Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Donald Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

That meeting sounds like a shotgun wedding between a shitshow and a clusterfuck.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

He really is that stupid.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

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

Everybody saw this coming.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

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I’m Not Dead, Either

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But I feel like it.

In the never ending struggle to get in shape, I apparently overdid the exercise bike, and am now walking (and feel) like an eighty year old man with chronic muscle pain and arthritis.

Second, for whatever reason (the damn ever-changing weather), I think I am getting the flu. This is weird, because I used to get sick all the time when Ismoke, and since I quit smoking, I have not been sick all year. However, in the last month and a half, this is the third time I have felt crappy. I think it might be all the exposure to the chronically sick undergrads at WVU.

At any rate, don’t expect much from me today (or perhaps tomorrow).

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New Exercise Bike

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Just got my new recumbent exercise bike put together, and man did I work up an aerobic sweat putting that bad boy together. Tunch, of course, was NO help, jumping in and out of boxes, attacking pieces, etc.

At any rate, the damn thing is up and put together. I do not know why companies that send things like this do not label the actual pieces, but want you to rely on little diagrams. is it too hard to just label each piece, so when it says “Insert seat carriage frame into rear support rod,” i will know what the seat carriage frame and support rod actually are, rather than what I think they are from a dinky little picture?

And another thing. If I ever run a company, I am going to make sure we intentionally ship double the nuts and bolts needed for assembly. As usual, I was one bolt short. Just ship double-triple the bolts needed, for goodness sakes, and put a little warning in the book:

“NOTICE- DON’T FREAK OUT. After assembly, you might have some screws, nuts, and bolts left over. We sent you twice what you need, because we know this crap always gets lost in transit or lost during assembly. Just our way of thanks for buying our product.”

Seems to me you did that, word of mouth would get around and you would increase sales The profit margin can’t be that tight that five nuts or bolts will break the company.

Here is a pic:

You can get one at the “O” for a couple hundred bucks.

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Saturday Afternoon Linkage

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* Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, has some thoughts about torture.
* Al Jazeera wants a copy of that Bush memo. So does conservative MP Boris Johnson, who says he’ll print rhe memo and bollocks to the Official Secrets Act.
* Generate singing text automatically.
* BoingBoing also has a comprehensive roundup of the Sony rootkit fiasco: here, here and here. If you have Sony music CDs and don’t know about this problem, you seriously need to read these and then go here to find out how to mitigate your risk. Read our previous coverage here.
* New test can diagnose schizophrenia before symptoms start. On the downside, there’s still no cure. How early would you want to know?

***Update***

I wasn’t aware that the schizophrenia link is subscribers-only. Here’s the key info:

But Ruben Gur and his colleagues are convinced it works. Earlier this year, they claimed that they could use the technique to detect whether individuals are lying or telling the truth (see Nature 437, 457; 2005). Now they have turned their attention to mental disorders.

They used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of 69 schizophrenia patients and 79 healthy controls. The images were analysed by computer to produce an algorithm that could tell the two groups apart. Rather than focusing on specific areas of the brain thought to be affected by the disorder, as has been tried in the past, they looked for subtle changes across the whole brain.

This type of approach has proved successful before — but only for images used to derive the algorithm. As soon as fresh images were introduced, the success rate plummeted. But this time the researchers say that they have overcome this problem and that they were able to classify new individuals as schizophrenic or healthy with 81% accuracy (C. Davatzikos et al. Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 62, 1218–1227; 2005).

If I invented an HIV test that was 81% accurate, I would throw it out the window. No scratch that, there’s a chance that somebody might pick it up and use it. I’d throw it in an incinerating compactor. The accuracy number indicates false negatives rather than false positives (I assume), but assuming that the test has a false-positive rate of more than one percent (which seems safe) and a real schizophrenia prevalence of one in ten thousand (pdf), less than one in a hundred positive tests will actually have the disease. As much as I appreciate the potential for functional MRI (fMRI), it looks to me like they have a ways to go yet.

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Got a Light?

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This is odd:

Given that they stand some 30 feet tall, their disappearance is attracting a good deal of attention here – even as their final destination remains a mystery.

Thieves are sawing down aluminum light poles. Some 130 have vanished from Baltimore’s streets in the last several weeks, the authorities say, presumably sold for scrap metal. But so far the case of the pilfered poles has stumped the police, and left many local residents wondering just how someone manages to make off with what would seem to be a conspicuous street fixture.

The poles, which weigh about 250 pounds apiece, have been snatched during the day and in the middle of the night, from two-lane blacktop roads and from parkways with three lanes on either side of grass median strips, in poor areas and in some of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods. Left behind are half-foot stubs of metal, with wires that carry 120 volts neatly tied and wrapped in black electric tape.

People will steal ANYTHING.

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Different Lenses

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Steve Benen:

Tomorrow, when you sit down for your Thanksgiving meal and your crazy right-wing uncle says something like, “Well, at least I can count on Bush to tell us the truth,” you can safely say, “You’re just about the only person who thinks so.”

…

Tell that to your uncle.

Hugh Hewitt:

It is that time of year again, when the extended family gathers to feast, watch some football, and fall into deep quarrels over politics.

Well, hopefully you can avoid the latter.

But, if you have a brother-in-law or a shirttail cousin who insists –absolutely insists– on arguing “Bush lied, people died” again, follow these simple rules:

And if you are just some innocent bystander at your family Thanksgiving dinner getting harangued by the activist liberal/conservative at the dinner table, you are welcome to come to my house, where I have spent the afternoon balancing a box of wine on my stomache while watching football.

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First album?

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I’m planning to spend the day with the extended family, but this post raised an interesting question: what was the first album that you bought on your own? Vinyl, tape or CD?

For me it was Midnight Oil, Diesel and Dust. I bought it on tape some time during the first second Reagan administration.

Diesel and Dust

Yep, I was pretty much born a raging lefty. You won’t be surprised to know that around the same time I secretly put weighted-down Listerine bottles in my family’s toilet bowls to reduce water per flush.

***Update***

Tear in time-space continuum repaired.

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