A previous entry highlighted past outstanding instances beyond satire. Here, I'll put some of my favorite online examples of satire. I know they're old, but some people may have missed them the first time around.

• The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation
• Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide
• Open Letter to Dr. Laura [on Biblically-forbidden acts]

(Unfortunately, www.blackpeoplelikeus.com is no longer online, not even through the Wayback Machine.)

Let me know if I've missed your favorite.

There are now a set of quotations for the site, shown at random on the bottom right of the screen. You can add your own quotes by selecting "create content" on the left, then choosing "quotes".

I just made a donation to put the above graphic "on billboards, including one outside of Grover Norquist's office at Americans for Tax Reform where 100 influential conservative leaders hold a weekly strategy session each Wednesday." One has already been placed across the street from Grover Norquist's home. You can find more pictures and details at Daily Kos. I was particularly amused by the sign "Make Levees, Not War".

The title of this post comes from this editorial cartoon, which I found through WorkingForChange. A separate campaign provides stickers and posters on the same theme.

From my earlier posts, you might think I oppose all aspects of creationism. That is not the case...

One of the hallmarks of creationists is that no scientific evidence can cause them to reject their belief. In other words, creationism is not falsifiable (and therefore not science). For example, when presented with fossils millions of years old, creationists say that God created those fossils when he created the rest of the world five thousand years ago.

I think that's a neat theory. By the same reasoning, it is also possible that God created the world yesterday, or even five seconds ago, creating us with false memories of a prior history.

This is not idle philosophizing but has been of practical use in my life. Whenever I have trouble making a decision, I consider the possibility that I was just created. For example, I have months worth of snail mail for the former owners of my house, which I haven't forwarded yet. Thinking ordinarily, I'd conclude:

• I've waited so long that forwarding the mail would just call attention to my lateness.
• I've waited so long that there's no hurry to forward the mail. Maybe I'll do it next week.

On the other hand, if I imagine that the universe was just created, it's much clearer to me that I should just send the mail on ASAP.

This is also helpful when facing criticism. I shouldn't feel bad about the negative code review because I didn't actually create the material being criticized. I was just created seconds ago with the false memory of having created it. With this viewpoint, there's no reason to feel defensive, and one can evaluate and incorporate suggestions without shame.

(Sorry to include something so positive on so cynical a site. Perhaps I should add a glurge tag.)

Have your own ideas what's beyond satire? You can submit stories to the site by clicking create content under the Navigation menu on the left. Now, you don't even need an account to do so.

If you prefer email, send ideas to me at my first name ("ellen") at this domain name ("beyondsatire.us"). You can also use the feedback form. (I'm obscuring my email address to foil spam robots. We all knew we'd be battling robots in the 21st century, but I didn't quite picture it this way.)

In yesterday's New York Times, Frank Rich shows in Message: I Care About the Black Folks that Bush is the master of going beyond satire. He begins the article with words I hope are true:

Once Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard again. He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil salesman. Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the American psyche as long as L. Frank Baum's mythic tornado, has similarly unmasked George W. Bush.

He goes on:

The most odious image-mongering, however, has been Mr. Bush's repeated deployment of African-Americans as dress extras to advertise his "compassion."....Some of these poses are re-enacted in the "Hurricane Relief" photo gallery currently on display on the White House Web site. But this time the old magic isn't working. The "compassion" photos are outweighed by the cinéma vérité of poor people screaming for their lives.

(I added links above not in the original Frank Rich essay.) Even after the flood, public relations remained the White House's priority:

Brazenly enough, Mr. Rove has been officially put in charge of the reconstruction effort. The two top deputies at FEMA remaining after Michael Brown's departure, one of them a former local TV newsman, are not disaster relief specialists but experts in P.R., which they'd practiced as advance men for various Bush campaigns. Thus The Salt Lake Tribune discovered a week after the hurricane that some 1,000 firefighters from Utah and elsewhere were sent not to the Gulf Coast but to Atlanta, to be trained as "community relations officers for FEMA" rather than used as emergency workers to rescue the dying in New Orleans. When 50 of them were finally dispatched to Louisiana, the paper reported, their first assignment was "to stand beside President Bush" as he toured devastated areas.

The below picture, from the The Salt Lake Tribune, shows frustrated firefighters receiving useless FEMA training:

The photo at the top of this post, which I found at Snopes, is artificial but seems increasingly true in spirit. I am in awe of the unknown satirist who created it when I thought this situation beyond satire.

I received an email nominally from GoDaddy.com asking for my account information. Since I have registered domain names through GoDaddy, I looked at it closely and thought it an above-average phishing attempt. I went to GoDaddy.com (typing in the URL myself, of course) to see how to report the email and found:

If you believe you have received a fraudulent Go Daddy email, report it to us. Forward the email, including the header information, or the site's URL to abuse@godaddy.com.

I dutifully forwarded the email with complete headers. Moments later, I got the following bounce:

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

abuse@godaddy.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 12): 554
The message was rejected because it contains prohibited virus or spam content

Well, duh...that's the whole reason I forwarded it.

This is the first of a series of posts about my life as a professor. Back in 1997, I had an exhaustive and exhausting job search, which I wrote up as Tips for a Massive Academic Job Search. (A more interesting title that I considered was "The Only Job Search Guide that Advises You to Call Prospective Employers in the Middle of the Night and Tells You What to Do If Your Mucus is Green".) The complete document is likely only of interest to people looking for academic jobs, so I'll only give a summary and some highlights here.

I interviewed at both research universities and liberal arts colleges because I wasn't sure which environment I'd prefer. This was unusual for an MIT student, almost all of whom go to research universities or industry. When I first mentioned an interest in a top liberal arts college, my then advisor reacted by telling me he was sure I could find a job at a research university. He didn't understand that watching him and the other junior faculty at MIT made me question that goal. Specifically, I saw how stressed assistant professors were, having to work all the time and worrying about whether to get tenure, and how women in particular had to choose between children and tenure.

A question I asked all junior faculty was what hours they worked. I ruled out one research university when a professor answered, "This week I've been getting up at 6:30 [AM] and going home at 2 AM, but this is an unusually tough week. Normally, I go home at 1 AM."

I liked to ask administrators whether any women who became a mother while on the tenure-track had gotten tenure. When no data was available on that, I would sometimes ask about the retention of female faculty. Of course, nobody told me that I couldn't get tenure if I had a baby. One president said, "I don't see why that would be a problem. That's just three months out of six years." (Presumably, he would have told a prospective father that it's just fifteen minutes.) While it's good to ask administrators questions, you should take their answers with a grain of salt. For example, it's fun to ask administrators how important teaching is ("very important") and to report the answer back to professors, giving them a good laugh.

I accepted an offer from Mills College, a women's liberal arts college near San Francisco. Even though Mills is considered less prestigious than many of the research universities I interviewed at, I felt I would be happier somewhere I wouldn't have to neglect or exploit my students. Instead, I'd be rewarded for what I considered important: high-quality teaching, encouraging girls and women in computer science, and remaining an active researcher, although not necessarily overseeing large projects or grants. I'll write about how things turned out at Mills in later entries, but the short answer is that I'm still there. :-)

• Bush told incompetent head of FEMA, whom he appointed, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" [source]
• Halliburton subsidiary and other firms with Bush ties get lucrative contracts for rebuilding flood-damaged region [source] (two years after The Bush Crony Full-Employment Act of 2003)
• Suburban police blocked bridge out of New Orleans [source]
• Bush visit to New Orleans causes delay in evacuation [source]
• FEMA for kidz Rap [suggested by Andrea]

I could go on and on...

This week, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is running a series "Evolution, Schmevolution". The first episode was great. If you get Comedy Central, I recommend watching The Daily Show more than ever. (In case you missed the first episode, it will be rebroadcast Tuesday morning and afternoon.)