There's something about Myrna

So whatever happened to Myrna Dick?

I blogged about her case over a year ago. A judge ruled that she could not be deported back to Mexico because her fetus was conceived in the U.S., and because the Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004 might imply that the fetus is a citizen entitled to equal protection of the law, Mrs. Dick could not be deported until the baby was born.

Well, her child was due back in October 2004... yet I don't see any articles about her on Google after June 2004! I'd like an update please, media!

Malice, not incompetence

Jonah Goldberg gives the benefit of the doubt:

I am no huge fan of Frist's (as a politician. As a man I think he's a pretty admirable guy). My guess is that this stock sale stuff will ultimately fizzle out, mostly because I doubt Frist is so stupid as to do what some allege...

Atrios suggests that the press always refer to Frist as "Senator Bill Frist, documented liar." I think that title should be modified to "Senator Bill Frist, incompetent doctor and documented liar."

Substitution error

M.C. Barsenas, before shutting his blog down like a little pussy, accused me of conflating creationism with intelligent design.

Now we find out that when writing the book Of Pandas And People, the authors essentially did a find-and-replace on "creationism" and replaced it with "intelligent design".

I'd like an apology, "James Hunter".

Hope for the pope

Kiss the ring!

Ok, now kiss my thumb-cock!

Bandwidth does cost money

Dave Winer needs a good bitch-slap.

Over and over again Dave criticizes people for including ads in their RSS/Atom feeds. The worst instance is here:

[Taegan Goddard] brought the ads back, without notice, without permission of the readers. It's pulling my attention into his stuff, and dammit that's my aggregator not his, and not FeedBurner's and not his advertiser's (who I won't name here).

Now Dave would deny content-providers the same opportunity to recoup costs, just because they're content providers, and he's a content aggregator. I would call this hypocrisy, but I think Dave just calls it a "fine line".

P.S. ResExcellence has come out and plainly said the reason they don't offer an RSS feed is because it would harm their ad revenue. Dave, would you rather they have no feed at all, or have a feed with ads in it?

The Scott Adams Principle

I love Scott Adams' work because it's hard to tell when he's being earnest or sarcastic:

Reason: How do you define yourself politically?

Adams: I find that I do not align with any well-established political viewpoint that has a name associated with it. So I've called myself pro-death. I looked for what commonality there is in all of my work and in all of my political views and realized that I support abortion, capital punishment, and a strong military. When I put together the things I'm in favor of, the only thing they had in common was that they all ended up killing someone, whether it was a fetus or a terrorist.

There's a metaphor here somewhere

Brian Williams doing some real reporting:

I am duty-bound to report the talk of the New Orleans warehouse district last night: there was rejoicing (well, there would have been without the curfew, but the few people I saw on the streets were excited) when the power came back on for blocks on end. Kevin Tibbles was positively jubilant on the live update edition of Nightly News that we fed to the West Coast. The mini-mart, long ago cleaned out by looters, was nonetheless bathed in light, including the empty, roped-off gas pumps. The motorcade route through the district was partially lit no more than 30 minutes before POTUS drove through. And yet last night, no more than an hour after the President departed, the lights went out. The entire area was plunged into total darkness again, to audible groans. It's enough to make some of the folks here who witnessed it... jump to certain conclusions...

Dim lightbulb

Wow, it's rare to see a story about science have so many errors:

An Australian man built up a 40,000-volt charge of static electricity in his clothes as he walked, leaving a trail of scorched carpet and molten plastic and forcing firefighters to evacuate a building.

Frank Clewer, who was wearing a woolen shirt and a synthetic nylon jacket, was oblivious to the growing electrical current that was building up as his clothes rubbed together.

When he walked into a building in the country town of Warrnambool in the southern state of Victoria Thursday, the electrical charge ignited the carpet...

...Clewer, who after leaving the building discovered he had scorched a piece of plastic on the floor of his car, returned to seek help from the firefighters.

"We tested his clothes with a static electricity field meter and measured a current of 40,000 volts, which is one step shy of spontaneous combustion, where his clothes would have self-ignited," Barton said.

"I've been firefighting for over 35 years and I've never come across anything like this," he said.

Firefighters took possession of Clewer's jacket and stored it in the courtyard of the fire station, where it continued to give off a strong electrical current... [all emphasis mine]

Total disregard for the truth

When you're richer than God, I guess you stop feeling bad for completely making things up.

Q: Some people hold Microsoft most accountable for security problems, even though software flaws are exploited by "bad guys," as you said. Is that a fair criticism?

[Bill] Gates: Software in general, whether it was from Microsoft or somebody else, was not set up for an environment where all the computers were connected together. So it's not like there was some software that had this security capability and our software did not. As we use the Internet to connect everyone up, then the need to essentially have suspicion and only listen to certain other systems, and if flaws come up to have those updated very quickly, that became a new requirement.

Because Microsoft is the biggest software company and so successful, we should be held responsible for coming up with those things. We've got to push the state of the art, we've got to be the one to solve those problems.

Even if we bullshit a bit ourselves and say Microsoft didn't think of computer networking until 1992, that's still 13 years ago. How long does it take for Microsoft to identify the need for security, and how long does it take to implement it?

The conservative platform

Matthew Yglesias cuts through the cognitive dissonance:

...When most of your big ideas are well-designed for election day but don't actually make sense, it's hard to make substantive progress on your agenda. Most notably, the idea that decreasing tax rates is a good way to increase tax revenue has become frighteningly central to conservative governance despite a lack of such things as evidentiary support. Its empirical falsity aside, this strong supply-side thesis doesn't even make sense as ideology. It casts conservative tax cutters as trying to maximize federal revenue (impeded, for mysterious reasons, by blinered high tax liberals) but also as opposed to spending the revenue on useful programs to help people. Supply Side Jesus is going to fill the federal coffers and then the president is supposed to just ... sit on the cash, like Scrooge McDuck swimming around in a pile of gold coins...

867-5390

A technological twist on an old classic: this weekend a girl gave me a bogus email address.

Malicious misinformation

Tim Graham, National Review Online, September 9, 2005:

...There's only one problem with the Mr. Bill the Prophet tale. Mr. Bill was doing a PSA to preserve "America's Wetland," not build higher levees. Try finding the word "levee" in this story.

MR. BILL: Gee, kids, I'm not sure we can do our show today because it looks like Hurricane Sluggo is headed right for us here in America's wetlands.

WALTER WILLIAMS, MR. BILL CREATOR: That's right, Mr. Bill. And since New Orleans is below sea level, if a hurricane hit us directly, it could push the water over the levees and fill it to the top...

So focus!

Here's a Google query that provides useless results:

tips for quitting caffeine

tips for "quitting caffeine"

Mock the controversy

You should be watching the Daily Show anyway, but next week should be extra-special:

For one full week, "The Daily Show" goes in-depth, around, through and quite possibly under, one of the hottest hot-button issues facing our nation: evolution. It's the accepted theory on the origin of life by an overwhelming majority of the world's biologists, but maybe they're all wrong. What's so great about the scientific method anyway? "Evolution Schmevolution" will explore:

• What other theories are out there?
• Who's on the frontlines of this debate?
• Should your child's curriculum really be decided by experts in their respective fields?

The Emmy and Peabody Award-winning "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" was launched in the summer of 1996.

So don't believe the Stewart-creationists -- there's fossil evidence proving Craig Kilborn is Jon's ancestor.

Man of action, part 2

More essential information from Andrew Sullivan:

The 2004 National Response Plan explicitly states that, at times of

any natural or manmade incident, including terrorism, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the population, infrastructure, environment, economy, national morale, and/or government functions,

the federal government pre-empts local and state government in its responsibility to act quickly. After 9/11, the administration wisely dispensed with the formalities of deferring to local authorities (which, of course, in this case had already issued a state of emergency as early as August 26). The attempt by the spinners to blame this on the obviously overwhelmed and incompetent local authorities, doesn't fit with the Bush administration's own rules. Proof positive can be read here. Keep digging, Karl.

Gyros and Lenny Kravitz

I was giggling all the way through this paper, to give you an indication of my maturity level.

The Soul Truth

Let's hear it for honest love songs from the female perspective!

Hastily copied and pasted

• Kevin Drum: "Here's the part I don't get — and I mean I genuinely don't get it, regardless of who's at fault here. Everyone suggests that part of the problem is that FEMA's focus was redirected toward terrorism after 9/11. In and of itself, this is neither surprising nor wrong. But the requirements to respond to a major terrorist attack on a U.S. city are largely identical to the requirements for responding to a hurricane like Katrina: food, medicine, maintenance of order, evacuation, and temporary shelter. So what are FEMA's plans for responding to, say, a large scale chemical weapon attack on Chicago? They'd have less warning than they did with Katrina and the requirements for aid would be largely similar. What would they do?"
• Matthew Yglesias: "...Rehnquist is a perfect example of the general principle that if you live long enough, and acquire enough power, everyone will treat you with a great deal of respect whether you deserve it or not..."
• Wonkette: "An operative who's been reporting on the disaster in New Orleans sent us a text message this morning: I have a rehnquist joke for you - he's actually been dead for 4 days but fema just found him."

Man of action

The Associated Press says:

...For the entire time Bush was in [Louisiana], [Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-La] said, a ban on helicopter flights further stalled the delivery of food and supplies.

No confidence

Andrew Sullivan:

...Funding FEMA and having a superb civil defense are very much part of conservatism's real core. It's when government decides to reshape society, redistribute wealth, socially engineer, and take over functions that the private sector can do just as well that conservatives draw the line. The reason I'm mad as hell over Katrina is precisely because I'm a conservative and this kind of thing is exactly what government is for. Bush in this sense is not now and never has been a conservative. A man who explodes government spending but can't run a war or organize basic civil defense is simply a fiscally reckless incompetent. If this were a parliamentary system, we'd have a vote of no confidence. Instead we have three years of more peril.

Death by privatization

The blog "Lenin's Tomb" has done some real investigative journalism, and they found that the company hired to develop "the Catastrophic Hurricane Disaster Plan for New Orleans & Southeast Louisiana" has removed the relevant press release from their website.

Shameful. Absolutely shameful.

Go Junior

This seems like a silly thing to talk about while helpless New Orleans residents are needlessly suffering and dying, but I highly recommend this preview track from Junior Senior with vocals by the B-52s.

Up on the roof

I haven't said anything about Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, mostly because it's such a tragic, gigantic clusterfuck that it's hard to find the words.

But this January 2004 news article really fits the bill:

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- The effort to save Louisiana's eroding coast is about to get a new catchphrase: "Ohh nooo!!!"

Mr. Bill, the "Saturday Night Live" clay character from the 1970s whose misadventures usually left him squished, will be part of a campaign aimed at teaching people -- especially children -- how Louisiana is losing its coastal marshes and swamps.

"I wish I had a quick three-word synopsis for it other than maybe Mr. Bill says 'Ohh, nooo!!! -- the coastal erosion,"' said Walter Williams, Mr. Bill's creator and a native of New Orleans...

NARRATOR: That's right, Mr. Bill. And since New Orleans is below sea level, if a hurricane hit us directly, it could push the water over the levees and fill it to the top.

[Via Amygdala]