November 2008
75 posts
Hierarchies of Moral Turpitude Different Overseas
The world’s most comprehensive legalized heroin program became permanent Sunday with overwhelming approval from Swiss voters who simultaneously rejected the decriminalization of marijuana. (AP via HuffPo)
“The last thing that men will realize about anything is that it is inanimate.”
– The World Set Free, H.G. Wells
'World only cares about pirates': Somali man says... →
I guess we’re all complicit in this.
:-(
Chris Matthews Senate Run Confirmed: Report →
!
So, I saw this on HuffPo and then went to the story to discover that it was being broken by 538.
FiveThirtyEight.com: Politics Done Right: Obama's... →
(via absalomabsalom)
What’s funny about this is how he made a big weird graph thing out of facts because he didn’t have any numbers or whatever. I guess his plan is to be a political blogger but keep doing things that give the impression that he is using science and is thus obviously always right (Olbermann, who it seems is easiest to fool in this fashion, has cited him thusly in the...
Howard Wolfson:
By the end of the campaign, I was seeing the Drudge siren in my sleep. As people in politics know all too well, Matt Drudge, the Internet provocateur who runs the Drudge Report Web site, posts a flashing siren whenever he wants to alert readers to major campaign news or rumors. The siren haunted my dreams and was always in the corner of my eye — except when it was in plain sight,...
Technocracy Incorporated →
The want to make biopower official I guess? Also, talk about immanentizing the eschaton!
...and we're back!
darkwingdach:
My recent tumble logs have been, like my recent meals, unoriginal.
I feel like this isn’t the first time you’ve tried to conflate such things. I can’t seem to recall specific cases though.
This is why I watch the Terminator television...
NYT:
Robot drones, mine detectors and sensing devices are already common on the battlefield but are controlled by humans. Many of the drones in Iraq and Afghanistan are operated from a command post in Nevada. Dr. Arkin is talking about true robots operating autonomously, on their own.
He and others say that the technology to make lethal autonomous robots is inexpensive and proliferating, and...
no, I won't stop quoting from Interfluidity
keyholez:
The only instrument in wide use more substantatively opaque than common stock is fiat money. (#)
!
Best phrases:
“Immanentize the eschaton” (wiki)
Did everyone else know this was a thing that people said/wrote? It’s amazing.
“He skateboards and snowboards and exudes a sort of hipster-wonkiness, using...”
– The Economist, on Geithner.
Oh, Economist. When will you learn?
GMF WATCH: Poverty, Pension Fears Drive Japan's... →
via GG (Gossip Girl?)
“There weren’t many people around. They were all smelly, they were all...”
– Scientist person on the television, regarding the interbreeding of humans and Neanderthals.
I really don't know how to feel about this...
keyholez:
Nerd Bird Shirt Monkeys, ninjas, pirates, zombies, robots: all have had their moment in the sun. Up next is ghosts — but right after that is nerds. And birds, of course, are eternal. Get ahead of the game with this trendsetting garm, available here and nowhere else.
‘
Do they mean…
This, too, sometimes gives me pause to think: that homo sapiens has only been without a sibling human species for some 25,000 years, whereas we shared the other with other human species for a period of not less than 160,000 years and possibly some 300,000 years. More time passed with more than one human species than without. And, even stranger to me — we forgot all about our sibling species until...
derrinyet:
“surging” vs. “dwelling”
I bet we could dwell our way our of some of these wars we’ve got going on.
Here are some games for us to play!
keyholez:
fiatluxemburg:
Genderanalyzer
Typeanalyzer
Kind of amazing to think about the cylicality of blog internet-cultural evolution here — this is exactly the sort of thing people would transmit via chain email and AOL profiles in the olden days…
Ah, but this seems to have been strategicly disseminated by a swedish “blog psychographic analysis” (blogganalys, as they call...
Here are some games for us to play!
Genderanalyzer
Typeanalyzer
Yes, I found out about these from “Sara K.” Funny thing: the typeanalyzer one uses the widely mocked/discredited but somewhat hilarious Myers-Briggs system.
Anyway, they guess that tumblr “is written by a man (53%), however it’s quite gender neutral.” Also that I’m a “mechanic.”
But more specifically I’m an...
Yes,
Subtle and seemingly vain changes have been made. There is a good reason for this, I promise.
But dog years are shorter than human years...
Biden’s birthday is Thursday, but Obama surprised his No. 2 after their weekly lunch Wednesday at the transition office in Chicago. According to staff, Obama presented Biden—a Delaware senator with decades of foreign policy experience—with a dozen cupcakes decorated with candles and teased, “You’re 12 years old!”
Staff reported that Biden, ever astute in the...
A Burmese blogger was sentenced to 20 years and six months in prison for crimes against public tranquility and video and electronics laws offenses. Nay Myo Kyaw, who writes under the alias Nay Phone Latt, was arrested as part of a crackdown on dissidents. The lawyer who represented Nay Phone Latt and poet Saw Wai, who was sentenced to two years in prison for publishing a love poem that also...
That "project" I allegedly have →
“Consciousness is not something that happens in us. It is something we do.”
– Obvi, but still. Pretty good discussion at Edge.
keyholez:
When’s the last time you went without fresh ATP?
A Thousand Plateaus? All Tomorrow’s Parties? (Novel, song, festival?) Adenosine triphosphate? (Endogenous, sublingual, otherwise?)
PLEASE SPECIFY!
absalomabsalom:
“Brown clouds” made up of toxic chemicals are blotting out the sun in large parts of Asia, a U.N. report said. (NYT)
WASHINGTON — President-elect Obama has hired former Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sam Nunn to help shepherd his Pentagon transition, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.
Nunn, a former Georgia senator and veteran Democratic defense adviser, was once rumored as a potential running mate for Obama. Transition spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said Nunn will perform “an informal senior adviser...
Bush said he plans to return to Texas after he leaves office January 20 and “may write a book” but otherwise has few plans. “No doubt I’m heading straight home. I miss Texas; I love Texas; I’ve got a lot of friends in Texas.
“I’ll probably get back and take a deep breath,” he said.
Bush said he has begun to think about an outline for the book.
...
“I remember the conversation I had with my predecessor Bill Clinton. As a matter...”
– #43
Do these people really just call each other like that?
Is Bush basically just rubbing it in here?
Ken Layne is going to be furious
Because of plunging home values, almost 90 percent of homeowners here owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth, according to figures released Monday. That is the highest percentage in the country. The average homeowner in Mountain House is “underwater,” as it is known, by $122,000. (NYT)
Is there any relationship between “underwater” and “in the tank”?
“Investment is something we do in the real world. Financial claims are only...”
– Interfluidity, from just before what keyholez posted.
Internet SECRETS
Joe Trippi, the unorthodox political genius who created the Dean Internet juggernaut, often said that if the Dean campaign was like the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, then Obama was the Apollo program—in other words, in one cycle skipping over commercial aviation, jet travel and supersonic transport to go straight to the moon. (Asked about this analogy, Rospars [director of Obama’s New...