The Enchanted Porkfist

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May 31, 2008

Our planet is not as small as you might think.

Doesn't this seem impossible in 2008?

In a palm-hut encampment, members of an "uncontacted" Amazon tribe fire arrows at an airplane above the rain forest borderlands of Peru and Brazil earlier this month. The black and red dyes covering their bodies are made from crushed seeds and are believed to signal aggression, native-rights experts say.

...the new photos are more proof that uncontacted, seminomadic tribes do exist in the increasingly threatened Amazon rain forest, according to Survival International, an international indigenous-rights group that works closely with FUNAI.

"We are very confident the photos are genuine," said Miriam Ross, a spokesperson for Survival International, which estimates that half of the hundred or so uncontacted tribes in the world live in the rain forests of Brazil and Peru.

Some experts say few, if any, tribes have had no outside contact. It's more likely is that previous generations had negative encounters, prompting social taboos that continue to drive clans deeper into isolation.

Due to their vulnerable immune systems, these groups are highly susceptible to diseases borne by outsiders such as missionaries, loggers, or oil workers.

"Uncontacted" Tribe Seen in Amazon (National Geographic)

May 27, 2008

Get ready for more of this as the year goes on.

John McCain has long since squandered any claim to a "maverick" identity—but a lot of voters need to be reminded. Do feel free to pass it along.

May 26, 2008

Sydney Pollack, 1934-2008.

There are very few great directors who are also compelling actors.

Sydney Pollack was one of them.

Put the helmet on.

If you're a space geek like me, you know that NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander pulled off a pretty amazing feat yesterday. It's fancy enough to launch a 900-pound object 422 million miles into space and have it land, on autopilot, at a specific spot.

But it's borderline ridiculous to be able to photograph that object's landing on Mars from another spacecraft that you just happen to already have in orbit there.

Now they're just showing off.

May 23, 2008

Weezer shoots and scores.

The song is fairly standard-issue, but the video is mighty fine.

Hillary's gunning for the win.

Hillary Clinton, Des Moines, today:

People have been trying to push me out of this ever since Iowa...between my opponent, and his camp, and some in the media, there has been this urgency to end this...My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it.

You certainly don't, Hill.

I'll just let David Rees take it from here:

She has a point: June is a great month for political assassinations.

Why drop out of the race before all the assassins have had their say?

After all, we know Barack Obama has received multiple death threats -- because he is black, of course, and because some of our fellow citizens think he's a secret Muslim terrorist who is going to take the oath of office on the Koran and make us all pray to Mecca five times a day with that screechy music coming over the loudspeakers(?) and then he'll fly Air Force One into the White House(?).

And the truth is, Obama has consistently failed to win over those voters who want to see him murdered.

In the interest of fairness, I should note that Hillary has since apologized for her curious statement. That is, she has apologized to the Kennedys.

Not to be missed: David Rees' amazing Get Your War On.

UPDATE (now with more invective!):

In her series of non-apologies, Hillary has been using the excuse that the Kennedys have been "much on my mind these days", due to Ted Kennedy's illness. How does she explain this exchange with Richard Stengel of Time, published March 6th?

TIME: Can you envision a point at which--if the race stays this close--Democratic Party elders would step in and say, "This is now hurting the party and whoever will be the nominee in the fall"?

CLINTON: No, I really can't. I think people have short memories. Primary contests used to last a lot longer. We all remember the great tragedy of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June in L.A. My husband didn't wrap up the nomination in 1992 until June. Having a primary contest go through June is nothing particularly unusual.

By the way, her endless repetitions of "my husband's campaign wasn't wrapped up until June" are themselves patently false, as a quick look back at a 3/20/92 NY Times article shows:

Get out, step down, exit, withdraw, leave. Pick one. Now.

I has a dandruf probum.

May 21, 2008

Droopy charts his course into history.

Joe Lieberman had an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal today. It's a brazen piece of revisionist history that goes all the way back to the 1960's in an attempt to create a prequel for his own loopy views on the meaning of the September 11th attacks.

In the late 1960s [the Democratic party] saw America as the aggressor – a morally bankrupt, imperialist power whose militarism and "inordinate fear of communism" represented the real threat to world peace.

It argued that the Soviets and their allies were our enemies not because they were inspired by a totalitarian ideology fundamentally hostile to our way of life, or because they nursed ambitions of global conquest. Rather, the Soviets were our enemy because we had provoked them, because we threatened them, and because we failed to sit down and accord them the respect they deserved. In other words, the Cold War was mostly America's fault...

There are of course times when it makes sense to engage in tough diplomacy with hostile governments. Yet what Mr. Obama has proposed is not selective engagement, but a blanket policy of meeting personally as president, without preconditions, in his first year in office, with the leaders of the most vicious, anti-American regimes on the planet.

Mr. Obama has said that in proposing this, he is following in the footsteps of Reagan and JFK. But Kennedy never met with Castro, and Reagan never met with Khomeini. And can anyone imagine Presidents Kennedy or Reagan sitting down unconditionally with Ahmadinejad or Chavez? I certainly cannot.

Hunter, on Daily Kos, writes a thorough, funny, and appropriately corrosive response:

If you don't support indefinite action in Iraq, if you don't support the most aggressive of uberhawkish positions in the Middle East, Joe Lieberman will declare you an appeaser, pure and simple. It does not matter what other foreign policy positions you may hold: whether you support action in Afghanistan, or wish to see a non-nuclear North Korea, or what your opinions may be about Sudan or Myanmar or Tibet or Russia or Pakistan or the dozens of other crisis points around the world; for Lieberman, Iraq is all. Support Iraq, or you are not "serious." Support Iraq, or you are an "appeaser."

Her is a man unbalanced by the rage that can only come from a steady stream of human failures. Foreign policy is a simple land, for Joe Lieberman; it steadfastly consists of doing the most aggressive thing at the most aggressive time, and all other options are weak to the point of very nearly being anti-American. And yet as Iraq has shown, such actions can be not just unwise, but catastrophically destructive. For Joe Lieberman, asserting his opponents to be complacent or unpatriotic or appeasers is the only possible rhetorical option remaining, and he lacks the wisdom to leave it unused.

I can think of only one example of recent Democratic appeasement; the way Senator Reid and others have constantly appeased Joe Lieberman, in spite of Lieberman's constant and increasingly rabid attempts to undermine his previous party. As has been amply demonstrated by Joe himself, appeasement does not work.

"Lieberman Goes The Full Zell" (Hunter, on Daily Kos)

When the new guy orders/makes the cake.

Via Antler International, who rightly notes:

I don't know what to say about this

The misogyny of numbers, rules, and mathematics.

This ad in yesterday's NY Times, run by the previously invisible group WomenCount PAC, managed to be simultaneously whiny, disingenuous, shrill, divisive, and moronic. Did you see it?

Allison Benedikt did:

As The First Viable Female Contender’s bid for the Democratic nomination sputters to its inevitable end, everyone and their mother/sister/daughter has something to say about the poisonous misogyny that’s apparently to blame.

...

Now we learn of a new, primarily female group, Clinton Supporters Count Too, which promises to actively campaign against Obama in the general because, as their leader told the Times, “We, the most loyal constituency, are being told to sit down, shut up and get to the back of the bus.” Also: Black people? Suck it.

And Hillary’s lapping it up. Confirming in today’s Washington Post that the primary campaign has been sexist (but not racist), Clinton complains—states/notes/ declares—that there’s been a “disservice because we have broad coalitions of voters who have voted for me who make up the base of a winning campaign in November that I think want to see this end up with my being nominated." Translation: "This is unfair and sexist, because my voters clearly want to see me nominated. And if I'm not nominated, a disservice has been done to my voters." What makes it really unfair is that she’s losing by every measure and we still won’t let her win. Classic misogyny.

Here’s the thing: There is plenty of sexism—more than enough, thank you very much—in this country. Which is why it’s so sad to see Hillary’s supporters (and lately even her female detractors, and way too many column inches) elevate her to some kind of goddess warrior, symbolizing the decades-long fight for gender equality, absorbing the entirety of history’s catcall in one massive blow, and then standing tall again because that’s what women do. Powerful stuff, except that she’s a lying, race-baiting insult to our collective intelligence. Powerful, if she and her husband hadn’t sold out poor people in the ’90s or if she had stood tall like a woman against the war in Iraq or if she wasn’t right now trying to change the rules of the game and stir up the worst kind of identity politics. Powerful, if her most fervent supporters weren’t threatening to vote for John McCain out of spite, Supreme Court justices be damned.

That’s right, ladies: Teach this nation a lesson for once and for all. Do it for Hillary.

"My Lady Parts Do Not Ache for Hillary Clinton", Allison Benedikt (Village Voice blog)

May 20, 2008

Truthiness meets wronginess.

Right-wing bloviator William Kristol is a nasty piece of work with a creepy jack-o'-lantern grin that frightens small children. He's also one of the current go-to guys for Republicans trying to paint a hopeful face on John McCain's presidential candidacy.

Since Kristol has a hard time coming up with things he actually likes about McCain, this effort pretty much boils down to undermining Barack Obama in any way possible. What it doesn't involve, apparently, is even perfunctory fact-checking.

From yesterday's Kristol column in the NY Times, listing developments he considers "problematic for Obama":

On Tuesday night, while the G.O.P. Congressional candidate was losing in a Mississippi district George Bush carried in 2004 by 25 points, Barack Obama was being trounced in the West Virginia Democratic primary — by 41 points. I can’t find a single recent instance of a candidate who ultimately became his party’s nominee losing a primary by this kind of margin.

If Kristol is the standard of excellence among conservative thinkers, it's no wonder the Bush years have gone so well; as Think Progress and anyone capable of using this newfangled "Google" can point out—

On Feb. 5 [less than four months ago—diligent research, Bill!], former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney beat presumptive GOP nominee Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) by 85 points in the Utah primary:

In fact, on the same day, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee beat McCain by the same margin Kristol touted as unprecedented — 41 points — in the Arkansas primary. As did Mitt Romney in the Colorado caucus.

This is at least the third time that Kristol has gotten the facts wrong in his Times column. In his debut column, Kristol misattributed a quote by Michael Medved to Michelle Malkin. Later, Kristol falsely claimed Obama was in church on a day that he was not.

Keep this in mind the next time you see Kristol's disturbing leer on the teevee, because he's not really all that great on the facts.

Walrus: your new best friend.

Lucky Natalie Angier got to play with a walrus.

Dr. Schusterman tossed out a bit of advice. “The first thing the walruses will do when they come over is start pushing at you, pressing their heads right into your stomach,” he said. “Don’t let them get away with that. No matter how hard they push, you have to stand your ground.”

I stopped short, confused.

“If you don’t stand your ground, you’ll be knocked over or backed against a wall in no time,” Dr. Schusterman said.

But but ... I sputtered. How was I supposed to stand my ground against an animal the size of a Honda Civic? This sounded less like “friendly and playful” than “aggressive and possibly dangerous.”

“Just push back on the snout with the palm of your hand and blow in its face,” Dr. Schusterman instructed. “A walrus really likes to be blown in the face.”

But suddenly there I was in the pen, time expanding as I watched Sivuqaq, a 2,200-pound adult male, roll toward me like a gelatinous, mustachioed boulder and head straight for my solar plexus. Somehow, either out of professional pride or rigid terror, I managed to stay standing and stuck out my palm; when Sivuqaq nuzzled against it, all my fears fell away. I stroked his splendid vibrissae, the stiff, sensitive whiskers that a walrus uses to search for bivalves through the seabed’s dark murk, and that feel like slender tubes of bamboo. Then I blew in his face, and he half-closed his eyes, and I huffed and puffed harder and he leaned into my breath, all the while bleating and grunting and snorting for more.

Who Is the Walrus? (NY Times)

May 17, 2008

Previously unseen: O'Reilly's producer.

Wow. Just wow. Nicely done, people. Respect.

I'm just mad I didn't think of it myself.

May 16, 2008

Talking shit in Jerusalem.

In case you missed it, here's the salient moment from a speech our genius-in-chief gave to the Israeli Parliament yesterday.

Aside from the ignorance of equating negotiation with appeasement (a word I doubt W could define), what's really striking here is his abandoning of a long presidential tradition—that of avoiding partisan attacks when speaking anywhere overseas, much less in another country's legislative body. Doing so cheapens both this president (if such a thing is possible) and the presidency.

Fortunately, Barack Obama didn't waste any time in repudiating this attack. Let's hope he stays this effective as the campaign moves into the really ugly phase.

Calmer than you, dude.

Tug points out that ratio of angry invective to cute animals has been a bit skewed lately.

In an effort to right the balance, he offers this two-month-old black panther, who works at the Huachipa Zoo in Lima.

Well, sir, allow me to retort. Here is five-week-old hippopotamus calf Muddy, representing Melbourne's Werribee Open Range Zoo.

Not defeated yet? You will be—by the power of Tamandua (Tamandua tetradactyla).

Resistance is futile.

May 14, 2008

Greetings from Repressionland.

You've got to read the NY Times' series on the young people growing up in the bizarre environment of gender separation, subjugation of women, and extreme sexual phobia that is our super-swell Middle Eastern ally, Saudi Arabia.

18-year-old Alia just got engaged:

A cellphone picture of Alia’s fiancé — a 25-year-old military man named Badr — was passed around, and the girls began pestering Alia for the details of her showfa. A showfa — literally, a “viewing” — usually occurs on the day that a Saudi girl is engaged.

A girl’s suitor, when he comes to ask her father for her hand in marriage, has the right to see her dressed without her abaya.

In some families, he may have a supervised conversation with her. Ideally, many Saudis say, her showfa will be the only time in a girl’s life that she is seen this way by a man outside her family.

...

The separation between the sexes in Saudi Arabia is so extreme that it is difficult to overstate. Saudi women may not drive, and they must wear black abayas and head coverings in public at all times. They are spirited around the city in cars with tinted windows, attend girls-only schools and university departments, and eat in special “family” sections of cafes and restaurants, which are carefully partitioned from the sections used by single male diners.

Special women-only gyms, women-only boutiques and travel agencies, even a women-only shopping mall, have been established in Riyadh in recent years to serve women who did not previously have access to such places unless they were chaperoned by a male relative.

Nader is 22, and a military communications officer:

[A counsin's] father agreed to let Nader marry one of his four daughters. Nader picked Sarah, though she is not the oldest, in part, he said, because he actually saw her face when she was a child and recalled that she was pretty.

They quickly signed a wedding contract, making them legally married, but by tradition they do not consider themselves so until the wedding party, set for this spring. During the intervening months, they are not allowed to see each other or spend any time together.

Nader said he expected to see his new wife for the first time after their wedding ceremony — which would also be segregated by sex — when they are photographed as husband and wife.

“If you want to know what your wife looks like, look at her brother,” Nader said in defending the practice of marrying someone he had seen only once, briefly, as a child.

Strangest of all, however, is an account of an illicit night out with a group of teenage Saudi boys as they went "numbering"—

—chasing cars containing young girls and trying to give the girls their phone numbers via Bluetooth, or by holding written phone numbers up to their car windows. When a Saudi girl I knew told me that her friend’s older brother would be willing to take me out numbering with his friends, I leaped at the chance.

...

“There! There in the GMC!” Mohamed shouted. “Girls!”

Through the tinted windows in the back of the GMC, I could make out three indistinct black shapes. Thamer stepped on the gas, but a white Mercedes S-class containing four young Saudi men edged him out. The Mercedes pulled alongside the GMC, and the two young men in the back seat waved pieces of cardboard with phone numbers written on them.

“They beat us,” Fahad complained, as Thamer tried to pull up behind the GMC. “And they have a hotter car.”

I looked around. We were surrounded by several other cars, all containing young men and all trying to get the attention of the figures in the GMC, while simultaneously trying to edge each other off the road at high speed.

“Isn’t this getting a bit dangerous?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Fahad. “Sometimes the girls get really scared, there are so many cars chasing them. Sometimes they’re in their car, crying and screaming for us to go away. It’s fun to make girls angry.”

Fifteen of the nineteen September 11th highjackers were from Saudi Arabia. Sounds like it's not just the girls who are growing up angry.

May 13, 2008

Mississippi confounds expectations.

The national Republican party has been not-so-discreetly freaking out in the last couple of weeks that it might lose Mississippi's 1st Congressional District, which is about as conservative as conservative gets—Bush won 62 percent of the vote there in 2004.

Leading up to today's runoff election, the Republicans so feared a Democratic victory that they sent a certain Mr. D. Cheney to campaign for Greg Davis, the handsome and well-coiffed mayor of Southaven, pictured above in an attempt to simulate the Vice President's conjoined sibling. The party feared that a loss in über-reliable Mississippi could portend a serious rout this November.

Well, let the pants-soiling begin: Democrat Travis Childers has won the seat, despite a last-minute attempt by Republicans to tie his image to Barack Obama:

In advertisements and speeches, Republicans have repeatedly associated Travis Childers, the white Democrat threatening to take the seat away from the Republican Party, with Mr. Obama. Republicans say Mr. Obama’s liberal values are out of place in the district. But for many Democratic veterans here, the tactic is a throwback to the old and unwelcome politics of race, a standby in Mississippi campaigning.

Former Gov. William Winter, a Democrat, expressed shock at the current campaign.

“I am appalled that this blatant appeal to racial prejudice is still being employed,” said Mr. Winter, who lost the 1967 governor’s race after his segregationist opponent circulated handbills showing blacks listening to one of his speeches. Mr. Winter went on to win the governor’s office 12 years later.

“I had thought we had gotten past that,” Mr. Winter said. “That was a tactic that was used against me in the 1960s.”

That it didn't work in Mississippi in 2008 is a hopeful sign indeed.

MORE: Gloating a bit is one thing; Democratic congressmen should leave lines like this to Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert:

Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, noted that Vice President Dick Cheney made a Monday visit to the district in a failed effort to boost Republican Greg Davis.

“They put everything into this race in Mississippi,” he said. “And I think one of the things they learned was that Dick Cheney was as dangerous to Republican candidates as he is to his hunting partners.”

May 12, 2008

The many (well, OK, two) moods of the Pacific Northwest.

Vashon Island, May 2008.

Thanks again, Marcus.

Hijinks of a more urban nature are at General Bonkers.

Nativist genius.

Meet one of the counter-protesters at a recent immigants' rights demonstration in Houston.

Nice blouse, Janey (or is it Johnny?) Neck-Vein. Desecrate the flag much?

Hillary plumbs the depths.

Phony, brain-dead economic populism stinks enough when it comes from Republicans. Disingenuously using it against someone on your own side is loathsome.

Also, your contempt for Americans' intelligence is revolting.

Don't let the door hit you in the ass of your mom jeans on the way out, Hill.

Portrait of the bully as a young man.

Trust the good people at Gawker to keep this clip alive after YouTube took it down.

It must have been quality journalism like this that won Bill's entirely non-tabloid show its "Peabody" award.

May 11, 2008

Progress against the electoral college.

Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker points out that earlier this month, Hawaii became the fourth state to adopt the National Popular Vote—which, when enough states join, will effectively eliminate the U.S. Electoral College and give us a presidency awarded by direct election.

Check out Hertzberg's 2006 New Yorker essay for the full background on how this plan works and why it's such a good idea:

One by one, legislature by legislature, state law by state law, individual states would pledge themselves to an interstate compact under which they would agree to award their electoral votes to the nationwide winner of the popular vote. The compact would take effect only when enough states had joined it to elect a President—that is, enough to cast a majority of the five hundred and thirty-eight electoral votes. (Theoretically, as few as eleven states could do the trick.) And then, presto! All of a sudden, the people of all fifty states plus the District of Columbia are empowered to elect their President the same way they elect their governors, mayors, senators, and congressmen. We still have the Electoral College, with its colorful eighteenth-century rituals, but it can no longer do any damage. It becomes a tourist attraction, like the British monarchy.

...

There’s a traditional view that without the Electoral College, presidential campaigns would simply ignore the small states. It hasn’t worked that way. The real division that the Electoral College creates, in tandem with the winner-take-all rule, is not between large states and small states but between battleground states and what might be called spectator states. Of the thirteen least populous states, six are red, six are blue, and one—New Hampshire—is up for grabs. Guess which twelve Bush and Kerry stiffed and which one got plenty of love, long after the primary season? Size doesn’t matter. At the other end of the spectrum, the three biggest states—blue California, red Texas, and blue New York—were utterly ignored, except for purposes of fund-raising.

That’s not the worst of it, though. After all, some people might count it a blessing to be spared the October onslaught of thirty-second spots and traffic jams caused by self-important motorcades. The worst of it is the death of participatory politics in two-thirds of the country. If you live in a spectator state, it might be fun to persuade your neighbors to vote your way, or ring their doorbells, or hand them leaflets. But it can’t make a difference. And it doesn’t matter which side you’re on or which color your state is. Widening your ticket’s margin of victory or narrowing its margin of defeat is equally pointless. In this sense, our Presidential campaigns are not only not national; in most of the country they’re not local, either. They’re just not.

The NPV needs states representing 220 more Electoral College votes to sign on before it becomes effective. If Governor Muscles here in California will rethink his veto, that'll get it down to 165.

A Texas wedding.

Jenna Bush, who I once had the displeasure of being annoyed by as she yammered loudly about manicures and massages while having breakfast in a small Buenos Aires hotel, got married yesterday.

Here's my favorite part of the NY Times' coverage:

The wedding, which began at 7:30 p.m., took place on the Bush ranch, before a white limestone altar erected next to a man-made lake. The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell of Windsor Village United Methodist Church in Houston officiated at the ceremony. Mr. Caldwell, a longtime religious adviser to Mr. Bush, has endorsed Senator Barack Obama.

Best wishes to the happy couple. Let's avoid overlapping travel schedules in the future, shall we?

May 05, 2008

That guy at Rummy's left hand is a terrorist.

As the NY Times wrote in a big article last month, quite a few retired military officers (all of whom happen to be network news "commentators") are regularly granted access to Pentagon officials in exchange for cheerleading the Bush administration's rhetoric. Refuse to pimp for the administration, lose your access. It's that simple.

One of these characters is retired Lt. General Thomas McInerney. Quoting the Times article about this bunch:

The group was heavily represented by men involved in the business of helping companies win military contracts. Several held senior positions with contractors that gave them direct responsibility for winning new Pentagon business. James Marks, a retired Army general and analyst for CNN from 2004 to 2007, pursued military and intelligence contracts as a senior executive with McNeil Technologies. Still others held board positions with military firms that gave them responsibility for government business. General McInerney, the Fox analyst, for example, sits on the boards of several military contractors, including Nortel Government Solutions, a supplier of communication networks.

McInerney, however, has decided to take things one step further. Appearing opposite a nearly-salivating interviewer last week on Fox News, this man openly advocated a U.S. campaign of terrorism in Iran.

Question: If we do have evidence, and apparently we do, according to officials, that Iran is killing U.S. troops in Iraq or supporting that, why haven't we struck by now?

McInerney: It beats me, Greg. I don't know why we haven't. They have killed hundreds of Americans with their explosively formed projectiles [EFPs], and that's why I think we have to take action. And here's what I would suggest to you. No. 1, we take the National Council for Resistance in Iran off the terrorist list that the Clinton Administration put them on, as well as the Mujahideen-e Khalq that are at Camp Ashraf in Iraq. Then I would start a tit-for-tat strategy, which I wrote up in the Wall Street Journal a year ago. For every EFP that goes off that kills Americans, two go off in Iran. No questions asked, people don't know have to know how it was done. It's covert action. They become the most unlucky country in the world. And then I would start moving U.S. carrier battle groups into the region, as well as some of our stealth aircraft, just to make sure they understand, don't try to kick off a major insurrection come October and September, October to impact our elections. They are deliberately ratcheting up and we’ve got to counter that.

Need I mention that you can practically see the Fox reporter's boner through his desk as McInerney lays out this plan?

Fox Military Propagandist Promotes Terrorist Murder, on Daily Kos

The Spin War (Patt Morrison, KPCC)