born live love die

There may be another reason the Republicans want Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic nomination: they get to run against her husband.

No.  Wait.

That would be the only reason.

Bill looks like he has been a bad boy again, this time with money. But, to quote Senator Larry Craig, “Has he been a nasty boy?” Time will tell.

The former president finds money the way hogs in France find truffles: with his nose. He well developed nose served him well while running for office, but it may have now gotten him into trouble.

In September, 2005, President Clinton accompanied a Canadian mining financier, Frank Giustra to Kazakhstan, ruled by Nursultan A. Nazarbayev. And ruled badly.

Upon landing on the first stop of a three-country philanthropic tour, the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent.

Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Within two days, corporate records show that Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.

The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said.

Just months after the Kazakh pact was finalized, Mr. Clinton’s charitable foundation received its own windfall: a $31.3 million donation from Mr. Giustra that had remained a secret until he acknowledged it last month. The gift, combined with Mr. Giustra’s more recent and public pledge to give the William J. Clinton Foundation an additional $100 million, secured Mr. Giustra a place in Mr. Clinton’s inner circle, an exclusive club of wealthy entrepreneurs in which friendship with the former president has its privileges.

Read the whole thing in the New York Times.

Smoke or fire? Will the Hillary Clinton campaign expire due to smoke inhalation?

Think the surge Iraq has worked?

Think again.

Patrick Barry reports on a talk at the United States Institute for Peace.

I went to an interesting talk today at the US Institute of Peace, with the somewhat noirish title “Iraq’s Mystery Men: Insurgents, Tribes, and Sadrists.” What’s so mysterious about insurgents, tribes and Sadrists you’re probably asking? Well quite a bit, though apparently not so much as there used to be. For some time, these groups have played a more shadowy role in internal Iraqi politics, but now each seems poised to step out of obscurity to take a more significant place for themselves. Views from the panel indicated that the Sadrists’s recent truce has allowed them the space to consolidate their power; tribesmen have used the awakening movement to come to make demands for inclusion; and insurgent organizations have remade themselves into political-military parties in the style of Hamas or Hezbollah.

Is this good or bad?

Where there were once relatively few influential political coalitions with numerous ‘mystery’ movements operating on the periphery, now there are multiple parties, of differing sectarian and ethnic compositions, each with legitimate claim to the future status of Iraq’s government and each with the force and following to back those claims. The Sadrists, the Political Council of the Iraqi Resistance, and the Anbar Salvation Council are all examples of entities whose political consciousness has stirred, yet still insist on maintaining experienced, well-armed militias with no ties to the central authority in Baghdad. Why do they feel a need to keep those armed men at their side? What end do they seek? Here’s a hint – it’s not reconciliation.

I’ll go with bad.

Too funny.

You’d think the worst thing about Sharon Stone’s new look was her “I did this by myself with my nail clippers at four in the morning after six Harvey Wallbangers and a cup of gravy!” haircut, wouldn’t you?

See the pic.

Think Progress is on the case. For every Bush claim in the State of the Union address, Think Progress has the rebuttal, with links. Here’s a taste:

He sits, reading a coffee table book about Corvette C6s. His book mark is a letter from the Washington Department of Corrections. He wears blue jeans, a pale blue shirt and a grey sweatshirt over it. He wears a black knit watch cap and black boots. He has white hair, and a well trimmed white moustache that drops down to his jaw line. When I first saw him, he reminded me of the men in a prison movie.

The letter is address to the Lutheran Compass Center, a house for homeless men. He pauses periodically and his chin drops to his chest as his eyes close. He is in his 60’s, thick glasses, book held close to his face when he brings his head back up and resumes reading. The man across from him has sunk into the soft chair and is clearly sleeping.

He comes up and drops the book to his lap, more envigorated. He taps his foot, the one with a boot with a normal sole. His right foot has a sole that is about two inches thick. His legs are thin where his calves show in white socks between the pants and the boots.

Questions ring: who is he? why is one leg shorter than the other? what did he do to become a convict? does he have family? how did he fall out of the manifold of love that keeps me me?

I have a moment when JMan and Bookzilla dance through my consciousness and I long for them, for their touch.  Life sometimes feels like I am not that far from the Compass Center, but I am redeemed by them.

I watched the video “The Story of Stuff“, where Annie Leonard chronicles the waste endemic in our society.  It’s pretty good stuff.  Here’s a taste:

She talks about planned obsolescence and how products get thrown out very soon after purchase.

I was thinking about that while reading this article about the passing of the Mormon church prophet and how the LDS church was going to pick a new leader.  After I said “Pick me!  Pick me!  Pick me!” and realized that no one was listening, I saw this:

Creating converts isn’t the same as keeping them, though—an issue in all religions that proselytize. Sociologist Armand Mauss estimates that 50 percent of LDS converts within the United States stop attending within a year of conversion, and 75 percent of foreign converts fail to attend after a year.

Basically, after some initial use, the Mormon religion product is getting dumped.

Robots learn to lie. Whoa, didn’t see that one coming.

Robots can evolve to communicate with each other, to help, and even to deceive each other, according to Dario Floreano of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

Floreano and his colleagues outfitted robots with light sensors, rings of blue light, and wheels and placed them in habitats furnished with glowing “food sources” and patches of “poison” that recharged or drained their batteries. Their neural circuitry was programmed with just 30 “genes,” elements of software code that determined how much they sensed light and how they responded when they did. The robots were initially programmed both to light up randomly and to move randomly when they sensed light.

To create the next generation of robots, Floreano recombined the genes of those that proved fittest—those that had managed to get the biggest charge out of the food source.

The resulting code (with a little mutation added in the form of a random change) was downloaded into the robots to make what were, in essence, offspring. Then they were released into their artificial habitat. “We set up a situation common in nature—foraging with uncertainty,” Floreano says. “You have to find food, but you don’t know what food is; if you eat poison, you die.” Four different types of colonies of robots were allowed to eat, reproduce, and expire.

By the 50th generation, the robots had learned to communicate—lighting up, in three out of four colonies, to alert the others when they’d found food or poison. The fourth colony sometimes evolved “cheater” robots instead, which would light up to tell the others that the poison was food, while they themselves rolled over to the food source and chowed down without emitting so much as a blink.

Some robots, though, were veritable heroes. They signaled danger and died to save other robots. “Sometimes,” Floreano says, “you see that in nature—an animal that emits a cry when it sees a predator; it gets eaten, and the others get away—but I never expected to see this in robots.”

How long before they have politicians?

I remember diagramming sentences in the seventh grade. I don’t think kids do that these days. I tried to explain it to Bookzilla, but she didn’t get it. This is beautiful.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Sing it!

Breakfast, 7.45 am. JMan is looking at the syrup server. I get the syrup in the big jug at Costco and use a ketchup server with the top trimmed back to serve the syrup at table. The server is about the shape and size of a baby bottle. There’s about 1/4 inch of syrup in the bottom.

“Guess it’s time nurse Mrs. Butterworth.” - JMan, 8

This was, of course, followed by a high pitched cackling giggle.

It appears that the chickens have come home to roost.  And they are bearing C4 laden vests.  It would appear that the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service, had been training militants and that they are now out of control.

The threat from the militants, the former intelligence officials warned, is one that Pakistan is unable to contain. “We could not control them,” said one former senior intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We indoctrinated them and told them, ‘You will go to heaven.’ You cannot turn it around so suddenly.”

No kidding.