Odetta, Voice of Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 77

Odetta, the singer whose deep voice wove together the strongest songs of American folk music and the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 77.

The cause was heart disease, said her manager, Doug Yeager. He added that she had been hoping to sing at Barack Obama’s inauguration.

If you’ve never heard her sing, you’re missing one of America’s greatest treasures.

Italian judge makes the internet illegal

Italian bloggers are up in arms at a court ruling early this year that suggests almost all Italian blogs are illegal. This month, a senior Italian politician went one step further, warning that most web activity is likely to be against the law.

What few noticed at the time was that this law had the capacity to place blogs on a par with full-blown journalism. It would only take a judge to decide that something as simple as a headline was what defined a “newspaper”.

The T-Shirt Wars

The once unpretentious T-shirt has become ground zero in America’s never-ending culture war.

Conservative patriotism bad, liberal Marx-hugging good.

Me, I like this one:

Ten-year-old Volker Bertelman couldn’t afford a synthesizer, so he modified the family piano to sound like a harpsichord by pressing metal tacks into its hammers. Mom was not amused, but she couldn’t have known that her little boy would soon make a living doing more or less the same thing.

“Wherever I play, people are surprised,” Bertelman told Wired.com in an extensive interview. “When I’m playing in front of an indie audience, people are just discovering more classical music. And when I play in front of a classical audience, people are surprised by how experimental a piano concert can be.

Gun owners dodge tax on ammunition

HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania gun owners dodged a bullet when lawmakers failed to enact legislation that would have levied a 5-cent tax on each shell and required encoding ammunition with serial numbers and registering those numbers in a statewide database.

But Joe Grace, executive director of CeaseFirePA, a group pushing gun control legislation, said any technology that would help lead to arrests of people who use guns while committing crimes should be seriously considered.

The reasons why this wouldn’t work are easy to see, the main one being that criminals don’t obey the law- in fact, that’s the definition of a criminal, so one would imagine that they probably will ignore the law yet again and use “illegal” ammo.

But a case resulting from this sort of law would never pass even the most rudimentary court challenge on the chain of evidence presented. When I go to the range, and shoot a semi-auto pistol, the spent cartridges fly out of the gun onto the floor- where they mingle with those shot by the other shooters that day. At some point they are swept up and put into large plastic bins and sold to a company that reloads them and sells the ammo back to the range. So unless I’m really a neat freak, or someone who does their own reloading, my used cartridges cease to be of interest to me the moment after I pull the trigger. So when your criminal type buys a box of reloaded ammo and proceeds to fire the entire brick of it (50 rounds) into some gas station attendant in the middle of the night, now the police have possibly 50 suspects to round up?

Genius, sheer genius. Really gonna help reduce crime, you betcha. But since that is only the stated goal of gun control groups, not the actual one, no one will really expect anything to change.

Hillary Clinton’s Disdain for International Law — Change We Can Believe In?

For those hoping for a dramatic change in U.S. foreign policy under an Obama administration — particularly regarding human rights, international law, and respect for international institutions — the appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State is a bitter disappointment. Indeed, Senator Clinton has more often than not sided with the Bush administration against fellow Democrats on key issues regarding America’s international legal obligations, particularly international humanitarian law.

Even worse, Hillary Clinton allied herself with the Bush administration on many its most controversial actions, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, threats of war against Iran, support for Israel’s 2006 offensive against Lebanon and 2002 offensive in the West Bank, opposition to the International Criminal Court, attacks against the International Court of Justice, and support for the unrestricted export of cluster bombs and other anti-personnel munitions used against civilian targets.

Pentagon hires British scientist to help build robot soldiers that ‘won’t commit war crimes’

The US Army and Navy have both hired experts in the ethics of building machines to prevent the creation of an amoral Terminator-style killing machine that murders indiscriminately.

A British robotics expert has been recruited by the US Navy to advise them on building robots that do not violate the Geneva Conventions.

Too bad they didn’t build an executive branch model, eh?

Pentagon to Detail Troops to Bolster Domestic Security

The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.

But the Bush administration and some in Congress have pushed for a heightened homeland military role since the middle of this decade, saying the greatest domestic threat is terrorists exploiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

So in the case of a WMD attack in this country, we need 20,000 troops with guns- not first responders? Not doctors? Not nurses? Hmm. Sounds like the beginning of a Heinlein novel to me.

Ocean currents can power the world, say scientists

The technology can generate electricity in water flowing at a rate of less than one knot - about one mile an hour - meaning it could operate on most waterways and sea beds around the globe.

Cylinders arranged over a cubic metre of the sea or river bed in a flow of three knots can produce 51 watts. This is more efficient than similar-sized turbines or wave generators, and the amount of power produced can increase sharply if the flow is faster or if more cylinders are added.

Now this could be interesting.

TTP will be taking a break for Thanksgiving, and we’ll see ya when we see ya.

So go eat, watch TV and go forth on Friday and stimulate the economy.

I suggest Sig Sauer, but that’s just me.