And from there, to infinity and beyond... - 01 August 2008

Welcome. You’ve got news. (And that joke will be obsolete soon enough.)

Ah, the international stage. Iraqi officials visit Walter Reed hospital to thank American troops for liberating them from Saddam, Israeli prime ministers tender their resignation, effective after the next primary, CIA officials travel to Pakistan to try and get the government to stop Pakistani intelligence people's ties to unsavory elements in the country, the air quality in China may differ from the official account,

Domestically, placing intelligence capacity into the hands of private corporations is just asking for security breaches, selling out to other interested parties, and private companies doing illegal things in the name of the United States government while lacking accountability to the same entity, according to Chalmers Johnson. Has the government sold you out to Blackwater or other private companies? And how can you find out, if it’s all cloaked under the “national security” sursanure? I mean, what if there was a combat division totally devoted to the development of a mass elation chemical? Or instead of fighting them with military might, the United States has been buying off insurgents? (Not to mention, they could buy off a lot of us for a simnilar price not to engage in our own vices...) And at the same time, is adding on more missile defense capability. (Oh, and apparently the current administrator desrves praise for withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, but needs to expand into outer space weapons and defense platforms...)

Additionally, we have at three examples of the “Tase first, ask questions later” mentality - a 16 year-oldwho fell off a bridge and broke his back was tasered 19 times for failing to comply with their orders to get up before the responding officers got a clue. As an excuse, the police said that the teenager was saying things like “kill cops, shoot cops”, despite obviously being unable to actually get up and do anything. “Refusal to comply” is quite the catchword now in justifying any sort of abuse by police officers, especially when tasers are deployed, an idea that suits the General well. (Source material for this example) Example two is tasering at a wedding reception, apparently after the party got too far out of hand for the owner of the gallery where it was being held. So the police came to break the party up, and according to witness accounts, started threatening to arrest people, which only incensed a probably intoxicated group further, and then the tasers came out and people were in squad cards. So I suppose it isn’t just rocking teenagers and colelge students that the police try to shut down. The last example - someone obviously impaired gets tasered repeatedly to "bring them under control" - except it kills him, and tasering someone doused in gasoline, giving them just the spark they needed to complete the job. And again, in all of these accounts, we see “resisting arrest” or the apparent need to use a stun gun to make someone docile and/or subdued. You know, despite the purpose of a taser being to disrupt soeone’s muscle movement skills, which will likely results in odd spasms.

The House of Representatives passed a formal apology for enslavement of Africans and Jim Crow laws designed to keep them down after they had won freedom. This is the first formal apology for the period.

Let the jokes commence - a person named Anthony Hopkins is under arrest for murdering his wife and then keeping her in the freezer. Oh, and he’s also got sexual abuse charges leveled against him, too.

Off in the opinion matters, Annie Shattuck finds Monsato's decision to raise their corn seed prices contributing to a potentially more fragile food supply while also squeezing more profit from small farmers.

Arthur C. Brooks says the country isn't really mad about high gas and dropping house values, using “outrage” as the standard for whether or not someone’s truly mad at their situation. Not everyone is constantly outraged at the way things are, he says, so we’re actually still very happy to live in America, and we should appreciate all the things America does right, like not spiking high unemployment or having public services shut off. The numbers will say anything you want them to, and if you’re asking about goods that are necessary, and that we have no real control on price over, then people may have passed beyond anger into resignation. They’re still mad, but they’re not outraged anymore because it doesn’t have a point. Walter E. Williams thinks we should all turn our aggravation against Democrats and environmentalists because they’re insisting on environmentally sound solutions, rather than going forward with drilling until we have enough domestic oil to satisfy our thirst.

The WSJ in Europe accuses Germany of letting business interests trump their proper political position of sanctions, which is fairly mild compared to the headline “Berlin [heart] Iran.” Could we get a little bit better accuracy in our headlines, please?

It must have been important - three opinions in the WSJ about the collapse of the Doha trade round, all of them saying “Protectionists are ruining our global economy!” and “The end of free trade may be near!” Thus, I wonder - just what actually happened? Is it that a bad deal was rejected for being a bad deal, or are we supposed to believe it’s the beginning of something significantly more sinister, like the collapse of the dollar, then America, ending in economic debt slavery to Europe and the Euro?

In more familiar matters (at least, for the opinion columns) Leslie Sacks accuses the world, liberals, and some part of the United States as being appeasers who haven't learned anything about when to stand up and stomp someone into the ground, and Debroah Weiss believes that words have power, and thus all thsoe blunt and un-PC words should be used to describe al-Qaeda and their ideological allies, thinking it has greater accuracy, because the groups use those words themselves. Even if, say, they’re deliberately trying to make people think the majority of a certain religious group are in complete alignment and endorsement of their radicalized agenda? (By the way, it doesn’t help whem members of your own media group perpetuate this belief and look for statistics and other studies to confirm it.)

Last out of general opinions, Adbusters decries the rise of the "hipster" - the vampire that sucks on countercultures, trying to be like them, but draining them of their meaning and turning them into vapid shells of themselves. The prevalence of hipsters spells doom for civilzation, Adbusters says, because it means we’ve stopped innovating and creating and are just sucking other people dry.

Turd Blossom opens the candidate opinions repeating the fibs about Senator Obama's supposed missteps in Iraq, including the “Obama has to admit the surge worked, or he’s a liar” and “Obama blew off the troops for his own personal gain”. He’s a bit more generous to Senator McCain’s campaign and Iraq difficulties.

The other side does not escape scrutiny. Daniel Henninger wonders what Senator McCain's major malfunction is, because of the Senator’s turbine-spinning position changes on taxes and attitude that the Democrats will implode at the last moment.

The Science and Technology department produces another mystery of the Antikythera Mechanism solved - it's not only good for eclipses, but for determining when the Ancient Olympics were due up. Coooooool. Going from past to future, fundingand bandidth to develop the next generation of the Internet, the first tele-ultrasound, giving us at least a proof of concept of robotic examination-over-satellite. How’s the surgery-by-wire projects coming?

Plus, cheap fabrication in three dimensions, ways of chemically disconnecting the brain mechanism that associates trauma response with past bad experiences, a vaccine against the Black Plague (just in case of bioterror), and The cheesesteak egg roll? Huh. The future is a strange place, indeed.

Last for tonight, some stamps from the heights of runaway hyperinflation, with denominations in the millions and billions. Staying in the past, but potentially with viewpoints on the future, The Orwell Diaries will start on August 9th and run for four years. It will be a serialization of Orwell's daily diary entries, coinciding with a big anniversary of Orwell’s books about dystopian futures. Perhaps there will be some prophetic writing about the potential nightmare that movies based on the Foundation series will be.

At the very tail end, currently, the world's oldest joke - and yes, it's a fart joke.

The World Is Your Oyster - 01 August 2008

New month, new feelings of joy and grandeur - well, that and the summer reading stuff comes to an end, but we’ve got to have our fall storytime stuff in by the middle of this month, and it will begin again at the end of next month. And thus, the cycle continues. Wheeeeeeeeee! In one more month (and a couple days), I’ll have made it to one year employed. That’s weird by itself, because I was starting to feel that I’d be on the job coaster for quite a while by this point last year. Funny how things change.

International news has its own fun things to deal with - Iraqi journalists working for Reuters detained by the military, held without charge or public reasons as to why he was detained. That whole “freedom of the press” thing goes up in smoke when “security” matters start horning in, doesn’t it? If the journalist was, say, taking pictures of a clandestine operation, then the military at least deserves to tell someone that much, be it Reuters or the public at large. Arbitrary actions without justifications make us all nervous, no matter where we are.

We’re supposed to cheer for this - torus of duty for Iraq and Afghanistan will return to their regular 12 months, after a significant extended period of time at 15 months. No word yet, of course, on whether soldiers returning will be able to have their proper amounts of downtime and cooling-off before being sent back.

The Non-Aligned faction of the United Nations has endorsed Iran's right to pursue nuclear energy. It’s reasonable to say that all countries should be able to develop nuclear energy for peaveful, civilian purposes. I can understand the paranoia from governments about nuclear weapon development, because often times the first true admission of weapons capability is the detonation of a weapon. Are people really that worried that some sort of religious fanaticism will override the very real logical conclusion that attacking someone else with nuclear weapons is suicidal, unless you have enough to obliterate them and their counterstrike... and all the other things that will be thrown your way from their allies and others? Seriously - India is signing on to inspection by the IAEA, even with their weapons tests. And they could “afford” to lose people if they did shoot nukes.

Psychopathy on a Canadian bus, as one passenger stabs and then beheads another. Ick. In possibly happier, although probably as morbid, other news of Canada, another proposal to make Ontarians organ donors unless they explicitly opt-out. The need for organs and tissues is always great. Having an opt-out scheme would certainly help that, and I’m sure those that had big enough objections to the matter would opt-out. Part of the problem is probably that organs have to be harvested from cadavers soon after death. While it would be nice to be able to get through a funeral service before the doctors came in, I’m guessing that isn’t possible. Would more people be organ donors if you could get through the services first?

Domestic news starts with a reminder - if leaving the country, take nothing electronic with you, as the government has the right to demand a search of your electronics upon re-entry, can confiscate them for the duration of this search, decide when and if they want to give you your material make, can make copies of all your data to send for analysis, and requires absolutely no suspicion that you have something contraband or illegal to do so. And they say they’re not infringing on someone’s privacy to do so, either. No doubt they are doing it to protect us from the Terrible Secret of Space.

The Federal Reserve is extending its emergency credit program and its swap-loans-for-Treasury-securities program through the beginning of next year, continuing to bail out banks and investment houses that are in trouble because of the overextended reach of their credit. AmSam is definitely not happy with this turn of events, considering it a "smash-and-grab" with the taxpayer's dollar being stolen from them to bail out companies and banks that should rightly fold. If that happens, then what happens to the multitude of mortgages and potentially pension investments - do they all automatically fail, or are they bought out by others at bargain-sale prices in the nature of capitalism by those who didn’t overeach? Just how much of the electronic dolalrs and cents evaporate if all the things that are supposed to collapse do?

Hrm. This is definitely a story of preferential tratment. First Pam wondered why certain male aides of Alabama Attorney General Troy King were getting big pay increases and titles for which they was not qualified, with rumors that the AG was playing favorites to that point. There were rumors that King had dalliances with aides, but Pam sidestepped the issue, considering it irrelevant. When King's wife caught him in bed with another man, they lost the rumor status, and those favors start looking really suspicious. Naturally, the scandal is of interest to the General, who enjoys covering cases where the anti-sex Republicans are getting plenty of it outside of their marriages. I guess I still don’t really understand why people insist on trying to repress that part of themselves. It can’t be good for their psyches.

Ah, and speaking of the Anti-Sex League, first it was thinking about classifying chemical birth control methods as abortifacents, now we find out that the proposed draft regulation would deny federal funds to any clinic, hospital, etc. that didn't accommodate a worker that opted-out of treatments that offended their conscience. “In general, the Department is concerned that the development of an environment in the health care industry that is intolerant of certain religious beliefs, ethnic and cultural traditions, and moral convictions may discourage individuals from underrepresented and diverse backgrounds from entering health care professions”, according to the draft document. In medicine, though, an objection like that could potentially mean that someone who thinks homosexuals are sinners and deserve to die could refuse to treat them. Or an anti-choice doctor could refuse to permit or authorize brith control, an abortion in a case where the mother’s life would be clearly threatened by the birth, or even medicine in general, if they truly believe that only faith can heal someone. I hope this regualtion is voted down by HHS, so that the public can be secure in their faith that medical practitioners will do their jobs, rather than having to worry about whether the only doctor for fifty miles around won’t let you get the service or prescription you need. (Or that the doctor will write it, but the pharmacy tech at the closest drugstore won’t fill it and will stop just short of calling you a dirty whore for bringing it to him/her.) Naturally, enterprising individuals have conceived campaign posters for the new possible regulation.

A gent who hacked the Pentagon several times from off-the-shelf equipment in London has lost a bid to avoid extradition - the account certainly paints him as the worst of both basement geek and black-hat hacker, looking for information about extraterrestrials and trying to show off the weak safeguards and security of the military network. Potential maximum sentence is 80 years and about 1.5 million USD in fines. And that’s just one man. After all, The Storm Worm, apparently on the rise again, could do a lot worse with less effort.

Just before the federal government was planning to move in and arrest him for the 2001 postal anthrax distribution scare, Bruce Ivins committed suicide. Ivins was working on vaccines for anthrax that would work even in mixed-strain attacks, and the article suggests the possibility that Ivins did the attack as a way of getting human test subjects to test new drugs and vaccines on. The BBC article has more information.

In the opionionated realms, more "victory in Iraq, but we're not out of the woods yet" cautious optimism, which appears to be fueled even more by the continued removal and redeployment of American troops outside the country. David B. Rivkin and Lee A. Casey tell us that the military comission trials at Guantanamo are fair and accord the most rights to enemy combatants in history, while also expressing confidence that the trial will find Mr. Hamdan guilty of actually being an enemy combatant.

Back in the country, the Wall Street Journal accuses the Democratic leadership of stoenwalling everything so as not to lose a vote on domestic drilling, to the detriment of the American people, of course, and furthermore, this is apparently by design, because Demcorats want high energy prices to convince everyone to switch over to environmentalism and alternative energy. So this whole “reduce dependence on foreign oil” thing from conservatives isn’t hypocritical, but despite all the information taht says “effects won’t be felt for a while”, it’s still the Dems fault for not drilling, and it will probably be painted as the Dems fault when gas prices don’t immediately drop back to their $1.50/gal level. At this point, though, why not put some serious investment into really removing a significant dependence on foreign oil and investing in clean domestic renewable technology?

Michael Medved tries to convince us that it's the decline of middle-class values that's causing the decline of middle-class Americans, using the sales records of Grand Theft Auto IV as his proof. Because so many people bought GTA IV, he reasons, the problem isn’t economic cabals and corporations trying to squeeze every cent possible out of the working American, it’s that people spend so much time in the violence-ridden, anti-authoritarian world of Grand Theft Auto, which erodes their morals and good judgment and makes them more likely to divorce or have children out of wedlock, incuring the financial ruin that both of those scenarios bring. Yep, if people just got married and stayed married and had good Christian, err, middle-class values, and shunned the entertainment of things like Grand Theft Auto IV, then we’d all be just fine in the face of outsourcing, increased corporate profits paying inflated executive salaries, rising prices on necessities and just-about-necessary luxuries such as insurance, all couched within a system that tells the corporations to make as much profit as possible, ignore rules in specific ways as long as they can, and then tells the individual worker that if they haven’t managed to find a way of making enough money, that’s their problem for being lazy, even if they’re working three jobs.

Probably in a related way, but I haven’t figured out the connection yet, Larry Elder prints a letter he received about someone who took a beating at CNN's hands because he apparently didn't fit the mold, and his response. I’m still trying to assess the character of the letter. I think it was a complaint about how CNN’s panel didn’t listen to what he was saying, that black people should fear more from other blacks, and that drug addiction should be treated as a health problem, rather than a law enforcement problem, in their rush to discuss their preferred topic, the racism of police and the legacy of slavery that starts blacks off further behind. Elder’s response is to point out there aren’t many special programs on the plights of immigrants and immigrant-Americans, despite their having to start new and build up, so the country should move beyond race issues for blacks, too. All anyone has to do is work hard, be smart, and keep their families together, rather than being a victim and waiting for the government and its faux-benevolent welfare and attempts to make society less racist help them. So Larry is basically saying, “Get over it. Don’t expect the government to fix anything, or for anyone to listen to you”, even though his friend has a legitimate complaint that a major news network basically ignored what he had to say in favor of what they wanted to say. The whole affair doesn’t make that much sense to me. Help?

More sensibly, Ying Ma suggests that if the current administrator wants better results in his freedom agenda in Southeast Asia, he should promote economic freedom with (or maybe a bit more) than political freedom, because many people, as he should know from his own country, are willing to live in a politicially repressive state, so long as their economic freedoms are not infringed upon. Perhaps as a countermove to that idea, and as a way of re-establishing newpapers as important, Dan Gilmor suggests newspapers open up their archives for free on their websites, stop pretending to be the omniscient oracles, and turn the newspaper site into a community meeting point through editorial expansion. Embracing the new media type, basically.

In candidate matters, Dick Morris and Eileen McGann think that Obama's unpopularity with women over 40 is a sign of weakness, because these women are apparently unsure about what the Senator does or promises, and something that sounds like “well, he’s black, and so they can’t really relate to him at all” without saying that, promoting the old white man as the familiar and comfortable, and thus preferable, choice. While familiar is nice, considering the way the last administration and legislature ahs been run, I don’t think familiarity is a strong selling point for this election. Theda Skocpol thinks Senator Obama could use some innovative ads, focusing on what Seantor McCain really will do, rather than getting ensnared in a racism trap - hammer Senator McCain on the issues, in other words, and hope that it counteracts the sometimes subtle “He’s black, you know” coming from the McCain campaign, among other untrue statements.

Art time - how about 19th-century scrolls of ghosts? This helps explain why Japanese survival-horror games are all pretty creepy - they’ve had centuries of practice. Now, we do things like build skeletons out of cassette tapes.

And then, science and technology - a study that purports religion is a useful way of combating disease, because the religious get isolated and stop catching things from their neighbors. The reasoning for this claim is that there are both more religions and diseases in hotter climates, so the religions must have been useful in stopping people from getting diseases from each other.

Getting more toward actual science, a drug that could potentially mimc the effects of exercise, boosting the results of an exercise program chemically. More research and talking about what makes smart people smart, developing gravity tractors to subtly push objects on collision course with Terra out of the way, new nanomaterials to make plastics even better, a cheap catalyst for hydrogen production, which could mean solar cell energy can be stored, if the solar cells are retooled to provide energy for the water-splitting catalyst, with the free hydrogen stored in fuel cells or other such places.

Last for tonight, peering under the hood of trolls and the lulz crew, trying to figure out why they do the things they do. The standard excuse, that trools will go away if you stop feeding them, is tempered with the reality of what can happen from sustained trolling, and what happens if trolling starts mixing with more black-hat type activities. It offers no complete pat solutions, and through the course of the article, I was still stuck trying to figure out why somone would want to cause capricious harm to someone they don’t necessarily know well. As a warning to guard oneself, like the interviewed troll, I suppose it could work, despite it being the solution that takes a sledgehammer to the task of swatting a fly. I guess it really is about having a laugh at someone else’s expense.

Just for laughs (and some very NSFW langauge) - start your own misadventure. And while you’re there, peruse Flabbergastedly for pictures appropriate and wholly inappropriate for your situation, whatever it may be.