Eh heh heh heh eh heh

Weird. It's like the exact same laugh every time.

Err-or. Does not compute. Commence laugh sequence.

The Brutal Truth

This hit on a lot of the thoughts I had about the scene surrounding Saturday's game and going forward as well as the real underlying issues.

It is not a failure of our institutions so much as it is a window into what they have become — soulless, profit-driven monsters, Darwinian predators with precious little humanity left in them. Penn State is only the most recent example. Too much of this country is too big to fail.

scorncob

The overwrought moralizing from sportswriters has been a source of annoyance to me for years. I thought Steve Rushin wrote a nice column about it that hit on some of the main reasons why I have a little more trouble getting worked up over steroids or whatever other controversy is the topic of the day.

Anyone who feels real moral outrage when reading the Sports section has almost certainly skipped the News and Metro sections. The murderers given a single paragraph on 2C, The Hague-bound war criminals on 1A, would leave the most self-righteous reader too demoralized to moralize on, say, the Miami Heat. A man taking his talents to South Beach is, in the context of a single day's newspaper, a comical diversion, a performance-art piece of slapstick self-absorption.

Crossover

Really enjoyed this. I remember hearing about Hardaway's crossover as a kid and learning what it was. AI's was definitely one of the best though.

Osama

A couple of scattershot thoughts on the killing of Osama bin Laden. Just a few things that crossed my mind.

I'm not the type of person to celebrate the death of anyone but I'm not shedding any tears over someone who orchestrated, encouraged, and inspired so many terrorist attacks that led to the death of thousands in all corners of the world. The idealist in me thought it would be a great representation of what I think the US should be if we captured him and brought him in front of a fair trial. It's unlikely that ever could have happened but I think it would have been a good symbol.

Do you think that conversation with Pakistan was a little awkward?
"Huh. So, you say he was sitting in a compound 40 miles from our capital the entire time? That's so crazy! I mean, you'd think we'd have noticed something like that."
"Uh, yeah..."
"No, but seriously, we really need just like 20 or 30 million dollars for some new military stuff. You know. Gotta keep up the fight against Al Qaeda! Am I right?"

Something like this makes a threatened government shutdown look dumb. It makes the birther "controversy" look dumber than I ever thought possible.

I'm not sure whether reading my Twitter timeline was worse than watching the network coverage. At one point the CBS reporter said something to the effect of, "Obama was briefed this morning. He played 9 holes of golf this afternoon. Maybe it's surprising he played golf at all but I guess perhaps that's why he only played 9 holes." My Twitter feed was mostly death certificate jokes, gloating, and other useless snark.

Despite all of that there were a couple of lines that made me laugh at the time:
"FOXNEWS REPORTS: Obama Administration Kills Homeless Religious Man with Kidney Disease"
"So he wasn't in a cave after all? Fucking poser!"
"So, who'd Trump fire tonight?"

Fox News did manage to put "Obama bin Laden" in their caption more than once. Fair and Balanced!

I've been thinking about how the cynic in me believes that our leaders like to have a convenient enemy to point to for a variety of reasons. Bin Laden is gone but there will always be somebody else. Al Qaeda was always more than one guy but it's also less than they have been portrayed in our media. While eliminating a powerful symbol may not finish off al Qaeda or "terrorism" in general, my hope is that this serves as some sort of catalyst to end these seemingly endless wars once and for all. Already some of the talking heads were beating the drum that there are still more terrorists out there we have to kill and I expect that line will continue over the next few days if there is actually any momentum towards withdrawing more troops.

A great way to help balance the state budget

Eliminate the wingnuts. Turns out Kansas has spent over $500,000 defending insane former AG Phill Kline from ethics charges stemming from his various crusades. Thanks, Phill. You're the gift we can't get rid of. More hearings are scheduled for this summer.

Speaking of wingnuts, 48% of Iowa Republicans believe Obama was born in Kenya while 26% aren't sure. Yeah, no way they're electing someone sane as their candidate in '12. It's going to be horrifying (and maybe a little amusing) watching them try to out-crazy each other before attempting to walk it all back after they get the nomination.

Blockquoting

These numbers about the electricity usage to grow marijuana indoors kind of blew my mind.

A new study estimates that indoor pot-growing operations in the United States burn about $5 billion worth of electricity annually, or roughly 1 percent of national power consumption. That’s enough electricity to power two million average homes.

The electricity use of the typical grow operation approaches 200 watts per square foot, on par with the power usage of a modern computer data center, Evan Mills, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and author of the study, said in a statement. (The study was completed in his free time and without federal funds, Dr. Mills added.)

The study estimated that a single joint contains the equivalent of roughly two pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, the equivalent of running a 100-watt bulb for about 30 hours on the California grid.

1% of consumption for the entire United States??

Budget cuts...

The entire list of shit what got cut is darkly amusing, like watching a cartoon salami with teeth discover his own body is delicious and then devouring himself. Gas prices skyrocketing and our tiresome dependence on foreign oil keeping us involved in our tiresome wars? Well, fuck you, you public transportation-using pussy: "the bill eliminates new funding for High Speed Rail and rescinds $400 million in previous year funds, for a total reduction of $2.9 billion from fiscal year 2010 levels."

The Rude Pundit is typically rude about some of the more absurd and short-sighted budget cuts that were the victim of the latest standoff. How great is it that we live in a country where, G.E., our largest corporation paid exactly $0 in taxes last year but we are cutting $600 million from community health centers and $1 billion for TB and AIDS prevention? Again, G.E. reported $14 billion in worldwide profits and paid $0 in taxes but we're looking at cutting into Medicare and Medicaid. Sorry, poor people, better not get sick because we're sooo serious about the budget deficit that we're going eliminate your doctor visits and cut taxes for the Koch's. It's bad enough when this shit happens under somebody like Bush but under Democrats? I'm sure car salesmen loved selling to Obama because we once again managed to end up with more cuts than were in the initial Republican offer. How is that possible? Dude, please stop with the grand unifier stuff because they're humiliating you every time.

The Civil War...

Today, the war’s centrality in American history seems both assured and tenuous. Each generation, the social critic Lewis Mumford once said, re-examines and re-interprets that part of the past that gives the present new meanings and new possibilities. That also means that for a time an event, any event, even one as perpetually important as the Civil War, can face the specter being out of historical fashion.

But in the end, it seems that the War of the Rebellion, the formal name our government once gave to the struggle, always invades our consciousness like the childhood traumatic event it was — and still is.

Used up your New York Times articles yet? Ken Burns wrote a good one on the 150th anniversary of start of the Civil War.

On a positive note, there's some good music out this week. I've enjoyed previews of the new stuff from Panda Bear, Low, and tUnEyArDs and am also planning on checking out the new TV on the Radio. Anybody listening to anything good?