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In Britain, a Member of Parliament was recently detained for nine hours by “counter-terrorist” police forces, and had his phone and computer seized.
His heinous alleged crime?

The MP was arrested under common law “on suspicion of conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office and aiding and abetting, counselling or procuring misconduct in a public office”.
—“Damian Green arrest: PM accused of contempt for parliament”, Andrew Sparrow, Nicholas Watt and agencies, guardian.co.uk, 28 Nov 2008

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I thought about planning my next novel in November, tying that in with NaNoWriMo, but didn’t commit to it, and hence didn’t get anything done.

So I’m going to try to do it in December instead. I intend the first draft to be sixty thousand words long, and as stated want to plan out every thousand-word section, so the aim is to write one hundred words of planning for each thousand words, or two hundred words of planning per day in December. I’m not going to post those plans, since they’re not intended to be real prose—unlike the microfiction version of my first novel, each section of which was supposed to be passably readable in itself. Next month, then, two hundred words extra per day—which really doesn’t sound like all that much, right?

Short post today due to Thanksgiving. I know this has done the rounds already, but it just seems too apt not to post. One comment I saw said it looks like a scene from a Coen Brothers movie, and indeed it does:

Maroni should do what I did when I was secretary of the interior. He should withdraw the police from the streets and the universities, infiltrate the movement with secret (provocateurs) agents, ready to do anything, and, for about 10 days, let the demonstrators devastate shops, set fire to cars and lay waste the cities.
—Francesco Cossiga (former President of Italy), Retribution and revenge, Roberto Mancini, guardian.co.uk 24 Nov 2008

Assuming some degree of “democracy” in a state, it should be rather obvious that those in power will do anything that they can get away with in order to sway public opinion in their favor. This clearly implies that they will do what they can to discredit any popular movement they don’t control, and this in turn explains quite a lot of the “extremism” on display at large rallies/marches/demonstrations, where there are suddenly lots of ‘protesters’ doing more or less exactly what would be guaranteed to stoke mass desire for crackdown/repression in the name of security. This also explains why those particular protesters don’t tend to get arrested: many of them are agents provocateurs.
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I haven’t got any graphs, despite what I said last time. I had some, but messed them up while experimenting with Flot, and in any case they weren’t quite what I wanted. However, I did solve some of the other issues I was having with my book-tracking application, and am relatively happy with the current view.
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Ah, the “American Family Association”:

I really wish this stuff were a joke, but no. It remains really difficult for me to accept that people find other people’s private sexual behavior so frightening.

Over the last month or so, via various references on forums and in articles, I’ve somehow become aware of a television ad, or set of ads. They’re part of the Toyota “Saved By Zero” campaign, and people hate them.

Toyota have apparently come up with television ads so irritating that not only do people go to the effort of making the clip below, but people who don’t watch television (like me) nonetheless have enough cultural awareness of the ads’ nature to appreciate it.

(Vaguely on the subject of cars, I think that a buy one truck, get another truck free” promotion clearly indicates the arrival of financial/economic apocalypse.)

I didn’t realize they were still in such significant trouble, but BusinessWeek reports they’re on the rocks. I’m not shedding too many tears for them, but a number of the figures cited in this article make for worrying reading. (Foremost being, if you’re a Citigroup investor, the 66% drop in their share price in November…)
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I doubt this will go anywhere, but a South Texas grand jury has indicted VP Dick Cheney and former AG Alberto Gonzales on prisoner abuse charges. When I first heard about this, I thought it was related to Guantanamo Bay, and hence an overreach by some eager locals, but in fact it appears quite related to their jurisdiction. It would be lovely irony if, after all they’ve pulled, they did get punished by a group of Texas citizens outraged over local crimes.

Michael Lewis returned to writing about Wall Street in this article for Portfolio.com, and naturally it’s full of the tidbits that are so great to hear about how our economy works (or doesn’t work, depending on your perspective). There are plenty of good ones, but my favorite is this:

[Eisman] called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.
—“The End”, Michael Lewis, Portfolio.com, 11 Nov 2008

Yes, those unbelievably savvy people at S&P, whose ratings department are/were supposed to be trusted with assessing the risk of investments/credit lines, simply didn’t have a “model” (that is, some black-box computer program of a mathematical formula some analyst thought would predict market movements) that could cope with the concept that house prices might, at some point in the future, not rise.