These stories have nothing to do with each other, except that they do. The six-year campaign to get Certain People put in charge of all those alphabetic agencies in Washington is bearing fruit.

The first we will call the “Mom Said No—Let’s Go Ask Daddy” amendment. It affects power companies [coughlikeEnronmaybe?cough] ability to overrule state regulators and put massive power transmission lines wherever the fuck they want.

The second is under the Department of Won’t Anyone Think Of The Children? and would give the FCC, that bastion of civil liberties ’n’ free speech ’n’ all, authority to regulate content of cable and other off-air providers just like they now do with over-the-air (broadcast) radio and TV. The regulations, we are told, would be to regulate violent programming. The FCC has been “studying” this question for three years, it seems, and by sheer coincidence released their report —discovering that they not only have this right but that it “does not conflict with the First Amendment” —a week after the Virginia Tech shootings. Sheer coincidence, we tell ya.  Read more 

Wow. I can’t believe that we are here. This is huge. Wow. Dude - trippy.

Rajesh Rao, associate professor of computer science and engineering, and his students have demonstrated that an individual can "order" a robot to move to specific locations and pick up specific objects by generating the proper brain waves that reflect the individual's instructions. The results were presented last week at the Current Trends in Brain-Computer Interfacing meeting in Whistler, British Columbia.  Read more 

Say, Dr. Benway?

William Burroughs:

A Model of Control
“I deplore brutality,” [Dr. Benway] said. “It’s not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-buman enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct.”  Read more 

Quote of the day, or at least for me, from the ever impressive Nur AC:

Concerning the “Kill them all” thread below, the US is doomed to “cut and run” for the following reason: The Arab world has only 25% of the oil.  Read more