Security, my ass

As recent events in Spain go to show, there is simply no effective protection against random acts of violence^*. As recent events in America go to show this country has become obsessed with "protecting" itself, ostensibly via a show of force and a show of enforcement. From "Homeland Security" to taking ones shoes off at the airport, all are intended to quell our paranoid fear and inspire loathing in those that would conspire to endanger our false sense of security.

So I was not the least surprised to travel to and from John Wayne Airport (Orange County, California) without ever having my identity checked. Yes, at my journey's start my drivers license was never asked for or looked at, and on my return it was asked for but not checked. In fact its authenticity received less scrutiny than the credit card of someone buying thee bucks worth of groceries at the local Safeway, not to mention the pathetic lack of credibility ensured by a drivers license. I mean, there are still states that don't even have photo on this most essential and more to the point trusted form of identification.

Okay, so I did have to pass through the compulsory vanguard of metal detectors, but as anyone should know, it is perfectly possible to construct not only a lethal cutting device, but also an entire gun from plastic. So it goes without saying I place as much faith in metal detectors for protecting me from evil doers as I do in a chocolate teapot for brewing my afternoon cuppa. If someone in TV land wants to make a real name for themselves then they should think about a new reality TV show. In it two competing teams are challenged to construct the most leathal weapon possible from random household items that will pass unnoticed through airport security. I guarantee you that even the most naivee team will be able to achieve this in short order, let alone your average and determined evil doer.

In fact all evidence seems to suggest that the major contributor to weapons being on board planes on 9/11 was in fact our old friend, or enemy, human error. With "red teams" smuggling guns and bombs on planes with an alarming success rate such an event was almost bound to happen if there was someone willing to exploit the weakness. However regardless of human error such as I encountered this weekend, what do they say? Where there's a will there's a way. So the only real way to ensure safety is to remove the will and that's what these folks "in control" just don't get. Until they do I'll be the first to volunteer to earn my future air miles with "Naked Airlines" where everyone goes "au natural" and let all the paranoid fly by "Full Metal Jacket Airlines" where everyone goes fully armed "avec les weapons aux mass destruction".

^*I'll refrain from using the subjective and ill defined term "terrorism"

Alistair Cooke, from America with Love

I learned tonight with much sadness that Alistair Cooke passed away today. He has been broadcasting "Letter from America" for 58 years now and that's much longer than my lifetime. I can remember my mother listening to his radio show since my earliest days and his voice has always been one of my strongest associations between Britain and the USA. In fact my earliest emails to my family from America were entitled "Letter from America".

Living in a flat overlooking Central Park he certainly enjoyed and shared a unique view of America few had the opportunity to enjoy. Speaking on his 3,000 broadcast he summized: "In America, the race is on between its decadence and its vitality, and it has lots of both." Well Alistair, I couldn't agree more. My hat is off to you and I'll soon be smoking a cigar and raising a glass in your honour and in thanks for all the letters.

OurMart - the peoples anti-WalMart

As regular readers of LDTT will have figured out, its not big corporations I loathe and detest, its the fact that they ultimately have no direct responsibility for the community they derive all their benefit from. Thats inspite of the fact that "we the people" are actually the ones who are their customers. You see the very small number of people who run these mega-corporations have a symbiotic relationship with the very small number of people who run the government, and the majority which is the rest of us seldom get a look in over saying what happens, except perhaps the opportunity to change the color of the shirts in charge once every two years, and the name of the stuffed executive shirt in charge once every four years.

However in a wonderful example of "we the people" turning the normal order of things on its head (or arguably on its feet) I recently discovered an article by Stacy Mitchell. In it she describes a small town called Middlebury in Vermont, where the demise of a chain of discount stores left them without anywhere in their town to shop for necessities. Some people suggested that inviting WalMart to open a store in Middlebury would be the answer to all their problems. However some other more enlightened people have suggested that perhaps the community could open its own store with financing raised by the community and all the benefits going back to that community instead of into large corporate growth plans, financing corporate debt, and paying dividends to out of town stock holders. The article describes the various business structures that can be used to start and run such community controlled ventures, and how many have been extremely successful at doing exactly what they were formed to do - serving the local community.

You see when a corporation's owners are all local, and the capital to start it is local, when the customers are local, and the business decisions made are felt by those who make them then its hardly surprising you get a company that has a strong interest in serving the local community. More to the point such a community owned corporation doesn't need a private Jet, an annual junket to Hawaii, an entire marketing team trying to lure you into the store, and a CEO making hundreds of times what the checkout guy makes.

When the owners are out of town, out of state, or even out of the country, when the captial comes from thousands of people who have never even been to your town and just want their tax free dividends, well then what do you expect? Well you'll expect them to hire a bunch of people to convince you to shop at their store, to borrow tons of cash to build stores just like yours in every town, build stores big enough to make its cost effective to ship container loads of products in from overseas and probably close down your local small store when its no longer "cost efficient" and cut costs by making sure every employee possible is part time, non-union and gets no health insurance or full time benefits. And you'll expect to have to own a car just to go get milk^*, and spend several hours of each weekend shopping at the mega-mall just to get it out of the way because its become such a wretched soul-destroying experience.

You see I really do think that neighborhood serving retail for more essential is the best way to go, and if you don't believe me I think you should go live in the heart of Paris for a few months and tell me if you think differently. For more information on supporting locally owned, independent retail businesses local self-reliance see The New Rules Project.

^*Well I did spend the best years of my life in a country where milk was delivered to your door each moring and your biggest worry in life was if the blue tits would get to your milk before you did

Quothe the blogger, "Nevermore!"

I don't usually indulge in self-referential posts about LDTT (Long Dark Tea-Time) but today I realized that a good portion of the blogs I've been linked to for a while now have either gone away or fossilized themselves of late. In no particular order, the list is: Johnny Theo^*, Rambling Web Girl, Nosey Little Crook, Rush Limbaughtomy, and Wallybrane's Martian Adventures. I don't know what's driving this rash of blog extinctions, maybe its just perfectly natural, or perhaps its a side effect of post primary liberal despondency?

After all these extinctions I'm afraid I have only Super Sea Chimps to report in the "births" column (and maybe a successor to JTO on its way too). In the mean time I hope to cultivate a few new blog links for your browsing pleasure. Send your recommendations to Blog Gently.

^*Okay I spoke too soon, JohnnyTheo is back.

WMDs from space: update

Apparently the $3.5M Nasa is spending each year on it LINEAR programme is to look for 1km and above sized asteroids. These are the size of object that will definitely crash to the Earths surface and will probably wipe out human life in the process. So far about half of the estimated 1,000 or so such objects have been cataloged and so far all have been deemed not to be headed our way in the next 100 years.

Anything smaller stands a better chance of not quite making it to the Earths surface, and only partially exterminating human kind. But even the smaller ones would take out cities, countries and have potential to cause global tsunami of a scale never scene in recent human history. Apparently is a proposal to start a project to look for the smaller objects which might number in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands, but at present it is deemed too expensive. The monumental price tag? Well its a snip at $235 million for a ground based system that could do the job in 20 years, or $400 million for a space based one that would take only seven years.

To me its a no brainer, even if team USA completely footed the bill it would be only just over $1 per US citizen for the year, shared across all nations its about 5 cents per man, woman and child. Now remember an object only a little larger than 2004 FH may not make it to the earths surface, but could easily produce a several hundred megaton airburst. If you can find a way to divert it or at least evacuate beneath it then you're going to save untold millions of lives. Just what kind of technologically advanced society doesn't care to invest less than the price of a postage stamp for each person to help avert such a calamitous event, but can afford $1 billion a week to hunt down one bad guy a bunch of other bad guys decided shouldn't exist any more?

I think its a society that either feels extremely lucky, or is too afraid to think about the consequences of actually discovering such a risk. If I was Bill Gates, or Paul Allen (who just donated $13.5M to fund SETI), I'd be at NASA's door tomorrow with my check for $500 million in hand. Each one of them has a market value that would be decimated overnight, if not made worthless by the market freefall that would occur if people thought there was an imminent asteroid strike coming. The only way to avoid such a problem is to catalog all risks and predict such things decades in advance so there is time to prepare and eliminate them.

Unfortunately, we're basically SOL until some people decide that investing in the future of the Earth is more important than a buying perhaps one less latte a year. Lets hope we all have a big rock to hide under when the shit, oops I mean asteroid, hits the fan.

Oh, oh, you're gonna raise my taxes!

Apparently "Kerry is going to raise taxes!" is the best old Shrub for Brains can come up with. Apparently he thinks we're going to forget why it is that taxes need raising, and apparently we're not going to realize that they aren't being "raised by Kerry" at all - its just the end of Bush's temporary cuts that are sunseting as planned, and were in any case funded by huge deficits that have lead to the jobless recovery to end all jobless recoveries.

I mean after all, Bush was the one who sold the tax cuts to all the sheep in Congress on the basis that they were temporary. It was a case of "we'll cut your wool, but don't worry, it'll grow back with the economy". If the economy was on the mend by now he would be the one up their blurting "Told yer so!" wouldn't he? But I'm sorry, it doesn't work both ways. When the cuts don't bring the instant viagra like recovery you promised you don't get to criticise others for cancelling your voodoo prescription. Your temporary cuts end up being just that, temporary, and you get to like it, or lump it. Then you go on to find some real solutions.

So GWB, step down and shut up.

Krave - food processing gone wild!

Jeffrey Reggio made a movie called "Koyaanisqatsi" meaning "Life out of balance". Kellogs Corporation makes a candy bar called "Krave". The 39 unique ingredients of "Krave" listed on its wrapper are presented below. To me they are also the perfect definition of life out of balance, or as my title puts it "food processing gone wild". Judge for yourself.

• Corn syrup
• Soy protein isolate
• Fructose
• Rice flour
• Soy protein concentrate
• Sugar
• Malt flavoring
• Salt
• Chocolate
• Cocoa butter
• Artificial flavoring
• Cream
• Malt extract
• Rice bran
• Corn syrup solids
• Skim milk
• Partially hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed oil
• Inulin from chicory root
• Cocoa treated with alkali
• Whey protein isolate
• Natural and artificial flavor
• Gelatin
• Glycerin
• Soy lechthin
• Peanut flour
• Partially hydrogenated palm kernal and palm oils
• Nonfat dry milk
• Cocoa
• Dimagnesium phosphate
• Calcium phosphate
• Natural and artificial chocolate flavor
• Sodium ascorbate (vitamin C)
• Alpha tocopherol acetate (vitamin E)
• Vitamin A palmitate
• Niacinamide
• Pyrodixine hydrochloride (vitamin B6)
• Thiamin hydrochloride (vitamin B1)
• Riboflavin (vitamin B2)
• Vitamin B12

Its a bird, its a plane, no its real WAND!

While the Bush Administration is busy spending tens, if not hundreds of billions working out his middle aged angst over WAND, the Near Earth Object program's at NASA gets just $3.5 million a year. The difference? The NEO program's is looking for asteroids that very definitely are out there (there's a long list of them found already), very definitely will collide with the Earth sooner or later (they have and will do as the see Tunguska Event proves), and very definitely will ruin our day when they hit no matter what country you're in.

Just to prove the point the NEO programme discovered on Monday a new near earth object designated as 2004 FH. Today, at 5:08 PST 2004 FH will come within 26,000 miles of the Earth as shown below.

Well what if luck wasn't on our side and it was coming straight for us and it was a little bigger than 100ft in diameter? Well four days notice isn't much to do anything, barely enough time to organize an effective evacuation let alone figure out how to stop it (which might require years of research, design and execution).

So this time we got lucky. No Tunguska, no global panic, no economic breakdown, no mass extinction. But next time? Well do you feel lucky punk? How about we spend more than $3.5M per year on some global insurance? $3.5M is about one twentieth of a cent per person, per year! Maybe we could find a way to increase funding to perhaps one cent, or even get all the countries in the world to chip in and make it, oh, say one dollar per person per year?

Its a kind of magic

Anyone who has studied magic tricks will know that a key part of many tricks is the act of deception. An example would be creating a fancy distraction with one hand, while the other does whatever it needs to. The result is that in a flashy show coins, cards and handkerchiefs galore appear and disappear as if by magic, while all the time the viewer was blind to the slight of hands going on behind the scenes.

As far as I can tell George W. Bush has spent the last three and a half years pulling off slight of hand trick after trick, while all the time the greater part of the country has been mesmerized by the magic show he keeps telling us is going on. Here are some examples:

The Magic Show Promised	The Slight of Hand Trick You Missed
National security for all!	Carry out shock and awe military actions and exercise divisive foreign policies to alienate the rest of the world
Enduring freedom forever!	Systematically undermine civil liberties and constitutional rights
Economic recovery now!	Go on a spending spree with the nations credit card, devalue your currency worldwide, and take the wrecking ball to the manufacturing industry
Steady leadership always!	Perform more U-Turns in policy since election than could ever fit in this table
The People's President for all!	Be elected by less than the popular majority of Americans, take most of your money from corporate interests, dish out favors to your donors like they were two a penny.
George Bush - champion of the environment everywhere!	Unleash the chainsaws! Let the oil flow! Burn baby burn!

Well now it appears that perhaps a few people watching the magic show have finally noticed its not magic at all. Of course a good number have been been screaming from the back of the hall "its a trick, its a trick!" for years. However their feeble shouts have consistently been drowned out by the amplified applause machines of organized media deception.

The first awakening award goes to Howard Stern who I mentioned last month in Indecency used as a smoke screen to silence shock-jocks new anti-Bush stance. Since being canned by Clear Channel Stern has gone on to take every opportunity to point out that the next President elected in November should be anybody but Bush again. Now Culture War May Find WMD tells us the full story and how Clear Channel is engaged in Bush's magic tricks, firing Stern for indecency and hiring Michael Savage, whom MSNBC fired for calling a viewer a "sodomite" and telling him to "get AIDS and die?".

I can only hope that this is just the first of many more awakenings in the mesmerized Bush audience, and hopefully they will all have a voice at least as loud and well focused as Stern's.

United in death

I was amazed to read that today millions of Spaniards took to the streets in peaceful protest and mourning of the deaths in Madrid. It was a very untypically American response but silly me, they are Europeans, not Americans. In America we cowered at home until the Commander-in-Chief said "go shopping". And we did. Then a few months later we went bombing while all the time the much mocked question "why do they hate us?" went unanswered, ignored and unappeased in our hearts and minds.

What did this teach us? Well absolutely nothing other than kicking butt feels good. But that's entirely in line with the "feel good" philosophy of America which is often inserted to replace "pursuit of life, liberty and happiness" without a second thought. However just how many times must each individual, each society learn that what feels good is often not the best course of events to pursue for overall gain? Isn't this exactly the lesson of team playing vs. individual pursuit of personal gain?

Somewhere along the line it seems to me that the world has to realize and start acting as if it has one common goal. It has to cease and desist with individualistic goals and aspirations and unite as one. Time and time again history has proved to us that you can't unite a nation by force, other than in uniting against that very same force. The world has to stop expending its resources in destructive measures against its own good. Therefore each reactionary tactic without opportunity for future improvement is just another huge self perpetuating step along the road back to the caves, and eventually back to the sea (if the melting icecaps or a giant tidal wave don't get us first of course).

Yes I know, as one of my very rare commentors on TLDTTOTS told me, "you don't half blather on and on don't you". But surely there must be something very profoundly interesting and useful to learn from the difference between the Spanish reaction to the Madrid bombings, and the American reaction to 9/11? So you tell me and I'll post the most interesting theories.

An eye for an eye

It goes without saying that the death of over 190 people in Madrid yesterday was a horrific tragedy. Some people will say this was a righteous retribution for Spain's involvement in another persons war on terrorism. An example if you will, of "eye for an eye" or "tooth for a tooth" played out in the flesh, hearts and anguish of Spanish people.

You can believe what you will, but as someone who lived in a country beset by such attacks for the best part of my youth, I can tell you that whatever the supposed justification, its just an exercise in futility. There is no lasting solution to the cause in reacting to the effect, the only solution is looking for and treating the cause. Whether it be ETA, or Al Qaeda, or some as yet unknown organization that perpetrated the crime there will be no solution from a pure seek and destroy response.

Just ask yourself, is just arresting criminals really an effective solution to crime? Is moping up pollution really the way to create a clean environment? Is treating disease after it strikes really an effective solution for ill health? No, of course not. So why is reacting to terrorism (whatever that may be) with preemptive strikes against rogue nations (whatever they may be) the proper solution to achieve national security?

Yes I agree that defense and reaction can be an intermediate response, just as no one would deny building a big gnarly fence around your property when the buglery rate is high might make you less attractive as a target. But is this really a long term solution? No of course not, you need to discover and solve the problem of why people wanted or needed to buglarize you in the first place.

I postulate that for any response to be effective there must be a perception that it will not be the permanent response based on some change in some other conditions. For instance a nuclear defense against an perceived nuclear offence must be perceived as something one is willing to eventually drop based on some unrelated criteria. Otherwise one will just end up in an escalation of "defense" against perceived "offense". Of course the two end up being the same - one mans defense is another mans offense. Just as our "pre-emptive defens"e against Iraq was clearly "preemptive offense" from their perspective, and just as the Palestinians and Israelis can never agree on who is on the offense or defense and hence "to blame" for not turning the other cheek, and just as the USA and CCCP both blamed each other for their spiraling ICBM nuclear warhead deployments. So naturally without a perception of opportunity for future improvement you'll be stuck in a rut of escalating tit-for-tat, eye for an eye, call it what you will, reactionary aggression.

Not my kind of Company, Episode I

I recently came across the following memo from a CEO of a software corporation:

To: The Hard-Hitting Executives
From: Chief Hard-Hitting Executive Officer
Subject: The Problem with Acquisitions

There are some gems here to use against company X, in addition I sent you information about X closing their office in ...... This was the [office of the company Y they acquired recently]. Facts: when X bought Y they had 22 engineers, they cut the work force to 5 now they have 1, Uno, ONE, person left. Would you trust your ... platform to a company who does this to key technologies?

Hit these X guys hard, we can beat them every time we meet them in the market place.

The irony is that apparently the aforementioned CEO was presiding over a corporation that had made all the mistakes mentioned in the article The Trouble with Acquisitions.

His company had acquired another company that had little or no product synergy other than they both had common buzzword in their marketing literature. They had paid a price that was way over what it was worth (think two to three times as much), had failed to achieve any significant integration between the products in over a year, and furthermore had cut the engineering team to the point where 0, Nada, ZERO persons were left sustaining the product.

If I was that CEO I'd go to the Executive Bathroom, take a good look in the mirror and hit myself hard.

Pray for the President...

Protestants for the Common Good have published an entertaining "anonymous piece" that illustrates the folly of taking quotes in the bible as literal and absolute guidance on how to live ones life.

Anyone who has watched the moive "Mosquito Coast" might remember the face off between the bible thumping preacher Reverand Spellgood and a well versed, but non-religious scholar Allie Fox. For each bible quote that Spellgood comes up with, Allie has a counter example from the good book with opposite meaning.

Now the Presidential Prayer Team is busy praying that marriage be codified based on Biblical values which it interprets to mean between only one man and one woman. The problem is, as ever with "which it interprets". Because of course the Bible is full of contradictory statements about marriage and coupling. To illustrate the problem here is an example of how the Presidents Constitutional Ammendment regarding marriage could be framed based purely on Biblical values...

A. Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Gen 29:17-28; II Sam 3:2-5)

B. Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives. (II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21)

C. A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deut 22:13-21)

D. Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden. (Gen 24:3; Num 25:1-9; Ezra 9:12; Neh 10:30)

E. Since marriage is for life, neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor any state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce. (Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9)

F. If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother's widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe and be otherwise punished in a manner to be determined by law. (Gen. 38:6-10; Deut 25:5-10)

G. In lieu of marriage, if there are no acceptable men in your town, it is required that you get your dad drunk and have sex with him (even if he had previously offered you up as a sex toy to men young and old), tag-teaming with any sisters you may have. Of course, this rule applies only if you are female. (Gen 19:31-36)

For another example see Biblical Sense - Making marriage religious.

So folks, no disrespect intended, but leave the bible along with your specific and narrow interpretations of its meaning out of our constitution and its definition. This is a government of the people and by the people, not government by the book.

The devil is in the details

Although widely reported elsewhere, I think it would be remiss of me not to mention the SCO-Baystar story. Apparently a leaked memo has surfaced that indicates some pretty strong financing ties between SCO and Microsoft via a company known as Baystar Capital which financed some recent SCO acquisitions. Even SCO and Microsoft has confirmed that the memo is authentic.

While the true meaning of the memo is not crystal clear, the sub-text inferred by the Linux community is that this is the smoking gun proving that Microsoft is helping finance SCO's anti-Linux jihad. Indeed the money injected into SCO via Baystar dwarfs its recent quarterly revenues. A lengthy description is available at eWeek. See also the interesting story From code war to Cold War at the BBC.

A ride on the dark side technology

In case you don't read Slashdot...

A young Ukrainian woman has posted a photo journal of her motorcycle rides through Chernobyl 18 years after the core meltdown caused the city to be evacuated. Visit her website and you'll see a graphic and erie illustration of the post disaster area. Its something like one of those movies like "28 days later" or "Night of the Comet" when someone wakes up and all humanity has disappeared overnight.

If you're an environmentalist who loathes nuclear fission power, these images should send shivers down your spine. Not to mention the death toll, even though that is widely reported to range from tens, to tens of thousands or even eventually to hundreds of thousands due to premature cancers caused by an increase in background radiation.

People will say "that could never happen here" but remember that many of our great technological failures can be traced back to things that know no geographical borders: human error, and cost cutting in the name of a quick profit. Think about the Hubble Space Telescope mirror fiasco, two space shuttle explosions, three mile island, Exxon-Valdez, massive power grid failures. There is absolutely no reason to suppose our nuclear reactors are any less immune to such a catastrophic failure, and that's quite apart from any incident caused by external intervention such as a plane flying into one...

The pyramid of wealth

AlterNet has an interesting article called "Democrat Not Spoken Here" by Kevin Griffis. It describes why Southerners just don't want to vote Democratic any more even though they might have done in the past (the Kennedy years) or just plain should do for their own good.

The main reasons? Focusing on fear and loathing of "those people" that has nothing to do with their own well being. Also buying unatainable goals promised by preachers of G.O.P. mantra that serve their own self-interested aspirations but again, in reality, not their own good.

The former is something I've always known about, the latter is something I've been hearing for the past few years. When the going gets good everyone suddenly sees a stairway to riches and assumes that they must adopt the part of the rich before they get there just insure their entrance pass. However no-one ever tells them its a big pyramid scheme based on pushing wealth up to the few at top of the pyramid.

Of course the dirty secret of pyramid schemes that everyone gets a sudden blindness too - for every dollar that is gained at the top, someone at the bottom looses a dollar. Another way to look at it, every person at the top is standing on the shoulders of someone less well-off underneath.

So if you climb your way up you're just pushing someone down off the top or, more likely, you'll need some new povety stricken suckers to line up underneath you. mmm, how about a few million cheated stock investors? No, not enough, how about six million undocumented workers, that might do the tric? No, still not enough, how about tens of millions of sweathshop workers proping up your well being? Now we're talking!

As the article points out. Those golden Kennedy years were actually the sixties and early seventies before corporations took their stranglehold on government and started their oh so successful campain to squeeze out the middle class. This created a vast plateau of poverty at the bottom, topped by a pointy Alpine peak of super rich at the top. Where does the mid point lie? Well in 2000 the top 20% of people earned about the same as the bottom 80%.

If nothing else, the article gives a good selection of attitudes and ideas held down in "Bush country". If you'e not a G.O.P. voter then you need to read it, because addressing those ideas and winning some hearts and minds there are the only way you're going to win back this country.