Psychopolitik 2.0

Apparently like so:

Cuba’s Fidel Castro published his first editorial since his July surgery on Thursday, signing his name to a scathing article on U.S. biofuel plans for Thursday’s edition of the Communist Party newspaper Granma. […]

In Thursday’s article, Castro said more than 3 billion people in the world were condemned to die prematurely of hunger or thirst from plans by his ideological foe, the United States, to convert foodstuffs like corn into fuel for cars.

“This is not an exaggerated figure, it’s more likely cautious,” Castro wrote in the ruling Communist Party’s daily newspaper. “I’ve been meditating quite a bit since President Bush’s meeting with North American automobile makers.”

He was commenting on a proposal by the Bush administration to cut gasoline use by 20 percent by 2017, mostly by increasing the use of fuels such as ethanol, made from home-grown corn. (emphasis mine)

As I’ve pointed out before, there are interests in the alt-fuels crowd that we have to be careful of, because they aspire to the same artificial behemoth status that the oil companies currently hold.  In terms of energy savings, ethanol justifiably draws tons of skepticism, especially considering it’s not coming about as a result of a market order.  So there is reason to question it.  However, the claim that weaning off of gas (which Bush doesn’t actually want anyway) is going to trigger mass starvation is a humongous crock of shit: our government deliberately holds down corn imports anyway, and even if it didn’t it’s not like the entirety of the crops involved would consist of every single kernel in poor countries, that’d never happen.

That claim makes Castro an idiot.  What makes him a sock puppet is that he even cares about gasoline consumption.  This reeks of ghostwriting, if it were on an album the liner notes would list “H. Chavez”.  Rather amusing…

Not to make light of something as heinous as this, but it does lend yet more fuel to a view about society and our assumptions about people that I’ve held for quite some time:

For at least two days, neighbors at a city apartment complex noticed an acrid aroma, black smoke and leaping flames coming from two barbecue grills on the balcony of a second-floor apartment.

What, neighbors at the Red Oak Place apartments wondered, was going on in the unit where 27-year-old Timothy Wayne Shepherd lived? What was he burning at all hours, for days at a time? The answer turned their stomachs.

According to law enforcement officials, Shepherd dismembered, and then burned the body of his former girlfriend, Tynesha Stewart, a 19-year-old Texas A&M University student. Nothing remains of Stewart’s body, Harris County Sheriff Tommy Thomas said at a press conference Saturday.

“I just don’t know what to think about it,” said Louis Evans, whose balcony faces Shepherd’s in the quiet tree-lined enclave in northern Houston. “I thought he was a nice normal person. I guess you never know what your neighbors are doing.” (emphasis mine)

You hear that a lot about gruesome murderers.  “He was quiet, kept to himself”, “He seemed normal to me”, etcetera, etcetera.  You ask me, the “normal” people are the ones to watch out for, quirks are a sign of humanity. The vanilla types are more likely to have a body in their fridge than your wise-ass neighbor who likes death metal at 2am.

Cunning Realist brings us another example of just how nuts we’ve gone: people on bikes spreading anti-Republican slogans are actually considered worth the NYPD’s time…

Thanks to the latest scandal from La Casa De Bush — the firings of US attorneys for operating as something other than political hack artists — Alberto Gonzalez is pretty much on borrowed time.  An interesting feature of this issue is just how a key component in the hacking of the justice department came about:

Senators sparred over the firings while debating legislation that would revoke the president’s power to name replacement U.S. attorneys without Senate approval. Bush got the power to bypass the Senate confirmation process in a little-noticed amendment that was added to the USA Patriot Act last year.

Democrats said previous documents released by the Justice Department indicate that the amendment was part of a broader administration effort to politicize the Justice Department.

“U.S. attorneys who did not play ball with the political agenda of this White House were dropped from the team,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told his Senate colleagues. “How many other U.S. attorneys were approached by the White House, asked to play ball and did play ball?” (emphasis mine)

“Read the Bills act”, anyone?

Props.

John Roberts is the gift that keeps on giving:

A high school senior’s 14-foot banner proclaiming “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” gave the Supreme Court a provocative prop for a lively argument Monday about the extent of schools’ control over student speech.

If the justices conclude Joseph Frederick’s homemade sign was a pro-drug message, they are likely to side with principal Deborah Morse. She suspended Frederick in 2002 when he unfurled the banner across the street from the school in Juneau, Alaska.

“I thought we wanted our schools to teach something, including something besides just basic elements, including the character formation and not to use drugs,” Chief Justice John Roberts said Monday.

But the court could rule for Frederick if it determines that he was, as he has contended, conducting a free-speech experiment using a nonsensical message that contained no pitch for drug use. (emphasis mine)

This is about whether or not a school can regulate speech by students outside of its halls, period.  Yet Roberts is leaning on the basis of the “message” offending his delicate sensibilities.  Pitiful…

I noticed earlier that the old garbage about a missile shield is coming up again, this time w/ us deploying one for Europe to protect against…Iran.

Simple question: why?

You see, people tend to do things for a reason.  Firing a missile at Israel, yeah, I could understand them doing something like that.  Sure, the response by Israel would be to completely wipe out Iran, but that’s irrelevant, point is it’s at least feasible, the slightest chance is available that it could happen.  But Europe?  For what reason?

This would be another example of what I would call “The Dr Evil theory of foreign policy”: starting international relations from an assumption that people you oppose are willing and able to do absolutely anything, with a complete disregard for rhyme or reason, simply to piss you off.   By this logic, it doesn’t matter if a possible action is completely suicidal* on its face, they don’t like you, therefore they will do it.  Never mind that events of the last 50 years have rendered traditional warfare by all but a few pointless, forget that sanctions over their nuclear program are nothing compared to what would happen if they suddenly decided to fire a missile for shits & giggles, Iran is run by an Evil Mad Scientist Genius, and we should consider ourselves lucky he hasn’t sent sharks with laser beams on their heads after us.

(* - in case anyone’s lurking waiting to yell out “9/11!” at this remark, here’s a refresher for you: 9/11 hijackers = anti-nationalist religious nutjobs, Ahmadenijhad = religious nutjob head of state.  They place completely different values on their own lives and positions.  Besides, the president of Iran doesn’t need to be suicidal, he’s got Hezbollah for that.)

Shorter 9th Circuit Court of Appeals: “We’d rather you die than smoke a joint”

…

Someone at Microsoft just had a moment of clarity:

A senior Microsoft exec has admitted that some software piracy actually ends up benefiting the technology giant because it leads to purchases of other software packages.

In this way, some software pirates who might otherwise never try Microsoft products become paying customers, according to Microsoft business group president Jeff Raikes.

“If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else,” Raikes told delegates at last week’s Morgan Stanley Technology conference in San Francisco, Information Week reports. […]

Rather than saying that piracy isn’t a problem per-se, Raikes reckons that between 20 and 25 per cent of US software is pirated, he argues pragmatically that it can have benefits over the long-run. “We understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the installed base of people who are using our products,” Raikes said. “What you hope to do over time is convert them to licensing the software,” he said. […]

“You want to push towards getting legal licensing, but you don’t want to push so hard that you lose the asset that’s most fundamental in the business,” Raikes said, adding that Microsoft is developing “pay-as-you-go” software pricing models in a bid to encourage low-income people in emerging countries to use its technology. (emphasis mine)

How else do you think they ended up dominating the market globally? There’s a LOT of people in the world for whom the price of a copy of Windows is simply out of the question, and within that group are people who could actually get better jobs and improve their lives w/ access to it in other ways. In the long run it benefits Microsoft because you end up with even more people fluent in their software, and since they’re used to it, that’s what they get when they have the chance.

Of course, if it didn’t cost so freakin’ much — even better, if it were open source — this wouldn’t be an issue at all, so…

Props to Afterdawn.com for spotting this. They have comments on the issue as well.

Another sign of how backwards the state I live in is:

Less than two years ago it looked as if Gov. Sonny Perdue would veto a bill that banned smoking in most public buildings.  He said he feared the government was becoming a “nanny state” where politicians tell Georgians how to run their lives. Perdue ultimately signed the bill, but said, “We don’t want or need government to mandate for us what we eat or drink or how much exercise we get or whether we engage in dangerous activities, from skydiving to smoking.”

Two years later, some Georgians say the governor has done an about-face. Perdue recently signaled his opposition to a bill that would allow voters to decide whether to allow Sunday beer and wine sales in stores. He remarked that the Sunday prohibition teaches Georgians “time management” by forcing them to purchase alcohol earlier in the week. (emphasis mine)

If that were the case then there wouldn’t have been so many job interviews when I first got here that I showed up early for only to find out the person I was supposed to talk to wasn’t even there yet — or in some cases didn’t know I was coming.  Hah!

You know the real reason for this though.   It’s not “time management”, but rather a leftover nugget of religious nuttery, a view that the act of drinking liquor offends god (conveniently forgetting that part about Jesus turning water into wine…).  Observe:

Democrats, who controlled state government until 2002, have also been accused of being nannies — outlawing gay marriage and sodomy, backing smoking bans and approving the blue laws prohibiting Sunday alcohol sales in the first place, long before Republicans took power.

But Republicans could be bigger targets since many ran for office promising less government interference.

House Speaker Glenn Richardson (R-Hiram) has been a leading proponents of a smaller, less intrusive government. But he calls the Sunday sales ban a “time-honored tradition.”

“As a general rule, most people go to church of whatever faith on Sunday,” he said. “And we don’t sell beer on Sundays. It’s just one of those traditions. And I don’t think Republicans are doing anything other than trying to very carefully measure if we want to put that out there and let the citizens end that tradition.”

Nonsense.  If it were a tradition to not sell liquor on sunday then it wouldn’t need a law.  If it needs a law, then that’s a sign the people could care less about the tradition, therefore it should die.  Period.

Out of curiosity, I clicked through some pages on here to see what different stuff the Google ad thing on the side came up with, since I remembered it put in ads based on content of the site.  Unfortunately I spotted this…

If it is not obvious, then here goes, one more time: do not assume that anything in that section of the sidebar is something or someone I support, ever.  Computer algorithms determine what goes there, sometimes it royally screws the pooch.