Quote of the Day

"No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society.  If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power."

-- P. J. O'Rourke

"Armed militia protects its New Orleans neighborhood"

From the Austin American Statesman:

NEW ORLEANS -- The Algiers Point militia put away its weapons Friday as Army soldiers patrolled the historic neighborhood across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter.

But the band of neighbors who survived Hurricane Katrina and then fought off looters has not disarmed.

(Registration required after, I think, third page view; BugMeNot has it covered)

Now, they don't want to leave:

Now the Algiers Point militia has defiantly declared it will not heed any orders for mandatory evacuation.  The relatively elevated neighborhood area is across the Mississippi River from the city's worst flooded areas and has running water, gas and phone service.

"They say they're going to drag us kicking and screaming from our houses.  For what?  To take us to concentration camps where we'll be raped and killed," Ramona Parker said.  "This is supposed to be America.  We're honest citizens.  We're not troublemakers.  We pay our taxes."

Now this is thinking big... but not clearly.

(Read the comic here)

There's just one problem with this idea:  If you take a star apart, it stops working.  Then all you have is a whole lot of hydrogen, helium, and relatively limited amounts of heavier fusion products.  The hydrogen you can get far more cheaply and easily, and in more than adequate quantities, from a gas-giant planet; the heavier elements you can mine far more cheaply and easily from asteroids.  It's a pretty poor return for an engineering product of such magnitude -- and for what, really?

If you have the technological capability to take apart a star, you probably have the capability to build a Dyson sphere (or, for that matter, a buuthandi, which is conceptually similar but built on a slightly different principle known as the Dyson bubble), which enables you to actually capture and use all of that energy.  OK, so maybe the star only remains usable (and the sphere only remains habitable) for another five billion years or so ...  You know what?  Honestly, the time to start worrying about that is probably at least about 4.9 billion years from now (which still leaves you about a hundred million years to do something about it).  If, that is, you're still around in 4.9 billion years and still dependent upon individual stars at all.  Odds are, one or the other of those will turn out not to be the case.

Bizarre occurrences

Something really bizarre happened last night.

mazianni made a post about Verison DSL, and I tried to comment on it in Firefox 1.0.6.  All went well, until I decided to add an addtional sentence at the start of the comment. I got to the first 'p' of the word 'prompt', asnd the machine utterly and totally locked up solid, instantly.

Very peculiar.

I rebooted the machine, couldn't see any obvious issues, opened Firefox to have a second try at the comment, started retyping my final version, got to the same character in the same first sentence ... you guessed it.  Blooeyville, buddy.

Rebooted the machine again, patiently sat there while all the metadevices resynced, went through the system logs with a fine-toothed comb, poked through the process table ... nothing.  Not a hint of anything wrong.  Opened up Firefox, opened up mazianni's post, typed the same comment again more slowly and possibly with minutely different wording, and it went through fine .... nothing out of the ordinary happened.

"Yo, there be some weird shit goin' down here, bro."

Hope for the third most intelligent species on the planet

(After the great whales and the white mice, that is.)

More than 20 nations have signed an agreement aimed at saving the world's great apes from extinction.

The Kinshasa Declaration acknowledges that the root cause of poaching and deforestation is poverty, and pledges to support local communities.

Numbers of gorilla, chimpanzee, bonobo and orangutan have fallen sharply, and experts warn that some wild populations could disappear within a generation.

The agreement came during a meeting in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

[...]

The UN body hopes the agreement will help stamp out poaching for bushmeat, animal trafficking and deforestation, which has destroyed the creatures' habitats.

Canada "Just Says No" to Shari'a

Dalton McGuinty, premier of the Canadian provice of Ontario, has ruled against a proposal to allow Moslems to use Shari'a law in family disputes.  "There should be one law for all Ontarians," says McGuinty.

Mr McGuinty said he would introduce "as soon as possible" a law banning all religious arbitration in the province.

Ontario has allowed Catholic and Jewish faith-based tribunals to resolve family disputes on a voluntary basis since 1991.

Mr McGuinty, who had been studying Ms Boyd's report since last December, said he was concerned religious family courts could "threaten our common ground".

He told the Canadian Press news agency: "There will be no Sharia law in Ontario.  There will be no religious arbitration in Ontario.  There will be one law for all Ontarians."

I have long maintained that, contrary to the proverb, when in Rome, you need not necessarily do as the Romans do; however, you're in a damned poor position to complain about the Romans doing as the Romans do.  This is a case where this principle does not apply; while you're not obligated to do as the Romans do when visiting Rome, if you decide to go to Rome to live, you'd damned well better be prepared to comply with their laws, and not expect to be allowed to bring your own with you and declare yourself to be a special case.

No, it's not religious discrimination.  It's the opposite of discrimination: it's called fairness.  Everyone gets to play by the same set of laws.  You don't get to pick and choose which ones you have to comply with based on your own personal religious affiliation.  If you want to choose to comply with additional laws imposed by your religion, so long as they don't conflict with the laws of the land, that's your free choice.

Public image trumps need for disaster relief, says Spiegel

Der Spiegel is reporting that a plane carrying 15 tons of food rations from Germany intended for Hurricane Katrina victims was turned back by the US last week because the Bush administration considers it embarrassing for Americans to receive aid from overseas.

Why was the aid not accepted?  As it turns out, the US Department of Agriculture had rejected the rations -- originally prepared for NATO troops -- out of fear they may be tainted with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the agent thought to cause mad cow disease.  Despite intensive efforts on the part of Germany's foreign ministry, the US government refused to give the plane flyover rights.

But officers at a US base in Pensacola -- where previous German aid planes had landed -- believe there was another reason.  In reality, the critics said, the Bush government was trying to avoid embarrassing images of Europeans making food relief deliveries to the States.  After all, the meals had already been certified by NATO as BSE-free.  Additionally, the same types of meals have been used in common deployments in Afghanistan, and they've also been consumed by American troops.  Startled by a query from SPIEGEL on Friday evening, the US Embassy here in Berlin said the ban on the pre-prepared meals delivered from Germany would be lifted.  Indeed, the shiny, new US Ambassador to Germany, William Timken, had only recently thanked the German government for the first 20,000 donated meals -- all of which have already been eaten by Katrina victims.

Which is the more embarrassing, and the more shameful:  America accepting overseas food relief for victims a major natural disaster, or American citizens starving after that disaster because their government is too vain to be seen accepting foreign aid to feed them?

Poverty up 12% under Bush administration

Another report from Der Spiegel:

On the same day the levees broke, Charles Nelson of the US Census Bureau in Washington presented the most recent report on income and poverty in the United States.  The numbers and graphs he unveiled offered an appalling insight into the USA.

The number of those in America living in poverty climbed by 1.1 million to fully 37 million people - the fourth jump in a row.  While the official number of US poor dropped steadily during Bill Clinton's presidency, it has grown by 12 percent under George W. Bush.

But the economy is in great shape, and getting stronger every day.  The government keeps on telling us so.  I guess this is what happens when you rob Peter to pay Paul, especially when Peter never really had that much to start with.

Scientific rigor?

"It has been established beyond doubt that the placebo-controlled, randomized controlled trial is not a fitting research tool with which to test homeopathy."

-- A spokesman for The Society of Homeopaths, on a study in The Lancet that showed homeopathic medicine works no better than placebos.

...Right.  The Society of Homeopaths recommends a ouija board instead.