Apocalypse Now(ish)?

Pretty Please?

So we have another candidate for a killer star to wipe out the pesky human race.

Eta Carinae, you need to work harder or you'll lose the limelight.

SYDNEY: A spectacular, rotating binary star system is a ticking time bomb, ready to throw out a searing beam of high-energy gamma rays – and Earth may be right in the line of fire.

Astronomers at the University of Sydney, in Australia, first discovered the unusual and beguilingly beautiful star system eight years ago in the Constellation Sagittarius. One member of the pair is a highly unstable star known as a Wolf-Rayet, thought to be the final stage of stellar evolution to precede a cataclysmic supernova explosion.

"When it finally explodes as a supernova, it could emit an intense beam of gamma rays coming our way", said Peter Tuthill, lead researcher of the team that report their findings in the current Astrophysical Journal.

Wooh! Death star!

Come on, give me those beautiful details...

At a distance of 8,000 light-years from Earth, the pair of stars are a short hop away in galactic terms, and just one quarter of the way to the centre of our Milky Way galaxy.

The researchers took images of the system, known as WR 104, over a period of eight years using Hawaii's Keck Telescope. These images reveal a vast and glowing plume of heated dust and gas, billowing out in a spiral as the stars rotate once every eight months. This 'tail' is up to 30 billion kilometres long.

But something curious about the images caught the attention of the experts.

"Viewed from Earth, the rotating tail appears to be laid out on the sky in an almost perfect spiral. It could only appear like that if we are looking nearly exactly down on the axis of the binary system," said Tuthill.

This means we are peering down the barrel of the gun, as when binary supernovae go off, all their energy is focussed into a narrow beam of wildly destructive gamma ray radiation that emanates (both up and down) from the poles of the system.

"If such a gamma-ray burst happens, we really do not want Earth to be in the way," he said. "I used to appreciate this spiral just for its beautiful form, but now I can't help a twinge of feeling that it is uncannily like looking down a rifle barrel."

For those creationist types out there, I have to ask: why did God stack the local universe with so many giant supernova stars just itching to burn our ass?

Though the risk may be remote, there is evidence that gamma ray bursts have swept over the planet at various points in Earth's history with a devastating effect on life.

A 2005 study showed that a gamma-ray burst originating within 6,500 light-years of Earth could be enough to strip away the ozone layer and cause a mass extinction. Researchers led by Adrian Melott at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, U.S., suggest that such an event may have been responsible for a mass extinction 443 million years ago, in the late Ordovician period, which wiped out 60 per cent of life and cooled the planet.

Ahh.... yet another way we can all die.

Sources: Cosmos Magazine
Physics Department, University of Sydney

Science

,What the World Needs is More

Devil Toad
So those wacky scientists have discovered a giant, sharp-toothed, armored prehistoric frog that weight ten pounds.

No word on whether it had hypno-vision.

WASHINGTON (AP) - A frog the size of a bowling ball, with heavy armor and teeth, lived among dinosaurs millions of years ago - intimidating enough that scientists who unearthed its fossils dubbed the beast Beelzebufo, or Devil Toad.

But its size - 10 pounds and 16 inches long - isn't the only curiosity. Researchers discovered the creature's bones in Madagascar. Yet it seems to be a close relative of normal-sized frogs who today live half a world away in South America, challenging assumptions about ancient geography.

...

"This frog, if it has the same habits as its living relatives in South America, was quite voracious," Krause said. "It's even conceivable that it could have taken down some hatchling dinosaurs."

...

It seems to be a relative of South American horned frogs, known scientifically as Ceratophrys. Popular as pets, they're sometimes called pacman frogs for their huge mouths.

Like those modern frogs, Beelzebufo had a wide mouth and powerful jaws, plus teeth. Skull bones were extremely thick, with ridges and grooves characteristic of some type of armor or protective shield.

The name comes from the Greek word for devil, Beelzebub, and Latin for toad, bufo (pronounced boo-foe).

The family link raises a paleontology puzzle: Standard theory for how the continents drifted apart show what is now Madagascar would have been long separated by ocean from South America during Beelzebufo's time. And frogs can't survive long in salt water, Krause noted.

He contends the giant frog provides evidence for competing theories that some bridge still connected the land masses that late in time, perhaps via an Antarctica that was much warmer than today.

A dinosaur eating frog.

I HIDE NOW IN CASE IT COMES BACK

Source: My Way News (Associated Press feed)

Tiny Pterodactyl
From giant (presumably) evil toads, we go to tiny pterodactyls.

Probably also evil.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- As pterodactyls go, it was small, toothless and had unexpectedly curved toes -- yet scientists are welcoming their new find as another piece in the puzzle of ancient life.

"We have this really amazing creature, sparrow sized, which lived essentially in the trees, showing us a very new, very interesting side of the evolutionary history of those animals," said Alexander W. A. Kellner of the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

It is cute though.

Source: CNN.com

Sleep Bot
So some wiseguy researchers are working on a robot to scan, recognize, and reenact your dreams.

FOOLS!

Fernando Orellana and Brendan Burns have teamed up on a neat project, which involves a robot logging and re-enacting dreams of a human subject. Brainwave patterns and eye movements during dozing will be monitored, depending on what is logged, the robot will alter its behavior accordingly. Sure, this is not dream enactment proper, but it is as close as we are going to get in the not too distant future.

Oh the humanity.

Source: Gizmodo

New York Times and T-Rex Sex
Seriously. They ran a column, for Valentines week, about the romantic habits of the T-Rex. It gets a little...blue.

Which brings me to my tyrannical fantasy. I want to take a journey 68 million years back in time to see a Tyrannosaurus rex couple mating. What was it like? Did they trumpet and bellow and stamp their feet? Did they thrash their enormous tails? Did he bite her neck in rapture and exude a musky scent? Somehow, I imagine that when two T. rex got it on, the earth shook for miles around.

And if I could only take this journey, I could answer a question that sometimes bothers me. Did T. rex have a penis? Did he even, as lizards do, have two?

Thank you for the insight into your twisted mind. Those of us not yet driven mad by your column will be over here, on the other side of the padded door.

Source: The New York Times

Culinary Mad Science
Some people just have way too much time on their hands.

When some of the world's top chefs put their talent to whipping up some fun, the results can be disconcerting: a salsify or vegetable oyster turns into a cork, watermelon becomes meat and dishes connect to a mobile phone.

At this week's annual Omnivore Food Festival in Deauville, some of the world's most avant-garde chefs had fun with trompe-l'oeil.

Spain's Andoni Luis Aduriz, the chef from "Mugaritz" in Errenteria, dished up thin slices of appetising red meat served with salad dressing and sorrel but left diners gaping when he revealed the meat was water-melon.

Another of his dishes was a bar of soap sitting on a plate in the middle of a cloud of bubbles.

"The world of cosmetics is increasingly stepping into the world of gastronomy," he said. "They put more and more cooking ingredients into shampoos, such as honey, barley, flowers or apples. So I am putting gastronomy into cosmetics."

The bar of soap was made of barley milk, rice and gelatine, but the hardest part was producing bubbles that did not burst, a task that took a year of research with an engineer. They now last and taste of honey.

It goes on from there. Suffice it to say, these people are weird.

Source: Raw Story

Bronze Clock
Ancient Greek device, seemingly a clock for astronomical use, turns out to be just that. It's also as sophisticated as 18th century Western clocks.

A 2,000-year-old mechanical computer salvaged from a Roman shipwreck has astounded scientists who have finally unravelled the secrets of how the sophisticated device works.

The machine was lost among cargo in 65BC when the ship carrying it sank in 42m of water off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera. By chance, in 1900, a sponge diver called Elias Stadiatos discovered the wreck and recovered statues and other artifacts from the site.

The machine first came to light when an archaeologist working on the recovered objects noticed that a lump of rock had a gear wheel embedded in it. Closer inspection of material brought up from the stricken ship subsequently revealed 80 pieces of gear wheels, dials, clock-like hands and a wooden and bronze casing bearing ancient Greek inscriptions.

Since its discovery, scientists have been trying to reconstruct the device, which is now known to be an astronomical calendar capable of tracking with remarkable precision the position of the sun, several heavenly bodies and the phases of the moon. Experts believe it to be the earliest-known device to use gear wheels and by far the most sophisticated object to be found from the ancient and medieval periods.

...

Remarkably, scans showed the device uses a differential gear, which was previously believed to have been invented in the 16th century. The level of miniaturisation and complexity of its parts is comparable to that of 18th century clocks.

Ahh, the ancient Greeks. They could do everything except organize a working national government. Oh well.

Source: The Guardian

Crap Shoot
So a no-fly zone has been declared by the Air Force types over a region of the Pacific, strongly suggesting that this is where, in fact, they plan to try and down the rogue spy satellite.

Of course, there's no need to do so, in fact, and even if they are successful the only real result will be to riddle space with additional shrapnel, and of course, anger the Russkies and Chinese military.

Source: Google Maps

Dried Out
So a long-term climate change study by the folks who won the Nobel Prize with Al Gore shows that the Southwest is going to start to run out of water. Err, pretty soon, actually.

Climate change and a growing demand for water could drain two of the nation's largest manmade reservoirs within 13 years, depriving several Southwestern states of key water sources, scientists warn.



Researchers at San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography said Wednesday that there's a 50 percent chance that lakes Mead and Powell will dry up by 2021, and a 10 percent chance the lakes will run out of usable water by 2013.

"We were surprised that it was so soon," said climate scientist David Pierce, co-author of the institution's study that detailed the findings.

I guess we can soon add Phoenix to the list of cities that will be ghost towns, thanks in no small part to Republican incompetence and corporate greed.

Source: Raw Story

Recycling
Ok, so it's not strictly speaking science. But science is involved, and I have to give IU credit when it does something right, if for no other reason than the novelty.

In 2006, IU put out more than 7,000 tons of garbage. This excess waste is beginning to take a toll on not only Bloomington, but also other cities in Monroe County, said a representative of Residential Programs and Services.

...

IU is improving with total amount of waste put out per year. In 2007, the University cut back to 4,103 tons. Though the amount of waste has decreased by more than 3,000 tons, IU still has a long way to go, said Steve Akers, residential programs and services associate director of Environmental Operations.

Woo, 3000 tons less garbage.

Though since recycling is hardly 100% efficient, it's a bit disingenuous to act like shoving stuff in a recycling bin solves the whole problem.

Ahh, there we go. I needed a little cynicism in my IU news. Don't want to go soft.

Source: The Indiana Daily Stupid (Student)

A Real Nightmare All Right

Horror Special

Dear God, No
No, no, no please, please...

Transformers director Michael Bay and his partners at the Platinum Dunes production company have been tasked by New Line Cinema to "relaunch" the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise.

Wes Craven’s 1984 slasher classic gave the world the iconic Freddy Krueger, who haunted a total of nine films and two TV series. According to Variety, the new outing will represent a "complete overhaul" of the Nightmare concept.

Not Michael Bay, please, please no. Not the man who insisted on a non-asian cast for Pearl Harbor, spread malicious lies about Japanese spies in America, and had to have a Japanese protagonist added over his head by the studio after production.... not to mention one of the most talentless hack producers of our time.

Well, at least that's the worst news.. what do you MEAN there's more?

Bay and chums are also gearing up for a May start on resurrecting Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th in a new film to be helmed by Marcus Nispel. This is apparently up for a "complete overhaul" as well, and movie buffs will remember just what a complete overhaul did for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - remade in 2003 by New Line with Nispel calling the shots and Platinum Dunes lurking in the shadows.

ARGH. A bad director AND Bay are remaking Friday the 13th?

I think he's determined to destroy everything that was good in the entire decade of the 80s.

Just please let that be the end of...MOTHERFUCKER

And just to reinforce the feeling that Hollywood has completely lost the ability to come up with an original concept, Variety adds that Platinum Dunes is "prepping an exorcism thriller" for Rogue Pictures, plus a remake of Near Dark to be directed by music vid vet Samuel Bayer.

Oh yes, and the company's filling its spare time "developing a Universal remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds", in which Casino Royale director Martin Campbell will presumably ensure that slated star Naomi Watts will get plenty of unwanted avian attention.

So talentless whore Michael Bay is remaking Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Birds, Near Dark AND an Exorcist ripoff all at the same time.

This man is the devil. We need to bind him in a circle of salt, wrap him in iron and dismember the body before burning it in cleansing fire at dawn.

It is the only way.

Source, and I mean I copied almost the whole damn depressing thing: The Register

LSAT BLOG DELAYS

ARGH THE ANALYTICAL SECTION IS EATING MY SOUL

Very quick blog post here. I'm terribly busy studying for my big LSAT exam on Saturday at some ungodly hour in the morning, but I figured I'd put something out here just for habit's sake.

Edwards Out; I Mourn
First Dodd dropped out, one of the very few men in the Senate, or anywhere else, for that matter, willing to stand up for the rule of law against warrantless wiretapping. He based his campaign on noble Constitutional principles and got completely ignored, which is a pity.

Yet, when he was free of the campaign, what did he do? He went right back to fighting the warrantless wiretapping and telecom-amnesty bill in the Senate, and won. Twice, so far.

He would have made a fine President.

Now we have Edwards stepping aside, in no small part due to the abysmal performance he got in the Nevada caucus. It was the first time they ever conducted one, caucuses are designed to ensure that only two candidates get any real support because of their run-off nature, so he was doomed from the start, but he seems to have taken it personally, which is a real shame.

Edwards stood for the poor, the downtrodden, for everyone who's lost out in the marvelous Bush 'economy'. He's fought this same fight for decades, to mockery, to attacks, and to deafening silence. I expect he'll keep fighting it. Good for him.

Now we're left with whoever the Republicans dig out of the crypt, and the lesser of two mediocrities on the Democratic side. All the idealism and vibrancy has been systematically drained out of this primary season, leaving a group of candidates with all the appeal of cold gruel, or in Obama's case, all the substance of a marshmallow.

Sigh. I keep telling myself, at least it won't be Bush...

Source: Raw Story

For information on the Telco Immunity Bill, go to Firedoglake. They have a lot of material, and liveblog it whenever the bill comes up in the Senate.

New York City Wants to Secede
So here's the deal: NYC pays the state of New York 11 billion dollars more in taxes each year than it gets back in services. This has left the city somewhat unhappy, and proposing to secede from the state of New York.

Now, I know that word secession has nasty, Confederate connotations from the Civil War, but remember, there's legal precedent for seceding from a STATE but staying in the COUNTRY; we let West Virginia do it during the Civil War, after all.

(It's a sad sign of what a comic book nerd I am that I keep thinking of Marvel when I type 'Civil War')

At any rate, there's a plan going around to change that pay imbalance the hard way:

Emboldened by Mayor Bloomberg's testimony in Albany this week that the city's taxpayers pay the state $11 billion a year more than they get back, a City Council member is offering legislation that would begin the process of having New York City secede from New York State.

Peter Vallone Jr., a Democrat who represents Queens, is pushing the idea, and the Council plans to hold a hearing on the possibility of making New York City the 51st state.

"I think secession's time has definitely come again," Mr. Vallone, who spearheaded a similar push in 2003, told The New York Sun yesterday. "If not secession, somebody please tell me what other options we have if the state is going to continue to take billions from us and give us back pennies. Should we raise taxes some more? Should we cut services some more? Or should we consider seriously going out on our own?"

I'm all for it, on paper at least. In practice though, as the article points out, there would be some issues with this plan.

He added that Albany and the rest of New York north of the Bronx border does have some redeeming qualities. "The city needs upstate — it's where the city gets its water. It dumps its prisoners upstate," Mr. Stern said.

I left out Mr. Stern's quote immediately preceding that because he said you can't secede from a state, which I already mentioned is actually not true.

There's also the matter of the fact that the people who'd have to vote on this plan are, err, unlikely to support it.

Mr. Vallone's legislation would create a commission to study the issue and then recommend whether to put it to a referendum. Since secession would have to be approved by the Albany legislators, its passage would be unlikely. Another to council member, Simcha Felder, who chairs the Governmental Operations committee, said the bill will be considered this year.

This is how governmental inertia works, folks. Revolutions are hard to conduct. That's sort of the idea.

Source: The New York Sun

Oh, Now THIS is Going to Be a Headache
The Kosovar government is threatening to announce its independence from Serbian Yugoslavia as soon as the Serbs finish their election.

This absolutely cannot go well.

Kosovo will proclaim independence within days of Serbia's presidential election on Sunday regardless who wins, the breakaway province's prime minister said Wednesday.

"The developments in Serbia do not have any influence on Kosovo. Kosovo has its own path," said Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci.

Hardline nationalist Tomislav Nikolic will dispute the Serbian presidency with pro-Western incumbent Boris Tadic in a runoff vote on Sunday. Opinion polls indicate the political battle is too close to call.

"The independence of Kosovo will happen in the next few days, regardless if Tadic or Nikolic wins," Thaci told journalists in the provincial capital Pristina.

Pressed to predict a possible date for a declaration, a senior Kosovo government official told AFP: "I would choose the second or third week of February.

Man, Putin's going to put his boot down if that happens, and then we'll be in the mess, and we're talking thick.

Sigh. Kind of wish we still had our international credibility and military presence, huh?

Source: Raw Story

Billy Boy Earns My Respect Again
Now he's on target, putting that temper of his where it belongs: aimed directly at the lunatic fringe.

The Clinton campaign may be stopping President Bill from taking on Senator Barack Obama in his public appearances on his wife's behalf. But that doesn't mean he can't go on the rampage against '9/11 hecklers.'

"9/11 was not an inside job, it was an Osama Bin Laden job," President Clinton proclaimed in the campaign stop.

"We look like idiots, folks, denying that the people who murdered our fellow citizens didn't when they are continuing to murder people all around the world," he added. "So we heard from you, you go away."

Bravo, Billy. It's beneath the Former President of the United States to talk whacko conspiracy theories with some crackpot glue-huffer, and you told him as much, though in much nicer language.

My hat, if I wore one, would be off to you today.

Source: Raw Story

Roommate's Assignment
This is what my roommate had to turn in as an assignment for a class, when asked for a small bit of flash animation: an Old One slaughtering some poor scientists at the Mountains of Madness.

Random

Varied Stuff

More Ledgermania
More effects from Heath Ledger's sudden and, ahem, unexpected death. This time in the world of marketing.

First, in an official entry for All Time Most Crass Store Promotion, a Best Buy employee set up a little shrine of Heath Ledger movies as soon as the news came out, in order to sell some extra copies.

The story got out, and Best Buy seems fairly embarassed.

Eh. It's not so much that they did it, as that it was so crass, what with the laserjet rush to the printer little flyer, and the completely random selection of dvds they wanted to push (Dogtown? BEST PERFORMANCES?).

Still, that's capitalism for ya.

Source: The Consumerist

I also saw this story somewhere else earlier, will try to dig up the link.

Sangria-ville
So Virginia has an idiot immediate post-prohibition law still on the books, saying that you can't mix liquor into anything else to drink until a customer immediately asks.

Why this was thought to be of benefit to anyone, I'll never know.

It does however make Sangria, traditionally mixed in large volumes and allowed to seep for flavoring, illegal in Virginia... and they actually enforce this 1930s era law, with fines and everything.

Gah. I hate Blue Laws.

Source: Raw Story

Web History 101
Josh from The Comics Curmudgeon has an article up at ITworld.com about the odd history of the early web. It's pretty entertaining.

Source: ITworld.com

Pregnancy Dreams
Yet another reason pregnancy is gross, I think: it apparently causes (relative to the person) weird dreams.

Here are a couple in comics form from the artist who does a comic Brian Clevinger recommended recently. It's a Euro comic, so, gasp, there are nekkid people in them and such.

First, Gabe from Penny-Arcade on the secrets of Photoshop.
Then, a Lovecraftian vision of childbirth (which coincides with my own fairly well)

Carnivorous Plants
No matter how much love and attention I gave it, my carnivorous plant died recently. I think it needed a terrarium. Which is odd, as it lives in a wide range of naturally chilly climates in the wild.

Anyway, here is a newly discovered pitcher plant big enough to eat small rats, in Australia.

A rare new species of plant that eats small rats has been discovered at the tip of Cape York.

Pitcher plants, otherwise known as flesh-eating plants, grow throughout Cape York but now a new, larger species that grows like a vine has been discovered.

The new species has been called "Tenax".

They're coming for us. Next it's the pods.

Source: ABC.net.au

I Try to Get Out, But He Keeps Pulling Me Back IN

Ron Paul Has Released an Economic Plan. This is a hoot.

I'm going to take this apart piece by piece, just for fun. You can see the original at http://www.ronpaul2008.com/Prosperity if you like whacko shit.

Tax Deform
The first part of Paul's plan is a plethora of Tax proposals. These are pretty easy.

1)Eliminate Taxes on Dividends and Savings
This is a blatantly obvious ploy to make the rich richer. Dividends are what you earn on investments, on your stock portfolio. Obviously, the richer you are, the more this benefits you.

2)Repeal the Death Tax
There is no such thing; it's an Estate Tax, as in, a tax on the Estate you leave to your designated heir or beneficiary. The Estate tax is an essential provision of liberty in a democratic society, as it places a cap on inherited wealth and retards the growth of landed aristocracy. This also almost exclusively benefits the wealthy.

3)Cut Taxes for Working Seniors
He wants to repeal the taxes on social security as a part of your income. I have no problem with this.

4)Accelerate Depreciation on Investment. We need to help companies grow and create jobs.
Pass H.R. 4995 to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to reduce corporate marginal income tax rates.
A tax cut for corporations. Big surprise.

5)Eliminate Taxes on Capital Gains. Investment should be embraced and rewarded.
Pass H.J. Res 23 (The “Liberty Amendment”), proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relative to abolishing personal income, estate, and gift taxes and prohibiting the United States Government from engaging in business in competition with its citizens.

This is the big one. No income taxes, estate taxes, gift taxes, and NO PUBLIC UTILITIES OR SERVICES.

This goes way, way beyond what even your average libertarian believes. This would eliminate everything from the public electric utlity, to the public library, to the highway department, along with all the taxes that pay for all meaningful public services. This is the absolute death knell of the federal system of government. Without those taxes, you have no military, no protection from our enemies, and no federal government. This would turn the United States into 50 separate governments.

This is huge.

6 and 7 are proposals for taking tips for wait staff off of taxes, and for some mortgage relief due to the current subprime thing. They're only there after 5 because he needs camouflage. There won't be any waiters or mortgages to worry about after Paul collapses American Civilization with his plan.

Spending Deform

Two simple proposals here:
1) Pulls our troops out of our overseas global bases, castrating our military strength.
2)Freezes non-defense, non-entitlement spending at current levels, presumably to attempt to account for the massive loss of revenue his tax cuts entail.

Of course, since those two categories make up about 70% of the federal budget, that helps, oh... not a lot.

NOWHERE HERE DOES HE SAY WHERE HE WILL PAY FOR THE PROGRAMS HE HAS NOT CUT. HE CANNOT DO IT, SO HE HOPES YOU WILL NOT NOTICE

Monetary Policy Deform
Three proposals here.

1)Televise Federal Open Market Committee Meetings
Ok, so he wants to see the Fed meetings on CSPAN. Probably not a big deal.... hardly revolutionary television, but ok.

2)Expand Transparency and Blah Blah at Federal Reserve
Essentially he wants a weekly book report from the Fed on our incredibly complex monetary policy. On its face, innocuous, but probably impossible to implement, which would give him cover to dissolve the Fed entirely.

3)Return Value to Our Money Legalize gold and silver as a competing currency.
Oh lord, this is great stuff. He wants to legalize people to PRINT THEIR OWN MONEY IN GOLD, SILVER, OR ANY OTHER METAL.

IN ANY LIKENESS.

PRESUMABLY HIS OWN.

Regulatory Deform
Two provisions here, both pretty whacko.

1)Repeal Sarbanes/Oxley
This is the law passed overwhelmingly by Congress after the Enron scandals. It's byzantine but designed to reign in the kind of blatant, outright corporate fraud that Enron and Worldcom engaged in.

Needless to say, binning this law would put us back in the Wild Wild West days of Enron. Hope you don't like investing in the stock market.

2)Repeal or Remove Costly and Unnecessary Federal Regulations. Neighbors know best how to help their neighbors.
We need to make it easier for community banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions to better serve their communities and to help people in these communities get access to credit and capital.
Pass H.R. 1869 to enhance the ability of community banks to foster economic growth and serve their communities, boost small businesses, increase individual savings, and for other purposes.

This one I had no clue on. I had to go look up H.R. 1869.

Basically, it lets small banks entirely off the hook of regulation by the federal government. Local banks can do what they want and not open their books to anybody.

Yeah... that sounds like a great idea.

SUMMARY:

So there you have it, Ron Paul's plan to save America. A few small sops to the working poor, a meaningless and corrupt gesture to small banks, a ton of corporate handouts, and, oh yeah, an AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION THAT WOULD DESTROY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IN ITS ENTIRETY FOREVER AND PLUNGE US INTO A NEW DARK AGE

Entropy Advances

Sometimes There's Nothing You Can Do; Sometimes It All Just Falls Apart


Nuclear Secrets for Sale
So BradBlog and the Sunday Times in jolly old England have been pushing a fairly explosive, no pun intended, story on nuclear proliferation.

It seems that a former translator working on our intercepts from Turkey stumbled on something she wasn't supposed to know; that high ranking US government reps in the Bush administration were selling out our nuclear secrets -- to Turkey, and through them, to half the Islamic world.

The paper now reports that they are able to corroborate an apparent FBI cover-up of documents detailing an investigation of the theft and sale of nuclear secrets to agents working for Turkey and Israel, who in turn shared the secrets with Pakistan, who in turn may have shared those secrets with Iran, North Korea, Libya, and possibly even al-Qaeda.

As The BRAD BLOG reported along with the Times two weeks ago, the operation also includes allegations that high-ranking U.S. officials --- such as Marc Grossman, a former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, who served as the #3 official in the State Department under Colin Powell and Richard Armitage from 2001 to 2005 --- were involved in the sale of those secrets and may have accepted pay-offs from agents in the black market network in the bargain.

Naturally, the informant in question is under a gag order to prevent her from spilling her guts on precisely who in the Bush administration committed bald-faced treason.

We've also just spoken to Edmonds, who has been under an unprecedented 5-year-long gag order by the U.S. Department of Justice. The DoJ has threatened Edmonds with prosecution under the so-called "State Secrets Privilege." The threat of prison has kept her from speaking publicly about details related to the case, which she claims to have heard while translating wiretaps for the FBI in 2001 and 2002. She has spent many years encouraging members of Congress to hold hearings and a public investigation into the case. Despite public support from senators such as Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and a promise for investigations from members of Rep. Henry Waxman's (D-CA) office, who have been briefed on the details, no such investigation has been carried out to date.

It gets even better of course. It turns out that Valerie Plame was betrayed yet again by the Bush administration, and our counter-proliferation efforts shot in the back.

It claims the government official warned a Turkish member of the network that they should not deal with a company called Brewster Jennings because it was a CIA front company investigating the nuclear black market. The official’s warning came two years before Brewster Jennings was publicly outed when one of its staff, Valerie Plame, was revealed to be a CIA agent in a case that became a cause célèbre in the US.

The letter also makes reference to wiretaps of Turkish “targets” talking to [Pakistan's] ISI intelligence agents at the Pakistani embassy in Washington and recordings of “operatives” at the [American Turkish Council].

Meanwhile, the American media, unlike some blogs and the British papers, is eerily silent on this whole sordid mess.

In response to that story, the top newspapers from Turkey to Pakistan to India to Israel picked up on the report. But in the United States, incredibly enough, absolutely nothing. Not a single major American media outlet covered the explosive and disturbing allegations.

Ahh, the American press. How little we can rely upon them.

Meanwhile, Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame has published an op-ed on the subject that I need to read. Though from what I've seen it didn't get much play either.

Source: The BRAD BLOG

NATO Staff Asserts Right to Use Nukes As First-Strike
Cold War all over again. Sigh.

The five commanders argue that the west's values and way of life are under threat, but the west is struggling to summon the will to defend them. The key threats are:

· Political fanaticism and religious fundamentalism.

· The "dark side" of globalisation, meaning international terrorism, organised crime and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

· Climate change and energy security, entailing a contest for resources and potential "environmental" migration on a mass scale.

In other words, prominent NATO officials believe that nuclear war is an acceptable tactic in response to terrorism, global warming, regional conflicts and humanitarian crises.

Just great.

Source: The Guardian

What's Good for the Goose...
Putin's Russia also recently stated its willingness to blow the living daylights out of the landscape on rather spurious justification.

Russia's military chief of staff said Saturday that Moscow could use nuclear weapons in preventive strikes to protect itself and its allies, the latest aggressive remarks from increasingly assertive Russian authorities.

Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky's comment did not mark a policy shift, military analysts said. Amid disputes with the West over security issues, it may have been meant as a warning that Russia is prepared to use its nuclear might.

"We do not intend to attack anyone, but we consider it necessary for all our partners in the world community to clearly understand ... that to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russia and its allies, military forces will be used, including preventively, including with the use of nuclear weapons," Baluyevsky said at a military conference in a remark broadcast on state-run cable channel Vesti-24.

...

The military doctrine adopted in 2000 says Russia may use nuclear weapons to counter a nuclear attack on Russia or an ally, or a large-scale conventional attack that poses a critical risk to Russia's security.

Note that the conventional attack doesn't have to be on Russia, or Russia's allies... or anything in particular really. That's a lot of wiggle room for a nuclear holocaust, to my mind.

Source: Raw Story

Bush is the New Hoover
Only without the compassion and human decency.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A shock U.S. interest rate cut failed to halt a stock market rout on Tuesday as fears of a U.S. recession forced policymakers in Europe and Japan to issue rapid reassurances about the health of their economies.

The Federal Reserve cut its key interest rate by three-quarters of a percentage point to 3.5 percent, its biggest in more than 23 years. But markets paused only momentarily before the selling wave renewed as investors seem fixated on the idea that the U.S. will drag the world economy down.

...

Outside North America, politicians and central bankers said the market selloff looked excessive. But they had their work cut out to convince as people like billionaire investor George Soros, who said the world faced a financial crisis worse than any since World War Two.

Meanwhile, the Europeans are already looking to a future where they can't rely on the United States to exist as a viable economic entity:

The message sounded more strident in Europe than Japan but the common theme was: don't panic.

"There are no signs of a recession in Germany and that's also the case for Europe," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said.

In an interview with German TV to be broadcast later, she called Europe an "anchor of stability" in the world.

France sought to put a possible recession in the United States into perspective, saying Europe trades just as much with other parts of the world, above all with the countries of the euro zone and 27-country European Union.

"Even if the United States goes into recession ... it's not a tragedy in itself," Economy Minister Christine Lagarde said.

She and other European finance ministers meeting in Brussels said Europe's economy was fundamentally sound and should in no way be grouped with the U.S. economy, hit by a housing slump and a debt default crisis in the subprime mortgage market.

"We feel comfortable with our economic situation at the moment. The economic situation in Europe seems to be uncoupled from the situation in the U.S.," said Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, who chairs meetings of euro zone finance ministers and acts as their chief spokesman.

Honestly, the fact that the perennially ossified EU, with its constant bickering and infighting, can do this to us is a sign of just how badly Bush runs the US Government. It reminds me of the famous Churchill quote on democracy; the EU can only seem like an idyllic paradise if you live in hell.

Source: Reuters

Meanwhile, In the Festering Wound That is Iraq
The other day on the Daily Show, Fareed Zakaria, strike-breaking scum that he is appearing on a show with a picket against it, said something that really summed up US foreign policy to me brilliantly, in a crystal-clear, concise phrase that could really be the substitute for a lot of classwork in poli-sci at the undergrad level:

"We like Democracy in strategically irrelevant countries." -- Fareed Zakaria

How can someone say something that bright one moment, and this dumb the next?

The Democrats are having the hardest time with the new reality. Every candidate is committed to "ending the war" and bringing our troops back home. The trouble is, the war has largely ended, and precisely because our troops are in the middle of it.

Nevermind the obvious logical problem with that statement, that a war has largely ended because we're mired inside of it; what planet is this guy on? Would he care for a vacation package to sunny downtown Baghdad, since he's so sure the war is over?

As Yglesisas notes while discussing the ever-improving tactics of the insurgency:

Obviously, though, this improvement in the tactics and doctrine of anti-American fighters in Iraq can't be a big deal since the war is largely over. If the war were still happening, this kind of thing might illustrate the illusory nature of tactical improvements in the face of a bleak strategic situation. But since the war is "largely" over already there's probably no problem here.

Yeah. It's all sunshine and lollipops over there. Yglesias' post comes on the heels of the news that the Army's latest, greatest, most bomb resistant troop transport technology, designed to put us ahead of the insurgents in the IED war, has been beaten for the first time.

What's so special about these new vehicles, called MRAPs, you ask?

The vehicles have distinctive, armored V-shaped hulls that are designed to deflect the force of the explosion from roadside bombs out and away from the vehicle, sparing the occupants in the compartment.

The underbody sits about 36 inches off the ground, higher than the Humvees that have proved susceptible to roadside bombs despite the additional armor added to many of them in combat zones.

The vehicles are much bigger than Humvees, standing 12 feet high, weighing up to 18 tons, and carrying 6 to 10 soldiers, depending on the model. There are more than 1,500 of them in Iraq now, and the military plans to purchase more than 15,000 of them at a cost of $22.4 billion.

Apparently the geniuses at the Pentagon have been unable to come up with a single design, so they're buying basically anything, from any contractor, that is thrown at them claiming to solve this problem. See this Wikipedia article on the sheer variety of vehicles they're trying out now under the MRAP banner.

The anti-armor weapon that took it out? Basically the same thing Timothy McVeigh utilized: a fertilizer bomb.

Several vehicles in the convoy had already passed over the same spot, but failed to set off what officers say they was a deeply buried, homemade bomb, which the military calls an improvised explosive device, or I.E.D., made from about 300 pounds of fertilizer and set off with a pressure device.

We are well and truly hosed, trying to fight an insurgency campaign with technology. You can't win; it's the fundamental nature of the universe that order loses out to degeneracy, entropy increases, and it all falls apart. It will always be easier to destroy than to create; you can't fight that, it's not an ethos, it's physical reality. The only way to build and protect a society is to keep it cohesive and safe from the inside out, and fight a never-ending war, one that ultimately all life is doomed to lose, against the ravages of time.

Ultimately, it will all just fall apart. It's up to us to slow the decay, to use the time we've been given, and lately, we've been miserable failures.

Sources: The New York Times
Matthew Yglesias
Wikipedia

Countdown to Armageddon

So El Presidente is going for a high level trip to Israel, and while there the Israelis are essentially going to present him with a wish-list of places in Iran they'd like bombed.

Israel security officials are set to brief President Bush on their "Iran file" regarding the country's alleged nuclear weapons program "and how it could be destroyed - when he begins a tour of the Middle East in Jerusalem this week," the UK Times Uzi Mahnaimi reported Sunday.

"Ehud Barak, the defence minister, is said to want to convince him that an Israeli military strike against uranium enrichment facilities in Iran would be feasible if diplomatic efforts failed to halt nuclear operations," the paper added. "A range of military options has been prepared."

Gee, thanks Israel. Thanks a load.

Sigh. Sometimes you just want to crawl back into bed when doing morning news like this. But that's not for me; I must learn to feed on my rage, hone it into a sharp, evil implement with which to maim my many enemies.

Bring on the pain!

Bush League Fakery

This one deserves its own special post.

Folks, Bush is officially trying to get us into a last-minute war with Iran. He's not even original enough to come up with a new excuse; he wants to reuse something from LBJ's Greatest Hits Collection:

(CNN) -- The U.S. military reported Monday on a "significant" confrontation involving five Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats that "harassed and provoked" three U.S. naval ships in international waters over the weekend.

U.S. military officials said the incident occurred early Sunday morning in the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow shipping channel leading in and out of the Persian Gulf.

The five Iranian ships made "threatening" moves -- in one case coming within 200 yards of a U.S. ship, the U.S. officials said.

In one radio transmission, the Iranians told the U.S. Navy: "I am coming at you. You will explode in a couple of minutes," the U.S. military officials told CNN.

When the U.S. ships heard that radio transmission, they took up their gun positions and officers were "in the process" of giving the order to fire when the Iranians abruptly turned away, the U.S. officials said.

Firing on the ship of a sovereign nation is a cause for war, folks. Err, for them, not so much us. Random and completely undocumented radio transmissions, not so much.

Gulf of Tonkin Part Deux! Onward to Tehran!

God this is going to be a slaughter. We can't even handle Iraq, how they think we can do Iran at the same time is completely beyond me.

Source: CNN.com

Cui Bono

(For the illiterate pagans out there)

So everyone's heard about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan, recently returned from exile, survivor of another attempt on her life during her welcome home celebration about a month ago. Bhutto's family has been involved in Pakistani politics much the same way the Kennedys have been in the United States, the difference being, our dynastic clan offs themselves, hers gets murdered.

She's the fourth Bhutto since Pakistan's independence to die as a result of politics. Her father and two brothers preceded her.

So, obviously, there are two ways to look at this assassination. One: It's another internal Pakistani thing, or Two: The All-Powerful Terrorists are behind it.

Cynicism aside, apply the aforementioned principle from the title and ask yourself, "Who Benefits?"

Well, in this case, it's a little muddy. Everyone seems to benefit from her death. Musharraf's political party has just seen its chief opposition die in a hail of... something (more on that in a moment), and is now a shoe-in to win the upcoming parliamentary elections. Which are, hence, a joke. Al-Queda supposedly hates her, but I think it's more of a pragmatism thing with them; Bhutto would have to be more competent at controlling those cave dwelling loons than Musharraf, who turns a blind eye.

So, who killed her, and why?

Bhutto certainly had her suspicions. She sent CNN an email to be opened only in the event of her death a short time ago. In the email, she lays the blame squarely at the feet of Musharraf.

"I wld [sic] hold Musharaf [sic] responsible," Bhutto wrote to her US spokesman, Mark Siegel, in the October e-mail, which was reported Thursday afternoon by CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "I have been made to feel insecure by his minions, and there is no way what is happening in terms of stopping me from taking private cars or using tinted windows or giving jammers or four police mobiles to cover all sides cld [sic] happen without him."

Blitzer told viewers he received the e-mail soon after it was sent two months ago, but he agreed not to report on it unless Bhutto was assassinated. "It's a story I was asked to report to the world in -- if Bhutto were killed," he said.

Source: Raw Story

It's like something out of a TV drama, isn't it?

The official timeline for the death goes something like this. Bhutto was leaving a rally and got into her bulletproof car. She stuck her head out of the sunroof to wave to admirers, and it all went to hell.

Depending on your version of events, she was shot twice and then the shooter blew himself up; there were no shots, and she died from blunt force trauma, her head hitting part of the car when the attacker blew himself up; she was shot AND riddled with shrapnel when the guy blew himself up.

She was quickly flown home for burial without an autopsy, which complicates matters.

As Bhutto's letter indicates, the state provided security has proven to be utterly useless in keeping her alive, and never seemed to try that hard to begin with. Musharraf certainly had no interest in keeping his chief rival around and operaating, and he made that abundantly clear.

But something more sinister than, well, pretty fucking sinister activities may be going on here.

Police abandoned their security posts shortly before Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto's assassination Thursday, according to a journalist present at the time, and unanswerable questions remain about the cause of her death, because an autopsy was never performed.
...
"Police officers had frisked the 3,000 to 4,000 people attending Thursday's rally when they entered the park, but as the speakers from Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party droned on, the police abandoned many of their posts," wrote Saeed Shah in an essay published by McClatchy News Service. "As she drove out through the gate, her main protection appeared to be her own bodyguards, who wore their usual white T-shirts inscribed: 'Willing to die for Benazir.'"

The reason no autopsy was performed was, as it turns out, a governmental one as well.

Whatever the case, Bhutto's precise cause of death may never be known because of the failure to administer an autopsy. The procedure was not carried out because police and local authorities in Rawalpindi did not request one, according to IBNLive, but the government plans a formal investigation why this was the case.

This does conveniently leave no one in a secure position to challenge the government's Al-Queda sunroof head smack hypothesis, though.

Earlier in the day Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz told a Pakistani news channel, “The report says she had head injuries – an irregular patch – and the X-ray doesn’t show any bullet in the head. So it was probably the shrapnel or any other thing has struck her in her said. That damaged her brain, causing it to ooze and her death. The report categorically says there’s no wound other than that," according to IBNLive.

Source: Raw Story

So what precisely does this mean for Pakistan, the region, and our colossal continuing failure abroad? Hard to say.

Currently the country is being gripped by waves of violence and chaos; the upcoming elections are now a complete farce and will put Musharraf back in power just as he always intended; and whether Al-Queda actually killed Bhutto or not, it's clear that Musharraf wanted to give them every opportunity to do so. The letter from beyond the grave is just icing on the cake.

This is one seriously messed up situation, folks.

(For more details on the aftermath, see this handy Telegraph article)

I Yet Live!

So after the snowman incident I kind of came down with something and was pretty sick all week. Yeesh.

But I'm better now, so on with the links and news.

Finally, CSI Redux
This pretty much explains the whole show, along with all of its various clones and retreads.

Source: Cascade Failure

Ebay Madness
If you're evil and have disposable income there's no end to the fun you can have.

Source: Ebay (naturally)

Mars Was Already Pretty Beaten Up, It Hardly Needs a New Dent
Used planets just aren't what they once were.

Oh well.

Source: The LA Times

Slashdot Said It Best, I Think
Begun, this War on Christmas Has.

Source: Gizmodo

Bush Sez: A Bargain at Twice The Price!
Oh, and you will be paying twice the price, too.

Iraq war now tops Vietnam in cost using adjusted dollars. Twice as expensive as Korea.

Source: Yahoo News

Lakota Indians Withdraw from Meaningless Treaties
Not that it will help them, but at least it made the news.

Source: Fox News (oddly enough)

Putin of the Year
Vlad makes Person of the Year at Time.

The article has some great Russian jokes in it too.

Still, creepy, creepy man.

Oh, and FYI, Time? "A Tsar is Born" is not a clever title. Not the least bit. Plus, considering how Russkies see the Tsars, it's pretty insensitive.

Source: Time.com

Department of RICHARD IS BACK OH THANK THE LORD
Looking for Group with another Richard comic that needs to be made into a shirt.

Seriously. I'd buy like five all by myself.

Source: Looking for Group

Stop or the Rainforest Gets It

In an amusing sign of things to come, perhaps, Ecuador is threatening to allow oil drilling in an incredibly valuable rainforest environment.... unless it gets a ransom of 350 million dollars. A year.

Seriously. They're holding a forest for ransom.

Source: USA Today

There. Is. No. God.

There will be a shojo X-Men manga series.

Just shoot me now. Please.

The first, X-Men, was described as a shōjo title — "X-Men meets Fruits Basket or Ouran High School Host Club" according to one panelist — features Xavier's Institute for Higher Learning as an all-boys' school, with the only female student being Kitty Pryde. The work will be aimed at a manga audience; while the characters will be based on famous X-Men heroes, the manga will not require any prior knowledge of the original X-Men comics. The manga is scripted by Raina Telgemeier and Dave Roman, with art by Indonesia-based artist Anzu.

What's next, a Harlequin novel? Isn't the 30 Days of Night franchise enough punishment inflicted on us by the comic industry?

Source: Anime News Network