Brains for a New Day

Congress is Fat

Another Republican dismisses Limbaugh as "just an entertainer."

( And just as quickly, he's forced to retract. )

The Wail of the 1%

( The privileged class in America lives with the shock of Obama )

Jo Walton interviews Lois McMaster Bujold about the Vorkosigan series.

The one book Republicans are devouring

( Amity Shlaes' 'The Forgotten Man' )

Follow-up Brains

NYT: The American use of torture is inexcusable.

By now, we know the truth: In the aftermath of 9/11, panicked administration officials authorized the use of torture as a means of getting information. Cheney, especially, authorized the use of torture to extract information about the assumed link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein because existing interrogation techniques had not revealed the link. He was informed by his own people that such techniques might be illegal, and even while the CIA was going at it he was ordering a legal team to create justification.

The claim that Khalid Sheik Mohammed broke after one waterboarding session, and provided useful information, is now revealed as a lie: the United States waterboarded Mohammed 183 times over a 30 day period.

Intelligence officials entrusted with vetting the torture program, a derivative of the military's SERE program (which trains soldiers how to resist torture), were unaware of its history or efficacy. They did not know that they were reverse-engineering Communist techniques used to elicit false confessions from prisoners of war. They gave the task of doing that research to John Yoo, who as far as we know, never did any research at all.

About that other al-Qaeda plot

( More fantasy ideology on our behalf )

Louisiana seeks to one-up Texas and ban all medical research

( The terrible scourge of mixing human and animal tissue! )

To be a conservative, you must approve of torture

John Hindraker, from the loony right website Powerline, describes the current wave of anger about torture as "mere policy differences" between administrations, and characterizes Barack Obama's attempt to regain "our moral bearings" as "criminalizing conservatism."

If that's what conservatism means, then we should be glad it's doomed.

The Evolutionary Basis For Female Orgasm

Oh, just read it. Really.

Helpful cheat sheets for web programmers

The latest gallery of web design galleries.

30 gorgeous website footers. Yeah, they're that important.

Create your Google profile ASAP.

Go to Google right now and type "me" into the search box. You'll be given a chance to secure your name as Google knows it, and create a profile, a starting point, which you can "encourage" Google to give to people rather than allowing them to hunt around randomly.

Arrgh!

Arrrrgh! That's the third recruiter to offer to help me get in with a Certain Stealthy Internet Startup.

The good news: they're looking at the requirements list and saying, "Hey, this guy's qualifications match these peoples' requirements exactly." Hopefully, since I have an interview with them later this week, said Stealth Startup will agree.

The bad news: This is apparently the only position they can find for me at the moment. Suck.

Back to the Wordpress mine.

A modest day

Well, on the job search front today things were pretty slow. I had one interview, and that was it. It was a pretty good interview, I think; they're looking for a serious Pythonista with some heavy web development skills, but they also want those development skills to be skewed toward social media. It's a big shopping list; I meet a lot of their requirements, but not all of them. I do meet the main ones, though, and the others are minor: all libraries, even web APIs, are just libraries to be learned. Doing that is pretty easy.

Kouryou-chan, on the other hand, developed a rash this morning, so Omaha and I took her to the physician. She has fifth disease, a common viral skin infection that often hits kids at this age. The school was nonchalant about the whole thing; apparently, it goes around once a year or so, and this was that time. The disease gets its common name from being the fifth disease in some old classic textbook on childhood diseases. It has the official name of "Erythema infectiosum," which if you say it emphatically, sounds like something from a Harry Potter movie: "Erythema Infectiosum!".

It doesn't help that the name basically means "infectious rash."

I worked mostly on Omaha's development project. I'm getting a few good posts out of it: How to create a glowy logo like the ones used in Apple ads, how to create a cylical memo, and the Simplest Tabs In The Universe, among others. Oh, and always use a revision control system! Re-learning a lot of the WordPress API; haven't done much with it since the Tina Orwall campaign, and both by CSS and my GiMP-fu are stronger now.

We had leftovers for dinner, there were a ton of 'em. And then we went to the pool, swam for an hour, got exercise. And now we're home and getting ready for bed. Maybe I'll get some writing in. That would be fun.