born live love die

PZ Myers on the host kerfluffle:

Go ahead, any of you can do it — you don’t need to be a theologian to see that it is just a cracker.

“No Joke”, by Drew Friedman in Vanity Fair.

Army of Dude is a great blog, written by a young soldier in Iraq.  His latest post is good writing, Enemies with Benefits.

Don’t tell the pathetic non-serving members of the old media (and new media), but the surge wasn’t wholly responsible for the drop in violence seen in Iraq over the last year. I have outlined the three main reasons violence has subsided, but one of the more important aspects is still largely misunderstood and mischaracterized by the punditry across the country.

The ‘awakening group’ movement first appeared in Anbar in late 2005 (or if you’re John McCain, it started in a time warp before and after the surge) and has since grown to a large, lethal force that battles elements of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State of Iraq. That is usually where the media narrative leaves you, insinuating that these groups are patriotic volunteers casting out the demons of al-Qaeda.

What they don’t mention is both the original motivations for these groups and their history of battling American soldiers. One of the latest to operate (and propped up by my unit in Diyala Province) is the 1920 Revolution Brigade. I covered their nationalist history a year ago, citing their name was a throwback to the 1920 revolution to oust British influence. So this group in particular didn’t start in 2005, 2006 or even 2007, but in 2003 for one reason: to attack and kill Americans.

We started paying them and they became “concerned local nationals”.  We were paying them $300/month to find and fight Al Qaeda in Iraq.

That’s why they’re trying to leverage the American military into giving them more money, the ol’ “pay me more or I’m going back to killing you” ruse. And for their part, they’ll probably be successful. Commanders know that they’re important not for killing al-Qaeda, but for not fighting us. They’re not allies, they’re enemies with benefits. And they’re holding the cards.

Like we didn’t see that one coming.

Why isn’t there an outcry from the media and citizenry about these people? Quite simply, the military led the media by its nose when they characterized insurgents as “concerned” and proudly spoke of them as volunteers. To further confuse people, they were renamed ‘Baqubah Guardians’ and then finally ‘Sons of Iraq,’ each name a brighter shade of lipstick for the same dirty pig. They’re only growing stronger and more experienced as time goes on, watching coalition forces close up, looking for every weakness. They’ve already discovered a big one: our over-reliance on their dirty, sectarian work.

What a mess.

The water carriers in the main stream media are so pathetic.  WaPo has an editorial up about the Republican Party Death Squad Justice Department under Alberto Gonzales.

Another stunning report has documented the bold and illegal influence of politics at the Justice Department over the past eight years.

Like you didn’t know.  If you didn’t know, it is because you didn’t want to know.  Real Journalists ™ would have been on the story.  Instead, you water carrying bastards wanted to make sure you were invited to the right parties.

The author, Jamie Gorelick, is not a writer for the WaPo.  I shouldn’t try to stand on her throat.  But the fact that WaPo would print this after their record of being Bush’s butt-boy is galling.

In a previous ad hoc post, I talked a bit about the impact of Netroots.

Dennis Ferrin agrees with me, I think.  He has written a book about how the Democratic party has been a party of war.  Along the way, he has this to say about the Netroots:

Q: What would you say are the biggest roadblocks for the Democratic Party preventing it from embracing or enacting at least real liberal-progressive policy or reform? You mentioned the corporate elite.

DF: It’s just the reality of our situation. There is no place in the current economic political make-up of the United States for a true peoples Democratic Party. This is one of my main arguments with liberal bloggers. They seem to think electing better Democrats is the answer. It may make a difference in small ways, but I just don’t see the Democrats being reformable at all. [emphasis added] It’s impossible under the current conditions.

Q: You wrote about your experience at Netroots Nation. What was revealing to me in your book was the line “I thought the whole point to blogging was to democratize political expression.” Can you elaborate?

DF: Of course blogs could have a tremendous effect, but that has to come from within the minds of the people blogging… [bloggers would have ] to think beyond the boundaries given to them and that’s just not happening. They’re using a narrow form and existing corporate parties to try to effect change. That’s impossible. So when I see Netroots Nation and online activism, it’s primarily the domain of white college-educated people. Working class poor people are not part of the Internet conversation. I talk about that in the book. If I mention Daily Kos or Atriosto them, they wouldn’t know what I’m talking about. That’s how far removed it is.[emphasis added]

I’m not saying there aren’t possibilities. I don’t think what we can see what this technology can do. We’re still in the silent film stage of the Internet. We haven’t gotten to techni-color or wide-screen yet.

[…]

I have never ruled out serious political and social change. It’s possible, but what I’ve experienced it’s going to have to go through a different avenue. Voting for better Democrats just gets us more Democrats. All it does is keep the system in place. What should we replace it with? I don’t know, but to know what that will look like [ahead of time] is insane. The whole process of social change is that you don’t know how it’s going to end. All you know is what your hopes and desires are in the present, and you build towards something. There will be plenty of defeats and roadblocks along the way, but you have to experiment, not get demoralized, not give up, and simply hope that Obama will change it for you. You have to see beyond the immediate structure. As they say, “no guts, no glory.”

I think there are structural defects in the instantiation of democracy in America.  Unfortunately, the number of stakeholders who must be appeased before there is a substantive change is such that the problem appears intractable.  Sometimes, it seems that only the complete collapse of American government will allow change to be made.

But here’s to hoping that it doesn’t go that far.

This Jon Stewart bit has some good stuff in it.

A long time ago, I wrote a script about the Earth being on a collision course with a very large asteroid.  In the first draft of the script, civilization broke down because the certainty of the collision was known far in advance of the projected impact.  That makes for a boring movie, or for a movie that won’t get made.  So I changed the composition of the asteroid and gave it very little reflectivity.  In my script, society still breaks down, but there is a military coup and the President is put on trial for treason.  I wrote that in 1996.

One of the problems I thought about is what do you do with a very large piece of rock that is heading toward Earth?  I rejected nuking it because nuking it would just break it up into smaller pieces and make them harder to target.  Meteor Crator, in Arizona, was formed by a meteorite that was only 50 meters across but travelling at a speed of around 20 km/sec (45,000 mph).   That crater is 1200 meters in diameter and about 170 meters deep.

If an asteroid about 1000 meters in diameter was struck by nukes, it would vaporize some of it, but the rest would be broken into pieces about this size or smaller.  The asteroid has a volume equal to around 8000 meteorites of the size that hit Arizona.  Some of them would be vaporized.  How many would still strike the Earth?

Well, there are people who have been thinking about this and they think that nuke are not the way to go.  The official government position is that nukes are still the way to go, but we’ll see.

Nuclear weapons could be used to stop earth-bound asteroids, but in most instances, they are not the best option, said Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart during a public lecture this Wednesday in San Francisco.

The venerable scientist explained that all but the largest heavenly bodies can be redirected by rear-ending or towing them with an unmanned spacecraft. But last year, NASA issued a report stating that using nukes is the best strategy to prevent a catastrophic collision with earth.

Although Schweickart has a great deal of faith in the agency, enough to risk his life piloting their lunar lander, he feels that they issued the misleading statement — under immense political pressure. It was a nefarious excuse to put nuclear weapons in space.

His own organization, the B612 Foundation, intends to use gentler tactics to alter the course of an asteroid by 2015.

My solution to the problem was to use nukes in a sequence to cause a wave effect that would deflect the pieces of the asteroid after the military took a shot with straight on nukes and failed.  I don’t know if that would work, but what the heck, it was just a movie.

I found this blog, which doesn’t allow comments, so I can’t comment there.  I’ll comment here.  It’s a women’s sports blog, and the writer makes the argument that even if women suck at a sport, it’s okay.

In the debates over women’s suffrage, some proponents argued that women should vote because they would provide an ethical balancing influence to men, who are naturally prone to immorality.  The rejoinder, voiced by Jo in Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women, is that “Men do not vote because they are good, they vote because they are men.”  In other words, it’s a right granted to them as human beings regardless of how they may or may not use it.  If I had a cup of chai for every terrible, non-competitive contest I’d seen played by men on TV, I would be awake until Christmas.  Everyone knows men’s teams play some games that suck.  Because of the double standard, no one uses those games to judge the sport or male athletes as a whole.  We need to proceed as if that were also true of women’s sports.  Of course I understand worrying that low-quality games are going to hurt the league’s image, because I worry about it too, but if we don’t treat ourselves as human beings who are allowed to have a bad day without it reflecting on womankind/africankind/queerkind or whatever, then nothing’s going to change.

My previous comments were based on a data sample of 1, so there may be some error there.

I would take one bad day, but on average, the women’s game has a lot of bad days relative to a men’s league.

Basketball, like all professional sports, is entertainment business.  There are people who are entertained by watching women play.  There are many reasons for people to be entertained.  Sometimes they are entertained even if the level of play is pretty crappy.

I ran across this page after seeing that Nancy Lieberman was, at the age of 50, rejoining the WNBA team, the Detroit Shock.

The game begins and suddenly my faculties are barraged with scene after scene of flailing ponytails and basketballs careening dangerously in every direction. At one point, Terry and Doris commented on the great defense each team was playing, but where I come from that isn’t called “defense”, it’s called “banging it off the rim”. The bricks were falling everywhere. Three minutes into the second half, OSHA showed up and closed down the game until everyone came back wearing steel-toed boots and hard hats.

While the whole post is pretty funny, I wondered just how accurate this description was.

Not accurate enough.

I just invested some time watching the Seattle Storm play the Sacremento Monarchs.  These teams are bad.  Stinking bad.  Just about any boy’s high school team with a winning record could school either one of these teams.

• There is no movement on offense.   Both teams seem to play a zone offense.  Any good defensive team could trap the ball very easily.
• The only offense was from spaced shooters who didn’t leave their spaces.  There was no reason to leave any shooter.  If there was a defender within 6 feet of the shooter, the ball was lucky to find the glass.
• Both teams threw the ball away like they were trying to take a dive.
• The announcer said that somebody was trying to set up a pick and roll, and it must be a different play than the one that is used by the Utah Jazz.  There was no pick, there was no roll.
• Nobody ever cut to the basket.
• Four out of five trips down the court resulted in the ball being thrown away, literally into the arms of the opponent, or a brick being thrown up as the clock ran down.

I exaggerated when I said that any high school boy’s team could school these two teams.  I have seen some men’s college games where the coach must have hired his team out to do masonry work because they were so good at hoisting up bricks.  Any team in the men’s NCAA tourney could take either of these two women’s teams.  The game would be over in the first quarter as the men’s team feasted on a trap and fast break to make the score something like 25-0.

I would like to see the Washington Huskies men take on the Seattle Storm in an exhibition game.  I think the Huskies could play just four men and it would still not be close.

Tom Brokaw opened by quoting Brooks from the NY Times to Obama.  Among other things,

The great illusion of the 1990s was that we were entering an era of global convergence in which politics and power didn’t matter. What Obama offered in Berlin flowed right out of this mind-set. This was the end of history on acid.

Obama didn’t point out that Brooks is the one on acid if he thinks any one who is both sane and responsible who thought that there was an era of global convergence in which politics and power did not matter.  Actually, Brokaw deleted the reference to acid.

What Obama didn’t say is that Brooks was not in the actual audience in Berlin, nor was he the intended audience.

Also, when is the last time McCain used the word “liquidity”?  Obama used it to describe features of the housing market.  McCain sticks to clauses and phrases in which he has been coached.

If the election turns on a candidate who seems like a good old boy, Obama is sunk.  But if it turns on having someone in the seat of power who understand the processes of the economy, then I think he has a chance.