Regular readers of this weblog may get the impression that I think the USA is getting more stupid by the day, so it’s time to give you an example that’s closer to home. Actually, across the street from home – that should be close enough.

There’s a major traffic crossing close by, and I have to cross it when I’m walking to the supermarket. Until recently, this is what a pedestrian saw;

Everybody living in the Netherlands for more than 162 minutes knows these and what they do. And for the readers who’ve never been in the Netherlands: I don’t really have to explain, do I?

Anyway, they were replaced this week, together with all the traffic lights at the crossing. The new lights are much brighter, and better in “low-hanging-sun” situations, so that’s an all-out improvement. But here’s what they did with the pedestrian lights:

Really? Not just one, but TWO illustrations demonstrating that a button is a thing you push with your finger? Are they afraid of people whipping out their dicks or something? And notice that they still don’t bother to explain what happens^* after you press the button – that’s apparently still assumed knowledge. But the “how” of pressing a button is clearly presumed to be slipping our collective mind. Also note that I’m not the only one irritated by the assumed stupidity of the average pedestrian – it’s been there for two days and already somebody tried to peel off the sticker, reducing the amount of disdain. And no, that wasn’t me.

^*Yes, I know, these buttons are sometimes presumed to be placebos. But I noticed during installation earlier this week that they are wired up. If they were full-time placebos the contractor would have saved a lot of money by leaving out the wiring. It’s still possible the traffic control computer ignores the signals during high-traffic situations, since the pedestrian green has enough opportunity to shine regardless of people pressing the button, but the wiring indicates that at least during low-traffic situations the buttons are no placebo

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The top US military commander said the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks must stop its "extremely dangerous" release of sensitive documents, according to a CNN transcript released Friday.

"I would hope that those who are responsible for this would, at some point in time, think about the responsibility that they have for lives that they’re exposing… and stop leaking this information," Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CNN’s "Fareed Zakaria GPS."

"It continues to be extremely dangerous," Mullen said ahead of the expected release by WikiLeaks of millions of sensitive diplomatic cables.

So, Mike, are you telling me that the minimal US military mission feasibility studies still don’t include “What’s the possible blow-back when all the information leaks?”

Sounds like you’re not the right man for the job.

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A 19-year-old has been arrested in connection with a plot to detonate a vehicle bomb at an annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon, on Friday evening, the Justice Department announced.

Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Somalia, was arrested on suspicion of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. He is a resident of Corvallis, Oregon, and is a student at Oregon State University, according to the FBI.

Mohamud was arrested by the FBI and Portland Police Bureau after he attempted to detonate what he believed to be an explosives-laden van that was parked near the tree-lighting ceremony in Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square, the Justice Department said in a written statement, but the device was actually inert.

"The threat was very real. Our investigation shows that Mohamud was absolutely committed to carrying out an attack on a very grand scale," said Arthur Balizan, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI in Oregon. "At the same time, I want to reassure the people of this community that, at every turn, we denied him the ability to actually carry out the attack."

According to TSA logic, the US now needs to improve security by installing scanners and grope-stations at every on- and off ramp for every freeway.

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Beck’s assertion — with which Palin showed no disagreement whatsoever — requires belief in no less than four different insane things – and that’s even if the contrail hadn’t already been fully explained. 

And this gets virtually no comment anywhere.

Apparently we’ve all been numbed by stupidity for so long that while the media can still grok an obvious up-is-down screw-up, the presence of mind-blowing nests of illogic immediately adjacent to the famous gaffe… that’s just dismissed as normal. 

“TSA says they are going to crack down on the invasive pat-downs. In fact, one agent was transferred to another parish.”

—David Letterman

[Quote]:

"The true story of Thanksgiving is how socialism failed,"

– Rush Limbaugh

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The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, "down and out, [the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up," as when the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in 1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there are other examples – the Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank. You’d almost get the impression that the riot is written into the plan.

And it is.

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There’s been a lot of very obnoxious misuse of software patents in recent years. This ranges from patent trolls wielding submarine patents to overly-generic patents being used to scare everyone else out of a business. But at least in most of the cases, the patents were an original idea of some sort, even if that idea was far too general to be patented.

The situation just got worse. We now have a company scraping open source commit logs and patenting them.

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Reporting from Los Angeles and New York —

The first arrest in an escalating probe of suspected Wall Street insider trading throws a spotlight on what authorities fear is a disturbing new trend by hedge funds and other big players — paying networks of well-connected corporate insiders for illegal access to privileged information.

The government appears to be building a case that the use of insiders is generating huge illicit profits for Wall Street heavyweights, at the expense of individual investors who don’t have access to the same information.

A disturbing new trend? Where has this newspaper been for the past decades?

[Quote]:

Germany and its few wealthy euro zone colleagues must wonder how much longer it can afford such rescue missions. German taxpayers must be shocked that the rescues were required in the first place. Eleven years ago, when the euro was born, they were told the shiny new currency would be as stable as the mighty Deutsche mark and any country that lived beyond its means would not be bailed out, so fear not. Both assurances were shams. The euro has been highly volatile during the European debt crisis and the bailout tab for tiny Greece and Ireland alone is expected to be a monstrous €200-billion.

[..]

If Germany realizes that it faces never-ending, and ever-rising, costs to keep the euro zone intact, and that the victim states will not ditch the euro of their own volition, it might be pushed into a radical move: Remove itself from the euro zone and put the mark back into action.

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The U.S. government has notified Ottawa that the WikiLeaks website is preparing to release sensitive U.S. diplomatic files that could damage U.S. relations with allies around the world.

U.S. officials say the documents may contain accounts of compromising conversations with political dissidents and friendly politicians and could result in the expulsion of U.S. diplomats from foreign postings.

In other words “if your country had friendly diplomatic relations with the US, odds are they screwed you over”

[Quote]:

Former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay — once one of the most powerful and feared Republicans in Congress — was convicted Wednesday on charges he illegally funneled corporate money to Texas candidates in 2002.

Jurors deliberated for 19 hours before returning guilty verdicts against DeLay on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. He faces up to life in prison on the money laundering charge.

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After the ban three ministries placed on photography, most Kuwaiti youth are a bit confused about what to do with their cameras if they can’t use them in public and why such laws were implemented in the first place. The Ministry of Information, Ministry of Social Affairs and Ministry of Finance recently came to the conclusion that photography should be used for journalism purposes only. This has resulted in the ban of Digital Single Lens Reflex Cameras (DSLRs) in public, on the streets and in malls

.

What most Kuwaiti photographers have come to wonder is how such a decision could be reached by authorities, especially considering that digital cameras and cell phone cameras have the same abilities.

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If the information recently acquired by Doug Hagmann of Northeast Intelligence Network is accurate, then something really big is happening in America right now – and it’s most certainly not a step towards individual liberty.

According to Mr. Hagmann, he was contacted by a source within the DHS who provided an alarming memo detailing a new administrative directive agreed upon by DHS chief Janet Napolitano and the head of TSA John Pistole. The memo, according to Doug Hagmann, “officially addresses those who are opposed to, or engaged in the disruption of the implementation of the enhanced airport screening procedures as ‘domestic extremists’.”

The memo leaves no doubt as to who, exactly, is leading the charge to label Americans who refuse current security measures due to health and privacy concerns as extremists. “The measures to be taken in response to the negative public backlash as detailed [in this directive], have the full support of the President,” it says.

[Quote]:

Here’s a scenario:

Middle Eastern terrorists hijack a U.S. jetliner bound for Italy. A two-week drama ensues in which the plane’s occupants are split into groups and held hostage in secret locations in Lebanon and Syria.

While this drama is unfolding, another group of terrorists detonates a bomb in the luggage hold of a 747 over the North Atlantic, killing more than 300 people.

Not long afterward, terrorists kill 19 people and wound more than a hundred others in coordinated attacks at European airport ticket counters.

A few months later, a U.S. airliner is bombed over Greece, killing four passengers.

Five months after that, another U.S. airliner is stormed by heavily armed terrorists at the airport in Karachi, Pakistan, killing at least 20 people and wounding 150 more.

Things are quiet for a while, until two years later when a 747 bound for New York is blown up over Europe killing 270 passengers and crew.

Nine months from then, a French airliner en route to Paris is bombed over Africa, killing 170 people from 17 countries.

That’s a pretty macabre fantasy, no? A worst-case war-game scenario for the CIA? A script for the End Times? Except, of course, that everything above actually happened, in a four-year span between 1985 and 1989.

[..]

In the 1980s we did not overreact. We did not stage ill-fated invasions of distant countries. People did not cease traveling and the airline industry did not fall into chaos. We were lazy in enacting better security, perhaps, but as a country our psychological reaction, much to our credit, was calm, measured and not yet self-defeating.

This time, thanks to the wholly unhealthy changes in our national and cultural mind-set, I fear it will be different.

You can download it here. It’s awesome.

[Quote]:

A Catholic priest charged with sexually assaulting a teenage boy in 2008 in the rural parish where he worked west of San Antonio was rearrested last week in Dallas and charged with trying to hire someone to kill his accuser.Father John M. Fiala, 52, was in Dallas County Jail on one count of solicitation to commit murder and two counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child, officials said. A judge set bail at $700,000.

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An actor who appeared in the television comedy Ugly Betty is alleged to have killed his mother with a samurai sword in their New York home while apparently screaming Biblical passages.

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Body scans and genital fondlings would save more lives if our Government was paying to have them done in hospitals rather than airports.

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"Java is a DSL for taking large XML files and converting them to stack traces"