Following up on his administration's Mars Rover project, Italian aesthete and PM-in-decline Silvio Berlusconi has taken it upon himself to declare lodestones aweigh:

Government officials confirmed today, however, that a valuable statue of the god Mars, on loan to the prime minister's office, had been fitted with an artificial penis. The original was chipped off at some stage in its long life, beginning in AD175.

…along with a new hand for an accompanying statue of the goddess Venus, it had cost the Italian taxpayer €70,000.

That's one way to address Italy's deficit.  With astonishing foresight, he provided that each new member be "attached to the original with a magnetic system".

Write your own joke.

For my part, a clerihew will do:

He felt less than martial
Because he was partial.
But then Berluscon',
Restored his omaccion'!

Venus and Mars, Photograph: Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty Images

. . . the nearest thing to a "coming out" experience I am likely to have is my father discovering this blog.

It remains to be seen how awkward Thanksgiving will be now.

Suffice it to say, though, that I did not get this sarcastic by being bitten by a radioactive spider or something.

Hiya, Dad.

I'd tell the commenters to behave, but Dad already snickers when he sees me tell my kids to behave.

If you didn't see "Inception" in theaters, it's available on DVD and Blu-Ray on December 7.

I didn't write about it while it was big, but "Inception" is the best mainstream movie I've seen in years.  A wonderfully satisfying thriller with a mild science / speculative fiction tinge, an intentionally Hitchockian aesthetic, and as much appeal for women as for men (a rarity in techno-thrillers).

And it's as good as Hitchcock at his best.   It's as good as "Vertigo," which is to say that it's a nearly perfect film that will be as great fifty years from now as it is today.  If you have a special someone, this is the stocking stuffer to get.

Judith Griggs of Cooks Source [sic] wrote the definitive clueless-entitled-jackass-on-the-internet email. Now she has written the definitive non-apology apology. I'd take a shot at it, but Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms has written the definitive takedown, using nothing but apt headings.

Oscar Wilde said words to the effect that a gentleman is someone who doesn't give offense unintentionally. In the same vein, if you want to launch an attack or present an apologia for your misbehavior, do it. Wrapping either in a fake apology is just self-indulgent passive-aggressive bullshit.

Edited to add: she took the page down. I copied the text first; it's below the jump:

Continue Reading »

At the risk of moving us ever-closer to an all-TSA, all-the-time blog, I just wanted to point out that Security Theater is not limited to the inanane antics of the TSA.

We — the passengers of America — have also been driven by irrational fear into paroxysms of moron-level behavior, and the airline industry is indulging us in them. Many of us are bit players on the stage of Security Theater.

Just ask Adam C. Parsons, a "food stylist", who got yanked from a Delta flight by the captain and flight crew because a passenger reported him for "suspicious behavior." His "suspicious behavior"? He has the words "atom bomb" tattooed on his fingers.

Pearson was temporarily asked to step off the plane and learned that another passenger had reported him for suspicious behavior, and noted that he had the words "Atom Bomb" tattooed across his fingers. Questioned by the captain and the flight attendant, Pearson explained that the tattoos referred to a childhood nickname. After answering a few more questions, Pearson — who is a frequent Delta passenger and has flown over 142,000 miles with the airline this year alone — was allowed to return to his seat.

America's scientists are second to none, despite the best efforts of our educational system. However, I am reliably informed that even they are not able to make the printed word "bomb" explode. Maybe if we gave them more funding. Also, to the extent that atom bombs are available in food-stylist-carry-on-luggage sizes, it strikes me as unlikely that terrorists will come with warning labels, tattooed or otherwise. Also, wouldn't an atom bomb be sort of overkill to take down a Delta flight? Have you seen their safety record? You could probably take one down with an allen wrench and a brusque tone of voice.

What probably happened here is that the sort of person who lives a sheltered life in, say, San Marino or La Canada encountered for the first time a person of the sort you encounter in Los Feliz or Echo Park, which are far more hipster-intensive. Nobody bothered to ease this person into her first exposure to pronounced hipsterism, perhaps by driving past a record shop or watching a shift change at Starbucks. So she saw someone who looked different, freaked out, and started stabbing at the attendant button like Casca knifing Caesar.

Given that even "trained security professionals" have difficulty distinguishing between a dangerous thing and a picture of a dangerous thing, even when the dangerous thing is imaginary, it's hard to expect the public to do much better. But the alarming thing here is not that a random citizen was an idiot. The alarming thing was that the random citizen gave in to the noisy and insipid "if you see something, say something" mindset, part of the ignorance-and-irrationality-as-a-virture Gift of Fear culture. TSA agents and their ilk are not personal liberty's greatest enemy. No, we've met the enemy, and he is us. Governments like us to inform on each other, and we're conditioned from childhood to do it. With the help of a government all too happy to increase its own power, we've convinced ourselves that we're duty-bound to voice our most irrational suspicions — for the children. We don't think about what sort of world that creates for those children.

Edit: Greetings, guests. You can read our other recent TSA coverage here.

Politicians posture. It's the nature of the beast.

The trick is to leverage their inclination to posture to produce the sort of action that you want. This month's challenge: let's move politicians off of their knee-jerk posturing about the need for security, and move them to posturing about rights and liberty and unwarranted encroachment thereof by the TSA.

And some are doing so. New Jersey state politicians are swimming against the anything-portrayed-as-a-security-measure-is-fine current of American politics, and demanding that Congress rein in the TSA:

TRENTON — Two New Jersey lawmakers are calling for an end to full body scans and pat down requirements for airline passengers.

State senators Michael J. Doherty (R- Hunterdon) and James Beach (D- Camden) announced today that they will present resolutions to the Senate and Assembly calling on the U.S. Congress to end the controversialTSA screening procedures at U.S. airports. Their action comes in response to widespread concerns over privacy and radiation, as well as reports of inappropriate conduct by TSA agents during the screening process.

“The pursuit of security should not force Americans to surrender their civil liberties or basic human dignity at a TSA checkpoint,” said Doherty. “Subjecting law-abiding American citizens to naked body scans and full body pat downs is intolerable, humiliating, vulnerable to abuse, and is fast becoming a disincentive to travel. Particularly concerning to us is the fact that physical searches result in children being touched in private areas of the body. Terrorists hate America because of the freedoms upon which this great nation was built. By implementing these screening measures, the TSA has already handed a victory to those who seek to destroy our freedoms.”

In a sentence I didn't expect to type any time soon, good for these New Jersey politicians.

Hat tip.

A funny thing happened yesterday.  I learned about the death of my wife's grandfather, a man I deeply respect, from a post by one of my wife's cousins on Facebook.

And I didn't like it a bit.  It seemed thoughtless, almost but not quite rude, to put it on Facebook.

And yet it wasn't.  There was nothing wrong with what the cousin, a bright, much younger man who's been wired into the internet most of his life, wrote.  It was a simple tribute to his grandfather as a grandfather, friend, and mentor.  The man had a large family, was a World War II veteran who fought in France, had a good career as a high school principal, and lived a long, rich life.  His memory deserves tribute.

And yet at first, just for a second or two, I thought it might be a poor joke.  One doesn't discuss some things, especially dark things, on Facebook.  Facebook is for fluff.  Photos of cats and the like.

The telephone is for death.

I didn't like learning about this death on Facebook.  I didn't like knowing about it hours before my wife knew about it.  I didn't like knowing about it before my mother-in-law, his daughter, knew about it.  I'm quite conversant with the internet for my age, having used it since the 1980s, but learning of a family death through Facebook seems wrong.  Almost as wrong as learning of it through email.

From: <cousin@gmail.com>

To: <family listerv>

Subject:  Grandpa is dead.

He died painlessly, in his sleep.  Grandma needs our help.  Funeral's Friday. See you then.

There are some communications, it seems, that are best handled in person, or by telephone, by voice if they can't be said in person.  I may be an irrational curmudgeon to think so, but it would never occur to me to post a tribute to my grandmother on Facebook if I weren't absolutely certain that all of my relatives, some of whom are Facebook friends, already knew about it.

Am I alone in feeling this way?  I don't know.  I'd never gotten such a shocking communication through a social network, or even email.  I learned of 9/11 by telephone.  I learned of the Challenger explosion by a public address announcement in high school.  Facebook seems tawdry, because it isn't, hasn't been, and can never be a part of my everyday life.  I haven't grown up with the internet.  I'm not a fish.  I had to learn to swim, and I had to learn it in a pool before I could enter the ocean.

And while this won't be so jarring the next time it happens (death of course, will always remain jarring), I don't believe I'll ever get used to it.

Imagine this:

A terrorist group — let's call them, I don't know, the Pervert Jihad — issues a videotaped threat.

Their demand: America must select 25 million of its citizens per year. Those citizens must give complete strangers working for the government a brief look at a blurry naked picture of themselves. In addition, the complete strangers working for the government must select 1 million of the citizens — men, women, and children of all ages — for "special treatment." That "special treatment" involves the one million lucky citizens submitting to the strangers from the government briefly running their hands over the citizens' clothed breasts and genitals, in public, in front of a crowd of annoyed strangers. The whole experience takes about an hour of the citizens' time every time they have to put up with it.

The Pervert Jihad says that if America does not comply, they will kill Americans every year. They'll kill, let's say, about 450 — the capacity of a jumbo jet. We have reason to believe they may or may not succeed at this mass murder if they try.

Query:

Would we do it?

(Welcome, visitors. Read our recent TSA coverage here.

Over the last few weeks we have received dozens of spam comments promoting — if that is the word — a Certain Mega Firm. I can see Certain Mega Firm's offices from my window.

As tradition dictates, someone using some sort of auto-spammer program hit us with dozens of comments targeted to multiple posts here, including posts in which I call out legal spammers. The posts have randomized names and email addresses, probably spoofed IP addresses, and the same content: "[Certain Mega Firm Name] Attorney [City]", followed by the address of one of the firm's many branches in a major city.

Normally, if the mood struck me, I'd out them and ridicule them. They're a gigantic and rather conservative megafirm, and certain other law blogs would find it hilarious that someone was promoting them with the same tactics typically used to market drugs that improve your man-junk. We have great fun here with spammers. Though the impact would be akin to a gnat biting a whale, it would be embarrassing to them on some tiny level.

But I've decided to be whimsical. I am 99% sure that nobody inside Certain Mega Firm did this. I once toiled at Certain Mega Firm, and there are people still there that I like very much. So I emailed a friend, showed him some links (including the Google link showing that this spam is posted all over the internet), and suggested that his web or marketing departments go drop the hammer, hard, on any outside marketers they are using.

Maybe I will be rewarded with an announcement that they have fired their marketers. That would make my day. If nothing else, I will be happy if a MegaFirm becomes aware of one of our favorite sayings: when you outsource your marketing, you outsource your reputation and your ethics to questionable people.

How about some recommendations for some tasty and interesting variations on Thanksgiving classics — with links, if possible?

The rules: (1) no food that is too fun to cook. In other words, no deep fried turkeys. (2) Only variations on classics. No strange shit.

Why am I so timid?

Well, it's not me. My lovely and much-smarter-than-I-am wife has a rule: if it ain't in Freedom from Want, we're not having it. Normally she permits me to cook adventurous things. Not on high holidays. This may be a form of PTSD remaining from our first Thanksgiving dinner together, eaten at my grandparents' stuffy and white-as-bone downtown club, where they served (among other things) lion, and where she was exposed to a is-she-good-enough-for-our-little-boy grilling from the relatives so severe that it makes Gitmo look like a spa day at the Plaza.

So if you have any recommended turkey brines and/or rubs, creative ways to do mashed potatoes, tasty gravies, etc., serve 'em up — I'm the chef on Thanksgiving.

And the Transportation Security Administration is doubling down on the Stupid.

From commenter Scott Jacobs:  The TSA has followed up on its threats against John Tyner, the man behind the "Don't Touch My Junk" video that brought a long-simmering public resentment against the TSA to a boil.  Now he's threatened with prosecution.

The Transportation Security Administration has opened an investigation targeting John Tyner, the Oceanside man who left Lindbergh Field under duress on Saturday morning after refusing to undertake a full body scan.

Tyner recorded the half-hour long encounter on his cell phone and later posted it to his personal blog, along with an extensive account of the incident. The blog went viral, attracting hundreds of thousands of readers and thousands of comments.

Michael J. Aguilar, chief of the TSA office in San Diego, called a news conference at the airport Monday afternoon to announce the probe. He said the investigation could lead to prosecution and civil penalties of up to $11,000.

The question of "selective prosecution" is frequently raised by ignorant criminal defendants.  "They prosecuted me for possession of marijuana because I'm an outspoken advocate for legalization.  All the guys at Freddie's Head Shop will tell you so."

But Tyner could make a case of it.  There is absolutely no question that Michael J. Aguilar, the head of the Transportation Security Agency in San Diego, would not know Tyner's name, much less be raising the prospect of a $10,000.00 $11,000.00 fine against Tyner if Tyner's "Don't Touch My Junk" video hadn't gone viral.  Tyner is being threatened for exercising his constitutional right to free speech.

I suggest that you may wish to contact your senator or congressperson.

You may wish to write something like this:

Dear ______:

I was distressed to read that the Transportation Security Administration chief in San Diego, Michael Aguilar, announced during a press conference on Monday that his office was opening an investigation of John Tyner, the man who recorded a video of his refusal to walk through a San Diego airport body scanner, then refusing an intrusive search in which a TSA agent would bring hands into contact with Mr. Tyner's genital areas.  (You may be aware of this video under its popular name, "Don't touch my junk.")

While there is debate about the safety of full body scanners recently deployed at airports as a reaction to the "underwear bomber" and the British bombers who attempted to disguise explosive chemicals as shampoo, is there any debate that law-abiding Americans such as Mr. Tyner, who simply shot a cell phone video of his interaction with TSA agents concerning his unwillingness to endure a search not much different from that undergone by new jail inmates, should not face government investigation and the threat of prosecution for engaging in free speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution?

I think not.  As an American citizen, and your constituent, I am concerned when government agents abuse their power to threaten citizens for lawful behavior.  If Mister Aguilar is unable to control himself (over a simple embarrassment revealing a problem anyone who flies frequently would complain about), someone with real authority must control him.  Won't you please exercise your authority?  If not by oversight, then by contacting Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano and Attorney General Holder to share these concerns?  I hope that we both agree that, even if Mr. Tyner's words were vulgar, his refusal to submit to the scan and refusal to endure the search were legal.  After all, he did not board the flight; he left the airport instead.  He should not be threatened with prosecution and a fine of $11,000.00 (in Mr. Aguilar's words) for exercising a citizen's right to free speech in a free country.

Mr. Aguilar, who has no authority to prosecute anyone (that is a decision for the Justice Department) seems to be abusing his power to get revenge against a citizen who embarrassed his office.   The threat of prosecution in and of itself can be used to chill free speech.  I hope that you agree with me.  Please contact Secretary Napolitano and Attorney General Holder with our shared concerns about a rogue TSA office and its disregard of the Constitution.

Thank you.

Be sure to let them know, politely, that you're a constituent and you vote.

Last year I was lucky enough to attend the premier boardgaming convention in the US, BGGcon. I will be there again starting tomorrow. Alas, I think it's unlikely that I will do much updating in media res, although like last year I will do a full post mortem (you can see last years starting here.) It should be an amazing 5 days.

To whet your appetite, here are a couple of games I am very interested in going in:

- Troyes. I've mentioned before that I like dice games, and in this game each color of dice represents a particular class of citizen. All of which can do different things. Looks right up my alley.

- Navegador. It looks a little like a combination of Finca and Endeavor, both games I really like.

- 7 Wonders. A civilization building (and destroying) version of Dominion? Sounds interesting to me!

- Vinhos. A game about making wine. Not my favorite theme, but this one has a lot of buzz around it.

- Merkator. The theme has been done to death middle ages trading empires, but this is from the guy that did Agricola and Le Havre, so I am automatically interested.

- Junta – Viva El Presidente. Just because I love the original so.

So, see everybody some time after Thanksgiving! Enjoy the holiday.

I must admit I'd have more sympathy for those who argue that stories of government regulation trapping the unwary in seemingly nonsensical ways were the result of faceless bureaucrats applying the letter, rather than the spirit of the law, if those wrote the law weren't among the worst offenders.

For instance, what sort of man calls the police to report schoolchildren for selling cookies, cupcakes, and rice krispie treats without a business permit and necessary insurance?  In New Castle, New York, that honor goes to city councilman Michael Wolfensohn.

Michael Wolfensohn sure does have a pretty mouth.

"All vendors selling on town property have to have a license, whether it's boys selling baked goods or a hot dog vendor," said Wolfensohn, who was elected to the board in 2007 after becoming well known in the community for leading a contentious, five-year effort to build a 9/11 memorial. The memorial ended up in Gedney Park after neighbors of the original location, the Duck Pond, sued.

Couldn't Wolfensohn have simply told the boys that they needed a license, the parents want to know, instead of calling the police?

"In hindsight, maybe I should have done that, but I wasn't sure if I was allowed to do that," he said. "The police are trained to deal with these sorts of issues."

Actually, and to their credit, the police of New Castle, New York are not trained to deal with the issue of thirteen year old boys selling unlicensed cookies and snacks.  That's demonstrated by the fact that the police had allowed the boys in question to sell other treats without harassment or complaint, until Michael Wolfensohn squealed like a pig that the law was being violated, by two children who wanted to make a buck selling their product to willing buyers through honest commerce.

In fact, no amount of training can make a man "qualified" to deal with "these issues," where the issues in question involve a self-important adult so concerned with upholding the sanctity of the law that he calls the cops on (if this story had been perfect) a kid's lemonade stand.

No, it took a born prick, of the caliber of Michael Wolfensohn, to rain on these boys' parade, and then to blame it all on a policeman who was just doing his job.

And while it may seem ironic that Wolfensohn, before today, was most famous for his struggle to build a 9/11 memorial in a town having no obvious connection to that tragedy, considering that he's the sort of man who would use his ham-fisted authority to quash even the tiny spark of free enterprise represented by a kid's cookie stand, it's in fact entirely appropriate.

Wolfensohn is the best possible representative of a political class that spends public money to build useless memorials where they're not wanted, and to step on children who have the energy, but not the good sense and legal advice, to build a cookie stand, all while claiming to stand for the American law and ideals that the terrorists attempted to crush on September 11, 2001.

I'm mostly spent from my rant, but I am having more fun than is appropriate with the #TSAslogans hashtag on Twitter. I think the title of this post is my best effort.

Mention your favorites, or suggest your own, here.