The Smug Baldy Speaks

You’re about to travel through another dimension, a dimension not of logic and reason, but of political influence and deep pockets. Your are journeying into a land where up is down, and more pollution is less pollution. If you could read that signpost through the smog, you would know you’ve entered the Alabama Department of Environmental Management Twilight Zone

In the past two days, there have been three major reports concerning the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) that makes me wonder what kind of wacky weed these guys must be smoking.

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So the big story today is how Big Brother the Bush Administration got the extra spying powers it sought with the passage of the so-called FISA Compromise Bill. The Washington Post reported:

Bush today welcomed the Senate vote, calling the bill “critical to America’s safety” and “long overdue.” He said in a statement, “This vital intelligence bill will allow our national security professionals to quickly and effectively monitor the plans of terrorists outside the United States, while respecting the liberties of the American people. . . . It will ensure that those companies whose assistance is necessary to protect the country will, themselves, be protected from lawsuits for past or future cooperation with the government.”

Senator Barak Obama voted for the bill - which, as Keith Olbermann said earlier, will probably be seen as some sort of political weakness, even though most Republicans voted for the bill as well.

John McCain didn’t bother to vote at all, and instead spent the day campaigning. He also predictably criticized Obama for voting for the the same bill that he too supported - and would have voted for - if he hadn’t been too damn busy.

Interestingly, while there is quite a bit of commentary about how the bill blocks lawsuits of Telecom providers who aided and abetted the Bush administration’s illegal domestic wiretapping scheme (for our own good, you know), there is relatively little commentary about whether Administration officials or Telecom execs could face future criminal charges. Now that would be something to see.

If YouTube views were votes, then we’d be talking about President Barak Obama, and how he beat John McCain by a whopping 50 million votes. Below is a screenshot of the YouTube politician channel, and as you can see, Obama has over 1100 videos with over 54 million views to McCain’s 216 videos with just 3.7 million views. Indeed, Obama has three times as many videos and almost ten times the number of views as Republican internet sensation Ron Paul.

Obviously YouTube views aren’t really votes, and it’s not really clear how, or even if, they’ll somehow translate into votes. Obama’s success on YouTube does, however, illustrate the fact that Obama, much more than McCain, has an effective strategy to leverage social media sites like YouTube and Facebook to get his message out, and that very well could translate into more votes come election day.

Take, for example, Brian Stelter’s interesting article in the New York Times yesterday about the new media strategy of the Obama campaign:

The campaign’s new-media strategy, inspired by popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook, has revolutionized the use of the Web as a political tool, helping the candidate raise more than two million donations of less than $200 each and swiftly mobilize hundreds of thousands of supporters before various primaries.

The centerpiece of it all is My.BarackObama.com, where supporters can join local groups, create events, sign up for updates and set up personal fund-raising pages. “If we did not have online organizing tools, it would be much harder to be where we are now,” Mr. Hughes said.

What we see here is that the Obama campaign is doing more than just taking the internet seriously. They’re making it an integral part of their media apparatus. They’re staffing their web team with savvy professionals, and funding it as if victory depended on it. If this trend continues, and if the Obama campaign can somehow translate all the social media juice into tangible action in the voting booth, you can expect every future campaign to learn the lesson: Rather than simply a tool for poking your friends or for niche marketing, social media outlets can play a key role in selecting the President of the United States of America. And to me, that prospect is simply amazing.

Here Pat Condell comments on how “the allowances we make for religion has encouraged Islam to push its way into our society, where it really doesn’t belong, and threaten all of our freedom.”

Some links from the youtube post are here for support:

Assault on free speech in the Netherlands

Islam can no longer be criticised at the UN Human Rights Council

Novelist could face hate crime charge for despising Islamism

You can download an audio version of this video at http://patcondell.libsyn.com/

I saw this over at SEB, where the title was simply: It’s funny because it’s sooo true:

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

Thanks to Les

This is arguably the best moment ever in recorded spelling bee history. Here, the contestant doesn’t quite hear the word he’s supposed to spell, and he’s relieved to be wrong.

Enjoy:

President Bush takes some direct questions after his announcement of a $50 Billion supplemental to battle zombies. Bush vs. Zombies isn’t just a Homeland Security priority, I think it’s an instant classic:

“How about their overall creepiness?”
HT To Matt

We just caught the awesomeness that is Kung Fu Panda. Jack Black was the perfect choice for the voice of Po, the noodle cook who dreams of being a Kung Fu master. The animation - even the short dream sequence at the film’s opening were amazingly well done, and I was surprised by just how much fun I had watching this gem.

I really appreciate great animation, and here Dreamworks delivered an excellent effort. The characters moved fluidly, the environments and lighting were expansive, and the level of detail was extremely high. We expect to see fur and hair rendered in CG films, but in this one, we even see the texture on Master Shifu’s nose.

Aside from the art and animation, however, the script was perfect for Jack Black. He got to go pretty wild with his vocal stylings, and he was still able to bring a good deal of humanity to his character. OK, he was a panda, but a very believable human panda that wants to learn kung fu.

Here are some of my favorite lines that I found on IMDB:

Po: Legend tells of a legendary warrior whose kung fu skills were the stuff of legend.

Po: It is said that his enemies would go blind from over-exposure to pure awesomeness!

Mr. Ping: We are noodle folk. Broth runs through our veins.

Po: The Furious Five! You look a lot bigger than your action figures! Except you, Mantis. You’re about the same.

Po: The Sword of Heroes! Said to be so sharp you can get cut just by looking at - Ow!

Po: [looking around at the historical artifacts in the palace] Wow! I’ve only seen paintings of that painting!

Oogway: Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.

Po: I just ate, so I’m still digesting, so my kung fu may not be as good as later on.

Tigress: It is said that the Dragon Warrior can go for months without eating, surviving on the dew of a single ginko leaf and the energy of the universe.
Po: Then I guess my body doesn’t know I’m the Dragon Warrior yet. It’s gonna take a lot more than dew, and, uh, universe juice.

Tai Lung: You… you’re just a big… fat… panda!
Po: I’m not a big fat panda. I’m the big fat panda.

Tai Lung: The Wuxi finger hold!
Po: Oh, you know this hold?
Tai Lung: You’re bluffing. You’re bluffing! Shifu didn’t teach you that.
Po: Nope. I figured it out. Skadoosh!

Scientific American is reporting today that a recent survey of users of magic mushrooms have had profound mental changes that have lasted up to 14 months:

Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives,” comparing it with the birth of a child or the death of a parent, says neuroscientist Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who lead the research. “It’s one thing to have a dramatic experience you say is impressive. It’s another thing to say you consider it as meaningful 14 months later. There’s something about the saliency of these experiences that’s stunning.”

Carefully screened volunteers were given psilocybin as part of the research, and about 2/3 of them reported having mystical experiences and a feeling of “oneness” with the universe. Then, after 14 months, the same volunteers were asked about their experience and about 2/3 gave it “high marks for transcendental satisfaction” and credited the experience with improving their well-being.

Griffiths is also recruiting terminally ill cancer patients to see if psilocybin reduces patients “existential anxiety” about their impending death. He also claims that it could be a treatment for alcohol and drug addiction.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that these sort of effects last very long indeed. I’ve had conversations with people who still reminisce fondly about “mushroom trips” they took years ago. A similar anecdote can be found here, in which the author states at the end, “I should add that no words can describe the intensity and personal significance of the experience.”

That sounds like too much fun to allow it to be legal.

One of the things I find interesting bout the FISA bill is that it doesn’t provide the telecoms that colluded with Bush administration officials with immunity from criminal charges.