Elliott Hall's Blog, page 10

These Aliens kind of suck

(Mark Wilson / AP)

The FBI has been putting a lot of its old documents online in the Vault, to better reassure the public that they weren't involved in vast conspiracies, just your run-of-the-mill anti-democratic chicanery. Their two most requested topics are Elvis and Roswell. Yesterday they released a memo that will no doubt send conspiracy nerds into a crazed frenzy:

The memo making the rounds Monday is the Hottel memo, written March 22, 1950, by Guy Hottel, a special agent in the FBI's Washington Field Office. The memo was sent to J. Edgar Hoover, then the director of the FBI.

It reads: "An investigator for the Air Forces stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico. They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots.

It's a pretty standard description of Little Green Men, though they could also be Munchkins that race competitively. Here's the part I don't get:

According to Mr. [Redacted] informant, the saucers were found in New Mexico due to the fact that the Government has a very high-powered radar set-up in that area and it is believed the radar interferes with the controlling mechanism of the saucers."

So these littlest test pilots, with their flashy suits of "metallic cloth of very fine texture," somehow travel across the galaxy only to be felled by… radar?

Maybe the government didn't cover up these aliens because they're dangerous or made some kind of deal. Maybe it's just because our first visitors from another world kind of sucked.

The End is Coming

PI Felix Strange is working his last case. The woman he loves has been taken by Fisher Partners – America's for-profit secret police – and, though he suspects he won't find her, he's going to do the next best thing: kill everyone involved.

As he works his way down the list, Strange is offered a secret deal, which could lead him straight to Iris. Across the American South, the militant Sons of David are on the rise. Their leader, the prophet Joshua, promises a new world to replace the sinful old.

To free Iris, all Strange has to do is assassinate this new messiah.

The problem? He's twelve years old.

ON MAY 5TH THE WHIRLWIND COMES

Pre-order on Amazon and receive a free Will & Kate™ commemorative tea towel.*

*Offer not valid. Ever.

The Decemberists – The Bagman's Gambit

Wednesday Exposition

World can be powered by alternative energy in 20-40 years – Stanford. I'm little dubious about solar doing much good in this country, but maybe wind makes up for it. Either way the bigger problems are political, not scientific.

Public Safety Alert – Crooked Timber. It is almost impossible to overstate how deeply crazy some of the newly elected officials in the US are.

Wachovia Bank pays trivial fine for laundering massive amount of drug money. – Naked Capitalism. "[Wachovia] paid federal authorities $110m in forfeiture, for allowing transactions later proved to be connected to drug smuggling, and incurred a $50m fine for failing to monitor cash used to ship 22 tons of cocaine."

Canadian conservatives promise corporate tax cuts as study reveals they don't spur growth – Globe & Mail. Meanwhile, in the Great White North, we are having an election because the government was censured in Parliament for the first time in Canadian history. They basically lied about about the cost of new fighter jets and some programs, and the minority government fell because of it. Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been warning the electorate of the dangers of coalition government.

For our American cousins, if none of the above makes sense, I recommend Canada, how does it work?

I know my British friends understand the intricacies of parliamentary democracy, so for you I thought this might help explain some of my home country's political nuances:

A mature conversation on the morality of intervention in Libya

From College Humor, via LGM:

It's Monday, I got nothing.

Cursed, John Ritter

This is one of those rare times that the video is almost as good as the song.

A Murder Foretold

"Good afternoon," Rosenberg said. "My name is Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano and, alas, if you are hearing or seeing this message it means that I've been murdered by President Álvaro Colom, with the help of Gustavo Alejos." Rosenberg went on, "The reason I'm dead, and you're therefore watching this message, is only and exclusively because during my final moments I was the lawyer to Mr. Khalil Musa and his daughter Marjorie Musa, who, in cowardly fashion, were assassinated by President Álvaro Colom, with the consent of his wife, Sandra de Colom, and with the help of . . . Gustavo Alejos."

That's David Grann in the New Yorker, writing about the Rosenberg case that rocked Guatemala. I won't spoil any more because it's an amazing tale, and would be unbelievable if it wasn't real. I'm always fascinated by these stories because I know that I wouldn't be able to get away with something similar in fiction. In fact, fiction becomes part of the story itself, as the rule of law in that country is so badly damaged that outlandish conspiracies – and conspiracies within conspiracies – are not only possible, they are plausible.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were half a dozen treatments for a movie making the rounds in Hollywood by the end of the week.

The Kill Team

An incredible story in Rolling Stone about a unit hunting Afghan civilians:

Early last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji.

Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions. For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging "savages" and debated the probability of getting caught. Some of them agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from the start. But not long after the New Year, as winter descended on the arid plains of Kandahar Province, they agreed to stop talking and actually pull the trigger.

It's not light reading, but you really have to read the whole article. There is a horrible inevitability hanging over what happened. These soldiers were trained to kill an enemy, but when it's difficult to figure out who the enemy is at the same time that soldiers are dying in IED attacks, it's easy to start hating everyone.

It's a frightening measure of how little these soldiers feared prosecution that, even after Abu Ghraib, they took pictures of their murders and passed them around. No officers or senior officials have been charged with covering up what they did, or the dereliction of duty from allowing such lawlessness by soldiers under their command. It's 'a few bad apples' all over again.

Wednesday exposition

GE pays no taxes in the US – NY Times. None. In fact, it gets tax credits.

Zadie Smith campaigns to stop her local library from closure – Guardian.

Incredibly high car theft rates in 1920 – Microkhan. A big complication in identifying a stolen car was that there were only a few body styles at the time, so they all looked the same.

The Austerity Delusion – Paul Krugman. I forgot to post this earlier, but it's a good companion piece on the economics I was talking about on Sunday.

New series of Mad Men delayed until 2012 – Times.

Via io9, clever robots take yet another job:

Now how will all those unemployed pong players put food on the table?

Why I marched

I marched for about four hours yesterday, which only managed to get me from embankment to the houses of parliament. I'm not one for public protest; the only one I'd been on before was the giant Iraq protest. You might have thought that experience would put me off for good, considering the invasion still happened on schedule. In the short term it will probably be the same for the cuts.

So why bother? Most importantly, I think the march challenged the breezy assertions of the coalition that the country is behind them. The sheer size and diversity of the crowd yesterday will make it difficult for the coalition to dismiss them as the usual suspects, though they will no doubt try. This government has been forcing through radical changes to Education, the NHS, policing, the military and pretty much everywhere else, acting as if they were elected in a landslide instead of a cobbled-together majority built on the Liberal Democrats betraying their core principles.

While the hash they're making of university funding does affect me directly, it's not what worries or angers me the most about Tory policies. Osborne have just handed out £2bn worth of tax breaks and giveaways claiming that this will, at some point, lead to growth. They are still going soft on tax cheats and coddling non-doms, at the expense of not only the middle class but higher rate tax payers and small businesses who can't afford to hide their profits offshore. Meanwhile the coalition turns around and says there is no money (though they always find a stray billion or so between the seat cushions when they want to.) There is no path to national solvency includes allowing the richest in society to pay less and less in taxes even as they gain more and more of the national income.

All that doesn't look very good on a placard, but the protest was the only way of registering opposition to these policies before the next election. Some cuts are inevitable, but the speed and way the Tories are cutting reveals that their program is an ideological, not fiscal one. Governments tried to cut their way out of the great depression, and what happened then is the same as what's happening now: no growth, as cuts suck desperately-needed demand from the economy when it's needed most.

The government has already changed its mind on other policies, from the fuel duty to selling off forests. Whether this march will change anything remains to be seen. If the economy fails to recover, I hope they will reconsider the neoliberal fundamentalism driving their austerity program. If the angels of their better natures can't be heard, maybe angry voters will.