A Blog Named Sue

The Mel Cooley Index for Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Today, Mel Cooley is thinking, Oh, sure - give him even less to live for - good plan:

The Swedish zookeepers have castrated Santino, in an attempt to keep his aggression at bay, but they can't castrate all the weapons-stockpiling human-hating chimps out there.

I mean, heck, why didn't they just take his stones away? Oh, wait ...

(Hat tip to res ipsa loquitor)

The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say

Speaking of the future ...

Ronald Mallet, a professor at the University of Connecticut and someone who by all accounts is not insane, seems to have developed a workable experiment that will prove or disprove the feasibility of human time travel. This, of course, has sparked a vocal debate among people who care about such things over whether or not humans should even pursue time travel; what if travelers from the future sojourn into the past and start mucking with things?

I don't worry much about that. I worry more about the possibility that travelers from the future have already been mucking about in the past - and this world was the best they could do.

The Mel Cooley Index for Tuesday, April 9, 2008

Today, Mel Cooley is thinking that when it comes to a giant particle accelerator that many believe is going to create a black hole that eats the planet, "Scientists hope for surprises in Big Bang experiment" isn't the most reassuring headline.

Oh, and Sarah? Mel's been rocking the stylin' eyewear since 1961, thank you very much.

Things that make me want to eat my own brain

Let me get this straight - NASA's saying that they maybe kind of have a shot at re-creating the forty-year-old technology that got us to the moon by, say, 2014 or so, but DARPA's going to have this monstrosity in the air by 2010?

This country is SO FUCKED UP.

Images conflicting into data overload

Interesting tidbit in this New York Times article about the cyber-attack precursor to Russia's invasion of Georgia:

Researchers at Shadowserver, a volunteer group that tracks malicious network activity, reported that the Web site of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, had been rendered inoperable for 24 hours by multiple D.D.O.S. attacks. They said the command and control server that directed the attack was based in the United States and had come online several weeks before it began the assault.

As it turns out, the July attack may have been a dress rehearsal for an all-out cyberwar once the shooting started between Georgia and Russia. According to Internet technical experts, it was the first time a known cyberattack had coincided with a shooting war.

I'm thinking that it's a coincidence, because there's really no reason for Russia to farm out work like that to the United States - a denial of service attack should be well within the abilities of their local talent. But if not, well, what exactly is going on there? Is the US-based server a "proxy" server? Or have we gone completely through the Tom Clancy looking glass and we're now seeing hotshot "cyber-mercs" who rent out their services to eager, well-heeled governments? Or is it something even weirder than that? The Times article also sees links between the cyber-attacks and a known Russian organized crime group that specializes in online criminal activities such as identity theft and distributing child pornography.

Of course, in the end, it's always the those meddling kids' fault:

A Russian government spokesman said that it was possible that individuals in Russia or elsewhere had taken it upon themselves to start the attacks.

“I cannot exclude this possibility,” Yevgeniy Khorishko, a spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington, said. “There are people who don’t agree with something and they try to express themselves. You have people like this in your country.”

First, they came for the bloggers ...

The Mel Cooley Index For Thursday, January 31, 2008

Today, Mel Cooley is thinking, "Hold on a minute - isn't it spiders from Mars?"

The Mel Cooley Index For Friday, December 7, 2007

Today, Mel Cooley believes he just heard abusive husbands, stalkers, rapists, and everyone else interested in bucking an order of protection quietly whisper, "Score."

Let Me Stand Next to Your Fire

Wired’s military technology blog, Danger Room,has video up of the Pentagon’s much ballyhooed Active Denial System – also known as the ‘pain ray’ - being used on a human volunteer. They also have links to the Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate home page which features more videos  of live subjects being zapped, and a link to a segment from the Discovery Channel program Future Weapons (which they dub “weapons porn”). You should check them out – live reporters step in front of microwave pain ray, get their insides cooked for a couple of seconds,leap away, and everybody has a jolly good laugh over the whole thing. See? Harmless. Heck, it’s no worse than a good nipple twist or a fraternity…um, hazing…

OK, bad analogy.

And for all I know it is harmless – if you can jump out of the way as soon as they turn the thing on. What I’m concerned about is the day they use that thing on someone tied to a post. That won’t happen, you say? What on earth makes you say that?

I still believe using this thing in an actual crowd control situation it will be a disaster. I marched in the big anti-war rally in New York City in February of 2003, right before the invasion of Iraq. NYPD had blocked certain streets with barricades, vehicles and/or mounted officers to concentrate the crowd into the smallest, most controllable area possible. Fair enough, I can see why they’d want to do that. Now, the main rally point was the UN Building on First Avenue and 44th Street; the closest I managed to get was Second Avenue and 49th Street – and it was a solid wall of people in front of and behind me. I could have crowd surfed down to the UN. We’re talking about 100,000 people in that limited area alone. If for some reason the Active Denial System had been employed at the front of a crowd like that, a crowd focused into a tight controllable area, the resulting stampede to get the hell away from it would have been a nightmare.

The weapon itself may be non-lethal, but  you can’t always say the same about people who feel like their intestines are on fire.