shelbinator.com

It’s true; most scientists agree science is hard. I know this all too well first hand.

But that doesn’t mean you can mock and ignore it and still lead the free world. There are too many important decisions that rely on a healthy appreciate for and understanding of man’s ability to shape the world with intellect, without just waiting for Jesus to come scoop you up before the Apocalypse.

I’ve been meaning to rant about this ever since McCain decided to make planetarium-bashing a regular part of his debate and stump speech talking points. He keeps referring dismissively to an “overhead projector” as if people want to spend millions to show decaying transparencies of lecture notes, and not excite thousands of school children about studying the heavens. And to think I was once warned that a Clinton administration would be the end of NASA as we know it.

But I’m a little busy doing some science now, so I’ll just excerpt heavily from this article in Slate by Christopher Hitchens, who’s almost as pissed at the GOP’s anti-intellectualism as I am.

Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place “in Paris, France” and winding up with a folksy “I kid you not.”

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly.

Anyone who escaped high school without learning about the fruit fly eye color experiments should stay in Alaska. Come on.

Sen. John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as “unbelievable.” As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers…[and the] cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species…. [But] all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a “paternity” or “criminal” issue….

Haw haw! Geddit?! Scientists are so stupid, I already saw this one on Law & Order!

[Palin] is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools…and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God.

Don’t forget throwing all those frozen, unused in vitro-fertilized eggs in the dumpster rather than use them to cure disease! Or maybe we don’t have to throw all those potential lives away; I’m sure Sarah Palin will take them in once she’s done with her doomed campaign.

Gov. Palin also says that she doesn’t think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a “premillenial dispensationalist”—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.

Eschatological arguments aside, right-wing refusal to even think that maybe we had something to do with it — and even if we did, why should be bother starting to fix it before we convince China and India to do it first (there’s American greatness for ya) — has always infuriated me. It’s tantamount to pointing a gun at my head without checking to see if it’s loaded first (something I’ve experienced as well), and it’s doubly painful coming from people who care about their children and their children’s future in every other respect. If there was a chance that maybe their supermarket got a shipment of the scary Chinese milk and eggs with melamine in it, every Republican mom I know would drive across town to another store for a week. But when it comes to global warming, the “speculative” and “hypothetical” consequences — though orders of magnitude more devastating than a Publix full of melamine — do not warrant the cost to the businesses because commerce is our way of life. That’s just the entrenched culture of a party that is 20 years too late to the climate change wake-up call: the status quo of industry (in the generic sense) was more important than the consensus of eggheads in lab coats, so clearly there was some ulterior agenda here. And for the love of God don’t bring those CFL bulbs around here, Rush Limbaugh told me they cause EPA-level toxic spills.

I could go on, but just go read the book.

All of this comes from folksy folks that accuse liberals of being “elitists” over lobster dinners at exclusive country club enclaves — so I can only assume the “elitism” charge is a derisive mockery of our reliance on book larnin’.

The Dude cannot abide that kind of abuse of science. Whatever the downside of Democratic policies and their “wasteful tax-and-spend” practices, so long as any politician enjoys dancing on the grave of intellectual curiosity, I’ll have a hard time taking any of their arguments at face value.

Bloggerinterrupted has a very good video up on YouTube with like a million skajillion views. He documents the results of the McCain-Palin campaign’s rather effective effort to brand Barack Obama as “The Other.” I’m sure people can disagree about whether there’s overt or even implicit racism and xenophobia in it, but an excellent point was raised on last week’s On the Media: McCain and especially Palin keep asking, “Who is Barack Obama?” They are painting him as risky by acting like he’s this big question mark, he’s The Unknown. Nevermind the one doing the asking was practically nobody in August. Huh.

This is coming from the same campaign that in another breath will accuse him of basically running for president since 2004, when he gave the speech at the DNC that made us all sit up and take notice. He’s officially been running for president for over a year and a half and probably hasn’t ever been more than 30 feet from a camera or a microphone since then. And yet he is more “unknown” than some backwater “Hockey Mom” that 98% of the country had never heard of two months ago, and who has spent half her time on the ticket in hiding from the big bad mainstream media (and the other half spewing talking points). She gets a free pass to One of Us Village, while that scary Other guy is still too risky and unknown.

Disheartening, to say the least.

Wow. What a jerk move.

In 2000, my father and I actually agreed on a political point. We both liked John McCain. I still knew I was voting for Gore, but I liked McCain and wanted him to be the nominee so two good men could debate serious issues and I could probably live with losing to the McCain of 2000, as we must call him these days.

McCain ‘08 has been a different animal. Most old men seem to mellow out in their twilight years, but some get cantankerous. McCain is clearly the cantankerous sort. And in his effort to win the White House, he has pretty much sold out, and after resisting years of Viet Cong torture has finally been broken to the point of saying anything to win, no matter how dishonest.

In tonight’s debate, he was angry and obnoxious. He would pony up one of his baseless attacks immediately after Obama had just explained how baseless the attack, already on the air in dozens of markets, truly was. It’s like he forgot his hearing aid.

And at the end, McCain, who loves to attack Obama for not “reaching a hand across the aisle” (boy does his beauty queen running mate love that line), couldn’t even reach his cranky hand out to “That One.”

“That One.” Nice, John. I mean, Senator McCain (I’d hate to upset Leslie Sanchez with my informality).

In case you missed this diss running off to a bathroom break, here, watch it over and over again:

(Note: C-SPAN’s Debate Hub is a better link than the one attached to the video above.)

Well, that was awesome. After what was a pretty crafty campaign to suck up a bunch of phone numbers for their SMS campaigns by promising to tell their supporters the inside scoop on the VP nom-noms, the Obama campaign rode the fail-whale all the way to Textland by playing the tease out a little too long. Even though many an internet observer figured Friday afternoon would be a good time to send out the most coveted SMS since Willy Wonka’s golden tickets, somewhere somehow someone on in the campaign figured they could milk it just a little bit longer.

You know, not like anybody would notice the Secret Service heading to Delaware to escort my boy Joey B to a chartered jet that had been sent from Chicago.

And then, as if to beat only the rooster, they started cranking out the texty goodness around 3am, rousting folks from their sleep like it wasn’t already old news. Well, that’s what you get for not thinking to text “STOP” to 62262 before you go to sleep after celebrating John King’s breaking story.

It’s 3 a.m. and your phone is beeping…

(Quicktime)

John McCain’s campaign sent out a little funny today, and it may actually be the most useful thing those pandering liars can do to help out with our energy crunch. If you send in a contribution of at least $25, they’ll send you a handy-dandy tire pressure gage that reads “Obama’s Energy Plan” on the side. I guess they’re all out of those pens that have undressing ladies on ‘em.

This is to continue their cute little “Dr. No” meme in which they claim that Obama is basically against everything under the sun that might do a dang thing for the average American as far as energy is concerned. You know, the one in which they repeatedly lie about Obama’s position on nuclear energy? And when I say “they” I include McCain himself, as he has been shown on CNN multiple times in the last week stating flat-out lies about Obama’s nuclear position, and CNN, desperately afraid of being accused of Obamania, refuses to say peep about the fact that they keep airing lies from the “maverick.”

Anyway. Back to his dipstick.

They’re using this prop to mock Obama’s claims about oil conservation and production last week. According to the McCain campaign email, “Senator Obama’s solution to high gas prices is telling Americans to make sure their tires are inflated.”

That isn’t so much a lie as an incomplete statement. What Obama actually said was that “we could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling - if everybody was just inflating their tires? And getting regular tune-ups? You’d actually save just as much!” This ray of optimism naturally sent the idiots who think NewsBusters is news into hysterical fits bad science. (Hint: McCain campaigners seem to be just such idiots.) Let’s take a look at their bad right-wing analysis:

Just for fun, I did the math. Properly inflating your tires can improve gas mileage by 3%. Of course, many people already keep their tires properly inflated, and many more are at least close to being properly inflated. Let’s be generous and assume that one-half of the total possible savings would be realized if we all inflated our tires properly; that’s a net gain of 1.5% fuel efficiency.

Americans drive approximately 2,880 billion miles per year. If we average 24 mpg, we use around 120 billion gallons of gasoline in our vehicles. If, through perfect tire inflation, we improved our collective fuel efficiency by 1.5%, that would be 1.8 billion gallons. A barrel of oil produces around 20 gallons of gasoline, so the total savings available through tire inflation is approximately 90,000,000 barrels of oil annually.

How does this stack up against “all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling?”

ANWR: 10 billion barrels
Outer Continental Shelf: 18 billion barrels (estimated; the actual total is undoubtedly much higher, since exploration has been banned)
Oil shale: 1 trillion barrels

So, on the above assumptions, it would take only 11,308 years of proper tire inflation to equal “all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling.”

First we’ll dispense with the obvious right-wing lying action. The blogger quoted above brings oil shale into the picture, which Obama wasn’t addressing in the Q&A period. You don’t drill for oil shale, boy, you mine it. It’s also unlikely that Obama was even referring to ANWR, since all the hubbub lately has been about getting Congress to follow the president’s lead and open up the outer continental shelf to drilling. (McCain’s email mocking Obama probably isn’t talking about ANWR either, stating “John McCain believes we should lift the federal ban on offshore drilling, enabling you to decide where we drill for oil.” The argument at hand is offshore, not arctic.)

Next, the analysis is rather optimistic in its assumption that we’re getting, on average, 24mpg in our cars. That’s a good one! The Transportation Research Board puts it at closer to 20mpg, based on a composite of cars (22mpg) and trucks (17mpg). But this comes out in the wash, because some of his other assumptions are rather generous in the other direction. The TRB puts annual mileage at 2,600 billion instead of 2,880 billion. And the 1.5% fleetwide fuel economy uptick is rather optimistic; Pearce and Hanlon wrote in Energy Policy (2007, v.35 n.4) that the impact of underinflation ranged from 0.16-0.22 mpg lost in the city and 0.22-0.29 mpg lost on the highway, suggesting we should at least be able to save about 1% on fuel economy. In the spirit of compromise, we’ll split the difference: 1.25%, saving 1.5 billion gallons of gas or 75 million barrels of oil a year.

Right-wingers go off the rails when they assume that the earth will just open up a gaping hole and spew forth all of her bounty in unlimited volumes, reaching the conclusion that Obama is ignoring an 11,000-fold increase in gasoline production off the coast of the Carolinas. Let’s see what the actual Department of Energy has to say about increased production if we listen to the petulant whining of the “Drill Here Drill Now” crowd and open up the continental shelf to drilling:

Total domestic production of crude oil from 2012 through 2030 in the OCS access case is projected to be 1.6 percent higher than in the reference case, and 3 percent higher in 2030 alone, at 5.6 million barrels per day. For the lower 48 OCS, annual crude oil production in 2030 is projected to be 7 percent higher—2.4 million barrels per day in the OCS access case compared with 2.2 million barrels per day in the reference case (Figure 20). Because oil prices are determined on the international market, however, any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant.

Subtract 4 years off those projected dates if the DHDN crowd immediately gets their way. Big whoop, look at that green line go. A whopping 0.2 million barrels a day from opening up the coastline and we come out to about…

73 million barrels a year!

Holy crap! That’s like, almost exactly the same number we just came up with in terms of tire pressure-based fuel economy savings! Saaaaaaay, you don’t think that’s what Obama was talking about in Springfield, do you? Nah, must be just a coinkydink.

Now just imagine how much oil we could stop importing if we just did something more aggressive with those CAFE standards.

I’ve been meaning to write over on Blog for Democracy about a certain Republican Congressman who is really showing us up on the new media front, using Twitter and Qik — personally, not just via a younger, hipper staffer — to communicate with his constituents (okay, let’s get real about TX-7; with the national cadre of poligeeks) in ridiculously real time.

And then Rep. John Culberson had to go and screw it up by being hysterically partisan, in 140 characters or less at a time.

Yesterday Rep. Culberson began some Chicken Little tweeting about the sky falling, claiming “I just learned the Dems are trying to censor Congressmen’s ability to use Twitter Qik YouTube Utterz etc - outrageous and I will fight them.” The problem is, he was basing this on a memo he saw from — and a conversation he may have had with — Rep. Mike Capuano (D-MA) about some proposed updates to the antiquated rules governing “official” House communications. These updates Capuano was proposing were intended to expand the ability of Representatives to use external social networking sites (specifically video hosts like YouTube) and not to restrict the use of Twitter et al any more than they were already being restricted by rules written by people whom my mom could out-internet blindfolded with a gimpy mouse.

As “evidence” of this Dem conspiracy to choke off free speech, all Rep. Culberson could produce was this memo (excerpted below) of 6/24/08 from Rep. Capuano to the Committee on House Administration. Capuano’s intent was basically to say, 1. The current House system for hosting and playing official videos on house.gov websites sucks, hardcore. 2. Current House rules of official communication prohibit Representatives from using sites like YouTube for better hosting of such videos. (Capuano apparently told Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-IN, in conversation that scores of Representatives do it anyway with a wink and a nod, and it’s just time to update the rules to reflect that.) 3. The House really ought to let Representatives use external hosting sites for videos, because these communications are a good thing. And 4. In order to keep up with the “decorum” of the House, they ought to find a way to do so that doesn’t get too tangled up in commerce or political campaigning due to free market forces (i.e., if you watch a Representative’s “official” YouTube video, it might be unbecoming if the three “related” videos that pop up in the YouTube player after it’s over were a racist anti-Obama ad, a pitch for Viagra, or candid footage of Britney Spears’ crotch). Not unreasonable suggestions, I think.

Apparently the guv’mint was already talking to YouTube about finding a way to do this, and YouTube was willing to create a “clean space” for official civic communication, according to this WaPo article. But Rep. Culberson grabbed Rep. Capuano’s language about how the updated rules should handle the hosting of video content — including a “this is official House bizniss” type notice at the front and the non-commercial entanglement concerns — and ran with it, screaming bloody murder, as if House Democrats woke up one recent morning and decided to enact a “rules change” to crack down on his Twittering and any other innovative use of new media.

But again, the problem with Congressional use of new media is that the rules already don’t allow for the use of commercial third party sites that might commingle the official with the unseemly. Rep. Capuano’s attempt to expand the ability of our Representatives to use the YouTube might be, at worst, a rather narrow-minded and poorly-worded proposed change to the rules that would create no extra wiggle room for people like Rep. Culberson to do things like Twitter (which are already against the rules as they stand anyway). But hey, I guess it’s not as easy to say, in 140 characters or less, that “ZOMG! House Dems are going to update the rules to expand Congressional use of social media in a very limited and non-forward-looking fashion, but still an update that House Repubs never got around to considering in 2006!” than it is to claim the House Democrats are taking away your Twitter because they hate free speech. (Sure enough, the right-wing screed blog Hot Air ran with the headline for Rep. Culberson’s plight, “Why do Congressional Democrats fear free speech?”) But even that kind of “non-forward-looking” allegation wouldn’t have been fair to Rep. Capuano, given this particular chunk of his letter:

While the above recommendations will help CHA as it seeks to provide House Members with the ability to post official video materials on the Web in an efficient and economical way, further changes to CHA regulations and practice may be necessary to account for the continual emergence of new technologies. I encourage CHA to view these recommendations as the first step in a process towards modernizing the regulations that govern communications of Members.

This post at TechDirt nails the analysis on the head, as far as I’m concerned. The right-wing bloggers parroted Rep. Culberson’s rather hysterical partisan interpretation. Even the social media powerhouse blog, under the steady hand of Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins (whom I’m biased against anyway after he blew off our Street Team ‘08 Super Tuesday stunt), put the disclaimer “This isn’t a knee-jerk post” at the top of a knee-jerk post that used its headline to perpetuate Rep. Culberson’s partisan myth. And to think I was intrigued when my Twitterrific feed asked me, “Why are the only people spun up about House Net rules on the right? I’ve seen nothing from lefty friends? Where’s the transparency crowd?” But I quickly realized that the answer was, “We aren’t sucking down your spin because the story has no merit.”

It’s even funnier when you put Democratic and Republican memos right next to each other for comparison, as TechnoSailor does. First he presents Capuano’s “letter sent to the Democratic House majority leadership to silence [social media like Twitter and Qik.” He, too, parrots the Culberson mythology at first, calling Capuano’s memo “ridiculous.” He later posts “the GOP response to the [Capuano] letter,” from Reps. Ehler, McCarthy, and Price, which in itself contains language that totally highlights Rep. Culberson’s Twitterspasm for the partisan smokescreen it is.

Committee rules that apply to these [web-based] services and technologies, however, significantly pre-date their invention. In some cases, Members have begun using these services and technologies despite being in violation of existing rules.

Despite being in violation of existing rules. So sayeth the Republicans themselves. And yet Rep. Culberson has stirred up this tempest in a teapot (via Twitter! against the existing rules!) suggesting that somehow the Democrats are suddenly out to censor him with new rules.

The Republican letter goes on to suggest updated language that highlights another inconsistency on Rep. Culberson’s part.

Toward that end, we request that the Committee consider adopting the following updated policy language.

With regard to the Internet
Members may use technologies, websites and services (paid or unpaid) to communicate with their constituents via text, video, or audio so long as the content posted by the Member complies with House rules and Franking content regulations.

(Emphasis mine.)

And yet, one of the particular things that had Rep. Culberson all up in arms was his interpretation of Rep. Capuano’s language here, which is hardly different:

Official content posted on an external domain must be clearly identified as produced by a House office for official purposes, and meet existing content rules and regulations;

As for what “clearly identified” entails, there is nothing in the letter to suggest that Rep. Capuano and the CHA wouldn’t be satisfied with some language on the main Twitter profile page of any Representative using Twitter. It’s a stretch to suggest, as Rep. Culberson does, that they would be forced to include a “disclaimer” in each single tweet that would exceed the 140 character limit by default, because in the memo Rep. Capuano is talking about video content only. But Rep. Culberson also zeroed in on the “existing content rules and regulations” phrase in a response he tweeted to all of us who questioned his allegations:

@shelbinator Look at page two - note each Twitter etc must meet “existing content rules and regulations” that means prior approval/rewrite 05:41 PM July 08, 2008 from web in reply to shelbinator

Huh. If it’s the House Democrats who are “trying to censor Congressmen’s ability to use Twitter” because of the “existing content rules and regulations” suggested in Rep. Capuano’s letter, then what the heck are the House Republicans doing so much better by recommending that “the content posted by the Member complies with House rules and Franking content regulations?”

Oh. Right. Absolutely nothing. Rep. Culberson is just acting like another extreme partisan trying to fan the flames of a fake fire so he can pretend to be the guy fighting the good fight. On his House.gov website — which apparently is unencumbered by any Franking Commission rules that might prohibit lies and bullshit malarkey^* — he alleges,

Democrats are looking at restricting Member content on websites outside the house.gov domain. Websites such as Youtube and other social networks would have to comply with government regulations before Members of Congress could post content on them.

He claims this despite the fact that (1) Democrats are looking at removing restrictions, as I detailed with self-admitted neophyte Capuano’s own language above (indicating that more evolution of standards will be necessary), and (2) the Republican letter to the CHA recommends the exact same compliance with regulations that Capuano’s does.

Yeah. I think bullshit is being too forgiving, even of a Congressman from Texas.

And that’s so, so very disappointing from somebody who really displayed a lot of initiative and openness by embracing these emerging technologies to open Congress up to the world. Too bad he thought it was just another medium he could use to pull the standard Republican playbook move: make up a lie, then repeat it as loudly and as frequently as possible until people dumb enough to fall for it start repeating it for you.

* Hat tip to my boy Joey B.

UPDATES:
1. Rep. Capuano brought the smackdown too.
2. ZOMG someone in Speaker Pelosi’s office apparently read this blog and got her to link to it (fourth paragraph) in a response to Leader Boehner! Leader Boehner!
3. I think we’re all going to put down our partisan guns and get behind the Sunlight Foundation’s Let Our Congress Tweet push. I’ll defend Democrats against exaggerated partisan claims, but I’m not going to let them have the dumb if they can’t brain the internet.

UPDATE: Go join in the fracas over at iReport.com, where this video has gotten over 48,000 61,000 107,000 121,900 views since posting on CNN.com’s front page Saturday afternoon. Clearly there is not enough real news being iReported.

If you were robbed, mugged, or otherwise assaulted or injured in the downtown Atlanta area between 6:45 and 8:00pm on Friday, we bicyclists do apologize for your lack of police protection. You see, we were busy occupying about a dozen motorcycle cops and several police cruisers with our monthly bike ride.

Two months ago when I filed my Choose or Lose story on Critical Mass, I made a specific point to mention that our local police force was actually rather cooperative with us cyclists compared to other cities. I had seen numerous videos before of uncomfortably hostile encounters between cops and Massers in San Francisco (the city of origin), Chicago, and New York, and I had had numerous conversations with Atlanta riders about how nice our local PD was to us. In the downtown area, where police were frequently out on the street directing traffic for tourist destinations, conference attendees, and sports fans, they often stopped cross traffic long enough to get the whole Mass through (and, blessedly, out of their way).

That warm and fuzzy relationship is apparently over. Last month, reporter Stacy Shelton wrote up Critical Mass in the AJC, and apparently someone at City Hall knows how to read. Whoever this literate person is wasn’t about to tolerate any civil disobedience in their fair city, and they ordered the police force into action. Here you go, in video form:

MP4 video enclosure

Before we had even gotten past Centennial Olympic Park — maybe half a mile from our starting point downtown — we were intercepted. A phalanx of motorcycle cops was poised on the sidewalk, ready to disrupt the ride. Apparently, only one of them had any cojones, because only a single cyclist was pulled over and ticketed for running a red light. The rest of them must have been too busy oogling the cleavage on wheels or something.

Once we had ridden past, the blood returned to their heads and they managed to figure out where we were going. We saw a few of our law enforcement friends again in Midtown, but things were pretty hunky dory until we crossed over into Virginia Highland and headed south toward Little Five Points. As we approached North Avenue heading south on Highland, the phalanx reappeared out of nowhere, cutting the Mass in half at Manuel’s Tavern and giving pursuit to the front half, which went another quarter of a mile before turning east on Freedom Parkway. By the time the rest of us caught up, the bikes were dismounting the pavement and running up the grass onto the pedestrian path along the Parkway; the motorcycle phalanx and a few cruisers had stationed themselves along the roadway leading up to Moreland.

And then they stood there. (See video.) Some of the braver and/or more confrontational cyclists kept on riding down Freedom Parkway while the rest of us rode in parallel on the walkway, watching (and in several cases, filming). The cops just stood there on their bikes, glaring, like it was some kind of staring contest (or perhaps a who’s-got-the-bigger-wang testosto-fest). They didn’t leap into action as we began to spill back onto Moreland heading south, but perhaps that’s because we came to a stop and in many cases signaled our turns. Or maybe we were in West Side Story, who knows.

Another motorcycle cop was waiting for us a quarter mile later in Little Five Points, as if expecting orders from his Parkway brethren on which one to pull over and ticket. We stopped at the light and then turned right/west into the residential neighborhood to get out of their sight. A much thinner, slower, more fragmented Mass headed down Sinclair for Inman Park.

We didn’t get far. The Freedom Parkway boys found us again at Austin and Elizabeth, and they did a pretty good job of clusterfracking the intersection of Highland and Elizabeth up themselves in an effort to make sure we all observed the stop sign.

Here’s the thing: when you have 400 cyclists out at one time all deciding to take the same route, it’s really in your best interest to let them all pass at once, sacrificing a red light or two if you must, rather than demanding we all stop and look left, right, and left again. Instead of almost a half a mile of solid bikes on the road, you’ll have three miles of two abreast. You want really that?

We made it several more blocks down Highland before the motorbikes raced ahead of us and basically formed a roadblock at Highland and Randolph. So we stopped — losing a number of us to Johnny’s Pizza — and turned left/south on Samson. By the time I caught up with what was left of the Mass at Samson and Irwin, there were a handful of cops there making sure we came to a complete stop and looked both ways before crossing.

The group finally built up some momentum again on Edgewood, but not as much momentum as a dozen or so police officers who just realized how much fun it is stalking and hassling bicyclists. A couple of their motorbikes came whipping past us again and managed to get to the front of the group in time to pull another cyclist over to ticket him for a traffic violation. The rest of the hundred and change cyclists left erupted into whoops and applause as these two brave officers were reinforced by one, two, three, four more motorcycle cops in order to enforce the law on this dangerous commuter-terrorist. A couple of police cruisers pulled up behind and alongside us, so that when the light — keeping us frozen in law abiding stillness while red — turned green, they could use their fancy loudspeakers and bark, “Move along! Move along!” And as it turned yellow again a couple of siren-whoops reminded the eager to stop at the broad white line.

I don’t know if the cops pursued what was left of the Mass all the way back downtown; I turned back at that point to get a beer with friends who had peeled off in Cabbagetown, not wanting their first Critical Mass to result in legal action. But this was definitely a strategic prerogative from on high. In all of my rides with the group, I have never seen such prominent police interference, and in all of my life in Atlanta, I have never seen such police organization, never seen so many cops in one place at one time with such well-timed serendipity. They were all out there just to pursue us and hassle at opportunity. They were reasserting the city’s power after Shelton’s article had made so public how intolerably open-minded they had been to people who actually wanted to do something about our oil addiction. Boy oh boy, did those big mens with their bikes and guns show us.

So, yeah, sorry if you actually needed a cop while we were out riding bikes. They were too busy keeping you safe from the Monkeywrench Gang.

For a split second I saw the $199 price of the new 3G iPhone and thought I might soon be abandoning my Nokia N95, after a mere three months. Then I clicked through the pages and realized that the drastic price cut must come from the fact that Apple still doesn’t think its mobile device with a camera should shoot anything but still photographs. (And when you take them, it seems you still can’t MMS them to other normal phones.)

Even CNN iReport’s story request was characteristically boring-sounding because of it: “Ever used an iPhone to snap a pic? Send an iReport. http://tinyurl.com/5m733c,” they said on Twitter. Ever used a pencil to do math? Ever used a car to drive to the grocery store? Ever use a match to light a cigarette? Yawn; we want to see sketch art, Formula 500 and forest fires, not the most basic use possible for ordinary household objects.

Ever take a video clip that doesn’t blow on an iPhone? Now that would be an iReport!

This is really getting to be like packing for a family road trip and leaving the baby in the carseat on the roof of the damn car.

Not much news to report back to MTV this week, so I just wrote up some remarks John Lewis made this weekend to a crowd of supporters at Melanie’s amazing multimedia home. It wasn’t until last night that I actually bothered to check out the websites of his two Democratic primary challengers.

It’s pretty ridiculous for Mable Thomas to cast herself as the “new generation” compared to John Lewis in the face of this groundswell of youth voters, given that watching a text-off between the two of them would be as painful as hilarious, methinks. RUS? LOL. But in an attempt to snag some of that youthy “change” vibe from our presumptive presidential nominee, Thomas’s website shamelessly snags a whole <div> from Obama’s website, down to the last GIF.

Tsk, tsk. I guess you shouldn’t expect much better from a web design company whose Contact info is a Hotmail address. Seriously, Hotmail, still?

You know a movie has gotten annoying amounts of undeserved publicity when Howard Kurtz is talking about it on Reliable Sources. So if you, too, would rather the four New York divas just retire to the woods to die (or anything that will get them off your Twitter stream), then you ought to enjoy this little preview mashup I made just for you (and to not think about crack growth for a while):