this is how it starts...

George Romero, call your agent:

Witness Larry Vega was riding his bicycle Saturday afternoon off the MacArthur Causeway that connects downtown Miami with Miami Beach when he saw the savage attack, he told local news media.

"The guy was, like, tearing him to pieces with his mouth, so I told him, 'Get off!'" Vega told Miami television station WSVN. "The guy just kept eating the other guy away, like, ripping his skin."

Vega flagged down a Miami police officer, who he said repeatedly ordered the attacker to get off the victim. The attacker just picked his head up and growled at the officer, Vega said.

As the attack continued, Vega said the officer shot the attacker, who continued chewing the victim's face. The officer fired again, killing the attacker.

It would be good to know if it took a head shot to finish him off. 

This does beg the question, though: if zombies overran Florida, would anyone really notice?

qotd

But when the GOP affirmatively declares that there is no such thing as a secular decision, that there is no place and no decision and no policy which is not subject to religious and theological influence ... it seems to me that we have to examine how a candidate's faith affects their politics - by the GOP's own reasoning.--Sully

I look forward to be lectured about how Mr. Romney's religious associations aren't an appropriate arena for criticism and scrutiny.

99% of discussions on the internet

...as an interpretive dance:

in which i make a (nearly) completely groundless prediction

People will look at today's IPO as the beginning of the end of Facebook. Not because the share prices fluctuated wildly before settling a mere $0.23 above where they started, but because today will be the day when Facebook had to start answering to shareholders.

I think the astronomical valuation of the company is absurd. To be sure, they have built a global social network that I never could have imagined being the pervasive entity it has become, when I first saw an undergraduate's FB page at the University of Arizona, c. 2005. And they have adroitly parlayed that ubiquity and the data its users so readily provide into the promise of endless ad revenue.

But I think the business model has peaked.

FB has already gotten a lot more clunky. I know, every few months, people bitch and moan about this change or that, and threaten to leave, and never do. But absent a tangible product other than user data and ad space, Facebook is going to get either a lot more invasive, a lot more ad-driven--but more likely, both--when shareholders start demanding real returns.

I may or may not be right about what people will be willing to put up with . But I am very, very, confident that you will not recognize the place two years from now.

qotd

Alex Pareene:

If the “electable” face of libertarianism is a fratty anti-gay, anti-choice nitwit like Rand Paul, I will stick with socialism, thank you. And I wonder if the Paul family’s plan is to promote “liberty” or to promote the Paul family.

Word.

I am a gullible fucking idiot for wasting a Saturday (even a shitty rainy one like it was) on this guy. If (when) I get a call from Rand Paul's people, they are going to get an epic barrage of profanity before I tell them to take me off their list and never, ever call me again. 

paul spokesman: "no chance" of endorsing gary johnson

Disappointing. But not terribly surprising.

$41m is a lot of sensitivity training

Seattle Times:

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn warned Monday that it could cost up to $41 million a year to pay for the U.S. Justice Department's proposed remedies to curtail excessive force in the Police Department, issuing a dire-sounding memorandum outlining severe consequences for the city...

Among the costliest items would be the promotion of 54 officers to sergeant to satisfy Justice Department concerns over adequate supervision.

To be fair, DOJ disputes the Mayor's estimates, and no one in the city budget offices have really checked his math yet. McGinn has every political reason to lay as much blame for future financial pain over this on the feds, and the feds have no compelling reason to get the numbers right (because they don't have to pay for any of this.) The truth almost certainly lies somewhere in between.

I don't know what the pay scales in SPD are, but it is no surprise to me that personnel costs make up the bulk of any initiative the SPD is looking at. The parking lot by the East Precinct contains an awful lot of very nice, very new cars...much nicer, in fact, than 95% of the cars parked in the (fairly affluent) surrounding neighborhood. (As in Lexuses, Beamers, and a whole lot of $40-50K SUVs and tricked out trucks.) That's a lot of overtime.

I'm sure there are issues of inadequate supervision and training at work here. But the figure I keep coming back to in thinking about all of this is this one:

Only a fraction of Seattle officers use force more than once a year, with 789 officers using no force at all during 2010 and 44 officers out of more than a thousand using force more than five times that year.

Certainly, some cops are just working rougher beats. But that cannot be the only thing happening. Other analyses have indicated that a very small population of the Department account for a very large proportions of the excessive force complaints.

It seems to me a more effective (and less costly) solution is not more SPD sergeants, but rather more former SPD officers.

color me shocked

So it turns out the kind of guy who grows up to run a company that extracted value from other companies by downsizing them to profitability (or by simply selling them off in pieces), goes on freeway drives with the family dog strapped to the roof of his car, has a political career marked by nothing so much as a craven willingness to appease whomever it takes to achieve his immediate goals, hires a capable (if wrong-minded) foreign policy spokesperson only to quickly hang him out to dry the moment some people object to his sexual orientation...was kind of a dick in high school.

This ain't news, folks.

leading from behind

My first thought was, "we really could have used you on this earlier, Mr. President. Like, yesterday, for example."

But of course, Mr. Obama's game is politics. That isn't to say that his professed opinion (today) on marriage equality isn't genuine--I suspect he was merely updating us as to how he has felt about this for a long time--but surely it is no accident that his VP floated a trial balloon on the subject this past weekend. Nor is it an accident that his "evolution" has reached this point early exactly a year about 18 months after the intersection on this chart:

Really, he has nothing to lose coming out in favor of marriage equality. It is difficult to imagine anyone who would consider opposition to equality a litmus issue was up for grabs in the presidential election. This isn't exactly courageous, is what I'm saying.


File it under "doing the right thing, eventually."


But it is still the right thing.

this week in science

--Ice cream headaches may tell us something about the biology of migraine.

--Martian sunsets are often blue.

--Return of the zombie ant fungus.