Yahoo!

A Yahoo defeated.  Maybe there's hope for Texas after all.  (If nothing else, the lege didn't want the state to have to deal with the lawsuits...)

Governor corrected, Creationist Don McLeroy rejected:
In a rare rejection of an appointment by the Texas governor, the Senate Thursday ousted Don McLeroy as chairman of the State Board of Education, with his supporters claiming the Bryan dentist was the victim of his strong religious beliefs. McLeroy is a devout Christian who believes in creationism and the notion that the Earth is about 6,000 years old. He has steadfastly argued that Texas students should be taught the weaknesses of evolution. 
 
 
 

 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

They don't deserve an apology...

Sotomayor's opponents that is, for the out-of-context comment 8 years ago that a Latina could render a better judgment than a white male...In context, her remark shouldn't be exceptionable to any sane, unbiased person. 

I don' understand why she and apparently the White House should dignify the vicious attacks on her by apologizing for ANYTHING. 

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

For me this calls to mind a certain principle: Puh-leez don't throw me in that briar patch!

Tomorrow: RNC Could Rename Democrats As "Democrat Socialist Party"
By Eric Kleefeld - May 19, 2009, 5:01PM
The Republican National Committee could potentially take a very bold, politically momentous move tomorrow. I am speaking, of course, about the upcoming vote on a resolution to declare that the Democratic Party should be renamed the "Democrat Socialist Party."
 
 
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Already polls show that as many as 47% of the public are either undecided or actually prefer socialism to capitalism.  The more the Republicans try this tack, the more the sting is going to be taken out of the word and the sooner it can become a viable option...
 
R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Thank God for Tennessee!

At last--a state legislature even more retrogressive than our own (meaning Texas): 

Tennessee state senator calls guns in bars a 'dreamy scenario'

Share on Facebook By David Edwards and Stephen Webster

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Of course, a good portion of white Texas is ancestored out of Tennessee (and me, too). 

R.

 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Some news continues to be good...

Senator Jeff Sessions, Rethug from Alabama, sez he is open to a gay or pro-choice Supreme Court nominee.  Senator John Thune, Rethug from one of the Dakotas, sez that's a "bridge too far."  Sessions, of course, is a lying sack of sh*t.  If he isn't in this case, it's because he's realized it's ultimately more important to pander to the money boys of the Rethug party than it is to the social conservatives, i.e., he might support a gay, pro-choice nominee to the Supreme Court provided he or she is a follower of Ayn Rand and wants to put the country on the gold standard.   But I am enjoying the spectacle of these conflicting Rethug pronouncements.   You would think that some political consultant would have told them not to gear up to opposing Obama's choice of Supreme Court nominee until he had named one.  It only solidifies their image as the Party of No.   If S.L.A. Marshall is right that discipline is something that arises out of
morale, then the Rethugs have a gaping wound in their esprit de corps.

In other news,  Specter has reportedly flipped again on  EFCA.  I am lacking in trust though it would be the smartest thing for him to do politically & Specter always seems to do the smartest thing for himself politically--after huffing and puffing a lot about doing the Right and Principled Thing..
 
Pelosi is going to continue to push for both the Health Plan & cap & trade despite pressure from the Blue Dogs    I would really like something more Draconian than "cap & trade" but I reckon that's just my Inner Stalinist talking--not that Stalin ever gave a flip about the environment. 
 
R.
 

 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

I like it where they are...more thoughts on Afghanistan

The better angels of my nature lead me to believe that even the Good Guys need to be constantly looking over their shoulder or else they will become Worse Guys, or worse yet, Bad Guys.  On that basis, I hope that some day the Republicans get it together well enough to become a party of sufficient appeal to the electorate to credibly threaten the Democrats.  That's the better angel.  (My Inner Trotsky, yea, my Inner Stalin is constantly whispering...a different prospect)

But right now, despite their huge majority, the Democrats have enough DINOs in their ranks to credibly threaten a Good Guy agenda--an agenda that would be even better if it weren't for the DINOs, so right now the Democrats don't need the threat of a revitalized Republican Party to keep them in line. 

I hope the Republicans stay stuck in their self-induced political purgatory at least through Obama's second term.   Health care reform (minimally with a public option),  a decent energy & environmental policy, EFCA, the beginnings of an effective strategy to help secure a (relatively) civilized rule of law in Afghanistan & Pakistan, education reforms (sans vouchers),  financial regulation, withdrawal from Iraq, accountability for the Bush torture regime, an end of the drive toward privatization of government services...that's all I want.  Oh.  And a peaceful solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.  That would be nice too.   And, actually, all of those are doable & politically feasible in terms of the what the public wants, DINOs notwithstanding.  (DINO--Democrats-in-name-only)

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I did not realize that even after the Soviets left, the Communist government in Afghanistan hung on for another three years.    Despite the brutal civil war that ensued, I suspect the Communist did manage to plant the seeds of modernism in Afghanistan, or else you wouldn't have the several organizations for women's rights that exist in Afghanistan. 

I have an overbelief, ungrounded in actual research, that the liberation of women is the key to success in bringing a minimum of social justice to Afghanistan and similar societies.   More later--if I can find out what I'm talking about. 

R.

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

More Info Age fun...

 
 
An invention that could change the internet for ever
Revolutionary new web software could put giants such as Google in the shade when it comes out later this month. Andrew Johnson reports
Sunday, 3 May 2009
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The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet's Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.
Although the system is still new, it has already produced massive interest and excitement among technology pundits and internet watchers.
Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet. Nova Spivack, an internet and computer expert, said that Wolfram Alpha could prove just as important as Google. "It is really impressive and significant," he wrote. "In fact it may be as important for the web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.
Tom Simpson, of the blog Convergenceofeverything.com, said: "What are the wider implications exactly? A new paradigm for using computers and the web? Probably. Emerging artificial intelligence and a step towards a self-organising internet? Possibly... I think this could be big."
Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as "how high is Mount Everest?", but it will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts.
The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out "on the fly", according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in "10 flips for four heads" and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.
Dr Wolfram, an award-winning physicist who is based in America, added that the information is "curated", meaning it is assessed first by experts. This means that the weaknesses of sites such as Wikipedia, where doubts are cast on the information because anyone can contribute, are taken out. It is based on his best-selling Mathematica software, a standard tool for scientists, engineers and academics for crunching complex maths.
"I've wanted to make the knowledge we've accumulated in our civilisation computable," he said last week. "I was not sure it was possible. I'm a little surprised it worked out so well."
Dr Wolfram, 49, who was educated at Eton and had completed his PhD in particle physics by the time he was 20, added that the launch of Wolfram Alpha later this month would be just the beginning of the project.
"It will understand what you are talking about," he said. "We are just at the beginning. I think we've got a reasonable start on 90 per cent of the shelves in a typical reference library."
The engine, which will be free to use, works by drawing on the knowledge on the internet, as well as private databases. Dr Wolfram said he expected that about 1,000 people would be needed to keep its databases updated with the latest discoveries and information.
He also added that he would not go down the road of storing information on ordinary people, although he was aware that others might use the technology to do so.
Wolfram Alpha has been designed with professionals and academics in mind, so its grasp of popular culture is, at the moment, comparatively poor. The term "50 Cent" caused "absolute horror" in tests, for example, because it confused a discussion on currency with the American rap artist. For this reason alone it is unlikely to provide an immediate threat to Google, which is working on a similar type of search engine, a version of which it launched last week.
"We have a certain amount of popular culture information," Dr Wolfram said. "In some senses popular culture information is much more shallowly computable, so we can find out who's related to who and how tall people are. I fully expect we will have lots of popular culture information. There are linguistic horrors because if you put in books and music a lot of the names clash with other concepts."
He added that to help with that Wolfram Alpha would be using Wikipedia's popularity index to decide what users were likely to be interested in.
With Google now one of the world's top brands, worth $100bn, Wolfram Alpha has the potential to become one of the biggest names on the planet.
Dr Wolfram, however, did not rule out working with Google in the future, as well as Wikipedia. "We're working to partner with all possible organisations that make sense," he said. "Search, narrative, news are complementary to what we have. Hopefully there will be some great synergies."
What the experts say
"For those of us tired of hundreds of pages of results that do not really have a lot to do with what we are trying to find out, Wolfram Alpha may be what we have been waiting for."
Michael W Jones, Tech.blorge.com
"If it is not gobbled up by one of the industry superpowers, his company may well grow to become one of them in a small number of years, with most of us setting our default browser to be Wolfram Alpha."
Doug Lenat, Semanticuniverse.com
"It's like plugging into an electric brain."
Matt Marshall, Venturebeat.com
"This is like a Holy Grail... the ability to look inside data sources that can't easily be crawled and provide answers from them."
Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of searchengineland.com
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Partisan snark is such fun...

Get a load of this headline from Josh Marshall:

New Brand Kinda Like The Old Brand
Mitt Romney: "We are the party of the revolutionaries, they [Democrats] are the party of the monarchists." 
 
 
 
This remark typies the absurdity and irrelevance into which the Republicans have fallen. 
 
It's sapping my motivation to post.   It seems pointless now to do anything except try and offer well thought out critiques and defenses of  positions on real world issues.   But it's harder than pointing out Republican outrages.
 
 I'm still bogged down trying to figure out what I think should be happening in Afghanistan. 
 
Originally, I was thinking in terms of framing the issue in terms of just war theory--but justified (or not) police action would be more descriptive.  Or should be descriptive.  Unmanned drone bombs and the use of bunker buster bombs I think are counterproductive, but their use suggests conventional warfare, which the intervention in Afghanistan ultimately isn't.  It's more like Northern Ireland although parallels can't be clearly drawn.
 
As Richard N. used to say, let me be perfectly clear. The emotional impetus for my support of the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is the Taliban's war against girls and women.    I should like to see the Taliban utterly destroyed as a political and social force.  It doesn't mean I think they should all be killed to the last man but I certainly think judicious force and violence against them is justified.  (For the purposes of this argument, I make no distinction between Al Queda and the Taliban). 
 
Leaving aside the use of unmanned drones & anti-personnel weapons like the bunker buster bombs, I think any criticism I have of what Obama is proposing to do is that it may not be enough, for both the military and nation-building aspects of the intervention, and that's even given the limited goal of trying to secure a stable government there with something like a rule of law that is not an outrage to civilized society. 
 
I would wish the same on the House of Saud and a dozen other places, but generally you have to pick your battles with those that have picked you. 
 
On a somehwat related note,  I saw with considerable surprise that Juan Cole refers to those who want the U.S. to leave Iraq immediately as "withdrawal fundamentalists." 
 
R.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Miss California & Afghanistan

Increasingly, anything associated with the Right, leaving aside all that is sinister, seems to consist of surrealistic schlock:  See comments of Michael Steele, Michelle Bachmann, James DeMint, the tears of Glenn Beck,  teabagging,..the list goes on and on.   But Miss California is special.    It's not just her views that are odious.  She is such a perfect parody of conventional standards of beauty & female demeanor, she is actually repulsive in her person. 

I have written an already lengthy screed on Afghanistan.  I'm not posting it until I can figure out what the hell it is I'm saying. 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/