Elevate the Ether
Filed Under Media, Musings, Technology | Leave a Comment
In the last few months, Gail Collins of the New York Times has become one my most-favorite pundits, making clear, concise points with a keen sense of humor.
This morning she looks at those insufferable computer upgrade notices that are seemingly always there, and always ready, willing and able to promise a more-wonderful life in the ether.
It’s depressing to realize that my computer is more bent on self-improvement than I am. At home, my laptop is so ready to update that it can barely be constrained.
The other day, I found three different pleas floating around on the screen. The “Dell Support Center Automatic Upgrade” was the most tempting since it sounded as if the computer wanted to give me a really good seat on a plane.
…
There was a time when I would have responded, but nothing good ever seemed to come of that. The updated computers were never any better at doing the things I wanted to do than the old ones. And there’s always the possibility that I could trigger an inadvertent disaster.
(Illustration found here).
The reason Collins’ commentary so struck me, forcing me to respond is that the “Upgrade” bullshit on my laptop is always striking without warning — although there are still those little floating notices, the real bitch is when they ‘Upgrade’ without saying a damn thing.
The last two days, when I turned on the laptop, went through the opening stages and tried to log on to Mozilla Firefox and out into the InterWeb, some bad shit would seemingly appear — white screen, the little circling indicator bubbling over with enthusiasm — that would scare the techno-shit out of me.
I couldn’t move, nothing happened — the little circling indicator would keep bubbling along.
After manually shutting off the computer a couple of times, a little box would appear and tell me that the guts of this machine was in the process of upgrading with “One of three updates complete: Do Not Turn Off Computer.”
WTF!
Technology can be dangerous to the ignorant.
After recalling how her Blackberry wouldn’t do anything other than re-dial the telephone number of a racist former US senator, Collins allows a mechanical conspiracy:
My darkest suspicion is that my computers are preparing to join their comrades in overthrowing humanity so machines can rule the earth.
I have seen quite a few movies on this theme, and really, the signs are everywhere.
The other day, Jim Dwyer reported in The Times about a man in Brooklyn whose oven broiler turns on every time the cellphone rings.
Experts think this is caused by electromagnetic interference.
However, I believe the oven is ticked off because its owners, in typical New York fashion, use it for storage rather than for actual cooking.
And it is in cahoots with the cellphone, which probably is resentful because it is not allowed to spend its time doing the things cellphones really enjoy, like talking to Trent Lott.
Read Collins’ entire post here.
This brings us to the conclusion that… Shit! Gotta upgrade or die…
Historical Horror of the Shame
Filed Under Madness, Media, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
In my eighth-grade history class (circa 1962), we would have studied a historical document similar to the one released on Monday, and although content might have been far less graphic, one thing was for sure – it would not be anywhere, anyhow at all connected to the US; most-likely from centuries past, in some more cruel and violent age.
The Spanish Inquisition, maybe.
No great gut surprises in the at-long-last release of a May 2004 CIA IG report on “Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogations Activities,” which finally found the light of day after nearly five years — torture is still torture and the US government was making ugly in the name of ALL US peoples.
Just a little sample of the back-ass-wards approach of the arrogant madness of George Jr.’s tenure in power and how they knew what they were doing was way-wrong: “This looks like the kind of stuff Congressional hearings are made of.” Waterboarding, for example, would “shock the conscience of any legal body looking at the results of the interrogations or possibly even the interrogators. Somebody needs to be considering how history will look back at this.”
(Illustration found here).
History is in the now, not tomorrow, or even yesterday.
Intelligence isn’t the central word with the CIA — the sledgehammer approach is its historical mainstay and have been using torture, threatening to use torture and teaching how to torture for a long, long time, as the big difference here this week (and really since Abu Ghraib) is the secret has become way-more exposed.
The naked truth, so to speak — and it runs in the face of eighth-grade history of the US being the light of the planet, the best place on earth to live, where freedom and “doing the right thing” the centerpiece of American society.
Although the US did practice genocide, did screw around with governments in South America (and in the Middle East, i.e., Iran) and did drop a bomb on a Japanese city that started the whole world crying, never before in public has the nastiness been so revealed — the emperor has no clothes.
Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish has the near-perfect prose:
Notice the shift from the standards of the past.
In the past, the US was known for being a country whose soldiers would never mistreat prisoners; now, the US wants the world to know that US custody is something to be dreaded.
That’s what Cheney did to America.
He’s proud of it.
If you are ever captured by a US soldier, and suspected of terrorism, you know that torture will be coming soon.
The values of Washington and Eisenhower and Reagan are inverted.
The reputation of the US as a defender of human rights is reversed.
The point is that America must be feared for its willingness to abandon all human rights.
And the point, therefore, has already been made.
There’s no putting the torture genie back in the bottle.
The IG’s report released this week has been very-heavily pre-marked — the word, redacted, has become synonymous with all of George Jr.’s misdeeds from his entire time in office, and among the word’s numerous definitions, to make ready for publication; edit or revise, also includes, black out – suppress by censorship as for political reasons — and only in time will the full, ugly story be exposed.
Maybe.
The report: “Though heavily redacted, the version of the report made public this week documents stomach-turning practices, apart from the hundreds of waterboardings, which we already knew had occurred. There was emotional torture: One detainee was told that if another attack occurred, his children would be killed, and another was told that, if he didn’t cooperate, the interrogators would “get your mother in here.” There were near-strangulations, mock executions and threats to maim prisoners with power drills.”
Also on Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced John Durham, the Connecticut-based prosecutor who is already investigating the destruction of videotapes of CIA interrogations, will conduct a widening exam into all this torture mess, but will only go after the fall guys and not George Jr., Dick Cheney or any of those young shithead-lawyers who wrote all those infamous “torture memos” released earlier this year.
Not everybody wants any kind of CIA investigation.
Reportedly, CIA Director Leon Panetta pitched a bitch-fit, “profanity-laced screaming match,” at the White House over investigations into agency misdeeds, even threatening to quit.
ABC News:
Amid reports that Panetta had threatened to quit just seven months after taking over at the spy agency, other insiders tell ABCNews.com that senior White House staff members are already discussing a possible shake-up of top national security officials.
“You can expect a larger than normal turnover in the next year,” a senior adviser to Obama on intelligence matters told ABCNews.com.
Since 9/11, the CIA has had five directors or acting directors.
Panetta should quit or be replaced — making it a quick six in eight years.
Supposedly, the CIA works for the US peoples, and the spy agency should let their bosses in on whatever is going bad or wrong in the organization — the CIA most-likely needs an ass-whipping.
Glenn Greenwald has really been covering this mess like a fly on some real-bad shit.
First, his post Monday on the IG report itself, found here — he breaks down the ugly and even title’s the piece, “What every American should be made to learn about the IG Torture Report.”
And on Tuesday, Greenwald launches into those defenders of torture — that post is found here.
Must reads.
The earth and all those dwell upon it are living in an extreme-interesting period of history — great economic and climate changes are not only a-coming, but are here now, not to mention the horror of wars and beyond-rumors of wars waging all over the globe — and for US peoples, a time to witness how a constitutionally-mandated democracy could end up so shamefully deep in the toilet over such a short space.
Down the Baseline
Filed Under Media, Politics | Leave a Comment
Last summer, I had some sort of political epiphany as candidate Barack Obama near-nonchalantly shot/tossed a basketball in front of a crowd of US troops in Afghanistan — Too cool for school.
One can watch the event here.
From a Washington Post/ABC News poll released yesterday:
Among all Americans, 49 percent now express confidence that Obama will make the right decisions for the country, down from 60 percent at the 100-day mark in his presidency.
Forty-nine percent now say they think he will be able to spearhead significant improvements in the system, down nearly 20 percentage points from before he took office.
As challenges to Obama’s initiatives have mounted over the summer, pessimism in the nation’s direction has risen: Fifty-five percent see things as pretty seriously on the wrong track, up from 48 percent in April.
…
Before Obama’s inauguration, 61 percent of independents expressed confidence in his ability to make the right decisions for the country. That number fell to 52 percent about 100 days into his presidency and now sits at 41 percent. Confidence in his judgment has also slipped substantially among seniors.
And the problems seem to run in deep, deep water:
WaPo polling analyst (Jennifer) Agiesta cautioned that independents were likely a greater factor, but she said Obama’s problems among Dems and liberals were clearly playing a key role:
“This is the first sign that something is going wrong with his base.”
No wonder — the Mid East wars are turning shitty.
And along that baseline is a scream to bring the troops home: A poll of 1001 U.S. adults published in the Washington Post on Thursday found that 51 percent said the Afghan war was “not worth fighting,” compared to 47 percent who said it was. Among Democrats, it was 70 percent to 27 percent against the war.
And like some bad-plotted story, Obama might encounter a real hurricane this weekend as he trips up to Martha’s Vineyard for a holiday — As the world goes to shit in a wire basket.
Clueless Shock
Filed Under Finance, Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
As the economy tanks, the more wealthy of us are also going down the drain, albeit in slower, easier fashion.
From the New York Times yesterday:
But economists say — and data is beginning to show — that a significant change may in fact be under way. The rich, as a group, are no longer getting richer.
Over the last two years, they have become poorer. And many may not return to their old levels of wealth and income anytime soon.
…
Last year, the number of Americans with a net worth of at least $30 million dropped 24 percent, according to CapGemini and Merrill Lynch Wealth Management.
Monthly income from stock dividends, which is concentrated among the affluent, has fallen more than 20 percent since last summer, the biggest such decline since the government began keeping records in 1959.
Bill Gates, Warren E. Buffett, the heirs to the Wal-Mart Stores fortune and the founders of Google each lost billions last year, according to Forbes magazine.
In one stark example, John McAfee, an entrepreneur who founded the antivirus software company that bears his name, is now worth about $4 million, from a peak of more than $100 million.
Mr. McAfee will soon auction off his last big property because he needs cash to pay his bills after having been caught off guard by the simultaneous crash in real estate and stocks.
“I had no clue,” he said, “that there would be this tandem collapse.”
Clueless is the cue.
Former Fed honcho Big Al Greenspan also had no clue:
“In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Waxman said.
“Absolutely, precisely,” Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”
Enough to make a grown man cry.
And Big Al’s replacement also keeps the shock pity flowing.
The US and the whole-wide world have arisen from the ashes of fiscal foolishness:
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said the global economy is “beginning to emerge” from a recession after “aggressive” action by central banks and governments.
“After contracting sharply over the past year, economic activity appears to be leveling out, both in the United States and abroad, and the prospects for a return to growth in the near term appear good…”
Be afraid, be very afraid…
Big Ben blubbered last summer — June 9, 2008, to be exact: “The risk that the economy has entered a substantial downturn appears to have diminished over the past month or so.”
I’m just plain shocked…
The Late, Great News Game
Filed Under Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
UPDATE BELOW
“I’m glad you’re not overreacting. What do you wanna run?”
“I don’t know. What do I wanna run? — They didn’t do it.”
“They didn’t do it? You don’t have close to that. You have unattributed cops.”
“She doesn’t have ‘Gotcha!’”
“You don’t have “Gotcha!” for page one until you have a shot of the kids.”
“So we’re going on the perp walk.”
“What time do they walk?”
“So we stretch it a little — You gonna pay for that?”
“Yes, we stretch the deadline to eight o’clock. If we get art on the two kids at the walk of shame, it’s “Gotcha!” If we miss them, the subway is page one.”
“The subway is bullshit!”
“You don’t have it, you know it. You wanna run the story? You got five hours. Get the story. Do your job! Do your job!”
– Executive Editor Bernie White admonishing his hyper-active Metro chief in ‘The Paper.’
(Illustration found here).
Don Hewitt, creator of “60 Minutes” and a pioneer in broadcast journalism, died Wednesday at age 86.
Among the many accolades to be planted at the feet of Mr. Hewitt in the next few days, and there will be many, one of the most-interesting is seemingly a nod towards the current ugly brand of TV news.
From the Washington Post’s Hewitt obit:
Mr. Hewitt’s impact on television was almost unparalleled, said Marvin Kalb, founding director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and a former reporter for CBS and NBC News.
“We never made money before ‘60 Minutes,’ ” Kalb said of news and public affairs programs.
“That had probably, with the exception of the introduction of the Internet, the most profound impact on television news.
It meant that everybody else had to make money, and in the quest for profit, standards began to fall.
Then add the Internet and you can see the powerful impact the combination of new technology and news profitability had upon the quality of the product.”
And the ‘quality of the product’ nowadays sucks.
‘Money’ is a key word in Kalb’s comment above.
And if truth be known, money was also part of the ideal for another journalist (though not really the right word, ‘journalist,’ for this guy) who died this week, Robert Novak, dead from cancer.
He once remarked in an interview that Medicare wasn’t needed, and when reminded of the folks benefited by the program — the poor and elderly — Novak shrugged with a quip, “We all die in the end…”
And like Hewitt, Novak was an influence on the current state of TV news, though, it will be debated whether it was for good or bad — Novak made popular the in-the-face, big mouth quasi-journalistic approach now popular on Fox News.
Both these old dead guys contributed to the sleaze, one most-likely inadvertently, and the other most-likely didn’t give a shit.
Prior to the financial success of “60 Minutes,” TV news was a network’s freebie, a “public trust” venture that didn’t really depend upon making money.
Although Hewitt would innovate a bunch of new ideas, like cue cards and graphics on screen during the 1950s, even staging the first televised presidential debate (between Nixon and JFK) and expanding CBS news to half-an-hour, it was the news-magazine format that changed the whole game.
Quickly after its launch in September, 1968, “60 Minutes” climbed to the top of the TV rating and has near-about stayed there: The show remained in the top 10 for 23 years, hitting No. 1 five times and earning 13 Peabody Award during his tenure. In the most recent TV season that ended in May, the program ranked No. 13, averaging 14.3 million viewers.
And like the entertainment division, high ratings mean big bucks.
Although “60 Minutes” practiced good journalism for the most part, the problem was in the imitators.
The networks (not much to cable in them days) responded — ABC with “20/20,” puffing the career of one Barbara Walters, but NBC never ponied up with a similar show (at least nothing I could Google).
And TV news transformed news gathering in general, moving from straight reporting to cross-dressing entertainment with journalism, thus slowly and surely the print side of the industry started its long, slow slide into oblivion.
In 1975, the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), the bailiwick of print journalism, revised and renamed the 1922 “Canons of Journalism” to a “Statement of Principles” (about the same thing, but in easier language) and again in 1996.
Both new versions, however, left out a critical ending to the 1922 edition, the claim of “Decency“:
A newspaper cannot escape conviction of insincerity if while professing high moral purpose it supplies incentives to base conduct, such as are to be found in details of crime and vice, publication of which is not demonstrably for the general good.
Lacking authority to enforce its canons the journalism here represented can but express the hope that deliberate pandering to vicious instincts will encounter effective public disapproval or yield to the influence of a preponderant professional condemnation.
And insincerity is now part of the problem, and the problem is so bad, the ASNE, for only the second time in its history (1945), canceled its annual convention for 2009, citing “…uniquely stressful period in our business as we face both structural change and deep recession.”
No shit, Sherlock.
This year alone, at least 10 major newspapers, including such giants as The Philadelphia Daily News, The Miami Herald, The Boston Globe and The Chicago Sun-Times, were on the financial ropes and were slashing newsroom staff or closing altogether.
The demise earlier this year of the fabled 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News — an award-winning, highly professional outfit — can be seen as a microcosm of the industry.
In Time magazine’s obit for the newspaper:
In shuttering an operation sprung in 1859 from a gold-mining camp just blocks from its downtown Denver home, Scripps directly or obliquely blamed everything — the economy, the Internet, demographics — and everybody — Denver Post panjandrum William Dean Singleton, ignorant consumers, bloggers — for the diminished tabloid’s demise. They certainly were factors.
But the black hats in this sad Western tale are the suits: the Scripps’ newspaper executives whose ineptitude over the past 25 years fumbled away a prime market to a competitor they should have killed off two decades ago.
The ’suits’ and greed once again.
Even in young reporter Mark Twain’s day, newspapers survived through its community, good or bad:
Twain witnessed a Chinese man who was chased and stoned by hoodlums under the eye of a policeman who did nothing to interfere.
“I wrote up the incident with considerable warmth and holy indignation,” Twain wrote.
“There was fire in it and I believe there was literature.”
He was astounded when the article didn’t appear.
The editor of the paper explained that “the Call was…the paper of the poor; it was the only cheap paper. It gathered its livelihood from the poor and must respect their prejudices or perish….The Call could not afford to publish articles criticizing the hoodlums for stoning Chinamen.”
Twain concluded, “I felt a deep shame in being situated as I was — slave of such a journal as the Morning Call.”
Of course, the movie quoted above, The Paper, represents the ideal of newspaper journalism, a position of importance in the community and with those professionals working in its crazed newsroom.
Noted film reviewer Roger Ebert nailed it:
Watching “The Paper” got me in touch all over again with how good it feels to work at the top of your form, on a story you believe in, on deadline.
Here on the movie beat everything is pretty neatly scheduled and we don’t cover a lot of crimes (“Ace Ventura” excepted).
But I used to write real news on deadline, and those were some of the happiest days of my life.
This movie knows how that feels.
Ebert also threw in a far-distant-preview barb in his review — and this from March 1994 — on the ’suits’ knowing all about journalism:
Last week, the new owner of The Sun-Times, Conrad Black, was quoted as criticizing journalists: They get too involved in the story, they all want to be stars, they’re cynical, they’re disillusioned, and a lot of them drink too much.
Everybody seemed scandalized that he would say such things. I think the problem was that he couched them as criticisms. A lot of the people I’ve worked with would use them as boasts. “The Paper” knows all about that, too.
Damnit! You know I can’t talk — I’m on deadline!
UPDATE: 8/20/09 PM
Just came across Glenn Greenwald’s latest, which goes into a more-fine detail on nowadays journalism, scoping in on the Tom Ridge political/terror alert bullshit and with one line nails what goes for MSM news reporting these days: ‘These journalists are the anti-I.F. Stones.’ (Most-excellent ring to it).
Read Greenwald’s post here.
Afghan’s ‘Toxic’ Election
Filed Under Orwellian, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
UPDATE BELOW
The war-worn and weary Afghan people go to the polls tomorrow for a national election amidst Taliban scare tactics and a weak central government unable to comprehend the inevitable.
In October 2004, Moqadasa Sidiqi (left), was the first Afghan to cast a ballot in the first national election post-Taliban, but she did so in Pakistan, where she and her family had fled in 1992.
This week’s election, however, is into complete fraud: Somebody even registered U.S. pop star Britney Spears to vote in Thursday’s presidential election — copies of her card were widely emailed and, for a while, pinned up in a Kabul hotel bar.
(Illustration found here).
In order to create some semblance of an election, Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission (IEC) will reportedly have a staggering 250,000 people around the country observing the ballot process, and will man the 6,000 polling stations to help the average Afghan vote without dying or being shot to bits.
Human Rights Watch reported security is “considerably worse than during the last elections,” with at least 13 political killings and at least 10 abductions of electoral commission officials, candidates and campaign workers.
Attempting to play down the violence, the Afghan government took a page from other nations’ playbooks and ordered a ban on reporting incidents this week — the news blackout didn’t seem to register, however, as this morning “insurgents” struck a bank in Kabul: With shots and explosions from the bank assault heard across the city centre it was impossible to suppress the news of the incident. But there has been no coverage of other events, including a rocket which landed in Kabul’s district eight.
And on top of all the violent shit, Afghanistan’s current president, Hamid Karzai — who is corrupt and useless as they come — brougt back an old buddy, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, the leader of an Uzbek militia, from out of exile in Turkey to campaign for him.
Dostum, if you recall, is one nasty-faced killer and is under investigation for the massacre of more than 2,000 Taliban prisoners in November 2001 and had to flee the country.
No politics involved, Dostum proclaimed, just a helping hand for his people.
“I have no personal agreement with Karzai,” Dostum told Reuters at his ostentatious pink and blue palace in Shiberghan.
He said he was a member of a political party that had already decided to back Karzai, and that his decision to return was intended to increase turnout in the election.
“The people … they became somewhat sick while I was away … I heard them say, ‘If General Dostum doesn’t come here, we won’t vote’,” Dostum told Reuters.
“I thought, God forbid people don’t vote, so I came here to make sure that people vote,” he said.
Oh, that’s so sweet and thoughtful.
President Obama has tied the feet of US peoples with a huge brick and thrown them into the bottomless pit that is Afghanistan, and in the long run, the situation will become worse than Iraq, if that’s possible.
Even now, Obama’s handpicked commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, doesn’t have a clue on what to do next — the big, new operation last month in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan has turned out to be a terrible bust.
From Lara Logan of CBS:
We were crouched down in a field, the earth steaming with the heat of the sun and the air thick with humidity. Two Marines were kneeling down beside me.
“All we’ve done since we got here is get blown up,” one of them said. And then they started to talk.
On a patrol exactly like this one a few days ago in southern Helmand province, they had been walking along the canal. One of their Marines stepped on a relatively small explosive device hidden in the ground, most likely a landmine.
The problem was, that mine was linked to a bigger explosive device in a deadly daisy chain that did not miss its mark. The Marine who was walking behind was hit by the bigger, secondary explosion.
We ran as soon as we heard it go off but when we got to the canal the only thing that was there was his body armor. He was nowhere,” they told me, “just gone.”
So they started to search. Some distance away, they found their friend’s arm, his watch still attached.
“I just cannot get that picture out of my head, I keep seeing it, his arm just lying there with his watch. I can’t stop seeing it.”
It was hours later when they found the rest of him. It would take much longer for the shock to wear off, and the fear to subside.
…
The terrain in Helmand is as relentless as the enemy. The heat burns into your body, tearing you down bit by bit. There is no shade, no shelter from the sun. The earth soaks up the warmth like an oven and spits it back at you when you come to the end of the day. A clinging, soaking humidity that wraps itself in a sickly blanket around your body.
These are the skinniest Marines I have ever seen, and I’ve been in some rough places with Marines, like Ramadi in Iraq, where more Americans died than any other part of the country.
But here, I stare in amazement — and some horror — at the uniforms hanging off their lean bodies. There isn’t an inch of excess anywhere. Every uniform is worn thin and faded, hanging off wily frames that still manage to haul over a hundred pounds of gear and weapons and patrol for miles.
This is a farce, a dangerous, ugly farce.
Even says voter registrant Britney Spears…
From “Toxic“:
It’s getting late
To give you up
I took a sip
From my devil cup
Slowly
It’s taking over me…
Never mind the ancient Greeks, the British and the Soviets — Oops…I did it again.
UPDATE
From Gareth Porter today (8/19/09) at IPS:
As early as last May, the country’s independent election monitoring organisation, the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA), had documented a suite of voter registration practices that laid the groundwork for massive voter fraud.
FEFA observers, who observed voter registration in 194 of 400 voting registration centres in four provinces during one stage of the process, found that nearly 20 percent of the voters registered, on average, were under age – in many cases as young as 12 years old.
It is now estimated that 17 million voter registration cards have been issued, which means that nearly 3.5 million cards may have been issued to children.
FEFA observers also found rampant distribution of multiple voting cards. During the third phase of registration, they observed at least four incidents of such abuses in 85 percent of the centres. The voter registration staff was seen handing out cards even before applicants had been registered.
In one case, the FEFA observers saw about 500 voting cards being given to a single individual.
The Afghan election is whacked.
Cold Methane Gets Hot
Filed Under Environment, Media | Leave a Comment
A shitload of cows standing around farting — Not!
Another brick in the wall as a research team has found that a powerful global warming component, methane gas, is seeping from the Arctic seabed, which is nothing new (a study last year revealed the methane time bomb), but for the first time the process appears to be at a faster rate than previously figured.
From the BBC:
Professor Tim Minshull of the National Oceanography Centre at Southampton told BBC News: “We already knew there was some methane hydrate in the ocean off Spitsbergen and that’s an area where climate change is happening rather faster than just about anywhere else in the world.”
…
Professor Minshull said: “Our survey was designed to work out how much methane might be released by future ocean warming; we did not expect to discover such strong evidence that this process has already started.”
This is another indicator global warming is much further along than anyone supposed just months ago, and this methane gas phenomenon is a baddie, it creates way-more heat and rising temperatures than does carbon.
Methane is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year period — the Arctic region is heating up, so warm apparently, the permafrost lid on the sea floor developed holes, thus leaking methane up though “methane chimneys.”
The principal component of natural gas, methane is extremely combustible.
(Illustration found here).
Heat over ice seems to be hotter than anywhere else.
Methane burps to the surface and becomes an unpredictable, flammable entity.
According to history these “burps” can be near-fatal to humanity as complied in Michael Benton’s When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, when most of all things living were nearly wiped out by a quick, CO2/methane overload.
Methane apparently has been in the air for eons, but human mechanical industry really, really put the icing on the cake, so to speak: The abundance of methane in the earth’s atmosphere in 1998 was 1745 parts per billion, up from 700 ppb in 1750, before the start of the Industrial Revolution.
The environmental problem facing the planet is nearly-beyond catastrophic.
In an increasingly interesting age with glaring, heinous financial meltdowns, unreasonable perpetual wars and other such-tomfoolery, it’s easy to overlook something coming at us slowly and easily like a comfortable form of mass asphyxia.
Read a good analysis and background on the methane “burps” at Climate Progress.
Coke-Dust Dollars
Filed Under Finance, Media | Leave a Comment
A fiscal reflection of the age.
From CNN:
Research presented this weekend reinforced previous findings that 90 percent of paper money circulating in U.S. cities contains traces of cocaine.
“When I was a young kid, my mom told me the dirtiest thing in the world is money,” said the researcher, Yuegang Zuo, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. “Mom is always right.”
Not only directly from drugs, doing drugs, buying and selling drugs – contamination comes from bank currency-counting machines.
Although the contaminated bills do not affect health, Negrusz said, they could cause a false positive drug test if a person, such as a law enforcement officer or banker, handles contaminated currency repeatedly.
“Imagine a bank teller who’s working with cash-counting machine in the basement of the bank,” Negrusz said. “Many of those bills, over 90 percent, are contaminated with cocaine.
There is cocaine dust around the machines. These bank tellers breathe in cocaine. Cocaine gets into system, and you can test positive for cocaine. … That’s what’s behind this whole thing that triggered testing money for drugs.”
The US led the world for tainted money.
Canada followed with 85 percent and Brazil with 80 percent. China and Japan had the lowest, with 20 and 12 percent respectively.
Interesting about China:
Actually, we were surprised to find cocaine in Chinese bank note,” Zuo said after analyzing 112 samples from China.
After the Communist Party took over, the country was relatively free of drugs from 1949 until the 1980s because of harsh punishments against substance use, he said.
Two years ago, Zuo collaborated with Beijing scientists on testing bank notes and didn’t find any contamination with cocaine.
“In the last year, 2008, we found trace amounts of cocaine,” he said.
Drug pollution in the communist-cocaine netherworld.
Woodstock Delayed
Filed Under Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
Today forty years ago the Woodstock Music Festival started and although it was a supposedly major US cultural event, a big chuck of Americans were unaware of a revolution that started and ended on a farm in upstate New York — including yours truly.
(Illustration found here).
In the summer of 1969 I was 20-years-old and in the US Air Force for just more than a year.
As an air traffic controller, I’d recently passed my final exam to become a full-fledged controller in the VFR tower at Eglin AFB, Florida — the world’s third busiest airport behind Chicago’s O’Hare and Vietnam’s Tan Son Nhut facility — and began my descent into right-wing political thinking.
As a teenager, I was extremely naive when it came to politics and surrounded by mostly Republican supervisors in the Air Force and after listening to their philosophy for years, I moved easily, near-faultlessly farther to the right.
An older sergeant (my immediate team chief and a guy I liked) was a big fan of William F. Buckley Jr. and I quickly became one also — we would discuss the latest “Firing Line” on long, midnight shifts.
And my father-in-law at the time was a retired Air Force senior-master sergeant and the right-wing slant on politics was also family.
The summer of ‘69 was an eventful one — the last episode of the TV’s original “Star Trek” series aired that June, the moon landing on July 20 and the Charles Manson murders in early August, among a shitload of other stuff.
My thoughts during late summer that year, however, were more personal — my first wife was heavily pregnant with my first child (a daughter, born Sept. 7, 1969) and a big concern for the weather.
Even as crowds began swarming to that farm in New York, eyes in Florida were focused on the Gulf of Mexico and Hurricane Camille.
First indications put the storm right up one of Eglin’s runways on the Florida panhandle.
I was worried about my wife, friends and neighbors as Camile churned its way north through the Gulf — the storm would suddenly steer westward and slam into an area around Biloxi, Miss., and Keesler AFB, a place I’d just left eight months earlier.
The storm missed, but the politics continued.
By the time I was discharged from the Air Force in July 1972 and moved to Gainesville, Fla., to attend the University of Florida that fall, my political views were Republican — I stood in a slight drizzle that November and voted for Dick Nixon — a shame I carry to this day.
However, as a student at Florida and a member those first couple of quarters on the copy desk of the student newspaper, The Alligator, I quickly morphed into a leftist hippie — the ‘Firing Line’ days were all gone by the time of Nixon’s Christmas of ‘72 bombing of North Vietnam.
During my stay at The Alligator, the publication was thrown off campus (its newsroom was originally in the student union) for being too liberal for the university’s administration.
My then-wife told me later I’d started to change as soon as I hit the Florida campus — that I don’t remember.
Upon graduation from Florida in June 1974, I was a card-carrying left-wing hippie freak, stoned-up to three concerts a week and I’d finally obtained the spirit of that music/cultural festival.
(Illustration found here).
Now four decades later, the only thing I can say is Keep on Truckin’.
No Longer ‘Just Around the Corner’
Filed Under Environment, Media, Politics | Leave a Comment
One of the most-alarming aspects of climate/weather change/global warming is the science — the most current report is always worse than the previous one and sometimes the figures are amazing.
Just a couple of examples can be found here and here.
If this trend continues, and most-likely it will, the very-near-future will assure there will cease to be any kind of global warming deniers — the reality of the horror will be staring us in the panic-stricken face.
Maybe the climate mutation won’t be as quick and violent as depicted in the film, “Day After Tomorrow,” but who’s to really say as science seems to continually confirm the environment is accelerating toward the whacked.
(Illustration found here).
So this from the BBC on how one of the largest glaciers in Antarctica is thinning four times faster than it was just a decade ago:
A study of satellite measurements of Pine Island glacier in west Antarctica reveals the surface of the ice is now dropping at a rate of up to 16m a year.
Since 1994, the glacier has lowered by as much as 90m, which has serious implications for sea-level rise.
The work by British scientists appears in Geophysical Research Letters.
…
Calculations based on the rate of melting 15 years ago had suggested the glacier would last for 600 years. But the new data points to a lifespan for the vast ice stream of only another 100 years.
…
One of the authors, Professor Andrew Shepherd of Leeds University, said that the melting from the centre of the glacier would add about 3cm to global sea level.
“But the ice trapped behind it is about 20-30cm of sea level rise and as soon as we destabilise or remove the middle of the glacier we don’t know really know what’s going to happen to the ice behind it,” he told BBC News.
“This is unprecedented in this area of Antarctica. We’ve known that it’s been out of balance for some time, but nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier.”
In 2006, the Christian Science Monitor reported:
Global warming appears to be pushing vast reservoirs of ice on Greenland and Antarctica toward a significant, long-term meltdown.
The world may have as little as a decade to take the steps to avoid this scenario.
…
By 2100, spring and summer temperatures in the Arctic could reach levels that trigger an unstoppable repeat performance, they say.
Over several centuries, the melt could raise sea levels by as much as 20 feet, submerging major cities worldwide as well as chains of islands, such as the present-day Bahamas.
The US would lose the lower quarter of Florida, southern Louisiana up to Baton Rouge, and North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
The ocean would even flood a significant patch of California’s Central Valley, lapping at the front porches of Sacramento.
As noted that report was from two years ago when things seemed fine and dandy.
Welcome to the new movie, “The Day After Yesterday.”
(Another great h/t to Climate Progress).
Rock/Country/Jazz — A Les Paul is still a Les Paul
Filed Under Musings | Leave a Comment
Although music didn’t die today, one of its real genius-producers did — Les Paul, dead at 94.
Mr. Paul was a remarkable musician as well as a tireless tinkerer. He played guitar alongside leading prewar jazz and pop musicians from Louis Armstrong to Bing Crosby.
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Mr. Paul’s style encompassed the twang of country music, the harmonic richness of jazz and, later, the bite of rock ’n’ roll. For all his technological impact, though, he remained a down-home performer whose main goal, he often said, was to make people happy.
…
“Honestly, I never strove to be an Edison,” he said in a 1991 interview in The New York Times. “The only reason I invented these things was because I didn’t have them and neither did anyone else. I had no choice, really.”
(Illustration found here).
Of course, from Rolling Stone magazine and the current CEO of Gibson Guitars:
“Most people, when they think of Les Paul, they think about the guitar.
Which is the most popular guitar — certainly in the Gibson line, and probably in the world.
But very few people know the inventive genius behind the scenes.
I think an appropriate title for Les would be ‘the father of modern guitar.’
Before Les Paul, the guitar was being used with amplifiers, but it was still just a loud acoustic guitar.
Les really brought the guitar into the modern age, and created the modern sound.”
And for every kid who’s picked up a pick and started strumming — So long Les!
Politics, Please!
Filed Under Media, Politics | Leave a Comment
On Tuesday, President Obama held a town-hall meeting on health-care reform at Portsmouth High School in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and after some opening remarks, he fielded questions from the audience.
The second person called was a sixth-grader with an intelligent and observant query:
All right. Let’s — this young lady right here. All right, this young lady right here. She’s still enjoying her summer. When do you go back to school?
Q: I go back to school September third.
THE PRESIDENT: September third, okay. What’s your name?
Q: Julia Hall from Malden, Massachusetts.
THE PRESIDENT: Nice to meet you, Julia. (Applause.)
Q: I saw — as I was walking in, I saw a lot of signs outside saying mean things about reforming health care. How do kids know what is true, and why do people want a new system that can — that help more of us?
Obama refuted the so-called “death panels” in which the system would “pull the plug on grandma” — a major falsehood promoted by the GOP wingnuttery — and explained in careful detail how this lie came about and how insurance companies profit from Medicare.
He also added this about the root of the current health care bill in Congress:
The irony is that actually one of the chief sponsors of this bill originally was a Republican — then House member, now senator, named Johnny Isakson from Georgia — who very sensibly thought this is something that would expand people’s options.
And somehow it’s gotten spun into this idea of “death panels.” I am not in favor of that. So just I want to — (applause.) I want to clear the air here.
Despite that question and its answer, young Miss Julia has become the bitch of the far-asshole-right.
Starting with drug-crazed Rush Limbaugh:
I predicted it halfway yesterday.
Right before Obama’s — we now know, by the way, the whole thing yesterday was a stacked deck.
That thing in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was totally phony. The little girl that asked a question is the daughter of a huge Obama supporter.
And the “plant” aspect reflects on young Miss Julia’s mom, Manning Hall.
As gutter-brain mouth, Michelle Malkin, spurted on her blog:
Manning Hall has donated thousands of dollars to Obama, as has her law firm.
But, you know, um, like Obama said: “I don’t want people saying I just have a bunch of plants in here.”
Oh, goodness. Of course not.
…
Now, look for Dems to play the kiddie human shield card to the hilt. Anyone who mentions Hall’s political pedigree will be attacked as a vicious meanie stalker.
Malkin also added a disgruntled and moronic reader response:
From reader Ricky: “I think everyone is missing the biggest point. We are in the middle of a most serious debate, why the hell is the President wasting everyone’s time fielding questions from an 11 year old? I am getting tired of this in our modern culture, the all wise and knowing child.”
And this from right-wing Washington Times:
The most insufferable moment of the “town-hall” meeting was when 13-year-old Julia Hall from Malden, Mass., read a question from a card about seeing “a lot of signs outside saying mean things about reform in health care.”
It’s a sad commentary on the health care debate that the president has to resort to this kind of stunt to attempt to insulate his plan from criticism.
No one in wingnut land discussed the crazy with a gun at the same meeting, or the mob attending a similar event in California, or the other “raucous” crowds at health care public discussions – threats and more threats from nutcases the media nutcases won’t talk about.
Young Miss Julia, however, is thrilled.
According to the Boston Globe:
Kathleen Manning Hall, Julia’s mother, was shocked when her daughter said she wanted to ask a question. They wrote it down beforehand, and Julia didn’t miss a beat when Obama called on her.
“It was surreal,” said Manning Hall, a coordinator of Massachusetts Women for Obama during the election.
She said Julia was moved by a woman’s testimonial on Tuesday before the president spoke. The woman described her ordeal battling liver disease without health insurance.
“Julia talked about it the whole way home,” said Manning Hall, adding that they often discuss politics. “We talk a lot about human rights and having compassion for people.”
Julia also enjoys soccer and playing guitar, especially songs by Taylor Swift, her favorite artist.
“She entertained my whole family on Christmas Day,” Manning Hall said. “She’s a wonderful child. She’s a very sensitive, smart girl and I’m hoping she becomes more interested in politics and helping people.”
She may get her wish. Julia said she’d like to run for office someday, maybe even for president.
“It would be awesome if I could work in politics,” she said.
Hey, Malkin, that’d be a real pisser, huh?
(h/t to Raw Story).
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