Gault's Slue

2007-10-28T11:12:00.001-05:00

Juicy Jane's Buzz Dive

Hello, darlin...

Been a while since I been round these parts, so I should make it sexy and exciting.

Preflight Check

The Economist cautiously praises the Senior Senator from NY's tax schemes. China is cozying up to South Africa. An interesting choice, given the apocrypha of social unrest ruminating about them parts. China has engaged in a lot of under-reported dealings in Africa, especially Egypt. and the Middle East. With American interests in the Middle East growing ever more volatile, China's quite infiltration into that sphere of events opens up omnious possibilities and complications.

In other oil product news, Greenpeace continue to wage their war against modernity by trumping up fears of the iPhone poisioning you. After all, if you consume the equivalent of a dozen melted iPhones chocolate sundays, you'll probably not do too hot. The brights at the Washington Pox demonstrated that fear and figures don't mix. In the course of "remarking" on VA lax gun laws, they prove that per capita they actually work better than gun abstinence.

US plans to widen access to intelligence satellite data
*Don't Be Paranoid or Anything*

The United States intelligence community plans to allow more federal and local authorities to access data from US reconnaissance satellites for counter-terrorism and other law enforcement purposes. Such use would be unprecedented and could encounter legal difficulties and other barriers.

" Cost prohibitive? Civil liberties? But, but it looks so cool on 24!" Or put more succinctly,

Google Earth? We don't need your stinkin' Google Earth!

Eastern Promises
*Red Heat*

Russia's Byzantine security community, so long united in their mistrust of the West and support for President Vladimir Putin, are increasingly parading their rivalries more openly as the prospect of political change opens up new opportunities for empire building and the settling of personal and institutional scores.
On 1 October, three officers of the Federal Drug Control Service (Federalnaya Sluzhba Narkokontrolya Rossii: FSNK), including operational support department head General Alexander Bulbov, were arrested at Moscow's Domodedovo airport by a joint team from the Federal Security Service (Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti: FSB) and the General Prosecutor's Investigations Committee.
Accused of illegal wire-tapping, protection racketeering and bribe taking, they were quickly arraigned and placed in pre-trial detention. They are awaiting trial and have denied the charges. Viktor Cherkesov, director of the FSNK, promptly wrote a lengthy article for the respected newspaper Kommersant in which he suggested the arrests were actually part of a struggle between security agencies, especially intended to discredit investigators working on the so-called 'Three Whales' smuggling case.

I guess the post-Putin playing for keeps has begun.

Attaturk Shrugged

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called on his senior advisors to meet on 16 October to discuss the developments in Turkey and offered "urgent negotiations" with senior Turkish officials over the situation in northern Iraq. However, he warned that Iraq would "never accept a military solution to the differences between Turkey and Iraq".
Maliki's comments came after the Turkish cabinet approved a request from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to submit a motion to parliament seeking authorisation for military action.

Cat Fight!

2007-10-05T04:44:00.000-05:00

I don't get this at all, eh?
*From Feudal Serf To Spender, This Wonderful World of Purchase Power*

You just can't beat the Pink Avenger to break something interesting to you,

Canadian shoppers are up in arms. Many have suddenly noticed that their dollar does not have the same purchasing power as the US dollar, and they are struggling to understand why.
The comparison has become much easier in the past 10 days since the "loonie" - named after the aquatic bird on the Canadian one-dollar coin - soared to parity with the greenback for the first time in 31 years.
With the currencies at one-for-one, consumers no longer need to do any arithmetic to work out that the conversion rate on foreign exchange markets is not the same as that on store shelves.
Thus, the price of Alan Greenspan's just-released memoir, The Age of Turbulence, is listed on the dust-jacket as C$26.45, but just US$20.99. Similarly, the cover price of the Financial Times is $2 in New York but C$2.50 in Toronto.
Douglas Porter, deputy chief economist at the Bank of Montreal, calculated last week that the prices on a random sampling of goods were an average of 24 per cent higher in Canadian dollars than US dollars.
Complaints are streaming in to newspaper letter columns and radio talk shows.
"Why are we not seeing the price stickers on many goods going down?" asked the host of a two-hour phone-in show on the issue on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on Sunday afternoon. Some callers noted that businesses were quick to push prices up when the loonie sank to an all-time low of 62 US cents in early 2002.

The reason? A combination of things. For one, the mentality of prepetual inflation for prepetual prosperity has obliterated Say's Law and Gresham's Law from collective consciousness of the retail industry. Two, buisinesses, unaccostomed to such windfalls, intends to milk it for as long as they can. Third, in all fairness, the decimination of downward price changes has never had a 1:1 time ratio, historically. It's a bit like the opposite of the stock market rule: ~~stocks go up~~prices go down the stairs and ~~drop out the~~ rise meteorically out the window.

It's just a coincidence, but I seem to recall a Dutch girl I went to skrool with once telling me how everything got more expensive once they switched from guilders to euros. Just a penny for your thoughts...

2007-09-19T06:23:00.000-05:00

So why support Ron Paul?
I was surfing around last week, and found this gentle zing from big daddy Roci over at Code Monkey Ramblings.

And appraising from a purely mercenary point of view, you'd be inclined to agree with Roci. Which of course begs the question, why support Ron Paul?

I was going to go into a long spiel and disect Roci's post bit by bit. But I've come to realize
there's no need in that and it would defeat the purpose of responding to Roci's post.

The simple fact of why I should support Ron Paul's bid for presidency is this: things change. And things can change for the better.

The federal government wasn't always a leviathan. It wasn't designed to be a leviathan. If people of all walks of life and political stripe can engage in actions and choices that make things worse than before, than they can engage in actions and choices that make things better. If incrimentalism can make things worse, than incrimentalism can make things better.
If Nineveh can repent, than so can Washington. Doesn't mean it will happen overnight. But that's OK, we didn't get to where we are now overnight. Reagan contracted the money supply, if only for a minute, and coupled with tax cuts, managed to get us out of the Keynesian malaise of the seventies.

It doesn't mean Ron Paul, or whomoever comes after him in bids for Congress and the Presidency, won't make mistakes. But the point is to change course and start heading back towards where we should be. We can't start over, and we can't erase the past. Yet neither should we attempt to create a New Jeruselem before Kingdom Come as evil ones have in the past. What the American people and the American government can do, is acknowledge with honesty and sobriety, that bigger government hasn't solved much and in fact created more damage than it sought to remedy.

It's the redeeming quality of the American character. From the time of the Boston Tea Party to the New Deal to today- we're willing to sacrifice a little here-and-now comfort in the status quo in exchange for a better tomorrow. Sure we've stumbled along the way, but like Vince Lombardi said,

It's not whether you get knocked down, it's whether you get up.

2007-09-09T11:13:00.001-05:00

Britain: A Nation of Rapists Coming Soon to a Court Docket Near You!
*Don't Be Paranoid or Anything*

Hmm. It's not often that something in you read in the Scum lends food for thought. But you got to reluctantly give credit where credit is due, sometimes.

MEN were warned yesterday they risk a rape charge if they have sex with a drunken woman.
The law is to be tightened, putting a burden on men to ensure a woman has agreed to sex.It follows concern about the low conviction rate in rape trials.More than a third of alleged victims had drunk alcohol.

Ministers now want to give juries power to decide if a woman was too drunk to give consent.A campaign will be launched next week, with ads in men’s mags and posters in pubs. It will drive home the message that women must agree to sex — and be free and sober enough to make the choice.

A Home Office spokesman said: “It will be a provocative campaign to educate young men.” The crackdown follows a recent case where a man was cleared after his alleged victim admitted she was too drunk to recall what happened.

Now, coupled with the following,

The entire UK population and every visitor to Britain should be put on the national DNA database, a top judge said today.
Lord Justice Sedley, one of England's most experienced appeal court judges, described the country's current system as "indefensible".
"We have a situation where if you happen to have been in the hands of the police, then your DNA is on permanent record. If you haven't, it isn't ... that's broadly the picture," Sir Stephen Sedley told the BBC.

Article continues

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"It also means that a great many people who are walking the streets, and whose DNA would show them guilty of crimes, go free."
He said that expanding the existing database to cover the whole population had "serious but manageable implications".

"Managble implications", I'll say! Seeing as how Britain has gone most gently into that good night of EngSoc thus far, you can rest assured this is but around the corner. On the bright side, hopefully cam-phone of Birds and Hens of the Sceptered Isle slurring, "I, Porsche Smythe, of s-sound m-mind and buh-body... OH SOD IT, SHAG ME!" will be admissible in all those cases of ~~buyer's remorse gone bad~~date rape. Time will tell. Oh well, the collective abdication and abolishment of individual responsibility marches on.

2007-09-09T10:51:00.000-05:00

Democracy ~~Now~~WOW!

In other breaking news, Godron Brown's taking a page out of Al Gore's sappy political playbook and has decided to "reinvent government".

Gordon Brown drafted in opposition politicians and ‘citizen juries’ to help shape his policies and bring an end to ‘politics as usual’ on Monday as Labour’s narrowing poll lead damped speculation of an autumn election.
In a speech to usher in the new political season, Mr Brown outlined ways to tap “the wisdom and experience of the British people” and conscripted three senior opposition figures to advise his government.
Meanwhile, the prime minister played down the prospects of a general election in coming months, saying: “There will be a time and a place for a general election but it is not now.
“I am getting on with the business of government and I think people will see by what I say today and what I do in the future that what’s on my mind is making this country successful...”
Allies of David Cameron, the Conservative leader, believe it is the closest Mr Brown has come to ruling out an autumn poll.
Mr Cameron’s team was buoyed by new opinion polls – an Independent/ComRes survey on Monday put Labour and Tories neck-and-neck on 36 per cent – and believe the prime minister would not risk an election without a solid lead. A Populus poll in The Times today puts Labour just one point ahead of the Tories, on 37 per cent.
Yet despite an improved standing, Tory leaders are likely to have been alarmed by John Bercow and Patrick Mercer, former frontbenchers, offering to advise Mr Brown on young people and security respectively.

"Citizens Juries", huh? I think Satan's little helpers in the advertising and marketing world already beat you too that one. Only they call them "focus-groups". Basically, it'll just be a tax-funded way to figure out how to shill EngSoc in more appealing terms. A brand new day indeed...

2007-09-04T08:08:00.000-05:00

Signs of the Apocalypse Buzzdive

Well so anyway, got a few minutes to kill here. Thought I'd bring all 4 of you reading this up to date on all the whacky shit I've been seeing lately in the papers.

On a personal note of the apocalypse, I had an effette bank teller offer me a guaranteed loan of 4,600 pounds. Guaranteed as in I'd get it, but to speak nothing of guaranteeing I'd pay it.

Something seems to be winding up. Let's see if we can read the pulp and mulch tea leaves...

This is just Frightening

Read in Rupe's titty-free rag (article unavailable) that the RIAA has successfully garnered royalties for all the quality music they play to soothe the inmates at Guantanamo. Sometimes, stupidity and insanity leap out and envelope your head like an elk's fart. And there's nothing more to be said.

I always thought sub-machine guns were a bit over-kill in crowed areas anyhow...

UNITED KINGDOM - Cops at Gatwick Airport had to buy colleagues doughnuts as a forfeit whenever they left GUNS unattended, a tribunal heard. One left his sub-machine gun in the canteen and allegedly had to buy the whole team a CAKE — the penalty for more serious rule breaches. The sliding scale of unofficial “fines” — echoing [...]

Sure, and it's AMERICANS that don't have a grasp of dangers of firearms...

And in a sure sign hell's freezin' over, the militant earth worshippers at the Methole actually published a front page article questioning... dare I say it aloud... our democratically elected public servants' motives in taxation

Mystery surrounding eco-taxes

Billions of pounds are being raised in green taxes with little or no reward for environmentally friendly consumers, according to two new studies.
Each British family is paying £400 more in green taxes than it would cost to cover its carbon footprint, one study claims – a total of £10billion nationwide.
While green taxes raised £21.9billion in 2005, the social cost of that year's carbon emissions was just £11.7billion, says the report from the TaxPayers' Alliance.
Matthew Elliott of the group said: 'We need more honesty about the costs of extra green taxes when British taxpayers already pay some of the highest pollution charges in the world.'
Only a fifth of people think politicians are genuinely trying to change behaviour using the tax system, a survey carried out by YouGov for the group found.
In contrast, 63 per cent believe Government is using the issue as an excuse to pull in more cash.
Nearly four-fifths oppose the so-called 'pay as you throw' schemes floated by the Government to encourage recycling – despite previous surveys indicating a majority backed the idea.

Mystery indeed!

In far more ominous announcements, the Pink Avenger tells us, in what should give humanity's collective anus curly-whurly, that our modern-day rumplestilkins are all hanging out at Check Point: Charlie for the Zion Curtain

News from Jackson Hole: Saddle up ma, it’s a shadow banking run
*From Feudal Serf To Spender, This Wonderful World of Purchase Power*

Perhaps it’s true what George Bernard Shaw said - that if you laid down every economist in a line, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion. Things are decidedly inconclusive at Jackson Hole in Wyoming, where central bankers are meeting for their annual symposium.

Powerful voices in the Fed are angling for a rate cut to help house prices and buoy markets, but they’re being met by those who see cuts as a dangerous moral hazard in a classic bank-run.

According to Axel Weber, the German Bundesbank chief, the current financial crisis bears all the hallmarks of a bank-run. You know the kind of thing - frustrated savers scrambling to cash in their flimflam paper at the Western Union for its value in gold. Something like that anyway. Weber told an audience at Jackson Hole:

What we are seeing is basically what we see underlying all banking crises

In his analysis, markets, just as in the 19th century, are currently prey to a spiralling liquidity crisis created as investor confidence drops and everyone rushes to get their chips off the table.

The difference is that this time, it’s not a run on the banks. Instead, noted Weber, the current liquidity storm is being weathered by unregulated financial institutions - hedge funds, banking conduits, SIVs and such like. It is what Paul McCulley, managing director of Pimco, has termed a “run on the shadow banking system”.

Haha, having lived once upon a time round them parts, I find a peculiar irony in meeting there. Jackson Hole is the closest place you can go to make a keg run or just buy full-strength beer that's already chilled. I rather imagine there's a lot of heavy drinking going on 'round them parts recently.

Even more ominous than perhaps accountants figuring out how to spin dross into gold is our super-dooper ally China has been pulling a Mongolian Horde on the military's Great Firewall,

Chinese military hack into Pentagon

The Chinese military hacked into a Pentagon computer network in June in the most successful cyber attack on the US defence department, say American officials.
The Pentagon acknowledged shutting down part of a computer system serving the office of Robert Gates, defence secretary, but declined to say who it believed was behind the attack.
Current and former officials have told the Financial Times an internal investigation has revealed that the incursion came from the People’s Liberation Army.
One senior US official said the Pentagon had pinpointed the exact origins of the attack. Another person familiar with the event said there was a “very high level of confidence...trending towards total certainty” that the PLA was responsible. The defence ministry in Beijing declined to comment on Monday.

While the Chinese are at least kind enough to keep the border skirmishes a matter of Spies Like Us satellite blasting lasers and sending our AWACS back in boxes, Mother Russia is wont to be a bit more prosaic about things

UK jets shadow Russian bombers
*Red Heat Rising*

The UK's Royal Air Force has launched fighter jets to intercept eight Russian military planes flying in airspace patrolled by Nato, UK officials say. Four RAF F3 Tornado aircraft were scrambled in response to the Russian action, the UK's defence ministry said. The Russian planes - long-range bombers - had earlier been followed by Norwegian F16 jets. Russia recently revived a Cold War-era practice of flying bombers on long-range patrols. In a statement the MoD said the eight Russian Tupolev Tu-95 Bear aircraft, flying in loose formation of four pairs, were initially intercepted by the Norwegian air force.

In poking around for some links to that story, I read that the Tu-95 is actually turbo-prop propeller powered. More interestingly, Vox Day's favorite intellectual punching bag and Neal Boortz's little on-air girlfriend, Michelle Malkin, took note of it on her blog. Fortunately for her, she gave no analysis. Vox might getting bored now that he's between books.

2007-08-28T06:37:00.000-05:00

Real Quick Buzzdive

Holy shit! I've got work today. But far be a thing like rersponsibility to keep me from bringing you, the non-existent reader, that hard-hitting, cutting-edge analysis that you've come to know and crave.

Today's buzzdive takes us from LA to London.

A third of UK’s biggest businesses pay no tax

Almost a third of the UK’s 700 biggest businesses paid no corporation tax in the 2005-06 financial year while another 30 per cent paid less than £10m each, an official study has found.
Of the tax paid by these businesses, two-thirds came from just three industries – banking, insurance and oil and gas – while the alcohol, tobacco, car and real estate sectors contributed only a few hundred million pounds.
Altogether, these large public and private companies paid £24.4bn in 2005-06, or just more than half of all the corporation tax paid, according to a National Audit Office analysis of the tax raised from the 700 companies handled by the large business service of Revenue & Customs.
It found that 50 businesses, or 7 per cent of the 700, paid 67 per cent of the tax while about 220 paid none and another 210 each paid less than £10m.
Some tax experts were taken aback by the small amount of tax many of the companies paid. Michael Devereux of the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, said: ”It is certainly surprising."

Excuse me, "surprising"? It's surprising that people with lots of money hire lawyers and tax gurus to milk the system for every loophole it can find or construe to the satisfaction of tha authorities? Sounds like Oxford has an interesting cirriculum for buisiness.

RHE man gets jail time for property fixes

He built a fence, a retaining wall, a patio and a few concrete columns to decorate his driveway, and now Francisco Linares is going to jail for it.
Linares had been given six months to get final permits for the offending structures or remove them as part of a plea agreement reached in January, when he pleaded no contest to five misdemeanor counts of violating the Rolling Hills Estates building code.

Oh I'll sleep easier knowing this hardened criminal learned his lesson. Always remember, the "real" in real estate is Spanish for "royal". Just in case you thought your home was your castle.

2007-08-26T07:37:00.000-05:00

Around the World in 80 Clicks, or,
Buzzdive without Borders

It's Sunday. Whole lotta shit's been going on. We'll get this party started first with a swing over to the always interesting Asia Times,

Taliban, US in new round of peace talks

The talks are based on previous Pakistan-inspired efforts to secure peace deals between the insurgents and the Western coalition in specific areas in Afghanistan with the longer-term goal of incorporating the Taliban into the political process both in Kabul and in provincial governments.

Similar deals were struck last year in the southwestern Afghan provinces of Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul and Urzgan, but they lapsed. In addition to reviving these, the talks aim to include the southeastern provinces of Kunar and Khost. The negotiators are Taliban commanders, Pakistani and American intelligence members, and Afghan authorities.

The Taliban, under the command of Mullah Mansoor (brother of the legendary Mullah Dadullah, who was killed in battle this year), are in Satellite town, Quetta, to talk of teega. The next rounds are scheduled for Peshawar, the provincial capital of North-West Frontier Province, and in the Waziristan tribal areas with Taliban commanders of the southeastern provinces.

Specifically, the deals aim to stop violence in selected areas and give the Taliban limited control of government pending the conclusion of a broader peace deal for the country and the Taliban's inclusion in some form of national administration...

It's never sat well with me the sudden vacuum the war with/on/against Iraq created in coverage of the original front on the war on terror. It's a small wonder the Sludge Report missed this bit.

Moving along our globe-trotting little tour, we come to see yet another new low on the horizon for the War on ~~Personal Liberty~~ Drugs.

Scientists drug-test whole cities
Don't be paranoid or anything

WASHINGTON - Researchers have figured out how to give an entire community a drug test using just a teaspoon of wastewater from a city's sewer plant...
One of the early results of the new study showed big differences in methamphetamine use city to city. One urban area with a gambling industry had meth levels more than five times higher than other cities. Yet methamphetamine levels were virtually nonexistent in some smaller Midwestern locales, said Jennifer Field, the lead researcher and a professor of environmental toxicology at Oregon State.

The ingredient Americans consume and excrete the most was caffeine, Field said.
Cities in the experiment ranged from 17,000 to 600,000 in population, but Field declined to identify them, saying that could harm her relationship with the sewage plant operators

Yeah, don't be worried there! People sick enough to root and wallow in your bodily excriments are totally committed to making you and your community better people! ...Or else.

I think this is great. This technology will finally give the drug warriors knives long enough to finally poke bovine America and make them flench. Trust me, collective punishments will cover the "guilty" and the "innocent" alike with this broadest of brush strokes. And if you genuinely think otherwise, just look where the corruption of justice has led us so far in "pulling out all the stops" in stopping the menace

Asset forefeitures (a phenomenona still unheard of in Europe on the scale scene in America)
De facto deletion of the 4th and fifth ammendments
Mandatory sentences that put non-violent offenders behind bars longer than those who have taken human life
The complete perversion of the criminal justice axiom "the punishment should fit the crime": Namely, treating unprocessed and unripe marijuana plants (including sprouts) as a minimum 100 grams ready to be pushed on the streets. Imagine the reaction the ACLU would have if people caught steeling a hood ornament were charged with grand theft auto?

And so needless to say, just inferring with the prior track-record, you can likely forecast no-knock raids on the scale of entire neighborhoods, city-wide "non-compliance" fines and taxes to force the communities that generate the "drug crime epidemic" are forced to pay "their fair share" to "combat" the bad guys. It may not have dawned on them yet (but it will), put this opens up Parkinson's Law in a way like nothing else has for the war on what you stick into your own system.

After witnessing, off-and-on, the numb-nuttery of nearly a decade of uninterrrupted Labour rule of Scotland, it's nice to see something positive happen,

Forth Bridge Tollbooth to be axed after just one year

A landmark structure in Scotland by Reiach & Hall Architects is facing demolition less than a year after completion.

The firm’s £8.5 million Forth Bridge toll development near Edinburgh, which beat submissions by Richard Murphy, Malcolm Fraser and Bennetts Associates and includes an iconic canopy, could be dismantled because of the new SNP-led Scottish Executive’s policy of abolishing bridge tolls. The client, Forth Estuary Transport Authority (Feta), has issued a £2 million contract to demolish the tollbooths and traffic islands. Feta is also considering removing the canopy despite the fact that the structure has been shortlisted for a Saltire Society civil engineering award. It is also a former finalist in the British Constructional Steelwork Association/Corus structural steel design awards. “It doesn’t make sense to remove it just because tolls are being scrapped,” Reiach & Hall technical director Angus Wilson said. “It was always about more than just revenue collection — it has a real role to play in traffic management. We don’t know whether it will be removed or not. We’ve had no contact with the client since completion last October.” Wilson added that he was due to visit the canopy with the Saltire judging panel this week.

Isn't great to read good news for a change?

2007-08-19T05:09:00.000-05:00

Ah, a weekend to meself at last...
*Miscellanea*

¡Buenosdias Caballeros! Wow. Working. It's intense. Glad I've got a couple days off. Well, since last we touched based, there's been crypto- bank runs, A wrinkle in time overlapping the start of the great depression and today, The "Comptroller"(still wondering just what that one is) saying America is Rome.

Well, who gives a damn? After all, inflation expectations fell. So that's good news, right? 1,200-something Americans say life's peachy. Amy and Lindsay are in rehab. All's well that ends well, right?

At any rate, that's just the way the cookie crumbles. I've had the hankering to blog, lately. But genuinely not a great deal of time to dedicate myself to the spelling errors and run-on sentences that make this blog so revolutionary.

2007-07-26T01:12:00.000-05:00

The Worst ~~Toilet~~Paper in ~~Scotland~~the World

It takes a very special kind of rag to to make USA Today look as substanitive the Presidential Daily Briefing. Here I am, busting my ass, getting ready to work seven days a week again, going to school, and volunteering on top of that, when instead I could obviously be making a comfortable living (read:living comfortably with myself, like the author) writing the following,

Children or The Planet?????!!!!????!!!???!!!
By Tit-Face
So you buy Fairtrade coffee, you've turned down the thermostat and pledged to not take so many cheap flights in order to save the planet. But would you go as far as Mark Fish?
'I had a vasectomy two years ago because I didn't want to add to the deteriorating environmental situation by bringing another person into the world,' says Fish, a 35-year-old health worker and environmental activist.
'The world is already overpopulated, with the current population of 6billion set to hit 9billion by 2045.'
An increasing number of people are joining Fish in deciding not to have children, based on the huge inequality in the use of resources between the industrial 'North' of the planet and developing countries in the 'South'.
Katy Black has also taken the controversial approach. 'I'm definitely never going to have children,' she says. 'If we're serious about cutting levels of consumption in industrialised countries, then we've simply got to stop making new consumers,' explains the 26-year-old, who works for a national environmental organisation.
Population problem
The stance of Black and Fish has been praised by Catherine Budgett-Meakin from the Population And Sustainability Network.
'Their decision is admirable,' says Budgett-Meakin. 'The environmental impact and resource use in countries such as Britain is so great that the fewer of us there are, the better.'
John Burton, of conservation charity World Land Trust, agrees. 'The population problem is most serious in countries such as Britain and America, not Malawi or Bangladesh,' he has written in his blog.
'It is in the developed nations that the consumer-orientated societies are based, and where even a tiny increase in population leads to a dramatic increase in consumption.'
Burton has pointed out that politicians are ignoring the connection between expanding human populations and increasing carbon emissions. 'While the use of fossil fuels and the release of CO2 is clearly driving climate change, reducing our individual consumption on its own will not make a shred of difference,' he has said.
'Reproduction, or lack of it, can be the greatest single contribution the individual can make to the future of the planet.'
Not everyone attempting to tackle climate change would be prepared to follow Black and Fish in their decision never to have children. American environmentalist and author Bill McKibben suggested another option in his groundbreaking 1998 book Maybe One, calling for single-child families as a way to avoid global catastrophe.
Culturally unacceptable
Here in Britain, many environmental and development groups are unwilling to talk about the issue of population. Budgett-Meakin says: 'The term “population” became increasingly tarnished by the brush of “coercion” and “control” during the 1980s in countries such as China and India and it has remained politically sensitive ever since.'
However, eco-auditor Donnachadh McCarthy believes the question of population needs to be confronted. 'We need to start reducing the population in developed countries,' says McCarthy.
'It should become culturally unacceptable to have a family with more than two children.'

Sorry to have made you wade through that. But I was afraid you would think I was lying or just data-mining the one low in an otherwise coherent news story. At any rate Simon Birch, yes you Simon Birch. I hope you're vain enough to google or ice rocket your name and come across this. Because obviously it's my reluctant duty to tell you that you're a militant earth-worshipping asshole who defies the statistical odds each day you're able to figure out how to cross the street without getting ran over by an SUV you're trying to give a lecture too.

Tell you what Simon, if you're so worried about over-population, I have a simpler solution: Catch a scenic ferry ride from Glasgow to Belfast (smaller carbon footprint, that way), try and remember which denomination your parents or grand-parents were baptized in, then pick the appropriate sectarian militia to purchase a fully-automatic sub-machine gun off of. Return to your office, wipe out all your waste-of-space work colleagues and then turn that last unspent shell on that empty skull, you loser. Come on buddy, lead by example you git!

Yes Simon, your fearless writing has inspired me. You've inspired me to strive to have at least seven children. One for each day of the week just to piss people like you off. Sure, it may mean working 90 hours a week just to keep them fed and clothed, but I'll die with the satisfaction of knowing it'll be my little population explosives that will inherit this wild blue yonder while myopic, useful idiots such as yourself have a bright legacy of fertizlizing the Earth which they shall tread.

Oh but it doesn't end there. More to come from the paper they couldn't sell if they tried later...

2007-07-24T07:46:00.000-05:00

Appropriate synonym for modern journalism: Wishful Thinking

I was grabbing the breakfast of champions at the corner shop this morning. And I saw the cover to the latest edition of Slime magazine. Althought I've managed to escape jury duty, I can't outrun ~~muck~~toilet raking American media organs such as this rag.

Growing up, I always had a bilious reaction to Time magazine's covers. It was the epitome of Rush Limbaugh's proverbial liberal media. It's bias is rank and miasmic. It's tone is the haughty and self-convinced nausea that the drugstore intelligentsia secrete.

But as I've grown older, and come to realize the New Media and the Legacy Media are just two sides of the same hall of mirrors, I've come to see them differently.

For a while now, I've been interested in how the Hegelian dialectic animates the political animal of the West. And by extension, the reporting of current events in newspapers and magazines. While Marxism's practical reality has ebbed into virtual-non existence, it's
intellectual legacy still poisons all facets of popular and academic political discourse. Today the bourgeois, proletariat, and the revolution are called decontsructionism, progressivism, climate change, conservatism, free-markets, the fairness doctrine, and so on. It's a story-telling narrative/formula used to frame reporter's perceptions of reality. And damned be the square peg that doesn't fit the round hole it's meant to be slotted in. You're either the oppresor, the underdog, or the common ground the two must find in order for there to be a happy ending.

But something even more deep, and simple, galvanized in my mind today. Watching the once omnipotent liberal media futily bang its head against the Bush juggernaut has been curiously eye-opening. Since most reporters dont' believe in "facts", they've instead waged a war fought with firecrackers and bottlerockets of insinuation and innuendos against the Bush Administration. The result has predictable and obvious, a beast pricked and singed, but hardly felled.

So the question becomes what has been the sum of the last 8 years of journalism being in the political wilderness?

Wishful thinking.

Why in heaven's name any rag as highly vaunted as Time magazine would put drivel like this on the front cover is beyond me. America will be in Iraq the forces that took us into it decide they have nothing left to gain by staying there. It used to drive me nuts that my liberal friends would parrot the media's fairy-taile that Kerry would get us out of Iraq with his ruby slippers of happy-shiney people power. Kerry wouldn't have pulled a troop out. He just wouldn't have the daily SNAFU report we get now. Unless it's decided by Bush and co that he wants the credit for ending Iraq, than you can rest assured the future Clinton Admin. will carry on buisiness as usual.

And so this is what the first ammendment has been reduced too. It's a fitting obituary, along with the obituary for the second, fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth, and tenth ammendment. The noble press doesn't report, they just sing socialist kumbayas.

2007-07-21T13:07:00.000-05:00

No, New York Times. You're the "wackos". And the assholes.
An investigation into the extremist world of the Upper East Side

So it's Saturday. I poke around on the Drudge Report. Find something linking to Editor and Publisher. Then I stumble on a review of an NYT article which is the concern of this post.

It may not be blatantly obvious, but this blog is a supporter of the Ron Paul candidacy for President. In the interest of full-disclosure, I'd like to mention Dr. Paul graciously permitted me to interview him for a college paper. I never thanked him properly afterwards, and I regret that. But maybe this will make amends.

So now it's Sunday, the inquisitive minds at the NYT decided to investigate how the Paul candidacy manages to defy the logical conclusions of the "reality-based community". That conclusion being: "We told them he said America deserved what happened on 9/11 and people haven't tarred and feathered him yet! What gives?"

That said, being Sunday, let's commence to picking apart what's sure to be the acme journalism we've come to know and trust from the likes of Jayson Blair...

*Intemperate thought: Woah, I didn't even notice that the author is Christopher Caldwell. He's the amateur Drew Carrey impressionist that writes an opinion column for the FT Weekend. I actually kind of like what he normally writes. This may steal my thunder yet*

... Ok page one: so far, so fair.

*Intemperate Thought II: Why on earth the idiots in the media feel the need to turn HTML into multiple "pages" instead of just posting the body of text in its entirety on one "page" is beyond me. Hence I switch to the print version of the article*

Ah, here we go, something to pick apart!

The attention Paul has captured tells us a lot about the prevalence of such pessimism today, about the instability of partisan allegiances and about the seldom-avowed common ground between the hard right and the hard left. His message draws on the noblest traditions of American decency and patriotism; it also draws on what the historian Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style in American politics.

Let's see here. When Caldwell says "the hard right" and "hard left", he means of those with a principled ideology that's not as susceptible to the dialectical "middle-way" slight-of-mind used to steer the bovine heard comprising NYT's faithful readers. This can be a problem. In this instance of "paranoid politics", it's a reference to bizzare fact Paul isn't content with the one-stage thinking inherent in the Hegelian thesis/anti-thesis/synthesis model of analysis used to shill politics today. He actually follows concepts like "perpetual inflation for perpetual prosperity" and "perpetual war for perpetual peace" out to their logical conclusion. Which is ruination in pursuit of a carrot on a stick.

While he backs free trade in theory, he opposes many of the institutions and arrangements — from the World Trade Organization to Nafta — that promote it in practice.

And once again, Mr. Caldwell, let's try panning the facts from the rhetoric. It's the wishes of the forces of darkness on this earth, parroted by the useful idiots whom monger their rhetoric, that we equivocate "common markets" with "free markets". The difference, all so subtle, is that "common markets" imply free of individual advantage. While "free markets" imply free for individuals to compete. I know, it's a tough one to wrap your pointy noggin around. So take your time before continuing.

His chief of staff, Tom Lizardo, worked for Pat Robertson and Bill Miller Jr. (the son of Barry Goldwater’s vice-presidential nominee).

Oh heavens to betsy, Stephanie Miller! A Republican brother and father? Your need for political penis-envy liberation is fully explained!

"The Owl-God Moloch"

This sub-heads a segment where Christopher provides a stratified statistical sampling proving beyond two degrees of standard-deviation that the rank-and-file supporting this candidacy obviously believe George and Dick each had guidance control joysticks steering the flight path of the 9/11 planes. And besides, Ron Paul himself just won't shut up about his fellow Republicans spending an homo-erotic fortnight upstate in NoCal.

In concluding, our rim-horned wordsmith gives the charming prediction,

Ron Paul will not be the next president of the United States. But his candidacy gives us a good hint about the country the next president is going to have to knit back together.

So having read the review and seen the movie, my initial gut feeling was pretty much spot on. The article isn't so much to meant to demonize Paul, because this man's about as spotless a lamb you'll ever get in politics. It's about demonizing those whom would vote for Paul.

Voting for Paul is to rub elbows with with tin-foiled wrapped fruit-cakes. We've got them all in here, neo-nazis, John Brichers, Big Foot hunters, post-mortem Elvis witnesses, and so on. So yes, Ron Paul = belief in 12' reptile aliens. Suck it up and get with the program, folks! It's either Rudy McRomney or Borat Obama and the return of Hope from Arkansas! Don't go thinking for yourself you little ignoble savages. Leave that to the professionals here in the office.

Now that said, let's take a look at the looking glass. We'll begin with the Old Grey Lunchlady's track-record for having a grip on reality. From just what I vaguely remember, we have the following "miscommunications",

The aforementioned Jayson Blair
The domestic spying farrago that was bad under Bush v2.0 but OK under Clinton v1.0
That there is such a thing as a "routine" investigation into anyone's adoption of a child

The Google search for "NYT lies" brings up a measly 1,780,000 hits. I realize this is hardly scientific, but even this conservative estimate should indicate the tip of the iceburg. But moving along, let's talk about that other most democratic of institutions: publicly traded shares. Yours my dears at the NYT, as seen in the chart above, show your share-price poll rating to be quite down. Your circulation tells an even more grim tail, thanks to the folks at political calculations, using the NYT's figures submitted to the SEC, we see

Ouch geez, did a third of your NY readers go blind or something? Probably not. Political Calculations goes on to note a bit of that belt tightening the NYT has been up too as well,

January 2001
New York Times announces that it will cut 69 jobs of its Internet staff (at the time, 17% of its Internet workforce.)
April 2001
New York Times announces will begin across-the-board layoffs. Job cuts include 100 employees from its regional newspaper group.
May 2005
New York Times annouces staff reductions of 190 employees (less than 2% of workforce).
September 2005
New York Times announces layoffs of 500 employees (4% of workforce.)
July 2006
New York Times announces will shrink newspaper (newsprint), news (5%) and employee headcount by 250 (2%).

Ah gosh, imagine that? Now, watch out for what comes out of the horse's mouth!

Despite his personal fortune and impressive lineage, Arthur Sulzberger, owner, chairman and publisher of the most respected newspaper in the world, is a stressed man.

Why would the man behind the New York Times be stressed? Well, profits from the paper have been declining for four years, and the Times company's market cap has been shrinking, too. Its share lags far behind the benchmark, and just last week, the group Sulzberger leads admitted suffering a $570 million loss because of write offs and losses at the Boston Globe.

As if that weren't enough, his personal bank, Morgan Stanley, recently set out on a campaign that could cost the man control over the paper...

"I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either," (Sulzberger) says.

Gosh now that sounds like the rosy prospectus of the guy who owns the finger on the pulse of the world! I guess when you've managed to run the nation's most influencial paper into the toilet, it might not be best not to trust the perspective of those aboard, seeing as how they'd likely be suffering from the vertigo...

2007-07-21T04:19:00.000-05:00

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
*Etectera, sweet fucking etcetera*

Oh man, what a day this one's lining up to be. You know, being a foreigner in a foreign land isn't always easy. I miss my loved ones. But oh shit, I didn't know it could be this good.

Our seemingly artless and sweet postman just knocked. He had a registered letter for me to sign for. I did so without inspecting seeing whom sent the missive. Upon shutting the door, I looked at the letter and shit my pants laughing. It seems the Missus has been called upon to fill that oh most civic of duties... Ah, I can't wait to take this to her at work. Like Dennis Miller said,

If you don't vote, they can't call you for jury duty!

... Just another reason to say, "Fuck democracy!"

2007-07-17T07:52:00.003-05:00

Maybe this will teach the Republicans big government a vicious tiger to ride, or,
"Fuck you, Wush Blix!"
*The New Face of Uncle Sam*

Give it up for the man named Matt Sludge for bringing this one to the Bovine Right's attention,

Eric Newman punches the numbers on his calculator and gapes at the results one more time.

It's no mathematical error: The federal government has proposed raising taxes on premium cigars, the kind Newman's family has been rolling for decades in Ybor City, by as much as 20,000 percent.

As part of an increase in tobacco taxes designed to pay for children's health insurance, the nickel-per-cigar tax that has ruled the industry could rise to as much as $10 per cigar.

"I'm not sure in the history of man, since our forefathers founded the country in 1776, that there's ever been a tax increase of 20,000 percent," said Newman, who runs the Tampa business founded by grandfather Julius Caesar Newman. "They had the Boston Tea Party for less than this."...
Here's the source of the controversy: The Democrat controlled Congress has sought an extra $35-billion to $50-billion for the state children's health insurance program. The program distributes payments to the states to help buy coverage for kids not poor enough for Medicaid.

Cigarettes, which accounted for more than 95 percent of tobacco tax collections last year, are the main focus of the bill. Federal taxes on a pack would jump from 39 cents to $1.

But the legislation has dragged cigars along for the ride. The industry operates under a 4.8 cents-per-cigar tax cap.

Under the proposed bill, taxes on "large cigars," a category that includes all but the tiny cigars sold in 20 packs like cigarettes, would rise to 53 percent.

A U.S. Senate version of the bill under consideration today in the Finance Committee sets the maximum tax per cigar at $10.

"We are a very small industry. We're the fly. The cigarette industry is the elephant as far as tax collections are concerned," Newman said. "We've been roped in with conglomerates that own cigarette companies."

Needless to say, Bush will sign it. Ironic only Neal Boortz talks about tax reform in this country, and he doesn't even smoke!

At any rate. Behold, once again, this is what your tax ~~debt instuments~~ dollars pay for- our special little egomaniacs in the Potomac Playpin to sit around and come up with shit like this. Mark Twain once remarked Congress alone constitutes America's only recognized criminal class. I couldn't be that harsh. I'd just settle on calling them all our very own intellectual special olympic hopefuls. There's a war in Iraq, a war awaiting a pretext in Iran, a war nobody talks about in Afghanistan any more, Tony Montana's proverbial great big pussy for a southern boder, Canadians conniving to our North. And this is all they're worried about?! Yep, H.L. Mencken put it best,

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

2007-07-16T06:42:00.000-05:00

The Misquito caught in the Spider's Web
*Red Heat Forecast?*

Been bored lately. Done some tinfoil surfing. Found this. It's a map concevied by a man named by Sir Halford Mackinder. He envisioned this map as the center of orientation in what he coined the Post-Columbian epoch (post circa 1900). The Columbian epoch was just an eloquent manner of denoting the period of exploration via sea power. He wrote at an interesting time in history. The sky was limit on the potential of fledgling air power. Sea power had reached it's satuation point. Land power was the usual lot.

What made the map and Mackinder's conjectures on the future interestring was that he wasn't looking at the burgeoning United States or at a plausible Atlanticist apex, but rather at the steppes of Asia. Being British and big on boats, he was vexxed at the nigh impegnable nature of what he called "World Island" (China, Russia, the Turkmetic crescent). He speculated that whomever controls this vast expanse would be the world's "last empire".

Strangely, the pages of the Financial Times seem to be the daily documentation of this prophecy's fullfilment. We're told oil is running out. Anybody who actually follows the oil trail know that the go-juice is going to start coming from Mackinder's prize. The dollarization of the oil markets is finally reaching its saturation point. Now oddly enough, we're militarizing the Turkmetic Crescent (I realize this geographic neologism I just coined ecnompasses non-ethnic turks, but still). In little more than a decade, China has gone from not being able to keep a satelite in space to being able to put an ICBM up capitol hill's ass. Russia has gone from aiming it's missles away from us, to well, threatening to aim it's missle's at us again.

The rosy "happily ever after" to the End of History faded pretty fast. China and Russia got hip to the socialist calculation fallacy. While freedom wasn't an end, it was certainly recognized as a means. The untapped market of China's billion and Russia's undeveloped expanses we're too much for the captain of industry in the West to leave unfettered. Capitalists selling the rope they'll be hung with, much?

And so capital has poured in for the nearly two decades. In the meantime, The United States has only absconded more and more of tommorow's wealth to finance today's party. In less than a decade, the Euro went from a joke to inching up on the sterling. Naturally, the Legacy Media spent this whole time recycling the same old dialectical fairy tales of Helter-Skelter with Right Wing Militias, Tupac, FDR socialism, and what not. Rush Limbaugh and the New Media Prostitution Ring moved in on the Legacy Media's turf. The two poles these parties occupy in the pedestrian political discourse beguiled the plebs sufficiently to keep them playing approved games.

Militarily, the last 25 years has gone on to demonstrate the limits of "Air Superiority". Iraq was only vanquished by the current quagmire. The cruise missile Clinton fired at Osama just ended up not undetonated and on a Chinese table being disected and reverse-engineer. Jesse Jackson had to go and pull our Special Forces out of Yugoslavia. But I guess the war on asprin in the Sudan was a resounding success.

Returning to Mackinder's Heartland and World Island. Ewan McGregor's little travel diary cuts a swathe through this region.
From it we see vast expanses untapped and unphased by the human touch. The only thing I've ever seen remotely like it was the interior of Alaska.

With the revving up of India, China, and Russia to take preeminence economically this century, only a fool would suppose the people holding the chips today wouldn't want to get a finger in this pie. And so the question becomes, how much does America want a piece of this action? It was enough to break the tides of Napoleon and Hitler. Like the Misquito, America has a careful path to tread in this part of the world. Washtington warned us against meddling in European affair. Cruel as it is to say, dealing with Europeans has nothing on dealing with Asiatic cultures.

So where do we go from here? A bit more to come later.

2007-07-15T05:05:00.000-05:00

Radicalizing the bourgeois: The Ultimate Goal of the Left?
Or, shilling Che shirts to the enemy: PartTwo
*Know Your Enemy*

Continued from Part One.

So what have the Left accomplished? Just because a model of society and economics isn't sustainable, that doesn't mean it can't be recalitrant. The answer is quite interesting. Towards the close 19th century people with money had two problems. One was that pesky ghost of socialism haunting their rarified peers on the continent Or at least that was what their kids coming back from college were saying. The other was the fact that under the national banking system, the lower and middle classes were enjoying the fruits of relatively sound money and falling prices. Wealth was being created and ammased from the bottom up. Which doesn't leave the best of pickings for those on top. The off-sets created in the inverted pyramiding of deposits, coupled with the decentralization of the issuance of bank notes, seemed to keep the issuance of new money well enough parallel with the creation of new wealth, that the nation had achieved a sustainable equilibrium. Sure, there were a few corrections in the 1880s and 1890s. But the outpouring of new wealth and productivity seen during the rapid industrialization turned assuaged these corrections, making them resemble stumbles instead of full-on crashes. So people with money at the time were hampered by free-markets on one hand, and the ghastly premise of a plebicite on the other. Something had to be done. Now, rich people being rich because they were smart enough to get money and hold on to it to begin with, came up with the following.

Muarry M. Rothbard tells us in A History of Money and Banking in the United States,

Fortunately for the cartelists, a solution to this vexing problem [free-markets] lay at hand. Monopoly could be put over in the name of opposition to monopoly! In that way, using the rhetoric beloved by Americans, the form of the political economy could be maintained, while the content could be totally reversed...For this intellectual shell game, the cartelists needed the support of the nation’s intellectuals, the class of professional opinionmolders in society. The Morgans needed a smoke screen of ideology, setting forth the rationale and the apologetics for the New Order. Again, fortunately for them, the intellectuals were ready and eager for the new alliance. The enormous growth of intellectuals, academics, social scientists, technocrats, engineers, social workers, physicians, and occupational “guilds” of all types in the late nineteenth century led most of these groups to organize for a far greater share of the pie than they could possibly achieve on the free market... And the intellectuals were ready for it, having learned in graduate schools in Germany the glories of statism and organicist socialism, of a harmonious “middle way” between dog-eat-dog laissez-faire on the one hand and proletarian Marxism on the other.

And so the age of mass marketing began. And by mass marketing, I don't mean our best attempt at wrangling in the the greatest number of people that willingly take to the message sewn. I mean right down to every last filthy, unkempt one of them were going to get with the program. In order to do this, you'd need to hijack about two things out from under the noses of the plebs. One would be the education system the other would be control of the money supply.

We'll start with the latter first.

Lenin *shudders to think of his corpse in a glass coffin* observed most astutely,

" The best way to ruin a country is to debauch its currency"

And in order to reliably extrapolate wealth from the middle and lower class, the prepetual pyramiding of debt must ensue. This works by taking the creation of money out of the service of the market and places it into the hands of those who control the teat. The creation of money prior to the nationalization (or perhaps internationalization) of the money supply operated very similarly to the production and exploration of today's token of wealth, oil.

Oil exploration is only as prolific as the market will bear. If Oil is fetching 70 dollars a barrel on the open market, and it costs 60 dollars for exploratory and production costs per barrel, then obviously people will continue to explore for new oil. However if there's a sharp spike in the availability oil, say Japan being wiped out by a combination of earthquakes and irradiated mutant lizards (God forbid), and the price of Oil was to drop to 40 dollars a barrel, than it would no longer be profitable to explore for oil.

This same economic principle once dictated the introduction of gold and silver coinage into the money supply in America. So long as it was profitable to mine and frank gold and silver, than obviously the market was in need of more money. This acted as an atuonomous circuit-breaker for inflation in the markets. The net practical effect was banks could not loan out money that wasn't there, for fear its customers might call their bluff and create a bank run.
Put differently, this meant that the auditing and control over the banks lay in the hands of the people, instead of the likes the likes of the IRS and such.

Naturally, this was a apalling to Hamiltonians and the people that could afford indoor plumbing, at the time. And who could blame them? The Robber Barons created and amassed wealth that made the old-money, Town and Country gentry look like midgets financially. Even though the Robber Barons obviously enjoyed their prestige, even they must have been existentially startled by the stark contrast in their nascent positions of powers vis-a-vis their predecessor's dearthed defintions of the same.

Tesla, Eddison, Marconi, Maxwell, and the likes were faces of science. Their science wasn't the abstract story-telling quantum mechanics and string theory are to us today. Their science was altering the face of society and the economy by extentions. Gaslight was about to give way to electrified phosphorous flints. Closed ciruits were the wave of the future.

So yes, on the inside looking out, the twentieth century was a pretty uncertain and hence scarry place to stare in upon. Surely the Robber Barrons themselves, looking at their own assent to power, and looking at the teeming unwashed masses from whence they arose. The teeming massses that seemed to swell each day in geometric proportions. Yes, this had to be dealt with and dealt with fast.

The day's beautiful and slipping away, so more to come later.

2007-07-09T09:02:00.001-05:00

Radicalizing the bourgeois: The Ultimate Goal of the Left?
Or, shilling Che shirts to the enemy:Part One
*Know Your Enemy*

A thought crossed my mind the night prior. What if the marxist dialect is a shell game? What if there's a glaring truth contained in 1984 never cliched, coined, and enter into the circulation of pedestrian political discourse? What if the point of "the revolution" was never to radicalize the "proliteriat", but rather the bourgeois? More to come later this evening, I hope...

~~Stay Tuned.~~
And so let's begin. From MTV, to Che Shirts selling in Old Gravy and The Crap, to the sprawling maze of political correctional institutes dotting the land, one thing is never questioned: Change for it's own sake is a good thing. The trick to a shell game and three-card monty is to get the audience to focus on what's not important, while the other hand does the actual magic. Can such sleight-of-hand be executed on the scale of trompes de la monde fooling whole societies?

Regardless of what the answer is, the fact remains it's been the goal of a lot of people for a long time. Control of the masses has been the Aesopian grapes of political animals since well before the time of Protagoras's weekend seminars and the wedding of church and state with Pharoah being Ra on Earth. Plato's Republic constituted a wishful stroll down of the candy-time corner where the order of the hive has already been socially codified. The throws of history left narry a civilization settled long enough to see this idea take fruition. But always it's lingered, extant, in one form or another.

That the omnipotent state, a superman amongst mere mortals, should arise from the bosom of Germany in the nineteenth century, an age ripe with liberalism and imperialism, is peculiarly ironic. But the dialectical fire that consumed German Idealism soon spread. The inherent allure of the artifical presumption of adversity found in class analysis appealed to the lowest common denominator in man. Yet what must never be forgotten about the sordid rise of socialism and statism in the West is that it spent so long in incubation and incohateness.

Tyrants drunk on the allure of getting to be remembered as the face of the future followed a myriad of bloody avenues to nowhere in trying to achieve Hegel's New Jeruselem of self-evident prefection. Still none were sustainably fruitful towards this purely positivisticly managed society. Fabianism, fascism, the New Deal, Keynesianism- all variations on same desire and goal. It seems the farther eastern the manifestion, either in actual geography or mentality, the bloodier the lurch "forward". The armchair linguist in one wonders to what extent concepts native to Western European languages such as static idealism fostered the preservation of the concept of an indivisible self extraneous to Heidegger's Geworfenheit.

Yet if the twentieth century is the garbage heap of failed totalitarianism, than it's only the collection of ineffective totalitarianism. What has never been achieved, either through the nationalism or communist humanism, has been the successful formulation of ideas and belief that trick mass man into subordinating his own self-interests for that of the "collective good". It is at this seeming impasse that we find ourselves today. RFJ Jr. accuses global warming deniers of treason. The BBC redicules the public it's charged with serving when they don't swallow the well organized media blitz of indoctrination. They may be a herd all right, but they behave like a herd of cats when it suits them.

Still, while Marxism may recieve lip-service to it's passing, none of us deny we took a far more socialized world into the twenty-first century than we took into the twentieth century.

Be back later...

2007-07-08T08:07:00.000-05:00

Retroactivity
*A New ongoing feature with a dash of miscellanea*

And so a new era begins. Only not exactly. Without trying to string out some joke about quantuum mechanics and rather Aristotle can know which fleet will win Tuesday's battle on Monday or not, I'll just cut to the chase.

In short, this blog's a fair way up there in age as far as amateur blogs go. That said, I'm interested to one- complete Slue by the Drop, and two- to preform an e-root canal on my many spelling errors, broken links, and the like.

But rather than be purely sneaky in all this, I intend to head up the refurbished post enteries with a retroactivity content meter that will look something like this,

Retroactivity:20%

Perhaps meta-comments will be keyed in that funky purple and Veranda text. Who knows. But if that doesn't work, then I can always go back and change my mind, because like Winston Smith and Jim Shooter would tell us, time is not absolute when it comes to internet content.

2007-07-07T08:37:00.001-05:00

Event Horizon
*Miscellanea by any other name*
And so, an era comes to a close this evening. No, not the Blair premiership. That was last week. We're talking something much broader in implications than the latest contestant on "PM Idol". We're talking about my job.
Well, one of them, anyhow.

After a much drawn out, broken cirucit of infinite deferrals and failure to communicate amongst my former managers, I had to take the bull by the horn and bring a year spent in an insomniac fog to a grinding close as of tonight. Yes, me and Teschole are parting ways today. And as an added bonus, I have the imbibed bosom of my colleuges at my new job as mammon's little helper at HBOS (the bank, not Radio:Long Island & Upper East Side propaganda channel) awaiting me tonight at a staff night out at the bowling alley. As relieved as I should be, I must say at some level I'm a bit nervous. Why? Who knows. But fear not, my letter of resignation is more than worth sharing with you,

7/7/7
(worth noting this is the one time in this year, and one of ten times in this century the dating system in the US and Europe overlap in concinity)

To all whom it may concern,

I, (state your name) on the seventh day, of the seventh month, of the seventh year of the twenty-first century do hereby tender my resignation as check-out girl and occasional price label monkey to Teschole.

As a brief aside, I'd also like to thank Sir Terry Leahy for sending a really cool DVD to all of us with Teschole commercials from the past, of all things, in the mail.

In an age of foam-flecked(thanks Vox Day for coining that one), militant earth-worship being the new black amongst over-privileged CEOs, viewing the world through a spread-sheet looking glass, it's good to know where our Dear Leader's priorities are.

Thank you, in all sincereness, to the staff and management of my Teschole branch for laughing at my jokes and patiently smiling through my melee-mouth ruminations. I don't think I could have spent a year trapped in a cyanosis-blue polyester firetrap otherwise without you.

Angst for the memories and kisses on all your pink parts,

Me

And on that note, wish me luck...

2007-05-09T13:11:00.000-05:00

~~Playa's~~ Banker's Holiday...
*When the Dismal Science met From Feudal Serf to Spender...*

The Pink Avenger and the Retardian both had politicians and banks on the cover. Two unrelated stories. Or are they? Actually, yeah, they don't have shit to do with one another. But why let that stop me from trying to draw some common conclusion from them? After all, if some asshole writing for the incontinent actually gets paid more than me to write stories about how carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere affect plate techtonics, why can't I write about banks and be credible?

The first story comes from ~~God's~~ de Gaulle's rottweiler. Fresh from an epic battle with the mastermind who nearly suckered the French into voting for her on account of a pledge for ten thousand euros a pop, "Tricolour " Nicola Sarkozy managed to inspire a nation into rising above the LCD of stupidity and has seemingly pissed off his neighbors. Sacre Bleu through and through, eh?

Anyway, seems all that shit-talking on the campaign trail is starting to catch up with Nick now that he has the prize.

European finance ministers on Tuesday issued a concerted warning to Nicolas Sarkozy to stop undermining the European Central Bank by blaming it for France’s economic problems, in a determined defence of the bank’s independence...
Mr Sarkozy’s desire to see the bank’s interest rate decisions to be more open to influence through a dialogue with politicians were denounced by finance ministers during a two-day meeting in Brussels...
Mr Sarkozy, a former French finance minister, has blamed the ECB’s obsession with fighting “inflation that doesn’t exist” for forcing up interest rates and the value of the euro against the dollar and other world currencies.

Of course, this is a bit strange. Seeing as how he has come across as a typical Eurotopian here.
Sarkozy may in fact be just John McCain with benefitting from a language barrier. "John McCain" in the sense that he'll say anything, no matter how self-contradictory, in order to get attention.

But all that aside? Is he right? The tin-foil crowd would speculate the ratchet tight interest rates are all part of the evil plot to sink the US from its preminent place in geo-political dynamics. The Austrian economic crowd would say the fact that,

European central bankers on Thursday signalled that they would act to control inflationary pressures across the Continent as the Bank of England raised interest rates and the European Central Bank indicated it would move rates higher in June.

is proof that inflation is far from imaginary and that all the three-card monty in the world played by central banks between the money supply, interest rates, and price changes are no more precise or efficient a check on inflation than the negative feedback control on your air-conditioning unit.

So what's the real deal? Well, I'd imagine that after watching America sump-pump money into the economy for the last ten years or so without collapsing under the weight of its own inflation (at least dramatically and in one fell swoop), that Sarkozy is smart enough to know a little cheap and easy prosperity when he sees it. Lowering intest rates would ease the private sector's recourse to venture capital and speculative loans. Were he to "get his way", than the equity grasping nation of France would certainly see a dramatic change. If he doesn't "get his way" on the other hand, than he's still scored plenty of political capital with the peeps and those who would like to see money ease.

Meanwhile, a long time ago on an island far, far away...

Tony Blair planned to divide Gordon Brown's fiefdom of the Treasury into two after the 2005 election under proposals drawn up in intense secrecy for the prime minister...
The Treasury was to have been divided into a ministry of finance while the department of industry would have been expanded to become a wider department of economic and industrial policy.
The plans were drawn up during one of the darkest periods for relations between Mr Brown and Mr Blair. The chancellor was furious at what he regarded as Mr Blair's repeated reneging on his private promises to stand aside....
Departments were coming under a plethora of policy checks from the strategy unit, the No 10 policy unit, the Treasury and the No 10 delivery unit. The Treasury had been persistently able to outgun No 10 with its access to policy advice and better economic statistics.
The plans were finally dropped at a meeting in Chequers in the winter of 2005 when it was decided that the polling showed the electorate did not like a divided Labour leadership.

I think this is rather quite telling. It plainly illustrates how little control and how little importance to the money supply elected governments actually exert. I mean, if an institution as old as the Chancellery of the Exchequer can be liquidated that easily, than why have it at all? Obviously this title in Britian and the dept. of treasury in the US are just fig leaves used to cover the actual nature of their monetary cartels, respectively. And I think that might be my common conclusion to be drawn: that governments and politicians have about as much control over the life blood of commerce as the heart has over emotions- which is to say not much save the act of ceasing up and causing brain damage or outright death.

Yeah, look for snapping writing just like that coming to the Independent soon.

2007-04-14T07:19:00.000-05:00

Stupid Lefty. The upper 1% of income earners are laughing at you. In the Eff Tee, no less.
*When Adventures in Quantifying Common Sense met the Dismal Science met Miscellanea*

Ahh man did I eat like a king last night. Well, maybe not a king, just better than I usually make the habit of.

I decided to surprise the Missus with a nice evening out. She's been fed some shit sandwhiches at work, and has been a trooper about it. So I decided a nice pick-me-up buquette of dinner and drinks and no dishes was just what the situation called for.

We went out to a posh hotel's restaurant. When I say "posh", I mean the guy sitting beside us in the lounge was missing only his monocle and MBE in pulling off a perfect caricture of English old money. Aside from a spectacular meal, there were also complimentary Pink Avengers for guests. Needless to say, I wouldn't have felt my money's worth attained had I not made like a scouser and absconded one.

In it, I found this hillarious bit of schadenfreude marketed to be a victory for all parties involved,

The introduction of the national minimum wage has boosted productivity because the lower paid now take fewer sick days, a study published today has found. Research into the correlation between pay rates and absence from work was presented to the Royal Economic Society's annual conference by Marco Ercolani from Birmingham University and Martin Robson from Durham University. Low-paid employees are more likely to be off sick than those on higher earnings, the report finds, and this significantly affects the workplace and economy. The direct cost of sick leave in value of lost output is estimated at more than £11bn, about 1 per cent of the country's annual gross domestic product. "On top of this, there are the indirect costs such as the loss of employee morale among those required to cover for absent colleagues," the report states. But a 1 percentage point rise in the rate of growth of the real value of employee earnings cuts the rate of sickness by about 0.05 percentage points on average.

Ah joy, everybody wins here, eh? Well, never one to a kernel of truth slip to the way side, the author Jamie Chisholm ends with a quote that actually captures the crux of the issue,

Ken Mulkearn of Incomes Data Services said: ''Wage setters are currently faced with the pressure of reviewing pay levels against much higher levels of inflation than before.''

And there's what's actually at issue, here. In cutting and pasting the press release kit quotes, Mr. Chisholm doesn't bother ask "Why?" there's suddenly a troph in the abscense rate. The reason's pretty simple. Labor is a commodity like any other. It has a subjective, open-market value just like food, oil, and retail goods. Businesses need this commodity. Businesses have to operate within the parameters of earning just as much if not more than they spend in order to operate at all. This is society's way of telling a buisiness it's using society's resources to society's satisfaction.

So thus, businesses have to bid these human resources through wage rates. If they pay too much, the buisiness will lose money and die. If they pay too little, than they'll lose the undervalued human resource to another buisiness that will pay said human resource a wage it's satisfied with. To put it in linear programming terms, these constitute the parameters.

Now, along comes the minimum wage. Irrespective of the natural rate of price-to-earning ratio among providers and consumers, this arbitrary number interpolates another parameter into our equasion. One that must be arbitrarily met, come hell or high water. The first effect of this is to drive those buisinesses that can't afford to pay their employees this wage to fire said employees. In addition, it prices under-skilled labour out of the market, creating fresh meat for ever-growing army of benefit-claimants.

But for those buisiness that can cope with the shock of an arbitrary price floor for the commodity of labor, it creates a earnings crunch that has to be resolved. You see, when your car window gets broken and the radio stolen, you don't say to yourself, "Thank heavens! I was worried about a sag in the window and car stereo market." You say, "Fuck! Where am I going to get the money to pay for this shit?"

And so a minimum wage is just an unexpected expense for buisinesses as your proverbial burglary. In order to pay for the mandatory pay raise given to you and to the government (in the form of higher witholding taxes), said buisiness has to recouperate these losses somewhere. And if every other buisiness is taking on the same new expense you are, you can best believe they'll all be turning to the same place to get that extra money- raising prices on things sold.

So prices go up, which is actually another way of saying that the purchase power of your shiney pound coin has just gone down. So in short, while you're taking more home, you're paying more out. Yeah, I didn't learn that one in home economics, either. Tack on the other forms of inflation such as defecit spending and stealth taxes governments impose to recouperate the losses caused by their prior tinkerings with the money supply, and you begin to see it's getting more and more expensive to live in Britain. So expensive in fact, that missing a day of work could make the difference between paying all your bills or not for the month.

So you see, it's not that people are "making more" and thus "missing less". In fact it's the opposite way around. Consumers are "earning less" and thus having to "work more" in order to achieve the same standard of living as prior to the minimum wage. This of course works out well for buisinesses, since in real terms they're able to pay less to employees in order to provide services that had no corresponding drop in demand. So strangely enough, despite all the leftist rhetoric about standing up for the little guy, and all that bullshit, it turns out only The Man really benefits from this, in the end. Price floors for wages actually benefit only "Big Buisiness" because it acts as a form of cartelism that benefits the over-skilled at the expense of the under-skilled.

"This effect might help to explain why the introduction of the minimum wage was greeted with apparent equanimity by many employers," the authors said.

Indeed.

2007-04-06T04:26:00.000-05:00

Eating shit and Asking for Seconds, Federalism style... II
*The New Face of Uncle Sam*

This sign of the apocolypse caught the Slue's attention last year about this time. Of course since then Nixon's little helper has gone to that big courtroom in the sky, and we have a couple of new "conservative," "constitutionalist" justices since then. Scientific American's blog has a pretty cogent breakdown of the scene,

The EPA had previously declared that the Clean Air Act does not give it the authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

Note that the supreme court dodged a bullet by not basing their decision on the question of the validity of anthopogenic global warming. As the New York Times reported:

In sending the case back for further proceedings, Stevens said the high court did not decide which policy the EPA must follow. "We hold only that EPA must ground its reasons for action or inaction in the statute," he wrote.

It's significant that the court did not throw out the case based on standing--that is, whether the states and cities that were suing the EPA had a right to do so in the first place. By not throwing it out on those grounds, the court declared, in effect, that these cities and states were in some way potentially injured by the actions of the EPA--essentially an admission that the court believes that anthropogenic global warming is at least a possibility...
The Times article I cited earlier includes an interesting dialogue between the chief justices and the lawyer prosecuting this case that reveals that the justices definitely took the science of anthropogenic global warming into consideration in deciding the case:

Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito both suggested that because motor vehicles account for only about 6 percent of carbon dioxide emissions, even aggressive federal regulation would not be great enough to make a difference, another requirement of the standing doctrine.

When Mr. Milkey replied that over time, "even small reductions can be significant," Chief Justice Roberts responded: "That assumes everything else is going to remain constant, though, right? It assumes there isn't going to be a greater contribution of greenhouse gases from economic development in China and other places that's going to displace whatever marginal benefit you get here." At another point, the chief justice said the plaintiffs' evidence "strikes me as sort of spitting out conjecture on conjecture."

I don't fault the Court's rationale in its holding, in and of itself. Yet I marvel at the fact the fate of the nation might actually hang in the hands of these clown shoes. For all the demonization (earned and unearned) Andrew Jackson gets, the older I get the more I believe he was right to try and excise the Supreme Court. He seemed to have the prescience then to see the institution for what lay dormant and metastasized in the prior century.

2007-04-06T03:42:00.000-05:00

"No, I went to Craignewton. I just put down Royal Edinburgh College to help get the job."
*Don't Be Paranoid, or Anything*

Remember not so long ago when you first started getting those irritating preface messages that say, "This conversation may be recorded for quality assurance and training purposes"? It was about the time you started hearing "por España, marque uno".

I was always dubious about those. Not because I gave a rat's ass per se that some twat in a call center is tediously going back over my words, but just the fact our so called "service providers" are this desperate to find some new way to screw you.

Well, it turns out there's even more added benefits to the corporatist gang-bang's control freak streak. Now they'll be administering lie-detection,

LONDON (Reuters) - Benefit claimants will face lie detector tests over the phone for the first time in an attempt to crack down on fraud, the government said on Thursday. Computers will check for small changes in a caller's voice that can be a sign of stress caused by telling lies. Insurance companies have used "voice-risk analysis" to weed out false claims for several years.

"The vast majority of people who receive benefits are genuinely entitled to them," said Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton. "However, there is a minority who are intent on stealing money from those who need it most. "This technology aims to tackle these fraudsters while speeding up claims and improving customer service for the honest majority. "The introduction of this cutting edge technology will be another weapon in the battle against benefit fraud." Fraud cost the Department for Work and Pensions an estimated 700 million pounds in 2005-2006. The department pays out more than 110 billion pounds a year and is in charge of job centres, pensions, disability payments and child support. The technology will be piloted in north London before being used across the country

I suppose I should be happy about this. But let's face facts here, taxes aren't going to go down because of this. Parkinson's Law of "where there's unspent revenue, there's a way to piss it off" will offset any net gain to be seen by the tax payers of Britain. Further, since much of the "fraud" in benefits in Britain revolves around mental health disability, this system will be ineffectual because a mentally unstable person, ipso facto, will unlikely be coherent and likely indistinguishable from a sane person that's lying.

More worrying than all these things is the fact this just spells out another brick in the Panopticon wall and another step taken down the road in Britain's transformation into Oceania.

2007-04-06T02:15:00.000-05:00

Late to It's Own Funeral, or, "Bury Me a G" (Miscellanea by any other name)
Yeah, yeah. Fuck some kind of blow-out spectacular for putting a bullet in this blog. Much like the rest of my ambitions, harboring the attention span of a gnat has precluded that. Despite having a fortnight off from doning the cyanosis-blue polyester fire trap, neither the inclination nor the outright opportunity came about. I actually have the final post saved in draft, just needs a few finishing touched. But at any rate, like Governor Ventura would tell you, "I ain't got time to bleed!" There's been some blogworthy stories in the news, as of late. Plus some updates on older blog posts worth getting into. The kettle's boiled. Somerfield's Best Ever Indo Sulwanese is calling. Let's get this party started.

2007-03-24T06:17:00.000-05:00

Hope, after all... (We Don't need no education part deux)
*Dispatches from Edutopia*

Meanwhile, somewhere in the most lothesome recesses of Mordor, hope floats. Surfing the Sludge Report these days is a little like masturbating with a cheese grinder; slightly amusing at first, but mostly painful. But still,

LONGMONT — Humans don’t cause global warming, a jury of sixth graders at Trail Ridge Middle School concluded Thursday after hearing opposing arguments from their peers.

“They’re pretty young for this kind of thinking. They did great,” paleontology teacher Ken Poppe said after the 40-minute “trial” in his classroom.

With Earth’s warming accepted as a tenet, pre-teen “lawyers” and “scientists” debated whether humans have caused it.

Eleven jurors listened intently as prosecutors and defendants flashed contradictory graphs tracking global temperatures, carbon dioxide levels, polar ice cap statistics, volcanic activity and sea surface temperatures — all of which were found Wednesday in the school’s computer lab. “The earth has warmed and cooled over many years. If it’s caused by CO2, why haven’t the charts shot up?” Poppe’s son and lead prosecutor Caleb argued during a rebuttal.

And perhaps there's something unconquored in the character of man. Battered as the masses have been by the forces of darkness' quest to replace, "an empty mind with an open one", perhaps there's something anterior to human nature that cannot be blanched out by generations of conditioning.

Even in Mother Russia, the first modern nation sacrificed on the alter of progress, the term for "executive assistant" sounds just like and literally translate secretary-prostitute. When a woman gets hired to handle the white-out, she really handles the white-out. This, inspite of three generations carte-blanche indoctrination of the equality socialism endows each of its adherents. But when the curtain had been drawn and rent, the dust settled, old ways die hard.

So who knows, maybe there's still a chance for this crazy old world. Like Chuck Palahniuk said in Fight Club,

"We're not unique snow flakes, we're not dancing piles of crap, we just are."

2007-02-16T07:23:00.000-06:00

~~Train~~Camelspotting III

Came across this not long ago. Felt it'd be a crime not touch upon it before the blog winds down...

Dan Aykroyd: Hello. I'm "Weekend Update" Station Manager Dan Aykroyd. This week, the Shah of Iran declared martial law, in an attempt to put a stop to the violent writing which has paralyzed his country. The Shah is the subject of tonight's "Point/Counterpoint". Jane will take the Anti-Shah Point, and I will take the Pro-Shah Counterpoint. Jane?

Jane Curtin: Dan, I know exactly what you're going to say: "Jane, you ignorant slut! The Shah is our friend, he sent us oil during the 70's re-embargo. He's a fighter against Communism." Maybe so, Dan, but what happened to the human rights you scream about every time a Saranski gets sentenced to some Soviet jail? Why is it wrong to torture a dissident and freezing Siberian Goulag, but okay to wire a leftist student's genitals in a baking Tehran dungeon? I only hope that someday someone wires your genitals, Dan. Then you'll be singing a different tune!

Dan Aykroyd: Jane, you poor, misguided scrag! Sure, the Shah's a jerk, but he's all we've got! Just look at the map. To the north, the Soviet Union; to the east and west, Afghanistan and Iraq. Both leftist radical states; and in the south, the Persian Gulf. Any idiot can see that Iran would be a prized stepping stone in an eventual Soviet takeover of the world. And when that happens, Jane, those Cossacks will be coming over here with their broom handle, and we'll see how you'll feel then! Of course, you'd probably love it, you ignorant slut!

Jane Curtin: That's the news. Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow.

Like Jonathan Lynn said,

The reason that the [Yes, Minister] is still so up to date after about twenty years is that nothing fundamentally changes. That's really the point of the series, too. The only things that change are the names of the participants and the numbers (due to inflation). For instance, when we started writing Yes Prime Minister in the summer of 1986, I went to the Daily Telegraph office in Fleet Street and looked up the news stories that the paper had reported during the same week of 1956, 30 years earlier. It turned out that all the stories were exactly the same: they were about the rising tide of violence in the Middle East, was there going to be a war between Israel and its neighbors, should Britain be in Europe or not, should Britain's special relationship with America be sacrificed in the interest of being good Europeans, defence expenditure, fear of inflation/deflation/stagnation/stagflation, unemployment and so forth. In fact, although our series was perceived as highly topical at the time, the episodes were frequently written months or even more than a year before being recorded and broadcast. Topicality is an illusion.

2007-02-14T13:04:00.000-06:00

Now even Dowd sees it....

At any rate, I see the Sludge Report has pre-empted a Maureen Dowd column in which she calls Borat Obama (not pictured for asthetic reasons) for the pissy little fashion plate he is.

"You've been reporting on how I look in a swimsuit," Obama lectured a reporter.

Well what the hell else are they going to report on? Your paltry dearth of understanding of Constitutional Law, despite having taught on the subject at a LAW SCHOOL?! Are they going to report on your "putting on notice" of a reporter who made a joke about the only "ear marks" of Ronald Reagan you'd ever betray?

Bill Clinton had a sense of humor about Clinton Care and filmed a mock-commercial. GHW Bush had Dana Carvey at a vis-a-vis roast of himself. GW Bush has mocked his verbose and himself on numerous occasions.

Borat can't even laugh at himself. How can you trust someone to reach for the nuclear football when they need to be reaching for a tissue? Borat Obama for president, is the saddest indictment of American politics in this century. Perhaps since WWII. Why is this abject light-weight even on the national radar? Oh yeah, because he's ethnically fashionable. This guy doesn't really want to be president, he just wants to play one on television...

2007-02-10T06:58:00.000-06:00

Riddle Me This, Climate-Change Cretins....

See that mighty fine bit gizelle skin, imput this into your Q-basic computation of the World's End...

The Piri Reis map shows the western coast of Africa, the eastern coast of South America, and the northern coast of Antarctica. The northern coastline of Antarctica is perfectly detailed. The most puzzling however is not so much how Piri Reis managed to draw such an accurate map of the Antarctic region 300 years before it was discovered, but that the map shows the coastline under the ice. Geological evidence confirms that the latest date Queen Maud Land could have been charted in an ice-free state is 4000 BC...

The official science has been saying all along that the ice-cap which covers the Antarctic is million years old.
The Piri Reis map shows that the northern part of that continent has been mapped before the ice did cover it. That should make think it has been mapped million years ago, but that's impossible since mankind did not exist at that time.

Further and more accurate studies have proven that the last period of ice-free condition in the Antarctic ended about 6000 years ago. There are still doubts about the beginning of this ice-free period, which has been put by different researchers everything between year 13000 and 9000 BC.
The question is: Who mapped the Queen Maud Land of Antarctic 6000 years ago? Which unknown civilization had the technology or the need to do that?

Just something to keep in mind as we're warned of the dangers of the Antartic turning into prime vacation destinations.

2007-02-08T14:51:00.000-06:00

The Daily Mail Buzz Dive

The Daily Mail is Paranoid. I like Paranoia in my papers.

Labour moves to strip voters of rights over rubbish collection

Labour has moved to strip voters of the right to object to cuts in rubbish collections and enforced recycling schemes. Ministers acted in the wake of a series of local rebellions against compulsory recycling and waste bin pickups that come just once a fortnight. They plan a law that will allow town halls to hand their rubbish collection and waste disposal systems over to new quangos - organisations over which voters will have no say. The effect of taking rubbish collection away from democratically-elected councils and giving it to appointed quangos will be to give the new "joint waste authorities" freedom from reprisals at the ballot box.

Families and householders across the country have protested about mess and vermin generated when rubbish is picked up just once every two weeks. Further unrest has followed the imposition of fines to enforce draconian rules stipulating that wheelie bins must be put out only on the right day, that their lids must be shut, and that no rubbish may be left for binmen unless it is put in the right recycling container. Government advice to councils last year warned that a number of councils had been forced to abandon their fortnightly collection schemes.

"Cool Britainia", indeed. Sure, 15 years of Tory rule got you Black Tuesday, Orange Flavoured Rigor Mortis, Jim Hack-, er, John Major for PM, but at least they weren't crawling around your trash bins, Britain.

3,500 schools now use finger print scanners in 'Big Brother state by stealth' *Dispatches From Edutopia*

As many as 3,500 schools are taking fingerprints from pupils, often without their parents' permission, a new poll revealed yesterday. Soaring numbers require pupils to undergo biometric identity checks before they can register in the mornings, buy canteen meals and use the library. But the trend has prompted furious complaints from parents who are concerned their children's data will be stored on insecure databases. Under current laws, schools do not have to seek parental consent before taking pupils' fingerprints, although they should notify them.

I remember in Kindergaarden, having my footprint taken. Even at the tender age of five, I actually felt something oddly disturbing about this. I thought, even then, that only criminals were "fingerprinted" or "footprinted", as the case may be. When I questioned my teacher about this, she told me this was for "my own safety" in case I was "lost or kidnapped." I thought even then, this sounded somehow illogical, as my foot was surely bound to grow. "Science" is out to prove how free-will and carteasan identity are just an "illusion". Trust me, God-fearing and atheist alike, the day's quickly coming you'll long for that sense of self-propriety, illusion or not...

363 tonnes of US cash sent to Baghdad before handover

The U.S. Federal Reserve sent record payouts of more than $4 billion (£2 billion) in cash to Baghdad on giant pallets aboard military planes shortly before the United States gave control back to Iraqis, lawmakers said on Tuesday.

The money, which had been held by the United States, came from Iraqi oil exports, surplus dollars from the U.N.-run oil-for-food program and frozen assets belonging to the ousted Saddam Hussein regime.

Bills weighing a total of 363 tonnes were loaded onto military aircraft in the largest cash shipments ever made by the Federal Reserve, said Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform."Who in their right mind would send 363 tonnes of cash into a war zone? But that's exactly what our government did," the California Democrat said during a hearing reviewing possible waste, fraud and abuse of funds in Iraq.

On December 12, 2003, $1.5 billion (£725 millon) was shipped to Iraq, initially "the largest pay out of U.S. currency in Fed history," according to an e-mail cited by committee members.It was followed by more than $2.4 billion (£1.2 billion) on June 22, 2004, and $1.6 billion (£530 million) three days later. The CPA turned over sovereignty on June 28.

Paul Bremer, who as the administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority ran Iraq after initial combat operations ended, said the enormous shipments were done at the request of the Iraqi minister of finance..."We are in a war against terrorists, to have a blame meeting isn't, in my opinion, constructive," said Rep. Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican.

Yeah, that's the way love goes in the Patomac Playpin. Scabbard Rattle all you like, just keep the buck passing. I mean, come on, how much of that money actually made it there? Yeah, Federal Reserve, just another reason right there to rest assured...

A third of GPs have private health insurance
*A Spoonful of Socialism to Help the Medicine Go Down*

Almost four out of ten GPs have so little faith in the Health Service that they would rather be treated privately, a survey shows today.

Of the 600 family doctors questioned, 28 per cent have actually taken out private medical insurance to avoid being treated on the NHS, and a further 10 per cent said they would opt for private treatment if they or a relative fell ill.

GPs have enjoyed huge pay rises since a new contract was brought in three years ago. Their average salary is now more than £100,000 a year.

Family doctors were more likely to go private than colleagues in NHS hospitals. Across all the 1,700 doctors surveyed by Hospital Doctor magazine, an average of 22 per cent have medical insurance, and 33 per cent would prefer private treatment.

This is so wonderful, it's just like the fact most public skrool teachers prefer their kids in private school, when given the chance. But at any rate, look for a lot of the same once Clinton v.2.0 hits the scene.

Brown wants an all-elected Lords

Gordon Brown has served notice that he wants to introduce a wholly elected House of Lords if he wins the next election. The Chancellor made clear he views the latest Government plans for a 'hybrid' chamber - part-elected, part-appointed - as an interim step. Mr Brown will back these proposals, but is expected to include a commitment for the more drastic change in Labour's next election manifesto if he succeeds Tony Blair.

Sources close to the Chancellor said he believed such a radical step would require a mandate from the electorate. Yesterday it emerged that several former Labour ministers, now in the Lords, are urging him to put off any timeconsuming reform of the house until after the next election.

The Government's latest attempt at an overhaul, unveiled yesterday by Commons leader Jack Straw, triggered a constitutional row. Opposition MPs and electoral experts said the plan would give political parties an even tighter grip on the House of Lords and perpetuate the culture of cronyism that has corroded trust in politics.

Six centuries of history will be swept away under Mr Straw's favoured option for a reformed house - with half of the chamber directly elected by the people and 20 per cent appointed by an independent commission. Around 30 per cent would still be nominated by party leaders.

There was further controversy at the prospect of existing life peers being encouraged to retire with generous severance packages.

Some of Britain's richest men could be eligible for tens of thousands of pounds in taxpayer-funded payoffs.

How awful. Of course, the real reason Labour wants to liquidate this last legacy-vestigage is because it's was the only check and balance to railroading whatever the current majority wants. Like for example, despite being Labour-by-majority, the House of Lords voted down Brown's National ID pet-project five times before caving -in for a two-year opt-out. If there were two aspects of British government I could impliment by fiat into the United States government, it'd be Question Time and the unelected upper-house. Sorry to see it go.

And on that note, I think this is the Buzzdive, signing off. I'd like to thank and credit Rocinante's Burden Headline Hodgepodge for the the source of ~~plagerization~~ inspiration for this favorite institution here at the Slue.

2007-02-08T08:30:00.000-06:00

For you ~~Brad~~ Beyonce, I've got Five...
*When Miscellanea met the Dismal Science*

Just had a call from an old friend. Just Had a cup of delicious instant coffee. Just ended another shit-week at work on another shit-note. What better time to blog?

Seeing as how this blog is generally celebrity free, it gives me great pleasure to play six-degrees of Kevin Bacon between a very important person such as Beyonce Knowles and yours truly. What circumstances might possibly overlap between a over-priveleged starlet and moi? Well, let me tell you,

Our friends from I don't Like You In That Way posted this ammusing piece,

Now that the promotional push for Dreamgirls is over (without Beyonce getting an Oscar nod), the singer has now turned her attention to promoting her latest album, B-Day. But despite being one of the highest paid women in Hollywood, Beyonce doesn't feel the need to spend money on the people who help make her rich and famous.
[Beyonce]is forcing her back-up dancers to pay for their own flights from New York to L.A. for rehearsals for upcoming tours and videos. Our source added that the struggling performers were asked to "work this week for a measly $400 per video." The insider also said that Beyonce's dancers wouldn't put up a fight about it for fear they would lose their gigs. "They were told that they couldn't call their agents and that if they didn't agree, they would not be hired."

Well, it kind of gets back to the conversation I had with my Supervisor, today. Due to work-related injuries, she's been away from work for the last few weeks. A lot has gone on since then, and my Supervisor Pro-Temp instituted a lot of changes in my department ("the department" pretty much comprising me and me alone. And I guess my Work Partner when he bothers to move his lazy ass). My Supervisor-proper, having just really eased back into her usual duties this week, decided to pull me aside, today. At around 9:30 in the AM, she informed me she would like to have a meeting with me at 10AM. I acquesced, instantly sending my mind into a myriad of paranoid conjectures as to what I might have done wrong,

Did I fart in noseshot of a customer?
Did I drop an F-bomb in front of a customer and/or the store manager, on the shop floor?
Did I make an off-color remark in front of a deconstructed victim of white-honkey oppression, like Shilpa Shetty?
Did I make a joke to someone and got their feelings hurt?
Did the little, withered krone that was mumbling incoherently about me not giving her green clubcard points overhear me wishing a lonely death on her, as she walked away? (Sorry God, about that one...)

I contemplated preying on my Supervisor's shortcoming of out-of-sight/out-of-mind. But then figured I haven't been brave about a whole helluvalot lately, and thought I'd stride in there like the mother-fuckin' champ.

So, what music was I too face?

"Hello"

"Hello, Supervisor."

"I needed to talk to you about some thingss I've been hearing, and things I've noticed myself. It has to do with your work performance."

"Oh sure, and what might that be?"

"Well, to be honest, I feel you've been skiving alot at work. Supervisor Pro Temp feels that you haven't done any of your Price Verifying this cycle, and other managers have noticed you looking at magazines in the morning. I've noticed you come to the canteen to do your labels and sit their with a juice, or reading a paper. And to be honest, you're not doing as much as you could. It's like you're barely eeking out and doing just enough to fill your hours. But I want to give you a chance to express what you feel, and tell me if you feel this is incorrect."

"M'allrighty then, let me tell you what I think. For one, I know have been clearing my workload screens, for the most part each day. If my performance has lagged a bit as of late, that's because I've been getting a crapload of labels to put out each day, far more than I have had so far in a consecutive period, since starting here. Not to mention last week I had to take considerable time out my usual duties to train the Wages Lady (who is filling in for my vacationing Work Partner). You've specified that so long as all the Point-of-Sale and Self-Edge-Labels for a given day are completed by no later than the next day, you'd be satisified with this, and this is what I've done. While you were gone, I had actually price verified the store up too isle four, for this PV cycle, but Supervisor Pro Temp decided the wall chart mapping my price verifying wasn't up to his priggish standards. So he then reset the price verification cycle, and erased all my work hitherto, until he got a new chart. He didn't bother telling me that he wanted me to start again, so thus I don't think I can be held to blame for not following instructions I was unaware of..."

"OK fine, but, you've also clocked-in late several times in the last few weeks and-"

"Are these late clockings-in exlcuding the several times the AM duty Manager has showed up late, thus forcing me and everyone else stuck outside freezing their asses off to be late, as well? Because I'll be honest with you, when the Duty Manager doesn't bother get to work on time in his warm and dry car, than I myself am less inclined to make a point of being here at the ass-crack of 6AM."

"Well, you should be here on time, anyway."

"No Supervisor, you're missing the point. He gets paid a hell of a lot more than I. And if he can't be bothered to make the effort, I don't see why I should bother. Look, when I sort the labels that don't print off with any rhyme or reason first thing, I promise you I'm saving time. When I have a can of coke, it's because I haven't had any breakfast. If it's an issue with me sorting them in the canteen, than I'll just go to the training room to do them then. If there's something specific you would like me to do different, than-"

"It's not just that, it's the preception you give off. You don't seem like you want to be doing this job. And I need someone who wants to be doing this job. So if there's something you don't like about it, or anything, than I need you to tell me."

"OK then, fair enough. I hate this job. I love everyone I work with. I'll be straight up honest with you, Supervisor. If I had known what this job fully entailed when the AM Duty Manager phoned me up the same day he interviewed me to offer me this job, I would not have taken it. I would have just held out for the W&S position I had originally applied for. Because frankly, it's bullshit that the expectations and responsibilities that come with job pay no more than what I could be earning if I was working on the checkouts or slinging shit on the shelves."

"I agree with you, there."

"OK, cool. I appreciate you have no control over that, and I'm not blaming you. But the fact of the matter is, I make ends meet up here. But you don't pay me enough to run my ass off around here and do all that I possibly could- for one. And two- You're sure as hell not going to get an improvement out of my performance until you have this convesration with my Work Partner, who has only gotten slower and lazier since this store has opened. Because I flat out resent that you feel it pertinent to get off in my ass, but he does less and less and I end up getting the blame for it. Trust me, if you think my performance is minimal, than try looking at the dearth he musters on the weekends when I'm not here. There's always a dozen mis-sized SELS and no replacement POS-"

"Yes, but when I come in after him his workscreens are clear."

"And when you come in after me so are mine, 90% of the time! Difference is, I have a hell of a lot more to do than him and I still manage to have more to show for my efforts in the same amount of time. Look, I understand he's still on holiday and there's nothing you can do about that until he gets back, but like I said, this all I have to offer for these wages until I see him start pulling his weight."

"OK, fair enough. I'm glad to you're airing these things out, now. Usually you're so opinionated about everything else other than this job. Why haven't you said these things before?"

"Well, Supervisor, let me tell you a little story about Dildo-Lips and the
Neutron Avenger..."

And so, we left on some note of accord, or at least armistice. I told her I needed the job, even if I hate it, and will do what it takes to make the ends meet. Nothing more. So you see Beyonce's back-up dancers, I too am a back-up dancer, of sort. I make a concrete hole look good on paper for the legal trading bigwigs and to customers looking for the prices. Point is, the commodity of my labor, like yours, is only worth as much as we and our respective employers agree its worth. We both feel our labor is under-valued. Difference is, my employer knows they're getting a bargain from me, yours knows dancers are a dime-a-dozen. My job doesn't pay much, but there's a bit of dignity in the fringe package, like saying all those things you never would to yours.

Just remember kids, with fame what you need you have to borrow, and all that glitters ain't bling-bling...

2007-02-08T08:18:00.000-06:00

Ah, The End is Nigh... (Not Just Miscellanea)

Not much longer for the Slue, here.
I suppose it'd be nice to strike upon some magnum orifice of a blog post to end it with, but I'm not sure if there's one coming or not.

But at any rate, there's still a few interesting things to touch upon before we but this blog on ice...

2007-02-05T09:51:00.000-06:00

A Final Thumb Through the Scum

And How could this blog end without a gratuitous titty-shot? For that matter, why not two? Or would that be four? Anyway, while bored shitless at work, staring with blank disaffection at the newstand, I saw this stupid headline, on par with the furthest depths plumbed by the Indepdenent, which read,

Gun Nuts Charter

Gun nuts could be heading for Scotland after police forces refused to join a UK weapons register.

Yes, because like any leftist inductive-alchemist will tell you, total information awareness means total activity control. After all, if someone is crazy enough to shoot you, they're probably not going to bother contemplating rather or not their gun is registered or not. Then again, they're probably not going to use a registered gun, to begin with. Although they may be high off their minds on pot...

And moving along, Scotland. Let's see what your newspaper has else to say about you...

The Scots are the grots!

SCOTS are the dirtiest people in Britain, according to a new survey.
A list of cities where folk wash least often was topped by Aberdeen, with Edinburgh and Glasgow next.

Then came Southampton, Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds, Leicester, Cambridge and Manchester.

Hair was washed least often in Coventry, then Cardiff, Belfast, Nottingham, Plymouth, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leicester, Birmingham and London.

Nope! No English bias there! Though come to think of it, my boss did ask me this morning what the hell happened to my hair on the way over...

Archbishop in police blast

THE Archbishop of York today warns Britain risks “coming close to a police state” – in the wake of the Birmingham terror arrests.
Dr John Sentamu who fled Uganda in the 1970s, likens proposed 90-day detention to life in his home country under Idi Amin.

As cops probe an alleged “soldier murder” plot, he says: “In a police state they pick you up and then find the evidence.”

He also tells ITV news tonight that he would like tea with BB’s race row star Jade Goody.

Does his imminence have a point? The British "Constitution" is just a nice word for what was once a combination of common law and societial centrifuge. The former has been liquidated by the EUSSR, the latter remains to be seen. Good thing we've got one in writing in America!

Why you should take today off

OVER 300,000 workers could call in sick today on what has become the worst day in the year for office absenteeism, research suggests.
A mix of the cold weather, financial problems and post-Christmas withdrawal symptoms has made the first Monday in February the most traumatic for staff.

According to Employment Law Advisory Services (ELAS), "fake" absenteeism could cost the economy £27m.

Unions said it was "insulting" to suggest people were taking "sickies".

Many people were likely to take a day at home in front of the TV rather than battle with the cold.

"Add that to the fact that almost three quarters of the country's skivers prefer to fake illness on a Monday and that makes today the worst day of the year for employers," said ELAS spokesman Peter Mooney.

Again union leaders defended workers and said they were particularly vulnerable to illnesses at this time of year and were better off at home if they were sick.

"Most employers are clearly going to prefer that their sick staff stay at home until they are better, rather than become 'mucus troopers' and struggle in, spreading their germs around the office," said TUC general secretary Brendan Barber.

Pussies. Where's Maggie Thatch and the troopers when the winter gets discontent?

And on that note, thanks for the titties, but try to leave the thinking to the professionals, and please hire editors that don't write professional wrestling storylines in their spare time...

2007-02-03T05:44:00.000-06:00

Red Heat Update
Meanwhile, in real news. The Pink Avenger tells us,

President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday Russia was interested in the idea of a "gas Opec" to co-ordinate supply activities and ensure energy security - but not as a price-fixing organisation.

Kremlin officials have previously dismissed suggestions Russia could form part of an international gas exporters' alliance. Despite Mr Putin's insistence that it would not be a cartel, his apparent openness to some sort of co-ordination with other suppliers may stoke European concerns about reliance on Russian energy.

Which is most humorous, considering we reported here nearly a year ago that

A rogue's gallery of Algeria, Lybia, Iran, and pertinent former Soviet states under a Russian Federation umbrella of policy could probably ring the knell of OPEC's total marginalization.

But at the end of the day, the ball's in Russia's court. They don't really have to form an outright cartel, so long as pertinent parties keep dancing to Russia's tune. Cartel's involve some measure of dialogue, Russia wants pure monologued dictation on it's part.

2007-02-03T04:21:00.000-06:00

... We don't need no thought control
*Distpatches From Edutopia*

(God Rest Your Soul, Layne. I hope you didn't run to far to get home..)

Oh, and the Incontinent had the headline they'd always hoped for yesterday...

All pupils to be given lessons in climate change
The new topics children will study
* Climate change - the impact on pupils, the UK and the rest of world.

* Children's responsibilities - whether to travel by aeroplane or buy food from the other side of the world, and the impact of purchasing a gas-guzzling car or buying new clothes or trainers.

* The impact of the south Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina.

* Sustainable development - the importance of recycling waste products and saving energy.

* Global warming - impact of rising sea temperatures and melting ice caps.

* Fieldwork projects - such as studying ways to regenerate east London during preparations for the 2012 Olympics.

* Learning to examine individuals' carbon footprints, and what they can contribute in the fight to preserve the planet's resources.

Ah, now there's good news for the last smoldering ruins British manufacturing. I'll bet a pretty penny, that over the course of the next decade, the highly laudable British average IQ is now going to drop. If this wasn't actually going to be ruination many young minds, it'd be hillarious to sit in on this shit.

"So class, can anyone tell us how rises in manmade Co2 triggered a techtonic plate shift in the South Pacific?"

"So class, can anyone tell me how planting meters in trash barrels, encouraging fly-tipping, and mandatory sorting of garbage helps spare ChiComs from having to sort your garbage that just ends up in a heap, anyway?"

"So class, can anyone tell me how we combat something we don't fully understand? Like rather Co2 is the cause or effect of global warming? Or how about why alleged climate change around us is not the result of the same forces that have caused it throughout the history of pre-industrialized man?"

"Last and CERTAINLY LEAST class, why can't we rely on weather forecasts five days into the future, but we can hinge the entire social structuring of the Western World on computer-generated climate model (the same one that get's falsified less than a week into the future), which is systemically slanted to the hockey-stick effect?"

Man is indeed a religious creature. Inductive-alchemy is the sign and wonder of this age. But seeing as how inductive-alchemists, weilding their infallable metrics haven't resolved Riemann's hypothesis, I'd stick to the tried and true living God.

2007-02-03T03:39:00.000-06:00

Happy Third Birthday!
Yes, The Slue is somehow 3 years old, today. And what better time to put a bullet in it? Don't get me wrong, I'll probably still be shootin' around the wild, wild web somewhere, but this incarnation of the cybernetic renderings of my thoughts has probably seen it's last straw.

Plan is to wind this little blog down in the weeks to come, tidy up while closed for renovations, and then we'll see what comes next. Truth is, this blog is one of the few indulgences I have going, and I really need to start focusing on starting a career that doesn't entail death-by-polyester trousers for several hours each morning.

So, for like all three of you that bother looking at it, thank you for patronage. I guess we could do a special third aniversary post on the same topic as the first post, Sean Hannity. But why soil your mental pallete with that? We'll leave him to his daily poor parrotings of el Rushbo.

The world's changed a lot since I started this blog, and yet is hasn't. It's been the best of times, it's been the worst of times. But like Nancy and Ronny would tell you, thank goodness there's been Jelly Beans to see us through...

2007-02-03T02:46:00.000-06:00

"Gotta Launder, my Karma"... (Miscellanea by Any Other Name)
Ah, swine and pancakes, the cornerstone of any nutritional breakfast. Bought a couple of papers yesterday to do the perfunctory british rag buzzdive. The Scotsman was shit like always, I'm not even sure if I'm going to bother with it.

Today I'm volunteering at the charity shop. Feeding the naked, clothing the hungry, and what not. This evening I'm working overtime at Teschole where I'll grace college-age sassenachs wankers buying health food, middle-class catladies buying the "Why am I single at 33?" Saturday night batchelorette-consolation package, and niggardly upper-class krones with my winning personality on the checkouts. After that, the plan is to go sip a cold pint of 80 and maybe some G&T with Benihana. Scotland's playing England in 6 Nations, tonight. It'll be nice to have the chance to start following a full season of something.

Other than that, inflation's up, my purchasing power is down, and being broke sucks. Aren't you glad you're capitalist?

2007-01-27T05:05:00.001-06:00

DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER: MASS HYSTERIA!!! *Know Your Enemy*

You know, purely from a marketing perspective, it's a wonder why the Left hasn't totally conquored the world. Sure, it's systemically unsustainable. But still, making it work is a far cry from selling it. I mean, after all, look at all the useless crap people buy every day.

Still, labor theory of value aside, I think the following dribbling from the New Statesman illustrates quite well why anybody who managed to get out of the government education system with a scrap logic still floating in their brain (your typical conservative voter) doesn't take the bait: Namely everything the Left tries to sell you involves a crisis of some sorts.

This isn't a coincidence. After all, the Hegelian dialectical model of existence the Left ascribes to artificially presumes conflict between two parties. This is the fig leaf (hypothesis versus null-hypothesis) they brandish in order to claim they're all scientifical. However, in this case, the medium is blurring the measage just a wee bit...

There are some aspects of global warming that we have barely begun to understand. Yet climate change will trigger enormous physical and social changes, including water scarcity, population movement, pollution and natural disasters.

The security implications of this are unprecedented. They are enormous in scope, redefining what we think of as a global threat. We should prepare for climate change to intensify political conflict and violence. If we don't reposition policies to address the so far invisible threats posed by global warming - for example, the struggle for land in drought-stricken areas, or the displacement of people in coastal zones and small islands - the consequences could be catastrophic.
First, though, we must accept the science. We need to know what to expect. Some facts are well documented and widely acknowledged: increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as hurricanes and tornadoes; increased average surface and ocean temperatures; increased global rainfall from increased evaporation; greater variability in rainfall and temperature, including more frequent and severe floods and droughts; rising sea levels, exacerbated by melting continental ice fields; extended ranges and seasons for mosquitoes and other tropical-disease carriers.
Such changes may be gradual or happen abruptly - we don't yet know. However, scientists are increasingly concerned at the possibility of abrupt, catastrophic climate change...

I'm going to go out on a limb and presume you're intelligent enough to suspect the emphasises are my own. Now, I think the first and only question this begs is, "If you don't know what the hell is specifically going on, how the hell can you prepare?" Science, by its defintion is knowledge, not speculation. If' it's not mechanically and quanitatively reproducable, than it's not science. Period.

Climatologist have become the new pop sensation prophets. Their manna from heaven is government funding. Governments like to fund these guys because they give legistlatures something to do: legistlate. Newspapers like it because "Hey, it's all going to work out! Here's sports..." for a headline would make you look like a loser before your peers. It's a viscious circle. Know-it-all climatologists need a buck. Politicians need something besides sex and bribery scandals written about them. Newspapers need something besides sex and bribery scandals to write about because it's pretty clear and boring to newspapers' readers this is what politicians get up too, anyway. And thus your liberty and property become the scape goat, sent out by the high priests of dialectical alchemy, to succor the big, bad boogey man of material sin inferrable only from scientific induction. Crisis created, solution enacted, crisis solved.

Congratulations, your PhD in political science has been just earned.

2007-01-26T11:27:00.000-06:00

First Among Equals Buzzdive
Ah, and now for a culling of pulp and mulch fit only for a fireplace. I'm not sure why I find the Incontinent peculiarly charming, inspite of its insipid agenda. I guess because nobody takes it seriously, not even its own editors and staff.

Hence the alarmism and end-of-the-world headlines read their daily takes on the proportions of a Fourth Grade book report. Like your typical fourth grader pontificating, they don't realize how stupid and naive they actually are, and so the teethless temptest-in-the-teapot becomes endearing.

That said, let's see what injustices our high and mighty little leftists have stumbled upon, today.

How our waste causes death and disease 6,000 miles from home

Lianjiao, a remote Chinese village in the booming southern province of Guangdong, is a long way for a plastic bag to travel; but it is where almost all British supermarket carrier bags end up. And the foil-lined crisp packets. And the triangular hard plastic packaging for your bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches from a top high-street chain. Because China is rapidly becoming Britain's biggest rubbish dump.

Regardless of how carefully you separate your waste, there is a good chance a disposal firm will dump it all in together with other kinds of plastic trash and ship it to the developing world to be dealt with by a family of migrant workers earning a pittance. They will deal with the salad-bar container, the pistachio ice-cream container and the superfluous bag for carrots in your shopping basket in a variety of different ways - it may be recycled, it may become landfill or it may simply be burnt. Whatever happens, it is generally not a priority for the waste disposal company. Britain dumps around two million tonnes of waste in China every year, everything from plastic mineral water bottles to shopping bags and other forms of superfluous packaging from some of the country's biggest supermarkets.

HA! Now if this doesn't expose the bad joke of "saving the earth", than I don't know what does. Environmentalism is just the new facade of communism. Hence it's not a conicidence that garbage ends up in commie backyards. What the article's Cliff Coonan fails to catch a glimpse of through all his histrionics is that if there was any genuine scarcity in the crap getting shipped over there, than it wouldn't have left the shores of "Thrift is 'Blessin" Britain, to begin with. Recycling is only beneficial iff it uses less resources to recover materials than it does to make perfectly good new ones. That's why garbage disposal companies pay for heavy machinery to sift out aluminum from mounds of garbage, yet nothing else. But since there's no market-basis for recycling, leave it to busy-body legistlatures to tax-and-fine you into of seeing the "benefit" of it. And one last note, Cliff. If that "pittance" the ChiCom on the street makes is so pitiful, than why isn't he doing something else more profitable with his time? Oh yeah, that's right, because picking through that pile of garbage beats the hell out of subsistence farming...

ALL ROADS LEAD TO GUANTANAMO ROCK CITY!

Two years after US soldiers used bolt-cutters to break Moazzam Begg's shackles and release him into British custody, America has found a new way to torment the man leading the campaign to close his former prison...

The guard in question is Damien Corsetti, a specialist Bagram interrogator who even among his colleagues was known as the "king of torture". "They asked to give evidence on this man's behalf. It is quite bizarre - a strange, strange paradox," said Mr Begg. "Yes, I remember Corsetti. I remember him particularly because he gave me a book called Catch 22, the great anti-war novel of our time. I was allowed to keep it through my time in Guantanamo and I still have it on my bookshelf in Birmingham." But Mr Begg, 38, said he has tried to be fair in dealing with the lawyers' request. "I said while it was true I didn't experience any of the things that Corsetti was accused of, people had told me that he done these things. "A Saudi still in Guantanamo, Ahmed al-Darbi, told me in Bagram that Corsetti had taken out his penis, threatened to rape him and, while pointing to his manhood, screamed, 'This is your God!'"

Mr. Begg, who wasn't captured by American forces, but rather by Pakistani Eye-Ess-Eye for reasons unmentioned, was kind enough to be honest. The article's author Robert Verkaik goes on to give a detailed Freudian analysis of Begg's son's oedipal complex, "While I was away, [his son] used to sleep with his mother but when I came back I kicked him out of the bed. So it's not surprising that he sees me as something of an intruder", and his wife's penis envy complex, "He says the readjustment has also been difficult for his wife who has had to learn to cope without him, and now finds that he has usurped her as the "figurehead" of the family". Come to think of it, between Corsetti's castration anxiety methodology and Begg's home life, it seems modern warfare has turned into an episode of the Sopranos.

Now on to the other cornerstone of any nutritional bolshevik's breakfast, The Retardian. I harbor a special hatred of this rag, ever since one of my numpty grad student teacher's assistants had the gall to email out this Arundhati Roy smear-and-gloat piece on America to the class, even while the WTC still burned. Needless to say, my less than eloquent response didn't help to earn me a high mark in that class. While the Incontinent's pinko passive-agression is at least bearable, this stalwart red's rag still hasn't come to grasp with the fact the Soviet Union collapsed. At any rate, here's the cream of the daily dribblings from the last "hardline" commie news outing in Britain,

Village on the road to a carbon-neutral future

The village school in Ashton Hayes, near Chester, already has a solar panel which provides enough energy to heat the water the caretaker uses to wash classroom floors, and soon a wind turbine will be installed on the school roof. The parish council chairman, Hugo Deynem, will be able to see its blades turn as he works on the eco-friendly extension he is building to his cottage in the centre of the village (pop: 1,000)...
Cheshire county council has agreed to build a new footpath so that residents can walk in safety to the local station. The area near the school is likely to be the centre for a proposed experimental micro-grid powered by bio-fuel or woodchips. "People might have been afraid to start taking action on their own, fearful of being seen as cranky," said Garry Charnock, the project's originator. "But when the whole community has a go, it becomes a team effort. The point is that this has to be fun." Mr Charnock was inspired by a Greenpeace debate at the Hay festival. The project's working group of 28 includes Dr Roy Alexander, village resident and reader in geography and development studies at the University of Chester.

YAY! Happy-Shiney people power saving the day! Looks like the ancestral villiage idiot spent a lot time in his neighbors' woodpiles, down there. It's nice to see the janitor will have a special boiler that won't work half the time due to climate change, and it's good to see precious firewood and popcorn will be used to fuel who-knows-what. Of course, notice how none of this has actually been implimented or proven to work. Oh well, I guess the decendents of the snake-oil salesman who sold cyanide antidotes for the vapors left in the wake of Haley's Comet still need a demographic...

Trade unions attack 'corporate greed' of private equity firms
*I'd like to preface this blurbing by saying having read the article twice, I'm still not sure what the hell it's supposed to be about...*

Phillip Jennings, general secretary of the UNI global union - which has 15 million members in 150 countries - said organised labour had come to Davos with the intention of forcing the activities of private companies into the spotlight...
Unions said yesterday... that private equity companies were "sweating assets" and that the rates of return expected by the new private entrepreneurs were incompatible either with good corporate governance or the fight against climate change.
"The philosophy is buy it, strip it and flip it," Mr Jennings said. "It's all about value extraction and not value creation."

Actually numb nuts, if there wasn't any value creation to begin with, than these corporate succubi would have gone out of buisiness, like Eastern Airlines. But at any rate, the article goes on to reveal the real motive of Trade Unions in all of this,

"The share of corporate profits taken as personal compensation by the top five executives in the 1,500 largest US public companies has doubled - from 5% to more than 10% of total corporate profits over the past decade - to a total of more than $40bn a year. That leaves a lot less for reinvestment, for wage increases for ordinary workers, for shareholders, or to fund pension plan liabilities."

So in other words, private equity firms are making you irrevelent because you can't squeeze them by the balls for more goodies at the expense of their profitability. I guess that's why Ford's doing so well while the Japanese automakers in America are struggling to move them off the assembly line.

And on that note, these rags are off to melt some ice-shelfs or some shit.

2007-01-26T09:43:00.000-06:00

I feel good today, Silent Bob....
(Miscellanea by any other name)

Ah, my day off. Sorry I haven't posted much, as of late. This bullshit of blogger going from "TRY NEW AND IMPROVED BLOGGER BETA!!" to "WANNA LOG INTO BLOGGER, ASSHOLE? UPDATE YOUR BLOG TO BETA, BECAUSE CHOICE IS SO OVER-RATED!" insulted me dearly. Not that it was entirely unexpected in the bait-and-switch perfunction of the corporate gang-banging of the internet.

Rather than go through the bullshit of "TRY IT" today and "DO IT" tomorrow, it would have been less infuriating had they just laid their cards out and said, "As of said date, in order to use your account, you will be forced to agree to new terms and the use the new software". I'm sure in agreeing to said terms without bothering to read them, I've spelled the demise of this blog due to its various litterings of copyrighted media. So far, I don't even see the difference between beta and the orginal blogger, other than I don't like the new dashboard. And still don't know how to edit a post post-publishing. *post script: it's actually just double-clicking "edit" instead of the single click in the old version*

At any rate, why let that get me down? Today is a day of rarified pleasures. I had my first Kangaroo burger for lunch. Not only was it tasty, but I took great pleasure in knowing I finally had the opportunity to contribute to the death of one of those UGLY F-ing rats. Hopefully that little slab of meat was pulled from the guts of cute, itty-witty joey. Also, for your mocking pleasure, I bought a copy of the Retardian and Incontinent. Both, somehow, concurrently "newspaper of the year", for God only knows how long. Having just glanced at the Incontinent, I see they have recently took the "newspaper of the year" off their cover page, But still, I'm sure the collective staff of both papers will breathe a sigh of relief in knowing as soon as I finish lampooning their crappy rags, the hard copies will do their part to contribute to climate change in the hearth of my georgous fireplace. Now that's MY kind of recylcing...

2007-01-13T08:09:00.000-06:00

Bob's Dead.
Robert Anton Wilson has assumed room temperature. It's hard to tell what his ultimate legacy shall be. Because as history as attested, death is often the biggest boon an author can have for his legacy. Look at Johnny Cash. Prior to covering "hurt", Bovine America had forgotten he existed. The same can be said Frank Sinatra. Bob's influence on Phillip K. Dick, amongst others, has trickled through the pop culture fog. It'll be interesting to see how much larger he grows in death than he did in life.

Reading RAW has been one of the few literary habits I developed in my adult life. I've never read any of his fiction, only his non-fiction. Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology have stuck in my crawl like little else I've ever read. And yet strangely, despite his fascination with the occult and agnosticism, his writings have actually done much to strengthen my belief God and Christ. That at a peculiar, philosophically fundamental level, we're really the carteasan creatures our intuition tells us. The pursuit of reality's anchor outside ourselves is ulitmately circular and self-defeating. And since the Kantian-Fitch phenomenonological divide cannot ever be certifiably traversed, we have to look into ourselves for the ulitmate underpinning and "how come". And since we must inventory and acknowledge those things within, it's the undeniable Spirit of God, perhaps felt in passing, perhaps eternally there and only beheld momentarily with open eyes and heart, that vindicates.

Of course, RAW's answer to this would be, "Yes. No. Maybe. Yes for you. No for me. Maybe because neither of us can pull out a trump card we'll both recognize. Save God himself."
And it's this that distinguishes RAW above all the other scientismic ilk that shall seek to claim him in times to come. RAW never sought to make a choice for another, and only asked you do the same for him.

It's not exactly related, but yet it is. In honor of Bob, here's a little sunshine...

2007-01-11T05:46:00.011-06:00

Science Versus Creation. Simplified: Part One
Retroactivity:4%

Between the musings of Vox Day and co. and a confluence of books I've been reading, I've pondered heavily the last few days, "Just what is the dividing line between 'science' and 'religion'? " The conclusion I'm working with comes out to this: not much. It really boils down to which you value more, the journey, or, the destination. Here's a side-by-side compare and contrast of what ulitmately underpins them,

Quantitative Metaphysics

1) This is the branch of metaphysics scientism roots in.

2) This philosophy is grounded in Platonic and Heracletian though.

3) Knowledge in this system of thought is derived a posteori, or, after-the-fact.

4) The nature of existence in this philosophy is object-object oriented.

5) This branch of metaphysics is "process" oriented. Which is just a fancy way of saying "to do is to be". Put differently, this philosophy contends we infer the existence of substance from activity.

6) This branch of metaphysics to the layman is commonly understood and used as "the language of numbers". As Physisicts and author Michio Kaku reflected, "...That's why I decided to get serious and learn as much advanced mathematics and physics as I possibly could. The language of nature is mathematics,"1

7) The bottom-line underpinning this philosophy is the abstract, irreducible, and arbitrary association of a phenomenon called "numbers" with perceptions. Numbers are fixed, unchanging creatures man uses after-the-fact to construct the activity of the components of a perception. It is highly counter-intuitive to think of numbers as abstract or metaphysical creatures. But that is just what they are, as Karl Popper notes, "[T]he [3] models of 'the language of science' ...philosphers construct have nothing to do with the language of modern science... [In] the third model... mathematics can again not be formulated, and what is still more interesting, there are no measurable properties expressable in it."2 Put differently, you may be able to pull two pens out of your pocket, but you can't pull a "two" alone out of your pocket.

8) In this system of thought, the knowledge is sequential, which is
just a fancy way of saying you know that 3 comes after 4. Why is this important?
Because it's the foundation of all mathematics. It's why you can know 2+2=4 in arithmatic, and you can also know that 3 is what's missing from 2+x=5 in algebra. It provides a way of organizing and measuring the relationships between objects, that may not be obvious otherwise, such as in statistics.

9) In this system of thought, the concept of quantification (activity) is the independent variable, and thus dictates the nature and outcome of substance.

1)Interview with Michio Kaku. TDG

2) The Logic of Scientific Discovery, pp. XXIV-XXV

Qualitative Metaphysics

1) This is the branch of metaphysics common sense abounds in.

2) This philosophy is grounded in Aristotilean and Cartesian thought.

3) Knowledge in this system of thought is derived a priori, or, pre-supposed.

4) The nature of existence in this philosophy is subject-object oriented.

5) This branch of metaphysics is "substance" oriented. Which is just a fancy way of saying "to be is to do". Put differently, this philosophy contends we infer the existence of activity from substance.

6) This branch of metaphysics to the layman is commonly understood and used as "the language of words".

7) The bottom-line underpinning this philosophy is the abstract, irreducible, and arbitrary association of a phenomenon called "words" with perceptions. Regardless of what tongue you're speaking in, a word means what it means, or else you're not communicating. Words are fixed,
unchanging creatures man uses before-the-fact to construct an identity for the components of a perception. Don't let the obviousness of this catch you off gaurd. So strong and binding are these parameters of perception that if you're truly at a loss of words, you may as well be have not been there at all, as Wittgenstein reflects, "That which we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence".1

8) In this system of thought, knowledge is incidental, which is just a fancy way of saying you can combine words to articulate just about anything within the rules of grammar. For example "Dick likes Jane", "Jane dislikes Dick",
"London is in England", "Big Ben tells time", and so on.

9) In this system of thought, the concept of qualification (attribute) is the independent variable, and thus dictates the nature and outcome of activity.

1) Tractus Philosophicus, p. 85.

Like I said, this is a working hypothesis. How free-will ultimately fleshes out into this, remains to be illustrated. All of this is grounded in the philosophy of Ludwig von Mises and was doubtless better articulated by him. But given the taultological impregnability of the material, charts like this are invaluable in orienting a discussion.

2007-01-08T11:19:00.000-06:00

Is Democracy Christian?

Well, let's take the bible for a track record. The Garden of Eden certainly wasn't majority rule, of course, God being God, that's understandable.

Then there was the tower of babel. The first New World Order. Everybody agreed, just like MTV morality plays always tells us we should. But God took the Guidance Councilor maxim "You can do anything you set your mind too" and laughed at it. This orginal plebiscite was summarily dispersed.

The Isrealites were orginally anarchists. It would seem God wanted it this way. Judges ends with this as God's own version of "happily ever after",

24 And the children of Israel departed thence at that time, every man to his tribe and to his family, and they went out from thence every man to his inheritance.
25 In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

When the Israelites sought to raise up a king to keep up with the jones, God frowned on this, as he was their King in Heaven. For it was by this holy citizenship, written onto their hearts, that they were able to live by "that which was right in his own eyes". In seeking out Earthly prestige and engaging in the intruiges that culminate in it, the Israelites spelled out their temporal demise, from which ultimately the Kingdom of God through Christ reclaims.

Jesus taught us to "Render unto Ceaser's what is Ceaser's" and nothing more.

The pagan world didn't have any better luck with making the whole "people" thing work. The Greeks, despite having Plato and Aristotle to choose and pick from, couldn't get democracy to work. The Shrewd and legalistic Latins opted for a short-lived republican government. And we know how those turned out.

Ultimately, the short-coming of democracy over represenative-governed republicanism is that democracy is the simply the lowest common-demoninator of the greatest number of people. This is why electing anything short of Ron Paul is ultimately self-defeating. Because once power is obtained, the empowered's chief goal is to maintain empowerment.

Just something for the Evangelical crowd to chew on next time Diebold votes Republican for them.

2007-01-05T08:04:00.000-06:00

Why it comes down to Libertarianism...

I stumbled upon this observation by J.T. Gatto from his book, "Underground History of American Education",

What if I proposed that we hand three sticks of dynamite and a detonator to anyone who asked for them. All an applicant would need is money to pay for the explosives. You’d have to be an idiot to agree with my plan—at least based on the assumptions you picked up in school about human nature and human competence.

And yet gasoline, a spectacularly mischievous explosive, dangerously unstable and with the intriguing characteristic as an assault weapon that it can flow under locked doors and saturate bulletproof clothing, is available to anyone with a container. Five gallons of gasoline have the destructive power of a stick of dynamite. The average tank holds fifteen gallons, yet no background check is necessary for dispenser or dispensee. As long as gasoline is freely available, gun control is beside the point. Push on. Why do we allow access to a portable substance capable of incinerating houses, torching crowded theaters, or even turning skyscrapers into infernos? We haven’t even considered the battering ram aspect of cars—why are novice operators allowed to command a ton of metal capable of hurtling through school crossings at up to two miles a minute? Why do we give the power of life and death this way to everyone?

It should strike you at once that our unstated official assumptions about human nature are dead wrong. Nearly all people are competent and responsible; universal motoring proves that. The efficiency of motor vehicles as terrorist instruments would have written a tragic record long ago if people were inclined to terrorism.

There's an important illustration about the faith we put in our fellow man. We rely upon this faith and credit vested for civilization to operate. It's the ultimate reason the compulsive charity and gun control of the left, and the drug war on the right are fundamentally flawed.

2006-12-28T07:32:00.000-06:00

If the argument works for UPS vs. the Post Office...
*Dispatches from Edutopia*

Someone at the FT was smarting just a bit as he wrote this...

Civitas, the right-of-centre group best known for its publications on political and economic issues, is looking for sites to set up a string of "new model schools" that will rely on market discipline and freedom from bureaucratic meddling to beat state schools at their own game.

It already runs a smallprimary school near Ladbroke Grove in London, which, in spite of initial scepticism from parents, has had to close its waitinglist for next year because demand has outstrippedsupply.

The primary school has 35 pupils and a teaching staff of just two teachers and two classroom assistants.

2006-12-28T06:48:00.000-06:00

As the Plot Thickens, it Gives me The Dickens... (part deux)
*From Feudal Serf to Spender, This Wonderful World of Purchase Power*

Good news! I think... To be honest, I'm not all that sure what it means, but I know it means something significant,

The value of euro notes in circulation is this month likely to exceed the value of circulating dollar notes, according to calculations by the Financial Times. Converted at Wednesday’s exchange rates, the euro took the lead in October...
By the end of October the $759bn-worth of US dollar notes in circulation was only a fraction ahead of the value of euro notes, converted at exchange rates at that time.
But since October the euro has risen strongly against the dollar and this month the value of euro notes has risen to more than €610bn, or in excess of $800bn at the latest exchange rates. That level is unlikely to have been beaten by the greenback.

Here comes George Soros' proverbial "reflexivity" into the equasion. That's kind of the financial concept of "post-modernism". Basically, it's the market's reaction to what the expected reaction will be from the market. The world has been been under the "operating assumption" that the "full faith and credit" of the greenback is worth putting your faith in and giving credit too. For 30+ years, foreign exchange markets and hence international trade have grown up around this operating assumption. But now, what once was good as gold is rusting before their very eyes. People like the way things were, but realize it's not the way things are now. It's kind of like being out on the middle of a wooden bridge when it dawns on you that all that's supporting you is termites holding hands. Where do you go from there? The answer to that question is going to make those in the know very rich....

So if you know, please tell me.

2006-12-28T05:59:00.002-06:00

I actually feel sorry for the Daleks....
*Miscellanea*
What are you staring at? Well, yes it's the man who had Angelina Jolie back before anyone else knew who the hell she was. Yes, there's also a certain actor in a certain trilogy we'd all rather pretend didn't get filmed. But most importantly, we're staring at the man, who, God willing, will be the next Doctor Who.

The Scum reports Roberty Carlyle is being approached to be the next "Doctor Who". Doctor Who is the British sci-fi tradition. Like Britain, there's still a whiff of it being a man's world because the Doctor's "assistant" is usually a hot babe. Normally, the Doctor is about as geeky as it gets. But this revelation opens up many doors of possibilities.

If you've seen "Trainspotting", than you'll appreciate the thought of the following headlines,

Francis Begby versus the Cybermen

Francis Begby versus the Daleks

Man, this could be great! "Leesin' tah me yeh daft tousta! Ye dunnie wanna ken what I'll dew to yeh if you get that bollocks' slime ye shuitin ouet on meh!"

2006-12-27T08:22:00.000-06:00

Oh Shit! Gerald Ford's gone?! How's Axel Foley and the gang going to sneak into the bar now?! (Miscellanea by any other name)
And hey, give Gerald some credit. Unlike his sucessor, he's managed to lay low and not make an ass out of himself. Sure, the pardon thing was probably not the best foot to start out on, but I personally like that executive check on the judiciary. It's just one of the few remaining vestigages of a time when men thought government was the problem, and not the solution.

Christmas came and went in a fog. Then again, so did today at work, which is always a blog-worthy event, anytime a typically boring day at work goes by painlessly. Santa gave me what I wanted, so I've got no beef with the fat guy or the venison-steaks-on-a-leash he sports around on.

"'PC Load Letter', What the fuck does that mean?!"

Oh, and I got "Office Space" for 3 quid at HMV. That was a nice little pick-me-up bouqet. I just want to say that Ricky Gervace is a no talent ass-clown. And all you Brits who think "The Office" is so wonderful should really get over this whole "awkward silence" thing as comedy and just tell someone to shut the hell up, instead.

Oh, and for the sheer train-wreck value of it, I went and saw "Deja Vu". I'm not sure if this was "Minority Report", "Free Jack", or what the hell I was watching. All I know was, it wasn't that good.

I guess I'll give Holywood credit in the fact they managed an entire 90 minutes of having a movie based in the South, with a black-man in the lead, and not one single honky making a racial slur. Of course, dust off this hoary old Holywood cliche, the "terrorist" was, you guessed it, "a patriot". He was kind of this un-cola neo-nazi that just randomly babbled Jefferson quotes. And the kicker, the "terrorist" was played by Jim "Jesus Christ" Caviezel. Ouuuu! "Mel Gibson"! "Neo-Nazi"! Feel the waves of irony prickle the hairs on your neck, there! Basically the movie was just pro pan-optic drivel that assures us only federal employees with rigorous background checks and good, starchy, liberal values would ever be put in charge of such devices.

But like Roci points out, just because someone can track your every move, doesn't mean they can control your every move. Like Chief Wiggam puts it, "I only said the police can punish you. I never said the police can protect you..."

2006-12-19T10:43:00.000-06:00

Weed, Whackos, and Woodies
*A spoonful of Socialism to Help the Medicine go Down*

From the Times,

In a development unlikely to reduce cigarette consumption but almost certain to produce other benefits — at least for male patients — a “computer glitch” led to smokers being mistakenly prescribed Viagra instead of the anti-smoking drug Zyban.

That's the government alone in control of medicine. Here's the government and Big Pharma's try at things,

Lilly’s own published data, which it told its sales representatives to play down in conversations with doctors, has shown that 30 percent of patients taking Zyprexa gain 22 pounds or more after a year on the drug, and some patients have reported gaining 100 pounds or more. But Lilly was concerned that Zyprexa’s sales would be hurt if the company was more forthright about the fact that the drug might cause unmanageable weight gain or diabetes, according to the documents, which cover the period 1995 to 2004.

Zyprexa has become by far Lilly’s best-selling product, with sales of $4.2 billion last year, when about two million people worldwide took the drug....
On Friday, in its written response, Lilly said that it believed that Zyprexa remained an important treatment for patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The company said it had given the Food and Drug Administration all its data from clinical trials and reports of adverse events, as it is legally required to do. Lilly also said it shared data from literature reviews and large studies of Zyprexa’s real-world use.

“In summary, there is no scientific evidence establishing that Zyprexa causes diabetes,” the company said.

Ah yes, your ever vigilent FDA with all its legal teeth bearing down on the throat of big buisiness, should it even utter contempt for the little man it shills it shit too!

Although, the Lilly spokesman wasn't necessarily lying, as Stats.Org points when doctors (whom I'm sure have proscribed Zyprexa), Big Pharma, and left-wing rags get together,

The quality(sic) British press doesn’t usually go in for American-style drug hysteria, but this article from last week’s Guardian/Observer could have been mistaken for a press release from the U.S. drug czar. It contained accounts of violent crimes committed by cannabis users and an essay by a thirteen-year-old about why she hates her brother who is “currently ill withs quitsaphrenia [sic] due to taking drugs (cannabis) from an early age.”
The misinformation begins with the sub-head, which claims that “a series of new studies proves the link between cannabis dependency and mental illness,” implying that marijuana causes mental illness. In fact, the new research, like the previous data, does not prove that marijuana makes people mentally ill, but merely finds that people who are mentally ill are more likely to smoke pot...
Finally, the article doesn’t mention the most compelling evidence against a causal link between marijuana and schizophrenia. Schizophrenia rates have been stable around the world at roughly 1% of the population for as long as they have been measured. Marijuana use rose in the West from virtually zero in the early 20th century to 50-60% of the adult population having tried it at least once in recent decades, with substantial proportions of the population taking it regularly at some point in their lives, often during adolescence. Schizophrenia rates haven’t budged”

The exact same findings of correlation versus causation, but when the FDA smiles on it, that's different. Like Scarface said, "If it's taxable, it's cool to smoke."

2006-12-19T09:37:00.000-06:00

As the Plot Thickens, it Gives me The Dickens...
*From Feudal Serf to Spender, This Wonderful World of Purchase Power*

Hmmm... So much going on in the world. I'd like to thank Vox for having the patience and stomach to troll the Old Grey Lunch Lady for what might be the most important story they've reported in years....

The United States Mint, concerned that rising metal prices could lead to widespread recycling of pennies and nickels, has banned melting or exporting them. The Mint is also testing dozens of cheaper alternative metal compositions in the expectation that Congress will mandate a change when it meets in the new year.

According to calculations by the Mint, the metal value of pennies, which are made of copper-coated zinc, is now more than one cent. The metal value of 5-cent coins, made from a copper-nickel blend, is up to 7 cents. Adding in the costs of manufacturing means the Mint now spends 1.73 cents for every penny and 8.74 cents for every nickel it makes...

How's that for proof of the Austrian theory of money? A penny is now worth more than once cent. Which may go to explain the 2% spike in the ever dubious CPI,

"US inflation made a surprise comeback in November with a surprising 2.0 percent rise in wholesale prices, the biggest monthly jump in 30 years, the government has reported. The Labor Department's producer price index (PPI) was far ahead of Wall Street expectations of a 0.5 percent rise and showed strong increases in a wide range of goods. ."

And what ever in the world would bring this about? Well since the government has stopped printing M3 estimations of the money supply, they seemed to have inflated the money supply by 20%. Coupled with the fact that according to the Generally Accepted Accounting Practices reckoning of the US federal defecit at $4.6 trillion, instead of $248 billion.

Now, as fun as it is to delve daily into the world internet paranoia and conspiracies. Now comes the frightening test of who's crying wolf and who's fiddling while Rome burns. According to WND, a London stockbroker is openly calling for the creation of an "Amero". According to the SPP website,

"The SPP in no way, shape or form considers the creation of a European Union-like structure or a common currency. The SPP does not attempt to modify our sovereignty or currency or change the American system of government designed by our Founding Fathers. "

The word of a financial mogul who makes his living by knowing what the hell he's talking about, or, prepared statement from a bureacrat in the Potomac Playpin. With whom would you lay your money on?

Thesis/problem- America is printing money that can't even be backed by the theoretical "wealth" of our GNP.

Antithesis/reaction- The world begins dumping dollars. Dollars at greater availibility loose their demand, and hence there purchase power

Synthesis/Solution- An American people shocked at the sudden spike in prices and expensive iPods gladly accept the "new" and "exciting" currency of an Amero.

I hope this seems really stupid in a few years time.

2006-12-16T09:27:00.000-06:00

A few thoughts on "Peak Oil" and "Climate Change",

I'm not sure about the American press these days, but if there's one thing the British papers all agree upon; man is hot-boxing the Earth.

The incontinent had a brilliant piece on a couple of weeks ago,

The world's largest energy company is still spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund European organisations that seek to cast doubt on the scientific consensus on global warming and undermine support for legislation to curb emission of greenhouse gases.

Data collated by a Brussels-based watchdog reveals that ExxonMobil has put money into projects that criticise the Kyoto treaty and question the findings of scientific groups. Environmental campaigners say Texas-based Exxon is trying to influence opinion-makers in Brussels because Europe - rather than the US - is the driving force for action on climate change.

Of course, Vox and others pointed out,

In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic journal Science. In that study, I reviewed how borehole temperature data recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in North America over the last 100 to 150 years. The week the article appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio. He offered to interview me, but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung up on me.

And there you go. If the newspapers say it's so, than it is so. It's seriously time the unwashed masses start calling the papers on the deaf drumming of this tune. It's just reconstituted communism with the ecology taking the place of the prolitariat. The lunacy of this stems from the fact if the ecotopians are right, the economy grinds to a halt and most of us starve. If we do it the ecotopian's way, the ecnomy grinds to a halt and most of us starve. So basically it boils down to rather or not you leave behind deoderant on your corpse.

Also, what they don't report is perhaps more interesting than what they do report. As Juciy Jane's points out,

A Boeing B-52H is being used to demonstrate that the US military's voracious thirst for fuel can be satisfied by alternatives to oil that are capable of being solely produced on US soil.

The bomber's first flight on 19 September with two of eight engines powered by a synthetic fuel derived from natural gas marked a first for the US Air Force (USAF), although it was cut short by malfunctioning landing gear.

Nonetheless, a series of planned test flights through to January 2007 is intended to certify that a viable synthetic form of JP-8 jet fuel can be produced from any carbon-based substance through a process known as the Fischer-Trope (FT) method.

If the FT fuel performs comparably to petroleum, the US Department of Defense (DoD) may decide to embrace an existing plan that would make the military's fuel budget the financial catalyst to build at least several multibillion- dollar factories that can mass produce alternative fuels to power combat vehicles, creating a new domestic energy industry and infrastructure.

Now isn't that good news in a time of a falling dollar and the atrophying of American important power? While I am no chemist, I do suspect it'd be easier to synthesize fuel for cars than jet engines. It's time people start demanding the other side of the coin be explored.

2006-12-15T04:52:00.000-06:00

Queue the glitter dust...
*The New Face of Uncle Sam*

Thanks to Winston Webb over on Vox's haloscan for pointing this out this bit of idiocy. The last few days of "Barack this" and "Barack that" over on Drudge have already nauseated me. But this was... "Woah", like Keanu.

I'm reading The Audacity of Hope right now. The first thing I noticed that was a glaring example of this clown's idiocy was in Chapter two where he bitches about the fact that [paraphrased] "2 Senators from Wyoming (population 990,000) can nullify the vote of the 2 Senators from California (population 33,000,000). There's something wrong with that."

It's time we just called this for what it is- Borat Obama wants to be Oprah with a penis. Let's not kid ourselves here, he's aiming for the same target demorgraphic: white, middle-aged women. I can prove this. Say, hypothetically, you've never heard of Borat Obama or "The Audacity of Hope". Now someone comes up to you and says I heard about said book on TV. Your first thought? That's right, "Oprah's Book Club". See, scientific verification right there in the comfort of you own chair and laptop.

This guy is a clown shoe. What's worse, is that he's such a reeking example of how image equals substance in America, today. He has no substance, no depth, no breadth of thought devoted to any political philosophy. His understanding of basic American civilization and government wouldn't pass a naturalization test. He believes his groggy recollection of jr. high social studies is sufficient to administer the affairs of 300 million.

The sheer fact this man, and those solar panels hanging off sputnik there, might occupy the highest office in the land, should be scare the ever-loving shit out of you. Oh, and in a couple of years from now, when you're tired of seeing Borat's ugly mug. Just remember I'm the one that substituted in a pic of Mrs. William Zane up there, today. Be sure and think kindly of me.

2006-12-12T08:43:00.000-06:00

Red Heat update

This should interest US papers a hell of a lot more than it does. But alas, with TomKat wedding photos and people getting sick after eating Taco Bell, well, I guess you have to squeeze somewhere...

Of course, oil isn't very much fun to talk about in the Legacy Media. Unless you're talking about it running out. After all, if you can't ellicit a visceral reaction (fear, sympathy, anger, sexual arousal) with it, than what good's the "news", right?

Well, I'll tell you. While the myopic American press keeps it eyes glued on the place where something bad's always happening, the Middle East, the real action in oil has moved north.
With the dollar continuing it's plunge vis-a-vis the euro, Mother Russia is feeling her oats and tossing that heft around.

The Times reports,

Foreign energy companies will be welcome in future as subcontractors but not as owners in Russia’s energy industry, the Kremlin signalled yesterday as Gazprom moved closer towards wresting control of Sakhalin-2, the giant Siberian gas project, from Royal Dutch Shell.

Now, if we we're talking Kentucky Fried Chicken muscling in on Wendy's in downtown Brule, NE than obviously that'd be different, but insead we're talking about an awakening giant telling one of the most powerful entities in the world, "Shut up, I'm the boss". How this pans out will be a true water-shed of just how much inertia the fomenting Russian Juggernaut has.
Remember, Russia is in the most viable geographic location in the world, and stands ready to vend energy to China, India, and Europe. The 21st century is going to be written by these cats, and Russia's holding all the go-juice.

2006-12-07T09:35:00.000-06:00

"~~Jane~~ Gwyneth, you ~~ignorant slut~~ daft toss-pot..."

Como stai, caballeros! I don't normally tread into the uniformed musings of my fellow, albeit famous Americans. Why? Because it'd be a full-time fucking job and I already have one of those. It seems the woman married to a man that whinnies like a horse everytime he climaxes has the following to say about the country she left behind,

"I love the English lifestyle, it's not as capitalistic as America. People don't talk about work and money, they talk about interesting things at dinner. I like living here because I don't fit into the bad side of American psychology. The British are much more intelligent and civilized than the Americans."

One of my favorite websites, What Would Tyler Durden Do? dot com, said all there really is to say here,

In other words, "I fit in better because I'm much more intelligent and civilized than Americans". Keep in mind that Professor Genius dropped out of college after one semester. She was born rich and hasn't worked a day since. She doesn't talk about work and money at dinner because she doesn't know what those things are.

Despite her denying the accusations, WWTDD goes on to point out a barrage of other "America is so icky" comments she made. But let's syllogize what our august ambassador had to say about her country,

England (that's actually the UK) is less capitalistic than America
I don't fit into the bad side of that psychology
The British are so much more intelligent than Americans

For your first point, I'd have to say, "Mmmm, dead fucking wrong." As recently as 2004, the US and UK were both tied for economic freedom (that's capitalism, hen), and I seem to recall earlier in this decade, Britain being more economically free than the US. These last two years the US eeked ahead of the UK for economic freedom, which recently began green-taxation, but we're talking margin even narrower than your waist-line.

Second, the whole psychology thing. Ah, I'm guessing that's like the whole celebrity culture thing, eh? Or would that be "fly-over country" you envision as huttling in caves and trailer parks? Or maybe you mean "civilized"? Well, if by "civilized" you mean polite, than yes. British people are generally a lot less rude than yankees like yourself. And regardless, it was just said "psychology" that made your blanched, boring ass rich and famous. Maybe you should try looking a word up before you use it.

Third, as noted here, Brits average an IQ of 100. Pokings around on the net suggest we're about 98, on par with France, but ahead of Canada. I'd hardly consider that wider than the breadth of one degree of standard deviation. Also, you might want to ponder just how it is that the "smartest" place on Earth, Hong Kong, is also, incidentally, the most "capitalistic".

So in truth, statistics seem to suggest American and Britain are about neck and neck.

2006-11-10T05:48:00.000-06:00

Sychronicity(Miscellanea by Any Other Name)

A butterfly flaps its wings in Greenland. A termite tree explodes in Africa. A guy gets laid in Bangkok. Supposedly there's a deterministic web of events that glue events on Earth together. I guess that's not really synchronicities, in the acausal sense. The only reason I belted out that opening was because I was watching "Playing God" with David Duchovony and Angelina Jolie (her sexiest role ever) the other day and Timothy Roth's character belted some variation of that.

Anyway, went and got the breakfast of champions this morning. It cost £3.34. I handed over a tener cause I'm a winner. I got back £6.66 in change. I kind of snorted out a snicker at that. The kid at the register looked at me funny. Yeah, this generation is ripe for the picking by ole' Satan Clause. Anyway, it reminded of the post where Mike said his change from breakfast came out to the same thing. I hope you're well today, Mike.

Need to rent Doom Generation. If I can even find it, over here...

2006-10-28T05:28:00.000-05:00

So by that logic, ocean front property, weekend getaways to Mauritius, and that Jaguar XKR are all also dead...
*The Dismal Science*
*Image≠Substance Prelude*
Gosh, what brings a procrastinating blogger out of his negligent funk? Why, the same thing that drives him to blog in the first place: REALLY STUPID CRAP IN THE NEWS!

Like most mornings, rather than take the high road and read news sites with mentally substanitive articles, I slide along good ol' Least Resistance Path to the Sludge Report. Just like B/E/C McGriddles versus a Breakfast burrito, it's not good for you, but it seems to satiate something in you, anyway.

The prospectus of this blog, as it were... wait, *snickers* I just used "prospectus" and "this blog" in the same sentence. Anyway, I do this blog, basically to try and provide a bit of alternative source for news and views that the Columbia School of Journalism Cartel and the New Media Prostitution Ring fail to bring to the agenda.

That aside, let's return to the stupidity in question. Over on Sludge, some duder from EMI sez,

"The CD as it is right now is dead," Levy said, adding that 60% of consumers put CDs into home computers in order to transfer material to digital music players... "You're not going to offer your mother-in-law iTunes downloads for Christmas," he said. "But we have to be much more innovative in the way we sell physical content."

Sigh... let's start off with some basic economics. Compact Disc sales are down. They've been dropping at roughly 5-7% a year since 2001. Better shelf-life than the Titanic had once it sprung its leak, but still an unsavory sign. Accodring to EMI duder, this sales slump is the result of not getting "enough bang for your buck". His solution to getting you to trade $20, $25 at the register in exchange for what he's selling? Pictures, Movies, and other things to occupy your eyes with. Herein lies the damning indictment of the music industry, today. The Music inudstry doesn't make music anymore. It makes fashion shoots with soundtracks. Somewhere back those proasaic days of the nineties, one of Satan's little helpers wondered into some record company boardroom and said, "Hey, guess what?! We don't have to sell records anymore, we just have to sell album covers! People are actually stupid enough to think image=substance these days!" And with that, the music died.

EMI duder doesn't stop and think that maybe its not the icing people aren't taking too, it's the cake itself. Shitty music has only gotten more expensive. Proof? OK, The compact disc player offered by the Sears Catalogue cost $1125.11 in 2005 dollars. Today, you'd pay a 100th of that price for a cheap Chinese model. This, despite 37% reduction in the buying power of the dollar since then. However, as our friends at Wired magazine point out,

When the compact disc was introduced, its price was about double that of the product it replaced, the LP. At the time of its introduction this was not surprising, as CDs represented new technology; the volume was low, the production capacity was rarefied, and the development expenses were still fresh on the books. What was surprising, though, was that the price of CDs remained high even when the cost of production fell to the point that CDs were cheaper to produce than LPs had been. Today, more than a decade after their introduction, CDs are cheap to make. Yet their price in real dollars is still a little higher than that of LPs at the time of CDs' introduction (without allowance for inflation, the price is still about twice as high). Thus the producers' profit margin is significantly higher than it ever was for LPs.

So, as you can see, record companies have continually fought market-forces that would drive the cost CDs down. As Gresham's Law points out, "An artificially overvalued commodity will always drive out an artificially undervalued commodity". In this instance, artificially overpriced compact discs have been unable to curry their humble self-estimation of value in dollars. Instead, people have been cherry-picking the roses from the thorns. The only intelligent words Fred Durst ever uttered actually happened to reflect this when he said, "People don't want to pay 20 bucks for a album with one good song on it."

So you see, it's not that CD are "dead". Just as the aforementioned beach front property, weekend getaway, and the future family truckster aren't "dead". They're all just out of the price range of consumers who need to squeeze an ever greater margin of utlity out of each dollar spent.

EMI duder goes on to say,

Levy said EMI is continuing to hold talks with Google Inc. (GOOG) on an advertising-revenue sharing partnership with the community video Web site YouTube, which the Internet search giant acquired in October for $1.6 billion in stock. EMI's rivals, Warner Music Group Corp. (WMG), Sony BMG - a joint venture between Sony Corp. (SNE) and Bertelsmann AG - and Universal Media have all signed content deals with YouTube. "The terms they were offering weren't acceptable," Levy said, adding that EMI continues to be concerned about copyright issues.

Guess the Emperor hasn't learned that clothes aren't stiched of fiat threads.

2006-10-23T09:05:00.000-05:00

"I hope You Doctors are Republicans..."
*A Spoonful of Socialism to Help the Medicine Go Down*

What's Hershey, PA smell like? Chocolate. Some things seem so glaringly obvious that to even bring it up bemuses you. This bit from the Torygraph should illlustrate just why socialized medicine isn't as noble a reality as it sounds,

Hospitals in Conservative and Liberal Democrat constituencies are more than twice as likely to suffer from NHS cuts as hospitals in Labour seats, an investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has found.
Thirty-four per cent of Tory and 37 per cent of Lib Dem seats in England and Wales have been affected by cuts that have been either announced or proposed. Only 14 per cent of Labour areas are affected. The cuts range from the closure of single wards to the axing of entire hospitals.
The findings follow news that Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, commissioned "heat maps" to show the potential political effects of proposed hospital closures, and figures showing that seven times as many cottage hospitals have closed or are under threat in Opposition-held areas than in Labour ones.

Gosh, imagine that? Government health care can get political? Drat, they never told us that in skrool! And on top of every other obvious reason socliazed medicine is a stupid idea, here's the most patently obvious one I've ever seen: IN A DEMOCRACY, THE MAJORITY HAS YOU BY THE SHORT & CURLIES! Piss off the wrong party in power and you'll get the shit-sandwiches come lunch-time. Being blackmailed with life-saving facilities. Now, that's power to the people, right there!

2006-10-11T11:46:00.000-05:00

Your taxes hard at work, Scotland...

Wow, maybe defense should have been a devolved power. Because the Scottish Parliament, in a bid to fill tri-fold election pamphlets, have waged a helluva War on a Good Time.

In little less than a decade, smoking in public buildings has vanished, the Fox and the Hound no longer makes sense, getting a six pack is under attack, and now you'll need a pair of fucking binoculars to enjoy a trip to the titty-bar,

A task force set up by the Scottish Executive is expected to recommend closing a legal loophole which allows licensed premises to becoming lap-dancing venues without seeking permission from the licensing authority.

The Adult Entertainment Working Group, which has visited strip bars and clubs across Scotland, found that five of the seven operating in Edinburgh were doing so without a proper entertainment licence. Sources close to the group said so-called "sex tourists" are travelling to Edinburgh and Glasgow from England because of the lack of regulation of such premises north of the border.

It is understood the task force will recommend the banning of private dances in booths after viewing CCTV evidence of what customers get during a one-to-one performance....
The task force is chaired by Linda Costelloe-Baker, the Scottish legal services ombudsman, and includes academics, councillors, and representatives of the licensed trade industry. Its members, who include Edinburgh councillor Lorna Shiels, have made anonymous visits to lap-dancing clubs.

I guess I should have been more concerned about this when the Slue reported on this last year. It just seemed like a joke then. It's a joke now, but just not the funny variety. First off, anyone with a hyphenated name shouldn't head anything other than an East German panel of judges. Because if you're that pretensious to begin with, you incapable of appreciating the utility of such a joint, anyhow. I'm sure a shrink could have a field day anaylzying this group's dynamic of sexual repression, physical jealously, post-feminist, artschool bollocks. Second, the bullshit alarm went off when I read this,

Community leaders and councillors, including Ms Shiels, claimed last year that sex businesses had transformed busy parts of the city into "no-go" areas for women.

They claim residents and female workers in the Lothian Road and Tollcross areas regularly suffer harassment and intimidation from customers of nearby strip clubs, saunas and sex shops.

If they're really wanting to rid Tollcross and Lothian Road of hooligans and scalawags. Try shutting down all the N.E.D.tastic clubs like the Scrubway and Cavendouche. Yes, I know the names of the clubs have changed in recent years. But same turds, different bowl.

What did those "CCTV footage" (BKA: porno paid for by taxes) catch, anyway?

One insider said: "The guy sat on his hands, while the girl basically rubbed her crotch in his face. It wasn't dancing."

Yet somehow this all gets lumped in with "The Sex Industry". Elliciting a case of blueballs is now engaging in sexual congress. 6 years of idle time is indeed the devil's plaything.

2006-10-11T10:45:00.000-05:00

Caught One...

And now to put it in the mail to the King. One thing that can't be denied by Roci, in all my duck-and-~~run~~redeploy arguments with him over the issuance of money, is the fact that this gem here is a hell of a lot cooler than than the ever tinseling visiages being shilled by the Fed. The Golden bear emblem is a nice touch. Or as Marky B. would put it, the "silver fox".

While trying to find a picture of this thing on google that's large enough to actually be seen, I found out from wookiepedia,

Scottish banknotes are unusual in that they are technically not legal tender anywhere in the UK - not even in Scotland - they are in fact promissory notes. Indeed, no banknotes (even Bank of England notes) are now legal tender in Scotland - although like debit cards and credit cards, they are still used as money.

But just imagine if banks everywhere, again, issued their own money? Hell, you could have everything from Bo Derek 10ers to 100 dalmations C-notes. Not to mention, money could start generate additional value by virtue of the after-market demand for the notes. The above is proof its possible. More on this some day. Along with a rebuttal to Roconomic monetary policy ; )

2006-10-06T13:19:00.000-05:00

Render unto Utopia what is Utopia's... (Miscellanea by any other name)

I'm on the horns of a dilemma.

I started volunteering (again) at a charity shop.

I like to volunteer. Why? Well, I go on and on and on about how welfare programs sucks, how it wastes more than it helps, how it is just communism trying to supplant religious and secular charitible industries, and such. But don't get me wrong, I believe something has to be done to help those whom cannot help themselves.

I believe that if people didn't put their faith in abstract ideals of social safety nets and foreign aid dollars magically falling into all the right hands, but instead gave a little of their own time, energy, and money, we could solve 90% of what ails this Earth. There's also the religious aspect of it. Just as Christ gave freely to us, so should we give unto others.

The one I used to volunteer at lost its lease a several months ago. That charity raised money to research a cure for a horrible congenital disease that strikes children.

The current one, raises money for ~~brown~~ developing peoples around the world. It provides for their needs, but more appealing to me, it helps them create entrepreneurial opportunities for themselves. Don't get me wrong, we're not talking IT infastrucure here, but things your grandparents would have seen the utility in.

I'm all for that. But what I'm not for, is the joint's politics. The nice thing about helping raise money for sick kids was the goal began and ended there. That's as it should be. This place I'm at now, seems to want to solve all the world's problem.

For one, I'm not for "debt relief". Admittedly, in a world of floating currencies, an IMF that usually resembles Mr. Fedallah lurking more than the Good Samaritan, and other shenanigans, one can make an honest argument for it. But what gets lost on its usual cheerleaders, is that wealth is not a zero-sum game and that money doesn't create stability in a community. Rather, it's that stability creates wealth. Stability, spelled out, is property rights and the rule of law. On the surface, at least, this is what foreign aid loans are supposedly purchasing.

The trouble is, the World Bank and the IMF are set up to deal with Westphalian states. They issue loans to entities they're expecting to behave like Westphalian states. But when African, Latino, and Asian cultures operating with band, tribal, and chiefdom mentalities don't play by the rules of Westphalian states , than up shit creek with Westphalians states is where they end up.

Plus, don't let the Orwellian slant on the phrase fool you. "Debt forgiveness" just means that the U.S. is assuming that debt on top of its own. What really pisses me off is when the likes of Bono, sheltering his taxable assets in the Netherlands, tells us to fork out more.

But more important than monopoly money, I don't like supporting an organization that goes on and on about "arms control". Despite owning five glorious seasons of "Yes, Minister/ Yes, Prime Minister", one utterance of Sir Humphery springs to mind more than any other when mulling lefty well-wishing,

Actually, it's only the urban middle class that worries about the countryside; because they don't have to live in it...

And the same holds true about worrying over "small arms" in the hands of brown people. The urban middle class, trapped in the Geworfenheit of Soccer Momdom, don't stop and think that perhaps not everyone harbors a reconstructed metrosexual secretly yearning to get out. They don't stop and think that the reason why they don't need guns in their homes is because they're surrounded by people who respect their properties and their persons. They reckon the reason millions slaugheted around the world ended up that way because is someone, along the way, didn't get a hug. For them, life's a big ol' playground that just needs the right recess teacher to straighten the naughty out.

The Lord of War, a movie that could have been Goodfellas, but instead ended up an MTV morality play, illustrated this naivity. For one, Ethan Hawke's mythical and incorruptable interpol agent is a total crock of shit. He's supposed to represent the untouchable virtue and goodness of international law and oversight. Untouchable international law and oversight embodied in our buddies, the United Nations. Problem with that fantasy is the same United Nations talking about "ending the small arms trade" (read: taking guns out of the hands of private citizens) was headed by a man who had quite the hand in the slaughter seen by Africa in the Nineties.

Oh yeah, you might not have heard about Boutros Boutros-Ghali overseeing the arming of Hutus. The legacy media tends to overlook little things like this that don't fit into the "US bad/UN good" script they read from.

The Left never stop and think anyone short of a philospher king would aspire to the mantle of their mythical recess teacher for the world. When they look at Soviet Russia, Red China, Cambodia, and other workers' paradises, all they see are incidental glitches. When they look at "right wing" totalitarian dictatorships, they see the full fruition of capitalism. The irony there, as my buddy Adrian pointed out, is right wing authoritarian governments tend to kill a hell of a lot less people than their left wing counterparts. I'm not for either, mind you, but it's still something to contemplate. After all, to make a buck, you need to make a profit. To make a profit, you need to exchange what you're holding for something you value more. And dead people don't usually exchange anything, or profit anyone, unless there's an insurance policy lurking in the background.

But before you can even worry about exchanging what you got for something you want more, you hang on to what you've already got. Not to mention your life, to begin with. The only way you can hang on to either is if those around you choose to honor your right to life and property. The choice to do that stems from one of two things: character or consequence to the contrary. Peckerwoods, in the suburbs, usually make this choice out of character. Spiritualy rich people, on the other hand, tend to do this only because of the consequences to the contrary. These consequences stem out of the barrel of a gun, or from the clinking of a jail cell door. Even the choice to not break out of jail is only as strong as the belief you'll get shot attempting to do so. Obviously, this doesn't apply to all of them, but just enough to make where they live pretty shitty.

So in the end, it all comes down to owning a gun. All the donkeys, mango sapplings, goats, llamas, wells, and outhouses you give the Third World are only going to help them if they can hang on to them. The only way they can make sure they hold on to them is if they have a gun. Thus, arms control defeats the point of even giving them aid, to begin with.

Hence my dilemma: Do I continue to try helping others and working with people I like, even while being associated with a group that proudly has its head up its own ass?

2006-10-05T07:12:00.000-05:00

Big ~~Brother~~ Oscar is watching you...

*Don't Be Paranoid, Or Anything*

So it's... really... come down... to this...

TOWN hall snoopers are secretly attaching spy chips to thousands more dustbins in a new bid to put up collection charges.

The bugs can weigh a bin’s contents which will allow councils to introduce a stealth tax levied on the amount of rubbish put out.

The "pay as you throw" policy is also aimed at residents who do not recycle their trash.

A pilot scheme started by one or two councils has now escalated as the microchips have been bought by 30 councils....

Councils also face heavy fines from 2010 if they fail to meet European targets to recycle 40 per cent of their rubbish.

I mean... what's there to say? A stockpile of jokes waiting to be maid? Oh sure. But, I mean, this is for real... Like el Rushbo used to say, back before he outed himself for the finger-in-the-wind-for-the-republicans whore he is, "When liberals are in power, they're dangerous. When they're out of power, they're funny."

And isn't just funny how environmentalism, incidentally, stands as a mighty convenient revenue source? "EU"SSR my ass, even the ruskies weren't this anal to get a ruble.

2006-10-05T07:03:00.000-05:00

Back To Work... (Miscellanea by any other name)

Back to work this week. Work sucks. Long live the work... Or hopefully still, a better paying job.

2006-09-30T15:18:00.000-05:00

Good

I've been in a bit of a huff with the FT, since it ditched my wet dream of a free online replica of the daily printed paper. But with good news like this, all might just be forgiven,

The US is to retain its controversial control of the internet’s core addressing system, at least for now, though it moved a step closer on Friday to handing responsibility for this key part of the online medium to a fully independent body.
The Department of Commerce’s continuing influence over the internet’s root directory – the system that “glues” the global internet together, enabling a person anywhere in the world to find any page – came under fire last year from the European Union, which wanted broader international oversight. Icann, the body that runs the addressing system under licence from the US, has also been accused of secrecy, and of moving too slowly to extending the addressing system to languages other than English.

There's only one word for this: outstanding! Unless something glaring is being ommitted from this story, it's about the only good news to come out of the Potomac Playpin in a while. But, "Oh no!" Now comes the dreaded caveat!

That has raised the spectre of rival, national-level addressing systems springing up outside Icann’s root directory, which would fragment the internet into a series of stand-alone networks.

Even better. And I don't say that merely to be droll or glib. Let the Chi-Coms keep all their rats running in their own maze if that suits their fancy, same for Saudi Arabia, and any other tinpot dictatorship with people who'll put up with it. This is the last bastion of free-speech. Let's hang on to it.

2006-09-27T05:12:00.000-05:00

~~National~~HM Lampoon's Work Vacation Buzzdive
And What a lovely vacation its been! It's not really over, but it already feels like it, in a way. As you can see, about the only sump-pumping I managed on the Slue so far far has been to get really neat little icons instead of drab old hyper-linked text for the Destinations and Downloads sidebar. Still, I got to admit it almost makes this blog look like it's operated by someone who knows that the hell they're doing in HTML.

I guess we'll go ahead and talk about other things. I finished a book for the first time in probably a couple of years, yesterday! Grant you, it was an arduous 106 pages, but still illuminating. It was "Hegel: A Very Short Introduction", and believe me, anything short of several thousand pages would be a short introduction to this clown.

In the war for cultural supremacy, the Right seems to take little interest in researching the foundations of Modern Leftism. This is a terrible shame, because just as university level political science is stuck in 50-100 year outdated philosophy, so too can 90% of Leftist thought be traced back to this man.

Most important thing to be gleaned from this work was a better understanding of the dialectic, the rudiments of the labor theory of value, and a belief in the End of History. Those vaguely familiar with Marx will instantly identify all these elements. Those familiar with the mores of post-modernism, especially Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, will also see the rudiments of that work in there, as well.

The glaring Achilles heel under-pinning all this thought is the fallacious presumption of struggle presupposed in dialectical analysis of history and human action. The Labor theory of value presupposes that there is no willing(subjective) contracting of labor, and that labor is inherently feudal and exploitative in its nature. This individual struggle between employee and employer is, in turn, exponentially spread across entire civilizations. Thus all individuals, engaged in varied and disparate actions and goals, are reduced down to classes (in the technical sense of the word), arbitrarily struggling against each other. Yes, methodological holism is very stupid.

This struggle to supplant the old authority with the new is, in many senses, the politicization of Freud's Oedipal complex. Hence you begin to understand why so many ignored rich kids buy into this shit and wreak havoc on lives and in worlds they'll never tread.

Also found in his writings is the seeds for the secular kingdom come. That, in time, the manichean struggle between the optimal and the unnecessary will chisel away fallacious ideas (and those whom cling to them), leaving only a perfect object in human civilization.

It must be noted, that much of the nefarious, amoral nature of the dialectical method, manifest to us with hindsight, did not originate directly in the writings of Hegel. For Hegel, the dialectical nature witnessed in the course of human history is merely the sad result that people only learn the hard way. He was not a proponent of violence for its own sake, per se. He only looked back on the course of history, and saw the "soft-science labratory" of civilization experimenting on itself, with often tragic results, but seemingly incapable of escaping the darwinian implications thereof.

Trying to strike while the iron of my attention span is hot, I'm also plowing through this nugget. What the hell is process philosophy? Well, the short answer is it asks us to consider that maybe objects don't generate activity, but rather activity generates objects. Put differently, it conceptualizes being and existence as a dynamic verb, instead of a static noun. Yes, it is problematic, and I don't really ascribe to it. My main criticism of it lies in the fact it doesn't explain how conventional objects come into the "orbit" of their respective processes. But it still raises interesting questions. You can tell it's much a product of the early 20th century scientism of its day.

But much like Hegel, don't presume that because it's obscure, you're hence not affected by it. This Nietzschean presumption of "to do is to be" is the bedrock of the "fake it until you make it" economics of Keynes. It is only in viewing all economics as a cash-flow/accounting problem do you begin to see how cleaving investment from savings, and thus inflation, is no longer problematic.

Also, the idea of process is at the very heart of the Dewey Pragmatism that has poisoned government education for the last 100 years. It holds that since there are no fixed truths, there can thus be no fixed way of coming to understand truth. Hence changeing education process and method is an end unto itself, since the target is constantly moving. Thus you begin to understand why we've gone from teaching latin in high school to teaching remedial english at university.

'We should admit defeat in battle with superstition'

HUMANS are born to be superstitious and scientists should abandon attempts to persuade everyone to think rationally all the time, an academic claimed yesterday. Experiments with young children showed that humans have a tendency to speculate about "unobservable properties" from an early age. Professor Bruce Hood, of Bristol University, said this desire to know the unknowable led to mistakes which can develop into superstitious or irrational beliefs such as the attachment of special properties to physical objects.

He has been challenging people to wear a cardigan said to have belonged the serial killer Fred West and said the fact that few were willing to do so showed they believed "evil" had been transferred to his clothes. Prof Hood said the same kind of logic was at work with sentimental objects, such as wedding rings or childhood teddy bears. Few people would be happy to be given a copy of their wedding ring in exchange for the real one, he said, even though they were exactly the same.

Woah, did some up-his-own-ass Scientismist just prove the subjective value of labor?

Man convicted of 1989 murder in first 'double jeopardy' trial

A man who was cleared of murder 17 years ago has become the first person in Britain to be convicted of the same charge after a change to the double jeopardy rule.

Billy Dunlop, 43, twice stood trial in 1991 for killing Julie Hogg, 22, at her house in Teesside. On both occasions the jury failed to reach a verdict, leaving the second trial judge no option but to direct that Dunlop should be formally acquitted.

In 1999, while serving a jail term for attacking another woman, Dunlop confessed to the killing. The double jeopardy rule, enshrined in English law in the 12th century, prevented someone from being tried twice for the same offence. It meant Dunlop could only be convicted of perjury, for which he was sentenced to a further six years.
The double jeopardy rule was changed under the Criminal Justice Act 2003.The Home Office calculated then that there were 35 murder cases in which acquitted defendants could be reinvestigated.The former home secretary David Blunkett said: "There was enormous controversy and difficulty in getting this change through Parliament ... but this legal milestone demonstrates how right it was to ensure that justice is done and the truth obtained at last."

A little taste of life without a constituional safety net. God rest the souls of the lives taken by this man. That said, convicting this man won't bring her back. But doing away with double jeopordy will lead bring more injustice, rest assured.

Polish workers feared killed on Italian farms

More than a hundred Poles, lured to Italy by the promise of work, have disappeared there, according to the website of the Polish police. It is feared some were murdered while working like slave labourers in the tomato fields of Puglia.Half of the missing are believed to have taken jobs on tomato farms around the city of Foggia in Puglia, which employ up to 7,000 workers at a time
The inquiry reportedly also uncovered evidence of murder. The Italian daily La Repubblica said police had heard a farm guard tell his girlfriend that two of his charges had escaped. "I'll not allow them to behave like that," he was quoted as saying. "I've said that today I'll kill one or two as an example."The paper said police in Puglia, in Italy's "heel", were looking into the deaths of 14 Poles and a Lithuanian, who could have been murdered. Some were burnt to death, others were drowned or run over.The Polish website Policja.pl is carrying the names of 123 people who have vanished over the past six years after saying they were going to Italy to work.

Something to keep in mind the next time you hear the latest crock of shit about America's exploited undoctument workers who illegally jumped the border. Also an abject lesson in the failure called gun control, after all "When you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns". Shame Europe never learned.

And the following instance of glaring stupidity actually deserves full color, play-by-play commentrary...
MSPs aim to cut Scots' drinking by curbing cheap supermarket offers

CHEAP alcohol promotions by supermarkets are being challenged in the Scottish Parliament over claims that the companies are encouraging under-age and binge-drinking.

Liberal Democrat MSP Donald Gorrie has tabled a motion in the parliament condemning supermarkets for selling bulk quantities of beer, wine and spirits at rock-bottom prices.

Mr Gorrie has called on the Scottish Executive to act to end the type of sales promotions which have seen two-for-one offers on cases of beer and big discounts on spirits and wine. Mr Gorrie's call for action is likely to find a sympathetic response from ministers who have targeted alcohol as the next major health problem to be tackled now that the smoking ban has been introduced.

Translation: OH SHIT! We've got an election coming up and not enough crap to stick in the leaflets and phamplets! We gotta do something, now!

The Central Scotland MSP is the latest public figure to condemn the supermarkets for their alcohol promotions. The retailers were criticised by politicians and alcohol experts during the World Cup for selling beer cheaper than water.

Some discount deals in supermarkets for bulk buys of beer reduced the cost of a can to 45p, while the same outlets were selling a litre of water for 54p.

Sounds to me like you ought to try doing something about the shit coming out of the taps.

The MSP is backed by Scottish licensees and landlords, who have watched as the Executive has cracked down on alcohol promotions in pubs and bars without doing anything to restrict similar promotions in the nation's supermarkets.

Paul Waterson, of the Scottish Licensed Trade Association, said he supported Mr Gorrie's proposals but wanted to go even further.

He said supermarkets should have dedicated cashiers and aisles for alcohol sales, which should be staffed only by people aged 18 and over.

He said: "When one considers that the vast majority of alcohol sold in this country is sold through supermarkets then the controls should be more than they are in other parts of the industry."

From the 40 million pound waste that brought you the titty bar czar and the war on NEDS, now comes, Big Brother at the Bread Line!

Scotland's appalling record on alcohol abuse was revealed in Executive statistics earlier this year which showed that Scots are drinking themselves to death at a faster rate than people anywhere else in western Europe.

Probably because they wake up and read shit like this in the newspapers.

Jack McConnell believes that action needs to be taken to curb binge drinking, but realises it is much harder to legislate against drinking than was the case with smoking.

It is understood that the First Minister is considering the plan promoted by the licensees for legislation to separate alcohol aisles from food in supermarkets. This would compel shoppers to go through a cashier twice if they want to buy alcohol with their weekly shop.

The First Minister is also looking at other measures, including a crackdown on off-licences and a possible raising in the legal age for alcohol sales from 18 to 21, in an attempt to reduce Scotland's poor record on alcohol abuse, but nothing has been decided yet.

Yeah, because pishheads and jakies aren't quite the minority that smokers are in this beautiful thing we call "democracy", hence inconveniencing them creates a sharp diminishing return on all your bright ideas.

The supermarkets, however, were not quite so enthusiastic in their responses to Mr Gorrie's motion.

A spokesman for Asda insisted that the supermarket was doing a great deal to help combat alcohol abuse and defended his store's pricing structure by stressing that Asda wanted to give customers the best value for their weekly shop.

He said Asda wine labels had been redesigned to include a sensible drinking message and meaningful information about the number of units of alcohol in each bottle.
But he added: "We simply want to give our customers the best value for their weekly shop - that means affordable prices."

Yeah, despite giving the world Adam Smith, Scotland isn't quite hip to that whole "economy-of-scale" perk of capitalism, they're still think "Thrift is blessing" and harbor a penny-wise/pound foolish mentality. I used to get pissed off when facing up the booze at night and seeing empty rings on beer packs that had been picked through. Then I found out you can actually buy individual cans here! Suckers!

Iranian leader insists: I am anti-Zionist, not anti-Jewish

Mahmoud Ahma, Ahmadi, Ahmadhijiohfuckit the Iranian president, said yesterday that his opposition to Zionism was not antisemetic, because, "Zionist are not Jews.
The Zionists are not Jews, that is athe biggest deception ever found...They are not Jews, not Christians, not Muslims, they are a power group".... He also demanded who say they have been exiled from Israel should be moved back there, and that a plebiscite should be held among jews and Palestinians to choose a new government to rule the territory.

Oddly enough, the Scotsman doesn't have an online link to this story. Neither does any where else. It's written by Carol Giacomo, a Reuters chick. Did a little photoshopped black smoke get mixed into this story? Dunno.

Tiananmen protester freed after 17 years

A CHINESE factory worker has been released after serving 17 years in jail for setting fire to a military vehicle during the Tiananmen Square democracy protest.
Zhang Maosheng was 21 in 1989 when he was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve on charges of counter-revolutionary arson.

No, stop and say that aloud, "counter-revolutionary arson". Oh well,

We don't need another hero
We don't need to know the way home
All we want is life beyond the thunderdome

2006-09-18T15:15:00.000-05:00

Sump-Pumping the Slue... (Miscellanea by any other Name)

Well, got a few days to kill for vacation. Of which one or two I guess will be devoted to some of the following tasks,

Finishing the Archives
Using MS Word to brush out most of the spelling errors.
Clear out the dead links and broken images

At any rate, we'll see how that all goes. Hopefully I'll get to drop in and put a few posts forward. Time will tell.

2006-09-18T09:53:00.000-05:00

Exo Squad's on Google Video! Oh Hell Yeah! (Miscellanea by any other Name)

Here's the Link. Relish it before the copyright cunts force it down and then never bother issuing them out on DVD!

In case you're not familiar with the background of this overlooked and unsung marvel of animated television,

One hundred and fifty years into the future, mankind has mastered genetic engineering and populated the planets of Mars and Venus (the "Homeworlds") by modifying the atmospheres of those planets to allow for human habitation. Military force was becoming of much less importance until attacks on space shipping by outlaw Pirates (former inmates of penal colonies on the outer planets) increased with alarming frequency. The Homeworlds Congress organized a new military force to deal with the Pirate menace: the Exoforce. Using sophisticated "Exo-technology" (powerful armored suits that function as impenetrable outer skeletons) these brave men and women do battle with the Pirates. Meanwhile, scientists continued to experiment with the human genetic code creating "the next phase of human evolution". This new "race" was called Neosapien. The Neosapiens possess an incredible intellect, need no sleep and very little nourishment; they are a perfect work force for the still harsh environments of Mars and Venus. The Neosapiens are deliberately subjugated by "natural" humans who fear their superior abilities in almost all areas. Neosapiens are very resentful of their role as second class citizens and soon are galvanized behind a charismatic leader, Phaeton. He insisted ominously that Neosapiens were the ultimate expression of intelligent life in the Universe and destined to rule all mankind. Phaeton soon planned and launched a brutal surprise attack upon the Homeworlds, and quickly conquered them while the Exoforce was occupied with the Pirates. Shortly Phaeton has complete control over the Homeworlds, and begins his plans to subjugate, and eventually eliminate all natural humans.

This is a show a little like GI JOE, only nobody actually hits the ejector seat when the missles come flying. People get sucked out into space, blown up by weaponized ionispheres, and eaten by gentically engineered monsters. You know, the shit that happens in typical combat zones, today.

Enjoy.

2006-09-14T05:47:00.000-05:00

"Well, you wake up in the mornin, you hear the work bell ring,
And they march you to the table to see the same old thing.
Aint no food upon the table, and no pork up in the pan.
But you better not complain, boy, you get in trouble with the man."
(Miscellanea by Any Other Name)

14 days straight, 106 hours on the clock, starting at 6AM and finishing at 10PM. Plus I started volunteering at a new charity shop. Or, as David Allen Cole puts it a bit differently,

working like a nigger for my room and board...
If that ain't country, I'll kiss your ass

Still need to apply for other jobs. Good thing that vacation's starting soon.

2006-09-06T15:33:00.002-05:00

Hedley Lamarr: Qualifications?
Applicant: Rape, murder, arson, and rape.
Hedley Lamarr: You said rape twice.
Applicant: I like rape.
(Miscellanea by any other name)

All play and not enough work are making me a broke mo-fo. I gave my resumee the Jenny Jones Make-Over. As trite as it sounds, changing the text from Times New Roman to something easier on the eyes has made it far more approachable. I inserted "target driven" crap randomly, as it seems to be pillow-talk to the ears of employers, these days.

As always, each succession of resumee revision entails taking stock of your life. As Minnie Driver's character in Grosse Point Blank warned us, "leave your livestock alone". For a soft science major such as myself, this is poignant advice. The bitch about prostituting yourself on various corners of Retail Ave. and occasionally on Office Blvd. is that you know you did damn well more than you can actually write down without sounding like an idiot. The worst is even with a bit of "gradeflation", you know employers expect you too skewer your achievements positively along the bullshit-bell curve, anyway. So you still feel undistinguished, in spite of "creative exagerations" that are now perfunctory in job hunting.

That said, with jelly beans eliminated as an excuse for being a lazy cracker-ass cracker, I guess I shall have to relinquish my other lolly, this blog, for a few days. That could mean tomorrow night if I actually bust my ass, or until my vacation coming up.

September being the slow month in the news cycle it usually is, makes it as good a time as any. I'm still plodding through "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" by Karl Popper, and picked up one I wanted to buy from the Coop back when I was behind enemy lines in the People's Republic of Cambridge, "Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart". It's a promising looking work that seeks to use the fruits science, AI, psychology, economics, and philosophy to improve and sharpen our gut reaction, instead of deconstructing it out of existence.

Catch you on the Flip Side...

2006-09-02T17:00:00.000-05:00

A Thumb through the Scum

Like always, I don't actually have The Sun articles. I can get the titties. I can't get the words written. Intertesting priorities.

Oil Cracks Toilets
The makers of the handy spray lubricant WD-40 proudly list 2,000 uses for their product, from unsticking rusty screws or squeaky bicycle chains to polishing frying pans.
But British police have found another - keeping the public from snorting cocaine off toilet lids in bars.

Police in the English city of Bristol said they have been advising pub and nightclub owners to spray the colourless lubricant on toilet seats and other flat surfaces in the lavatory that customers often use to snort drugs.

Apparently, cocaine and spray lube don't mix.

Great, because 44 people qualified for the Darwin Awards, I now have to get poopy oil on my ass. Where as before only drug users would get poopy pubes up their nose. That's some cost-benefit bargain there. Once again, a new low has been reached in innocent peoples' dignity being violated, in the name of victimless crime.

EU membership costs every Briton £873 a year
Every man, woman and child is paying £873 a year for Britain to be a member of the European Union, according to a devastating new study.
An analysis of the price of EU membership has concluded combined direct and indirect costs will reach close to £100,000 a minute by next year.

Ah America, a little taste of what's to come...

Ban Romanian workers and we will sue you

Tony Blair has been warned he will be challenged in court if he imposes limits on the number of Romanian and Bulgarians allowed to work in Britain.
The warning came from Romanian Opposition leader Mircea Geoana amid mounting concern over the numbers expected to head to Britain once his country and Bulgaria join the EU on January 1.
It has been estimated that as many as 400,000 are planning to move to Britain.

Oh don't be that way! C'mon, just think of the fun in pitting all the Eastern Europeans against each other! It'll be just like old times, only without the stigma of colonizing!

2006-09-01T09:52:00.000-05:00

The Trouble with Legislating from the Bench. Not to mention the Oval Office...
Don't be Paranoid, or anything...

In the midst of tinfoil-surfing, in order to avoid doing something productive, like apply for jobs, I came across this interesting bit from the American Federation of Scientists Project on Government Secrecy,

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) can be used to monitor U.S. persons who engage in unlawful collection of classified or controlled information even if they are not acting on behalf of a foreign power. That is the upshot of an August 14 ruling (pdf) disclosed last week in the case of two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The defendants had argued that they were improperly subjected to FISA surveillance since FISA requires that the target be "an agent of a foreign power" and, they insist, they were never acting on behalf of a foreign power.

Judge T.S. Ellis, III, rejected that defense argument.

But in doing so, he redefined and significantly expanded the meaning of "agent of a foreign power" to include non-foreign agents who may be involved in unlawful information gathering.

Couple that, with the fact that we've begun reclassifying long declassified crap, and you begin to see a slippery slope.

Tenuous, you say?

Well, is that any more tenuous than the fact your leaders in the Potomac Playpen tried to invoke the States Secret Privilige... from English Common Law? It's only been acknowledge in the canon of American precidence once. Which is far less than Supreme Court Rulings that would seem to blatantly proscribe the activites of the IRS.

Still, more troubling than this to me is the bullshit of "signing statements". It's the main reason why President Bush has nearly set a record for lack of vetos. He doesn't need to veto because he just tacs on an addendum that says, "subject to signatory's discretion". I find it assinine that the Supreme Court struck down the line-item veto which would have made de jure what this constitutional non sequitor does de facto.

"The Constitution isn't a Suicide Pact!" The Alan Dershowitzes of the world scream. Strangely enough, the bete noir of the left, Henry Kissinger, had the most eloquent rebuttal that,

"The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little bit longer."

2006-08-31T15:26:00.000-05:00

"Credat Iudaeus Apella, non ego."
"Eventus Stultorum Magister."
*America: Natation of Pussies* A Final Note...?

Perhaps I was a little hasty in my previous utterances. After all, to see something beloved wounded, perhaps fatally, is a slap to the face like few others. Still, love, true love, sometimes means being tough. And "tough love", ironically enough, isn't always found in firmness of hand, but sometimes more in letting go. Yes, just like a bird, if something has its mind made up to go a certain way, holding it back is only staving off the inevitable.

When I was born, America had about the best chance it will ever get at being a free nation again. The soft communism of Keynes was being rejected, inflation was still understood to not merely be the price of a loaf of bread, and the masses wanted what a nigh-libertarian Californian govenor was promising them, out on the campaign trail.

All of that today is an anarchronism. It was a zietgeist, though noble, that has been demonized by its enemies and quietly relinquished by its former champions. Like a precious metal standard in money, like republicanism and federalism, like inalienable rights, like the seperation and enumeration of powers, it's all floating out from the river of living memory and into a watery grave trolled and sifted only by the nets of deconstruction and academia.

Just as the "America" my father inherited from his father had little resembalance to the world grand-pappy was born into, neither will the "America" my children will come to know resemble much of the one I was born into.

Dialeticism and Deweyism have reduced what "America" means into ever blurring simulacrum, with each version capable of being liquidated at the drop of the latest trend in thought. And this isn't just the back-and-forth of politics. Most think this is a good thing. We like the thought of "evolving" societies, because it offers what was hitherto only promised in Kingdom Come: paradise on Earth. We're told legislation and civil practice are a soft science labratory. That slowly, but surely, through statistical engineering, we can falsify what doesn't "work" and through the gospel of abstract induction, formulate an optimal code of governance. As long as a vague sense of democratic choice is implied in all this, than it is germane.

The smugness of this self-assurance has crowded out even seeds that gave rise to it, as the average man on the street couldn't name off his city councilman, let alone his congressman, senator, or lt. govenor. The children of the baby boomers have all been reared in government schools that look back on the past with humanist self-righteousness, simply for its own sake. We aren't really taught what people actually said and thought, in the context of their time. We are only taught that it was wrong and here's what they were missing because they weren't enlightened like us. The lessons of history have thus been reduced to a maze of corrective bracers, absent ideas which they were meant to rectifiy.

And so here we are today, riding the heap of history, self-assured our shit doesn't stink.
After all, the rachet-effect of political "science" assures only what works is carried forward into the future. It is in this Hegelian synthesis, the end justifying the means, that modern society puts its faith. "The Constitution isn't a suicide pact!" Jay Severin is oft fond of quoting Alan Dershowitz, a man otherwise antithetical to him. (Try telling that to the southern confederates.)

This, coupled with the Dewey take on knowledge that it's not what you know, but how what you know helps you to cope, sums up our justificaiton. After all, what good are economics if there's a minimum wage, burgers to flip, and an iPod you can afford? We don't have to really worry, we've got newspapers and Katie Couric to tell us if something's wrong, right? Everything works itself out...

But what of this? If people are happy in it, well, who am I to judge? No one, to be honest. Everyone knows George Santayana caveat. Conmsumer goodies are our bread and wine. Advertising and marketing are our new sermons. An ever flowing sucession of apolonic muses and gods flow out of the television and movie theatres to keep something in us eternally young. And now we have internet porn for saints of aphrodite and temple prostitutes. Image is now substance. Liberty took the pepsi-challenge against bread and circus. Liberty lost. We are content to be a nation with the soul of a moth.

Hence, we are left with a generation that doesn't even know that banks and the government can rob them with their own money. That anything uttered on televesion, or read in the Metro, must be true. That corprorate Wizards of Oz, are somehow greater than sum of the smoke, curtains, ink and paper that constitute them. That they, and all the acronyms on letterhead, are not only equal with citizens, but first among them.

Thus you begin to understand how we became a Nation of Pussies. Despite the fact our homes, our wealth, our privacy, and even our persons are not safe, we are content to hide in the safety of the law of averages. "That won't happen to me", a nation quitely tells itself. The show must go on, and no omlet was born of an unbroken egg.

Of course, this wholesale auctioning off of America to those who neither built it or contributed to its prosperity isn't an all bad thing. After all, the Fed admits outright its bankrupting us. Allowing the peso, USD, and loon to merge into an Amero will probably be about the only thing to keep the economy propped up. In the meantime, grab yourself some CADs before they're par with the USD. A loony that's par with the buck will make building a trans-rockies pipeline from Alaska a bit more affordable, and Ameica's oil problems will dry up. To those who don't mind kicking peasents off their land, the undeveloped mineral and energy deposits in Mexico are an open secret the press might figure out, if they read anything other than press kit releases.

So, if bread and circus is the price of freedom, well, than at least someone, somewhere, is getting a hell of a bargain.

2006-08-30T12:03:00.000-05:00

Deconstruction's Stupidity
*Know Your Enemy*

If you've ever found yourself trying to put a finger on that thread that seems to bind assholes as varied Guncontrol Inc, Undocumented Worker Activitists, Andrea Yates apologists, Take Back the Night screeds, Terrorist aplogists, AIDS activitists, Environmentalists, NAMBLA, Jesse Jackson, The New York Times editorial board, Osama Bin Laden, and Kofi Annan, well prepare to shout, "Eureka!"

What Larry Elders calls the "victicrat" mentality was, and occasionally still is called "deconstruction". It's an outgrowth of Marxist dialeticism. Our homeboy Cornell West spells it out clearly in his reader,

race, gender, sexual orientation, age . . . have assumed the place of the proletariat in Marxist theory.

In short, it says that the fruits of pale-male civilization, from Christianity to free markets, are somehow insturments of "oppression". I don't have to spell out the rest for you, just look around you at the things that irriate you most and you'll find this kernel of bullshit at its core.

There's only one problem with Hitler's (and the left's) presumption they're riding the Heglian "wave of the future": the baby's rolling out to sea with the bathwater. The baby here being what the framers of the constitution understand damn good and well when they spelled out the right to keep and bear arms, free speach, property, free association, privacy, and person. Evil isn't a misunderstaning, it's a fact of human nature. Just because these assholes believe they're enlightened, and know something ignoble savages in fly-over country don't, doesn't make it so. Evil can't be reasoned with or rationalized away. New Speak and indoctrination won't consign evil out of our world, only Kingdom Come.

2006-08-29T09:40:00.008-05:00

"Now to teach you boys a lessson, Officer Rabbit and I are going to sit here and make you boys smoke the whole bag..."
Ah, you really can't make shit like this up!

...During law enforcement's briefing on how they were going to conduct the ATV sting Saturday, Goerdt heard two members of a rival news team talking about "something interesting" in front of the police station at 5315 Grand Ave... When that assignment was over, Goerdt returned to the police station and took a walk around the building. She found the marijuana plants. Although she said she didn't know that they were marijuana plants. She plucked one of the leaves
and brought it back to the newspaper. "I needed some evidence," she said. "I
didn't know if anyone would believe me. I didn't think it was a big deal. I just
thought it was rather amusing." Duluth City Gardner Tom Kasper was given the
leaf for inspection Monday and confirmed that it came from a marijuana
plant....
Kasper immediately traveled to the West Duluth police substation
to inform neighborhood supervising police Lt. John Beyer of the pot growing in
the front-yard planter. Beyer pointed out that he, his police officers and
the public use the backdoor entrance to the police station. The front door just
off busy Grand Avenue is usually locked and not used...

But this isn't the first time marijuana has been discovered growing in a
public place in Duluth. In 1990, a citizen pointed out to police that a 3-foot
marijuana plant was growing in the northern corner of the Civic Center courtyard
near City Hall.

Would these be classified as "insurgents" or a "sleeper cell" in the war on drugs? Does this constitute at a "siege"? I'll let Mike get into the 4th and 5th ammendment one-liners when he posts on it. Thanks to the Sludge Report for always keeping the Right distracted from substanitive things and on top of stories like this and the Chupacabra of Stephen King Country.

2006-08-26T06:20:00.000-05:00

And who sez Womyn can't have it all? Or, Somewhere in Italy, Vox Day Smiles...

Having been raised by a loving single-mother myself, it's always an a posteori journey to follow Vox's thought-process on the role of women in the work place and positions of power. I don't dispute them, per se. It's just the presumptions he rails against have been a norm my whole life. Still, to see it borne out on reality-tele is perhaps the most damning indictment of all.

As The Missus was reading over-my-shoulder, while I labored upon the prior post of this timely and important blog (instead of cleaning up my shit like she nicely asked), she reminded me of something ("up the duff", as she put it) that had gotten lost in the fog of insomnia my current vocation shrouds my brain in.

During the ~~season~~series finale of "The Apprentice" over here, Sir Alan Sugar (whose gruffness grows on you faster than kudzu in Kentucky) was on the "horns" of a delimma involving two shining examples of ~~political penis envy~~ feminism's promise. His choices for an apprentice had been eliminated down to either the diesel-dyke with a 14" cervix hanging out, Ruth, or the more marketable variety of ~~cock-pieced~~ empowered woman, self-starter Mz. Dewberry.

The butch one, when she wasn't shilling herself off for a clam dinner, basically pitched herself to Sir Alan with, "Gimme the job or I'll castrate you!" Dewberry, taking the more diplomatic approach, basically just gave the Stuart Smalley self-affirmation angle of,

"I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!"

Surprisingly, Sir Sugar took the path of least contempt and hired Dewberry. Now, here's the fucking gas, and I quote the Daily Mail,

The Apprentice winner Michelle Dewberry is pregnant by rival contestant Syed Ahmed. The pair had a fling while filming the BBC2 show last year then split. But they had a recent reunion and Dewberry is now up to three months pregnant. The 26-year-old only began her £100,000-a-year job with Apprentice boss Sir Alan Sugar in May. A source revealed: "She is stunned, this was definitely not in her plan for the future. She has worked so hard to get this job.

That 100K per annum package include maternity leave, per chance? Looks like scissors cut paper, as nature-taking-its-course trumps deconstruction theory. In all fairness, I don't specifically recall either one beating viewers over the head with the "you've come a long way, baby!" pitch. Still, you couldn't help but getting the notion it was implied.

On the bright side, she ain't giving the little squirt the proverbial factory-recall from God. So at least she's showing character there...

2006-08-26T04:39:00.000-05:00

CRAZY PEOPLE IS ON SALE AT HMV.COM FOR 7 QUID. YES! (Miscellanea by any other name)
Now here's a forgotten classic that shows how only the blind make movies for the blind in Hollywood, these days. I truly can't think of a better modern satire that isn't mean-spirited. From David Paymer's character singing the "Hello, hello, hello!!!" song to J.T. Walsch's seminal line in all his under-appreciated career,

"'The Thing- It won't just scare you, it will fuck you up for life.' WHAT THE FUCK IS THE WORD "FUCK" DOING ON THE FUCKING COVER OF THE NEW YORK-FUCKING-TIMES??! You are so fired, it is unreal..."

Ah, The Donald and Sir Sugar both ritually jerk off to that.

And speaking of jobs, I'm off to do the dirty with job applications. Oh wait, the Missus just reminded me of something that should make Vox Day smile in self-satisfaction. Perhaps methinks, a bit more procrastination is in order...

2006-08-22T10:52:00.000-05:00

~~Train~~Camelspotting II

British bitterness nonwithstanding, let's take a look at what would motivate the UK to supply military equipment to a country may end up making war on, Iran?

Rupert Murdoch's titty-free rag, The Times, tells us that,

Around 250 sets of military night vision equipment sent to Tehran from Britain appear to have been passed on to the Lebanon-based militia group which it funds and supports.
They were sold under an export licence in 2003 to help the Iranians to monitor the desert and mountainous border regions with Afghanistan...

Through the UN’s Drug Control Programme (UNDCP), Britain supplied Tehran with bullet-proof vests, and soon afterwards, Mr Cook visited Tehran where he was told of other equipment shortages, including night-vision equipment.

Now, here we have a clear cut and fresh case of the true cost of the war on drugs. In order to fight the evil of junkies killing themselves, thus purifying the gene-pool of future headaches for coming generations, Britain has unwittingly enabled Hizbullah to navigate in the dark. Not to be let off in all this is your buddies, the United Nations. Oh well, the lesser of two evils, right three-monkey commentariat? Try telling that to Israelis burying loved ones right now.

Also, speaking of pragmatism, let's not forget about the last crop of super-dooper allies, the Taliban, and the 43 million we gave them to obliterate poppy fields in Afghanistan, about the only thing they can grow there. It's looking like the only thing that got obliterated was a couple of Bhuddist statues, cause the fields sure as hell never went anywhere.

Now, do you really think none of that money has the blood of the 1000 dead and wounded Americans in Afghanistan on it? Don't forget this was given to them a little less than a year before 9/11. Democracy over there doesn't entail boondoggles for local constituencies, just the old-fashion variety of bribery. Now tell me, drug-warriors, how many of you actually have the balls to tell the wounded and the suvivors of the fallen the bullets they caught, bought with your tax dollars, was worth keeping some loser from ODing?

And be honest...

2006-08-19T09:22:00.000-05:00

The Day the Bottom Fell Out of America, or, how I came to stop fearing the end of the world and start loving the North Apocalyptic Union
*Borders, Language, Culture and Some Shit*

Will tells us that border patrol gaurds, doing the job the federal government employed them to do, are being prosecuted by the federal government for doing the job they were hired for. The United States Government, a "sovereign" nation-state, are prosecuting them on evidence levelled by another "sovereign" nation-state, Mexico.

When cameras are looking at him, President Bush tells us that ~~Karl told him to say~~ he'll put troops on the border. Well, sort of. The National Gaurd will not actually secure the border, but will provide logisitical support. Karl Rove's New Media fluff-girls declare a victory. Matt Sludge, to his credit, tells us a force majeure of 483 are patroling a few thousand miles of border as of June, or so. Not even a quarter of what was promised.

And speaking of armed forces, anybody remember the wrong team being in New Orleans, last year?

It's my sincere hope that sometime before the '08 elections, that rank-and-file conservatives begin to realize what a fucking joke the Republicrat party leaders are. At least once upon a time, people still gave a rat's ass enough to raise up a Goldwater to foil the Rockafeller/Eastern Establishment/Moderate wing of the Republicrats.

Now, Bush tells you 2500 = 483, and people just sigh.

It's on that note of tenacity demonstrated by my countrymen, that I harken upon the future,
kids. All this back-peddling and flip-flopping isn't coincidental. Since tersity isn't a quality I'm known for, so I'd like to thank The Glass Appearance for summing this up so well.

North American Union
The North American Union is a plan that focuses on the unity of border security and economics between the U.S., Canada and Mexico. It may have started from a Joint Statement (March 23, 2005) by President Bush, President Fox, and Prime Minister Martin announcing the establishment of a Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America.
The Council on Foreign Relations document Building a North American Community describes details of how they plan to execute this plan. Steps for action include establishing a common security perimeter by 2010, developing a North American Border Pass, developing a border action plan, and expanding border infrastructure. The document advocates the use of biometric identifiers for crossing the two borders and the expansion of NORAD as part of the defense plan.
Perhaps the most massive part of the North American Union plan is NASCO (North
America's SuperCorridor Coalition) International Mid-Continent Trade and Transportation Corridor. The "corridor" would be a highway four football fields wide going from Mexico, through Texas and Kansas City, and splitting off to Winnipeg, Deluth, and Detroit-Windsor. The Kansas City SmartPort is at the center of this plan. An article by Jerome R. Corsi of Human Events Online is a good start toward learning about this project. Mexican trucks will be free to drive through the U.S. using customs-free express lane with electronic "SENTRI" technology.
The execution of the North American SuperCorridor plan is already in progress.
Governor Rich Perry of Texas has already proposed a Trans-Texas Corridor toll road, which will cause serious problems for Texas farmers whose land is in the way (the Texas Department of Transportation has releaseda map of the toll road's path). With much pressure from Governor Mitch Daniels and an okay from the State Supreme Court, the State of Indiana leased its turnpike, I-80 to Australian-Spanish consortium, Macquarie-Cintra. I-80 runs east-west across the north side of Indiana, stretching between Chicago and Ohio, where I-80 also happens to be a toll road. In Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell is pushing very hard to privatize the Ohio Turnpike. If you examine the location of these highways (they connect Laredo to Gainsville in Texas, and Chicago to Detroit and Canada, Toledo, Cleveland, and other major cities from the Midwest to the East Coast) and compare it to the NASCO plan, it becomes obvious why politicians in Texas, Indiana and Ohio are making these seemingly stupid moves. Indiana has established a privatized toll road that will be part of the NASCO system. Ohio is pushing for the same. Texas already has plans to build one. Welcome to the North American Union.

Ah, now has does that sit with you?

Oh, and by the way, this (via Rigorous Intuiton) is a taste of what lies just beneath that thin little line on the map. A virtually meaningless line that your democratically mandatted leaders have just officially erased. Sleep tight.

MONTERREY, Mexico (AP) -- Federal officials have quietly closed a three-year inquiry into the rape-strangulation of 14 women and teenagers in the border city of Juarez, leaving relatives with little hope the killings will ever be solved.
The federal Attorney General's Office intervened in 2003, promising it would try to solve cases plagued for years by allegations of state police corruption and incompetence.
Federal prosecutors privately returned the cases to state authorities in June because they didn't find evidence of a federal crime, according to the Chihuahua state prosecutor's office. The federal Attorney General's Office didn't respond to repeated requests from The Associated Press for comment.
The victims' families weren't told the investigation had been closed; they read it in the local newspaper.

2006-08-19T09:15:00.000-05:00

If anyone other than 5 people ever read this blog, than I would...

Make Ryanair the official airline of Gault's Slue,

A week after Britain said it had foiled a terrorist plot to blow up US-bound aircraft, the authorities face a backlash against a confusing array of security restrictions that have baffled passengers, upset pilots and drawn legal threats from one airline.
The world’s busiest airports are now mostly free of the grim queues and cancelled flights that afflicted thousands of travellers last weekend, but there is no sign of a change to safety measures that Michael O’Leary, chief executive of Ryanair, Europe’s biggest low cost airline, on Friday described as “farcical” and “Keystone Cops-like”.

It's always strange when the truth beltches out of unexpected places, eh?

2006-08-18T05:42:00.000-05:00

"~~Jane~~ America, you ignorant slut..."
(Setting Fire to the Civil Liberties We Cherished to Show those Muslim Motherfuckers We Ain't Fucking Around!)

I've been busy ushering in all that Keynsian magic at the shop, but that doesn't mean I haven't been witnessing my beloved nation drinking more kool-aid that the kids in the Potomac Playpin mixed all by themselves. And to think this lemonaide-stand-of-ideas only costs us just 64.7% of our GDP last year. What a bargain!

Juicy Janes's reported on August 16th,

Security system vendors are frustrated by the slow progress being made by the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in adopting new and improved screening technologies. A number voiced their concerns on Capitol Hill in mid-July, when chief executives of several systems manufacturing companies gave testimony before the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittee on Economic Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Cybersecurity.

At the hearing Deepak Chopra, chief executive of OSI Systems, pointed out that a combination of bureaucracy and the TSA policy of holding back too much new technology for extended review and testing meant that advanced screening solutions were not getting into the field.

"The aviation industry and the travelling public clearly want a secure civil-aviation system. But long lines, inconsistent inspection procedures, and a beleaguered airline industry are not acceptable outcomes of increased aviation security. We continue to focus too much on old technology solutions," Chopra told the subcommittee.

"Every US airport uses the same technology for checkpoint, passenger and checked baggage screening that was in use before 9-11. More astonishing, is that not one new technology has been deployed aviation system-wide since 9-11.”

While the WSJ reported on August 14th that all of the sudden,

At airport security checkpoints in Knoxville, Tenn. this summer, scores of departing passengers were chosen to step behind a curtain, sit in a metallic oval booth and don headphones.

With one hand inserted into a sensor that monitors physical responses, the travelers used the other hand to answer questions on a touch screen about their plans. A machine measured biometric responses -- blood pressure, pulse and sweat levels -- that then were analyzed by software. The idea was to ferret out U.S. officials who were carrying out carefully constructed but make-believe terrorist missions...
Here is the Cogito concept: A passenger enters the booth, swipes his passport and responds in his choice of language to 15 to 20 questions generated by factors such as the location, and personal attributes like nationality, gender and age. The process takes as much as five minutes, after which the passenger is either cleared or interviewed further by a security officer.
At the heart of the system is proprietary software that draws on Israel's extensive field experience with suicide bombers and security-related interrogations. The system aims to test the responses to words, in many languages, that trigger psycho-physiological responses among people with terrorist intent.

The technology isn't geared toward detecting general nervousness: Mr. Shoval says terrorists often are trained to be cool and to conceal stress. Unlike a standard lie detector, the technology analyzes a person's answers not only in relation to his other responses but also those of a broader peer group determined by a range of security considerations. "We can recognize patterns for people with hostile agendas based on research with Palestinians, Israelis, Americans and other nationalities in Israel," Mr. Shoval says. "We haven't tried it with Chinese or Iraqis yet." In theory, the Cogito machine could be customized for specific cultures, and questions could be tailored to intelligence about a specific threat....

Looks like that live-action infomercial CEOS shot on your dime on Capitol Hill, along with the shit the federal government bought off these guys, went to head and heart with the wards in the Potomac Playpin. These guys go and shill their shit to Congress. Congress decides to starts funding the test-marketing of the machines. I just can't figure out where they get these ideas from?

Well, where to begin? What's the upshot of this shit again? That Wonder Woman's Lasso of Truth here is going to give panoptic assurance of character for the smelly, heavy-breathing person you usually get stuck next too on the plane? Well, I'm not a pharmacologist, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn once. So I'll proceed in addressing the puzzle.

It turns out Viagra isn't the only "dual-use" heart medication out there. There's also yesterday's news, beta blockers. Beta blockers work by

Beta-blockers may work by slowing the heart rate, which allows the left ventricle (the main pumping chamber of the heart) to fill more completely.
Some of these medicines may also help open or widen blood vessels in the body. This makes them especially useful in some people with certain forms of heart failure who may also have high blood pressure.

That should take care of persperation and heart rate. That, or perhaps a spike in sodium intake to dehydrate the body. Throw in a few other happy pills for a chemical cocktail, that coupled with a little rehearsing with a machine the terrorists can buy off the same company that's selling them to the Feds, and I'd say your "added security measure" is neutralized.

Perhaps actual experts might refute my hypothetical counter-messures. But the point is, if I, an utter fuck-up, can come up with this shit without even trying; imagine what an actual terrorist determined to get around this shit could actually come up with?

The downshot of this? Oh, not much. Just another of chain being unfastened from your wise and caring leaders in the Patomac Playpin and being fastened around your neck. After all, any honest TSA agent will tell you that the searches don't amount to much more than a dog-and-pony show, until what John Q. Public doesn't see is dealt with.

Well then, if we're not really making any difference in safety, what is being achieved in all this?

This is where specualtion diducts from the obvious. Obviously, this is what happens when you try to make life imitate the minutes of a senate subcommitte session. But still, speculatively, taken together with the broader push make suspects out of all Americans , rather than unfairly profile the fuckers actually out to get us, all I see is the first formative steps towards conditioning a rising "Outer Party" from Orwell's 1984.

Just as the marginal prols didn't really get it probed and prodded like the middle echelon of Oceania, neither does tornado-bait in trailer cranking KISSFM, or welfare-broodmares in section 8 housing watching BET really threaten anything. It's only those, like say, wealthy, influential, and educated enough to have buisiness on a plane to begin with, that ever effect anything. What a serendipituous segment of the population for Uncle Sam to probe and demonstrate the State's superiority over, huh?

Since we're talking civil liberties "plural" here, let's not forget that other harmless bit of data the Feds intend to start collecting off of you: your biometrics! In an uncharacteristic move by Congress, apples were buried in the orange cart, and it turns out a little something called the real ID act was inserted in a military spending bill. But on the bright side, identity theft will evaporate and we'll know who we're dealing with, right?

Of course, skinny-dippers in the Slue will have been familiar with the Real ID act when it was reported here a year ago. Only gosh, there's a bit of a hick-up in all this master-planning. It's looking like the last hundred years of presuming finger-printing infallible was a little erronious,

Fingerprinting experts have long claimed that their error rate in matching prints is zero—but without any supporting evidence... This claim is scientifically dubious, for two reasons. One is that many prints collected at crime scenes are so-called latent prints, meaning that it takes special chemical treatments, or illumination with ultraviolet light, to “recover” them. Such latent prints are often incomplete and indistinct, and might not produce unique matches. The other reason is that declaring a match between two prints generally requires a certain number of points of similarity between them. Different jurisdictions set varying standards for how many similar points are required, which makes this standard seem arbitrary. Even worse, in some jurisdictions declaring a match requires only an overall “impression” of similarity on the part of an expert....
Regardless of how Judge Pollak's ruling fares, two changes are likely. One is that challenges to fingerprint evidence—now more than 20 in America alone—will keep growing, especially in cases where other evidence suggestive of a defendant's guilt is weak or missing. The other is that, if fingerprints lose their scientific status, so might other dodgy forensic evidence, such as handwriting analysis or making matches from eye and hair characteristics. Ballistics experts might also come under fire, because the marks left on bullets change as the rifling inside a gun barrel undergoes the wear and tear of repeated use.

Even the current “gold standard” of evidence, DNA testing, may face challenges. However, matches made with DNA are already expressed as statistical probabilities rather than as certainties. Thus it is the admitted error of DNA testing, rather than its claims to infallibility, that will safeguard its continued use in the courts.

Now, as a generation reared in Microsoft's granite stability, do you really want to trust that two bytes of information could not be misread on your National ID, resulting in your being fined, detained, or worse? Reality isn't always as neat as it sounds on paper or looks on TV. And as we reported here an year-and-a-half ago, buearucrats already have a track record of identity peddling. Still feeling all of this is going to somehow make you safer? Even only incidentally?

To make an awful metaphor, America's security policy is like a horse. It's a horse with post-structural blinders that's guided by an ever ellusive inductive carrot-on-a-stick. This has been done in the name of deconstructed fairness. But it is neither fair or even effective.

There's already a time-tested solution to America's security problem. It's one Israel has been using all along. It's called profiling. We know damn good and well who wants to kill us. We know damn good and well where they come from. Heard of an El Al flight getting fucked with, as of late?

Of course, policy wonks in Washington seem to still labor under the illusion that good intentions pay for themselves and equality-of-misery is the only equality there is. The Israelis have never had the luxury of this misconception. They also have seen a lot less threat of sky-terror than we have. The Israelis realized that there's only a finite amount of policing power to go around, and that trying to stretch those resources beyond limits was just stupid, even it sounds enlightened. So, using some basic economics, they realized it would probably be wisest to start figuring out just where those resources might be best spent. It turns out the answer wasn't that hard to reckon: the demographic most terrorist come out of!

Profiling those we know most likely to hurt us is more than fair. It's fair for car insurance companies that profile young, single males for higher rates. It's fair for you to be more concerned by a large group of hoodlum looking losers walking past than a large group of Mormon Missionaries. It is not fair to ensare all Americans in some idiotic null-hypothesis of being potential terrorists in order to satisify the whinging of professional ethnics and the fetish of scientism.

Remember government control is only going to rachet.

Start deciding who it's going to squeeze.

2006-08-18T03:33:00.000-05:00

Miscellanea

Move over Michael Keaton! Actually, what the hell ever happened to Michael Keaton? Oh yeah, he was part of the first wave of phasing-out actual acting in movies and replacing it with moth-souled, meathead whores that conceptualize themselves living merchandise.

Anyhow, it's looking like a really action-packed day off from work chock-full cleaning, more cleaning, grooming the cat, possibly going to the gym, and perhaps even doing some job-hunting like I should instead of bitching about the the Sisyphian curcuit my weekly schedule has assumed.

On the bright side being at the centre of likely targets for terrorism in Britain, I caught an improv performance by the Jim Hansen puppeteers. It admittedly had a diminishing return for laughs, due to the curveballs the audience were throwing them for material, but was great all the same.

They had this one improv where the audiance had to give them two random subjects to formulate a hypothetical literary criticism about. They chose how Robin Hood was a metaphor for the sexual repression of lesbians. Yeah, this show was that fucked up brilliant. What made the bit kick-ass though was the cigarette smoking French Muppet (I'm laughing even thinking about it) that didn't actually contribute anything, yet criticizing everything the other muppets deliberated. The French Muppet would always interject by announcing himself as, "I zam a vreally annoying French Person", and, "Az a French Person whouz duzzint knu shhhit!". The Muppets finally connected the peices the audiance gave them (Lesbianism and Robin Hood) by realizing that Robin is both a boy and girl's name, Robin (symbol of lesbians) robbed from the woman-rich patriarchy and gave to needy lesbians. They closed the bit with one of the intellectual Muppets asking the French one (more or less), "Is there anyting you'd like to add? You know, or actually even contribute anything at all, as opposed to just jumping in after others have done all the work?"

Fucking priceless like Mastercard...

If you're old enough to remember Mr. Mom, than you're old enough to know where clicking on Statler and Waldorf will take you, and that it's NOT SAFE FOR WORK ;-)

2006-08-17T08:18:00.000-05:00

Update from Cobra Commander...

Saw this one at Juicy Jane's, and since super-dooper news sleuth Matt Drudge was too busy rationalizing his disgust with Sex and The City and linking to videos of innocent persons being beheaded, I'll gladly bring it to your attention instead...

Two audio statements released by Osama bin Laden since late April suggest that Al-Qaeda is taking an increasing interest in East Africa. Bin Laden identified Sudan as a natural focus for the spread of jihadist activity from Arabia and backed the recent Islamist victories in Somalia.

Bin Laden on Sudan

Bin Laden's 23 April statement was strongly critical of the peace agreement signed between Sudan's military-Islamist central government and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) in January 2005. Disregarding the non-Muslim identity of the southern Sudanese, Bin Laden stated: "Nobody, whoever he is, has the right to accede an inch of the land of Islam and the south will remain an inseparable part of the land of Islam."

He went on to identify the post-2003 Darfur conflict as part of the same "continuous Crusader-Zionist war against Muslims", a less credible assertion given that the combatants are all Muslims. Whereas Western commentators tend to blame the Khartoum government for exacerbating the Darfur conflict by arming and inciting the local Arab minority against the various non-Arab groups, Bin Laden accuses the US of exploiting inter-tribal tensions to stir rebellion in the province as a pretext for "sending in Crusader troops to occupy the region and steal its oil".

Bin Laden on Somalia

In a statement released on 1 July, Bin Laden praised the Islamist forces in Somalia that seized control of most of Mogadishu from a coalition of US-inspired warlords on 5 June. He urged resistance against future peacekeepers, including those from so-called Islamic states.

Bin Laden's worldview contradicts local perceptions in both Somalia and Darfur, where the conflicts are not seen as part of a globalised struggle against anti-Islamic forces. Both conflicts pit Muslims against Muslims. In the case of Darfur, it may be argued that at least two of the three main rebel factions are already committed to an Islamist agenda, although Bin Laden appears to approve of neither.

Something to keep in mind.

2006-08-14T11:03:00.000-05:00

Miscellanea

Tonight's forecast calls for a sprinkling of jelly beans and a lot of good fucking music. Kasabian, to be exact. If you've never heard of them, don't worry, it's not your fault. Blame Simon Cuntley for tossing the Spice Girls monkey-wrench into the recording industry gears and having British music contrabanned. I'll get into this later. Any rate, if you thought pop music could no longer be enjoyable, than look no farther than here to be refuted. Here's a couple of the mediocre songs (which naturally their A&R schlubs zeroed in on to promote), but they're still better than any of the shit KISSFM syringes into your ears over 'States-side. Catch you on the flip side.

2006-08-14T09:52:00.000-05:00

(This is Why) We're all Living in Amerika!
*The Dismal Science*

Saw this one in the WSJE this weekend and it reminded me of this nugget from last year.

Deutche Telekom said net profit in the scond quarter fell 14%... DT joins an expanding list of European telecom incumbents scaling back growth forecasts as consumers migrate from traditional fixed-line telephony to wireless and Internet-based services offered by a growing number of smaller carriers at ever-cheaper prices.

Gosh, ain't that something? The only dog-eating-dog is big corporatist buisiness' own ass.

A Priori economics demonstrated.

2006-08-13T10:30:00.000-05:00

Miscellanea

Greetings from the land where lads are lads and the sheep are skeered. Just got back from a nice, relaxing camping trip that wasn't so relaxing. And to top it off: The house is mine this afternoon, MUHAHAHAHA! No Frogistani background chatter. No bitching and hollering. Just what the doctor ordered.

Pleanty of shit going on, like always. But I guess there's no need in me telling you that the Apocalypse is cranking along swimingly. Picked up a copy of the WSJ Europe weekend-wrap up. It's actually a nice little recap without so much of the bullshit. Pan-handled some blog fodder from it. Anyhow, had this for a view this morning. Thought I'd share. Also, on a complete aside, I gave the original plumbing a test-drive. Bonnie, as the locals say.