Former Texas Governor Ann Richards died. That’s too bad, I really loved her. She was an excellent person.
“I did not want my tombstone to read, ‘She kept a really clean house.’ I think I’d like them to remember me by saying, ‘She opened government to everyone.'”
Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy have proven that they can easily, undetectibly hack Diebold voting machines and alter votes and the outcome of elections, and they’re publishing a paper on their findings.
Abstract This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine’s hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.
Via my friend Ian at [Link deprecated: http://www.socialoracle.com/node/538] Social Oracle, this CNN article:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.
The object is basically public relations. Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions from others about possible safety considerations, said Secretary Michael Wynne.
…The Air Force has paid for research into nonlethal weapons, but he said the service is unlikely to spend more money on development until injury problems are reviewed by medical experts and resolved. They should not be issues like how people claim for compensation for slip and fall injury .If you are injured in any accident, it is advised to first contact a reputed injury claims law firm serving in Canada to claim compensation for the injury caused and give you legal representation. If you’re interested in helping car accident victims, then you can check for attorneys here! If you are from another country and are finding it difficult to communicate with native lawyers, you may contact expert traffic injury lawyers for Chinese speakers or other languages to help you out legally.
Nonlethal weapons generally can weaken people if they are hit with the beam. Some of the weapons can emit short, intense energy pulses that also can be effective in disabling some electronic devices.
And… Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne is getting fired when?
Wait, wait, what country are we in again? I keep forgetting and thinking we have the right to public assembly. Silly f*%&ing me. Yes, let’s microwave people!
[Link deprecated: http://www.socialoracle.com/node/538] As Ian says:
What’s the setting for this “non-lethal” weapon, defrost?
I’m basically at a loss on the definition of a mob, so I consulted a dictionary which says:
1 : a large or disorderly crowd; especially : one bent on riotous or destructive action
2 : the lower classes of a community : MASSES, RABBLE
3 chiefly Australian : a flock, drove, or herd of animals
4 : a criminal set : GANG; especially often capitalized : MAFIA 1
5 chiefly British : a group of people : CROWD
I’m not entirely comfortable with 2,3 and 5. Number 2 would be the ’70’s version of a pale grey meal not entirely appealing or cooked thoroughly.
Given that the police have a proven tendency to not be respectful of people at people public demonstrations (see the raging controversy about the police laughing about shooting a woman in the face with rubber bullets) I don’t think I want the police to have the ability to MICROWAVE ME.
He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.
…
One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.
So far this year, I’ve read 30 books, and many of them have been pretty light reading. I guess I’m quite a bit behind Bush. At this point, I’ve pretty much abandoned my New Years Reading List and gone off on wild tangents, which seems to be a commentary on my life in general somehow. And it’s probably a good thing.
Here’s the run-down so far:
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists
by Gideon Defoe
Description from Amazon.com:
Not since Moby-Dick… No, not since Treasure Island… Actually, not since Jonah and the Whale has there been a sea saga to rival The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, featuring the greatest sea-faring hero of all time, the immortal Pirate Captain, who, although he lives for months at a time at sea, somehow manages to keep his beard silky and in good condition.
Worried that his pirates are growing bored with a life of winking at pretty native ladies and trying to stick enough jellyfish together to make a bouncy castle, the Pirate Captain decides it’s high time to spearhead an adventure.
While searching for some major pirate booty, he mistakenly attacks the young Charles Darwin’s Beagle and then leads his ragtag crew from the exotic Galapagos Islands to the fog-filled streets of Victorian London. There they encounter grisly murder, vanishing ladies, radioactive elephants, and the Holy Ghost himself. And that’s not even the half of it.
Of course I loved this book — it’s about Pirates. And as a bonus — monkeys!
On Bullshit
by Harry G. Frankfurt
A small, funny book I picked up at the library after the author was interviewed on the Daily Show – it’s a scholarly inquiry on the definition of “bullshit.” From the Amazon.com description:
“More pertinent is Frankfurt’s focus on intentions–the practice of bullshit, rather than its end result. Bullshitting, as he notes, is not exactly lying, and bullshit remains bullshit whether it’s true or false. The difference lies in the bullshitter’s complete disregard for whether what he’s saying corresponds to facts in the physical world: he ‘does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.'”
But Frankfurt notes another important point — part of the reason that there’s so much bullshit these days is that people are called upon to comment in depth on subjects that they don’t have expert knowledge of, so they bluff their way through.
A journalist and a TV producer working on a piece about Katrina refugees have been charged with the crime of videotaping a “critical national security structure” in Louisiana… Palast Charged with Journalism in the First Degree:
On August 22, for LinkTV and Democracy Now! we videotaped the thousands of Katrina evacuees still held behind a barbed wire in a trailer park encampment a hundred miles from New Orleans. It’s been a year since the hurricane and 73,000 POW’s (Prisoners of W) are still in this aluminum ghetto in the middle of nowhere. One resident, Pamela Lewis said, “It is a prison set-up” — except there are no home furloughs for these inmates because they no longer have homes.
To give a sense of the full flavor and smell of the place, we wanted to show that this human parking lot, with kids and elderly, is nearly adjacent to the Exxon Oil refinery, the nation’s second largest, a chemical-belching behemoth.
So we filmed it. Without Big Brother’s authorization. Uh, oh. Apparently, the broadcast of these stinking smokestacks tipped off Osama that, if his assassins pose as poor Black folk, they can get a cramped Airstream right next to a “critical infrastructure” asset.
So now Matt and I have a “criminal complaint” lodged against us with the feds.
…
Dectective Pananepinto, in justifying our impending bust, said, “If you remember, a lot of people were killed on 9/11.”
Yes, Detective, I remember that very well: my office was in the World Trade Center. Lucky for me, I was out of town that day. It was not a lucky day for 3,000 others.
Yes, I remember “a lot” of people were killed. So I have this suggestion, Detective — and you can pass it on to Mr. Bush: Go and find the people who killed them.