After a routine play is whistled dead, the clock will continue to run, even as the players are peeling themselves off the turf and limping back to their huddles. The team on offense has a maximum of 40 seconds after one play ends to snap the ball again. A regulation NFL game consists of four quarters of 15 minutes each, but because the typical play only lasts about four seconds, the ratio of inaction to action is approximately 10 to 1.

Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey were performing on stage during the halftime show for about 12 minutes, probably exceeding the time of the players' on-field efforts. The veteran rockers said as much during a press conference last week:

"We're going to be playing for about 12 minutes at halftime," he said. "But I've heard if you take out the commercials, there's about 11 minutes of playing."

"We're going to be playing longer than the players," Townshend added.

Their ages (65 and 64 respectively) mark this as a past-their-prime performance, but at least they played better than Peyton Manning.

Consider, for example, what the latest budget proposal from the Obama administration says about interest payments on federal debt; according to the projections, a decade from now they'll have risen to 3.5 percent of G.D.P. How scary is that? It's about the same as interest costs under the first President Bush.

Why, then, all the hysteria? The answer is politics.

The main difference between last summer, when we were mostly (and appropriately) taking deficits in stride, and the current sense of panic is that deficit fear-mongering has become a key part of Republican political strategy, doing double duty: it damages President Obama's image even as it cripples his policy agenda. And if the hypocrisy is breathtaking -- politicians who voted for budget-busting tax cuts posing as apostles of fiscal rectitude, politicians demonizing attempts to rein in Medicare costs one day (death panels!), then denouncing excessive government spending the next -- well, what else is new?

As noted in this NYT editorial, the "breathtaking" deficit numbers are surpassed by "the Republicans' cynical refusal to acknowledge that the country would never have gotten into so deep a hole if President George W. Bush and the Republican-led Congress had not spent years slashing taxes -- mainly on the wealthy -- and spending with far too little restraint:"

The Republican amnesia and posturing are playing well on the hustings, where Americans are deeply anxious about the economy and fearful of losing their jobs and homes. Far too many Democratic lawmakers are losing their nerve.

Americans should be anxious, for reasons including the huge deficit. But the cold economic truth is this: At a time of high unemployment and fragile growth, the last thing the government should do is to slash spending. That will only drive the economy into deeper trouble.

If the GOP succeeds in causing a double-dip recession with their deficit fear-mongering, no doubt they'll want to continue slashing the safety net for the lower and middle classes while cutting taxes for the wealthy. Those are the only economic tools they know how to use, so why learn anything else?

Energy
Budget Tax cuts
Lift American Spirits

Here's a photo of Palin's palm:

As Steve Benen wrote at Washington Monthly:

First, if Palin is going mock the president for using a teleprompter while giving speeches, it's probably not a good idea to act like an unprepared 14-year-old, scribbling answers to easy questions on her hand. It doesn't exactly scream "presidential material."

Second, that she wrote notes at all suggests Palin was aware of the questions in advance. She obviously couldn't prepare answers unless she knew what she'd be asked. If so, think about what that tells us about her readiness -- Sarah Palin was afraid questions from Tea Party activists might be too difficult.

It's pretty pathetic when a politician can't even remember her own bumpersticker slogans.

Most importantly, I've also been D). keeping my data well away from various physical hazards.

I hope to be back to my usual posting schedule shortly.

You have been warned.

Fuck.

performing during the White House's "Evening of Poetry, Music & the Spoken Word,"

and a gig, at Obama's request, in honor of his Nobel Peace Prize:

Her website has a list of upcoming tour dates--if you get a chance to see her perform live, I suggest that you take it--talent like hers is rare!

In a blog post about the poll, PPP's Tom Jensen observed that "These numbers suggest quite a shift in what Americans want from their news:"

A generation ago Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in the country because of his neutrality. Now people trust Fox the most precisely because of its lack of neutrality. It says a lot about where journalism is headed.

A significant proportion of Americans believing that Faux News is "Real news: Fair and balanced" is as damning an indictment as I can imagine about both confirmation bias and credulity.

Apollo 1 (27 January 1967)
Challenger (28 January 1986)
Columbia (1 February 2003)

See NASA's press release or the Kennedy Space Center's media gallery for more. Interestingly, Gus Grissom wrote the following shortly before he died in the Apollo 1 launchpad fire:

"There will be risks, as there are in any experimental program, and sooner or later, we're going to run head-on into the law of averages and lose somebody. I hope this never happens, and... perhaps it never will, but if it does, I hope the American people won't think it's too high a price to pay for our space program."

The experience of watching the Challenger disaster live on TV made this scene from the 1982 art-house film classic Koyaanisqatsi (website, Wikipedia) all but unbearable:

As mentioned by Brian McLaughlin at Wired's GeekDad, the Latin phrase ad astra per aspera ("through difficulty to the stars") is particularly poignant when juxtaposed with our astronauts' sacrifices.

With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests -- including foreign corporations -- to spend without limit in our elections. I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people. And I'd urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems.

and the Clintonian failure that is DADT,

My administration has a civil rights division that is once again prosecuting civil rights violations and employment discrimination. We finally strengthened our laws to protect against crimes driven by hate. This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are. It's the right thing to do.

but most media attention seems to be focused on his simple statements of fact about the abyss into which we were staring at this time last year.

One year ago, I took office amid two wars, an economy rocked by a severe recession, a financial system on the verge of collapse and a government deeply in debt. Experts from across the political spectrum warned that if we did not act, we might face a second depression. So we acted -- immediately and aggressively. And one year later, the worst of the storm has passed. But the devastation remains. [...]

We can't afford another so-called economic ''expansion'' like the one from the last decade -- what some call the ''lost decade'' -- where jobs grew more slowly than during any prior expansion, where the income of the average American household declined while the cost of health care and tuition reached record highs, where prosperity was built on a housing bubble and financial speculation.

Obama, against all expectations, managed to make Republicans sit on their hands when he discussed tax cuts--something that they haven't done for quite some time:

...we extended or increased unemployment benefits for more than 18 million Americans, made health insurance 65 percent cheaper for families who get their coverage through COBRA and passed 25 different tax cuts.

Now, let me repeat: We cut taxes. We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families. We cut taxes for small businesses. We cut taxes for first-time homebuyers. We cut taxes for parents trying to care for their children. We cut taxes for 8 million Americans paying for college.

The facts were just as one-sided when he talked about the spending side of the equation, saying "let me start the discussion of government spending by setting the record straight:"

At the beginning of the last decade, the year 2000, America had a budget surplus of over $200 billion. By the time I took office, we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts and an expensive prescription drug program. On top of that, the effects of the recession put a $3 trillion hole in our budget. All this was before I walked in the door. [...]

Now, even after paying for what we spent on my watch, we'll still face the massive deficit we had when I took office. [...] From some on the right, I expect we'll hear a different argument -- that if we just make fewer investments in our people, extend tax cuts including those for the wealthier Americans, eliminate more regulations, maintain the status quo on health care, our deficits will go away. The problem is that's what we did for eight years. That's what helped us into this crisis. It's what helped lead to these deficits. We can't do it again.

Former Bush spinmeister Karl Rove complained that "I think it makes you look weak" for a president to discuss the mess left by his predecessor, but ThinkProgress wondered what Rove thought of this line:

To understand the State of the Union, we must look not only at where we are and where we're going but where we've been. The situation at this time last year was truly ominous. [...] First, we must understand what's happening at the moment to the economy. Our current problems are not the product of the recovery program that's only just now getting under way, as some would have you believe; they are the inheritance of decades of tax and tax, and spend and spend.

Oops! That wasn't Obama complaining about Dubya, it was Saint Ronnie Reagan whining about Carter in 1981. It should be pointed out that Democrats wouldn't have to collect taxes if Republicans weren't still stuck in the rut of Reagan's borrow-and-waste tactics from the Eighties. Can anyone seriously believe--despite the past three decades of evidence--that Dems are spendthrifts and Repubs are fiscally responsible?

Speaking of facts, FactCheck's analysis has plenty of support for its summarization that "while we found Obama strained the facts or cited uncertain statistics at times, we uncovered nothing we could show to be false." (There were no unseemly outbursts from the floor, so at least the GOP can claim to be doing something better than last year.)

When he spoke against poverty it was from the perspective of someone who had to work in the shipyards during the Great Depression. When he spoke against war, it was from the perspective of someone who flew as a bombardier during World War II, and was forever changed by the experience. When he spoke against racism it was from the perspective of someone who taught at Spelman College during the civil rights movement and was arrested sitting in with his students.

Amy Goodman from Democracy Now! had a nice discussion with authors Anthony Arnove, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and Alice Walker about Zinn and his influence. Amid the reminiscences, Arnove commented that "Howard never rested. He had such an energy:"

And over the last few years, he continued to write, continued to speak, and he brought to life this history that he spoke about in that segment that you just aired. He wanted to bring a new generation of people into contact with the voices of dissent, the voices of protest, that they don't get in their school textbooks, that we don't get in our establishment media, and to remind them of the power of their own voice, remind them of the power of dissent, the power of protest.

Zinn's last published work may be a brief essay on Obama from The Nation, where he says of Obama, "I wasn't terribly disappointed because I didn't expect that much:"

I expected him to be a traditional Democratic president. On foreign policy, that's hardly any different from a Republican--as nationalist, expansionist, imperial and warlike. So in that sense, there's no expectation and no disappointment. On domestic policy, traditionally Democratic presidents are more reformist, closer to the labor movement, more willing to pass legislation on behalf of ordinary people--and that's been true of Obama. But Democratic reforms have also been limited, cautious. Obama's no exception.

We who insist on looking critically at the Columbus story, and indeed at everything in our traditional histories, are often accused of insisting on Political Correctness, to the detriment of free speech. I find this odd. It is the guardians of the old stories, the orthodox histories, who refuse to widen the spectrum of ideas, to take in new books, new approaches, new information, new views of history. They who claim to believe in "free markets" do not believe in a free marketplace of ideas, any more than they believe in a free marketplace of goods and services. In both material goods and in ideas, they want the market dominated by those who have always held power and wealth. They worry that if new ideas enter the marketplace, people may begin to rethink the social arrangements that have given us so much suffering, so much violence, so much war these last five hundred years of "civilization." (The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy, p. 497)

...knowledge has a social origin and social use. It comes out of a divided, embattled world, and is poured into such a world. It is not neutral either in origin or effect. It reflects the biases of a diverse social order, but with one important qualification: that those with the most power and wealth in society will dominate the field of knowledge, so that it serves their interests. The scholar may swear to his neutrality on the job, but his work will tend...to maintain the existing social order by perpetrating its values, by legitimatising its priorities, by justifying its wars, perpetuating its class order. (Howard Zinn on History, p. 167)

[This book is] a biased account, one that leans in a certain direction. I am not troubled by that, because the mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction - so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people's movements - that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission. (A People's History of the United States, p. 645)

The fact is, things are already unbalanced. The pretense is that things are balanced and you want to keep them that way. But of course they're already so far out of balance, we would have to put an enormous amount of left-wing weight onto the scales in order even to make the scales move slightly toward balance. (The Future of History, p. 39)

Think differently.

If you're not a Nature subscriber, check out Harvard's website "Running Barefoot or in Minimal Footwear." It has plenty of information: clips of shod-vs-unshod footstrikes, discussions of running biomechanics, and an explanation of how modern running shoes have altered our natural gait. It's a great resource that has just become my go-to link for anyone who wonders a) why I run barefoot, or b) what's up with those funny-looking shoes.

Dr Lieberman was also featured in the PBS series The Human Spark; here is a video of him discussing our species' two-million-year experience with endurance running:

update (8:24pm):
Here is another video of Dr Lieberman, discussing much of what is in his paper:

Avatar's production design seems to have been strongly influenced by the trippy album cover art Roger Dean used to supply for Yes and other prog-rock bands in the 1970s...

The film's multiple visual borrowings from the imagination of Roger Dean (website, Wikipedia) do indeed deserve some scrutiny. There's a great selection of Roger Dean images at io9, and Signal to Noise reproduced some of Dean's images side-by-side with stills from Avatar's moon Pandora that drive home the similarity. Here are a few samples of Dean's art:

Roger Dean did far more than design landscapes for progressive rock albums. His eclectic designs were featured in three books to date: Views (1975) and Magnetic Storm (1984) were reissued in hardcover last year, along with a new volume entitled Dragon's Dream. Check them out for a look at his incredibly fertile imagination. Entertainment Weekly asked Avatar's writer/director James Cameron about whether he was inspired by Dean's work:

Where did James Cameron get the idea for the floating mountains? Was that from a Yes album cover?

''It might have been,'' the director says with a laugh. ''Back in my pot-smoking days.''

I haven't seen the film yet, but have contented myself with repeated viewings of the trailer and several YouTube clips. The ten-minute "Making of..." is my favorite (sorry, embedding has been disabled) with the Sigourney-Weaver-narrated piece "Pandora Discovered" a close second:

To go full circle from art back to nature, here's a shot of China's Huang Mountains:

I look forward to spending a few hours on James Cameron's Pandora, but the Huang Mountains could easily absorb much more of my time.

A bitterly divided Supreme Court vastly increased the power of big business and unions to influence government decisions Thursday by freeing them to spend their millions directly to sway elections for president and Congress.

The ruling reversed a century-long trend to limit the political muscle of corporations, organized labor and their massive war chests [...] the court set the stage for a wave of likely repercussions -- from new pressures on lawmakers to heed special interest demands to increasingly boisterous campaigns featuring highly charged ads that drown out candidate voices.

"US Government for Sale" at ThinkProgress is a great summary of the case, and includes this comment from Justice Stevens' dissent: "While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics." Obama's brief statement notes that "the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics:"

It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.

John Nichols writes in "Unions Can't Compete with Corporate Campaign Cash" from The Nation that the pretended equivalence between corporations and unions is farcical: "Some union leaders think that the Supreme Court ruling [...] will give them the same flexibility and freedom to influence the process as it does corporations:"

They imagine that, with spending limits removed, organized labor will be able to buy enough television time to reward their political friends and punish their political enemies.

It's a sweet fantasy. But the reality is that corporations will be buying so much more television time when it matters -- in the run-up to key elections -- that the voices of working Americans will drowned out with the same regularity that they are on Capitol Hill...

Besides that important observation, Nichols has also provided my first-ever Analogy of the Day:

The bottom line is that a union leader who supports the Citizens United ruling is like a steer who talks up a steak restaurant because they're both in the same business.

As noted at American Prospect, however, "The Real Problem with Citizens United" is that "[i]n striking down the federal ban, the Supreme Court overruled two of its decisions: Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, decided in 1990, and McConnell v. FEC, decided less than 7 years ago." "Corporations Take the Court" pinpoints the same problem, that "a Supreme Court that is increasingly solicitous to the interests of big business [...] went well beyond the facts of the case to overrule two important precedents:"

...the five most conservative members of the Roberts Court have now held that corporations have virtually the same rights as citizens when it comes to spending money on electioneering, prohibiting long-standing prohibitions on corporate campaign spending by state and federal legislatures. It also overruled one landmark precedent and parts of another to reach its decision.

Ron Chusid has a great question at Liberal Values:

Can we expect to see conservatives protest this decision by an activist court which went against years of legal precedent?

Conservative activism--the reactionary kind--is OK with them; it's only liberal activism (voting rights for women, civil rights for African-Americans, marriage equality for same-sex couples) that will get Republicans riled up enough to protest. My favorite snark comes from Driftglass in "Five Conservatives Vote to Obliterate Democracy." After quoting some of the predictable right-wing reactions to the ruling, Driftglass makes this observation:

Of course, if the teabaggers were actually interested in saving this country from the actual enemies of democracy instead of blaming imaginary hippies for the sour taste that sucking George Bush's dick for eight catastrophic years has left in their mouths, this Supreme Court decision should put them in the street-- pitchforks and torches in-hand -- by the millions.

Which is about as likely as Pavlov's dog getting up on its hind legs and beating the crap out of the guy with the little bell.

Ding ding ding!

I hadn't seen this painting before, but I've fallen in love with it already. My dream library will certainly require a reproduction of it.