Month: January 2009

Republican Party: Stupid and Evil. Republican Party: Stupid and Evil. Republican Party: Stupid and Evil…

Dana Hunter

Whoda thunk it’d be so easy to put a screeching halt to the Cons?

Neuroscientists have demonstrated that repeatedly pairing one word or idea with another leads to changes in both the connections among neurons in the brain that represent those ideas and the readiness of those neurons to fire together, so that even those of us on the left do not realize that concepts like “bureaucracy” and “waste” are triggered unconsciously in our brains when someone mentions government.

All right, everybody, repeat after me:

Republican Party: Stupid and Evil. Republican Party: Stupid and Evil. Republican Party: Stupid and Evil…

Seriously, what else can you conclude about this bunch of assclowns? Since they can’t restrict birth control for everyone, they’re willing to just force unwanted pregnancies on poor women:

House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) appeared on “Meet the Press” yesterday, complaining about a proposed stimulus package. He noted, in particular, a proposal to spend “over $200 million for contraceptives.” He asked, “How will this fix an ailing economy?”

Apparently, the contraceptives proposal has become quite an issue for conservatives. It was the lead story on Drudge this morning, far-right blogs are all worked up, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was quizzed on the spending on ABC yesterday.

[snip]

As you might have guessed, it’s not quite as scandalous as conservatives would have you believe.

[T]he family-planning program that Pelosi supports expanding in the stimulus bill was created in 1972 under the leadership of Republican president Richard Nixon.

What’s being proposed is an expansion in the number of states that can use Medicaid money, with a federal match, to help low-income women prevent unwanted pregnancies. Of the 26 states that already have Medicaid waivers for family planning, eight are led by Republican governors (AL, FL, MS, SC, CA, LA, MN and RI — a ninth, MO, had a GOP governor until this past November). If this policy is truly a taxpayer gift to “the abortion industry,” as John Boehner and House Republicans claim, where are the GOP governors promising to end the program in their states?

They’re lying little shits:

In staking out their opposition to the economic recovery package, conservatives have been peddling a variety of myths. One of their favorites is that taxpayers will pay $275,000 for every new job:

Rep. John Boehner (R-OH): All told, the plan would spend a whopping $275,000 in taxpayer dollars for every new job it aims to create, saddling each and every household with $6,700 in additional debt.

[snip]

As Scott Lilly pointed out, the actual cost per job is closer to $50,000, without taking into account the “substantial number of additional jobs [created] beyond 2012.” And even if the conservatives’ number was anywhere close to accurate, their proposed job creation program — tax cuts — would cost more than three times as much per job. As Christian Weller and John Halpin found, “even under the most optimistic assumptions about the relationship between tax cuts and jobs,” President Bush’s 2001 tax cut cost $871,000 for every job created.

(That’s just rich, innit? You don’t hear them screaming over the fact that Bush’s “job creation” plan cost nearly four fucking times as much as even their made-up number for the current stimulus. Sniveling little shitheads.)

They don’t live up to their own double standards:

I remember when Alberto Gonzales’ confirmation hearings were underway, conservatives like Rush Limbaugh took to the airwaves to decry the racism of those liberals who dared oppose him.

Now the shoe’s on the other foot. Even though most of Barack Obama’s nominations have sailed through confirmation hearings and votes with alacrity, there’s one notable exception — Hilda Solis, Obama’s pick as Labor Secretary:

The confirmation of Rep. Hilda Solis, D-El Monte, as President Barack Obama’s Labor secretary has been delayed because of Republican objections.

Democrats have announced that a Republican senator is using a parliamentary procedure to delay Solis’ confirmation, the Washington paper Congress Daily reported Friday.

And they think they should get a free pass for war crimes:

Chris Wallace frames the following question on torture as to whether anyone at a lower level should be prosecuted as opposed to anyone in the Bush administration who ordered the torture. McCain follows right along with Wallace in his answer and only talks about those at the lower level in the CIA who followed the orders and not those they
were taking orders from, and says we need to “move on”.

(That’s rich, John. I’ll remember that if I ever end up in trouble with the law. “I was just following orders, just like the Nazis, Officer. Seriously, I think we just need to move on here.”)

And this is all from just three blogs on one single fucking day. I haven’t mentioned the relentless horrors of the last eight years. I shouldn’t have to, now, should I?

If anyone takes a lesson away from this mess, it should be this: Cons should never, ever in a billion zillion years be allowed to run anything more important than a bake sale, and that only if it’s raising money for the high school football team’s jockstrap fund. We sure as shit wouldn’t want to let these lying, thieving, torturing sons of bitches near a fundraiser for someone suffering from cancer. That would be as wrong as letting them get their grubby hands all over our government again.

So, my darlings, let’s put neuroscience to work for the greater good of this country. Repeat after me:

Republican Party: Stupid and Evil. Republican Party: Stupid and Evil. Republican Party: Stupid and Evil…

Republican Party: Stupid and Evil. Republican Party: Stupid and Evil. Republican Party: Stupid and Evil…
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Happy Hour Discurso

Dana Hunter

Today’s opining on the public discourse.

John Boehner’s stupidity continues to impress:

Congressional Republicans have reportedly “taken issue with the large chunk of funding in the stimulus package — some $300 billion all told — that will go to shore up the budgets of states.” Matt Yglesias notes how ridiculous this is.

I’m pretty impressed with John Boehner’s ability to zero in like a laser on the least-defensible possible position…. In the serious-people universe, [assisting with state budgets] is the least controversial form of federal outlay. The idea is merely to prevent overall public spending from dropping too precipitously at a time when state budget cuts would have a contractionary impact. […]

One of the privileges of opposition, of course, is that you don’t really need to take responsibility for the consequences of your views. So if Boehner wants to take this line, nothing will really stop him or pull him back to planet earth. But it should be seen for what it is.

Abject stupidity. Indeed.

I suspect he believes he can get away with it because the media is so very impressed:

If you ever need an example of how the media swallows whole every right wing talking point, here it is. Norah O’Donnell uses John Boehner talking points about “contraception” to attack President Obama’s stimulus plan as if it’s the absolute truth. And of course everything else that republicans don’t want in the bill is just plain old pork.

Norah: With all due respect isn’t that a bunch of pork in here and how is that exactly stimulus?

I take your point Congressman. but go ahead and answer what Congressman Boehner said. How can you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives. How does that stimulate the economy?

Well, let me ask you that then, do you think 200 million dollars essentially contraceptives is wasteful spending?
You get my point, (scowl on her face) there is going to be since this is over 800 billion dollars there’s going to be a lot in there that people are going to raise questions about in the long run about wasteful spending, whether it’s democrats efforts just to HUGE massive, unprecedented spending bill to put stuff and get stuff paid for that they haven’t been successful or paid for in the past.

She even used the now discredited talking point about the CBO. Now we have a real CBO report that says: CBO Report Confirms Economic Recovery Act Provides Immediate Stimulus to Help Create Jobs.

It didn’t matter what answer Chris Van Hollen gave Norah, she wasn’t buying it. Suddenly John Boehner is a source of incredibly non partisan information.

What did we do, empty the world’s villages of their idiots to staff our national media? Check out how many times they’ve been citing a thoroughly debunked report:

Last Tuesday, the AP reported on a leaked Congressional Budget Office (CBO) “analysis” that had concluded that “it will take years before an infrastructure spending program proposed” by President Barack Obama “will boost the economy.” Conservatives, such as House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), quickly pounced on the story, claiming the CBO had proved that “government spending isn’t going to get our economy back on track.”

After the AP first wrote up the “report,” the rest of the media piled on the story. In a new analysis, ThinkProgress has found that since the AP’s report last Tuesday, the CBO report has been cited at least 81 times on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, the Sunday shows and the network newscasts in order raise questions about Obama’s recovery plan.

[snip]

As the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim and the American Prospect’s Tim Fernholz reported last Friday, the CBO report being touted by conservatives and the media isn’t an actual report. “We did not issue any report, any analysis or any study,” a CBO aide told the Huffington Post.
It takes a special kind of idiocy to cite a non-existent report over eighty times. Political journalism in this country is dead.

And Faux News is threatening to break the mold on dumbfuckery:

Since President Obama’s announcement last week that he would shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention center within one year, Fox News has done its best to frighten its viewers about the rule…

[snip]

Rep. Jack Murtha (D-PA) said last week that the U.S. could hold the detainees in federal prisons, just like we hold thousands of other dangerous inmates. This morning, Fox and Friends responded by sending a reporter to Murtha’s district to flash photos of suspected terrorists — their only identification being Muslim headgear — and ask residents, “Would you want a guy like this living in your backyard?”
Strangely enough, they’re not going to be living in our backyards, unless your actual back yard happens to contain a Supermax prison and you tend to have the inmates over for tea and cookies on a regular basis. Dumbasses. And yet, as Think Progress points out in that post, they somehow manage to get even more stupid:

Later in the segment, the Fox hosts repeated some of the right wing’s favorite myths about Guantanamo. They endorsed the “great idea” conservatives have been pushing of sending detainees to Alcatraz or a “haunted” prison in West Virginia:

CLAYTON MORRIS: We’ve got Alcatraz that exists. We give tours out there. Put them out on an island on Alcatraz, which is under our jurisdiction. What about Moundsville State Penitentiary? Someone from West Virginia wrote me and said it’s a haunted prison. It’s vacant.

In other words, Fox News and the right wing would prefer to send Guantanamo detainees to theme parks rather than to maximum-security federal prisons.

Ye fucking gods.

I need to go lie down with an icepack. The relentless dumbassery is giving me a migraine.

Happy Hour Discurso

Out o' the Taverns and On Board, Ye Scurvy Dogs!

Dana Hunter1 Comment


This be our treasure chest for this month’s sailing. It be nearly empty.

We can’t have a sailing w’out sailors, as I’m sure ye know. And while Obama’s a bloody good leader, I know he didn’t scuttle ignorance in his first week. The world still needs its Elitist Bastards! So get those submissions in by Friday.

Out o' the Taverns and On Board, Ye Scurvy Dogs!

Pope Palpatine Extends the Hand of Peace to Rabid Anti-Semites

Dana Hunter

I’m sure plenty of people will blabber about healing, reconciliation, and all that rot, but all I’m seeing here is an attempt to return things to the good ol’ days before that bleeding-heart liberal John Paul II put a stop to all the bigoted fun:

A lot of people were concerned when an arch-conservative like Cardinal Ratzinger was named the pope, but I don’t think any of us imagined that he would be soon playing footsie with some of Catholicism’s most prominent anti-Semites — namely, the Society of St. Pius X.

From the Catholic Reporter:

Papal reconciliation move will stir controversy

In a gesture billed as an “act of peace,” but one destined both to fire intra-Catholic debate about the meaning of the Second Vatican Council and to open a new front in Jewish/Catholic tensions, the Vatican today formally lifted a twenty-year-old excommunication imposed on four bishops who broke with Rome in protest over the liberalizing reforms of Vatican II (1962-65).

Ironically, news of the move came just one day before the 50th anniversary of the announcement by Pope John XXIII of his intention to call Vatican II.

[snip]

What none of these news accounts observe is that the problem with St. Pius X isn’t just that it has some kooky leaders, but that their rejection of Vatican II prominently includes their rejection of one of its most important reforms — namely, the longtime Catholic belief in the “blood libel” that Jews were guilty of deicide for having ostensibly killed Jesus. In fact, these Catholics openly trumpet their belief that the Jews are responsible for Christ’s crucifixion.

[snip]

As the SPLC reported:

It is in The Angelus, published monthly by the SSPX press, and on SSPX’s website, that the radical anti-Semitism of the order is most evident today. One example now on the website is a 1997 Angelus article by SSPX priests Michael Crowdy and Kenneth Novak that calls for locking Jews into ghettos because “Jews are known to kill Christians.” It also blames Jews for the French Revolution, communism and capitalism; suggests a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy has destroyed the Catholic Church; and describes Judaism as “inimical to all nations.”

Another document reproduced on the SSPX’s current website is a 1959 letter from Lefebvre’s close friend, Bishop Gerald Sigaud, who also rejected the Vatican II reforms. “Money, the media, and international politics are for a large part in the hands of Jews,” Bishop Sigaud wrote. “Those who have revealed the atomic secrets of the USA were … all Jews. The founders of communism were Jews.”

Not one fucking word to me about morality, Rat-boy. Not. One. Word.

Pope Palpatine Extends the Hand of Peace to Rabid Anti-Semites

Can Obama Save Journalism?

Dana Hunter

Maybe if he follows Kevin Drum’s excellent advice:

Gossip and chatter have always been part of politics, of course, but over the past decade or two, at the same time that gossip has practically taken over political journalism, it’s gotten so inane that it’s hard to tell where Access Hollywood ends and Hardball begins. It’s nearly impossible to turn on a talk show on any of the cable nets these days and hear anything that’s even remotely enlightening.

And I’ll bet McQuaid is right: it probably bugs the hell out of a guy like Obama who takes politics and policy seriously. When he said in his inaugural address that “the time has come to set aside childish things,” I wouldn’t be surprised if he was addressing the media directly.

So how does he work to change things? McQuaid warns that tightly controlling media access the way George Bush did isn’t the answer, and I agree. Instead, I’d say that he should send a consistent message about the value of serious journalism by providing the best access to the most serious journalists. Not the ones who are the most famous, or have the biggest audiences, or who agree with him the most often, but the ones who have written or aired the sharpest, liveliest, most substantive, most penetrating critiques of what he and his administration are doing. He should spar with them, he should engage with them, he should take their ideas seriously. Eventually, others will start to get the message: if you want to get presidential attention, you need to say something smart. It’s too late to for this to have any effect on media buffoons like Maureen Dowd or Chris Matthews, but you never know. It might encourage a few of the others to grow up. It’s worth a try, anyway.

At this point, anything would. There’s a damned good reason I rarely turn on the teevee or crack open a magazine – the flood of inanity that pours out is enough to drown a stronger swimmer than I.

Dday has the rundown of the Sunday morning talk shows. T’ain’t pretty:

The Sunday talk shows were filled with conservatives (it really is a new era on Sunday mornings, isn’t it?) trashing the Obama recovery plan and demanding more concessions in exchange for their votes, despite the fact that they have almost no leverage in the Congress.

You know what? I need a drink. I’ll even take one of those fake margaritas at this point. I just hope to hell that Obama takes Kevin’s advice. It would be a simple way to try to coax a smidgen of actual journalism out of these assclowns.

Can Obama Save Journalism?

Happy Hour Discurso

Dana Hunter1 Comment

Today’s opining on the public discourse.

We already had a feel for how dramatically incompetent the Bush regime was, but we knew that as Obama took office and the crannies were poked into, we’d discover more. This truly takes the breath away:

Upon announcing his plan to close the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Barack Obama also began a process that would review the case files for every detainee. The problem for the new administration, however, is that there are no files.

President Obama’s plans to expeditiously determine the fates of about 245 terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and quickly close the military prison there were set back last week when incoming legal and national security officials — barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees — discovered that there were no comprehensive case files on many of them.

Instead, they found that information on individual prisoners is “scattered throughout the executive branch,” a senior administration official said. The executive order Obama signed Thursday orders the prison closed within one year, and a Cabinet-level panel named to review each case separately will have to spend its initial weeks and perhaps months scouring the corners of the federal government in search of relevant material.

Several former Bush administration officials agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner. They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and that the Bush administration’s focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority.

These people are un-fucking-real. They were so busy torturing they couldn’t bother gathering evidence for prosecution. They must have had some fantasy that they could just keep people locked away forever without doing a damned thing other than degrading them.

It’s no wonder our economy’s in such a wretched mess. Oh, and the next time some idiot of a Con tells you how great everything was under Bush, you might want to remind them that we haven’t seen a president this bad since Hoover:

On Friday, the New York Times provided a jaw-dropping analysis of the dismal state of the economy under George W. Bush. Just days after the Washington Post documented that Bush presided over the worst eight-year economic performance in the modern American presidency, the Times charted his historic failure in expanding GDP, producing jobs and fueling stock market growth. As it turns out, Bush is just the latest Republican to confirm the maxim that Wall Street and the economy overall almost always do better under Democratic presidents.

As the Times revealed (article here, charts here), the only bright spot for the first MBA president’s economic mismanagement was the low inflation rate during his tenure:

During his administration, the country grew at the slowest overall pace of any recent president, whether measured in gross domestic product or employment. The last president to preside while the stock market did worse was Herbert Hoover…

…President Bush’s administration was marked by a recession that began two months after he took office and another downturn in his final year of office. In the end, the economy during his term added enough jobs to employ only 14 percent of the added number of working-age Americans, the lowest proportion of any postwar administration. Employment grew at a compound annual rate of only 0.3 percent, half the 0.6 percent rate that his father had recorded in what had previously been the worst post-World War II performance.

For the investor class so fond of perpetuating the myth of Republicans’ superior economic stewardship, the collapse of the stock marketing during the Bush recession must be particularly galling. The Standard & Poor’s 500 spiraled down at annual rate of 5.6% during Bush’s time in the Oval Office, a disaster even worse than Richard Nixon’s abysmal 4.0% yearly decline. (Only Herbert Hoover’s cataclysmic 31% plunge makes Bush look good in comparison.)

The article goes on to explain in some detail, with plenty of evidence, that Dems do the economy right, and Cons leave it in tatters. Not that this will matter to people so disconnected from reality as to still support Cons, but at least it might reach those who just didn’t know any better.

In other stupid Con news, McCain’s flip-flopping didn’t stop with the spectacular fail of his campaign:

Today on Fox News Sunday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said that he would not support the stimulus plan in its current form. With the help of host Chris Wallace, McCain criticized infrastructure spending, specifically singling out a plan to expand internet access to rural communities:

MCCAIN: There’s got to be some kind of litmus as to whether it’ll really stimulate the economy and whether it will in the short-term. Some of the stimulus in this package is excellent; some of it, frankly, has nothing to do — some of the projects and others that you just mentioned, $6 billion for broadband and internet access. That will take years.

[snip]

Expanding broadband was also a major part of his presidential campaign. Speaking last April in Inez, KY, McCain emphasized that “government has a role to play” to makes sure “every community” has access to high-speed internet — and that it was key to driving innovation:

MCCAIN: In particular, through access to high-speed Internet services that facilitate interstate commerce, drive innovation, and promote educational achievements, there is the potential to change lives. These kinds of transformations of our way of life require the infrastructure of modern communication, and government has a role to play in assuring every community in America can develop that infrastructure. This country has a long history of ensuring that rural areas have the same access to communication technology as other places.

Still a raging idiot, I see. Quelle surprise.

By the way, if anyone tells you America is a center-right nation, cite this Gallup poll and tell them to go fuck themselves with a fork:

But the numbers I found even more interesting were released Friday, measuring party identification. Based on all 2008 polling, 36% of Americans describe themselves as Democrats, while 28% identify as Republicans. The eight-point gap is “the largest for the Democratic Party
since Gallup began regularly conducting its polls by telephone in 1988.”

When the poll includes those who “lean” toward one party or the other, the gap is even larger: 52% back Democrats, 40% back Republicans. This is not only the third consecutive year in which Democrats held a majority, but it’s also the “best showing for the Democrats — in terms of both the percentage of Democratic supporters and their advantage over Republicans — since Gallup began regularly tracking this measure of party support in 1991.”

Dems are in. Cons are out. America’s finished with them fucking up the country. Eventually, the Cons may even comprehend this reality and start acting like responsible adults.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Happy Hour Discurso

Sunday Sensational Science

Dana Hunter3 Comments
Completely gratuitous picture of Michio Kaku


Outstanding Science Authors

As an SF author trying to grasp enough science to make her world work, I’ve read a crapton of science books. Some of them have been meh, some mkay, and some teh awesome. There are authors whose books I return to endlessly, not merely because of the science, but because of the way they wield their words. They’re not only scientists, but prose poets. They get across the grandeur and excitement of science. They delight in the absurd and bask in the beautiful. They make me think, but more than that, they make me dream.

I’ll introduce you to a few of them today. They’ve not only written books, but articles worth reading.

One of the most important things scientists can do is popularize it, bring it within the grasp of people without degrees. These authors have done that. We owe ’em one.

Steven Pinker, experimental psychologist, Harvard University

During one of my many extravaganzas in the local used bookstore, I ran across a book called The Language Instinct. I’d fallen in love with linguistics because of Tolkien, and here was a man who explored the evolution of language. Brilliant! The book came home with me. And I know I’ll probably hear screams from those of you who think evolutionary psychology is so much bunkum, but I enjoyed it immensely. Steven’s subject matter isn’t simple, but he makes it seem so. He’s got a wonderful sense of humor and rapier-sharp insight. One of my favorite lines comes from another book of his, The Blank Slate: “It is precisely because one act can balance ten thousand kind ones that we call it ‘evil’.” Say what you will about evolutionary psychology, but he’s speaking absolute truth there.

I found two fascinating articles by Steven. In “My Genome, My Self“, he takes us on a whirlwind tour of what genes mean to personality, and then his adventure in personal genome sequencing:

Our genes are a big part of what we are. But even knowing the totality of genetic predictors, there will be many things about ourselves that no genome scan — and for that matter, no demographic checklist — will ever reveal. With these bookends in mind, I rolled up my sleeve, drooled into a couple of vials and awaited the results of three analyses of my DNA.

Then he provokes some thought by exploring “The Moral Instinct.” This one might be of enormous good use in debates with frothing fundies.

Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist, City College of New York

Working at the bookstore brings a lot of books to your attention you might not have noticed otherwise. Such was the case with Beyond Einstein. What did this guy mean, beyond Einstein? Who could possibly be beyond Einstein?

Such was my introduction to string theory. And I fell in love. I understand it even less than I understand quantum mechanics, but damn it, Michio makes it exciting. He takes you right out on the cutting edge, and sends you careening through realms of possibility you didn’t even know exist. Beyond Einstein? You betcha! Or at least, there’s the possibility we’re getting closer to that Theory of Everything Einstein spent the rest of his life pursuing.

Michio also wrote a book called Visions, which is an absolute boon to an SF writer who has a little trouble extrapolating the possibilities for the future. He’s got a lot more books out there, all of them intriguing, all of them bringing incredibly complex subjects within the reach of ordinary folk.

His excitement about the cosmos continues to bubble over as he advises NASA to “Follow the Methane!”

The recent discovery of methane on Mars is more than a curiousity. It could be a game changer.

For the last three decades, NASA’s Mars exploration program has been based on a single mantra: Follow the water. Where there is water, there might be life. So far, this strategy has come up empty handed. But now, NASA might have to change course and follow the methane.

Seems like good advice to me.

Oliver Sacks, neurologist, New York City

I had no idea what to think of a book with a title like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Written by a man whose last name was Sacks, no less. I shelved copies of it many times before intrigue finally got the better of me and I finally bought the thing.

And I was in another world.

Oliver explores damaged minds, showing us the bizarre and fascinating things that happen when the wetware is nonfunctional (h/t Connie Willis). And he does it with glorious warmth, compassion, and wonder. This is a man who adores his work, adores the people he works with, and helps us view even the most damaged people as individuals who are more than the sum of their disorder. And the man who mistook his wife for a hat? Visual agnosia, brought on by a brain tumor.

In “The Abyss,” Sacks discusses music, amnesia, and a profoundly amnesiac musician named Clive:

Though one cannot have direct knowledge of one’s own amnesia, there may be ways to infer it: from the expressions on people’s faces when one has repeated something half a dozen times; when one looks down at one’s coffee cup and finds that it is empty; when one looks at one’s diary and sees entries in one’s own handwriting. Lacking memory, lacking direct experiential knowledge, amnesiacs have to make hypotheses and inferences, and they usually make plausible ones. They can infer that they have been doing something, been somewhere, even though they cannot recollect what or where. Yet Clive, rather than making plausible guesses, always came to the conclusion that he had just been “awakened,” that he had been “dead.” This seemed to me a reflection of the almost instantaneous effacement of perception for Clive—thought itself was almost impossible within this tiny window of time. Indeed, Clive once said to Deborah, “I am completely incapable of thinking.”


Richard Fortey, paleontologist, London

When I was studying plate tectonics, I ran across a book called Earth: an Intimate History. And intimate it is. It reads more like a biography than geology, although you come away knowing more about geology than you’d ever imagined you could. The Alps take on a completely different meaning when you know how they formed. You discover that England and America have far more in common than our political history: the Appalachians were once part of Scotland. Other wonders await. I don’t think I’ve ever quite been so absorbed by geology. Richard Fortey turns out to be one hell of a biographer.

He’s also an enthusiastic fossil man, having written more than one book regarding life on earth. In the following YouTube video, he introduces us to his favorite fossil:

And in “The Ego and the ID,” he gives Intelligent Design the thorough spanking it deserves.

I can assure you from experience that the authors I’ve explored here are well worth savoring. Here are two that I haven’t yet had the pleasure of settling in with yet, but plan to in the very near future:

In “The Beasts Within,” University of Chicago paleontologist Neil Shubin explores what made him fall in love with his inner beasties:

I’ve come to love my inner fish. My inner worm, jellyfish and sponge too. And I can tell you exactly when I first recognized this infatuation: in September 2003, the year I was pressed into teaching human anatomy to first-year medical students at the University of Chicago.

And astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson gives us “The Cosmic Perspective” and reminds us not to forget each other as we pursue the stars:

Yet the cosmic view comes with a hidden cost. When I travel thousands of miles to spend a few moments in the fast-moving shadow of the Moon during a total solar eclipse, sometimes I lose sight of Earth.

You know what, Neil? I think Professor Fortney can help you with that.

Sunday Sensational Science

Torture Advocates Will Be Disappointed

Dana Hunter

These people are unreal:

Yesterday, President Obama signed an executive order banning the use of torture in all military and CIA interrogations of suspected terrorists. The order specifically revoked the legal memos written by the Bush administration to justify the use of torture on detainees.

Today, the Wall Street Journal editorializes that Obama “wants to have it both ways on torture,” saying he will ban it but simultaneously carve out legal loopholes for coercive techniques to be used in an emergency:

The unfine print of Mr. Obama’s order is that he’s allowed room for what might be called a Jack Bauer exception. It creates a committee to study whether the Field Manual techniques are too limiting “when employed by departments or agencies outside the military.” The Attorney General, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Director of National Intelligence-designate Dennis Blair will report back and offer “additional or different guidance for other departments or agencies.” […]

The “special task force” may well grant the CIA more legal freedom to squeeze information out of terrorists when it could keep the country safe.

Despite the Wall Street Journal’s foreboding intonations, Obama made it clear yesterday that the era of coercive interrogations had come to an end. Speaking to the State Department he said firmly, “I can say without exception or equivocation that the United States will not torture.”

That’s it. Zip, nada, zilch, none. No matter how much the fearmongers on the right wish it were otherwise, Obama’s not going to carve out loopholes, or play semantics to pretend the torture the U.S. is engaging in isn’t really torture. And, just in case there was any doubt as to that point, Sen. Diane Feinstein is all ready with some legislation to sew up any loopholes remaining:

As I noted here yesterday, human rights advocates think that the executive order outlawing torture that President Obama signed yesterday preserves some wiggle room, because it also appoints a task force to determine whether the techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual are appropriate to the task of keeping the nation safe.

Well, it turns out that others have reached this conclusion, too. The ranking Democratic Senator on the intel committee is now working on ways to stitch up this apparent loophole:

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the committee, said that despite the executive orders she still planned to press for legislation mandating a single standard for military and C.I.A. interrogators. Such a law would be harder to reverse than Mr. Obama’s executive order, which he could alter or cancel at any time by issuing a new order.

“I think that ultimately the government is well served by codifying it, by having it in law,” Mrs. Feinstein said.

It’ll be interesting to see how the Obama administration reacts to such legislation, should it gain steam.

It’ll be far more interesting to see how the rabid right reacts. I wonder if they’ll finally have a complete psychotic break?

Oh, right. They already did. They just haven’t been committed yet.

And in case you were wondering how the professionals feel about Obama’s new direction, David Danzig has our answer:

Interrogators are lauding President Obama for signing an executive order that will shut down secret CIA prisons and place the use of coercive interrogation techniques completely off limits.

“[The order] closes an unconscionable period in our history, in which those who knew least, professed to know most about interrogations,” said Joe Navarro, a former special agent and supervisor with the FBI.

“Some die-hards on the right — who have never interrogated anyone — are already arguing that forcing interrogations to be conducted within army field manual guidelines is a step backward and will result in ‘coddling’ dangerous terrorists,” retired Colonel Stuart Herrington, who served for more than 30 years as a military intelligence officer, said soon after the order was signed. “This is a common, but uninformed view. Experienced, well-trained, professional interrogators know that interrogation is an art. It is a battle of wits, not muscle. It is a challenge that can be accomplished within the military guidelines without resorting to brutality.”

Read that article for an inside look on how torture provides useless, bullshit intel, and how a smart, humane approach to interrogation led to the capture of Sadaam Hussein and allowed us to locate and kill al-Zarqawi.

I know the fucktards on the right think 24’s more realistic than the situations actual investigators have faced in the really real world, but you know what? They can go fuck themselves with a serving fork.

Obama won. They lost. Torture’s over.

Torture Advocates Will Be Disappointed

Remembering What I Loved

Dana Hunter4 Comments

Socializing IRL was rather a bit of a shock. I live one of those semi-hermetic lives in which I’m perfectly happy home alone, but even hermits need to kick up their heels every once in a while.

Won’t be at the Rodeo Steakhouse again, though. Who the fuck makes a margarita with Jack Daniels? And then they started blaring really awful country and western at us. It’s a good thing we were close to home, and the roomie was gone. Alas for my poor friend, he got to go waltzing down memory lane with me. Yup. I busted out the photo albums.

It was initially because we’re going to Arizona, and I was showing him some of the places we’d be visiting. Wupatki National Monument and Sunset Crater. The San Francisco Peaks. Places where I roamed happily through all the years of my young life. I’d subject you to those pics, too, but alas, they are not digital, and Dana has no scanner. Dana is not only a hermit, but technologically impoverished.

I left home because I’d fallen out of love. Sometimes, to love a place again, you have to leave it. Spend some years elsewhere. Now, the irritating memories are faded, and the fun ones bubble to the surface. Running flat-out over the slickrock along a mesa in Page, with nothing between me and a 100-foot fall but a ledge four inches wide and a tenuous grip on sandstone. Standing on the side of a mountain surrounded by golden aspens and gazing out over miles of wilderness in the clear Arizona skies. Roaming the rooms of ruins, wondering what it was like to live in such small spaces.

There are things I miss. Strangely, dry dirt looms foremost in my mind. I love the sound of my shoes grating through gritty soil and rock as I roam. Northern Arizona’s a place built from volcanoes. You can feel it when you run the earth through your hands. You see it all around you, in the cinder cones, the andesitic peaks, the ridge lines and the lava flows. There is a particular place at Sunset Crater where you can stand and stare into the heart of the caldera that splits the San Francisco Peaks. There is nothing like gazing into that beauty and realizing it resulted from catastrophic destruction. If there were people living there when the mountain erupted, they must have been mightily impressed.

I miss the demarcation between alpine climes and the desert. One side of the Sunset Crater/Wupatki National Monument is all Ponderosa pine. In just a few miles, you pass through juniper and piñon pine trees, and then, abruptly, the high desert looms. This Nasa Earth Observatory satellite image will give you some idea: we’re looking northeast, from the pines to the Painted Desert:


For an absolutely spectacular aerial view of Sunset Crater with the desert on the horizon, go here.

All of this awesome stuff used to be my back yard. I could roam ancient plate boundaries, see the remnants of ancient underwater eruptions and seas, visit dinosaur tracks, wander at will through forests, deserts and plains – all without driving more than an hour or two from home.

Those were the good things. I do remember the bad as well – Northern Arizona has very little in the way of big-city culture, and Phoenix is, well, Phoenix. I definitely prefer Seattle. And it’s nice not to feel dessicated all the time.

But I loves me my original home state. It’ll be teh awesome to go adventuring there again. I especially can’t wait to tramp through Wupatki one more time.

What about you lot? Any nostalgia for the places you’ve left behind, or are you of the “ran away and never looked back” persuasion? And do you believe it’s at all right for a restaurant to offer up a margarita that contains not one drop of tequila?

Remembering What I Loved