palin-stalking media offended at the logical consequences of their own actions

maybe that's because the reporters are acting like paparazzi.

this isn't real news, it's just a famous person is driving around the country in an bus. there's no reason to cover it at all. but if you're going to shadow her every move just because she's famous, don't get offended when you get treated like the lowest form of life on the journalistic food chain.

(via memeorandum)

он төрт

hey, my marriage turns 14 today! i can't come up with anything clever to say about the number 14 this year. i didn't post anything about #13 last year. due to circumstances beyond our control, mrs. noz and i had to spend that one apart. also i was too busy sitting naked in a hot room with strangers while getting slapped on the back with some wet leaves that day to post.

this year, i don't have to suddenly flee the country. so i should be able to actually spend time with mrs. noz, even if we're both feeling pretty sick. yay being married to mrs. noz!!!

that is all.

(for history buffs: 13 12 11 10 9 8 7...)

kazdress

one of the common questions i get about kazakhstan is how women dress there. because it ends with "-stan" a lot of people assume that the women dress conservatively. maybe they imagine burqas, or maybe just long skirts and headscarves. in fact, it's completely the opposite. women, especially young women, tend to dress a lot more provocatively there than they do here. if you took the average 20-something female university student in her usual clothes and transplanted her to the u.s., people might mistake her for a prostitute.

when i first arrived in kaz, i didn't have the guts to take photos of all the short skirts, knee-high high-heeled boots and leopard-skin fabrics. and after a few weeks, i got used to it and stopped noticing (except when women tried to walk on the ice in their heels, that never got old!) but susan and paul, peace corps volunteers in northern kazakhstan posted some pictures. so now when people ask i can just send them to that post.

(via KZblog)

duff gardens hurrah!

ugh

how bad is the current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls?

this bad.

with the GOP presidential field filled with weak candidates, it's too inviting for a delusional wingnut like newt and rudy to resist.

there can be only one

i guess there's some kind of rule that only one crazy demagoguing woman can compete for the republican presidential nomination at a time.

there doesn't seem to be any limit on the number of crazy demagoguing men.

...okay so he didn't really sign it

as much as i did not want the president to sign the patriot act extension, i don't have any objection to the use of the autopen to sign a bill. the whole point of signing the bill is to memorialize the president's agreement. provided the president authorizes the autopen to be used, it does just that.

the legal basis for the use of the autopen is a 2005 legal memorandum, which suggests that this isn't the first time that a bill has been autopenned into law. has this been reported before for other bills?

(via memeorandum)

meet the new boss

obama signs patriot act extension. no amendments were made to the act.

chinese prisoners forced to play world of warcraft

the newest thing in prison labor.

appropriating

i was just notified that someone added one of my photos to the appropriate uzbekistan gallery on flickr. there doesn't seem to be an inappropriate uzbekistan gallery, which is a pity.

төрт

kazakhstan is sending four (individual) troops to afghanistan.

we used to see more of these small token forces in the early bush years, but they're still happening now. i don't think anyone believes the four kazakhs will make any difference in the war effort there. the costs to kazakhstan is relatively small, and it gets goodwill from the u.s. and other NATO members for helping out. meanwhile NATO and the u.s. get to pretend their coalition is a bit broader. the "coalition of the willing" lists have traditionally listed states, not people, which creates the illusion that kazakhstan is contributing as much as the UK.

so it's win-win for everyone! well, except for those four kazakh soldiers. and arguably the afghans.

the war powers act is dead

i don't think there is any serious question that president obama has violated the war powers act. the act requires the president to withdraw u.s. forces from an armed conflict within 60 days unless congress passes an authorization to use force or a formal declaration of war, though the president can get an additional 30 days to give time to withdraw the troops. the 60 days have passed since american involvement in libya commenced and congress has not given any approval. (this is why he is ignoring the act, by the way. the M.O. of most presidents is to say the act is unconstitutional but then hedge their bets by quietly complying with it)

the act was passed over president nixon's veto and ever since there have been serious questions whether it is constitutional, with every president since it was enacted claiming that it is not. but the bottom line is this is the kind of issue that the courts will never touch, which means the only penalty for violating the act is the potential political cost of public outrage.

for almost four decades no one has had any idea how great of of a cost that would be. that is, until now. the cost is zero. because obama will pay no political price for this, future presidents are sure to completely ignore the act. the act might remain on the books but it is effectively dead.

thought experiment made real

for years i have wondered what would happen if egypt simply stopped cooperating with the israeli blockade of gaza. i guess i'm about to find out.

thanks paul!

thanks to paul ryan, the democrats have now taken a congressional district that was long seen as a GOP stronghold. the only real question now is whether the democrats will figure that that this is something they should not fuck up.

the backstabbing party vs. the party of witch hunts

the contrast between these two stories is a nice illustration of a major difference between the republican and democratic party right now.

geek culture

(click to embiggen)

the above comic came out this week. and yet it would make no sense at all unless you happen to know the plot of a television episode that aired 20 years ago.

laying down his cards

i'm really curious to see what bibi will say to congress today. every peace proposal in the past twenty years have used the 1967 borders as the starting point. but now that netanyahu and his supporters have  declared that approach to be akin to the holocaust, so what can his map possibly look like?

i figure there are two ways he can go:

(a) he can propose some non-continuous system of bantustans, guaranteeing that he goes down in history as his generation's PW botha, or

(b) he won't give any indication of what his map will look like.  instead he will just give the usual laundry list of all the reasons that the palestinians suck and can't be trusted without providing even a pretend outline for what a palestinian state would look like.

at this point i'm betting (a). but never underestimate a politician's ability to promise to give a speech on something and then to deliver one long dodge instead.

see also josh marshall.

things blowing up

one week ago, a suicide bomber attacked a KNB (the kazakhstani successor to the KGB) office in aktobe. authorities attributed the blast to organized crime, rather than religious extremism. but subsequent stories about the bomber made it less clear. but still, with just one incident and no one claiming responsibility, you couldn't really say whether the aktobe bombing was a lone nutjob or part of something bigger.

this morning a car bomb went off in front of a KNB office in astana. the explosion occurred at 3:30am, not a time that was likely to harm a lot of people. in fact, the only casualties were the two people in the car. KZBlog wonders if it wasn't just a screw up by KNB agents.

so what is the deal? i guess now we have a pattern, two explosions near different KNB offices. but beyond that i don't know what this means other than things are blowing up in kazakhstan (so far at least) in cities that i have been to.

poof!

i guess we can probably rule out the possibility that he was raptured. but if he was, that's a god who no one will be happy with.

ready or not...

(HT: MatthewB)

now he only eats guitars

yikes! just as you were gearing up for some good post-rapture looting tomorrow, it turns out that the rapture will actually start tonight:

The end of the world will be at exactly 6 p.m. on May 21, 2011, says Camping, who along with his organization, Family Radio, are behind those billboards across the country forecasting the Rapture this Saturday. The Rapture, the Last Days, Armageddon and the Final Days of Judgment are all interchangeable. It's when God will destroy the Earth to show his love for humanity.

Is that Eastern Standard or Pacific Standard Time?

Neither, says Camping, whom I interviewed recently for my online news show TYT Now. The Rapture is at 6 p.m. on May 21, 2011, where ever it's 6 p.m. first, with the "fantastically big" world-ending event taking place on a time zone by time zone basis.

That means we can expect the Rapture to start when it hits 6 p.m. at the International Dateline at 180 Longitude -- roughly the between Pago Pago, American Samoa, and Nuku'alofa, Tonga. We'll know it's Judgment Day because there will be an earthquake of previously unprecedented magnitude, Camping predicts.

but if the rapture comes on a time zone by time zone basis, there are going to be some pretty weird jumps in the rapture's progress, especially in the middle of asia. the time zones skirt around borders for political reasons. the soviet union packed a whole bunch of extra time zones into siberia as a propaganda move to make it an 11 time zone empire. the time zone lines are not always nice equal slices along the earth's longitude lines.

(click to embiggen)

as the rapture progresses from east to west across asia, it will move unevenly, subject to the whims of local politics as much as the relative position of the earth and sun. all of china, for example, is on beijing time, even though that country is nearly as large as the continental united states. when you cross the border between china and pakistan, you move from GMT+8 to GMT+5, a three hour difference. so as soon as the rapture hits the easternmost bit of china, it will simultaneously hit all of china. but if you step over the border to pakistan just before it hit, you could rest easy for three whole hours right next to the rapturing across the border.

and what about daylights savings time? countries away from the equator tend to have it, whereas tropical countries tend not to. countries that have sprung forward will be raptured one hour earlier than countries that have not.

on the other hand daylight savings time is a product of legislation. if the rapture follows daylight savings time, doesn't that give us a loophole to escape judgment day? all the u.s. would have to do is pass a quick bill through congress resetting the time zone for the entire u.s. to be GMT+10 (eastern australia time) effective immediately. if congress passes the bill and president obama waits to sign it until 5:30pm eastern daylight time on May 21st, it would instantly become 7:30am on May 22, 2011, skipping over the rapture entirely. a few days later, when we're sure the coast is clear, congress could pass a new bill putting our old time system back. if the local time never hits 6pm on may 21, 2011, we might be okay.

that's assuming the bill doesn't get filibustered by the GOP. with their evangelical base, they might prefer the rapture.

ticket to ride on the ipad

just a follow-up to my ipad bleg from last week. the ticket to ride app is out, and it's really good. i ended up getting all of the expansions because they are on sale this week. i'm not sure if anyone reading this is both an ipad owner¹ and a boardgame geek, but i highly recommend this one if you are.

--------------------
1-i don't think it would work on the small screens of an ipod touch or iphone.

what really happened

OMG the president of the united stated has said publicly what has been u.s. policy for at least the past 12 years!!!! clearly this calls for a complete freak out. let's compare recognizing the only borders that the u.s. has ever recognized to auschwitz. let's pull out that old trope about "indefensible borders" notwithstanding the historical fact that they were successfully defended.

as far as i'm concerned, the big news from obama's speech today is that he came out against the unilerateral declaration of a palestinian state in the general assembly. in that he did israel a huge favor. but many of the the so-called supporters of israel are too busy flipping their lid to notice.

with marchenko, everybody wins!

that alleged rapist dude resigned, which means we need a new head honcho for the IMF. exciting!

the position has always been held by a european, which is why the europeans think the new honcho should be a european.but for that same reason, a lot of non-europeans think new honcho should be a non-european. the europeans reply by noting that their continent is all screwed up with that debt crisis they made, so there should be a european honcho because only a european knows how to bail out a failing european economy. the non-europeans counter sarcastically, "yeah, that's why the IMF was led by an argentinian in the 1990s."

and so we're at a stalemate. or are we? surely there's a compromise. maybe both sides can get what they want. there are countries out there that are both european and non-european at the same time. several, in fact. and someone from one of them is already being floated as a possible successor to alleged rapist dude! yes, the ex-soviet states are backing grigory marchenko, current head of kazakhstan's central bank. and being from kazakhstan, he can claim to be both european and not-european. it's like a special national superpower.

"but wait, kazakhstan is in europe?" you ask. yes, part of it is. check out this map:

see that blue bit in the upper left? (the one with all the arrows pointing at it?) that part is in geographic europe. here's the deal:

there are a lot of definitions of "europe", mostly because it's not really a continent. in reality it's just the far western bit of the asian land mass that is the home to people who wanted to pretend they were different from those savages in the rest of asia. because they drew the maps and labeled the continents, they got their europe. after using the arbitrary label system for a while, they were eventually pinned down and forced to make up a definition of the purported continent that related to geographic landmarks. and so they made the eastern border of europe to be first the ural mountains, and then the ural river as you go south and the mountains peter out, until the river dumps into the caspian sea. everything east of the ural mountains and ural river is asia and everything west of it is europe. the ural river flows south from the ural mountains in russia and then cuts through the northwest corner of kazakhstan before it reaches the caspian sea at atyrau. which means that bit of kazakhstan, comprised of about half of west kazakhstan oblast and half of atyrau oblast, is by definition in europe. and that means that kazakhstan is a european country. so clearly everyone will be happy with marchenko, right?

(tune in for our next exciting episode where i show that christine lagarde is really south american)

غرين

watching noz jr. pick up language, i'm surprised to see that the ghayn sound from arabic (غ/gh) is easier for him to pronounce than the hard-G in english. he currently pronounces the word "green" like "غرين"/"ghreen". it's strange because the ghayn sound was one of the more difficult sounds for english speakers learning arabic. so to me, a native english speaker, it seems like it should be harder than an english hard G. it's hard to get past that native language bias, so it still is difficult for me to really believe that a gh sound is inherently easier than a G.

on the other hand, noz jr. didn't come to us completely as a blank slate. though he wasn't talking much when we got custody, he had been exposed to kazakh. kazakh has both the gh sound and the hard g sound (Ғ and Г in the kazakh alphabet). so maybe noz jr's use of the "gh" sound is particular to his own personal history.

i've tried to ask a few other parents about it, but most of them don't know what the gh sound is. even if i make the sound for them, if they didn't know the sound before they might not have taken note of it when their kid made it. (i guess i could ask GW. GW, are you reading this?)

not everyone needs to be on twitter

why is the secret service tweeting at all?

newtspeak

first gingrich explained that quoting him accurately would be "inaccurate".

then he said that remembering the positions he has taken (as recently as last sunday) is "amnesia".

why are they doing this?

apparently it wasn't enough for newt gingrich to just claim his criticism of the ryan plan was "taken out of context". he also had to call st. ryan and personally apologize for being so horrible as to publicly disagree with ryan's remarkably unpopular plan. will that be enough to save newt? probably not. if you want to be the GOP nominee there are lines you just can't cross. a mere phone call might not be sufficient penance. perhaps he should try self-flagellation next.

this whole entertaining spectacle reminds me of what marindenver asked yesterday:

And if anyone has any insights on why the Rethugs are so determined to cling to and defend a proposal that has about a snowflake’s chance in hell of passing AND antagonizes their constituents at the same time, feel free to share those here too. I’m just gaping at them with wonder.

i can't say i understand what they're trying to do here.

in which i resume my annual tradition of torturing myself

my annual decaffeination begins today! what am i talking about? i could explain, but i feel like i've already written about it before. (see 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009. i skipped 2010 because i figured the kazakh court system was already torturing me enough)

it looks like i've already said all there is to say about this tradition of mine. this is the first time i've started while i was already feeling sick. so there might be some ambiguity over the cause of the pounding headache this year.

new rule

politicians should not be allowed to claim their words were "taken out of context" without making them identify the proper context and explain how pulling the quote out of context changed the original meaning of what he/she said.

the whole reason that they all claim they were taken out of context is because no one follows up for an explanation. "it was taken out of context" becomes the explanation, even though it doesn't explain anything. that gives politicians a huge incentive to use it every time they want to disavow a prior pronouncement without accepting responsibility for it.

an idea

if the democrats really want to preserve medicare, they should just transfer its administration to the department of defense. once they put it under the DOD it will never be threatened with cuts again.

i can't think of anything

nate silver writes:

Mike Huckabee’s decision not to run for president in 2012 may be the most consequential event of the Republican primary campaign so far.

what's the second most consequential event of the republican primary campaign so far?

too cowardly to be smart or interesting

well that didn't last long.

iran ate my homework!

everything that the IDF doesn't like must be iran's fault. because before the iranian revolution, palestinians didn't have any issues with israel.

gingrich does something strategically smart and interesting

on a purely strategic level, it's interesting that newt gingrich is attaching the ryan plan. pretty much all the other major candidates and most GOP members of congress are on the record endorsing it. since then it has become evident that the medicare phase-out plan is enormously unpopular with the american people.

as i've said before, i don't think newt will win the GOP primary, but this is a way for him to distinguish himself from the pack. and because newt gets media attention, his stance is going to complicate the GOP's attempt to reboot its ryan plan rollout this week.

next they'll tell us they found a half-eaten ham sandwich on his kitchen table

i haven't been online much earlier today, but surely i'm not the only one who wonders whether this is just something cooked up by u.s. intelligence agencies to undermine the cult of bin laden? we'll never know for sure, but u.s. intelligence agencies have a history of this kind of thing. plus, anything that bin laden got from the outside world had to be delivered by a courier. so he would have had to had to have had his courier get the porn for him. considering that the courier's loyalty was based on the perception that bin laden was a pious muslim, that would have been a major risk to ask him to do something like that for him.

on the other hand, it could be true. i try not to resort to conspiracy theories when run-of-the-mill human behavior is also an available explanation. but because it involves both sex and hypocrisy, just seems like the kind of leak tailor-made to spread both quickly and widely.

UPDATE: no, i'm not the only one. (update links via memeorandum)

rubber hose apocrypha

a few of my recent posts (e.g.) seem to have disappeared. it sounds like blogger was having technical issues earlier today. so maybe they will magically reappear later, or maybe they are gone forever.

mitt

the most striking thing about mitt romney (well, aside from the fact that he seems so willing to jettison any position for political expediency, and also the fact that the voters don't seem to ever like him no matter how many times he is deemed to be the "front runner") is that he is one of the rare examples of a national republican politician who actually understands substantive points about health care policy. of course, all that will do is further doom his chances in the GOP primary.

flip-flops in the modern age

it's a lot easier now to catch politicians flip-flopping than it used to be. a simple google search can often dig up what politicians have said about issues in the past and a lot of times it's even possible to find video of those prior statements. i would have thought that this new era would have kept politicians more in line. now that it's so easy to look up their previous pronouncements about stuff, it seems logical that they would be more careful when they switched positions, or at least come up with a coherent explanation for their change of heart before they do.

but that hasn't happened at all. in fact, flip-flopping has become a defining characteristic of the modern GOP, the party that came up with the individual mandate for health coverage, cap-and-trade to regulate pollutants, and numerous other issues that the national party is now almost uniformly against. this goes way beyond mitt romney. two months ago, newt gingrich completely reversed himself on whether he supported u.s. military intervention in libya over the course of 16 days. all but two of the GOP freshman class in the house (i.e. everyone except david mckinley and denny rehberg) recently voted to cut medicare even though many of those freshman got elected by running advertisements accusing the democrats of voting to cut medicare six months previously.

why isn't there a huge incentive for politicians to police their own consistency? it's almost like complete reversals have become so common that most of the time they happen they are not even viewed as newsworthy. but why not? jon stewart thrives on this stuff, but for the most part politicians seem to be getting away with it. and yet with records like these their opposition's commercials practically write themselves.

the newt kid on the block

the weirdest thing about gingrich's presidential campaign is that he will probably be treated as one of the top-tier candidates. he's going to get a lot more coverage than people like herman cain and yet newt probably has about the same shot of ever being president as herman or the other second stringers.

it used to be a total mystery to me how the press decided which candidates were in the top-tier and which were not. i've since become convinced the distinction depends on two things: (1) whether the pundit class has declared the candidate to be "crazy" or a "loser" yet (see e.g. dennis kucinich), and (2) whether the candidate is already in the establishment media's rolodex. if the answer to those questions are "no" and "yes", then we have a top-tier candidate.

newt is definitely a yes to question #2. i can't figure out why he isn't be a "yes" to question #1.

---------------------------------------
ASIDE: just after i wrote this post i noticed that the blogger spell checker recognizes "Gingrich" but not "Kucinich". just throwing that out there.

hold the G

so what if the gulf cooperation council might expand to include countries located nowhere near the gulf? italy was one of the founding members of NATO and it doesn't border the north atlantic. turkey and greece were admitted to NATO in 1952, bringing the alliance even further away from that ocean. these days 16 of the 28 members of NATO aren't on the NA. once you get into the partnership for peace countries, you're well into central asia.

so the GCC wouldn't even have to change its name if it admitted jordan and morocco. but they really want to shed their geographical heritage, i guess it could be the council of monarchies that hate iran (CMHI? COMTHI?). if israel got a king, i wonder if they would let it join.

for sale university

FSU has completely destroyed its credibility as an academic institution. and for only $1.5 million!


UPDATE (3/2/18): Thanks to Melissa from Geekwrapped the first link in this post has been updated. the old Tampa Bay Times article was no longer at that location. Geekwrapped had an archived version.

callista bisek should hope she never gets sick

i usually don't judge politicians for what they do in their personal life. that's because i don't think what they do in private is relevant to whether they will make the right decisions in office. but i have a hard time not thinking that newt gingrich is a repulsive human being for how he has treated his former wives.

he divorced wife #1 while she was in the hospital recovering from surgery to remove her uterine cancer. he divorced wife #2 just after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. it's easy to assume that male politicians who keep trading in their wives for younger women are misogynist. but newt also seems to have issues with people who are fighting serious illnesses.

u.s. strategy: make bin laden look pathetic

because no one wants their martyr to be a guy who dyes his beard just to impress the mujahideen.

it would have been better if they had done it in elvish

the NYT does the nerdiest correction ever:

(via SM on FB)

ipad boardgame geek bleg

i'm probably asking at the wrong place, but can anyone out there recommend any strategy boardgame app for the ipad/iphone? i see there is a settlers of catan app (that costs money and doesn't have great reviews). there's also one for tikal, a game i have played but don't know very well. carcassonne has a fairly well-reviewed app, but it's pretty overpriced. as far as i can tell puerto rico and ticket to ride don't exist yet in app form. (UPDATE: P.R. is coming!) tigris & euphrates seems to be in the works, but isn't out yet. hansa doesn't have an app either (this isn't it). i'm assume there's no reasonable chance of ever finding a тоғыз құмалақ app (but i'd be happy to be wrong!)

those are the games that i thought of looking for. there are probably a lot of others that i didn't occur to me when i was searching. of course, i'm happy to try a good strategy game that i haven't played before. i downloaded the app for reiner knizia's money!, but i haven't figured out the rules yet.

ура!

hey, it's victory day. where's my freakin' parade?

mother's day

each year i'm surprised by how seriously people seem to take this hallmark holiday. not that there's anything wrong with celebrating one's mother or the mothers in one's life. i guess that's the secret to gaining holiday legitimacy: pick a subject matter that makes it impossible for anyone to talk trash about the day without looking like a total asshole.

by the way, the wiki page of anna jarvis, the mother of mother's day in the u.s. is pretty interesting. after campaigning to have mother's day made an official holiday, she ended her life campaigning against the holiday after witnessing its hallmarkification (yes, that's a word. i just used it. you just understood it. therefore, a word). also, she's buried in a cemetery that i have driven by a million times. small world.

talking turkey

issandr el amrani writes what i was thinking when i read anthony shadid's article in the NYT a few days ago. the new common wisdom that turkey has lost its groove in the face of the arab spring seems to assume that unless a country gets every decision exactly right, it is not getting anything right.

my view is that every state is constantly making numerous decisions in its diplomatic dealings and is never getting everything 100% right or wrong. instead, countries are always getting some stuff right, some stuff wrong, and a whole bunch of stuff that isn't clearly one or the other. the country is doing well if the stuff it does right outweighs the stuff it does wrong wrong, and the unclear stuff isn't so huge and unclear as to muddle up all of its points in the "stuff right" column.

in turkey's case, not supporting the libyan rebels right off the bat is being presented as a gaffe. but in my view, that decision is solidly in the "stuff that isn't clear one way or other" pile. it's the same with turkey's reluctance to criticize the assad regime in syria. the struggle over the future of libya and syria aren't over yet. how successfully states states manage to navigate those crises depends upon what happens when those crises ends. it just seems really premature to rule turkish policy a failure on those issues at this point. you might disagree with the country's decisions, but it's too early to say whether the decisions it made will serve turkish interests in the end.

god bless america?

i just noticed on my work calendar that may 21, 2011 is armed forces day.

delicious soup from the bones of the poor

my favorite part is the menu options for the subject line under the "grovel" link. as susie says, this is what happens when you don't buy up all the plausible domain names!

UPDATE (5/6/11): the atlantic follows the trail and believes the site is the work of ian murphy, the guy most famous for punking WI governor scott walker by pretending to be david koch. murphy happens to be running against jane corwin as the green party candidate. murphy's own campaign site is also pretty entertaining.

the ISI is a big loser in this

i think this is far more embarrassing to the ISI, pakistan's intelligence agency, than the pakistani army. sure, bin laden ended up being in a compound right next to the army's military academy ("pakistan's west point"). but intelligence agencies, not the military, build their credibility almost entirely on their ability to know things.

i've long suspected that intelligence agencies are a lot less competent and more fallable than their reputation makes them out to be. many of the CIA and mossad's most spectacular successes only exist in conspiracy theorists' imagination, but that buzz is part of what makes them effective. every intelligence agency tries to cultivate its own hype. the only reason that intelligence agencies are respected is because they are believed to be effective. it's what keeps the funding flowing.

but when the most wanted man in the world, someone who the ISI claims it was looking for almost ten years, turns out to be hiding in the non-lawless part of pakistan, it really just leaves two possible conclusions: either the ISI was protecting bin laden, or the ISI isn't really as good as it makes itself out to be.

first blog post via ipad

that is all.

it's not just mitt romney who has a consistency problem on health care

slowly the press is noticing that paul ryan's plan includes what is essentially a crappier version of obamacare for seniors. remember, almost every republican in the house voted for this plan, proving either that almost the entire GOP house caucus does not know what the ryan plan actually says, or they don't really believe their own constitutional argument.

every single republican in the house except walter jones, david mckinley, ron paul and denny rehberg voted in favor of an individual mandate for health insurance. that fact can't be repeated enough.

where in the world is mrs. bin laden?

one thing that occurred to me when i wrote this post: where is that wife of bin laden who was shot in the leg? the current story is that she survived, does that mean she was captured? was anyone else taken alive from the operation? if so, where are they now?

remember the "black sites" are supposedly closed, guantanamo is not accepting any new detainees. so where could they be?

UPDATE: according to al-arabiyya, two women and six children who were taken out of bin laden's compound are currently in a hospital in rawalpindi and are in pakistani, not american, custody. according to the article u.s. troops took four bodies with them and no prisoners. one of those two women is said to be one of bin laden's wives. because the woman is described to be yemeni, she is probably amal ahmed al-sadah, osama's youngest wife.

what drives evolving stories

it's fascinating to see how the account of bin laden's killing has evolved since it was first announced sunday night. evolving stories like this are inevitable when big news breaks, the media is hungry for details and its the kind of story likely to make the powers-that-be look good.

what tends to happen with a rushed story like this, however, is the initial information gives out details that turns out to be untrue. nevertheless those first inaccurate story often are the ones that stick with the public. we all remember that the 9/11 hijackers used box cutters. because that's what the first reports told us, even though there there doesn't seem to be any evidence of that and the subsequent inquiry concluded that the hijackers probably had utility knives instead. but by then it was too late. box cutters had become part of the 9/11 lore. not that it mattered all that much for the overall story.

the initial story from earlier this week was that bin laden himself was killed while he was "engaged in the firefight" and that he used one of his wives as a human shield before both he and the wife were killed. that story has since been revised. as of today, we are told that bin laden was unarmed, that his wife was not used as a human shield but rather charged at the navy SEALs and was shot in the leg, but not killed.

the account might change again (who knows where it will end up). but i think the differences between the original story and the revised version are pretty interesting. the first version had bin laden as almost a cartoon version of a villain. i'm surprised they didn't have him twist his mustache and cackle as he held his wife in the line of fire. also, as echidne points out, the first version also portrays the wife as a typical female victim. now it seems that bin laden was unarmed (raising the question, which few dare to ask out loud, whether shooting him in the head and chest was really necessary) and his wife was actually pretty courageous. i doubt if i would have had the guts to run towards a team of heavily armed SEALs if i were in her situation.

we're all biased. and when facts are not clear, those biases tend to fill in the gaps. i think the differences between the initial account and the revised account says a lot about the people telling the tale.

i have no insights into the psyche of whoever came up with the box cutter thing, though.

what a day

i got up, missed my train to new york, caught a later train, was late to the meeting, cut out as soon as the meeting ended, barely caught the train out of new york (total NYC time: just under 2 hours), returned to philly, rented a car, drove to the far south of new jersey, attended a press conference, drove to a meeting in the next town over, locked my keys in the rental car, showed up late for that meeting (after waiting for a cop with a slim jim), sat through a meeting that took longer than i was told it would (my 30 minute appearance turned into a 90 minute appearance), drove home.

total work day: 13 hours and 20 minutes.
total time actually working (as opposed to traveling and related stuff): about 3 hours and 30 minutes

always seeing what they want to see

no matter what happens in the world, people will claim it proves whatever they believed all along to be true.

i expect the "we got osama because of waterboarding" meme will become one of those unquestionably true "facts" on the right, even with none other than donald rumsfeld saying it's not true.

a special forces strike force killed bin laden and all i got was this stupid t-shirt

the death of bin laden in abbotabad, pakistan is all over the internets, but not on the abbotabad tourism page. at least not yet. surely the shot up mansion has even more potential than that spider hole.

a nation of disenchanted marginalized cats

the below video is about the cinco de mayo referendum in the UK, but it also gives a pretty concise explanation of why alternative voting would be a good thing to institute here in the u.s. as well.



of course it will never happen here. both major parties have too much to lose if it did. the democrats want to keep the "hold their nose" votes from people who would otherwise be greens or other more liberal third party voters but who don't want to "throw away" their vote. likewise, the GOP wants to keep libertarians and other far right fringe people voting for their party even if in their heart-of-hearts they would rather go somewhere else. (it also suits the GOP just fine for the likes of the greens to never get any real power). but i am still very curious how the last few elections would have played out differently if there were an AV system in the u.s.

breaking ipad tracking update.

it looks like my ipad has decided to spend the entire weekend in hong kong.

sigh.