Back to the Noosphere

Media ecology, feeding frenzy, and the inevitable self-serving self-examination. Why yesss... we did slip up a little on that one cuz... and protecting our freedoms ( the advertiser ) and our way of life. A tweet from the corner drunk becomes a major breaking news story in a matter of hours.( and you can find more opinions on the reporter's Facebook page with explosive up-to-the-minute suppositions) Be right back after this message. (cue the John Williams break theme and bring up the chattering daisy wheel printer sample a bit) Not to denigrate a show business supplied noosphere, but I felt better informed when I was cut off from the blather and froth during fleet week. I'd like to vote for the freedom from mendacity. On to my slightly neglected link-dump.

The first bit is about the press, as you may have guessed. First a story that caught fire, with more and more revelations (My God, we coulda been blowed up) When a cooler head says wait, this doesn't make a lick of sense, the story magically transmogrifies. A report on a report of allegations, made by a book that you can buy for $27.95.DEFEND YOUR RIGHT TO KNOW, BUY IT FROM OUR SPONSER. The second link could profitably be interpereted as a knee-jerk turf defense. The third is political, NYT is tring to position itself as a bit more blue colar without loosing its base on the Upper East. It's hard to effect change with the same people, the same policies, and the same ownership, behind the same closed doors.

• Shelton Story Bogus: The device is a critical link in our system of command and control, is handled by a military aide, and if it were missing, I am certain it would have been noticed -- immediately, not months later. So, what was actually lost? Shelton may have a story to tell here, but so far, it does not hold together.
• Head Start on Smear: The US major papers of record have yet to fill their opinion pages with supposition, slander and rumor concerning Wikileaks and its most visible representative, Julian Assange. That’s for the week to come. But the New York Times has already gotten a head start in its news pages.
• Change we used to believe in: Well, yes! Obama couldn’t have said it more eloquently himself. But with all due respect to Secretary Donovan’s blogging finesse, he wasn’t promising action. He was just stroking the liberal base while the administration once again punted. In our new banking scandal, as in those before it, attorneys general in the states, where many pension funds were decimated by Wall Street Ponzi schemes, are pursuing the crimes Washington has not.

Yes kids, I'm old enough to remember when Rocky and Bullwinkle was a new show, with new episodes. Yikes! Here is the creator's obit.

• R.I.P. Alexander Anderson: ...but few were more obscure, or more important, than Alexander Anderson, who died Friday at 90 in Carmel, Cal. Anderson created the characters Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Bullwinkle Moose and Dudley Do-Right, and the vaudeville-style format, for the 1959 animated program Rocky and His Friends and its 1961 spinoff The Bullwinkle Show, known collectively as Rocky and Bullwinkle.

The next is a bit of security related computer tomfoolery. This one raises a more basic question. A program is a series of yes or no voltage pulses sent to the tick of a controlling clock. Once it's on your machine, it can be decompiled. When a program is in widespread use killing people, the people in question will find a way to get a copy. If you think a remote controlled weapon can't eventually be turned on its user, I've got a great bridge to sell you. The second story is about making-do effectively with the things at hand.

• Predator Drones sued: Intelligent Integration Systems (IISi), a small Boston-based software development firm, alleges that their Geospatial Toolkit and Extended SQL Toolkit were pirated by Massachusetts-based Netezza for use by a government client. Subsequent evidence and court proceedings revealed that the "government client" seeking assistance with Predator drones was none other than the Central Intelligence Agency.
• Wheelbarrow Launchers: It shouldn’t be so surprising, considering that lots of Iraqi insurgents came out of Iraq’s huge Saddam-era military, or that some had help from elite Iranian agents. But here’s an overview of some of the more ingenious, lesser-known innovations in asymmetric warfare that insurgents developed during the Iraq war to neutralize the U.S.’s conventional advantages.

Here are some of the more questionable policy shenanigans the folks in the back room have been up to. The third one comes under the - what the heck did you expect - rubric.

• Saudi Arms Sales: And look, it's preferable to starting a war with Iran, but the trajectory of America's relationships with the countries that had the most direct role in incubating and fomenting the terrorism that slaughtered thousands of Americans and continues to threaten the West is an enduring curiosity. To put it mildly.
• Insider Trading inside the Beltway: What’s wrong with this picture? Nothing, according to the law. Nor would it be illegal for him to tip someone else, say, his largest campaign contributor.
• That's Our Job: The U.S. said Iran shouldn’t interfere with Afghanistan’s internal affairs following a report that an Iranian official gave an aide of President Hamid Karzai a bag filled with packets of euro bills.

Yes, It can happen here.

• A Rationalization of Evil: A doctor quoted in the article notes the irony that this occurred at the same time that the United States was prosecuting Nazi medical experimenters for crimes against humanity at Nuremberg.

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.

Moon Festival Java Time

This week has been a stuff-'o'-rama extravaganza. Oracle / Java has a huge exhibition at Moscone. Streets blocked south of Market, shuttle busses all over the place, and everyone suddenly has an opinion about some aspect of cloud computing. It's also the weekend of the Moon Festival next door to me in Chinatown. Both events have conspired to produce a tsunami of folks that aren't quite sure where they are or what they're doing there. But everyone seems to be having a good time, and things sort themselves out by daybreak, so what the heck. The first three links are humor. (at least I hope they're humor).

• How to Spot a Spy: So it is possible that there are spies in your midst, blending in and going about their daily business just the same as you, only covertly, and probably with a lot more riding on the outcome than most of our daily toiling. It is equally possible, of course, that our wild imaginings are creating spies out of people and situations that are perfectly innocent or un-spy related.
• The Top 5 foreign policy initiatives of the Tea Party: But given the ever increasing strength spinning up this storm that's sweeping across the American landscape (Tropical Storm Sarah?), the world's questions will soon be answered. Tea Partiers will inevitably be elected. Maybe a bunch of them. And soon the world will have to deal with the policy initiatives of the Tea Party Caucus in the Congress.
• Consensus Statement on Morality: I dunno why these big-brain “EDGE” guys are making such a fuss here about “morality.” Everybody knows that morality is whatever God says. And God says, whatever me, my best friends, and my hierarchical coalition say that God says.

The next set is a bit of theology paired with an essay denoting every worker's nagging feeling that they've just taken it in the touchis ... again.

• Beck, Christianity, and Individual Rights: Traditional soteriology in the patristic era taught that Christ assumed human nature like ours in every respect except for sin, which meant that He assumed a sinless humanity that was substantiated in His Person, the Person of the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity.
• The Tea Party: There is a lot of truth to this. There is a visceral dislike among at least some conservative and Republican elites who have little more than disdain for the rank-and-file supporters who make their careers possible. While they are willing to tolerate the rank-and-file so long as they remain in a supporting role, they will absolutely refuse to accept them as equals, much less as leaders.

The next is our bit for the media / showbiz. The talking heads (Sunday yap-yap shows) are all a-flutter over Dinesh D'Sousa's Forbes article. Will some obscure academic bring down the President? Can his laser-sharp insights be denied? Will Scooby Doo get away from the lake monster? Some of these folks need to get out more. Maybe have a moon cake. They only bake this large a variety once a year, and they'll be gone by Tuesday too.

• All Eyes on the Horse Race: We all know today’s news cycle as generated and perpetuated by the cable news/Internet bubble is famously ephemeral. It’s certainly nothing new to say that we live in an age when stories explode in clouds of links, only to disappear like so much smoke before the next “publish” button is clicked.

Here is a crypto page, with links to some more detailed papers.

• Post Quantum Cryptography: Here's the one-minute introduction: "Imagine that it's fifteen years from now. Somebody announces that he's built a large quantum computer. RSA is dead. DSA is dead. Elliptic curves, hyperelliptic curves, class groups, whatever, dead, dead, dead. So users are going to run around screaming and say 'Oh my God, what do we do?

The remaining links are political in nature. The one that makes me think impure thoughts is the radical President essay. Written by an foreign policy expert, you can read it two ways. 1) As written or 2) Where would the writer's cushy internationalism, deal making, and generally unsupervised lifestyle go if America elected a President who was concerned about Americans. It must be so tough. (another round, and freshen the caviar. I'm about to generate an opinion.)

• The Radical Presidency: After America's century-long rise to world hegemony, the presidency is a vastly different institution than it was in the days of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The next few decades will be equally transformative, but in ways that will cause great difficulty for the sober formulation of U.S. foreign policy.
• The insurgency next door: I note that Clinton used the phrase "We [the United States] face an increasing threat ...," not "they [Mexico]." The cartels are transnational shipping businesses, with consumers in the United States as their dominant market. The clashes over shipping routes and distribution power -- which over the past four years have killed 28,000 and thoroughly corrupted Mexico's police and judiciary -- could just as well occur inside the United States.
• Interdependency Theory: In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the economies of North America and Europe remain fragile while those of Asia continue to grow. This is especially true in the cases of China and India, which both boast near double-digit rates of growth and have therefore inspired confidence around the region.

Dressed to Sell

Today is the `Opera in the Park` show in Golden Gate. You get to hear some of the best singers of the season, grab a nosh while the glitterati are patting themselves on the back, and lounge in the sun. I'm in. The first set of links relate to economics.

• Understanding America's Class System: For instance, they do not work for a living in the normal sense of a job, but rather obtain their income from abstractions such as investment and law, neither of which ever gave anybody a hernia or carpal tunnel. By comparison, the ruling class does not work at all.
• Scott vs. Hayek: And because it is standardized, the person who comes from the corporate headquarters can come with a kind of checklist in which every place is more or less the same, and they can check on cleanliness, quality, productivity and conformity to the corporate standard.
• Rome is Burning: This is a failure of our basic institutions of production. The job of the market is to bring together willing buyers with willing sellers in order to produce value. This is not happening and as a result literally trillions of dollars in value are not being produced.

Next a bit of hackery in the Sterling style.

• Hacktivist: The deniable patriot hacktivists who work for Russia, China and India can talk just as patriotically as any Fox News fan. So, if you’re from USA and hammering Russia for underhanded cyberattacks, you’ve gotta figure out what America’s own “citizen hacker vigilantes” are up to someplace. And your answer is, you don’t have the foggiest idea. Not a clue, brother.

Now for the culture portion of the show.

• Overcoming Obstacles: Pick the right time and day to approach the steps at the foot of Citadel Hill, Halifax’s central tourist site/fortress, and you will encounter a ragtag group of people behaving in a rather unusual way: balancing delicately on the railings, hanging off of the walls, leaping up over them from the sidewalk, and bantering on the hillside grass.
• The OED: Bibliophilic considerations aside, however, the OED Online is my dictionary of choice. This remarkable resource displays both the second edition of the OED, published with great fanfare in 20 volumes in 1989, and the gradually accumulating third edition, begun in 2000 and due to be completed some decades hence.
• Technique and Food: Technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity. As Jacques Ellul argues in The Technological Society, in such a society the multiplicity of means is reduced to one: the most efficient.

I was paging through the TV channels this morning (Sun) while I was cleaning the hovel. In almost every case a talking head was castigating the other media outlets and patting himself (or herself) on the back for the team's nuanced reporting of a report about the influence of an article about a report on a blog that said... In other words, the TV version of a circle jerk. The P.R. department has become a primary news source and some jake, with the approved ethno-signifiers (discrete gold cross nestled in a not so discrete décolleté, refined hint of indeterministic accent), gets elevated to expert status. (as long as you can read the teleprompter) Thank God for the cartoon channel. At least the inside references are both clever and inclusive. This little jeremiad brings us to the last links: politics

• Obama, Anticolonial Hegemonist?: Dinesh D’Souza has authored what may possibly be the most ridiculous piece of Obama analysis yet written. He takes a number of decisions Obama has made on a grab-bag of issues, declares that they are “odd,” and then proceeds to explain the “oddness” he has perceived by cooking up a bizarre thesis that Obama is a die-hard anticolonialist dedicated to his father’s anticolonialist legacy.
• The Tricky New American Moment: Let's take alliances first. Clinton celebrated NATO, ritualistically, as "the world's most successful alliance." Left unmentioned was the growing divergence among U.S. and European politicians—and their electorates—on its ultimate purpose.
• Taming the Tea Parties: All of this is rank nonsense. Federal power has been exploding for decades under Republican as well as Democratic administrations. And it is not at all clear that what George Washington or even Dwight Eisenhower understood as “constitutional limits” on federal power were the ones that still existed under George W. Bush. What Lowry and his crew really want is to neutralize the Tea Party.

Million Breasted Cow Suckers

Labor day is almost over. One of the weekend's headlines was 'The CEOs that fired the most people received the largest salary". My personal bug-a-bear this week is Senator Simpson and the million breasted cow suckers. My guess is that he'll stop collecting on his senator's pension, special medical insurance deal, and the other perks he didn't pay into as soon as he realizes that that would help the debt... Then again, maybe not. Ragging on Vietnam vet's disability benifits is a pretty long stretch for a guy who spent his two years driving a desk around in Germany. Parallel universe, whiskey in the kool-aid, not enough ventilation in the limo, who the heck knows.

The first links are cyber security related. The one about cracking the quantum encryption shows a major weak point. It was in fact cracked at a hardware point, which is where most monkey business is done. The weak spot isn't some Alice, hidden in an underground bunker in West Slovinia, it's at the origination and destination points. With Homeland handing out Top Secret ratings hither and thiver combined with the turf-walls that seem to grow like mushrooms, COMSEC security becomes a bit illusionary.

• Successful Attack Against a Quantum Cryptography System: Quantum cryptography is often touted as being perfectly secure. It is based on the principle that you cannot make measurements of a quantum system without disturbing it. So, in theory, it is impossible for an eavesdropper to intercept a quantum encryption key without disrupting it in a noticeable way, triggering alarm bells.
• NEW DELHI: Borrowing a page from China’s art of cyber war, the government is giving shape to an IT infrastructure setup manned by a small army of software professionals to spy on the classified data of hostile nations by hacking into their computer systems. (((Lemme know if you find their shoulder-patch.)))
• HP Holds Navy Network ‘Hostage’ for $3.3 Billion: It’s become a Washington cliché that the military and the intelligence community rely too much on outside contractors. Everyone from President Obama to Defense Secretary Robert Gates has promised to cut back on Pentagon outsourcing. But the Navy’s ongoing inability to separate itself from Hewlett-Packard – after years of trying – shows how difficult that withdrawal is going to be.
• Iran to search for WMD on its own: Now, in the case of Iran, we know very little about this new search enterprise; some fear that it might create some kind of an intranet in Iran -- but that's about it. Let's assume it would be very expensive and very ineffective -- not unreasonable assumptions to make in the context of a sluggish state like Iran, which has a few other things to take care of before exploring the world of Web2.0 in all its glory.

Next is a continuation of the computer meme. The commentator, Marc Thiessen, comes across as a tough American hard-butt, but the record shows him to be a Toupac, in the limo headed South when the going gets tough. He hasn't got the message that the real tough guys don't have to tell you over and over about how manly their manhood is.

• The Best Part About WikiLeaks: Honestly, the best part about the whole Wikileaks phenomenon is the spectacle of Mark Thiessen saying that America should invade Iceland to kill or capture Julian Assange.
• McClatchy D.C. Law
• Philip Brennan

The next two could be filed under philosophy.

• Does Language control thought: Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute.
• Christianity and the West: Whenever I see or hear politically conservative and religiously traditionalist Christians make an argument like this, it brings me up a little short. There is some truth in this claim, but it seems to me that it is especially important for traditionalist Christians to distinguish between arguing for the undeniable Christian heritage of Western societies and the importance of Christianity for the flourishing of those societies, which Christians should argue for, and making claims for the direct link between modern political arrangements and the Gospel.

And last, that darn old politics.

• How Washington Rules: Worldly ambition inhibits true learning. Ask me. I know. A young man in a hurry is nearly uneducable: He knows what he wants and where he’s headed; when it comes to looking back or entertaining heretical thoughts, he has neither the time nor the inclination. All that counts is that he is going somewhere. Only as ambition wanes does education become a possibility
• Whitewashing the Failure in Iraq: On the eve of President Obama's speech to the nation on Iraq, some of the people who dreamed up this foolish war or helped persuade the nation that it was a good idea are getting out their paintbrushes and whitewash. I refer, of course, to the twin op-eds in today's New York Times by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and neoconservative columnist David Brooks.
• The Nuclear Domino Myth: But there's one problem with this "nuclear domino" scenario: the historical record does not support it. Since the dawn of the nuclear age, many have feared rapid and widespread nuclear proliferation; 65 years later, only nine countries have developed nuclear weapons.

Trainwrecks, Trappist Monks, and Mossad

Aw jeez, it's Tuesday already. Somebody managed to sleep through the entire weekend. Link-dump follows. First a eulogy for George Weiss.

• R.I.P. George David Weiss: “the lion sleeps tonight” (1961), based on a south African Zulu song first recorded in the 1930s, was given a reworked melody and new lyrics (“in the jungle, the mighty jungle/the lion sleeps tonight”) by Mr. Weiss, Mr. Peretti and Mr. Creatore.

Next a rather unusual look at the administration of the Catholic Church. As a side note, it seems that the Belgium government's raid netted a Bishop,but he's been sent to a Trappist monastary, so it's OK - nothing to see here.

• The Pope is not Gay: So far, tragically, fear has won. But Toibin also sees the potential for a reborn Christianity in the papacy of John Paul II - wrecked by the white-knuckled reactionary politics that grew under him and now defines the Vatican. Here is what I too found so mesmerizing about Wojtila - as Toibin describes an event in John Paul II's native Poland in the spring of his papacy.

And as long as we're on a computer, a bit of meta about them.

• The Web is Dead: Long Live the Web: ...which argues that the web is an antienlightenment phenomenon, a destroyer of wisdom and culture and an infantile, Rousseau-esque fantasy. “It’s the cult of the child,” he says. “The more you know, the less you know. It’s all about digital narcissism, shameless self-promotion. I find it offensive.”
• Virtual Horizon: Computers today barely connect with people. The human body evolved as a whole to sense and interact with the world, but computers sense us only at our fingertips. Even the fingertips aren’t allowed to do all they can; a computer that was designed to interact with us holistically would feel different from moment to moment in order to convey information. For more than two decades, I’ve been working on the grand project of virtual reality (VR) to bring the whole body into computing.

A bit of business. I mean really, if we didn't have a banker veto in congress, the hoi polloi might vote for jobs or worse.

• The Business of Business: As with the banks and other financial institutions that played clever, manipulative games, producing little of real value other than moving vast amounts of capital from A to B in a giant shell game and racking up massive salaries and bonuses as their games plunged the country into recession and drove "the little people" out of jobs and homes. These "giants" provide ample proof that not all products that can be produced should be produced and that not all services that can be provided should be provided.

And last, the trainwreck section. (politics)

• Since when is it rational to bet on history being made by rational men? But then, a few days back, with the sanctions regime fresh out of the Suzy Homemaker oven that produced the oddly small confection, the Chinese let it be known that sanctions or no they would be working to deepen their trade ties with Iran. Which more than trumps the even more recent announcement that the Brazilians will, reluctantly, go along with the sanctions program.
• Mossad in America: It also dominates two commercial sectors that enable it to extend its reach inside America’s domestic infrastructure: airline and telecommunications security. Israel is believed to have the ability to monitor nearly all phone records originating in the United States, while numerous Israeli air-travel security companies are known to act as the local Mossad stations.
• Anti-Fascist Superheros: The comfort of the child’s vision of right and wrong is that he or she lives in a mental world where only monsters perpetrate crimes. Here on planet Earth, people who are certain they are doing right murder and terrorize. It’s a cruel world.
• America Is Exporting Terrorism: Think about what the U.S. reaction would be if, say, France claimed jurisdiction over a terrorist crime that a U.S. citizen committed on American soil, in which a visiting Frenchman happened to be one of the casualties.
• The Undemocracy: Let us consider how it is that Benjamin Quayle, son of the former vice president, opposed by a majority of Arizona's Republican voters, will soon be a member of Congress, their opposition notwithstanding.

Fountain of Bedlam

The first two URLs of this week's link-dump are about blogging itself and a take on the difference between pundits, the pundocracy, and expertise.

• Slow Blogging: In between the slow bloggers and the rapid-fire ones, there is a vast middle, hundreds of thousands of writers who are not trying to attract advertising or buzz but do want to reach like-minded colleagues and friends. These people have been the bedrock of the genre since its start, yet recently there has been a sea change in their output: They are increasingly turning to slow blogging, in practice if not in name.
• Slow Blog Manifesto
• So You Want to be an Expert
  

  9) Recognize your limits. True experts don't just know a lot -- they are also aware of the vast oceans of knowledge that they don't know. 
  10) Quit reading blogs. They rot your brain and give you cooties.

Next is a bit of computer lore, the first prognostication is making all the rounds, i.e. talking head-o-rama, while the 2_nt is drowning in that fountain of openness; Homeland.

• The web is dead: It seemed just a matter of time before the Web replaced PC application software and reduced operating systems to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers,” as Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen famously said. First Java, then Flash, then Ajax, then HTML5 —
• Pentagon wants to secure domains of contractors: Under the proposal, which is being informally circulated throughout the department and the Department of Homeland Security, the NSA could set up equipment to look for patterns of suspicious traffic at the internet service providers that the companies' networks run through. The agency would immediately notify the Pentagon and the companies if pernicious behavior were detected.

I'm not to sure how I feel about steampunk lately. I'm told that there are writers and salespeople clamoring for a new marketing slot - dieselpunk. Sorry, I'm more of a rocket and ray-gun reader. For those of you that do enjoy that sort of thing, here is a bit of exotica.

• More Brazilian Steampunk: It was with great surprise I saw this cover, published in the City Phantastica of Romeo Martin. I was mesmerized with the quality of it and sure it take to see a cover of this genre better than this, so soon. I do not know the stories that rechearão editing this show, but they are so amazing, we have a work to remember for a long time.

The next two are about different business models.

• How to Run a Maritime Militia: The UNSC-mandated Monitoring Group on Somalia presented its report to the Security Council Tuesday. The part of the report detailing corruption in the distribution of humanitarian aid is getting all the press, but for my money the most interesting part of the report is the discussion of piracy, which has morphed into a multi-million dollar business replete with investors and an informal business model.
• Soft Rock Power: For decades, the world has considered business giants like IKEA and Saab the bright lights of Swedish industry. Yet the real symbol of Sweden's economic power is not the Poäng chair or the Gripen fighter jet, but the catchy choruses of the 1970s pop supergroup ABBA.

And last, politics. Let's see, what's a good word: bedlam? loonie bin? Inane? Inmates running the .. uh .. courtesan residence?

• Just how broken is the Senate?: Between speeches, there are quorum calls, time killers in which a Senate clerk calls the roll at the rate of one name every few minutes. The press gallery, above the dais, is typically deserted, as journalists prefer to hunker down in the press lounge, surfing the Web for analysis of current Senate negotiations; television screens alert them if something of interest actually happens in the chamber.
• Getting Digital Statecraft Right: In January, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for the United States to pursue a policy of "twenty-first-century statecraft," which would use modern information and communication technologies to promote development. She foresaw "a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas."
• Rebuilding the Democratic Brand with Jobs: That leaves the Democrats not as the party of government so much as the party of paralyzed government. That the Republicans are largely responsible for the paralysis isn't a big problem for a minority-status GOP so long as the public has concluded that activism per se is a bad idea.

Brujeria's brew

I have a love / hate relationship with philosophy. Ostensibly the word means love of thought and I like to think about things as much as the next guy. One would assume that a philosophy course would give the student a set of whetstones for sharpening their thinking, or, at minimum turn up their BS detector. As an aside, I've noticed that professional philosophers (take an asprin, it helps) have taken the bad habits of other professions (lawyers, economists, apologists) and mixed terms of the art with colloquial homonyms to force a conclusion. Shades of pollsters statistics. They have a word for that; Brujeria's brew is my favorite, metonymy and syllepsis are a bit more posh. Back to the point of this link, the American University seems to have discarded its mission to educate and embraced the profit center's need to inculcate. To wit:

• Teaching philosophy with Spider-Man: When academics struggle to fill seats in their medieval poetry classes while their colleagues are turning students away from packed courses on the mythic rhetoric of the superheroes, sniping in common rooms is to be expected.

Now I like comic books better than most, and would be delighted to see them examined in literature courses. Which book reflects our present condition, Jane Eyre or Ghost in the Shell? You could always read both. Next in line is music and cookbooks. The commonality lies in the dreaded hive mind, a dream come true for advertising profession.

• How the Internet Makes us all DJs: Even factoring in college radio and other small-wattage towers, American cities no longer have a majority of stations in which a DJ will take your call, mark your song request, and play according to consumer demand. Nor do most American DJs have the privilege of picking a new, personal favorite song and peppering a full day of airtime with it.
• Fibs my Cookbook told Me: The claim of this post is simple but facetious. Cookbooks lie to you. Cookbooks lie about big, important things. I suspect that they do it so that you will not know how to cook. That way you will continue to buy more and more cookbooks. It’s a total racket. I know it sounds paranoid. But I have no other explanation for what follows.

A bit of science;

• Ant Warfare: They’ve got complex societies with a rigid division of labor and ingrained conventions that let them eat, reproduce and wage war as a single unit. Given their massive populations and, as the famed entomologist E.O. Wilson writes, their “unity of purpose [and] social machinery,” it’s no surprise that ants are also bonafide masters of war.
• Social Networking Data: Lately I've been reading about user security and privacy -- control, really -- on social networking sites. The issues are hard and the solutions harder, but I'm seeing a lot of confusion in even forming the questions. Social networking sites deal with several different types of user data, and it's essential to separate them.

Now it's off to political land. You would think with all the froth, manifestos, insightful commentary, important information, and promises that I promise to refer to vaguely once elected, that something would change. Guess again:

• Another School Districting ‘Solution’: And the “ethnics” of Boston and Springfield, not to mention Lowell, Brockton, Malden, and Everett, were and are perfectly aware of why Wellesley chose to ally with the African-American parents in one end of Dorchester over the white welfare recipients at the other end. White working-class cops like Sgt. James Crowley, or his kids, weren’t eligible for METCO.
• How Partisanship Hurts Conservatism: Now imagine Obama did exactly everything Bush did, in terms of policy, programs, the whole works. Would the Right be beating up a Democratic president for doing exactly what they either defended or ignored Bush doing? Of course they would. “Why is President Obama on vacation down at the Crawford Ranch in Texas?” an angry talk radio caller might ask.
• What’s the Matter with Connecticut: —nicknamed the “land of steady habits” in recognition of its erstwhile traditionalism—is, per capita, the richest state in the nation. The bedroom of the country’s financier class, it is home to some of our wealthiest towns and most prestigious blue-blood educational institutions, including Yale, Choate, and Loomis Chaffee.
• The Man Gitmo Raised: After several months of such treatment, Khadr was transferred to Guantánamo, where he says the abusive interrogations continued. He did not meet with a lawyer until 2004, a full two years after he was taken into U.S. custody. In 2005, Khadr was charged under the first set of military commissions authorized by then-President George W. Bush.

I just got a copy of Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget. You probably noticed some references to the hive mind in the preceding. Lanier goes into this from the viewpoint of a software designer. He tends to explain a great deal of society in relationship to the net, (it is what he does, after all) I suspect that there are deeper roots. Be that as it is, if you want an antidote to the rapture around corner rhetoric, get the book. I think a softcover version will be on the shelves soon, and if this temporary economic readjustment really has you by the ***** go to the library. (it, in fact, stands as one of mankind's better inventions).

In or Out

The sun can't seem to make up its mind - in or out. Otherwise a lovely day. The first part of this link-dump will be the customary politics. The general feeling in blog-world seems to be new boss, same as the old boss. Hijinks ensue. A third party would be nice, or more to the point, a real 2^nt party; one with grownup supervision.

• Big Brother: After flipping the script on Patriot Act reformists last year when he supported the extension of unconstitutional law enforcement provisions he once criticized, now he wants to broaden the amount of information the FBI can access without warrant for so-called counter-terror investigations.
• Too Big to Ignore: The Treasury Secretary and the FED’s extraordinary role as merger midwife for our troubled Corporate Financiers is extensively detailed, including their calls to foreign corporations and governments on behalf of our crumbling private corporations. I never thought I’d live to see the day that our Treasury Secretary or New York FED chairman would consider their job description to include managing the mergers of private corporations out of one side of their mouths as they muttered “moral hazard” and “too big to fail” out of the other.
• Ground Zero Mosque: If only - if only! - other people possessed my resolution, my ability to see everything as it really is. If only others could be as vigilant as I am. If only we could rid ourselves of the weak who fail to share my awareness of the peril we face. Well, then, victory would be ours! Instead, alas, we are on the road to defeat and thence to hell.
• Plug a Wikileak?: Second, for all the talk -- by the Chinese as well as outside observers -that they are not ready to lead on the international stage, they're doing it. On climate here and on climate during international negotiations, on currency adjustment, on economic reform, on Iran, on North Korea, they have led or been hugely effective behind the scenes.
• Answer to "End of Establishment":Several of my Shadow Government colleagues have already responded to Jacob Heilbrunn's obituary for the Republican foreign policy establishment. Most of the comments have focused on the diversity present on the Right on foreign policy and I agree with those assessments.

The next part is on the economy and by extention, the 'little guy'.

• Four Deformations of the Apocalypse: More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses.
• Let the Little Guys Get in on Pre-IPO: The hot IPO market of the 1990s, which allowed Regular Joes to buy stock in new companies, has been replaced by a rich insider’s club that trades in pre-IPO equity sales. The middle-class folks who daytraded their way through the dotcom boom are now locked out.
• Science and the Decline of the Liberal Arts: Our universities readily take credit for their Rhodes scholars and Fulbright award winners. What of those graduates who helped foster an environment of avarice and get-rich-quick schemes? Are we so assured that they did not learn exceedingly well the lessons that were taught them in college?

Re: the above. Science is not the problem. The humanities inability to differentiate between scientific and scientifical is. This might stem from their confusion between hot air and substance, or maybe show business and the real deal. After all, tempest in a teapot is a phrase most often applied to academics. As long as I'm treading on others turf, I may as well point out that there is a difference between education and inculcation. Science, at least in terms of its logic and method fall on the education side. So learn how to check the numbers, the toothy man on the TV may not have your best interests at heart. Enough: to end this is another article about (re)growing replacement parts and a science fiction book that has the Chinese government making cranky noises. (at least that's what the book's publicist says)

• Recipes For Limb Renewal: Bioengineers continue to refine prosthetic limbs, but they still can’t replicate the entire constellation of capabilities provided by flesh and blood. So a few determined scientists are pursuing a different solution: They are seeking the recipe for regrowing a missing limb.
• China 2013: A controversial novel marks the return of politically charged science fiction in China -- and evokes a decidedly mixed vision of the country's future..... In the euphoric Beijing of 2013, Starbucks is Chinese-owned and called "Starbucks Wangwang." Its trademark drink is Longjing Latté, named for a famed Chinese tea. It is a place where Mr. Chen, an immigrant from Hong Kong, feels comfortable escorting a marginalized woman named Xiaoxi, the secret love of his youth. After running into Xiaoxi in a Beijing bookstore, their first encounter in many years, Mr. Chen asks her whether she had gone abroad. "No," she replies.

Does Everything Have a Meta

Today I'm going to see Ricky Lee Jones at Stern Grove. (south of Golden Gate Park on 19th) It's grey this morning, but that's nothing unusual and the reports predict sunny soon. The first link excoriates professional economists. Fairly easy prey, pampered folks with their own language, used to assuring each other how above-the-herd their teapot tempest really is. As politicians talk about the Economy, they mean the activity of their contributer's stock. Personally, I think it's time to re-examine the idea of money as an object that can be bought and sold, the velocity of money through a system as an indicator of health, and our plethora of value added boys. If a rating agency adds value to a trache by giving it an AAA, what real value was added if they didn't take the time to pop it open.(pace: when the banks first started to fail, Bush, and the then campaigning Obama, agreed that it was too complicated to lay blame, despite billable signatures all over the place) If an open market is desirable, why does a small coterie of insiders get responsibility-free first crack at IPO's, hedges, et al. Economists like to say they're big picture people, charting the ebb and flow of value between nations according to scientifical precepts. (scientifical means you can't test it until you've bought it, but it sounds so..numerical) In fact, economists work for banks and large institutions, and their employment and income is directly related to the profit they bring in. If you crash the economy, but profit afore said small coterie, the big car stays in the McMansion's driveway. You could view them as sales managers or advertising managers, rather than disinterested researchers, and get a more realistic view of their work. And please don't quote van Mises or Marx or the Austrian-Chicago school until you've worked at least one day at a job that involved your hands. (dang, that first cup of expresso was good)

• Economists and the Real World: The problem, however, is that the same 90% of all economists also missed the last crises, and the one before that as well, and before that, and so on. In fact, their record of being able to diagnose and treat economic problems is about zero. And their prescriptions always seem to be counterproductive: the recommendations to limit government always make it grow, their advice on limiting taxation always makes it more, their prescriptions on growing the economy only leads to the illusory growth of bubbles, etc. Put it this way: If your doctor had this same track record of diagnosing and treating disease, you’d be dead by now.

Next are some computer related updates. On HTML 5: The cross platform problems, ie mobile vs. fixed, world-wide vs. insular, are becoming a thicket. I don't much feel like learning a new set of commands, but it is time.

• HTML 5: But many of the sophisticated features of these sites depend on connections that developers create between different Web technologies, such as HTML, javascript, and cascading style sheets (CSS)--connections that don't always work perfectly. As a result, websites can be sluggish, may work differently from browser to browser, and can be vulnerable to security holes.
• A whole passel of dumb: In late February 2008, Scott Graham shelled out US$115 for a spyware program called SpyAgent and sent it to the woman, according to a plea agreement filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northeastern District of Ohio. (my own opinion: The boyfriend was an idiot, the girlfriend had to initiate the install, busted, and the hospital's tech squad was asleep at the wheel. Goes to show you that your communications are not private; no way, no how)
• The Myspace Set: Ross wrote a great post on how our endlessly connected lives make it so hard to sit down and read a book, and its implications on class and access to culture, quoting a very touching post by our own Ayjay on Clay Shirky’s techno-optimist vision and his own upbringing.
• Peter Winiwarter: A quick introductory abstract to general systems theory. (pdf)

A bit of science. I don't know about you, but the links about regrowing joints (knees) interest me in a very personal way. I rather like the idea of being able to get up in the morning without making all sorts of creaking and popping noises.

• Helping Joints Regrow Themselves: Today's titanium replacement joints work very well for 10 to 15 years, but replacing them after they've worn out is a challenge for both patient and surgeon. A team of researchers from Columbia University proposes a way around that problem: by implanting a scaffold that encourages the patient's own stem cells to regrow the joint.
• The Bio-Printer: Clearly, it would be better if some of this organization could be generated prior to implantation. This would also be essential for cases where the tissue being repaired is so severely damaged that there's little intact structure for the implanted cells to integrate with. To generate these preformed functional tissues, a number of researchers are turning to a technique called bioprinting that takes advantage of a ubiquitous piece of technology: the inkjet printer.
• A Non-Math Look at Math Objects: I found out something neat about three-dimensional shapes. Many strange mathematical solids are constructed by rotating the plane of a two-dimensional shape around an imaginary axis. Think of the flat holiday decorations you fold out around its spine/axis. Once I understood what is called a “surface of revolution” in my mind, the construction of many odd mathematical shapes began to make sense.

And finally, a bit about what some term "the culture of fear".

• Life and Death in the Obedience Culture: Many, and perhaps even most, political commentators and bloggers today agree that the United States is an increasingly authoritarian State.
• The end of Military history: Yet from start to finish, military might had determined that competition’s course as much as ideology. Throughout much of the twentieth century, great powers had vied with one another to create new, or more effective, instruments of coercion. Military innovation assumed many forms.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.