Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

Suffer

Bad Drugs: Lethal Injection Does Not Work as Designed: Scientific American
Current lethal injection protocols would not pass muster in animal euthanasia and may leave condemned inmates needlessly suffering.

Needless suffering? Needless suffering?

I know some of you will think I’m a terrible person for writing this, but… if the inmate is guilty of the sort of murder that most often draws the death penalty — I’m quite content to have them suffer as much as possible before dying.

Child killers? Torture-murderers?

Bring on the suffering — I want that kind of monster to pay and pay and PAY and pay for the terrible things they did.

It’s not about justice. It’s about revenge. And I’m okay with that.

Prairie Chickens in Love

Maybe I’m weird (oh, okay — we all know I’m weird), but I think this series of pictures of Greater Prairie Chickens doing their mating dance is pretty cool. The chicken in this picture, by the way, is the female who’s got the roosters all excited. Oooo baby.

Washingtonpost.com’s Idiotic Hypertext Links

Has anyone else noticed the really stupid way washingtonpost.com has been using hypertext links lately? Actually… maybe they’ve done this all along and I just never noticed until now. Hm. No — I think I would have noticed. I think it’s fairly recent.

Here’s an example — selected pretty much at random (though it is too bad about David Halberstam’s death): Author Uncloaked Vietnam Blunders – washingtonpost.com.

Let’s just look at a few of these links, shall we?

• First link, “David Halberstam” will take you to everything the post has on him. That makes sense.
• “Pulitzer Prize” takes you to everything the post’s got on the Pulitzer Prize. Not specifically anything about David Halberstam’s Pulitzer Prize. This is not particularly helpful.
• “Vietnam”, “San Francisco”, and “New York” take you to everything the Post has referencing those places. You want something specifically about David Halberstam in Vietnam?? You’re on your own, pal. Maybe you can find something on the Post’s site and maybe you can’t. Either way, the Post isn’t helping you.
• Oddly, they don’t link to anything on Halberstam’s book “The Best and the Brightest” — a link that would actually be, you know, useful. But they do link to everything the Post’s ever had about John F. Kennedy — but nothing they ever had to say about Lyndon B. Johnson.

Who is coming up with this nonsense? These hypertext links are really strangely chosen and pretty much useless. They don’t link to anything meaningful within the context of the news story.

The links are so stupid and so useless that I wonder whether they haven’t been created automatically by a program of some kind. I’m envisioning some sales guy persuading someone at the Post — someone who knows very little about how people actually use the internet — to buy this thing, with glowing descriptions of how great it will be.

Uh…no.

It’s not great. It’s stupid — and annoying — and almost entirely useless.

Science In Silico

Extreme Coolness! Watch this short (less than 7 minutes) video about using computer simulations to study natural phenomena.

Java Jive

Retrospectacle: A Neuroscience Blog
As we all know, caffeine is a nervous system stimulant. As you may not know, its the world’s most commonly used psychoactive drug, and 90% of North Americans consume caffeine in some form ever day. Caffeine evolved as a defense mechanism for plants. Insects eating a decaffeinated [sic] plant become paralyzed and die, making it an effective pesticide. Global consumption of caffeine is around 120,000 tons.

Fascinating stuff! Check out what caffeine does to the spider! I wonder how much caffeine they gave it? I wonder what the equivalent doseage would be in a human being in terms of cups of coffee, for example. I wonder why I don’t just download the original paper and find out? There’s a link to the paper on the Retrospectacle web site. Maybe I’ll just do that, eh?

The Retrospectacle site also has pictures of webs created by spiders on marijuana, benzedrine, and chloral hydrate. Interestingly, of the four “drugged-out spider” webs, the caffeine web is the one that’s most screwed up — barely looking like a regular web at all.

Minnesotans! Vote for Al in 2008!

The Truth

If you want to win hearts and minds, the first thing you should do is protect people’s chests and heads.
– from The Truth (with jokes) by Al Franken

READ THIS BOOK!!

Thank God for Al Franken. He’s got all the disgusting crap perpetrated by the Bush administration over the past seven years documented in one funny and heartbreaking book. Stuff I’d completely forgotten about — Al’s got it all here.

A few hundred years from now, historians are going to pull a dusty copy of Al Franken’s “The Truth with jokes” down from the shelf and point to it and say, “This guy. He knew!! He saw what was happening and he wrote all about it! And how many people listened to him??” And, hopefully, that historian of the future will continue on with, “A lot of people MUST have listened because after 2008 everything turned around and got a lot better!”

Wouldn’t that be great?

The Dustin Inman Society

The Dustin Inman Society – Secure American Borders – Enforce American laws – founded by D.A. King
Named for one of the thousands of Americans who have paid the ultimate price for those unsecured borders, The Dustin Inman Society is a non-partisan coalition of citizens of all ethnicities and from all walks of life who recognize that illegal immigration and homeland security are the most critical issues in America today.

Dustin Inman was a 16-year-old killed in a traffic accident where the other car was driven by an illegal immigrant.

The Inman family has my sincere condolences. However, their son is not dead because of illegal immigration. Their son is dead because Gonzalo Harrell-Gonzalez was a crappy driver.

Billy Inman [Dustin's father] will tell you that he blames the government sworn to protect him and his family for his son’s death more than he blames the illegal alien who killed him.

I can understand that. It makes no sense, but I understand it. The enormity of the Inman family’s grief must be such that blaming one person couldn’t seem like enough. Unfortunately, there are plenty of American citizens who drive just as recklessly as Harrell-Gonzalez did on that terrible day. I’m not saying it would have been a citizen who’d killed Justin if there were no illegal immigrants driving around — I don’t believe in that sort of predestination — I’m just saying that there’s no real link between illegal immigration and national statistics for motor vehicle deaths. These people might just as well call themselves “The Daffy Duck Society” for all the connection Dustin Inman’s death has to the overall problem of illegal immigration.

Honestly, I think it’s pretty disgusting how these particular anti-illegal immigration people are using this family’s grief — and the good name of their dear departed son — to push their political and social agendas.

Rally Against Illegal Immigrants in DC Today

Rally Against Illegal Immigration Scheduled – washingtonpost.com
Organizers of today’s demonstration say they plan to focus on three issues: improving border security, opposing amnesty for immigrants living illegally in the country and enforcing U.S. laws, including those against hiring illegal immigrants.

This, as much as anything else, tells you something about where these “Minuteman” types are coming from. According to this Washington Post article, 62% of those polled said they favor a plan where those illegal immigrants already in the country would be offered a chance to keep their jobs and apply for legal immigration status. Of course, I am among that 62%. Sure, fine, tighten the borders. I don’t have a problem with that — but don’t just toss out those who are already here. Many of them have made the US their home. They have friends here and family. Give them a chance to become citizens and you not only gain a little extra tax money from them (it’s not like most of these folks are raking in big bucks), but you also provide them with legal protection against predatory employers who pay less than minimum wage and who don’t provide any worker’s compensation coverage.

People in this area bitch and complain about “loitering workers” and “over-crowded housing”, but these things wouldn’t be so much of a problem if the illegal immigrants could gain some kind of legal worker status. If you’re a legal worker, you can get a regular job so you don’t have to hang around outside a 7-Eleven hoping to get picked up. If you’re a legal worker, you can get paid enough so you don’t have to crowd into a tiny apartment with a bunch of other illegal guys.

Dancing Monkey

Hmm. Maybe Alberto Gonzales was actually brilliant yesterday. – By Dahlia Lithwick – Slate Magazine
Gonzales’ failure to even mount a defense; his posture of barely tolerating congressional inquiries; his refusal to concede that he owed the Senate any explanation or any evidence; his refusal to even accept that he bore some burden of proof—all of it tots up to a masterful display of the perfect contempt felt by the Bush executive branch for this Congress and its pretensions of oversight. In the plainest sense, Gonzales elevated the Bush legal doctrine of “Because I said so” into a public spectacle.

Slate’s got a great analysis of yesterday’s Alberto Gonzales grill-a-thon. I think Dahlia Lithwick has it exactly right. When Gonzales said “I don’t recall that” what he really meant was “None of your fucking business.” He’s not incompetent — he and his evil organ-grinder boss, George W. Bush, simply don’t believe they’re accountable to anyone. For anything.