EDIT: I suppose I could have been more rational and eloquent about this and simply said: "the McCutcheon v FEC ruling has unfortunate corrupting consequences. It will likely require a Constitutional Ammendment to properly fix our democracy. I am rather upset about this turn of events. But, this is 'Repeated Expletives' so instead I ranted and bitched.
What the hell is going on in the heads of the assholes currently presiding in the Supreme Court? They damn well knew McCutcheon vs FEC wasn't really a First Ammendment case, just a blatant power-grab by the nation's wealthiest. And they went for it anyway, because they just want their share of the dirty money (filtered via third-parties since they themselves don't have election campaigns). It's god-damn Citizen's United all over again. Fuck them and the damn upper-class mafia kickback-scheme that they put in the seats where our government used to be! They don't deserve anyone's respect, the corruption-loving bastards.
Excuse me. I'm a little steamed about this unfortunate turn of events, and needed to vent.
So I'm working on this mod for a game. Mainly, the project is mostly code and game design, with a little bit of pixel art on the side. The code is challenging, and I had to get things running and bug-free before I could release. So I started with and focused on what was the hard stuff to me, and then I just hammered out some quick and dirty placeholder artwork for the graphics as an after-thought. There'd be plenty of time to spruce that up later. After all, I've never had a programming course, but I've been to art school.
Problem is, my placeholders look good enough to be someone without an art background's best efforts... yet not not nearly as good as the final art of the main game without mods.
So based on that initial release, I've now got people crawling out of the woodwork offering to do my graphics for me and asking to collaborate, because my code is strong, my game design stronger, but my art sucks. It's like almost flattering, yet humiliating at the same time.
I AM SO PISSED! Grrrr! Arrgh! Hear me roar! Again.
I mean seriously, someone redid half my place holders and sent their versions to me unsolicited so I could replace my crap with his beautiful art. I didn't ask to collaborate with him, and even though his work is great, this project is my baby. But now I'm stuck where I either have to use his contribution, or top it.
Plus, among the things he sent his version of was one of the two graphics in the mod that I _didn't_ consider a placeholder. The bar has been raised and the little thing I was doing for fun is now like a freaking exam.
Grrr, whine, etc. I am not a team player, I am a tempermental auteur!
And now I've shared my shame with a wider audience. Cause if you can't humble yourself, who can you humble?
Time to spin up the old FTL drive, put a fresh coat of paint on your time machine, and get your texting fingers ready at the buttons of your subspace ansible or tachyonic antitelephone. There are time-travellers among us, right now. There are already human colonies on other planets, too. Say goodbye to cause-and-effect, because the speed of light is no longer a barrier!
Seems the good folks at CERN, when not too busy blowing up the Earth of countless parallel dimensions*, have found the time to prove Einstein wrong about a little thing called Relativity.
An international team of scientists said on Thursday they had recorded sub-atomic particles travelling faster than light -- a finding that could overturn one of Einstein's long-accepted fundamental laws of the universe.
Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the researchers, told Reuters that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.
"We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."
If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.
The article simplifies the details a bit, since relativity does make allowances for hypothetical tachyonic particles that can move faster than light, provided they always move faster than light and are impossible to slow down, and might possibly have to be massless (or even have negative mass). Basically, the standard model of physics breaks everything down into three categories: objects with mass which can only travel slower than light, objects without mass which can only travel at the speed of light, and objects that probably don't exist (but which if they did exist would constantly move faster than light and appear to be in multiple places at once). It's all about the mass, really, as the fundamental equations behind relativity just require infinite energy to accellerate anything with mass up to the speed of light. So unless your big booty is made up of exotic matter that repels gravity and zips around the cosmos in two directions at once, you ain't never going anywhere near lightspeed.
But now it turns out the neutrino, a known particle which definitely has mass (though very very little per neutrino) breaks those basic rules, bringing everything else into doubt.
Unless of course it turns out the real problem is something to do with an incredibly tiny error in our maps or the grid of global positioning satellites that tell us how far away CERN is from San Grasso. The article doesn't indicate whether or not they actually shined a beam of light to compare it against. It'd be a real shame if the biggest news in science in our lifetime turned out to be nothing more than instrument malfunction or the coastline paradox. We are, after all, talking about 60 nanoseconds shaved off a 500-mile trip.
But if they're not somehow wrong, then this is the big one. If neutrinos can move faster than light, it's a whole new ballgame.
*: Why I'm no longer afraid the LHC is going to destroy us all when it gets to full power (1.21 Gigawatts, 55MPH) . I mean, aside from the fact that it hasn't yet, which is also pretty good evidence.
I came to terms with the LHC thanks to Schroedinger's Cat. I'm sure we all know the experiment, where the cat is put in the box, along with a lethal mechanism that can only be triggered by radioactive decay, and the result is that the cat is simultaneously alive and dead at the same time, and the waveform doesn't resolve into one state or the other until you open the box and observe it. Provided the cat is wearing a blindfold, because otherwise it might, you know, observe whether or not it died. Which, when you think about it, you can probably observe that you're alive even in a blindfold. In fact, odds are good the cat can only observe that it's alive. If it's not alive, then it's not observing that fact, which means there's no one to observe the quantum waveform so it's not dead in the first place. (Though I am thinking vampire kittens in an undead quantum superposition that die if they look at themselves would actually be a great plot device for a really stupid B-movie somebody ought to make.)
After going around in circles for a while, the mind puzzles of the cat in a box settled down into the notion of Quantum Immortality. The idea that you will live forever, but only in your own universe, which is but one out of an infinite number of parallel universes (the Many Worlds Interpretation). Everyone else resides in universes where you do eventually die (but they don't). We are all The Highlander, we just don't figure it out till we hit 150 or so and start setting what are longevity records in our own little universe. So take care of that body, because you're gonna be in it for a very long time. (Not to mention, you'll need it to be in good shape when The Kurgen shows up to challenge your geriatric self to a duel.)
Which brings me back to the LHC. Pretty much all the doomsday scenarios involving the LHC were in fact doomsday scenarios, not just inconvenience scenarios. Everybody buys it, as the earth turns into a quivering lump of steaming strange matter, breaks apart into a cloud of debris, or collapses into a black hole under the mass of the infinite matter from the future falling through the LHC's gaping time portal. In each of these scenarios, we all die. Which means there'd be nobody left to observe that we died, so therefore we're back to the position where we're not dead, or simultaneously dead and alive at the same time (a state you can avoid by simply unplugging your TV set). That in turn means that the LHC can't go wrong, because the negative consequences would kill us all, and my consciousness by definition only exists in a universe where I am alive. That the LHC was largely an all-or-nothing apocalypse ensured it could only end happily.
I should be a lot more afraid of experiments (unlike the LHC) that only have the potential to ravage half the earth, or could release a plague that could kill everyone but me.... heck, maybe it's not that we're all The Highlander, maybe we're all I Am Legend. That would really suck. So, barring the slim possibility of the Earth being overrun by blindfolded vampire kittens and I am the only human left to open the canned food for them (a scenario I dread, but refuse to take seriously), I long ago overcame my fears of the LHC.
So I'm at the Thrift Store the other day, and they have the second season of Alias on DVD. It's at a good price, but not a great price. Off the top of my head, I couldn't recall if I liked the second season. I remember the first season was brilliant, and the third season was painfully bad. But I couldn't remember when it started getting stupid. Rather than risk throwing money away on something I might regret buying, I decide to check my netflix ratings for the second season when I get home, and should it prove to be a worthy season, I'll swing back and pick it up.
Get home, log in to netflix, and attempt to look it up. I expected to see the five seasons rated individually. Instead, to my surprise and horror, they've consolidated all five seasons into one entry. They applied my rating from the first season to all that followed. I'm 100% certain I gave Season 3 a single miserable star, but now it's merged with Seasons 1, 2, 4 and 5, and the whole lot are rated with five stars. A quick glance about the site shows me that they've done similar mergings for nearly all TV series.
Honestly, I've been hoping that someday Netflix would allow further differentiation of ratings within a series, and instead they've reduced it. I've repeatedly wished over the years that they'd allow me to rate per disc or per episode of a show, and not have to generalize about entire seasons at once. Then when a new disk shows up, you could skip the episodes that all of fandom gave a one star rating. Just imagine how cool it would be to look at a list of all theTrek episodes, and be able to separate the dozen groundbreaking and mindbending sci-fi classics from the crappy Romulan Yahr invasion plotlines and the hundreds of mindless holodeck episodes just by how many stars the public gave each individual episode. That would be sweet... and so very very useful.
Instead, they've pushed the other way, making us give a single rating to an entire series. Given that the "jump the shark" phenomenon is so pervasive in series programming that there's even a catchy turn of phrase to describe it, it seems ridiculous that netflix would pretend it doesn't happen. Of all the series I've ever watched from beginning to end, only a precious handful didn't suffer from some sort of dip in quality after a certain point.
How could this simple truth escape Netflix, a company whose entire focus is on not just renting films but on compiling your ratings of them and using those ratings to suggest what other films you'll like. And they take the same amount of money from you regardless of how many films you watch in a month, so there's no conflicting financial incentive for them to make you watch crap. Giving you good recommendations and good customer service is in their obvious best interests. Failing to warn you that your new favorite show turns to crap after the star leaves in season four does them no good. What are they thinking?
Now I have to redo all my TV series ratings. Shall I rate Alias based on the taut and byzantine first season, the painfully predictable third season, or the regurgitated fifth? How do I reflect that The IT Crowd starts dry and slow for its first 5 or 6 episodes, but is worth muddling through for the incapacitatingly funny second season? Is there a way to note that LOST season 5 ends with one of the crowning moments of awesome in TV history, but season 6 ends with a let-down? How do you draw the hard lines where Ritchie Cunningham joins the army, the Great Gazoo lands in Bedrock, or when Sherman T. Potter replaces Henry Blake? More importantly, how can I trust a Netflix rating on a TV show ever again? Every series is now a potential mine field.
I'm a little annoyed at this, so I decided to send them a complaint email. Maybe it wasn't too late to reverse this change. I knew it would be hard to rally the Netflix fan base this time, because there's no longer any sort of netflix community. They eliminated all the social networking tools from the site a few years back, so you can't readily contact other netflix customers. I have no delusions about being a great leader or organizer, so I figured if I could at least send an email complaint to netflix itself, I'd be doing my part.
Complain once, and move on. Such complaints could actually work if enough people took part, because such complaints worked last time.
That was a couple years back, when they almost eliminated the "profiles" feature. The profiles function is what allows you to maintain multiple queues on one account, useful if the various members of your household have different tastes. They tried then to merge all the profiles into the main accounts, but backed off from it when the customer base rose up in complaint against the notion. Nobody wanted to have to re-rate hundreds of films, or have their account suddenly start recommending for the whole household a muddied mix of slasher films and Dora the Explorer.
So, I'd just drop a quick email and...
You ever try to email Netflix? It's impossible. Not just a little tricky, but completely impossible. It's amazing that a so thoroughly online company can have completely forsaken email and text-based communication. As it turns out, ever since shortly after the whole "profiles" rebellion, they've eliminated all incoming public email addresses. They replaced them with a 24-hour phone center. Which would be okay, I guess, if I didn't have spasmodic dysphonia and a pay-by-the-minute cellphone plan. So I searched a little online, because I figured they probably at least needed an email address for deaf people to contact them. As it turns out, no, the deaf community is up in arms about Netflix eliminating email, not training call center staff on how to take relay calls, and even not putting captions on most streaming content (including most films that have captions on the DVD).
What was I just saying about "good customer service" being "in their obvious best interests"? Netflix clearly doesn't agree.
It amazes me that the same conservatives who are so against WikiLeaks can simultaneously be in favor of right-wing undercover operations such as posing as a charity to lure folks at NPR into saying something stupid in front of a hidden camera.
I mean, logic would dictate that if you're against whistle-blowing because it's somehow dangerous or wrong, you'd also be against going undercover in search of whistles to blow. I mean, unless you were a big fucking hypocrite that just didn't want your own group's secrets exposed, and couldn't give a damn about anyone else.
Oh well, the information is out there, and the public has a right to know about it, says non-hypocrite I.
Just the same, I think it's a shame that folks at NPR are losing their jobs (and NPR might lose its gov't funding) just because someone spoke (amongst what they thought to be like-minded individuals) two facts we all know to be true:
EDIT: Man, when I get fired up, the hyperbole just gushes forth. If it's not obvious, nothing here is quite as bad as I made it sound. Quite. But I'm still voting for Jake in 2012.
Start digging the bomb shelters again, 'cause Obama just handed the '12 White House to the fucking nut job that thinks she's here to nuke the Russkies* in accordance with God's will. I swear this guy desperately doesn't want to serve a second term - why the hell did he campaign the first time, anyway?
Obama is cementing his place on the list with Pierce, Van Buren, Adams (both of them), Polk, Buchanen, Hayes, Harrison, Taft, Hoover, Carter and Bush I. A single term will suit him just fine.
The latest bit of capitulation on his part is reaching across the isle to give rich people money. $700 Billion dollars to rich people, to be precise.
He could have stood his ground, stuck to his principles, and made a big stink about how the GOP was causing all our taxes to go up by insisting on fillibustering to keep tax breaks for millionaires from running out. Hell, I'd have gladly coughed up the $3,000 the "average American family" was going to have to pay in taxes, just to see a Democratic leader actually find their fucking spine. But instead, he caves, which allows the Republicans to claim that their strength and leadership saved us all thousands. Just hand the election away again, why don't you?
Let me remind you of his previous position regarding the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich, back in 2007. It goes something like the first 9 seconds of this video:
Whatever happened to that brilliant idealist who was going to clean house and fix the system? I loved that man. He sure gave some rousing speeches. He was all full of charisma and genius. I wonder where he went? In his place is the guy who says crap like this (while knuckling under to the teabaggers)...
"I've said before that I felt that the middle-class tax cuts were being held hostage to the high-end tax cuts," President Obama said. "I think it's tempting not to negotiate with hostage takers -- unless the hostage gets harmed. Then, people will question the wisdom of that strategy."
"In this case, the hostage was the American people, and I was not willing to see them get harmed," he said.
Jesus Husein Christ, Mr. Obama, everyone who's ever watched an action-adventure movie or a single episode of 24 knows that "the President of the United States DOES NOT negotiate with terrorists and hostage takers". As you keep waving that damn metaphor in one hand, and the white flag in the other, take a moment to think about what you've just done.
Could you send a worse message, Mr President? You just:
Looked like a wimp and a coward. You drew people's attention to the Hollywood-driven trope of what the President of the United States is supposed to be, and then ran screaming from it like a bullied 12-year old would.
In the process, reminded us that you are an effete elite liberal milquetoast brainiac who spends his time reading books instead of watching movies like a real American. You announced to the world: "Remember when you thought I was hip and cool (and young)? Yeah, I'm not really that guy. I'm his much-nerdier (and older) father."
Capitulated to, and thus emboldened, the tea-bag radical Right. You conceded the initiative to all those clueless junior Palin-clone congressmen your party lost the elections to last month. Apparently, you've forgotten that they are not reasonable. Given up ground to them will not ingratiate them to you, it will not earn you brownie points, or get them to reach across the isle. That is the whole point of why the Michelle Bachman's and Christine O'Donnel's of the world are so fucking scary - because they are idealogical nutjobs with a failure to understand cause and effect or basic human decency.
Sent a message to the fucking terrorists that you actually are willing to negotiate with them, all they have to do is threaten to kill more Americans. You've encouraged them to imperil us. ...Or, at least, that's how idiots like (me and) Fox News are going to choose to interpret that sound bite. For an eloquent, educated, intelligent man, you sure are good at giving your enemies ridiculous quotes than can repeat out of context.
Every one of those perception issues is going to cost this country, it's people, and your administration. Every one of those points is going to undermine your ability to get re-elected. Your entire first two years has been all about back-pedaling and making concessions, and it's gotten us nowhere.
Just as none of us noticed when you gave us our Stimulus bonus in the form of $16 a paycheck break instead of a lump sum check we would have had to take to the bank, virtually no one in America will notice when they don't pay an unexpected $3,000 dollars more come April 15th.You have gained nothing by caving.
The sad thing is, the President (assuming he's not secretly the scum-sucking money-serving scum-bag that I don't think he is) clearly imagines that by bending over backwards like this he's actually preserving his principles and doing what's right. He thinks he's being mature, realistic, and centrist. He thinks that in doing so, he's making the next two years a little better.
I ask you, Mr. President, What hurts America more, taking $3,000 out of our pockets, or getting us all Killed by Palin sometime in early 2013**? As much as I like my money, I value not being nuked just a little more. So why are you giving up the game to the other side, when the correct is so damn obvious.
The right play here would have been to hold your ground and refuse to buckle. Then the tax-breaks for everyone would have expired. The new Congress reconvenes in January shortly before your State of the Union Address, in which you could have drawn attention to the fact that unless Congress gets it's ass in gear, we'd all have significant tax increases. That (plus their own greed) would motivate them to put the breaks back in, and if they proceeded to put in the cuts for the richest again, you'd have yet another opportunity to repeatedly point out that they were doing so specifically to benefit the rich. You could hold on to your principles there, and rest assured that the damn Republicans would have no choice but to fix it pronto, or else they'd be the ones standing to loose an election over it.
About the only way the Democrats could get my vote back would be with a Kucinich-McDermott ticket. That's particular pipe dream has about the same odds as the DNC mastering the ancient art of necromancy to raise FDR and Wellstone from the grave for 2012.
Footnotes: *: Whom she can see from her front porch, don't ya know. **: Remember, the church she attends teaches that it's God's plan that the Apocalypse will happen in our lifetimes, and Alaska will serve as a refuge for the least evil of those who are left behind after the Rapture. I'd be surprised if she waits 10 minutes from be sworn in till the missiles are in the air.
This is a really under-reported story from earlier this summer. It documents obvious evidence that the Primaries in South Carolina were rigged and stolen. It should have made repeated national headlines, but I just heard about it today despite being 2 months old.
In South Carolina, the majority of votes are placed on electronic voting machines at the polling stations. Machines that have no transparency or safeguards, so you can't be certain that your vote was tabulated or reported accurately. As near as I can tell, that's why Alvin Greene won the Democratic primary.
Greene is unemployed but somehow came up with the $10,440 filing fee to get on the Primary ballot. He's currently indicted on two criminal counts - one a felony - and was arrested for them both 6 months before the Primary. His master plan to save the South Carolina economy is to create jobs by making and selling action figures of himself. As I understand it, he had no TV ads, no website, he neither scheduled nor attended any campaign rallies, did no fund raising nor any campaigning of any recognizable sort. He had no political background at all.
Watch this downright bizarre interview where Keith Olbermann asks Alvin Greene about how he campaigned:
His chief opponent in the primary was a four-time State legislator who did lots of campaigning.
Despite those many handicaps, Alvin Greene won the Primary by a landslide victory at the polls - with the electronic voting machines in some precincts reporting more votes for Green than total ballots cast! In most precincts in South Carolina, the only paper trail left after an election is the absentee ballots. Traditionally, absentee ballots tend to have similar results ratios as polling-place ballots. However, in this case, Greene got only 16% of the absentee ballot vote, but got 59% of the non-traceable, non-verifiable electronic votes at the polls.
The best case scenario seems to be one of State-wide election-machine error, and the more chilling yet more likely scenario seems to be systematic fraud and rigging of an election. Right here in the USA, not in some rinky-dink third-world banana republic.
I'm all for Freedom of Speech. I understand that one man's art is another man's blasphemy, or the other way around. I've been involved in a good deal of both. As a general policy, I'm largely in favor of legalizing anything that doesn't hurt anyone, and decriminalizing (but probably still regulating) anything that only hurts yourself.
Just the same, I can't help but wonder if maybe the folks at the Dove World Outreach Center have a different definition of "World Outreach" than I do, and I'll bet money that there's is an immensely ironic meaning. We also probably don't envision the same iconography and symbolism when we talk about Doves, either.
Florida church’s ‘Burn a Koran Day’ brings Islamist threats
...
"On September 11th, 2010, from 6pm - 9pm, we will burn the Koran on the property of Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, FL in remembrance of the fallen victims of 9/11 and to stand against the evil of Islam,"
Sad, so very, very sad.
Unless they're affiliated with Dove Chocolates, they should probably change the name of their organization.
The White House recently sacked General McChrystal, largely because of some comments he made to Rolling Stone magazine. I'm all for freedom of speech, but I can see how there's something of a need for the top Generals in the field to not be scathingly critical of their Commander in Chief. Letting them trash-talk the civilian government could theoretically open the doors to a coup. In general, we should try to not make the same mistakes the Romans did.
But this vacancy means General Petraeus will be filling the gap, and increasing his duties. Petraeus, about whom there's a fair amount of internet speculation that he might be the Republican Nominee for President in 2012. Which means you have a sitting general at the pinnacle of his career with really no where to rise, possibly contemplating running for the highest office. That's a pretty serious conflict of interests. He can either do his current job real well, or he can let things get out of hands and claim it's the President's fault then use it against him while campaigning. I know there's that bit about keeping your enemies closer, but I'm kinda wondering if this isn't a tactical blunder for the O-man.
Of course, for all I know Petraeus is a stand-up guy with a strong moral compass who would never dream of doing that. Obama may have assessed that. And for all I know, he might not be interested in the Oval Office, and rampant internet speculation may be way off the mark. I'll admit my paranoia on this one is mainly based on him having a Roman-sounding name. It's just too close to Praetorian.
Bonus Historical Fact: When the Romans would give a parade for a triumphant General, there was always an extra man in the main chariot, whispering in the General's ear. This man's loyalty was to the Senate. His duty during this triumphal parades was to whisper "remember, you are mortal" in the Commanding Officer's ear, to counter-act the ego-rush of having a million Romans cheer your name and throw flowers at your feet. I've often wondered if this tidbit recorded by historians is incomplete. I mean, if you're standing that close to him and whispering in his ear, you could easily also be holding a knife to his back and the crowds might never notice. That would certainly remind him just how mortal he is.
Okay, I have to give this guy high marks for making a very clever political spot that's far more entertaining than most campaign ads I've seen...
...even if I disagree with his message and platform. "Vote for me because I can shoot a rifle while I fix my roof" is just a bit odd. I can't help but wonder how exactly it is that mowing lawns and throwing grenades prepares one for being a Senator. I don't suppose it'd go over well if you tried doing any of those on Capitol Hill. I was likewise amused by his flippant remarks about Miranda rights and due process, and by his choosing to compare himself to a fictional character that tortures people on an hourly basis. Seems like maybe, just maybe, he just might have a little trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality.
There's also something a little amusing about this not terribly manly-looking guy trying to real hard play up his manliness in these ads. He focuses on his military service, but tells stories about ducking for cover, not heroics. That's realistic, and refreshingly honest, but kind of sends a conflicting message. Even his military photos made him look like a scrawny goofball in uniform. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I used to hang with some Airforce SP's who'd play D&D while on night patrol. They were good guys, but eager to prove themselves, and he seems cut from the same cloth. In that light, he'd just be drawing the connections to Jack Bauer to let us know how manly he is, because it's always in question when you're the runt of the platoon litter. The message he's declaring so emphatically is that the only way you'll see him anywhere near a log cabin is if he's fixing the roof of it.
And then I think of the 24 references again, and I realize he might also use the log cabin as a place to hold foreigners he intends to torture.
Maybe in a few years he'll show us how he prepared to run for President by blowing up the Death Star and kissing his sister. I think that would play to a wider audience.
BP has succeeded in capturing "some" oil and gas by inserting a mile-long tube into the main Gulf of Mexico leak, but would not say if it was a significant percentage of the gusher or just a dribble.
Despite the uncertainty, it was still the first tangible sign of success in more than three weeks of efforts to prevent at least 210,000 gallons of oil from spewing unabated into the sea each day and feeding a massive slick off the coast of Louisiana.
BP senior executive vice president Kent Wells refused to be drawn on quantity Sunday, ...
"We will look to... capture as much of the oil as we can," he told reporters in Houston, Texas. "At this point, we don't know what percentage we will capture" by the process, in which the oil was sucked up as if through a straw to the giant ship.
A BP statement said simply that the four-inch (10-centimeter) diameter tube inserted into the 21-inch leaking pipe using undersea robots had captured "some amounts of oil and gas."
Since BP wouldn't comment on quantity, I thought I'd make a little visual aid. In the very simple graphic shown to the right, the black circle is 21 units in diameter, to represent the 21-inch diameter pipe / hole that oil is flowing out of. The lighter teal circle is 4 units in diameter, to represent the 4-inch diameter "sucking straw" that is pulling oil up to burn off. The area of the teal circle is just over 3.6% the area of the black circle. Look at that cute little teal circle. So tiny and cuddly. The oil pipe followed me home from school, mommy, can I keep it?
I have zero data on the suction rate or force of the 4-inch extraction pipe. It may be a fast-flowing siphon, a miracle of modern engineering built to suck like nothing else has ever sucked before. Or it might just use the same pressure that's making the existing leak flow. If the later, then I imagine it doesn't catch too much of the leak, fluid dynamics being what they are... but, I suppose, even if it were just 3.6% of the flow, that's still like 7,600 gallons per day less being poured into the ocean. It's better than nothing, I guess, and it's not like I'm an expert on oil, physics, or engineering.
Hey, I've got an idea, though, one that I think we could all get behind. Instead of going to war over oil in the Middle East, how about we just don't freakin' pour what we've got left into the ocean?
That's what really wrenches my gut about all this. The ecological catastrophe is horrendous, and will poison the Gulf for generations, but even worse is the thought that the oil companies who aren't involved with this particular spill are probably going to be able to sell crude at a higher rate thanks to this disaster. We need to get on solar and wind power ASAP, because burning dinosaurs seems to be more and more to looking like a really bad idea in general. That's just my opinion, though, your mileage may vary - and you'd better have a car that gets good mileage, 'cause the oil is gonna get real expensive again in the near future.
Surprisingly, I'm about to argue for deregulation at the SEC. That's far afield from my normal politics, but then, this is not about normal politics or what's supposed to be going on at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
It turns out that the guys who were supposed to be regulating our banks instead spent their days searching for porn.
_ A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. ...
_ An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as "Sex" or "Pornography." ...
California Rep. Darrell Issa, ... said it was "disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at porn than taking action to help stave off the events that put our nation's economy on the brink of collapse."
So, of course, the short-sighted response is to spend more government money investigating, disciplining, firing, and hiring replacements. The intention being to make it harder for someone to spend all day searching for porn on the job, and to punish them more heavily when and if they do so. This deterence methods are guaranteed to fail. If being blocked 16,000 times doesn't stop you from spending 8 hours a day looking for porn, then honestly nothing will. These people's jobs must be boring, and their lives must be desperate.
The real solution here is deregulation, or actually, one step past deregulation. If you want to stop people from spending all day searching for porn, the way to do so is to pony up for a couple of high-quality porn sites for all employees.
People spend all day searching for porn when they're bored and have nothing else to do, so a lousy do-nothing job like the SEC is bound to have people slacking (and whacking) off. I mean, it's not like the SEC actually polices the financial sector, they're not paid enough to do that. Their job, whether we like it or not, is to sit around pretending to regulate while waiting for corporate America to send them their next big fat bribe check. Waiting for your next bribe is not exciting or engaging, so some segment of the workforce at the SEC will always be bored and looking to get off.
As anyone whose ever spent hours looking for porn can attest, you can kill a hell of a lot of time looking for something that's actually worth watching. Most of the amateur fucking on the internet is horrid. Either it's boring and uncreative, or the opposite - it's too damn disturbing to enjoy. If you grab a DVD or magazine out of your own collection, you can be done in 20 minutes or less, but if you have to get your rocks off via a net search, expect to spend many hours trying to find something that matches your particular tastes in kink. It's the way things are, and we all know it.
If the government wants to increase productivity in the boring SEC workplace, they shouldn't regulate, restrict, and investigate. They should give each employee a budget, enough to get subscriptions at the 2 or 3 websites that best match their tastes. Instead of spending 4 or 8 hours hunting for porn day after day, they'll log in for 30 minutes, have a nice orgasm, and get back to work. They may do so again 2 or 3 more times during the day, but that still totals less than 2 hours total spent on porn daily, and happy workers will be more rested and productive in-between porn searches.
Hell, throw some hookers into the mix, and you might create a work environment rewarding enough for the SEC to stop taking bribes. Just sayin'.
I voted for him, and then spent the first year of his term watching him backpedal and fail. It was frustrating.
Then he and his team got some health care reform passed, and while the concessions and loopholes in it really alarmed me, at least he got something done. I was thankful, even if kinda worried.
Then he set a Mars schedule for NASA, and it made me smile. I think getting off this rock is an important goal for our species. At the same time, though, I can't say that NASA plans really figured into any of progressive campaign promises that made me vote for him. Plus, I couldn't rule out that a 2030 goal might just be lip service and PR. So while it made me a little happy, it wasn't likely to have a lasting impact on my opinion of him.
That's when he went out of his way to remind me that he really was worth voting for after all. Obama orders hospitals to extend visitation and legal decision rights to gay and lesbian partners. Kick ass! There's a liberal, progressive, socially conscious, forward minded, humane thing he enacted by way of Presidential power. Something you can be absolutely certain would not have been done under a Republican administration. Well done, Mr President.
Last week's Health Care Reform passage was a long time coming, and really only amounts to a tiny step in the right direction. It could have been a lot better. I for one would have loved a full-on European-style socialist single-payer system. I feel that's eventually where we're going to have to go to meet the needs of the people, but it'll be lots of kicking and screaming battles, with tiny little hops of progress between them.
I found last weeks small victory somewhat unpalatable partly because it was so small (by the time it passed, it was packed with pork and concessions for the Insurance and Pharmaceutical industries), and partly because it was achieved by Obama and Pelosi. I've detested Nancy Pelosi since she took Bush's impeachment "off the table" in the name of making the government run smoothly. She said she wasn't going to let the government grind to a halt like it did during the whole Ken Starr investigation of Clinton.
To that I had two counter-arguments:
While that desire to see government function properly and without disruption is quite noble, it was naïve to think that the Republican obstructionism of the later Clinton years wasn't now just a standard part of the playbook that they would unleash the next time a Democrat sat in high office. I felt she was hamstringing her own party by forcing it to hold itself to an unreasonable standard of behavior, one which the opposition would never hold themselves to. Don't do the Repubs any favors that you know they wouldn't do for you.
War crimes ain't blow jobs (and vice versa), and impeaching an evil President for war crimes is the definition of "government functioning properly and without disruption", even if everything else takes a back-burner while that's in motion.
This past year has proven me right on the first point at least. Last year set a congressional record for the number of cloture votes to break fillibusters, and the first three months of this year have been even worse. Here's a nice chart that lays it out. The Republicans have been obstructing at record levels, essentially hitting our government with a "slow-down strike" (which is pretty bizarre given the well-known Republican hatred of Unions).
So, for the past couple years, I've been sitting around feeling all contemptuous of Nancy Pelosi, and for the last year of it I've been occasionally allowing myself a smug "I told you so!" Of course, I didn't believe in her. I thought she was a defeatist at best, a corporate shill or even evil conspirator at the worst. Now, I may in fact be right about the later in regards to certain elements, but she's acquitted herself of the defeatist accusation, at least. She stuck to her guns, and forced this bill through the most horrendous obstructionism our government has seen since the 1870s.
I didn't believe in Obama, either. I voted for him, but then had to watch him concede ground like crazy for his first year in office. It was shameful and disgusting, and looked all the more so because I had no faith in him. I didn't expect him or Pelosi to see this Health Care bill through. I remembered the first 100 days of the Clintons, who actually made great strides in Washington in the opening months of their administration, only to have that momentum broken in the fight over health care. Seeing that we were fighting the same battle again 16 years later, I didn't think Obama would be able to pull it off.
So, I'm not saying the bill (now law) was perfect. There's a long way to go to make it what we need, and it's clear that the Rethuglicans will continue to fight hard for the next 3 years+ to keep anything else progressive from coming out of Washington. But, I have to admit, I now suspect Pelosi and Obama will actually give them a fight worth watching after all, and that's pretty fucking awesome. In the words of Bill Maher at the Huffington Post:
Two months ago, conservative Fred Barnes wrote, "The health care bill is dead with not the slightest prospect of resurrection." Well, if it's dead, you just got your ass kicked by a zombie named Nancy Pelosi. Seriously, the last time a Democrat showed balls like that John Edwards' girlfriend was filming it. Make all the botox jokes and she-shops-too-much jokes you want, but this is the biggest political victory a woman has ever achieved in America.
I was in a department store the other day, and I took a moment to wander through their toy section. There's this big display of Star Wars action figures. Including a figure Wisolea, who looks like this: The action figure looked a little less ridiculous than that photo - but not much. You got this bizarre alien head with eyes all over the place, and these two long limp tentacles that just hang there - atop a perfectly human-looking body.
I had to gawk. I flip over the back of the package, to find out what part of the "expanded universe" this awful monstrosity came from.
It tells me this character is from Episode IV? Supposedly it's the merchant that bought Luke's Landspeeder for 2,000 credits.
I couldn't completely believe that. I don't remember seeing it on film, and the only image of the thing I can find online is clearly a bad pre-photoshop paste job. Someone took a colorized poster featuring b-movie horror monster, and just glued it over Obi-Wan's face. It's an illustrated head on a photographed body!
But it gets worse. The box claimed (and Wookiepedia confirms) that the critter only paid the 2000 credits it did because Obi-Wan used a Jedi Mind Trick on it to fool it into paying more than the speeder was worth.
God dammit, George Lucas! What the hell is wrong with you (and your merchandising Empire)? When Qui-Gon abuses the force to fleece Watto, the viewer can almost justify that, seeing as how Watto is a low-life and a slave-owner. Almost justified. At least the scene is kinda funny. It's still sad to see a Jedi behaving like a con-man, but it's not like anyone with any taste or intelligence considers Phantom Menace to be cannonical. We all just kinda try to pretend it doesn't exist. It communicates volumes about Lucas's takes on philosophy, morality, personal profit, and storytelling.
But, dammit, to retcon this sort of crap into one of the films that we all still love and adore? I'm insulted. Worse, Luke complains in A New Hope about how he didn't get much for his Landspeeder, that they weren't in demand since the new model came out. I get that Luke's whinny, but seriously, this retcon means he's bitching even though Obi-Wan just swindled the vendor to get that money. It's not like Luke could miss that, since in the previous scene, Obi-Wan, sitting in the Landspeeder, had done the "these aren't the droids you're looking for" trick, and explained how it worked to Luke. You've just retroactively made Luke stupid.
Thanks a lot, Lucas. I really needed you to piss all over my childhood yet again, and you and your money-machine were all too happy to oblige me.
Beep! Beep! Beep! The little electric steamer shouts out to us that the lentils are not nearly done, nor will they progress any further unless we put more water in the steamer. It sounds like a pulse monitor, on a man whose terrific aerobic workout is about to cross the line into full-on cardiac incident. I'm right there in the kitchen, tall glass of water in my hand, but I can't pour it in fast enough to silence the thing. Beep! Beep! Beep!
That's when my wife chimes in. Barely audible over the beeping, she says "that sure is an informative beeper you've got there. They made that thing terribly effective, didn't they? Quite the technological marvel..."
I stopped pouring. Thoughts boiling into words, and steaming out my mouth, I disagree. It's not terribly effective, not at all. If it were literally terribly effective, it wouldn't tell me a thing. Now wouldn't that be a technological marvel? A completely uninformative beeper. A beeper, built into a steamer, that communicates nothing. You'd have to make it beep randomly, not only when you're out of water or the lentils are done. Of course that still lets you know it's running, so you'd need to design it to beep at unpredictable intervals. Even if turned off for months, it'd save up some power to surprise you. In the middle of the night, you're up to sneak a snack in, and there's this random beep coming at you from a nearby cupboard. Damn thing's unplugged, yet there it is beeping at you, for no good reason. Of course, that communicates where the steamer is, so even it's not entirely uninformative. No, for that, you'd have to send the electric steamer to ventriloquist's school. It might be beeping at you out of the fridge, or beeping from your sock drawer, then.
That, I think smuggly to myself, but loudly enough to get her blood boiling, that would be a true marvel of terrible effectiveness. Ventroliquist steamer. A machine that cooks your food, keeps you company in the middle of the night, and can entertain the kiddies, all while communicating nothing. There's bachelors who'd put down hard money down for that. That's about when I notice that the look she's giving me. Just below my nose, the steamer was still beeping. Informative little thing, trying to tell me that I might be one of those bachelors if I keep this up.
A sprinkler pipe burst in the attic, and flooded three apartments. Luckily, not mine, but my neighbor and the two apartments below his. The landlord and some plumbers came out, and it's looking like $20,000 worth of damage.
They patch the pipe, and turned on the water again. Suddenly, all the fire alarms in the building start going off. We walk the building, no signs of fire, but the alarms won't turn off.
It's freaking loud. It hurts my ears. I'd leave, I'm tempted to head out and get away from the noise, but my cats are freaking out. I'm not sure leaving them alone with this scary noise is a good thing. Last time the little one got this scared, she peed on things for more than a month.
And then, magically, as I typed these words, the noise stopped. Beautiful, serene, silence. I realize there's a tiny chance this means the building went up in seconds and I'm now dead, but it'd be worth it.
Surreal Update: A fireman, in his full getup, just knocked on my door and asked "you got any water in there?" Turns out his 'hose' was a shopvac.
I read these newsarticles, and I can't help but be suspicious. I don't know if the CIA is involved, or if the Afghani's are just fucking up their own politics, but I guarantee you there's more going on than meets the eye. My instincts are that something sinister either just went down, or is about to go down. Mind you, this is all based on a handful of news and wikipedia articles, and the conclusions it draws are just idle speculation, but here's the situation as it appears to me...
Hamid Karzai was chosen by "prominent Afghan political figures" to lead the provisional government there in 2001, a 6-month term. This was followed by a 2-year appointment to the Presidency by the Loya Jirga, the council of tribal chiefs. In 2004 he was elected President in an actual election. Then, in 2008 he got elected again... but this time the U.N. inspectors discovered that nearly a third of his votes were fraudulent, and he didn't actually have a majority.
At this point, John Kerry flies to Afghanistan, and convinces Hamid Karzai to allow a new run-off election. It would be just Karzai and the next highest vote-getter, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah. Now, that seems a reasonable thing to do if your problem is that no single candidate got the majority of votes. But that's not the problem. The problem is that Karzai, as sitting President with power over the election process, engaged in voter fraud.
A second election would have one of two results, obviously, depending on whether or not Karzai had control of the election process again.
If he did, then he'd likely fudge the numbers again and declare himself the winner.
If he didn't have control, or chose not to cheat, then he would lose. Because the majority of people didn't vote for him in the first place, and those people now yet have another reason to vote for his opposition - because Karzai is now, according to the U.N. inspectors, a known liar and cheater.
Either Karzai would win, and everyone would know it's because he cheated and lied again, or else he'd lose by a huge overwhelming majority. If you're a powerful foreign government that has found Karzai to be easy to work with, this could be quite the dilemma. Either your man will lose, or he'll win and you'll have to acknowledge you're working with a criminal who subverts the democratic process.
So, instead, 6 days before the run-off election, his opposition suddenly drops out of the race. Instead of transferring his slot to the next candidate down on the list, Karzai's election board decides the only way to proceed is to not proceed at all. The run-off is canceled, and Karzai is declared the winner.
Conveniently, this saves face for his international allies, who now have plausible deniability about Karzai's direct involvement in election-rigging. "Oh, that was just zealous supporters rigging things. He'd told them not to do it, that there'd be stiff punishments for subverting the will of the people. That second election was going to be legit. It's not his fault that the only opposition conceded. I mean if Gore can concede to Bush, then why can't Abdullah concede to Karzai?" Etc. And thus is a major scandal poo-poo-ed and hand-waved away.
The question that bothers me regards the secret backstory of all this. Did Abdullah concede because:
of a bribe? This would be the happiest scenario. It's also unlikely, since Abdullah still made parting shot comments at Karzai, calling attention to his corruption and election-rigging.
of threats or danger? Fearing for his life if he continued to resist the President who was desperate to retain power? Again, that he called out Karzai's corruption in his concession speech makes this unlikely, but doesn't completely rule it out.
of plans to rebel? I don't know much about Abdullah. He's a medical doctor, but he was also a military adviser to one of the leaders of the revolution against the soviets, and then fought against the Taliban. He's comfortable in a western suit, and has visited the Pentagon. That paints a complicated portrait, but at least suggests he's unlikely to go help the Taliban.
A few of the wikipedia articles did point me to some interesting breadcrumbs. Abdullah had been military advisor to Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was the leader of the anti-Taliban resistance prior to 9/11. On September 9th, 2001, Massoud was assassinated. The assassins had stolen Belgian passports, claimed to have been born in Morocco, but were really citizens of Tunisia. As part of their cover as photojournalists, they carried a fancy camera that had been stolen in France. Regardless of what country actually financed, trained, and employed them, the assassins entered Afghanistan from the Pakistan border, and were helped in the getting through Northern Alliance security by one Ustad Abdul Rabi Rasul Sayyaf. Sayyaf was part of the Northern Alliance, but also has connections to Pakistan and has political views that are very Taliban-esque. He struck a deal with Karzai, so Wikipedia tells me, to get one of his pawns declared Chief Justice of the Afghani Supreme Court. The details of the appointment violated the Afghani Constitution. The Justice then reinstituted the Taliban practice of organizing squads whose job it is to discourage and punish "un-Islamic behavior" in women.
In case that's all too dense, I'll pluck out the relevant threads:
This election-rigging is not the first time Karzai has violated the Constitution of Afghanistan, and at least one such violation has lead to human rights abuses.
Karzai has political ties with a extremist who's suspected of killing Abdullah's good friend.
Had that friend not been assassinated two days before 9/11, the post-Taliban government in Afghanistan would have been very different.
It ain't pretty. From where I'm sitting, it also kinda looks like our government is propping Karzai up, just like it did with the Shah of Iran. You'll recall how well that went over.
Analysis finds holes in US Iran story: US may have pretended to know about facility
WASHINGTON (IPS) – The story line that dominated media coverage of the second Iranian uranium enrichment facility last week was the official assertion that U.S. intelligence had caught Iran trying to conceal a “secret” nuclear facility.
But an analysis of the transcript of that briefing by senior administration officials that was the sole basis for the news stories and other evidence reveals damaging admissions, conflicts with the facts and unanswered questions that undermine its credibility.
The article goes on to explain that while Obama and the rest of the U.S. Government claimed to have caught Iran secretly setting up a nuke factory, the truth is they didn't know what the building was until after Iran contacted the International Atomic Energy Agency and officially announced to the world what the facility was. So, it's not that we caught them sneaking around. They snook around, yes, but then they came clean about it, before our intelligence services knew what it was. But we'll still claim we caught them with their hands in the atomic cookie jar, and start building up towards war. A claim that all the major papers and networks trumpeted.
Noam Chomsky is right. The major media lies through it's teeth to support the status quo and extend our power abroad.
*Sigh*
I so desperately want to like President Obama. He said all the right things prior to the election... but now he's acting more and more like Bush. I thought he was going to change things, so I voted for him. Instead, we get more saber-rattling, plus caving on public healthcare, and maintaining unconstitutional rendition policies. A year ago he was saying he'd talk unconditionally with Iran, now he's yelling "gotcha" at them instead. WTF Obama!? You have the power to fix our country - please don't squander that by repeating the mistakes of the 8-years of tyranny that went before you.
So very sad.
The fact of the matter is, we can no longer control who has nukes. It's been dubious ever since the fall of the USSR. The technology is on the net. Enriching uranium is difficult and dangerous, but not so difficult that we can keep it from happening all over the world, not with 100% accuracy. All it takes is screwing up once, and millions die. So, attempting to stomp on every nation who tries to build nukes isn't a winning strategy. It's a doomed strategy, that will eventually lose in a big way. The only winning strategy is to reduce peoples desire to nuke us. The only way to do that is to restructure the power in the U.S. and the World. It's time for the rich to start giving it away to the poor, and for the U.S. to start making restitutions to all the places we've bombed, invaded and robbed, and to the places our allies did the same to while we looked the other way.
I don't know whether to be happy, sad, paranoid, or really let down.
Happy, 'cause this is starting to look like another awesome example of speciation in our time. Two finds now (this year and 2 years ago) of hairless gray dog-like creatures with abnormally large teeth and abnormally long legs, wandering the wilds of Texas and attacking chickens.
Sad, because the poor little puppies were killed both times. And the poor little chickens. The horror!
Paranoid, because 2 years ago the news promised us gene-sequencing to find out if it was a new species... ...and then never followed up! They must be hiding something! It's a conspiracy!
Or really let down because it may turn out that El Chupacabra is just a mangy dog. Man, that would really suck (goats)!
