Chicken Coop

Here's one way to keep your chickens dry. Pete Betchik of Madison on the Lake, Ohio built a chicken shelter using found materials. "The frame is made from wooden pallets, the roof also is pallet wood. The sides are old steel shelves. The inside is lined with old pizza boxes, the nest box was once used to ship fresh fish to market, and the front door was an industrial clothes dryer front."

Via: Kevin Kelly

Kitchen Oil Fire

Book of Joe

Mars attacks ICANN

You may have heard the rumor that swirled briefly last month about an Internet “kill switch” that could power down the Web in the case of a critical cyber attack. Those rumors turned out to be largely overblown, but it turns out there are now seven individuals out there holding keys to the Internet. In the aftermath of a cataclysmic cyber attack, these members of a “chain of trust” will be responsible for rebooting the Web.

Seven Cyber-Guardians

As this bit of housekeeping bounces around the wired, we'll get all the inside theories; private elite hold your cyber life in their hands, government front group steals control of net, libruls hiding the truth, wingnutters comming to your computer, whatever. Take your pick and their's probably a grain of truth to it.

The part that isn't mentioned: ICANN servers drive the name to number part of the net. You can profitably think of them as the yellow and white pages of the system. If you already know your target machine's number (the 32 bit numeric representing the target) TCP-IP will route around blockage the way it was designed for. Hardlines will be uneffected. Landlines with a modem will be pressed into use. Viagara dealers and people with amazing stock secrets will probably think up brand new work-arounds. This is one more chapter in the continuing saga of people with power attempting to concentrate it and people without finding ways to get on with their lives.

WikiLeaks n' stuff

Since opinions are about a dime a dozen, and they're about a bazilion blogs, I'm going to try to put links to primary sources when I can find them. Yeah .. I know this is also a blog with an opinion,(# bazillion and one) but one does what one must. Trying to separate facts from wishful thinking is as hard on the wired as it is in the library. It's way too easy to extrapolate from consensus thought and personal comfort zones. It strikes me as odd that the one thing magazines, and to a certain extent newspapers, had in their favor was an editor, an omnibudsman, and an org that guarded against crap or at least put the cart back on the path if the horses ran wild. When the old media was faced with competition from the new media, this advantage was the first thing that got pruned. I understand commerce and the need to meet your bills, but one assumes that you plan to be in business past the next quarter. On the other hand, some CEOs seem to get huge bonuses for running their stockholder's business into the ground. That's way too sophisticated for me to understand. The first set of links is related to WikiLeaks. We'll skip the "this changes everything" meme, because it doesn't. Democracy is a leaky process (messy too) and if Congress thinks issuing 100,000 more top secret clearances will staunch the flow, it won't.(Pace: The Washington Post's recent security industry story) Journalists caught with their pants down? Insert cynical snort here. We now know the truth? Well no, we're now in possession of a firehose of information, but the professional spinmeisters are as good as ever and which of us have the time or skills to clean that particular stable. Then we come to the more mundane questions. If we misplaced $8.7 Billion in Iraq's rebuilding funds will our accounting get any better with the $37 Billion just approved for Afghanistan? In the real world, if you're working the cash register and your drawer doesn't equal your tape, you don't get to come back.

• WH Presser on Wikileaks Afghanistan Docs: They're trying to score points by sounding tough, so as to have something to show for their (lack of) efforts. The smarter ones probably realize that they're struggling for their profession's existence: the main value of newspapers and television news was their ability to get interviews and primary source material, and wikileaks showed that non-newspapers can handle it.
• War Logs: The beginning of the end of nation state secrecy. As usual, I’m less interested in the leak itself than the larger implications. The next few months will be crucial in determining the shape of the political world to come, because Wikileaks have suddenly brought radical and deep transparency to the geopolitical process, and that cloak and dagger world has always thrived on the comparative ease with which it could obscure distant truths from the sight of its electorates.
• The ChickenHawk Database
• Portal to Source Material: The Diary is available on the web and can be viewed in chronological order and by over 100 categories assigned by the US Forces such as: "escalation of force", "friendly-fire", "development meeting", etc. The reports can also be viewed by our "severity" measure-the total number of people killed, injured or detained. All incidents have been placed onto a map of Afghanistan and can be viewed on Google Earth limited to a particular window of time or place. In this way the unfolding of the last six years of war may be seen.
• My War, WikiLeaked: Why the Public (and the Military) Can’t Count on Those Battle Logs. A cautionary tale.

While it's easy, albeit not very calming, to blame officials for living on planet Zod, here's a writer that dares to mention that in a democracy we're ostensibly in charge but not doing a good job of it.

• American Hypocrites: If you don't live here all the time, and I don't, here is what you notice when you come home: Americans—with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession, and above all their addiction to government spending programs—demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world.

The next link is about another piece of evolution's puzzle falling into place.

• Translating Stories of Life Forms Etched in Stone: The difficulty posed by the Cambrian Explosion was that in Darwin’s day (and for many years after), no fossils were known in the enormous, older rock formations below those of the Cambrian. This was an extremely unsettling fact for his theory of evolution because complex animals should have been preceded in the fossil record by simpler forms.

Last are some examples of writing that bespeaks too high a value placed on the humanistic theories of obscure dead people. Magical thinking won't make science or the present day go away. The first one natters about the absence of free will because studies have shown that nerve activation impulses fire before conscious decision. Jeez, stop your sobbing. All that means is that most of your neural work is done somatically and the talkative fellow in your head gets a report when most of the work is done. Just because your final layer of conciousness thinks its solely in charge doesn't make it an eternal philosophical truth. As noted in Blindsight, what we like to think of as mind was the last thing to the evolutionary party.

• The Limits of the Coded World: In an influential article in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, Joshua Gold of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Shadlen of the University of Washington sum up experiments aimed at discovering the neural basis of decision-making.
• Greening of American Diplomacy: Grand strategy as a “mode of consciousness” – sounds trippy! It is ironic that Hill attacks the 1960s, for it seems that grand strategy has a lot in common with hippie culture. (Hill, incidentally, is a baby boomer.) Both hippie culture and grand strategy denigrate technical knowledge or knowledge that can be written down.
• Le Corbusier and Certain Pro Se Litigants: Recently, I've been taking a peek at the writings of Le Corbusier. He's one of history's most celebrated architects, and he has had a profound influence on the modern cityscape. Definition: Pro Se

Addendum: (about an hour later) I used the phrase "obscure dead folks". This is a mispercision at best and unfair. Dead people have the ultimate disadvantage when it comes to defending their life's work against misappropriation via cut and paste. We do so love our slogans and simplifications, and don't really want to do the heavy lifting necessary to earn the scholarly authority.

No Fascists Either

Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive. - Friedrich Wilheln Nietzsche

It's Been Covered

The 1997 video stars Angelina Jolie. Any resemblance to kt lang's Constant Craving was addressed in the back room. One supposes that lang had better representation than Robert Johnson. (Love in Vain)

Whale in a Can

Corpus Hypercubus

I stumbled across this site through the Presurfer. (Kuriositas). It has the best flash animation of a tesseract rotation I've seen. If the "au shucks, bumpkin" style of the site's explaination bothers you, skip it and go to mathworld and get the grown-up's version.

Patrons at the Met

Another round-up. I know I have some thoughts of my own, but I'll be darned if I can sus-out where I keep them. The media, ding an sich, isn't any help. Finding something that isn't cut and paste (usually from an advertiser) is a job that doesn't seem worth the effort when the weather is nice and summer days are long. One suspects that Lanier's criticism of the wired had its genesis on a day like today. The first two links are about science and the inside baseball aspects of attribution.

• Higgs is the hot topic at ICHEP: Everyone’s catching Higgs fever, even French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The elusive particle – and the race between the experiments at Fermilab’s Tevatron and those at the Large Hadron Collider to discover it – have made headlines for years, but the frenzy reached new heights in the run-up to the International Conference on High Energy Physics.
• The $2 billion error: It’s a sordid but rather entertaining story (would make a decent screen-play), and I stumbled on to it whilst Merrill Goozner’s history of the modern pharmaceutical industry “The $800 Million Pill: The Truth behind the Cost of New Drugs”. Not only did the sequencing error set back Genetics Institute in the race to patent the synthetic manufacture of EPO, but Genetics Institute had actually stolen the sequence from Amgen in the first place.

The next three links question the accepted view by taking the cover off the memory hole and peering inside.A lot of us are old enough to remember some of these things for ourselves, but ...

• Think Again: These days, virtually every time someone on the American right bashes President Barack Obama for kowtowing to dictators or failing to shout that we're at war, they light a votive candle to Ronald Reagan. Former presidential candidate John McCain has called his own foreign-policy views "a 21st-century policy interpretation of the Reagan Doctrine."
• The American Establishment: This article addresses what should be a puzzling question: Why did Barack Obama nominate Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court? Not only has Kagan never been a judge, but, far more problematically, she has over the course of a 25-year legal and political career taken almost no public positions on any significant legal or political questions.
• You must be Joking: Seriously, I hear from time to time that our nation's opinion leaders are sincere. That they aren't being deceptive, disingenuous, dishonest, but are merely stating valid opinions that, if you took a step back and thought about them, are a perfectly reasonably approach to an important problem or issue.

The next two are about Israel and the politicians who use it as chum around campaign donation season.

• An Alliance In Search Of A Reason To Exist: There is almost nothing in Frum’s argument that comes from the last twenty years, and much that has happened in the last twenty years weighs against continuing the alliance in its current form. First, as Millman says, the Cold War is long over, and whatever strategic advantage Israel provided back then disappeared along with the Soviet Union.
• Locus Sanctus: Whatever else one wants to say about the proposed Islamic center or the Cordoba Initiative, one thing that ought to be obvious right away is that this is a matter to be decided by New Yorkers, especially by the people who live in the immediate vicinity. The local community board supported this project almost unanimously, which should make the protestations of a politician parachuting in from the other side of the continent as irrelevant as they are ridiculous.

Here is one that almost everyone suspects. Them that got, get.

• No to Oligarchy: This upper-crust of extremely wealthy families are hell-bent on destroying the democratic vision of a strong middle-class which has made the United States the envy of the world. In its place they are determined to create an oligarchy in which a small number of families control the economic and political life of our country.

The last two are about Korea and by extension China. As the fight to keep the tax breaks for the rich intersect the campaign season, I'll bet the war debt owed China doesn't get much play. Instead we can look forward to tough talk, preserving our freeedoms, and the necessary expansion of our security apparatus (temporary, only temporary) needed to grow our way out. After all, magical thinking has always worked in the past.

• South Korea reels as US backpedals: As United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates this week met in Seoul with their Republic of Korea (ROK) counterparts Yu Myung-hwan and Kim Tae-young in an historic "2+2" summit, the Cheonan sinking in March, the defining crisis that was supposed to highlight the relevance and effectiveness of their relationship, instead cast an ugly shadow over the event.
• Reassessing China's Role in North Korea: Once again, North Korea is playing brinksmanship and escalating tensions by raising questions about its willingness to instigate armed conflict with South Korea. And once again, the United States is trying to persuade China to take a stronger stance toward the North.

I suppose the short of it is to keep your own backyard clean, and your house in order cuz the rest of the world will go on its merry way, with or without you.

Not Everyone is Here to Help

Ratings agencies refuse to rate collateralized asset securities

Gosh, can you imagine being held responsible for your own work. When has a cook ever been blamed for a burned dish? The agencies have every right to take your ball and go home. Our freedoms are at stake.

That darn Hypno-Toad

They've faced down humans time and time again, but Fred Phelps and his minions from the Westboro Baptist Church were not ready for the cosplay action that awaited them today at Comic-Con. After all, who can win against a counter protest that includes robots, magical anime girls, Trekkies, Jedi and...kittens?

Being something of a cynic, I wonder how much the local media has to pay to get a genuine Fred Phelps dilemma in their market? For an org that doesn't live in this world, they seem to have mastered our legal industry. Since they picketed a military funeral, Fox has gone south on them. People's discovery of humor has sent MSNBC the same way and all that remains is a local Lucy Luscious to do a minute's color commentary running up to the advertisments. Poor Fred's Q ratings have gone way down. I imagine him as a coot in a rocking chair muttering about his headline draw, "in the old days."

Article link w/ pictures and video

He ain't got no pulse

Image - FreakingNews,com

Our former VP, Darth Cheney, has suffered a 5th heart attack. Make your own Borg jokes. Predictably, some media sources have excoriated others for even mentioning cost: "..war hero..", "..outpouring of venom..." Below are a few cost estimates, arrived at by old-fashoned averaging of multiple sources.

• $ 100 K - Cost of Device
• $ Half Million - Estimated current bill
• $ 55 K - Previous mild heart attack
• Lifetime bill - Top Secret, National Security, eyes only
• $ 34 Million + amenities - Estimated current worth
• Tapayer (you) - Footing the bills

In a related development, Congress is working to balance the military budget with caps on VA healthcare expenses. The anything goes lifetime medical plan for themselves and their families remains untouched.

Wednesday Evening

Here are a series of links that all seemed to cross my radar almost simultaneously. The first has to do with polls, specifically the 538 Poll. They claim to use Beysian methods to extract meta-data from published polls to .. well, blow more smoke I guess. On the various poll websites there is a kerfluffle regarding landline vs. cell, various weighing methodologies, and enough sigmas, deltas, and probability densities to induce MEGO. A much more pertinent question is who designs the questions, the client or the pollster, do the polling compainies know the desired result (read: cui bono) before or after submitting the bill, who the heck do they poll (have you ever been contacted, your family, your friends?) and how often are these numbers invented on the fly by journalists looking to add some scientifical gravatas to a partisan fluff piece?

• John Zogby's Open Letter to Nate Silver: John Zogby wrote an open letter to Nate Silver that is typically seen as an expression of emotion and clash of egos. But in my view, the deeper reality it revealed between the lines was that 538 has created a real business model problem for pollsters.

Now, while Israel is away from the penumbra of the frothing-mouth crew, some of the more informed opinions are having their say.

• Enforces consensus, jettisons democracy: I have the unenviable task of telling you tonight about the state of the State of Israel. In short, it's not good. I've been following Israeli politics since I was a teenager in 1967 and I don't think I've ever felt more alarmed and depressed about what is happening within Israel.
• Discrimination against Arabs in Israel: The possibility of filing civil suits in cases of discrimination in public accommodations is a relatively recent development in Israeli law. It has developed in both case law and statutes. In the last decade, Israeli courts have applied the constitutional right to equality to relationships between private parties through the use of private law doctrines. (pdf.)

The next set is about good old-fashioned class war. As a small town farm kid, I was made aware that some coasted and some had to work hard to break even. This isn't news to most, but possession of the proper accent and vocabulary, mannerisms and assumptions, and a name or two to drop go a lot further than hard work or acumin in greasing the rail and getting your shot. Cranky attitude to be sure, but the best and brightest seem to have a consensus about their own significance that isn't shared by reality at large.

• The Roots of White Anxiety: But cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”
• The Trouble With Meritocracy: For anyone with an appropriate skepticism toward meritocracy and its works, there’s an obvious critique of my suggestion, in today’s column, that America might be better off if our top-flight colleges welcomed more students from demographics — the white working class, rural America, evangelical Christians, etc. — that are currently viewed with suspicion and hostility by the highly-educated elite.
• The American Ruling Class: When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term "political class" came into use.
• The Class War We Need: The rich are different from you and me. They know how to game the system.

Congress has just reviewed the use of Predator Drones along the southern border. This doesn't feel right to me for several reasons. Giving some enforcement hire the ability to play video games, with real world consequences several states away, from a bunker in Nevada? Face it, gamers excel in slipping out from underneath adult supervision. That's part of the game. The establishment of a regular patrol area will mean the establishment of fixed communication and command functions. Perfect for crackers who need some time to break in. I would think that some in the military would see this as a potential security hole for their own weapons. The crash and burn rate for UAVs is currently about 10 times that of manned flights, and they cost a bundle. If one police agency has them, everybody needs them. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

• A hidden world, growing beyond control: The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
• Jaysen A. Yochim, Major, US Army: The Vulnerabilities of Unmanned Aircraft System Common Data Links to Electronic Attack. (pdf)

And finally the Front Porch Republic, a multi author blog that sways between grounded common sense and some of the most inanely dense philosophical claptrap you've ever decided to skip over.(but I like it anyway)

• The Information Age Springs a Definitive Leak: Funny enough, the barking message is on the blank side of a sign that originally advertised a local Reggae Music Festival. On the furiously adapted re-use side however, it now proclaims : “NUKE THE OIL SPILL”. So much for bongs and a funky back beat, this new age has a more emphatic solution: atom-splitting bombs.

The Greater Good

This week's SF Weekly (July 21, 2010) contains a list by Benjamin Wachs titled Ban-Wagon. The jist of it lists things our city government might ban for the dreaded Greater-Good.

• Pension Reform
• Things that look like guns
• The 49ers
• LOLcats
• Humor that isn't empowering
• Sex that doesn't offend the Midwest
• Things that are labeled "organic," but aren't organic enough for us
• Books: We all know they're going to die eventually anyway
• Intolerence
• Straight white guys
• Gendered pronouns
• Coffee beans without a romantic origin story

Now I'm sure that this is Irony. I mean the adults on the Circus of Supervisors would never ... Surely the Mayor would want to appear level-headed for his campaign .. A bit of self-depreciation from the chattering class? .. If the same powers that know when to give us rain (when you're out from underneath the awning) have any sway in this matter, Brucecorp's Bay Guardian will take this vital story and run with it.

Back in the real world, this bit of doggerel was sufficient excuse to post a picture of a small town's (Springfield, N.Y.) 4th of July.

Mom's Fruit Salad

Here is a quick recipe I got from my mom. At first blush, it looks like one of those handy housewife - early 60s style insta recipes found in the local church bulletin. (she assures me that in fact, it is exactly that) The extended family loves it, the local church asks for it specifically, and both my sister and I like it. It's straight-up, non-healthy, non-ethnic, verrry non-cosmopolitan, quick, tasty, almost foolproof, plop on your picnic plate food. Don't try to tart this one up. If a more upmarket presentation is required, you're probably better served by starting with gelatin or a Maderia aspic and building from there. If your hot dog and sweet corn need a spoonful of something and cole slaw just won't do, this might be the ticket. (and you would not believe how much slaw gets moved from bowl to dish to garbage in restaurants)

Dry mix 1 box (3oz) lemon jello and 1 box (3 oz) orange jello in serving bowl. Set aside. Combine a 12 oz can of pineapple, 1 can mandarin orange, and 1 cup of grated carrots in a work bowl. Drain and reserve the liquid using water to bring it up to 2 cups. Boil the liquid and use it to melt the jello. Add 1 cup of ice water - mix - add fruit and fridge. Stir after 1 hour.

A quick rule of thumb is 3oz jello, 1½ c fluid, 1 c fruit. If you're in the middle of a heat-waves (like the one that just made N.Y. melt down), you could drop a tablespoon or two of fluid to make things stiffer. The almost foolproof remark comes from the inclusion of pineapple. Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, which is a protease enzyme. This enzyme chops (digests) the long protein molecules that need to tangle to make the jello set. (kiwi - actinidin: same deal) Heat denatures a protease, hence canned fruit - boiled juice.

The Business of the Court

That's right, now you can have all the same disregard for the environment (albeit virtual) that big oil does everyday! Why should they get to have all the fun?

Simply enter the web address of the site you'd like to contaminate and watch the spill happen.

Instant oil Spill

Found in Presurfer

Now that we've had our fun, cleanup consists of pushing delete or left clicking the red x. Recent headlines suggest that the analog world's messes are more stubborn. However, like the digital world, they leave hidden copies and traces that are prone to resurfacing at the most inopportune time. In a roundabout way, this brings us to the crux of the post. I have seen some trial balloons on the net suggesting that corporations should have the right to vote. (so far, only national elections have been mentioned)

Before you dismiss the idea as the wet dream of power mad insiders, you might want to review the current tenor of our political discourse. Although the courts have been edging toward the idea of the corporation as a person (most commonly attributed to Santa Clara County V. Southern Pacific R. Co., 118 U. S. 394 (1886)) for quite some time, the current SCOTUS appears ready to lurch the last inch. Upon the discovery of a new legal classification would come the natural step of assuring the inalienable rights guaranteed in the Constitution; huddled masses breathing free, the downtrodden being admitted to the shining city on the hill, etc. A media ready slogan, perhaps "No Taxation Without Representation", and the bandwagon be rollin'. Pointing to the Constitution as being written by and for landowners and men of substance would provide an easy choice for the Originalists. (read: Antonin stare decisis when it suits me Scalia) Boy howdy, that would show them gov'mint elites we mean business. Unlikely: yes, a can of worms that will blow smoke in every direction: fer sure, impossible: no.

Going back to the recent corporation / money / speech decision, I note that one aspect is little remarked upon. The money spent on a candidate is taken from the profit side of the ledger. (Ford vs. Dodge Brothers) This gives the CEO and Board latitude to spend the stock and stake holder's investment dividends on a personal hobbyhorse. A few years back, there was a big brouhaha concerning Union leaders supporting this or that candidate. The manufactured consensus was horror at the thought of the poor working man being relieved of his dues to support someone he might not agree with. Change the scenario to a man in a suit and Granny Tilda's nest egg, and all's fine in the world. (that's not irony, it's chutzpa)

Current law protects the Board and Boss from any number of things, personal responsibility being a major one, answering questions concerning unwelcome results another. In our messy analog world, the best we can hope for is that the question of campaign spending, by a boss who probably has plenty of his own cash, is reflected in the stock's desirability.

Magritte Symmetry

I'm Back from vacation and re-entering the work-a-day world. Somewhere I read an article about investors that were given information on a yearly cycle as compared to investors that attempted to ride the market on a day to day basis. The less informed made decisions on long term factors and emerged with a reasonable profit. The day to day folks were able to say that they had a few instances of windfall profits, but over the summing period made less money overall. Relevant to this, I noticed that the same commentators are pushing the same memes and products, different only in which dilemma of the day was used to fill in the blank. The combination of too many cherry picked details giving the illusion of competence in the subject, an ahistorical worldview bounded by the last edition, blood specked frothing substituting for thinking, and an amoral determination to push the owner's product, leave you wanting less. I can feel my inner curmudgeon (or cynic, your call) returning in full force. In summary, vacations are good for the long term.

This Sunday's round-up reflects my just dipping my toe back in. I can't really sort it into catagories, so I'll list it chronologically.

• Pre-existing Rights: Of course, these are chartered and customary rights that pre-existed the creation of both the Confederation and the Republic. These were rights that the colonists possessed as part of their constitutional inheritance resulting from the struggles between Crown and Parliament in the 17th century, or which evolved as part of the colonial experience. Sullum has confused them with natural rights right from the start, and his entire argument suffers because of it.
• Something you already suspected Wealthy Defaulting More Than Others on Their Home Loans: Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.
• Venus Envy: To European ears, President Obama's analysis -- a characteristic piece of consensus-building -- appeared wholly reasonable, even unexceptional. On Thursday, Jose Borroso, president of the European Commission, indicated his agreement, telling the British newspaper The Times, "The transatlantic relationship is not living up to its potential."
• Independence Day Eve: Whenever I hear someone claim that “our enemies hate us for our freedom,” I think first of the USS Vincennes and July 3rd, 1988. Twenty-two years ago today, Vincennes was as sophisticated as warships came and by far the most powerful surface vessel on Persian Gulf patrol.
• Anti-Miltiarism and the Right: On the face of it, that sounds right, but as Millman noted there was no Jacksonian backlash against McCain’s pro-Georgian enthusiasm. Why not? There is no way to be absolutely sure, but a likely reason is that when McCain’s “Jacksonian” supporters heard this (if they were paying attention to the August war at all) they took it in the spirit in which it was offered: as a fanatical statement of hostility to Russia.
• Futurists ponder planet, avoid despairing: Where We Are Winning – Where We Are Losing: Futurologists Publish Annual Report on Major World Problems and Opportunities.
• Debating Non-Violent Islamism: I found much to criticize in the book, including Berman's exceedingly thin engagement with the vast scholarly and historiographical literature, his still-puzzling obsession with Ramadan, and his tiresome infighting with a few liberal Western journalists such as Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma. But looking past the polemics, there's a serious debate to be had about how to think about non-violent Islamist activism in Europe and the United States, the Middle East, and throughout the Muslim communities of the world.
• End of the Establishment: When Mitt Romney denounced the new START treaty in the Washington Post last week, he didn't simply demonstrate that he's determined not to allow Sarah Palin to outflank him on the right. He also affirmed something else -- the decline and fall of the Republican foreign-policy establishment.

I had lunch with my cousin Susan and she showed me around her town. Aparently NYC, in order to assure its watershead (or lebensraum, again - your choice), has been buying land and moving people.(not necessarily with their co-operation) Plenty of insider profit making opportunities and back room "for the greater good" monkeyshines. Shows to go you that all the less desirable characters don't necessarily live in D.C. or some far away foreign capital. Here in the future, homegrown isn't necessarily a guarantee of qualification.

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

Friends of Irony

Higgs Boson

The particle physics community is buzzing about a blog posted by a University of Padua (Italy) physicist saying that he's been hearing rumors about a "light Higgs boson" discovery at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois.

The story is at the link. I'll post-edit in more links below as I find primary material from the labs.

Reentry

I returned from N.Y. late yesterday night. Saw most of the family and several old friends. Downstate has changed enough since I lived there that I actualy needed a map. To be honest, signs noted the changes, but I neglected to read them. Getting lost on vacation can be fun. Take-aways from my time away.

• Folks in Buffalo know how to make the best roast beef sandwiches and do a fine job on pickled beets too.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art whopped our local versions before the end of the first room.
• Small town 4th of July parades are way better than the big-time professional ones.
• A hot day in upstate N.Y. is way different than a hot day in S.F.(it was melt the lard off your butt hot around the 6th)
• You can get along without being online. The withdrawl symptoms ease after the 9th day.
• Family is family.

May (picture above) serves me coffee in the morning.(Happy Donuts - next door) I'm not really sentient before the first cup, so I've come to depend on her for acculturating the curmudgeon in the morning. I bought her the hat (and some Amish fudge for the kids) and now we're going to work on the laconic yup (serviceable, albeit a bit chipper) and y'all. In return, she's going to teach me to pronounce her name properly. (it's Sokmay. Where y'all from, N.Y.?) I'll post more pictures as time permits.