My last blog had a link to the War Profiteers Card Deck from the Ruckus Society. Its such an excellent come back at the Iraqi most wanted deck (that someone actually gave me) that it deserves its own entry.
Notice the joker is actually "The Jerk". It gives a whole new meaning to "playing the jerk".
Its seems like the Friendster virus is spreading rapidly. Friendster is a particularly infectuous meme infecting social networks all over the world as I type. Judging by the extreme slowness of their server(s) it may even be spreading exponentially.
The cynical side of me wonders if its actually the Department of Homeland Security that is running Friendster. They just want to find out which malefeasants know which, and if the yellow-cake road of interconnected friendsters will eventually lead them to the Axis of Evil.
Even if it is not, it is likely that the signal to noise ratio on Friendsters may soon make it useless for any serious use (if there ever was one). I would cite this posting and the testimonials it attracted as typical of the things to come for Friendster users. I'm still trying to work out if someone really wrote this, or if it is a brilliant parody of "totally kewl people-people". Was the juxtaposition of "i am a born-again christian and i'm allergic to corn!" inspired schadenfreude, or are we all doomed to die of the Friendster virus?
I find the news that the Pentagon was planning a "terror futures market" abosolutely astounding. Just what were they thinking? The idea was that they would create a market selling futures in the political stability of overseas governments, military events and the like. Their brilliant idea was that "markets have predictive powers" and hence they could use the market they create to discern how those events would actually play out and to find out who knows what about terrorist acts that might affect them.
Did they really think that sane, right thinking people wouldn't find it totally and utterly tastless to be allowing people to openly create a market to wager on death and destruction? Did they just think it was a simple step from wagering on boxing or the stocks of military companys to betting on death and destruction?
And aren't they admitting that the predictive power of markets is essentially based on the proliferation of insider knowledge. If they can really figure out insider knowledge by market analysis why don't they start by analysing the regular financial markets. That way they can find out which executives are breaking all the SEC insider trading rules? Of course they wouldn't do that because it would point to too many of their own and too many public people with a lot to lose. Much better to create their own terror market to ferret out the "evil-doers".
No doubt the conspiracy theorists are busy shouting "told yer so" right now. After all, as they have been saying all along, the last time anomalous trading in a financial market predicted future terrorist events, the date was about 9/11/2001. So can anyone tell them why the government let the trail go cold? I guess they were too busy setting up their own terrorist futures market.
By all accounts I no longer have to think about the horror of millions of befuddled Californias voting for Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor. Or at least not this time around anyway. Its possible he might stand at a future date, probably when we've all had to endure the pain of cleaning up the huge deficit the "free market" power debaucle left us with. Of course none of those "free market" exponents are making much of how it actually meant shovelling money into the pocket of Enron who had interpreted it to mean "free money".
Anyway, I digress. Suffice to say for a while longer I can now watch Terminator, without having to worry about mixing the fiction of Arnorld "The Terminator" working for SkyNet (the evil power mad machine), with the reality of the Arnorld "The Governor" working for GW. Bush (the evil power mad humman).
Joanna bravely said she'd come with me to see Terminator 3 "The Rise of the Machines". As she hasn't seen the first two movies I insisted we rent those on NetFlix and catch her up and meanwhile give me a welcome refresher and a break from "chick flix". Now I'll be the first to admit I always liked the Terminator series which are some of the earliest and finest examples of the genre I call "Dick Flix" (I'm told that has a different meaning in the gay community so I'll probably have to find another name for it). But I've heard and read some reviews that indicate T3 isn't going to be up to snuff. Even so I'm sincerely hoping that T3 has at least some redeeming qualities. If it turns out to be like Alien 3 then I''ll be wishing I never saw it (Alien 4 was a mild improvement over 3).
However after re-watching the movies on DVD I can honestly say my opinion of them has improved even more, especially Terminator 2. The reason was a bunch of deleted scenes for Terminator they dug up and the extra 15 minutes of footage in the T2 "Extreme" version. It turns out that both versions had some very substantial and important material added. The ending of the first movie takes on a whole new significance with the delete scenes. And Terminator 2 gains some significant character development and has a much more human story as a result.
For anyone who enjoyed the movies (or hasn't seen both) I can highly recommend you get go rent the DVDs and check them out. Furthermore for the extreme movie buffs, the T2 Extreme DVD has an interactive mode. With it you can watch the entire movie with continuous subtitles and overlays indicating all kinds of information on the movie including information on where every scene was shot, how it was shot, stuff about the location, music, lighting and even background info on movie making. Plus the regulation voice over sound tracks, and a whole second disk of material I didn' even see (NetFlix doesn't include it).
Now having got Joanna to suffer through four plus hours of brutal dark portent, I'm just hoping she's still up for seeing Terminator 3 "The Rise of the Machines".
Yes, that was a Pink Floyd reference in the title. In case you didn't get the reference, the original words were "All in all, its just another brick in the wall". There's some irony in the implied juxtaposition of bricks in walls and bugs in windows. Another brick in the wall helps build the wall and walls are for keeping things inside inside and things outside, outside (as the Roman emporer Hadrian knew all too well). However a bug in windows just makes it less safe and as well all know windows are pretty transparent at the best of times so its a bad name for a product that makes an claims to be safe. Maybe someone should be selling Window Bars for Windows?
Oh, in case you don't know what I'm prattling about, its the latest bug in Windows. It just goes to show that you can't even trust the file types that Windows marks as "safe", especially ActiveX which has long been derided as a vast sinkhole waiting to open up and swallow your entire hard-drive. Now with the lid blow off ActiveX do you really trust the Windows setting of "allow only safe scripting"? As all you grown ups know even safe sex has its little dangers, so why should we trust "safe scripts"?
What next, JPG files considered harmful? Of course there's some patent infringement aspects to worry about with .jpg, lets hope that PNG files will remain safe otherwise we'll be stuck with plain old TXT.For my part, I only completely trust information delivered to me in thin-tree format (that's paper to you youngsters). Its better to be safe than sorry.
Okay, so Hunter S. Thompson pissing down the throats of Nazi's may have been a bit much for some of you. So for a bit of balance here is some comic relief. The video is streaming from Nippon TV in Japan so it may be a tad slow to load, but its worth the wait.
Yesterday I came across the following quote from Hunter S. Thompson. After some investigation I discovered it is from an essay in his latest book "Kingdom of Fear : Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century".
The essay in full is here.
I have previously written on the realities of adopting US standards of life, liberty and imprisonment, and the current levels of incarceration. However today I learned that the US average figure of one in forty two being either in prison, on parole, or awaiting sentancing is just that, only an average.
The state of Texas currently (as of 2002) has one in twenty-one Texans are under the care of the department of corrections. Texas is #2 in the country for percentage of its people actually behind bars having 762 per 100,000 locked up. Louisiana beats them with narrowly with 776 per 100,000 locked up. Staggering as these figures are, they are worse when you get a historical perspective. In 1980 the rate of incarceration in Texas was 210 per 100,000.
Why isn't anyone stopping to question why in this supposedly so great country, so many of its inhabitants are choosing to check out of society and get checked behind bars courtesy of the local Dept. of Corrections? And we are not talking minor misdemenours or deviations from the constitution, we are talking major crimes. This country has 1 in 110 men surving in excess of one year in jail. 1 in 11 black men in their late 20's surving at least one year.
Folks, the reality of America the Brave, America land of the Free, or America the whatever the government is raming down our throats and the media is raming into our heads, is a travesty of the reality that is witnessed by our prison population. Its time people stood back, took a look at their country, their leaders, their employeers, their detractors, their society, themselves and ask the very important question:
To me the answer seems, most definitely yes. We have to change direction and stop the pursuit of goals based purely on financial costs, and change direction right now!
GWB is busy fending off assertions that he deliberately included a falsified claim about Iraq and nuclear weapons in the state of the nation. That's a calculated lie to the nation, one far more heinous than Clinton's "I did not have sex with that woman" claim, and far more worthy of impeachment. He can shovel the blame on all his advisors all he wants, but for just once Bush she take the pie square in the face and admit, "mia culpa".
In the mean time, the department of Homeland Security is awarding a huge contact to Microsoft. So don't they know anything about security? Did they really buy Microsoft's claims that Windows Server 2003 was invulnerable. They of all people should know these are as good as Oracle's still advertised claim that Oracle Server is "uncrackable" inspite of it being cracked the very day it was launched. So just to prove the point, for the clinically dumb, today's press release shows Windows Server 2003 has had its first critical security flaw which came close on the heals of four moderate security flaws which were only moderate because they weren't apparent in the default configuration. That's almost like saying a critical flaw in a cars engine isn't critical because the default car configuration as supplied by the dealer is with the engine off...
Commenting on the bug Microsoft could only say "we knew it was coming at some point". So, I'll tell you the day someone hijacks all the Microsoft PCs used by the Department of Homeland Security and turns them into a porn distribution system will be the day I post here "we knew it was coming at some point". I'll also tell you for free, right now, ahead of the time, that... Someone in the government should be running Microsoft through the grinder for equiping every US home and business with one, two, or many more PCs that run an OS that is demonstrably insecure, does not include easy to use security controls, and includes dozens of technologies that are known and unprotected vectors for thousands of known and unknown viruses, worms, trojans, and other malfeasant code that can hijack and disable an US computer in seconds.
It appears the Google "get lucky" myth is spreading rapidly. Folks, get lucky just picks the #1 link and saves you a click. However, so long as your target stays #1 why not? So go get lucky at Google with "Bush and Blair endless love". I still think "Bush and Blair at the gay bar" is better, but the more the merrier. Enjoy.
Californian (or in some cases not Californian) Republicans have been out collecting votes to recall Governor Davis. Supposedly this is because he lied about how large the California deficit would be. Why do I say "supposedly"? Well surely a Republican couldn't believe misleading voters about the size of the deficit is a cause of recalling a leader? Because if they did then they would have to be marching on Washington to recall George Bush. Today he blew estimates for the federal budget deficit by over 50% to give the largest dollar deficit in US history. Naturally this is not the first time this has occured - every deficit since GWB came to power has exceeded the "estimates" that GWB based his unprecidented orgy of tax cuts on.
And if GWB claims that he didn't lie about deficits, he was just relying on his advisors estimates, then he should be firing every sycophant croney that is feeding him the BS that his policy is based on. Of course he wont fire any of them because he has "complete faith" in every one of them, inspite of their continued and egregious errors that are misleading the country about our economic future. Yes folks it time to recall the President (or the president pretender) for continuing to ignore the truth and continuing to feed the nation his brand of bushit that matches his "perceived truth".
This article published at Scoop details how easy it is to rig an election with the latest electronic ballot machines. All you need is a default password, a handy timestamp editing utility supplied with the counting software, and rudimentary Microsoft Access knowledge. Apparently some elections using this machine by Diebold have already been compromised. An open FTP site used to transfer ballot files is a sure way to give a new meaning to "public access" to elections.
Sometimes my judgement about prejudice is just all wrong, but I find this Electric 6 video hilarious, not to mention brilliantly edited and lip-synced. I mean, it has to be that the juxtaposition of Bush and Blair, with doing evil in the place they would most fear to tread, the gay bar, is funny. Isn't it?
Or maybe I just got it completely wrong...
Apparently this blog has been pigeon-holed into the Loony Leftists On the Web category. Its always good to know where you stand with the Raving Right. Just remember folks, the majority of the peoples vote in the last election was on the loony left side of the asylum, so ya boo sucks to all the supporters of Monster Raving George reading this.
Sorry, couldn't help it, I was just acting out my sterotype...
Unfortunately the real truth is that the real heart of America is the Muddling Middle. That fifty percent or so of Americans who never turn out to vote because they:
The right and left always try to field candidates that appeal to the mass middle, but in reality they never attract many of them. The truth, like the evil-doers, is still out there. Probably we'll never find out what they think until the GOP has down trodden them so much that one day Bush II, Bush III or Bush IV (however long it takes) will say "let them eat cake" and they'll rise up and take the country back (so finally they get what the second ammendment was for).
The thing that really gets my goat up, is that the Raving Right actually associate my politics with Bill Clinton, Carter and Johnson et al. No sirs, the problem is the democratic party has never yet fielded a candidate approaching what I think, or I'll wager, any of the loony left (if that's the corner you insist on painting me into). Who ever I might vote for, if I did (see above), would probably be yet another compromise of "us" against "them". So don't paint me with the brush of previous Democratic Presidents and try to tell me how bad Clinton's foreign policy was, and how good Bush's is. GWB just doesn't have a foreign policy, he has an army and a reflex action that drives it that is worse than Dr Strangelove's jerking right arm.
So why don't you raving right wingers just shut up for a bit, and get back to your own asylum while the loony left plays on the grass?
Read it and weep. For those who don't know their history, King George III was the King of Great Britain at the time of the Declaration of Independence. Poor King George III was mad, quite mad. It was said of him 'that he had addressed a tree as the King of Prussia, [and] insisted on ending every sentence with the word "peacock"'. Phew, at least he didn't start every sentance with "God said ..." and end it with "... rid the world of evil-doers".
Just how many weeks, well months now, is it since the "military action" in Iraq finished? Well its enough that I don't even need to go and check, I'm comfortable to say its been a long time now. And just how many weapons of mass destruction have been found? Well apart form the large piles of American dollars Iraq's most wanted seemed to have stashed away in every hide out, precisely none.
Of course this point has been made over and over, to the point where Bush can comfortably just shrug it off and tell us he really doesn't have to explain all over again to the media, why WOMD have not been found. The media just take it as red that he had a really good reason, one time, and they are really too lazy to remind him each and every day, and maybe start calling for impeachment. And the anti-Bushies are red in the face from telling the world there's something amiss here, so red in fact that they are begining to tire and fade.
My thinking on it is either there were weapons of mass destruction at the time Saddam "gone done a bunk", or there weren't. And either Bush and his minions will or wont ever find them. So we have four possibilities and I think the consequences of all of them are very, very serious. No one seems to be pointing out how bad it is, no matter which way the cookie crumbles.
This one means its time to impeach the President for lying to the nation. He categorically told us and the whole world he had conclusive proof that Saddam had WOMD and that Blix just wasn't looking in the right place, but he wasn't going to tell poor Blix where to look (just why no one has ever dug into it). In reality if there were no WOMD then of course neither Bush nor anyone will never find them. Since he'll never find them he'll always maintain they are "out there" just like the truth in X-files. Its likely we'll never know, since their non-existance is something that is extremely difficult if not impossible to prove.
Clearly someone planted the evidence. Will we ever know? If we do find out about it then it'll be time to impeach the President again. I think we can all be assured that some of the Presidents finest stooges are right now figuring out how to plant some WOMD and get away with it.
If no WOMD turn up after a long while eventually the US will tire of searching for them. Quite probably they hope people will get bored of asking about them and then they will eventually just quitely shelve the whole search. After all, as long as they are actively searching and not turning up anything, the spotlight is on them for not finding anything. It would be a lot easier for them to just declare the weapons as unfindable and get on with the real task in hand, finding the cash cow otherwise known as Iraqi oil.
The worse part of this scenario is that it basically means that UN weapons inspections are a complete waste of time. If a country can hide weapons of mass destruction so well that even the most powerful nation in the world, with the greatest survelliance and intelligence arsenels on the planet available to it cannot find them, well then we're kind of screwed aren't we? Every nation on the planet can now claim any weapons inspections as worthless, and then cite its own super-secret intelligence as an excuse for pre-emptive strikes. This doesn't exactly bode well for Iran and North Korea.
This is the one every Bush supporter believes will happen. If it does, and its possible to prove the find is real (conspiracy theorists will never swallow that one) then Bush and every smug, self congratulating Bush supporter will become so intolerable. that any opposition for the next election will be crushed like a bug under the wheel of a Hummer H2 speeding to the next gas pump. And for the rest of us? Well we should be glad that Bush is vindicated, we should be glad that the USA didn't attack under false pretenses. Shouldn't we?
Well no, not really. The problem is that it has been widely admitted by those close to Bush, that WOMD was simply the only pretense for war that they, and the pitiful bunch of sycophants who supported him (like Blair), could agree on. In reality they knew that Saddam's capability to actually use WOMD to do any harm to the USA was limited to say the least, and quite likely virtually none. Saddam, evil despot that him might be, was actually rather intelligent and he knew that any use of WOMD that could in any way be implicated with him would instantly result in the Wrath of Bush raining down on him. He knew that nothing, save nothing, would have given Bush more pleasure than to have been able to implicate Saddam for using WOMD. In the end Saddam was playing a reverse shell game, whether the WOMD were deployed and used in one place or another, or kept hidden up his sleeve, Saddam was bound to loose. He either showed his hand and lost for using them, or kept them hidden or destroyed them and lost because Bush would always say he had them still and invade anyway.
So the situation in which WOMD did exist and were found, would just vindicate the theory that even Americas supposed most evil and most powerful enemy was impudent even with an arsenel full of WOMD. He didn't even so much as lob one missile full of nerve gas in our direction before getting out of town. So what does that prove? Why is that something to worry about? Well remember that guy Osama? Did he have WOMD? No. Did he have a nation state and mass armies to threaten us with? No. Did he have to play hide and seek with weapons inspectors? No. Did he find himself with a carte-blanche to launch a suprise attack on the USA without any credible opposition? Yes!
Basically finding WOMD in Iraq will just mean that we completely wasted our time and $70 billion hunting down America's most wanted and his WOMD only to find that the real threat is still "out there". We'll be so busy dancing a gig around the Whitehouse as Bush is voted in for a second term that we'll forget Osama is still out there, and Saddam is still out there, and many, many more people than before we invaded Iraq will be out there, hating our guts for all the reasons the Americans hated the British right about the time when they decided the worlds most powerful nation sucked - big time. More on that for the next blog, it'll be a cracker!
Of course Bush and Co. know all that. They had a different agenda for invading Iraq, WOMD was after all just a convenient excuse the world might swallow. Remember if that was their number one reason, what about humanitarian reasons? Nope, that wouldn't fly, the "allies" knew that America has an appaling record for supporting human rights across the globe, unless its in their own interests to do so. Now as Liberia and the Congo are exploding into public view we can see why. America just doesn't have the guts for a real humantarian rescue mission with no glory for the winner, or indeed no military winner at all.
It'll be interested to see what happens, but whatever does happens, we all lose.
Does anyone see the irony that Bush & Mothers of all F**k Ups Inc. now, only now decides there is a price tag on Saddam's head? Never mind the cliche that it smacks of plastering the world with some god old Texas cowboy's "Wanted Dead or Alive" poster. Never mind the huge and smoldering dung heap of lies, and deception associated with the puported reason we invaded Iraq. No, the irony is far worse. If capturing Saddam is so important, if he's such the source of all evil in Iraq, why heck isn't the price on his head some significant fraction of the fifty billion or so the government spent on invading his country? Surely putting the price on his head at $25 million just goes to show that really the don't seriously think Saddam is much of a threat at all. Ditto for Bin Laden.
If the US government had decided to put a $30 billion dollar bounty on his head the people of Iraq might just have collectively decided to turn him in and share the spoils, and carry on without him. After all that would have been $1000 each and about the same as one years of revenue from their oil fields once the evil-hordes (US corporations) came over and started sucking their oil fields dry. Yes, that would be just like vote buying on mass scale. But hey, why is over-throwing a country's leader by force with guns, explosives and civilian casualties any more acceptable?
Just how is buying the head of a country's leader with a big pile-o-cash any different from the kind of bribing and coercion of governments that happens every day? The world bank has done it over and over in South America, and the USA does it all the time all over the world. Remember the huge cash pile the US government was offering to buy the hearts and minds of Turkey? Was it $20 billion they offered to launch an invasion from the north? And didn't Turkey hold out for more just like Oliver Twist? Perhaps, they figured, that $20 billion is peanuts compared to what the bank of Uncle Sam can afford. After all if we can easily afford $10 trillion in tax cuts for the rich its not suprising they wanted to put a high price on making GWB's shock and awe invasion easier.
So its quite clear to me that GWB has no intention of ever paying out $25 million to someone for Saddam, dead or alive. Its just another cheap marketing trick from Bush Inc. that someone thought would make him look like he was really concerned about catching Saddam. After all, if Saddam was turned in tomorrow what would our government do with him? Turn him over to the World Court? Well that's not going to happen since Bush doesn't support the World Court or any other organization that might actually prosecute America for war crimes. Maybe they would have a little show trial down in Guantanamo Bay and then execute him? The alternative would be to lock him up like Rudolf Hess in his own custom prison for the rest of his life. The we would sit back and watch his imprisonment fester in our countries credibility for the rest of his life.
Personally I'm just waiting for Saddam or Osama Bin Laden to wise up and call GWBs bluff. Then they can turn around and put an even higher bounty on GWBs head. It would be funny to watch the international "who's the most valued evil-doer" bidding war that would ensue! Probably the only laughs we'd ever get out of the whole sorry-assed and sordid affair.
If anyone seriously thinks that face and voice recognition could be widely deployed to spot evil-doers (lets face it, you don't have to be a terrorist to be an evil-doer) they should think again. Why? Well did you ever notice how, every time someone appears on Arab TV purporting to Saddam Hussein, or Bin Laden, it takes our government days to pass judgement on whether its them or not? Think about it. It takes the government, with all its human experts and super-secret analysis techniques, days to pass judgement. So what chance does a machine at the airport have when its just some cheapo PC running Windows (they always do, have you ever noticed the number of X-Ray machines suffering from the blue screens of death?) and all the time it has is a few milliseconds?
Yes you can argue that the government is shooting for a much higher probability of being correct with their analysis. After all Saddam has a $25M price tag on his head (I'll be blogging about that next) so you want to be damned sure you're right. Right? Sorry but I think that is a bogus argument. The reason is, if and when face and voice recognition are widely deployed at our airports, on our streets, and in our phone systems, there will quite literally be tens of billions of recognition events every day. Hence any technology that is going to ever stand a chance of being practical will have to have an extremely low false positive rate. Otherwise thousands if not millions of people will be stopped, hauled off and get accused of being evil-doers every day. And if its false positive rate is bad than its likely that a good number of legitimate evil-doers will walk on by due to false negatives.
Also, we shouldn't forget that Saddam is one the most studied, photographed, and video-taped people on earth. Automated systems are lucky to get a few blurry ten by eights to base their recognition on. So I believe all the evidence indicates that fully automated systems are still years, if not decades away from being useful. The government should just stop wasting their money on the foolish notion it can use these systems now to "protect us". It should instead channel its efforts into finding out who is responsible for all of these people wanting to do "evil" against us. I for one, could recognize that person in a flash...
Okay, I'm a little late on this one, but its still bugging me over a week later. I just fail to see why MoveOn didn't have the foresight to run their primary with instant run-off voting rules. Aren't they supposed to be a progressive organization that would actually support something as important as instant run-off?
I seem to remember complaints from MoveOn about how the people voting on it were worrying about voting for one candidate or another, just because they thought in the real Democratic primary their candidate wouldn't win. Well then, aren't those exactly the conditions under which instant run-off rules? If you really support someone but are afraid everyone else wont support them then go ahead put them first, and put your perception of the mass vote popularity poll winner second. Maybe you'll be pleasently suprised!MoveOn missed a huge opportunity to show over one million voters, and all the mass media following their primary, just how instant run off works and can change the voting habits of Americans.
It looks like I'm not the only one who thinks the Department of Homeland Security color coded terroism alert status is a bunch of horse hooey (to put it politely). Its clearly just a clever marketing ploy to instill fear in the more gullable population. The only thing they missed out was the fluorescent purple level, to tell us the government fucked up, the WOMDs fell, and we've all been irradiated. Oh, and the white level to tell us we've all been lulled into such stupidity by the government brain-washing that we've been carted off to a padded white cell.
The other folks thinking like me are Democracy Means You where they have developed the Smiley Alert System. While you're visting the site check out some of their serious articles, its not all laughs and smilies at Democracy Means You!