In Aid of A,B,C

The lipstick on a pig thing is indeed the greatest issue facing the country since John McCain spent several years as a guest of The Red Menace.

But it's worth noting that there's another scandal of phenomenal proportions out there, just waiting to give us its money:

Palin's [gubernatorial] office requested $2 million in federal monies to study crab mating habits; $494,900 for the recreational halibut harvest and $3.2 million for seal genetics research.

Those requests for the study of wildlife genetics and mating habits seems pretty antithetical to the long-standig views of Palin's running mate, John McCain.

"We're not going to spend $3 million of your tax dollars to study the DNA of bears in Montana," McCain said earlier this year, referring to a request from Montana for federal money to study the endangered grizzly bear. "I don't know if it was a paternity issue or criminal, but it was a waste of money."

My stars, she wanted to study crab fucking? How old were those crabs? Were they instructed on how to use crab condoms? Were there any crab abortions planned as part of the research? And, won't somebody please think of the seal DNA!?! This is before we get to her tacit approval of dread science and knowledge. Jesus, shouldn't she be in some kind of jail cell right now awaiting verdict?

Of course, we'll hear about none of this. Why? Well, fortunately Joe Scarborough told us why in this little moment in which the truth slipped out:

MATTHEWS: Now, [the lipstick on a pig flap will] die, as we said, it'll jump the shark. Two days ago, no, we're all talking about -- you're waving the tabloids around, come on. Two days from now -- I want to ask you, what will we talk about two days from now?

SCARBOROUGH: Whatever the McCain campaign wants us to talk about, because the McCain campaign is assertive.

To quote Steve Benen:

As far as I can tell, the story has to a) have video; b) be exceedingly simple and easy to summarize in a few seconds; and c) be good for John McCain.

Millions of dollars for seal DNA and crab fucking clearly have A and B, but not enough C. Back to porcine cosmetics, then.

Why not try this on for size: John McCain must hate Israel since he wants to de-fund our support to it. Sarah Palin quotes an anti-Semite in her speeches; she must hate Israel even more (and that's rather charitably assuming she's aware of its existence). AIPAC much? They were never that into politics anyway. But they probably just realize that this one only has A and lacks B or C. Lets face it, Israel's just too boring and complicated for the media. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what the McCain campaign decides to talk about.

Win one for the Zipper

This is a nice enough idea, separating the battery from the car, linking power generation and distribution, and then essentially selling you the "minutes" rather than just the car and then going your separate ways.

But they need to go one step further. This model won't scale in the US; we're too big, too mobile, and nobody is going to stop 18 times to replace a battery just to relocate or haul the family truckster across country (talk about running out of gas; you'd need a forklift to bail you out).

What they need is for a business model here is a sort of Ultra-Zip Car. You don't buy anything other than a use-privilege. You're a member, and, in fact, ultimately not that many cars are privately owned. A few gas-powered cars or clean-diesel hybrids are in the fleet for edge tasks that just don't make sense on 100% electric supply. When you move, you leave the car right where it is. There will be thousands just like it where you arrive. Something like that could genuinely be deal-changing and, over the course of many years, could fundamentally restructure how we think about transportation in this country.

Tie this model to green energy (as they note they're specifically doing in Denmark) and suddenly you've gotten around the generation/distribution connundrum of technologies like wind. Just store it in all the cars and get it back later (if you need it in a pinch) from the cars plugged in. Texas suddenly becomes the Saudi Arabia of wind energy.

Dropping some LHC

Large Hadron Collider fun fact(s) of the day:

In experiments, researchers found that an 86-microsecond exposure of the beam would bore a hole 40 meters into a block of copper.

I see. Maybe this explains why they decided to go with a graphite composite.

...instead of letting it burn a single 1.5-mm-wide hole into the cylinder, CERN engineers designed the system to “scan” the beam onto the face of the cylinder, much as the electron beam is scanned in a cathode-ray-tube television screen...

Then let me be the first to say "Where's the oscillator on this thing? I want to watch the other broadcast!"

Finally, it's worth noting that:

Though the graphite beam dump becomes very hot (about 750 °C), it does not melt. In fact, after it cools down it can be reused a few hours later.

So they won't have to run down to the spar to get yet another 10-ton graphite cylinder encased in 1000 metric tons of steel and concrete. That there is good planning. Officer thinking, even.

The Smallening

Rolling Stone cutting its size down, going glue-back.

Sad, but true. I must admit that I particularly love this line:

On balance, going to standard size should appeal to advertisers, according to Brenda White, senior vice president for publishing at Starcom USA

Why the fuck should that necessarily be so? Advertisers like eyes. Period. RS is (reportedly) at its highest circulation ever. This is like saying people will just naturally prefer New Coke in the total absence of any evidence to support it. After all, it's new! Didn't you see the name? New!

And then there's this all-too-depressing note:

In the large format, long articles often turn up as daunting expanses of almost uninterrupted type. With the revision, such pages are smaller and less intimidating, and more likely to be broken up with photographs.

Yep, we like our 2nd grade level picktoor books. Don't skaer me with that there tipe of your'n cause'n I don't cotton to the readin' so much.

“We’ve evolved,” Mr. Wenner said. “But the core tradition, the mission, remains the same.”

Indeed, Jann, shorter articles and, preferably, just a picture about Brittney are irreducibly the core tradition of long form music criticism and politically charged articles. Hunter S. Thompson became the face of the magazine mostly because of his brief, 10 word bullet points (and lots of pictures) about how Avril Levigne is totally kewl.

Mark my words: this is officially the middle of the end (the beginning was the demotion and summary deletion of anything approaching serious criticism alongside the transformation of the other content to little more than Maxim-style laddy-mag filler).
Content may come and go, but you generally don't mess with your fundamental brand image and survive. McDonalds, for instance, may as well adopt a large red "D" logo and a friendly but comically edgy cat-spokesman named Terry. How did New Coke work out? More of the same.

My remarkable, nay oracular insight into the future? Single copy newstand sales (what they claim to be after) will not be positively affected by making the magazine more generic in appearance. I know, I know. Rocket science.

The Paper

From Bernie Mac's Tribune obit:

"When I started in comedy in the clubs in 1977, blacks couldn't do certain clubs—not because they were segregated. They just didn't want to put the [black comics] out there," Mac told the Tribune in 2007.

Huh. Wonder what he could have possibly said. Probably not "gentlemen," though. Good thing they protected us from whatever that might have been. Also here:

"I ain't scared of you, [expletive]!" became a signature tag line.

Presumably not talking about [black comics] there...

Can't we, as a nation, agree that the problem isn't really so much that 6 year old, delicate eyes are getting all sorts of filthy idears from the nasty newspaper, and instead, that the real problem is much more along the lines of: with few exceptions nobody younger than 65 gives a shit about the paper anymore? And from there, isn't some sort of, oh, I don't know "solution" starting to be pretty fucking obvious? And it's not something that involves ever more trend pieces about how more and more couples are using the intarwebs to shop these days.

Not saying that cursing in the paper is the, or even a solution, but at least adopting a way of discussing more complex subject matter in a way that doesn't immediately infantilize the readership you're so desperately trying to court could be a good fucking idea.

Chartsengrafs

This is a start, at least:

Let me make a point about efficiency, because my Republican opponents - they don’t like to talk about efficiency," Obama said.

"You know the other day I was in a town hall meeting and I laid out my plans for investing $15 billion a year in energy efficient cars and a new electricity grid and somebody said, 'well, what can I do? what can individuals do?' Obama recalled.

"So I told them something simple," Obama said. "I said, 'You know what? You can inflate your tires to the proper levels and that if everybody in America inflated their tires to the proper level, we would actually probably save more oil than all the oil we'd get from John McCain drilling right below his feet there, or wherever he was going to drill.'"

"So now the Republicans are going around - this is the kind of thing they do. I don't understand it! They’re going around, they're sending like little tire gauges, making fun of this idea as if this is 'Barack Obama's energy plan.'

"Now two points, one, they know they're lying about what my energy plan is, but the other thing is they're making fun of a step that every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 to 4 percent. It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.

Fine. But what we really need in this fight are Ross Perot style charts and graphs. Hard numbers. Hit McCain right where he's most vulnerable: his total lack of understanding of anything numerical. He's already said he doesn't get economics, is unaware of the computer, knows nothing of the innertubes. The simplest pie chart will strike him like a bolt from the distant future; and he's guaranteed to do us the honor of saying so on national television. Every one of these idiotic GOP-lead, media enabled "ain't it funny?" lines needs to be systematically dismantled beyond the point of comfort.

Brazen, prideful stupidity and its media enablers must be exterminated from the public discourse. Starting now. Because it's only going to get worse, and because McCain is counting on a bunch of silly issues like this sopping up all available debate time. If they actually were to, you know, debate three or four times, well, let's just say that would be a GOP disaster.

After 9 or 10 years of this non-stop nonsense, we're so steeped in it we don't even notice anymore. It's going to take 15 or 20 years to march it back. Start now.

Clarity

Let's just make clear that I agree with the point of this paragraph in its entirety:

As for FISA, while in principle I think legally restricting government spying is a good thing, in practice I'm skeptical it makes much difference. As someone who has had a foot in the harder "left", the one that gets spied on, the old FISA rules didn't stop government infiltrators or all sorts of violations of privacy. [...] I see FISA as a nice issue to huff and puff about, but it's a pretty minor issue compared to just ending the war [and] shutting down torture...

It's not about "making a difference" in a strict "the government shall never spy on its citizens without due process" sense. It's about making a stand. It's about the political optics of the vote. It's about letting your opponent flail about with a bunch of vague claims as opposed to clear, quantifiable, and antithetical viewpoints from you and your campaign over the course of a very few months.
Is this so hard to understand? Is there no Democratic policy adviser that can understand these simple facts? You are the Change Candidate and you choose to side with the least popular President in history? To hand the GOP a bill that they couldn't pass when they held control of both houses of Congress? This is Change we can Belive In?

Let the illegal, warrantless wiretaps expire in August. Tell America why you did so. We still would have the secret FISA court, and plenty of low-barrier, almost-never-denied secret warrants out there avialable for when bin Laden makes that so-frequently-heralded call to somebody in this country. We already know these things were approved on the least scrap of probable cause. That bit of non-action accomplished, you set about prosecuting anyone and everyone who took part in these illegal wiretaps.

But don't take my word for it. Check out this quote:

"This Administration has put forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. When I am president, there will be no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens; no more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime; no more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. Our Constitution works, and so does the FISA court."

That would be Obama, back in 2007. I guess he thinks it's better to wait until he's President to live up to those words rather than to do so yesterday when it really mattered.

9/11 didn't happen because law enforcement couldn't tap a phone. Broadly speaking, it happened because when presented with a memo titled "bin Laden determined to strike in US" Bush said "All right. You've covered your ass, now" Period.