Thailand

So, a mostly-democratic country stages a (admittedly bloodless) coup and goes from having an elected-but-unpopular Prime Minister, to having a military dictator who has the support of an (unelected, for all I know entirely uneducated) monarch. 

 

Meanwhile, the US, the UK, the UN - everyone who's all up in arms (literally) over the lack of democracy in Iran/Iraq/etc, sits back and says, "Huh, interesting".  Then the new Thai military dictator threatens to shut down the media if they broadcast anything that comes close to expressing a dissenting political opinion.

 

Uh, am I missing something?  What the hell?  Sure, Mr. Dictator is saying he'll step down in two weeks and they'll have an election in a year, but the dude's got the Thai military behind him and now control over the entire country.  Somehow, I won't be surprised if two weeks come and go and there's no change.

 

Meanwhile, we don't really care, because we haven't yet set up any Halliburton contracts in Thailand.

Whoa

This is rather interesting: A district court has ruled that a public library in CA is well within the bounds of the law when they prohibit prayer and worship meetings in their meeting rooms.

On the one hand, I'm in favor of the judges decision, because the library isn't descriminiating against, say, a particular religion. They're just flat-out barring prayer. If a church group wants to hold a bake sale or something in the meeting room, go ahead. If they want to have their Easter service there: nope.

On the other hand, I'm not a big fan of banning any variety of speech or peacable assembly. If it were a private facility, then I wouldn't care, but since it's a public library, I'm a bit uncomfortable.

I'm willing to bet this goes on to a higher court, and I'm definitely going to keep an eye on this one.

Triumph!

Phoenix may be slowly and unstoppably creeping up on Philadelphia in terms of population, but they'll never have as much crime as us!

Wait, what?

More firepower!

I'm rapidly falling in love with Matt Tiabbi, who writes for Rolling Stone and is also published on AlterNet. His latest (here) can be summed up thusly:

We're spending over $360 million per plane to build a whole bunch of new fighter jets that are apparently plagued with problems. We're doing this because while our current fleet works fine other countries are catching up to us, mostly because we keep selling our tech to them. So we're slashing social programs, such as child welfare, all over so we can build these new planes and stay ahead of the evil terrorists, who obviously have been using fighter jets against us.

We're also selling this brand-new fighter-plane technology to the countries we're trying to stay ahead of.

Meanwhile, little children in Detroit rely on their underfunded schools not so much for an education (because there's no money for supplies or well-trained teachers) but for the required two-warm meals a day, because their mother doesn't have a degree and lost her job at the Ford plant, and therefore finds herself working for $5.25 an hour at Wal-Mart.

...I'd been feeling a bit homesick lately. That did the trick quite nicely.

Aaaah

Coming to you live from not-my-laptop, which is now engaged in an epic battle against a freaking worm. Why? Because when I got my new harddrive a few months back I stupidly failed to install SP2. Aaargh.

Neil Gaiman is doing a reading and Q&A session in London on Monday. I got tickets. I am excited. Neil Gaiman!

I picked up House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski today. I already cannot put it down despite it thoroughly freaking me out. I've been meaning to read it since it came out, but heard such great things about it I wasn't sure it was worth the hype. It is.

Also, good luck with your new military dictatorship, Thailand.

We can never see...

Look at that picture. My first thought: We are very tiny, because that blue beach ball? That's everything we've ever created. Every influential leader, every war, everything. Just sort of...there.

Now let's zoom out a bit:
See the teeny speck? Us. Everything. Humanity and everything that goes with it. Mr. Carl Sagan said it better than pretty much anyone:

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Only...it's not. That's not everything. Because something took that picture. There were astronauts and cameras and film and the Lunar module and the work of thousands and thousands of people on the Moon. Thousands of people effected Voyager 1. Millenia of human knowledge went up with that little craft. Take a picture of the earth from millions of miles away, billions of miles away, however far, and there's still something looking back at us taking that picture.

We can never see beyond what we've accomplished. We managed to send a camera that far away from home, but as far as it gets is as far as we can see.


For bonus fun, think about the fact that the light from the Earth in that second picture probably took years to get to that lens, which means that that's not a picture of the Earth at the moment that picture was taken. It's a picture of the Earth at some point in the past.

Headlines that tell you absolutely nothing new:

High school dropouts earn far less money.

I'm shocked, I tell you. Shocked.

And history repeats

The "Mark II" "microbombs" had Casio digital watches as the timers, stabilizers that looked like cotton wool balls, and an undetectable nitroglycerin as the explosive. Other ingredients included glycerin, nitrate, sulfuric acid, and minute concentrations of nitrobenzene, silver azide (silver trinitride), and liquid acetone. Two 9-volt batteries in each bomb were used as a power source. The batteries would be connected to light bulb filaments that would detonate the bomb. Murad and Yousef wired an SCR as the switch to trigger the filaments to detonate the bomb. There was an external socket hidden when the wires were pushed under the watch base as the bomber would wear it. The alteration was so small that the watch could still be worn in a normal manner. ^{[1] [5] [7]}

Yousef got batteries past airport security during his December 11 test bombing of Philippine Airlines Flight 434 by hiding them in hollowed-out heels of his shoes. Yousef smuggled the nitroglycerin on board by putting it inside a contact lens solution bottle.

The density of the explosive cocktail would be about 1.3.

From here. Which is talking about a 1995 bombing plot.

A very bad frog

The newest in the War on Freedom to listen to music as you chose is apparently SpiralFrog. It's a "digital entertainment destination!"

Apparently the way it will work is this: it's an ad-supported site offering free music downloads. The theory, I suppose, is that they'll make enough money from adspace to repay the music labels. I'm doubtful that that'll work regardless of whatever terms the set out, but okay, it could be viable.

There will, of course, be DRM nonsense. Apparently we've fallen into a sort of binary system: Either your music/movies/etc are legal but not free for you to use as you wish, or they're illegal but you can use them without limits.

Anyway, this paragraph from their first press release interests me:

Digital rights management technology is built-in to all audio and video content as part of measures the company and its partners are actively taking to address piracy. "We want to provide the best environment for everyone - our partners and the recording artists, as well as consumers," Kent said. "Piracy continues to be one of the biggest issues facing the music industry where illegal file sharing and unauthorized CD burning are the prime means of music piracy. Digital rights protection will help us combat piracy and provide peace of mind for the record labels and the artists."

Take a closer look at this:

"We want to provide the best environment for everyone - our partners and the recording artists, as well as consumers,"

Here's a hint: If you want to be successful in a consumer business, put your consumers first. The world is full of bad examples of this, where the stockholders and corporate executives are who the business is really looking after, and the customers that actually produce the profit are an afterthought. If you tell people that they're effectively an afterthought, and then ask them to give you money, it may not be that successful.

Cool story of the day:

89-year-old man graduates college.  If I manage to live to that point, that what I'm going to do.  Just...study. 

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/5320852.stm

Really tiny motors.

Really really tiny, bacteria-powered motors.

Holy god this is cool to the point of freaking me out.

Something both depressing and enjoyable:

Wikipedia's category of previous PBS kid's shows.

My god, that's my childhood right there. Thankfully, not everything is on the "cancelled" list: Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street are still on and they're still making new episodes of Sesame Street.

But, man: 3-2-1 Contact, Anne of Green Gables, Bill Nye, Ghostwriter (I loved that show in early elementary school), Lamb Chop, Shining Time Station, Square One, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, and Wishbone. Those are just the ones I clearly and distinctly remember watching fairly regularly, and not one of them is on anymore.

The true sign of a PBS kid: Nearly every show you watched regularly in elementary school was cancelled due to lack of funding.

Five things I saw in Hyde Park today that amused me

1. At Speaker's Corner, someone who clearly wanted to preach about "Christian Atheism" but could not get a single person to listen to them.
2. A quite elderly couple, who had to have been mid-sixties at the youngest, sitting on a park bench and clearly being very much still in love.
3. A black lab puppy.
4. [There apparently was some charity race today in the park]Three generations of women, apparently having ran together. A very young daughter (10, maybe), a not-quite middle-aged mother, and an aging (apparently well) grandmother.
5. A father teaching his son how to ride a bicycle.

Beautiful, beautiful weather in London today.

Conspiracy Theory of the week:

I'm becoming fascinated with the existance of Mount Weather. There's just something naturally intriguing about these giant, ultra-hush-hush military/government places.

BBC4 assassinates Bush.

So, I'm a little bit late with this one, but here goes: BBC4 has filmed psuedo-documentary showing Bush's future assassination. They apparently used footage from the attempted shooting of Reagan, and CG'd Bush's head into place.

Predictably some people are really pissed off about this. Equally predictably I am not amongst them.

To a certain extent I agree that it's not in the best taste. Put politics aside and he's got a wife and daughters, he's got siblings, he's got parents. It's kind of unsettling - I don't think anyone would really like to think about someone in your family being murdered, especially not when there really is a fair chance that people are actually going to try to kill you because you're not real popular.

On the other hand: He's an American president (and a rather controversial one at that), so "What happens if someone tries to kill him" is a valid question. BBC4 says that they made it to "explore the effects of the war on terror" at home in the US, and I think that academically that's valid. Controversial, sure, but something that generates controversy is more likely to generate thought, which means that it's more likely to mean something. Personally, I'd be interested in seeing it.

Besides, it's not as if they've introduced some terrifying new possibility to the public. I'm quite certain that many people have at some point thought "Hey, what would happen, in today's political climate, if someone even tried to take out the president?" Hell, immediately after the 2000 election, prior to when the Supreme Court overthrew the constitution, I was invisioning massive bouts of attempted assassinations and tanks rolling through the streets of DC. A BBC fake-documentary is not going to convince anyone to shoot the president: his idiotic and inflammatory policies are doing that just fine.

Free TSA training online!

Now you can put yourself in the highly stressful shoes of a minimum-wage employee on their feet for eight hours a day dealing with impatient, angry, surly airline passengers who just want to get on a plane and go wherever it is their going, while meanwhile the government crawls up your ass and tells you that now water is a dangerous substance!

Bomb or Not. (Via BoingBoing.)

A good Friday thought

Here's a good question (found via BoingBoing). For those not in the mood to click, a blogger asks: What would the TSA do (other than, most likely, have a heart attack or something) if someone tried to make an explosive ID?

I can see it: a real thin bit of plastic explosives tucked in someone's passport or something...