brainrow

Via Boing Boing, Fox News’ unbiased report:

Yeah, that’s your headline. Guilty on four counts, but the big news is the one not-guilty verdict.

Media Matters has a dishonor roll of bad media coverage of the case.

Update: Via Crooks and Liars, more Fox spin:

Bill Maher, via GrrlScientist:

New rule, in two parts: a) You can’t call yourself a think tank if all your ideas are stupid, and b) if you’re someone from one of the think tanks that dreamed up the Iraq War, and who predicted that we’d be greeted as liberators, and that we wouldn’t need a lot of troops, and that Iraqi oil would pay for the war, that the WMDs would be found, that the looting wasn’t problematic, that the mission was accomplished, that the insurgency was in its last throes, that things would get better after the people voted, after the government was formed, after we got Saddam, after we got his kids, after we got Zarqawi, and that the whole bloody mess wouldn’t turn into a civil war, you have to stop making predictions.

Dispatches from the Culture Wars found a selection of new definitions “for those who appreciate bumper sticker politics”:

Cheney, Dick (n.) The greater of two evils.

Class warfare (n.) Any attempt to raise the minimum wage.

Clear Skies Act (n.) Reduction of the bird population.

Creation science (n.) Pseudo-science that claims George W. Bush’s resemblance to a chimpanzee is totally coincidental.

Extrodinary rendition (n.) Outsourcing torture.

Fact (n.) Liberal spin.

Healthy forests (n.) No tree left behind.

Honesty (n.) Lies told in simple, declarative sentences (e. g. “Freedom is on the march.”)

Patriot Act, The (n.) 1. Pre-emptive strike on American liberties to prevent them the terrorists from destroying them first. 2. The elimination of one of the reasons why they hate us.

Pro-life (adj.) 1. Valuing life up until birth. 2. Valuing human life after being born, only if diagnosed to be in a persistent vegitative state. (See: Punitive pregnancy).

Punitive pregnancy (n.) 1. Fitting puhishment for fornication targeting the feminine gender 2. A chip off the old pillory block.

Voter fraud, (n.) A significant minority turnout.

Woman (n.) 1. Person who can be trusted to raise a child but can’t be trusted to decide whether or not she wishes to have a child. 2. Person who must have all decisions, regarding her reproductive functions made by men.

I hope the many typos are intentional. If so, heh-heh. If not, how embarrassing.

Thoughts from Kansas asks us to compare and contrast:

Bill Clinton tells Kansas Democrats:

“You’re in a party that’s in the solutions business. … Can you prove that what unites us is more important than what we disagree about? Can you prove that America can be about doing again? And that the Democratic party can lead the way? That’s what everybody’s looking to see, and I’m gambling you’ll give them a very good answer.”

Grover Norquist at the Conservative PAC summit:

“Our job is to say ‘no, no, no, no’ for two years.”

Which would you rather be part of?

Hmmm… try to solve problems, or try to prevent problems being solved? Tough call.

Via Pharyngula, Hypnocrites has a look at the future:

The Bush Administration went into Iraq without a Plan B. Before the invasion, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he’d “fire the next person” who talked about a post-war plan.

Live and learn, right?

Wrong. This administration’s bedrock principle is never, ever learn:

During a White House meeting last week, a group of governors asked President Bush and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about their backup plan for Iraq. What would the administration do if its new strategy didn’t work?

The conclusion they took away, the governors later said, was that there is no Plan B. “I’m a Marine,” Pace told them, “and Marines don’t talk about failure. They talk about victory.”

Pace had a simple way of summarizing the administration’s position, Gov. Phil Bredesen (D-Tenn.) recalled. “Plan B was to make Plan A work.”

You know, I’m starting to think impeachment’s too good for Bush and his gang.

I’ve been telling friends that I think the Bush Administration planned to spend about 90 days on Iraq. We’d go in, set up Chalabi as our puppet president, and move on. Then we’d attack Syria and Iran and set up puppet governments there, too.

Jonathan Schwarz says on This Modern World that this would be a good time for the Democratic Congress to break out the subpoena powers. Gen. Wesley Clark says the plan was for seven wars:

About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. … He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.” And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”

So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

And here I thought I was being fairly extreme, saying they were planning three wars. What I suffered was a failure of imagination.

From Corpus Callosum:

Point one: when sanctions were imposed upon Iraq after the first Gulf War, Iraqi children began starving.  But we did not blame ourselves.  After all, it was Mr. Saddam Hussein who chose to spend money on more palaces, rather than on feeding the children….

If funding [for the surge] is cut, the Commander in Chief has a choice to make.  He can leave the troops in harms way, without adequate supplies, or he can bring them home.  

A vote to cut funding for the war is not a vote against the troops, any more than the sanctions against Iraq were a vote against the children of Iraq.

An interesting point, but given what we already know about George W. Bush, isn’t it akin to criminal negligence to trust him to choose wisely?

I was rolling merrily along, believing I was reasonably healthy for a guy my age. Hah!

I’m sick, sick, sick. I’m sick in ways that didn’t even exist just a few months ago. It’s called scientific progress.

The pharmaceutical companies have set me straight. Every few months, they tell me about another formerly unsuspected way that I might be seriously ill. And fortunately, there’s always a pill for it.

At the end of a long day of hard work, do you sometimes come home tired? Talk to your doctor.

When you’re sitting or lying down, do you ever feel like getting up? There’s a pill for that. When you’re up and about, have you ever wanted to sit or lie down? Pill for that, too. Disappointed that you haven’t done more with your life? Pill.

Now, via Molecule of the Day and Justine Cooper, there’s Havidol, for “When More is Not Enough.”

There are potential side effects, of course. From the FAQ:

It may decrease the patient’s sense of moral responsibility or social conscience. There is little documentation to support this claim other than the observations of those not undertaking treatment with HAVIDOL.

Yeah, there’s always somebody whining about scientific progress. Fortunately, there’s a pill for that. From The Onion:

The Food and Drug Administration today approved the sale of the drug PharmAmorin, a prescription tablet developed by Pfizer to treat chronic distrust of large prescription-drug manufacturers.

Pfizer executives characterized the FDA’s approval as a “godsend” for sufferers of independent-thinking-related mental-health disorders.

Update: Okay, it turns out Justine Cooper is an artist, not a scientist, and Havidol is really a parody of “lifestyle drug” advertising. And it turns out The Onion is not, as they claim, “America’s Finest News Source,” but a satirical fake newspaper.

Now, I like to laugh as much as the next person, but I’ll take my humor in time-release capsule form, please.

GrrlScientist asks What’s Wrong with Bush?

Is Bush suffering from presenile dementia? Is this the result of Alzheimer’s Disease or is it the result of brain damage due to excessive drug and alcohol use?

The second video is funny. The first video is scary.

While we’re on the subject of flow charts, here’s one, via Boing Boing, from WellingtonGrey.net: W.W.G.W.B.D.?

Now we can understand how the Decider decides.

I’m reading a programming book called Perl Best Practices. There’s some good stuff in it, though most of it is fairly technical. My favorite things are the short quotes that begin each chapter. Most of them are pretty nerdy, but a few of them speak to all of us:

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. –Charles Babbage

This is why everyone should learn at least a little bit of computer programming. There is no magic inside the computer, but it can certainly seem like magic until you get in and poke around a bit for yourself.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t. –Erica Jong, How to Save Your Own Life

Advice is what you ignore when you already know the answer and think it might magically change.

Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction. –Albert Einstein

Haven’t you heard? That emboldens the other fools.

What do you do when the facts don’t support your conclusions?

You get new facts, of course!

Ladies and gentlemen, the Conservapedia.

On unicorns:

The existence of unicorns is controversial. Secular opinion is that they are mythical. However, they are referred to in the Bible nine times, which provides an unimpeachable de facto argument for their once having been in existence.

On kangaroos:

After the Flood, kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia. There is debate whether this migration happened over land — as Australia was still for a time connected to the Middle East before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart — or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters.

On the cactus:

Cacti are known for their high content of alkaloids, and have often been used in the sacramental rights of the Native Americans. Because of this, the early Catholic missionaries in the west thought the plants to be the work of Satan, and this is perhaps a preferable view to that of materialistic evolution since it is difficult to imagine how something like mescaline could have evolved by natural selection. Besides that, the psychoactive content of many cacti have inspired the writings of such ungodly men as Aldous Huxley and Albert Hoffman.

The entire entry on the Stone Age:

The Stone age is the prehistoric time before the Age of Metal. It is divided into two parts; Paleolithic and Neolithic. During the Paleolithic age, man harvested wild plants and animals for food. Agriculture began in the Neolithic age. The dates of the Stone age are debated. Biased historians often give older dates than can be proven by archaeology.

An early entry on the Theory of Relativity:

This theory rejects Isaac Newton’s God-given theory of gravitation and replaces it with a concept that there is a continuum of space and time, and that large masses (like the sun) bend space in a manner similar to how a finger can depress an area of a balloon. From this proposed bending of space the expression arose that “space is curved.” But experiments later proved that space is flat overall.

Nothing useful has even been built based on the theory of relativity. Scientists claim that this is because relativity only applies to extremely heavy or fast objects and rely on future scientists to finally come up with the proof that will vindicate their life’s work. Most conservatives are skeptical since science is supposed to be about finding proof before a theory becomes a fact, not after.

I found Conservapedia via a lot of blogs at ScienceBlogs, and found links to specific entries on many different blogs.

Iran rushes over the cliff:

Iran has no brake and no reverse gear in its nuclear program, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday, while a deputy foreign minister vowed Tehran was prepared for any eventuality, “even for war.”

No brake? No reverse gear? Listen, Mahmoud — George W. Bush is not a good role model.

I don’t think we can eradicate the influence of stupidity in any human endeavor. But isn’t it about time we all stopped making it the core of every plan?

Does it ever end?

At times, it seems the world’s supply of ignorance and pettiness is inexhaustible:

Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.

“Virtually everyone who didn’t fit a certain sorority member archetype was told to leave,” said Kate Holloway, a senior who withdrew from the chapter during its reorganization.

“I sensed the disrespect with which this was to be carried out and got fed up,” Ms. Holloway added. “I didn’t have room in my life for these women to come in and tell my sisters of three years that they weren’t needed.”

At times, we find ourselves once again in old battles we thought had been fought and won years ago.

This is not the first time that the DePauw chapter of Delta Zeta has stirred controversy. In 1982, it attracted national attention when a black student was not allowed to join, provoking accusations of racial discrimination.

Are we in a rut?

The trouble is that prejudice and ignorance and pettiness are not enemies that can be overthrown once and for all. They are like stones that must be eroded over a long, long time — worn down, and worn down, and worn away, slowly, steadily, ceaselessly, by every breath we take.

It never ends.