IT Professional Dies In Plane Crash

The headline is the fact. The rest of this is what I could gather gleaning, while theoretically working one of my several day-jobs:

Mike Connell was an IT professional who worked for the Republican National Convention and set up hosted services for them.

Mike Connell is mentioned as being responsible for setting up the non-White-House email server GWB43.com that was used to by staffers to communicate without recording/oversight.

Mike Connell was implicated in various and sundry “electronic voting irregularities” in Ohio during the 2004 election.

Mike Connell reported threats against himself and his family from Karl Rove with the aim of interfering with his testimony regarding aforementioned 2004 election irregularities.

Mike Connell was apparently told not to fly his plane due to the possibility of it having been tampered with.

Mike Connell had apparently decided not to fly his plane a couple fo times because he thought he detected tampering.

Mike Connell died when his plane crashed on Dec 20 2008.

MarketWatch: Bush Insider Who Planned To Tell All Killed In Plane Crash: Non-Profit Demands Full Federal Investigation

Larisa Alexandrovna’s blog: One of my sources died in a plane crash last night…

PRNewswire-USNewswire via Yahoo!News: Bush Insider Who Planned To Tell All Killed In Plane Crash: Non-Profit Demands Full Federal Investigation

Ohio Action 19 News (video): Pilot Killed In Plane Crash Thought Plane Was Sabotaged

Telegraph (UK): George Bush aide dies in plane crash

SourceWatch wiki info on Mike Connell

E Pluribus Media: Ohio Attorneys Seek Protection for Mike Connell and his Family against Alleged Threats from Karl Rove

McClatchy: Computer expert denies knowledge of ‘04 vote rigging in Ohio

The Raw Story: ‘Karl Rove’s IT guru’ Mike Connell dies in plane crash (previous article/background material:Republican IT consultant subpoenaed in case alleging tampering with 2004 election)

Velvet Revolution: UPDATE: 12/20/08: Michael Connell Killed: VR Demands Full State And Federal Investigation

Enjoy doing whatever homework you think might be required.

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Time for the wrap-up: 2008 in pictures

…assuming nothing worse happens in the next twenty-two days.

Click on the images for sources and/or explanations, if needed.

Thank you for playing.

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There will be peace on this farm or else!

Someone issue those chickens a pair of blue berets.

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It’s no stupider than burying fake dinosaur bones 6000 years ago.

It’s a little long for a motto, but this needs to be streamlined, translated into (possibly Pig) Latin, and added to the Xalieri family crest.

What’s Latin for “Stump the Future’s Archaeologists”?

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The action doesn’t happen until the 1:08 mark.

I find this obscenely fascinating.

Also there are no comments yet. For YouTube, this is unprecedented.

Go fix that.

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Your world in pictures.

My new travel alarm clock. Already packed for my next flight:

Nummy puggle:

Hell of a peep show in there:

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When Nonsequiturs Attack

Needs more photoshop:

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My new desk at work

My new desk at work is going to look a good deal less slick with all my crap on it and dripping with cables. And I’m not sure which of those little wings is large enough and sturdy enough to hold up an ancient (blue and white, if that means anything to you, Jan 1999, 48 lbs, pre-Graphite) 17″ CRT Apple Studio Display. The 20″ dual-core Intel iMac really needs to be front-and-center.

Also, it’s not here yet. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. Wednesday at the outside. Also also, it’ll require some assembly, I assume, which gives me plenty of chances to scratch it up and break parts.

Also also also, my new tiny shiny office still needs some drywall hung and painted, plus maybe some carpet, a decent chair, a coat rack, and a bookshelf. And the wall-sized white board moved in there. Before I move in furniture I don’t want to get too badly damaged. Though I can probably get the coat rack and chair in there without wrecking the desk and anything on it. Possibly the bookshelf. Definitely need the drywall, paint, and carpet first.

And it won’t really look like my office until it looks like someone dropped a live grenade in a garbage can and walked away.

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The transition from hunter/gatherer to farmer, revisited

One of the big concepts in Charlie Stross’s Accelerando was Economics 2.0, a kind of unhinged and basically incomprehensible technology of the exchange of financial debts and investments, a financial system become as complex as life itself and governed by pretty much the same rules — a dynamic equilibrium against a background of raw resources and waste products, self-continuance, and expansion to comfortably fill the available niches. It really is the sort of thing that you get once you have charters that establish corporations as independent entities which can refine their own operations through minute actions of their member-constituents and can, to their own benefit, merge and split, spawn and replicate, seek new resources and, when circumstances require it, fail and die. The ones that last are the ones best fit to succeed in their respective environments. The attributes that make them successful are the most likely to be transferred to their neighbors and child companies.

Currently companies are livestock we tend and parasitize — and I use that term in full knowledge of the fact that they do actually receive benefit from their relationship with us, and that the term symbiosis would be, from a certain view, more accurate. Like cows are factories that produce milk while we keep them alive and meat once we decide to kill them, we feed companies resources and use them to multiply wealth until they are no longer viable. Then we butcher them. Though that’s not actually the metaphor that comes to my mind….

If it weren’t for us, they’d produce milk until they got the high score. It’s payroll and profit-taking that limit them the most, which is why payroll and dividends are cut when they are starting to fall ill. If they could trade milk to one another for oats, so to speak, without our intervention, they’d be a lot more healthy.

One of these days they’ll figure that out.

In any case, as long as it’s us that are steering the corporations that make up the market, it’s important to remember that the entire market as a whole is worth no more and no less than the sum of all worthwhile human effort, which should also equal the worth of all needs for sustenance and comfort. Too many cows is just as big a crisis as too few. Especially when it’s the cow that’s feeding you milk that gets slaughtered, and you’re not scheduled to get any of the meat. That’s still the wrong analogy, though….

It doesn’t help that a lot of our cows are sick from eating bad food. Blowed-up sub-prime mortgages — overinflated in fake nutritive value by assesors who inflated the value of the properties backing them and underfed by property owners who can’t make the payments — are just as bad as baby formula with melamine added to make it test higher for protein content. It’s poison. So are credit-default swaps, where companies trade back-and-forth the right to collect credit card debts from people who’ve gone broke trying to keep their houses. There are all kinds of financial poisons floating around right now, just like the worthless and possibly even toxic foods and medicines from the pre-FDA snake oil days.

But, you know, all people wanted was more milk for less moo. And we get dead cows because the people feeding the cows weren’t the ones drinking those particular cows’ milk, so what’s it matter to them?

What do you expect? We’re pretty new to this agriculture thing. It’s a new technology. We live in the guts of these huge cows and try not to hurt them too much by helping ourselves to their chow and excreting our wastes into their innards and we try to steer them from the inside. And it’s dark in here.

…

Screw it. Here’s a chipmunk being menaced by a spear-wielding ewok:

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The Ig Nobels!

Awesome synopses, as always, from here at MSNBC. Not time for that? Jump straight to the meat:

“Here’s the full list of winners, with links to the research if available:

• Nutrition: Massimiliano Zampini and Charles Spence for demonstrating that food tastes better when it sounds better (report from The Guardian).
• Peace: The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity.
• Archaeology: Astolfo Gomes de Mello Araujo and Jose Carlos Marcelino for showing armadillos can scramble the contents of an archaeological dig (report from Natural History).
• Biology: Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert and Michel Franc for discovering that fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than fleas that live on a cat.
• Medicine: Dan Ariely for demonstrating that expensive fake medicine is more effective than cheap fake medicine (report in Stanford GSB News).
• Cognitive science: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Hiroyasu Yamada, Ryo Kobayashi, Atsushi Tero, Akio Ishiguro and Agota Toth for discovering that slime molds can solve puzzles (report in Math in the Media).
• Economics: Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tyber and Brent Jordan for discovering that exotic dancers earn more when at peak fertility.
• Physics: Dorian Raymer and Douglas Smith for proving that heaps of string or hair will inevitably tangle.
• Chemistry: Sheree Umpierre, Joseph Hill and Deborah Anderson for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide, and C.Y. Hong, C.C. Shieh, P. Wu and B.N. Chiang for proving it is not (report at Snopes.com).
• Literature: David Sims for his study “You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations” (report from The Boston Globe).

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