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Scotland Yard admitted Saturday that a man police officers chased and shot to death at point-blank range in front of horrified subway passengers on Friday had nothing to do with the investigation into the bombing attacks here. Senior investigators and officials of the Metropolitan Police said the man was believed to be South American; it was not known whether he was Muslim. No explosives or weapons were found on the man’s body after the shooting, police officials said.

It’s important to remember that the police are government employees. This does not meant that they will always foul things up, only that they can be reliably depended upon to do so.

So, while Scotland Yard may not have any idea where those responsible for the bombings are, at least they managed to kill one innocent man. And, as usual, they’ll be doing their best to cover their respective asses.

“After the shooting, Sir Ian Blair, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said, “The information I have available is that this shooting is directly linked to the ongoing and expanding anti-terrorist operation.”

Or not….

From the Evening Standard:

Eyewitnesses described mayhem at Stockwell Tube station today after a suspected suicide bomber was shot dead fleeing from armed police. One said the man was shot five times as he ran on to a Northern line train soon after 10am. Scotland Yard have confirmed they shot a man and he was pronounced dead at the scene….

“As the man got on the train I looked at his face. He looked from left to right, but he basically looked like a cornered rabbit, like a cornered fox. He looked absolutely petrified. He sort of tripped but they were hotly pursuing him and couldn’t have been more than two or three feet behind him at this time. He half-tripped, was half-pushed to the floor. The policeman nearest to me had the black automatic pistol in his left hand, he held it down to the guy and unloaded five shots into him.

“He looked like a Pakistani but he had a baseball cap on, and quite a thickish coat. It was a coat like you would wear in winter, a sort of padded jacket. Maybe he might have had something concealed under there, I don’t know. But it looked out of place in the weather we’ve been having.”

I don’t know what the correct way to handle a suicide bomber is, so I’m not qualified to have an opinion on this. Perhaps I’ve seen too many movies, but it seems to me that if the guy was wearing a bomb vest, simply shooting him would run the risk of triggering a dead-man switch.

And if it turns out he wasn’t concealing a bomb, this would be truly appalling news.

The Sports Guy’s intern passes on a link:

According to researchers, celebrities are four times as likely to commit suicide as noncelebrities and live, on average, thirteen years less than Joe and Jane Sixpack. Celebrities may receive substandard treatment at hospitals, victims of deferred medical tests or competition between surgeons for the honor of operating on a celebrity. Celebrities may experience more insomnia, migraines, and irritable-bowel syndrome. Celebrities are twice as likely to develop a serious alcohol problem….

Are the crazy drawn to Fame, or does Fame make them crazy? ASN claims the latter. To a celebrity, narcissism is a rational response to a world that functions as a mirror, amplifying one’s positive self-image, the sense that one is in the absolute center. It arrives later than classical narcissism—which sets in between the ages of 3 and 5, once a realistic view of the world begins to develop—but the disorders are indistinguishable, with patients exhibiting the same grandiose fantasies, excessive need for approval, lack of empathy, anger, and depression (how fabulous). Fearful of exposing the real them, narcissists project a glorified self that becomes so ingrained it becomes impossible to tell what’s real and what’s made up. This is the self they start talking about in the third person. Everyone must love this self or it risks dissolution. There must be Omnipresent Love. Speech becomes impressionistic and lacking in detail—a symptom celebrity profilers well recognize….

Celebrity, as John Updike wrote, is the mask that eats into the face. A study has shown that pop stars use personal pronouns in their songwriting three times more once they become famous; another study claims that the more famous one gets, the more one checks oneself in the mirror, and the more one’s self-concept becomes self-conscious. It’s a problem, to be both self-involved and self-conscious.

My personal suspicion is that it is the crazy who are drawn to fame. Even in the less-famous world of celebrity punditry, you have only to witness the delusional opinion-spinning of a Sean Hannity, an Al Franken or a Michelle Malkin to wonder if these people have it all together. The fascinating thing about Ann Coulter’s pundithood, what sets her apart, is that she gives off a powerful sense of not giving a damn where she is or with whom she is speaking, as opposed to the desperate If-I-am-not-on-Fox-I-do-not-exist brand marketing of so many other chattercrats.

While fame opens doors and makes many desirable things more accessible, it is a curse in its own right. I have known very few famous people that I considered to be sane who enjoyed the celebrity aspect of their fame for very long. And those I’ve known who consciously sought, and failed, to find success in those industries that lead to celebrity were, almost without fail, more than a little off their rocker.

ihatedashrub writes:

I’ll type real slow because I know you have trouble with comprehension…

Where does human talent originate? From whence does it come? What is the birth place of human creativity?

I even asked three different ways. I’m going to pen a new book…Cedarford: The Myopia of Me, an unauthorized autobiography.

I think my favorite thing about this blog is that I regularly lose track of who is on whose side on any given issue, as teams seem to shift unpredictably depending on the issue. For some inexplicable reason, this little post threw me for a loop, forcing me to step back and remind myself of the most basic foundations on which this quasi-community rests.

1. Nate aka The Gargler vs the Civil War aka The War of Northern Aggression
2. Bane aka The Weeper vs insufficiently attractive women, Muslims, fat people, etc
3. Crystal vs killing babies
4. Dread vs Area 51
5. Shrubbery aka ihatedashrub vs the President of the United States of America
6. Desert Cat vs the Drug War
7. Gregg vs the English language
8. Cedarford vs the insufficiently human
9. The Lizard Queen vs Mighty Cthulhu

Okay, now I think I’ve got it again.

Regarding the knowability of the supernatural:

Note that the sciences are incapable of recognizing such phenomena. For the sake of discussion, let us suppose that some unscientific event actually occurred—say, that the shade of Elvis in fact appeared in my living room one night, sang Blue Moon Over Kentucky, and then vanished. Would science, or any scientist, be able to know it?

I could tell a physicist that I had seen Elvis, of course. He would assume that I was joking, lying, or deluded. I could report that the neighbors had heard Blue Moon, but the physicist would say that I had played the song on my stereo. I might show him video that I had shot of the appearance, but he would say that I had hired an Elvis impersonator, or that I had faked the footage with video-editing software.

In sum, even though it had really happened, he could never know that it had.

The difficulty is that the sciences can apprehend only the repeatable. If I could summon Elvis at will, again and again in an instrumented laboratory, physicists would eventually have to concede that something was happening, whatever it might be. While scientists defend their paradigms as fiercely as Marxists or Moslems, they can, after sufficient demonstration, be swayed by evidence. But without repeatability, they see no evidence.

Not uncommonly, those in the sciences say that they “do not accept supernatural explanations.” One might observe that the world remains the same, no matter what they accept. I might choose not to accept the existence of gravity, but could nonetheless fall over a cliff.

Yet those who do not accept the supernatural never say just what they mean by “supernatural.” By “nature,” do we not simply mean, “that which is”? If for example genuine premonitions exist (which I do not know), how can they be supernatural, as distinct from poorly understood?

I think that by supernatural scientists mean “not deducible from physics.” But of course a great many things are not so deducible—thought, consciousness, free will if any, sorrow, beauty. Scientists do not accept things which seem to have no physical cause, and of course as scientists should not accept them. If a comet were suddenly to change course, it would hardly be useful if an astronomer said that it just happened, or that a herd of invisible unicorns had pushed it off course. He, properly, would want to find a gravitational influence.

Trouble comes when the sciences overstep their bounds. It is one thing to study physical phenomena, another to say that only physical phenomena exist. Here science blurs into ideology, an ideology being a systematic and emotionally held way of misunderstanding the world. A science is open and descriptive, an ideology closed and prescriptive. A scientists says, in principle at least, “Give me the facts and I will endeavor to derive a theory that describes them.” The ideologist says, “I have the theory, and nothing that does not fit it can be a fact.” Having chosen his rut, he never sees beyond it. This has not been the way of the greats of science, but of the middle ranks, adequate to swell a progress or work in a laboratory.

I have written on this phenomenon before myself. Does it trouble no one that many of the greatest scientists in history believed in things supernatural? That nearly every physics supremacist’s pet theories have eventually been proven to be wrong by their fellows?

Science, as a tool and a method of increasing knowledge, is invaluable. Science as a substitute faith for materialist idealogues is a sham. Despite the vast difference between “we know” and “as far as we can tell at this point in time”, second-rate minds arrogantly continue to confuse the two, often, ironically, when they are deviating wildly from the strictures of logic.

Jon Podhoretz writes on NRO:

Neil Livingstone, one of those “terrorism experts” who seems to be one only because he has declared himself one, just said on the CBS Morning Show that this was the first time there had been follow-up attacks after a major terrorist assault. Hello? Neil? Anthrax? Ever heard of anthrax?

I don’t recall any major anthrax assaults. I don’t recall stock markets and currencies plunging because of dozens of anthrax victims. It all depends upon the meaning of the word “major”, I suppose. The silliness of the hurry with which pundits leap into these petty frays has become seriously annoying.

And anyone who still says “hello” as a poor excuse for a witty wake-up call deserves to be forced to watch the entire Michael J. Fox ouvre, without commercial breaks. It was already old when it was still the Eighties.

From Soccernet:

England have been overtaken by the United States in the FIFA Coca-Cola world rankings after dropping one place to eighth. The USA, still managed by Bruce Arena who guided his country to the quarter-finals of the 2002 World Cup, have reached their highest ever placing with a rise to sixth.

Heh heh heh….

Instapundit quotes Jeffrey Rosen of the New Republic writing:

Top of his class at Harvard Law School and a former law clerk for Rehnquist, Roberts is one of the most impressive appellate lawyers around today. Liberal groups object to the fact that, in 1990, as a deputy solicitor general, Roberts signed a brief in a case involving abortion-financing that called, in a footnote, for Roe v. Wade to be overturned. But it would be absurd to Bork him for this: Overturning Roe was the Bush administration’s position at the time, and Roberts, as an advocate, also represented liberal positions, arguing in favor of affirmative action, against broad protections for property rights, and on behalf of prisoners’ rights. In little more than a year on the bench, he has won the respect of his liberal and conservative colleagues but has not had enough cases to develop a clear record on questions involving the Constitution in Exile.

Top of his class at Harvard Law School sounds a bit suspect to me, but if he is truly a strict constructionist, that would certainly be good news. Supreme Court justices are notoriously unpredictable, so any celebrating by conservatives would be premature, but it does appear that the President has at least avoided openly stabbing his base in the back again.

One Republican Insty reader, meanwhile, is rather less sanguine:
“What do I think of him? Beats me. Just searched his hearing transcripts on the right to bear arms and found nothing. How is he on federalism and other limits on government power? Beats me again.

Great. O’Connor with a penis. I’m supposed to be happy about this?

7 of the 9 Supreme Court justices were appointed by Republicans. 3 of them are acceptable, which shows you how incompetent Republicans are at choosing judges.

Frankly this conservative is completely underwhelmed. Bush might think he’s got some sort of mojo going on, but if Roberts doesn’t turn out to be a solid conservative, and not another O’Connor, then the GOP is screwed.

I know a lot of conservatives who have been adding up the support given, and lack of results received from the GOP. I’ve been asking a lot of conservatives to name which issues or agendas the GOP has come through on for conservatives.

It’s a damn small list.

From an actual IM session celebrating a long-awaited and significant technological breakthrough:

[17:01] f78: u got lucky
[17:01] f78: everything works, no worries about the automatic UV shit
[17:01] f78: i installed sp1
[17:02] f78: gives new options to choose
[17:02] f78: how lucky is that? lol
[17:02] bc1: Not lucky. That’s forethought. Planning is what it is.
[17:02] bc1: Good going. You deserve twice what your making!
[17:03] f78: i now have new options in the render to texture options
[17:03] f78: mapping coordinates let me choose “existing channel” or “automatic unwrap”
[17:03] bc1: Seriously, you can export automatically by baking to the diffuse texture or something?
[17:04] f78: and now under baked material i can choose output into original source instead of “Save Source (Create Shell)”
[17:04] f78: fucking wonderful
[17:04] bc1: Do you lose the oringal texturing then?
[17:04] f78: i still have to apply the texture to a new swatch but 9 out of the 10 steps i wrote to you are eliminated
[17:04] f78: this is fuckin’ tits.
[17:04] f78: 🙂
[17:05] f78: big beautiful perky implanted tits
[17:05] bc1: So no problems then? On to [reference to forthcoming feature removed]?
[17:05] f78: yeah, go ahead and do your thing
[17:06] f78: i’ll hollar if i have a problem
[17:06] f78: this looks good though. 🙂
[17:06] bc1: Fantastic! Considering I wasn’t planning on having time to address this until mid August, we are ahead of schedule. Thank you f78 and SP1!
[17:06] f78: lol

It may not be particularly edifying, but it is funny, at least to me. And, I’m in an excellent mood thanks to the quoted developments, the “hostile environment” notwithstanding.

This reminds me of when Big Chilly and I were once asked if we planned to institute drug testing for our game development company…. Big Chilly looked at the questioner in complete disbelief, then told him that we had no intention of testing anybody, since we wouldn’t have any employees left. The guys actually liked the idea of drug testing, though; they figured that if an artist managed to pass a the test, he wasn’t likely to be any good.

Freaks, the lot of them. “big beautiful perky….” I’m still laughing.

Fighting the copyright war is utterly useless. The S/D curve varies depending upon price. People will buy what they value and want to buy, not the pigs in a poke that copyright holders try to force them to buy, and the success of Harry Potter proves this in spades.

It seems to be selling just fine, despite the fact that the full text is already floating around the Internet in at least three formats that I’ve seen.

Once a Swashbuckler, always a pirate….

UPDATE: Perhaps I should mention that I have put my copyright where my mouth is. As does Charles Stross, who actually has his publisher’s approval to give out free downloads of the full text in seven different formats. Although I cannot do the same thanks to my publisher’s archaic views, you may wish to know that there are electronic versions of my novels floating around the Internet and not only does this not disturb me, it pleases me immensely. I only wish more people were interested in passing them around, as I contend that people will always support those products and artists that they like enough to support financially.

It is, as I mentioned before, yet another example of the S/D curve in action. A downloaded ebook is very seldom a lost sale, as a willingness to pay $0.00 is not the same as a willingness to pay $12.95. In any event, it is lack of market awareness is the author’s enemy, not free ebooks, which actually help combat the primary problem.

One should note that it is the best-selling books that are most frequently seen on the pirate ebook sites. As for the idea that copying an ebook or an mp3 is “stealing”, one must first accept the idea that one can steal something that doesn’t exist and leaves the producer with exactly what he had before. I find this to be an interesting demonstration of post-scarcity economics at work and given the human creative impulse, I reject the notion that it will have any deleterious effect on art of any kind.

Indeed, an elimination of the need to appeal to the lowest common denominator might well improve the general level of art being produced.