I just* finished my third semester of college. I am not a happy man. Those two statements are far from unrelated.
*For certain vaules of “just.” I got out on the 21st.
Think about it. In nature, a lion (say) will go after the weakest member of the herd, removing it’s slow genes from the gene pool. As a result, the average wildebeest (or whatever) is now more able to evade the average lion. The lions are naturally selecting the wildebeests to be faster. Hence, an evolutionary arms race. However, we as a species have managed to do the opposite and artificially select our prey species to be slower, dumber, more docile, and easier to predate.
Exhibit A: the Cow. The cow as it exists today wouldn’t last a month in the wild.
Ray Comfort’s people are here at U of M handing out that copy of The Origin of Species. I declined. There is a perfectly good copy in the library.
Also, I’m not going to miss blogging for this month.
Yahoo! is dismantling Geocities, home of many a web developers first page. I never used it, because I couldn’t get it to load the one time I tried. So my first website was over at Angelfire.
SDMB thread on the XKCD tribute to the closing
And I’ve procrastinated enough.
I’ll be writing the occasional blog post at the blog of Michigan’s Center on International Relations, a part of the Roosevelt Institute. My first speed-written article is here: Humanitarian Aid as Soft Power.
Funny story about this article. I was asked to write it before the IR Center’s meeting tonight. So, at 5:55pm, I sat down and pounded it out; took me an hour. Got to the meeting room at 7:10. That’s when I realized that the IR Center meets at 6. So I fucked up doubly. Ah well…
Title says it all.
On Wednesday the 23rd, the Senate Judiciary Committee will begin debating renewing portions of the PATRIOT Act. Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin introduced a bill recently to limit the potential abuses of power and invasions of privacy that characterize the PATRIOT Act as it exists. Feingold and his co-sponsors are looking to safeguard our basic constitutional rights in a way that doesn’t neuter our national security apparatus. Write your senators.
Text of the Bill (S 1686)
About a week ago, Paul Krugman had this to say about the necessity of the public option:
“Remember, to make reform work we have to have an individual mandate. And everything I see says that there will be a major backlash against the idea of forcing people to buy insurance from the existing companies. That backlash was part of what got Obama the nomination! Having the public option offers a defense against that backlash.
What worries me is not so much that the backlash would stop reform from passing, as that it would store up trouble for the not-too-distant future. Imagine that reform passes, but that premiums shoot up (or even keep rising at the rates of the past decade.) Then you could all too easily have many people blaming Obama et al for forcing them into this increasingly unaffordable system.”
—-Why the Public Option Matters
He’s absolutly right. With the idea of an individual mandate the most likely part of the reform package to pass, the public option is the only thing seperating a sensible attempt at healthcare reform from a massive handout to insurance companies. If there is no public option, there is no incentive for insurance companies to become more competitive price-wise, and yet they will still recive an influx of 50,000,000 customers.
I while back, I started work on a comprehensive May Day Mystery Timeline. It should be more than done by now, but various things got in the way, and the project grew in scope. As I combed through my notes to find my source material, I realized that my notes documents need some serious revision. That has made the project triple in size, and so take much longer to get through. I project that the project will be finished by the end of the month, but take that with a grain of salt.
In the interim, I’m going to post the addendum to the current note-set fairly soon.
[EDIT 13-September-2009 12:36am -- I uploaded the new notes documents to the index, and I submitted the following clues which can be found on the Contributions page.]
Letter [105]
The bottle cap ties into an ad from 2001.
“In Binary congruence with 3/8/89, Chemnitz has provided a zabra…for the initial transfer.” – ADW 17-January-2001
As Jessica Augustsson notes, Zabra could be a misspelling of “sabra,” which is both a type of boat or a Jew born in Palestine. In the context of the ad, it could either mean the furnishing of a small boat to transfer something that the Arbella is unable to, or the provision of a bottle of Sabra Chocolate Orange Liqueur as part of a transfer.
The question at the heart of this is: “Is this cap a clue to deciphering 17-January-2001, is it supposed to draw your interest back to that ad for some reason, or is the Orphanage just messing with you?”
Freaks 214
The “cancel” he is talking about is the cross-shaped marker-lines on this envelope (http://www.maydaymystery.org/mayday/offsite/delivery05202009/envelope.jpg) from ~20-May-2009 (the one with the bottlecap in it). While the Orphanage would point this out because it follows the cross shape they made with the stamps, it was probably the result of the cancellation machine being broken or something of that nature. Or, they could have a man on the inside at the Post Office.
Freaks 215
This email to you references a group called the Zion Rangers “walking through walls.” This could be a reference to ADW 1-May-2006, which includes a refernce to the book “Walking Through Walls: A Presentation of Tibetan Meditation” by Anne Carolyn Klein.
1-May-2009
To Anne,
I had the same reaction to that map that you did. However, I went to elementary school in Michigan, so I think the U.S. Map pattern must be fairly widespread, at least enough so that a cold-identification of the particular school in question will be all but impossible.
Never let someone you don’t trust have control over something important to you.
Two radio related mini-posts.
Rush Limbaugh is a frakin’ idiot. Nobody forced anyone to watch Obama’s speech. Not a soul. Schools chose to show it. Nothing in his message was the least bit controversial, and it wouldn’t have been. They’re kids for fuck’s sake.
Also, a weird thing. I don’t like cars (other than my pimp-mobile), and I don’t fancy auto-repair. However, I love Car Talk on NPR. Love it. It’s so entertaining.
If there’s anything you should know about me, it’s that I’m lazy. Dead lazy. I’ll start things and let them hang in the wind until they aren’t relavent anymore. I have 5 saved drafts of articles that I started in April and May that are so out of date that, even if I still felt strongly enough about the topic to actually write them, would be of absolutely zero interest to anyone (as if anyone was interested in anything I had to say to begin with). So, this post is a dump of all the links from those various dead articles, arranged topicaly. (Plus a few other misc links I had lying around).
I have returned from the Decemberists concert in Indianapolis, and am working diligently to restore as much of The Small Island Nation website as I can. Those damn dirty spambots wrote over the wiki version so many times they maxed-out the memory alloted to P.M. Wiki and killed it. This means I am unable to recover anything from the wreckage, so I nuked it. The only remaining vestiges of S.I.N. are on Bluwiki, and this represents perhaps 50% of the material I lost. To save that material from destruction, I’m creating a group of static pages for it. This will serve as a stop-gap until I can figure out how I want to proceed.
[EDIT 6:40pm - I found the Evolver theme that I thought was so neat in an HTML version courtasy of OSWD via GLIntercept.]
So, I decided to check up on my neglected Small Island Nation wiki this morning, only to find that some spambot had deleted the contents of the main page and replaced it with links to porn. And, when I go to revert the damage, the database has written over the “real” page. Now, I need to re-do the entire wiki from the originals I have stored here. And I somehow need to disable editing for the wiki…
[EDIT 10:44 - PM Wiki is unable to let me edit it at all. So, I nuked it. I haven't the foggiest what I'm going to replace it with, but it's done for now. Spammers usually clutter things up, but in this case, they went truely over the line when the DESTROYED CONTENT. Fuckers.]
As you may have been following on the news, now that congress is in recess, and that congressmen are holding “town hall” meetings, trying to figure out their constituent’s wishes vis-a-vis healthcare reform. This could be a good opportunity for an honest back-and-forth between the people and their representatives; for example, congresspeople could make a mass push to put this “elderly euthanasia” nonsense to rest, or find out what the man-on-the-street thinks. Instead, certain groups are acting in bad faith and trying to turn these town-hall gatherings into shouting matches, shutting down actual discourse between the people and their government for the sole purpose of keeping the public in the dark and turning functioning democracy into cheap theater. This is an enormous damn shame and a kick in the pants to the democratic process. Argument in good faith assures that the people will be able to make an informed decision and the best result will result. Argument in bad faith shows that you do not believe your position to be strong enough to survive on its merits, and must resort to tricks and ploys to confuse the masses. Killing rational debate kills democracy.
‘Grassroots Protester’ Actually GOP Official
Todd Akin Jokes About Activists Lynching His Democratic Colleagues
[EDIT 12-August-2009: Added the below]:
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