High on Drugs: Breaking the Just Say No Addiction | Science | Religion Dispatches

High on Drugs: Breaking the Just Say No Addiction | Science | Religion Dispatches

I had just finished reading this depressing and annoying piece when I came upon High on Drugs: Breaking the Just Say No Addiction. I don't know much about the drugs the author mentions other than to have read his words in different form elsewhere, but I do know the author's piece is a flash of brilliance in contrast to the propagandist drivel that continues to ooze from the likes of DEA and ONDCP.

Congratulations Gary Laderman. I'll have to go back and read some of your other stuff.

It's not my money. I shouldn't take it.

Good for you Robert Adams!

– Thu Jun 9, 5:05 pm ET

ROLLING MEADOWS, Ill. – Robert Adams craved an ice-cold drink after finishing his shift on a sweltering workday, but not having enough money to buy the burrito he also wanted left him with two obvious choices: Stop at the ATM, or find a bag containing more than $17,000 in cash.

"I wanted to get a large horchata, which is almost like a rice or coconut milk," Adams told the Daily Herald (Arlington Heights) for a story published Wednesday. "I would have grabbed a chorizo burrito, too, but I didn't have enough money."

That changed Monday when the Chicago-area man stood at a Chase ATM in Rolling Meadows, looked down and discovered on the sidewalk near a newspaper box a clear plastic bag containing receipts, checks and $17,021 in cash — mostly $20 and $100 bills bound by a rubber band.

"I see this plastic bag. It's clear plastic and it's half full of money," Adams said. "I figure this is a joke. Somebody took some napkins and made it look like money. This has to be a setup. People are going to look at me and start laughing."

Adams said he never had the urge to keep any of the money.

"It's not my money. I shouldn't take it. I don't care if you put another zero on there, I wasn't raised to take money that isn't mine," said Adams, a 54-year-old single man who lives in Arlington Heights and credits his deceased parents for teaching him right from wrong. "If I saw you drop it, I'd say, `Excuse me, sir. I think you dropped something.'"

The word "Chase" was printed on the bag, so Adams carried it inside the nearby branch.

"I walk up to the teller and say, `I think you might have left this outside,'" said Adams, figuring an employee left it behind after restocking the ATM. But employees told him the machine is filled from inside and the money didn't belong to the bank.

Adams then called police, who along with bank officials later determined the money was meant for an ATM in Midlothian and had been under the care of Loomis, an armored truck company. Rolling Meadows police took the money to the station, where it was picked up by a Loomis official.

Loomis officials said they were investigating, but have not said whether Adams will get a reward.

"I really don't know what happens with this situation," Adams said.

Onesimo Santillan, owner of the Senor Taco restaurant where Adams originally was headed to indulge his cravings, said the actions of his longtime customer don't surprise him.

"He has been coming in for years, always orders the same thing, very nice guy," Santillan said. "It's hard to find people like that, honest people."

Rolling Meadows Police Chief Dave Scanlan said Adams did good: "We all said right away that this guy deserves something — credit for being an Honest Abe."

___

Information from: Daily Herald, http://www.dailyherald.com

Google Sidewiki entry by Steve

Pfff... Surely he said more than that because, if that's all he said he marked himself as brain dead, stupid, uncaring, a bullshit artist or worse.

in reference to:

"Colom told a Mexican radio station Friday that the flow of illegal weapons to drug cartels should be cut off to prevent further killings."
- Guatemalan gang members, no Mexicans, in massacre - Forbes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

Drug gangs muscle into new territory: Central America | McClatchy

Drug gangs muscle into new territory: Central America | McClatchy

Yeah, but...

There is one economy. Just one. That it is composed of legal and illegal sectors might as well be by design.

The legal part of the economy is much more complex, thus much more difficult to deal with, than the illegal part of the economy. When the legal economy declines you have to mortgage the future, start hot wars and apply complex, politically challenging programs to try to avoid depression.

It makes little sense to damage any part of the overall economy, especially at a time when the legal sector has been so severely challenged as of late.

In contrast to the legal sector of the economy (where you must have massive, complex and at least somewhat transparent bureaucratic programs to prop it up) the illegal sector of the economy is relatively simple to deal with.

Yes, you have to apply subsidies to the illegal sector of the global economy in order to bolster its contribution to the whole, because what's good for the illegal sector of the economy is good for the whole economy. Part of the genius of Prohibition is that it applies the required subsidy to the illegal sector of the economy at virtually no cost. The measly few billions in the budget for the ONDCP, for example, generate two or three orders of magnitude greater effect in the illegal sector of the economy, providing greater bang for buck than almost any other government economic program.

There are intangible social costs of applying such subsidies to the illegal sector of the economy, of course, but intangibles are essentially unquantifiable and therefore, as in other arenas like anthropogenic climate change, these not much weighted in such analyses.

The policy of Prohibition must be maintained in order to maintain the contribution of the illegal sector of the economy to the overall economy. This is especially true with marijuana because of its dominant role in the illegal economy.

How could it be otherwise?

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/04/21/112617/drug-gangs-muscle-into-new-territory.html#ixzz1KG3vmvOU

NRA asks: President Calderon’s Eyes On The Wrong Border?

I'm generally in agreement with the NRA when it comes to gun rights, but I don't think they are serious about rights in general. Maybe someone has studied the question and could correct me if I'm wrong, but I perceive the leadership and membership of the NRA to be, generally speaking, a bunch of right-wing authoritarian followers, unconcerned with rights in general.

What sets me off is this annoyingly written piece, President Calderon's Eyes On The Wrong Border? Oh, what the hell. Here it is:

President Calderon’s Eyes On The Wrong Border?

Friday, April 01, 2011


Blaming America for Mexico’s problems has been something of a national pastime for Mexican politicians for many years. True to tradition, Mexican president Felipe Calderon has been blaming Mexico’s astronomically high murder rate on Americans who buy drugs and who sell guns, rather than on the Mexican drug cartels who commit a vastly disproportionate share of those murders, and the historic corruption in Mexico, from which the wicked cartels have spawned.

However, an article published by the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada suggests that el Presidente might better serve the good people of his country by looking to his southern border, instead of al norte.

As explained in English by the Latin American Herald Tribune, “The most fearsome weapons wielded by Mexico’s drug cartels enter the country from Central America, not the United States, according to U.S. diplomatic cables disseminated by WikiLeaks and published on Tuesday by La Jornada newspaper. Items such as grenades and rocket-launchers are stolen from Central American armies and smuggled into Mexico via neighboring Guatemala, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City reported to Washington.”

The article also refers to “Fast and Furious,” an element of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' “Project GunRunner” operation that allegedly knowingly allowed more than 1,700 firearms to be smuggled into Mexico from our country, including those that may have been used to murder U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in December and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent Jaime Zapata in February.

Increasingly, the question is who knew about the operation, and when. President Obama has stated that neither he nor Attorney General Eric Holder were aware of the scheme. Holder is said to have told his subordinates that letting guns “walk” to Mexico is wrong and should not be repeated. The McAllen, Tex., newspaper, The Monitor, quotes the Mexican government as saying that it “did not have knowledge on an operation that included the controlled traffic of weapons in Mexican territory,” and that “The Mexican government has not and will not give any implied or formal authorization for this to happen.”

Meanwhile, Fox News reports that U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, today issued a subpoena to the Justice Department demanding that the BATFE respond to his March 16 request for information about the operation, the deadline for which passed on Wednesday. Rep. Issa is quoted as saying, “The unwillingness of this administration—most specifically the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms—to answer questions about this deadly serious matter is deeply troubling.”

CBS News similarly reported that “The Department of Justice and ATF have missed repeated deadlines to turn over information and documents” to Congress, and further noted that the investigation of Project GunRunner may significantly delay hearings on President Obama’s nomination of BATFE agent Andrew Traver, an activist gun control supporter, to head the BATFE.

The BATFE has until April 13 to respond to Rep. Issa’s subpoena. Stay tuned.

Keep it simple, dumbshits. Don't write anything deeper than you absolutely must.

Restating the obvious for the NRA, the root of the problem IS north of the border. The root of the problem is the enormous subsidy provided to "the wicked cartels" by the idiocy that is prohibition. That's not the party line, though, is it?

What is it about these True Red White and Blue patriot types that prevents them from seeing the

Never mind. Hopeless...

The New Yorker - Unravelling the ultimate political conspiracy

In case the Rodrigo Rosenberg case interested you and you have not already seen this.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/04/110404fa_fact_grann?printable=true

Cheers from Phoenix! Steve

Bitcoin

Bitcoin. Bit. Coin. Two little syllables. They seem completely natural together.

I think Bitcoin stands a good chance of becoming a big deal. A great big deal.

Lots of questions though.

Bitcoin is a new electronic currency. A currency out of the control of bankers or governments. It's an open source currency running on open source software loaded on standard computers of various OS flavors. It'll be immune from inflation because the total, ultimate amount of coin is embedded in the system.

I've said virtually nothing above, and already I'm saying more than I know. I only know that it smells significant to me.

It'll be interesting to watch this develop. Will governments and banks subvert it by various means. Will they be able to do so? Will it eventually take on the role of global reserve currency? How will it avoid total reliance on breakable infrastructure and dependence on public utilities and communications channels? What about money laundering?

What if I need to stop payment?

I'm thinking about setting up a node, just to learn more and support the effort, but what if I change out my hardware or software, or if my house burns to the ground? Or gets destroyed in an earthquake and tsunami. I don't think it's a simple as joining SETI. I've never allowed port forwarding at my house; what are the security implications of opening ports in my firewall to receive incoming Bitcoin traffic?

Do I have the capacity to understand Bitcoin? I recognized 25 or 30 years ago that asymmetrical, public key cryptography was probably going to become a great big thing, and yet I barely understood it. Now that it has become a great big thing, I still don't really understand it.

So what if I don't understand it? I don't understand much of anything, really.

I guess Bitcoin could be broken some time, just as the cryptography that's central to today's online economy could be broken by the use of chemical genetics in a massively parallel approach to cryptanalysis. Or something. Quantum computing. Who knows?

I'm pretty sure, though, that this will be an interesting thing to follow, and maybe join.

There are lots of really smart people in the world. Sometimes that alone is enough to give me hope.

Usually not, though.

Go Bitcoin!! Suppertime...

Well, it made me smile...

sls

The Irish Millionaire

The Irish Millionaire

Mick, from Dublin, appeared on 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire,' and towards the end of the program had already won 500,000 dollars.

"You've done very well so far," said Chris Tarrant, the show's presenter,"but for a million dollars you've only got one life-line left, phone a friend. Everything is riding on this question. Will you go for it?"

"Sure," said Mick. "I'll have a go!"

"Which of the following birds does NOT build its own nest?  a) Sparrow, b) Thrush, c) Magpie, d) Cuckoo?"

"I haven't got a clue," said Mick, "so I'll use last lifeline and phone my friend Paddy back home in Dublin."

Mick called up his mate, and told him the circumstances and repeated the question to him.

"Fookin hell, Mick!" cried Paddy. "Dat's simple. It's a cuckoo."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm fookin sure."

Mick hung up the phone and told Chris, "I'll go with cuckoo as my answer."

"Is that your final answer?" asked Chris.

"Dat it is."

There was a long, long pause and then the presenter screamed, "Cuckoo is the correct answer! Mick, you've won 1 million dollars!"

The next night, Mick invited Paddy to their local pub to buy him a drink."Tell me, Paddy? How in Heaven's name did you know it was da Cuckoo that doesn't build its own nest?"

"Because he lives in a Fookin clock!"

Disagreement with the church again

The claim that violence cannot be resolved with more violence is false because of its implicitly universal scope.

To the contrary, the sort of state "violence" the bishops refer to can help resolve some types of actual violence. In particular instances it can solve the immediate problem.

The judicial and penitentiary systems should be improved, for sure, but so should health care, diet, education, and a whole host of other things.

Improving the judicial system should begin with strengthening administration of the death penalty. Foregoing the death penalty while improving the judicial and penitentiary systems makes as much sense as foregoing GM foods while trying to improve food production.

in reference to: Church in Guatemala calls on Congress to abolish death penalty :: Catholic News Agency (CNA) (view on Google Sidewiki)

When the law is an ass you treat it accordingly.

"When the law is an ass you treat it accordingly."

That's a meme I've been carrying around since at least July 2007, and almost certainly for some time before that. July 2007 is just the date of a blog post comment in which I used it.

As I type, if I Google that sentence the blog comment I mentioned is the only hit.

Same result on Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, and 100SEARCHENGINES.

I guess the meme is mine. There must be a million ways to express the idea that asinine laws are to be ignored, but I searched out pithy expressions similar to mine (well, I think it's pithy) and found none.

The only reason I care about claiming ownership, copyright or whatever one can claim with respect to a meme, is because my son told me about an outfit that sells t-shirts with provocative or offensive themes, and they accept submissions which, if accepted, net you a couple of t-shirts. Something like that. It might have been Road Kill T-Shirts, where these two and a few others caught my eye and made me smile:

• Beautiful girl wears a t-shirt that says,
  With a shirt this AWESOME who needs pants?
  
  
• Marked as outsourced so it must be popular:
  Spooning may lead to forking.
  
  

But hey, why not check out one of the print-on-demand services like CafePress, Printfection or Spreadshirt?

I've been aware of CafePress for a while, but only learned about the latter two as a result of checking out the former. There must be others, or better ideas entirely.

What to do? Could I supplement my upcoming retirement income by dreaming up stuff to sell via these services? Should I just pick one and give it a shot? Which one?

Maybe I should just ask someone I know, whose worthy cause I support, if he wants this meme for his CafePress shop.

I don't know. I'll have to do some research and think about this some more, obviously, but in the meantime I claim this as mine:

"When the law is an ass you treat it accordingly."

"Should Be Legalized" Eminem - Love The Way You Lie Parody by Steve Berke

I really like this video, and not just for its political message. I did not like the Eminem video it parodies, probably just because I'm getting old now.

As for the political message, it won't stir the powers that be, unfortunately, but who knows. Maybe if the video helps to get out the vote in California they can actually pass Proposition 19. Prop 19 is flawed, like any such, but its catalytic effect can only be good for the country if it helps to end the very deep corruption that underlies our national drugs policy.

Item from Blog Del Narco

There was an incident last week in the city of Ixtepec, Oaxaca, Mexico. Here's a quick manual translation of the post at Blog Del Narco, imperfect but probably better than by machine. There are other accounts of the incident, of course, but Blog Del Narco is where I first saw it so that's the one I translated. Details differ among accounts, but the gist of it is there. Square brackets and parentheses below are where I didn't know or find a direct translation, but the meaning remains, I think.

Video in which federal policemen beat municipal policemen in Ixtepec, Oaxaca

Oaxaca de Juarez, 8 September

This evening around 7:30, a group of federal policemen tried to rescue two of their members who had been detained by municipal police for being in a state of complete drunkenness. In the process, federal police shot at municipal elements (municipal police forces) in the city of Ixtepec, Oaxaca.

According to early reports, it was around 4:30 p.m. when two federal policemen were "celebrating" with some women from a bar called "El Chicotazo" (The Whiplash), raising so much hell in the place that the owners called the municipal police who, upon arrival, detained the two drunken federal policemen and the women they were with, and transported them to the police station.

Three hours later, a convoy of federal police arrived at the police station aboard two vehicles, one numbered 14049, to rescue their friends, and without saying anything started to shoot at the station with their R-15's [AR-15's?], hurting nine uniformed municipal policemen, three of whom are in serious condition in Macedonio Benitez de Juchitan Hospital in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. (This is an early report. From the video, and from later reports, it looks like the shooting was apparently into the ground for intimidation.)

The police in the City of Ixtepec do not bear arms, and so were not able to repel the aggression of the PFP (the federal police).

The three seriously injured municipal policemen are: Padilla Torres Diaz, Uriel Ortiz Leon and Regino Guzman Colmenares, the latter in very delicate state.

In the same vicinity is the 13th Cavalry Regiment of the Mexican Army, who, upon hearing the shooting went to the location aboard vehicle 0913271, and apparently detained 12 federal policemen, transporting them to military headquarters.

It's not known if the military (consignaron) [questioned] the federal agents, but they did confiscate seven R-15 with retractable butt, 12 30-round magazines, a loaded 9-millimeter, seven bullet-proof vests, a portable radio, a black Kaplan helmet and a van numbered 14049.

A YouTube video of the incident is embedded at this point in the Blog Del Narco post. Watch it at YouTube or at the embed in the Blog Del Narco post.

Ixtepeceans view federal policemen in the municipality as criminals

City of Ixtepec, Oaxaca. - The [jeromeña] citizenry coincided in signaling that the federal policemen who have come to this city have behaved like real criminals and do not inspire confidence, since those belonging to that police group are people whose absence of education shines through. (This refers not to academic education but manners, courtesy, respect, decency. Apparently the federal police are regarded as a bunch of lowlife hooligans.)

This after learning of the new aggression against local police in which nine were injured, one of them balancing between life and death because of injuries received at the hands of the [energúmenos] members of the federal police.

The most gravely injured among the municipal policemen is Regino Guzman Colmenares who received, according to his colleagues, several rifle-butt blows to the head, and was thrown to the floor leaving a pool of blood, and who is under care at the general hospital of Juchitan.

Municipal authorities say they have filed complaints against the eleven members of the PFP (federal police) and the two women who were with them.

It nevertheless happened that despite the [malandros] (federal police miscreants) having ended up in the hands of elements of the 13th batallion of motorized calvalry from the 46th Military Zone, they were not turned over to the federal prosecutor's office as procedure requires, but instead, taking unilateral decision, they were set free, leaving [un palmo de narices] (a slew of injuries) to the municipal police which are still being tended to medically.

That is why the citizenry [jeromeña] rises in indignation, for the fact that delinquents dressed as federal policemen are given cover by the Mexican army when they should be paladins of justice.

The municipal police are now fearful that the freed federal agents will take reprisal against them, and that there will be frameups linking the municipal police to other criminal groups, as the feds frequently do.

Later on it was announced that while the military released the federal policemen, personnel from federal police internal affairs have sequestered them in the Regente hotel, where they remain until their situation is determined.

Narcoblog Post Translated

This item in the Blog Del Narco caught my eye. I'm curious to see how well my translation compares to what the automated translators produce (update: Mine is better). This is just my first pass, and there are many improvements I could make, but I'm about out of interest in the translation part. The story, this particular one and the wider one, remain compelling. What a tragedy. Doubly tragic because it our own goddamed fault.

They declined to be a part of the Zetas, and 72 were shot

Thursday 26 August 2010

Several vehicles, according to the only survivor of what is the worst massacre on the part of organized crime, blocked the path of the vehicle in which the victims traveled and made them descend. The blockers warned the passengers that they were The Zetas.

The 72 undocumented people murdered in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, were aboard a truck headed for the United States when, last Saturday or Sunday, they were intercepted by the Zeta convoy.

Several vehicles, according to the story of the only survivor of what is - until now - the worst massacre in the wave of violence on the part of organized crime, blocked the vehicle in which the victims were riding and made them get out. They warned the travellers that they were The Zetas.

One by one, the 58 men and 14 women, among them minors, were placed against the wall inside of a storage building, first investigations reveal. Then they were ordered to keep their heads down and were shot with volleys from high-power weapons. At the end, the killers gave each victim a coup de grace.

Among the shot was a citizen of Ecuador, who played dead. The final shot entered, apparently, on the edge of the neck and exited through the jaw. He waited, lying there, until the killers left and he was able to escape. He ws the only survivor. Until now it remains a mystery how he was able to go the 22 kilometers that separate the site from where he made contact with personnel from the Mexican Navy from which he sought help.

Asking for help, Luis managed to say that "the killing was not long ago." He said the miscreants offered them work as hitmen, and that they would earn US$1000 every two weeks. All of the passengers resisted, and with the rejection came the massacre.

At first, the marines did not believe him, since on other occasions they have been ambushed with lies.

It was close to seven in the morning of Monday when the marines had contact with him (Luis) who babbled that there were more than 70 dead at a ranch, but the marines were reluctant to believe him. The head of the unit informed his superiors and it was decided to make an aerial recon of the area, and when flying over they were attacked, from which they deduced indications that the survivor's story was true.

As night fell on Monday, the marines had to redeploy towards Matamoros in the face of the possibility of an ambush by the criminal group The Zetas. Tuesday morning, with more manpower and equipment they arrived at the ranch and discovered the 72 bodies inside an abandoned grain store. They were tied up and blindfolded.

The remoteness of the ranch and the insecurity of the area caused a delay until almost midnight on Tuesday before complete information about the massacre was available. Another 70 marines in vehicles with protection and weapons to confront the delinquents deployed to the ranch where a confrontation ensued in which a marine and three criminals died. During this action a minor from Veracruz, who had particpated in the killings, was captured.

The survivor commented that among the victims were people from Brazil, Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. In the report about the victims it says that one of the 14 women was in the late stages of pregnancy. The majority of the victims were young people in their productive age.

One hypothesis about the massacre is that the assassins, presumably The Zetas, want to send a message of fear to those who would resist working for them or under their orders, especially illegals crossing towards the United States.

The captured minor, according to initial reports, is very well trained about not revealing information about what he was involved in. His first comments were made only to personnel from the national prosecutor's office which took charge of the case as of late night on Tuesday.

(With information from correspondents)

Update: The Guardian has a piece about this incident.

.

The Associated Press: GOP calls Obama insensitive over stand on mosque

Every day my disrespect for the Republicans as a pack increases, deepening my sense of despair.

Partisan opportunists exploiting religious nuttery. Fuck you all!


The Associated Press: GOP calls Obama insensitive over stand on mosque:

From statehouses to state fairs on Tuesday, Republican incumbents and challengers unleashed an almost unified line of criticism against the president days after he forcefully defended the construction of a $100 million Islamic center two blocks from the site of the 2001 terror attacks.'
...
'He is thinking like a lawyer and not like an American, making declarations without America's best interest in mind,' said Andrew Harris, a Republican running for Congress in Maryland against first-term Democratic Rep. Frank Kratovil.
...
'Well I think it's another example of him playing the role of law professor. ... We can have a great debate about the legal arguments. But it's not about that,' Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said in an interview Monday on Fox News.
...
With a steady drumbeat, Republicans tried to force Democrats into difficult positions of either standing with the president or bucking him.

Speaking of map projections

Wolfram|Alpha is pretty amazing, I think. My brain doesn't have enough oomph to really play with it much, but I've been able to use it on occasion.

Now they have this new thing going, Wolfram|Alpha Widgets. Supposedly you can use their tools to create useful little widgets to put on a blog or web page. Supposedly it's simple. Maybe a dummy like me can do it!

I might try this out. If I can do it, I'll make a widget to do some engineering computations at work, such as converting transmission line impedances from a 50 MVA / 345 kV base to something else like 100 MVA / 525 kV. Maybe a widget to decypher the status bits in a synchrophasor stream or something.

It seems this thing might be very useful (assuming I can muster the mental steam to do it, which isn't a sure thing).

But speaking of map projections, someone called Jessica Paris made a widget to see a map of the globe in various different projections. They say it's as simple as copying the embed code into the HTML view of the post I'm typing. Let's see if I can stick it in here:



Hey, it worked!

As for the angelic projection at the bottom of my last post, I guess it looks like an equirectangular projection, but I'm not sure.

Facing East or Facing West?

Updated below to add a flat projection of the Magic Ovals.
---------------------------------------

It seems that a few months ago, Muslim clerics in Indonesia made a clerical error and told the country's faithful that they should face West when praying in order to be facing Mecca. They recovered, though, with the help of experts in cosmography and astronomy, who verified that by facing West from Indonesia the faithful would actually be facing Kenya and southern Somalia. Something like that. Google is my friend.

Naturally enough there was plenty of fun to be had ridiculing religious foolishness. I managed to honor my Grandfather's good advice along the lines of saying nothing if you can't think of something nice, and found myself playing with Google Earth. I don't know why these clerics needed expert cosmographers and astronomers to look into the question. Maybe it's against the religion to... Never mind. For some reason the question interested me.

Using Google Earth, I picked a few points roughly defining the extension of Indonesia. I plotted some lines that start out from those spots directly towards the West. Sure enough, they wind up in Kenya and southern Somalia. Then I made some green lines running from those same spots in Indonesia directly to Mecca. Here's the picture:



So, there is no place in Indonesia where one can face directly West to face Mecca. There must be such places, though, so I used the ruler tool to draw a line directly from Mecca to wherever I wanted to, and looked for places where the end point would be arriving directly from the West. I plotted a few such points and saw that they formed a line, like this (click the picture to make it bigger):



Wait a minute, it doesn't look like lines starting out from the magic arc are going West!

True, they just start out facing West. In so doing they define part of a "great circle" line directly to Mecca. Here's a closer view of the lines to Mecca as they start out from the magic arc. You can see that, in each case, the line starts out directly West.







If you try to continue the magic arc up through the Arctic and back down into the Atlantic Ocean (to form a magic circle, say), you find that it doesn't work. If you start a line to the West towards Mecca, before you get there it'll flip around and wind up starting out East instead. I guess that's because we're generally after the shortest distance, but trying to go West to Mecca from the Atlantic portion of a magic circle would lead to a path longer than the Easterly path. That's just a definitional thing, I think; just like the Equator, any great circle goes completely around the Earth.

(I'm starting to confuse a Great Circle with my magic circle. My magic circle is not a Great Circle because it does not have the center of the earth as its center. My magic circle just defines the points on the earth where any Magic Great Circle crossing it in an east-west direction will also pass through Mecca. I think.)

It turns out that there is a magic circle, though. It's actually more like a magic oval. I'll capitalize that. Magic Oval. It's just that, in the Atlantic you have to start out towards the East, not the West, like this:


Putting the two Magic Arcs together to form a Magic Oval, you get this:


As one might expect, there's a similar Magic Oval in the Southern Hemisphere. It looks something like this:


(I'm going to have to come back and put a nose and mustache in that picture.)

Since Google Earth works on a global projection (Is that the term a cartographer might use?), you can't see the whole thing all at once. If Google Earth has a way to present the whole thing into a flat projection, I have not learned how to do it yet. So, instead, I made a couple of videos showing the Earth with the Magic Ovals and Mecca Lines in polar and equatorial rotations. Let's see how that works.

First the Equatorial rotation:



Now the Polar rotation:



I don't know how to project the Magic Circles onto a flat projection in order to be able to see the whole thing at once, but someone made a similar thing that's available on Wikipedia. I think it's really quite beautiful. The Wikipedia image shows equidistant lines, whereas I am trying to show where one can face Mecca by facing either directly East or directly West, but what the hell. If I can figure out how to make Google Earth flatten out the Magic Ovals into one flat image, I'll post it later. Otherwise, hey, it's been interesting and fun. For me, anyway.

UPDATE:

It turns out that if you put all the relevant Google Earth items into one folder under My Places, you can select that folder and export it as a KMZ file. Then you can go to Google Maps MyMaps and import the KMZ file.

Projecting the Magic Ovals above on to a flat projection in Google Maps produces the image that follows:



Above is just a screen snag of the browser window showing the relevant part of the online version, which rolls the left and right edges (repeats the opposite edge to fill in what would otherwise be blank space).

The flat projection isn't quite what I'd expected, which was something more like the equidistant projection at the Wikipedia link. Clearly, I have a great deal to learn about map projections.

The flat projection above (a cylindrical projection, I think) looks to me sort of like an angel. Maybe a wire-model manga angel about to stomp on a poor heathen like me.

Hey! This could be a hidden sign from above, donchathink? Maybe I should copyright this image and sell it on eBay or something.

"it's where the money is."

Between this shameful admission by a US lawman and the narco submarine that was found recently (the first true submarine found in the hands of the narcos), I wonder even more about the sanity of people who cannot see the blindingly obvious fact that our stupid approach to the drugs problem is what creates the incentives for such things (not to mention such consequences as failing states to our south, empowerment of war enemies, increased disrespect for the law, and on and on. .

We can be so god damned stupid...

in reference to: Law Enforcement Against Prohibition: FOXNews.com - Strapped U.S. Police Turn to Marijuana Busts for Cash (view on Google Sidewiki)

Vuvuzela culture

Tolerance of other cultures? Tolerance at a distance maybe. Having heard about the vuvuzela long before the World Cup, there's no way in HELL I'd have attended.

The vuvuzela is like a needlessly loud motorcycle. It's just obnoxious, and the responsible party is just being a thoughtless creep. "Mood Killer" is a perfectly apt description.

"Addressing calls for a vuvuzela ban in an interview with the BBC, Danny Jordaan, the head of the World Cup organizing committee in South Africa, said that the vuvuzela would only be forbidden if fans started throwing the trumpets onto the pitch."

Well, there you have it. 20,000 vuvuzelas raining onto the field might have an impact.

in reference to: The World from Berlin: Vuvuzela a 'Global Synonym for Mood Killer' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International (view on Google Sidewiki)

Piping feature

I can't see leaking pipes causing the sinkholes in Guatemala City. Most likely these holes are the direct result of subsidence due to excessive groundwater pumping. It may be that storms and leaky pipes precipitate the visible consequences, the sinkholes, but the root cause is many decades of excessive groundwater pumping.

in reference to:

"In fact, Bonis thinks calling the Guatemala City chasm a sinkhole is a misnomer—a true sinkhole is an entirely natural phenomenon. There is no scientific term for what happened in Guatemala, he said, adding that he recommends the pit be dubbed a piping feature."
- Guatemala Sinkhole Created by Humans, Not Nature (view on Google Sidewiki)