EGAD
or, (de)mythologizing the fetish of placewherein our unlikely hero composes a series of
empirical geo-anthrospatial dispatches, aimed at establishing just where
he is, and perhaps even why it matters
Very oddly for Minnesota, the brown grass is still showing. Historically the La Nina pattern suppresses snowfall over the northern tier states, and this year appears to be no exception. However, I can report that it is currently snowing.
Because large, round numbers resonate with people, the AP is reporting that as of now the ICCC counts 3000 US soldiers killed in Iraq since the invasion.
But that'll hit CNN shortly enough. Here's a list of the top 10 stories you probably didn't hear about in 2006. Who needs censorship when you've got a media that ignores the inconvenient stories all on its own?
In short, we are all going to have our work cut out for us in 2007. But for now, go enjoy the fireworks, kiss someone at midnight, and have a happy New Years.
So did I mention the part where it's going to be a crazy month and I won't be able to post very often? Yes? Good, 'cause it's true in spades.
I'll be in New York from the 14th to the 19th, but the vast majority of that time will be taken up by the collaboration meeting I'm in town for. I should have that Friday and some evenings here and there. I'll be in Texas after that, and back in Minneapolis just before the new year begins.
In the meanwhile, here's some interesting reading material to tide you over: The Astrobiology Primer, compiled by a host of actual astrobiologists.
Made up a word yesterday, but I'm not entirely pleased with it. Maybe you folks can help out.
Numerodictulibrophile: one who loves free software (literally, lover of freedom relating to commands given in numeric form).
I'm not sure I've formed the roots correctly for joining like that, but the bigger problem is that it's clunky, and doesn't adhere to the standard choice of roots for this sort of thing. (For example, if I refer to the phobia list I see that we prefer the Greek root eleuthero for freedom.) Any ideas?
So, what complex concepts can you express love (or fear) for in a single tacked-together word?
...is a tricky month. In general I'm quite fond of it. Seasonwise I love that late autumn/early winter transition, although in these northern parts that's really more of a November thing. Harvest is over; here we are on 1 December and it's not forecast to get above freezing this week. Feels like winter's already here. Nevertheless December has much the same feel to it, fluctuating as the month begins between autumn and winter, and diving at the end into the crazy icebox of January.
Then there's all that home, hearth, and holiday hoopla, which I'm kind of a sucker for as well. When else are you gonna get the chance to belt out wassailing songs at the top of your lungs (or get to wash it down with egg nog)? But of course there's that flip-side, that it's kind of a creepy zombie season that pretty insistently tells you what to be like. The good cheer I can be down with, although I understand from suicide statistics that it's pretty rough if you're already depressed, but the retail impulse is full stop loco.
But in terms of the day-to-day, December is mostly about the end of the year. The end of the semester for both myself and my students, which has been keeping me pretty occupied as they get ready to turn in their final projects. Preparing results for my collaboration's end-of-year meeting. Tying up loose ends before the world -- or at least a fair chunk of it -- throws a party.
I'll mostly be cooking and eating today, so no time for a lengthy post. Anyway, I've practically been posting essays of late. Just wanted to wish you all a happy Thanksgiving! Not that, as a historical holiday, it isn't highly compromised; but everyone needs an excuse for a party now and then, so think of it as an old-fashioned harvest festival. Here's to good company and good wine.
As a reminder, tomorrow is Buy Nothing Day (known as Black Friday in the retail biz, which should speak for itself). So, you know, don't buy anything. It'll be good for the soul.
Free as in Free Software, that is. Or to be a bit more slogantastic, not free as in beer (to quote the article I'm about to crtique, "free as in fusion"). How about free as in free to open a post in the least useful way possible, then?
Moving on. At my house we've been doing some winterizing, so energy is on my mind. One of the Debian bloggers pointed me to an article that proposes a free energy movement analogous to the Free Software or Free Culture phenomena. Obviously the parallel envisioned is in tactics, since software and joules behave fundamentally differently as commodities. See, e.g., conservation laws. And while I'm not sure the comparison drawn is sufficiently precise as to be useful, the underlying idea merits some thought.
At root, the question is how new technology and media -- specifically the many-to-many interactions that networked life delivers -- can be exploited to organically create more beneficial modes of relating to energy. Free Software created an alternative and self-amplifying marketplace for code that subverts copyright law to counteract the negative impacts of proprietary software. It worked as far back as the 1980s because, while networks only reached the technical elite, that audience was exactly the one with the skills and motivation to create software. Free Culture is a derivative effort to create an alternative marketplace for expression, designed to grow outside the bounds of media conglomeration, which is working because, again, the social classes with access to fast networks and multimedia hardware are also those priviledged with the leisure time and education to pursue creative endeavors without remuneration.
Come at from this direction, we see the outlines of why something analogous might work for energy. Most of the world's energy is consumed by technologically advanced Westerners (although the more useful term, I've stated before, is the Global North, not West), who are by now almost universally connected to global packet networks. We do run into a problem of motivation, since these affluent classes will also be best insulated from climate change -- but their lifestyles are the most sensitive to depleting nonrenewable energy reserves. Thus networks might be a plausible vector for change, but what is the mechanism?
The article gives product energy labeling as an example. In this scheme of things, networks can be used to collaboratively generate a shared symbolic vocabulary allowing consumers to directly compare, say, the carbon footprints of two products. The idea has merit. One notion that informs Free Software and Free Culture thinking is that everyday artifacts can be made disruptive in context. This can be done -- routinely is done -- by arranging for a mundane object to represent a question whose answer would otherwise have been taken for granted by the user. In the case of the above mentioned movements, the central question is, can I share this thing? For Free Energy the corresponding technique is to present the consumer with an unexpected choice, of how much energy to consume in using a thing.
There are a few problems here. Products are already awash in brands disguised as choices, for one thing, including those designed to mark some as more environmentally friendly than others. The trouble is that, with all those brands on the shelf, the choice is already framed as a three-way tug-of-war between altruism, quality, and price. So I don't think presenting an additional choice here is really all that revolutionary. There's a larger difficulty here, though.
Ultimately a scheme like product energy labelling is just tinkering at the margins, because we already know where our energy goes -- moving our heavy, ubiquitous vehicles and moderating the temperature swings of our temperate zone habitats. Energy efficiency in our engines and construction goes a long way, as does revamping our economy to move fewer people and things over shorter distances. Both of these goals require fairly substantial changes in the real world, but both are also driven by the economic choices of individuals. In short, most everyone already knows what to do to conserve energy: drive less, insulate buildings, buy goods that don't have to be shipped enormous distances. This should be common sense, except that right now energy costs less than skilled labor, efficient materials, or our own time. As long as energy remains artificially cheap these options will look like luxury lifestyle choices.
So insofar as our networks provide an infrastructure within which to collaboratively debug, upgrade, and disseminate improved lifestyles, we might be onto something. But we don't just need better symbolic vocabularies -- we need re-engineered marketplaces that correctly reflect the price of energy.
Whew, busy week, but I think things are about back to normal after the election push and the catching up therefrom. Didn't quite keep all my balls in the air and completely flaked on a couple of things (sorry Gemma), but all in all we're in good shape.
My atmospheric turbulence video was more popular on YouTube than I would have thought, and has been viewed several hundred times now. Who knows, maybe there's some huge pent-up demand for 80s-filmstrip-quality instructional videos. I've got plenty more image sets like that, but since I animated the thing frame by frame I doubt it'll be a regular feature unless I suddenly acquire a lot more free time.
Billmon does the best job I've seen yet of summarizing the past couple of weeks:
A Bush in the White House, the Democrats in control of the House and Senate, Jimmy Baker, Robert Gates and now Larry Eagleburger making U.S. foreign policy, the neocons in retreat and the Sandinistas back in power in Nicaragua. I feel like I stepped into a political time warp and came out in 1989.
If that doesn't freak you out enough, here's a horror story from Pam at Pandagon. Morale of the story: watch out for fundies. On a brighter note, Ezra thinks a Democratic Congress might well get us universal health care after all, kind of despite itself.
Finally, today's picture. Sure, you may have a picture in your head of driving white and snow-blindness, but Minnesota in the winter isn't like that. Between the end of daylight savings and the already early sunset, it can happen that one's primary experience of this city is in darkness, and it's designed to be well-lit in compensation. So as we drive further into winter, expect more photos of luminous landmarks.
(I have recently come into possession of an actual tripod, so I will only get more obnoxious with this long-exposure work. I cannot control that.)
This is my new Congressional Representative: yesterday, Keith Ellison blew off a new-representatives' reception with Junior to attend an AFL-CIO event.
I like his style.
[Updated 18:15] -- swapped link to a Minneapolis local news outlet, although it appears to be the same AP wire story. Also got some attention on one of the big national blogs.
Continuation on a theme; this very theme in fact. The last time we were here I posted a GIF animation loop showing off the effect of atmospheric turbulence on my astrophotography.
To review: the moon, it did ripple and wave, thanks to the slight variations in the refractive index of air you get from density and temperature gradients. Since this sequence was shot from our refractor dome on a fairly warm night, most of what we saw represented turbulent mixing in the bottom few hundred meters of the atmosphere; the important factor there being the recently sun-warmed ground and buildings driving convection. (This never really stops, but in the winter when the ground's nice and chilly, it quiets down a lot. Not that this helps much with the dome seeing, since in winter it's generally already full of air that's much warmer than outside.)
Now in addition to assembling animated GIFs (in, say, GIMP), there are a number of command-line tools that will take a big collection of images and run them together into some kind of MPEG encoded movie. Which ordinarily wouldn't be so attractive to me, since it's always a pain to figure out what movie formats one's audience is able to view. But with the advent of YouTube I just have to work out how to encode for their system (320x240, MPEG-4) and away we go. So we have this movie now, which is a bit lower resolution than the original GIF loop, but since one can stick a great many more frames in an MPEG movie than in a GIF file, it's possible to make up the difference in the time domain. Check it out:
It's in the air, new and intoxicating. It's even in my comments: said Gemma, "Who knows, at this rate there may actually be fish in fifty years." There's a sense that we may finally be at the beginning of the end of a dark chapter in American history, or better. Connor: "This may end up being the Best Year Ever. Or even better, the beginning of the beginning..."
I've been wanting to share this article in which Chris Bowers attempts to define the progressive movement as fundamentally cultural, the political reflection of an emerging ethos of creativity and re-invention. It's a hopeful vision, even if he glosses over a number of important issues and caveats, and I'd be interested in hearing your take.
An anonymous commenter announces that Overheard at UChicago is open for business again, and looking for submissions. This started out as a Scavhunt item, but has the potential to be delightful in its own right.
Finally, my latest experiment in image-processing has turned cinematic. I took a bunch of rapid-fire pictures of that odd little snowstorm back in early October, and was looking for a good way to encode the motion of the flakes to help them stand out. And wound up making a movie of them. So I figured I'd just stick it on YouTube and share it with you folks. Enjoy:
Aaand, the election continues.
There are still 10 house races that haven't been called, a couple of which the Dems stand a good chance of flipping yet. However, the Florida-13th is turning out to be a special case. Whether by design or incompetance the voting there was flawed, and now Republicans are trying to steal the election there. Fittingly enough, it's Katherine Harris' old seat.
It's actually your pretty standard tale of electronic voting -- in one Democratic-leaning county a shocking 18,000 voters apparently cast no vote in the Congressional race, and without any paper trail there's no obvious way to check on that. Except that the local newspaper and Democratic campaign office received hundreds of complaints that voters couldn't find the race, or that their vote didn't seem to register on the machine. Unsurprisingly the Florida Secretary of State is refusing to investigate, so the local party is going to have to fight this one on their own. You can help them out here.
Which reminds me of something I saw a few days ago (via Lindsay) -- there's a company out there hawking a provably secure, open-source voting system for the modern age. They've got a cute little slideshow illustrating the basic idea, which is this: by borrowing some ideas from cryptography, it's possible to build a voting system that's nearly impossible to cheat. Once a ballot is voted it's impossible to know for whom it was cast, but the voters can prove to themselves that each vote was counted, the candidates can prove to themselves that the system is fair, and the head of elections can prove to everyone that the count is correct. If the new Congress pushes another round of voting reform (as it certainly should) systems like this should really be the gold standard against which proposals are weighed.
(Personally I think the technique is pretty neat, but since I don't really want to math out my audience I won't get into it unless you folks want me to.)
It has been pointed out to me that when I post YouTube videos, they don't show up in the LiveJournal feed version of this blog. So LJ users: sometimes you just have to click through. In fact, it looks like none of the images or formatting really go through, so I'd bet this whole blog makes a lot less sense if you just read it on your friends-list page.
The past week I've been running nonstop like it's Scavhunt, so that's about it for today. But we've been having an interesting discussion on the implications of the election over at Connor's place if you're up for more.
Otherwise, I leave you with a photo.
We. Win. The AP is calling Montana, and it's not clear they'll even bother with recounts either there or in Virginia.
Newt's "Republican Revolution" took place in 1994, and even though the good guys have been slowly crawling back to parity ever since, this is really the first time since 1992 that it's felt like winning. First time in my active political life. And it is ... delicious.
There's a lot of work to do. The "Republican Revolution" is dead, but notice that they guy about to replace Rumsfield is an Iran/Contra old hand. Movement conservatives are basically political zombies, and it's time to finish them off. But also, stop for just a second and savor the moment.
It's a new day. A beautiful day.
Okay, so it's been a long run of losses, many so close we could taste them. So tonight is a sweet, sweet thing.
Because Good God, Sweet Creeping Zombie Jesus, and By the Noodly Appendage -- I think we did it!
I'm looking at the numbers now, and it's pretty much a cinch that when the new Democratic majority is seated in the House come January, we're going to have a larger majority than the Republicans have now. Plus we're totally dominating the governors' races -- although I will personally strangle Peter Hutchinson if he puts Pawlenty back in the state house, as it looks like he might have.
More speculatively, even money says we take the Senate by one, although what with the Virginia recount it'll be weeks before we know for sure. But I'll come out and say it: I think we took the Senate.
This electon cycle's going to be all about turnout, which is why the Republican party would really rather you didn't bother voting. And in case you were fired up, they're ready and willing to fix you.
There are reports coming in from all over the country. Talking Points Memo, TAPPED, and Firedoglake have good running coverage as well. Just remember, they want you scared:
And seen by Shakespeare's Sister via Amanda:
They'll threaten us, even attack us, and it's time to stand up to the bullies. Vote.
PS. Cribbed directly from here:
1-888-DEM-VOTE for the DNC's voter hotline — this will get you directly to DNC lawyers and others to help with fraud issues.Election Protection's 1-866-OUR-VOTE has live operators who can address some problems over the phone and dispatch lawyers on the ground, if necessary.
Common Cause's 1-866-MYVOTE-1 can help people find their polling place.
Prognostication:
America chooses change.
Can't wait for Wednesday!
Okay, so now there are slightly less than 48 hours until the polls close.
This morning it was announced that we knocked on just over 20,000 doors yesterday, according to our tally sheets. And that's just the Minneapolis operation -- America Votes pulled off about as many in St. Paul and Duluth on Saturday as well. (One of my roommates, meanwhile, has been in South Dakota all weekend door-knocking to repeal the Coathanger Act ... er, unconstitutional abortion ban.) By the end of the first shift today we had crossed off the entirety of north and northeast Minneapolis.
For the second shift we were joined by Minneapolis Mayor R. T. Rybak and America Votes president Maggie Fox. The former took a shift of pavement pounding with us, although I didn't catch which ward he chose. Between shifts I added the above to a haiku board hanging on one wall of the makeshift America Votes assembly area, then I hit a couple of neighborhoods in south Minneapolis. Monday I'll be in the lab, then it's out again on Tuesday to prod people off to the polls.
It's not to late to help out. (Minneapolis: Monday night and Tuesday. Everywhere else.)
[Update: Election Day] -- Well, we did all we could. By Sunday evening we knocked on over 105,000 doors in Minnesota. I don't know how many more on Monday and today. Now we wait and see.
We may not be hearing any more stories of illegal imprisonment and torture like this one. It's a pretty nifty trick -- once you've been subjected to the CIA's tender mercies, they want to stamp your brain "top secret". If they get away with this, they never again need to worry about having to release detainees or allow layers to see them, because of national security.
Observe. From the Washington Post:
The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods" that their captors used to get them to talk.The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets and that their release -- even to the detainees' own attorneys -- "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage." Terrorists could use the information to train in counter-interrogation techniques and foil government efforts to elicit information about their methods and plots, according to government documents submitted to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Oct. 26.
The battle over legal rights for terrorism suspects detained for years in CIA prisons centers on Majid Khan, a 26-year-old former Catonsville resident who was one of 14 high-value detainees transferred in September from the "black" sites to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many detainees at Guantanamo, is seeking emergency access to him.
The government, in trying to block lawyers' access to the 14 detainees, effectively asserts that the detainees' experiences are a secret that should never be shared with the public.
Because Khan "was detained by CIA in this program, he may have come into possession of information, including locations of detention, conditions of detention, and alternative interrogation techniques that is classified at the TOP SECRET//SCI level," an affidavit from CIA Information Review Officer Marilyn A. Dorn states, using the acronym for "sensitive compartmented information."
As of Friday evening, there were 96 hours remaining until the polls close on Tuesday. This is endgame, folks, when the ground operations swing into high gear to get voters to the booth, and the legal teams suit up to make sure Republican tricks don't force them away. The final round of surveys is winding up, and the Senate's going to be an absolute squeaker -- but we have the chance to build a Democratic majority in the House that will set back the conservative machine by a generation. But now the time for advocacy is pretty much over, and there's no more infrastructure to build. So this morning I was at the America Votes field office for my first shift of pavement pounding in the 96-hour final push (a bit of local coverage here).
Two three-hour shifts in north Minneapolis, and by my count I knocked on something like 120 doors ... and there were probably a hundred volunteers there today. A well-run GOTV operation, according to conventional wisdom, can tilt a midterm election by 1-2 percentage points. There's lots of races out there that'll be decided by less than that. I've got two more shifts tomorrow. What are you doing in the next 72 hours?
P.S. Anyone remember how David Horowitz finally went over the edge into tin-foil-hattery and discovered The Network? I have to say that the entry on America Votes somehow manages to be both reasonably informative and pure comedy gold.
By my ephemeris, yesterday was the last day of 2006 that the sun will set after 5 pm in Minneapolis. The sun won't be visible after working hours again until January 17 of 20071.
Regarding the Hubble servicing mission I discussed earlier, I notice that DrSpiff is less enthused than most, judging it a "too little too late" effort. And while I would correct him on one point (the mission description I saw actually does devote a spacewalk to attempting to repair the STIS instrument), he makes a good argument that the new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph doesn't seem like the best use of Hubble's very limited capacity. I also mentioned the possibility that HST won't even make it to the 2008 servicing mission window; DrSpiff pegs this at an alarming even odds chance.
Anecdotal hopeful sign of the times: It's well known that the 18-29 year old demographic has been breaking heavily Democratic for several years now, but can't be bothered to vote. If they do start showing up at the polls, the Republican party is royally screwed for a decade ... and now I'm starting to think that they will. Teaching lab today, I absolutely did not bring up the subject, but the election was just about the only topic of conversation at the group tables. I am heartened. Apparently, so are the pros, as every new analysis that comes out predicts a bigger landslide for the good guys. There's every chance that come January the Democratic majority in the House will be even larger than the Republican majority is now.
So make sure everyone you know votes.
1 The astute will notice something odd here: November 2 is about six weeks before the winter solstice, but January 17 is only four weeks after it. What gives with the asymmetry? As it turns out (I hadn't thought of this until just now, either, so I actually plotted it up!) our earliest sunset will be at 4:32 pm on December 10, even though the shortest day of the year doesn't arrive until December 21. Between those two dates, the sun will set later each day, but the sunrise will be later too, by a slightly larger amount. I'm not entirely convinced that I understand why this occurs.
In a bit of self-promotion by proxy, I'd point those as have an interest at this article, wherein one of my old cosmology profs lays out in reasonably straightforward terms the theory behind the experiment my group is trying to pull off.
Check out this APOD from a couple of days ago. And my students complain that the Moon's hard to find whenever it's partly cloudy or not visible at 9 pm. Now if only we could make them record the phase of Venus as well...
The Centauri crew was sad that the starshade proposal didn't make the cut for this round of Discovery missions. I suspect the idea's awesome but not necessarily as workable as its proponents think. Still, there's a great journal club article in there for someone.
Oh, and I mailed in my absentee ballot today. Which made for an ideal excuse to make sure that everyone in my lab is planning to vote on Tuesday. And you'd better, too. They're talking about a Democratic blowout, but the thing that's driving it is turnout among independents fed up with incompetent (and criminal) Republican rule. That falls apart if you stay home thinking it's in the bag, so I'll be tromping about knocking on doors all weekend to remind them. Never mind love, if you're even vaguely fond of America (or what it could be), vote.
Title says it all. Go terrorize something.
Via astrogeek, I give you the Dalek Pumpkin. Presumably it exists to exterminate all non-pumpkin pie forms.
Just announced today, the Hubble servicing mission is back on. This isn't a huge surprise, since there's been huge political pressure on the new administrator to "save Hubble," but it is very good news for everyone involved. Bad Astronomy has more.
Depending on ISS assembly flights keeping to schedule, the servicing mission would happen sometime in 2008. The other big variable here is whether Hubble's gyros keep working that long. At present four of the original six are working. It used to be believed that HST would become uncontrollable with less than three operational gyroscopes, which meant that if one more failed NASA would have to start planning to deorbit it immediately, rather than risk a fourth failure that would greatly complicate a controlled reentry. However, NASA engineers last year demonstrated software modifications that allow Hubble to operate on only two gyros, forstalling this scenario. Even so, it's by no means guaranteed that Hubble can make it through 2008 with even two gyros still working.
Apropos of my previously announced plans, I completely spaced on the fact that we're finishing up a proposal that wants to go in Tuesday afternoon. So I'll be hitting the Tuesday evening performance instead, which will be extra spooky because it's actually on Halloween.
This is turning out to be one of those autumns when the daylight savings hour kicks in, and I'm like, "Sweet, bonus hour!" and actually get stuff done. I forgot to reset my alarm clock, and was thus a bit confused at first when it piped up and Weekend Edition hadn't even begun yet. Guess now we're officially in the season of the preternaturally early sunset.
Now this is interesting. According to the Times today, an investigation may be underway because a maker of electronic voting software may have ties to the Venezuelan government. From what I can gather the concern stems from a series of transactions probably calculated to help sell voting systems to Latin America. You can probably guess how the article is actually spun, of course. (Story originally broke in this Miami Herald piece.)
The reason this catches my eye is its striking resemblance to a standard Republican play. Right after Mark Foley resigned, the Republican talking point was that their candidates had been recovering in the polls, and that if they lost the House it would be all Foley's fault. Or better yet, the fault of those tricky Democrats for arranging for the story to break in late October. Which sets them up nicely to claim on November 8, if they do lose the House (or Senate), that the new Democratic majority doesn't have a "real" mandate. After all, good red-blooded American voters would never break blue unless they weren't thinking straight. Only the inconvenient fact that powerful Republicans tend to be hypocritical sexual perverts could possibly distract the consumers from the overriding narrative of libruls will turn your children into gay suicide bombers.
With that news cycle pretty much over, the media's been starting to turn to the election itself, and there's even been a flurry of stories about electronic voting. So planting1 this story now is clever. Just when people are starting to think (far too late, but whatever) again about the security of electronic voting machines, get people talking about how the anti-American Chavez government is out to hack the vote -- for the Democrats! Thus laying more groundwork to claim that a new Democratic Congress will have gotten elected by cheating, and for that matter to call for recounts and legal challenges before the results are even certified.
The other reason this feels so much like a Republican ploy is that it fits so well with their other major trick, accusing one's opponent of the very thing one is weakest on. Recall the Swiftboat thing, where we had the odd spectacle of John Kerry, decorated war hero, having his war record disparaged by surrogates for Bush, a cowardly brat who couldn't even be bothered to finish out the cushy Air National Guard assignment he specifically got to avoid having to go to 'Nam. And on a smaller scale, they've done the same thing a hundred times in Congressional races around the country this year.
On the bright side, the Republicans wouldn't be working so hard to spin a defeat unless they seriously expected to lose, given that half their schtick is absurd come-what-may kool-aid-drinking bravado. But caution is also advisable here, because it sounds like they're also preparing to supress some votes after they're cast by -- of all the gall, as usual -- claiming rigged voting machines.
[Update: 31 October] -- digby makes essentially the same point, but with less rambling and more quotes to back up the argument.
1 Planting? Well, nothing against Tim Golden, the story's author, but he's basically spent the last two years doing quite decent coverage of Guantanamo -- the detainees, the abuse, the legal wrangling. I expect he was put on this story because of the Latin American connection, but frankly I see little evidence that he has much experience with election law, voting machines, or national politics. So he's mostly just amplifying the Miami article to a national audience.
On a lighter note, it's the Halloween weekend. The first year grad students are throwing a party Saturday, which I might peek in on if I can find the time (this weekend also features a daunting to-do list). However, Sunday evening promises to be awesome in a whole different way.
BareBones Productions presents the
13th Annual Halloween Harvest Outdoor Puppet Extravaganza. I expect puppets, acrobatics, fire, and silliness, in various combinations. Actually, the friend who first tipped me off to this happening sounds to be planning a performance likely to involve all four. Something about giant flaming claw hands.
It's right across the river from Fort Snelling in the Hidden Falls regional park. So it's easy for me to toss a bike on the light rail and just go, but if anyone here wants to make an expedition of it, by all means let's!
The post title, of course, is a plug for Do More Than Vote, because it's increasingly looking like the midterm elections 11 days from now are for all the marbles.
I'll probably be in the field doing get-out-the-vote (GOTV) work the four days ending November 7. Probably some combination of door-knocking with the Wellstone Action Network and whatever the local Democratic party needs done (possibly more door-knocking -- man, am I gonna have sore feet on November 8). Here in Minnesota we've got one seat in the Senate and at least three in the House up for grabs, and the United States needs every one of them to be filled by a Democrat. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise, I've got half a million dead Iraqis they should meet.
It goes without saying, my dozen or so readers, that I shouldn't have to get out any of your votes. (And I'm pretty sure none of you were even thinking of voting for the wrong team, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.) So what I want to know is, how many votes are you bringing with you to the polls?
A few examples:
"The first lesson is, is that oceans can no longer protect us. You know, when I was coming up in the '50s in Midland, Texas, it seemed like we were pretty safe. In the '60s it seemed like we were safe."
To which the internet responds, bwah? For instance:
I also enjoyed this Prospect article today illustrating the tendency of conservatives to take their foreign policy cues from science fiction. Seems they mistook Battlestar Galactica for a documentary.
A more recent Bush gem:
This stuff about "stay the course" -- stay the course means, we're going to win. Stay the course does not mean that we're not going to constantly change.
So we've been exporting torture for a while now, and increasingly outsourcing it, too. This should have been obvious: now we're inspiring cheap foreign knock-offs:
UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 23 -- Several governments around the world have tried to rebut criticism of how they handle detainees by claiming they are only following the U.S. example in fighting terrorism, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture said Monday.Manfred Nowak said that when he criticizes governments for their questionable treatment of detainees, they respond by telling him that if the United States does something, it must be all right. He would not name any countries except Jordan.
For great justice! Really, though, this is a delightful idea, using the Googlebomb effect to link odious Republicans up for reelection to the most damning articles about them. Grab the HTML and join in!
--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl
--AZ-01: Rick Renzi
--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth
--CA-04: John Doolittle
--CA-11: Richard Pombo
--CA-50: Brian Bilbray
--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave
--CO-05: Doug Lamborn
--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell
--CT-04: Christopher Shays
--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan
--FL-16: Joe Negron
--FL-22: Clay Shaw
--ID-01: Bill Sali
--IL-06: Peter Roskam
--IL-10: Mark Kirk
--IL-14: Dennis Hastert
--IN-02: Chris Chocola
--IN-08: John Hostettler
--IA-01: Mike Whalen
--KS-02: Jim Ryun
--KY-03: Anne Northup
--KY-04: Geoff Davis
--MD-Sen: Michael Steele
--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht
--MN-06: Michele Bachmann
--MO-Sen: Jim Talent
--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns
--NV-03: Jon Porter
--NH-02: Charlie Bass
--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson
--NM-01: Heather Wilson
--NY-03: Peter King
--NY-20: John Sweeney
--NY-26: Tom Reynolds
--NY-29: Randy Kuhl
--NC-08: Robin Hayes
--NC-11: Charles Taylor
--OH-01: Steve Chabot
--OH-02: Jean Schmidt
--OH-15: Deborah Pryce
--OH-18: Joy Padgett
--PA-04: Melissa Hart
--PA-07: Curt Weldon
--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick
--PA-10: Don Sherwood
--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee
--TN-Sen: Bob Corker
--VA-Sen: George Allen
--VA-10: Frank Wolf
--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick
--WA-08: Dave Reichert
So my bike's bottom bracket has been acting a bit odd for a few weeks now. Inspection suggested that one of the cranks was getting a bit loose in the ratchet mechanism, since it's the peculiar sort where the cranks on either side aren't actually a single unit. Then yesterday something gave, and it did this.
Let's take a closer look.
Turns out it's not so easy to ride a bicycle that way. Felt like I was kangaroo-hopping down the street. Modestly awkward, and quite difficult to get good acceleration from a stop.
Apropos of yesterday's post, I'd call attention to this post in which Lindsay highlights a couple of other notable detainees.
Pulitzer Prize winning photographer (he took #15 in the collection) Bilal Hussein has been held without charges in Iraq for about six months now.
Oh, and remember right after 9/11 when the FBI Hoovered up every Middle Easterner they could find? Not all of those detainees ever resurfaced. Turns out Ali Partovi has been held, illegally until yesterday, without charges and apparently with occasional torture. For five years and counting.
