Bet

A friend of mine recently won a bet he had with himself. The loser had to cut a 1" square of skin from a part of his body, and the winner was free to do whatever he wanted with it. He's been under a lot of stress you see. I guess that ended. Currently, he's having a piece of skin grafted over a recent wound. It's convenient the patch is exactly the right size for the wound; it's unfortunate that to commemorate his victory, he had the patched tanned first.

Kagan

I read through several pages of reader comments in response to a recent editorial by Kagan on Bush's proposed 20K troop increase in Iraq. On the second page, there was one post which could have been read to either say "I disagree with Kagan" or "I agree with Kagan." I couldn't quite tell. All of the others were from very angry readers who wanted to see Kagan's fat lips wrapped around an apple while he roasts on a spit.

The basic gist of Kagan's article, if you don't feel like reading it, is that the Dems are wrong to criticize the surge/escalation because they don't have a better plan for winning in Iraq. Implied in Kagan's editorial, but deftly unsaid, was that the surge would accomplish what Bush has promised: stability in Bagdahd. Many of the responders noted that we had been trying for stability in Bagdahd for some time and that little has changed to suggest that this year we'll get it.

It's funny to me: Kagan criticized Hillary for proposing a cap at the current level of 137K troops because he sees that number as arbitrary and lacking a justification. Kagan doesn't take up the responsibility, however, of justifying an expansion by 20K troops that to me seems just as arbitrary and without justification. Does that feel intellectually dishonest to anyone else?

The other thing that bothers me is that Kagan acts as if an anti-escalation stance is somehow just Politics with a capital P because its evil. Dems feel like they can gain power by pressing the Iraq issue. But wait. That's exactly what happened. They gained office because the public voted on the Iraq issue! The current congress better reflects the will of the American public. Who the fuck is Kagan to suggest that their anti-war agenda is impure? Its called Democracy.

It's fitting that he included the word "Delusion" in his title.

Spring Shed

More old pics from my cell phone. This is my siberian husky in spring; this picture was taken after I pulled fur off of him for 10 minutes. I wasn't feeling very attached to the fur, so I just let it fall on the ground. He didn't mind me pulling hair off. He does this every year.

Same species

I took this pic on my cell phone two years ago while crossing campus. These animals could have grandchildren together.

csh

I stumbled onto a cool little page giving examples of fun things you can do with csh. I wish I'd found it years ago.

Three unneccessary judges

Last night the wife and I watched Tuesday's American Idol -- it was TiVo'd. This is the beginning of the season, so they're auditioning tens of thousands of singers. They were in Minnisota so the usual 3 judges were joined by Jewel, making a panel of four. Of the thousands of auditioners, many many of them are terrible and have no hope of winning. There are some who have no hope for anything. Many sing out of key, meekly, and in a narrow range. (Interesting note: 9 times out of 10 a guy who can only sing in falseto but lacks a mid-range and a bass, or a girl who can only sing deeply but lacks a mid-range and a saprano will describe themselves as having a great range.)

They're reactions to being told they should not be singing are mixed; some have set their hopes on winning this competition and becoming rich and famous and I assume loved, so that when they get cut they shatter.

There are also several whose reactions border on violence. They debate the judges, tell them "you only heard one song," and leave the room yelling obscenities.

This is the part everyone tunes into, of course, the "drama" that surrounds these whirling tazmanian devils of failure. Of course the producers know this and edit the shows to include the dramatic failures and exclude those who solemnly and gracefully accept that they will not win the contest. But since these people never make it into the show, we can only assume they exist; we can be certain that there are many vith violent delusions of grandeur.

There was something I noticed in watching last night that makes this explitive-flinging croud all the more amusing: the judges always agree. There was never a case of a border-line singer being given two thumbs up and one thumb down. In fact, of those given the golden ticket to Holywood, I was iffy on half of them, thinking they were pitchy or their voice went thin in the high notes... I would have expected the judges to be split.

But not once was their dissent amongst the judges. Their bar was low but way higher than most could get to. And the judges agreed on exactly where that bar belonged.

So effectively, there was a single judge up there, and three unneccessary ones. Why? Why hire 3 judges? Why go the next step further to hire a fourth guest judge?

I think it's because of the delusionals who protest and yell and scream and shake their fists at the judges. If there were only one judge telling a delusional that their voice is made for the deaf, then the bodyguards in wings (we never get to see them, but you know they are there) would have to step in and break up dozens of fights. The unneccessary judges are there to provide saftey; saftey in numbers. I could probably take Simon, but I don't think I could take Simon and Randy, and certainly not if Paula were there scratching at me. I'm not sure the presence or absence of Jewel would make much of a difference for me. She probably knows how to fight, but she's only 100 pounds.

White Whale

Garrison Keiler had a funny article on Salon. (To read, you have to obtain a "site pass" by watching an ad.)

Power

Slate has a good article on Bush's power trip. I read it yesterday while surfing Sullivan's website, but I would have read it on my own anyways...

revision and retirement

Hitchens has decided that the civil war in Iraq was inevitable -- that Saddam would not have been able to keep a lid on the boiling tensions between Shia and Sunni factions -- and that our presence in Iraq now as the pot begins to boil over is a good thing. There you have it, a revisionist explanation for why we invaded: to put ourselves in the middle of a religious struggle.

Meanwhile, Bush is considering a new strategy (or soda) called "Surge." The idea is that we need to provide security for the Iraqi people; that democracy cannot emerge in the presence of excessive violence.

WAY TO GO YOU FUCKING IDIOT. We could have used some security in Iraq immediately after we invaded, don't you think? You know, fill a power vacuum before allowing insurgents to get a good footing?

ITS TOO LATE, BUSH, YOU FUCKED IT UP.

Abizaid agrees. He's retiring.

Padilla

I've been disgusted by the descriptions that surfaced a few weeks ago about the detention of Jose Padilla. I am shocked and appauled. Horrified. Padilla faced no charges for years -- no indictment -- and instead was detained as an unlawful combatant on suspicion of plans to detinate a dirty bomb. The indictment that was finally delivered makes no mention of this dirty bomb. The reason? The only evidence against him are toture confessions.

Great job, Bush.

So while Bush has obtained no admissible evidence against Padilla, he's abused him so thuroughly, Padilla remains only the shell of a former man barely able to control his own body.

Salon has a great article contrasting the successful prosecution of a right-wing domestic terrorist threat in Tennessee and the miserable failure of a prosecution of Padilla.

From Salon:
"Given the chance to prosecute Jose Padilla in the way that countless prosecutions had been successfully conducted before, the Bush administration chose instead to go a new route, assuring us all the while that only they knew how to keep us safe. In that, they seem to have failed."

Gordievsky: Russia has become a terrorist regime

Powerful opinion piece by a former KGB agent.

Clown

Scaramela was a charlatan.

Kovtun was not poisoned Nov 1

The half life of polonium 210 is thirty days in humans. Now, thirty five days after Litvinenko's Nov 1 poisoning, a Russian business man, Kovtun, falls seriously ill and into a coma* from Polonium 210 poisoning. Fishy? You bet. Why would someone fall drastically ill so rapidly so long after an initial exposure to Polonium? After all, Litvinenko was hospitalized only hours after he first fell ill. Do you think the timing of Kovtun's hospitalization could have anything to do with the British arrival in Moscow?

*Kovtun's layer says he is not in a coma. Why is there a discrepancy? Why would the hospital say otherwise?

The Russians will say "Oh, look, Litvinenko poisoned another man but poisoned himself in the process, case closed. Everyone go back to your business and forget about this incident."

Litvinenko

A lot of my readers* have been emailing me asking why I haven't yet blogged about Litvinenko's poisoning.

(*All of them in fact. No one reads this blog.)

I have been following this case like a hawk, of course. I'm decidedly anti-Putin and I see the connection between Litvinenko and Politkovskaya as further evidence against Putin. (Can you believe that fucker dismissed her assasination by noting that her work as a journalist was inconsequential?)

So, the story for those of my readers who haven't been following it*:

(*Again, an empty set)

Litvinenko stumbles into a London hospital after a shitload of vomiting. 10 days later, he's lost all his hair. Litvinenko accuses the Kremlin of beging behind his apparent poisoning. Doctors struggle to identify whatever it is that's killing him. They fail; it kills him. They detect Polonium 210 in an unnatrually high concentration.

Polonium, it turns out, isn't available to anyone who doesn't have a nuclear reactor.

The Britts then start combing London for more of this Polonium and find it in minute traces everywhere Litvinenko has been.

His timeline is here.

Some of the controversy has revolved around Mario Scaramella who met Litvinenko for lunch at a sushi bar on the day of his poisoning. Scaramella has been accussed of being behind the poisoning, which he vehemently denies, since the two were friends and on the "same side" in the investigation into Politkovskaya's murder -- and because the topic of the conversation was a hit list from the Kremlin that Scaramella had gotten wind of... Scaramella was on it. Scaramella also says that Litvinenko did not eat anything

Today, Scaramella was found to have some amount of Po 210 in his system. (Traces or lots? Don't know.)

The rest of the controversy has been over the meeting that Litvinenko had with two former KGB agents in a London hotel on the day of his poisoning. It's a classic case of "you done it" -- Just like the dioxin poisoning of Ukranian candidate Victor Yushchenko two years ago.

Polonium 210 was found both at the hotel where Litvinenko met the KGB agents, and at the sushi bar where he met Scaramella afterwards. I'm no genius, but seems to me like the poison simply followed Litvinenko around with him -- he shed some at the hotel and then later he shed some at the sushi bar. This clears Scaramella's name.

Russian Mafia

The poisoning of an outspoken critic of Putin,Alexander Litvinenko, seems related to the assasination of an outspoken critic of Putin, Anna Politkovskaya. An italian man has turned emails over to Scottland Yard describing a well organized plot to kill Litvinenko by the Russian Mafia.

I'd put money on Putin being behing the whole thing.

Boycot OJ

Blood money buys Simpson's book.

Don't buy it.

Hitchens on Intelligence Squared

Hitchens was brilliant as usual on NPR's debate last night, Intelligence Squared. The topic of discussion was: Freedom of expression must include the right to offend. Hitchens and two others agreed, while another panell of three disagreed.

This topic was motivated, of course, by the uproar and the violence and the murder in the Muslim world following the publication of a handful of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed in a small Danish newspaper.

The stream is available here.

Hitchen's concluding remarks begin at minute 49 in the 53 minute version and at minute 140 in the 143 minute version.

I'm transcribing his comments here:

"The real question, or if you like the sub-text question, before us is this "Is nothing sacred?" What we've been discussing is the old question whether or not there is such an offense as blashphemy or profanity?" Now if I don't tell you exactly what I think about the simpering speeches that came from the other side, I'm not censoring myself, I'm just being polite, and civil and just saving some of your time.

What I will not prevent myself from saying, and will not let anyone else prevent me from saying is the following: It is wrong and it always has been for churches -- powerful, secular, human institutions -- to claim exemption from criticism, which is what really is being asked here. If there's going to be respect, it has to be mutual.

Does Islam respect my right to un-belief? Of course it does not.

Does it respect the right of a muslim to appostasize and change belief? Of course it does not.

I have had to have -- I can name now four or five friends, six or eight, maybe, if I had time, five or six of whom you would certainl have heard of, who have to live their lives under police protection for commenting on Islam, for having an opinion on it, and this is getting steadily worse all the time. And it's grotesque!

Here is an enormous religion with gigantic power that claims that an archangle spoke to an illiterate peseant and brought him a final revelation that supercedes all others. Its a plagarism by an epileptic of the worst bits of Judeaism and Christianity. That's obvious, it seems to me.

Do you think -- How long do you think I'm going to be able to say that anywhere I like? It would already be quite a risky thing to say in quite a lot of places. I did not come to the Uninted States of America 25 years ago to learn how to keep my mouth shut, and I'm going to reject all offers that I change that policy, however simperingly they are put."

Double Standard

From Sullivan's blog, I found a link to David Frum's reaction to the allegations that the prominent evangelical leader, Ted Haggard, has been employing the servies of a male prostitute while high on crystal meth.

Frum frames the left's uproar over the issue as: "See, he's no better than anyone else." The left's glee in this, he charges, is out of toppling a high-and-mighty man, exposing his weaknesses and therefore ridiculing the ideals he stood for. Something like: "This man had ideals that he himself could not live up to."

This straw man liberal that Frum has constructed looks like quite the fool when Frum turns the tables on him and suggests that a man who tries to lead a moral live and fails is better than the man who makes no attempt to lead a moral life. The "hypocracy" that liberals accuse Haggard of, of knowing the difference between right and wrong but being unable to choose right, that hypocracy is more admirable than the bandit homosexual who unclosets himself, chosing wrong with an open distain for right.

Frum misses the point, almost purposefully.

The glee that I feel (I guess I'm that evil leftist) over this revelation is based on two ideas:

1) The moral compass that Haggard has tried to steer his life by points the wrong direction. He is wrong in saying that homosexuality is evil. Frum's argument is first framed on the premise that homosexuality is evil; the rest of his discussion requires the reader accept the premise. I reject that premise.

2) Those who most loudly condemn homosexuality are those who feel its "evil pull;" those who feel confronted with the choice between doing the right thing and doing that gay prostitute. If you're loudly criticial of homosexuality, it's because you're gay.

It is in this second idea that the notion of hypocracy arises. The hypocracy is not in saying that gay sex is evil and yet having gay sex anyways; the hypocracy is in asserting homosexuality is a choice (as murder is a choice) while KNOWING that the pull he feels towards homosexual behavior is not under his control. Haggard knows he is a homosexual and that the behavior is a result of who he is; he cannot correctly assert that he simply enjoys the behavior and is drawn to the behavior despite being straight.

Unfortunately for him, he lives in an evangelical culture that condemns homosexuality so roundly that he has no choice but to resist his homosexual tendancies. He can't be who he was born to be without being ostracized. And so his resistance turns into rabid defiance. The only way to control his behavior is to speak out against its source constantly. And his rabid hatred produced his rise in the community that supported that condemnation. Eventually he feeds the fire of hatred and intollerance in the community whose hatred and intollerance pushed him in the direction he was forced to follow. In physics, this would be called a positive feedback loop. A community of hatred that produces objects of its hate will continue to formet its own hatred.

The only escape is a radical meltdown of that society. It's what I hope for, that some day the evangelicals will realize the lunacy of their precepts and finally reject them. Haggard's position of prominence in the evangelical society and his very public and very poorly timed meltdown may break the positive feedback loop.

But I doubt it. Haters like their hatred.

Kim Jong Il can suck it

From today's Post

"South Korea's Yonhap News Agency reported that North Korea said it would fire a nuclear-tipped weapon if the United States continues to refuse direct discussions with the country, according to the Associated Press."

Putin did it

I'm convinced Vladamir Putin assasinated a critic of his policies in Chechnya. This KGB agent, after all, thought Bush fired Dan Rather.

From the first article linked to above:

"There was no attempt to disguise the murder as a theft or an accident: Her assassin not only shot her in broad daylight, but he left her body in the elevator of her apartment building alongside the gun he used to kill her -- standard practice for Moscow's arrogant hit men... Whereas local thieves might have tried to cover their tracks, Politkovskaya's assassin, like so many Russian assassins, did not seem to fear the law.

...

After all, whoever pulled the trigger -- or paid someone to pay someone to pull the trigger -- has already won a major victory. As Russian (and Eastern European) history well demonstrates, it isn't always necessary to kill millions of people to frighten all the others: A few choice assassinations, in the right time and place, usually suffice... After the assassination of Politkovskaya on Saturday, it's hard to imagine many Russian journalists following in her footsteps to Grozny either. "

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Putin is not our friend.