Friday, October 29, 2004

Twice The Astonishing Lunacy, One Grand Old Party!

Unmitigated Gall

Rudy Giuliani, sawing through his own treelimb on The Today Show:

“No matter how you try to blame [allegedly misplacing 370 tons of ‘splosives] on the President, the actual responsibility for it should be on the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough?”

Shorter Rudy: “Our troops are clowns.” Way to energize the base!!

Gen. Patrick M. Hughes, now an Intelligence bigwig at the Department of We Can See What You’re Doing, speaking at Haahvahd last yearon the topic of civil rights, safety and terrorism:

“Set aside what the mass of people think. Some things are so bad for them that you cannot allow them to have them. One of them is war in the context of terrorism in the United States… [t]herefore, we have to abridge individual rights, change the societal conditions, and act in ways that heretofore were not in accordance with our values and traditions, like giving a police officer or security official the right to search you without a judicial finding of probable cause.

Let me guess. We live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. You have more responsibility than I could possibly fathom. I weep for civil liberties. I have that luxury. I have the luxury of not knowing what you know. That what you do saves lives. And your existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to me, saves lives. I don’t want the truth. because deep down, in places I don’t talk about at parties, I want you on that wall, I need you on that wall!

Something like that, then? Assclown?

[wik] ... and a Bonus Round from the Department of Homeland Security And Frivolous Prosecution of Stated Duties (this and the last via Reason):

So far as she knows, Pufferbelly Toys owner Stephanie Cox hasn’t been passing any state secrets to sinister foreign governments, or violating obscure clauses in the Patriot Act.

So she was taken aback by a mysterious phone call from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to her small store in this quiet Columbia River town just north of Portland.

When the two agents arrived at the store, the lead agent asked Cox whether she carried a toy called the Magic Cube, which he said was an illegal copy of the Rubik’s Cube, one of the most popular toys of all time.

He told her to remove the Magic Cube from her shelves, and he watched to make sure she complied.

After the agents left, Cox called the manufacturer of the Magic Cube, the Toysmith Group, which is based in Auburn, Wash. A representative told her that Rubik’s Cube patent had expired, and the Magic Cube did not infringe on the rival toy’s trademark.

Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said agents went to Pufferbelly based on a trademark infringement complaint filed in the agency’s intellectual property rights center in Washington, D.C.

“One of the things that our agency’s responsible for doing is protecting the integrity of the economy and our nation’s financial systems and obviously trademark infringement does have significant economic implications,” she said.

Seriously, DHS agents could take a stroll down Canal Street in Manhattan every day of the week and meet their yearly quota for copyright infrigement busts. It’s not that I object to them doing their job (much) but I do object to spending money on a toy store outside Portland and for busting Tommy Chong for selling impractical and unusable artistically-designed handblown glass intoxicant delivery devices. C’mon guys! Real bootleggers sell off tarpaulins, and real stoners can make a bong out of an apple. Why not go bust up a crystal meth lab somewheres?


Posted by Johno on 10/29/04 at 06:08 PM
Unmitigated Gall • Permalink

Accountability

Partisan Politics

NDR has voted, and he (plus brdgt in the comments) makes an eleoquent case for the virtues of thoughtful political involvement. Says brdgt: “I will never mistake carefully crafted apathy as actual political participation again.”

Earlier this week I found myself on the phone to my parents pleading with them about the upcoming election. They live at Ground Zero (formerly known as “Ohio"), and between the Presidential race, a few ludicrious Congressional races including the one in their district, and the outrageous baby/bathwater Let’s Ban Gay Marriage And Everything That Reminds Us Of It Act that’s up for ratification, the stakes are pretty high. Although I changed no minds (and found that in important ways minds didn’t need changing), I found myself, almost for the first time in the past eighteen months, discarding my “carefully crafted apathy” (which is actually more like “finely modulated disgust,” but a spade’s a spade) in favor of unavoidable facts and solid positions. As for what that means, and who I’m voting for-- not telling, and your guess is probably wrong.

See also farther down NDR’s main page for perceptive comments on the ways that regional ties (homeland-ness) hinder the democratic process. 


Posted by Johno on 10/29/04 at 02:17 PM
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On Any Other Day…

Just So You Know

...this would be big news. But today, in light of the horrifying developments in the Robot War Against Nature we at the Ministry say ho-hum. A teacup-sized flying spy robot. Whoopeedoo. Wake us when they build a Veritech.


Posted by Johno on 10/29/04 at 01:54 PM
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Our Overlords Will Roam Free

Just So You Know

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse than bionic rat brains and disembodied monkey waldos, it does. The benighted fools at the University of West England have built a robot that recharges itself by eating.

Scientists at the University of the West of England have designed a potentially autonomous robot which feeds on flies attracted by human excrement and uses them to generate electricity, the New Scientist reports.

EcoBot II is reckoned to be a real step towards “release and forget” autonomous robots - albeit it a small one. At present, EcoBot II has to be fed bluebottles manually by its creators and can generate enough juice to travel at about 10 centimetres an hour.

The device uses the chitin in the fly’s exoskeleton for fuel. The six-legged snacks are digested by bacteria in eight “microbial fuel cells” (anaerobic chambers filled with raw sewage slurry). The bacteria produce enzymes which break down the fly chitin, releasing sugars which the bacteria then absorb and metabolise. This latter process produces electrons which EcoBot II captures to generate electricity.

Oh, fabulous. Way to break the tether, gentlemen! The yoke of external power is the single most potent weapon in humankind’s fight against the encroaching robot menace. As long as they are resigned to periodically recharge themselves in some way, they can be fought and beaten. But what now? Imagine a titanium-framed wheeled machine (large or small) equipped with ‘nonlethal’ “pain ray” technology that can roam indefinitely, sustaining itself on biomass as it rounds up humans to labor in the tungsten mines. “Scientists"-- or should I say, species-traitors-- like this are only hurting the cause of humanity.

If we’re lucky-- if we’re lucky-- perhaps the robots will condescend to program themselves with taste, preserving our human traditions of “palatable food” and “good cooking” so as to make the coming Age of Machines less utterly miserable. 


Posted by Johno on 10/29/04 at 01:44 PM
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New Robotic Overlords to Use Rudimentary Tools, Fling Feces

Holy Shit!

Minister GeekLethal has notified me of a deeply disturbing new twist in humankind’s relentless march to self-enslavement: monkey-controlled robot arms.

US scientists have taught a monkey to operate a robotic arm to feed itself using only the power of its thoughts.

The experiment was revealed Tuesday at a meeting of neuroscientists in San Diego, The Guardian reports, and involves interception of signals from the brain by electrode probes. The signals are interpreted through an algorithm and transmitted to a robotic arm. The robotic arm consists of a mobile shoulder, elbow and gripping device.

<...snip...>

Four years ago a team from Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, used electrode brain implants to link a monkey to the internet to allow it to move a lever 600 miles away in Massachusetts.

In the last several weeks we at the Ministry have collected a number of alarming stories. To name a few, we have seen: robotic house servants to do our chores and prepare us for a life of slavish lassitude; disembodied rat neurons flying jet planes; and the advent of ‘nonlethal’ “pain ray” technology ostensibly for crowd control but doubtless destined for infamy as our robot overlords’ weapon of choice against uprising, free-thinking, and food riots. Pain rays aren’t much good against robots, are they?

(Has anyone contemplated the horror that will befall mankind when the robots take over? I mean, really thought about it? I’m a bit of a gourmand and am looking forward tonight to dining with my wife on a nice piece of Alsatian cheese, a Cotes du Rhone, and a loaf of pain Levain. Do you think the robots will give two shits for how or what we eat? Soylent Green for some, and nutritous Vitamin Gruel for all! No more aged Angus steaks. No more new potatoes steamed and served with butter and thyme. No more artisan cheese. No more slatey, herbal Australian Sav Blancs. No more pizza. The horror!)

But back to the monkeys. We at the Ministry take our position as quislings very seriously, and when the robots come we intend to do all we can to extend the Ministry’s dominance and by implication see to the well-being of mankind-- something the robots will surely neglect. (We expect all to remember this kindness when the dark day comes, and to not hinder the Ministry in the unfortunate tasks set before us.) Unfortunately some things are beyond the pale, and remote-controlled mechanical monkey strangling arms are it. I for one do not welcome our screeching, feces-flinging, publicly autoerotic, bionically enhanced fleabag overlords and hereby put them on notice: KOKO BAD MONKEY.  BAD PAIN. SHINY ARM BAD. MAKE KOKO PAIN. Got that, monkeyboy?

I hope I have made myself clear to simian and hominid alike. That is all.


Posted by Johno on 10/29/04 at 01:23 PM
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