Awesome. John Stossel uses Thanksgiving as a chance to bash sharing communism.

Every year around this time, schoolchildren are taught about that wonderful day when Pilgrims and Native Americans shared the fruits of the harvest. "Isn't sharing wonderful?" say the teachers.

They miss the point.

Because of sharing, the first Thanksgiving in 1623 almost didn't happen.

The failure of Soviet communism is only the latest demonstration that freedom and property rights, not sharing, are essential to prosperity. The earliest European settlers in America had a dramatic demonstration of that lesson, but few people today know it.

When the Pilgrims first settled the Plymouth Colony, they organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share everything equally, work and produce.

They nearly all starved.

Attention!

"If the passenger with the IPhone would be kind enough to use it to check the weather at our alternate, calculate our fuel burn due to being rerouted around the storms, call the dispatcher to arrange our release, and then make a phone call to the nearest Air Traffic Control center to arrange our timely departure amongst the other aircraft carrying passengers with IPhones, then we will be more than happy to depart. Please ring your call button to advise the Flight Attendant and your fellow passengers when you deem it ready and responsible for this multi-million dollar aircraft and its passengers to safely leave."

390 Million-Year-Old Sea Scorpion Found, Man-Size

Fuck yeah.

The creature, which has been named Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, would have paddled in a river or swamp.

The size of the beast suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought, the team says.

The claw itself measures 46cm - indicating its owner would have been longer even than the average-sized human.

David Brooks: The Last 25 Years of Music Is At Fault In This Way

Good gravy, this is an irritating article, wherein Brooks blames someone or other for the terrible fragmentation in culture today and how, without the Rolling Stones around to unite us, music stinks, and young musicians don't know their past.

Classic Brooks Dumbass Statement #1:

Technology drives some of the fragmentation. Computers allow musicians to produce a broader range of sounds.

Classic Brooks Anti-"Elite" Rant #2:

People who have built up cultural capital and pride themselves on their superior discernment are naturally going to cultivate ever more obscure musical tastes. I’m not sure they enjoy music more than the throngs who sat around listening to Led Zeppelin, but they can certainly feel more individualistic and special.

Sure, unity's great, David. Education on the past of music is great, but I would *never* turn to you to understand the history and present of the musical landscape.

So the beta of Firefox 3 is out. I was excited to check it out, because this version is supposed to demonstrate greater mac-like interface elements. Software interface design is important to me, and I live with the functional limitations of Safari because all the other osx options are so awkward and ugly.

But check out this screen - the "Places Organizer," which I think is the bookmarks organizer. Ick! Sure, this is a beta, but come one.



It does finally have aqua widgets - which would have been nice 2 years ago, before Apple began ridding the os of such things.

(IcanHas, of course)

Shoot Me.



(an ad I found on the yahoo weather site)

Not directly related at all, but this ad reminded me of this old classic.

More on the terrible effects of Typhoon Sidr on Bangladesh, from the excellent Dr. Jeff Masters.

The story gets worse and worse.

BAGHLANI-JADID, Afghanistan (AP) -- Up to two-thirds of the 77 people killed and 100 wounded in a suicide bombing last week were hit by bullets from visiting lawmakers' panicked bodyguards, who fired on a crowd of mostly schoolchildren for up to five minutes, a preliminary U.N. report says.

Shitty AP Coverage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

I know it's hard, but...

(AP) -- When some of the world's leading religious scholars gather in San Diego this weekend, pasta will be on the intellectual menu. They'll be talking about a satirical pseudo-deity called the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whose growing pop culture fame gets laughs but also raises serious questions about the essence of religion.

(my bold)

Right. A "pseudo-deity." As opposed to...? Say it.

"A real deity."

I would love to see the AP's official list of non-pseudo deities.

I imagine the writer was trying to make some point along the lines of the unique properties of a language like Esperanto, but as written, this is bunk.

It doesn't end there, however, and on the whole I was pretty disappointed with the article. As I said, I know it's tricky to cover exactly what the FSM represents, since it cuts to the bone about the undebatable pedestal we tend to let religious beliefs sit on. But this kind of coverage is so oddly irrelevant.

Lucas Johnston, the third Florida student, argues the Flying Spaghetti Monsterism exhibits at least some of the traits of a traditional religion -- including, perhaps, that deep human need to feel like there's something bigger than oneself out there.

He recognized the point when his neighbor, a militant atheist who sports a pro-Darwin bumper sticker on her car, tried recently to start her car on a dying battery.

As she turned the key, she murmured under her breath: "Come on Spaghetti Monster!"

A. In what delusional word do you believe that FSM represents a "deep human need to feel like there's something bigger than oneself out there?" Absolutely not. It's about the authority vested in some myths, and how that authority gets there. The whole thing springs from a bit of skepticism over this "deep human need" shit.

B. "militant atheist?" Where'd you get that language?

C. When your atheist neighbor whispered "Come on Spaghetti Monsters!", you thought that that indicated that the atheist believed there was something "bigger" than herself, and she was unconsciously asking the Spaghetti Monster to help her car start? Thus indicating her hypocrisy or something and proving that all humans are "religious?" Actually, that does seem to be the overall lazy premise of the article:

In short, is an anti-religion like Flying Spaghetti Monsterism actually a religion?

This misses the point entirely.

I've been meaning to post this for a while now, so...

I read Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz via Daily Lit a couple months back, and found the following passage pretty fascinating:

And Ozma has an enchanted picture hanging in her room that shows her the exact scene where any of her friends may be, at any time she chooses. All she has to do is to say: 'I wonder what So-and-so is doing,' and at once the picture shows where her friend is and what the friend is doing. That's REAL magic, Mr. Wizard; isn't it?

Could you conceive of such incredible technology?

You can donate to the relief efforts for the victims of the terrible Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh here.

Andrew Sullivan:

Isn't it remarkable how eager the Republicans are to declare the Democratic race over?

Absolutely. It's like they don't want to waste any of their mud on folks that won't end up running. They don't understand that the primary period is a valuable time for a political party, while we work out what we stand for and what we believe in. The goals of the party are more important than what Personality we decide is "faultless" (or, in the case of the repubs hoping that the candidate gets locked down soon, "always wrong").

Who do I want to listen to answer the question "Can America rise above the divisions of the 1960s?" Not the Wall Street Journal, that's for sure.

Why weren't you fuckers complaining about a lack of civility and bipartisan cooperation when Bush and the Repub congress were steamrolling the country in the last 5 years?

To the degree and manner that you do, please pray for Bangladesh.

Liquidy

4-part video interview with Kevin Shields in a pub, on (among other topics) the new My Bloody Valentine record - which he calls coming out "this year."

One great quote from Part 2:

We didn't use reverb, and flanges, and choruses, and delays, and stuff like that, you know what I mean, there was none of that. I just used one effect, which was that reverse-reverb thing. And that was only because I could get that simultaneously up-front dryness as well. And yet it was all liquidy.

Cramps

About 20 years too late, I'm finally getting around to checking out The Cramps (thanks, Rob!). They're a bit more rockabilly than I usually like (witnessing the rise of Union Pool was enough to make me cringe from that for a while), but I'm digging them all right.

The truth is, though, I have no choice but to love them, since one of their albums has what may well be my very favorite album cover of all time. I loved this image for at least a decade before I even knew who The Cramps were!

Oh, Judith Warner.

I'm sure your article itself will argue why it exists, but that would necessitate me reading it.

Gothamist: Exactly What Makes James Lipton So Irritating? By the numbers.

Great thoughts from the Bad Astronomy Blog about the freakout that erupted around the Best Science Blog Weblog award this week.

Again, let me be clear: I applaud McIntyre’s efforts to work through this. He has clearly done some good, and I have said so in previous posts. An argument can be made that my use of the term “denialist” for him may be too strong, but it still does seem to me after reading more of his site that he comes at this from the angle of trying to tear down arguments made for anthropogenic GW while not going after the antiGW claims.

That’s where I stand. I wish this hadn’t become such a foofooraw, but there you have it.

So: tomorrow or the next day the votes will be tallied, one of us will take the prize, and that will be that. Good.

I have learned quite a bit from this, as I’m sure others have as well. For my own part, I will try to be even more diligent about categorizing others. I have also been exposed to a whole slew of sites I didn’t know about, which is an obvious side effect of this whole awards thing, and that’s good. And maybe when this all blows over we can go back to trying to figure out what’s real and what isn’t.

Absolutely beautiful insect-et-al photography by Igor Siwanowicz. (via Dark Roasted Blend)

This being Chelicerata, I've chosen a beautiful shot of an Amblypygi.

Links to Links to Links

Oh, boy, My Bloody Valentine new album rumors!

Horror.

Matthew Yglesias, in discussing pundit commentary on Pakistan, notes a pattern:

How many times have I read a column making an argument like 'Iraq is all fucked up for reasons A, B, and C but given the price of failure we have no choice but to close our eyes and hope really hard that A, B, and C vanish for some reason'? It's really foolish, a way of trying to present oneself as wise and knowledgeable about difficult questions without putting anything out there that one can be held accountable for if things don't work out.

Leopard Corners

There are certainly some rough edges to the new Mac OS, Leopard, but there are also many things to be happy about in it.

Most new menu items, including contextual menus, have rounded corners. But note here how the upper left corner of the included sub-menu does *not* have a rounded corner. It visually suggests the relationship between the two menus, better than two self-contained interface pieces, each with 4 rounded corners. Someone had to notice this issue, make the suggestion, and a group had to successfully decide to do it. Bravo, Apple, for the little things!

Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population, according to a report to be released Thursday.

This is a staggering statistic, and terribly sad. It should should hopefully throw a little water on the War As Heroics bullshit that's so deeply ingrained in our country.

Being in a war fucks you up. Deeply.

GWB should fall to his knees and beg the forgiveness of those he was responsible for sending.

Sad, but good to remember. Kos.

[W]e go to D.C. with the weak Democrats we have, rather than the strong Democrats we wish we had.

Sadly No yesterday posted a pretty awesome BlogsForBush double-take post yesterday:

I discovered a lengthy anti-Bush comment preceded by the following taunt:

I don’t think you have the b***s to allow this post to the blog. Let’s see.

Well, guess what? The comment was published… But I’ve taken it down.

But Mark keeps up the stoopid this morning, with this one:

The Border Fence is Working
At least in the small area its been completed, according to this new story.

The Kung Fu I've been practicing in my head totally saved me in when I was punched in a fight the other day - at least in the part of my body where I wasn't punched!

Fakery, or Defending Quayle and FEMA

Jonah Goldberg is, um...objecting to Saturday Night Live's mockery of the fake FEMA press conference (and the blocked promotion for the director who ran it) because, um, Weekend Report is fake news itself? And Colbert was a jerk for running for President, or something.

Really, Jonah, this is stretching it. The topics just flow and drift as you start with a failure of a group tangentially related to Bush, and end up relating it to the litany of faults you find with the mentality of the "hip, iPhone crowd."

But how about you get to the heart of it?

The problem of parsing fact from fiction, news from entertainment, has been inherent to broadcast journalism from the beginning. Radio newsman Walter Winchell got his start in vaudeville. But in the modern era, I blame "Murphy Brown," the show about a fictional TV newswoman who talked about real newsmakers as if they were characters on her sitcom. When Brown had a baby out of wedlock, Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the writers of the show. Liberals then reacted as though Quayle had insulted a real person - and so did the fictional Brown, whining about how she'd been personally attacked. Ever since, journalists and politicians have been playing themselves in movies and TV series, perhaps trying to disprove the cliche that Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.

Murphy Brown ruined America! An old classic.

Update: I guess when reality makes you look like a fool, the only option left is to focus on the "fakeness" of media! Michelle gets into it, too, with her latest spin on "faux hate crimes" and everything else she can think of that proves that all the shit we're pissed about can't actually be trusted to exist.

200 year-old sketches from the Swedish East India Company, via BibliOdyssey (which provided this detail of a chelicerate):

Indy Fails

Sad but true.

To paraphrase Wolfman: In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Nazis' big plan is to locate and open the Ark of the Covenant. Indiana Jones tries to stop them at every turn. He fails. Because at the end of the film, the Nazis still get the Ark and open it. Look at it this way: if you remove Indy from the film, the outcome is the same. The Nazis go to Marion Ravenwood in Tibet and get the headpiece of the staff of Ra. They already know where the Map Room is, so — possessing the actual headpiece which will give them the right height for the staff — they find the Well of Souls easy-peasy, put the Ark on a truck, and drive it to a submarine bound for the island. (Or, they could've flown it there as planned.) Then, they open the Ark and everyone dies.

While I can't lay claim to this theory, it saddens me to say that I wholeheartedly agree with it. All Indy does is slow them down and cause a little property damage. He never stops them from getting the Ark. And, I guess, he saves Marion's life. But the Nazis win. (Oh, and by the way, remember that fertility god statue Indy was after in the film's open? Belloq gets it.) Not only is Indiana Jones a completely reactive character, his actions dictated entirely by what other people do, he's a big honking loser.

Marv Wolfman, to whom this EW writer attributes the theory, is this person.

2007 is the most deadly year for American troops so far in Bush's War.

And there are still two months left.

Fake Steve Jobs on the gPhone:

Look. We've seen one of these phones. Eric brought one over the other day. It's fine. Nice looking enough. Works. Makes calls. The apps run. But it's nothing overwhelming. You couldn't put it in a plexiglass case and make nerds drool looking at it.

It burns! Teh Stupid!

I find it interesting that it is NOT OBVIOUS that evolution is still occurring. Think about it. Look at the world around you. Things appear basically complete. It seems to me the theory of macro evolution would predict that we would see MASSIVE evidence of macro evolution still taking place. It seems we would see many species of plants, animals and humans in transition from one thing to another, creating entirely new species. Instead we see nothing at all. That seems rather odd to me. It does not seem to be what Macro Evolution would predict. In fact, we almost daily are reminded the number of species is actually declining. Why is it totally OBVIOUS that species are disappearing during our lifetime and yet no new species are appearing at the same time?

Why would macro evolution somehow take primordial soup and create thru random means this amazingly diverse world we observe and then STOP? I suppose it can be argued it is because of the massive amount of time and the last 5,000 years is just a nit in time. But that seems irrelevant to me. Regardless of where we are on the spectrum of time, there ought to be massive numbers of obvious, incomplete transitional forms for us to observe. e,g, cows with 3 legs and a partial 4th still in the process of evolving. Multiply that across tens of millions of species. The amount of macro evolution we should be observing ought to be massive. And yet there essentially is nothing.

This is like the inverse of understanding of what evolution is.

John Cole is fed up:

I have had a couple drinks, so let’s be blunt (pardon the pun)- and this goes out to anyone, of any political persuasion, anywhere, who had a problem with this woman using marijuana to alleviate her pain (especially the alleged “conservative” federalists who can’t handle the thought of states making their own drug laws):

Go fuck yourself. To death.

I am tired of being patient with you nannies and your stupid self-serving rules and your slippery slopes and your bullshit and your need to be tough on crime and your earnest concerns about society. Mind your own business, get your own house in order, stop fucking interns and little boys and cheating on your wives and on your taxes and being found dead wearing two wetsuits with a dildo shoved up your ass. Just mind your own damned business, and let people do what they must to deal with their own screwed up lives, and let people handle their pain the best way they can.

I am sick of the bullshit. Life is hard for most people out there, and damned near impossible for people in chronic pain. Quit making it worse, you allegedly compassionate sons-of-bitches.

It's Over

Watch as any remaining nostalgic respect you might have had for Ben Stein ("yeah, but those Visine ads are funny! How can he not be an okay guy?") is wiped away. I knew it was bad, but this is ridiculous.

Yeah, "Darwinism" is a "relic of the Age of Imperialism."

John Cole: "Maybe we can all get together and kick Glenn Beck’s ass?"

Between Thinking and a Final Draft

Merlin Mann, on paper:

When we rely on a paper document as the final, unique destination for information, we create physical and cognitive limitations that seem crazy once you’ve spent a chunk of your life living on Google. No one disputes that.

But as an intermediary medium between thinking and a final draft, I still just love what you can do with a stack of index cards and a little spare time.

No content types. No taxonomy. No typefaces. Just you and your ideas — in a bunch of little piles that make sense to you.

Cory Doctorow, on the court decision against Major League Baseball - that baseball stats aren't property:

Facts aren't property -- even when they're facts about you.

Rainy Weekend Means Sloth-Time!

Sloths are honorary members of chelicerata for me, at least in terms of the respect I show them.



A brilliant work from ICanHasCheezburger.

photo: Craig
capped and submitted by: K Smith

Creating Place

I'm in love with this homemade 747 cockpit flight simulator environment. Brilliant.

Fair Enough

Sharp comic today from an artist I found via PZ:



See the whole thing.

Good Grief

Rep. Steve King, Republican from Iowa, brought in a little poster to the US House of Representatives today that explained that S-CHIP really stands for “socialized Clinton-style Hillarycare for Illegals and their Parents.”

What About Gifts?

Today's Dinosaur Comics wisdom: "Brains in Jars Don't Get Birthdays!"

Bring it:

A research team led by professor Jun’ichi Ushiba of the Keio University Biomedical Engineering Laboratory has developed a BCI system that lets the user walk an avatar through the streets of Second Life while relying solely on the power of thought. To control the avatar on screen, the user simply thinks about moving various body parts — the avatar walks forward when the user thinks about moving his/her own feet, and it turns right and left when the user imagines moving his/her right and left arms.

50 years. This development is encouraging, but freeze me for just 50 years, please. That should be enough.

Anthony Bourdain, on Rachel Ray's Dunkin' Donuts endorsements:

"She's got a magazine, a TV empire, all these best-selling books - I'm guessing she's not hurting for money. She's hugely influential, particularly with children. And she's endorsing Dunkin' Donuts. It's like endorsing crack for kids." Bourdain adds: "I'm not a very ethical guy. I don't have a lot of principles. But somehow that seems to me over the line. Juvenile diabetes has exploded. Half of Americans don't have necks. And she's up there saying, 'Eat some [bleeping] Dunkin' Donuts. You look great in that swimsuit - eat another doughnut!' That's evil."

super tuber

The universe is a marvelous and mysterious place. From a non-satire site on favorite foods of members of Congress ("Congress Cooks!"), we have the top choice of The Honorable Larry E. Craig: the super tuber.

Wash and dry potato. Rub with shortening or butter. With an apple corer or small knife, core out the potato center (end to end). Push hot dog through the center. Bake until potato is cooked through.

XKCD is without a doubt Back in the Saddle Again.

Have I told you how much I love Fake Steve Jobs?

Do you have any idea how maddening it is to be this smart and to create perfect products and then have frigtards tell me I'm arrogant because I won't let them mess with perfection? Did Leonardo da Vinci finish his big statue of David and then say, Hey, any frigtards who want to add an extra leg or a third eye right in the forehead or whatever, well, go ahead, have at it? No. He did not. He said, Get the fuck away from my statue, jackass. You can look at it. That's it. And oh yeah. Pay me.

Colbert, 10/3/07:

When my car runs out of gas, I buy a new one. I don't want to ride around in a quitter.

Yup, we sure are making our children proud with the level of political discourse in this country.

The Poor Man Institute notes a growing paradoxical feeling.

I’ve developed this weird new emotion over the last five years or so, where I can be absolutely flabbergasted while simultaneously thinking ‘oh, not this same old crap again’. I would have thought these were mutually exclusive, that you would have to choose to be either A) totally shocked and horrified or B) the absolute negation of A). And yet, here we go again.

Guilty!

Okay, the silly use of "squirt" in relation to the Zune (meaning "sending a file wirelessly") might be Cory Doctorow's fault.

From this morning's DailyLit segment of Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003):

"That's not really my area," Tim said. "I'm a programmer. But I could have one of the designers squirt some plans at you, if you want."

Ick.

I loved the Libertines. Great band, even though they had only two records, and were always about to implode.

Ooops, my bad. They have a third coming. It's a Best Of.

WTF?

Misuse of Position

Clarence, don't be a shit:

The new term has begun for a bitterly divided court in a dangerously divided nation, and the most visible event was a Supreme Court justice using the court’s return as a book promotion to remind the world of his enemies, demons, biases and vendettas.

This is extraordinary and unprecedented.

Justice Clarence Thomas should now recuse himself from any cases involving any litigants who opposed his confirmation, because his attacks on them destroy any pretense of judicial impartiality. This is a man with a chip on his shoulder, axes to grind and scores to settle.

There is no need to re-litigate the issues surrounding his confirmation, our opinions of his tenure on the court or his various commentaries on divisive political and social issues. Perhaps Justice Thomas would feel more comfortable leaving the Supreme Court and running for public office — or hosting a conservative radio talk show.

The bottom line is this: The essence of the highest court in the land is the appearance and reality of judicial impartiality, with justices who stand for judicial temperament, fairness and respect for the law without using the forum of the court to settle scores with enemies or demonize those with whom they disagree.

There will be litigants with cases before the court who opposed Thomas’s confirmation, and because Justice Thomas cannot control his urge to attack them while he sits in judgment of them, he should recuse himself from cases involving any of them.

Mowgli bipedal jumping robot

It's Tuesday. Why NOT a frog-jumping robot?

(via TV In Japan)

I have to admit this to myself: I just don't care for Asobi Seksu.

Duncan provides a bit more insight on this issue than my last post:

Meanwhile, showing that as usual they understand this game much better, the Republicans have introduced a measure in the House to *commend* Rush Limbaugh.

This is absolutely, positively, totally and completely fucking apeshit nuts.

God it hurts. From the marvelous hit & miss new site LOLTheist: Blasphemy is Teh Funneh

What A Day

How about "What's your favorite Cure song?" Nicole Belle writes:

This had to be the most aggravating question during the Dartmouth debate, both in its implication and in sheer unconstitutional glory. Moderator Tim Russert asks the Democratic presidential contenders to name their favorite Bible verse.

Um, Tim, are you trying to say that Democrats need to prove their faith? Nice Republican framing there. And on whole other level, are you confirming the mindset that only practicing Christians should be eligible for the presidency? What if there was a Jew, Buddhist or a *gasp* atheist on that stage? Would that question be considered appropriate then?

"Digital Television Goldrush"

Funniest headline of the day: Microsoft Wants to Take on YouTube, Apple TV

And memory lane...

WIRED News, 4/7/97

As a major broadcasting industry conference kicks off in Las Vegas, Microsoft made a typical splash by announcing its US$425 million acquisition of WebTV Networks, the Palo Alto company that delivers the Net to ordinary TVs.
"We've been planning for some time to use Windows CE across a number of appliances," Microsoft senior product manager Alan Yates said Monday. "The more we evaluated WebTV, the more we saw how well it would fit with our plans."
The move is Microsoft's nimble attempt to outmaneuver its rivals in the digital television goldrush. The software giant is aggressively moving to push — and dominate — the developing merger of PCs and televisions. The purchase of WebTV, which lets users get email and browse the Web on a TV set, will position Microsoft to penetrate the home-television market, which includes 98 percent of American homes.

Why God created in-the-ear headphones.

Verizon Decides What We Can Do With Our Phones (Updated!)

See Update Below!

Despicable.

Saying it had the right to block “controversial or unsavory” text messages, Verizon Wireless has rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon’s mobile network available for a text-message program.

The other leading wireless carriers have accepted the program, which allows people to sign up for text messages from Naral by sending a message to a five-digit number known as a short code.

This is not spam. This is a person signing up for information they wish to receive through their phone, and Verizon claiming it doesn't want to let you receive that information through their service, because it objects to the message.

But legal experts said private companies like Verizon probably have the legal right to decide which messages to carry. The laws that forbid common carriers from interfering with voice transmissions on ordinary phone lines do not apply to text messages.

The dispute over the Naral messages is a skirmish in the larger battle over the question of “net neutrality” — whether carriers or Internet service providers should have a voice in the content they provide to customers.

Sorry, Mr. Artist, we don't like your art - we're not going to provide you electricity.

Nancy Keenan, Naral’s president, said Verizon’s decision interfered with political speech and activism.

“No company should be allowed to censor the message we want to send to people who have asked us to send it to them,” Ms. Keenan said. “Regardless of people’s political views, Verizon customers should decide what action to take on their phones. Why does Verizon get to make that choice for them?”

I wish I could call up Verizon and quit again. They should get SHREDDED over this in the media.

Not. Your. Choice.

Timothy Wu, a law professor at Columbia, said it was possible to find analogies to Verizon’s decision abroad. “Another entity that controls mass text messages is the Chinese government,” Professor Wu said.

Updated 10:30am: Verizon knows a catastrophic PR event when they see it coming. Eat Crow, Mutherfuckers.

“The decision to not allow text messaging on an important, though sensitive, public policy issue was incorrect, and we have fixed the process that led to this isolated incident,” Jeffrey Nelson, a company spokesman, said in a statement.

“It was an incorrect interpretation of a dusty internal policy,” Mr. Nelson said. “That policy, developed before text messaging protections such as spam filters adequately protected customers from unwanted messages, was designed to ward against communications such as anonymous hate messaging and adult materials sent to children.”

(my emphasis)

"We prevented people from receiving the information they requested on their phones in order to save children from receiving adult materials." Bullshit. It was opt-in, assholes.

Set Tricoder to "I'm Stunned"

Fresh of my shock that the Space Age is only 50 years old, now it's noted that the damn hand-held calculator is only FORTY years old!

Temper Blame

Baseball player gets called a profanity by an umpire, freaks out, hurts himself when his own manager pushes him to the ground, and now he blames the ump for his injury? Sure, the ump was out of line, but Milton, you sound like an idiot saying shit like this.

The Padres claimed Winters baited Bradley, who has a history of losing his temper. Bradley tore a knee ligament when his manager spun him to the ground while trying to keep him from going after the umpire during Sunday's 7-3 loss to Colorado in San Diego.

[..]

First base coach Bobby Meacham and Black said Winters used profanity. Bradley called it ''the most unprofessional and most ridiculous thing I've ever seen.''

''It's terrible. And now, because of him, my knee's hurt,'' he said after the game. ''If this costs me my season because of that, he needs to be reprimanded. I'm taking some action. I'm not going to stand pat and accept this because I didn't do nothing wrong.''

A Book or Something

Gruber:

Which brings me to the jackassiest comment of the day regarding Amazon MP3, from Jupiter Research analyst David Card to the Associated Press: “In and of itself, (Amazon MP3) isn’t enough to change any market share. They have to do a good job at building their store.”

Well, perhaps Amazon can find a book or something about how to build a successful high-volume online store.

Life in IRAF: "There's one hour allotted every day to either fudge ice-cream or volleyball."

The Times Style section outdoes itself, produces the single most irritating shit I've ever read there, about women who date people who make less money than them, and find it too awkward to take.

FOR Whitney Hess, a 25-year-old software designer in Manhattan, the tension that ultimately ended her recent relationships was all right there, in the digits on her pay stub.

The awkwardness started with nights out. She would want to try the latest downtown bistro, but her boyfriends, who worked in creative jobs that paid less than hers, preferred diners.

They would say, “Wow, you’re so sophisticated,” she recalled. A first look at her apartment, a smartly appointed studio in a full-service building in TriBeCa, would only reinforce the impression. “They wouldn’t want me to see their apartments,” she said, because they lived in cramped surroundings in distant quadrants of Brooklyn or the Bronx.

Read it all, if you dare...

Awesome:

Turner, a graduate student at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and lead author of the study, says Velociraptor appears to have been a smaller creature than in Jurassic Park, but just as nasty.

"It's sort of as if you scaled up a chicken and then gave it really nasty teeth and big claws on its feet," he said.

Again, no chelicerates, but some fancy lil' critters in this post from BibliOdyssey. They're prints from a man named Adriaen Collaert from around 1600.

More of the endless stream of pleasure for the eyes and mind from Dark Roasted Blend.

My Outrage Is Bigger Than Yours

Exactly.

No sooner had word gotten out last week that New York City was considering the request than politicians of both parties went into spasms of outrage. There was such a piling on of outrage you’d have thought Ahmadinejad had proposed offering a human sacrifice or, worse, memorializing Muhammad Atta. As BooMan says, the piling on turned into a game of one-upmanship, with pols bragging that they were not only outraged, they were more outraged than their political opponents.

At this point in the post I have to stop and declare how much I don’t like Ahmadinejad. And I really don’t, but I resent having to say it. I am, however, obliged to make it clear that I don’t like Ahmadinejad so that righties don’t show up and accuse me of being a Mahmoud lover. What I will not do is enter into a competition to prove how much I dislike Ahmadinejad or if my dislike is sufficient dislike, because insufficient dislike is tantamount to siding with the terrorists.

[...]

Columbia U. President Bollinger makes it clear he’s not inviting the Iranian leader over for tea and cookies. Bollinger intends to challenge Ahmadinejad on matters of terrorism, nuclear weapons, Holocaust denial, women’s rights, and other thorny issues, which I would think would be educational.

See, Scott, this is a World Leaders Forum, which I assume includes world-leaders-in-training. What World Leaders normally do is deal with other World Leaders of all stripes, and it’s good to have some laboratory experience with such things before you go out and practice World Leadership for real. Among other things, real World Leaders are not cartoons and do not go about with “Good” or “Evil” stamped on their foreheads. Real World Leaders are complicated people who probably got to be World Leaders because they are very good at handling other people. Even evil World Leaders can be charming. Back in the 1930s lots of people — right wingers, mostly — thought Hitler was a reasonable fellow. I remember reading that the first time Harry Truman met Joseph Stalin, Truman thought Stalin was an OK guy. This World Leadership thing isn’t as easy as it looks.

REAL magic

From Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, in the segment I got in the mail the other day from (the marvelous) DailyLit:

And Ozma has an enchanted picture hanging in her room that shows her the exact scene where any of her friends may be, at any time she chooses. All she has to do is to say: 'I wonder what So-and-so is doing,' and at once the picture shows where her friend is and what the friend is doing. That's REAL magic, Mr. Wizard; isn't it?

1. Play Chess, 2. Win!

Emperor Lieberman on why he voted with Republicans to reject the bill requiring that troops be given equal time at home to the time that they serve in Iraq:

“It means that Congress will not intervene in the foreseeable future,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the Independent who has voted with the Republicans on war issues. “The fact that it didn’t get enough votes says that Congress doesn’t have the votes to stop this strategy of success from going forward."

Yes, our strategy is success, Joe.

Paul Can Resist

Paul Krugman's new blog in the new Times-Selectless NYTimes:

But here’s the thing: new polls by CBS and Gallup show that the Petraeus testimony had basically no effect on public opinion: Americans continue to hate the war, and want out. The whole story about how the hearing had changed everything was a pure figment of the inside-the-Beltway imagination.

What I found striking about the whole thing was the contempt the pundit consensus showed for the public – it was, more or less, “Oh, people just can’t resist a man in uniform.” But it turns out that they can; it’s the punditocracy that can’t.

Microsoft loved its word "squirt" so much in relation to the Zune, now it introduces squircle."

DSC02104, Limon, Costa Rica

DSC02104, Limon, Costa Rica, originally uploaded by lyng883.

Not a chelicerate, but a true winner. Thanks to my friend Armistead for noticing something I'd like...

I'm glad I can now die having seen a manshroom.

Holy Fucking Shit

The front-runner for the GOP nomination?

Sadly, No summarizes:

Brilliantly, Bush is ‘posturing’ pro-war and anti-war people to unite behind his plan to keep having a war.

Between the twin obsessions of Norman Hsu and the "Betray Us" MoveOn ad, the right is seeming pretty desparate right now.

Petraeus on the "General Betray Us" MoveOn ad:

Needless to say— and to state the obvious—I disagree with the message of those that were exercising the First Amendment right that generations of soldiers have sought to preserve for Americans.

It could be a snip at those opposing the war, suggesting that they don't realize that their very right to make some criticisms is only possible with some general "military action," but I hear it at least partially as a STFU to the irritating rightwing noise machine going apoplectic over this ad.

We Set a Giant Cell Phone Tower on Fire

Fake Steve Jobs:

Anyway, last night we got everyone out on the lawn, gave out free booze and peyote, and set a giant cell phone tower on fire to represent the way we are about to torch the entire cell industry and change the world forever. Intense symbolism. And yes, we got hit with a huge fine from the Cupertino Fire Department, but you know what? It was worth it. Everyone was blown away. Lots of freaky body painting and nudity going on. I've always believed that you don't really know someone until you've tripped together. Last night I really got to know Al Gore and I must say, he's an awesome human being with a truly elevated spirit. Much love, Al.

My government: The extra 30,000 troops are doing a good enough job that those same 30,000 troops can come home in nine more months.

Joe at AMERICAblog:

The media is gobbling up the idea that Bush is going to endorse the Petraeus plan tomorrow night in a BIG speech. Of course, he is. It's Bush's goddamn plan. And, the big plan is nothing more than "reducing" the number of troops to pre-escalation levels in 9 months. That's a plan? That's a scam.

Olbermann described it as like when a thief gives you a gift of the $100 he stole from your wallet.

Thank you, Gawker:

Summer Is Over, Stop Listening To Feist
I was in the DUMBO West Elm watching stroller-pushing condo-dwellers tap their toes to the beat of "Sealion Woman" while admiring antler lamps when it finally dawned on me: Feist's "The Reminder" is totally the "Speakerboxx/The Love Below" of Summer 2007. Leslie Feist's Canadian smart-rock was fun for a minute and then so ubiquitous you felt like killing someone every time you heard it. Sure, the first few hundred listens were great! And those wistful yearning songs about how "I will be the one to break my heart" were perfect complements to all our summer crushes. But it's fall now, even though it's still 85 degrees out, and everyone's job is back to being serious and all those summer crushes have decayed like so many overripe farmer's market tomatoes. Please. It's over. It's time to forget.

Satire Becomes Truth

The other day I wrote a post, snarkily (I thought) called New Wingnut Argument: The Poor Aren't Actually Poor. Well, never underestimate the adventurers of wingnuttia. Today I find Bill Steigerwald, in Townhall.com, actually asking, rhetorically and in all earnestness, Are Our 37 Million Poor Really Poor?

When you look at the people who John Edwards insists are poor, what you find is that the overwhelming majority of them have cable television, have air conditioning, have microwaves, have two color TVs; 45 percent of them own their own homes, which are typically three-bedroom homes with 1{1/2} baths in very good recondition. On average, poor people who live in either apartments or in houses are not crowded and actually have more living space than the average person living in European countries, such as France, Italy or England.

It's the same article as the other one, with the same points from the Heritage Foundation "report."

And the same overriding point: the poor aren't poor, but when they are, it's because they're lazy and they like being single mothers.

Q: Is there any single reason why the “official poor” are poor?

A: If you look at the official poor, particularly at children who are officially in poverty, there are two main reasons for that. One is that their parents don’t work much. Typically in a year, poor families with children will have about 16 hours of adult work per week in the household. If you raised that so that you had just one adult working full time, 75 percent of those kids would immediately be raised out of poverty.

The second major reason that children are poor is a single parenthood in the absence of marriage. Close to two-thirds of all poor children live in single-parent families. What we find is that if a never-married mother married the father of her children, again, about 70 percent of them would immediately be raised out of poverty. Most of these men who are fathers without being married in fact have jobs and have a fairly good capacity to support a family.

Glenn finds a gem:

In one sense, it is quite unhealthy in a democracy for such a large majority of Americans to so distrust the political and media establishment that they even believe in advance that war reports from our leading General will be nothing more than self-serving and misleading propaganda. But in another, more important sense, when a democracy's political establishment becomes as rotted and deceitful and corrupt as ours has become -- enabling the most unpopular President in modern American history to continue what is so blatantly a senseless war for years and years, in complete defiance of what Americans want -- the one encouraging sign is that a majority realizes how corrupt our establishment is and has stopped believing anything they say.

One of the very few governmental institutions that inspired respect among Americans has been the military, and that is still the case. But anyone who becomes a part of our political class, such as Gen. Petraeus, is inherently distrusted. This war has completely eroded the relationship between our Beltway ruling class and the rest of the country. That would normally be something to lament, but in this case, it is something to celebrate. The Beltway ruling class -- political and media figures alike -- deserves nothing but scorn and distrust. As they spend the next several weeks enabling George Bush to continue this war for as long as he wants, they will earn a lot more of both.

My emphasis makes me chuckle. From an AP story on the so-very-boring iPhone price discussions:

"If they told me at the outset the iPhone would be $200 cheaper the next day, I would have thought about it for a second - and still bought it," said Andrew Brin, a 47-year-old addiction therapist in Los Angeles. "It was $600 and that was the price I was willing to pay for it."

Reason #431 that Word on Mac Sucks

In many OSX apps, option-delete in a text field deletes the preceding word and leaves the space before it, letting you type a replacement word immediately.

In Microsoft Word on OSX, option-delete also deletes the preceding space. Therefore, option-delete will ALWAYS be followed by the need to type a space.

Ugh.

Glenn:

It's as though we are now ruled by the Supreme Commander, General David G. Petraeus. And the task is to convince him to "accept," to "agree" to, to be "willing to consider" a symbolic reduction in the number of troops at some point in the far off future provided a whole series of subjective conditions are met (to be determined at his sole discretion). And if our Leader, Gen. Petraeus, agrees to allow this, we can be grateful for his magnanimity and flexibility and thankful to our Congress for having stood so tall in such a bipartisan way.

Why not just pull out one single troop a year from now, maybe, if Gen. Petreaus thinks things are going well? The disaster of the Iraq War is a perfect expression of our rotted political class.

I was struck by seeing the transliteration "Usama" on FoxNews this morning instead of the more common Osama. After a look around the web, it appears that ONLY FoxNews spells it "Usama" - not ABC News, MSNBC, CNN, NYTimes, BBC. The wire-reports from AP that appear on FoxNews are the only hits on a search for "Osama" on that site.

Why is this?

A news search for "Usama" brings up primarily Fox alone, with a handful of other - it seems - right-wing new sources, with headlines like "The CIA Proves Clinton's Dereliction of Duty."

As the transliterated sound is neither an "O" sound nor a "U" sound exactly, neither is technically more "correct," but this Fox-only insistence is just odd. Oddly, the NYPost uses "Osama" - and then, high-lariously, quotes the SITE Instituate, the organization responsible for the "CIA" article I mentioned above!

This is rad. Go, humans!

This is why you should read Atrios and bookmark him and subscribe to him in your reader:

No one could have predicted that building a massive $600 million fortified embassy compound in Saddam Hussein's palace would maybe send the wrong signal.

I know it's so stunningly obvious that no one bothers to point it out anymore, but didn't anyone raise their hand at a meeting [meetings? -ed.] and say that maybe, just maybe, taking control and occupying Saddam's palace might not be such a good idea?

Original iPhone

Fake Steve Jobs:

No, not a $200 rebate. And no, we're not going to let you return the phone or cancel your plan with AT&T. But here's what we're going to do. It's a sticker. Bring in your receipt to any Apple store or AT&T store and show that you paid full price for your iPhone, and we'll give you a sticker that says, "Original iPhone." Very small, very classy, black on black, made of super high quality plastic with a glossy finish. Something you'll be proud to put on your iPhone so everyone will know that you're not just any iPhone user; you're one of the super smart, super cool early adopters who paid full price.

I'm sad to be late to the FSJ party, but this guy's brilliant - his many takes on yesterday's Apple event are spot-on.

New Wingnut Argument: The Poor Aren't Actually Poor

Lisa Fabrizio argues that poor people aren't really that poor.

Are you like me? If you are, you're constantly amazed by and grateful for the bountiful opportunities this country affords to anyone willing to work for them. Living as I do in the New York metropolitan area, I've seen places that were formerly considered the 'wrong side of the tracks' transformed into beautiful apartment complexes. And in my own previously all-white neighborhood, we have a great assortment of families of all colors and creeds living in houses that only a generation ago would have been impossible for them to afford.

Go into almost any store or shop and you're likely to see all types of folks walking around on their expensively clad feet, swiping their credit and ATM cards with their carefully manicured hands. Drive through any neighborhood in any town — even in run-down areas — and check out the crowded restaurants while perusing the satellite dishes adorning the homes; homes filled with purchases that were once considered luxury items that now grace even the most humble of abodes.

She then cites some totally awesome stats from something called the Heritage Foundation that prove that poor people have all kinds of luxury items and aren't actually poor. Just a couple:

- Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.

- Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded. More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.

- Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.

- Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.

Never mind the truth of the stats, the main points are:

1. Suck It, John Edwards! Don't Talk About Two Americas. There's Only One!

2. Poor People, Even Though I've Just Proven They Don't Exist, Are Only Poor Because They're Lazy!

A one, and a two, and, Lisa, take us out...

But although our poor are better off than those in most of the world — so much so that millions of impoverished foreigners are willing to risk their lives and break our laws to join them — some Americans do live in unfortunate, if not dire, circumstances. Of course, the major difference is that the poor in this country have the opportunity to improve their lot.

[...]

All Americans used to know the way to prosperity for themselves and their families. It was, and is pretty basic: a two-parent family working as diligently as possible...

[...]

This, of course, is a truth that Edwards and friends cannot bear to hear or admit. To placate their diverse voting blocks — feminists, race-baiters, gays and socialists — their aim is to keep the 'lower' classes low by demeaning marriage, exalting 'single moms,' encouraging race and class envy, and subsidizing all of the above under the guise of 'helping the poor.'

This is a new angle for me: Democrats Are Making Up "The Poor" to Demean People Who Already Have Satellite Dishes!

Excuse me, I'm off to work on my application to join the cool kids at Single Mom Magazine...I exalt them!

"How The Mind Works"

Washington Post article on a study of the "persistence of myth":

The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths... The research is painting a broad new understanding of how the mind works.

(via /.)

Um, also...

Aug 31 - We Finally Found WMDs...at the UN (NY Post)

Sept 5 - Chemical 'WMD' found at U.N. may be little more than cleaner (NY Daily News)

On This Apple Day, a Moment for Zune

Not only is it pathetic that a site called "zuneinsider.com" is in fact a Microsoft corporate blog, but look at the desperation in this language announcing the Zune price drop today, the same day as Apple's new announcements.

Some of you may have already heard, but tomorrow we’re dropping the suggested retail price for Zune to $199. It’s part of the normal product lifecycle, something we’ve had on the books for months. We just got some research back and customer satisfaction with the 30GB device is really high (around 94%) and we expect even more consumers will now want to discover the Zune experience at the new lower price.

Hope everybody had a great long weekend!

My emphasis.

I love the final line, too. Reminds me of the pathetic attempts at personalization in something like the Mercedes-Benz ads in NYC, where they end with "We Live Here, Too."

One other thing - after throwing up in my mouth a little over the "comments" on this "story," I was going to post a few examples, but I figure commenter "Dave" makes the point I was going to make:

Most of these comments sound like they were composed by the same person.