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Untitled

2010-01-16T12:30:00.001-05:00

Sent from my iPhone

Posted via email from bdolan's posterous

Untitled

2009-12-20T08:32:00.001-05:00

Sent from my iPhone

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Boston Beer Co's Utopias Illegal in 13 States

2009-11-30T11:50:00.001-05:00

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/11/30/utopias_pushes_new_limits_on_extreme_beer/

The maker of Samuel Adams beer has released an updated version of its biennial beer Utopias -- now the highest alcohol content beer on the market. At 27 percent alcohol by volume and $150 a bottle, the limited release of the brandy-colored Utopias comes as more brewers take advantage of improvements in science to boost potency and enhance taste.

"Just part of trying to push the envelope," said Jim Koch, founder and owner of the Boston Beer Co. the maker of Sam Adams. "I'm pushing it beyond what the laws of these 13 states ever contemplated when they passed those laws decades ago."

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DJIA priced in Gold

2009-11-12T09:09:00.001-05:00

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DJIA priced in Gold

2009-11-12T09:05:00.001-05:00

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3d printing with Shrinkydinks

2009-11-11T06:23:00.001-05:00

http://www.technologyreview.com/TR35/Profile.aspx?Cand=T&TRID=764

Racking her brain for a quick-and-dirty way to make microfluidic devices, Khine remembered her favorite childhood toy: Shrinky Dinks, large sheets of thin plastic that can be colored with paint or ink and then shrunk in a hot oven. "I thought if I could print out the [designs] at a certain resolution and then make them shrink, I could make channels the right size for microfluidics," she says.

To test her idea, she whipped up a channel design in AutoCAD, printed it out on Shrinky Dink material using a laser printer, and stuck the result in a toaster oven. As the plastic shrank, the ink particles on its surface clumped together, forming tiny ridges. That was exactly the effect Khine wanted. When she poured a flexible polymer known as PDMS onto the surface of the cooled Shrinky Dink, the ink ridges created tiny channels in the surface of the polymer as it hardened. She pulled the PDMS away from the Shrinky Dink mold, and voilà: a finished microfluidic device that cost less than a fast-food meal.

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Jobless rates for people like you

2009-11-10T21:26:00.001-05:00

Explore the disparity in joblessness in the current recession:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/economy/unemployment-lines.html

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Early color film of London

2009-11-09T06:38:00.001-05:00

1927 demo film of a new color process:

(via boingboing)

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Rent-a-goat

2009-10-28T16:59:00.001-04:00

That’s right, rather than spending tons of money and time on diesel-powered machines, filing the proper permits, and administering dangerous herbicides, the Seattle-based Rent-a-Ruminant organization will loan your a team of 100 goats for all your brush-clearing needs—all at a very modest rates.

http://www.good.is/post/rental-goats-clear-brush-better-beat-cosmonauts-in-space-race/

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Focusing on the Ordinary

2009-10-21T14:47:00.001-04:00

From http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/focus-on-ordinary.html

"A common idea is that outliers are more important than averages, as this is the them of Taleb's Black Swan, or Gladwell's Outliers. Predicting one great outlier is worth predicting many ordinary outcomes, so on one hand it seems like an optimal focus. Also, the outliers should highlight the essence of something. A stock that has risen 10 fold, or a great athlete, supposedly lays bare the essence of its greatness.

But I think we forget how biased our view is on exceptional events and people. We watch sports and learn about Usain Bolt, a most unusual man. Or my kids read the Guiness Book of World Records, containing stories about 1200 lb men and giant frogs. News is biased towards the exceptional, it takes no effort to emphasize it. In fact, it takes effort to see the ordinary. It's too bad people think of heroes as those who, for a brief moment, offered their life in some battle or harrowing situation, compared to the much more common heroism of providing one's family, not complaining, and being charitable to friends and neighbors, for decades."

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Schmalz

2009-10-21T08:02:00.001-04:00

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Maine WWII Vet on Marriage Equality

2009-10-21T07:03:00.001-04:00

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/20/86-year-old-wwii-vet.html

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Amazon introduces same-day delivery service in select cities

2009-10-15T14:38:00.001-04:00

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/15/amazoncom-introduces-same-day-delivery/

"If an eligible item is ordered between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. (depending
on the city) Amazon will have it delivered on the same day. To start
out, the e-commerce giant is rolling out the service in seven cities -
New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, Baltimore, Las Vegas and
Seattle. (With Chicago, Indianapolis and Phoenix to come soon)."

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Awesome letter from Berlin

2009-10-14T18:32:00.001-04:00

...typewitten and illuminated

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2009 Malibu vs 1959 Bel Air Crash Test

2009-09-30T11:30:00.001-04:00

http://video.consumerreports.org/services/player/bcpid1078549944?bctid=41311737001

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El Perro Del Mar - Change of Heart

2009-09-20T08:58:00.001-04:00

Change Of Heart by El Perro Del Mar
Download now or listen on posterous

El Perro del Mar - Change of Heart.mp3 (4859 KB)

Promo for the upcoming release from Swedish solo act El Perro Del Mar, aka Sarah Assbring.

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Failures of the invisible hand

2009-09-18T13:01:00.001-04:00

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/13/why_capitalism_fails/?page=full

Minsky called his idea the “Financial Instability Hypothesis.” In the wake of a depression, he noted, financial institutions are extraordinarily conservative, as are businesses. With the borrowers and the lenders who fuel the economy all steering clear of high-risk deals, things go smoothly: loans are almost always paid on time, businesses generally succeed, and everyone does well. That success, however, inevitably encourages borrowers and lenders to take on more risk in the reasonable hope of making more money. As Minsky observed, “Success breeds a disregard of the possibility of failure.”

As people forget that failure is a possibility, a “euphoric economy” eventually develops, fueled by the rise of far riskier borrowers - what he called speculative borrowers, those whose income would cover interest payments but not the principal; and those he called “Ponzi borrowers,” those whose income could cover neither, and could only pay their bills by borrowing still further. As these latter categories grew, the overall economy would shift from a conservative but profitable environment to a much more freewheeling system dominated by players whose survival depended not on sound business plans, but on borrowed money and freely available credit.

Once that kind of economy had developed, any panic could wreck the market. The failure of a single firm, for example, or the revelation of a staggering fraud could trigger fear and a sudden, economy-wide attempt to shed debt. This watershed moment - what was later dubbed the “Minsky moment” - would create an environment deeply inhospitable to all borrowers. The speculators and Ponzi borrowers would collapse first, as they lost access to the credit they needed to survive. Even the more stable players might find themselves unable to pay their debt without selling off assets; their forced sales would send asset prices spiraling downward, and inevitably, the entire rickety financial edifice would start to collapse. Businesses would falter, and the crisis would spill over to the “real” economy that depended on the now-collapsing financial system.

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Big gay beatdown in Moscow

2007-05-27T14:21:00.001-04:00

from cnn:

Russian police detained gay protesters calling for the right to hold a Gay Pride parade in central Moscow on Sunday while nationalists shouting "death to homosexuals" punched and kicked the demonstrators.

Cypripedium acaule

2007-05-27T14:01:00.001-04:00

Cypripedium acaule
Originally uploaded by bd2k+

The pink lady slipper requires a rare symbiotic fungi to grow:

"It takes years for the new plant to develop leaves for supplying its own energy. The plant requires low pH, nutrient poor soil and other special conditions for successful establishment."

2007-05-27T10:55:00.001-04:00

links from reddit

Man who stayed up for 266 hours awakes to bad news
150 points | 26 comments

Bullet vs Knife 1/50,000 of a second later. [pic]
303 points | 36 comments

Ohio lethal injection takes 2 hours, 10 tries
9 points | 6 comments

A Friend in Seattle Saw This While Working
572 points | 106 comments

Straight Dope scoop: The truth about the boy with "two spiders living in his ear."
235 points | 20 comments

2007-05-24T21:41:00.001-04:00

links from reddit

Nearly 75% of US households forbid smoking, up from 43% ten years ago
3 points | 0 comments

reCAPTCHA: A new way to fight spam - it also helps to digitize old books
647 points | 105 comments

Your power supply is only 60â"70% efficient. Google's are 90% efficient, which cuts energy loss by a factor of four, and they want you to have the same technology.
433 points | 49 comments

Airline with $10 one-way fares debuts in the US. The catch? $5 to check a bag, $8 blankets, $15 pillows, $5 beers, $10 to jump the line...
85 points | 24 comments

FDA decides to keep lifetime blood donation ban for gay men
18 points | 4 comments

2007-05-23T23:58:00.001-04:00

links from reddit

A bored mathematician discovers an unusual numerical pattern while doodling
594 points | 49 comments

How Aphex Twin hid pictures in his music
477 points | 44 comments

Excessive precision
185 points | 44 comments

One is only micrometers wide. The other is billions of lig ht-years across.
401 points | 43 comments

So what really is in a McDonald's Chicken McNugget
365 points | 71 comments

A bored mathematician discovers an unusual numerical pattern while doodling

2007-05-23T22:35:00.001-04:00

The "Ulam sprial" reveals diagonal patterns in prime numbers plotted in a spiral. Isn't this what you're supposed to run through a supercomputer that folds it into a shape that reveals alien plans to build a trans-dimensional gateway?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulam_spiral

Rocky

2007-05-23T22:27:00.001-04:00

Kitty
Originally uploaded by bd2k+.

Station nightclub fire leaves more victims than just the dead

2006-05-11T06:11:00.000-04:00

As the first sentence is delivered in the 2003 nightclub fire which left 100 people dead, it's worth noting that there's even more to the tragedy than the dead victims, whose families finally got their day in court this week. New research indicates that even the survivors, burned or not, continue to experience ongoing suffering as a result of the tragedy.

On February 20, 2003, an 80's hair metal band played a roadhouse bar south of Providence. Part way through the set, the band's manager, Daniel Beichele, set off pyrotechnics which quickly ignited foam packing material surrounding the stage. Within seconds, the foam, mis-used as a sound-deadening device, caused flame to spread throughout the club. Minutes later, the club was engulfed, doorways were jammed, and 100 people were dead or dying.

Research conducted by Dr. Jeffrey Schneider of Boston's Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital underscores the impact of the fire on the 330 survivors, and represents the first study on a large group of people surviving a fatal fire.

Burn victims in the study, who averaged 42 days in the hospital, live with a wide range of problems: chronic pain, depression, loss of work, disfigurment. But even those who weren't burned are suffering, Schneider found.

Non-burned survivors scored significantly higher on an index assessing post-traumatic stress, and had slightly higher rates of depression than burn victims. And while their overall quality of life ratings are higher than those who continue to suffer the effects of burns, for the first time a body of research is indicating the need for continued treatment of all survivors of a major fire.

So while relatives of the dead can at last try to achieve some closure, 330 survivors whose stories are glaringly absent from court proceedings and newspaper coverage continue to live with the outcome of this disaster.

Constitutional convention on gay marriage deferred

2006-05-10T07:17:00.000-04:00

The Massachusetts Legislature enters into constitutional convention today to debate a ballot initiative on banning gay marriage, but the whole affair is likely to be delayed until at least July due to a pending Supreme Judicial Court decision on the certification of the petition that got the whole thing started. Oh, and also due to the fact that local politicians are loathe to stick their necks out on this one. For them, today is like having that college exam you never studied for cancelled at the last minute.

For ballot proponents, this has got to be a disappointment: every day that the sky doesn't fall on Massachusetts means a few more votes slipping away from their side.

Lesbians smell like straight guys

2006-05-09T12:37:00.000-04:00

Following up on similar research on gay men last year, scientists find lesbians' brains react similarly to straight men when exposed to female pheromones:

Heterosexual women found the male and female pheromones about equally pleasant, while straight men and lesbians liked the female pheromone more than the male one. Men and lesbians also found the male hormone more irritating than the female one, while straight women were likelier to be irritated by the female hormone than the male one.

[...]

In heterosexual males, the male hormone was processed in the scent area, but the female hormone was processed in the hypothalamus, which is related to sexual stimulation. In straight women, the sexual area of the brain responded to the male hormone, while the female hormone was perceived by the scent area.

In lesbians, both male and female hormones were processed the same, in the basic odor-processing circuits, Savic and her team reported.

If pro-lifers were serious about preserving life...

2006-05-09T12:28:00.000-04:00

...they would take this news very seriously:

American babies are three times more likely to die in their first month as children born in Japan, and newborn mortality is 2.5 times higher in the U.S. than in Finland, Iceland or Norway, Save the Children researchers found.

Only Latvia, with six deaths per 1,000 live births, has a higher death rate for newborns than the U.S., which is tied near the bottom of industrialized nations with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia with five deaths per 1,000 births.

Unfortunately, that would involve tackling tough problems like the roots of poverty and dealing with scary minorities, rather than trying to legislate what women can do with their wombs:

The report, which analyzed data from governments, research institutions and international agencies, found higher newborn death rates among U.S. minorities and disadvantaged groups. For African-Americans, the mortality rate is nearly double that of the U.S. as a whole, with 9.3 deaths per 1,000 births.

WWJD, as they love to say...

News of the weird: Murdoch [heart] Hillary

2006-05-08T21:15:00.000-04:00

Drudge super-duper exclusive:

Rupert Murdoch has agreed to host a political fundraiser for Hillary Clinton this summer!

Murdoch's surprise decision to raise money for Clinton in July, on behalf of NEWS CORP., parent company of FOXNEWS and the NEW YORK POST, underlines a dramatic turn of relations between Murdoch and Clinton, who in 1998 coined the phrase “vast rightwing conspiracy” to denounce critics of her husband.

Some say the move by Murdoch reflects approval of her Senate career. Others note his record for picking future national leaders. Last century, he threw over the British conservatism he'd long supported to back longshot Tony Blair

Hawking: Work backwards on cosmology

2006-05-07T10:06:00.000-04:00

Trying to figure out the origin of the universe from first principles is problematic because we can't know the starting conditions:

Most cosmologists think, for example, that the universe went through an early burst of rapid expansion, or "inflation". There is some evidence to support the claim, but there's also a problem. Standard inflationary models require a very improbable initial state, one that must have "finely tuned" values that cause inflation to start, then stop in a certain way after a certain time: a complicated prescription whose only justification is to produce a flat universe without any strange topology, and so on - a universe like ours.

(some reactionary theists via robotwisdom)

Who doesn't love gay hooker gossip?

2006-05-06T17:49:00.000-04:00

Mmm, trashy:

First, as DailyKos convincingly argues, the true scandal of the Duke Cunningham hooker story is likely the gender of the hookers. There are some very carefully parsed statements regarding Brent Wilkes' Watergate "hospitality suites," such as the claim of the lawyer for Shirlington Limo's Chris Baker that his client was "never in attendance in any party where any women were being used for prostitution purposes."

[...]

Cunningham, who is married with grown children, has admitted to romantic, loving relationships with men, both during his Vietnam military service and as a civilian. That was the remarkable story that this publication reported two years ago, when Elizabeth Birch, the former Human Rights Campaign leader, inadvertently outed Cunningham at a gay rights forum.

Link (via robotwisdom)

Science Friday

2006-05-05T14:51:00.000-04:00

A bit of physics geekery for the weekend.

Universe infinitely old, says new theory:

"People have inferred that time began [with the big bang], but there really wasn't any reason for that inference," said Neil Turok, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge, "What we are proposing is very radical. It's saying there was time before the big bang."

Under his theory, published today in the journal Science with Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University in New Jersey, the universe must be at least a trillion years old with many big bangs happening before our own. With each bang, the theory predicts that matter keeps on expanding and dissipating into infinite space before another horrendous blast of radiation and matter replenishes it. "I think it is much more likely to be far older than a trillion years though," said Prof Turok. "There doesn't have to be a beginning of time. According to our theory, the universe may be infinitely old and infinitely large."

(via robotwisdom)

I knew it

2006-05-02T10:36:00.000-04:00

I had a conversation over the weekend about this, and got the impression someone thought I was crazy to make this point: there's no way the fed can promise they won't raise rates again right now. Now Bernake is denying he ever said it:

"I asked him whether the markets got it right after his congressional testimony and he said, flatly, no," Ms Bartiromo said. She was reporting live from floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the resulting trading roar almost drowned out the rest of her remarks.

She added: "He said he and his Federal Open Market Committee members were basically trying to create some flexibility for the Federal Reserve, saying the Fed may pause but the data will really dictate whether more rate hikes will occur."

Link

Music creeps back into the political arena

2006-05-02T06:20:00.000-04:00

History textbooks have left me with a mental picture of 19th century political campaigns that include massive rallies with theme songs, free-flowing beer, catchy slogans and un-amplified public oratory.

Aside from the beer, it's the live music in that mental image which captures my imagination the most. So it's with some interest that I got this email from singer/songwriter Dan Gonzalez:

On June 14, some of Massachusetts' best singer/songwriters (and even one from New York!) will perform to raise money for the Deval Patrick Campaign.

WHEN: Wednesday, June 14, 8-10pm

WHERE: Johnny D's, Davis Square, Somerville (www.johnnyds.com)

WHO: singer/songwriters Dan Gonzalez, Kate Klim, Rebecca Pronsky, and a very special musical guest

TICKETS: $25 minimum. Tickets can be purchased at:
https://secure.devalpatrick.com/page/concert

There's a lot of evidence that Patrick "gets it", and the use of this kind of original live music in campaigns seems to be on the upswing as a whole. As far as I can tell, he's the only local candidate doing something like this. I think we'll see this happening more often as politicians look for more visceral ways to connect with people.

And after that weird choice of a hair-metal theme song at the local Republican convention, it's easy to see how Democrats can open up a hipness gap with their taste-challenged rivals.

More on Massachusetts' weakened GOP

2006-04-29T08:31:00.000-04:00

After noting the lack of a credible opponent to John Kerry we find a followup in today's Globe noting their across-the-board inability to field candidates:

The result: 2,500 delegates will gather at today's party convention in Lowell to endorse a ticket that, aside from Healey, is little-known and underfinanced.

The GOP has no candidate for secretary of state. The party is fielding two obscure political figures -- Lawrence Frisoli, a Cambridge lawyer and one-term city councilor, for attorney general, and business consultant Earle Stroll of Harvard for state auditor. Frisoli had $1,000 of his own money in his campaign bank account as of several weeks ago, campaign finance records show. Stroll reported having $200 in his account at the beginning of April.

The Globe article chalks it up to Kerry Healy, but I think it's impossible to underestimate the role played by our absentee governor, Mitt Romney.

As much as I dislike so much of what the GOP stands for, the lack of any back and forth in an election is bad for everyone. And with New England's history of cultivating some less-reactionary Republicans, it's unfortunate to think that a moderating influence on the party at a national level is being lost.

Don't run, John Kerry

2006-04-29T08:23:00.000-04:00

Ellen Goodman in today's Globe:

This time he'd get it right? What the Democrats need this time out is not a messenger honed to squeak on the margin of undecideds, but a vision of what's gone wrong and how to right it. As Michael Tomasky writes in The American Prospect, they need a liberal message of the common good that trumps the conservative message -- a view that we are in this globalized, post-industrial, post-9/11 world together and must ''pull together, make some sacrifices, and, just sometimes, look beyond our own interests to solve our problems and create the future."

A heart-warming bit of local interest

2006-04-28T12:25:00.000-04:00

To follow up on my Ben Franklin post from earlier this week, it turns out I'm not the only Bay Stater* who has been reading about Franklin lately:

Three hundred years after his birth in Boston, two classes of local third-graders are hoping to persuade Massachusetts state lawmakers to reclaim the legacy of one of the nation's founding fathers -- despite the fact Franklin fled Boston for Philadelphia at age 17.

"You might say he helped invent America," said John Dyer, a third-grader at the Winthrop Elementary School in Hamilton, testifying at a Statehouse hearing Thursday before the State Administration Committee.

Ahh, the wide-eyed youth of today, earnestly participating in government, oblivious to the evil machinations occurring behind the scenes.

I remember my own visit to the State House at that age, seeing the sacred cod hanging above the chambers of the legislature, and learning of its mystical power over our body politic. I also learned that students such as myself had actually introduced legislation to make the state something other be what it was.

If the students' bill is passed, as State Inventor, Franklin will join (among many other things) the State Muffin (corn), State Shell (neptune), State Cat (tabby), State Folk Dance (square dancing), State Game Bird (wild turkey), State Bean (navy), State Dessert (Boston cream pie, of course), State Polka Song ("Say Hello to Someone From Massachusetts"), State Donut (Boston cream, again), State Blues Artist (Taj Mahal), and, of course, the unforgettable State Mineral (Babingtonite).

So hooray for our new State-Inventor-to-be. I, for one, urge our Legislators to adopt the measure post-haste.

* official State Citizenry designation, adopted 1990

So many links, so little time

2006-04-27T20:08:00.000-04:00

mydeathspace.com: profiles of dead myspace users. Probably one of the most morbid things I've seen in ages. They're all so young. On second thought, don't click it. (via digg and others)

Offensive jesus cartoons: "Oregon student newspaper entitled The Insurgent has printed 12 anti-Christian cartoons, apparently as a response to the Danish publication of 12 cartoons deemed offensive to Muslims earlier this year" (thanks, 5PO)

Cynical and depressing right-wing advice for Tony Snow: "By favoring the center-right media, the president will enhance their prestige while the anti-Bush establishment media play catch-up." (via Josh Marshall)

An unhealthy obsession with sex

2006-04-27T06:14:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure why Lexington, of all the wealthy, progressive, suburban towns around Boston, has become such a flashpoint in the culture war over gay families.

In Newton, a few miles south of Lexington, an activist named Brian Camenker has been fighting a losing war against any mention of homosexuality or gay families in the school system since the early '90s. For Camenker, the battle has resulted in public humiliation and bankruptcy, and no progress for his cause in the ultra-progressive Newton schools. Other anti-gay groups have distanced themselves from Camenker's organization due to its "rude" and aggressive tactics, solidly placing him on the fringe of the movement.

But Camenker seems to have found an ally in Lexington's David Parker, who was arrested last year after refusing to leave a Lexington elementary school following a meeting with its principal. Parker wanted the school to guarantee not only that no teacher-led discussions about gay families occur, but that they would further have "an automatic opt out for our child when such discussions arise spontaneously to be enforced by those in authoritative control"

Parker's meeting, conveniently, was photographed: splashed across Camenker's site are pictures of Parker in handcuffs, Parker being led into the police station, Parker through the window of the principal's office.

Prior to the meeting which led to the arrest, Parker had addressed the Lexington school board, and tried to explain the deep root of his objection to Lexington's in-school discussions of same-sex families:

Let's not be naive about the implied human sexuality aspect of same-sex unions. Let's be honest with ourselves. When we accept same-sex union, we accept its implied. . .sexual intimacy. These concepts are indeed inextricably linked.

Today, the one year anniversary of Parker's arrest, he joins another set of parents in filing a lawsuit against Lexington schools. The suit alleges that discussions of gay families violate the Massachusetts law which allows parents to opt their children out of sex-ed class.

In my memory, life in elementary school didn't include much thought about sex. Maybe it's different for kids these days, but somehow, I have a hard time imagining a five year old figuring out the "implied... sexual intimacy" of a pair of gay moms unless an unhealthily obsessed parent explained it in detail.

To people like Camenker and Parker, I'd pose one question: does every mention of heterosexual families imply sexual intimacy as well?

What's really going on with Iran?

2006-04-26T19:32:00.000-04:00

Fascinating piece on the spin gap with Iran:

Yesterday morning I was watching a streaming English-language news broadcast from Russia. [snip] The lead story was the press conference of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the main points hit by the Russia Today correspondent were Ahmadinejad's renouncing nuclear weapons as contrary to Islam and his reiteration of Iran's 30-year commitment to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, though Iran reserved the right to revisit its commitment if adherence to the treaty imperiled its sovereignty.

It was an unexpectedly optimistic piece. Ahmadinejad was allowed to speak at length and appeared relaxed and informed while fielding questions. If the excerpts were representative and the translation accurate, he appeared to be credibly attempting to defuse the crisis.

Three links for your reading pleasure

2006-04-26T13:15:00.000-04:00

Matt Groenig: "I would prefer to listen to a French classical composer like Olivier Messiaen than to the pop hits of the day."

We heard some Messiaen performed last week, and it was pretty atrocious.
(OnionAV via robotwisdom)

It's the 50th anniversary of the shipping container
(via boingboing)

BT launches 102 Octane fuel in the UK. Zoom!
(via digg)

The new home sales zombie

2006-04-26T13:02:00.000-04:00

It sounds like prices are dropping overall, and people are trying to get in before interest rates rise. I probably would have bought something around here already if all the houses weren't so damn ugly. What I'd like to find out is what counts as a 'new home' -- my impression would be that there's relatively little new construction here in eastern Massachusetts compared to the rest of the US.

"New homes sales sprang back to life like a zombie in a cheap horror flick," Brusca said. "And like that zombie, housing really is dead. Don't let all that twitching fool you."

[...]

Meanwhile, average prices fell 7.1 percent from February to $279,100, after topping $300,000 for the first time in the February revised figures. The median price, which reflects the point at which half the homes sell for more and half sell for less, also fell 6.5 percent to $224,200.

And while month-to-month declines in home prices are not unusual, more significantly, prices also fell from a year earlier: a 2.2 percent decline in median prices and a 3.6 percent fall in average prices over that time.

Link

Franklin: our ingenious, sometimes-vegetarian, whore-lovin' forefather

2006-04-26T09:47:00.000-04:00

Could America have dreamed up a better patron saint than Ben Franklin? A journalist, an inventor, a politician, a moralist, a diplomat. A dabbler in vegetarianism and atheism. A champion of ingenuity, industriousness, sobriety and the dispersion of knowledge.

And yet truly decent-seeming and modest. He valued niceness, good conversation, and a non-confrontational approach to all dealings in life.

How much of what we value as an American character comes straight from this man?

He quotes Pope in his autobiography, and tried to follow his advice throughout his life:

Men should be taught as if you taught them not
And things unknown proposed as things forgot

Writing about himself, he comes across as honest, admitting his vanity, his difficulty living up to his own (and oft-quoted) list of virtues, and his visits with whores in the days before his marriage.

"I was almost ready to give up the attempt," he says of trying to follow his own precept for order.

One idea in particular jumped out at me while reading Franklin: the idea that his virtues could form a kind of extra-religious common ground -- something that everyone could agree on. Now, as much as ever, I think we're in need of things to agree on, and Franklin offers a fascinating starting point.

Kentucky lawsuit over anti-gay college funding

2006-04-26T09:40:00.000-04:00

Interesting update to a previous post about the University of the Cumberlands, a stop on the Soulforce Equality Ride. They receive state funding, in spite of their discriminatory policies. Sounds like the governor takes a pretty narrow view of their laws about discrimination:

Kentucky's constitution prohibits the state from using tax money in support of religious institutions or entities that discriminate against citizens, according to the suit. "We're asking that the governor uphold the constitution and not allow the funding of the University of the Cumberlands," Gilgor said in a telephone interview.

Fletcher declined to veto funding for the college because, he said, the money came from coal severance taxes paid by coal companies, not by individual taxpayers in the state. Jim Deckard, Fletcher's general counsel, said Monday evening he believes the constitution's prohibition on funding private schools is limited to elementary and high schools, not colleges and universities.

When I first read about the state funding for a Christian school, I thought, hey, if that's how you want to roll down in KY, that's your business. But it looks like there's a bit more nuance to the story.

See you in court!

In case you forget what we're dealing with

2006-04-26T09:35:00.000-04:00

It would be great to see groups like the Article 8 Alliance and the Massachusetts Family Institute disavow any violence leading into the vote on the ballot initiative next month:

Law enforcement investigators are looking into a letter received by Minnesota state senator Satveer Chaudhary that criticized his vote against placing a same-sex marriage ban on the November ballot; the letter featured a picture of Chaudhary with a bullet hole drawn on it.

Link

How long until instant-on consoles come back?

2006-04-25T20:39:00.000-04:00

Spouse: You know what I miss about Atari?

Me: What?

Spouse: Turning it on and just playing.

When we get back to zero-boot-time computers and game machines, things will really start feeling futuristic again. PS2 wasn't even close to loading GT3 in the duration of that conversation. Macs are improving, but still not great, and I don't even want to talk about the travesty of my employer-issued Dell Inspiron 1700's glacial wake-from-sleep times.

Instant-on, if we ever get back to it, will give me that Jetsons feeling I don't get enough of these days.

"Gasoline prices are like a hidden tax on the working people"

2006-04-25T13:38:00.000-04:00

The title is a quote from our president, speaking today at a renewable energy conference.

Look, it's not a tax, and it's not hidden. People who buy their own gas see it every time they fill up. By that definition, everything would be a hidden tax. Bread, milk, beer, water.

When you do the math, some people are spending a whole lot of their money on gas, and you can bet they don't think it's "hidden":

It turns out that the average household uses about 1100 gallons of gasoline per year and has an average income of about $44,000. Take out 20% for taxes and that's a disposable income of $35,000.

So at two bucks a gallon that means the average household spends 6% of its disposable income on gasoline. At three bucks a gallon it's more like 10%. And that's only the average.

So it's great to see our president suddenly interested in keeping down gas prices, I just wonder if if he's seen this chart that ties his popularity rating to the price at the pump?

(chart link via robotwisdom)

Chavez's discount oil plan to expand

2006-04-25T06:37:00.000-04:00

What I find interesting about Chavez is the role he plays on the foreign policy stage. The reactions he's able to provoke are endlessly entertaining -- he plays the neocons like a fiddle:

That program set off sharp criticism from some Republicans who said Delahunt was playing into the hands of Chavez and undermining US foreign policy by dealing with an anti-American populist with a questionable human rights record.

Yeah. We never deal with anti-Americans with questionable human rights records when it suits us.

''We want to get more [discounted Venezuelan oil], particularly when we're looking at $3 a gallon at the pump and $70 a barrel" for oil, Delahunt said. ''We want to extend the deal because we don't have confidence in the administration and the Republican Congress to deliver adequate dollars for the LIHEAP program." Congress has repeatedly failed to come through with the full amount of money it has promised for LIHEAP.

Let's face it: we should be embarrassed to have what Republicans would call a third-world dictator showing us up when it comes to caring for the needy.

The striking thing is how neocons let themselves get played in foreign policy situations like this. A smalltime figure sets up a little trap for them to walk into, and they walk right in. Isn't the answer to say "Well, if Mr. Chavez wants to short-change his own people by giving away all of his oil, that's quite unfortunate"?

The angry harrumphing and fist-shaking while little old ladies gladly take the free oil makes us look like fools.

Peggy Longueil of Brattleboro, Vt., said the discounted oil is critical to covering her household budget. ''It gives us a chance to not have to worry about whether we're going to pay for food or oil, or medicine or oil," said the 64-year-old, who was at a dinner Sunday night for the heating oil beneficiaries.

Criticizing Chavez for this or playing up the ridiculous uranium thing just legitimizes his attacks and fans the flames.

How does this square with Lawrence v. Texas?

2006-04-24T22:37:00.000-04:00

A federal judge threw out a "don't ask, don't tell" case. I can see how the speech bit is weak, but any lawyers out there care to explain how the equal protection parts of SLDN's argument work?

In his ruling, O'Toole cited the authority given to Congress in establishing the country's military policies.

"Deference to Congressional judgment is of even greater importance in a case such as this one where the legislation challenged was enacted pursuant to Congress' authority over the national military forces," O'Toole wrote.

"In Congress, there were hearings by committees of both Houses at which the arguments for and against the policy were aired and debated. The resulting legislation was the end product of a focused process of debate and deliberation."

BlyssPluss has arrived: a viagra that works on women and goes up your nose

2006-04-24T16:44:00.000-04:00

In Margaret Atwood's recent postapocalyptic novel Oryx and Crake, an evil genius engineers a destructive virus into a wildly popular new combination aphrodisiac-and-contraceptive called BlyssPluss.

In what sounds like another case of life imitating scifi, the aphrodisiac part of it seems to be in the works. Coverage in the Guardian is full of rich quotes like this one:

Every time the penis of a subject rat emerged, observers marked down the event in a notebook. The subjects, all 'naive' adults whose last contact with a female was on the day their mothers weaned them, seemed to have had, if anything, slightly less curiosity about their spontaneously generated erections than the researchers. The typical reaction: 'He notices it's there, and he grooms it to detumescence,' says Annette Shadiack, Palatin's executive director of pre-clinical development. 'And then it happens again.'

Grooming it to detumescence? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

The Guardian does a surprisingly good job of covering the science, as well as getting to heart of the matter: this new drug, called PT-141, doesn't just cause arousal, it makes you really, really horny as well. And everyone's going to love it.

Women, according to one set of results, feel 'genital warmth, tingling and throbbing', not to mention 'a strong desire to have sex'.

[...]

Fast-acting and long-lasting, packaged in an easily concealed, single-use nasal inhaler, unaffected by food or alcohol consumption, PT-141 seems bound to take its place alongside cocaine, poppers and alcohol in the pantheon of club drugs.

Exactly. If it's that good, everyone's going to want to try it. How long before some enterprising basement chemist is able to cook up a batch?

I say cut to the chase and just sell it OTC.

An impotent local GOP: no one to face Kennedy?

2006-04-23T09:19:00.000-04:00

Does Mitt Romney's new healthcare plan cover Viagra? Because the state GOP can't seem to get it up enough to put someone on the ballot against Kennedy:

Kevin Scott, a former selectman from Wakefield, and Kenneth G. Chase of Belmont, the co-owner of the French and Spanish Saturday School Inc. (and a French-trained chef, according to his website), are vying for the chance to unseat US Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

Both men have spent months scrambling to get the 10,000 signatures they need, in addition to the support of 15 percent of convention delegates, to qualify for the ballot

That's a pretty sad state of affairs. A former town selectman and a part-time French teacher?

In 2000, the GOP fielded businessman Jack E. Robinson against Kennedy, who pulled in a respectable 13%, neck and neck with Libertarian Carla Howell.

In 1994, it was Romney himself. That's quite a downward spiral from '94 to now.

There's a big symbolic importance to running against Kennedy. On one hand, you've got to concentrate your resources on more meaningful races, but on the other, it's an opportunity to take pot shots at the national GOP's number one most wanted villain.

And frankly, even as progressive voter, I like to see even our most senior elected officials kept on their toes. This is no time to get lazy.

Is this a leading indicator of GOP prowess across the nation? Are they too weak? Is they field of candidates tapped-out? If they can't field a spirited contender here, what's going on everywhere else?

More support for gay rights from the business community

2006-04-21T14:50:00.000-04:00

It's interesting to see support for gay rights coming from the business community, such as the testimony during last week's gay marriage hearing here in the bay state.

Similarly, an Adovcate article today covers an editorial in a Kentucky business journal which condemns Kentucky's recent shift to allow employers to fire people for being gay:

"Governor Fletcher may or may not be pandering to the most extreme social and religious conservatives among his voter-base. That's a political matter," Martin wrote. "Our concern is for the well being of our business community. And in any case, either way, this policy sends Kentucky stumbling backward, even as the nation and the world have moved on."

He added: "With the stroke of a pen, Governor Fletcher has undermined the efforts of our urban centers, which have local antidiscrimination statutes shielding gays and lesbians, to present themselves to prospective new businesses and residents as progressive and fair-minded."

I'm sure this editor isn't fully representative of Kentucky's business world, and I wouldn't count business as a devoted, core defender of gay rights. Still, I don't think we would have seen this kind of support twenty or thirty years ago, and it's an interesting shift.

Yes, but what about pot brownies?

2006-04-21T14:32:00.000-04:00

You have to wonder if they're splitting hairs with the 'smoked' bit:

The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that "no sound scientific studies" supported the medical use of marijuana, contradicting a 1999 review by a panel of highly regarded scientists.

[...]

Susan Bro, an agency spokeswoman, said that the statement resulted from a past combined review by federal drug enforcement, regulatory and research agencies that concluded that "smoked marijuana has no currently accepted or proven medical use in the United States and is not an approved medical treatment."

Certainly, smoking grass isn't the only way to consume it, and it seems like a substantial number of people using marijuana for medical puposes will eat it rather than smoking.

But that's just one too-narrow distinction they seem to be drawing: what's a 'sound scientific study' in their book, when the goverment blocks scientists from studying its effect?

The FDA statement said that state initiatives that legalize marijuana use "are inconsistent with efforts to ensure that medications undergo the rigorous scientific scrutiny of the FDA approval process."

But scientists studying marijuana said in interviews that the federal government has actively discouraged research into marijuana's benefits. Dr. Lyle Craker, a professor in the division of plant and soil sciences at the University of Massachusetts, said that he submitted an application in 2001 to the DEA to grow a small patch of marijuana to be used for research because the government-approved marijuana, grown in Mississippi, is of poor quality.

In 2004, the drug enforcement agency turned Craker down. He appealed and is awaiting a judge's ruling. "The reason there's no good evidence is that they don't want an honest trial," Craker said.

Voters approve decriminalization and medical use over and over, but they're trying to move a mountain. It's going take a long, long time, I think.

Links hither and yon

2006-04-20T16:13:00.000-04:00

Giant tires in demand, supply low (nyt, login required)

A touching article about some lesbian moms and their Catholic school (nyt via aaron, login required)

747 wing provides 2500 sqft roof; that and other misc 747 parts cost $100k in multi-million dollar california home project. (bbc, via drudge)

10% of MMR vaccine recipients still succeptible to mumps, minor outbreak underway

Soulforce, the Equality Ride, and fundamentalist institutions

2006-04-20T16:11:00.000-04:00

Reaction to my coverage of the Soulforce Equality Ride (here and here) I think largely misses the point.

The problem, in my mind, isn't whether these institutions have the right to their policies -- they do -- but whether they're somehow immune to people pointing out what a horrible idea they are.

We can all agree that private institutions in this country are just that -- private. They're free to make decisions about who is a trespasser and who isn't, who can belong and who cannot, what people can do there and what they can't. The ability to make those decisions is fundamental to the freedoms enumerated in the Constitution, for both individuals and groups. And even public educational institutions, which one can argue are held to a higher standard, are free to be selective about who can and cannot join.

But let's face it: policies which expel students for being gay are horribly cruel to people who don't realize or are unable to admit they're gay when admitted.

Here's BYU's policy quoted in a campus paper article:

Advocacy of a homosexual lifestyle (whether implied or explicit) or any behaviors that indicate homosexual conduct, including those not sexual in nature, are inappropriate and violate the Honor Code. Violations of the Honor Code may result in actions up to and including separation from the University

What's implied advocacy of a homosexual lifestyle? Or a behavior indicating homosexual conduct that's not sexual in nature?

Imagine a freshman coming to BYU, a woman who knows she's gay, but is unable to admit it to her family, and unable to articulate to them why BYU is a horrible place for her to go. When she arrives, she's faced with a campus where even open discussion -- implied advocacy -- of being gay could result in expulsion.

What should someone in this situation do? Talking to anyone about it could violate the Honor Code. Searching on the internet could violate the Honor Code. Where are you left? Alone, repressed, fearful. What happens if you're discovered, outed and expelled? Are you left ostracized from your friends and family, peniless on the streets of Provo?

It's worth pointing out the distinction between the policy and how it's carried out. I've never been to BYU, and don't know how it's enforced. Maybe it's never used. But the option exists, and that alone can create a climate of fear and distrust.

People who face dilemmas like this are real. The impact -- suicide, isolation, depression -- is real. Is this how we want people in America to be treated?

Places like Brigham Young University and University of the Cumberlands have choices. They have the option to enact compassionate policies which don't compromise their professed beliefs. They do not choose to do so, and deserve vigorous condemnation.

A real belief in freedom of speech involves supporting the rights of people and groups to take positions you disagree with. So I support BYU's right to its policies. But I also condemn the policy itself, and applaud Soulforce for bringing attention where there otherwise would be none.

McClellan resigns

2006-04-19T09:55:00.000-04:00

He always seemed like a deer in the headlights. Maybe the next one will be more entertaining.

Update: NYT says "Also, Karl Rove will no longer direct policy development, an official said."

A link or two

2006-04-19T07:58:00.000-04:00

I no longer need to worry about cosmic radiation completely ionizing the surface of the earth. Or at least not as much. (via robotwisdom)

Switzerland turns on the beefcake to attract German soccer widows.

The universe as a giant quantum computer (via digg)

The state taxman puts iTunes in the crosshairs by defining a music file as 'software'. (via aaron)

Springtime in the desert

2006-04-18T19:31:00.000-04:00

We spent last week in Tucson, Arizona, hiking, taking part in the protests and generally enjoying being in the southwest.

Pictured is our haul from the fruitful and well-irrigated desert: local produce and meat from a farmer's market, with juicy lemons from our host's backyard. The rancher who sold us the meat was quite a character. We asked him what was freshest, and he felt around in his cooler then pulled out that lamb chop.

"People in Iowa think they feed the country," he told us. "All they put out is feed corn and some scrawny cattle that get fattened in feed lots. California is the real food producer."

We went on to discuss the merits of grass-fed over grain-fed meat -- he had some spiel about omega-this vs. omega-that, but all I can tell you is that was a damn tasty piece of lamb.

The desert around Tucson is full of fascinating stuff: parks, museums, saguaros, cholla, the soon-to-be-demolished biosphere 2, nuclear missile silos, a world-class go kart track, and airplane boneyards. Quite a haul for your average postmodern tourist.

Twenty minutes by car and a short hike out of town, you can be surrounded by desert or deep in a cayon: all teeming with life, and (in April, at least) in full bloom. We found hares, snakes, lizards, turtles, frogs, coyotes, and little gopher-like things -- a tremendous amount of life by any measure.

I'm constantly amazed by the variety of landscapes in this country, and having visited only 33 of the 50 states, I really look forward to experiencing the rest.

Links

2006-04-18T10:23:00.000-04:00

Fascinating maps of religious adherents broken down by county and sect (via boingboing)

Myspace profile of student expelled from Christian University for being gay (via queerty)

Josh Marshall on journalists failing to make the republican/corruption connection

Paying my gay tax

2006-04-17T18:38:00.000-04:00

I'm married here in Massachusetts, and last year after a little fight with my new mean-spirited benefits provider ADP TotalSource about documentation*, was able to enroll my spouse under my healthcare plan. This isn't really much of a change -- I enrolled him during in our living-in-sin days as a domestic partner.

Another thing which hasn't changed is that I owe federal taxes on the money my employer pays to insure my spouse. We're not talking about my healthcare contribution. My employer's part of the insurance bill for my spouse (but not the part for me) counts as additional taxible income for me.

I think that sucks, and people are constantly shocked to hear about it. Here's a reminder for any of my 3.75 regular readers who don't know this is the case. Of course, I can also take the opportunity to thank Bill Clinton for signing DOMA into law.

*in which I solidly kicked their ass

Boston in springtime

2006-04-17T11:46:00.000-04:00

Near the marathon finish line this morning.

Ted Rall on Hugo Chavez

2006-04-13T10:53:00.000-04:00

Damn those commies.

When the hated despots of nations like Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan loot their countries' treasuries, transfer their oil wealth to personal Swiss bank accounts and use the rest to finance (in the House of Saud's case) terrorist extremists, American politicians praise them as trusted friends and allies. But when a democratically elected populist president uses Venezuela's oil profits to lift poor people out of poverty, they accuse him of pandering.

more...

(via robotwisdom)

Republican America redux: no free expression for you

2006-04-13T00:05:00.000-04:00

A group named Soulforce is sponsoring a bus tour of anti-gay colleges and universities. What they're revealing about places like BYU is pretty shocking:

Kulisch's unauthorized act of "public expression" was a violation of the university's conduct code, said university spokeswoman Carri Jenkins.

"We do not allow campus to be used as a public forum," Jenkins said.

Gay marriage ballot debate begins

2006-04-12T10:14:00.000-04:00

The Massachusetts legislature began debate on a ballot initiative to reverse the SJC decision legalizing gay marriage. It's interesting to hear support from the business community:

'I believe that if the Legislature does not vote the amendment down, our state will be subjected to an ugly, protracted fight that will adversely affect the civic and business environment," Robert L. Beal, director of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, told the committee.

More on the immigration protest

2006-04-12T10:09:00.000-04:00

Aaron's coverage at c75. We went together, but Aaron's the one with the DSLR.

Republican America: fear keeps you quiet

2006-04-11T10:33:00.000-04:00

Christian college expels gay student, others afraid to discuss:

Johnson, a sophomore majoring in theater arts, was expelled from the university Thursday because he declared online that he is gay. In a statement released last week, the university's president, Jim Taylor said students are held to a "higher standard" and that "students know the rules before they come to this institution."

[...]

Renee Kuder, a University of the Cumberlands senior and a friend of Johnson, says many students worry they'll be punished if they discuss the case online or in the media. Some students declined to comment for this story, or did not return messages.

(via drudge)

Three convictions, no hint of White House involvement

2006-04-11T10:15:00.001-04:00

The GOP is shocked, just shocked that Jim Tobin & co crossed the line with their 2002 phone jamming in New Hampshire. But in spite of his lawbreaking, they bankrolled his losing defense to the tune of a few mil.

Somehow prosecutors didn't think it was worth looking for any higher-up connections. Maybe we'l find out more with the civil case Democrats are pursuing:

The Justice Department has secured three convictions in the case but hasn't accused any White House or national Republican officials of wrongdoing, nor made any allegations suggesting party officials outside of New Hampshire were involved.

Democrats plan to ask a New Hampshire judge Tuesday to order GOP and White House officials to answer questions about the phone jamming in a civil lawsuit alleging voter fraud.

What shocks me is how brazen they can be in their rhetoric: disavowing all knowledge, yet supporting this guy right into the slammer. This is another in the long list of reasons that New Hampshire turned from red to blue in '04.

Tucson protest footage

2006-04-10T20:21:00.000-04:00

Coverage below

Immigrants' rights protest report: live from Tucson AZ

2006-04-10T18:22:00.000-04:00

Just returned from the immigrants' rights protest here in Tucson. Stay tuned for footage.

This movement is a force to be reckoned with: it delivered a crowd of 10,000 well-organized, upbeat, and disciplined marchers here, in a small city on a workday. Legislators should be paying careful attention.

We joined the protest at its origin in South Tucson, and marched north. The crowd was almost entirely Hispanic and represented a large cross-section of the community -- families, college students, professionals, older people.

People chanted "Si se puede" and "A people united will never be divided", while waving American flags and signs against HR 4437. Other signs read "Humane immigration reform", "Humanitarian aid is never a crime", "We are part of the solution" and "Liberty and justice for all". My favorite read "Where you came from?"

Police were out in force, and helicopters circled the crowd. We didn't see even the slightest hints of rowdiness, only a well-organized and media-savvy group. Most signs were in English, and large numbers of marchers wore white shirts, presenting a unified look.

My take: this makes the anti-war movement look like a joke. This movement occupies a moral high ground: they represent people trying to better thsemselves through hard work, and rhetorically evoke the American Dream.

Their opponents advocate the assasination of people attempting risky desert crossings, or paint immigrants as people who don't want to learn English. That's a tired old warhorse that's been dragged out for every immigrant group to come to these shores, and advocates of murder usually have trouble finding allies.

To someone from the East, this looks like it came out of nowhere. Right-wing politicians who thought they had the Hispanic vote in the bag probably feel the same way.

These people vote, and they're feeling the power.

[Update: some reports of police using pepper spray on protesters scuffling with counter-protesters at the far end of the march]

Linkorama: 'dis' edition

2006-04-06T14:09:00.000-04:00

Dear Abby smackdown

Dissing the local 'classical' radio station

Telling off bush to his face

Realtime dublin rail map mashup. Not so much a dis, unless you count it as dissing Boston's ineptitude when it comes to managing it's public transit. Click on a train to follow it. And btw, doesn't that map make Dublin and Boston look alike? (via starts & stops)

Libby sings, implicates Bush

2006-04-06T12:39:00.000-04:00

Huge.

"Defendant's participation in a critical conversation with Judith Miller on July 8... occurred only after the Vice President advised defendant that the President specifically had authorized defendant to disclose certain information in the NIE"

The smoking gun has it.

Winning the middle ground: abortion, gun control, gay marriage and the death penalty

2006-04-06T12:09:00.000-04:00

The discussion surrounding Klam's anti-death penalty argument reminds me of an anecdote about the American Revolution. Leading up to the revolution, a history teacher explained once, opinion seemed split with about a third of the population pro-revolution, a third Tories, and an an uncommitted middle.

Revolutionaries won the rhetorical battle for that middle group, and went on to military victory. It was an earth-shattering step forward for freedom and rational thought -- a complete rejection of the European tradition of monarchies and religious domination of politics.

Ignoring accuracy for a moment, there's a grain of truth in that pre-Revolutionary opinion split. It applies to nearly every "wedge" issue in play now: a passionate, unswayable group of people on one side, a second group on the other, and a swayable middle.

The rough numbers are the same today as well: 1/4 to 1/3 of the population on one side, same on the other, the rest in the middle. Each side is battling for that middle, the folks who might change their minds.

That battle is complex and nuanced, sometimes unconscious, and the actual mechanics are probably beyond our understanding. But as Klam articulates so well, one critical weapon is presenting vivid arguments to the people in the middle, the ones who can be convinced.

During the revolution, pamphleteers and thinkers like Paine or Jefferson persuaded that middle ground. They were vivid, compelling, and still readable today. They used passion and reason together, playing to the heart and the mind.

Today, reactionaries have an edge in the war of vivid arguments, and progressives are just starting to build momentum. People "identify" as conservative more often in polls. But really, that just means half the middle ground leans in that direction.

As progressives, we need to speak to that middle. When we weigh the merits of one progressive argument against another (as thousands of blog comments do every day), we don't have to worry about persuading the committed right wing. We can only speak to people who are open to changing their minds.

That's all we need in order to win.

Positioning himself left of what, again?

2006-04-05T13:07:00.000-04:00

So when Russ Feingold indicates support for gay marriage, he's "positioning himself to the left of possible 2008 rivals." When right-wingers say wacky shit, it doesn't seem like they're portrayed as positioning themselves to the right of anything.

(link via atrios)

Linkage

2006-04-05T09:57:00.000-04:00

Things I come across while waiting for code to compile:

Apple releases bootcamp, a dual-boot loader for OS X. I smell a macbook in my future. (via /.)

When did Kerry grow a scrotum?

Bostonist on the Herald: 'In today's story, the ever-literary tabloid uses what Bostonist thinks is the coolest word ever: "man-burner."'

Jesus-based research vs the Objectivists

2006-04-05T06:33:00.000-04:00

The Objectivists over at the Ayn Rand Institute got their panties all bunched up over the study which found that prayer doesn't help bypass patients:

Every minute these doctors spend conducting this sort of faith-based study is one minute less spent on reality-based research--research that actually has hope of leading to real medical cures.

(link)

While that's true, there's also a place in science for debunking this kind of hoo-ha, because a lot of people believe it. (ref: "But prayer saved me" letter in yesterday's Metro, Boston edition) And I'm really not sure I would want the followers of Ayn Rand to be making decisions about the directions of science. They seem a little mean-spirited at times.

Still, I hope they've got a few more letters left in them, because an FSU prof named Doron Nof is trying to explain how Jesus walked on ice, not water:

The New Testament story describes Jesus walking on water in the Sea of Galilee, but according to a study led by Florida State University Professor of Oceanography Doron Nof, it's more likely that he walked on an isolated patch of floating ice.

The study points to a rare combination of optimal water and atmospheric conditions for development of a unique, localized freezing phenomenon that Nof and his co-authors call "springs ice."

When you get down to this bit, it's actually kind of interesting:

Using paleoceanographic records of the Mediterranean Sea's surface temperatures along with analytical ice and statistical models, Nof and his colleagues focused on the dynamics of a small section of Lake Kinneret comprising about 10,000 square feet near the salty springs that empty into it. Their analysis supports the likelihood that a brief blast of frigid air descended over the lake and dropped to 25 F (-4 C) for at least two days, coinciding with the chill that had already settled in for a century or more and quite possibly encompassed the decades in which Jesus lived.

Ok, sure, interesting phenomenon. A big 'what-if', though. Sounds a bit like the movie The Day After Tomorrow.

We want scientests to have some latitude in what they study -- pursue things they're interested in, etc -- and you don't people like me or the Randies to dictate what should or shouldn't be studied. But I'm still pretty flabbergasted that among all the problems an oceanographer could be studying today, someone chose this.

Of course, we probably shouldn't be talking about science here.

links via boingboing

A craigslist for concerts...

2006-04-04T17:42:00.000-04:00

Bostonians, my friend Chris has a cool tool for you: it's called tourfilter, and it's a website which keeps track of bands you like and emails you when they come to town.

http://tourfilter.com

It's non-commercial, ad-free, and easy to use. Enter some bands, see what's coming up. Add your email, and it'll let you know about new shows. That's it.

Eliminate the death penalty: it's a cop-out

2006-04-04T15:00:00.000-04:00

Over at Klamtroob, Klam articulates an anti-death penalty argument I've been interested for a long time:

...people who endorse the death penalty, most of them, anyway, seem most drawn to its retributive power, i.e., vengeance. They want the gruesome child-murdering rapist to get killed. They want Biblical justice.

If vengeance is what you want, why would you think that a controlled, sterile lethal injection is going to satisfy that desire? Why would an all-too-brief electrocution scratch that itch?

[...]

Instead of punishing capital offenders, we coddle them by euthenizing them with near-painless, evanescent executions. We spare them their guilty consciences and torturous minds. We let them off the hook.

If we really wanted to punish Moussaoui, we'd force him to rot in maximum-security prison until he's a shriveled-up, disease-ridden, arthritis-wracked old man. No hero's death for him.

Google AdSense, AdWords and a brave new approach to marketing

2006-04-03T20:24:00.000-04:00

Google's AdWords/AdSense program represents a great leap forward in ad delivery, but they're not the real pioneers, and they're not even in the best position to deliver targeted advertising to consumers.

This CS Monitor article profiles people in India and the Phillipenes making up to $1000/month with Google's AdSense on their blogs. That's a full-time programmer's salary for one guy in India, and allowed one article subject to return to school. It's a compelling and heart-warming story, and it underscores the billions of dollars Google is raking in with their ad program.

Google has a great product with AdWords/AdSense, and they're slightly ahead of the marketing industry as a whole. They're able to deliver ads people want to see on a much more consistent level than a broadcaster. Google also delivers analytics which give a detailed breakdown of how your ads are peforming individually, and against various keywords, as well as the ability to track ad clicks from the point at which the ad is selected to the point at which users complete a transaction.

It's a killer combination: I was recently emailing a friend about a problem I was having with JBoss, a finicky open source Java application server. When I read a reply to my email in GMail, an AdWords ad appeared to the right of the message telling me about a JBoss configuration tool which might help with my problem.

I haven't bought the product yet, but for that advertiser, it's a great success: for a few dollars they were able to get the ad in front of someone who was deeply interested in what they sell, to the exclusion of others. Try that on TV. Google has opened web advertising to small players -- someone with $50/month to spend or less, a non-existant budgets by industry standards.

An old marketing saw goes something like "I'm wasting half of my budget, but I don't know which half". When you can track an ad from click to checkout, it's a brave new world of advertising, and you can know exactly which half goes to waste. You can perform statistical analysis on ads, who the ads are shown to, when, and develop an excellent idea of how many dollars it costs to acquire a paying customer. In short, it's a scientific approach.

The marketing industry as a whole has been taking a radical turn towards the scientific in the past 10 years or so, and online advertising hasn't been the sole market-driver.

CapitolOne, the credit card issuer, is frequenly cited as one of the earliest and most successful adopters of this approach. They perform A/B tests on things as detailed as envelope color for mailed solicitations, and leverage artificial intelligence in their call centers to determine not only why you're calling, but what they want to do about it: if they suspect you're about to cancel your card, computers decide whether to route you to a customer retention specialist, or an automated cancellation routine.

The ability to test envelope colors makes Google look rinkydink. Google's targeting is largely limited to keywords now: their newly-released demographic targeting is limited to a small number of categories and deployed on low-traffic sites. But other companies are about to take this much further.

During my day job I work with a cellphone carrier who is applying the same approach to people who browse the web on mobile phones. Your cell carrier knows a lot more about you than Google: birthdate, ssn, credit rating, household income, number of kilobytes downloaded per month, among other things. When they combine the data you provide when buying a cellphone with commercially available profiles, what they know becomes creepy.

Carrier X is taking all this data, and combining it with your browsing and purchase history to figure out what ads to show you. They're sensitive to the 'creepiness factor', as they call it, but at the same time it's potentially even more effective than Google's demographic targeting due to the detail and richness of the data they're able to feed into the targeting system.

In any information processing system the quality of input data correlates directly to the quality of output: the success of ad targeting so far will effectively suck in more and more detailed data, simply because it works so well. Advertisers like it, and I as a consumer like seeing ads I'm interested in.

Will people freak out about how much is known about them? Once the ads start crossing a 'creepy' threshold, some people will for sure. For those people, there's a suite of privacy tools available, and hopefully marketed through a highly-targeted ad campaign.

(link via robotwisdom)

They promised us flying cars: Windows XP wireless adapter edition

2006-04-01T14:48:00.000-05:00

I use three major computing platforms on daily basis: Windows XP, Mac OS X, and Fedoracore/Redhat Linux. While each sucks in its own special way, Microsoft consistently shocks me in its lack of features and usability. Take my wireless connection, for example. Please.

I move between multiple wireless access points with my XP laptop. At work, I have a DHCP-enabled network with non-DHCP-supplied DNS settings. At home, my wireless router has DHCP and supplies the DNS settings. You might think it would be easy and straightforward to configure the laptop to move between locations. But you'd be wrong.

Windows XP knows only one configuration per network adapter, plus an 'alternate' configuration. The alternate configuration, however, seems to offer a subset of the main configuration: you can have dhcp-only, fully-manual, but no choices.

My laptop is supplied by my employer, so it comes set up for the office. You might think that making the alternate connection DHCP-only would allow the primary DNS settings to be overridden when I connect at home, but they don't change. My DNS server stays stuck on the hardcoded work addresses.

Now imagine I were to visit several wireless access points -- friends, cafes, airports, some of which are non-DCHP. What are my options? Third-party sofware. For a fee.

The last time I used a third-party network settings manager, it constantly fought with the windows configuration, and most of the time ended up needing manual help to find the right settings.

Let's compare this situation to that of another leading brand, Mac OS X. Apple provides multiple locations, each with its own detailed configuration, and all for the same low price. No hidden fees, no third-party software. Seemless automatic switching without the headache.

Giving up windows isn't an option right now, sadly, but if I could I would. Seeing one manufacturer do such a great job while Microsoft flails is just painful and sad. It's 2006. Bring on the flying cars already.

Spot the objective coverage

2006-03-31T06:23:00.000-05:00

Globe: Mass. can bar marriage for nonresident gay couples

Herald: Gay-wed opponents cheered by SJC ruling

Out-of-state gay marriage challenge denied

2006-03-30T11:17:00.000-05:00

Via drudge:

The state's highest court, which made Massachusetts the first state to legalize gay marriage, ruled Thursday that same-sex couples from other states cannot marry here.

No details yet.

Update from Boston.com: status of RI/CT couples ambiguous.

Vaffanculo: Scalia caught in a lie?

2006-03-30T08:17:00.000-05:00

As much as I generally dislike the Herald, like any trashy paper, they can't resist some controversy:

“It’s inaccurate and deceptive of him to say there was no vulgarity in the moment,” said Peter Smith, the Boston University assistant photojournalism professor who made the shot.

Smith said the jurist “immediately knew he’d made a mistake, and said, ‘You’re not going to print that, are you?’ ”

“The judge paused for a second, then looked directly into my lens and said, ‘To my critics, I say, ‘Vaffanculo,’ ” punctuating the comment by flicking his right hand out from under his chin, Smith said.

The Italian phrase means “(expletive) you.”

What's that they say about picking fights with people who buy ink by the barrel?

Again, compared to some other allegations about Scalia, this is pretty immaterial. It speaks to his character, perhaps, but so do his decisions.

Gov race takes an early turn towards the bizarre

2006-03-30T07:40:00.000-05:00

Christy Mihos, independant candidate for governor, has launched a 'canine coordinator' program and hopes to recruit a dog from each of the 351 towns in Massachusetts. The effort is led by Regan Mihos, Christy's Yorkshire Terrier.

Reagan is very worried when walking in Boston where his pals have been electrocuted. Reagan hates “no dogs allowed” signs and wishes dogs had equal rights, similar to his dad’s view that all humans should have equal rights.

Okay. So when I made some cracks about the Mihos website last week, it was kind of tongue-in-cheek. After all, not everyone cares about or notices website design, and ultimately it's something that the candidate isn't directly responsible for.

But this is something else entirely. When Mihos really only has one other issue articulated on his website (property tax restructuring), what could say "let them eat cake" more than a page dedicated to dogs -- particularly the electrocuted dogs of rich downtown loft-dwellers?

Reagan, are those buoys in the picture from daddy's yacht?

Here's an equal rights issue for you, Christy: gay marriage. None of the other candidates wants to touch the issue with a ten foot pole. Where do you stand on that? How about immigration? That's a big topic.

Really, I was hoping he'd be able to hold it together long enough to draw off some votes from the right, but I see this as a foreshadowing of early withdrawal. Time will tell.

(via this pithy globe article)

[Update: I should point out that I have a lot of sympathy towards the dogs who were killed, and their owners. It's a broad public safety issue. But this just begs for ridicule. While standing on its hind legs.]

Grist for your paranoid fantasies

2006-03-29T22:34:00.000-05:00

Coming to a sky near you: remote controled drone aircraft. Get those tinfoil hats ready.

Lem on atheism

2006-03-29T12:42:00.000-05:00

"for moral reasons I am an atheist -- for moral reasons. I am of the opinion that you would recognize a creator by his creation, and the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created by anyone than to think that somebody created this intentionally."

(via cognoshanty)

Leave the tough questions to the bloggers

2006-03-29T07:27:00.000-05:00

Is newly-elevated Cardinal Sean O'Malley really a humble Capuchin, or does he just wear the trappings?

Theology teaches that the Deadly Sins are not characterized so much the act as they are by obsession. For instance, a person feverishly weighing every ounce of food consumed is as guilty of Gluttony as a jaded gourmand consuming a seventeen course meal. It is the obsession with what ought to be a routine concern that distracts from God, not the form that obsession takes. So, a person who rejects appropriate recognition with extraordinary modesty and protestations of humbleness is as guilty of Pride as the more easily recognized arrogant and snobbish. It's always harder to see the Uriah Heeps clearly.

Now that he is Cardinal, will O'Malley begin to call the men to task also, or will he continue to reserve his condemnation for the more usual and easily disregarded targets of the Roman church, the women?

Link

They get letters

2006-03-29T06:44:00.000-05:00

Scalia responds to the Boston Herald's 'obscene gesture' article with a letter:

Your reporter, an up-and-coming “gotcha” star named Laurel J. Sweet, asked me (o-so-sweetly) what I said to those people who objected to my taking part in such public religious ceremonies as the Red Mass I had just attended. I responded, jocularly, with a gesture that consisted of fanning the fingers of my right hand under my chin. Seeing that she did not understand, I said “That’s Sicilian,” and explained its meaning - which was that I could not care less.

It pains me to even hint at defending this guy, but I've covered the Herald's fast-and-loose reporting about gay marriage (also here)and liberals. If Laurel J. Sweet is indeed taking some liberties with her coverage of Scalia, it's not out of character for Boston's tabloid rag.

Now I should stop to point out that I have no idea if that's an obscene guesture or not. I think we can all agree that it rises to the level of 'rude', no? But, really, who cares?

The more interesting story is the increasingly high-profile role Scalia seems to be playing in the public realm. He's playing with fire by making prejudicial remarks prior to an important case -- by no means the first incident which brings his impartiality into question -- and as an outside observer it seems to me like he wants to pick a fight.

Maybe that's his nature. Writing letters to the editor of crappy tabloids about sloppy journalism indicates he's a little testy. Or maybe there's a vast Opus Dei conspiracy to produce an impeachment showdown. Certainly the right is itching for some kind of action around the Supreme Court. It's really the last holdout against their desctructive politics. Maybe not for long.

Breaking: Card to resign

2006-03-28T08:25:00.000-05:00

AP has it. Someone had to go. Who's next?

Articulating progressive values

2006-03-28T07:22:00.000-05:00

There's a broad failure to publicly explain the reasoning behind a progressive viewpoint: why we want to invest in the future, why people care about the disadvantaged, and how such ideas are at the core of the American Dream.

These values have been ridiculed and demonized, but I think the time has come to dust them off and take a fresh look. I'll explain five here, starting with the word at the heart of it:

Progress: History is filled with tragedy and epic success, yet between the earliest civilizations and today there's a distinct line of expanding knowledge, farther reaching exploration, and growing achievements. It is the continuation of these trends that is at the core of progressivism.

Hope: Progress is not inevitable. In the face of malice, evil and a vast empty universe, people continue to get up every day to make things better for themselves and their families. Speaking to this drive forward should be at the heart of progressive communication.

People: We can expect greatness from people without ignoring the horrible things they are capable of. People built the pyramids, went to the moon, and discovered DNA. We take these things for granted now, but the scale of achievement they represent is immense. People are still capable of amazing things, but must be put to the task.

Compassion: How do we treat the old and dying? Veterans? Others who cannot care for themselves and have no one to care for them? We can decide to care for the neediest people while acknowledging the risk of creating unneeded dependency on the government.

Strength: Sharing these is not weakness; far from it. We can share these values without sacrificing military strength, while having strong laws, ethics and punishments for people who trangress them.

These are the themes that people like Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton used with such great success. Barak Obama draws on them today. We can claim the high ground as forward looking people, and not sacrifice it to people who play on our base emotions.

Pulling the plug on a 1300 acre lake

2006-03-28T06:25:00.000-05:00

Somehow I missed this one when I read all those disaster books as a kid. In 1980 an oil rig in a New Orleans lake penetrated the shaft of a salt mine below, and drained 3.5 billon gallons of water:

Concluding that something had gone terribly wrong, the men on the rig cut the attached barges loose, scrambled off the rig, and moved to the shore about 300 yards away. Shortly after they abandoned the $5 million Texaco drilling platform, the crew watched in amazement as the huge platform and derrick overturned, and disappeared into a lake that was supposed to be shallow. Soon the water around that position began to turn. It was slow at first, but it steadily accelerated until it became a fast-moving whirlpool a quarter of a mile in diameter, with its center directly over the drill site.

(via digg, iirc)

Corruption: the gift that keeps on giving

2006-03-28T06:01:00.000-05:00

In light of the unfolding Republican corruption scandals of late, it's worth remembering the terrible and ongoing cost of abusing the public trust:

If you're confronting a 30-year collaboration between the FBI and powerful mobsters who've sat at your kitchen table with guns and knives drawn, you'd probably be inclined to wait for some judicial acknowledgment of the corruption before filing a lawsuit -- particularly if your previous attempt at official redress nearly got you and your family whacked.

But today a three-judge panel (all Republican-appointees) didn't see it that way. They ruled that the two-year statute of limitations had expired, and that Rakes and his wife should have sued when press reports first linked the FBI to the mobsters, instead of waiting for a judge to confirm the conspiracy.

The fact that the judges were Republicans is probably irrelevant, and I can't evaluate what's likely a pretty well-defined limitations statute. But the abuse of public trust is a very serious crime, with real human impact whether it involves civil servants or elected officials.

It seems absurd that you can get life for carjacking or selling LSD, but Connolly (the FBI agent in the case above) got off with 10 years for letting the mafia run rampant around Boston and giving passing along information that lead to multiple people being assasinated.

Backbone-related activity

2006-03-27T06:16:00.000-05:00

Driving through Providence this weekend, I noticed this towering over route 95:

It's hard to imagine that this is the most effective way to spend campaign dollars, but it unquestionably exhibits cajones.

Carl Sheeler is challenging Lincoln Chafee, and I know nothing about the race or Sheeler's prospects, but that billboard certainly gets some attention.

Inching twoards a separation of powers showdown

2006-03-24T06:44:00.000-05:00

Eventually Congress will stop kissing Bush's ass and fight back on this stuff:

When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers.

[...]

Bush wrote: ''The executive branch shall construe the provisions . . . that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch . . . in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information . . . "

GOP credibilty gap hindering election slate

2006-03-24T06:13:00.000-05:00

Massachusetts, in spite of whatever else you might say about it, is a well-educated, progressive, and high-income state. But with Romney travelling around the country to court the hard right faction of the party, it's no wonder that the GOP is having a hard time fielding a slate of candidates. The part of the party he's kissing ass with is the bit that's most at odds with the folks back here.

Attorney General, in particular, should be an easy one for them to field:

Just a month before GOP delegates meet in Lowell to endorse a slate, no serious Republican contenders have emerged for two of the most important constitutional positions, attorney general and state treasurer. The party has embraced a politically inexperienced candidate with few financial resources for state auditor and is courting another with few political credentials to run for secretary of state.

[...]

Darrell Crate, Romney's hand-picked state GOP chairman, said he is proud of the candidates the party has recruited so far to fill out the statewide ticket. He acknowledged the party is in a weak position, but he attributed that to what he says are years of neglect.

This was one of Romney's big pledges -- to revitalize the party. But it's not working. Perhaps because there's a growing sense that he told a bunch of bold lies to get into office with the sole idea of advancing his career on a national level.

Neglect or no neglect, the combination of Romney's slick cynicism with the overall hard-right-no-middle tack the GOP is taking as a whole makes it incredibly challenging to cultivate the Bill Weld-style fiscal conservatives that have played well here.

Any potential GOP candidate here has to spend at least some extra time differentiating him or herself from the national party -- explaining how he's not out to take over a woman's uterus, spy on email, raise massive budget deficits, or stop teaching evolution in the schools. I think we're seeing the same thing in New Hampshire as well, and I think it's indicitive of problems the Republicans are going to face in plenty of other states in the next few elections.

America to Atheists: Go to hell

2006-03-23T12:02:00.000-05:00

Atheists identified as America’s most distrusted minority:

From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.”

[...]

Many of the study’s respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism.

[...]

The researchers also found acceptance or rejection of atheists is related not only to personal religiosity, but also to one’s exposure to diversity, education and political orientation—with more educated, East and West Coast Americans more accepting of atheists than their Midwestern counterparts.

(via digg)

Let's not talk about science

2006-03-23T07:14:00.000-05:00

I considered blogging about the study indicating conservatives were more likely to have been whiny children when it was first covered a few days ago. I wanted to say something to the tune of "we have a hard enough time covering and discussing largely apolitical science, so we should just give up all hope of a reasonable discourse surrounding anything political."

Putting the substance of the study aside for a monent, here's how my favorite local tabloid opens their coverage today:

And you thought liberals were the whiners.

Yes, Jessica Fargen, we all thought liberals were the whiners. Watch Bill O'Reilly much? Great job at rising above petty stereotypes to show some objectivity and balance. Did you help out with those hit pieces on gay marriage supporters?

Getting back to the substance of the study: did you read the study itself? No? I didn't either. I didn't try hard to find it, but that's not my job. At least not my day job. I'll go out on a limb and guess 100% of the coverage on this study is based solely on press releases and interviews.

For all we know, it could be a fantastic study, full of insight. Or maybe it's complete garbage, with false conculsions and sloppy work. But no one discussing it knows, and there is no mechanism in this country for digesting and responding rationally to scientific information, so we won't know.

Coverage like this is the other side of the coin that permits credulous reporting on 'creation science'. It's not a problem that's going away anytime soon, and it's going to bite us on the ass as more and more complex issues -- stem cell research, prenatal genetic testing, energy, cloning -- become pressing policy questions.

What can we do? Let's start with a moratorium on press releases about scientific papers.

Chavez, continued: playing with fire, fueled by crude

2006-03-22T17:22:00.000-05:00

The Chavez issue is fascinating. Here's a charismatic populist/socialist talking trash to the United States with a cowboy in the Whitehouse. The US has a long history of involvement with violence in Central and South America, including removal of leaders through various means, and some have suggested that the CIA played a part in the failed coup against Chavez.

Yet Venezuela is the third largest supplier of crude to the US by some accounts.

A Latin America policy analyst I spoke to had this to say:

Chavez has made sure that his untimely demise would be followed by a real anti-US backlash. If he were choking on a piece of steak, the US would send in people to give him the heimlich.

The US cares a huge amount about Venezuela, despite what our ambassador says. What really scares people in DC is that Latin America, as a region, could become a continent akin to Africa -- too many civil wars, stagnant or reversing growth rates, growing inequality, crumbling infrastructure, environmental plight, governance by mob/coup, no rule of law, bastian to extremists, mass starvation due to ineptitude, you get the idea. Clearly all of Africa isn't all these things at once, but the past 30 years has seen a strong smattering of that scenario across Africa, and the State Dept guys can't imagine a worse scenario for Latin America.

But clearly the State Department isn't the entire government. Ask Oliver North. On one hand we've failed to remove Castro, but on the other there's a long list of Latin American heads of state who we've been directly involved with removing, peripherally involved with removing, tacitly approved removal of, or are rumored to have been involved with removing.

It's easy to get all conspiracy-ish, but when the Iran-link test baloons start floating and John "D is for Death Squad" Negroponte has too much time on his hands it's hard not to start thinking about black ops.

At the very least, Chavez presents the highest potential for comedy in the forgiegn policy arena that we've got going now. The rest of it is so damn serious.

Opinions are like what again?

2006-03-22T09:30:00.000-05:00

My horoscope in the metro today advised me to keep my opinions to myself. Here's someone else's: www.fucksouthdakota.com

Can the Democrats field a viable candidate at long last? A superficial look.

2006-03-22T06:44:00.000-05:00

The inability of the Democratic party to field candidates from outside the machine has been heartbreaking, both here in Massachusetts and nationally. It's the outsiders who have big appeal, not the Kerrys and the Gephardts.

Today, a Boston Globe survey indicates that gubenatorial candidate Deval Patrick has a 3-to-1 lead in Democratic convention delegates, an interesting early start, and a potential break in the logjam of terrible insider candidates.

Putting aside the racial comparison, I get a Barak Obama vibe off this guy: he seems to be running an upbeat campaign with positive rhetoric, a theme of hope, and a personal history that explicity references the American Dream. He's not the same stirring orator as Obama from what I can see, but he's good looking and has the message that people are looking for.

Let's look at the opponents. In the primary, he's likely to face Tom Reilly, the current Attorney General. Reilly has a pinched-looking face, seems tense on tv, sounds harsh, and got a rough start by picking a black city councilwoman with some financial problems as a runningmate.

The likely contender in the main event is Lt. Governor Kerry Healy. She'll be able to make some claims about economic growth, can probably deliver soccer moms, and seems to be highly focused on victims rights an other tough-on-crime messages. She also seems pretty tightly wound on tv.

Mentally, I think people are making some pretty simple calculations in voting situations: could candidate x run the show? do their policies sound like they make sense? where do they fall on the 1-2 issues I care deeply about? do I get a good feeling from this person?

It's not some deep and lengthy calculus. For Healy, it's policy + tough - tense - Romney = zero. With Reilly it's crime - tense - insider = -1. In each case, it's a series of minor themes taking the place of a larger one.

Duval Patrick's campaign video is full of warm fuzzies about coming to Milton Academy on scholarship, suing Bill Clinton in a civil rights case, and working for Coke. But here's the kind of gold that he should be able to cash in on during the campaign:

"I feel as a citizen tired of politics as a partisan blood sport. [...] Frankly, it's the rest of us who are waiting while the games get played by the insiders."

Hope + outsider +/- black could equal a win.

Coldwar bunker found in Brooklyn Bridge

2006-03-21T17:04:00.000-05:00

Shit like this cracks me up:

New York workers have discovered a trove of Cold War-era supplies within the masonry of the Brooklyn Bridge, a cache meant to aid in survival efforts in the event of nuclear attack.

City Department of Transportation employees were conducting maintenance on the structure Wednesday when they found the cache on the top floor of a three-floor space inside the bridge's base, agency spokeswoman Kay Sarlin said.

[...]

The stockpile included empty water drums and boxes of medical supplies, such as tourniquet bandages and an intravenous drip. Also, there were cans of high-calorie crackers with instructions to consume 10,000 calories a day per person. The instructions said the crackers should be destroyed after 10 years, but they were mostly intact.

10,000 has to be typo.