No sir, I don't need any details

We had a ship on Pier 30-32 this week. We were a bit short of proper security people, so I ended up standing at the gateway giving directions to the passengers. (no, the hippies and the sea lions both moved North a while back... yes the ferry boats dock at the ferry building, are you asking about something else? .. F line to the Castro, be back by 5:30) As you can tell from the frequency of my posting, I've been busy. The first link is a good old fashoned snarl.

• A Brief History of Time Wasted: This cocksure claim begs to be differed with because humans in this post Y2K America really don’t need Satan to unleash the horrors of Hell anymore. We do quite well enough on our own, thank you very much. Being cheerful Americans, we’ve concocted our very own Hell-On -Earth with a Happy Face, a kind of sprightly ornamented Skinner Box Sit Com of relentlessly droning idiocy.

The next set involves the sciences and the uses the political class puts them to.

• The Last Countdown: At present, it looks like there will be two more space shuttle launches. That’s it. Within a year, our nation will no longer have the capability to launch humans into space. For some this is a sure sign that America is sliding into mediocrity.
• Bizarre Robot Traders: The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren't doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there's no way they'd ever be part of a trade.
• One step ahead of the future: What if there was a way to predict how a virus is going to evolve? What if technology could help peer into the future and see the next steps in mutation? What if there was a missile warning system for incoming viral threats?
• Iran Fights Malware Attacking Computers: Stuxnet, which was first publicly identified several months ago, is aimed solely at industrial equipment made by Siemens that controls oil pipelines, electric utilities, nuclear facilities and other large industrial sites.

Media soul searching. The media doesn't have a soul, it's owned and operated. They must have pre-printed articles like this one, with fill in the blank areas for the specific mea culpa, because like the sales down this Christmas article you see every year, the same outline pops up on a weekly basis. If it draws eyeballs to advertising, it's professional journalism.

• Forbes Article Spurs Media Soul Searching: I received a call yesterday from Nathan Verdi, a fact checker at Forbes, who was calling to fact check your article after it was published. (Is this how journalism works now?)

Keeping up on science fiction. As a side note, I haven't read Zero History yet and every time I stop to buy it, something comes up. Soon come on that one.

• Science influenced by science fiction: There’s not a lot of science fiction around these days, so pretty soon science will have to put up with being influenced by paranormal romance.
  I never minded that working scientists were influenced by science fiction, but I was always impressed by what bad science fiction scientists liked. It was usually junk that they had read back when they were 14, before they had to knuckle down and earn a doctorate.

The remainder of the links are political. I'll end with Lapham's interview: an upbeat reflection as opposed to the fear-mongering we recieve as daily fare.

• The End of an Insurgency: As the Obama administration weighs its strategy, it would be wise to consider the history of 89 insurgencies in the second half of the twentieth century. How governments manage to defeat -- or be defeated by -- insurgencies reveals a number of lessons for Washington today.
• Americans Turning Against Hegemonism: A large majority (69-28%) said that it was “mostly good” for Turkey and Brazil to become more independent of U.S. foreign policy, which suggests that the hysterical anti-Turkish reaction in the last few months has a very limited base of support. I should note that the questions might have biased the result towards the “mostly good” side by explaining that Turkish and Brazilian independence in foreign policy would mean that they do not rely on the U.S. as much.
• Lewis Lapham on the end of capitalism: It’s faith in the spirit and mechanics and moral value of capitalism. It is a country of expectant millionaires. You have the notions of risk, of labor put to a productive use, deferred pleasure — ideas that come out of our Puritan ancestry.