Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

People are weird.

American history and black history cannot be separated.

You know he’s going to shit a cat.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

Weird. Rome has an American Pope and America has a Russian President.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

If you’re gonna whine, it’s time to resign!

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

“A king is only a king if we bow down.” – Rev. William Barber

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

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Archives for 2005

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I’m not appealing for sympathy or anything, by my prep for a conference (for which I leave this friday) has reached full panic mode, I have 100 exams to grade by thursday and I got no sleep because last night I mixed up Dayquil with Nyquil. Expect light blogging from me. About the conference, if any San Fran readers know who makes the best beer you can be sure that I’ll follow up on your tips.

A couple of links to tide you over:

* Vote on the worst sound in the world.
* Orisinal – kind of like a cross between the Daily Kitten and an Xbox.

This is an open thread.

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Football Thread

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Congrats to the Mountaineers, who finished the season yesterday with a win against South Florida, finishing Big East play unbeaten. Looks like we will now face the Georgia Bulldogs in the Sugar Bowl.

Today, of course, the big game is the Steelers versus the Bengals. Go Steelers!

*** Update ***

Congrats to the Bengals, who hung on to win 38-31. Four turnovers, dozens (it seemed) of penalties, no running game, and NO pressure on Palmer doomed the Steelers. I think this was effectively the end of the season, and they will not even make the playoffs.

The one positive note for the day- Hines Ward went old school and busted out the Icky Shuffle after a touchdown. Nice.

*** Update ***

At the end of the day, even the Wild Card looks out of reach anymore, with San Diego, Kansas City, and Jacksonville all doing what they had to do. The cream is rising to the top, and that does not appear to include the Steelers this season.

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Open Pants Thread

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I picked up a pair of hemp jeans, Patagonia brand, the other day. I know that you guys care about everything I wear, but hemp is especially awesome. They’re my favorite pair of pants now. It wears lighter than denim, has a cool dress-casual look and the material is practically unbreakable. Of course it’s expensive since hemp, which will kill you from smoke inhalation before you get a buzz, is for some stupid reason ILLEGAL to grow in the United States. I got mine for half off and I’m not telling you where [actually I don’t remember]. I’m just sad that society (and my wife) has rules against wearing the same pair of pants every day.

So, when will America do the sensible thing and legalize the best clothing material since silkworm poop? I’ll start the bidding at never, or as soon as the cotton lobby collectively resigns to take up a career in the musical theater. Whichever comes first.

Consider this an open thread.

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See It For Yourself

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A few days back I linked to a report that pushed back recorded climate history to some 650,000 years ago. In a nutshell, today’s greenhouses are completely off the charts as far as history goes.

I’ve posted one figure from the papers* that I think captures everything that I was trying to say in a fairly easy-to-digest format. It’s a big file, so click through the extended text to view it.

The time scale runs horizontally from the left to right, from zero thousand years ago (today) on the left to 650 thousand years ago on the right. The colored traces represent different measurements that the scientists made continuously down the length of the ice core. The purple line represents atmospheric temperature, which you estimate using oxygen isotopes. Working your way up, the next three lines represent different greenhouse gases, with nitrous oxide in navy, carbon dioxide in red and methane in light blue. If you start at 650,000 years ago and work left you can see a fairly regular rise and fall in each gas that correlates more or less with a rise and fall in the estimated atmospheric temperature. That’s the world coming in and out of ice ages. Now look at what happens when each greenhouse gas reaches the far left, corresponding to today. Cripes.

You can see another important point on this graph. Human civilization started anywhere between ten and fourteen thousand years ago, by which I mean centrally-governed populations with borders and urban centers; loose tribes with fire in caves go back much farther than that. If you look at the last few millimeters on the left side of the temperature record you can see that for ten thousand years we’ve had a surprisingly warm and stable climate. As far as civilization is concerned I don’t think that’s an accident.

Based in part on some ideas that Jared Diamond brought up in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs and Steel, I think that we owe a good bit of our global success to that climate stability. If that’s the case then we won’t do civilization any favors if we manage to bring our current island of stability to an end. Looking at those crazy spikes at the far end of the greenhouse gas traces it’s hard to imagine how we won’t.

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Hitting the Lottery

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So one day, you are just lying somewhere in abject poverty with a very grim future in some backwoods third-world (excuse me, “less developed”) country, and out of nowhere swoops Angelina Jolie, who picks you up and whisks you off to Hollywood to live a life of luxury. Some might say that was a touch lucky.

It just got better. Brad Pitt wants to be your daddy.

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Al Qaeda Agent Killed

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More dead terrorists, and that is always good news:

One of al-Qaida’s top five leaders, a key associate of Ayman al-Zawahri, was tracked down with U.S. help and killed by Pakistani security forces in a rocket attack near the Afghan border, officials said Saturday.

Hamza Rabia, believed to have become al-Qaida’s operational commander after the arrest of Abu Farraj al-Libbi in northwestern Pakistan in May, ranks somewhere between third and fifth in the terror network’s hierarchy, officials said.

He was among five people who died in an explosion Thursday in the North Waziristan tribal area. Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said Rabia’s remains were identified via a DNA test.

In Kuwait, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf confirmed that Rabia was killed.

”Yes, indeed, 200 percent confirmed,” Musharraf said at the start of a three-nation visit in the Middle East.

I did notice and appreciate that Hamza Rabia was not described as Ayman al-Zawahri’s number two man.

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Plame Update

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Eight Mystery Pages! The stuff of movies!:

There are eight blank pages in the public version of a decision the federal appeals court in Washington issued in February. The decision ordered two reporters to be jailed unless they agreed to testify before a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson. What is in those pages is one of the enduring mysteries in the investigation.

In a filing yesterday, the special prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, told the court that he had no objection to the unsealing of parts of those pages, and he gave hints about what they say.

The pages, in a concurring opinion by Judge David S. Tatel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, analyze secret submissions by Mr. Fitzgerald. Judge Tatel suggested, in a terse and cryptic public summary of what he wrote in the withheld pages, that testimony from the reporters, Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, was needed to determine whether a government official committed a crime in identifying Ms. Wilson.

Tom Maguires comments on what isn’t in those eight pages.

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