Hope amid the ashes

Some of the militant expansionist Israeli hardliners who are building and occupying illegal settlements in the West Bank in defiance not only of international law but even in the face of Israeli laws have adopted a new "policy" that should settle once and for all the question of are they "settlers" or are they bigoted fanatics.

It's called "the price tag." Any time the Israeli government acts to curtail their illegal activities or makes moves toward a peace settlement, they respond with violent attacks on Palestinians or Palestinian-owned property, thereby exacting a "price." If you can't understand why they would attack someone - Palestinians - in supposed retaliation for something someone else - the Israeli government - did, back up to the last two words of the previous paragraph.

One "price tag" incident occurred Monday, when settlers

launched an attack on a small Palestinian village, burning carpets and Qurans inside the village’s mosque before being expelled by the Israeli military.

The inside of the mosque had been doused with kerosene and slogans in Hebrew were written all over the mosque. ...

The timing of the attack again was clear, as Israel’s cabinet is in intense debate at the moment about extending the settlement construction freeze that expired last week. A number of settlers, as well as settler supporters in the cabinet, have expressed outrage at the idea of its extension.

But then again, things don't always work out the way the fanatics hope. The very next day, six settler rabbis

delivered a box of Korans to a West Bank mosque which had been torched by vandals, in an unusual peace gesture welcomed by Palestinians.

The delegation was led by Rabbi Menahem Froman, a founder of Eretz Shalom (Land of Peace), a small group of West Bank settlers who have reached out to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank to pursue peaceful coexistence.

They brought around a dozen copies of the Muslim holy book on a solidarity visit to the mosque in Beit Fajjar near Bethlehem the day after unidentified vandals spray-painted Hebrew insults on its walls and set it alight. ...

Several hundred Palestinians cheered as the rabbis arrived in two armoured Land Rovers accompanied by Israeli soldiers. ...

After talking with residents and examining the damage, Froman, who comes from the nearby Tekoa settlement, held hands with a Muslim cleric as they both raised copies of the Koran in the air.

"My belief is in peace and in God," the white-bearded rabbi told reporters.

"Those who act against peace act against God. God will defeat those who do things like this."

Palestinians at the event expressed a similar sentiment.

"We are all from the same family and we must live as good neighbours," said Abed Farajallah, a Palestinian from the southern West Bank town of Idhna.

But, as Jason Ditz wrote at AntiWar.com, when it comes to the West Bank, it don't come easy

and the plan for these settlers to join with Palestinians in a pro-peace demonstration were foiled by the Israeli military, which blocked them from attending and later clashed with them.

Meanwhile, more attacks seem to be in the offing, as a right wing settler group condemned the plans of the Israeli government to shutter an illegally built synagogue in a remote settlement and threatened to set Palestinian farmlands on fire and launch more “price tag” attacks if the Israeli government doesn’t back down.

The Israeli government joined the Palestinian Authority and the White House in condemning the attack; Netanyahu called it "terrorism." So now we will see just how serious the Israelis are about "fighting terrorism" when it can't be blamed on Hamas.

Oh, what a beautiful morning

Oh, what a beautiful day....

October 2. Gandhi's birthday. And the date of the One Nation Working Together rally in DC.

By almost all accounts it was an exciting and inspiring day - even if it was, as the satirical Charlie King song has it, "vaguely reminiscent of the '60s." I haven't written about it because I assume you know about it, plus that you were there and/or read accounts of it. Unhappily, I wasn't there - I wanted to go but for various reasons having to do with arrangements here it just couldn't be worked out.

So assuming as I do that you know about it and have seen at least a couple of the many pictures of that day that are out there, I'm going to add just a few observations of my own.

One is that I just knew that the numbers game was going to get played: Was this bigger or smaller than Glen "I am the Messiah" Beck's on August 28? Well, in fact it seemed to me, based on the pictures, that it was somewhat but not significantly smaller - but frankly I really don't care because I got tired of that game a long time ago. Back in the days when the DC police would give crowd estimates, I used to say you could get a fair guess as to the total by taking the average of the police estimate and the organizers' estimate and shading it a little toward the latter because the police tended to underestimate more than the organizers tended to overestimate.

On the other hand, the organizers' estimate here of an attendance of 175,000 was surely a lot closer to the mark than Beck's wildly inflated claim of 500,000-plus for his revival meeting - especially since according to an aerial survey of the crowd commissioned by CBS News, Beck's crowd actually numbered less than 90,000.

That in turn would make the total for October 2 "only" about 70,000 or so, but leave that aside because what I think is more important and can be safely said in any event is that the October 2 crowd was far more diverse both racially and ethnically than that Beck drew. If you wanted to judge on a "looks like America" scale, One Nation would drub Beck-o-Rama - that fact being one of the things that drives the fear in the Beckians: More and more, they do not "represent America."

At the same time, I knew I knew I knew as soon as I saw this photo from CNN, obviously taken before the rally started, that some rightwing nutzoid somewhere would take that or some similar shot and use it to claim that the rally was a fizzle. And indeed one, someone of who I had to this point been happily unaware, did just that, using a photo taken after the rally was over to claim that only "a few hundred losers" showed up - a claim so out of it that even his commenters could not swallow it whole.

Something else here is that whenever I attended these kinds of huge rallies, I never listened to the speakers. I usually spent the time roaming the edges of the crowd, reading signs and seeing what sorts of literature were being passed out. So had I been able to go to this one, perhaps I wouldn't have been as disappointed as I could have been - since I wouldn't have been aware of it as I could have been - by the fact that what came from the speakers' platform amounted to "elect Democrats." October 2 was promoted as a rally to demand jobs, justice, and educational opportunity, but what it came out as from the stage was a big Get Out The Vote For The Democrats event. That was not only a major disappointment, I say it was a serious failing.

Now, I am going to vote - other than a few strictly local elections, the only time in my adult life I haven't voted was once when I moved into an area too late to register - and while for Governor I'm voting Green, for Congress I will vote for the Democrat because he's reasonably good and there is no one better on the ballot. But if you try to tell me, especially at a "Jobs, Justice, and Education" protest, which should be about policy, not party, that the answer to our problems and pitfalls is keeping Congress in the hands of the Democrats who have been either (depending on your viewpoint and assuming there's a difference) corporate-toady fucking assholes or GOPper-accommodationist fucking assholes, well I'm going to tell you to go fuck off. Voting for a Democrat can be a tactic. It is not an answer.

Talking with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! on October 4, journalist and filmmaker Danny Schechter expressed much the same idea in much politer terms. I did disagree with his first comment:

They were speaking not just to themselves, but to America. ... [T]hey missed an opportunity, I believe, to offer their analysis to the American people, who don’t get it in the media....

The idea of a rally is to rally. It is a time to rouse, to inspire, to demand, and to show there is support for those demands. It is a time to press your case to the powers-that-be and to show people who may be leaning in your direction that yes, they are not alone and others feel much the same way so come on in, the water's fine. It is not a time to "offer your analysis."

But what he said after that was, I think, spot on, especially as it relates not so much to the particular event itself but to the broader effort that should surround it:

[T]there was very little offered about what to do about all of this, except voting in November. And we all know that voting in November to return to Congress even people who are supposedly, you know, trying to do the right thing is very problematic, because we know that—how badly they’ve done. You know, even the Democrats are saying, you know, "Even if you don’t like us, vote for us, because we’re better than the other guys." That’s not much of an appeal.

So, where was the strategy? Where was the plan for the future? Where was the organizational vision for how to bring these people to stay together to work together to move for change? That was sort of missing, and I think it became, in a way, more of an event, more of a movie than a movement.

After Goodman mentioned that the people out on the grass "were more critical than the message from the stage," and "it was about how careful [the speakers] were not to criticize the administration," Schechter remarked on something I have said so damn many times (here, for example) it makes my teeth ache:

[I]f there’s pressure on the right and no pressure on the left, the left is not going to be taken seriously, as it has not been, because the administration feels they can take people like us, at large, for granted. ... But the people who want to see this administration really push forward a progressive agenda have to do more than just rally on the Mall. They have to organize. They have to try to build support for a program for change. And that, so far, has been missing.

And October 2 did very little to change that. And as long as the focus comes down to "vote for Democrats because OMIGOD! REPUBLICANS!" it's still not going to change.

Footnote: On another front, Jon Stewart's upcoming "Rally to Restore Sanity," with its "the left and right are both insane and wanting Bush administration officials prosecuted for their documented illegal wiretaps, illegal torture, and illegal wars is exactly the same as saying Barack Obama is a Kenyan Muslim" theme has obtained evidence of just how frivolous it is: Obama approves of it.

Obama said he was "amused" by Stewart's rally and that it's for people who expect some common sense and courtesy in their daily interactions.

The president said that having those voices lifted up is, as he put it, "really important."

And just how innocuous, how vacuous, how utterly unthreatening, how safe does an event have to be to get such an endorsement?

Everything you need to know

Okay, I've had everything you need to know in two sentences and everything you need to know in one sentence. Now comes a case of everything you need to know in just one phrase.

But getting there takes a bit of an introduction.

Some years ago, my wife and I seriously investigated the possibility of a version of living on the road: buying and living in an RV or what was then called a fifth-wheel for at least a few years if not longer. This was a time when my wife, an RN, could get work pretty much anywhere with the Traveling Nurse Corps and I could do odd jobs; plus there was a possibility I could do a newspaper column about politics and our travels.

Well, the column possibility fell through and we ultimately gave up the whole idea because try as I might, I couldn't make the finances work out in a way that would allow my wife to work any significantly lesser amount of time. So while the ideas of the travel and the seeing/living in different parts of the country were attractive, the bottom line was that we would be giving up a fair amount of security without the intended gain of more free time. It just didn't seem worth it. In the years since, the dream has not died, but the practicalities are even more against it.

There are people who pursue that dream, and more power to them. The point here, however, is that for other people, a good and increasing number of them in fact, making an RV your home is not a dream or a lifestyle, it's a necessity. From the NY Times:

Los Angeles - Every day, Diane Butler and her husband park their two hand-painted R.V.’s in a lot at the edge of Venice Beach here, alongside dozens of other rickety, rusted campers from the 1970s and ’80s. During the day, she sells her artwork on the boardwalk. When the parking lot closes at sunset, she and the other R.V.-dwellers drive a quarter-mile inland to find somewhere on the street to park for the night.

Their nomadic existence might be ending, though. The Venice section of Los Angeles has become the latest California community to enact strict new regulations limiting street parking and banning R.V.’s from beach lots — regulations that could soon force Ms. Butler, 58, to leave the community where she has lived for four decades. ...

Southern California, with its forgiving weather, has long been a popular destination for those living in vehicles and other homeless people. And for decades, people living in R.V.’s, vans and cars have settled in Venice, the beachfront Los Angeles community once known as the “Slum by the Sea” and famous for its offbeat, artistic culture.

Yet even as the economic downturn has forced more people out of their homes and into their cars, vehicle-dwellers are facing fewer options, with more communities trying to push them out.

What we're talking about here is people who are homeless - or, if you prefer, "semi-homeless," since they do have some sort of shelter - who are living in RVs because that's the best housing they can manage. As law professor and activist on homelessness issues Gary Blasi was quoted as saying,

most people choose to live in vehicles only when the alternative is sleeping in a shelter or on the street.

“The idea of carefree vagabonds is statistically false,” Professor Blasi said. “More often, these are people who lived in apartments in Venice before they lived in R.V.’s. The reason for losing housing is usually the loss of a job or some health care crisis.”

Neil Donovan of the National Coalition for the Homeless echoed that, saying that

vehicle-dwellers often end up on the street after their vehicles are towed or become inoperable. When his organization surveyed tent camps in California, they found that many residents had come from R.V.’s.

But why is this crackdown happening in Venice, "the 'Slum by the Sea' ... famous for its offbeat, artistic culture?" Why now, after "decades" of van-dwellers settling in Venice? Well, here comes that phrase, the one that explains it all in just three words, with the emphasis obviously added:

In the past, bohemian Venice was tolerant of vehicle-dwellers, but, increasingly, the proliferation of R.V.’s in this gentrifying neighborhood has prompted efforts to remove them.

And there you have it. The "better sorts" are moving in, in search of cheaper housing and good investments - and we all know how icky they find the sight of their inferiors.

Footnote to the preceding

On a somewhat brighter note, Senate progress on the misnamed Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act (COICA) has been put off until after the election. While that doesn't mean the bill has been defeated, it does mean that the chances of doing so, at least for this Congress, have clearly improved.

The bill, introduced by Pat Leahy on September 20, was scheduled for a markup session just one week later. This rush to judgment was stalled when staffers realized the Senate would likely adjourn before that meeting could begin.

The reason this is good news is that the bill is, as EFF labels it, "an Internet censorship bill" that would empower the DOJ to hinder or even ban access to websites on lists it would compile. More specifically, EFF explains, it

would allow the Attorney General and the Department of Justice to break the Internet one domain at a time — by requiring domain registrars/registries, ISPs, DNS providers, and others to block Internet users from reaching certain websites. The bill would also create two Internet blacklists. The first is a list of all the websites hit with a censorship court order from the Attorney General. The second, more worrying, blacklist is a list of domain names that the Department of Justice determines — without judicial review — are "dedicated to infringing activities." The bill only requires blocking for domains in the first list, but strongly suggests that domains on the second list should be blocked as well by providing legal immunity for Internet intermediaries and DNS operators who decide to block domains on the second blacklist as well. (It's easy to predict that there will be tremendous pressure for Internet intermediaries of all stripes to block these "deemed infringing" sites on the second blacklist.) ...

[T]he DMCA [the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1996] already gives copyright owners legal tools to remove infringing material piece-by-piece, and to obtain injunctions requiring ISPs to block certain offshore infringing websites. The misuse of the existing DMCA provisions have had a tremendously damaging impact on fair use and free expression. By comparison, COICA streamlines and vastly expands this; it would allow the AG to shoot down a whole domain including all the blog posts, images, backups, and files underneath it. In other words, it's not just possible but probable that a great deal of legitimate, protected speech will be taken down in the name of copyright enforcement.

The way the bill would work is by interfering with the net's domain name system, or DNS. When you enter a web address in your browser, the DNS translates it into the form the system uses and tells your browser where that address can be found. Under the bill, the DNS in effect would have to tell your browser "ya can't get theah from heah."

Generally speaking[, EFF's legislative analysis says,] the bill forces all the Internet "middlemen" to act as if a part of the Internet doesn't exist, even though that page may otherwise be completely available and accessible.

As the group notes, if the bill passes the list of targets could conceivably include hosting websites (because in the absence of a takedown notice they don't police files, so the DOJ could decide there is "too much" piracy, making that "central" to their business), MP3 blogs and mashup sites (because the DOJ, under expected pressure from the RIAA, could declare such mashups are not "fair use"), and sites that advocate for p2p technology and/or piracy (because, while there is a great deal of Constitutionally-protected speech there, posts on the sites regularly link to tools and information potentially useful in piracy, and DOJ could decide that piracy is therefore "central" to the site's purpose).

Indeed[, EFF says,] had this bill been passed five or ten years ago, YouTube might not exist today. In other words, the collateral damage from this legislation would be enormous.

There are already laws and procedures in place for taking down sites that violate the law. This act would allow the Attorney General to censor sites even when no court has found they have infringed copyright or any other law.

And even where a site had violated the law, it would apply a bludgeon rather than a scalpel, smashing the legal along with the illegal. This bill is a really bad idea.

It's last week's news

Updated But still too important to let pass without comment.

Net neutrality, put simply, is the principle that providers can't discriminate among users in managing traffic flow. They can't, for example, give some corporate behemoth the digital equivalent of a superhighway with all green lights while relegating some crummy blog with 35 hits a day to a rutted side road with a stop sign at every intersection. Traffic is traffic and it all gets treated equally.

Net neutrality is one of the reasons the internet has thrived: It has been, at least technologically and theoretically, equally available to all rather than being dominated and ruled by a handful of media conglomerates, à la broadcast media. So of course corporations hate it and persistently have tried to undermine it.

One of the people who was supposedly a champion of net neutrality is Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman of California, who chairs the House's Energy and Commerce Committee. That accolade, apparently, is no longer deserved. Raw Story reported last week that Waxman has put forth a proposal that

under the banner of mandating network neutrality would instead prevent the government from requiring broadband providers to treat all Internet traffic equally.

Waxman, who has vowed that he would support the so-called 'Net Neutrality' policy proposals favored by most Democrats and progressives, has instead put forward an as-yet-unsettled legislative framework that explicitly prohibits the Federal Communications Commission from regulating broadband Internet under Title II of the Communications Act: a caveat key to implementation of what's been called the Internet's First Amendment.

Should the president sign a bill containing Waxman's language, it would effectively kill 'Net Neutrality' efforts and make key parts of a hotly contested proposal by Google and Verizon the law of the land.

Without plunging into the details of that proposal, I'll mention that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has an analysis of it, various points of which it rates "Good," "Interesting," "Troublesome," or "Fail." Even at that, I'm not sure I can agree with some parts they consider "good," such as "limit[ing] the FCC to case-by-case enforcement of consumer protection and nondiscrimination requirements and prohibit[ing] broad rulemaking." While I can share their concern about giving the FCC overly-broad authority, a "case-by-case" approach to the internet, with its tens of millions of content providers from major media outlets to individual blogs, would make any nondiscrimination requirements essentially unenforceable - a concern shared by others, even among some who see good parts to the corporate proposal. Indeed, as Raw Story points out,

[f]rom an Internet user's perspective, traffic shaping and discriminatory practices are impossible to prove without the service provider's own admission that it is occurring.

Despite that, Waxman's bill embraces case-by-case enforcement and states, Raw Story reports, that it gives the FCC no new authority to regulate providers unless the company actually elects to be regulated. What's more, violations of the rules would incur a maximum fine of $2 million, chump change to the majors, particularly in light of the profit potential of skirting those rules.

But even more importantly, the Google-Verizon vision would exempt wireless networks - almost universally agreed to be the future of internet access - from neutrality rules.

John Bergmayer, a staff attorney at Public Knowledge, has said that in doing so, the corporate plan

draws illogical distinctions both on the basis of what technology you use to access the Internet, and between “the public Internet” (Verizon’s mantra on the press call) and “additional online services.”

The Google/Verizon blog post misleadingly mentions “the FCC’s current wireline broadband openness principles.” But the FCC’s 2005 Internet Policy Statement refers to broadband, and does not carve out a distinction for wireless. The FCC was right to see that the Internet is the Internet—it makes no sense to apply different principles to different technologies.

That is, what Google and Verizon are trying to do is to create distinctions that did not exist previously in order to carve out a space where they can act to pursue their own corporate interests without oversight. And Henry Waxman is right there with them. While his bill

carries language that speaks of preventing ISPs from "unjustly or unreasonably" discriminating against "lawful traffic," the spirit of the rule is completely undermined by text that follows.

For today's fast-growing wireless networks ... it makes a provision allowing for "reasonable network management," but prohibits blocking "lawful Internet websites".

Which raises two enormous problems: One is, what defines "lawful?" Who gets to decide what is a "lawful" site? The primary issue here seems to be peer-to-peer sites, which the majors and their entertainment corporation partners hate with a passion. It's safe to say that at any given moment on any given p2p site there is a lot of copyrighted material being illegally distributed and a lot of other material, both copyrighted and non-copyrighted, being legally distributed. Is that site "legal" or not? Does it depend on how much of the traffic is being distributed contrary to copyright restrictions? Who decides how much is too much?

Here's another: Suppose the relevant honchos of some provider corporation dislike the War Resisters League because of its support for conscientious tax resistance and nonviolence civil disobedience. Can that provider block access to the WRL site on the grounds that its support for such law-breaking makes it an "unlawful" site? Who decides? And on what basis?

But Raw Story nabs the big one, the one that just slips by in a single phrase but makes all the difference:

That term, "reasonable network management," is defined as "a network management practice that is appropriate and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management function". Waxman's text goes on to explain that "appropriate and tailored practices to reduce or mitigate the effects of what it calls "traffic that is harmful to or unwanted by users" are permissible.

The catch: "Users" includes "premise operators, [...] the provider’s network, or the Internet".

Stated in plain language, under Waxman's proposal, traffic that is unwanted on a provider's network may still be subject to "management."

Stated in even plainer language, in Waxman's bill providers are "users" and in the case of wireless networks they are free "deprioritize" or even to block any content which they do not want. While the bill bans blocking "lawful applications that compete with the provider’s voice or video communications services," I'm really not worried about ads for T-Mobile not making it across Verizon's network; I sincerely doubt there will be a problem. I am, however, worried about sites like Verizon Sucks Ass and Google Sucks and other better- or lesser-known voices of whatever style or focus or seriousness that are for whatever reason unwelcome in the offices of C. S. Lewis's "quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice" being banished to some dark back alley of the internet.

Ultimately, as PC World columnist Ian Paul said back in August,

[t]he Google-Verizon proposal appears to make room for a two-tiered Internet: the public Internet we use today and a private one for premium services. That raises the question about what happens to the regular Internet in the long term? Would broadband providers be compelled to maintain and upgrade their regular Internet services? Could carriers cap regular Internet speeds at a certain level, and then force users over to the proposed private service if they wanted better broadband speeds? How does an open or so-called public Internet survive when corporations have financial incentives, such as private networks, to ignore it?

That is the future Henry Waxman has now endorsed, in fact for which he is pushing.

Did he ever did actually believe in net neutrality? I admit, I wonder, since a much better bill, the Internet Freedom and Preservation Act, has languished in the Energy and Commerce Committee - the committee Waxman chairs - for over year.

The fact remains, if he ever did believe in it either he doesn't now or he's been rooked by corporations that are prepared to pretty much accept the status quo that exists in the present for the sake of owning the future.

More and better Democrats, indeed.

Updated with a Footnote: I've learned since that when he presented his proposal, Waxman said that

if efforts to create bipartisan broadband legislation fail, the Federal Communications Commission should move broadband businesses under Title II of the Communications Act, a possibility phone and cable companies strongly oppose.

"If our efforts to find bipartisan consensus fail, the FCC should move forward under Title II. The bottom line is that we must protect the open Internet. If Congress can’t act, the FCC must," he said in a statement.

It appears, then, that Waxman is wielding the sword of pushing for regulation of broadband carriers as "common carriers" like telephone companies, and so subject to equal access rules, as a sort of weapon to pressure the corporations to get behind his bill. A "Hey, look, it could be worse" argument.

I'd like to be able to say that Waxman's repeated support for the principle of net neutrality mitigates some of the concern about his proposal, but it doesn't. The proposal still says what it says and either Waxman doesn't grasp the import of his own proposal or he has decided that it's sufficient to have a philosophical statement in favor of net neutrality even as actual control of the future of broadband is handed over to the corporate giants.

An Amusingly Revealing Footnote to the Footnote: It turns out that some GOPpers are feeling trapped between some of their big donors among the telcom industry (which likes some form of government regulation of the internet because it protects them against competitors while not damaging their positions) and their TP followers, who opposed to any sort of regulation whatsoever. Which means, true to their logic-less libertarian roots, the TPers think government is so eee-vuul that they actually want to have a handful of corporate behemoths dictating what can and can't be sent over the web, when, and how fast.

The Crawling Geek

Adding a bit to the overall mystery of Stonehenge comes the fact that in ancient times it may have been a tourist destination - at least it was a place people from quite some distance came to see.

Studies of the skeleton of an adolescent boy from some 3,500 years ago found near the site suggest that he traveled all the way from the Mediterranean - potentially Italy, Spain or southern France - to the southwest of England. ...

Another body found near the famous stone complex has been identified as coming from the German Alpine foothills some 800 years earlier.

So over 4,000 years ago, not only was Stonehenge being put to some actual use but knowedge of it was spread wide enough that people traveled halfway across Europe to be there.

Knowledge of the skeletons themselves was not new - the boy was found five years ago and the German before that - but determining where they came from, is.

Tooth enamel forms in a child's first few years, so it stores a chemical record of the environment in which the individual grew up. ...

Most oxygen in teeth and bone comes from drinking water - which is itself derived from rain or snow.

In warm climates, drinking water contains a higher ratio of heavy oxygen (O-18) to light oxygen (O-16) than in cold climates. So comparing the oxygen isotope ratio in teeth with that of drinking water from different regions can provide information about the climate in which a person was raised.

Most rocks carry a small amount of the element strontium (Sr), and the ratio of strontium 87 and strontium 86 isotopes varies according to local geology.

The isotope ratio of strontium in a person's teeth can provide information on the geological setting where that individual lived in childhood.

By combining the techniques, archaeologists can gather data pointing to regions where a person may have been raised.

One interesting thing is that both skeletons seem to indicate the presence of some sort of illness or injury. The boy died at 14 or 15 and since the article makes no mention of the skeleton bearing marks of violence, he apparently died young of some sickness.

The German seems to have suffered from a painful leg condition.

It may be that Stonehenge was a center of healing, drawing people from across Europe in search of cures....

Nobody is quite sure what the site was used for. It could have been a religious site built by sun worshipers, since the axis that runs through the center of the stone circle aligns with the midsummer sunrise.

Actually, it doesn't anymore due to Earth's precession of the equinoxes, but it did a few thousand years ago. Personally and in what is hardly an unshared opinion, I think part of the problem of "what was Stonehenge used for" is that is was used for different things by different people over the 1500 or so years in which the site was in use.

Whatever drew these ancient travelers to the location, they certainly weren't budget travelers. The boy was found with a 90-piece amber necklace, while the German had copper daggers and gold hair clasps.

"People who can get these rare and exotic materials are people of some importance," Andrew Fitzpatrick of Wessex Archeology told BBC News.

So were they seeking some sort of medical miracle? Was this a Bronze Age Lourdes? Or were they each on some (very) early version of The Grand Tour who just happened to die while they were there?

Questions are cool.

Footnote: Major props to the first one who can identify the source, the theme if you will, that provides the titles of a number of the science posts, marked by use of the word "geek" somewhere in the title.

A few random bits and pieces

Some things I noticed over the past week or so to which I wasn't going to devote a full post but still deserved to be mentioned, arranged chronologically.

- September 24: Citigroup, which received $45 billion in government bailout money and still holds such large amounts of bad loans and investments that it posted a loss in the third quarter, is giving millions of dollars in raises to top executives by paying them in stock to get around a cap on cash pay.

A couple of weeks ago I had a post called "Everything you need to know in two sentences." Consider this everything you need to know in one sentence.

- September 25: Fred Korematsu, a Japanese-American who refused to enter an internment camp in 1942 and was arrested for it, is to be honored by the state of California. A new law designates January 30 as Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution.

It would have been nice if this had been done while Korematsu was still alive (he died five years ago), but ain't that always the way: The rebels get jailed while they are alive and honored when they are safely dead.

- September 27: Appalachia Rising staged a demonstration of about 2,000 Appalachians and supporters, who marched from the EPA to the White House, demanding an end to mountaintop-removal coal mining. At the White House, about 100 people were arrested in nonviolent civil disobedience, sitting down on the sidewalk and refusing to leave.

I have to say that video of the event, which included the crowd chanting "What do we want? Clean water! When do we want it? Now!" and a speaker crying out "Power to the people!" brought a smile to the face and some cheer (i.e., encouragement) to the heart of this worn-out DFH.

- September 29: A police officer from the town of Monck's Corner, South Carolina, has been fired for violating official policy. Y'see, police there are allowed to take their cruisers home and the unnamed officer thought he'd help out a charity fundraiser carwash for the Shriners Hospital in Georgia. So he had his own car washed there and then brought his cruiser.

But no good deed goes unpunished, so when his superiors heard that the car had been photographed being washed by women in bikinis, they fired him.

That is stupid enough, but when I think of all the cops who have walked after harassing people, beating people, tasering people (often repeatedly), shooting people, killing people, who walked because it was "reasonable" or "appropriate" or "in line with policy," it becomes thoroughly disgusting.

- September 29: A study claims that laws banning texting while driving have not reduced accidents.

This really was a lame study, as it examined accident rates in some states with anti-texting laws, comparing the rate just shortly before the law was passed to shortly after. However, it made no attempt to see if the rate of texting while driving had changed, nor did it consider any issues of how strictly the law was being enforced. What's more, it ignored the fact that behavior related to a change in a law generally does not happen immediately but develops over time. Just lame.

Finally, there is this:

- September 29: Canadian Minister of Justice Rob Nicholson announced that the government will appeal an Ontario court ruling that struck down key provisions of Canada's prostitution laws.

I really just included this because I was amused that my news aggregator filed it under "Business."

Maybe Alan Simpson is in for a bigger fight than he thought

CBS News reported yesterday that

[a] group of Democrats today pressed President Obama's bipartisan fiscal commission, which is will be putting fourth recommendations on December 1st to reduce the deficit, not to include any cuts to Social Security when they do.

The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform "should keep their paws off" Social Security, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) said on a phone call with reporters, calling for "no benefit cuts, no raising the retirement age, no privatization."

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said explicitly that the purpose of the call was to warn the commission not to include recommendations to cut Social Security. "If you do we'll vote it down, and do everything we can to see it defeated," he said.

On another front, a letter circulated among members of the House by Rep. Raul Grijalva vowing to vote down the Commission's recommendations if they include any cuts in Social Security (including raising the retirement age) now has 102 signers - including five members of the Blue Dog coalition.

I can't help but wonder if this passion for keeping the system intact will melt away in the face of White House stubbornness and eagerness to placate conservatives, just as similar passion melted in the health care debate. Still, it's good to at least see some overt pushback on the moves to use Social Security as the sacrificial lamb on the altar of deficit reduction, to be presented as a burnt offering to the gods of the banks and investment houses and yes I know that was an incredibly strained bit of imagery. It's still good to see open resistance to cutting SS among members of Congress.

Yes, of course there's a Footnote: As another example of "know your sources," in its own short article on the Democrats' statement, The Hill referred to both "the nation's looming debt crisis" and "the looming fiscal crisis." But perhaps "looming," with all its overtones of imminent danger (How much more imminent can danger be than a "looming crisis?") was just the Word-of-the-Day at the place - especially since the same article also referred to the "looming elections."

More seriously, it described Sherrod Brown as having "argued that working class citizens couldn't reasonably survive an older retirement age," a statement that seems to make little sense and reads as thought The Hill wrote it with a smirk. What Brown really said was that

while raising the retirement age may not seem like a big deal to white collar workers, it would be devastating for people who work on their feet, such as a waitress or a carpenter.

Or a nurse. It's amazing to me how we already seem to have forgotten that not that long ago, 65 was the "normal" retirement age and that we have already repeatedly raised that age. Now, normal retirement age is 66 for those born between 1943 and 1954 and stretches out to 67 for those born in or after 1960. To further stretch that out to 70, as some GOPpers have proposed, would indeed be a cruel thing for people whose bodies can be so worn by the stresses of their work that they look forward to retiring at 62, despite the reduced benefits, just to be able to be away from it. But somehow I doubt that is something that Sir Boehner of Orange or Lord Alan - or Lord Erskine, for that matter - have ever considered.

It surely is something The Hill didn't.

A little T&A

Updated Yesterday, in a wonderful bit of political theater, Terry O'Neill, President of NOW, presented professional jackass Alan Simpson a bag of 1500 plastic baby bottle nipples in a campaign called "Tits for an Ass."

It was intended to dramatize their demand that Simpson have the "decency" to step down from Obama's Fiscal Commission in the wake of his calling Social Security "a milk cow with 310 million tits" and telling Ashley Carson of the Older Women's League to "get honest work!"

“The Fiscal Commission should be led by someone who will actually try to address the federal budget deficit, instead of using it as an excuse to undermine Social Security by cutting benefits or raising the retirement age,” O'Neill added. “Alan Simpson is not that person.”

Of course, the oh-so-serious pundits had to look for ways to dismiss it. The eternally-smirking Dana Milbank referred to it as "chest-bumping" between Simpson and NOW, focusing as always on the peripheral rather than the meat of the actual issue. Meanwhile, Tracy Clark-Flory, a staff writer at Salon who is so serious that she got the vapors just typing the phrase "Tits for an Ass" (no joke; she claimed doing so made her blush), called the action a "pathetic" "stunt" that only made NOW "look ridiculous." I can't understand how she could say that while also saying "I'm not sure" if the protest was "an effective way of communicating [the] point" that Simpson shouldn't be on the panel, but serious pundits don't have to be consistent.

She also appeared - it was hard to tell, but she appeared - to think the protest was over Simpson using the word "tits" in writing Carson. NOW's press release is focused entirely on Social Security and mentions the milk cow phrase only to call it an insult to "those who depend on Social Security." But of course, serious pundits are not required to have their facts straight, either.

Simpson didn't address NOW's criticism during the hearing, but co-chair Erskine Bowles, President Bill Clinton's chief of staff, defended Simpson's stance on Social Security.

"For those of you here today that want to save Social Security, I can assure you that the one thing Alan Simpson talks about is simply making Social Security solvent for 75 years," he said. "You don't have to worry about Alan Simpson."

Well, we could make Social Security solvent for far longer than 75 years, I expect, by raising the retirement age to 85 and cutting benefits in half. Problem solved. Oh, no one's proposing to do anything like that? (Aside from the privatizers, that is.) Well, you can't deny that it would make the system solvent for a very long time, yes? So the real issue is not making - actually keeping is the accurate word - the system solvent, it's how you do that.

Which means that, to use Simpson's words, "babbling into the ether" about "making Social Security solvent for 75 years" is utterly, completely, totally, vacuous. It means nothing, it tells you nothing.

But it sounds all good and reassuring, yes? So when Erskine Bowles says "You don't have to worry about Alan Simpson," by "you" he doesn't mean us. He means the people who put him where he is. As I said a bit back, Alan Simpson is not on the President’s Fiscal Commission despite his attitudes, he's there because of his attitudes. And don't you forget it.

Footnote the One: A month ago, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research offered a terrific "quick list of study questions on Social Security for Simpson." I won't try to summarize it here be I urge you to check it out, especially #1, as that relates to something I've said more than once, most recently just over a month ago: The business about the system being able to pay only 75% of scheduled benefits in 2037 is thoroughly, totally, bogus because it does not take into account the real (post-inflation) value of those benefits.

Footnote the Two: According to The Hill,

Standing on one side of the dais, O'Neill presented the bag of nipples to Simpson, who didn't take them, but just smiled and said, "You should send that to a children's hospital."

Close: They were trying to give them to someone acting like a child.

Updated with Footnote the Three: I see where Simpson dismissed O'Neill with "Merry Christmas." Now, how can we entrust planning for our nation's fiscal future to someone who doesn't even know what month it is? And if you think that reasoning is silly, consider his on the subject at hand. I think I come out looking rather good.

An I. F. Stone "shirttail"

Izzy Stone became well-known for paying attention to the "shirttail" of a news article. He explained the term in this 1988 interview:

You know what a "shirttail" is? When a paper picks up some information from the wires, related to a larger story, the desk editors will run it as little paragraphs following the paper’s own story. They hang down at the end like a shirttail.

He often found that the shirttail was more interesting or revealing than - and sometimes directly contradicted - the story's lead.

Well, on Tuesday, AP provided a damn fine example of that. Here's the lead:

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said Tuesday that whistle-blower website WikiLeaks' decision to publish entire contents of classified U.S. military documents was irresponsible and could put innocent lives at risk.

WikiLeaks drew worldwide publicity in late July when it posted a huge trove of secret U.S. military documents about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. Defense Department has warned it could have blood on its hands for publishing documents that name Afghan sources.

Besides calling WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange "irresponsible," Wales accused him of "dumping all kinds of crazy information online and get[ting] people killed." (And irrelevantly groused about WikiLeaks using the term "wiki.")

Now, I'm sure all the folks in the White House and the DOD are delighted that the media has swallowed their line and has made the leaking itself, rather than what the leak revealed, the story. But compare all that with this, the last line in the story, the shirttail:

The WikiLeaks leak is unrivaled in its scope, but so far there is no evidence that any Afghans named in the leaked documents as defectors or informants from the Taliban insurgency have been harmed in retaliation.

Which surely does re-raise the question of just who it is that is endangering the lives of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the media's almost-eager capitulation to the militarists' framing of the issue.

Nice while it lasted? It lasted?

It's not just your words the O-crowd wants to be able to track, it's your money, too.

The Washington Post reported a few days ago that

[t]he Obama administration wants to require U.S. banks to report all electronic money transfers into and out of the country, a dramatic expansion in efforts to counter terrorist financing and money laundering. ...

Financial institutions are now required to report to the Treasury Department [cross-border] transactions in excess of $10,000 and others they deem suspicious. The new rule would require banks to disclose even the smallest transfers. [Emphasis added.]

Yep, you got it right: The White House wants to be able to track every single dollar - or franc or pound or baht or rial or whatever - going in or out of the US with the avowed purpose of "establishing a centralized database" of transactions. They don't even claim that this will uncover terrorist plots or their financing, but rather that

the expanded financial data would allow anti-terrorist agencies to better understand normal money-flow patterns so they can spot abnormal activity.

Uh-huh. So they should have access to all our trans-border financial activity just to "better understand normal flow." Because maybe that will help at some point in the future. And maybe they should also be allowed to search all our houses to "better understand normal furniture arrangements," the better to detect "abnormal" arrangements that could indicate the presence of contraband.

[C]ritics have called it part of a disturbing trend by government security agencies in the wake of the 2001 attacks to seek more access to personal data without adequately demonstrating its utility. Financial institutions say that they already feel burdened by anti-terrorism rules requiring them to provide data, and that they object to new ones. ...

"This regulation is outrageous," said Peter Djinis, a lawyer who advises financial institutions on complying with financial rules and a former FinCEN executive assistant director for regulatory policy. "Consider me old-fashioned, but I believe you need to show some evidence of criminality before you are granted unfettered access to the private financial affairs of every individual and company that dares to conduct financial transactions overseas."

FinCEN is the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Djinis said he does not think the department has made a case that it could analyze such volumes of data effectively or needs so much raw data. "It's presumed that the information will be valuable in anti-terrorism activity," he said. "We're told, 'Trust us. Once we get the data, we'll determine what's legal or not.'"

Indeed. "Trust us." That's what we always told every single time.

The plan would require money-transfer businesses such as Western Union to report transactions of $1,000 or more - that's some 750 million transfers a year. The feds want to store all that info and datamine it. And to make you feel even better: In addition to the name, address, and account number of both sender and recipient normally included with wire transfers and thus to be available to the government, the Obama proposal wants banks to obtain the Social Security numbers for all such senders and recipients and submit them to the government every year.

Don't you feel so secure now?

Thanks go to Marcy Wheeler for the link to the WaPo story.

Footnote: Earlier this year the US and the EU worked out an agreement that would allow European banks' financial-transaction data to be shared with US authorities for terrorist-finance tracking purposes - but in order to obtain the data, the US would need to substantiate the need.

But if the proposed rule goes into effect, transactions between European and U.S. banks would be captured regardless of whether there is a substantiated need.

Sophie in't Veld, a member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands, said lawmakers undertook "painstaking" negotiations to restrict the amount of financial data to which the United States would have access. "It seems they're getting it anyway," she said.

[FinCEN spokesman Steve] Hudak had no comment.

I'll bet.

It was nice while it lasted

It was nice to be able to praise the O-crowd for something, in this case the effort to preserve federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

But of course it couldn't last. Next year, the White House will push for legislation

to require all services that enable communications - including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype - to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

That's a polite way of putting it; the more direct way is to say that the Obama administration wants to be able to demand of all communications companies of all sorts that they redesign their systems and re-rig their hardware so that anything you write or say can be made instantly available, on demand, to the government - and in plain text form, even if the message was encrypted. And they will want it to apply even to companies that operate from servers abroad if they do any business in the US, including requiring them to open some office in the US at which taps can be installed.

The thing here is, a 1994 law required telephone and broadband providers to have "interception capabilities," that is, they had to be designed in a way that allowed the cops to conveniently tap into them. But that law does not apply to outfits like Blackberry, Facebook, or Skype because they are not "providers" under the 1994 law. So to put things even more directly, the O-gang wants to be able to demand that all such companies go out of their way to make it easier for the government to spy on you.

As is typical with what years ago was called a "salami slice" ("It's a little thing, not worth fighting about" - but enough such slices and the whole salami is gone.), officials minimized the meaning.

“We’re talking about lawfully authorized intercepts,” said Valerie E. Caproni, general counsel for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “We’re not talking expanding authority."

You're talking about being able to force companies to do what they didn't before, to have cop-friendly capabilities they didn't before, in order to enable you to wiretap where you couldn't before, spy where you couldn't before, to get data (including messages in decrypted form) that you couldn't before. Yes, you are talking about expanding authority, Ms. Caproni, and you are a liar.

And of course there were the horror stories about how without this expanded power all hell could break loose. But that argument seemed especially lame this time around, since this is one of the examples cited:

[A]fter the failed Times Square bombing in May, investigators discovered that the suspect, Faisal Shahzad, had been communicating with a service that lacked prebuilt interception capacity. If he had aroused suspicion beforehand, there would have been a delay before he could have been wiretapped.

So if we had known something we didn't, these new demands might have saved us from a bomb that didn't go off planted by someone who was apparently a lone wolf about whose plot (for that reason) a wiretap - which still could have been placed, just not as quickly - would be expected to reveal little if anything.

I am not impressed. Especially since another thing that gets minimized is that these new capabilities would not be available only in "24" scenarios of "Catch the bombers before they strike!" but would be available to all law enforcement down to the local level for any reason a wiretap on a telephone might be approved now.

Civil rights and privacy groups were quick to condemn the plan, warning that the administration faces an uphill battle.

"This is a shortsighted and ill-conceived power grab by some in the administration," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. "The balance has swung radically toward enhanced law enforcement powers. For them to argue that it's still not enough is just unbelievable. It's breathtaking in its hubris."

He said that over the past 15 years - particularly since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks - the standards for warrants have been lowered. And he said law enforcement has many new technologies, ranging from biometric tracking to DNA databases, to enhance it's information gathering.

Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said that mandating that all communications software be accessible to the government is a "huge privacy invasion."

"Under the guise of a technical fix, the government looks to be taking one more step toward conducting easy dragnet collection of Americans' most private communications," said Calabrese. "This proposal will create even more security risks by mandating that our communications have a 'backdoor' for government use and will make our online interactions even more vulnerable."

One the other hand,

[o]ne senior law enforcement official said it is premature to conclude that the changes would erode computer security or enable identity theft.

Right. So we have to expand the ability of the government to spy on us, to poke and probe our private conversations, without regard to the potential consequences because we have to wait until those consequences actually happen (and are proven over the expected vociferous denials of law enforcement), when it is too late. I feel much better now.

As long as I'm on a science kick

Credit where it's due:

The Obama administration pleaded with an appeals court Monday to overturn a judge's order halting federal funding of stem cell research, arguing the ban would irreparably harm scientific progress toward potentially lifesaving medical treatment.

That ban was issued by District Court Judge Royce Lamberth on the grounds that the administration's research funding guidelines likely violate a federal law against the government funding any program that involved the destruction of human embryos. Lamberth is overseeing a suit against the federal stem cell research program by an anti-abortion group.

That law, passed in 1996 to please abortion opponents, was stretched to a ridiculous extreme by Lamberth. Due to the law, batches, or lines, of stem cells have been harvested, often from aborted embryos, using private money. Those lines can reproduce indefinitely. The new guidelines permitted federal funds to be used in research with existing lines, thus expanding the number of privately-created lines that federally-funded researchers could use from the 21 approved by Shrub up to 75.

Lamberth, however, bizarrely ruled that because those lines had at some point in the past involved the "destruction of an embryo" by someone else, the new rules were using federal money in research that now "involved" destroying embryos and were thus illegal.

The administration strongly defended the rules and urged the three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals to suspend the order while the case proceeded, arguing that interrupting on-going research would irreparably harm scientific progress toward the kinds of cures and treatments that stem cells may make available.

In an unusually quick decision, the very next day the Appeals Court granted the government's motion for a stay of Lamberth's order, allowing federal funding of embryonic stem cell research to continue. And while it's unwise to put too much meaning on such things, the temptation still exists to think that the Appeals Court didn't think too much of Lamberth's order, like it really didn't take a lot of thought to say of the order, "Um, no."

"President Obama made expansion of stem cell research and the pursuit of groundbreaking treatments and cures a top priority when he took office," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a statement after the ruling. "We're heartened that the court will allow NIH and their grantees to continue moving forward while the appeal is resolved."

Ron Stoddart with Nightlight Christian Adoptions, which filed the suit and helps with the adoption of human embryos that are being stored in fertilization clinics, said the case promises to be a long and involved process. "I think that eventually Congress has to step up and deal with it," he said.

Considering that Congress twice passed legislation approving federally-funded embryonic stem cell research only to have it vetoed each time by George Bush, I don't think getting Congress involved is actually what Stoddart is hoping for.

Speaking of space stuff

Barack Obama has now put his stamp on the space program.

Congress approved a blueprint for NASA's future Wednesday that extends the life of the space shuttle program for a year while backing President Barack Obama's intent to use commercial carriers to lift humans into near-Earth space.

The bill passed by the House on a 304-118 vote brings major changes to NASA's space agenda: It dismantles the Constellation program under which former President George W. Bush sought to return astronauts to the moon, and extends the life of the International Space Station from 2015 to 2020. The Senate passed the measure last month. ...

[Obama] told NASA workers at Cape Canaveral, Fla., in April that he was committed to manned space flight and envisioned sending astronauts to near-Earth asteroids in the near future as a prelude to trips to Mars in the coming decades.

Okay, first, I'm not going to get into the argument about "manned" space flight versus probes beyond stating my conviction that while probes should be emphasized (they not only reduce the human risk but in terms of scientific knowledge they produce more bang for the buck) they should not be the sole focus. The very idea of exploring, of actually going out there and seeing, of being there, is such a powerful one that human space exploration should be continued; it must be a part of the overall effort.

Second, what the article mentions but doesn't make clear is that this kills the shuttle program. It extends it to the end of the 2011 fiscal year, but that's it. Instead, the program proposes to rely on the still-barely-existing commercial space industry; that is, it proposes to use commercial rockets, private industry rockets, profit-making rockets, to get to and from the International Space Station. I think that's both utterly idiotic (and the reason why Obama's plan "met resistance from the space industry, former astronauts and lawmakers") and offensive, as it is yet another example of the government (i.e., the public) doing the research, doing the development, proving the concept, creating the technology, and then basically just handing it over to private, profit-oriented interests that never would have been in the field if they'd had to do the original work themselves. And here it's even more offensive because after handing off to private industry another technology developed with public money, the government is going to finance the profit of that industry by paying them to use that same technology (i.e., the rockets).

But what I really wanted to say is that I am just f'ing sick and tired of presidents and politicians (Obama is hardly the first) pushing for their own "vision" of space exploration rather than seeking out the vision of the scientists, the astronomers, the astronautical engineers - of, that is, the people who know what the hell they are talking about.

It just pisses me off.

More Geek! Less filling!

Found this right after I put up the previous post and could not let it pass.

Astronomers say they have for the first time spotted a planet beyond Earth in what is sometimes called the Goldilocks zone for life: where crucial conditions for life to exist are just right.

Not too far from its star, not too close. So it could contain liquid water. The planet itself is neither too big nor too small for the proper surface, gravity and atmosphere.

It is just right. Just like Earth.

The planet circles a star called Gliese 581, a red dwarf some 20-plus light years (about 125 trillion miles or 200 trillion kilometers) away in the constellation Libra.

It may seem like a long distance, but in the scheme of the vast universe, this planet is "like right in our face, right next door to us," [co-discoverer Steven] Vogt [of the University of California at Santa Cruz] said in an interview.

The planet, called Gliese 581g, is not exactly like Earth; it's a little bigger and more massive. It's also much closer to its star, leading to a short year (just 37 days), and rotates little, apparently being tidally locked. However, it is right in the habitable zone and looks so promising

that five outside astronomers told The Associated Press it seems to be the real thing.

"This is the first one I'm truly excited about," said Penn State University's Jim Kasting. He said this planet is a "pretty prime candidate" for harboring life. ...

It is unknown whether water exists on the planet, and what kind of atmosphere it has. Because conditions are ideal for liquid water, however, and because there always seems to be life on Earth where there is water, Vogt believes "that chances for life on this planet are 100 percent."

Another factor here is that red dwarfs such as Gliese 581 are such because they are low mass and "burn" their hydrogen fuel more slowly than more massive stars. Think of them as a glowing red coal as opposed to something burning with a yellow flame: Not as hot but will keep going longer. Whereas the life span of our Sun is estimated at about 10 billion years, the life span of Gliese 581 is on the order of one trillion years - a lot of time for life to start and develop.

Footnote: The linked article does contain one real boner. It mentions a calculation that suggests as many as one out of five or 10 stars have planets in the habitable zone.

With an estimated 200 billion stars in the universe, that means maybe 40 billion planets that have the potential for life, Vogt said.

Um, that's a mid-range estimate for the number of stars in the Milky Way, not the universe. It's actually estimated that the observable universe contains something around one to 10 billion trillion stars (10²¹ to 10²² stars). A few more.

Tales from the Geek

Time for a sanity break with a couple of recent science stories that interested me.

- Last week, paleontologists reported that

they've discovered fossils in the southern Utah desert of two new dinosaur species closely related to the Triceratops, including one with 15 horns on its large head.

The discovery of the new plant-eating species - including Kosmoceratops richardsoni, considered the most ornate-headed dinosaur known to man - was reported [last] Wednesday in the online scientific journal PLoS ONE, produced by the Public Library of Science.

The other dinosaur, which has five horns and is the larger of the two, was dubbed Utahceratops gettyi. ...

The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument has been a hotbed for dinosaur species discoveries in the past decade, with more than a dozen new species discovered. ...

Paleontologists say the discovery shows that horned dinosaurs living on the same continent 76 million years ago evolved differently.

- Also from last week comes the cool news that

[t]he $10 billion Big Bang machine under the Swiss-French border may be on the verge of its first scientific breakthroughs after appearing to produce a small amount of the matter that existed in the first moments of the universe....

Scientists say they are thrilled about a series of recent experiments with simple protons at the Large Hadron Collider, and that a wealth of new physics knowledge could be unearthed soon when the machine begins to smash more complicated nuclei into each other at nearly the speed of light.

Already, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, and outside experts are hailing the new data. They say colliding particles seem to be creating "hot dense matter" that would have existed microseconds after the Big Bang and might hold the key for understanding how the liquids, gases and solids of our universe were created. ...

Scientists say the effects they are observing are "obscure." But they are possibly a key piece in CERN's ultimate quest of answering the great questions of particle physics, such as the presumed existence of antimatter and the Higgs boson - sometimes referred to as the "God particle" because scientists theorize that it gives mass to other particles and thus to all objects and creatures in the universe. ...

The machine in the 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel under the Swiss-French border at Geneva is already operating at 7 trillion electron volts, an energy level three times greater than any previous physics accelerator. The energy won't be doubled to 14 TeV until 2013, but CERN already plans to replace the simple protons with heavier lead nuclei for collisions in October.

As a sidebar to that, the LHC had a lot of technical glitches and one major melt-down at its start-up. So much so that two physicists suggested - no one seems quite sure how seriously - that the Higgs boson was actually causing "ripples in time" from some point in the future and thereby sabotaging its own discovery.

And in April, CNET reported, a "strangely-dressed young man" wearing "a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age" was found at the collider site, rooting around in trash bins. Upon being arrestred, he said he was looking for fuel for his time machine's power unit. He had come from the future, you see, a future when the discovery of the Higgs had lead to a "communist chocolate hellhole" of limitless power, no poverty, and "Kit-Kats for everyone" - and he was determined to prevent that by cutting off supplies of Mountain Dew to the experiment's vending machines. He was taken to a secure mental facility but later disappeared from his cell.

In considering this, the facts that CNET published it on April 1, that the "fuel for the time machine" sounds suspiciously like the device itself would be built on a DeLorean, and that the description of the "young man" sounds rather much like Matt Smith's Doctor Who should be ignored as thoroughly irrelevant.

- Yesterday, Greek archaeologists announced finding an ancient skeleton covered with gold foil in a grave on the island of Crete.

Excavator Nicholas Stampolidis said his team discovered more than 3,000 pieces of gold foil in the 7th-century B.C. twin grave near the ancient town of Eleutherna. ...

The tiny gold ornaments, from 1 to 4 centimeters (0.4 to 1.5 inches) long, had been sewn onto a lavish robe or shroud that initially wrapped the body of a woman and has almost completely rotted away but for a few off-white threads.

"The whole length of the (grave) was covered with small pieces of gold foil - square, circular and lozenge-shaped," Stampolidis told The Associated Press. "We were literally digging up gold interspersed with earth, not earth with some gold in it." ...

The ruins of Eleutherna stand on the northern foothills of Mount Ida - the mythical birthplace of Zeus, chief of the ancient Greek gods. Past excavations have discovered a citadel, homes and an important cemetery with lavish female burials.

The town flourished from the 9th century B.C. - the dark ages of Greek archaeology that followed the fall of Crete's great Minoan palatial culture - and endured until the Middle Ages.

- And just today, Time magazine reported on new research that shows just how "social" there is in our being "social creatures." It notes that "we've known for some time" that "social denial lights up our central nervous systems," so much so that even if we know the rejection is coming from a computer, the experience sparks the release of a stress hormone called cortisol.

This week a new study shows that these physical effects go further: rejection actually stops your heart. ... The authors of the study - a three-member group led by a University of Amsterdam psychologist named Bregtje Gunther Moor - measured beat-by-beat heart rate changes in 22 students as they received either rejection or acceptance of portrait photos they had submitted. When hooked up to electrocardiogram monitors, the students reliably showed a skip in their hearts when they thought they had been rejected by someone shown their photos. ...

[T]he findings help explain how evolution programs human sociability.

In essence, it reinforces social tendencies by making it unpleasant to be rejected - which in turn pushes us toward seeking acceptance.

Curse of the undead

Via Unknown News (Thanks for the links to here, folks!) I learn that The Hill reports that

Vice President Joe Biden on Monday urged Democrats to overcome their differences and support their candidates at the polls by telling them to "stop whining."

And yes, "stop whining" was a quote, one he declined to walk back the next day. Because we have to "look at the alternatives" - you know, "Look! Over there! ZOMBIE REPUBLICANS ARE COMING! Be afraid - be very afraid!"

Besides, Biden whined, Obama has "kept his promises." Right. Except to people struggling to keep their homes from foreclosure, progressives, social justice activists, gays and lesbians, DADT opponents, unions, Latinos, open-government advocates, civil libertarians, gun-control advocates, pro-choice advocates, supporters of Social Security, supporters of universal health care - I'm sure I've missed some.

But still, in Biden's words, we just have to "buck up" and vote for Democrats because - well, because Look! Zombies!

Or, as Ring Lardner famously put it, "'Shut up,' he explained."

Another example of how they make a story say anything they want it to

This comes courtesy of a Fox News story dated September 24.

An official report released this week says an ACORN offshoot group cannot properly account for how it has spent millions of federal dollars and recommends that the group repay the government and be put on standby mode until it cleans up its act.

The report from the inspector general for the Department of Housing and Urban Development reviewed how ACORN Housing Corporation -- now called Affordable Housing Centers of America -- has spent federal grant money over the past two decades. The report described the group's book-keeping as "problematic and unsupported," and claimed that more than $65,000 in "ineligible" salary expenses were charged to a federal grant last year, including costs for six employees after they were terminated. ...

The study is the latest blow to the beleaguered low-income advocacy group ACORN and its offshoots. After Congress voted to cut funding to the main organization following the release of undercover videos that showed its workers appearing to help a couple posing as a pimp and prostitute, the organization's affiliates and chapters have been reorganizing under different names.

ACORN Housing Corporation, which was formed in 1985 by ACORN organizers, changed its name this year to Affordable Housing Centers of America.

So yeah, once again ACORN has been caught ripping off public money! Once again it's a "criminal enterprise!" Evil, evil, evil ACORN!

Except, of course, in just that excerpt it's crap four times over.

One: It attempts to equate ACORN with an "offshoot" without mentioning that structurally and financially the groups have been separate since AHCOA was founded 25 years ago.

Two: It leads with references to "millions of federal dollars" and "repay the government" - only to admit pretty much in passing later in the article that the actual amount the report calls on AHCOA to repay is $65,000, with more due back only if the group continues to be unable to account for it.

Three: It spends paragraphs outlining the charges but manages to mention only at the very end of the article (in one of I. F. Stone's "shirttails") that the report alleges neither that funds were misused nor that the work for which the grants were made was not done - and neither does it mention that the report "commends" AHCOA for its "efforts to bring its operations into compliance with Federal requirements and its willingness to resolve the issues in the report."

Four: It brings up the infamous "undercover videos" - which Fox promoted endlessly and breathlessly - without mentioning that they have been thoroughly discredited by revelations that they were selectively edited and that chief creep James O'Keefe lied about how he and his co-conspirator presented themselves to the ACORN employees. It also fails to mention that in a plea deal to dodge a felony rap, O'Keefe later pled guilty to a charge of unlawfully entering federal property in a not-actually-unrelated incident involving an attempt to tamper with the phones of Sen. Mary Landrieu. (If that's not relevant, why is it relevant that AHCOA was founded by ACORN organizers 25 years ago?)

So here's the actual story: An organization which has received federal funds over the years is unable to account for some of that money and if after further investigation it still can't, it will have to repay it. In the meantime, the group has made efforts to improve its compliance with federal regulations.

And here is how the story reads as reported: ACORN IS EVIL!

Just another day at the media office.

Angry, depressed - and a bit scared

Just a little. But it's there.

Thuggish police tactics to suppress dissent still generate outrage but no longer shock. At the same time, it's wise to recall that police violence against demonstrators is hardly new - and neither is spying on peace and justice movements.

Still, that doesn't take away the tingle of another '60s flashback, this one being raids on the homes of peace activists coupled with grand jury investigations into vague charges of some sort of associations with "terrorists" - or, as it was back then, "known radicals."

The FBI said it searched eight locations in Minneapolis and Chicago as part of a terrorism investigation Friday. Warrants suggest agents were looking for connections between local anti-war activists and terrorist groups in Colombia and the Middle East.

An FBI mouthpiece said the raids were "seeking evidence relating to activities concerning the material support of terrorism." Although there were no arrests, those raided in Minneapolis, along with those in Chicago, were subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury.

Ted Dooley, the attorney for one of those whose home was searched in Minneapolis, said

It seems like they're casting a huge seine or net into the political sea and see what they can drag up on shore and dry out. There's no rhyme or reason to it in a free society.

"Casting a huge net." Yup. Or, as it's otherwise known, a fishing expedition. Just keep groping around, see if by chance you can come up with something that can be used to attack or better yet discredit protestors and their causes. Same as it ever was; only the proximate claims have changed.

The claim this time revolves around, again, "material support of terrorism," banned by federal law and a phrase which survived a court challenge this past June even though it's so vague that it could not only be used to arrest people who donated food or clothing to a legal charity allegedly connected to a "terrorist group" (Hamas, for example, has such charitable arms) on the grounds that such a donation "frees up other resources" but could even make talking to a "terrorist group" about nonviolent alternatives a cause for imprisonment.

What makes this especially disturbing is that this comes right about the same time that a DOJ Inspector General report

blasted the Federal Bureau of Investigation for lying and spying on anti-war activists, animal-rights groups, and environmentalists, calling the improper “terror” investigations "unreasonable and inconsistent with FBI policy."

Among those targeted were the anti-war Thomas Merton Center, the Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers), the Catholic Worker, Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and an individual Quaker peace activist. According to the Inspector General, there was "little or no basis" for the investigations.

The phony probes resulted in innocent people being placed on the infamous “terror watch list” and in FBI boss Robert Muller providing "inaccurate and misleading information" to Congress, the report stated.

A Boston Globe editorial called the FBI's actions "shameful red-baiting at its worst" involving "serious abuses," including (beyond those mentioned above) extending investigations without good cause, improperly retaining information on the groups, and classifying anti-war protests and the like under the category "terrorism."

One part of the report covered a case in Pittsburgh where a rookie agent was sent on a make-work assignment to identify "terrorism suspects" at a rally organized by the Merton Center - but when that story started to come out, the local Bureau tried to avoid being embarrassed by creating fake "routing slips" intended to create - out of thin air - a "counter-terrorism"-related cause for the agent to attend the rally. While at first blush that may seem like just some bureaucratic CYA, it demonstrates beyond doubt that offices of the FBI are entirely willing to lie, to create false records, and thus brand a targeted group as connected to terrorism - maybe even, one could easily think, to branding it as offering "material support."

Damn. There's that tingle again.

Footnote: Still, filed under "Every dark cloud and all that" comes a report from The Uptake, an independent online news site based in Minneapolis, that by 5:30pm Friday, the same day as the house raids, a public meeting was organized to which "several hundred concerned citizens" turned out to hear about what had happened and that there will a rally today, Monday, at the Minneapolis FBI office.

A lesson from the '60s apparently well-learned by some: In the face of these sort of official pressures and tactics and threats (both real and implied), the best thing to do is just keep going. Just keep doing what you were doing. And now I'm frustrated because I know there is an old folky-type song that has a line something like "don't get turned aside" and I wanted to find a link to it or the lyrics and I can't think of the song or find it by any search I can think of. Damn. Help?