Budget Day of Reckoning

Scary.

Mining sulfur in a volcano's crater

Amazing photographs [Link]

Photographer Olivier Grunewald has recently made several trips into the sulfur mine in the crater of the Kawah Ijen volcano in East Java, Indonesia, bringing with him equipment to capture surreal images lit by moonlight, torches, and the blue flames of burning molten sulfur. Covered last year in the Big Picture (in daylight), the miners of the 2,600 meter tall (8,660ft) Kawah Ijen volcano trek up to the crater, then down to the shore of a 200-meter-deep crater lake of sulfuric acid, where they retrieve heavy chunks of pure sulfur to carry back to a weighing station. Mr. Grunewald has been kind enough to share with us the following other-worldly photos of these men as they do their hazardous work under the light of the moon. (30 photos total)

Zombie Presidency

Stick a fork in him. [Link]

If the commenters at the Huffington Post, and the hosts and guests at MSNBC, are any guide, the Bush tax cut deal has rendered the Obama presidency a zombie.  It looks alive and is even able to move and groan a bit, but it’s mostly dead.

foxinretreat—CLASS WARFARE and some civil unrest , brewing in a neighborhood near you. Hey oligarchs how it turns out is anybody’s guess. I hope Wikileaks unleashes its info on the banks ASAP, I could care less if WS has to tank to stop this madness.

mjtaylor22—THEY GOT MOR EBANG FOR THEIR BUCK, HOW BOUT INCREASE UI PAYMENTS, AND SEND EVERY CITIZEN A CHECK FOR AT LEAST 1,000..SORRY TAX PAYING CITIZEN……

Linda Mulenbach—Dear Mr. President. You had me, and then you lost me! Can we please have a democratic primary challenger! I am DONE with Obama.

Chefbob50—Wanted: One backbone and set of balls send to B. Obama c/o 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Wash. D.C.

Well, Chefbob, you obviously sent Obama your heart in 2008. Why not complete the deal now?  There’s more HuffPo commentary at the link, including stuff like this:

srheard—The next time I vote for a President, I am going to rank strong negotiating skills right up there with literacy and intellect.

That’s funny.  Conservatives brought up the “competency” argument in 2008 and got slapped with the race card.  Now here’s a liberal playing competency against Obama.  I happened to be watching MSNBC’s Ed Schultz (so you don’t have to) when the deal came down on Monday.  His guest was liberal Rep. Keith Ellison.  I thought the two might have an on-air rage party.

Plus, inflammatory language about Republicans being hostage takers. A new of civility in government. [Link]

UPDATE More on hostage taking. [Link]

I mean how many ways was this statement stupid?

First, it was unnecessary.  You don’t need a metaphor to explain.  You needed the tax cut and this was the price you were willing to pay to get it.

Second, it is petulant and un-presidential.   To quote Peter Wehner, “Obama has mastered the ability to look both unprincipled and graceless at the same time.”  Not too long ago, Evan Thomas gushed “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.”  Now he has come down to Earth.

Third, it is demonizing your fellow Americans as though they were enemies of this nation. So much for being post-partisan.

Finally, it tells the world that you will negotiate with terrorists. All they have to do is take live hostages and hurt them, and Obama will negotiate.  At one point in time, Obama and his handlers denied that he would negotiate with terrorists.  But now he has cleared up any ambiguity.

Julian Assange, Information Anarchist

Wikileaks real agenda? [Link]

Mr. Assange is misunderstood in the media and among digirati as an advocate of transparency. Instead, this battening down of the information hatches by the U.S. is precisely his goal. The reason he launched WikiLeaks is not that he's a whistleblower—there's no wrongdoing inherent in diplomatic cables—but because he hopes to hobble the U.S., which according to his underreported philosophy can best be done if officials lose access to a free flow of information.

In 2006, Mr. Assange wrote a pair of essays, "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as Governance." He sees the U.S. as an authoritarian conspiracy. "To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed," he writes. "Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate," he writes, and "pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result."

His central plan is that leaks will restrict the flow of information among officials—"conspirators" in his view—making government less effective. Or, as Mr. Assange puts it, "We can marginalize a conspiracy's ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to its environment. . . . An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think efficiently cannot act to preserve itself."

Berkeley blogger Aaron Bady last week posted a useful translation of these essays. He explains Mr. Assange's view this way: "While an organization structured by direct and open lines of communication will be much more vulnerable to outside penetration, the more opaque it becomes to itself (as a defense against the outside gaze), the less able it will be to 'think' as a system, to communicate with itself." Mr. Assange's idea is that with enough leaks, "the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller."