This Made Me Laugh
Saw this on that facebook thing:
Pretty much.
September 28, 2011 12:35 pm
Posted in: Gay Rights are Human Rights
25 Comments
Amazon’s Kindle Fire
Just curious what all you tech folks think of this new Silk browser.
September 28, 2011 12:16 pm
Posted in: Science and Technology
66 Comments
Open Thread
Sometimes it’s the classics that give us an insight into our shared humanity. Here’s an open thread.
September 28, 2011 8:29 am
Posted in: Open Thread
77 Comments
Flirting with Disaster
Chris Christie has definitely gone from being a straight governor to presidential-candidate-curious. He’s probably not going to run, but when he spoke at the Reagan Presidential Library last night, he was a little more coy than usual.
Let me first express my surprise that people are actually allowed to speak inside the St. Ronaldus Magnus library—I would have thought that reverential whispers, accompanied by the occasional “shush” of a nervous mother, would be the only human vocalization heard in that sacred chamber.
That said, this kind of desperation is really begging for the full Palin:
Don’t even say anything tonight, go home and think about it. Do it for my daughter, do it for our grandchildren, do it for our sons, please sir: we need you. Your country needs you as president.
What’s next? Are these people going to stand on the lawn at Drumthwacket holding up a ghetto blaster playing a Peter Gabriel song?
A Christie candidacy, Christie shaking his man boobs and staring slyly into the camera—hell, even the mere mention of the alliterative syllables of his name—are all good news for Democrats. It all highlights the weakness of Perry and Romney, was well as Republicans’ disgust with their repugnant choices. To Christie, I say: dance, motherfucker, dance.
September 28, 2011 8:10 am
Posted in: Republican Stupidity
128 Comments
I’m Looking at the Man in the Middle
Researchers at Argonne National Labs have developed a $10-30 set of parts that can be inserted into a Diebold voting machine and used to alter votes. The machine can be opened by using a standard hotel minibar key, or a similar, easily copied key, and the parts can be inserted in a matter of seconds. Once the parts are inserted, votes can be altered by remote control from a distance of up to 1/2 mile (or I assume the device could be set to do a pre-programmed vote modification).
Researchers didn’t have to alter the machine’s software—in fact, no special knowledge of the machine’s software was required. They didn’t have to solder anything inside the machine, so the devices could be easily removed with little or no signs of tampering. Since machines often sit for weeks in church basements and school storage rooms, it’s easy to imagine a successful hack.
The is just another reminder that the voting machine procurement storm that followed Bush v Gore was mainly a boondoggle. All of the touchscreen-only machines are going to be invalidated by court order someday, and they’ll be thrown away and replaced by a paper-based system that’s counted by machine, or at minimum, a kludged-together touchscreen system that prints a human-readable printed ballot output. In the meantime, we’re just going to have to trust local election boards, which don’t have a lot of money or knowledge of technology.
September 28, 2011 7:45 am
Posted in: Our Failed Political Establishment
85 Comments
Early Morning Open Thread: Rosh Hashanah
Via commentor MRK, because it made him smile, as it did me. Shana Tova Umetukah, a good and sweet year, to the believers among us, and may we all be inspired to reflect upon our transgressions and strive for a better tomorrow!
September 28, 2011 5:33 am
Posted in: Daydream Believers, Open Thread
22 Comments
Boob Tube Fall Line-UP
Obviously, Chuck and Psych, but what else are we looking forward to checking out? I’m kind of intrigued by Jesus in Person of Interest, and might give Terra Nova a whirl. I watched about ten minutes of Whitney and was ready to kill myself, so that is out.
September 27, 2011 9:03 pm
Posted in: Open Thread, Television
188 Comments
Taste includes both oysters and snails
September 27, 2011 8:16 pm
Posted in: Movies
36 Comments
Just a Few Bad Apples
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
September 27, 2011 6:52 pm
Posted in: Shitty Cops
151 Comments
A Dubious Distinction
Goes to Reading, Pa., which most of us around here only know of as an exit on the way to Philly:
The exhausted mothers who come to the Second Street Learning Center here — a day care provider for mostly low-income families — speak of low wages, hard jobs and an economy gone bad.Ashley Kelleher supports her family on the $900 a month she earns as a waitress at an International House of Pancakes. Louri Williams packs cakes and pies all night for $8 an hour, takes morning classes, and picks up her children in the afternoon. Teresa Santiago takes complaints from building supply customers for $10 an hour, not enough to cover her $1,900 in monthly bills.
These are common stories in Reading, a struggling city of 88,000 that has earned the unwelcome distinction of having the largest share of its residents living in poverty, barely edging out Flint, Mich., according to new Census Bureau data. The count includes only cities with populations of 65,000 or more, and has a margin of error that makes it difficult to declare a winner — or, perhaps more to the point, a loser.
Reading began the last decade at No. 32. But it broke into the top 10 in 2007, joining other places known for their high rates of poverty like Flint, Camden, N.J., and Brownsville, Tex., according to an analysis of the data for The New York Times by Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College.
Now it is No. 1, a ranking that the mothers at the day care center here say does not surprise them, given their first-hand knowledge of poverty-line wages, which for a parent and two children is now $18,530.
The city had been limping for most of the past decade, since the plants that sustained it — including Lucent Technologies and the Dana Corporation, a car parts manufacturer — withered. But the past few years delivered more closings and layoffs, sending the city’s poverty rate up to 41.3 percent.
And of course, they keep electing Republicans. He’s a “moderate” by GOP standards, but that means nothing these days.
September 27, 2011 6:30 pm
Posted in: Domestic Affairs
53 Comments
“I knew I was going to take the wrong train….”
...”so I left early.”
Thus sayeth that noted neutrino expert Yogi Berra, Bb.D.
Because humankind cannot live by politics alone, here’s a bit of an off-angle reaction to the biggest news in physics since Big Al (as I thought of him through a decade of film-and-book making/writing on the good Dr. Einstein) looked out of his window and wondered what would happen if the roofer he was watching slipped and fell. Before the poor fellow hit the pavement, of course.
That would be the announcement last Friday that an Italian team of physicists sent a beam of neutrinos from the CERN high energy physics facilty on the Franco-Swiss border through the Alps to a detector in the Italian national physics lab in Gran Sasso, a journey of almost 460 miles (~730 km). The newsworthy bit was that the experimenters measured the speed with which some 16,000 or so neutrinos covered that distance, and found that it very slightly exceeded the speed of light, “c” —the canonical limit within Einstein’s special theory of relativity that nothing may exceed.*
The effect detected by the experiment, known as OPERA, was small: 1 part in about 40,000 greater than c. But any breaking of the light barrier is a huge deal. If the result stands up, we’re in for a fun ride. There will be lots of new physics to be found. Good initial reactions can be found all over the physics blogosphere—try this, or this to get started.
For my part, as someone who’s been observing physics from the outside since I first grew fascinated with Einstein’s work in the late 1980s, I’m reminded a bit of the last decade of the nineteenth century. In 1894 the (to-be) Nobel laureate A. A. Michelson famously told an audience at the University of Chicago that
The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.
Timing is everything: in 1895, just one year after Michelson gave his speech Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays, and it was off to the races into the 20th century revolutions in physics. Read the rest of this post »
September 27, 2011 6:17 pm
Posted in: Science and Technology, Starbursts
68 Comments
Tuesday Evening Open Thread
Jonathan Chait, now at New York’s Daily Intel, is losing hope for a Republican horse race:
The search for a viable alternative to Mitt Romney has been a long and oddly futile process. The requirements are not especially strict: one must be a Republican politician in good standing, be interested in becoming president, never have proposed national health care or tax increases, and be able to deliver teed-up scripted attacks on Romney. The combination turns out to be surprisingly difficult to put together.
One of the handy rules of politics is that any politician who claims to not seek an available promotion due to family interests is lying. Political families are for photo ops, not for consultation. And yet a series of mainstream Republican contenders have all, in apparent sincerity, declined to run due to their family’s desires: John Thune, Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan. Jeb Bush begged off, sensibly, due to the branding problems entailed by his unfortunate last name and close blood relations…
And now, Rick Perry. This is a man who was put on Earth to defeat Mitt Romney. He is the walking embodiment of the Republican id. His disembowelment of Kay Bailey Hutchinson in the 2010 Texas gubernatorial primary is the blueprint for attacking a favored Republican from the right. Simply substitute Romney for Hutchinson and “Romneycare” for “bailout” and the plan could not be more promising. And yet Perry, like Pawlenty before him, has found himself unable to deliver the line. In Thursday night’s debate, with a devastating attack teed, up, he began stammering painfully, looking as though he were about to fall asleep. You have to wonder if Romney is protected by some invisible force-field, which incapacitates the brain of any foe who approaches him…
The Media Villagers are facing a contest between the guy who survived a fatal car crash and the guy whose first statewide political opponents are now best known for Seven of Nine jokes and the Crazification Factor. Since all horse-race enthusiasts are superstitious by nature, expect a lot of “luck” talk from the gamblers in the press box.
And, on that note, what’s in the cards for this particular Tuesday evening?
September 27, 2011 5:42 pm
Posted in: Election 2012, Open Thread
71 Comments
Dead man’s bluff
The redoubtable Stan Greenberg thinks we really will have a third party candidate of some kind in 2012 but that the candidate won’t do very well:
Somebody will run as an independent in 2012. You don’t have 80 percent of voters saying we’re on the wrong track and not have an independent candidate. In 1992, Ross Perot carried 20 percent of the electorate with a pretty well-defined bloc that tended to be younger, white, male, and non-college. But right now, independents are so diverse that it’s not obvious that anyone could capture all of them.
First off a question: what did the Village make of Ross Perot? I didn’t follow politics so closely in my younger days so I can’t remember. Was Perot treated as a weirdo outsider or a potential centrist savior?
Second: while it may be a given that Lieberman-Scarborough or Trump-Fulani or whatever won’t attract that many actual votes, what are the chances that a third party candidate gets massive Establishment Media support?
I ask because today’s self-styled centrists seem so incoherent and inauthentic. David Broder’s third-party centrist fetish always felt authentic. He’d lived it, devoted his entire life to keeping exactly in the right-center of American politics on any and all issues. When he sang of Evan Bayh and Mike Bloomberg, it was like hearing Robert Johnson moan “O Willie Mae”.
Matt Miller, Tom Friedman, and the rest sound more like a bad cover thereof done by Eric Clapton. They’re not real centrists, they’re people who agree with today’s democratic party about almost everything but want to make themselves bigger than the game. Friedman mostly wants trains and a big gas tax. Miller wants a transaction tax, a huge increase in the highest marginal rate, and a big cut in military spending. Yes, they both top it off with a little of the union bashing and anti-”entitlement” talk that’s become de rigeur for Beltway elites, but it’s mostly either gibberish or something that the federal government has little control over anyway (e.g. public schools).
Today’s dreams of third parties don’t mean anything concrete. Bobo wants a real Broderian movement to fuck the middle-class, but Miller and Friedman want a traditional left-wing party with an elitist Washington face. Just take whatever policies you want—left, right, center, popular, unpopular, whatever—and start dreaming of a third party that advocates exactly these policies.
September 27, 2011 1:12 pm
Posted in: Good News For Conservatives, Our Failed Media Experiment
219 Comments
Tim Kowal’s Proud Stance Against Educated Black Californians
There are many reasons to view libertarianism as the destructive toddler of American politics. Among them is certainly the tendency of libertarians to get all ginned up about totally irrelevant theoretical problems and to remain totally indifferent to real problems. So, you know, the Affordable Care Act sucks because it represents Friedrich Hayek’s creeping serfdom, in some Matt Welch daydream, but the fact that millions of Americans have previously suffered for lack of adequate health care is no big deal. You can also see this in attitudes towards the now-daily experience of big banks fucking over people who have no ability to fight back. Libertarianism simply has nothing to say to that kind of power imbalance. Libertarianism has a vast literature about power as a theoretical entity, but it doesn’t have a vocabulary of power as it is experienced by real people leading real lives. (IOZ graphically represented this gap pretty well a while back.)
So it is with Tim Kowal, blogger at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen and member of the Orange County Federalist society, which is apparently a real thing and not a stock villain from the West Wing. Kowal is very upset that the California state legislature is considering reinstating the right of public universities to use race as a determining factor in admissions decisions.
Here’s the deal, homeslice. After California banned affirmative action practices in 1997, the number of black students in the UC system plummeted. This was a predictable result, and one that supporters of affirmative action had warned about for years. The year following the ban, the number of black students admitted was sliced in half. In a state where the black population is around 6%, black students barely make up 2% of the UC system. As college is a system that requires a certain amount of gating, there’s no sense in attempting a purely racially proportional system of college admissions. But this kind of discrepancy is disturbing, and as college is also a system that cares about fairness and which is dedicated to addressing historical and systemic inequality, it is totally within the mission of the university to make outreach to racial minorities a priority.
So now you have this scenario in California where the population of the premiere public university system looks nothing like the population of the state as a whole. The proportion of black UC students is dramatically lower than the proportion of black Californians. You can find similar dynamics in other states. Does Towal consider this a problem? Does he care that the state’s university system is now contributing to leaving California’s black population farther and farther behind? There’s no indication that he does. He doesn’t consider the impact of abandoning affirmative action at all. He hides in the theoretical, as libertarians always do, and treats the real world as if it is an annoying distraction from the important work of considering philosophical questions nobody is asking.
As is typical of these anti-affirmative action screeds, Kowal couches his argument in the terms of racial equality and describes affirmative action as racially discriminatory. But this is the real/theoretical divide exactly: the racial equality that matters is racial equality in fact and not in theory. And in California, on a vast swath of metrics, it is the black and Hispanic people who are served by affirmative action who need the most help. If Kowal would bother to look outside his myopic framework he might see that white people in California aren’t suffering under the oppressive yoke of racial discrimination but rather are richer, healthier, and longer lived than their black and Hispanic counterparts. That’s the reality of racial discrimination, not the slogan-ready bullshit of theory.
There are many ways to attack Kowal’s argument, starting first with why Kowal assumes such a reductive vision of what college is for and what the mission of the university is. And a long history lesson on the entrenched and powerful discrimination that black and Hispanic people have faced and continue to face is in order, and might make him reconsider what, exactly, is unfair in the “meritocracy” of contemporary America. But I’m afraid that as long as he is permitted to play in the sandbox of purely theoretical politics, there’s no getting through to him. Abstraction is the playground of the privileged.
September 27, 2011 12:02 pm
Posted in: Education, Glibertarianism
83 Comments
You Know What Is Next, Don’t You
Now that the cop has been named from the pepper spray incident, and it appears he has had multiple outbursts like this, should he be fired, you know what is going to happen, don’t you?
How long before he is the next Allen West? Macing hippies is almost as sure a vote getter in the Republican primary as torturing prisoners.
September 27, 2011 11:52 am
Posted in: Fucked-up-edness
67 Comments
