Infrared

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The photo below is by my little pal Nadia J., longtime friend of my family. I loaned her my Sony Cybershot, and she immediately went to work documenting artifacts around my house using the "night vision" mode. This mode records a scene at the infrared wavelength by emitting said radiation to reflect off objects within a few yards of the lens. It works best when there is little or no ambient light.

Nadia's little pictures are brilliant, and they make me feel dumb for never having tried the same thing during some otherwise boring rainy evening. This particular one radiates a certain amount of social commentary, which is to me all the more poignant for the fact that it probably was not the motivating intent for creating the image. I think Nadia may be the Cartier-Bresson of my bungalow, curiously finding the "decisive moment" in creating her little still lifes using the junk laying around here. I'll post more of these periodically because I like them, and I hope you do, too.

This tinto tastes like paint!

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Actually, the Spanish wine I'm drinking at Kopi right now tastes more like Pixie Stix. And that's not all bad, flashwise regarding taste. Much better than vinegar or a gym bag.

In my most recent blogging hiatus I have been planning for the future, blogwise. I've been dissatisfied with how much attention I felt compelled to focus on Hillary Clinton's self-obsessed behavior during the latter half of the Democratic primary process. Too much vitriol from me, as well as Clinton. So I just wanted to say "hi" and assure you that great new features are coming your way!

But for right now I want to post one awesome idea for Barack Obama: a deal that he might make with Hilary that would get her out on the campaign trail and truly working hard to help him sew up the bitter middle-age female and hillbilly vote. He should offer to nominate her for the first SCOTUS vacancy! That would provide Senator Clinton an escape hatch from some discomfort that awaits her in the Senate, and would install her at the highest level of one of our three coequal branches of government. I'll bet she'd go for that. Now, I don't trust her for a second in any elected capacity, but I do think it's possible that an appointment to SCOTUS would allow her to revisit her youthful idealism and dedication to liberal democratic principles. And maybe even give her an opportunity to dump her peckerwood husband. So how about those apples, My Friends?

It was a simpler time

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From the Science & Engineering Desk, and apropos of nothing (as our correspondent often says), I present to you an invention for the ultimate in comfort and convenience during the reportedly grueling act of childbirth: behold U.S. Patent 3,216,423 --- Apparatus For Facilitating the Birth of a Child By Centrifugal Force (1965). Notice the cruciform plan of said apparatus, providing subliminal reassurance to all of an immaculate delivery, if not conception. And, no, it's not a nutty idea, regardless of what you may think! Click the image to enlarge detail. My favorite feature is the safety net for Junior.

Listen, I'm a busy man!!!

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I must apologize for using my discretionary time for activities other than blogging.

I have been busy with some side work that will enable me to feed my addictions for another month. Hopefully, these addictions will destroy me before I feel the need to overwork myself to such an extent again.

Very late update: This is my occasional reminder that, as a Simple Country Editor, I edit. To include judicious deletions, and stuff like that there. It is hoped that not even regular visitors will have any idea what I am taking about at this point.

All you need to know about primary coverage

Click through this link for a first-rate primer on the job that insider campaign spinners and the official media do on John Q. and Mary S. Public every day there is a presidential primary election in the United States. Gullible "political junkies" who get their juice from the likes of Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, and Cokie Roberts need to consider the possibility that their chosen narrators of life are unreliable with the facts and untrustworthy in their motives.

Concurrent update: Apologies for filing this link after the Tuesday primaries, but it really pertains to the political media-industrial complex in perpetuity.

WPE cafe blogging!

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I heart my new MBP and am taking a smidgen of time away from the Simple Country Editor grind to blog, just because I can now, in style.

A certain meme, documented in this case by Atrios, has been floating around since Our President has fallen into disfavor with a majority of die Volk. Specifically, the meme is that George W. Bush is the most unpopular president "in modern times." I wonder: why the qualification? Do we really know of any president who has been more unpopular? A more important question, in my opinion, is why it took a majority of the people 7 years to reach this opinion. Everything about Mr. Bush --- literally everything --- was apparent on its face since before his election, when I remember news reports of him standing at a Florida stock car track or something, repeatedly bleating "W" in high-school Spanish to a crowd of frothed-up Cuban exiles, with the learned media commentators asserting that this behavior displayed not only Governor Bush's fluency in a foreign language, but also his deep connections to the "Hispanic" community.

I believe there is one, and only one, reason why Mr. Bush's popularity ratings are so dismal: people are afraid that they can't afford all their great stuff any more.

Acronym alert: for the benefit of all you puny humans out there, WPE means "Worst President Ever."

Assignment desk: Question for McCain

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In a Florida speech today, John McCain said it's time to put Americans "back in charge" of their own health care. The idea is that you and I are in the best position to shop for healthcare insurance. If by "are in the best position" he means "don't know crap about how to", then he may be right.

I respectfully suggest that a reporter ask McCain if he has ever shopped for his own healthcare insurance, and whether he had any difficulties selecting a plan. Then ask him if all of his "friends" can sign up for the same healthcare plan that he is covered by, for an affordable price. And whether he supports full, immediate enrollment in that same plan for all combat veterans from all wars as a paid-in-full benefit of the GI Bill.

PS: click through to the NPR transcript and get a load of the commentary by one Regina Hertzlinger, a Harvard Business School professor and "leader in the consumer-driven health care movement." Something about people wanting a Toyota when their employer would rather buy them a tricked-out Harvardmobile, and how that would be a shame, or something. I think Dr. Hertzlinger might be better described as a " leader in the right-wing idiotic simile movement."

Scribefire!

Pay no attention: I'm just trying a Firefox plug-in called Scribefire, which supposedly will let me post to this blog without actually logging in. The purpose of this technology? I have no idea. But it's sure awesome!

Immediate update: Scribefire messes with my precious ledding (that's line-spacing to you nonspecialists). Therefore, my interest in it has seriously declined over the past 90 seconds.

Fifty50 in-depth analysis: Pennsylvania Democratic Primary

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You've heard the liars and BS craftsmen spinning their primary analysis to the craven official media. Everybody wants to tell you what it all means. Well, allowing for the fact that I have my own biases, I think a few basic facts are hard to dispute. And the meaning is self-evident to us rubes in Champaign, Illinois, if not the bitter imbeciles of central Pennsylvania and the Beltway Cocktail Circuit.

First, look at these Pollster.com charts. I'm not good at this stuff, and these are probably not the best charts to use, but they look good enough to show that Obama has been steadily been closing the gap on Clinton's lead since the beginning of 2007 or the beginning of 2008 --- take your pick. As far as I can tell, that fact has not been widely reported, or reported as being significant. You may remember that a similar failure of communication led to stories about how Obama got trounced in the New Hampshire primary, even though he steadily gained on Clinton up until primary day. (Obama got "trounced" because he did not live up to the hype or inaccurate opinion polling after the Iowa caucuses.)

Second, there is some irritating and disingenuous "conventional wisdom" being dispensed about how the Democrats are doing themselves tremendous harm through self-destructive negative campaigning tactics. Well, no, that's not really true: Hillary Clinton and her peckerwood husband, and their surrogates, have been directly appealing to the bigot vote by invoking the names of Scary Negroes and their purported association with Obama. Then there's her disingenuous shot-and-beer pandering to morons who think Chablis and Merlot are not manly, and her ridiculous purported love affair with guns. And she has been aided in her tactics by the official media, especially Gibson and "George" on the ABC debate. As far as I can tell, Obama has retaliated by referring to Hillary as "Annie Oakley."

To summarize, both a casual and a careful reader of the news would be justified in concluding that after months of throwing the kitchen sink, all the rolling pins in the drawers, and a bushel of bigoted personal attacks at her opponent, Hillary Clinton was not able to stop the slow and steady gains made by Obama in Pennsylvania over the past year or two.

Update while I'm still writing the original post: now The New Republic is comparing Obama to McGovern, meaning that he is a Don Quixote figure with an increasingly isolated band of fanatics as his only support. Expect to hear a lot of this "meme" in the next two weeks and beyond. Obama will be portrayed as the Democrat who is tearing the party apart.

Bill Clinton: against fearmongering before he was for it

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Josh Marshall, my online journalistic hero with at least one editorial foot of clay, posted this video flashback of Bill Clinton yesterday. It's from 2004; click through after you read Josh's introduction.

It's difficult for me to understand why smart younger guys like Marshall, as well as Atrios and others, still lionize the Bill Clinton of the past and to this day cannot understand that they bought a Bill of goods back in the early 1990s. The words Clinton speaks in Josh's video clip are fine words, and true, even if they reflect irony on the campaign of his wife today, 4 years hence. But those fine and true words were uttered by a slippery peckerwood who has even stopped trying to sound sincere since he started earning $50K/hour flicking his silver tongue at corporate audiences following his "retirement."

Look, fellas: Bill Clinton was never a liberal, and was never even a "progressive." His program has always been basically the same as the Rockefeller Republicans, including their twisted heirs such as G.H.W. Bush. Not liberal. Not progressive. Not concerned in the slightest about you or me. This fact was obvious to liberal adults in 1988 and 1992 and 1996. So guys, stop waxing nostalgic about the "old" Bill Clinton. The "new" one is same as the "old" one.

Do you disagree, Puny Human? OK: send me one example of any truly liberal or progressive initiative that arose from either of the two Clinton administrations. And Al Gore accomplishments don't count. Neither do things that just look liberal in comparison with the Reagan/Bush administration. Neither do botched healthcare policy reforms....

A Brooks & Shields joint

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Driving south on Prospect last night I had the misfortune of punching the radio through a transcription of the PBS NewsHour, and some insane punditry by Mark Shields and David Brooks. You just have to listen to it to appreciate the, what --- I don't know: stupidity, mendacity, mental illness? Depends on who was talking at a given moment. Examples:

1. Listen to how Shields immediately goes off the deep end in renouncing debate moderator questions about flag lapel pins while at the same time implying that people who agree with his opinion may be internet-based left-wing conspiracy nuts.

2. Marvel at how smarmy Brooks sounds right out of the gate, lecturing Shields (but really lecturing all of us rubes in the audience) about how important it is for moderators to ask presidential candidates questions to discover whether they are really like "us," possibly not aware of the fact that most of "us" wear lapel pins of any kind, and even fewer wear lapels.

3. Wrap your puny human mind around this bit of analysis by Shields: Pennsylvania have lost 237,00 manufacturing jobs since the beginning of the Bush administration; change has not been good for Pennsylvanians, and change is not a welcome message for these people because change has hurt them. Therefore, Pennsylvania is a "good fit" for Hillary Clinton. [I solemnly swear that my paraphrase of his clanging is accurate.]

4. Mystify yourself wondering why Brooks thinks it's appropriate to slip in an endorsement of retired Senator and unretired DLC A-hole Sam Nunn for VP. What?! That's some nice "being in touch," there, fella.

The insight of the evening, which both of these soiled specimens seemed to think they were uttering for the first time in American history: these (Democratic) people will just say whatever it takes to get elected without any regard for what they would actually have to do once in the Oval Office! Next week: Soylent Green is PEOPLE!

Epiphany

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Small-town crackers are so stupid that they need elitist pundits to convince them that Barack Obama condescended to them.

Should-Never-Have-Left Department

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Jeez, I take a sabbatical and the political discourse becomes so unimaginably stupid that I'm literally frightened to say anything about it.

I believe that thinking people, and especially people of good intentions, are natural suckers in what passes for political discourse today. We behave all politely and try to address the disingenuous points made by professional right-wing liars and troublemakers. We try to play by civil rules of discourse, and observe the principles of logic. And they don't. I wonder when a political leader or presidential candidate will just say to Russert or Matthews or Stephanopolous, live on TV, that no, he or she will not answer the moderator's carefully engineered double-bind question because it was deliberately contrived to elicit an answer that can be interpreted by the elite media to offend a significant portion of the population. Or that it is just too stupid to answer, and that an answer would offend the intelligence of the viewing audience. What would someone like Obama have to lose with a statement like that? Really.

It terrifies and sickens me that the elite media present right-wing talking points as if they're the touchstone of fact that we must all acknowledge before we are allowed to utter a sound. I can assure all you young people out there that there was a time when journalism and public discourse at least resembled a truth-seeking activity.

Yes, all that I'm presenting here are gross generalities, but it's time to jump back into the blog again, so this is where and when I choose to do it. Consider this a bit of throat-clearing. But, really, where can I intelligently begin when the hottest topic in the establishment media for the past week has been an off-the-cuff remark by Obama, taken entirely out of context, liberally spiced with dog-whistle racism and anti-gay subtext, courtesy of the sociopaths running Hillary Clinton's campaign (i.e., the Clintons) and the sociopaths who make their living talking on your TV, your radio, and probably, soon, in the fillings of your molars?

My fervent hope is that, finally, we are on the verge of a watershed event: someone (the Republican/DLC establishment) may finally go broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American people. First chance I get, I'm sending $25 to Obama, if for no other reason than I'm awed by his ability to maintain his dignity so far.

Will return soon

Occasionally, regular, hideous life takes a front seat to blogging. This past week has been, collectively, one of those occasions. I promise to return soon in order to provide more of the mature commentary and creative fugues that you have come to expect.

Executive summary on Reaganomics

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Jane Smiley is a novelist who writes really clear-headed and lively commentary for HuffingtonPost. Her latest post is a brilliant and concise description of... well, just go read it. I have some younger readers, and I hereby command them to click through and get a short course in post-1970s American political economy. Don't worry, kids: it's actually quite entertaining.

In my opinion, Smiley's column covers everything a regular, everyday person needs to know about Reaganomics, other than the self-evident observation that it has been a miserable failure in all it ever has attempted, even by its own standards, except its efforts to dismantle U.S. democratic institutions, transfer public wealth to private corporations, and maintain a perpetual state of war. And fear. And pestilence.

I do disagree with one detail in Smiley's analysis, though. The ultimate problem really isn't the sociopathic economists, but the transformation of the free press into a house organ for the Reagan Revolution over the past 25 years. These free-market goons would have been humiliated and laughed off the stage by real, two-fisted reporters even before they had their right foot out of the green room two decades ago.

Funny

Hillary Clinton supporters are staging a writer's strike at DailyKos. They feel they are victims of meanness.

Doodooodoot duhdootdoot! I interrupt this blog to bring you a special bulletin: No One Cares.

Hillary Clinton: monster

Actually, much worse than a monster: Republican.

Geri Ferraro: bigot

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Much comment on the racism of our first-ever female vice presidential nominee (1984), Geraldine Ferraro, can be found on the web tonight. Here's a representative one --- a Daily Kos link with commentary from Bob Cesca, illustrating that Ferraro has a long history of this kind of race-baiting.

Obama's campaign doesn't need to be demanding resignations from Hillary's campaign, but they do need to point out what the Clinton campaign has become: monstrous. And then they should hire back Samantha Power and give her a raise.

Erratum and update: Well, it appears that Geri Ferraro was not the first-ever female vice presidential nominee after all. StuporMundi apologizes for his error. However, Ms. Ferraro was, as far as StuporMundi knows, the first-ever female vice presidential candidate to end up being such a clueless, bigoted asshole.

Warrantless wiretapping thought experiment

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It's audience participation time! You are invited to help with my domestic wiretapping thought experiment! Let's get started!

Suppose you are the U.S. Attorney General, in charge of a Justice Department that believes it has the power to conduct warrantless wiretaps of any telephone conversation that takes place in the United States. Suppose further that your department has in the past investigated and prosecuted domestic political enemies for the sole purpose of removing them from elected office. Also suppose that you had spent the previous 20 years as an ultraconservative judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and may or may not harbor feelings of animosity about a flashy, arrogant liberal prosecutor (now the Governor of your state) who in the recent past caused considerable trouble for some of the nice men who toil on Wall Street.

Given those assumptions (here comes the audience participation part), could you think of any reason not to allow the G-men to prosecute Eliot Spitzer on the basis of evidence that may have originated with an illegal wiretap? As a corollary experiment, can you think of any reason why Pat Fitzgerald's investigation of Karl Rove may have gone suddenly, inexplicably limp a coupla years ago?

All this is just the basis for a "hypothetical," of course, not a "conspiracy theory."

Update: Well, dagnab it, Jane Hamsher beat me to the punch with this nice post at FireDogLake that includes other, more wonky, Spitzer-type hypothetical questions for you to ponder. I hope our heroes at TPM Muckraker dig into it.

A little Obama history

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The link below goes to Bob Cesca's blog. It reprints an October 2002 antiwar speech by Barack Obama. Read the text. At the time Obama gave the speech, while he was still serving in the Illinois legislature, Senate Democrats were falling all over themselves to stand up and be counted by President Bush. (Yes, that's right: falling all over themselves to stand up.)

Then, if you like, you can follow another link provided by Cesca, this one directing you to the text of a speech Hillary Clinton gave on the floor of the Senate about a week later. It includes this line:

If we get the resolution and Saddam does not comply, then we can attack him with far more support and legitimacy than we would have otherwise [emphasis added].

She made that foreign policy speech less than 2 years after her first election to any public office. Some may attribute the poor judgment shown in that speech to her lack of experience.

Today's doke

Update: Hat-tip to Big Otis for pointing out some "slipshop" editing in the text of Today's doke. I have corrected the error. Thanks, asswipe.

Looking back on Huckabee

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He said he majored in miracles. But he didn't say whether he stayed awake during class.

A difference between Clinton and Obama

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Putting aside ideas and policy, an area where political competition is obscured by pointless nuance and deliberate ambiguity, I see one revealing difference between Clinton and Obama. It is evident in the basic strategy and tactics used by each campaign.

Obama seeks support through his personal charisma and giving inspirational speeches. He puts together strong local campaign organizations, including effective get-out-the-vote operations. His goal seems straightforward: to attract the most voters and make sure they get to the polling place on primary day. His campaign treasury is rich largely because hundreds of thousands of everyday people are contributing small amounts in direct response to the message they hear.

Clinton relies heavily on party establishment types and their established political organizations, which can be assumed at least in part to depend for their power on patronage at the city, county, and state levels. She entered two rogue Democratic primaries, in Michigan and Florida, in defiance of the national party and all other competing candidates, and is now lobbying to change the rules pertaining to whether her delegates from those states may be counted. Behind the scenes, her campaign has been trying to lean on party "superdelegates" to snatch the nomination if Obama gets to Denver with more regular delegates than she has.

In other words, Obama is working hard and playing by the rules to win the nomination; Clinton is working the establishment, gaming the system, and operating through back-channels to get what she wants.

"I heard it on NPR"

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Back-to-back stories on All Things Considered this afternoon:

First, a strangely objective update on an under-reported story about a "loner," found comatose in a Las Vegas motel room, in possession of (1) firearms, (2) undisclosed amounts of the neurotoxin Ricin, (3) castor beans, from which Ricin is synthesized, and (4) an "anarchist-type textbook." Although the man's ethnicity was not reported, we can be fairly certain that he does not come from any brown-skinned, funny-accented region of the world. Why? Because, according to ATC co-host Melissa Block, Vegas police have stated that "it doesn't make you a terrorist to have an anarchist-type textbook." No word from John Law on whether it makes you a criminal to possess a deadly illegal poison previously used in terrorist attacks.

The frame for this first NPR story was something to the effect that, 'well this is certainly an interesting mystery, isn't it?' The report does represent an admirable presumption of innocence by an often-hysterical press in This Time Of War. They give us this tale of a simple country pizza delivery guy, living in his cousin's basement, taking his anarchist's cookbook and his castor beans and his guns along with undisclosed amounts of illegal neurotoxin on a road trip to Vegas, just minding his own business and living there with no visible means of support, when he mysteriously goes into a coma. Maybe he was "just trying to do harm to himself," one reporter mused. There are probably easier ways to do that, but who knows?

Second, a strangely sanctimonious story about a New York cabbie, briefly hailed as a hero for having rescued an infant abandoned in his taxi, until it was discovered that he was indirectly acquainted with the baby's father. NPR calls the story "Taxi Driver Arrested for Helping Girlfriend Ditch Kid." Nice. ATC co-host Robert Siegel clumsily walks the listener through the convoluted facts by asking the New York Daily News police reporter he's interviewing questions such as, "Is he from Ecuador, is that what I read?" Ah-HA! (How the hell should the police reporter know what Siegel read?)

As near as I can tell, here's the story. The father of an "angelic" 5-month-old baby girl tells his sister he can't care for the baby himself because he works construction and the underage mother has left him. This guy's sister tells her boyfriend, the Ecuadoran taxi driver, that they must bring the baby to a city fire station, which is reasonably in sync with the intent of the city's safe harbor law if not the letter of it. The immigrant does this, but he fabricates a story about how the baby was abandoned in his taxi, presumably to protect the brother of his girlfriend. Bad call, of course. But before the cabbie confesses to his fib, the heartwarming story hits the press: Ecuadoran Samaritan Toast O' Town --- Read All About It! But then the fairy tale is spoiled by an inconvenient detail, and everybody feels chumped. So the cabbie loses his livery license and faces prosecution for filing a false police report. Forget about the fact that this guy actually did take charge of an abandoned baby and did the right thing --- he made an error doing it. Let's pile on and strip him of his livelihood, then send him back where he belongs. Unless he has an apartment full of guns, castor beans, and an anarchist-type textbook.

International Journal of Nana Studies 1(4)

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Proposed: A Fifth Law of Thermodynamics

Background

Nana has developed and proposed a new Law of Thermodynamics, the acronym for which is DENOLT (Double E's Negative- Oneth Law of Thermodynamics. This new law of physics, in its draft form, may be described as follows: The entropy of an isolated thermodynamic system decreases in direct proportion to the amount of time heat transfer occurs within the system.

Discussion

Initial development of DENOLT took place at a traditional American pancake house located in Champaign, Illinois, on 10 February 2008. The thermodynamic system described in the original embodiment of the theory consisted of natural gas from a conventional municipal gas main, a small source of heat to ignite the gas into a sustained flame, a steel restaurant cooking grill, a film of vegetable-based cooking oil, and diced Idaho russet potatoes.

Nana [poking at hard potato cubes within a "Farmer's Scramble"]: This is why we waited so long.
SM: What do you mean?
Nana [continuing to poke at the hard potato cubes]: They started with raw potatoes.
SM: They always start with raw potatoes.
Nana: No they don't.
SM: Are you saying that they grow potatoes already cooked?
Nana: No. But they had to cut them up.
SM: Do you mean that they can't cut up well cooked potatoes?
Nana: Oh, you know what I mean!

Analysis and Conclusion

Because cooked-in-the-dirt russet potatoes harvested from Idaho are demonstrated to become more heterogeneous the longer they are grilled at high temperature, the entropy of the system of which they are a part has been demonstrated to decrease in proportion to the amount of heat transferred. The proposed new thermodynamic law, DENOLT, assumes that said precooked-by-nature potatoes are cut up at some time between when they are harvested and when they are introduced to a hot grill.

Although DENOLT may currently be regarded only as a hypothesis, it is considered probable that research scientists and engineers will be able to test and replicate the initial results through controlled experiments at any traditional pancake house. Theoreticians may be expected to employ these data to codify and refine DENOLT as a scientific theory. Upon subsequent rigorous testing and observation by the scientific community worldwide, confirmation of DENOLT as the fifth confirmed Law of Thermodynamics should be expected within the century.

Afterword

"Double E" is an alias by which Nana is sometimes identified for purposes of confidentiality and protection of intellectual property.

Afterword II: Erratum

A commenter who should be able to grasp esoteric thermodynamic theory was confused by this account of the draft DENOLT. Part of the confusion may be attributed to the author's incomplete description of the cubed potato (CP) properties. The CPs were not cold, and their hardness was attributable to a state of rawness not explainable by the established Laws of Thermodynamics (Nana 2008a).

Beyond "Good to Great"

From The Salt Lake Tribune, via TPM and reader DB (where I saw the relevant Trib excerpt), comes an account of a next-gen employee motivation program.

In the long term, employee motivation through management-initiated waterboarding is probably a welcome development for several reasons. First, it will weed all the sissies out of the sales team and put them on the streets where they really belong to begin with. Second, it will finally rid us of impermanent, namby-pamby management fad thinking epitomized by Harlequin-style boardroom romances such as Good to Great. Third, it will help to rip the grinning, baboon-like happy-mask off the Reagan Revolution and reveal just what it's always been about: applying wealth and brute force to deceive the innocent, intimidate the weak, and redefine human beings as an expendable capital resource for use by a handful of degenerate plutocrats and their enforcers.

Bottom-feeding on the irony circuit

Since the following morsel is too small for the heavy hitters of political blogging, I suppose it's up to me to put it on the record. This, from President Bush's White House press conference today (transcript excerpt from Fox News, to which I will not link):

Question: I'm wondering if you can give us a little bit of insight into your thinking about this, and just explain to the American people what is lost by talking with those with when (sic) we disagree.

Bush: What's lost by embracing a tyrant who puts his people in prison because of their political beliefs? What's lost is it'll send the wrong message. It'll send a discouraging message to those who wonder whether America will continue to work for the freedom of prisoners. It'll give great status to those who have suppressed human rights and human dignity.

As if you, my most sophisticated and highly intelligent reader, need me to interpret for you, I will just point out that Bush's words could just as appropriately have been aimed at his own administration by the leader of any democracy that still abides by the Geneva Conventions and the various nuclear non-proliferation treaties.

The President's words were evidently a swipe at Barack Obama, who would glorify dictators by considering the use of diplomacy to solve international conflicts. Now, is anybody really worried that a competent Secretary of State couldn't easily achieve all key U.S. foreign policy goals with Cuba, Iran, and North Korea within a year? I'll bet it wouldn't take much more than secretly offering Castro, Ahmadinejad, and Kim each a few boatloads of swag, a bottomless expense account, and carte blanche at David Vitter's favorite brothel. Seriously.

Good riddance...

...to Bill Buckley, whose Cold War-era hallucination of conservatism (e.g., blacks shouldn't have civil rights, government spending is Socialism except when it's an investment in Empire, corporations shouldn't have to follow laws or pay taxes) played a key role in helping to create half a dozen intractable real-world national and international crises. His charming, polysyllabic patrician demeanor and "genius for friendship" was eulogized by David Folkenflik on NPR this afternoon. (Click the "Listen Now" link at the NPR page if you can stomach it, but I don't recommend it.)

"He drove the kooks out of the [conservative] movement," said Buckley's son, Chris. "He separated it from the anti-Semites, the isolationists, the John Birchers. He conducted, if you will, a kind of purging of the movement." Well, actually, no he didn't, Chris; he only got rid of the isolationists because they're not good allies when a guy is trying to intellectually justify turning a republic into an empire. And all those other "kooks"? They've been ruling us for 28 years.

I'm not a person who believes we are obligated to be polite about the dead if we strongly feel they were premeditated assholes who left the world a worse place than when they entered it. I will, at least, wish Mr. Buckley luck with his "genius for friendship" as he shakes hands with The Devil.

Dodd's an Obamaniac

This morning I received an email from Senator Chris Dodd informing me that he is endorsing Barack Obama for President. What's that? You haven't received your email from a U.S. Senator today? You must be a bad citizen!

I hope that Senator Dodd has extracted a promise from Obama to support all of his (Dodd's) efforts in the Senate to avoid further erosion of the Bill of Rights, and to withdraw the carte blanche for domestic surveillance that the Congress has "granted" the Executive Branch in recent years. (I put scare quotes around granted because the Congress has no more authority to "grant" the Executive Branch permission to ignore the Constitution than the Judicial Branch has to "grant" the presidency to its favorite candidate before all the votes have been counted. But, whatever.)

Anyway, Senator Dodd urges me to become involved in Obama's campaign. We'll see.

Troubling development that bears watching

At least this is getting some media play, if mostly only in political blogs. If you're younger than 45, you do not know what it's like to see three of the most charismatic leaders of your young life be gunned down in cold blood over less than 5 years. And that doesn't include Malcolm X. The Secret Service needs to know the whole world is watching (as they said in 1968, in Chicago, where there was teargas and blood). As Big Otis notes, we need to hope that Dion DiMucci never sees a need to reissue Abraham, Martin and John with a new verse. (Reproduction of picture believed to be fair use for same reasons stated on Wikipedia, from whence the image was borrowed.)

Prelude to "today's doke"

In order to move this blog a little further away from mediocrity and more in the direction of charming idiosyncracy, I have decided to change the title of my "humor corner" from "Today's chuckle" to "Today's doke." A fast search of The Google tells me that everybody and her giant embryo is using "today's chuckle" to flag their own so-called humorous content. Well, StuporMundi don't roll that way, mostly because everything he finds on the web tagged as "today's chuckle" just really sucks.

So starting now, and until such time as I realize that this is stupid, I hereby re-christen my funny stuff as "Today's doke." A doke happens to be anything that is very funny, especially to a childish person, whether it is a joke, peculiar-sounding flatus in a somber setting, or a frat boy driving to Foosland with sand in his gas tank. As far as I know, the inventor of the doke is Big Otis, who known by many names (as is Lucifer). We experienced many dokes from the time I was a toddler. Often they involved such merriment as my breaking Nana's tear-shaped eyeglasses from the top bunk bed, or putting a thumbtack on The Music Man's kitchen chair before dinner. And to inaugurate "Today's doke," as a matter of fact, I present an original portrait of The Music Man, by Big Otis (c. 1964). It was probably BO's response to some long-forgotten humiliation, or maybe to having his little head put through the Beatle drywall one Beatle time too many during a fab Beatle weekend. All this should serve as more than enough information on the topic. And the image is copyright 2008 by the artist known as Big Otis.

Today's chuckle

The passion of St. McCain

Snarky bloggers call John McCain "Saint" because the establishment press worships him. Because he's a war hero. Unlike John Kerry or Al Gore or George McGovern or John F. Kennedy or Walter Mondale. (Gore and Mondale might not be "heroes," but they're veterans.)

But McCain's "story of redemption and rectitude" has more holes in it than Albert Hall, to quote the Beatles and the Firesign Theater. And the McCain campaign's response to this first salvo, which was undoubtedly ginned up by the right-wing McCain-haters' club, invokes the Senator's "hero" status and claims that St. McCain has never "violated the public trust" or "the principles that have guided his career." Well, depending on what those principles might be (e.g., venality, opportunism), the second statement may be true. But I doubt that the first statement really is.

Now we have an allegation, from unnamed New York Times sources from McCain's 2000 campaign, of some potentially Bill-Clintonian behavior with a female lobbyist. If this story plays out to be a sordid mess for McCain, I wonder if you'll see lefties wearing purple band-aids of mockery on their double chins like wingnuts did when the Bush campaign's surrogates repeatedly smeared Kerry in 2004. Heroes....

Rapid-fire update: Wow, now the Washington Post is piling on, too. We may be be headed for a deadlocked GOP convention yet! I'd almost feel sorry for St. McCain if he wasn't such a sleazy and dangerous man. One can almost hear the slabs of plaque spalling off the artery walls right now.

Today's chuckle

Why criminals need immunity from prosecution

The U.S. Director of National Intelligence, one Mike McConnell, believes that telecoms need blanket retroactive immunity for breaking federal eavesdropping laws because "[t]he issue is liability protection for the private sector. We can't do this mission without their help."

That's correct: our right-wing U.S. government, despite controlling all three branches of the federal government (including Republican-loving Democrats in both houses of Congress), cannot successfully implement a permanent police state without the "help" of the private sector.

Interesting. I wonder how these people would like it if our "unitary executive" (i.e., Fuehrer*) is a brown man or wears control-top panty hose. Maybe Final Call will get to "eavesdrop" on Dick Cheney's business dealings, or Bust can perform a warrantless investigation on the office wives of George Bush.
____________
* Fuehrer is German for "Leader." What did you think it means?

Today's chuckle

This is a real quote from the Bullwinkle show, after the network dropped Moose and Squirrel's option. The situation: Rocky thinks he may have met Boris and Natasha before.

Rocket J. Squirrel: That voice. Where have I heard that voice?

Captain Peter Peachfuzz: Rocky, you hear more voices than Joan of Arc.

Shooter sanctimony, part 1

I suppose that people who make their living selling firearms designed to kill humans should find another way to earn their living; I'd always counsel friends and family to stay away from that line of work. But this sort of sanctimony, in my opinion, falls into the category of unhelpful liberal claptrap. Moralistic posturing like this is not a helpful way to start a public policy discussion of campus shootings and how to prevent them. So the visionary Mithras stands firm, against time and tide, in opposition to random mass murder committed by the mentally ill. Bravo!

Despite the warm feelings of moral superiority that often plague us, society's response to school shootings (and workplace shootings and mall shootings) can't be all about confiscating guns and demonizing gun owners. That's the same approach wingnuts use to attack the practice of planned parenthood by demanding to outlaw abortion while demonizing people who have sexual relations with no reproductive intent. The people who actually operate government have to deal with a lot of stuff that people of the right, left, and center wings consider icky, but pragmatism has to win out in order to develop a functional policy.

So what would be helpful in terms of discussing campus massacres? I'll make a suggestion in a follow-on post.

Bear with me

As seen through a link on Eschaton. But he doesn't need the traffic, so thanks to me you can just click through to the original source.

Good "get," Hillary

Our heroes over at TPM write that Hillary will soon pick up "a big Ohio endorsement: former U.S. Senator John Glenn."

Yes, that U.S. Senator John Glenn. Of Keating 5 fame. And looky who is right next to Glenn in the Keating 5 WikiPix: U.S. Senator John McCain!

Corporate media: not "mainstream"

Big Otis sent me this link from CommonDreams. The article makes what I think is a critical point about the predicament Americans find themselves in today. The lunacy of right wing extremist politicians and insane free-market economic policies could not have dominated the U.S. landscape for a generation without the systematic intervention of corporate mass media. Specifically, there have been two principal corporate interventions: (1) withdrawal of support (in the form of funding and employment) from impartial investigative reporting units, and (2) the staffing of high-profile celebrity journalism positions with corporate apologists and their political fellow-travelers. Reagan Administration officials helped to make this possible by undermining, then revoking, the Fairness Doctrine. Throw in the concentration of media ownership under a handful of transnational corporate logos, and the consequence is that American society today bears little resemblance to the mid-20th century version. Thanks, "liberal media"!

Yes, we should expect to hear from political extremists from either side (or no side) of the spectrum in a liberal democracy, because that comes with the territory where there is freedom of speech. And sometimes we may even expect extremists to hold sway over the discourse, especially in time of national hysteria. But the genius of the system always has been that it self-corrects --- something that many of us have taken for granted, but never should have. The rise of malignant corporate media has just about annihilated this feature of our system, like a virus can do to an organism's immune system.

The first step toward a cure is to recognize the problem. Huge step... and huge problem.

Coincidence? You decide!

In case you think the cute little cartoon executioner in the 8 February post looks familiar, maybe this quote from the recent, pre-New Hampshire past will help to jog your memory-bones:

"The 16 people I carried out execution on in Arkansas would hardly say I'm soft on crime," Huckabee told supporters while campaigning in Indianola, Iowa, over the weekend. [Stephen Dinan, The Washington Times, 31 December 2007]

I might add that the 16 people he "carried out execution on in Arkansas" would hardly say anything at all these days, except maybe "Aaaarrrghhhh! Stop poking me with that infernal pitchfork, Satan!" The felicitous appearance of the Reverend Governor Huckabee's likeness in a book of vintage advertising art, along with his stunning sitzkrieg victory in Kansas today, proves to me beyond a doubt that there is a Prime Mover.

Some advice for white folks

If you're a white person some of whose best friends are black, I will use the news hook of African American History Month to offer some advice. Starting now, try to actually get to know at least one of your black friends. I mean really, personally. Find an opportunity to have a candid discussion about something important to him or her. By "discussion," I mean that, mostly, you need to listen and let your friend talk. Avoid the temptation to blurt out what you think, and certainly avoid the stupidity of telling your black friend what he or she "should" think. Or what they "really have to understand" about white people.

This is not a short-term task, or anything along the lines of gallantly celebrating Take A Negro To Lunch Day. For one thing, your friend may not want to let you in. Or you may feel punked as soon as you hear something that you'd prefer not to think about. This endeavor is not one in which you call the shots. But I strongly suggest that you try it anyway. Shut up, listen, and learn.

Why? Not simply to be noble or to become a better person. But because you need to, Caucasoid. It is of the utmost importance to your future. You have a lot to learn. Because of this. Click on the link. Read the article. Then read it again. And again. Until you really understand it. Then click through the links in the post and read those, too.

Here's the issue: if the Congress doesn't start jailing Executive Branch criminals for Contempt of Congress soon, and start impeachment proceedings against any senior Justice Department appointee who refuses to impartially enforce the laws of this land, then you and I no longer live in a democracy. The U.S. Constitution no longer means anything insofar as your civil liberties (i.e., Civil Rights) are concerned. You have none, if that's what the Justice Department, or its private-sector designee, decrees. Of course, this has pretty much always been Standard Operating Procedure for the application of laws to African Americans, so they have "institutional expertise" that the rest of us don't have a clue about.

White people do not understand this, though. We deny it. Very few white people, psychologically, can afford to even contemplate the oppression of blacks too deeply. Directly and indirectly, white people in America always have been beneficiaries of that oppression. But now, whether you believe it or not, your lily white complexion guarantees you no protection against arbitrary execution of the law. No white person will ever know what it is like to be a "nigger," but every one of us could benefit from earnestly trying to understand what it must be like. Because that is exactly what we all are now in the eyes of the Executive Branch. And your African American friend may see fit to share some insights on the subject with you, if you're lucky. And if she does, you'd better listen.

International Journal of Nana Studies 1(3)

Background and Objective

Nana employs routine conversational skills and auto-recursive reasoning techniques to tease out and share new facts about the world around her. The objective of this report is to investigate one recent example of the subject methodology and form a hypothesis concerning it.

Field Investigation

This form of nanoconversation begins with a question about a self-evident aspect of the surroundings. The example documented here occurred in a car driving south on Mattis Avenue, Champaign, Ill., after consuming half of a "Farmer's Scramble."

Nana: Is that a bookstore?
StuporMundi: Is what a bookstore?
Nana: That sign...
StuporMundi: What did the sign say?
Nana: "Books."
StuporMundi: [Laughter.]
Nana: [Nonverbal question mark, blending delight and confusion about the laughter.]
StuporMundi: No, Mom, it was a hardware store.
Nana: [Giggling.] Well, the sign wasn't attached to a building. It was just there.
StuporMundi: So you're asking if the sign was a bookstore?
Nana: No. I was wondering if the sign meant that they sell books in one of those buildings.

Discussion and Analysis

This form of nanoconversation [see erratum to Int'l Journ. Nan. Studies 1(1)] begins with a preliminary request for self-evident information. Typically, a non-obvious premise or motivation for the question is withheld from the initial query. Such unknown antecedents are sometimes drawn out by answering Nana's initial question in a hyper-literal or ironic manner; sometimes both approaches are required. Then, through little-understood cognitive processes, Nana re-synthesizes her original question to sound less ambiguous, but no less unnecessary. This form of nanoconversation can become highly iterative.

Conclusion

This method of nanoconversation, Way 3, shares certain characteristics with Pretzel Logic. However, instead of being a deliberately recursive method of logical fallacy invoked to emulate the exercise of reason, Way 3 is a self-perpetuating method through which Nana investigates the world around her but learns little from it. This method superficially resembles deductive logic, but continually returns to a refined restatement of the original query. The technique is referred to as Circular Interrogation. It borrows its name from the wind musician's technique of circular breathing.

Super Bowl drool

I just returned from a Lynn Street Super Bowl party that provided me pleasure insofar as the Pinot Noir had the desired numbing effect and the Patriots lost. It's enjoyable to see a non-Chicago team choke for a change when it comes down to the wire. Haha.

Oh yes: the company was pleasant and almost altogether agreeable, except for a moment when I expressed doubt that anyone could ride a mountain bike for miles through 8 or 9 inches of snow. After being brutally scolded for my skepticism, I backed down for the sake of The Children. For me, the highlight of the night was that a visitor from Spain --- a young lady who knows even less than I do about football --- won the in-house betting pool for three of the four quarters. Twenty-four bucks and six bits, I believe. Now she knows what America is all about.

One wonders why there is such breathless anticipation stored up for the TV commercials rolled out especially for the Super Bowl. Do we really forget how lame they are, year after year? The 2008 crop featured (1) at least three ads for energy drinks, or amped-up pop in one case, all featuring (wait for it) people and/or CG characters energetically boogeying beyond all expectations, (2) an Anheuser-Busch commercial making fun of Indians (the ones from south Asia --- ahh-oooooo-gah!), and (3) an alternately sentimental and humorous spot about the little Clydesdale that couldn't... until he was (this is just so out-of-the-box you won't believe it) trained to pull a freight train... by a Dalmatian dog!!! Oh yes, and there was another crop of those darn mischievous squirrels that cause auto accidents, or near misses, or something. One year they're working for an insurance company; the next for a purveyor of radial tires. I never know who, or care, because every year the game is all about people getting together to eat, drink, and watch a game they don't care about. No one watches the show in order to find out how to set up an e-Trade account so he can set up a new account at the dawn of a worldwide economic collapse. (I wonder how Busch would like it if a billion Indians from India decide to boycott their products for all time.)

Undoubtedly there were many more commercials exhibited during the game, but all of them (N x $3 million) were totally wasted on the highly desirable demographic in attendance at the swanky Lynn Street venue. I've been to Super Bowl parties for the past 10 years (when all of a sudden, without explanation, I suddenly became popular enough to be invited). In that time, I really don't remember a single party where the room was ever quiet enough to hear the text of a commercial. Tonight, everyone (except me, apparently) was looking forward to a commercial that promised to present a joke which only deaf people "get," or something like that, but evidently it ran around halftime when everybody was in The Cat In The Hat's kitchen putting cheese and gravy and mushrooms all over baked potatoes. Once, during the 4th quarter, the room did become eerily quiet when Victoria's Secret ran an ad, but silence was not necessary to get the gist of the message. Furthermore, the model --- by reason of her appearance --- gave strong indications of being a skank, so I for one did not feel that tempted to run home and start leafing through all the VS catalogs I keep in the bathroom.

So, in summary, this year's Lynn/Healey Super Bowl party was a huge success. And I think that tonight we were all winners. Except all those miserable bastards in the Patriots' locker room after the game, and their betrayed fans. Haha! Oh, darn, the alcohol is wearing off now. Ouch....

Retrospective metaphor

In yesterday's post, a prescient allegory. Today: something also like that, but flipped on its head through the canyons of time. The screengrab below came from HuffingtonPost today at about 1335 Central Time. If you changed "Females" to "Male" and sent the headline back in time to 20 March 2003, it might be criticized for its lack of respect toward the mentally retarded, but not for any fundamental inaccuracy.

Prescient allegory

The best political prediction of the previous week, in my opinion, came in the form of a nifty five-panel allegory by my (current) all-around favorite cartoonist, Tony Millionaire. In Mr. Millionaire's pint-sized morality play we find Hubris, portrayed by a gingerbread Rudy Guiliani, halfway around the world before Granny Truth has put on her shoes (or, in this case, her dough-belted radials). You can peruse it there instead of here because it is Copyright 2008 by Tony Millionaire.

Mr. Millionaire, like the most authentic visionaries, may have had no idea of his political prescience. No matter, I think he's the funniest cartoonist in the business today, bar no one. But a prospective fan must have a taste for vulgarity and robust cartoon violence in order to find the humor.

I offer this post as a welcome change of topic for an evening, and also as a memory jogger to myself. There are more important things to blog about in life than the U.S. Constitution and a world economy on the brink of depression. Cartoons are one of them. (That's right, English majors: cartoons are one of them. Fuck you.)

Another letter to Barack Obama....

...in which I implore the Senator to get off the #!©k!n& campaign trail for a day or two and motivate back to Washington to block the heinous telecom immunity provisions of FISA renewal legislation. The excerpt below reprints my recommended political tactic, which I provided pro bono for Mr. Obama to use in the event that blocking the bad bill were to require a filibuster (as promised by Senator Dodd):

"I urge you to join your colleagues who are opposed to telecom immunity, including any filibuster of FISA legislation that includes retroactive immunity. Perhaps this would not even require an interruption in your campaigning for the presidency: you could take your turn at the rostrum to support the filibuster by continuously reading from transcripts of your best campaign speeches until adversaries of the Constitution get tired of hearing about you and relent. Your speeches would undoubtedly be broadcast on C-SPAN, at no cost to the Obama campaign."

Now, isn't that a piece of cunning advice? Yes, I agree with your concurrence: it is indeed.

I've already written several letters on telecom immunity to Obama and to Dick Durbin, my U.S. Senators. This stuff really matters if we want to continue living in a nation where jack-booted thugs aren't authorized to kick in our doors or our throats because they don't like something they overheard us say on our cell phones. Or write on our awesome blogs. What --- you don't have an awesome blog?!? Then write your senators and tell them you agree with StuporMundi.

Awesome prediciton revisited

First, cross-reference this. Now fast-forward to this. The author of the former was me, here, on 16 December 2007. The author of the latter was bigshot wingnut and Iraq War advocate Michael Ledeen at National Review Online, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, on 25 January 2008. I don't know much about Ledeen, but evidently he's a right-wing insider, and people of that type pay attention to him. The Republican Party overflows with them.

Think of it: Joementum 2008 -- Lieberman and Petraeus as the Republican standard-bearers. A "national unity" ticket for the celebrity DC pundits and journalists to fetish. I don't think regular voters would see much of a difference between that ticket and a Hillary Clinton/Wes Clark Democratic alternative. Except I'm guessing that more of them would vote for Joe and Dave because Hillary is too cold, or too emotional, or is humorless, or cackles too much, or something. So how do you like them apples? I know Big Otis hates them and thinks they're make-believe.

I edit

Sharp-eyed visitors to my blog may notice that I have edited the dialog that originally was presented in Wednesday's "chuckle." I think the new way is slightly funnier than the original, at least to me. Blogger ethics require me to point out the revision to you, so I am, herewith. I do it all the time. I'm just a simple country editor, after all. Thank you.

Today's Chuckle

From the Department of Fantasy Presidential Debate Questions

Yes, it's time for another one of those questions, alright:

Chris Matthews: Senator Obama, given the choice, who would you prefer to have serving as First Lady right now: Nancy Reagan or Hillary Clinton?

Senator Obama: "Present." [Reaches over and pinches Matthews' rubber clown nose. Funny honk. Rim shot.]

From the Department of Round Chickens

See the two adorable tykes, as depicted on a billboard located along Bloomington Road in Champaign, Ill. I wonder if Mike Huckabee's America will still love these big embryos if they evolve into giant zygotes that spend Sunday mornings under their blankets watching porn on their PSPs.

New Year's resolution No. 1

Fewer adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions. More concision.

Cafe Kopi's continuing decline into suckworld

Champaign-Urbana residents as perceptive as StuporMundi may have noticed that local iconic coffee house Cafe Kopi has been on a downward spiral of service and public image in recent years: unannounced short evening hours because staff doesn't show up, bitchy little notes about clearing one's own table in order to keep costs down --- that kind of thing. Lame.

On my visit tonight I took note of an item posted on a list of "upcoming changes": evidently Kopi is "thinking about succumbing to the industry standard of putting foam on lattes." Reason given? None. If you don't want foam in your latte, then you need to order a no-foam latte.

Here's the thing: foam on a latte isn't an "industry standard"; it's a Starbucks standard, and it's intended to fill a customer's cup with more air and less latte, dig? Many old-timers (i.e., those who discovered the health benefits of latte sometime in the 20th century) will remember that a latte with foam is called "cappuccino," and that a no-foam latte is called... "latte."

What next? Will our heroes "succumb to the industry standard" of putting only two shots in a "venti"? Or the "industry standard" of nosepicking behind the cash register?

Update: I just noticed that Kopi has this slick, bitchen website that is barely informative and several years out of date. Note to management: you've been in business longer than 10 years and you no longer accept personal checks... you patchouli-reeking ne'er-do-wells....

Proposal for brokered GOP convention

Last month in this blog I made the historic prediction that when none of the surviving Republican presidential candidates is able to win a majority of delegates at the GOP National Convention in September, the power brokers will draft Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, the anti-Democrat (in two senses of the word), with General Dave Petraeus --- the fresh-faced architect of the '07 U.S. surge in Iraq --- to be the nominees. I'm aware of how silly this prediction sounds, but you must admit that my dream team looks serious and distinguished compared with the psychos, geezers, and nonentities still haunting the Republican campaign trail.

Today, however, Beardy provided one of his patented instant assessments of a complex situation and served up an alternative convention scenario that would be just as effective, and even more entertaining than my prediction. With wisdom that, in my mind, makes him a modern-day heir to the throne of Solomon, Beardy suggests that the Republicans break any convention deadlock with a game of Russian Roulette. Here are the rules: if you want the nomination, you have to play. If you don't play, you (ignominiously) drop out.

This is a brilliant solution, and is highly probable to produce a nominee that most strongly appeals to the core GOP lizard brain due to the guts and vision (i.e., macho insanity) that it would take to play. For purposes of dignity, I'd suggest that the proceedings take place in a nicely appointed television studio rather than on the convention stage; the latter setting might be a little too WWE even for Republicans. Anyway, I see the event being moderated by Tim Russert. The sequence of play could be determined with Mr. Russert asking each candidate in alphabetical order a jeopardy-style question of neocon trivia. A correct answer would earn the candidate the right to select the first roulette contestant; an incorrect answer would give him the roulette trigger.

Mr. Russert: Governor Romney: This lady liberal-basher has more cold sores than Heidi Fleiss.

Neat, huh? Actually, Beardy and I initially predicted that it would come down to a contest between Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee. Then Beardy added Fred Thompson to the list because, "for him, it would be a win-win situation."

Who's the ventriloquist?

At Hillary Clinton's victory celebration in New Hampshire Tuesday night she told the audience, as reported by AP via Huffington Post, "Over the last week, I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice."

On the face of it, that doesn't sound like a very shrewd thing for a politician to say, most especially a female who might be the object of sexist stereotypes by opponents and media ill-wishers. So, in consideration of the ready availability of the greatest political straight line of the week, here is the first post to my brand new Fantasy Presidential Debate Questions Department. And it goes a little something like... this:

Debate moderator: Senator Clinton, on January 8 in New Hampshire you told supporters that you had that week finally, as you put it, "found my own voice." My question to you is that, prior to January 8, 2008, whose voice were you speaking in, and why?

Senator Clinton: [Silence. Big round Ralph Kramden heart-attack eyes.]

So-called "stunning comeback"

I can barely stand to hear political news coverage by the state-controlled media. For one thing it mainly speaks for corporations and propertied Americans. For another thing, it guards the gates against facts that don't fit the daily military-industrial narrative. And for a third thing, it's wrong about all the important things.

It was disappointing to see my hero Josh Marshall fall into the trap of echoing conventional platitudes about Clinton's "riveting win." Here is a link to TPM reporter Greg Sargent quoting AP on the "major upset" as if that characterization is a fact rather than someone's opinion.

Let's look at the freakin' historical NH poll data from Pollster.com. I'm terrible parsing lots of numbers, eyeball-wise; maybe Big Otis can help sort out these numbers for me. But it looks to me as if Obama, in most polls, was trailing Clinton by a wide margin --- often double digits --- back in November 2007. His numbers started creeping up in December 2007, but he was still a bit behind in most polls. He was even tied with or behind Clinton in a number of polls as late as 2 January 2008.

In actual voting totals, Obama finished only three points behind Clinton, which is well within the margin of error for a properly conducted poll. Now I'm just a simple country editor, but it looks to me as if the real stories are these:

* Obama slowly and steadily closed the gap between him and Clinton in December, and finished in a statistical tie with her for the primary win.

* Something --- the euphoric impact of a real news event on the people polled, the polling organizations, and the mass media, maybe --- skewed multiple polling results between the caucuses and the primary crazily in Obama's favor.

* The entire media establishment (plus non-establishment guys like Josh Marshall) became deranged --- first by all the amped-up Obama buzz out of Iowa, then by all the bizarre Clinton buzz (negative and positive) after Iowa through NH.

I think the Clinton fall from grace and stunning comeback happened mainly in the minds of celebrity journalists and the people who shovel them press handouts. Yes, we may see that Clinton had a late surge in voter support, and there is in fact anecdotal evidence (too lazy to link to it) that some late support was voter reaction against the negative coverage of her after Iowa. Fine: so be it. But the final NH voting totals were right in line with how the polling there had been trending all along! At least that's the way it looks to my dyslexic eyebones.

So the big news, in my view, is that the establishment media and polling organizations completely misreported what was really happening in the run-up to NH. And now they are all covering each other's backs by pretending that some sort of miracle occurred for Ms Clinton. Can't let the rubes see behind the curtain. To me, this "comeback kid" narrative is even less plausible than the fairy tales Mike Huckabee is ridiculed for spinning.

I'll forgive Josh, though: he's a young guy, and overworked.

Late update: I hate Blogger's numbered list and bulleted list styles. They screw up all typography that comes after them. Therefore, my bulleted lists will employ manual asterisks in order to otherwise preserve typographic beauty and legibility.

International Journal of Nana Studies 1(2)

Background and Objective

Nana enjoys making conversation that employs special forms of logic of her own origin. The objective of this report is to examine nanoconversation Way 2, known as Pretzel Logic. This way of nanoconversation may not be dismissed as an artifact of Nana's inability to apply communal forms of reasoning to a simple set of facts, but it is better understood as a highly refined mode of social interaction where no obvious basis for such activity is in evidence.

Analysis

When employing Nanoconversation* Way 2, Nana begins with a statement festooned with more hooks than a Rapala jigging shad rap, any one of which may snag the living flesh of a person temporarily attracted by the glint of it. Then, once nanoconversation is initiated, Nana will use her free-range associative capabilities to advance the talk in any direction that simulates a logical interaction.

The following example is a typical application, wherein Nana comments upon an invitation to Sunday breakfast, telephoned to her on Saturday evening:

Nana: I almost broke my neck getting to the phone last night. I'd just gone to bed.
StuporMundi: Don't you have a phone in your bedroom?
Nana: No.
StuporMundi: Would you like me to put one in there for you?
Nana: No, I have another phone somewhere.
StuporMundi: Well, I can hook it up in your bedroom for you if you want.
Nana: No, it would always be in a place I couldn't get to it.

Discussion

As with other ways of nanoconversation, the central motivation for Pretzel Logic is to construct a controversy, a mystery, or another rhetorical framework designed to maximize interaction based on the minimal amount of substance. In the example above, the rhetorical framework was an implicit unjustified admonishment. The genius occurs when an attempt to correct the imaginary transgression (i.e., installing a telephone in a convenient bedtime location) is rebuffed with a logic that indicates no corrective measures are possible under conditions normally prevailing in the universe.

Conclusion

Nana enjoys maximal conversation with minimal intellectual or factual input. Nanoconversation Way 2, Pretzel Logic, enables Nana to insert drama into a mundane event, imply external blame or responsibility for said event, then rebuff offers of help or reparations with the sort of recursive reasoning that drove Hal 9000 into a fateful series of illegal operations.
_____________________________

*Erratum [Int'l Journ. Nan. Studies 1(1)]

In the subject issue of this journal, the term nanoconversation was incorrectly conflated completely with nanoconversation Way 1. That variety of nanoconversation is correctly identified as "smallest talk". The editor regrets the error, and this erratum has been posted as a late update to the subject issue of this journal.

Strange affliction

One of my favorite household devices is the wet/dry shop vac. I've accumulated three over the years: the oldest for the garage, the biggest for the funky basement, the mighty portable for everywhere else.

But here's a problem: I'm reluctant to use them because I don't like to get them dirty.