In 1992, President Bush the Elder pardoned the remaining major players in the Iran-Contra affair, abruptly ending the investigation just before the part where his own role would have come to light. (For those of you who've forgotten about it or weren't around then, here's a Wikipedia article on the business. I'll leave the question of who the actual, day-to-day leader of this operation was as an exercise for the reader.)

For those of you who don't read bradhicks' journal (you should), here's a pointer to an excellent article from the Arkansas Times about the role of religion in politics in the past few years. Short and well-written.

There's a big ethical debate storming over the recent cloning of a pet cat. One line that caught my eye in this was from David Magnus, of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford: "It's morally problematic and a little reprehensible... for $50,000, she could have provided homes for a lot of strays."

This argument seems specious to me. For $50,000, she could also have provided homes for humans; does that also make the action reprehensible? Would it be less so had she spent it on a car? For that matter, a number of people persist in having biological children, even though there are plenty still available for adoption. Is he arguing that that's morally problematic as well?

It seems to me that if there are ethical issues involved in this, the ones being discussed right now aren't them - but I'm a bit surprised to see so many scientists and ethicists jumping on this bandwagon. Is it just me, or is some deep fear of "cloning" - not a fear of the actual procedure, but of something subconsciously associated therewith - taking over the discussion?

Does someone have a sense of what the actual underlying fears are?

A good rule of thumb when trying to sell things: If you think a potential customer may not have much money, and you're especially polite to them anyway, that's a good thing. If you think they may not have much money and you're rude to them, that's a bad thing. These two effects are magnified if you guess wrong: especial politeness to a customer who turns out to have money will make them happy. Especial rudeness to a customer who turns out to have money will make them take their money elsewhere.

On a completely unrelated note, if you're ever buying a car, you may want to give Stevens Creek Acura in San Jose a miss.

A new report on substantial progress in treating spinal injuries with embryonic stem cells, from UC Irvine. They managed to cause the cells to grow into new myelin sheaths for neurons.

(Side note, which the article doesn't mention: This couldn't have been done with adult stem cells; working on neurons more or less requires totipotent cells, and thus embryonic research. Let the politics begin...)

...and I'm sitting in a cafe, drinking coffee and trying to understand K-theory. It's probably a sign that I'm a geek, that this seems to be one of the most wonderful ways possible to spend a Friday night.

Incidentally, since I know there are other geeks out there: Does anyone happen to have a good intuition for Bott periodicity, in any context whatsoever? (Topological K-theory, algebraic K-theory, cohomology, something else...) I'm feeling very stuck in not having a good intuition for why it works.

Iran is trying to build and weaponize a bomb.

It's really too bad that Powell had to waste so much of his international credibility on justifying the administration's WMD red herring; that should give Europe the perfect excuse to ignore this statement. (Which, thanks to what I'll politely call a combination of pusillanimity and financial considerations, they would very much like to do)

But the best I can say for this is "no shit?" I mean, did someone not get the hint from their (a) developing longer-range missiles, (b) developing more advanced missile guidance systems, and (c) pushing their isotope enrichment program into high gear? Does the rest of the world need an engraved invitation to an A-test?

What galls me most about this is that we encouraged it so strongly. The run-up to the Iraq war and our subsequent dealing with North Korea made it very clear to everyone in the world that someone who's about to get major weapons is likely to get invaded by the US, but someone who already has them is permanently sacrosanct. Then we left them to their own devices and stopped all engagement with even the moderates, and turned a blind eye to their programs and their deals with NK for several years. I really do not want to have to deal with even a regional nuclear war because of high-level official fuck-ups...

Peru seizes cocaine haul hidden in giant squid
Squid are getting bigger and more numerous

Ashcroft condemns judges who question Bush.

Really, the headline is a pretty good summary of the content.

The funeral arrangements having been made, Yassir Arafat died early this morning.

( In memoriamCollapse )

Date:	2004-11-09 17:58
Subject:	This is just worth sharing:
Security:	Public
Mood:	busy

From a NY Times review of Polar Express:

It's likely, I imagine, that most moviegoers will be more concerned by the eerie listlessness of those characters' faces and the grim vision of Santa Claus's North Pole compound, with interiors that look like a munitions factory and facades that seem conceived along the same oppressive lines as Coketown, the red-brick town of "machinery and tall chimneys" in Dickens's "Hard Times." Tots surely won't recognize that Santa's big entrance in front of the throngs of frenzied elves and awe-struck children directly evokes, however unconsciously, one of Hitler's Nuremberg rally entrances in Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will." But their parents may marvel that when Santa's big red sack of toys is hoisted from factory floor to sleigh it resembles nothing so much as an airborne scrotum.

Date:	2004-11-09 14:56
Subject:	...and good riddance.
Security:	Public
Mood:	pleased

Our beloved Attorney General, may his name and memory be forgotten, just resigned; he won't serve a second term. No word yet on his future plans or his successor (a matter which concerns me deeply - Gonzalez, the current White House counsel and architect of various plans to thwart the Constitution, has been described as a likely candidate, and the others likely to be even worse) but I certainly won't be sad to see him vanish.

Alas, a bit longer until he formally leaves office, so I can't legally state what I think of him quite yet. But I'm thinking it.

I feel like some sort of parody of the "cultural elite." I'm sitting in a cafe, and my bag contains an iBook, the New York Times magazine and book review, and volume 1 of a new translation of the Zohar.

[Cross-posted to novadem]

At this site you can find maps of the United States at single-county resolution showing the votes in 2000 and 2004. The results are fascinating and well worth a look, especially if you take both images and flip between them a few times.
( Some features of note:Collapse )

A quick reminder: If you can't remember where your local polling place is, or need its hours, or a list of local ballot measures, or the like, SmartVoter is a non-partisan site that has all of this available.

DO NOT FORGET - polls will be open until 8pm in most places, but lines may be longer than usual, especially if you live in a contested area.

I probably don't need to say this to anyone who's reading this journal, but this is the most important election we've had in many decades, and every vote counts. You simply can't justify not voting tomorrow - if you're eligible to vote in your area, you need to be at those polls. This is what they mean by "civic duty;" everyone's contribution really is that important tomorrow.

An interesting news story some of you may have seen: The DHS is enforcing trademarks, on the theory that part of their job is "protecting the integrity of the economy and our nation's financial systems."

Has anyone noticed that this "department" has taken on itself the authority to enforce more or less anything they want to, and subject to only nebulous and unspecified restriction?

Nice column by Paul Krugman on the issue of cover-ups and Porter Goss' performance in his first few months at the CIA.

Meanwhile, our president is informing everyone that the missing explosives disappeared a while ago (which is somehow supposed to be better?) and reminding everyone that we've already destroyed over 243,000 munitions.

If someone is coming at you with an axe, the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of axes in the world that they're not carrying is not really germane to the problem.

But the President's unofficial flaks are trying to move attention elsewhere. (NB this article's focus is on Bush's campaigning, not the charges against him) I suggest that we don't let him change the subject quite so quickly. Just what has this led to as far as force protection? How many of the roadside bombs that have been killing American soldiers in the past few months have come directly out of this stockpile? How many more are to come? As pointed out recently, that's a whole lot of explosives.

About 380 tons of high-density chemical explosives, mostly HMX and RDX, have gone missing from a munitions dump in Iraq.

I'll just say that a fist-sized lump of either of these is enough to make a fairly impressive crater, one in which you could easily park your car.

So, anyone want to play "guess where the explosives are now, and what kinds of uses they'll find?"

Edit: Some side computations, just for amusement. The legal max GVW of a semi in California is 40 tons, which translates to about 30 tons of cargo space, so this is maybe 12 semis' worth. In a Trauzl block test, RDX is about 186% the explosive power of TNT, (it's the active ingredient in most plastic explosives) so if you set this all off at once it would be about 0.7kT equivalent explosive force. This should be enough to level unreinforced buildings at a distance of about 0.9km, and which should be audible (~1Pa overpressure) at a distance of about 550 miles. (Using Sublette's formula that the radius (in km) as a function of blast overpressure is about Y^1/3(P/P₀)^-0.7, where Y is the equivalent blast power in kT, P is the overpressure of interest and P₀ is 3psi) So if that blast were to go off in New York City, you would hear a quiet little "thump" (well, 60dB, but down at 90Hz, far in the bass where human hearing isn't very good. Elephants would hear it from about 10 times farther away) in Lansing, MI. Or from Salt Lake City to San Francisco, your choice. That's really a lot of high explosives.

President Bush has two new endorsements for his campaign: From Russia and Iran.

No word yet from North Korea.

Robert Suskind has an article in the past week's New York Times Magazine about the role of faith in Bush's presidency. It's not quite what you would expect, and I recommend reading this - not so much for the information as for the piecing together of things and for the rather fascinating quotes from various administration and party officials.

For some reason, this article has disturbed me more than almost anything I've seen in the news in the past several months. The conjecture and the analysis ring too true, and the possible consequences are far more alarming than most possibilities of war.

( What concerns meCollapse )

The New York Times has an article about how European countries are working to train Europeanized imams for their mosques.
( Two better solutionsCollapse )

Of "Team America: World Police," from the New York Times:
"Team America: World Police" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has graphic violence, explicit sex and shocking language. And puppets!

Well, you clearly can't beat a combination like that.

I missed the debate tonight. Blame it on work, blame it on already having seen the first two (as well as the veep debate) and noticing that they were already repeating themselves pretty thoroughly by the second.

It makes sense; Kerry knew damned well that he won the first, so he kept doing what he was doing. Bush knew that he lost the first, so he corrected and tried to do as well as possible in the second, and in fact improved.

But one week of study can't really make up for being, as they say in Yiddish (forgive my horrible attempt at transliteration) nicht ein grosse chuchen, nicht ein kleiner narr -- neither a great sage nor a small fool. So the second debate was pretty much as expected. From what I've heard, the third debate was much of the same.

Oh well. If it wasn't clear from this post, my mind is pretty much made up, and it has been for a couple of years.

Nicked from various of my friends. I admit, I'm curious. :)

1. Think of a word you would use to describe me.
2. Go to Google Image Search and search for that word.
3. Select the picture you see as most fitting, and post it as a reply.
4. Post this meme in your journal

The NY Times has an interesting summary of the fighting in Israel after four years. Interesting for the statistics it provides, including the sidebar with a partial breakdown of casualties and the numbers on suicide bombings.

It's bloody depressing. What's more depressing is that there's no obvious way out of this.