Caveat Lector

For years, I've thought that "Caveat Lector" was a combination of "Caveat Emptor" and Hannibal Lecter. Today, I find out that "Caveat Lector" is a fully legitimate Latin phrase in its own write, and that "Caveat Lecter" is only either a misspelling or a pun by movie reviewers who also happen to be scholars of ancient Latin. I blame my Latin instructor for this misunderstanding; I am self-taught.

I was thinking of this today because Mr Halliburton "Dick" Cheney was recently out of the Secure Undisclosed, walking around in public, possibly unarmed or only lightly armed, boasting of how a little water torture is just what the terrorists and/or illegally detained citizens need.

Dick always reminds me of Hannibal Lecter. How could he not, I wonder, and remind myself that none other than the Diebold corporation insist that his ticket got more votes than all but maybe one other candidate. I guess some people don't see him the way I do – the way he really is. For people without the vision-thing, here he is, in the low-res quality with which he appears to those of us who see his soul. He may be even scarier than the mothman.

The Shining

Around this time of year I sometimes find myself watching The Shining. This analysis is interesting. I'm not sure if it really rises to the level of being the hidden meaning, or if it was intended to work subconsciously on a visual level to activate that repressed complex of guilt, fear, and hate. The site has a synopsis and some other thoughts about the duality motif in the film.
Update: I think Kubrick was definitely conscious of the symbology mentioned above, and was making meanings on many levels, as artists like him do.

G.O.P. runs Bush/BinLaden '06 Congressional Campaign spot

The new Repugnicant Nationalist Committee features their hero, Osama BinLaden, prominently, and lets Osama do the talking for them. "What is yet to come will be even greater," the ad quotes bin Laden as saying, according to the Washington Post. Osama has had a prominent role as a front man making audio and video releases for the Party of God (G.O.P.) for years, and is considered untouchable within the party, a key asset that replaces the need for policies and enables a repressive form of kleptocracy. Just imagine the wonders these two (the Bush-BinLaden ticket) can bring us, if they continue to work together. You ain't seen nuthin' yet! If BinLaden didn't exist, they would have to invent him. If he wouldn't make a pre-election recording, the RNC will just have to do it for him.

The RNC website refuses any access from any of my browsers; apparently I am not allowed to know their plans? Is it my IP address or all foreign IPs that they are blocking??

Update: Media Matters did a report on the extensive airplay as "news" that the ad has enjoyed before it aired. (But aren't they part of the same problem?) You can watch a recap of the coverage by Fox, CNN, etc there (but with awareness^TM).

Job opportunities in the US Torture Corps

After a while, I'm not really sure if this is funny or not. I worry a little that the truly shameless torturers might even enjoy this video, too. When you make a joke that references past or ongoing oppressions, it is abusive, exploitative, or does it bring attention and awareness to the issue? Take it with a bit of a Mel Brooks mentality. It has its moments, might make you think, and takes 1 minute 11 seconds. Via Americablog.

Cities of Dreams

On occasion, I have had dreams in which I seemed to be a traveler to a future time and place.

One time, I dreamed I was in an area of rolling mountains. The area was mostly grassy green, and we were on top of a ridge. The slope was rather steep to build on, and the valley below could be prone to flooding or avalanche. On top of the next ridge was another large building like the one we were approaching. I became aware that there was something very strange about this place, that it was real, but I could not tell whether we were in Europe or America. I asked my two guides "What country is this?" and "What year is this?", questions which were met with laughter and disbelief even when I repeated the question, insisting that I was serious. We entered a large single-story building. There was a single entrance to the building, although it was very large and many people lived there. I thought it was something like a longhouse. The entrance opened directly into a large area not unlike a hotel lobby, where various activities were taking place in different corners. For example, in one corner, small children were playing, and being watched and entertained by caretakers, possibly while their parents were away. Children of different ages hung out in another area, and a group of old people were gathered to play chess and cards and chat in another area. I realized that this was not just an apartment-style building, but much more sophisticated. This lobby or social area provided services such as childcare, elderly care, a hangout for interest groups or discussion groups, and even security, since everybody would have to pass through this area to go through to more private living areas.

I don't remember much else about the dream. I half-expected to see elements of the housing design that I had seen start to appear in real designs, but I have seen movement more in the opposite direction: less communal housing and shared communal spaces, more video cameras for security and small or nonexistent shared lobby spaces.

Last night I had another strange dream that was similar. I was awake from 4:05 to at least 4:54, probably due to one of the medications I am taking for pneumonia. The pharmacist had told me it could cause doki-doki, which I took to mean excitement, rapid heartbeat, or something similar. Maybe that caused me to wake up. I had this energy to cycle to the beach and watch the sun rise or something crazy like that. I think the energy was supposed to go to expectoration, not expectation. After I fell asleep again, I was in a dream. I was being given a tour of a place. I knew it was a dream, and that I would be returning from the tour. I was trying to take photos with a cellphone, and take notes to record what I saw. Obviously, when I woke up, these records were gone, but I attempted to take a few notes of what I remembered before the dream eroded away to a trace.

I was in a city. It seemed to be Tokyo. The year may have been 2020 or 2200 or something like that. In the old city, I was being taken around to visit many people. Most interiors had been done completely with bamboo. Interiors looked like a Thai countryside house on the inside. Some of the people I visited seemed to be living in small apartments on small side-streets of the old city. Some of these were clearly very old, and surrounded by older decaying apartment units which were bigger.

Exploring from these side streets, I could see that much of the city was in ruins. It was not the ruins of an earthquake or war, but the ruins of mold, rust, and decay. The buildings looked just like modern buildings only aged 100 years. They were drab, sometimes twisted or warped, appearing leaky and unlivable. Perhaps they were too expensive to tear down and were just abandoned for the time being. The biggest structural problem was probably that many roofs had collapsed. I found the ruins quite picturesque, and was enjoying the atmospheric shadowy spaces among the rusted metal, broken glass, and grimy concrete of this area, taking photographs. People were few in these areas, but friendly, yet slightly curious as to visitors. In some places, the sidewalks along these areas were made of old plywood layered like shingles on a roof. In some places, the plywood had rotted and my foot would go through it into a hole. Underneath, I could see that it was not dirt, but was made of the crushed ruins of old wooden houses.

A few times, in the ruins, I came to spots where there were big steel grid gates, more like a drawbridge or gate that would be dropped in a river or something. You could see through this fenced area to a special area inside. In there was a large cleared area of a few square kilometers. Much of it had been cleared of everything but dirt, and excavated deeper than other areas. It looked cleaned up as if no city had ever been there. Off about a kilometer away, in the background, I could see a big machine working. It was like a car carrier, scaled up to be about 4 times wider, 4 times higher, and longer. It also resembled a combine (harvester) in how it functioned. I called it a city-eater. It converted the ruined city into empty space and materials for building new city. It took in the ruins of the old city at the front, and discharged small amounts of dirt underneath or from the back. Apparently the chopped-up bits of city that it was taking in were sorted into bins inside for re-use. I thought that these machines were human-operated, but while I was watching one, it turned and headed toward me. I thought that it was responding to my staring at it, but it was just coming to the gate where I happened to be. I saw then that it was autonomous, not human-operated, and that it responded to human speech. A guard at the gate met it and left, speaking with it, as it maneuvered down the street toward the port. I followed it to find it there waiting for a ship. Traffic, by the way, was very busy, and consisted of cars, trucks, and bicycles that didn't seem much different than now.

I was able to bring my family there, but we didn't live in a single-family unit like the bamboo-refinished antique apartments of the old city. There was a larger social unit, an intermediate one, that doesn't exist today. Unlike the Work Unit of China, this was like a Living Unit. I think there may have been about a hundred or more of us. We were together in the open air at picnic-tables at the twilight, talking with others. Later, inside, I saw a kitchen area. There was a colored slider-abacus-like device to show when it was your turn to cook. There was room for about 20 people to work, with 4 or 5 rows of counters, with 4 or 5 work stations in each row. Each work space was walled off like a library carrel. These carrels and the walls were made of a plastic or glassy material about 4 to 6 inches thick. Some children were standing up on top of the dividers or trying to help out their dads and moms with cooking chores. There was a nice atmosphere, like a house or casual restaurant more than work. There was a big round metal grill or griddle (teppan) shaped like a barrel, and on top, some kind of gyoza, about 50 of them, were cooking.

Near the cooking area was a shower area. I didn't see any baths, but there were showers for about 20 people at this location, semiprivate. The walls were made of this glassy material that looked like marble or superball-sized pieces of clear glass or plastic, mixed in with some colored pieces of the glass or plastic, had been melded together into semi-translucent walls. There were doors made of this stuff on some showers, which were more like stalls, others were in a more open part of the shower area.

The eating area was near here, too. It seemed a little too crowded and brightly lit. There was picnic-table type seating, i.e. benches and long tables. It all seemed to be indoors, and I don't remember windows in any of these areas, so maybe we were underground.

On waking up, the dream began to evaporate very quickly. I took a few notes to try to save some of it, but most dripped back into the subconscious like water flowing out of a car dredged from a river, or soap bubbles popping.

Update: (20061021): I remembered that "Gunkanjima" -- Hashima Island, in Nagasaki Prefecture, possibly the most densely populated place on earth in 1959, and abandoned since 1974, is a good place to see the process of modern high-rise architecture returning to nature, except that you can't really legally go there, so look up some of the online galleries.

Guns before butter. 花よりだんご

I have pneumonia. It took a while to realize that and be diagnosed properly. The fever of 39.5 and coughing up of blood helped the hospital to get the right diagnosis the second time, with the help of an x-ray. An unpleasant symptom of pneumonia is feeling hot, cold, sweaty, and clammy all at the same time. My splitting headache has come back. Yes, like the one Abe Lincoln had.

I was thinking about two things one day while I waiting around at the hospital. First, it is taken for granted that everyone is cared for in Japan, everyone has health insurance. The system is not up for much political debate of any kind; changes may be made by bureaucrats (by which I mean professionals in the best sense of the word) not politicians. Like virtually every other industrialized country, a public health system was put in place when the GNP per capita passed about US $8000 or 10,000. Countries with socialist ideologies, such as Cuba, build a health system before almost anything else. Something went wrong in the US. Was it that Truman didn't package it correctly? Was Eisenhower blocking it? Why did Kennedy invade Cuba and fly to the moon instead of build up a public health system? Why did Johnson invade Vietnam with his Grate Society? We can't blame it on the Chief Executioner; what about the Congress? They were bought and sold, so why didn't the public insist on it? It could be the assured class-consciousness of the ruling class which runs the press, or it could be a peculiar ludicrousness or gullibility in the American people. I can't explain what went wrong with America but, in Japan, the idea that you would just set off certain people and make it hard or impossible for them to get the same care as everybody is hard to even imagine. It would be like denying some people the vote, or elementary education, or mail service, or electricity, or mail delivery. Which reminds me: maybe it is related to American racism.

The second thing I appreciate is that there are no nuclear weapons and no appetite for them. Somebody who proposes that the country have an atomic bomb is a good candidate to be sent off to a mental hospital. I don't talk with a large number of adults freely about topics like this much anymore, but I would be surprised if many people were in favor of arming with nuclear weapons. I would be surprised to find even one Japanese female who would support Japan having nukes. Let's say the percentage is under 1%. As for the men, I tend to think it would also be hard to find anyone, but in the case of repeated tests or threats from North Korea or China, I can imagine that from 5% to 20% or so of the men might begin to back such a plan. My estimate may be too high. The sea between Japan and Korea has been sufficient to deter effective invasion until the Americans came. The US should likewise have little to worry about, with the Atlantic, Arctic and Pacific oceans serving as moats for the fortress. Anyway, it is a mark of insanity to propose having a nuke here, while in the US, to propose the country get rid of its nukes, one might be called insane.

Two cheers for Japan!

If I could add a third point, it would be having decent daycare available for communities, so that children are safely, professionally, and inexpensively cared for while their mothers work. This can be done on a community or state level. For that matter, so can health insurance. Neither seems to be a big priority in the States.

Getting your priorities right is the first step of politics!

America, stop lashing out and killing foreign people, and take care of your own! Be a great nation again! Stop embarrassing us! People, demand the best of your elected officials. Don't settle for money politics.

How to improve your tourism promotion strategy (Lesson 1)

Here we see the old Malaysia tourist campaign and the newer one. I mentioned these in an earlier post. When entering Malaysia from Thailand as late as the early 1990s, the item on the left greeted you in billboard proportions. I seem to remember this in giant banner form waving over the immigration officers counter, but it may be that it was in a large poster form. The message: "Death awaits you in Malaysia!" or "You'd better hope no junkie slipped a packet of powder into your backpack before crossing the border, because if we find it, we will kill you." The punk aesthetics of the old one were hopelessly out of date by 1992, and the marketing appealed only to masochistic junkies contemplating suicide.
The newer version stresses that Malaysia is truly Asia, not Africa or South America as believed by many non-travellers. This geographical confusion apparently arose from the fact that Malaysia sort of rhymes with Venezuela, and could resemble Malawi or Madagascar if you didn't look carefully at the travel brochure. There is also the possibility of confusion with Melanesia. Having worked for years to associate Malaysia with the right continent, one is curious to see what the second phase of this ad campaign will consist of. They seem to be confident that "Asia" has connotations, not of kamikaze, Kim Jong Ill, Agent Orange, Genghis Khan, Pol Pot, the little Red book, war, despotism, and overpopulation, but rather of peace, harmony, cultural diversity, gentleness, and lovely women. It works for me.
I found the DEATH picture from Stephen Bougerolle. (It's probably not pronounced the way most people would pick.) Steve has a great set of pages of travelogues, although I haven't explored them all yet. I did appreciate the description of Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong, and the Travellers' Hostel there. Thanks, Steve, for allowing me to use the picture. I nicked it without your permission, since the source image is just the Malaysian government's public artifact anyway. I may have a better picture of this somewhere, too, in a box in a basement on another continent. Maybe.
I know I have a picture of a stick figure man shooting another stick figure man in the back with a rifle. The first stick figure man is surprised to be shot in the back without warning, and his arms are jerking up in the air to convey that. That was the international sign language used on a sign in Singapore for "Do NOT Enter!" or "Trespassers will be shot," I suppose. I would have thought that the 3-meter high chain-link fence and coiled razor wire on the top would convey that, but the sign adds another signal for the semiotically challenged.

Hawaiian Earthquake

The last time Hawaii had a quake over magnitude 6.0 was in 1989. To find a quake over 6.0 in Japan, you would have to go back… 6 days.

Kim's Grocery: No mushrooms for export today

It's been a week now since our neighbors, the Kims, allegedly set off their first nuclear test explosion. I say "allegedly" because statements by the DPRK authorities have a very low probability of being true. Almost everything they ever say is a lie. (There are so many more ways to lie than to tell the truth, after all.) I won't report those here; you can find them elsewhere. You can look up Megumi Yokota and a few dozen other kidnapped Japanese slaves, the agreement on a non-nuclear Korean peninsula, and various other pacts over the years.

We also cannot believe the reports of other intelligence agencies. If Iraq taught us anything, it taught us not to believe that something is true just because 3 or 4 national intelligence agencies are saying it is so. Although several agencies confirmed the North Korean statement, they all did so with widely varying numbers. The Russians, in particular, seem to have been tipped off in advance, like the Chinese, and just reported the number the DPRK gave them rather than look at their seismographs.

The US has been slow to confirm that it was a nuclear test, and only yesterday claimed to have found an atmospheric sample consistent with a release of radioactive gas. We don't know if this was cherry-picked intelligence, though, one sample out of a hundred, or what. We certainly cannot trust American integrity or competence (in this administration).

The half-kiloton yield was more typical of a test of a suitcase-bomb or some small artillery nuke. Every state that has tested a nuclear weapon before now has had at least a 9-kiloton explosion. Recall that the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki was a 22-kiloton weapon, and most modern(?) nuclear weapons are in the megaton range. Is it consistent with the personality of Kim Jong-Ill to explode the tiniest possible micro-nuke, or would he want to make a big bang? He would want to make a big bang, so either it was 1) a dud, 2) a conventional explosion to feign that he had worse weapons than he really does, the strategy that misfired for former CIA agent Mr Saddam Hussein, 3) they didn't have enough enriched uranium or plutonium, and had to conserve the core material, or 4) they are even more advanced than we thought, and are making suitcase nukes for export now.

I would say that it was either a dud, a fake, or their only ready-to-go model. Newsweek seems to be talking up the option number 4 above.

The only thing worse than listening to DPRK propaganda is to hear people talk of opening negotiations with the DPRK. This may be a rare issue that the Republicans understand better than the Democrats, probably because like the Kim Jong-Ill entourage, Republicans are also driven by hatred. As much as I hate the un-elected ambassador John Bolton, he sort of understands North Korea. They hate his guts because they can't mindfuck him like they could Jimmy Carter or Madeline Albright. The DPRK leadership are people more like Asian versions of Dick Cheney. They really believe their own propaganda, you see. It is a scaled-up model of what Jim Jones was doing, but more Stalinist in tone. It really doesn't matter what they say. They will say and have said anything and everything. It also doesn't really matter what you say to them either. If you say anything, it can just be conditionals: "If you do A, we will do B. If you do X, we will do Y." However, that may just restrict your options. By saying military options are unthinkable, it actually gives them leverage, because they can always hold Seoul hostage. Regarding "negotiations," there really is no reason for the second-generation politician Dear Leader to meet his second-generation politician counterpart deer-in-the-headlights (cheer)leader. Nor is there reason to send Condoleeza "Birth-Pangs" Rice, the so-called international peacekeeper and destroyer of worlds, aside from the slim hope that Kim may hold her hostage! (It's worth a try!)

As odious as DPRK is, however, there is plenty of blame to go around for the state of proliferation. A Q Khan may have set up nuclear weapons programs in two dozen small countries. Khan is a sort of Johnny Appleseed for developing nations' nuclear weapons programs, and is protected by Perv now, under house arrest, a national hero to Pakistanis. In the long run, his shadow may dwarf that of small-time pirate Osama binLaden. Perhaps the US or UN should insist that he be handed over for an international tribunal, where the extent of who he sold to could be determined.

Quite a lot of the blame for gutting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty also has to go to the US, which is still busy designing and building new nukes even as it dismantles old nukes, and claiming the right to weaponize space with nukes, too. It is the same kind of non-leadership that was shown on the Kyoto climate treaty. It has always been clear from the earliest days, that the nuclear-armed states would have to climb down if they ever expected the rest of the world (all more insecure than the Permanent 5) to not arm themselves. They have been blowing the world off for 50 years.

It seems more and more that we will have to drift into another Hiroshima or Nagasaki before the non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament efforts are really given the attention they deserve. It may be impossible to bottle that genie, so maybe we should start designing more dispersed non-cities and building earth-sheltered housing for the day when 65 countries, 23 companies, and 12 terrorist groups all have suitcase nukes.

Official seals, church signs, cassettes, and Planet Jonestown

Says-it.com has some interesting web-based image generators such as the Official Seal generator, the church sign generator, and the cassette tape generator, among others. The Official Seal generator is worth looking at, since there are many wingdings and other possible images. It could save you some time if you ever needed something like this.


Here is my example of a church sign. I didn't have space to add "THAT GOES FOR MOHAMMED TOO." I guess it's a job for Photoshop the free open-source image editor of your choice, after all. This will only let me fit in 10 short words, not 15.
Below this was my attempt to make an "album art" to visually represent the Jonestown Death Tape, which is available at http://www.archive.org/details/ptc1978-11-18.flac16 for anyone else interested in the social psychology of that event. Regarding that, I concur with the comments by "brainfuzz":

…these tapes were quite enlightening. Moreso from the perspective of drawing parallels between the language used by Jones and the language used by media and world leaders. Compare it to the language that is used in advertisements for the armed forces, for example.

I thought it could replace the Jim Jones shot to the left as album art, but I guess that tape looks sort of overproduced. As if we all listened to it on our car stereos. According to an academic site at SDSU for studying the Jonestown phenomena, The Jonestown Institute, the real tapes looked more like this, below.

Ruggedization of the USJFCOM Transformation Laboratory -or- Yes, MASTOR!

DARPA has been working with IBM to create a "ruggedized" laptop with the Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator system, a.k.a. MASTOR, "to translate natural speech in real-time to make up for a lack of military linguists proficient in Iraqi Arabic." (I seem to remember reading that their busload of freshly-trained Arabic linguists was blown up on delivery. This must be Plan B.) One just can't help but wonder, how well this is going to work, just from looking at all the military jargon in the press release -- and that's in printed English, presumably written by a professional writer, not translation from input derived from speech recognition of a stream of obscenities uttered by an undereducated grunt noble American warrior in a noisy environment. When you need it the most, in a firefight, or when explosions are going off, flames are crackling, babies crying, women wailing, it probably wouldn't function much better than a Bowlingual with low batteries. To be fair, they admit that is is designed for use in "benign environments" such as hospitals and "secure areas", a constantly shrinking topological construct, hard to find in neo-mesopotamia, until we train them to build karaoke boxes.

When used in Iraq, Mastor will act as an automated bi-directional, English-to-Iraqi Arabic translator capable of translating more than 50,000 English words and 100,000 Iraqi Arabic words.

Uh-huh, right. Tractors are flowering as the nuclear explosion in a binding stores beans. Insert this substance into your hookah and proceed to inhale the fumes thereof. My hovercraft is full of eels. And get this: It's a Panasonic Toughbook. You gotta like the sound of that. Now we're gonna win the war for sure! War is over, if you want it. OK, maybe I am overreacting to the silly name. Too bad it isn't a wind-up like Moammar's. Where are you going to charge it in Iraq?

The only good thing I see about the feature set is that it is going to include a back-translation, so the speaker may often be able to see how garbled his or her words became in the round trip. Within a few generations (of users), they might learn to speak clearly in short simple sentences using a few hundred key words, which, after all, they could have learned in a few weeks. Carry on, invisible insanity! You will extend an appendage to the earth of assurances.

I know it is intended to reduce the need to shoot civilians, by enabling a machine-language interface for speech-to-speech communication, but I wonder if there aren't some people who would prefer to be shot. But what do I know? This just might be the killer app that causes lions to lie down with leg of lamb or whatever the saying is.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.

Floyd Rudmin, a professor in Norway, in an online essay titled The Politics of Paranoia and Intimidation, argues that it is statistically impossible for the NSA mass-surveillance program (of American e-mail and phone calls) to detect terrorists effectively, since the false-positives of such an effort would vastly outnumber the actual terrorists you could find, unless there are a million or so "terrorists" as the target of your search.

It's more likely that the program has political motivations.

The ratio of real terrorists to innocent people in the prison camps of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Kandahar shows that the US is paranoid and is not bothered by mistaken identifications of innocent people. The ratio of real terrorists to innocent people on Bush's no-fly lists shows that the Bush administration is not bothered by mistaken identifications of innocent Americans.

Also, mass surveillance of the entire population is logically plausible if NSA's domestic spying is not looking for terrorists, but looking for something else, something that is not so rare as terrorists. For example, the May 19 Fox News opinion poll of 900 registered voters found that 30% dislike the Bush administration so much they want him impeached. If NSA were monitoring email and phone calls to identify pro-impeachment people, and if the accuracy rate were .90 and the error rate were .01, then the probability that people are pro-impeachment given that NSA surveillance system identified them as such, would be p=.98, which is coming close to certainty (p=1.00). Mass surveillance by NSA of all Americans' phone calls and emails would be very effective for domestic political intelligence.

Here is the article at: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/rudmin1.html
Found via a comment posted at Conscious Junkyard. The comment poster also refers to a Bloomberg article reporting a claim in court that the surveillance program pre-dates its supposed cause: the 9/11 terror attack.

Be like the squirrel.

I came home late a few days ago and discovered this mysterious bag nearby as I ate a late night snack. I thought it might be a gift for me, but it turns out it is not ours but was used to bring over some food, and is going back. The French "Parlons plus avec le temps" means "Let us speak more with time." Just what you would expect a squirrel to say to you in French. (A lot of furry creatures probably learned French as an evolutionary ploy to compete with French trappers during the settling, or unsettling, of the North American continent.) Earlier, I had been compiling for some as-of-yet-undetermined purpose a mental list of animal words that can also be used as verbs, so I was surprised to see this, since squirrel was on my list. I guess it's not such a strange coincidence. Thinking that someone must have already made a list like this, I did a google search, but I am not turning up anything. Here is a first draft:
Full-fledged verbs: fly, duck, bear, dog, hog, cow, rat, fish, hound, weasel, grouse, snake, bug, kid, badger, goose, seal, buffalo, buck, crow, parrot, swallow, ram, bat, ape, rail, snipe…
Half-assed forms of the verb (2-word verbs requiring a preoposition): horse(around), ferret(out), pig(out), squirrel(away), (out)fox, monkey(around), wolf(down), lion(ize)…
Near-misses and homophones: bull(shit), lion, dove, sow, boar, bee, flea, robin…

Just another working Sol on Mars

The Spirit and Opportunity rovers continue to probe away on Mars, as they have since January 2004. Both will pass the 1000 Sol mark before 2007. Having not checked in very regularly since the first year, I took another poke around the rover's home and the raw image archive, definitely the best part of it, to see what was new.

(Left: Right Navigation Camera Non-linearized Full frame EDR acquired on Sol 959 of Opportunity's mission to Meridiani Planum at approximately 13:29:09 Mars local solar time. NASA/JPL)


Update: On second thought, the Press Release area is pretty cool, too. Take the "false color" images of the surface, for example. What exactly does "false" mean in this context, considering that if you were on Mars, you would not be seeing in black and white, but in color, and certainly through a tinted helmet which would alter the "real" UV-rich light, too.

"Homeland" gets into Natural Language Processing

The Department of Homeland Security is funding machine-learning research to help separate opinion from fact. Apparently they think they need to be able to find out what Americans think from analyzing the e-mails they have collected from their surveillance program. The domestic spy agencies of East Germany and other soviet bloc states never had it this good.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-09/cuns-sfa092206.php
http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=364

Why atheists (have to) care about religion.

This well-made little editorial short film embedded below documents the legalized discrimination against atheists in various states all across JeezusLand (the former Republic of Armed Desire). Teachers should make it part of the public school curriculum.


(Thanks to Erik again)

Notes: My optimystic(alist) take on that
While I am not devout enough to proselytize the Atheist creed actively (not the film's purpose), I do, like the (film)maker, resent the institutionalized inquisition by Theists against Atheists and/or non-theists. I try to keep an open "optimystic(al)" mind. None of the Taoist, Buddhist, spiritualist, mystical, and scientific outlooks that influence my thinking have any need or concern with gods. I have some confidence in the existence of spirits or spiritual energy, and the One Mind, but "gods", like "self", seems to be an artifact that arises out of mammalian or primate psychology, as far as I can tell. Given that there still is no accepted scientific theory, and not even the rough notes to begin to construct a theory of what mind is, what a thought is, or what consciousness is, it has always seemed a little premature for someone to proclaim complete knowledge of the psychic superstructure of the universe, let alone to force it onto people who do not see it the same way.

We have just begun to scratch the surface of the universe, have a (begin Carl Sagan voice here) billionth of a billionth of it under our scientific wings, and the rest of it remains unaccounted for, "mystical".

What is scary is that the religious nutcases are so afraid of freedom, so afraid of free thought. Maybe they think that the non-believers will not be under their social control, but statistics show that the Christians are just as likely, or a little more likely, to cheat, steal, fornicate, shoot the place up, and so on. Dogma product works just the opposite of as advertised.

I don't feel as oppressed as the guy in the video. You need to keep your own psychic flexibility and metacognition open and active. While they want you to say that you believe in god(s), they don't always define it or say which one. Is god "love", (the one) mind, science, Thor, Shiva, the flying spaghetti monster, Eris, or even yourself? Yeah, I believe in that. They do sometimes use the term "Supreme Being", which is probably not unlike a Supreme Pizza among the other Bee-ings, or the word "Creator", which sounds like either a massive software application which created this simulation, or the process which wrote it. Why would I believe in any of these things? Better to keep your options open, hold on to the zen. (not the mp3 player) Doesn't anybody believe in nothing, the void? Has the zero not been discovered yet? Who can believe that the universe is simple enough to model in a small primate brain, with any validity? I'm not buying it. That's my mysticism: accepting the reality that the universe is too great to compress into a format which is small enough to be comprehensible to the categories of my mind.

The person in the video could have avoided a lot of trouble if his parents or teachers had taught him the importance of lying to your oppressors. Almost everybody is a nazi, and when they come knocking on your door to ask if you have Anne Frank in the basement, you should happily tell them no, and consider that to be better integrity than if you ratted her out, right? The capacity to deceive, which exists everywhere in nature, evolved for a reason: to protect, like skin and hair. If you want to join the boy scouts or run for office, tell them you believe in god, while assuming that the word is their euphemism for the Great Spirit, the singularity, or whatever, i.e. without defining what the word means to you.

Having said that, I do appreciate him making his statement and trying to change society.

All religions are fundamentally intolerant, but here the theistic ones have effectively ganged up on the non-theistic thinkers.

The multiverse of E.P.

I recently found time to shrink myself to the nano-scale and navigate the complex webular system of tubes which is "The Internets". Whilst there, I stumbled onto surfed into Ethan Persoff's site. Ethan has archived and posted some of the greatest moments in 20^th century American comics, such as the comic book introducing and explaining Martin Luther King's role in the civil right movement, circulated in the 1950s. He has the comic book re-write of history that the CIA dropped on Grenada after Reagan's 1983 invasion to distract attention from the hundreds of dead Marines in Lebanon. There are various government-funded anti-drug comix, including one which was spotted in the Principia Discordia, and let's not forget the racist hate campaign that the US powered up as part of their war effort. He seems to be a musician and cartoonist as well, a multimedia artist as well as archivist of American cultural history. I downloaded his new short movie, Poodle (Samizdat?), which I haven't had time to watch yet. I guess I'm saving it. There is too much freaky stuff on his site to digest in one stop. Shall return.

Fire Monkey's Nuthouse Planet made into Hothouse

This just can't be good news. A study by NASA's James Hansen, climatologist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences reports Earth is approaching a million-year high in temperature. I have said since the 1980s that if we put all the carbon from the Carboniferous back into the atmosphere, we would return to the conditions of those times, making Iowa, for example, the shallow sea it once was, with excellent diving among its coral reefs. Can people stop talking about whether the heat is real and just agree to do something to slow down any further jump in CO2 levels? A carbon tax and crash program for energy independence would be a reasonable step for a start.
A million-year high is not a return to Jurassic conditions yet. The Cenozoic has gone on for 65 million years, so saying we are at a million-year high is not the end of the world or even necessarily of this geological era. On the other hand, the ongoing mass extinction and reduction of biodiversity suggests that we are leaving the garden of the Cenozoic behind.
I wouldn't gamble on it, but there is one spot of hope offworld, outside of the hope of Sapiens having the sap to save their burgeoning bottoms. That is the Sun. It could be that the present high temperatures on Eath are related to a high in sunspot activity, and that a new little ice age is around the corner with a decline in sunspot activity.
I wouldn't count on it, though. I always remember that over 97% of the species that have lived on this planet are extinct now. We seem to be more careless than most mammals in undermining our own sustainability, but could still avoid giving the planet up to squid and cockroaches, in my opinion. Yes, I'm that optimystic.

Maopost: "dedicated to China propaganda posters"

Wow. What a great collection of Chinese Revolutionary posters. 1,279 of them. I am partial to those featuring class warfare, tractor-driving, scientific/futuristic themes, and educational settings such as barefoot teachers in the fields. If you are a a Mac owner as well as a true red fanatic, you can get the Mac OS Maopost widget. (Right: collecting "medicinal" herbs.)

Defend yourselves against atomic, chemical and biological warfare.
Fang yuanzi, fang huaxue, fang xijun.

George Carlin on Religion

You just don't see much of George Carlin these days. I don't, anyway. The false-god theocracy (one-nation undergod) of the United States could benefit from more exposure to this great American atheist (but not in Jersey Girl). Let's remember our (60s hippie) culture, and where we came from. Carlinization of the culture has been partially successful in the taboo words department, but not in replacing religion with sun-worship. This was one of the great Carlin comedic/political/philosophical rants of the late 20th century.

Wake up and smell the sulfur

PRI had an interview with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, done by Tavis Smiley. (It's Windows Media.) http://www.tavistalks.com/ttcom/tsradio/HugoChavez092206.html

Take it easy, it's only a coup.

I was a little surprised at first when I read that Thai coup leader General Sondhi was a Muslim, but it just goes to show how laid back the Thais are toward the Muslim and Chinese minorities, as well as everything else. A coup is just another thing to joke about, and a reason to take a short holiday. Happy Ramadan!
As Thaksin has crippled the independence of the media in recent years, blogs are probably the best way to get news of the coup. I visited a few earlier and can't find them again, but news can be found at Bangkok Pundit, MetBlogs, Global Voices, 2Bangkok, Thai Photoblogs, Austen Arensberg, and by just searching fLIckr.

Puffy Planet

Hat-P-1, discovered by a team led by Gaspar Bakos of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), is way too big for its mass. Finding extrasolar planets that do not match known physics or planetary formation theories might cause speculation about engineered worlds. Being located that close to the star might seem unwise, but, on the bright side, locating close to the local natural nuclear fusion reactor would solve your energy problems. Astronomers will probably eventually find a source of energy that is enlarging it. If not tidal forces, then some other source that hasn't been considered, such as the magnetic field of the star, high-energy particles in the solar wind, or even sound waves causing some kind of standing resonant waveform could be the explanation.
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/pr0624.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060914_cork_planet.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5346998.stm

The rise of Eris (in the fifth house)

2003 UB₃₁₃ has been renamed Eris, the Greek Goddess of Chaos and Confusion. Eris is larger than Pluto, and would be the tenth planet if things had been decided a little differently. This gives a strong Discordian flavor to the dwarf planets. Eris is now recognized as the 17^th largest object in the solar system, just ahead of Pluto, and just behind numbers 10 through 16, Ganymede, Titan, Callisto, Io, Luna, Europa, and Triton.
Discordian Links:
Principia Discordia in the JFK Collection! (ironic, considering Kerry Thornley's connection to Oswald)
http://www.principiadiscordia.com/
Reported by the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5344892.stm
Reported at MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14825585/

Coup in Thailand

Thailand has had a new coup de etat! That reminds me that I was in Hat Yai during the last coup, February 23, 1991, when Chatichai Choonhavan, Mr "No Problem!" was overthrown by a military group that called itself the National PeaceKeeping Council, for the time before they started shooting student protesters. Has it really been 15 years already?

At the time, I didn't think it odd that every TV in the city was tuned to a general giving a speech, interview, or press conference of some sort. Later I was told that there had been a coup, and that "Thailand is like Iraq now!" The sight of a general in uniform explaining himself was similar to the daily appearances of Saddam Hussein, after he had invaded Kuwait and before it was recaptured.

By the way, Saddam was a popular t-shirt hero across the border in Malaysia at that time. In those days, Malaysia welcomed visitors with huge posters of a hangman's noose over the point of entry and a message that death was the penalty for drug possession, rather than the feel-good TV spots of sun and surf that have run 12 times an hour on CNN for the last 7 years.

Anyway, then as now, the coup procedure is to neutralize the PM, put some tanks out on the street, and most importantly, seize the organs of state power: the TV stations. As elsewhere, once you are on TV claiming to be the government, undisputed, then you are the government. There is still the matter of groveling and crawling up to the king, to try to get a pass from him. But this is mostly a formality. He'll let you off with a warning.

It's funny that Thaksin was in New York at the time, preparing to speak to the United Nations as a powerful regional leader. How embarrassing. If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere. He should have resigned when he resigned. Maybe the imaginary plots to kill him were real after all.

Thaksin (toxin) reminds me of other billionaire CEO Presidents, Berlusconi, and Bush. They share that smell of pop-fascism, money, corruption, spoiled rich boy arrogance, and decay. Good riddance! There are worse things than the extraconstitutionality of a military government. The most effective dictator is an elected dictator. If the military runs an honest election, less corrupt and quicker than Thaksin was doing, to resolve the political uncertainty, then the proof will be in the tapioca.

The Mark of the W

Tony Blair made a non-statement about his non-resignation today in front of TV cameras in the bright sunlight. The natural illumination and added contrast provided by video allowed me to see for the first time the huge W on his forehead which, I suppose, was carved there by the monkey boy king when he took possession of Blair's soul during one of their special-relationship occult seance get-togethers. This has allowed him to use Blair's special powers which the Chimperor does not possess: the articulate use of the English language. Since the demon which possesses Blair's body was unable to begin to step aside, this suggests that the cabal has additional tasks for Tony, probably involving convincing a coalition of the willies to do to Iran what they have done to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Earthquake Weather

We had an earthquake here a few minutes ago. Apparently I slept through a 4.9 M at 3 a.m. too. This was a 4.4. That's pretty minor, but it was close, so we had the fine up and down shaking of the p-wave, very crisp and sharply defined, followed closely by the s-wave with its more funky low-key dance vibe. NHK tv reported it as centered in Kanagawa before deciding a few minutes later that it was centered in Chiba. Somehow Kanagawa and Ibaraki shook as much or more than the epicenter. The Meteorological Agency seemed to have the fastest reports, so check there or NHK for best results. http://www.jma.go.jp/en/quake/ You may wonder why tectonic movements are part of the weather service, but there actually is some relationship, such as quakes occuring during winter high pressure, and the phenomenon of earthquake clouds. I checked the USGS for weather reports but there seems to be a clearer division of labor in the US; the USGS is not allowed to forecast or report the weather.

Party of God more competent than G.O.P? (Crazy, but they get the job done.)

Ted Rall pointed out some time ago that compared side-by-side, Hezbollah is doing a much better job of rebuilding south Lebanon than the Bush misadministration is doing rebuilding New Orleans. If only the US had leaders as competent as their competitors.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucru/20060817/cm_ucru/ifpeoplegethelptheterroristshavewon

Which of these two looks like the better master strategist to you?
Which player would you bet on winning the chess match?
Who would you prefer to see as your surgeon as the anesthesia takes hold?

Sea of Troubles

I have been seeing a lot of news about the oceans in the news. This article mentions marine organisms cropping up in strange places, and this one suggests that military sonar might be to blame. I think the problem is much bigger than sonar experiments gone bad. To me, it seems that some arctic animals may be looking for their habitat. "Hey, this isn't right. I can't be in the arctic." Then they go looking for where the arctic may have gone, and end up in mid-latitude waters. Who moved my cheese? Likewise with the tropical organisms, who may also find something wrong with their waters and go looking for their missing habitat.

The Los Angeles Times had a five-part series on the oceans called "Altered Oceans". Part 5 was about the increasing acidification of the oceans as the take up CO₂ from the atmosphere. Part 4 was about the growing amounts of plastic found in the oceans. The Great Garbage Patch, formerly known as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, is a mass of floating plastic objects accumulated since WWII. According to a story in the Seattle Times,

In August 1998, Moore and his crew extensively sampled the surface waters of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre with a fine-mesh net resembling a manta ray. "What we saw amazed us," Moore said in an analysis for the 2001 Marine Pollution Bulletin. "We were looking at a rich broth of minute sea creatures mixed with hundreds of colored plastic fragments — a plastic-plankton soup." The team collected six times more plastic particles (by weight) than zooplankton.

That is worrying. It would seem that the slow decomposition of plastics would increase the CO₂ in the water or in the atmosphere, too. Does the increasing acidification of the oceans help dissolve the plastics? Will any animals or plants evolve a way to use the plastic? Is it really impossible to "clean" the oceans? At a certain concentration, might it not be cost-effective, at some future time, to develop a process to filter out the plastic particles and use them for something else? Certainly, if some beaches are themselves now composed of plastic sand, it could almost be scooped up and used again to create windmills or something, or could just be burned as fuel. Could floating colonies of sea-gypsies live on the Great Garbage Patch, creating floating islands of polystyrene and the like, lashed together with old fishing nets and barnacle-derived glues, powered by wind, waves, and solar? Their nets gather tiny plastic particles, their giant parabolic mirrors distill water and melt down the plastic mash to produce nets of plastic baubles to extend the growing island.

Dis-saving the next generation of future revolutionaries?

This article documents a 4% drop in entry-level pay from 2001 to 2005 in the US. Going into debt in the new economy makes it feel better, but what is the future for these people? Either they will need to get more wabi or start a revolt or they will be locked into debt-slavery.

In a steep drop over a short time, 64 percent of college graduates received health coverage in entry-level jobs in 2005, down from 71 percent five years earlier. As employers grapple with fast-rising health costs, many companies have reduced health coverage, with those cutbacks sharpest among young workers.

Partly because of the decline in manufacturing jobs that were a ticket to middle-class life, just one-third of workers with high school diplomas receive health coverage in entry-level jobs, down from two-thirds in 1979.
…
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com, said it was surprising how deeply young workers were going into debt to maintain the living standards they want.

The nation's personal savings sank below zero last year for the first time since the Depression, meaning Americans spent more than they earned. But for households under 35, the saving rate has plunged to minus 16 percent, which means they are spending 16 percent more than they are earning.

"The post-boomer generation feels very cavalier about saving," Mr. Zandi said. "They've been very aggressively dis-saving and have borrowed significantly."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/090406C.shtml
Originally from the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/04/us/04labor.html

If I understand that correctly, young Americans are "dis-saving" a negative 16% of their income. I don't doubt that I haven't misunderstood that. Even going into debt with no health care, they are still living at or near poverty level. If not actually poor, they feel poor and inadequate, because the machine has become better at manufacturing false needs and desires to enslave them.

Thor bless the atheists.

An interview with atheist Sam Harris points out that all religion is sanctified intolerance.

What do you mean when you say that intolerance is intrinsic to every creed? And what are the implications of that?

The core claim of every creed is that it, alone, is true. The truth is, if you’re a Christian, Jesus really was the son of God, and was really resurrected, and he’s really coming back to judge the living and the dead. This is a fact. It is metaphysically true, it is physically true, it is historically true; if you’re standing on the right spot at the right time, you’re going to see Jesus come back with a host of angels.

This description of the world is either right or wrong. If it’s right, only the Christians are right, and only the Christians are going to heaven. So this doctrine, by definition, excludes the truth-claims of every other religion . Muslims claim that Jesus, while he was a prophet, was not divine, and that anyone who thinks he is divine is going to go to hell. This is explicitly spelled out in the Koran. These are mutually incompatible claims about the way the world works. They’re worse than that. They’re incompatible claims that are extremely motivating, because their adherents think that the difference between believing the right thing and the wrong thing is the difference between spending eternity in hell, or eternity in paradise. And that’s a very big difference.

This bit was good, too:

How do you define the differences between an atheist and an agnostic?

“Agnosticism” is a word that was brought into use by T.H. Huxley. I don’t think it’s a particularly useful word. It tends to be defined as the belief that one know whether or not there is a god. An agnostic is someone who thinks we don’t know and can’t know the truth of a position. So it’s a non-committal attitude.

But it’s not an intellectually honest position, because everyone is walking around presuming to know that there isn’t a Zeus, there isn’t a Poseidon, and there isn’t a Thor. Can you prove that Thor with his hammer isn’t sending down lightning bolts? No, you can’t prove it. But that’s not the right question. The right question is, “Is there any reason whatsoever to think there’s a god named Thor?” And of course there isn’t. There are many good reasons to think that he was a fictional character. The Batman of Scandinavia.

The problem for religious people is that the god of the Bible is on no firmer footing, epistemologically, than these dead gods. Which is to say that nobody ever discovered that Thor doesn’t exist, but that the biblical god really does. So we have learned to talk and use the word ‘god’ in a way so as not to notice that we’re using a very strange word and evoking a very vacuous concept, like the concept of Thor.

http://www.truthdig.com/interview/item/20060403_sam_harris_interview/
(Thanks, Erik!)

Fortunately, I live in a place where 90% of the people do not believe in "God", having a long Buddhist tradition, and Buddhism being unconcerned with ideas of gods. Shinto sometimes recognizes gods, but these are really more like spirits, and may be in a stone, a waterfall, a deceased great person, and so on.

Religion is like a spiritual pollution we inherited from our ancestors. It must have been very useful at one time, but they didn't consider what would happen in the future, when these aggressive universal religions collided. It's a lot like plastic or nuclear power in the 20^th century. They seemed miraculous and wonderful for solving problems but people didn't consider what effect they would have on people a thousand years down the road.

India Blog Blackout Update

It seems that things may be back to normal in India, but the blog blackout by the Electronic Media Monitoring Committee could be a model used in the US or other countries in the future.

The clamp down on blogging following 7/11 blasts has now been revoked, not because the blogging community had expressed unhappiness, but intelligence agencies pointed out that the ban is limiting their scope of investigations into the serial blasts.

The restrictions on blogging were imposed immediately after the blasts and lifted about 10 days back. With the ban revoked, investigating agencies have started keeping a tab on online chat rooms and blogs for any "circumstantial evidence" linked to the serial blasts.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1859860.cms
In the meantime, I guess they will just keep mining the data.

Pluto, Lord of the Dwarf Underworld

More and more anthropomorphizing of Pluto. How sad she must feel that the stargazer fire-monkeys of Terra have created a class of objects which excludes her! Does Pluto really read our papers?

After Pluto lost its planetary status, I felt a sense of pity akin to watching the prodigal son of a wealthy merchant being disowned by his father at a family meeting attended by his brothers and grandfather.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/columns/musings/20060830TDY03003.htm
I guess we all sorta felt that way. And why were the brothers and grandfather there, but no uncles or female relatives? How sad that the prodigal son was disowned during the obon season, too.

This guy, Michael Heaton, seems to feel that Pluto is more like Tom Cruise or Mel Gibson.
http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/entertainment/1157099494274620.xml&coll=2

Somebody needs to make a collection of these Pluto-nic Anthropomorphisms.

By the way, I hope all this talk about what a "planet" is will help the Japanese to stop referring to the Earth as a "star".

I'm Back

In Japan again with my family. Our pineal glands are adjusting their melatonin secretions and we expect to recover locally appropriate circadian rhythms soon. Meanwhile, one is up at 1 A.M., another at 3 A.M., and the others at 5 A.M. Five is actually reasonable since the sun is up at that time. Another little-known advantage is that you can also catch the last hour of All Things Considered here on a regular clock-radio at that time, with no need to subscribe to the podcast.

Aside from the jet-lag and weather adjustments, I found out that the 2 batteries I have for my PowerBook may burst into flame in a few rare cases and need to be replaced. Even if it doesn't crash, it burns. It's a Sony. I mean "The batteries are Sonys." Maybe Apple should use a more reputable manufacturer like Samsung or LG next time. At least I can wait for the replacements to be delivered and then send in the old ones. This (getting 2 new replacement batteries) could actually be a good thing.

Nontanoshippa のんたのしっぽ 第1話

Japanese video of the day.

You'll need to see the conclusion(?) in part two:

All that killin' and rapin' makes our boys hungry

I'm in Vancouver. It is a light non-accumulating precipitation kind of day, when the rain keeps falling but the sidewalk never gets wet, somehow. Light jackets and unbrellas optional.

Today has been a nightmare come true for the purveyors and marketers of american-style grilled chicken wings everywhere.

Update: It turned into real rain.
I wonder if the 21st century will be remembered as the century of religious wars. The Islamofascist Parties of Gods versus the Christofascist One-nation Undergod and the Judeofascist Chosen People (not Korea). If so, can I be frozen and woken up next century? Maybe I should stick around and join in with my own Twenty Three Thousand Armed Buddhas, the Guerilla Armies of the Goddless, or the Definitely Maybe Usually Agnostics Liberation Front. My present strategy is to sit it out and let the crazies kill each other, but will they kill all of us?

Rio Karma (and the POS Seal of Disapproval)

I liked Rio's MP3 CD players. They were cheap and you could load a dozen albums on one disk. Bulky, though. When I wanted a smaller (than CD) MP3 player, about 3 years ago, I got the Rio Karma. I hated all the DRM in iPods and the control freak mother attitude embedded in Apple's iTunes system, which is still not up to the SoundJam MP standard of 2000 C. E. Rio could share files using a Java application, it acted as a server on the network, and it was endlessly configurable. I chose it over an iRiver I was considering.

Later, I was given an iPod shuffle and I never looked back. The DRM is annoying and stupid, since you can only sync it with one computer, but I try to deal with that. I have been given a Nano, too, that I am saving to use for photos or something else later, since the low-budget shuffle is still working fine for me.

These photos show what happens to a Karma after 3 years. The battery swells up and bursts the case open. I dissected it to find that out. It doesn't hold a charge, either, in case you wondered, and freezes up when run off the wall current. It is truly a POS, unless you like your electronics engineered to last one or two years rather than a more reasonable length of time.

Rio has gone out of the mp3 player business, so you won't be buying one. I wonder how iPods will age. They certainly have been built to last -- all summer long-- as the saying goes.

God told me to do it! (a short message from your personal savior)

Feeling angry at the crazies who are saying that God tells them to kill babies? Well, I am, too, and although these are not aimed specifically at the "parties of gods" and partygoers in their various manifestations, they do help to remind you to regard with skepticism those people who claim they hear God, see God, or are God's organization on Earth. (Thanks, Erik.)

11th and C

In 1981 I lived in Manhattan at the corner of 11^th and Avenue C, at 649 E. 11^th Street, on the top floor of a walk-up. The building apparently pre-dated the invention of the elevator. I had a corner room with a good view of the World Trade Center over the burned-out building across the street. The building had a spray-painted black plexiglass door with an peephole area that had been scratched clean with a razor blade. The dealers kept a doorman there, another guy on the street next to a barrel of burning wood scraps or trash, and another guy at the corner as a lookout. A couple of flights up the stairs they would be dealing, mostly junk, and sometimes the dealers let the customers shoot up there, candle, spoon, the whole works.

Why was I there? I was bored of the midwestern small university town and shocked by the murder of John Lennon and election of actor Ronnie Reagan. New-York based punk rock musicians and leftist political philosophies may have influenced my choice to be there. Cost-wise, there was a sharp devaluation from 1^st Ave. to Avenue A and then down to C that made it extremely affordable to venture farther east, about a 75 or 80% discount over 2 or 3 blocks, if you wanted to live in Manhattan rather than Queens or Brooklyn.

The neighborhood was mostly Spanish-speaking Puerto-Ricans, poor native New Yorkers, and small numbers of artists, musicians, and punks. I shared the living room with my friend, Pete. I separated my room with a California Republic flag I had found outside a suburban San Diego police station, and slept under an American flag from the same source. Sorry, officers. Youthful indiscretion. Statute of limitations is expired, isn't it?

We furnished the place with stuff off the streets: a sofa with a broken leg, artificial christmas tree, plaster madonna with broken-off head, a chest of drawers. Yes, we carried this stuff up 8 flights of stairs. I turned 18 while I was there. When we got sick of some furniture, like the chest of drawers, we would wait for the street below to get really quiet late at night, and then hurl it out the window.

We would sometimes be asked to show our "tracks" before being let in, and have to tell the doorman that we lived there. There was never any violence, as I remember. There was crime; when the dealers were not there we usually got broken into. Occasionally someone in the neighborhood would try to hold us up with a knife.

I never ventured far from Manhattan in the year I was there. The farthest I went was probably Jones beach and inside the crown of the Statue of Liberty. I was an avid urban hiker already then, walked all over the city, through the Bowery and Chinatown down to Wall Street and Battery Park, through midtown and to Central Park. From 11^th to Central Park is really too far, though.

Within a year, it was clear that I wasn't going anywhere, and didn't have much more to learn from this place. I thought NYC would always push me down, too many rich and too many poor. The clincher came when the building caught fire, twice. The first time we discovered it in the apartment under ours. The second time alot of the doors were broken in with axes, windows were broken as people got onto the fire escapes, and some of the slate steps collapsed. Some of the steps were then holes, which you could step over, but some of the landings also collapsed, which made going up or down 8 flights pretty weird, as you had to hold onto the railing and swing your body 180 degrees over a huge drop. Then I think they cut off the water, so you had to visit friends just to bathe, and most of the residents went on a rent strike and were demanding that repairs be made. I didn't stick around to see how it all turned out. I stayed at my girlfriend's until I could go back to university, where I was still an honors student from the 4.0 GPA I somehow got in my first semester. I got this new idea that maybe getting a loan to go to university really was better than working for minimum wage and living in a slum. (I tend to learn by doing. I got to feel it in my gut.) Within less than a year, I had moved on to Los Angeles, but that is another story.

The reason for this story? I have never been back to New York since I left in 1981. I have wanted to see a picture of that neighborhood for a long time, if I can't go there. I decided to google up 649 East 11^th Street for the first time in… maybe ever, and googled 647 instead. Why did I do that? Somehow "647" has a stronger trace in the universal mind matrix, I guess. I then discovered that there is now a Japanese sake bar called Kasadela on the site next to where I lived. Kasadera means Umbrella Temple, and it is a temple-town on the Tokaido near Nagoya. I also learned that the musical Rent is supposed to take place at 11th and B, and that Dustin Hoffman, Jane Curtin, and the Black Liberation Army have a history on Eleventh Street. (Not all together as part of the same incident, though. They all lived there.) I found some decent pictures of the restaurant interior and exterior here. Although they don't have sushi, they do have grilled eel over rice, Unagi-don on the menu! I want that and plenty of sake to wash it down. Unfortunately, I am 11 (or 13) time zones away. If I am in the neighborhood, I will stop in.

"The Alphabet" had a pejorative sound in those days. We called it the Lower East Side and sometimes Loisada(?). "Alphabet City" seems to have decent connotations now (but what do I know). It is a major mental hurdle to imagine the neighborhood has changed that much. We were the pioneers, I guess. The few, the proud, the idiots.

Two Things with Wings

DARPA has Lockheed Martin building "spy seeds".

Yellow-jacket nests the size of a Chevy. Bees evolve mega-cities. Sweet home Alabama.

Via Aberrant News

Blogs, news, and bookmarks

I neglected to mention that the US Senate still has to approve DOPA, so contact a Sedator to undo what your Reprehensible has tried to do. This legislation would block up the system of tubes known as the internets.

I see that the Indian blog blackout was reported by BoingBoing a few weeks ago, on the 17^th, by the BBC on the 19^th, and by, for example, the Financial Express on the 24^th of July. OK, so I am a little out of the loop. I've been getting my news from CNN, from Wolf Blitzkrieg's Situationist Room, Anderson Cooper's 360 Degree VR, or something like that. So, whatever happened with the blog block anyway? Everybody found a hack or workaround by now? I will look into it.

What has changed with my news sourcing is that I now trust blogs more than the other (slipstream and cashstream) media. I wouldn't have said that a year ago. The seeds of doubt were planted by Jayson Blair, Judith Miller, and Bob Woodward (implicated in the Plame affair), reporters at the reputable(?) newspapers of the NYT and the Washington Post. The media reaction to Stephen Colbert's speech at the Nationalist Press Klub cemented my growing inclinations to withhold trust. Also note above in the preceding paragraph how the blogs report news before the cash-stream media does. A blogger is just your personal choice(s) of editor, among other things (columnist, diarist, essayist, unpaid volunteer, writer, correspondent, etc.).

I trust blogs more than other media, but I don't necessarily read many blogs. The few blogs I have sidebarred(?) here are ones to which I want to return, sorta like a bookmark. I have this time-consuming thing called a job, and then a family, too. One of my favorite blogs, ThisModernWorld, I only get to every ten weeks or so, then go back to read the last ten comic strips. Funny how "Tom" wasn't political at all back when I knew him in the 80s, but is actually a little too political, for my tastes, this last… decade or so.

And, speaking of bookmarks, I have been waiting for a good free bookmark manager to come along since about 1998, by which time I had accumulated an unwieldy list of bookmarks. I expected something that would update outdated links, delete nonexistent ones, map them into some kind of semantic web of lexical analysis (maybe based on the Dewey Decimal system or some thesaurus), etc. Nothing like that ever came along, and I think everyone else has also turned to Google. Sometimes Google can't get me back to somewhere I was before, if I can't remember any uniquely aberrant words from the site, though.

The World Wide War on … blogs?

Simran reports from India that India is now blocking most popular blogging sites:

Our lovely government, the government of India has BLOCKED all .blogspot.com, .typepad.com, geocities.com/ blogs and web-sites. There are more on the list, but these are the three, that all the media is agreeing on. I am in India, and I’m confirming it.

Meanwhile, back in the USA, the House of Reprehensibles has passed (by 410-15!) DOPA, which will make it illegal for schools and libraries to allow access to blogs, wikis, and sites with editable profiles. The opposition of the American Library Association didn't seem to matter.

"This unnecessary and overly broad legislation will hinder students' ability to engage in distance learning and block library computer users from accessing a wide array of essential Internet applications including instant messaging, email, wikis and blogs," said ALA president Leslie Burger. "Under DOPA, people who use library and school computers as their primary conduits to the Internet will be unfairly blocked from accessing some of the web's most powerful emerging technologies and learning applications. As libraries are already required to block content that is "harmful to minors" under the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), DOPA is redundant and unnecessary legislation."

Some observers have noted that, as worded, this ban includes e-commerce sites such as Amazon and ebay.

You probably couldn't find a better argument against this legislation than the one offered by CBS's Larry Magid:

The bill defines social networking sites as being "offered by a commercial entity; permits registered users to create an on-line profile that includes detailed personal information, permits registered users to create an on-line journal and share such a journal with other users; elicits highly-personalized information from users; and enables communication among users."

That covers more than just chat and social networking and could force school and library officials to ban a wide range of sites, including Amazon.com and many news sites that allow for user feedback and interaction.

But even if the bill weren't overly broad, it would still be troublesome because it is the wrong – and I would argue a dangerous approach – to Internet safety.

While nearly everyone agrees that Internet predators should be "deleted," this bill doesn't address that issue. Unlike the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, which the President signed into law on July 21, DOPA does nothing to strengthen penalties or increase prosecution of criminals who prey on children. Instead, it punishes the potential victims and educational institutions chartered to serve them, by denying access to interactive sites at school and libraries.

It would be like trying to protect children from being injured or killed by drunk drivers by ruling that kids can no longer walk, ride a bike or even ride in a car or bus to school.

Aside from punishing potential victims rather than the perpetrators, the bill doesn't even address the issue where it matters.

If children are going to get into trouble online, chances are it won't be at school. They'll be home, they'll be at a friend's house or they could even be completely away from adult supervision using their mobile phones. Schools and libraries are relatively protected environments where adults are never far away and, for the most part, computers are in public locations that make it difficult for users to hide what they're doing.

If anything, schools and libraries should be encouraging kids to use blogging and social networking services. They have enormous educational potential for such things as writing, interviewing, collaborative research, media literacy, and photography, but even if not used as part of a formal supervised education program, they encourage kids to communicate and reach out to others.

This affects me personally, since I have just started using blogs for students to publish, read, peer edit, and revise their writing. (Me is tea-cha, after all.) Hopefully Japan will not follow China, India, and now the United States into the black hole of internet censorship.

It's odd (or fitting?) that this move comes just as MySpace becomes the #1 internet portal in the United States. The internet is a new medium that still eludes government control. Social networking and communication are threats to the ruling elite's media control. It is predictable that they will continue to try to control this channel. Paranoid delusion number 200,608,031,538 tells me that "they" are data-mining all the e-mail and internet traffic to construct a model which will tell them where to send the death squads, if real democracy ever threatens to break out. (Is Google a CIA front?) Stand up, though! They will never be able to kill all of us!… Well, not until the mass production of robots really takes off. (Is a christo-fascist zombie man or machine?)

Gibbon arrested, charged, may seek political office

Feeding rumors of a run for the White House in '08, Hollywood actor Malik "Mal" Gibbon (a pseudonym is used to protect his privacy) has recently been arrested for DUI. Driving-under-the influence-of-alcohol arrests were also important millstones in the political careers of chimperor G. W. Bush and Vice Executioner Halliburton "Dick" Cheney. Although Mr Gibbon has no requisite record of avoiding military service, another important qualification for the post, he is suspected to be of "foreign" extraction. In recent years Americans have turned away from corrupt and incompetent home-grown kleptocrats and sought out escaped musclemen from Austrian circuses and/or actors to manage their nation's increasingly complex "innernaschnull" and "nukyular" affairs. The actor's foreignness, drunkenness, bigotedness, and heavily documented dedication to Jeezus are all factors that are causing Repugnicant Particals in the Base, the Party of God (G.O.P.) to take a closer look at the profile of this rising star.
(Pic googled from the Smoking Gun)
Update: I see that somebody of the one mind has crafted their own Mr Gibbon before I thunk it.