woo-hoo!

i received my ABC mix disk in the mail today. thanks baji! here's hoping that noz jr. gets to listen to it soon.

defamation

given the way that the anti-defamation league has acted over the last few years, it really should come as no surprise that they came down on the pro-bigot side of the "ground zero mosque controversy." a whole lot of commentators have already pointed out just how ridiculous the ADL's stance is (and i mean a lot, so many i had to stretch out this sentence to include all these links).

abe foxman has managed to take an institution that has spent almost 100 years forging a reputation for opposing bigotry in all forms, and turn it into little more than an american appendage of the israeli far-right. it's sad to watch an organization that used to have so much integrity shit all over itself like this. but i guess it's good to have it made perfectly clear that the ADL can't really be called a civil rights organization anymore.

ADDING: m.j. rosenberg gives some context. as i said, in the post: the latest ADL statement is generating a lot of outrage, but it really is consistent with how foxman's ADL has been heading in recent years. these days they're more like the american chapter of yisrael beiteinu than an anti-bigotry group.

(previously)

upception

sailor?

why does the u.s. navy have sailors in kabul? it's a landlocked country that is not near any major body of water. i understand that the navy does more than sail ships, but sailors do sail ships, right? or is that just the generic term for anyone who is in the navy even if they do air traffic control or some other non-sea related job?

to be clear: i'm not pose one of those "what were they doing there?" questions as a way to implicitly blame them for their own kidnapping or death. i don't believe that at all. i'm just curious why a sailor would be sent to a country with the geography of afghanistan.

esquire

i never realized that i had a title of nobility.

you learn something batshit crazy every day.

city museum

every once in a while i'm in a foreign country, see something, and think: this cannot exist in the u.s. it's too dangerous. there's too much potential liability and the place would be shut down under a mountain of personal injury lawsuits. on saturday i went to the city museum in st. louis and for the first time had those thoughts about something that actually does exist in the u.s.

i don't know how they do it. it's been around for thirteen years and hasn't been bankrupted by personal injury lawsuits yet. it's a bizarre wonderful place. but it's also dangerous, ten stories of things to climb on and crawl into. (12 if you count the two levels on the roof). guests are welcome to climb on anything they find, or crawl into any space they see. the objects are are recycled bits of st. louis' former factories.a lot of the objects are hard metal. while there aren't sharp edges, the hard surfaces are not padded. of the 13 members of our group, every single one of us was bruised by the end of the day. at least one was bleeding. it's a little surprising that no one was seriously hurt.

how else do i describe it? parts of it were like a giant habitrail hamster habitat, with a twisting network of tubes to crawl through, snaking up eight stories up the outside of the building. there was even human-sized a hamster wheel on the inside. (that's where A. lost her balance and fell on her face as the wheel continued to spin, tossing and churning her a bit more).

it is an amazing place. thanks to CaTHY for talking me into flying halfway across the country to see it. i already want to go again. and that's not just because the law geek in me likes that the building used to be the international shoe factory.










(photos courtesy of LF)

that arrival monitor rant again

i was starting to compose a rant about why they still have the flight arrival monitors in the secured area beyond the security checkpoints considering that people waiting for arriving flights aren't allowed to be there. then i realized that i ranted that rant already.

it's still true though, even moreso the more time that passes since 9/11. the monitors in this terminal of lambert airport are very shiny and new looking. i bet they were installed after 2001 and yet they still put up all these arrival monitors that no one pays any attention to.

checking-in

doesn't checking in for a flight online before you go to the airport totally undermine the whole idea of checking in? i thought the point of the check in is to see who among the people who bought tickets for the flight actually showed up at the airport. but with at-home check in, the airlines can't have any idea who actually made it until they show up at the gate to board.

maybe the don't need to know who makes it to the airport and all they need to know is who shows up at the gate. but in that case why have this check-in process at all? most forms of transit don't have separate tickets and boarding passes. a train ticket, for example, is effectively the pass to board the train. because trains don't have a special check-in procedure, there's no need to have a separate boarding pass. you board with the train ticket you could have bought months earlier.

so why do we need the extra step with the check-in and the boarding pass when we fly on a plane? why not just let us board with the ticket?

travelin'

i'm off to st. louis to watch CaTHy age. happy old, CaTHy!

Older - They Might Be Giants from Charlie Campbell on Vimeo.

ah, the british press

i don't see any reason to read more than the headline for this one.

zero

is there any possible reason to oppose the so-called "ground zero mosque" that isn't based on pure bigotry? i'm having a real hard time imagining there is one.

westward ho!

if you played the video, you've seen more of the city than i will in my 14 hour stay.

the war against the unemployed

what i don't understand about the current fad of conservative commentators dumping all over the unemployed, is not that they would think it or say it privately in the company of their close friends. it's that they would say this stuff publicly in print. it seems they are not at all concerned about looking like total assholes.

drinking liberally

it's tuesday, which means i'll be at the center city drinking liberally tonight. everyone is welcome, especially those who remember where it is now:

jose pistolas
263 south 15th street,
philadelphia, pa.

we'll be at the upstairs bar, from 6pm until we leave.

Ò"

i got a link from memeorandum today. or at least that's what the sitemeter said. for a few moments i had trouble finding it. that's because the memeorandum site has translated the kazakh title of this blog into an unpronounceable symbol.

just call it "the blog formerly known as rubber hose."^*

----------------
*- actually, i insist that everyone refer to this site by it's proper name: kauchuktan zhasalghan qübyrshek. (say that ten times fast!) at least until i am finished with kaz and turn it back to "rubber hose"

〒 vs. [no unicode yet]

why did it take this long for the indian rupee to get a symbol? the rupee goes back centuries, while the tenge didn't exist until 1993 and it has had a symbol (〒) for almost three years (although no one in kazakhstan seems to use it). is getting a symbol hard for some reason? and if so, why was kazakhstan able to pull it off so much quicker than india?

does anyone else find this amusing?

the NAACP passes a resolution calling on the tea party to "repudiate racist elements" within the movement. this causes a big kerfuffle by right wingers who (wrongly) claimed that the the NAACP was calling the entire tea party racist. in fact, by referring to "racist elements" the NAACP was implying the opposite: that there are parts of the tea party that are racists and parts that are not, and that it is possible for there to be a tea party without the racist parts.

so then tea party express spokesman (and vice-chair of our country deserves better PAC, the tea party's parent political action committee) mark williams posted a satirical letter purporting to be a letter from the "head colored person" to president lincoln, saying that they don't want to be emancipated after all. (williams later pulled the letter from his web site, but not before ta-nehisi coates could post a copy).

williams' posting pretty effectively proves the NAACP's point. it seems obviously racist to me. in fact, that satire doesn't work at all, unless you buy into some pretty racist assumptions. and so the tea party federation has tossed mark williams out. in other words, they repudiated that example of a racist element in the tea party movement.

which is what the NAACP asked them to do in the first place. in protesting the resolution and screaming about the NAACP, the tea party waltzed right into doing exactly what the civil rights organization wanted.

dammit

yet another too hot day.



(and i guess i should at least link to the correction)

personal inception

i saw inception this afternoon.

for much the film i was noticing this spooky parallel between my current life and the situation of cobb (the main character played by leonardo dicaprio). i wasn't sure if i was just imagining it because i've been obsessing about that stuff too much or if it would really be something that someone else could see. then when the film ended and the credits rolled one of my friends leaned over and said, "i'm really sorry about that. i hope it didn't strike too close to home."

issues? we don't need no stinking issues!

this is a pretty funny headline, but also says a lot about the sad state of american politics.

there's really no incentive for the GOP to have an agenda. if they wrote down a list all it would do is risk pissing off some faction in their tent. in theory not having an agenda could also pose a risk, the risk that the press would make a big deal about how the party doesn't stand for anything other than obstructing the democrats. but there's no chance of the press doing that. the current state of affairs is viewed as too normal to be newsworthy.

ASIDE (that really isn't totally an aside): want another example of the craziness of the american political press? matt lewis, columnist for politics daily, reads the same article and thinks the most newsworthy bit of the story is the fact that newt gingrich calls political consultants "stupid". yes, an insult hurled at a respected beltway profession is far more newsworthy than the fact that one of the two political parties doesn't have an agenda and isn't sure whether it needs one.

(via memeorandum)

bumped

my iphone 4 arrived earlier this week. i haven't experienced any signal problems yet. but that could just be because i've only been in places with good AT&T signal strength. i was planning to buy a bumper or case for it later this week, partly to protect the phone when i inevitably drop it but also because the bumper solves the signal problem.

but now i think i'm going to wait, at least for a few more days. apple is getting mercilessly panned for its signal design flaw. while apple initially claimed the signal loss was a software problem and not a design flaw, its software fix doesn't solve the problem.

so apple is holding a press conference on friday. if they're smart, they'll give all iphone users a free bumper. and that's why i'll wait a few more days before i buy one.

2053 (+2 or 3)

it's a little slow to get going, but i find the above animation, showing every nuclear explosion on earth from 1945 to 1998, to be pretty fascinating. (the video doesn't include vela incident, a possible nuclear test conducted jointly by israel and south africa, nor does it have the two alleged north korean nuclear test from 2006 and 2009).

it really is amazing just how many times the earth has been nuked. i'm also struck both by the range of places where there have been nuclear explosions (on every continent except south american and antarctica), and also how certain spots (nevada, semey, kazakhstan, and the south pacific) got nuked a whole lot.

some info about the video is here.

(via blood and treasure)

nostalgia

p. 160: Other Major Cities [i.e. other than almaty and astana]:

Taraz and Kyzlorda are the two other cities in the south, and although they are primarily Kazakh, they have nothing in particular to recommend to them. Both have about a quarter of a million people. Taraz lies about 560 kilometres west of Almaty, and 200 kilometres east of Shymkent... Both cities have a venerable history, Taraz claiming to be over two thousand years old, but there is almost no evidence whatsoever of an interesting past.

drinking liberally: yes, i'm doing these posts again

it's tuesday and i didn't forget. so that means it's time for my usual post announcing my intention to attend the center city philadelphia drinking liberally.

consider it announced. DL is now at the upstairs bar at jose pistolas, 263 south 15th street, philadelphia, pa, 6pm until we leave.

everyone is welcome.

simultaneous bombings

why are simultaneous bombings always deemed to be a sign of a technically sophisticated terrorist group? it seems to come up a lot. like in today's NYT article about the recent bombings in kampala:

But other terrorism experts said that running a clandestine operation in Uganda, which lies hundreds of miles away, on Kenya’s western border, requires sophistication, as does pulling off simultaneous bombings, at a rugby field and an Ethiopian restaurant.

i can't say i've ever tried to bomb anything, so i'm no expert in what makes an attack technically challenging. but once you have the explosives it seems to me that making them go off simultaneously wouldn't require anything more sophisticated than a clock.

an origin of specious

fox news, under the headline u.s. senate felons voting illegally may have put franken over the top in minnesota, study finds, reports on a study from minnesota majority, an overtly partisan conservative advocacy group. they're not necessarily the best group to conduct research on whether the other party stole and election. nevertheless, thanks to the fox news report, they are getting a bit of attention on the right.

anyway, what did minnesota majority find? as the fox article explains

[Minnesota Majority's study] found that at least 341 convicted felons in largely Democratic Minneapolis-St. Paul voted illegally in the 2008 Senate race between Franken, a Democrat, and his Republican opponent, then-incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman.

The final recount vote in the race, determined six months after Election Day, showed Franken beat Coleman by 312 votes -- fewer votes than the number of felons whose illegal ballots were counted, according to Minnesota Majority's newly released study, which matched publicly available conviction lists with voting records.

and from that fox reports that the election "may" have been stolen. which is technically correct, but in practice it's highly unlikely. even if we assume the minnesota majority's data is correct, they don't know who the felons voted for. in order for it to have affected the outcome, at least 91.5% the 341 felons who voted would have had to vote for franken and not coleman. a margin like that is extremely unlikely. there's almost no demographic that votes in such lopsided number (the only one i can think of us barack obama' share of the black vote in 2008).

so what the study supposedly found is that a few hundred people may have voted in the minnesota senate race that shouldn't have. but while it was more than franken's margin of victory it's pretty unlikely to have affected the outcome. and it's far more likely that coleman got a fair number of the votes. but of course fox's report has triggered the ditto heads on the right to jump to the opposite conclusion. dan @ wizbang claimed the study showed that "a number of felons voted illegally for Al Franken in the 2008 Minnestota Senate election" when all it actually showed is that they may have illegally voted. gateway pundit calls it "likely" that franken only won because of the felon's vote. it's only a matter of time before this study goes down in right blogistani lore as proof positive that the franken-coleman election was stolen.

UPDATE (7/13/10): right on schedule, the bright lights of right blogistan have sprung into action. closeted carol links to the fox story and acts as if that means the stolen election is an absolute certainty. paul cooper writing for david horowitz's NewsRealBlog claims the study "show[ed] that Franken received at least 341 counted votes by felons." and doug ross's snarky headline reads: "Study Confirms: Felons Illegal Aliens (aka Undocumented Democrats) and Zombies elected Al Franken to U.S. Senate." (thanks to memeorandum)

totally nuts

actually, i think this is a pretty good election strategy. so good, in fact, that there's no need to limit it to the race in kentucky.

tea party jesus

real quotes, fake jesus.

(via pen-elayne)

you maniacs! you blew it up! ah, damn you! god damn you all to hell!

according to the people's daily online, the taliban is training monkeys to kill, giving them AK-47s, and setting them loose in waziristan. i'm no expert on monkey military strategy but that doesn't seem like an a very good plan. how good is their training? are they getting full monkey army training or some half-assed slapped together monkey combat course?

and won't this just start a new arms race in south and central asia? how will the u.s. close the monkey gap? we don't have monkeys. at least not indigenous ones, and they're the best soldier stock! would you want your security in the hands of some zoo-raised monkey, who never had to learn to scrounge for food? or worse, one of those lab monkeys? how soundly would you sleep if the only thing standing between you and the forces of darkness was a monkey with antibiotic resistant bronchitis?

XVII

i really don't understand the current conservative fascination with repealing the 17th amendment. the average person almost certainly doesn't know what the seventeenth amendment says. and i suspect if you explained it to them, that wouldn't evoke any strong feelings against it.

and it's not clear to me why members of the public, whether conservative or liberal, would be opposed to having the ability to vote for their own senator instead of having someone else choose the senator for them. there doesn't seem to be any public controversy over the ability to vote for senators. so why do conservative politicians keep bringing it up as there is some broad untapped anti-17th sentiment? it's especially odd because the rhetoric about repealing the 17th is coming entirely from conservatives even though a repeal of that amendment would almost certainly deliver an even wider senate majority to democrats. so why are some rightwing candidates jumping on a bandwagon that, in the highly unlikely event that they actually pulled off a repeal, would end up damaging their own political prospects?

tenther tantrum

if this keeps happening, how much longer will conservatives be jumping on that tenth amendment bandwagon?

going for broke

someone probably already said this when i was out of the country and paying less attention, but assuming this arizona law survives the constitutional challenge its likely effect will be to bankrupt arizona municipalities.

local police departments are going to have to choose between stopping to check the immigration status of everyone (thus effectively shutting down their ability to investigate crime, or issue the traffic tickets that provide so much of their department's revenue), or stopping only some people and subjecting the department to endless lawsuits over racial profiling and selective enforcement. this is a potential bonanza for the civil rights bar. i almost suspect they wrote the law themselves.

trust the fortune cookie?

on this awful day, i'm wondering how much stock i should put in the advice of a slip of paper found in a baked good.

drinking liberally: retroactive edition

um yeah, i guess i forgot to write the thrilling post about my triumphant return to the non-triumph drinking liberally.

well, i was there. if you weren't you missed your chance. well, this week's chance. i guess i'll go back to going every week again now.

going fourth

iDon'tcare

with mrs. noz on a different continent and not in any position to talk me out of it, i'm probably going to upgrade to an iphone 4. yes, i know about all the signal issues and shit. i also know you can fix it with a rubber band, so that doesn't seem like a big issue to me.

huh?

so hamas's increasing tendency to embrace non-violent methods of resistance is bad news?

BP

i didn't pay any attention to the american political fallout from the BP gulf disaster while i was in kaz.

what i find fascinating is how little attention the disaster is getting now even though it's still just as bad as ever and getting worse. i assume it's because the coverage saturated at the beginning, which would dampen any enthusiasm for follow-up stories a month and one-half later. i mostly missed the saturation, so the relatively light coverage seems completely disproportionate to what is going on.

or perhaps the lack of coverage has more to do with a lack of solutions. it seems to me that we have the technology to create an undersea gush, but not to stop one. the things we can do keep failing. it's harder to talk about a mess when you don't have a real answer. and maybe there are just more pressing things to cover.

not that people trying to make political hay of the matter aren't trying. like this post from the heritage foundation blog. (via golden boy on FB) not a single thing on their "to do list" would address the source of the problem, continuous the gush of oil into the gulf. two of the suggestions (#3 and #10) would not even do anything to clean up the oil that was already released. in fact, #3 would potentially make it worse.