OYE Bingo
Instructions: Take this card to your school’s next College Republicans meeting. Ask the members why they aren’t “fighting for freedom” in Iraq. Mark an “X” in the appropriate box as they each make their excuses. Yell, “Bingo, mission accomplished!” when a line of boxes has been checked.
It's Good to Be Transparent
[Of jellyfish:] Their bodies are 99 percent water; they have fewer non-aqueous ingredients than lemonade. But they've been around for 700 million years. Armored trilobites, thunder-footed dinosaurs, and saber-toothed tigers have come and gone; the watery jellyfish endure. They have outlasted animals with bulk and brains. Their strategy for survival has been spectacularly successful: Keep it simple, go with the flow.
[Chet Raymo, "Go With the Flow", Science Musings Blog, 29 June 2005.]
My 4.8% Lammy
A bear who is haunted by his past and his relationship with his late lover gets some assistance from a bear spiritualist.
The Lambda Literary Awards recognize and honor the best in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender literature. From hundreds of books nominated by their publishers and other authorized agents, five nominees were selected in each of 20 categories. Panels of judges in each category, chosen to represent the diversity of the LGBT literary community, determined the final winner from the finalists.
Chicken Feathers
Yes, this is actually about chicken feathers. Partly, at least.
During my reading this morning, I read a science brief (rather like this one: "Poultry Feathers Made Into Plastic Mulch" by Sharon Durham at Agricultural Research Service news) about some Agricultural Research Service research and engineering going on that has developed some processes that convert chicken feathers into plastic.
Pretty obviously, this is the type of topic that's going to grab my attention, because it sounds silly but isn't.
First off, the idea is good and it's practical. It was reported that the process works with chicken feathers that have already been cleaned and chopped, and uses conventional equipment for the processing, which would make it practical. Chicken feathers, it seems, are mostly made of the protein keratin, which is tough, lightweight, and "relatively processable".
The payoff could be huge, largely because there's an abundance of raw material. As Ms. Durham writes:
Approximately four billion pounds of feathers are generated each year during the poultry production process, resulting in a serious solid agricultural waste problem.
That is an amazing amount of chicken feathers! First, think about the size of the average feather pillow, which has a little under a pound of feathers in it. Now, imagine four billion feather pillows if you can. (US annual chicken production is about 45 billion pounds of chickens; each chicken weighs about 5.25 pounds, so that's about 8 billion chickens. We in the state of Maryland have to be up on our chicken facts since Maryland was the home of the late Frank Purdue.)
There's a local interest for me in this story, too. It turns out that the scientist/engineer (self-described as a "Research Chemist") spearheading the chicken-feather research is Dr. Justin R. Barone, who works for the Deptment of Agriculture at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC), in Beltsville, Maryland. (Beltsville, by the way, was named for Trueman Belt in 1835, when he gave the B & O Railroad right of way through his property. Beltsville is at the northern-most exit of the Capitol Beltway around Washington, DC, and many people seem to think that Beltsville is named for the Beltway, but it's not. The only significance between "beltway" and "beltsville" is that it's the location of our nearest Ikea store.)
The BARC is a surprisingly venerable research location. Early last century the USDA needed more space and began, in 1910, to buy land in Beltsville for the Agricultural Research Service, its research arm. Dairy and animal husbandry moved in first. They were joined by animal disease research in 1936, then plant research in 1939. Eventually the BARC covered over 14,000 acres, making it the largest center of agricultural research in the world. Among other things, we owe its researchers for creating some of our most productive modern varieties of agricultural crops, like corn. The BARC is also home to the National Agricultural Library, the tallest building for some distance.
For nearly a decade, Isaac and I lived in a house just about a mile down the road (Rhode Island Avenue, for the locals) from the Agricultural Library. Consequently, we frequently drove by and through the BARC, which is very scenic. In the summer there are fields gowing experimental corn and soy beans, cows stand around in some of the fields, and the main road winds through fields featuring bucolic barns and out buildings. I find it especially enchanting to drive through the BARC by moonlight.
There are a number of curious road names that one sees driving through the BARC that suggest its research activities: Animal Husbandy Road, Entomology Road, Biocontrol Road, Beaver Dam Road, and Soil Conservation Road are just some.
Now, Soil Conservation Road (which has a green, rectangular sign for its name that's quite a bit longer than usual) is an important road in the area. It links other thoroughfares, and it goes past the east side of the Goddard Space Flight Center. Goddard is intimately associated with the BARC, since it was the BARC that transferred 548 of its acres to NASA in 1961 so that NASA could build the Goddard Space Flight Center.
The most prominant building that you see as you pass Goddard is a large, blue and white building that houses the "High Bay Clean Room", a specially built room, 60 feet high (enclosing 1.3 million cubic feet), with air filtered to extremely low levels of particulate contamination. The building was built for putting together ("integrating" in NASA speak) the Hubble Space Telescope. According to Prince George's County "Fun Facts":
The world's largest clean room is in Prince George's County at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The Hubble Clean Room is an 86,000 square-foot (7989.4 square-meter) building used to integrate and test space equipment and hardware. How clean is it? 1,000 times cleaner than a hospital operating room.
This clean room (for the specialists: it's apparently Class 10,000) would be one whence you've seen pictures of engineers and scientists walking around in "bunny suits", those flimsy white outfits that cover just about everything except for the face. (Some of us get special little hair-nets for the chin if we have beards.) The bunny suits get very hot, but they do look very space age. I know from experience working in a clean room on a space instrument. Although I have worked in the building housing the Hubble Clean Room, I've never worked in that clean room. My time was spent in the clean room at the facilities of Ball Aerospace, in Boulder, Colorado.
So anyway, I was rather interested to read about this process that turns chicken feathers into plastic.
I should probably note that this is not the only approach to solving the problem of too many chicken feathers. It appears that another researcher, in Israel, has been trying to breed a featherless chicken. You can read about that in this story: "Featherless chicken creates a flap" (May 2002), which comes complete with a rather disturbing photograph of the "prototype featherless chicken".
[Edited and updated from the original verion of 7 April 2005.]
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., The Art of Conversation
The Purpose of Science (Part I)
About 10 or 12 years ago, when I was still a scientist producing science, I was working on an experiment that eventually flew on two Space Shuttle missions (in 1994, then 1996 — our project was called "Zeno"1). We were working under the umbrella of "microgravity" research, research that wanted to exploit the very reduced gravity available while orbiting the Earth.2 We were studying some general properties of fluids in very unusual thermodynamic states; when they were in these states, they were very susceptible to the effects of gravity, which supressed the effect we were trying to look at. "Turning down gravity" was our answer.
At any rate, our experiment was of the type often referred to as "pure science"; we were doing "science for science's sake". Of course, to us, the goal of the experiment was importantly related to questions about thermodynamics, critical phenomena, universality, the renormalization-group theory, and other things that we physicists got excited about but no one else had ever heard of.
I spent quite a bit of time working with the NASA Public-Affairs Office (at Marshall Space Flight Center, our home for mission operations, in Huntsville, AL) trying to find interesting things that they could say to the public-at-large about our project. We all took that goal — inviting the public to share our excitement — very seriously and worked hard at it, but it was a challenge to explain in a sound-bite why we were doing it all and why we were spending $20 million to do it.
I still think that elucidating science to interested non-scientists is an important thing to do. Generally, my feeling is that understanding full-blown concepts deserves more than bite-sized explanations, at least when there's time, but there's not always time.
The perennial question about any science experiment seems to be "what's it good for", that is, "what new product to make out life better are you working on". It's very frustrating to be asked over and over, when we felt that our work was important but that our distance from products on the shelf was rather large. We often felt that it was not the best question to ask.
I wanted to expound about the thrill of intellectual pursuit, the great adventure, exploring the unknown corners of the physical universe … but those weren't the answers that were wanted. We could say some things about how it might lead to new, environmentally friendlier refrigerants, or help in industrial painting applications (both were true), but that seemed so trivializing.
I still don't have the sound-bit answer. The best I'd been able to come up with then was a small parable, a metaphor for the place of science in a technology consumer's life.
Think of technology as being a house that we all live in. The house of technology is built on a foundation of science. The foundation is made of many, many bricks. Each brick is a scientific idea, or scientific discovery, or the result of a scientific experiment. All the bricks fit together and make a solid foundation for the house of technology.
Perhaps, we think, all those bricks aren't really necessary to hold up the house. Surely we could take some out and the house would still stand.
Undoubtedly this is true. Pull out some of the bricks. Choose some more and yank them out, too. For awhile the house is fine, but sooner or later trouble arrives. The house develops cracks in the walls, the floor shifts precariously, windows no longer open properly. Ultimately the house collapses, unable to stand without a solid foundation.
Which bricks are the most important ones? Who can say which bricks are supporting the house and which ones are not essential for holding the house up?
Technology is built on a solid foundation of science, a foundation that gets its strength from many, many interconnected bricks. Although individual bricks look individually unimportant, and any one or two might be removed with no apparent effect, all of them are needed to keep the foundation strong.
[Edited and updated from the orignal post of 4 April 2005.]
__________
1There is a Zeno home page, which is very rudimentary. I put it together during the second Zeno mission in 1996. It was my first website, and the technology was still in the early stages, which explains why there was no website at the time of the first mission in 1994.
2"Microgravity" was meant literally as a measure: micro, 10-6, times g, the acceleration due to gravity. One micro-g was about the level of residual accelerations in quiet orbit on the space shuttle, i.e., provided the astronauts weren't exercising or bouncing (literally) off the walls. These tiny accelerationswere mostly caused by tidal forces on the shuttle itself, due to the fact that the spacecraft is large enough (an "extended body", i.e., not a "point mass" without size) that different parts of the craft, being at slightly different distances from the center of the Earth, would prefer to orbit the Earth at slightly different velocities. Thus, the magnitude also depended slightly on the "attitude" of the Shuttle, whether it was moving with its nose in front of it (in the direction of the velocity vector) or pointed away from the center of the Earth (tail to the Earth); the latter was common, apparently because it was led to more stable orbits that required fewer firings of the retro-rockets to maintain. However, I'm no expert at orbital dynamics, which would nevertheless be an entirely different posting anyway.
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Notes to Richard
Support Our Troops (BBA XIII)
A little while back, having read an interesting piece about Bush's imperial dreams and his place in history (which he's imagining a little differently from the rest of us), I realized the place of his own hubris in invading Iraq. ("To Be Seen as a Great Leader (BBA X)".) The conclusion then — and I still believe it — is that he manufactured the war fundamentally so that he could be seen as a "great president". In his analysis, to be seen as a great leader means to be seen as a great commander-in-chief, which obviously calls for a war.
I am pleased to see evidence that I'm not alone in thinking this.
America's founders knew all too well how war appeals to the vanity of rulers and their thirst for glory. That's why they took care to deny presidents the kingly privilege of making war at their own discretion.
But after 9/11 President Bush, with obvious relish, declared himself a "war president." And he kept the nation focused on martial matters by morphing the pursuit of Al Qaeda into a war against Saddam Hussein.
In November 2002, Helen Thomas, the veteran White House correspondent, told an audience, "I have never covered a president who actually wanted to go to war" – but she made it clear that Mr. Bush was the exception. And she was right.
[Paul Krugman, "The War President", The New York Times, 24 June 2004.]
Of course I'm cynical, of course I'm liberal, of course I support our troops by wanting to see them taken out of harm's way and only used — truly — as a last resort. Forget the insurgents, I think, but save them from their commander-in-chief. With so many lives and so much money being wasted, opposing a war provoked by the president (see the Downing Street Memos) as a boost to his ego is the only patriotic way I can think of to support our troops in a way that honors our constitution and pays more than lip service to our shared values of liberty and democracy. Alas, there is no magnetic "ribbon" for the back of my car that expresses my sentiments.
The closest I've seen to a suitable groundswell (and appropriate response!) of democracy in action is Jesus' General's "Yellow Elephant" campaign. In the words (more or less) of one of my favorite, fictional characters, the General has a bold and cunning plan, audacious in its simplicity, outrageous in its poetic perfection:
The objective of OPERATION YELLOW ELEPHANT is to recruit College Republicans and Young Republicans to serve as infantry. They demanded this war and now viciously support it. It's only right that they also experience it.
I support our troops by demanding an end to the way; Young Republicans enthusiastically call for more blood and guts — shouldn't they show their support in ways that affirm their principles with appropriate action? The fiasco in Iraq (now becoming known as "The Quagmire") is clearly not an American War so much as it is a Republican War.
Krugman's point, Jesus' General's point, my point and the point of all those in the Big-Brass Alliance (and other collectives) who demand answers to the questions posed by the Downing Street Memos, is that there should indeed be accountability for this war, and now is a good time to start the accounting. Far from accepting the President's assertion that "the accountability moment" passed with the last election, we believe that the accountability moment is just arriving.
I think I'll end with another short quotation from Krugman's piece, just because I like his calling it their "splendid little war":
On one side, the people who sold this war, unable to face up to the fact that their fantasies of a splendid little war have led to disaster, are still peddling illusions: the insurgency is in its "last throes," says Dick Cheney. On the other, they still have moderates and even liberals intimidated: anyone who suggests that the United States will have to settle for something that falls far short of victory is accused of being unpatriotic.
[This continues my series of posts concerning the pre-Iraq-war actions of the US administration, aimed at increasing awareness of those activities, as part of the Big Brass Alliance (or BBA) and it's support of AfterDowningStreet.org. For more information from me, see my first posting on The Downing Street Memo: "Worth Remembering"]
Almost Right, Karl (BBA XII)
Karl almost got it right. He had nearly all the right words, just in the wrong order:
"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war."
— Karl Rove"Conservatives prepared for war and saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks as an opportunity."
— me
Yes, I'm also of the opinion that this is all a calculated ruse on Rove's part to attract attention towards him and away from further scrutiny of the allegations in the Downing Street Memo(s). I don't think it will work. My opinion, stated elsewhere, is that this administration is in its Last Throes.
[This continues my series of posts concerning the pre-Iraq-war actions of the US administration, aimed at increasing awareness of those activities, as part of the Big Brass Alliance (or BBA) and it's support of AfterDowningStreet.org. For more information from me, see my first posting on The Downing Street Memo: "Worth Remembering"]
Republican Insurgency: Last Throes? (BBA XI)
True, I am a self-avowed "America Hater" (I don't even have a magnetic "ribbon" of any color on the rear of my car) but, among the many events swirling about, I note the following:
The Downing-Street Memo story is still remarkably alive The administration's mouths all keep saying that the DSM is not a story Over 500,000 Americans think the DSM is a story Karl Rove announces that America-hating liberals didn't care about the events of 9/11, and want the Iraq war to fail Donald Rumsfeld keeps on with his "Iraqi insurgency in its last throes" lyric (sung to the tune of "Over the Rainbow") The President is taking his war-propaganda show on the road, hoping that none hear the intense lame-duck quacking sound following him about Condi would like to say something intelligent, but can't manage Conyers carries on the DSM investigation Waxman reports on shocking mishandling of funds for "reconstruction of Iraq" "Protect our Flag" amendments are again the summer fashion Republican hyenas seem to be snarling constantly at each other DeLay is keeping a remarkably low profile Gonzales wants to protect us from Internet porn Bolton is getting sulkier, but no one notices Religious fanatics, briefly thrilled and distracted by election resuls that had little to do with actual vote counts, are back to looking for gays to bash …
Is it just me, or is it looking like the Republican Insurgency is in its Last Throes?
[This continues my series of posts concerning the pre-Iraq-war actions of the US administration, aimed at increasing awareness of those activities, as part of the Big Brass Alliance (or BBA) and it's support of AfterDowningStreet.org. For more information from me, see my first posting on The Downing Street Memo: "Worth Remembering"]
When to Adjust Plans in Iraq
"Stay the course"?
GWEN IFILL: What is the Achilles heel here? Is the Achilles heel that we didn't study up enough on what to expect from these [Iraqi] paramilitary or as the Pentagon likes to call them, "thugs"? [i.e., the term two years ago for "the insurgency" which, as Donald Rumsfeld has assured us, is "in it's final throes".]
COLONEL SAMUEL GARDINER: I really — let me say it another way. It's about the plan. We're not losing [in Iraq]. We're still on top in this. But the notion is when there begins to be problems with plans, with the plan that you start with, the worst of military mistakes occur when you don't adjust, that when you take the plan you started with and keep going with it and don't adjust to it.
[From "War Plans", a segment on The Newshour, with Jim Lehrer, 26 March 2003.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Splenetics
Real Science is That Simple
Evolution rankles them because it contradicts the Bible which says God made man in his own image and describes specifically how God did it. But cosmology, the study of the Universe as a whole, is even worse for them, since it clearly contradicts the very first passages of that Bible. If you take the Bible literally, then you have to reject everything we understand about science, and vice-versa. Most Christians in the US do not take the Bible literally, but those who do are a very squeaky wheel indeed. A lot of legislators (like say, in Kansas) think that wheel should be oiled. To push the analogy further, I think the air should be let out of it.
Many people like to say that science and religion are compatible. I find that to be a monumentally naive statement. Perhaps science and some religions can be reconciled, but if your religion says that Jupiter is really made of pixie dust, or that the Earth is flat, or that 1+1 =3, then your religion is wrong. It’s really just that simple. The Universe knows what it’s doing, and the reality of it is what science seeks. If your religion cannot be reconciled with that reality, then your religion is wrong (and I would certainly say the same thing about any science which incorrectly describes reality). Perhaps not all religions contradict reality, but certainly creationism does, as does Intelligent Design.
The effect of this on young-Earth creationism is obvious. I will be very clear here: If people read a book and use it to interpret reality, and it contradicts the way the Universe works, then either that book or their interpretation of it is wrong. Again, it is really just that simple.
[Phil Plait, "The Fort Sumter of Creationist Astronomy?", Bad Astronomy Blog, 13 June 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science
Polling: "Margin of Error"
This is not a particularly recent poll, although the assertion is still true. But that's not the point.
The New York Times > Washington > New Poll Finds Bush Priorities Are Out of Step With Americans
The poll was conducted by telephone with 1,111 adults from Thursday through Monday. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.
Have you ever wondered where that "margin of error of + or – 3 % points" comes from, or why the weird number of people polled (which most people react to by thinking it's much too small)?
The simple answer is simple. Follow along:
- The sample size is 1,111
- The square root of 1,111 is 33.33
- 33.33 / 1111 = o.03, or 3%
The answer is that simple. In random sampling from a uniform population, the best estimate of how good the average result is will be
+/- [sqrt(N) / N] = [1/sqrt(N)],
where N is the number of [statistically independent] samples.
The inverse works too. If you are told that the error is E%, then
N = 1 / (E/100)2
is the original sample size.
There is no mystery about this relationship between error and sample size in polls, and it is not what determines careful or "scientific" polling. It is simply an unvarying, mathematical result giving the best guess you can make about the error in an average calculated from random (i.e., statistically independent) samples taken from the larger population that one is trying to characterize.
The trick, of course, is in that bit about taking "random samples". That's the part that polling organizations work very hard at: to convince their customers that they (and they alone among their competitors) know how to take very good, very nearly "random samples" from any given population — all Americans, all likely Republican voters, all women under 18 who watch MTV, all men over 50 who eat chocolate ice cream at least twice a week, whatever group the poll's sponsor is interested in.
All the work, or artistry (some would like to say "science") goes into selecting the samples so that they will be randomly drawn from the population of interest; none of it goes into calculating the margin of error.
So now, when you hear a margin of error quoted, you can amaze all your friends by revealing the exact number of people who were asked the question, and sound amazingly clever.
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, The Art of Conversation
No Recruiting!
Having read that New York Times Magazine feature story about the zealous anti-gay soldiers marching to protect the sanctity of "traditional" marriage (right here in my home-state of Maryland, no less), Stephanie Sandberg summarizes this way:
In sum: the anti-gay-marriage activists in the Times story say they are galvanized by fear of contagion. They claim that the civil rights argument is just a means for the gay community to push its “lifestyle” agenda – there’s a remarkable consensus that being gay is more choice than reality – onto the community where it will grow, virus-like, until youngsters and others are infected by it. This will result in more than sexual-identity chaos and all manner of crazy sex; there will be marriages of multiples, perhaps including animals.
Allow two men to marry today, and tomorrow: team bestiality.
[Stephanie Sandberg, "Girl in a Bubble", The Huffington Post, 22 June 2005.]
Hmm. So really it's fear of recruiting that's motivating them? Of course! I should have seen it before!
In that case, I have the perfect suggestion that — incredibly — will satisfy both the pro-equal-rights and anti-equal-rights crowd.
We need a Constitutional Amendment that says:
- Any two consenting adults may marry; and
- No person of any sexual orientation may recruit for their team.
We homos get the sanctity of marriage as a virtuous excuse to perk up our otherwise dull, long-term relationships, and straight people who lie awake at night worrying that marriage equality is the first step on the slippery slope towards a major recruiting drive will sleep easily knowing that recruiting is now un-Constitutional!
Of course, we homos know that the idea that anyone can be recruited into the "homosexual lifestyle" is ridiculous*, so that clause is meaningless to us, but it might have the salutory effect of getting all that straight-booty-based advertising off TV.
———-
*Ask any gay man. All of us have seen at least one of our friends — if not ourselves — driven to the limits of obsessive frustration by falling for a straight guy; if recruitment were even remotely possible, it would be happening all the time and these unfortunates wouldn't be as frustrated as they are.
In: All, Eureka!, Splenetics
363 Tons
I can feel pretty jaded, worn down even, by stupendous, jaw-dropping political revelations which arrive with such machine-gun speed that there's no time or energy left for one's jaw to drop.
But, this story managed it.
It begins with the release of a report from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and his Minority Office of the Committee on Government Reform called "U.S. Mismanaged Iraqi Funds"; he's about to hold hearings (scheduled for yesterday, but I haven't looked for the outcome yet). The report is about all those billions of dollars lost in Iraq by US officials in the early days of the occupation amidst confusion over administratin of the Oil for Food program, the Development Fund for Iraq ("DFI"), and Halliburton's egregious overcharging for importing gasoline into Iraq (>$200 million), among other comedies of graft and corruption.
We have heard about the misplaced, unaccounted-for billions that were part of the DFI. Amazing and jaw-dropping business as usual. Yeah, so familiar from Enron-type tales; one hardly thinks about the underhanded accounting done with a flick of the metaphorical pen to alter the books and hide another billion or two.
I read and realized that my mental image of the "accounting fraud" in Iraq was not quite right. What really made my jaw hit the floor was this statement:
In total, nearly $12 billion in cash was withdrawn from the DFI account at the Federal Reserve–the largest cash withdrawals in history. The Administration transferred from New York to Baghdad more than 281 million individual currency notes on 484 pallets weighing a total of 363 tons. This included more than 107 million $100 bills.
Can you believe that! 363 tons of cash! (Just guess how much — by weight! — ended up in Halliburton's corporate hands.)
That's incredible enough, but to top it off:
In late June 2004 � in the last week of its existence � the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority ordered the urgent delivery of more than $4 billion, including the largest one-day transfer in the history of the Federal Reserve — a single shipment of $2.4 billion in cash.
With so much cash arriving in Iraq, you might think that extensive precautions would be taken to account for the funds. But exactly the opposite happened: U.S. officials used virtually no financial controls to safeguard the Iraqi funds. No certified public accounting firm was hired to monitor disbursements, and auditors found that U.S. officials could not account for billions of dollars.
One former CPA official told us that Iraq was awash in $100 bills. One contractor received a $2 million cash payment in a duffel bag — other cash payments were made from the back of a pickup truck — and cash was stored in unguarded sacks in Iraqi ministry offices.
The records are so lacking that it�s impossible to know the full extent of the waste, fraud, and abuse that occurred during the period of U.S. control. But what we do know is alarming.
[…]
Alarming! It takes my breath away, it does.
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Splenetics
Constitutional Quiz
Which do you think is more important to protect by amending the US Constitution?
- "Traditional" Marriage
- The US Flag
- The Right to Vote
Hint: which one have you heard the most about?
Hussein a Gambler?
Be honest, now. Shortly after the US invaded Iraq, would you or would you not have been surprised to find Saddam Hussein playing slot machines at a casino in Connecticut?
A tribal court in Connecticut has imposed a $33,070 civil penalty on two New Hampshire men for allegedly attacking a man at the Foxwoods Casino because he looked like Saddam Hussein.
According to the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Court record, Michael McLane of Goffstown and Emanuel Papadakis, formerly of Merrimack and now living in Florida, pointed their fingers at Michael Barbosa and told him: "We're kicking your (expletive) over there and we'll do it here."
"Over there" was apparently a reference to Iraq. The alleged assault took place on March 22, 2003, shortly after the war began.
Barbosa, of Randolph, Mass., who has a thick mustache, "bears a remarkable resemblance to Saddam Hussein" and was wearing a beret in a style favored by the former Iraqi dictator, according to the tribal court judge, Edward B. O'Connell.
[Nancy Meersman, "NH man will pay for beating Saddam look-alike at Foxwoods", New Hampshire Union Leader, 9 June 2005 — noticed thanks to DemocraticUnderground.]
God's Envoy
Since George W. is not only a horse's ass, but vain and platitudinous to boot, it can hardly escape us that he is also serving (with all due inner incandescence) as God's chosen envoy for America.
[Norman Mailer, "God's Chosen Envoy for America", The Huffington Post, 21 June 2005.]
gettysburg.ppt
In the fullness of time, even I will finally trip over some otherblog's pointer to a must-see corner of the Web that everyone else has known about for years.* But finally, finally I did: Lincoln's "Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation", brought to us since 2000 by Peter Norvig.
I won't excerpt any of it, since 1) the presentation is predictably short — this is the Gettysburg Presentation, after all; and 2) there is such perfection in its gestalt that I refuse to violate it.
After viewing the presentation and pondering its message, don't neglect to read Mr. Norvig's fascinating essay, "The Making of the Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation", filled with fascinating tidbits like:
I wasn't a professional designer, so I thought I'd be in for a late night doing some serious research: in color science to find a truely garish color scheme; in typography to find the worst fonts; and in overall design to find a really bad layout. But fortunately for me, the labor-saving Autocontent Wizard took care of all this for me!
—–
*Another way I know I'm becoming an old fart: just today I read where someone had written "people have for years done …", where the author was referring to something that had started in 2002! "Years!" I thought. For me, "years" means, oh, since the early 80s at least.
In: All, Such Language!, The Art of Conversation
The War Machine
What was the purpose of this complex organization [the arrangement of conscription, military organization, civilian production, and transportation that was brought to bear to fight the first World War]? Officially it was supposed to save civilization, protect the rights of small democracies, demonstrate the superiority of Teutonic culture, beat the dirty Hun, beat the arrogant British, what have you. But the men caught in the middle came to glimpse a darker truth. "The War had become undisguisedly mechanical and inhuman," Siefgried Sassoon allows a fictional infantry officer to see. "What in earlier days had been drafts of volunteers were now droves of victims." Men on every front independently discovered their victimization. Awareness intensified as the war dragged on. In Russia it exploded in reolution. In Germany it motivated desertions and surrenders. Among the French it led to mutinies in the front lines. Among the Biritish it fostered malingering.
Whatever its otstensible purpose, the end result of the complex organization that was the efficient software of the Great War was the manufacture of corpses. This essentially industrial operation was fantasized by the generals as a "strategy of attrition." The British tried to kill Germans, the Germans tried to kill Bristish and French and so on, a "strategy" so familiar by now that it almost sounds normal. It was not normal in Europe before 1914 and no one in authority expected it to evolve, despite the pioneering lessons of the American Civil War. Once the trenches were in place, the long grave already dug (John Masefield's bitterly ironic phrase), then the war stalemated and death-making overwhelmed any rational response. "The war machine," concludes Elliot, "rooted in law, organization, production, movement, science, technical ingenuity, with its product of six thousand deaths a day over a period of 1,500 days, was the permanent and realistic factor, impervious to fantasy, only slightly altered by human variation."
[Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1986), pp. 102–103.]
Einstein the anti-German
"Antisemitism is strong here and political reaction is violent," Albert Einstein wrote Paul Ehrenfest from Berlin in December 1919. The letter coincides with Einstein's discovery by the popular press, the beginning of his years of internatinal celebrity. "A new figure in world history," the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung described him under a cover photograph on December 14, "…whose investigations signify a complete revision of our concepts of nature, and are on a par with the insights of a Copernicus, a Kepler, a Newton." Immediately the anti-Semites and fascists set to work on him. [p. 169]
[…]
He [Einstein] was challenged more seriously the following August by an organization assembled under obscure leadership and extravagant but clandestine financing that called itself the Committee of German Scientists for the Preservation of Pure Scholarship. The 1905 Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard, seeing relativity hailed and Einstein come to fame, retreated into a vindictive anti-Semitism and lent his respectability to the Committee, which attacked relativity theory as a Jewish corruption and Einstein as a tasteless self-promoter. The organization held a well-attended public meeting in Belin's Philharmonic Hall on August 20. Einstein went to listen — one speaker, as Leopold Infeld recalled, "said that uproar about the theory of relativity was hostile to the German spirit" — and stayed to scorn the crackpot talk with laughter and satiric applause.
The criticism nevertheless stung. Einstein mistakenly thought the majority of his German colleagues subscribed to it. [p. 170]
[Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1986).]
Theatre of the Absurd
Q Right. What is the evidence that the insurgency is in its last throes?
McCLELLAN: I think I just explained to you the desperation of terrorists and their tactics.
Q What's the evidence on the ground that it's being extinguished?
McCLELLAN: Terry, we're making great progress to defeat the terrorist and regime elements. You're seeing Iraqis now playing more of a role in addressing the security threats that they face. They're working side by side with our coalition forces. They're working on their own. There are a lot of special forces in Iraq that are taking the battle to the enemy in Iraq. And so this is a period when they are in a desperate mode.
Q Well, I'm just wondering what the metric is for measuring the defeat of the insurgency.
McCLELLAN: Well, you can go back and look at the Vice President's remarks. I think he talked about it.
Q Yes. Is there any idea how long a 'last throe' lasts for?
McCLELLAN: Go ahead, Steve….
From "Terry Moran vs. Scott McClellan on 'Last Throes' of Insurgency in Iraq", Editor & Publisher, 16 June 2005. They introduced their longer excerpt from the press-briefing transcript this way:
After McClellan outlined the president's plans, leading up to a key June 28th speech, ABC correspondent Terry Moran asked a pointed question, which referred back to an assessment recently made by Vice President Dick Cheney [that the Iraqi insurgency was in its "last throes"].