Fabbers

This is technology that will probably become omnipresent in your life time. As a photocopier copies a two dimensional image a fabber copies a three dimensional image. Turn a three dimensional image in your computer into a solid object resting in your hand.

This isn't Star Trek. We're not talking here of 'replicating' something from the constituent molecules up, but if your looking for a simple, solid or even hollow object made of specific materials you can get that from a fabber either from materials poured, dripped or carved.

And of course, the technology will get smaller, easier, more advanced and more specialized. You may not have a Fabber on your desk next year, but you might have one next decade. Imagine a world where even simple objects, from mass produced art, to toys to tools, even objects as complicated as consumer electronics eventually can be generated automatically from a 3D computer model.

At the moment, you can already use it to bring the objects and characters from Second Life into the real world.

North Korea claims to have conducted Nuke test

Confirmed by seismometer readings in South Korea apparently. And the hits keep coming...

An eye for an eye...

UNKLE -An eye for an eye

Sunday Link Blast: Oct. 8

• Russia gets scary again
  Possible war in the Caucasus, ethnic cleansing and murdered journalists. Depressingly familiar patterns emerge.
  
  
• Sowing the Seeds of Fascism
  Militarised culture and the fascist impulse.
  
  
• The Case against Canada's Afghanistan mission
  From Tyee. Well argued.
  
  
• North Korea climbs down
  No nuclear test so far. Presumably some behind the scenes arm twisting and deal making continues.
  
  
• Time Poll
  The GOP had no margin for error in the mid-terms and the Foley affair has been a body blow.
  
  
• Battlestar Galactica Webisodes
  The premiere was mindblowingly brilliant and provocative. Here's another taste for those who can't wait till next week.
  

Sunday Morning Coming Down

Once again, the irreplaceable Johnny Cash:

The Foley Scandal: Rosetta Stone for the Darkness in the Bush Movement

Glenn Greenwald has an insight into why the Foley scandal is in many ways the perfect model for all recent Republican scandals:

...this scandal is like the Cliffs' Notes version of a more complicated treatise on how the Bush movement operates. Every one of their corrupt attributes is vividly on display here:

The absolute refusal ever to admit error. The desperate clinging to power above all else. The efforts to cloud what are clear matters of wrongdoing with irrelevant sideshows. And the parade of dishonest and just plainly inane demonization efforts to hide and distract from their wrongdoing: hence, the pages are manipulative sex vixens; a shadowy gay cabal is to blame; the real criminals are those who exposed the conduct, not those who engaged in it; liberals created the whole scandal; George Soros funded the whole thing; a Democratic Congressman did something wrong 23 years ago; one of the pages IM'd with Foley as a "hoax", and on and on. There has been a virtual carousel -- as there always is -- of one pathetic, desperate attempt after the next to deflect blame and demonize those who are pointing out the wrongdoing. This is what they always do, on every issue. The difference here is that everyone can see it, and so nothing is working.

Animated Tom Waits

Tom Waits - 'The One That Got Away' 1978

Bush appends FEMA law with signing statement 'allowing him' to appoint more unqualified cronies.

You're doing a heck of a job Bushie.

The Connection

Beatings and humiliation routine inside the black hole of Camp X-Ray

From Salon:

Other guards in the group also "told their own stories of abuse towards the detainees," the sergeant said. They spoke of hitting detainees, denying them water and "removing privileges for no reason." All told, the sergeant said, "about five others in the group admitted hitting detainees."

"From the whole conversation, I understood that striking detainees was a common practice," the sergeant said. "Everyone in the group laughed at the others' stories of beating detainees."

The AP obtained the sergeant's statement from Lt. Col. Colby Vokey, who is the Marine Corps' defense coordinator for the Western United States. Vokey is calling for an investigation, but it can go only so far: Even if the sergeant's allegations prove to be correct, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 would prohibit federal courts from doing anything about them.

American Election Watch

In just over a month on November 7 Americans will go to the polls for midterm Congressional and Senate seats as well as various State governor races and plebiscites. This election will decide whether Bush continues to have the untrammelled power of Republican control over every branch of the federal government.

The Republicans have been sliding in the polls for months as the national mood in the States sours over Iraq, corruption, an increasingly unpopular president and pocket book issues. The Republicans got a marginal uptick from conveniently lower gas prices (Not that oil companies would do almost anything to help the GOP, the party that has looked out for their interests more than anyone else...) and the mainstream media's complicity in keeping the bad news about Iraq off the TV screen. The recent Mark Foley scandal may have eliminated that lead however, with its media friendly simplicity of narrative. Sex and cover-ups are easy to explain, and Republicans are vulnerable to morality issues having so completely adopted the moral scold role themselves.

Vastly more money than the Democrats and the incumbancy advantage which has turned congressional and Senate seats into a new aristocracy are the only advantages the Republicans have left. Their hard core of religious right-wingers may be marginally less likely to get out and vote after the Foley scandal.

If the Republicans are planning some sort of traditional October surprise, it could hit any day now - some observers suggest various stock option activity indicates tomorrow could be a day to watch the news. Its debatable whether anything big enough to reverse the GOPs slide couldn't have the potential to backfire on them.

For the best ongoing analysis of the midterm race, check out PBS's NOW Election site with its excellent combination of detailed polls, local and national issues and threats to the right to vote.

Parent calls for book about book banning to be banned during Banned Book Week

Sorry, couldn't pass up the chance to write that headline - try saying it three times fast.

A Texan parent is calling for the banning of Fahrenheit 451.

Waterboarding Demonstration

This is what waterboarding look like:

Waterboard Senior Republicans

We really need to know what senior Republicans knew about the sexual predator in their midst and when they knew it. It's unreasonable and treasonous to suggest that the government shouldn't use all the 'tough and safe' methods available. It's time to waterboard Speaker of the House Hastert, number two man Boehner and possibly the enabler in chief in the White House.

It's not as if its torture after all. Do you want to protect America's children or are you with the pedophiles?

You say 'cheap shot' like it's a bad thing...

October Surprise?

OK, tinfoil hat time.

First there's this.

And this.

And finally, be sure to read this.

Now think about the Bush administration. Really think about how irrational, reckless, venal and irresponsible we know this regime to be. How committed, on an arguably criminal level, they have shown themselves to total unrestricted power. Power free of restraint and oversight. Think about their willingness to throw away blood and treasure and lives. Think about their naive utopianism. Think about Bush; a dry drunk, uncurious, arrogant smirking thug with a messianic belief in his historic role.

If all that doesn't scare the shit out of you, you've got icewater running through your veins, Batman.

Lies, Damned Lies and Fraser Institute Studies

The Fraser Institute has released a new study claiming yet again, that Public Healthcare is unsustainable and will make up 50% of Alberta's budget by 2017.

The same crap has been peddled by the free market ideologues of the Fraser Institute and the Alberta government before and, no matter how many times such arrant deliberate nonsense is refuted by the facts, it will be again. Promoting the same tired narrative depends on funny numbers, overestimating costs, underestimating revenues. ignoring inconvenient facts such as the fact that the public components of healthcare have stable costs while private components increase wildly, the fact that private healthcare costs vastly more overall and basically having no regard for the truth.

Believing this fairy story, on the other hand, only requires breath-taking naivete and gullibility.

Update: The response from the Paul Moist, President of CUPE today is basically: 'Of course they said that - it's the Fraser Institute, what do you expect?' He points out that it's drug costs - almost entirely in the private sector - where the real skyrocketing increases to health costs are occurring, which makes solving the so called 'funding crisis' by bringing more of healthcare into the private sector more than a little counter-intuitive.

What Waterboarding looks like

From the Robin Williams movie Jacob the Liar.

Deception, Demagoguery and Scapegoating: The Klein Years

Rabble has what may be the definitive short history of the Klein years in Alberta politics. A taste:

In 1997, Kevin Taft wrote a slim book called Shredding the Public Interest, where he showed health care spending through the '80s had been stable. Other programs had already been cut by Premier Getty; spending was not out of control. But corporate subsidies demanded between $2 and $3 billion per year— an amount rivaling the Conservatives' yearly deficits. The justification for public sector cutbacks was built on a fabrication, retold with a terrifying mendacity by the province's news media for the next 13 years.

All this over a $25 billion debt piddly in retrospect. To put the figure into context: Alberta racked up $33 billion in surpluses over the last decade. This year, the surplus may top $10 billion almost half the debt bogeyman.

Real people live with the consequences. From the lowest rates of high school completion and university participation, to the highest rates of divorce, problem gambling, family violence and levels of greenhouse gas emissions, Alberta continues to distinguish itself as a place defined by social and environmental extremes.

Sunday Link Blast - October 1

• Get Over Yrself by The Oxygen Ponies
  Dreamy but unsentimental pop.
  
  
• Woodward's book puts White House on defensive
  They can feel the security issue slipping out of their fingers, get ready for the frenzied thrashing to begin.
  
  
• Whiskey Whiskey (Saved my life.)
  The Hard Rock Miners
  
  
• Readying the narrative
  It'll be Chavez's fault if oil prices go up again.
  
  
• Darrel Reid, former President of "Focus on the Family" and former Chief of Staff for the Reform Party, has just been named Rona Ambrose' Chief of Staff.
  Says the new chief of staff to our big-haired Environment Minister: "I think every Christian's under an obligation to change laws to reflect biblical values."
  
  
• Canadian Military caught spying on war critic
  Officer assigned to monitor respected military analyst accidentally leaves his surveillance logs on a chair.
  

DJ Shadow - Midnight in a Perfect World