I protest.

So much for the First Amendment.

CNN.com - Man jailed for linking to bomb sites.

A federal judge sentenced a man to a year in prison Monday for creating an anarchist Web site with links to sites on how to build bombs.
…
Austin must also pay a $2,000 fine and is barred for three years from using a computer without approval. Wilson said he also may not associate with anyone from a group that "espouses physical force as a means of change."
…
Austin said he took a plea bargain because he feared his case was eligible for a terrorism enhancement, which could have added 20 years to his sentence. The plea deal had called for him to serve four months.

So. You don't have to write the stuff, all you have to do is link to it and you're a "terrorist." The worst part of this is that Ashcroft's plan is working: Rather than fighting the accusation, Austin just caved in out of fear that he would be so labelled.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Emphasis mine, of course.

Reasons I'm glad I live in California.

On the way home from my Tuesday mental adjustment session (that is, my therapist) I saw a license plate with the following letters:

IMPCH W

Heh.

Oh, yeah, the weather doesn't suck, either.

Still depressurizing...

I'm still not up to sustained posting, the strain of the last few months still has me down. The last seven days have been relatively restful, though. Despite the fact that yet another job possibility fell through due to the "recovering" economy. (The company is no longer hiring as of last week and their recruiter is now unemployed.)

It seems, though, that the energy is trickling back, so I should be posting as the inspiration strikes. Just maybe not every day.

Thank you, by the way, to the various individuals who expressed support in email. It is truly appreciated, even if I don't manage a reply in a reasonable amount of time.

The more I hear...

The more I like. Dean says Democrats moving 'too far to the right'. Unlike the rest of the field, by and large, the man is not afraid to speak his mind, bluntly. He is very plain-spoken and is actually saying things in public that I've previously only seen in weblogs.

Stuff like this:

"Any one of (the Democratic candidates) would be better than the president they have now," [Dean] said. "But what our party really has to have is some backbone."

That includes, he said, not voting for Bush measures like the tax cut programs, which the Vermont governor said "have really harmed our economy and taken jobs away from Americans."

Dean said the only way to beat Bush in the next election is to confront him head-on.

"What the American people are going to see, should I get the nomination, is a Democrat who is not afraid to be a Democrat again," the 59-year-old internist said.

"In Washington, the game for too long among the Democrats was 'Let's try to be a little bit like (President Bush),' and that's not going to get us elected," he said. "The only way to beat George Bush is to stand up to him."

And by ghod somebody needs to!

Blood and death.

Another dead family.

Well, except for the pregnant mother and the thirteen-year-old daughter, who will have to live with these horrific memories.

Speaking of horrific memories, what about the kids that did the shooting? Kids who are in the wrong place, for the wrong reason, who are terrified and who just want to stay alive. Kids who were put in their position by the lies of George W. Bush.

To those who dismiss such incidents as some kind of "necessary cost" or who pooh-pooh the trauma resulting from something like this: Have you ever seen someone killed? Have you ever seen the bullet splashes and heard the deep, horrible groan from the victim as he or she dies?

It's not like in the movies. It's not clean, easy, bang, bullet, fall down dead. Bullets literally splash as they hit a human body. The person falls down, sure, but then he or she lies there bleeding and dying for minutes or longer.

Have you ever heard the rasp of their breathing as their lungs fill up with blood? Have you ever seen the bloody foam from their mouth and nose as they try to cling to life? Have you heard them groan as they lie there in pain, slowly slipping away?

Now imagine that you are nineteen. You are in a strange country. You don't know the language, you don't understand what these people are saying to you, but you know that other people here, who look just like these people, want to kill you. You are afraid. When you look, you see that you have done this to a little girl. To a boy about your age. To another girl just a little younger than you. To a man the same age as your father.

How do you feel? What do you do with those feelings? How do you live with yourself?

If you have never found yourself in this situation or in a situation comparable to it, and you support this horror, this waking nightmare, then just shut the fuck up. You have no right to talk. Go live with those kids for a few weeks, then tell me how "right" this war is.

In my book, "hawk" is basically another word for "potential murderer." Sometimes, yes, this kind of thing is unavoidable, in a situation where to do nothing would be worse than going to war. This isn't that kind of situation. In this situation, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the White House clique lied in order to make this happen.

They could be no more guilty if they pulled the triggers themselves.

A diamond is forever, or something.

It looks like De Beers' long monopoly is coming to end. The Wired story "The New Diamond Age" presents not one but two new processes for manufacturing synthetic diamon. One uses a device originally invented in Russia, which uses the classic ingredients of pressure and heat to create a three-carat diamond from a tiny "seed diamond" in about three days. The company is called Gemesis and I think I'll be buying stock in them when they go public. Their diamonds are yellow since it takes longer to manufacture clear diamonds, and due to the nature of the process it's possible to distinguish them from natural diamonds due to atoms of the metal solvent caught in the carbon lattice.

The other process, though, uses chemical vapor deposition, the same process by which semiconductors are made. It produces perfect diamonds. The company is called Apollo Diamond and is the brain-child of Robert Linares, whose "company, Spectrum Technology, pioneered the commercialization of gallium arsenide wafers." He sold the company to PacifiCorp, took his millions and spent the next fifteen years trying to figure out how to make diamonds using chemical vapor deposition. He succeeded. As the article says,

The diamond industry is in fact even more concerned about gems made using chemical vapor deposition than it is about Gemesis stones, though Gemesis poses a more immediate threat. The promise of CVD is that it produces extremely pure crystal. Gemesis diamonds grow in a metal solvent, and tiny particles of those metals get caught in the diamond lattice as it grows. CVD diamond precipitates as nearly 100 percent pure diamond and therefore may not be discernible from naturals, no matter how advanced the detection equipment.

Heh. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of murderous monopolists.

The real story, though, is that due to these new processes and to some research by the Navy into creating diamond-based semiconductors, we will eventually be using processors made out of diamond, not silicon. Will, not "may." Jim Butler at the Navy's project "Code 6174" made the last big breakthrough:

The third big challenge has been the most daunting for materials scientists: To form microchip circuits, positive and negative conductors are needed. Diamond is an inherent insulator - it doesn't conduct electricity. But both Gemesis and Apollo have been able to inject boron into the lattice, which creates a positive charge. Until now, though, no one had been able to manufacture a negatively charged, or n-type, diamond with sufficient conductivity. When I visit Butler in Washington, he can barely contain his glee. "There's been a major breakthrough," he tells me. In June, together with scientists from Israel and France, he announced a novel way of inverting boron's natural conductivity to form a boron-doped n-type diamond. "We now have a p-n junction," Butler says. "Which means that we have a diamond semiconductor that really works. I can now see an Intel diamond Pentium chip on the horizon."

A processor made from diamond can operate at temperatures that would melt a silicon-based processor. This means even higher speeds and much more processing power. I can't imagine where the heat will go, we're talking hundreds of degrees or more. Cooling systems would have to change a lot. You could use your computer cooling system to flash-boil water for your coffee!

The Wired article quotes folks at Intel saying that just evaluating a new material takes them ten years. The implication is that it could be fifteen before we actually see diamond-based computing. I understand what they're saying, but somehow I have the feeling that we'll be seeing diamond processors in computers a whole lot sooner than that.

Welcome to the future. Again.

The perfect gift.

eBay item 3141998098 (Ends Aug-18-03 10:25:37 PDT) - Texas ANG George W Bush Action Figure.

Buy it for the hyperconservative wingnut in your life!

(Via natasha at Pacific Views.)

Surrealism.

The Austin American Statesman tells us, "U.S. abandons plan for greater U.N. role in Iraq." This is hardly surprising; the surprise is that the White House considered it at all. The bottom line is that

"The administration is not willing to confront going to the Security Council and saying, 'We really need to make Iraq an international operation,"' said an administration official.

It would embarrass George Bush, and of course the neocon idiots would never stand for it:

Rumsfeld, according to administration officials, vehemently opposes any dilution of military authority over Iraq by involving the United Nations, either through U.N. peacekeepers or indirectly in any U.N. authorization of forces from other countries.

Rumsfeld being one of those "neocon idiots."

None of this is surprising in the least. The story becomes a bit surreal, though, when the same "administration official" quoted above continues,

"You can make a case that it would be better to do that, but, right now, the situation in Iraq is not that dire."

"Not that dire." Either this "administration official" is named "Wolfowitz" or the person has been living on Mars for the last few months. Unfortunately, he's not alone in saying stuff like this:

"The last thing we need is a loss of momentum over the efforts to get things under control in Iraq," said a Western diplomat involved in these discussions. "Besides, the violence in Iraq is not as bad as everyone thinks it is."

"A loss of momentum???" There's no "momentum" to lose! The situation is getting worse by the day, more and more American kids are dying every day, and this guy tries to tell us that the violence isn't "as bad as everyone thinks it is."

I wonder what these people might think about that. I suspect that the American soldiers there might also disagree, right, skippy?

The Statesman article, though, concludes with this:

Some experts say, however, that sooner or later, the United States may have to change its mind again, particularly if conditions in Iraq deteriorate drastically. U.N. officials involved in peacekeeping efforts in Afghanistan and the Balkans say that the total number of troops in Iraq may have to double before the security situation gets under control.

Um, yeah. And then what are Bush, Rumsfeld and the rest going to say? "Oops?" Or are they just going to continue to pretend that it isn't happening?

It must be nice to be able to live one's entire life in a fantasy world. Too bad that people are dying because of it, though.

Here we go again.

I am stunningly unsurprised to see Jeralyn mention in "TalkLeft: Cities on Ashcroft's Victory Tour" that the so-called "VICTORY" Act that Ashcroft is pushing is nothing more than a very slightly redressed and renamed "PATRIOT Act II." "VICTORY" stands for, get this, "Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations." Hmm, that spells "VICTO." I guess that he just couldn't come up with a phrase that made any kind of sense and that used those last two letters, eh?

According to Jeralyn, who quotes heavily from the Congressional Quarterly, the Act

would allow law enforcement officers to seek roving warrants to monitor cellular telephone and other wireless communications. It also would allow the attorney general to issue administrative subpoenas in the course of terrorism investigations.

So Ashcroft could subpoena anyone he liked and could listen to your cellphone conversations almost any time he likes. He could also arrest people for being "narcoterrorists," people who "manufacture or distribute controlled substances with the knowledge or intent that the activity would benefit a foreign terrorist organization." Only Ashcroft wouldn't have to prove that they knew they were aiding terrorists.

Want to keep money in an offshor tax shelter? Nope, that would be "illegal money laundering" and if they somehow connected it to "narcoterrorism" you would be put away for a long, long time. If you were lucky.

It figures that it's Orrin Hatch, R—Fascist, who is writing the bill (with, of course, several other Republicans on the Judiciary Committee) and who will introduce it in the Senate next month.

Time to write my Senators, again. This is a vile bit of legislation. You should, too.

We got T-shirts!

Well, okay, a T-shirt. So far. In order to try to make a few bucks and help out with this being-unemployed thing, I'm putting together a few interesting things and making T-shirts out of them. For the moment I'm using Cafe Press, despite the fact that I'll make almost nothing from them, just because there is zero up-front cost. The shirts themselves will have a Chinese proverb or saying on the front, along with the rough English translation below it. The first one, which I already have designed, looks like this:

It's politically appropriate at the moment, as well; the phrase means, roughly, "The more you try to cover things up, the more exposed they will be." Something Bush and his bunch could learn from.

Maybe this will earn my wife and I a few bucks. Maybe not. It's worth a try, though. Let me know if you like it. Better yet, buy one!

Support the troops!

Unlike Bush, who seems to think that "supporting the troops" means "making their lives as miserable as possible," I do feel very much for those unfortunate enough to be stuck in Iraq with no idea when they may come home. Today I ran across a blog by one of those people, moja's "<...turningtables...>." Check it out.

While I was there, though, I ran across a reference to an organization that is putting their words into actions, a bunch called "Operation Military Pride." While I would call myself "pround of our military," these folks do seem to be doing their best to keep folks' morale up and to provide a way for the rest of us to chip in a bit. Considering that their superiors won't support them, I guess that it has to be up to the rest of us to fill in.

So hop over there and start corresponding with a soldier on the ground in Iraq or send a care package.

And with a little luck (and a lot of letter-writing), Congress will begin to get the message and will start pressuring Bush to bring them home.

Maybe that will take more than a little luck. Sigh.

Snicker

This speaks for itself:

What are you doing here? You aren't in any
of Jane Austen's novels! Go find another quiz!

Which Jane Austen Character Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Heh.

Via Sisyphus Shrugged.

Hell is other people.

Via Unqualified Offerings:

Other people's kids.

You Just Don't Bomb Other People's Kids.

Via Ceej.

Mixed feelings.

On the one hand, I don't believe in the death penalty at all. On the other, the world can get by quite well without someone like Geoghan, a vile betrayer of trust and a murderer himself in all but the actual deed. Molestation and abuse is in essence spiritual murder. I know. It happened to me.

Sex abuse priest killed in prison.

While my intellect says that this was wrong, my heart tells me that Joseph Druce did the world, and potentially a lot of children, a favor.

Hitting the road.

My wife and I will be hitting the road today, heading north for Santa Cruz, Monterey and points nearby. My wife is on break from school and wants to travel, so although we're a bit short of money (what with me still not having a job and all), we're heading out for a few days. Among other places, we'll be visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium and at least driving through Big Sur (and probably stopping there as well). We'll actually be staying with a friend who lives in Santa Cruz. We may or may not visit Hearst Castle, depending on how my wife feels about it. We'll probably stop at a few other places as well.

While we're in Santa Cruz, we'll undoubtedly visit my artist friend Sheba, who does very interesting art indeed. I currently don't own any of her pieces, but she finally has a couple that I really like. There's this piece, which is interesting, but I am really enamoured of this piece. This is a rendering of our local group of galaxies, scientifically accurate as of the latest data. It is extremely cool. Feel free to buy it for me. (Hey, it's only $85! Universal Clef is $475 for the three-inch version!)

Hopefully my batteries will be somewhat recharged when we return. I will certainly be posting pictures. I may post a bit while we're on the road, but I seriously doubt it.

Until then …

Santa Cruz tonight.

Santa Cruz is not a haven for your average radical Right Republican, to put it faintly. The city is a "nuclear free zone" by ordinance, had the first public library to deliberately obstruct bits of the so-called "USA PATRIOT" Act and in general has been a wretched hive of lefties and liberals. Along with hippies, treehuggers, granola-eaters and others of the more left-of-center persuasion.

So it will come as no surprise to anyone that tonight, at some kind of street festival downtown, I saw both a booth of supporters of Howard Dean and an older, white-haired man handing out leaflets and declaiming that we need to hand Iraq over to the United Nations and get out of there. I smiled at the Dean booth and told the older man that he had my vote, for what it was worth.

It feels very strange to be surrounded by a bunch of liberals, even if they are tree-hugging leaf-eaters. (Hey, some of my best friends are tree-hugging leaf-eaters!) I'm so accustomed to having to fight the lack of awareness or the sheer idiocy of the people I run into, I feel almost uncomfortable among these people.

Hmmm.

Art!

Having seen it in person, I can pronounce that Sheba's Large Scale Crystal is extremely cool! It turns out that the data upon which it is based is a mass distribution, so the individual galaxies are basically sized by their mass. Additionally, it sounds like the galaxies are blown up so that they will actually be visible at the scale of the piece. Still, it is amazing.

Probably the best news, though, is that Sheba is working on using a newer process that will produce much smaller fractures. This will make both this piece and the Galaxy Crystal even more cool than they currently are. Sheba is also trying to get data for the Large Scale Crystal that involves the physical locations and orientations of the galaxies, rather than a simple mass distribution. That data, though, is more difficult to come by. (If you know, or you know someone who knows, how to come up with it, please let her know.)

Home again.

Well, I'm back. Not entirely rested and refreshed, I'm afraid; it's tough to get real rest when one is constantly worried about one's continued lack of a job. It was good to get away, though. We did manage to drive through Big Sur on the way home, stopping an inordinate number of times to gaze at (and take pictures of) the stunning beauty of the place. Here's just a single example:

After driving from Santa Cruz to Big Sur, then driving through Big Sur, then driving from there down the coast to LA, I was much too tired to post last night. This evening, however, I am much rested.

Again I am reminded of just how nice it is to be home. Travelling can be fun and it was certainly nice to see some old friends and some gorgeous scenery, but home is where I am truly comfortable.

Speaking of one of those friends, this particular friend expressed some shock at the fact that I had actually taken up weblogging. In the past (ten years ago, now, in painful fact) I posted quite a bit to Usenet, particularly to soc.singles and later to soc.singles.moderated as the former group was overrun by idiots, fools and spammers. Unfortunately, in this the Eternal September, Usenet has become a waste of time. There are no more heated discussions of religion or morality, or of just how stupid a statement "nice guys don't get laid" really is. Instead, there is a remarkable conformity of opinion and when someone (like, um, me, for example) writes something that is perhaps controversial or inflammatory, said someone is royally excoriated.

None for me, thanks. While I'm not thin-skinned, I'm also neither a glutton for punishment nor one to waste time where I'm not wanted. Instead, I get my writing done here, for what it's worth. I do miss the old arguments and debates, and even the flamewars, but those days are gone.

As for what I write here, I hope the three of you reading this like it. I also hope that if you don't like it, you will say so. Be prepared to defend your opinion, though.

File this under "duh."

This morning's CNN "Quickvote" poll: "How would you rate today's job market?" Choices: "Good," "Bad," or "OK."

Ten guesses which way I voted.

"Bad" is leading "OK" 72% to 22%. "Good" is a very distant third at 6%.