What needed to be said

Bush consistently harped on not sending Iraqis "mixed messages". I think Kerry needed to rebut this decisively, like this:

Iraqis don't want messages. Iraqis want security and stability.

However, I thought Kerry's two-minute response about nuclear proliferation was fabulous. I (and hopefully the undecided voters) was reassured that John Kerry will fight a more effective war on terror.

Ninesome

Justice Antonin Scalia says:

I even take the position that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.

Trust, but verify

I urge everybody out there to double-check right now to see if you're actually registered to vote.

If you're a Michigan resident, you can go here to check your registration status, see where you go to vote, and read your ballot.

Bad news, but good to know

If you're going to make an educated voting decision this November, you should know these facts:

1) "The Bush administration is spending more [money] in Iraq in four days than they've spent protecting our ports for all of the last three years."
2) "The CIA unit charged with finding Bin Laden has fewer experienced case officers today than it had before 9/11."
3) "More [Soviet nuclear] materials were secured in the two years before 9/11 than in the two years after."
4) "There were more terrorist attacks in the world last year than the year before."
5) "We hear the secretary of defense himself wondering whether the radicals are recruiting, training, and deploying more terrorists than we're capturing or killing."

While the overweight Americans wear their patriotic jumpsuits

Kim is surprised that some of our fellow citizens are so dumb and ignorant, they are unaware of Austria's existence.

I wish I could share her surprise -- but I keep on top of the latest polls, and I know how close the Presidential race is.

I just want to be alone today

Go check out the video for the new Cake song, "No Phone".

Iyad Allawi, Robert Nozick, and licking bathroom floors

• The right is angry that a Kerry staffer had the gall to accuse Iyad Allawi of being a puppet. Publius is angry for a different reason: "I for one am sick and tired of hearing attacks on those who attack failed policies that got our troops killed, destabilized the Middle East, and have been the biggest gift ever to militant Islam." [Via Washington Monthly]
• Robert Nozick is a principled libertarian. Except, apparently, when there's an opportunity to extort $30,000.
• Yglesias on being bold: "Does anyone really believe, after all, that our enemies currently lack for boldness of all things?"
• As The Apple Turns points out that there were over 5,000 new Windows viruses in the first half of 2004: "Meaning that, if using Mac OS X is like, say, breathing through a mask in a sterile operating room of a top-rated internationally-known hospital, then Windows is roughly equivalent to licking every surface in a gas station bathroom and then kissing... Tommy Lee full on the mouth."

Ask Geekable, vol. 1a

As if I didn't link to a shrill enough article in the first edition of Ask Geekable, I give you a shrill definition of conservatism.

Bill O'Reilly, ketchup, and BJs

• Clarence Page shows why the conservative media both hates and loves Dan Rather. "Ever since Rather answered a snippy remark from President Nixon (Now, there's a heckuva hero to have!) with a snippy remark of his own back in the Watergate era, the right has been gunning for steely Dan." [Via Tapped]
• "Mad Dog" Bill O'Reilly invents French publications and thinks Palestinians are boring. [Via kottke.org]
• Learn more than you ever wanted to know about ketchup, "the only true culinary expression of the melting pot". [Also via kottke.org]
• What do you expect a blog entry to be about when its title is "This BJ's going to be either really good (or really bad)..."?
• Josh Marshall is snark-master supreme. "Don Rumsfeld said yesterday that elections in "three-quarters or four-fifths of" Iraq might be good enough. In other words, run the place on Florida rules."

A cheesy pun for you

Do not read this joke with a mouthful of beverage.

I boo my vote

So what happens when you ask eleven-year-olds to vote for a candidate based not on image or press spin, but based on the issues a candidate stands for? The children boo their own votes when they find out who they voted for:

Anyway, the teacher was talking about their current events unit, which as you might expect is primarily taken up with the election process right now.
The teacher told of an exercise wherein he read from both the Bush and Kerry websites.  He read where each of the candidates stood on the main issues of the campaign.  He didn’t say who was who…just “this is what candidate one says, this is what candidate two says”.
The kids made tally marks about each thing they agreed with from each candidate.
Then the kids voted on the issues.
Four kids voted for Bush.  26 kids voted for Kerry.

...

At any rate, Eden Prairie has grown a crop of Bush/Cheney yard signs that rivals the corn crops of neighboring rural towns.  This is Bush country, make no mistake about it…
…as illustrated by the fact that most of the kids who voted for John Kerry were greatly upset by it.  They booed the results of their vote.  They were upset that they had voted for the “wrong guy”.

[Via Metafilter]

Ad baculum

Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian candidate for President, on Slashdot:

David Nolan, the founder of the Libertarian Party, is fond of pointing out that history seems to run in cycles of 70 years or so. We rebelled against the British and set up our own nation. 70 years later, we fought the War Between the States. 70 years after that, the Depression and the New Deal. If Nolan is right, and I don't find any fault in his logic, we're about at the end of a natural societal cycle. Barriers are breaking down and new things are coming.

...

As my friend L. Neil Smith puts it, "a great explosion is coming." As a matter of fact, we're right in the middle of it and it's hard to see what shape things are going to take when the smoke clears.

I see the next decade or so as a time of change, whether we like it or not. If Americans try to stick to the old way of doing things, the dislocation will last longer, be more disruptive and possibly tip us over into totalitarianism or some other nightmarish societal paradigm. If they adopt the libertarian way of doing things, it will be shorter, not as disruptive -- and usher in a better era to follow.

The radio and the telephone and movies that we know

How do you tell those annoying religious types to go to hell without telling them to go to hell? Sing show tunes. [Via Boing Boing]

Since Wayne State has been besieged by an army of Jews for Jesus in the past two weeks, I think I will try this: "I've got you.... under my skin!"

Diet reminder

Flowers go in a vase, not in your mouth. (I don't care what those frou-frou restaurants say.)

Weekend politics

Here are some things you have to read this weekend:

• Crooked Timber on Memogate
• Volokh on Moral Relativism [Via Yglesias]
• Kerry's speech justifying his vote to give Bush the authorization to go to war, free of Republican spin [Via Yglesias]
• James Wolcott sez: "The surest way to be proven wrong is to give George Bush the benefit of the doubt." [Via Pandagon]
• Can I catch the gay from my toothpaste? [Via Fafblog]
• Warning all liberals. [Via Jesus' General]

Have you smacked a libertarian today? Vol. 2

I think it's important to know that "Michael Badnarik", the Libertarian candidate for President, is an anagram for "A animal bred hick".

In the key of Rufus

Just to let you know, Rufus Wainwright has compiled a celebrity playlist for the iTunes Music Store.

While you're there, why don't you visit his music store artist page and buy all his music?

But I want it now

I planned on ordering a new 12-inch PowerBook tonight. But I unwisely looked at the MacRumors Buyer's Guide, and now I'm leaning towards waiting.

Damn you MacRumors! Damn you and your convincing product-cycle predictions! You've just ruined the possibility of a wonderful impulse buy!

Q, thus P

Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, has been all over the dubious story of the Killian memos. Fake? Real? One thing's for sure: Glenn has an unhealthy interest, and the blog entries keep coming like a diarrhea attack. (Like diarrhea, something at Instapundit smells fishy.)

Glenn explains that the age of logic is over:

That's because, while arguments from authority are hard on the Internet, substantiating arguments is easy, thanks to the miracle of hyperlinks.

While on our pedantry high horses, this passage from the Washington Post

“I am personally 100 percent sure that they are fake,” said Joseph M. Newcomer, author of several books on Windows programming, who worked on electronic typesetting techniques in the early 1970s. Newcomer said he had produced virtually exact replicas of the CBS documents using Microsoft Word formatting and the Times New Roman font.

Now what exactly is the argument here? I think it’s of the following form.

If the memos were produced on Microsoft Word, they’d look exactly like this.
The memos look exactly like this.
So the memos were produced on Microsoft Word.

Nevermind that the first premise is probably false, because the distinction between exactly and virtually is pretty darn important here. The argument is the kind of howler that we fail freshman logic students for committing. It even has a fancy name: affirming the consequent.

And shame on Brad DeLong for being so easily swayed.

Thank goodness for Bill Maher

From Larry King Live (I'm paraphrasing):

KING: So you don't think Iraq is like Vietnam?
MAHER: No, of course not. With Vietnam, George W. Bush had an exit strategy.

Embarrassing childhood revelations, vol. 3

Once upon a time, during a family trip to the Cranbrook Museum, I came across an Apple II computer in what used to be the geology (read: rocks) section. It had some interactive program discussing rocks, and possibly radioactivity.

I was a youth -- stupid, but familiar with how Apple II computers worked. So out of boredom I hit the restart keystroke combination to bring myself to the BASIC prompt. Then in a classic move of stupidity, I typed "list" and hit enter.

Line after line of the program started scrolling up the screen. It soon became clear that the software was thousands of lines long, and wouldn't stop anytime soon. I panicked because I was not able to bring the computer back to normal, and ran away. A couple of minutes later, I admitted to my father that I had just messed up one of the computers, and together we told a curator so they could restore the machine back to normal. (I think it simply involved another restart, which wasn't obvious at the time.) And later, of course, I got punished.

Moral of the story: don't fuck with computers that aren't yours!

Shitting some more prime numbers

A fellow blogger wants me to recommend a recreational book about mathematics.

The first one that comes to mind is Prime Obsession by John Derbyshire. Yes, that John Derbyshire, the homophobic Brit who writes for the National Review. Even though he's a conservative prick, he managed to write a very good book about prime numbers and the Riemann Hypothesis. It should be equally interesting to mathematicians and non-mathematicians alike, so go check it out!

Typeface time

I am a big font fan, as you might have deduced from previous entries. Thus, I thought I would enjoy any blog discussion about fonts and typesetting.

I was wrong. The entire political blogosphere (both liberal and conservative) is debating whether the documents CBS recently discussed are forgeries, based on some nutjob's observation that he could create crappy replicas with Microsoft Word. Now we've got the Daily Kos going over the history of Times New Roman, and I'm sick of it.

You would think that the big story would be how Bush disobeyed direct orders...

A little more than borrowing, part 2

Dear Jill Sobule,

Today I heard the song "Cinnamon Park" from your upcoming album "Underdog Victorious".

I hope Peter Cetera and Chicago don't sue you for copyright infringement, as you obviously copied the music (and several lyrics) from "Saturday In The Park". So unoriginal! So.... plagiarism!

Sincerely,
Geekable

Black math

For a community of nerds, Slashdot contributors sure don't know their mathematics.

One of the top-level stories today described how a Dutch student found a way to calculate the numerical roots of polynomial equations of any order. This sounds pretty exciting, until you realize that Isaac Newton knew how to do this back in the 17th century. (Specifically, equation 5. It converges quadratically, too.)

Getting away with it

Tbogg is a very funny blogger. Today he posted a bit of a daily White House press conference with Scott McClellan. Just in the brief excerpt on Tbogg, there are four instances of the following line, pretty much verbatim:

MR. McCLELLAN: If the President had not fulfilled his commitment [to the Texas Air National Guard] he would not have been honorably discharged.

Ask Geekable, vol. 1

Kevin Drum asks,

States with low taxes, minimal public services, and low wages are precisely the same states that have historically had the worst economies. So why does the Republican party think this is the right economic formula for the entire country?

Dancing about architecture

Alex Ross, music critic, astutely notes:

And the social code around classical music is so stupidly superficial. People think that if they dress a certain way, if they keep quiet and purse their lips and look thoughtful, read the program notes and murmur, “Ah, Mozart,” then they’re having a serious experience. It’s thinking from the outside in. It’s just as much of a pose, no, more of a pose, than any punk with a sneer and a nose-ring and purple hair.

What country is this again?

Let's get this straight: a man doesn't like that he's either required to present identification or submit to in-depth searches to get onto an airplane flight. He asks the airline where it says he has to do either of these things. Turns out it's a secret law. When he challenges the secret law in court, the Justice Department says that the reasons for the secret law also have to be kept secret.

I keep thinking back to Stephen Colbert's report on the Daily Show entitled, "So You're Living In A Police State..."

Practice makes perfect

Here's the best Bushism ever:

We've got an issue in America. Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country.

UPDATE: Reuters has picked it up.

Dirty conservative tricks, part 3067

Kevin Drum links to a New York Times article showing how many otherwise excellent schools are being deemed "failures" by the No Child Left Behind Act. And he has some valuable insights to share:

I suspect that a lot of people who supported the worthier goals of NCLB simply didn't realize they were getting snookered: the fact is that the Bush administration wants to see lots of public schools labeled as failures. It's basically a long-term plan to erode the public's faith in public schools and thereby increase support for private schools and vouchers.

This is part of a pattern from conservatives, who realize that their domestic agenda is actually pretty unpopular and can be passed only if people don't realize what they're getting. NCLB is an example of this kind of stealth legislation, and both last year's Medicare bill and this year's "ownership society" are additional examples. In the end, though, NCLB may turn out to have been too clever by half, as parents rebel against being labeled failures instead of meekly accepting the verdict of the federal government.

Of course, that's not the only surprise the Bush administration has in store — surprises that they're hoping nobody will notice until they're either safely reelected or out of office. As I wrote last December, 2010 should be a helluva year....

I think you're full of prime numbers

In honor of my upcoming number theory class, I present the following web site to you:

The Prime Number Shitting Bear

Deal-breaker

Why do all the cute women seem to be either taken, gay, or libertarian?

I'll pick up the slack

This just in:

THE IRISH ARE drinking less Guinness - official. Figures just released by Diageo - the company which owns Ireland's national tipple - show that sales slumped by six per cent.

The reason? Paul Walsh, Diageo's CEO, revealed that the typical 21 to 25 year old is failing to follow his father's footsteps down to the pub. Instead, "They're often putting their money into electronic stuff such as iPODs," Walsh told the FT.

Don't know why that sounds so good

Back during my first year of college in 2000-2001, I was a music major.

My theory professor sat at the piano one day and demonstrated the circle of fifths. It's been a while, but I seem to remember a certain demonstration of his: a set of seventh chords that followed a circle of fifths pattern. Everyone in the room thought it sounded awesome.

Norah Jones must have been sitting with us.

UPDATE: Mr. Drezner is also mesmerized by the circle of fifths.

Everybody likes soft serve drippin' down in the June sun

I had a flashback to my early childhood today while walking through a parking lot.

Does anybody else remember squeeze-tube ice cream? The product had a round top with a star shape cut out, and the tube contained soft-serve chocolate ice cream. You squeezed the tube and the ice cream would extrude in a long star-shaped column of deliciousness.

I don't remember exactly when these were available, or what they were called. But I know I'm not crazy! Let me know if you share my memory.

Why I'm a liberal

Here's a nice, short repudiation of everything I hate about Bushonomics.

RNC 2004

I propose that the Republican National Committee should make the following song the theme of the 2004 convention:
Read the rest of "RNC 2004"