Soooo much crap going on in the world.

Recommended reading. It's short and informative. Now I'm not any expert on economics this or that, and I don't feel qualified to make predictions about our fiscal future. However I don't have to be qualified in those areas to tell you that giving Goldman Sachs' CEO a $700 billion line of credit, supplied by taxpayers' money, and giving him the power to do whatever he so chooses to do with that money with no oversight and without any legal limitations on what he does with it is, um, FUCKING SCARY AND REALLY BAD IDEA, guys! I don't even know why there's a "debate" at all. And people are like, "Ohhh we have to act. We can't just do nothing." Okay, so our choices are either do nothing OR give Paulson $700 billion of our money ($2300 for every single man woman and child in this country)? Are you kidding? Do you think I'm in kindergarten or something? Are most people in this country so braindead? And this is when we're trying: we're experiencing a record high (less than half of us! WAY TO GO!) interest in "political" news.

Of all the crazy things, Sarah Palin would support a war with Russia. She's not even in office yet and she's already admitting to having her eye on our old Cold War "buddy." Nice.

To live up to the title of my blog and write about various interesting things, instead of just depressing interesting things, here is some information on sonoluminescence--a bubble turning sound into light guys!!:

"One other area of research may lead to a dynamic foam that of sonoluminescence, in which a very small gas bubble, floating in water, converts sound waves into a burst of light. The sound in generated at a frequency inaudible to humans, but it is as intense as that from a shrieking smoke alarm. In the water, the sound waves create alternating pulses of high and low pressure that make the bubble contract and expand in the same rhythm. At the bubble's maximum size of about fifty micrometers, the gas it contains exerts hardly any outward pressure. The surrounding water pressure then drives the bubble violently inward, shrinking it fifty times or more. At that point, the bubble emits a flash of light that comes and goes in mere trillionths of a second, as determined by physicist Seth Putterman at the University of California, Los Angeles. The flash repeats once every cycle of the sound waves, with such faultless regularity that sonoluminescing bubbles are used to time the motion of elementary particles moving near the speed of light.

The startling feature is that the light lies mostly in the invisible ultraviolet part of the spectrum. According to the laws of radiation, that means this tiny collapsing bubble, buried deep within a liquid, somehow reaches temperatures up to 100,000 degrees Celsius (180,000 degrees Fahrenheit), far hotter than the surface of the Sun.

The leading theory to explain sonoluminescence is that the rapid implosion creates a shock wave, a moving zone of high pressure where the gas in the bubble is greatly compressed, enormously raising its temperature. In support of this view, measurements in Putterman's laboratory show that the bubble contracts at greater than Mach 4, that is, four times the spaced of sound or thousands of miles per hour. Even more impressive is the acceleration of the bubble as it expands after compression, which is several billion times that of gravity. That would bring the bubble wall to the speed of light in a fraction of a millisecond, except it is not sustained for nearly that long a time. " [From Universal Foam by Sidney Perkowitz, which is book you can buy or check out of your library.]

Well, I don't know if you guys all knew about that or not, but if you did...shame on you for not telling me.

Ars Technica's Julian Sanchez reports:

Attorney General Michael Mukasey has agreed to postpone implementation of new FBI guidelines, after four Democratic senators raised concerns in a letter Wednesday about proposed changes that they say could permit the FBI to launch investigations of American citizens without any individualized basis for suspicion.
[...]
The proposed rule change, first reported last week, would loosen restrictions on information sharing between agencies, and allow investigators to begin gathering information for criminal or intelligence purpose, even in the absence of any particularized evidence suggesting that a target is connected to criminal activity.

In an article on the same subject, written a week ago, Washington Post adds:

The guidelines [...] do not require congressional approval.

Ho-kay, then! So the time has come that we are inviting national surveillance, provoked perhaps by race, religion, or legal free speech activities. We are on the verge of opting to give an enormous amount of power to unelected officials, held accountable by no one, belonging to a(n arguably illegal) federal police force. Really, America? Does that make you feel safe?

(I guess now at least those brown people over there won't be "jealous of our freedom" or whatever.)

John McCain isn't sure how many houses he owns. But is he elitist? The current state of US affairs would say no. Elitist used to refer to someone who had a lot of power & money. Dick Cheney, for example, who made tens of millions of dollars with Saddam Hussein before deciding to start a war with him and ending over a million Iraqi civilians' lives along with over four thousand Americans' in the process. You might think that kind of money and that kind of power--power to destroy nations--is elitist, especially when combined with the nonexistent "checks & balances" and national debate (things we're supposed to be proud of as Americans). Unfortunately, these days, an "elitist" is someone who reads and engages in that hated nuance. Why use your gift of a brain to make distinctions (elitist) when you could instead use it to invent reasons to go to war--of which you have never even been close to being a part of--and kill other people's children (which must be downright folksy by comparison)?

Watch this clip. It includes a mayor who sees no problem with the fact that he has implemented a continous curfew on citizens, no matter their age and no matter what time it is. He, in fact, states that it is "akin to martial law." What happens if you're a regular old citizen who just happens to live in a bad neighborhood? It looks like you can't leave the inside of your home, even on your own property. What happens if you do? In the mayors own words: "Zero tolerance, they're going to jail."

So the police can't do their jobs, and citizens are now under virtual house arrest, their liberties stripped, because of it. Thumbs up, America. Way to go! What an inventive way to fight crime! But do you honestly feel safer now?

I've been busy / link roundup

Although some of it is old news by now...

- Black man tasered nine times in 14 minutes by white cop, including two times while he was unconscious. He died.
- CBS covers for John McCain's dangerous stupidity/lies. Despite outrageous incidents such as this, McCain supporters still think their candidate is getting "unfairly negative" press coverage.
- Dick Cheney was going to address injured vets; however, his invitation was rescinded when the vets deemed his "security measures" draconian & unreasonable.
- Over a million disappear from Indiana's voter rolls; Indiana continues to use decertified electronic voting machines. Also of interest, three states may be illegally purging their voter lists.
- University of Florida & Catholics go in together on being ridiculous.
- Church shooter & domestic terrorist Jim David Adkisson was a fan of Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Bill O'Reilly; he hated "liberalism," even though as a food stamp recipient, he depended on it.