the world cries out for a pacer app

it is surprising how annoyed i get when i think of an iphone app that would be really useful and then determine that it probably does not exist after fruitlessly searching the app store. it's the curse of those of us with big ideas and no actual programming skills.

so why hasn't anyone written a pacer app yet? that would be so useful! they have an app for everything else, dammit!

blackmail

shorter muammar gaddafi: pay me six billion euros or i turn europe black.

he's talking about flooding europe with african immigrants, but it would have been way cooler if he had some kind of race-changing ray gun. they just don't make racist super-villains like they used to.

nature's labor day present

it looks like we're in for a lovely holiday weekend. but it's probably a good thing that mrs. noz is flying back from kazakhstan now rather than next weekend.

not worth it

i can definitely see the kitsch appeal of some of this stuff. but i'm not sure how these foreign tourists expect to get through israeli security when they cross out of gaza, and then again when they eventually leave israel.

just the fact that you crossed into gaza means you are going to be subject to greater scrutiny. i can't imagine how much worse it will be when they find that islamic jihad keychain in your luggage.

zwiebelgeist

it's the onion, but it's also sadly close to reality for a lot of folks out there.

with all due respect to random person holding a t-shirt

i thought AFP was agence france-presse. which means it is a foreign corporation.

you can't tell if you scored until they set up the goal posts

i don't understand how, even after seven and one-half years, we can have articles discussing whether the u.s. "won" or "lost" the war in iraq without first trying to define what exactly the goal was. once you do that the win/loss determination is easier to puzzle out.

if the goal was to secure weapons of mass destruction to keep them from falling into the wrong hands, the u.s. lost the war. there were no WMDs. and, on the off chance there were, the u.s. doesn't know where they are.

if the goal was to overthrow saddam hussein, the u.s. won the war. except if that was the goal, then everything since march 20, 2003 has been largely pointless.

if the goal was to foster a function democracy in iraq, you could argue it either way, but at this point i think a "loss" is more convincing than a "win". there's a weak democracy there, but it's not clear if it will last without the u.s. to prop it up. and it's not clear whether it is really functioning, as the country's leadership is paralyzed and unable to form a government. at best it's too early to tell. at worst, it's a loss.

if the goal was to spread democracy throughout the rest of the middle east, the u.s. lost. if anything, iraq is a cautionary tale for the countries in the region. no one is rushing to make themselves "the next iraq."

see? isn't that better than calling up a bunch of people the reporter thinks are experts and asking them to pontificate?

putting aside the child soldier and coerced confession problems...

i still do not understand how throwing a grenade in the middle of combat at a military officer on the other side counts as "terrorism." don't get me wrong, i don't approve of grenade attacks. but if that is what it is, then every soldier who has ever been in a firefight is now a terrorist too.

a very christian nation

it's interesting to compare the story of cassie bernall with the recent stabbing of a new york taxi driver.

putting aside questions about the veracity of either story, the way the victims are being treated is so strikingly different. i don't know how many others out there remember, but bernall was a bit of a cultural phenomenon following the 1999 columbine massacre. she really was turned into a modern christian martyr. i haven't seen anything like that with sharif ahmed, the cabbie who was stabbed. at this point, the focus of the news coverage seems to be much more on the attacker than the victim.


i guess one big difference is that ahmed survived his attack. but i think the bernall-ahmed comparison is also a reflection of how powerful evangelical christians are in this country and how loud of a voice they have. if ahmed had died, you can bet there would be no national bestseller called "he said yes".

that prayer rug really tied the mosque together!

not a chinaman, no ferret, just a drunk asshole doing a hate crime.

ad-free and not a business

i've never allowed advertisements to appear on this site on principle. based on my traffic numbers that also means that i missed out on something like $5.38 in profits over the past few years. damn. i could have had an ice cream cone!

but now my missed ice cream opportunities are looking like a good call.

hallowed isn't necessarily the hallowest

tea party leader mark williams is calling for a "mirror image" of the cordoba community center built in mecca "that would be dedicated to showcasing American values."

why are they so fixated on mecca? again and again, you hear cordoba house opponents saying their should not be a "mosque at ground zero" until someone can build synagogue or church in mecca. why the fixation on mecca? sure, it is the holiest city in islam, but it's not the only holy place in the religion. is ground zero the holiest place in the u.s?

maybe it is to some people, but i'm guessing they are a minority, or maybe are overly caught up in the heat of the current controversy. i'm not sure how anyone would rank holiness of american icons and there are probably a lot of competing ideas for how various "hallowed grounds" in the u.s. would stack up against one another. mormons, for example, would probably disagree with ground zero holding the number one slot. more secular-minded people might rank historic places central to the formation of this country like valley forge or independence hall a little higher than ground zero. after all, those are sites that mark the creation of our country, not one of its catastrophes. and what about gettysburg? pearl harbor? the mall in washington? which of them is more hallowed?

for the mecca analogy to work, ground zero must not just be hallowed ground, it must be the hallowest ground. there are a lot of important muslim sites that are not in saudi arabia and are quite close to christian or jewish sites. the umayyad mosque in damascus is just a short walk from the christian quarter, and not much further is the jewish quarter. the whole reason that the cordoba house opponents keep coming back to saudi comparisons is because that is the muslim government virtually no freedom of religion. it's quite revealing that of all the countries in the muslim world, the one that the tea-partiers keep demanding we emulate is the one with the least religious freedom.

drinking liberally

should i do a drinking liberally post this week? i should!

i'll be at the center city philadelphia drinking liberally this evening, just like i am every tuesday (except for those times i don't go). be there or, um, else. everyone is invited:

jose pistolas
263 S. 15th Street (between locust and spruce)
philly, pa 19102

this week's topic: what topic will glomarization say is this week's topic? enquiring minds wanna know!

it's worse than that, he's dead jim

the reason i like my iphone is because it consolidates all these things i used to carry around into a single object. my phone, PDA, ipod, internet surfing device, SEPTA schedule and watch are all my iphone these days. sometimes it's also my newspaper, tv and radio. there's a problem with that strategy. if i should, say, drop my iphone in the toilet (by accident!), all of those things are wiped out at once. whereas in the past, to ruin everything i would have to drop so much stuff in the toilet the top things would probably still be dry.

so last night, as my iphone was sitting in a bag of jasmine rice, i went into philly but realized that i didn't know the train schedule for getting home, didn't know the time (so even if i had a train schedule it wouldn't matter) and didn't have anything to do if i actually got on the train.

okay, it wasn't that bad. i could rely on the ancient technology of asking people. that at least handled the first two. and i did bring a book, so #3 wasn't a big deal either.

this morning my phone smells like jasmine but otherwise is just a very expensive paperweight. i made a morning date with a genius. we'll see whether they can revive the patient.

UPDATE: nope. and the stupid water sensor ratted me out and voided the warranty. i do have a new phone though. i just had to pay for it. i think the lesson in all of this is to avoid toilets at all cost.

timing

so let me get this straight:

(1) wikileaks publishes a bunch of classified documents that the pentagon doesn't want them to publish.

(2) the pentagon slams wikileaks when it announces its plan to post more classified documents.

(3) wikileaks founder julian assange is charge with rape in sweden and people speculate that assange may be the subject of an american-led smear campaign.

(4) wikileaks gives the pentagon some kind of access to the documents.

(5) sweden abruptly drops the rape accusation against assange.

was assange blackmailed?

the biggest city i've never heard of

is "the biggest city you've never heard of" the official slogan of chongqing? whenever i see an article using that phrase i say out loud "chongqing." every article about chongqing uses that line. i've heard of it already!!!

besides, haven't a lot of people heard of it? i mean, they may not know it's the name of a city in china but there are a ton of chinese restaurants with names that are variations of "chung king." (szechuan is one of the more popular types of chinese food in the u.s. it's not surprising that the region's biggest city comes up a lot in restaurant names). if you just spelled "chongqing" a little differently, i'm sure lots of people would at least vaguely recognize the name. but that would spoil the lede.

i wonder what the largest city i have never heard of is. looking down this list it's tianjin, which is arguably bigger than chongqing (depending if you use the metro area number or the administrative area population). but my googling says that only this guy uses the "biggest city you've never heard of" phrase about tianjin (see right margin under "CONTACT"). also now i've heard of it.

so i guess the biggest city i've now never heard of is Hangzhou. except i've heard of that now too.

dammit.

TürkBirDev!

since i got back from kazakhstan, i've been spending all this time visiting pan-turkic nationalist web sites. the sites are almost all in turkish, which suggests where the pan-turkic push is really centered. (another example: try switching the language from turkish to something else using the drop-down menu at the upper right of this page)

and then there's all the videos. i like the below one. even though it is in turkish, i can understand it pretty well:



my favorite part is the graphic that starts around 3:53 where an expanding EU, russian federation, china and america (which seems to own all of north africa, the entire middle east and southeast asia) surround and then gobble up the hapless un-unified turkic states. some of the other videos seem to want to include turkic speaking areas of russia, china, iran, iraq, the caucasus and eastern europe. this one implies that mongolia would be in on the deal (though mongolians are not turkic. i think my searches may have strayed into turanism).

anyway, i'm not sure why i continue to be so fascinated by this stuff. most of the pan-turkic videos are little more than an exhaustive list of every turkic ethnic group and flag, usually set to traditional turkish or martial music.

i'm also partial to all the cheesy wolf imagery. those pan-turkic folks really do like wolves.

shit bray duck

it occurs to me that eat pray love would have been a better film if julia roberts went to three totally different foreign countries that begin with the letter I. maybe she could have started by getting dysentery in the ivory coast, then going to recover in ireland, before reaching the end of her journey of self-discovery in war-torn iraq.

fourth place?

at least that's where my pick is right now. vote dylan smith in the Dollar ReDe$ign contest.

i'm pretty solidly against putting obama (bush or clinton or bush) on any bill. one thing i really like about this country is the tradition of not putting any living leader on a bill. it really does a lot to avoid the cult of personality feel that i see when i visit other countries.

it's not the end, but halfway there is something

i've seen a lot of sarcasm about the touted "end of combat operations in iraq" when there will be 50,000 u.s. soldiers in-country at the end of the month. i understand the sarcasm. the entire distinction between "combat troops" and "non-combat troops" seems to be comprised of three letters and a dash. but it's still a landmark of sorts. a year and a half ago there were 140,000 u.s. soldiers in the country. that's a significant decline. it's not as fast as i would want, but what do i know about the logistics of getting that many soldiers and their equipment out?

the main thing that i think is significant is that the obama administration is following the timetable for withdrawal set forth in the SOFA. u.s. troops were withdrawn from iraqi cities by june 30, 2009, as required by the timetable. and now it looks like they will make it down to 50k troops which they will dutifully label "non-combat" by august 31, 2010. those two milestones are important because it means that the u.s. is on track for the next milestone, really the one that really counts: having all u.s. soldiers (whether "combat" or "non-combat") out by december 31, 2011. the fact that the obama administration complied with the first two doesn't necessarily mean it will comply with that last deadline. but the plan does lead to zero and, so far at least, they are following the plan.

(that's not to say that the entire SOFA schedule has worked out. the iraqis still haven't held the SOFA referendum, and it seems pretty unlikely they will any time soon given the total political paralysis that has followed the last parliamentary election. pretty soon the vote on an earlier withdrawal will be rendered moot.)

but the thing that is annoying about the obama administration's handling of this is all this premature triumphalism. they say that "operation iraqi freedom is officially over" when really we're just at an arbitrary halfway point of a slow draw-down. i'm all for celebrating the end of the iraq war. but why not wait until it's actually over before tooting that particular horn?

moot court

earlier i asked "where?" and now (via glomarization) i have the answer: the international courts for human rights violations!

of course! how silly of me. only an imaginary court could fully adjudicate the claims of orly taitz. she's also submitting some kind of complaint to the inter-american commission for civil rights, another court that doesn't exist. i wonder if she sent her complaint by mail or by magical flying horses?

riding the roller coaster of life

unfortunately, i'm living in interesting times right now.

can't tell his ja'fari from his shafi'i

the response that DougJ got to his crazy question is a good example of a phenomenon that has been running rampant among rightwing commentators for the past nine years: a lot of them fancy themselves experts at "sharia" and yet they don't seem to understand that "sharia" isn't a single monolithic thing.

i mean, why would a "sharia expert" think that an egyptian sunni born in kuwait and an imam in the sufi tradition might subscribe to a doctrine that is pretty strictly limited to iranian shi'a, unless he didn't have a fucking clue?

bad satire

amanda says it all.

it has gotten to the point where, when i read something written by opponents of the cordoba house project, what i mostly feel is sorry for them. at best they're being used by people who know better. at worst they're simple bigots, with the emphasis on simple. a lot of times i try to understand and respect the other side. but this time, what i understand doesn't deserve any respect. i've asked before if there's any other way of looking at this that would put the anti-cordoba crowd in a better light. i just don't think any exists.

what a buffoon

john bolton is like a broken record. his obsession with bombing iran reveals him to be little more than a psychopath.

and i bet eight days from now, there's no chance he will say "okay forget bombing iran. it's too late now. i'm moving on to something else."

my next two weeks

uh, keep fighting where?

i guess orly taitz isn't familiar with the meaning of the word "supreme."

how to wash a rabid monkey

four easy steps!

(via)

i guess it still works...

...but maybe the text was written in 2008?

i also like this one. more here.

in just a few days, mrs. noz will get to experience ramadan ramazan first hand in kazakhstan! from what i've heard, there's not all that much to experience.

(via)

cha

my first thoughts after reading this was: that's the best he could come up with? can't he think of something better than a hackneyed reading recommendation to be the biggest message in the world?

my second thought was the realization that i can't come up with anything much better.

making a point by polling

so much of the campaign against cordoba house (aka the "ground zero mosque") seems to be based on misinformation. the "ground zero mosque", is not on ground zero. it's blocks away and would not even be visible from the ground zero site. it's also not a "mosque" but rather a community center (which would include a prayer space). nevertheless the framing adopted by the opponents of the project seems to be the one adopted by most of the media. for example:


given that the opponents dominate the framing, it's not surprising that polls show the public is pretty strongly against the "ground zero mosque." which is why i wish someone would do a poll asking the following question:

would you support, as a compromise, a project that is a muslim community center, which would include a prayer space, but it would be located more than two blocks away from the ground zero site, in a commercial area using a building that used to house a clothing store?

except for the words "as a compromise", the question pretty much describes the actual cordoba house project. i bet the poll would show that a whole lot more americans are in favor of the real project than the so-called "ground zero mosque."

RIM vs. KSA and then UEA and then ROI and then?

the problem with RIM negotiating a deal with saudi arabia that would let the kingdom get access to blackberry users' emails is that now everybody else will want a similar deal. and then soon RIM's famous super-secure encryption won't be all that secure anymore.

terror babies!

this is probably one of the most awesome stupid ideas ever floated by the right! oh, alright, maybe that's setting too high of a bar. they've had some pretty stupid stuff and a lot of it was pretty awesome. but still. i can't get enough of the terror babies idea.

the basic plan is this: terrorist organization sneaks a pregnant woman illegally into the u.s. the pregnant woman gives birth in the u.s., and the baby gets u.s. citizenship thanks to the fourteenth amendment. then the kid grows up into a terrorist and when he grows up perpetrates a horrible terrorist attack.

i think all this is is an attempt to tie the current rightwing jihad against birthright citizenship, with their usual post-9/11 hysteria about terrorism. they seem to think that if they can come up with some tenuous story linking their pet issue to terrorism, everyone will freak out and do what they want. and they won't notice just how stupid that tenuous story is.

how stupid is it?

first, if the terrorist can sneak a pregnant non-citizen woman illegally into the u.s., why do they need a u.s. citizen? the whole benefit of having a terrorist with a u.s. passport is that they can get into the u.s. much easier than one with a different passport. but if the plot presumes the ability to get one of their agents over the border illegally, the citizenship no longer confers any special advantages.

put another way, if they can get someone into the country illegally, why not just sneak the terrorist in to commit an attack right now? isn't that easier than sneaking a pregnant woman in so she can give birth to a kid who decades later could grow up into someone who commits a terrorist act? if terrorists plots were that unnecessarily convoluted, we have less to worry about, not more.

also, have they noticed this plan takes a really really long time? it seems like it would be much easier to just recruit someone who already has a u.s. passport than to smuggle a pregnant woman into the u.s. so she can give birth before smuggling the baby back out again so the kid grows up in a proper environment for training.

how can anyone even float this theory without at least cracking a smile?

i didn't do it!

as mark lynch pointed out several weeks ago, the obama administration got the israelis to significantly ease the blockade of gaza in return for a whitewash investigation of the flotilla incident. i understand that was the deal and, like lynch, i think the easing of the blockade was worth it.

but just because that's the deal, doesn't mean that anyone should take the ridiculous israeli commission's investigation seriously. sure, the army chief says that the other guys fired first. that's the story that would save his ass. but why is he even qualified to testify? he wasn't there. in fact, pretty much everyone testifying wasn't there.

maybe eventually they will have some of the IDF soldiers testify. at least their testimony of what happened would be relevant. but there doesn't seem to be any plans to have any of the mavi marmara passengers tell their side. and, at least so far, no one seems to be presenting any of the medical evidence, even though some of it (like the turkish-american who was shot at close range in the back of the head) directly contradicts the military chief's testimony. if they're not considering any evidence that contradicts the israeli government's official story, it's not an investigation.

during the soviet era. show trials designed to white wash the regime's actions were often presented in the western press as the kangaroo courts they were. why is anyone pretending this is a real investigation of anything?

dollar coin

ezra klein notes that using the dollar coin would save the u.s. treasury a lot of money. but the dollar coin won't catch on unless they stop making the dollar bill. that's how canada did it. as long as there is a paper or metal option, the people will prefer the paper. if you really want to save that $500 million a year, they need to eliminate the more expensive choice.

i've been wondering whether someone at the u.s. treasury isn't considering eliminating the dollar bill. it's been about 15 years since the u.s. treasury redesigned all u.s. bills (moving to the ones with big off-center heads). they did all the bills that are currently in print except the one dollar bill. they even redesigned the redesign for those other non-one dollar bills (eliminating the oval surrounding the now off-center head and adding a bit more color), but the dollar bill still looks the same as it ever was.

maybe they don't want to pay for a redesigned $1 because its days are numbered? but if so, what's taking them so long? and if they get rid of the dollar bill in favor of a coin, can we at least get a toonie?

good news for norfolk!

for the past year i've had these arguments with people who are opposed, not just to the obama stimulus plan, but to the very concept of governmental spending having any stimulative effect. as they tell it, government money can never stimulate the economy because when the government spends money there are all these hidden "costs" that end up choking off private investment. what those hidden costs are and how that choking off works has always been a little fuzzy, but the bottom line is that a lot of people seem to believe that government spending on a particular area always seems to do a lot more economic harm than good.

but if that's the case, how to they explain the bipartisan outcry whenever something like this happens? are the politicians protesting the closure of a military base in their district acting irrationally? shouldn't they be cheering the economic boom times that will come to their district when the base closes, thousands lose their jobs but all those hidden costs and choking off goes away?

cataloguing the noz empire

i got my castle, a film, another film, a festival, a chain of stores, an airport, a slang term for a balloon filled with nitrous oxide, a performance enhancing drug, a spy, a line of nasal sanitizers, a fairy spirit, a walnut in galacian and portuguese (and cattle in old high german), a french techno band, a secret society and a chair.

did i miss anything?

zero tolerance

i've long thought the simon wiesenthal center was going for some kind of irony award in its "museum of tolerance" project. first they are building their museum in jerusalem on top of a historic muslim cemetery famous for being the final resting place of various saints and scholars. and now they're saying they won't tolerate an islamic center in lower manhattan.

maybe this whole thing is some kind of modern performance art project.

eyerollgate

OMG! why isn't the MSM covering this unquestionable abuse of authority!?!?!?

okay, so there's no video showing that any actual eye rolling occurred. but franken's political opponents swear to god that it happened! so it must have. why would his political opponents make something like that up?

plus, look at the allegations! HE ROLLED HIS EYES. can you appreciate how egregious that is? it's "almost unbelievable" and "conduct unbecoming a United States Senator"!!! no other member of congress has ever done anything this disrespectful in the entire history of the united states!

spring mid-summer cleaning

between 2004 and 2009, i had a weekly meeting with an arabic tutor. each week i'd meet my tutor and talk about my week. if i asked the tutor how to say a word in arabic, he would write it down for me on a piece of scrap paper. at the end of the session, he would hand me the scrap paper with a list of new (to me) words. every few months i would go through the scrap paper stack and make flash cards from them. then i would leave the stacks of stack paper in a corner of our study specifically reserved for things i wanted to keep but had no idea where to put them.

this morning i went through the stack. the arabic notes were in roughly chronological order, with the most recent stuff on top. as i sifted through the stack i saw a crazy reminder of my life in 2009. here are some of the words i learned that year:

النحل
تطبيق
رخصة
منسق
حماتي
شرطان
حضانة
ak
tepe
براز
مرض الكلب
بصمة الاصابع
سنجاب

what a shitty year that was.

it's only a dirty trick if the tea party is bad for the GOP

the accusation that democrats have engaged in tea party tampering (really the claim is that democrats have assisted tea party candidates to get on the GOP ballot or otherwise get the GOP nomination) is interesting because of what it says about the electoral prospects of tea party candidates. it's only a "dirty trick" if tea party candidates are a liability for the GOP, not an asset. (that point seems to be lost on dan riehl).

as others have noted, the tea party really has flopped as a political force. tea party candidates haven't fared well in a bunch of elections, they only seem to have a clear record of victory in GOP primaries. and yet by winning the primaries in nevada and kentucky, the GOP has turned what should have been easy wins in those two states into toss-ups. if harry reid holds onto his senate seat (and polls currently have him in the lead), he should thank the tea party movement for saving his ass.

courting death

looking over booman's list of birth dates for supreme court justices i was surprised to see how old some of the individual justices are. i hadn't realized, for example, that scalia is in his 70s. and thomas, who for much of my adult memory was the "young justice" is now in the middle of the pack and in his 60s.

also, as booman says, if obama wins a second term things will get very interesting. how long can scalia hold out, waiting for a president who will appoint an ideological ally as a successor? essentially, he would be in the same position that the liberal justices were in during the bush years.

and it's a little depressing to see there is now a justice of the supreme court who was born in the same decade as me. i though they were all old people?

campbell's suit

few people pay much attention to the various war crimes tribunals that are currently under way. even fewer pay any attention to the tribunals dealing with war crimes in africa. that is, until a supermodel gets called as a witness. suddenly there are 2,876 news stories about charles taylor and sierra leone!

judges in arusha and the hague take note: if you're tired of laboring in obscurity, pull out a fashion magazine and start issuing subpoenas.

so much for "don't be evil"

making the internet cost more and limiting access based on ability to pay counts as evil.

UPDATE: apparently the NYT got it completely wrong. now the reports are all saying that the verizon-google agreement protects net neutrality. plus, google is denying that the NYT's story is accurate and has reaffirmed its commitment to net neutrality. i guess they're back to not being evil.

UPDATE (8/9/10): okay, the NYT got it more right than wrong. in fact, it sucks worse than expected. google is back to being evil again.

go!

i have a pair of friends who were married during the five month period between the in re marriage cases decision (which legalized gay marriage in california) and the passage of proposition 8 (which outlawed gay marraige). they were in an odd situation. under california law, they were still married. and yet under california law, no new gay marriages could be formed.

the window opened and then it slammed shut. it was just that arbitrary. gay weddings were not recognized, then they were, then they weren't again, except that they still were if you had it timed just right. impulsive couples were rewarded. couples who were careful planners were just out of luck.

and now the window may be opening again. well, unless opponents get a stay pending appeal, and i bet they're gonna ask for one.

so run to the chapel gay californians! run run!

sergey larenkov

i'm completely fascinated with sergey larenkov's work, where he uses photoshop to blend together world war two-era wartime images with photographs of the same locations today. the ghostlike feel of the images in which the present is haunted by the black and white figures from the past is so captivating. i can look at these pictures forever.

(see boing boing's two posts and my modern met)

sharron's angle

i suspect what happened is that angle was parroting the stuff her handlers have been saying during their strategy sessions. she just isn't bright enough to realize that it's not something she should say on the air.

BUHLUD!

"little children and pregnant women should not watch"

because the video induces labor? or maybe it just makes them pickled.

(via)

maybe mahmoud will take it as a compliment

good for lula, but oops:

I call on the supreme leader of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to permit Brazil to grant asylum to this woman.

oops.