perfidy

What quest, I see you asking yourself?

The one designed to make sure that nobody ever takes a Libertarian candidate seriously, thanks for asking. In an article entitled "Loretta Nall campaigning on her cleavage", we're informed that:

Loretta Nall, the Libertarian Party’s write-in candidate for governor of Alabama, is campaigning on her cleavage and hoping that voters will eventually focus on her platform.

“It started out as a joke, but it blew up into something huge,” said Nall, a 32-year-old with dyed blond hair.

Sorry, dear - hate to burst your bubble, but it's still a joke.

I'm sympathetic to many of the ideas espoused by Libertarian candidates, insofar as I can separate the seemingly copious stupidity of some of the party's adherents from the ideas themselves. No fascist, I tend to think that people should be allowed to do many of the things that the laws of the various states presently prohibit. Many of those laws have only passing basis in maintaining an orderly society, and the Libertarians broadly support getting rid of such regulations.

However...

Here (from the linked article) are the things Nall stands for:

• Withdrawal of the Alabama National Guard from Iraq
• Tax credits for sending children to private school and home schooling
• Opting out of the No Child Left Behind Act
• Legalizing marijuana
• Not complying with the Patriot Act and the Real ID Act.

Well, all that, plus tits.

And of the items on her list, I only see one that's actually within the purview of a state governor, from Alabama or anywhere else in the US, to control.

So, loosely viewed, she's either pissing up a rope, or she thinks everyone's stupid enough to fall for her moronic platform. To my complete lack of surprise, I find that:

The Libertarian Party could not collect the 40,000 voter signatures needed to get her name on the ballot, and she has not reached the $25,000 threshold in contributions that would require her to file a campaign finance report.

She puts her cleavage behind her deeply held beliefs, however:

Early in her campaign, she talked about how her misdemeanor arrest for marijuana possession in 2002 led her to start the U.S. Marijuana Party.

So there's that - she's a woman of her (misdemeanor) convictions. And she's an entertainer, it seems:

Then she entertained readers of her campaign Web site with lots of information about her personal life, including a discussion of why she doesn’t wear panties.

All due respect to the Libertarian Party, but next time somebody tells me, incorrectly, that my vote, two weeks hence, for Kinky Friedman as governor of Texas is wasted, I'll point them toward the story of Loretta Nall, and they'll know what a truly wasted vote would look like.

The ubiquitous "dogtag" is getting a makeover.

Matter of fact, several thousand improved identity tags are already downrange. The new tags are more than just a visual display of name, ssn, blood type, and religious preference stamped on a flimsy splinter of aluminum. Oh no. These babies will be all electronical and whatnot, and record every med you're taking, all your allergies, all your ow-ies, every injury and sickness you were ever treated for, and could probably archive every time you beat off too, 'cept that where soldiers are concerned no device yet conceived has the memory capacity to store that much data.

But the real clever bit is that field medics will have electronic readers, somewhere between PDAs and medical tricorders, that can read the data on e-tags just by proximity. Medics will not have to dig around a wounded servicemember to plug the new tags into their reader, and gone will be the days where that medic or corpsman had to find the old tags before he could see bloodtype or that he's allergic to such-such med. Taking it a step further, those med readers will tie into your permanent health records, maintained at your post or base of origin, the hospital where you were (or are about to be) treated, or presumably your civilian health system or the VA after you get out.

I think there's alot that can be weird and kludgy with such a system, particularly with all the vagaries of wireless data transmission that have to occur without fail. I might also be unsure about power use/supply/resupply to those readers, particularly with forward units or SOF far away from reliable energy supply or logistics trains.

But I'm not skeptical of the overall program concept, and I think it's a tremendous advantage.

We here at the Ministry are always alert to the danger of Giant Fighting Robots. We realize, as few do, the threat that these inhuman machines pose to our species. However, until this very moment, we were unaware of the extent, depth and mind-destroying horror of that threat. Thanks to watchful ministry crony MapGirl for raising the hue and cry.

In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Phil Sheridan had this to say about Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, after he threw three interceptions in yesterday's loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers:

"You know it's a bad day when you vomit on national television, and it isn't your worst toss of the afternoon."

Maybe not second best, but probably in the top ten, just for fluid continuation of a theme, from the same article:

Eagles fans would hurl if they knew their team had been wounded, maybe mortally, by a 5-foot-9 guy who looks more like an extra from Lord of the Rings than a professional football player.

It is perhaps overstating the obvious to say that advancing technology will bring new dangers. What is less obvious, is that advancing technology will require advances in the state of the art of warning signs. Before there were lasers, there was no need for the "Do not look into laser with remaining eye" signs. A hundred years ago, there was no need for the radiation trefoil, the biohazard sign, and so on. When we finally get around to inventing self-replicating nanosystems, devices to modulate spacetime, artificial intelligences and, to be sure, giant fighting robots - well, the humble warning sign will need some upgrades as well.

But fear not! Someone has done the work for us. And that someone is Anders Sandberg.

Mr. Sandberg has thoughtfully and carefully designed a panoply of warning signs for the singularity. Here are some of my favorites: (You can see all of them here.)

The black light bulb for ideas that aren't just bad, but contagiously bad, is effing genius. Likewise, this image just screams that something ominous and desirous of personally introducing you to a naked physical singularity, and not some nerdly rapturous technological singularity.

This sign is fantastic, Sandberg really captures the ominous potentiality of something that isn't merely self-replicating, but remorselessly self-improving. Think hordes of nanoscale Tony Robbinses, getting leaner, meaner, more numerous and more garsh-darn positive every second.

We are already verging very close to needing this sign, especially in areas of downtown London, and soon in Chicago.

And of course, the all-encompassing:

That sort of sums it up, doesn't it?

We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Mr. Sandberg for instantiating our fears in handy, easy to print warning signs. But he didn't stop there. No, indeedy do. He came up with a further classification scheme to indicate just how dangerous a particular danger is.

A level 0 threat threatens all humanity - imminent danger of species extinction. The number of individuals descends on a log scale to level nine, where only a few people might be endangered, and then down to level 10, "no humans threatened, but other values (such as unchanged biosphere, aesthetics or economy) threatened." He speculates that the colors of the warning signs above might be altered, but that might affect recognition. Instead, you might have the two signs, the warning type sign, and under it a color coded threat level with perhaps some explanatory text. His example is amusing:

SELF-REPLICATING DEVICE. LEVEL 0 THREAT: GLOBAL DANGER. DO NOT MESS WITH

It seems to me that these warning labels pretty much cover most of the likely dangers - excepting of course Cthulhoid elder creatures, homicidal extraterrestrials, and giant fighting robots. Of course, none of these would typically allow anyone to affix a warning label to them, nor would that warning label be of any possible help to anyone confronted by these dangers.

[wik] Found this on the Blogundershlock, as Sandberg's post references an early Schlock Mercenary webstrip, by way of Bruce Schneier's blog.

Somewhere in the rainbow of tacky products, sandwiched between commemorative coins for events of only passing interest, and "collector's editions" fast food beverage cups, lies the novelty chess set.

In modern tymes, the game of kings is so widely accessible that it has become just another victim of mass tackiness. Long reserved for the wealthy and noble who didn't have to work for a living and had time for trivial pursuits, chess can now be no less attractive than your plastic dinnerware that celebrates "Fifty Years of the Dragster".

I don't play chess. That is, I can, I'm just not very good at it, and have nothing personally invested in keeping at least marginally attractive chess pieces around. But just out of a sense of respect for a game of such rich and dignified history, I just can't accept things like The Animal Chess Set:

Baboon to Zebra 7...oh hell with it...

Or the Farmland Set:

Is it the pig that moves like an L, or is that the dairy cow...?

Or the Basketball Set:

Maneuvering your big balls onto the opposing cheerleader- a classic chess strategem.

But it doesn't stop there. You got about a dozen variants of cats vs. dogs. You got evil vs. good. You got skeletons vs, I believe, other skeletons. Taking it forward, the Ministry recommends these new chess sets for future development:

Bloods vs. Crips
Sunni vs. Shiite
Godzilla vs. Megalon
John Birch Society vs. COMINTERN
Boy Scouts vs. Girls Scouts
Aryan Brotherhood vs. MS13
Ford vs. Chevy
Bananas vs. Plantains
Typhoid vs. Penicillin
8 ½ x 11 vs. Legal
Coke vs. Pepsi
Paperclips vs. Staples
Tequila vs. Stomach Lining
Sutures vs. Scissors
Hawking vs. Newton
Guggenheim vs. Metropolitan
Turds vs. Daisies

Don't let your trailer's walls limit your imagination the way you let it limit your hygiene, nutrition, and job prospects. With a bit of imagination, the tacky possibilities for embarrassing chess sets are endless!

[wik] I forgot to add that I know what I'm getting Minister Buckethead for Chrsitmas this year: the Endangered Species set, complete with pandas as pawns. Extinction with every move!

Who knew? In an opinion piece from today's WSJ, Kimberley Strassel writes:

In the Ohio governor's race, Ken Blackwell is trailing his Democratic competitor, Ted Strickland, by double digits. Save a last-minute miracle, Mr. Blackwell will lose the governor's mansion, and so end 16 years of GOP dominance.

In the Florida governor's race, Charlie Crist is leading his Democratic competitor, Jim Davis, by double digits. Save a last-minute misstep, Mr. Crist is set to give the state GOP a third term in the governor's mansion, overseeing a strong Republican legislative majority.

Their respective failure and success is not ideological: Messrs. Blackwell and Crist are both running on the same agenda of tax cuts, fiscal responsibility and broad government reform. This, instead, is a story of the state parties behind them. In Florida, Republicans have spent the past eight years keeping their promises to voters; in Ohio the GOP forgot what "promise" meant somewhere in the '90s. The tale of these two GOPs offers broader lessons for congressional Republicans, who are facing a rout this fall.

As my fellow Minister Ross pointed out just yesterday, it's important to hold politicians to their promises (after, of course, you've convinced yourself they're not morally lower than whale shit, and then voted for them). He spoke in terms of how the left side of the blogosphere should "declare its independence from the political order", and while I think he was being far too specific to one portion of this medium, it was, after all, his post, and thus his opinion. But his overall point was quite valid, even before I filtered it through my own worldview.

I am not intimate with Florida politics, though a proto-communist friend of mine claims that the state's a mess, with crumbling infrastructure and enough other woes that I'm curious why, oh why, he relocated to Tampa, having commuted to the area for quite some time (ironically, from Ohio) before deciding to move house. But if, as Ms. Strassel says, the Republicans are cruising to a victory there, I guess that some large proportion, a majority even, of the state's voters think things are fine.

And on the other side of the ledger, we have Ohio. I'm somewhat more current on my knowledge of that state's, uh, state. Ken Blackwell, aside from periodic flashes of near-zealotry that have no place in politics, has long seemed like a guy I could support if I were still an Ohio resident. Says Ms. Strassel:

"There hasn't been a bigger critic of the Taft administration than Ken Blackwell," says Ken Blackwell . . . again and again. Voters can't find it in themselves to make the distinction.

All true - Mr. Blackwell has been, rightly and deservedly, a complete pain in Bob Taft's ass. (And mine, now that I think about it, referring to himself in the third person. Who does he think he is, Bob Dole?) I can, however, understand the desire of the state's residents to "throw the bums out", as the stench of corruption, devil-may-care tax policy, and flat incompetence has gotten bad enough that I can almost smell it from South Texas.

More than once over the past several years, I've been reminded that Ohio was a good place to be from, and if a majority of the residents think the same, well I can't say as I blame them. I don't remember Ted Strickland as a scary guy at all, and he could hardly do worse for the state than the execrable Mr. Taft, who, along with the lachrymose George Voinovich, presided over tax increases of more than 70% since I left the state last century.

And there's the problem, as I think I intimated in a comment to Minister Ross' post - it sucks to have to wait so long to flush the toilet. And that goes quadruple at the Federal level, where our elected spastics can do some damage worthy of the moniker.

Some day, if this entire "Internet" thing ever takes off, there might be a way to coherently, and in an adult manner, express an opinion between elections that someone will listen to.

At least that's my hope.

Buck Turgidson would surely have been horrified to learn that the NORAD command center, the spiffy "war room" made famous in movies and popular culture, is going away.

Not literally going away- why, not even commie hydrogen munitions could've removed the mountain range. But the facility will no longer be fully staffed, in a cost-cutting measure. It's another Cold War apparatus that's outlived it's usefulness. Mmmmostly....seems they're going to leave stuff plugged in and dust free, just in case.

Henceforward, command will be consolidated and exercised from a nearby USAF facility.

It struck me a few days ago that now is the time for the blogosphere to declare its independence from the political order. In particular this is the time for the left wing blogosphere to send a strong signal to the politicians they're trying to get elected: We are watching you. We've been watching the right for a while now, and believe me when I say that we're going to be watching you the second you're elected. The GOP hoodwinked a lot of real conservatives and turned into garden variety crooks in astonishingly short order.

Let's try hard not to let that happen again. Let's tell them we're going to be watching. Positions on the issues don't matter if you're a crook and your ethics are in question. The starting point is honesty in opinion, self-reflection, and ethical discourse. These are dangerous times, and dangerous times require realism. Elected representatives need to engage in realism for the country as a whole; not for one part of it, or for themselves.

Finally someone puts all that nifty information visualization stuff to a use we can all understand. Even if maybe we really didn't want to. Check out the spiffy graph of "who did who". The sheer number of stories amazes me. It's a red pixel/blue pixel soap opera, complete with tragedy (slept with one hot guy and never recovered), opportunistic men, settlers, searchers, and bona-fide hoochie-mommas. Ah, the human condition.