Beneath contempt

Apparently some sacks of reeking excrement are attempting voter suppression tactics in a number of key states, and apparently in a pretty big way. A few items to fuel appropriate levels of rage

1. a pamphlet being handed out in Milwaukee's African American communities
2. one of many bogus challenges in Ohio (warning, site not work-safe)
3. mass challenges, also in Ohio

Shameless don't cut it. What the hell is wrong with these people?

The beauty of the mass challenge: even if it gets overturned, if the voter doesn't get the message, and doesn't show up on election day, the deed is done.

Remember those caging lists from a few posts back?

Guess this is what they look like in the news.

Gonna be an ugly Tuesday.

Homo floresiensis

Because of climate change or the impact of modern humans, who began to spread from Africa around 100,000 years ago, the strange story of H. floresiensis eventually ended in extinction. But modern humans must surely have encountered this tiny relative of ours, and the discovery shows how much we still have to learn about the story of human evolution.

-- from Nature putting the Homo floresiensis thing in perspective this week (free article, though much of their site is not).

(Fights urge to sing The Tragically Hip's Little Bones...)

This, in case you missed it, is a rather dramatic discovery. Lots else at Nature and elsewhere.

The really wacky part--and ya gotta love a researcher with a sense of imagination (and/or, I could suppose, a nose for newsworthiness), is more here--folk legends of those islands concerning a 'little people' which do, at first blush, seem to have a few things in common with the remains:

The ebu gogo were short--about a metre tall--long-haired, pot-bellied, with ears that stuck out, walking with a slightly awkward gait, and had longish arms and fingers. They murmured at each other and could repeat words parrot-fashion. They could climb slender trees but were never seen holding stone tools, whereas we have lots of sophisticated artefacts associated with Homo floresiensis. That's the only inconsistency with the archaeological evidence. Gert had heard of these stories 10 years ago and he thought them no better than leprechaun stories--until we unearthed the hobbit."

Well, okay, but lots of cultures have little people legends. Doesn't necessarily mean that much. Let's keep that in mind...

But do let's have a very, very good look around for them anyway, just in case...

Lotsa questions, with or without living, undiscovered near-cousins with some linguistic and toolmaking capabilities hiding out on Pacific islands, sure. Especially this one:

So H. erectus was building boats suitable to get to Flores 800,000 years ago?

That's something all on its own, if true, make no mistake.

Just. Wow.

Recommended viewing and reading

Stuck at home today, doing essential (and long overdue) paperwork. Recommended viewing and reading from recent browsing:

• Bob Harris' Blog. A brother-in-arms and support blogger to Tom Tomorrow, Bob Harris is now doing is own thing, and it's a frequently very funny thing. Easily one of the more entertaining of the lefty bloggers I've been reading of late
• actually via Harris, The Fifth Estate did a documentary on Cheney a week ago. Their pages on the subject are here, and the video, thought not officially online, can be found here and there.

I've seen the doc, of course. Favourite bit: the Cheney compadre (Woolsey) responding to questions about the rationale for the Iraq invasion with the usual: you bastards who wouldn't help us 'spread 'freedom and democracy' have some nerve hassling us about it...

Interviewer: Can you understand how people in the rest of the world listen now to the rationalizations of the war in Iraq, and given what was said before and what has happened there since and look on it as justification of what is still a bad idea?

Woolsey: Sure, a lot of people are predisposed to think that bringing democracy and the rule of law to the Middle East is a bad idea, because they don't want to have to make a contribution to it, and because I think they want to put their head in the sand and believe that everything will work out fine...

Riiiight, dearie. Those who said 'Hey stupid! Dooooon't goooooo! Baaaaad outcome'... they're the ones who've got their heads in the sand. As opposed to the 'Democracy is on the march!' yutzes in the executive branch, and, of course, your charming self, who has apparently concluded that 'democracy and the rule of law' look like this and this.

Yeah, baby. Sure we got our heads in the sand. Better 'n you who've got 'em so far up your asses.

First glimpses of a new world

... Titan's surface comes into view.

Titan, as you might have heard, is near the top of the list of places of interest for the exobiology (yes, there is such a field, notwithstanding that it does seem a bit of a non sequitur as yet) folk, as one of the more sensible places in our solar system to look for complex organic chemistry and maybe even, in some of our wilder dreams, an actual biology of some form. And in one interesting way, Titan's kinda like home, as outer solar system moons go, insofar as it actually has a substantial atmosphere--though Titan's also a lot smaller, colder, and more distant from the sun than are we, all of which probably has important ramifications for any speculations being made about the development of complex chemistries in such environments.

In any case I have to say I find myself watching the Cassini-Huygens stuff come back with some interest. Though the same is true, I guess, of pretty much any video from the outer solar system. Jupiter, Saturn, Io, Uranus, Neptune, Triton--all of these places have a cold, alien beauty about them only made more alluring by their distance from us, and the rather remarkable things that have had to be done to get those pictures back here.

Most of you who know me know that notwithstanding my involvement in software, I'm not really a gadget guy--the camcorder is actually my wife's, my computers (though yes, I do have several, and I do spend some time with them) are usually a few years old at least, and I know comparatively little about such technoboy subjects as cars and large jet aircraft equipped to blow things up. But those little robots NASA and company (the EU have got into this a bit too with Huygens) have sent out to the farthest reaches of the solar system, those make my eyes light up more than a bit. It's more than merely inspiring to see semiconductor technology and rocket propulsion systems applied to something that advances human knowledge, makes our world a little bigger. This, I find myself thinking, is one of the few things that makes it all worthwhile--learning, getting out there, becoming a little more than we were, by casting our gaze a little farther.

Fun fact for the day--Voyager 1--the more distant of the two li'l beasties carrying the gold records--is now around 93 AU (or 14 billion km) from the sun.

Quoting Sagan: "...The launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet."

Sail on, wayfarer.

Plus ca change...

... see this link.

MIAMI (Reuters) - U.S. Postal Service investigators on Wednesday were trying to find thousands of absentee ballots which should have been delivered to voters in one of Florida's most populous counties, officials said...

(Checks calendar).

Funny. Sez here 2004, not 2000.

Caging

(...and why the GOP really has to get with this top level domain thing.)

All the cool kids are using it... be the first on your block to show off your political literacy with the term 'caging'...

Which, loosely translated, means 'being an asshole by using challenges against specific voters to cause mass disruptions at the polling booth'. From Palast's bit:

Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign's national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called "caging list."

It lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida.

An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown the list, told Newsnight: "The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day."

Ion Sancho, a Democrat, noted that Florida law allows political party operatives inside polling stations to stop voters from obtaining a ballot.

They may then only vote "provisionally" after signing an affidavit attesting to their legal voting status.

Mass challenges have never occurred in Florida. Indeed, says Mr Sancho, not one challenge has been made to a voter "in the 16 years I've been supervisor of elections."

"Quite frankly, this process can be used to slow down the voting process and cause chaos on election day; and discourage voters from voting."

Sancho calls it "intimidation." And it may be illegal.

See the Palast's comments here. The BBC stuff is in a video stream available for 24 hours--you can get it via Palast's page.

'Caging' seems to come from the GOP people's own lexicon--which brings us to the fascinating story of how these lists came to light.

Seems the site www.georgewbush.org, a parody site run by the same delightful loons who do the Landover Baptist schtick, got a few emails sent by GOP operatives... probably, they were meant to go to georgewbush.com. See the .org folks' page of dead letters--stuff caught in the gears of their mail server--at this link.

Which leads me to two observations:

1. the GOP folks really have to get with this top level domain thing. Remember Cheney and factcheck.org during the veep debate?
2. hit and miss though it may be, never underestimate the power of parody--this seamy bit of business--which I'd think in sane world should do some pretty serious damage to what remains of the GOP's reputation in Florida--came to light because a coupla funny guys put up a lampoon site, and I hereby heartily salute them for it.

Betty Bowers, we luvs ya!

Ick

For the first time ever, myself and my lovely wife managed to come down with the flu (contracted from our charming daughter) at the same time...

Well, with some lag. I got to start about twelve hours sooner.

I should, I suppose, be grateful that I don't get these things more frequently. But damn, when I do, I really do. A whole day on about a 1/3 of a glass of water, and 1/4 of a glass of apple juice, which was all I dared put down the hatch. 36 hours without a cup of coffee (this is beyond painful, for me).

My love's contracting it was really the greater danger... as she's carrying our second child right about now, a day without fluids coulda been trouble. Fortunately, she seems to have had a little less trouble in this department than did I, and was able to get onto the crackers 'n juice stage of misery after about an eight-hour night of unpleasantness.

There's really nothing quite like having to clean up after someone who's just been sick, when your own stomach is still making threatening gurgling noises, and probably only behaving itself because there's nothing within it to object to.

Fun times, kids, fun times.

Aaaarrrggghhh! Not the fluffy bunnies!!!

Well, it was pretty much inevitable... this is just one of several Vewy Scawy Petting Zoo parodies.

Laughin'. Hard.

Thoughts on global culture

... Nothing so deep as the title implies... or not yet, though the day may come that I do a decent essay on this; so much bubbling about in the brain on this general topic of late. This specific bit of brooding--that is, this evening's--was touched off by reading the page of Amazon reviews for the The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King extended edition. Odd notes:

• there were 146 reviews on the page--this for a product that hasn't been released yet, which, while unsurprising, amuses me
• there were many, many gushingly 'wow, amazing film' reviews
• there were inevitable naysayers, some of whom were shouted down (in the virtual sense--would seem they got their reviews pulled
• the gushing reviews had a strong preponderance of 'the neat thing is the effects were better than in Star Wars' type elements

... a few thoughts:

First, I can't comment on the film. I mean, I could, but I hardly see the point. If you care, you've seen it, and you've decided for yourself, I'd expect. It's that global a phenomenon (by the same justification, I didn't bother to link the Amazon page. As if, really).

I actually follow the same principle, generally, in doing IMDB reviews. I've written one or two, but I don't bother with stuff that gets a thousand freakin' reviews. First, no one's gonna find it anyway when there's that many fish in the pond. Second, I'd rather put a little time into talking about stuff, which, in relative terms, I think gets passed over (such as Jadorowsky's delightfully odd Santa Sangre, as one example). Honestly. Yeah, I love Blade Runner too, but what am I supposed to tell you? That it's got some lovely glass paintings? I'd think you'd know that already, if you were in any way likely to ever see it. And there are about another 1,000 guys who can already tell you that. And will, on every opportunity.

My reaction to the gushing fanboys writing about the Jackson film is (as I'd think you could tell from this sentence's subject phrase) a bit hostile, too. Don't get me wrong, I like the films, on several levels, from the technical through their strength as an adaptation of the supposedly unadaptable, through the general strength and beauty of the story as they tell it. But somehow one more grinning fanboy zombie saying 'oh, wow, this film R0X0Rs!!! Doodz!!' just pisses me off, somehow.

Mebbe some snobbish tendencies slipping out. Fair comment, fair possibility. But I don't think that's all there is to it. Not by a long shot.

I think one of the things that pisses me off the most about global culture is it just seems so damned full of the same people. The same people, saying the same things. Human beings safely reduced to ticket buyin' theater seat occupyin' slabs of meat. They're like the franchise fast food of humanity... always the same uninspiring preformed grey patty, every time. And to wander in among them is (to trot out another food metaphor... guess I must be hungry) to get lost in a sea of human tapioca... it sticks to you, and you can't breathe...

And it takes so long to wash off.

Okay. Guess it's time I moved on. That metaphor ain't breathing any more. But yeah, to sum it up: I find it alienating. One of the things that frightens me about such global cultural products as the Rings films is, I think, a larger scale phenomenon of the same thing I've always hated about spectator sports... in the tribal group mind they create, the individuals that make it up become less individual, and, in the end, really rather boring... a line of football fans cheering for their team (why? who knows? a ball gets thrown between two posts several times, and this somehow has an impact on their lives?) has the same quality as all those fans posting frantically into the Amazon review threads... they are subsumed in a larger current, and somehow, realizing this, I just do not want to jump in with them.

(That said, I'll probably still buy the DVD)