Category Archives: News and politics

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has reported that the Afghan poppy crop this year will be the largest on record.  Afghanistan produces roughly 90 percent of the worlds’ opium.

Some Science Content, so hang on:  Opiates are the chemical things that give pain killers their ability to kill pain, to behave as an analgesic.  Morphine is a highly refined opiate.  Codeine is another one.  They are naturally occurring chemical compounds that have been used in medicines for a zillion years.  For that matter, street heroin is also an opiate and comes from exactly the same source:  Papaver Somniferum, which the ancient Sumerian civilization called Hul Gil, the "Flower of Joy" 

By cutting tiny slits in the seed bud, the plant oozes raw opium-laced plant milk to heal the cuts. This is scraped off a few days later and wadded up in a ball of goo that eventually becomes opium, or black tar, or smack, or the components of legitimate pharmaceutical medicine. 

Afghanistan, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Laos, Viet Nam and a few other countries in the area produce almost all the World’s source material for Morphine. 

Medical opiates, like Morphine are very important chemicals.  Ask anyone who has had their wisdom teeth out, or knee surgery, or been injured in wars, calamities, or simple bad luck.  There is nothing that kills pain faster, better and with less problems than Morphine.  It is a wonder drug of the first order, naturally occurring and with known, studied, documented side effects. 

Afghanistan is the biggest producer of opiates for heroin.  The entire agricultural economy and most of the urban economy is set up to produce, refine, distribute and export heroin.  Totally illegal, yes and the source of the vast majority of the revenue of the whole country. 

The SENLIS Council, an international think-tank, has a very simple concept on their plate right now.  Rather than trying to eradicate the poppy crop and all the economic and security structures in Afghanistan that are opiate-based, why not redirect the money and power into producing opiates for medicine. 

This makes sense.  Afghani politics are utterly tied to opiate production.  Poppies are the only way peasants can earn enough money to keep from starving to death.  Poppies are the only way peasants can get some semblance of security, as the buyers offer armed, skilled and thorough protection for the growers, as part of their agreeing to buy the output of the poppy fields. 

International politics do not have any relevance to a farmer up the hills of various provinces of Afghanistan.  For that matter having running water and electricity are considered wild extravagances that only Kings and Queens can ever aspire to having.  Conventional jobs, like you and I have, are only available in the cities, which are so far away as to be on another planet.  Poppy production, they understand.

Now lay a fine mist of International Military Intervention over the top of it all.  The United States wants to defoliate the poppy crop for a couple of reasons.  The first is "Drugs Are Bad"  No debate there, that those who abuse heroin have serious problems beyond being addicts.  Like stealing anything nailed down to support their habit, crime, smuggling, international money laundering, gang violence and the rest of the social impact of illegal drugs. "Drugs Bad" I can buy into. 

However, the "War on Drugs" begun back in Ronnie Regan’s day has never worked.  Despite spending millions of dollars and exercising all kinds of moral and political pressure on various governments, the "War on Drugs" has been an abject failure. 

The second reason to defoliate is more basic:  Someone has to make the defoliant and hire the planes to spray it, then hire the consultants to verify that it has been done.  Naturally, one must never trust local wisdom, so the US Government would have to hire private contractors to do it at exorbitant rates on a cost-plus open-ended contract basis.  Blackwater comes to mind.  Haliburton, KBR, or any other of the crony companies associated with the Republicans and President JoJo The Idiot Boy are more than willing to attach themselves to that kind of money tit and suck until their cheeks collapse.

There are a couple of other reasons the US wants to defoliate most of Afghanistan that are more political.  The Taliban (who were the Good Guys when they fought the Soviets, but are now the Bad Guys because they want a piece of oil revenues) are known to be funded by narcotics revenue.  The Taliban are not renown for playing nice with the US, or going after various "War on Terror" folks like Osama Bin Laden. 

The Bought And Paid For Unocal and US Friendly Afghani Federal Government fronted by Hamid Karzi is having hassles galore with the Taliban.  The thought is to cut off the Taliban funding via opium by obliterating the vegetation on most of the country. 

There is no consideration that the next five generations of Afghan infants will be born with three heads and seventeen legs from being exposed to defoliants.  Or that most of the country, without vegetation will actually blow away and a couple of million subsistence farmers and their families will starve to death.  That’s just the price you pay for winning the War on Terror and defeating the Evildoers of the Axis of Evil Axis of Evildoers.

Besides, nobody who is a friend of JoJo The Idiot Boy is making any money off the Afghan Poppy crop. 

Here’s the nub of the radical idea.  Buy as much opium as you can afford from Afghani farmers.  Pay the going price and rather than have it smuggled into New York City for addicts to shoot into their arms, ship it to pharmaceutical companies for use as feedstock for medical uses.  We need the opiates, and Afghanistan grows it.  Afghanistan has the infrastructure and expertise to grow, process and distribute the goods.  Pharmaceutical companies need it. 

What it comes down to is circumventing the illegal supply chain with a legal supply chain.  Farmers back up in the hills of Kabul can still make a living doing what they know how to do.  The various middlemen can make their cut of the action doing the basic refining and packaging.  The smugglers would be out of business, but that’s ok.  Junkies in NYC would be faced with a shortage of heroin, as the program makes it more lucrative for the supply chain to stay legal, supplying for pharmaceutical uses. 

By the way, the cynic in me says that if we’re going to have wars, we’re going to have wounded and maimed people on either side of the ocean who will need morphine to recover from the horrendous wounds of war.  We might even actually need the expanded supplies of morphine for legitimate medical uses.

Which brings us back to the SENLILS council recommendations.  Their idea is Poppies for Medicine.  There is a precedent for this.  US Pharmaceutical companies are required, by law, to source 80% of their opiates from Turkey and India.  This regulation was put in place 35 years ago to help eradicate the illegal opium industry in Turkey and India and it has worked fine.  (I bet you didn’t know that the source of the codeine in your painkillers or cough syrup was Turkey or India.  I didn’t either.)

About all the SENLIS council wants to do is to add one word to the existing law.  Add the word "Afghanistan" to the paragraph that identifies Turkey and India as the source of legal opiates for pharmaceutical uses.  The rest of the infrastrucutre, except for the smuggling, would be used intact and eventually weaned off the gun-wielding nacortics warlords.  Just like they did in Turkey and India.

This makes so much common sense that it is immediately suspect. 

Notice too, that nowhere have I said legalize heroin, or make smack the next drug of choice among the next crop of Congresspersons. I think that’s a bad idea all around. 

There will always be a market for heroin, just as there will always be a market for booze, cigarettes, sex, gambling and Linux, regardless of how legal or illegal we make it.  The trick, the really clever trick, is to make it financially worthwile for Afghanistan to convert over to legal opium production. 

This would merely require the application of money, to keep an entire population out of the clutches of radicalized groups.  Folks who are making a reasonable living and who have enough to eat tend not to get involved in suicide bombing, protesting everything and blowing up the foreign invaders with improvised explosive devices.  This is good for Afghanistan and is good for soldiers, like the Canadians who are over there.  It’s even good for those injured in various ways as they would have access to modestly priced effective opiate based medicines to ease the pain of their injuries. 

You could even argue it would be good for oil companies, as a vaguely content population, not engaged in active warfare, would not get involved in the politics of oil companies cutting deals with the government. 

The only folks not impressed with the concept of Poppies for Medicine are the ones who look at defoliation on a country wide scale as financially important for their wellbeing.  Big Pharma is a little jittery about it too, as Poppies for Medicine touches their supply chain in a small way:  They’ll have to get by with only making 2,000% markups, instead of 3,000% markups.

Sorry to not post for a couple of weeks, but life occasionally intrudes. 

There was a change of job and a couple of hectic weeks that ran end to end to end to end.  By the time small things like dinner were constructed there were enough hours left to get some sleep and run a shirt under an iron.

However, the new job is great and the employer is actually respectful and appreciative of my efforts.  I’m back.  Not to worry.

Seemingly unrelated, children’s toys, butter-flavor popcorn, condoms, voice mail and nuclear weapons, are all related by the concept of unintended consequences.  Not everything in our world behaves as we expect it to all the time.  This has been ably demonstrated this week.

For instance, we know that lead in paint is a bad thing when the lead is ingested by toddlers who have a tendency to stuff anything in their mouths at any given time.  Kids were found to have elevated levels of lead in their bloodstream from gnawing on window sills and furniture painted with lead paint.  This is why we have laws regarding lead content in toys and why lead paint has been banned in houses for years. 

More correctly we have laws in most of the developed world regarding lead in toys and paint.  In the third, fourth and fifth worlds, the laws may exist, but the kids play with unexploded ordinance, or live on top of a toxic waste dump where inadvertent lead ingestion is the least of their worries.

Mattel is taking their third beating in the last four weeks for selling toys that contain lead, or lead paint, or have small parts that young’uns will eat.  The toys were made offshore, in China where the labour rates are about as cheap as you can get.  Mattel saves a bucket of money having things made in China and this goes straight to their profit. 

The unintended consequences?  Mattel is in a world of pain and will probably have to declare bankruptcy if only to get out from under the class-action lawsuits that are probably lining up right now.  Little Jordan or Alexis is going to be screaming at Mommie and Daddy for the next six weeks for confiscating their favourite toy of the minute.  Psychiatric counseling will increase in 20 to 25 years time as "Mattel Babies" go nuts as adults.

Diacetyl is a naturally occurring chemical that imparts a ‘butter’ flavor but isn’t actually Butter.  For the microwave popcorn fanatics out there, that "Buttery-Flavor" has no butter, but has artificial flavorings that contain diacetyl. 

To make the flavoring, workers are exposed to dusts that contain the chemical.  Some have developed a condition called bronchiolitis obliterans whereby the lungs are clogged with buttery flavoring particles that glom together.  The fix?  A lung transplant is the only route available.  You can eat diacetyl but don’t breathe it.  

This week, ConAgra Foods, the folks behind the Orville Redenbachers and Act II brands said they are phasing out diacetyl in the manufacturing of the "buttery flavor" microwave popcorn over the next year.  Not this week, or by October, but over the next year, as they use up their supply of "buttery flavor" powder.

From the Washington Post, tens of thousands of condoms provided by the District of Columbia to curb HIV/AIDS have been returned to the health department because the condoms are paper-wrapped and would break open if you looked at them sideways.  Therefore they weren’t being used to prevent the transmission of HIV/AIDS or preventing unwanted pregnancy.  The condoms were bulk ordered from offshore and are apparently not even useful as water bombs. 

According to the DC health department’s fartcatcher, they will hold a "contest for the new versions".  Meanwhile, one would suppose that the Minneapolis Airport Men’s Room would be a better source of condoms that could be used with a reasonable certainty of efficacy.  I don’t want to know what the prize would be from the District of Columbia Health Department Condom Contest.  I can think of about five or six things, but I won’t list them here.

Then there was Sen. Larry Craig leaving a voice mail message on someone’s phone where he says that his ‘intent’ is to resign his seat for pleading guilty to disorderly conduct in a men’s room at the Minneapolis airport.  It doesn’t mean he’s actually going to resign for trying solicit a knob shine.  The ‘intent’ is Larry’s way of getting around things and he explained it well in his voice mail. 

At least he didn’t say he was checking into rehab for 30 days or was under the influnce of crack that he didn’t buy or share with a male masseuse or House page. 

The unintended consequence is voters becoming so jaundiced and uninvolved that they’ll vote for anyone who isn’t actively gnawing on a severed human leg during a debate.  The further unintended consequence is Ralph Nader could run and might win this time.     

In our final unintended consequences, A B-52 bomber was loaded with older Advanced Cruise Missiles that were to be decommissioned and destroyed.  Not a story, as this happens every day and the aircraft flew from Minot AFB in North Dakota to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana on August 30th in an uneventful flight.  Except that five real nuclear munitions were loaded in the cruise missile noses that were strapped to the BUFF.

Apparently the ground crew at Barksdale noticed something was amiss when they went to unload the cruise missiles, presumably from the wing pylons.  Fortunately they spotted the warheads before some tech took a cutting torch to them.  Barksdale AFB would be a smoking hole today if they hadn’t. 

Technically, everyone involved in the handling of special munitions has to sign at each stage of movement, storage, transfer, assembly, disassembly, testing, custody and so on.  The weight of paperwork usually matches the weight of the aircraft or the missile.  The whole nuclear munitions system is supposedly set up for Zero Errors, as it should be.

The unintended consequence? There are some folks at Minot who have been and are going to be sleeping face down because a well-shined airforce boot is embedded quite uncomfortably in their rectums.

What do these unintended consequences all have in common?  Stupidity.  Either assuming we’re too stupid to understand, or so stupid to be that gullible or so stupid that we shouldn’t be allowed to breed.

Remember, Stupidity and Hydrogen are two constants in the universe and I’m not sure about Hydrogen

With Sen. Larry Criag (R-Idaho) joining the list of politicians nailed for surreptitious sauciness, we feel it is incumbent upon us to laugh like a truck full of fools at the utter silliness of the whole situation.

Two facts:  Humans like sexual activity.  It is one of those down-in-the-DNA things that are hardwired into us.  It feels good.  It lowers your blood pressure.  You get an endorphin flood from it and it is a somewhat important component for breeding other humans.  Like it or not, we are also animals and we are predisposed to wanting and enjoying sexual activity. 

Morality, the control of where, when, how and in what context humans engage in sexual activity, is a learned behavior.  Religion, family and societal conditioning are very large components of morality that change sexual activity patterns and practices.  The two are inextricably intertwined.  Again, like it or not, we are also socialized animals.

(Personal Morality Disclosure:  If the participants are of the age of majority and can actively consent, I have no issue, as long as the participants keep it private and discreet.  Those three conditions means no kids, no animals, no tonsil hockey on the subway, please.  The details, I don’t want to know about it)

The list of politicians who have been caught in various shenanigans is too long to be recited, even here.  However, the reason many have been caught is quite clear:  Lack of Discretion.

Entering a leadership position in a societal structure usually entails surrendering personal privacy and personal morality for raw, unadulterated Power.  Power, to quote Hank Kissinger, is the ultimate aphrodisiac.  Which leads me to a vivid mental picture of Margaret Thatcher and her consort Dennis, later in the evening, after declaring war on Argentina over the Falkland Islands.  I’ll need an extended session of self-trepanation with a 3/8" drill to get rid of that image.

The immediate loss of privacy is part of the deal for power.  Setting yourself up as a Moral Leader means you must behave as an exemplary example of all things Moral, by what ever definition the electorate is fond of this week.

Where we get all bent out of shape is when those in a leadership position say one thing and do another.  The hypocrisy of it makes us outraged and crusty because the leaders’ lack of discretion has led to us being confronted with hard evidence that our leaders are mere mortals too.

By being humans we’re intertwined in the rope of sexuality and morality in every possible combination, permutation and association you care to mention.  Which is at best, confusing, possibly uncomfortable and potentially unsanitary.

Feel free to lead, but do not take a moral position unless you are willing to back it up with behaviors that reflect that moral position.  Or, if you choose to lead, take a moral stance and get caught deviating from it, learn this quote from the Duke of Wellington:  "Publish and Be Dammed"

I think it would be lovely if a leader caught in one of those situations simply said "So what?  At least I’m getting some.  Next question?"  The media would have a collective stroke and possibly fall over dead.  I’m not seeing a downside to that.

The deep sucking sound you heard yesterday, was Michael Vick’s career going down the toilet.  Having cut a plea deal on dogfighting, the Atlanta Falcons quarterback grabbed the handle and flushed his career away in a press conference. 

The story that Vick had been running a dogfighting ring and betting on the outcomes is almost too grisly to comment upon.  Historically, dogfighting, bearbaiting and the rest of the animal bloodsports have been going on since shortly after humans started walking upright.  Given the right circumstances you could probably get rabbits to fight to the death and it is a given that somewhere nearby a person would be taking bets on the outcome.  Humans are like that.

My bias, I’ll put up front: I do eat beef and wear leather shoes.  Pork is a wondrous meat and fish, fresh from a stream, pan fried on the shore is about as good as you can get.  Veal, I will eat if served, but I don’t buy it, as I think immobilizing a year-old cow or steer merely for tender meat is not right.  Yes, I know we boil lobsters alive and I have done it personally.  I have skinned and dressed the carcasses of a few animals and fish that I have either hunted, or caught.  I know what goes into sausages and I have been to a slaughterhouse, so I know how my steak was made.

I will live with the contradictions, as being a carnivore does not make my opinion regarding animal cruelty less important.  I’m merely going to recognize my contradictions up front.

Wagering on organized animal cruelty compounds the offense.  Which explains the instant suspension without pay from the NFL.  One bright light at the Atlanta-Journal Constitution newspaper has done a bit of back of the envelope calculating and figured that dogfighting has cost Michael Vick about $51 million in endorsements.  The other shoe that we’re waiting on, is how much jail time?

The likelihood is a year, plus probation, which means three to six months, then the probation, as Michael Vick is not your next door neighbor.  If you or I ran a dogfighting ring, we’d be looking at five years, then three on probation.

The mere fact that we have dogfighting, cockfighting or other animal blood sports and I include bullfighting in there, as well as calf-roping and steer wrestling, is the part that makes no sense in the year 2007.  There is no need for it. 

Is it some kind of fashion statement?  Some kind of street-cred machismo to engender respect?

The dumb part is it isn’t actually that difficult.  There is no physical danger, no real personal blood involved.  You’re watching something else do your posing, fighting and dying for you.  It doesn’t take any more bravery than going to the 7-11 in a tricked out Land Rover.

If you want to butch up and show how tough you are, enter bare knuckles fistfights, take boxing lessons, or become an Ultimate Fighter type of athlete.   The truly tough sure as hell aren’t on a football field, ball diamond, race track, soccer pitch, or in the back yard organizing dogfights. 

Those who think they get a bigger dick and more respect from watching pair of dogs fight are cowards and poseurs of the first order because they are not in any danger whatsoever.  None.  They’re in more danger when they go on a roller coaster than running an animal bloodsport.

Want to show the world how big your dick really is and how much respect you really deserve?  Why not enlist?  You get to prove how tough you are when people shoot real bullets at you.  You get to prove how tough you really are if your leg gets removed with an IED and the blood is your own blood, not some dog blood.  Wager on the patrols if betting is what gets you off. 

Those who serve in the military, male and female, have a big set that clank when they walk.  They are truly tough, deserve true respect and have more street-cred in their little finger than Michael Vick or his ilk would have in their whole extended families.  

Poseurs and cowards run things like dogfights and deserve exactly how much ‘respect’ and street-cred?

This weeks’ collection of the lame, the halt and the deeply disturbed, including the last weenie roast of the summer.

From AFP On Wednesday

A Japanese game maker said Wednesday it would withdraw arm-wrestling machines from arcades after three players — two of them foreigners — broke their arms.  Players would choose a strength level from 10 characters, ranging from a maid to a professional wrestler, and face off with an artificial arm on the other side of the table.  A 25-year-old South Korean man broke his right arm while playing the game in Osaka, while a 19-year-old Frenchman and 24-year-old Japanese man also suffered arm fractures, the company said.

Atlus, a Tokyo-based arcade game maker, said it will remove the 155 machines of the game — called "Udedamashii," which means Arms Spirits — which were put into service just a month ago.

"We had done careful simulations on the possibility of injuries before putting it on sale, but unexpected accidents can happen with game machines when people are too excited or fail to follow instructions," a company spokeswoman said. "But I’m afraid some foreign nationals couldn’t understand the instructions well as it was written only in Japanese," she said. By paying 100 yen, or just under one dollar, the player would have two battles of strength.

I’ll pay the $1 to pit any 13 year-old boy without a girlfriend against the machine, as long as he can have a copy of FHM or Maxim to help. 

From the Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre, PA  Police officer charged with prostitution

Part-timer for Newport Township arrested in sting at W-B motel. By Edward Lewis

A Newport Township part-time police officer was working as an escort when he was arrested in a prostitution sting at a Wilkes-Barre motel on Friday, according to arrest papers.  Levi Gibbon Jr., 40, of East North Street, Wilkes-Barre, was charged by the state police Organized Crime Unit with a single count of prostitution. He was arraigned before Hanover Township District Judge Joseph Halesey and released on $5,000 bail.

Newport Township Solicitor Richard Shiptoski said Gibbon has been suspended without pay until resolution of the charge, a third-degree misdemeanor. Gibbon couldn’t be reached for comment on Tuesday.

I know being a part time cop does not pay well, but couldn’t he check the schedule before going to his other job.

From ABCNews  Aug 22, 2007

BEIJING (Reuters) – A Beijing factory recycled used chopsticks and sold up to 100,000 pairs a day without any form of disinfection, a newspaper said on Wednesday, the latest in a string of Chinese food and product safety scares.

Counterfeit, shoddy and dangerous products are widespread in China, whose exports have been rocked in recent months by a spate of safety scandals, ranging from pet food to medicine, tires, toothpaste and toys. Officials raided the factory and seized about half a million pairs of recycled disposable bamboo chopsticks and a packaging machine, the Beijing News said.

The owner, identified only by his surname Wu, said he had sold the recycled chopsticks for 0.04 yuan a pair and made an average of about 1,000 yuan ($130) a day. Wu, who had no license to sell the goods, said he had sold 100,000 pairs a day when business was good.

From AFP under the heading to Tit for Tat

(Xinhua) China said Wednesday it had discovered many safety problems with soybeans imported from the United States, urging US authorities to deal with the problem.  "Inspection and quarantine units in various areas have discovered a large number of quality and safety problems with imports of US soybeans," the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said.

"We have reported this to the US side, demanding that it look into the causes and adopt effective measures to ensure that a situation like this does not repeat itself," it said on its website.  It detailed a series of safety problems, including the discovery of sorghum halepense and other exotic harmful weeds among the soybeans.  There was no mention in the statement of any plan to restrict or halt imports of US soybeans.

Recent global scares over the safety of China’s exports — ranging from toys to clothes to toothpaste — have not made major headlines in the nation’s state-run media. However, frequent reports have emerged about safety problems in goods imported into China, especially from the United States.

On Monday, China said it had returned 272 heart pacemakers imported from the United States after they failed quality inspections.  The Xinhua news agency quoted the general administration as saying the pacemakers posed potential threats to patients’ lives as they could cause misdiagnoses.

Of course there were defective pacemakers, half the components were made in China and the other half in that hotbed of medical device technology, Taiwan.  Perhaps it is just a way for Taiwan to get even…

Survey: Seniors Have Sex Into 70s, 80s
Aug 22, 8:24 PM (ET) BY MARILYNN MARCHIONE

(AP) An unprecedented study of sex and seniors finds that many older people are surprisingly frisky – willing to do, and talk about, intimate acts that would make their grandchildren blush. That may be too much information for some folks, but it comes from the most comprehensive sex survey ever done among 57- to 85-year-olds in the United States.

Sex and interest in it do fall off when people are in their 70s, but more than a quarter of those up to age 85 reported having sex in the previous year. And the drop-off has a lot to do with health or lack of a partner, especially for women, the survey found.

The federally funded study, done by respected scientists and published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine, overturns some stereotypical notions that physical pleasure is just a young person’s game.  "Most people assume that people stop doing it after some vague age," said sex researcher Edward Laumann of the University of Chicago. However, more than half of those aged 57 to 75 said they gave or received oral sex, as did about a third of 75- to 85-year-olds.

The rumor is that there is sex in the afterlife.  The drawback?  You can’t feel it.

And to wind up with the final summer weenie roast… 

MOSCOW (Reuters) – A woman set fire to her ex-husband’s penis as he sat naked watching television and drinking vodka, Moscow police said Wednesday. Asked if the man would make a full recovery, a police spokeswoman said it was "difficult to predict."

The attack climaxed three years of acrimonious enforced co-habitation. The couple divorced three years ago but continued to share a small flat, something common in Russia where property costs are very high.  "It was monstrously painful," the wounded ex-husband told Tvoi Den newspaper. "I was burning like a torch. I don’t know what I did to deserve this."

Hmmm.  Would sitting around the apartment for three years, watching television, naked and drinking vodka all day long constitute a ‘reason’ for your ex to set fire to you?  She was probably trying to see if you were still alive. 

There has been a lot of blowback about the People’s Republic of China in the media over the last couple of weeks.  The continuing storylines are the usual things:  Food Safety  Lead Paint  No standards  Corrupt Practices  Economic Blackmail  Police State and so on.

Overlooked in all this is the PRC’s determination to take a firm stand on reincarnation. 

From Newsweek in a piece by Matthew Phillips, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission.  I’ll quote the article here:  According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation."

Of course, the real story is the Chinese government messing with Tibet in general and the Dalai Lama in particular, reincarnation of the Dalai Lama being a core tenet of Buddhism.  Perhaps the more absurd side of this, is that the US Department of Homeland Paranoia didn’t come up with it first. 

One could almost imagine Mikey Chertoff and Shotgun Dick at a signing ceremony in the White House:  The bill, called Reincarnation Enhancement as part of the Secure Homeland Institutional Terror Statutes would very specifically outlaw any suicide bombers from getting the 72 nicey-niceys or coming back to this life as anything except illegal aliens. 

I mean really, if President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy isn’t going to protect us from terrorists reincarnating, then, hey, we might as well go on Rush Limbaugh and whine for the next four weeks about how the government is abnegating their responsibilities, leaving us open to another 9/11.  I could probably book an appearance on O’Reilly too.  

I need some letterhead along the lines of Americans Reincarnating Securely Everywhere and a few hundred names on a petition.  If Ann Coulter can draw an audience with her inanities, then protests about reincarnated terrorists isn’t that far a leap.

This might work.  That’s the scary part.  It might just work. 

In Shenzhen, China, a port city on the Pearl River, a bit north of Hong Kong, is going to be the home of an experiment that might just curl your hair.

According to an article in the NYTimes the authorities are taking identity cards to the next step.  The card will contain not merely the name and address of the holder, but also work history, education, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance and the landlord’s phone number.  The reason for this?  Fighting Crime, of course. 

This is a little easier in China than, oh, let’s say the US, or Canada, as the government in China can do whatever they want.  Ostensibly, we have controls here. 

This was illustrated by a comment quoted by the author, Keith Bradsher, in the NYTimes story:  "If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits and that is a way for the government to control the population in the future," said Michael Lin, the VP for investor relations at China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology. Plans are afoot to include credit histories, subway travel payments and even small purchases to the functionality of the ID Card.

Short form?  China is going to tag their citizens like cattle, put more cameras everywhere and use face recognition software to track down miscreants:  The whole system is built for it.  Interestingly enough, the whole system is GPS-based, powered by big North America companies who provide the software, hardware and skills to put the whole thing together.

China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology, is incorporated in Florida, China Public Security has raised much of the money to develop its technology from two investment funds in Plano, Tex., Pinnacle Fund and Pinnacle China Fund. Three investment banks — Roth Capital Partners in Newport Beach, Calif.; Oppenheimer & Company in New York; and First Asia Finance Group of Hong Kong — helped raise the money.

Check out their website at http://www.chinacpby.com if you want to eyeball their SEC filings, as they are an over the counter stock.

As it stands now, Britain has something like one CCTV camera per 14 citizens.  Chicago has promised the Loop will have a complete 2,000 camera remote surveillance system shortly.  They already have ‘gunshot detector’ cameras mounted in certain ‘high crime’ areas.  Toll-Road EZ-Pass data is obtainable in divorce court proceedings in New Jersey.  New York City already has 1,000 cameras in the subways, with another 3,100 monitoring city housing projects.

COMPASS, the traffic monitoring system in Ontario has 104 cameras watching over us.  Right now, I’m watching the intersection of the Airport Parkway and Hunt Club Road in Ottawa.  Traffic is moving fine, by the way.

There are no statistics about how many private CCTV systems exist, like the ones used in stores to stop shoplifters, or watch over the cash register.  For that matter, there are also no legal controls over what the store can do with the images they collect. 

The Face Recognition Vendor Test for 2006 asked for participants and got a lot of applicants.  The results were not as wonderful as the tinfoil hat brigade would suggest, in that false positive identifications were a little too high still.  Vendors in the casino industry security space, however, claim that their software can spot a cheat with little more than a blurry shot of someone’s’ left eyebrow.  The truth is somewhere between the two ends of the spectrum.

Which brings us back to the Identity Card system in Shenzen.  How easy would it be to implement in Canada?  Too easy is the accurate answer. 

If you check your drivers’ license or health card, you’ll see a big, fat, magnetic stripe and probably a bar-code readable area.  That’s all it takes to find you in the database in the sky. The question becomes what data can be incorporated into your record.  Shenzhen wants to have everything, including, if the face recognition software works out, your whereabouts at any given time based on surveillance CCTV cameras. 

It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if The Department of Homeland Paranoia is looking longingly at Shenzen and the Peoples’s Republic of China, using them as a beta test.  A beta test?  Dave, that’s a bit over the top, even for you?  Not really, the companies providing the technology are all American companies.  

I’ve worked on systems (older ones) that did license plate recognition, using infrared cameras to read your car tag, front, back or both, that could sort and match things in under two seconds.  This was before the high speed systems we have now, in the mists of time known as i386 and 486 days.  Face recognition software is another step in matching a unique metric to a person.

Faces are almost all unique.  Take four or five measurements and you can probably come up with a unique number for the face attached to the body.  These are things you can do at home, if you want to.  Measure your intraocular distance, that distance between the irises of both eyes, like your optometrist does, with his or her little steel ruler.  That’s one unique number.

Measure from the notch on your brow where your nose joins your forehand, to the tip of your nose.  Another number.  Measure from tip of nose to tip of your jawbone, then measure a triangle from ear hole to jaw tip, to ear hole, as well as the angles of that triangle.  Don’t bother noting that you have a four-colour snake tattoo on your face and enough piercings to sound like an ocarina on a windy day. Then measure the little patch of skin between the bottom of your nose and the top of your upper lip. 

You now have enough data to do a really cheap, probably effective, numerical representation of the landmarks of your face, or any face.     

Add’ em all up and then search for faces in your library that have a value near your value.  You now have come very close to recognizing a face.  Where do you get a library of faces?  Mug shots from the cops will do nicely, thanks.  Drivers’ Licenses, Health Cards, Costco Membership Cards and Company ID will also supplement the database. 

The relationships between those numbers, (your intraocular distance being .987 of the length of your nose, while nose to jaw is 1.244 of your nose length and 1.863 of your intraocular distance) is what you really want.  If you have the relationship between landmarks, then you can search by the relationships:  Find me everyone with a nose this long and at least an ear-hole to jaw distance of this number on either left or right, as most faces are close to symmetric from ear-hole to jaw, left side or right side.

I am simplifying beyond absurdity here, plugging in some fanciful numbers.  Face recognition software uses several dozen landmarks, the more landmarks; the more accuracy, but the core concept is the same.  Reduce a face to landmarks and derive a big number from it, out to a few dozen decimal places. 

Big Math says if you can do a measurement remotely, you can narrow your search down to a few faces that come close to matching.  A database is just Big Math for comparing and searching.  Face Recognition Software is a way to automate finding and measuring landmarks, then assigning a value to it with the least amount of human intervention. 

All you have to do is say that Jerimiah Fleegus has a face of this value, a credit score of this value, a health card of this value and a drivers’ license of this value.  Add in his address, organ donor status and a few other impertinent facts, burn it onto the back of his ID card and voila!  Jerimiah Fleegus is now searchable, even in crowds of people. 

Tie in some other data, like Jerimiah Fleegus’ car was noted coming downtown a half-hour earlier on a toll-road, then he bought a sub (Chicken Teriyaki, 6-inch, whole wheat) using his debt card one block away, not twenty minutes ago.  A public CCTV camera spotted someone close to Jerimiah Fleegus’ face coming out of the restaurant and heading to the ball park. 

Then a camera at the ball park pedestrian ramp noted a face, sort of like Jerimiah’s, climbing to a seat in the high up seats.  We already know he has season tickets to the Jays and the seats are in the nosebleeds, from his credit card records. 

So where is Jerimiah Fleegus?  Probably at the ball game, watching the Jays beat the Anaheim Angles like a cheap gong, 4-1 in front of 31,978 fans.  We checked, using the cameras in the stands, and yep, there was Jerimiah, so far above the third base line that he is closer to the CN Tower Observation Deck than field level. 

He’ll check out of the car park around 10:30 PM and be on the toll road near 10:55 PM.  If the car gets off on the Hurontario exist of the toll-road, then he’s probably going home.  If we check his Rogers PVR later tonight, we’ll see that he watched an old episode of Mythbusters around midnight and skipped over the commercials.  Then he turned it off at 0040 hrs and went to bed.

So then this story,  U.S. to Expand Domestic Use Of Spy Satellites off the front page of WSJ online, by ROBERT BLOCK August 15, 2007; Page A1 would point to more societal management coming our way:

"The U.S.’s top intelligence official has greatly expanded the range of federal and local authorities who can get access to information from the nation’s vast network of spy satellites in the U.S.

The decision, made three months ago by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, places for the first time some of the U.S.’s most powerful intelligence-gathering tools at the disposal of domestic security officials. The move was authorized in a May 25 memo sent to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff asking his department to facilitate access to the spy network on behalf of civilian agencies and law enforcement."

The capabilities of American spy satellites are subject to much speculation, most of it ill-informed or wildly exaggerated.  They don’t need to see if Vladimir Putin shakes it with his left hand or his right hand. 

For the record, Putin is right-handed, and he doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who would take piss outside, unless he was at his dacha at Solovyovka.  Solovyovka is just off the M56, but is well wooded, so he could take a leak in the woods, if so inclined.  I’m reasonably certain somewhere in the depths of Homeland Paranoia or the DIA Mapping Branch, there exists pictures that prove or disprove Putin’s handedness, as well as his predilection for taking a piss in the forest. I digress.

We know Google Earth and MS Maps Live have the resolution needed to see license plates.  There are enough anecdotal stories about people being photographed from great height, sunbathing nude in the backyard,or coming out of peeler bars, for it to be funny anymore. 

We know that the Toronto police are using airborne Infrared cameras to find houses that have too many lights on at 0300:  This usually indicates a grow operation and as often as not, means a group of unfriendly people are coming in the door.  Unfriendly to the tennant at least. 

Data mining we’ve talked about before, but this is almost into the realm of speculative fiction until you stop and think about it.  The ability to have this level of data about everyone in a few seconds short of real time, is perfectly doable right now.  There is no magic involved, or special computers with a black hole suspended in space plasma at their center.

The issue is not the doing.  The issue is the why we’re doing it.   

Karl Rove, longtime puppet-meister of the Terror Troika of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove, has finally pulled the pin on his career at the top tier of politics. 

Kousin Karl, architect of President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy, since Texas Governor days, said in a Wall Street Journal piece by John D. McKinnon, that; "I just think it’s time," Mr. Rove said in the interview. "There’s always something that can keep you here, and as much as I’d like to be here, I’ve got to do this for the sake of my family."

Kousin Karl has been sniffing the Bush athletic supporters and other foundation garments since 1973 when he was Special Assistant to Daddy Bush as Chairman of the Republican National Committee. 

The big break came in 1984 when Daddy said he’d fund a corporation to put some fresh, working, electronics in his eponymous son George "Give Baby a Lap Dance!" Bush and stand him up as a meat puppet for the Texas gubernatorial election.  Karl and some of the other fixers did good work and got Dubya elected in ’94 and again in ’98.

Two years later, after regrooving the Dubya software and putting some of the electronics in First Puppet Peggy Hill, Kousin Karl ran it for President of the Whole Shebang against Al Gore and won, more or less.  This put Kousin Karl in a position of Great Power along with the ex-Daddy Bush cronies like Shotgun Dick, Donnie Rumsfeld, Irv Libby, Rickie Pearle, Wolfie Wolfowitz, Fast Fred Fielding, Slick Rick Armitage, the Z-Man, Zalmay Khalilzad and Dougie Feith.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the chain-whipping specialists of "Larry" Ari Fleisher and Victoria "Torie" Clarke, who thought that genital electrocution was merely a prelude to permanent attitude adjustment for reporters unfriendly to the White House and Pentagon.  Larry Ari Fleischer’s weapon of choice was a bricklayer’s hammer, while TC used her Death Ray stare to boil the kidneys of recalcitrant reporters. 

We know where all that got us.

Now with Kousin Karl walking the plank, it looks like Shotgun Dick is going to drive for a while, from the Undisclosed Location.  I wonder where Karl is going to get the fresh human blood to drink?  Ah.  I forgot, Texas is his home state.

I’ve been a space case as long as I can remember.  No, not that way, but a fan of the Space program and I am old enough to remember Walter Cronkite covering the Mercury missions.  Then Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and the whole Shuttle program, including the three disasters of Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia.

This morning, after the wake up music, some insipid, overly meaningful piece of pop-pap, I listened to the crew talking with the capcom, Shannon Lucid about some of the administrivia of flying people out of the atmosphere. 

Their first bit of fun happened around 0840 EDT or so.  The commander was looking for the eating utensils for the crew:  They weren’t where they were expected to be in the pantry. 

By 0854, the situation was resolved and one would assume that  Cdr. Scott Kelly (RED) could have his A-meal of Grits with Butter, Seasoned Scrambled Eggs, Beef Pattie, Tortilla, Pineapple, Grape Drink and Coffee with Cream and Artificial Sweetener.

Their second bit of fun was printing the day’s work log around 0845.  Mission Control in Houston had noted a log entry of a failed printing request, before the wakeup call. 

Cdr Kelly was right on top of it.  They had a printer jam, cleared it and have printed out the work log, so they know what they’re going to do today.  Meanwhile they had to fiddle with a circuit breaker for an oxygen cryo-tank instrument on Tank 2, then swap over to Tank 4 and run some power cables from a different power source.

Incidentally, there is a Canadian along this trip.  Dr. Dave Williams (ORANGE) is on his second flight.  Since they found the food utensils, one would assume Dr. Dave is having his Dried Pears, Oatmeal with Raisins, Granola with Raisins, Chocolate Breakfast Drink, Orange-Grapefruit Drink, Kona Coffee with Cream and Apple Cider as his Day 2 Meal A 

Yes, you can get all this hyper-trivia online at NASA.  No, Dave Williams did not bring an extra-large, double-double from Timmy’s.  Roll Up The Rim To Win is over.  There are no drive-thru’s in low earth orbit and he can’t get a Dutchie or Apple Fritter. 

What does this mean?  Even in space, you can’t find your fork, printers jam up, circuit breakers go for vacation and you have to run some extension cords once in a while.  Sounds just like life here on the planet.

I’m hoping I’ll hear one of the astronauts say either "Are we there yet?" or "Houston, Endeavor, Tracy took my Macadamia nuts! Over."