The autumn ritual

Got up to the Mackenzie-King estate again this morning, to take photos and video of the lovely little one, as is a required ritual each autumn.

We were a bit late doing it this year, so there were a few more leaves on the ground. And the day started a bit dull, light-wise. But the sun came out eventually, and the leaves on the ground were good for the little one, who (once she got over her 'no pictures' thing--she can be such a difficult model) had fun playing in them.

The required autumn leaves photos are to the right.

Electoral fraud as addiction

Stealing elections, is, apparently, habit-forming.

Caught As It Happens this eve, while running an errand, and heard a piece on Sproul & Associates, and a truly fascinating approach to democracy, currently under way in several swing states.

An Oregon librarian recounting the story makes it very clear the fuckers (no apologies -- (i) this site makes no claims to be PG-13 and (ii), yep, that's what they are) were posing as a contractor for America Votes. More here and here.

Their spokestwit's defense is just hilarious. Riiight. All a big misunderstanding, I'm sure...

I mean gee, you could make a note of the multiple witnesses reporting the obvious attempts to disenfranchise anyone voting Democrat, in several different districts...

Or you could just count the dollar signs on the cheques the GOP wrote these folk.

Seriously don't see how anyone could argue these guys even have plausible deniability any more. Honestly. This goes beyond blatant.

Send in the freakin' UN. These guys obviously need electoral monitors. Ain't no bloody way it's gonna meet international norms otherwise. Not with the GOP around.

Bring 'em in

Re US conscientious objectors and others catching onto the reality that Iraq is rapidly turning into a meat grinder for body and mind, I hereby would like to say to my government, bring 'em in. Anyone with the smarts to get out of that turkey oughtta be welcome here.

And, yeah, as far as international law goes, I'm with this guy:

Canada evaluates refugee claimants based on the Geneva Convention on Refugees. It says there that if a soldier refuses to participate in a war condemned by the international community and deemed illegal by the international community – which I think it has been. This fellow named Kofi Annan said so, and most of the world seems to agree – then being prosecuted for that amounts to persecution on the basis of political opinion. I don't see any way around how we don't stand solid on those grounds. So, based on that, I think that we have very sound cases for a refugee claim.

Again. Bring 'em in. More than enough blood has been spilled here.

Of tree frogs and coalmines

Well, this gives one pause.

“There is the canary in the coalmine argument,” says Stuart. “Because of their sensitivity, amphibians are the first species we would expect to show adverse reactions to climate change and new emerging diseases.”

Jes' your weekly dose of something else to worry about.

Assorted atrocities

The lieutenant proceeded to do the same thing as I had been doing, finally beating the prisoner, and this did not work. The lieutenant had an Army field telephone, which runs on batteries and generator. You crank it and it gives a nasty shock, a very nasty shock, quite painful. The interrogation commenced with the prisoner being tortured by field telephone. The telephones were first placed on his hands and then the field telephone wires were placed on his sexual organs. I left, I could not watch it.

— Testimony of Peter Martinsen, Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal.

Can anyone imagine any greater bitterness than that of the parents of little children choking away their last few moments of life after being poisoned by ‘humane nauseating’ gas spread by our military leaders?

The weakest, young and old, will be the ones unable to withstand the shock of this supposedly humane weapon. They will writhe in horrible cramps until their babies’ strength is unequal to the stress and they turn blue and black and die. This may be a more humane weapon than shells and napalm, but its legacy of bitterness will be even more lasting.

— Report on Chemical Warfare in Vietnam

Napalm burns are so deep that they are never first degree. Second- and third-degree burns represent fifteen per cent. Fourth-degree seventy-five per cent. Fifth-degree ten per cent. In other words, three quarters of all napalm victims are burned through the hypodermic tissues to the muscles.

Two thirds of the victims have burns covering twenty to twenty-five per cent of the whole body surface. All those burned up to 100 per cent of the surface of course die. What is the degree of fatal burns? The Vietnamese doctor gave the following reply. If burns cover fifty per cent of a victim‘s outer skin and twenty per cent of this is fourth or fifth degree, through the hypodermic tissues to the muscles, death is almost certain, or at least a year or more is needed for healing. If fourth- or fifth-degree burns extend over five per cent of the victim, he can be saved.

If he lives he will be covered with keloids. Keloid scars not only look hideous, but bring about motor disturbances, depending on cases, one of the frightful characteristics of the napalm bomb.

— The Napalm Bomb

After the battle was over there were several wounded North Vietnamese, you know, laying around on the ground, see, so everyone was angry because this was our first battle and we had lost a lot of our friends, see. So one Japanese-American, his name was Sergeant Takahatchi, I believe he was a staff sergeant, he took his machete and beheaded this wounded soldier. The soldier was wounded in the chest but he was still alive. So after he beheaded the man, he threw his head down the hill to serve as warning to other NVA elements, if they were still in the area, that we meant business. And I was standing near by when this occurred.

— Testimony of David Kenneth Tuck, Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal.

When I got there they had the man tied on the ground; he was spreadeagled. They were using a knife to sort of pry under his toenails and the soles of his feet. When this got no results they went on to other more sensitive parts of the body. Well, this still got no results, because evidently this man was, as we say in America, a tough nut to crack. So then after that they put the knife under his eyeball in another endeavour to make him talk, and he still would not talk. So then what they did, they put him in a barbed-wire cage in which he was on his hands and knees. And if he made any moves the barbs of the barbed wire would press into his flesh, so they kept him there for two days.

— Testimony of David Kenneth Tuck, Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal.

And remember, the right's beef with John Kerry: he had the balls to stand up and tell people this kind of thing was going on.

Man became a hero, the moment he did that. Flawed like every living being, but a hero. Came back, stood up, said 'this cannot stand'. And now the twits bringing us our modern Vietnam are playing politics with that act.

Enraged disgust does not adequately describe my reaction.

Hee heeee...

I am so going to see this.

Marionette sex? Count me in!

Mommy? Can I have my toy duck back now?

In keeping with this blog's fearless determination to bring you all the weird sex toy news that's fit to print* (and some that probably isn't, really), I really have to pass on this link... concerning, apparently, a vibrating duck... and the furor it... umm... aroused...

Or should I rephrase?

(Sings ... )

Rubber ducky, you're the one
You make my bath time so much fun
Rubber ducky I'm awfully fond of youuuuu...

Welcome to Tennessee. Vibrating ducks will be prosecuted.

(* No, however, this most emphatically does not extend to any mention of the Bill O'Reilly/vibrator thing. I mean, apart from this concise comment on the business:

Ewww!

Thank you. We now resume irregular programming.)

Buoy oh buoy

Heh. Apparently il chimp's partisans, in an effort to put a positive spin on the meltdown that was his debate performance, are describing him as 'buoyed' by the results of the last debate (note the Gulf Daily News story, which apparently gets the joke, and puts it in quotes)... this in the same day that they concede that yeah, okay, Kerry kicked his ugly little butt (this being my paraphrase) in all three encounters, pretty much...

But then again, maybe it's not spin. Maybe he actually is cheered by failure, for some twisted reason...

Would explain why he's smiling all the time, anyway... Hell, anyone who gets off on fucking up big time would probably go off like they were doing Prozac, coke, and meth all at once just walking downwind of the oval office these days...

(breathless)Wow! What was that heavenly reek of failure? Again! Let's go roll around the West lawn again!

Returning to reality ('buoyed'... heh... wow... same planet, different worlds) I do notice something entirely welcome after the debates...

Courage.

That is, in the media. My perception is, having been reminded again that the man currently propped up behind the desk in the Oval office is, actually, a clueless buffoon, and far, far from a particularly impressive figure, all those papers that had been so circumspect about calling the lying little twerp on his howlers are finding their spines again. Witness, as exhibit one, this bit of candour in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Or better, let me quote:

In the whopper of the night, Bush said most of his tax cuts "went to low- and middle-income Americans." That is a baldfaced lie. In taxes paid for 2004, the top 1 percent of taxpayers get about one-quarter of the cumulative benefit from Bush's cuts, according to the Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center. The top 20 percent get almost two-thirds, leaving only one-third for 80 percent of taxpayers. Statistics can be used to do lots of things, but they can't make Bush's tax cuts friendly to Americans with modest incomes.

To the point. Dammit, that's what the media's supposed to do. And about damned time. To the rest of you in the media, listen, I've said it before: this guy tells his lies with your help, because you don't call him on it. Not nearly enough, anyway. He and his lying buds' idiot drumbeat of 'We must attack Iraq' and 'Iraq and al Qaeda' shoulda got them laughed off the stage, a year ago. You shoulda just shut the buggers down. Just tell your readers: 'Listen, sorry we stopped reporting what the idiot White House press secretary has to say, but since these lying bastards can't possibly level with you, and their noses grow every time we turn on our mics, we just turned them off... They aren't credible sources, and it just wouldn't be responsible to quote them... This concludes their access... Now, we bring you tap dancing...'

Oh, and as to that debate 'performance'... um, guys, I got a look at some more of it this morning (had to rely on transcripts and excerpts until now; the ladies in my life fell asleep entirely too close to both available televisions the other night)... and I really gotta wonder how anyone even thought this was close. I think the only sense in which that could possibly be the interpretation is through the lense of drastically lowered expectations.

As in: by now we know Bush ain't much for thinking on his feet. But hey, the trained monkey didn't actually pee on the stage. So B+, we guess...

Whatever, guys. You go with that. But someday, far in the future, archaeologists are going to find the MPEGs of the debate, look them over, and assume it was all some kind of bizarre satire...

(archaeologist, indignant) “Oh come now, Higgins! You can't be serious! Preposterous! The very idea that this was genuinely a head of state! Why, it simply must have been some sort of low entertainment for the masses... My god, man... is he drooling?”

Yep. This is our world.

Dulce et decorum est...

“I was called to serve in Iraq because the government said there were weapons of mass destruction, but they weren't there. They said Iraq had something to do with 9-11, but the connection wasn't there. They told us that we'd win the war and be home soon, but we're still there. So when people ask me where my arm went, I try to find the words. But they're not there.”

— US soldier Robert Acosta, wounded in Iraq;
see Democracy Now's October 13 program

[Rob] Sarra's unit had just been in a firefight when he saw an elderly burkha-clad woman carrying a bag on her arm walking toward a nearby armored vehicle. The soldiers raised their weapons and began yelling at her to stop. Sarra, a Marine sergeant, then made an instantaneous and fatal assumption: if the woman did not respond, she must be carrying a bomb.

She did not stop.

Sarra had a clear shot and he took it. As soon as he fired his second shot, his fellow soldiers opened fire and cut her down.

“She fell to the dirt and as she fell she had a white flag in her hand, that she had pulled out of her bag,” says Sarra, staring past the camera into the distance.

“At that moment right there I lost it, I threw my weapon down on the deck of the vehicle, I was crying, I was like, Oh my god what are we doing here?”

— The Ground Truth: The Human Cost of War
via The Hartford Advocate

See also Salon's article.

Of nuisances, Saudi and Texan

So Chimpya and Frankencheney (two more of my many endearing nicknames for the dahlings--collect all 6,000,000) are now grindin' those meagre neurons, trying to make an issue of Kerry's 'nuisance' comment.

And, of course, revealing more and more about themselves which is, frankly, just terrifying.

Yep, apparently aspiring to do anything less than eliminate all terrorism forever is simply unacceptable...

Bein' against war is like bein' against rain. An understandable sentiment. But not a battle you should go on a hunger strike over.

Yep. I'll start eating again when we've achieved world peace.

And we'll elect an actually competent executive branch when there's no more terrorism.

And I bet these chumps would declare war on the rain, too, if they figured it would give them job security.

Yep. And then decry as a traitor anyone who suggested that, realistically rain happens, now and then, and maybe keeping an umbrella around is just how it's gonna be...

And that is how it is. The reality is, there will always be terrorism. You might reduce it substantially, as I've written elsewhere, by shifting the political landscape, so the many grievances of so many bitter young men in the Arab world in particular are a little less bitter, and thus less available for manipulation by certain fanatical sects. But with or without that, there will still always be terrorism. Angry people with a grievance against a state they cannot attack directly will take it out on civilian populations, and will use the ability to inflict that terror as a political pressure point. It's a path of least resistance, and a tempting one, and probably always will be.

So if reducing terrorism to the point where it's in real terms a nuisance (a burden on law enforcement, a constant cost in terms of watching for dangerous nuts with explosives, but usually, you get them, and people don't live their lives hoarding duct tape) isn't 'winning', what is?

Oh. I forgot. That's the point. There is no 'winning'. 'Winning' is a transparently meaningless rhetorical device used by a coupla yutzes trying to hold onto power by scaring people.

When's it won, guys? Huh? When there's no more terrorism? And your poor suffering citizenry are to keep your ugly mugs in the Oval Office until then, right?

No. It's never won. Ask Dear Leader from 1984 how that works. There's always gotta be an enemy. Keep the people scared, keep 'em doing as you say.

Boys, ya know, you're scary freaks, and if you talk too much, more and more folk are gonna start to notice.

So if you wanna have a chance at winning, my recommendation would be: just shut up, smile and wave.

Let's face it, opening your mouths just ain't smart. Too much behind them it doesn't serve you to let your citizenry see.

He tries his hand at soundtracks...

... well, a drum track, actually.

So, like so many doting parents, we shot video of our charming little one during our recent sojourn to various pseudo-educational venues such as the zoo and the science centre, this weekend last... close to an hour of mini DV format digital video--interlaced 720x480 pixel frames--of a cute kid, playing with lego, with a big and very cool indoor track thing along which you throw balls, with some neat old percussion instruments (from China, I believe, mostly) and with a great big 'installation art' thingy kinda like a giant 3D pinball machine...

Unlike (certain) doting parents, however, I know there aren't a lot of people who will actually want to see all of this. A partisan supporter of the old Super-8 format, writing on the beauty of his favoured medium, commented that the two great things about the film cassettes were (and are) these: they're (i) short and (ii) expensive. So at most, you sit through about two minutes of Junior being unreasonably cute at once, and, in general, people actually work a little harder to put something actually interesting on a Super-8 film. Since it's pretty expensive (around $20 CDN for a colour cartridge, I believe, not including processing), there isn't much film in each cartridge, and you can't tape over it later if it's awful, they're likely to put on a reasonably punchy little show.

Video, in contrast, is the bane of all those who know people who (a) have children and (b) have neither taste nor tact about showing video to friends--an hour of the little darlings making a mess out of the cake served at their birthday (why do people even film such things, anyway?) is pretty durn painful to contemplate, even for a loving gramma who normally thinks the little darlings are just about the greatest entertainment on earth.

So I endeavoured to take the stuff on the tape and (in the parlance) punch it up a bit. And used the lovely and talented Kino (primitive by some digital video standards, but I like it because if you're careful, it's quite conservative about hanging onto the whole 720x480 frame, as opposed to certain Windows cheapo packages, and because, like all open source stuff, you can tweak it a bit if you need it to do something new) to cut all the video down to something a little more lively, snipping out bits where the lovely little one wasn't actually looking at the camera or being suitably cute, throwing in some snappy titles, and, of course...

A soundtrack.

This is just essential, really. The reality is, most audio off handheld cameras sucks, and ours (an otherwise lovely JVC) has issues with motor noise. A bit of something lively in the background can make the difference between a rather boring bit of video, and something that, at least, won't put your friends to sleep. And it imposes a certain discipline on length--think in terms of putting it over some pop song or other, and you're probably going to keep yourself to five minutes or less.

Except that the Beasties track I initially cut it to fit (timewise) really didn't fit the mood of the video, despite my best intentions. So I would up rolling my own somewhat minimalist bit of sound with a neat little drum kit package called Hydrogen, and using that instead. Which worked out pretty much okay. Adds a little spice, and much better than wild sound, which was pretty heavy on the motor noise.

Now I can't put the video online (as per discipline comments above, it's under four minutes, but four minutes of decent MPEG-2 of 720 x 480 comes out to around 125 Mb with sound, and that's a bit more than I'm going to pay to host, besides which, the thought of putting video of my daughter online strikes me as more than a bit icky), but a not great but not awful .OGG (most modern players, including WinAmp, will do OGG, which is a somewhat less encumbered equivalent to MP3) format copy of the audio track I made is here (warning to dialup types--this file is approx. 2.7 Mb).

Dig the beats, yo.

Dark fantasies

So, if you could (see the previous post) hack the encryption on Bush's alleged earpiece, cut in on the transmitter, and have your own private line into the shrub's ear during the debate, what would you say to him through it?

I'm currently trying to decide between:

• Playing The Village People's Macho Man, over and over
• Neener neener neener neener...
• Reading the 'pouting sex kitten' scene from Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen's masterpiece 1945
• Selected excerpts from The Diary of Anais Nin
• Selected excerpts from 'his' book, A Charge to Keep
• Doing a 'voice of the schizophrenic demon' 'they're all out to get you, you know' thing
• Readings from Molly Ivens' Shrub
• 'George? This is the voice of Gawd!!! And I want you to strip to yer skivvies, and dance around this stage half-nekkid, singing 'The Good Ship Lollipop'. Now!!! I command you!!!
• 'Okay... You can answer this one: Try "My fellow Americans, my opponent is wrong on terror. Clearly, he just doesn't understand the terrorists. I understand the terrorists. Because I'm a nutty religious zealot willingly detached from the realities of the modern world, much like them."'
• George, this is your debate support team... Listen, we're giving up on this thing... You always lose even with the wire, so you're on your own now... We're signing off, but before we do, we're just gonna put on a little light music... Okay boys, cue the soundtrack to The Rocky Horror Picture Show...

Well, a guy can dream, can't he?

Odd

More stuff at Salon re Bush's alleged earpiece.

It amuses me. Must confess those photos look pretty convincing. I mean, unless his personal tailor's got some weird quirk wherein he always leaves a bulge large enough for a modest-sized radar dome in the middle of the back when making suits and shirts, it does seem hard to explain... and the transceiver idea would explain a few things about his weirdly telegraphic speak/vacant pause/speak/vacant pause thing...

But, I mean, the fact the man's a bit... well... challenged would also explain that. And even if there is something solid in that bulge, is everyone so sure it's a transceiver back there? I mean, I can think of any number of other possibilities. Including:

• a goiter... which, in the fashion of the man upon which it has grown, has become slightly lost
• an evil Puppet Masters-esque alien, jacked into his brain stem--a la Heinlein's nasty squishy things (this one, apparently, from the distant planet 'Neocon', where, strangely, the fundamental laws of nature are radically different, and pandering voodoo economics actually works)
• an evil telepathic midget, channelling Karl Rove
• an evil telepathic midget, channelling Dick Cheney
• the jar wherein he keeps the atrophied remains of his conscience
• a package of distinctly scary, obsessive love letters, from Ann Coulter
• a package of distinctly scary, obsessive love letters, from Rush Limbaugh... along with a (somewhat thin) lock of his hair
• the plastic Fisher-Price phone he got for his fifth birthday, on which he talks to God
• several thousand missing Florida ballots, from the last presidential election...

I mean, let's not jump to conclusions, people...

Still. Beautifully poetic illustration. Yes, I mean, we've always assumed the guy was at least figuratively a marionette, at least as much as was Reagan. But to have him literally on a remote control? That's got a certain poetry about it... One entirely appropriate to the reality of electoral politics in so many modern democracies, in which the candidate frequently has about the same relationship with the policies he claims to speak to as the replaceable plastic celebrity hawking soft drinks during the commerical break has with the pointless product their image is supposed to sell (and to continue with the metaphor, both the policies being sold and the soft drink in question will probably eventually kill you, but you're not supposed to care about that-- you're not to look at the toxic brew being foisted upon you, but at the vacantly smiling yutz holding it up to the camera for you... though I digress, as is customary)...

Yep. Pay no attention to the oligarchy behind the curtain.

Wiseass scavengers

Yes, the character on the right really did plunk herself right down on the 'Do not feed the animals' sign--you're not looking at a photoshop job.

This scene comes from the restaurant at the bottom of the Ontario Science Centre--down deep in the Don Valley--this raccoon and another were hanging out around the outside of the big greenhouse-like thing in which the tables are located, apparently hoping someone would be moved by their antics to throw them a scrap or two. I was resisting the temptation to waste space on the flash RAM on a raccoon when the lil' beastie pulled this rather priceless pose.

It was my impression the Science Centre might be having funding issues, notwithstanding the new addition they seem to be working on. A lot of the exhibits seemed to need repairs, and there was some shabbiness about, here and there. The lovely rainforest atrium thingy was closed, much to my disappointment. Corporate sponsors seemed to be picking up the slack in places, but it wasn't all good.

Hope not. Public investment in science education is a good thing. And not investing in it leads to an annoying, obnoxious, ignorant citizenry, who sit on their butts on Sunday mornings watching Peter Popoff or some damn thing. Or so sez this shameless intellectual snob.

Support yer local test tube jockey.

'From Lake Nyasa'

The beasties to the left are specimens from various species of Cichlids (family Cichlidae). There's a general review of their significance at the Smithsonian's/FONZ site (and many others around the web, if you're up to googling for them). I shot these through an aquarium wall with a mini-DV camera, at the Metro Toronto Zoo, yesterday, while strolling through with my lovely wife and our little one on our jaunt to that city this weekend.

The Cichlids of the African great lakes, to precis what you might find elsewhere on the web, are significant as a 'species flock' of extraordinary size and diversity. This is a parallel phenomenon to the Darwin's (Galapagos) finches which are known to have (in part) inspired Darwin's theory of natural section--like the Galapagos finches, the Malawi Cichlids are a group of relatively closely related species which have radiated successfully into a wide range of niches.

The difference is in the number of species that occur in the flock--in the case of the Cichlids, there are known to be more than 1,000 species in Lake Malawi alone--a few orders of magnitude more species than occur in the 'Darwin's finches' species flock, of 13 species, give or take.

The Metro Zoo's Cichlid tank, for its part, is pretty impressive on its own. Kinda a 'wall'o'fish' thing--designed, one would presume, as an illustration of extraordinary diversity. Rather purty.