Bullitt list -- 06.21.10

Today's category: Watching the watchmen

As we make the government more responsible for our everyday lives (food, shelter, health care, etc.) it stands to reason that it will require a more aggressive police force to, well, enforce all the rules we as a country have been begging for.

Well, welcome to the future…

• A group headed by the National Hispanic Media Coalition has requested that the FCC launch a probe to monitor hate speech and "misinformation" online. They say the FCC should gather and catalog information about who uses hate speech, when and where, then turn that information over to the NHMC so that they can "hold the media accountable" for hate speech.
  
  Aside from the obvious First Amendment violation this suggests (not that we actually care about the Bill of Rights anymore), this is a good example about being careful what you wish for.
  
  Often, a police state isn't forced upon a society, at least not initially. What happens is that through fear and ignorance, a group will demand the the government protect them from whatever bogeyman du jour they perceive to be out there. Then, too late, they realize they've given up their liberty in exchange for the illusion of security.
  


• Luckily, we live in a republic that recognizes certain inalienable rights that protects us from abuses of the state. Of course, just because those rights are inalienable, doesn't mean they can't be watered down.
  
  The highest court in the land got into the act recently when it declared that if you remain, then you give up your right to remain silent. Any watcher of TV cop drama's is pretty familiar with the Miranda Rights. I bet most of you could say it right off the top of your head.

  You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you. Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you?

  Until a few days ago, the only way you could waive this right was to expressly say that you waive your right. Now the only way you can exercise your right to remain silent is to break your silence to expressly affirm that right. In other words, your Fifth Amendment (there's that pesky Bill of Rights again) right not to incriminate doesn't exist if you don't say it does.
  
  As my friend Joel rightly put it, police now get to assume you don't want your Constitutional rights. Makes trampling on the public that much easier, I guess.
  


• You know what else makes it easy to keep the plebs under your boot heel? Tasers, baby!
  
  That's right, another court ruling has established precedence that will allow your local stormtroopers to indiscriminately Taser your ass for something as harmless not wearing a seat belt while driving and wearing only boxer shorts and sneakers.
  
  Now granted, Tasing is probably better than having a cop pop a cap in you half-naked ass. And even I'll admit to seeing a bit of humor in the over use of the Taser in the past. But come on people, am I the only one who thinks its a bit of an over reaction to Taser these hippies? I know they smell bad, but I suspect this ruling might have turned our different if it had been caught on camera…
  


• …Then again, maybe it wouldn't. Another disturbing trend is that more and more people are being arrested simply for … taking pictures. In public areas… Where you would have no expectation of privacy… But there are police there.
  
  And this is one of the scariest developments in our nascent police state. Not only is the government using abusive tactics and ignoring constitutional rights, but now they are trying to criminalize the documentation of those abuses.

  A few weeks ago, an Illinois judge rejected a motion to dismiss an eavesdropping charge against Christopher Drew, who recorded his own arrest for selling one-dollar artwork on the streets of Chicago. Although the misdemeanor charges of not having a peddler's license and peddling in a prohibited area were dropped, Drew is being prosecuted for illegal recording, a Class I felony punishable by 4 to 15 years in prison.

  Look, I respect good police officers and I'm grateful for the work that they do. But in my opinion, the clear sign of an abusive officer is if they are afraid to be seen doing what they do. How else could this kind of law be interpreted other than to protect officers who abuse their authority?
  
  Kind of makes you want to right your congresscritter to complain. But that might not be such a good idea…
  
  
• You see, in a police state your best course of action is to stay low and try to maintain your anonymity. But that won't be so easy is some lawmakers have their way.
  
  A bill sponsored by New Mexico Democrat Harry Teague aims to use the Federal budget bribes to get states to collect DNA samples from ANYONE who is ARRESTED and put them in a national database.
  
  It doesn't matter if the person is charged, or even acquitted. Merely being brought "down to the station." This is some next level, pre-crime Minority Report meets 1984 meets Blade Runner type shit.
  
  Think of the message this is sending:
  
  "Okay kids, think what we want you to think, snitch on your friends, don't take pictures or we'll Taser your ass, haul you downtown and your DNA will be ours for the rest of your life."
  
  Sounds like Utopia to me.
  

tagged: Bullitt, police, abuse, Constitution, Bill of Rights, Miranda Warning, DNA, Taser, cameras

Random Photo XXXII: First quarter moon

I went out earlier this evening to try to get some decent photo's of the bright first quarter moon. This is one of the best results.

The moon is a fickle creature, and you pretty much have to shoot in manual mode to get the exposure right. That's okay, because I should really be shooting in manual most of the time anyway.

But I'm pretty pleased with this. In retrospect I should have gone for more depth of field, but I was more concerned with catching the proper lighting. Something to think about next time, though.

First quarter moon, 06.19.2010 (click to enlarge)

As always, your constructive criticism is appreciated.

tagged: Random Photo, moon, first quarter, night

YouTube Tuesday: Spillicious

Well, we're way passed the 50-day mark with this oil spill business and it's enough to cause a Chief Executive to drop expletives in public.

I've still got the germ of a post about this mess in my head. Not sure if it will ever be published, but I did like this video peak at the internal workings of a British Petroleum board room.



tagged: YouTube, Tuesday, British Petroleum, BP, Gulf of Mexico, oil, spill, coffee

After the rain

I have this weird kind of obsession that hits whenever we have these really hard rains like we've had the week or two.

It goes back to the first house we owned in the Roeland Park area. Every time a gully-gusher came through, I would get water in the (partially finished) basement. No matter what I did to try to stem the tide, water somehow found its way in during hard rains. It got to the point where whenever it rained more than a little bit, I was walking around the house with an umbrella and heading down to the basement to make sure it was still dry. It could start raining at 3 o'clock in the morning and I would get up to check things out.

The trouble is that when we moved, the obsession didn't stay at our old address. I still have dreams, on particularly stormy nights, about getting up to clear clogged gutters in the middle of a storm, or Shop-vac out a river of water flowing through the basement.

Last night was no exception. The rain was falling hard when I fell asleep between thunder claps that sounded like they were right on top of our house. I had a dream that a water pipe in our clothes closet was leaking with a "drip, drip, drip" sound. In my dream, I saw the leak getting worse. The more I tried to tighten the joints, the worse the leak became. Our clothes were getting wet and moldy and still the water kept coming.

When I woke up, I could still hear the "drip, drip, drip." Obviously, I knew it couldn't be from a water pipe in our clothes closet. They don't put water pipes in there. But I could hear the dripping and it wasn't letting up. As the fog of sleep cleared, I realized that the ceiling fan in our bedroom was out of balance it it was making regular clicking sound that my stupid subconscious had incorporated as a leaky pipe into another water nightmare.

Driving to work, I saw that my nightmare was the least of the damage related to the storms.

The little park at 97th and Roe, next to a storm water creek, was caught in a flash flood. The playground equipment was still there, but the picnic table was gone downstream. And the timber frame containing the wood chips has been washed out of position.

About a block and a half south, I what water damage can really do to a basement that's too close to a storm water creek. About half of the wall for a lower level room had been washed away and there appeared to be pretty severe damage to the garage doors (and presumably the garage itself).

Lots of people in the neighborhood were pumping water out of basements and garages. One guy had moved everything out of his garage and onto his driveway to dry.

I hope it doesn't rain on him again.

tagged: rain, weather, Johnson County, spring, home, dream, water

Anyone else?

I'm really having trouble being interested in anything these days. Is it just me?

I have some thoughts on the most recent gulf oil spill and college athletic conference realignment, but I don't know whether I can summon the focus to make what passes for a coherent post around here.

As for politics and economy, I've pretty much blown my wad as far as that goes. There are only so many ways to say we're screwed.

Ah well. Guess I'll just keep my eyes and ears and mind open. Surely something will seep in. In the meantime, keep those Viagra spam comments coming.

tagged: blah, politics, sports, blogging, economy

YouTube Tuesday: Rip out all the epilogues

This song came up on my iPod's shuffle this morning, and I've had it stuck in my head all day.

I like the tune. I haven't done a deep deconstruction of what Bright Eyes is saying, but to me it's about trying to look at the bright side of our steep cultural decline, kind of a silver lining approach to hitting rock bottom.

Of course I could be way off on that. I have a history of totally misreading this kind of thing.



tagged: YouTube, Tuesday, video, music, Bright Eyes, At the Bottom of Everything, culture

Random Photo XXXI: Cloudscape

The thing about spring storms is that they can bring some pretty dramatic sky's. For better and worse.

This shot was taken from the top of a parking garage in southern Overland Park.

Click to enlarge.

tagged: weather, spring, cloud, storm, Kansas, Kansas City, earth

Can able

A few years back my favorite convenience store chain, QuikTrip, removed 12-ounce cans of soda from their coolers.

Oh sure, they still stocked the big 12 packs of 12-ounce cans, but you couldn't buy a single, cold 12-ounce Mountain Dew from the refrigerator case anymore. Coupled with that, they also removed the 12-ounce cups from their soda fountain.
So, if you wanted to buy a nice refreshing soda beverage, basically had to commit to drinking 22 ounces of carbonated sugar water to quench your thirst and spike your triglyceride levels.

Round about this same time, I noticed that the break rooms where I work removed virtually all of the 12-ounce soda options from the vending machines. You basically were limited to Coke or Diet Coke if you wanted a 12-ouncer.

So yeah, it sucked. I basically chalked it up to another conspiracy hatched by the soda-industrial complex designed to force us to buy more MellowYellow than we actually want. It's just another step in making Americans fatter and lazier and easier to manipulate when leading them to the slaughter.

Now fast-forward to a year or so ago when I started to see small cans of soda appear on supermarket shelves. Finally, I thought, some of my domestic sleeper operatives in key government regulatory agencies are getting something useful done (aside from the "substance abuse and promiscuity" of some of my agents. I tell ya, good help is hard to find these days).

Now I don't want to take all the credit for soft drink makers putting these more reasonably sized portions back on the shelves. I think it's important to give credit where it's due, and I'd like to encourage the bottlers to sell these smaller 7.5 ounce cans in more locations, including the vending machines in my office.

There are several good reasons why they should.
For one thing, most of us don't want to drink 20 ounces of soda at a time. If you're like me (and god help you if you are, you poor bastard), you typically leave about a third of the soda in a typical 20-ounce bottle unconsumed, only to throw it away when you get to the office the next morning.

This is just wasteful. Forget about the number of plastic bottles that are littering the landfills and creating a floating island of plastic out in the Pacific Ocean, do you know what all that acidic, carbonated sugar water can do to your office trash can when it spills in there? It's a gawdawful mess is what it is!



And then there's the whole nutritional side of things. Not only do we not want a whopping 20 ounces of soda, we shouldn't drink that much anyway. It's just not good for you.

Granted, we all have to drink soda because of the addictive additives used by the secret cabal of high-fructose corn syrup producers (of which Ted Turner is the reigning imperator, btw) to control the population. But it's a well known scientific FACT that we don't need more than about six ounces to maintain our minimum levels of mind-control substances. Anything beyond that and you're just adding weight around your middle. And nobody needs that. Am I right, people?

But there is one reason, above all others, why we need to keep these "mini" cans on store shelves. There is one benefit above all, one advantage beyond the health and environmental advantages, of buying these 7.5-ounce cans.

I love the way they make me feel like a giant when I'm holding one.

They're just so darned cute!


tagged: Coke, can, soda, size, food, waste, environmentalist

YouTube Tuesday: Celebrity

I think we've all become a bit fed up with the celebrity worship.

I mean, like who you like. Idolize your Lady Gagas and Tiger Woodses and your Lindsay Lohans and your Bonos if you like. But some of us are just tired of the paparazzi and the cheering autograph seekers…



tagged: YouTube, Tuesday, video, animation, celebrity, humor, Lady Gaga, Tiger Woods, Lindsay Lohan

Random Photo XXX: In flight

I stopped by the side of the road in one of the many suburban wetland ponds to get some pictures of a Great Blue Heron during one of the few sunny day's we've had this spring.

click photo to enlarge

tagged: random, photo, Great Blue Heron, bird, Kansas City, Johnson County, spring

My Big Fat Greek Bailout

A week and a half ago, financial luminaries in Europe (and in the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank) decided to give bankrupt Greece a larger line of credit to bail them out of their financial crisis.

In simple terms, Greece, like many US families, went into debt by spending more than it produced. In fact, it's debts totaled 125% of its total national production.

That essentially means that if everyone in Greece put all of their annual income to paying off the national debt, they still wouldn't have enough to keep Tony Soprano's goombahs from breaking their kneecaps.

The total bailout for Greece is somewhere around $1 trillion, a jawdropping number for such a small country. But the bailout also came with a few provisos, the "austerity measures" that we've been hearing about and that the Greeks have been rioting about. "Austerity measure" is a nice term for "you've been eating more gyros than you can afford, and now it's time for some budget cuts."

I'm not going to go into an opinion on bailouts. I've done that before. Rather, I'll note that the Greek bailout is interesting because of how common and wide spread the circumstances are that have lead to it.

The Greek government, in order to get reelected, promised everything to the voting public. Government jobs, high salaries, pensions, health care, digital converter boxes... anything to garner votes from Androcles Q. Public. And the governed didn't really worry about how (or whether) all those bribes would be financed.

Anyone who was around two years ago during the "Hope and Change" campaign will recognize this. The "two" parties in the United States were falling all over each other to see who could promise more government bribes to voters.

The same has happened in other European countries. Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland are also in dire financial straits. In fact, the Greek bailout was seen as a way to forestall a financial domino effect that would leave those countries' economies in ruin as well. Even the U.K. is struggling, with some estimates placing it's debt at over 103 percent of its GDP.

Scott Mather, head of global portfolio management at Pimco (one of the largest bond buyers (i.e., "loaners of money") in the world) put it this way in a recent interview with NPR,

Most of the developed world is screwed. That makes this crisis particularly different from anything we've seen in our lifetimes.

The countries that aren't screwed are the emerging market countries. They have low levels of debt. The emerging market world is lending money to the rich world so the rich countries are continuing to spend more than they've made.

Mather noted that there is no easy way out of the debt mess. Bailouts like this only delay the day of reckoning. The only way to reduce debt is to either cut spending or default on your bonds.

This is going to happen in Greece and the rest of Europe. It will happen in the UK and in the US as well. People have to develop a better connection with what government spending means for them personally. We've had the better part of a couple of decades where people have lost that connection. [Government money] is viewed as manna from heaven and it's an entitlement, something that is deserved and shouldn't have an impact or repercussions on them.

When the country was discussing the "health care reform" bill a few months ago, one of the so-called arguments was that, as one of the richest nations in the world we can afford to give everybody great health care. After all, if Europe can do it, we can too.

Well, it turns out that Europe can't do it. We probably can't either, not without making serious sacrifices in quality of life. And let's face it, we're due for some drastic quality of life downgrades anyway. We've just had it too good for too long.

I don't know how much longer the strategy of bailout-bubble-burst will last here in the US. Hell, even now it's considered safer to lend money to Iraq than the State of California.

I do suspect that we will have the illusion of an economic recovery over the next two years or so. But you don't have to be Dave Ramsey to know that the party will eventually turn into a pretty serious debt hangover.

When that happens, it won't be just a Greek tragedy.

tagged: Greece, Europe, Greek, bailout, EU, Pimco, Scott Mather

YouTube Tuesday: No watching the clock

I have a theory that if something is weird enough and odd enough and in French, it doesn't have to make any sense…



tagged: YouTube, Tuesday, video, French, weird, odd

Random Photo XXIX: Chipper

This guy has been living in by backyard for at least two years. I'm not sure how damaging chipmunks are, but this one is pretty brave. Despite the constant presence of our Jack Russel Terrier, he has made himself at home under our air conditioner.

Of course, he doesn't look very relaxed about it.

tagged: chipmunk, random, photo, Kansas, rodent, cute, wildlife, nature

Crude awakening

Sure, some people are calling the oil spill in the Gulf a "crisis." And I guess to certain people with certain world views, it is a crisis.

But I prefer to look on the bright side of things. Where some people see crisis, I see opportunity. In this case, it's the opportunity to look at our national energy consumption and talk about ways to make it better.

And I'm not alone. Two of my favorite bloggers have noted the increased awareness of our energy situation.

Xavier Onassis, reining Imperator of Independence made some great points in his post about a smart energy grid, or as he called it an "agnostic energy grid":

What we need is a … power grid that will accept input from any source at a standard, pro-rated, kilowatt-based compensation, feed that electricity into the grid where it is distributed as needed at a standard, pro-rated, kilowatt-based pricing system.

There are so many ways to generate electricity that with a distributed generation strategy and a unified grid, we can have all the power we need without depending on fossil fuels.

He then lists many different ways to produce electricity, including small nuclear reactors like those that have been used for years to power America's warships at sea.

That post dovetails nicely into R.Sherman's two-part series on the importance of nuclear energy to our energy future. It's a great series (as you would expect from one of Missouri's finest minds) that scientifically points out that the so-called "green" energy solutions won't be enough by themselves to provide all of our energy consumption needs.

All these points made me realize that as a culture we have a pretty limited view of how we generate electricity. It's either from nuclear plants, coal plants, hydroelectric or wind or some other grand scheme.

But let's not forget that there are many ways to capture energy that is wasted every day. It seems like there are many opportunities to generate-- or rather capture -- small amounts of energy over a very large area. Kind of a "long tail" approach to the energy problem.

For example, an Israeli company has developed a new highway surface that generates electricity as cars drive over it.

A United Kingdom company has developed a way to convert the kinetic energy of pedestrians walking down a busy street into electricity.

There have also been proposals to embedded piezoelectrics in shoes, clothing, even body parts to convert kinetic energy into electricity.

None of these plans individually generate very much electricity. But if created in mass and spread out over a national -- maybe even global -- smart energy grid, a dent could be made in our electrical consumption.

So my mind started to wander and look for ways to capture and convert more kinetic energy into electricity. They've got cars and sidewalks and shoes covered. People have even hooked bicycles up to generators.

And then I saw an opportunity literally right in front of me. We need to have tiny little piezoelectric generators embedded into every computer keyboard and mouse in the country.

Just think of the potential. Any time anyone presses a key on the keyboard -- and it's done billions of times a day -- a tiny electric charge would be created. Every time you move your mouse, every time you hit the enter key, every time you backspace to correct a misspelling you would be generating a tiny bit of power.

All of these tiny bits of power would cascade into the smart energy grid like delicate snowflakes on a mountain top. But by the time they accumulate, they would become an avalanche of clean electric power that anyone could have access to.

And finally, at long last, the millions of bloggers writing inane, uninformed posts about subjects of which they have little understanding would be serving a useful purpose.


tagged: oil, energy, nuclear, Deepwater Horizon, piezoelectric, blogging, environmentalist

Separated at Birth II

Remember a couple of years ago when I did the Separated at Birth with Sarah Palin and Liz Lemon and then Saturday Night Live picked up on my joke and used it in their little skit show for the next 8 weeks?

Well, SNL, here's your new opening bit:

President Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court Elena Kagan...


...and former SNL cast member Jon Lovitz...

tagged: Separated at birth, Elena Kagen, Jon Lovitz, politics, pop culture, Saturday Night Live