New month, new seasons - 3 Feb 2008

Morning. Groundhog sees shadow this year, so it’s going to be foggy and cold. Which only makes the fifty year anniversary of a plane crash that would be later referred to as "The Day the Music Died" all that much more bitter.

Steelers won the American Padded Rugby Championship in fine form, though.

The beginning of a new blog - Psychotic Letters From Men, which will no doubt give more than enough examples to spot Nice Guys (that aren’t) everywhere. And possibly provide some inspiration for that delightful series that Comic Philosopher-General ldragoon penned some time ago.

The Annoyed Librarian making comment on the profession, namely how much it's an annoyance to have people using the library profession as political stompping grounds, trying to silence dissent, and wanting the profession in lockstep on a range of issues in addition to their libraries. And yes, that also includes annoyance at the professional organization for those kinds of stances, too. Healthy dialogue, especially in the library profession, and all that.

And take heart if you have to polish up your resume and are dreading it - there are other people who feel the same way.

At the top, once again, in international affairs, It's Gadahfi! Well, the new leader of the African Union is he, anyway. This makes for some nice eyebrow-raising affairs. Similarly eyebrow-popping is the explicit thanks to Iran given by the leadership of Hamas for their help during the recent Gaza situation. It’s like they’re painting a target for the next Israeli prime minister...

In Iraq, a woman recruiting other women to be suicide bombers was arrested, hopefully cutting down on a newly preferred tactic that takes advantage of Muslim customs about men and women mixing, dress, and touch.

Pakistani police are searching for a kidnapped American working for the United Nations. Kidnapping U.N. workers is not smart (mostly because it tends to bring the fury from a lot of places).

Stimulus is tricky business - France continues to resist calls for a more "Obama-stlye" consumer spending stimulus, focusing on infrastructure spending.

On the domestic desk, Big Boss Obama directs $20 million to be used for refugee matters in Gaza.

There may finally be a full cabinet, with Judd Gregg named as commerce secretary, assuming all the confirmations go through.

Speaking stimulus, the government is hiring, even as private sector jobs shed like snakeskin, and will probably have even more when stimulus spending comes into effect. That said, the government is also looking to lmiit the use of the President's likeness in so many commercial products, so that the Obama-mania doesn’t cross too far over into the tasteless. Or too many people use the image, likeness, or words for their own profits.

An Arkansas piece of legislation would allow concealed carry inside houses of worship. One of the cited reasons is to avoid repetition of events where mentally deranged people shoot up the insides of churches. Well, would the possibility that your pew neighbor is packing detract from your worship service? The General doesn't think so.

Shock. Michael Phelps and marijuana, to which The Agitator has a letter he'd like to see Phelps write, but won't. I think I’m with the Agitator on this one - pot has been in a lot of very famous people’s history, and it didn’t bring about their downfall. Besides, if people really wanted to get tough on drugs that were unequivocally bad for you, they’d be campaigning for marijuana-style penalties for tobacco usage. As it is, the best they're doing is complaining how raising the cigarette tax hurts poor people most. Now, why would that be? Why are so many poor people on cigs? Here’s hoping that Mr. Phelps doesn’t become a pariah for a little pot. El Paso is asking for a frank discussion on the use of drugs, so why can’t we all have one?

For-profit droput recovery schools are collecting even when their students are truly truant, because of the way those schools get paid for having the desk, and not actually having the student in the desk. Suffice to say, in a tough budget time, the states are looking to plug that hole.

Last out of this section, newspapers are not sounding their own death knells yet, despite everyone else writing them off, trying to use things like Renee Zellweger's crush on Jimmy Carter as some sort of expression of how dumb Hollywood (and by extension, liberals and the media) are, and why bailing out any newspaper would be a terrible idea, because it makes them non-independent.

Opening the opinion section, The American Cargo Cult, or attempting to put into manifesto what Americans of any political stripe believe, with plenty of IngSoc moments of our own.

Mr. O'sGrady is certain that violence and intimidation are stepping up before Hugo Chavez tries to get a erferendum passed (again) that would make him dictator-for-life.

Mr. Stephens advises President Obama to help make a stable and good Iraq part of his legacy, even as he looks elsewhere to do more good in the Middle East. Mr. Pearl, father of the executed reporter, was hoping that his son's death would result in less legitimacy for terror groups, instead of more, and Ms. Rabinowitz returns to the refrain of how much the new President is letting terrorists win because of his Guantanamo and torture EOs. Which is nice, but I think Mr. McGurn finds the right spot for criticism by declaring that if the Congresscritters wanted to, they could pass laws declaring waterboarding and other such enhanced interrogation to be torture and ban them.

Mr. Reinheart tells us that we're still on track for a nasty depression, and that we shouldn't be overly optimistic if it stops us from doing what's necessary to beat it, including accelerated bankruptcies and bracing for the drop still to come. Mr. Pozen suggests that Treasury's "bad bank" purchase toxic assets at 80 percent cash, 20 percent capital certificate, which then lets the banks stay solvent. If the asset sells above the price Treasury bought it for, the bank receives 80% of the profit and Treasury keeps 20%. Mr. Ely tell us that banks are lending out more, even as they tighten their standards about who gets credit and make their loans better, as Messrs. Cole and Ohanian repeat the other familiar refrain that FDR's policies did not save the Depression, but instead prolonged it as Mr. Steyn decries what's in the stimulus, how long it will take to have effect, and how it's so very partisan in how it lays out money.

Putting these two together, Ms. Parker proclaims that President Obama is apologizing for being an American abroad while he institutes government control over our lives domestically, and the WSJ chimes in that he's a hypocrite because he keeps Tom Daschle on despite his tax issues, when any Republican would have been out on their ear. As it turns out, later on, Mr. Daschle resigned his appointment.

Last out, Mr. Crovitz says that stimulus spending needs more for broadband access and connectivity, if we are serious about spending, and the mere $10 billion or so won’t help us get any closer to the penetration that Japan and other nations have. Of course, he says that private sector investment and competition is the best optino for all of us to get proper peentration and service that’s affordable. I agree. More Internet access for all, including that whole competitive bit (although I’m not all that fond off the tiered service models). Oh, and investigating someone for securities fraud based on the health of one of the employees? Stu-pid.

In technology, live webcam footage of a volcanic eruption, building bigger supercomputers, robot medics for soldiers, thinking more abotu how hormones affect medicine, a three-dimensional cockpit instrument display, a garbage truck powered by the garbage it collects, new techniques for seeing tiny things even better, a South Korean high-bandwidth information pipeline, e-commerce back on the rise, new thoughts about data writing and storage, using "magnetic tornadoes", Google going under the sea and all the way to Mars, a NASA-formed and funded Singularity University, using chips, GPS, and constant data feeds to track animals, rather than having to hope they wait long enough for you to observe them, and more robot designs mimicing basic life forms.

Last for tonight, why RFID should never be used to store or transmit sensitive data. Y’know, a format that willingly surrenders its data when someone, anyone, asks, data encrypted or no, is probably not the right format to use for storing important data.

There’s also playing Where’s Waldo in a rather interesting way. A dageurrotype of the inauguration leads to the photographer of a gigantic gigapan image of the inauguration to search through the crowd and find the person taking the dageurrotype. Self-referential? Perhaps, but there’s also the satellite image of the ceremony, so that one can go top-down and see if you can spot the person in question. (Although the resolution is a bit highly limited.)

And photographs that may be worth thinkies - pictures of someone before and slightly after they died.