Feeling a little too secure in your freedoms? Miss that post-9/11 sense of dread that the country would turn into a police state, devoid of dissent or even abnormal behavior? No longer wondering who may be listening to your phone calls? Afraid you may soon live in an open society where the sanctity of individual privacy is not only tolerated but upheld as a fundamental principle?

Me neither, but let’s suppose you were, because your fear would no longer be justified. Cuz pretty soon flying fucking robots will be silently following you everywhere you go.

Yup, these are the same ‘Predator’ drones that have been hunting and killing people who might be terrorists, the American citizens they travel with, and other assorted brown people. No word on whether the domestic model will carry the same massive deathstrike capabilities.

Now if these were normal times and a normal administration we could probably assume that this slightly-scary-but-somewhat-inevitable technology would be confined to the heavy duty work like border patrol and searching for clandestine pot farms. But lucky us — we live in interesting times indeed:

one North Carolina county is using a UAV equipped with low-light and infrared cameras to keep watch on its citizens. The aircraft has been dispatched to monitor gatherings of motorcycle riders at the Gaston County fairgrounds from just a few hundred feet in the air–close enough to identify faces

Biker gangs? Are you fucking serious? The last time I heard of violent biker gang causing any trouble was in Cannibal Apocalypse. And even there they weren’t more than a set piece.

Since these are federally funded by the Department of Homeland Security, and we know how well-spent their money is, we can expect to see these deployed in all sorts of mission-critical capacities - real soon now.

Can someone please explain to me why the MSM is so blase about the results of the Israeli election? While they came in less than the optimistic projections, Kadima has enough seats to form a strong coalition with Labor, and Netanyahu’s militaristic Likud is soundly defeated. This is an explicit affirmation of Olmert’s plan to remove up to 90,000 Jewish settlers from the West Bank, forcibly if needed. The people of Israel have finally, emphatically, said “enough.” How is this anything but a resounding win for peace? Or maybe that’s the problem?

Some brilliant quotes from King George’s talk in West Virginia today:

“I knew that the farther we got away from Sept. 11, 2001, the more likely it would be that some would forget the lessons of that day. And that’s OK. That’s OK … And it’s fine that people forget the lessons, but one of my jobs is to constantly remind people of the lessons.”

“Iraq is a part of the global war on terror. In other words, it’s a global war.”

“De Tocqueville, who’s a French guy, came in 1832 and recognized and wrote back — wrote a treatise about what it means to go to a country where people have — associate voluntarily to serve their communities.”

“Anyway, you’ll be confronted with some stuff. Hopefully, our job is to make sure you’re confronted with less issues, like being hooked on oil. One of the issues that we’re confronting with now that I hope you’ll not have to confront with is jobs going elsewhere because we don’t have the math and science skills and engineering skills and physics skills that are taught to our children here.”

Where was his speech writer? His handlers? This guy verbally stumbles and just keeps on fumbling.

There are lots of good nuggets in this Wired article on getting business to internalize the costs of environmental damage. Here’s my favorite:

“Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth.” - Oystein (Exxon’s former vice president for Norway and the North Sea)

Check out the article. All the sound bites you want on development in China and India, too.

This homemade music video is beautiful. I keep listening and watching over and over. It’s by a guy named Fredo Viola who filmed the entire thing with his Nikon CoolPix digital camera.

For all y’all Trekkies out there, you’ll enjoy Captain Picard’s Journal. Of particular note are the following entries:

First Contact Field Trip (technically written from Wesley Crusher’s perspective; hilarious) Christmas Shopping with Beverly (written by Troi) Halloween on the Enterprise

And, to underscore my trekkieness, I feel inclined to admit to ownership of the following commemorative plates:

The star of the 2006 Philadelphia auto show was an impressively stylized sportscar that goes zero to sixty in four seconds.

Boring, I know.

Oh, and it runs entirely on soybean oil. At fifty miles to the gallon.

Concept car, five to seven years from production? nope. Six-figure pricetag? nope.

Here comes the best part.

It was designed and built in a high school garage, by five dropouts or near-dropouts, one of whom is named “Cheeseborough.” They used primarily spare parts and a high school shop teacher’s know-how.

And you can’t fool these kids as to the uniqueness of their accomplishment, either:

“We made this work,” says Hauger. “We’re not geniuses. So why aren’t they doing it?” Kosi thinks he knows why. The answer, he says, is the big oil companies. “They’re making billions upon billions of dollars,” he says. “And when this car sells, that’ll go down — to low billions upon billions.”

So what now, GMFordToyotaDaimler? Fuck around with half-hearted hybrids and promises of hydrogen highways in two decades, or run off of something we’re paying farmers /not/ to produce, today? How soon before a team of VCs picks up these designs and starts up real competition, something you haven’t faced in a quarter-century?

Clock’s running. Get to it.

It looks like Batman is slated to take part in the War on Terror:

At the WonderCon 2006 comic-book convention in San Francisco last weekend, legendary comics writer and artist Frank Miller revealed that Batman would hunt down bin Laden and al Qaeda in his next DC Comics graphic novel. In “Holy Terror, Batman!” the Caped Crusader goes after the terror leader and his organization after Gotham City is attacked by terrorists. Though the graphic novel’s title is a take on Robin the Boy Wonder’s catchphrase, Miller said there was nothing campy about the story.

As Miller noted, comics have a long history of serving as patriotic propaganda, dating back to Captain America’s run-in with Hitler. Maybe this is fitting, in comparison: a morally ambiguous hero to befit a morally ambigous cause.

On a side note, this was the first time I’d heard about the Captain America thing. While reading The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (a fantastic novel about the creators of the modern comic book hero), there was a passage in which the artists express their anguish over loved ones lost in WWII by depicting their character, the Escapist, punching out Hitler. I hadn’t realized that this part of the story was based on Captain America #1:

It had taken Joe only a few minutes to get the Escapist’s pose right — legs spread, big right fist arcing across the page to deliver an immortal haymaker — and hours to paint in the highlights and shadows that made the image seem so real. . . the veins of his arm rippled with the strain of the blow. As for Hitler, he came flying at you backward, right-crossed clean out of the painting, head thrown back, head thrown back, forelock a-splash, arms flailing, jaw trailing a long red streamer of teeth. The violence of the image was startling, beautiful, strange. It stirred mysterious feelings in the viewer, of hatred gratified, of cringing fear transmuted into smashing retribution, which few artists working in America, in the fall of 1939, could have tapped so easily and effectively as Josef Kavalier.