1.29.2008
Worth a look perhaps
An interview in The New Republic with 'Atonement' author Ian McEwan is interesting - his answers on the growing 'popularity' of atheism, even in the American South, are right out of our playbook.
1.27.2008
1.24.2008
1.23.2008
Guess What Will Be Attacking A Certain Miniature Wooden New York Facsimile
It's still alive...
Addition: it won't be $100 for long. Until then, Godzilla and a giant squid will have to do.
Addition: it won't be $100 for long. Until then, Godzilla and a giant squid will have to do.
One-Week Boycott of ESPN
I'm not watching ESPN for the next week. Dana Jacobson, an ESPN talking head, best-known for bad ESPN2 morning shows, has been suspended for a week, and I've got her back. At the "Mike & Mike" Roast in Atlantic City (is it me or are they slipping?) Jacobson, a Michigan grad, said, "Fuck Notre Dame. Fuck Touchdown Jesus. Fuck Jesus," to Notre Dame grad Mike Golic. The show was not broadcast live. The Catholic League catches wind of this and starts moaning and she get suspended for a week for saying "Fuck Jesus". Well fuck the Catholic League for trying to wield power they don't legally have, and fuck ESPN for knuckling under. I don't even much care for Jacobson, nonetheless this is ridiculous. No ESPN this week for me. Sorry Mr. Tony & Wilbon. Oh yeah, and seriously, fuck Notre Dame.
1.22.2008
Hitchens Blasts Neo-Confederate Huckabee
As if we needed more reasons not to like him............
In this country, it seems that you can always get an argument going about "race" as long as it is guaranteed to be phony, but never when it is real. Almost every day brings news of full-dress media-oriented spats about Don Imus, Bob Grant, or the recent nonstory about how some golf show had managed to mention Tiger Woods and the word lynch in the same news cycle. The preceding week had involved some trivial but intense parsing of an exchange between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But just let the real thing occur, with a full-blooded and full-throated bellow of old-fashioned authentic racism, and you can see the entire press refusing to cover it for fear of having to confront the real and unvarnished thing (and perhaps for reasons having to do with other "sensitivities" as well).
Gov. Mike Huckabee made the following unambiguously racist and demagogic appeal in Myrtle Beach, S.C., last week:
You don't like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag. In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell 'em what to do with the pole; that's what we'd do.
This is a straightforward racist appeal for the following reasons:
1) The South Carolina flag is a perfectly nice flag, featuring the palmetto plant, about which no "outsider" has ever offered any free advice.
2) The Confederate battle flag, to which Gov. Huckabee was alluding, was first flown over the South Carolina state Capitol in 1962, as a deliberately belligerent riposte to the civil rights movement, and is not now, and never has been, the flag of that great state.
3) By a vote of both South Carolina houses in the year 2000, the Confederate battle flag ceased to be flown over the state capitol and now only waves (as quite possibly it should) over the memorial to fallen Confederate soldiers.
Thus, as well as crassly behaving exactly like someone "from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag," former Gov. Huckabee of Arkansas deliberately aligned himself with the rancorous minority who are still not reconciled to the idea that South Carolina may not officially consecrate racism and slavery and secession. "Your flag"? What an insult, not just to the descendants of slavery but to the many, many other loyalists and Unionists who fought and died to bring their state back into the Union. And what is the point of the "outside the state" slur? Wasn't this exactly what Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas used to say, as if to make it seem that all was hunky-dory in his own tight little dominion until them goddam "outside agitators" arrived? In the end, as Gov. Huckabee may or may not recall, the 101st Airborne Division, most of them "outsiders" not from Arkansas, had to be sent by a Republican president to integrate the schools of Little Rock. That was a lot of trouble and expense that the big-mouth rednecks put us all to, but it was worth it. It's insufferable to hear this glib idiot make a mockery of it now in order to try to get the Klan vote in South Carolina.
One might add a couple of other points. The political flag of the Confederacy—the so-called "Stars and Bars"—is one thing. The battle flag of the Confederate army, the most militant symbolic form that secession and slavery ever took, is quite another. Under this fiery cross of St. Andrew, the state of Pennsylvania was invaded and free Americans were rounded up and re-enslaved. Under this same cross, it was announced that any Union officer commanding freed-slave soldiers, or any of his men, would be executed if captured. (In other words, war crimes were boasted of in advance.) The 13 stars of the same flag include stars for two states—Kentucky and Missouri—that never did secede, and they thus express a clear ambition to conquer free and independent states. And this is the symbol that Huckabee, seeking to ingratiate himself with the lowest element and lowest common denominator, calls "your flag." You might as well do a cross-burning and have done with it, and we all know how the networks would react if some ignorant kids did that.
But when real political racism rears its head, our easily upset media fall oddly silent. Can you guess why? Of course you can. Gov. Huckabee is the self-anointed candidate of the simple and traditional Christian folk who hate smart-ass, educated, big-city types, and if you dare to attack him for his vulgarity and stupidity and bigotry, he will accuse you of prejudice in return. What he hopes is that his neo-Confederate sickness will become subsumed into easy chatter about his recipes for fried squirrel and his other folksy populist themes. (By the way, you owe it to yourselves to watch the exciting revelations about his squirrel-grilling past; and do examine his family Christmas card while you're at it.) But this drivel, it turns out, is all a slick cover for racist incitement, and it ought not to be given a free pass.
And not merely racist incitement. So slack is our grasp of history and principle that we seem unable to think of the Confederacy as other than "offensive" to blacks. But there are two Republican candidates in this election—the absurd and sinister Ron Paul being the other—who choose this crucial moment in our time to exalt those who attempted to destroy the Union by force, and those who solicited the help of foreign powers in order to do so, and whose treason led to the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Should their patriotism be questioned? I would say most definitely yes, and questioned repeatedly, at that, perhaps especially if they are seeking the nomination of the party of Lincoln.
In Washington, D.C., Gov. Huckabee has hired as smooth and silky a pair of big-city insiders as you could meet in a day's march: Ed Rollins and James Pinkerton. Elegant ornaments of many a past administration and many a well-heeled think tank (Pinkerton describes himself loftily as "a Burkean conservative and a Nixonian foreign-policy realist"), they know exactly what calculation lies behind their boss' smarmy appeals to the uneducated racists and losers and to the fools who believe that Adam and Eve were real (and recent) people. But do they endorse his street tactics as well? I, for one, would rather like to find out. Here's a genuine scandal about racism, and waddaya know? My great profession is absolutely determined to overlook it.
In this country, it seems that you can always get an argument going about "race" as long as it is guaranteed to be phony, but never when it is real. Almost every day brings news of full-dress media-oriented spats about Don Imus, Bob Grant, or the recent nonstory about how some golf show had managed to mention Tiger Woods and the word lynch in the same news cycle. The preceding week had involved some trivial but intense parsing of an exchange between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But just let the real thing occur, with a full-blooded and full-throated bellow of old-fashioned authentic racism, and you can see the entire press refusing to cover it for fear of having to confront the real and unvarnished thing (and perhaps for reasons having to do with other "sensitivities" as well).
Gov. Mike Huckabee made the following unambiguously racist and demagogic appeal in Myrtle Beach, S.C., last week:
You don't like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag. In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell 'em what to do with the pole; that's what we'd do.
This is a straightforward racist appeal for the following reasons:
1) The South Carolina flag is a perfectly nice flag, featuring the palmetto plant, about which no "outsider" has ever offered any free advice.
2) The Confederate battle flag, to which Gov. Huckabee was alluding, was first flown over the South Carolina state Capitol in 1962, as a deliberately belligerent riposte to the civil rights movement, and is not now, and never has been, the flag of that great state.
3) By a vote of both South Carolina houses in the year 2000, the Confederate battle flag ceased to be flown over the state capitol and now only waves (as quite possibly it should) over the memorial to fallen Confederate soldiers.
Thus, as well as crassly behaving exactly like someone "from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag," former Gov. Huckabee of Arkansas deliberately aligned himself with the rancorous minority who are still not reconciled to the idea that South Carolina may not officially consecrate racism and slavery and secession. "Your flag"? What an insult, not just to the descendants of slavery but to the many, many other loyalists and Unionists who fought and died to bring their state back into the Union. And what is the point of the "outside the state" slur? Wasn't this exactly what Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas used to say, as if to make it seem that all was hunky-dory in his own tight little dominion until them goddam "outside agitators" arrived? In the end, as Gov. Huckabee may or may not recall, the 101st Airborne Division, most of them "outsiders" not from Arkansas, had to be sent by a Republican president to integrate the schools of Little Rock. That was a lot of trouble and expense that the big-mouth rednecks put us all to, but it was worth it. It's insufferable to hear this glib idiot make a mockery of it now in order to try to get the Klan vote in South Carolina.
One might add a couple of other points. The political flag of the Confederacy—the so-called "Stars and Bars"—is one thing. The battle flag of the Confederate army, the most militant symbolic form that secession and slavery ever took, is quite another. Under this fiery cross of St. Andrew, the state of Pennsylvania was invaded and free Americans were rounded up and re-enslaved. Under this same cross, it was announced that any Union officer commanding freed-slave soldiers, or any of his men, would be executed if captured. (In other words, war crimes were boasted of in advance.) The 13 stars of the same flag include stars for two states—Kentucky and Missouri—that never did secede, and they thus express a clear ambition to conquer free and independent states. And this is the symbol that Huckabee, seeking to ingratiate himself with the lowest element and lowest common denominator, calls "your flag." You might as well do a cross-burning and have done with it, and we all know how the networks would react if some ignorant kids did that.
But when real political racism rears its head, our easily upset media fall oddly silent. Can you guess why? Of course you can. Gov. Huckabee is the self-anointed candidate of the simple and traditional Christian folk who hate smart-ass, educated, big-city types, and if you dare to attack him for his vulgarity and stupidity and bigotry, he will accuse you of prejudice in return. What he hopes is that his neo-Confederate sickness will become subsumed into easy chatter about his recipes for fried squirrel and his other folksy populist themes. (By the way, you owe it to yourselves to watch the exciting revelations about his squirrel-grilling past; and do examine his family Christmas card while you're at it.) But this drivel, it turns out, is all a slick cover for racist incitement, and it ought not to be given a free pass.
And not merely racist incitement. So slack is our grasp of history and principle that we seem unable to think of the Confederacy as other than "offensive" to blacks. But there are two Republican candidates in this election—the absurd and sinister Ron Paul being the other—who choose this crucial moment in our time to exalt those who attempted to destroy the Union by force, and those who solicited the help of foreign powers in order to do so, and whose treason led to the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Should their patriotism be questioned? I would say most definitely yes, and questioned repeatedly, at that, perhaps especially if they are seeking the nomination of the party of Lincoln.
In Washington, D.C., Gov. Huckabee has hired as smooth and silky a pair of big-city insiders as you could meet in a day's march: Ed Rollins and James Pinkerton. Elegant ornaments of many a past administration and many a well-heeled think tank (Pinkerton describes himself loftily as "a Burkean conservative and a Nixonian foreign-policy realist"), they know exactly what calculation lies behind their boss' smarmy appeals to the uneducated racists and losers and to the fools who believe that Adam and Eve were real (and recent) people. But do they endorse his street tactics as well? I, for one, would rather like to find out. Here's a genuine scandal about racism, and waddaya know? My great profession is absolutely determined to overlook it.
1.20.2008
We called this one a mile away
State complains about the flood of Mexicans into its towns will hurt their economy - the Mexican state of Sonora that is.
Several of our bloggers have discussed over the past few years that illegal immigration is a market problem - the demand is created by employers who will hire illegal immigrant workers, who are simply providing the supply. Cut the demand, by by actually punishing the employers, and the workers will stop coming. An Arizona law that will do just that has the adjacent state of Sonora all antsy because Mexican workers will come home if there are no jobs. Not a perfect solution, but a very sensible step in the right direction. No demand for illegal workers = no (or substantially less) illegal workers.
Several of our bloggers have discussed over the past few years that illegal immigration is a market problem - the demand is created by employers who will hire illegal immigrant workers, who are simply providing the supply. Cut the demand, by by actually punishing the employers, and the workers will stop coming. An Arizona law that will do just that has the adjacent state of Sonora all antsy because Mexican workers will come home if there are no jobs. Not a perfect solution, but a very sensible step in the right direction. No demand for illegal workers = no (or substantially less) illegal workers.
1.19.2008
This Pisses Me Off!
The New York Times compiled a list of all congressional earmarks that went to religious organizations since 1989. You will probably notice how the number increases as a certain anti-spending, anti-waste, pro-superstition party took over Congress and cut out "waste." Right....
1.17.2008
1.16.2008
I Anti-[Heart] Huckabee
I really hope that Huckabee wins the Republican nomination. I really do. Republicans need their crazy-ass, fundamentalist base to be electorally chastised.Huckabee sounds like the guy to get that done. Did you ever think a major contender for the President of the United States would ever say this:
"I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution," Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. "But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view."I wish I didn't know history; I wouldn't weep so much. Or have to write this note:
Dear John Galt,Brazil might be nice...
Where are we moving to again?
Sincerely,
Fucked Homo Who Only Wants To Be Left Alone
1.15.2008
MESSENGER Flyby of Mercury
At 2:04 p.m. EST MESSENGER skimmed 200 kilometers (124 miles) above the surface of Mercury in the first of three flybys of the planet. Initial indications from the radio signals indicate the spacecraft is still operating nominally. The first science data return from the flyby was received today, just minutes before the closest approach point with the planet, as planned. “The engineers and operators at the Deep Space Network (DSN) in Goldstone, Calif., in conjunction with engineers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., pulled off a tremendous feat, acquiring and locking onto the downlink signal from the spacecraft within seconds, providing the necessary Doppler measurements for the Radio Science team” said MESSENGER Mission Systems Engineer Eric Finnegan, of APL.“ The spacecraft is continuing to collect imagery and other scientific measurements from the planet as we now depart Mercury from the illuminated side, documenting for the first time the previously unseen surface of the planet.”
Tomorrow at noon EST, the spacecraft will turn back towards the Earth to start down-linking the on-board stored data. Measurements of this Doppler signal from the spacecraft will allow improve knowledge of Mercury’s gravity field.
Keeping a Rendezvous with Mercury
Between January 9 and 13, 2008, as the MESSENGER probe approached Mercury for its first flyby, the Narrow Angle Camera, part of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS), acquired a series of images of the planet in support of spacecraft navigation. These images have been put together as frames in a movie. The final frame of the movie has the highest spatial resolution (20 km/pixel, 12 miles/pixel) and was recorded when the spacecraft was at a distance of about 760,000 kilometers (470,000 miles) from Mercury. Mercury is about 4.880 kilometers (about 3,030 miles) in diameter.
As part of MESSENGER's flyby on January 14, MDIS will obtain high-resolution image sequences with the Narrow Angle Camera, and the Wide Angle Camera will collect images in eleven colors. The images will cover portions of the planet never before seen by spacecraft, as well as regions that were photographed by Mariner 10 in 1974 and 1975. The new data for the previously studied areas of Mercury will help scientists to interpret the data for the parts of the planet that MESSENGER will reveal for the first time.
1.14.2008
New game
I've been playing a new online game called Imperium Nova. Imperium Nova is a free text-driven browser-based multiplayer game of trade, diplomacy, subterfuge, warfare and exploration, set in a remote galaxy some time in the distant future. A new galaxy, Draco, just opened up and the starting emperor is my good firend Samuel Leighton Lair. Check it out, so far it's fun.
1.13.2008
Bourdain Update
New No Reservations Monday - Berlin at 9pm CST. I 've started checking his TravelChannel blog, from which I learned that, much to his chagrin, Cook's Tour is being shown on FoodTV on Tuesday's at 9:30pm. All Tony all-the-time.
1.11.2008
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