Watching Build It Bigger’s Battle Machines episode, I was reminded of a troubling thing: American “defense contractors” and their subcontractors who have little to no experience and bid on projects that come down to life or death for our soldiers in combat … and call themselves capitalists and patriots.
Before you read on, consider this: Much like with patients and doctors in the case of the healthcare debate, neither folks who have to live in the filth nor those who actually work in the energy industry get a say in the policymaking. In other words, this conversation is held at all the wrong levels.
… the part that has liberals really foaming at the mouth is [Rick Perry's] suggestion to severely check the power of the EPA and give states more leeway to set their own environmental regulations. The standard criticism of such rollbacks is that states, released from Uncle Sam’s iron fist, will engage in a race to the bottom and gut environmental standards to attract business. But states have a far greater incentive than distant bureaucrats to look for ways to protect their natural resources with minimal sacrifice of economic and other priorities.
A state government is no less reckless and capricious than its federal counterpart. Are we sure states truly have the wellbeing of all of their people as well as the required long-range thinking to hold themselves up to such high standards? Ask and the Louisiana news will answer.
The Gambit | Landry, Vitter Meet With Oil Regulators On Drilling
“The purpose of this meeting is to make sure the information given to us in Washington is the same going on here as well,” Landry said. “And how we as legislators can help to address the lack of permitting going on in the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon incident. We hope it’s a step in the right direction to getting the Gulf back up and running and people back to work.”
… “These are great American jobs we need to preserve and build here,” Vitter said. “As these two charts illustrate, it’s major revenue for the federal government to help with lessening deficit and debt. (It’s the) second biggest source of revenue (for) the federal government after only federal income tax.”
What about the tourism and fisheries jobs and protecting the natural environment for our descendants along with responsibly drilling for oil? But wait, let’s look at how many of those great American jobs we will preserve here. Dalmia again, from the same article as above:
[Job] projections are notoriously difficult to make accurately, and there is every reason to believe that Perry’s claims, largely lifted from oil industry studies, are way off. Michael Levi, senior fellow for energy and environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, estimates that Perry’s plan will create 620,000 jobs at best [vs. 1.2 million as predicted]. If Levi is right, Perry has needlessly opened himself up to attack by using inflated numbers. And for what? The main point of energy liberalization is not to create jobs. It’s to make cheap and reliable energy available to individuals and businesses. That’s the message that Perry should be hammering.
Cheap, reliable, fast. You pick two. Anyway, I’ll leave you with that.
Remember when TSA had this program and then cancelled it? Yeah, they’re resurrecting it. I would say Hallelujah but who knows whether it will make it out of the (second) trial?
Pilot Starts at Select Airports to Further Enhance Security
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) [on October 4th, 2011] announced that it began testing a limited, voluntary passenger pre-screening initiative with a small known traveler population at four U.S. airports.
… During this pilot, TSA will use pre-screening capabilities to make intelligence-based risk assessments on passengers who voluntarily participate in the TSA PreCheck program and are flying domestically from one of the four pilot sites: Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County, Dallas/Fort Worth International and Miami International airports. Eligible participants include certain frequent flyers from American Airlines and Delta Air Lines as well as members of the Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP’s) Trusted Traveler programs, including Global Entry, SENTRI, and NEXUS, who are U.S. citizens and are flying on participating airlines. If successful, TSA plans to expand the pilot to include additional airlines, as well as other airports that participate in CBP’s Global Entry program, once operationally ready.
As a Global Entry customer, I cannot say enough good things about how efficiently the program gets you into the country after international trips. No standing in an hour-long line for a CBP/INS agent to stamp you through – just scan your passport, have your fingerprints and picture taken and off you go. It saved me from missing a crucial, cross-country connecting flight once.
Once you get to the domestic terminal, however, the system falls apart. All that Trusted Traveler stuff is out the window and, if you opt out of the millimeter-wave scanner as I often do, you are ripe for non-standard groping and explosive checks by a domestic TSA agent. The program that lets you into your own country doesn’t work in your country. The Department of Homeland Security was formed to reduce departmental redundancy and waste, merge databases and increase cross-organizational cooperation and overall efficiency. So, why in the name of “eliminating government waste” don’t CBP and TSA processes talk to one another? And why am I treated like a pariah in my own country, and especially after I went through the pains and paid to be pre-approved as a low-risk traveler?
All of this went through my mind in Hobby airport last week when, for the very first time in all my years of flying and patdowns, my nether region was rather unprofessionally and vigorously probed and patted down by a burly, female TSA agent before I got on a routine flight to Dallas. (Which incidentally was grounded and cancelled due to inclement weather in the north – figures.)
But, what really gets me comes from this last sentence in Mominem’s latest post on this same topic: “I don’t expect any airline to be able to block anyone from using government services we all pay for.” Mominem is a preferred AirTran customer and he was kept from the PreCheck line by a Delta gate agent who gave access to that line to preferred Delta customers. Leaving aside for a minute the defeat of purpose in allowing airline gate agents to have anything to do with security pre-screening, that entire barrier between the passenger and the flight gate was made possible by the taxpayer. Security priority and better treatment given to those who have flown more miles with a private airline and/or have had to pay extra to become a trusted traveler seems cross purposes when the intent and follow-through should be standard, courteous and timely service for all, regardless of race, age, gender, number of frequent flyer miles. Anything less makes me wonder how seriously our government-security complex takes this whole business.
My question is quickly answered when O’Hare TSA pulls aside a passenger for wearing this Pardon My Hindi tshirt.
A Hindu Iyengar uncle in hipster glasses and fedora? Too suspicious, yaar!
Basic research used to be privately funded in the past, like with Bell Labs. That used to be THE place where basic research was happening. But somehow that model has disappeared and I think it’s because corporations are looking for more short term goals. There’s really no corporation doing basic research in the same way Bell Labs did.
… Corporations are interested in proprietary technologies and getting out ahead of another company. They won’t share what [they discover] and they’ll use it exclusively to their advantage. They’ll file patents and protect their turf. And that’s fine. But the reason we want public funding is that we want to generate public knowledge. We want to share this with the world. We want it to be immediately available to everyone around us. Science doesn’t have trade secrets. I think public funding is essential to keep it that way.
If they don’t step up from spectacle to actual involvement (as the Tea Party ended up doing successfully), even at the most local levels where the work is the most tedious, they aren’t going to change one damn thing.
After boarding a couple dozen flights in the last few months, I am an old hand at the opt-out and full body pat down. One doesn’t have to be a statistician or a mind-reader to figure out why underpaid TSA hands “randomly” pick me for the millimeter-wave scanner. These workers are so used to passengers robotically (and tiredly) doing exactly what TSA tells them to do that it’s an opportunity to remind that there is such a thing as “a right to opt out.” There’s also a certain humor in the government running its latex-gloved finger around my jeans waistband before I board a domestic flight when I’ve paid for and used the United States Global Entry program, “a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) program that allows expedited clearance for pre-approved, low-risk travelers upon arrival in the United States.” Government waste that’s a-ok with certain parties because it’s done in the name of national defense obviously. We are all safer from my pre-approved, low-risk behind being patted down for everyone to see when fake pilot IDs and uniforms are now enough to bypass airport security.
So, why the security theater?
A new study published by the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes shows that despite the ton of taxpayer dollars spent on decision analysis and modeling the likelihood of terror events, it’s all for naught because the [voting] “public will largely neglect normative likelihood considerations when judging the actions of policy makers.” In other words, because “people have particular difficulty dealing with probabilistic information for small likelihood events, like those for terrorist attacks” and politicians are more interested in the votes of these people than preventing terror, actual threats with higher likelihood of occurrence go ignored.
Schneier himself brings this back to the TSA and their airport practises: “Are they doing their best to mitigate terrorism, or are they doing their best to ensure that if there’s a terrorist attack the public doesn’t blame the TSA for missing it?”
From Bloomberg:
President Barack Obama is proposing expanding tax credits and a “reverse boot camp” to help veterans find jobs and adjust to civilian life as part of an effort to curb veteran unemployment.
I hear “Reverse Boot Camp” and this recent Oatmeal graphic is all I see.
This image belongs to Matthew Inman a.k.a The Oatmeal who is awesome.
I’d make a great drill instructor.
Never mind that Swartz is a researcher, JSTOR makes it difficult for users to download articles to which they have rightful access and the government (your taxpayer money) pays for much of the research that ends up in journals not made available to you. Culture is anti-rivalrous as the great Nina Paley likes to point out. “Anti-rivalrous goods increase in value the more they are used.”
Boston Globe: Activist charged with hacking
Aaron Swartz, a Cambridge web entrepreneur and political activist who has lobbied for the free flow of information on the Internet, was charged in federal court with hacking into a subscription-based archive system at MIT and stealing more than 4 million articles, including scientific and academic journals [while a student]. Swartz already had regular, licensed access to the database through his work at Harvard. But prosecutors said he was so committed to the immediate acquisition of materials that he used special software to enable the quick downloading. He changed the Internet protocol address on his computer several times to circumvent security guards, according to court records.
The American Prospect on this matter
It’s easy to forget that there’s something at all controversial or oppositional about accessing information, or that some people really, really want data to be free — and others don’t. Open data has been mainstreamed. Whatever hacker-culture roots the free information movement might have are subsumed by the idea that simply everyone agrees that data is meant to be free, and the struggle is over the mechanics of freeing it. That’s never really been true, as Swartz’s case makes plain.
The Huffington Post:
JSTOR’s the one that should be in prison, man, for locking up knowledge.
Note that JSTOR has no issues with Swartz and that is the government coming down on him for what they argue is felony computer hacking. Reminds me of War Games. “I mean have you gotten any insight as to why a bright boy like this would jeopardize the lives of millions?”
Yesterday’s Houston Chronicle:
Texas’ main electric grid operator is warning customers to reduce their usage during the peak power demand hours of 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. today as high temperatures and unexpected power plant outages will stretch supplies.
Today on Capitol Hill:
An amendment from Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) defunding the Energy Department’s standards for traditional incandescent light bulbs to be 30 percent more energy efficient starting next year was approved rather anticlimactically by voice vote.
Cut off nose, meet spited face.
Katrina’s Secrets. It’s a new book by Ray Nagin, the ex-former-gone-but-comes-back-like-exzcema mayor of New Orleans. Self-published. Mmmm hmmm. Barely ridiculed on The Daily Show. The title reminiscent of a discount lingerie store where, as I said on the twubes, there is always a “50% off sale on purple-green-gold thongs, misspelled tourist tees & adult diapers embroidered with family values and laced with eau d’oil spill.”
This is my favorite Nagin line from a presser that The Gambit attended: “There were recovery strategies put in place early that are now paying dividends” By the way, El Gambito reads the book so we don’t have to … just yet.
Politicians have gone beyond lying. They are now shamelessly turning lies into the truth. Right is wrong, who controls the present controls the past, ignorance is fraking strength. What you see is not what you see.
bry4n sent me a video on “diminished reality.” Amazing how you can alter reality with a bit of upscaling. Just because you’re looking at something doesn’t mean you see things as they are.
This is what I tweet to my friends.
Because my opinion matters somehow. Well, it did to the LA Times blog, where I am quoted only three tweets down from Steve Martin Yes That Steve Martin.
Here it is: Get over it, you frustrated, misprioritizing tensionball of a nation just waiting to burst. I really don’t care if former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford “hiked the Appalachian trail” or if Anthony Weiner eWeinered. They are representatives of the people, not gods. Judge their politics. What is wrong with this world? The French think Dominique Strauss-Douche is some sort of entitled hero because he forced himself on a woman (and one so much weaker than him on the socioeconomic scale), while we Americans clutch our aprons at the slightest whiff of consensual sexual activity.
Have at John Edwards. He broke laws. Newt Gingrich – complete misogynistic asshole, but he hasn’t done anything illegal, although his actions do make me question his opinion of women. Arnold Schwarzenegger? That’s something to be sorted out among Maria Shriver, baby mama, baby and him. Public Official does not mean your personal life ought to be splayed out there for everyone in the United States of Stepford to have a conniption over. If they are representatives of us, then let’s treat them like we would our own fallible selves and let them sort their lives out in private.
I completely disagree with the notion that a person who cheats on and lies to his or her spouse would do the same to the public. These are separate realms. But, come at it from this angle: They’re politicians; they lie all the time and about more important stuff. Where’s this outrage when they prevaricate on The War On Terror, Wall St. bailouts and public healthcare? Policy lies kill and steal from many, while a politician who runs around on his or her spouse or tweets his schlong maybe burns our retinae and thus steals five minutes or so from our lives.
Just hope and pray that that place from which you source your morality doesn’t come to bite you in the behind if, heaven forbid, you should ever flub up. And don’t you dare think you’re a better human being because you’re faithful to your spouse but gleefully bless sending young people to die in foreign lands daily, in the name of our so-called freedoms.
But, most importantly, I am never using the Direct Message feature on Twitter again.
