The Atlantic’s InFocus this week is all shots of the Tour de France so far. Picture #27 is especially lovely.
The sound of a million middle-aged nerds simultaneously going SQUEEEEEE!
Because you needed to know. Duh.
Ever wonder what money is, really?
Yeah, me too. This Reddit post actually does a pretty bang-up job of explaining how barter, currency-as-marker-for-something-else, and modern fiat money all work.
Hey, did you happen to lose a Russian fighter plane?
Like, maybe, 70 years ago? Yeah, well, somebody found it.
(h/t: Senor Mantler.)
Dept. of Cool Things You May Have Missed
Mr Tom Waits was on Letterman last night. Click in the bar to skip to about minute 32 to start with the interview, or minute 38 for just the performance.
Waits will be on Fallon tonight. Plan your evening accordingly.
Missing Achewood?
Perhaps you’ll be delighted to hear that Chris Onstad has been doing some food and travel writing.
(Via MeFi.)
Photos Of That Other Space Program
No, not the private sector one. The one that beat us to orbit.
The monument pictured is much more striking in person, which is sort of amazing given how cool the pictures are. I saw it in 1991.
Stay classy, Arizona
96 year old Latino former Arizona governor detained by border patrol in 100 degree heat because, you know, he’s brown.
Dept. of Guitar Geekery
Here’s the widely linked video of an employee of the Chicago Music Exchange playing 100 rock riffs chronologically in one take, which is entertaining in its own right, but real music nerds will notice that the truly impressive bit is that he retunes on the fly a couple times.
Anyway, enjoy.
This week in fabulists
The Worst Marriage in Georgetown is the story of Albrecht Muth and his improbable union with the Viola Drath, some 40+ years his senior.
Wow. Just . . . wow.
I’m not sure if I need the shirt, but the sentiment is absolutely true
About those new NSA docs…
You probably heard that there were new docs released regarding 9/11. Here’s Salon’s coverage thereof, but the real takeaway point is this, as articulated by Wil Wheaton:
The thing that I think a lot of people are missing when they read this story is that intelligence worked the way it was supposed to, but Bush the Incompetent didn’t pay attention, because he didn’t care. He was a lazy and stupid son of privilege who was too busy being on vacation to take his responsibilities as president seriously.
Consider this, though: all the laws passed in the aftermath of 9/11, including the PATRIOT Act, that we were told were absolutely necessary to save us from The Terrorists™ just aren’t. The system was working the way it was supposed to work, and the 9/11 plot should have been stopped, but we had an incompetent jackass president who didn’t take it seriously.
This is hilarious.
Unhappy with their ex-label, it appears that Def Leppard are re-recording their biggest hits to release electronically instead of agreeing to let Universal release the originals.
Think about that for a minute.
TechDirt’s post ends with this probing question: “Makes you wonder if there are any acts who feel they weren’t screwed over by their major label…” My guess is “no.”
What were they thinking?
Apparently, it’s possible on some Android devices to allow Facebook to take over and manage your address book based on your friends list.
Yeah, I know, right? What a HORRIBLE HORRIBLE IDEA.
If you reacted as I did, it should come as no surprise to you that this turned out to be a horrible, horrible idea.
Don’t outsource that kind of thing, people. Especially don’t outsource it to a “free” service that makes billions by selling information about you, and that has a financial motive to push you away from normal channels of communication and towards methods that rely on a private service.
Facebook will fuck you if you let them. Keep as little information there as you can, and don’t let them worm their way into other aspects of your life. It’s not worth it.
Hey Heathen! How do YOU use Facebook?
Glad you asked.
- Lock down your profile
- Only some friends can see my activity. I decided long ago that I’d accept requests from most people I know, or have known, but most of those distant connections go into a group that can neither see nor comment on any activity on my wall.
- Sanitize the info in your profile
- I keep essentially ZERO personal data in my profile. Not my job, not my real world address, etc.
- Never use your Facebook login on other sites
- This ought to be easy. Doing this gives Facebook access to all your activity on any site that uses your Facebook credentials. Seriously, don’t do this.
- Use a dedicated browser
- This is the biggie. I don’t go to Facebook with my regular browser. I use Chrome for most of my web activities, and I allow Chrome to store some limited login information about various sites. That makes my life easier. On the other hand, Chrome is also configured to explicitly block most ads as well as nearly all site-to-site tracking methods.
-
This means some sites won’t work right for me. I’m okay with that. When I run into a problem site, I switch over to Safari, which is set up with much more permissive settings — but it’s also set up to purge all local cookies and data every time I quit. Chrome runs for weeks at a time on my laptop, but Safari is quit and restarted every time I need it to protect my privacy.
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Because Facebook is so craven and shameless about snooping on its members, I only ever visit Facebook with Safari.
You may be laboring under the misconception that Libertarianism is about personal freedom
It is not:
Libertarianism is a philosophy of individual freedom. Or so its adherents claim. But with their single-minded defense of the rights of property and contract, libertarians cannot come to grips with the systemic denial of freedom in private regimes of power, particularly the workplace. When they do try to address that unfreedom, as a group of academic libertarians calling themselves “Bleeding Heart Libertarians” have done in recent months, they wind up traveling down one of two paths: Either they give up their exclusive focus on the state and become something like garden-variety liberals or they reveal that they are not the defenders of freedom they claim to be.
Happy Fourth
Sure, I’m two days late. Sue me. But once you get over your shock at my delay, read this. (Via MeFi).
The Health Care Omnibus Post
There’s been lots of smart things written about the ACA ruling. Here are a few I found particularly on point:
from Forbes, who are not known for their lefty politics: Don’t Buy the GOP Narrative That Obamacare Is A Tax On The Middle Class — It’s a Lie Designed to Mislead
Wil Wheaton points us to a Daily Show bit wherein Romney is quoted as promising to a few changes (via repeal) to American health care policy — all of which are already part of the ACA. Romney is transparently scaremongering here, and it’s shameful.
Also via Wheaton: What exactly is Obamacare, and what did it change? Seriously, read this.
Finally, John Scalzi has some very smart thinking on the issue of Roberts’ vote in this case. He closes with “I don’t think there’s any question that Roberts is a conservative judge; a look at his track record and even at his ACA write-up makes this abundantly clear. I don’t think there’s any question that Roberts will continue to be a conservative judge. What the ACA ruling serves notice for, perhaps, is that Roberts is following his own conscience and reasoning regarding what it means to be conservative, rather than taking his cues from the the current right-wing orthodoxy. Ultimately, that’s what sending the right wing into their rage about Roberts: That now it’s possible he’s his own man, not theirs.” (By the way, the fact that Roberts has a chronic condition may well have played a role in his thinking here.)
Right, so….
Vacation this week. Look for a bolus of posts STARTING NOW.
Well, shit.
Salon is looking to sell the Well, and has apparently already laid off its staff.
That’s been my online home for a really long time. Dialog there is better than on 99% of the web. It’s never been anonymous, which is probably one reason why. Before there was Facebook or social media, the Well was having gatherings and parties and picnics — like, in the 1980s.
With fewer than 2,700 subscribers left, I wonder how long it’ll even exist now — I mean, short of some deep-pocketed angel coming along to save it for the sake of saving it.
Voting Republican in Texas?
Looks like Richmond is in for some weather
(Related.)
Oh, Iggy.
From this NYT interview:
Has your relationship with your penis changed?
I would characterize it sort of like a powerful interest group within a political party at this point. It used to be the entire political party.
I’m curious how your tour is going. You have a new album, “Aprés,” and you’re out there with the Stooges. You resolved in 2010 that you wouldn’t stage-dive anymore after you had a mishap.
I said that after doing a concert for Tibet at Carnegie Hall, which I did because Philip Glass asked me to. [Emph. added — Heathen] But yeah, I am a little impulsive, and Lenny Kaye was playing “I Want to Be Your Dog” too damned slow, and I just ran out of ideas and I thought, Well, let’s just stage-dive. Nobody caught me, because it was the Carnegie Hall-Tibetan-whatever audience. I was a little miffed. We’ve done two gigs this year, and I haven’t done one yet. Stages are getting higher and higher, and I’m getting older and older.
“Hey, what should we do with the DEA?”
Baby, what do you expect?
WARNING
If you stop moving long enough, ants will eat you. Especially if you are a dead lizard.
WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?
The best part of the ACA decision
I’m sure enjoying the right-wing freakout on this stuff, but really the most bizarrely delightful aspect of this turn of events is that it means Romney must spend the summer campaigning on the promise of repealing a health care plan authored by the Heritage Foundation that he implemented at the state level in Massachusetts.
You ought to read this.
Dept. of People in the Way
This DEA bureaucrat will not admit, under pointed and repeated questioning, that heroin and crack are more dangerous than marijuana.
She will not do so because her job and her agency depend on everyone believing something false: that all these drugs pose an existential threat to the country, and that they must be eradicated, and that aggressive law enforcement activity is the right path, and that (moreover) this mission is possible without destroying civil liberties as we know them. Funding depends on this. Jobs depend on this. And so she continues to lie.
That she may even believe the lie does not make her any less of a liar.
“That is the scariest Elmo I’ve ever seen in my life!”
At The Awl: “After being ejected from the Zoo, and then the park altogether, anti-Semitic Elmo was taken away in an ambulance for psychiatric observation.”
As you do.
What Republicans mean when they say “religious liberty”
We told you last week about Louisiana’s new plan for educating its youth, which is to stop having a plan for educating its youth and just dump everybody into classrooms owned by private companies that replace teachers with Moses Explains Algebra on VHS.
They’re set to steer tens of millions of dollars into the new privatization program, which pays for vouchers that parents can use to send their children to religious schools. Gov. Bobby Jindal said the state was “changing the way we deliver education,” which is a lot like Domino’s saying it’s changing the way it delivers pizza by locking up the store and telling everyone to buy a Hot Pocket from the Vatican. In any case, Louisiana Republicans loved the plan. Until a group of folks showed up to ruin the whole thing: Muslims.
(From Slacktivist’s excellent post.)
Abu Dhabi MiniPost: About the weather
I just wen to lunch. I rode my bike the six blocks rather than walk, because that would lead to a net lower amount of exposure to the HOLY JESUS ON A POGOSTICK ITS HOT weather we’re having.
People in Abu Dhabi asked me how I liked the heat in exactly the same way Chicagoans will ask the reverse question of visitors in January. The locals seemed mildly disappointed that I was able to report, after a little arithmetic, that the coast of the UAE isn’t much hotter or more humid than Houston. We’re normally a little cooler — 95, not 105 — but some days we lose the gap.
Today’s one of those days.
(I will say the flight home led to the only time I’ve ever gotten off a plane in Houston and felt mild relief and not oppressive humidity; all things are relative.)
Abu Dhabi Minipost: Pooping and plumbing
This post over at BoingBoing about the ubiquitous-in-the-non-western-world squat toilet reminded me of the mild anxiety I had about facilities before I got to the UAE, and how absurd that seemed after I arrived. See, the Emirates — especially Abu Dhabi and Dubai — are pretty new places, and very focused on foreigners. I saw no squat toilets as a result.
What I did see were the modern nods to the traditional “left hand and a bowl of water” approach still used by most of the planet, but without removing the modern facilities westerners would expect.
In my hotel it took the form of an unexpected addition: “Hey! A bidet!”
But elsewhere the facilities were much less continental. This is from an apartment in Dubai:
This amused me, but not in any culturally bigoted way. What tickled me was that even though the “water method” is by far the most popular approach there (I assume), the hardware used is a repurposed kitchen sprayer. It was like this in a fancy Dubai high-rise, and it was like this in the bathroom at the client office, and it was like this in the restrooms off the hotel lobby. You’d think there would be something purpose-built, but (short of the bidet in the hotel) I never saw anything else.
On an unrelated note, both showers I used over there were materially better than any American one I’ve ever seen. This is why:
The top (brass colored) knob controls bath-or-shower. The left-hand chrome knob controls water pressure only. The right-hand chrome knob controls temperature. You set the right knob once and leave it the hell alone. It’s a small thing, but holy CRAP why don’t I have this in my bathroom?
Remember when Facebook launched their own email, and nobody used it?
Yeah, they’re trying to force the issue now. Check your profile; they’ve replaced the email you elected to show in your profile with your special “@facebook.com” email address.
Nice.
Fortunately, it’s easy to fix, but let this remind you that Facebook will absolutely change your preferences to suit their needs. You are not their customer. You are their product. Behave accordingly.
What the SCOTUS is now
Folks widely expect the Supreme Court to strike the mandate provisions of the so-called Obamacare bill despite widespread belief among nonpartisan Constitutional scholars that the mandate falls within the norms established by Wickard and referenced by this same court, and by Scalia specifically in the Court’s prior opinion that Federal law trumped state efforts to legalize the personal cultivation of marijuana for personal use.
The ugly and obvious fact is this: Scalia and his right-wing cronies rule based on politics, not the law. (N.B. that as apparent cover for his no-doubt predetermined vote on ACA, Scalia has published a book in which he disavows Wickard!) They work backwards from the desired outcome, not forwards from established precedent and legal principle. Moreover, they’re willing to blow established precedent when it suits them, as in Citizens United and, most likely, this ACA case w/r/t Wickard.
James Fallows has more over at the Atlantic. You should read it.
Bonus hilarity: Who wants to bet the same 5 conservative justices would uphold ACA if it had been a continuation of Romneycare under a Republican president?
Mini-Dhabi: Cool non-Burj Buildings Dept.
Still haven’t finished the Abu Dhabi commentary, but I will note that the building on this list that’s in Abu Dhabi was on my route out of town towards Al Ain. I wondered at the time if the facade had a job; it’s cool to see that it’s not only functional, but far more interesting than I expected.
Clearly, the new ride needs one of these
I’ve been too busy to post much lately, so there was no long exegesis about the selection of the new official Heathen two-wheeled muscle-driven vehicle, but I think it ought to go without saying that it needs one of these to be complete, don’t you?
“Hey, TSA! How many bad guys did your porno-cancer-scanners catch so far?”
Would you be shocked to discover the answer is zero?
At a forum conducted by National Journal yesterday on aviation security, John Halinski, TSA’s Assistant Administrator for Global Strategies, claimed that the TSA mission was to protect passenger security. Not so. The difference in mission between what one of the administration’s top security executives and the TSA website claims makes a big difference in how the U.S. is spending time and money regarding “ensuring freedom of movement for people and commerce.”
Halinski was asked directly whether there has been even a single instance of an arrest or detention of anyone, in any way, related to terrorism based on airport whole-body scanners. His answer was, “No.” Of course, he then went on to assert that the mere fact that we have these whole-body scanners is keeping terrorists away. (Evidently, terrorists don’t have access to websites that tell them which airports have whole-body scanners and which don’t.)
Film Crit Hulk SMASH Prometheus
I saw Prometheus and enjoyed it as a great spectacle, but left feeling like I’d eaten junk food. Film Crit Hulk explains why perhaps better than I can. The central issue? A Lost alum as the primary screenwriter.
Because two just isn’t enough
The new Retina-display MacBook Pro](http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/) can apparently drive three external displays in addition to its built in screen.
At once.
By comparison, my current 2-year-old model drives one extra monitor.
WHAT IS THIS I DONT EVEN
What We Talk About When We Talk About Micheladas
Guns & Tacos is on the story. Don’t miss this.
Having solved all other crime, the DEA is doubling down on legal painkillers
This is just absurd. As is often the case, we can find civil forfeiture laws contributing to this bizarre pursuit.
Your Tax Dollars At Work
Other sources are picking up on the fact that the FBI is creating its own terror plots to foil, possibly causing them to miss real ones.
Dept. of Pithy but True
Via Wil Wheaton’s Tumblr:
It somehow became an article of faith on the right that Obama is “the most extreme President in American history.” Although when they say that, I think what they really mean is, “He’s black.” — Bill Maher
Go on. Open the bottle.
It’s time for the Overthinking Person’s Drinking Game.
This is too good not to quote
Once Washington was a happy place where a girl and her mother could be groped simultaneously in good fun by a white supremacist. Sadly, it has all been ruined by Kim Kardashian and Ezra Klein.
It’s from this takedown of Sally Quinn in reference to her absurdly hilarious piece here, as quoted at Electrolite.
WHY WAS I NOT INFORMED?
Apparently, yesterday was Bourbon Day.
Abu Dhabi Quiz!
Heathen nation, which of the following do you think was hardest for me to acquire in my stay here in the capital emirate?
A. Kentucky Fried Chicken, Hardee’s, and Popeye’s B. Laphroaig C. Bacon D. Air conditioning E. A beach