brainrow

A Daily Show listens to Mitt Romney’s withdrawal announcement, and has the only appropriate response. (Warning: strong language, bleeped but not really disguised.)

I read the news today, oh boy — that NASA will observe its 50th anniversary on Monday by beaming a Beatles song toward Polaris, the North Star. The song, of course, is “Across the Universe,” but the 431 light years to Polaris isn’t even across the galaxy. Gotta start somewhere.

NASA launched the first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, on January 31, 1958, and that’s the anniversary which is being celebrated.

While we’re celebrating, let’s take a moment to remember the crew of the space shuttle Columbia, which broke apart on re-entry five years ago today.

Let’s remember the crew of the shuttle Challenger, which exploded shortly after launch on January 28, 1986 — 22 years ago last Monday.

And let’s remember the crew of Apollo 1, lost on January 27, 1967 — 41 years ago last Sunday. They died in a fire in the spacecraft during a “routine” test on the launch pad. Nothing is “routine” when you’re testing the limits of humans and their machines.

Apollo 1: Gus Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee

Challenger: Francis Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnik, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe

Columbia: Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Ilan Ramon, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark

John Glenn, at a memorial service for Judith Resnik:

We hoped these past few days would never come. And for nearly a quarter of a century we pushed back the time we knew — intuitively — must sometime be, that day when despite all our best efforts, there would be a loss.

…

It has been my observation that the happiest of people, the vibrant doers of the world are almost always those who are using — who are putting into play, calling upon, depending upon — the greatest number of their God-given talents and capabilities. For them, curiosity is a way of life, and the quest for knowledge and the new is insatiable and exhilarating.

But it becomes many-fold more meaningful when put to use for a higher purpose, for something bigger than self, for a goal that calls on those individuals to dictate themselves to accomplishment for the betterment of our nation, and indeed for all mankind.

Let’s not forget all those, living and dead, who have given — and are still giving — their best for a higher purpose.

I was electronically incommunicado most of the day yesterday, so this posting is a day late.

Yesterday, January 30, 2008, was the 75th anniversary of the first radio broadcast of the Lone Ranger.

Coincidentally, it was also the 75th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in Germany.

Both events took place on January 30, 1933. (Lone Ranger was better.)

That’s trivia for you!

How did we come to this?

Mitt Romney’s failure to eat fried chicken with the skin on is nothing short of blasphemy here in the South, according to GOP rival Mike Huckabee.

I blame this organization.

I wanted to mark the new year by observing a minute of silence for each American soldier who died in Iraq in 2007. I wanted to think about each of those lost lives, about their hopes, about their heartbroken families.

Sixty seconds for an entire life — it’s a feeble gesture, I know. But I wanted, by devoting just one minute to contemplation of a single life, to get some sense of the scale and scope of the sacrifices made in Iraq by our men and women in uniform.

In 2007, there were 901 U.S. deaths in Iraq. That’s fifteen hours and one minute of silence.

In March, the Iraq war will enter its sixth year.

Now I want to scream.

The most generous man in Washington, D.C., must be the CNN reporter who writes that Bush’s legacy is a mixed bag:

It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times — a tale of two legacies as President Bush prepares to ring in the final year of his presidency.

I’m not nearly as generous as that guy. If I were to say that Bush’s legacy is mixed, I would mean it’s a mix of honest incompetence and deliberate malice, and I slipped “honest incompetence” in there only because I’m in a giving mood this time of year — most of the time I think the Bush administration is pure malice.

So, Merry Christmas to Ed Henry, the soul of generosity. Merry Christmas to you, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, and all the administration. May this Christmas bring each of you exactly what you deserve.

Uh oh…

At an afternoon news conference, D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Fire Chief Dennis L. Rubin said security concerns prevented them from saying exactly where or how the fire started.

Maybe I’m just paranoid… Security concerns? Really?

But a source with knowledge of the fire said the flames began in a utility closet off Vice President Cheney’s ceremonial office on the second floor. The flames were confined to the closet, but a significant amount of smoke raced through the building, the source said.

Some reports say the fire apparently started in an electrical closet or telephone room.

An electrical closet — yeah, that makes sense.

Today’s fire at the Executive Office Building next door to the White House suggests that sometimes, shredding the evidence just isn’t enough.

Yet another quote from A Blog Around The Clock:

The best time to hold your tongue is the time you feel you must say something or bust. —Josh Billings

Now we’re getting warmer…

Nice quote, by way of A Blog Around the Clock:

Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d have preferred to talk. —Doug Larson

Does this explain the recent inactivity of this blog? Highly unlikely.

Another quote, swiped from the same blog for efficiency’s sake:

The most dangerous words in the English language are, “This time it’s different.” —Sir John Templeton

Highly unlikely.

Garrison Keillor explains a particular strain that still runs through American political life:

My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time. —Garrison Keillor

(Via A Blog Around The Clock.)

Via Corpus Callosum, here’s another way to handle uncertainty:

And the child asked:

Q: Where did this rock come from?
A: I chipped it off the big boulder, at the center of the village.
Q: Where did the boulder come from?
A: It probably rolled off the huge mountain that towers over our village.
Q: Where did the mountain come from?
A: The same place as all stone: it is the bones of Ymir, the primordial giant.
Q: Where did the primordial giant, Ymir, come from?
A: From the great abyss, Ginnungagap.
Q: Where did the great abyss, Ginnungagap, come from?
A: Never ask that question.

The author says we have lots of “semantic stopsigns,” signalling “do not think beyond this point.”

The stopsigns are up wherever the questions start to get hard. That’s where the most interesting answers lurk.

It’s not just the usual suspects that signal “no thinking”:

I know someone whose answer to every one of these questions is “Liberal democracy!” That’s it. That’s his answer. If you ask the obvious question of “How well have liberal democracies performed, historically, on problems this tricky?” or “What if liberal democracy does something stupid?” then you’re an autocrat, or libertopian, or otherwise a very very bad person. No one is allowed to question democracy.

I once called this kind of thinking “the divine right of democracy”. But it is more precise to say that “Democracy!” functioned for him as a semantic stopsign. If anyone had said to him “Turn it over to the Coca-Cola corporation!”, he would have asked the obvious next questions: “Why? What will the Coca-Cola corporation do about it? Why should we trust them? Have they done well in the past on equally tricky problems?”

The problem with blind faith — no matter what it is we believe in — is that we don’t even realize where we’ve stopped thinking. We’re blind to our own blind spots.

Eolake Stobblehouse considers the dead horse problem:

Dakota Native American tribal wisdom, passed on from generation to generation, says:

“When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount and get a different horse.”

Governments, he says, employ “more modern strategies,” including:

Buying a stronger whip. …

Appointing a committee to study the horse. …

Lowering the standards so that the dead horse can be included. …

Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed. …

Providing additional funding and / or training to increase dead horse’s performance. …

Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.

This reminds me of something, but I can’t quite put my finger on it…

I was born here in Ohio, and I’ve lived here all my life. When it’s finally my time to be executed — whether for some terrible crime, or because a brutal totalitarian regime has seized power — well, that will probably be in Ohio, too.

I just hope that when my time comes, they do a better job than these two times:

The execution team stuck Christopher Newton at least 10 times with needles Thursday to insert the shunts where the chemicals are injected.

He died at 11:53 a.m., nearly two hours after the scheduled start of his execution at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. The process typically takes about 20 minutes.

“What is clear from today’s botched execution is that the state doesn’t know how to execute people without torturing them to death,” American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio attorney Carrie Davis said Thursday.

“Having one botched execution is too many; that Ohio has now had two botched executions in as many years is intolerable.”

Officials said the delay was due to Newton’s size — he weighed 265 pounds. In May 2006, the execution of Joseph Lewis Clark was delayed about 90 minutes because the team could not find a suitable vein. He was a longtime intravenous drug user.

From war-planning to hurricane relief to execution technique, incompetents are taking over more and more government functions.

I wonder if executioners would do better work if our lethal injections were done like an old-fashioned duel: if the executioner misses the first time, the prisoner gets a turn, and they keep trading places until somebody’s dead.

Boing Boing found a slip-up on CNN’s International channel:

Okay, they meant to say “Blair resigns.” But I can dream, can’t I?