Incite

A Parrot with a Sense of Humor

A little humor to brighten your day - from a parrot!

Corin says:"An African Grey Parrot called N'kisi has a vocabulary of 950 words and can 'communicate' (as opposed to repeat). He has a sense of humour as well. Amazed by this [article on the BBC web site] I searched a little and found a recording of the bird with his owner. Initially I thought 'why they hell did you put the microphone next to the person and not the bird?' before I realised it wasn't the person I was listening to but the bird."

Boing Boing: Parrot uses 950 words to converse with people

technorati tags:parrot, talking, humor, smart, intelligent

Florida Shifts to Voting Machines with a Paper Trail

Finally, Floriday is moving to more reliable - and verifiable - voting machines with paper trails.  Other states are making the change as well.

DELRAY BEACH, Fla., Feb. 1 — Gov. Charlie Crist announced plans on Thursday to abandon the touch-screen voting machines that many of Florida’s counties installed after the disputed 2000 presidential election. The state will instead adopt a system of casting paper ballots counted by scanning machines in time for the 2008 presidential election.

Voting experts said Florida’s move, coupled with new federal voting legislation expected to pass this year, could be the death knell for the paperless electronic touch-screen machines. If as expected the Florida Legislature approves the $32.5 million cost of the change, it would be the nation’s biggest repudiation yet of touch-screen voting, which was widely embraced after the 2000 recount as a state-of-the-art means of restoring confidence that every vote would count.

Florida to Shift Voting System With Paper Trail - New York Time

technorati tags:politics, voting, e-voting, election, papertrail, touchscreen, Florida, Virginia, Maryland, Congress

Bush Agreed About Warrants

In Buffalo on April 20, 2004 President Bush said clearly and forcefully:

"Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."

This was two years after he asked the NSA to conduct domestic surveillance without warrants - and they complied with his wishes.  He clearly knew and agreed that warrants were necessary even as he proceeded without them.

Judge Prevents Import of Suspect Cows

The craziness continues. Our government is supposed to protect us, but it continues to gamble with our health. Canada has reported finding several "mad cows" yet Bush wants to start importing Canadian beef again. This will put our health needlessly at risk. I remain concerned about the cows we're raising here which "may" be safe. I'm more concerned about importing beef from a country we know is having problems with this. Right now, this judge seems to be our only line of defense.

Another thing this article mentions that I wasn't aware of is that Canada can't ship us cows, but it is still allowed to ship us packaged meat. How crazy is that?

Early this month in Billings, Mont., a federal judge, Richard Cebull, blocked the Bush administration's plans to resume imports of Canadian cattle and beef. Those imports ended in late May 2003 after mad cow disease was discovered in a Canadian cow. Since then, Canada has discovered three more cases of the disease. The United States Department of Agriculture argues that there is a "very low" or "minimal" risk in reopening the border to live cattle under 30 months of age and to certain cuts of beef. But that argument is based on a hope and a wish.

In pressing to reopen the border, Mr. Cebull writes in his injunction, the U.S.D.A. has made "a decision that subjects the entire U.S. beef industry to potentially catastrophic damages and that presents a genuine risk of death for U.S. customers." The Senate has endorsed this position, and the House is planning to introduce legislation. President Bush has vowed to veto any bill that keeps the border closed.

Read more: The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial: The Merry-Go-Round of Beef

Pearl of Wisdom

This post from Are We Doing Anything Today blew me away:

[Warren Buffett] told of the Founder of the Nebraska Furniture Mart, one of his companies, and how she came from a poor Jewish family and couldn't read, write or speak English. She was had survived the Holocaust, spent 16 years bringing her family to the U.S. (at $50 per person), and grew the Nebraska Furniture Mart from a $500 initial investment to do $350 Million annually from a single location in Omaha.

She told Warren at one point that the way she evaluated people was simple:
She simply asked herself, "Would they hide me?"

What a great way to judge your instincts about whether to trust someone or not.

Is a Cinema Studies Degree the New M.B.A.?

Ok, this was too good to pass up! The New York Times says film is the professional language of the future. I guess that makes it official!

RICK HERBST, now attending Yale Law School, may yet turn out to be the current decade's archetypal film major. Twenty-three years old, he graduated last year from the University of Notre Dame, where he studied filmmaking with no intention of becoming a filmmaker. Rather, he saw his major as a way to learn about power structures and how individuals influence each other.

"People endowed with social power and prestige are able to use film and media images to reinforce their power - we need to look to film to grant power to those who are marginalized or currently not represented," said Mr. Herbst, who envisions a future in the public policy arena. The communal nature of film, he said, has a distinct power to affect large groups, and he expects to use his cinematic skills to do exactly that.

At a time when street gangs warn informers with DVD productions about the fate of "snitches" and both terrorists and their adversaries routinely communicate in elaborately staged videos, it is not altogether surprising that film school - promoted as a shot at an entertainment industry job - is beginning to attract those who believe that cinema isn't so much a profession as the professional language of the future.

Read more: The New York Times > Is a Cinema Studies Degree the New M.B.A.?

Too Much Freedom of the Press?

Freedom of the press is one of the most important elements of our democracy - envied and desired by much of the world - but it is deemed excessive by one third of high school students in a study of their attitudes. They also felt government should have approval of newspaper stories!

when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes "too far" in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.

"These results are not only disturbing; they are dangerous," said Hodding Carter III, president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which sponsored the $1 million study. "Ignorance about the basics of this free society is a danger to our nation's future."

Read more: CNN.com - Freedom of what? - Jan 31, 2005

The Year of Living Indecently

Frank Rich has a good column about the amount of censorship and self-censorship that's happened in the year since last year's Super Bowl. There's been more than I was aware of. In addition to cuts in "Saving Private Ryan" on network television, PBS has trimmed the BBC's "Prime Suspect", and is making cuts in HBO-BBC's "Dirty War" - about terrorist attacks. This year's Super Bowl half-time show will air minus an Airborne commercial containing Mickey Rooney's 84 year old behind which was deemed too salacious for us to see. I don't see the need to be protected from these images. "Private Ryan" was fine the first time it aired and "Prime Suspect" has always been high quality drama that is appropriate to it's setting.

One new target is a kids show "Postcards from Buster" which is animated (Buster, a rabbit) and live which showed lesbian moms in one episode about how Maple Syrup is made. It was pulled before it was aired. Buster has also visited Muslims, Mormons, Orthodox Jews and Pentecostal Christians with no problems. Prior to being sworn in, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings threatened PBS with loss of funding because of this episode. That's a little scary.

I was also amazed to see changes and complaints about animated shows like "Family Guy" (a naked baby) and "SpongeBob SquarePants". This seems to be quite silly to me, but Rich says:

there's a method to their seeming idiocy: the cartoon surrogates are deliberately chosen to camouflage the harshness of their assault on nonanimated, flesh-and-blood people.

This, too, has its antecedent in the McCarthy era. In his novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," Michael Chabon was extrapolating from actual history when one of his heroes, a gay comic book artist, is hauled before Congress to testify about pairing up "strapping young fellows in tight trousers" as superheroes. A Senate committee of the time did investigate the comics. Its guiding force was the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham's fear-mongering 1954 tome "Seduction of the Innocent," which posited that Batman and Robin could corrupt children by inducing a "wish dream of two homosexuals living together." The decency cops of that day, exemplified by closeted gay right-wingers like J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn, escalated a culture war into one with human costs by conflating homosexuality with the criminality of treason.

With so many networks running scared, it will be interesting to see what this evolves to.

Read more: The New York Times > Frank Rich: The Year of Living Indecently

Passport Privacy Protection? Nope

The Bush Administration fights the concept of foreign countries telling us how to behave in any way, but they let them dictate how our passports should work. Why?

By the end of this year, our new passports will have an embedded microchip that can broadcast our information - name, birth date, picture - to anyone within 30 feet - unencrypted. Why does this information need to be broadcast? The only reason I can think of is so the government can scan people whenever they want to - to discover who's going into any kind of meeting, for example. This would give governments much greater surveillance power without the need for a warrant.

The reason they are unencrypted, we're told, is to make them more easily usable by foreign countries. It makes it easier for terrorists and identity thieves to get information as well. Since the information is unencrypted, they are LESS secure than our current passports, and will not stop counterfeiters.

Credit cards work just fine by swiping the card. Current passports require physical contact to be scanned, so someone would have to have possession of them to steal your information. You wouldn't be able to be tracked by having it in your bag - a downside for surveillance - a plus for your privacy and the safety of your identity.

I suppose we could just put them inside aluminum foil to stop the broadcasts ;-)

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration opposed security measures for new microchip-equipped passports that privacy advocates contended were needed to prevent identity theft, government snooping or a terror attack, according to State Department documents released Friday.

The passports, scheduled to be issued by the end of 2005, could be read electronically from as far away as 30 feet, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained the documents under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Though the passports wouldn't include transmitters of their own, they would have antennas to allow a reader to capture the data.

The ability to read remotely, or "skim," personal data raises the possibility that passport holders would be vulnerable to identity theft, the ACLU said. It also would allow government agents to find out covertly who was attending a political meeting or make it easier for terrorists to target Americans traveling abroad, the ACLU said.

Read more: Wired News: Passport Privacy Protection? Nope

The CIA's 9/11 Report Held Till After The Election?

The CIA completed it's 9/11 Report in June and has not yet shown it to the congressional intelligence committees who commissioned it two years ago. Unlike the other 9/11 Report, this one reveals names of the people who are at fault. The House Intelligence Committee asked for the report two weeks ago and has received nothing. The CIA has no reason to hold it back - except to protect Bush in the election - and Bush didn't want this report done in the first place.

""It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that "the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward.""

Link: Los Angeles Times - The 9/11 Secret in the CIA's Back Pocket