If the universe is a hologram...

Okay, this is for real, whatever that really means.

There's an instrument under construction now at Fermilab which will, among other things, look for evidence that the universe (Yes, the one we live in.) is a holographic projection of data encoded on its 2-dimensional “surface”. Theoretically, it's a sound idea that could help explain some very basic problems in physics.

If it's true, there should be some measurable “jitter” to reality; the holographic equivalent of the pixelation you see if you enlarge a digital photo too much. That's what the “holometer” under construction now will look for; jitter. If the universe is a hologram, it'll be there. The holometer should be operational in 2012. This story itself isn't breaking news, but we might have some actual data a year from now.

See The Femilab Holometer for more.

If there universe is holographic, it means there's a fixed amount of information in it, and a maximum bandwidth.  Exactly how our holographic universe might get projected is a pretty interesting question, to say the least. And if there are parallel universes and extra dimensions, this gets even better. “The Holographic Principle and M-Theory”

I've been doing a lot of thinking the past few months about “real” vs. “virtual” relationships and experiences, and what “real” means. For example, is there a qualitative difference between a “real” friend and and friend in virtual space, or is there only a difference in quantity of information?  And one can ask the same question about every virtual experience, cyber-sex being the one that probably gets discussed most often.  But how about virtual artists, who create art entirely within a virtual space?  If a Second Life artist creates a stainless steel sculpture, what medium is he working in? 

See what I mean?  The idea of “real” gets blurry (or jittery?) pretty quickly.

And now, we may find out that all this nice “real” reality is just a hologram. If I were paranoid, I'd think the universe was poking me with a stick, just for fun. I don't believe that, but this question of what's  “real” gets more interesting all the time.

Another Decaying Orbit?

I was at the Cafe Wellstone in Second Life last night when the Occupation went bad in Oakland and the police attacked, so like just about everyone else there, I pulled up the live feed and tweet channel. The following is what I personally saw.

 The tweets were talking about flash-bangs, rubber bullets, and a sound cannon.  The live feed from ABC was cut.  Howls went up on twitter. The story was that two news choppers were being refueled.  Ten minutes later the live feed came back.  The cops were lined up in a double phalanx, clearly getting ready to move against the protesters.  Then the live feed went down and didn't come back.  The TV news channels and networks were showing nothing of any of this.  Normal moronic programming.   This morning it's obvious that things went from bad to worse last night after the feed was cut. 

I have a few thoughts.

I saw this before with the antiwar movement in the late 60's. It didn't take long for some to become radicalized and start blowing things up. The Occupation threatens the status quo far more than the antiwar movement did.   Look to the early history of the labor movement for a better parallel. 

In the 60's we all saw blood.  We saw war footage every night, we saw the bodies at Kent State, and we saw the police brutality in Chicago.  When's the last time you saw footage or photos from the war in Afghanistan? 

And here's a question:  Is there a difference in kind--a qualitative difference--between governments here in the US and those anywhere else, like Egypt, Israel, or Syria?  I don't know.

You can be sure of one thing, at least.  Your TV is spewing kool-aid.  Turn it off.  Better yet, kill it and toss the corpse into the street.  Look elsewhere to find out what's going on.  Good luck!

Pottery Shards

Chasing a tangent of a conversation this morning, I dug out my dusty copy of The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell  with Bill Moyers.  I spotted something I'd highlighted years ago. Moyers noted that Campbell saw judges in mythological terms. They wear black robes instead of suits.  Why? 

Campbell believed religion and culture and language transmit myths to us, even though we usually don't realize it. Those bits of myth "line the walls of our interior systems of belief, like shards of broken pottery in an archaeological site." But those broken shards aren't just junk. Campbell believed they could be energized through ritual, as for instance in the rituals of a courtroom.

"For the law to hold authority beyond mere coercion, the power of the judge must be ritualized, mythologized.  So must much of life today...from religion and war to love and death."

Campbell died in 1987.  I wonder what he'd make of things today; the greed, partisanship, and deepening poverty in the U.S. and much of the world. 

Love is ritualized in marriage. But half those marriages end in divorce. 

How about death?  We have rituals, but compared to what's practiced in much of the world they aren't much.  Ours take a few hours and we pay contractors to do most of the work.  Compared to the way our great-grandparents buried their dead, we've pretty much skipped out on the whole thing. 

War?  Well, the US is at war right now.  But most of us don't give a rat's ass. Most of us don't know anyone who has anything to do with that.  Our wars are handled by a small underclass who ultimately get thrown under the bus when they're done fighting. 

Religion?  Our religions have become mostly politics. 

Does the law have any power today beyond coercion?  You tell me, but it doesn't seem like it. Our behavior, especially at the top of the pile, seems limited only by what we think we can get away with. 

I'm just making observations.  I have no prescription in mind.  Maybe there isn't any for a culture amputated from its own roots and left to find meaning or purpose in nothing more than digital networking and credit ratings.  Our ancestors left the trees so we could invent Facebook.  Great...

Ooooo! Pretty lights!

The subject of "automation addiction" among airline pilots is all over the news suddenly, again.  New report comes out, the media runs with it, and lots of us will care for a few minutes, until our iPhones go off again.  Well, kids, we ought to stop and think about this a little longer. 

Once your next flight leaves the runway, those two pilots in front may only spend about 3 minutes  actually flying that plane.  The rest of the time they'll be "managing" the flight.  Here's one summary of the issue and you can search that subject for yourself and pull up a whole bunch more. 

Just to be clear, here's what those kids in front are "managing."  This is the cockpit of an Airbus A320. The newer Boeing airliners look about the same to those of us who don't actually sit in them for a living.

Cool, huh?  I think so. Ahead warp 6.  Engage, and all that.  I can well imagine how a couple of guys could snuggle up in there, hit the Wild Blue for Minneapolis, put er on "auto", get the laptops out, turn the radios down, and fly right past the whole damn city by a couple of hundred miles. Hell, that could happen to anybody. Perfectly understandable.

That incident had a happy ending.  The aircraft was never out of control, just the crew. Everybody lived.  If you were on Air France 447 you didn't.  Same basic problem, though.  It's all those pretty lights and what they do to us.

The Air France 447 plane (the plane, not the crew) got confused about how fast it was going.  That confusion lasted less than a minute, but the plane shut off its own autopilot and said to the crew, "You drive."  The pilot was clearly confused.  He did exactly the wrong things.  The plane stopped flying and hit the Atlantic at over 10,000 feet per minute.  That wounded duck death plunge from 38,000 feet lasted roughly as long as a top 40 song on the radio.  Find something on your iPod that's 3 min 30 seconds long, and scream through the whole thing.  I picked an old song, "I'll Be Seeing You" by Sinatra. 

What's my point? 

I used to have a head full of phone numbers. If you're old enough, you probably did, too.  But right now, if Peaches the pit bull eats my cell phone, I'll have to dial 411 to get the numbers for my own children.  This isn't funny. Peaches has already chowed down 4 TV remotes in her short life. 

There was a story a few years ago about a group of people who jumped off a perfectly seaworthy yacht in the Atlantic, in good weather, got into a raft, and set off their emergency locator thingy, while the yacht sailed away.  Why?  The GPS quit!  The boat made it home.

Urban legend? Maybe.  But don't be too sure. 

Here's an interesting exercise for you:

Make a list of things you can do well, or subjects you know well, without the help of electronic gadgets, talking robots, wifi hotspots, Blackberrys, or instructions of any kind.  What can you cook without your recipe file?  Could you find the Grand Canyon or Detroit on a paper map, and actually get there without a GPS?   Think you could build a fire in the woods on a rainy day with a pocket knife and three matches?

Science fiction author Robert Heinlein wrote:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
 
How we doing, do you think?  It's a noble goal, at least.

Peaches is a bit bigger now. This was January 2011. She had Parvo and was left to die in a vacant apartment.

 
Be well.  Work for peace. Learn something new everyday. Watch your back-trail.  Let's be careful out there. 

Identity: Will the Real Me Please Stand Up?

Yup. Eric Shcmidt, heads up, buddy!  I'm outing myself.

Unless Google changes its hive-mind policy on identity, I'll be moving shortly. Google chairman Eric Schmidt thinks I'm a fraud.  I think he knows better, but he chooses to peddle his snake oil anyway.  He's right about one thing, though:  Google, Google+, Blogspot... these are optional. 

Yesterday in the Guardian there's a good essay on what's wrong with the Google identity policy, and I'm not going to rehash it.  Go read, if you like.  Watch out, though.  It was written by "Cory Doctorow" and I have to wonder about a famous last name like that.  In my youth I sometimes signed unimportant stuff with famous names, just to see if anyone noticed.  (Nobody did.)  Pen names and stage names have been around forever, and I'm not worried about Cory. I don't care what name is on his passport. He wrote a good piece. Mark Twain wrote good pieces, too, but that wasn't the name on his steamboat license.

At least until the Department of Homeland Security came along, there has never been anything illegal about using any name you choose.  Not in the U.S., anyway.  It's done all the time, and has been for centuries. Silence Dogood showed up in 1722 from soon-to-be   notorious bad boy and traitor to his king Ben Franklin.  A pseudonym only becomes an "alias" if you do something illegal.

Okay, as much as I may be a legend in my own mind, especially if drinking heavily, I agree with you.  I'm not Ben Franklin, or even Cory Doctorow.  Not Mark Twain, not Joseph Conrad, not William Shakespeare.  I blog a little bit.  I was in the newspaper business once, long ago.  I could blog under "Wilma Flintstone" and it would make no difference to anyone but me. 

I set this blog up under "Red Sparrow" because I wanted something that sounded vaguely partisan. My mission, after all, and insofar as I have one, is to follow in the footsteps of Jesus by comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.  I'm much better at the second part. What's a poor girl to do? Answer: Play to your strong suit, even if it's only clubs.

It's not too hard to figure out that my "real" identity is Sparrow Letov.  But hold on.  Don't call 411 just yet. Sparrow Letov was born 13 Novemeber 2007, courtesy of Linden Labs and Second Life. At that time, when you created an SL account, you had to pick a last name from a list of a few dozen options.  I picked "Letov" because it's short, easy to remember, has a good beat and it's easy to dance to, and because Russian writers and poets are so wonderfully tragic and romantic.  Or as we used to say back in the day, they're kozmic. 

"Sparrow" has nothing to do with the moronic pirate movies.  That comes from an excellent novel, Bone Dance, by Emma Bull, now sadly out of print. 

If the DHS or the NSA or the FBI want the name printed on my driver's license, that's easy. Linden Labs has that information, and so does Comcast, my ISP for many years.  A few folks in my Google+ circle have it, though very few and only in cases where (a) there's a reason, and (b) trust is pretty damn total.  Of course, the name on my driver's license isn't the same as the ones on either of my two very valid birth certificates.  And those two documents show different names. My old-old passport shows a different name than my old passport. So all you identity wankers who agree with Eric Schmidt, tell me:  What's my real name?  Must be the one on my credit card, huh?

If you've entrusted a bunch of computer geeks and corporate buccaneers at Google and Facebook with your personal information, or hung it out there in public, I think you're a fool, frankly. You've made yourself part of a target-rich environment for every sociopath and evil-doer on the planet.  Good luck. My friends and my family have my phone number and address.  They're free to use them anytime.  And that works both ways. If I went to high school with you in 1963 and we haven't seen each other since, don't expect me to be very interested in what's gone on in your life.  I'm not.  And I'm not interested in telling you about mine.  You're not an "old friend" I can "reconnect" with, you're merely another stranger in this strange land. That's not a bad thing, it's just the way it is.  The past exists only in our minds, and very imperfectly. 

Safety on in the Internet?  Not likely.  Careful as I try to be, anyone who hacks any one of several databases can clean out my debit account.  They could come knocking on my door anytime. So be it.  I'll take those risks.  At least they won't know who's going to answer the door, and they might be surprised. 

Be safe.  Work for peace. Be careful.  It's dangerous out there.

Looking Over the Edge

New Jersey from the ISS.  Very pretty.  But where does the food come from?

In the fantasy land of my own romantic imagination I'm a post-apocalypse kind of gal.  Or  I was until I read The Road.  Or tried to.  Frankly, if I have to choose, I'll take a nice clean asteroid impact anytime, over a wasted planet where we become our own last food supply.  I don't think our prognosis is necessarily terminal, but no pom-poms or snappy cheers from me.  Our response to the unfolding climate disaster, especially, shows that we're collectively not much smarter that those deer I wrote about who yard up and die for lack of critical thinking.  But we might survive what we've done to ourselves. It's possible.

We are developing good technology to solve our energy issues.  We might be able to survive the next couple of centuries' worth of climatic consequences if we move fast enough.  But our core problem is paradoxically the one that's both the easiest and hardest to fix; population growth. I've tried to explore how our energy and population problems are converging. No matter how much sunshine you smoke, it's pretty clear that the rest of this century is liable to be a  horror show. But a lot depends on how fast we can adapt to the end of oil. 

Our brightest hope is hydrogen, the original stuff of the universe. (At least matter-wise.)  This really can be a permanent solution to the energy problem if we get our numbers stabilize at a sustainable level. We just need to find practical technologies for using it.  There's actually a new technology that looks big, as least initially:  nano-porous micro beads.

Cella Energy reportedly has a found a low-cost way to trap hydride compounds inside nano-porous polymer micro beads, thus creating a safe way to store and use hydrogen as safe liquid fuel.

"The hydrogen storage materials are stored at ambient temperatures and pressures, this means that the Cella Energy hydrogen storage materials can be packaged in a regular shaped fuel tank. They do not require the large heavy cylinders designed to withstand high pressures normally associated with hydrogen storage."

Reportedly these micro beads can even be mixed with conventional petroleum fuels and used in existing vehicles with little or no modification.  If this really works and has no unacceptable down-side, this could provide a way to transition off petroleum fuels using existing infrastructure and  resources.  It really could happen, and start happening almost immediately.  Very good news. It could mean we won't have to strip-mine the US and further foul our planetary nest with a massive synthetic fuels program. 

There's still hope for hydrogen fusion, too, although it's hard to be optimistic after 50 years of "just around the corner." 

But we've got to manage our population.  As Issac Asimov and others have pointed out many times, liberty, prosperity, human dignity, and ultimately we ourselves, cannot survive population growth, no matter how slow it may be.  The simple math will kill every last human on earth, just as it did on Easter Island.  For all we know the universe is littered with the ruins of civilizations that did just what we're doing now; ran off the edge of the population cliff at full speed while cutting down every last tree on the island.  Let's hope we can wake up in time. 

San Francisco Bay from the ISS

Be well.  Work for peace.  Keep your powder dry. Don't make babies.   - RS

Consider the Coal-Fired B-52

                            A B-52 flying out of Minot, ND, reportedly on 50-50 synthetic fuel.

There's no such thing as a coal-fired B-52.  Or is there?  It seems there is. 

The US Air Force has been looking at synthetic fuel for years. I found a paper written by Dr Carlo Kopp, a well-known civilian defense analyst and author. His paper, The US Air Force Synthetic Fuels Program, was published by Air Power Australia, an air defense think tank he founded. The paper was last updated in 2008. It's very interesting reading.  I will also point out that the author, Dr. Kopp, is not some cheezy internet blogger pulling nonsense out of his butt. He's a senior member of both the IEEE and the AIAA, and a working computer scientist and EWAR researcher.

He states:

In the US, the Defense Department launched its Assured Fuels Initiative (AFI) in 2001, with the aim of developing domestic sources of clean fuels, using coal and natural gas. This is an ambitious effort intended to break dependency on imported crude oil products. The US Air Force alone burns around 3 billion gallons of aviation kerosene annually, more than half the consumption of the whole US military machine.

Michael A. Aimone, the US Air Force assistant deputy chief of staff for logistics, recently commented 'Our goal is by 2025 to have 70 percent of our aviation fuel coming from coal-based sources'. This is an aggressive but clearly very achievable planning goal.

Conventional oil reserves with essentially be gone very soon—within decades. This is no secret except to those who don't want to think about it. For the Peak Oil doomsday theorists, this is the end of the trail for industrial civilization. Well, not so fast. Not quite.

You can't power a jet fighter or a tractor with coal. (Actually, you could a tractor but it would be ugly.) But there are many mature technologies for converting coal, oil shale, and natural gas to liquid fuels just as good as gasoline or diesel. Canada and China are both doing it today. China is investing heavily in this effort.

Kopp gives a good summary of the available technologies. He also makes several striking statements. Here's one:

In terms of coal reserves, the US is well positioned as it is ranked first globally with 26 percent, followed by Russia with 23 percent, China with 12 percent, and Australia with 8 percent. No less importantly, the US has large reserves of oil shale in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado, forming the Green River formation, which is estimated to contain around 1.5 trillion barrels of oil, cited as 'more than five times the stated reserves of Saudi Arabia'.

Natural gas as a potential feedstock for synthetic fuels is no less abundant, with Russia ranked first, the US ranked sixth, and Canada nineteenth.

Great news, huh?  We're out of the woods.  The sky isn't falling! 

Not so fast, there, Chicken Little.  You've got that nonsense in your head about "500 years of coal reserves," don't you?  That "500 years" is probably less than 50 when you start plugging in what might happen to demand.   And we're going to have to strip-mine a lot of the country to get at it.  Synthetic fuel production processes are dirty.  Coal mining is dirty.  Environmental concerns?  Forget those.  They're gone.  We can't afford them. We've got a greedy world to fight off, mouths to feed, and a landscape to rape.  You tree-huggers better shut up if you know what's good for you. 

If oil consumption goes up just 7 percent per year, that means it doubles in 10 years.  And we know that globally, it's going up a lot faster than 7 percent. 

Coal fuels most of the power grid in the eastern US, and coal and natural gas together fuel almost all of US electricity production.  Nuclear and renewable sources contribute tiny fractions to the total. That's not likely to change. Right now demand is essentially flat. But consider what happens to demand for coal and gas when we start wholesale conversion to synthetic liquid fuels. 

Let's be conservative and say that as we start a wholesale shift to synthetic fuels, demand for coal increases 10 percent per year for awhile.  That's not much, right?  That's a believable number.  Well, that means we have to double our coal production every 7 years.
Put another way, we will have to mine more coal in the next 7 years than we have so far in our entire history.  That's what "doubling time" means. 

If demand for coal rises 30 percent per year, for even a few years, that means coal production has to double every 70/50 = 2.3 years!   

Here's a last tidbit to consider.  Those nice Canadians have all that oil up there. Right now it looks like a lot, and they're happy to sell it to us. The party is going fine so far.  We buy more oil from Canada than from anyone else.  (Think about that Keystone pipeline again.)  But the US is a greedy energy pig, and one day soon the Canadians may realize that their oil reserves aren't really that big at all.  What happens then? 

Whose Oil Should We Use First?

The graphic above is from our friends at Wiki.  It shows the world's proven oil reserves.  Darker = more.  Let's assume this is reasonably accurate and close enough for our purposes.

First, it's important to understand that oil is running out quickly.  We're at peak world production now, meaning plus or minus perhaps five years.  During the latter part of this century world oil production will be a fraction of what it is today. We have increasing demand pursuing a finite resource and there's only one way that can end.  If you don't believe this, you don't understand exponential growth.  Go here and learn.  It's a little arithmetic lesson by physicist Al Bartlett. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&feature=related 

Of course, you can bat your eyelashes and titter something moronic about never being good at math.  Cute dosen't fix stupid, but that's okay.  You'll be happier if you don't know what's really going on.   

Oil is food.  Agriculture is the process of converting petroleum into food.  World population already exceeds the carrying capacity of the earth by at least 4 billion people. That's how many people eat today only because of oil production.  No oil, no food.  And there are lots more people arriving every day. 

A lot of us have been concerned about the levels of oil imports and the national security implications.  I made some noise about that here, the other day.  I've listened to T. Boone Pikens and wondered why the government isn't listening.  Well, I think I figured it out. 

Imagine you're elected President and you're suddenly confronted with what our intelligence planners know; oil is going to be very, very scarce in only a few decades.  Those intel folks understand exponential growth vs. finite resources every bit as well as Dr. Bartlett in his video.  From a national security standpoint, it's very important to be the last country standing with oil  It makes far more sense to hoard your own reserves now and buy foreign oil in todays dollars, which will be worth less tomorrow through inflation. We're still in deep trouble.  We're still running out.  But the rest of the world may run out before North America does.  We'll fend off mass starvation longer. We'll be able to defend ourselves longer. 

So why doesn't anyone talk about ths?   

Do you want to be a President or politician who stands up and starts telling America that the world really is running out of oil, and your children and grandchildren may well face starvation and a collapse of civilization as we know it?  Do you want to try to explain why we need population decline, not growth?  Or economic contraction rather than expansion? Welcome to recession, the new normal. Would anyone listen?  Is anyone listening to those who are saying it now? 

The data's all there, folks.  It's all available.  Do the math for yourself.  Every major news outlet fails to do the math, or else does the math and then lies for their own purposes. 

Don't drink the kool-aid.  Do the math yourself. 

Keystone XL Protest is Bone-Headed

I know I'm about to piss off some of my good friends with this.  I'm sorry.  I have to call them like I see them.

The facts:  The Keystone XL pipeline, when completed, will carry crude oil extracted from the Alberta tar sands to refineries in the U.S.  Pres. Obama has to sign off on the permit for the pipeline.  Congress is not directly in play on this one.  The protest effort, including a petition, protest, and civil disobedience at the White House, is underway this month.  Here are the details: http://www.tarsandsaction.org/

I think this protest effort is based on poor thinking, wrong conclusions, and generally dunder-headed analysis.  It's a misdirection of valuable energy and resources.  To wit:

We're stuck with a petroleum-fueled infrastructure and it's going to take time and a lot of fighting to change that. Canada and the U.S have been extracting crude from the Alberta deposits for years already.  That's not going to stop. If the US doesn't want the oil, the rest of the world, esp. Japan and China, will gladly buy it.  They already are.  But sure, let's dump the pipeline idea and buy more oil from Saudi Arabia...you know...that country that was complicit in the 9/11 attacks.  That's a really good idea, isn't it?  Why would we send our money to those pesky hockey-crazed Canadians when we can give it to a repressive monarchy that helped kill over 3,000 Americans and never stopped smiling?

Are you nuts?  Come on!  Get a grip, people!

It almost gags me to say this, but we need the oil industry.  They've murdered, robbed, and trashed the environment for almost 200 years.  They destroyed mass transit in America.   They need their fingers stomped on, and hard.  Better yet, let's nationalize them.  But we do need them.  There aren't any really good alternatives to petroleum fuels.  None. Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) is the best and closest technologically, but that comes with extraction problems and a carbon penalty, too. If you think electric cars are practical, you've never lived in snow country and you don't know anything about batteries.  I wish they were practical.  Maybe they will be. But they're not an answer now.  Not a practical, affordable one. You want to run cars on ethanol?  Check the grocery prices and think again.  Bio-diesel?  Any commercial drivers reading this?  I was until last year.  Put bio-diesel in a truck or bus that's been running the real stuff and let me know how that works for you.  And don't forget your cell phone or you'll be walking. 

Yes, we need to get rid of the oil-fueled infrastructure.  It's a save-the-planet issue, although I think it's already too late to save the climate.  If you want to protest something, work on that.  Or remember the war in Afghanistan?  Almost nobody gives a shit about that, and this fact alone convinces me that getting rid of the draft was a really bad idea.    Or work on getting our schizoid immigration non-system fixed.  Or figure out a solution to half our population being functionally illiterate. Spend your energy trying to stop the rapid slide of the US towards Third World Shithole status. 

I suggest that getting arrested in front of the White House over this issue has a lot more to do with Mr. McKidden's street cred as a protest organizer than it does with a pipeline that will get built anyway. 

Critical Thinking in the Deer Yard

In the last post I used deer as a metaphor, more or less in passing. For whatever reasons, I woke up this morning thinking about that. Maybe it's because I was an avid deer hunter for a couple of decades in central Minnesota, sitting in tree forts...errr... deer stands in cold, wind, snow, and silence while chickadees landed on my head and my rifle barrel. (I also got to be a pretty hot cribbage player.) Whitetail deer is a subject I know something about. I've read extensively and studied them in the field over many years. I've dissected well over a dozen specimens and studied their anatomy intently. (It's called field-dressing.) But it all came to an end one November morning circa 1995. I was up a tree, studying two big does through my rifle scope, They were 75 yards away, across a small ravine. I steadied on the largest. She was broadside to me and an easy shot. I was in the act of squeezing the trigger when I had “moment” and realized I didn't want to shoot anymore deer. I unloaded the rifle and climbed my sorry butt down out of the tree, and that was that. Don't ask me. I don't know. These things happen, I guess. Anyway, let's get on with the business at hand.

There isn't any accurate way to know how many whitetail deer there were in North America before the Euro-trash arrived, but it was certainly far fewer than it is today. Deer don't thrive in mature forest. There's not much to eat if the trees are big and there's little growing on the forest floor. Given a choice, deer prefer the margins between deep cover and fields or grassland. Logging and agriculture creates wonderful habitat for deer. (So does modern suburban residential development.) But deer were also very much in the human food chain, and by 1900 they were in danger of being hunted to extinction.

Nowadays the damn things have overrun a lot of the country.  They're a bane to farmers and gardeners, and a serious traffic hazard. We've eradicated many of their natural predators because we're too chickenshit to coexist with wolves and big cats. The only real predator deer have left in most places is us. And since most of us object to bullets and arrows flying around our neighborhoods, we aren't too effective at preying on them locally. Except with our cars. So in many parts of the US there are chronic local over-population problems. I live in the city, but along the Mississippi River bluffs, which are steep and heavily wooded. I watch deer prance across the street here almost every day. A couple of times I've had to stop my car in the street to let small groups of does and fawns cross.

Deer care about some of the same things we do; food, water, our children, staying warm and dry, and avoiding getting killed for as long as possible. And here in the north they face an energy crisis* every winter. As cold weather grinds on, there's less and less to eat, i.e. less and less energy to stay warm. If the snow gets deep, it takes more and more energy to look for less and less food. What do they do? They huddle up in refugee camps* called “deer yards.” That sounds vaguely pleasant and pastoral, but that's not the truth. Deer yards for many are no more than places to die. The food runs out, and they die slowly. Coyotes or wolves may take some, if there are wolves or coyotes available. Deer are strictly herbivores, so cannibalism doesn't come up they way it does for humans. For lucky individuals the snow pack will melt soon enough for them to make it. Or not.

Why deer yard up like this isn't settled science.** It's not hard-coded genetically. It's learned, adaptive behavior that has a survival value we don't fully understand. But while the behavior may be the best thing for the species, it's not necessarily the best choice for individual deer. They're smart, adaptable animals. But critical thinking isn't something they're good at and don't seem to be able to learn. Once yarded up, they tend to stay that way even when the future is obvious.

On the other hand, for us humans critical thinking is something we can learn, and as we've already noted, it's a good survival skill. As individuals, it serves us very well when we bother to do it. The trouble is, we don't seem to be able to do it in packs or herds. Unless we're under duress, we're lazy. If there happens to be a smart, strong Alpha who cares about the pack or herd more than his own skin, the critical thinking may get done and be acted on. The pack might thrive. The herd may eat well. But often that's not the case. Most of the time, when we make it through a winter. it's on the strength of social or economic momentum, or sheer dumb luck.

Just something for you to think about the next time you turn on your TV. And if you think you hear an odd noise in the woods, remember to look up.

* I try to flag metaphors with something obvious, but don't blame me if you miss any.

**Here's a good article on deer yarding if you're interested: http://www.deeranddeerhunting.com/biology/why-do-deer-starve-themselves-in-winter

3 Billion Seats, 9 Billion Tickets

The photo above is of Athens, Greece. It was taken from the ISS orbiting 400 km above. More about that in a little bit. 

In Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe there's a fictional rock band, Disaster Area, inspired by Pink Floyd. They're so loud that the audience listens from bunkers thirty seven miles away.  Their PA system violates stategic arms limitation treaties. Just doing their accounting and tax returns requires the invention of a new branch of mathematics. 

Most of us have probably been to a concert of some sort, and paid a lot of money for tickets.  So you can imagine if Diaster Area gives a performance and sells 9 billion ticketsm and when those folks start arriving, imagine there are only 3 billion seats inside those bunkers.  What do you suppose happens next?  Yeah...pretty ugly, I think.

World populations is expected to be over 9 billion by 2050.  Yes, the rate of growth peaked in 1989 and has declined every year since. But that doesn't mean much.  It's growing slower, but it's still growing.  The math is inexorable.  If it keeps growing, eventually the earth is full.

Take another look at Athens.

The actual carrying capacity of the earth for humans is unknown, but estimates are usually 2-3 billion.  Right now population is approaching 7.2 billion.  At the end of WW II it was about 2 billion--pretty near the carrying capacity of the planet. 

We currently convert energy, mostly from petroleum, into food and water.  That's how we make up the difference between carrying capacity and population.  It's not just fuel for tractors or fishing boats.  Think about all the industrial processing and fuel requited to turn Kansas wheat or Iowa corn or Chinese rice into something you or I can buy locally.  Meat, by the way, takes at least 100 times the energy input of rice or wheat.  Think about all the transportation, refrigeration, processing, reprocessing, packaging, the lights in the processing plants, the machinery, and getting the workers to and from work. 

Got it in your head?  Okay, now cut world oil production by half and increase demand by..oh...20 percent.   What do you suppose happens to the price of food in your local store?  In Athens? 

For some chilling reading try the Hirsch Report, prepared for the US D.O.E. in 2005.
http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf

Take another look at Athens, and consider that the planet isn't ever going to look like that.  The earth isn't going to ever "fill up" with people. 

Deer don't control their population, so nature does it for them.  You find them in the woods around here sometimes, usually in the spring.  Sometimes people feed them corn or deer pellets to get them through the months of deep snow and starvation, but a lot of folks have stopped doing that because the costs have risen so much, and the economy is so bad.  In severely over-populated areas the state encourages predition by humans, i.e. more deer hunting. 

Three billion seats, nine billion tickets.  It won't work.  That's six billion too many. For every three people on earth, two won't get a seat at the dinner table. 





 

On Romney, Obama and Roaches

Yesterday I wrote about the Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case, and the Orwellian notions that (1) free speech applies to corporate entities, and (2) giving someone money constitutes speech. That wasn't anything new to anyone who's been paying attention. Obama slapped the court around over this in his 2011 State of the Union speech, and that brought some short-lived media attention to the issue. But memories are pretty damn short. Yesterday Mitt Romney said, “Corporations are people, too.” and that's getting all sorts of media attention. But I haven't heard any of our alleged pundits connect the dots yet.

As usual, I find myself muttering, “WTF?” under my breath.

The heckler who called Romney out on that statement was right on the mark, but that's beside the point. This notion is a key piece of the Big Lie that's been peddled by what we now call conservatives since the founding of America. This notion of “corporate personhood” was very much on the table when the Constitution was written. Thomas Jefferson warned George Washington that we should, “crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government.” The first Supreme Court decision on this issue came in 1819. Now, almost 200 years later, it seems to be all but settled.

When politicians peddle lower tax rates for the “job creators” this issue is at the unspoken core of the argument.

If you don't think history is worth studying, here's a perfect example of why you're full of shit.

If you think American public education is designed to crank out obedient workers with very little capacity for critical thinking, you're right and this is a perfect example of why it's been deliberately designed to do just that. (It fails even at that limited goal, but that's another discussion.)

Romney defended his statement by saying that corporate profits go to “people.” Well, now Mitt, that's an abuse of logic worthy of Palin or Bachmann. And I don't know about Palin, but I'm pretty damn certain both Romney and Bachmann have visited this corporate personhood issue before. Bachmann is an attorney. Romney has a law degree from Harvard.

In theory, we could have a constitutional amendment to define, limit, or eliminate corporate personhood. If it were sold the right way, I think most Americans would jump all over it. But it won't ever happen because almost every elected official, of either party, is a tool of that aristocracy Jefferson warned Washington about in 1816, and anyone who supported such a thing would be squished like a roach under that aristocratic heel. Obama may rant about that Supreme Court decision in public, but he understands the issue and the fix better than most people in the country. He's a constitutional law professor, besides being President. But he's powerless, too. Just like the rest of us.

I didn't set out to write a political blog. If I write about politics a lot, it's because I don't know how the hell to keep my balance in this rolling flood of stinking brown slop. I've tagged myself a “liberal” all my life, but I don't even know what that label means anymore. For example, the recall elections last Tuesday in Wisconsin, my neighbor 20 miles to the east... Some of those political ads aired here. They were so devoid of meaningful content that they would have persuaded me of nothing except to stay home. I don't like organized labor any better than I like Koch Industries. Those two played Dueling Dollars, labor lost, and the public employees never had a chance.

But hey, that's nothing. Just wait until the house/senate uber-committee tries to negotiate a budget deal. We ain't seen nothin' yet. (And if you haven't rescued your 401k from the stock market yet, just sit back and try to enjoy the ride until you black out at 8 or 12 g's.) The best budget advice I've seen comes from a guy in Alaska named Jim Wright, who writes a wonderful blog at www.stonekettle.com:

You ever hear of old people before Social Security? No, no you did not. That’s right, Social Security causes old people! No Social Security, no old people. We’ll live forever! Get rid of Welfare and we’ll cure poverty too! Double Rainbow!


Blame isn't very helpful, but it feels good.  I blame the Supreme Court, at least for the moment. Socrates warned us that democracy was a bad idea and suggested we go with a group of philosopher-kings.  The SC is the closest thing we have, and they've saved our bacon more than once.  But this time they screwed the pooch big time. I refer, of course, to Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.  (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=08-205#other1)

The gist of the SC ruling here is that restricting campaign contributions by corporations violates freedom of speech.  Think about that a minute.  Is GE or Koch Industries entitled to freedom of speech?  Is giving someone money even "speech?" 

In the dissenting opinion, Justice Stevens says:

In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be managed and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters. The financial resources, legal structure, and instrumental orientation of corporations raise legitimate concerns about their role in the electoral process. Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.

A majority of the court didn't see it that way, and the floodgates were opened.  Justice Kennedy wrote the ruling.  It's about as long as Orwell's 1984, and it's similar in other ways, too.  You can read it at the link posted above if you're a masochist.

It's my sincere hope that as the budget battles and electioneering heat up, a great mass of Americans will exercise their right to self-defense, shoot their TVs, and toss the carcasses into the streets. 

And I swear... If we elect another Texan to the White House I'm walking north and never looking back.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

"In God We Trust" might be the official US motto, but it's not the national slogan.

Snap, crackle, pop.

Plop plop, fizz fizz...
Tastes great, less filling.
Change you can believe in.

Slogans have power. A few words evoke a whole constellation of ideas, memories and feelings.

Stay with me, now... Radio operators use a “phonetic alphabet” because letters and some numbers sound too much alike. So in the usual phonetic alphabet the letter “a” becomes “alpha”, “b” becomes “bravo”, “9” becomes “niner”, and so on. And WTF becomes “whiskey tango foxtrot.”

In 2007 photographer Ashley Gilbertson published Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War. I heard Gilbertson say in an interview that he used that title because he heard this constantly on the radio channels in Iraq. “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” Many of the combat personal were young and, safe to say, familiar with text messaging and the internet, so “WTF” was already a natural comment/question for them. Add to this mix the f-bomb problem. The single word that's still the potentially most offensive, at least in the US, is “fuck.” I don't blame the FCC for this, but they could have fixed it years ago with a little free speech. No big deal, perhaps, but as with all things naughty, WTF and it's phonetic equivalent is a little more evocative for it.

Muzafer Sherif, the famous pioneer social psychologist, said, “(S)logans catch almost spontaneously when (and not before, because only a few might notice them) they stand out as short-cut characterizations of the direction and temper of the time and situation. … (S)logans are short-cut expressions arising in confused and critical situations. This does not mean that these short-cuts necessarily express the true and objective solution of the problems they are facing.” (1)

Short-cut characterization of the direction and temper of the time. WTF? You think?

Exactly right. It's perfect.

1. Muzafer Sherif, "The psychology of slogans." Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1937, 32, 450-461 archived on the web at: http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Sherif/Sherif_1937b.html

Faith

This entry is about why I think faith is dangerous, but let me clarify something first. Full disclosure here.  I'm not an atheist, new, old, or otherwise.  We know more about physics and cosmology than any civilization, ever, but there's a lot more that we don't know. Nobody has any firm notion of what gravity really is, or time, or how many dimensions may actually exist.  Read about string theory or quantum mechanics a bit, and existence suddenly seems pretty strange and confounding.  So I, for one, am very cautious about drawing conclusions on the nature of existence.  If you need a label, call me a provisional agnostic in search of data.

Faith is, by definition, belief without substantiation.  There's nothing wrong with believing whatever you like.  Imaginary friends are, for the most part, harmless. But if you act on the basis of irrational beliefs, you become a danger to self and others, or at least very annoying.

If you tell me you believe thus-and-so, that's fine. But if you want me to believe the same thing, you need to offer evidence. And I'm talking about empirical, quantifiable evidence, not rhetorical arguments or personal narratives. I don't believe anything simply because someone tells me it's true. If I were that foolish, I would have been dead decades ago.   If you claim prayer can effect events, show me your data.  If you claim people who worship your god make more money, show me the numbers.  If you claim you have miraculous healing powers, I've got a job for you. Claims of that kind should be pretty easy to substantiate. 

If you tell me I have an immortal soul, there's no way to test that, is there?  Well, I guess there is, but there's no way to recover any data. There are lots of stories and myths and anecdotal narratives, but that's all.  

Life is difficult and always terminal. Bad things happen for no apparent reason. The universe is a dangerous place. We're members of an inherently violent species that's always in heat, and whose behavior is erratic. We struggle to find some predictability; some reassurance that we aren't going to die momentarily and that this struggle and pain of life is all worthwhile.  Our minds abhor chaos because chaos is dangerous. So if we can't see patterns in the world around us, we invent them. This seems to be the pattern for every life form we know of that has any sort of self-awareness. It's in our wetware.  Ink blot tests and superstitious conditioning are two examples.

(http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~psych200/unit3/32.htm)

There are things I'd like to believe are true. I'd like to believe kindness, empathy and compassion are rewarded. I'd like to believe evil never wins. I'd like to believe I'll see my dead mother again someday. I'd like to believe I'm going to win the lottery on Saturday. I'd like to believe my social security benefit will arrive every month, adjusted for inflation as needed, until the day I die. It doesn't hurt me to believe some of these things, and may make me feel better. Believing others can only hurt me. There's no evidence I'll see my mother again, but it doesn't hurt me to entertain that idea occasionally.  But spending money today that I'm sure I'll win tomorrow could land me in jail.  And not stashing away a little money every month, for as long as I can, would be just plain stupid. 

Evidence is important. Faith is dangerous. If you can convince a man that he'll have it made in an afterlife and you make him miserable enough in the here-and-now, you can make him do anything, like become a suicide bomber.  Create enough unreasoning faith in government and you'll get people eager for battle against enemies real or imaginary, or against each other.

Now go watch the news for 30 minutes and tell me I'm wrong.

Video Games Destroying Civilization Again!

I get really annoyed when people take some issue of  the moment and promote their position by twisting cause and effect.  Here's a perfect case in point. I just saw a post on one of the forums I graze about the supposed ill effects of violent video games.  The poster cited this: http://ithp.org/articles/violentvideogames.html

"In summary, there are good theoretical reasons to believe that violent video games are even more harmful that violent TV programs or films. We also have empirical data showing this (Polman et al., 2008). In this study, children were randomly assigned to play a violent video game or watch someone else play it. There was also a nonviolent video game control condition. The results showed that boys who played a violent video game were more aggressive afterwards than were boys who merely watched."

Yes, well, Hitler had "good theoretical reasons" and "empirical data", too.  But thanks for reassuring us that you really are scientists. 

Look at art and literature from any time or place, and what are the two universal themes?  Sex and violence. Hopefully they're treated in ways that shed light on the human condition, or caution us about what lurks in our own hearts, but that's another matter.  The content of an artwork may or may not be explicitly violent, but it very often is.  No matter how you parse it, in the end we humans are a violent species that's always in heat. We probably made weapons and killed sexual rivals before we made fire.  There's a layer of culture on top of that behavior, but it's always proven to be a thin layer.

Art is a mirror.  If the art is popular or lasting, that means a lot of people find it a better mirror.

Video games are not art?  Think again.  You can argue that they're bad art, just like most popular music or television programming is; just as most published novels or films are.  But the only thing that differs among any of these media is ease of access and the immediacy of the experience.  Video games have characters and plot lines, just as any film or novel does.  Identifying with a character involves more than it does with novels or film, and the player has a degree of freedom in helping create his/her character and drive the plot.  Character identification is an active process, not simply a passive one.  But it's the same process.

The Catcher in the Rye has gotten some press for being a favorite read of psychopaths and killers, perhaps most recently John Lennon's killer, Mark David Chapman. Does anyone seriously want to suggest that the novel had any causative effects on him?  Of course not!  The novel speaks to millions up millions of readers who feel alienated. Most readers aren't present or future psychopathic killers, but it's hardly a surprise if a small number are. 

If you don't like what you see in the mirror, don't blame the mirror.  Don't confuse cause and effect.

Dump Obama? Do I Care?

Last night I was carousing with some of my pinko socialist cronies on-line. The most reasonable group consensus seemed to be that we should work for Obama's re-election and hope for the best during a second term. In other words, let's hope he somehow becomes willing to stand up for some sort of social and economic justice. But in the cold light of morning I'm not so sure.

Barack Obama isn't a liberal. Hell, he's barely a Democrat if you stand him up next to Harry Truman or Lyndon Johnson. That's okay. He never pretended to be a liberal. But he did promise transparency. Remember his line about putting the national health care debate on CSPAN? As soon as he took office he made a U-turn. He cut his teeth on Chicago politics, and does it show? It sure does. “National health care” became the Chicago Plan, brokered behind multiple smoke screens, and now he's doing it again with the deficit ceiling negotiations. America, prepare to be sold down the river one more time. (That would be the Illinois River—the one that turns green now and then, and has dissolved a lot of corpses over the years.)

Sell-Out No. 1 – No cost-of-living increases to Social Security benefits.

Here's a site which calculates inflation of the U.S. dollar by a number of methods:
http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/

If you receive a monthly SS benefit today of $1600, you're not living high on the hog unless you have a lot of other income. Now let's roll that amount backwards 15 years, using the above calculator. In 1995, the relative worth of $1,600.00 from 2010 is:

	$1,120.00	using the Consumer Price Index
	$1,180.00	using the GDP deflator
	$1,090.00	using the unskilled wage
	$1,010.00	using the Production Worker Compensation
	$941.00	using the nominal GDP per capita
	$809.00	using the relative share of GDP

You can see why the wankers in Washington would love to amputate any COLA from Social Security. The long-term impact is enormous.

And by the bye, it's interesting to go to that website and plug in numbers from your own life. For example, if your rent in 2000 was $700 per month, that translates to at least $860/month today by the lowest of those calculation methods.

Sell-out No. 2 – Unfunded Foreign Wars

Yes, Obama always “owned” the Afghanistan thing, but he also tripped all over himself to tell us how he wasn't “nation-building” and how this wasn't Vietnam all over again. Well, guess what? Osama bin Dead for awhile now, and his organization left town long before. Why haven't we? I know why, and so do you. Too many Important People are making too much money. It's $10 billion per month x 12 months x how many years? I'd love to have a pizza contract for that game!

The President is the Commander in chief. He can order the troops home any time. He doesn't need Congress for that. He just needs the courage, but I don't think it's in him.

Someone needs to explain to me why, exactly, I should care whether Obama is re-elected. He re-upped on the Patriot Act. He gave all the lifeboats to Wall Street and left the rest of us to suck seawater. He short-circuited any chance for real national health care. He relentlessly feeds the military-industrial complex while helping stake the space program. Now he's willing to gut Social Security and Medicare, which I've paid into all my life and now rely on almost totally. He's a sweet, smooth talker, but it's all bullshit. Bush Jr. was dangerous because he's a stupid tool. Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al are dangerous because they're fascists. Mitch Romney is dangerous because of his vanity and hubris. Michelle Bachmann is dangerous because she's a flake with cunning and hubris. Tim Pawlenty is yet another fascist bully. (I'm from Minnesota. Trust me on this.) But are any of them worse than Obama? Pretend I'm from Missouri.

Here's someone who believes living to age 150 is just around the corner.

(Cue Rod Serling)

Meet Aubrey de Grey, formerly of London and currently on a quest to revise the most basic fact of his existence, his own mortality. He will soon discover that time is more than what he makes of it. Next stop; the Twilight Zone.

Well, okay. Maybe that's a little over-dramatic. Or maybe not. Disney notwithstanding, The Sorcerer's Apprentice has proven itself to be a cautionary tale to be taken seriously. Mess with the Unseen Forces at your own risk. You have to live with spirits you summon.

In the future de Grey sees, the ravages time commits on our bodies will be unraveled at the doctor's office and we'll be able to live for 150 years, and maybe indefinitely. The effects of aging will even be reversible. So if you're say, 60, when this wonderful technology hits the street, the good doctors will be able to rewind you to the biological equivalent of 25.

This sounds just ducky, but I'm a little worried. I have concerns. My concerns manifest on several levels.

The human population is already 3-4 times what the planet's current ecosystem can sustain and it continues to grow. Since we humans show no sign of being willing to control our own numbers, nature will soon solve the problem the way nature always solves it, and a bunch of us living especially long lives will only make the medicine more bitter. And if it actually prolongs our ability to breed, so much the worse. A lot of us are going to have to go away soon. Let's not make things any worse than they already are.

The technology de Grey talks about will obviously not be available to everyone. It will no doubt be very expensive. Who will the gatekeepers be? What standards will they impose? This could be a tool for control and repression on a level never before seen.

That's all serious stuff, but here's my big concern:

Time is merely the perceived order of events. For us humans, time without memory is meaningless. And at least for me personally, time becomes less and less linear as I age, and my whole temporal landscape can shift without warning. An event of 50 years ago can suddenly seem more real than the breakfast I ate five minutes ago, until the phone rings and it all shifts again. This is endlessly entertaining, despite the occasional discomfort it can spawn. But I suspect it's also my mind's way of indexing large volumes of data; tying up loose ends, reconnecting loose fragments of files; my wetware's version of a disk optimization routine. I don't want to mess with that process.

I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid dying might hurt and I'd rather not be there when it happens, but the bare fact of my own mortality doesn't bother me. I certainly prefer it to any myth of an afterlife or rebirth I've ever heard. I don't want to roll around heaven all day, nor rot in hell, nor find myself looking at the universe through the eyes of a salamander or sewer rat. I'm quite sure I wasn't Catherine the Great in a past life, and I don't want to be the queen of Titan in a next life. And I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way. We're just not that important in the big scheme of things.

(Images courtesy of Wikipedia. )

Show us the math!

The state government here in Minnesota is currently in Day 6 of a shutdown.  The President and Congress are locked in a dance of death over the federal budget.  Personally, I blame all parties. A plague on all your houses!  You were hired to govern and you're not doing your jobs.  You're only campaigning.  If you have the courage, here's how to proceed to fix the problems.  It's very simple. 

Present specific solutions supported by rigorous math. Don't tell us about your personal values and priorities, show us what they are.  We value the things we spend our money on. That's true of individuals and nations equally. Don't tell, show.  Once more for clarity:

1. Do the math.
2. Show your work.
3. Present your solutions.

If you can't do that, shut up and resign. We the people will be better off without you.

Kill Your TV (Part 23)

Everyone who works in the criminal justice system, in any capacity, should have the experience of being arrested and jailed at least once. The weight of the whole system landing on top of you will change you forever. The sense of being a bug in the shadow of a shoe is unmistakable. I'm here to testify.

I was lucky. I didn't do it, the charges were dropped, and I was only held for 24 hours. Maybe, if you go through it a few times, you get used to it, but I doubt it. I'm betting you just get ground down and down.  Judges, trial lawyers, prosecutors and police don't give a damn about "truth." They only care about winning, or at least covering their own asses.  Cops arrest the wrong people all the time. Many "innocent" victims of the criminal justice system have spent decades in prison, and many were executed, because the system doesn't care about truth.

Casey Anthony, accused killer of her child and accused low-life slut, was acquitted of murder charges yesterday in Florida. Media pundits flaunted their astonishment and villagers outside the courthouse waved torches and pitchforks.  As usual, most people succumbed to simplistic thinking and false choices.  Of course, "not guilty" doesn't mean "innocent."  It doesn't even imply it. In this case the state didn't even prove there was a murder.  Nancy Grace, self-crowned  Maggot Queen of the 7x24 news cycle, seemed very sure about everything despite a shortage of facts.  Thankfully, the jury in this case was made of better stuff. 

"But what about poor little Caylee?," you may cry. 

Caylee is dead.  Nothing any of us do or say can effect her in the least.  Any notion of "justice for Caylee" is just code for revenge, and we do love our revenge.  We lust after it and roll in it, and this truth isn't lost on media decision-makers.  That's why they lavished so much money and attention on the Anthony trial.  If you needed another reason to turn off CNN, NBC, Fox, and the rest...  But you didn't. Not really. You already had plenty of reasons.