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silveradeptWeekend's here, and I can get down to really dosing myself with good stuff. The positive news is that my voice has basically returned to me this morning, and so I'm feeling that I'm almost over the cold. This is a good, good thing. If all traces can disappear by tomorrow, I will be happy.
Internationally, the trial begins for two doctors accused of planning and executing an aborted terrorist attack against the Glasgow airport, the one that ended with the truck overturning and setting alight. This was apparently not the only car bomb that had been planted and attempted execution. One of the interesting things I'm pulling out of this article is the basic admission that law enforcement got lucky that nobody was hurt, because their dragnets and data mining and other terrorist-identification methods had not alerted them at all to the presence of the two accused men. In small enough groups, no matter how hard one tries, potential terrorists can escape the things looking for them, assuming they don't slip up and present themselves in a suspicious manner to those methods or law enforcement personnel. For some, like DHS, this is an opportunity to try and convince the populace that anyone could be a terrorist, and anything suspicious should be reported. For others, this would be an opportunity to refine the methods and put more trust and work in investigators and police personnel on the beat, in neighborhoods, looking out for strange things and out-of-the-ordinary behavior, rather than computers and algorithms. We should be aware that terror will still happen, as not everyone will be caught, but the possibility of terror should not be a paralyzing factor, nor should it stop us from fighting for and retaining our liberties, rather than foolishly bargaining them away for the illusion of security.
Domestically, the economy may very well be summed up in one picture right now - the famous bull statue on Wall Street has been blueballed. A picture is worth more than the thousand words it would need to begin to describe the situation. For some, it's a call to return to the wisdom of the ages, about saving and living within one's means, rather than borrowing, although, in some ways, the interest made on savings comes from the interest paid in loans, so you can't get rid of one completely without killing the other. 'S too bad that savings accounts make such piddly amounts of interest. I make less than one percent on my savings account, and less than three on the latest Certificate of Deposit I had. The real benefit, if any, of my savings is that they are savings that I'm putting away. I suspect more people would have more in safer investments if the returns were better. 3-5% in an FDIC-backed savings account versus the possibility of 10% or losing all of it? That might rebalance some risk, and make it easier for those institutions to lend to each other.
For others, the crisis is the herald of the destruction of the dollar, which may precipitate the disaster that triggers a martial law declaration by which the military is permitted to run roughshod over the populace in the name of quelling civil unrest. Speculation at this point, but a big problem with the world today is that it becomes increasingly difficult to tell who is the far-winged conspiracy nut and who has found a nugget of truth right before it unfolds. If letters of credit start becoming unreliable, then goods don't ship and some of those doomsday things start looking really possible. As I've said before, it's getting progressively harder to distinguish between wildspec and actual news.
Hrm. Claims that the Mainstream Media's new exclusive story about wiretappers coming forward is at least a year old and had been covered extensively by the blogs and indie media before it got to them. Y'know, I don't doubt it. For people trying to get a story out, going somewhere, anywhere, that will listen to them and take them seriously would be quite the thing. That it's places like Democracy Now! means that there's some intelligence in the choosing of where to go. Is it appearing in the MSM now because they've managed to corroborate enough to publish it at their standards? Or are they just late to the ball?
Truth be told, though, there's some other things that need to be paid attention to, instead of everyone zeroing in solely on the economic matter. Like, after trying to figure out how they got them, Ars Technica concludes that the **AAs numbers on piracy and intellectual property theft damages are essentially fabrications. I can imagine those cabals moving to take advantage of the depressed economic state to impose tighter controls. In the United Kingdom, at least, it looks like the government is doing its best to replicate Little Brother and then some, complete with perpetual surveillance, monitoring and tracking of your every thing, and vague laws with vague standards that can be used to punish anyone arbitrarily if they land on the wrong side of the government, for whatever reason. Only a matter of time before a panicked populace and an Imperial President implement such a program openly here in the States, I'm guessing. One more sufficiently large terror incident, and we can start having to practice our ParanoidLinux technique on something like the X-Net. And the Justice Department released its scathing review of politically-motivated firings of attorneys in 2006, that which was scandal a couple years ago, but now is being drowned out by the deluge of Wall Street.
When it comes to candidates, that rage theme I touched on yesterday, when talking about the mobs that support McCain/Palin and are advocating heinous things as the people on the podium just smile and wave? The rage extends to the candidate, as well - "Senator Hothead" is apparently well-known for how he treats his colleagues and the public. The General posits that the rage is an example of how he'll treat America's enemies. Do people want a President that will go off like a loose cannon at the helm?
His attacks, however, are apparently yawners, even to his own base.
Michael Reagan is trying hard to paint Senator Obama as a socialist and leftist by his connection to William Ayers, but when it comes to offering up the proof, he woefully falls flat. Past associations do not always follow through to present affiliations. He'd do better following other columnists in trying to paint the Obama health care and tax plans as socialism and wealth redistribution. Plus, he fails to make the case that having "the farthest left candidate" in years is going to be harmful to the country in any sort of way, relying instead on the reader to already believe that the word "socialist" instantly spells doom for the country and to believe in a sort of "one drop" theory that says if one has any association at all with socialists, one is forever and always a socialist and will advocate socialist ideals. Incidentally, that makes me a socialist, because in my university days I had very stimulating conversations with people who identified as revolutionary socialists. Even, I suppose, if fifteen years later, I become a hardcore conservative, everything I advocate will be socialism. Won't that be an interesting turnaround?
Last out of the candidates, a very interesting sequence, tying together correlational studies, new materials, and additional data/speculation to understand what the power of Palin and religious communities is and why they're still here, even if, in the attitude of the poster, they're basically hindering the evolution of mankind and the progression of science. The conclusions rest on the following premises: Fear and stress result in loss of perceived control; Loss of perceived control results in increased perception of nonexistent patterns (a study that I linked to a little while ago); Those with right-wing political beliefs tend to scare more easily (based on a very small study that measured responses of people to pictures of big hairy spiders on faces); Authoritarian religious systems based on a snooping, surveillant God, with high membership costs and antipathy towards outsiders, are more cohesive, less invasible by cheaters, and longer-lived. They also tend to flourish in high-stress environments. This based on the idea that the more you have to sacrifice to gain entry into a group and maintain that membership, the more dedicated you are to the survival and continued existence of that group, and that people tend to be more honest and altruistic when they feel that someone is watching, whether anyone actually is or not. (Because you want a return on your investment, even if it is a celestial one, for all your earthbound suffering.)
Putting all those together is a possible formula for why fundamentalist religious organizations of any stripe tend to survive and thrive longer than secular-based ones, and why someone hitting all the dog-whistle notes of those fundamentalists has quite a bit of popularity, despite lacking any actual substance past that point. This might also help the Slacktivist find ways of applying the knowledge that information is necessary, but insufficient, when it comes to freeing people from believing already-debunked material. There has to be a way of breaking the conscious choice to believe one thing, even to the point of declaring all other sources contrary to it as untrustworthy and unreliable because they're debunking. So, even if one chose to Print the Truth, which has a poster a day with quotes, facts, and other material about the candidates, taken from what the candidates say, it might not impact anyone unless they were already willing to believe it.
Larry Elder defends "the rich" by pointing out how much of the total tax bill they already pay, and uses it as a segue to point out how conservatives give more to charity than liberals, using the Democratic candidates versus the incumbent administration for the high-income brackets. And naturally, those who don't pay taxes, because they don't make enough, favor spending that will benefit them, like a single-payer health care program that is designed to let them keep more of their money by not having to purchase expensive insurance premiums. So, we should be considerate of our rich people and not make them pay more taxes, because us voters are clueless to how much they already pay, and because the liberal candidates and liberals in general are meanies who don't contribute to charity like their compassionate conservative brethren do. Except, I'm guessing, for many of those in the highest income brackets, they can afford to have their taxation increased.
SCIENCE! Progress even in recession, where nerve stimulation alleviates chronic headaches, ginko might be a great help in keeping brain cells after a stroke, vitamin D is an essential thing to keeping the body functioning and healthy, theories and models developed for economics turn out to be helpful for brain studies, studies are ongoing on the technique used to save the sole person who survived rabies without a vaccine, and nanomaterials are developed that are better than gecko feet in their adhesiveness, yet are reusable.
Bridging between science and art, after this XKCD comic, it appears that Youtube has actually added an audio preview feature, which reads a comment back in speech synthesis... obviously, it needs to be tweaked so that it can read it back in a mood appropriate to the comment, but still, I wonder if anyone will actually be stopped from posting something stupid because they hear it aloud back to them.
Last for tonight, awesome art. The Tokyo cityscape at night, as photographed from apartment building emergency exit staircases, and Tokyo and Osaka at night, on busy streets teeming with people, with the people removed. Additionally, the work of women illustrators, on a variety of subjects. And then a sobering reminder - the nuclear nightmare - the Chernobyl incident, twenty years later.
The very final part, also about art, is the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund coming to the aid of one Christopher Handley, charged with possession of obscene materials because of his collection of manga. A small subset of the available images are being used as the basis for charges, apparently because they depict minors in sexual situations. No photographs, but the material is still being subjected to the Miller test before a jury, after segments of the PROTECT act that made it illegal to own art, including drawings or sculptures, that appeared to be or were minors engaged in sexual acts. The whole thing tripped in 2006 when the person's imported manga (doujinshi, maybe?) tripped the eyes of the Postmaster, who got a search warrant, searched the package, then gave it to the person in question with no notification of the search having occurred so he could be followed home and have his possessions and collection seized. In any case, the artistic tastes of one person are now being subjected to the decision of the mob. Is it possible to find a true jury of the man's peers that will be knowledgeable and try him fairly?
Internationally, the trial begins for two doctors accused of planning and executing an aborted terrorist attack against the Glasgow airport, the one that ended with the truck overturning and setting alight. This was apparently not the only car bomb that had been planted and attempted execution. One of the interesting things I'm pulling out of this article is the basic admission that law enforcement got lucky that nobody was hurt, because their dragnets and data mining and other terrorist-identification methods had not alerted them at all to the presence of the two accused men. In small enough groups, no matter how hard one tries, potential terrorists can escape the things looking for them, assuming they don't slip up and present themselves in a suspicious manner to those methods or law enforcement personnel. For some, like DHS, this is an opportunity to try and convince the populace that anyone could be a terrorist, and anything suspicious should be reported. For others, this would be an opportunity to refine the methods and put more trust and work in investigators and police personnel on the beat, in neighborhoods, looking out for strange things and out-of-the-ordinary behavior, rather than computers and algorithms. We should be aware that terror will still happen, as not everyone will be caught, but the possibility of terror should not be a paralyzing factor, nor should it stop us from fighting for and retaining our liberties, rather than foolishly bargaining them away for the illusion of security.
Domestically, the economy may very well be summed up in one picture right now - the famous bull statue on Wall Street has been blueballed. A picture is worth more than the thousand words it would need to begin to describe the situation. For some, it's a call to return to the wisdom of the ages, about saving and living within one's means, rather than borrowing, although, in some ways, the interest made on savings comes from the interest paid in loans, so you can't get rid of one completely without killing the other. 'S too bad that savings accounts make such piddly amounts of interest. I make less than one percent on my savings account, and less than three on the latest Certificate of Deposit I had. The real benefit, if any, of my savings is that they are savings that I'm putting away. I suspect more people would have more in safer investments if the returns were better. 3-5% in an FDIC-backed savings account versus the possibility of 10% or losing all of it? That might rebalance some risk, and make it easier for those institutions to lend to each other.
For others, the crisis is the herald of the destruction of the dollar, which may precipitate the disaster that triggers a martial law declaration by which the military is permitted to run roughshod over the populace in the name of quelling civil unrest. Speculation at this point, but a big problem with the world today is that it becomes increasingly difficult to tell who is the far-winged conspiracy nut and who has found a nugget of truth right before it unfolds. If letters of credit start becoming unreliable, then goods don't ship and some of those doomsday things start looking really possible. As I've said before, it's getting progressively harder to distinguish between wildspec and actual news.
Hrm. Claims that the Mainstream Media's new exclusive story about wiretappers coming forward is at least a year old and had been covered extensively by the blogs and indie media before it got to them. Y'know, I don't doubt it. For people trying to get a story out, going somewhere, anywhere, that will listen to them and take them seriously would be quite the thing. That it's places like Democracy Now! means that there's some intelligence in the choosing of where to go. Is it appearing in the MSM now because they've managed to corroborate enough to publish it at their standards? Or are they just late to the ball?
Truth be told, though, there's some other things that need to be paid attention to, instead of everyone zeroing in solely on the economic matter. Like, after trying to figure out how they got them, Ars Technica concludes that the **AAs numbers on piracy and intellectual property theft damages are essentially fabrications. I can imagine those cabals moving to take advantage of the depressed economic state to impose tighter controls. In the United Kingdom, at least, it looks like the government is doing its best to replicate Little Brother and then some, complete with perpetual surveillance, monitoring and tracking of your every thing, and vague laws with vague standards that can be used to punish anyone arbitrarily if they land on the wrong side of the government, for whatever reason. Only a matter of time before a panicked populace and an Imperial President implement such a program openly here in the States, I'm guessing. One more sufficiently large terror incident, and we can start having to practice our ParanoidLinux technique on something like the X-Net. And the Justice Department released its scathing review of politically-motivated firings of attorneys in 2006, that which was scandal a couple years ago, but now is being drowned out by the deluge of Wall Street.
When it comes to candidates, that rage theme I touched on yesterday, when talking about the mobs that support McCain/Palin and are advocating heinous things as the people on the podium just smile and wave? The rage extends to the candidate, as well - "Senator Hothead" is apparently well-known for how he treats his colleagues and the public. The General posits that the rage is an example of how he'll treat America's enemies. Do people want a President that will go off like a loose cannon at the helm?
His attacks, however, are apparently yawners, even to his own base.
Michael Reagan is trying hard to paint Senator Obama as a socialist and leftist by his connection to William Ayers, but when it comes to offering up the proof, he woefully falls flat. Past associations do not always follow through to present affiliations. He'd do better following other columnists in trying to paint the Obama health care and tax plans as socialism and wealth redistribution. Plus, he fails to make the case that having "the farthest left candidate" in years is going to be harmful to the country in any sort of way, relying instead on the reader to already believe that the word "socialist" instantly spells doom for the country and to believe in a sort of "one drop" theory that says if one has any association at all with socialists, one is forever and always a socialist and will advocate socialist ideals. Incidentally, that makes me a socialist, because in my university days I had very stimulating conversations with people who identified as revolutionary socialists. Even, I suppose, if fifteen years later, I become a hardcore conservative, everything I advocate will be socialism. Won't that be an interesting turnaround?
Last out of the candidates, a very interesting sequence, tying together correlational studies, new materials, and additional data/speculation to understand what the power of Palin and religious communities is and why they're still here, even if, in the attitude of the poster, they're basically hindering the evolution of mankind and the progression of science. The conclusions rest on the following premises: Fear and stress result in loss of perceived control; Loss of perceived control results in increased perception of nonexistent patterns (a study that I linked to a little while ago); Those with right-wing political beliefs tend to scare more easily (based on a very small study that measured responses of people to pictures of big hairy spiders on faces); Authoritarian religious systems based on a snooping, surveillant God, with high membership costs and antipathy towards outsiders, are more cohesive, less invasible by cheaters, and longer-lived. They also tend to flourish in high-stress environments. This based on the idea that the more you have to sacrifice to gain entry into a group and maintain that membership, the more dedicated you are to the survival and continued existence of that group, and that people tend to be more honest and altruistic when they feel that someone is watching, whether anyone actually is or not. (Because you want a return on your investment, even if it is a celestial one, for all your earthbound suffering.)
Putting all those together is a possible formula for why fundamentalist religious organizations of any stripe tend to survive and thrive longer than secular-based ones, and why someone hitting all the dog-whistle notes of those fundamentalists has quite a bit of popularity, despite lacking any actual substance past that point. This might also help the Slacktivist find ways of applying the knowledge that information is necessary, but insufficient, when it comes to freeing people from believing already-debunked material. There has to be a way of breaking the conscious choice to believe one thing, even to the point of declaring all other sources contrary to it as untrustworthy and unreliable because they're debunking. So, even if one chose to Print the Truth, which has a poster a day with quotes, facts, and other material about the candidates, taken from what the candidates say, it might not impact anyone unless they were already willing to believe it.
Larry Elder defends "the rich" by pointing out how much of the total tax bill they already pay, and uses it as a segue to point out how conservatives give more to charity than liberals, using the Democratic candidates versus the incumbent administration for the high-income brackets. And naturally, those who don't pay taxes, because they don't make enough, favor spending that will benefit them, like a single-payer health care program that is designed to let them keep more of their money by not having to purchase expensive insurance premiums. So, we should be considerate of our rich people and not make them pay more taxes, because us voters are clueless to how much they already pay, and because the liberal candidates and liberals in general are meanies who don't contribute to charity like their compassionate conservative brethren do. Except, I'm guessing, for many of those in the highest income brackets, they can afford to have their taxation increased.
SCIENCE! Progress even in recession, where nerve stimulation alleviates chronic headaches, ginko might be a great help in keeping brain cells after a stroke, vitamin D is an essential thing to keeping the body functioning and healthy, theories and models developed for economics turn out to be helpful for brain studies, studies are ongoing on the technique used to save the sole person who survived rabies without a vaccine, and nanomaterials are developed that are better than gecko feet in their adhesiveness, yet are reusable.
Bridging between science and art, after this XKCD comic, it appears that Youtube has actually added an audio preview feature, which reads a comment back in speech synthesis... obviously, it needs to be tweaked so that it can read it back in a mood appropriate to the comment, but still, I wonder if anyone will actually be stopped from posting something stupid because they hear it aloud back to them.
Last for tonight, awesome art. The Tokyo cityscape at night, as photographed from apartment building emergency exit staircases, and Tokyo and Osaka at night, on busy streets teeming with people, with the people removed. Additionally, the work of women illustrators, on a variety of subjects. And then a sobering reminder - the nuclear nightmare - the Chernobyl incident, twenty years later.
The very final part, also about art, is the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund coming to the aid of one Christopher Handley, charged with possession of obscene materials because of his collection of manga. A small subset of the available images are being used as the basis for charges, apparently because they depict minors in sexual situations. No photographs, but the material is still being subjected to the Miller test before a jury, after segments of the PROTECT act that made it illegal to own art, including drawings or sculptures, that appeared to be or were minors engaged in sexual acts. The whole thing tripped in 2006 when the person's imported manga (doujinshi, maybe?) tripped the eyes of the Postmaster, who got a search warrant, searched the package, then gave it to the person in question with no notification of the search having occurred so he could be followed home and have his possessions and collection seized. In any case, the artistic tastes of one person are now being subjected to the decision of the mob. Is it possible to find a true jury of the man's peers that will be knowledgeable and try him fairly?
