The Meltdown

White house is on the run for cover. Someone's got to be a scapegoat for the Iraq war, and they just happen to lack the volunteers. That's right, the time has come, and looming elections may be the cause. Republicans lost both House and Senate over Iraq and their own little indecencies, and while the president remained in his office, they, his majesty's devoted puppies were thrown off to the sidelines. Merely distancing didn't work at elections. Now they are ready to bark.

Republican presidential hopefuls are not going to run on the "cut and run denial" strategies. Even if they manage it, their ranking will be sinking from day one in the White House. They need a reset point, somebody to blame for going there in the first place.

Finally, the media knows people are bored. They need a new story. And yes, they do go with the approval ranking. And yes, they are terribly guilty themselves. Finally, even democrats seem to have regained their bite.

Alberto Gonzales scandal and looming Paul Wolfowitz girlfriend/hooker scandal are taking huge chips off the invincible administration, but these seem to have been merely a warm-up.

Condi The Terrible is being subpoenaed by Congress to explain developments leading to the Iraq war. She so far refuses. Dennis Kucinich tries to impeach Dick Cheney for misleading the nation, yes, for going to Iraq. George Tenet wrote the book spreading the blame as far from his pity ass as possible. Come thinking about it, it takes some time to write a book. Former chief spy has been preparing. When some folks from intelligence wrote a four pages long open letter accusing Tenet of basically being a coward, CNN puts the news on the front page, giving enormously long and multiple citations including the statement known to any kindergartener the world over - drum roll - Saddam hated Osama.

It was this very CNN beaming into nation's televisions bullshit campaign fed to them by the administration. These were the same people repeating that Saddam is essentially bin Laden's ally. These very same people never went ahead and aired what they or their analytics must have known rock hard. Saddam Hussein has always perceived Osama bin Laden as a major threat. He always feared an islamic revolution.

The fact that everybody is so energetic at finger pointing will only speed the things up. Once the republican crowd feels the weakness, everybody will be on lookout for a political opportunity. I cannot wait for the heckuva fun this will be. Wont fix Iraq though.

Columbine Lives On

Three dead at a mall in Kansas City. This will take the pressure off the Koreans, but certainly does not help the issue. These things are happening fast enough for a perpetual mourning, and of course nobody really asks why this happens. Everyone's busy being respectful to somebody not sure who. For example, one of my friends has a personal theory that mental illnesses of all kinds tend to get exacerbated in the spring.

Manhunt

Just saw a shoplifter at Target. I was picking toiletries and staring at hundred-bucks toothbrushes as I noticed this simple-looking casual-dressed dude staring at the side shelf. I had much more to stare at, but he wouldn't go away, peaking at a choice of about ten odd items. Then he produced a walkie-talkie and said "... OK I got ...", pulling something from the shelf. This dude clearly needed a better training.

What he was really doing was a discount-store type James Bond thing. He was peaking at and hiding from another dude, two aisles away along in his sight. He was the security. By then I broke the hundred-dollar toothbrush stupor and was painfully trying to find antiperspirant, running between the aisles. You just never find these things when you actually need them. This is when I heard the security dude say "... he put something in his shirt ... OK now he put something in his pants ... " and indeed, that's what the fella was doing. The black guy, perhaps in his late teens of early twenties, in typical black-guy attire, except the pants high enough to actually move around. His moves were casual and plastic, and even though he wasn't particularly hiding, you wouldn't tell right away that he has been stuffing himself up.

The security guy was quite tense. It is strange that he had to air every move instead of just following all the way to the checkout. Now at any cost he had to avoid scaring the fella. He was just doing his job, but from the gaze in his eyes you could tell he was on a hunt. It was white guy hunting down the black guy, twenty-first century way.

In a completely unrelated development, I noticed that organic kiwis have much longer hairs.

Did You Fuck Her?

The fallout from the 'D.C. madam' scandal started today with some dude Randall Tobias resigning from his post. While we'll never know how this started, this is the season opener of one of the best scandals to hit the D.C. so far. Everybody's happy to learn some of the republicans are not gay. Funny enough, nobody is mentioning the family implications of this. Will the big shot's wifes dump them or are they in it for the money?

Ann Coulter Has A Humster in Her Head

Listen to the crazy bitch say "twelve days a week".

Second Try

An Earth-like planet was finally found in Libra constellation, and not too far, in a sense that it's actually not completely off the books.

New 'super-Earth' found in space

Questions are already asked about possibility of discovering life there. How lame. The question is not whether there's life, the question is how do we get it there.

Second Try

An Earth-like planet was finally found in Libra constellation, and not too far, in a sense that it's actually not completely off the books.

New 'super-Earth' found in space

Questions are already asked about possibility of discovering life there. How lame. The question is not whether there's life, the question is how do we get it there.

Year 2020

Applicants must present two bionics IDs and have at least five Google ID Level A hits.

Double

It was a sad day on 22nd - birthday of one of the first of the bloody dictators of the twentieth century, Vladimir Ulyanov aka Lenin. He killed mercilessly, draw the country into a civil war and terrorized the population. He broke up the Russian Empire and established communists' rule in what became the Soviet Union. He said he was ready and willing to sacrifice half the population if that helps to establish communism for the other half. Got pretty good at the former, but failed with the latter, nearly returning to pure capitalism with what was called NEP (New Economic Policy, that's right), once the country ended on a brink of the final economic collapse. Numbers died during his rule. Backbone of society, down to school teachers, craftsman and small owners, priests of all variety were killed or incarcerated and then killed anyways. Richies fled the country. It was during his rule that Stalin began to rise to power, and eventually took over from Lenin. It was his regime that spawned bloody regimes all over Asia. That Korean shorty is his distant though impotent political relative. After he died, Lenin's brain was preserved, sliced thin and carefully studied for signs of communistic greatness by the very regime that he had created. His skin was stuffed and placed for warship in a Red Square mausoleum. You can still come to Moscow visit the great leader of Russia, any day. Macabre communist motto went "Lenin lived, Lenin lives, and Lenin will live forever"

Just in that line, I was surprised to observe a couple on the bus, wearing buttons with Lenin's picture on Sunday, obviously celebrating the occasion. I also previously ran into hardcore socialists, praising Lenin as a near superhero. To them, he's just a political leader, with his own mistakes and one of the great leaders of their movement. They show no judgment or knowledge about his rule. They use the fact that this was all in some far-away country to excuse him from his doings. They use the fact that he was opposed to Stalin's becoming the ruler to whitewash his action and distance him from his own doings. Hmmm think for a moment here, one dictator not so happy with someone else taking over.

American socialists with their praise for Lenin are a grand example of people lost without the least bit of a sense for humanity or compassion for the humankind. That's what really makes them not so special, after all. There are so many politicians and their followers claiming themselves full of morale and shit, but lacking a very basic respect for their fellow human beings. It just doesn't show.

On a brighter side, Sunday was also the first month since I started my blog.

13 People Indicted In $3 Million Credit Card Fraud

That's right, a group of just thirteen people are accused of stealing three mils by producing fake credit cars. Waiters scanned customers' credit cards and then passed this to the ring leaders to make the cards. It occurs to me that this is a very small number of people for quite a chunk of money - sounds better then a bank robbery! Modern technology brings us a highly efficient crime.

Earth Day

Use your bike today :) In case nobody noticed, Google has a reminder right there for you
Despite being unphysical, nothing screams "melting" better then an iceberg with receded underside.

Iceberg means ice mountain, from Norwegian. Wont be too long before there's a Cali slang word for these things.

The Great Move-In Generation

It occurs to me that all the futuristic images of the super-duper green living that are being propagated as the vision for our future are as useless as the grim variety of the baked-and-smogged supercities if we don't act.

As we fail to meet our energy demand, one of the things that will have to change is where and how we live. Hours-long commuting will have to go rather soon. People will have to move closer to work or work remotely. Well it's not just any place where you'll be moving in. You'll be moving in with other people. That's right, creating living space requires enormous effort and energy. That means moving back in time - to the times when there were such thing as two-person house.

So this got to be the image to get the lazy America moving. Crowded living room, no personal bedrooms, and forget those long showers. It's either this tomorrow or go greener today.

Driving Visitors

I installed Google Analytics script into my blog and see how many people stop by, and from where (that information comes from your IP address which can be located down to about a city). The first shocker is that I get visitors from all across the globe and from all over the North America. No major cities in the US, just a single hit from Los Angeles.

No one really comes back, and I conclude that they come with blogger's "Next Blog" feature or something similar. In fact when I use it a lot myself, I get a spike in visitors. Looks like a way to give a little boost to traffic! I wonder how did you get to this page yourself.

Greenest Of Them All

The Bush Administration's unparalleled financial, international and domestic commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions is delivering real results.

EPA Administrator Dave Johnson

That's right, bushies are trying to hijack the environmental issue. How could he physically open his mouth and say this bullshit? On the second thought, that's a white house appointee right there. If they spend a day without trashing some rule protecting our planet, that's unparalleled commitment right there. Sort of like a day without a pretzel.

University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus was partially evacuated for a bomb threat today. No bomb was found. Talking to people who guarded the police line, the rumor is that this was there were five bomb threats across the nation yesterday alone. That's right, maniacs from across the country are vastly stimulated by all the attention the VT story has got. There's not a mention of the bomb threats on any TV network.



There is however a mention of Cho Seung-Hui's final video. It is not on YouTube yet, but you simply got to go and watch it on CNN's front page. See how this dickhead compares himself with Jesus. Christians will scream that this proves that he was touched by devil, or some sort of bullshit like that. What this really illustrates is that Christians tent to be crazy, certainly not less than the average folks. Which they would deny 'cuz that would put an interesting light on all the divine revelations. Oh never mind.

This Week's Best Video

The Virginia Tech was not a nerd, but a plain-out psycho. He wrote plays so sick that he was removed from his class and taught one-on-one by his English teacher, as told by the CNN. What an utter bullshit.

As the story goes, the teacher informed the University administration, but they said the dude was protected by the first amendment. Nonsense, they just did not want to deal with it. He was not writing it elsewhere, he was writing this as a class assignment. Class assignments are graded. Why couldn't he collect D's in his courses and drop out?

Instead, she went for the trouble teaching him one-on-one, so that other students would not get terrified by his crap. He'd sit there in sunglasses and give her one-word answers. What is this some fucking kindergarten? If the student refuses to perform, is not learning and his presence in the classroom does not benefit anyone else, that student moves on to try himself elsewhere, perhaps with greater success. That's what's called a college dropout.

Why did they keep him? That's because the college system has been completely pussified. The faculty are pussies, the students are pussies and of them biggest pussies and the engine of it all are student's baby-boomer parents.

Faculty are supposed to represent school's academic and moral backbone. Imagine a University in which each professor has a "veto" right - he or she can expunge a student from the school, with no cause, once in his or her carrier. Or make it once in a decade. Or add the condition that that professor must have had that student in his/her class. Now imagine that was your school. Puking already? That's because you a total pussy, as well. With all and any explicit and implicit limitations (peer pressure first of all), this would mean that students have to have some self control, and the sole thought of that is unbearable.

Similarly irresponsible was the administration, not ready to deal with the problem and hence not ready to be held responsible for its decisions. Similarly the professor, with all my condolences, was simply doing a sort of damage control and trying to just get this guy through, quite unsuccessfully.

C'mon, admitting a mentally ill person to a university is the same as taking a physically disabled person on a sports team. Utter nonsense, that is. That's what "dis-ability" means. You can certainly be a fulfilled individual, but you are not able to do just any activity. For example, epileptics should not play certain computer games or risk severe attacks.

The shooter's identity is known, and he's a foreigner. South Korea named Cho Seung-hui was studying English and yesterday he went ahead and killed a bunch of people. It is interesting how the White House is on board of all this. Asians will undoubtedly be hated for this, even though there certainly are no school shootings in Korea. That's because everybody hates nerds.

For A Little Relaxation

Here's an amusing clip, I first found it on Daniel Thompson's blog. Instruments are 3D animated. The motion literary makes them come alive, and that's your original meaning of the word!. They did it so well, each instruments' character stands out - and that's quite a deed.

Your Friend Will Take You Down

Be afraid, be very afraid. Here's a piece from a mass email sent out by a vice pres of a big ten school, titled "Today's tragedy at Virginia Tech":

Unfortunately, the best planning and preparation in the world are sometimes not enough to prevent random acts of violence. That is why it is so important for students, faculty and staff to pay attention to their friends, their surroundings and observe appropriate security protocols. If you observe potential risks to safety and security, please don't hesitate to report it to the University ... Police Department by calling 911.

That's right, this morning's bloody massacre is a "random act of violence", and that's your fault. You haven't been watching your friends, buddy, and you did not obey the "security protocols", whatever that shit might be. Watch them. Be suspicious. Be formal. Obey. Only police can help. You cannot prevent it. You may not think.

Fuck that shit. I have a friend at Virginia Tech. Is this his friends who did it? Did he not not obey some fucking protocols? Go shoot yourself.

Deadly shooting at Virginia Tech, 33 dead

Virginia Tech woke up to gunshots this morning at quarter past seven. An account of the story is on CNN. The horror of the people barricading themselves from the shooter must have been unspeakable, and so the sadness of the parents and the loved ones. Read on once you have digested the story.

The suspect was a stereotypical Asian nerd gone postal (perhaps after pulling an all-nigher?):

"He was, I would say, about a little bit under six feet tall, young looking, Asian, dressed sort of strangely, almost like a boy scout, very short-sleeved light, tan shirt and some sort of ammo vest with black over it."

Isn't this story a little deja vu? Yes, even though this is the record shooting so far. The tech college kids are ahead of the high-schoolers, and of college shootings an Asian pinhead is ahead of them all. Nothings special in all this. Thirty tragedies is as bad as twenty. Extensive media coverage will bring attention of the future psychos. "Nucular" safety measures in schools and now perhaps at universities across the country will help to spend the money but wont stop future killings. America looses its memory and forgets its way. The way to dig down to the cause, to remedy if the cause cannot be fixed, and at all times to remain efficient and sincere about its goals.

After all these years, there is no explanation of why this happens. No studies are made public, there isn't a good public discussion. All that's said is "the boy had a good heart, we would never imagine; wait now that we think about it, he was a little wacko". Perhaps the truth is just too hard to swallow. What's even harder to swallow is the public that does not demand the answers and just tugs along - till the next time. If this incident gets a wider attention, some stupid PC story will be made up to make us happy. After that, it will be PC-illegal to question the cause of the shootings at all.

People seem unwilling to join about the cause. They either feel guilty or take it as entertainment. To help raise the awareness and keep the memories alive, there really got to be a ribbon for this. So that was my take on it.

Simulation at fingertips

Here's a peculiar video about computer simulations integrated with an awesome video interface.



In fact, tailoring special physics courses to computer game programmers has been an issue for a while now. They would do the stuff similar to this video, but mostly in gaming environment - trying to make it as [un]natural as possible. It will be great when this will become a mature technology. Too bad that people that are actually expected to know their stuff will be tempted to use a toy simulation like this. I call this toy simulation because the actual scientific computing involves quite complicated algorithms for unsolved problems, highly tuned for efficiency and usually ran on a supercomputer or a cluster. Fancy software but no fancy interfaces there.

Relevant for everyone is the part where the computer guesses the shapes and special marks to interpret them as certain objects and properties. It may well be that the way is being paved for a better computer interfacing, of the sci-fi movies sort. Toshiba's TablePC technology may turn out to be an early bird for these. Goodbye keyboards?

Just got from a panel at the U - "Do Organized Religions Suppress Women's Rights?". The panel didn't really work coherently, and there was little common ground to be found, and little discussion on the subject matter. Most everybody simply cited some great equality passages from their scriptures and named fictional important women figures in the religion's history.

Muslim chicks clad in linens head-to-toe boldly claimed Islam does not oppress women's right whatsoever, that's all a thing of the past. You could literary see how submissive and immature these women (girls?) were. Apparently they just don't get it.

The only standouts and perhaps the only true believers there sure enough were two Christian chicks from the "Women of Virtue" organization. Both are converts. Suzi Sunderman is a self-described former lesbian of the butch variety. Juliane Moch was a hardcore bondage fan. They sat at the center, a blond and a brunette, with hair of the same shoulder length, identical style jackets and t-shirts and a hint of being overweight on their bodies. They are the same now, faceless stamps of a cristian identity model.

No big surprise they found what they wanted in Christianity. Jesus was obviously gay, and those trips to the lake with a bunch of dudes look really fishy now that the "Brokeback Mountain" is out. The whole crucifixion is plain hard-core BDSM.

Neither of the "virtual" ladies was able to get the questions read out by the host, and had to write them down first. They've obviously been emotionally disturbed for most of their lives. Still they were bold enough to preach to the perfectly stable audience. Feeling of a superiority so Christian indeed.

The dirty secret they did not know about was that they could not preach to the sane audience. Both tried the standard Christian approach of telling their very own and very personal, though not very original, sin-fast-and-find-Jesus and live-happy-thereafter stories. The story breaks, they cannot find the words and there's no real emotion coming through. That is all because of a dirty little thing - they let a shadow of doubt and criticality into their minds - they actually tried thinking about their faith, if only for a moment. The room is full of people of various religions and of outright atheists. Audience meets them with straight faces and they cannot help but start thinking who are these people and what you can say to convince them. That's the trap right there - they reflect on their own beliefs, and you just don't do that if you want to remain a Christian. Certainly you got to shut down your brains completely if you want to preach.

I'd wish this was a start for the virtual ladies, but I doubt it will, and that's just too bad.

Coffee Experiment

It is the second consequent day of the coffee experiment, and it's starting to feel real. A sense of missing something really important in life, a very personal and irreversible loss - and I am only doing this for a month! I am sluggish and feel really inefficient, and a puny voice in my head says I really should get on top of things. Just have a cup. I'm keeping far from coffee shops and coffee machines of any kind.

A dull pain in my knees and the lower back, but just the right side. I think its my kidney. I fell asleep during quite an interesting talk today, and with my head bending backwards over my back launched a headache. Must have looked really funny. That's two tylenols down, no caffeine.

I am starting to eat more, and that may be a problem. Still it looks like I am making it. The withdrawal peaks somewhere between days 3 to 5, and I am somewhere at 2½, with Monday hiatus. Once you get to this point, you gain momentum and feel really determined to make it.

I had a coffee-free Sunday past weekend. I like coffee and have been drinking it in various forms for a long time now. The problem is, I've got to the point of drinking it instead of water. Evenings have long been a taboo - that's the best thing I've ever done to my day rhythm, but other then that I would use any opportunity to down a dose. Limiting did not work. I had to stop drinking my office nearly-free nearly-coffee, and that meant taking from home - cold, vented and often forgotten, or buying from Startbucks - but I have a much better use for the buck.

So this Sunday I just did not start my dripper, and went without coffee for the whole day. Sounds easy enough, but now that I think about it, I probably did not have a coffee-free day in at least five years. That's right, not a single day!

It felt OK, slow and even a little lethargic, perhaps a little disoriented. I was still enthusiastic enough to go out and later watch a movie, and make plenty of calls. Nothing like a withdrawal, really. It hit me in the night, right in base of my skull, strong enough a headache to wake me up. So Monday morning was Excedrin (that has plenty of caffeine by itself, so that broke the abstinence) and a whole lot of coffee. Today, I did it again, and I'll keep the pills ready and my fingers crossed.

On Saturday, my page was visited by the first three visitors. One from Virginia, one from Neuenwege in north-west Germany, and one from Manila. This is quite an amazing demographics. While these people probably got here by some sort of a random blog pick and are unlikely to come back, welcome nonetheless! You are the first visitors to my page other then myself :)

The sailors are happily back home, and now we know they've been tortured. Here's how serious they are. Notice their brand new uniforms. These guys seem to change their clothes as often as fashion models. Well, see how angry they've been while in captivity. Looks like dudes simply got scared shitless that they'll have to stay in Iranian prison with a bunch of hairy locals, and were ready for anything. That scared without anybody extinguishing cigarette butts on their asses, not even being piled naked or made to masturbate in front of the camera. You know, the innocent, Abu Ghraib kind of stuff.
Now the British are trying real hard to suck at least a little bit of heroism out of this story, but it just does not fall together. These kids are no braver then your average janitor, and may have sold out, too. They really should have hired Carl Rove for this. Pretty show with heroic freeing of the soldiers by a special unit, complete loss of memory and the chick that only remembered she was ass-raped would immediately follow. Sounds familiar?

A story is breaking out about Citibank giving kickbacks to universities for advertising the company to the students as their 'preferred lender'. Amusing part in it all are the student loan stories that will inevitably pop out. Rachel Sullivan from a CNN story has amassed a 100 grand debt, and yes, she "partially" blames the Citibank. Really, this is your typical phony college gal, with all the gadgets and cheap makeup. She must think frugality stands for a kind of perversion, and you can bet she hadn't yet tried that one. What is really needed is an ugly chick with tons of debt and skin problems. That will break the ice!

See that chick? That's right, of the British sailors-being-released. What's she's really thinking is "man, I wish I knew and lost some weight". This undoubtedly proves she's not in the conspiracy.

Decomposing bodies smell like vanilla. While it is not clear how much and after what time, it is quite clear how full of shit the catholic church is. All kinds of it, including mummy remains kind of shit. BBC link

The story is about Joan of Arc's remains, which in fact turned out to be pieces of a human and cat mummies, perhaps Egyptian. It's sad how much hypocrisy this story keep reveling throughout the centuries. Joan was burned as a witch, for fun of the crowd. It shows just how much the church was ready to use its claimed connection with god for purely political reasons and not a tad more. These days, churches claim they have bigger, ehmm, stronger, ehmm better family values and what not. Yes, that and a connection with god.

Joan was canonized whopping half a thousand years later, made into a saint by the same church that burned her for witchcraft. Not only did they not give a shit for burning people alive just to get rid of them, they did not give a shit to admit to doing that. They went even further. They burned her for fun and profit, and they canonized her just because the chick went so well with the crowd. Somebody really wants to be popular, huh?

To give more grounds to the canonization, some crap was presented a century ago to be her unrotten remains. These are then declared sacred and people think somehow being associated with these will help them heal, which is your textbook example of neurosis. I just wish it turned out to be a mummy's dick in that jar.

The sad part of it all? It took more then half a millennium for this turn. And nobody will make a connection with today's most popular schizophrenics.

Just watched "the girls next door". The movie's great, should have watched it the day I got it. I was reluctant because the whole story of the school senior wanting to be a politician and how he's all determined and then faces the porn girl next door dilemma blah blah blah sounded too much like yet another Hollywood story of highly conscious losers. You know, taxi drivers who keep never forget their plan for the whole life and strip girls saving for retirement, that is when they turn 25.

This movie's just fine - everyone's as immature as they should be, but additionally Elisha Cuthbert is awesome looking and playing. Ironically, the dude does become more like his hero JFK. He's just eighteen and already has questionable connections with women and businesses that look more like mafia clans.