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Check out John McCain’s latest 30-second spot, which is airing in here in New Mexico, other battleground states and on national cable:

They sure are grasping at straws; clearly the McCain camp has no new solutions to present — rather than discuss their own candidate they lob grenades at Obama, and the attack isn’t even particularly on-target. The Illinois senator is plenty vulnerable in a lot of areas, but singling him out for actually being likable is just ridiculous.

The best part is at the end, with the little hopeful musical chime and McCain sporting that far-off, wistful twinkle in his eye. It’s like someone decided to beat Obama’s “hope” meme to death with hackneyed gimmicks. Truly amazing.

[note: this started as a response to charlie's tour de france post, but got a little too long for the comments thread.]

if you think that’s bad, just wait ’til 2012, when gene doping will be in full flower just in time for london.

“It is possible to introduce genes into people and change the DNA of some of their cells, genes that affect the way muscles function or the way that they heal after injury,” he said.

Although gene doping is probably still in its infancy, as techniques become more sophisticated naturally occurring hormones could be boosted or altered to enhance performance.

“In mice and in monkeys and in other tests that have been done, the animals have shown increased amount of blood production,” Dr Friedmann said. “Those mice have in fact become much stronger and much more muscular.”

…and we’re still at least a decade away from developing a test that will be able to detect it. some think it’s already going on in beijing this summer:

Dr Peter Larkins is a former head doctor for Australia’s athletics team and past president of Sports Medicine Australia.

“I think it is happening now,” he says of gene doping.

“I can’t believe that 10 years after gene therapy has been proven and we have mice that grow muscles twice the size of normal mice and mice that are called marathon mice because they run all day, I can’t believe the scientists who have been unethical enough to help athletes cheat for the last 30 years aren’t giving that technology to some people.

” Associate Professor Bob Stewart, a drugs-in-sport expert from Victoria University, is also pessimistic.

“We just have to accept the fact that athletes and biochemists are a jump ahead of the WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) testers,” he says.

“accept facts”??! sounds like surrender talk to me!

seriously, though. the puritans and drug warriors and self-deluded nostalgia mongers who run professional sports (yes, the olympics are a pro outfit) have an extremely simple choice to make: either figure out a way to remove big money from the equation, or deal with the fact that athletes as a group are going to continue doing whatever is required of them to stay competitive. it’s unreasonable — hell, it’s unfair — to expect otherwise from people whose livelihood is competition.

and please, no lectures about sportsmanship and unfair advantages from the olympian sector, when the IOC already sanctions huge technological and economic advantages for certain competitors. why is it that the larger, developed nations always seem to do best in the medal count, anyway? is it because we’re naturally superior, or could it be that our teams enjoy superior training facilities and equipment, better coaches and staff, larger and more competitive recruiting pools, and more all-around institutional support?

drawing the line at drugs seems pitifully arbitrary, especially when the pace of development in the doping sciences is so fast that we can’t even agree on a stable universal definition of what “doping” is in the first place, or in some cases, as charlie notes, how to differentiate between doping and legitimate sports medicine. besides, as long as prohibition prevails and doping happens underground, the aforementioned institutional & economic disparities mean that only the most technologically disadvantaged dopers — the ones who can only afford treatments that the piss police have already figured out how to catch — will get caught.

it seems obvious that the hardline anti-doping stance is more ideological than anything else. but don’t take my word for it: ask WADA chair Dr. Gary Wadler why cannabis is also a no-no:

“Specifically, three criteria are used when considering whether or not a drug should be on the Prohibited List: (a) Does the drug or method have the potential of enhancing performance? (b) Does its abuse represent an actual or potential risk to an athlete’s health? And/or (c) does its use violate the spirit of sport? To be even considered for addition to the Prohibited List, the drug or method under consideration must fulfill at least two of the three aforementioned criteria.

The use of marijuana… is considered to represent a risk to the athlete’s health and its use violates the spirit of sport.”

that is to say, “drugs are bad, m’kay?”

So another person gets popped for EPO use in Le Tour.  Eporon, Mi(r)cera… It all seems to be advertised on the web by the same companies willing to sell Vi@gr@ via email. (Who buys this stuff to keep the spammers spamming? Someone must be!) Obviously the stuff is out there, and it sounds like the number of products won’t be decreasing any time soon.

I found an interesting tech. doc. on how it works, including info on CERA. Trilife has a small debate on testing Age Groupers  triathletes for it. The effects of altitude on hypoxia seem to cause a similar, potentially “unfair,” advantage. Heck, if the only argument is that it means the athlete isn’t naturally maintaining their level of fitness, then most of the Tour should go as they monitor and artificially adjust hematocrit all the time. I’d sure like to see who’s on the list of the “20 riders (that) had abnormal blood test results before the race“.

Now that I’ve relocated to New Mexico, I’ve been paying close attention to the local cuisine — the centerpiece of which is, of course, green chile. I knew they used it in nearly everything, but the sheer variety of applications is startling. So I’ve begun compiling a tally. Right now we’ve got:

• Hamburgers
• Cheese fries
• Beef stew
• Breakfast burritos (and other common Mexican foods)
• Hummus
• Beer
• Teriyaki chicken
• Bacon

I’ll keep you apprised of further additions. Hopefully I’ll find ice cream at some point.In other, unrelated “news,” here’s a recent classic from The Onion:

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

This is like a bad launch day in an MMO. No official word on why some of the iTunes Store is offline, and we’re paying for the update! Please Mr. Jobs, can I give you ten dollars to waste my morning because your engineers failed to anticipate server loads? Why did I pay so much for your device? That’s right, because things “Just work” in Apple land. Your overpriced gadgets with revolving costs are starting to really chap my hide.

The thing that annoys me is that to have the functionality of a portable computing device that also happens to play music, I’ve been forced to purchase an update for email, and now an update so I can finally get the thing on the WPA-Enterprise network. Heck, the thing still doesn’t do Flash. Sure, some may say, it’s just an iPod, buy a laptop or an iPhone. I’m tired of buying an Apple product and getting burned for not waiting another six months. It’s not that I’m expecting to get things sooner, it’s that I hate feeling like I’m being milked by Apple. “Gee, if we sell an 8 gig unit for a while, then update in a few months to a 16 we’ll make more money and who cares if our customers feel burned.” It’s the standard anymore. Heck, I can’t imagine how people who dropped coin on the Airbook with SSD feel after the big price drop there. Whose pockets got lined with that change?

More rant once I get back from work…

Update 2: Okay, so 12 hours have passed, and nothing changed. No email from Apple, except the one telling me they’d deleted my post from the discussion thread (I’ll show you non-constructive). No official statement on the apple.com website, nor even a removal of the “Buy” button. Fuck you Apple. I wanted to like but you’ve obviously shown us all that you’re way too cool to even come out of the Cupertino bunker and say “We fucked up, here’s 10$ in free software. Our bad.”

Update: Start-up cost for an 8 gig iPhone 407$

Update: iPhone 3G plastic casings are cracking left and right.

if there’s one thing that might have made a clinton supporter out of me, it would’ve been this:

[Obama] ended up voting for what he called “an improved but imperfect bill” after backing a failed attempt earlier in the day to strip the immunity provision from the bill through an amendment… Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, who had battled Mr. Obama for the nomination, voted against the [FISA] bill.

of course, had she won the nomination, i’m guessing hillary too might have felt differently about FISA — especially knowing she’d be next in line to take those fancy new executive powers out for a spin. still, at least she’s able to mimic the basic postures of leadership, which is more than i can say today for the other guy. “improved but imperfect”?? way to set the bar higher, mister reform candidate.

obama won’t take the oath of office for another six months — it is way too early for buyer’s remorse to be setting in.

This morning’s news of Iran testing missiles weighs a bit heavy on the mind as I write this. This story over on the Washington Post doesn’t help. When asked how he felt about increasing exports to Iran under the Bush Administration, McCain smirked as the reporter pointed out that the largest export was cigarettes. “Maybe it’s a way of killing them?”, he chuckled. Then, forgetting how many years it’d been since he done something for the umpteenth time, turned to his chief Internet officer for fact checking… (youTube videos below the fold) Read the rest of this entry »

You know, it’s time to admit I was wrong. Way, way back, before being hacked, before moving over to wordpress, back when stickybuffalo was a big brown page with a shoutbox, there was some discussion of Apple’s switch from PowerPC processors to Intel processors. As I recall, I was pretty much against the move, seeing it as a bad omen for Apple’s independence. But I was wrong.

Read the rest of this entry »

And now, a klezmer song about sex addition:(via Acephalous)