Personal Genome Project
I’ve signed up to participate in the Personal Genome Project.
We believe individuals from the general public have a vital role to play in making personal genomes useful. We are recruiting volunteers who are willing to share their genome sequence and many types of personal information with the research community and the general public, so that together we will be better able to advance our understanding of genetic and environmental contributions to human traits and to improve our ability to diagnose, treat, and prevent illness. Learn more about how to participate in the Personal Genome Project.
I wonder where the yellow brick road leads.
Is that an attorney general in your pants?
One of the things that irritates me most about life in these United States is the tendency our public officials have to respond to any negative situation by peering into your bedroom window, climbing into your pants, or otherwise attempting to restrict your behavior as a consenting adult. In the wake of some nutter wacking women in the New England area (a nutter who happened to prefer finding his victims via Craigslist) South Carolina Attorney General Henry “I’m In Your Pants” McMaster is looking for some attention.
Let’s not pretend that Mr. McMaster wants to make the world a better place. He makes his living profiting from punishing people. If he didn’t have access to what was going on in your pants it would diminish his market share on spanking naughty people.
Which brings us back to the subject of hookers, and South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster. Earlier this month McMaster, who is of course eyeing a run
for governor, threatened criminal prosecution against Craigslist management if pornography and ads for prostitution were not removed from the site. Craigslist took extraordinary measures to comply.
But quiet compliance isn’t what McMaster is looking for. He wants handcuffs and a trial, the kind of stuff that Spitzer got. He issued the following statement on Saturday “As of 5:00 p.m. this afternoon, the craigslist South Carolina site continues to display advertisements for prostitution and graphic pornographic material. This content was not removed as we requested. We have no alternative but to move forward with criminal investigation and potential prosecution.”
Frankly, I’m not interested in political “servants” who are interested in what goes on between consenting adults. Craigslist is not a criminal organization – it provides a service that connects people. What consenting adults do with their pants (or without them) is only a matter for a prosecutor to get involved in when nonconsensual activity has taken place. The response to the South Carolina AG by Craigslist is noteworthy.
South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster today announced that our recent improvements, which go far beyond measures he himself personally endorsed with his own signature six months ago, not only aren’t good enough, but actually require a criminal investigation:
“As of 5:00 p.m. this afternoon, the craigslist South Carolina site continues to display advertisements for prostitution and graphic pornographic material. This content was not removed as we requested. We have no alternative but to move forward with criminal investigation and potential prosecution.”
He evidently feels justified in singling out craigslist for investigation, and publicly condemning me personally as being worthy of criminal prosecution.
Seriously? The craigslist adult services section for Greenville, SC has a total of 1 ad for the last 3 days, featuring a photograph of a fully clothed person. The “erotic services” section for Greenville, which we recently closed, has 8 ads total which will expire in two days, and even for these ads the images and text are quite tame.
Meanwhile, the “adult entertainment” section of greenville.backpage.com (careful with link, NSFW), owned by Village Voice Media, has over 60 ads for the last 3 days, and about 250 in total. In sharp contrast with craigslist, many of these ads are quite explicit, quoting prices for specific sex acts, featuring close-ups of bare genitalia, etc.
Of course, no one in mainstream legal circles thinks either company should be subject to civil suit, let alone a criminal investigation. But if for whatever reason you were so motivated, would you target a venue with 9 PG-13 rated ads, or one with 250 XXX rated ones?
And FWIW, telephone yellow pages and other local print media have both companies beat hands down as adult service ad venues for South Carolina.
Any interest in targeting them for criminal prosecution? Didn’t think so.
Update – 1st comment on this entry lists 19 adult ads for 1 day from the Charleston Post and Courier.
Update 2 – 5 pages of escort listings on live.com (owned and operated by Microsoft), click on the “images” tab at the top of the listing page if you want to see photographs (careful NSFW), and note the sponsored “hotel” ads being sold against these listings
Update 3 – 26 escort ads for Myrtle Beach on yellowpages.com (owned and operated by AT&T). Anyone care to count the escort ads in the print yellow pages for major cities in South Carolina?
No matter which political whore is busy making hay, adults will find ways to connect, both sexually and otherwise. People will still be murdered. Your pants will still represent a place the attorney general of South Carolina thinks he belongs. Isn’t it time we told self-righteous bastards like Henry McMaster to stay out of our pants? After all, no matter how many attorney generals you have in your pants, your statistical chances of being murdered by a crazed psychopath remain about the same. What do people like Henry McMaster actually bring to the table, other than an unhealthy obsessession with running our lives?
New communication paradigms and the U.S. military
One of the biggest challenges the U.S. military faces in early 21st century is that while it has all the best weapons of mass destruction it has NONE of the best weapons of mass communication. If history remembers either Iraq or Afghanistan, or possibly both, as a defeat, it will be because the Pentagon was not focused on the right things. It will be because the military chain of command failed to recognize, understand and embrace the power of the tweetbomb.
One of the first tweetbombs will likely cause the ‘action’ of sending a vast and sudden surge of 100 million users to a particular website or document somewhere on the internet. Information distribution paradigms that came before Twitter, such as Slashdot or Digg, are famous for bringing surges of tens of thousands of users to websites within a matter of hours, but this is nothing compared to the power that will be unleashed by Twitter. A key difference between Twitter and previous paradigms is that Twitter automatically pushes information to users, whereas previous paradigms relied on users to seek out a specific website to find and act on information. This makes all the difference.
How can an organization that blocks thumb drives ever hope to win an information war? As a society, we need to encourage our best minds to focus on methods of information warfare. Obama is a cult of personality. Imagine a United States where Obama had a twitter account where his followers waited to receive instructions to mobilize and demand that his political agenda be made reality.
It is conceivable in the next few years that a single individual or institution could have more than 100 million followers dutifully waiting to receive a message and take an associated action. Imagine an official Twitter account for the United States or Chinese Government, created with the specific purpose of mobilizing its citizens at a moments notice to respond to a natural disaster, military attack, or any number of other emergencies.
The U.S. government has some trust issues to overcome that it will probably have to face before millions of citizens would be willing to respond to a tweet. That’s really neither here nor there. The key point of this blog entry is that information distribution systems continue to grow more robust and ubiquituous. People are growing infinitely more connected than they ever have been in human history. This will shake up paradigms long taken for granted and rearrange them in ways most people are not ready for.
The U.S. military needs to be paying attention to the technology changes taking place in the United States and worldwide because the wars of the 21st century are likely to be won or lost on LED screens or whatever replaces them. Right now that isn’t happening at the level it should be. DARPA might be thinking about how to win an information war, but corporals and captains are not. Ultimately they will need to start, or the U.S. is going to start losing.
Fist from the sky
A tornado rolled up the hill and between the neighbor’s house and our house on Friday. I was driving home from work so I missed it. My wife called and you could hear the fear in her voice and the roaring outside. There is nothing quite like the sky turning into a giant black fist and smashing your house. Luckily our house wasn’t smashed. A lot of trees on our 11-acre property were knocked over. Two of them were on the driveway from the street down to our house. It took many hours of chainsaw and Bobcat to get them out of the way so our access to the world could be restored. The power came back on eventually and we returned to being connected to the world and as such, members of civilization. How easily all of that can be taken away should be sobering. More sobering than it usually ends up being.
My dreams of living in an earth sheltered home always come to the forefront when natural disasters occur anywhere that they penetrate my consciousness. My wife tends to dismiss these dreams. She would rather expand our existing standard ranch home. I’d prefer to knock it down and start over with something original. The fist from the sky must have other plans for now.
FCC wants to administer your broadband
I’m from the government and I am here to help. Many of the world’s most deadly events begin with a promise like this one. Sure, government sometimes manages to do some good. Some people would even tell you government does more good than harm. That may even be true. However, we should ask ourselves a few questions when we hear that the FCC is going to take control of national broadband.
The Federal Communications Commission said today that it has taken the first step toward developing a National Broadband plan to ensure that all Americans have access to high-speed Internet connections.
A CNET report notes, however, that the process could get bogged down by special interest groups who may use the opportunity to push their agendas on topics such as Net Neutrality. The FCC’s announcement today calls for input from “all stakeholders: consumers, industry, large and small businesses, non-profits, the disabilities community, governments at the federal, state, local and tribal levels, and all other interested parties.”
Who voted for this program? Who elected the FCC to be in charge of my bandwidth choices? And where is all the funding to “make things better” going to come from?
Now, the FCC has been given $7.2 billion of stimulus money to bring broadband access to every American. I think we should be very afraid. Unless the FCC vastly improves its game, this is going to be a sinkhole for your, and my, dollars.
The FCC is required to submit a plan to Congress by next Feb. 17 that will bring broadband to all Americans at affordable prices. Already, the carriers are lining up to protect the status quo–a situation that already is not working.
There are two things I know from having been in the military for 12 years. The first is that nothing ever goes according to any plan I’ve ever seen hatched up by a government employee – myself included. Second, there is no constitutional mandate for nationally managed broadband.
I am not convinced that we need another federal body to manage yet another aspect of American life. On the other side of the coin, I would like to see widespread penetration of cheap broadband. I’m predicting that whatever they say this is going to cost will be 20 to 30 times underestimated. However long they tell you it is going to take will be off by at least 10 years. You’ll get your cheap fat pipe but it will be closely monitored and you’ll have to pay way more than they told you for the privilege of your “free” Internet.
