Thursday (and it's still HOT!!!)

Wednesday June 25, 2009

. . . . . My bad, I forgot yesterday while tweaking my inner fan-boy nirvana up and talking about movies opening and on the screen.. . . .and realistically, how could I? . . . .I forgot G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is coming to screens soon too. Quoting any number of science fiction movies - "I am complete"

. . . . .Alright, I knew she wouldn't be able to resist and would weigh in quickly here. My favorite Right wing nutjob, Republican Representative Michelle Bachmann of Anoka, Minnesota just absolutely couldn't stand the rest of the fruitcakes in her party getting all the spotlight for their inanities lately, so she weighed in yet again with another Bachmann-ism. Did you know that the U.S. Census is merely preparation for the Obama administration rounding us all up and putting us in internment camps? Hmmm? Did you? Well, she does, she has the inside scoop (probably been talking it over with Glenn Beck and his insider info on FEMA preparing concentration camps as part of Obama's "Master Plan"). To quote the ever logquacious and profoundly weird Bachmann from her appearance on Faux, err, I mean Fox News this morning:

If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the census bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations, at the request of President Roosevelt, and that’s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps. I’m not saying that’s what the Administration is planning to do. . . . . . but?

. . . .I absolutely love that woman, when I get down, she reminds me that the fact of the matter is, health care in America truly must suck, and the mental health care system is completely broken, and prescription drugs must truly be far too expensive. Go Michelle!

Think Progress picked the story up here as well, and Media Matters has it here.

. . . .Let's go back to last summer and Sarah Palin's claim that then-candidate Obama was "pallin' around with terrorists" and Bachmann's claim that he was "unAmerican" and the entire Republican narrative that somehow President Obama would be welcomed by terrorism-supporting governments like Iran and dicatators like Ahmadinejad. . . . . .OK, enough nostaligia, let's skip forward to today and Ahmadenijad's pronouncement on Obama. Referencing the President's press conference on Tuesday, Ahmadenijad said "Do you think this kind of behavior will solve any of your problems? It will only make people think you are someone like Bush". (shudder, little bit of vomit at the back of the throat). I wouldn't call Obama and Ahmaedenijad BFF's exactly. Complete story here, on CNN.

. . . .From the continuing coverage of Iran being carried here and here, from the BBC's John Simpson:

For reasons best not explained, I've come to know a former member of the Revolutionary Guards really well. He's done some pretty dreadful things in his life, from attacking women in the streets for not wearing the full Islamic gear to fighting alongside Islamic revolutionaries in countries abroad.

And yet now, in the tumult that has gripped Iran since its elections last week, he's had a change of heart. He's become a backer of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the reformist candidate who alleges fraud in the elections. He's saved up the money to send his son to a private school abroad, and he loathes President Ahmadinejad. He's not the only one.

I had to leave Iran last Sunday, when the authorities refused to renew my visa. But before I left, another former senior Revolutionary Guard came to our hotel to see us. "Remember me," he pleaded. "Remember that I helped the BBC." I realised that even a person so intimately linked to the Islamic Revolution thinks that something will soon change in Iran.

. . . .R.I.P. Farrah Fawcett, who succumbed to the symptoms of her cancer today at age 62. Another celebrity that I'll miss. Yes, I was a teenager who had her poster on his wall.

. . . .R.I.P. Michael Jackson, may his tortured soul finally find some rest.

. . . .I can't joke or be a smartass about either one. Between these two and Ed McMahon last week, three huge touchstones of popular culture, interestingly enough, from 3 consecutive decades all have gone. It seems to be the hallmark of my generation, the tailend of the babyboom to want to make wiseass comments when one of these goes, probably due to our own inability to grasp our own mortality and our unshakeable belief that somehow the rules don't apply to us and that we're going to find out that we're immortal.

. . . .Face it folks, I say it every day at the close, and I'll say it again today, this rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, no one, gets out alive.

. . . .You may not remember one of the great shows of television, Babylon 5. If you do, you're my kind of guy or gal. The Ranger Creed: "We live for the One, We die for the One. We walk in the dark places that no one will enter. We stand on the bridge and no one may pass."


. . . .New jobless claims last week alone are at 627,000. That's over half a million. It's grim, and getting grimmer.

. . . .Paul Krugman, in his blog in the New York Times this morning:

Back in March, when I was lamenting the inadequate size of the Obama stimulus, I made this prediction:

Republicans are now firmly committed to the view that we should do nothing to respond to the economic crisis, except cut taxes — which they always want to do regardless of circumstances. If Mr. Obama comes back for a second round of stimulus, they’ll respond not by being helpful, but by claiming that his policies have failed.

And I laid out the following scenario:

So here’s the picture that scares me: It’s September 2009, the unemployment rate has passed 9 percent, and despite the early round of stimulus spending it’s still headed up. Mr. Obama finally concedes that a bigger stimulus is needed.

But he can’t get his new plan through Congress because approval for his economic policies has plummeted, partly because his policies are seen to have failed, partly because job-creation policies are conflated in the public mind with deeply unpopular bank bailouts.

It’s only June, but Republicans are already claiming that the Obama economic plan has failed. (Yes, that’s insane — hardly any of the money has flowed to the economy yet — but this was predictable.) Meanwhile, unemployment is already above 9 percent. And the green shoots are looking browner by the week, especially on the jobs front: new claims for unemployment insurance are stubbornly running at more than 600,000 a week, far above the 350,000 or so that would be consistent with a stable unemployment rate.

We really do need a bigger stimulus. But it’s going to be hard slogging.

. . . .I'm keeping track this week, on Open Congress, of:
- H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy And Security Act, which will probably come up for a vote on Friday.
- H.R. 45, Blair Holt's Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009. For God's sake, quit sending me e-mails talking to me about tracking ammo, engraving it, etching it, pulling primers off the shelves, whatever. Use your common sense, quit listening to Fox News, and quit reading every e-mail your friends send you. That part of the bill never made it out of committee, it just got dropped. Do your research people, think for yourselves. Use a resource like Open Congress
to do some actual reading and research and find out for yourself what it says or doesn't say.

. . . .I spent some time over the last few days talking about how first Google, and then Facebook and Twitter were profoundly changing how we interact with one another here on the web, in the matrix, coming closer to approximating how we interact in the "real" world socially and in networks of friends. To some people, it's intimidating. They're used to the anonymous interaction of Google, well, they think it's anonymous. Remember that your IP address and keystrokes are recorded, and in a few nanoseconds, the servers at Google are putting your search up for auction and advertisers and websites are competing to be the ones who fit your tastes. The fact is, Facebook and Twitter "act" more like we interact, are closer to the vision of the Wachovski brothers in "The Matrix".
. . . .William Gibson, starting back in 1984 when he started writing was eerily prescient about where the Web would go, and how we would begin to interact with it and come to depend on it.
. . .From over at KurzweilAI, where futurist Raymond Kurzweil holds court, this one then from Kurzweil himself, wherein he sees the "great leap forward" in evolution that the human race will take in the next 40 years based on our human-machine interaction. I'll run this one in parts over the next few days:

We stand on the threshold of the most profound and transformative event in the history of humanity, the “Singularity.”

What is the Singularity? From my perspective, the Singularity is a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so fast and far-reaching that human existence on this planet will be irreversibly altered. We will combine our brain power—the knowledge, skills, and personality quirks that make us human—with our computer power in order to think, reason, communicate, and create in ways we can scarcely even contemplate today.

This merger of man and machine, coupled with the sudden explosion in machine intelligence and rapid innovation in the fields of gene research as well as nanotechnology, will result in a world where there is no distinction between the biological and the mechanical, or between physical and virtual reality. These technological revolutions will allow us to transcend our frail bodies with all their limitations. Illness, as we know it, will be eradicated. Through the use of nanotechnology, we will be able to manufacture almost any physical product upon demand, world hunger and poverty will be solved, and pollution will vanish. Human existence will undergo a quantum leap in evolution. We will be able to live as long as we choose. The coming into being of such a world is, in essence, the Singularity.

How is it possible we could be so close to this enormous change and not see it? The answer is the quickening nature of technological innovation. In thinking about the future, few people take into consideration the fact that human scientific progress is exponential: It expands by repeatedly multiplying by a constant (10 to times 10 times 10 and so on) rather than linear; that is, expanding by repeatedly adding a constant (10 plus 10 plus 10, and so on). I emphasize the exponential-versus-linear perspective because it’s the most important failure that prognosticators make in considering future trends.

Our forebears expected what lay ahead of them to resemble what they had already experienced, with few exceptions. Because they lived during a time when the rate of technological innovation was so slow as to be unnoticeable, their expectations of an unchanged future were continually fulfilled. Today, we have witnessed the acceleration of the curve. Therefore, we anticipate continuous technological progress and the social repercussions that follow. We see the future as being different from the present. But the future will be far more surprising than most people realize, because few observers have truly internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change is itself accelerating.

Exponential growth starts out slowly and virtually unnoticeably, but beyond the knee of the curve it turns explosive and profoundly transformative. My models show that we are doubling the paradigm-shift rate for technology innovation every decade. In other words, the twentieth century was gradually speeding up to today’s rate of progress; its achievements, therefore, were equivalent to about 20 years of progress at the rate of 2000. We’ll make another “20 years” of progress in just 14 years (by 2014), and then do the same again in only seven years. To express this another way, we won’t experience 100 years of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will witness on the order of 20,000 years of progress (again, when measured by today’s progress rate), or progress on a level of about 1,000 times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century.

. . . .I'll continue this piece throughout the upcoming few days.

. . . .The one thing that I am afraid many people around me fall into is what I call being an "unconscious Luddite", that is someone who is unconsciously wary of technology and are at the core, very, very stuck on the idea of humanity being able to fix or evolve itself. The technology we use today is a natural outgrowth of the expansion of human intelligence and the ability to adapt tools, so, it only makes sense that we leverage those tools to expand and evolve ourselves.

. . . The sweaty, gassy, drug-addled traitor Limbaugh today on Republican Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina:
"Society needs hypocrisy"
- This one is classic traitor Limbaugh talk - in the first hour of his radio show today he suggested that President Obama is the root cause of Sanford's affair (which has been going on for a year now) because somehow he "sapped Sanford's spirit" and that's why Sanford did what he did, to "regain his spirit".
-In his second hour today "You ever think people go to the doctor too much. The whole thing is a rigged scam."
. . . .In his third hour today, he said that if I, or you, or anyone cares about the environment, then they "have pony-tailed fathers and mothers with armpit hair."
. . . The sooner this gasbag drops of a heart attack caused by his own inability to control his appetite, the better off this society will be.

. . . .You read it here a few months ago. I opined then that Darth Cheney's motives for "speaking out" and being so visible and critical of the Administration had absolutely nothing to do with his sense of patriotism, or his belief in Republican values, that instead it was motivated by the one crass, material, earthly thing that's always motivated Cheney, money and that he was setting the stage for big book deal. Cheney signed a deal today for $2 million dollars for his book. See, . . .told ya.

. . . . .More from the Wired magazine series on fixing/upgrading/improving the national electrical grid, again, the cheapest, fastest, most efficient thing we can do to (a) reduce our dependence on foreign oil (b) make it more efficient and cheaper and (c) reduce the damage to the environment from coal-fired plants:

Problem A smart grid requires smart electric meters that let households track and manage their power consumption in real time. The Obama administration wants 40 million homes to have technology like this installed within the next three years. But smart meters require smart consumers—or at least attentive ones—and most people don't think about their energy use until it's time to pay the bill or until the lights go out.

Smart Grid Customers

1 Average Consumer Most customers simply replace their old meter with a smart one. Then they enter some basic preferences—do you care more about cost or reliability?—and input data on their house size and appliances. The system tracks usage and will eventually be able to suggest changes to help users achieve their energy goals. Special vacation settings can be programmed in. Call centers will be ready to help the tech-averse.

2 Energy Donor Some homes with solar panels on the roof—or a plugged-in hybrid in the garage—will be able to funnel power back into the system, choosing when and how much they send. A homeowner could, for example, arrange to shoot solar power to the grid, instead of to their air conditioner, when the price rises above a certain threshold. That would boost the system's supply precisely when it's most needed.

3 Electricity Geek By inserting special plugs into their electrical outlets, creative consumers can turn almost anything into a smart appliance—even mundane stuff like hall lights, pool pumps, and garage doors. With a bit of tinkering on the grid program's Web site, savvy users can then manage the power flowing to each appliance and rank them according to the order they should be shut down when prices rise.

Solution Make the meters as easy to use as a TiVo. Then, make them interesting—and worth real money—to folks who like to fiddle. For the $100 million SmartGridCity project in Boulder, Colorado, Xcel Energy and a group of partners are building a system that lets customers manage home electricity use through a Web page that shows energy burned, carbon footprint, and ways to save cash.

. . . .This administration came into office, I believe, truly believing in their mantra, "Change", and I still believe that we need change, top to bottom. I also think that this administration is running into what every Presidential administration runs into; K Street. Don't for a minute think that the reforms on the financial and banking regulatory system, health care reform or energy policy reform will look anything at all like what the White House envisions them by the time the lobbyists get done pouring money into your Senator's or Representative's pocket. Remember, they don't work for you, they work for the lobbyists and the money. You can keep track of the money, the heroin that is how Washington flows and works, that lobbyists pour into members of Congress here at Open Secrets.org. Click the link and see just who owns your Congressperson.

. . . . . .On this day in music history: Paperback Writer by The Beatles was in it's 2nd week on top of the charts in 1966.

. . . . .Outta here for today

. . . .Kiss your kids and tell them you love them. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, no one, gets out alive. We don't get to dictate the terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. So, it's not about yesterday, tomorrow, regret or guilt. It's about right here, right now. To quote Maximus in Gladiator: "What we do in life echoes in eternity". Go change yourself, go change your own world and in so doing, change the world around you.


The Desolation Angel