Tactical decision

Q: So what do you call a Macintosh with a Pentium inside?

Read the rest of "Tactical decision"

Two atoms

Snarkmarket does a spit-take:

NYT: France to Be Site of World’s First Nuclear Fusion Reactor.

Wait a minute! I thought we didn’t have nuclear fusion reactors??

Two smells

Two nearly identical smells (oddly enough):

• Old Spice deodorant
• Jägermeister

Scumbag

"We know for a fact, I know for a fact that no one in the Administration lied about weapons of mass destruction."

Donald Rumsfeld, Fox News Radio, 6/21/05

Donald Rumsfeld, ABC's This Week With George Stephanopoulos, 3/30/03

[Quotes from ThinkProgress, via J. Bradford Delong]

All the response that's justified

Atrios on Karl Rove's dumbfuckery:

For the record, my motives aren't to get more troops killed. If those were my motives I'd ship them off to a war on false pretenses without sufficient equipment to keep them safe.

Who are the moral relativists?

There's been so much torture defense and torture glorification lately, it makes me want to vomit.

Dilawar was a shy, frail, uneducated cab driver who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time -- driving past a base that had been the target of a rocket attack earlier in the day. He was arrested by Afghan militiamen who turned him over to the Americans. This past February, the commander of that militia was himself arrested. He is suspected of attacking the base and turning over innocent men like Dilawar to the Americans in order to curry favor with our military. Before Dilawar's final interrogation, the one that finally killed him, most of the interrogators had already realized that he was innocent.

We snatched an innocent young man out of his quiet life and beat him to death, even after we knew he was innocent.

If you can say that sentence out loud and not cry, I don't want to know you.

What's accountability?

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber makes some points that should be obvious, but strangely aren't:

...In many countries (including my home country, Ireland), police have a reputation for stitching people up; they seem prepared in some instances to commit perjury in order to get people convicted for crimes. Now in some cases, this is a completely cynical exercise – the police have no idea of whether the accused is guilty or not, but need to get a conviction for political or other reasons. But in others, it’s because the police think that they know who committed a crime, but don’t have the necessary evidence to get the person convicted in court. Therefore, they perjure themselves and lie about the evidence in order to get the conviction.

This, it seems to me, is what happened in the lead-up to Iraq. The Bush administration, like others, probably did genuinely believe that Iraq had an active nuclear program. But it didn’t have the necessary evidence to prove this, either to its allies or to its own people. It therefore cooked the evidence that it did have in order to make its claims more convincing. It didn’t deceive the public about its basic belief that there were WMDs in Iraq. But it did deceive the public about the evidence that was there to support this belief, in order to convince them that there was a real problem. In other words, it did “consciously mislead” the American people (and its allies). When the police are caught perjuring themselves to get convictions, they should (and frequently do) suffer serious consequences, even if they believe that they’re perjuring themselves in order to get the guilty convicted. That’s not what the police should be doing; they haven’t been appointed as judges, and for good reason. If the police persistently lie in order to get convictions, the system of criminal law is liable to break down. Similarly, when the administration lies about a major matter in order to get public support, it shouldn’t be excused on the basis that it thought that it was lying in a good cause. It’s still betraying its basic democratic responsibilities.

I don't understand why journalists are making such a fuss about this

Gotta love those Romanian priests -- they sure know how to crucify a nun.

Persuasion by equation

This video of Tom Lehrer performing (only the second I've ever seen) is a delight. I've been listening to him since a very early age, probably too early to be healthy.

Math geeks rejoice!

[Thanks to Metafilter]

Sold

This is why they invented Moviefone.com:

She is good-humored about the scrutiny, but she confesses the one-note quality of it all is starting to wear her out. "The scripts I get are always for the whore, or the motorcycle chick in leather, or the horny maid," [Jessica] Alba says as she climbs a hill, panting slightly. "I get all these screenplays that start, 'Tawnya is in the shower. The water streams down her naked, perky breasts.' "

Doctor, heal thyself

Why hasn't there been a push to have Dr. Bill Frist's license to practice medicine revoked? He's established a clear pattern of incompetence -- first, he can't quite recall whether tears and sweat can transmit HIV (they can't), and now he can't distinguish a blind patient from a patient who can see!

(I am completely serious about this, in case this post came off as sarcastic.)

Avalanche or roadblock

"If it wasn't for disappointment
I wouldn't have any appointments"

They Might Be Giants, "Snowball In Hell"

Re: the new Coldplay album X&Y

I liked them better when they were called Travis.

The saxophone is the devil's instrument

Ezra tries to reason out the unreasonable:

...Ehrahalt is comparing, here, the deep-seated hatred for Clinton with the only "recent" president loathed enough to be used as precedent -- and you have to go back 75 years to find one Moreover, he's right. In 1992, a Democrat who eschewed liberalism beat a Republican who violated conservatism. Republicans should have been bouncing off the walls. Not only did their ideological betrayor find defeat, thus serving as a head-on-pike example for future tax-raising Republicans, but the Democrat who did win was shifting the party right! Once Clinton entered office, he failed on some minor thing (gays in the military), some big things (health care), and succeeded on a variety of conservative-friendly ventures (NAFTA, welfare reform, deficit reduction). Nothing truly liberal squeezed through, the welfare state did not grow, the government, in fact, shrank, and the country was generally run from between the poles.

So why, exactly, did the right hate Clinton with the fire of a thousand suns? Boomer ethics has been the refrain, they hated his sexual appetite, his generational difference. But what then of Newt Gingrich, also an eggheaded boomer who switched wives like they had a shelf date? Hell, compared to him, Clinton's marriage was a picture of rock-solid stability. Was it that Clinton was too good? Too eloquent, too smart, too attractive, too successful?

Maybe it was, I really don't know. But the fact remains that what the right hated about Clinton was ineffable, unexplainable. Democrats hate Bush for being warlike, smug, and duplicitous. They hate that he calls for compassion and cuts Medicaid, that he calls for cooperation and governs as a bitter partisan, that he wants a humble foreign policy and makes us an international Zorro. Bush hatred, fair or not, blooms from identifiable seeds. But Clinton hatred? It was straight partisanship begging for a rationale. That's why, in the end, the right needed to search so hard and dig so deep for Whitewater, Paul Jones, Monica, Travelgate, and all the rest. It's hard to hate without a reason, and all the reasons, at least until Monica, proved inadequate. So they had to be cycled out. You could only get so mad over Travelgate and Whitewater, so once that rage was spent, a new outrage had to be summoned, which first meant it had to be discovered. It was a hell of a way to spend eight years...

It's not easy being green

Would you like to pretend to be a Martian? Just follow these three easy steps!

1. Drink three grape Gatorades in a relatively short period of time.
2. Wait approximately twelve hours.
3. Look at what comes out the other end.

Tolerant-esque

Stinging Nettle makes a good point about Jesse Helms:

Now, let's not be ungrateful for small miracles. At least Helms admits he was wrong to oppose AIDS treatment and education programs, but look at that paragraph. Implicit in that statement, despite the claim of having learned his lesson, is the reprehensible argument that had AIDS remained confined to a population of homosexuals and intraveneous drug users, it would have been nothing to worry about. Evidently, in his estimation such people deserve to suffer and die.

I don't think the old guy has learned that much at all.

Did he really need an entire book to say "We would've shut off the hoses eventually"?

And huggable, too!

If there's a story more worthy of being linked to from Geekable.com, I'd like to see it.

Etymological naughtiness

Today NPR referred to the manatee by its common nickname, the "sea cow".

I will confess my complete ignorance w.r.t. the manatee, so hopefully a marine biologist can clear this up for me: do manatees have comically large nipples? If not, then why "sea cow"?

Understatements

detroitblog: "So here I was, alone in an abandoned building in Detroit as it’s getting dark outside, and I’m frozen in place as a sex act is taking place near me, just around the corner. It suddenly struck me quite forcefully that my life is very, very strange."

Reassembling the bunny

The Apple-Intel announcement makes me feel very uneasy.

Read the rest of "Reassembling the bunny"

Kangaroo court

Yesterday I linked to an article that claimed that intelligent-design creationists love to selectively quote Charles Darwin to make him sound like he himself doubted natural selection.

For one actual example of this, check out this link (and associated criticism). I think Rubinstein's article may hold the record for most utter falsehoods about evolution contained in one place.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

As they say on South Park, "Dude, this is pretty fucked up right here!"

Friday night round-up

Some interesting links before I head out this evening:

• Talking Points Memo: "The idea that President Bush ran [for re-election] on a specific agenda that included privatizing Social Security strikes me as little more than preposterous... Yes, he did mention it during the campaign -- just enough to allow his supporters to say now that he didn't spring it on the public without ever having mentioned it before... But he didn't bring it up in ads, in the debates, in any prominent setting. And for good reason. His entire campaign was framed around two planks: strength against terrorism and the flaws of John Kerry. The first time it got any sort of significant emphasis from the president was a couple days after the election."
• American Civil Liberties Union: "A federal judge has ordered the Defense Department to turn over dozens of photographs and four movies depicting detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as part of an ongoing lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union... 'It is indeed ironic that the government invoked the Geneva Conventions as a basis for withholding these photographs,' said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney at the ACLU. 'Had the government genuinely adhered to its obligations under these Conventions, it could have prevented the widespread abuse of detainees held in its custody in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay.'"
• Richard Dawkins in the London Times: "'To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.' You will find this sentence of Charles Darwin quoted again and again by creationists. They never quote what follows. Darwin immediately went on to confound his initial incredulity. Others have built on his foundation, and the eye is today a showpiece of the gradual, cumulative evolution of an almost perfect illusion of design... The creationists’ fondness for 'gaps' in the fossil record is a metaphor for their love of gaps in knowledge generally. Gaps, by default, are filled by God. You don’t know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don’t understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don’t go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, don’t work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries for we can use them. Don’t squander precious ignorance by researching it away. Ignorance is God’s gift to Kansas."

Say what you mean and mean what you say!

O'Reilly Radar asks a question that deserves to be repeated over and over:

But then I noticed something about the sites using the "XML" icon: nearly all of them add some text right next to the icon, clarifying that by XML, they really mean RSS. In some cases, such as SFGate and Amazon, they devote entire pages to explaining what RSS is, before going ahead and using the XML icon. Oy, I ask you. What craziness is this? Using one obscure acronym to describe another obscure acronym...oy!