AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: Kissing Cousins DATE: 1/30/2005 01:24:00 PM ----- BODY:
Incest taboos have become prevalent in our interlinked, modern societies because promoting exogamy acts as a great mechanism for wealth redistribution. Societies that facilitate familial endogamy tend not to be relatively successful in a post-medieval economic situation. In a very great way you can trace the evolution of the pre-Renaissance economic conditions to the inadvertent creation of a pan-European merchant class by the Roman Church throughout Europe in the late medieval period following its proclamation of extreme cosanguinity marriage decrees . These defined (and constrained) marriage between relatives out to the 7th degree (later relaxed after several decades to the 4th decree) and had a powerful disruptive effect on the tight kinship economic blocs that had characterised medieval European society and mitigated against the emergence and growth of strong City and State power structures. Basically, it took the Catholic Church a long time to decide on its preferred balance between Roman and German techniques of kinship evaluation. It was noted by many observers at the time that under the Roman system (~4th degree) pan-European trade and tax systems had propsered, but that under the Germanic systems (~7+ degrees) the ability of the King/State to tax widely and promote wide trade networks had foundered. Someone said in response to this argument: it's just utterly unlikely that a council of elders convened somewhere and decided to somehow train youngsters that incest was wrong. Why do people believe that some of the greatest minds in some of the most powerful organisations of their time were not capable of planning and executing social engineering projects on a huge scale? The 1st through the 4th Lateran Councils of the 12th Century were that period's equivalent of the G7 Powwows. And they concerned themselves tremendously with describing and codifying the shape of the new incest decrees, and with establishing methods of education and enforcement throughout Europe. In recent times the Roman Church even engaged in a little bit of incest redefinition. This nicely illustrates pre- and post-Vatican II Canon Law incest taboos. Pre-Vatican II Post-Vatican II Women whom Ego cannot marry are shaded in red
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: Irony As Policy, Tragedy As Strategy DATE: 1/27/2005 06:38:00 PM ----- BODY:
Baghdad is not under control, either by the Iraqi interim government or the American military ... "I would definitely say it's enemy territory," said Col. Stephen R. Lanza, the commander of the Fifth Brigade Combat Team ... responsible for patrolling a wide area of southern Baghdad with a population of 1.3 million people ... With hundreds of Baghdad police officers killed in insurgent attacks and others spending much of their time hunkered down at police stations hidden behind high concrete blast walls and watchtowers, police investigations have virtually ceased ... Hospital morgues are filled with unidentified bodies and body parts, many of them found floating in canals or decomposing on stretches of wasteland.
But there is a bright spot...
One tentative success story for the Americans has been Sadr City, the Shiite slum district on the capital's northeastern edge that is home to more than two million people. If election turnout is high anywhere in Baghdad, it is likely to be among the slum's dwellers, mostly followers of Moktada al-Sadr, the fiery Shiite cleric who twice last year mounted uprisings against American troops.
So in the end, it looks like one of the stronger political blocs to emerge from the elections will be the fundamentalist, revolutionary al-Sadr militia. There is a certain ham-fisted pithiness in this ironic denouement.
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: Deep Freeze! DATE: 1/24/2005 10:38:00 PM ----- BODY:
Foiled! I had this great idea to record some of my more tedious and long-winded lectures to save myself getting writer's cramp. However, twice my plucky little Archos died on me after a song or two while walking outside. Turns out that the operating temperature range for the cheap old-school lithium-ion battery does not go to the -10 to -15 Celsius that has been prevalent lately. Dammit.
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: Note To Self DATE: 1/23/2005 01:03:00 PM ----- BODY:
I noticed this interesting new Google Blogger feature: audio blogs. Set it up to work with your mobile phone, then just call a specific number and waffle for up to five minutes. Your voice is sampled and stored on Google's servers as an audio blog note.
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: Now Playing DATE: 1/23/2005 01:48:00 AM ----- BODY:
So by using a Frankenstein-like combination of Media Center, AudioScrobbler and Magpie RSS, I managed to rig up a "Now Playing" list for the page.
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: Swimming Lessons DATE: 1/21/2005 11:20:00 PM ----- BODY:
"U.S. soldiers began to open fire on the houses, so I decided that it was very dangerous to stay in my house" ... Hussein said he panicked, seizing on a plan to escape across the Euphrates River, which flows on the western side of the city "I wasn't really thinking," he said. "Suddenly, I just had to get out. I didn't think there was any other choice." ... Hussein moved from house to house dodging gunfire and reached the river. "I decided to swim � but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river." He watched horrified as a family of five was shot dead as they tried to cross. Then, he "helped bury a man by the river bank, with my own hands." "I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim. I quit the idea of crossing the river and walked for about five hours through orchards".
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: Buy! Sell! Buy! DATE: 1/20/2005 01:40:00 PM ----- BODY:
Movie stock exchange.
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: Iraqi Information Minister Redux DATE: 1/19/2005 08:41:00 AM ----- BODY:
"If there are not good elections, we won't have a constitution, and there will be chaos, and we will have a civil war," the minister, Falah Hassan al-Naqib, said at a news conference in the heavily fortified Interior Ministry in Baghdad. Gunfire rattled behind him nearly the whole time he spoke.
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: Oops! DATE: 1/16/2005 03:21:00 PM ----- BODY:
According to the [CIA's] NIC report, Iraq has joined the list of conflicts -- including the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, and independence movements in Chechnya, Kashmir, Mindanao in the Philippines, and southern Thailand -- that have deepened solidarity among Muslims and helped spread radical Islamic ideology.
The NIC is the CIA's "think tank", and produced Mapping the Global Future.
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: Bad Guys Finish First DATE: 1/16/2005 11:22:00 AM ----- BODY:
Two US defence contractors being sued over allegations of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison have been awarded valuable new contracts by the Pentagon ... Three employees of CACI International and Titan - working at Abu Ghraib as civilian contractors - were separately accused of abusive behaviour. The report on the Abu Ghraib scandal implicated three civilian contractors in the abuses: Steven Stefanowicz from CACI International and John Israel and Adel Nakhla from Titan ... CACI International has been awarded a $16 million renewal of its contract. Titan, meanwhile, has been awarded a new contract worth $164m.
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: Yahoo Is Evil, But... DATE: 1/15/2005 08:04:00 PM ----- BODY:
for the first time is many years, Yahoo now has a new search tool that beats Google: Yahoo Video Search It's a good idea to edit your preferences to turn off the safesearch nanny filter - the results get a lot more... interesting.
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: Your Tax Dollars At Work DATE: 1/15/2005 04:39:00 PM ----- BODY:
Armstrong Williams, a conservative commentator, talk-show host and newspaper columnist [has] just been unmasked as the frontman for a scheme in which $240,000 of taxpayers' money was quietly siphoned to him through the Department of Education and a private p.r. firm so that he would "regularly comment" upon (translation: shill for) the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind policy in various media venues during an election year ... Mr. Williams also appeared ... on CNN to accuse the media of being Michael Moore's "p.r. machine" and on Tina Brown's CNBC talk show to lambaste Mr. Stewart for doing a "puff interview" with John Kerry on "The Daily Show" (which Mr. Williams, unsurprisingly, seems to think is a real, not a fake, news program) ... [During an interview with Mr Williams, VP] Cheney criticized the press for its coverage of Halliburton and denounced "cheap shot journalism" in which "the press portray themselves as objective observers of the passing scene, when they obviously are not objective."
"I am a pure entrepreneur, and I made a business decision," Williams said of the $240,000 contract. "I didn't think about the dual role of media pundit and entrepreneur. And if I had to do it again I would do it differently, because it is much more important to me � my reputation with my peers and with the public." Williams said it was only after being interviewed by journalists Friday that he realized many major news outlets had disclosure requirements to ensure that their employees avoided such conflicts of interest.
"This happens all the time," he told me. "There are others." Really? I said. Other conservative commentators accept money from the Bush administration? I asked Williams for names. "I'm not going to defend myself that way," he said. The issue right now, he explained, was his own mistake. Well, I said, what if I call you up in a few weeks, after this blows over, and then ask you? No, he said.
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: Connections DATE: 1/12/2005 02:49:00 PM ----- BODY:
I just noticed a weird, trainspotterish connection. In the 1974 series that was the major inspiration for the X-Files, Kolchak the Night Stalker, the episode "Mr RING" concerns a genetic-mechanical hybrid android that rebels against its programming and refuses to be deactivated. It escapes and tries to become more "human", and of course a murderous rampage ensues. Anyway, the entity that created this bio-mechanical hybrid was the Tyrell Institute... virtually the same name as the corporation in the Bladerunner movie that creates the rogue replicants.
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: Ohio Low Down DATE: 1/10/2005 05:44:00 PM ----- BODY:
Here's a status report on the election "irregularities" in Ohio. It's pretty ugly stuff, kind of a mini-Ukraine. Given the closeness of the result, the reasonable course of action would be to hold another election. But that won't happen because of the way US politics has institutionalised control of the voting process by the dominant plurality party... in this case the Republicans. I also noted from the report that pretty much every substantial office is reserved for the appointment of declared Republicans (mostly) or Democrats (less so) in a weird system of state-proscribed two-party oligarchy that reminds me of how the Communists structured their political systems throughout the Eastern Bloc for maximum stability and resistance to change. They maintained an illusion of choice by also reserving public but generally insignificant slots for members of the officially sanctioned minority political parties (usually something along the lines of a "Farmers' Party" or "Peasants' Party"). This may presage the role of the Democratic Party in US politics for the next decade or so: the GOP's tame poodle, fitting perfectly the role of an Emmanuel Goldstein pseudo-resistance group to GOP hegemony. It's quite odd and definitely ironic as hell that the 21st century US now increasingly resembles mid-to-late 20th century Eastern Europe.
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: Pimps Up, Ho's Down DATE: 1/09/2005 04:26:00 PM ----- BODY:
So Pimps Up, Ho's Down was apparently the title of one of the many porno media found in Michael Jackson's bedroom during a warrant search. Surprisingly, much of the porn involved females, as well as males and juveniles. Looks like this case is not quite so open and shut as it might appear...
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: The Last Quack DATE: 1/09/2005 03:57:00 PM ----- BODY:
Vietnam culled 450 ducks in its largest city on Thursday ... doctors in Ho Chi Minh City had also received another patient suspected of carrying the virus, which has killed two Vietnamese boys since Dec. 30, taking the country's death toll to 22 ... By Jan. 6, the H5N1 virus had spread to 13 provinces and Ho Chi Minh City.
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: This Reserve's Broken, Can We Have Another? DATE: 1/06/2005 01:16:00 AM ----- BODY:
The head of the Army Reserve has sent a sharply worded memo to other military leaders expressing "deepening concern" about the continued readiness of his troops, who have been used heavily in Iraq and Afghanistan, and warning that his branch of 200,000 soldiers "is rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force" ... "The purpose of this memorandum is to inform you of the Army Reserve's inability . . . to meet mission requirements" associated with Iraq and Afghanistan.
More here or here.
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: Free Cams! DATE: 1/05/2005 01:39:00 AM ----- BODY:
From MeFi, people have inadvertently left their network-enabled webcams unsecured, some with motion and sound. This one has someone's sleeping dogs! Some laundry. Some kind of altar. Frogger, for real. Tires and crap. Nerds hanging out. This hotel's lobby. Enough rice for ten thousand curries! More frogger. Ah those ocean breezes and swells. Cute rabbit. Watch the watchers. Eerily deserted ostrich farm. Classy pagoda. A greasy kitchen. Some kind of school for tots. This eatery. Desolate street. Michigan beach and lighthouse. Fishtank (oldskool cam!). A model railway. Chinese government cam in Macao. Cold harbour. Dutch science museum. No clue what this is, but it could be an experimental wormhole. There are lots more unsecured, motion controlled cams here or here or here. For a lot of these cams, the default login info is root:pass.
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: Free Propaganda! DATE: 1/05/2005 12:25:00 AM ----- BODY:
Courtesy of our friends in NATO.
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It? DATE: 1/04/2005 08:40:00 PM ----- BODY:
What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It? For me, I see there's the Continuum Hypothesis debate on one hand, and the kinda-related (through acceptance, rejection, or modification of the axiom of choice ) plausible existence of satisfactory models of infinitesimals (derived from internal set theory ). The fact that so many people disagree violently with this belief, or in fact that there could be any disagreement at all (and that the relative strengths of differing and oppositional beliefs varies over time and across generations) leads me to believe that the shape and discourse of maths and logic are products of our embodied consciousnesses , that evolve within social lives organized from the top down through impenetrable hierarchies that make us into receptacles for the cultures that seduce us into functioning as robots in the economy.
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: Into the Abyss DATE: 1/04/2005 04:31:00 PM ----- BODY:
Insurgents assassinated the highest-ranking Iraqi official in eight months Tuesday, gunning down the governor of Baghdad province and six of his bodyguards, and a suicide truck bomber killed 10 people at an Interior Ministry commando headquarters.
I hate to be proved right but things are looking increasingly bleak in Iraq. The resistance to US occupation is morphing into a full-fledged civil war, while the impotent puppet regime suffers the ignominy of watching its leaders struck down one by one with seeming effortless ease. Most of the Sunni areas of Iraq are ungovernable and in a state of armed insurrection or military subjugation while Sunni political leaders have already pledged to boycott the forthcoming elections. This leaves the Sistani-influenced Shia parties free to sweep the polls in January. The weakening US occupation forces must look on in baffled bemusement as an Iran-aligned popular front bides its time, conserves its strength, and restrains its militias from open resistance. Meanwhile the northern Kurdish factions have already basically opted out of a united Iraq, and still refuse to disarm. Whichever regime takes "power" in southern Iraq -- be in the Islamist Shia parties or a new hasty US-appointed rainbow coalition of vaguely popular forces -- will face the refusal by over two-thirds of of Iraq to accept its putative legitimacy or instruments of governance. In this environment a continued regression towards autarchy or theocracy seems inevitable.
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: iselfra DATE: 1/03/2005 06:47:00 PM ----- BODY:
Someone called "iselfra" has linked here, or so Technorati tells me. I don't know anyone in Virginia. How odd.
----- -------- AUTHOR: Mike TITLE: Back Once Again With the Renegade Master, Again DATE: 1/03/2005 06:18:00 PM ----- BODY:
Stop me if you've heard this one before. So the MS thing refused to go away and I was getting these weird and conflicting threats of suspension, deletion, and legal action. Mainly while I was away on vacation in an internet-free hinterland. And all over this. The offending string is very well hidden now, and probably more in keeping with the kabbala theme, so all's well that ends well. Earlier here.
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