Author: Muttrox

Stop yammering about Cheney’s hunting accident. It’s not important. It has no larger ramifications. Last week, Peter Daou wrote an excellent post about Scandal Fatigue, widely cited, and yet this week every blog is taking time out to try and make points on the Cheney incident. Every time you talk about this, you’re not talking about illegal wiretapping, torture, lying AGs, record deficits, corrupt majority leaders, etc.

I ate at Romano’s Macaroni Grill for the first time last week. I was particularly intruiged by their “Create your own pasta” dish. (I accidentally called it “Make your own pasta” when I ordered, our waitress instantly corrected me. Lordy.) To create your own pasta, you are a given a menu. You pick any of six noodles, eight sauces, up to three vegetables out ten, five meats, and a couple of salads (numbers are from memory). That’s a good amount of variety. And in fact the meal was delightful and I will return. So why am I blogging? Because of the catchphrase on the menu. “The possibilities are endless”. No, they’re not. The possibilities are not endless, they are finite, countable, and easily calculated.
6 noodles X
8 sauces X
120 vegetable combinations X
5 meats X
3 salads (none, A, or B) =
86,400 combinations*. Very finite.

But Romano’s is not the only offender. Let’s talk about Waffle House. They claim prominently on their menu how many ways there are to prepare a burger. On their website, they claim at least 70,778,880 different ways.

This was deconstructed nicely in this article. Here’s how you do math for something like this. How many possible toppings are there? Eight. Each one can either be there or not — two ways for each topping. So you take two, and multiply it by itself eight times. This equals 256. How do you get from 256 to 70 million? You can’t. You can get weasely to get closer. For instance, you could either have a bun top, bun bottom, or not. That’s another factor of 4. You could get the burger rare, medium rare, medium, medium well, well done. That’s a factor of 5. That gets you to 5,120. We are almost halfway to supporting their claim (because 5,120 squared is almost 70 million.) But we’ve used everything we got.

Here’s one way to explain the discrepancy. Consider the clientele and employee base at Waffle House. Do they strike you as particulary sophisticated when it comes to mathematics? I’d guess over half the people who eat there need a tip calculator to figure out what 15% of $10.00 is. The workers are no better. It’s the bottom of the barrel, no getting around it. The management doesn’t look like they’re taking Number Theory courses at night either. So based on this limited sample, we conclude that everyone associated with Waffle House is a drooling idiot of some kind. I conclude that their advertising claim is false, but is merely due to stupidity rather than malice.

*Interestingly, this number is the exact number of seconds in a day. I often need to use this at work to convert dates to datetimes and back. From now on, all my code will call it the “Romano” factor.

Ever since I started Muttroxia, I’ve been wanting to do a post about the things I like about the Bush administration. I suppose it was part of an effort to seem non-partisan, or objective or something like that. Problem was, every time I sat down to write, I couldn’t come up with much. It was going to be a top 10, but I ended up with only four. And since one of them (#4) was a unanimous decision by 300 million Americans, it’s not really all that amazing. And they all have asterisks. Oh well, when you’re grading Worst President Ever, there’s not a lot to work with.

The things I like fall under two broad themes.

Economics: These folks believe in the power of the free market. To a large degree, so do I. They often put it places it doesn’t belong (Social Security, Health Savings Accounts), but sometimes it goes somewhere I like.

1) No Child Left Behind – Without accountability, it is foolish to hope for change. Hoping for A while rewarding for B does not work. Bush deserves credit for bring market forces to bear in the educational system, and installing a system where performance is rewarded. There are major major problems with the implementation and details (not enough money, testing standards that don’t take gifted or special needs students into account, no real option for students or schools that just failed) — but the idea has merit, and to some degree, this is the pain that is needed to get to a better place in the future.

2) Market-based trading of pollution emissions – Again, there is plenty of room to argue about how exactly this program was implemented. Nevertheless, bringing market forces into the area of environmental pollution is a great idea. As far as I know, it has been proven over and over to produce the best results the quickest, and do it in a way consonant with both democracy and capitalism.

Black and White foreign policy: These folks believe in good and evil. They believe that some societies are just bad, and deserve to be treated like dirt. They should not be negotiated with, they should not be given the same status as mature democracies, etc. Many times, this leads to huge foreign policy mistakes (Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, etc.), but if I happen to agree with the judgement, it’s refreshing not to have the President pretending that these societies are every bit as good as everyone else, just different. That’s simply not true, and we all know it.

3) Calling out the Palestinians – There’s never been a shadow of a doubt that the Arab world is the bad guy in the Arab/Israeli conflict. No one with an ounce of perspective can claim otherwise. The line from Yasir Arafat, who invented modern terrorism, to Osama Bin Laden is self-evident. To his credit, Bush did not treat Arafat like a hero or diplomat or peace monger. His stance was very clear, that until Palestine cleaned up it’s act, there’s nothing to talk about. Despite the recent triumph of Hamas at the polls, there have been any number of positive developments since he took this stance.

4) Taking out the Taliban – Yes, he let Osama get away. Yes, he invented a war in Iraq, and let Al Queda flourish. But at least for a couple months, he did what any sane person would have done. Al Queda, through the Taliban, ran Afghanistan. We took ’em out. They were evil, and we dumped them. Too bad we didn’t follow through, but at least the start was right.

All TVs now come with a mute button. I am asking for a “blind” button. This would keep the sound going, but turn off the image. It would be good for shows with gross medical stuff. NipTuck, medical surgery shows, etc. Seriously, who wants to watch that stuff, it’s repulsive. I know have all kinds of disgusting organy things inside me, but I don’t need to think about it. It would be good when good songs are played on a show, but the imagery is just annoying. Any of the CSI/Who openings, bands that should wear bags on their head, etc.

Most people already have a hundred stations that do nothing but broadcast music. Why not complete the comparison and turn off the video? This is especially easy in the digital TV/TiVo world, it ought to be one simple button.

Yes, this is a great idea! No doubt about it – that Muttrox sure is smart! But even one so insightful and brilliant as I cannot come up with the right name for this function.

The sound one is called “mute” to indicate no noise being broadcast, not deaf, which would refer to you the listener. (Wouldn’t it be funny if they had called it “dumb” instead?) What is the equivalent with light? Is there a word for someone that can’t show themselves? Well, no, that’s physically impossible, more or less. Blind? Invisible? Ideas welcomed.

Many have framed this issue as a tradeoff between civil liberties and national security. It is not. There are many venues to have that debate. One of them happens to be Congress. In fact, this debate happened about 30 years ago, when the FISA courts were created as a response to Nixon. The FISA court was created specifically so that the president could take appropriate actions to protect national security. In it’s history, it has approved over 99.9% of requests, so it’s not exactly a bastion of treehugging liberal civil liberties crybabies. It even approves tapping retroactively (within 72 hours), in case the need is truly urgent.

Further, if the president truly felt that FISA was tying his hands too much, he had an obvious option. It’s called Congress. At any time, he could have asked Congress to rewrite the rules. Data mining provisions could have been added, adjustments to modern technologies and the particular enemy we face could have been made. Although the president has loyal majorities in both houses of Congress, he chose not to do that. He chose to simply ignore Congress and do what he wanted.

This is what the Democrats/Liberals/Left/Libetarians are up in arms about. In point of fact, there has been remarkably little criticism for the idea that some domestic monitoring may be needed. The primary criticism is that the president knowingly, willfully, broke the law. When confronted, he has been unrepentant. Bush’s position is that he has the authority to ignore Congress’s explicit wishes. His position is that if Congress passes any law which he disagrees with, that law is unconstitutional. You don’t need to be much of a constitutional scholar to understand why this is a bad thing. It’s equivalent to saying that he does not recognize that Congress has any authority. In fact, this has been demonstrated. In his signing statement for McCain’s recent torture law, Bush claimed he has the right to ignore the law whenever he wants. He and his cabinet have been asked if the Patriot Act were not renewed, would he recognize that authority, and they have said they would simply work around it as needed.

This is not a president. This is a king. America got rid of them over 200 years ago, and we went to create the best society in the history of the world. It’s a shame to see the monarchy making such a comeback.

As a postscript, one of the primary authors of the legal theory underlying Bush’s actions happens to be Sam Alito.

***late addendum:
Andrew Sullivan, whose essay on torture I referenced earlier, wrote an excellent article about the issue at stake here. I gotta admit, I’m starting to like the cut of his jib.

Most of you who read this blog get our annual holiday card. We get them from Snapfish. They send you the cards and the envelopes. After writing and printing out the letter, we folded them all up. Unsuspecting of any trouble, we did a standard tri-fold of the letters. I am for too proud that I can always nail this perfectly on the first try to fit into a standard envelope. Anyhow, so we’ve folded all the letters, and we go to put them in the envelopes, and…

The envelopes aren’t quite wide enough to accomodate a standard piece of paper. For some odd reason, instead of making them 9 1/2″ wide (which, you’ll notice, gives you enough room for a 8 1/2″ wide piece of paper, with a little left over), they made them around 8 1/4″ (which, you’ll notice is ever so slightly less than 8 1/2″). Why would they not make them just a bit larger, so that they could accomodate a letter along with the card? Admittedly, holiday letters are a bit dopey, but I know we are not the only people that do them. It’s hard to believe the people at Snapfish ever had to eat their own dogfood, or they would have noticed and fixed this in 10 minutes. At any rate, we had to go back and fold each letter into 6ths instead of 3rds, which looked very amateurish, if I do say so myself.

The truly irritating part? The exact same thing happened last year, and I had totally forgotten about it. Feh! Double Feh!

The other day I got a menu from a new Chinese delivery place. It said in big letters, “WE DELIVERY!” But that’s not what I’m up in arms about. It’s too easy, and I make too many typos to get preachy about it.
Yes, it’s the exciting conclusion to my Asian-themed trilogy o’ rants!

Here’s my latest beef (and I don’t mean with broccoli): fortune cookies — They’re not fortunes!!!! A fortune cookie should have a prediction about what could happen in the future. I’m not asking for specific, testable prediction, a simple “You will find great happiness next year” will do. Or “If you have no love for others, you will find yourself alone.” Some sense of consequences.

Instead what you get is inane blather. “Love is it’s own reward”. It’s even that way online, try a few sample fortunes at the Fortune Cookie Generator, or an Astrological Fortune Cookie.

Resist everything but temptation.
Well begun is half done.
Faith is the answer to success
” .” — Harpo Marx

Here are two from my favorite Chinese place growing up:

Today, by civil, but don’t go out of your way to be over friendly.

Draw upa budget and figure out how to cut down on your debt.

Folks, these aren’t fortunes. Half of them don’t even make sense. That last one is a quote. You might as well start adding in Jon Stewart’s latest one-liner, or directions to the bus stop. It makes as much sense as these, and would be more in line with the lottery numbers often added. Yep, the lottery numbers, there’s another alarming twist. C’mon, who is so desparate for tips on the lottery they think that a mass-produced fortune cookie has the answer, just for them. Anyone who plays the numbers on a fortune cookie should instantly be taken out back and castrated.

***LATE UPDATES***
I am informed by an old source that once the California lottery was in fact won by the number from fortune cookies. There were 300 winners. Lottery officials suspected fraud until the truth came out. (The truth being that they were all idiots, having to split the pot 300 ways).

Someone actually sent my wife a fortune cookie in the mail that said “You are the life of any party”. That’s not a fortune! (Although it probably does apply to her a lot more than me.)

Here’s another annoyance. Chinese food places always give you two pieces of silverware. A fork and a spoon. Why a fork and a spoon? Where’s my knife? Every meal I have to make a special point to ask for a knife. In every other way, Chinese food places rock. Do you know why? Service. You can waltz in with torn jeans, 3-days of stubble, reeking like the sewer, and they’ll still treat you like an honored guest. Except for the silverware.

I think they want you to use chopsticks. It’s only in a nod to Western culture they even include a fork and spoon. But if they’re going that far, where’s the knife? Don’t Aisans ever need to cut anything? Have you seen the size of those broccoli pieces? Chopsticks don’t cut anything. Chopsticks stink. I don’t care how cool it is to be able to use them, they’re stupid. Once your society passes the phase where you have to rely on bamboo for your flatware, it’s time to upgrade to actual utensils.

Give me a knife!

I am officially sick of hearing anything about pandas. It is not news when a zoo gets a panda. It is not news when one has a baby. They are evolutionary dead-ends that should be left on their own to go extinct.

Just because they have fur does not make them cute. They are not cute. They are big fat oafs.

They are stupid. Breathtakingly stupid. Did you know after the cubs are born, they have to be separated from the mothers? Yes, it’s because the mothers roll over in their sleep and crush their kid. That’s a good evolutionary winning strategy. I guess they’re still waiting for that one mutant gene that says, Hey maybe I shouldn’t kill my kids, wonder if that would work?

How much money do zoos spend on these drooling buffoons? Over a million bucks per panda per year. Why don’t they spend the money on something better? They’re goners. Pandas are goners, wake up and admit it.

And stop playing chinese music in the panda “pavillion”! If you play chinese music for the asian animals, then play AC|DC in the kangaroo pen.

Just let them die already.

I don’t get into the “I played it when it was a kid, so now it’s some kind of cool kitsch to love it as an adult” movement. A hipper-than-thou roommate ruined that for me. But Gnip-gnop just rocks. You gotta love a game where the strategy is to just hit the buttons as fast as hard as you can until you pass out from fatigue.  Good times.

So here I was, trying to figure out how to state the practical case against torture, without simply regurgiating Andrew Sullivan’s excellent article.

And then I read the latest. It’s too fitting. It’s just too perfect, in a sick I-can’t-believe-it sort of way.

Remember the case to go to war in Iraq? It wasn’t about making a pretty democracy there. It wasn’t about regional geopolitics. It wasn’t about oil. It wasn’t even about WMDs(*). These were all offered up as various excuses after the fact. The original and strongest justification was that Iraq was responsible for 9/11, despite the lack of evidence, and that if we didn’t stop Al Queda in Iraq, we were going to get nuked. This is the line that was fed congress and the public, and got them their authorization to declare war if needed (no, it was not a vote for war. Learn the difference). As I’ve demonstrated in other posts, they actually got most of the country to believe this swill. They kept repeating until the lie was no longer needed, after the 2004 elections. Isn’t it interesting that shortly after the elections, the populace no longer believes? It’s simply because the Bushies don’t care if you believe anymore, so they’ve let their propoganda machine die out. Believe what you want, we’re in Iraq, they’re in power, too late chump!

At any rate, the topic is 9/11 and Iraq. There was never the least shred of evidence to connect the two directly. There didn’t seem to be much to even connect Iraq to Al Queda. They hated each other, what with Sadaam actually being a secularlist. Sure, there were very weird reports of an isolated “contact” between the two, as if that meant they were allies. We had extensive contact with the USSR throughout the entire Cold War, no one would be stupid enough to think that meant we were buddies.

So, what to do? You need some information. This is where it gets juicy. You just go out and get it. Torture until they confess.

The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda on detailed statements made by a prisoner while in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials.

And there’s your perfect case for why torture is not only an offense against God, but completely impractical as well. Yet another of the pillars for the war completely destroyed. Is it any that those parts of planet Earth that don’t already hate us are beginning to? Every step in this lunacy has been held to the highest standards of immorality, and is fundamentally unamerican. Torture, crushing lawful dissent domestically, preemptive war, manufacturing propoganda lies for both domestic and foreign press, callous disregard for other points of view, slandering and libeling political opponents, disgracing one of the only honorable people in their administration (Colin Powell) by knowing whoring on his integrity, giving away the spoils of wars to cronies, hiring mercenary armies to do the dirty work, the list goes on.

*(WMDs covers both chemical and nuclear weapons. Everyone know there were no nuclear weapons, but we were only 90% sure about chemicals. By constantly referring to WMDs instead of nukes, Bush took a clear lie and conflated with something that was just very improbable, again avoiding being caught in a clear lie. It is helpful to translate WMD in your head whenever you hear it though.)

Does the Bush Administration torture? The short answer is, well, duh. The evidence is overwhelming. It’s not even truly denied by the administration, their denials take the form of “We have created legal opinions about what torture is. We do not engage in practices that we have defined as torture. Therefore, we do not torture.” Note that this is entirely dependent upon what the Bushies themselves say torture is. It doesn’t matter if international law, human rights organizations, or common sense say it’s torture; as long as Gonzales and crew have said it ain’t, it ain’t.

An stronger justification is the form of “Torture is illegal. Everything we do is legal, since we decide what is legal. Therefore we do not torture.” Bush used this one recently. Note that this is literally no way to torture then. Anything you do is legal, by definition. Since torture is illegal, nothing you do is torture.

Is torture justified? No, not at all. It’s appalling that this discussion is even taking place. Did you ever think the day would come where you could have a straight-faced discussion about whether the US should torture as a regular practice?

Andrew Sullivan, once a pro-war hawk, shows how far we’ve come. Waterboarding (one of the many non-torture tortures employed by the Bushies) is a torture popularized by Torquemada during the Spanish Inquisition. Click to the link, and compare the description of Torquemada’s techniques and the CIAs. Identical.

Andrew has a lengthier article on torture. It is worth taking the time to read in full, it does a much better job than I could ever do on laying out the case against torture. Continuing with the example of waterboarding, we read:

“According to the sources, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the waterboarding technique lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in. They said Al Qaeda’s toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last between two and two and a half minutes before begging to confess.”

If the toughest guy in the world can only take two minutes, and most garden variety toughies can only take 15 seconds — that is unquestionably without doubt torture. QED, end of story.

In addition to being fundamentally immoral, one of the most immoral actions concievable, torture is also fundamentally useless, if not counter-productive. (More on that soon)