Cryptography and e-security expert, Bruce Schneier, has a good article featured on BoingBoing today arguing to either let people bring liquids back on planes, or take the ban seriously and actually treat the supposed threatening liquids like a threat:

• Why people who try to bring toothpaste on a plane should be arrested

I came upon the subject through a blog entry on Skepchick:

• Creationist Comeuppance on YouTube

I started watching the video apology the creationist is “forced” to give for unethically and possibly illegally invoking DMCA to try to extort a critic of his to remove his critical videos. I got bored and stopped watching it. While I’m glad justice prevails and no slimy lawyers had to get involved (no offense to my friend* who’s a lawyer; he’s a public defender and not a civil suit lawyer anyway *grin*) I get no pleasure fr0m the schadenfreude inherent in celebrating his (just) public apology.

I watched a couple of the Thunderf00t YouTube videos in which he categorically refutes the creationist VFX’s video claims, and they’re extremely well-informed, researched, reasoned, evidenced-based, etc etc yadda yadda. I don’t mean to imply the videos refuting the creationist are boring or uninspired in any way–they’re quite good (if a bit rough in the audio quality) and I would absolutely recommend them to anyone interested in the debate between empirical reality and Biblical literalism…

Thing is, it’s getting tiring to me. I’ve spent nearly eight years now actively following and reading and watching all I could get my “hands” on regarding the fight between evolution and creationism, and I feel like, not that I’ve seen it all (although I am seeing the same old creationist misunderstandings/fallacies/mistakes/lies and the same old empirical evidence/logical reasoning/evidentiary refutation fr0m the evolutionist side over and over), it’s more like I’m tired of the existence of the debate itself. It’s become obvious this will never end. It’s like digging a hole in water.

No matter how much factual evidence is out there, completely open and available to anyone and everyone who wants to bother looking for it, there’s still armies of people who are quite happy living in worlds of cognitive dissonance (I used to freak out but now I just sigh when people, like this VFX does, decry science as all ideological and full of fantasy and imagination and lies, and then use (a misapplication of) whatever scientific laws and processes is convenient for them to try to prove their creationist argument) and mythological fantasy as far as the eye can see. Change needs to be made and humanity needs to finally enter the 21st century, but the fight is wearying.

In any case, I skipped to the most recent video by Thunderf00t, and the first two-thirds and a refutation of one of VFX’s latest videos using terrible reasoning to accept micro-evolution but claim macro-evolution is “evil.” And the last third of Thunderf00t’s video, though, becomes a philosophical criticism of the concept of “eternal life” as a creation of greedy humans, as the idea of eternal life is not only horrific to sentient beings, but removes all value fr0m life! The fact that we are finite sparks of life in a vast universe gives the ultimate meaning and the greatest importance possible to life. It was a very inspiring closing and for that reason alone I highly recommend viewing it!

*Update, 11 Nov, 08: I had written there all this time, until today, “non-friend”. I have no idea how that typo happened, and I do hope if the friend in question saw that, he realizes that was a mistake. I dunno, maybe I intended to type “non-slimy friend”.

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I can’t believe I missed this. In researching information on my last post regarding the addition of peaceful opponents to capital punishment being added by police to terrorist watch lists, I found this news item from last year about the FBI and CIA’s programs to recruit and pay for citizen informants (thus spreading fear and mistrust as well as creating gi-hugic ineffectual mountains of hay to look for needles in–resulting in more false accusations and arrests and less actual safety and security)

• FBI Proposes Building Network of U.S. Informants

Excellent, emotional and enlightening movie, by the way, of a story set within the end of the East German informant society: The Lives of Others.

It’s easy to find countless articles on the appearant rise of police brutality and fascist, militarized mindset, and are gleefully proud of their testasterone overdosed abuses, and stories in which the police are used as political weapons.

Well, here’s one more story of overreaching abuse of power and damage to civil liberties:

• Top Maryland cops ordered nonviolent peace activists’ names added to anti-terror, drug trafficking databases

And a good editorial on the subject:

• Opposing death penalty gets people listed as terrorists.

In the midst of the ever-increasing shift from police watching over the public to the police watching the public, one will try to mitigate the fear and disappointment by rationalizing: “Well, these are just the bad ones in the news. Most cops are good ones!” So, where are those “good cops” when the bad ones are breaking the law, violating the Constitution, and generally harassing and beating the public? Why aren’t the so-called good cops standing up against the few bad ones and eliminating them from their ranks?

Because: (a) police forces generally draw the power-hungry bullies of society which tend to create a pervasive culture of abusiveness from the inside;

(b) police forces are being funded by the Department of Justice and given neato-cool paramilitary toys to play with based on their devotion to and performance in the War on Drugs (and increasingly the War on Terrah) which is inherently a civil liberty trampling campaign that routinely treats harmless citizens as wanton and deadly criminals, fostering a culture of abuse and power from the outside;

(c) police forces are fiercely fraternal and loyal to each other–a useful and vital trait for military units in war, a destructive and criminal trait in a group that is supposed to serve the interests of the public over and beyond any sense of brotherly camaraderie.

These influences from the inside, outside, and the pathological in-group loyalty police forces encourage, generally lead to an environment which will quickly reject or break the few people who go into police work with a true desire to serve the public and put citizen above fellow cop.

However, there are very rarely exceptions to the rule. A story out today tells of a Chicago sheriff who is (at least in this case…who knows what he’s like otherwise) thinking and feeling like a real person and not RoboCop (pre-self aware RoboCop, of course) :

• Illinois sheriff scolds banks for evictions of ‘innocent’ renters

Banks on foreclosed houses aren’t doing basic checking on who’s actually in the houses, and are literally forcing renters out onto the street even if they’re good, rent paying renters, despite what defaulting the actual owners of the home are doing on their mortgage.

“These mortgage companies … don’t care who’s in the building,” [Sheriff] Dart said Wednesday. “They simply want their money and don’t care who gets hurt along the way.

“On top of it all, they want taxpayers to fund their investigative work for them. We’re not going to do their jobs for them anymore. We’re just not going to evict innocent tenants. It stops today.”

So, good for him!

Hilarious story for you; be sure to hold onto your side for this rib-tickler:

As the nearly 160 year old bank, Lehman Brother’s, failed, funneling toward bankruptcy, it was handing millions of dollars in compensation over to its CEO.

• Lehman Bros. chief executive faces lawmakers

“Your company is now bankrupt, our economy is now in a state of crisis, but you get to keep $480 million,” [Rep. Henry] Waxman [(D-Bev. Hills)] said, displaying yearly compensation figures on large TV screens in the hearing room. “I have a very basic question for you. Is this fair?”

. . .

Waxman then ticked off some of Fuld’s other personal assets — a $14-million oceanfront home in Florida, a vacation home in Sun Valley, Idaho, and an art collection “filled with million-dollar paintings.”

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“It seems that the system worked for you, but it didn’t seem to work for the rest of the country and the taxpayers who now have to pay up to $700 billion to bail out our economy,” Waxman said. “We can’t continue to have a system where Wall Street executives privatize all the gains and then socialize all the losses.”

Ah, that self-correcting free market works so well, making sure those who work get paid fairly. Well, nothing more really needs to be said. Except maybe to ask if people have stocked up on their torches and pitch forks yet.

The House just passed the bail-out bill the Senate passed earlier this week, which not only bails out Wall Street but also has billions for pork attached to, such as subsidies for rum makers in Puerto Rico and a couple million for makers of kids’ wooden arrows.

So, the bankers and speculators who f–ed up the economy and screwed millions of people get their golden parachutes and are not held accountable for their actions–and the millions of harmed Americans who have their lives ruined by the actions of predetory lending and quasi-criminal securities reselling, are producing stories like these:

• Woman, 90, shoots self inside foreclosed home

Nearly 90% of Americans did not want this bail out. At the very least, some wanted assistance for citizens such as frozen foreclosures until they can be reevaluated or adjusted interest or principles–but nothing is in the bill which helps anyone but the bankers and the companies that got the attached earmarks.

That said, I’d like to present something:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Just some silly words from the Founding Fathers in a little paper called the Declaration of Independence. Probably outdated and worthless sentiments nowadays. I guess take whatever meaning from that what you will.
How’s that “consent from the governed” working out, ya think?

In reference to the blog title: The exact same thing happened in 1931 when a very similar over-credited housing bubble burst and friend of big business President Hoover ramrodded Congress to pass a bill to give (in today’s money) about $500 billion to bail out the banks. A move that worked so well that countless people were forced out of their homes and off their farms and we had a Great Depression that required Roosevelt to allow the banking system to finally fail and rebuild itself with appropriate regulations. (The very regulations that Reagan and Bush got rid of in their terms. Funny, that.)

Of course, we don’t have a drought of Biblical proportions we have to deal with today which does change things significantly. But maybe that just means that people in all these tent cities that are starting to spring up will get to eat government veggies instead of government cheese.