silveradept | Yet another one of those neat days

Lots of packages appear today! One from

annaonthemoon, which has restocked my chocolate supply, one from the Archie McPhee company, which has an office (if not completely based) in Mukilteo, Washington, which I’m guessing comes from someone in the Weirdo’s household, because it’s the right vibe. Also got a nice card from

elusive_goalie, and I solidified plans for the holidays. I have really great co-workers, who are more than willing to help a recent transplant have a holiday with friends. I’ve got a nicely stocked stocking now, too, hanging off the Allen wrench outside my fireplace. So even though I don’t have family and friends from back home, I think I’m going to be okay for the holidays.

I appear to have picked up another viewer. Would

meiiikeee please wave to the crowd and say hello?

A little art before text. Beautiful wings, melancholy lady.

And then a mashup that G.W. Bush would certainly not approve of - Mr. Bush, meet Mr. Lenon, as he speaks "War is Over (If You Want It)".

Onward to the news. Tomorrow, a large amount of the planets will be in alignment, along with the full moon phase and a conjunction of Pluto and the Sun. We suspect anyone born on that day or near it will probably make their star chart casters scratch their heads. Or start proclaiming them to be messiahs. In other celestial materials, Mars may or may not have an asteroid impact in the next month. The chances are still being revised and recalculated, so it’s not a sure thing, but if it does happen, it would be great to observe. Rounding out celestial news for tonight, the messages being beamed from Earth in hopes of contacting other life forms may be too boring to merit a response, according to a Canadian astrophysicist. Pure maths do not actually say anything about the society transmitting the feeds, but things like solutions to the cake-cutting problem or other socioeconomic equations might be enough for an ET to take notice and make contact.

Back on Gaia, Wired posits 10 "crazy" ways of hacking the earth. With population increases, resource consumption, and all those other nasty environmental and planetary problems, finding new ways of making everything fit and everyone still able to maintain an appropriate standard of living will take some doing.

Several persons are not very fond of speed cameras in the United Kingdom, going forward to the point of burning or putting explosives in them. With the way some cameras are mounted in the United States, it’s not as easily possible to destroy them, but I wonder how many U.S. citizens would take a shot at the cameras if they had the chance and the supplies.

Reason Magazine’s Radley Balko calls attention to some of the shadier dealings going on and how they’ll shake out in 2008 with Government Power Grabs: 'Predicting' 2008. With handy links to all of the things ‘predicted’ to come in the new year, based on their twins happening in this year.

The family of a girl who died waiting for a liver transplant is suing the insurance company CIGNA because they initially denied the authorization for the transplant. The family is also looking into having manslaughter or murder charges leveled at the organization. The organization denied the transplant procedure completely, considering it experimental and outside the scope of their coverage, even after a doctor sent along a letter to the company indicating that those who underwent the procedure had a 65 percent six-month survival rate. This is what privatized health care can do - through approval or denial, they can choose whether someone lives, dies, and at what percentages either of those is likely to happen.

Alberto Gonzalez is having a piss-poor college lecture circuit. Instead of trying to defend himself with packed crowds, he gets empty arenas and heckling. Much like Mr. Bush would get, were he not able to direct the Secret Service to remove anyone who disagrees to “Free Speech Zones” well away from his sight. In the comments, someone with less than sufficient brain power to drive the manual transmission of his brain says that “progressives” are racists at heart, because they attack minority conservatives and expect the minorities to fulfill ethnicity-based roles. The response is that progressives are equally incisive of all conservatives - these particular ones happen to be the latest recipients of scorn and derision.

After not hearing anything about music or the music industry for a while, things return in spades. Wired has David Byrne talks with Thom Yorke of Radiohead about the success and decisions behind the pay-what-you-want album "In Rainbows". A couple days before, Byrne talked about his survival strategies for emerging artists, pointing out that the way things used to be made sense, because artists didn’t have the money to hire studios and produce the volume of album copies they’d need to break even, but with the digital world now, it’s possible to do things differently. Depending on how much control an artist wants and how much help they want with their promotion.

Commercial radio may have to pay performance fees for the music it broadcasts, bringing it into line with every other distribution method. Of course, if every commercial radio station had to pay the fees for broadcast, there would be a lot of radio stations shutting down because the fees were too high, or the fees themselves will spiral downward because of the pressure from consumers who want real radio rather than Clear Channel’s pop mixes. The broadcasters argue that they’re providing free advertising for those artists getting radio play, and have also asked Congress to look into the way record label contracts are written, pointing out that perhaps the reason the RIAA and the labels are failing is because of the way they structure their agreements. On all sides, everyone agrees things aren’t currently fair. So maybe the broadcasters will have to pay performance fees, but the cabals will then have to restructure their recording contracts to be more fair to the artists. In a really weird way, it could end up being a better situation for everyone.

In politics, an Arizona judge has ruled that the contents of a database must be released for inspection with regard to 2006 elections. The opposition to the ruling attempted to argue that the database’s contents were part of a computer program, which would exempt them from disclosure because of secrecy requirements for election programs, and that the release of the contents and passwords of the database would make it easier for someone to manipulate results in future elections. The Judge's ruling indicates that the database files are not sent to the state, and are not computer programs. While there’s no guarantee than any sort of fraud can be detected through inspection of the database, if both political parties have access to it, any serious irregularities are probably detectable.

Ari Melber finds Facebook and social-networking sites doing the work of surveillance without the worries of law, simply based on what people post to their social networks. Melber also thinks that the upcoming generation’s definition of privacy is based on control, rather than anonymity, a fair shake considering they’ve been raised in an environment where government and private enterprise collect detailed information on their “private” practices and habits for marketing or tracking purposes, there are cameras just about anywhere there could be checking on their behavior, and effective tools for keeping one’s circle of friends in the know are now available across the Internet. The defaults on Facebook are a pretty loud broadcast, and the ToS of a lot of places gives the companies the right to use you for marketing without having to contact you first. For the old school of privacy advocates, this sort of culture isn’t anything resembling privacy, because everything you do is broadcast or monitored. In the new school, though, problems only develop when someone who shouldn’t have access to your materials does. I’m not sure I’m very fond of the new definition, but truthfully, if I could figure out who and how much information has been collected on me and sold around, I’d probably be buried in paperwork. I can trust that those places that have my information will not abuse it, and that if they do, they get smacked around sufficiently forcefully that they don’t try it again.

With regard to religion, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation is objecting to a Campus Crusade for Christ video stationed at the Air Force, where the leader of that particular chapter envisions Air Force graduates as “government-paid missionaries” and two candidates, in uniform, talk about their experiences with the group and their religious experiences. The Campus Crusade Video is available at the MRFF's site. This is in addition to other indications of Christianity receiving preferred treatment on military bases, as Mother Jones magazine reports. My memory is fuzzy on this matter, but are there regulations or prohibitions about members of the military speaking positively of any religious belief while they are dressed in uniform, because it gives the appearance that the government and military are endorsing said religious belief? For much of the video, I thought that it might be just that the CCC were putting together statements made that would make it appear like an endorsement when it wasn’t, but then at the end, both cadets mentioned specific things about their faith. I’m not against the ability of anyone to worship in the manner of their choosing (within the usual limits of the law), but the government and the military cannot be, nor be perceived as, the tool of one religious sect without severely endangering everyone else’s Constitutional right to the free exercise of their religion.

A much better use of religion involves the story of a letter sent through the post to Heaven, and the package that came back. Regardless of the truth value of the religious claims, I think the decision made by whomever it was that received the mail and decided to act on it was a good one.

Texas has imposed a new tax on those who attend strip clubs, with the proceeds to benefit rape victims. The tax is going to be $5 a head. For those who frequent or visit, I don’t think an extra $5 will break them, and the possible revenues generated would give a much-needed boost of money to those doing good work helping rape victims. Objections to the tax are that it will become too expensive, or a resentment of the implication that strip clubs are at least partially responsible for sexual assaults.

In California, a budget shortfall of 10-14 billion dollars U.S. has Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger thinking of releasing over 22,000 nonviolent offenders as a way of cutting costs. Those released would be at the end of their sentences. The projected savings for such a move would be about $256 million US, so it won’t fix the budget shortfall by any means, but it will relieve crowding in the prisons.

Keeping our pastry oven hot is a sixty year-old man suing an eight year-old boy after the boy and man collided on a ski slope. The man claims the boy caused a shoulder injury. The boy’s parents wonder why someone would be suing a child. I’m sure there has to be a waiver somewhere that covers this.

Winding down tonight, seven great "medical myths", including the one about how reading in dim light worsens your eyesight.

Last for tonight, Pantone has declared that in the next year, blue iris is the color to be. With a general election coming down the pipe, a color described as “anchoring and meditative with a touch of magic” suits the election process well. And it’s a nice deep blue, so maybe it’ll be a happy year upcoming for me, too, because the color picked is one I like.

However, it is well past bedtime, and I should be doing the snooze part now.