For the Record

Shut out

CNN warehoused a stock of pink pixels to mark GOP pickups on these three pages. They haven't needed them yet -- but their logistics team was on fully taxed in trying to keep the streams of baby blue flowing.

This marks what, as Bill Montgomery notes, may turn out to be an extremely rare electoral outcome: while not every race in the midterm has been decided yet, it seems that no Democratic-held Senate or House seat or governorship was picked up by a Republican -- apparently such a shut out has never happened before.

Pre-election weekend linky post

• A cheering reflection on the cultural underpinnings of the left blogosphere political movement. Especially cheering when read as a sort of "happy face" take on the value of bricolage in response to Thomas Frank's depressing doctrine of the context of cool. Also most excellently proceeding from the core Lennon-ist exhortation to "try something new".
• Vids: good natured people and one fucking psycho. (Though I note that Big Time manifests a bit of stung-ness in response to a huge dis from his long time bud Ken Adelman.)
• Ramsey Clark, former USAG and Saddam's lawyer, worries about "victor's justice".
• There's a good deal to read on the incredibly hilarious "101st fighting keyboarders fuckup" reported by the Times over the weekend; most cheering is that Bush considered it a pet project and even engaged in a bit of sympathetic interpretative prediction of the reaction of the sweet cherries that the 101st would pluck from his document treasure trove: "Bush extended his arms in exasperation and worried aloud that people who see the documents in 10 years will wonder why they weren't released sooner. "If I knew then what I know now," Bush said in the voice of a war skeptic, "I would have been more supportive of the war." " Note that this anecdote is from last March's Weekly Standard! [Backstory; more: apparently Laurie Mylroie and some other crazies, worried about the evaporating WMD justification for the Iraq invastion, enlisted PowerLine's moronic "Big Trunk" Mirengoff and others in pressuring a pair of congressmen to pressure Bush to pressure Bush's third CIA boss, Negroponte, to release 2 million pages of captured Iraqi docs on line. Or something like that. The goal was for an "army of Davids" -- in InstaIgnorance's asinine phrase -- to open-source translate them out of Arabic to provide the retrospective propaganda that would induce the war critics to shut up. Because we know how the right wing blogosphere is so knowledgeable about other cultures and so public spirited. For months, the IAEA was warning the Cheney Admin to take the docs down since they tell you in detail in Arabic how to build a nuke, info that the IAEA suppressed from the public until last March. Needless to say, they paid no attn until the NYT broke the story over the weekend. The national security party at work. I've been rotflmao all weekend!]
• A very cool formula to predict the outcome of a given congressional race without polls.
• The Clinton folk wargamed an Iraq takeover in 1999 and predicted that even with 400K troops, the likely outcome would be chaos. Rummy's New Model Army tried to do it with a third of that. Result? Chaos! (Incidentally, I've never seen a decent explanation of just why Rummy digs the light military so much. Maybe his thought is just as straightforward as this: with the same manpower a light military can fuck up a lot more places than a heavy military.)
   

Linky post

• Talk about reaction formation! This story is a real treat for lovers of one of Brian's favorite concepts. Apparently Ted Haggard, one of the fathers of the contemporary American Taliban, and the major player behind the theocratization of the USAF (his megachurch is right across from the Air Force Academy), has been involved in a sexual relationship with a male prostitute for the last three years, apparently also engaging in "p&p" or enhancing the experience by smoking crystal. Dude, stay off the crystal, that stuff will make your teeth fall out.
• Why is Stanford University, my alma mater, the lying right-wing propagandist Thomas Sowell -- who has recently lied about the anti-terrorism positions of a leading member of California's congressional delegation? Answer, Sowell a "fellow" -- translation, on a sinecure post -- at the Hoover Institution. Hoover certainly performs some worthwhile services -- eg their archives are tremendous. Still, providing Sowell and the even more odious and stupid Dinesh D'Souza with the sheen of a Stanford association damages Stanford's good name, as well as blurring the line in the public mind between serious scholarship and propaganda. (Incidentally, if you haven't yet read James Wolcott's devastating D'Souza dis, do so: it's archived here.) Financial pressure obviously won't do anything to get SU to disgorge this pair of goons: Hoover is self-funding -- or rather owned by the corporate and elite paymasters that benefit from its propaganda (ADM "supermarket to the world"; big oil and their auto buddies; big war; big FIRE; assorted individual plutocrats). Still, maybe moral pressure would induce Stanford, if not to pressure Hoover to get rid of these jerks, at least to issue a strong statement deploring their lies and distinguishing what they do from what Stanford is supposed to do. Maybe after the election ...
• US determined to be an "extensive surveillance socieity", with privacy protections just above those of China, Russia, and Malaysia.
• Last night I got round to reading Matt Taibbi's terrifying Rolling Stone piece on the historically dreadful 109th congress. If you haven't read it yet, please do. I found I learned a great deal about legislative mechanics -- also, in grueling detail, how the Republican party has utterly destroyed this central system in US democracy.
   

I, Elephant

Elephants pass the "mirror test" for self-awareness:

In a series of experiments, the elephants first explored the mirror -- reaching behind it with their trunks, kneeling before it and even trying to climb it -- gathering clues that the mirror image was just that, an image.  

That was followed by an eerie sequence in which the animals made slow, rhythmic movements while tracking their reflections. Then, like teenagers, they got hooked.

All three conducted oral self-exams. Maxine, a 35-year-old female, even used the tip of her trunk to get a better look inside her mouth. She also used her trunk to slowly pull her ear in front of the mirror so she could examine it -- "self-directed" behaviors the zookeepers had never seen before.

Moreover, one elephant, Happy, 34, passed the most difficult measure of self-recognition: the mark test. The researchers painted a white X on her left cheek, visible only in the mirror. Later, after moving in and out of view of the mirror, Happy stood directly before the reflective surface and touched the tip of her trunk to the mark repeatedly -- an act that, among other insights, requires an understanding that the mark is not on the mirror but on her body.

This is pretty extraordinary.  Besides bottle-nosed dolphins (who also use mirrors to perform self-examinations), elephants are the only non-apes to exhibit such behavior.

Spread the word: doing it is good

Some women talk about their first time.

More memoirs here.

Hi, I'm Flipper!

Turns out dolphins name themselves with whistles:

Scientists say it's the first time wild animals have been shown to call out their own names.

Evidently dolphins make up their names as infants, as variations on the names of their elders; their names are readily recognizable to friends and family.  Moreover, dolphins use each other's names:

More than that, two dolphins may refer to a third by the third animal's name, said Laela Sayigh, one of three authors of a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Ah, the origin of gossip!

Colbert roasts Bush, reporters at the WH correspondents' dinner

Actually, it's more like an incineration (the audience reaction shots are priceless).  The complete video is here and a clean transcript is here.

UPDATE: my mother, the former intrepid journalist, emailed me on Colbert:

Can you believe how great this guy was---and can you believe how many stories have been written by the msm on how "out of line" and "unfunny" he was??  Oh my, he really let those flacks have it, didn't he?

Just when you think there's no hope at all, someone actually gets in front of the Washington powers and press (I've attended that function several times, by the way) and quite simply pulverizes them with the most deliciously devastating irony I think I've ever seen or read.

Nicely said, Mer!  Would that there were more like you were.

UPDATE 2: Of course, the NYT (your favorite "liberal" newspaper) didn't even mention Colbert---by any reasonable standards, the story of the evening---in its coverage of the dinner.  Benj notes that that's because "Kneepads" Bumiller wrote the article.

BSPC 2006

Ned Markosian of the Philosophy Department at Western Washington University has written in about BSPC 2006. Information is available here:

The Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference is an annual festival of philosophy, featuring several days of formal philosophy sessions, informal discussions, and various non-philosophical activities, all in and around scenic Bellingham, Washington, in the beautiful northwest corner of the U.S. (Click here to see a map of the region.)

 

The BSPC is a general philosophy conference, with no particular philosophical theme. For the past four years, Philosophical Studies has agreed to publish selected papers from the BSPC (see here and here), and there is some reason to think that will happen again with BSPC 2006.

 

In addition to numerous exciting philosophy papers, previous BSPCs have featured barbecues, lots of enjoyable meals and late-night revelry, and various other activities (including basketball, ultimate frisbee, hiking, and sea kayaking).

 

BSPC 2006 will feature ten formal philosophy sessions, taking place over three days, together with various informal philosophical and recreational activities, taking place over a span of about five days.

 

Each of the formal philosophy sessions of BSPC 2006 will be devoted to a single paper. It is likely that all of the papers will be  "pre-reads" -- papers that have been made available to conference participants in advance. Each of these sessions will consist of the presentation of prepared comments on the relevant paper  followed by a discussion of that paper.

 

BSPC participants are encouraged to bring their families and friends, to arrive early and stay late, and to take advantage of the many recreational activities in the region, including hiking, biking, boating, island-hopping, and visits to Vancouver and Seattle.

 

Bellingham, Washington is located on Puget Sound, 55 miles from Vancouver and 85 miles from Seattle. It is a pleasant town of about 80,000, with lots of nice scenery, restaurants, bookstores, and coffee shops. In the immediate vicinity there are beaches, mountains, lakes, numerous local and state parks, all manner of biking and hiking trails, ferries to Victoria and the San Juan Islands, and opportunities for kayaking, sailing, and whale watching.

 

Please note that BSPC 2006 is not open to the general public. It is, instead, an invitation-only affair. (This is partly due to funding and logistical constraints, and partly due to the fact that the BSPC is a workshop-style conference that involves in-depth discussions of works-in-progress.)

 

The method for determining conference participants this year will be similar to the one that was used last year. Attendance at the conference will be limited to (a) people on the program as either authors, commentators, or session chairs,  and (b) the members of Western's philosophy department. But everyone in the world is welcome to submit a paper, or volunteer to be a commentator or session chair.

 

For paper submission guidelines, and information about how to volunteer to be a commentator or session chair, click here.

 

Note to potential conference participants with children: For information on the availability of childcare during the BSPC, click here.

 

Here is a page with some information about BSPCers who are interested in sharing rides to and from one of the local airports.

 

Here is a page with various pieces of information pertaining to arriving for the BSPC.

Bellingham is a lovely town, and the folks at WWU have in the past always generated a relaxed, philosophically rich atmosphere. How have they done it? I dunno! But philosophers should seriously consider submitting papers or volunteering to comment or chair.

"How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal?"

So asks the great Harold Pinter in his long but extremely worthwhile Nobel Prize acceptance speech, reproduced in full in the extended body.

Kazakhstan threatens borat

About time!

ASTANA (Reuters) - Kazakhstan's Foreign Ministry threatened legal action on Monday against comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, who wins laughs by portraying the central Asian state as a country populated by drunks who enjoy cow-punching as a sport.

Baron Cohen, who portrays a spoof Kazakh television presenter Borat in his "Da Ali G Show", has won fame ridiculing Kazakhstan, the world's ninth largest country yet still little known to many in the West.

Baron Cohen appears to have drawn official Kazakh ire after he hosted the annual MTV Europe Music Awards show in Lisbon earlier this month as Borat, who arrived in an Air Kazakh propeller plane controlled by a one-eyed pilot clutching a vodka bottle.

"We do not rule out that Mr. Cohen is serving someone's political order designed to present Kazakhstan and its people in a derogatory way," Kazakh Foreign Ministry spokesman Yerzhan Ashykbayev told a news briefing.

"We reserve the right to any legal action to prevent new pranks of the kind." He declined to elaborate.

Cohen's earlier jokes about the Central Asian state include claims that the people would shoot a dog and then have a party, and that local wine was made from fermented horse urine.

"We view Mr. Cohen's behaviour at the MTV Europe Music Awards as utterly unacceptable, being a concoction of bad taste and ill manners which is completely incompatible with ethics and civilised behaviour," Ashykbayev said.