A certain someone took the weekend off for his birthday, and I guess I kinda did it in an unannounced way. Meaning, I disappeared. Sorry, and to make up for it, I present you with this present:
Enjoy!
by John Cole| 18 Comments
This post is in: Cat Blogging, Previous Site Maintenance
A certain someone took the weekend off for his birthday, and I guess I kinda did it in an unannounced way. Meaning, I disappeared. Sorry, and to make up for it, I present you with this present:
Enjoy!
by Tim F| 12 Comments
This post is in: Beer Blogging
Here in PA beer buyers get to choose between picking up a case at the state storedistributor or buying overpriced sixpacks at a bar. As a result we keystone staters take time getting to know a single beer before moving on to the next one. Case in point, over the last week we’ve worked our way through a case of the IPA-style Two Hearted Ale from Bell’s in Galesburg, MI and at this point I can say that I’m ready for a review.
When you have plenty of time to contemplate a beer named for a Michigan river and story by Ernest Hemingway the mind begins to associate things. If brewing is an art and all art is essentially a running commentary on other art, could one think of beer itself as a form of literary criticism? Last year the Lagunitas Brewery commemorated an unwelcome visit from the DEA with a brew formulated to reflect the experience. A pointless twenty-day shutdown hardly compares to forty years lost in the desert, but here you have an especially bitter beer serving the same purpose as bitter herbs and saltwater on the Passover holiday. The principle is there.
Two Hearted Ale seems bigger than it is at 6%, which you won’t find out from the bottle label. A touch of bitterness contributes, and despite subtle contributions from malt and hops the beer comes across as dry, almost to a fault. If it were a sentence Bell’s Two Hearted Ale would be about eight words long, emphatic, contain no adjectives and take three or four samplings before you get everything that it’s trying to say. You may not find yourself among the Snows of Kilimanjaro, but Hemingway has written things harder to get through than this golden straw-colored brew. A lingering head caps this brew with a hoppy nose, and leaves behind a slight lacing when it retreats.
For more reasons to find some for yourself, see BA.
Friday Beer Blogging – For Whom The Bell’s TollPost + Comments (12)
by Tim F| 475 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
As long as we’re dredging up years-old WMD reports, I have proof that Saddam kept a fleet of mobile anthrax botulinum smallpox plague mumps production labs! On trucks!
That’s right, you too can be a Santorum. Post your scoops in the comments.
And you know, chat about whatever.
by Tim F| 45 Comments
This post is in: Politics, Science & Technology
Break out the sunscreen:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The last few decades were the warmest on Earth in the past 400 years, and may well have been warmer than any comparable period since the Middle Ages, U.S. scientists reported on Thursday.
In a separate study, climate experts blamed global warming for much of the hurricane-fueling rise in temperatures in the North Atlantic last year, when there were a number of devastating hurricanes, including Katrina.
In a new report by the National Research Council, researchers said they were highly confident the mean global surface temperature was higher in the past 25 years than any comparable period during the previous four centuries.
And:
It has been 2,000 years and possibly much longer since the Earth has run such a fever. The National Academy of Sciences, reaching that conclusion in a broad review of scientific work requested by Congress, reported Thursday that the “recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia.”
A panel of top climate scientists told lawmakers that the Earth is heating up and that “human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming.” Their 155-page report said average global surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rose about 1 degree during the 20th century.
I post this information for entertainment value only, because as long as somebody somewhere doubts that human pollution cases climate warming the present government will do exactly nothing.
On this issue the real action will happen at the local level. Take a neighbor to Al Gore’s movie (it is excellent), get your local fishing and hunting clubs worked up about the Republican war on the environment. Leave the NRA and join the non GOP-toadying alternative, the American Hunters and Shooters Association. We the people need to light a burner under Congress’ asses before they lift a fat finger over this issue. Even then any useful progress probably depends on turning over Congress in November – an American writer once said, don’t bother convincing a man of something whose salary depends on him denying it. Set aside some scratch to donate to an appealing local candidate, and even phone them up to volunteer if you have a weekend to spare.
Maybe, just possibly, scientific consensus has reached the point and public awareness is trending in the direction that we might accomplish something useful before a decreasingly-habitable Earth solves the problem for us.
This post is in: Blogospheric Navel-Gazing, General Stupidity
I guess my political transformation is complete- Bob Somerby did not like my post on Joe Klein from the other day, and had this to say:
Many readers will understand these things—but apparently, the netroots will not. Who is this major, famous pundit? Who is saying these things about Bush and Rove? The major pundit is Joe Klein—but, because some regard liberal readers as children, liberal readers are being spoon-fed other excerpts from Klein’s column and are being told—“Oh My”—that Klein is kissing Bush’s ring once again. You can see your kind being treated like children at this post, or here, or here. (Or here.) These posts include only the parts of Klein’s column which liberal leaders want you to see. And by the way, can we explain to you what you might have realized if you weren’t being thoroughly juvenilized? When Klein says that Bush was being “frothy” last week, that isn’t meant as a compliment either. Nor is it meant as a reference to blow jobs—the only metaphor in which some “liberals” now seem able to traffic.
It’s sad to see liberals treated like children. But, all through the annals of human history, “leaders” have been happy to please the masses in this manner. They’ll feed you the tidbits they want you to swallow. The babyish spinning of this column by Klein is just the latest example.
Let’s set the record straight. First, I am no liberal. The other sites he links to are, indeed, members of the fire-breathing left, and proud of it. Second, I really have no desire to see liberals succeed, so much as I want the current ‘conservatives’ to be thrown out of office. In my opinion, many liberal positions are still disastrous, but less damaging than the current crap being heaved at us by the nanny-state Republicans.
Finally, I have no desire to to treat my readers ‘like children.’ I read the Klein piece, and I felt like I was reading someting from an alternate universe. I commented on it, and I excerpted the part that I thought was most fanciful. I then included a link, because unlike some people (*cough* – BOB), I assume my readers are adults and will click through to the link and read the whole thing. They then can make their own decisions about what Klein wrote, and when they are done, they can come back here and, unlike some websites (*cough* – Bob), they can leave their comments and let me know if they agree or disagree. To date, 177 of my ‘children’ have done just that.
Daily Howler, indeed.
BTW- this is really the funniest part of Bob’s post:
These posts include only the parts of Klein’s column which liberal leaders want you to see.
I excerpted the first two paragraphs of the piece and provided a link. I didn’t selectively ‘choose’ the most ‘damning’ part- I cut and paste the first two paragraphs to give readers a taste of the babble.
by Tim F| 22 Comments
This post is in: Outrage
Same as the old AT&T privacy policy. No wait, it’s not:
AT&T has issued an updated privacy policy that takes effect Friday. The changes are significant because they appear to give the telecom giant more latitude when it comes to sharing customers’ personal data with government officials.
The new policy says that AT&T — not customers — owns customers’ confidential info and can use it “to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.”
Noticed my post below? Maybe AT&T realized that their battle with the Electronic Frontiers Foundation won’t die a quiet State Secrets death after all. AT&T can hardly kick the NSA out at this point. Only one way left, then, to avoid embarrassing contradictions between practice and policy: change the policy.
Strange times.
by Tim F| 13 Comments
This post is in: Politics
Judge Vaugn Walker, presiding over the FISA-related suit between EFF, AT&T and the government, has demanded that attorneys address a list of eleven questions that suggests a growing skepticism about the State Secrets priviledge. As I pointed out earlier the government basically considers State Secrets to be a bulletproof legal get-out-of-jail-free card and (not coincidentally) government use of the State Secrets priviledge has gone up by a factor of more than seventeen. Don’t get me wrong, the priviledge exists for a reason. We need to keep a lid on cutting-edge nuclear technology and hide the identity of moles in foreign governments, but protecting the administration from political embarassment simply doesn’t cut it. A few questions on the list suggest that Walker is leaning towards the latter:
3. How can the court minimize the conflict between right to litigate this case and the government’s protect state secrets? See Ellsberg v Mitchell, 57 (DC Cir 1983) (“[T]he [state secret] privilege used to shield any material not strictly necessary injury to national security; and, whenever possible, information must be disentangled from nonsensitive to allow for the release of the latter.”).
6. How can confirming or denying the existence of the alleged surveillance program at issue here, or AT&T’s alleged participation in that program, constitute disclosure of a state secret when the program has been so widely reported in the public sphere?
9. If the court denies the government’s motion to dismiss on state secret grounds, what are the parties’ positions on the possible appointment pursuant to FRE 706 of an expert to advise the court on state secret assertions with respect to particular pieces of evidence?
This may seem like less than a total refutation, but I don’t expect any judge to reverse State Secrets jurisprudence overnight. It would make much more sense if justices, sensing a shift towards damage control and away from protecting what a neutral observer might consider a real ‘secret,’ began to express skepticism and gave the government a chance to defend its decisions.
Frankly I doubt that the government is ready or able to present a coherent answer to judge Walker’s questionnaire. This administration has a history of ducking legal oversight that stretches from removing JAG officers from the detainee treatment process to the Jose Padilla debacle to the basic mistrust of the FISA warrant application process that lies at the heart of this current eavesdropping scandal ( see here for more). They don’t think that the law will approve of what they do and they don’t have the nerve to change the law, so they cut the law out of decision making and they count on secrecy to keep it under wraps.
Sounds insightful? Before anybody calls the Pulitzer committee I should point out that highly-incompetent governments always act this way. Stupid decision-making creates a need for privacy, an excess of privacy creates a fertile ground for corruption and the presence of corruption makes the need to privacy even worse. How telling that Dick Cheney, not so much a Veep as the president’s overzealous XO and no stranger to clandestine cronyism, demands to work in near-absolute secrecy.
Back to the point, I think that judge Walker is going about this the right way. Even demanding an explanation is a major step away from the blanket deference that the priviledge usually commands. The government could make their case and prevail here, although question #6 suggests that they have their work cut out for them. If the response is pure amateur hour then Walker has every reason to reverse precedent and put the kibosh on the government’s near-bulletproof get-out-of-embarassment-free card, and set a precedent that a secrecy-obsessed government would clearly prefer not to set.