“We couldn’t love him more,” say the proud paleontologists.

Nebraska Baseball Game Lasts 30 Hours

Take that, cricket. Oh… you say cricket matches regularly go over 30 hours. …Um, take that, Princess Di.

Blair expected to set a date for exit

World expected to pretend to care for upwards of six months.

Bush says secret CIA jails “necessary and effective tools”

Stalin remarks via medium in Sedona séance: Atta boy!

BRODER: Media Owes Karl Rove an Apology

POND: America Owes Karl Rove a Rope and a Footstool

Austrian discusses years of captivity

Assures world there was some kind of mix-up as she is not a “Hebe.”

Feds may ease limit on painkillers

Sunday liquor sales in Washington? ’Bout fucking time.

The paradoxes of the Bush presidency

Pat M Holt, a former chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, offers three of them.

1) Campaigning in 2000 GW said he would be very careful about using America’s military for nation building. After Autumn of 2001, he was pretty whole hog about it.

2) To spread democracy abroad GW is doing things like suspending it at home.

3) To further national security GW is adopting fictional presidential powers not given by any laws of the United States of America.

Okay, Pat, you used to work in government so I’m sure you’re a little slow. Still…

Those are not paradoxes. They’re lies and contradictions. There is no such thing as a paradox in the real world excepting perhaps in the hemp-addled minds of philosophy students at MIT half-way to emigrating to Cuba if it’ll get them a pat on the back from the gnarled claw of the linguistics department chair.

No less than 9 of the last 10 US presidents were natural born liars who nudged the office higher and higher above the law every term they served.

I thought I had something funny to say about it. There’s another paradox for you.

Iraq deaths multiply in new August count

Associated Press writer Rawya Rageh reports:

Baghdad recorded more than 1,500 violent deaths in August … nearly three times the preliminary figure … released last week. The figure is a sharp contradiction of U.S. and Iraqi claims that a security crackdown led to a steep drop in deaths in the capital.

Um… Is this the part where I say, I told you so?

Ahmadinejad offers Bush debate at UN General Assembly

Bush counters with an offer of exile to neighboring Islamic nation before invading Iran. But that’s just something I made up. An American president would never do something like that.

NASA to decide when to launch shuttle

Plans to stop letting Mrs Neusbaum, the handsome astronaut’s mother, choose launch times based on her bridge club.

Bush to bin Laden: “America will find you”

America to Bush: “Give it a rest, sparky.”

When, at the next State of the Union address, you are able to produce his head from a tote bag bearing the presidential seal, you can crow all you want. Till then, shut your fumbling trap. You should take less time reminding us that the single corpse every American—red, blue, green, or polka-dots—agrees you should have been able deliver out of this mess is not only not dead but living the semi-retired high life in the hills of Pakistan.

JULIE

I can’t believe there are four beds in this room and you have to sleep on the floor.

ASHLEY

I prefer to think that there are five beds in this room and I’ve chosen to sleep in the comfortable one.

In Safeway last night. Two carts cruising through the vegetables, mine and his, crossed and we saw our daughters together.

Mine, with storm-cloud-blue eyes and hair long enough to reach her waist when wet but so curly it barely passes her shoulders dry. His, less than half my girl’s age, with tight black curls and hazel eyes. The futures of both obviously complicating their father’s lives greatly in 10 years.

We exchanged mutual admiration.

He asked, “Where am I from?”

I looked carefully at him. I’m good at this game. Like it or not, some of us can, just by looking at you, tell with fair accuracy, all the borders implied by the sordid grab-ass your maternal line invited or survived. I know, however, that not everyone likes the conclusions. Especially when you’re off by one racial hair; say tribe “14” instead of “12.”

He looked slightly Egyptian but I had a feeling he wasn’t. Too fine boned. Nose was wrong. I knew Egyptian, if the wrong answer, was truly the wrong answer. I began to scan North Africa in my mind for matches.

He said, “Here’s a clue. I’m from the first country to recognize the independence of the United States.”

Well, that was a terrible clue because it only suggested France to me. France, deplorable as their government and blind intolerance has become, was America’s fast friend since back when the Lobster Backs had the OG on the run. There are so many North Africans in France, he wrecked any chance at guessing right.

I said, “France?”

“No. They were fourth.”

Predictably, it takes an African to teach me the finer points of American history.

“Morocco,” he said.

The Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship is the oldest non-broken friendship treaty we hold. Our oldest, most steady friends a sultanate turned constitutional monarchy. Muslims. How do like that?

We talked a bit more about our girls. No wrong answers possible there.

Then away from the vegetables and tofu and into the sauces and durum, litter and nip, tortilla and gyoza, vanilla and cardamom, stimulants and depressants, sustenance and diversion. The bazaar.

Simultaneously back at the checkout. He asked me what I thought about the Lebanon business.

I said, “It certainly makes it hard. How can one be pro-Israel while being anti-Israeli government?”

Eager, cautious chatter.

“Shameful,” was the conclusion. We both clucked and shook our heads at the situation and where it landed all spectators while I lined up my goods on the conveyor to the cashier.

Then, in the parking garage beneath the Safeway, after belting the kids down, putting the groceries in the car I asked myself, “Wait, wait, wait. Wait. Why are you even pro-Israel? When exactly did you decide you were?”

I take pride in that my opinions are never ready made; even while my art history cliché references sometimes are. I think about things before I choose a side; decide a moral position. I think about why I do everything. It’s, frankly, the only thing that elevates me. I don’t fly blind. I don’t “just do” shit unless I know everything that is going on behind it. I care not about looking right but about being in the right.

At the age of 10, maybe, I saw, for the first time, films of the many-pronged genocide that the Nazis undertook. It wasn’t just Jews. That’s easy to gloss. Jews made up about 60% of those sacrificed to the State of Deutschland. Poles, Czechs, homosexuals, and gypsies. The last being entirely ironic. Roma gypsies are Aryan. No statist regime has ever run on facts though. Not then, not now.

Corpses, in black and white, so emaciated that they could be flung with rakes and shovels. A body thrown with a single hand. Piles of pseudo-rubber. Bad special effects. Millions of naked sexless dolls; no longer anatomically correct. Robbed first of their identity, then humanity, gender, and finally breath.

Of course I was on their side. Anyone who could survive that deserved sponsorship. Anyone against it is a certifiable monster. Still…

The Holocaust was two and more generations ago. Almost everyone involved is dead. Both my grandfathers who participated in the war as Air Force officers are dead. The few children survivors of the camps are in their 70s and 80s. The last won’t die for another 30 years but there are few enough left compared to the weight of guilt that hangs on Germany and neighbors still.

(Japan at least had a clean path out. They suffered what none has. They were purified of many sins in the heat of crumbling isotopes. They could begin fresh and make it stick.)

The id of Israel, if you will, is the kibbutz. No longer very relevant, at the time the US was laying waste to Viet Nam with surplus ordnance because they were red, Israel was barely a faded pink.

There is archaeological and genetic evidence that the Palestinians have, if not superior, a roughly equal historical claim to the space Israel fills on modern maps.

No religion has any evidence or clean history behind it. They’re all superstitious nonsense that have cost centuries of progress; and lives beyond counting. Judaism being slightly more offensive to reason, even, at its root than Christianity. A state based on a religion, founded with intensely socialist practices, in a location held by other peoples on and off since Lucy’s grandsons staggered north, recently on a 1,000 year jag.

Why am I pro-Israel? Well, the opposition is deplorable but that’s the case in so many conflicts. Simply picking a side because the other offends you is not reasonable. It’s emotionally satisfying but it’s morally incorrect. Property rights based on religion is the worst kind of nonsense.

So why? Guilt insinuated via atrocities I had nothing to do with. That’s about what it boils down to. I admire the military they had 50 years ago. They had the power to carve a state out of a mountain of would-be destroyers. Still, if aggression is all it takes, then another match with any and all comers seems fair.

Today, I can’t say much for Israel. I certainly can’t imagine why the fate of the United States should be tied to it in any way whatsoever. I can’t imagine why billions of dollars of American money should be going there as foreign aid as if they were Cuba and we were the goddamned USSR. How did we get here? I have a feeling it was the same way I did. By not thinking about it. Letting pity decide.

Real estate is still a real value

Written by Linda Stern at Reuters. One can only assume Ms Stern currently has a difficult listing receiving infrequent nibbles entirely without the proper level of enthusiasm.

Nude teens raise eyebrows

Theresa Toney … complain[ed] about a group of youngsters naked in a parking lot. “The parking lot is not a strip club,” she said. “What about children seeing this?”

You mean the kids whose heads are still getting the right shape after being squeezed through a vagina, the kids that suck naked tits for breakfast, lunch, and supper, or the kids that need their naked asses cleaned 6 times a day and don’t get to bathe alone till their 13^th birthday? Are those the kids who will be damaged by casual public nudity?

Put down the Fruit of Knowledge, honey. It wasn’t meant for you.

Farmers believe cows “moo” with an accent

Cows believe farmers should spend more time with human women and less time complimenting cows on their accents.

Stick of dynamite found in checked luggage

Made it from Argentina to Houston where it did not, alas, effect any improvements to that city or state.

Harris clarifies comments on religion

Pond clarifies comments on Katherine Harris: Loopy cunt.¹

U.S. works to defuse spat with Venezuela

Little optimism to found. Kissinger is apparently no longer the match-maker of choice.

Soft drink companies reach benzene deal

With 10.67 Pepsis to the gallon at about 50¢ each I think they should have realized a long time ago that there’s no future in benzene.

Activist’s remark starts FBI probe

Jim Bensman got an FBI call because the local toiletnewspaper exagerated his suggestion to remove a dam at a public debate over what to do to ameliorate fish migration problems caused by the dam.

What the FBI man who answered criticism about the overreaction said should be the most welcome statement ever published for terrorists out to get America. He said–

We have to investigate everything.

There’s your manna, my bèturbanned foes. All it will take to shut down every public and federal agency in the United States of America will be a pocketful of quarters, a pay phone, and showing up to a town meeting or two unshaven and saying, “Boo.”

Taller people are smarter: study

Short people got no reason. Short people got no reason…

Ho, ho, ho.

More this week in the news via Google.

I haven’t been insulted well, ever, and it hurts my feelings. This has been a topic of lament here before and in other items unpublished. I think I’m not trying hard enough. I’m irritating all the wrong people. Like the addict who wrote this. No one with any panache or flair for a turn of phrase ever goes after me. Just garden variety, toothless snakes.

It’s a only a token gesture but if you link to me, using either the home page — http://sedition.com/ — or the “author” page — http://sedition.com/a/951 — and use the text, “this clown,” for the link, I will link back to you on this page.

I’m not asking for a blogroll or anything, just an inline, below the fold, straight to the archives clickable without any rel="nofollow" shenanigans. That’s plenty for what the goal. A Google bomb so the world will ever after—well, for the next two years anyway—know who is meant whenever anyone talks about this clown.

Sample prefab links if you’re in a hurry

Participants in the “This Clown” project

#1 from cofucius.

Your link back will appear here if you go through with linking me as “this clown.”

It’ll take quite a few of you to get me to number one for it: http://www.google.com/search?q=this+clown

I won’t rest until I get there. Or until I’m tired. I might rest then too.

For 99¢—which is for all purposes a dollar—you get an aural piece of crap from the iTunes store. 128kbps (or as Apple calls it, “High Quality”) AAC is certainly not the worst sound in the world. They do sound okay through poor equipment competing with ambient sound. But to use 128kbps in the same sense as audiophile is absurd. It’s just not very good and even a tone deaf monkey would know it if that monkey had some Boston Acoustics instead of iPod headphones turned up loud enough to destroy your high frequency hearing by the time you’re 40. Apple and the music labels could easily offer 320kbps, more than twice the current data rate they’re selling, but they don’t and even 320kbps wouldn’t be close to the resolution of music on CD.

A typical CD retails for like $18 but no one except your stupid parents and kids with outrageous allowances ever pays more than $14 or $12 for a CD. The rest of us who know used digitized music sounds exactly as good as new usually pay $2-$8 for CDs.

A five and a half minute song compared

So, for $1 you can buy a piece of crap which you could easily lose to a computer problem, or for full quality AIFFs which you can rerip at any rate you want, any time you please, you can pay between 20¢ and $1.50 per song (assuming 10 tracks per disc).

I love the idea of the iTunes store but as it stands it is a colossal rip-off strictly for suckers laboring under the pitiful delusion that they love music. Paying full price for a fragile, DRM controlled fraction of the real product doesn’t make you hip. It makes you stupid and rewards the music industry for continuing to assume that you are.

Update 8/27: okay, okay, solutions are better than bitching

Résumé — I own four Macintoshes and two iPods and I shopped the iTunes store before you even knew it was up. I’ve never and probably never will own anything pre-installed with any Redmond product.

I want an online music store—badly—but if it sells 9% of the original product for 100% of the original price, it is a rip-off. Don’t learn to accept it as a consumer win. It’s not.

[By the by: the voice/audiobook files are much lower quality and a point unmade about CDs is that not only do you own it, you can legally sell it so the net cost after enjoying your music can be free or even a profit.]

Still, this original post was not a part of the solution. So, let’s start on the solution. Getting, at least for starters, 320kbps songs for sale. I think the full 1,400kbps or the AIFF files would be the real consumer win.

To be a part of the solution

1. Follow this link: iTunes feedback.
2. Select Feedback Type: Enhancement Request and Feedback Topic: Buying Music, Videos, or Audiobooks.
3. Write whatever you want. What I recommend is what I’ve written them twice in various venues: “I love your store but will never shop in it again until you offer higher quality sound files. 128kbps is too low to justify paying full price.”

Update, 22 May 2007

You can now, or soon will be able to, buy 256kbps DRM-free files from the iTunes store for an extra 30¢, i.e. $1.29.

This is—like most of Apple’s business decisions—half terrific, half awful.

Win column–

• No digital rights management.
• Improved quality.
• This ups the ante for other music vendors who will have to follow suit which will up the ante for Apple, rinse, repeat.

Lose column–

• Still only a fraction, ≈ 20%, of the quality they could sell.
• This still inferior, fragile music is on par with a new CD in cost: $1.29 x 12 tracks = $15.48; 15 tracks = $19.35.
• Only one major music distributor is on board so far: EMI.
• No digital rights managment (it’s a loss as well as a win but this isn’t the place to get into it).

The AP tonight reports: “Workers discover chocolate Virgin Mary.”

This reporter wonders if the Health Department will treat future batches of congealed goo with more respect and fewer violations of code.

A tiny white circle … sits in the upper center of the creation… Cruz says the white speck is the head of the Baby Jesus as he is held in Mary’s folded arms.

Notice that even a Mary of chocolate is able to produce a white baby.

Yes, that image is something. That’s just how I imagine the virgin time and time again. Why I’ll say my faith is shooting right up. I know this picture will bring me peace and a good night’s sleep…

Oh, just click on the thing and spare me from further self-flagellation.

Dramatic flash back to another image you’d better be 18 or over to click on: Virgin Mary in the news last year.