national disgrace back on the front burner

wow, the hunger strike might actually be working.

not that the president making a renewed effort necessarily means that anything will actually happen with guantanamo. in fact, i doubt if it will. but just this morning i also would have doubted that the hunger strike would have gotten the president to do anything.

fukishima

it's unbelievable that two years later, the fukishima plant is still just barely held back from disaster by a series of jury-rigged measures that are unsustainable in the long run. obviously, i have little understanding of the technical problems to containing a disaster like that. and i guess because the plant is on the coast and is in a densely populated country, they can't just do the chernobyl thing and move everyone out and abandon the place.

i've never been a big basher of nuclear energy, despite all its issues. but if there really is no complete solution for a disaster like fukushima, that's a pretty damning indictment of nuclear power everywhere.

ian khama can't get no respect

i like TPM, i visit the site pretty much every day. but there's something absurd about the site publishing an AP report that the president of botswana got attacked  by a cheetah and then publishing the story with a photo of the cheetah.

actually, it looks like a stock photo of a cheetah rather than the actual one that scratched president khama. what value does the image of some random cheetah add? i think most people already know what a cheetah looks like. i'm guessing a lot fewer readers of the story know who ian khama is. and if the TPM editors weren't sure how familiar its readers are with the cheetah, it could have gone with both like sky news did.

another sign of the triumph of nerd culture

i agree with booman, calling the White House correspondents' dinner the "nerd prom" is an insult to nerds. plus, a bunch of successful journalists, politicians and celebrities all hobnobbing together is pretty much the antithesis of nerd culture. what's interesting is that said successful journalists are the ones who refer to it as a nerd prom. which is more of a commentary on the current caché of nerdiness than anything else.

she's back, and this time it's personal

i mentioned it parenthetically back here, but my old friend dagger aleph is blogging again. at least until she finishes recounting her adventure in iran.

thought experiment

what if european leaders have a road to damascus moment. they suddenly do a 180 on their economic policies, focus on stimulating the economy instead of debt. they print more euros and helicopter-drop it on people rather than banks. the gambit works and the troubled euro-economies come roaring back just as a die-hard keynesian would predict. the economic growth solves most of the continent's debt problem and the EU surpasses the u.s. in economic performance.

what would republicans in america do? would any of their policies change?

i think the answer is "no". i also think that we will never find out.

blah

sometimes my busyness overwhelms my blogginess.

minaret of the great mosque of aleppo destroyed

i know, i know, there's something wrong about mourning the destruction of buildings in the middle of a war that is killing a lot of human beings. but damn, it's hard not to be sad about this. i am really glad i got to see it before it was gone.

today in marriage equality

once again, i'm struck by how quickly attitudes have changed about gay marriage. it wasn't that long ago opening supporting gay marriage was tantamount to political suicide. then the courts started ruling in favor of gay marriage, but commentators noted that gay marriage was not being approved by elected officials.

that was just a few years ago. today, a gay marriage bill passed the house in delaware, the nevada senate voted to repeal that state's ban on same sex marriage, and a rhode island senate committee approved a marriage equality law. on top of that, the rhode island bill is favored by every republican in the state senate. and when i wrote "today", i really mean today. all of those things happened on april 23, 2013.

what walt said

i'm glad i'm not the only one who sees it like this.

further downgrading WMDs

i noticed that detail in the charges when they were announced yesterday. i guess any bomb is now a weapon of mass destruction.

this is really just a logical extension to the slippery slope started in the run up to the iraq war. nuclear weapons that can destroy whole cities, were joined with biological weapons and chemical weapons under the catch phrase "weapons of mass destruction." never mind that biological weapons are difficult to use for mass destructive effect. and never mind that chemical weapons' area of "mass destruction" is limited to a much smaller area than a nuclear blast radius (like a single enclosed space, or a field). by calling them all WMDs, it made them all seem like nuclear weapons, which heightened the sense of danger posed by saddam hussein. it makes total sense that ten years later the WMD slope has further slipped to encompass a pressure cooker bomb.

ethnic-based detention

senator lindsey graham:

You can’t hold every person who commits a terrorist attack as an enemy combatant, I agree with that. But you have a right, with his radical Islamist ties and the fact that Chechens are all over the world fighting with Al Qaeda — I think you have a reasonable belief to go down that road, and it would be a big mistake not to go down that road. If we didn’t hold him for intelligence-gathering purposes, that would be unconscionable.

so half of the reason that senator graham thinks dzhokhar tsarnaev should be held as an enemy combatant is his ethnicity.

"refuse to be terrorized"

i realize that to some extent it's the president's job to say stuff like this. but if there's anything the events of the last 48 hours have shown it's that americans were pretty terrorized.

scary things happen and people totally lose their shit

i wonder if when we look back at yesterday from some time when the tragedy of the bombing is more distant, we will see the madness of shutting down a metro area of 3 million people to catch a single teenager with a gun.

not that a dangerous person with a gun fleeing the authorities isn't scary. it just happens more often than people might think. we simply don't react this way in any other case.

why not jokhar?

while everyone else is transfixed by the real-life die hard movie unfolding this morning in boston, i am distracted by a transcription issue. AP has identified the bombing suspect who is still at large as "dzhokhar tsarnaev.".

wonder what the deal is with all those consonants are the beginning of his first name? it works like this: the russian language doesn't have a j-sound like the one we have in english. instead it has a "ж" (the "zhe") that stands for a sound that is like how french people pronounce the "j". the sound that letter makes is also like the "s" in the english word "treasure." when transcribing russian into english the ж-sound usually gets written as "zh".

meanwhile, russians have their own transliteration conventions. because they don't have an english-style "j" sound, they transcribe that sound by putting their letter that makes the d-sound, "д" (the "de") in front of the zhe. so when they spell a word with this combination: дж, they mean a j-sound like in english. chechen is apparently a language that has an english-style j-sound. so that is why dzhokhar tsarnaev's first name would be written "джохар" in cyrillic.

if you transcribe the name into english treating each letter separately, the "дж" would come out to be "dzh" (the "д" would be a "d" + "zh' for the  "ж"). but the only reason that "дж" was used in the first place is to signify the english j-sound. so instead of writing the clunky "dzh" why not just use a "j"?

NY joke continued

and the NY post continues to commit journalistic malpractice. there's really no reason to believe anything the NY post publishes unless you see it verified by another (non-murdock owned) news source. but if you decide NY post stories need outside verification, that means that the post has effectively ceased to be a news source. you can just rely on those other news sources. there's no point in looking at the post first.

NY joke

one thing about the boston marathon tragedy, it really has demonstrated that the NY post is more of a joke than a news source.

riverbend posted something!

i was just asking what happened to riverbend, and there she is telling us.

(via dagger aleph on FB, who is also (maybe) back!)

condolences-stop

president nazarbeyev sent his condolences about the boston bombing to obama by telegraph. i wonder if it got through.

reminder re: boston

most early reports about these kinds of events turn out to be bullshit. people obsessively check news sites to stay informed, but the best way to avoid being misinformed is to give it a rest and avoid the coverage until at least tomorrow morning.

(not that that's necessarily what i will do. who says i'm not up for being misinformed?)

the george w bush peznit liberry for kids who can't read good

every presidential library is basically a propaganda piece if it opens too soon after the presidency. you need to wait until the generation after that president leaves office before there can be any honest assessment of the president's policies or legacy. you couldn't find a non-bullshit display on watergate at the nixon presidential library until 2011. i can't say i expect any better from W.

why do we always screw over our translators?

i don't understand why the u.s. keeps fucking over people who work as translators for our military. i really would think that this is one area where people with different politics would all basically agree.  mean, i'm a pretty anti-war guy. but i still think that if someone risks everything to help u.s. forces in a foreign country, we should make sure that person and his or her family can get out when the u.s. forces leave. i would think that pro-war types would also appreciate what local translators have done for this country. so why does this problem keep coming up?

an old blogfriend kirk johnson is quoted in the NYT article. the list project's web site is still very much iraq focused. i wonder if it will get more heavily involved in afghanistan as the u.s. pulls out of there.

dʒɪf

totally unacceptable. why would it sound like a brand of peanut butter?

besides, isn't "gif" an acronym with the "g" standing for a word that starts with the hard g sound? until we start pronouncing "graphics" as "jrafiks" (dʒræfɪks) i'm not buying it.

go west (not so) young man!

fiat currency

quoteth one of the winklevii:

It has been four years and it [bitcoin] has yet to be discredited as a viable alternative to fiat currency

bitcoin is fiat currency just as much as the dollar is. by definition bitcoin has no intrinsic value. while it's true that bitcoin's fiat does not come from a governmental entity, it still only has value by fiat. it's just the fiat of a group that is not also a political entity.

i never really understood the beef against fiat money anyway. all currency is a mass delusion. precious metals like gold and silver are only "money" because everyone decided that those particular elements have special value. none of it is really "real" in the sense that there is intrinsic value beyond the value ascribed to it by a critical mass of people. bitcoin may not be subject to manipulation by any central bank, but i'm not sure why it is better to have a currency that is completely subject to the whims of speculators.

franchising

i have often wondered how much of an operational difference it makes when an organization "pledges allegiance to al qaeda". in the past decade such pledges have been all the rage for local extremist islamic groups. and so "jama'at al-tawhid wal-jihad" (جماعة التوحيد والجهاد) became "al qaeda in iraq" when its leader pledged allegiance to bin laden's group in 2004. the "salafist group for preaching and combat" (تنظيم القاعدة في بلاد المغرب الإسلامي) became "al qaeda in the islamic maghreb" in 2007. "al-shabaab" in somalia pledged allegiance to al qaeda in 2012 (though the group did not change its name). and now this week, the al-nusra front (جبهة النصرة لأهل الشام‎) is jumping on the al qaeda bandwagon.

whenever a group makes a pledge like that, it gets a burst of publicity. so is that all this is about? is this just the same group rebranded? or does an announced al qaeda affiliation change its character or capabilities?

aqua buddha at howard

i realize that the GOP isn't looking to me for advice, but maybe they should stop using the "decades ago republicans were for civil rights and democrats were racist" pitch in their minority outreach efforts. that crap might play well at CPAC, but there's no conceivable reason that would be a compelling argument for black people to vote republican right now. i mean, who gives a shit what the republican party stood for in the 19th century? okay fine, i kinda give a shit as a matter of historical curiosity, but why would that be relevant to casting a vote in the 21st century? parties' policies change over time

it's also pretty surprising that rand paul didn't expect that students at howard university would be aware of black history. way to condescend, rand!

racing towards ?

i don't have much insight into how to handle north korea. but i keep wondering how exactly the cycle of escalation is supposed to stop. if kim jung-un doesn't give himself an off ramp, then is our only choice giving him some kind of concession or a terrible war that no one wants?

maybe if he shoots off a missile that will give the NoKos an excuse to declare themselves victorious and to take a step back. but if that doesn't do it, what then? in the long run NoKo is fucked. it is shutting down its few economic lifelines and is pissing off its only friend. they are pretending they can afford to do this, but really they can't. i wonder if they know that or if the leadership is so securely in its propaganda bubble it doesn't see how bad their situation is.

there's no hidden wealth if it's purely digital

the unspoken lesson of this podcast (planet money: the hidden digital wealth in your pocket) is that buying CDs is better than buying and downloading a digital music file. you can make a digital music file out of a CD. the CD has a secondary market whereas a downloaded digital file does not.

also the files you make are more likely to be DRM-free. the main thing purely digital purchases have going for them are convenience and the lack of clutter. if those aren't a factor, old skool may be the way to go.

"chlling in istanbul"

i didn't understand why the u.s. is prosecuting eric harroun even before i read the article in today's NYT. but doesn't the fact that he was bragging to the press about drinking a martini undermine the government's claim that he is a salafi extremist?

spaces in hashtags would be useful

cher is not dead.

the answer to life, the universe and everything

i got an email from amtrak that was part of its marketing tie-in with the upcoming film 42. the email began: "The number 42 will forever be associated with the great Jackie Robinson..."

putting aside the fact that i had no idea that robinson was #42 until i started hearing publicity for the film. (it's a small miracle that i even know who jackie robinson was). i guess geek culture hasn't completely taken over the world after all.

ding dong

thatcher's dead. the most interesting thing about her is what david weigel points out: the huge difference in how she is remembered on the two sides of the atlantic.

over here in the yoosay, she's a tough glass-ceiling breaking leader who did something vaguely positive for britain, like, um... well, we're a little fuzzy on the details. it was probably something to do with their economic system, which is hopelessly confusing. (how many half-farthings are there in a quid sterling?) or maybe it has something to do with that time she totally kicked argentinian ass!!! or who cares. anyway, i doubt if many people can get that specific, but we're pretty sure whatever she did was good for england, or britain, or the yookay, or whatever the hell we are supposed to call it.

meanwhile, my friends in that yookay all seem to think that maggie was the devil incarnate.

the contrast between her reputation in the country she actually led and the one she has over here in the u.s. is really remarkable. the only other modern figure who is like that is mikhail gorbachev.

ADDING: okay it looks like others (beyond weigel) noticed what i did. so far, i'm the only one with a gorbachev comparison tho. that's the value-added you get from rubber hose!

issue based journalism

why did CNN write an article on this?

i say that as someone who happens to agree that lapierre is essentially a clown. I just don't think it's particularly newsworthy whenever i say something like that.

the sinking dreams of an almaty accord

last february, kazakhstan hosted P5+1 talks with iran over its nuclear program in almaty. it was a feather in president nazarbayev's cap to be able to host those talks. not only does it get recognition for the country, it also highlights the fact that kazakhstan is one of the few countries to have voluntarily given up a sizable nuclear arsenal. on top of that, there was a chance, however slight, that the powers would finally reach some overarching accord with iran, an agreement that would probably forever after be referred to as "the almaty accord".

okay, i don't think there was much chance of that actually happening. and, in fact, to the surprise of virtually no one, the parties were unable to reach much of an agreement in february. but they did agree to schedule new talks in april, also to be held in almaty. so kazakhstan was going to get another chance.

which brings us to now. and also brings us to why i feel sorry for kazakhstan right now. while though this is pretty much the result i expected, i can only imagine the dashed hopes for a better boost to its image.

UPDATE (4/8/2013): this article suggests i shouldn't pity the kazakhs. fair enough. it will be interesting to see if almaty becomes a regular summit venue. today's article does make me miss almaty though.

shitty negotiator in chief

i was kinda hoping that obama was over that ridiculous awful-compromise-as-the-opening-proposal strategy. i guess not.

once again, the best hope for liberals like me is the fact that republicans don't want to get a deal, any deal, with this president, even if it gets them a bunch of things that they want.

barron v. baltimore 4evah!

this quote is a work of art:

The Constitution of the United States does not grant the federal government and does not grant the federal courts the power to determine what is or is not constitutional; therefore, by virtue of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the power to determine constitutionality and the proper interpretation and proper application of the Constitution is reserved to the states and to the people.

looking at the text of the bill as highlighted by erik loomis, it looks like NC reps warren and ford are anti-incorporationalists? am i giving them too much credit by trying to make sense of their bill?

brooks loses one

it's been a long time since i ranted about a david brooks column, but seriously, is he fucking serious? having the government recognize same-sex marriage is not a "loss of freedom." even if the two supreme court cases both come out 100% in favor of gay marriage, that doesn't mean that homosexuals won't have the freedom to not enter into a long term committed relationship if they don't want to.

first, as i've been saying for a long time, the same sex marriage issue isn't about "allowing gays to marry." this is about whether gay marriages that already exist will be recognized by the state, with all the benefits that come with governmental recognition. gays have been getting married for decades. plenty of gay people i know had a ceremony and consider themselves to be married even though they live in a jurisdiction that doesn't attach any legal significance to their marriage. gay marriage have happened and will continue to happen no matter how the supreme court rules, or what the various state legislatures do. the issue is official recognition of something that already exists, not whether that thing exists in the first place.

second, why the fuck do so many conservatives have such difficulty with the concept of consent? government recognition of gay marriages does not mean that gay people will suddenly all be shackled with the responsibilities of married life. the idea is letting gays have the option of marriage (with all its benefits), not making everyone get married. even in a world with universally recognized SSM, some gay people will still be single, and others will be in a relationship that isn't marriage. it will be up to them to choose whether to get married or not. (you know, just like straight people right now!) how is that a loss for freedom?