One Stop Thought Shop

Speaking transparently, feeling utterly nude under Big Brother’s increasing watchfulness, it’s clear that the legal foundation of privacy law is being rendered increasingly irrelevant.

Whether one fingerprint or ten fingerprints, whether DNA databanks or VISA purchasing trails, whether a camera near the curb or a camera through my window, whether radio authentication or long lines of interviews and strip searches, we are living in glass houses to learn that somehow in some way we have indeed transgressed the rules. Our steps along the street are different now.

“Privacy law has long relied on the twin pillars of notice and consent whereby consumers are notified of, and consent to, the collection, use and disclosure of their personal information.”

Notice and consent.
These pillars fall, says Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa.

Of course Ben Franklin’s warning has been so overused it seems trite.

“Those who lightly give up their liberties in the name of safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

But Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner appointed by the British Parliament, recently cited Ben Franklin’s warning in his formal report to the British people. He’s further warned about what’s glued around the corner:

“Tiny cameras, hidden in lamp posts, will replace more obvious monitors. Microphones that can eavesdrop on conversations in the street are the next step in the march towards a “Big Brother” society.”

I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know what a dream is anymore. I got a lot of shit kicked out of me.

Have you somehow made your peace with this world? I’m curious: without getting all religious or flaky on me, can you tell me how you did that?

Once upon a time, lord, wasn’t I sweet? A more mild-mannered, easy-going guy you couldn’t find. We all know, though, that things change, and often enough we’ve no good idea why, or how. Not exactly, anyway. The goodness bleeds out of you. The world takes your trust through a series of thefts both large and small. One day you wake up and you no longer recognize your face in the mirror. The muttering voice in your head is as unfamiliar as the face.

Dreams are tough things, cruel schoolchildren, cheap balloons, faded flowers, broke down hot rods, blind dogs, etc. Time carves them all down to dim wishes and fragments of memory.

Brad Zellar

Is there a strategy that will improve random odds?

This is an important question while McDonald’s is spending tens of millions across the USA implying in its advertising that there IS a strategy that will improve random odds. In all likelihood, induces McDonald’s, we each can choose a strategy that will improve random odds.

And that is false.

Perhaps a tort as well.

The new champion with the world record for skipping stones found his rock near Lake Erie. But there are 1000s & 1000s of, I swear, perfect skipping stones in the delta bed of California’s Eel River.

I’m astounded. I would never have imagined anything like it. Every footstep reveals a handful of granite Frisbee. There can’t be another factory like it anywhere. I’m stunned there isn’t a local championship event each year.

Others are stunned this summer when Guinness recently certified a Stone Skipping World Record of 51 skips by Russel Byars that has eclipsed 40 in 2002 and 38 in 1992. Most amateurs can ‘smut’, as skips are known, between 10 or 20.

Guinness experts analyzed film of his record-breaking effort frame by frame, checking the concentric circles left in the water by each hop — or, as stone skippers say, by the plinks and pitty-pats.

The aerodynamic and gyrodynamic features of spinning flight have only recently been studied in wind tunnels.

Research shows a skipped stone requires a speed of 12 m/s (25 mph) with a rotation of 14 revolutions per second which must be set strictly at an angle of 20 degrees.

In some parts of the world, skipping stones is an important activity. Pennsylvania has appointed a High Commissioner of Stone-Skipping to oversee Skipping and Gerplunking festivals. An effort known as the North American Stone Skipping Association started in 1989 to organize global champions. I shouldn’t be surprised to find “100% Guaranteed Professional Skipping Stones” for sale.

Fighting the Armada, perhaps British sailors scornfully ‘smut’ Spanish coins away, known as Drakes, or they may have used stones to plink male ducks, known as drakes, because scholars found that an old game of skipping stones across the water was known as Ducks and Drakes and is mentioned as early as 1585,

“A kind of sport or play with an oister shell or stone throwne into the water, and making circles yer it sinke, etc. It is called a ducke and a drake, and a halfe-penie cake.”

Mother Goose composed a rhyme to Ducks and Drakes:

A duck and a drake,
And a halfpenny cake,
With a penny to pay the old baker.
A hop and a scotch
Is another notch,
Slitherum, slatherum, take her.

More than stumping their crafted popularity or their hallway scheme-antics among friendly cohorts, we must demand superior qualifications from world leaders.

If George Bush were as well read and educated as our “childrens”, we’d hear more than slogans over borrowed policies.

If Queen Elizabeth enjoyed literature as eagerly as students of Oxford, read on, this is how she would explain Proust to her staff.

“Terrible life, poor man. A martyr to asthma, apparently, and really someone to whom one would have wanted to say, ‘Oh do pull your socks up.’ But literature’s full of those. The curious thing about his was that when he dipped his cake into his tea (disgusting habit) the whole of his past life came back to him. Well, I tried it and it had no effect on me at all. The real treat when I was a child was Fuller’s cakes. I suppose it might work with me if I were to taste one of them, but of course they’ve long since gone out of business, so no memories there. Are we finished?”.

John Naughton is certain we’ll hear these words in a movie someday.

As if leaning your elbows on 14th Century oak while enjoying a British pub, read Naughton’s superb composition describing his new Prime Minister.

“The truth is that much of what is most detestable about New Labour — its authoritarianism, contempt for civil liberties, adulation of ‘wealth creation’, micromanagerial obsessiveness over ‘targets’, etc. — are actually more Brown’s creations than Blair’s. The only difference is that Brown is now varnishing them with a new layer of patriotic tosh about “Britishness”, “British values”, etc. If the Tories weren’t so pathetic there might be some hope of unhorsing the pompous ass.”

Varnish and tosh. Seems similar to politics in the USA. We call it pandering.

Jeff Jarvis noticed how accustomed politicians have become to spoon feeding us when he captured this sound bite from Barack Obama.

“One of the things the next president has to do is to stop fanning people’s fears. If we spend all our time feeding the American people fear and conflict and division then they become fearful and conflicted and divided. If we feed them hope and we feed them reason and tolerance then they will become tolerant and reasonable and hopeful.”

Jeff continues, “Isn’t that essentially insulting? We are politicians’ empty vessels. We are molded by their rhetoric? The Presidency isn’t a PBS self-improvement show. It’s an executive job.”

Exactly. These jobs require superior qualifications.

We expect a mountaineer, for example, to be an expert.

“… If you wanted to go up or down a mountain, you had to look at it rather carefully. You wanted to reach the summit – but it would have been a mistake simply to look for an easy way up. As an experienced mountaineer, you first of all figure out where you must not go. You try to see possible avalanches, ice breaks, crevasses, and other fatal constraints. Only when you have, so to speak, blocked out the treacherous parts of the mountain, would you begin to plan your way up.”

It’s our turn now. No more easy way up.

This is beyond horrid.

Nova Spivak reports:

The situation in Burma is far worse than the mainstream media has reported so far. There are now reports coming in from eyewitnesses of young school students being shot by the army, masses of injured protestors being cremated alive, and thousands of monks and other protesters being killed and dumped in mass graves in the jungles.

The Burmese people are helpless…

We live in odd times. I hadn’t expected that. I would have thought there’d be much warmth and celebration by now, working in a global ‘camp kitchen’ somehow. Not this rude stuff again. Yes, I feel somewhat surprised by it. And gullible.

I’ve just watched a video on YouTube, “Nickel and Dimed“. Has me irked.

Barbara Ehrenreich is featured in this musical excerpt made by The American Ruling Class, a “dramatic-documentary-musical” starring Harper’s Magazine editor emeritus Lewis Lapham.

“Divine madness” says The Montreal Mirror.

One commentor under the video said, “I first saw this on Bill Moyer’s Journal on KCET here in Los Angeles…. The premise is clear. The working class are the silent majority that will rise someday against the corporate machine, i.e. WalMart, and will get a decent wage. This is not propaganda, but truth.”

I enjoy the word irk.

I have privacy. I am a large box wrapped in bright paper tied with string. To open the box, you must pull the string. But if we fail to provide authentic privacy, we wrap ourselves in nothing, not even brown paper, and no string.

We may not have privacy for long.

If we want to keep our jobs, we might all become accustomed to living without privacy as Homeland Security rules change our culture.

For example, NASA employees are concerned that new security requirements are demanding so much transparency, folks will be packaged in glass.

According to this article about a JPL professional, she must “either sign over to the Federal Government the right to investigate every aspect of her life or she can “voluntarily” choose to not be allowed entry into the building wherein she works.”

A new Presidential Directive is demanding a privacy waiver from employees which will authorize fingerprinting, credit checks, financial history, bill paying and spending habits, marriage and court records, medical and mental health records, character references, family and sibling disclosure, and not the least, authorizes investigating adverse comments from peer and neighbor interviews, with any of these investigations to be carried out by third-party contractors.

“Executive Order 10450 requires National Agency Checks with Written Inquiries…” where ALL federal employees, as well as contractors, students, interns, etc. associated with the government must sign the waiver or voluntarily not show up for work. “Form 85” says you agree to give up the information or you will be ‘voluntarily resigned’.

A number of scientists and staff have joined a lawsuit to be heard this week.

One employee struggled to retain her unemployment benefits when she stood to her principles by not submitting her signed waiver. I suppose glass packages can break.

We could have purchased Saddam Hussein for one billion dollars. That’s a discount of 100s of billions of dollars.

Buying off threats is not customary, but it’s cheaper.

The former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar kept notes and recorded his meeting in Crawford, Texas with a war-biased George W. Bush. He’s “revealed a previously undisclosed initiative to avert war in Iraq by spiriting Saddam Hussein out of the country.”

Full story here.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/29/104252

“AT&T’s new Terms of Service give AT&T the right to suspend your account and all service “for conduct that AT&T believes”…”(c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.” After cooperating with the government’s violations of privacy and liberties, I guess AT&T wants their fair share. AT&T users may want to think twice about commenting if they value their internet service.”

Lily Tomlin
“We handle eighty-four billion calls a year. Serving everyone from presidents and kings to the scum of the earth. We realize that every so often you can’t get an operator, for no apparent reason your phone goes out of order, or perhaps you get charged for a call you didn’t make.

We don’t care.

Watch this.. [ she hits buttons maniacally ] ..just lost Peoria.

You see, this phone system consists of a multibillion-dollar matrix of space age technology that is so sophisticated, even we can’t handle it. But that’s your problem, isn’t it? Next time you complain about your phone service, why don’t you try using two Dixie cups with a string?

We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company.”

The scary thing is that

Furthermore, every man is responsible for his own faith, and he must see it for himself that he believes rightly. As little as another can go to hell or heaven for me, so little can he believe or disbelieve for me; and as little as he can open or shut heaven or hell for me, so little can he drive me to faith or unbelief. Since, then, belief or unbelief is a matter of every one’s conscience, and since this is no lessening of the secular power, the latter should be content and attend to its own affairs and permit men to believe one thing or another, as they are able and willing, and constrain no one by force. – Martin Luther, Doctrine of Liberty of Conscience.

The State of California has banned ozone generators wherever there are people nearby.

Once sold as a miracle device to cure Anemia, Hay Fever, Coughs, Catarrh, Asthma, Bronchitis, Insomnia, Nervous Debility and Tuberculosis, California’s Department of Air Resources says that marketers of indoor ozone generators are once again deceiving the public.

“There are thousands of peer-review studies showing ozone is dangerous,” states the American Lung Assn. of California. Anyone caught selling the devices after a two-year phase-in period [2009] could be subject to fines starting at $1,000 a day. [story]

Sir Richard Branson at Virgin is lobbying the idea that all airplanes be towed from the gate to the runway rather than turn on their engines at the gate and then remain, engines running, for minutes (or hours) waiting for a take-off slot.

He said that if this was applied to all airplanes, “8 to 9 % of the carbon produced by airlines could be avoided”. [via Bruno Giussani]

“I was driving north on US-101 on the Waldo Grade in Marin County when I was struck by the sight of the tunnel which appeared like a rainbow except for the lack of color.

“Why not make it a rainbow?

“I was so certain that the bureaucrats at Sacramento would find 1000 reasons why I couldn’t paint the rainbows that I never made any effort to get their approval. – Alan S. Hart, CalTrans Engineer during 40 years on the job.

Why wait twenty years? Witness the effect of devastating rising seas right now with the Global Warming Mug?

Filled with a hot drink, land mass begins to disappear, oceans devour coastlines and the ice caps melt.

It’s the end of the world as we know it! Pass the biscotti.

Twenty-five thousand cars have been seized in Britain using ‘license plate recognition’ cameras to check various databases to determine whether the car is

1. unregistered,
2. uninsured or
3. if the driver is wanted for a crime.

[more at Motor Authority]

Our mission is to take kids from the margins of society and take them to the margins of leadership. – Susan Weijel

A new psychological theory

Psychologist Dr Andrew Clark at the University of Bristol finds that facial movements, outright flirting, gets the girl.

“Men who smiled, nodded and raised their eyebrows more – won every time.” [go figure]

In an open letter, one of bin Laden’s most prominent Saudi mentors, the preacher and scholar Salman al-Oadah, publicly reproached bin Laden for causing widespread mayhem and killing.

“How many innocent children, elderly people, and women have been killed in the name of al-Qaeda?”

“How many people have been forced to flee their homes, and how much blood has been shed in the name of al-Qaeda?”

Although al-Oadah and other senior Muslim scholars condemned the Sept. 11 attacks, until now they had refrained from direct criticism of bin Laden.

Now, with al-Oadah’s new frontal assault on bin Laden, there is no longer any ambiguity.

In his statement in a letter on his website, Islamtoday.com, and in comments on an Arabic television station, al-Oadah holds bin Laden personally accountable for the occupation of Muslim lands in Afghanistan and Iraq, the displacement of millions of Iraqis and the killings of thousands of Afghans, for deluding young Muslims and tarnishing the image of Islam and Muslims all over the world.

“Are you happy to meet Allah with this heavy burden on your shoulders?” al-Oadah asks bin Laden. “It is a weighty burden indeed — at least hundreds of thousands of innocent people, if not millions (displaced and killed). And it is all because of the ‘crimes’ perpetrated against civilians by bin Laden’s al-Qaeda on Sept. 11.”

[link to story]

From Sweden, Promessa is offering new options in Corpseware and ecological dying:

• The corpse is frozen to minus 18 degrees Celsius and then submerged in liquid nitrogen.

• This makes the body very brittle.
• Vibration of a ‘specific amplitude’ transforms it into an organic powder. [!!]
• A vacuum chamber evaporates the body’s 74% water.
• The now dry powder then passes through a metal separator where any surgical ‘spare parts’ and mercury are removed.
• The remains are now ready to be laid in a coffin made of corn starch. [!!]
• There is no hurry with the burial itself. The organic powder, which is hygienic and odorless, does not decompose when kept dry.
• The burial takes place in a shallow grave in living soil that turns the coffin and its contents into compost in about 6-12 months time.

Click ‘The Greening of Dying‘ for a roundup of green burial options, including ‘body-reduction boiling’ and other innovations.

Tip to SpringWise for the new Cracked Ice Corpse Method.

In a silly attempt to buy Burma and shunt the junta into becoming wealthy corporate shareholders, I wish my efforts had been successful twenty years ago. But I still wonder if a mercantile approach in Myanmar wouldn’t be effective. Greed has colors other than the saffron and blood red we see today. But I can tell you that companies and institutions vacated Burma when conditions began to affect their brand and reputation, and that’s the color of yellow. Levi’s was sewing jeans. Macy’s fashion. Union Carbide held on for a few years. There’s a neon list of top firms that made it easy for the pickup truck pythons to strangle Burma. They just walked away. What now?

---

Simon Tisdall at The Guardian states:

Western governments are right to condemn the repression in Burma. But for the most part, their actions, inaction and indifference have strengthened the generals – and they should take their share of the blame for what is happening now.

---

Buying off threats is not customary, but it’s cheaper.

We would have saved 100s of billions buying Saddam Hussein.

The former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar kept notes and recorded his meeting in Crawford, Texas with George W. Bush. He’s “revealed a previously undisclosed initiative to avert war in Iraq by spiriting Saddam Hussein out of the country.” Cost? A bargain at one billion.

Full story here.

Measurements of emissions from the burning of biofuels derived from Europe’s rapeseed and America’s corn have been found to produce more greenhouse gas emissions than they save. The Times, via checkbiotech via Doug Powell.

With the US Senate aiming to increase corn ethanol production sevenfold by 2022, greenhouse gas emissions from transport will rise by 6 per cent. Rapeseed and corn biodiesels were calculated to produce up to 70 per cent and 50 per cent more greenhouse gases respectively than fossil fuels.

Sadly, I’ve assumed that if a policy is formed during this era of government, it’s wrong. While happy last year to see a shift to agricultural fuels, I’m learning this year that inadequate research, favors to friends and pulpit populism are behind America’s biofuel policies.

“One wants rational decisions rather than simply jumping on the bandwagon because superficially something appears to reduce emissions,” said Keith Smith, a professor at the University of Edinburgh.

Michael Byers holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia.

He’s asking, “What is a nation if not its people? Why can’t an entire country be a ‘global citizen’? Why can’t this be our ‘intent for a nation’?

“My mentor, the Cambridge international lawyer and social philosopher Philip Allott, opened my eyes to a simple but incredibly empowering fact: much of what human beings take to be immutable about political systems — traditions, norms, laws and constitutions; institutions and organizations; even the nation-state itself — exists principally at the level of human ideas. As a result, these seemingly immutable structures can in fact be changed.

“All we have to do is imagine something different — better laws, a better country, even a better world — and then translate our ideas into action. Can we do it?“

trolling through my search