Whenever I click ‘submit’ after editing a blog entry, I get a javascript alert telling me ‘editor absent.’

Why?

They Rule has been updated in time for the election. Once you load it, click on ‘Load Map’ for some easy research. A related site is Political Friendster, which lets you visualize the relationships between politicians in a Friendster-like way.

Also: David Brock’s new book, ‘The Republican Noise Machine,’ is excerpted on Salon.com. If you care about American democracy, you should read it.

Josh Marshall is overwhelmed with the whole Abu Ghraib thing, but manages to pull a few rabbits out of his thinking cap. Especially this one:

As I think is already becoming clear, the responsibility for all of this goes right to the very top — to the President, the Secretary of Defense, the Vice President and many others. The point isn’t that the president ordered or knew specifically that soldiers in Iraq were setting attack dogs on to naked prisoners or all the other outrages we’re about to hear of. But going back almost three years these men made very conscious and specific decisions to disregard or opt out of the various international conventions, rules and traditions governing the treatment of prisoners of war and enemy combatants that are intended to prevent such things from happening.

[..]

In the case of the president, it’s hard to know what to think. As Jake Weisberg explains here, the president of the United States is just so cocksure, incurious and lazy that I think it’s half possible he’s never gotten past the gleaming phrases his advisors have given him to make sense of what’s happening on his watch. Nor, I think, can we discount the possibility that the president’s advisors and the president himself knew enough of what was probably happening — how their orders were being executed in practice — not to want to know the details.

Via Bloggerheads:

Bush Apology Sparks Torrent of Global Goodwill:

Typical of the responses was a personal note from Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad, who wrote “aww, dude, you know I can’t stay mad at you,” saying that the apology had prompted him to immediately dismantle his country’s secret nuclear weapons program. In a postscript, Assad added, “good luck to the Rangers this year.”

Bloggerheads comes up with simple activist projects and tries to get people to do them. The latest is Sack Bush, which I think I’m going to perpetrate. More as it develops.

Because I know some of you will be jazzed about it:

ABC presents ‘A Wrinkle In Time,’ as part of ‘The Wonderful World Of Disney.’

ABC’s site says it’ll air Monday the 10th at 8/7c.

There’s a more featureful Disney site, as well.

I remember watching a filmstrip version of the book in the school library, thinking I was very adult for having seen it. I was in the second or third grade or so at the time. I can’t remember if I read it, but I think I did.

I’m on a coffee fast. Yesterday around lunch time I realized I hadn’t had my morning coffee (terms like ‘lunchtime’ and ‘morning’ are relative to my screwy sleep schedule). So today it’s yerba maté.

I have this feeling like I’m almost about to have a headache any time now, that it’ll just come bursting through my cranium at the slightest provocation, but it’s not quite happening just yet. Sort of like living on the San Andreas fault. If I drink coffee, this situation will either get better or get worse, but if I don’t, it’ll at least stay this bad. Not that it’s really bad.

I don’t like that this drug, coffee, comes with withdrawal symptoms.

But. I. Really. REALLY. Like coffee.

I’m trying to guess how long it’ll be before I have more coffee. Will it be an automatic wake-up-in-the-morning-and-start-making-coffee-without-really-thinking-about-it that ends the run? Will I somehow need the jittery buzz sometime in the next few days? Will someone offer to buy me a soy latté?

I still have about a half-pound of beans. What will become of them? They weren’t cheap, either.

On WorldChanging, an entry about ‘biophilia,’ which is an architectural/design movement emphasizing evolutionary psychology. The idea being that human beings have an instinctual desire to be where they can see the landscape, know where to hide if there’s a predator, feel the natural rythms of sun rise and set, and so forth. (A parenthetical sentence in the cited article says: as Heerwagen and Gordon Orians describe it in The Biophilia Hypothesis, “habitability cues, resource availability, shelter and predator protection, hazard cues, wayfinding and movement”.) Studies show significant improvements in productivity in such spaces.

This got me thinking about the old punk warehouse I visited a few times. While not biophilial in design, it was constructed out of found material gleaned from the dumpsters and free piles of Oakland, California. Every piece that wasn’t an original floor or wall or joist was something someone else had thrown away, and brought and placed by the folks who lived there. The end result of this was that you could ask for the story behind anything in the place, and there would be one. You’ve heard the phrase ‘storybook house?’ Well, here was an actual one.

I’m interested in the stories that places can tell.

For Cinco De Mayo, I went with some friends to a Mexican restaurant/bar/patio party with a DJ type thing. Woot. Craziness. But the point is that I met the person that’s living in the room where I used to live in Ballard. I joked that there were probably some dead skin cells left around somewhere as evidence that I lived there, and she responded with a mixture of revulsion and good humor. Which is good. But the moral is that if you get out your handy scanning electron microscope and look in the crevices of the floorboards, you might find whole bookstores’-worth of stories.

And maybe you don’t even need a scanning electron microscope. Just a scanning electron perceptiveness.

Something I’d been meaning to mention: Bruce Sterling is out and about promoting his new book, and he’s going to be making two public appearances in the Seattle area, on May 20 and 21. I know I’m going, and any Seattle-area folks who want to share a ride or meet there should drop an email my way.

Great story:

The protestors were dragged away and our bus set off for ExCeL, the banter continued and soon the other public on the bus were joining in berating the [arms] dealers. As we pulled up to the stop outside ExCeL one of our crew announced ‘Lets have a big cheer for all the people about to get off and deal in death, I hope they have a great day’. The whole bus was cheering as the dealers were getting off, the funniest moment was when the two that had denied even going to ExCeL had to stand up and march with red faces past mothers and children mocking them.

Just want to wavey wavey to aerodeliria.

If you are part of the Cult Of Homer (and you are if you’re reading this), you should do my bidding when I Command You To Go Read Her ‘Blog And Encourage Her To Write More!

Terry Gross interviews Dr. Fred Volkmar about Asperger’s Syndrome. Listen in.

Update: I posted this before I had finished listening to it, and I have to say it was hard to make it all the way through. There’s just so much being described in that interview that seems to match up with my experience in superficial ways, but which comes from misguided observation and assumption rather than actual experience.

Example: I know I can seem aloof, and I know that when I was a little kid I probably seemed detached, but Terry Gross asks a question about AS people lacking empathy, and Volkmar’s answer tacitly agrees with this. And I have to say: I don’t lack empathy and never did; I simply lack a certain social facility to express my overwhelming empathy. In fact, the overwhelming quality of the experience is what short-circuits the social facility.

So it’s frustrating listening, for me. This is part of the reason I don’t keep up with AS stuff as much as I could (or probably should). It’s all so half-way, and doesn’t give me much of anything except greater pessimism about the medical profession.