May 22, 2011
Apocalypse not-now: “I don’t understand it. Obviously I haven’t understood it correctly because we are still here”
The disappointed followers of Harold Camping are (as far as the media have been able to determine) still around, and there are no explanations yet from the prophet of doom:
The California radio evangelist attracted the worldwide following proclaiming that the apocalypse would come Saturday.
Some of Camping’s followers gave away all their worldly possessions in anticipation of the biblical rapture.
In Oakland, California a group of onlookers poking fun at the predictions gathered outside Camping’s radio station to countdown to the deadline.
Camping predicted an apocalypse once before in 1994 and said it was a “miscalculation.”
In New York City, 60-year-old retiree Robert Fitzpatrick was also a believer of Camping’s prediction.
Fitzpatrick said he was expecting a natural disaster. “We’ll I expected the earth quake to begin, right around 6:00.”
“I don’t understand it. Obviously I haven’t understood it correctly because we are still here,” Fitzpatrick said to the Associated Press.
Fitzpatrick is the author of, “The Doomsday Code,” and spent more than $140,000 of his retirement savings on ads about the end of the world.
Still, you have to feel a bit sorry for them: who among us hasn’t had the disappointment of a cancelled Camping trip on the May Two-Four weekend?
May 21, 2011
President of TEPCO falls on his sword a few months late
The president of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) has resigned:
In a business practice that recalled the ritual seppuku suicides of samurai warriors, the president of Japan’s largest power company resigned Friday to assume responsibility for the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
At a nationally televised news conference, Masataka Shimizu bowed deeply in an exhibition of remorse and declared, “I am resigning for having shattered public trust about nuclear power and for having caused so many problems and fears for the people.
“I want to take managerial responsibility and bring a symbolic close.”
Whether it’s a hearkening-back to Samurai ethos or not, he should have resigned long ago, as soon as it became clear that the company he headed was doing everything it could to conceal the extent of the actual damage both from the media and from the government.
There is a widespread feeling the government and TEPCO officials did not disclose all they knew during the early days of the crisis and have been less than forthcoming since.
In the first weeks after the earthquake, TEPCO officials received 40,000 complaints a day about the lack of information. Police had to be assigned to guard the company’s offices from anti-nuclear protesters.
This week, TEPCO released documents showing it was dealing with three simultaneous nuclear meltdowns, while reassuring people the fuel rods were safely intact in all the reactors.
“Why did it take two months to get to this point?” demanded a Wednesday editorial in the Nikkei business newspaper.
“Even a rough calculation of conditions inside the reactors would have helped in choosing the best response.”
Public confidence was shaken further when it emerged engineers at Fukushima were so unprepared for the disaster, they had to scavenge flashlights from nearby homes and used car batteries to try to reactivate damaged reactor gauges.
Nobody with an ounce of sense is criticizing the workers at the plant for their reaction to an earthquake that was far in excess of the design for the reactors, or a tsunami that was much higher than anything the designers had foreseen. Shit happens, and it was the daily double of fantastically unlikely natural disasters that struck the plant.
The company, however, deserves more than just a light dusting of shame for the way they appear to have been actively preventing the real state of the plant becoming known to the international nuclear community and the national government. A nuclear disaster is everyone’s business, and there were resources available to TEPCO that they signally failed to draw upon. Saving face is not an acceptable reaction to this kind of catastrophe.
End of the world playlist suggestions
Because whether you ascend in the Rapture or are one of the ones left behind, you’ll want to have an appropriate playlist on your iPod:
- You’d have to have “The End” by the Doors, of course. And “Welcome to the End” by Bif Naked. Oh, and of course “Rapture” by Blondie.
- @Crystal11: I’m going with “Until the End of the World” & “Last Night On Earth” (both U2)
- @Metz77: “The End” (The Beatles)
- @grahamlavery: “At least (It’s not the end of the world)” Super Furry Animals
- @nightfallcub: Morrissey “There Is A Place In Hell (For Me And My Friends)”
- @neilhimself: (Oh that’s clever) @Gem_Clair: “Easy Like Sunday Morning” – Lionel Richie
- @TrumanAragorn: “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” by Death Cab For Cutie
- @Valya: “The Sky’s Gone Out” (Bauhaus)
- @hmmarcus: “I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire” – The Inkspots
- @MitchBenn: The Byrds: “You Ain’t Going Nowhere”
- @alandhisguitar: got to include “We will all go together when we go” by Tom Lehrer.
- There are just too many appropriate songs by Yngwie Malmsteen to list . . . “My Resurrection”, “Alone in Paradise”, “Like an Angel”, “Seventh Sign”, “Arpeggios from Hell”, “Heaven Tonight”, and so on.
Idea stolen from Neil Gaiman’s @neilhimself Twitter feed.
May 20, 2011
Bank of Canada is not there to “guide” the markets
Stephen Gordon points out that there appear to be some dangerous assumptions out in the market about whether and when the Bank of Canada will change interest rates:
The Bank of Canada is scheduled to make its next interest rate announcement on May 31, and my understanding is that the consensus of opinion among private sector analysts is that interest rates will remain unchanged, because there was no explicit warning of an increase in its April 12 decision.
This consensus of opinion may turn out to be well-founded — but not for that reason. Recent reports confirm what Bank officials have said several times: the Bank of Canada believes that it under no obligation to provide guidance about short-term interest rates. Governor Mark Carney has already noted that one of the contributing factors of the financial crisis was the private sector’s overconfidence in its ability to predict central banks’ behaviour.
This doesn’t automatically mean the Bank will raise interest rates at their next meeting, but it does mean that it could happen (despite the “lack of warning” in April).
Next on the primary school curriculum: Minecraft
<voice style=”curmudgeon”>Back in my day, we didn’t have computers in the classroom. We had books. And we liked ’em. Kids these days are just spoiled, I tell you.</voice>
At the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, first and second grade computer teacher Joel Levin developed an experimental Minecraft teaching unit that was designed to let kids explore, build, and collaborate within the game. He wasn’t sure how it’d go over. Much to his surprise, the students took to Minecraft like they do to sniffing scented markers.
Levin allows his students to play in a modified Minecraft world that doesn’t include monsters. His classes aren’t so much focused on teaching kids to play Minecraft as they are on using Minecraft as a canvas for them to be creative with. In one situation, Levin had to take animals out of the game because students were just killing them all over the place, which wasn’t in the spirit of his lessons.
H/T to Victor for sending the link. Video at the linked site.
May 19, 2011
“Brave stuff indeed, mocking a man of God who is clearly a few clowns short of a circus”
Brendan O’Neill wonders why we are all happy to pour scorn on Christian predictions of the end of the world, yet treat similarly apocalyptic Green claims seriously:
The eccentric Californian preacher Harold Camping, who claims that Jesus will return this Saturday and bring the world as we know it to an end, has been the subject of much Twitter-teasing and ridicule. “The Rapture? If it comes near me this Saturday I’ll kick its arse through its neck”, says Charlie Brooker. “I expect everyone who thinks so-called Judgement Day is on May 21st to support science and reason from the 22nd onwards”, says Professor Brian Cox. Brave stuff indeed, mocking a man of God who is clearly a few clowns short of a circus. But what I want to know is this: why don’t these Camping critics, these alleged challengers of bunkum and defenders of reason, also stand up to the far more mainstream yet equally batty predictions of End Times emanating from the environmentalist lobby?
Perhaps Camping’s real crime is that he has got the date of the Rapture wrong. After all, according to the green writer Andrew Simms’ countdown to doom, which is published monthly in Brooker’s own newspaper the Guardian, we have 67 months left to save the world. Camping you idiot! The world’s not going to end this Saturday – it’s going to end in December 2016!
Of course Simms, who runs the ominous One Hundred Months project, is not so crude as to talk about Apocalypse or Judgement Day or Rapture. No, he simply says: “We have 70 months to save our climate. When the clock stops ticking, we could be beyond our climate’s tipping point, the point of no return.” Which of course is just a more PC, more sciencey, less instantly insane-sounding way of saying exactly what Camping has said: that there is an endpoint to the world, it is arriving soon, and it will involve some judgement of mankind for his sins against God/overuse of carbon. Where Camping says our sinful behaviour has precipitated Saturday’s rapturous showdown, Simms says it is the “global suicide pact” of human greed and nature-wrecking that gives us only another 70 months. Both of them sound mental.
May 18, 2011
Reminder: check state law before videotaping the police
Clive sent me this Wendy McElroy post from last year, but it’s still (mostly) valid today:
In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.
Even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists.
The legal justification for arresting the “shooter” rests on existing wiretapping or eavesdropping laws, with statutes against obstructing law enforcement sometimes cited. Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the 12 states in which all parties must consent for a recording to be legal unless, as with TV news crews, it is obvious to all that recording is underway. Since the police do not consent, the camera-wielder can be arrested. Most all-party-consent states also include an exception for recording in public places where “no expectation of privacy exists” (Illinois does not) but in practice this exception is not being recognized.
It shouldn’t need to be said that the police and the courts who’ve backed the police on this issue are wrong. But they appear to be running scared, at least in a few states:
Carlos Miller at the Photography Is Not A Crime website offers an explanation: “For the second time in less than a month, a police officer was convicted from evidence obtained from a videotape. The first officer to be convicted was New York City Police Officer Patrick Pogan, who would never have stood trial had it not been for a video posted on Youtube showing him body slamming a bicyclist before charging him with assault on an officer. The second officer to be convicted was Ottawa Hills (Ohio) Police Officer Thomas White, who shot a motorcyclist in the back after a traffic stop, permanently paralyzing the 24-year-old man.”
When the police act as though cameras were the equivalent of guns pointed at them, there is a sense in which they are correct. Cameras have become the most effective weapon that ordinary people have to protect against and to expose police abuse. And the police want it to stop.
May 17, 2011
Matt Welch: BHL is a “national embarrassment to France”
Actually, I understate in the headline what Matt actually wrote:
And since we don’t want to reprint the whole quavering bag of apologia (“Charming, seductive, yes, certainly; a friend to women and, first of all, to his own woman, naturally,” etc.), let’s close with perhaps my favorite line:
What I do know is that nothing in the world can justify a man being thus thrown to the dogs.
I’m guessing what BHL really means here is that no worldly rape can justify Strauss-Kahn’s treatment. Since if the accusations are true, a 62-year-old man known by every French person I’ve asked to have the sexual manners of a primate lunged nakedly at hired help half his age, grabbed her breast, knocked her to the floor, and chased her around his expensive hotel suite attempting with some success to thrust his penis into her body and discharge DNA evidence.
I don’t know if he’s guilty, and it would be imprudent not to consider the conspiracy theories in a case involving someone who until this week was the single biggest political threat to the sitting president of France, but the only decent way you can arrive at “nothing in the world can justify” Strauss-Kahn’s treatment is if you oppose all perp walks equally. Short of that, it’s just special pleading for a powerful dick. And another reminder that BHL is 10 times the national embarrassment to France than Jerry Lewis or even Johnny Hallyday ever was.
Who’s going to feed Fluffy if you get taken up in the Rapture?
Sorry, of course I mean when you leave for your seat at the right hand of God. For a small advance fee, you can be (relatively) certain that Fluffy or Rover will be seen to by After The Rapture Pet Care:
In case you hadn’t heard, Judgment Day is pencilled in for 21 May and any Christians among you who hadn’t made provision for your pets’ wellbeing after the Rapture had better pull your fingers out before you take your place at God’s right hand and your poor moggy is left stuck here on Earth staring at an empty bowl.
Make no mistake, this is serious. Harold Camping, the 89-year-old founder of Family Radio, has spent years scouring the Bible for evidence of just when it’s time for believers to pack their celestial suitcases. True, they had to unpack again back in September 2004 following Camping’s first shot at naming the big day, but he assures that this time it is “absolutely going to happen without any question”.
So, you’re ascending to eternal glory and your cat’s litter needs changing. It’s an upsetting thought for any true follower of Christ, but help is at hand in the form of another creature absolutely guaranteed to be left behind by the heavenly mass exodus: the atheist.
May 16, 2011
A disturbing possible future: nanolaw
Paul Ford writes about a morning in the near future:
My daughter was first sued in the womb. It was all very new then. I’d posted ultrasound scans online for friends and family. I didn’t know the scans had steganographic thumbprints. A giant electronics company that made ultrasound machines acquired a speculative law firm for many tens of millions of dollars. The new legal division cut a deal with all five Big Socials to dig out contact information for anyone who’d posted pictures of their babies in-utero. It turns out the ultrasounds had no clear rights story; I didn’t actually own mine. It sounds stupid now but we didn’t know. The first backsuits named millions of people, and the Big Socials just caved, ripped up their privacy policies in exchange for a cut. So five months after I posted the ultrasounds, one month before my daughter was born, we received a letter (back then a paper letter) naming myself, my wife, and one or more unidentified fetal defendants in a suit. We faced, I learned, unspecified penalties for copyright violation and theft of trade secrets, and risked, it was implied, that my daughter would be born bankrupt.
But for $50.00 and processing fees the ultrasound shots I’d posted (copies attached) were mine forever, as long as I didn’t republish without permission.
H/T to Kevin Marks, retweeted by Cory Doctorow for the link.
Ear worms
For the last few weeks, I’ve had a musical track bothering me: I knew it very well, but didn’t know what it was called or where I’d encountered it. An unexpected earworm from the past. Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, I finally managed to track it down — it’s the theme music to a British TV show that I don’t remember watching (yet I know the theme music very well):
It’s a very distinctive late-60s to early 70s sound. I have no idea why I know it so well: perhaps my dad used to watch the show and I just heard the music in the background. Actually, that’s the only thing I could come up with to explain why I’d know the theme music, yet not remember ever having watched the TV show.
I thought I’d exorcise the earworm demon and buy a copy from iTunes. But no, they’ve got several covers of the music by various artists (including an interesting version by the Band of the 1st Battalion, the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment — currently classified as “Rock” by iTunes), but not the original. HMVDirect has a similar selection (covers, but no original performance). “Curses, foiled again!”
I found out more about the TV show from Wikipedia, the Unofficial Sweeney website, and a true labour of love, a page devoted to sleuthing up all the many musical tracks used in the original series named for the only album of music released: the Shut it! The Music of “The Sweeney” site.
This page is an ongoing development to identify the 300 different pieces of music used in the 1970s British television series The Sweeney. As is common practice with many television shows, other than the specially-comissioned title theme, Harry South’s unforgettable, rousing actioner, “ready-made” music was mostly used to provide incidental themes to the action. These came from specialist “Production Music” houses, the most well-known being De Wolfe, KPM (Keith Prowse Music), Chappell and Bruton. The years 1971 to 1978 arguably represented the genre’s most creative era (before competition and corporatism took over and strangled much artistic creativity), serendipitously co-inciding with production of The Sweeney itself.
In 2001 Sanctuary Records issued a Sweeney CD compilation with 25 tracks used in the show. As good as it was, it really only scratched the surface and sadly no further volumes have been forthcoming.
But unless I happen across a physical copy of the CD, I’m stuck with my persistent earworm. Here’s the closing credits, in hopes it’ll help banish it from my mind temporarily:
May 15, 2011
How many e-books do you need to read to make your reading device economical?
Dark Water Muse does the math for you:
In this piece DWM does not explore other possible ways that a tablet does things differently to a smart phone, net book, laptop or desktop computer. This is not a general review of tablet capabilities. It can be considered an update to DWM’s eReader versus Book piece [Ed: linked to from this post last week] with emphasis on the cost of the use of the tablet as an eReader.
Since DWM is focused on eReading then cost is an influential factor when considering any eReader device.
If you trust DWM to do the math and you don’t want to review DWM’s work (included further below in the section entitled “The Math”) then you can read the results in the Table #1: comparison of relative eReading costs below.
If we assume the average book price is $20 and eBooks are discounted by 40% (a gracious discount from DWM’s experience) then we get the following equation for N, the number of eBooks you must purchase and read on your new device to ensure you’re not paying more for the content you could have read as a book:
N = cost of device / $8
Table #1: comparison of relative eReading costs: The following table indicates the number of books N you must read on the corresponding eReader on the market today (prices taken from the web as of May 15, 2011) in order that the cost of the device does not drive up the cost of eBooks you read.
Redefining the word “anarchist” to mean “statist”
A post at the Cato @ Liberty blog, qualifies as a proper Fisking:
The Washington Post splashes a story about “anarchists” in Greece across the front page today. The print headline is “Into the arms of anarchy,” and a photo-essay online is titled “In Greece, austerity kindles the flames of anarchy.” And what do these anarchists demand? Well, reporter Anthony Faiola doesn’t find out much about what they’re for, but they seem to be against, you know, what the establishment is doing, man:
The protests are an emblem of social discontent spreading across Europe in response to a new age of austerity. At a time when the United States is just beginning to consider deep spending cuts, countries such as Greece are coping with a fallout that has extended well beyond ordinary civil disobedience.
Perhaps most alarming, analysts here say, has been the resurgence of an anarchist movement, one with a long history in Europe. While militants have been disrupting life in Greece for years, authorities say that anger against the government has now given rise to dozens of new “amateur anarchist” groups.
Faiola does acknowledge that the term is used pretty loosely:
The anarchist movement in Europe has a long, storied past, embracing an anti-establishment universe influenced by a broad range of thinkers from French politician and philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to Karl Marx to Oscar Wilde.
So that’s, let’s see, a self-styled anarchist who was anti-state and anti-private property, the father of totalitarianism, and a witty playwright jailed for his homosexuality.
However you try to twist the word “anarchist” to include the Greek protestors, it still won’t fit:
Real anarchists, of either the anarcho-capitalist or mutualist variety, might have something useful to say to Greeks in their current predicament. But disgruntled young people, lashing out at the end of an unsustainable welfare state, are not anarchists in any serious sense. They’re just angry children not ready to deal with reality. But reality has a way of happening whether you’re ready to deal with it or not.
May 12, 2011
Record gasoline prices drive journalists insane
Well, that’s the only way to explain the causes when the reflexively right-wing Toronto Sun starts frothing at the mouth about “unregulated derivative speculators” while the staunchly left-wing Toronto Star claims “The oil industry doesn’t like high gasoline prices any more than you do.”
Jon, who sent me links to both articles, titled it “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!”
I think the election has unhinged people — or at least finally driven out the pins for those who were already well on their way to being unhinged. [. . .] Go to Google and search the Sun‘s site for “fat cats AND pigs” and you’ll find a Saganesque hyperbole of hits from just the last three days. And a similar number of calls for increased government regulation of the oil industry.
I’ll cut the linked Sun article above some slack, as the author does mention unwashed hippies as being part of the problem — the guy does just a little to maintain the Sun‘s conservative front — but the overall tone from the paper in the last few days has been just a little weird.
That, and you could see the track marks all over yesterday’s Sunshine Girl. What is that paper coming to, I ask?
Update: On the other, other hand, here’s Stephen Gordon from the Globe & Mail‘s Economy Lab on why high gasoline prices are good for Canada:
If there is a proposition in economics that can aspire to law-like status, it is surely Easterbrook’s Law: “All economic news is bad.” This is a truly powerful insight, and it explains how phenomena that would ordinarily be seen as good news are generally portrayed as a problem demanding government intervention. And so it is with the recent rise in gasoline prices.
[. . .]
So how can higher gasoline prices be consistent with increased purchasing power? The answer is that we are observing a relative price shift. The prices of some goods — notably gasoline — have increased. But the prices of other goods have fallen, most notably imported goods that have been made cheaper by an appreciating Canadian dollar. The overall net effect on Canadians’ buying power is positive.
To be sure, there are some people for whom this shift is genuinely bad news: many with low incomes may not be able to easily reduce their consumption of gasoline. But the real problem facing these households is that they have low incomes.
