Vacation Time

I'll be going to Springfield, N.Y. for the 4th of July. (hometown) I plan to visit family and friends. Since many of these folks are far enough off the net to preclude a connection faster than snail mail, I'll save whatever posts I come up with for my return. Can the boy think without the background click and hum? Can lack of ubiquitous media drone produce withdrawl symptoms? I'll know soon enough. In the meantime I'm going to clear my link-list and pack.

• The G20's Twenty Agendas: Heads of state from the Group of Twenty (G20) advanced economies meet in Toronto on June 26 and 27 to discuss policies to balance global growth and strengthen global financial supervision. The meeting follows an early-June gathering of G20 finance ministers in Busan, South Korea, which stressed the need for fiscal tightening and "sustainable public finances."
• The Financial Times highlights a concern we had raised early on about the effort by BP to drill a relief well to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf. While many analysts have acted as if the BP forecast, that the well would be completed by August, there is no reason to assume the initial effort will succeed, particularly at this depth, which is unprecedented for this effort.
• What the Earth Knows: Any serious conversation about the planet’s climate and our energy future must begin, paradoxically, with a backward look at geologic time. The reason for this is that the way forward is fogged by misunderstandings about the earth. Experts are little help in the constant struggle in this conversation to separate myth from reality, because they have the same difficulty, and routinely demonstrate it by talking past each other.
• Soviet Arlington: Though I had heard his name mentioned a time or two, I keep myself sufficiently out of touch with the FOX News/Weekly Standard/National Review crowd not to have known much of anything about Lt. Col. Allen West (Ret.). My first inkling that I’d not think highly of him came as I stood outside a ladies’ room at O’Hare, unintentionally eavesdropping on the forty-something man (hardly of a gentle nature) who spoke on the phone nearby.
• The Two Faces of the Tea Party: As a student in the exciting new field of Tea Party Studies, I’ve noticed that no one agrees on what the Tea Party actually is. Is the anti-Obama, anti-big government movement simply AstroTurf fabricated by Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks? Is it a bunch of Birthers, Birchers, conspiracists, and white power misfits .. Or are the Tea Partiers nothing more than indulgent Boomers who combine 1960s social libertarianism with 1980s laissez-faire economics?

Hope you have a good Fourth of July.

News You Can Use

First the professional journalist reads the tweet. (just ignore the parody disclaimer on the right) Next, you publish a scathing article, demonstrating your insider connections, metahuman technical insight, and your heartfelt sympathy with the common man. (be sure to toss in a sidebar diddling your owners latest product - that pay review is getting closer) Finally the pay-off. To the blare of martial typewriter music, pneumatic Polly Perky does your story as the lede on tonight's TV news.

Via: Presurfer

Beware of Your Blender

Fox News reports:

That's right: your blender is under attack! Most mixers are self-contained and not hackable, but Siciliano says many home automation systems tap into appliances such as blenders and coffee machines. These home networks are then open to attack in surprising ways: A hacker might turn on the blender from outside your home to distract you as he sneaks in a back window, he warns.

Aw jeez, not the blender

Cindee and Pride

It's Cindee's birthday today. Happy and many more. It's also pride day. I have to admit I don't feel much connection to what has become a sell-o -thon. Buy Mr.S fetters for that edgy epater les bourgeois look. But tradition is tradition, so I'll probably tumble down Kearny street, take a couple of snapshots of folks celebrating their identity, realize that I still don't like large crowds, and mark it as being done for this year. I'm in the wrong demographic I suppose. (I'll smash the State after my morning coffee thank-you) I wonder what the Westboro Church will be doing this year? After their protests at military funerals and Fred Phelps' God hates Ireland speech, the TV cameras might be in short supply. They could always admire themselves on You Tube after editing out the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence laughing them off the stage. And speaking of the God-wacked:

• God Is Cursing Us With Bear Attacks For Failing To Follow The Bible: Last week, researchers at Yellowstone National Park trapped a Grizzly Bear, tranquilized it and fitted it with a radio collar. Shortly after the bear awoke, it attacked and killed a man who had apparently "ignored warning signs posted advising hikers to avoid the area because of the likelihood of a dangerous bear encounter."
• Rev. James David Manning posts a video with La Guns about the revolution.

Next is a bit of history:

• This fascinating essay, written by King Hussein’s grandfather King Abdullah, appeared in the United States six months before the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In the article, King Abdullah disputes the mistaken view that Arab opposition to Zionism (and later the state of Israel) is because of longstanding religious or ethnic hatred.

A few computer and tech articles:

• The internet, Everything you ever need to know: A funny thing happened to us on the way to the future. The internet went from being something exotic to being boring utility, like mains electricity or running water – and we never really noticed. So we wound up being totally dependent on a system about which we are terminally incurious.
• The Terminator Comes to Wall Street: You’ve seen this story in countless Hollywood science-fiction movies, from The Terminator to War Games. Scientists develop a sophisticated computer or robot to assure the nation’s security, but something goes wrong and the technology itself mutates into a catastrophic threat. Unfortunately, the U.S. economic system now finds itself crippled by a real-life technology-gone-wrong story line.
• Large Cryogenic Gravitational-wave Telescope: We have waxed poetic about gravitational-wave detectors before. These instruments are truly amazing feats of engineering, with the power to unlock a whole new window on our Universe. LCGT would be even more impressive than the current instruments.

A short story.

• The Exterminator's Want-ad, by Bruce Sterling: So, I'm required to write this want-ad in order to get any help with my business. Only I have, like, a very bad trust rating on this system. I have rotten karma and an awful reputation. "Don't even go there, don't listen to a word he says: because this guy is pure poison."

And, of course, the week's politics. Eris must be working overtime or The Twilight Zone was a documentary or all three.

• Geopolitics in the Raw: I have been wondering for a while just what we — the west in general — are doing in Afghanistan. Iraq was pretty obvious: oil. (Don't listen to the mouth, watch the hands.)
• The Failed State Index: The 10 states that fill out the top ranks of this year’s Failed States Index — the world’s most vulnerable nations — are a sadly familiar bunch. Shattered Somalia has been the No. 1 failed state for three years running, and none of the current top 10 has shown much improvement.
• SCOTUS: The question at issue was whether Washington state is within its rights to require the disclosure of signatures given to a petition to get an initiative on the ballot. The argument made by the anti-same sex marriage group that the First Amendment required that the signatures be kept private, to put it mildly, not very convincing. In essence, the argument seems to dovetail uncomfortably with Sarah Palin’s, er, innovative contention that the First Amendment should protect her from any criticism.
• The Very Angry Tea-Party: Sometimes it is hard to know where politics ends and metaphysics begins: when, that is, the stakes of a political dispute concern not simply a clash of competing ideas and values but a clash about what is real and what is not, what can be said to exist on its own and what owes its existence to an other.

 

The Cockroach Hat

Tor Books has put a short story by Terry Bisson, The Cockroach Hat on its website. If you want your Kafka marinated in Southern gothic, here you be.

Gates vs. Jobs

I went to the bank yesterday to see about a loan.

Sad & Useless

Music of the Sphere

Sound of the Sun (courtesy Richard Morton) by University of Sheffield

Scientists at Sheffield University in the U.K. have released what amounts to a recording of what you would hear if you could stand inside the solar corona - the upper layer of the Sun's atmosphere - and it turns out that what you'd hear is music

Link & Video Via: The Presurfer

Spike Jones: Another Drink

A short with Mel Blanc (mustache and beer stein)

Useful Dohicky

Lifehacker

The other day I helped the lady next door to move a bookcase to retreive some fallen stuff. The case had pressed some extention chords into an outlet, cracking the outlet and creasing the chord enough to expose copper. The denouement of the story was a trip to Cole Hardware and about ten minutes with an unlabeled breaker box. The dohicky in the picture looks like it would have, at least, saved about $17.00, and more importantly, stopped a fire hazzard. As for the unlabeled box, that's just p-poor workmanship. ¡Ándele! - ¡Ándele! no-good if the job is unfinished.

Aurora Australis

Popular Science: This particular aurora is unique in the sense that it was spotted fairly far away from the South Pole over the southern Indian Ocean, likely as a result of a large ejection of energy that burst from the sun on May 24. The photographer is looking south toward Antarctica, though you can’t see the southernmost continent in the photograph. The ISS orbits at around 220 miles, while the aurora was located somewhere in the ionosphere between 60 and 190 miles above the planet’s surface.

Taken from the International Space Station. Link

Via: Neatorama

OMG

Lemmy Kilmister

via: Dangerous Minds

Belated Round-Up

This weekend, I had a visitor. The end result was I found various ways to not get a darn thing done. It was great fun, but the catching up Monday portion is about what you would expect. As I wrote before, Alison is now Dr. Alison. I received pictures through Dianne and one is above. The belated link-dump begins with Afghanistan. Quite some time ago, the President said we had to finish the Afghan job, but never explained what that job was. Now we know.

• Vast Minerals" in Afghanistan: The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
• Trillion Dollar Curse: The value of the reserves just discovered is already estimated at about a trillion dollars - and there's probably more where that came from. What does this portend for Afghanistan, and the war? That's the, ahem, trillion dollar question.

Next are culture links, including a eulogy for Jonathan Wolken, founder of Pilobolus. You might remember seeing Summer in the City on a late night gabfest.

• The nature-nurture canard: I sympathize with both arguments; I see Carr's point, but feel he overplays it. I find digital culture immensely distracting. I regularly dive down rabbit holes in my computer, iPhone, and iPad, taking wandering, shallow paths much like those manner Carr describes. Yet I remember pretty clearly getting distracted by other things — newspapers, magazines, favorite books I'd already read, tennis matches, conversations with neighbors — as a young adult in the dark dark pre-Internet era.
• Jonathan Wolken, R.I.P: The lights go down, the curtain goes up, and six half-clothed dancers come running on stage and immediately start tying themselves into exotic knots and strange, almost-familiar shapes. Are you dreaming? Are you trapped inside a surrealist painting? No, you're just watching Pilobolus Dance Theatre, a group so witty and imaginative that it has flourished for a quarter-century...
• New science fiction and fantasy from Finland in English: It may be those long cold winters, but when it comes to fantastic writing the Finns are on top of their game.
• Charles Fort, The original Art Bell: A better description of his interests would be to say that what fascinated Fort were the things which were intellectually excluded by science. Rains of frogs, alien spacecraft, meat falling from the sky and spontaneous human combustion were the grist for his mill and this is what he spent his life meticulously cataloging.

The remainder of the links are political. I can find no reason to think that professional wrestling isn't a good metaphor for the real world.

• Tsk tsk … I realize we should all be amazed and delighted that state Rep. Nikki Haley won the Republican gubernatorial primary in South Carolina despite the nasty and hard-to-substantiate charges of adultery coming at her from two yoyos who claim to have been her lovers. But personally, I’m riveted by Haley, a Tea Party favorite and Sarah Palin buddy as everyone delights in observing, precisely because of those allegations. I know columnists are supposed to be above the fray and bemoan, as Nikki did on the cusp of victory, the trashing of opponents with “disgusting politics.
• The deterioration of U.S.-Turkish relations: Of course, for many analysts referring to this divide is not so much intended to describe what is going on as it is aimed at demonizing the direction Turkish foreign policy has taken. The so-called “Islamic” turn is mostly cited by those who want to minimize or deny the role that Western governments have had in sabotaging the Western orientation of Turkey they claim to find so valuable.
• No one under the bus: The omnipresence of this narrative is matched by its complete disconnect from reality. In fact, the reset has provided a laundry list of deliverables, from an agreement that allows U.S. planes to fly over Russian territory on their way to Afghanistan, to Iran sanctions that are significantly more stringent than the prior three (if it's a used rug, then it must be a pricey Persian antique).
• The Hollow Arab Core: But for the most part, the Obama administration chose to fall back on the conventional policies of the past: Palestinian reconciliation remained in the hands of an enfeebled and partisan Egypt, the grand bargain with Iran faded from an agenda dominated by the nuclear question and sanctions, and the Turks are now seen as more of a problem than an asset.
• Weasel Stomping Day: What do you mean, ‘in’ a democracy?” answered the Stoic. “Democracy is a procedure of rulership. It’s not a place you live in. Saying you live ‘in’ a democracy is like saying you live ‘in’ a trial by jury.”

Smoke first, Soup Later

"Opium was stuffed into the chicken's head and then a whole basketful of the things could be carted about Chinatown without drawing much attention."

There is less live animal sales in Chinatown today compared to a few years back, but I suspect that those in the know (native speakers) can still find the unusual stuff. Cash is king.

Via: TYWKIWDBI and TIME Inc. photographic archives

Back in the Day

When I was a kid, your phone didn't have naked ladies on it. Thats what National Geographic was for. And furthermore, your slide rule couldn't be programed for lascivious suggestions. Well mine only had 5 scales, maybe the professional ones could. And as far as I know, the magazine you kept upstairs in the hog-house couldn't tattle on you the way an I-Pad can. That, as we all know, is what sisters are for. And yeah, I promised myself when I was a kid that I'd never sit around and **** about progress, but....

Via: I have seen the whole of the Internet/ joannecasey.blogspot.com

Avoiding Offense

The Ministry of Truth gets caught out. The picture on the right was used in the British exhibition The War Experence, the one on the left is the original. Of course the politicos are out looking for a PC librul or a tyrant that hates our freedoms to blame, but I didn't really have to tell you that. A more cogent theory is that it was some mid-level executive just sanding off the less profitable aspects of the exhibit. After all, cigars don't draw customers. It does go to show you how malleable history is when an interested party sees a dime in it.

The Daily Mail - UK

Oily Joe

Oily Joe would like to apologize to: DARTH VADER, FOR BLOWING UP THE DEATH STAR (TWICE!). THAT THING MUST HAVE COST A LOT OF MONEY TO BUILD. TELL YOU WHAT, WE'LL WRITE YOU A CHECK FOR IT FROM THE AMERICAN TAXPAYER. COPACETIC?

Share, and Share Alike

HP and Yahoo are set to release a net-connected printer (ePrinter) that will provide scheduled delivery content.

HP's ePrint printers, some of which will become available next month, are connected to the user's home router, which means they will have an IP address. IP addresses can be used to identify an approximate area where the Web-connected device is located, opening the potential for targeted advertisements based on location.

So let's see. An IP sniffer, needed to properly target the advertising, HP's habit of providing the printer with plenty of memory, (you might want to reprint that manafesto, I mean advertisment from last month) a hole in the firewall exempting the scheduled content, and ink that costs a kajillion dollars per oz. To rephrase, they get the contents of your drive, you get photo-quality advertisments and the bill. Hot dang daddy, sign me up.

Plan Needs Work

I mean,what could go wrong?

Pasta Glossary

Here's a quick link to a Pasta Glossary. It's a reference to the shapes and uses of the standard selection. There are, in reality, about a bazillion kinds of pasta, but most are small variations of the ones shown here.

World Cup vs. The P.H.D.

Via: Bennybb

Industrial Frites

This post is a linked one to a French Fry recipe.

To be absolutely honest, I've never been able to make fries as good as theirs (shhhhh!). Sure, my thick-cut pub-style fries are super-potatoey and fantastic, and when I'm in the mood for them, my seasoned steak fries can't be beat, but for thin, super-crisp fries (I'm talking the kind that only appear in fast food restaurants and French bistros under the name frites)? I'm always better off running down to the take-out window than bothering to fry them myself at home. Link

The target page is a combination tick-tock about the research and some good old gastroporn regarding fries. The difference between the author's method and the double fry fiites method is the introduction of a quick step involving ascidulated water. Plenty of pictures for those of you that don't have a House of Clown just down the street. (A back road in Nevada?)

Sun's Out

My link-dump this week starts with media. Competition hasn't improved it one whit, 99 channels with the same mish-mosh. Reading about the journalist that reported on the investigator who refered to the story on the article about the press release would be refered to as a circle jerk in the real world. In media world, it's news.And now a word from our sponsors.

• Blogger bites back: On Friday, I broke a tasty story about a woman suing Google, claiming bad directions caused her to get hit by a vehicle. Today, I discover our story is everywhere, often with no attribution. Come along and watch how the mainstream media, which often claims bloggers rip it off, does a little stealing of its own.
• War Room Reams Friedman: SkyLounges across this flat world, take note! Opinion guru Thomas Friedman has issued his important, moderate, hot, crowded opinion on the disastrous raid by Israeli commandos on a humanitarian aid flotilla headed to Gaza!
• Political journalism has evolved somewhat the same direction as literary criticism, which is now dominated by people called deconstructionists. Deconstructionist criticism is indifferent to the literary value of the "text"--novel or poem or whatever--it is analyzing. The "text" is just grist for arcane and self-referential analysis. A work of no special merit is even preferable in a way, since it doesn't distract from the analysis, which is the real show.
• Kitten up a Tree: Within a few days, though, the Washington media's "Israel narrative" abandoned those questions and focused instead on the ugly words and sudden Retirement of cranky 89-year-old White House correspondent Helen Thomas. Somehow, the debate shifted from Israel behaving badly to Helen Thomas behaving badly.
• Encomium with required disclaimer: Thank God for Helen Thomas, the only person to show any courage at the White House press briefing after President Barack Obama gave a flaccid account of the intelligence screw-up that almost downed an airliner on Christmas Day.
• Lawrence Lessig: How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement--if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness--will inspire not reform, but disgust.

I'm going to slip in a great interview from Arthur Magazine.

• Robert Fripp in conversation with John McLaughlin: Happily, my mother was an amateur musician; she was a violinist and there was always music going on in the house. We got a gramophone one day, and someone had Beethoven’s Ninth, and on the last record, which is at the end of the symphony, there’s a vocal quartet in which the writing is extraordinary.

The remainder of Sunday's round-up is the political section. I've often been at odds with the contrarian label. When prefering original sources, verifiable facts, and reasoned arguments is eschewed for slogans, of course everybody knows quotes and factoids, yeah, I get a bit cranky. Oh well.

• The Meaning of Toughness: It was power politics at its best: Cold, humiliating, threatening, and leaving the other side to face the consequences of defying American interests and policies. It is not by accident that in the Middle East the common wisdom is that Americans make you an offer you cannot refuse, while Europeans make you an offer you cannot understand.
• Terrible Analysis: It isn’t because Turkey is “moving decisively away from its longtime partnership with the United States,” and it isn’t even because the AKP government is bent on undermining the relationship with Israel. There has been a strong reaction because eight Turkish citizens were killed on a Turkish-flagged civilian ship in international waters by the armed forces of its ostensible ally while on a basically peaceful aid mission. Name me a government that would not have a strong reaction to such an episode.
• Letter From Kathmandu: Although the United States envisions Nepal as a stable and democratic buffer between China and India, the road ahead may be determined by those competing giants.
• Israel Without Clichés: The Israeli raid on the Free Gaza flotilla has generated an outpouring of clichés from the usual suspects. It is almost impossible to discuss the Middle East without resorting to tired accusations and ritual defenses: perhaps a little house cleaning is in order.
• God's work at Goldmans: The challenges the United States faces are familiar territory to the people at the IMF. If you hid the name of the country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say: nationalize the troubled banks and break them up as necessary.

Samizdat

I tried to write a review of Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl. New "it" book? Yes .. but we live in the miasma of the commercial era. Mega-ultra super-duper is faint praise in the current marketplace. Biopunk? I prefer the neologism ribofunk. Set in another country? Well, 1956 Midwest America's chrome and Formica could use some time to recharge as a setting. In other words, I enjoyed the heck out of the book, but can't come up with boo in terms of review: snark, gush, or otherwise. So I decided to open a can of worms, and build a list of books that served as my gateway. These books are responsible for my love of the genre. Sure there are about a zillion others, but both you and I have only so much bandwidth.

• Dune - Frank Herbert ('65): This is the real one. It's also the raison d'être for a shelf full of sequels, prequels, and movie attempts. Start with the real thing, and you can profitably put off the rest.
• Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick ('91): You can pick up just about anything by this author and be assured of getting a top of the line story. This one is better still.
• The City and the Stars - Arthur Clarke ('56): Classic for a reason. The smell of the old paperbacks that the story survives in just adds another pleasure.
• Neuromancer - William Gibson ('84): Street-style cyberpunk has been pounded by a thousand tiny cuts, and devolved into a sad version of urban contemporary. Return with us to the thrilling days of not that long ago when the clichés were being invented, and black ice didn't include a Viagra pitch.
• The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury ('50): This one seems to be the embodyment of a sense of wonder. Other authors try to achieve this with grandiose effects and portentous tushery, but here a summer night with rockets does the job.
• Nightwings - Robert Silverberg ('69): This has all the sfnal trappings; tech, biomods, alien invasion et.al., but it's a real story, with characters, something a great many current producers might want to include in their product.
• Bloodmusic - Greg Bear ('84): Next time you're on 101 between Palo Alto and San Jose, look over to your left.
• The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester ('53): Sometimes the pulps can trancend their origin. A police procedural with golden age gegaws becomes a classic.
• Radix - A. A. Attanasio ('81): Before the technobabble done whopped the man, Mr. Attanasio wrote a story that was just the embodyment of right time, right place.
• Vacuum Diagrams - Stephen Baxter (2001): This is a collection of short stories that tie together the XeeLee sequence. All gems and a great reminder of why the short story form was so important in science fiction's development.

Of course, once you get hooked, their's Watts' Blindsight, Stephenson's The Diamond Age, Sterling's Heavy Weather, Greg Egan, Clarke,and to bring it around, Palo Bacigalupi.

Can You Imagine?

From: Book of Joe

Get the **** off my land

Chinese farmer Yang Youde, 56, of Wuhan built this DIY cannon to keep demolition crews off property that he says he has a legal right to use. Apparently, a commercial developer had requisitioned the land and offered him much less than he wanted for use of the property. So Youde took the A-Team route. The cannon uses fireworks as its ammunition. I think Youde should be invited to the next Maker Faire.

more quotes and links at: BoingBoing

Politics

You said it, Kid

Via: tywkiwdb

Yup, You Guessed It

Yup, It's a BP station in NOL

Via: BoingBoing

BLF vs.House of Clown

The Billboard Liberation Front (BLF) improved a sign at the Cala (Hyde x California) supermarket. I'm sure House of Clown and Clear Channel are in the back room now, sharpening their daggers.

BLF press release @ Laughing Squid

Philadelphia awaits Dr.Tan

My cousin Allison graduated this week. She'll be doing her residency in Philadelphia. The first part of this week's link-dump will be computation.

• Review of Adrian John's Piracy: As piracy has grown and diversified, so a counterindustry has emerged, dedicated to combating it. The coherence and scope of this industry are relatively new and remarkable. In previous centuries, particular groups or industries mounted efforts against piracy; but they did not generally regard them as fronts in one common cause.
• Social Network opt-out: Recently, some programmers figured out how to computationally do exactly this. By entering in your username and password, the software would delete as much information as possible, ultimately removing the account itself. It was a radical enough idea to attract the legal attention of Facebook.
• 5 Best diagnostic tools: If things haven't gotten bad enough that you're forced to take refuge with a Live CD, SIW is a Windows-based diagnostic tool that can help you get to the bottom of things. SIW is incredibly detailed in its analysis, next to nothing is left uncatalogued from the timings of your memory modules to the DLL files loaded to what applications you have set to autorun at startup. Even if you're not currently experiencing any computer issues, SIW gives you a really interesting peek inside your computer.
• Surprise: All the yapping about our supposedly fast, flat, and wired world fosters bizarre expectations. Computers, we are told, possess and confer power. Out of power comes mastery. Don’t believe it. The fact of the matter is this: We live in a world characterized not by ever-greater speed but by never-ending surprise. No one—not the pope, the president, or even a fast-world guru like Thomas Friedman—knows what’s going to happen next. Those who pretend otherwise are frauds.
• Wikileaks: Their focus was Project B—Assange’s code name for a thirty-eight-minute video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq in 2007. The video depicted American soldiers killing at least eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists; it later became the subject of widespread controversy, but at this early stage it was still a closely guarded military secret.

Next are a few references to journalism and the concomitant umbrage industry.

• Here is David Brooks, peering down from his perch at the New York Times, offering a tutorial on why ordinary citizens, as opposed to well-heeled newspaper columnists living in the nation’s capital, just don’t understand what makes America tick. Populists, writes Brooks, mistakenly view the country through the lens of social class. Convinced that “economics is a struggle over finite spoils,” they betray an “Us versus Them mentality.” They see politics as a “struggle between the enlightened and the corrupt, the pure and the betrayers.” Brooks wants it known that such heresies (which are, of course, daily fare within the Beltway) possess not even the slightest legitimacy when voiced by ordinary citizens from Indiana or Kansas.
• France has more moustaches than Norway: I just made that up. But the great thing about numbers is that you don’t even need to make them up to make them say anything you want them to say.

Next are the political blogs this week.

• What's in it for US: When discussing the blockade of Gaza, the tendency in the Western media is to focus on what is Israel’s legitimate interest in denying arms shipments in light of the rocket attacks emanating from that territory. However, the reality is that the blockade goes far, far beyond interdicting arms shipments, and instead becomes a policy of collective punishment aimed at severely impoverishing the Gaza region in order to retaliate against the entire population for the majority’s election of Hamas, and perhaps to inspire the population to reject Hamas’ leadership.
• To Bad Not to Fail: Under that setup, the general partners risked their personal net worth on the solvency of their firms and regulated the bank’s activities with the knowledge that they were liable for any losses. When almost all the partnerships reorganized into corporations, investment banks became, in effect, liability casinos operated by croupiers unbridled by long-term financial responsibilities. The sole object was to maximize day-to-day profits.
• Hegemony and Democracy: He is certainly right that hegemonists are inconsistent in their enthusiasm for democracy promotion, as I’ve mentioned many times before. In this view, Venezuelan and Bolivian democracies are blights on the earth, but Georgian democracy is wonderful and vitally important. They used to like Ukrainian democracy until the Ukrainians elected the wrong candidate, and now they’re not so sure it’s a good idea

And the last link is about food. The most important last, in this case.

• Virus Ravages Cassava Plants in Africa: Inside its tan skin, the white flesh was riddled with necrotic brown lumps, as obviously diseased as any tuberculosis lung or cancerous breast. “Even the pigs refuse this,” she said.

Duct Tape Redux

Duct tape makes the world prettier.

Via: Crooked Brains

Juged Wrong

On this test, spelling counts.

Via: Oddee

The Peter Principle

Ibn Kafka has a post catching Israel in a propaganda f**k-up. The Israeli Ministry Foreign Affairs posted on its Flickr account pictures of the terrifying weapons they found on the IHH ship. You know, things like bulletproof vests for emergency services, pepper spray, kitchen knives, bits of wood and other weapons of mass destruction. Except that they did not realize that Flickr displays EXIF data, which is the information that cameras record when they take pictures: aperture, shutter speed, flash status... and the time the picture was taken. Which, as Flickr commenters quickly pointed out, was sometime in 2006.

I think we're all pretty clear on the Idea that Governments lie. Human desire for status, reward, power and stability, especially in one's own life and job, trump for the people more often than not. This is the commonality between communist, revolutionary, consumerist democracies, and theocracies. Our idea of checks and balances weaken when the checkers and balancers live on the same block, golf on the same course, and attend the same parties. None of this is new, anyone would have observed the same thing fifty years or five hundred years ago.

I'd like to suggest The Peter Principle as a good thing in this case. In the pictures on the Flicker example, they were probably posted by a middle-operative more interested in getting the job done and making tee-off time. No doubt sanatation protocols were put in place as soon as the powers that be realized the boo-boo and our hypothetical bureaucrat got a lateral promotion to the garbology division, but due to a quirk of technology a crack appeared in the monolithic wall. In a related note, NYTs has been salting its opinion page with references to the violent Hamas takeover. It only takes a second to confirm that they were elected, but you know the drill... wrong kind of democratically.

Closer to home, we're justifiably cranky when Government can't seem to tie its own shoelaces. But what if the Government was able to spin on a dime? We would have had the entire Constitution explained away on this or that temporary emergency measure, (it's my tee-time) and every electable gumbah's fervid campaign dream or contributer's wish list posted into law before you could say Bobs your Uncle. Sometimes all that gives the governed some breathing room is the sheer inertia of the bureaucracy and the less than stellar performance of those on the inside.

Spill Response

Use this link, AmyOops: BP's chief executive in charge of global oil leaks, if you need a laugh regarding the spill.

Ethel's Day

Via: SNUH

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Via: Geeks are Sexy