Glenn Hauman: A View From Above

YouTube - Straight No Chaser - 12 Days:

I just sent a letter to Senator Reid and let him know I wanted him to support Chris Dodd's filibuster to stop telecom companies from getting immunity for illegally spying on Americans. You can do the same here: http://action.firedoglake.com/page/petition/ReidDoddFISA/kviid

I wrote about it exactly two months ago here.

Because you never know when this stuff will come in handy:

What To Do If Your Friend Is Arrested How to Handle Getting Pulled Over Without Losing Your Cool Avoiding the Section 1001 Trap - Why You Always Need A Lawyer Top Five Cop Tricks %u2013 How They Get You to Give Up Your Rights

As for raising bail money, you're on your own.

Have you ever wondered what Christmas would be like if it were a Jewish Holiday? I'm not sure this is it, but it could be...

Remember, Jesus was Jewish, but only on his mother's side.

My dad's a born troublemaker. He used to make a habit, back in 1982, of saying that he was rooting for Gerry Cooney to win over Larry Holmes in the boxing match because Cooney was white, and he was white.

When he got back the appropriate level of shock from his audience, he'd say, "Now wait. If I said I was rooting for Cooney because he's Irish and I'm Irish, you'd have no problems with it. If I said it was because he's from Long Island and I'm from Long Island, it'd be okay. If I said it was because he's 6'6 and I'm 6'6..." and by that point people got the general point he was trying to make.

I was reminded of this when listening to Mitt Romeny's speech on religion, but for all the wrong reasons. Do I vote for Giuliani because he's a white male from New York? Should people vote for Romney because his faith really isn't that far from his?

And in the case of ol' Mitt, should I support someone who doesn't want to identify with me because I don't believe in the same god he does? (More atheists in this country than, say, Mormons.)

How about this: vote for the guy who will do the best at the job and best live up to the ideals we profess.

Just for the novelty of it all.

Dear Lord.

It can happen anywhere—at an amusement park, zoo, school field trip, museum, or even your local shopping mall. Your attention shifts for a moment, and suddenly your child or loved one has wandered out of sight.

So put the odds in your favor for a safe return, with SafetyTat. Designed by a graphics professional and Mom of three kids, SafetyTat is a fun and colorful temporary tattoo that’s uniquely personalized with your phone number. When applied to the arm of your child or loved one, SafetyTat provides an immediate, highly visible form of identification that stays in place even when wet and lasts for days.

Are you scaaaaaared yet, mommy and daddy?

If you want to pick your dividing point from the laid-back 70's to the me-me-me 80's, you could make a good case for December 8, 1980.

While having a brief conversation with one of my few constant readers of this weblog who was threatening to never return if I didn't start posting here, we started talking about the size of my ego. Mine, I suspect, is not dissimilar to Keith Olbermann's, who once commented:

"This is the exact definition of my ego. When [Fox] had my head 40 feet high at Shea Stadium they said to me, 'We're going to give out 100,000 temporary tattoos of your face at the Super Bowl.' And I just swallowed and said, 'No. God. Don't. You're not going to, you can't possibly—what do you mean, temporary?'"

But if you're jonesing, you are reminded to come over and read my stuff over at ComicMix. Heck, you can even read the comic I'm coloring, Jon Sable Freelance.

ABC News: 20 Years Later: Could Stocks Crash Again?:

Twenty years ago today, the U.S. stock market suffered its worst one-day drop ever: the Crash of '87. The Dow Jones industrials plunged 508 points, or 22.6 percent, as waves of selling swamped the New York Stock Exchange. It was a market dislocation so intense that some pundits predicted another Great Depression.

I was a freshman at NYU, rooming with a finance major, and I heard what had happened-- and wondered how bad it was going to be. I was up late that night, and walked out of my dorm on 5th Avenue (Rubin, if you must know) wondering how the world was going to change as a result.

And I was looking to the north when I saw the lights of the Empire State Building go out.

I was pretty new to the city, I didn't know they turned out the lights every night. And only a few months earlier, I had read Atlas Shrugged, which ends with the lights of the Empire State Building and New York going out.

Brrrrrrr.

But then I looked to the south, and I was reassured-- the lights were still on down there, at the World Trade Center. Everything was going to be okay.

Amazing how things can change in a few years, eh?

There's a lot of debate going on in the House and Senate about making changes to FISA, allowing illegal acts of wiretapping and surveillance programs conducted in the past to retroactively become legal.

Don't fall for it. Pass no such laws.

If George W. Bush thinks it's so damn important, then he can issue a Presidential pardon to the telecoms and take the political heat for doing so. But don't let him try to trick you into doing his dirty work for him. Let him take it on the chin. Don't enable his lawbreaking.

Or do you agree with Richard Nixon when he said that if the President does it, that means it's not illegal?

Playbill News: Clay Aiken to Make Broadway Debut in Monty Python's Spamalot:

"American Idol" finalist Clay Aiken is scheduled to join the Broadway cast of the Tony Award-winning musical Monty Python%u2019s Spamalot in the role of Sir Robin.

Aiken will be making his Broadway debut in the role originated on Broadway by David Hyde Pierce. His stint begins Jan. 18, 2008, and is scheduled to continue through May 4.

Brain found in bag near Va. apartments - USATODAY.com:

RICHMOND, Virginia (AP) %u2014 A brain was found in a bag near a Virginia apartment complex Tuesday morning, but it was not clear if it was human or animal, police said.

It was discovered next to a suburban apartment complex under construction and near a mall, Richmond police spokeswoman Karla Peters said.

The state medical examiner was examining the brain, she said. It was not clear how long it had been there.

"We're waiting for the medical examiner to determine how we should proceed," Peters said.

Now all we need is to find Dick's heart and the press corps' courage.

(Via ectomo.)

If you're not scared or angry at the thought of a human brain being controlled remotely, then it could be this prototype of mine is finally starting to work. --John Alejandro King

Really scaring me...: Could be worse. Could be Klingon furries. All dressed up like targs.

ABC News: Could Docs Save Man with Bomb in Body?:

Making Light: "I don't need to know the details.":

I think there's an idea here without a clear term to point to it: ideologies that require or encourage a kind of willful ignorance. Those can be cured, but only by breaking with the ideology.

Frex, a lot of economic determinists (Marxists and neoclassical economists) seem to have the idea that they don't need to know much about the world to understand it, because their economic models give them the fundamental insights. I think the screwups in Iraq have largely been caused by very smart people whose ideology led them to think that they had grasped the essentials of the situation there, despite scary stuff like not knowing the difference between Shia and Sunni. I think there's also a widespread idea in management that you should be able to manage things whose details you don't understand all that well. (But that's way outside my field or interests, so I may just be misunderstanding.)

The hard thing is, you *have* to have simplifying models -- they're what make a fiercely complex world usable. But your model can really screw you, by convincing you that you know the important stuff, even when you're frightfully ignorant of the details. And people with very powerful or convincing models often get screwed in just this way, as they try to apply their powerful model from one situation into a different one. Even worse, some models' strength is that they make for good rhetoric, and when tested against the real world, they fail horribly. But group decisionmaking is largely done through rhetoric -- both national politics and internal politics of most groups. You can have disastrous ideas that win all the arguments, sound great, and reliably gain power -- I'd say that the rhetoric about the Middle East being ripe for democracy, democracy leading to peace, etc., is a good example of that.

Science Fiction Writer Admits Unstoppable Killing Machine Based On Mother: Sure, you only think the Onion made it up.

Second Hand Songs: a cover songs database.

Why should God bless America? Because if we have people like this in the country, we need all the blessings we can get.

Related: Windows users 20% more interested in God than Mac users - Boing Boing:

Thoof has done some analysis of the data collected by their recommendation algorithm, and discovered some interesting differences between Mac users and Windows users. For example, it seems Windows users are 20% more interested in religion, but 6% less interested in intellectual property law.

Getting Things Done: David Allen on Managing Your Stuff with GTD - video - Lifehacker