The Reality-Based Community: Fair is fair

Reposted in its hilarious entirity, "Fair is Fair" by Michael O'Hare at RBC:

The "worst president ever?" meme has floated from bitter-liberal whining lounges to mainstream venues and plutocrats like Donald Trump, who should know which side their bread is buttered on. This piling-on in the face of the clear facts has to stop if Democrats want to keep a shred of intellectual respectability.
History simply will not support this level of condemnation. Never mind presidents from decades back, here are five contemporary presidents who completely refute the idea that
Bush is the worst:
None of the antiwar protesters arrested in Washington Friday night were
beaten in captivity. Not a single fractured skull or broken jaw. Bush is much more protective of civil rights and free speech than Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe.
Bush has never, ever, claimed to have an herbal AIDS cure revealed by ancestors in a dream, nor touted it to replace anti-retroviral drugs. Bush is much less anti-scientific than
Yahya Jammeh, president of Gambia.
The number of US dissidents killed overseas by plutonium poisoning is zero, and the number
of US businessmen ruined and imprisoned for opposing the government is also zero. Bush is much more respectful of law and property than Vladimir Putin, president of Russia.
Bush hasn’t tried to fire even one Supreme Court justice, much less a chief justice. He’s much more respectful of separation of powers than Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan.
Bush hasn’t named a single city, river, month, or day of the week after himself, and aggressive research has turned up no gold-plated colossal statues of him, not even silver-plated. Bush is much less egotistical and narcissistic than Sapurmurat Niyazov, the late president of Turkmenistan.
George W. Bush, better than many presidents; let's give credit where credit is due.

WSJ vs. NYT in a subscription model deathmatch

Over at the Freakonomics blog, there was some discussion of why the Wall Street Journal has a subscription wall while almost every other newspaper in America allows free online access to its news product. Author Steven Levitt opined that someone has to be wrong: the WSJ or the rest of the newspaper industry.
I posted multiple comments, not so much because I had a lot to say, but because the comment engine on Levitt's blog (probably wisely) strips out HTML tags and properly renders multiple spaces as a single space. (No, I have no idea what the comment engine here does. I don't comment on my own blog. That'd be kinda onanistic.) But my point was that the WSJ and the New York Times have almost inverse pay/free models and good/crappy products. To wit:

	New York Times	Wall Street Journal
News Pages	Spotty (mostly bad) but free	Good but costly
Editorial Pages	Spotty (mostly good) but costly	Bad but free

(One of the nice things about having your own blog is the ability to drill down to the HTML and hand code a damned table when you need to.)
What may be at work here is that the WSJ is an outlier, a special case: a truly national business paper that is unique and can charge for access to its news content because of its intrinsic value. (Well, that and the added value of being from the Wall Street Journal, whose news pages have been above reproach despite the lunacy over at Editorial, probably a far greater achievement than most people realize.)

Ding dong the Frank is gone

I suppose it's bad form to enjoy the semi-forced retirement of an 80-some-odd-year-old man, but I've been waiting for Frank Broyles to retire (or the other option, because apparently he got the same deal as Arkansas athletic director that federal judges do) for a damned long time. Now to get to cutting the Nutt, and maybe it really will be the year of the pig!

Victory Is Not an Option - washingtonpost.com

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush's illusions from the realities of the war.

That first line of Gen. Odom's Op-Ed in the Washington Post is really all you need to read. The rest is Odom's methodical delineation of what's gone wrong and what we can do to make it right and just how we can get our collective nuts out of the roaring fire Bush and company lit in Iraq (and are trying, like demented, defrocked Boy Scouts intent on a pyromania badge, to light in Iran). That we have a president (and for real nuttiness, see Vice President Cheney on any given day; it's quite an accomplishment to make Bush look like he's in touch, but Cheney sometimes manages it) who can't see past his illusions is bad enough; that we have one whose illusions are killing and maiming American soldiers and Marines (who come back to be treated like shit at Walter Reed, apparently) by the truckload is unforgivable. I don't care that the right wing will whip up its nut cases with a cry of "It's retaliation for Clinton!", we've got to impeach Bush and Cheney before there's a mushroom cloud over Tehran. The American soul has been besmirched enough, damn it!

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

While this introduction lacks something for people who don't read in eyeblinks, it's still the best introduction to the concepts underlying the Web 2.0 phenomenon. From an anthropology prof at Kansas State.

Biden's foot-in-mouth moment

Biden:

"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," he said. "I mean, that's a storybook, man."

Lurch at Main and Central:

What Senator Biden apparently said was pretty simple in my mind. He was trying to be graciously complimentary. I focused on the word “clean” and felt he meant “clean cut”. With the aid of the always-useful second thought I think he also meant clean as in the sense of “free of baggage,” most especially so after CNN committed journalism and put Fox Noise Channel’s attempted madrassa slur to bed. It’s important to remember that Senator Biden was speaking extemporaneously, and everyone fluffs now and again.

The problem, as always, is context, and I think here we have a case of focusing exclusively on a single word rather than the statement as a whole. Set aside the fact that whatever his good points, Barack Obama isn't the first mainstream blah blah blah. Mainstream actual viable politician well regarded in his party and whatever else passes for an atmosphere a few miles west of me? Maybe, though that's less of his own doing than we would like to believe (but maybe more than my inner cynic says).

Second, look at the four adjectives he chose: articulate, bright, clean and good-looking. The only one I would consider an always unquestionable complement is good-looking, though it bespeaks a certain vapidity. (And I always have to question what people mean by that--is it that Obama isn't dark? Is Biden comforted, as so many have been before, by the presence, real or imagened, of some leavening?)

Bright has always stuck me as mixed bag, an impression somewhat bolstered by the definition in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary:

3 a : showing mental quickness, ready understanding or learning, prompt responses, or originality b : showing lively animation, vivacity, or activity c : showing glib quickness or facile resourcefulness without deep intellectuality

I'm not saying Biden was definitely thinking about c, but even the a definition can be seen as favoring quickness over depth of understanding.

Now for the word that everyone is tripping over: clean. I, too, heard a lot more "clean cut" and "scandal free" (as if any Democrat will long remain so in the current media environment), and thus my panties stayed moderately unbunched. Again, I thought it was foolish diction, but I'm pretty sure part of the job description for a senator is to talk and talk and talk and talk, especially on hot topics, especially off the cuff, especially in front of cameras, especially so as not to step on your dick--and here Biden failed miserably.

Articulate is the one that really sealed the deal for me. I don't care if he didn't mean it negatively and truly doesn't have a racist bone in his body (which I highly doubt, as it seems to be ground into our genes to some extent) or whatever, but how many kinds of fool do you have to be to go anywhere near such a stand-in for the dismissive "well spoken"? If you're trying to say Obama is a powerful public speaker, say that. If you're trying to say he has a pleasant speaking voice, say that. Set a staffer on finding a one- or two-word well known synonym so the press corps won't get too far behind in scribbling your words, but don't take a quicksand shortcut like "articulate." Again, not even close to fulfilling the job requirements.

While I don't think we need to do what should have been done to Trent Lott, I'm not upset that Biden's out of the race--I would fully support term limits on presidential campaigns some days, as these same characters keep popping up, in both major parties and especially in all the little fun parties, thinking that this will be the year that the talking points they developed five elections or more ago will finally resonate with the voting public--and given his record and the opponents he already had, there's almost no chance I would have voted for him. I guess I'd rather all incompetents self-destructed with such quickness, and without taking the whole country and much of the world with them.

Arkansas Coach Nutt a Candidate for Parcells' Cowbows Gig

Cowboys coach Bill Parcells retires - Yahoo! News
Anyone care to take up a collection to duct tape Frank Broyles to Nutt and make a clean sweep of it?

How about "We don't feel like answering stupid questions, Condi"?

U.S. Tries to Interpret China’s Silence Over Test - New York Times
Are we headed to a new form of Kremlinology, where we think ourselves into knots because our enemies (and the neutral parties and even our allies), because they're not like we are, can't be expected to react at least as irrationally as we do or in the same way. Not being a diplomat, I can't say.
Will it lead to decades of overestimation of the Chinese or Iranian or Elbonian threat? Likely.
Does this bother those positioned to make money off the inevitable government contracts? Not at all. See War is a Racket by Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC, the proceedings of the Truman Commission, etc. ad naseum.

Amazing sunset!

Don't know what it was about yesterday's sky, but it was a doozy. Shot from the platform at the Silver Spring Metro Station.

The Post-Perfect Storm

Today's Washington Post may be a weather map to the perfect storm that has hit America.

Upper left: A story about how the government been robbing Peter (in this case climate research) to pay Paul (Mars, bitches!, etc.). I mean screw figuring out what's wrong with the house we live in, let's daydream about a trip to Australia by car!

Upper middle: A digital day in the life. I'm always amazed at how amazed professional, top-tier reporters can be amazed by things I've known about for months if not years. I've ceased to be amazed at their inability to make the leap necessary to take the story from the obvious (e.g., the phone company has tracked phone calls ever since it began charging money for it, i.e., forever) to deeper understanding (it's the low cost of storage, the consolidation of data, the mining of data, the "national security" backdoors that are so ineptly constructed that they leave portals into people's lives that a script kiddie could drive a black ice Hummer through that really matter, not that suddenly that we notice how much of our lives occur in public).

Upper right: Bush says after years of running the budget into the ground with a compliant, Republican-run (but I repeat myself) Congress, it's now up to the new Democratic-run (barely in one house, lest we forget) Congress to change his diaper, clean his backside, exchange any clothing soiled by his excesses, and, for good measure, prevent any further blowouts--all while letting him run amok in Iraq and at home. He needs the Hannibal Lecter handtruck treatment.

Right side, second story: It seems the Iraqi "government" still can't hold a lynching without screwing something up. Here's a first step to not embarrassing yourself while hanging people: Stop hanging people. At least bring back the hooded, muscled man with the scimitar and give the beheadings a bit more grandeur, people. Or maybe something more civilized, like not rushing headlong to kill anyone and making sure not only that you have had a fair trial, but fair punishment as well.

Right side, third story: Yes, folks, it's been five years since the first person was hauled to Gitmo from far off lands, possibly never to return, face anything resembling a fair trial, or otherwise leave the hell on earth America has built next to the Communist Paradise of the West.

And at the lower left: Ladies and gentlemen, one of the things the Post does pretty well, packing a lot of localish crap into a single story on A1. If you've driven around here and had to stop for anything other than gas, chances are you got a parking ticket. Along with specious moving violations and other draconian non-moving offenses, this has got to be one of the top revenue sources for local governments in the region.

Metro: Martin Luther King? Look in Metro. He's not A1 material anymore. Yesterday's news. Beyond that, today's Metro section is a prime example of the Post's attitudes of "eff local, we don't need no stinkin' suburbs" and "Virginia uber alles" (the second prevails if there's a conflict). Would it have killed them to put a Maryland story on A1 in the Maryland Edition instead of the Virginia parking ticket pastiche? Maybe the big school construction thing? But of course, anyone reading a newspaper is too old to have kids, or too smart to live in Maryland or D.C.

Business: Golly gee, a mirror that has a Web cam and can display IMs. Alert Steve Jobs. (See earlier snark about journalists and technology.) Why the hell, other than the huge monetary impact it has on Big Pharma, is the BioShield (government preparedness for bio-attack) story here? There isn't even a business mentioned on the section front. Look honey, a navel-gazing newspaper business story (tip to readers: stick to Editor and Publisher, they have a clue about the business without being mired in it), and something about a hotel magnate blogging. Business sections after holidays suck even worse than usual, because that's when the reporters pretend they're with the Style section and (usually--there are some fine business writers around, including some at the Post) show why they aren't.

Sports: Apparently the Sports section's recipe for survival is 1 part game recap and stats anyone with an Internet connection could have read for 8-16 hours + 2 parts columnists, half panderers and half shockers, + some graphics and agate, most of which has again been available, free, online to anyone interested enough to look for it, plus lots of TV time for Tony "I'll make you miss Dennis Miller" Kornheiser and Mike Wilbon. I sometimes think the only people who read agate are non-stats freaks following out of town teams.

Health: Decent article on warm-winter caused allergies inside aside, the rest is middling to poor.

Style: Finally, something I'm at an absolute loss for explaining: Yet again, the Style section is far more relevant and important, e.g. today's coverage of the Appeal for Redress movement, than the "news" sections of the newspaper. Hell, it even does a good job with congressional representation for D.C. But it's the Style section. The writers, while one of the finest Style section stables in the land, are constrained by the section itself: snappy, scrappy writing in the space allowed by all the Kids Post, funnies, puzzles (not that, heaven forfend, I am advocating a reduction in those three; they are probably the best parts of the paper day in and day out), celebrity trash, television, music, theater, quirky crap and all the other things that help the Style section speak to people with too much free time, free money or both (those latter could be abolished without much crying from me).

So there you have it: Passing of the buck on a monumental scale, not that the story would lead you to any such conclusion; a story far too clueless for consumption in what may be one of the best informed, technologically adept metro areas in the nation; national embarrassment; MLK relegated to Metro because that was yesterday, just like your civil rights; traffic tickets! (please ignore our paltry Metro coverage); well, we have the dysfunctional, blame-everyone-else CEO president, why not cover government in the Business pages; Marriott blogs!; sports is life, Sports section is irrelevant; Style's got at least two stories that should be on the front page of the paper, much less given the Leeza-Gibbons-in-print treatment. And it's still a top ten American newspaper, no doubt.

From the "Deranged Data" Files

According to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, the most stolen car in the state of Kentucky is ... the 1986 Olds Cutlass. An '86 Cutlass Ciera S 2 Dr Coupe with 150,000 miles, 2 barrel carb and automatic transmission in average condition would run you about $196 from a private party in Henderson, Ky. according to Edmunds. (Zip code 42420 chose at random from Kentucky zip codes. Why? Because I can.)

WTFO?

How many of these are even still running and in stealing-worthy condition?

Is there some kind of Cutlass-pimping culture that values the originality and verve of the '86 above all?

Have the Hatfields and McCoys gone from shooting each other to playing Capture the Cutlass?

Freakin' weird, it is.

Our royal family lineage

In one of those weird moments where random crap seems really appropriate, the Presley family titles:

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Sir Pierce the Pompous of Hope End Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

My Wife's Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Her Noble Excellency Kelly the Hunted of Throcking in the Hole Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

My Daughter's Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Her Imperial Majesty Laura the Ineffable of Biggleswade by Biscuit Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

My Son's Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: His Most Serene Highness Lord Kane the Dulcet of Gallop Hophill Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

My inner grammar Nazi makes an appearance

Commas, semicolons, colons, lists and “and”, and how they work together to handle nested lists.

Poor usage:

“Metro’s operating expenses are paid through three sources: passenger fares, revenue raised by the agency through advertising and other sources and taxpayers in the District, Maryland and Virginia.” — “Metro Considers Increasing Rail Fares” by Lena H. Sun, Washington Post Dec. 11, 2006, Page A11 (from A1).

What’s happening here? There’s a list, the colon tells us that, but then there is but one, wait, no, two commas and three “and”s to help us sort it out. No semicolons. Lots of words that go together in confusing ways.

The most likely answer is that there are nested lists and we need some way to sort them out, and this is where semicolons working with colons, commas and “and”s shine.

Try this:

“Metro’s operating expenses are paid through three sources: passenger fares; revenue raised by the agency through advertising and other sources; and taxpayers in the District, Maryland and Virginia.”

Not only is this now clear, but it opens the sentence up to paring unnecessary words.

Thus:

“Metro’s operating expenses are paid from: fares; advertising and other revenue; and taxes from the District, Maryland and Virginia.”

No need to say “three sources, because our semicolons make that perfectly visible, and this leads us away from other cruft like “passenger fares” and “revenue raised by the agency.”

My inner grammar Nazi usually stays in the background, but occasionally there's something that requires action.

Inhuman intellect

In its glorious entirety and brevity, a post from Razib at Gene Expressions (A Science Blogs Joint):

In the post below there is a lot of talk about genius that might rival Newton. I didn't throw down a list of criteria for why I esteem Newton, a lot of this is gestalt intuition anyway, and I'm probably not reflectively totally aware of why I feel the way I do. That being said, someone threw down Aristotle. Instead of Aristotle, or Plato, or any of the other numerous ancients I mentioned Archimedes. Why? Aristotle certainly had, and has, more influence than Archimedes. The reason is simple: Aristotle had superhuman intellect, but Archimedes had inhuman intellect. Aristotle had beefed up hard disk space, lots of RAM and top of the line CPU, but Archimedes had incredible applications that you just didn't see on any other box. Aristotle took the vector that was humanity and extended incredibly across the length and breadth of human space, but Archimedes shifted orthogonally outside of the plane of known space. I believe that Frederick Gauss, Isaac Newton, and their kind were aliens amongst us. While superhuman intellectuals can aid us in accelerating faster across the ocean of the unknown, the unhumans can cast a spell which magically parts the waters and exposes dry land.

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing when discussing the intellects of Aristotle and Archimedes, and if not then it's not fair to compare the two.
There are probably as many ways to slice the question as there are reasonably binary pairs, but in this case I'll take theorist vs. engineer. Aristotle was a consummate theorist, someone who thought about how things should fit together. Archimedes, on the other hand, thought about what things could do, and while I think Razib is correct in projecting a perpendicular relationship between the two, I think that perhaps the great difference in direction might have misled him about the difference in the quantity and quality of their intelligences.

Working Again

Well, I've finally rejoined the workforce. Today through Dec. 3 I'm working at Wintec Arrowmaker in what will hopefully be the last short-term assignment for quite a while. I'm doing print production on a contract proposal, bringing together materials from different companies into a coherent whole. So far, everyone here is great.

On Dec. 4, I go to work at Synergy Enterprises, doing the same sort of thing plus some things ancillary to production, as a full-time, temp-to-hire employee.

The perverse upside to this is that I'll hopefully be posting more, since I won't be drowning in my own inertia at home, plus I truly believe that busy people get the most done--to an extent.

I suppose time will tell. But it is nice to be working again.

That Syria?

The state sponsor of terrorism? The torturer? The supposed resting place of Saddam's WMD? The country some posited was next on the invasion list? That Syria is going to "help bring stability" to Iraq? We're playing international footsie with those bastards? (Referring to the government; I have no rancor for everyday Syrians.)

And it only gets a blurb box on the front page of the Washington Post? While polygamists, fucking OJ and bible-reading grunts take up space. (Not that I'm begrudging the grunts anything, but c'mon, it's a feature photo unrelated to any of the stories. Unrelated art is by definition unnecessary.) I know the State Department is being run by Aunt Tom and that we've apparently become unable to control the Vichy Iraqi Government. But Syria? That Syria?

33 months and counting ... what to do?

Mahablog says:

What are we to do? Let’s think about this.
Although I support impeachment, I’m not sure that’s the way to go. We’d have to impeach Bush and Cheney — a tall order — and if they’re removed from office we’d end up with Dennis Hastert in the White House. I’m not sure the 33 months are lookin’ any smoother under that scenario, although perhaps Hastert will be enough of a wuss to not do much. That may be the best we can hope for. At least he would probably work with Congress to run the country.
Same thing if Bush and Cheney were forced to resign, as Nixon and Agnew were.
If Dems get control of at least one house of Congress next year the subpoenas can begin. Perhaps if Bush is under incessant investigation for his last two years he will be slowed down some. On the other hand, he might start another war just to wag the dog.
And if Republicans keep control of both houses of Congress I don’t see an alternative to limping along as we are.
Thoughts?

Read the rest at Mahablog.

My two cents
Cent one: the midterms are probably our last chance to grind this to a halt. We’re going to have to get subpoena power in congress and a set of juevos for pushing the subpoenas in the face of withering fire from the VRWC and corporate media. And don’t doubt this: even if Bush’s numbers drop to the single digits, it’s going to be a fight to win those seats, thanks to the trifecta of gerrymandered safe seats, years of GOP institutionalized leftist voter repression and the VWRC working the refs and corporate media bending over and taking it.

Cent two: I’m sorry, but start thinking about what we should do to halt this maladministration from hell? The unwillingness of most of the left, not to mention the DLC, centrist weenies currently keeping almost all of the Dems out of the pool in re Iran, warrantless wiretapping, etc., is exactly why we’re in this situation. The unwillingness to discuss impeachment, censure, threatening armed rebellion, hell, any substantive action in response to the rape of America, her ideals and her reputation has done, I think, more harm than the Bush administration. This is the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, but the unwillingness to call them on it, to hound them into the impotence of the above-mentioned failed administrations has allowed them to shoot again and again and again. Why should they change tactics? No one has forced their hand. If we get congress, we’re going to have to beat on this administration like it’s a turtle we’ve mistaken for a steel drum while in the midst of a Jamaican revelry on speed, or they’ll come out and screw something up. It’s like fluorescence or something.

Bonus third cent: Some have made mention of the populace’s (notice I didn’t say “voters'”) disaffection with politics. Part of that is the constant refrain from ethically challenged politicians and their allies that “everyone’s doing it”; part is the parties’ unwillingness to purge their ranks of these people; part is the VRWC’s insistence that “real people” lie outside of the political process–all fine and true. But I hold that a large part is the lack of any pushback. What does it avail a person to become disenchanted with crooked politicians if all that is ever offered to them is another politician with a different letter by his or her name on the ballot. Dems have got to stop cutting off the Paul Hacketts of the world in favor of career politicians. Make the slogan “We’re going to change more than the names on the office door; we’re going to change more than the ‘culture’; we’re going to change more than the window dressing. Politics as usual, meet politics for the people.” Throw some (verbal) bombs, hoist some petards, burn some effigies, relentlessly call out the transgressions of the powerful and, for the sake of all that is good about this country, offer a real alternative.

My brother-in-law, thespian

This either puts him in a league with a NASCAR pit crew, or a chimp, if previous commercials are any guide.

CREW files complaint against Grover; Joe in DC is shocked, shocked!

Joe said:

... CREW is alleging that Grover was using his non-profits as for-profit companies to launder money. That would violate IRS rules - irnoic for the leading anti-tax guy ...

Didn't a great writer, like John Grisham (please note sarcasm), write a book once about an evil law firm that, among other things, gladly took as much money as its rich clients would give them for figuring out ways to let the clients pay "the firm" (hey, that would be a good title, gotta write this stuff down) instead of the man?

I mean, yes, we'd all like it if everyone was a non-hypocritical grownup like we usually envision ourselves to be, but I think we're really into Pollyanna land to think that people like this won't break some rules to get to the tax-free utopia a bit before everyone else.

Intipuqueños celebrate ... someone ... or something

Among the anonymous sources floating administration trial balloons and salacious dirt came a nice front-page story in today's Washington Post about Salvadorans living in Washington who return to their home town of Intipucá in the "state" of La Unión, and the changes in the town and the emigrants. It's a pretty good story, with a lot of cultural sensitivity and human interest in both El Salvador and Metro Washington. But the narrative hook the reporter chose was the event that drew back the former residents, referred to as a "patron saint festival" apparently honors some saint whose name must not be mentioned. It's really the celebration of the immaculate conception of Mary, which is rather more of an event than a "patron saint," unless you're going to claim that Mary was a different person at each of the celebrated eras of her life.

South America may be the last place outside of Vatican City where the Catholic calendar of saints is still the defining latticework partitioning out the year. Cities and towns traditionally celebrate one (or more) of the festivals much like American ones do everything from oatmeal to pickles to pumpkin chunkin' on any given weekend, in addition to the major feasts that everyone celebrates like Carnivale, Christmas and Easter (or New Year's Day, Easter, Independence Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas for the states). Referring to the festival in this way may be intended to preserve its relationship to festivals honoring saints' entire lives, but it doesn't make grammatical sense nor does it tell that the city is honoring not only Mary, but what is perhaps one of the most agreed-upon celebrations in Catholicism, and it is only one of several festivals in the calendario de fiestas patronales that honor something other than a single saint, from the divine face of Jesus to the black Christ of Esquipulas, a statue of Jesus in dark wood housed in a nearby Guatemala town that is now the most significant pilgrimage site on the continent. Mary herself is celebrated in many different ways, both as symbol and as person.

Why would a story sensitive enough to use the correct name for a town native, intipuqueño and intipuqueña, including the tilde (though it omits the accent from the town's name and capitalizes the nouns despite proper Spanish usage, both common occurrences in American newspapers; the presence of the tilde in so many may be due to the difference in meaning between ano and año and the popularity of a telenovela rendered in many listings as "Los Anos Perdidos," babelfish.altavista.com translation: The Lost Anuses) gloss over the question of what the focus of the festival actually is? After all, this isn't just a festival of Mary, it's a festival of the immaculate conception, an event signifying Mary's lack of original sin, probably the most important reason she is held in adoration by Catholics comparably to Jesus, the only woman of comparable importance among prominent religions and certainly of the Abrahamic strains. It's probably too much to ask that the writer note that the immaculate conception celebrates Mary's conception (and existence thereafter) in a state of grace and is set on a date (Dec. 8, though Intipucá starts two days earlier) nine months in advance of Mary's birth, a parallel to the celebration of the incarnation of Christ on March 25, nine months before Christmas, and not the virgin birth. But in a story about a significant minority in a geographic area with a sizable Catholic population (both Salvadoran and other nationalities), naming the festival wasn't important?

Pierce Presley is a graduate student in journalism at the University of Memphis and a freelance writer living in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. He received his B.A. from Loyola University New Orleans, a Jesuit Catholic university.

Note: edited to correct babelfish link.

If that's what it'll take ...

Here was a picture of Bush with the caption "Won't somebody give this man a blowjob so he can be impeached?" But it's gone now.
But, of course, it wasn't the sex, it was the lying, which means Bush was impeached years ago. But it's a secret, so no one has told the people, and that's just the way President Cheney likes it.

paper cd case

For idiots (even your host, sometimes) who lose their CD case and for those trusting souls who think that a bubble envelope is overkill, what with the professionalism of your modern postal worker, there is an origami paper CD case. Added bonuses: a CD search engine for those CDs that cleverly omit track info in favor of kewl graphics and a compilation of people's mix CDs that you could rip off, or draw inspiration from.

Boing Boing: Cafe Scientifique

Boing Boing has an article up about Cafe Scientifique, a chance for people to marvel at scientific minds on display. I think that any exposure to science, the scientific method, rationality, etc. is good for people, even if one already has a scientific outlook.
Sadly, I was less than amazed that there isn't an affiliate in or around Washington, D.C., given both the current administration's well documented hostility to science and Mark Kleiman's noting that think tanks just ain't what they used to be.

And people wonder why I laugh out loud spontaneously

I don’t know which is funnier: that I had the sudden realization that my basement laundry room would be infinitely cooler if it had the sort of industrial disintegration sound effects that you could imagine in any early Nine Inch Nails video if the audio wasn’t composed entirely of far more aggressive industrial sounds, crazy drum tracks and Trent Reznor doing things to keyboards that nature never intended, maybe with a little trippy visual disorientation like the onset of LSD; or that this thought came to me at 34 years of age and as the father of two, as I was gathering sheets from the dryer and moving a blanket into it and stuffing a big-ass king-size comforter into an energy-efficient front-loading washer. Maybe the humor is in the difference in the life I projected for myself 13 years ago and where I’ve ended up.

There are things that need to be said

If these political pushers can throw a man like John Murtha under the bus, they can do it to anyone.

This is what it's come to, a decorated Marine pilloried for political points by a nitwit freshman congresswoman, a draft-dodger VP and a TANG playboy. Not to mention the bread-and-circuses resolution the GOP floated to discredit Murtha's proposal. Will the last to leave this madhouse please turn out the lights? The inmates are willfully living in the dark already.

Everyone who voted Republican, I hope you're happy. Everyone who let the long lines, lack of voting machines, poll watchers/inimidators, crappy weather, work schedule, whatever keep you from voting, I hope you're happy too. Everyone who couldn't be bothered to vote, or couldn't be bothered to learn enough about the current situation to feel comfortable pulling a lever, touching a screen or anything else, I hope you're happy. Everyone who voted in one of the enabling assholes--of whom Murtha was until recently a member--I hope you're happy.

I sure the fuck hope you're happy, because if you aren't, you helped fuck this up and it'll likely end up that not even the Bush administration and its useful idiots in Congress are going to end up with much to show for it. Hopefully they'll be brought lower than the Nixon gang, low beyond the hope of recall in the shadowy netherworld of talk radio and the "balanced" op-ed pages of dying newspapers. But even if all they face are three years of emasculation and impotence (which, while hard to bear for tough-talking bullies like these, isn't nearly punishment enough; anyone up for a trip to The Hauge?), even if the military and its friends like Murtha convince them to leave Iraq before many more lives are lost, the damage this had done, this five years of incompetance and, frankly, an unwillingness to aim for competence, will be horrendous.

We'll have a symbol--perhaps in the sad husk that was America's most interesting city, New Orleans. We'll have to overcome a mind-boggling deficit held entirely too much by a strategic rival. We'll have to live with generations of poorly educated people unable to adapt to new economies. We'll have the domestic economic, racial and other divides to overcome that have been exacerbated by this pack of morons. We'll get the chance to really understand Britain's post-WWII malaise and the fall of the Roman Empire. Like as not, we won't recover in our lifetimes, nor our childrens', not as a recognizable United States, and hopefully not as what we've become. It's a sorry state to reach where you'd rather see your country cease being than continue in its current path.

I don't want to be too pessimistic, but I really think it's hard to understate the danger the ideal of America is in, really hard to overstate the dire consequences of a descent into autocracy, torture, dictatorship, madness.

Oh, and for those who think "It can't happen here," you're helping it happen. Stop now.