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Thursday, Aug 31, 2006
"Fostering Democracy"
1. To bring up; nurture: bear and foster offspring. See Synonyms at nurture.
2. To promote the growth and development of; cultivate: detect and foster artistic talent. See Synonyms at advance.
3. To nurse; cherish: foster a secret hope.
American Heritage Dictionary
Amrani, a journalist in Morocco, lauds "the efforts of ambitious independent media that consider themselves indispensable to the fabric of Moroccan civil society and a veritable agent of reform." She concludes with this thought:
But if he considers invasion and occupation to be "fostering", I have to wonder about his views on other things. Would tossing a baby into a pool be "nuturing natation"? Would pumping raw sewage into his vineyard be "cherishing with nutrients"? Would napalming a village be "encouraging renewal"?
Hanson's views are the same as those of the childish bullies who lead this country: violence is the only solution. While Amrani has the more patient view of an adult: durable change requires intelligent action, persuasion and learning. She describes how to foster democracy, while Hanson reveals that he doesn't even understand the meaning of the phrase.
Wednesday, Aug 30, 2006
The Boat! The Boat!
The canoe arrived today, wrapped in layers of foam, cardboard and bubblewrap. It took about an hour to unwrap, and it survived the trip unmarked.
My god it's a big boat. I'm glad it's kevlar, or it would be a hundred pounds. I've joked about being able to carry an ice chest and a BBQ. Kayaks have less volume, and small little hatches, meaning they could carry a six-pack cooler and a hibachi. This baby could carry a fickin' smoker.
Initial launch: tomorrow evening at a local reservior.
Yeah, that's the tragedy: that the government is spending money. Worst. Possible. Tragedy.
I'm wating for the WSJ editorial denouncing the expenditures associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
This Just In ... Bad Government is Bad
I read a couple of opinion pieces on Katrina this morning. One was a Krugman piece, reprinted in the San Jose Mercury News. The other is an editorial from the Wall Street Journal.
The WSJ piece is moderately coherent, but I believe the point they are trying to make is that government is bad and capitalism is good. They point out that Congress has "spent" vast sums of money, far more than for any other disaster, on Katrina. Actually they meant to say "allocated". As Krugman points out, there's a big difference between allocation and disbursement. One would expect capitalists to know the difference between approving a budget and writing a check.
The subtext of the WSJ piece is that the lack of progress, despite all the "spending" is proof that government is bad. Krugman argues that incompetent government is bad.
New Orleans was flooded because of failures by the federal government. This is not to say that government is inherently bad, but that bad government is bad. Because, besides the federal government, who can take on engineering tasks of this scale?
Perhaps we should take more seriously the WSJ's call for more capitalism in New Orleans. Perhaps New Orleans would be better served if it could shop around for a different national authority. I know if I was a New Orleanian, I would rather secede from the Union and become part of the Netherlands. At least they know how to keep the ocean at bay.
Sunday, Aug 27, 2006
Kumbaya
I believe that the best way for us to win the war in Iraq is to come together - the administration, Congress, and Republicans and Democrats - to find a solution that will allow our troops to come home with Iraq united and free, with the Middle East stable and the terrorists denied a victory.
Joe Leiberman
Atrios' reaction is evocative of my unabridged response to Mr. Brooks, which went like this ...
Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman have said that voting for Ned Lamont encourages terrorists. CNN anchor Chuck Roberts ponders on air whether Lamont is the al Queda candidate. Daniel Henninger echos the violent imagery of the wingnut blogosphere with his piece "Democrats Knife Lieberman" on the Wall Street Journal Opinion page. Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas outright calls Lamont supporters terrorists by labeling them "American Taliban". And they send the facile and amiable neocon, David Brooks, over to the New York Times and the Mercury News to make nice? Kumbaya, and can't we all get along?
No, we can't. The rational middle is rising up to reject the failed policies of Bush, and the failed vision of those who enabled him. The anti-science-pro-superstition agenda, the unchecked executive branch, the civil war in Iraq, the destabilization of the Middle East are each unacceptable outcomes and as a whole are disasterous for this country and the world. So no, Mr. Brooks, we aren't going to make kissy face.
What the fuck it is with these guys? They fucked up. They fucked up badly. And now they want us to hug them through the perilous night?!
Fuck you Brooks, and the Leiberman you rode in on.
Shut the fuck up about foreign policy, and get the fuck out of the way. Fucking losers. Fucked up this country. Fucked up the middle east. We're going to be paying for their violent, ignorant hubris for generations.
Jeeesus.
Friday, Aug 25, 2006
I caught your show last night, and gotta say booyah! You really gave it to those Plan B feminazis. Your analysis was spot on ... "Any pill that stops you from being pregnant has got to be doing some crazy stuff to your insides!" You're a man of science, so that ought to carry some weight with the pointy headed libro-fascists. As a meteorologist (totally rhymes with endocrinologist), you have the bodacious cred on this one, dude!
You're right to ask what respectable woman would want this Plan B pill. Some libro-fascists might argue that it's of use to rape victims. But any woman that doesn't have a locked chastity belt is just asking for trouble. Am I right? Walking around without locking up the special place is like leaving an unlocked Lamborghini lying around. Trouble with a capital T.
But I have one niggle -- you missed an important angle. In addition to being a theo-con, like you, I'm a hard core Catholic (like my man Mel Gibson), so I'm concerned about the feminazi war against our little swimmer dudes. Plan B the moral equivalent of spermicide. Spermatozoa-Americans are alive, and killing human life in any form is wrong. Killing 10 million sperm (or equivalently, interfering with their divine duty to nail an egg) is a holocaust, or as I like to call it, a spermocaust.
There's an awesome song about this, called Every Sperm is Sacred. I think you should play it on your next radio show. That will send the feminazis and libro-fascists into convulsions!
Thursday, Aug 24, 2006
Road(way) Trip!
My new canoe, which will look something like one of these, is on a truck and on its way from Michigan. W00t!
13th???? Slackers
UT Austin is a perfectly cromulent school.
Apologies to Chicago
The phrase "leave Iraq" was spoken many times during today's press conference, both in questions and in Bush's rambling responses. The chorus of a certain song appeared in my head, and I thought I would share the experience.
[span class="maniacal laughter"]Ha ha ha ha ha![/span]
Oo, oo, oo, oo, we got to kill some more
If we leave Iraq, you'll take away the very heart of me
Oo, oo, oo, oo, we got to kill some more
Oo, oo, oo, oo, babe I want my troops to stay
A war like ours is war that's hard to find
How could we let it slip away
We've come too far to leave it all behind
How could we end it all this way
When tomorrow comes we'll both regret
All the blood on our hands
If we leave Iraq, you’ll take away the biggest part of me
Oo, oo, oo, oo, no, please don’t stop my war
Oo, oo, oo, Death, I’ve just got to have you by my side
Oo, oo, oo, oo, no, please don’t stop my war
Oo, mama I’ve just got to have my war!
Nothin! (Bitches.)
I caught a bit of the press conference that Mr. Bush held with the White House press corps in their temporary digs. Too much of it was a chummy love fest. How about some professional distance, hmmm?
But there was just enough tough questioning to get Mr. Bush a little feisty. At one point, a reporter interrupted a rambling answer, and got Mr. Bush to admit, in plain language, that one of the pro-war talking points was bullshit.
QUESTION: What did Iraq have to do with it?
BUSH: What did Iraq have to do with what?
QUESTION: The attack on the World Trade Center.
BUSH: Nothing. Except it’s part of — and nobody has suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a — Iraq — the lesson of September 11th is take threats before they fully materialize, Ken. Nobody’s ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq.
Update: Full transcript.
Update 2: Norbiz's transcript.
Science Funnies
Centrifugal Force
Science, It works bitches
Mars, Bitches!
The guy causing all the trouble with all the new planets, Mike Brown, is an old buddy of mine. I used to hang with the UC Berkeley hiking club in the late eighties, even though I wasn't a proper student. I was taking extension classes, off campus, taught by non-faculty members. But hey, I had a car with four doors, and was willing to drive on every single backpacking trip that I went on.
Anyway, Mike was a grad student at the time, unsure of where he wanted to go with the whole astronomy thing. Eventually, planetary science sparked his interest. And he's gone down that path in a big way, making some breakthroughs in the field by revisiting the techniques (in a modern computer-oriented sort of way) that Clyde Tomball used to discover Pluto.
Speaking of planetary science, I'm particularly pissed at Mr. Bush for his initiative to go back to the moon and on to Mars. The non-manned flight portions of NASA are being gutted to serve this goal. Really the goal is just a front for building more capable space craft for operating in the near Earth environment -- for military purposes. The Republicans are preying upon the ignorance of the American public.
Most people haven't done the math to realize we could have vast numbers of little robots crawling all over Mars for much less than the cost of sending people there for a very short visit and back. Sending carbon-based bipeds into the inhospitable realm of interplanetary space is a crappy, overpriced way of doing science.
This is all long-winded windup to saying I mentioned the "Mars, bitches!" catch phrase, which is a favorite of Atrios', to Mike, who had never heard it before. I did the homework to find the origin. Dave Chappelle. Duh. It's at the end of this excellent send-up of Mr. Bush.
Today in Architecture
Via Pharyngula, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster in Legos.
Now you can be an all-terrain dork
Inerrant Bible
PZ Meyers was kind enough to link to my post below. While scanning the referral log, I noticed that his post on faith-based structural engineering was pasted into someone's posting at a TheologyOnline forum. Hmmm ... an undiscovered country of faith-based rational thought.
Poking around a bit there I found a posting by someone, claiming to read the Bible in the original Hebrew, who cites a contradiction in the books of Samuel. Apparently, two different people are credited with killing Goliath. The poster asks, "where is our inerrant Bible?" And teh hilarity ensues. My favorite response is by a Christian biblical literalist (judging by his/her other posts supporting young earth creationism).
Congregation Narrowly Misses "Large Ensemble Darwin Award"
The congregation of the Cedar Grove Methodist Church, near Thorsby, Alabama selected their pastor, rather than an outside contractor, to oversee the construction of a new church using home-made blueprints based on looking at pictures on the internet. That choice very nearly earned the congregation the coveted Large Ensemble Darwin Award.. According to the pastor, an Invisible Sky God scuttled the award-worthy effort by causing the building to collapse on the wrong day.
"[Because of that meddling Invisible Sky] God nobody was hurt," Pastor Jeff Carroll said. "He chose to let it come down on a Thursday evening when nobody was there."
Although a deity interfered in the process, the pastor had been successful in keeping local authorities from hampering the Darwin attempt. The congregation and volunteers designed and built the new church apparently without filing plans or gaining approval from local or state entities. Carroll, himself a homebuilder, said he was not aware of any requirements and remains unconvinced a government body should have a say in how a church is built. "If the state and the church are separate, I don't understand why they think they've got jurisdiction," he said.
In related news, the Darwin Awards Committee is tracking anyone who continues residing in a home built by Carroll.
Yes, it's a real story.
Tuesday, Aug 08, 2006
Cracker Troll
I'm a denizen of the comments at Hairy Fish Nuts. Part of the reason is the joy I get from swatting the softballs lofted by the trolls who frequent that site. One of these trolls goes by the name "Squeamish". I've always thought of him as a "reasonable wingnut". This is a term of art by which I mean "consistenly wrong, often twisted, but probably not psychotic".
In this assessment of Squeamish, I was mistaken.
His psychosis first became clear during the Katrina aftermath, and has resurfaced recently in the comments when the topic of Katrina came up again on this post.
Below are a few excerpts, from a much longer exchange, in which I compare Squeam's words to those of a famous statesman, Squeam pleads innocence, I 'splain to Sqeam the nature of his psychosis. Although D told me this was a waste of time, and I suppose it is, I have difficulty letting white-supremacy-expressed-without-saying-nigger pass without pulling off its veil -- or hood.
Read the rest of this post...
Not a good way to be on the news
A few months back, my chiropracter was featured in local media coverage, including footage from a news chopper.
Everyone made it out safe, but just. Between fire, smoke and water, the house and contents were a total loss.
Check those fire alarms.
WWFSMD?*
PZ Meyers
Tuesday, Aug 01, 2006
Overthrow
I finished Kinzer's Overthrow on the flight back from NYC.
The book details the US actions behind the overthrows of fourteen regimes in: Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Honduras, Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, Chile, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
It reads as a series of tragedies, as fools wielding great power repeatedly mislead the US into criminal acts and strategic miscalculations on a massive scale. Kinzer lets each overthrow unfold in a narrative. In the manner of someone watching a horror movie, I couldn't help but mutter, "No, don't go that way", again and again.
The overthrow of Iran is the most tragic of them all. A democracy was overthrown in the heart of the middle east, and replaced with a repressive dictator. The backlash against that dictator lead, two decades later, to a takeover by a repressive Islamic revolution, which has served as an inspiration to and sponsor of Islamic militants -- including those who are currently firing missiles into Israel. And if you asked the average American what major event happened in Iran in 1953, only a few would have the slightest clue.
The individual stories of these overthrows are elements of Kinzer's larger goal of finding patterns in the motivations and patterns in the aftermaths. Recuring themes are a desire to protect US business interests and results of worsening conditions for both the US and the countries whose regimes were overthrown.
One aspect of tragedy that Kinzer laments is that often the US government has overthrown regimes that share US ideals, including democracy, market economy and fair play. I think this is a generous reading of the American people, who too often place the highest value on US hegemony. Below is an excerpt from a reader review on Amazon that helps illustrate the point.
More On Crichton
jimlouis suggested that I read Crichton's new anti-global warming book, as a way to see both sides of the debate. I'm not so sure I will. His short speech, linked to in the post below, pissed me off so much I don't know if I can handle a full novel of it.
One point he drills in over and over and over is that we can't know the future, and it's a fool's mission to attempt to do anything for future generations. He explains that in1900, New Yorkers might have thought that by 2000 vast piles of horseshit would have been one of the chief problems in NYC. By golly, by gosh, I suppose some schmuck might have worried about huge mountains of horseshit burying Manhattan. Although others would have noted, "There's precious little horseshit in the Boston subway. Perhaps we should build one of those!"
Fucking retard. Crichton engages in a sort of purposeful ignorance that pisses me right off.
So, on an up note, let me mention some 19th century visionaries, the Sempervirens Club. Through their efforts, at least some of the ancient coastal redwoods still live. These are folks who in 1900 had the novel concept, "Holy Jeebus, you don't have to cut down all the trees, do ya?"
Their efforts led to what is now Big Basin State Park.
Thanks 19th century enviro-whackos!
Shorter Michael Crichton
- Collecting data with radio telescopes and analyzing them for potential communications signatures is not a scientific exploration, but rather is a religious activity which has fundamentally undermined the practice of science.
A lecture by Michael Crichton
California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, CA
January 17, 2003
My topic today sounds humorous but unfortunately I am serious. I am going to argue that extraterrestrials lie behind global warming. Or to speak more precisely, I will argue that a belief in extraterrestrials has paved the way, in a progression of steps, to a belief in global warming. Charting this progression of belief will be my task today.
Crichton also says that consensus has no place is science. Hmmm, I guess we can just toss all those "peer reviewed" journals in the trash bin. They're nothing more than popularity contests.
He asserts that the only science that counts is experimental science, with repeatable experiments. So unless you have a whole set of identical planet Earths upon which you can perform various global experiements, it is totally ridiculous to draw global conclusions.
His fundamental position regarding the future is: We just don't know. There are unknown unknowns and unknowable unknowables! Don't dare think ahead, because you're just wasting your time!
Thanks, Mike. You are the Donald Rumsfeld of science.
[Disclaimer: I knew an engineer who developed signal processing HW for the SETI Institute in the late eighties/early nineties.]
Monday, Jul 31, 2006
David Brooks S. Broder: Grand Master Concern Troll
"Doctor" Laura: Patriarchal Hegemon
I listen to KSFO HateTalk 560 from time to time just to see what's going on with the American Taliban. "Dr." Laura is on if I'm doing mid-day errands.
I've gotten used to her old-timey views. I've gotten used to the idea of a Jewish woman giving props to fundamentalist Christians. But a call today really surprised me.
A woman with a very slight, possibly Arab or Persian accent called in to say that her husband "got rough with" her when she declined sex. They had had a difficult argument the previous day, she wasn't quite over it, and simply wasn't in the mood. While describing her feelings in the aftermath of this, she said in strong terms that she had the absolute right to refuse sex with her husband, and said "no means no."
Under the circumstances of recent physical abuse, the way she expressed herself was perfectly reasonable, but not to the good "doctor". Ms. Schlessinger accused the caller of spousal abuse for saying no. And her refusal was just as bad as what the husband did, although his act is illegal. Schlessinger also said that the woman was part to blame. Hear that bitches? All your sex is belong to your man! Submit quietly like a good vassal, and everything will work out fine.
Thanks for the insight "doctor". Now here's some advice for both "Dr." Laura and the caller's husband: Go fuck yourselves.