MAN, noun.
An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he ought to be. – Ambrose Bierce

Tourists are vital to running America’s cities.

The number of overseas visitors to the U.S. has dropped 17% since its peak in 2000 — and 20% in the top 15 cities — costing more than $100 billion in lost visitor spending through 2005. In Los Angeles, tourism is expected to add $13 billion in direct cash to the economy this year, but from 2000 to 2005, the number of overseas travelers declined 27%.

Mayors are worried, nearly 75% saying that entry procedures and treatment by U.S. immigration and customs officials reinforce negative perceptions of the country. [LA Times]

The U.S. is likely to cede to China in the next couple of years its position as the third-most-visited international destination. France and Spain are the top international tourism destinations.

Factoid: American Tours International brings in 1 million tourists each year.

He said the Brits are more careful about dropping bombs on villages than the Americans.

US forces, he said, had a visible doctrine of using overwhelming force to keep troops out of harm’s way – with the result that, according to the BBC, coalition forces have now killed more civilians in Afghanistan this year than the militants have.

If that’s correct it is a truly terrifying statistic.

NATO is moving swiftly to try and limit the damage – apologizing….

From the Telegraph, with additional insight here.

The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler was elected.

We have people in this country who are richer than whole countries.
They run everything.

We have no Democratic Party.
It’s financed by the same millionaires and billionaires as the Republicans.

As the world is ending, I’m always glad to be entertained for a few moments.
The best way to do that is with music. You should practice once a night.

[Quotes of Kurt Vonnegut]

I’ve been wondering how we can carry the bad news. Signs of desperate feelings sometimes creep near, such as this post at WorldChanging:

To put it simply, things are getting worse more quickly than we thought, and much more quickly than we’re making things better. Prospects of planetary collapse we once thought native to the next century, or the century after that, are looming as possibilities for the next decade or two.

And another, coupled to assertions that wooden computer keyboards are a response to a disappointing world flooded with unfulfilling gizmos, today’s “back-to-the-land movement” [wiki],

When we look ahead, the skies darken, and we see not aluminum cities of flying cars, but a “global Somalia.”

No wonder, then, that we cling like a monkey with a wire-brush mama to the idea of a future in which engineering conquers the human condition, where we can leave off serious worrying about the planet until the godlike AIs get here, and in which, in any case, we can always jump ship and scuttle off to another planet if things get too hot.

Unfortunately, wishing doesn’t make it so.

The ‘After Gutenberg’ blog covers climate change and energy options with some courage:

My fellow members of the Duck-N-Cover generation, it just dawned on me… Remember how our parents, to relieve their stress of worrying about nuclear destruction of the entire world, took steps (to check on supplies down in the bunker, the bunker so low) to Action (one pill makes you smaller and one pill makes you large).

Now the onus is on us, Gus, to exhibit such remarkable fortitude for which Americans are known.

Let us come together, “Come on down”, and come up with some innovative ways that we, you know, us, can “Not To Worry” if the WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) don’t get you, then the CTL (Coal to Liquids) will.

“Well.”

Well, what?

“But somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together,” Senator Obama said. “Faith started being used to drive us apart. Faith got hijacked.”

In a secret coalition with the Swedish Mafia, the powerful Tonga CIA is reported to have cracked a sinister plot which has stumped Homeland Security since the Pizza Delivery Conspiracy.

Seized during extensive search campaigns, new and alarming evidence reveals what may be secret offshore plans for mass distribution. Thought to be needed to authorize access to urban or wilderness terrorist training camps, numerous allen-type rods, perhaps weapons activation keys known as ikea or i-keys, have been recovered from a cache of contraband assembly kits.

Bush Administration intelligence teams are laboring to decipher cryptic picture diagrams and related printed materials that may contain hidden instruction codes.

Platoon leaders are complaining of poor GPS equipment while navigating maze-type warehouse facilities that slow progress and confuse highly skilled penetration squads. To help decrease port and border crossings, investigating personnel are installing surveillance equipment hidden in lightweight props that appear to be pricey electronics.

The Executive Branch is being criticized after leaked reports reveal that the Swedish Mafia has been allegedly contracted to train military prison guards in methods of torture that smother evil combatants under huge piles of plastic balls. Inhumane interrogation techniques include threats of bursting while forcibly ingesting tiny meatballs and the use of washable slipcovers in apparatus that restricts breathing. Stating the threat level will remain at orange, the Vice President has refused an Oversight Committee subpoena to disclose additional data.

Nixon’s Revenge?

Flu may hitch a ride on banknotes – New Scientist
The exchange of money has often been used as a model for the way infections spread. Now turn that thinking around because it looks as if the flu virus persists so well on banknotes – days rather than hours – that money could help spread the next pandemic.

The Supreme Court will hear this testimony regarding how we manage prisoners at Guantanamo.

“What were purported to be specific statements of fact lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence.”

Forbes

An Army officer who played a key role in the “enemy combatant” hearings at Guantanamo Bay says tribunal members relied on vague and incomplete intelligence while being pressured to rule against detainees, often without any specific evidence.

His affidavit, submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court and released Friday, is the first criticism by a member of the military panels that determine whether detainees will continue to be held.

Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a 26-year veteran of military intelligence who is an Army reserve officer and a California lawyer, said military prosecutors were provided with only “generic” material that didn’t hold up to the most basic legal challenges.

Despite repeated requests, intelligence agencies arbitrarily refused to provide specific information that could have helped either side in the tribunals, according to Abraham, who said he served as a main liaison between the Combat Status Review Tribunals and the intelligence agencies.

The question we must face is: what do we want? We should want to abandon that which has no future. We should blow right through mere sustainability. We should desire a world of enhancement. That is what should come next. – Ken Novak

In 1998, I had it figured that the dot-com boom would become a dot-green boom. It took a while for others to get it. Some still don’t. They think I’m joking. They are still used to thinking of greenness as being ‘counter’ and ‘alternative — they don’t understand that 21st-Century green is and must be about everything — the works. Sustainability is comprehensive. That which is not sustainable doesn’t go on. Glamorous green.

Hung in the Precambrian basement of our paleomagnetic crater.

Other than standing great, an iron stiff skeleton sinewed upon the height of virtue;other than casting memory, back and beyond the first and only moment;other than penetrating boundary, free envisioning robed in the seduction of better;other that bending blood, tasks of will encrusting good,then there is only beauty and beauty and only beauty, a melody exposed to the exquisite,well beyond the dilemma of our hopefulness; impressive ecstasy owing loyalty to the noble of our mind.

Shai Carmi, a physicist at Israel’s Bar Ilan University says this is the most complete picture of the Internet available today

Previous maps of the internet show the topological structure, the connections between nodes, but “some nodes may not be as important as other nodes,” says Carmi.

Technology Review states this is the first study to look at how the Internet is organized in terms of function, as well as how it’s connected.

“The Internet has a core of 80 or so critical nodes surrounded by an outer shell of 5,000 sparsely connected, isolated nodes that are very much dependent upon this core. Separating the core from the outer shell are approximately 15,000 peer-connected and self-sufficient nodes.

“Take away the core, and an interesting thing happens: about 30 percent of the nodes from the outer shell become completely cut off. But the remaining 70 percent can continue communicating because the middle region has enough peer-connected nodes to bypass the core.

“With the core connected, any node is able to communicate with any other node within about four links. “If the core is removed, it takes about seven or eight links,” says Carmi. It’s a slower trip, but the data still gets there. Carmi believes we should take advantage of these alternate pathways to try to stop the core of the Internet from clogging up.” [pics here]

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In 1998, Cheswick and Burke posted The Internet Mapping Project. Wired has an article and the layout of the early web’s Scenic Route. In 2006, CIO used the 1998 map [full gif here, pdf here] to ask Who owns the Internet?

In 2003, New Scientist shows the Internet Map as traceroute nodes, the ‘Opte’ project by Barrett Lyon.

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How heavy is the Internet?
A “bit” is about 40,000 electrons stored in a capacitor on a chip. Multiply a bit by the total volume of information passing around the net, estimated at 40 petabytes, and voila: 0.2 millionths of an ounce.

Thoughts on Friday morning, 1837

    Inspiration,         the great incision in the soul bodie,    lingers like a wound in the side of the mind;         so much more when inspiration    converges near the limits of perceived reality.

    Will we ever come to see    That only courage grows tomorrow?

    Mind opens the gates of time    And flies the eagle's soar    Into the space beyond    limits of our agreed reality.

    Tenets of the past--    romantic, spiritual stewards of the weave--    spring up as markers,         (pray end up as understanding)    helping to divulge new identity    in a vast quanta of unique opportunity.

    There is the urge that will not be ceased:    To bring the forward back to the existing.    Reaching up to the heavens,    we bring insight to its test.

    Our science, our commerce, our effort,     merely to launch our timid rationality.

    Ah, the restraint of practical reason    coupled to the liberty    of a dignified mind:            an                                    infinite                                     wedge.

The waves come in again and again,
Come in from the sea to the shore.
The waves come in and retreat and then
Leave that part which retreats no more.

The waves come in on watery feet
With no two ever the same.
The waves come in, the earth to meet.
Then leave constant, untamed.

The waves sing out in watery voice
To earth and sky and cloud.
What message is’t to man they pose
Now gentle then now loud?

The waves come in to the land from the sea.
Their tops a’foaming and curled.
Their great voice repeats whisperingly
That each is a part of this world.

Oh, I propose to love the waves
As they have indeed loved me.
Waves bring the gift that each heart craves:
Peace is the gift of the sea.

Crowds are untrustworthy.

The larger parts of crowds may merely be attracted to the buzz, the novelty and, well, the crowd.

This post isn’t an argument against a green future, nor supports new scientific claims, but is a necessary post because we must move forward with caution and be wary of crowds.

Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, is going against the crowd and recent policies responding to global warming.

Klaus argues in the Financial Times that ambitious environmentalism is the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity. Strong words.

Is he to be grouped with other leaders on the fringe, such as South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki questioning the link between HIV and Aids? Or George W. Bush as he flames evil-doers?

Vaclav Klaus writes,
and answers a swarm of questions and comments,
that “global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem”.

He asserts that the issue “is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom” than about global temperature.

“As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.”

Ed Ring at EcoWorld stands behind Klaus and is incensed as millions of acres of forest are sacrificed for artificially profitable biofuels or when Washington spends billions on ethanol infrastructure that warps and damages related food, land and water systems – a net effect of more warming and less efficiency than using fossil fuels.

“As scientists and politicians catch up with independent minded skeptics like President Klaus, we will hopefully stop the anti-CO2 agenda, and return to things that matter, like eliminating truly noxious pollutants, reversing tropical deforestation, and continuing to develop clean and efficient fossil fuel while we eventually transition to nuclear and solar power.”