The funeral arrangements having been made, Yassir Arafat died early this morning.
This is just worth sharing:
From a NY Times review of Polar Express:
It’s likely, I imagine, that most moviegoers will be more concerned by the eerie listlessness of those characters’ faces and the grim vision of Santa Claus’s North Pole compound, with interiors that look like a munitions factory and facades that seem conceived along the same oppressive lines as Coketown, the red-brick town of “machinery and tall chimneys” in Dickens’s “Hard Times.” Tots surely won’t recognize that Santa’s big entrance in front of the throngs of frenzied elves and awe-struck children directly evokes, however unconsciously, one of Hitler’s Nuremberg rally entrances in Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will.” But their parents may marvel that when Santa’s big red sack of toys is hoisted from factory floor to sleigh it resembles nothing so much as an airborne scrotum.
…and good riddance.
Our beloved Attorney General, may his name and memory be forgotten, just resigned; he won’t serve a second term. No word yet on his future plans or his successor (a matter which concerns me deeply – Gonzalez, the current White House counsel and architect of various plans to thwart the Constitution, has been described as a likely candidate, and the others likely to be even worse) but I certainly won’t be sad to see him vanish.
Alas, a bit longer until he formally leaves office, so I can’t legally state what I think of him quite yet. But I’m thinking it.
Part of the cultural elite…
I feel like some sort of parody of the “cultural elite.” I’m sitting in a cafe, and my bag contains an iBook, the New York Times magazine and book review, and volume 1 of a new translation of the Zohar.
Dynamic polarization
[Cross-posted to novadem]
At this site you can find maps of the United States at single-county resolution showing the votes in 2000 and 2004. The results are fascinating and well worth a look, especially if you take both images and flip between them a few times.
Some features of note:
Voting Locations
A quick reminder: If you can’t remember where your local polling place is, or need its hours, or a list of local ballot measures, or the like, SmartVoter is a non-partisan site that has all of this available.
DO NOT FORGET – polls will be open until 8pm in most places, but lines may be longer than usual, especially if you live in a contested area.
I probably don’t need to say this to anyone who’s reading this journal, but this is the most important election we’ve had in many decades, and every vote counts. You simply can’t justify not voting tomorrow – if you’re eligible to vote in your area, you need to be at those polls. This is what they mean by “civic duty;” everyone’s contribution really is that important tomorrow.
What the…?
An interesting news story some of you may have seen: The DHS is enforcing trademarks, on the theory that part of their job is “protecting the integrity of the economy and our nation’s financial systems.”
Has anyone noticed that this “department” has taken on itself the authority to enforce more or less anything they want to, and subject to only nebulous and unspecified restriction?
Checking to see if the stars are still moving…
In the past 24 hours, Arafat has gone from “sick” to “hospitalized in what is aides deny is critical condition;” the Red Sox may be on the verge of winning the World Series; and I can’t talk about today’s events at work, but there were at least two major and unexpected turns.
Oh yes, and there’s a lunar eclipse tonight.
Has someone been fscking with the laws of nature again?
Edit: The Red Sox just won the series!
More fun with explosives…
Nice column by Paul Krugman on the issue of cover-ups and Porter Goss’ performance in his first few months at the CIA.
Meanwhile, our president is informing everyone that the missing explosives disappeared a while ago (which is somehow supposed to be better?) and reminding everyone that we’ve already destroyed over 243,000 munitions.
If someone is coming at you with an axe, the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of axes in the world that they’re not carrying is not really germane to the problem.
But the President’s unofficial flaks are trying to move attention elsewhere. (NB this article’s focus is on Bush’s campaigning, not the charges against him) I suggest that we don’t let him change the subject quite so quickly. Just what has this led to as far as force protection? How many of the roadside bombs that have been killing American soldiers in the past few months have come directly out of this stockpile? How many more are to come? As pointed out recently, that’s a whole lot of explosives.
You lost /what/?
About 380 tons of high-density chemical explosives, mostly HMX and RDX, have gone missing from a munitions dump in Iraq.
I’ll just say that a fist-sized lump of either of these is enough to make a fairly impressive crater, one in which you could easily park your car.
So, anyone want to play “guess where the explosives are now, and what kinds of uses they’ll find?”
Edit: Some side computations, just for amusement. The legal max GVW of a semi in California is 40 tons, which translates to about 30 tons of cargo space, so this is maybe 12 semis’ worth. In a Trauzl block test, RDX is about 186% the explosive power of TNT, (it’s the active ingredient in most plastic explosives) so if you set this all off at once it would be about 0.7kT equivalent explosive force. This should be enough to level unreinforced buildings at a distance of about 0.9km, and which should be audible (~1Pa overpressure) at a distance of about 550 miles. (Using Sublette’s formula that the radius (in km) as a function of blast overpressure is about Y1/3(P/P0)-0.7, where Y is the equivalent blast power in kT, P is the overpressure of interest and P0 is 3psi) So if that blast were to go off in New York City, you would hear a quiet little “thump” (well, 60dB, but down at 90Hz, far in the bass where human hearing isn’t very good. Elephants would hear it from about 10 times farther away) in Lansing, MI. Or from Salt Lake City to San Francisco, your choice. That’s really a lot of high explosives.
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 