Post-apocalyptic videogame style and music, Hollywood-quality dystopian frame -- "Road" -- narrative driven by gloom and ruin, words by Barack Obama, damning punchline: "I don't think people are better off than they were four years ago." The reported Obama re-elect abandonment of Pennsylvania's 20 Electoral College votes connects with this attack ad.  It does not and will not get TV time.  This is pure YouTube strike force, to be emailed and blogged. The Obama team will counter, but the POTUS trip to Scranton, PA, these hours looks even more illogical.  What is to campaign for in Scranton?  Can POTUS develop a collar-county stealth campaign, winning PA with the Black vote of Philadelphia and the educated white vote of the collar counties?  My home district as a child was 13 PA.  POTUS is an overwhelming favorite from Bryn Mawr radiating out in concentric circles of Progressives (Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky's home district, mother-in-law of Chelsea Clinton); but are there enough votes in all Montgomery County to make up for the Democrats who will not vote west of the Alleghenies or north of the Delaware Wind Gap?

All eyes on the Cape for the Mars Lab United Launch Alliance Atlas V launch, scheduled for Saturday 25 November, carrying the one-ton heavy Mars rover "Curiosity" and the dreams of a Mars colony in this century.  The launch will be the least fretful part of the adventure, however; after the Phobos-Grunt mishap, every detail needs worry beads.  This video illustrates the elaborate landing protocol for next spring, as a very heavy craft is lowered down to the planet from a robot flying saucer.  Most cool.  The target area is the Gale Crater, chosen because it looks from the orbiter glimpse to contain several layers that illustrate the depth of Mars epochs -- perhaps as rich as 2 billion years ago.  There is a 5.5 km-high mound in the middle of the 154 km-diameter crater that may be the remains of an eroded lakebed.  This is a debate.  Curiosity will spend at least two years exploring.  It carries a plutonium-oxide battery to sustain the night tempeatures and the sunless days.  Spoke Brian Enke, Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, and to David Livingston, The Space Show, re the experiments onboard, especially the instrument aimed at collecting spectrum of radiation, including galactic and cosmic radiation on the outbound journey as well as on the surface.  The search for organic markers, called biosignatures, is paramount.  What we don't know is if Mankind can exist in the surface radiation levels.  My focus is on the metrics that can support a colony, most likely a subsurface construction in the discovered caves, canyons and caverns.  Mars atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide.  Submartian space (left) provides shielding from surface radiation and the severe temperature range.  Also, caverns can be pressurized chambers for oxygen manufactured from the ground ice.

Genius, along with the Amazon product reviews for Pepper Spray. Genius.  Spoke Mike Giglio, Newsweek, in Tahrir Square, where the frontlines are described as surrounding the Ministry of the Interior, where the authorities use stronger and stronger tear gas and rubber bullets and suspect live ammo.  The connection between Tahrir Square and UC Davis is that it is spontaneous young people confronting authority; and authority answers with the losing hand of brute violence.  The much more potent weapon is mockery such as above.  The "Know You Meme" site now grows quickly, and the assembled images of photoshopped Officer John Pike are deeply clever political speech.  When the protest is artful, e.g. 1773 and the Minute Men; e.g. 1915 and the Wobblies; e.g. 1939 and "The Grapes of Wrath," then the victory is near at hand.  Style trumps muscle; and wit trumps everything.

Occupy Wall Street moves into farce with this video political cartoon from the Washington Post. Gingrich, Cain and Cantor demonstrate a pomposity that manages to be both contrived and self-conscious.  I would toss it off to seniority and living in a bubble, but Cantor isn't 50, and he does not miss trendy details.  It must be the Washington's water.  #OWS is a spontaneous response to three years of defeatism.  POTUS Obama is feckless and out of even his library of cliched nostrums.  Mitt Romney leads cautious technocrats into office.  Long after both Obama and Romney are libraries, #OWS will stand as tomorrow's executive class and consumer elite.   POTUS Obama is not in this video send-up, because that's how out of the picture he has become.

The surprisingly beefy and crude UC Davis campus police illustrate how long it's been since the campus authorities were trained for student non-violent resistance. Rule 1: Do not use force against non-violence; it is futile. Rule 2: The campus belongs to the students; the planet belongs to the young. The pepper spray used by the riot helmet topped hero (identified but not confirmed as John Pike) as casually as bug spray is a symbol of frustration and defeat. UC Davis administrators can now enjoy the accolades of the many, and the disdain of the few, for having so effectively marked the campus as a police riot. What are they gonna do when the crowd is several thousand? Review the handbooks on non-violent protest. It works; it always works. Note the useful fact in the Census report that one-third of Americans are now near or under the poverty line, half of them non-Hispanic whites. Gee. Perhaps #OWS is on target and winning. Do you think the pepper spray campus cop is ready to pepper spray the poor, too?  How about the UC David administrators?  Send the Cossacks into the protesters?  Reminds me that students do a fine job of policing a campus if paid as part-timers.  Reminds me that unloading the campus police and the administrators is a fine budget reduction move: watch them join the ranks of the unemployed poor -- and then join the Occupiers.  No student in university today is well-to-do unless from one of the 1% families. Retired Philadelphia Police captain Ray Lewis (arrested video below) is matter-of-fact about why the police bullies fail, in NY and in UC Davis:

In his late-night interview, Lewis expressed that he felt the NYPD should have approached Occupy Wall Street with alternative tactic, perhaps through negotiation, rather than forcefully removing them from the park: "You should, by law, only use force to protect someone's life or to protect them from being bodily injured. If you're not protecting somebody's life or protecting them from bodily injury, there's no need to use force. And the number one thing that they always have in their favor that they seldom use is negotiation-continue to talk, and talk and talk to people. You have nothing to lose by that. This bullrush-what happened last night is totally uncalled for when they did not use negotiation long enough." In his interview, Lewis also criticized Mayor Bloomberg's claim that the raid was necessary due the risk of fire, crime and health hazards in the encampment, calling that rationale "a farce." "They complained about the park being dirty. Here they are worrying about dirty parks when people are starving to death, where people are freezing, where people are sleeping in subways and they're concerned about a dirty park. That's obnoxious, it's arrogant, it's ignorant, it's disgusting," Mr. Lewis said.

 said.

Magnificently over-the-top ham-handed performance by the Savanarola Ironist of New York, Keith Olbermann, who enjoys pounding the cookie midget Mike Bloomberg into crumbs. Every word is crisp and witty. Bloomberg is a man on the run from his own peculiar history of vitriol and elitism mixed with strangely needy ambition. Olbermann has the right target, Blommie as Plutocratic nincompoop in Gotham '11.  Another Batman movie needs Bloomie more than Manhattan needs Batman.  The Occupy imbroglio now moves to winter quarters to plan for the Spring Offensive.  Note that KO does correctly explain that the Zuccotti Park camp had moved past its sell date with no plans for how to survive the winds of December.  Mike Bloomberg's arrogant folly provided a thrilling end to Act 1 with the needed turn to the long Act 2 of resistance and discovery.  Hint that Homeland Security coordinated the dishoming sweeps is the beginning of the investigation.   This will not go well for the Obama Re-Elect team if they must defend the Occupy sweeps as civic mindedness and a local matter.  Meantime, Mike Bloomberg is in hiding from his own summary, that Bloomberg stayed too long at his post, launched by the tragedy of 9-11 and failed at the comedy of power-washing the young and restless.  Who then will mourn Mike?  Pigeons?  Nah. 

The Russian space program returns manned Soyuz to low Earth orbit in order to rendezvous with the ISS.  The RUssians launched in a snow shower in Kazahkstan, on time, on target, with the muscular and reliable Proton/Soyuz rocket combination that has served well these last forty years.  The Russians are the backbone of low Earth orbit now.  The failure with the Phobos Grunt mission to Mars is a blow to the robot program -- and there may be a Jonah loose on Mars against the former Reds.  The Phobos Grunt fail, which threaten Earth now with a falling missile of poison, underlines the risk and worry of the Mars Lab launch next week.  Fingers crossed for outbound Curiosity.  A fail for Mars LAb would be a major blow to the fragile American sense of confidence.  Will that Jonah stay in Moscow?

There is no adequate explanation for this evidence of a police riot at November 3 Occupy Oakland. The shooter is unseen. An inquiry would produce results. The Oakland PD and the mayor cannot survive this inquiry. Zero tolerance for police brutality is a starting point for the discussion. Perhas the police departments need a lesson that everyone of their targets must be considered armed with an IPhone and its magnificent video capabilities. Blame-shifting and finger-pointing and moral equivalences will not answer. The inquiry must also seek the veracity of the victim and the before and after of this event. What appears now is a case that Occupy Oakland is a massive governnance fail.