Month: November 2009

The grandmother of Tripp Johnston, Bristol Palin's infant and Sarah Palin's grandson, is headed to jail for three years plus three years of probation:

Johnston made a deal with prosecutors to plead to a single felony count in exchange for dropping five other felony drug dealing charges against her. The deal called for the 42-year-old Wasilla woman to be sentenced to three years of prison time plus three years of probation, which is what the judge gave her.

Johnston received less time than the normal five to eight years for a second-degree felony drug charge because the amount she was dealing was so small.

What impact this could have on the Palin-Johnston feud requires inside knowledge of those families that the Dish simply doesn't have. But I imagine it must be painful for Levi. I wonder if Palin will comment.

An amateur’s moment of glory in rugby: a $400,000 prize is awarded to any of a group of rugby fans to kick the ball and hit the crossbar. First up, Steve Tinner:

Clay Shirky tries to figure out how to save the bookstore as a social space.

Liz Cheney's terror-mongering advocacy group releases an ominous short documentary about how the citizens of Standish, Michigan, are supposedly dead set against the transfer of detainees to a nearby prison. Greg Sargent cuts through the deception:

But Standish’s City Manager tells us that local leaders and residents want the facility, and dismissed Cheney’s efforts as “fearmongering.” Cheney is “certainly not representing the views of our community,” the City Manager, Michael Moran, told our reporter, Amanda Erickson. While some local residents do appear to have expressed mixed feelings or opposition to the plan, Moran says that they’re an isolated minority that Ms. Cheney’s video elevates out of proportion in a way that’s “off base.” What’s more, the Standish city council recently passed a unanimous resolution expressing support for bringing Gitmo detainees, citing job losses in the wake of the closing of the facility.

Under-blogger Bodenner profiled the town for TNR last month and found the same findings. Noam Scheiber this week suggests that the scare tactics in Standish are working, and that similar tactics are showing up in Thompson, Illinois – the latest potential destination for detainees.

It's so bizarre that transferring prisoners to mainland jails in order to shut down the objective black eye of Gitmo is receiving so much resistance from the pro-torture right. We can argue about how to try these suspects, but their location should surely be a non-issue. 

What Cheney fears, I suspect, is that Gitmo will be shut down, that history will record it as the lowest point in US human rights ever, that the Cheney family will be tarred as the brand that destroyed America's moral standing, and that Dick Cheney will become one of the darkest figures in modern American history.

But if you can keep Gitmo open, if you prevent detainee transfer, if you can spin the next terror attack as caused by the refusal to torture … you have a chance to rescue the narrative again. And so America's cold civil war continues …

Suzanne Sena, former anchor for the Fox News Channel, joins the Onion News Network. Her starring in this particular segment is apt – and very funny:

Douthat’s read on 2010:

Right now, I think a lot of Democrats would take a 1982-style result — the halving of their House majority — and consider themselves lucky to escape. Whether they’ll feel the same way in a year’s time will depend on where the unemployment numbers go from here. But I doubt that anyone on the Democratic side of the aisle was encouraged to hear the Obama administration’s Jared Bernstein — the co-author of the over-optimistic chart that I tweaked in today’s column — telling CBS last week that job growth won’t return until the second half of next year. He may be erring on side of pessimism, but that’s an awfully long way off — especially if unemployment goes higher still in the meantime — and much too close to November for comfort.

Bratislava, Slovakia, 9.36 am

Charles Krauthammer gets in on the act. They never disappoint. My prior thoughts here.

The IBM achievement poses some complications:

In a nutshell, when a simulation of a complex phenomenon (brains, weather systems) reaches a certain level of fidelity, it becomes just as difficult to figure out what’s actually going on in the model—how it’s organized, or how it will respond to a set of inputs—as it is to answer the same questions about a live version of the phenomenon that the simulation is modeling.

So building a highly accurate simulation of a complex, nondeterministic system doesn’t mean that you’ll immediately understand how that system works—it just means that instead of having one thing you don’t understand (at whatever level of abstraction), you now have two things you don’t understand: the real system, and a simulation of the system that has all of the complexities of the original plus an additional layer of complexity associated with the models implementation in hardware and software.

In other supercomputer news, the record for fastest computer was recently broken:

Jaguar’s spot atop the list marks the first time a civilian Department of Energy computer has been the most powerful in the world. Instead of modeling nuclear explosions, which is Roadrunner’s primary job, Jaguar carries out scientific research on the globe’s climate and other computational-intensive problems.

Jim Fallows is deeply depressed by the moronic horse-race coverage of Obama's recent trip to Asia. He is not the only person staggered that the cable-news 24-hour spin-cycle is now the main prism through which to analyze complex long-term diplomacy. Money quote:

We're all familiar with one "crisis of the press," the business collapse. This is a different kind of crisis, though it makes the business crisis worse: the distortion of reality by compressing every complex issue into the narrative of the DC-based "horse race."