I like this headline from The Huffington Post: "Obama Responds To Gay Anger: You'll Be Happy In The End." Haha. Happy Endings.
However, I don't really like what President Obama is saying: "Obama added that he was working with the Pentagon, as well as Congress, to end "Don't Ask Don't Tell." He called this period a "transition" toward that end but said it had to be done pragmatically, so the new policy works in the long-term."
Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of "the tranquilizing drug of gradualism." In the 1960's, many felt that the belief that blacks and whites should be gradually integrated was just a way for the government to put off doing anything substantial.
Now is always the time. If the commander-in-chief really wants to end the military policy of "don't ask don't tell," why doesn't he issue an executive order? (MSNBC video link)
In the aftermath of the election in Iran, Twitter emerged as the most powerful way for Iranians to disseminate information and organize protests. The Iranian government has been censoring the Internet for years, but of course -- as the Cute Cat Theory explains -- firewalls don't stop anybody for long.
But don't expect our own government to understand technology, firewalls, or cute cats. Sens. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., plan to introduce a bill that would bar foreign companies that sell technology to Iran from receiving federal contracts.
My first thought -- have these senators heard of China? China's net censorship is well documented. American companies like Cisco, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have all been complicit in China's human rights abuses. Heck, you might even say they were enthusiastic.
But why do these companies make technologies with wiretapping features built in anyway? Our lawmakers should know the answer to this simple question. In the EU and the US, telecommunications networks are legally required to have those capabilities for Lawful Intercept. Unfortunately, the exact same network hardware that is sold over here is also sold over there.
This fact shouldn't give the above mentioned companies a free pass for supporting oppressive regimes. However, our own government has to see the bigger picture. We want our law enforcement agencies to be able to wiretap (with a court order -- wink wink), but these Lawful Intercept requirements have consequences far outside our own borders.
Oh, and this leads me to my second thought -- why the hell aren't we punishing the companies who enabled warrantless wiretapping within the US? Schumer and Graham ought to work on that one for a while.
Michael Jackson died today. A lot will be said about his unusual life and transformations, but all I want to replay right now is this little message he sang as a teenager: "You don't have to change at all."
First he was lost and now he is found. This new Mark Sanford show is better than that old Jon & Kate crap.
When the South Carolina governor went incommunicado for a seven days, his staff happily told us he was vacationing out in the wilderness... probably praying and possibly naked. If it turned out this upright Republican was a weekend nudist then the story would have been interesting enough.
Ends up the governor was in Argentina breaking up with his mistress.
His confession and tears are a little insincere. He was caught by a reporter at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta after changing his flight plans in order to avoid the press. If he could have gotten away with this liaison, he would have.
Hypocrisy and sex scandals are nothing new of course, but let's see how FOX News tries to spin this one:
Anyway, some legislators are talking about impeaching Mark Sanford. I'm hoping they do it for the right reasons -- not because of his affair, but because he shirked his duties as governor by being out of contact with his office.
And if they can't impeach the guy, well maybe Mr. Conservative can run for president in 2012?
Well, the above comic shows one way to join the war on drugs. I wonder if it would work as a defense in court? "I was just smoking it out of existence, your honor." Okay, probably a bad idea. But here is a better idea...
Congressman Barney Frank has introduced a new bill to decriminalize marijuana use. He introduced a similar bill last year which failed. Political momentum is a funny thing. Politicians have capitalized on this war for decades, and in the process, spent billions of our tax dollars. It must be very painful for them to change direction now, but public opinion has changed and momentum is building for a broad debate.
Legalizing drugs would weaken the Mexican drug cartels, save billions on law enforcement, and ease the budget problems in states that can grow marijuana. I think we've moved way beyond those simplistic fried egg PSA's from the 1980's. Also, I'm getting really sick of hearing tragic stories like this one and this one.
But I do try to understand what I don't understand. Last year, during our own long and heated election debates, I blogged about McCain and Clinton's cavalier attitude towards war with Iran. The candidates' flippant remarks played to the public belief which, for as long as I can remember, is that the people of Iran hate America.
Oh, where did we get that idea? In recent memory, we got the fear-mongering from Bush who put Iran in an "axis of evil" even though there was no axis. But even long before that, we heard the Iranian chants of "Death to America." I always wondered exactly what the people meant by that.
So the phrase really kind of means "down with America" which doesn't sound nearly as threatening. Sometimes history is shaped by things lost in translation.
But right now, I don't think much is being lost in translation. It's very clear that Iranians are willing to die for freedom and democracy. And people who share our basic values probably don't want to kill us.
Religious extremism and parody -- I've previously commented how I can't tell the two apart. Between Pterosaur Hunting, funny museums and video game protests, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. At work here is a little known law called Poe's Law, and it suggests the following:
...it is hard to tell fake fundamentalism from the real thing, since they may both espouse equally extreme beliefs. Poe's law also works in reverse: real fundamentalism can also be indistinguishable from parody fundamentalism. For example, some conservatives consider noted homophobe Fred Phelps to be so over-the-top that they think he's a "deep cover liberal" trying to discredit more mainstream homophobes.
If you want additional evidence just look at the Ohio study that found that conservatives believe that Stephen Colbert dislikes liberalism. The study raises legitimate questions about the influence of shows that parody and satirize politics and belief systems. The conclusion is that political satire may not affect people in the way that it has historically been assumed.
So while I understand the satire of Colbert and other late night shows, I still struggle to identify religious parody... probably because all religious views are a little bit nutty. However, I'm still positive that Pat Robertson hasn't entered the world of comedy.
So this is where we're at. An 88-year-old white supremacist with a rifle walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum today and opened fire killing a security guard. The gunman, identified as James Von Brunn, unsurprisingly had a web site which was one hell of a rambling manifesto full of the extremist rhetoric we've been warned about. This shooting is our second domestic terrorist attack in less than a month.
Why? The extremists can certainly hookup online now and feed each other a steady diet of lies and hate, and FOX has graciously provided them a place to call home. But even FOX is starting to realize their audience is looking more and more like the lunatic fringe:
The kind of people who leave comments on FOX Nation are a very frightened bunch. They feel like they're losing, and they are. They're losing the last battles of the so-called culture war. We'll legalize gay marriage sooner or later. Maybe even marijuana. Abortion will probably remain legal. Stem cell research is moving forward. Oh, and we also have a black president who isn't afraid to speak with the Muslim world.
Maybe even more frightening to their ilk is that one day the politicians will stop pandering to them. They're a dying breed after all.
I'm reading this NY Times article on blogging and finding myself getting more and more irritated. Their premise is that bloggers expect instant fame and fortune and when it doesn't come, they abandon their blogs:
According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.
Dreams? Ambitions? Are we climbing to the top of Mount Everest or writing a blog? They certainly manage to quote a bunch of dimwits who fit their profile of the discouraged blogger with an audience of one. The Internet does not mourn their retirement. But do I believe the stats that say 95% give up?
I'm positive that narcissism is alive and well. The people who think the world is interested in what they ate for breakfast probably abandoned public blogs for a good reason -- it's too easy for your friends to "forget" to check your blog. Instead those types opted for a more captured audience -- like on Facebook, where your friends, family, and distant acquaintances will at least skim your daily minutia and angst every time they login.
But my main gripe is the NY Times portraying that exact caricature of self-absorbed opportunistic bloggers. There are other reasons to blog like sharing what you've learned, pointing out interesting news items, and adding your own commentary... which is, of course, also narcissistic.
I guess you need a little bit of arrogance to be a good writer, but then I see this article about J.D. Salinger. It's a mystery if he's still writing or not. He's certainly not publishing. The article posits "perhaps he's writing not for publication but for God, which would mean there'd be no need to preserve any material traces of his work."
Well, I'm satisfied with a happy medium. Try not to be vain, but don't keep it to myself. Don't dream of fame and fortune, but think about the therapeutic benefits of writing.
Where do people feel the most positive about their lives?
Denmark
Finland
Netherlands
Sweden
Ireland
Canada
Switzerland
New Zealand
Norway
Belgium
The United States ranked number 11 -- behind all those other countries with their socialism and health-care. Yeah, somehow I imagine we Americans would be happier if we didn't fear that a chronic disease or tragic accident could bankrupt our families.
The happiness report was released by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development. They used data from a Gallup World Poll conducted in 140 countries around the world last year. Some of the questions asked: Did you enjoy something you did yesterday? Were you proud of something you did yesterday? Did you learn something yesterday? Were you treated with respect yesterday?
I wonder how many people answered with "go to hell."
But apparently this positive psychology research is a big deal. It is a recent branch of psychology that "studies the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive." Like in New York for example:
Although many economists agree that money doesn’t make people happy, disparities in income make people miserable, according to most happiness literature. Happiness, in other words, “is less a function of absolute income than of comparative income,” as Gilbert puts it. “Now, if you live in Hallelujah, Arkansas,” he continues, “the odds are good that most of the people you know do something like you do and earn something like you earn and live in houses something like yours. New York, on the other hand, is the most varied, most heterogeneous place on earth. No matter how hard you try, you really can’t avoid walking by restaurants where people drop your monthly rent on a bottle of wine and store windows where shoes sit like museum pieces on gold pedestals. You can’t help but feel trumped. As it were.”
So here is another list. These 10 things are scientifically proven to make you happy:
Savor Everyday Moments
Avoid Comparisons
Put Money Low on the List
Have Meaningful Goals
Take Initiative at Work
Make Friends, Treasure Family
Smile Even When You Don’t Feel Like It
Say Thank You Like You Mean It
Get Out and Exercise
Give It Away, Give It Away Now
Of course, the skeptic in me says nothing is ever as simple as a 10 point list. Also, they left out hugs.
In his monologue tonight, Bill Maher linked the banking failure, health care crisis, obesity epidemic, prison population, global warming and war profiteering all to the common problem of greed. "Humans have always been greedy, but they never convinced themselves it was good." Well, I guess not until Reagan came along.
When are hugs okay, and when are they just plain awkward? According to the NY Times, today's teenagers never give that question a single thought:
“We’re not afraid, we just get in and hug,” said Danny Schneider, a junior at the school, where hallway hugging began shortly after 7 a.m. on a recent morning as students arrived. “The guy friends, we don’t care. You just get right in there and jump in.”
Of course, principals are responding by clamping down and banning hugs or at least limiting them to a 3 second rule. These drastic measures are either a plot to undermine kids' confidence, practical advice from rabid school lawyers, or the "gateway theory" run amok.
Whatever the reasoning, I'm glad I went to high school back when sex, drugs and song lyrics were the only causes for moral panic. I think the peer pressure to hug might have killed me. I'm just not a hugger.
I wouldn't really say my parents were frigid, screwed-up or repressed, but am I the only one who thought the Keaton family hugged way too much? I'll hug friends and family if they're going away for a long time, or if they're coming back from a long trip. I'll hug the youngest family members because they're cute. Of course I'll hug anybody I'm in a loving relationship with, but that's a different kind of hug.
I loathe hugs from strangers. It's fake intimacy from fake people. But why do I suddenly feel like I'm the one who's maladjusted?
From now on, I'm ending all blog posts with "hugs and kisses." Blame it on the peer pressure.
"This isn't paradise and you know it. The people here are starving and dying. The whole world uses Somalia as a dumping ground for toxic waste. Even the fish here are radioactive." — Kyle
I think it was inevitable that South Park would have a Somali pirate episode. The complete uncensored version is available now, and it's sure to become a classic.
Like all memorable South Park episodes, Fatbeard is rude, crude, and... fair and balanced? That's the only way I can describe it. The crazy story line is about Cartman and his recruits running off to Somalia to plunder treasure completely oblivious to any danger. But by the end of the show, after they sing a catchy sea shanty, they give us insight into the real Somalia -- a political, humanitarian and environmental train wreck.
"When they see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, the terrorists see just what they were hoping for — our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity." — Dick Cheney, 05/21/2009
"The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness of judgment suspended, in favor of self-fulfilling prophecy. The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness of moral force supplanted by violence and revenge fantasies. The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness... of Dick Cheney." — Keith Olbermann, 05/21/2009
I'm still trying to get my head around Cheney's paradoxical double-flip of criticizing dissent and appealing to the terrorists all in the same gasp. I realize that ingrained deep in the Republican psyche is the stabbed-in-the-back philosophy. Failure in war is always the fault of domestic enemies and treachery in high places. Always blame the dissenters and hippies! Except now, Cheney is the dissenter... Does he even realize that?
I don't want to take away his right to disagree or anybody's right to disagree. But does he get it that he's not the one in charge now? Most of us voted for Barack Obama (he won the election, you know).
And Cheney is engaging in another old game of extreme fear-mongering (plus exaggerations and misstatements). If we don't agree with him, we're all going to die. He must have mentioned 9/11 every 30 seconds in his speech last night. Republicans can't get any blunter than that, or can they?
Why is the GOP remixing the 1964 "Daisy" ad? The main offense is that they took White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs completely out of context, but at least they were smart enough to leave out the H-Bomb of the original ad. The message is the same though: the future of America is in immediate danger. In 1964, the perceived threat was Barry Goldwater. In 2009, the perceived threat is closing the Guantanamo Bay Prison.
But I thought we had already tortured this topic. Our world-class prison industrial complex can safely hold these alleged terrorists. Supermax prisoners spend up to 23 hours a day in solitary confinement -- unable to communicate, unable to plot, and unable to escape!
Glenn Greenwald lists the convicted Muslim Terrorists already imprisoned inside the US, and he refutes another popular scare tactic. If there really were sleeper terrorist cells waiting to liberate their imprisoned comrades, then they've already had a long list of potential "target" prisons for 20 years now.
But let's not forget why the Guantanamo Bay Prison was opened in the first place. The location was ostensibly selected for its security. But let's get real. The location was really selected for its legal ambiguity. However, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo detainees do indeed have habeas corpus rights.
So Dick Cheney and the RNC are scared. They're scared of something, but I'm not convinced it's the terrorists. I think their biggest fear is that nothing bad will happen, and then their ideologies, their policies, and their wars will lose even more credibility.
The world hasn't gone completely mad yet. Two top Bush-era officials, Robert Gates and Tom Ridge, say the country's national security is not in jeopardy. And at least one American town realizes that taking Guantanamo prisoners could be good for their economy.
Right now I wish Dick Cheney would take a nice long vacation. I hear Spain is lovely.
I admit I'm not a big fan of The View, but every once in a while Whoopi Goldberg makes the show worthwhile like this morning when she called Glenn Beck a "lying sack of dog mess":
I love seeing Glenn Beck squirm like that. I'm surprised tubby didn't start to cry like he does on his own show. But the most revealing bit was the exchange he had with Barbara Walters.
Walters: You are an investigative reporter. Beck: No, I'm not. Walters: Well, you're a reporter. Beck: No, I am not. Walters: So you check no facts at all? Beck: Uh, no. I am a commentator. I am a commentator. I comment on life.
He's an overpaid blogger! I comment on life too, but I'm pretty sure I spend more time checking facts and looking up relevant links than he does. Did you notice how Elisabeth Hasselbeck was mighty quiet? I know she is the conservative voice on The View, but damn, I hope she's catching on that Beck pulls crazy crap out of his ass all the time.
Oh, and you know who else doesn't deserve a professional pulpit and should stick to blogging like the rest of us? John Yoo. The author of the infamous "torture memos" has been given a monthly column in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The MSM is failing us, and they can't figure out why they're going bankrupt. Maybe the problem starts with their morals.
I cringe every time I hear the word "teabag" now. I thought that, in time, I would recover, but apparently the Republicans want to tea party like it's 1999 or something. Even Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, one of the few Republicans not invited to any tea parties at all, says a Republican renaissance is "being delivered in a tea bag, and that's a wonderful thing." It is? The imagery doesn't really work for me. I'm picturing the soggy teabags my parents leave laying all over the house. Not a wonderful thing. Stephen Colbert mocks, and the word tonight is "I Know You Are But What Am I?":
Also, I'm trying to figure out the part of Steele's speech where he declares an end to the "era of apologizing for Republican mistakes of the past." Did I miss that era? Or was Steele talking about all his groveling to Rush Limbaugh?
The imminent threat of a terrorist attack was Dick Cheney's justification for torture. Terrorists are poised to set off dirty bombs and biological weapons annihilating entire US cities -- according to Cheney and the popular TV show 24. But real experts, like former Army interrogators in the war in Iraq, tell us how unrealistic a torture fantasy show can be:
“These are very determined people, and they won’t turn just because you pull a fingernail out,” he told me. And Finnegan argued that torturing fanatical Islamist terrorists is particularly pointless. “They almost welcome torture,” he said. “They expect it. They want to be martyred.” A ticking time bomb, he pointed out, would make a suspect only more unwilling to talk. “They know if they can simply hold out several hours, all the more glory—the ticking time bomb will go off!” ... “In Iraq, I never saw pain produce intelligence,” Lagouranis told me. “I worked with someone who used waterboarding”—an interrogation method involving the repeated near-drowning of a suspect. “I used severe hypothermia, dogs, and sleep deprivation. I saw suspects after soldiers had gone into their homes and broken their bones, or made them sit on a Humvee’s hot exhaust pipes until they got third-degree burns. Nothing happened.” Some people, he said, “gave confessions. But they just told us what we already knew. It never opened up a stream of new information.” If anything, he said, “physical pain can strengthen the resolve to clam up.”
But now, after all these years of FOX propaganda, evidence is gathering that Cheney's authorization of torture wasn't really about the theoretical ticking time bombs anyway. The Bush administration tortured for political gain:
Perhaps the sharpest rebuke to Cheney's assertions has come from Lawrence Wilkerson, the retired Army colonel and former senior State Department aide to Colin Powell, who says bluntly that when the administration first authorized "harsh interrogation" during the spring of 2002, "its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaida."
I don't know if these revelations will change public opinion, but most certainly we need to rephrase our dialog about these issues: "Pollsters should be asking if Americans support using torture to extract false confessions for political purposes, because that's what happened."
Also, somebody needs to present Cheney with this bit of logic: if torturing people led to false justifications for war, and if thousands of Americans died in that war, then didn't torture cost American lives?
The amateurish cover sheets adorned top-secret intelligence briefings approved by Rumsfeld and featuring triumphant images from the Iraq war effort. But it's the quotes above the images that reveal way too much about Bush's crusade. Straight from the Bible they came: "Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand."
I can only see this as a cynical and crafty move by Rumsfeld:
The Scripture-adorned cover sheets illustrate one specific complaint I heard again and again: that Rumsfeld’s tactics—such as playing a religious angle with the president—often ran counter to sound decision-making and could, occasionally, compromise the administration’s best interests. In the case of the sheets, publicly flaunting his own religious views was not at all the SecDef’s style—“Rumsfeld was old-fashioned that way,” Shaffer acknowledged when I contacted him about the briefings—but it was decidedly Bush’s style, and Rumsfeld likely saw the Scriptures as a way of making a personal connection with a president who frequently quoted the Bible. No matter that, if leaked, the images would reinforce impressions that the administration was embarking on a religious war and could escalate tensions with the Muslim world. The sheets were not Rumsfeld’s direct invention—and he could thus distance himself from them, should that prove necessary.
So this is why I never again want a "true believer" as president. Bush was too easily manipulated. Convinced he had a calling from God, he shunned diplomacy, rushed to war, and was simply reckless.
It's a miracle we didn't all die in a big mushroom cloud.
I was always curious about A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram, but never curious enough to spend my own money or time on the book. In a previous era, I was a very nerdy college student with a PC and a 2400 baud modem. I had early access to the underworld of fringe science and free text files. So the idea of reading over 1100 pages from Wolfram, an author who is overly impressed that a simple computer program can produce output that seems irregular and complex, seemed kind of anticlimactic.
But since Wolfram is obviously into rehashing old ideas, he built a search engine, WolframAlpha, which launched yesterday. It's certainly different. Remember that Cute Cat Theory I discussed a few days ago? Well, try searching for "cute cats" and all you'll find is that "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input." I doubt this thing can survive!
But to be fair, it's not trying to replace the old search engines. This engine is all about computing answers. I'm not really sure how I can put it to use yet, but here's a handy table comparing the popularity of the names Michael and Elvis:
(click to enlarge)
And here's one chart I get when I enter "greenhouse gas emissions":
(click to enlarge)
And here are the demographics of Zimbabwe:
(click to enlarge)
That's all cool, but it took quite a bit of poking around to get results. WolframAlpha doesn't understand the simple human queries that I thought it would handle. If it can't be HAL, I might as well stick with Google and WikiPedia... Sadly, the only time it does act like HAL is when it can't complete a computation. At least it's not killing anybody yet.
