If you enjoy pointing your mouse at things and killing them, this might be the coolest demo video that I have ever seen (click on “Portal trailer 1”). Hours and hours of physics fun.
Eh, what else? I dunno. Chat about stuff.
by Tim F| 32 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
If you enjoy pointing your mouse at things and killing them, this might be the coolest demo video that I have ever seen (click on “Portal trailer 1”). Hours and hours of physics fun.
Eh, what else? I dunno. Chat about stuff.
by Tim F| 89 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, War
Putting recent events in the frame that I described below:
* Kevin Drum notes that Israel may not want to destroy Hezbollah but merely degrade it. This agrees with my understanding of the situation – the political pressure within Israel does not mandate that Olmert make Hezbollah go away entirely, merely that they stop firing rockets into Israel. Hezbollah’s newer Iran and Syria-made rockets require a relatively sophisticated infrastructure to fire which means that Israel has a decent chance of making most (but obviously not all) of them inoperable before the UN is able to impose a truce. Kevin’s correspondent also notes that Hezbollah has built itself an infrastructure that upgrades them from a pure guerilla force to something approaching a regular army, which paradoxically makes them much more fightable with conventional forces. The more that you have built up, the more that your enemy can knock down.
* Israel has already begun invading Lebanon. Either the domestic political pressure became unbearable, the risk of an external peace deal became too immediate or Israel has decided that Hezbollah can no longer resist effectively. Suing for peace now sounds appealing except for two factors: Hezbollah will not stop fighting voluntarily, and I cannot stress enough how damaging it would be for Olmert if Israel were forced to withdraw while rockets kept raining from Lebanon.
* In case anybody was still unsure, Israel has declared that it has no interest in fighting Syria and Iran. Any widening of this conflict would inflict tremendous Israeli casualties for negligible benefit and would distract, at least in the short term, from the goal of ending the Hezbollah rocket fire. Michael Savage can go cry in his Cabernet Franc.
* Also via Kevin Drum, a scoop from Garance Franke-Ruta that could prove politically damaging (to say the least) if any Americans are hurt in this escalating conflict:
Individuals within the State Department, I am told, have been reluctant to create an impression that the Israeli assault on Lebanon is as bad as it is or that civilian U.S. citizens are being threatened by U.S. ally Israel. If a conflict this severe had broken out in, say, Indonesia, the American embassy would have been shut down the next day and its personnel and families rapidly brought to safety….The diplomatic message sent by shutting down the U.S. embassy in the face of Israeli bombing would have contradicted the U.S. government message of support for the Israeli mission against Hezbollah terrorists.
* I had an illuminating conversation last night about how exactly the factions can deal with this in the mid/long term. It seems to me that Israel needs another occupation like it needs a hole in the head, which leaves basically one option. If Israel demotes Hezbollah from quasi-army back to ragtag guerilla outfit and participates aggressively in the rebuilding of Lebanon and particularly a central Lebanese army, the chances are very good that Lebanon will exert its prerogatives and clamp down on the Hezbollah troublemakers by itself. For one thing the simplest definition of a government may be whoever owns the monopoly on force, and no functioning government can long tolerate an independent entity using force within its borders. Worse for Hezbollah is their sponsor (Syria) who grows increasingly unpopular among the Lebanese. In my view Israel can help guarantee the security of its own government by contributing generously to that of Lebanon.
As always, post your updates in the comments.
***Update***
* To add, of course Israel must take more care to avoid civilian casualties. Apartments and gas stations can be rebuilt, but you cannot reassemble children.
Twelve-year-old Nour lay heavily bandaged and fighting for her life in a hospital in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre. She is one of many children killed and injured in Israeli air strikes on this Mediterranean port in past days.
More ambulances streamed into the hospital and doctors hurried to treat the victims of the latest bombing. Whatever the Israelis’ intended target, the bomb fell on a small water canal next to the Qasmia refugee camp, home to about 500 Palestinians. Its victims were 11 children taking an afternoon swim in the canal.
People who support Israel should make an extra effort to demand that she avoid handing these PR gifts to her Hezbollah enemy. And yes, Hezbollah’s indiscriminate rocket barrages are no better.
by Tim F| 17 Comments
This post is in: General Stupidity
WTF.
And yes, via Atrios, Tom Tomorrow has magical powers of predicting the obvious.
***Update***
Another literary reference. If the end comes as a surprise twist then you slept through more high school English classes than I did.
by John Cole| 97 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity, Science & Technology
Meet the modern stone agers:
President Bush vetoed a bill for the first time today, using his constitutional power to reject legislation passed by Congress that would expand federal research on embryonic stem cells, a step he said would be “crossing a moral line.”
“This bill would support the taking of innocent human life,” Mr. Bush said at the White House, surrounded by scores of children born as a result of an embryo-adoption program and their parents.
“These boys and girls are not spare parts,” Mr. Bush said, to loud applause.
Undifferentiated globs of cells are now to be treated as your equal. That doesn’t make much sense until you realize who voted against the legislation, leaving it short of a veto-proof majority:
Allard (R-CO)
Allen (R-VA)
Bond (R-MO)
Brownback (R-KS)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burns (R-MT)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Coleman (R-MN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Craig (R-ID)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
DeWine (R-OH)
Dole (R-NC)
Domenici (R-NM)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Graham (R-SC)
Grassley (R-IA)
Hagel (R-NE)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Kyl (R-AZ)
Martinez (R-FL)
McConnell (R-KY)
Nelson (D-NE)
Roberts (R-KS)
Santorum (R-PA)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Sununu (R-NH)
Talent (R-MO)
Thomas (R-WY)
Thune (R-SD)
Vitter (R-LA)
Voinovich (R-OH)
One can understand why Rick Santorum would side with the unthinking and unfeeling cells with little future. The bolded individuals are up for election in 2006. Support their opponents, even if that means NANCY PELOSI AND ROBERT BYRD WILL BE RUNNING THINGS. BOO! And while we are at it, kudos to Orrin Hatch, Bill Frist, and a few others who parted with the lunatic fringe on this issue and supported the stem cell legislation.
I support giving the ‘culture of life’ crowd some room, and I respect their right to differ on issues with me. That doesn’t mean I am going to give them any quarter when they are flat-out making things up, as they are when they claim these cells are human life. They are not, and even with this legislation vetoed, they never will be. Not one life was saved with this bill, and while Chuck Schumer is clearly overstating things and exaggerating the state of stem cell research, this is a step backwards.
by Tim F| 265 Comments
This post is in: Politics
True Fact: whenever I pick up a pizza at Mineo’s I spend the 20 or 30 minutes listening to Michael Savage. Oppo research? A weird infatuation with clinical insanity? Whatever, it just puts me in the right mood for a pizza. Anyhow his outraged reasonable-guy act is a lot more listenable than smirking bombasts like Hannity and O’Reilly (distinction without a difference? discuss).
For months now Savage has more or less written off president Bush as a chump and a useless gasbag. The Dubai deal set off the nativist in Savage, obviously, but Savage’s real beef comes from his inner thwarted warmonger. Example, Savage spent most of my last pizza trip wondering whether the GOP has any leaders willing to do what it takes to win the war on America’s enemies. In general each talk radio “talent” has his own decent-size army of dittoheads which presumably overlaps significantly from talent to talent, so it seems likely that Savage speaks for a decent swath of wingerdom. Savage and his listeners have decided that Bush just doesn’t have the cojones to take the fight to enemies both outside and (he spends a lot of time on this point) inside America.
As always, talk radioland gets the new meme before the national media:
At a moment when his conservative coalition is already under strain over domestic policy, President Bush is facing a new and swiftly building backlash on the right over his handling of foreign affairs.
[…] “It is Topic A of every single conversation,” said Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank that has had strong influence in staffing the administration and shaping its ideas. “I don’t have a friend in the administration, on Capitol Hill or any part of the conservative foreign policy establishment who is not beside themselves with fury at the administration.” […] Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who is considering a bid for president, called the administration’s latest moves abroad a form of appeasement. “We have accepted the lawyer-diplomatic fantasy that talking while North Korea builds bombs and missiles and talking while the Iranians build bombs and missiles is progress,” he said in an interview. “Is the next stage for Condi to go dancing with Kim Jong Il?” he asked, referring to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the North Korean leader.“I am utterly puzzled,” Gingrich added.
[…] “What they are doing on North Korea or Iran is what [Sen. John F.] Kerry would do, what a normal middle-of-the-road president would do,” he said. “This administration prided itself on molding history, not just reacting to events. Its a normal foreign policy right now. It’s the triumph of Kerryism.”
In sum, the president who many think is batshit crazy has started taking fire from his “side” for not being batshit crazy enough. Keep in mind that these are the people to whom the administration has paid careful attention since before the 2000 election. George Will, to whom they have never paid attention*, comments:
The administration, justly criticized for its Iraq premises and their execution, is suddenly receiving some criticism so untethered from reality as to defy caricature.
In some ways I feel for the Bush crowd. For a short time they let these people live out their talk-radio fantasy world where the brute force of war solves all problems. After a high like that you can hardly blame the denizens of talk radioland for wanting to stay a little longer even after the great White Knight has beat an ignominous retreat to the real world.
It seems somehow poignant that the only caller who answered Michael Savage’s search for a new leader suggested…Dick Cheney.
(*) Maybe because George Will makes a surprising amount of sense. You know, for a conservative.
by Tim F| 29 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
By popular demand, let’s scroll that last thread a bit down the page.
Mister Floofersons probably doesn’t mind uninvited backrubs. That, my friends, is the difference between Mister Floofersons and the German Chancellor.
by Tim F| 186 Comments
This post is in: General Stupidity
This simply makes me cringe (photo via Josh Marshall):
Yes that is Angela Merkel, conservative Chancellor of Germany.
Yet another reason why we should take Barry White off the Marine Band’s regular rotation.
***Update***
John Amato has the video (WMP).
So far the rightwing responses:
* Maybe the photos are out of context? No, see the video.
* Liberals are angry! Also known as the devastating Michael Moore is fat line of critique. Thanks for sharing.
* Clinton would have done worse! A humorous overstatement that will soon be rendered moot by a blogger making the same comment in all seriousness.
* [New] This post has too many comments! Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.
* [Newer] (I honestly think that this one was delivered with a straight face) If she doesn’t file a complaint then she must have liked it!
Maybe the female rightwing bloggers (Pam?) can weigh in on how much they like it when random acquaintances do that uninvited.