More Police State bla bla bla

The cost of America’s police state
Hundreds of billions have been spent to militarize our nation against a terrorism threat that barely exists
http://www.salon.com/2012/03/05/the_cost_of_americas_police_state/singleton/

I don’t have much to offer that I haven’t already but thought in the interests of trying to ignite a tiny flame of revulsion that might lead to rebellion, I offer this quote as a means to tease you into reading the whole article…

Why, for instance, are New York cops traveling to Yale University in New Haven, Conn., and Newark, N.J., to spy on ordinary Muslim citizens, who have nothing to do with New York and are not suspected of doing anything? For what conceivable purpose does Tampa want an eight-ton armored vehicle? Why do Texas sheriffs north of Houston believe one drone — or a dozen, for that matter — will make Montgomery County a better place? What manner of thinking conjures up a future that requires such hardware? We have entered a dark world that demands an inescapable battery of closed-circuit, networked video cameras trained on ordinary citizens strolling Michigan Avenue.

As usual, it is only bad if someone does it to us

Gen. Hayden: Stuxnet virus “Not an act of war”
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57390498/gen-hayden-stuxnet-virus-not-an-act-of-war/

There is no shred of doubt in my mind that the US would consider stuxnet an act of war if it were used against us, so it seems disingenuous in the extreme to claim that Iran shouldn’t consider stuxnet an act of war. It seems I haven’t commented on stuxnet before (at least the search tool for the blog isn’t turning anything up), so I will add some additional thoughts…

I think stuxnet was a really bad idea because unlike a conventional weapon that destroys itself under proper use, the stuxnet weapon (I can’t consider it anything else based on what I have read about it) not only left a pristine copy of itself on the target machines, but its very means of attacking the target left copies of itself all over the ‘net. It is very true in the world of technology that some problems are very intractable until one person has a bit of inspiration and suddenly what was once ‘impossible’ becomes trivially obvious. I don’t want to trivialize what stuxnet is purported to have done, but the thing is, now that the hacker community has a working copy of the code it becomes almost trivial for it to be reused. Unlike, say, nuclear weapons that still requires an unfeasibly large lump of highly enriched uranium, in the case of stuxnet the possession of the code is possession of the ‘highly enriched uranium’ and the weapon can now be ‘mass produced’ and used indiscriminately. I have read articles where infosec researchers have seen bits of stuxnet packaged as libraries and are now being actively used in the hacker community. I consider the temporary reduction in Iran’s abilities to enrich uranium (something, btw, they have the legal, moral and ethical right to do, a fact most conveniently ignored by US media and government) a trivial benefit at the huge expense of releasing such a potent weapon to the masses.

It is clear to me that the people making the decisions (stuxnet was clearly the result of a well funded group with strong backing of one or more governments) weren’t thinking about consequences. Of course that could be said (and has been said) about the whole Iraq thing, so I doubt any sort of rational cost/benefit analysis is in the making.

The real problem is with the people, not the technology

I was reading this interesting article (likely too long for many readers) about one of the personalities behind the whole Fracking issue and thought I would use that as incentive to talk about some of my thoughts on the issues of personalities behind the technology. It isn’t necessarily important to read this article before reading my comments, unlike most of my posts which presume you have read the article. Here is the article:

The Big Fracking Bubble: The Scam Behind the Gas Boom
It’s not only toxic – it’s driven by a right-wing billionaire who profits more from flipping land than drilling for gas.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-big-fracking-bubble-the-scam-behind-the-gas-boom-20120301

In addition to the above article these thoughts were further triggered by an article I was exposed to via a LinkedIn group:

Shale Gas: The True Story
http://www.dailyenergyreport.com/2012/02/shale-gas-the-true-story/

Reading this rather glowing potential on fracking _assuming that no mistakes are made_ triggered a recollection of an article I had read much earlier (before I started blogging, I think) that laid out in terms I found very easy to understand the primary complaint the author had against the nuclear industry (from a tree hugger’s perspective). I somewhat summarize what I recall from my post to the LinkedIn group discussion:

I am a fervent supporter of the nuclear industry but read an article some time ago that was finally written in such a way to allow me to understand the problem from the ‘tree huggers’ perspective. The problem is not with the use of nuclear reactors itself, the problem is that because of the NIMBY issues that have unnecessarily driven up the costs of construction and operation the most moral and ethical operators have been driven out of the business (either from economic considerations or simple frustration) leaving the industry, on average, operated by unethical people who lack the moral compunction to ensure that all the regulations are met. Couple that with the raging plethora of idiotic regulations (for instance: I worked in a university lab that used as much radioisotopes as the entire rest of the university combined (and it is a major public university) and even though the radioactivity would decay to immeasurable in a year or so we had to account for every jot and tittle of the material. Yet I know with absolute certainty that I could have swallowed the entire contents of the stock bottle when it was fresh from the reactor and wouldn’t have suffered any tiny possibility of health concerns) that lead even the people who care to get frustrated and you have a recipe for the willy nilly adherence to regulation. So, with unethical owners and managers encouraging people to cut corners because even well educated, caring and thoughtful people think that a lot of the regulations are idiotic, you wind up with a culture that ignores regulations and minimizes maintenance, etc. As such, the real problem with fraking, just like the real problem in the nuclear industry, is that the owners and operators don’t care and take short cuts that will inevitably lead to problems. Then, because they know they are violating regulations, when the inevitable does happen they immediately leap to cover ups and attacking the victims.

Solution? In my mind the regulations need to be established by rational people who use real science and evaluate economic tradeoffs, cost/benefit, etc. so that thoughtful caring people will agree that the regulations are meaningful, then, something else sadly lacking in our current government, require strict enforcement so that all industry participants are operating in a level playing field. Those that game the system need to be punished in such a way that the economic cost of violating the regulations is too high to consider.

Not all regulation is bad. For instance I am a strong believer in building codes and while I do find bits arguable, on the whole I find the emphasis on safety that encompasses a realistic cost/benefit analysis to be spot on, so much so that when I find something arguable I tend to go along without (much; no one who knows me would expect me to not bitch about it) fuss. However, when regulation is done without sane cost/benefit analysis and further, when extrapolations are done without any scientific merit, you wind up with nonsensical regulations that encourage the industry to ignore them.

A for instance I used during my discussion (oration)… When engineers evaluate a material for construction, for example steel, they build some examples and test them to failure. With that information the general engineering rule of thumb is to halve the load, then halve it again, so basically operating at design loads leaves you with a 75% margin of error. Since the engineers working from the design loads reported by those doing the testing tend to halve the load once again you are often now looking at something designed at close to 10% of its ultimate failure load. Engineers tend to be very conservative and since they are literally putting their professional lives on the line every time they sign something, it is the smart thing to do. Additionally, from an economic stand point, the cost of a steel beam (compared to the cost of the overall project) that is rated at 10% of its ultimate design load vs one that is rated to, say, 90% of its ultimate design load, is so trivial to be inconsequential. Thus the cost/benefit tradeoff is such that the cost is very low and the benefit quite high, so these sorts of rules (much like the building codes (which, of course, are on top of much of the engineering testing mentioned)) generally find very few in the industry who advocate ignoring them or taking shortcuts to get around.

What happens when you have nonsensical regulations (like the ones on radioisotopes I mention in my quote above)? Well, business owners hire experts to manage the technical aspects of the business and when those experts express frustration at regulation, belittle the people who produced the regulation and actively suggest ways to get around the often expensive adherence, what would the business owner come to think? That _all_ the regulations are dumb and _all_ the regulations should be ignored and avoided. Since the expert is expert by virtue of a substantial life-time of effort in a very technical area, he (or she; while women are still finding it hard to break into senior management (in business or politics), they have made substantial headway in technical areas) finds it very difficult to communicate when certain elements of the regulation are sane and need to be addressed.

Personalities of the people at the very top of organizations (particularly organizations that have been quickly built by those at the top) tend to be reflected in the organization throughout and it seems to me that once a culture of ignoring the rules and regulation has been established at the very top, the ‘trickle down effect’ pretty much ensures that the organization as a whole will reflect that lack of respect. It is not so much that moral and ethical people lose their morals and ethics when they join such companies, it is more about the self selection that goes on when people in their youth examine industries and those with high moral and ethical character choose not to explore industries that have a long history of corruption and rule breaking. Thus there is more than a bit of feedback leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy where once NIMBY has targeted some industry for a heaping serving of idiotic regulation, which often leads to the potential for substantial profit margins for those willing to ignore said regulations, leading to a loop where additional idiotic regulations are heaped on until any moral or ethical people in the ‘biz have been driven out. Naturally, once it becomes impossible to be profitable only by ignoring the regulations then you are basically guaranteed that only criminals or people acting ever-so-slightly within the bounds of the law (laws, btw, that they tend to use their ill-gotten profits to tailor to allow them more freedom) will be in the industry.

To me fracking and nuclear energy has been over regulated to the point where nonsense has got involved, which has lead to blanket rejection of all regulation and the subsequent criminal activity. Of course people will point out that even good regulations are worthless without strict oversight, but my immediate response is that it cost just as much to enforce an idiotic regulation as a sane one and if your regulators get sucked into the culture that some regulations are OK to ignore, then even that will be suspect. There is the additional problem that the excess profits generated through the illegal (immoral, unethical) behavior is used to water down the enforcement of the regulations, so this is hardly a magic bullet, but it seems to me that nonsensical regulations implemented without a peer (i.e., no tree huggers allowed) accepted cost/benefit analysis are at the core of the problem. Clearly not even ideal regulations are meaningful if there is no enforcement and enforcement must be economically more costly than the cost of the regulations or enforcement is useless. Which means, of course, that fines need to inflate as the industry profits inflate and larger companies need to be subject to higher fines than smaller companies else they simply factor it in as a cost of doing business.

This is not to say that I am anti-regulation. I am just anti-idiotic regulation and I know personally that the nuclear industry has a huge share of idiotic regulations (based in large part that you cannot extrapolate the health effects of radiation effectively; our bodies have extensive mechanisms in place to minimize the effects of radiation as after all, we are ourselves made of radioactive material). What this country needs is a required course on risk assessment and what it means to do an economic cost/benefit analysis.

Of course, like most other topics here at TFOUI, it is all meaningless electrons tossed into the wind.

Conspiracy theory

Attorneys for RFK convicted killer Sirhan push ‘second gunman’ argument
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/04/justice/california-rfk-second-gun/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

I admit to being a long-time conspiracy theorist regarding the JFK assassination. I based that almost entirely on the behavior of Oswald as I felt he wasn’t reacting as I would have expected (the majority of assassins are all to happy to brag about their involvement), but that changed when I saw an interview with his brother. His brother stated that he had no qualms about Lee’s involvement and found Lee’s non-denial denials to be perfectly in alignment with what he knew of Lee. Lee’s brother indicated that Lee was intent on being ‘someone’ and simply assassinating the President wouldn’t have been enough. Lee would want to preserve his ‘day in the sun’ as long as possible, according to his brother, so would have wanted to have the full trial. Thus Lee would have avoided admitting his involvement, but according to Lee’s brother, the word choices Lee made in the few statements recorded made it clear that Lee was responsible. The forensics, to me anyway, are unequivocal that shots were all fired from the book depository window by a single person. There is no magic in the ‘magic bullet’, the forensic recreations based on the film are crystal clear that the bullet’s trajectory was perfectly in line with the book depository at the time it was fired. The only question in my mind was if Oswald was that single gunman or if he was set up as a patsy with someone else taking the shots.

However, reading the above article sure provides a bunch of plausible information that RFK’s assassination was part of some conspiracy. I haven’t looked into the forensics at all (beyond what is reported in the article) and because crime scene analysis was light years away from today’s CSI-inspired reality (and of course, lacking the definitive film evidence like we had with JFK) we are pretty much left with crap. If the reports in the article are accurate (meaning Sirhan was too far away to leave powder burns and the bullets entered from back-to-front and from bottom-to-top) and one exclusively considers the witness reports recovered immediately after the attack (witness reports are well-known to evolve over time, even when there isn’t huge media influence (of course witness reports are barely worth considering since they tend to be contradictory and sometimes wildly inaccurate)) it seems that Sirhan never had the chance to fire at such close range so even if RFK had turned and ducked (as one might easily believe) there would still have been no powder burns. Throw on top of that what seems undisputed in the article that the bullets recovered from the scene were all ‘lost’ and the ones that were shown in court were replicas (so hard to imagine that today) and there being inconsistent reporting on how many bullets were recovered and how may bullet holes (including those in people) documented and it sure seems like there is tons of room to let in conspiracy without needing to be a tinfoil hat wearing Internet troll.

I am not, however, motivated to explore further. I already don’t trust my government and I am already confident that my government lies to me on a regular basis on even the most trivial of subjects (just spend a few moments reading Pat Tillman if you need anything) so investing the time and energy to further convince me that my government is lying would just be a waste of energy.

Is no news bad news or good news?

OK, nothing has grabbed me today but in an effort to reward (punish?) those loyal reader(s) I figured I would spew some random thoughts in an attempt at being interesting and/or entertaining enough to justify your visits.

The US continuing down its path to an oligarchy controlled police state and I think I have babbled about that enough. The looming war with Iran continues to loom with more and more of our idiot talking head media shamelessly claiming their coverage is unbiased despite not getting a single point of view from Iran, so no need to carry on about that. The GOP race to the bottom continue apace, so much so that moderate stalwart Olympia Snow has decided to throw in the towel (it seems the forced rightward drift she has been engaged in has finally turned her stomach enough to convince her to leave), but except for the novelty of a politician actually standing up for principles (note, however, that she only did so after having sashayed rightward the last couple of years), there isn’t much of interest here.

I have been signed up on some groups in LinkedIn for a while, one of which has as its topic biofuel. I just can’t get excited about biofuel. I have convinced myself there are several ways to increase the profit potential per acre (the traditional way farmers measure their success) from the abysmal $50 (really! They make, on average, a profit of $50 an acre! What a bunch of morons! No wonder none of their children want to continue their legacy!) to way higher, but the funny thing is no matter how I slice and dice it, I can make at least 10x more profit by selling the raw materials as animal food than I can possibly make by selling it as fuel. My latest mental foray into biofuel is to grow duckweed and use thermal depolymerization to produce a light crude analog and based on my research it seems possible to get the equivalent of 50,000 gallons of fuel per acre (per year). Selling that for a couple of bucks a gallon and estimating capital costs on the order of $200K per acre gives a gross return on investment of 50% or higher, something that would normally be hard to resist. However, if the _exact_ same investment could be instead turned into $400K a year selling it as animal feed, why the heck would I want to give up that kind of money? I will probably validate my yield estimates when I finally get my greenhouse finished if for no other reason to have proof that it is indeed possible to do such, but I can’t imagine actually going forward with it unless I wanted to rip off dumbassed investors too clueless to do their own economic analysis. If only I lacked morals and ethics, I could be really wealthy!

I have been pursuing an idea for table-top fusion (not as silly as it sounds, check out the Farnsworth Fusor, but no one has been able to make it a net producer of energy) and alternatively get very excited and convinced it is a slam dunk and I should focus every waking moment on it and depression since I have done that a couple of times before (once to build molecular scale computer components and another time to build a DNA sequencing chip) and had my hopes dashed. If it works the upside is almost incalculable, but, of course, I have to build a working prototype first to know if I am full of crap or not. Since my wife and I have already committed a lot of our resources toward our greenhouse/pool project I am not encouraged by my better half in spending money willy nilly, but I am trying to remain motivated enough to pursue it. The upside is that unlike in the case of the DNA research where I would need several hundred thousand bucks to do it myself (presuming I could find the appropriate equipment used) and thus wound up dependent on doing the work at a university research lab (which made finding time very challenging), this work can be done for a few grand with vastly cheaper equipment (and thus at home whenever I feel like it). Still, I find myself so many times getting home from work, eating dinner, and sitting in front of the boob tube (sadly, seldom any views of actual boobs) until it is bed time.

Spring looks like it will be here early. Thanks Global Warming! My worry, though, is late frosts. If we can avoid the late frosts then everything get off to a wild head start and maybe, just maybe, this year the hundreds of plants I have tediously stuck in the ground will finally pay off with something to look at and enjoy. At our Maryland house I see lots of plants that have made the decision that spring has sprung, bugs are in the air (that is my favorite thing about winter, no damn bugs!) and the birds are singing. Actually, I tend to prefer how quite winter is, it always amazes me how much racket there is in late summer.

Have a great weekend!

Being a lazy bumb really is bad for you!

Why It’s So Important to Keep Moving
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/why-its-so-important-to-keep-moving/

It is official! Sitting on your ass will kill you, it just takes a long time. In this intriguing experiment they did a pretty good job of eliminating variables and took a group of people who were normally active, measured their blood glucose, then asked them to become couch potatoes. Unsurprisingly, their glucose levels spiked (spiky blood glucose levels being highly correlated with heart disease and type 2 diabetes, not to mention being a fat ass like me), but it is nice now to have experimental evidence (_most_ of the time the Mythbusters predictions are correct, but they are wrong a surprisingly high number of times).

So, do yourself a huge favor and start shaking your bootie around on a regular and daily basis!

Military-Industrial-Media Complex

A bit of a slow news day, or rather a day slow on news that prompts me to comment. I read this article earlier today and was on the edge of blogging on it, but the activation energy was just not quite enough. However, upon reading his second update that last bit of energy was supplied…

Gen. McCaffrey privately briefs NBC execs on war with Iran
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/28/gen_mccaffrey_privately_briefs_nbc_execs_on_war_with_iran/singleton/

It seems the military has so thoroughly learned its lessons about manipulating the media (it seems to me I wrote on this before, but wasn’t able to find the post, but they learned it during the first Gulf war) that it can’t help itself even when it is no longer in the military. Of course it could all be about naked greed and secrete payola, but that implies conspiracy, planning, forethought and coordination, something I am not yet convinced is actually possible for these sorts of people (maybe they really are so much smarter than I am that they can act like morons as a smoke screen?). Anyway, were I a god believer instead of the pagan heretic I am, I might say “Thank God for the Internet” and its ability to provide some news that isn’t in direct control by the 1%. Not content with three unfunded wars (everyone is so quick to forget Libya), now the drum beats for a fourth (well, more than that if we count Yemen, Somalia, etc., etc.) get hot and heavy and one of the purported news agencies is offended that they are being accused of bias because they only get information from one side of the debate. Of course, they are all pretty much ‘reporting’ (government stenographers is their real role) the same thing and offering the same biased viewpoint, so I guess we should all happily prepare for a whole new war just because, well, that is what _they_ tell us to do!

As a by the by, anyone notice that North Korea has decided to ditch its nuclear weapon program in exchange for food? I suspect that the thought that leaving the sanctions to work on Iran for a few more years is totally out of the worldview of all the drum beaters. Sanctions are boring. I am reminded of a scene in Issac Asimov’s Foundation series where one of the little empires the Foundation had been trading with got upset and started a war only to have the Foundation simply refuse to engage in war-like activity. Remarkably, in a fairly short period the populace got very upset about all the sacrifices demanded of them and overthrew the government (at least that is how I remember it, I haven’t read the stories in years). If Israel and the US would simply stop all the talk of war the Iranian government would be left without an external enemy (of course, they could try to get people fired up about the sanctions, but that argument likely will ring hollow) and would have to respond to internal dissent and might finally be inclined to moderate their stance.

Anyone else as frustratingly amused as I am that Iran’s ‘dictator’ is democratically elected? Since the sheeple seem to eat whatever they are fed I guess I should stop complaining about them. My problem is that by admitting that to myself I now become one of ‘them’ who tailor arguments specifically for the sheeple to lead them around. Even if I did it for the greatest good of the greatest number, I am still treating them like shit. Why can’t they pull their heads out of their asses and learn to think? Why, oh why, is the sky not pink?

Got to be seen!

So, here’s why I’m not moving to Wyoming
http://www.hlntv.com/article/2012/02/27/wyoming-doomsday-bill-emergency-military-draft?hpt=hp_bn13

This really has to be read! Wyoming wants to explore the feasibility of having its own aircraft carrier in the event there is a nation-wide economic meltdown! While I am quick to discuss the looming apocalypse I advocate doing things that make economic sense even if the apocalypse fails to materialize. I would never advocate doing things that make no economic sense no matter how bad the apocalypse turned out to be and I can’t think of any way that Wyoming having an aircraft carrier makes the slightest amount of sense.

The crazies are now running the asylum!

What is the chance of a favorable ruling?

Favorable, of course, to the poor people

Shell Oil must aid workers abused overseas
http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/27/opinion/simons-corporations-abuses/index.html?hpt=hp_bn9

Somehow I expect the Supreme Court will follow the lower court ruling and agree that corporations are only people when it comes to Constitutional _benefits_ but magically revert to helpless scraps of paper as soon as anything negative comes along.

Of course, the idea that the US ‘justice’ system should be the world’s watchdog is more than a little bit silly but given the global nature of business today and the absolute uselessness of the UN (there isn’t, to my knowledge, any other organization that even purports to act for the world as a whole) there is some sense in allowing the US courts to arbitrate some of these things. Of course, if the targeted company chooses to avoid doing any business in the US then they should be immune, but even if they do business in the US given our silly-assed tailored for global mega corporations accounting laws that allow profit to be squirreled away overseas, even suing in the US might not achieve anything meaningful as they could easily show that they have no profits in the US to take.

Of course the idea that everyone is equal under the law is quite quaint; clearly the author hasn’t been keeping up with local events.

He makes this sound very attractive

Privacy versus Efficiency
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/privacy_versus_efficiency/

Adams makes the idea of zero privacy sound very attractive. I am sure that for youth of today (probably anyone under 35) this ‘loss’ of privacy wouldn’t even be noticed. Barring biblical apocalypse or some such this is probably the direction we are going whether we like it or not, and probably in the very near future. I have to say I am on the fence when it comes to having a _thing_ I have to tote around, but I will probably be quick (but not the first, I will let someone else be the test subject) to have the brain implants that would allow for direct computer interface and get the same _result_. Yes, very Matrix-like, but I have long cursed my inefficient mind and having an accurate storage mechanism as well as the ability to start, monitor and see search results makes me think I can be immensely more productive (well, depending on how you measure things, perhaps infinitely more productive). I have thoughts all the time I wish I could record in some meaningful way but since I lack access to pen and paper (and couldn’t read my damn chicken scratch anyway) I lose quite a few. I like to think the good ones pop back up often enough to leave enough of a trace I can start documenting them, but I am left with a nagging feeling that I often am unable to reproduce the thought process at a later date and the idea is lost.

Of course, then we bring hacking to a whole new level as how many people would have the intelligence and education to actually secure their own minds?