answering the question that's been plaguing scientists for ages

can hamsters ride subways?

it's got just as much scientific merit as this. first prize!

(via)

NATO

a nice thing about 20th anniversary of the fall of the berlin wall are all the articles about what was going on behind the scenes at that time. they are particularly interesting to me because i remember that period in broad strokes but not so much of the day-by-day news that added up to the end of the cold war.

which is why i found mary elise sarotte's piece in today's NYT to be so fascinating. it looks like the reunification of germany really was based on a misunderstanding. the USSR agreed to pull out of east germany on the condition that NATO would not expand to include former warsaw pact members. the US unofficially made that offer, but later backed away from it. because there was no comprehensive written agreement outlining the terms, each side went away thinking they got what they wanted. later when NATO expanded and russia cried foul, the US didn't know what it was talking about. russia really did get screwed in the deal, but i don't think the US intended to screw them. the story also explains one of the reasons why to this day russia is upset about NATO expansion.

which raises one of my pet issues about why NATO survived the end of the cold war. it was formed as an anti-soviet alliance and should have ended with the end of the soviet threat.it seems to me that NATO survived due to the inability of the political and military leaders of the time to break out of the cold war mentality that they had grown up with. Over the past 20 years as NATO has survived beyond its original purpose there have been periodic attempts to attribute some new point to the alliance, like stopping genocide in eastern europe or fighting terrorism. both are fine goals, but it's really not clear why an alliance to accomplish those things has to exclude russia. any claims that it is no longer an anti-russian alliance are undermined by the fact that russia is the only eastern european country that has never been invited to join.

so it's just about snubbing france?

i didn't know a country that wasn't a former british colony could do that. it makes me question the point of the whole commonwealth thing.

the bibi freeze

the UN, backed by all security council members, has demanded that iran immediately freeze its uranium enrichment program. i keep waiting for iran to respond by agreeing to the freeze, but add that its freeze will be netanyahu-style.

the israeli government recently announced a "freeze" in settlement construction that doesn't doesn't apply to whatever the israel's decides to call "east jerusalem", doesn't freeze the construction of 3,000 or so projects that were already approved (even though many were approved in anticipation of the current settlement freeze) and which doesn't apply to the construction of public buildings on settlements. (which is how they approved the construction of 28 new buildings at the same time they announced the freeze).

so why doesn't the iranian government announce a "freeze" of uranium production that doesn't apply to its main enrichment facility at natanz, doesn't apply to any processing that is already in progress and doesn't apply to any enrichment for public purposes? they could even call it a "bibi freeze." sure, it isn't everything the west wants, but it's progress, right? no doubt the west will understand the internal pressures the iranian government is facing and view a loophole-filled freeze as a welcome move.

40

woo-hoo! i'm now protected by the ADEA!!!

(39, 38, 37, 36, 35, 34)

out with it

i think at least 80% of my regular readers already know this. but in case you haven't heard it from me in real life or don't read arabic, it's time to end the embargo:

mrs. noz and i have been trying to adopt a baby for some time. but now it looks like it might actually work. barring something else going wrong (and believe me, there has already been plenty of that),it looks like we will go to kazakhstan fairly soon. we will then spend the next two months or so in aktobe (also spelled aqtobe), in the northwest bit of the country and then eventually come home with a baby.

so that's the deal with all those references to being fingerprinted, the two censored comments, the race (which i lost), my musings about pronunciation, the random references to aktobe scattered throughout my posts, that post i wrote the day we got our regional assignment (when we were told would start a 60 day wait before we get our letter of invitation and travel), and the post i scheduled to appear 60 days later, before i realized that the phrase "about 60 days" is kazakh for "165 days". (or something like that--inshallah i'll know the exact number soon). that's also the deal with my not exactly hypothetical question.

so there are big changes ahead, both for this blog and life in general. i cannot yet comprehend what the full extent on those changes will be on either. i guess we will find out eventually.

admitting my deep dark thanksgiving secret

i don't really like pumpkin pie.

there, i said it. i mean, it's okay. i don't hate it or anything. but it is, unquestionably, the least tasty pie in the universe. maybe i should try covering it with fudge.

reality TV is a menace 2 society

well not really. but it does make people try to do stupid things in public. (which i'm not necessarily against). first, we had balloon boy and now this (not to mention this).

i don't understand why anyone would want to be on reality TV. actually, i don't understand why anyone would want to watch it either. and yet a lot of people do and do. also there is this idea that doing something stupid and high profile is a way to get on a show. that idea seems to be right. more is coming.

i studied arabic for years, housewife

i was playing with google translate's new "type phonetically" feature to translate from arabic to english and, um, i think it needs a little work.

visually, it was pretty neat. each time that i hit the space bar after typing a phonetic arabic word, it turned my word into arabic script. but here's what it did to my last two words:




when i decided to try "8 years" instead, the sentence came out: "i studied the arabic language for years of ottoman."

this is the life

why we can't have a two and a-half day work week every week?

oops he did it again

doug hoffman un-unununconcedes the NY-23 congressional race.

(background)

the matrix (1905) [russian w/eng subtitles]

(via elayne)

lesser known? but i know who i am!

hey, it looks like i'm quoted in a philadelphia weekly column this week.

thanks brendan!

accidental geography

i can totally relate to this post. i am always seeing the shapes of countries and continents in the world around me. although i think #15 looks more like a backwards croatia than new zealand.

even weirder is when i start seeing the outlines of countries or continents in maps of other things. wisconsin sideways looks a little bit like australia (though i've never thought that australia sideways looks much like wisconsin). also, i've long thought that illinois looks a lot like sudan. when i lived in chicago i briefly considered telling people that i lived in port sudan. but i dropped the idea because no one would know what the hell i was talking about.

livestation

last week, og left a comment about livestation. i downloaded the program shortly thereafter, but only got to play with it today. it's pretty great if you want to practice a foreign language, or just watch the news from a different perspective. where else would i be able to see the russian arabic language news channel, or al-manar (hezbollah's tv station)?

right now i'm watching a news correspondent from a french news channel try to explain the american health reform debate in arabic.

it's annoying that al-jazeera tv is "not allowed to be displayed in [my] region", whatever the hell that means. the livestation page for the channel says (under the availability tab) "Available worldwide, not USA", how annoying is that? it's not like i can't watch it stream from the al-j page.

opure

yesterday's cloture vote on the health reform bill has been bugging me. not because i mind the outcome. (i'm glad it passed) rather, what bugs me is that they called it "cloture".

as i understood it, "cloture" is a vote on whether to end debate on a bill and bring it to a vote. yesterday was a vote to begin the debate on the senate health reform bill. it wasn't closing anything. shouldn't that vote, yesterday's kind of vote, be called "opure"?

khyber

i always wondered how that bar got the name "the khyber".¹ at some point someone told me that it had to do with the former owner. i just never learned what exactly that was until this morning.

------------------------------------------------
1-it really is called "the khyber", not "the khyber pass". at least i've never heard anyone call it anything other than "the khyber" and that's what is on the sign out front, as the NYT's own photo shows.

cheese day XV

very excited for cheese day today (as i was last year). this year's is a real nostalgia pick. i took all my friends to see it in the theater for my 11th birthday party. i don't think i've seen it all the way through since that day.



i'm a little offended that the music video is such a spoiler.

how far can he go?

first doug hoffman conceded that he had lost the NY-23 congressional race.

then, while hoffman was on the air with glenn beck, beck prodded him into un-conceding.

then the next day, free from the mesmerizing aura of mr. beck, hoffman un-unconceded.

it's been a few days. i guess hoffman got bored or something. because now he's un-ununconceding.

the guy just can't stop undoing what he's just done. he's an un-maniac!!!

d'oh!

it looks like the anti-gay marriage folks may have accidentally eliminated the legal recognition of all marriages in texas when they amended the state constitution in 2005. article I, section 32(b) seems clear enough to me:

This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.

people do funny things when they try to "defend traditional marriage."

(via)

how could you possibly top that?

lately the two national parties have seemed to be in a race to see which can screw itself over more. the democrats control both chambers of congress and the presidency and yet they seem intent on undermining the passage of any legislative agenda at the very time that they will be blamed for the failure to pass any legislative agenda. meanwhile the republican party is in the midst of a rightwing witch hunt, designed to chase out all the moderates whose votes they will need in future elections. the current situation probably hurts the democrats more. they're the party in power so the republicans will be the ones who reap the benefits of protest votes against the status quo.

but damn, it's hard to imagine how even the democrats' infinite capacity for self-inflicted wounds could top this.

okay, it will never happen. but a guy can dream, can't he?

election delay

january 2010 is shaping up to be the month of postponed elections for the middle east.

if the iraq vote is delayed, it could cause some hard decisions for the u.s. under the status of forces agreement signed last fall, the u.s. is obligated to remove all combat troops from the country by august 31, 2010 and to remove all foreign troops from the country by the end of 2011. there are a lot of troops and equipment in the country so the easiest way to meet the deadline would be to start the withdrawal right away.

but instead the u.s. has only reduced its presence in the country back to the pre-surge levels through attrition. the plan is to maintain those levels to provide security through the january 2010 parliamentary election and then to rapidly reduce the number of u.s. forces to 50,000 (all of whom would be classified as "non-combat troops") to meet the august 31, 2010 deadline. it's a tight schedule, but apparently the military thinks it can do it. that would give the u.s. another 16 months to withdraw the remaining 50,000 and to remove all of the american military equipment.

a delay in the parliamentary election mucks up that plan. the obama administration would have to decide whether it wants to begin the rapid withdrawal on schedule at the end of january 2010 (even that means fewer troops available whenever the parliamentary elections ever happen), or delay the beginning of the pullout until the iraqi election happens (even though that might make the u.s. miss the august 31, 2010 and december 31, 2011 pullout deadlines).

to make things more complicated, the status of forces agreement between the u.s. and iraq that established the pullout timetable is supposed to be put to a ratification vote at the same time as the january 2010 parliamentary elections. unless the agreement gets ratified, the iraqi government will give notice to the u.s. that all foreign forces have to be out of the country in one year, a much tighter timetable than the one in the SOFA. it's not clear to me whether the delay in parliamentary election would also delay the ratification vote (the news articles i have read imply that it would, as they seem to assume that without a parliamentary vote, there will be no election in january), or whether the failure to ratify would trigger the one year notice accelerated withdrawal provision.

not a lot of attention has been focused on iraq since obama took office. the u.s. has committed to a binding withdrawal timetable and the president has put the focus on afghanistan, where his priorities lie. but the end of american involvement in iraq is only a done deal if everything goes as planned. tariq al-hashemi veto of the election law may have tossed that original plan out the window. it's not clear to me how the obama administration will handle it.

to answer CN's question

TPM reader CN asks a question:

Let me get this straight: we kept KSM and his buddies in Gitmo for eight years, no trial, no process, under harsh conditions including torture -- and now that we're finally giving them a trial in civilian court, NOW Al-Qaeda wants to retaliate? NOW they're going to kidnap the mayor's daughter and demand that KSM be released? It doesn't even make sense on its own terms.

CN is overlooking the fact that gitmo is a magical place where the normal rules don't apply. it's both cuba and american. it's also american but not america. no process is due except that the supreme court of the united states says that it is. gitmo is like that steel chamber in shrodinger's hypothetical, except without the hydrocyanic acid or the cat. its quantum dampening field both cancels out the superpowers of those who are detained there and emits a powerful SEP field to al qaeda members at large in the outside world.

once detainees are brought to the mainland, the spell will be broken. that is the danger we face. once they leave gitmo, no mere mortal supermax facility will be able to hold them. KSM's radioactive eyebeams will melt those puny bars lickity split! outside of the forbidden zone that is gitmo, their secret subdermal transponders will reactivate. osama himself will hear the ping in his cave, remember that KSM has been held all this time and throw together a nefarious plot that would not have been possible so long as the detainees were all tucked into their snugly gitmo beds.

moon

hey look at that, rich miniter is filing a complaint against the moonie times for discrimination. now there's a name from my college days!

what the hell is up with that crown? does reverend moon get those things from burger king?



i'm not trying to be mean. but if i were the officially crowned king of peace and also the prophet and grand poobah of a world spanning religion, i think i would demand a better looking headpiece.

self-fulfilling prophesy

saudi arabia is convinced that the houthi rebels it is fighting along the yemeni border are backed by the iranian government. they base their charge on the following reasons:

1. the houthi are shia

um, that's pretty much it. the yemeni government has claimed it intercepted a ship that proves that iranian arms were being sent to the rebels, but they also won't give any information about the ship or present any other evidence. it really does look like they just made it up and that the entire basis for the charge is the fact that both the iranian government and the houthi are shia.

the problem is that the houthi are zaidis, members of a shia sect that is quite different from the twelver version practiced in iran. theologically, zaidi shi'ism is closer to sunni islam than it is to twelver shi'ism.

of course, the fact that they are different sects doesn't prove that iran isn't supporting them. there are plenty of examples of people from different religious sects cooperating for the sake of political expediency. it's just that the saudis and yemenis are not making much of a political expediency argument. they're just pointing to the fact that both groups fall under the category of "shia" and letting the implication flow from there.

on top of that, the saudis are really paranoid about iranian influence in the region these days. viewed through that lense, they're inclined to see almost everything as an iranian plot.

but now the iranians seem to have had enough. after being blamed for the rebellion for weeks, they've now unleashed their own rhetorical salvo and are charging the saudis with slaughtering shia. if they weren't already on the houthi's side, the saudis may have pushed them into it. all this time the saudis have been warning that the yemeni rebels could trigger a regional proxy war. it looks to me like the saudis may have created one themselves.

columbus go home!

hilarious!

i happened to be in the twin of the MN capital on that same saturday. i can't believe that i was that close and missed the fun. instead, i showed my support for native americans by winning money from them.

declaring a state

while reading this article, a thought occurred to me: if abbas declared an independent palestinian state, would that state get more countries to recognize its existence than israel currently has?

it looks like the answer is no. israel has more diplomatic relations than i would have guessed, with 162 countries recognizing the state and only 37 that do not.

it's unlikely that the u.s., canada, australia and new zealand or the 27 members of the EU would recognize an independent palestinian state without a peace agreement with israel. that's 31. there are at least 6 other client states of the u.s., the u.k. and france that would not recognize a palestinian state without their big brother's say so. (palau is probably the most extreme example. the island nation always votes with the u.s. on israeli palestinian issues in the UN, even when no one else will).

on the other hand, a declared palestinian state probably would get more recognition that a bunch of other places that have declared independence in the last few years. they're sure to beat out transnistria (which no UN members recognize), south ossetia (recognition by 3 UN members), abkhazia (recognition by 3 UN members) and northern cyprus (recognition by 1 UN member).

just by getting all the countries that refuse to recognize israel, a newly declared palestinian state would do better than taiwan (which only has the recognition of 23 UN members). it might even do as well as kosovo (recognition by 63 UN members).

on the other hand, if abbas unilaterally declares a palestinian state, it will never get a UN seat. kaufman and lieberman are right, the u.s. is sure to veto its admission absent agreement with the israelis. which would also put them in the same boat as kosovo (whose UN recognition is blocked by russia)

whether a declaration of independence would do any good is a completely separate question. it definitely would stir the pot. and the israeli government seems afraid enough of the prospect to issue threats of retaliatory annexation. but is that really much of a deterrent? the west bank is already being effectively annexed bit-by-bit via israeli settlement policies. the current israeli government is determined to grab a chunk of the west bank, whether or not abbas declares an independent state.

an exciting change to my view during my morning commute

i was flying back from minnesota and so i missed this:



(nothing blows up immediately. try skipping to 0:40 if you get impatient). that wasn't really an "implosion"--i don't think it was supposed to fall like that. it just missed my train tracks!

what is this?

does anyone have any idea where this design comes from?



the woman with the man (her tutor?) sitting to her left holding up a book. who are they? who first painted it? what is it supposed to be?

everything he touched turned to shit

the legal obstacles faced by prosecutors were mostly created by bush administration policies. it's silly to pretend that the problems stem from trying terrorists in a civilian court. the u.s. government has successfully prosecuted a lot of terrorists in the civilian court system. that's not the difficult thing about these cases.

tv news networks don't think very highly of the public

i usually don't watch news on the tv news channels, mostly because i think they're so terrible. but every once in a while i get in a situation where i'm basically stuck in front of a screen without the ability to change the channel. situations like when i'm stuck in the airport.

anyway, it's really remarkable to watch these channels go apeshit over the prospect that some beaten and broken detainees will be transferred to a supermax facility in new york. they're treating the american public like they're a bunch of scaredy-cats, who are liable to shit their pants at the sound of the letters KSM.

west

today is shaping up to be a nice stormy friday the 13th. what a lovely day to fly.



another decade, another blown meeting in paris.

DC archdiocese acts like same sex marriage is the worstest worst in the world

i'm not catholic and so i usually don't have much to say about things the catholic church does. as a non-believer it's really none of my business and they can run their religion any way they like.

but jesus, mary and joseph, it's weird how the american church is turning into little more than an anti-gay anti-abortion lobby. i mean, the catholic religion is also anti-death penalty, but has no problem aiding the poor in jurisdictions that put people to death.

again, i'm not saying that the catholic church has to adopt all the doctrines i like and ditch all the ones that i don't. i just think it's strange how the american church favors certain catholic doctrine and downplays or completely ignores others. it's like when the american church all but declared its support for george bush and threatened to excommunicate john kerry for his abortion stance, but completely ignored the fact that the church was also opposed to the iraq war. if you're really going to be this hard line, i don't understand how they can be this inconsistent.

the facebook alibi

i guess i should update my status more often.

what is it good for?

i'm glad that the president is insisting on a plan for afghanistan that includes and exit strategy. but does that mean that all four of the options that he was presented with yesterday didn't have one? what kind of strategy could they be if they don't have an end game? that's the best our military leaders could come up with?

the problem is defining a concrete and realistic goal in afghanistan is hard to do. but that's a reason to leave, not to escalate. if we can't identify what we are trying to accomplish, there's really no point in staying.

meep

why would using that word justify a suspension? "meep" seems to be the equivalent to the local philly slang word "jawn." but if i can mean anything, it's no more offensive than the word "anything." i'm guessing the school administrators are just pissed off that they don't understand their students.

also, i'm not completely convinced that "meep" was invented by beaker. what about the road runner?

gaubatz

it looks like my old friend dave gaubatz has got a new fetish. but alas his attempts to broadly discredit all muslims is too embarrassing even even for a rightwing think tank.

lieberman swap

i'm no fan of joe lieberman, but i think the swap would leave us with an even worse senator from connecticut.

the passion of the crist

speaking of that florida race, i expect it will pay off rather nicely in terms of crist/christ puns. why just this morning, i was reading the paper and got a chuckle out of this headline:


unfortunately, the headline isn't anywhere on the NYT site. i guess someone noticed the pun and rewrote it after it went to press. the rewritten version is here.

drinking liberally: go back to being lazy edition

the SEPTA strike is over! there's no need for any of you lazy bastards to get any exercise. so either come to tonight's drinking liberally or come up with another excuse:

triumph brewing company
117 chestnut street
philadelphia, PA
6 pm until we leave

chicken for crist

i wrote before about how the right's ploy to take NY-23 hilariously backfired last week. well it looks like they're going to try to do it again in florida.

as noted in the link, florida, unlike new york, does not permit fusion voting. that means that if charlie crist gets the GOP nomination, there's an even greater chance that the tea partiers' ploy will backfire than there was in the NY-23 election.

but i guess that's the tea partiers' point. right now, they're not trying to win the general election, they're trying to influence the primary. they can point to NY-23 and tell the party "if you nominate crist, we'll deliver the governor's mansion to the democrats." essentially they're playing game of chicken with the GOP leadership, trying to get their way and threatening to sink the party's chances if they don't.

for a party that has a hard time saying "no' to its right wing, it might just work.

if being anti-abortion were really their highest priority...

it just occurred to me that the republicans now have the unique opportunity to effectively make abortion unavailable to a substantial slice of the population (though the exact size of that slice is hard to say). all they'd have to do is to vote en masse in the senate for the house bill as-is.

they're never do it, of course. which means that there still is a chance of getting the stupak amendment out of the final bill in conference. though, at this point, i'm not very optimistic.

if i had a cat...

...i'd definitely get it some higher education.

i guess i could just invent an imaginary cat to enroll.

the war on sesame street

this has real potential to be awesome. the "controversy" has already crossed into the non-fox mainstream media, i heard it on the radio yesterday. but the story i heard was more about the weird stuff that people get excited about than echoing their point. i think this is yet another example of something that may make sense to the folks blowing a gasket over it, but looks totally bizarre and stupid to anyone who doesn't live in their little persecution complex bubble.

but the funniest thing about all of this is that the breitbarts and o'reillys of the world misunderstood the sesame street skit. in the context of grouches talking to each other, "now there's a trashy network" is supposed to be a complement. on sesame street, grouches love trash. one could even say that's the defining characteristic of a sesame street grouch. to them, the word "trashy" means something good.

why am i not surprised that certain right wingers can't conceptualize the context of a statement to determine what the speaker might actually mean? this is something that six year olds watching sesame street are able to understand. but i guess it's too complicated for andy breitbart.

abbas declines

i'm not sure why abbas' decision not to run in the upcoming palestinian election is being viewed as a setback for the obama administration. if he were running, he would surely lose after the entire goldstone report debacle. it's far better for he administration to rely on someone who has some credibility with the palestinian people and who isn't likely to be tossed out by the voters in just a few months.

like rain on your wedding day

it's the 20th anniversary of the fall of the berlin wall. to celebrate U2 is holding a concert at the brandenburg gate. the problem is that the organizers want to sell tickets to the event, but the concert is in an open area right in the middle of the city. so how do you make sure non-ticket holders won't watch the concert for free?

luckily they came up with the perfect plan. they're building a wall. that will keep those cheap freeloaders out!

a wall. in the center of berlin. to commemorate the end of the berlin wall. brilliant!

van stolen 35 years ago found in shipping container

my first suspect was frank sobotka. but i'm not sure how old he was in 1974.

fun times

it's my first attempt to train home since the beginning of the transit strike! my trains are at least running. but because they are, they're clogged with people switching from other modes of transit that aren't. and for some reason they won't let us go to the platform. so i'm just hanging out in line, crammed with a couple hundred of my new best friends.






then again, this is better than this morning. at least this time my train isn't on fire.

obligatory post-election post

the saddest result from yesterday's election was the maine referendum.

the result that makes me the most happy that i'm not a betting man is the new jersey governor's race. i thought it would be close, but if forced to pick, i would have bet that corzine would eke out a narrow victory.

the strangely-least-talked-about result is the fact that democrats won both of the house races, including one pick-up from a seat previously held by republicans.

credit where credit is due: the pick-up is thanks to the efforts of glenn beck, dick armey, and the dittoheads of right blogistan. just yesterday, armey was threatening to do a NY-23 on a whole bunch of seats held by moderate republicans. i, for one, hope he follows through.

prison

matthew yglesias highlights the description of living conditions in the gaza strip from lawrence wright's new yorker piece.

i'm really curious what the justification for the ban on toys is. i suspect there isn't one. and the ice cream factory that was bombed or bulldozed.

if you create conditions like this, you're asking for people to react violently to you. anyone would in those circumstances. i don't understand how israelis could be so short sighted that they don't see their gaza policy as creating a major security threat.

drinking liberally: get your exercise edition

remember ye olden days when i would post something about drinking liberally every friggin week like clockwork?

i guess the clock broke. or maybe i just got sick of writing the same post every week. in any case, i and a bunch of other people are still going every tuesday and everyone is still invited. this week, you're probably gonna have to walk, but that just makes it good for you.

triumph brewing company
117 chestnut street
philadelphia, PA
6 pm until we leave

and now for something completely the same

there have been a bunch of cases in the last few years where politicians have been accused of misusing intellectual property in their campaign. the politician in question is almost always a republican. i'm not trying to bash republicans by saying that, it just seems to be true. the mccain campaign was accused multiple times of using copyrighted music without the artists' permission. jackson brown even sued.

one one level i understand the bind that republicans are in. if you have a rally and want to stir the crowd up, popular music is the way to go. popular musicians are not all liberal, but as a group they tend to lean left. democrats can probably get permission to use songs a lot easier than republicans.

so when i heard that chris christie had an ad that ripped off some scenes from monty python, i assumed the ad incorporated just a few clips. in fact, the entire commercial is basically the "it's the mind" skit. the ad seems to be no more technically sophisticated than one of those untergang videos that someone posts on youtube every ten seconds.¹

i'm not really bothered by the intellectual property issues. the christie campaign pulled the ad as soon as monty python's lawyers contacted them. i'm just surprised that anyone would have thought the ad would be a good idea in the first place. they probably could have copied the basic joke of the sketch (talking about deja vu while saying the same stuff over and over again) without stealing the clip. but that would have costed more than paying some kid minimum wage to stick a few subtitles on an existing video clip.

-----------------------------------------------------
1. speaking of which, i've been looking for an excuse to post this one for the past few weeks:

walking back

arabs are disappointed with the obama administration because it seems to have abandoned its demand that israel freeze all settlement activity. that's because, it looks like the obama administration really has walked back from its demand that there be a total settlement freeze as a precondition for negotiations.

all the obama administration was trying to do was to get the israelis to carry out what they agreed to years ago when they signed on to the bush-era "road map to peace." "phase one" of the road map imposed preconditions on both sides to any negotiations. on the israeli side, it required israel to freeze all settlement activities. of course, when bush proposed it he added a secret agreement with the israeli government allowing it to ignore the preconditions that applied to them. that is, they could ignore the part about withdrawing from territory settled after september 25, 2000 and to continue to expand settlements under the guise of "natural growth." meanwhile both israel and the u.s. insisted that the palestinians comply with all of their preconditions.

obama's "bold new policy" was really nothing more than getting serious about what was officially the american position all along: the idea that both sides are expected to live up to their obligations instead of bashing the palestinians for every transgression while winking at the israelis when they ignore what they're supposed to do. the fact that this was seen as so radical is a testament to how bizarre the conventional wisdom about I/P issues have become in the u.s.

because the obama administration is unwilling to do anything more than ask the israelis to play nice and because the netanyahu government has no intention to agree to any freeze, obama is sliding back to the old default american position of tolerating settlements while pretending that only the palestinians break agreements. is it any wonder that the arabs are losing patience with him?

validating the prism

for the past week or so, there's been this theory bouncing around the right that obama is delaying the announcement new afghanistan strategy to avoid further democratic losses in the november 3rds off-year election. as yglesias noted last week, the theory makes absolutely no sense.

it seemed rather obvious that the president might be delaying his announcement until after the afghan elections were resolved. in fact, the administration has all but hinted that's the case. but that's a responsible reason for the president to delay, which doesn't suit his critics' charge of dithering at all. plus, a lot of members of the right seem to be incapable of viewing foreign events without viewing it through the prism of domestic party politics.

but then over the weekend, just days before the american election, abdullah abdullah announced that he was withdrawing from the afghan runoff. the runoff has now been canceled and karzai has been officially declared reelected. which means that one factor that was probably delaying the president's afghan strategy announcement has been resolved and that announcement could come soon. but if it does come soon, that would be just after the american elections. even though abdullah²'s decision had nothing to do with the governor's race in new jersey or the contest over a congressional district in rural new york, proponents of the stupid theory are sure to point to that if obama announces the strategy in the next week.

of course, maybe he won't announce later this week. the afghan elections were just one of a few different factors that obama was considering. it's possible they will mull it over a little longer. we'll find out soon if it's coming soon.

fall back

is it really so hard to come up with a "back one hour" button? we do this every year! i can't believe it's 2009, i can post this on the Internet from a telephone that fits in my pocket, and i still have to go all the way around, scrolling through 23 hours, to move each clock back one hour.

post-halloween public service announcement

i'm out-yebeeing the yebee with this one!