Only follow the law when it benefits

by Keith Bacongco

I used to think we were a nation of laws but we are seeing more and more instances where lawbreaking by the top is okay. I’ve written about the approval of torture – which does not work –  by our government but no one goes to jail. We continue to treat American citizens with these sorts of approaches. The President can, on his sole authority, arrest any American citizen on American soil and hold them without benefit of legal council, in violation of many of our Bill of Rights, for as long as he wants. In 2003, when asked what insurance an American citizen had against secret arrest and detention, an aide to the President said

Well, I guess his family could speak out if he’s missing, and if that creates a political furor, then the President would be accountable at the next election.

That still holds true with a different President. I wrote then:

That is something you expect to hear from some third world, banana republic. Without any oversight, any checks and balances, this system will eventually be abused.

It used to be that laws were what kept things from being abused. Now it appears that the laws mean little for Executives. Of course, with a corrupted Supreme Court, increasing power is really easy.

Take Wisconsin, where we have heard for a month that the unions needed to be busted, even after giving in to every financial demand, because the long term finances of the state required it. Except the unions that supported the Executive. They still get to keep their rights. Apparently their effects on the finances of the state were outweighed by their loyalty to the Governor.

Today, the GOP got around the rules that state that financial bills, like the one getting rid of 50 years of collective bargaining, needed a quorum of 20. They  did this by making it a non-financial bill. See no reason to have a rule declaring what a quorum is for financial bills. Simply declare them non-financial.

So, by skirting the rules, they reveal that the purpose of this really was for non-financial reasons. Using un-democratic means when possible.

This would just be antoher example in the long history or dirty tricks except it appears that in order to do this, they violated state law. The open meetings law requires notice of 24 hours before. This was apparently not abided by. The Capital is also supposed to be accessible to the public, which it was not during the vote.

This is actually how banana republics act – with a false face of democracy while forcing through bills, in  violation of law, that empower the central authority. All that matters is shear political muscle, not the law. As Wikipedia states “The purpose of a banana republic is commercial profit by collusion between the State and favoured monopolies, whereby the profits derived from private exploitation of public lands is private property, and the debts incurred are public responsibility.”

Commercial profit by collusion.Profits derived from the private exploitation of public resources. Like selling state-owned power plants to private interests with no oversight for any amount of money the central authorities decided. The governor of Wisconsin can do that now.

As I said then, this is what happens when the bandits are leading the stupid.

Well, we have gone through periods of idiocy like this before, where the long, hard work of millions is undone by the rapid, rapacious efforts of a few. The End of Reconstruction comes to mind. It took almost 70 years for that damage to be fixed.

If that happens this time, I won’t be alive to see America re-right itself. Maybe things will happen faster in this modern age.

And thus Comcast may get to decide how much to charge Netflix for their downloads

Key House subcommittee votes to undo net neutrality rules
[Via Ars Technica]

On partisan lines, a House subcommittee on Communications and Technology has voted to disapprove the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules, which were enacted in December. The vote was 15 ayes and eight nays.

“The Internet works pretty well. It’s the government that doesn’t,” insisted Greg Walden (R-OR), who made the opening comments at today’s House hearing. “There is no crisis warranting intervention. The Internet is not broken,” agreed the subcommittee’s chair Fred Upton (R-MI). “The market has not failed.”

[More]

The whole point of Net Neutrality to to prevent ISPs from picking and choosing whose data they will transport for what price. In the present internet, my data and IBM’s Internet data are pretty much treated the same.

Where many companies, and apparently many Republicans, want to go is to create tiers of service. So Netflix, which competes with Comcast for movies, might have to pay extra to transmit its movies to my house, while Comcast will not. Or perhaps Verizon will make sure that I can only download music from Apple’s iTunes at slow speed because MIcrosoft has paid Verizon money to get the fastest downloads.

The ISPs want to be able to split the Interenet up into those willing to pay top dollar and the rest of us. Instead of a neutral internet, where everyone’s data can stand with everyone else’s, they want to create a segregated one, one where the barrers to entry for new innovative companies is greatly reduced.

I’ll let the founder of Zipcar give some testimony:

For example, if Zipcar had been forced to rely on the auto industry’s definitions of car ownership—or worse yet, had to ask their permission—our vision of a fleet of personal cars being shared among unconnected individuals would have never made the cut. Our vision did not match their understanding of consumer demand, and our business model reduces the number of cars sold. Likewise, we cannot rely on the telecommunications industry to define the Internet. The industry would almost certainly believe that they know definitely what consumers want, and they would define the Internet as their new preferred “triple play”—their telephone service, their video service, and their idea of your ideal Internet experience. Such an approach is a perfect receipt for stifling innovation in this country.

If we relied on the telecommunications or cable companies – our major ISPs – to determine what innovations were, we would still be paying $5 for a ringtone, have to watch movies only on a TV and probably still be using landlines to call.

Net Neutrality is a litmus test for seeing who is most beholden to what corporations want and who cares most for people.

More about penis spines

I kept trying to find something acceptable to show regarding the spines found on some other mammals, following the previous post’s topic. Here is a nice drawing that demonstrates the differences:

You can see the raised bumps on the mouse penis.  Think of them as whiskers for the penis. This figure is from a paper entitled A histological study of the development of the penis of wild-type and androgen-insensitive mice. What they did was look at mice that had lost the ability to respond to androgens, the hormones responsible for most male development.

As seen in the paper, the spines on the outside of the penis disappear when androgens don’t work properly, along with lots of other things. The Nature paper describes a small deletion in non-coding DNA, so it does not effect whether a protein is made or not. What the region, called an enhancer, does is affect the expression of the gene.

In this case, it is the androgen receptor, the same sort of gene affected in the mouse figure above. As the authors of the current Nature paper say:

Profound changes have also evolved in the genitalia of humans compared to other animals. Many mammals have keratinized epidermal spines overlying tactile receptors in the glans dermis. Penile spine growth is androgen-dependent, as primates lose spines upon castration, and treatment with exogenous testosterone restores spine formation (Fig. 2k). Mice with AR protein-coding mutations fail to form penile spines, confirming an essential role for AR in penile spine development. Our results show that humans have lost an ancestral penile spine enhancer from the AR locus. Humans also fail to form the penile spines commonly found in other animals, including chimpanzees, macaques and mice (Fig. 2l). Simplified penile morphology tends to be associated with monogamous reproductive strategies in primates. Ablation of spines decreases tactile sensitivity and increases the duration of intromission, indicating their loss in the human lineage may be associated with the longer duration of copulation in our species relative to chimpanzees. This fits with an adaptive suite, including feminization of the male canine dentition, moderate-sized testes with low sperm motility, and concealed ovulation with permanently enlarged mammary glands, that suggests our ancestors evolved numerous morphological characteristics associated with pair-bonding and increased paternal care.

So, we lost our penis spines and whiskers as well as having decreased tactile sensitivity, smaller balls, feminine teeth and slower sperm but gained endurance, larger penises and breasts. I think most men will go along with the consequences.

Interestingly, the paper mentions that all the internal apparatus for producing penis spines might still be present. When they put the enhancer region from chips into human skin cells, they see a large increase in specific gene expression. So all the rest of the genetic apparatus may still be there. I wonder if men with Hirsuties coronae glandis express some barely function form of the enhancer. Maybe they have different facial hair also – perhaps real whiskers.

This suggests that perhaps we could add back the receptor and get penis spines back. Maybe put the genetic sequence in a hand cream that could be used. The skin cells take up the DNA and away we go. Of course, one would want to use gloves when doing this since we would not want to see hairy spines growing on our palms.

Gives new meaning to the phrase “spineless dick”

by Nina Matthews Photography

Humans are losers (when it comes to penis spines)
[Via Ars Technica]

Having a human-centric view of the world, we tend to think of the traits that make us distinct from our fellow primates in positive terms, focusing on the features we’ve gained, like our big brains. But human evolution has also meant the loss of some potentially useful features, like upper body strength. New traits can also arise from the loss of DNA. So, it was just a matter of time before someone tried to identify the DNA sequences our species has lost along its evolutionary past. A study that does just that appears in today’s issue of Science, describing DNA sequence losses implicated in bigger brains and the end of penis spines.

The logic behind the new work is very similar to that used in the identification of “human accelerated regions,” areas of the genome that have undergone unusually rapid changes since humans split off from our common ancestor with chimps. The researchers started by comparing the chimp, human, and macaque genomes to help identify areas that are missing in humans, but similar between the other two primates. This indicated that humans have lost about 34 million DNA bases since we diverged from the rest of the primates; that’s over one percent of the entire chimp genome.

[More]

*From a comment.

And no, a penis spine is not a baculum. Many mammals have bumps on their penises that humans generallydo not. The belief is that they are their to pull out a competitors sperm although there is not great proof here. I wonder if Fordyce’s spots are the leftover remnants of the spines? The normal form of these sebaceous glands includes a hair follicle. In addition, these spots can be found around the lips on the face. Right where whiskers would go. Perhaps Hirsuties coronae glandis are similarly derived remnants.

In a mostly monogamous species the bumps aren’t as necessary because there is not the same level of ‘adultery.’ This all makes for great media coverage as this is all over the MSM. Although, wouldn’t it be cool to have whiskers? The penis spines would just be extra.

Of course, many sex toys are covered with bumps. I wonder if there could be some sort of biological ‘memory’ that makes that useful? Perhaps the bumps are gone but the nerve ending that respond to them – in cats, the spines on the male penis induce ovulation – are still there? Would bumpy dildos have any effect on the female reproductive cycle? Who do I apply to for that research grant?

Throw RIM/Microsoft a life preserver or an anvil?

by tinyfroglet

Microsoft, RIM plan services to compete with Apple’s iTunes
[Via AppleInsider]

Two of Apple’s chief rivals are working on their own separate services to compete with iTunes, as Research in Motion has partnered with 7digital for its PlayBook tablet, and Microsoft is cooking up a secret project dubbed “Ventura.”

[More]

RIM is not working on their own – they are partnering with 7digital, a company that already has an app for Blackberry’s. 500,000 so far.  Of course, this is not an exclusive deal – Samsung already has one with 7digital.  Wow. Scary. Since the 7digital shop is available on iPad and iPhones also. What a stroke of genius – get a competing music service that also works well on the iPhone/iPad universe. That’ll provide some obvious separation.

I can see the consumer’s quandary – “Get a Blackberry Playbook that lets me download music from another site than iTunes or get an iPad that lets me download music FROM THE SAME SITE?”  What a selling point!

And MS is talking again about a new service for music, this time apparently doing to Zune what Zune did to Play for Sure.

I’m not seeing the convenience here for the average person. What are they going to provide that iTunes does not?