Rhinocrisy

Fuck Negroponte, man. My roomie has an OLPC XO. I played with it a bit, recently. It’s a beautiful device. The applications are ingenious, simple, and extremely powerful. They’re the kind of thing that anyone could enjoy using. The few apps I played with seemed designed for growth - you can start off merely fooling around, but if you want to go further, the sky’s the limit. What’s more important is that the XO was FREE. Of course, it cost $150, but it was free in the important sense of that word - free like air and water, free like sunshine and mother’s milk. Now, it’s another brick in the wall. Well, can’t have those emerging markets polluted with non-Microsoft products, I suppose.

Friends, we have in the past expressed concern that our readership might have an overdeveloped sense of morality, and so may be trampled and bruised by the herd in the mad dash towards the pinnacle of crapulence. For your protection, therefore, we present this occasional series on how you, kind reader, may become less kind and more cruel, and thus hopefully further your success.

There are few people as vulnerable and impressionable in this world as children, and as we suggested in previous editions of our Guide to Being Evil, one of the surest paths to unadulterated evil is by exploiting that weakness. As I like to say, there is no sound sweeter than the piteous shrieks of the innocent.

However, it is vital that, in committing your evil deeds, you don’t make too much work for yourself. Not because sloth is an exceptional evil by itself (it’s only a second-rate evil), but because mass productivity is what’s really required to achieve legendary status as a demonic fiend. We’d all like to be able to disembowel and consume the entrails of half a million small toddlers, but who has that kind of time?^* Instead, we can save ourselves considerable effort by piggy-backing on the general tide of evil washing over society.

As a case study, we present the website Miss Bimbo, a “virtual fashion game” created by one Nicolas Jacquart, an evil genius capable of inducing such a towering hatred that you, personally, would relish the act of skewering his body with a couple of meat-hooks. The site is directed at an extremely vulnerable segment of the population: young, pre-teen girls, and its goal may be neatly summed up by the tag: “Are you ready to become Queen of the Bimbos !?!” Herein, the young female may pilot a virtual bimbo, and by controlling her weight, appearance, and social status, may accrue “bimbo dollars” and “bimbo cred”, until she (hopefully) attains the desired rank of ruling monarch of a very sad kingdom.

Now, hold your skepticism. You may, at first, be disinclined to believe that such a website is not a parody, or that it actually has managed to attract half a million young, impressionable girls and inculcated in them a desire to become a vapid, clownish caricature of a human being. This is because you do not have the necessary propensity towards evil! Your failure to imagine such a thing is precisely what we are attempting to correct via this series. Take notes, and learn.

I created a test account to explore the Miss Bimbo virtual world (bimbo nickname: Jenghis Khan). At this beginning stage my goals are modest: secure an apartment, get a job, and “Change your drab hairstyle to become a blonde with cool pigtails!” However, if I were to persevere, I would be able to purchase lingerie, a makeover, a nice tan, and maybe (for the benefit of thousands of points of “Bimbo Attitude”) some plastic surgery: a face lift, or perhaps some breast augmentation surgery! Unfortunately the complaints of outraged parents and health care officials forced M. Jacquart to remove the ability to purchase diet pills for your bimbo, which means that he will no longer be able to directly instruct young girls in how to develop and maintain their eating disorders. However, we can be confident that the remainder of his website will admirably succeed in destroying any sense of self-worth that those girls may have.

Now, take note of what M. Jacquart is doing: his barbarism is hinged on a prototype that is well-familiar within the zeitgeist. Rather than doing the hard work of creating a destructive archetype all by himself and somehow encouraging young girls to adopt it, he has made use of the already-widespread social message that girls need to become as empty-headed and artificial as possible, aspiring only to the acquisition of clothes, money, looks, and social notoriety. Others have already laid the groundwork by creating and maintaining industries devoted to making girls hate their bodies and devalue their minds. Pleasant Nicolas merely provides a conduit for the flow of this filth, directing it more efficiently towards the intended targets. Thus he manages great evil with only slight effort.

We may all learn from his vile example.

^* Not to mention that toddler entrails go straight to the hips.

What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that’s already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued. I can’t prejudge that because we don’t have access to all the material right now. I think that you are right, if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated. You’re also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.

So this is an area where I would want to exercise judgment - I would want to find out directly from my Attorney General - having pursued, having looked at what’s out there right now - are there possibilities of genuine crimes as opposed to really bad policies. And I think it’s important - one of the things we’ve got to figure out in our political culture generally is distinguishing betyween really dumb policies and policies that rise to the level of criminal activity. You know, I often get questions about impeachment at town hall meetings and I’ve said that is not something I think would be fruitful to pursue because I think that impeachment is something that should be reserved for exceptional circumstances. Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law — and I think that’s roughly how I would look at it.

What a brave, brave man. His noble spirit embiggens us all.

More nobility from the media:

The mainstream media by and large seem to agree with Bush that the ABC News Report wasn’t so startling, and they have given Bush’s remarks almost no coverage. There was no mention of Bush’s admission in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or the Los Angeles Times. There was nothing on the major wire services. And nothing on CNN, CBS or NBC.

Finally, this video from “Condimustgo.com” is worthwhile. Although I might add ‘to jail’ to the end of that URL.

William Kristol is one of the pre-eminent neo-conservative mouthpieces. He was one of the most consistent defenders of Bush administration policy in the leadup to the war, supported unequivocally the idea that Saddam’s WMDs proposed a threat, claimed that we’d be greeted as liberators, and to this day asserts that the outcome in Iraq will be roses and custard pie, resulting in a strong, stable democracy and an American ally emerging in the Middle East.

Needless to say, William Kristol is frequently wrong. And not just wrong, like, “I forgot to add the fabric softener,” or “I chose the wrong drapes to go with this wallpaper,” but catastrophically wrong, like, “Nearly every important factual claim I’ve made in the past five years is incorrect, and the policies I advocated resulted in a million deaths.”

The correct thing to do when someone’s entire worldview has been discredited and the president whose policies they’ve supported is a laughingstock with an abysmal approval rating is, of course, to give them a column in the nation’s most prominent newspaper, the New York Times.

But, before you stab your eyes out, you should read this excellent article by Jon Schwarz dissecting Kristol’s idiocy.

Tuesday morning I am in the shower before I am even awake, thinking about how the Sandman got his name as my heavy lids slide down over my eyes. We are in our hotel in Santa Fe, at the end of a brief but enjoyable sojourn. Our belongings are still half-scattered across the floor of the room. I seem to have misplaced a pair of boxers; somehow, I suspect the maid.
Read the rest of this entry »

The next day I saw his picture in the Daily News, beneath a caption saying he had been “mugged.” Poor fool, poor blind fool, I thought with sincere compassion, mugged by an invisible man!

Where I come from (a watery planet called Earth) this is news.

Congressman Kucinich Will Hold Press Conference to Announce Introduction of Articles of Impeachment Relating To Vice President Richard Cheney

But on this strange desert world, where the sand has blinded the rich, this impeachment is the action of an invisible man. It will be funny if it prevails.

It got a few minutes on CNN followed by senior political correspondent Candy Crowley, who spoke in a tone that said “he’s not one of us, we’re responsible, I’ve never even seen him before!”

“This is not what the Democrats were elected to do,” she said. Her tone made it sound like even honoring the news with a report was akin to holding soiled toilet paper. But I should give her credit — the cool kids haven’t even gone as far as her. The story isn’t on the web sites of the Washington Post, the allegedly “newspaper of record” New York Times, LA Times, or Chicago Tribune. It isn’t on Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal. Not even the most liberal major newspaper website in the USA, SFGate (of the San Francisco Chronicle), has anything about it. But who can blame them? Even my favorite liberal blogs have blacked (tee hee) out the news. Nothing on Eschaton or Talking Points Memo.

I don’t care if the reporters and editors think this is a stupid move by a fringe candidate. When someone moves to impeach the Vice President of the United States, the public deserves to know.

Fortunately, they have these news sources:
CQ
Associated Press
AND
And blogs like Tiny Revolution, which I believe beat all but CNN, and the liberal uber-blog Daily Kos, which even (holy cow!) has a discussion on the topic.

I suppose the situation goes along with the rest of Kucinich’s “Invisible Man” campaign. The media love to say that none of the Democratic candidates have a comprehensive plan to reform the American health care system, ignoring Kucinich’s repeated call for a single-payer Canadian-style insurance system. And they say the Dems don’t have a plan for Iraq, ignoring his call to shrink the military and create a Department of Peace. Funny, I might even have to vote this year for an invisible man.

Thank god we don’t live in an evil torture state! Remember, it’s okay for us to hold people indefinitely without rights if it’s not on American soil. We can do that without being an evil torture state. Hooray!

Some of you may have missed the fact that we started the Tribunal farce process in Guantanamo Bay, to finally give those terrorist scum the cursory dog-and-pony show they deserve. There was a lot of fanfare a few weeks back when Khalid Sheik Mohammed confessed to planning every single terrorist attack of the past ten years. They even released his testimony. Note how the names of the judges and all the court officers have been redacted from the record, just like in a real fair, impartial public trial!

Anyway, my point. A few months back I was throwing up in my mouth because someone made me remember that Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s kids were at one point in American custody, fate now unknown. Well, since then, we’ve heard a little bit more on the subject, in this rather disturbing letter from the father of one Majid Khan, formerly a legal resident of the United States, one-time guest at a CIA “black site”, and now cooling his heels at Guantanamo Bay. Majid’s father, who had no idea whether his son was alive or dead for the past few years, is submitting testimony to the Tribunal, not being allowed to attend himself. Just like in a real public trial! Ha ha!

[left eye twitches unsteadily]

Included therein is this nice little bit about those kids:

Also according to Mohammed [Majid’s brother, not KSM - ed], he and Majid were detained in the same place where two of Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s young children, ages about 6 and 8, were held. The Pakistani guards told my son that the boys were kept in a separate area upstairs, and were denied food and water by other guards. They were also mentally tortured by having ants or other creatures put on their legs to scare them and get them to say where their father was hiding.

Good to know they’re in such warm and tender hands.

Please disseminate this letter widely, so everyone can know what a wonderful, freedom-loving government we have.

I know how low my expectations of U.S. government have fallen when, upon reading this report, I am not only furious but also relieved, like the time I hurled up a burger that had been out too long.

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board decided to slam oil company BP for screwing the pooch on safety at its Texas City, Texas refinery and contributing to an explosion that killed 15 people and injured 180 in 2005. Their press release is terrifying. It says a tanker-truck worth of flammable hydrocarbons spewed out of a vat in less than two minutes. It vaporized and spread over the property before being ignited and bang. “High overpressures from the resulting vapor cloud explosion totally destroyed 13 trailers and damaged 27 others. People inside trailers were injured as far as 479 feet away from the blowdown drum, and trailers nearly 1000 feet away sustained damage.”

It wasn’t surprising that fuels can burn and even explode. Or that refineries might suffer from design flaws. The two surprises were how open the investigators were about negligence by the oil company and in recommending federal regulation as a cure.

For BP’s part, here was a particularly damning section:

the refinery only investigated three of the eight known previous ISOM blowdown release incidents, where flammable and potentially explosive vapor was released from the same blowdown drum involved in the March 23 accident. In 2004, an internal BP audit graded the refinery’s analysis of incident information as “poor.”

And there was that subhead, “Dysfunctional Safety Culture Existed at All Levels of BP,” followed by lines like “BP executives made spending cuts without assessing the safety impact of those decisions.”

I know I’m not including BP’s side of the story here, because my point isn’t to provide a news story. I’m just pleased that any U.S. federal agency would speak such clear truth to power. And even more surprised that they would call on the government, rather than voluntary industry action, as the remedy. They did so in a section called “OSHA Should Increase Petrochemical Inspections, Enforcement.”

Proposed OSHA fines during the twenty years preceding the March 2005 disaster - a period when ten fatalities occurred at the refinery - totaled $270,255; net fines collected after negotiations totaled $77,860….

Federal OSHA conducted only nine [in depth, multi-week] inspections [between 1995 and 2005], and none in the refining sector. State agencies in the 26 states that operate their own workplace safety programs conducted a total of 48 [such] inspections, including six at refineries. However, a number of states - including Texas, Louisiana, and New Jersey, where much of the U.S. oil and chemical industry is concentrated - rely upon federal OSHA to enforce workplace safety rules….

California’s Contra Costa County, which has its own industrial safety ordinance, inspects each covered facility every three years. A county staff of five engineers performs an average of 16 inspections per year.

I can think of a few other places where the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board’s straightforward analysis could come in handy.

In recent months I’ve been in the habit of setting my AIM ‘Available’ message using interesting units of measure. E.g., 53.4 Röntgens, 126.6 Teslas, and so on. Currently it’s 0.77 megaparsecs, the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy. It’s been stuck on that for a while, so I thought it deserved a change. I don’t think I’ve ever used Kelvins, so I was hunting around for interesting high-temperature objects that could be measured in petakelvins. Supernovae set a pretty high bar, up to 1 billion kelvins, but it seemed like there ought to be something hotter than that, around 1 trillion degrees.

This led me to a press release on some interesting work in the development of metallic glasses. “Neat,” I thought, and proceeded to read along, some genial feeling spreading in some corner of my heart. But then it died:

Hufnagel, whose studies are funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army Research Office, has set up a lab at Hopkins to test new alloys. He is trying to create a new metallic glass that will remain solid and not crystallize at higher temperatures, making it useful for engine parts. The new metallic glass may also have military applications as armor-piercing projectiles. Unlike most crystalline metal projectiles, which flatten into a mushroom shape upon impact, Hufnagel believes the sides of a metallic glass head will sheer away on impact, essentially sharpening the point and providing more effective penetration.

Some numbers, if you aren’t familiar. The NIH budget these days runs at around $28 billion. NSF is around $4.5 billion. The Pentagon, meanwhile, manages $74 billion in research funds. A portion of this supports basic science research; e.g. my ex’s extremely archane atomic physics research was supported by a DOD grant, and another friend’s even loopier biophysics research was funded by the US Navy. But $63 billion goes directly to funding weapons development, including the extremely unfortunate anti-ballistic missile defense endeavor, currently spending ~ $8 billion a year and climbing.

A lot of research is plastic, and readily molded to a myriad of uses. And of course everyone in the business of getting grants quickly learns how to change their stripes for spots when necessary (e.g. in 2001, when suddenly it became obvious that everyone was, in fact, doing research with a great deal of relevance to homeland security). But knowledge can only be bent and twisted so far, and sometimes small gaps in understanding can turn out to be surprisingly hard to step across, unless specific interest is taken in a more careful exploration of their subtle landscape.

In other words, having turned a vast portion of our engineering prowess to the task of building more efficient killing machines, is it any surprise that the remaining spheres of life have seen little improvement? This is why we don’t have flying belts.

My perusal of this 9/11 conspiracy theory last night prompted a conversation with my roommate about our government’s ability to do things that are consciously evil, which brought up the Iran-Contra scandal. My recitation of the events was somewhat muddled, so this morning I freshened my memory by reading the Wikipedia article on the subject, which included this excellent joke:

The allegations resurfaced in 1996 when journalist Gary Webb published reports in the San Jose Mercury News, and later in his book Dark Alliance, detailing how Contras had distributed crack cocaine into Los Angeles to fund weapons purchases. These reports were initially attacked by various other newspapers, which attempted to debunk the link, citing official reports that apparently cleared the CIA.

In 1998, CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz published a two-volume report that substantiated many of Webb’s claims, and described how 50 Contras and drug traffickers had been protected from law enforcement activity by the Reagan-Bush administration, and documented a cover-up of evidence relating to these activities. The report also showed that Oliver North and the NSC were aware of these activities. A report later that same year by the Justice Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich also came to similar conclusions.

In 2004, Gary Webb allegedly committed suicide by shooting himself twice in the head.

Update: Thanks to Uncle Pea in comments for clarification, and apologies for my grave error. As penance I will update the Wikipedia article accordingly.