Sophianotloren

Make no mistake, child sex and the trafficking of children in Cambodia is a business.

But not in the way we are lead to believe. Here are the components of this business, that are brought together in Cambodia;

Children
It is widely accepted that Asian children follow the instructions of adults, and especially authorities.
If a child is pressured to make a false statement by a NGO or a room full of police – you will get a false statement.
There are no controls in place.

Foreign men
Foreign men are targeted by NGOs because we are lead to believe that any single, man in an Asian country is a sex tourist.
The worlds press feed off and sensationalise any allegation of child sexual abuse and as a result, the conviction is by media – not by the courts.
The benefit for NGOs such as APLE is a wave of donations.
So, in violation of local laws, stories are pushed out to the media at every opportunity, and the presumption of innocence is lost.

Corruption
Cambodia is ranked, by Transparency, as one of the most corrupt countries on the planet at 160th of 177.

It is this corruption that enables some 30 child sex NGOs and hundreds of orphanages to exist, yet there are fewer than 5 child sex convictions here during an average year.

Khmer Rouge
We are lead to believe that Cambodia is a war torn country, suffering from the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge atrocities some 35 years ago.
This perception is exploited by corrupt NGOs who wish to live off donor funding.
The truth is that Cambodia is one of the fastest growing countries in Asia, with only the issue of corruption preventing faster growth.
The majority of the thousands of children held captive in NGO orphanages, are not orphans. They are just a commodity, prisoners. Trafficked by NGOs for foreign donations.

No NGO laws
There are no laws to regulate NGOs in Cambodia. They can operate without regulation, accountability, inspection or reporting.
These NGOs hold thousands of children in protective custody. But protection from who?
To illustrate the NGO regulation issue, there are around 3,000 NGOs in Cambodia for a population of 15 million.
This is far higher than the number of NGOs in regulated India, with a population of 1.25 billion.
This is around 1 NGO for every 10,000 Khmers.

A heaven for. ..NGOs
A quote from a speech by Prime Minister, Hun Sen.
“Cambodia has been heaven for NGOs for too long,” he said in a speech broadcast on national radio on September 26, adding that he had given up hope of reading any positive reports written by international or local NGOs. “The NGOs are out of control … they insult the government just to ensure their financial survival.”

Source : Asia Times – http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/JK14Ae02.html

Corrupt courts
The courts, like the majority of authorities in Cambodia are under funded and corrupt.
Money is used by NGOs to influence the outcome of verdicts. This is clear by the number of highly unsafe convictions.
To a corrupt NGOs such as APLE, these court payments are seen as a cost of business, to secure further donations.

The public
The immediate reaction of the average person is that child protection NGOs must be a good cause.
Few would believe that donations could be misused for bribing authorities.
But the main issue is that most members of the public are unwilling to look beneath the headlines.
Fear and social compliance means that it is incredibly rare for anyone to look into an individual case – even close friends.
Is this justice?

Social media
During a recent book launch, the renowned law author, John Grisham made a comment regarding the possibility that some men, who have been branded pedophiles, may have in fact come across underage pornography by accident.
Mr Grisham would be as qualified as anyone to have an opinion on a controversial legal topic, especially as many of his books have involved social taboos.
But despite our claims of freedom of speech, Mr Grisham faced a torrent of abuse and criticism on social media.
He was forced to take back his comments and to issue an alternative statement, that was on message.

The business model
The complete business model can claim to protect children from sexual abuse.

This does result in false convictions.

This does result in imprisoned children.

This is extortion and human trafficking.

So in a country so endemic with corruption, where police and courts openly demand corrupt payments and where thousands of “orphans” are held for profit.

Do you really beleive that NGOs such as APLE are using donor funds for child protection?

Government conspiracy
The governments of the West are complicit in the unlawful activities of these NGOs in Cambodia.
We are lead to believe that every single man is a paedophile and an immediate danger to children.
The British government is aware of the endemic corruption by NGOs such as APLE in Cambodia.
They are also aware of the failures of the criminal justice system, having recently donated GBP 500,000 to the Khmer Rouge tribunal, in order for a few Khmer nationals to receive a fair trial.

The United Nations Childrens Emergency Fund (UNICEF), is an established, well regarded organisation, which operates in a large number of countries worldwide.

To get a balanced view of the current emergencies in Cambodia, visit the UNICEF website;

http://www.unicef.org/cambodia/activities.html

The UNICEF priorities include;

– child protection
– education
– health and nutrition
– HIV and aids
– local governance
– social protection
– water and sanitation

While it comes under a general heading of child protection, sexual exploitation, does not headline above.

So what about child protection?

The UNICEF website details the following situation in Cambodia;

– poverty resulting in abuse, violence, exploitation and neglect

– the absence of social services

– lack of family support

– drug abuse, gang violence, criminal activity

– the inadequate justice system

There is no specific mention of child sexual abuse amongst the UNICEF priorities and while this could be included in the above, the sexual abuse of children in Cambodia doesn’t warrant a separate heading.

Local partners

Taken from the UNICEF website.

No mention of APLE Cambodia?

What about National Multi-Sectoral Orphans and Vulnerable Children Task Force?

Well. No. No mention of APLE.

Debunking the myth

Taken from the UNICEF website;

Myth – Foreigners and/or homosexuals are primarily responsible for sexual violence: “People in society hear from the media that it is mostly foreigners abusing boys but by talking to children it becomes clear that it is also locals” explains Socheat. Fact: abusers often include neighbours, friends and family members (including women). It is important that sexual abuse is primarily about abuse of power and a desire to control, humiliate and subjugate the victim and not sexuality — research reveals that the vast majority of those who abuse boys are not homosexual at all. Perpetuating these myths can result in us not protecting boys from many of those likely to abuse them.

Conclusion

It is quite difficult to draw a conclusion from the available information online.
Sexual exploitation may be an issue, but it is certainly not highlighted as an emergency or one of the main priorities for UNICEF.

In contrast, the APLE website seems to indicate rampant child sexual abuse, by foreigners, in Cambodia.
However, the statistics do not support APLE’s claims – and mathematics never lie.

alt=”" />

On Monday night, as a guest of the Secret Science Club, I attended a preview of the upcoming film about Alan Turing's efforts to crack the Nazi Enigma crytographic machine- The Imitation Game:





The movie is not a straight biopic, as it takes certain liberties to heighten the dramatic tension (notably, it turns Commander Alexander Denniston into an unimaginative, antagonistic martinet). The movie really is a mid-20th century techno-thriller, a boffins-versus-bombers espionage film. It is structured as a narrative within a narrative, with Turing, brought into a police station for interrogation, recounts his wartime service to a detective who is convinced that he is a Soviet spy. The film jumps back in forth in time, weaving together several story arcs concerning different times in Turing's life.

One of the arcs in the film involves Turing's days at the Sherborne School, where he is tormented by the majority of his classmates, with the exception of fellow mathematics whiz Christopher Morcom. In these scenes, Morcom is portrayed as a gallant savior, rescuing Turing from repellent hazing, and an inspiration, introducing Turing to cryptography, eventually leading to the two students passing encoded notes to each other during their overly simple mathematics classes. These scenes establish Turing's perennial outsider status, and lend an emotional depth to Benedict Cumberbatch's portrayal as the adult Turing, who is emotionally "tone-deaf".

The second story arc, the main one of the film, involves the cracking of the Enigma code, starting with the assembly of a team of cryptographers including Conel Hugh Donel Alexander (the married Alexander is played as a single cad in the film) and Joan Elisabeth Lowther Clarke, who was briefly engaged to be married to Turing. This particular arc not only portrays the race against time to crack the Enigma code, but the harrowing decisions that had to be made regarding reactions to Nazi attacks after the code had been broken- how many attacks could be thwarted without revealing to the Nazis that their encryption had been rendered useless?

The third story arc is set after the war, in the course of a police investigation after Turing's home had been ransacked. In the course of the investigation, a detective suspecting that Turing is a Soviet spy runs into obstacles such as sealed military records. The film is presented as Turing revealing the truth of his wartime service to the detective, with the horrific maltreatment of Turing by the government of the country he had helped to save.

Benedict Cumberbatch does a credible job portraying Turing. There is some humor to be found in his performance as literal-minded individual with no skill deciphering verbal or social ambiguity. He is a riveting screen presence, by turns intense, obtuse, and vulnerable. In a film in which the "action scenes" typically involve clacking wheels, the tension has to come from interpersonal relationships, and Cumberbatch's interpretation of Turing beautifully conveys a personality of a man who can be admired and pitied simultaneously from a distance, but who would undoubtedly be infuriating to associate with up close.

Keira Knightly, portraying Joan Clarke, lends the film some warmth to counteract Cumberbatch's icy matter-of-factness. The film conveys some of the patriarchal flaws of the contemporary culture- assurances have to be made to Clarke's parents that the environment at Bletchley Park is wholesome, and Turing's marriage proposal to Clarke is portrayed as an attempt to mollify Clarke's parents regarding their daughter's unmarried status. Ms. Knightley is not just a luminous presence in the film, she conveys a spirited intelligence and an empathy as well.

On the whole, the film is not without its flaws, but it is important nonetheless. The post title here was totally stolen from a comment made at Alicublog by Shakezula... Turing's role in WW2 and his role in the nascent field of computer science make him a central figure in mid-20th century history, albeit an unsung one. Besides bringing Alan Turing more centrally into the public awareness, the film does a wonderful job of publicizing the work of Joan Clarke. I would have preferred if the film had actually portrayed Turing's death (probably a suicide, possibly an accident involving cyanide), as it is, his cyanide poisoning is mentioned in a coda to the film which also mentions the persecution of tens of thousands of other gay men by the government of the U.K. As it is, Benedict Cumberbatch's performance as a weak, shaking shell of a man ravaged by chemical castration is pretty devastating, albeit too brief. Perhaps the production team didn't want to have such a jarring shift in tone... it's hard to have the "good guys" in the film become the "bad guys" in such short order.

I predict that the film is going to do extremely well come Oscar time. It's a WW2 film. It's about a man with a mental condition who is brilliant. It has a gorgeous young star playing a brainiac. That's all catnip for the Academy. I don't know if it will sweep, but I think it'll have a Best Picture nod, with a Best Leading Actor nomination for Benedict Cumberbatch and a Best Leading Actress nod for Keira Knightley.

When was the last time you thought about Totino’s frozen pizza? When you were 16 and hated good food? Me too. That’s some nasty “pizza.” And other frozen pizza-like products. But I have to give them credit–their tumblr is seriously amazeballs. Like there’s some great drugs floating around Totino’s corporate headquarters amazeballs. Whoever is running this thing is pretty good at their job. I mean, it’s sure as hell not going to make me buy their product. But I’ll probably keep checking the tumblr.

We've known for years that the FBI spied on Martin Luther King's personal life and sent him an anonymous letter in 1964 threatening to out him for his sexual indiscretions unless he killed himself in 34 days. Now we have an unredacted version of the notorious letter. Read the rest

A couple of weeks ago I took myself off to the cinema to see “The Equalizer”. It is an old-fashioned morality tale, very loosely based on the TV series which made Edward Woodward a very rich man, before his sad departure. I can still remember “Callan” – a chilling and excellent series.

The premise is very simple. A mysterious middle-aged man, Robert McCall, (played with due understatement by Denzel Washington) works at the US version of Home Base. He is a teetotal insomniac. He frequents a night café in New York, where he has become familiar with a very young woman called Teri (the beautiful Chloe Grace Moretz) who has fallen into the clutches of a Russian Mafia vice ring, and these are very, very bad people. When he pleads with them to free her from their clutches, they refuse. Sadly, those Russians are very, very bad people indeed. So he goes to war with the Russian Mafia, exhibiting what Liam Neeson’s character in another recent film called “a very particular set of skills.” Mayhem ensues.

It is quite a violent film, which builds to a crescendo of ultra-violence which is so insane I actually started laughing. I won’t say more. Washington is an excellent actor, beautifully measured before he starts killing people, and I do love Chloe Grace Moretz, even though I now expect Operation Yewtree to be on my tail (they probably are anyway, because I am male and over 50). But there is a standout performance by a chap called Marton Csokas, who plays the psychopath from hell who, as the film critics say, chews up the scenery. If there was an Oscar for “Best Supporting Role as a Psychopath” he would be nailed on to win.

Which brings me to Suzi. That is, of course, not her real name. About a year or more ago my lovely friend Dominique who ran the bric-a-brac shop and read Tarot Cards (I know, I know, but she was really just a psychologist) asked me to help this young woman. She was 24 and had come from a difficult background on a council estate in Leeds. She was, as people of my age say, a bonnie lassie, and sometimes that can be a curse. She had been the subject of certain abuse a child, and although she had some decent relatives and loved her mum and granddad, she had left home and made her own way in the world as soon as she could. With a violent, erratic, drug-abusing brother I don’t blame her. She made the right call, and she has looked after herself since maybe 18. She’s a grafter. She started as an office “Go For” and worked her way up to be a general office manager – on not a lot of money, but OK.

Dominique asked me to help because the company’s HR department got leaky due to a drunk, and the personal details of her past had become common knowledge; she felt ashamed and unable to stay. It was a reasonably clear case of constructive dismissal. By the way, I’m not a softie or a bleeding heart liberal when it comes to such matters. I met her at the local coffee shop and she passed all the necessary tests for honesty and genuine distress. I’m not sure I passed her tests, being dressed as is my “habit” (pun intended) in my most comfortable ragged sweater, a standard British Army combat jacket and tatty trainers.

They sent a little delegation from the company to do a deal and pay her off. They expected to meet a vulnerable and upset young woman, and had come with a nice letter for her to sign and a cheque for £1,000 to give her in settlement. The delegation was ushered by her landlady into the dining room, where they did meet a vulnerable and upset young woman. And also yours truly, suited and booted. I can also promise that a suited and booted Gildas is a far cry from a cuddly fellow in a ragged sweater. I suit suits, so to speak – charcoal grey on this occasion, well cut, with a nice crisp white double cuff shirt and silk tie (red – a power colour, with matching cufflinks). Shiny Oxford brogues completed the outfit. I introduced myself very politely as a practicing lawyer and her friend, and they got the very best “smile”. Not every one can do “the smile”. It’s when there is a deliberate mis-match between the lower facial expression, which is polite, and the stare, which is not. It is cold, piercing and cruel, and a perfectly deliberate act of psychological intimidation.

I won’t go through all the details. She got a better settlement. Not massive, but OK, and enough to tide her over and give her a holiday before she started a new job. As I say, she’s a grafter.

We stayed in touch. Having realised that I was not, in fact, a tramp but quite possibly a card-carrying psycho of the “I know where you live” attitude to bad guys, she was very grateful, and I liked her. There was, by the way, nothing untoward or inappropriate in my interest. As I say, she is a bonnie lass, perhaps too much for her own good as will become apparent below, but whether she is just not my type or my avuncular responsibility had pressed an “off” switch, it doesn’t matter. I am quite sure she has no interest in me in that way and I don’t think about her other than as a good young woman who has not had the advantages I had starting out in life. And besides, it does me good to be “down with the kids” sometimes. What middle-aged man wouldn’t enjoy the company of a pretty and nice young woman, just, well, just because? Ask me about a mutual acquaintance with flaming red hair and I will give you a very different answer.

Anyway, we hadn’t been in contact for a little while when I met her for a coffee in the pleasant café in a Pennines’ village on Tuesday. It turned out things hadn’t been so great for her. She had resigned her new job because her boss’s husband had been persistently “hitting” on her. As I say, it can be a problem being good-looking, and you can see that she might have handled it differently and kicked up a fuss, but that’s how she felt. She was OK for rent but looked a bit tired and underfed and was a bit short. More worryingly it turned out that she had had a minor operation, and she was in some pain.

This clearly needed addressing.

The immediate issue was addressed by buying tea and the most immense slice of cream cake that I have seen for quite a while, which disappeared in no time at all. I offered her some money to tide her over for the week, but she refused, and good for her. I can see that it may have been inappropriate for a middle-aged man to be giving a young woman money, although it was meant well. I drove her home and slipped a block of very good chocolate which I had bought at the café and “forgotten” to eat into her bag. However, plainly this situation needed more attention. Coping on your own, with family far away after an operation can’t be fun, and I could tell she had been going without. I had a moment of inspiration.

On the Wednesday I drove back to her house, bearings gifts in the form of home-made soup and a Tesco “Meal Deal”, with which you get a “Finest” range starter, main course and side order, dessert and a bottle of wine for £10. Thank you Tesco. Some easy-to-cook luxury food for her at little cost. The home-made soup was important too. Although I will never win Masterchef, I make really good soups and casserole – an inheritance from my parents’ war time make-do attitudes. Also, I recognised the home-made nature of the delivery was important. Not money – a personal thing. She was totally delighted. As I guessed, she had nothing much in, there was only a poor convenience store nearby, and it was cold and gloomy for going out. She would be fine for a while.

Why did I do this? Was it vanity? Was it self-indulgent and for my own ego? I don’t reject these thoughts, but on the whole, I don’t think so. Because I can. Because it was simply the right thing to do.

She got a telephone interview for a job the next day, and she starts on Monday. I will keep an eye out for her.

I have found in my middle-age, after all my troubles and suffering which I recounted on this site a couple of weeks ago, that I like giving rather than receiving. But, curiously, what I give, I get back, and more. Not in the same way, but still more.

The next project is the home for stray and homeless dogs. They take them into care and re-home them when they can. This week they asked for volunteers on Facebook, and so I have put myself at their disposal. The Monk Mobile is a stately old Volvo Estate with 150,000 miles on the clock, with the nick name “Tilly”. Perfect reliable transport for a dog in need of a lift.

I suppose one doesn’t need to take out swathes of Russian Mafiosi to be an Equalizer. One can do it in small, quiet un-dramatic ways, but none the worse for that.

Here is some music. Have a Blessed Day.

Gildas the Monk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLbEZkuIRBk&index=3&list=PL80D18478A58833C1

© Gildas the Monk

A number of things have conspired in any number of attempts to conjure up a Sadly worthy jeremiad over about the last four or five months. and there were many things that came like a flood of fodder during that time, starting near-abouts with Ferguson and the dead kid left in the street for four hours.

Some shit just knocks the wind out of you and being hit by a fusillade of hatred, naked racism and bullshit can on the right days get to even the most tightly girded of us.

Personally, there was the job I had to get out of lest I appear before a judge on assault charges, some rather uncomfortable issues with my health which stole time, vim and vigor. The laptop went down (more accurately the power supply went down and with a battery life measured in minutes…we are in brick territory.) Thank the FSM that I know how to use a soldering iron.

So the good news is that Lappie™ is back in business after a six week hiatus. My body seems to be gaining strength after a month of pain. While I am not sure where next months rent is going to come I figure I can manage a patron. The return of JP is of great solace as well.

Yesterday, I was cleaning/straightening up my room and ran across my beloved Nexus 7 which I had given up for a brick over a year ago. For shits and grins I thought I might plug it in and attempt to charge the beast. I honestly had no hope whatsoever given previous attempts, but 20 minutes later I caught the google bootup screen out of the corner of my eye and was like “You’re fucking kidding me.” I had to make sure that I left it alone for at least an hour as I went about my business (this was hard).

Happy to say that after 5 software updates the Nexus is humming along with the latest version of Android and I am a happy camper. I am going to take this as a sign that things are beginning to turn in this holler. If the Opinel and Swedish fire steel make an appearance all the better.

Sometimes it is the little things…

In the midst of laments that the shared culture of television is dwindling – that charming picture of a nuclear family gathered around the TV set outshone by the glow of individual screens — “Send Blank Tape,” an installation at Pioneer Works, is providing an alternative communal viewing experience. With carpets on the floor and a sofa, eight CRT monitors propped atop milk crates play works produced in connection with Radical Software, the earliest publication to cover all aspects of the then-unexplored medium of video. Between 1970 and 1974 the Raindance Corporation published eleven issues of the journal, which are now compiled in an online archive.

It was a DIY venture aiming to disseminate discoveries of any and all possibilities video had to offer, not just for art, but also for activism, documentary, science, psychology, and play. Its distribution forged the consciousness and communication of disparate collectives across the country. The title of this exhibition refers to a system set up at Antioch College in Ohio by which people could send in their own videos to be included in an ever-expanding archive, along with a blank tape to be filled with other programs from the collection, creating a kind of grass-roots library that embodied the ideology of a movement.

Fueled by the teachings of Marshall McLuhan, Radical Software railed against the deeper message of that 1950s family portrait: that the television at its center was broadcasting the same corporate media message into every American living room, a fixed perspective consumed by the masses as truth. One video at Pioneer Works, “Some Short Scenes in the Life of Radical Software,” shows the printing and distribution of the journal. Beryl Korot, one of the journal’s founders, explains to the camera that they believe television can be much “more than a radio with a screen,” or the “feedback of feedback of information.” The journal’s agenda was to promote independent, pirate television, and gave down-to-earth information about equipment and how-to’s in all levels of production. In the videos we see mechanics laid bare – microphones poke into many shots and you hear directions and the voices of people behind the camera. Emphasis is always on the medium and its practicality.

The magnetic tape of video degrades far faster than film, and these screens show a low-contrast image, a mesh of grey vibrating with artifacts and banding. The content is similarly imprecise, crossing from documentary to trippy video feedback experiment to free love sex tape to a camera being passed around at a loft party. One highlight is John Reilly’s “The Ballad of AJ Weberman,” a profile of the self-proclaimed Dylanologist rummaging through Bob Dylan’s trash cans outside his Bleecker Street apartment like a stoned archaeologist making important historical discoveries: “Dylan uses Clorox!”

The works on view here offer a time capsule of early seventies counterculture, but the silent majority peeks through. In the middle of “Whole Earth Demise Party,” a video from 1972 documenting a public forum held at the Exploratorium in San Francisco on how to spend the profits of a counterculture magazine, the camera turns to the monolith of national broadcast itself: a news program showing Richard Nixon as he walks his daughter Trisha down the aisle and Dan Rather duly commentating. A reel of shorts by the collective Videofreex features an interview with Yippie Abbie Hoffman in Chicago for a Weathermen protest. Hoffman’s manic comments on the “establishment” and curly mass of hair find stark juxtaposition with the nervous laughter of two short-haired, buttoned-up boys and their hairsprayed mother insisting that it’s “the government’s job to make the decisions” about whether to end the war.

As if in direct response to that sentiment, a particularly tragic video shows a worried 21-year-old Fred Hampton, deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of The Black Panther Party, discussing the leaders who have been “wiped out,” just three months before he was assassinated in his sleep by the FBI’s COINTELPRO program.

Most of these early experiments were made in New York City, though the Videofreex collective moved their equipment to the Catskills to become “the most neighborly television around.” The installation features work by other collectives such as Ant Farm, Raindance, Community Video, and Media Access Center, along with a series of works by female students at Antioch College.

In fact, most striking about the installation and the early video movement it covers is the prominence of women. Two women founded Radical Software and published its first issue, and in these videos women are clearly involved both in front of and behind the camera. Even Shirley Clarke, the goddess of independent film and video, makes a cameo in “Laser Games,” confounding pedestrians on 23rd Street with a laser pointer aimed from her Chelsea Hotel penthouse.

In my day job I’m a video editor, and when I mention this to someone (usually a man) in the same field the response is always some variation of, “Gear. Gear? Gear!” This pissing match goes on until my eyes have satisfactorily glazed over. It’s the kind of technical machismo that seems ironic in an age when equipment, education, and information are more accessible to a wider range of people than ever before. And yet this competitive attitude has dire effects on who makes it in the industry.

That’s why the sharing philosophy and instincts of openness Radical Software promoted feel so refreshing. Sitting cross-legged on the carpet, I felt nostalgic not for the American living rooms of the past, but for a time when the medium and its message were more generous.

“Send Blank Tape” is on view at Pioneer Works (159 Pioneer Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn) through November 16.

Well, this is hell of a thing.

“I read it with mounting uneasiness,” Asimov wrote the next year. “I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever did. All three volumes, all the nearly quarter of a million words, consisted of thoughts and of conversation. No action. No physical suspense.”

Asimov’s self-deprecating description of his own series sounds as inviting as a synopsis of Season 1 of The Leftovers. And soon, it might be available for the same subscription price: According to a report at The Wrap earlier this week, Jonathan Nolan (brother of Christopher, and cowriter ofInterstellar) is writing and producing an HBO/Warner Bros. TV series based on The Foundation Trilogy.¹

I wonder if we can avoid Ben Kingsley as Hari Seldon? And let me be the first to put in a vote for Robin Lord Taylor as the Mule.

There’s nothing I’d like better than a well-executed television version of the Foundation trilogy (we’ll set aside, for the moment, the prequels and sequels).  And there’s no one more capable of doing this well than HBO.  But having read the entire trilogy a dozen times, I struggle to come up with the names of more than a handful of characters, most of whom don’t appear until the Mule cycle of stories.  It’s going to be tough.

What does Republican control of both houses of Congress mean? Many things of course. But one of them might be yet another push to open the Yucca Mountain nuclear storage facility in Nevada. And really, what could go wrong?

The key design element in question is something the Energy Department calls a “drip shield.” This is a kind of massive, corrosion-resistant titanium alloy mailbox that is supposed to sit over each of the thousands of waste canisters in Yucca Mountain’s underground tunnels. In NRC’s definition, it is designed “to prevent seepage water from directly dripping onto the waste package outer surface.”

The name drip shield itself is a giveaway that there is a water problem at Yucca Mountain. There is indeed a lot more water, and it is flowing faster, than the Energy Department imagined when it picked the site, which is why it added the drip shield to the original design. Without the titanium shields, dripping water would corrode the waste canisters placed in the repository and release radioactive waste, and the moving underground water would carry it to the nearby environment. Using the corrosion data in the Energy Department’s license application, one can calculate that this corrosion would take not the “million years” cited by Mr. Shimkus, but about 1,000 years.

Although the Energy Department has included the drip shields as part of the repository design, and NRC has accepted them for license-review purposes, the Energy Department doesn’t actually plan to install the shields until at least 100 years after the waste goes in. Presumably, this delay is based on financial considerations; installing the shields early in the project would add hugely to the repository’s cost and thus threaten its funding prospects in Congress. If you look more closely into the situation, you can’t escape the conclusion that it is highly implausible that the drip shields will ever be installed. In fact, as a practical matter, it may not even be physically possible to install them.

A 100 year delay? Well, what harm is there in that? Surely on top of everything else, the geopolitical situation will be precisely as stable as today, if not more so! Still…

According to Energy Department’s plan, after the radioactive waste canisters are placed in the repository tunnels, the site would receive minimal attention for many decades. After a hundred years or so, before the repository was permanently closed, the Energy Department would install the protective drip shields. So it says. Because of the radioactive underground environment, it would take highly specialized robotic equipment to install the shields with the required precision. None of this equipment has been designed, or even thought through.

Realistically, a century into the project, the underground tunnels would have deteriorated considerably and collapsed in part. Dust would sharply limit visibility. The tunnels would have to be cleared of rubble for a remotely operated underground rail system to transport robotic equipment and the five-ton drip shields to the waste canisters. The shields would then have to be installed end-to-end, so as to form a continuous metal cover inside the tunnels, obviously a delicate, complex, and extremely expensive operation. Is it reasonable to believe that after 100 years, with the nuclear waste in the repository long out of the public mind, that Congress would appropriate enormous sums of money for the Energy Department to go back into the tunnels to install the shields? Can we really rely on an agency that hasn’t yet cleaned up a nationwide radioactive mess that dates from World War II to keep a promise that it will do something a century into the future? Will there even be an Energy Department in 100 years?

This is one of many reasons why there is no room for nuclear energy in our future. As Alan Weisman discusses, building nuclear power plants assumes a forever of continued electrical production because if that power goes out long enough for the backup generators to run out, every single nuclear power plant in the world turns into a situation worse than Chernobyl. Then there is the storage issue that the U.S. certainly has never dealt with, as we see with the Yucca Mountain problems. Nuclear power is a bad idea.

What do you do if you sell a product on terms that legally bind your customers not to complain and they complain anyway? Pretend that the DMCA gives you the right to censor search results. Read the rest

Darth Vader is showing less mercy than usual here. [via]

Fuck you, George W. Bush. Go suck on some hairy rhino balls so that your mouth is so full of sack that you can't breathe, let alone talk. And fuck you to all the media outlets treating Bush like a long-lost beloved uncle who has finally come back from exploring the Congo with his Hottentot manservants. Any interview with the former president should begin with "Shut the fuck up, you fucking America-wrecking imbecile" and end with "Why won't you shut the fuck up, you fucking torturing, murdering, war criminal motherfucker?"

Bush has been just about everywhere promoting his book on his fucking asshole father who everyone loves now because he's old and jumps out of planes and shit, but who was a shitty president who bobbed on Reagan's knob until he lost his own personality. Here's W. on NPR when asked if his mission in Iraq was as clear as his father's during the Persian Gulf War: "Yes. I think in many ways it was. It was more complex because this decision was made in a post-9/11 world. In other words, the removal of Saddam from Kuwait was definitely in our national interest. But it didn't necessarily mean that the United States's homeland would be threatened or not threatened depending upon his actions. In our case, the 9/11 attacks changed the strategic equation for the United States, and we had to deal with threats before they fully materialized."

Wait. Yes, it was as clear as Dad's but it wasn't because it was more "complex"? Ah, there's that old logic. And, motherfucker, you are the fucking godfather of the post-9/11 world. And, motherfucker, are you still tying Saddam Hussein to 9/11? In less than 5 minutes, Bush mentions 9/11 four times. It's all he's got. So shut the fuck up already.

And then there's the softballs, like on Face Bob Schieffer's Face, Nation, when Schieffer's face asked Bush if politics has gotten "meaner." Bush actually said, "People were held to account for what they said. In other words, there was a pushback. Now there's just so much stuff out there--flotsam out there that people say what they feel like saying without any consequences." And Schieffer did not arthritically rise out of his chair and bitch slap Bush, screaming, "Motherfucker, that cocksucker Karl Rove ran your campaigns. You fucking made it meaner. Rove was never held accountable, even for outing a fucking CIA agent whose husband pissed him off. He should be skull fucked by bears. Shut the fuck up."

Let's not even talk about his Today show appearance, which should cause the set to be burned and the ground salted.

Why are we doing this? Why is Bush allowed to go anywhere without crowds pelting his car with shit and rotten tomatoes and eggs? Why aren't there riots at his book signings, demanding his arrest for crimes against humanity? Why hasn't he been run so far out of any town that he has to live in an underground bunker so that the angry masses don't tear him limb from limb? Are we that brain-damaged a nation that we've forgotten? Are we that delusional that we can't just say, endlessly, "Shut the fuck up," and mean that we never want to hear from him again until we all jubilantly join hands and do a crazy jig on his grave?

Oh, and, fuck you, W., you didn't write a fuckin' book.

On Tuesday, I took my beloved number 4 subway down to the Nevins St stop so I could visit the brilliant BRIC House to see math whiz, funnyman, Public Engagement in Mathematics Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, and all-around good guy Matt Parker perform his entertaining blend of mathematics and comedy in a joint presentation of the Secret Science Club and the BRIC Stoop Series. Matt has just released a book, Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension: A Mathematician's Journey Through Narcissistic Numbers, Optimal Dating Algorithms, at Least Two Kinds of Infinity, and More.

One of Mr Parker's first displays of acumen involved asking the audience if anyone had a calculator (practically everybody did, because we had phones- one lady in the audience actually had a straight-up calculator, which impressed Matt), then asking everyone to pick a double-digit number and to cube that number- he then quickly solved the cube root problems that he solicited from the audience, perhaps by using this method. He then moved on to perform his barcode bit, and digressed about the difference between European and North American barcodes, which led to a bit about the need to encode information in such a way that the inaccurate lasers can be compensated for, which led to a bit about using a 3mm drill bit to make a hole in a Blu-Ray disc (preferably someone else's, he quipped) and ascertaining that there was enough data coded on the disc to compensate for damage to said disc.

One of the tours de force of Matt's presentation was his spreadsheet trick (which you can duplicate at the linked site, by which he illustrated that digital images can be likened to spreadsheets, each pixel being a "spreadsheet cell". He capped this by noting that anyone who relaxed after work by watching television was basically going over multiple spreadsheets per second.

A lot of Matt's presentation involved props, such as interlocked rolling discs and a plethora of Möbius strips. Mr Parker told us that the Möbius strip is his second favorite shape, and in the Q&A admitted that his favorite shape is the Klein bottle. He also proudly displayed a self-correcting binary scarf knitted by his mum, who is now working on a Klein bottle hat.

It was an entertaining night of mathematics, but enough of my yapping... how about some of Matt's mathematical musings? Here is a long bit about a computer constructed out of dominoes:





Here's a funny bit about the imperial measurement system:





Here is a nifty "Fractal Pterodactyl" pattern (hint: the pterosaurs depicted are Pteranodon longiceps:





Here's a review of Matt's book, which promises to be a fun series of activities. He'll be appearing in Seattle next week, so if you're in the area, he's a fun lecturer and a great person, so check out his event. If you're really serious (but not overly serious) about math(s), check out one of the mathsjam events in your area, and while you're engaging in mathematical activities, drink to Mr Parker's health.

View

micdotcom:

Women’s products cost more than men’s — and the French have had enough

It costs more to be a woman than a man.

It’s an infuriating and relatively unnoticed fact: Not only do women earn less than men, all around the world, they are essentially being “taxed” for their purchases. 

Sometimes called the “invisible,” “pink” or “woman” tax, this capitalism-induced phenomenon reflects the price difference between otherwise functionally identical products marketed to women as opposed to men.

Unlike in the United States, however, France has decided to do something about it. | Follow micdotcom

clementinemorrigan:

hiddenjumprope:

thecatsmeow90:

My lovely friends and I did a thing.

I love that this is happening.

I was fighting dress codes when I was thirteen / fourteen. That was back in 1999 and 2000. The fact that this shit is still going on is so gross. Grateful that the resistance is still happening.

The sons of our sons will marvel,
Paging the textbook:
“1914 … 1917 … 1919 …
How did they live? The poor devils!”
Children of a new age will read of battles,
Will learn the names of orators and generals,
The numbers of the killed,
And the dates.

They will not know how sweetly roses smelled above the trenches,
How martins chirped blithely between the cannon salvos,
How beautiful in those years was Life.

Never, never did the sun laugh so brightly
As above a sacked town,
When people, crawling out of their cellars,
Wondered: is there still a sun?
Violent speeches thundered,
Strong armies perished,

But the soldiers learned what the scent of snowdrops is like
An hour before the attack.
People were led at dawn to be shot …
But they alone learned what an April morning can be.
The cupolas gleamed in the slanting rays,
And the wind pleaded: Wait! A minute! Another minute!
Kissing, they could not tear themselves from the mournful mouth,
And they could not unclasp the hands so tightly joined.
Love meant: I shall die! I shall die!
Love meant: Burn, fire, in the wind!
Love meant: O where are you, where?

They love as people can love only here, upon this rebellious and
tender star.

In those years there were no orchards golden with fruit,
But only fleeting bloom, only a doomed May.
In those years there was no calling: “So long!”
But only a brief, reverberant “Farewell!”
Read about us and marvel!
You did not live in our time — be sorry!
We were guests of the earth for one evening only.
We loved, we destroyed, we lived in the hour of our death.
But overhead stood the eternal stars,
And under them we begot you.

In your eyes our longing still burns,
In your words our revolt reverberates yet
Far into the night, and into the ages, the ages, we have scattered
The sparks of our extinguished life.

©Ilya Ehrenburg 1919.

While this rendition isn’t going to get the same results as a real particle accelerator, I invite you to take a look at this fantastic LEGO version from Jason(JK Brickworks).

This “working” accelerator does in fact send a LEGO soccer ball around the track at 440 studs per second, or approximately 12.5 km/hr. Jason outlines some of the build in more detail on his blog.

I highly recommend checking out the video, too.

Here’s another blast from the past, this time from July 2012. Sadly, the link to Lily LLoyd’s blog is broken, but I like the think the post basically makes sense without it.

---

 

 

LilyLloyd wrote this amazing post about how “The whole born dominant bullshit is… well, bullshit”. It’s fantastic and you should read it right now. And it gets better! A Feminist Sub left this brilliant comment:

Really interesting post! I do have to say that I have a problem with the old Leather idea of bottoming as a step on the way to topping, because I think it conveys an idea that topping/domming is more valuable than bottoming/submitting. Like subs are simply people who couldn’t cut it as doms.

I don’t *think* that was the intended message with that tradition, but I do think that it’s contributed to domism in contemporary BDSM culture – I think the “standards” for calling oneself a dom are much higher than for calling oneself a sub. To be a sub, you just need submissive desires – to be a dom, you need credentials. Hence all the ranting about how there are no “real doms.” And I think that’s another reason that it seems like there are so many more doms than subs.

That blew my mind. It makes so much sense, but somehow I just never saw it before. Of course we don’t see submission as valuable in its own right if we treat it like it’s just a stage you go through before you reach the real goal of becoming dominant.

Why don’t we ever suggest that submissive/bottom type people try topping? We tell tops all the time that you should bottom before you top. It’s certainly true that there are lots of things you can learn by bottoming, but there are also plenty of things you can learn from topping. I can tell someone I really do want to hear about what my bottom wants until I’m blue in the face, but if they try topping it might click for them that’s it really is helpful to get some feedback.

Then again, it would totally destroy the dominant mystique if any lowly submissive could pick up a flogger and try it out for themselves. Anyone can bottom after all, it’s only the chosen few who can top. And if you actually believe that, there’s a Nigerian Prince who would like to speak with you, you poor stupid fuck.

Assuming that just anyone can bottom but topping is special is pretty much the dictionary definition ofdomism. With how passionately I hate the idea that I’m somehow more worthy because I decided to call myself dominant, I’m amazed and kind of disturbed that I never saw it before. I should know better, but I just didn’t see until A Feminist Sub pointed it out. This is how ingrained domism is in BDSM culture, and this is why I rail so hard against it when I see it.

carnivaloftherandom:

curlykytta:

comedium:

news flash: bbc finally does something right

Listen up college kiddies that think your drunken escapades don’t matter!

Ooh, and bonus Colin Salmon.

My name is bspencer and I’m a dirty liar. A few days back I wrote a florid post saying I was taking a break from #GamerGate because it was taking its toll on my psyche. That was true. And I did take a break. But it was a short one, and after a couple of days I was back at the hashtag, getting my fix like some huffer who’d just stumbled upon an unattended pile of metallic Krylon.

The truth is I can’t quit #GamerGate. 

So the way I see it, GG is a toxic stew of aggressively stupid and/or ignorant teenagers who now have a lot (cont) http://t.co/UzVr6C7ZkM

— bspencer (@vacuumslayer) November 5, 2014

A couple weeks ago my son and I were watching a series about reptiles. It was hosted by David Attenborough. During the intro, there’s a quick cut of Attenborough watching two huge tortoises mating. It’s weird. You wonder how he’s feeling. Like…does he feel awkward? Is he stifling a laugh? And thinking about that cut made me think about #GamerGate. Watching #GamerGate is like watching reptiles awkwardly mate–you don’t know whether to laugh or be disgusted. You don’t know if you want to keep watching or turn away. But somewhere along the way, I decided to be GG’s David Attenborough: I decided to stay and watch.

I’ve combed through that hashtag searching for signs that I am even 1% wrong about its inhabitants. But I’m not. I’m 1000% right. It’s a movement based entirely on driving feminist women and feminist allies out of gaming and shutting up feminist women who critique games and game culture.

The best thing about GG’s longevity is that its supporters–who are an incredibly unwieldy lot–have given up the pretense that’s about “ethics in journalism.”  On any given day, every other tweet says in language even GGer’s can understand that the goal is to drive feminists and “Social Justice Warriors” out of gaming and gaming criticism.

Everyone knows it’s a cesspool. Everyone outside its bubble sees it the way I do: as a daycare gone rogue with toddlers running around smearing the walls with poop. Everyone who’s cool hates #GamerGate. Everyone who matters hates #GamerGate. But like many toddlers GGer’s think any attention is good attention, so the daycare continues to teem with excitable, poo-smearing toddlers. I think it may be time for that to stop. I think that we all need to just stop paying attention to GG. Because if we do, soon it will just be a room full of toddlers sending nasty emails to Gawker babbling to each other and proudly showing off  their baffling Microsoft Paint graphics poop-drawings.

I promise this time I’ll go first. I promise I’ll stop giving it attention. Then maybe the toddlers of GG will finally get tired and go down for their naps. Boy, do they need one.

maxistentialist:

Maciej Cegłowski:

In 1952, an American attaché in Moscow was innocently fiddling with his shortwave radio when he heard the voice of the American ambassador dictating letters in the Embassy, just a few buildings away. He immediately reported the incident, but though the Americans tore the walls out of the Ambassador’s office, they weren’t able to find a listening device.

When the broadcasts kept coming, the Americans flew in two technical experts with special radio finding equipment, who meticulously examined each object in the Ambassador’s office. They finally tracked the signal to this innocuous giant wooden sculpture of the Great Seal of the United States, hanging behind the Ambassador’s desk. It had been given as a gift by the Komsomol, the Soviet version of the Boy Scouts.

Cracking it open, they found a hollow cavity and a metal object so unusual and mysterious in its design that it has gone down in history as ‘The Thing’.

‘The Thing’ had no battery, no wires, no source of power at all. It was was just a little can of metal covered on one side with foil, with a long metal whisker sticking out the side. It seemed too simple to be anything.

That night the American technician slept with ‘The Thing’ under his pillow. The next day they smuggled it out of the country for analysis.

The Americans couldn’t figure out how ‘The Thing’ worked, and had to ask the British for help. After a few weeks of fiddling, the Brits finally cracked The Thing’s secret.

That little round can was a resonant cavity. If you shone a beam of radio waves at it at a particular frequency, it would sing back to you, like a tuning fork. The metal antenna was just the right length to broadcast back one of the higher harmonics of the signal.

The resonator sat right behind a specially thinned piece of wood under the eagle’s beak. When someone in the room spoke, vibrations in the air would shake the foil, slightly deforming the cavity, which in turn made the resonant signal weaker or stronger.

As the attaché discovered, you could listen to this modulated signal on a radio just like a regular broadcast. ‘The Thing’ was a wireless, remotely powered microphone. It had been hanging on the ambassador’s wall for seven years.

Today we have a name for what ‘The Thing’ is: It’s an RFID tag, ingeniously modified to detect sound vibrations. Our world is full of these little pieces of metal and electronics that will sing back to you if you shine the right kind of radio waves on them.

But for 1952, this was heady stuff. Those poor American spooks were up against a piece of science fiction.

Today I want to talk about these moments when the future falls in our laps, with no warning or consideration about whether we’re ready to confront it.

Another amazing talk by the creator of Pinboard. I first heard Maciej speak at XOXO, he blew me away. This transcript of his Webstock talk was also amazing.

Technically outside the scope of this blog, but this was way too interesting/cool not to share.

By modern standards, the inclusion of two women in this Dungeons and Dragons ad was a surprisingly bold move -- a kind of sad snapshot of our lost, pre-Reagan/Thatcher/Pinochet/Mulroney-era past.

(via Seanan McGuire)

I am feeling a bit off the normal page today.  Today is my Minotaur husband’s last day at work — he is retiring.  I admit, superstition and fear are ruling my morning.  Both of us are a bit flighty this week, expecting some disaster to ruin our plans for a new post-0330 til 1830 life.  Because yes, that has been his work day hours for most of our married life.  So, I restlessly tossed and turned last night, worried about his final day.

He took yesterday off to help with some household things, but even that didn’t go as planned.  He speared the palm of his hand with a screwdriver!  It has long been a joke how accident prone he is at all matters of home and garden, but I was horrified that changing out a light switch required a visit to Urgent Care, pain meds and antibiotics.  (I’m trying unsuccessfully to comfort my anxiety with another bit of superstition, an old saying of “Blood has been shed, the danger is passed.”) We picked the 31st of October as the end of work for symbolic reasons — most of my fellow pagans celebrate this day, not as Halloween, but as Samhain.

Samhain* is celebrated by some as a Celtic New Year.  My Samhain is next weekend, not this one — but New Year it is and the week leading up to it is always profoundly moving in terms of portents and memories wafting out of my mind and memory like scents from a mythical witch’s cauldron.  Our married world will turn this next week, once he gets home safely today and I can stop sweating.  (Is the difference between a premonition and superstition that at the end of one you say “Well, I knew something was happening!” and after the latter you go “Well, that’s OVER with, thank goodness!”??)  His focus, for the first time ever, CAN be on his marriage and home life.

But there is always a worm in the apple, they say.  I know a lot of women who suddenly hate having the man under foot if she is (like me) already home from the paid work world.  I admit, I have some trepidation going there.  My Minotaur defined himself by his work life; home is where he hung up his brain with his hat.  Thus his accident proneness here — home is where he didn’t need to focus and engage.  I expect an adjustment period where he thinks I am very bitchy-demanding and I think he is behaving like an absent-minded, disengaged twit.

But since it IS the Samhain season?  I admit to a bit of amusement amidst my ambivalence. This is the time of year when it always seems things go forward of their own inertia without that much actual doing from us.  It is the time of sudden happenstance and synchronicity in this household.  Working on the bedroom for our returned youngest son this week, it all went so easily as to spook us out.  This house is infamous for making us sweat and bleed for every change.  But screws found studs, moved furniture fit perfectly, paint did not run out before walls did.  So, as a family, we seem to have turned a corner, found the key to  unlocking our future?

And because there must be balance, perhaps?  I note with amusement that another key turned as well.  The one locking up the man his family insists is not crazy, who had led police in Pennsylvania on an unmerry seven week chase!  The sport-killer who shot cops for no better reason than to prove he could is caught!  It made me smile that he was handcuffed with the cuffs of the man he murdered.  And yes, I said superstition and “woo” was in charge of my mind today, right?  I’d say his surprise arrest was just my world saying “Don’t fuck with Halloween OR Samhain, you asshole!  The kids get to trick-or-treat now and YOUR year of self-aggrandizement is OVER!”

* Samhain is generally pronounced “Sow -in” or some variant thereof.  We pronounce it more like “Sah-vein” rather like the Gaelic name for the month of November.

Filed under: Life Tagged: fate, marriage, pagan life, Samhain, synchronicity