Somehow, I suspect the ad will fail to mention that fact.

[E]very post and comment — both public and private — by a U.S. user that mentions a presidential candidate’s name will be fed through a sentiment analysis tool that spits out anonymized measures of the general U.S. Facebook population.

No, your private comments won’t be republished and, yes, it appears that the process will strip your identifying information from your content. But it’s another reminder that nothing you put on Facebook is truly private.

Via Ann Althouse, where it took all of six minutes for a commenter to suggest “put[ting] a candidate’s name in every message and status update.”

Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22, and began chemotherapy soon after.

The inestimable Mr. Hitchens was one of those rare public figures who genuinely lived by the maxim in Stacy McCain’s masthead: “One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.” (Arthur Koestler). And, regardless of whether one agreed with him or not, he always commanded one’s attention when he spoke out. He’ll be called many things over the next few days. “Brilliant,” “firebrand,” “masterful rhetorician,” perhaps even “piquant.” But it’s doubtful even he himself could have adequately captured in mere words what made him such a striking and important figure.

He will be missed. R.I.P.

Update (Doug Mataconis): From The New York Times:

Christopher Hitchens, a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by enthusiastically supporting the American-led war in Iraq, died Thursday at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He was 62.

The cause was pneumonia, a complication of esophageal cancer, said the magazine Vanity Fair, which announced the death. In recent days Mr. Hitchens had stopped treatment and entered hospice care at the Houston hospital. He learned he had cancer while on a publicity tour in 2010 for his memoir, “Hitch-22,” and began writing and, on television, speaking about his illness frequently.

“In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist,” Mr. Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair, for which he was a contributing editor.

He took pains to emphasize that he had not revised his position on atheism, articulated in his best-selling 2007 book, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” although he did express amused appreciation at the hope, among some concerned Christians, that he might undergo a late-life conversion.

He also professed to have no regrets for a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking. “Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me,” he told Charlie Rose in a television interview in 2010, adding that it was “impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.”

Armed with a quick wit and a keen appetite for combat, Mr. Hitchens was in constant demand as a speaker on television, radio and the debating platform, where he held forth in a sonorous, plummily accented voice that seemed at odds with his disheveled appearance. He was a master of the extended peroration, peppered with literary allusions, and of the bright, off-the-cuff remark.

In 2007, when the interviewer Sean Hannity tried to make the case for an all-seeing God, Mr. Hitchens dismissed the idea with contempt. “It would be like living in North Korea,” he said.

Mr. Hitchens, a British Trotskyite who had lost faith in the Socialist movement, spent much of his life wandering the globe and reporting on the world’s trouble spots for The Nation magazine, the British newsmagazine The New Statesman and other publications.

His work took him to Northern Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain and Argentina in the 1970s, generally to shine a light on the evil practices of entrenched dictators or the imperial machinations of the great powers.

After moving to the United States in 1981, he added American politics to his beat, writing a bimonthly Minority Report for The Nation. He wrote a monthly review-essay for The Atlantic and, as a carte-blanche columnist at Vanity Fair, filed essays on topics as various as getting a Brazilian bikini wax and the experience of being waterboarded, a volunteer assignment that he called “very much more frightening though less painful than the bikini wax.” He was also a columnist for the online magazine Slate.

His support for the Iraq war sprang from a growing conviction that radical elements in the Islamic world posed a mortal danger to Western principles of political liberty and freedom of conscience. The first stirrings of that view came in 1989 with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwah against the novelist Salman Rushdie for his supposedly blasphemous words in “The Satanic Verses.” To Mr. Hitchens, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, confirmed the threat.

In a political shift that shocked many of his friends and readers, he cut his ties to The Nation and became an outspoken advocate of the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and a ferocious critic of what he called “Islamofascism.” Although he denied coining the word, he popularized it.

He remained unapologetic about the war. In 2006 he told the British newspaper The Guardian: “There are a lot of people who will not be happy, it seems to me, until I am compelled to write a letter to these comrades in Iraq and say: ‘Look, guys, it’s been real, but I’m going to have to drop you now. The political cost to me is just too high.’ Do I see myself doing this? No, I do not!”

Hitchens’ atheism always seemed to be the one bugaboo among the conservatives who had come to admire him, to the point where, just this week The Daily Caller published a piece insinuating that the battle with cancer was leading Hitchens to the point where he was about to convert to Christianity. Jeffrey Goldberg pushed back on that idea quite strongly:

Very early in his cancer, Hitchens told me that there would come a time when someone, a charlatan, maybe, or perhaps even some presumptuous person of misdirected goodwill, would try to convince the world that he was undergoing a deathbed conversion. I didn’t believe that such a thing would happen. “Watch,” he said.

Hitchens also said that if information emerged that he had, at some late stage, made a statement of faith, or a religious confession, including but not limited to, “I accept Jesus as my lord and savior,” or, “Muhammad, peace be unto him, is the messenger of God,” or, “the Lubavitcher rebbe is the true messiah and currently living in Brooklyn,” that his friends were to make it known that it was not the true Hitchens doing the confessing. This is what he told me once, during a video conversation we posted on this website: “The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain,” he said. “I can’t guarantee that such an entity wouldn’t make such a ridiculous remark. But no one recognizable as myself would ever make such a ridiculous remark.”

So, just to be clear: Christopher Hitchens has not found God, and is not finding God. It is mischievous to suggest otherwise.

Earlier this year, Hitchens was the subject of a 60 Minutes interview:

Hitchens was a fascinating guy. Even when one disagreed with him, it was impossible to dismiss him, and hard to argue against him.

UPDATE (James Joyner): Just a couple days ago, I read what one presumes was Hitchens’ last work, a Vanity Fair article reflecting on the maxim, “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

In fact, I now sometimes wonder why I ever thought it profound. It is usually attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche: Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker. In German it reads and sounds more like poetry, which is why it seems probable to me that Nietzsche borrowed it from Goethe, who was writing a century earlier. But does the rhyme suggest a reason? Perhaps it does, or can, in matters of the emotions. I can remember thinking, of testing moments involving love and hate, that I had, so to speak, come out of them ahead, with some strength accrued from the experience that I couldn’t have acquired any other way. And then once or twice, walking away from a car wreck or a close encounter with mayhem while doing foreign reporting, I experienced a rather fatuous feeling of having been toughened by the encounter. But really, that’s to say no more than “There but for the grace of god go I,” which in turn is to say no more than “The grace of god has happily embraced me and skipped that unfortunate other man.”

[...]

I lay at the point of death. A congestive heart failure was treated for diagnostic purposes by an angiogram that triggered a stroke. Violent and painful hiccups, uninterrupted for several days and nights, prevented the ingestion of food. My left side and one of my vocal cords became paralyzed. Some form of pleurisy set in, and I felt I was drowning in a sea of slime In one of my lucid intervals during those days of agony, I asked my physician to discontinue all life-supporting services or show me how to do it.

[...]

So as a rational actor, taking the radiation together with the reaction and the recovery, I have to agree that if I had declined the first stage, thus avoiding the second and the third, I would already be dead. And this has no appeal.

However, there is no escaping the fact that I am otherwise enormously weaker than I was then.

[...]

These are progressive weaknesses that in a more “normal” life might have taken decades to catch up with me. But, as with the normal life, one finds that every passing day represents more and more relentlessly subtracted from less and less. In other words, the process both etiolates you and moves you nearer toward death. How could it be otherwise? Just as I was beginning to reflect along these lines, I came across an article on the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. We now know, from dearly bought experience, much more about this malady than we used to. Apparently, one of the symptoms by which it is made known is that a tough veteran will say, seeking to make light of his experience, that “what didn’t kill me made me stronger.” This is one of the manifestations that “denial” takes.

I am attracted to the German etymology of the word “stark,” and its relative used by Nietzsche,stärker, which means “stronger.” In Yiddish, to call someone a shtarker is to credit him with being a militant, a tough guy, a hard worker. So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing.

Brutally honest to the end.

And, in the least-surprising NFL news of the season, Tony Sparano also got canned. The Dolphins had clawed their way to 4-8 after dropping their first seven games, but losing to the hapless Eagles sealed his fate. The fact that he lasted two weeks longer than Jack Del Rio is pretty much the only unexpected twist in this story.

A top official with the National Labor Relations Board announced on Friday that the agency was dropping its politically charged case against Boeing, in which the agency had accused the company of violating federal labor law by opening a new aircraft production plant in South Carolina.

The N.L.R.B.’s acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon, said the labor board had decided to end the case after the machinists’ union — which originally asked for the case to be brought — had urged the board on Thursday to withdraw it.

On Wednesday night, the union announced that 74 percent of its 31,000 Boeing workers in Washington State had voted to ratify a four-year contract extension that includes substantial raises, unusual job security provisions and a commitment by Boeing to expand aircraft production in the Puget Sound area.

SEC. 1034. AFFIRMATION OF ARMED CONFLICT WITH AL QAEDA, THE TALIBAN, AND ASSOCIATED FORCES.
Congress affirms that—
(1) the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces and that those entities continue to pose a threat to the United States and its citizens, both domestically and abroad;
(2) the President has the authority to use all necessary and appropriate force during the current armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40; 50 U.S.C. 23 1541 note);
(3) the current armed conflict includes nations, organization, and persons who—
(A) are part of, or are substantially supporting, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or
(B) have engaged in hostilities or have directly supported hostilities in aid of a nation, organization, or person described in subparagraph (A); and
(4) the President’s authority pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 11 107-40; 50 U.S.C. 1541 note) includes the authority to detain belligerents, including persons described in paragraph (3), until the termination of hostilities.

But, wait… it gets worse. The White House has threatened to veto the bill–but not because of this. In fact, the current draft of Levin-McCain came about because, “according to Senator Carl Levin, it was the Obama administration which told Congress to remove the language in the original bill which exempted American citizens and lawful residents from the detention power.” Josh Gerstein confirms. Rather, the White House wants more flexibility in deciding exactly how it will detain people. The administration’s objections (PDF) expressly state that they believe that the detention authority already “exists under the Authorization for Use of Military Force.” It just wants to be free to chose how to use that power and not be required to use only the military detention option.*

As Adam Serwer puts it in Mother Jones, this bill therefore goes beyond the policy “that was followed almost without exception by the Bush administration: Domestic terrorism arrests are the province of law enforcement, not the military.”

Only a few people come out looking good in this, Mark Udall (D-CO) and Rand Paul (R-KY) chief among them. Udall was the only vote against passing this abomination out of the Democrat-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee and his amendment to strip the detention provisions was voted down 37-61 on Tuesday. Paul, one of the few Republicans to vote “Nay,” quoted James Madison: “The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become instruments of tyranny at home.” We could use a few more like them in both parties–and a lot fewer Lindsey Grahams and Mark Levins.

Supreme Court cases that mightmost certainly would have definitely affirmed that such detentions are unconstitutional (which they manifestly are) have been dodged before simply by remanding detainees over for civilian trials before an adverse ruling could be handed down. If the flexibility the White House wants is to keep playing that game, Congress should indeed clarify the detention powers of the AUMF. But it should be making it clear that that power does not extend to indefinite military confinement of American citizens without trial, not the other way around.

—
* Disappointingly, the White House sounds like the worst caricatures of the Bush administration, going to great lengths in detailing its concerns that the bill “would raise serious and unsettled legal questions and would be inconsistent with the fundamental American principle that our military does not patrol our streets… and would, in certain circumstances, violate constitutional separation of powers principles.” But not so much as a dependent subclause is devoted to the massive Constitutional defect inherent in indefinite detention of American citizens without trial.

Two years ago, South Carolina Boeing workers voted 199-68 to decertify their union. The NLRB has filed suit against the company for choosing to locate a new plant there instead of Washington state. And House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi thinks it’s just fine if those jobs go the way of the dodo if they’re not proper union jobs.

“Do you think it’s right that Boeing has to close down that plant in South Carolina because it’s non union?” asked host Maria Bartiromo. Pelosi’s reply: “Yes.”

The minority leader quickly added that she would rather it simply unionize and stay open. But barring unionization, by Pelosi’s reasoning, it should simply shut down.

Bartiromo followed up by asking if government should be getting involved in such corporate decisions. Pelosi dodged the question by saying “you asked me what I thought and I told you what I thought.” In short, Pelosi strongly supports every citizen’s right to choose–so long as the choices they make are one of which Pelosi approves. Otherwise, not so much.

Long-time Oakland Raiders owner and NFL icon Al Davis has died:

Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis, whose rebellious NFL legend began 60 years ago as an assistant with the Baltimore Colts and was punctuated with a 1992 Pro Football Hall of Fame induction in Canton, has died at 82.

The team’s website released the news Saturday morning, posting a simple tribute with his name in large silver letters above “July 4, 1929-October 8, 2011.” … No cause of death was released, and it was not immediately clear when and where he died.

I’ve had many a harsh word about Al over the years, but today I’ll simply say R.I.P.

Believe it or not, the world of the past was much worse. Violence has been in decline for thousands of years, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in the existence of our species….

These investigations show that, on average, about 15% of people in prestate eras died violently, compared to about 3% of the citizens of the earliest states. Tribal violence commonly subsides when a state or empire imposes control over a territory, leading to the various “paxes” (Romana, Islamica, Brittanica and so on) that are familiar to readers of history.

It’s not that the first kings had a benevolent interest in the welfare of their citizens. Just as a farmer tries to prevent his livestock from killing one another, so a ruler will try to keep his subjects from cycles of raiding and feuding. From his point of view, such squabbling is a dead loss—forgone opportunities to extract taxes, tributes, soldiers and slaves….

Another pacifying force has been commerce, a game in which everybody can win. As technological progress allows the exchange of goods and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of trading partners, other people become more valuable alive than dead. They switch from being targets of demonization and dehumanization to potential partners in reciprocal altruism.

I’ve long thought that the perception that the world is getting worse than in previous generations arises at least in part from the fact that we hear about a lot of tragedies we’d never have known about then. An earthquake across the world that kills hundreds makes the nightly news today. A few centuries ago, if we heard about it at all it would have been months or years later–and wouldn’t have pictures. Now we can follow the tragedy in real time. And, of course, there are a lot more people around to whom such things can happen.

Which is not to say that unrestrained growth of government or even commerce is without its own risks. The newest phase of violence reduction Prof. Pinker identifies is, for instance, a direct result of the collapse of totalitarian communist states. By contrast, China’s one-child policy has created a volatile social environment in which there are millions more men than women, meaning there are vast numbers of of men reaching adulthood and unlikely to find mates. In an earlier era, that would almost certainly have resulted in large scale war. But China’s deep commercial ties to the West make that considerably less likely now.

There are always groups (especially in government and the media) who benefit from the perception that the world is getting more dangerous, not less. And, of course, Prof. Pinker’s conclusions are subject to all of the usual caveats about academic theories and research. But he has provided a healthy dose of perspective.

“A wise man once said — ‘the skill in attending a party is knowing when it’s time to leave.’ We built something extraordinary together. We did this thing. And now we’re going to walk away from it,” frontman Michael Stipe said in a statement on the website.

“I hope our fans realize this wasn’t an easy decision; but all things must end, and we wanted to do it right, to do it our way.”

I admit I’m surprised. Their new album was their best in years. Here’s to the memories:

Jay Carney set the stage last week, saying, “It’s pretty clear that this bridge could benefit from a little repair and renovation.” Saying the bridge is “in such poor condition that it has been labeled functionally obsolete,” the President today demanded immediate passage of his ‘jobs bill’ to put people to work right now. But this kabuki dance is less about bridges than those dastardly Republicans:

“It desperately needs rebuilding, as do substandard roads and bridges all across America,” White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage said. As the two most powerful Republicans in Washington, Speaker Boehner and Senator (Mitch) McConnell can either kill this jobs bill or help the president pass it right away.”

“Instead of looking for every excuse to justify doing nothing about the damaged infrastructure in their states, we believe it’s in their interest and the country’s interest to act as soon as possible and put people back to work.”

If you’re wondering why the second-most powerful Democrat in Washington–Senate Majority Leader Reid, who can’t seem to find time for the bill on the Senate’s calendar–didn’t get a mention, well, just stop. There’s a campaign theme to be developed here.

In the speech, in his usual pick-a-straw-man-and-beat-it-into-flinders fashion, Obama bemoaned opposition to infrastructure spending: “We are better than that. We are smarter than that.” If only that were true of his administration. No competent political operation (IOW, some other operation than this White House) would ever have allowed its principal to do this photo op. But apparently the “accidental” association with his Congressional Republican rivals was just too juicy to pass up. Or even do some basic fact gathering about to make sure it made sense.

For one thing, the river crossing in question is already slated for a new bridge. It’s been in the planning stages for years; the project is currently barely into the public comment phase. In fact, Obama’s own FHWA doesn’t expect it to start construction in 2015 or be completed until 2022.

The President did not explain how his ‘jobs bill’ will alter time so that the project can start creating jobs “right now.”

Worse, Obama, Carney, and Brudnage are flat-out wrong. The I-75 corridor is indeed outdated, but the bridge itself doesn’t actually need repairs:

It’s got decades of good life left in its steel spans. It’s just overloaded. The bridge was built to handle 85,000 cars and trucks a day, which seemed like a lot back during construction in the Nixon era. [Ed. - the bridge opened five years before Nixon was elected President.]

Today, the bridge sort of handles more than 150,000 vehicles a day with frequent jam-ups.

So, plans are not to repair or replace the Brent Spence Bridge. But to build another bridge nearby to ease the loads.

His first “stimulus” bill could, perhaps, have been used to repair some of the hundreds of bridges nationwide that actually do need repair–if he had required the states to use the extra money for such purposes as a condition of accepting it rather than using it instead of their own money. But he didn’t, so they treated it as found money and funded other things that, apparently, had a higher priority (i.e., keeping public sector unions happy while infrastructure employment actually declined). So now, knowing that he can’t even count on all of his own caucus in the Senate to vote for it, he uses a bridge that doesn’t need fixing as a prop to castigate Boehner and McConnell for not pushing his bill anyway.

All in all, a pretty typical day for our gaffe-prone, increasingly-ridiculous President. And a near-perfect metaphor for his entire, intended-to-fail “jobs bill.”

Shocking news, I know.

Look, this comes down, basically, to fringy anti-vax panic, plus the idea we shouldn’t inoculate against STDs. People get weird about this.

But we’re not vaccinating against STDs. If this were just HPV, no vaccine would have been developed, let alone put on the list of “mandatory” (with opt-out) list.

HPV is something that half the population has had. Most don’t even know they’ve had it– you get it, most people don’t even know they’ve gotten it, then it goes away.

It’s a fairly trivial “STD,” except for one thing: It causes 70% of all cervical cancer.

That’s why a vaccine was developed — not to protect against a minor (and incredibly widespread) STD whose direct symptoms are fairly trivial, but to protect against the deadly cancer it causes late in life.

This is being demagogued as some “Pro-Sex” STD vaccination. But no one would have bothered to make a vaccine for it all — it’s pretty minor, as far as primary effects — except for that “deadly cervical cancer” part.

It’s an anti-cancer vaccine. Period.

And apparently, in some quarters, this is now a riotously controversial initiative.

RTWT. Ace recounts the unethical, dishonest roots of the autism/vaccine hoax. And then proceeds to open up with both barrels on Bachmann, who apparently decided last night to up the ante on her already well-established loopiness by declaring herself a member of the certifiably-insane fringe.

There’s room in the population for a small number of unvaccinated free riders. A small percentage of people who don’t get their children vaccinated because of religious objections or simple ignorance won’t have an especially deleterious affect on the rest of us. But the rise, since The Lancet‘s execrable autism lie, of the anti-vaccine crusaders has already begun to push us past that point. Chief anti-vaccine loony toon Jenny McCarthy actually says she’s fine with some diseases coming back if it means we’ll start making “safe” vaccines. Despite the total and complete lack of any causal connection ever having been established between vaccines and autism–except in her own delusions.

McCarthy’s just a celebrity best known (before her anti-vaccination activism) for peeling off her clothes. But now we have a woman who thinks she should be President of the United States who subscribes to this criminal stupidity. I realize that she’s getting desperate now that her boomlet is collapsing. It was always obvious that it eventually would, so I’ve mostly ignored her up to now. Even so, and despite my usual preference for avoiding the so-and-so-said-something-silly cycle of blog posting, this is simply beyond the pale.

The last of the air can’t finish leaking out of that balloon soon enough. How is it even possible she’s still getting invited to debates while guys like Gary Johnson and Thad McCotter aren’t?!?