While America is a young country not as prone as some others to preserving ‘relics’ of the dead, we do appear to have a thing for blood, which, if modern science progresses as some think it might, could result in some interesting historical clones. This article on the subject by El Pais columnist Marcos Balfagon reflects on this odd historical preoccupation, and on the wisdom of someday restoring another Ronald Reagan to the world.

For El Pais, columnist Marcos Balfagon starts off this way:

An online auction house [PFC Auctions] based on the island of Guernsey, a British tax haven, has put up the “for sale sign” for a vial of blood that supposedly came from Ronald Reagan. According to the seller, the sample, now dried out, was taken on March, 30, 1981 at the hospital in Washington that the-then president was taken to in the moments after he was wounded at the hands of a madman. Of course, the news has angered the Reagan family, and through its foundation, denies the authenticity of the sample, as does the U.S. medical profession.

This not the first time – nor will it be the last – that civil relics have been for sale. As mentioned by the magazine The Atlantic, the United States lacks the saints whose alleged remains have been saved through the centuries in Europe – nor has it an officially-recognized church to protect them. To indulge their fetishism, they have to opt for newer remains. The blood-stained sheets of assassinated President Lincoln are preserved, as is the blood-spattered dress Jackie Kennedy wore as her husband was killed in Dallas.

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John Darkow, Columbia Daily Tribune, Missouri

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Back in September 2009, when the Navy was seriously considering allowing women to serve aboard its nuclear submarines, I posted an article titled, “Should Women Serve on Submarines?” and, at the end, asked, “What do you think?”

With a couple of exceptions, most of the readers saw no problem with this change in policy or had some reasonable, practical reasons for opposing women serving on our submarines.

One woman gave several reasons for her opposition. In addition to bringing up the cost (in dollars and in space) to separate the men and women and the “sexual tension” factor, she suggested, perhaps playfully:

As a woman I know it is very hard for women to get along. Women are catty. Women get jealous. This would be ten times worse if they were on cramped close quarters unable to get away from each other. No work would get done.

One of the main reasons men go submarines is to get away from women. How are they going to do that if we let women on them? That is just a random point that may not make a lot of sense to the argument but it is valid for those who really make it a point is choosing where to go with their Navy Career.

There was one reader — no longer with us — who not only strongly opposed women serving on submarines (“Suck it up folks, war is serious. Who really gives a darn if 500 or so women get to tell their grand kids they rode around in a submarine in the Navy? So we do this just for the sake of equality?”), but who also took the opportunity to launch into one of his tirades against gays in the military: “We have no homosexuals in the military what-so-ever. If you know one, post his name here please. He has lied to the military upon joining and that is a crime and must be reported.”

Another reader declared: ‘Suck it up, folks. We have women – and homosexuals – who serve with honor in our military. The ignorance of holding people back from reflexive objections needs to stop.”

In a related event, in April 2010, the Navy announced that a smoking ban would go into effect on submarines no later than December 31, 2010.

The reason why I bring up “gays in the military” and smoking aboard submarines should become obvious shortly.

But back to the present.

Today, May 2012, Navy women are serving successfully on our fleet ballistic missile submarines.

Just as with gays serving openly in the military, the sky has not fallen because of this.

According to Vice Adm. John Richardson, commander of submarine forces, the integration process has been “very successful.” The Stars and Stripes adds:

Twenty-four women have already reported to guided missile and fleet ballistic missile submarines and about 20 more will report each year. Fast-attack submarines, which are smaller and would require more modifications to allow women aboard, are still men-only.

The Navy is moving very deliberately with the integration process and will gather information from the first gender-integrated submarines before determining whether to modify submarines to allow enlisted female sailors to serve aboard, or to allow women on fast-attack submarines.

“We want to open this opportunity as widely as we can, but we want to make sure it’s sustainable,” Richardson said.

As a matter of fact, one of the first women to serve on U.S. submarines — delicious irony — is Lt. Rebecca Dremann, who is an openly gay naval officer and a smoker.

The Stars and Stripes:

As an openly gay naval officer, a smoker and one of the first women to serve on a submarine, Lt. Rebecca Dremann joked she was “the triple trifecta coming onto the submarine.”

“I’m a total culture shock to the submarine force and they handled me just fine,” Dremann said Thursday after a roundtable hosted by the Navy to discuss the integration of women into the submarine force.

Other women — and men — who are completing their qualifications and have already spent time underway aboard submarines echoed Dremann’s sentiments, saying the biggest “problem” they’ve faced is sibling-like squabbles over the bathroom.

If this is one of the bigger problems we have in our “gender-integrated submarines,” I say that we are doing pretty good.

Now, let me ask again: What do you think?

—————-
Photo credit: Courtesy ssp.navy.mil

[T]he MIT team, led by Ian Hunter, the George N. Hatsopoulos Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has engineered a jet-injection system that delivers a range of doses to variable depths in a highly controlled manner. The design is built around a mechanism called a Lorentz-force actuator — a small, powerful magnet surrounded by a coil of wire that’s attached to a piston inside a drug ampoule. When current is applied, it interacts with the magnetic field to produce a force that pushes the piston forward, ejecting the drug at very high pressure and velocity (almost the speed of sound in air) out through the ampoule’s nozzle — an opening as wide as a mosquito’s proboscis.

The video is more interesting than you might think… WATCH:

How confused and ‘dangerous’ has German foreign policy become? For the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, German Vice Admiral Ulrich Weisser [ret.] pulls no punches, as he lays out in detail how Germany has disappointed the United States and its NATO partners in Europe with its U.N. Security Council abstention on action in Libya, its refusal to allow its forces to face the same dangers as its coalition partners in Afghanistan, and its unhelpful attitude toward vital cooperation with Russia on missile defense.

For the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Vice Admiral Ulrich Weisser writes in part:

Germany is untrustworthy. The expectation on the part of our most important European allies and America that we would adopt a reasonable strategic role in and for Europe was bitterly disappointed when our country sidelined itself in the face of a looming humanitarian crisis in Libya. Germany’s abstention at the U.N. Security Council has far-reaching consequences.

The German position is also diametrically opposed to the future needs of European security: With the U.S. commitment to Europe diminishing, Europeans will have to handle future crises on their own. This historical failure on the part of Germany is a result of the many caveats imposed by the federal government and Bundestag, which have tied the hands of German soldiers in action – in combat against piracy and also in Afghanistan. This has prevented our soldiers from shouldering the same risks as their NATO comrades.

And so far, the federal government has not distinguished itself in furthering an improvement in relations between NATO and Russia. The Alliance has made no substantial progress on the critically-important issue of whether and how to establish a shared missile defense system. Russia has long expressed a clear willingness for genuinely equal cooperation on the project, would be a litmus test for the Alliance’s sincerity on the issue of partnership and mutual transparency on strategic issues. The lack of willingness for cooperation that became so apparent at the summit therefore represents a failure of far more than just a project.

Inexplicably, NATO still refuses to guarantee to the Russians that the missile defense system would not be directed at its strategic response capability.

Although the U.S. repeatedly asserts that Russia has no need to worry about the issue, the guarantee Moscow demands has failed to materialize. President Obama would have to have a suitable treaty approved and ratified in the Senate, which seems impossible given the domestic political confrontation between the two parties in Congress; and Republican Mitt Romney still considers Russia America’s most dangerous enemy. This view fails to recognize that our most dangerous and threatening risks – radical Islam and terrorism – are concentrated in the Middle East, and thus right at our doorstep.

READ ON IN ENGLISH AND GERMAN AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.

The New York Times has an interesting and, I am sure, controversial opinion piece, which from the beginning (Title: “G.O.P. Nightmare Charts”) to its conclusion (see below) suggests that present trends “do not bode well for Republicans.”

All sarcasm aside and keeping in mind that the Times is called a “liberal newspaper” and worse, that it is written in “a place for opinionated political thinkers from all over the United States to make their arguments about everything connected to the 2012 election”, that polls and surveys are meaningless, unless they support one’s position; that it is still a long time before the elections and that the writer bringing this to your attention is a biased Democrat, here is a thumbnail.

The author, Charles Blow, has selected two questions “tucked away” in two polls that caught his eye but do not grab the headlines.

Questions that, according to Blow, “get us away from the presidential race, both of which highlight just how much trouble the Republican brand continues to find itself in despite the party’s many legislative and statehouse victories in 2010.” Blow adds: “Public sentiment is slowly drifting away from the Republicans in a way that must be giving the party’s long-range strategists sleepless nights.”

What are the two questions?

The first question comes from the NBC News/Wall Street Journal Survey released on Tuesday (question number 27). It read:

“When it comes to (READ ITEM), which party do you feel is most attuned and sensitive to issues that affect this group.”

Among the “Items” are groups such as religious conservatives, men and women in the military, retirees, stay-at-home moms, Hispanics or Latinos, Gays and Lesbians.

You can analyze the responses and charts yourself. Blow summarizes:

The chart illustrates just how narrow Republican support is. Respondents viewed Republicans as more sensitive to religious conservatives, people in the military and small business owners. That’s not enough for a winning coalition. For everyone else — including the middle class, young adults and Hispanics — Democrats won out. Democrats even scored higher than Republicans among some groups that conventional wisdom associates with supporting Republicans, like retirees and stay-at-home moms. (I wish that the pollsters had also asked about men and racial groups, but unfortunately they did not.)

The second question comes from a Gallup morality poll that was also released on Tuesday. The question read:

“Next, I’m going to read you a list of issues. Regardless of whether or not you think it should be legal, for each one, please tell me whether you personally believe that in general it is morally acceptable or morally wrong.”

Some of the issues in the list are divorce, gambling, sex between an unmarried man and a woman, birth control, medical research using embryonic stem cells, gay or lesbian relations, abortion, pornography, the death penalty and suicide.

Again you can do your own analysis. Among Blow’s comments:

Of the 18 moral issues, Democrats were more permissive than Republicans on 14. No surprise there. But what was a bit surprising was that on seven issues, independents eked out a small margin of permissiveness over Democrats. (This may be due in part to the fact that some devout Democrats like blacks are rather conservative, socially speaking.)

Republicans were only more permissive than Democrats and independents on three measures and they all had to do with the killing of people and animals — the death penalty, buying and wearing clothing made of animal fur and medical testing on animals. Interpret that as you will.

Independents were closer to Democrats than to Republicans on 13 of the 18 issues outlined. The only exceptions were medical research using embryonic stem cells, the death penalty, suicide and human cloning. (On cloning animals, Democrats and Republicans were both less permissive than independents, and in equal measure).

When people are asked to identify themselves by political ideology, Americans may appear to be center-right, but independents look more like Democrats than Republicans on moral issues.

Ergo, Blow’s verdict that all this does not bode well for Republicans “as the composition and conscience of the country continues to change” and as “we are slowly becoming less religious, more diverse and increasingly open-minded.”

Analyze it all for yourself here.

Image: www.shutterstock.com

Bob Englehart, The Hartford Courant

This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Adam Zyglis, The Buffalo News

This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which is basically a portable, poor man’s version of fMRI, Brainput measures the activity of your brain. This data is analyzed, and if Brainput detects that you’re multitasking, the software kicks in and helps you out. In the case of the Brainput research paper, [MIT's Erin Treacy] Solovey and her team set up a maze with two remotely controlled robots. The operator, equipped with fNIRS headgear, has to navigate both robots through the maze simultaneously, constantly switching back and forth between them. When Brainput detects that the driver is multitasking, it tells the robots to use their own sensors to help with navigation. Overall, with Brainput turned on, operator performance improved — and yet they didn’t generally notice that the robots were partially autonomous.

Now, it’s easy to see how this could be extrapolated out into the real world. We already have steering wheels that detect when we’re falling asleep — with Brainput, your car could automatically drive itself during that split second where you turn around to shout at your kids, or twiddle with various dashboard knobs. The same goes for airplane pilots, or indeed anyone seated behind the controls of a large, dangerous vehicle…. Imagine a computer that increases the size of buttons and text when you’re tired, or a video game that slows down when you’re stressed. Your Xbox might detect that you’re in the mood for fighting games, and change its splash screen accordingly. Likewise, Firefox could detect that you’re feeling amorous, and automatically load up Private Browsing mode. Menu buttons could move around and change in size — or disappear entirely. Eventually, computer interfaces might completely remold themselves to your mental state.

The state media wasn’t much better, devoting an article or two on a “exposé” and then right back to debating pig effluvium and its pros and cons. The blogosphere picked up the story, and when the voters found out, they overwhelmingly rejected these measures in states in which they were exposed, and passed them in states in which they were not.

This year is the SAME THING. On steroids.

And if we don’t pay attention, and if the media do not pay attention, then we are guilty of electoral treason. Period.

Let me give you a case in point, and then I’ll tell you WHY we need to pay attention to what the REAL election is, and why it’s important.

Foster “Aspirin Knees” Friess.

Koch Dominionists for Santorum 6 January 2012

Slow as it was, the dinosaur media found out that Foster was financing Rick Santorum’s superpac. And, he was standing behind Santorum cheering in Iowa. A couple Wyoming blogs and I found it almost immediately. (I give them full credit for spotting Foster first, but my observation wasn’t influenced by theirs.)

Articles were written. Pundits pontificated. But nobody dug.

It remained obscure in news reports that Foster financed and just ponied up another seven figures for The Daily Caller, run by his Jackson Hole, Wyoming neighbor and Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff Neil Patel. Cheney is another neighbor in Millionaire Gulch, outside of Jackson. The only face noted by media is the media face, Tucker Carlson, and even that isn’t much talked about.

We know, for instance, that Andrew Breitbart and Tucker Carlson staged a stealth maneuver to “interview” Bill Ayers.

[* A "benefit" lunch with Ayers was auctioned off at a fundraiser, not for his past, but for his present involvement in the community and education; an operative purchased the auction, and then Breitbart dot com and The Daily Caller dot com showed up. You can hear Bill Ayers public radio interview "My dinner with Andrew Breitbart and Tucker Carlson," March 15, 2012 HERE.]

The spirit animating Breitbart dot com

Breitbart dot com and The Daily Caller have become prominent for taking down persons, bullying media and getting people fired (e.g. Shirley Sherrod in the former case, and David Weigel in the latter. There are many more instances.)

But, during the entire phony “presidential” primaries race and media circus, amidst torrents, floods and seas of blather, nobody had any spare time to note the bizarre connection between The Daily Caller and Foster Friess as a meaningful avenue of inquiry?

This is the same media that provided their OWN tour bus for the fake “Tea Party Express” tours (CNN) thus giving the imprimateur of imperial media legitimacy, even though it’s the same bus show that started out as the “You Don’t Speak for Me, Cindy” tour, to promote the War and silence Cindy Sheehan’s increasingly effective (at the time) protest against the unlawful war of aggression against the wrong opponent.

The “public’s right to know” 2010

When Foster made his “aspirin between the knees” joke to Andrea Mitchell, he claimed a special “wedding anniversary” getaway and existed the media spotlight to hide out like the drunken younger brother of a legislator up for state re-election in a Motel 6, with plenty of booze, cable TV and a baby-sitter.

The media stopped asking any questions, even though it is known that Foster Friess was one of those singled out for praise by Charles Koch at the Palm Springs get-together last year for having given their zillionaires’ slush fund a million dollars before. I’ve gone into this at length, so I won’t repeat myself here.

The Aspen Koch Get-together. Click pic for details

The point is that when somebody gives the Kochs a million bucks to launder however they may, almost single-handedly underwrites the presidential campaign of the last man standing, who was given absolutely zero chance of surviving past Iowa by those self-same know-it-alls, isn’t that worth cutting a couple slices of BS blather out of the columns and paying some investigative attention?

When he underwrites a prominent new “attack media” Right Wing blog in collusion with the fading Breitbart dot com empire that gave us James “Pimp” O’Keefe, with the instantly recognizable mask of Tucker Carlson in front of the snarling face of the Cheney Veepiness, isn’t that worthy of paying SOME DAMNED ATTENTION TO?!??

No.

Because this election isn’t expected to involve us. This election is for rats. This election will take place at the state and local levels as the Friesses and the Kochs finance a Pavlovian election machine that they tested out in 2010.

Let me show you how pernicious this is. AAMCO Transmissions. (You ought to hear their jingle “Double A, Em Cee Oh. AAAMCO.)

Those jingles, ubiquitous in American life since the early days of radio, have a very specific purpose: they condition you to associate the tune with the name, so that you will think of the name when you think of the product.

Roto-Rooter!

Well and good. But that’s conditioning. That’s not choice. Bill Maher was paneling last night and ranting about fast food, that it was a choice and his split on the issue. But it isn’t a choice. If you’ve watched any TV, you might notice that the food commercials come on just at those points they think you might be hungry. Dinnertime. Breakfast.

Even my favorite recent commercial, where a “phantom bong” is in the middle of a table surrounded by Jack in the Box taco wrappers, always run late at night (with Late Night logo), and showing the reverse angle that no, it’s ACTUALLY a ceramic mug and was a trick of the light. The two stoner dudes are saying how great their surcease of munchies was.  The initial impression is clear: stoned? Jack tacos would be AWESOME right now, and hey! We’re open right now.

Click for the commercial on YouTube

Or the current Applebees commercial, (which you should just listen to, without looking; THEN go back and look): The soundtrack emphasizes the sizzle sound. And they even cop to it. “And what gets your juices flowing.” Anton Pavlov must be chuckling. Now, they ring the bell, and WE drool.

Frank Luntz became the indispensable man in Republican Rhetoric long ago, not for his eloquence, but for his Pavlovian research into WHAT words will imprint, will create the proper emotional response, will cause the dog to drool.

Death Tax.

And now, it’s a simple game of pick your candidate, turn on your secret SuperPac machine, and carpet-bomb with conditioning.

Candidate A? Unicorns and rainbows and butterflies.

Candidate B? Dark Satanic rites, prowling wolves, spiders.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Roto-Rooter.

Associative Conditioning

What happened in 2006 was a national legislative agenda, drafted by unseen hands for shadowy plutocratic masters. And we STILL don’t actually know who financed it. (Although the implications are clear enough that anyone but a journalist or lawyer could see it.)

What happened in 2010 was a shift to playing a national game at a state level. Having a slate of candidates. Taking out unwary incumbents in poorly-covered primaries. Overwhelming the state parties and organizations with CONDITIONING and taking over governorships and legislatures across the land.

The real, untold story of 2010 was how the “Tea Party” meme was created and conditioned, supported and financed, successfully, to grab massive power across the land, and the same machinery is clanking underway this year as well.

The Republican party is being taken over by another force, the pie on whose crust Mitt Romney merely is a top flake upon. Here’s a little factotum: The Republican governor of New Mexico, elected in 2010 was aided by a $300,000 donation from Foster Friess, the largest donation in her campaign.

In Wisconsin, Foster Friess is (or was, as of last month) among the top contributors to Scott Walker’s “Don’t Recall Me, Bro!” campaign, to the tune of six figures. (And the bastard has the gall to whine that he’s not NEARLY as rich as some of the other players. “I may be richer than Croesus, but I’m an underdog, because so many gazillionaires have more than I. I’m not even a lousy BILLIONAIRE.” Awww. We weep.)

When you’re worth several hundred
million dollars, you get to pretend
you’re a cowboy and nobody
will say a word. Money talks.

THAT is this year’s election. The shadowy masters, and those trying to make us drool, utterly without any but the slightest nod to the higher cognitive faculties, like … choice.

All they are trying to do is to get the rats to press the proper lever, using conditioning and reinforcement techniques.

And if that doesn’t scare the piss out of you, there’s no point in going on.

This is a NATIONAL campaign being waged on a state level.

Used to be that it was a contest of self-limiting size. It used to be here in Eugene, Oregon, a state senator’s campaign rarely went above five figures spent (and a low five figures at that)  and often less than five figures. Now, it is a six-figure race. Each election ramps up the costs of running for statewide offices geometrically.  Money becomes the determinant.

And, increasingly, as in Wisconsin, the money has nothing whatsoever to do with the state. Somewhere in Valhalla, over a marble chessboard, played with bejeweled pieces made of precious metals and lovingly hand-crafted by Norns, the Great Bears and Bulls play a money game this year, picking and choosing the candidates that they have no moral entitlement to support or deny, since they do not live on the ground with we, poor ants, nor share our toils and travails.

Political parties used to be different, state by state. The “national party” was a creature of the state parties. Today, the GOP is a franchise operation, and the local and state parties merely retail outlets, where, mostly, “involved” citizens are allowed to play kabuki politics that have no effect on the candidates, the issues or the legislation that ensues. They are valuable more for their bodies in getting the rats out to press the proper lever than they are for their modest contributions. Their money is meaningless, as is your money.

Sorry lady. You’re off the board and out of the game.

But we pretend that it is still like Idaho was in 2006. When you look through the patiently chronicled contributions it is easy to spot the out of state “Club for Growth” bundles. The average donation that year was five and ten, and sometimes fifty dollars. Those were the in-state donations. The out-of-state donations ran to four and even five figures.  How is granny going to compete, politically, with her widow’s mite against the plutocrats’ might?

Local fundraising and local donations (and support) have become mere window-dressing. The real action is in the money that can now sluice in, smoking and steaming,  from every piggy bank in hell.

THAT is the real election. THAT would actually employ reporters covering a presidential contest more notable for its gaffes than for its substance. One candidate actually HAS no substance.

But he DOES have a massive “independent” conditioning machine behind him, as Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum and all other pretenders found out to their chagrin. No candidate ever approached 1:1 parity. Usually they were outspent twenty and forty to one.

teeny facebook ad
running presently for
Americans For Prosperity
(Koch front group) page

We are enslaved by our conditioning. Multiple generations of Americans will instantly hear a jingle when the magic words are spoken.

I wish I was an Oscar Mayer wiener.

The Faux Nooz crowd are so conditioned that they truly believe that President Obama was born in Kenya, is a Muslim, is a “socialist” (whatever THAT means, but it’s BAD, right?), is a Marxist (see previous parenthetical), a radical, the “most divisive president in modern American history” (as I actually heard spoken with a straight face this week, thinking, true, if by “modern” you mean the past three years) and is a “celebrity.”

Jack = yum

Which is hilarious, since being a celebrity has become the lingua franca of American discourse AND the chiefest thing to be ardently hoped and dreamed for its magical acquisition. cf. “Kardassian.” cf. every author in America, who must now become a “celebrity” interview to sell books. cf. everyone on TeeVee. cf. every journalist, who requires the cachet of BEING on TV to lend “celebrity” status to his/her journalism. “I been on TeeVee. I’s a REAL journalist.”

Or in the words of Faux Nooz (local edition):

The Fauxmobile screeches to a halt (You can tell, because it’s got the logo emblazoned on its otherwise white exterior). Reporter, sound/boom guy and cameraman emerge, along with another couple of guys holding portable lights, which they aim at an unshaven, fedora’d fellow leading a pack mule out of the Sonoran desert.

HEAD JOURNO: We are reporters. You know, journalistos.

F.C. DOBBS: If you’re journalistos, where are your facts?

HEAD JOURNO: Facts? FACTS?? We don’ got to show you no steenking facts!

(With apologies to John Huston.)

The “reporting” isn’t as important as the conditioning.

Bong: Jack in the Box.

Phantom bong reinforcement

(The later message that it was a trick of the light, even though J.P. Morgan’s ‘phantom dagger’ is literally in the center of the frame doesn’t undo the conditioning. FIRST impressions are almost always the only impressions that matter. How else do you explain the still prevalent idiocy that AIDS has something to do with homosexuality? It’s a disease that shows up according to the chain of transmitters, not the method of transmission. In Haiti and Africa, it’s a disease of heterosexuals. But the INITIAL conditioning was that it’s “God’s Vengeance on Homos” and that conditioning remains stuck fast in the glottis of American small-mindedness to this very day.)

Famous Edward Steichen portrait of
J.P. Morgan with “phantom dagger”

Let me give you an example (from “Truth Is Whatever I Say It Is” ):

[Karl Rove] “writes” this in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal today:

As for the killing of Osama bin Laden, Mr. Obama did what virtually any commander in chief [sic] would have done in the same situation. Even President Bill Clinton says in the film “that’s the call I would have made.” For this to be portrayed as the epic achievement of the first term tells you how bare the White House cupboards are…

Setting aside for a moment Mr. Rove’s qualifications as a film critic (they are slightly fewer than his qualifications as a creature with a soul or a conscience), one asks one’s self: When was the last time that you ever heard ANY Republican admit that Bill Clinton could possibly be right about ANYthing? And yet, here, Karl Rove is marking up the merchandise right in front of our eyes.

[...]

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal has “corrected” the lie that Karl Rove told:

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this column included an incomplete quote from Bill Clinton in the last paragraph.

Now, it reads: Even President Bill Clinton says in the film ”I hope that’s the call I would have made.“

Which completely changes the meaning of Rove’s oily assertion.

The correction doesn’t matter. The first impression has produced the desired imprinting, GIGO as they used to say in the punch card days of computing, “Garbage In: Garbage Out.”

YouTube “click to turn off” Romney ad that appears on videos right now

Here is some conditioniong today from John Hinderaker, new Koch appointee to the CATO Institute board, former vice-taker-downer of Dan Rather:

John Hinderaker / Power Line:

Is Romney Pulling Away? —  It is, of course, way too early to get cocky.  But Republicans have to be happy with the way current polling is going.  In this morning’s tracking poll at Rasmussen Reports, Mitt Romney leads Barack Obama by a stunning 50%-42%.  Rasmussen’s matchup is a rolling three …

Discussion:

Gregg Re / The Daily Caller: Obama ignores gay marriage issue on Saturday as Romney surges ahead

Scared Monkeys: Rasmussen: Mitt Romney 50% – Barack Obama 42% … Hardly Good Polling Numbers for an Incumbent President

McPartland / nation.foxnews.com: Rasmussen Poll: Romney 50%, Obama 42%

Weasel Zippers: Rasmussen: Romney 50%, Obama 42%

You see the talking points, which are about conditioning. And it has been successful. You can see how much if you follow threads in discussion groups. A made up example:

Someone is making a point about campaign cash, and uses an analogy about tacos.

Someone else says: “Tacos! Tacos? I LOVES me some tacos!’

And someone else says ‘But not those tacos at Hyper-Taco. They’re using evil chemical additives!’

And then someone else says, yes, it’s all a conspiracy of the FritoBandito Supremacy, who have taken control of every bubble-gum manufacturing facility on the planet!”

And someone else says “Bubble-gum! Bubble-gum? I LOVES me some bubble-gum!”

And so forth.

Jack tacos yum – from same commercial

The logical train of thought is not rational, it is associative: it is dream logic, the logic of the subconscious (or the soul-in-drag) of teddy bears remind you of childhood and that reminds you of your childhood and that reminds you of your bed where the teddy bear used to sit and that hole in the mattress that your brother burned in it playing with matches and how much you used to like matches and free matchbooks that said “Can you draw the Pirate?” and how much you liked Pirates of the Caribbean, and so on.

Can YOU draw the pirate?

The links are by association, but not logical. The constant and unending conditioning that we’ve undergone has programmed an unending and endlessly annoying series of conditionings that have trapped us as surely as the Lilliputians trapped Gulliver with gossamer threads.

So: secret gazillionaires are paying Frank Luntzes and filmmakers to condition you via carpet-bombing all the way down to the local level. And you’ve been neatly finessed right off the game board.

Because your thoughtful vote only counts as one against a sea of rats trained to press the proper lever.

Woof

All the way down to your hometown.

That’s this election and that’s the national story that we need to be talking about, no matter whose face ultimately graces the marquee.

All that matters is that the conditioning proceeds, bypassing rational thought and producing the proper results for our chess masters.

But that’s not newsworthy.

Roto-rooter!

Courage.

====================

A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog

The New York Times story was about a wonderfully intelligent, market-based method of putting solar panel-generating electricity atop individual homes in a way that cost homeowners nothing (that’s right nothing!), while also making money for the installers of these units and for the large Wall Street banks (yes, them!) who are funding the installers.

Here’s how this arrangements works. Installers buy cheap Chinese-made solar panels (alas, America blew this end of the industry) that are put on the homes of credit worthy home owners at no cost to the latter. The electricity generated by these panels, however, is paid by the homeowner to the installer, though at a rate no higher than he/she pays for electricity at present.

Hence, no extra out-of-pocket for the homeowner. The installer (and its Wall Street backers) meanwhile derive an estimated 7-13 per cent return per annum on electricity payments.

One might add, looking ahead, that hard-pressed local governments with large numbers of their own buildings (police and fire stations, hospitals, et. al.) would be crazy not to go for similar deals that would not only be good publicity as public-private partnerships, but would also generate decent jobs for locally-based skilled solar panel installers. (Chicago, Philadelphia, are you listening?)

That was the solar tale in yesterday’s New York Times. Which brings us to today’s very different solar tale written about in today’s Los Angeles Times.

This story is about the California legislature’s approval of a proposed 663-megawatt solar plant in the desert, a plant that’s supposed to feed electricity into an existing utility grid. Environmentalists hate this solar project because of its potential destruction of a precious desert ecology. It’s also the kind of project that requires an enormous amount of government intervention, approval, and various other kinds of financial and non-financial support.

Now let’s compare these two projects for what they mean, could mean, should mean for the future of solar energy, and for the future of power generation in this country and around the world generally.

The individual units on individual buildings approach taps into the inherently decentralized nature of solar energy, rather than centralizing solar technology for the benefit of utilities. The former is thus the future — individuals (and local governments) getting off the grid. The latter is the past — like adding a motor to a horse-drawn cart so your horse can jump in the cart once in awhile to rest.

Individual solar units rather than centralized solar generation gives individuals control over their home’s power source. In terms of employment, though building one large solar power plant creates a one-time big surge of employment, tens of thousands of individual solar installations create more jobs over a longer period and are an ongoing source of employment. And by the by, also an ongoing source of safe and socially responsible investment for Wall Street.

As an added benefit, as Kay Wood, a contributor to TMV has noted, if local governments adopt this no-cost, job-creating approach to solar installation atop their police and fire stations and hospitals, they achieve an added measure of homeland security against terrorists who might one day bring down a centralized power plant – or an entire power grid. 
   
Even with our fractured contemporary politics, the obvious solar choice here is a truly bipartisan one. The left loves solar. The right loves individual control. Let’s run with this one big time.

How long will it be before America’s friends and adversaries all have the same drone technology that the U.S. is using to such effect in places like Pakistan’s tribal areas? Based on this article by columnist Laura Gil of Colombia’s El Tiempo, that time has already arrived – along with some of the most complicated questions involving civil liberties, human rights and international law ever contemplated.

For El Tiempo, Laura Gil writes in part:

“Drones” – unmanned aerial vehicles – already fly over the skies of Colombia. In March of 2009, FARC rebels announced that they had downed one of the devices. Later, Hugo Chávez protested the overflight of a “drone” that had penetrated Venezuelan airspace from Colombia.

In the U.S., everyone from municipal police forces to universities are considering their use. And what about the use of “drone” aircraft by the military? Even the United Nations hopes to integrate them into its peace-keeping missions. But taking the step from surveillance “drones” to combat “drones” is no small matter. That is what the Colombian government wants to do.

Before they overwhelm us with killer aircraft, should we not be demanding some clarity? Who will pilot the combat “drones?” Colombians in uniform? Foreign consultants? Who will they be? Where will they be? Will they do this from within our national territory? Or from some foreign refuge, like CIA headquarters in Langley (Virginia)? To whom will they answer if they commit a crime? Colombian authorities haven’t even confirmed if the surveillance “drones” are operated by Colombian personnel.

The defense company Vanguard has announced on its Web site its next job opening: “Position number VTG-1206 – Unmanned Aerial Service Operator (UAS Operator) – Colombia.” There are reasons for concern.

READ ON IN ENGLISH OR SPANISH AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.

UPDATE:

Related in more ways than one to the “brain drain,” especially as it affects our young people, is a “brain waste.”

Paul Krugman addresses how some of our policies are contributing to “wasting the minds of a whole generation.”

Please read it here

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Original Post:

The unemployment in Spain “just hit a depression-level 24.4 percent.”

Portugal, and Greece are not faring much better.

Meanwhile in the Heilbronn-Franken region alone — in a Germany presently boasting Europe’s most thriving economy — 7,500 jobs, everything from health care to hospitality, but especially engineers, go begging.

The rest of Germany is not much different : “While much of southern Europe is struggling with soaring unemployment rates, a robust Germany is desperate for educated workers, and it has begun to look south for the solution,” says the New York Times in an interesting article this weekend.

It is thus not surprising to hear that thousands of workers from southern Europe are coming to Germany in search of jobs and a better future in what can be described as another “brain drain.”

It seems like these difficult and uncertain economic times and the changing fortunes of nations are causing the movements of people, and their talents, in unexpected ways and directions.

Recently, the United States — always a magnet for people from all over the world — is experiencing what some call a “reverse brain drain” as we are seeing an increasing number of highly educated and skilled sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, of Indian, Chinese, Russian, Brazilian immigrants returning to their ancestral countries where new and plenty of opportunities beckon.

Similarly, a few days ago there were reports that for the first time since the Depression more Mexicans are returning to Mexico than coming to the United States.

As to the reasons for this most recent reversal, the Mexican reverse migration, sources attribute it to, among others, a weak U.S. job and housing construction market, stricter border enforcement, improving social conditions in Mexico, a decline in Mexican birthrates.

The movement of labor, skills and “brains” across borders and continents is nothing new.

While the British Royal Society first coined the expression “brain drain” to describe the outflow of scientists and technologists to the United States and Canada in the 1950s and early 1960s from post-war Europe, such a migration of skills and talents can probably be traced to the earliest of times.

Wikipedia cites the seeking of protection by members of the closed (Neoplatonic) “Academy” in AD 529 under the rule of Sassanid king Khosrau I, “carrying with them precious scrolls of literature and philosophy, and to a lesser degree of science” as a historical example of brain drain.

As socio-economic fortunes change, and with the relative ease of travel and free movement of people — especially in the European Union and the “free world” — some scholars and business leaders claim that all these back-and-forth “brain movements” ( they refer to them as “brain circulation”) are not necessarily bad for the country “losing the brains.” Why? Because, for example, these young American entrepreneurial émigrés sow American knowledge and skills abroad and in return acquire experience overseas and build networks that they can carry back to the United States or elsewhere .

But back in Germany and especially in the southern European countries presently watching their young, talented people leave, there are some concerns. The Times:

“This generation of young people who are leaving are our best qualified ever,” said César Castel, the director of operations for the Spanish branch of Adecco, a Swiss headhunting firm. “It is a huge loss of investment for Spain. On average it cost us 60,000 euros to train each engineer, and they are leaving.” That is about $80,000.

Mr. Castel says that if Spain’s economy turns around in two years, he expects 90 percent of the Spanish professionals to return home. However, “[I]f the recession holds on longer, the figures could drop precipitously as the workers marry and have children abroad. He fears a situation where the northern economies retain industry and the southern ones are left with agriculture and tourism,” according to the Times.

Peter Fenkl, the president of the executive board of the German company Ziehl-Abegg, looks at this issue from an opposite perspective: “If they leave in a year or two, that is not good.” Fenkl estimates that it costs as much as $50,000 more to train and integrate a foreign worker than it does a German. “But the company has little choice — having enough highly trained workers to fill orders is a necessity,” says the Times.

But so far the brain drain seems to be going as well as can be expected for both sides — under the circumstances.

To the unemployed masses in the south, Germany’s needs are a relief. In Baden-Württemberg, the unemployment rate is just 4 percent. The country seems like “El Dorado,” the legendary lost city of gold, said one Spanish engineer still searching for a job in Schwäbisch Hall. For the most part, engineers are being offered twice the salaries they could make in Spain, he said, though taxes are higher in Germany.

Of course there are some cultural, language and other issues, but — mindful of past experiences with integrating foreign workers– “[t]oday, many government officials and business leaders are examining Germany’s culture, eager to do what it takes to be hospitable and acknowledging that they have not always been so.”

“We need to become a welcoming culture,” said Guido Rebstock, head of the jobs agency in Schwäbisch Hall, repeating a phrase that has become part of the vocabulary here. “The firms have to help the workers with more than their jobs.”

Schwäbisch Hall is the “postcard-perfect” town in the Heilbronn-Franken region that in the last 18 months has “recruited thousands of the Continent’s best and brightest.”

Hopefully, when the economies in Europe recover and most of the émigrés return home, the previously mentioned benefits of the new “brain circulation” will be realized.

Read more here.

Image: www.shutterstock.com

From the start the Bill was advertised with an unhealthy dose of jingoism, its proponents sold it as a way to defend against foreign cyber-threats. While not mentioned specifically, the Act talks mostly about US intelligence agencies sharing information with private parties (with adequate security clearance) and viceversa. Checks and balances are supposedly placed on the use of that information and how it is to be stored and handled by the US government. The heavy implication here is that these threats come from abroad, or that is how the proponents sold it to the tech industry and to the media. The reality is that the final ACT is horrendously vague, and seems to create a private intelligence apparatus. My greatest concern about CISPA is that it will create surveillance sub-departments in technology companies, just like there are DMCA compliance offices everywhere.

CISPA becomes truly worrying in Sec. 1104.(b)(1), which cites the private entities that will be subject to the law. These are “cybersecurity providers” and “self-protected entities”. The definitions for these are too vague, to say the least. A cybersecurity provider is “a non-governmental entity that provides goods or services intended to be used for cybersecurity purposes.” In other words, this covers anyone who manufactures anything which can be used to secure information online, including certificate authorities and other similar security intermediaries. The clear threat here is that these intermediaries will have to snoop on their users and report back to the US federal government. Interestingly, I think that the definition clearly covers VPN and proxy providers! Similarly, a self-protected entity is “an entity, other than an individual, that provides goods or services for cybersecurity purposes to itself.” In other words, any company with antivirus software and a firewall is subject to the law. Nice piece of legislative jiggery.

Back in January, the major tech companies joined the internet hordes to stop SOPA. This time around those same companies are sitting on their hands. What gives?

Well, for starters, the two laws are very different: among other things, SOPA would have turned them into copyright cops, while CISPA simply gives them the option to pass on data if they choose.

Secondly, cyber-attacks are serious stuff for such companies. For just one example, read Stephen Levy’s In the Plex description of how the Chinese government broke into Google’s computers and stole not only code, but the Gmail messages of political dissidents. China is plundering US tech secrets on a regular basis and it’s understandable that the firms would welcome new tools to help them fight back.

Whether CISPA is the right tool is another question, of course. But the point, for now, is that CISPA doesn’t harm the self-interest of Silicon Valley companies so they have little incentive to kick up dust. (Facebook offered initial support for the goals of the bill but has since gone silent).

Finally, CISPA is not going anywhere fast. It passed the House with Republican support but is unlikely to make quick headway in a Democrat-controlled Senate, especially after the Obama administration threatened to veto it. This means the tech companies may be simply keeping their powder dry, betting that no law is going to pass until after the November election. Or maybe they just don’t care.

Either way, CISPA opponents looking for their SOPA allies to ride to the escape may have a long wait.

GigaOm’s CISPA FAQ, comparison of CISPA and SOPA and step-by-step guide to making CISPA less vile.

Previously, CISPA allowed the government to use information for “cybersecurity” or “national security” purposes. Those purposes have not been limited or removed. Instead, three more valid uses have been added: investigation and prosecution of cybersecurity crime, protection of individuals, and protection of children. Cybersecurity crime is defined as any crime involving network disruption or hacking, plus any violation of the CFAA.

Basically this means CISPA can no longer be called a cybersecurity bill at all. The government would be able to search information it collects under CISPA for the purposes of investigating American citizens with complete immunity from all privacy protections as long as they can claim someone committed a “cybersecurity crime”. Basically it says the 4th Amendment does not apply online, at all. Moreover, the government could do whatever it wants with the data as long as it can claim that someone was in danger of bodily harm, or that children were somehow threatened—again, notwithstanding absolutely any other law that would normally limit the government’s power.

Read/WriteWeb’s Dan Rowinski:

CISPA has enjoyed relative anonymity compared to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which sparked protests that effectively blacked out the Internet for a day earlier this year. While opposition from advocate groups like Demand Progress, Sum of Us and the Center for Democracy & Technology, among others, has been vocal, the lack of major corporations opposing CISPA is really what will let the bill slide through Congress. No major technology corporations have stepped up against CISPA the way Facebook, Reddit and Wikipedia (among hundreds of other companies and websites) did against SOPA. Because of the lack of business opposition, CISPA has been a much lower-profile bill and members of Congress have not faced grassroots pressure to vote against it. Passage of the bill depended on Republicans pulling a couple of Democrats to their side.

David Kravets at Wired’s Threat Level:

The bill’s supporters include Microsoft, Facebook, AT&T, Verizon, Oracle and many others.

The ACLU quickly blasted the measure’s passage. They and other groups said Americans’ private data should not be shared with the military, and that data sent to the government should be anonymized as much as possible to protect privacy.

“Cybersecurity does not have to mean abdication of Americans’ online privacy. As we’ve seen repeatedly, once the government gets expansive national security authorities, there’s no going back. We encourage the Senate to let this horrible bill fade into obscurity,” said Michelle Richardson, ACLU legislative counsel.

Earlier, the White House issued a veto threat.

memeorandum with color annotation

Research (Glance and Adamic) in the early days of blogging suggested very little cross-linking. In other words, liberal blogs rarely linked to conservative ones (and vice versa). This current visualization reflects linking behavior in the context of featured stories on memeorandum. In other words, what stories are the bloggers talking about?

The brighter the color, the more frequently they only cover stories by their counterparts…

Seeing each site’s potential bias provides the context for understanding how news is spread. Right-leaning blogs are eager to point out new evidence that George Zimmerman was hurt the day he shot Trayvon Martin, but left-leaning blogs aren’t covering that story. Likewise, only left-leaning news sites appear to be covering the news of Ted Nugent’s threatening remarks to the president, but conservative blogs aren’t. This visualization also makes it easy to spot outliers, the sources that are breaking away from their past behavior to link to something beyond their usual circle.

Some of the color choices may raise a few eyebrows; CNN, for example, shows up as pale red. Others will cause nary a blink of the eye, such as HotAir (red) and ThinkProgress (blue). Others, like Shakesville and Ezra Klein, have no highlight.

The tool is open-source, free and available for Firefox (requires GreaseMonkey) and Chrome. Baio launched the project in 2008.

Gabe Rivera is the founder of memeorandum, which is part of his stable of aggregators: Ballbug (baseball news), mediagazer (media news), Techmeme (tech news), WeSmirch (celebrity news).

:: Cross-posted from wiredpen :: Talk to me on Twitter! :: Follow me on Facebook :: Circle me on Google+