Disturbing final song and everything.
I mean, Portal’s
bloody cheap now. Of course, so was Tomb Raider Anniversary
Hey: I’m lame. I admit it.
Moe Lane
Giant, scary-looking bug given computer control chip.
What could possibly go wrong? (Via Steve Jackson Games)
The Army’s Remote-Controlled Beetle
The insect’s flight path can be wirelessly controlled via a neural implant.A giant flower beetle with implanted electrodes and a radio receiver on its back can be wirelessly controlled, according to research presented this week. Scientists at the University of California developed a tiny rig that receives control signals from a nearby computer. Electrical signals delivered via the electrodes command the insect to take off, turn left or right, or hover in midflight. The research, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), could one day be used for surveillance purposes or for search-and-rescue missions.
Ah, DARPA: Eager to have you show them; to show them ALL!!!!! since 1972. Not that I mind… just so long as they avoid putting the X-Ray lasers or psionic hallucination projectors that DARPA-of-course-doesn’t-have on these suckers. Mad science is all very well, but WiFi isn’t what you’d call secure, you know what I mean?
I’m missing the “Outrageous” part of Outrageous Military Experiments.
The 10 Most Outrageous Military Experiments, via Fark.
Going down the list: the plutonium one might be a bit dicey, although I presume that the accident victim was brain-dead already. The hallucinogenic warfare one, likewise kind of ethically challenging. And the psychic vision one… well, no moral objections there. But the rest of them seem pretty straightforward. Pretty impressive heroism there on the part of the volunteers, even. Especially the guys that volunteered for bioweapons vaccine testing.
Your random evocation of Opus for the day.
No real reason.
George the Kiwi: ALBATROSS. Just be glad your wife didn’t leave you for an albatross.
Ronald-Anne: Good, George, confront your feelings.
George the Kiwi: My puny kiwi wings weren’t big enough for Delores. Oh no, oh no… she had to have AN ALBATROSS. With great big huge LONG WINGS. He was on hormones. You heard me, read my beak: HORMONES.
Opus: Uh, maybe we shouldn’t confront those particular feelings.
A STORC choice to make.
“Your sluggardly, world-weary defeatism can inspire those with the energy and passion to do what you can’t or won’t.”
I meant to link to this Jim Treacher post a couple of days ago. He decided to take as inspiration the unsung hero of Animal House.
Bill Burton petulant about CIA photo goof.
You know, I don’t really expect anyone from this administration to be gracious, or even polite, to either Republicans or conservatives. It’s nice when it happens, but by and large the the executive branch doesn’t like us, they downright hate having to pretend that they do, and they get petulant about the whole thing. So if it had been Brother Caleb or Michael Goldfarb asking this question, I’d expect that Bill Burton would be a bit of a schmuck about replying.
But why is he sneering like this to Ben Smith?
A photograph posted by the White House to the photo sharing website Flickr includes an image of a document with the letters CIA printed beneath what appears to be the word “secret.”
[snip]
The other words on the visible portion of the document aren’t easily legible, and a White House spokesman, Bill Burton, dismissed it as innocuous in an email.
“Uh oh. Please don’t tell me that the enemy is now going to know what our fax coversheets look like. (That is indeed what it is.),” he emailed.
Aside from the fact that, actually, we don’t want the enemy to know what official fax cover-sheets look like – apparently, Burton is ignorant of the term ‘trashing‘; God only knows what he thinks ‘social engineering‘ refers to – this wasn’t a particularly gracious answer, particularly since the White House thought that the situation was important enough to remove the photo anyway. Also, given that (as Ben noted) something like this cost a British counterterrorism officer his job earlier this month, you’d think that this might have resulted in a more serious response.
I’m being sarcastic, of course. Nobody mentioned in this piece really expected any better from the White House.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
Much as I hate to disagree with Jonah Goldberg…
…and I do hate to disagree with Jonah – still, I feel compelled to note the following with regard to this video:
- Olivet Nazarene University is a dry school. A seriously dry school.
- The students in that video made no attempt to hide their location. Or their names.
- No actual drinking took place in that video.
- I think that we can also assume that there were multiple takes for most of those shots.
- In other words, this was five college students making a movie. With a soundtrack. Probably a script. Definitely a tripod – those weren’t hand-held camera shots. I’ve been playing with video footage myself lately, and it’s not easy.
- Most importantly, that was an interesting movie. Not the easiest thing in the world to find on YouTube, honestly.
So I think maybe their parents aren’t completely wasting their money.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
Hello, my fellow DHS-designated extremists.
Whether or not you agree with my politics, don’t worry: you’re probably in here somewhere. It’s a report from last month called the “Domestic Extremism Lexicon,” and it’s quite comprehensive. Did you know that anti-abortion protesters and animal rights activists are domestic extremists? Yes, the same sloppy language as last time. So bad, in fact, that they tried to bury it…
Hot Air and The Daily Beast are both covering this one, and I agree with both that the categories are disturbingly broad, and cross-spectrum. The phrase “[members of group X] have been known to advocate or engage in criminal activity and plot acts of violence and terrorism to advance their extremist goals” appears far too often for comfort. The reason that this is discomforting is that it strongly implies that DHS isn’t distinguishing between (for example) animal rights activists who don’t intend to break the law to further their agenda and animal rights activists who do. Why, in fact, does DHS even care about animal rights activists who aren’t breaking the law? Or anti-abortion activists? Anti-technologists? Green anarchists? Heck, they even know that there’s several different flavors of skinheads, and they lump them all together in one big ball anyway. What gives?
Well, what gives is that we’re talking about DHS, which was created in haste: we are apparently starting to hit the ‘repent in leisure’ point. The real problem is not any one particular memo, of course. The problem is the mindset that created those memos, and I’ve yet to see any indication that people are working on fixing that mindset. This should alarm you, no matter where you stand on which status quo to disrupt: apparently just wanting to change it at all is enough to worry Homeland Security in the Obama era…
Moe Lane
PS: Unlike Ed Morrissey I am not automatically upset at the rather gaping lack of any discussion of Islamist (or Muslim) extremists in the lexicon: I’ve read the introduction, and it suggests that there’s a separate report out there that specifically handles that issue. This would be logical, given that the threat from Islamist extremists to this country is greater than that of every domestic extremist group combined… but the longer it is before that report gets leaked, the worse PR it’s going to be for this administration.
Crossposted to RedState.
‘The Trillion Dollar Fix.’
I hope you meant that as a drug reference, Megan.
R.S McCain summarizes Megan McArdle’s post about our current economic strategy in three words: “It won’t work.” Which is a fair assessment, both in what Megan’s analysis and in her conclusions. Personally, I would have preferred it if Stacy could have been able to summarize both with one word, though: “Oops.” Not to be a broken record about this, but I didn’t need Megan to tell me that we enjoy, ah, suboptimal economic oversight. I already knew. Or that the current administration seems to default to style over substance. I already knew that, too. Or even that we are going to have to raise taxes on the lower and middle class to pay for all of this. A lot of us knew this already.
But apparently, we just weren’t trendy enough to satisfy a sufficiently large portion of the electorate. To those of them reading this and smirking, at this point: real quick. You know that tax cut that some of you college kids received? Yeah, the $13 dollars a week thing that didn’t even register with most people. Anyway, turns out that the IRS messed up:
— A single college student with a part-time job making $10,000 would get a $400 boost in pay. However, if that student is claimed as a dependent on a parent’s tax return, she doesn’t qualify for the credit and would have to repay it when she files next year.
Yes. Yes, I have been neglectful.
Long since past time that I did some things here. Going a month without blogging gaming or bardic material is just a bit too long. Well, easily fixed.