Links for January 19th through January 20th

Sometime between January 19th and January 20th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • ‘Battlestar Galactica’s’ Ron Moore addresses the shocking developments of ‘Sometimes a Great Notion’: This post contains extensive interviews and information about “Sometimes a Great Notion,” the Jan. 16 episode of Sci Fi's "Battlestar Galactica." Below, “Battlestar Galactica” executive producer Ronald D. Moore talks in detail about several big developments in the episode. I'd recommend watching the episode before reading the full text of the post.
  • The country’s new robots.txt file: Here's a small and nerdy measure of the huge change in the executive branch of the US government today.
  • Gothic Charm School: Snarklings, why do so many people (including ones who should know better) think that Goth has some sort of religious affiliation? Is it because so many Goths like wearing large, ornate cross pendants or intricately-beaded rosaries? Wait no; that, while possibly a small part of it, can’t be the main impetus for so many people assuming that Goth comes with a particular religious requirement. Because if that was the case, the accessorizing with crosses and rosaries would cause people to assume that all Goths are particularly flamboyant Catholics or Christians….
  • One man’s take on the new whitehouse.gov on TwitPic: Humor for the HTML geeks out there. :)
  • The top 25 Bushisms of all time.: I find the Bush who flails with words, unlike the Bush who flails with policy, to be an endearing character. Instead of a villain, he makes himself into an irresistible buffoon, like Mrs. Malaprop, Archie Bunker, or Homer Simpson. Bush treats words the way he treated recalcitrant European leaders: When they won't do what he wants them to, he tries to bully them into submission.
  • Worst Commercial Placement Ever: This is violent and contains a fairly major spoiler from the most recent episode of Battlestar Galactica. The inverse serendipity of the commercial is priceless, hilarious, and very, very wrong. (via wcitymike and MeFi)

George W. Bush’s Last Day in Office!

The legacy of President George W. Bush:

George Walker Bush. 43rd president of the United States. First ever with a criminal record. Our third story tonight, his presidency: eight years in eight minutes.

Early in 2001 the U.S. fingered Al Qaeda for the bombing of the USS Cole. Bush counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke had a plan to take down Al Qaeda. Instead, by February the NSC had already discussed invading Iraq, and had a plan for post-Saddam Iraq. By March 5 Bush had a map ready for Iraqi oil exploration and a list of companies. Al Qaeda? Rice told Clarke not to give Bush a lot of long memos — “not a big reader.”

August 6, 2001, a CIA analyst briefs Bush on vacation: “Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.” Bush takes no action, tells the briefer, quote, “All right, you’ve covered your ass now.” Next month Clarke requests using new predator drones to kill Bin Laden, the Pentagon and CIA say no.

September 11th: Bush remains seated for several minutes to avoid scaring school children by getting up and leaving. He then flies around the country and promises quote a full scale investigation to find “those folks who did it.”

Rumsfeld says Afghanistan “does not have enough targets, we’ve got to do Iraq.” When the CIA traps Bin Laden at Tora Bora it asks for 800 rangers to cut off his escape, Bush outsources the job to Pakistanis sympathetic to the Taliban. Bin Laden gets away.

In February General Tommy Franks tells a visiting Senator Bush is moving equipment out of Afghanistan so he can invade Iraq. One of the men who prepped Rice for her testimony that Bush did not ignore pre 9-11 warnings later explains, quote, “We cherry picked things to make it look like the president had been actually concerned about Al Qaeda…they didn’t give a bleep about Al Qaeda.”

July, and Britain’s intel chief says Bush is fixing intelligence and facts around the policy to take out Saddam January ’03. Bush and Blair agree to invade in March. Mr. Bush, still telling us he has not decided, telling Blair they should paint an airplane in UN colors, fly it over Iraq, and provoke a response, a pretext for invasion.

The man who said it would take several hundred thousand troops: fired. The man who said it would cost more than a hundred billion: fired. The man who revealed Bush’s yellowcake lie: smeared, his wife’s covert status exposed. The White House liars who did it and covered it up: not fired, one convicted — Bush commutes his sentence.

Then in Iraq, “stuff happens:” Iraq’s army, disbanded. The government de-Baathified. 200,000 weapons, billions of dollars just
lost, foreign mercenaries immunized from justice. Political hacks run the Green Zone. Religious cleansing forcing one out of six Iraqis from their homes. Abu Ghraib, the insurgency, Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Other stuff does not happen: WMD, post-war planning, body armor, vehicular armor.

The payoff? Oil, and billions for Halliburton, Blackwater and other companies, while Mr. Bush denies VA healthcare to 450,000 veterans, tries to raise their healthcare fees, blocks the new G.I. Bill, and increases his own power with the USA PATRIOT Act, with the Military Commissions Act, public orders exempting himself from a thousand laws, and secretly from the Presidential Records Act, The Geneva Conventions, FISA, sparking a mass rebellion at the Justice Department.

Secret star chambers for terrorism suspects, overturned by Hamdan v Rumsfeld. Denying habeas corpus, overturned by Boumediene v Bush. 200 renditionings, sleep deprivation, abuse.

Rumsfeld warned in 2002 that he was torturing, that it would jeopardize convictions. Out of 550 at Gitmo, hundreds ultimately go free with no charges. Dozens are tortured, eight fatally — three are convicted. On U.S. soil twelve hundred immigrants rounded up without due process, without bail, without court dates, without a single charge of terrorism.

It wasn’t just Mr. Bush no longer subject to the rule of law. He slashed regulations on everyone from banks to mining companies. Appointed 98 lobbyists to oversee their own industries, weakening emission standards for mercury and 650 different toxic chemicals. Regulators shared drugs, and their beds, with industry reps. The Crandall Canyon mine owner told inspectors to “back up” because his buddy, Republican Mitch McConnell, was sleeping with their boss. McConnell’s wife is Bush Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. Her agency overruled engineer concerns about Crandall Canyon, and was found negligent after nine miners died in the collapse there.

Mr. Bush’s “hands off” as Enron blacks out California, doubling electric bills. After months of rejecting price caps Mr. Bush bows to pressure, the blackouts end.

Mr. Bush further deregulates commodity futures, midwifing the birth of unregulated oil markets which, just like Enron, jack up prices to an all time high until Congress and both presidential candidates call for regulations, and the prices fall.

Deregulating financial services and lax enforcement of remaining rules created a housing bubble, creating the mortgage crisis, creating then a credit crisis, devastating industries that rely on credit, from student loans to car dealers. Firms that had survived the Great Depression could not survive Bush. Those that did got seven hundred billion dollars. No strings, no transparency, no idea whether it worked. Unlike the auto bailout, which cut workers’ salaries. A GOP memo called it “a chance to punish unions.”

But Bush failed even when his party and his patrons did not stand to profit. Investigators blamed management cost cutting communication for missed warnings about Columbia. Bush administration convicts include sex offenders at Homeland Security, convicted liars, every kind of thief in the calendar, and if you count things that were not prosecuted, the vice president of the United States actually shot a man in the face — the man apologized.

Mr. Bush faked the truth with paid propaganda in Iraq on his education policy, tried to silence the truth about global warming, rocket fuel in our water, industry influence on energy policy. Politicized the truth of science at NASA, the EPA, the National Cancer Institute, Fish and Wildlife, and the FDA

His lies, exposed by whistleblowers from the cabinet down. “Complete B.S.,” the treasury secretary said of Mr. Bush on his tax cuts. Rice’s mushroom cloud, Powell’s mobile labs, Iraq and 9-11, Jack Abramoff, Jessica Lynch. Pat Tillman. Pat Tillman again. Pat Tillman, again. The air at Ground Zero, most responders still suffering respiratory problems. Global warming, carbon emissions, a Clear Skies initiative lowering air quality standards, the Healthy Forests initiative increasing logging, faith based initiatives, the cost of medicare reform, fired US attorneys, politically synchronized terror alerts. The surge causing insurgents to switch sides, that abortion causes breast cancer, that his first recession began under Clinton, that he did not wiretap without warrants, that we do not torture. That American citizen John Walker Lindh’s rights were not violated, that he refused the right to counsel.

“Heckuva job, Brownie!” Some survivors still in trailers, New Orleans still at just two-thirds its usual population.

The lie that no one could have predicted the economic crisis, except the economists who did. No one could have predicted 9-11, except one ass-covering CIA analyst, or thirty. No one could have predicted the levee breach, except — literally — Mr. Bill, in a PSA that aired on TV a year before Katrina.

Bush actually admitted that he lied about not firing Rumsfeld because he “did not want to tell the truth.” Look it up.

All of it, all of it and more leaving us with ten trillion in debt to pay for 31% more in discretionary spending, the Iraq War, a 1.3 trillion dollar tax cut. Median income down two thousand dollars. Three-quarters of all income gains under Bush going to the richest one percent. Unemployment up from 4.2 to 7.2 percent. The Dow, down from ten thousand five hundred eighty seven to eighty two hundred seventy seven. Six million now more in poverty. Seven million more now without health care.

Buying toxic goods from China. Deadly cribs. Outsourcing security to Dubai, still unsecure in our ports and at our nuclear plants. More dependent on foreign oil. Out of the international criminal court. Off the anti ballistic missle treaty.

Military readiness and standards down, with two unfinished wars, a nuclear North Korea, disengaged from the Palestinian problem, destabilizing eastern European diplomacy with anti missile plans and unable to keep Russia out of Georgia.

2000 miles of Appalachian streams destroyed by rubble from mountaintop mining. At his last G-8 summit, he actually bid farewell to other world leaders saying, quote, “goodbye from the world’s greatest polluter.”

Consistently undermining historic American reverence for the institutions that empower us. Education, now “academic elites,” and the law, “activist judges,” capping jury awards.

And Bin Laden? Living today unmolested in a Pakistani safe haven created by a truce endorsed and defended by George W. Bush.

And among all the gifts he gave to Bin Laden, the most awful, the most damaging not just to America, but to the American ideal, was to further Bin Laden’s goal by making us act out of fear rather than fortitude.

Leaving us with precious little to cling to tonight, save the one thing that might yet suffice:

Hope.

Tomorrow’s inauguration can’t come soon enough.

(via windycitymike, transcript from Daily Kos)

Links for January 12th from 10:14 to 15:44

Sometime between 10:14 and 15:44, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: The Elements of Spam.: Form the possessive of nouns by adding 's, just an apostrophe, just an s, a semicolon, a w, an ampersand, a 9, or anything. "My wifesd*porcupine hot pix for u."
  • Stephen King fan publishes Shining’s Jack Torrance’s novel: A Stephen King fan has published an 80-page version of the book which novelist Jack Torrance obsessively writes during King's The Shining, where his descent into madness is revealed when his wife discovers that his work consists of just one phrase, endlessly repeated.
  • W. and the damage done: After a couple of presidential terms, mismanagement in every area of policy — foreign, domestic, even extraterrestrial — starts to add up. When George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001, he inherited peace and prosperity. The military, the Constitution and New Orleans were intact and the country had a budget surplus of $128 billion. Now he's about to dash out the door, leaving a large, unpaid bill for his successors to pay. To get a sense of what kind of balance is due, Salon spoke to experts in seven different fields. Wherever possible, we have tried to express the damage done in concrete terms — sometimes in lives lost, but most often just in money spent and dollars owed. What follows is an incomplete inventory of eight years of mis- and malfeasance, but then a fuller accounting would run, um, somewhat longer than three pages.
  • Milky Way Transit Authority: I was re-reading Carl Sagan's novel Contact recently, essentially a series of arguments about SETI wrapped into a story, and he alludes to some sort of cosmic Grand Central Station. That, coupled with my longtime interest in transit maps, got me thinking about all of this.
  • How big Jurassic flying reptiles got off ground: Habib used CT scans of the bones of 155 bird specimens and a dozen species of pterosaurs and found that they were greatly different in strength, size and proportion. In birds, the hind legs were stronger than the front and in some pterosaurs the front legs were several times stronger than the hind ones. "It's a lot like a leapfrog," Habib said, describing how he figures the pterosaurs got off the ground. "They kind of pitch forward at first, the legs kick off first, then the arms take off." That allowed some of the ancient giants to get into the air in less than a second. Habib calculated that the 550-pound pterosaur called Hatzegopteryx thambema launched at a speed of 42 miles per hour.

Abstinence courses wildly off base

Our tax dollars at work: the abstinence programs that Bush is so heavily in favor of (as opposed to real sex education) are distributing wildly inaccurate information to teens:

Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person’s genitals “can result in pregnancy,” a congressional staff analysis has found.

Those and other assertions are examples of the “false, misleading, or distorted information” in the programs’ teaching materials, said the analysis, released yesterday, which reviewed the curricula of more than a dozen projects aimed at preventing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.

In providing nearly $170 million next year to fund groups that teach abstinence only, the Bush administration, with backing from the Republican Congress, is investing heavily in a just-say-no strategy for teenagers and sex. But youngsters taking the courses frequently receive medically inaccurate or misleading information, often in direct contradiction to the findings of government scientists, said the report, by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), a critic of the administration who has long argued for comprehensive sex education.

Several million children ages 9 to 18 have participated in the more than 100 federal abstinence programs since the efforts began in 1999. Waxman’s staff reviewed the 13 most commonly used curricula — those used by at least five programs apiece.

The report concluded that two of the curricula were accurate but the 11 others, used by 69 organizations in 25 states, contain unproved claims, subjective conclusions or outright falsehoods regarding reproductive health, gender traits and when life begins. In some cases, Waxman said in an interview, the factual issues were limited to occasional misinterpretations of publicly available data; in others, the materials pervasively presented subjective opinions as scientific fact.

Among the misconceptions cited by Waxman’s investigators:

  • A 43-day-old fetus is a “thinking person.”
  • HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread via sweat and tears.
  • Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse.

One curriculum, called “Me, My World, My Future,” teaches that women who have an abortion “are more prone to suicide” and that as many as 10 percent of them become sterile. This contradicts the 2001 edition of a standard obstetrics textbook that says fertility is not affected by elective abortion, the Waxman report said.

“I have no objection talking about abstinence as a surefire way to prevent unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases,” Waxman said. “I don’t think we ought to lie to our children about science. Something is seriously wrong when federal tax dollars are being used to mislead kids about basic health facts.”

Bad enough that Bush is pushing teaching abstinence instead of safe sex, rather than teaching both concurrently (doubly stupid considering “Nonpartisan researchers have been unable to document measurable benefits of the abstinence-only model.”), but when the information in the abstinence courses is this ridiculous — really, it borders on nothing more than right-wing propaganda — there is no way that the government should be funding these programs!

Inaccurate information like this helps nobody, least of all the kids in the classes.

Ugh. Makes me see red.

(via William Gibson)

Mars vs. Marriage

Money allocated by President Bush to increase NASA’s budget in order to encourage space exploration, a replacement for the Space Shuttle, finishing the International Space Station, establishing a manned base on the Moon, and planning for manned trips to Mars:

One billion dollars spread over the next five years.

Money allocated by President Bush in a planned drive to “promote traditional marriage values”:

One and a half billion dollars, apparently over a single year.

I guess we’ve all got to have our priorities, don’t we?

As a long-time science fiction geek, I’d really like to get excited about the new emphasis on space exploration and research, and even a little more budgetary increase is better than none. Somehow, though, it comes across to me as nothing more than election-year grandstanding than something that’s really going to have much impact.

The speech follows no logical pattern

From Tom Tomorrow:

The entire situation is reminiscent, as someone pointed out on Atrios, of the old Star Trek episode “Patterns of Force” (in which) Federation history professor John Gill becomes the drugged leader of a Nazi planet:

GILL (seen on TV at a rally): If we fulfill our own greatness,
that will all be ended. Working together —

SPOCK: Captain, the speech follows no logical pattern. Random sentences strung together.

MCCOY: He looks drugged, Jim, almost in a cataleptic state.

GILL: …reach our goal, and we will reach that goal. (cheering) Every thought…directed toward a goal. This planet…can become a paradise, if we are willing to pay the price. As each cell in the body…works with discipline and harmony for the good…of the entire being —