The year is 2035. Joe Smith stands in front of the United States Senate, subject of a confirmation hearing for the post he has sought all his life:

Camera cuts to Senator Archibald Huffenpuff [R], looking self-important and slightly bored.

Huffenpuff: Mr. Smith are you now or have you ever been a member of the web site called [checks notes] MySpace.com?

Cut to Joe Smith, in a sharp suit.

Smith: Yes sir.

Huffenpuff: In what capacity?

Smith: Well, while running for office several years ago, we used myspace.com/joe-smith-in-30 as part of our grassroots campaign to…

Huffenpuff: Have you ever used any other usernames on this site?

Smith looks moderately confused by the question.

Smith: I don’t particularly recall, Senator.

Huffenpuff: Have you ever used the name el-guapo-suave?

Smith smiles.

Smith: Ah, yes. I used that name during school.

Huffenpuff: Do you recall comments made then about circuit judge Mary Jones?

Smith blanches, clearly confused

Smith: Back then? I didn’t even know who she was then, Senator.

Huffenpuff: Let me refresh your memory. In 2008, she was fifteen years old and went by the user name meow1kittens15.

Smith: Uh…

Huffenpuff: You left comments on her page when she posted a picture of herself in her cheerleader uniform.

Sensing Smith’s discomfort, the camera slowly zooms in.

Smith: Uh…

Huffenpuff: Specifically, you said of the then underage Mary Jones, and I quote “I’d tap that” and “omfg u r so h0ttt!!!11!1″. Are these your words, sir?

Smith: Uh…

Camera cuts to a closeup of a white cat with blue eyes and a diamond necklace, being pet by Rupert Murdoch (indirect owner of MySpace) in his orbiting space station.

Murdoch: Bwah-ha-ha-ha! You should have paid up, Mr. Smith.

Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are already being used for blackmail, but I can’t help but suspect that blackmail is actually their entire reason for existence. This is the only reason I can find to explain why Faceberg still gets investment capital in spite of having no visible business plan or prospects. It may also explain why Facebook removed a third-party application that let its users stab each other: it was cutting in on Facebook’s action.

Expect to see this type of thing show up in government more often, along with services that will eliminate incriminating web evidence. One interesting aspect of this will be the collateral damage created. For example, in my fictional example above, a plot intended to take down Smith would probably also take down Mary Jones by also exposing her teenage escapades.

Popularity: 2% [?]

• August 29, 1936 - McCain born
• 1936 - electric guitar
• 1937 - jet engine
• 1937 - Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
• 1937 - U.S. criminalization of marijuana (at the behest of DuPont)
• 1938 - ballpoint pen
• 1938 - fiberglass
• 1938 - Superman
• 1939 - helicopter
• 1939 - View-master
• 1939 - automated teller machine
• 1939 - World War II
• 1941 - Turing complete computer
• 1941 - Citizen Kane
• 1942 - nuclear reactor
• 1945 - the Slinky
• 1945 - microwave oven
• 1945 - fission weapons
• 1945 - United Nations
• 1946 - bikini
• 1946 - mobile telephone service
• October 26, 1947 - Hillary Clinton born
• 1947 - transistor
• 1947 - Pakistan
• 1948 - Israel
• 1948 - NATO
• 1948 - House Committee’s Investigation of Un-American Activities
• 1948 - Apartheid
• 1949 - People’s Republic of China
• 1950 - U.S. approves standard for broadcasting color television
• 1951 - Nash equilibrium
• 1951 - the term “rock ’n’ roll”
• 1951 - “the pill”
• 1952 - fusion weapons
• 1953 - discovery of DNA’s structure
• 1955 - Velcro
• 1958 - integrated circuits
• 1958 - communication satellite
• 1958 - implantable pacemaker
• 1959 - statehood of Alaska and Hawaii
• 1960 - LISP
• 1960 - laser
• 1960 - Psycho
• 1961 - ICBM
• August 4, 1961 - Obama born

Most dates from Wikipedia.

Popularity: 3% [?]

The plague of reality television has spawned some unexpected phenomena over its decade-long life. Most interestingly, shows that allowed public voting demonstrated that people had both the desire and the means to organically organize to rig elections on a massive scale. Once again, the internet demonstrates its core competency, connecting strangers in weird ways, in this case through nexus sites like Vote for the Worst.

The question that’s been bugging me this morning: how to harness this ability? Any thoughts?

Popularity: 3% [?]

Now that idiot thugs are refusing disaster relief and rice shortage prophesies are being self-fulfilled, it won’t be long until famine starts to rear its head. While many people are busy dying, those that aren’t will be spreading blame around. Blame will fall on bad weather, bad crops, bad luck, even on Al Gore. But the truth will be none of these. While starvation is (obviously) caused by a lack of food, famine—that is, widespread starvation over a large area—is the result of bad government.

As far as food goes, governments fail their people in two ways: by failing to plan for bad times and by bungling (or, all to often, profiting from) crises when some external event triggers a food problem. Usually, famine involves both. In its 2002 coverage of Ethiopia entitled “Bad weather, and bad government”, the Economist said:

Bad weather is rarely enough, on its own, to kill large numbers of people. Famine usually
requires bad government, too…. In Ethiopia, the food crisis has been aggravated by the legacy of a senseless border war with neighboring Eritrea between 1998 and 2000. It killed tens of thousands, forced 350,000 to flee their homes, blasted both countries’ infrastructure and prompted foreign donors to freeze a lot of aid. In all, it cost Ethiopia an estimated $2.9 billion—almost a whole year’s output for every farmer in a country where 80 per cent of the population lives on farms. Such a monumental man-made disaster has made it harder for the country to cope with a natural one.

The millions of Chinese that starved from 1958 to 1961 also owe their deaths more to their government’s response to natural disaster than to the disasters themselves, even by that governments own admission. Research into other famines by Amartya Sen reached similar conclusions. Even black swan events, such as fungus unexpectedly killing potatoes needs bad government to become the Irish Potato Famine.

Our modern reaction to famine in other countries is to send relief aid and “keep them in our prayers”. This probably saves a few lives (at least in countries where the government isn’t stealing the aid), but treats the symptom, not the disease. You will continue to see famine in country after country until we change this “we sympathize” tune we sing into an accusation of incompetence against the government causing the problem, even our own (especially our own). Some, for example, are taking the World Bank to task, claiming it created policies that encourage governments to create famine. This is a step in the right direction, but a better step would be to also blame the governments themselves.

Art “Four Horsemen: Famine” by Greyskin666.

Popularity: 4% [?]

The general reaction to the Eliot Spitzer “scandal” strikes me as an interesting stop along a fairly recent road toward a (sort of) more mature public treatment of sex. It wasn’t that long ago (say, a century or so) that nearly all of the public would have laid the blame for the whole scandal solely at the feet of the prostitute. Only recently has the “scarlet letter” mentality shifted to force men to bear the weight of their transgressions. Some parts of the world still stone prostitutes and adulteresses.

So, it seems encouraging to me that virtually no one has been trying to lay blame at the feet of the prostitute in this case or claiming that, somehow, Spitzer was somehow powerless to resist her feminine wiles. In fact, it seems that she has become something of a hero, with lots of people buying her music.

It seems like a good sign that the U.S. is starting to grow up a little bit, sticking a toe out from under the smothering history of Puritanical idiocy that has shaped so much of the region’s politics for centuries.

Of course, a nation that really had a mature attitude toward sex (and loves the free market as much as the U.S. claims to) wouldn’t be so bent out of shape about prostitution in the first place, so we still have a long ways to go.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Now that samaBlog has provided a primer to most of the candidates, I am upgrading my Care-O-Meter for the 2008 U.S. Presidential race from “nonexistent” to “slight”. I now care a little bit about the election. I didn’t yesterday. I didn’t last week. And I sure has hell didn’t care two years ago when all this election coverage started. There is no purpose to debates 18 months before the election, damn it! States, your disgusting race to have the first primary does nothing but make me hate you and your vanity. Stop it. XM, there is no need for an entire freaking channel covering this election, particularly this far away from the actual election. Stop it. CNN, there is a reason that a Google search for “election coverage” brings up the page for your 2004 coverage long before showing a link to your 2008 coverage. There is a reason that the Economist’s current “Week in Politics” only mentions the US election as its second to last item, and even then with a note that the process “got under way” this week. There is a reason these elections only happen every four years. I look forward to when this one is over, so that the next one can start a day after the inauguration.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Seeing samaBlog tackle an office pool of 2008 predictions from the New York Times, I thought I’d do the same. The only thing is, I think many of the choices suck. So I’m going to answer free-form. Also, I’ll not repeat the questions or choices, so you’ll need to follow along in one of the links above:

1. The SEC does not allow me to answer this question.
2. No Country for Old Men
3. Portions of either the DCMA or the Patriot Act are un-Constitutional. Preferably both.
4. Tree of Smoke.
5. The World Without Us.
6. …services offering media without access control financially crush those that require DRM, and find that “old media” sales (CDs, DVDs) for such “open” titles actually increase as well.
7. …the 50 trillion dollar shortfall that will fiscally destroy America pretty soon will continue to be unmentioned.
8. Pervez Musharraf.
9. Cuba.
10. …hell freezes over.
11. …whichever of them happens last. I might even care by then.
12. …slightly higher than it is now. Also, October and November will be bloody, as the insurgency attempts to influence the U.S. Presidential election.
13. …roughly equivalent to shuffling deck chairs on the Titantic, as it will be something other than the only one that actually matters (see answer #7).
14. …something very loud but, ultimately, not important that skews the results of one or more party’s nominations. In the actual election, the standard advantages of height, hair and the “beer factor” will turn out to not play a role.
15. Hillary Clinton-Robert “Bob” Kerrey
16. …almost certainly a pair for whom I will not vote.
17. “Anyone but Bush”. This theme will likely be just as disastrous as the soccer-mom “I just think it’s time for a change” theme that brought Bush to power was. Alternately, the winning theme may be the real lesson learned in the 2000 election: “I can rig election results better than you”.
18. …something other than the only thing that actually matters (see answer #7).
19. …the consequences of a 50 trillion dollar shortfall that no one has done anything to fix.

Popularity: 10% [?]