not very bright. We recently elected someone like that to two terms as president of the United States, and it was not a pleasant experience.”

- Why we report on disasters | Democracy in America | Economist.com

"his usual mix of striking insight and infuriating nonsense"

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:32:53 -0800

“his usual mix of striking insight and infuriating nonsense”

- re: Joel Spolsky - Headphones and hand grenades

"The United States has to stand or fall by being the preeminent nation of science, modernity,..."

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:09:18 -0800

“The United States has to stand or fall by being the preeminent nation of science, modernity, technology, and higher education. Some of these needful phenomena, for historical reasons, will just happen to concentrate in big cities and in secular institutions and even—yes—on the dreaded East Coast. Modernity can be wrenching, as indeed can capitalism, and there will always be “out” groups who feel themselves disrespected or left behind. The task and duty of a serious politician, as Edmund Burke emphasized so well, is to reason with such people and not to act as their megaphone or ventriloquist. Sarah Palin appears to have no testable core conviction except the belief (which none of her defenders denies that she holds, or at least has held and not yet repudiated) that the end of days and the Second Coming will occur in her lifetime. This completes the already strong case for allowing her to pass the rest of her natural life span as a private citizen.”

- Sarah Palin’s Political Instincts: Hitchens | Newsweek Politics | Newsweek.com

"In my own not-all-that-humble opinion, duping the hicks is a degree or two worse than condescending..."

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:06:53 -0800

“In my own not-all-that-humble opinion, duping the hicks is a degree or two worse than condescending to them. It’s also much more dangerous, because it meanwhile involves giving a sort of respectability to ideas that were discredited when William Jennings Bryan was last on the stump. The Weekly Standard (itself not exactly a prairie-based publication) might want to think twice before flirting with popular delusions and resentments that are as impossible to satisfy as the demand for a silver standard or a ban on the teaching of Darwin, and are for that very reason hard to tamp down. Many of Palin’s admirers seem to expect that, on receipt of the Republican Party nomination, she would immediately embark on a crusade against Wall Street and the banks. This notion is stupid to much the same degree that it is irresponsible.”

- Sarah Palin’s Political Instincts: Hitchens | Newsweek Politics | Newsweek.com

(via )

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:47:04 -0800

(via )

"My solemn meeting on Veterans Day with President Obama at my friend’s resting place in..."

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:56:37 -0800

“

My solemn meeting on Veterans Day with President Obama at my friend’s resting place in Arlington

BY James Gordon Meek
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Thursday, November 12th 2009, 4:00 AM
ARLINGTON, Va. - He didn’t introduce himself. He didn’t have to.

President Obama simply stuck out his hand and asked for my name as he stepped toward me amid a bone-chilling drizzle in the Gardens of Stone.

This was Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery. I wasn’t there as a reporter, but to visit some friends and family buried there when Obama made an unscheduled stop - a rare presidential walk among what Lincoln called America’s “honored dead” - after laying a Veterans Day wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns.

What I got was an unexpected look into the eyes of a man who intertwined his roles as commander in chief and consoler in chief on a solemn day filled with remembrance and respect for sacrifices made - and sacrifices yet to be made.

I’m sure the cynics will assume this wasjust anotherObama photoop.

If they’d been standing in my boots looking him in the eye, they would have surely choked on their bile.

His presence in Section 60 convinced me that he now carries the heavy burden of command.

I had stopped at Arlington to see the resting place of Ken Taylor, Ed Lenard and Dave Sharrett. Ken and Ed survived their service, in World War II and Korea, and died as old men. Dave did not leave Iraq alive. He was 27.

Obama arrived just before noon at the serene Section 60, where many of the dead from Iraq and Afghanistan are buried together - and where many more heroes will undoubtedly be laid to rest before this President leaves office.

It’s a section typically bustling with those visiting loved ones. Every time I go there, more and more graves have been dug into the earth.

The President and First Lady Michelle Obama emerged from their armored limousine hatless in the frigid downpour and took a slow stroll into the soggy rows of white marble headstones.

They stopped first at the grave of Medal of Honor recipient Ross McGinnis, an Army private who threw himself on a grenade in Iraq three years ago to save four buddies.

A sad-faced woman reached for Obama’s hand and pointed him to a nearby plot.

The face of another woman - who had grimly sat in a folding chair for hours next to a headstone she’d arranged flowers around - suddenly broadened into a smile as she stood to embrace Obama and thank him for paying his respects.

She was so overcome with emotion that a soldier from the Army’s Old Guard had to console her afterward.

The President patted backs of adozen other Gold Star relativesand troops visiting buddiesnow in the ground.

He gave hugs. He shook wet, chilly hands. He wanted to know something about each fallen warrior.

He began to slowly trudge back toward the motorcade - and to another White House huddle with his war council, which is advising him whether to send up to 40,000 additional troops into harm’s way in Afghanistan.

And then Obama noticed a tall, bearded figure. He probably didn’t see the mud-caked combat boots I trudged around Afghanistan in a few years ago.

“What’s your name?” a somber President asked as he extended his hand.

“James Meek, sir,” I replied, struggling to pull off my wool glove and pull my hood back from my head. “I’m here visiting a friend, Pfc. David H. Sharrett II, who was killed in Iraq last year.”

He asked how I knew Dave. I explained that his father, also named David, was my high school English teacher in nearby McLean, Va. My classmates and I knew Dave as a little boy playing at our feet.

“He became a star football player and was one of the toughest soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division,” I told Obama.

I didn’t tell the commander in chief that Dave was killed by friendly fire. Or that the Army bungled notifying Dave’s parents of a probe that concluded his lieutenant tragically mistook him for a terrorist in the dark and shot him. Or that his family had to fight for accountability - which two battlefield commanders promised but stateside generals derailed.

That wouldn’t have been appropriate, Dave’s deeply grateful father later agreed.

“Well, we appreciate his service very much,” Obama told me.

I then told him I’m a reporter for the Daily News - but was just there to visit friends.

“Well, James,” he said, looking me in the eye, “just because you’re a journalist doesn’t mean you can’t honor your friends here.”

The First Lady smiled and squeezed my hand. I thanked her for coming to Section 60.

Her face opened up into a smile filled with warmth and comfort, a welcome antidote for the weather and sadness around her. She said there was no finer place to be on Veterans Day.

Ironically, I was ready to leave the cemetery an hour earlier, but it went into lockdown because of Obama’s visit.

“Sorry for any inconvenience,” a terribly polite Secret Service agent whispered in my ear.

As the Obamas ended their pilgrimage through Arlington’s hallowed ground, inconvenience was hardly what I felt standing there as the rain pelted my coat, staring at blades of grass around a headstone etched with a name and a date I will never forget.

jmeek@nydailynews.com

”

- My solemn meeting on Veterans Day with President Obama at my friend’s resting place in Arlington

Grover the Hill | November 11, 2009 | ColbertNation.com

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:29:25 -0800

Grover the Hill | November 11, 2009 | ColbertNation.com

"Every writer on 1989 wrestles with an almost unavoidable human proclivity that psychologists have..."

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:21:08 -0800

“Every writer on 1989 wrestles with an almost unavoidable human proclivity that psychologists have christened “hindsight bias”—the tendency, that is, to regard actual historical outcomes as more probable than alternatives that seemed real at the time (for example, a Tiananmen-style crackdown in Central Europe).[1] What actually happened looks as if it somehow had to happen. Henri Bergson talked of “the illusions of retrospective determinism.” Explanations are then offered for what happened. As one scholar commented a few years after 1989: no one foresaw this, but everyone could explain it afterward. Reading these books, I was again reminded of the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski’s “law of the infinite cornucopia,” which states that an infinite number of explanations can be found for any given event.”

- 1989! - The New York Review of Books

X.

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:29:20 -0800

Auto-Tune Cute Kids and Kanye (via schmoyoho)

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:20:32 -0800

Auto-Tune Cute Kids and Kanye (via schmoyoho)

"Take the United States, which wasn’t damaged in the war. Take per capita real GDP. Give hostages by..."

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 08:32:41 -0800

“

Take the United States, which wasn’t damaged in the war. Take per capita real GDP. Give hostages by taking data from 1950 to 1980, which means including the 1980 recession, but stopping at 2007, so that the current slump isn’t included. Then here’s what you get:

Growth in per capita real GDP from 1950 to 1980: 2.2 percent per year
Growth in per capita real GDP from 1980 to 2007: 2.0 percent per year

Oh, and if we look at real median family income instead, we get:

Growth from 1950 to 1980: 2.3 percent per year
Growth from 1980 to 2007: 0.7 percent per year

Sorry: there’s no measure I can think of by which the U.S. economy has done better since 1980 than it did over an equivalent time span before 1980. It may be something you’ve heard, it may be something you’d like to believe, but it just didn’t happen.

”

- Reagan! Reagan! Reagan! - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com