Elder Peeps

The Easter holiday is over. What is to be done with the leftover marshmallow peeps piled in boxes in the closeout sections of grocery and drug stores?

That's easy ... sacrifice them to Cthulhu!

Cthulhu Peep #2

Great Old One Peep

(via the Nameless Dread – who, alas, has been smitten by the wroth of Bill Keane's lawyers)

Shadow Boxing

I played $15-$30 hold'em last night at the Oaks.

Rich is a smart, aggressive, tricky player who is tough for me to outplay. On that basis, I don't like to play at the same table as him. At the same time, he tilts easily. If someone puts a bad beat on him, he starts steaming and muttering about how they shouldn't have been in the hand in the first place or something similar. He gets mad if people beat him by playing badly. In other words, he embodies a lot of my own darker tendencies at the table. This can make it fun for me to play with Rich, because once he starts to tilt, it becomes easier for me to step out of the role of tight-player-on-tilt and let Rich occupy it. And when I do this, I find it difficult to resist the temptation to make sport of him.

(This is surely one of the reasons why so many players treat Phil Hellmuth as such a goat. Phil has a famously bad temper – he's the John McEnroe of poker – and has a very high opinion of himself. When he busts out of a tournament and storms furiously out of the room, hundreds of players project their bad-temper and arrogance onto him, and confidently comfort themselves that they aren't like that at all, no, not one bit.)

Last night I was winning, but I had taken a few bozo beats, so I was tending towards tilt. Fortunately for me, players with worse hands had outdrawn Rich a few times, he was losing, and he was radiating his annoyance.

For one hand, Rich was in the small blind in seat three. A crafty gambler in seat five opened the betting by limping in. The action was folded around to me, on the button, in seat one (the player in seat two was away from the table). My hand was the the 5 and 6 of hearts. I trailed in, Rich threw in a chip to complete his bet, and the player in the big blind rapped his knuckles. The dealer burned and turned a flop of 7 6 3 rainbow, with one heart. I had second pair with a weak kicker and a gutshot straight draw. There were four small bets in the pot.

Rich was first to act; he bet out. The player in the big blind folded. Crafty Gambler called, and I chose to try to play for a free card: I raised. Rich reraised (no free card for me, unless Rich wanted one too). CG cold-called the two bets, and I called after him. Thirteen small bets – six and a half big bets – were now in the pot.

The turn card was the ace of hearts, and I had picked up eight more outs to make a winning hand. Rich checked, and CG bet. It was a sure thing that he had an ace in his hand. Calling here was a no-brainer: I was getting the right price to call for the heart draw alone, my straight outs were probably good, as would the two remaining sixes, and my second pair might possibly hold up if I hit it. Rich also called, clearly not happy with his situation. The pot now held nine and a half bets.

The river card was a black seven, for a board of 7-6-3-A-7. Rich checked, and CG checked also, presumably because he feared I held a seven in my hand. I rapped my hand on the table and announced, "Two pair."

CG turned over his hand: the ace and eight of clubs. I mucked my hand unseen. So did Rich, and he went into a slow burn.

"You cold-called two bets with an ace," he said. "Nice hand!"

I couldn't resist the temptation. "If you don't want people to draw out on you, you shouldn't price them in; you should price them out."

"What are you talking about?" Rich shot back. "Do you think I should check-raise? Either way he has to call two bets with an ace as his only out."

The next hand was underway, and Rich was in it. I kept my mouth shut and did the math in my head: With four bets in the pot, CG was getting 5:1 for his first call of one bet; and with my raise and Rich's reraise he was getting 11:2 (5.5:1) to call again. On the other hand, if Rich had checked and raised my bet, CG would only be getting 7:2 (3.5:1).

There are compelling reasons not to talk about strategy and tactics at the table, but Rich on tilt was too tempting a target. When we next had both folded before the flop, I said, "If he's getting the right price to call your first bet, then he's getting the right price to cold-call the next two."

"That's completely wrong! His only out was an ace! How can you say that?"

"I'm saying that if he was getting the right price for the first bet, he would still be getting the right price for calling the next two. It's an 'if' statement. A conditional. It's logic, which is part of math."

Of course, I knew very well that CG had not been getting the right price to call that first bet, even if his kicker would have been good if he had spiked it instead of the ace. I wasn't going to say that, however. I also knew that if Rich had held the hand I now thought he had -- an overpair to the board -- he would want to price both CG and I into the hand, not price us out. Rich seemed to be missing this point, and a lot of others as well.

"If you think that the pot odds of catching an ace are that good," Rich said, "you're a moron."

Now I was kvelling: Rich thinks I'm a moron who can't do math! And he'd lost track of the difference between pot odds (what the betting action offers a player) and probability odds (the likelihood of the event happening). You can't ask for more than that, and besides, he was acting just like me! What a wonderful opportunity to give my shadow a few kicks in the butt!

An opportunity came shortly later. Seat two vacated, and I moved into it, right next to Rich. Connie Hyun sat down in seat one, and waited for the button to pass. When it was my button, with Rich in the small blind, Connie posted three chips to get a hand.

The player in seat seven limped in. The players after him folded. Connie looked at her cards, thought for a moment, then checked. I had pocket threes in my hand. I limped in also. Rich completed his small blind, and the big blind checked. I got my dream flop of 2-3-K. Rich bet out, and everyone else dropped out. I called Rich's bet. The turn was a mid-range blank – call it a 9. Rich bet again, and I called again, figuring I could jam him on the river no matter what it was and make the most I could out of the hand. The actual river card was perfect for me: another king, giving me a full house of treys over kings The only hands that beat me were KK and 99 (unlikely given the preflop action) and K9. Rich bet one more time. I raised him. He reraised me. I put in the fourth bet. Rich called me, muttering something about "Kings full?". I showed my hand, and he mucked.

As I was stacking the chips from this hand, Connie asked me, "Would you have called me if I had raised?"

"Hell, no," I said. "You need to get seven and a half to one to get the right price to call with a small pair."

Rich couldn't resist his chance to show me he knew more math than I did. "It's eight and a half to one," he said.

I kvelled again. Rich was forgetting the difference between probabilities and odds. (There's one chance in 8.5 that a pocket pair will flop at least a three of a kind; and that works out to odd of 7.5:1 against.)

Rich and I are very much alike as players. We both think we're smarter than everyone else, and we're both wrong. We tilt in the same way, and we both have a tendency to write other players off as morons, even when they clearly aren't.

The things that provoke us in others are part of our own shadow.

Eldritch Mashup

The Nameless Dread is a mashup of wootsy-cutesy single-panel cartoon "The Family Circus" and the writing of H. P. Lovecraft. Think of it as lighthearted humor about family life in suburban Arkham, Massachusetts.

(via Susanochka)

Schiavo Alert!

Bush's approval ratings are tanking. The administration's top-priority plan to use "personal accounts" to gut Social Security is dead in the water. Meanwhile, in Congress, the odor of scandal surrounding Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay grows fouler with each passing day.

Isn't it time for the Department of Homeland Security to ratchet up the terror alert level?

Why are the Republicans using the Schiavo case as their smokescreen rather than the tried-and-true Terror Trick? The polls are showing that a majority of the American people oppose federal intervention in the Schiavo case and a supermajority of them believe that the congressional intervention spearheaded by DeLay is motivated by politics, not principle.

If the Republicans realize that the terror dog don't hunt no more, where do they get the idea that this one will?

The Lurkers Oppose Him in Email

Harry Shearer, filling in for Josh Marshal at Talking Points Memo, has evidently taken flak in the email responses to this post early Friday morning:

Sudden thought #2: reflecting on the other loss to journalism widely subjected to elegaic remembrance in recent days, I couldn't help thinking: Didn't Ann Coulter learn everything she knows about toxic political rhetoric from Hunter S. Thompson?

Because TPM doesn't allow comments, readers who are moved to respond have to send emails. (Unless, that is, they are so divinely inspired as to write blogs of their own.) And according to Shearer, they've been overwhelmingly in Hunter Thompson's defense:

[O]ne emailer said this thought had been thoroughly blogified within hours after Thompson's death. If so, I missed it. Most have been appalled that I would compare the sainted Hunter with the devilish Coulter.

I missed it, too. I did some googling around, and could only find this mention in No More Mister Nice Blog:

It occurs to me that you can go from Hunter Thompson to Ann Coulter in two moves (via P.J. O'Rourke).

Maybe that's not surprising. In the end, a lot of what Thompson wrote about was just pure individualism – thwarting enemies you regard as vermin, getting away with as much as possible, not giving a shit about hurt feelings. That's a fairly good capsule description of what the Right stands for now, albeit with a different enemies list.

That Thompson's writing might have been toxic is not actually a new thought. More than twenty years ago, Richard Bergeron wrote something to the effect that Hunter Thompson's writing actually made him feel sorry for Richard Nixon (whom Bergeron despised). And to be fair, Thompson was by no means the only source of political venom in the alternative press of the time. Without reaching very far, for example, I can pull off my bookshelf a copy of Harlan Ellison's The Other Glass Teat, television criticism originally published in the Los Angeles Free Press, containing an attack on Vice President Spiro Agnew as vicious as anything Thompson ever wrote about Nixon. (According to Ellison, e.g., Agnew "masturbates with copies of the Reader's Digest.")

The 60s were a different time. Back then it was left-wing extremists, not right-wingers, who blew up buildings; and it was Democrats, not Republicans, who started wars half-way around the world on pretexts that turned out to be thin tissues of lies.

Notes Toward an Essay on Torture: Double Signal

Here is some evidence in support of my belief that, in our society, the messages we receive that tell us torture is wrong carry with them a secondary, hidden message conveying approval of or desire to torture. In the jargon of process-oriented psychology, this is known as a "double signal."

On Make Them Accountable, David Podvin has posted an article, "Savagery" [link NSFW], that is a, well, savage denunciation of the Bush administration and its apologists over the torture issue. At the head of the article is a JPEG image, a drawing showing three nude hooded men standing on buckets, with electrodes attached to hands and feet. In the foreground a uniformed man is shouting and brandishing a stick with prongs or electrodes. In the middle ground, a woman in uniform (who seems to be a grotesque caricature of Lynndie England) holds the gathered wires from the electrodes in her hands. In the background, a uniformed man wearing dark glasses is guiding a handcuffed, blindfolded woman into the room. The torture victims standing on the buckets are facing the viewer. All three are well-muscled, and the genitals of two of the three are in full view. The only color in the otherwise black-and-white drawing is the red-white-and-blue American flag shoulder patch on the soldier in the foreground.

The drawing has none of the sad, sordid, passive misery we see in so many of the actual torture photos from Abu Ghurayb. Instead, it is active and dynamic. The shouting soldier in the foreground is ready to strike. The muscular torsos of his victims are erect and poised. The drawing looks pornographic, like an idealized, eroticized substitute for the real thing. The drawing style in fact resembles that of Tom of Finland [NSFW].

Podvin dehumanizes his foes, describing Ann Coulter as "eighty pounds of toxic sewage wrapped in six feet of reptile skin," and uses rhetoric of civil war (Republicans are "Confederates ... striving to make Andersonville a global phenomenon"). What would David Neiwert make of him, I wonder?

Here we have a diatribe against torture that is couched in violent, dehumanizing llanguage and illustrated with BDSM porn. That's a double signal, if ever I saw one.

(via The Sideshow)

Judge Rules California Same-Sex Marriage Ban Unconstitutional

San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer has found that California's law defining marriage to between one woman and one man to be unconstitutional.

The ruling will surely be appealed, with the state Supreme Court making the final decision.

Quoth SF Gate:

In his 27-page decision, Kramer – an appointee of former Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican – said the state's ban on same-sex marriage violates "the basic human right to marry the person of one's choice," and has no rational justification.

Rejecting California Attorney General Bill Lockyer's argument that California is entitled to maintain the traditional definition of marriage, Kramer said the same explanation was offered for the state's ban on interracial marriage, which was struck down by the state Supreme Court in 1948.

The judge also rejected arguments by opponents of same-sex marriage that the current law promotes procreation and child-rearing by a husband and wife. "One does not have to be married in order to procreate, nor does one have to procreate in order to marry," Kramer said.

Same-sex marriage is legal in Massachusetts. Similar court decisions are being reviewed in the states of New York and Washington.

(via Patti Beadles)

Notes Toward an Essay on Torture: A Culture of Abuse

Jeanne at Body and Soul warns us:

[Conservative Catholic commentator Mark] Shea is right in identifying why the avoidance of torture is a moral absolute:

But the pains and penalties of sin (by which we mean “risking the everlasting fires of Hell and eternal damnation”) aren’t the only reasons no Catholic should support the use of torture. It is also worth noting that right here in this world, a culture’s adoption of torture – even the “non-lethal” variety, and even in times of emergency – is a formula for social catastrophe.

For it – like legal abortion – is a slippery slope leading to, among other things, the creation of a special class of people who truly enjoy this sort of work and are good at it. Reward such work and create a special department in the government for it, and people like that tend to find ways to continue plying their special skills, even when they’re no longer wanted by the state that once supported them. Just ask the victims of the quasi-mafia, quasi-KGB operatives who are doing very well in the post-Soviet era of gangsterism in Russia.

A culture of abuse doesn't stay in the box.

In fact, I'd take that argument much farther. The problem isn't just that certain people, already prone to that sin, will be given license to practice it and won't know when to stop. Evil isn't something that exists over there in the other guy, but not in me. Whatever penchant for cruelty exists in each of us will come to the surface. And at some point you end up with a country in which people can look at pictures of abuse, read about men beaten while hanging from the ceiling, or children raped and set upon by guard dogs, and move on, perhaps even find some sick enjoyment in the spirit of vengeance. They won't react to the evil done by their leaders. They won't care. Or worse, they will approve.

Maybe we're already there, in which case this is less a matter of politics than of saving souls. I can't think of any effective political response to this situation. There's no way to "frame" abuse so that people who don't care will care. The only way to talk about it is – with or without religious language – as the most important moral issue we face.

The culture of abuse has already existed in the USA for quite some time. The torture at Bagram, Guatanamo, and Abu Ghurayb did not emerge out of nothingness prompted only by the rage of 9/11. It was already there: in the institutional memories of the CIA and the US armed forces; and in the whole of American culture. Some of us kept others of us as slaves, knowing the lash and the brand. Later, some of us used mob violence and murder as a tool for social control. Many of us were beaten (or worse) by our parents as children, and some of us have in turn done the same to our own children.

The problem of abuse may or may not be "the most important moral issue we face," but we face it (or turn our faces away from it) every day, at home, in our city streets, in public places, at our jobs, in the books we read, on the video programs we watch. Jeanne is correct that the evil is in all of us, in herself and myself as well as Lynndie England and Charles Graner, and in Alberto Gonzalez and John Yoo; and in you.

The torturer is in me. He cannot be expunged – trying to do so will only drive him deeper into the shadows. The moral, emotional, psychological task facing me (and Jeanne, and England, Graner, Gonzalez, Yoo, and you) is to bring him out of the shadow and into the light. Only when we acknowledge the torturer can we stop the torture.

Notes Toward an Essay on Torture: The Mother Lode

A commenter to a post last month on TalkLeft points us to the Winter 2005 issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy, where we can find the article "Cruel Science: CIA Torture & U.S. Foreign Policy" by Alfred W. McCoy. The 54-page article can be found as a .PDF on the journal's Web site.

Some people, in expressing their outrage about the Abu Ghurayb photographs, have insisted that "Americans don't torture." McCoy reminds us that this has not been true, not since the end of the Second World War.

McCoy's paper both provides exhaustive detail about interrogations at Abu Ghurayb and the unfolding of the scandal and places the scandal in the context of the CIA's half-century record of researching and implementing interrogation methods and teaching these methods to intelligence and police agencies of US partners and allies. I'm relieved to find all this information pulled together in one place: that's a big chunk of research I don't have to try do do myself.

A Spectre Is Haunting Gaming

Greg Costikyan seems to have lit a fire at the Game Developer Conference that just wound down at Moscone Center in San Francisco, when he spoke on a panel called "Burning Down the House – Game Developers Rant." A blogger named Alice has been taking notes, and posts the details here:

Greg Costikyan: I don't know about you but I could have been a lawyer, or a carpenter. or a sous-chef. How many of you are here because you’re after a paycheck? [One bloke raises his hand, audience laughs and crows]. Ahuh. And how many of you are here because you love games? [all hands go up]. Right. So we’re being told that everything’s going to get bigger. Paychecks. Budgets. Consoles. But is it going to get better? I’ve been researching old board games and I’ve spotted a pattern. A new genre: it’s called One Hit Game And Its Imitators. One fishing game appears in mid-19C and dozens follow. Games grow through innovations. Creations of new game styles that spawn imitators and whole new markets. The story of the past few decades is not about graphics and processing power, but startling innovation and industry. That’s why we love games. BUT IT’S OVER NOW!

As recently as 1992: games cost 200K. Next generation games will cost 20m. Publishers are becoming increasingly risk averse. Today you cannot get an innovative title published unless your last name is Wright or Miyamoto. Who was at the Microsoft keynote? I don’t know about you but it made my flesh crawl. [laughter] The HD era? Bigger, louder? Big bucks to be made! Well not by you and me of course. Those budgets and teams ensure the death of innovation. Was your allegiance bought at the price of a television? Then there was the Nintendo keynote. This was the company who established the business model that has crucified the industry today.. Iwata-san has the heart of a gamer, and my question is what poor bastard’s chest did he carve it from? [audience falls about]

How often DO they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo?? My friends, we are FUCKED [laughter]. We are well and truly fucked. The bar in terms of graphics and glitz has been raised and raised until we can’t afford to do anything at all. 80 hour weeks until our jobs are all outsourced to Asia. but it’s ok because the HD era is here right? I say, enough. The time has come for revolution! It may seem to you that what I describe is inevitable forces of history, but no, we have free will! EA could have chosen to focus on innovation, but they did not. Nintendo could make development kits cheaply available to small firms, but they prefer to rely on the creativity on one aging designer. You have choices too: work in a massive sweatshop publisher-run studio with thousands of others making the next racing game with the same gameplay as Pole Position. Or you can riot in the streets of redwood city! Choose another business model, development path, and you can choose to remember why you love games and make sure in a generation’s time there are still games to love. You can start today.
[standing ovation]

Read the whole thing, because Warren Spector (who has haunted gaming for years), Jason Della Rocca, Brenda Laurel, and Chris Hecker also have important things to say.

(via boingboing)

Update: Greg has posted the text of his talk on his blog.

Notes Toward an Essay on Torture: My Starting Point

The proximate cause of my desire to write about Americans and torture was this passage from a post on Hullabaloo that Patrick Nielsen Hayden quoted approvingly last January:

Every person alive in America today grew up with the belief that torture is wrong. Popular culture, religion, folklore and every other form of cultural instruction for decades in this country has taught that it is wrong, from sermons and lectures to films about slavery to photographs of Auschwitz to crime shows about serial killers. It is embedded in our consciousness. We teach our children that it is wrong to torture animals and other kids. We don't say that there are exceptions for when the animals or kids are really, really bad. We have laws on the books that outright outlaw it. The words "cruel and unusual" are written into our constitution.

Digby, in expressing his genuine and legitimate anger, is only telling half the story. The words "cruel and unusual" were written into the Constitution by James Madison, who owned a plantation that ran on slave labor. Madison may or may not have whipped his slaves with his own hand, but without a doubt he employed overseers who did.

Yes, Americans are taught that torture is wrong. And we are also taught that it is right. The belief that torture is wrong may be embedded in our consciousness; but the belief in the efficacy and rightness of torture is embedded in our unconsciousness. Those sermons, lectures, films, photographs, and TV crime shows depict the horrors of torture in loving detail. We are told over and over again not only that torture is bad, but that this detail of torture is bad, and so is this one, and this one. At once, while society teaches us that torture is bad, it teaches us how to torture.

I Want My ... I Want My ... I Want My W P T

Rodney Chen on the ba-poker mailing list points us to a story in the San Jose Mercury News [registration required] about Bay 101's "Shooting Stars" World Poker Tour event going on now:

Jesus had already lost his chips, but Fossilman was there. So were the Poker Brat and the Unabomber.

Some of the biggest nicknames to ever draw a full house were doing just that on Tuesday at San Jose's Bay 101 Casino. The World Poker Tour is in town this week. That means big players, big prize money – and big groups of onlookers with jaws dropped down to here.

The tide has turned. A year and a half ago, journalism about the television-fueled growth of poker emphasized the dark side of gambling. Now it's about poker stars, celebrities, and glamour.

"[E]ver since they put poker on TV, these guys are like rock stars'' [said Bay 101 dealer Tony Fletcher.]

And having rock stars means one thing: Groupies. Or at least a crush of hangers-on, card-shark wannabes, and assorted gawkers who have helped turn poker into the smokingest professional game in America at the moment.

Old-fashioned Hollywood star-power has also fueled the frenzy. And this week's million-dollar event has brought out actors James Woods, Mimi Rogers and Jennifer Tilly. If that wasn't enough, Tobey ``Spider-man'' Maguire slipped in, hooked up to an iPod and skulking behind dark shades as he waded into hands of no-limit hold 'em. ...

[Pleasanton software salesman Bill Balew] said he heard Jennifer Tilly is Phil ``Unabomber'' Laak's girlfriend.

``That's proof that poker has gone big-time,'' Ballew said. ``Beautiful women used to date professional football or baseball players. Now they want to date poker players.''

Groupies? Jennifer Tilly?? Man, that ain't working; that's the way to do it!

Hans Bethe

Nobel -Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe died last Saturday in Ithaca, New York. He was 98 years old.

I remember Bethe from his time as a visiting scholar at Caltech when I was a physics graduate in the mid-1980s. My impression of him was that of a kind-hearted and gentle man. When he smiled, which was often, he looked like the demented subject of a Brughels painting or Doré engraving; but both his sharp mind and warm heart showed through.

Bethe received his doctorate in 1928, in the heyday of the quantum revolution, when giants walked the laboratories and classrooms of Europe. He was one of the pioneers of nuclear physics, and his work in the '30s on the C-N-O cycle of nuclear reactions that fuels the sun eventually won him his Nobel Prize in 1967. When the Nazis took power in Germany he fled to the United States. He was one of J. Robert Oppenheimer's early recruits to the Manhattan Project, and he headed the Theory Division at Los Alamos.

After the war and the Manhattan Project, Bethe returned to his post at Cornell University, attracting such lights of the next generation as Richard Feynman and Freeman Dyson to work with him. In the nuclear politics of the time, he positioned himself as the Anti-Teller, lobbying against the development of the H-bomb (although he in fact did some work for that project), and for nuclear disarmament and for banning of nuclear testing.

And in the 1980s, when Edward Teller was spinning fantasies that the gullible Ronald Reagan turned into policy in the form of the Strategic Defense Initiative, Bethe spoke out against Star Wars. It was at this time that Bethe revealed to the public that behind Teller's betrayal of Oppenheimer was Teller's desperate search for a fall-guy when the H-bomb project at that point was fruitless and the government wanted to know why.

I remember a talk at Caltech by Teller's protege Lowell Wood – the most evil human being it has yet been my misfortune to encounter in the flesh – in which Wood was pitching the Livermore Lab's nuclear-explosion-pumped X-ray laser program to an uncharacteristically stone-faced Hans Bethe. I walked out of that lecture hall feeling like Peter Venkman after his first encounter with a ghost. Seing the grim countenance on the face of the usually smiling and happy Bethe made me imagine that he felt something similar. (The X-ray laser never worked, and, true to form, Teller and Wood wrecked another career of another fall-guy.) According to the Times obituary for Bethe, "In his memoirs in 2001, Dr. Teller accused Dr. Bethe of letting his political views color his technical judgment." Perhaps a wee bit of projection was going on here.

Hans Bethe has always been in my mind a shining example of a person who brought his conscience and moral judgment to his work as a scientist, and as a person who named the truth in the face of evil. His long and fruitful life is now over, and he lives on in the hearts of those whom he has inspired.

Notes Toward an Essay on Torture: Frat-House Frolics

Remember when Rush Limbaugh made excuses for the Abu Ghurayb photographs by comparing them to fraternity hazings?

Last Thursday, police in Chico, California, arrested five members of the Chi Tau fraternity at the California State University campus in that town for the death of Matthew Carrington a candidate for membership in the fraternity. The description of the circumstances of Carrington's death seems eerily reminiscent of the reports coming out of Guatanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Liberal bloggers and pundits ripped Limbaugh several new ones for his dismissal of the Abu Ghurayb atrocity as a frat-house prank. Dismissing Abu Ghurayb is the act of a moral cripple. Yet the people whose reaction to the horrors perpetrated by their government is a shocked, outraged "How can they do this – Americans don't torture!" would do well to open their eyes to quite how beastly ordinary Americans can be.

For the wrong reasons, Rush Limbaugh was right. There is a link between the insane cruelties perpetrated by Americans against military detainees and the insane cruelties perpetrated on Frat Row – and the insane cruelties perpetrated behind the closed doors of suburban homes.

Confidential to J.K.

Once you've sold yourself to Lowell Wood, it's true, to subsequently sell yourself to Donald Rumsfeld is to take a small step in the direction of honor, integrity, and truthfulness. One nevertheless hopes that you might someday be capable of taking more than baby steps.

Even apart from questions of basic human decency, though, there are practical reasons why it might not be wise to accept a job in the Bush administration.

(Aside to Avedon: Did you really let this man stay in your house? I hope you burned the bedding afterwards.)

Life in These United States

An angry teacher in New Jersey assaulted a student who would not stand for the national anthem. Another student used a phonecam to record a video of the assault and of the teacher's shouted verbal abuse and later posted it to the Internet.

Reaction of local authorities has been swift: Students involved with recording and publicizing the teacher's outburst of rage have been charged with criminal mischief.

The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy society, which must therefore adjust these "incompetent and lazy" folk to its own patterns by changing their mentality. These marginals need to be "integrated," "incorporated" into the healthy society that they have "forsaken."

The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not "marginals," are not people living "outside" society. They have always been "inside" – inside the structure which made them "beings for others." The solution is not to "integrate" them into the structure of oppression, but to transform the structure so that they can become "beings for themselves." Such transformation, of course, would undermine the oppressors' purposes; hence their utilization of the banking concept of education to avoid the threat of student conscientização [critical consciousness].

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 74

(via boingboing)

Head-Up NLHE Tournament Strategy

Paul Phillips is playing in the National Heads-Up Poker Championship this Friday. In his LiveJournal he asks the question When if ever should you fold your button preflop in a no-limit heads-up match?. He gets the range of answers one would expect: some good, some not so good.

The best answer he gets, by far, is the link Jerrod Ankenman posts to his own LJ:

Case 1: Small stacks (<10 BB)

Just play jam or fold. It's really, really hard to do better than this, and really easy to do worse.

Case 2: Larger stacks (10-25 BB)

Now the game moves from 1 bullet to approximately 2.
I think at this stack size you should probably be raising to either the minimum or 2.5, depending on your particular preference: if you like raising to 2.5, then you should probably play jam or fold up to about 12 or 13, lest you wander into the realm of "I've raised and I can't give up!"

There's more. Read the whole thing. In fact, click on the link and save the info to a text file, because the info is so hot that if I were Jerrod I would friends-lock it so that it didn't spread too far. It's that good.