In my opinion, I’d much rather see legislature passed than just a warm fuzzy reassurance from the oval office. Though it’s been a slightly bumpy ride I’m still proud to say that Obama and the Democratic Party has my vote.  

In conversations over the past few weeks, some of the party’s leading strategists told me that it all comes down to messaging, or — here’s that ubiquitous word again — “framing.” The president who ran such a brilliant campaign, they argue, has utterly failed to communicate his successes. They cited factors like the president’s cool demeanor and suggested that he hadn’t used the right words or shown the proper empathy.

But when I put the same question to John Podesta, the former White House chief of staff who led Mr. Obama’s transition team, I heard what sounded like a deeper and more persuasive explanation. You might call it the “legislative box” theory.

Like other Democrats, Mr. Podesta, who now runs the liberal Center for American Progress and is arguably the most influential Washington Democrat not currently in government, assumes that many of the president’s struggles were unavoidable. Stubborn joblessness and anemic growth have thus far resisted intervention and defined the administration.

But to whatever extent Mr. Obama controlled the fate of his young presidency, Mr. Podesta believes that his most consequential decisions on domestic policy stemmed from one overarching conviction — that the president’s most important job in a crisis, requiring nearly single-minded attention, was to pass huge legislation.

“By focusing on getting big legislative accomplishments, which was understandable, they necessarily gave up a larger image of him as president,” Mr. Podesta said, referring to White House advisers. “They cast him as the prime minister. They were kind of locked into the day-to-day workings on the Hill.”

- New York Times (read the entire article here)

the hypochondriac in me is panicking

The oldest evidence of a fungus that turns ants into zombies and makes them stagger to their death has been uncovered by scientists.

The gruesome hallmark of the fungus’s handiwork was found on the leaves of plants that grew in Messel, near Darmstadt in Germany, 48m years ago.

The finding shows that parasitic fungi evolved the ability to control the creatures they infect in the distant past, even before the rise of the Himalayas.

The fungus, which is alive and well in forests today, latches on to carpenter ants as they cross the forest floor before returning to their nests high in the canopy.

The fungus grows inside the ants and releases chemicals that affect their behaviour. Some ants leave the colony and wander off to find fresh leaves on their own, while others fall from their tree-top havens on to leaves nearer the ground.

The final stage of the parasitic death sentence is the most macabre. In their last hours, infected ants move towards the underside of the leaf they are on and lock their mandibles in a “death grip” around the central vein, immobilising themselves and locking the fungus in position.

“This can happen en masse. You can find whole graveyards with 20 or 30 ants in a square metre. Each time, they are on leaves that are a particular height off the ground and they have bitten into the main vein before dying,” said David Hughes at Harvard University.

The fungus cannot grow high up in the canopy or on the forest floor, but infected ants often die on leaves midway between the two, where the humidity and temperature suit the fungus. Once an ant has died, the fungus sprouts from its head and produces a pod of spores, which are fired at night on to the forest floor, where they can infect other ants.

Scientists led by Hughes noticed that ants infected with the fungus,Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, bit into leaves with so much force they left a lasting mark. The holes created by their mandibles either side of the leaf vein are bordered by scar tissue, producing an unmistakable dumb-bell shape.

Writing in the journal, Biology Letters, the team describes how they trawled a database of images that document leaf damage by insects, fungi and other organisms. They found one image of a 48m-year-old leaf from the Messel pit that showed the distinctive “death grip” markings of an infected ant. At the time, the Messel area was thick with subtropical forests.

“We now present it as the first example of behavioural manipulation and probably the only one which can be found. In most cases, this kind of control is spectacular but ephemeral and doesn’t leave any permanent trace,” Hughes said.

“The question now is, what are the triggers that push a parasite not just to kill its host, but to take over its brain and muscles and then kill it.”

He added: “Of all the parasitic organisms, only a few have evolved this trick of manipulating their host’s behaviour.

Why go to the bother? Why are there not more of them?”

Scientists are not clear how the fungus controls the ants it infects, but know that the parasite releases alkaloid chemicals into the insect as it consumes it from the inside.

- The Guardian, 18.08.10

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This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. And we don’t just have more options than we used to. We have better ones: These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It deserves to die.

Consider: If I suddenly decide I want to dial you up, I have no way of knowing whether you’re busy, and you have no idea why I’m calling. We have to open Schrödinger’s box every time, having a conversation to figure out whether it’s OK to have a conversation. Plus, voice calls are emotionally high-bandwidth, which is why it’s so weirdly exhausting to be interrupted by one.

— The Death of the Phone Call | Wired Magazine (via themadeshop) (via nathanjohnson)

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Tattoos and burqas are all the rage. One in five of us now has a tattoo and there are enough burqas around to invoke talk of banning them. Some people, presumably, sport both – but they’re difficult to identify without causing an embarrassing scuffle. Especially if the person under the burqa turns out to be a woman.

Nothing good has come out of the tiresome burqa-banning debate, other than a timely reminder that the French aren’t really to be trusted. Most of the time they’re OK – quite like us, relatively affluent, but not so as to make us feel bitter, the kind of people you’d happily share a school run with. But, every so often, they’ll do something a bit mental – have a revolution, nearly elect Le Pen, capitulate in the face of an evil empire whose armies they outnumber, ban the burqa from public places. It’s always a bit of a shock, an undermining of confidence, like noticing that your accountant has a tattoo.

Damian Green, the immigration minister, deftly dismissed calls for a burqa ban as “rather un-British”. I imagine he was hoping that this would cause a sort of feedback loop in the minds of xenophobes: “Hate not British! Burqa not British! Hate burqa! Ban burqa! Banning not British! Hate banning! Ban banning! Ban burqa! Ban burqa banning! Does not compute!”

I certainly prefer that argument to his colleague Caroline Spelman’s view. She thinks burqas are “empowering”. That’s only true in the sense that a ban would be massively disempowering and colossally violate the rights of free-born citizens. It would, in fact, be the only thing that would persuade me to wear one myself, in the spirit of Guillaume Morand, a Swiss businessman who last year responded to his country’s outlawing of minarets by defiantly erecting one over his shoe shop.

Governments and legislatures shouldn’t tell people what they can and can’t wear. By doing so, they would, in every sense, be taking a massive liberty. As long as people aren’t wearing crotchless jeans outside primary schools or deely boppers with attached sparklers on petrol station forecourts, we’ve all got the right to wear exactly what the hell we like and I can barely believe that we’re having this debate.

But we are. Stupid people are thinking about an issue that doesn’t need to be thought about and a YouGov survey says 67% of us want full-face veils outlawed. Just when I thought my estimation of humanity couldn’t fall any further, I discover that two-thirds of my fellow countrymen are, or at least were for the duration of taking a survey, morons. I’m so glad the Conservatives are committed to local referenda.

These idiots may not be proportionally represented but they do have a voice in parliament: Philip Hollobone MP. He’s tabled a private member’s bill that would make it illegal for anyone to cover their face in public. “Covering your face in public is strange, and to many people both intimidating and offensive,” he says. Take that, Batman.

None of this means I think there’s anything good about wearing a burqa. I think it’s daft. I think any belief system that concludes that half the population should go around constantly covered from head to toe in black cloth, whether out of modesty, humility, tradition or stealth, has a massive flaw in it.

And, while I’m at it, I think that it’s ridiculous to believe in transubstantiation, that considering the Bible to be the literal word of God reduces that supposedly omnipotent being to a muddle-headed maniac and that the Hindu caste system and Roman Catholic rules against contraception could have been invented by Satan. There! Now no one will be able to guess who’s killed me.

Expressing these kinds of opinion is becoming taboo, as Cardiff councillor John Dixon has found out. He’s up in front of the public service ombudsman for Wales for calling the Church of Scientology “stupid” on Twitter. Ever zealous in the defence of their good name (and can you imagine what would be said about them if they weren’t?), the Scientologists lodged a complaint against Dixon, accusing him of “bigotry”. It was taken further because, as the letters “Cllr” were part of his Twitter name, he was deemed to be commenting in his official capacity and thus breaching Cardiff council’s code of conduct on respecting people’s religious beliefs.

There’s altogether too much harping on respect and banning these days. If you can’t respect something, you should ban it. If it’s not banned, you should respect it. Bullshit. There is a huge gulf of toleration between respect and banning. In a free society, people should be allowed to do what they want wherever possible. The loss of liberty incurred by any alternative principle is too high a price to pay to stop people making dicks of themselves. But, if people are using their freedoms to make dicks of themselves, other people should be able to say so.

So the fact that, lamentably, some people sincerely believe in Scientology and consider it a religion, even if the British state does not, doesn’t give Scientologists the right to be treated with rhetorical kid gloves. Similarly, while burqas shouldn’t be banned from public places, we don’t have to respect people’s decision to wear them. We can tolerate but criticise it and, as long as we’re not being abusive, take the piss. Consequently, those women who feel pressured into wearing burqas by cultural or familial forces might become aware that they’re living in a society where questioning those forces is welcomed.

It bears restating that it’s not bigoted to disagree vociferously with people’s choices, as long as you’re even more vociferous in defending their right to make them. So if, because of peer pressure, a section of our community is altering its appearance in a way that I think looks awful or silly, I’m allowed to say so. Which brings me back to tattoos.

Tattoos are horrible and they never come off. Walking around with a tattoo is like perpetually screaming: “I should not of done this!” at the top of your voice. It is foolishness and vulgarity made permanent. Most people can extricate themselves from marriages with less pain. This fashion for tattoos – this fad for the indelible – shows an outbreak of mass imprudence comparable with Easter Island at its head-carving peak. It will lead to thousands of years of collective regret. But that’s liberty for you: gladly or not, it’s all about suffering fools.

— David Mitchell, The Observer

the oregon trail is also permanently imprinted on my brain

More than 400,000 people traveled the Oregon Trail during the 19th century—so many that there are spots where wagon ruts are still visible. This photo was taken at Three Island Crossing, better known to children of the 1980s as the Snake River Crossing. (Don’t ford it! Never ford it!)

When I first saw this photo, taken by Flickr user gharness, I thought, “No freakin’ way.” But, I’ve been assured by both the Associated Press and Idaho State University that this is for real. Wagons really did wear down certain patches of ground so much that nothing grows there to this day. The National Parks Service, Bureau of Land Management and other groups have marked many of these spots (you can see a marker in the above photo on the right) and have taken steps to preserve them. Mind-blowing hist

via boing boing

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The church should always put humanity before unity

Sexual equality, rather than schism, should be the Archbishop of Canterbury’s foremost concern

The task of preventing schism in the Anglican church has consumed Dr Rowan Williams’s tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury. But the split he tried to prevent had, in a fundamental sense, already occurred.

The general synod has been wrangling over women bishops. Again. Their consecration was made technically possible in 2008, but traditionalists have lobbied ever since for a men-only track within the church hierarchy.

Dr Williams tried to broker a compromise, mindful that elements on his conservative flank were mulling an offer from Rome to take in schismatic Anglicans. That compromise has failed.

Meanwhile, away from the synod, the archbishop has become embroiled in a row about the prospect of a gay man presiding in the Southwark diocese. Canon Jeffrey John was under consideration for the high-profile south London bishopric until his name was leaked. His candidacy was then effectively derailed by conservative evangelicals. Dr Williams has too often submerged his own liberal inclinations in what he sees as a higher duty to preserve institutional unity. Now, surely, his priorities should change.

Most of Britain has accepted that women can assume positions of authority and that homosexuality is a quite ordinary part of human experience. The explicit discrimination practised by the church is unacceptable in most non-religious settings and would be illegal if expressed by any other employer. There are, meanwhile, ample theological grounds for accepting that women are not created subordinate to men and that homosexuality is not hateful in the eyes of God. Dr Williams was determined not to go down in history as the Archbishop who split the church. He could have been remembered by future generations as a religious leader who stood unequivocally on the right side of a moral argument about sexual equality. Regrettably, that opportunity seems now to have passed.

— Editorial in The Observer, Sunday 11 July 2010