Truth Like The Dark

It’s election time in old blighty, and The Conservative Party (known to Bristolians as “The Tory Scum”) have a wonderful ad campaign. Billboards with mild-sounding slogans that pander to racism and fear. Here’s an edited version:

Now you can make your own online. Here’s my entry:

Continuing the struggle to let my US readers see the finest in UK TV ads. Click the image below:

Since the earliest days of man, something other than necessity was the true mother of invention.

Today Gizmodo blogged the first WiFi enabled tea kettle:

Apparently, the point is if granny misses tea time, it sends you an email, so you can remember to pop by and see if she’s joined the invisible choir.

Reminds me of when my ex worked in medical device approval at the FDA. Apparently there was a submission of a wireless thermometer for infants. The official review submissions documents exclaimed that “this magic device raise your children in safety!”

Sarah politely informed them that the FDA did not believe in magic, and generally would not approve thermometers that claimed to raise children.

It’s not often that I get a chance to have a full scale rant and present academic results in the same place. But a position paper for something like The Grand Challenge in Non-Classical Computation International Workshop affords me that rare opportunity. My position (along with some results from my student Jon Caves) can be found here, in the company of a number of other position papers.

And it’s all sponsored by the lovely people at Microsoft Research.

It seems no public figure can die now and be objectively criticized in the media, because we are all so hungry for primetime coverage of that Diana moment. I wonder if Elton John will rework a version of “Where to now St. Peter?” for the Papal Finale?

The connection to an old rocker would be apropos. JP2 was sort of the high-priced oldie rock band reunion tour of popes. The people paying for the high-priced tickets don’t really live that rockin’ believer lifestyle anymore, but they want to cling on to the time when they did. American Catholics, the richest in the world, have the most liberal lifestyles of religious folk in the US. The Church conveniently looks the other way.

Looks the other way while tremendous effort and resource is applied to “the JP2 phenomena”: development of “The Stadium Mass” and “The PopeMobile” (an armored car to get him closer to the people, think about it).

We are told that JP2 personally arranged for his death to be announced by automated email and SMS distribution to thousands.

All this is popstar stuff, not efforts or innovations in the spirituality of the church. Sure, JP2 was a nice looking old grandfatherly type of fella, but that too is part of being a popular icon. Reagan was one of those nice old guys who looked good on TV, and his passing was similarly cloying. I’m afraid the real legacies of these two men are those of similarly dire effects on real people.

While JP2 was on TV and in stadiums worldwide, looking so good in funny hats, his church was condemning the use of condoms to their unprecidented numbers of converts in the third world, where AIDS has become the most lethal epidemic of modern times. JP2’s Catholic Church was revealed to have aided and abetted a child abuse tragedy of Biblical scale. Yet The Church has used the sleaziest of corporate tactics to hide assets from the victims; those spiritually damaged people seeking the only measure of justice their painfully real world can possibly provide.

All of this went on while JP2 was Pope. And with all his god-granted power, he did nothing to stop it.

It’s sad when anybody dies. And I don’t believe JP2 was a monster. I do believe he was a symbol of a disease of our time, our preference for form over substance. And I do believe he was negligent. As I’m afraid we all are.

My friend who writes tired fools this morning blog-echoed a story that appeared on another friend’s blog, fartnoise, the substance of which is encapsulated below:

On 29th March reuters carried a story that the abu ghraib abuses were effectively sanctioned by Lt General Ricardo Sanchez. …
Big stuff. Except that you won’t find it on mainstream american media.

I was just about to blog-echo this blog-echo, since Americans have certainly not paid enough attention to the chain-of-command failures that must have led to Abu Ghraib. But I feel compelled to offer some correction to my friend’s posts. Note that the citation they provide is from The Independent, entitled “Green light for Iraqi prison abuse came right from the top“. The Reuters story is entitled “Memo Shows U.S. Inmate Interrogation Plans in Iraq.” The story broke on March 29th, based on an ACLU press release.

If one searches Goggle news for the title of The Independent story, one doesn’t find anything from mainstream US sources, as reported by fartnoise and tired fools.

However, if one types in “Sanchez ACLU” into Google News, it reports that the story appeared in or on The New York Times, ABC News, Washington Times and in Star and Stripes, Marine Corps Times, Air Force Times, Army Times.

A little more searching reveals the story at MSNBC. I couldn’t find the story at CNN or CBS (which is disturbing, but it could be I used the wrong search words). I couldn’t find it in The Washington Post (but I suspect this is due to some problem, since The Post were the people who first reported the memo’s existence, and provided the ACLU with the information necessary for requesting the document).

Is there something wrong that this isn’t Headline News? Yes, and damned wrong. Has US news been “silent” on this issue: simply, no.