In what context, Charlie?

Not to pile on. Because (a) I was willing to believe the "is Africa a continent?" thing was either bogus or taken out of context without any defense or explanation, and (b) Sarah Palin is now utterly irrelevant. (The fun story if you axe me is the GOP smear machine turning on her, but I digress.) The explanation is pathetic enough to merit especial ridicule:

“So, no, I think that if there are allegations based on questions or comments that I made in debate prep about Nafta, and about the continent versus the country when we talk about Africa there, then those were taken out of context,” Ms. Palin said.

Sigh.

Shorter everything-I-have-heard-on-the-news-the-past-few-days

Failed conservative ideology has dug us into a hole so deep that it is now, officially, a crisis. So we must set aside partisan differences and implement a conservative solution to the problem.

And that's good news for John McCain.

In what respect?

She apparently didn't know any of them. But it doesn't matter. If you're going to vote for McCain, this sort of ignorance makes you like him more. And if you're not going to vote for McCain, you'll waste 60 seconds of your Saturday morning writing what I just wrote.

Nobody expects

I apologize for letting this place die. But I lost one job, became a corporate tool, moved to a new state, and found myself paying two mortgages in very short order.

Cut me some slack.

SASETC shall rise again. Just let me get settled at my new job and stuff. (By the way... I have no idea how people manage to maintain real jobs and weblogs at the same time.)

In other news. If I hadn't been such a lamer, I probably would have written something in the past few days about the Pope and torture and how no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.

This is fun.
Filthy, filthy

Scary, but oddly refreshing

A senior aide to Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee admitted Friday that the former Arkansas governor had "no foreign policy credentials" after his comments reacting to the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto raised questions.

Keyser Söze

A Master's course in paranoia: Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace.

Note: I have better things to do (and I don't need a Master's degree), so I kinda just skimmed it. But this part (from Section 5) leapt out at me:

Satellites can bounce LASER light off of your windows and, by measuring the minute distance differences between a vibrating window and the satellite, reconstruct your speech -- from orbit!

I leave it as an exercise for the interested reader to count the ways in which this is utterly ridiculous.

· - ·· - - - · - ·· !

[CHRIS] MATTHEWS: You have passed over a lot of Democrats that you know pretty well. You serve in the Senate, obviously, with Dodd, with Biden, with Clinton, with Obama. You've known Bill Richardson for a long time, and all the others. Are all the others out of your consideration? Are they just not strong enough for America for you to endorse?

[JOEMENTUM] LIEBERMAN: Look, these are a lot of fine people. A lot of them are my friends. But you got to go with the best at this time in American history. And I think particularly on national security and the ability to work across party lines to get things done, including in the war on terrorism, John McCain is the best, so I decided to go with the best.

Incidentally, you and I are both students of the great Tip O'Neill. All those Democrats, not one of them asked me to support them. John McCain did ask for my support. I thought about it…

Daily Planet

This Daily Planet image from JPL is pretty slick:

This mosaic is continuosly [sic] updated with images from MODIS TERRA, which has almost global daily coverage. This layer is the most current, near-global image of the earth available. The resolution is 250m per pixel in the middle of the swath, less on the edges. Visit the MODIS Website for more information.

New images are added on top of the old data, in the order in which they become available. In general, the newest images are between 6 and 24 hour late, possibly more.…

If you play with Google Earth, you can see the Daily Planet image (and archives) here, courtesy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And if you play with NASA World Wind, here's the OnEarth add-on.

Much more of this kind of stuff from UWM.

Retro

There was a dust-up in the Senate yesterday. Much of the dust-up involves whether telecommunications companies get retroactive immunity for breaking the law when they agreed to help the government wiretap without warrants. This is a complicated story--made more so by the fact that it involves politics and, thus, does not receive fair or objective treatment by the news media--but there is one aspect that I think is worth writing out as clearly as possible. (For the gory details, I recommend my primary source for this post.)

Read the rest…
1. It has long been the case that telecommunications companies are allowed to assist the government in wiretapping even without a warrant or a court order. The law says it's okay as long as, "the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, the Associate Attorney General, or [a] principal prosecuting attorney" certify in writing that it is okay. Note that the "White House Counsel" is not on that list.

2. In March of 2004, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales went to bother Attorney General Ashcroft in the hospital about a warrantless surveillance program. The Acting Attorney General (Comey) had refused to approve this program, saying it was illegal, and Gonzales hoped Ashcroft would sign off. Ashcroft did not.

3. There is this October 2007 report (pdf, see also here) from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence--a committee populated by tools and chaired by Senator "suspicious campaign contributions" Rockefeller. They report that since September 11, 2001, there has been only one stretch ("of less than sixty days") during which an Attorney General failed to authorize warrantless surveillance with letters to the telecoms. This would be when Ashcroft was in the hospital. And according to the committee report, for that sixty-day period, "the activities had been determined to be lawful by the Counsel to the President."

1+2+3. The issue of retroactive immunity to the telecommunication companies is mostly bogus. They already have immunity--via letters from an Attorney General--for all but about sixty days of warrantless surveillance. The big problem, the political problem, and the reason they need blanket retroactive immunity is because they relied on letters from a White House Counsel (Gonzales) for those sixty days.

A hell of a lot more abstract

Fred08 sent me an e-mail last night. It's kinda fun. Thought I'd pass along some bits.

It opens with, "Today is an exciting day on the campaign! Tonight in Dubuque, Iowa, I kick off my 'The Clear Conservative Choice: Hands Down' bus tour. I will spend all my time between now and the Iowa Caucuses talking to voters about my vision for our country." "Exciting" and "all my time" are shots at the he's-too-bored and he's-too-lazy schools of thought as to why he has no chance at winning the nomination or the election.

Then Fred gets serious, "We're too far along in this campaign for me to be coy about things." And just as I'm about to crack wise about how chilly it must be in hell thanks to Fred's change in style, I read, "We've said all along that this campaign is built on a Southern strategy that includes South Carolina's primary on January 19th." Wow. That's not a bit coy. For those who don't recognize the term:

Listen to the late Lee Atwater in a 1981 interview explaining the evolution of the G.O.P.'s Southern strategy:

"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

"And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me - because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'"

Also worth remembering, as Digby notes elsewhere, "Before it was a television show, 'Law and Order' was the slogan for the southern strategy." And one more thing, then I'll let you go.

Okay. Dismissed.

Match Game

Amaze your friends! Match the following snippets of recent e-mails sent by political campaigns to the candidates involved:

1. "What an amazing mission you and I are on. What great ideas we uphold -- the legacy of the most important thinkers of liberty in our country's history, and the most important doers of liberty in America. At the top of that list are the donors and volunteers of this campaign."

2. "As we head into the final 20 days before the first in the nation Iowa Caucuses, the campaign is asking for the help of its strong grassroots organization to carry _____ across the finish line on caucus night."

3. "Over the last year, you've constantly heard the phrase '_____ is right' echoing throughout the presidential debates.…"

4. "Today is the day you can re-dedicate yourself to our founding principles by pledging your support to the one Presidential candidate who is fighting to defend our Constitution.…"

5. "The dramatic upswing in our campaign is due to the tremendous volunteer effort of the friends like you who have believed in me, not because the conventional wisdom said we would win but because your convictions said we should win."

6. "Running for president means asking a lot of people to put their faith in you -- and putting your faith in a lot of people. You've never let me down, and my promise to you has always been this: if you put your faith in me, I will fight for you every day when I'm president."

7. "Write to an Iowa Precinct Captain or a volunteer now. Let them know you appreciate the effort and sacrifice they are making to win Iowa for _____.…"

Any boldface is reproduced from the original e-mail. If that helps you. Also, the possible choices are: Fred Thompson, Barack Obama, Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Mike Huckabee.

Click here for the answers...
1 -- Ron Paul ("doers of liberty")
2 -- Fred Thompson ("carry Fred across the finish line")
3 -- Joe Biden ("echoing throughout the presidential debates")
4 -- Dennis Kucinich ("the one Presidential candidate")
5 -- Mike Huckabee ("your convictions said we should win")
6 -- Hillary Clinton ("you've never let me down")
7 -- Barack Obama ("write to an Iowa Precinct Captain")

Ten Boring Scientific Discoveries

Maybe I'm just having a bad day, but this top-ten list from TIME magazine bores the hell out of me:

10. Real-Life Kryptonite "a white, powdery mineral that … had the same chemistry … as the fictional kryptonite"

9. The World's Oldest Animal "a 405 year-old clam … researchers had to kill it"

8. Man's Migration Out of Africa "fossil evidence that modern humans left Africa between 65,000 and 25,000 years ago"

7. A Big Birdlike Dinosaur "the skeleton of an enormous, birdlike dinosaur"

6. "Hot Jupiters" Discovered "three new planets outside our own Solar System"

5. Building a Human Heart Valve "A team of researchers … grew bone marrow stem cells into functioning human heart-valve tissue"

4. Hundreds of New Species "including carnivorous sponges and giant sea spiders"

3. Brightest Supernova Recorded "the largest and brightest stellar explosion … ever observed"

2. Human Mapped "Venter published … all the DNA in both sets of chromosomes inherited from each of his parents"

1. Stem Cell Breakthroughs "may someday allow scientists to create stem cells without destroying embryos … '[It] changes both everything and nothing at all.'"

Okay. After reading them all and not just skimming the headlines, I retract my above claim that they bore the hell out of me. Numbers 4 and 5 are actually pretty cool. Not my cup of tea, but cool nonetheless. And all of them (except "Kryptonite," which is just plain stupid) are at least slightly interesting.

But is this really the best science had to offer this year? I doubt it.

The Game

Two quotes pass in the night…

"[C]ountless Americans have worked to reduce the demand of illegal drugs. It's one thing to affect supply, but when you reduce demand, it affects the capacity of people to supply. If we have people -- fewer people using, there's not going to be a need to supply as much."
-- George W. Bush, actual President of The United States

"What you're thinking is that we have an inelastic product here. But what we have here is an elastic product."
-- Stringer Bell, fictional drug dealer on The Wire

I'm not sure I understand the point Bush is flexing his MBA mind to make, but Stringer is talking about the difference between selling photocopies (elastic) and selling heroin (not so elastic).

(In fairness, I'm not so sure I understand the point I'm flexing my Ph.D. mind to make, but I thought the "wavelengths" of these two quotes were too similar to let them pass without note. The "juvenile snarkiness" center of my brain sometimes kicks in and I can't control myself. Heh-heh-heh!)

Oops

I knew this would happen eventually. I just accidentally posted notes I was making about something I had decided not to post to the website. (I'd given the notes post the title "delete" to remind me to delete it from by Blogger drafts; after typing "delete" in the title form box, I hit return out of habit… hitting return while the cursor is in the Title form box, apparently, posts what you've written. Stupid habits.)

Anyway, I quickly un-posted the notes, but they went out over the RSS feed before I could stop them. Consider it a rare window into my silly thought process for the dedicated readers slash lunatics who subscribe to SASETC.

UPDATED to include the draft text... (because why not?)

Here is what accidentally went out over the RSS:

Nice to hear a bigshot like Marty Lederman express something I've been wondering about for awhile:

Conduct that is revealed to persons outside the government -- such as the way we treat detainees -- should not be classified.

No shit. Or does the CIA make suspects who've been interrogated in an "enhanced" manner sign confidentiality agreements? Because it's pretty ridiculous when the torturers in our government get mad about leaks (a tame example):

"It's troubling," White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto said Friday. "I've had the awful responsibility to have to work with The New York Times and other news organizations on stories that involve the release of classified information. And I can tell you that every time I've dealt with any of these stories, I have felt that we have chipped away at the safety and security of America with the publication of this kind of information."

. t newspapers etc. for writing say No shit. The CIA interrogates some guy in an enhanced manner, and then makes him sign a confidentiality agreement?

---

NOTE: I added a piece of html code to close the boxed quote from Fratto. And you can find that quote here (though I'm sure it's also available at more reliable links.)

The tears of irregardless cure cancer

Too bad irregardless has never cried.

(Yikes. I almost wrote "But seriously, …" as a throw-away transition. Far from it. And now I'm telling you about it.)

Setting aside the Chuck Norrisness of irregardless, dude could totally kick its ass.

In Churmany…

In Churmany, our robots have a lot of spare time on their hands clampy pincer gizmos.

Two comments on the link:

1. The post's title is genius. I welcome them, too.
2. The author writes, I have no idea what is so upsetting to people about this robot, but please don't send me insults. I encourage both insults (of me, not the aforementioned author) and speculation as to why the robot upsets people. Leave them as comments to this post.

It's Tommy Vercetti, right?

I avoid Wired. But I ended up there just now after this sent me to this sent me to this. (I've been enjoying this Joke Line Joe Klein saga all week--if you are even remotely interested, start at the second of the above links.)

Anyway, while at Wired, I noticed the headline Cryptographers Use Sony PlayStation to Predict US Presidential Race Winner in the margin. How fucking stupid.

I continue to avoid Wired.

2008 Campaign Crap

I'm still not quite sure why I did this, but I just created a shell address and signed it up for e-mail updates from everyone running for President. A few notes on this little project.…

For one thing, none of the Democratic candidates' websites required my phone number or street address to sign me up for e-mail updates. Similarly, they did not demand that I open an account at their campaign websites, join their "teams," or any such horseshit. Basically, all they needed was my e-mail address, ZIP code, and (in some cases) my name. I regret that I gave all these websites the same fake name. It would have been smarter to give them each a different name so I could track which ones shared/sold my e-mail address. Oh well.

On the Republican side, not surprisingly, things were a bit more--oh, let's just call it thorough. Ron Paul demanded my phone number (I gave him the 800 number for Empire Carpet). Rudy and Mitt demanded that I open accounts and join their "teams" ("Team Rudy" and "Team Mitt"). In order to join Team Mitt, I had to give them my street address (123 Fake Street). Fred Thompson didn't call it "Team Fred," but he did make me register an account and surrender my address on Fake Street.

The only two candidate websites that demanded more of (fake) me than I was willing/able to provide were those of Alan Keyes and Tom Tancredo. Alan demanded that I sign his creepy "Pledge for America's Revival." No fucking way, Alan. And Tancredo, pathetic lunatic, demanded that I join "Team Tancredo," but had his web form didn't work… Strike that. It's just that the Team Tancredo website doesn't work with the Firefox browser; I was able to join the Team using Internet Explorer. Had to give the Team my Fake St. address.

Who polls the pollsters?

I've been hoping someone-not-me would do something like this for awhile. It's the Huffington Post Polling Project:

We're asking everyone to share their polling experiences with us via a simple form … telling us exactly how they have been polled. For too long, the polling industry has had the luxury of operating largely under-the-radar. The Polling Project aims to move polling from under-the-radar to under the microscope.

Alas, I have a hard time stomaching the Huffington Post, so if anything interesting comes of this project, I'll probably only learn about it through Josh Marshall (that's how I learned of the project's existence in the first place). But if either of my readers hear that anything has come of the project, it would be sweet if you'd let me know.

Quantum freakout rant

This reminded me of quantum theory.

Uninformed fixation on quantum stuff is one of the things that has long made me crazy. It's time people took it down from its pedestal. Quantum theory is nothing special. That's right: it's nothing special.

Sure. There was a time when it was radical, mind-blowing stuff. Quantum mechanics was special. It shook worldviews. It made us scientists all philosophical. It called a lot of things we thought we knew cold into question. It dealt with a freaky side of nature that we never saw in our daily lives. It was mysterious and counterintuitive.

But that was a long time ago. Anyone who's been trained as a scientist in (at least) the last 25 years has been hearing quantum theory since the first day. Like all (interesting) science, it's a little mysterious at first. A little counterintuitive. But no more counterintuitive than the one about dropping a feather and a bowling ball in a vacuum. It certainly doesn't break anyone's brain nowadays to learn about wave-particle duality. Or that you can't pin down the location and momentum of an electron with arbitrary accuracy.

The universe is not a clockwork mechanism. Does this come as a surprise to anyone?

(Note: none of this is to say that quantum theory is easy. It's difficult. The math, in particular, sucks on a deep and profound level. But so does the math underlying most science. Again, quantum theory is not special.)