And another dose of strange stuff - 28 October 2008

On a dat where the posibility of one of King Solomon's copper mines being found, the riches of our world continue to display themselves in their people, even as they feel that the resources of the planet may be draining faster than the natural repleneshing process.

At the International desk, amidst concerns of terrorism and the desire to gather data on every aspect of a citizen's life, the United Kingdom has proposed a requirement that government-issued identification to be shown to purchase mobile phones, including pay-as-you-go items. Because anonymous people are up to something, and are always hiding criminal dealings when they use such phones, and the government must know who is purchasing them, so they know whom to watch for their obvious criminal behavior.

The raid into Syrian territory was successful in killing the leader of a Syrian terror network, according to an unnamed American official, giving details of why the raid happened, at least. For some, of course, the hit comes too late to be effective, but I’m sure they see it as progress.

The United Nations nuclear chief accuses Iran of blocking his inspectors and preventing full knowledge as to whether Iran has or is working on nuclear weapons. Iran counters that the demand of the Security Council that it stop uranium enrichment is illegal.

Iraqy militant convicted in Iraqi court on attacking United States military personnel, sentenced to death by hanging. This makes me wonder: Is there such a thing as a “humane” way of executing someone?

A mess in the DRC, with resignations of UN peacekeeping commanders, stoning of those compounds, and what appears to be a major retreat of government forces against rebels. Leaflets dropping over the DPRK, containing the names of possible prisoners, the family tree of the DPRK leader, Kim Jong-Il, and other data, sent over by balloons. This, in the middle of military talks between the two Korean nations.

At the Home desk, as houses foreclosed, mosquitoes bred in swimming pools, and thus, West Nile Virus spread with the credit crunch. Isn’t it wonderful living in the future where computers can detect these kinds of things?

The TSA may be relaxing their requirements on liquids in the next year, permitting people to actually bring things with them that are useful and helpful and more than three ounces.

The case for videotaping interrogations, so as to see where and how false confessions might appear. Because people, for whatever reason, will confess to things they didn’t do, especially if confronted with the idea that the evidence is against them.

If one wants to accomplish communication between teens about sexual issues, a mandated parental notification proposition is the wrong way to go about it, according to the RHRealityCheck - if it’s for STD lowering, then comprehensive sex ed is the right idea, and as it turns out, most teens do talk to their parents and involve them - those that aren’t are usually doing so for a good reason, like the fear of abuse. I mean, if someone gets told they have to get out for voting for a political candidate, then it’s not too hard to imagine young teenagers being tossed from the house for coming home and saying they’re pregnant.

A fuller account of the conviction of Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska of corruption, right before his re-election campaign goes to the polls. While the Senator may not be able to vote, he can still hold public office.

The interviewer who asked Senator Biden whether Senator Obama has stopped beating his wife, err, is a Marxist claims to be a journalist asking tough questions when interviewed by Larry King. If you’re a journalist, the Scripps school should start offering continuing education for those who might need a refresher course. Of course, they might also want to take a gander at the paper that has declared the election in favor of Senator Obama, because their next cycle will be too late past the election date to be relevant. It was called “Dewey Defeats Truman”, recall...

False Virginia flyer declares Democrats should vote on November 5, the Wednesday after the election, after claiming that an emergency session of the Legislature changed the rules, anticipating a higher turnout than usual. The Virginia Board of Elections is aware of it, but says the hoax did not originate from their office. Investigations are ongoing to see whether someone can be charged for an offense of voter intimidation. On the positive side, more open hours for Florida polls, in anticipation of a bigger-than-usual crowd.

Candidate caught stealing opponent's signs thanks to YouTube. Bad tactical decision in the first place, but of course, getting caught and having it shown across the Net is even worse. I think that candidate is pretty well sunk if enough people see the video. A different bad decision would be secretly calling your child Sarah McCain Palin, without consulting your wife or going with the name you had picked out.

If the early voting figures are to be believed, there's going to be a lot of voting going on this election. Which is good, regardless of how the results turn out, because it means that enough people were involved to cast the ballot and have a higher chance of paying attention when it comes to government doing something they don’t like.

A little satire in the morning, about the awesomeness of America, and how that awesome governs our relations to everyone else. Of course, not everyone takes humor as such, for one reason or another, and thus, Your Hilarity may Vary. Perhaps claimed extraterrestrials endorsing a political candidate is more up your alley.

What is not funny at all, however, is the display of Governor Palin hanging from a noose and Senator McCain engulfed in flames. It would not be funny if it were Senator Obama or Senator Biden on the noose or in flames, and so we should accord the same respect to Governor Palin and Senator McCain. The person putting up the displays said it wouldn’t be okay any other time, but that it’s Halloween and thus, it’s okay. Doing something like this lowers you at least to the point of the dirtiest trick of your political opponents, if not sends you meteoring past them. Stupid, stupid rat creatures.

In general opinions, Cal Thomas berating the populace for buying the snake-oil selling that got us into the credit crunch, William McGurn offers a suggestion for a pro-choice candidate to prove his commitment to choice, by taking Governor Palin's proposals for funding special education as a springboard toward providing better services for disabled children in general. And The WSJ offers an informative look at the candidates' environmental plans.

A letter from the executive director of the ACLU about his experience coming out and living as a gay man, and why he opposes California's Prop 8 that would stop him from having a family.

In opinions of the candidates, I admit that I haven’t seen this one yet outside the context of “negotiation without preconditions”, but Mona Charen finds Barack Obama to be anti-Israel, willing to talk and listen to Palestinians and those who feel Israel is the problem, and that this position makes him untenable to Jewish voters as well as the voting populace at large. Normally, I would have expected more anti-Israel stuff, but I guess worries about whether the military can continue to suck up as much money as it can request, the economy, trying to paint the Employee Free Choice Act as the death of the secret ballot for unionization, and socialism are felt to be more important. David Limbaugh provides the nice capsule summary of what he feels conservatives should be worried about in Obama.

Although, now that we’re down to the wire, a potential new hotness seems to be on Senator Obama's ability to appoint Supreme Court justices, as well as apellate and lower court appointments from a President Obama that the opinions feel will not administer even-handed justice, preferring to take into account who you are as a deciding factor instead of sticking to the facts of the case and the requirements of the law. In other words, the originalists don’t like the idea of a “living document” President appointing judges, fearing they will legislate from the bench all over the place, to the detriment of the people.

Of course, you won’t hear about any of this on the news (excepting, I’m assuming, Fox News and any other NewsCorp-owned outlet), because the media is doing everything it can to bury all the negative things about Senator Obama that it can, because it refuses to judge someone on the company he keeps, instead of his stated policies and ideas, prefering the issues to the associations, because it doesn’t care about the large amounts of money coming in to the Senator’s coffers, because the way the rules are written, small donations don’t get the scrutiny bigger ones do, so there’s no documentation to find a scandal in, and other such avoidances of making personal judgments about the candidate and trying to pass them off anywhere other than the OP/ED page.

And if you’re Neal Boortz, if you vote for Obama, or plan to, you need help, starting with the need to turn your TV off of BET, Entertainment Tonight, SNL, or any of the other "MoveOn Media" and find actual news, because you believe the Senator will cut taxes for 95% of Americans (even though 40% don’t pay federal income tax, and any time a politican talks about cutting taxes, it’s always the income tax), instead of calling it the welfare that it really is and realizing that it gives you the perfect set of incentives to slack off and not do too well so that you don’t pay taxes and get all the welfare, that while businesses won’t be hurt, the small business employees won’t feel the brunt of Senator Obama’s new taxations, that Seantr McCain wants to tax health benefits, and that Senator McCain voted with the current administrator 90% of the time (really only 79% of the time with Republicans), and that’s bad, while Senator Obama’s 97% of voting with the Democrats is good. Oh, and if you vote against Senator Obama, you’re a racist too, according to what Boortz thinks all liberals believe. With the way that started, I was expecting him to say “race traitor” instead.

If none of this appeals to you, consider, perhaps, the Modern Whig party or some other third party. Or, perhaps in some way, it may be necessary to ruminate on why the United States has an interest in electing those less intelligent than they are to political office.

In technology, the dangers of format incompatibilty and the degradation of storage media over time may lead to the digital Dark Ages, Microsoft joins the cloud computing game, offering a Windows platform for those who want to run Web apps but can’t afford their own servers, spaces, and staff, increased methanol fuel-cell efficiency, generating a virtual touchpad to use for phone applications, so that you can scroll by dragging your finger on the table rather than the touchscreen, red LED treatment for wrinkles, funding research into generating atomic-powered planes to transport passengers with, the new Ares rocket having significant difficulties, of which the response appears to be to lower teh safety standards so that the rocket can launch anyway, rather than, say, redesigning the rocket, and Google Earth comes to iPhone.

Last for tonight, though, is the pure awesome of the dance floor that turns human motion into energy to power the lights. A good DJ could help make sure the actual energy expenditure of the place is small... and power floors might be a good way for us Humes to regenerate some electricity as we do things like mass movement or even our house and apartment life. Imagine young children and pets dashing about the floors, and their parents chasing them... and all the parts of family life naturally helping to kill the power bill.

Less than a week to go, finally - 29 October 2008

We live in the future. The future is awesome. How do we know this? Using commercially available technology, an amateur astronomer can photograph Pluto and Charon better than the professionals who discovered it did, and someone with an iPhone and a telescope can capture a good picture of Jupiter and some of its moons. This is the future, make no mistake about it. Of course, if they could just figure out that faster-than-light travel...

Ah, and my professional self gets a good laugh in at Unshelved, because Dewey has the correct response to a more frequently-asked question.

And thus, news. The Festival of Lights has started today, and so it’s a good time to remind people that despite Godwin’s Law and the abuse it took in the early part of the 20th century, the swastika is still a positive religious symbol.

Leading off with something both international and weird, a speeder driving a United Kingdom vehicle is giving German police fits, because the speeding cameras capture the passenger-side seat... where a Muppet has been placed. The plate number is clearly visible, but the police would like to have a word or two with the driver about dangerous speeds.

The Forestry Comission of the United Kingdom is no longer issuing licenses to persons so they can collect firewood from the local forests, a right given in the Magna Carta. According to the article, health and safety concerns are at the core of the refusal, but no further details.

Google Book Search resolves issues with many in-copyright but out-of-print books, with compensation for authors and the ability to buy a digital copy of the book through Google. In the library world, apparently we can designate a “Google Book” machine to have free, full-text access to the entire Google Book Search catalog. (Just one computer? Dang. Unless we can make some proxy magic work, and then we’ll be totally in.)

On more standard international matters, The United States still believes Syria is a major route for extremists to enter Iraq, even after the raid and Syria’s protestations that they’re doing all they can to stop extremists. Syria has alleged that the attack was intending to derail progress Syria has been making in diplomatic relations with Europe. This sounds like it’s going to be a game of “we said, they said” until it can be confirmed that the people killed were terrorists or innocents.

The United Kingdom is placing the burden of proof on applying immigrants, saying they have to show they won't be disruptive or "stir up tension" in the UK before they will be allowed to enter. Prove to me you’re not a terrorist, and we’ll let you in. Prove to me you’re not a skinhead, and we’ll let you in. And anything you may have said or done in the past may be used to deny you entry.

In technology, setbacks on the Ares rocket program aren't necessarily a reason to scrap it, trying to find out if military bases are haunted, tuning nanoparticles to hit multiple cancer genes and shrink the tumors, black silicon, which could cut costs and open silicon up to purpose it hadn't been useful for before, and an artificial heart that beats like the real thing, and could be the best one to date, assuming it gets through the trials.

The Web Without Sense, a coarse-language-filled miniblog about the things on the Internet that annoy the writers, including pompousness, bad design, and ego problems.

And then, politics. The GOP Senate chief says Senator Stevens should resign and not seek re-election because of his conviction as a felon, or he will face expulsion from the Senate.

Early voters in Georgia wait in lines lasting up to eight hours to cast their ballots before November 4. I suspect this is fueled at least in part by the drive to get more people out to vote and that more people feel like this election counts for something, so they want to avoid lines on the Election Day and vote when its convenient to them. This trend may help to counter voter-suppression tactics, assuming they aren’t in the machine themselves. Lines in Florida were similarly long, as the Secretary of State made the comment that lines were a sign of a healthy democracy. Well, they would be, if your idea of healthy democracy is a subtle attempt to disenfranchise voters by forcing them to spend hours in lines so that they can cast their ballots, because there are insufficient stations to cast your ballot at.

Regarding the candidates, regardless as to whether you believe in McCain's supply-side economics, or Barack Obama's introduction of demand-side matters to the equation, even if you're a blue in the most red of states, or a red in the most blue bastion ever, get your ass to the polls and cast your ballot. bradhicks finds it that easy, in some ways, to differentiate between the two candidates, and that if one has a clear preference for one type over the other, then giving an accurate count of how many people believe in it is crucial. If this isn’t your hot-button, seal-the-deal issue on any candidate, it’s still important to go vote for the candidate you support on the issue you support, because otherwise we have no idea what you think, unless you’re lucky enough to represent other people in a poll.

Socialism. I do not think you know what that word means, conservatives, especially when Governor Palin has described something remarkably socialist when talking about how Alaskans get oil money. And besides, it’s not as big of a red flag as it used to be. We might even find that some people think that if Senator Obama truly is a socialist, then the country would do better with his leadership. There’s no USSR to play bogeyman anymore, and so we might be finally looking at socialism and socialist policies in a properly critical light. Or, instead, it might be that people will spend time trying to resurrect the red scare knee-jerk reaction, being shocked and surprised that the nominally left-wing candidate sounds like someone... left-wing. For Dennis Prager, liberals are passionate about change and the Obama camp because they have been led to believe a lot of atrocious things that simply aren't true, like “America tortures”, “George W. Bush led the country into war on lies”, and “The rich are getting richer, and the poor aren’t able to make any headway.” And so, we congregate together in our little bubbles on the left coast and in universities, where we rail against these imagined foes and advocate for radical change, which will no doubt damage the country more than if we just let things continue as they are going, because it’s really not that bad. There aren’t xenophobes on every corner (this time a potentially ugly incident after a McCain rally, with bad words and threats of violence given to two men wearing Obama shirts and carrying signs on public property across from the rally) and religious fanatics at every turn, claiming that those who vote for the opposition are hellbound, looking to turn the country into their version of utopia, including rejecting those who don't fit the image, regardless of their party affiliation, and branding them as potential protesters, and they’re certainly not trying for high levels of government. How silly.

The famed Obama tax cuts are now painted as a moving target by the WSJ, but there’s something more to it than that. Almost everywhere, it’s an assumption that when tax rates increase, those who should be paying the most or get hit hardest will find ways of making that income disappear into tax-safe places, while the people underneath them who can’t afford someone to go through the tax code will be hit with the brunt of it. That’s the assumption that small business owners will be hit hardest. Maybe, if we’re gung-ho about getting the rick to pay their fair share, we decide that for anyone or any corporation making over a certain threshold of income (different between businesses and people), the government does their taxes to the appropriate amount and sends them a bill to pay (after collecting all the documentation they have and would need to file said taxes)? I have no idea where such a threshold would be so as to be affordable to the government, but it would be instructive, at the very least, to have numbers to give to the Congresscritters about how much money is being squirreled away without being taxed.

Rumors suggest the French President is not fond of Senator Obama&aops;s stance on Iran. Any bets on whether we’ll see this splashed into conservative talk, especially if Iran comes up, despite some conservative having already openly proclaimed that they don’t really give a damn what Europe thinks?

The news director at the Florida station that asked Senator Biden whether Senator Obama was a Marxist stands by the questions and decisions, claiming that there will be no “softball questions” for any candidate interviewed by their station. Which is all fine and dandy, but next time, instead of making your conclusion and then daring the Senator to defy you, perhaps soliciting information would be a better tactic to take? If you believe Holman W. Jenkins, Jr when he says that Senator Obama has been a man lacking substance or commitment to any policy, at all, on anything, including the ones that are supposedly his, though, then I guess you feel soliciting information won’t get you anywhere, and the only thing that will stick is to relentlessly attack the image of Obama. However, as William Rusher almost proves, you can get information that might be helpful in deciding whom to vote for. I say almost because of the stinger on the end of his material about Barack Obama, dedicating a paragraph to Senator Obama’s first denial of running for President and then subsequent decision to do so. A subtle painting of a flip-flop or a lie, but not one that escapes notice.

Pat Buchanan could be a spokesperson for Focus on the Family, talking about Senator Obama’s first 100 days. A lot of those things he’s certain will happen were also outlined in the FotF 2012 Obama letter sent out (and linked to) earlier. Buchanan is just moving up the timetable on most of those. My memory recalls that Mr. Buchanan, at least once upon a time, in an earlier administration, was very active with the Dobson-type crowd, in some ways a predecessor to Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin’s appareances in the Republican Party, so his repetition of the talking points there isn’t totally surprising.

What is potentially the endpoint of this thing... with a week to go on the election, the GOP had almost no mention of John McCain or Sarah Palin. The Democratic Party website? Obama-mania.

In less candidate-specific matters, Andrew Napolitano laments that since the beginning, it seems, all branches of the federal government have been working to steadily increase their power beyond that which the Constitution delegates to them to the point that they interfere unconstitutionally in our lives, the bailout being just the latest example of such a thing.

Niger Innis feels that the drive to switch to more renewable energy and less fossil-fuel is waging war on the poor by driving up energy prices and requiring them to spend even more of their income on energy costs. Energy costs in general are rising, but it doesn’t make sense to me that research into renewables is somehow driving up those costs. Supply and demand probably is doing more for it than anything else. And while domestic drilling seems like a good solution, I keep hearing that refinery capacity is already maxed out. “Drill, baby, drill”, should probably not be uttered until there’s at least some amount of planning to increase capacity for refinement when those new wells come on-line. We may have missed a window of great opportunity when we had cheap fuel to do research into getting viable renewables for the time when fuel became expensive. Stopping at nuclear power along the way may have been a great idea, but a lot of people didn’t want nuclear power because they were afraid of the catastrophe result. The paradox is not “These environmentalists want you to pay higher prices and restrict your usage to ‘save the planet’ using unverified research that says the planet is warming because of us”, but “The American populace seems to want inexpensive energy without the consequences of such, whether it be pollution or radioactive waste, but are unwilling to invest in the technologies and middle steps that it woudl take to achieve this”.

Closing it out, Paul Weyrich opposes the idea of a Department of Peace and Non-Violence, although what he’s really opposing is the cutting of the War Department’s budget in the next presidency, thinking it would leave the nation weak and powerless against tyrants in the Middle East, Latin America, and Eurasia, and that the idea of having a Cabinet-level minister who advocates for peaceful and non-violent solutions to domestic and international conflicts should be a joke.

Last for tonight, although I think I’ve linked to it before, Chimps and Tigers. The tigers are soooo cute. And customized vehicles of Japan, which show that there’s no obstacle at all to making a car exactly the way you want it to be. As your parting thought, remember - God hates Signs.

(Okay, a postscript. Something totally unsafe for work - Twenty-one condom ads that require a little thinking to get.)