Payam’s Place

BBC NEWS | Business | US economy at a glance

Perhaps the only thing gloomier than this picture is the fact that no American news source can be bothered by the simple process of consulting publicly available data from the government. The Brits seem to have grasped the utility of the internet browser better than American journalists. Perhaps that’s because it was a Brit who invented the world wide web and the browser.

BBC NEWS | Americas | Drug stash found in US police car

We are led to believe that the huge stash of cocaine found in this undercover Dallas police officer’s car was an accidental discovery. The car in question was an asset seized from a drug operation, and the police claim that drug traffickers have become so sophisticated in their means of concealing contraband within the various open spaces of a car that the police had no idea that nearly $400,000 worth of cocaine remained hidden protected by various hydraulic schemes inside this car which was seized from a drug dealer.

The NPR series on how drug seizures have become a means for police departments–especially those in the south states of the United States–to fund themselves casts serious doubt on the authenticity of this claim of accidental discovery. Incidents in which police seize private assets legally but illegitimately are on the rise, and the impetus seems to be the independence that the departments gain from the municipalities and constituencies that support them. Confined by meager budgets that restrict their hiring practices and their appetites for high-powered fire arms, police departments have found a bounty in poorly written laws that empower them to declare private assets as ill-gotten arbitrarily and to seize those assets thus declared  illicit. Thus, the poorly written drug-related asset seizure laws have become a means for police departments to disentangle themselves from the accountability that binds them to the communities that they serve. If these drug seizures are appreciable, police departments no longer need popular support to receive additional funding. They can simply seize what they need.

At least, one can only pray that this is not the destination toward which we are headed. For if it is true that police departments do view and employ drug seizure in the manner outlined above, then the war on drugs has been transformed from the politicians’ wet dream to a perverse vehicle that empowers the most corrupt elements of society against the society that created them. If any of the foregoing has any truth, then the war on drugs is what the war on drugs is seeking to protect.

In other words, the war on drugs is no longer the pursuit of the protection of the public. It has become exactly what the most pessimistic among us had predicted. The war on drugs has become a power grab that seeks only to perpetuate itself. More drugs lead to more war which leads to more power to those who are waging the war.

Put away that joint, if you know what’s good for you. In truth, this means “put away that joint if you want to keep your car and your house”.

BBC NEWS | UK | Women deny Mosley ‘Nazi theme’

Our wealthy hero must have struck a very resonant cord today in court when he managed to get one of his sadism and masochism partners to confess in court that calling the proceedings “Nazi” constitutes overreaching. After all, one of the lovely maidens tending to Mr. Mosley testified that:

Witness B said that during the session she played a guard wearing a German Luftwaffe jacket, which she had previously bought in Camden Market to wear to a concert.

Naturally, she didn’t mean a Nazi guard, because there must have been Luftwaffe officers who were not officially in the Nazi party. Ergo, the depravity lies in the minds of those who would be so presumptuous as to associate a Luftwaffe leather jacket with Nazis.

Yes, the British are clearly superior to the Germans, and especially to the Nazis, and more especially to Nazi sadomasochists.

Mea culpa. The concept seems to have been lost on the obscenely wealthy.

Shakespeare, a mighty famous Brit, famously declared that that which we call a rose, if we called by a different name would smell as sweet. The ugly parallel of this maxim seems not to hold for Mr. Mosley. That which we call depravity is more depraved if it happens to smack of racist role playing, and he really needs to clear his name because he is not that depraved.

It is precisely these sorts of revelations that make one take comfort in the fact that the world is more and more ruled by the spectacularly wealthy.

BBC NEWS | Also in the news | Porn appears on rugby programme

The digital media infrastructure is still undergoing much debugging. This is how hardcore pornography interrupted the feast of violence known as the game of rugby. Rugby fans in New Zealand had their feast of violence interrupted by four minutes of hardcore pornography that was destined for a different channel.

It would have been incredibly entertaining had the Superbowl been similarly interrupted a few years ago. So far, it seems, cooler heads have prevailed in the Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction” incident. It would have been awfully funny to find out what the repercussions of this (hardcore) software bug would have been.

BBC NEWS | UK | Mosley denies ‘Nazi-themed orgy’

Life imitating art. In this instance Max Mosley, head of Formula One Racing, got himself into some hot water for what he did with five prostitutes. His situation imitates a sick joke by the legendary blue comedian, Robert Schimmel. (His Wikipedia entry.) The joke goes something like this:

A guy was tried for animal necrophilia. What’s the guy’s excuse going to be in court? “Sorry your honor. I could have sword the cat was alive when I started fucking it.”

Now, Mosley has to resort to a similarly pathetic excuse like “Aryan doesn’t mean Nazi“. Apparently, Mr. Mosley feels no need to apologize for sleeping with five prostitutes simultaneously, but that he may have partook in an orgy that might be potentially misconstrued as racist or anti-semitic is cause for apology and legal action. The depravity of sleeping with five prostitutes is apparently better than the depravity of pretending to be Aryan or Nazi in bed.

That’s ok, Max. We all know that the British are far better than the Nazis and the Aryans. Especially the rich Brits. Your orgies are far cleaner than the Nazi orgies that the Allies finally quashed in 1945.

Why is the stereotypical computer geek typically single? Because he can’t find a woman who is perfectly scriptable.

Not that the rest of us have not contemplated that prospect.

pMac is an 867 MHz G4 12″ Apple Powerbook purchased in August of 2003. By that reckoning, it is nearly five years old as of this writing. It has traveled extensively. It has seen limited travel within California–only about as far away as Livermore from its current home in San Buenaventura–but it has been to quite a few places in Europe: Amsterdam, Brussels, Mons (Belgium), Berlin, Muenster, Mannheim, Bad Duerkheim, Paris and Munich. Some destinations probably elude recollection at the moment.

It bears the scars of its only fall quite well. The fall happened at the platform at the Rheine (Germany) train station while en route from Amsterdam to Muenster, Germany. pMac was in its trusty Timbuk2 laptop bag at the time, and the cushioning provided by the bag was sufficient to keep it alive.

At 3.5 years of age, the original Toshiba (40 gigabytes) hard drive failed, but it was promptly replaced by a similar Toshiba model with an 80 gigabyte capacity by the wonderful technicians at CNG in Westwood the same afternoon! This replacement drive used to be the former back up drive, which contained an exact copy of the main drive thanks to the wonderful free backup utility, Carbon Copy Cloner. (Thus, I only lost about two weeks of work as a result of the failure.)

Now it chugs along nicely, albeit slowly at times, but without  any problems at all. It runs Leopard at a reasonable speed. It is now awaiting  the arrival of a MacBook Pro so that  it can be demoted to home entertainment center. The transition may happen in 2008.

Let’s have some fun. I tend to be right on these matters, so I might as well publish these predictions and see how I fare against the “professionals”.

Barack Obama will choose either Bill Richardson or Wesley Clark as his running mate because both men are without peer in their respective fields. Richardson is peerless in issues of foreign affairs, and Clark is peerless in military affairs. Either man will round out the ticket nicely.

The most likely choice is Bill Richardson because he was the first to endorse Obama.

Sorry Hilary. You just blew it big time.

I still use Safari and Omniweb as my primary browsers, but Firefox is far too cool a browser to be forgotten. After all, it is the most feature rich browser on the planet by virtue of its add-ons.

So, strike a blow against inferior browsers and help to set a new internet record for the most software downloads in one day. Download Firefox 3 on Download Day. The Guinness Book of World Records awaits.

Powered by ScribeFire.

IP Addresses Are Personal Data, E.U. Regulator Says | washingtonpost.com

The diametrically opposed directions that the European Community and the United States are taking ought to be extremely disconcerting to those who reside in the United States. The United States, the country that invented the internet and the addressing protocol that identifies computers on the internet (known as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP), is moving rapidly to relegate TCP/IP to a means of spying on its citizens. The awful–perhaps nonexistent–regulatory regime in the US allows providers of network services to monitor what users do, to track their habits, and to share that information with just about any entity that requires. That entity could be marketers or the watchful eyes of the government.

Meanwhile, the EU is conducting the most rational debate on the status of the IP address of computers users. As the computer becomes a significant means of communication–through applications like Skype, Gizmo, Yahoo! MSN AIM and other instant messaging clients–the IP address will become as unique and as important as a telephone number. Hence, it ought to receive as much protection as a telephone number. Global governing bodies are beginning to realize this, but the different ways in which the US and the EU governing bodies are approaching the IP address’s significance is alarming.

The American government is actively extending and abusing the regulatory vacuum surrounding the IP address to let American companies and government bodies to gather information on every citizen. In contrast, the EU is actively discussing a regulatory regime that recognizes the importance of the IP address. While the US government is diminishing privacy, the EU bodies are seeking to protect and to expand privacy. Hence, the liberties in which Americans take excessive pride are being, in effect, exported to the European Union, where people can surf comfortably now and perhaps with even greater privacy in the future.

Bloomberg.com: Warren Buffett Sees More Opportunities in Europe

Perhaps only Warren Buffett can declare the American economy dead, stick a fork in it and pronounce it dead. All the Americans who still consider Europe “socialistic” ought to heed the great oracle’s declaration that Europe is his prime target for business acquisitions.

Note that he is looking for business acquisitions in Europe, not the acquisition of communes or other socialistic constructs and some such.

And, yes, the oracle of Omaha does declare that Europe has a terrific economy, one considerably better than the American one.

Perhaps the United States ought to consider becoming “socialistic” like Europe. It seems to be good for business. 

Pentagon announces Iraq, Afghanistan troop deployments | Yahoo! News

The animosity between George W Bush and John McCain is insufficient to moderate the latter’s desire for power.  Consequently, the former is conveniently building up troops in Iraq in order to aid McCain’s already lackluster campaign. The strategy is quite clear, and it will most likely become apparent when the troops who are slated to be relieved will be retained. It is an escalation of the military conflict that  will create a circus of fear and greed come September, and there is little doubt that McCain will gladly oblige W by continuing the fear mongering that has thus far guaranteed reelection for every Republican who is utterly bereft of creativity, desire for serving the nation and scruples.

Never before could it be said that the success of one man will guarantee failure for everyone else.

nicworks :: downloads ::  brokeback mountain icons set

Customized, clean, artistic and professionally rendered icons are one of the many nice things that the Macintosh developer community offers the Macintosh user community. An icon set based on Brokeback Mountain, however, is a mystifying contribution from this incredibly generous developer community. The offering of the icon set begs a lot of questions.

Is the gay Macintosh user base so large that catering  to it is useful? Or is the heterosexual base small enough that it can be ignored? Does the gay user base want gay icons? Does my writing on the subject qualify me as a member of the gay user base, or merely as a curious metrosexual? Why would anyone be so obsessed with this movie so many years after the fact?

Will the fundamentalist Christian community condemn the users of this icon set?

Most fortunately, however, no one will ever bother answering these questions.

L.A. airports director Lindsey oversaw Seattle airport when controversial contracts were awarded | Los Angeles Times

The only thing more puzzling about the rapid decline of Los Angeles as a functional, livable city is the bold transparency with which the destruction of the city is undertaken by its elected officials and the contractors who have successfully corrupted them. The above link cites but the most recent instance of the grotesque cronyism and lack of accountability that  has made Los Angeles the most unlivable and unmanageable city in the United States. Even though Los Angeles has the most unsafe airport in the country and the worst traffic in the country, no leader in this city can sustain moral fortitude long enough to address problems that imiserate millions of people daily.

One would surmise that  after hosting the most embarrassing public works project in human history (one in which the Federal Government calls the Los Angeles Government corrupt!), the processes of improving the city’s infrastructure would improve. As the above articles shows, quite the contrary is true. The city’s airports, roads and public transit system are destined to wither and perish under unrelenting corruption before the eyes of a citizenry apparently too sleepy to care for its own well being.

As nature has demonstrated time and again, evolution is more likely to eliminate the weak than to promote the strong. Evolutionary data from the primordial soup that is Los Angeles strongly suggest that  evolution on occasion favors the stupid and the weak over the judicious and prudent. Whatever organism emerges from the primordial soup, I am ecstatic that, for now, I have managed to extricate  myself from the unbearably ugly evolutionary process that is shaping the primordial soup.

You should be too, if you don’t live in Los Angeles.

Photo by VirtualErn.

ABC News: Florida Calls Evolution ‘Scientific Theory’

Does this mean that Floridians now view Barrack Obama differently? Does it mean that they intend to end the disenfranchisement of minorities?

It is somewhat comforting to note that people change over time.