This story, about a FTM transsexual who gave birth, is really fascinating.  It says something important about gender that a person who identifies as a man would want to give birth.  This is the first time I’ve heard of a transman giving birth–I wonder if it will remain equally rare in the future, or if a general softening of gender norms will make a regular, albeit uncommon, occurence.

The first independent ad put out by the Republican party is strikingly dishonest.  It’s attacking Obama’s positions on climate change, using the new nickname “Dr. No.”  The problem is that climate change is an issue where Obama’s position clearly does more than McCain’s–that’s not something that’s really up for debate: both candidates have cap and trade as the centerpiece of their efforts, but Obama’s climate change proposals involve more ambitious caps for emissions.  One of the policies mentioned in the ad, lowering gas taxes, could only help to increase emissions.

The only thing that might favor McCain is his proposal for a $300 million prize for better battery technology to be used in hyrbids.  Obama has said we would not favor such a policy.  However, if the prize is a good idea (and I’m not sure whether it is or not), it’s primarily a good idea because it’s cheap–the emissions reductions that could be achieved by any battery technology would be a lot smaller than what we want.  So it’s, at best, a way to spur innovation, and reduce the economic cost of a cap-and-trade program.

Matthew Yglesias wonders why conservatives are affirming that Jesse Helms was a central part of the conservative movement, rather than cautiously distancing themselves from him.  Surprisingly, I think the answer is honesty, but this does commit them to saying a raving bigot was very important in the conservative movement.

There’s another important point here, which is that all the recent kerfluffle over whether the southern strategy was central to the Republican party’s success seems harder to take seriously, now that such a prominent conservative’s legacy is in the spotlight.  Jesse Helms was hardly the whole of the Republican party for the past forty years, but he was important, wasn’t he?

A New York Times article on Fox News mentions how the station was caught altering photos of reporters who’d posted stories which didn’t give Fox glowing coverage.  In response:

A spokeswoman said the executive in charge of “Fox and Friends” is on vacation and not available for comment but added that altering photos for humorous effect is a common practice on cable news stations.)

I rather suspect that’s not true, since it’s so easy to score points by pointing out the deception, but even if it was, I suspect that the practice just became a lot less common.  (For the initial incident, try this media matters bit).

Another simple and restrained comment on Fox’s tactics came earlier in the article:

Jacques Steinberg, a reporter at The New York Times who covers television, wrote a straight-up-the-middle ratings story about cable news. His article acknowledged that while CNN was using a dynamic election to push Fox News from behind, Fox was still No. 1. Despite repeated calls, the public relations people at Fox News did not return his requests for comment. (In a neat trick, while they were ignoring his calls, they e-mailed his boss asking why they had not heard from him.)

That said, the article has a little bit of deserved outrage:

In a technique familiar to students of vintage German propaganda, [Steinburg's] ears were pulled out, his teeth splayed apart, his forehead lowered and his nose was widened and enlarged

…

[Bill Carter] was appalled to see what he viewed as an anti-Semitic caricature of Mr. Steinberg

I thought about highlighting this aside from James Fallows’ article on China’s manufacturing, an article which is worth reading for its own sake:

(I might as well say this in every article I write from overseas: The easier America makes it for talented foreigners to work and study there, the richer, more powerful, and more respected America will be. America’s ability to absorb the world’s talent is the crucial advantage no other culture can match—as long as America doesn’t forfeit this advantage with visa rules written mainly out of fear.)

So while I knew that customs is searching and/or making full copies of information contained in laptop computers entering the country, it’s quite timely that an article I got from my friend Nick let me knew they are also often keeping the laptops for weeks or even months.  While much of the press has focused on the business travelers’ need to avoid losing sensitive information, it’s also clear that the effect on individuals is terrible: how many of us have spare laptops to replace the one that’s confiscated (side note: there are four laptops in my household).  In my case, my laptop is second only to my family and the cats, and just as with them, I reserve the right to kill to defend it.  So please do not take my laptop.  It would be terribly inconvenient for a great many people if I was forced to kill the government.

Judging by this page about rediscovered scenes from Metropolis, one of the most famous silent movies, but one which had been missing many scenes for 80 years, machine translation has entered pernicious new territory.  Unlike years ago, when machine translation produced obvious crap, it seems that it now produces sentences which only reveal themselves to be incoherent upon close inspection.

It was the most expensive German film, which it previously had. There should be a major attack on Hollywood. But critics and audiences was the film.

Was actually the set of sentences that made me finally realize that the translation didn’t make sense (I typically read too fast and comprehend too little).  On the other hand, there are perfectly sensible, if peculiar, sentences:

On Tuesday last week traveled Paula Felix-Didier in a secret mission to Berlin to get there with three film experts and editors of TIME magazine to meet.

Not my usual gig, I suppose, but let me just say something.

THIS MAN IS WEARING A ROMPER.  HE IS WEARING A ROMPER.  A ROMPER.

Update: If it’s not clear from the URL, that is a picture from an honest to god fashion show.  Can’t remember which one.

I seriously hope to god that David Brooks is not writing a book about “the brain, neuroscience, sociology, politics, and the intersection thereof,” because the ensuing internet discussion will probably make me want to stab myself repeatedly. Let’s not even mention that the anecdotes about the unconscious mentioned in Ross’s post are only arguably instances of unconscious thought–they sound more like unrecognized habits of conscious thought.

Awhile back, I started a post about the idea that Obama’s bipartisanship has never involved contradicting any liberal orthodoxies–a charge that I thought true, but not particularly upsetting, or one that posed a lot of strategic risk for the campaign.  The post languished, but we now have an actual case where he has bucked the liberal orthodoxy in the faith based thingamawhatchits (”initiatives,” Wikipedia tells me).  The decision is already getting him some criticism from the folks who thought it was a bad idea the first time around.

This is probably the worst PR possible–a number of pro-Clinton or anti-Obama blogs hosted at blogspot were temporarily prevented from posting after being labelled spam.  There’s some absurd conspiracy theories that this reflects a pro-Obama bias, but there’s also rumors that some Obama supporters abused the feature for reporting spam blogs.  Of course, there’s no evidence of that yet, but for the sake of preemption: any such people are idiots as well as assholes.

A more plausible explanation is just that blogger is an awful system.  You might think that the world’s largest search engine would have a good way to deal with spam on its blogging service, but blogspot handles this stuff terribly.  I’ve previously had content scrapers or spam blogs linking to me from blogspot, and reporting them never did a damn bit of good.  In contrast, on the occasions when I’ve reported spam on wordpress, it’s usually been dealt with in a day, and I’ve been notified of that fact.