Magpie

Friday, August 17, 2007

Can I see your papers, please?

Guess what? It looks like Dubya's administration is parlaying the Real ID Act and its new passport requirements into a de facto internal passport that will have to be used by many US citizens.

Americans may need passports to board domestic flights or to picnic in a national park next year if they live in one of the states defying the federal Real ID Act.

The act, signed in 2005 as part of an emergency military spending and tsunami relief bill, aims to weave driver's licenses and state ID cards into a sort of national identification system by May 2008. The law sets baseline criteria for how driver's licenses will be issued and what information they must contain....

The cards would be mandatory for all "federal purposes," which include boarding an airplane or walking into a federal building, nuclear facility or national park, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the National Conference of State Legislatures last week. Citizens in states that don't comply with the new rules will have to use passports for federal purposes.

I guess those wild-eyed privacy fanatics who opposed the Real ID Act weren't so paranoid about the feds' real intent, were they?

Via CNN.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Civil liberties, Fascism, Privacy, Real ID, Surveillance

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:10 PM | Get permalink

Good thing these birds don't have opposable thumbs.

In today's corvid news, it turns out that New Caledonian crows are even better tool users than researchers had thought.

In experiments carried out by researchers at New Zealand's University of Auckland, crows showed evidence of analogical reasoning skills—a type of reasoning found only in humans and some great apes.

New Caledonian crow using first tool

Gypsy grabs the first stick.
[© 2007 University of Auckland]

From a BBC story on the research:

The crows were presented with:

A scrap of meat, which was tucked away, out of reach, in a box;

A small twig, which was too short to reach the food;

And another longer twig, which was long enough to reach the food, but was locked away well out of bill-grabbing range in another box....

Alex Taylor, lead author of the paper, said: "The creative thing the crows did was to use the short stick to get the long tool out of the box so that they could then use the long stick to get the meat."

Russell Gray, another author of the paper, told the BBC News website: "What is most amazing is that most of them did this on the first trial.

"The first time we gave them the problem, six out of seven tried to do the right thing.

"They took the little tool and they tried to get the big tool out, which we had made quite hard to reach, and four out of the six managed to get the big tool out and then use this to get to the food."

In another experiment, the positions of the long and short twigs were reversed.

The team found that all apart from one crow briefly attempted to use the long twig to try to retrieve the short twig from box before quickly correcting their mistake and using the long twig to directly access the food.

The scientists said the crows' performance was comparable to that of the great apes in similar experiments.

Or, as a friend of mine once commented after watching video of another tool-making feat by New Caledonian crows, there are humans who wouldn't figure out the two-tool task so quickly.

You can watch video of a crow named Gypsy making its very first attempt at the two-tool task if you go here [MPG file]. And if you go here, you can view other movies of very smart crows.

For more on how smart those New Caledonian crows are, check out the video in this earlier Magpie post.

Via UK Guardian and BBC News.

Labels: Corvid News. Crows, Our New Masters, Science

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:13 PM | Get permalink

Ooooooh, shiny!

Lowering the national flags at the India-Pakistan border. As narrated by Michael Palin, no less.

Nationalism and hostility turned into choreography and spectacle.

Via 3QuarksDaily.

Labels: India, Nationalism, Pakistan, Shiny things

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:52 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Cheney uses the the Q-word to describe Iraq.

On C-SPAN back in 1994, no less.

Can you say 'quagmire', Mr Cheney?

I guess a few years running Halliburton opened Cheney's eyes to the error of his ways, eh?

Via MoveOn.org.

Labels: Cheney, Iraq, Quagmire

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:34 PM | Get permalink

Of course the surge in Iraq is working.

As Dubya and his minions started reminding us five months ago, we needed to give the administration until September to start showing results of the so-called surge in Iraq. Then General David Petraeus would be issuing a report on whether things were going as planned.

Since the planned report was first announced, there's been a lot of skepticism about its value, and about whether it would just be a rubber stamp for Dubya's continuing Iraq adventure. Well, now we know.

Despite Bush's repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.

And though Petraeus and Crocker will present their recommendations on Capitol Hill, legislation passed by Congress leaves it to the president to decide how to interpret the report's data.

Wanna lay any bets as to whether the September report says that everything is going as planned in Iraq?

I guess you have to admire the administration's lack of tact and trust. I mean, your average corrupt government would be satisfied to let a general know what conclusions he should come to and then let him write the report himself. In Dubya's regime, however, even the most loyal minions can't be trusted to do the job right, so the White House has to write its own lies.

Via LA Times.

Labels: Insurgency, Iraq, Pentagon, Stupidity, Surge, White House

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:10 PM | Get permalink

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Still hungry in the US.

Another sign of the times: A new study by the nonpartisan National Priorities Project shows that only half of the low-income people in the US receive food stamp benefits.

"We've got over 35 million people in this country struggling to get enough food to eat, and 50 percent of all low-income people are not receiving the benefit that is intended to alleviate this food insecurity," said Greg Speeter, the project’s executive director. "While the food-stamp program provides a vital service, clearly too many people are still going without."

For the sorry details, see McClatchy's story here. You can download a copy of the original NPP study if you go here [PDF file].

Labels: Hunger, Poverty

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:19 AM | Get permalink