If you're gonna oppose Judge Alito, do it for the right reasons.

Think Progress has a handy Alito guide, featuring pithy headings such as "ALITO WOULD OVERTURN ROE V. WADE" and "ALITO WOULD ALLOW RACE-BASED DISCRIMINATION". Such themes are being embraced in unsurprising places.

Patterico has already done a great job of outlining the true nature and implications of Alito's dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (which Think Progress wrongly construes as evidence that Judge Alito would overturn Roe); I thought I should touch upon Alito's dissent in Bray v. Marriott, which Think Progress offers as evidence that "Alito would allow race-based discrimination."

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*** Alito for SCOTUS it is. A mixed bag for me, though a solid win for conservatives:

Unlike Roberts, he has opined from the bench on both abortion rights, church-state separation and gender discrimination to the pleasure of conservatives and displeasure of liberals.

While he has been dubbed "Scalito" by some lawyers for a supposed affinity to conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and his Italian-American heritage, most observers believe that greatly oversimplifies his record.

Alito is considered far less provocative a figure than Scalia both in personality and judicial temperament. His opinions and dissents tend to be dryly analytical rather than slashing.

And yes, he's eminently qualified.

*** Dean Esmay on WMD historical revisionism:

Having been part of those debates when they were happening, I am utterly appalled at people I used to think of as intelligent and well-informed who keep repeating falsehood after falsehood after falsehood about it. And I am utterly exhausted with having to, at least once a month or so, go back and rehash the same arguments because some people are not simply honest enough, diligent enough, or caring enough to go back and look at the historical record and just be honest about it.

*** What's a a tadpole?

A tadpole (technically known as a protein-DNA chimera) is a hybrid of two molecules. Its head is a protein designed to bind to one specific type of molecule. Its tail is a strip of DNA that serves as a chemical bar code. Despite its name, the tadpole isn't alive. It's a chemical sticky. Mix some tadpoles into a blood sample and their heads will stick to, say, the specific kind of protein that breaks loose into your blood as a prostate tumor develops—months before your doctor would notice anything funny down there. In the past, biologists would have struggled to find and count the protein heads. But the tadpoles' DNA tails stand out like price tags. "No other biological molecule can be quantified as easily, or with as much sensitivity, as DNA," Ian Burbulis, the biker biologist, explained to me.
...
To test your blood for cancer, a medical lab would mix the tadpoles with a single drop of your blood. A minute or two later the tester would wash away any tadpoles that hadn't bound to a target. To measure the remaining tadpoles—the ones that have latched onto cancer indicators, the tester would place the tadpole-bearing blood sample into a PCR (polymerase chain reaction) machine, a sort of incubator that replicates short DNA strands.

This is the genius part. Even if there were only a dozen tadpoles in your blood sample, the PCR would multiply their tails until there were enough (say a thousand or so) to be detected by standard lab gear. By dividing what he or she had just multiplied, the tester would know roughly how many tadpole tails—and hence how many cancer-indicating molecules—were in your blood sample. The whole process takes an afternoon at most. MSI refused to let me quote a number until rigorous trials are done, but I'd wager that tadpoles could be at least 10 times more sensitive than current lab tests at spotting cancer.

Very cool. If it seems like the pace of medical technological development is accelerating, you're right, it is.

Part of a series:

Wilson was sent to Africa on an investigative mission regarding nuclear weapons, but never asked to sign any sort of secrecy agreement(!). Wilson returns, reports, then publishes an oped in the New York Times (!!) about his mission. This pretty much ensures that people will start asking why he was sent, which leads to the fact that his wife arranged it. Once Wilson's oped appeared, Plame's covert status was in serious danger. Yet nobody seemed to care. *(emphasis added)

Batman: Robin, we've got to find out who sent Wilson to Africa and why...
Robin: Maybe the CIA asked him to go because he had worked as a diplomat in several African countries, including Niger, and maybe he had contacts there that he could speak to?
Batman: That would be easy, Robin. Too easy. And not convoluted enough. No, there must be some riddle... Who sent him on this merry errand? Wait... merry, marry? Who do men marry, Robin?
Robin: Their wives!
Batman: Exactly! To the Batmobile!

The op-ed only leads to the fact that his wife sent him if that classified fact is leaked by those in the know. Nobody would have asked for the name of the individual who sent him, no foreign spycatcher would have started an investigation of his family. Can we please just stop trying to argue that Wilson brought this down on his wife?

Batman: What is yellow and writes?

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Yes Professor, it bears repeating:

ONE OF THE THINGS I'VE NOTICED in the Judy Miller / Scooter Libby coverage is the development of a new history that's very convenient for a lot of the people peddling it. The new story is that:

1. We only went to war because of WMDs -- that was the only reason ever given.

2. Bush lied about those.

3. He told his lies to Judy Miller, who acted like a stenographer and reported them.

4. Everyone else gullibly went along.

There are lots of problems with this, beginning with the fact that it's not true. I've addressed much of this -- especially parts 1 & 2 -- in earlier posts like this one, this one, and especially this one. It gets tiresome having to repeat this stuff, but the new history, despite it's falsity, is just too convenient for too many people to be stopped by anything as simple as the truth.

Yep. Distortion through frame of reference, and all. How quickly some of us forget ... or dissemble during evasion of honest discourse.

A reader's response to selective editing at the New York Times:

I know it just kills you guys to think that overwhelmingly our soldiers actually, consciously support the war, are perfectly aware of the dangers they face, and are as perfectly prepared to face them. I know it comforts all the Timesmen and women to think that soldiers are just sad, pathetic, barely literate dupes (when they aren’t being babykillers and Koran flushers), but in fact the soldiers view their lives as imbued with transcendent meaning, apparently something no Times reporter can claim. Maybe it’s just envy on the part of all your reporters that these American teenagers in uniform make history every day of their lives, while you all just continue to transparently twist the news and to accumulate contempt from the American people, which is now compounding at a daily rate.

Of course, the original, truncated letter that inspired the rebuke is the main event:

I don’t regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it’s not to me. I’m here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark.

Have you ever seen one of those mysteries, where you can just tell the writer started at the ending and worked his way backwards, coming up with ridiculous "clues" that no non-imaginary person without benefit of hindsight would have reasonably come up with?

Yeah.

It's like something from the old Batman TV show.

"But wait! It happened at sea! See? "C" for Catwoman!"

Let's take a look at "Batman Versus The Foreign Spycatcher":

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Blackfive responds to Peter Daou.

*** New technology could make Dan Rather lean right.

*** Iraqi widow shoe slaps the terrorist who killed her husband. Very sad. Apparently this is a clip from one of the "Most Wanted" programs that are popular in Iraq.

*** No Fitzmas for Kos?

*** Raging Bill Gates headbuts camera.

*** "Cuba Accepts U.S. Aid Offer For The First Time." I'll leave the commentary to Val.

Sulu is gay.

Evolution: The Dover trial is looking pretty interesting. (Via WWR)

George Galloway: Repeatedly accused of being bribed under Oil-For-Food, this time in the Final Report of the UN's Independent Inquiry Committee. Ouch! (pdf, starting on pg. 71, more links at Tim Blair's)

No Miss Moneypenny in the new Bond movie. *

Napoleon Dynamite fans, check out these ads for the Utah State Fair. (Via File It Under)

Lady Miers
Embraced by peers
Plebes without JD
Howled with glee

For
your destruction

Lady Miers
Pride through my tears
Wracked with sobs
Mocked by snobs

Elitism
their instruction

Oh Sweet Lady Miers
I have such fears
The Mob has won
Blogs jumped the gun

GOP
obstruction.

Oh lovely, lovely Lady Miers ...
The smoke ... it clears
Though it begins anew
I'll always love you

My heart's
abduction.

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Harriet Miers Withdraws Nomination

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We did it! We did it!

BOW BEFORE THE MIGHTY POWER OF THE BLOGSWARM, BEEHORTCH!

...

What?

...

What?!

Why are you looking at me like that?

The most relevant analysis of George Galloway's recent troubles can only come from the fascist advocate's dogged bete noir, Christopher Hitchens:

Just before my last exchange with George Galloway, which occurred on the set of Bill Maher's show in Los Angeles in mid-September, I was approached by a representative of the program and asked if I planned to repeat my challenge to Galloway on air. That challenge—would he sign an affidavit saying that he had never discussed Oil-for-Food monies with Tariq Aziz?—I had already made on a public stage in New York. Maher's producers had been asked, obviously by a nervous Galloway, to find out whether I had brought such an affidavit along with me. I replied that this was not necessary, since his public denial to me was on the record and had been broadcast, and since it further confirmed the apparent perjury that he had committed in front of the U.S. Senate on May 17, 2005. I added that I wanted no further contact with Galloway until I could have the opportunity of reviewing his prison diaries.

That day has now been brought measurably closer by the publication of the report of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. This report, which comes with a vast archive of supporting material, was embargoed until 10 p.m. Monday and contains the "smoking gun" evidence that Galloway, along with his wife and his chief business associate, were consistent profiteers from Saddam Hussein's regime and its criminal exploitation of the "Oil for Food" program.

Hitchens examines the details of the new evidence and Galloway's various denials in the rest of the piece. Also notable is this graph:

Yet this is the man who received wall-to-wall good press for insulting the Senate subcommittee in May, and who was later the subject of a fawning puff piece in the New York Times, and who was lionized by the anti-war movement when he came on a mendacious and demagogic tour of the country last month. I wonder if any of those who furnished him a platform will now have the grace to admit that they were hosting a man who is not just a pimp for fascism but one of its prostitutes as well.

(Emphasis mine)

As a flashback to another example of the Washington Post Express's ridiculous anti-war bias, recall their narrative for Galloway's testimony back in May (representative of many Western outlets):

The other day, the "Express" version of the Post, which is handed out at various Metro stations as a commuter read, had an interesting headline describing George Galloway's testimony before the Senate regarding his bribery implication in the Oil-For-Food scandal.

Was it, "British Lawmaker Questioned for Iraq Bribery Ties?" Nope.

How about "UK MP Denies Pre-War Bribery Charges?" Nope.

It was something like (paraphrasing)...

"Lawmakers Rebuked Over Iraq."

As in, the lead was that the criminally charged British MP flew to Washington, DC in order to lecture our Senators for their decision to go to war. What an astonishing choice of headline.

Since everyone else is linking this odd formula to determine blog worth, here you go ...

Your blog, indcjournal.com, is worth $421,711.38

Great. To be honest, I was skeptical; how does the formula calculate worth? Why haven't I received any bids? What a load of hooey, etc.

But after running another familiar blog's projected worth, I became a BELIEVER:

Your blog, llamabutchers.mu.nu/, is worth $0.00

To the penny, I'd say. Spooky.

*** Moment of editorial disgust: today's Washington Post Express (the free mini-rag handed out on the subway), once again asserts its ideological identity by featuring a huge, color, semi-fish-eye perspective graphic of a line of American memorials in Iraq (boots, rifle, helmet) with the reverse bolded 60+ point type "2,000 DEAD" to celebrate report the grim, round number of the latest casualties from the two-and-a-half year old conflict.

This comes a mere few weeks after the same publication described an incident where insurgents pulled a handful of unarmed elementary schoolteachers out of their classrooms and executed them as ... wait for it ... "a bold attack." (no link, it's strictly a print edition)

This editorializing is repellent.

(And please note that I limit the use of the terms "repellent," "disgust," and/or "I'm outraged" to no more than 10 references during any calendar year.)

*** Some perspective on US casualties in Iraq:

Of course, there is a clear moral difference between "ordinary" deaths and military deaths in war. So let us draw a comparison to the statistics on American military fatalities in modern wars. According to a site that tracks such information, the fatalities rates, including killed-in-action and non-battle deaths, were:

For World War I, over 6,100 per month.
For World War II, over 9,200 per month.
In Korea, over 900 were killed each month (non-battle death information is not available).
For Vietnam, over 600 per month.
For Gulf War I, almost 300 in one month.

The first Gulf War was noted for its remarkably low casualties. Some even observed that the death rate for the deployed American military personnel was lower then than that during peacetime, making it "safer to be at war than at home" for the soldiers. In comparison, an average of 53 died each month in this war.
...
Today the news-hungry media reports each death in an agonizing, repetitive fashion. One learns of a death in the morning newspapers, hears about it on radio on the way to work, sees it on CNN during lunch time, and the cycle repeats itself for few more hours in the evening, capped by a special on Nightline. The effect is that the impact of each death is sensationally and numbingly magnified without any reference to the contexts, such as toppling a murderous dictatorship, defeating a sponsor of terrorism and bringing freedom to an oppressed people.

Bingo.

(Note: the excerpted statistical death rate for the current conflict is as of 2004. The relative context is still relevant.)

*** 1Lt Bruce Bishop of the Utah National Guard explains his motivation to re-enlist:

..."because as I look around at the state of this nation and see all of the weak little pampered candy-asses that are whining about this or protesting that, I'd be afraid to leave the fate of this nation entirely up to them."

*** Rarified quarters of Washington, DC wait for the boom:

Bush Aides Brace for Charges
Grand Jury May Hear Counts in Leak Case Today

My abbreviated opinion: Yes, Joe Wilson is a lying dandy, addicted to attention and responsible for projecting false martyrdom of his wife to fulfill his personal and ideological ambition. Yes, "faith-based" liberals have been willing to lionize him and distort and selectively interpret the scenario to fulfill their ideological ambition (ignoring the fact that his "report" from Africa was inaccurate and that he lied about being recommended for the assignment by his wife, for examples). Yes, the entire basis of initial potential indictments is probably thin, as it looks like no crime was committed in "outing" Plame according to the letter of the law ("intent" of the law is more subjective).

But if Libby, Rove or anyone else lied or obfuscated during testimony after the fact - hang 'em high (figuratively). If one gets caught playing games at that level - and I stress "caught," as many politicos do play such games - there are consequences. And it's fairly easy to imagine a mirror image interpretation of Clinton's impeachment scandal drawn along partisan lines, if the indictments are notable ones. We'll see.

Tom Maguire is doing the yeoman's work of fine analysis on this topic, if you're interested.

For those interested:

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RINO Sightings XII XVIII

UPDATE: Link is broken. The URL is correct, it's a problem with Blogger or Blogspot. Shrug.

*** Are you a blogger? The Commissar is gathering data for a family tree of bloggers: Who's Your Daddy.

*** Two highly accurate takes on blogging:

Iowahawk: How to Blog Good, Part Two:

Blog Dimension 3: Anger. If you expect to get and retain readers, you need to show your passion -- and nothing spells passion like good old-fashioned anger. Some of the blogosphere’s most effective writing comes from anger, and if you don’t see this, I’d be happy to come down to your mom’s basement and beat your pathetic face to a bloody pencilneck-stump, looser. Is there something, or someone, out there that’s got your goat? Nurse that grudge into a simmering beef! Set CAP LOCKS ON, then wade into the fray with the hobnailed boots of passion, swinging your organ-flecked club of reason.

By communicating that "I'm mad as hell" and "I'm not gonna take it anymore" and "I'm teetering on the convulsive edge of a violent breakdown," you will naturally draw an audience who will think, "say, now here is a fellow who really bears watching." Anger will also help differentiate you from the online herd of namby-pamby sob sisters, whose idea of punditry is stuff like

(a1) I really have some concerns with this Harriet Miers nomination.
(b1) If you ask me, Harriet Miers sounds like a pretty decent nominee.

Snore!! Like that kind of squeamish milquetoast garbage is going to make to Technorati Hot 100. Mister, if you are going to survive the online ThunderDome steel cage opinion match, you are going to have to 'bring the pain' with your shiv-like exclamation points. Also, don't be afraid to 'keep it real' with some brutal profanity. This gives you "street cred" with the blog community, who are always on the lookout for 'narcs.'

And a rather more pithy version of blogging how-to from Chiefly Musing. I like it!

*** Many of us were pleasantly surprised - and offered praise - when the UN issued a report that directly blamed the Syrian government for the assassination of Rafik Hariri, Lebanon's Prime Minister. This praise was naive and premature:

THE United Nations withheld some of the most damaging allegations against Syria in its report on the murder of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, it emerged yesterday. The names of the brother of Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, and other members of his inner circle, were dropped from the report that was sent to the Security Council.

The confidential changes were revealed by an extraordinary computer gaffe because an electronic version distributed by UN officials on Thursday night allowed recipients to track editing changes.

The mistaken release of the unedited report added further support to the published conclusion that Syria was behind Mr Hariri’s assassination in a bomb blast on Valentine’s Day in Beirut. The murder of Mr Hariri touched off an international outcry and hastened Syria’s departure from Lebanon in April after a 29-year pervasive military presence.
...
But the furore over the doctoring of the report threatened to overshadow its damaging findings. It raised questions about political interference by Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary- General, who had promised not to make any changes in the report.

THIS MAKES ME VERY, VERY ANGRY!

(Actually, Iowahawk's advice aside, it kind of does, in a "'what do you expect?' followed by a deep sigh and then 'ooh, Rome is on!'" sort of way ...)

(Via IP)

First reason: Why are you spending your weekend watching DVDs and reading blogs? Make love to a woman or man you really care about, for chrissake.

Second reason: When you read this:

But I don't think W ever second guessed his manager when, in the top of the sixth, the manager made a decision the owner found inscrutable.

That's the difference between an owner and a sportswriter. One lives to win. The other lives to write good copy.

...you'll inevitably be reminded of when Denethor tries to burn himself and his son Faramir alive on a funeral pyre. Hugh likely identifies strongly with royal guardsman/flunky #2, who thinks to himself: "Hey, this is some pretty freaky inscrutable shit, but what do I know? Have at it, sire."

You may recall that Noam Chomsky won the public poll sponsored by Foreign Policy and the UK's Prospect Magazine to determine the top "public intellectual" from an initial list of 100 nominees. In a stinging deconstruction of Chomsky's credentials and anti-Western political ideology (originally published in Prospect), writer Oliver Kamm denounces the pick:

In his book Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, Richard Posner noted that "a successful academic may be able to use his success to reach the general public on matters about which he is an idiot." Judging by caustic remarks elsewhere in the book, he was thinking of Noam Chomsky. He was not wrong.

Chomsky remains the most influential figure in theoretical linguistics, known to the public for his ideas that language is a cognitive system and the realisation of an innate faculty. While those ideas enjoy a wide currency, many linguists reject them. His theories have come under criticism from those, such as the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, who were once close to him. Paul Postal, one of Chomsky's earliest colleagues, stresses the tendency for the grandiloquence of Chomsky's claims to increase as he addresses non-specialist audiences. Frederick Newmeyer, a supporter of Chomsky's ideas until the mid-1990s, notes: "One is left with the feeling that Chomsky's ever-increasingly triumphalistic rhetoric is inversely proportional to the actual empirical results that he can point to."

Prospect readers who voted for Chomsky will know his prominence in linguistics, but are more likely to have read his numerous popular critiques of western foreign policy. The connection, if any, between Chomsky's linguistics and his politics is a matter of debate, but one obvious link is that in both fields he deploys dubious arguments leavened with extravagant rhetoric—which is what makes the notion of Chomsky as pre-eminent public intellectual untimely as well as unwarranted.

Read the rest.

UPDATE: Also be sure and read these previous condemnations of Chomsky's intellectual credibility and political posturing.

(Via Allah)

Dorkafork adds: and one more analysis of a Chomsky whopper, from Kamm.

While My Ukulele Gently Weeps

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You can try out the new Xbox 360 in kiosks in select Walmarts. Check this map or find a Walmart near you and call to see if they have one. Tell them dorkafork sent you.

Bill Adds: while researching why one might be inclined to follow Dorkafork's direction, I found some impressive trailers and actual gameplay footage from an XBox 360 title called "Gears of War." Pretty intense.

Now imagine fully immersive, 3-D rendered environments in the not-too-distant future ...

dorkafork: forgot to emphasize it is not for sale, but you can play some demos and watch some trailers.

*** Dave Price fleshes out my IM'ed wonderings about the body politic as an organic system with a specific metaphor about the exponentional contextual complexity of the human genome:

Ray Kurzweil noted that the entire human genome is less than a gigabyte; you could store dozens of people’s full genetic codes on your hard drive. But the total amount of information in the design of a human body is far, far higher than that; the brain alone requires hundreds of million times that much data to fully describe. How then is your extraordinarily complex body created from such a small amount of data? The creation and maintenance of the body involves a relatively simple set of instructions, the iterative execution of which creates enormously greater complexity, far exceeding the amount of information in the instructions themselves. Rather than a blueprint, your body is constructed using a fractal process, a complex biological version of Wulfram’s cellular automata.

Something akin to a fractal process is also fundamental to the success of democratic capitalism, which like the human body is governed by a relatively simple set of rules rather than a blueprint intended to describe or dictate everything we do.

*** WaPo:

U.N. Report Sees Syrian Involvement in Hariri's Death

A U.N. investigation has implicated senior Syrian and Lebanese officials in the assassination of Lebanon's leading reformer in a move that U.S. and European officials expect will generate new international pressure on the Syrian government of President Bashar Assad.

In blunt language, the report by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis concluded that the Valentine's Day bombing of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri and 22 others "could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security officials and could not have been further organized without the collusion of their counterparts in the Lebanese security forces."

Everyone "knew" this, of course, most of all the Lebanese, but it's interesting to see a UN Report affixing such specific blame. Good on 'em.

*** Ok, which of you knuckleheads gabbed about the Venezuelen invasion plans? Remember, the first rule of the Neocon Combat Auxiliary is that we do not talk about the US plans to invade Venezuela.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Thursday that his government is preparing for a possible U.S. invasion and he warned that such "aggression" would send gasoline in the United States prices soaring higher. The U.S. government repeated that it is not planning any such thing.

Yes Hugo, you're big, you're bad, you won't take nada mierda de los matónes Americanos. Give thanks to the AP for running your paranoid political ads. Yawn.

*** Krauthammer nails it (again) on Miers:

And while I remain as exercised as anyone by the lack of wisdom of this choice, I part company with those who see the Miers nomination as a betrayal of conservative principles. The idea that Bush is looking to appoint some kind of closet liberal David Souter or even some rudderless Sandra Day O'Connor clone is wildly off the mark. The president's mistake was thinking he could sneak a reliable conservative past the liberal litmus tests (on abortion, above all) by nominating a candidate at once exceptionally obscure and exceptionally well known to him.

The problem is that this strategy blew up in his face. Her obscurity is the result of her lack of constitutional history, which, in turn, robs her of the minimum qualifications for service on the Supreme Court.

The rest outlines his prediction for rocky hearings ...

*** Also, once again, as I've elucidated before, I do NOT endorse INDC Contributor Hubris's shameless (and rather perverted) mockery of Hugh Hewitt's allegiance to the GOP.

I'd ban Hubris from posting rights on this blog, but the wily bastard's overridden the log-in that I gave him and is scurrying loose through the ship's bowels like a vicious rodent infestation.

*** And finally, speaking of "vicous rodent infestations," this is the funniest video that I've watched in recent memory.

(Via AoS and Red State Rant)

by Hugh Hewitt

Winston Churchill once said that “nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than a flasher, a gentleman who exposes his private bits in public.” President Bush understands that simple maxim as well.

That’s why the anti-anti-anti-Miers crowd continually astonishes me. Actually, they shouldn’t surprise me. I can easily imagine the George Will types when they were children at the library, pretending to pore over Tolstoy while they were actually purloining copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover or some such trash. Twenty years later, they put on bow ties and call themselves conservatives.

That’s how it works with “book-learning” elites, folks. First it's the library, then the hidden desire to emulate Oliver the game-keeper’s vigorous coupling, then they’re criticizing the president’s nominees and showing their genitals to innocent elderly women in parking lots to scratch the shameful itch on their souls. Some of them also opposed Bush’s social security reform plan.

Save democracy, my friends. Listen to Churchill. Support Miers.

*** ID proponent admits his definition of “theory” was so broad it would also include astrology. Also admits today will be a good day for financial dealings, suggests calling up an old friend.

*** Digital organisms shown to evolve into irreducibly complex forms according to an article from the Feb. '05 Discover Magazine. UPDATE: You can download the program the researchers used here.

*** Spanish arrest warrant issued for 3 US soldiers. A journalist who witnessed the incident believes the warrant is politically motivated.

*** "Mr. Foreman, has the jury reached a YAAAH! ... excuse me, didn't mean to jump like that."

*** Who could possibly be against choking the chicken? (The chicken in question.)

*** At the recent Million Man March, Wyclef Jean said "Father Saddam cries in prison" (apparently as part of an outreach effort to centrist voters). I'm unsure whether he meant it to be similar to "Mother Sheehan" or if he has just been reading old Hussein era propaganda.

Actually, that describes most of my posts. In this case, however, I'm referring to a headline from MSNBC:

"Rumsfeld spars with Chinese military officers." If this were a just world, I would have clicked over to find a story about Rumsfeld's tour-gone-wrong of a Chinese military facility. He would have demanded fuller disclosure regarding Chinese military spending, and when his inscrutable host said "We are sorry, but under the circumstances..." Rumsfeld would have yelled, "Circumstances hell! I make circumstances!" And then he would have ripped off his suit jacket and shirt and revealed a physique that rivals Matt Furey's just before the bloody sparring began.

Fucking news cycle.

*** The Pundit Guy photoblogs Dachau:

As I walked into Dachau, I was greeted with these words.

“Work Makes One Free”. You might recognize this motto as the same one posted at the main gate of Auschwitz.

*** In a nanotech primer with a particular gloom-and-doom anti-military-industrial complex spin, Salon's Alan H. Goldstein nevertheless raises some of the relevant scary issues related to the 21st Century's fast approaching changes:

In high-technology incubators around the world, biotechnology and nanotechnology together are spawning. With the literary imagination for which engineers are famous, the offspring of this union has already been named nanobiotechnology. The overt goal of nanobiotechnology is to completely break down the borders between living and nonliving materials. This goal has the most profound implications for every aspect of human endeavor, but in warfare the consequences of integrating our most powerful technologies are almost beyond comprehension. The fusion of nanotechnology and biotechnology will erase any distinction between chemical, biological, and conventional weapons, altering the face of war (and life) forever.

The key thing to remember is that every military application also has a non-military one: tomorrow's sword will be next week's plowshare (and vice versa). In the nano age, if you aren't very afraid and very excited at the same time, you aren't paying attention.

Though I maintain faith that a Benevolent Glenn Reynolds will protect us, some of these issues echo Joel Garreau's description of the "Hell Scenario:"

The Hell scenario is the mirror image of the Heaven scenario in a lot of ways. The spokesperson for this scenario is Bill Joy, the former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems. Joy looks at the same information that Ray Kurzweil does and says, “It could all go the other way.” He absolutely agrees that we are on this curve of exponential technological change that is changing what it means to be human. But he worries that this power could get into the hands of nutcases, with extremely bad consequences. The optimistic view of the Hell scenario is that we extinct the human species in 20 to 25 years. The pessimistic view is that we wipe out all of life on Earth.

HAVE A NICE DAY!

*** On an equally fun note, more Llama mockery: the Llama Sutra.

*** And finally, Feminists perpetually aggrieved by THE PATRIARCHY! - what to make of this?

As women march forward, more boys seem to be falling by the wayside, McCorkell says. Not only do national statistics forecast a continued decline in the percentage of males on college campuses, but the drops are seen in all races, income groups and fields of study, says policy analyst Thomas Mortenson, publisher of the influential Postsecondary Education Opportunity newsletter in Oskaloosa, Iowa. Since 1995, he has been tracking — and sounding the alarm about — the dwindling presence of men in colleges.

College administrators shy away from the term “affirmative action,” a murky concept rooted in redressing historic inequities and loaded with legal implications. Yet the imbalances do trouble some admissions officials.

So just as they might consider race or geographical diversity in building freshman classes, they similarly look for gender parity.

There are more men than women ages 18-24 in the USA — 15 million vs. 14.2 million, according to a Census Bureau estimate last year. But nationally, the male/female ratio on campus today is 43/57, a reversal from the late 1960s and well beyond the nearly even splits of the mid-1970s.

Through a custom predictive algorithm created in INDC's own nanotech and bioinformatical warfare labs, I've been able to simulate a projected response from Pandagon's feminiacal Amanda Marcotte:

"An illusion! One designed to further the PATRIARCHY'S scheme to maintain cultural and economic control over my WOMB! They send their aryan males to secret elite schools built in wilds of the Rockies and Poconos, you see. It's all funded by corporate sponsorships from the underwire bra-Hooters-brazilian bikini wax-industrial complex, a hidden oligarchy of rich old white men scheming to keep us robotic, hairless, servile and shackled in orange hot pants! Larry Summers! Keep away. The sow is mine! Stick your &*$#@ up her @$#, you mother*&%$#@!@ worthless &%$#@%$@!*"

"Your mother's in here, Summers. Would you like to leave a message? I'll see that she gets it!"

You know, or something like that.

(Via Commissar)

Me?

The meme is spreading.

And Dean, you could have corrected the ridiculous amount of typos ...

UPDATE: the Final Historian belatedly contributes to the conversation with an interesting post on the concept of "satisficement."

... pulled from the work of Douglas Adams:

Douglas Adams' book and cult radio show The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (now made into a film) discusses the Babel fish, a marvellous creature that, when inserted into the ear canal, allows the wearer to understand any language in the Universe. Pan-galactic philosophers find the Babel fish so expertly designed for its task as universal interpreter that it can, in a bizarre twist of logic, be used to prove the non-existence of God.

The argument runs like this.

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing."

"Aha!" says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own argument, you don't. QED."

"Oh dear, I hadn't thought of that," says God, and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

All right, this is a bit silly. But the point it illustrates is not trivial. And it can be argued that followers of 'intelligent design' fall prey to the same flaw in logic.

Intelligent design is the idea that humanity and the world are so intricate that there must be a creator behind it all. Some proponents of the idea wish to see this concept treated as a proper theory, having it peer reviewed and accepted by the scientific community. The intention is to establish the existence of a creator, declaring along the way that unguided natural selection is not a credible process.

But they have failed to grasp the futility of this exercise. It is a tenet of any faith that the adherent should believe in the precepts on offer, without asking for evidence. Proof denies faith, says God, and without faith, I am nothing. And the old guy is right.

Read the rest. I made a similar argument back in June:

Who designed the designer? And why must we have a supposedly scientific answer, despite the fact that such an ultimate conclusion can only now be realized via faith and completely subjective reasoning, two human traits that largely fall outside of the mandate of true scientific inquiry.

And while some scientists certainly do cling to imperfect theories and protocols like their very own articles of religious faith, those examples fail to meet the true standard of scientific inquiry as well. Which is why that common strawman used in defense of ID - one that highlights flaws in scientific execution spurred by human emotion - sits mutually exclusive from the fact that science (clearly defined and executed), by its very nature, should maintain a healthy delineation from faith.

I'd even go so far as to say that using science to support religion actually undermines religion, chiefly by invalidating its central reliance.

(Ah, repeats)

But take heart, faith-based readers - in the rest of the piece, the author goes on to take a few very reasonable swipes at the politically correct scientific orthodoxy and reveals Adams' plan for the aforementioned atheistic riddler of God to go on to prove black is white and thus meet an ironically grisly end at a newly deadly zebra crossing.

Enjoy.

UPDATE: The Raving Atheist has an interesting post putting forth the postion that Atheism is not another belief structure comparable to religious belief (in the context of a story about atheistic prison inmates seeking religious benefits). I selectively disagree and stick up for theism (uh, sort of) in a pair of comments under the post. Might as well edit them into a rambling, barely coherent post:

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... as selected by Foreign Policy and the UK's Prospect Magazine.

Notables:

Noam Chomsky, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Bernard Lewis, BjØrn Lomborg, Bill Ardolino, Paul Wolfowitz, Fareed Zakaria, Camille Paglia, Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman.

I guess that Maureen Dowd didn't quite make the cut.

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Miers didn't say that Griswold was "rightly decided"; rather, she said that it was "slightly misguided." Or "rightly derided." Pay attention, Specter!

I, for one, am confident that the confirmation hearings are going to go extremely well.

*** Yes, cranky Bill Quick may have misjudged the scope of an interventionist policy designed to strategically stabilize a region:

There has been terrorism in the Arab and Muslim worlds for decades, if not centuries. We didn't set out to discourage that. We set out to discourage Islamist and Arab terrorists from waging terror war on the United States of America.

To some degree, one follows from the other, Bill.

*** Mocking the Llamas: always a winner in my book. Because let's face it, reading Robbo's posts about gardening are about as entertaining as reading about someone watching plants grow.

*** Tweaking Goldstein with Photoshop: also a winner in my book.

*** In the forthcoming Rocky installment, Sly battles his toughest opponents yet: creeping androgen deficiency, age-related macular degeneration and a prostate the size of Mr. T.

*** Leading Intelligent Design advocate cites God as the force behind "irreducible complexity:"

The intelligent design concept does not name the designer, although Behe, a Roman Catholic, testified he personally believes it to be God.

“I conclude that based on theological and philosophical and historical factors,” he said.

(Via Commissar)

*** More grumbly naysaying on the Iraqi vote from the Kossacks. One might almost get the impression ... that they're rooting against success.

Nah.

I think it would be good for her to focus on the future to get past this devastating miscue. What should she do now?

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