Big Balls Won't Fly

On a flight arriving in Detroit Metropolitan, a would-be terrorist burned his leg and singed his balls as the explosives he was carrying in his underpants burst into flame instead of exploding as he had intended.

Had they exploded, castration would have been the least of his problems. Now, though, one must wonder at the consequences. Somewhere there is a Mustafa The Bomb-Maker, whose defective merchandise let this hero be near-castrated instead of immolated. Will the angry customer ever return? Will Mustafa ever sell another bomb? Will he be required to test them first? Mustafa, there is someone at the door...

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, hundreds of thousands of the rich and famous and even just moderately so-so will be submitting to very detailed scans of their bodies at airports to see if they are hiding anything in the wrinkles. On men, these scans can count to three.

And, if you have big balls, forget it. You will be need to be felt up.

Biggest Political Disappointment Of 2009

Yeah.

Me, too.

Will 22 Million E-mails Fit A Flash Drive?

The 22 million White House e-mails from March 2003 to October 2005 that somehow got mislaid during the Bush Administration got 'found' again in January - just before he left office. Found hiding in tape vaults in warehouses in caves, most likely. And now the courts have said that they must be read and archived. According to the Associated Press,

"The government now can find and search 22 million more e-mails than it could in late 2005 and the settlement means that the Obama administration will restore 94 calendar days of e-mail from backup tape, said Kristen Lejnieks, an attorney representing the National Security Archive."

How big are these emails? What is their average size? Would they fit a jump drive?

A full page of typed paper of 50 lines at 80 characters each contains 4000 characters. This page of text will fit in 4 kilobytes of storage space. This is not saved as an image, but as a text file in the ASCII format. An ASCII file is readable in Microsoft's WordPad and is searchable in ordinary databases.

Suppose these emails are three pages long, on the average, including headers. An average message then requires 12 kilobytes of storage space.

22,000,000 messages would require 264,000,000,000 bytes of space - 264 gigabytes. All the emails would fit very nicely on a portable 32o gig drive. These drives cost $59.95 today and are so small they will soon be off the market. Sold only for use as delivery media.

Would you pay $149.95 for the inside scoop on the Bush boogie-man years? How about the Library Edition with indexes? Would you like the plain cloth outer-box cover or prefer the Corinthian Leather? Sign with my pen or yours? Yes, you can keep it, oh sure. We give them as souvenirs.

Of course, only 94 days will be released at first. 3 months out of 32, roughly. Ten percent. And that will be cut in half by messages removed due to security issues. So only five percent of the 264 gigabyes will be released within the next few years.

That's 13 gigabytes. Fits on a 16 gig flash drive. It will walk out the door.

The portability. The market. Would you like the Corinthian Leather flash drive?

We will give them as souvenirs.

When New Frontiers Become The Village Commons

Ayn Rand capitalism works best on a flat earth. There it can grow larger forever. Boundaries can always be expanding on such a terrain. There is always another hill to cross, always more nature to conquer. A galaxy far away would work well, too.

On a round earth, in limited space, expansion runs into itself. When expansion in the global marketplace is geographic, for example, the final unsold market may be a small island chain in an ocean far away, perhaps a place like the Seychelles. Lovely but distant, and oh, so enticing. The final market. No one else left to sell to.

So it is that new products blossom onto the marketplace as specialty products, then become commodities. Not much profit in commodities. Banks, the final salt mine, try to create new thrilling products out of the one thing they sell - credit - and introduce so much fluff and fakery that they bring the system down. Anything they do to recapture their youth works against them.

Large companies run government. We live in a capitalist society. Senators are openly bought, and they blithely ignore the public shame. The military professionals and the defense industry have sold the country on a war that drains it even today. The insurance industry - which moves paper around, pooling risk and selling thrilling new insurance products - celebrates that it has killed, it thinks now, a health care bill that would have ensured that all Americans have health care.

Whatever of wealth is left in America, whatever has not been grabbed, is up for grabs. As the pile of wealth grows smaller, the grabbing gets more fierce.

In villages in early America, cattle were kept on a shared commons surrounded by houses. Whoever could breed the most cattle got the lion's share of the grass that grew in the commons and crowded other householders out of their share. A limited supply of grass could not provide for a village containing expansionists. Milk cows, perhaps, herds, no. Limited supply requires limited participation. The Law Of The Commons.

The earth being round, supplies are limited.

So what's a poor aging business to do? When your stocks behave like your bonds, how can you spin a profit? When your market is saturated with product and the customers haven't been given raises in years, what can you do?

When the pool of customers hasn't been given raises in years, when you send their jobs overseas, golly, what can you do? When you fight to deny them health care so more can be driven into bankruptcy, what can you do?

How can capitalism survive a round earth?

Can There Be A War On Piracy?

Terrorism and piracy are two of a kind. Berserkers with brains use violence and fear of violence to acquire power and wealth.

Bullying and extortion are in about the same class. All are assaults on freedom. All are piracy.

Is this not the enemy? Piracy of the dollar, of our health, of unschooled children's futures, piracy of votes? Piracy of the air we breathe? Is there any enemy who is not a pirate?

Is there any war other than the war on piracy?

Ugandan "Kill-The-Gays" Bill Nears Passing

Uganda is about to enact a "kill the gays" bill. They expect to be able to extradite gay - or "suspected gay" Ugandans from foreign countries...such as our own. We shelter people who leave their homelands under fire.

Could someone correct them on this oversight before they pass the bill?

Their intent may be that if they can't extradite escaped gays back for death or imprisonment, then they would have cause to withdraw from global extradition agreements. Without extradition, they could then perhaps become a final refuge for the evil of the world and their wealth. One wonders at their motive.

Their attack on gays may be a back-door way of getting out of their extradition responsibilities.

Maybe Ugandans could confirm that for an Ugandan emigre in other countries, suspicion of gayness is not cause to have them extradited, as they now specify in the bill that it should be?

Do they plan to re-negotiate extradition agreements?

We are all gay Ugandans.

- - -

Update: Large church minister Rick Warren, whose Ugandan influence helped propagate the hate that led to this bill, has called it Un-Christian, and has asked the Ugandans not to pass the bill. Others in The Family, founders of the C-Street House clique in Washington who made Uganda a special project for their ministry, are also now asking that the killing not be done.

Imprisonment, yeah, that's Christian. But killing... gee, that smacks of Rwanda.

We are all gay Ugandans.

Cellphones For Afghanistan

The world throws away enough cellphones every month to provide one for every adult in Afghanistan. If people were to throw them a little farther, so that they landed in that distant place, how would Afghan politics change?

Could we leave sooner?

Of course, Afghans already have some phones. The cell towers are a target for the Taliban - except that the gunmen on the ground and the Taliban middle management like to use their cell phones. They are conflicted. Writes Strategy Page:

"In Afghanistan, the Taliban leadership has recognized the phone network vulnerability, and the addictive nature of cell phones. So the Taliban have tried to stop cell phone companies from moving in with their cell towers, and attractive (to Taliban gunmen and middle management) cell phone service. In this, the Taliban have largely failed, and the cell phone addiction of their fighters has caused no end of problems when the U.S. hacks the cell networks."

So more cell phones would enable the resolution of political differences.

Suppose we air-dropped old cell phones to people who didn't have any towers? Would they want towers?

Suppose we paid for free minutes?

It may not be the addictiveness of cell phones that bothers the Taliban. The fact that the message of their presence gets around could be more a problem. Staying hidden matters.

When every victim can squeal to the world, how can an aggressor survive?

A Terrain Fit For Warlords

Afghanistan, where American troops will be staying for a while - at least until our fiery warlikeness is tamed - is mountainous. Very mountainous.

It is easy to think of it as mountain tops, but the Afghan people live in the valleys. Mountain tops are sprinkled, valleys connect. How the valleys connect determines how the people connect.

Do connections tend to follow a tree-like pattern?

Does the terrain itself limit the kind of government that can happen?

How does control, which depends on boundaries, traverse a tree-like pattern? There is always an uncontrollable outer edge.

What can government be?