Someone on the Internet Agrees With Me
It turns out I’m not the only one who thought of George Wallace when Hillary Clinton made her “hard-working Americans, white Americans” comment.
Related posts
Posts by Stephen
And Now For Something Sciency
I ranted about politics a lot yesterday. Let’s balance that with some science!
(Say it with me: Science!)
Did you know the Earth might once have had multiple moons? The theory is that, when the Moon was created by the Earth being hit by something the size of Mars, a bunch of other chunks got blasted off, like blood spatter from a GTA4 pedestrian. Some of those chunks could have ended up in the Earth-Moon Lagrange points, areas where the gravitational pull of the Earth and the Moon are balanced. Some Lagrange points are stable — think of a marble inside a bowl. Small perturbations won’t knock the marble out of the bowl. The same goes for Earth chunks that might have ended up in some of the Lagrange points.
If that’s too abstract for you, here, have a Flash app that shows the Solar System. You can see the planets and large asteroids orbiting the sun, and the moons that are orbiting various planets. For fun, take a look at Jupiter and its umpty-ump moons. It’s hypnotic.
Also, Some Simple Math Regarding Delegates Might Be In Order
Dear Hillary Clinton,
I’ve had a lot of sympathy for you. You had name recognition and a commanding lead in the polls before actual voting and caucusing began, and were making history as the first woman to run for President on a major party ticket, and yet you were never able to deliver the knock-out punch you and your gifted chief strategist were hoping for. The presidential nomination that you thought was yours moved ever further away from you.
You were the first student to give the commencement speech during your graduation from Wellesley and were a graduate of Yale Law, working-class roots that are so solid I was surprised to see you drinking beer and taking a shot of whiskey to play up those roots. I winced as your husband blundered about like a Bill in a china shop, afraid that his antics would damage your reputation.
But it wasn’t until you started playing up your gas tax holiday plan — or, rather, your echo of John McCain’s plan — that I started losing that sympathy. “I’m not going to put my lot in with economists”? Really? The economists’ analysis of your gas tax holiday plan is an example of “elitist opinion”? Color me stupid, but I’d like the President to take advice from people who know what the hell they’re talking about instead of going with their gut.
But now? Now you’ve squandered any sympathy I might have had for you.
“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”
“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she went on to say. No kidding. That pattern is you and your campaign moving slowly from insinuating that Obama is just a black candidate to decrying his playing the “race card” to out-and-out saying that whites won’t vote for him because he’s black.
It turns out that when you were running on your establishment credentials against Obama’s message of change, you were hearkening back to the 48th governor of my state.
Related posts
Score One for Librarians
Thanks to the Patriot Act’s expansion of investigative powers, for years the FBI has been using National Security Letters to gather information about US citizens. Now the Internet Archive, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the ACLU managed to get the FBI to rescind one such request and make some details public.
National Security Letters are particularly dangerous because there’s no judicial approval or oversight, and they come with a nasty gag order that prevents you from talking to anyone about it other than your attorney. Imagine trying to fight an NSL in court, unable to tell your friends or family why you’re going to court — remember, you can’t even admit that you’ve been served with an NSL! While the FBI claims that NSLs can only be used in cases relevant to an authorized FBI national security investigation, they’ve instead used it to skirt the laws restricting domestic surveillance. And for such a powerful tool, the FBI is remarkably lax in keeping track of NSLs, telling Congress they can only estimate how many NSLs they’ve issued. Worse, they have consistently underestimated the number to Congress.
The need for secrecy leads to the desire for secrecy regardless of need. Without oversight, review or appeal, secrecy feeds on itself, and government agents turn to it because it makes their investigations easier. It’s good to see a case where that unneeded secrecy is publicly challenged and stopped.
Related posts
The View From the Top
Before Eli was born, I looked at how much we were spending and how much Eli was likely to cost us. I then took a moment to breathe slowly and deeply into a paper bag while red numbers danced in my vision. It’s a natural reaction, and I always figured most parents-to-be experienced it regardless of how much they made.
It looks like I was right, if this post is any indication. The would-be parents are making $200,000 in Silicon Valley, and aren’t sure how to make ends meet. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the readers to determine how reasonable the poster’s proposed budget is. Note that he’s in the top 5 percent of US earners, views his monthly budget as “austere,” and has come up with similar budgets for living somewhere other than Silicon Valley.
Related posts
Mission Accomplished[citation needed]
Five years ago, President Bush gave a speech aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, where he spoke in front of a giant MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner. Yesterday, White House press secretary Dana Perino explained that the banner needed to be more specific.
“President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said ‘mission accomplished’ for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission,” White House press secretary Dana Perino told the Associated Press on Wednesday. “And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year.”
She went on to say that President of the United States Who Has A Record Low 22% Approval Rating Bush would strive to be more exact in the future.
Related posts
I’m a Confirmed Dragon*Con Guest
Hey, look at that. Time to finish my planned presentation on quantum computing, where by “finish” I mean “start”.
Related posts
A Four Year Old Reviews Grand Theft Auto IV
Long ago I reviewed a lot of video games for a dot com, which meant that I got a lot of free games. Even now, years later, I sometimes get free games.
So how could I not try out Grand Theft Auto 4? And how could I not see what Eli thought of it?
Technorati Tags: grand theft auto 4, video game, review, not the kind of sandbox he usually plays in
Related posts
I Survived ROFLCon
The conference was both stranger than I imagined and far more fun than I could have hoped for. Many of the guest who attended were like me: they did a random thing that became unexpectedly popular. And many of the attendees seemed to find it as fun as I did, and looked to be having a great time of it.
Overall: a completely surreal and fun weekend.
Technorati Tags: roflcon, it’s full of weird
Related posts