Solidarity

I'm thinking that of all the states in which conserviative governors are gearing up to try to destroy public sector unions, maybe Wisconsin wasn't the right place to start.

Mahlon Mitchell, president of the Professional Firefighters of Wisconsin, who pledged solidarity with his fellow state workers, even though firefighters and police were spared from Gov. Scott Walker's attempt to bust state unions' bargaining power. Among Mitchell's pledges: The state's safety workers would agree to forgo some of their privileges and benefits to preserve collective bargaining for all the state's union workers. "We have a unique job," he said, "but so does the snow-plow driver, so does the janitor, so does a nurse, so does a teacher at UW college.

Honestly I can't tell what's going to happen here. Russ Feingold is going around describing our time as "the Gilded Age on Steroids," and I'm not sure he's wrong. But I also don't see the antidote, so I'm hoping he's wrong and that we bounce back towards something like the mid-90s status quo.

Yeah I know what you mean

I don't have a source or context for that, but I like it.

WTF, Texas

On the one hand, Rick Perry is quick to proclaim that Texas's limited, business-friendly government is responsible for Texas weathering this recession better than other states.

Meanwhile, in reality, Texas school districts are laying off tons of teachers--yes, I weighed them--due to budget shortfall, meaning we will continue to have one of the worst educations systems in these United States.

Also in reality, rolling freakin' brownouts. Clearly our limited government is up to the challenge.

Just because I need to vent, let me introduce Apologist for the Incompetent Regime, Bradley Griffin:

While it might relieve some tension to complaining via news outlets, on Facebook, and / or calling the electricity retailer (Reliant, TXU, Ambit, or others) we should all be thankful, not complaining.

Controlled outages are good.

When energy reserves have been depleted, rolling blackouts provide a "last resort" answer.

Controlled outages allow your power to come back on! When energy consumption is high, ERCOT implements rolling blackouts to prevent circuit breakers from tripping and generators from overloading. If the controlled blackouts were not executed, there would be a total blackout...for everyone!

...

When another round of rolling blackouts hits our area, be happy in anticipation that your power will come back on.

Says $2 Bill:

Hitler also had a few good ideas

Genghis Khan has been branded the greenest invader in history – after his murderous conquests killed so many people that huge swathes of cultivated land returned to forest.

The Mongol leader, who established a vast empire between the 13th and 14th centuries, helped remove nearly 700million tons of carbon from the atmosphere, claims a new study.

The deaths of 40million people meant that large areas of cultivated land grew thick once again with trees, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

And, although his methods may be difficult for environmentalists to accept, ecologists believe it may be the first ever case of successful manmade global cooling.

via

Metaphor's a hell of a drug

According to NPR's Morning Edition, the reason Michelle Bachman looked so crazy last night on CNN is that she was facing the right (as in to the right) camera instead of the left (as in correct for TV) camera.

The right camera was the webcam broadcasting to Tea Party nation over our beloved tubes. So to the Tea Party, she was eye to eye. To the rest of us, she was looking a little to her right.

Life, she is so sweet to offer us such as this to blog about.

Casual Violence

I don't know what the motive for the shooting in Arizona was.  Anyone that tells you that they do is either a liar or the shooter.  And I wont accept the easy scapegoats like Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck either.

But not knowing the specifics of that particular event won't change the grim reality that we have a problem with violence in this country.  A problem with casual violence.  Violence seen as a reasonable response to any of life's unpredictable twists and turns.   Casual violence permeates our language to the extent that I recently heard a man declare that he would 'kill for a cigarette.'  Not to take nicotine addiction lightly (I was a nicotine addict for 20+ years), but the fact that the individual in question wasn't actually killing at the time that he made that declaration was little comfort.

The common vernacular of sports holds that great players are 'warriors' even at a time when many of our young people have experienced the un-glamorous and terrifying truth that 'warrior' is something that no sane person would aspire to.  War, among all human endeavors, should be condemned out of hand.  War should be the bane of all sane and thinking people. The idea that the vocabulary of war is casually invoked in metaphor to describe something like a football game should be repugnant to anyone.

Likewise political speech should not require martial metaphors to be effective.  War is about killing people to achieve political ends.  War fighting, therefor, should be the last resort of civilized people to resolve any difference.  Casually evoking the language of warfare in political discourse must be rejected.  Those who use it must be held to account by all reasonable people.

Wikileaks saves the internet

While some of the companies that targeted Wikileaks were subject to direct political pressure from American politicians, others seem to have volunteered—a decision that must have been easy to make given all the Wikileaks-bashing in Congress. Wikileaks survived these betrayals; but the myth that today’s Internet is the best of all possible worlds didn’t.

That the Internet is heavily dominated by for-profit companies, and therefore subject to influence from governments, is not a ground-breaking discovery.... Until Cablegate, this situation, while theoretically problematic, was something that most geeks accepted as some kind of necessary evil inherent to capitalism. It seemed unlikely that Amazon or PayPal would bow down to pressure from the governments of Vietnam, Azerbaijan, or Tunisia...  Likewise, it seemed unlikely that democratic governments would want to bully the intermediaries rather than pursue their grievances via the legal system.

What Wikileaks has revealed is that that it doesn’t take all that much pressure (or even controversy) to force Internet intermediaries to drop clients that are not on Hillary Clinton’s Christmas card mailing list. Thus, one way to ensure that the next Wikileaks is not mistreated by its business partners is to minimize the power of intermediaries and, preferably, make them immune to political and financial pressure. This objective, as much as the desire to boost transparency and reduce government secrecy, is what presently unites many of Assange’s technology-savvy supporters. And such geeky efforts to remake the Internet are likely to pay off in the long run even if Wikileaks’s transparency drive falters.

mojo

Weather control is not just for Reichians and warlocks any more

Last June Metro Systems built five ionising sites each with 20 emitters which can send trillions of cloud-forming ions into the atmosphere.

Over four summer months the emitters were switched on when the required atmospheric level of humidity reached 30 per cent or more.

While the country's weather experts predicted no clouds or rain in the Al Ain region, rain fell on FIFTY-TWO occasions.

The project was monitored by the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, one of the world's major centres for atmospheric physics.

Professor Hartmut Grassl, a former institute director, said: There are many applications. One is getting water into a dry area.

'Maybe this is a most important point for mankind.' 

I wonder if this causes droughts downwind. BEGUN THIS WEATHER WAR HAS!

via img

A reason to stay up

At the Christian Science Monitor, scientists are using tonight's eclipse to get a better idea of how light from an earthlike planet (like Earth!) would look to spectrum analysts (like us!). 

Lunar eclipse tonight: How it helps the search for extraterrestrial life

Over the past two years, two teams of astronomers have been using this effect to figure out what Earth might look like as a distant, extrasolar planet orbiting another star. By analyzing the light reflected off the moon during a lunar eclipse – light that has passed through Earth's atmosphere – they have detected gases in the atmosphere that indicate the presence of organic life on the planet.

If the teams' baby steps are any indication, the techniques they are developing may be able to detect evidence of organic life imprinted in an extrasolar planet's atmosphere – at least for rocky, Earth-mass planets orbiting stars relatively close to the sun – using large Earthbound telescopes.

"It's an exciting experiment – one of the few I've seen that I wish I'd thought of myself," says Sara Seager [well lah dee dah! -J], a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies exoplanets and their atmospheres and who was not involved in either project.

"The Earth is our best laboratory; it's the only planet we know of with life," she says. "So we really want to understand what Earth would look like as an exoplanet far away."

Less seriously, I'd also like to point another possibility that served as a premise of a recent Iain Banks novel: Aliens might come to earth to see the eclipse. 

One of earth's unusual features (we think) is the relative size of and distance to our moon. It is astronomically unlikely to have a huge moon perfectly positioned so that it has the same apparent size in the two-dimensional sky. Other planets don't have moons that can create total solar eclipses, where the corona of the sun shines around the edge of the moon.

So if there were any reason for aliens to come to earth (and let's face it, they aren't interested in Dancing with the Stars) would be to see such an unusual natural wonder. 

Although this is just a lunar eclipse, it's still a sight. So look around. If you see some not-quite-right-looking folks staring at the sky, introduce yourself. You might make some new alien friends. 

For our 2300th post, allow me to introduce

... the future. Holy shit!


I've got this in my pocket right now, and it works as advertised.

Go now and ponder

"Yet the Journal neglected a more important point: There's nothing forcing Apple to manufacture the iPhone abroad. The ADBI researchers estimate that Apple's gross profit margin on iPhones in 2009 was a whopping 64 percent. This leads them to conclude that "profit maximization behavior," and not competition, is what's driving Apple to China. In other words, Apple would rather make a little bit more money than employ more Americans."


via MoJo

How to start a movement and influence people

Over at Neal's Fireside chat, we have this excerpt from John Michael Greer:

The most common source of trouble when a social movement succeeds in entering the collective conversation of politics is the lack of any constructive plan... [upon gaining] access to the halls of power, [the movement] lowers its sights to target only that set of goals it can reach consensus on, and thinks it can get from whichever subset of the political class is currently in charge.

That’s a fatal mistake, in two mutually reinforcing ways. First, it allows the... political class that’s currently in charge to turn the movement into a wholly owned subsidiary, by giving just enough scraps to the movement to keep it hankering for more, while dangling the whole package just out of reach before the movement’s eager eyes.

That’s how the Democrats turned the environmental movement (among others) into one of their captive constituencies, for example, and it’s also how the Republicans turned gun owners (among others) into one of their captive constituencies – and you’ll notice that neither movement, nor any of the other movements thus co-opted, have ever managed to get more than a few token scraps of its shopping list out of the process.

The second difficulty is the natural result of the first. Once a movement is turned into a wholly owned subsidiary of one end of the political class, it can count on losing any chance of getting anything once the other end of the political class gets into power, as will inevitably happen.

The result is an elegant good cop-bad cop routine; each party can reliably panic its captive constituencies every four years by saying, in effect, “Well, granted, we haven’t done a thing for you in years, but think of how much worse it will be if those awful (fill in the blank)s get into power!” 

Those who swallow this line can count on watching their movement sink into a kind of political zombiehood in which, whatever its official goals, the only real function remaining to it is to get out the vote for one or the other set of mutually interchangeable candidates come Election Day.

Combine these two difficulties and you get the graveyard that’s swallowed most movements for change in America in the last half century.

I think this nails the examples of movements that are cited, but what about movements that are more successful and less successful? To wit,

• Equal rights for African Americans (starting with ending slavery under the Republicans and ending (for the sake of discussion) with the Civil Rights acts passed by Democrats)
• Equal rights for women
• Equal rights for homosexuals
• Social justice for the poor
• The anti-war movement (w/r/t Iraq and Afghanistan)

In different ways for each, the proposed explanation doesn't add up.

If their general demeanor to date wasn't enough to make you hate the Gawker empire, now there's this.

They thumbed their nose at the hacking community, and got hacked. They didn't realize they got hacked for a month, despite some pretty clear warning signs. And when they found out, they didn't worry about it, because it seemed like only their users, "the peasants" were affected. Classy.

Forbes does a very nice sum up slash take down, and says,

And when they have finished hiring a real security person and drafting an incident response plan, they can create a password composition and management policy, a policy on not writing passwords in chat logs, a patch management policy, and maybe for kicks a policy against bad mouthing their own users internally, users that they themselves put in harm’s way.

Amen.

Leave the wiki out of the wikileaks [Updated]

Yglesias says,

I have mixed feelings about a lot of different aspects of this, but there are two key points. One is that the leaker here (presumably Bradley Manning, but that’s not yet been proven in a court of law) has broken the law and needs to be punished. The other is that the ability to republish leaked secrets is integral to the operation of a free press. Creating a new standard of harassing not leakers, but the publishers of leaks, is a very dangerous precedent whose implications go far beyond whatever you may think of the particular circumstances.

I think this is actually pretty well understood. Nobody's proposed any new legislation. The Department of Justice hasn't unveiled any actual charges against Assange or Wikileaks. And while it's very unseemly to see a United States Senator throwing his weight around to get Amazon, Twitter, etc. to drop Wikileaks, at the same time he is not getting the same info pulled from the New York Times.

So everyone instead wants to make this a story about the person of Julian Assange, or the technology of the Internet. (Verbally) attacking Assange is fine, but mostly irrelevant.

And over on the technological side, it's amazing how few people get it. I understand that most of the people I listen to on NPR or whose words I read in the paper are over 50, and probably do not think about the internet as much as I do. But take Josh Marshall, a youngish guy whose whole enterprise is built on the web. He writes:

Let's say that the Wikileaks cables hadn't been State Department cables but rather the final tracks of Lady Gaga's next album or perhaps each episode of next season's Mad Men? How long do you think they would have stayed online?

Say what? There's no difference. That content would have stayed online forever, as the wikileaks will. To miss this important point is to completely misunderstand the current state of the internet.

Wikileaks is alive and well. You can go there, you can donate to them if you so choose, and the "poison pill" insurance file is sitting on many servers around the world, waiting for you to pull it down to your hard drive.

So Joe Leiberman gets to look like a national-security tough guy by bullying Amazon. And it's distressing that Amazon, Twitter, Paypal, etc. have caved. But, in strictly technological terms, it doesn't matter. 


"You can't stop the internet, bitches." -Monkey


Updated Monday @ 10:30. This from the Guardian

Attempts to railroad WikiLeaks off the net quickly failed. Removing its hosting servers has increased WikiLeaks' ability to stay online. More than 1,300 volunteer "mirror" sites, including the French newspaper Libération, have already surfaced to store the classified cables. Within days the WikiLeaks web content had spread across so many enclaves of the internet it was immune to attack by any single legal authority. In some respects, WikiLeaks has never been safer or as aggressively defended.

Check what China is up to

There's some hot shit in this wikileaked cables!

Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak ... was designed to be a controlled nuclear fusion tokamark reactor with superconductive toroidal and poloidal field magnets and a D-shaped cross-section. One of the experimental goals of this device was to prove that a nuclear fusion reaction can be sustained indefinitely, at high enough temperatures, to produce energy in a cost-effective way. In 2009, IIP successfully maintained a 10 million degree Celsius plasma nuclear fusion reaction for 400 seconds. IIP also successfully maintained a 100 million degree Celsius plasma nuclear fusion reaction for 60 seconds. ...

The Chinese Academy of Science ... has developed a biometrics device that uses a person’s pace to identify them.  The device measure weight and two-dimensional sheer forces applied by a person’s foot during walking to create a uniquely identifiable biometrics profile. The device can be covertly installed in a floor and is able to collect ... biometrics data on individuals covertly without their knowledge. When questioned about the device’s potential applications, IIM officials stated the device was being used by “secret” customers and was not available on the commercial market. ...

Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Science at the Microscale (HFNL). HFNL has 95 faculty members and roughly 400 graduate students. HFNL research focuses on quantum communication, nanoscience, superconductors, spintronics, and cognitive sciences. In the area of quantum communication, HFNL was conducting research in quantum teleportation and free space quantum cryptography that scientists hope will result in “totally secure” communications. USTC also oversees China’s “Program 178,” although they did not describe the nature of this program. (COMMENT: A cursory walk through their labs seemed to indicate they had already succeeded in single-particle quantum teleportation and are now trying to conduct dual-particle quantum teleportation. END COMMENT)

via wikileaks | img

Can anyone explain how this happens?

In what amounts to an epic constitutionality #fail, Senate Democrats may have blown their chances to see their food safety bill signed into law.

The U.S. constitution requires that any revenue-raising bill must originate in the House of Representatives. To honor this provision, the Senate often finds a discarded old House bill, strips it bare, and uses it as a "shell" and passes it back to the House.

They somehow forgot to do that this time.

....

According to Hoyer, this has happened multiple times this Congress, causing severe legislative angina.

TPM

A game for you to play

Loondon. It's not hard, just point and click. Because politics is really depressing today.