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Monday, March 08, 2010
While wandering through sites I ran across this Nobel-Prize-Candidate story, purporting to show an addiction that as far as I can tell has no scientific basis. This was accompanied by an item that "proved" the correlation between trust and width of a man's face. The BS that's generated in the name of science is truly hilarious. Life is good.
By the way, the publicity that resulted from the so-called abduction of the Haitian children stressed that the arrests were because the involved group lacked the paperwork for a proper adoption. This despite the fact that the Haitian government ceased to exist following the earthquake, so where were they supposed to get the necessary paperwork? Some people genuinely tried to help, and were kicked in the teeth. Life is good.
.: posted by dweeb eubanks 3/08/2010
Friday, February 26, 2010
Heimo Korth and his wife Edna are the last full-time residents of ANWR in Alaska. This is a series of five short videos about their lives. Pretty great stuff.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
The problem with the word "terrorist" is where to draw the line. When the guy went on the shooting spree in Binghamton, we just called him a murderer. His motivations were very similar to the guy who crashed the plane into the IRS building. Would you call a high school shooter a terrorist? What is the dividing line? The kind of weapon they use?
The word "terrorist" gives some level of validation to so-called terrorist acts. Let's call them all murderers or attempted murderers, and not acknowledge the reasons for their actions. Let's try them in criminal courts and house them in the general population of our state or federal prisons.
Instead, we build special camps and set up special courts just for them. This creates a special class for this kind of person. It gives them legitimacy. Who cares what their cause is?
We also have a separate class for "hate crimes." As if one kind of murder is worse than another. It's not as bad if I kill you over $50, but if I kill you because you're black, then hell's bells. But if you kill me because I'm white, that's just regular murder because "white" isn't a protected group. If you kill someone because he's a gay jewish man, does that make the crime three times as bad? At what point does someone from the Aryan Nation bridge the gap from hate crime to terrorist? Maybe if he uses a pipe bomb instead of a knife...
Punishing people for their crime is one thing. Punishing them for their motive as well is ridiculous. If we can all agree that there is no justification for murder, then why do we allow the motive to play a role in the trial? Some illegitimate justifications are less illegitimate than others?
Friday, February 19, 2010
The Austin police chief refuses to call the intentional suicidal divebombing of an IRS office in Austin a terrorist act. This boggles my mind. It also boggles my mind when I see reader comments on news sites celebrating the guy who did this as some sort of revolutionary, or an example of patriotic resistance.
It was pretty offensive to me in 2001 when reuters declared that they would minimize the use of the word 'terrorist' in their articles because the word was loaded and implied bias, because one person's terrorist was another person's freedom fighter or patriotic resister. I imagine it was equally if not more offensive to hawkish patriotic right wing americans as well. However, given the political propensities of those I see lauding this latest terrorist, I certainly see more validity to the argument reuters was giving in 2001. I still believe it's bullshit, though. It also gives me yet more uneasy feelings about our aggressive stance towards islamic cultures in the world, and leads me to believe that this really is more about a cultural and racial expression of dominance than it is about suppressing terrorism.
Then again I suppose if a police chief were to label an act as terrorism, he'd be abdicating his authority to homeland security and the department of defense, given that our collective confidence in our justice system to handle terrorists has been thoroughly undermined by the previous administration.
.: posted by jeremy 2/19/2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
I think the Iranians are behind the Dubai assassination. The passport photo shown yesterday on CNN looks more like a Persian than a Jewish person (if anyone accepts that I'm qualified to make such a determination). The Iranians did business with the guy in the past, they probably had a good reason to kill him. Bonus that they could try to frame the Israelis.
If there's one thing I learned from the movies, it's that arms deals always go bad, and someone will always have to die.
Then again, maybe this is a double reverse psych-out. Maybe the Israelis intentionally made a lot of mistakes so that people would think it wasn't them, even though it really was.
I don't buy the whole, "Mossad doesn't make mistakes" line of thinking. What about the Lillehammer Affair, where a team of Mossad agents mistakenly murdered a waiter and were then arrested? They carried fake Canadian passports, in case you wondered.
A followup on the Dubai assassination story.
.: posted by dweeb eubanks 2/18/2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Updates on the Laura Silsby case:
1) A man who sort of represented himself as a lawyer retained to represent the missionaries is not actually a lawyer after all. He is a Dominican named Puello. He now says that he is a mere legal consultant, or facilitator for the group. He recently fired one of their actual attorneys, and hired another, who in at least one article I read claims that the bulk of his fee was stolen by Puello. More to the point, Puello is under investigation in El Salvador (and the US?) for involvement in human trafficking.
2) A US family reports that Silsby contacted them three different times about Haitian orphans. The family was nearly through the formal and legitimate process off adopting Haitian children prior to the earthquake. After the quake, Silsby offered to pick the children up and deliver them the family. The family declined her assistance on all three occasions. Silsby nevertheless attempted to pick the children up when she arrived in Haiti. The orphanage did not turn the children over to her.
This is all very interesting to me. It is also very interesting what gets reported, and what gets repeated. For instance, the part about Puello stealing fees was alluded to in one paragraph of one article, and they didn't even say it flat out. It seemed like parts of that paragraph were edited out. No other articles that I read mentioned it.
Likewise for the part about the family adopting Haitian children. I only found one article telling that story. I am surprised it has been picked up and recirculated by other news outlets, and I wonder if it doesn't stand up to fact-checking.
A great post on Metafilter pulling together several articles and a lot of commentary about the assassination of a high-ranking Hamas official in Dubai.
Killed by Israel or Iran, I wonder? Syria? The US? Russia?
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
So tonight I finally decided to get to the bottom of the Laura Silsby Baptist child-smuggling ring in Haiti.
To recap the situation, 10 Americans are being held for trial in Haiti on charges of kidnapping and criminal association. The group consists of the leader, Laura Silsby, and 9 followers. All are members of two Baptist churches in Idaho, and traveled to Haiti after the earthquake. They were arrested trying to cross the border into the Dominican Republic with 33 Haitian children. The group claimed the children were rescued from collapsed orphanages or surrendered by distant relatives of deceased parents. It has since developed that 22 of the children have living parents, and were surrendered to the Baptists out of desperation. The group had little to no paperwork authorizing them to remove the children from Haiti, hence the arrests.
It is now common knowledge that Silsby's life in the US was a train wreck. Sued 14 times for non-payment of back wages, once for non-payment of legal fees, and now foreclosed on (as of December), she had little to get excited about here. The earthquake probably presented a great opportunity to raise some funds and leave the country on a charitable mission. She somehow convinced nine others to come along.
Some articles say that the group planned to deliver the children to Dominican orphanages. Other articles say that Silsby planned to build an orphanage of her own. No Dominican orphanage has stepped forward to say they coordinated with Silsby for the receipt of these children. For damn sure Silsby built no orphanage. No one is talking about this part of Silsby's plan. Why not? The first step to opening an orphanage is NOT gathering children.
My conclusions:
1) She is incompetent in the worst way, and maybe a bit of a psychopath.
2) Or else she is a full-on criminal opportunist. The sinister possibility: she planned to adopt these children to wealthy Americans in an under-the-table fashion. Lord knows there is unquenchable demand for Haitian children right now. The legitimate international adoption community is bending over backward to screen out the impulse-adopters, as they should. This means there has to be a booming black market for Haitian children.
Yikes.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
This is just so cool. It just shows how ingenious people can be, given the chance. I'm surprised the FDA hasn't stepped in.
.: posted by dweeb eubanks 1/31/2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
It just doesn't matter. Let them spend their money trying to steer this ship. We're on auto-pilot. We have only two political parties, and both are ultimately thoughtless machines intent only on their own propagation and the propagation of the government itself.
Bacteria work just as hard and just as thoughtlessly to edge out competitors and fill that particular evolutionary niche to bursting.
Most human beings' efforts can be traced back to the biological imperative to reproduce. Human beings band together into communities to amplify reproductive advantages. Those communities then take on that same biological imperative. Multiple communities then band together to amplify their reproductive advantages. Pretty soon, you have a Bear Stearns or an Enron or a US Government or a UAW. Each will expand past a sustainable point, then be forced into contraction and possible death.
All this Republican vs Democrat conflict is a lot of noise. The government will continue to expand, whether Republicans or Democrats are in power. It will continue to accumulate powers, and it will not relinquish any without a struggle. At some point it will swell too much and be forced into contraction. I don't think that point is very close, but I bet it will be during our lifetimes.
Don't believe me? Consider this: Our government has the autonomous power to incinerate the earth with nuclear weapons, and we have a half trillion dollar a year standing army (not to mention additional appropriations to pay for our various wars). But if you're poor and uninsured and you need to go to the doctor, you can fuck off. Why? Because the ability to dominate the globe militarily is a reproductive advantage to the US Government. But the US Government does not need an individual poor person and his/her puny little vote.
So corporations will now be more overt in their acquisition of politicians. What will the net difference be? Our best hope is that there will be so many well-moneyed interests (corporate and otherwise) that they will often find themselves in conflict. You and I, the individual human beings, stopped mattering at the close of the Whiskey Rebellion.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Money = Speech
Corporate Charter = Person
These are legal truths established by our "judicially restrained" Supreme Court.
The concept that personhood was mutable was originally established in the constitution, especially if you note the three fifths compromise. We fought a civil war to settle that outrageous flaw.
If there were some sort of moral underpinning to for-profit corporations then this wouldn't be as bad. There is a right to assembly, a right to speech, and rights to property and the pursuit of profit. But there are also limits to each of these in extremes or in certain combinations. The basic reason for existence for corporations is to make profit and increase value for shareholders, completely regardless to the impact on their communities, employees or indeed even the nation in which they are chartered. A human being has a vast array of interests beyond the profit motive, and that's what the constitution and more generally our nation was structured around, life (a corporation doesn't die, how can it have life?), liberty and the pursuit of property. Other forms of organizations often, but not necessarily, have moral underpinnings. Unions are concerned with the well being of their members and other non-profit groups generally coalesce around some issue that is often perceived to be moral in nature. These organizations also often have a governing structure that is vaguely democratic... although not completely, they are much closer to 1 person/1 vote than a corporation's 1 share(dollar)/1 vote structure.
As if our lives weren't already guided enough by the amoral profit motives of immortal corporations, this rewinds the influence of the individual voter even further. This is a new guilded age, clearly. It would have been nice if Obama had turned out to be the Teddy Roosevelt of our times, but it looks like we may have another 20 or 30 years of carnegies, rockefellers, etc running our political machines.
.: posted by jeremy 1/22/2010
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Tonight I had to euthanize my dachshund, otto.
He got an infection on his hind end that basically overtook most of his body within about 48 hours. The dog I had growing up died at home right before finals my junior year in austin, and my parents didn't tell me about it until finals were over with so it wouldn't distract me. So that was just a weird and confusing experience. I was detached from his death by both distance and time, as well as him being an outside dog and having not been around him at all regularly for a few years since living in austin. I was agitated at having information withheld from me, but I felt strange for not being more upset than I was. He was old (around 17) and lived a good life. He was a part of my childhood, and I was at college, moving to a different part of my life. Something about it seemed sad yet appropriate.
I got otto as a christmas present virtually the week after I graduated college and moved back home. I've been through some ok times, and time bad times, and some good times, and some really bad times... made and lost good friends, but otto has always been unwavering. It's been just me and him in this house I live in for the past 4 years, and I've lived in the same house as him on and off the 5 years before that.
I made the decision and was able to be there with my hands on him as he was sedated and euthanized. I brought him home and buried him in my backyard. This certainly feels different than the last dog I lost.
.: posted by jeremy 1/14/2010
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
More ammo in thebattle of the sexes.I reserve judgment on the outcome.
.: posted by dweeb eubanks 1/13/2010
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
I just watched Dweeb's video demonstrating the scale of the universe. Here's what amazes me: our astronomers find distant planets by looking for stars that have a wobble caused by gravitational pull from the planet's orbit. That we can detect something like that over such a distance is incredible. We determine the distance to close stars by observing them from two different places, then triangulating. We know the location of each observation point, and the angle of observation, and thanks to the Greeks, that's enough to calculate distances up to 1600 light years away. After that, the distance is too great and the angle of observation is effectively 90 degrees. This is why some stars appear to move in the sky, while others remain fixed.
More on determining stellar distances.
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