Let's get to it, then - 19 September 2008

Internationally, after dealing with tainted rice, a new more moe character has appeared on the bags to help sell some.

North Korea is threatening to restart their nuclear reactor, trying to pressure the United States into removing them from the state-sponsored terror list. If she can build a coalition, Tzipi Livni might become the leader of Israel. Russia's actions have NATO members worried that the Article 5 provision may not actually hold.

And now, as expected, the backlash against the Saudi cleric who said that it was okay to kill the owners of television stations that carried "immoral" programming.

Domestically, after apparently accepting to appear along with Senator Clinton, Governor Palin will not be present at the "Stop Iran Now" rally. Speaker Pelosi says that everyone, not just the current administration, deserves credit for the lack of attacks since 11 September, a position with which Charles Krauthammer disagrees, and further believes that the historical legacy of the current administrator will be far more positive than it is now.

The SEC has temporarily banned the practice of short-selling, or betting against a company's survival. Additionally, science confirms that as individuals, people can be rational actors, but they often aren't, especially in markets. Thus, boom, bust, and panic are all possible.

The cracker who compromised Governor Palin's e-mail account has explained some of how he did it, through social engineering and research. Thus, he managed to answer the “secret question” and change the Governor’s password.

A record number of people applied to become citizens of the United States in 2007, according to figures published by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. The reason for the rush was a planned increase in fees.

Members of an Army Brigade will be assigned to be a rapid-response team in case of natural disasters or terror attacks. Isn’t this why we have such things as the National Guard? Oh, wait, they’re shipped somewhere else, too, aren’t they? Either way, this is also happening during the downtime that the soldiers are getting in between tours of the other wars. And they might be called in to help with crowd control and civil unrest... is that illegal in some way? Additionally, the AP has confirmed that photos released to the media of two soldiers had been digitally altered. Upon confirmation, the AP issued an elimination order for the photos.

In non-candidate opinions, Neal Boortz continues with the idea that lawmaking decisions are the real cause for the credit collapse, Terence Jeffrey decries the bill passed in the House as a way of making it so that nobody can drill anywhere, a position the WSJ concurs on.

Oliver North dismisses the United Nations as a place that revels and enjoys attacking America, putting "the worst" of the world's leaders up there to spout as much anti-Americanism as they want. Marvin Olasky tells us that we should befriend Muslims and be patient as they fight us over things long in the past, so that we can convert them to Christianity through talking up Jesus more to them. Diana West is panicking that Europe will slowly be converted into a politically Islamic bloc.

T.X. Hammes on why a surge strategy will not necessarily work for Afghanistan - Pakistan may be the real problem, for one thing. With regard to that, William S. Lind notes Senator Obama's plan is much like a surge strategy, and thus, will not likely be effective. Even worse, based on night light patterns, the surge's effectiveness might be due to Sunni Arabs deserting the high-violence areas, which was then followed by the surge to keep it down.

Elsewhere, the leader of the PLO believes peace is still possible, if only Israel would actually cooperate, R.W. Johnson lays out a plan to wrest control of Zimbabwe from Robert Mugabe, the writers of a Burmese news service find themselves under DDoS, suspect the ruling junta is trying to silence them, and one of the opposition leaders in Russia blames Vladimir Putin for Russia's economic decline

In very candidate opinions, Mike Gallagher gets the ball rolling by accusing the Democratic Party of having abandoned civility and shown their true colors. Stepping down to the level of the Republican campaign, you say? Nah. Even with the examples given (and how nice of you to select the protesters at the RNC as your average Democratic Party supporter. But calling them Democrat anarchists is a contradiction.), it still sounds much more highbrow than official Republican campaign ads. Michelle Malkin joins the bandwagon, as apparently the Senator’s exhortation to get his supporters out and to be a bit more in-your-face as carte blanche for Democratic supporters to do all sorts of dirty tricks that Malkin and Gallagher are certain that the Obama campaign has already done or will do. Already, they’re trying to link the Palin e-mail hack to Senator Obama, despite the fact that it would be such an obvious breach of ethics, like, say, Watergate. Rush Limbaugh claims Senator Obama is quoting him out-of-context in the latest advertisement tying bites made by the comedian to John McCain’s immigration policy.

Peggy Noonan believes this election will come down to a decision about whether or not people believe their candidate can tackle the problems, and thus the finger-pointing and blaming and such is hurting both candidates because neither one is trying to convince us they’re the best, but to convince us the other one is worse than them. Adding many more voices to that kind of work, Women Against Sarah Palin, where the VP choice continues to drag Senator McCain’s electability down.

The very best opinion seen today, however, is Glenn Greenwald, noting that when one of their own gets hacked, suddenly the Republicans and the conservatives who have been enthusiastically cheering for the privacy of Americans to be taken away are very concerned about an illegal, privacy-breaching act. As Greenwald points out, by the logic of the last several years, if Palin has nothing to hide, why are so many people concerned about her privacy? For all we know, she’s a terrorist-in-training and this hack could have exposed her plan. And then it would have been totally justified to have broken into her account without a warrant. Right? You can’t have it both ways - either everyone’s a terrorist, needs surveillance, and Big Borther should assume his place as the Fearless Leader, or everyone has a guarantee that their private documents and correspondence will remain so unless required to divulge them through a legal court order. Because no one person, tool, computer, or aggregate thereof can accurately pick the terrorists with one-hundred percent accuracy. And if you’re going to arrest the cracker who broke in, then perhaps you should be arresting the people who authorize and execute wiretaps, surveillance, and cracking without warrants (and with no indication that they will actually get one, either.)

In science and technology, a rare combination of common factors led to a woman having a stroke during her orgasm, sodium-in-steel attempts to replicate Terra's magnetic field and analyze it, radios that adjust their mode based on their surroundings, finding a way to make even hot air be able to cool computer server racks, and several excellent images of the Large Hadron Collider and its components.

Winding down, a lot of free education available from the universities of the country. No credit, necessarily, but you could certainly teach yourself, say, engineering from Stanford. Or get information about what brilliant minds at Google think the future of many things will be.

Last for tonight, in a happy sort of way, the NYT looks into the Goth subculture. And I’m sure the Goths are laughing at the square around trying to understand them.

And very last, in a Worst Person in the World sort of way, every librarian or adult who has read a YA novel - congratulations, you're a pedophile, to some degree. My professional self says, “Ouch. The circ stats and program attendance is so nosediving when this gets out. And I guess it explains why librarians are all privacy advocates - we’re trying to hide our rampant pedophilia.” Never mind this particular stupidity, the overall theme of the piece, “Stop classifying books as YA” (despite his insistence that his point is we should stop writing YA books) is pretty well shot on sight, because the reason YA exists is because there are readers that want books aimed for their demographic and that deal with issues specific to that demographic. Perhaps in some earlier life, once turning thirteen, one could jump all the way up to the adult section, but these days, culturally speaking, there’s the YA period. Really, though, good books are good books, regardless of labeling. No adult should feel that reading YA is pedophilic, no YA reader should feel that adult books are beyond them, and neither should feel weird about checking back in with the E and J books, because there’s still a lot of funny stuff being published there. And, like, Harry Potter was a J book for the first four incarnations. So there must be some serious stuff going on in JK’s legions.

Work-work! - 20 September 2008

A germ of an idea appears and begins, and much like larva art, for some, it's beautiful, and for others, it's quite ugly. Depending on how one views one's path through the multiverses, that decision may have some effects... or none at all. (I like the idea of only a few major narrative points generating branches, with the creatures in this branch of the multiverse actively contributing toward choosing the nxt big decision. Makes sliding around the various branches much easier, if one could do it.)

And thus follows the news.

On the international scale, police banned an anti-Islamification rally in Germany before it was scheduled to begin, citing the behavior of counterdemonstrators creating a public safety issue. The rally was to protest the approval of building a large mosque in the country.

a truck drove into the Islamabad Marriot and exploded, killing more than forty and wounding at least two hundred fifty. Is Pakistan the new front for the Concept War?

Domestically, Mark Foley, the male Congresscreature that sent racy e-mails and IMs to male teenage pages will likely not be facing charges, as the investigation against him concludes. Meaning, sure, he sent all that stuff, but he didn't have any "inappropriate contact" with the pages, so there's nothing to charge him with. He already resigned his position, so I suppose that's all the damage there will be, aside from his reputation.

Hurricane Ike uncovers an old, currently unknown ship, possibly dating to the Civil War era.

Senator Leahy, targeted by the antrax attack in 2001, disputes the findings of the FBI that Dr. Ivins worked alone on the plan. Of course, since a significant amount of the case work, like who can generate anthrax, is classified, most of the details that the Senator wants to know will probably be available only in closed sessions, so we'll never know the complete truth. It could be that Dr. Ivins was working along, but with the way the investigation has been handled up to this point, the conclusions drawn by the FBI will probably always be viewed as suspect.

Talking yet more about the upcoming election, the mainstream media wastes ink and paper talking about how Senator Obama is now the candidate people would watch a football game with. There's a very slow news day somewhere. As a refresher, Sam Harris on why electing someone just like you is a bad idea for politics, because most of the people just like you aren't really qualified to be President or Vice, and that the last eight years really should have taught the populace that the candidate you want to have a beer with is probably not the candidate you want running the country. Or in place to potentially be running the country.

What the media should be focusing on is something like Senator McCain proclaiming that the country should deregulate health insurance like it has deregulated Wall Street. Without, apparently, noticing where those deregulations have gotten us, and who was giving them the rope to hang themselves with.

In more general opinions, ddjango suggests that trying to stand and shout down the storm that is modern life and modern national politics is futile, and that getting out of the way of it and cultivating one's own happiness and love with a small group is far better. And then, like the water, one eventually would wear down the edifice, but on the water's time, not ours.

The Wall Street Journal on the potential path to getting out of the current panic, and making things hunky-dory again. On the other side, The Power of Narrative suggests that the government's takeover of AIG was strategic, to use the group as a weapon against other countries who need their services. Considering AIG has quite a few fingers in various pots, if that were true, then there's a lot of people in the world that just went up the creek. Perhaps the best example of why people shouldn't panic on their market investments, though, is an example in Nashville where people believed rumors that there would be no gas in Nashville, so they panicked, and now, there's no gas in Nashville because everyone went out and filled up.

In our science department, humans will correct their reach toward an object even if the object is moved as the lights go out, based on research that prevented subjects from seeing a second light that came on after the first light went off, but noted they changed the course of their reach toward the light they did not perceive. At least, I think that's what this is saying.

Giant VR room makes for interesting play and discovery at UCSD, the growing popularity of the treadmill desk, which combines work and exercise. It's a pretty cool idea, so long as they don't do anything like require workers to be walking for their computers to be powered. For my profession, that would be a disaster, considering how much we walk around away from the desk as it is.

And then there's the mail that people who comment on unexplained phenomena get.

Last for tonight, a woman won her sex-discrimination case against the Library of Congress after it withdrew a hiring offer based on the fact that she was originally born a he and was going to transition. That's a nice ruling, and it makes sense that the discrimination based on sex/gender would apply to a case like this.