Left Behind

You know the Tea Partiers who decry the state of our nation and want to rend from it any citizen who does not match their qualifications, through skin color or sexual orientation or liberal beliefs or irreligious tendencies?

Sometimes, I wish they would get exactly what they are wishing for.

I was recently directed to observe the it-would-be-so-funny-if-it-were-less-awful MRA community* (Men's Rights Activists, and I'm not even going to link to a site like the dash spearhead) with their near-constant avowals of boycotting American women. In addition to being sexist and homophobic, MRAs tend to be racist in weird ways. They have a particularly hilarious fixation on Asian or Middle Eastern women, and not in an openly-avowed, fetish sort of way--just in a "perhaps this is a woman who will let us knock her around ye gods Feminism is So Evil let us boycott all American Women Forever!" sort of way.

*not to be confused with the occasional macho radical libertarian who finds himself slightly in this camp, they're a bit more consistent and intelligent, but I'll save it for the Field Guide. 

Oh, thank you, FSM. Gracious, am I ever so glad these men are deciding to take themselves out of the dating pool. This is a maaaaarvelous way for them to handle their disagreements with humanity and I approve.

Now listen up, Tea Partiers, because this is what you should be doing! No more of this "reclaim our country" crap. You've said so yourself--the country is freakin' lost. The liberals have taken over. You've been watching Beck, you already know all about the conspiracies! Hell, you've already purchased your limited edition solar-powered emergency radio and stockpiled an Apocalypse Seed Starter Kit.
Now just take your thinking one step further. It's time to remember your Old Testament and realize that you, the Tea Party, are the modern incarnation of the tribes of Israel, being led by Moses to the Promised Land! Are you with me? Do you realize the implications of your special covenant with god? It is time to abandon the formerly great United States and seek refuge elsewhere.

Glenn Beck model I: right after parting the Red Sea he peddled Goldline

That's right. I said it, and you're denying your own god if you refuse. My logic is unassailable. Go to Mongolia or something, I don't care where you go, but go somewhere you can conquer and take for your own with your rifles and Bibles and hordes of children. Set up a land full of edicts about private morality and above all, remember that corporations are As Children Unto the Lord and Ye Shall Not Make Rules Upon Them, even unto the recessions at the end of days, for lo, god writes with an Invisible Hand the free markets of the earth. Don't stick around here protesting, don't try to vote--you are just buying into the liberals' system if you do that! No, you are above that. Let Beck lead you into the light, and away from this place.

Oh god (not that there is one but I refuse to try and purge my language of religious cusswords like some of my atheist friends, life is just too dang hard already), let it happen. I mean, holy crap. We can develop amazing medical innovations with all the embryonic stem cells we want, and their society can devolve to the point of disallowing anesthesia because pain, after all, is man's lot according to the Bible. Of course, the liberal utopia will probably have truly annoyingly long debate sessions. We'll have a damned hard time coming to consensus (which is why I favor a dictatorship headed by yours truly, but we'll get to that later). There are details to work out.

It's like the heaven/hell dichotomy. My sexual practices and inability to stop questioning religious beliefs and conventions are going to land me smack dab in a pile of fiery doom, according to the Catholic rector down the street. And then where will I be? Well, toasty warm with a bunch of other perverts, misanthropes, and people who are too snarky for their own good. It's exactly the kind of company I want to keep.

Pppppparty every day-hey-hey-hey, party every day!

Oh, dear Tea Partiers, please leave us alone. You have been decrying our vast numbers and vast power, disavowing everything about the way our country operates including its legal authorities, and tying yourself to the Judeo-Christian tradition in a way that boggles my heathen mind. Please, take your thinking to its ultimate conclusion and go find your promised land.

Shit That's Bugging Me: Holiday Edition

• The way my mom looks woefully at my plate and sighs every mealtime (being a Jewish mother, she's convinced I don't eat enough)
• The way everyone in my family insists on keeping the house ten degrees cooler than my comfort zone (I'm a tropical creature) 
• The way my devoutly religious sister calls me to inquire about whether or not I've accepted god yet (I ask if she's accepted science yet)

• The way I forgot my socks (see above complaint about temperature)
• The way I'm getting set up with various single sons of parents' friends (siiiiigh) 
• The way I resolve to accomplish weighty intellectual work, but end up watching three hours of Battlestar Galactica while eating barbecue potato chips on the couch (in my defense there was a blanket on the couch, it was the only place to keep warm) 

But--I do love Christmastime.

Gay Sleeper Agents

Dear DADT Advocate,

I realize that in your newly-discovered zeal for DADT, you've scoured the internet for the most widespread conservative arguments about how openly gay individuals will stain the face of our brilliant military, miring Dedicated Patriots in their homosexual wiles. Your recent googlings have probably produced quite a bit of material which you are just aching to spew forth, a miniature McCain.

But let me stop you. I've been hearing a lot lately from you and your fellow Fox News-sustained clones, and I've got some things to say too. That is, if you can hear me through all the tin foil wrapped around your head.

You say repealing DADT contributes to "the moral degradation of America." Your concern for our morality as a nation is touching, as is your obvious concern for the separation of Church and State. I won't even try and convince you of the obvious reality that sexual orientation has nothing to do with morality because I know that I'll just get a face-full of holy water for my troubles. But I will say that your voracious attempts to dictate everyone else's behavior is despicable. Also, you're a fascist.

I assume that you'll be expelling any and all soldiers who commit adultery, get a divorce, oh and kill. Killing's kind of a big deal in the Bible--god forbids it explicitly in the Ten Commandments (we'll ignore the times he commands it, for now), supposedly a clearcut guide for your morality, right? I mean you do seem to love to adorn courtrooms with them.
Your own morality is obviously flexible. Let's try and remember that before we cite Bible verses, mkay pumpkin?

Oh, yes, the "where will they shower" argument. I point you to this lovely answer, that is if you can survive the aneurysm watching Barney Frank undoubtedly gives you. Also, sexual arousal is contextual, you complete and utter nitwit. Just because someone can be attracted to people of their own gender does not mean that any and every situation between this person and others of their gender is rife with sexual desire, tension, or even attraction. Just ask nudists, doctors, and anyone who's visited hot springs. And for real, what's with the fixation on the way in which, and with whom, gay people have sex? Come on. We don't constantly talk about "the straight identity" in terms of a simple, single sexual act. Did I mention you're a fascist?

I'm going to level with you, now, since we're friends and all. Do you want to know something incredibly frightening?


There are already gay people in the military. 


OMGEEZ! I know! I swear to your god, I am not making this up. Ask anybody. There are gay people in the military and they have been hiding, in secret, which makes them gay sleeper agents. There they are hiding out in the military, fighting and dying for our freedom, and nobody even knows that the whole time they are carrying out some kind of sinister Homosexual Agenda by their very existence. If you ask me, this is what we need to be concerned about! We need to somehow figure out some way of fixing it so that we don't have all these secretly gay people in the military, constantly trying to hide their sexual orientation.

See? You and I might be on the same page after all.

P.S. We won't even touch the subject of transgendered individuals and the plethora of possible identities which American Patriots might choose for themselves, because I'm afraid your brain will explode.

Funding Life and Death

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'

-Isaac Asimov 

Scientists attempting stem cell research, in particular embryonic stem cell research, continue to be under-funded and subject to relentless criticism and attack from the religious right.

Oh for the day when scientific progress will be allowed to progress unhindered by histrionic, judgmental, illogical religious tyrants who invoke god in attempting to play him arbitrating what we shall or shall not understand about the universe. Research has long been stifled by historically-situated dust-ups about what isn't an appropriate viewing matter for the human race--ultimately many of these arguments boil down to "sanctity," the notion that anything edging to close to 'life' is simply too awful and mysterious for our dissection. A blatantly backwards notion, to my mind.

Life is complex and mysterious, and I do believe in (secularly-determined) ethics. I believe that bioethics is a legitimate concern for stem-cell research, cloning, and seemingly life-affecting biology. However, I cannot help but remember antiquated claims such as early religious objections to anesthesia. It would be good to recall that our definitions of life, conceptions of what constitutes "tampering" with said life, and sense for what is "normal" are in a constant state of contextually-dependent flux. One's "gut instinct" (which provides the basis for most religious positions on bioethics, in my experience) is hardly the indisputable guide for what we should research.

A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. If our concern is about suffering in this universe, it is rather obvious that we should be more concerned about killing flies than about killing three-day-old human embryos… Many people will argue that the difference between a fly and a three-day-old human embryo is that a three-day-old human embryo is a potential human being. Every cell in your body, given the right manipulations, every cell with a nucleus is now a potential human being. Every time you scratch your nose, you’ve committed a holocaust of potential human beings… Let’s say we grant it that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. First of all, embryos at this stage can split into identical twins. Is this a case of one soul splitting into two souls? Embryos at this stage can fuse into a chimera. What has happened to the extra human soul in such a case? This is intellectually indefensible, but it’s morally indefensible given that these notions really are prolonging scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings, and because of the respect we accord religious faith, we can’t have this dialogue in the way that we should. I submit to you that if you think the interests of a three-day-old blastocyst trump the interests of a little girl with spinal cord injuries or a person with full-body burns, your moral intuitions have been obscured by religious metaphysics.

- Sam Harris on stem-cell research, ftw.

EDIT: And, the latest xkcd is beautifully congruent.

Asked, Told

Countries that allow gay people to serve in the military: 

• Albania
• Argentina
• Australia
• Austria
• Belgium
• Canada
• Colombia
• Czech Republic
• Denmark
• Estonia
• Finland
• France
• Germany
• Greece
• Ireland
• Israel
• Italy
• Japan
• Lithuania
• Luxembourg
• Malta
• The Netherlands
• New Zealand
• Norway
• Peru
• Philippines
• Poland
• Romania
• Russia
• Serbia
• Slovania
• South Africa
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• Taiwan
• United Kingdom
• (UK) Bermuda
• Uruguay

• United States of America (finally)

First Amendment

source.

Don't tell the Tea Party.

Fun With Google

Clearly my work is cut out for me.
However, still a little higher than Blag Hag, and I'm a fan of that one.

DADT repealed!

Does the repeal of DADT cancel out the failure of the DREAM act?

My emotions are a little confused.

Burden of Proof

If only.

SOURCE.

The Power of Myth

eyeroll.

The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. Yes, there was a boom in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from a severe recession. But while the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen. 

-Krugman, SOURCE 

First Day of Saturnalia

VIA...

Party for a week? Hell yes.

Courageous Identities

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one.'

- C.S. Lewis

The Personal is Political.

- Carol Hanisch (debated; early feminist slogan)

Today I heard some delightful news. Two old friends from my days in the conservative midwest re-connected with me through the powers of Facebook, and we three ended up sharing about our transitions from conservative to liberal over several group chats and virtual drinks together. It was a mutual surprise; we had all masqueraded rather successfully as the prototypical religious adherents that the social pressures of our school demanded. 


And yet here we were, years later, heathens all. We toasted Obama, came out of various closets, revealed the range of verboten experiences we'd been lucky enough to have. Over and over again, we kept saying--"Wait, you think this? ME TOO!" My friends had become liberal, tolerant, pro-gay marriage and anti-war. They'd had poly relationships and monogamous relationships, flings and love affairs and heartbreaks, been disowned by conservative families or embraced by siblings who were able to come out of their own closets as well. Most of all, my friends had become themselves, were finding great happiness as I have in being open about the values they held.

But all was not sunshine and unicorns. I don't know if the emotional journey from an excessively conservative and constrictive worldview to a liberal one can be wholly understood by someone who hasn't traveled that path. Especially when you truly, sincerely believed the world you were raised with.
It may seem absurd, but where I grew up, even going to college was a questionable endeavor for someone my gender and under the umbrella of our particularly harsh interpretation of Scripture. Let alone striking out in pursuit of a career or living out an alternative sexual identity. Even my most mainstream, neutral career triumphs raise eyebrows among old friends and family. Daring to be open about my sexual or feminist beliefs is liable to prompt heart-attacks and exorcisms.

The kind of courage it takes to question fundamental precepts about how the world operates does not come easy, and that questioning always comes with a cost. Our lives had been shadowed with lost friendships, lost love, self-doubt, and fear. Fear lurks in the corners of your mind, doubt whispers along mental schemas built and reinforced with years of learning "this is wrong, this is wrong," you are wrong. Coming into an identity which you've only been shown through a lens of disgust is not easy.

But here, dealing with this mess, facing change and standing in the face of doubt, my friends and I are more ourselves. Whether or not our families ever accept us again, we ever find anyone to understand all facets of our complex identities, we are more compassionate people, more attuned to the suffering of others, more able to explore the possibilities of our own identities. And this is why it's worth it.

This is why I take pride in identifying myself as a liberal, and in being committed to a life of tolerance and free from dogmatic thinking. It's not about snarky politics, it's not even just about social justice, it's about life--my own life. It's about feeling inner conflict and plunging right into it instead of running away, because understanding yourself is worth something. It's about being able to have the courage to throw away the beliefs which are stifling you, and venturing out into a world even when you've only ever been told that you won't be strong enough to take that world on. And then, maybe you'll have the opportunity to tell someone else that they are also just that strong.

Life's not perfect, and self-discovery never ends. I have no doubt that I will continue to deal with the isolation and ostracism I've experienced from my conservative former life. And my friends and I are far from reaching a nirvana state of self-actualization. But at least for a moment, it was wonderful to be able to say, "You, too?"

Predators

Everybody's looking for somebody to love.

In Case You Were Wondering.

Certain Interpersonal Behaviors Make You Seem Overly Predatory, For Instance:

• Trying the whole back-handed, negative-compliment-insult thing. Especially recommended if you're five years old, or taking interpersonal cues from How I Met Your Mother. There's nothing I love more than a person who's willing to take the time to be passive-aggressively manipulative with me.

• Taking advantage of people in front of me. This includes but is not limited to shoplifting, berating servers, and begging for money from your mom. 
• Interrupting me while I'm in the middle of performing some task and telling me that you can do it better. This is especially effective if you frame it in terms of a stereotypical gender difference and it has to do with something I own, like my car.

Seriously. I can do it.

• Calling me "dollface." 

Now you're predatory and retro. What are you, a Mad Men fan? Get out of my face and go home. You're fooling no one.

Clash

In case you were wondering why we all can't worship at the Temple of Palin, here's an explanation:

Black Swan

Anyone who's ever suffered from an eating disorder should probably stay away from Black Swan; that shit's total ED porn. Already many of the thinspo sites I'm familiar with are touting this movie's triggering potential and glam waste themes.

Any film with a graphic rape scene or something brutally triggering would carry more of a warning than this one; it's interesting to realize how trivial watching someone struggle with eating issues can seem to those on the outside. The glamorization of eating disorders continues in our culture, mowing the girls (and some boys) down for the sake of edge or shock, capitalizing on our deep need to be loved and desired at any cost.

I'm certainly not against a film tackling and portraying difficult subjects like eating disorders and the like, and I'm not saying this is a bad film by any means. Art should find a way to portray any situation, and expressive treatment of dark subjects is powerful and incredibly valuable. But it does prompt one to think long and hard about the line between artfulness and exploitation, the mixed messages regarding what is or is not beautiful and desirable. While Black Swan's two petite starlets were purportedly opposing characters with opposing lifestyles (one disciplined, one partied; one starved, one ate), they both lost weight for the roles in order to live up to ballet's harsh standards (Mila went from 117 to 95, gracious). As Alastair Macauley so kindly reminded us in his weight-critiquing review, this is accurate filmography.

Most of all, this film prompted me to think about the apathy and lack of understanding our culture still exhibits, as celebrities garner more negative attention for weight gain than for drug abuse. The solution is not, of course, to not make a film like Black Swan (although it may be helpful to make its message less ambiguous), but to promote more dialogue not just about the disorder itself, but its disturbing glamorization. Because it's hard to protect oneself when self-destruction seems so beautiful.

Down to Five Moose Packages

(note--don't worry, the below clip isn't the graphic one you may have been hearing about)

My relationship with Sarah Palin is a lot like my relationship with fudge. I know it's no good for me, but I'm irresistibly drawn to it, particularly when I'm feeling a little bit down on myself. I get a lot of enjoyment out of consuming more than I should, and then it ends up making me feel sick.

How many things do I love about this clip? There are so many. There's Sarah's headband, managing to be both redneck and hippie at the same time. There's the charming way she eeps and meeps over marsh and bog, so obviously pandering to her camera. On that note, there's the mind-expanding possibility for contemplating the mise en abyme that is Sarah Palin's Alaska--apparently there isn't a grocery store for 500 miles, but there is certainly a film crew.
I adore this professionally-produced show about a professionally-made-up Palin in her supposedly rugged natural environs...sprinkled with such gems as "We're down to just, ya know, five moose packages, three caribou packages" and "I'm ready-freddy!"



"We don't have the advantage!" Sarah gushes. "The animals have the advantage."
Over you, Sarah? Maybe.

American Dreams

Tomorrow they're voting on the DREAM act. From the wikipedia article cited (don't give me your "I can't believe you're using wikipedia as a reference"--it's ridiculously reliable when it's being rigorously edited by people who care):

This bill would provide certain illegal and deportable alien students who graduate from US high schools, who are of good moral character, arrived in the U.S. illegally as minors, and have been in the country continuously and illegally for at least five years prior to the bill's enactment, the opportunity to earn conditional permanent residency if they complete two years in the military or two years at a four year institution of higher learning. The students would obtain temporary residency for a six year period. Within the six year period, a qualified student must have "acquired a degree from an institution of higher education in the United States or [have] completed at least 2 years, in good standing, in a program for a bachelor's degree or higher degree in the United States," or have "served in the uniformed services for at least 2 years and, if discharged, [have] received an honorable discharge."

Now here is a piece of legislation that I very much support. It is only reasonable that minors who have been brought here and are living good lives should be given an avenue through which to continue those good lives. It is heartbreaking to think of these young people being deported back to Mexico after coming or being brought here as children to escape from poverty and violence.


Predictably, support for this bill is shattering, under the old explanation of "political games" and the tired fear-mongering about "amnesty for millions of illegals" from our ever-big hearted friends at the GOP. Meanwhile, children suffer.

Robotics

Recently, the Denver police engaged in a tense, hours-long stand-off with a tiny toy robot who was accused of being a potential source of violence. Ultimately, this was a tragic decision given that the robot was innocent and lacking in any detonation equipment. Even though the toy robot was clearly being coerced, in that it was cemented down, the Denver PD Bomb squad detonated the robot itself, living out an inevitable cycle in the endless of loop of mindless explosion-causing.
(SOURCE)

Through this story and others like it, it has been brought to my attention that there may be some resentment towards and prejudice against robotkind floating about our species' consciousness. Through our entertainment industry, we indulge these fears in vague thrillers which serve as nothing more than an exploitation of the uncanny valley and foster dangerous luddite tendencies which will greatly increase the number of years I have to wait before I can have a mechanical slave who monitors the tire pressure of my car. As an impassioned fan of robotics, I feel it's my duty to keep sharing the reasons for promoting robots and their ilk as a boon to our society. To that end, I am detailing three very unemotional, goal-oriented reasons in the hopes of appealing to the greedy, materialistic side of humanity (this is the side that gets things done, don't even bother trying to deny it).

Three Utilitarian Points Regarding Our Need for Robots

• We Cannot Drive. 

Seriously. One of the most irritating things in the otherwise delightfully mechanical (for me, that's a compliment) feature film I, Robot is that it has a moment of rather hilariously defending human driving (under the guise of defending the sanity of its protagonist). Will Smith has been driving in manual rather than choosing the automatic driving feature of his piece of shameless product placement, and he's crashed. Granted, this crash was due to a huge van of mad attacking robots, but I think we can agree that traffic accidents are at ridiculously high levels only rendered commonplace by the fact that they are, unfortunately, commonplace. Robotic driving would be significantly safer, given that such a system could integrate enough information into its analysis which doesn't seem at all unlikely.

• (Other) Dangerous Stuff. 

Technology has been making our lives safer ever since we figured out how to weld metal into armor. Coincidentally, this was at the same time as we were welding it into weapons, or perhaps slightly after. So the first order of business for technology is actually to make our lives more dangerous. Then we realize the discrepancy and attempt to bring defense technology up to speed. This is about where a lot of our industrial technology has led us. We're now able to do things like, oh I don't know...drill oil underneath the ocean. However if disaster ever strikes, we all suffer the consequences because our clean-up, defensive technology exists only as an after-thought.
Robots could change this dramatically. We could have legions of robotics technology dedicated to safety concerns. We need to have robotic workers taking on the more dangerous tasks and relieving humanity of this risk.

• Companionship.

Oh, you may scoff. But loneliness is a serious problem in this country and others. Loneliness cuts into people's lives, distracts their attention, and drains productivity like nothing else. Think for a moment of how many divorces there are taking place right now in the working demographic, and hence how many people are dragging themselves to work with significant personal turmoil on their minds. Think of the elderly, the disabled, veterans, sick people...now imagine that we had robot companions programmed to a high degree of sophistication able to keep tireless, perpetually-affirming company with anyone and everyone who wants one.

Perhaps you are still scoffing--"No robot could ever take the place of a human being!" I'm not saying they necessarily will. But in the name of the FSM, people use cats to take the place of human beings. There's a vast literature on the positive impact emotional therapy animals have on people with anxiety conditions, veterans, etc. A well-designed robot could certainly be as useful as an animal, and probably much less stressful to care for. Without a doubt, a robotic companion could provide a very meaningful source of consolation and affirmation to the stressed, sick, or lonely. And without a doubt, this would boost our productivity greatly and help the emotional health of the nation as a whole.
Mind you, I'm not advocating that robot relationships take the place of human ones, which is of course the source of horror for this plan. We haven't disallowed pets because they provide emotional support to people; give the human race a little credit for nuance in our emotional affairs. I'm sure we could manage to have robot companions as well as human ones, and like I said before the boon to those who are lonely right now would be immense.
And if you're scowling at my snuggy-feel-goodiness...it is utilitarian, perhaps the most utilitarian out of all three of these points. Creating more emotional stability in our ranks would only service humankind in our ability to think rationally and deal with problems calmly. Our robotic companions would be programmed to a fine degree in order to give us helpful and corrective feedback, a form of constant cognitive-behavioral therapy. Just knowing that one had a positive, animate presence in one's life would take a great deal of stress out of everything else--relationships would be less desperate, concentration and productivity would increase, caretakers would be less burdened.

I admit that these points may raise a number of concerns, especially the triune basis for most anti-robot arguments:
Robotic rebellion (the Terminator factor)
Robotic rights and independence (The Asimov factor)
Robotic supplementation of human caretaking, e.g., robots raising babies (the Matrix factor)

You may look forward to a post in the future addressing these concerns. But until then, I hope you will join me in a moment of silence for our poor, cemented robot friend who has been blown to kingdom come due to nothing more than fear and sad, sad ignorance.

Discoveries

We interrupt what is otherwise a too-busy-to-blog day with some scientific discovery:

All life on Earth - from microbes to elephants and us - is based on a single genetic model that requires the element phosphorus as one of its six essential components. But now researchers have uncovered a bacterium that has five of those essential elements but has, in effect, replaced phosphorus with its look-alike but toxic cousin arsenic.

SOURCE.

And...

Talking at the NASA conference, Wolfe Simon said that the important thing here is that this breaks our ideas on how life can be created and grow, pointing out that scientists will now be looking for new types of beings and metabolism that not only uses arsenic, but other element substitutions.

SOURCE.

More thoughts to follow, but I'm kind of excited.

EDIT:
As always, smart people, be sure and read the news' attempts at reporting science critically:

Eulalia!

Today I was stricken with a thirst. A thirst for blood.

Taking Sarah Palin as my inspiration, I'm not going to rest until everybody who annoys me is hunted down "with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders"* I've ordered hits on everyone from the guy at the salad bar who forgot my dill pickles to the girl in my seminar who would not shut up about her eye-tracking research.** They will rue the day. 

But seriously folks, at least Sarah's the only one making this kind of....oh WAIT.

Personally, I haven't quite made up my mind about the whole Assange situation, but HERE's some better reading on the topic than Palin-fluff. 

*then again, judging by the effectiveness of Bush administration in such pursuit, Julian Assange should be pretty safe for a while.

**here's a tip: if your results are measured in milliseconds, outside of your field nobody cares.