You (yes, you) need to read Seymour Hersh's latest report on Abu Ghraib in this week's New Yorker. Rumsfeld and the top military leadership knew about the treatment of prisoners at the prison, and they lied about it to Congress. The White House repeatedly failed to provide clear guidance on prisoner treatment and interrogation to military and intelligence personnel, while putting intense pressure on them to extract and deliver information. Gee, I wonder what message that sent.

This administration's callous indifference to human dignity disgusts me.

Ahhh, the Trabi. When my then-girlfriend-now-wife and I were living in Germany, we used to see a lot of these cars, even though we were there nearly ten years after the last one rolled off the assembly line. They're legendary in Germany. I came across this nifty video of their quality control measures.

Link

Lately, with the TV season over, my wife and I have been perusing the networks' websites for episodes of shows we hadn't seen before. We do this instead of, say, reading, or talking, or other, more productive activities. It's bad enough that we watch good TV; watching shows we don't even care about is just an exercise in self-loathing.

But our latest find, October Road, has been entertaining. Not because the show is entertaining (which it is, mildly), but because it features some of the worst TV writing we've ever heard. Hearing some of the strange, awkward phrases that come out of the characters' mouths is an endless source of amusement.

Consider the scene where our hero, Nick, decides he's really in love with his old flame, Hannah. We're treated to a montage of Nick sprinting along a picturesque Massachusetts neighborhood street, interspersed with shots of "the other girl," Aubrey, packing her bags and crying. Cheesy enough, but nothing surprising. Nick arrives, out of breath, at Hannah's door.

Now, what does a guy in this situation say? He just sprinted to his true love's house. He's going to put himself out there. He's going to make his feelings known, right away, in no uncertain terms. He's out of breath, so he's going to be blunt, monosyllabic, and brief. Basically, it's going to be the Jerry Maguire "you had me at hello" speech, the one that makes your sweetie's knees weak. Right?

Wrong. Nick belts out this gem:

Everything about this place reminds me about my mother; everything. Her memory haunted it all, and when I left here, and put some distance between myself and the Ridge, it got easier. But just the thought of me coming back here, the pain of it, kept me away. It's indefensible, I know, but I was a kid, I was grieving, and I was dumb. I lost my way.

Huh? You sprinted halfway across town to talk about your mother? Then:

What I remember is you, barefoot, in your prom dress, pumping gas into my truck, laughing beneath the lipstick sky.

Yes, he actually utters the words "beneath a lipstick sky."

Now, I'm not a TV writer. But I know that there are things that look all right on paper, but that no one in their right minds would ever say out loud. I'd have to put "beneath a lipstick sky" in that category.

October Road is full of this purple stuff. The story is actually pretty engaging, with a good mix of characters. To their credit, the actors do a reasonable job of getting through their lines with straight faces. But I'm constantly feeling sorry for them because of the ridiculous things they're made to say. That gets old.

Here's another choice bit from the same episode:

Eddie: And then I was thinking about you, and the way you smile, and the way it starts in your eyes and spreads across your face like a rush of ink. I was thinking about how, when I see you, or I hear your voice on the phone, I think to myself, "Oh goody, now the fun begins."

Goody. Just for a little perspective here: Nick is a writer, so you could argue that he has an excuse. Eddie mows lawns.

Imagine my amusement when The Daily WTF happened to post this excellent screenshot today. It was meant to show how programming can go wrong, but as any software developer will tell you, sometimes bugs are actually features.

(An aside… my original comment on the Daily WTF post mentions Dean Koontz. When my wife and I lived in Germany, we used to go to the library and look for novels in English. They didn't have a lot, but they did have Dean Koontz. So we picked up a few, took them home, and read them. We still chuckle about that. I've long since forgotten the particulars, but Dean Koontz has this habit of overanalyzing his characters. Most novels would describe someone's behavior and allow you to reach your own conclusions as to their motives and mindset. Dean Koontz lays it all out - you get the action (say, X punches someone), the generalized mindset (X is an angry person), and the relevant back story (X's dad was a drunk and punched people), all in one or two convenient paragraphs. This gets the character development out of the way so we can move on with the plot. Handy, no? October Road reminds us a lot of Dean Koontz.)

Honestly, as weird as the dialogue is, we'll probably still watch October Road. At its core, it's driven by its characters - it owes a lot to Ed, Dawson's Creek, and similar shows - and they're likable, believable, and well-acted. They just need to stop with all the pseudo-Shakespearean speechifying.

Note: because I couldn't bear to watch the episode again, I ganked the quotes from TV.com. I'm not sure they're verbatim, but the important parts are.

President Bush has always kept himself in the dark. Now he gets dressed there too.

While reading a children's book, my daughter just pointed to the driver of a train and said, "He a good driver. He a man."

How can you not be amazed at this:

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin, contains thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects, including a lock of Byron's curly brown hair. It houses one of the forty-eight complete Gutenberg Bibles; a rare first edition of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," which Lewis Carroll and his illustrator, John Tenniel, thought poorly printed, and which they suppressed; one of Jack Kerouac's spiral-bound journals for "On the Road"; and Ezra Pound's copy of "The Waste Land," in which Eliot scribbled his famous dedication: "For E. P., miglior fabbro, from T. S. E." Putting a price on the collection would be impossible: What is the value of a first edition of "Comus," containing corrections in Milton's own hand? Or the manuscript for "The Green Dwarf," a story that Charlotte Bronte wrote in minuscule lettering, to discourage adult eyes, and then made into a book for her siblings? Or the corrected proofs of "Ulysses," on which James Joyce rewrote parts of the novel? The university insures the center's archival holdings, as a whole, for a billion dollars.

Read more in The New Yorker.

George W. Bush recently visited the only country on Earth that can still stand him - Albania. I believe he was checking out retirement communities or something. Anyhow, while he was working the crowd, someone stole his watch. Check out the video, and keep your eyes on his left wrist.

I believe the word you're looking for is "hapless."

This is an amazing video. It speaks for itself, so I'll shut up now.

direct link

I just finished reading Sam Brownback's opinion piece, What I Think About Evolution, in the New York Times. It was… strange.

Brownback, of course, was one of the three Republicans to indicate that they did not believe in evolution when asked during the Republican presidential debate. His Times piece seems to be an attempt to clarify, or perhaps to back away from, or possibly to defend, that position. I've read it several times and I can't tell.

He says:

The premise behind the question seems to be that if one does not unhesitatingly assert belief in evolution, then one must necessarily believe that God created the world and everything in it in six 24-hour days. But limiting this question to a stark choice between evolution and creationism does a disservice to the complexity of the interaction between science, faith and reason.

Fair enough. And:

Faith and science should go together, not be driven apart.

Great! Let's be friends. We can end the incredibly divisive, yet completely pointless, debate about whether we came from monkeys or not. But:

If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.

OK, wait a second. First of all, to be clear, the question in the debate wasn't "Do you believe in microevolution within a species," or "Do you believe that the world is guided by an intelligent being." It was "Do you believe in evolution," and evolution, in this case, would seem to mean the entire theory as currently accepted by the scientific community. So, since this theory includes more than just microevolution, Brownback rejects it. So far so good.

But what happened to the part about "limiting this question to a stark choice between evolution and creationism" being a bad thing? In Brownback's view, he must either limit his acceptance of evolution to changes within a species, or deny God. And so now we're back to science and religion being at odds again. So much for the happy reunion.

Isn't there any other way to jive evolution with the existence of God? Evolution is pretty nifty - it's the kind of system that any God I can think of would have come up with to make sure things kept working properly. If you believe that God created Earth, then why not evolution, too - just more evidence of divinity at work. Right?

Then:

There is no one single theory of evolution, as proponents of punctuated equilibrium and classical Darwinism continue to feud today. Many questions raised by evolutionary theory - like whether man has a unique place in the world or is merely the chance product of random mutations - go beyond empirical science and are better addressed in the realm of philosophy or theology.

The most passionate advocates of evolutionary theory offer a vision of man as a kind of historical accident. That being the case, many believers - myself included - reject arguments for evolution that dismiss the possibility of divine causality.

Okay, so what about the other, less passionate advocates? Might they, perhaps, have a theory that does not dismiss divine causality? Remember, "there is no one single theory of evolution." (Oh, and the "fueding?" It's called scientific discussion, and it happens when you're allowed to ask questions and express doubt.)

See, Brownback wants to say that he's bringing science and faith together. But he's not trying very hard. He chooses to take a very deterministic interpretation of evolutionary theory, and then he proceeds to show why most of it is incompatible with his beliefs. But there are many religious scientists who don't have trouble reconciling their beliefs with the entirety of evolutionary theory. Brownback is right that faith and science can coexist. But they can coexist even better than he thinks - marveling at the complexity of the universe and believing in a being that can create such a universe are two sides of the same coin.

What's clear is that Brownback was right to raise his hand in that debate - his version of evolution is not supported by scientific evidence. But the problem is not science's inability to incorporate faith. It is his faith's inability to incorporate what science has shown us to be true.