Mark Kleiman asks whether political motives were involved with Ricuarte’s retracted MDMA paper and suggests a full investigation of MDMA research.
Well, Cancun is where the action is and Arnold Kling has the links for you including this one at the Cato Institute that has a wealth of pro and con discussion.
Late Niight Reading should lengthen again soon. Other project are impinging for the rest of this week.
Good Night!
Take Back the Media has a post bush speech edition here. Read the speech and then listen to the September 8 edition of TBTM Radio.
Do you agree with their rating of 2 thumbs down?
Via blah3.
Jeralyn Merrit wonders:
We don’t know why people aren’t screaming bloody murder about this.
The this is CAPPS II, the new airline passenger screening system currently under development.
Yes, why aren’t we up in arms about this? Go read Jeralyn’s post and the related links. CAPPS II looks like Total Information Awareness is alive and well not something 5 years away as Fox News argues:
Any real development of TIA technology is more than five years away, so concerns that the technology will be abused are speculative, at best.
Well, since Fox’s 5 year forecast is clearly speculative why would we expect it not to be abused.
Gosh, just imagine, you are headed to New York next summer to provide peaceful input to the GOP convention but, oops, your color is red and you don’t get to go. What set of data in the fed files might cause this to happen?
Even though the absence of information may be as problematic as the information the feds have you just might want to start making yourself a little less visible by learning how to use cash again.
Many papers have been carrying this article about the search for extraterrestrial life. As more planets are discovered interest in this effort increases:
But after four decades of frequent ridicule, the astronomers seeking signs of life in the heavens are gaining some respect. Since 1960, when Tarter’s colleague Frank Drake first pointed a radio telescope at a pair of nearby stars in hopes of dialing in an alien broadcast, there have been about 100 searches for ET signals.
No aliens have been found. But new planets have, more than 100 outside our solar system since the first was discovered in 1995.
Whether those distant worlds teem with life, let alone intelligent life, remains unknown. But each new discovery further energizes the search for ET.
Many of the current efforts have as their target extraterrestrial intelligence, e.g., the SETI Project.
Things would move much more quickly if just a little bit of effort were spent looking for ETUI, or extraterrestrial unintelligence. For instance this speciman* was photographed two days ago and the astute observor should easily find more examples of infestation.
*Photo from Yahoo/Reuters.